Читать книгу The Empire Reformed - Owen Stanwood - Страница 11

Chapter 1

Imperial Designs

BEGINNING IN THE 1670s administrators in Charles II’s court sought to build a new empire. As an anonymous official noted, proper management of “forraigne Plantations” was of “great consequence … to the prosperity of [the] Nation.” The king’s empire was vast, but poorly regulated. Local officials in the various plantations worked in virtual isolation from authorities in Whitehall, and unlike other European states, England did not have a single office managing colonial affairs before the mid-1670s. The consequences of this oversight were profound; the king lost revenue and power, and colonial subjects languished on their own, as evidenced in the crisis of 1675–76, when New England nearly fell to a coalition of enemy Indians and Virginia experienced a massive civil war. If the empire was to work for the king and his subjects, it had to be brought into line.¹

The later Stuart reorganization of the empire was a bold exercise in trans-Atlantic state building. It represented one strand of a campaign to augment the crown’s power at the expense of the localities, reflected most notably in the reorganization of dozens of local corporations in England itself. Reformers hoped that England would soon have a much more streamlined state, one that reflected in some form the royal absolutist political philosophies pursued by Louis XIV in France at the same time. In order to do this, the king and his ministers had to reorganize the state on a grand scale, but in addition they had to change English political culture, which included a strong attachment to local customs, privileges, and liberties. If they were to succeed, crown officials had to convince people to view the king and the state in a new way.²

Thus royal officials had to translate this grand imperial vision in dozens of local contexts. In England the drama played out in counties and towns across the kingdom as local interest groups battled the crown for their privileges. Across the ocean, meanwhile, the theoretical issues were similar but the context very different. Zealous civil servants made the long trip to North America and the West Indies to accomplish what they hoped would be a simple task. The colonies were farther away and there was little money to help imperial officials build an empire, but few people lived in the plantations and they did not have entrenched interest groups like those in Britain and Ireland. Even the oldest colony, after all, was just over seventy years old. The crown began modestly: in 1678 it created a new royal colony in New Hampshire, a tiny outpost in northern New England, sending a minor courtier named Edward Cranfield to lead the colony into stability. Soon afterward, an English court revoked the charter of the Bermuda Company and took that island colony under its control. These minor conquests would pave the way for the royalization of New England, the most argumentative and independent of the colonies, and eventually all of the American plantations.³

This simple task proved very difficult for administrators to accomplish. In New Hampshire and Bermuda, the governors sent to oversee these changes met serious resistance—especially from the religious dissenters who formed majorities in both places. New Hampshire’s Governor Cranfield quickly ran afoul of prominent landowners and assemblymen, surviving an attempted rebellion in 1683. In Bermuda, meanwhile, Governor Richard Coney managed to alienate virtually everyone, at one point confronting an armed mob right in front of his house, and declaring the colony to be in “actual rebellion.” Beyond the physical perils of office, neither man was very successful at the tasks of governance, whether raising revenue or providing for defense. Put simply, colonial subjects refused to recognize their authority, meaning that both colonies were essentially without governments during much of the 1680s. The new empire did not come together as its planners envisioned; rather than uniting colonial subjects, imperial reform divided them into two hostile and irreconcilable camps.⁴

These reform efforts proved difficult because they ran into the conspiratorial political culture of popish and Puritan plots that poisoned Anglo-American politics in the Restoration era. Rather than bringing England and the plantations together in a more perfect union, the program of imperial centralization polarized colonists, creating two different factions or parties that took on slightly different forms from place to place but organized themselves around two conspiracy theories. One faction, which can be called the royal party, believed that a Puritan plot threatened the plantations; that Protestant dissenters, heirs to the regicidal impulses of their forebears, intended to undermine the Restoration monarchy and strip the king of his empire. The other side, which might be called the Protestant party, began to see imperial centralization as one plank in a popish plot, a design by Stuart officials, sometimes in collusion with French or Spanish allies, to reduce the plantations to popery and tyranny. With both sides dependent on such conspiratorial visions, the actual task of governance became much more difficult.⁵

• • •

In 1685 Nathaniel Crouch, a famous London bookseller known for his condensed histories and devotional tracts, issued a new title, The English Empire in America. The book was inexpensive and small enough to fit in one’s pocket, and its 200 pages contained vivid, if somewhat remarkable stories about the history and present state of England’s overseas plantations. The book would win no points for either originality or accuracy: as in his other histories, Crouch simply reprinted much of his material from other available printed sources, and selected anecdotes aimed at an audience more interested in curiosities than in the subtleties of colonial society or government. Nearly half of the book consisted of descriptions of native life culled from authors like Thomas Hariot and John Smith, while the chapters on the Caribbean Islands focused on sea monsters. But for all its eccentricities, Crouch’s book teaches historians a very important lesson. Even among London’s humbler classes, the American empire had begun to acquire a reputation. People knew about it, and wanted to know more. The colonies had entered the popular consciousness.⁶

It is hardly coincidental that Crouch’s book appeared in 1685, the last year of Charles II’s reign. Arguably no monarch in English history had presided over such a profound expansion of England’s overseas empire. During the twenty-five years following the king’s restoration in 1660 the plantations grew in both number and importance. Charles created five new colonies on the North American mainland by granting charters to royal favorites, while also expanding the scope of royal authority in existing colonies and handing more power to chartered trading monopolies like the East India Company or the new Royal African Company. At the time of the king’s death his empire stretched from London to Newfoundland, Barbados, and India. Tens of thousands of his subjects lived overseas, along with many people of other nationalities who dwelled in his dominions, often against their will.⁷

But if Charles II’s empire was mighty on paper, it was also diverse and diffuse. Not only in geography, but in economic livelihood, political form, and ethnic composition, each of the king’s plantations was a world apart. Certainly it was a major goal of the king’s ministers to impose some kind of order on the chaotic system he inherited from his father and grandfather, and he did preside over an unprecedented expansion of the imperial administration, but the farther one went from Whitehall the less this bureaucracy seemed to matter. Part of the king’s irrelevance stemmed from his own inconsistency: just as he sought to eliminate the chartered corporations in New England and Bermuda that made the colonies so hard to govern, he also created new proprieties as late as 1681, when he granted Pennsylvania to the Quaker William Penn. This waffling has led many historians to downplay the significance of the Restoration empire and consider the eighteenth century as the true beginning of British imperialism.⁸

Despite its diversity, there was one thing that united the various parts of the Restoration empire, and that was fear. The expansionist push of the late 1600s did not stem, as one might think, from national self-confidence, but from the very opposite feeling, an anxiety that England was in danger of being subverted and undermined, or even destroyed, by its rivals. The identity of this eternal foe was a matter of some dispute, and English political writers engaged in a constant debate concerning which of the nation’s chief rivals, France or the Netherlands, was more dangerous or cunning. But whoever the enemy was, most English people agreed that the proper response was an expansion of England’s global influence. Thus, the empire that Crouch chronicled was in part a national attempt to save England and its interests from subversion.⁹

The champions of imperial consolidation came from a cadre of Stuart loyalists who shaped colonial policy on both sides of the Atlantic. The most ubiquitous was William Blathwayt, a political chameleon who never visited the colonies, but became England’s most influential American expert, and a tireless advocate of a more centralized empire. While he rarely engaged in overt political sermonizing, Blathwayt left little doubt that he favored tighter controls over the colonies, and he also suggested why: without centralization, the king’s rivals—especially France—would gain more power and resources in North America. In 1688 Blathwayt defended the proposed Dominion of New England by stating, “it will be terrible to the French and make them proceed with more caution than they have lately done.” But if Blathwayt and other Stuart officials feared the French, they combined this anxiety with a great deal of admiration. Indeed, they proposed that the best way to defeat the French in America, as in Europe, was to emulate them.¹⁰

