About six weeks later, on Friday, November 7, word came to the governor from Salem of the disastrous events in the St. Lawrence and the discomfiture of Phips.[165]
The unfortunate expedition had cost Massachusetts £50,000, and while the colony was devising an illusory scheme of paper money as a quick way of gathering taxes, Phips slipped off to England, with the hope that his personal explanations would assist in inducing the home government to lend a helping hand in some future attempt.
When Phips reached England he found that Mather had done good work in preventing the reinstalling of Andros, as at one time was threatened.[166]
Memorials and counter-memorials, printed and manuscript, were pressed upon Parliament, by which that body was now urged to restore, and now implored to deny, the vacated charter. It was at this juncture that Mather, with two other agents, petitioned the king for a new charter; and the law officers reporting favorably, the plan had already been committed to the Lords of Trade at the time when Phips appeared in London. With the assent of the king, the framing of a new charter was entrusted to Sir George Treby, the Attorney General, who was instructed to fortify the royal prerogative, and to make the jurisdiction include not only Massachusetts, but the territory of New Plymouth and all that region, or the better part of it, lying east of the present State of New Hampshire, and stretching from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
It was the dawn of a new existence, in which the province, as it now came to be called, was to be governed by a royal governor, sent to enforce the royal prerogative, to administer the navigation laws in the interests of British merchants, to gratify the sectaries of the Established Church, and to embarrass the old-fashioned theocracy. The chief power reserved to the people was that of the purse,—an important one in any event, and one that the legislative assembly knew how to wield, as the years which followed proved.
Mather professed to think the new charter—and it perhaps was—the best result, under the circumstances, to be attained. He talked about the colony still having a chance of assuming the old charter at some more opportune moment. Cooke, the champion of the old conditions, was by no means backed in his opposition by a unanimity of feeling in the colony itself; for many of the later comers, generally rich, were become advocates of prerogative, and lived in the hope of obtaining more consequence under a changed order of society. Connecticut and Rhode Island were content, meanwhile, with the preservation of their own chartered autonomy, such as it was.
Thus affairs were taking a turn which made Phips forget the object of his visit. Mather seems to have been prepared for the decision, and was propitiated also by the promise of being allowed to nominate the new governor and his subordinates. Phips had been Mather’s parishioner in Boston, and was ambitious enough to become his creature, if by doing so he could secure preferment. So Sir William Phips was commissioned Governor; and as a sort of concession to the clerical party, of which Mather himself was the leader in Boston, William Stoughton was made Lieutenant-Governor. Isaac Addington became Secretary. Bradstreet was appointed first assistant. Danforth, Oakes, and Cooke, the advocates of the old charter, were forgotten in the distribution of offices.
On Tuesday, January 26, 1692, Robin Orchard came to Boston from Cape Cod, bringing tidings that Capt. Dolberry’s London packet was at anchor in the harbor now known as Provincetown, and that she had brought the news of the appointment of Phips under a new charter.[167]
Boston was at this time the most considerable place in the New World, and she probably had not far from 7,000 inhabitants; while Massachusetts, as now constituted, included 75 towns, of which 17 belonged to Plymouth. Within this enlarged jurisdiction the population ranged somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000,—for estimates widely vary. Out of this number twenty-eight persons had been chosen to make the governor’s council, but their places were to be made good at subsequent elections by the assembly, though the governor could negative any objectionable candidate; and the joint approval of the governor and council was necessary to establish the members of the judiciary. The acts of the legislature could for cause be rejected by the Privy Council any time within three years, and to it they must be regularly submitted for approval; and this proved to be no merely formal action. It meant much.