center viewed the events over the course of 1683. Thacher spent much of the 1680s, like his neighbors, praying for the Protestant cause and “for the Continuation of our libertys sivil & sacred,” and he was horrified when he received news of the court action against the charter. On 31 October 1683 he met with other ministers to decide what to do—the matter was so sensitive that Thacher recorded his observations in cipher. Several days later, after the General Court met to consider the matter, Thacher revealed the predominant opinion of the gathered ministers: “tht if the patent was forfeited by law, thn it was best to resigne it up to his majesty for such regulation as might make it most fit for his Majesty’s service, tht so the Essentialls of the patent might be continued.” In other words, even the ministers, those trumpets of sedition, thought twice before offering offense to the king, preferring a pragmatic course over confrontation.52
Despite the moderation of many New Englanders, however, there were others who resisted any compromise regarding the country’s “liberties.” Alongside the longtime firebrand, Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, Increase Mather emerged as the most eloquent spokesman against surrendering the charter; he did so by linking the design against the country’s liberties to the ongoing popish plot. Such an interpretation was not altogether fanciful. Many New Englanders knew that the campaign against corporations in England was primarily a means to remove dissenters and their allies from positions of authority, and pamphleteers noted that the same thing had happened in France before Louis XIV escalated his campaign against the Huguenots. An exasperated Edward Cranfield accused radical ministers of “infusing the people, that it is God’s cause and that they may lawfully draw their Swords in the defence of the Charter.” This was surely an exaggeration—no one openly favored armed resistance—but opponents to royal government were beginning to endorse aspects of Calvinist resistance theory, arguing at least implicitly that people, or at least inferior magistrates, did not have to obey their rulers if they turned against God.53
The confrontation over submission climaxed in Boston’s town meeting in January 1684. In a ritual repeated all over the colony, the city’s inhabitants met to consider the design against the charter. The same divisions existed in Boston as in the colony as a whole, but in this case the radicals ruled the day by a combination of parliamentary tactics and soaring rhetoric. First, leading radical Samuel Nowell dismissed all nonfreemen from the meeting, ensuring that only church members would be present for the discussion and vote on the charter. Then Increase Mather rose and addressed the crowd, using examples from the Old Testament and the recent past—including contemporary events in New Hampshire—to urge resistance. In response, the freemen of Boston pledged that they would not voluntarily relinquish their charter, and essentially dared the king to take it.54
Despite the drama, however, Mather’s speech did not usher in a new age of resistance in New England. Throughout 1684 and 1685, as anarchy reigned in New Hampshire and Bermuda, inhabitants of Massachusetts continued their lives much as before. The most notable event was the electoral defeat of several prominent moderate magistrates, but at the same time Governor Bradstreet won reelection. In 1685 colonists learned that the king had chosen Percy Kirke as their governor, an unwelcome choice for radical Protestants. Kirke had been commander of the royal regiment at Tangier—afterward known as the Queen’s Regiment—a division known for its popish leanings. Moreover, after presiding over the abandonment of Tangier—also cause for suspicion among many Whigs—Kirke gained a particular reputation for cruelty in his response to Monmouth’s Rebellion, where he allegedly “Invited 30 Gentlemen to dine with him, and after dinner hanged them up in his hall to satisfie his popish and blood thirsty Cruelty.” Such stories traveled around New England, but in the end the king passed over Kirke—a narrow escape according to Increase Mather, who claimed that “Bloody Kirk would in a few weekes have made horrible slaughters.”55
In the end, however, the coming of royal government to Massachusetts did not bring about bloodshed of any kind. Instead, the change in administration occurred slowly and a bit haphazardly. It also showed the influence of the most hated man in New England, Edward Randolph, who had a very different approach to colonial governance from that of his ideological allies Cranfield and Coney. For all his hatred of New England’s Puritan past, Randolph retained the belief that most New Englanders were naturally loyal, and he recommended giving a great deal of power to reliable local people. He also eschewed extreme tactics like imprisoning opponents or interfering with the region’s religious establishment, which would only play into the hands of his radical enemies. Indeed, Randolph’s moderation eventually set him at odds with Cranfield in particular, who he complained was “of the most arbitrary nature I have heard of.” It seems probable that Randolph used his connections at Whitehall to secure freedom for both Edward Gove and the prisoners from Bermuda, understanding that the creation of martyrs would only hurt his cause. “They are very numerous,” Randolph wrote of the colonists, “and it is far easier to affright them into rebellion than to obedience.”56
The first royal administration in Massachusetts bore the marks of Randolph’s moderation. Rather than Percy Kirke, the king commissioned the most reliable moderate in the colony, Joseph Dudley, to be council president, meaning that control passed to the son of a Bay Colony founder rather than an outsider like Kirke. Dudley’s commission brought howls of protest from his political rivals; outgoing secretary Edward Rawson, for instance, lodged a protest that the new commission violated the colonists’ “rights as Englishmen” because it did not provide for an assembly. The protest never left the council chamber, however, and it seems that historians have noticed the lack of representation much more than ordinary New Englanders did at the time.57
Dudley’s presidency was short-lived, however, replaced at the end of 1686 by the new Dominion of New England. The main difference between the two commissions was that the Dominion extended much farther, incorporating all the New England colonies under one government, and eventually annexing New York and both New Jersey colonies as well. In addition, an outsider, former New York governor Sir Edmund Andros, served as the Dominion’s governor, and he arrived with several regiments of redcoats and some allies from his days in New York. In some ways the Dominion was an experiment in absolutism, planned in James II’s court with little input from people with actual experience in the colonies. More than that, however, it was created to defend the king’s interest against the French. One internal memorandum, written sometime in 1688, made clear that the king had joined the colonies together so that “the Frontiers of his Ma[jes]ty’s Dominions in those Parts, with the Beaver Trade, [would be] more easily secured.” The same report devoted more pages to French pretensions in Hudson’s Bay than to any other single colony, demonstrating the degree to which geopolitics shaped colonial policy in James II’s court.58
The Dominion of New England, in the long run, represented a more focused exercise in royal power than previous regimes in New Hampshire and Bermuda. Andros was a competent administrator not liable to the conspiratorial outlooks of many contemporaries, and he also had the support of royal troops and resources. While he did attempt, and in many ways accomplish, a thorough remaking of the region’s political culture, his correspondence is surprisingly free of the unrest that often accompanied such changes. At the dawn of 1688, advocates of royal government could look with some pride on a system that actually seemed to work. It was only when the new regime failed to deliver on its main promise—defense against external enemies—that conspiratorial fears and partisan divisions once again came to the fore.
Chapter 2
Catholics, Indians, and the Politics of Conspiracy
IN THE SUMMER of 1688 the governor of the Dominion of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, faced a political crisis. A group of hostile Indians had attacked the colony’s northern and western borders, killing and capturing a number of English settlers and causing frightened townspeople to take refuge in garrison houses. Even more alarming than the violence, however, were the colonists’ reactions. In Maine, local officials foolishly imprisoned several Abenaki chiefs, while the people of Marlborough, Massachusetts, assembled in arms
