Conceived in Liberty (30 page)

In 1627 the inherent conflict between colony and company in Plymouth was finally resolved, by the elimination of the company from the scene. In that year, the seven years of enforced communism by the company expired, and all the assets and lands were distributed to the individual shareholders. Grants of land were received in proportion to the size of the stock, so that the larger shareholders received larger gifts of land. This complete replacement of communism by individualism greatly benefited the productivity of the colony. Furthermore, the colonists took the happy occasion to buy up the shares of the Peirce company. Plymouth was now a totally self-governing colony. By 1633 the entire purchase price had been paid and the colonists were freed from the last remnant of company, or indeed of any English, control.

There still remained, of course, the overlord Council for New England. In 1630 the Council granted a new patent to the Plymouth Colony, clearly defining its territory, and recognizing its right to freedom of trading and fishing. But Governor Bradford limited the privileges of trade to the original Pilgrim partners—the Old Comers—and kept the patent in his own possession before relinquishing it in 1641. Plymouth was destined to remain a small colony in which the nominal rulers, the freemen, were rarely consulted, and the governor and the Council imposed an oligarchic rule. But after the Council for New England was dissolved in 1635, Plymouth nevertheless became a fully self-governing colony.

*
William Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-47
(New York: Knopf, 1952), pp.120–21.

When the tiny band of Separatists left England in 1608, the great bulk of English Puritans, despite the persecutions of the early part of the reign of James I, were highly confident of their future in England and of the potential for reform within the English church structure. Why then the intense Great Migration only one generation later? What had happened to sap the confidence of the English Puritans?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, virtually all of England’s export trade consisted of unfinished woolen cloths, which were sent to the Netherlands for finishing and dyeing and to be reexported to the north for grain. In the decade following the conclusion of peace with Spain in 1604, the woolen trade, and hence the English economy, flourished. But parliamentary refusal to approve any further taxes in protest against rising taxation, as well as the persecution of Puritan clergy, led, in 1614, to the Crown’s dissolution of Parliament. In its search for revenue, the Crown then decided to create new monopolies—and its meddling in the vital wool trade had disastrous results. On the proposal of Alderman Cockayne of the Eastland Company, the government suspended the charter of the Merchant Adventurers (an attempted monopoly in the export of unfinished cloth), and completely prohibited the export of unfinished cloth upon which the prosperity of England rested. Instead, a new charter was granted to a syndicate of Eastland Company and Levant Company merchants in a new company, the King’s Merchant Adventurers, which had a legal monopoly of the export of finished and dyed cloth, half the profits of which were to be paid to the Crown.

The English government failed to realize that the English were not technically equipped for finishing and dyeing cloth; the higher costs of finishing woolens in England left an open field for the emergence of a new competitive cloth industry on the Continent. As a result, English woolen exports fell by a catastrophic one-third in two years, and the repeal of the prohibition in 1616 could not succeed in reviving the cloth trade. Not only did the tax-crippled English industry have to compete with the low-cost industry of the Continent, but the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 brought about a Continent-wide debasement of currencies, a debasement that aided exports from the debasing countries at the expense of such other countries as England. Renewal of war in the Netherlands in 1622 further disrupted the vital market there, and the result was a continuing great depression in England in the twenties, a depression and unemployment concentrated particularly in the cloth-making centers of East Anglia and the West Country.

Fearful of rising political opposition sparked by the depression, the government tried desperately to relieve the victims of the depression by maintaining wage rates at a high level and keeping failing companies in operation. The result was only to prolong and intensify the depression the government was trying to cure: artificially high wage rates deepened unemployment in the clothing centers and imposed higher costs on an already high-cost industry; propping up of inefficient producers wasted more capital and ruined their creditors; and the domination of inefficient monopoly companies was tightened at the very time when the industry’s salvation could only come from freer competition and escape from the taxation and regulation of government. The overcapitalized monopoly companies were especially hard hit by the depression; the East India and Muscovy companies defaulted to their creditors, and the Virginia Company’s difficulties resulting from the government’s monopoly of tobacco sales led to its dissolution. Hence the royal assumption of power over the Virginia colony.

One growing light on the economic horizon was the exportation of the lightweight “new draperies,” produced free from government control, and over which no monopoly company held sway. Export trade in these new draperies was developing in southern Europe by the 1620s. The contrast in the fortunes of the two branches of cloth trade was too great to be ignored—the connection between free trade and economic growth, and between privileges and decline was becoming evident to contemporaries.