Two brief examples can serve to illustrate this anti-French imperialism. In the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, perhaps the most exposed of England’s colonial possessions, the crypto-Catholic Tory Governor Sir William Stapleton complained throughout the 1670s and 1680s of the attention the French king lavished on his island colonies, implying that if the Lords of Trade and Plantations did not imitate the Sun King and send a well-provisioned naval brigade, England’s rivals could easily overrun the islands. In the meantime, another Irish Catholic, Thomas Dongan of New York, worked against French pretensions in the north by adopting French tactics. England’s rivals had built a potent empire despite the perennial lack of migrants by cultivating Indian alliances that united the French, at least in theory, with natives stretching from Montreal to the Illinois Country. Dongan consciously imitated this alliance system by renewing the “covenant chain” alliance with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy dwelling north of the colony, which had been inaugurated by his predecessor Edmund Andros. At the same time, Dongan understood the role of Jesuit priests in expanding French trade and influence, and he proposed that the English expel the priests and replace them with English Jesuits—a tacit admission of the importance of missions in strengthening the imperial state. Indeed, the Jesuits had become leading vanguards of French expansionism, and Dongan understood their power.¹¹

These Stuart planners perceived a hemispheric design by the French to dominate the continent both politically and economically. The Sun King and his minions would use every tool at their disposal—including military power and the more subtle efforts of the Jesuits—to win over the trade of the Americas for themselves, and with it land and power as well. The design was secular at its core, but had a strong religious component, since the French masked their true intentions under a religious veneer. Thus the Stuart vision of empire was based on a widespread fear of the French that was at least implicitly, and sometimes explicitly anti-Catholic.

At the same time, they perceived another enemy that aided the French in their designs: radical dissenters. Along with the king’s foreign rivals, these internal foes were the most dangerous enemies of the national interest. It was Puritans, after all, who had taken up arms against King Charles I and plunged the nation into civil war during the 1640s, and forty years later their heirs—usually labeled dissenters or nonconformists—appeared to be doing the same thing. By fomenting quarrels between English subjects and challenging royal authority, these subversives provided aid to the king’s Catholic rivals. Stuart officials often made toleration a feature of their religious policy, but they accompanied this apparent moderation with a vitriolic condemnation of dissent, which often crossed the line from being a matter of conscience to a marker of treasonous inclinations. In addition, imperial planners used the lack of religious toleration in New England, especially toward conforming Anglicans, as another reason to reform the colonies.¹²

The New England colonies provided the clearest indication of the dangers of an empire run by dissenters. Edward Randolph, a royal officer sent to investigate the region in 1676, portrayed Massachusetts as an “arbitrary government” in the truest sense, as leaders claimed authority with no real mandate. They flouted English economic regulations, passed laws that were “repugnant” to the English constitution, and even harbored “regicides” who had signed Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Reform was necessary, Randolph argued, not just for economic reasons but for geopolitical ones as well. These perverse “Independents” threatened to betray the colonies to a foreign power because they fomented divisions among Protestants and rejected the king’s authority, and they occupied a vulnerable corner of the English dominions adjacent to New France. “There are dangerous principles among them,” Randolph complained, and if the crown did not exert some control, “the French will certainly by degrees swallow up that great Countrey … & so at length become masters of all his Maj[es]ties West Indian Plantations.” Some Tories even went so far as to suggest that an alliance existed between papists and dissenters, claiming that Jesuits lurked in bastions of dissent like New England, where they encouraged heresy against the Church of England in order to weaken their rivals.¹³

Luckily for the crown, Randolph thought that reforming this system would be fairly easy. Most New Englanders, the agent claimed, did not hate the monarch, and indeed would welcome greater imperial regulation, especially if it would provide safety against external enemies like the Indians who had almost destroyed the colonies in King Philip’s War. Randolph also noted that New Englanders hated the French to an unusual degree, a factor that could work in the crown’s favor in the contest against its chief rival. It appeared to be obvious to all that a centralized empire, rather than a set of separate colonies that had trouble cooperating with each other, would best defend America against the French. As bureaucrats like Randolph allied with military men like Thomas Dongan to remake the colonies, therefore, they had high hopes for success. These hopes proved short-lived, however, once they actually attempted to implement their imperial policies.

• • •

The first experiment in Stuart imperialism was the remote colony of New Hampshire. There were few places in the English Atlantic of less strategic importance, but the province provided an opportunity for the crown to begin to restructure the political culture of the plantations. New Hampshire would not have attracted any attention in Whitehall but for the many petitions of Robert Mason, who claimed a title to New Hampshire based on a grant his grandfather had received from James I. Though he proved to be a poor politician in America, he played the game of court politics extremely well. His claim to New Hampshire was shaky, but he knew that if he agreed to share the spoils with the crown, he could succeed. So he presented his campaign for New Hampshire not as a design for personal profit, which it was, but as a means to buttress the king’s authority, especially against Massachusetts Congregationalists, who had administered New Hampshire since the 1650s. “Mischiefe and miseries … have befallen those Colonies by reason of a divided and disjointed government,” he wrote in one of his many petitions, and without “One General Governor,” New England was “liable to become an easie prey to every Invader.” In other words, both Mason and the crown viewed New Hampshire as a first step to the royalization of New England and, eventually, all America.¹⁴

The first royal government in New Hampshire, therefore, was a classic public-private partnership, combining aspects of the older model of chartered or proprietary colonies with a new, royal vision. Mason received title to all the province’s land, meaning that he could legally charge quitrents from the inhabitants, provided that he could convince them to take out new patents acknowledging him as their landlord. The crown took on the right of government, which would be managed by a governor appointed by the king along with an appointed council and elected assembly. In an apparent act of magnanimity that may have been the price of doing business with the king, Mason agreed to give one-fifth of the proceeds from the land taxes to the provincial government to cover its costs. Thus the royal government appeared to be a winning proposition: it would help to establish royal authority in the region and support itself with the revenue from Mason’s lands—which Mason assured Whitehall would be large.¹⁵

Of course, no one could deny that this design had certain pitfalls. The thorniest issue concerned the people who believed they already owned the land that Mason now claimed as his own. Not surprisingly, few if any landowners proved hospitable to Mason’s claims, and to make matters worse, the initial commission that established royal government in 1679 gave political power to some of the men most likely to resist the proprietor’s designs, like council members Richard Waldron and John Gilman, two of the colony’s largest landowners. Faced with widespread disobedience, Mason waged a nasty battle with his political rivals, accusing Waldron and Gilman of being enemies of the king for several incriminating statements they had made. The council fought back by ordering Mason’s arrest “to give Answer for his Usurpacon over His Ma[jes]t[ie]s Authority.” In the main, the initial struggle between Mason and his enemies had little to do with royal government. Both sides accepted the king’s authority, and claimed to be the true representatives of the royal interest. They differed on one very discrete issue: whether or not Mason had a right to the land.¹⁶

In 1682 the crown appointed a new governor, Edward Cranfield, to break the impasse. The reasons for his appointment are unclear: he was a military man, a minor officer in the queen’s household, who had successfully negotiated with the Dutch in Surinam for the return of some English planters there in the 1670s. Some historians have argued that Robert Mason engineered Cranfield’s appointment, knowing he would support the proprietor’s interest, but there is no positive evidence for that assertion. In the main, historians have castigated Cranfield for his sins but done little to examine his policies, characterizing him as “rapacious,” a tyrant interested only in self-aggrandizement. While Cranfield’s tenure was an undoubted failure, such rhetoric is unfair. In fact, Cranfield was the most principled defender of the royal prerogative working in the colonies during the 1680s, and his detailed correspondence provides a wonderful narrative of how this early experiment in royal government capsized in a sea of religious paranoia and controversy.¹⁷

