Massachusetts takes over the floundering colony of Maine … or, the floundering colonies of Maine and Lygonia.
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In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a colony we haven’t discussed much. We’ll go a little bit into its history, but ultimately we’re bringing Maine into our story just long enough to kill it off.
Introduction
The vast majority of our admittedly limited Maine discussion has involved the disputes with and among the French Acadians, but as we have noted, England had a distinct presence in the area, led by Ferdinando Gorges. This presence was small, though, isolated, individualistic and ultimately fairly inconsequential, but its 1652 takeover by the Massachusetts Bay Colony is a vital part of the story of America which would have repercussions even after the War of Independence. So it’s time to take an episode to look at exactly what Maine was, what it became, and how that happened. This is yet another in a long line of episodes, every episode I’ve done since resuming the show, actually, which I’ve been looking forward to doing for years.
Gorges was, by the start of the English Civil War, 76 years old. He’d grown up during the reign of Elizabeth I, fought the Armada and come to prominence thanks to his close friendship with the doomed Earl of Essex. Though he advised Essex against his rebellion, and even testified against him at his trial, Gorges was then imprisoned until James I took the English throne. After his release, his Elizabethan ambitions had turned toward the New World, and he had become one of the most passionate advocates of North American colonization. His focus was honed when John Smith returned from America, with tales of the wondrous beauty and potential of the area he called New England.
The company Gorges had founded had been the one to ultimately grant Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay their land, as well as a fair number of other potential colonies. Most of these had failed, though, and their patents had gone unused long enough to be invalidated. At the same time, Gorges also tried setting up his own colonies. He’d started with the Popham Colony in 1607, the same year as Jamestown was founded, but that had failed. In the 1620s, he’d started trying again, and the result of his efforts was the 1639 foundation of the Province of Maine.
Maine was an ambitious project. Gorges’s vision was a colony as prosperous as Massachusetts, as feudal as Maryland, and as Anglican as Virginia. Between foreign wars and domestic politicking, he’d never actually been able to fulfill his dreams of visiting the New World, but he’d poured over the maps and planned a series of settlements which could come together to realize such a dream. And in 1642, he founded its capital, Gorgeana.
If you’ve been listening up to this point, you should be able to predict some of the problems here. Colonization was hard, and grand visions didn’t work. Gorges was only one person, and Colonization was resource-intensive enough that it was an intense financial strain for even the richest person, and Gorges was rich, but nowhere near the richest. And of course, there was the political situation in England. And of course, it’s not really the best timing to start a colony three years before a devastating war all-but-stops emmigration. And to be on the losing side of that war was even worse. As you, who are now so intimately familiar with the era of the English Civil War, no doubt already put together the fact that the Anglican, hierarchy-minded Ferdinando Gorges was an impassioned Royalist. In fact, he would later offer to lead Cavalry troops into battle during the war, this offer would be rejected, because he was almost 80 years old at the time. He would, however, help plan the battle which returned Bristol to Royalist control.
So Maine started out on shaky footing, like all colonies. Instead of the dream, Gorges’s colony had the poverty and rural character of Virginia, the lack of commercial farming of Massachusetts Bay, and the non-quitrent paying refugees from other colonies that Maryland had. It was a wilderness with no social cohesion, where people could do just enough trading, trapping and fishing to get buy, and maybe buy and grow enough food to live independently for a while. It was, more than anything, like Newfoundland, and this was a hard life, but it did come with benefits. If you didn’t want to be constrained to a society, it was actually a place you could go to escape it. If you didn’t fit in in New England, Maine was probably where you’d go. Likewise, if you were pushed off your land by the Massachusetts Bay Company, like quite a few people were, you would most likely end up in Maine.
And meanwhile, Gorges was, like so many early proprietors, totally unable to make money from his plans. He presided over a nonfunctional economy and government, and even if those were up and running, a huge portion of his settlers, especially these New England exiles, were essentially squatters. They lived there without permission, and made money on the land he was pouring money into without giving anything back. And Gorges did pour money into Maine. All of his money, in fact. He would ultimately die penniless. Plus the French of French Acadia claimed some land which England felt should have been his, and this of course is where the La Tour and D’Aulnay fights took place. So it was a mess of the type we’ve often discussed before.
