AS NEW ENGLAND SETTLERS waited to learn how the crown would reshape their governments and possibly their churches, Plymouth’s leaders blithely decided to revise the colony’s laws. In June 1685, the General Court approved the new edition.
In a preface, the laws referenced the compact that the Mayflower passengers had entered into some sixty-five years earlier. Next came a list of “general fundamentals,” a bill of rights. It began with the declaration the freemen had made in 1636, that “no act, imposition, law or ordinance be made or imposed upon us … but such as shall be enacted by consent of the body of freemen or associates, or their representatives legally assembled, which is according to the free liberties of the freeborn people of England.” In keeping with developments in English rhetoric and political thought, New Plymouth’s freemen now referred to themselves not as “freeborn subjects” but as “freeborn people.” Other fundamentals followed, including rights to annual elections, the impartial administration of justice, and jury trials.
The last substantive fundamental pertained to the colony’s Congregational churches. Because the “first comers” had braved the wilderness that they “might with the liberty of a good conscience enjoy the pure scriptural worship of God, without the mixture of humane inventions and impositions,” the laws called on the colony’s government to protect and encourage the established churches. Correspondingly, if there was a “defect of church order” in a town, the General Court should compel it to employ an able, orthodox minister.
Drawing of the Plymouth Colony seal, from The Book of the General Laws of the Inhabitants of the Jurisdiction of New-Plimouth (1685). (Courtesy of Library of Congress.)
On some matters of liberty, there was considerable consensus among New Plymouth’s freeborn people. The colony had conducted annual elections for more than six decades. The right to a trial by jury had been codified in 1636. Furthermore, most of New Plymouth’s inhabitants cherished some form of Christian liberty. They desired freedom from ecclesiastical hierarchy and any nonbiblical elements of worship, though Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers disagreed about what constituted pure worship. Plymouth’s settlers also disagreed about the meaning and extent of liberty of conscience. Congregationalists and John Myles’s Baptists wanted town governments to protect their own consciences but did not believe that liberty of conscience required exempting dissenters from church taxes or the toleration of heresy. Both the Friends and a growing number of Baptists in the western portion of the colony favored a broader liberty that would end church taxes and allow a wider variety of religious groups to meet for worship.
In a departure from prior practice, the 1685 laws divided the colony into three counties, named for county seats Plymouth, Bristol, and Barnstable. The magistrates who lived in each county would comprise its court, though others could attend if needed. The county courts were given the authority to try most civil and criminal cases (excluding divorce and crimes for which execution or banishment could result). The new laws also empowered county courts to record deeds, settle estates, and raise taxes for bridges, roads, and prisons. Furthermore, if communities did not tax their residents according to the colony’s laws, the courts would appoint men to complete the task.
Scituate’s householders complained that the new courts deprived both freemen and towns of their “ancient liberties.” The crux of the objection was that inhabitants would be taxed without their consent, an example of arbitrary government that New Englanders had long feared. As far as Scituate’s townspeople were concerned, the establishment of county courts with the power to tax violated the first of the general fundamentals enshrined in the colony’s laws.1
By the time New Plymouth’s General Court arranged for the publication and distribution of the revised laws, it was clear that they would not remain in effect for very long. A new form of arbitrary government was coming to New England.
In May 1686, Edward Randolph arrived in Boston with the news that the Bay Colony’s government had been replaced by a provisional council headed by Joseph Dudley, a Massachusetts politician who favored accommodation with the crown. The provisional council had no authority over New Plymouth, but Dudley and Randolph informed Governor Thomas Hinckley that his colony would be attached to Massachusetts as soon as a crown-appointed governor reached Boston.
Randolph, now secretary to Dudley’s council, brought with him a Church of England minister named Robert Ratcliffe and asked that one of the city’s three meetinghouses be set aside for worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. He might as well have asked Boston’s ministers to dance around a maypole. He also asked the council to fund Ratcliffe’s salary. Its members told him that in Boston, church members made voluntary contributions. Those who supported Ratcliffe could pay his salary. (Boston was an exception to the general Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colony rule of church taxes.) Relegated to a small room in the Town House, Ratcliffe, Randolph, and a few others met for worship. The piqued secretary informed the archbishop of Canterbury that the city’s ministers denounced their liturgy as “leeks, garlic, and trash.”2
In Plymouth Colony, towns continued to rate their inhabitants to support the Congregational churches and their ministers. Edward Wanton once again refused to pay his portion of Scituate’s rate and received his customary constabulary visit. Randolph heard of Wanton’s treatment and upbraided Hinckley for violating the “liberty of conscience” that the crown promised New Englanders. “Let us bring the matter to the square,” Randolph explained to Hinckley. Would Plymouth’s Congregationalists “be rated to pay our minister of the Church of England who now preaches in Boston?” If not, they should not tax Quakers who had no desire to hear Scituate’s ministers. The governor ignored Randolph’s warning.3
Soon Hinckley and New Plymouth’s other magistrates received more than counsel. On December 19, 1686, the tenth anniversary of the Great Swamp battle and massacre, Boston’s inhabitants heard a “great gun or two.” They could see the frigate carrying New England’s newly appointed governor to their shores. The next day, clad in a “scarlet coat laced,” the aristocratic and authoritarian Sir Edmund Andros landed at Boston. According to Peter Thacher, minister in the town of Milton, the “rabble” greeted the governor with “three shouts,” but the city’s ministers and former magistrates looked on with stony disapproval. Andros then marched through Boston, entered the Town House, kept his hat on, and began imposing his will on colonies whose religion and independent spirit he had long disdained.4