After his arrival in October 1682 Cranfield exhibited many of the same skills that had allowed him to negotiate successfully with the Dutch in Surinam. He set himself up, as his commission dictated, as an arbiter between the proprietor and his purported tenants. If anything—and in spite of historians’ contentions that he was in league with Mason from the beginning—Cranfield sided with Mason’s rivals. He reported that Mason had exaggerated both the wealth and the refractoriness of the king’s subjects in the province. In truth, the colony possessed few resources; the people were generally loyal to the king but poor. Mason’s proposals, meanwhile, had the potential to further impoverish the people. For instance, his attempt to seize common lands from the towns would have meant that ordinary settlers would no longer have any place to graze their livestock. As for Mason’s opponents, Waldron and Martin, the governor found that “although there might have been some Heats of Spirit & undueness of Expression betweene Mr Mason and them while contending about property,” it was “nothing to render them guilty of such disloyalty as they were charged with.” One of Cranfield’s first actions was to restore the two men to their seats on the council.¹⁸

Within two months of his arrival, however, everything changed. The conciliatory governor disappeared, replaced by a forceful and unbending advocate of centralization, by brute force if necessary. While some historians have blamed this change of heart on Cranfield’s acquisitive nature—essentially contending that he abandoned the colonists when they refused to pay him enough—such a reading has little relation to the evidence. In fact, Cranfield was very clear about why he changed his mind: the situation in New Hampshire, he came to believe, was not a local dispute about property rights, but part of a transatlantic battle between the king and his enemies. A thorough royalist brought up in the age of civil wars and conspiratorial politics, Cranfield became convinced that a murderous Puritan plot, a “grand combination made up of Church members of Congregationall Assemblies throughout all the colonies in New England” intended to topple the king’s government and, in effect if not in design, hand over America to Charles II’s enemies.¹⁹

The governor’s paranoia originated in a series of disputes with local interest groups that, at first glance, had little to do with each other. One rift involved a Scottish ship accused of trading in the colony contrary to the Navigation Acts. Under the recommendation of Edward Randolph, Cranfield prosecuted the ship’s master, but found that since the master belonged to Portsmouth’s Congregational church, the governor could not convince any jury to convict. At the same time, Cranfield ran into loggerheads with the colonial assembly, which refused to pass any of the governor’s revenue bills. In an imitation of his master across the ocean, the governor dissolved the assembly, sparking the resentment of certain members. In a clear signal that he associated this resistance with the Congregationalists’ longstanding antipathy toward monarchy, Cranfield scheduled a colony-wide fast for 30 January 1683, in order to commemorate the execution of Charles I by overly zealous Puritans 34 years before.²⁰

This series of insults did not sit well with members of the assembly. By Cranfield’s own admission, the people of New Hampshire had been fairly well disposed to royal government, only resisting Mason’s designs on their land. Cranfield’s actions convinced some that the new royal government, at least as it was currently composed, was illegitimate, and indicated another kind of plot, orchestrated by “papists,” to erect an arbitrary government in New Hampshire.

The dispute manifested itself in the mysterious actions of one Edward Gove, a member of the assembly and militia lieutenant from the town of Hampton. Gove had led resistance to Mason’s land grab at the Hampton town meeting, but in January his anger toward the regime took on a different hue. Taking away land was just the first step in a general campaign against the country’s “liberties,” one that would culminate with the establishment of Catholicism. On 26 January 1683, Gove began riding around the province in attempt to raise a party to “stand against the governor.” His exact intentions remain murky. Partisan accounts by Edward Randolph and Robert Mason claimed that Gove aimed to kill Cranfield and his allies while they paid homage to their martyred king on 30 January—a report sure to evoke a sympathetic response at Whitehall, but lacking corroboration. More likely, Gove wanted to raise up the militia as a show of force against Cranfield and Mason, a warning that the people of New Hampshire would not give up their land or liberties without a fight. While many people sympathized with Gove, however, he attracted few supporters. Only about a dozen teenage boys joined his cause, and they surrendered before the governor even arrived on the scene.²¹

Gove’s “rebellion” marked an example of how paranoia could turn a simple property dispute into a cosmic drama in which some people were inclined to take up arms. The rebel’s only written statement, penned in jail to the justices of the court that tried him, revealed a man convinced that New England stood on the precipice of doom. The rambling and barely coherent letter claimed, among other things, that his prison keepers fed him poison, but it ended with an alarmist biblical allegory. “If ever New-England had need of a Solomon, or David, or Moses, Caleb or Joshua, it is now,” Gove wrote. “The tears are in my eyes. I can hardly see.” Statements by his enemies, while biased, help to corroborate this vision of a man who believed New England’s Protestant establishment to be in great danger. According to Randolph’s account, Gove claimed that Cranfield’s governorship was illegitimate because his commission was signed in Edinburgh by the Catholic duke of York, not in London by the king, and that Cranfield himself “was a papist and intended to bring in popery.” In addition, Gove allegedly referred to a theological argument with Cranfield as one justification for the rebellion. The governor, citing the Gospel of Mark, argued for “the necessity of children’s baptism,” complaining that the Congregational system excluded the vast majority of New Hampshirites from the benefits of the sacrament, since only the children of church members could be baptized. Gove considered this “a great imposing upon the Ministry,” and in the fevered atmosphere of January 1683 Gove combined this fear of ecclesiastical innovation with Mason’s land designs, seeing both as elements in a global Catholic plot to extinguish the colony’s civil and religious liberties. Gove may have declared that “his rising in arms was for liberty,” but that “liberty” was very different from the modern definition.²²

The aborted rebellion changed the nature of Cranfield’s mission, and altered the way that people on both sides viewed the ongoing disputes over taxation and land tenure. Gove and Cranfield each saw the other’s actions not as isolated events, reactions to local circumstance, but as parts of a global conspiracy. It was a battle of two universalisms: one rooted in radical Protestant thought, the other in royalist politics. With both sides so intransigent, there was little hope of compromise, and the situation in New Hampshire only deteriorated in the following months, as the colony’s leading inhabitants divided into two hostile parties.

Cranfield’s voluminous correspondence from this period allows for a close examination of his changing views of the imperial mission. If he originally considered himself as a neutral arbiter between Mason and the established colonists, such a role was altogether inappropriate in the face of a transatlantic design against the royal interest. The only way to make New England loyal was to refashion its political culture, to purge it of its seditious elements and train the people in loyalty—by force if necessary. Not surprisingly, his plan had a strong economic motive—he called for proper enforcement of the Navigation Acts—but his boldest policy proposals came not in the economic arena, but in the religious one. He believed, like many Tory royalists in the early 1680s, that radical preachers served as anchors of the Puritan Plot, poisoning the people from their true obedience, and he proposed that only by dealing with the ministers could the empire prosper.

