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DURING the period upon which our story now enters, all of North America was claimed by the three contestants for empire--Spain, England, and France. The claims of the first covered the entire western world beyond the line established by the treaty of Tordesillas; while those of he other two are indicated, at least as to their minimum extent, by the patents granted. Adrian Gilbert, in his application to Queen Elizabeth, had asked leave to "inhabit and enjoy" all places discovered between the equator and the North Pole;1 and although these limits are nowhere given in any single charter, those granted to various companies show English claims extending from at least 10° to 52° North Latitude, or from Panama to Labrador.[2] Following the difficulties of colonizing in Maine and Nova Scotia, mentioned in the last chapter, the French King granted to Madame de Guercheville all of the continent from Florida to the St. Lawrence, thus overlapping the Spanish and English claims.[3]

The title to newly acquired lands, originally deriving validity from Papal sanction, even in the eyes of Englishmen, had gradually come to rest upon the right of discovery.[4] This theory was based upon the principle of Roman Law that the finder could appropriate what belonged to no one. A heathen was considered as nullus, hence his property had no owner, and

[1. W. R. Scott, Constitutions and Finance of English and Irish Joint- Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 1910) vol. II, p. 244.]

[2. The southern limit was that of the Providence Company (Scott, Joint- Stock Companies, vol. II, p. 327); and the northern that of the Newfoundland Company, (D. W. Prowse, History of Newfoundland [London, 18951, pp. 122-25).]

[3. F. Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World (Boston, 1909), p. 303.]

[4. Henry II asked and obtained the Pope’s consent to conquer Ireland. W. B. Scaife, "The Development of International Law as to newly discovered Territory," in American Historical Arsociation Papers, vol. IV, p. 269.]

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American soil could be appropriated by whoever first found it. Although it was agreed by all that discovery must be consummated by possession and use, there were two very difficult questions, as to which the law was silent, in connection with the new situations now arising. One of these was the length of time which might elapse between discovery and taking possession, before the claim should become invalid through failure to consummate the discovery; while the other was that of the extent of territory involved by the above acts.[1] The claims of the three contestants were preposterous, though no one more so than another, perhaps; and, in the absence of any superior authority, it is difficult to see how the matter could have been settled otherwise than by power of the sword, which thus replaced the Pope as arbiter. At the time we are now considering, it would seem as if, theoretically, England’s claim to any part of the New World were the least valid of the three. Although it was necessarily based solely on the voyage of Cabot, she had made no effort to colonize for nearly ninety years, and as yet had failed to do so successfully. To the south, Spanish titles were, in part, unassailable;2 while in the north, French claims were being made good by the struggling colony at Port Royal, and by scattered traders in furs.

The treaty of peace with Spain, in 1604, which followed almost automatically upon the accession of James to the English throne, changed the situation in important respects with reference to the success of English colonization. Privateering, which, in spite of many brilliant exploits, had become "a sordid and prosaic business," and decreasingly profitable, came to a legal end temporarily under the English flag. It is true that certain of the larger venturers in the trade merely flew the Dutch flag instead, and continued their depredations; but the

[1. Cf. B. A. Hinsdale, "The Right of Discovery," in Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. II, pp. 351-78; and Scaife, "International Law," pp. 269-93.]

[2. The number of colonists living in Spanish possessions varies greatly in estimates. DeLannoy thinks that it may have been 152,000 by 1574 (DeLannoy and Van der Linden, Histoire de l’Expansion Coloniale des Peuples Européens [Paris, 1907], vol. I, p. 414); while Leroy-Beaulieu puts it as low as 15,000 in 1550. De la Colonisation chez les Peuples modernes (Paris, 1898), vol. I, p. 5.]

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calling no longer offered its former opportunities, either for restless spirits or for the employment of capital. The more legitimate commerce with the Spanish possessions, such as the import of salt from Venezuela, which had grown to large proportions during the war, was also ended by the terms of the treaty, which completely surrendered English rights of trade with the Indies.[1]

Meanwhile, the amount of capital seeking investment had become large, and owing to the enormous increase of bullion, the changed feeling in regard to the taking of interest, and other causes, it was rapidly growing larger.[2] It was also becoming more fluid, as was labor, likewise. Contemporary, as well as many modern, authorities, have considered England as suffering from over-population at this time; but it is doubtful if this were so; and it is probable that the material for colonization came rather from "the displacement and disturbance of population" than from its growth.[3] Not only the substitution, to a considerable extent, of sheep- grazing for farming, and the inclosure of the common lands, but the gradual breaking up of the whole mediæval system of trade and conditions of labor, had resulted in an extraordinary amount of idleness and vagabondage for several generations.[4] During the same period had occurred also the enormous rise in prices, and in the cost of living, with results very similar to those which we are now experiencing.[5] As to-day, they were severely felt by people with approximately fixed incomes; and the country gentry in particular, with their lands let on long leases, suffered greatly. During the war, younger sons, and the more enterprising of all classes, had had an opportunity to gain a living by embarking on a career in privateering or other warlike pursuits; but with the coming of peace, those openings

[1. A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (Yale University Press, 1914), pp. 13-17.]

[2. W. Cunningham, English Industry, vol. II, pp. 77 ff.]

[3. E. P. Cheyney, "Some English Conditions surrounding the Settlement of Virginia," in American Historical Review, April, 1907, p. 526.]

[4. F. Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (Oxford, 1913), pp. 3- 20.]

[5. A Discourse of the Commonweal of this realm of England, 1581; reprinted, Cambridge, England, 1893.]

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were for the most part closed to them. On the other hand, the scale of living had risen rapidly, and extravagance required a much greater outlay than informer days. "In a time wherein all things are grown to most excessive prices," wrote Harrison as early as 1577, "we do yet find the means to obtain and achieve such furniture as heretofore hath been unpossible."[1]

During the war, moreover, the older channels of legitimate trade had, for the most part, been closed to the English merchant, who found himself cut off "from Spain, Portugal, Barbary, the Levant, and, to a considerable extent, from Poland, Denmark, and Germany."[2] The seventeen years prior to the death of Elizabeth had been years of depressed business, now, in turn, to be followed by a like period of prosperity, while trade continued fairly good until 1636.[3] Although other elements entered into the problem, it may be noted that the efforts to colonize, whether near home in Ireland, or far off in the new world, had been failures when general business was poor, and successful when it became good.[4] Neither in Ulster nor in Munster, in Newfoundland, Virginia, nor Guiana, had the individuals or their associates, who had obtained grants, been able, as yet, to plant any permanent settlements.

The time, nevertheless, was evidently growing ripe for accomplishment. Apart from any political or religious motives, America was as certain to be colonized in the early part of the seventeenth century as it was to be discovered by Columbus, or someone else, in the latter part of the fifteenth. After the fall of Calais in 1557, England, though fearful of the future, had turned her back definitely and forever upon continental conquest and entanglements, and had embarked boldly upon those waves which it was to become her pride to rule.[5] With the seas safe for traffic, with a host of younger sons and other men suffering from the economic conditions of the time,

[1. Harrison’s Introduction to Holinshed’s Chronicle, reprinted as Elizabethan England (London, n. d.), p. 118.]

[2. Scott, Joint-Stock Companies, vol. I, p. 98.]

[3. Ibid., pp. 465 ff.]

[4. Cf., however, Leroy-Beaulieu, who thinks that "la colonisation anglaise eut donc pour origine une nécessité réelle, une crise économique intense." Colonisation, vol. I, p. 91.]

[5. A. B. Hinds, The Making of the England of Elizabeth (New York, 1895), p. 138.]

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with the growing need in England of many commodities found in the new world, with the great growth of capital seeking investment, and with the trade of practically every other portion of the earth already in the hands of corporate companies, English merchants and adventurers could not fail to turn again, with ampler resources and better methods, to the land where they had already tried and failed. The Muscovy Company controlled all trade with Russia, the Eastland that with the Baltic, the Levant that with Venice and the East, while another controlled the African west coast, and the East India Company held from the Straits of Magellan around to Africa again.[1] Although these companies, which were almost wholly owned in London, aroused the jealousy of Plymouth, Southampton, and the other provincial ports, which found themselves limited to a little nearby continental and coasting trade, they pointed the way to the corporate form and joint-stock undertakings as the successful method of handling large business enterprises, such as colonizing was now realized to be.

This was clearly brought out by an unknown author, who, probably toward the end of 1605, wrote the paper known as "Reasons for raising a fund."[2] The writer strongly advocated the raising of a "publique stocke" for "the peopling and discovering of such contries as maye be fownde most convenient for the supplie of those defects which the Realme of England most requireth." It is likely that this paper, which was intended for Parliament, had considerable influence in the granting of the Virginia charter, and it is, therefore, interesting to note that, at the very beginning of successful colonization, one of the leading points in future English colonial policy was thus touched upon. It is often lost to sight that practically the sole value of her colonies to England all through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was the value of their trade, and the most important part of that trade, during nearly all of the period, was in supplying her with such materials as

[1. S. R. Gardiner, History of England (London, 1895), vol. I, p. 187.

[2. For discussion as to authorship and date, vide Brown, Genesis, pp. 36- 42, where the document is printed in full.]

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she lacked at home. In this respect, her West Indian colonies became more important than her continental ones, though an exaggerated emphasis has been laid upon the contemporary importance of the latter, in part because they chanced to revolt, whereas the island colonies did not.

As one of the reasons for raising a public fund to assist in colonizing, our unknown author went on to say that "private purees are cowld compfortes to adventurers," and pointed to the "marvelous matters in traficque and navigacon" which the Hollanders had accomplished, in few years, by a "maine backe or stocke." Whether the paper was written in order to obtain the Virginia charter, it is impossible to say; but apparently it was, and, in any case, that charter was issued on the 10th of April, 1606. The great revolution in foreign trade, which had been going on for the past two centuries, was now complete, and the period of chartered companies, foreshadowed by the formation, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, of the few already noted, was well under way.[1] With the addition of the East India Company, chartered in 1600, the existing English companies covered practically all known parts of the world except America; and during the next generation about the only companies organized were for the new world--North and South Virginia in 1606, Guiana, 1609, Newfoundland, 1610, Northwest Passage, 1612, Bermuda, 1615, New England, 1620, and Massachusetts, 1629.