Andros had begun his adult life as a soldier. He cut his teeth in battle by fighting in the employ of the Dutch, then commanded an English regiment on Barbados. Through the patronage of James, Duke of York, Andros became governor of New York and obtained a knighthood. The formation of the Covenant Chain alliance with the Iroquois kept New York’s settlers safe during King Philip’s War, and Andros gained a reputation as an efficient administrator loyal to the crown.5
In 1686, his old patron, now King James II, commissioned him as captain general, vice admiral, and governor in chief of a “Dominion of New England” that at first encompassed Massachusetts Bay, New Plymouth, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island. Over the next two years the crown added Connecticut, New York, and the two Jerseys to the Dominion. Andros’s chief task was to defend New England against the French and hostile Indians. The king and the Lords of Trade also instructed him to enforce the Navigation Acts, to ensure liberty of conscience, and to encourage those individuals who wished to conform to the Church of England. The king’s commission empowered Andros to make laws and levy taxes with his appointed council’s “advice and consent.” The council, however, was unelected, and Andros could dismiss its members for any cause. Thus, Andros governed without any checks on his power beyond those that might come from England.6
The Plymouth men on the council included Hinckley and magistrates Barnabas Lothrop, William Bradford, John Walley, and Daniel Smith, as well as Nathaniel Clarke, the colony’s former secretary. The appointees did not include the venerable John Alden, who was too frail to attend meetings in Boston. The last of the Pilgrim leaders, Alden finally died in September 1687, nearly ninety years of age. At an unknown date, Priscilla Alden had predeceased her husband. In an elegy, John Cotton praised Alden and subtly criticized the new order:
whilst to choose they had their liberty
Within the limits of this colony
their civil leaders, him they ever chose.
For more than half a century, New Plymouth’s freemen had elected the Mayflower cooper as one of their magistrates. Cotton used the occasion of his death to remind New Plymouth’s settlers that they no longer possessed that liberty.7
One day after Andros’s dramatic entrance in Boston, he sent letters to Rhode Island and New Plymouth, ordering their appointees to appear on December 30. Hinckley and his fellow councilors complied, came to Boston, took the oath of allegiance to the king, and also swore an oath to uphold their new offices. The colony founded by the Pilgrims no longer existed.8
In some ways, the transition to the new regime was smooth. Andros left county courts and militia officers in place, and he had instructions to accept the validity of marriages contracted by magistrates.
The new governor represented a king who favored a broad religious toleration. Around the year 1670, the future James II had been received into the Catholic Church. Shortly after his conversion became public knowledge, English Protestants grew alarmed about a “Popish Plot” to assassinate Charles II and place his Catholic son on the throne. A parliamentary faction made an unsuccessful bid to exclude James from the succession. Once he became king, however, James needed allies, and he hoped that Protestant dissenters (those who refused to conform to the Church of England) would support toleration for Catholics if they received it themselves. In March 1686, James pardoned dissenters in prison, and his April 1687 Declaration of Indulgence suspended the ecclesiastical penal laws and opened public offices to Catholics and all Protestants. While Catholics and some dissenters celebrated James’s religious policies, the crown’s imposition of religious toleration horrified many other Protestants.9
In keeping with his instructions, Governor Andros insisted that New England towns stop taxing their inhabitants to pay ministers. He also forced the issue of space for Church of England worship in Boston. In March 1687, Andros sent the widely reviled Randolph to ask for the keys to the city’s Third Church. At first, the church’s officers refused, but the sexton finally gave way on Good Friday. Thereafter, the church provided space for both Congregational and Church of England services on Sundays, with congregants sometimes waiting outside for the previous minister to conclude a long sermon. The scene was not repeated in towns such as Plymouth or Scituate, which lacked both a Church of England minister and prospective parishioners.10
There were other important changes. Partly on the basis of existing Massachusetts laws, Andros raised revenue through a penny-a-pound tax on property, plus twenty pennies for each free man aged sixteen or older. The council also imposed duties on wine, rum, and other liquor. The Lords of Trade also encouraged Andros to introduce a system of quitrents, nominal payments made by landowners to their lords or governors. Going forward, inhabitants could obtain land only from Andros and only if they agreed to pay a bit more than two shillings per one hundred acres each year. What about lands already granted? At issue here was the fact that many inhabitants of Plymouth Colony—and other parts of the Dominion—had never obtained title to their land from the crown or a corporation specifically empowered by the crown to make lawful grants of land. According to Andros, grants from town governments were invalid, as were land purchases from Indians. Implying that there had been no legal basis for most prior grants, Andros suggested that settlers should petition him to confirm their grants and agree to the same quitrents.11
Many New England settlers and their former magistrates objected to Andros’s policies. In February 1687, Thomas Hinckley petitioned Andros that the settlers of New Plymouth be allowed to retain “their ancient rights.” In particular, he asked that all of the inhabitants of each town support “godly, able, orthodox ministers or preachers of the gospel.” Andros rejected the request. The next month, Hinckley tried again. He read a statement in favor of ministerial rates at a council meeting. Rhode Island’s former governor, Walter Clarke, countered that persons “who had not actually obliged themselves … to maintain the minister should be left at their liberty and not be pressed to pay against their wills.” Andros confiscated Hinckley’s paper. Plymouth’s former governor next sent a petition to William Blathwayt, asking that laws mandating church taxes remain in effect. Otherwise, Hinckley warned, Andros would “starve out the ministry, and the people thereby exposed to turn heathen or atheists.” Blathwayt, now secretary to the Lords of Trade, was not at all concerned about the potential starvation of New England ministers. He ignored Hinckley’s petition.12