The governor adopted these views during a lengthy residence in Boston, the regional center of sedition. He went there because he was frightened to remain in New Hampshire, believing his life to be in danger, but the time in Boston allowed Cranfield to “pry into the secrets of the faction.” These investigations of the town’s Congregational underworld led him to some dramatic policy proposals. First, he advocated the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, as the rulers of that government used their semi-independence to spread anti-monarchical sentiment around the region. They corresponded with and provided refuge to seditious elements from England, and they had their hands in everything unpleasant, from the Rye House Plot to Gove’s aborted rebellion. Next, Cranfield requested a permanent military presence to enforce the king’s will, a “frigate” that would defend the region not only from foreign enemies, but from domestic ones as well. But more than all these necessary measures, Cranfield demanded the authority to act against “the preachers.” Congregational ministers, he claimed, did the most to excite the people against the king, because they had a captive audience in church each Sunday, and unusual powers of argument and persuasion. There could be no order in the region, Cranfield wrote, until he received a command to “remove all such their Preachers who oppose & indeavour to disturb the peace of this Government. Which method will be necessary to be observed in the Settlement of the Bostoners colony, & also in the Province of Main, from which I can only expect tricks & trouble, till annexed to this Government.”²³

Cranfield thus aimed not just at the structures of government in the region, but at New England’s political culture: the beliefs and values that informed politics. In doing so, however, he did not make reference to a “New England Way” that distinguished the region from the rest of the empire. On the contrary, he saw the colonies as dumping grounds for the worst people and ideas of English (and Scottish) dissent, a place with a profound and deleterious connection to the wider world. At the same time, Boston served as a conduit, nurturing seditious ideas that could be repackaged and sent to other parts of English America, like New Hampshire or Bermuda. The key institution in this process was Harvard College, the local training ground for ministers. The college sent forth “Rebellious Trumpeters” who spread sedition around New England, meddling with local governments and encouraging everything from violation of the Navigation Acts to the harboring of regicides. Along the way, they excited the people against the established Church of England, as they “term the liturgy a precedent of superstition picked out of the Popish dunghill.” In order to fix the problem, Cranfield demanded the power to turn out ministers and replace Harvard’s faculty with orthodox preachers from England. Moreover, he proposed levying direct taxes in order to pay these Anglican ministers, bypassing the recalcitrant assemblies. Had it been implemented, Cranfield’s all-out assault on Congregationalism would have transformed the region, establishing by fiat the kind of parish structure that existed in England.²⁴

For the most part, Cranfield’s English correspondents proved hesitant to move ahead on the governor’s extreme proposals. The king’s ministers did continue their legal campaign against the Massachusetts charter—a longtime goal of many Tories—but they would not send a frigate to New England or grant the governor power to turn out ministers. Indeed, they even took a softer line on the rebel Edward Gove than Cranfield believed was prudent. The rebel arrived in London in 1683 a condemned man, sentenced to be drawn and quartered for his act of rebellion. In a city teeming with rebels and traitors, however, this old New Englander was a very low priority. Consigned to the Tower of London, Gove repeatedly petitioned for release, while friends and family members testified that he had a history of mental illness. Soon Gove was given free rein to roam around the Tower grounds, and within a few years he received a full pardon and returned home to New Hampshire. Cranfield was long gone by that time, but he did complain bitterly when he heard of the prisoner’s easy treatment, arguing that “if Gove escape[s] the sentence of the law there is an end of his Maj[es]t[ie]s business in New England.”²⁵

In the absence of meaningful assistance from his superiors, Cranfield was left floundering for any way to exert the king’s will against those who conspired against him. He chose the worst possible battle, taking on Portsmouth’s articulate Congregational minister in a struggle that made the governor look like a cruel and arbitrary tyrant, and undoubtedly caused many people to think Edward Gove had not been so crazy after all. Since his arrival in the colony, Cranfield had complained about the Reverend Joshua Moodey, who he believed was a covert enemy who encouraged the enemies of the king in New Hampshire, even Edward Gove. Since no evidence linked Moodey to such activity, the governor set a trap for his enemy, one that had the added benefit of furthering his design to establish the Church of England in the colony. He made clear that he expected the colony’s ministers to administer the sacraments according to the custom of the Church of England, meaning that all children could be baptized, and all adults who did not lead “scandalous” lives could receive communion. In addition, he issued a direct challenge to Moodey, stating that he and several other prominent Anglicans would come to receive communion from the minister in December 1683.²⁶

The governor’s position had a logical consistency that was difficult to refute. Like many outside observers, Cranfield considered New England’s ecclesiastical system hopelessly unfair and even un-Christian, since leaders of most churches limited the sacraments to those who provided direct evidence of being “visible saints.” As a result, the vast majority of children in the colony were not baptized, even though everyone contributed to the minister’s maintenance. In addition, Cranfield believed the Congregationalists were persecutors, particularly against those who advocated “Common Prayer Worship,” and his action only took the logical measure of ensuring that those who worshiped in the national church were not objects of discrimination in a royal colony.

If Cranfield’s motives made sense, his move nonetheless backfired. Moodey naturally refused to give communion to the governor. In retaliation, Cranfield banned the minister from the pulpit and threw him in the common jail, also sending a letter to the colony’s next most important minister, Seaborn Cotton, that Cranfield intended to seek communion from him as well. The results were predictable: by placing Moodey in prison, Cranfield turned the minister into a sufferer for the faith, the greatest reward for any Reformed cleric. Within days Moodey had advertised his state to friends around New England, not only complaining about the physical conditions, but also warning that such persecution would spread around the region. Soon other New England divines were using New Hampshire as an example of what would happen if the people surrendered to royal government: “The Cup is going round the world,” warned Boston minister Cotton Mather, and would soon come to these remote provinces as well, recreating the familiar horrors of the Laudian persecution that had inspired the first Puritans to cross the ocean, or, even worse, the dragonnades currently rooting out French Protestants. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, all religious services ceased as the colony’s other ministers fled to avoid Moodey’s fate. “No public worship, no preaching of the word,” railed one of the governor’s enemies. “What ignorance, profaneness and misery must needs ensue!” In his attempts to allow freedom of worship for Anglicans, Cranfield had effectively shut down the colony’s churches, blackening the reputation of royal government throughout the region.²⁷

The Moodey debacle was a public relations disaster, and one that only made the more mundane tasks of governance more difficult. Cranfield found it virtually impossible to raise revenue, as the assembly refused to pass any money bills. In the meantime, Robert Mason had just as hard a time convincing New Hampshire’s landowners to surrender their land and become his tenants, eliminating another source of revenue that was supposed to support the province and its executive. With no money coming from England either, Cranfield became desperate. He threatened to take landowners to court and force them to pay quitrents to Mason, charged exorbitant fees in the colony’s courts, and eventually decided to enforce old revenue statutes from before his arrival in the colony, bypassing the legislature altogether. Like his campaign against Moodey, these moves made a fair amount of sense. Cranfield was personally broke. Never a rich man, he had sold his office to travel to New Hampshire. While his critics and historians characterize him as a greedy man intent on making a fortune, he may have never been paid a cent by anyone. Moreover, the government of New Hampshire had no funds to operate. Desperate times called for desperate measures, but these measures only cemented Cranfield’s reputation as a tyrant who aimed to subvert the colony’s constitution.²⁸

These efforts were all for naught, as the colony’s inhabitants increasingly refused to follow any of their governor’s orders. While there was no repetition of Gove’s rebellion, no angry people taking to the streets and demanding their liberties, Cranfield’s opponents did not completely reject violence. Revenue collectors routinely met resistance, including from women who threatened the men with “scalding water, & red hot spits,” if they attempted to collect taxes. Far worse was the punishment afforded Thomas Thurton, Cranfield’s provost marshal in the last days of December 1684. As he traveled around Exeter trying to serve arrest warrants, an angry mob followed and mocked him, on one occasion untying his horse while he visited a neighbor’s house, and on another occasion stealing his sword. Thurton’s deposition of these affronts reads like the complaint of a schoolboy facing off against bullies: at one point he refused to show his commission to the crowd, out of fear that they would take it and refuse to give it back. The mockery turned serious in early January. Thurton went to the house of Samuel Sherborn to collect a small fine, but found Sherborn in no mood to pay. Thurton and his deputy began to take the offender to jail, but on the way a group of Sherborn’s friends freed him, and took Thurton into custody. Over the course of a harrowing two days, the provost marshal was tied up and imprisoned in a house in Exeter, dragged through the town with a noose around his neck, beaten with a cudgel, and eventually dumped over the border into Massachusetts, where he spent another 40 hours tied up in a stranger’s house. Thurton knew most of his attackers, and he and several witnesses left detailed depositions of the affair, but the state of New Hampshire was such that it proved impossible to bring any of the attackers to court. Thurton, after all, was the face of royal authority, and the people had already demonstrated how much respect they had for him.²⁹

