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Years of building
With things going well for Puritans in England, migration slowed significantly from 1631-32, and colonists were able to spend their time building the colony. They constructed permanent residences, and a couple new towns, but also the much more complex process of building a commonwealth. They were constructing an ideal protestant society in the New World, which meant making decisions, going beyond the scope of their patent, and preventing rival claims from establishing themselves in the region. There was conflict, but they made significant progress.
1633 brought bad news from Europe, though – William Laud had been made Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Protestant champion of the Thirty Years War had been killed. With the setbacks, a flood of immigrants started to flow into Massachusetts, and it wouldn’t stop for a decade.
Transcript
For English Puritans In 1631, staying in England seemed to be a better option than emigrating. They’d heard about the cold, disease and hunger, and things in the Old World were looking pretty good. Their conflict with the king remained steady, and at the very least were no worse, but there was great news from Europe, where the Protestants had started to win in the Thirty Years War as the Swedish King Gustavus Adolfus entered the fray. They had good reason to be optimistic.
So, for the people committed to building a Godly society in the New World, 1631 and 32 wouldn’t be characterized by the type of mass emigration witnessed in 1630. They’d be years of building, planning, and organizing. Everyone who had invested 50 pounds got 200 acres of land, and everyone else who had paid their own way got 50. Grain was expensive in England, so they bought corn from Virginia. Winthrop and Dudley started building their permanent houses in Boston and Newtown, respectively, and they started fortifying the towns.
That was the easy part. The hard part would be fighting competing claims, and turning the company’s charter into the basis for an autonomous commonwealth.
Introduction
Ferdinando Gorges had been the strongest advocate for New England colonization since the first days of Jamestown. He’d been one of the original Plymouth Company leaders, and then been the man who transformed the Plymouth Company into the Council for New England. In 1622, the Council had given his son Robert a patent for a colony around the Northern part of Massachusetts Bay. His son’s colony had failed, and when England went to war with France in 1627 in the La Rochelle incident, Gorges was forced to give up his interest in the Council for New England because he was busy helping with the war effort. So, when Warwick and others granted the land of Massachusetts Bay to the New England Company – the predecessor to the Massachusetts Bay Company – Gorges wasn’t there to stop the re-patenting of land he felt he owned. There were even colonists who had been living in America for years, sent by Gorges to establish his claim to the region. One of these was Thomas Morton, another was a man named Christopher Gardiner, and a whole group lead by a man named Captain Neale were living at Pascataqua. To make matters worse, Gorges was an Anglican and an ardent royalist. He had given the Pilgrims a patent for land in New England, but the Puritans were another matter. The Massachusetts Bay Company had a patent, though, granted by the company, and a royal charter, too. At this point, Gorges had two options. If he wanted to reclaim his land, he needed to either get the Massachusetts charter annulled, or have the area declared a crown colony. Either way worked for him.
Over winter, the settlers had found and arrested two of Gorges’s agents – Morton and Gardiner – and prepared to send them back to England on the first ship that arrived that spring, along with a third prisoner who had nothing to do with Gorges. Morton had either been living in exile in the wilderness or under arrest since the destruction of Merrymount, and had been watching the goings-on of Endicott’s Salem with increasing disgust.
Before they could send Gardner back to England, though, he escaped and went to live in the wilderness. He had been living in New England since long before Endicott moved to Salem, along with some servants and family. One of his supposed family members was a pretty young woman, but the Plymouth settlers had suspected that she was a concubine. Nonetheless, the Plymouth settlers had allowed him to stay, even when they’d arrested Morton. He wasn’t giving guns to the Indians or threatening their trade. The Puritans, however, ordered Gardiner be returned to England. He was a Catholic, a knight of the sepulcher and a descendent of Catholic bishops, and there was some evidence that he had two wives, though he claimed to be divorced.
After fleeing Boston, Gardiner ended up in Poconoquet territory, and Bradford paid the Poconoquets to arrest him, but emphasized that they must not under any circumstances kill him, and when they beat him too severely in the course of the arrest, Bradford reprimanded them, and ordered the doctor to treat Gardiner’s wounds before returning him to Boston. When Gardiner had fled, he’d left his companions in Boston, and the pretty young woman, Mary Grove, soon married a Maine fisherman and trader. Gardiner accompanied the two to Maine, but soon returned to England anyway.
The third prisoner was a man named Philip Ratcliffe, and he wasn’t a Gorges agent. In fact, he was an agent of Matthew Cradock, who had specifically given up his governorship to stay behind in England to fight Gorges’s rival patent. He had sent Ratcliffe to take care of his land in the colony, to keep him informed, and to hopefully guide the colonists. He was being exiled for blasphemy, but his sentence was the first truly shameful story in New England.