Several towns—including Scituate, Duxbury, and Eastham—contravened Andros’s orders and continued to rate their inhabitants to support their churches. As usual, Scituate’s Edward Wanton would not pay the church tax, and as usual a constable came and seized some of his “goods and chattels.” Andros and his council declared that Scituate’s rate was “without any legal proceedings or authority … and contrary to his Majesty’s gracious indulgence [of April 1687] to all his loving subjects.” They ordered the confiscated goods returned to Wanton. Scituate then found a more creative way to punish recalcitrant Friends. Scituate appointed Wanton and his fellow Quaker Joseph Coleman as town constables, knowing that they would refuse the office. Coleman explained that his conscience would not permit him to fine men who did not participate in militia training. The town fined the Friends when they rejected their appointments. A county sheriff seized thirty sheep and lambs from Coleman, and he took nearly 150 pounds of wool from Wanton.13
In the town of Plymouth, John Cotton’s salary became a point of contention. Cotton’s £90 annual salary was a princely sum by Plymouth Colony standards. By comparison, Duxbury’s Ichabod Wiswall and Marshfield’s Samuel Arnold each received £50. At an August 1687 meeting, Plymouth’s householders discussed whether they should collect Cotton’s usual amount. Only a few men voted to do so. “The negative vote being called for,” recorded town clerk Thomas Faunce, “many more hands were held up.” Town leaders declared that their promises to Cotton would instead be met “by the free subscription of everyone,” and they appointed men to learn how much individuals would pledge.14
Cotton, who expected to receive about half of his customary amount, was beside himself. He fingered Isaac Cushman—son of Plymouth’s longtime elder Thomas Cushman and Mayflower passenger Mary (Allerton) Cushman—as the “ring leader” of those who “voted down a rate.” Throughout the 1680s, Plymouth’s church was roiled by strife and factionalism. In his letters and church records, Cotton made only cryptic references to the troubles, which stemmed from conflict between the minister and Elder Cushman. By January 1684, things were bad enough that Cotton raised the idea that the congregation might dismiss him as its minister. Church members had a contentious meeting in his absence, but they neither granted a dismissal nor restored peace. Finally, two months later, neighboring churches effected a tenuous reconciliation, but Cotton continued to feud with the Cushmans and with Ephraim Morton Sr., the brother of colonial secretary Nathaniel Morton. Thus, when Andros made church contributions voluntary, Cotton’s opponents—along with many other townspeople—were happy to keep their money.15
Cotton informed his son Rowland that he now would “be poorly able to maintain [him] at [Harvard] College.” Perhaps it was time for Rowland to find a pulpit. The next year, Plymouth’s townspeople promised John Cotton even less money. “People being left to their liberty,” the minister warned, “maintenance of the ministry is likely to be brought to nothing very speedily.” For John Cotton and Thomas Hinckley, liberty properly understood was inextricably connected to social order and religious orthodoxy. Liberty meant the cultivation and preservation of churches where Christians worshipped according to the Bible as Plymouth’s Congregationalists understood it. What Randolph and Andros had ushered in, as far as Cotton and Hinckley were concerned, was license for religious indifference and chaos.16
Given the reduction of his salary, Cotton sought supplements to his income. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (often called the New England Company) still paid Cotton an annual stipend for his work with the Wampanoags. Cotton now asked for a raise. In a letter to Increase Mather, then in England, Cotton noted that John Eliot drew fifty pounds a year from the society. The aged Eliot, Cotton reported, was “hastening to his journey’s end.” Perhaps Mather could help Plymouth’s minister assume Eliot’s higher stipend after the latter’s death. Cotton was nothing if not presumptuous. Longtime New Plymouth magistrate John Freeman (of Eastham) once lamented to Thomas Hinckley that “English ministers go away with too great an allowance for the little service they do for” the Indians. Wampanoag ministers who were “constant teacher[s]” received only three or four pounds a year. The New England Company, however, continued to reward English ministers more handsomely than their Native counterparts. After Eliot died in 1690, John Cotton obtained his requested increase.17
While Cotton worried about his salary, many of Plymouth’s inhabitants objected to the poll tax and property taxes. Hinckley complained to Blathwayt that “it seemed neither just or legal to impose that law, made by another colony, on us in our colony, who never had any hand in the making of it.” Taxing freemen without their consent was arbitrary government. Moreover, the former governor insisted that Plymouth’s settlers could not afford to pay the new taxes. “Poverty is like to come upon us like an armed man,” he warned, alluding to the Book of Proverbs (6:11 and 24:34). Rather brazenly, given the demise of New Plymouth’s government and in light of his own place on Andros’s council, Hinckley also sent a petition to James II in which he repeated his objections to the taxes. Hinckley begged the king to reverse course and grant New Plymouth’s settlers a charter that would prevent “burdensome taxes or other uneasy things [being] imposed on them without their consent.” It was another futile protest. Nothing in Andros’s commission required him to obtain the consent of New England settlers for the taxes he decided they should pay.18
Some New England communities refused to collect Andros’s taxes, among them the Massachusetts town of Ipswich. Andros ordered the arrest of thirty individuals there, including the minister John Wise. At the resulting trial, presided over by Joseph Dudley, Wise asserted that the taxes and arrests violated the rights of Englishmen enshrined in Magna Carta. According to Wise, Dudley countered that England’s laws did not follow men to the ends of the earth. “You have no more privileges left you,” he threatened Wise, “than not to be sold for slaves.” The respective positions of Wise and Dudley represented two sides in an ongoing debate about whether the laws and liberty of England extended to its colonies. The judges handed down large fines and compelled Wise to apologize to Andros.19
