Conceived in Liberty (63 page)

Governor Andros, however, was not the man for friendly conferences when violence could be employed. He denounced Connecticut’s stubbornness as virtual rebellion. With King Philip’s War now breaking out in June, Andros informed the Connecticut Council on July 7 that he was dispatching posthaste his troops to the Connecticut River. Professor Dunn aptly summarizes the Connecticut reaction: “Whether Andros’ soldiers were to be used against the Indians or against the Connecticut government was unclear, but the Council members could guess. They sent a company of militia commanded by Capt. Thomas Bull to Saybrook with the instructions to protect the seacoast from ‘the approach of an enemy’— either redskinned or redcoated.”
*
Andros managed to reach Fort Saybrook first, but there he was confronted with armed and glowering local militiamen. Andros had expected to find the militia away fighting Indians and to seize the undefended fort. Instead, the militiamen were preparing their cannons. In this crisis the Connecticut General Assembly stood fast. It directed Captain Bull to tell Andros to go to Mt. Hope if he really wanted to fight Indians, but to resist if he tried to land his troops. Andros, his bluff called, contented himself with reading aloud a proclamation of the duke’s charter. The Connecticut force countered with a proclamation of its own, protesting Andros’ illegal actions, and calling Andros a disturber of the public peace. Feebly protesting this as slander, Andros sailed back home. Connecticut had successfully resisted the loss of its self-government by the imperialist seizure of Andros and New York. Interestingly enough, the Hartford government’s reaction was to commend Bull and the other officers, but to complain that they acted too mildly. Andros’ reading of the duke’s charter, they said, should have been drowned out by the drums of Connecticut troops.

*
Richard S. Dunn,
Puritans and Yankees
(Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 183.

It was 1675. The last Dutch war was well over and King Charles II was free to turn his attention to longer-run concerns. Furthermore, the relatively liberal Cabal administration, which had succeeded Clarendon in the mid-1660s, had now fallen, to be replaced by the absolutist Earl of Danby. With the accession of Danby, Charles determined to scrap his relatively tolerant administration at home, his flirting with liberty for Catholics and Dissenters, and to embark instead on an absolutist course: royalist and theocratic-Anglican. In colonial affairs, with the relatively liberal Shaftesbury now in opposition instead of in power, Charles determined that absolutism would hold sway there as well. As he looked overseas, it became obvious what was the stumbling block to absolute royal power: New England; New England that had the temerity to govern itself, without so much as a royal governor, and to trade freely with blithe disregard for the ever-tightening English imperial Navigation Acts. And at the heart and head of New England, Massachusetts Bay, overwhelmingly the most populous and most prosperous colony, the successful defier of the king’s royal commission a decade before. Massachusetts—the seat of the prosperous rising merchant groups, who were the primary scoffers at restrictive trade laws and the main thorns in the side of those London merchants that had pushed through the Navigation Act of 1673, the purpose of which was to enforce the navigation laws. It was high time, on many counts, to impose the imperial power on New England.

The first preliminary step in the drive to centralize royal power over the colonies came in 1675, when the king transferred the handling of colonial affairs to a new committee of the Privy Council, the Lords of Trade and
Plantations, with more power than previous committees in the imperial bureaucracy. The lords realized that the main function of the goal of absolute power was to regulate, monopolize, and extract revenue from colonial trade.

The first direct step in King Charles’ campaign to seize New England began in 1676, when the Lords of Trade appointed Edward Randolph to go to New England and check on its situation and on enforcement of the Navigation Acts. Randolph also carried a letter from the king to Massachusetts, ordering the colony once again to send agents to answer the various charges against her, including the Gorges and Mason claims to the Maine and New Hampshire towns. The June morning in 1676 when Randolph arrived in Massachusetts marked the beginning of the end of the autonomy and virtual independence, and many of the liberties, of the New England colonies.

Edward Randolph was the perfect choice for heading an expanded imperial bureaucracy. He was the very model of the royal bureaucrat and placeman, dedicated to maximizing the power and plunder of the Crown—for the benefit of king and self. He was an arch-royalist and high Anglican. He was grasping and arrogant before his inferiors, while obsequious before his betters. Randolph was by marriage a cousin to Robert T. Mason, the son of John Mason, who was pressing for his old claim over the New Hampshire towns and who was largely responsible for Randolph’s appointment. Thus, Randolph had a special, personal interest in the assertion of royal authority over the New Hampshire towns, and their separation from Massachusetts rule.

