in January his anger toward the regime took on a different hue. Taking away land was just the first step in a general campaign against the country’s “liberties,” one that would culminate with the establishment of Catholicism. On 26 January 1683, Gove began riding around the province in attempt to raise a party to “stand against the governor.” His exact intentions remain murky. Partisan accounts by Edward Randolph and Robert Mason claimed that Gove aimed to kill Cranfield and his allies while they paid homage to their martyred king on 30 January—a report sure to evoke a sympathetic response at Whitehall, but lacking corroboration. More likely, Gove wanted to raise up the militia as a show of force against Cranfield and Mason, a warning that the people of New Hampshire would not give up their land or liberties without a fight. While many people sympathized with Gove, however, he attracted few supporters. Only about a dozen teenage boys joined his cause, and they surrendered before the governor even arrived on the scene.21
Gove’s “rebellion” marked an example of how paranoia could turn a simple property dispute into a cosmic drama in which some people were inclined to take up arms. The rebel’s only written statement, penned in jail to the justices of the court that tried him, revealed a man convinced that New England stood on the precipice of doom. The rambling and barely coherent letter claimed, among other things, that his prison keepers fed him poison, but it ended with an alarmist biblical allegory. “If ever New-England had need of a Solomon, or David, or Moses, Caleb or Joshua, it is now,” Gove wrote. “The tears are in my eyes. I can hardly see.” Statements by his enemies, while biased, help to corroborate this vision of a man who believed New England’s Protestant establishment to be in great danger. According to Randolph’s account, Gove claimed that Cranfield’s governorship was illegitimate because his commission was signed in Edinburgh by the Catholic duke of York, not in London by the king, and that Cranfield himself “was a papist and intended to bring in popery.” In addition, Gove allegedly referred to a theological argument with Cranfield as one justification for the rebellion. The governor, citing the Gospel of Mark, argued for “the necessity of children’s baptism,” complaining that the Congregational system excluded the vast majority of New Hampshirites from the benefits of the sacrament, since only the children of church members could be baptized. Gove considered this “a great imposing upon the Ministry,” and in the fevered atmosphere of January 1683 Gove combined this fear of ecclesiastical innovation with Mason’s land designs, seeing both as elements in a global Catholic plot to extinguish the colony’s civil and religious liberties. Gove may have declared that “his rising in arms was for liberty,” but that “liberty” was very different from the modern definition.22
The aborted rebellion changed the nature of Cranfield’s mission, and altered the way that people on both sides viewed the ongoing disputes over taxation and land tenure. Gove and Cranfield each saw the other’s actions not as isolated events, reactions to local circumstance, but as parts of a global conspiracy. It was a battle of two universalisms: one rooted in radical Protestant thought, the other in royalist politics. With both sides so intransigent, there was little hope of compromise, and the situation in New Hampshire only deteriorated in the following months, as the colony’s leading inhabitants divided into two hostile parties.
Cranfield’s voluminous correspondence from this period allows for a close examination of his changing views of the imperial mission. If he originally considered himself as a neutral arbiter between Mason and the established colonists, such a role was altogether inappropriate in the face of a transatlantic design against the royal interest. The only way to make New England loyal was to refashion its political culture, to purge it of its seditious elements and train the people in loyalty—by force if necessary. Not surprisingly, his plan had a strong economic motive—he called for proper enforcement of the Navigation Acts—but his boldest policy proposals came not in the economic arena, but in the religious one. He believed, like many Tory royalists in the early 1680s, that radical preachers served as anchors of the Puritan Plot, poisoning the people from their true obedience, and he proposed that only by dealing with the ministers could the empire prosper.
The governor adopted these views during a lengthy residence in Boston, the regional center of sedition. He went there because he was frightened to remain in New Hampshire, believing his life to be in danger, but the time in Boston allowed Cranfield to “pry into the secrets of the faction.” These investigations of the town’s Congregational underworld led him to some dramatic policy proposals. First, he advocated the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, as the rulers of that government used their semi-independence to spread anti-monarchical sentiment around the region. They corresponded with and provided refuge to seditious elements from England, and they had their hands in everything unpleasant, from the Rye House Plot to Gove’s aborted rebellion. Next, Cranfield requested a permanent military presence to enforce the king’s will, a “frigate” that would defend the region not only from foreign enemies, but from domestic ones as well. But more than all these necessary measures, Cranfield demanded the authority to act against “the preachers.” Congregational ministers, he claimed, did the most to excite the people against the king, because they had a captive audience in church each Sunday, and unusual powers of argument and persuasion. There could be no order in the region, Cranfield wrote, until he received a command to “remove all such their Preachers who oppose & indeavour to disturb the peace of this Government. Which method will be necessary to be observed in the Settlement of the Bostoners colony, & also in the Province of Main, from which I can only expect tricks & trouble, till annexed to this Government.”23
Cranfield thus aimed not just at the structures of government in the region, but at New England’s political culture: the beliefs and values that informed politics. In doing so, however, he did not make reference to a “New England Way” that distinguished the region from the rest of the empire. On the contrary, he saw the colonies as dumping grounds for the worst people and ideas of English (and Scottish) dissent, a place with a profound and deleterious connection to the wider world. At the same time, Boston served as a conduit, nurturing seditious ideas that could be repackaged and sent to other parts of English America, like New Hampshire or Bermuda. The key institution in this process was Harvard College, the local training ground for ministers. The college sent forth “Rebellious Trumpeters” who spread sedition around New England, meddling with local governments and encouraging everything from violation of the Navigation Acts to the harboring of regicides. Along the way, they excited the people against the established Church of England, as they “term the liturgy a precedent of superstition picked out of the Popish dunghill.” In order to fix the problem, Cranfield demanded the power to turn out ministers and replace Harvard’s faculty with orthodox preachers from England. Moreover, he proposed levying direct taxes in order to pay these Anglican ministers, bypassing the recalcitrant assemblies. Had it been implemented, Cranfield’s all-out assault on Congregationalism would have transformed the region, establishing by fiat the kind of parish structure that existed in England.24
For the most part, Cranfield’s English correspondents proved hesitant to move ahead on the governor’s extreme proposals. The king’s ministers did continue their legal campaign against the Massachusetts charter—a longtime goal of many Tories—but they would not send a frigate to New England or grant the governor power to turn out ministers. Indeed, they even took a softer line on the rebel Edward Gove than Cranfield believed was prudent. The rebel arrived in London in 1683 a condemned man, sentenced to be drawn and quartered for his act of rebellion. In a city teeming with rebels and traitors, however, this old New Englander was a very low priority. Consigned to the Tower of London, Gove repeatedly petitioned for release, while friends and family members testified that he had a history of mental illness. Soon Gove was given free rein to roam around the Tower grounds, and within a few years he received a full pardon and returned home to New Hampshire. Cranfield was long gone by that time, but he did complain bitterly when he heard of the prisoner’s easy treatment, arguing that “if Gove escape[s] the sentence of the law there is an end of his Maj[es]t[ie]s business in New England.”25
In the absence of meaningful assistance from his superiors, Cranfield was left floundering for any way to exert the king’s will against those who conspired against him. He chose the worst