In New Plymouth, Shadrach Wilbore—Taunton’s town clerk—became a symbol of resistance. On behalf of the town’s inhabitants, Wilbore drafted a petition that questioned the legality of the new taxes and sent it to New England treasurer John Usher. According to Boston’s Edward Rawson and Samuel Sewall, it was a “modest paper signifying their not being free to raise money on the inhabitants without their own consent by an assembly.” Andros, who did not suffer challenges to his authority, considered Taunton’s paper decidedly immodest, a “scandalous, factious, and seditious writing.” The governor issued a warrant for Wilbore’s arrest and ordered him to stand trial in Bristol. Andros also took action against several other officeholders in Taunton who had supported the protest. After the county court dutifully sent Wilbore to prison, Taunton ceased its resistance and collected the tax. By mid-November, after five weeks in jail, Wilbore’s courage was thoroughly daunted. He wrote Andros and begged for a pardon, noting that it was “very cold” and he had “a great family of children.” He promised to be more circumspect with his writing in the future. Andros let him go.20
It was Andros’s land policies that created the most stubborn opposition. Some New Plymouth landowners petitioned Andros to confirm their grants, but most settlers hesitated to do so, partly because of the expense and partly because taking that action would have conceded the governor’s view of existing deeds. Andros, meanwhile, made grants of land that towns had reserved as commons or had in some cases granted to others. For instance, the governor granted Clark’s Island to Nathaniel Clarke. The town of Plymouth claimed title to the uninhabited island, named for John Clarke, who had guided the Pilgrim shallop to shelter during the December 1620 exploration of Plymouth Bay. It is possible, but not certain, that Nathaniel Clarke was the grandson of the Mayflower pilot.21
Clarke had once been a respected member of Plymouth’s town and church. In 1685, New Plymouth’s freemen elected him as the colony’s secretary, replacing the recently deceased Nathaniel Morton. Then, the next spring, Clarke’s life unraveled. His wife, Dorothy, moved out of their home, taking with her considerable “money, rings, and treasure,” assets from her first marriage. She also petitioned the General Court for a divorce, accusing her husband of impotency by reason of deformity. Puritans expected married couples to maintain conjugal relations, for pleasure as well as procreation. Unlike their civil and ecclesiastical counterparts in England, magistrates and ministers in New England accepted sexual impotence, insufficiency, or refusal as grounds for divorce or annulment. New Plymouth never passed a statute governing divorce, but its General Court granted divorces in cases of desertion, bigamy (one man had other wives in Boston, Barbados, and England), and adultery. In at least one other instance, an accusation of impotency led to a couple’s separation, though apparently not a formal divorce. The magistrates accordingly took Dorothy Clarke’s allegations seriously. They also decided that Nathaniel Clarke should not continue as the colony’s secretary. He lost the position and the fifteen-pound salary that accompanied it. Thomas Hinckley ordered Clarke to surrender the colony’s records.22
The court appointed three physicians to examine Nathaniel Clarke’s genitals (at his expense), which they judged to be without defect. As a result, the magistrates would not grant a divorce, but they feared that the Clarkes would “ruin each other in their estates.” The colony’s leaders therefore brokered an agreement. Each spouse would live in one half of their newly built house. Dorothy Clarke would keep her estate, except for one hogshead of rum to pay for the finishing of the new house, and three barrels of cider for Nathaniel Clarke to drink.23
Once the civil proceedings ended, congregational discipline began. Dorothy Clarke was a full member of Plymouth’s church, whereas Nathaniel Clarke had been born within its covenant but had not advanced to full membership. Church leaders called the couple to appear before the congregation. Cotton and Elder Thomas Cushman spoke to Dorothy about “some breach of rule in the management” of her differences with Nathaniel. She confessed her transgressions, and the church declared itself satisfied. Cushman then spoke “a few serious words” to Nathaniel Clarke, who flew into a “wicked passion,” upset that “the church would clear the guilty and condemn the innocent.” He declared that he would no longer have anything to do with the congregation. Nathaniel Clarke blamed his wife for both their marital strife and the divorce suit. Perhaps because they agreed with him, church members let the matter drop. Remarkably, the Clarkes seem to have lived together more amicably after the unusual court settlement. Nathaniel, however, resented the town and church leaders who had contributed to his private examination and public humiliation.24
Thoroughly alienated from Plymouth’s other leaders, Clarke curried favor with Andros. In late 1687, he petitioned the governor for the island. Andros sent notice to the town of Plymouth informing its settlers of Clarke’s request and asking whether any individuals claimed title to the island. In response, the town appointed a seven-man committee to defend its claim and agreed to raise ten pounds to defray the committee’s expenses. Plymouth’s objections did not sway Andros’s decision. By the spring of 1688, Nathaniel Clarke owned the island.25
In response to resistance from towns such as Ipswich, Taunton, and Plymouth, Andros’s council in March 1688 made it unlawful “for the inhabitants of any town … to meet or convene themselves together at a town meeting, upon any pretense or color whatsoever.” The only exception was an appointed day each May for the election of town officers. In the summer of 1688, Andros signed warrants for the arrest of the Clark’s Island committee members, along with Plymouth town clerk and deacon Thomas Faunce. They were accused of holding illegal meetings and of raising unauthorized taxes. Andros also charged Duxbury’s minister, Ichabod Wiswall, because he had authored the town’s defense of its claim. A court in Boston meted out stiff fines to the defendants and ordered them to appear again that fall. Plymouth’s John Cotton reported in September that “hard measure is expected.” Cotton worried that “our people are so impoverished by the management of this unhappy island” that they had promised him an even more meager salary. Plymouth’s church set aside October 30 as a fast day and instructed townspeople to pray for their “brethren and neighbors” appearing before the court.26
By the late summer of 1688, New Englanders had more pressing concerns than Clark’s Island or John Cotton’s salary. Fighting had resumed between English settlers and Abenakis in Maine, and Indians razed the Massachusetts towns of Deerfield and Springfield. James II had consolidated the colonies and appointed Andros in large part to secure the New England frontier. The governor responded to the raids by impressing hundreds of Massachusetts men and sending them to Maine. At the same time, Andros tried but failed to mend relations with the Abenaki.
