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Transcript
So, last episode ended with a race. The signers of the Remonstrance of 1646 rushing to get their petition to England to put it in front of Parliament, and the General Court racing to stop them. At stake was the autonomy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whether Parliament would exert a direct influence in colony matters.
Introduction
To stop the petitioners from taking the Remonstrance to England, the Court decided to arrest those planning to leave the colony, namely Fowle, and Smith for good measure. They pulled the two in front of the magistrates and deputies, and asked if they would admit to signing the petition, to which they said “yes.” Then they asked if they wanted to retract anything, anything at all, to which they said, “nope.”
Then, Fowle and Smith went on the offense, accusing the court of singling out and arresting them. There had been six signatories to the petition, so why was the Court only arresting them? Winthrop didn’t respond. He simply told them they must post a bond of 100 pounds each as security for their appearance in court to answer any charges. And, they refused, saying they would appeal to the Commissioners for Plantations instead.
At this point, Winthrop asked if they made their appeal to England with deliberation, in other words if they had already planned to appeal to England, and they said “yes.” This was a mistake. It was a blunder made by inexperienced people, and one which Child probably wouldn’t have made if he was arrested alongside them, or if they had had a chance to consult with Vassall, and Winthrop had them. Now it was on the record that they had planned to go to England even before the General Court had rendered its decision, and they could argue that this was contempt of court. And this allowed the Court to bring in all the other petitioners at this point, except Maverick who wasn’t in Boston.
Experienced bickering with the General Court, Child now took the lead. He demanded to know the charges against them. You couldn’t actually charge someone just for petitioning, so surely that wasn’t what was going on, so what was it? The Court responded that they hadn’t been brought in for the act of petitioning, but the contents of the petition. Which, just, no. No, no, no. From 350 years in the future, NO!
And Child said as much. He told them that was completely insane, and repeated his question. What were the actual charges? And after more attempts to evade, the Court ultimately answered that they couldn’t press charges yet, because the charges weren’t yet prepared. They hadn’t intended to call them so quickly, but needed to because multiple petitioners were leaving the colony, perhaps never to return. And Child rightfully told them that that’s no excuse for going beyond the bounds of the law. So, cite. A. specific. Clause. You. find. Offensive! Cite a specific law we have broken. Or let us go. Thoroughly shaken, they looked through their books and found something, anything, completely trivial which they might be able to legally argue. It was so disingenuous, so trivial, so obviously going beyond the letter and spirit of the law that Child flat out told the Court he shouldn’t have even bothered with the petition in the first place. He should have known he couldn’t reason with them, and just appealed to Warwick’s committee in the first place. At this point, some of Child’s old business associates, themselves either Presbyterians or people who favored religious tolerance for other reasons, backed down and voted against the harsh fines and jail sentences the petitioners were now being threatened with. But, they were a tiny minority in the court, not enough to change anything.
The Court addressed Smith and Fowle directly, and demanded they post bond. And, following Child’s lead, Fowle said he wouldn’t give them anything until he was presented with charges, but that if he was charged he would appeal to England. He noted that the Court was actually party to this dispute, and therefore not a competent judge. And, Smith agreed. The Court then turned them over to the marshal, with instructions to hold them until bond was paid, and ordered the others to remain available until further notice. So, Smith and Fowle were under a very hefty bond which they refused to pay on principle, and the others had been ordered to remain in Boston. The Court had them all stuck, unable to take their appeal to England.
Or not. Because a couple days later, Smith and Fowle did pay their bonds. It was a sudden, unexpected backtracking, and quite a lot of money, but Vassall had visited them, and explained that if they were going to appeal to England, they needed to pay the bonds. He couldn’t appeal alone, as a Plymouth resident, so this was worth it.
And out of jail, they prepared to leave within the next couple days. The next Monday, to be precise. As they were in Boston, they spent the day before they left in Cotton’s Church, and there, Cotton preached a deeply ominous sermon. He warned passengers that God might be angry seeing people taking a petition to England to irritate God’s Churches and weaken the government of Massachusetts, a colony which He would most certainly protect. When they were punished, Cotton said, they should remember this sermon, and that times of adversity are times for God’s people to reconsider their ways.