There was a very close connection between many of these great companies. The East India, for example, was practically an outgrowth of the Levant;2 while of the two hundred and three members of the Virginia Company, one hundred and sixteen were members of the East India, and thirteen of the Muscovy, ten were to become interested in the Newfoundland, one hundred in the Northwest Passage, forty-six in the Bermuda, and thirty-eight in the New England companies. Members of the Virginia Company were also represented in the African, Levant, Guiana, Guinea, Eastland, Providence, Irish

[1. Cf. P. Bonnassieux, Les grandes Compagnies de Commerce (Paris, 1892), pp. 510 ff.]

[2. W. W. Hunter, History of British India (London, 1899), vol. I, p. 244.]

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Plantation, and other stock enterprises.[1] To the noblemen and merchants thus brought into close working relations, America was but one of the many irons which they had in the fire, and by no means the most important. Their interest, as that of their successors, was naturally in British trade as a whole, and not in the success of any particular colony, much less in its religious bickerings or political aspirations. From the very beginning, the trade of the Empire was considered paramount to that of any unit, even in England itself. At this very time, King James, in pressing for the union with Scotland, expressed what was later to become the established policy. "It may be," he said, "that a merchant or two of Bristow or Yarmouth may have a hundred pounds lesse in his packe; but if the Empire gaine and become the greater, it is no matter."[2]

These two points thus early made, namely, that the value of colonies lay in their contributing to the empire products otherwise obtainable only from foreigners, and that the interests of the empire as a whole were paramount to those of any section, were well understood by those at the head of colonizing enterprises, and must have been understood also by the more intelligent of the early planters themselves. These views naturally would continue to be held by those who remained at the centre of the empire in England; while those who dwelt on its periphery, in many scattered settlements, would as naturally, in time, tend to lose sight of them, and to consider their own particular interests as greater than those of the empire. The struggle between these centripetal and centrifugal forces was bound to result in warping the imperial structure, though in one case only was it to end in the breaking away of a part of the system. Adjustments, continuing even to the present day, were to save the rest intact; but it is interesting to note the germs of conflict present from the very beginning. The forces which brought that conflict about were operative, in varying degrees, not only in North America, but throughout the entire empire, and extended back to its unconscious inception.

[1. Compiled from Brown, Genesis, pp. 811-1068.]

[2. Cited by Scott, Joint-Stock Companies, vol. I, p. 132.]

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The charter granted in 1606 provided for the formation of two colonizing companies, one of which was authorized to plant anywhere on the American coast between latitudes 34° and 41° North, and the other between 38° and 45°, provided that, should either, or both, choose to settle in the overlapping strip of three degrees, they should not plant within one hundred miles of each other.[1] The patentees of the first company were residents of London, while those of the second were of Plymouth, the companies thus becoming known as the London and Plymouth companies respectively. Among the patentees of the latter, which embraced New England, were Thomas Hanham, Raleigh Gilbert and George Popham, although the names of the two who are thought to have been the prime movers in the whole enterprise, Chief Justice Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, do not appear. Practically all those connected with it had seen service in the Spanish war, and many had already been interested in attempts to colonize in America and elsewhere. The charter, together with the instructions issued by the King some months later,[2] reveals a mixed organization, partly proprietary and partly royal. The patentees were to provide the capital and colonists, and to have control of the trade, which was to be carried on by means of "magazines," or joint stock; but the King, through the provision of a royal council appointed by himself, retained in his own hands the government of the entire province from 34° to 45°. Two local councils, one for each company’s territory, were appointed by the royal council, with power to govern the affairs of each colony under the king’s instructions. Land could not be granted to individuals by the patentees, but only by the king, upon application in their behalf by the local council for the colony in which it was located.[3]

Both companies at once took steps to plant their colonies, the Plymouth being the first in the field, although to the London Company was to accrue the earliest lasting success. The latter’s expedition, including in its members Bartholomew Gosold,

[1. Hazard, Historical Collections (Philadelphia, 1792), vol. I, pp. 50- 58.]

[2. Brown, Genesis, pp. 64-75.]

[3. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. I, pp. 25-35.]

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who had already been in New England, and Captain John smith, who later was to become a factor there, sailed from London in three ships, on December 20, 1606. Arriving in Virginia the following spring, they established themselves at Jamestown, and so founded, what, in spite of many vicissitudes, was to be the first permanent English settlement in America.

Meanwhile, the Plymouth Company, mainly by virtue of the activity of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who became indefatigable in his colonizing ardor, and of Chief Justice Popham, had also commenced operations. In 1600 had occurred Gorges’s unfortunate connection with the revolt of Essex, which had blasted his character in the eyes of the Puritans, and so served, perhaps, to embitter his future relations with Massachusetts. He had been for some time reinstated as Governor of Plymouth, when Weymouth returned from his voyage in 1605; and from him Gorges obtained possession of the three natives whom the captain had kidnaped on the coast of Maine. Having learned much from them of the nature of the country and its inhabitants, he despatched a vessel under Captain Henry Challons, in August, four months after the granting of the charter, with strict instructions to take the northern route to Cape Breton, and then to follow the coast southward to the place the natives had described.[1] Challons disobeyed the order, went southward by the West Indies, and was captured by the Spaniards, some of the crew, with himself and the two natives, being carried to Spain, and others, by accident, to Bordeaux. The latter, after having filed claims with the authorities of the port, and left a "Letter of a Turnye," returned to England, as did also, after some time and difficulty, Challons himself.[2]

Although the little ship of fifty-five tons had carried only

[1. Gorges, "Briefe Narration," Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Series III, vol. VI, pp. 51 f. Various members of the company were associated with Gorges, but he seems to have been the leader in this venture, as Popham was in the next. An account of the voyage, written by John Stoneman, the pilot, is in Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, pp. 284-96.]

[2. J. P. Baxter, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, vol. III, pp. 129-32, 168; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1675-76, p. 53.]

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twenty-nine Englishmen, it had been the intention to leave some of them for settling, "if any good occasion were offered"; and the Chief Justice had also dispatched a ship, under Captain Hanham, to meet and assist Challons in the enterprise. This, of course, he was unable to do; but he explored the shore, taking back with him to the company "the most exact discovery of that coast that ever came into their hands."[1] The reports were considered so encouraging that a much more considerable effort was next made by the adventurers.

On May 31, 1607, two ships, the Gift of God and the Mary and John, were dispatched from Plymouth under command of Raleigh Gilbert and George Popham, a relative of Sir John.[2] The vessels became separated on June 29, and did not meet again until August 7, among the St. George’s Islands, off the coast of Maine.[3] Having reached the mouth of the Kennebec, then called the Sagadahoc, the colonists explored the stream, and finally chose for their place of settlement a point at its mouth, on the high ground of the peninsula of Sabino.[4] They landed on the 19th, when they had a sermon preached to them, and listened to the reading of their patent and laws. The next day they began the building of their fort, named St. George, followed by the dwellings and storehouse and the first boat built in America.

Meanwhile, the Spaniards were by no means oblivious of what was going on, both in North and South Virginia; and to the zeal of the Spanish ambassador in London in keeping his master posted as to the encroachments of the English upon his territories, we owe the preservation of a drawing of the fort in the infant colony, which he obtained from some one who had been there.[5] From the first discussion of the Virginia charter, Zuñiga had written frequently to the King, telling him of the

[1. Gorges, "Briefe Narration," p. 53. No account of this voyage has been preserved, although Purchas had one in his possession written by Hanham. Vide Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, p. 296.]

[2. Always stated to have been his brother, until Brown threw doubt upon the point; Genesis, pp. 791, 968.]

[3. "Relation of a Voyage to Sagadahoc," Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, vol. XVIII.]

[4. H. O. Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony (Gorges Society, Portland, 1892), pp. 167-87.]

[5. Reproduced by Brown, Genesis, p. 190. Cf. also Ibid., pp. 183 ff.]

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plans and doings of the English, and advising strong action to prevent their settling. For some years, Spanish spies were kept at Jamestown, who regularly sent home word of what was going on, by means of renegade English sailors, while evidently there was also a traitor at Sagadahoc, as even in the Royal Council itself.[1] A vessel was once dispatched by Spain to wipe out both the colonies; but the crew proved faint-hearted, and no attack was made upon either, the King, moreover, having some hope, apparently, that both would conveniently prove failures of themselves.

At first, however, all went well at Sagadahoc, and early in October the Mary and John was sent home to carry word of the colony.[2] The account brought back so pleased Gorges that he wrote a letter, "late at night," to Sir Robert Cecil, to tell him of the "greate newes." But he was doomed to disappointment. A couple of days later he had evidently heard more, and in a second letter wrote that the settlement was getting into trouble because of "childish factions, ignorant, timerous and ambitious persons." Popham, who had been made president of the colony, he described as "an honest man, but ould, and of an unwieldy body, and timerously fearfull to offende, or contest with others that will or do oppose him, but otherways a discreete, carefull man." Gilbert was declared, by hearsay, to be "desirous of supremacy, and rule, a loose life prompte to sensuality, little zeale in Religion, humerouse, headstronge and of small judgment and experience, other wayes valiant inough."[3] The next ship brought a letter from Popham to the King, but no better news for the company than the first, in spite of the president’s enthusiastic belief in the presence of nutmegs, cinnamon, and "other products of great importance," in the imaginatively tropical climate of Maine.[4]

[1. Correspondence in Brown, Genesis, p. 117 and passim; also The First Republic in America (Boston, 1898), p. 91. Cf. I. A. Wright, "Spanish Policy toward Virginia," in American Historical Review, April, 1920, pp. 448 ff. and Cal. State Pap., Col., 1675-76, pp. 45 ff.]

[2. Cf. note on the "Movement of the ships," Thayer, Sagadahoc, pp. 192 ff.]