While Plymouth’s settlers lived far from the fighting, they shared in the region’s fear of a conspiracy that involved not only the French and their Indian allies, but allegedly extended to Andros himself. The town of Rochester’s Samuel Eldred Jr. heard a rumor of sixteen hundred armed Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard and the other islands to the south of Cape Cod. A Native man named Joseph told Eldred that the “governor did not dare to disarm them for the governor had more love for them, the said Indians, than for his Majesty’s subjects the English.” The rumor was sheer fancy, but many New Englanders suspected that a governor appointed by a Catholic king worked for rather than against their enemies.27
Fears of Catholic conspiracies were even more advanced on the other side of the Atlantic. In June 1688, James II’s wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son. The birth meant that a Catholic prince rather than the Protestant daughter of the late Charles II was now next in the line of succession. Attempting to discredit the newborn heir, some Protestants outlandishly claimed that it was a sham birth, that the queen had never been pregnant, and that palace courtiers had smuggled an imposter infant into the royal birth chamber. Church of England leaders, meanwhile, took the birth as a signal to stiffen their resistance to toleration. Later that same month, a jury acquitted seven bishops—including the archbishop of Canterbury—who had refused to read the king’s Declaration of Indulgence. By the fall, both James and his opponents anticipated that William of Orange would invade England. William was married to King Charles II’s daughter Mary, and he now sought his uncle’s throne. James prepared to fight, then fled to France when his allies deserted him soon after William’s landing, amid massive displays of popular support for the usurper.28
In February 1689, Parliament declared the throne vacant and offered it to William and Mary as joint monarchs. A Bill of Rights placed limits on royal prerogative, upheld the liberties of Parliament, and barred Catholics from attaining the throne. The goal was the creation of a constitutional, staunchly Protestant monarchy. Those who celebrated the accession of William and Mary called it a “Glorious Revolution.”
In the winter of 1688–89, rumors of revolution crossed the Atlantic, but confirmation of James’s flight did not reach New England for quite some time. John Winslow, whose grandmother Mary Chilton and great-uncle Edward Winslow had been Mayflower passengers, arrived in Boston from Nevis on April 4 with news of “happy proceedings in England.” Andros jailed young Winslow. Soon, however, town militia companies and mutinous soldiers from the Maine campaign were marching toward Boston. Sensing opportunity and wishing to avoid bloodshed, Boston town leaders arrested Andros, Randolph, and other members of the Dominion government. They forced Randolph to arrange the surrender of the Redcoats, both those at the town’s fort and those on Castle Island. From Boston, William Bradford informed Thomas Hinckley that Andros was now “in irons.”29
It was by no means clear that any of the Dominion colonies could simply revive their prior governments without the sanction of the crown. The accession of William and Mary did not invalidate the decisions their predecessors had made about New England. Nevertheless, New Plymouth’s freemen met in early June, voted to resume their “former way of government” that had been interrupted “by the illegal arbitrary power” of Andros, and reelected all of their former magistrates (with the exception of the late John Alden). The colony held a day of thanksgiving later in the month. For his resistance to Andros, the town of Taunton thanked Shadrach Wilbore, compensating him for his imprisonment with a grant of one hundred acres of land. Similarly, Plymouth sold land to reimburse the men who had suffered fines and incurred other expenses defending the town’s ownership of Clark’s Island.30
Not everyone was thankful. Nathaniel Clarke had been in Boston at the time of the uprising. He made plans to flee New England but was arrested and brought to Plymouth. After the colony’s June 1689 election, the first act of the reestablished General Court was to declare Clarke a “public enemy.” The court required that he post a bond of two hundred pounds, promise to appear before the magistrates in October, and behave well until then.31
Plymouth’s church leaders also examined the Clarke family’s recent behavior. They accused Dorothy Clarke of “encouraging her husband to get Clark’s Island from the town” and of abusing John and Joanna Cotton’s nine-year-old son, Josiah. The boy had climbed into a tree on the Clarke property, and Dorothy Clarke allegedly had pulled him out of the tree and thrown him over her fence. In her defense, she claimed that she had gently removed Josiah from the tree and that Joanna Cotton had caused her son’s bleeding by “putting a key into Josiah’s mouth.” The church ordered Dorothy Clarke to repent and ordered Nathaniel Clarke to appear before the congregation. He twice refused, cleverly stating that “he could not speak, because he was under [court] bonds” for good behavior. The church voted to disown Nathaniel Clarke as a child of the church, declaring that he, like Esau, had “despised his birthright.” The next spring, Dorothy Clarke confessed her sin and was forgiven. Her husband eventually made his peace with the town’s church, which he joined nine months before his January 1718 death.32