Cotton’s words so thoroughly spooked Hugh Peter’s brother, Thomas, that he cancelled his plans to sail on that ship and decided to go to England later. And the funny thing is, Cotton’s predictions did come true to a large extent. It was a rough passage at that time of year anyway, but this crossing was one of the roughest ever recorded. Days of storms which darkened the sky, and wrecks averted by the the nearest of misses. At one point, terrified that they were going to die, and increasingly convinced that Cotton was right, a group of passengers seized the Remonstrance, tore it to pieces and threw it overboard. Within a day, the storm died down, and everyone considered it a miracle. And when they did finally reach England, stories of what had happened spread like wildfire.
Back in Massachusetts, the General Court was still trying to figure out some actual charges against the petitioners, and by November, they’d decided on sedition. The petitioners had painted the colony in the worst possible light, dishonestly represented disputes in the colony, and planned an appeal before the Court had officially responded to their initial petition. They gathered the remaining petitioners in front of a packed meetinghouse to read the charges, and when the petitioners fought back, they reduced Maverick’s charge to contempt, because he hadn’t actually participated in the appeal. Only three magistrates voted to acquit, the by-now-notorious Bellingham, Bradstreet and Saltonstall. This time, though, they were joined in their vote by only the smallest handful of deputies, a handful which did notably include all the deputies from Hingham. The Court asked the Church elders to give their advice, but when Peter Hobart said he thought they should acquit, Winthrop responded that he didn’t think Hobart had any business giving advice on the case, given his own history of contempt of court. So, Hobart stood up and left the meeting.
And then the Court pushed all deputies, magistrates and clergy to say where they stood on the issue of submission to Parliament. Most said that Massachusetts’s relationship to Parliament was one of obedience but not subordination. They compared their relationship to that of Normandy to the French Crown in the Middle Ages. They were independent, but paid homage. They didn’t go against Parliament’s interests, but Parliament didn’t get to dictate colony affairs. The handful who disagreed with this were confronted on the spot, and when they backed down, the Court considered unity established, and prepared to send someone to England to advocate on the colony’s behalf. They had been trying to get Winthrop to go, but Winthrop just didn’t want to. He was getting older, and he wanted to stay put. Plus, he was still the center of Massachusetts political life, and there was some concern about sending him to England. So, they decided instead to send Edward Winslow, which funnily enough means that Massachusetts’s future was going to be determined by a fight between Plymouth residents.
They then fined every petitioner 30-50 pounds, except Maverick who was fined 10, and they offered to return the fines if they repented, but each refused, and Child threatened to appeal again. This time, he started preparing to go to England himself, taking copies of the original petition as well as a second petition with a couple dozen signatures, in which people complained that they had fled Laud’s tyranny only to find themselves suffering under a new form of tyranny, and asking that liberty of conscience be imposed on the colony externally, because it would not otherwise be granted. He also took a series of questions for Parliament to answer regarding the Massachusetts Charter. This document emphasized the core themes of the other ones, that Massachusetts was a hotbed of sedition and religious tyranny, and that Parliament’s Presbyterian majority needed to revoke the charter and be done with it. Massachusetts had no business turning a corporation into a semi-autonomous state, and it had behaved so badly that it needed to be stopped.
And you can just imagine the type of panicked chaos the Court was falling into. What could they do? They had to stop him. So, they sent officers to arrest Child and seize the documents he had. The officers grabbed him, and ransacked his baggage and lodgings, but didn’t find the documents. So, they figured they must be at John Dand’s home. Dand wasn’t there, but Smith was, and when he saw the officers, he panicked. He ran to try to hide the documents, or to destroy them, or something, but in reality he just led them to where they were hidden. They grabbed him and seized the documents, and brought them all before the Court. And at this point, Smith started ranting furiously. “I hope that before long I will have orders to search the governor’s closet and do as much for him as he did for me,” he’s paraphrased as saying.
They brought in Dand and Child to join him, and Child joined in Smith’s livid protests. Winthrop stopped them, and told Child that the Court regarded him as a person of quality, but if he didn’t behave better, they would clap him in irons and throw him in the common prison. They then interrogated all three, and all three refused to answer any questions. They were jailed without bail, and the people who had collected the signatures on Child’s other petition were fined 30-40 pounds each. Taking a note out of Vassall’s book, Child offered to pay his fine if the court would set him free, but they told him he would have to stay in jail until they organized and conducted a new trial. Only after the next ship left did they even set his bond, and when they did, they set that bond at an astronomical 800 pounds, and even then, he would be under house arrest until the next spring. It’s been a while since I’ve rolled out this statistic, but the average yearly income for a non-gentleman landowner at the time was 40 pounds, so Child was required to pay 20 times that amount in order to upgrade his status from prison to house arrest. He had absolutely no reason to give the 800 pounds, even if he had it, so he refused, and remained in prison instead.