In successive Parliaments the representatives of the people demanded freedom in economic and political affairs and the termination of the government’s restrictions, monopolies, and taxes that had brought about the depression engulfing the country. The government responded characteristically by imprisoning the opposition leaders, such as Sir Edwin Sandys and Lord Saye and Sele, for advocating free trade, radicalism, and interference with tax collection. The Parliament of 1624 presented a list
of grievances in protest against the moratoria issued to debtors against their creditors, against the increases in government officials and expenses, against extraordinary tariffs and taxes, against the government’s use of informers and enforcement of regulations and controls, and against the monopoly trading companies, which were popularly regarded simply as gangs of thieves, from the East India Company to the Council for New England. The Parliament concluded by passing the Act Against Monopolies, by which all monopolies were outlawed and all proclamations furthering them prohibited. Unlike the depression of the 1550s, which had led to the unquestioned creation of monumental government controls over the economy, the depression of the 1620s witnessed an attempt toward liberalization by removing the regulations that had caused the crisis. The movement for the abolition of the government’s monopolies and regulations became a major part of the seventeenth-century constitutional struggle in England, and had a significant influence on the American colonists, whose migration was a fruit of the government’s controls.

However clear the principles of liberalism had become, the struggle for their realization in the seventeenth century had hardly begun. The accession of Charles I to the throne in March 1625 ushered in a period of conflict that was to span the mid-seventeenth century. The financial difficulties of the new government were greatly increased when England decided to enter the Thirty Years’ War by attacking Spain in 1625.

The English government had remained behind the scenes in the early phases of the war, acting through diplomacy and subsidies, despite the pressure of Puritan opinion for greater aid to the Calvinist forces of Germany, which had gone to war with Austria, and to the United Provinces, which had renewed the war with Spain and had suffered heavy defeats by the two Hapsburg powers. When the English government intervened in an alliance of the Lutheran powers of northern Europe with the anti-Hapsburg Catholic powers of southern Europe, it tried to use the excitement of war preparations as a convenient means of gaining taxes from Parliament. However, the Parliament refused to be stampeded by the crisis of European Protestant fortunes, and refused to vote taxes until the government had redressed grievances, especially in church reform. For the major authority in government on ecclesiastical matters was Rev. William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, who strongly opposed Puritanism in doctrine and in practice, and who had embarked upon a policy of eliminating all churchmen suspected of Puritan sympathies and promoting those whose theology and devotions the Puritans considered Catholic in origin.

The persecution of the Puritan clergy was matched by imprisonment of the opposition leaders and of merchants who refused to pay the taxes that Parliament had refused to approve. Moreover, the people were conscripted or had soldiers quartered in their homes if they refused to pay these taxes. It was this climate of increasing religious and political
persecution placed on top of the continuing economic depression that led the Rev. John White, a mildly Puritan minister from Dorchester and founder of the Dorchester Company, to revive the project of a settlement on the coast of New England. A settlement was projected to form a colony of West Country Puritans who would find refuge without having to submit to the tyranny of the religious and social conformity of the Separatists at Plymouth. Surely if the relatively humble Separatists could succeed in America, the far wealthier and more powerful Puritans could succeed all the more. The old Dorchester Company was bankrupt, but in 1628 White formed the New England Company with other Puritans and with old Dorchester associates, and secured a grant from the Council for New England of all the land between three miles south of the Charles River (which runs through Boston) and three miles north of the Merrimack (now the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border). Immediately John Endecott and a major financier of the company, Matthew Cradock, were sent out, with settlers, to take control of the Naumkeag settlement—by then renamed Salem—and for Endecott to supersede Conant as governor.

John Endecott’s idea of rule was that God had chosen him as “a fit instrument” for establishing a new Canaan for the chosen people by rooting out all lesser folk, red and white, preferably by means of the pillory and the whipping post. His major struggle was to cripple the livelihood of the old settlers by prohibiting their tobacco culture and beaver trade, turning these over to the New England Company. The “old planters” could only protest in vain that they were becoming slaves to a monopoly company.

