Wordsworth.
With the precious charter in its pocket, the complacent Massachusetts Company strode out of the royal antechamber, and proceeded at once to effect an organization. Matthew Cradock was elected to the gubernatorial chair; and to Endicott, as deputy, was delegated the government of New England.[607]
A letter of instructions was indited. It was unique, and highly illustrative of the benevolent spirit of these builders of states—Conditores Imperiorum—to whose brotherhood Lord Bacon, in “the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of honor,” assigns the highest place.[608] Let us cull some specimen paragraphs from the old parchment: “If any of the savages”—such were the orders long and uniformly followed and placed on record more than half a century before William Penn proclaimed the principles of peace on the borders of the Delaware[609]—“pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our patent, we pray you endeavor to purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion.”[610] Elsewhere the colonial authorities were bidden “particularly to publish, that no wrong nor injury be offered to the Indians.”[611]
Tobacco was held in especial abhorrence, and denounced as “a trade by this whole Company disowned, and utterly disclaimed by some of the chiefest, who absolutely declare themselves unwilling to have a hand in the plantation, if the intention be to cherish or permit the culture thereof.”[612]
Endicott was authorized to expel the incorrigible, using force when necessary. It was also appointed that all labor should cease at “three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, in preparation for the Sabbath.”[613]
The colonial seal was an Indian erect, with an arrow in his right hand, and the motto, “Come over and help us,” peculiarly appropriate in that age. The old seal has been retained by Massachusetts; but the motto has been superseded by Algernon Sydney’s famous Latin, Sub libertate quietem.[614]
“No idle drone may live amongst us;” so ran the colonial statute; and it “was the spirit as well as the law of the dauntless community which was to turn the sterility of New England into a cluster of wealthy, cultured, model states.”
The charter had been granted to the Massachusetts Company in March; in April preparations were hastening for the embarkation of fresh emigrants.[615] It was not difficult to get recruits; for the pinchers of tender consciences grew daily more rigorous. Puritanism saw popery preparing to spring upon it upon one side; it felt the ravenous bite of the Conformists on the other side. It was worse than folly to look to the government for redress; that was the engine of the persecutors. Villiers of Buckingham, that volatile madman, who was
“Every thing by turns, and nothing long,”
as Pope has painted him, had been recently assassinated. His place in the king’s confidence was now filled by Strafford, the systematizer of tyranny in England, whose audacious genius impelled him to attempt to nationalize despotism, and erected the tenets of absolute power inside of constitutional forms.[616] By his side stood Laud, his Siamese twin, a prelate who assumed to ransack the universe—