As the Indian population dwindled, that of the English expanded. Their hogs spoilt the Indian hunting lands and their fences stopped the running of the deer. The country rang with the sound of loud confident English voices as they hammered and chopped and split rails in what had been silent places which knew only Indian hunters. They set to work building more small churches. With some relief their wives and daughters could spread out bedding to air. Around 200 houses went up on the Connecticut’s banks amongst its graceful trees.
Uncas, meanwhile, constantly suggested to his English neighbours in Connecticut that Miantonomo was really on the Pequots’ side and would one day attack them. He was right.
On 29 April 1640 Bradford sent a secret message to John Winthrop. He had heard there was to be an uprising by the Narragansetts with help from the Mohawks. No threat could have been more alarming. The Narragansetts had ‘sent a great present, both of white and black beads to the Mohawks to entreat their help against you, and your friends, if they see cause. And the Mohawks have received their present and promised them aid, bidding them begin when they will, and they will be ready for them, and do encourage them, with hope of success.’ Bradford could not reveal his source, or it would cost him his life. He feared that laziness about allowing the Indians guns meant ‘they are too well furnished with pieces by too much remissness’.
* * *
The Mohawks or Maquas, reportedly flesh-eaters, lay to the Narragansetts’ west and were the most feared of the Iroquois confederacy, the Five Nation federation of the Indians of western New York which also consisted of the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca peoples. The Mohawks were known as the Keepers of the Eastern Door and historically they were the habitual enemies of the Algonquian Indians, who included the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags. Although they were based in the Hudson Valley to the west of Connecticut, the fearsome Mohawks ranged widely, collecting tribute from as far east as the interior of Maine and what is now New Hampshire and Vermont up to the Great Lakes. One of the reasons the Connecticut River Indians had encouraged Plymouth to have a trading house near them was so that their guns would stave off the Mohawks.
Now there was a chance the Indian tribes might unite against the settlers. All over the Narragansett country below the circling flights of the great blue heron, Miantonomo’s most trusted officials were speeding up the production of wampum. This honing of the shells generally took place over the long cold winters. Picking it from the black rocks in the sparkling waters of Narragansett Bay was the Narragansetts’ pursuit all the long summer days, as it had been since time immemorial. Now it had to be swifter.
But despite the whispers there was no proof. In 1640 the Narragansetts did not, in fact, revolt. Yet the rumour mill did not stop, fed ceaselessly by Uncas. Miantonomo was summoned to Boston to answer questions. He vehemently denied he was planning anything. He was not pleased to be told that he could not bring Roger Williams to translate for him because Williams was banned from Boston. The Indian prince never moved without a train of attendants and warriors for security and as a sign of his status. Roger Williams described the great pride and splendour of Miantonomo, who kept his ‘barbarous court’ at his house with fifty warriors in attendance. But when the Indian king was met at Roxbury, Governor Thomas Dudley did not treat him with the courtesy he was expecting. When the English insisted on a Pequot interpreter, who was also a woman, it further infuriated Miantonomo. He thought it an insult to provide a woman and also feared the Pequots would deliberately misinterpret what was said. Dudley thought it a ‘dishonour to us’ to give way so much to them. At this Miantonomo stormed out, ‘departing in a rude manner, without showing any respect or sign of thankfulness to the governor for his entertainment’, as John Winthrop noted in his journal. But the Indian king had not departed before the former articles of peace between the two peoples had been read to him, and once more agreed.
In 1639 after the Pequot War, Lion Gardiner, along with some of the other Saybrook soldiers, had bought what is still called Gardiner’s Island in East Hampton. He became friendly with the Montauk Indians. The Long Island chieftain Waiandance had long been warning Gardiner that Miantonomo planned to leave the English alone only till they had got rid of Uncas, then they ‘with the Mohawks and Maquas and the Indians beyond the Dutch, and all the Northern and Eastern Indians, would easily destroy us, every man and mother’s son’. Gardiner passed this information on to Boston and the leaders of the river towns. In the spring of 1641 Waiandance told Gardiner there was a specific plan to attack along the Connecticut River. The Montauk sachems had been told to watch for ‘three fires that will be made forty days hence, in a clear night’. The following day with the aid of a party of 300 Narragansetts, the Montauk Indians must fall on ‘men, women, and children’. They were not to touch the cows ‘for they will serve to eat till our deer be increased again’.
