American Antiquarian Society, the Hampshire County Bar Association; and the officials in charge of the Massachusetts Archives, the British Museum, the Privy Council Office, the Public Record Office, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in London, and the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. Acknowledgments are also due to Professor C. M. Andrews of Yale University, who kindly put his expert knowledge of the English archives at my disposal while I was carrying on the investigation of the English material. Especial acknowledgments are due to Professor A. B. Hart of Harvard University, under whose direction a dissertation was prepared upon the same subject and offered in partial fulfilment for the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1904. But, above all, I am under the greatest obligations to Professor Edward Channing, who first suggested the subject and under whose direction the early investigation was carried on, and who has given freely of his time in reading and criticising the manuscript and proof. SMITH COLLEGE, April, 1911. EVERETT KIMBALL. CONTENTS THE TEMPORARY POLICY OF THE RESTORATION: JOSEPH DUD- THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JOSEPH DUDLEY CHAPTER I THE EARLY LIFE OF JOSEPH DUDLEY AND THE LOSS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS CHARTER 1660-1686 THE life of Joseph Dudley falls between the period of the settlement of New England and the American Revolution. His public career did not begin until Charles II had been on the throne for more than ten years; and most of his associates were men of the second generation, who faced new conditions and were called upon to solve other problems than those of the first planters. The material condition of Massachusetts had also changed. Commerce had flourished, wealth had increased, and a party devoted to the preservation of these interests had arisen and was strongly opposing the leaders of the first generation of settlers, who recalled the time when Massachusetts existed independently of both crown and commonwealth. By birth and training Joseph Dudley belonged to the party of independence; but his career was a direct contradiction to his inheritance, and was spent in a consistent endeavor to realize the aims of the moderate party of the seventeenth century, which developed into the loyalist party of the eighteenth. This is the key to his political activity, and he should be judged by the aims of this party rather than by the ideals of the first planters. This policy, too, explains his strength and his weakness, which made him at once influential in England and the most hated man in the colonies, a man of great ambitions, who from the point of view of the party of independence has been justly termed a traitor, but whose real aims have been too little understood. Joseph Dudley was born in Roxbury, September 22, 1647, the son of Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, who was over seventy years of age when Joseph, his fourth son, was born. The stern and intolerant character of the father was not inherited by the son; nor did he receive much training from his father, who died, leaving him a child of four years. His mother soon married the Reverend John Allen, minister of the church in Dedham, with whom Joseph lived and who was responsible for his upbringing. He received as good an education as the colony afforded, and was graduated from Harvard College in 1665 with the intention of becoming a minister, like his stepfather. Deciding, however, to enter the field of politics, he was made a freeman of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1672,2 and the next year was elected to the General Court as representative from Roxbury, from which town he was returned every year until 1676. During the war with Philip he was chosen one of the commissioners to accompany Major Savage in his attempt to hold the Narragansetts in obedience, and was also present at the destruction of the Narragansett stockade, where the power of the Indians was broken. It was possibly in 1 Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, ii. 76; Dean Dudley, History of the Dudley Family, 162. 2 Massachusetts Colony Records, iv. pt. ii. 585. 3 Ibid. 550. 'Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, i. 273. |