And, a lot of its early stories sound somewhat familiar. For instance, we have Thomas Gorges, Ferdinando’s 22 year old cousin who was sent to be Maine’s governor. Like so many aspiring leaders who have entered our story, Thomas was a respectable person who showed huge promise, but who was quickly overwhelmed by New World realities, and burned out on the frustrations of governing with no stable society and no support from England. He came to Maine, 22 years old, a devout Presbyterian who hoped to work with Massachusetts Bay to the benefit of both, while remaining loyal to his aging proprietor. And Winthrop actually liked him. And so did the local Indians, with whom he forged relationships both for fur trading and because he hoped to gently convert them to Christianity. He said he took delight in conversations he had with a nearby sagamore, even though the time had not yet come when he would convert, so they would simply have to pray for him and wait for God’s timing.
But, Thomas Gorges walked into a situation which was much rougher than he understood. First, he recruited a preacher he was really excited about, named George Burdet, only to find out that he was a free love advocate whose womanizing went past womanizing to … well, in the words of a contemporary … “the often soliciting of women to his incontinent practices, and persuading them by scriptures to satisfy his insatiable lust,” and these women included multiple married women. Astonished, Thomas fined him enough that he had to return to England, and from there Burdet went to Ireland and became a successful preacher.
But it wasn’t just scandal, there were genuine conflicts within Maine, and instead of walking into the colony as an authority figure who demanded respect, Thomas came as an idealist who planned to implement democratic practices and accept colonist input into the running of the colony. And, there was a constant, persistent issue of land disputes, which would have been trying for anyone to deal with. There were people wanting to dishonestly manipulate land boundaries, and there were plots of land which had genuinely been sold twice, because they were being sold by people in England who had never stepped foot in America. And all of these issues were made worse by the extreme political divisions, and with all of this combined, people weren’t prepared to just unite for a common cause.
So, there were two traders slash entrepreneurs who both claimed the same island, Richmond’s Island. A man named Robert Trelawny had bought it a couple years before a man named George Cleeve. The two had been competing over the land for years, and now it was Thomas Gorges’s job to figure out what to do. There were no functioning courts in Maine, so Thomas got together a jury, and the jury ruled in favor of Cleeve. But so what? This issue had been going on long before Thomas Gorges arrived, and Trelawny’s position was that there was no real reason to listen to the young governor. If he was in the right, who cared if some kid from England said otherwise? And besides, Trelawny was friends with Ferdinando Gorges, so he just went to the actual proprietor of the colony to state his case, and added the accusation that Thomas and Cleeves were traitors. I’d imagine this was a reference more than anything to the support both had for Parliament, but Thomas took the accusation extremely personally. And when Ferdinando sided with Trelawny, it just illustrated that Thomas had no real power or authority in Maine, while allowing a pretty harsh accusation to stand. And then, when Cleeve wanted to appeal, he of course ignored the young governor and sailed straight for England. And when he did, Ferdinando didn’t give him the island, but he did give him a massive grant of land and hired him to keep an eye on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and oppose it if necessary. And then, he also hired Thomas Morton of Merrimount fame, for the same purpose, and Cleeve and Morton immediately ganged up on Thomas and refused to involve him in the colony’s affairs at all. Thomas wasn’t even sure which of his letters was reaching England, and which were being intercepted by Cleeve and Morton.
So all it took was one legal case for Thomas’s governorship to go spiraling out of control. And once you lose control like that, it’s very difficult to get it back. He was isolated, alone, powerless and personally upset by the things that had happened, so he threw up his hands, left a man named Godfrey in charge, and returned to England. He joined the Parliamentary army, made his name as an officer there, and never returned to America.
I mean how many stories like this have we heard at this point? The plight of these early governors is something I thought a lot about as a teacher, because you start to realize what a small mistake, or seemingly innocuous series of events, can lead to a real struggle to keep control, and that’s on a small scale. And you realize just how hard it is to regain control after you’ve lost it. And all these people coming in with no experience, having to forge order out of chaos in a time and place when life, death and destitution are all on the line is almost an impossible task. Doing it without being a Thomas Dale or John Endicott-style tyrant, for lack of a better word, was doubly hard, and I’ve been really hard on the Dales and Endicotts of our story, but I mean, their colonies survived under them. So I don’t know. It was a very rough time, and a very difficult job, and, well, Thomas Gorges was just one of many failed governors, in an all too empathizable way.