Punishing Nathaniel and Dorothy Clarke was easy. Resuming effective self-government proved difficult, and the colony’s decision to support Massachusetts and New York in wars against the French and Indians made it almost impossible. The revolution against Andros had left frontier communities in Maine undefended, and raids in the summer of 1689 alarmed settlers across northern New England. The Bay Colony quickly requested the services of Little Compton’s Benjamin Church, the Plymouth Colony hero of King Philip’s War. With a mixture of English and Wampanoag recruits, Church headed north to Casco Bay. Church and his men successfully defended the town of Falmouth against an Abenaki attack. Eleven of Church’s men died in the expedition, including one Wampanoag and one “negro” from Plymouth Colony. In 1690 and 1692, Church returned to Maine to lead English raids against the Abenaki.33
What became known as King William’s War—the North American counterpart to a war in Europe between France and an alliance of England, the Dutch Republic, and the Hapsburgs—soon widened. French and Indian raids against Schenectady in New York and Salmon Falls in New Hampshire prompted the Bay Colony to send an expedition commanded by Sir William Phips against Port Royal on French Acadia. The Maine-born Phips had made his mark in 1687 by discovering a sunken Spanish galleon, which netted him some £11,000 and a knighthood. His good fortune continued against the French, who quickly surrendered. Breaking the terms of the surrender, Phips allowed his troops to plunder the settlement.
Buoyed by his conquest of Port Royal, Phips next led a campaign against Quebec, where his luck came to an inglorious end. Two hundred Plymouth Colony men, including fifty Wampanoags, sailed north as part of a twenty-three-hundred-man force. Lieutenant General John Walley, son of Barnstable’s late minister Thomas Walley, played a pivotal and controversial role in the operation. Walley had been a militia captain in Bristol and a member of Andros’s council during the Dominion. Phips gave him the critical task of leading the land assault on Quebec. After Walley’s troops went ashore, they repulsed the French, but Walley did not press his advantage and move toward the city. John Wise, the former Ipswich tax resister and a chaplain on the expedition, confronted Walley about his failure to advance. “I cannot rule them,” Walley said of his troops. Nor did he wish to rule them. After several days of indecision, Walley pushed for a retreat and became one of the first into the boats. “What is an army of lions,” wrote another member of the expedition, “when they must not go on except a frighted hart [deer] shall lead them?” Walley’s soldiers were not lions. They were hungry and weak. Many died of smallpox on their homebound ships, which encountered a storm that wrecked one and blew others clear to the Caribbean.34
Wise put the blame for the defeat, deaths, and the abandonment of considerable artillery squarely on John Walley. The loss of pay or having to wear the “wooden sword” as a badge of cowardice would be insufficient punishments, Wise asserted. “There is no less than death deserved,” the minister concluded. Walley countered that the fleet should not have spent three weeks within three days’ sail of Quebec, giving the enemy ample notice of the planned assault. “Our consciences do not accuse us,” Walley wrote. In abandoning an attack against a well-fortified city whose defenders outnumbered the New Englanders, Walley probably saved his troops from an even greater disaster.35
Around two dozen Plymouth Colony settlers died in the 1689–90 campaigns, along with an unknown number of Wampanoag volunteers. In addition to these human losses, King William’s War was a financial and political debacle for the colony. Unlike his predecessor Josiah Winslow, Thomas Hinckley had not hesitated when Bay Colony governor Simon Bradstreet requested his help. With Hinckley’s support, the General Court repeatedly voted to raise troops and money for the war. The tax burden proved crushing, with communities in 1690 being asked to raise five to ten times the amounts they had paid in 1685. The war threatened to bankrupt the Bay Colony as well, but New Plymouth’s government was especially fragile.
The result was a tax revolt that spread across the colony, from Bristol to the Cape Cod town of Eastham.36 By the summer of 1690, six communities—out of the colony’s twenty towns and villages—“neglected” to choose officials to rate inhabitants. There were multiple reasons for the recalcitrance. Some inhabitants questioned the government’s legitimacy, and there were rumors that the crown would soon attach New Plymouth to either New York or Massachusetts Bay. Why pay taxes to a government that might cease to exist? Moreover, the sheer size of the rates collided with the colony’s limited resources. Even with representation, settlers could endure only so much taxation.