By this time, in fact, Cranfield had essentially given up on New Hampshire. While agents from the colony worked to discredit him at Whitehall, the governor begged for a new assignment. He cited his deteriorating health, which he blamed on the cold weather, and requested a posting in a more “healthful” climate like Barbados or Jamaica. These later letters revealed a broken man, physically and mentally exhausted by his long political struggle with the New Hampshirites. When the Committee on Trade and Plantations finally appointed him to be customs officer in Barbados, he pronounced it “the greatest happyness that ever I had in my life … to remove from these unreasonable people.” He served with distinction for over a decade in Barbados, where he successfully weathered the Glorious Revolution and the vagaries of politics in the famously tumultuous colony. Indeed, but for his two years in New Hampshire, Cranfield seems to have been a model public servant.³⁰

The troubles in New Hampshire demonstrated both the possibilities and pitfalls of Whitehall’s new imperial vision. There was no reason why Charles II’s ministers could not build a centralized empire—in New Hampshire, after all, no one denied the king’s theoretical power to rule his plantations. At the same time, however, the volatile political and religious situation across the Atlantic had the potential to complicate imperial plans, especially when people on both sides of the divide insisted on reading every local dispute as an element in a global design. In the midst of this controversy, one issue lurked just beneath the surface: defense against external enemies. On one occasion Cranfield tried, without success, to use fears of an Indian attack to shame the legislature into compliance with his demands. In the next experiment in royal control, on the island of Bermuda, the problem of defense jumped to the fore, causing a dispute perhaps even more dramatic than the one in New Hampshire.³¹

• • •

If New Hampshire was the most worthless corner of the king’s dominions, Bermuda was not far behind. The island’s 3,600 whites and 5,000 slaves produced low-quality tobacco and served as a way station for ships crossing the Atlantic, but the colony had yet to attain its later reputation as a shipping hub. In terms of politics and religion, Bermuda stood apart. Its rulers, the Somers Island Company (usually known as the Bermuda Company), held the oldest continuous patent in the New World, but their membership was severely depleted and they paid little direct attention to the colony. In terms of religion, most people were dissenters of one kind or another, but the colony maintained a parish structure that gave at least an appearance of conformity to the Church of England. Nonetheless, several of the island’s ministers had ties to Boston.³²

Like New Hampshire, Bermuda came to the attention of Restoration imperialists as a result of the efforts of several private interests. Throughout the 1670s parties in both London and Bermuda labored to break the Company’s monopoly; by the early 1680s a Tory lawyer named Francis Burghill had become the leading advocate of royal government in the region. The Bermuda Company was a small, insignificant operation, but Burghill found plenty of sympathizers in Charles II’s court who aimed to curb local corporations of any kind, especially those with historical ties to Puritanism or dissent. Burghill’s grievances resembled those used against the Massachusetts Bay Company at the same time. The Bermuda Company, he claimed, was tyrannical—it oppressed the king’s subjects and took their property without due process of law. Company leaders were also guilty of economic mismanagement, especially in their stubborn refusal to allow Bermudians to export tobacco except in one annual company “magazine ship.” Finally, Company leaders were traitors, adherents to the old Puritan cause who would betray the colony to the king’s enemies in a heartbeat. Burghill contended that an old Company governor allowed the Dutch to scout out the island’s harbors and fortifications during the Third Anglo-Dutch war, and that the Company also harbored a number of known rebels. The foremost example was William Milborne, a Baptist radical who had lived on the island for many years and had once publicly compared King Charles II to a dog. The colony’s governing council suspended Milborne for his seditious speech, but according to Burghill, the very fact that such a man was allowed to maintain a position of influence painted the Company as hopelessly disloyal.³³

If the case against the Bermuda Company appeared to be a classic example of Tory empire building, a closer look reveals a more complicated picture. Indeed, most of Burghill’s allies on the island were not Tories or royalists, but radical dissenters—including the island’s ministers and even William Milborne himself. These radicals, most of whom had lived in Bermuda for decades and were a bit out of touch with English politics, had both economic and political grievances against Company rule, which they compared to the “Grand Signiurs”—meaning that that paragon of arbitrariness, the Ottoman sultan. But they seem to have given little thought to the realities of royal government. As the last Company governor, Richard Coney, noted, the people of Bermuda believed that the coming of royal government would lead to less, rather than more regulation. “They aim at the sole Government themselves,” Coney complained, “many of them saying His Ma[jes]ty will not concern himself with them, a small Island of Rocks, and such poor people as they are God bless him hee hath enough to doe at home, they can look after themselves.”³⁴

This odd partnership succeeded in breaking the Company and turning Bermuda into a royal colony, but not without some tension. Burghill’s letters to his Bermudian allies reeked of condescension and frustration. He berated them for failing to send enough money or sufficient evidence to prosecute the case against the Company, and he also chided them for their dedication to Whig political principles at a time when these ideas had little purchase in the Stuart court. On one occasion, the Bermudians requested that the king give them complete control of the island’s judiciary, a request Burghill considered to be a major affront to the king’s authority. “Is it reasonable,” Burghill asked, “to thinke the Kinge willbe Setting up Comon welthes in any of his Dominions at this tyme of Day?” Such rhetoric was bound to strengthen the hand of the Company, who could easily paint Bermudians as disloyal subjects. On the island, meanwhile, Company advocates also attempted to use Whig, anti-Catholic rhetoric to urge people to resist royal government, claiming that the end of Company rule would lead to “Loss of their Landes, Poperey & voyalence.”³⁵

The breaking of the Company led to a period of profound chaos in Bermuda. It is easy to read these events, like those in New England, as disputes between local interest groups and overbearing outsiders, but in fact such an interpretation would be too simple. Bermudians had successfully worked with metropolitan agents—including some with very different political principles—in their efforts to break the Company, and the issues of dispute were even clearer than in New Hampshire. A sympathetic royal governor could have easily brought the island to an accommodation with the new imperial system, merely by opening up the island’s trade and giving leading inhabitants a modest voice in local affairs. After all, most people had earnestly desired royal governance, even if they had little sense of what it entailed. As it happened, though, Bermudian politics fell victim to the same process that struck New Hampshire—people began to view local events in global terms, as manifestations of a larger battle between cosmic forces intent on world domination. And as in New England, the Bermudian political nation polarized into two hostile factions.

The Bermudian crisis was driven by two sets of international events. The first centered on the Caribbean islands and especially the Bahamas, a true periphery of the empire that had longstanding connections to Bermuda. Throughout the early 1680s, English and Spanish mariners menaced each other in spite of official peace between the two kingdoms, usually justifying their conduct by claiming that the other side violated international law by engaging in piracy. The struggle culminated in two Spanish strikes, the first devastating New Providence Island in 1684, the second destroying the Scottish Covenanter community at Stuart’s Town, South Carolina, in 1686. In both cases, the Spanish claimed to be retaliating against piratical assaults on St. Augustine and surrounding Indian missions, and English officials forbade their own subjects from fighting back. Nonetheless, word of these incidents spread alarm across the English Atlantic, as refugees dispersed as far away as New England. In a conspiratorial time, such attacks could only feed into fears of a generalized popish conspiracy against Protestantism, especially when so many of the victims were dissenters. Bermuda welcomed many survivors from these assaults, and the close proximity of the incidents combined with Protestant zeal only increased the fear of an imminent Spanish invasion.³⁶

