complain that not only was the religious system which was forbidden by the laws of the realm established in the new colony in America, but the service established by law in England was prohibited. Proof was produced of marriages celebrated by civil magistrates, and of an established system of church discipline which was at variance with the laws of England. The superintendence of the colonies was, therefore, in April, 1634, removed from the privy council to an arbitrary special commission, of which William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the archbishop of York, were the chief. These, with ten of the highest officers of state, were invested with full power to make laws and orders for the government of English colonies planted in foreign parts, to appoint judges and magistrates and establish courts for civil and ecclesiastical affairs, to regulate the church, to impose penalties and imprisonment for offences in ecclesiastical matters, to remove governors and require an account of their government, to determine all appeals from the colonies, and to revoke all charters and patents which had been surreptitiously obtained, or which conceded liberties prejudicial to the royal prerogative.

Cradock, who had been governor of the corporation in England before the transfer of the charter of Massachusetts, was strictly charged to deliver it up; and he wrote to the governor and council to send it home. Upon receipt of his letter, they resolved "not to return any answer or excuse at that time." In September, a copy of the commission to Archbishop Laud and his associates was brought to Boston; and it was at the same time rumored that the colonists were to be compelled by force to accept a new governor, the discipline of the church of England, and the laws of the commissioners. The intelligence awakened "the magistrates and deputies to discover their minds each to other, and to hasten their fortifications," toward which, poor as was the colony, six hundred pounds were raised.

In January, 1635, all the ministers assembled at Boston; and they unanimously declared against the reception of a general governor, saying: "We ought to defend our lawful possessions, if we are able; if not, to avoid and protract."

In the month before this declaration, it is not strange that

Laud and his associates should have esteemed the inhabitants of Massachusetts to be men of refractory humors; complaints resounded of parties consenting in nothing but hostility to the church of England; of designs to shake off the royal jurisdiction. Restraints were placed upon emigration; no one above the rank of a serving man might remove to the colony without the special leave of Laud and his associates; and persons of inferior order were required to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, of obedience to the church of England, as well as fidelity to its king.

Willingly as these acts were enforced by religious bigotry, they were promoted by another cause. A change had come over the character of the great Plymouth council for the colonization of New England, which had already made grants of all the lands from the Penobscot to Long Island. The members of the company desired as individuals to become the proprietaries of extensive territories, even at the dishonor of invalidating all their grants as a corporation. A meeting of the lords was convened in April, 1635; and the coast, from Acadia to beyond the Hudson, was divided into shares, and distributed among them by lots.

To the possession of their prizes the inflexible colony of Massachusetts formed an obstacle, which they hoped to overcome by surrendering their general patent for New England to the king. To obtain of him a confirmation of their respective grants, they set forth "that the Massachusetts patentees, having surreptitiously obtained from the crown a confirmation of their grant of the soil, had made themselves a free people, and for such hold themselves at present; framing unto themselves new conceits of religion and new forms of ecclesiastical and temporal government, punishing divers that would not approve thereof, under other pretences indeed, yet for no other cause save only to make themselves absolute masters of the country, and uncontrollable in their new laws."

At the Trinity term of the court of king's bench, a quo warranto was brought against the company of the Massachusetts bay. At the ensuing Michaelmas, several of its members who resided in England made their appearance, and judg ment was pronounced against them individually; the rest of

the patentees stood outlawed, but no judgment was entered against them. The unexpected death of Mason, the proprietary of New Hampshire, in December, 1635, removed the chief instigator of these aggressions.

In July, 1637, the king, professing "to redress the mischiefs that had arisen out of the many different humours," took the government of New England into his own hands, and appointed over it Sir Ferdinando Gorges as governor-general, upon whose "gravity, moderation, and experience," some hope of introducing a new system was reposed. But the measure was feeble and ineffectual. While Gorges in England sided with the adversaries of Massachusetts, he avoided all direct collision with its people, pretending by his letters and speeches to seek their welfare; he never left England, and was hardly heard of except by petitions to its government. Attempting great matters and incurring large expenses, he lost all. The royal grant of extended territory in Maine was never of any avail to him.