Ratcliffe hadn’t been accepted into the Salem church. The members of the Salem church decided that Ratcliffe was an Anglican at heart, and that he didn’t agree with enough puritan or separatist ideology. This could have been true, Salem was extremely strict, but it could also have been a political attempt to sever all ties to London. Regardless, some settlers had then borrowed money from Ratcliffe, but when he tried to collect the debt, instead of the money, they’d sent him a letter telling him that he shouldn’t mind these transitory things that perish with the body, and that he should, instead, work on his soul.
Ratcliffe was beyond furious. When he got the letter, he launched into a rant, declaring “Are these your members? If they be all like these, I believe the devil was the settler of this church.” In response, Endicott charged him with blasphemy, and had him whipped, fined 40 pounds (that’s the average yearly wage for a landowner of the time), had his ears cut off, and had him banished. Multiple magistrates and many colonists intended to banish him immediately, sending him into the wilderness in the middle of winter, but Winthrop intervened and allowed him to remain under arrest in Boston until he could be sent back to America.
In England, the three would form the core of Gorges’s attempt to oppose the Massachusetts Bay Charter.
A few colonists voluntarily left on the Lion, too, including Richard Saltonstall, who would never return to America. Two of his sons had died that winter, and New England wasn’t for him. He stayed connected to and active in the colony’s affairs, and went on to help organize the Connecticut colony, and ultimately became a prominent Parliamentarian during and after the English Civil Wars.
Funnily enough, as Massachusetts worked to send three accused troublemakers back to England, they were inviting the man who would soon become perhaps the most famous troublemaker in the colony’s history. Few people came to New England in 1631, but, Roger Williams was never one to follow the crowds. Born in London, he’d had a spiritual conversion against his father’s wishes, had interned with Edward Coke, and had studied at Cambridge, but embraced a radical separatist puritan stance which kept him from getting a job as a minister. As soon as Williams arrived in New England, he rejected a position preaching in Boston – a job most people would kill for – saying he considered the Church dishonest in many ways. He didn’t want to lead people in worship who refused to renounce the Anglican Church, and in fact he didn’t even want to be a part of such a church. So, he moved to Salem, though he did strike up a friendship with John Winthrop. Then, he went on to say the charter of the colony was illegitimate because the Crown had no right to the land outside of England, and he suggested the charter be sent back to the king, and the land be bought from the Native Americans instead. Then, he suggested that no one should be punished for holding religious beliefs different from those in the majority. That’s a whole lot of inconvenient or just plain unacceptable ideas, and by summer, Williams would be living in Plymouth.
Williams may have been in the top percentile of political and religious agitators, but the colonists were far from united in their ideas of how best to run the colony. In transitioning from corporation to commonwealth, the colony’s leadership was going to have to violate its charter, and it ran the risk of angering colonists with its new policies. The first charter violation dealt with voting requirements.
The previous fall, they’d admitted 107 people as freemen – or, full members of the colony with voting rights. In May of 1631, though, Winthrop and others had started to worry that allowing everyone to become a freeman could change the goals and direction of the colony. They had a very specific idea of what they wanted the colony to look like, but they also wanted a democratic system. To achieve both goals simultaneously, they had to control the voter base. So, they decided that no one would be admitted as a freeman unless he belonged to the church. This made ministers a first line of defense to ensure the political purity of the colony. No one protested the fact that this violated the charter, though, so the changes went into effect.
In June, the Massachusett sachem, Chicatawbut, visited Winthrop to offer peace between the two peoples. The English had been worried about Indian attacks, though in reality there wasn’t much that the devastated locals could do to the English, who were stronger, wealthier and more numerous than ever. Still, the meeting assuaged their fears, and the English decided not to fortify Newtown after all, instead moving the lumber down to Boston.
A couple weeks later, though, the Gorges issue resurfaced. Captain Neal brought a shallop from Pascataqua carrying a packet of letters addressed to Thomas Morton and Christopher Gardiner. Winthrop decided to open them, and learned they’d come from Gorges, who claimed most of the Bay and was trying to recover the land. Pascataqua’s current residents were hostile to puritan political and religious ideas, so even though it was outside the Bay Company’s charter, Winthrop sent a trusted associate named Captain Thomas Wiggan to defend puritan interests there and investigate the possibility of setting up a Puritan colony. Wiggan and Neale fought about Gorges’s claims, and Wiggan soon decided to return to England to get a patent for his own town in the area, thus ensuring it fell under Puritan control.
A few months later, when Wiggan sent Winthrop a letter asking the governor to help avenge the deaths of two former Bay Colony servants who had been killed by the Indians, Winthrop refused, saying he didn’t have the boats fit for such an expedition, and that he was more worried about Captain Neale and the threat from London.
