THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 157 regarded their plans benevolently, but it was difficult to obtain * financial help to carry them into effect. As was shown earlier, so much money had been lost in colonial schemes that financiers generally declined to help them. Luckily for the pilgrims, some of the London fishing merchants were beginning to be interested in the New England fur trade and fisheries and saw opportunities of profit in the establishment of a permanent base there. A terminable joint stock was formed to which the merchants subscribed money or stores and the emigrants their labour, and it was agreed that after seven years the accumulated property of the venture should be distributed pro rata among the shareholders. Incessant difficulties arose to delay the enterprise, and it was not until 6 September 1620 that the first of the emigrants managed to get away from the port of Plymouth in the Mayflower. Their pastor Robinson was unable to go with them and John Carver was elected governor, being succeeded on his death a few months later by William Bradford, the historian of the colony. After a voyage of two months and a half they came at length to the sandy shores behind Cape Cod and landed there in the middle of November. The region clearly lay beyond the limits of the Virginia Company whose licence they held, but they decided to remain, and after some weeks' search they settled on a site for the colony which they called Plymouth. There building began on 21 December 1620. As already mentioned, a grant of land for the settlement was obtained by John Pierce from the Council of New England in whose jurisdiction it lay, but this was rather for the security of the merchants who had financed the voyage than for the benefit of the colonists, and ultimately they had to buy Pierce out. The foundation of the Plymouth colony attracted little notice in England, and almost the only public reference to it was in the debate in the House of Commons on free fishing when the issue of a patent to the settlers by the Council for New England was quoted as one of the grievances of the fishermen.1 For ten years until the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629 Plymouth with its two or three hundred settlers was by far the largest centre of population in New England, but there were many other attempts along the coast from Maine southwards. None of them succeeded in establishing organised or self-supporting communities because profits were lacking. In the plantation colonies where profitable investment was possible, the planters became to a considerable extent merely cultivators for English absentee owners, but in Plymouth the London merchant-venturers had sold out to the settlers and cut their losses by 1627, and from that time onward the colony was economically self-contained. The settlers could live their own lives, and all their efforts contributed to their own benefit. A great sickness had recently killed off almost the entire aboriginal population 1 Vide supra, p. 148. A about Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, so that the little settlement was fortunately able to survive its early years without Indian attack. Constitutionally the colony was in an entirely anomalous position, for it could never procure a grant from the Crown giving rights of jurisdiction. The Company derived directly from the earlier trading enterprises with a terminable joint stock. When such attempts had been made with the shiftless or broken men who were the usual emigrants of the time, they had resulted in failure, but the infusion of the religious motive provided a nucleus of settlers of determination and self-control who could carry the colony over its initial difficulties, and this was the new and vital factor in the experiment. The men of strong religious conviction were, it is true, but a nucleus; among the original 102 passengers in the Mayflower only thirty-five had belonged to the Leyden congregation and the remainder were a very mixed company from London who gave signs of indiscipline from the start. But the leaders found means to control their followers even before they landed in America, and thenceforward they never lost command. The first permanent colony in New England owed almost everything to a narrow group of men who could work together as a team. To quote the words of one of them: "In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and murmurings arise amongst some, and mutinous speeches and carriage in others; but they were soon quelled and overcome by the wisdom, patience and just and equal carriage of things by the governor and better part which clave faithfully together in the main."1 The steps they took were of constitutional significance, for they gave a radically democratic basis to the colony from the start. Some of the rougher emigrants from the London slums, sent out by the merchants as indentured servants, knew that they were no longer under authority when it was decided to settle beyond the boundaries of the Virginia Company's grant, and boasted that they did not intend to be ruled by anyone, but would use their own liberty. To cope with this menace the leading colonists assembled together on II November 1620 and drew up a short written instrument modelled on the form of a separatist Church covenant. By this "Mayflower Compact", as it has been called, they agreed to combine themselves into a civil body politic for their own preservation and to assume such power under the King as was necessary for the framing of just laws and equal ordinances and the appointment of competent officers. Fortyone men signed the document and thus established a basis for the legal authority of their government in the absence of an express commission from the King. The signatories became in fact the first freemen of a new political community, preserving their allegiance to the English Crown and laws unimpaired, but compelled by reason of 1 Bradford, pp. 192, 3. 2 Facsimile from Bradford's History in Adams, J. T., op. cit. p. 93. THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COMPANY 159 distance to govern themselves separately. Such plantation covenants were used in the next twenty years in the founding of many other settlements in New England, and they provided a written fundamental instrument of authority wherever there was no royal grant conferring jurisdiction on a lord proprietor or a chartered company. Throughout the whole of its separate existence the Plymouth colony was a poor and struggling community, but the religious motives that had inspired it found a wider outlet in the larger and more important settlement that was founded ten years later on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Such a stream of emigration was attracted as England had never seen before, and the new commonwealth rapidly became a factor of immense importance in the development of the Empire. The germ of the enterprise is to be found in one of the small fishing ventures, common along the New England coast at the time, which was started at Cape Ann in 1623 by certain merchants of the town of Dorchester, and by 1626 seemed to have come to the usual unprofitable end. But the Rev. John White, the Puritan incumbent of the parish of Holy Trinity, Dorchester, saw in the venture an opportunity to further a project of wider import. Conditions in England were rapidly growing unbearable to men of a certain temper, for the rift between Crown and Parliament was daily widening and religious dissensions becoming more acute. Puritanism and English