[3. Baxter, Sir F. Gorges, vol. III, pp. 154 f.]

[4. Maine Historical Society Collections, vol. V, pp. 357-60.]

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During the winter, which was unusually severe, the storehouse was burned, with most of the provisions; and before the arrival of the two supply ships sent out from England, Popham, the leader of the colony, died. The ships carried yet more serious news to the colonists in the death of the Chief Justice in England, which proved "such a corrosive to all, as struck them with despair of future remedy."[1] A later ship brought word of the death of Sir John, Gilbert’s elder brother, which necessitated that leader’s returning to England to look after his affairs. The colonists, in view of all these circumstances, resolved to quit the place, and return with Gilbert; and so all "former hopes were frozen to death," and, by October, the wilderness of Maine was abandoned by the English, as, five years before, it had been by the French.[2]

The character of the colonists, and, more particularly, the unusual sequence of accidents, were enough to account for the failure of the attempt, without invoking, with Gorges, "the mallice of the Divell" to explain it. The company at home became thoroughly discouraged, and no further efforts were made to plant a settlement, although Sir Francis Popham, son of the late Chief Justice, continued to send over vessels for some years for trade and fishing, and it is probable that no year now passed without the temporary presence of Englishmen upon the coast.[3] In connection with the obtaining of a new charter by the South Virginia Company, in 1609, the adventurers in the Northern Company were offered the opportunity to join with the Londoners on favorable terms, and to form with them "one common and patient purse," an opportunity of which some of them availed themselves.[4]

Although temporarily abandoned as a site for colonizing, the coast of North Virginia was by no means deserted, and the

[1. Gorges, "Briefe Narration," p. 55.]

[2. Attempts have been made to magnify the importance of the colony, and even to insist upon its continued existence. Following the publication of the uncritical Popham Memorial, Portland, 1863, 98 pamphlets and articles appeared in six years. The literature is surveyed by Thayer, Sagadahoc, pp. 87-156.]

[3. Gorges, "Briefs Narration," p. 56; "Briefe Relation," Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, p. 271.]

[4. Brown, Genesis, pp. 238-40.]

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events of the next few years there were of great importance to the future history of the territory. Hudson, an Englishman employed by the Dutch, coasted along its shores during the famous voyage on which he explored the river which bears his name;1 and the following year, Argall and Somers, attempting to sail from Jamestown to Bermuda, were blown out of their course, and having made for the North Virginia coast, spent some time along it, fishing for cod.[2] Upon Hudson’s voyage was based the Dutch claim to their portion of North America. The validity of such a claim to the country immediately about the Hudson would depend upon the interpretation of the two difficult points in connection with titles noted at the beginning of this chapter.[3] Any such claim extended by Holland to the coasts of the present eastern New England, however, could have no standing whatever, as French and English explorations in that exact locality had been both prior in date and far more thorough. The only real dispute there lay between the English and French, which was soon to be decided in the main by force. In fact, with three nations, to say nothing of Spain, claiming the same territory, all basing their claims upon discovery within a few miles of each other, even where explorations did not actually overlap, the points raised were too fine, in the then inchoate state of international law, to permit of any other arbitrament.

When, owing to the annulling of De Monts’s patent, the French colony at Port Royal had been temporarily abandoned in 1607, de Poutrincourt, who still retained his rights, intended

[1. G. M. Asher, Henry Hudson the Navigator (Hakluyt Society, 1860), p. 63.]

[2. Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, pp. 73, 84.]

[3. Leaving out of consideration the early coasting voyages, in which the Dutch had no part whatever, they had recently been preceded to within a reasonable distance of both the mouth and the source of the Hudson. The English had made a detailed discovery as far as the entrance of the Sound, while Champlain was within a few miles of the source of the river some months before the Dutch ascended it. If rights of discovery were to be limited only to the points actually visited, with no extension thence in any direction, the country would have become a veritable checker-board of warring nationalities. The Dutch themselves held no such view, and claimed all the land from Cape Cod to Delaware Bay, with indefinite limits toward the interior. Acknowledgment of any such claim would have to be based upon a theory of extension which would seem, therefore, equally to validate the claims of English and French, arising in both cases from discovery prior to the Dutch.]

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and made a careful examination of the coast. At the island of Matinicus, where the attack on Plastrier had taken place, he found some Englishmen fishing; but although he was urged by some of his party to burn their ships, he would not do so, as they were peaceful civilians, and contented himself with erecting a large cross with the arms of France.[1]

A couple of years later, under the more aggressive regime of Madame de Guercheville and the Jesuits, an extension of French settlement toward the south was attempted by the founding of a colony on Mt. Desert, which was named St. Sauveur.[2] It was not, however, to remain undisturbed for many weeks, for at a meeting of the Quarter Court of the Virginia Company in London, in July, 1612, Captain Argall had been commissioned to drive out foreign intruders from the country claimed under English charters, and had sailed from England for that purpose.[3] After wintering in Virginia, he proceeded northward the following summer, to clear the territory as far as 45°, and promptly ran across the newly established Jesuits on the Maine coast, being guided to them by Indians, who were under the mistaken impression that the English were friends.[4] The French, being taken wholly unaware, made practically no resistance, the only one among their number who had presence of mind enough even to fire their cannon, having forgotten to aim it. Argall easily overcame such opposition, and having obtained possession of La Saussaye’s commission from the French King, proceeded to break up the colony and dispose of his prisoners.[5] Fifteen of

[1. Brown, Genesis, p. 534.]

[2. The accounts of the latter voyage are slight. John Smith, in a page, gives us all we know, and says nothing of Plastrier. Works (ed. Arber, Glasgow, 1910), vol. II, p. 696. Purchas had a full account, which he did not print and which is now lost. Pilgrimes, vol. XXX, p. 296.]

[3. Brown, First Republic, p. 176; Genesis, pp. 709-23.]

[4. W. D. Williamson, History of the State of Maine (Hallowell, 1832), vol. I, p. 206, states, but without giving any authority, that there had been Jesuits at Mt. Desert for five years.]

[5. The story of his having secretly rifled La Saussaye’s trunks of his papers, and then demanded them from him, seems hardly likely, in view of other facts. It rests on the authority of Biard ("Relation," in Levermore, Forerunners, vol. II, p. 496). As to Biard’s character and credibility, cf. Biggar, Trading Companies, pp. 263-65.]

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to return speedily, and to continue his settlement. Various delays, however, kept him in France for three years, and it was not until the spring of 1610 that he again set sail. The houses and their contents, untouched by the friendly Indians, were found intact, and life at the little colony, which had thus been merely interrupted, was resumed. In the following year, a certain Captain Plastrier, who had been fishing near the Kennebec, complained to the Sieur de Biencourt, Poutrincourt’s son, that he had been attacked and robbed by English, who claimed title to the coast.[1] These may have been Captain Williams and his party, who were annually sent out by Francis Popham, or Captains Harlow and Hobson, who were on the coast, in 1611, on a voyage of discovery and Indian kidnaping, for the Earl of Southampton.[2] Thus obscurely, off the New England coast, between a French fisherman and English seamen, whose very names are unknown to us, began that duel for empire between France and England, which was to last a century and a half, and which was to decide the fate of the vast continent of North America and the teeming millions of India. Clive and Dupleix, Wolfe and Montcalm, were the successors of these humble pioneers striving to assert the claims of their rival nations to the empire of the world.

The significance of the attack by the English was not lost upon the young Biencourt, who "represented very earnestly" to his people how important it was to "every good Frenchman" to prevent this usurpation by the English of lands claimed by France, and occupied by her citizens "who had taken real possession . . . three and four years before ever the English had set forth"--which was quite true in so far as related to colonizing. In August, Biencourt made a trip along the shore of Maine, stopping at St. Croix Island, where Plastrier had decided to spend the winter, and thence down to the Kennebec, where he inspected the abandoned site of the Popham colony,

[1. Brown, Genesis, p. 534.]

[2. The accounts of the latter voyage are slight. John Smith, in a page, gives us all we know, and says nothing of Plastrier. Works (ed. Arber, Glasgow, 1910), vol. II, p. 696. Purchas had a full account, which he did not print and which is now lost. Pilgrimes, vol. XXX, p. 296.]

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them, including Biard and another of the Jesuit fathers, were taken back as captives to Virginia, and the remaining thirty, in two small boats, allowed to take their perilous way to rejoin their countrymen to the northward.

Soon afterward, Argall, with three ships and the Jesuit Biard, who, apparently out of personal rancor toward Biencourt, had turned traitor to his former associates, again set sail from Virginia, for the purpose of completely extirpating the French settlements. Revisiting St. Sauveur, he burned the buildings, and tearing down the French cross, erected another. Continuing his voyage, he put in at St. Croix, where he likewise burned the buildings and confiscated the stores collected there.[1] Arriving next at Port Royal, from which the inhabitants were temporarily absent, a few miles off, after taking as booty even the locks and nails from the buildings, as well as the food, ammunition, and clothes of the unfortunate French, he burned the whole settlement to ashes.[2] It is difficult to conceive of a more dastardly act than thus to rob a peaceful colony of its stores, and then to render it homeless on the approach of winter in a far northern country.

The action, however, if not the manner of it, fitted in with the English temper of the time, which was becoming increasingly aggressive in colonial matters. On the shores of India, as on those of North Virginia, the cannon’s mouth was announcing territorial decisions of vast import for the future. Almost simultaneously with the operations of Argall in Maine, Captain Best, off the Indian coast, was having a running fight, lasting a month, with four Portuguese ships, attended by over a score of galleys, against his own little fleet of only two vessels. As a result of his brilliant victory against these overwhelming odds, the English obtained their first permanent foothold in continental India.[3] The glorious battle of Swally, and the petty raiding of Mt. Desert and Port Royal, were alike mere

[1. Biard, in Levermore, Forerunners, vol. II, p. 506. Cf. also the English account in Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, pp. 214-16, 271.]

[2. Biard and Purchas, ubi supra; also Biencourt’s complaint, in Brown, Genesis, pp. 725 ff. and Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660, p.15.]