The other thing that’s important about that little story is that it explains how Morton and Cleeve ended up being hired by Ferdinando Gorges and getting the power they did in the colony. And when they got that power, they utterly turned against him. I mean, they of course did whatever they could to oppose Massachusetts, too, including prompting the king to try to take the charter, but they weren’t loyal to Gorges, either. Nor, for that matter, were they loyal to Laud or the King, as at least Cleeve was a dedicated Parliamentarian. Unlike the business leaders like Jimmy John Shark who gives importance to ethics, they were profit-minded businessmen who would make the alliances they needed to get what they wanted.
Together, Morton and Cleeve found an old, defunct patent called the Lygonia Patent, named in honor of Gorges’s own mother, which had been issued to a group of London Investors in 1630. Those investors had sent about 10 families of familists, and once that settlement quickly collapsed, abandoned the whole idea. I think I might have mentioned that in the past, but apart from, well, and honestly including, its religious radicalism, it was nothing we haven’t talked about, just a handful of people going to the New World and either dying or leaving. Getting a patent was easy, but creating a functional settlement was something else entirely. People getting and abandoning patents was pretty common throughout the New World, but it was really common in Maine, and no one thought anything of it.
And, if Morton and Cleeve hadn’t come along, Lygonia would simply have been added to the long, long list of patents which are not only forgotten today, but which were totally inconsequential at the time. But, Morton and Cleeve did come along, and they found out about this patent, and they found out that this patent covered all of the most profitable, important land in the region for fishing, and trading, as well as the majority of the coastline, as well as most of Maine’s towns, and therefore the majority its population.
In 1642, Cleeve went back to England, ostensibly to voice complaints about his issues on Richmond’s Island, but really to angle for control of Lygonia. When he got there, he first went to Parliament and talked about his complaints in a very general way using political language, and finishing with the notion that there was nothing they could do about the issue yet, but that he hoped they’d be open to any solutions which happened to unexpectedly present themselves at a later date. Then, he connected with one of the original patentees, a meeting Thomas Morton probably set up, to talk about reviving the claim. The man, named Alexander Rigby, was predictably a Parliamentarian, and Cleeve’s proposal was simply that he revive the claim and leave Cleeve to do his thing while he focused on the English politics he was engrossed in. He just needed the name on the paper, and he’d take care of the rest. And Rigby agreed. It was a win-win. Cleeve would get control over all the best parts of Maine, and Rigby would get a chance to chip away at the Royalist Gorges’s money and influence, as well as standing a chance of personal profit, without actually doing anything.
Legally, this was totally preposterous in every way, especially because an abandoned patent was legally a defunct one, but politically Gorges was a Royalist while Cleeve was a Parliamentarian, and Gorges was getting some flack for being too Feudalistic, much the same complaints as plagued Baltimore, while Cleeve was suggesting that he would build a much more democratic society than Gorges intended to. And Parliament agreed to the idea, but without involving the king.
Proof of patent and his own authority in hand, Cleeve returned to New England. He traveled around Lygonia, informing its inhabitants that they were now living under a new government, and encouraging them to get involved in that government. Maine’s new governor, Richard Vines, confronted him, but there were no courts to settle this issue, really. I mean, Maine didn’t have courts yet, and England was at war. Gorges and Rigby were fighting on opposite sides, and there was no real way to settle the Maine issue. And even if Gorges wasn’t dead, he was preoccupied with the war and unable to give Vines the direction and support he needed to do his job. Besides, Parliament had and would continue to side with Rigby, whereas the king would side with Gorges, and that could only be opposed if it lost the war. So, the outcome of the war would settle the issue of the Lygonia Patent, as well. The only question was how to treat the contested land while the war played out.