Edward Randolph was also a model of the new breed of imperial bureaucrat for another critical reason: he was a leading official emerging not from the great aristocratic families, but from the ranks of the burgeoning royal bureaucracy itself. Like such contemporaries as Sir Robert Southwell and William Blathwayt, Randolph was a creature of the new imperial civil service. And this common experience forged in this new breed a common class or “caste” interest, an interest that joined the power and fortunes of the king to their own.
*

Massachusetts, used to its independence, treated Randolph’s message from the king with its accustomed short shrift. Governor John Leverett at first refused to take off his hat for the reading of the king’s letter. When Randolph complained of the extensive violations of the navigation laws, of the foreign ships and the cargo of Spanish wines he had seen in the harbor, Leverett staunchly replied that English laws were only applicable in “what consists with the interest of New England.”

It took Randolph only a week to decide on what should be done with Massachusetts: smash it. It was a course he would urge for years. King Philip’s War was not quite over, and so now—
now
was the time to act. He warned: “Three frigates of forty guns with three ketches well manned lying a league or two below Boston with his Majesty’s express orders to seize all shipping and perform other acts of hostility against these revolters would... do more in one week’s time than all the orders of King and Council to them in seven years.” To make Massachusetts look even blacker, Randolph grandiloquently claimed that the other New England colonies would like nothing better than a royal governor general to rule over them. The plan was a little too abrupt for the Lords of Trade, but it echoed a considerable amount of influential opinion in England.

Before leaving for England, Randolph traveled through New England trying to round up allies for his campaign to take over the colonial governments in behalf of the Crown. The motley group of allies that Randolph was able to accumulate has generally been called the “moderate party”—a curious concept, since they were neither moderate nor a party. It is difficult to see why these satellites of the Crown should be called moderate. And they were by no means a homogeneous party, but a varied group of individuals, collected from different circumstances and occupations. Neither is it true that these “moderates” were “the merchants.” It is true that the ruling oligarchy of magistrate gentry and Puritan ministers in Massachusetts generally excluded the merchants, and that the ranks of Randolph’s favorites were drawn from the opponents to the existing regime. But merchants never form any sort of homogeneous “class,” and they differed on this issue too. Furthermore, those seeking government privileges, or lucrative posts in the bureaucracy, perform an economic role entirely different from that of people genuinely engaged in trade; those so engaged oppose interference with their trade. It is highly misleading to lump the two together into the term “merchants.”
*

In each case, Randolph tried to find the factor that would turn the person against the Massachusetts government. As in the case of the royal commissioners a decade earlier, Randolph found his first allies outside Massachusetts: Anglicans, especially in the Maine and New Hampshire towns; and Governor Josiah Winslow of Plymouth, who made Randolph a freeman of the colony. Winslow was motivated by understandable fear of Massachusetts aggression, a fear heightened by the unfortunate precedent set by Connecticut’s swallowing up of New Haven. Plymouth was still in limbo without a charter and Winslow was anxious to curry favor with the Crown to obtain such a charter.

Returning to England, Randolph wrote two lengthy reports in the fall of 1676. In these he denounced Massachusetts in detail and erroneously asserted that the bulk of the people would welcome the capture of the government by the Crown and the consequent overthrow of the existing oligarchy. But with the theocracy already decidedly on the wane, many Massachusetts citizens undoubtedly felt that its elimination by such a route would be much too high a price to pay.

Randolph tried to turn every contingency to his anti-Massachusetts designs. Thus, in late 1676 he wrote a series of papers in which he tried to tie in the measures under way against Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. One paper suggested that the anti-Bacon fleet in Virginia proceed to Boston to help settle matters there.