Although it is plain that many minor sachems such as Waiandance were reporting on Miantonomo in order to further their own interests, it is equally clear that the charismatic Miantonomo was stirring up the Indians to make a last stand, visiting Indian camps and having secret meetings all over southern New England. He warned his Indian allies that if they failed to unite as the English colonies had done ‘we shall all be gone shortly’. The Narragansetts in the past had received presents, in their progresses; now Miantonomo gave the gifts, ‘calling them brethren and friends, for so are we all Indians as the English are, and say brother to one another’.
In a speech that was a lament for the passing of Indian supremacy, Miantonomo warned that while their fathers had plenty of game to live on, now the English had got their land ‘their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved; therefore it is best for you to do as we, for we are all the Sachems from east to west, both Moquakues and Mohawks joining with us, and we are all resolved to fall upon them all, at one appointed day’.
On 22 June 1642 Winthrop reported to his diary with some alarm that there had been an assassination attempt on his new trusty friend. Edward had been attacked at Plymouth’s trading house in Maine. It appeared ‘the Indians at Kennebec, hearing of the general conspiracy against the English, determined to begin there’. One of them, knowing that Edward liked to walk outside the trading house, ‘within the palisades, prepared his piece to shoot him, but as he was about it, Mr Winslow not seeing him, nor suspecting anything, but thinking he had walked enough, went suddenly into the house’. God had preserved him. Edward himself must have relayed this failed attempt with its frightening implications when he returned to Plymouth via Boston, having taken a boat down the coast. Meanwhile, information was coming in thick and fast about a rising from ‘testimonies of the Indians many hundred miles asunder from each other’.
Connecticut’s colonies were vulnerable and isolated. The planters constantly sensed Indians 200 feet above the valley floor watching them from clefts in the traprock. When a new warning appeared of Miantonomo’s plans to attack Connecticut after the harvest, their magistrates demanded a war. The Indians intended to go in small groups ‘to the chief men’s houses by way of trading, etc and should kill them in the houses and seize their weapons’. But Winthrop and his fellow Bay magistrates were loath to go to war again: ‘Although the thing seemed very probable, yet we thought it not sufficient ground for us to begin a war.’
They would have to stand continuously on their guard. Unable to venture out beyond their palisades they would be prevented from attending to their farms or continuing to trade with the Indians. The Bay disarmed important chiefs: Cutshamekin at Braintree and the celebratedly long-lived Passaconaway, chief of the Pennacooks, who lived by the Merrimack River. Once again Miantonomo was hauled in to be questioned. At his examination at Boston he insisted on having several councillors with him, for as Winthrop noted, Miantonomo was ‘a very subtle man’. He wanted witnesses to confirm what he had said. He denied all manner of conspiracy and asked for those accusing him to be present and do so to his face. He said the accusations were mere rumours set about by Uncas – whom he said was treacherous to the English. Miantonomo was fed up of having to keep his men at home and not allow them to go out hunting.
By the end of October the Indians’ guns were handed back, though most of New England’s small settlements remained tense and on edge. The winter of 1642–3 saw extraordinary snowfall, reducing communication between settlements to the advantage of the Indians. It was decided that every town must be furnished with powder out of the common store. Guns must be provided, as well as military watches and alarms.
The citizens found it hard to contain their anxieties. The town records show their fears about Miantonomo were so great that colonists travelled in convoys. The Indians’ mastery of woodcraft and ability to move silently through the forests in their moccasins meant the colonists were constantly on edge.
The farmers were sitting ducks. Some said that Pequots were now part of Miantonomo’s force prepared to burn homesteads and scalp the inhabitants. Edward was one of the chief architects of a plan to join the separate plantations into an overarching organisation for their protection, so the colonies could coordinate troops and act at short notice. The English government could not help because their soldiers were occupied on English Civil War battlefields, and in any event they were too far away. Putting aside their differences and jealousies over land patents, an inter-colonial organisation called the New England Confederation was established. The more far-sighted, including Edward, believed it was all too possible for the Dutch and French to be drawn in on the Indian side, not to speak of the Mohawks. The United Colonies created on 19 May 1643 were a ‘perpetual league of friendship for offence and defence’. Each colony sent two commissioners and no colony was to declare war without consulting the others.
Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven* were thus drawn together. Rhode Island, however, was regarded as being full of dangerous heretics – like Roger Williams, plus Anne Hutchinson and her supporters – and was not allowed to join. Nor were its idiosyncratic settlers interested in doing so. Anne Hutchinson and her husband and followers were in exile at Aquidneck, Rhode Island, on land sold to them by the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags. The Narragansetts’ decision to sell land to the Bay’s enemies of course did not improve their standing in Boston. In addition it had become clear that the land round Narragansett Bay was some of the most fertile in New England with potential for a superb harbour.
Most Plymouth colonists fatalistically buried themselves in the hard work involved in just getting by, raising enough pigs for the winter, chopping enough trees for the stove. They did not want to think about war. Edward, one of the two commissioners representing Plymouth in the confederation, spent far more time in Boston. His fierce devotion to John Winthrop continued. He hero-worshipped Winthrop as he had once hero-worshipped William Brewster and John Robinson. It had altered him, making him more zealous and less open-minded. Moving in the company of Bostonians gave him more of a sense of a New England that was not just a loose collection of small settlements, but a place growing up into a godly nation.
* * *
Immigrants fleeing Charles I’s reforms continued to arrive. Perhaps they had no idea of quite how disturbed the situation was. They were just anxious to get out of England. In the August of 1638 twenty ships and at least 3,000 persons ‘of good quality and estate’ came through the port of Boston. Many were enterprising and zealous Puritan gentry who had no faith in the king’s promises. Amongst them was a small party of East Anglians, connections of the Winthrops headed by Herbert Pelham. His wife Jemima (née Waldegrave) had died on the voyage, but Herbert sailed on. The Pelham family would play a big part in the Winslows’ lives. Amongst the arrivals, no doubt bewildered by their mother’s sudden death, were Herbert’s four young children, including the five-year-old Penelope, Edward’s future daughter-in-law. Their maternal grandfather, Thomas Waldegrave, had pooled resources with Herbert Pelham, investing early in the Massachusetts Bay Company, so they were entitled to at least 800 acres once they got to America.
Like many of the gentry passengers who came off the boats in their heavily embroidered and expensive fabrics denoting their status at home, the Pelhams were damp and anxious. Accompanied by their beautiful and elaborate household objects they lumbered down the rough gangplanks onto the mud of the Boston wharves in their dainty shoes, clutching their cloaks tighter against the sharp air. What had started out as an exhilarating adventure in a large family party had gone tragically wrong already. They were perhaps a little fearful, but the Pelhams had powerful connections in colonising circles, as well as family in Boston. Herbert’s brother William and sister Penelope were there and could look after Herbert and his motherless children. William Pelham was one of the first planters at Sudbury – he had secured land there for Herbert and the Waldegraves.
Despite the storm of the Anne Hutchinson affair, the settlers at Boston had not lost all their human qualities, including the governor, Richard Bellingham. He had been not only the recorder of Boston, Lincolnshire, but also its MP before emigrating in 1634. Herbert’s sister Penelope caught his eye. She was already promised to a young man lodging in the governor’s house, but the forceful Bellingham, who was one of the most powerful politicians of the day, soon got her to prefer himself, and they married in 1641. In Boston in New England Bellingham had a large country house on the marshes at what is now called Chelsea, where he hunted. He owned the ferry between Boston and Chelsea, across the Mystic River.
Fortunately for Herbert and his motherless brood an intimacy sprang up between himself and Elizabeth Harlakenden, the young widow of an admired and very orthodox Boston magistrate. She may have felt sorry for a man struggling with small children, as she was in a similar position herself, and they probably had friends in common. Herbert and his former wife Jemima had been close neighbours of the family of Elizabeth’s husband Roger, living a couple of miles away from their manor house at Earls Colne in Essex. By 1638 Roger had died of smallpox. But he left a wealthy widow and by 1639 Herbert had married her, adding a New World fortune to his already sizeable portfolio (he owned at least 800 acres of Lincolnshire and had great expectations of his father-in-law Thomas Waldegrave’s estates in Suffolk).