The General Court threatened fines against delinquent individuals and reluctant communities, and it considered taking tax collection into its own hands. In the end, though, the tax revolt succeeded. Hinckley reported in the fall of 1691 that inhabitants were “riotously assembling in considerable numbers at Dartmouth to resist” constables. He feared similar displays of unrest and revolt in other communities, including Little Compton. “It’s thought there would be bloodshed,” he informed Duxbury’s Ichabod Wiswall, “if means should be used to reduce them to order and their duty.” Hinckley and his fellow magistrates felt powerless to collect the taxes needed to meet the colony’s obligations.37
The political disarray contributed to the colony’s final dissolution. After the collapse of the Dominion, Plymouth’s leaders petitioned the new king—whom they flattered as a second Joshua, Constantine, Theodosius, and Augustus, all in one obsequious letter—for the resumption of their “former enjoyed liberties and privileges, both sacred and civil.” It quickly became clear, however, that William agreed with his predecessors about the need for greater royal control over England’s colonies. Massachusetts Bay, for example, did not get its old charter back.38
What would happen to New Plymouth, the only New England colony whose government had never rested upon a charter? The most likely outcome was that the 1684 decision to attach New Plymouth to Massachusetts Bay would stand. In the meantime, the colony’s leaders made yet another half-hearted attempt to secure their own charter. The General Court sent no agent to England, instead relying on Boston’s Increase Mather and Sir Henry Ashurst, a baronet and member of Parliament. Mather had encouraged Hinckley to sever his attachment to William Blathwayt; he chided Hinckley for wasting fifty guineas on someone who would “make you purchase your own slavery with your own money.” He recommended that New Plymouth instead distribute money to Ashurst. Hinckley took the advice about Blathwayt to heart. The colony’s leaders sent their future petitions to Ashurst.39
In February 1690, Duxbury’s Ichabod Wiswall sailed to England (on the same boat as Edmund Andros and Edward Randolph). Despite his lack of influence and access, Wiswall was the closest thing to an advocate and agent for New Plymouth in England. He agreed with Mather that funds were essential, reminding Hinckley of Ecclesiastes 10:19 (“Money answereth all things” in the King James version). New Plymouth needed to secure access to the king and his council by paying bribes to men with influence.
Wiswall grew frustrated when New Plymouth failed to provide the bribes. The General Court voted to collect a modest sum through voluntary contributions, but the freemen would “raise but little to send upon an uncertainty.” Wiswall could not believe his colony’s apparent indifference, terming it a “great riddle.” “If you desire to return to the late experience of the miseries of an arbitrary government,” he told Hinckley, “a little longer neglect of your opportunity may hasten it.” He wondered how it was that Plymouth’s current leaders ventured so little for “their civil and religious privileges” when the Pilgrims had risked everything. Wiswall was not alone in his exasperation. John Cotton also urged the governor to provide more leadership for the charter effort. “Stand forth, and play the man,” he wrote him in February 1691, “for our God and for the cities of our God.” Despite the prodding of Wiswall and Cotton, the neglect continued. Hinckley conceded that his government had no ability to procure the needed money.40
Other colonies were less neglectful of their interests. Henry Sloughter, soon to become governor of New York, made a bid to have New Plymouth attached to his colony. Despite their geographic separation, the idea was not farfetched. Some settlers in the western towns of New Plymouth favored the plan, and Martha’s Vineyard was already under New York’s jurisdiction. Mather parried the scheme and instead asked officials to include Plymouth within a new Massachusetts Bay charter. Wiswall alleged that “the rashness and imprudence of one, at least, who went from New England in disguise by night, hath not a little contributed to our general disappointment.” The cryptic reference was to Mather, who had slipped away from Boston at night to avoid Andros’s warrant for his arrest. What Wiswall understood as betrayal may have been unavoidable. Mather’s son Cotton informed Hinckley that Plymouth had no chance of obtaining its own charter. It was only a matter of whether Massachusetts or New York would absorb the small colony. In the fall of 1691, the crown attached Plymouth and the islands to its south to an expanded Province of Massachusetts Bay.41
Even before English officials settled its fate, the Pilgrim colony had ceased to govern itself. Some communities did not send deputies or freemen to the June 1691 election, causing the magistrates to reschedule it for later in the summer. The last action of New Plymouth’s General Court came in July 1691, when it appointed a day of fasting and prayer. During the final months of the colony’s existence, there were no general courts or courts of assistants.
Increase Mather received the honor of recommending the new province’s first governor and the members of his council. As governor, he proposed William Phips, who had returned to England to answer critics of the failed campaign against Quebec. As members of Phips’s council, Mather recommended Hinckley, Walley, Barnabas Lothrop, and William Bradford, men who had held office under Andros and during the colony’s final years of self-government. Shortly after Governor Phips reached Boston in May 1692, he appointed a special court to prosecute cases of alleged witchcraft at Salem, then focused his own attentions on the ongoing war against the French-backed Abenaki.
While representatives from Plymouth, Barnstable, and Bristol Counties had little clout in the expanded Massachusetts, its charter guaranteed that colonists could elect a House of Representatives each year, that the members of that House could elect the governor’s council (subject to the governor’s veto), and that the king would appoint someone from Massachusetts rather than a stranger as governor. The new Massachusetts Assembly (House, council, and governor) declared that it alone could levy taxes, direct expenditures, and oversee the colony’s courts, but the new charter allowed the Privy Council to veto any colonial laws within three years of their passage.
