Conceived in Liberty (51 page)

The commission came armed with two sets of royal instructions: public and secret. The public instructions were to hear complaints, settle disputes between the New England colonies, and enforce the Navigation Acts. They also conveyed the king’s good intentions to Massachusetts. The secret instructions, however, were to press for the election of more amenable deputies and magistrates who would approve the idea of a royal governor in Massachusetts. Nicolls himself was the king’s preference for this post. The king also instructed the commissioners to insist upon religious toleration in New England, especially, of course, for Anglicans.

Upon the commissioners’ arrival in July 1664, Massachusetts delivered a ringing reply to their pretensions: Massachusetts’ enemies had evidently persuaded the king to send a commission that could on its own discretion revoke the colonists’ fundamental right of self-government, a right granted in their patent. In addition to these arguments from principle, the royal commissioners were subjected to personal denunciation in the colony. One of the commissioners, the ambitious Sir Robert Carr, was accused of keeping a mistress, while Col. George Cartwright was suspected of being a “papist.” In the Puritan climate of Massachusetts Bay, it was difficult to know which crime was deemed the more heinous.

The commission proceeded first to the rapid accomplishment of its top-priority mission—the conquest of New Netherland. The commissioners’ next step, according to their instructions, was to outflank Massachusetts by bringing the weaker New England colonies into submission before confronting their most difficult task, Massachusetts Bay. Accordingly, their first step, in early 1665, was Plymouth, where the commissioners demanded that the franchise no longer depend on religious opinion, and that there be religious liberty, at least for “orthodox” Christians. In contrast to Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth quickly succumbed, thus greatly weakening the theocratic and oligarchic rule. The king warmly commended Plymouth for its ready compliance, but not without a pointed
reference to her errant sister: “Your carriage seems to be set off with the more lustre by the contrary deportment of the colony of the Massachusetts....”

The next step was to settle the still raging boundary dispute over the Narragansett Country; the commission was granted power to override any previous royal charter. Connecticut and the Atherton Company were still actively claiming the land. The Crown had advised the commissioners to take the Narragansett Country away from both Connecticut and Rhode Island and to make it a direct royal province, with the Atherton claim continuing in force. At the end of March the commissioners rendered their decision, amending their instructions significantly. For although the Narragansett Country was indeed awarded directly to the Crown and called “King’s Province,” the commissioners decided to compensate Rhode Island for the loss by authorizing it independently to govern the province in the king’s stead. Moreover, they were convinced by Rhode Island’s demonstration of the fraudulent nature of the Atherton Company’s purchase of the tract from the Indians. The commissioners, therefore, boldly vacated the arbitrary Atherton claim and ordered the company proprietors off the territory. (Sir Robert Carr, however, demonstrated his buccaneering bent by asking the Crown to grant him title to a large tract of the best Narragansett grazing land.) Winthrop, however, managed to persuade Nicolls, who had not been present, to get the Atherton decision reversed. But at least Rhode Island was left in charge of the territory.

The commissioners’ other major impact on Rhode Island was, as we have seen, the compulsory narrowing of suffrage to those of “competent estates.” Rhode Island needed no prodding, of course, to agree to what they already had: permission for all the orthodox to have churches of their own choosing.

Apart from the Atherton decision, the commissioners’ rulings were quite satisfactory to Connecticut. We have already seen the commissioners’ role in the liquidation of New Haven. The commissioners were told by Connecticut that it already met the requirements of giving the right to vote to all “men of competent estates,” even if not church members, and of permitting full religious liberty to those of orthodox belief and “civil lives.” While it was true, however, that Connecticut had been far more democratic than Massachusetts in granting the vote to nonchurch members, it had hardly permitted full religious freedom to non-Puritans. In return for their ready compliance with the commissioners’ requests, Connecticut and Rhode Island were, like Plymouth, favored with a message from King Charles complimenting them on their good behavior.

Their business with the southern New England colonies speedily and satisfactorily concluded, the commissioners turned their attention to their major problem—Massachusetts Bay. Confronting the Massachusetts General Court in May 1665, the commissioners soon realized that this colony would be winning no good-conduct medals from the king. The
commissioners put forth their demands: that they proposed to act as an appeals court for Massachusetts cases; that, as the other colonies had done, Massachusetts adopt an oath of allegiance to the king; that it grant full religious liberty to Anglicans; and that it observe the Navigation Acts. The commissioners also demanded that Massachusetts
really
eliminate its prohibition against voting by nonchurch members.