And indeed, Gorges was sending more settlers to enforce his claim to the area. In July, a group of settlers called the Husbandmen Company arrived in Sagadahoc, Maine, which they planned o rename Lygonia. They were mostly farmers, as Gorges envisioned a farming and fishing-based colony. They were also members of a religious sect called the Familists – an Anabaptist sect originating in Muenster, which denied the existence of the Holy Trinity, and said God didn’t directly influence events in this world. They soon abandoned their settlement, though, and moved to Boston. From there, they went to Watertown, which was a more farming-oriented plantation than others.
Watertown, itself, soon became the center of controversy. Their separatist Elder, Richard Browne, said something which seemed to defend Catholicism. It seemed, he said, that there must be some truth in the Catholic Church if they didn’t force people to re-baptize themselves as protestants. The congregation was shocked, and contacted Winthrop, who replied that they should seriously consider whether or not Browne was fit to continue as an elder. The congregation split, with half supporting Browne and half opposing him. Winthrop, Dudley and some of the assistants went to the town to smooth the tensions. They succeeded in achieving a compromise, but the result was only temporary.
The next year, the colony’s General Court voted to raise a levy to fund a protective fence around Cambridge, formerly known as New Towne, and Watertown owed 8 pounds. A number of Watertown residents said that the company wasn’t a government, and that the charter didn’t give the Bay Company the authority to levy taxes, and that therefore the colony didn’t have the right to do so. The town refused to pay. Winthrop responded that the presence of elected officials meant it was a government, and one in the nature of a Parliament. He then said the colony was a commonwealth, not a corporation. That was an extremely politically charged word in the 17th century, and Puritans strongly supported the idea of a commonwealth. The dissenters were more than convinced – they apologized for their misunderstanding.
Opposition ended, the colony soon created its own public stock to help meet expenses in the future. Plus, each of the eight settlements would appoint two people to advise Winthrop and the assistants about introducing a permanent system of taxation.
This wasn’t the end of conflicts over the colony pushing beyond the purview of its charter, though. When people complained, they simply began explaining that this was a representative government, and that the colonists could replace their elected magistrates if they weren’t happy with the way the government was run.
In reality, this wasn’t exactly true, because the Churches had to approve each new voter, and voters had to sign an oath of allegiance to the Massachusetts Government. Ministers weren’t allowed to run for public office, and people cite this when arguing that Massachusetts Bay enforced a separation of church and state. That may be the case, but it’s also important to note that they had more control over the civil government than pretty much anyone else.
The other requirement to be a freeman was signing the Oath of a Freeman – also written in 1632, though adapted from previous covenants – which gave explicit consent to the authority of the Massachusetts civil government, and pledged loyalty to that government.
The end result is that, if you didn’t like the government changes that were happening, and you either weren’t accepted to the Church or didn’t pledge your loyalty to the Bay Company government, you really didn’t have any say. Almost all families had at least one church member, but in many cases this was the woman, who already couldn’t vote. In some towns, fewer than half of the men were accepted freemen, while in others the vast majority were.
This led to a fair amount of political tension, especially in Watertown, and Winthrop visited the town again in July, this time ending the conflict in a heavier handed way, and this time it worked.
Fortunately for the Puritans, though, they weren’t the only people who had been dealing with internal struggles. As they worked to solidify peace with the Naragansetts, they heard news that members of an eastern tribe called the Tarratines had attacked the leaders of a town called Agawam. They’d killed seven men, and wounded the two sachems, or sagamores – named John and James – and taken a bunch of hostages.
The English argued that the sagamores had killed some of the Tarratines’ families and that therefore the attack was warranted. The Agawam, whose population had been devastated by disease and who couldn’t afford a serious tribal conflict, allowed a group of Puritans to move to Agawam, thus strengthening their own position, and within a year they’d turned it into a new settlement – Ipswich. When the Winthrop heard that the French were preparing to start setting up towns in the area, he sent his own son to lead the settlers and defend the town’s status as a Puritan possession.
The French had bought a Scottish Plantation near Cape Sables, a colony authorized by Cardinal Richlieu, himself. Richlieu was also compiling companies of priests and Jesuits to send to the colony, so the English started re-building their abandoned forts. And they weren’t the only hostile force out there. In November, Gorges’s Captain Neal sent a letter saying that some of the English Pascataqua had turned to piracy, and asking to join forces with the Puritans to fight a common threat. Winthrop called the council, and they agreed. They were by no means allies – back in London, Cradock, Saltonstall and Humphry were fighting Morton, Gardiner and a very upset Ratcliffe, who were trying to either strengthen Gorges’s claim or have the colony become a Crown Colony, like Virginia – but neither Winthrop nor Neal could afford a pirate presence in New England.
And, speaking of London, the next year brought terrible news from the Puritan perspective. The Catholics had started winning the Thirty Years War after the death of the protestant champion, the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus. And, King Charles had named William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury. For New England, this would mean a continual flood of migrants which lasted a decade.