The next day, a deputation waited on Nichols, but he declined the conference, informing them that on the morrow he should be at Manhattan, and would see them there; and on a slight show of dissatisfaction added, “raise the white flag of peace, for I shall come with ships of war and soldiers!”
The flag of peace was hoisted; and on September 8th, the life, liberty, religion and property of the inhabitants being secured, New Amsterdam surrendered, and the people and the magistrates being all agreed, Stuyvesant reluctantly ratified the capitulation.
New Amsterdam was no more; the Dutch dominion in America was overthrown by a flagrant act of injustice, and yet the change seemed to produce in the colony itself great satisfaction. Very few of the settlers removed to Holland, and their wounded national pride found its consolation in the enjoyment of English privileges and liberties. On the submission of the capital, Fort Orange, now called Albany, from the Scottish title of the Duke of York, quietly surrendered, and the Dutch and the Swedes of Delaware shortly afterwards. The league with the Five Nations was renewed. The whole extent of coast, from Acadia to Florida, was now in possession of the English.
Three years afterwards, when a treaty of peace was signed between England and Holland, the colony of Surinam, in Guiana, which the Dutch had captured during the war, was left in their possession as a compensation for New Netherlands. About the same time, the province of Acadia was restored by treaty to France, greatly to the vexation of the people of New England.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE RESTORATION.
In the month of May, 1660, England was almost mad with joy because Charles II. was restored to the throne. In London, “groups of royalists,” we are told, “gathered round buckets of wine in the streets, and drank the king’s health on their knees. The bells of every steeple rang, and bonfires were so numerous that the city seemed surrounded by a halo; men shouted, women scattered flowers, and with loud thanks to Heaven, as if he had been an angel sent down from God, Charles II. was received at Whitehall, where so lately the tragedy of fallen royality had been enacted.”
Republicanism was at an end; and the stern virtues of puritanism gone quite out of fashion. The season of violent reaction was come; and again the noblest blood in England, noblest in the truest sense of the word, flowed from the hands of the executioner. Amongst the earliest victims was Hugh Peters, the successor of Roger Williams as minister at Salem. His arraignment, trial, and execution were scenes of wanton cruelty. Any trial indeed was a mockery, because his death was already decreed. “Go home to New England, and trust God there,” were his last words to his daughter, the wife of the younger Winthrop. At the gallows he was compelled to wait while his friend Cooke, who had just been executed, was cut down. “How do you like this?” asked the savage hangman, exultingly. “I thank God,” replied Peters, “that I am not terrified at it. You may do your worst;” and turning to his friends he said, with a smile, “Weep not for me; my heart is full of comfort.” Several of the regicides perished about the same time, with equal calmness and resignation, their faith in the principles which brought them to the scaffold no whit abated. Three of the regicide judges, however, Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell, of whom we shall speak presently, fled to New England. Nor did the thirst of English vengeance satisfy itself with the execution of the living; it wreaked itself on the dead. The corpses of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton were disinterred, dragged on hurdles to Tyburn, and hanged on three separate gallows, after which they were cut down and beheaded! The whole horrible and disgusting scene being considered one of great merriment.
In June, 1662, perished also on the scaffold the noblest of the advocates of liberty in the New World, Sir Henry Vane, the former governor of Massachusetts, the firm friend of Rhode Island, and the supporter of liberty under all circumstances, whether religious or political. One of the first and fastest friends of republicanism in England, he had resisted the aggressions of Cromwell, and Cromwell for this cause had imprisoned him. The trial of Vane has become a noble passage in history. Though a man of a nervous temperament, he stood before his judges with an undaunted courage which amazed all, and there pleaded “for the liberties of England, for the interest of all posterity in time to come.” Counsel was not allowed him, and he stood, “not afraid,” as he said, “in that great presence, to bear witness to the glorious cause, nor to seal it with his blood.”
“Sir Henry Vane is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way,” wrote the king to his counsel; and though they could not honestly put him out of the way, yet they sentenced him to the block, while others were hanged.
When, on the day before his execution, his friends were admitted to visit him, they found him so serene and cheerful, that he, not they, administered consolation, “reasoning calmly on death and immortality.” Reviewing his political career from the day when he had defended in New England the unitarianism of Anne Hutchinson, to his last struggle for English liberty, he said, “I feel not the least recoil in my heart for what I have done.” When his children gathered round him weeping, he said, kissing and embracing them, “The Lord will be a better father to you than I have been. Be not troubled, for I am going home to my father;” and his last words to them were, “Suffer anything rather than sin against God.” To his friends he said, “I leave my life as a seal to the justness of that quarrel. Ten thousand deaths rather than defile the chastity of my conscience; nor would I for a thousand worlds resign the peace and satisfaction which I have in my heart!”