The trial took place the next June, and unsurprisingly the Court found him guilty of all charges, with only a single Salem deputy refusing to agree to the verdict. They fined him 200 pounds, and ruled that he would remain in prison until he paid it or gave security. Child didn’t have that much in cash, so what he would have to do would be to give up all of his interests in the New England businesses he’d helped set up, effectively severing his connection to the region and encouraging him to leave.
John Dand was given the same punishment, and everyone else was fined 50-100 pounds each. A few deputies said the penalties were too severe, but nothing changed. Child paid within a couple months, and by September had left for England, never to return. Dand didn’t have enough money to pay that kind of fine, and the court would only let him off if he backed down and said he’d been wrong. It took him a whole year to do that, but he ultimately did, and went back to the life he’d lived before the Remonstrance, running his store but essentially disengaged from the rest of New England society.
In England, the appeal just didn’t take hold. The story of the storm was too compelling, and even though Vassall worked with Child’s brother to publish a pamphlet disputing the popular account of the voyage, it was an uphill battle. Winslow had by this point arrived in England and was very effectively defending the colony. He used the ambiguous wording about wanting Presbyterian Churches in Massachusetts to discredit the petition as a whole, saying there were two Presbyterian Churches in the colony, so clearly they were allowed and the petitioners were just trying to make the colony look bad in front of Parliament. It was actually quite a disingenuous argument, but it was an effective one at deflating the petition’s claims. And Winslow said that as a matter of sheer practicality, Massachusetts couldn’t be forced to submit to a constant stream of appeals across the Atlantic. If Parliament did this, they would be imposing arbitrary government on their American friends at the very moment that they’d overturned it in England. And that was a bit less disingenuous. Massachusetts would have had to adopt a radically different approach to governance if its decisions could be challenged by dissenters, especially because each challenge would take months and be expensive to refute.
Warwick’s Commission quickly decided against the petitioners, saying that it wouldn’t act as a court of appeals for Massachusetts, and justifying its involvement in the Gorton case by saying that it had involved a boundary dispute rather than being a purely internal thing. Of course they had also overturned numerous sentences of exile, which they conveniently didn’t mention, but regardless. They stated their policy, they sided with Massachusetts, and by the time Child arrived in England, the debate was long over. Even presented with new documents, Parliament wasn’t interested in reviving the issue, and in Massachusetts, Child’s allies had also fallen away. They had lost, they didn’t want to keep fighting. They either resigned themselves to living in Massachusetts as it was, moved back to England or, in the case of Vassall, moved to Barbados.
The funny thing is, a couple years later, John Winthrop, Jr. wrote to Child asking him to start investing in New England industry again. Child agreed, on the condition that his fines were returned to him, meaning if his interest in the industries he’d already helped to set up was returned, and they refused. So, he refused, and turned his attention elsewhere. Ultimately, after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Child decided to put his money there, and spent the rest of his life supporting Cromwell’s activities there.
And Winslow stayed in England, publishing, fighting on Massachusetts’s behalf, including against Gorton, and joining the list of New Englanders who took leading roles in Parliament’s government. Most notably, he soon took a leading role in the sequestration of Royalist estates in the aftermath of the first Civil War, determining under what conditions and how large a payment it would take for individual Royalists to have confiscated property returned to them.
The Remonstrance of 1646 changed Massachusetts in a way that might have seemed impossible in 1645. It resulted in a new synod of New England Churches, the Cambridge Assemby of Divines, which would meet three times over the next three years, and which would ultimately formulate something called the Half-Way Covenant, which would become a major focus of the region’s religious debates. More surprisingly, even shockingly, it put the magistrates and deputies on the same side, something which very rarely happened, and something which had a lingering impact on the relationship between the two. And the combination of changes meant that, even though some reforms might still happen, the end result of the battle was the strengthening of the status quo in Massachusetts.
And that’s where we’ll leave it for today. Next week, we’ll look a little more closely at the changing face of England after the King’s military defeat, and how that affected its American colonies.