[3. Hunter, British India, vol. I, pp. 300-304.]

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incidents in the struggle of new forces let loose by the age of discovery, and the transformation of the European nations into world powers. The struggles between French and English in North Virginia and India; between English and Portuguese in the Gulf of Cambay; between Dutch and Spanish, or Dutch and Portuguese on many seas; between English and Dutch in Guiana and on the Amazon and in the Spice Islands of the East, must all be considered as but parts of one stupendous drama. Everywhere along the edge of the world, traders and settlers were being tossed on those stormy political waters, where met the new tides of imperial ambition, fast flowing to the farthest confines of the new-found seas.

In that portion of the drama with which we are particularly concerned, a new figure now appears upon the scene, whose services to North Virginia have been somewhat overrated by many, but whose personality remains a matter of fascinating interest. Around few names in American history has legend clustered more luxuriantly than around that of the South Virginian hero Captain John Smith; and as to the real merits of few men is opinion more diverse. Even though it must be frankly admitted that no one will ever again think as highly of the Captain as he thought of himself, yet much of the modern detraction from his character and services is so evidently biased as to be critically of little value. The main importance of his share in North Virginian colonization, unlike his labors in the south, was in his capacity as author, and his efforts to stimulate interest in the possibilities of the New World. He himself, however, wished for and endeavored to achieve a more active part in the settlement of the country to which he attached its present name of New England.

He first saw its shores, on his only voyage thither, off the island of Monhegan, in the spring of 1614, having been sent out by some London merchants "to take Whales and make tryalls of a Myne of Gold and Copper."[1] "If those failed, he wrote, "Fish and Furres was then our refuge." It was soon evident that the refuge was needed, and it proved, fortunately,

[1. John Smith, Works, vol. I, p. 187.]

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to be a goodly one, although along the New Hampshire and Massachusetts coasts, he found that the French had recently preceded him, and spoiled his market. While fishing for cod, and trading with the Indians, he also explored a considerable part of the shore, and, as a result of his observations, prepared a map, on which many of the names still familiar to us appear for the first time.[1] In spite of all the explorers who had preceded him, Smith asserted that the shore was "still but even as a coast unknowne and undiscovered"; and historians formerly dated the beginning of modern New England cartography from the appearance of his chart. Without necessarily detracting from the excellence of Smith’s field-work, however, his claim to be the first accurate cartographer of our coast has been dispelled by the discovery of the excellent map transmitted by the Spanish ambassador in London to King Philip in 1611, and found some years ago in the Archives at Simancas.[2] This map, prepared for King James in 1610, shows that the New England coast was well known, and had been well drawn, before ever John Smith began his labors. It probably embodies the surveys made by Gosnold, Archer, Pring, Weymouth, Champlain, and, perhaps, others, and shows, for the first time, correctly drawn, such characteristic features as the peculiar hook of Cape Cod. This very point had hitherto been considered the distinguishing mark of excellence of Smith’s map, drawn six years later.

However, if Smith’s cartographical services cannot now be considered as important as formerly, his work as a popularizer remains unimpaired. Although the map of 1610, until published within the present generation, continued in the form of a single manuscript copy, and was seen in its day by few outside the inner circles of company promotion, Smith’s was published in a large edition, and, together with his Description, which has not yet lost its charm, did much to spread a knowledge of New England among the people. Many a man in

[1. For various states of the map, vide J. Winsor, Memorial History of Boston (Boston, 1882), vol. I, pp. 52-56.]

[2. Printed for the first time by Brown, Genesis, p. 456.]

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disgrace with fortune must have pondered his note for those "that have great spirits, and small meanes," and have read enviously of "the planters pleasures, and profits," as set forth by the plausible captain.

An act of cruelty, which occurred on Smith’s voyage, was to bear unforeseen results in the future. One of the captains, a rascal named Hunt, kidnaped twenty-four savages, and sold them in Spain for slaves. One of these, who was subsequently returned to his native land, was the Squanto who so materially assisted the Pilgrims at Plymouth, as we shall see later.

Of more immediate influence were the fish and furs with which Smith reached London,--valued at £1500,--and which served to direct attention to the possibilities of the region. It was, it is true, a trifle compared with the L90,000 or more which the stockholders of the East India Company were receiving from the annual voyages of their fleet; but interest in colonizing as well as in trading was rapidly growing.[1] In Ireland, where colonization ran a course curiously analogous to that in America, settlement now proceeded rapidly.[2] In Newfoundland, two colonies were founded, and in Bermuda people were said to be beginning "to nestle and plant very handsomely."[3] Little Englanders of an early type, and opponents of chartered privilege, were not wanting, indeed, to inveigh against the growing imperialism of the times. As "for the Bermudas, we know not yet what they will do; and for Virginia, we know not well what to do with it," wrote one author; while Bacon compared the visionary possibilities of America with the solid results in Ireland.[4]

While Smith had been ranging our coast, getting information,

[1. Hunter, British India, vol. I, p. 306.]

[2. Cheyney, "English Conditions," pp. 514-21. For a report on a site for a colony in Derry, which might be mistaken for an American "prospectus" of the same period, vide Cal. State Papers, Ireland, 1608-1610, p. 318. The items are curiously familiar: the goodness of the air and the fruitfulness of the land"; "the red deer, foxes, conies, martins, otters"; "the great plenty of timber for shipping"; "the commodious harbor"; "the infinite store of cods, herrings," etc.; "the sea-fowl in great abundance"; even the pearls.]

[3. Cal. State Pap., Col., 1558-1660, p. 15.]

[4. The Trades Increase, in Harleian Miscellany (ed. 1809), vol. III, p. 299; Brown, Genesis, p. 820.]

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furs, and fish, another expedition, despatched by Gorges, under Captain Hobson, was seeking gold on Martha’s Vineyard. Needless to say, he did not find it, and, as Smith laconically remarks, he "spent his victuall and returned with nothing."[1] The tangible cash results of Smith’s own voyage pointed to him as the man whom the company needed, and by them he was made Admiral of New England for life, and started on another voyage, with two ships and Captain Thomas Dermer. He never again, however, saw America. Owing to damages to his vessel, received in a storm only a few days out, he was forced to return to Plymouth; and although Dermer went on, we know nothing of his trip.[2] On Smith’s next attempt, he was taken prisoner by pirates; and on his fourth start, in 1617, for some reason he never got out of Plymouth harbor.

Voyages to New England now became frequent, however, and it is not necessary to mention them all. In 1615, Sir Richard Hawkins was exploring and trading for Gorges, whose agent, Richard Vines, probably spent the following winter in Maine, bringing back with him the first news of the great plague which was decimating the Indians, and which was to simplify the question of settlement. As Gorges speaks of the "extreme rates" at which he had to hire men to stay the winter quarter, it is probable that he had other parties there, in this or other winters. "This course I held some years together," he wrote in his old age, "but nothing to my private profit; for what I got one way I spent another; so that I began to grow weary of that business, as not for my turn till better times."[3] The surprising part is, not that he grew weary, but that he still continued the unprofitable business for a lifetime.

In 1618, he received a letter from Captain Dermer, in Newfoundland, saying that he had there found Squanto, one of Gorges’s savages, and that the Indian’s description of New England had made him desirous to "follow his hopes that

[1. Smith, Works, vol. I, p. 240.]

[2. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 731 ff.]

[3. Gorges, "Briefe Narration," pp. 57-62.]

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way,"[1] The next spring, therefore, the indefatigable Gorges sent out Captain Rocroft to meet Dermer and cooperate with him. Dermer, meanwhile, had returned to England; so Rocroft failed to meet him, and after capturing a French barque off the New England coast, sailed to Virginia, contrary to orders, and was there killed in a quarrel. Gorges reimbursed the Frenchmen for the damages suffered, and, in other respects, made a heavy loss on the voyage, from which he recovered nothing.

As soon as possible after Dermer’s unexpected arrival in England, he was again fitted out and sent to join Rocroft, who had meanwhile gone to Virginia. Having missed his associate in the enterprise, whom he had expected to find at Monhegan, Dermer sailed along the coast, making observations, from Sagadahoc to Martha’s Vineyard, and then on to Virginia. Finding Rocroft dead, he wintered there, and went back to New England in the spring.[2] Apparently on this visit, he returned Squanto to his native Plymouth, where Dermer seems to have wished to plant. "I would, " he wrote, "that the first plantation might hear be seated, if ther come to the number of 50 persons, or upward"--a desire which was to be fulfilled within a few months by the coming of the Pilgrims.

Meanwhile, the colony in South Virginia, at Jamestown, had been passing through a long series of troubles, which on more than one occasion had nearly ended its career. Those in its first years led the company to publish A True and Sincere Declaration as to the affairs of the settlement, in which the form of government was given as one of the roots of the evils which had "shaken so tender a body."[3] As a result of changes effected by the two subsequent charters, which they obtained in 1609 and 1612, the London patentees were incorporated as a joint-stock body, and their territory increased to a strip four hundred

[1. Gorges, "Briefe Narration," p.62. He does not give the name of the savage. The identity is established by Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston, 1861), pp. 96 f.]

[2. This I take to be the explanation of the voyages, though he may have returned to England between them. It seems certain that he was on the coast in 1620. Cf. Dormer’s letter in Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, pp. 129 ff.; Gorges, "Briefe Narration," pp. 61 ff.; and Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 95-98.]

[3. Reprinted by Brown, Genesis, pp. 338-53.]

