MEETING-HOUSE AT HINGHAM.
[This is considered the oldest meeting-house in present use in New England. It was erected in 1681. Cf. The Commemorative Services of the First Parish in Hingham on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Building of its Meeting-House, Aug. 8, 1881 (Hingham, 1882), with another view of the building,—a photograph; also E. A. Horton’s Discourse, Jan. 8, 1882. A meeting-house of similar type, erected in Lynn in 1682, is represented in Lynn, Her First Two Hundred and Fifty Years, p. 117.
The annexed autographs, taken from a document in the Trumbull Manuscripts, in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Cabinet, and dated 1690, represent some of the leading ministers of the colony at the close of the colonial period. Morton was of Charlestown; Allen of Boston; Wigglesworth, the author of the Day of Doom, a sulphurous poem greatly famous in its day, was of Malden; Moodey was of Portsmouth; Willard and Mather of Boston; and Walter of Roxbury.—Ed.]
He arrived in July, 1676, with a letter from the King and with complaints from Mason and Gorges, and armed with a royal order for agents to be sent to England to make answer. This was but the beginning of the end. The legal authorities in England, before whom the case was brought, decided that neither Maine nor New Hampshire was within the chartered limits of Massachusetts, and that the title of the former was in the grandson of the original proprietor. Whereupon the agent of Massachusetts bought the patent of Maine from its proprietor for £1,250, and stood in his shoes as lord paramount.
This greatly displeased the King, and the hostility to the colony continued. Additional charges, such as illegal coining of money, violations of the laws of trade and navigation, and legislative provisions repugnant to the laws of England and contrary to the power of the charter, were now alleged against the colony. The agents of the colony and the emissaries of the Crown crossed and recrossed the ocean with apologies on the one hand and requisitions on the other; but nothing would satisfy the Crown but the subjugation of the colony. A quo warranto against the Governor and Company was issued in 1683; and finally, by a new suit of scire facias brought in the Court of Chancery, judgment against the Company was entered up Oct. 23, 1684. Intelligence of this was not officially received till the following summer. Meantime the new king, James II., was proclaimed, April 20, 1685. The government of the colony was expiring. The “Rose” frigate arrived in Boston May 14, 1686, bringing a commission for Joseph Dudley as President of the Council for Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, and Maine, and the Narraganset country, or King’s Province. There was no House of Deputies to oppose him. Dudley was succeeded by Sir Edmund Andros on the 19th of December, who had arrived in the frigate “Kingfisher,” with a commission for the government of New England. He was detested by the colony, and the people only needed a rumor of the revolution in England, which reached Boston in the spring of 1689, to provoke a rising, and he was thrown into prison.[535] A provisional government, with the old charter-officers, was instituted, and continued till the new charter of 1691 was inaugurated.
Maine.—There were many settlements on the coast of Maine prior to the grant to Gorges from the Council in 1635, and consequently before his subsequent charter from the King. Indeed, very little was done by Gorges as Lord Proprietor of Maine. The patents from the Council to the year 1633 had embraced the whole territory from Piscataqua to Penobscot, thus including the territory on both sides the Kennebec, which was claimed by the Pilgrims of Plymouth under their patent of Jan. 13, 1629/30. In various places settlements had already been begun. In the royal charter to Gorges, whose grant extended from Piscataqua to Sagadahoc, the rights of previous grantees were reserved to them, they relinquishing or laying down their jura regalia.
