Lygonia, and stretching from Harpswell to the Kennebec, soon sought a home among the rising settlements of Massachusetts. Except for peltry and fish, the coast of Maine would not at that time have been tenanted by Englishmen.

Yet, from pride of character, Gorges clung to the project of territorial aggrandizement. When, in February, 1635, Mason limited himself to the country west of the Piscataqua, while Sir William Alexander obtained of the Plymouth company a patent for the country between the St. Croix and the Kennebec, Gorges succeeded in soliciting the district that remained between the Kennebec and New Hampshire, and was named governor-general of New England. Without delay he sent his nephew, William Gorges, to govern his territory. Saco may have contained one hundred and fifty inhabitants when, in 1636, the first court ever duly organized on the soil of Maine was held within its limits. Before that time there may have been voluntary combinations of the settlers themselves; but there had existed on the Kennebec no power to prevent or to punish bloodshed. William Gorges remained in the country less than two years. Six Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut, who, in 1637, received a commission to act as his successors, declined the trust, and for two years no records of the infant settlements then called New Somersetshire can be found. In April, 1639, a royal charter constituted Gorges the lord proprietary of the country, for which the old soldier, who had never seen America, immediately aspired to establish boroughs, frame schemes of colonial government, and enact a code of laws.

The region which lies but a little nearer the sun was already converted, by the energy of religious zeal, into a busy, well-organized, and even opulent state. The early history of Massachusetts is the history of a class of men as remarkable for their qualities and influence as any by which the human race has been diversified.

The settlement near Weymouth was kept up; a plantation was begun near Mount Wollaston, within the present limits of Quincy; and the merchants of the west continued their voyages to New England for fish and furs. But these things were of feeble moment, compared with the attempt at

a permanent establishment near Cape Ann; by which Arthur Lake, bishop of Bath and Wells, and John White, the patriarch minister of Dorchester, Puritans, but not separatists, "occasioned, yea, founded the work" of colonization, on a higher principle than the desire of gain. "He would go himself but for his age," declared Lake shortly before his death. Roger Conant, having left New Plymouth for Nantasket, through a brother in England who was a friend of White, the minister, in 1625, obtained the agency of the adventure. A year's experience proved that the speculation must change its form or it would produce no results; the merchants, therefore, paid with honest liberality all the persons whom they had employed, and abandoned the unprofitable scheme. But Conant, a man of extraordinary vigor, "inspired as it were by some superior instinct," and confiding in the active friendship of White, succeeded in breathing a portion of his sublime courage into three of his companions; and, making choice of Salem as opening a convenient place of refuge for the exiles for religion, they resolved to remain as the sentinels of Puritanism on the bay of Massachusetts.

In the year 1627, some friends being together in Lincolnshire fell into discourse about New England and the planting of the gospel there; and, after some deliberation, they imparted their reasons by letters and messages to some in London and the west country.

"The business came afresh to agitation " in London; the project of colonizing by the aid of fishing voyages was given up; and from that city, Lincolnshire, and the west country, men of fortune and religious zeal, merchants and country gentlemen, the discreeter sort among the many who desired a reformation in church government, "offered the help of their purses" to advance "the glory of God" by establishing a colony of the best of their countrymen on the shores of New England. To facilitate the grant of a charter from the crown, they sought the concurrence of the council of Plymouth for New England; they were befriended in their application by the earl of Warwick, and obtained the approbation of Sir Ferdinando Gorges; and, on the nineteenth of March, 1628, that company, which had proved itself incapable of colonizing