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miles wide, extending from coast to coast, which they were empowered to grant to others.[1] The old Royal Council was replaced by one elected by the members of the company, thus becoming subject, not to the king, but to the fifty-six city companies, and to the six hundred and fifty-nine individuals, who formed the membership of the enterprise at the time of the 1612 charter. Governmental powers were also bestowed upon it, and the colony thus became a proprietary province, with a trading company as proprietor.[2]

The unfortunate results of the recent voyages in which Gorges had been interested, so far from dampening his ardor, had made him more anxious than ever to go on with his efforts. The governmental changes in the charter for South Virginia, together, perhaps, with the enlargement of its bounds, moved him to apply for a new charter for the northern plantation.[3] A dispute in which he had become involved with the southern company, regarding its rights to fish within the limits assigned to the North Virginia patentees, which rights he denied, had won for him the hostility of a part of the Virginia Company’s membership. As the new charter for which he had applied contained a clause giving the New England Company a monopoly of the fishing along their entire section of the coast, it was bitterly attacked by the southerners, who had annually gone to the northern fishing-grounds for an important part of their year’s supplies. The dispute was taken into Parliament, where Gorges defended himself with ability, and thence to the King. The factional fight then in progress between Smythe and Sandys, in the Virginia Company, led Smythe’s party to support Gorges against their opponents in their own company; and as Gorges had also strengthened his cause by including among his associates many of the influential nobles of the court, an order in council was finally issued in his favor, on the 18th of June, 1621, for the delivery of the new charter.[4]

[1. Hazard, Hist. Coll., vol. I, pp. 58-81.]

[2. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. I, pp. 56 ff.]

[3. Gorges, "Briefe Narration," p. 64.]

[4. Ibid., pp. 64 ff.; Documents relating to the Colonial History of State of New York (Albany, 1853), vol. III, p. 4; Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the British Colonies (London, 1777), vol. I, p. 49.]

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Thus was originated the "Council established at Plymouth in the County of Devon for the Planting, Ruling, and Governing of New England in America," which now became the proprietor of all the territory between 40° and 48° North Latitude, and extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in utter disregard of the French claims in Nova Scotia and Canada, and of the colonies planted there. The charter stated that there were no subjects of any foreign power in possession of any part of the territory, although Quebec had been settled for thirteen years, and French fishermen and fur traders were constantly being met by the English.[1] Upon the new company were bestowed rights of trading, colonizing, and governing. The members were allowed to elect their own officials in England, and to appoint those for ruling in the settlements. The members of the Virginia Company numbered nearly a thousand persons, who elected their council, and were responsible for the administration of the colony; but under the Gorges charter, the council was the whole company, limited to forty members, who were self-perpetuating, and whose relation to the colonists was thus direct and final.[2]

The new company was never either active or successful. The controversy which had marked its slow birth tended to keep people from investing; and from its narrow and monopolistic nature, it could make no appeal to popular support. While the passage of the charter was still pending, chance decreed that under it was to be made, even before its issue, the first successful planting within its granted limits, and without efforts of their own, the grantees, when they received the powers bestowed upon them by the King, were to find the Pilgrim colony already established at Plymouth.

[1. Charter in Hazard, Hist. Coll., vol. I, pp. 103 ff.]

[2. Cf. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. I, pp. 98 ff.]

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THE history of the New England group of colonies was, in the main, shaped throughout the entire prerevolutionary period by the influence of three factors. These were the geographical environment, the Puritan movement in England, and the Mercantile Theory. The first of these has already been discussed, and the last will be more particularly referred to later. As the second was not only a continuing influence during the period, but was the chief determinant in the small settlement of Plymouth, and an element in the great migration to Massachusetts, it must be considered before entering upon the story of those two colonies.

The first difficulty in dealing with the problem of Puritanism is to define the term itself. The earliest appearance of the name seems to have been about 1566, and in the following year a certain London congregation was spoken of as "Puritans or Unspottyd Lambs of the Lord." The members of this congregation, which met secretly in Plumbers Hall, called their sect "the pure or stainless religion"; and the derivation of the name Puritan, for long a term of reproach, is sufficiently obvious.[1] Its application, however, is less so. Part of the confusion is due to the fact that, like "democratic" and many other such words, it has been applied to an attitude toward life, to a broad movement, and to a definite political party. Moreover, between the meeting of those "Unspottyd Lambs" in Plumbers Hall in 1567, and the overthrow of the Puritan Commonwealth of England in 1660, nearly a century elapsed, during which the meaning of the word underwent the changes

[1. C. Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research, 1550-1641 (Cambridge, 1912), vol. I, pp. 84, 93. Hinds, in The England of Elizabeth, p. 19, traces "the first whisper of that sound" to Calvin’s letter of 1554.]

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which time always brings to words of its class, whereas it still continues as a living term in our social and religious vocabulary. Rigidly and briefly to define a word which has thus had a vague and changing content throughout a dozen generations is impossible. To attempt to confine its definition to only one of its former meanings is unhistorical, however desirable it may be that an author should define it as used by himself in his own writings. Not long ago it was fashionable to decry, as showing total lack of scholarship, any attempt to apply the name to the men who founded Plymouth, it being considered as applying solely to those who founded Massachusetts. It may be true that "the Separatists were not Puritans in the original sense of the word";1 but the word did not retain its original sense, and although Separatist and Nonconformist represent a real difference, the word Puritan may well be used to cover both. The pendulum, indeed, seems now to be swinging the other way, and several writers describe Puritanism broadly as an "attitude of mind," or as "idealism applied to the solution of contemporary problems."[2] As specific terms for the many sects and minor currents in the great movement, which for a time dominated the history of both the Englands, are by no means lacking, it would seem desirable to retain the use of the word Puritanism in its widest application, and it is so used in the present work.

The idea of unity seems to possess a peculiar fascination for the average human mind. Only a savage or a philosopher may be content with, or rise to, the conception of a pluralistic universe. Moreover, the desire to conform, and to force others to do so, is as typical of the average man as of the average boy.

It is in but few persons, and in rare periods, that the spirit of unrest, of dissatisfaction, of growth, manifests itself so strongly as to overcome the innate tendency toward static conformity. The mediaeval period was essentially, for the most part, one of

[1. Burrage, English Dissenters, vol. I, p. 34. Cf. E. Channing, History of the United States (New York, 1916), vol. I, p. 272 n.]

[2. Channing, History, vol. I, pp. 271 ff.; G. B. Tatham, The Puritans in Power (Cambridge, 1913), p. 2; and R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church (New York, 1910), vol. I, pp. 244-46.]

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religious unity. For long, the two great ideas of the Empire and the Church had dominated men’s minds. With the Renaissance and the Reformation, however, arose again, not only nationalities, but individualities. With the growth of the separate nations, developed simultaneously a new sense of individual responsibility in the face of the universe. For the average man during the Middle Ages, the moral, even more than the economic, life had been corporate. Outward conformity to the dogmas and usages of the only church which then represented Christ’s Kingdom upon earth lulled his thoughts, and soothed his conscience. The necessity of belonging to the Church was not forced upon a man merely by fear of persecution or of the public opinion of his own little world. His belief in such a relation, and his ignoring the possibility of any other, had become as innate and instinctive as his belief in the physical laws of the universe by which he guided his daily life. It was not alone the historians of the period who were "content to be deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction," as "the atmosphere of accredited mendacity thickened."[1] The subtle poison had flowed through the veins of the entire social organism.

As the idea of nationality grew and rooted itself in the mind of the masses, it attracted to itself, by a sort of mental gravitation, the institutions and thoughts of the peoples. Everywhere, the religious reformation had been closely allied with secular politics, and the reformed churches became national. As universal empire had gradually given place to nations, so the universal church was in part broken into state churches, but without any loosening of the bond which bound the individual to them. The idea of the church persisted, and the average man considered separating himself from it almost as one would consider separating one’s self from the civil state of to-day. It was almost as unthinkable and impossible to realize in practice. His life was so interwoven with it, his civil rights, as well as his religious duties, were so involved in his relations to it, that, even if he disagreed with its dogma, disliked its policy,

[1. Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London, 1907), p. 5.]

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or strove within it to alter both, he had no thought of leaving it. To do so would have been to constitute himself a religious anarch. Not only were the mental inhibitions to the development of such an idea greater than those operating in the case of political anarchy to-day, but the pains and penalties attending the action, both from law and from public opinion, were also greater.[1]

One of the most dynamic ideas, however, which had come in with the Reformation, was that of the responsibility of the individual to God, both for his own life and for that of others. To those whose minds were open to receive it, the thought came with a force which was almost overwhelming. In the training of youth, it is well recognized that responsibility must be thrown upon them gradually if their characters are to grow normally, and not be warped or broken under sudden strain. But here were men, in many cases incredibly ignorant of the Christian story, to whom the very existence of such a book as the Bible had been unknown, and whose faith and conduct had been regulated for them for centuries. Suddenly they found themselves in possession of the original sources in their own tongues, and were told that the eternal salvation of their souls was no longer in the keeping of the institution upon which they had always leaned with the unconscious confidence of a child upon its parents. Inspired by a new sense of their importance as individuals, and, in the majority of cases, by a self-confidence born of ignorance, earnest men undertook to interpret the scriptures, and to revise the existing ritual, dogma, and government of the Church. Extreme individualism on all these points was the natural result. Sects, often counting only single congregations in their numbers, arose everywhere. Separatism was the logical end of these discontents and strivings; but men are not logical in their actions, and separatism formed but a small element in the Puritan movement. Where it did occur, the disintegrating force did not usually stop there, but continued to plague, with petty and ignoble quarrels, the little groups thus split off.

[1. Cf. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, p. 273.]

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Not only were the Separatists logical, but their action required far more courage than that of the mere Nonconforming Puritans. Not only did the act itself call for a higher degree of intellectual daring, but the penalties attached to it were greater. In many cases, Nonconformity, so far from entailing loss or suffering, possessed a distinct money and social value; but no highly paid cure or easy berth in the household of a Puritan nobleman awaited the Separatist. Misguided as many of the latter may have been, and disappointing as were many of the Separatist movements, it would seem that, on the whole, the Separatists possessed more sincerity and loyalty to their ideas than the Puritans who remained within the Church. This the great majority of them did. The number of Separatists, like the number of Puritans generally, has usually been overstated in the past. The twenty thousand Brownists mentioned by Raleigh in 1593 have dwindled, under the light of modern critical research, to a mere five or six hundred at most.[1]

When the ordinary man gets a new idea, it does not necessarily dislodge the old ones that may be antagonistic to it, or even greatly modify them.[2] The tendency to cling to the established church was as strong in the minds of most Puritans as was their self-confidence in their own beliefs and superior sanctity, and their desire to alter the Church to suit them, whether in the earlier demands in the matter of vestments, or the later in matters of polity and doctrine. Thus the survival of the mediæval idea of the Church, coupled with the new one of individual judgment and responsibility, led the conservative Puritans to adopt a half- way policy as compared with the Churchmen and the Separatists.