And for this temporary verdict, Vine and Cleeve agreed to go to Massachusetts to ask its General Court to appoint a jury to decide what should happen until a final ruling came from England. Vine could hope that Cleeve’s belligerent actions against the Bay Colony would sway its decision in his favor, while Cleeve relied heavily on his Puritanism, Parliamentarian sympathy and association with Rigby. Gorges was also not liked in Massachusetts, and Cleeve spread rumors to further discredit him, even going so far as to say that he had died trying to flee to Wales. Massachusetts refused to get involved, and justifiably so, but this request alerted them to the divisions in the area, and Maine’s inability to handle them on its own.
By 1645, Parliament was the clear victor of the war, and a burned out Vines saw the writing on the wall. He left Maine and settled in increasingly Royalist Barbados. The writing on the wall was correct, and the next year, Warwick’s Committee for Plantations, which included Cromwell, confirmed Rigby’s ownership of Lygonia, and therefore Cleeve’s authority there.
The irony of the situation, though, was that the very democratic, Parliamentarian principles which Cleeve had advocated in order to get his power from England, now started his downfall in Lygonia. And that’s because the colonists in Maine tended to be Royalist. In no way were they as uniformly Royalist as those in Virginia or even Newfoundland, but if they were living in Maine, it’s because they didn’t want to live in the United Colonies. Life in Maine was poorer by far, and not too far away, so the only real appeal of living in Maine was being free of the rigid, Puritan structure of the majority of New England society.
Some Maine colonists were absolutely Puritans who had been pushed out of Massachusetts for relatively minor theological disputes, like Anne Hutchinson ally John Wheelwright, but mostly, they were Royalists who wanted to live in New England without the whole Puritan thing. So when it came time to vote for who would lead the colony, Cleeve was not chosen. In fact, the men who were chosen were Cleeve’s former rivals. Robert Jordan, from the Richmond’s Island dispute and Gorges ally Henry Josselyn took the most important positions, while Cleeve served under, and outnumbered by, them. Cleeve went to England, complained to Rigby, and returned with a demand that Maine’s elected leaders do nothing more without Rigby’s permission. In other words, he returned with a revocation of the very democratic government he had been advocating. But, Lygonians were thoroughly unimpressed, and realizing that Rigby couldn’t actually do anything from England especially while the war was still going on, simply ignored their new proprietor and his deputy president.
So, after all of that, Cleeve found himself in the exact same position as the people from whom he’d taken control of Lygonia, and Lygonia residents found that the change in ownership didn’t actually change anything about their existence. They were still impoverished, still had no real government institutions, still had no structures to promote overarching economic growth, and even the ones who cared about having democratic institutions still found themselves without them. Cleeve rival John Winter said he didn’t know how Lygonians could even buy clothes with the level of their poverty. They went two months without buying bread, and had already killed enough of their animals that they’d soon be facing meat shortages.
So that was the state of Maine, or what remained of Maine along with Lygonia, when Ferdinando Gorges died in 1647. 81 years old, penniless, and under house arrest for his support of the Royalists, he had spent his last days writing about the beauty of a New World he had never seen. It had consumed him, and along with the Earl of Warwick, he’d probably done more than any other individual to bring about English colonization in North America, but never in a way that he profited from. A couple years later, King Charles was also dead, and Cromwell’s Commonwealth took his place. And, six months after that, Rigby died, too, removing the same leadership from Lygonia as Gorges’s death had eliminated in Maine. The whole region was suddenly very unprotected.
And that is what brings us to Massachusetts. In 1649, it was a new world. Gorges was gone, Puritans were in control and Royal charters were all but invalid at this point. Maine was high quality land with abundant natural resources, including valuable furs, but it was clumsily run and struggling, and by taking it, Massachusetts would solidify itself as the dominant power North of Virginia, as well as creating a buffer between itself and French Acadia. It would also establish puritanism in what was supposed to be a rival, Anglican colony. And, if things went well, they might also be able to take the Maine lands which Charles I had allowed the French to claim, meaning Acadia.
And Massachusetts had already begun its expansion, especially in New Hampshire after Mason had died, an area within Maine where lots of its disaffected citizens, like John Wheelwright and other Anne Hutchinson supporters, had relocated. Now it was looking at how to take the rest.