This time in peril, Massachusetts sent two agents to England to argue against Randolph’s designs. In response, Randolph launched another series of detailed attacks on the colony. In the summer of 1677 the Committee of Chief Justices of the Lords of Trade issued their report on New England. The committee recommended for Massachusetts a supplementary charter, which Boston hailed as a great victory over Randolph’s proposals. The Massachusetts General Court, cockily triumphant, ignored almost all of the other recommendations of the committee, brushing aside its demands that Massachusetts allow appeals or reviews of its laws to the Crown. Massachusetts even ignored a royal request of great symbolic, but only symbolic, importance: taking an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Instead, Massachusetts repeated its own independent Oath of Fidelity. Massachusetts’ only concession was to agree to enforce the Navigation Acts in the colony—a very sore point with the Crown. But here, Massachusetts staunchly insisted on its view of its own absolute right to make laws for itself, and not have English laws apply overseas. Therefore, the Bay Colony proclaimed the Navigation Acts to be its own voluntary statute; it thereby evaded submitting to the authority of Crown or Parliament.

The Committee of Chief Justices also decided to reject the Mason claim to New Hampshire; it also rejected the right of Massachusetts to rule there. This left New Hampshire explicitly in limbo, but with the implicit threat of being converted into a royal colony. Massachusetts expected, however, that the end of the Mason threat would soon result in the acknowledgment of its own jurisdiction over New Hampshire. For the Maine towns, however, the committee decided to acknowledge the Gorges claim. At this point, the King received shocking news. King Charles had hoped to buy the Maine charter back from Gorges, and then grant the area as a proprietary gift to his natural son, the Duke of Monmouth. But Massachusetts now executed a brilliant maneuver, purchasing all of Gorges’ rights to Maine for £1,250 cash. Massachusetts now had an excellent royal title to the Maine towns and it later proceeded to enforce that title by trying to collect quitrents from the Maine settlers.

At the turn of 1678 a clamor grew on all sides for the reopening of the
Massachusetts case. Overconfident, Massachusetts itself wished to push on to final victory: the official incorporation of New Hampshire. And Randolph wished to bombard the Lords of Trade with anti-Massachusetts arguments, to reverse the decisions of the previous year. Finally, the report of Massachusetts’ maneuver in Maine angered the committee and moved it to a general reevaluation of New England affairs.

At the reopened proceedings of the committee, Randolph maneuvered masterfully. He first attacked the personal acts of the Massachusetts agents and heaped discredit on the agents, then turned to the Bay Colony itself. Here he stressed the colony’s insistence that only Puritan church members could vote, and especially its lofty rejection, the previous fall, of the committee’s proposals—a point well calculated to inflame the committee against Massachusetts Bay. Randolph also warned that Massachusetts’ imposition of an Oath of Fidelity was a direct threat to his own informers in the colony.

By May 1678 Randolph’s victory over Massachusetts was complete. The King insisted on the oath of allegiance in the colony, which Massachusetts finally accepted in October. But most important, the attorney general’s advice was accepted: Massachusetts’ crimes and violations were sufficient to void its charter, and the Crown prepared to sue to nullify the charter in the courts. To complete the rout, Randolph was himself appointed, over Massachusetts’ bitter protests, to be the collector of customs for New England—the first salaried bureaucrat to be stationed by the Crown in that region. Randolph’s task was primarily to enforce the collection of duties from the Navigation Acts. The decisions in the spring of 1678 spelled the beginning of the end of independence in Massachusetts and New England.

At this point, with the jubilant Randolph prepared to distribute patronage to his friends, events in England forced another turn: a postponement of the destruction of the Massachusetts charter. In 1678 Titus Oates and his friends touched off a mighty wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, with his elaborate hoax of a “Popish Plot” to assassinate the king and impose Roman Catholicism upon England. This hysteria was manipulated by a relatively liberal Country party, headed by Lord Shaftesbury, to ride briefly back into power. The Earl of Danby was impeached and sent to the Tower, and Shaftesbury became president of the Privy Council in early 1679 and a member of the Lords of Trade. In view of this, the committee of the Lords of Trade realized that it had to postpone indefinitely its plans for crushing Massachusetts. The lords contented themselves with urging the colony to adopt liberty of conscience—especially of Anglican conscience—to repeal the religious restrictions on voting, and to impose the oath of allegiance. They also decided to move quickly on New Hampshire. The Lords of Trade made New Hampshire a new royal colony, with a president appointed by the king, an Assembly, and a Council of nine, of whom six were to be appointed by the Crown and the three others to be selected by
those six. Robert Mason was persuaded to acknowledge the land titles of existing settlers, in return for a yearly feudal quitrent of not more than six pence on the pound. And the vital timberlands were to be reserved to the ownership of Mason.