SIR HARRY VANE new code of laws drawn up. A new and more various life had come to the quiet bay. Captain Standish had been the first to set the example of expansion. In 1632 he had crossed the little harbor which lay before the town and had begun to build at Duxbury. Others followed his lead. Villages sprang up in quick succession, both on the shore to the northward facing the open sea, and on the shore to the southward which lay within the sheltering curve of the great arm of Cape Cod. Settlers turned inland also, and began to build at Taunton, full twenty miles and more away in the forest, upon one of the larger streams which ran southward into the bay of Narragansett. The Dutch were not slow to see what they must do against the swarming of the English at their doors. The best and only chance for New Netherland, as they saw, lay in pushing her own enterprises very vigorously and multiplying her own population as fast as possible, and so growing too strong to be despised and encroached upon. The great grants of land and privilege offered to "patroons had attracted some rich purchasers, but not many actual settlers. Not many could be found who wished to go to the New World to live under feudal lords more absolute than any in the Old. The Company changed its policy, therefore. It offered patroons less and actual farmers more. It arranged to let every settler have land "according to his condition and means," and to give him free passage to the colony; and it opened the trade of the colony to all upon equal terms. French Huguenots, as well as Dutch farmers, even Englishmen from New England and Virginia, came to take advantage of the new terms of settlement. It was no small part of the attraction of the place for the English in New England that there was as complete liberty of conscience in New Netherland as at Providence with Mr. Williams or on Rhode Island. The colony grew steadily and in a way to countenance the brightest hopes. But every prospect was marred by bad administration. The place was spoiled by a veritable pest of Governors. The Company sent out either mere clerks, or else men of questionable reputation and ruined fortunes, to take charge of its affairs. The weak and silly Van Twiller, who blustered and threatened but did nothing when the English began to crowd in at the Connecticut, was succeeded in 1638 by the no less foolish Kieft,-a good enough agent for business to be done on a small scale and by rote, but incapable of understanding men or any large question of policy; and Kieft brought everything to the verge of utter ruin by his faithless and exasperating dealings with the Indians. He prompted attacks upon them for what they had not done; demanded tribute from friendly tribes who were the colony's best defence against those which were hostile; suffered them to be treacherously massacred THE CIVIL WARS AND THE COMMON- when they fled to Fort Amsterdam for Netherland; grew steadily Swedish rather succor against the Iroquois; finally than Dutch in blood; and seemed likely, brought friend and foe alike to such a though neighborly enough for the prespitch of exasperation that they united ent, to oust their lagging rivals in good for a war of extermination. Every season. outlying farm was rendered uninhabitable; scores of white men were put to death; the nearer English settlements suffered with the Dutch, and all the slow work of peaceful growth was undone. In that fearful year of plunder and death (1643) Anne Hutchinson lost her life, her last refuge swept away with the rest. On the 19th of May, 1643, commissioners representing Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, sitting in Boston, made a formal agreement that their colonies should be joined in a confederation for mutual support In the South River the very friends of and defence, under the name of The JOHN DAVENPORT of a patroon under the Dutch West India Company, and Peter Minuit, who had once been the Company's Governor at New Amsterdam, set up a colony at the South River under a charter from the King of Sweden, Minuit himself leading the settlers thither, and bringing with him more Dutch than Swedes. And there the colony he established remained, safe at its "Fort Christina" because stronger than the Dutch at their lonely "Fort Nassau." The new-comers cheerfully lent a hand in driving the New Haven men out; but they kept their own foothold; multiplied faster than the men of New United Colonies of New England. Mr. Hooker and Mr. Haynes had been urging such a union for quite six years, ever since the synod of churches had sat, in 1637, to draw up its list of heresies and unwholesome opinions in reproof of Mrs. Hutchinson and her supporters in Boston; for the Connecticut towns had no charter of their own, and these prudent gentlemen knew how much they might need the aid and countenance of their neighbor colonies should the time come when their rights were too narrowly questioned, by the Dutch, for example. New Haven, with her government but just formed, and with as little show of charter rights from the crown, was glad to come into the arrangement for very much the same reason. Plymouth and Massachusetts agreed because there was common danger from the Indians all about them and from the French in the north, and because there were awkward boundary disputes to be settled between the several colonies, for whose discussion and peaceful decision it would be well to have some common authority like that of a confederation. Massachusetts, by far the greatest and strongest of the colonies, no doubt expected to rule in its counsels; the other colonies hoped to restrain Massachusetts and hold her back from dominating overmuch. That same year, 1643, Roger Williams went into England to get a charter for the settlements in the Narragansett country. It was hard to deny Mr. Williams anything he seriously set himself to get and went in person to obtain, and young Mr. Vane, who had been Governor of Massachusetts in Mrs. Hutchinson's day, and who was Mr. Williams's friend, was one of the "Commissioners for Plantations ed in Boston because they were thought to be too full of troublesome persons and uneasy politicians to be safe or peaceful partners; but now that they had their own charter they could endure the exclusion without too much anxiety as to how their rights should fare. The "United Colonies" had not asked leave of anybody in England to form their confederation, and no doubt their independent way of acting without authority