The second outside influence came from the uncertain state of English politics around the time of the fall of the Bermuda Company. In February 1685 Charles II died, leaving the throne to his Catholic brother James. Most subjects accepted the succession with little apparent alarm, but a minority of radical Protestants in both England and Scotland refused to countenance the accession of a popish monarch. During the summer of 1685 two prominent nobles—the duke of Monmouth in England and the duke of Argyll in Scotland—led expeditions aiming to overthrow the new king. Both rebellions failed miserably, and the two ringleaders died as traitors within months. In the American colonies, however, where European news was often out of date and unreliable, the rebellions caused a minor crisis, as many people came to believe—by a combination of wishful thinking and inaccurate news—that Monmouth and Argyll had succeeded and that the King James set to take the throne was the Protestant Monmouth rather than the Catholic York.³⁷

Monmouth’s level of support in the colonies is difficult to ascertain. No one openly admitted favoring the duke’s cause, and the writers who claimed widespread support for Monmouth in America were all imperial officials attempting to blacken the colonists’ reputations and underscore their own loyalty. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the rebellions caused a great deal of confusion and excitement. In Boston, according to one report, Congregationalists welcomed the news of the victory of the “Protestant Prince,” calling it “an answer of their prayers.” In Virginia—not usually considered a center of radical Whig thought—the news of the invasion “so farr Imboldened” the people “that their Tongues runn at Large and Demonstrated the wickedness of their harts.” The governor responded by issuing a proclamation against the spreading of rumors. In Bermuda, speculation about Monmouth combined with fear of the Spanish and local political uncertainty to inspire a true rebellion, a temporary chaos that again revealed the limits of imperial policies.³⁸

The crisis in Bermuda owed much to the policies and personality of the island’s governor, Richard Coney. While his initial commission came from the Bermuda Company, Coney owed his appointment to the king, who essentially forced the Company to appoint him, and his political predilections reflected the high Tory ideals of the royal court rather than the moderate Whiggism of his original superiors. Indeed, Coney’s wife and children were Catholic—a fact never publicly mentioned by Bermudians, but one that could not have escaped their notice. Coney secured a royal commission after the Company’s fall, overcoming Francis Burghill’s attempts at the office. The fact that the last Company governor stayed on as the first royal governor only exacerbated the crisis, as some Bermudians questioned the validity of Coney’s commission. More than that, Coney seemed to inspire great passions in people. Even before the royal commission arrived, he faced an armed mob in front of his house, narrowly escaping death, or so he claimed, by the heroic appearance of one of his slaves.³⁹

As Bermudians simultaneously learned of unrest at home and the dissolution of the Bermuda Company, they challenged the governor over the issue of defense. As for many English plantations, Bermuda’s defenses consisted of a few aging fortifications and a small cache of arms and ammunition, and when word of the Company’s demise reached the island the governor and his enemies began to argue about who controlled these resources. Local militia officers claimed they did, and proved willing to support their claims with force, occupying the forts and demanding that Coney give up any pretensions to control the colony’s stores of arms. In the meantime, Coney set out to strengthen the fortifications on his own, actions that he assumed to be prudent, but that worried his opponents, who believed Coney to be an illegitimate governor with Spanish sympathies. One Bermudian suggested that it was “treason” to build fortifications without the king’s direct order. Over the course of 1685, further rumors of Coney’s treasonous nature circulated, mostly reports that the governor intended to “betraye the Island” to Spain.⁴⁰

The tension led to a confrontation between the governor and militia leaders in October 1685. Seven leading officials appeared before the governor demanding powder from the governor’s store, noting “The nakedness, distres, & necessity of that Country, for want of arms & ammunition.” He refused, leading to a sustained argument, as the militia leaders complained that Coney had turned out qualified militia officers and claimed supplies that rightfully belonged to “the Country.” In the heat of argument, two of the officers said, “clapping their hands uppon their brests, That they believ’d in their conscious, That the Govor intended to betray the Island.” They added that if Coney did not name them to his council, they would refuse to recognize his authority—leading to a constitutional crisis on the island not unlike the one that Cranfield faced in New Hampshire.⁴¹

In Coney’s view, the rebellion he faced in 1685 was just like the one at home—a treasonous combination of preachers and other radicals intent on subverting the king’s authority and ultimately handing Bermuda to England’s enemies. The governor and his few allies—almost exclusively ship captains passing through Bermuda—made great note of the timing of the Bermudians’ actions, just as news of Monmouth’s rising reached the island, and of the Whig, anti-Catholic rhetoric they used to justify their actions. Coney noted that one opponent claimed he had “noe power to Governe but by the Duke of Yorke who is a Papist,” and questioned whether “a papist” should “comand this country”—a dangerous statement, since Monmouth justified his rebellion in much the same terms. Indeed, in another letter Coney claimed to hear one of the rebels proclaim that “The Right of the Crown was in the Duke of Monmouth; and that hee was noe Papist; that the Protestant Religion now profest in England was Popery; and that the Pope was the Whore of Babilon and drunk with the bloud of the Saints.” At times, Coney even suggested that his enemies had secret knowledge of the risings at home, especially the minister Sampson Bond, the island’s most prominent divine and a man with longtime links to the dissenting interest in England.⁴²

Beyond their specific links to Monmouth, Coney and his allies noted the Whig rhetoric the colonists used to justify their conduct. Indeed, they seemed to be intent, as the visitor from New England William Phips observed, “to sett up for a free Comon wealth & to follow piracy.” The people were devoid of any natural loyalty to their sovereign, but served only their own interest, which meant they would freely give up the island to the highest bidder. They justified their actions, naturally, by the disloyal rhetoric in English opposition literature. Captain George St. Lo, a visiting naval officer (see below) who sided with Coney against the Bermudians, noted that one opponent of the governor showed him “a Booke entituled the Liberty of the Subjects of England, by which he would make it appear, that they had the power to send the Governor home prisoner, but not the Governor them.” St. Lo eventually came to the conclusion that they were “a mutinous turbulent, hypocriticall people, wholly averse to Kingly Government.”⁴³

The governor’s response to the plot against him surpassed even Cranfield’s actions in sheer foolishness. Since he had virtually no allies on the island, and no support from the crown, Coney deputized the captains and crews of passing ships to serve as councilors and provide assistance against the rebellion. His foremost ally was Bartholomew Sharpe, who sailed into St. George Harbor to purchase provisions for a return voyage to the Leeward Islands. A zealous defender of the king’s prerogative, Sharpe was only too happy to devote his ship and crew to the cause of defending the new royal colony against the rebels. Sharpe was less than an ideal lawman, however, since he was also one of the most notorious pirates in the Caribbean. In fact, he came to Bermuda after a lengthy romp around the West Indies, in which he had threatened the provost marshal of Jamaica, plundered a New England merchant ship, and sacked a Spanish settlement at Campeche, capturing thirty Indian slaves he intended to sell at Bermuda. Despite his Toryism, in other words, Sharpe was an unlikely agent of empire.⁴⁴

Over the next few months the colony verged on civil war. On Coney’s orders, Sharpe imprisoned Richard Stafford, an elderly leader of the local opposition. Stafford quickly played the role of Joshua Moodey in New Hampshire, becoming the symbol of Coney’s oppression, locked in irons in the hold of Sharpe’s ship and not allowed to venture outside. Meanwhile, Sharpe’s men—many of them escaped servants from the West Indies—ranged around the island intimidating the governor’s opponents. One petition to Coney gave a sense of how the people viewed Sharpe, begging “That there bee no more rude men sent arm’d into the Country swearing & threatening to kill the Kings Subjects putting them in fear & takeing w[ha]t they please wch by the law is no less than robbery under the pretence of Authority.” In response, many Bermudians turned their homes into garrisons, hunkering down in anticipation of an impending strike from the tyrannical governor, his pirate sidekick, or even their possible Spanish allies. In an incendiary letter to local justices of the peace, William Peniston virtually called for armed resistance against Coney and Sharpe, protesting that the people’s “lives & estates” had been “vilely prostituted to the rage & fury of pirate Roags” who ran roughshod over the country. He urged the justices to act unilaterally against Sharpe, whom he defined as an enemy of the king, and noted how the pirate had imprisoned Richard Stafford “wth Irons on both leggs.”⁴⁵