liberty alike seemed swamped by tyranny and ungodliness, and White conceived no less a plan than to found a refuge for the righteous beyond the Atlantic and there "to raise a bulwark against the kingdom! of Antichrist which the Jesuits labour to rear up in all quarters of the world". The Protestants of the Palatinate and La Rochelle were already "overwhelmed and enslaved" and he urged his countrymen "to avoid the plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did till it overtook them".1 White exercised great influence among the straitest sect of Puritans under the leadership of the Earl of Lincoln, who were closely bound together by ties of friendship and intermarriage, and they warmly took up his plan. The Dorchester fishing company was revived; a grant of land was obtained from the New England Council with the assistance of the Earl of Warwick, and one of White's parishioners, John Endicott, was sent out in September 1628 to prepare the way for those who would follow later. The number of the supporters of the scheme grew rapidly, and on 4 March 1629 they obtained from the Crown a charter establishing "the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England". Its provisions were modelled on those of preceding chartered companies for colonisation, with a Governor, a Court of Assistants and rules for the holding of quarterly General Courts of all the freemen.2 According to the Virginia and Bermuda precedents a local governor and council 1 General Considerations for Planting New England (1629). 2 Massachusetts Records (ed. Shurtleff), pp. 1-20. were appointed by the Company to manage affairs in New England; they established their first settlement at Salem and by the end of the summer of 1629 the colony numbered about 300 persons. A momentous departure from precedent was made by the Company in England during the same summer. On 26 August 1629, after much secret debate, it was determined by the ruling members of the Company that they would transfer themselves and their families with their belongings to Massachusetts. They resolved that "the whole Government, together with the patent for the said Plantation, be by an order of court legally transferred and established to remain with us and others which shall inhabit upon the said Plantation".1 That this resolution could be legally carried out was due to the fact that, whether by design or otherwise, the patent departed from earlier colonising grants since it contained no provision to secure that the government of the Company should be carried on in England. It is possible that the petitioners for the patent knew how the Plymouth colonists a couple of years before had bought out their London partners and so made themselves independent of outside interference; there may or may not have been a positive design to secure a like autonomy, but whatever the case, the step was of far-reaching consequences. John Winthrop, the newly elected governor of the Company, in the summer of 1630 took out with him nearly a thousand emigrants who had paid their own costs of transportation and were bound by no financial obligations to promoters remaining behind in England. Thenceforward with hardly a break until his death in 1649 Winthrop took a leading share in the government of Massachusetts, and to him is attributable in no small degree the success of the colony. Though the form of government that he did so much to found was one of the main roots from which sprang the troubles of the American Revolution, Winthrop undeniably deserves to be ranked very high among the builders of the Empire. By the transfer of the form of government of an autonomous trading company, and its almost insensible adaptation to the purposes of civil government, the Massachusetts colony was provided with a polity based not upon traditional and flexible English precedents but upon a written instrument to be interpreted according to strict legality. The promoters had no intention of founding a democracy, though that was to be the most striking result of the colony's development. They believed in strong government by those qualified to exercise it, and they felt themselves divinely called to establish God's kingdom. Hence the narrowness and aggressiveness of the ruling clique of magistrates and clergy which from the beginning distinguished Massachusetts from other colonies. The management of the Company's affairs and therefore the whole governing power in 1 Winthrop, R. C., Life of J. Winthrop, 1, 345. GOVERNMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS 161 the colony was legally vested by the charter in the subscribing free- * men, but of the 2000 inhabitants in 1631 not more than twelve possessed this qualification. A demand for a share of political rights could not be refused to some of the leading colonists outside the governing circle without the danger of an exodus to the unoccupied lands of Gorges and Mason to the north. Again, some of the outlying settlers raised objections to the payment of taxes about which they had not been consulted, and the governing clique gave way a little and agreed to admit a number of new freemen to the General Court, not like subscribers to the original commercial Company, but as citizens admitted to the franchise. Many of them in outlying settle- ^ ments could not attend meetings in Boston and elected deputies to represent their particular communities. Before 1635, therefore, a full system of parliamentary government had been evolved from what had at first been the ordinary machinery of a joint-stock company.1 But through all the changes the complete control of the ruling few was never weakened, and the essential character of the government remained that of a theocratic oligarchy. For local purposes the settlers organised themselves by Church covenant into a closely-knit and self-perpetuating body from which all but the most rigid Puritans were excluded. As the colony grew, this device for Church government was adopted in each new settlement, and it produced momentous results. It derived not from English but from continental precedents inspired by John Calvin, and it meant that Massachusetts from the first diverged from England in matters of religion, for worship according to the form of the English Church was stringently forbidden, and those who practised it were driven out. In civil matters, too, the organised congregation became the body in which the local affairs of the community were managed. Political rights were thus restricted to the narrow circle of Church 1 members, an undeniable narrowing of the usual English freehold franchise. But the form of local government was strong and efficient under the lead of the minister, a better educated man than the rest; it ensured the extension of the colony not by unorganised individuals in haphazard fashion, but by a number of community groups each carrying with it a ready-made organisation. Englishmen emigrating to Massachusetts became subject to a government which differed radically from anything they had known before. Between 1629 and 1640 its population rose from less than 300 to more than 14,000, but not more than one in every five adult males possessed full Church membership or political rights. Religious freedom was non-existent, for the government was infinitely more rigorous in its demands for orthodoxy according to its own interpretation and as unsparing in its pursuit of the unorthodox by the civil power as any English government had been. 1 Osgood, H. L., American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1, pt II, chap. i. CHBE I II |