The summer ripened and passed. The autumn heralded the ermine-robed King Winter, with glorious pageantry. The trees put on their cloth of gold and crimson, and when the hoary monarch came, the millions of leaves strewed his path, and, prostrate before his march, laid their matchless tapestry beneath his merciless feet.
During all this time Randolph had made no sign toward his revenge upon Garde, for the scorn with which she had cast him from her side. No petty vengeance would gratify his malignant spirit. The whole colony must suffer for this indignity, and Garde and her grandfather should feel his hand mightily, when all was ready. He prepared his way with extreme caution. He was never hurried. He laid wires to perform his mischief far ahead. Indeed he lingered almost too long, in his greed to prolong his own anticipation of what was to be.
Thus in December of that year, 1686, the frigate “Kingfisher,” from England, brought to the colony their newly-appointed Governor, Sir Edmund Andros, who assumed the reins of power with an absolute thoroughness which left Randolph somewhat shorn of his capacity for working evil.
Andros, who had formerly been Governor for New York, for a matter of three years, was a person of commendable character, in many respects, but the policy which he had come to put into being and force was stupid, oppressive and offensive to the people he had to govern. Being the thorough Tory that he was, he enforced the policy with a vigor which brought upon him the detestation of the Puritans, who visited the errors he was ordered to commit upon his own less guilty head.
The Puritans, in the extremes to which they had fled, in their separation from the English forms of worship, had adopted a rigid simplicity in which the whole fabric of ceremonials had been swept away bodily. They rang no bells for their divine service; they regarded marriage as a civil contract, purely; they observed no festivals nor holidays of the church; they buried their dead in stolid silence. They abhorred the English rites.
Governor Andros inaugurated countless ceremonies. That very Christmas the English party of Boston held high revel in the city. The Puritans refused to close their shops, or to join either in rites or merriment. They brought in their fire-wood and went about their business, grim-faced and scowling darkly upon the innovations come among them, with their fascinations for the young and their enchantment of the frivolous.
The offenses against their rigid notions increased rapidly. In February they beheld, with horror, the introduction of a new invention of the devil. One Joseph Mayhem paraded in the main street of Boston with a rooster fastened on his back,—where it flapped its wings frantically,—while in his hand the fellow carried a bell, on which he made a dreadful din as he walked. Behind him came a number of ruffians, blindfolded and armed with cart-whips. Under pretense of striking at Mayhem and the chanticleer, they cut at the passers-by, roaring with laughter and otherwise increasing the attention which their conduct attracted. This exhibition was thought to smack of Papacy and the hated days of Laud.
The church itself was invaded. There was as yet no Church of England in the town. Governor Andros therefore attended with the Puritans, at their own house of meeting, but to their unnameable horror, he compelled Goodman Needham, the sexton, to ring the bell, according to English usage.
Rebellion being impossible, the Puritans nursed their grievances in sullen stolidity. They were powerless, but never hopeless of their opportunity still to come.
Taxation came as a consequence of the pomp in which the new Governor conceived it to be his right to exist, as well as the natural result of his glowing reports to England that the people could be made to disgorge and would not resist.