And as Massachusetts planned, Maine and Lygonia leadership worked to figure things out, themselves. They knew that their future was very much in jeopardy, and when they contacted Parliament, they worryingly got no reply. I mean, Parliament had more important things to do, but still, it was worrying.
So, Edward Godfrey took charge. Once a London merchant, he had been a leader in the Maine region since the 1620s, before Massachusetts was even founded, and worked with pretty much everyone to help get colonization up and running there. So now, he called an assembly with everyone from New Hampshire to Lygonia, and proposed that they work together, at least for the time being. Not a complete union of the settlements, so there would be no talk of the rivalry between Maine and Lygonia, but a social compact for self protection. A centralized government for everyone in the region, which could advocate for united colonies better than each colony could advocate for itself. Then hopefully, England would allow them to continue existing as before. The settlements agreed, and Godfrey was their logical leader. People he’d been working with to lead Maine were elected to help him lead the “combination.” They would act under the original, royal charters, and try to get those confirmed.
Cleeve still wanted to focus on his Parliamentary support rather than ally with Godfrey, and in fact he saw the new situation as an opportunity to extend his control over the largely Royalist Maine. Meanwhile, Royalists in that colony who hadn’t liked Rigby or Cleeve, and who had continued to support Gorges, now worked to support Godfrey’s plan. So there was a split, and Cleeve went to England to try to secure his patent, both from his Lygonia opposition, and from Massachusetts. He would contact Rigby’s heir, and also set forward his case before the Rump, and hopefully preserve and even extend his fabulous claim. .
The issue is, though, that Lygonia’s inability to unite, even within its own borders, strengthened Massachusetts arguments that the region needed more oversight, and Massachusetts had both agents in England to continually advocate for its interests, as well as a close relationship with Cromwell. Lygonia’s patent was treated no differently from Maine’s, and both were left vulnerable, perhaps even moreso than before Cleeve’s visit. And by the time he returned to New England in 1653, his position would be even weaker.
Massachusetts had redefined its northern borders, and sent surveyors to stake out the new lines. This redefinition already swallowed New Hampshire, and it took chunks from Maine and Lygonia as well. When Joseph Mason, relative of New Hampshire’s John, came to New England around this time, he found the colony completely taken over with no way to reverse the change. He complained to the General Court, but the Court simply explained that it had always owned this land, and that its current interpretation had always been its interpretation. This was absolutely untrue, with plenty of documents showing Massachusetts’s recognition of the old borders, but there was nothing that Mason could do. The General Court would, of course, rule in its own favor, and England wasn’t likely to overturn this.
And while these surveyors were there, they visited every town in Maine and Lygonia and talked about just how smoothly things ran in the United Colonies, and just how prosperous everyone was there, and they suggested that Maine and Lygonia settlers might be better off if they joined the Bay Colony. When Cleeve protested, he got the same answer as Mason had. The boundaries they were now asserting had always been the borders, and our surveyors are doing nothing more than talking to people, offering help to make things better. And what was Cleeve going to do? He hadn’t gotten protection from England, and there was no one else to arbitrate the case. So he finally joined forces with Godfrey, Mason and Ferdinando’s son and heir John Gorges, but it was too late. Massachusetts’s takeover had begun, and it had to do nothing more than hold firm.
The Bay Colony continued to stand by its new interpretation, and Godfrey organized Maine’s provincial general court. There, they continued their protests against the Massachusetts Court and drew up a petition to Parliament asking for their patent to be confirmed, and declaring their allegiance to the Commonwealth government. Godfrey emphasized how much money they’d invested in Maine, and how their authority had been approved and justified in England, and said, therefore, that the colonies of Maine would not submit unless the Commonwealth ordered it.
With Godfrey and Cleeve united in petitioning Cromwell’s government, Massachusetts decided to get a vote from each town it intended to take over. A vote in favor of takeover, though wholly illegal, would give the illusion of legitimacy and all but seal their case within England, should it come to that. They would easily be able to dismiss opposition as nothing but a few Royalist officers not wanting to give up power. So, a group of commissioners started a new journey, and over the course of a few weeks, they visited each settlement of New Hampshire, Maine and Lygonia.