Both in Massachusetts Bay and New Plymouth, there was far more quiescence than had been the case during the Dominion. In his diary, John Paine of Eastham lauded King William as “a bulwark to their castle’s walls,” a monarch appointed by God to protect Protestants from “the heathen and Antichristians [Catholics].” Rather than fearing bishops and royal governors as agents of Antichrist, settlers increasingly saw themselves as members of a Protestant empire with a shared interest in advancing the cause of Christ against France and Spain.42
The Massachusetts Assembly required communities to support an “able, learned and orthodox minister.” In other words, the church taxes that Edmund Andros had scuttled were back. By adding Plymouth Colony to its territory, though, Massachusetts Bay had absorbed hundreds of religious dissenters into its jurisdiction. The historian William McLoughlin estimates that approximately one-third of Bristol County’s population consisted of Baptists and Quakers. As had been the case during the 1670s and 1680s, men who refused to pay ministerial rates had their property seized by constables, and some ended up in prison. For decades, Baptists, Quakers, and Anglicans fought for exemptions from laws that required them to support ministers and churches they rejected.43
The new charter was good news for John Cotton, as Plymouth resumed its collection of his salary. Cotton’s ministry came to an ignominious end a few years later, however. In addition to the conflicts with members of the Cushman and Morton families, there had been other signs of trouble. In 1691, John Gray accosted Cotton in the street. “Thou, a minister of the gospel,” Gray railed. “Thou art a dirty fellow.” Then in June 1697, Plymouth’s church members assembled to consider “some miscarriages in the pastor towards Rebekah Morton.” He confessed to one of her charges and denied everything else. The church voted to continue him in office, but when rumors of Cotton’s indiscretions spread across New England, other ministers intervened. According to Boston’s Samuel Sewall, a council of neighboring churches found him guilty of “notorious breaches of the Seventh Commandment [against adultery], and undue carriage in choosing elders.” The more salacious accusations extended beyond Rebecca Morton to include other women. Cotton’s friends and ministerial colleagues advised him to make a full confession and ask for a dismissal. Cotton partly capitulated. He agreed that his ministry in Plymouth was over, but he now refused to admit any wrongdoing.44
Joanna Cotton had borne her husband’s scandalous behavior in Connecticut. She had moved with him to Martha’s Vineyard, then to Plymouth. For decades, she had raised and mourned children, all the while continuing her work as a midwife and healer. She visited the sick, made remedies, and sent recipes and advice in letters. In the 1690s, she coexisted uneasily with a French Catholic physician—Francis LeBaron—who had moved to Plymouth. Joanna sometimes recommended bloodletting, but customarily only after “physick”—medicine—had been tried. John once informed one of his sons that LeBaron was “very sullen and surly” toward Joanna. Most townspeople probably preferred her ministrations.45
As John stewed over his most recent humiliation, Joanna’s work was unremitting. In February 1698, Robert Bartlett asked her to come to his family. Joanna spent the night. Sarah Bartlett had just given birth to a “lovely boy … both its feet bending inwards, likely to be a cripple.” She spent the night with the Bartletts and returned home early the next morning. (The Bartlett baby died several days later.) There was no time to rest, however. Joseph Churchill needed her help with his twenty-year-old son. At the same time, two men wanted her to visit their pregnant wives. William Ring fetched her on horseback to tend to his sick daughter. Finally, she visited Mercy Wood and treated an infection that eventually proved fatal. “She was never more willing to do and run as now,” John Cotton observed, even though Joanna was “tired with serving.”46
Joanna was also tired of her husband’s inability to own up to his transgressions. Shortly after Joanna’s spate of work in late February and early March, Boston’s Samuel Sewall visited Plymouth. He dined with the town’s new minister, but he also called on John and Joanna. “A free confession was the best way,” Sewall urged John Cotton repeatedly, bringing up the example of David’s adultery, suffering, repentance, and redemption. The deposed minister would not budge. “Some of my last words to him was,” Sewall wrote, “kiss the Son [Christ], lest he be angry.”47
In an attempt to salvage his reputation, especially with Joanna, John Cotton blamed his dismissal on the circumstances surrounding New Plymouth’s failure to obtain its own charter. He explained that when his brother-in-law Increase Mather had returned from England with the new Massachusetts Bay charter, “our people were all in a rage at him [Mather].” They accused Mather of having pretended friendship to New Plymouth and then of having “take[n] them in to be slaves.” Cotton fingered Ichabod Wiswall as the source of the contention. “When another man [Wiswall] came home from old England,” Cotton continued, “he made it his work … to traduce Brother Mather.” What did any of this have to do with John Cotton? Plymouth’s now former minister had defended Mather against his critics. Five years later, Cotton suggested, those grudge-bearing critics sought revenge with their trumped-up charges. It seems highly unlikely that the machinations surrounding the charter had much if anything to do with Cotton’s travails. Most damning is the fact that the Mathers themselves accepted his guilt. Increase Mather thought the council of ministers had been too lenient on Cotton.48
Gravestone of Joanna Cotton (1642–1702), Sandwich, Massachusetts. The epitaph reads: “The memory of the just is blessed.” The winged skull represents the flight of the soul to heaven. (Photograph by author.)
Plymouth Colony had dissolved, and so did John and Joanna Cotton’s marriage. Joanna could have sued John for divorce on the grounds of adultery, but she did not want to expose herself and her family to further humiliation. Instead, she separated from John by moving to her son Rowland’s home in Sandwich. Joanna’s withdrawal stung John. Churches and communities expected couples to cohabit. Wives were bound to their husbands, bound to obey and follow them. By the summer of 1698, John complained to Joanna about “aspersions, grounded upon your living so long at Sandwich.” She was unmoved.49
In the wake of John Cotton’s dismissal, no other congregation in New England would employ him. Then a call came from Charlestown (later Charleston), South Carolina, founded some two decades earlier. Congregationalists there were forming a church and needed a pastor. When John Cotton left for South Carolina in 1698, Joanna remained in Massachusetts. “Mother seems not to know what to do about coming to you,” Rowland Cotton wrote to his father. It seems, however, that she knew exactly what she wanted to do. By staying in Sandwich, Joanna Cotton exercised a measure of liberty.50