Led by Governor Richard Bellingham, Massachusetts flatly refused each one of these royal demands. Massachusetts’ charter, it further declared, gave the Bay Colony absolute power to make laws and administer justice; therefore, any appellate activity by the commission would be an intolerable breach of Massachusetts’ rights. The commissioners angrily retorted that they were the direct agents of the king, the very royal authority responsible for the charter. Does Massachusetts deny the authority of the royal commission? Massachusetts answered, in a masterpiece of evasion and pseudohumility, that it was beyond its capacity or function to pass on the validity of the commission.

The commissioners decided to take the bull by the horns, and set themselves up as an appellate court, in the house of Capt. Thomas Breedon, to hear grievances against Massachusetts. But the General Court moved swiftly, proclaiming “by the sound of the trumpet” outside the Breedon house that this action was a breach of the royal charter and of Massachusetts’ rights, and could not gain the General Court’s consent.

Defeated and frustrated, the commissioners left Boston, but with this warning of things to come: “The King did not grant away his sovereignty over you when he made you a corporation. When His Majesty gave you power to make wholesome laws and to administer justice by them, he parted not with his right to judge whether the laws were wholesome... ‘tis possible that the charter that you so much idolize may be forfeited, until you have cleared yourselves of those many injustices, oppressions, violences, and blood for which you are complained against.”

With Col. Richard Nicolls returning to New York to take up his post as governor, the other commissioners proceeded northward, to try to disrupt Massachusetts’ rule over the New Hampshire and Maine settlements. Beyond obtaining a few signatures on a petition to the king for relief from Massachusetts’ rule, the commissioners accomplished little in the New Hampshire towns, even though accompanied by agents of the proprietary claimant to New Hampshire, Robert T. Mason. The towns of Portsmouth and Dover, in fact, sent for some Massachusetts magistrates to emphasize their solidarity with Massachusetts. This was not surprising because New Hampshire was dominated by an oligarchy of Massachusetts merchants—for example, Valentine Hill and the Waldron family—who had moved to the Piscataqua to engage in the flourishing timber and fish trade. The oligarchy was either appointed by the Massachusetts General Court or elected by a highly limited franchise. A dozen petitioners from Portsmouth complained to the commission that under Massachusetts “five
or six of the richest men of this parish have ruled and ordered all offices, both civil and military, at their pleasure, and none durst make opposition for fear of great fines or long imprisonment.” In particular, the opposition attacked the theocratic Puritan rule and pleaded for the right to worship as Anglicans and for the right to vote. The greatest fire of the petitioners was leveled at Dover’s Puritan minister, Rev. Joshua Moody. The petitioners also asked for a union of New Hampshire with Maine, where the settlements had similar problems.

If some merchants were privileged members of the New Hampshire oligarchy, so also merchants like Francis Champernowne headed the petition and merchants like Pynchon and Bradstreet defended the petitioners in the Massachusetts court. But all to no avail. For as soon as the commissioners left, the Massachusetts authorities began to arrest the leading petitioners and complainants. Thus, the Portsmouth distiller Abraham Corbett was hauled into court “to answer for his tumultuous and seditious practices against his government.”

Pickings were more fruitful for the commission, however, in the Maine towns, which had been seized by Massachusetts only a decade before, and where the preponderance of anti-Puritan settlers and fishermen kept resentment high. Finding Maine discontented with Massachusetts’ rule, the commissioners proceeded to organize an independent government at York for the eight Maine towns. The commissioners were armed with a royal letter commanding the surrender of the Maine towns to the jurisdiction of Ferdinando Gorges, grandson and heir of the previous proprietor, and John Archdale accompanied the commission as an agent of Gorges to see that the order was carried out.

Traveling further east to the Duke of York’s new province east of the Kennebec river (now central and eastern Maine), the commissioners then organized a government, under the duke, of the few scattered inhabitants, and named the territory Cornwall.

Before disbanding, the commissioners sent their report to the Crown in December 1665. In it they attacked Massachusetts’ intransigence and recommended revocation of the Bay Colony charter. They also recommended direct royal government for New Hampshire and Maine, and praised the cooperative attitude of other New England colonies.

