degree, a factor that could work in the crown’s favor in the contest against its chief rival. It appeared to be obvious to all that a centralized empire, rather than a set of separate colonies that had trouble cooperating with each other, would best defend America against the French. As bureaucrats like Randolph allied with military men like Thomas Dongan to remake the colonies, therefore, they had high hopes for success. These hopes proved short-lived, however, once they actually attempted to implement their imperial policies.
• • •
The first experiment in Stuart imperialism was the remote colony of New Hampshire. There were few places in the English Atlantic of less strategic importance, but the province provided an opportunity for the crown to begin to restructure the political culture of the plantations. New Hampshire would not have attracted any attention in Whitehall but for the many petitions of Robert Mason, who claimed a title to New Hampshire based on a grant his grandfather had received from James I. Though he proved to be a poor politician in America, he played the game of court politics extremely well. His claim to New Hampshire was shaky, but he knew that if he agreed to share the spoils with the crown, he could succeed. So he presented his campaign for New Hampshire not as a design for personal profit, which it was, but as a means to buttress the king’s authority, especially against Massachusetts Congregationalists, who had administered New Hampshire since the 1650s. “Mischiefe and miseries … have befallen those Colonies by reason of a divided and disjointed government,” he wrote in one of his many petitions, and without “One General Governor,” New England was “liable to become an easie prey to every Invader.” In other words, both Mason and the crown viewed New Hampshire as a first step to the royalization of New England and, eventually, all America.14
The first royal government in New Hampshire, therefore, was a classic public-private partnership, combining aspects of the older model of chartered or proprietary colonies with a new, royal vision. Mason received title to all the province’s land, meaning that he could legally charge quitrents from the inhabitants, provided that he could convince them to take out new patents acknowledging him as their landlord. The crown took on the right of government, which would be managed by a governor appointed by the king along with an appointed council and elected assembly. In an apparent act of magnanimity that may have been the price of doing business with the king, Mason agreed to give one-fifth of the proceeds from the land taxes to the provincial government to cover its costs. Thus the royal government appeared to be a winning proposition: it would help to establish royal authority in the region and support itself with the revenue from Mason’s lands—which Mason assured Whitehall would be large.15
Of course, no one could deny that this design had certain pitfalls. The thorniest issue concerned the people who believed they already owned the land that Mason now claimed as his own. Not surprisingly, few if any landowners proved hospitable to Mason’s claims, and to make matters worse, the initial commission that established royal government in 1679 gave political power to some of the men most likely to resist the proprietor’s designs, like council members Richard Waldron and John Gilman, two of the colony’s largest landowners. Faced with widespread disobedience, Mason waged a nasty battle with his political rivals, accusing Waldron and Gilman of being enemies of the king for several incriminating statements they had made. The council fought back by ordering Mason’s arrest “to give Answer for his Usurpacon over His Ma[jes]t[ie]s Authority.” In the main, the initial struggle between Mason and his enemies had little to do with royal government. Both sides accepted the king’s authority, and claimed to be the true representatives of the royal interest. They differed on one very discrete issue: whether or not Mason had a right to the land.16
In 1682 the crown appointed a new governor, Edward Cranfield, to break the impasse. The reasons for his appointment are unclear: he was a military man, a minor officer in the queen’s household, who had successfully negotiated with the Dutch in Surinam for the return of some English planters there in the 1670s. Some historians have argued that Robert Mason engineered Cranfield’s appointment, knowing he would support the proprietor’s interest, but there is no positive evidence for that assertion. In the main, historians have castigated Cranfield for his sins but done little to examine his policies, characterizing him as “rapacious,” a tyrant interested only in self-aggrandizement. While Cranfield’s tenure was an undoubted failure, such rhetoric is unfair. In fact, Cranfield was the most principled defender of the royal prerogative working in the colonies during the 1680s, and his detailed correspondence provides a wonderful narrative of how this early experiment in royal government capsized in a sea of religious paranoia and controversy.17
After his arrival in October 1682 Cranfield exhibited many of the same skills that had allowed him to negotiate successfully with the Dutch in Surinam. He set himself up, as his commission dictated, as an arbiter between the proprietor and his purported tenants. If anything—and in spite of historians’ contentions that he was in league with Mason from the beginning—Cranfield sided with Mason’s rivals. He reported that Mason had exaggerated both the wealth and the refractoriness of the king’s subjects in the province. In truth, the colony possessed few resources; the people were generally loyal to the king but poor. Mason’s proposals, meanwhile, had the potential to further impoverish the people. For instance, his attempt to seize common lands from the towns would have meant that ordinary settlers would no longer have any place to graze their livestock. As for Mason’s opponents, Waldron and Martin, the governor found that “although there might have been some Heats of Spirit & undueness of Expression betweene Mr Mason and them while contending about property,” it was “nothing to render them guilty of such disloyalty as they were charged with.” One of Cranfield’s first actions was to restore the two men to their seats on the council.18
Within two months of his arrival, however, everything changed. The conciliatory governor disappeared, replaced by a forceful and unbending advocate of centralization, by brute force if necessary. While some historians have blamed this change of heart on Cranfield’s acquisitive nature—essentially contending that he abandoned the colonists when they refused to pay him enough—such a reading has little relation to the evidence. In fact, Cranfield was very clear about why he changed his mind: the situation in New Hampshire, he came to believe, was not a local dispute about property rights, but part of a transatlantic battle between the king and his enemies. A thorough royalist brought up in the age of civil wars and conspiratorial politics, Cranfield became convinced that a murderous Puritan plot, a “grand combination made up of Church members of Congregationall Assemblies throughout all the colonies in New England” intended to topple the king’s government and, in effect if not in design, hand over America to Charles II’s enemies.19
The governor’s paranoia originated in a series of disputes with local interest groups that, at first glance, had little to do with each other. One rift involved a Scottish ship accused of trading in the colony contrary to the Navigation Acts. Under the recommendation of Edward Randolph, Cranfield prosecuted the ship’s master, but found that since the master belonged to Portsmouth’s Congregational church, the governor could not convince any jury to convict. At the same time, Cranfield ran into loggerheads with the colonial assembly, which refused to pass any of the governor’s revenue bills. In an imitation of his master across the ocean, the governor dissolved the assembly, sparking the resentment of certain members. In a clear signal that he associated this resistance with the Congregationalists’ longstanding antipathy toward monarchy, Cranfield scheduled a colony-wide fast for 30 January 1683, in order to commemorate the execution of Charles I by overly zealous Puritans 34 years before.20
This series of insults did not sit well with members of the assembly. By Cranfield’s own admission, the people of New Hampshire had been fairly well disposed to royal government, only resisting Mason’s designs on their land. Cranfield’s actions convinced some that the new royal government, at least as it was currently composed, was illegitimate, and indicated another kind of plot, orchestrated by “papists,” to erect an arbitrary government in New Hampshire.
The dispute manifested itself in the mysterious actions of one Edward Gove, a member of the assembly
