CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.

The year 1691 opens the second period in the constitutional history of Massachusetts. From the coming of the Puritan settlers of the town of Boston in the stirring days of Charles I's reign to the last years of the restored Stuarts, the Bay Colony had nothing more elaborate than the old charter of 1629 as its instrument of government. This was not primarily a document for the governing of a colony but the charter of a commercial company, organized by certain English Puritans with a view of settling the Massachusetts shore, but not then ready to state their purpose of becoming colonizers. With the sudden transformation of the stockholders of the Massachusetts Bay Company into settlers of Massachusetts Bay, this charter, carried across the Atlantic, became the source of authority in the local administration of affairs, and by a gradual process of stretching and adapting its provisions to suit the new conditions it was made to serve as a colonial constitution for over half a century. In this way an unusual degree of independence was maintained by the local authorities, and the spirit of the leaders in this Puritan experiment in government became strongly fastened on the manners of the colony. A governor and council as well as an assembly were elected by the freemen of the colony, and the legislative body kept up the traditions of the first-comers in maintaining a theocratic and exclusive form of government which was fully developed and fairly aggressive by 1660.

This in itself was irritating to the restored Stuarts, who were suspicious of an independent colonial government so thoroly Puritan; but the attack which was begun upon Massachusetts in Charles II's reign was primarily economic. The Navigation Acts of England were fashioned to produce a more efficient commercial system

throughout the empire. To promote this scheme, every province must bury its individual advantage for the good of the whole, a thing which the colony of Massachusetts Bay was not content to do. The resistance to authority which Massachusetts offered, with other evidences of an independent spirit, was the cause of the investigation ordered in the colony in the sixties, of the coming of Edward Randolph as royal agent, and of the subsequent quo warranto proceedings which resulted in the loss of the charter. Pending the organization of a strong royal government, Massachusetts during part of the year 1686 was under the authority of a governor and council appointed by the king. Then followed its incorporation in the Dominion of New England, a territory planned to embrace all the broad lands lying between the Delaware and the St. Lawrence, and placed in the hands of Sir Edmund Andros as governor and representative of the royal prerogative of the later Stuarts. Widespread dissatisfaction with the Andros regime found a chance to express itself when the news of the English revolution of 1688 reached Boston, and the royal government was then overthrown.

In the meantime Increase Mather, who had been dispatched to England as the representative of Massachusetts in the general resistance to Andros, had been making every effort in frequent audiences with James and later with William to secure the old charter once more. This proved impossible and inadvisable; all that remained was to attempt to obtain a new charter from William and Mary which should reserve to the governing powers of Massachusetts as much as possible of their former rights and privileges. The result was the province charter of 1691 which opened the second period of Massachusetts history. During the interim between the overthrow of Andros and the arrival of the new charter a temporary government along the old lines managed affairs but gave way to the new régime when the second charter reached Boston. The method of reorganization in Massachusetts indicates the extent to which William III continued the colonial policy

bequeathed him by the Stuarts. In the charter of 1691 Massachusetts, which now included Plymouth, was made a royal province. The governor was to be appointed by the king and to possess an extensive veto power, while the king himself held the further right of refusing colonial legislation. By these means the authority of the General Court would be much limited and the province would be forced to fall in line to a certain extent with the wishes of the English government. The old order suffered severely by these limitations of its political power. It suffered also as an ecclesiastical state through a change in the franchise. The older rule of church membership as a qualification for voting now gave place to a property qualification, and many persons formerly excluded now had a voice in the government. Thus it came about that Massachusetts began the second period of her history with an enlarged boundary and under a royal government, on aristocratic lines as before, but no longer as a theocracy. The influence of the new government on the relation between church and state was soon to become apparent.

The Massachusetts charter, as we have seen, illustrates the way in which William III followed the colonial policy of the last two Stuarts in its political and economic phases. William believed, as had the Stuarts, that the well being of the empire lay in the enforcement of the Navigation Acts; he believed that colonial governments which had shown a tendency to resist such law in a spirit of independence must be controlled, and that the way to do this was to be found in uniting them and bringing them more closely under the crown. In the reign of Charles II there had appeared some indications of a desire to advance a religious policy, suggesting the ambitions of Archbishop Laud in the days of Charles I. That unity, so desirable in the administration of the colonies, might be forwarded by supporting the missionary work of the Anglican Church in the British possessions beyond the seas, and by means of the establishment of Episcopacy as the state church throughout the colonial empire the royal government might

have a definite hold upon the colonies. That variety in religious forms and creeds, which was characteristic of British America, was increasing the growth of particularism which the authorities at home were anxious to prevent, as it made more difficult the problems of administration. It is doubtful if such a plan was ever frankly recognized as a governing policy. Certain it is that while the commercial greatness of England was an object which each reigning house and each political party came more and more to seek, the enforcement of such a religious policy as this depended too much upon the attitude of monarch or chief minister toward the English Church.

If such a scheme was in existence, lying dormant, at the accession of William and Mary, it was not to be called to activity by a representative of Dutch Protestantism and low churchmanship. Succeeding reigns, which adhered to the enforcement of British imperial control over the political and economic life of the colonies, were inconsistent in ecclesiastical affairs. This side of colonial policy was for the most part neglected during the century introduced by the coming of William of Orange except under Queen Anne. The reign of William and Mary was in this way a disappointment to the English Church, and much more so was the period of the early Georges, when the Church in its enterprises over the seas received little sympathy from Walpole. For this reason the Church of England, during the greater part of this time, found itself on almost the same footing in the colonies as any one of the dissenting sects. The laws which proclaimed an establishment at home were not generally considered as extending to the colonies. Whatever attempts were made to advance Episcopacy in the provinces belonged not to the government but to the Church itself, working through individuals and organizations in both England and America, and only on rare occasions assisted by governmental authority.

While the government failed to carry out the plan of promoting the Church in the colonies, the Church itself turned to the matter with zeal. Beginning with the efforts

of the Bishop of London, acting as diocesan of the colonies, and continued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S. P. C. K.), under the influence of Dr. Bray, the work culminated in the formation of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S. P. G.), which was to devote itself entirely to the British possessions beyond the seas. In the reign following that of William and Mary, when the influence of Queen Anne was cast on the side of the Society, it made a real beginning and grew rapidly.

The Church of England's enthusiastic interest in missionary work among the colonies of British America had no counterpart in any of the other Protestant sects of the mother country except the Quaker body. At the opening of the eighteenth century the Protestants of England outside of the Anglican Church were divided among four important denominations,-Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist and Quaker,-and these sects possessed certain differences which distinguished them from one another as clearly as from the established church. Closest to the Church of England were the Presbyterians who still favored a state church but disapproved of much of the form and ceremony which the Anglicans maintained. The Congregationalists, with doctrinal views which were little different from those of the Presbyterians, denounced the theory of a church establishment, and were therefore more in sympathy with the Baptists than with the Presbyterians, except in theology. The Baptists, the term covering a number of dissenting groups which traced their origin to the continent, were more radical in their treatment of the ideas of the Reformation than any of the other nonconformists except the Quakers. The latter far surpassed them, standing alone as the Protestants of Protestants, unique in belief, in an exclusive attitude toward other Christians, and in their customs. During the last decade of the seventeenth century the leaders of the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists, the two sects having most in common, made some earnest attempts to unite on a single