And in each town, after a furious debate, residents voted to submit. Massachusetts Commissioners had come with a plan to push hard for submission, and ultimately, even the most diehard opponents of submission were forced to sign their recognition of the Massachusetts government. Commissioners would not negotiate at all, and would only reveal the concessions they’d already decided to make after colonists voted. Leaders who voted for submission would be able to keep some level of public office, but if they opposed submission they’d have to withdraw from colony affairs entirely. And, Massachusetts was both stronger and better connected, so the choice seemed to be between submission with concessions, and takeover without them. And one by one, the towns fell.
Kittery was the first town visited, and there, one man started to make violent enough threats toward the Massachusetts Commissioners that he was brought to a makeshift trial even during the debates. After confessing his misbehavior, he was released. After four days of debate, Kittery residents agreed to submit.
When that submission happened, Kittery was informed that the region it was in would be renamed Yorkshire, and that it would be entitled to a deputy on the General Court, and two if it wanted. A group of three people was appointed to operate as a provincial court, and Massachusetts said it wouldn’t draft people from the town for anything without their consent.
Next was Godfrey’s own town and Gorges’s proposed capital, Gorgeana, and there Godfrey continued the fight. Using the same tactics, though, Massachusetts commissioners overcame his opposition, and the vote favored takeover. Then, they offered him the chance to continue in office if he joined in the vote to submit. The vote was already cast, and this was the only way for Godfrey to maintain even a little bit of influence, so he reluctantly added his name to the bottom of the list. He was appointed one of the three members of the town’s court.
With each town to submit, the next debate became a little shorter and easier, and soon each one had done the same. Cleeve couldn’t resist, either, and was now demoted to the position of small claims judge. He went from being the owner of the nicest land in New England, to being able to hear cases of up to 50 pounds within a jurisdiction of two towns, and that would be his job for the rest of his life.
After all this was done, Cromwell quickly confirmed that Maine and Lygonia were now owned by Massachusetts. With that victory, they continued to spread. The handful of small settlements which had existed beyond its originally proposed boundaries were now incorporated, and Massachusetts turned its eye toward Plymouth-owned land on the Kennebec, as well as to French Acadia. With D’Aulnay dead and La Tour totally apathetic about which country owned the province as long as he kept his estate, plus Cromwell’s support for the English retaking of French Acadia, this was easy.
By July 5, 1653, Massachusetts had extended its boundaries through English Maine, by 1654 it had French Acadia, and by 1658 it had taken the Kennebec land, too. This made the Bay, not only the most populous, but the largest and most resource-rich colony north of Virginia, whether owned by England or any other country. It had no equals in power or affluence.
And this would continue to be the case for over a century. Massachusetts settlers would expand to the more remote sub-colony of Maine, including a group of Scottish POWs trying to escape the social confines of the Bay Colony. And, as they did, Maine would shift from being a fundamentally Anglican colony, to being one that looked increasingly like Massachusetts in economy, religion and education. Dissenters absolutely continued to exist, and they continued to oppose and protest Massachusetts’s claim to Maine, but they lost prominence and influence, and never successfully advocated for Maine to return to its original ownership situation. In fact, more than anything, it would be a region of second class citizens, and it would remain that way as long as it was owned by Massachusetts.
Cleeve continued to try to protest, and he continued to fail, and Godfrey left for England in 1655 to repent of his weakness and argue against the unjustness of Massachusetts’s takeover, its theft of Maine. But, not only was he unsuccessful at this, his life was destroyed in the process of trying. All the turmoil had put him 1,000 pounds in debt, and unable to recover the costs while in England. He died in the 1660s in debtor’s prison at the age of 80 years, and was buried in an unknown grave.
A lot of people have argued that practically speaking, the Maine takeover by Massachusetts was for the best, because it started to lessen the poverty and infighting which plagued the region. At the same time, it was undeniably one of the sleazier moments in Bay Colony history, and would have some implications which we’ll explore later. But we’ll have to leave that for another day, and simply recognize that for now, one of our colonies has disappeared from the map, and another is significantly empowered.
Next episode, we’re going to have what’s perhaps our most remarkably perfectly timed episode ever. It’s time to talk about witches.