But go at once.”
Had some good genius nudged the elbow of the king, on that critical morning when his breathless messenger was hastening to stay the emigrant flotilla, urged him to say Yes, to its sailing, and foretold the future, how eagerly the fated monarch would have caught the cue, and torn that parchment, so pregnant with mischief, which forbade their departure; and offered the immortal junto jewels of gold and precious stones as an inducement to be gone, and cried, “Egypt is glad,” when they set out.
But God made the wrath of man praise him. He struck the besotted court with judicial blindness. Neither Charles, nor Strafford, nor Laud could read the hand-writing on the wall. They could not foresee events which were ere long to
“Fright the isle
From her propriety.”
These “fanatics” were not needed in New England. Their fellows had already commenced to build, at Plymouth and at Massachusetts Bay, for God and liberty. So they were detained to organize “resistance to tyrants” in the senate-house, and to give the arbitrary principle its death-blow at Naseby and Long Marston Moor.
But though the court, frightened at the prodigious extent of an emigration which threatened to depopulate the kingdom, had fulminated a decree against colonization, the departure of Pilgrims was only hindered, not stayed. They continued to cross the water until, in 1640, this pattering emigration had rained four thousand families and upwards of twenty thousand settlers into New England.[791] Then for a few glorious years the exodus ceased. The prospect of reform in England caused men to remain at home, “in the hope of seeing a new world” without passing the Atlantic.
In the summer of this same year which witnessed the detention of Cromwell, and Pym, and Hampden, and Hazlerigge, and Lord Brooke, a ship was freighted for America; and with two hundred other passengers, it bore to these shores three men who became as famous on this side the water as the revolutionists did on the other—John Haynes, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker.[792] On board the “Griffin” at this same time was another eminent minister, Mr. Stone; “and this glorious triumvirate coming together,” remarks Cotton Mather, “made the poor people in the wilderness say that God had supplied them with what would in some sort answer their three great necessities; Cotton for their clothing, Hooker for their fishing, and Stone for their building.”[793]
Haynes, afterwards governor both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, was “a man of very large estate, and still larger affections; of a ‘heavenly’ mind and a spotless life; of rare sagacity and accurate but unassuming judgment; by nature tolerant; ever a friend to freedom, ever conciliating peace. He was an able legislator, and dear to the Pilgrims by his benevolence and his disinterested conduct.”[794]
Cotton and Hooker speedily became the most revered spiritual teachers of two commonwealths; Cotton shaped and toned Massachusetts ecclesiasticism; Hooker was the Moses of Connecticut. Both were well born; both had been clergymen of the English church; both had been silenced for non-conformity; both were consummate scholars—in Mather’s strong phrase, walking libraries; both had won wide fame at home, which, like Joseph’s bough, “ran over the wall” of the Atlantic ocean, and made their names familiar in every cabin on the eastern coast.