During the spring of 1629, still harder-line Puritans immigrated to the New England colony, and their ministers established a quasi-Separatist church based on a congregational covenant. Old planters who refused to go this far from the Church of England and embrace the covenant were persecuted by Endecott as “libertines,” and some were deported to England, where the Rev. John White tried vainly to protect them. Many of the old planters expelled from Salem by Endecott moved to Rev. William Blackstone’s settlement at Boston and Charlestown.

Migration under the New England Company was small, but the rush of events soon intensified Puritan desires to seek a haven in the New World. Having added a war against France in 1627 to the conflict with Spain, the Crown was obliged to call Parliament into session to provide financing for the war effort. But Parliament took the occasion to present a petition of its grievances to be met before voting taxes for the king’s adventures. The Petition of Right (June 1628) denounced taxation without consent of Parliament, arbitrary arrests without benefit of habeas corpus, and the quartering of the government’s soldiers upon the people. Insistence upon these libertarian demands before supply of revenue led to the king’s dissolution of Parliament in March 1629 and to the Crown’s arrest of the leaders of the opposition.

Thus, English Puritans faced the gloomy prospect of greatly intensified repression at home, at the hands of the absolute royal power and its prerogative courts (of the High Commission and the Star Chamber). Puritan gloom was further deepened by the aggravated plight of their fellow Calvinists on the European continent. England’s military operations against France and Spain had failed, especially in trying to relieve the French Huguenots (Calvinists) besieged by the French Crown at La Rochelle; the Huguenots were forced to surrender to the French forces in October 1628. Early the following year, the Protestant powers in Germany concluded a humiliating peace issuing from the almost uninterrupted string of losses they had suffered in the first decade of the Thirty Years’ War. Finally, the Calvinist United Provinces in the Netherlands were undergoing serious losses at the hands of the Spanish army. Thus, everywhere in Europe the Catholic powers were triumphant, and the Protestants suffering losses. As the Puritan leader John Winthrop concluded, during 1629, “All other Churches in Europe are brought to desolation, and it cannot be but the like judgment is coming upon us.” A secure sanctuary in America seemed to be vital for Puritan survival.

Seeing their plight, the Puritans were able to persuade Charles I to grant a royal charter in March 1629 to the Massachusetts Bay Company, the more powerful successor of the New England Company. Coincidentally, the charter was granted just four days after King Charles’ dissolution of Parliament. The old unincorporated company had now become an incorporated body politic with power to govern its granted territory. The old grant of land was reconfirmed. The new company was to appoint the governor, deputy governor, and council, and make laws for its settlers. The company promptly sent out a fleet of colonists to Salem. With the arrival of this fleet, Salem immediately attained to a larger size than the decade-old Plymouth Colony (by 1630 the Massachusetts Bay colony totaled a little over five hundred people).

Massachusetts Bay Company and colony, however, developed far more rapidly than their founders had foreseen, thanks to the unexpectedly overwhelming interest in emigration among the Puritans of East Anglia. The East Anglians were the most numerous and most extreme of the English Puritans, reaching virtually the point of Separatism from the Church of England. As dedicated Puritans, the East Anglians had been embittered by Archbishop Laud’s anti-Puritan movement within the Church of England, and by a widespread growth of a liberal Dutch theology in the universities and among the upper classes, a theology stressing free will and religious toleration. Such doctrines were highly suspect to the Calvinist Puritans bent upon predestination and extirpation of heresy. For a long while, however, the East Anglians had been indifferent to the emigration movement, for East Anglia had not been as widely hit by the depression of the 1620s as had the West Country and other manufacturing centers in England. The reason for the relative prosperity was that East Anglia was
the center for the production of the lighter new draperies, which had not been crippled by taxation, monopoly privilege, or stringent state regulation. However, the wars with France and Spain interrupted the markets for East Anglian textiles while moving the state, in its frantic search for revenue, to bring taxes and controls upon the new-drapery industry. Production of new draperies in East Anglia dropped by a startling two-thirds between 1628 and 1631, and tens of thousands of spinners and weavers were thrown out of work, increasing the poor-tax burdens upon the country farmers and gentry. Riots and disorders by the workmen made things still worse; they led the government to impose further taxes and minimum-wage rates upon the manufacturers, to force merchants to buy textiles, and to prohibit export competition with the monopoly companies. With sudden economic distress and injustice added to unwelcome political and religious trends, the Puritans of East Anglia were now ripe for mass emigration.