Under Henry VIII there had been little change, save in the single fact of the break with Rome, and the substitution of King for Pope as the head of the Church. The ecclesiastical

[1. Burrage, English Dissenters, vol. I, p. 152.]

[2. "Unless we allow for the innate capacity of the human mind to entertain contradictory beliefs at the same time, we shall in vain attempt to understand the history of thought in general and of religion in particular." J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris [The Golden Bough] (London, 1907), p. 5 n.]

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property had, indeed, been largely confiscated and distributed among the laity so as to create a powerful economic interest in the maintenance of the King’s supremacy. By the fact of that supremacy, religious questions had become political, and important changes would necessarily in time have to be made in church administration and discipline. Otherwise, however, there was little alteration, and apparently but two out of the King’s subjects refused to conform to the new order.[1] Although further progress was made under Edward, the reign of Mary restored the union with Rome, and sent many exiles to Frankfort, Geneva, and other centres of the Protestant movement on the continent.[2]

On the accession of Elizabeth, the refugees flocked back to London, keen to work into the fabric of the English church the religious ideas which they had imbibed and developed during their exile. The bulk of the clergy, however, were not desirous of innovation, and seem hardly to have been affected by the controversies raging at the time.[3] Of the nine thousand four hundred serving the Church under the Pope in Mary’s reign, fewer than one hundred and eighty, or less than two per cent, refused the Oath of Supremacy under Elizabeth.[4] Not only had the parish priests thus accepted with indifference the various changes,[5] but the laity in the country districts, especially in the north, had scarcely been touched by the Reformation. When Elizabeth came to the throne, the distracted country needed, above all else, peace and unity. The fifth of

[1. D. Neal, The History of the Puritans (New York, 1843), vol. I, p. 34.]

[2. Hinds, The England of Elizabeth, pp. 6-68.]

[3. H. Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy and the Settlement of Religion, 1558- 1564 (Oxford, 1898), pp. I ff.]

[4. J. Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors (London, 1906), p. 26; Gee, in Elizabethan Clergy, p. 247, estimates that not many more than 200 were deprived between Nov. 17, 1558, and Nov. 17, 1564, for refusal to acknowledge the Elizabethan settlement. These were mainly Roman Catholics.]

[5. One is reminded of the satirical verses on Richard Lee of Hatfield, on his conforming again in 1662:--

Three times already I have turned my coat,
Three times already I have changed my note,
I’ll make it four, and four-and-twenty more,
And turn the compass round, ere I’ll give o’er.

Cited by F. Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, 1672 (London, 1908), p. 30.]

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her house to reign in the period of about seventy-five years since the end of the long War of the Roses, she found a nation yet suffering from the severe economic effects of that protracted crisis, and a church rendered unstable in doctrine and almost impotent in discipline by the four alternations between Roman and Protestant allegiance which had occurred in less than a quarter of a century. The question of her own legitimacy, bound up as it was with the question of religious authority, and the extreme delicacy of international political relations, especially with Spain, France, and Scotland, added difficulties to the problem of church settlement.[1]

An established church was a necessity from all three standpoints, of religion, morals, and politics. Here and there, a few zealots might organize their own congregations and support a preacher; but any sort of congregational church government was out of the question for the overwhelming mass of the people, who were ignorant and indifferent, but still superstitiously devoted to the old Roman forms. The moral sanctions of the time were, moreover, far more closely involved with religion than they are to-day, and the church was far more essential as a prop to a government none too strong. The situation called for the opportunist policy which the Queen always favored in every difficulty. Whatever may have been her own religious beliefs or lack of them, which cannot now be known, she never cared for religious persecution, but she cared everything for a strong and united England. Although conformity was necessary to prevent the disintegration of the national life, the standards to which she required men to conform were purposely left so vague as to permit all but the most advanced of Protestant sectaries and most irreconcilable of Romanists to become members of the Church of England.

Opportunism may temporarily save a dangerous situation, but cannot be pursued successfully as a permanent policy. The course of events led extreme Catholics to feel that the Church had advanced so far that they could not follow it, and

[1. Cf. F. W. Maitland’s chapter on "The Anglican Settlement and the Scottish Reformation," in Cambridge Modern History (New York, 1918), vol. V, pp. 550-99.]

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the ultra-Puritans to consider that it had stopped so short that they could not stay for it. To an opposition, all things, theoretically, seem possible. The practical difficulties are for those who have the responsibility of power. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the Catholics realized that the most they could hope for would be toleration; and the real struggle for the control of the organization lay between the Puritans and those who wished the Church to continue its middle course. It must be pointed out, that this struggle of the Puritan Nonconformists was in no sense for toleration. They had as little thought of it as the Inquisition itself, nor did they exercise it when in power, either in old or New England In that regard, the Separatist John Robinson, preaching to his little congregation in Leyden, was as far ahead of the Puritan leaders in England, as Roger Williams was of the leaders of Massachusetts.

As has already been seen, only two men failed to conform to the change under Henry in 1534, and less than two per cent were forced from their cures when Elizabeth introduced the Oath of Supremacy. In the great deprivations under James and Archbishop Bancroft, following the adoption of the Canons of 1604, the most careful sifting of all the records indicates that less than three hundred Puritan clergy were deprived of their livings.[1] On the other hand, when the Puritans came into power, out of eighty-six hundred clergy of the Church, the livings of approximately thirty-five hundred, or over forty per cent, were sequestrated.[2] The Nonconformist struggle was not for toleration, but for control. Indeed, the objection of the Puritans to the Court of High Commission itself, to which they sometimes voluntarily carried their own cases, and which had a certain popularity that has largely been lost to sight, was not so much that it was an instrument of oppression, as that at times it was turned against themselves.[3]

[1. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. II, Pp. 3-14.]

[2. Tatham, in Puritans in Power, pp. 91 f., gives from 3,000 to 3,500. In his monograph on Dr. John Walker and the Sufferings of the Clergy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1911, p. 132), he states 3,500 as the probable number.]

[3. R. G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the High Commission (Oxford, 1913), pp. 72, 105, 329.]

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One of the claims made for them is that they constituted a large percentage of both the clergy and the laity, and embraced a great part of the learned men of the church, and were therefore entitled to guide the organization. This claim does not stand the test of rigid criticism. As exhaustive a list as possible, giving every doubtful name to the Puritans, shows not over three hundred Puritan clergy in the church between 1600 and 1610, or about three per cent of the establishment.[1] There are no figures available for the laity, but computations based on various methods of estimating the numbers yield totals equivalent to from two to six per cent of the population. These figures may be too low, but it must be considered that the common people, particularly in the country districts, were inert to a much greater degree even than to-day, and their normal attitude toward the clergy might well have been summed up in the dictum of the choir in Hardy’s "Under the Greenwood Tree," that "there’s virtue in a man’s not putting a parish to spiritual trouble."

On the other hand, again, as tending unduly to swell the estimated number of Puritans, it must be remembered that the great landlords possessed the gift of many livings, and if one of them, from any motive whatever, turned Puritan, all of his livings could be bestowed upon Puritan clergy, and the congregations would be nominally counted as Puritan. For example, to cite by no means the most influential of a group which included such men as the Earl of Warwick, we may note that Sir Robert Jermyn controlled ten livings in one archdeaconry, while nine other laymen controlled sixty-five more.[2] Thus these ten men--chosen somewhat at random--owned seventy-five livings; and, upon their declaring themselves Puritans, not only would seventy-five clergy have to become Puritans, to be acceptable, but, if we place their congregations as low as two hundred each, we would have fifteen thousand laity thus attending Puritan churches as a result of the religious or other motives which had moved ten landlords to number

[1. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, pp. 249-51.]

[2. Ibid., p. 270.]

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themselves with the Saints. This indicates how impossible it to calculate the number of Puritans who were such by sincere conviction.

As to the learning of the Puritan clergy, the latest researches also fail to bear out the earlier controversial claims on their behalf. Of the two hundred and eighty-one men whose names are known, one hundred and seventy- six had no university degree, while of the remainder, only thirty-one were higher than Masters of Arts.[1] There were, indeed, Puritan divines eminent for learning, but the proportion of university men among them was no higher than is known to have been the case among the Conformists.

Hence the Puritans were but a small minority, both of the clergy and of the laity. The instinct of fair play, which leads a man to side with the under-dog, without stopping to consider whether the upper-dog may be not only upper, but justified, induces us to lay great stress on the rights of minorities, on the theory that a majority can take care of itself. Minorities, however, are usually vocal, organized, and zealous, while the majority is dumb, unwieldy, and but little inclined constantly to resist the attacks of all the various minorities in the field. If there is reason to condemn the Church in England for requiring the Puritan minority to conform, then the Puritans themselves must be condemned just as strictly for their oppression of the minorities in New England. There cannot be two canons of judgment for the same act; and, in fact, as we shall see later, the Puritans there in power were, if anything, the more guilty of the two.

There is much truth, however, in the doctrine of the saving remnant; and, in the low condition of morals in the early seventeenth century, it may well be that the Puritan element was that remnant by which England was saved, as well as New England founded. For morality had sunk to a low ebb, and, even if the reality was not as black as it was painted by Puritan writers, we know enough to realize that there was sore need of a reforming zeal which should cleanse society of its rapidly

[1. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, p. 251.]