Persecution in England gave strength to the Puritan colony. The severe censures in the star-chamber, the greatness of the fines which avarice rivalled bigotry in imposing, the rigorous proceedings with regard to ceremonies, the suspending and silencing of multitudes of ministers, continued; and men were "enforced by heaps to desert their native country. Nothing but the wide ocean and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter them from the fury of the bishops." The pillory had become the scene of human agony and mutilation, as an ordinary punishment; and the friends of Laud jested on the sufferings which were to cure the obduracy of fanatics. "The very genius of that nation of people,” said Wentworth, "leads them always to oppose, both civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them." They were provoked to the indiscretion of a complaint, and then involved in a persecution. They were imprisoned and scourged; their noses were slit; their ears were cut off; their cheeks were marked with a red-hot brand. But the lash and the shears and the glowing iron could not destroy principles which were rooted in the soul, and which danger made it glorious to profess. The injured party even learned to despise

the mercy of their oppressors. Four years after Prynne had been punished for a publication, he was a second time ar raigned for a like offence. "I thought," said Lord Finch, “that Prynne had lost his ears already; but," added he, looking at the prisoner, "there is something left yet;" and an officer of the court, removing the hair, displayed the mutilated organs. A crowd gathered round the scaffold where Prynne and Bastwick and Burton were to suffer maim. "Christians," said Prynne, "stand fast; be faithful to God and your country; or you bring on yourselves and your children perpetual slavery." The dungeon, the pillory, and the scaffold were stages in the progress of civil liberty toward its triumph.

There was a period when the ministry of Charles feared no dangerous resistance in England; and the attempts to override the rights of parliament by monarchical power were accompanied by analogous movements against New England, of whose colonists a correspondent of Laud reported, "that they aimed not at new discipline, but at sovereignty; that it was accounted treason in their general court to speak of appeals to the king."

The Puritans, hemmed in by dangers on every side, and having no immediate prospect of success at home, desired at any rate to escape from their native country. "To restrain the transportation to the colonies of subjects whose principal end was to live as much as they could without the reach of authority," one proclamation succeeded another. On the first day of May, 1638, the privy council interfered to stay a squadron of eight ships, which were in the Thames, preparing to embark for New England. It has been said that Hampden and Cromwell were on board this fleet. The English ministry of that day might willingly have exiled Hampden, who was at that very time engaged in resisting the levy of ship-money; no original authors, except royalists writing on hearsay, allude to the design imputed to him; in America there exists no evidence of his expected arrival; the remark of the historian Hutchinson refers to the well-known schemes of Lord Say and Seal and Lord Brooke. There came over, during this summer, twenty ships, and at least three thousand persons; and, had Hampden designed to emigrate, he possessed energy enough

to have accomplished his purpose. He undoubtedly had watched with deep interest the progress of Massachusetts; The "Conclusions " had early attracted his attention; and, in 1631, he had taken part in a purchase of territory on the Narragansett; but the greatest patriot statesmen of his times, the man whom Charles I. would gladly have seen drawn and quartered, whom Clarendon paints as possessing beyond all his contemporaries "a head to contrive, a tongue to persuade, and a hand to execute," and whom Baxter revered as able, by his presence and conversation, to give a new charm to the rest of the saints in Heaven, never embarked for America. The fleet in which he is said to have taken his passage was delayed but a few days; on petition of the owners and passengers, King Charles removed the restraint; the ships proceeded on their voyage; and the company arrived in the bay of Massachusetts. Had Hampden and Cromwell been of the party, they would have reached New England.

Twenty-six days before this attempt to stay emigration, the lords of the council had written to Winthrop, recalling to mind the former proceedings by a quo warranto, and demanding the return of the patent. In case of refusal, it was added, the king would assume into his own hands the entire management of the plantation.

But "David in exile could more safely expostulate with Saul for the vast space between them." The colonists, on the sixth of September, without desponding, demanded a trial before condemnation. They urged that the recall of the patent would be a manifest breach of faith, pregnant with evils to themselves and their neighbors; that it would strengthen the plantations of the French and the Dutch; that it would discourage all future attempts at colonial enterprise; and, finally, "if the patent be taken from us," such was their remonstrance, "the common people will conceive that his majesty has cast them off, and that hereby they are freed from their allegiance and subjection, and therefore will be ready to confederate themselves under a new government for their necessary safety and subsistence, which will be of dangerous example unto other plantations, and perilous to ourselves of incurring his majesty's displeasure."