XVII. the revocation of the edict of Nantz, and sought to CHAP. intrust civil and military power to the hands of Roman Catholics. The bishops had unanimously voted against his exclusion; and, as the badge of the Church of England was obedience, he for a season courted the alliance. of "the fairest of the spotted kind," the only tolerable Protestant sect. To win her favor for Roman Catholics, he was willing to persecute Protestant dissenters. This is the period of the influence of Roch ester. 1688. The Church of England refused the alliance. The 1687, king would now put no confidence in any zealous Protestant; he applauded the bigotry of Louis XIV., from whom he solicited money. "I hope," said he, "the king of France will aid me, and that we together shall do great things for religion;" and the established church became the object of his implacable hatred. "Her day of grace was past." The royal favor was withheld, that it might silently waste and dissolve like snows in spring. To diminish its numbers, and apparently from no other motive, he granted-what Sunderland might have done from indifference, and Penn from love of justice-equal franchises to every sect; to the powerful Calvinists and to the "puny" Quaker, to Anabaptists and Independents, and "all the wild increase" which unsatisfied inquiry could generate. The declaration of indulgence was esteemed a deathblow to the church, and a forerunner of the reconciliation of England to Rome. The established franchises of Oxford were invaded, that its rich endowments might be shared among the Catholics; the bishops were imprisoned, because they would not publish in their churches the declaration, of which the purpose was CHAP. their defeat; and, that the system of tyranny might XVII. be perpetuated, Heaven, as the monarch believed, you now of predestination?" demanded William, as he landed in England. Tories took the lead in inviting 1688. the prince of Orange to save the English church; the whigs joined to rescue the privileges of the nobility; the Presbyterians rushed eagerly into the only safe avenue to toleration; the people quietly acquiesced. King James was left alone in his palace. His terrified priests escaped to the continent; Sunderland was always false; his confidential friends betrayed him; his daughter Anne, pleading conscience, proved herself one of his worst enemies. "God help me," exclaimed the disconsolate father, bursting into tears, "my very children have forsaken me;" and his grief was increased by losing a piece of the true wood of the cross, that had belonged to Edward the Confessor. Paralyzed by the imbecility of doubt, and destitute of counsellors, the good soul fled beyond the sea, and gave up three kingdoms for a mass. Aided by falsehoods, the prince of Orange, without striking a blow, ascended the throne of his father-in-law, and Mary, by whose dishonest letters James was lulled into security, came over exultingly to occupy the throne, the palace, and the bed of her father, and sequester the inheritance of her brother. Thus were the rights of Englishmen rescued from XVIL danger; thus did Protestant liberty, after a long strug- CHAP gle, achieve its triumph, and put an end forever to absolute power, in England, in the state and over mind. Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari blazed in golden letters on the standard of the rejoicing aristocracy, desiring to give immortality to their privileges. Humanity was present also, and rejoiced at the redemption of English liberties; she reproved the unnatural conduct of daughters who drove their father into poverty and exile; she sighed for the Roman Catholics who were oppressed, for the dissenters who were but tolerated; and as, on the evening of the long struggle which had been bequeathed by Rogers and Hooper, and had lasted more than a century and a half, she selected a restingplace, it was but to gather strength, with the fixed purpose of renewing her journey on the dawn of morning. The great news of the invasion of England, and the 1689. declaration of the prince of Orange, reached Boston on the fourth day of April, 1689. The messenger was immediately imprisoned; but his message could not be suppressed; and "the preachers had already matured the evil design" of a revolution. For the events that followed were "not a violent passion of the rabble, but a long-contrived piece of wickedness." Lam beth MSS. 1025. 16. "There is a general buzzing among the people, April great with expectation of their old charter, or they know not what;" such was the ominous message of Andros to Brockholt, with orders that the soldiers should be ready for action. 18. About nine o'clock of the morning of the 18th, just as April George, the commander of the Rose frigate, stepped on shore, Green and the Boston ship-carpenters gathered about him, and made him a prisoner. The town took the CHAP. alarm. The royalist sheriff hastened to quiet the multiXVII. tude; and the multitude secured him as their prisoner. 1689. From him they hastened to the major of the regiment, beth and demanded colors and drums. He resisted; they threatened. The crowd increased; companies form under Nelson, Foster, Waterhouse, their old officers; and Lam already at ten they seize Bullivant, Foxcroft, and Ra1025. venscraft. Boys ran along the streets with clubs; the drums beat the governor, with his creatures, resisted in council, withdrew to the fort to desire a conference with the ministers and two or three more. The conference was declined. All the companies soon rallied at the town-house. Just then, the last governor of the colony, in office when the charter was abrogated, Simon Bradstreet, glorious with the dignity of fourscore years and seven, one of the early emigrants, a magistrate in 1630, whose experience connected the oldest generation with the new, drew near the townhouse, and was received by a great shout from the freemen. The old magistrates were reinstated, as a council of safety; the whole town rose in arms, "with the most unanimous resolution that ever inspired a people;" and a Declaration, read from the balcony, defended the insurrection as a duty to God and the country. "We commit our enterprise," it was added, "to Him who hears the cry of the oppressed, and advise all our neighbors, for whom we have thus ventured ourselves, to joyn with us in prayers and all just actions for the defence of the land." On Charlestown side, a thousand soldiers crowded together; and the multitude would have been larger if needed. The governor, vainly attempting to escape to the frigate, was, with his creatures, compelled to seek protection by submission; through XVII. the streets where he had first displayed his scar- CHAP. let coat and arbitrary commission, he and his fellows were marched to the town-house, and thence to 1689. prison. April 19. On the next day, the country came swarming across the Charlestown and Chelsea ferries, headed by Shepherd, a schoolmaster of Lynn. All the cry was against LamAndros and Randolph. The castle was taken; the frigate was mastered; the fortifications occupied beth MSS. 1025. How should a new government be instituted? Townmeetings, before news had arrived of the proclamation of William and Mary, were held throughout the colony. Of fifty-four towns, forty certainly, probably more, voted to reassume the old charter. Representatives were chosen; and once more Massachusetts assembled 22. in general court. May April It is but a short ride from Boston to Plymouth. Already, on the twenty-second of April, Nathaniel 22. Clark, the agent of Andros, was in jail; Hinckley resumed the government, and the children of the Pilgrims renewed the constitution which had been unanimously signed in the Mayflower. But not one of the fathers of the old colony remained alive. John Alden, the last survivor of the signers, famed for his frugal habits, and an arm before which forests had bowed, was silent in death. The days of the Pilgrims were over, and a new generation possessed the soil. beth MSS. 841. The royalists had pretended that "the Quaker Lamgrandees" of Rhode Island had imbibed nothing of Quakerism but its indifference to forms, and did not even desire a restoration of the charter. On May-day, their May usual election-day, the inhabitants and freemen poured into Newport; and the whole "democracie" published 1. |