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accumulating filth. That zeal was provided almost wholly by the Puritans. Not but that there were plenty of moral and able men in the other party, who were striving with the problems of the day as well as the Unspotted Lambs and Saints--striving, perhaps, with better understanding and more breadth of view. But that was not what the moral situation called for. Luckily the more extreme of the Puritans were thoroughgoing fanatics; for nothing less than a good dose of fanaticism seemed likely to purge England of its social evils. But that is a different matter from fanaticism erected into a permanent compulsory system, or from the attempt to control an organization by three per cent of its membership; and it must be admitted that there was much to be said on the side of Archbishop Bancroft and the Church. Not only was the small number of the Puritans known to him, and also their methods, which were by no means above reproach, but their refusal to cooperate in an effort to reform one of the worst abuses confirmed his belief that their real desire was not for reform but to force their views on the other ninety-seven per cent of the clergy and the nation, and to gain control of the ecclesiastical machinery of the State Church.

He was thoroughly familiar with the facts that modern research has brought to light in regard to the methods of securing signatures to the various petitions presented to the King, and knew how much less they represented than they purported to.[1] Very real abuses in the Church, which were undoubtedly largely responsible for the low spiritual state of the people at large, were those of pluralities, non-residence, and lack of properly qualified preachers, although the number of clergy holding more than one living has been exaggerated. To a very great extent, the reason for the practice, as well as the cause of the great number of inferior, and even immoral, men, who were to be found in the Church, was economic. As we noted in an earlier chapter, the period had been one of an unexampled rise in prices, and in both the cost and scale of living. The tithes,

[1. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, pp. 45, 291, 294, 412. On the unreliability of Puritan petitions in other cases also, cf. Tatham, Puritans in Power, pp. 59 ff.]

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which supported the clergymen, had originally been paid in kind, but had gradually been commuted into money payments at a time when prices were low, and the general manner of living far inferior to that of the later Elizabethan period. In 1585, over one half of all the clergy received salaries of less than L10 each;1 of these, approximately three thousand received less than #163;S, and one thousand but #163;2 annually, or less.[2]

Pluralism and ignorant preachers were the only possible spiritual fruits of such an economic system, though the use of pluralities was abused by some of the higher clergy. Bills were introduced in the Parliament of 1604 for the increase of the incomes of the parish priests, thus striking at the root of the trouble; but they were shelved by the Puritan Commons, though the Puritans were loud in their denunciation of these very evils.[3] By means of contributions, however, they increased the pay of their own clergymen, so that a Puritan incumbent might expect from two to three times what a Conformist might be paid in a similar cure. At a time when over half of the clergy were receiving less than L10, one Puritan of the Dedham Classis received L50, several others from L30 to L70, a Mr. Dalby L40, another L50, yet another L73, a Puritan assistant L33, and one Puritan congregation which offered over L46 had difficulty in finding any reformer who was willing to accept so small an amount.[4] Here at any rate, was a very tangible reward for those who felt that they could remain in an institution which they condemned, while they drew pay from both sides. Many a poor devil of a sincerely conforming parish priest, struggling along on two or three pounds a year, must have wondered whether it were not worldly-wise to turn Puritan; and a Separatist had to console himself with a logical position and a comfortable conscience.

Advocates of the Puritans, in an effort to prove that their minds were not absorbed by squabbles over petty details of

[1. J. Strype, Life and Acts of Archbishop Whitgift (Oxford, 1822), vol. I, p. 371.]

[2. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, p. 219.]

[3. Ibid., p. 352; It was said that three quarters of the House was Puritan, but this is doubtful. S. R. Gardiner, History, vol. I, p. 178.]

[4. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, pp. 274 f.]

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should allow itself to be turned out of control by a small minority, whose attitude it considered detrimental, not only to itself, but to religion and the State. There could be only one answer. Had it not been for the survival of the mediæval idea as to the necessity of belonging to the Church, it is possible that those Puritans who were actuated purely by spiritual motives would have followed the more consistent Separatists, and merely have withdrawn from the body with whose government and usage they were no longer in accord. In that case, the way would have been cleared for the great moral influence which the Puritans exerted, without the embittering results of the struggle, and the reaction of 1660 against Puritanism as it showed itself when in political power. On the other hand, political liberty might have been the loser.

In theological dogma, the Puritans had, at least until the later period, but little quarrel with the Church. Both were largely under the influence of Calvinistic doctrine, although there was considerable latitude of belief among individuals of both parties. The central pivot of their creed was the absolutely unconditioned will of God.[1] The system, which is strongly tinged with legal doctrine, acknowledges no law but that of his untrammeled will. From this flow two consequences. One is that there is no room for a non-moral sphere of activity, for actions which, belonging merely to the domain of nature, are untinged by moral obligation. The other is the doctrine of predestination, by some considered the central point of the Calvinistic theology. "God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and the ruin of his posterity in him," wrote Calvin, "but also arranged all by the determination of his own will."[2] The decree involved both election and reprobation. Except for this decree, all human beings, including those to whom the gospel had never been preached, and the baby who died at his first breath, were condemned to hell forever. God, however, chose certain individuals as his elect to

[1. D. Masson, Life of Milton (London, 1875), vol. II, p. 532.]

[2. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, pp. 42 ff., 347 ff.; J. B. Marsden, The History of the Early Puritans (London, 1853), pp. 78 ff.]

[3. Marsden, Early Puritans, p. 168.]

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vestments and symbols, have explained at length the importance of such matters in that age; and they are quite right. The Puritan attack, however was not merely against the surplice, or minister who did not preach, or immorality in privy life, as it certainly was not for liberty of conscience. It was obvious to those in authority that what the reformers desired was a change of the established church government into the Presbyterian form with themselves in control. Masson claims that between 1580 and 1590 there were not less than five hundred beneficed clergy who practically maintained a Presbyterian organization within the body of the Church.[1] Although these numbers may be somewhat too large, evidence was continually cropping out which showed that the Puritans wished not only to gain control of the Church, but to substitute the Presbyterian discipline in its place.[2] Marsden, like many other writers, has raised the questions whether the points at issue were really vital and whether "Christian meekness and moderation" should not have been shown "even to the obstinate." From the standpoint of the administration of a great organization, upon which rested the responsibility of maintaining what it believed to be essential both to the Church and to the State, it must be admitted that these things did seem vital, just as they seemed so to the small Puritan minority. If they were not vital, then we must impugn either the good faith or the intellectual ability of the entire mass of Puritans who fought for them so bitterly; and if they were, then it must be conceded that they were quite as much so for the majority in power as for the minority in opposition.

The ecclesiastical struggle between the Nonconforming Puritans and the Church, then, was fundamentally administrative. It came down to the question whether a powerful organization, which thoroughly believed in itself and its own importance, as all powerful organizations and vested interests come to do,

[1. W. Walker, John Calvin (New York, 1906), pp. 409-29; cf. also P. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom (New York, 1877), vol. I, pp. 451 ff.]

[2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by J. Allen (Philadelphia, 1844), vol. II, p. 170.]

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be saved, foreordained from all eternity by "his gratuitous’ mercy, totally irrespective of human merit." The rest He condemned eternally, by "a just and irreprehensible but in comprehensible judgment."[1]

Although this decree, being eternal and immutable, could not be altered by anything that the individual could do, as he was forever blessed or damned irrespective of his character or conduct, yet, since the wills of those chosen as the elect were in harmony with God’s will, by careful observation of one’s own actions it might be possible to lift the veil and discover whether one were, perhaps, of the elect or not. Hence all those torturing self-examinations and searchings of heart, which fill so much of the early Puritan letters and diaries. Such doctrine, though apparently stripping God of every shred of what we consider moral character, would be of profound influence upon that of those who truly believed it; and the Puritan believed with extraordinary tenacity. His imagination was wholly concentrated on questions of religion, and that religion was a "narrow Hebraism" which "kept open its windows toward Jerusalem, but closed every other avenue to the soul."[2] His creed must not be considered as merely a series of logical deductions from the Bible, which appealed to him solely through the intellect. Heaven and hell were as vividly visualized by him as external facts.[3] In the early seventeenth century this doctrine was a living thing, the word-pictures not having lost their reality by long familiarity and much repetition.

If it be asked how people who believed that no efforts that they could make would save them from everlasting damnation, if not of the elect, could possibly face life with any cheerfulness, the answer is that the Puritans considered themselves as elected. Now and then a poor wretch did torture himself

[1. Calvin, Institutes, vol. I, p. 149.]

[2. J. F. Jameson, Introduction to Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (New York, 1910), p. 16.]

[3. Cf. S. N. Patten, The Development of English Thought (New York, 1904), p. 121; and B. Wendell, The Temper of the 17th Century in English Literature (New York, 1904), p. 227.]

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with the belief that he was damned, and occasional qualms were experienced by the staunchest; but, on the whole, the terrible doctrine seems to have lost its greatest sting for the individual in the comfortable assurance that, although the bulk of his neighbors were going to hell, he himself was one of the everlasting Saints. Such belief naturally fostered, too, that smugness of self-assurance that has always been characteristic of Puritan reformers in all ages, and also a hard intolerance. Those who did not believe as the Puritans believed were not of the elect, and so were condemned by God to eternal torment. No act of intolerance shown toward them by the Puritans could thus compare with the almost unthinkable intolerance displayed toward them by the author of their being. To show toleration or mercy toward such was, logically, to exalt humanity above the deity.

To the Puritan, the reign of law was merely the reign of God’s will, but it was universal. No act was indifferent, either in the universe or in the individual. John Winthrop’s consideration of the special providence of God, in permitting the discovery of a spider in some porridge before it was eaten, was not merely Puritanical.[1] It was scriptural, and it was to the Scriptures that every Puritan turned to ascertain the will of God upon every detail of daily life. This obviously opened the way to the most far- reaching tyranny to which men could be called upon to submit, should those fanatically holding the view be in possession of the civil power to enforce it. The tyranny of political despotism had left untouched the whole vast field of private conduct, save in so far as the acts of individuals might minister directly to the despot’s pleasure, wealth, or power. The conformity forced upon individuals by established churches had left to the individual his whole freedom outside of the limited relations to the establishment and its doctrines. But the Puritan left no such free spaces in life.

Nothing was so small as to be indifferent. The cut of clothes, the names he bore, the most ordinary social usages, could all be regulated in accordance with the will of God. For him,

[1. R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (Boston, 1869), vol. I, p. 69.]