The commissioners’ report, however, proved to be ill-fated. One ill omen: none of the commissioners arrived home with the report. Maverick settled down in New York, Carr died shortly after, and Cartwright, traveling to England with the report, was captured at sea by the Dutch. More significantly, the king found this an inopportune time to tangle with Massachusetts.

The Dutch had naturally taken umbrage at England’s sudden seizure of New Netherland at a time when the two countries were at peace. And in the ensuing war with the Dutch, England bore heavy losses and expenses, especially as the French entered on the side of the Dutch. A great
plague also devastated London and southern England, and later in the year a great fire destroyed two-thirds of the housing of London. Furthermore, clamor was rising against the king’s lord chancellor, the despotic Earl of Clarendon, soon to be ousted and to flee into exile. With all the turmoil in England, Charles decided to let the Massachusetts matter go for the time being. In April 1666 he asked Massachusetts to send an agent to England to answer the commissioners’ charges. Massachusetts brusquely replied that it had already given all its explanations to the commissioners and now had nothing to add. The Bay Colony did, as a sweetener, send to the Crown for the royal navy a gift of two large expensive masts, worth about two thousand pounds, from the New Hampshire forests.

Massachusetts’ refusal had not been decided upon without opposition. Leading citizens of a few Massachusetts towns counseled obedience to the king’s order. Of the Boston petitioners against defiance, the overwhelming majority were: (a) merchants, and (b) nonfreemen, and hence nonvoters and non-Puritan church members. Thus, the counsel of caution came largely from the groups most prominent in strong opposition to the rule of the existing oligarchy.

Despite the defiance of Massachusetts, the king now dropped the matter and pursued the colony no further. At home the hated Earl of Clarendon fell from power in 1667, to be succeeded by the Cabal ministry, in which Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, was the most influential official on colonial affairs. And since Lord Ashley was himself an active proprietor of the new Carolina grant, it was to his interest to minimize royal interference in the colonies. Influential fellow colonial proprietors like the Duke of York, furthermore, were interested more in exploring their own proprietary claims than in bringing the colonies to heel. The Massachusetts government had triumphed—for the short run.

Even the one victory of the commissioners over Massachusetts Bay—the separation of Maine—turned out to be short-lived. During the Anglo-Dutch war, support for Massachusetts in Maine increased out of fear of the Indians friendly to the French and French-Catholic missionaries. Also, realizing that England, in the wake of war and the fall of Clarendon, was in no mind to intervene, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1668, took steps forcibly to reincorporate the Maine towns into the Bay Commonwealth. Four leaders of the General Court went to York and there reimposed Massachusetts’ rule on Maine. Massachusetts now ruled triumphant, without a single defeat at the hands of the Crown.

One of the most far-reaching actions of the first years of the Restoration was a series of Navigation Acts, by which England imposed mercantilist restrictions on its empire. Attempting to eliminate the more efficient Dutch shipping from the American trade for the benefit of the London merchants, the Puritan Parliament in 1650–51 had prohibited foreign vessels from trading with America; goods to and from the colonies could only be carried on English or colonial ships, or on ships of the home
country of growth or manufacture. Fish imports and exports from England were limited to English ships alone. As part of the Restoration compromise, Charles II continued to gratify the London merchants and passed a series of Navigation Acts in 1660–63. Part of the commissioners’ instructions, indeed, was to see to the enforcement of these acts.

The new Navigation Acts drastically restricted and monopolized American colonial trade, to the detriment of the colonies. The Navigation Act of 1660–61: (1) restricted all colonial trade to “English” ships (English and American), that is, ships built, owned, and manned by Englishmen; (2) excluded all foreign merchants from American trade; and (3) required that certain enumerated colonial articles be exported
only
to England and English colonies. We have already seen the havoc caused in the Southern colonies by tobacco being made one of the enumerated goods. Among the others were sugar, cotton-wool, and various dyes. The second important Navigation Act was the Staple Act of 1663, which provided that all goods exported from Europe to America must first land in England. Only a few colonial imports were exempt from this prohibition: salt, servants, various provisions from Scotland, and wine from Madeira and the Azores. The Staple Act meant that English ships and merchants would monopolize exports to America, while English manufacturers selling to America would be privileged by extra taxes being levied at English ports on foreign exports to the colonies. The enumerated-articles provision insured that these staples would be exported only by English merchants and in English ships. The English seizure of New Netherland was partly designed to complement the Navigation Act by crushing the Dutch freight trade with the New World.