its domain, and could derive revenue only from sales of territory, disregarding a former grant of a large district on the Charles river, conveyed to Sir Henry Roswell, Sir John Young, Thomas Southcoat, John Humphrey, John Endecott, and Simon Whetcomb, a belt of land extending three miles south of the river Charles and the Massachusetts bay, and three miles north of every part of the river Merrimack, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, to be held by the same tenure as in the county of Kent. The grantees associated to themselves Sir Richard Saltonstall, Isaac Johnson, Matthew Cradock, Increase Nowell, Richard Bellingham, Theophilus Eaton, William Pynchon, and others, of whom nearly all united religious zeal with a capacity for vigorous action. Endecott -who, "ever since the Lord in mercy had revealed himself unto him," had maintained the straitest judgment against the outward form of God's worship as prescribed by English statutes; a man of dauntless courage, and that cheerfulness which accompanies courage; benevolent, though austere ; firm, though choleric; of a rugged nature, which his stern principles of non-conformity had not served to mellow-was selected as a "fit instrument to begin this wilderness work." In 1628, before June came to an end, he was sent over as governor, assisted by a few men, having his wife and family for the companions of his voyage, the hostages of his irrevocable attachment to the New World. Arriving in safety in September, he united his own party and those who had gone there before him into one body, which counted in all not much above fifty or sixty persons. With these he founded the oldest town in the colony, soon to be called Salem, and extended some supervision over the waters of Boston harbor, then called Massachusetts bay, near which the lands were counted the paradise of New England." At Charlestown an Englishman, one Thomas Walford, a blacksmith, dwelt in a thatched and palisaded cabin. William Blackstone, an Episcopal clergyman, a courteous recluse, gifted with the impatience of restraint which belongs to the pioneer, had seated himself on the opposite peninsula; the island now known as East Boston was occupied by Samuel Maverick, a prelatist, though son of a pious non-conformist minister of the west of England. At

Nantasket and farther south, stragglers lingered near the seaside, attracted by the gains of a fishing station and a petty trade in beaver. The Puritan ruler visited the remains of Morton's unruly company in what is now Quincy, rebuked them for their profane revels, and admonished them "to look there should be better walking."

After the departure of the emigrant ship from England, the company, counselled by White, an eminent lawyer, and supported by Lord Dorchester, better known as Sir Dudley Carleton, who, in December, became secretary of state, obtained from the king a confirmation of their grant. It was the only way to secure the country as a part of his dominions; for the Dutch were already trading in the Connecticut river; the French claimed New England as within the limits of New France; and the prelatical party, which had endeavored again and again to colonize the coast, had tried only to fail. Before the news reached London of Endecott's arrival, the number of adventurers was much enlarged; on the second of March, 1629, an offer of "Boston men," that promised good to the plantation, was accepted; and on the fourth of the same month, a few days only before Charles I., in a public state paper, avowed his purpose of reigning without a parliament, the broad seal of England was put to the letters-patent for Massachusetts.

The charter, which was cherished for more than half a century as the most precious boon, constituted a body politic by the name of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. The administration of its affairs was intrusted to a governor, deputy, and eighteen assistants, who were annually, on the last Wednesday of Easter term, to be elected by the freemen or members of the corporation, and to meet once a month or oftener "for despatching such businesses as concerned the company or plantation." Four times a year the governor, assistants, and all the freemen were to be summoned to "one great, general, and solemn assembly;" and these "great and general courts" were invested with full powers to choose and admit into the company so many as they should think fit, to elect and constitute all requisite subordinate officers, and to make laws and ordinances for the

welfare of the company and for the government of the lands and the inhabitants of the plantation, "so as such laws and ordinances be not contrary and repugnant to the laws and statutes of the realm of England."

"The principle and foundation of the charter of Massachusetts," wrote Charles II. at a later day, when he had Clarendon for his adviser, "was the freedom of liberty of conscience." The governor, or his deputy, or two of the assistants, was empowered, but not required, to administer the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to every person who should go to inhabit the granted lands; and, as the statutes establishing the common prayer and spiritual courts did not reach beyond the realm, the silence of the charter respecting them released the colony from their power. The English government did not foresee how wide a departure from English usages would grow out of the emigration of Puritans to America; but, as conformity was not required of the new commonwealth, the persecutions in England were a guarantee that the immense majority of emigrants would be fugitives who scrupled compliance with the common prayer. Freedom of Puritan worship was the purpose and the result of the colony. The proceedings of the company, moreover, did not fall under the immediate supervision of the king, and did not need his assent; so that self-direction, in ecclesiastical as well as civil affairs, passed to the patentees, subject only to conflicts with the undefined prerogative of the king, and the unsettled claim to superior authority by parliament.

The company was authorized to transport to its territory any persons, whether English or foreigners, who would go willingly, would become lieges of the English king, and were not restrained "by especial name;" and they were encouraged to do so by a promise of favor to the commerce of the colony with foreign parts, and a total or partial exemption from duties for seven and for twenty-one years. The emigrants and their posterity were ever to be considered as natural-born subjects, entitled to all English liberties and immunities.

The corporate body alone was to decide what liberties the colonists should enjoy. All ordinances published under its seal were to be implicitly obeyed. Full legislative and execu