Undoubtedly Sharpe’s actions did more than anything else to dampen enthusiasm for royal government in Bermuda. He combined a thirst for power and authority with an almost fanatical opposition to dissent. In a brief letter to the Lords of Trade—his sole statement of his role in Bermuda’s political crisis—Sharpe wrote that “the Islands here are all in Rebellion agt his Majtie, and will nowaies believe that there is any other King than Monmouth Living.” All their complaints about Coney’s tyranny were mere pretenses; they really hated him because he represented the king, “for they are so contentious that they will alwaies be kettling against Monarchy.” For Sharpe, zeal for monarchy and distrust of dissenters went together; one witness said Sharpe “Swore Severall times that he … would bee … a plague to the New England men and the Burmudians.” And a plague he was: aside from imprisoning Stafford and confiscating arms from unruly subjects, he also hounded merchants, confiscating the sails of one ship that refused to lower them in recognition of the king’s standard, which Sharpe confidently displayed on his own ship. Such actions did allow Coney a measure of control, but at the cost of his legitimacy. As word circulated around the country that Sharpe was suspected of piracy, the governor’s reputation among his people dipped even lower. One opponent called him “the pitifullest Domineeringst rascall in the world”—a description that most of the island seemed to endorse.⁴⁶

The end of Sharpe’s term as royal enforcer came in the spring of 1686. The royal frigate Dartmouth arrived in Bermuda, commanded by an actual naval officer, George St. Lo, who carried a warrant for Sharpe’s arrest. St. Lo shared Sharpe’s politics but not his tactics. The officer surveyed the situation and spoke to partisans on both sides before concluding that Coney was right and the Bermudians had no legitimate grievances against the governor. When he departed during the summer of 1686 he carried off both Sharpe—to face trial for piracy in Nevis—and five leading opponents of the regime, sent like Edward Gove to face trial and punishment in England.

At this point a measure of calm returned to Bermuda, but for Coney the damage was done. His efforts to royalize Bermuda had been even less successful than those of Cranfield. Moreover, officials in Whitehall proved reluctant to take a hard line against the rebels. Almost as soon as they arrived in London, the five opponents of Coney petitioned for their freedom, and within six months they returned to Bermuda and presented a petition to receive reimbursement for their forced confinement and transportation. The new governor, Sir Robert Robinson, viewed local politics in a much less paranoid manner than his predecessor, and as a result his rule was remarkably free of drama. Indeed, as former Bermudian William Milborne joined his fellow Bostonians in overthrowing their governor during the revolutionary turmoil of 1689, Robinson and his people sat tight, confused but not particularly alarmed by the tumultuous politics in England.⁴⁷

• • •

The ordeals of royal administrators in New Hampshire and Bermuda demonstrate some important truths about the Restoration empire. In both places, reformers had grand ambitions and expectations for success, not least because so many local inhabitants expressed theoretical support for royal governance. As they set out to govern, however, the governors and their primary opponents fell prey to the conspiratorial outlook that pervaded English politics during the 1680s. Moreover, while officials in Whitehall theoretically supported their officers in the field, they proved reluctant to provide any actual support, leaving the new royal governments as mere ciphers with great theoretical powers but no means to turn their ideals into reality. The result was chaos and rebellion, the first examples of colonial subjects rising up against imperial centralization. At the same time, however, the news was not all bad for bureaucrats in Whitehall. After all, no one in either Bermuda or New Hampshire questioned the king’s right to remake the plantations; people simply disputed whether their governors were legitimate royal representatives. If the king found wiser men to rule the colonies, and supported them with even a few royal soldiers, future royal projects might prove more successful than the false starts in New Hampshire and Bermuda. In addition, the Bermuda debacle especially underscored the importance of security in colonial politics. In that case, it was fear of Spanish enemies, and the widespread belief that the governor was in league with them, that doomed the government. If this issue had been neutralized, it seemed, the people would have been more compliant.

In many ways, the campaign to remake Massachusetts reflected the lessons learned in the other old Puritan colonies. Unlike New Hampshire or Bermuda, Boston was important—not an economic powerhouse, perhaps, but a center of commerce with a large and growing population. Moreover, it had a longstanding reputation as a haven for radical dissenters, exacerbated by the virtual independence that the Bay Colony enjoyed under its 1629 charter. In many ways, the royal campaigns in both New Hampshire and Bermuda were practice runs for the much more critical design against the Massachusetts charter, and in turn, the events in each of those colonies only underscored how Boston served as a center for antimonarchical sentiment in America. Cranfield had blamed Harvard College for trumpeting sedition, and rebels from both New Hampshire and Bermuda fled to Boston to avoid punishment. As Edward Randolph told the Archbishop of Canterbury, “they give encouragement to Phannaticks of all sorts & receive them from all places.” The town and region were filled with refractory subjects from all over the empire, and a firm action against the charter would send a message to all enemies of the king that they now had nowhere to hide.⁴⁸

The battle over the Massachusetts charter—beginning with Edward Randolph’s arrival in 1676 and ending with a ruling against the colony in the Chancery court in 1684—appears in many historical accounts as a contest between core and periphery, Puritanism and empire, America and England. When compared with New Hampshire and Bermuda, however, the long process of royalization appeared both moderate and more or less consensual. Randolph hurled vitriol at his enemies and they hated him in return, but he always believed that a majority of New Englanders would welcome royal government once they understood that it would guarantee their rights against an overbearing Congregational “oligarchy” and protect them from outside enemies. He was at least partly right: while Cranfield and Coney inspired a large majority of subjects in their colonies to resist royalization, people in Massachusetts divided into two more or less evenly matched parties. On one side stood not just new arrivals like Randolph, but the colony’s few Anglicans and even many self-styled “moderates” such as Governor Simon Bradstreet, one of the original Puritan settlers, and Joseph Dudley, whose father had been one of the first governors. The opposition party, led by a cadre of church members and eventually championed by the Rev. Increase Mather, attempted to use conspiratorial politics to inspire a popular movement against imperial regulation. At least at first, however, the attempt to build a consensus in favor of defending the charter did not succeed. New Englanders were divided on how to deal with the empire, mainly because royal officials acted with more moderation than Cranfield or Coney had done. Most historians have labeled Mather’s group the “popular party,” thus implying a high level of opposition to imperial plans; in fact, neither side could claim a popular mandate at the outset of the controversy.⁴⁹

While some royal officials aimed at the Massachusetts charter as early as the 1640s, the campaign resumed during the Restoration and reached a crescendo in the mid-1670s. King Philip’s War devastated New England, reminding imperial administrators of the dangers of allowing a large and strategically placed region essentially to rule itself. These issues appeared clearly in an anonymous report filed in 1675. The author objected to the religious life and antimonarchical bent of New England’s leaders, but his main objections concerned defense. New Englanders argued constantly among themselves and “they cannot I doubt at present make a sufficient defence of his Majts Territorys & Subjects in those parts, if a more powerfull Enemy should invade.” The author recommended sending “some Gentlemen, residing there, by his Majte authorized to make appeales unto to end their Differences, and keep unity amongst them”—an appointed royal council to serve as the face of authority. This particular plan proved too cumbersome or expensive to realize; instead, the king’s ministers went after the Massachusetts charter in the courts, much as they opposed the charter of London during the same period.⁵⁰