in matters of the greatest importance would have got them into trouble with the government at home had there been a government there which had time or means to deal with them. But England was convulsed whom the Parliament in England with civil war. At last she was reckonhad recently appointed to govern the ing with Charles, the false king, who colonies; so that by March, 1644, "Rhode for ten years had refused to summon a Island and Providence Plantations" had Parliament, and who had seemed from their own separate charter rights, and year to year to become more and more could assert them upon a footing of openly an enemy of the liberties which equality with Plymouth and Massachu- Englishmen most cherished, until the setts. The settlements on the Narragan- slow fire of indignation against him, how fierce a feeling had sprung up against him, and yielded so far as to consent to call a Parliament. The Parliament, once called together, assumed a new tone of mastery. Under the leadership of such men as the steadfast Pym, direct in speech, indomitable in purpose, no revolutionist, but a man whom it was wise for a king who ignored the laws to fear, and Hampden, whom all just men loved because he was so gentle and gracious in his gallant uprightness, the Commons impeached the men who had aided the king's injustice, and proceeded to bring the government back again under the ancient restraints of freedom. Charles saw that he must either yield all or else openly resist. He chose to resist; set up his royal standard at Nottingham (August, 1642); called upon all loyal subjects to rally about it for the defence of their king; and so brought civil war and a revolution upon England. Every one knows what followed: how at first the cause of the Parliament seemed desperate, because Pym died and Hampden was killed, and there was no leader in the field who could withstand Prince Rupert; and then how an increasing number of steadfast partisans of Parliament in Norfolk, Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk, and Hertford Water-Gate, Foot Of Wall Street, New York The Canal, Broad Street, New York formed an association, levied troops, and put Oliver Cromwell beside the Duke of Manchester to command them; how Cromwell's horsemen drove Prince Rupert's men in hopeless, utter rout from Marston Moor on a July day in 1644; and then, in June of the next year, at Naseby, repeated the terrible work, and finished what they had begun, to the utter undoing of the king; and how Charles, on a day in May, 1646, seeing his cause desperate, surrendered himself into the hands of the Scots, in order to play the game of politics,-the game of war having failed; knowing that the Scots, who were Presbyterians, would not easily come to terms with Cromwell, whom it would be very hard to bring into any Presbyterian arrangement. Three years went by, and the subtile king was dead upon the scaffold at Whitehall (January, 1649), showing a gentle majesty and steadfastness at the last, though he had not known how to keep faith even with himself and his own friends while he lived. He was not brought to his death by the Parliament, but by the army, and the army did not represent the nation. Cromwell had not put his men to any test of opinion; but in the end it had turned out that the rank and file of the army were, for the time at any rate, "Independents," holding opinions concerning worship and the government of church and state like those which he held, and the strict Puritans who had gone over sea into New England. They were the more likely to hold their opinions stiffly and without compromise because Parliament, leagued with the leading men of Scotland, was Presbyterian, was jealous of the army's rising power, and wished to disband and send them home without so much as paying their wages. Though Cromwell held them back as long as he could from violent measures, they at last made bold to win by force in their contest with the Commons, and he found it best to lead them. All who were not partisans of the army and the Independents were driven from the House, and the handful who remained brought the king to his trial and condemnation, and finally to his death at Whitehall, close by the window of his banqueting hall. They were acting for a minority of the nation, but no one dared withstand them. Hooker was begged by letters signed by as a Because It was a very serious thing for the Puritan colonies that their rapid growth was thus stopped of a sudden. It meant that no farmer there could any longer get the high prices for his cattle or for his With such matters as these to look corn, or for any crop he might raise, upon at home, there was no time in Eng- which he had learned to count on while land to watch events in the far colonies immigrants poured in; that the value of across the sea. The New Englanders land suddenly dropped; that every trade could form their confederation if they fell off; that money, always exceedingly pleased without molestation. But if the scarce from the first, now stopped comwar gave them freedom of action, it ing in altogether, for it could come only brought other things in its train which from England. Some of the colonists were not so acceptable. No new settlers lost heart, and hastened to return to came any more. Men began to return England, not to see the wars, but to into England instead,-ministers to give escape ruin. Some took themselves off counsel, as well as soldiers and men of to the islands of the West Indies, where, affairs. Stephen Winthrop, the Govern- they heard, it was easy to live. Some or's son, George Fenwich, of Saybrook, even joined the Dutch at Hudson's Israel Stoughton, captain of the Mas- River. It required not a little steadiness sachusetts men sent against the Pequots, of mind and purpose, not a little painful and not a few others less known, entered economy and watchful good management, the Parliamentary army. Edward Hop- to get over the shock of such changes kins, who had but just finished his term and settle down to make the best of the as Governor of Connecticut, and Edward new conditions. Fortunately the colo Winslow, who had been with the Plymouth people from the first, went back into England to assist in the administration of the navy maintained against the king. Mr. Regen Williams Signature Of Roger Williams nists were not men to be daunted, and had made too good a beginning to fear failure. Massachusetts, with her four counties and thirty towns, her fourteen hundred free |