MATHER BYLES.
This follows a red-chalk drawing in the cabinet of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which came to it with other portraits by the bequest of the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem (b. Boston, June 22, 1759; d. Salem, December 29, 1819). There is another likeness in the Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 227. Cf. Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc., p. 37.
During the night of the 29th of October, 1727, New England experienced one of the severest earthquakes which she had known. The next morning Cotton Mather made a speech in Boston, and this, with an account of the earthquake’s effects, was published at once as The Terror of the Lord, followed shortly by his Boanerges, intended to strengthen the impressions of the awful hour in the minds of the people. Haven’s bibliography shows the affluence of the ministerial mind in the face of this event.[257] Sermon after sermon was published, and the press had not ceased issuing the renewed editions of some of them when Cotton Mather died on the 13th of February, 1728, and gave the preachers another fruitful theme. Here was a man whose views of a fitting mundane life were as repulsive as those of Sebastian Rasle, and whose scalp would have aroused Quebec as Rasle’s did Boston. We have grown to judge each by a higher standard than the prejudices and doctrines of their time.[258]
After the departure of Shute, Wentworth continued as lieutenant-governor in the executive chair of New Hampshire. The assembly tried to insist upon a speaker whom he disapproved, but the explanatory charter of Massachusetts came to Wentworth’s support, and he prevailed; and under his lead the province experienced its share of the Indian warfare. Rhode Island remained all the time under Gov. Cranston, who had held the office by election thirty successive years when he died in 1727. Her chief point of contact with her neighbors was her bills of credit, which had sunk so low that they had become little better than a pest to herself and to the neighboring colonies. Connecticut kept her activity and quiet ways within herself. She took no part in the war beyond putting her border towns in a state of defence.
Shute was pursuing his aim in England. He had succeeded in getting from the king an explicit threat, under whose pressure it was thought the Massachusetts assembly would see the advisability of establishing a fixed salary for the royal governor, when George I. died (June 11, 1727), and Shute’s commission was vacated. He slipped into a pension of £600 a year, and died an old man. The news of the king’s death reached Boston in August, and on the 14th George II. was proclaimed with military parade. The ministers beguiled themselves, as usual, preaching many sermons on the death of a good king, and Mather Byles published a poem.
Since 1720 William Burnet, a son of Bishop Burnet, had been governor of New York and New Jersey, whither he had gone to retrieve a fortune lost in stock speculations; and with a numerous family to support, he felt the necessity of it. The new king relieved him of some embarrassment, occasioned by a growing unpopularity in his government, by directing his transfer to the vacant chair of Massachusetts, signing his commission in March. He reached Boston July 13, and as he was escorted to the Bunch of Grapes tavern[259] the people marked his noticeable presence and his suave manners, and might have predicted a calmer sway from him than proved to be in store. He was flattered by his reception, and even ordered the publication of some eulogistic verses, which Mather Byles, the clerical wit of the time, addressed to him.[260]
GEORGE II.
From a print in Entick’s Gen. Hist. of the late War (2d ed. 1765) vol. ii., frontispiece.