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that will was expressed once for all, and only, in the Bible, and of that Bible the Puritan believed that he alone had the key, and was the valid interpreter for the rest of mankind. The more extreme of the sects, indeed, occasionally remind one of those hill tribes of the northern Himalayas, who consider themselves so holy that no one is allowed to touch their persons, while they alone are allowed to approach the symbol of their god.[1]

In a trial before the High Commission, in 1567, of certain Puritans who had hired a hall ostensibly for a wedding, and had then held an illegal prayer meeting in it, one of them claimed that he should be tried only by the word of God. "But," said the dean, "who will you have to judge of the word of God?"2 The obvious answer, which every Puritan, from then to now, has made, is that he alone is such an interpreter, not merely for himself, but for the entire community. It was natural, with the Puritans’ idea of God, that they should take special delight in the Old Testament. From it, almost exclusively, they drew their texts, and it never failed to provide them with justification for their most inhuman and bloodthirsty acts. Christ did, indeed, occupy a place in their theology, but in spirit they may almost be considered as Jews and not Christians. Their God was the God of the Old Testament, their laws were the laws of the Old Testament, their guides to conduct were the characters of the Old Testament. Their Sabbath was Jewish, not Christian. In New England, in their religious persecutions and Indian wars, the sayings of Christ never prevailed to stay their hands or to save the blood of their victims .[3]

From this attitude toward the Bible the doctrine developed, as Milton wrote, that in that book God had once for all revealed all true religion, "with strictest command to reject all other traditions or additions whatsoever."[4] It was upon this belief

[1. Frazer, Adonis, etc., p. 137.]

[2. Usher, High Commission, p. 58.]

[3. This did not, however, imply any love for living Jews. Cf. D. deS. Pool, "Hebrew Learning among the Puritans of New England prior to 1700," in American Jewish Historical Society Publications, vol. XX, p. 57.]

[4. John Milton, Of true Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, etc. (Works, London, 1806, vol. IV, p. 259.)]

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that the Puritan took his stand in opposition to the Church. For him, truth had been revealed once for all, in its entirety. Nothing could be added, nothing could be taken away. To this deadening doctrine, the Church opposed the idea of growth and development. Combine this theory of the absolute finality of the truth, as revealed in books written centuries before, with the Puritan habit of literal interpretation, and the verbal application of sayings, torn from their context, to every occasion of domestic and public life, and we have, not merely an engine of spiritual and moral despotism, but one which was calculated to stultify all liberty of thought. Once allow the body of men professing such doctrine to dominate public opinion, or control the machinery of government, and there would evidently be no limit to their deadly influence upon freedom of intellect as well as of action. It is not a question of the personal morality of its professors or of the nobility of heir motives. Without the vital idea of development, both would slowly harden into mere forms and empty professions, while the human mind would lie shackled, debarred from seeking new truth, or from making those experiments which alone bring about healthy growth. The attempt was made, both in old England, with its ancient civilization, and in the New, untrammeled, as far as is ever possible, by any vestige of the past. It is one of the elements that give unique interest to the history of New England as compared with that of the other colonies on our coast. Had they all alike failed, no interest would attach to the others, above that of scores of other attempts to settle a wilderness. But in New England there was an effort, under the most favorable conditions possible,--numbers, economic resources, untrammeled freedom,--to found and govern a state solely by the self-confessed elect of the community.

Puritanism was essentially a movement of protest, and so was largely negative. In fact, to such a degree was it a matter of protest and negation, that the Puritan became absolutely fascinated in his contemplation of that first great protestor and protagonist of negation, the devil himself. It has frequently been pointed out that, in the one great poem which the movement

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has given us, the "Paradise Lost" of Milton, the real hero is Satan, and that it is upon him that the poet’s interest centres. The Puritan’s relations with the Deity were not merely fatalistic, but were expressed in the legal form of a covenant in which God and the individual were the contracting parties Drama, or melodrama, was supplied only by the devil, who from that standpoint, may almost be said to have been the saving grace of the Puritan doctrine. Men become eloquent over what appeals to their interest; and it is noteworthy that not only did the finest English Puritan poem centre about the devil, but the finest American Puritan prose was to be devoted to the horrors of hell, and that Jonathan Edwards was to find the last touch to the felicity of Heaven in the saints’ contemplation of the tortures inflicted upon the damned by the Arch-fiend in the depths below.

It was, as we have said, natural sympathy that attracted the Puritans to the Old Testament, that long protest against paganism, with its "thou shalt nots." The positive side o the New Testament seems to have left them singularly cold. Indeed, so little appeal did the words of even Christ himself make, that, for once, they abandoned their literalism in the quoting of texts, and doubted whether the use of the Lord’s Prayer should be permitted, as it savored too much of ritualism. The Puritans’ virtues were thus mainly negations. Their ideals were based almost wholly upon mere avoidance of sin. They sought complete surrender of will. Humanity, in their eyes, was so utterly an evil thing, that only by an undeserved act of the grace of God was it possible that even a few human beings could possibly do anything pleasing in his sight.

This is not an ideal which can permanently satisfy man’s whole nature or exert complete influence over him. It is a far cry back to the Greek picture of the perfect life as the fullest development of the entire man, body and soul. Whether that may not properly be a Christian ideal also is not to be discussed here, but it is toward some such ideal of self- expression that the ordinary man strives. His history is that of the fuller and fuller development of his dual nature, in all its varied

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aspects. Sometimes the emphasis is placed here, sometimes there, but it is difficult to see what other subject can really be the central theme of his earthly striving, and the history of it. Education, economic struggles, law, government, liberty, "emancipation from superstition and caste," all must be traced through their long careers, but none are ends in themselves. They are but the beginnings of opportunity, of no value save in so far as they secure for man the most balanced development and most perfect self-expression of which his nature is capable. To this natural desire, the Puritan opposed the utter surrender of one’s own will to the divine will as expressed in minuteness of detail, applicable to every need, even to the style of hats for a minister’s wife, in the old Semitic writings. At the time of the Puritan movement, there was much rank growth in society. That growth needed a severe pruning, and for that service the Puritan deserves all praise. But the pruning-knife, after all, is only one of the garden implements, and a tree is pruned that it may grow more abundantly.

This system of negation and protest might have done its needed work and passed, had it not had the misfortune, from the moral and intellectual sides, to come to dominate the power of government. At first Puritanism claimed nothing that could really be termed a party. It may be compared to the Labrador current, cold and invigorating, flowing through the ocean of national life. As it proceeded, however, it met and united with another great current, and the sweep and impetuosity of the two combined carried with them the whole life of the nation, as neither could have done alone. Much had been borne by the people during the reign of Elizabeth, which it had become increasingly evident toward her end that they would not submit to under any successor. The early years of the Stuart dynasty indicated that a constitutional struggle, far transcending the religious, was in preparation. It was by no means true that all of those who were opposed to the King’s views as to his prerogative agreed with the Puritan views as to prelacy; but in the case of many individuals, the two revolts were

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merged into one; and in any case, the two movements, being both directed against the government, would tend to unite, in order to make common cause against the same enemy, though to attain their several ends. It is true that, in the long run, the leading ideas of the Reformation led toward liberty and equality, especially through the influence of that widely diffused education which was a corollary of the new attitude toward the Bible. It is a fallacy, however, to believe, because certain results have followed certain causes, that, therefore, those results were striven for by the men who endeavored to put those causes into motion, for the purpose, perhaps, of securing results of quite another sort. The Puritan, at least, was no more a believer in the political rights of an individual as such, or in democracy, than in religious toleration, and the leaders in Massachusetts denounced both with equal vehemence. Calvin himself, who most fully represents the political philosophy of the movement, was inconsistent and confused in his thought on the subject; and, as Gooch has said, "modern democracy is the child of the Reformation, not of the Reformers." The Reformation was much broader than the Puritan groupings, and so was reform in the state; but the political leaders realized the great force to be added to the struggle for civil liberty, and welcomed the burning zeal of the religious malcontents. Thus arose the Puritan party, strong alike in numbers and in purpose, and composed, like all parties, of men infinitely varying in views and character. Their united forces helped at once to create civil liberty under the law and to establish a tyranny of public opinion.

We have already seen some of the incentives that induced men to become Puritans. As the movement grew, worldly motives, aside from the purely religious or purely patriotic, would tend to influence an increasing number. We have noted above how the financial sacrifice was frequently made by the Churchman and not by the Puritan. Indeed, "many of wit and parts," wrote one of the most attractive of English Puritan

[1. G. P. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the 17th Century (Cambridge, 1898), p. 8.]

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women, "who could not obtain the preferment their ambition gaped at, would declare themselves of the puritan party," while "others, that had neither learning, nor friends, nor opportunities to arrive to any preferments, would put on a form of godliness, finding devout people that way so liberal to them, that they could not hope to enrich themselves so much in any other way."[1]

Moreover, there had for some time been growing up into prominence a new class, which we now call the middle, and which had had no assigned position under the feudal form of society. In the Stuart period, this class was, for the first time, to impress its character deeply upon national affairs. The activities by which, during the preceding two centuries or more, its members had been gradually rising into their new position had given a marked quality to their minds and characters. Looked down upon by the noble, and disliked by the peasant, they returned these feelings with interest. When the noble disdained their birth and breeding, they in turn condemned the immorality of those above them in both. Again the element of negation entered, and the Puritan fostered an ideal which was the reverse of the lives of those who looked down upon him. Puritanism became the "reasoned expression of the middleclass state of mind,"2 which it has always remained.

Among the leaders, however, as among the middle class and country gentry, there was a group which had a very great influence, not only upon the party in England, but upon colonization in America, and which will concern us more directly. We must now turn to examine the settlement of those two colonies in the New World which represented, in the main, the earlier religious, and the later economic and political, aspects of the English Puritan movement.

[1. L. Hutchinson, Memoirs of Col. Hutchinson (Everyman’s Library, 1913), p. 65.]

[2. C. L. Becker, Beginnings of the American People (New York, 1915), pp, 81-85.]