The circumstances of the delivery of the quo warranto against the charter demonstrated the diversity of New Englanders’ responses to the royal campaign. A common legal tactic in Charles II’s time, the order demanded “by what warrant” the Massachusetts Bay Company exercised power over the colony, charging that the company had violated the terms of the charter and therefore possessed no rightful authority. When Edward Randolph delivered the quo warranto, he pleaded with the rulers of Massachusetts to relinquish the charter without a legal challenge, ensuring that the king would deal with them tenderly as he designed the new royal government. In order to help the process along, Randolph brought two supporting documents: the first a guarantee of liberty of conscience, to dissuade the people from the belief that the king had any designs on their churches; and the second a declaration of how the corporation of London had surrendered its charter without a fight.⁵¹

Evidence from within Massachusetts indicates that the colony’s inhabitants were divided over how to respond to the loss of the charter. No angry crowds met Randolph when he delivered the writ to Massachusetts officials, and even among the magistrates there was an air more of resignation than of resistance. After all, Charles held out an olive branch to the colonists, offering them the chance to submit input regarding a new charter that would better acknowledge the king’s sovereignty. Governor Bradstreet and many of the more prominent magistrates favored submission, and so did many of the colony’s clergy—though not without consternation. The diary of Peter Thacher, the minister at Milton, provides some indication of how people away from the colony’s center viewed the events over the course of 1683. Thacher spent much of the 1680s, like his neighbors, praying for the Protestant cause and “for the Continuation of our libertys sivil & sacred,” and he was horrified when he received news of the court action against the charter. On 31 October 1683 he met with other ministers to decide what to do—the matter was so sensitive that Thacher recorded his observations in cipher. Several days later, after the General Court met to consider the matter, Thacher revealed the predominant opinion of the gathered ministers: “tht if the patent was forfeited by law, thn it was best to resigne it up to his majesty for such regulation as might make it most fit for his Majesty’s service, tht so the Essentialls of the patent might be continued.” In other words, even the ministers, those trumpets of sedition, thought twice before offering offense to the king, preferring a pragmatic course over confrontation.⁵²

Despite the moderation of many New Englanders, however, there were others who resisted any compromise regarding the country’s “liberties.” Alongside the longtime firebrand, Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, Increase Mather emerged as the most eloquent spokesman against surrendering the charter; he did so by linking the design against the country’s liberties to the ongoing popish plot. Such an interpretation was not altogether fanciful. Many New Englanders knew that the campaign against corporations in England was primarily a means to remove dissenters and their allies from positions of authority, and pamphleteers noted that the same thing had happened in France before Louis XIV escalated his campaign against the Huguenots. An exasperated Edward Cranfield accused radical ministers of “infusing the people, that it is God’s cause and that they may lawfully draw their Swords in the defence of the Charter.” This was surely an exaggeration—no one openly favored armed resistance—but opponents to royal government were beginning to endorse aspects of Calvinist resistance theory, arguing at least implicitly that people, or at least inferior magistrates, did not have to obey their rulers if they turned against God.⁵³

The confrontation over submission climaxed in Boston’s town meeting in January 1684. In a ritual repeated all over the colony, the city’s inhabitants met to consider the design against the charter. The same divisions existed in Boston as in the colony as a whole, but in this case the radicals ruled the day by a combination of parliamentary tactics and soaring rhetoric. First, leading radical Samuel Nowell dismissed all nonfreemen from the meeting, ensuring that only church members would be present for the discussion and vote on the charter. Then Increase Mather rose and addressed the crowd, using examples from the Old Testament and the recent past—including contemporary events in New Hampshire—to urge resistance. In response, the freemen of Boston pledged that they would not voluntarily relinquish their charter, and essentially dared the king to take it.⁵⁴

Despite the drama, however, Mather’s speech did not usher in a new age of resistance in New England. Throughout 1684 and 1685, as anarchy reigned in New Hampshire and Bermuda, inhabitants of Massachusetts continued their lives much as before. The most notable event was the electoral defeat of several prominent moderate magistrates, but at the same time Governor Bradstreet won reelection. In 1685 colonists learned that the king had chosen Percy Kirke as their governor, an unwelcome choice for radical Protestants. Kirke had been commander of the royal regiment at Tangier—afterward known as the Queen’s Regiment—a division known for its popish leanings. Moreover, after presiding over the abandonment of Tangier—also cause for suspicion among many Whigs—Kirke gained a particular reputation for cruelty in his response to Monmouth’s Rebellion, where he allegedly “Invited 30 Gentlemen to dine with him, and after dinner hanged them up in his hall to satisfie his popish and blood thirsty Cruelty.” Such stories traveled around New England, but in the end the king passed over Kirke—a narrow escape according to Increase Mather, who claimed that “Bloody Kirk would in a few weekes have made horrible slaughters.”⁵⁵

In the end, however, the coming of royal government to Massachusetts did not bring about bloodshed of any kind. Instead, the change in administration occurred slowly and a bit haphazardly. It also showed the influence of the most hated man in New England, Edward Randolph, who had a very different approach to colonial governance from that of his ideological allies Cranfield and Coney. For all his hatred of New England’s Puritan past, Randolph retained the belief that most New Englanders were naturally loyal, and he recommended giving a great deal of power to reliable local people. He also eschewed extreme tactics like imprisoning opponents or interfering with the region’s religious establishment, which would only play into the hands of his radical enemies. Indeed, Randolph’s moderation eventually set him at odds with Cranfield in particular, who he complained was “of the most arbitrary nature I have heard of.” It seems probable that Randolph used his connections at Whitehall to secure freedom for both Edward Gove and the prisoners from Bermuda, understanding that the creation of martyrs would only hurt his cause. “They are very numerous,” Randolph wrote of the colonists, “and it is far easier to affright them into rebellion than to obedience.”⁵⁶

The first royal administration in Massachusetts bore the marks of Randolph’s moderation. Rather than Percy Kirke, the king commissioned the most reliable moderate in the colony, Joseph Dudley, to be council president, meaning that control passed to the son of a Bay Colony founder rather than an outsider like Kirke. Dudley’s commission brought howls of protest from his political rivals; outgoing secretary Edward Rawson, for instance, lodged a protest that the new commission violated the colonists’ “rights as Englishmen” because it did not provide for an assembly. The protest never left the council chamber, however, and it seems that historians have noticed the lack of representation much more than ordinary New Englanders did at the time.⁵⁷

Dudley’s presidency was short-lived, however, replaced at the end of 1686 by the new Dominion of New England. The main difference between the two commissions was that the Dominion extended much farther, incorporating all the New England colonies under one government, and eventually annexing New York and both New Jersey colonies as well. In addition, an outsider, former New York governor Sir Edmund Andros, served as the Dominion’s governor, and he arrived with several regiments of redcoats and some allies from his days in New York. In some ways the Dominion was an experiment in absolutism, planned in James II’s court with little input from people with actual experience in the colonies. More than that, however, it was created to defend the king’s interest against the French. One internal memorandum, written sometime in 1688, made clear that the king had joined the colonies together so that “the Frontiers of his Ma[jes]ty’s Dominions in those Parts, with the Beaver Trade, [would be] more easily secured.” The same report devoted more pages to French pretensions in Hudson’s Bay than to any other single colony, demonstrating the degree to which geopolitics shaped colonial policy in James II’s court.⁵⁸

The Dominion of New England, in the long run, represented a more focused exercise in royal power than previous regimes in New Hampshire and Bermuda. Andros was a competent administrator not liable to the conspiratorial outlooks of many contemporaries, and he also had the support of royal troops and resources. While he did attempt, and in many ways accomplish, a thorough remaking of the region’s political culture, his correspondence is surprisingly free of the unrest that often accompanied such changes. At the dawn of 1688, advocates of royal government could look with some pride on a system that actually seemed to work. It was only when the new regime failed to deliver on its main promise—defense against external enemies—that conspiratorial fears and partisan divisions once again came to the fore.