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."

What liberal English statesmen thought of the people of Massachusetts we know from D'Ewes, who wrote: "All men whom malice blindeth not, nor impiety transverseth, may see that the very finger of God hath hitherto gone with them and guided them." On the other hand, the government of Charles were of the opinion that "all corporations, as is found by experience in the corporation of New England, are refractory to monarchical government and endeavor to poison a plantation with factions spirits."

Before the supplication of the colony was made, the monarch was himself involved in disasters. Anticipating success in his tyranny in England, with headlong indiscretion, he insisted on introducing a liturgy into Scotland, and compelling the uncompromising disciples of Knox to listen to prayers translated from the Roman missal. In July, 1637, the first attempt at reading the new service in the cathedral of Edinburgh was the signal for that series of events which promised to restore liberty to England and give peace to the colonies. The movement began, as great revolutions almost always do, from the ranks of the people. The nobles of Scotland take advantage of the anger of the people to promote their ambition. In the next year the national covenant is published, and is signed by the Scottish nation, almost without distinction of rank or sex; the defences of despotism are broken down; the flood washes away every vestige of Anglican ecclesiastical oppression. Scotland rises in arms for a holy war, and enlists religious enthusiasm under its banner in its contest against a despot, who has neither a regular treasury, nor an army, nor the confidence of his people. The wisest of his subjects esteem the insurgents as their friends and allies. There is now no time to oppress New England; the throne itself totters: there is no need to forbid emigration; fiery spirits, who had fled for a refuge to the colonies, rush back to share in the open struggle of England for liberty. In the following years the reformation of church and state, the attainder of Strafford, the impeachment of Laud, caused all men to stay at home in expectation of a new world.

Yet a nation was already planted in New England; a commonwealth was ripened; the contests in which the unfortunate

Charles became engaged, and the republican revolution that followed, left the colonists, for twenty years, nearly unmolested in the enjoyment of virtual independence. The change which their industry had wrought in the wilderness was the admiration of their times. The wigwams and hovels in which the English had at first found shelter were replaced by wellbuilt houses. The number of emigrants who had arrived in New England before the assembling of the Long Parliament is esteemed to have been twenty-one thousand two hundred. Two hundred and ninety-eight ships had borne them across the Atlantic; and the cost of the plantations had been almost a million of dollars-a great expenditure and a great emigration for that age. In a little more than ten years, fifty towns and villages had been planted; between thirty and forty churches built; and strangers, as they gazed, could not but acknowledge God's blessing on the endeavors of the planters. A public school, for which, on the eighth of September, 1636, the general court made provision, was, in the next year, established at Cambridge; and when, in 1638, John Harvard, a church member of Charlestown, where he was "sometimes minister of God's word," dying in the second year of his residence, bequeathed to it his library and half his fortune, it was named HARVARD COLLEGE. "To complete the colony in church and commonwealth work," Jose Glover, a worthy minister, “able in estate," and of a liberal spirit, in that same year embarked for Boston with fonts of letters for printing, and a printer. He died on the passage; but, in 1639, Stephen Daye, the printer, printed the Freeman's Oath, and an almanac calculated for New England; and, in 1640, " for the edification and comfort of the saints," the Psalms, faithfully but rudely translated in metre from the Hebrew by Thomas Welde and John Eliot, ministers of Roxbury, assisted by Richard Mather, minister of Dorchester, were published in a volume of three hundred octavo pages. This was the first book printed in America north of the city of Mexico.

In temporal affairs, affluence came in the train of industry. The natural exports of the country were furs and lumber; grain was carried to the West Indies; fish was a staple. The art of ship-building was introduced with the first emigrants