But many immigrants were not in his fortunate position and had to travel to found new towns. Freshly arrived from England, the less well-to-do inhabitants of Massachusetts had little idea how to survive in the wilderness, let alone how to combat their Indian neighbours. There were few horses and they were no good in forests. To get to the new towns they had to travel through watery swamps with all their luggage, walking on tree trunks in thickets which sometimes gave way to ‘an uncertain bottom in water’. Once they emerged from the forest they met ‘a scorching plain’. Sometimes the sun was so strong and the fern undergrowth smelt so overwhelming that folk whose stockings were already cut to pieces fainted, yet on they went, carried by their pastors and their faith.
Once they found a place to plant their church, near water, it was thin times bartering with the Indians for flesh, including an animal none of them had seen or eaten before, a ‘rockoon’ or raccoon. And ‘instead of apples and pears, they had pompkins and squashes of divers kinds’.
It was hard to get a herd established; often after one or two years the cattle died, wolves still took the pigs, and the sheep did not thrive unless they were farmed with cattle. Horses also did not do well, ‘which made many an honest gentleman travel a foot for a long time, and some have even perished with extreme heat in their travels’. The lack of English grain – wheat, barley and rye – ‘proved a sore affliction to some stomachs’. Those who survived best were the ones who could live ‘upon Indian bread and water’.
Emigration ceased abruptly when the English Civil War began, and with it the specie that came with immigrants. Prices plummeted: cows and corn lost three-quarters of their value. The New Englanders could not pay their debts in England for commodities they had already imported. There were gigantic economic problems as well as the fear of the Indians.
* * *
A weary Edward was permanently in the saddle on the trail through briars and undergrowth that lay between Marshfield and Boston. Nowhere was safe. Even the most trusted Indian guide might turn out to have Pequot sympathies or have a relative who was a Pequot or a Narragansett. Now that the colonists had essentially become an occupying force, it was hard to make a distinction between friendly pro-English Indians and those full of hatred for these newcomers. The wrong guess could mean death. Edward was no longer their champion and perhaps no longer even really their friend. His admiration for the exotic ways of the Indians had been replaced by fear.
He now believed there was a ‘deep conspiracy against all English in the land’, a conspiracy his knowledge of the Indians convinced him the Indians could win. Pamphlets written by Edward in the 1640s show his belief in the necessity of patrolling all Indian alliances, particularly anything to do with Miantonomo and the Narragansetts. Writing for an English audience to defend the way of life in New England and convince the English government not to interfere in it, Edward was mindful of London friends who asked why the colonists kept needlessly engaging ‘in the troubles between the Indians’. Attempting to convey the intricacies of life surrounded by the tribes, Edward told them that in New England it was fantastically important (even if unimaginable to an English person) to know what was going on amongst the Indians. He wrote: ‘if we should not here and there keep correspondence with some of them, they would soon join all together against us’. A couple of marriages could link dynasties and armies in the twinkling of an eye.
At the height of the threat of war, a mystical free spirit called Samuel Gorton – a man regarded as a heretic by most of the New England leadership, including the ‘heretical’ Rhode Islanders – chose to befriend Miantonomo. Gorton and his family refused to obey the laws of Plymouth, and moved from settlement to settlement managing to offend everyone with whom they came into contact. Gorton challenged William Coddington for the leadership of Newport. The Rhode Island settlements found him insolent and intolerable. Roger Williams thought he truly deserved the name of ‘familist’ and refused to have him causing trouble in Providence. Taking pride in not being book learned and saying the first thing that came into his head, Gorton had a genius for putting people’s backs up. (In fact he shared many of the traits of Puritan settlers – self-belief and a conviction that he knew best about God.)
In the winter of 1642 Miantonomo sold Gorton land at Shawomet, now Warwick, Rhode Island (no colonist would sell him land). Miantonomo’s right to do so was forcefully challenged by the English, and he was yet again summoned to court in Boston. Not only was the Narragansetts’ freedom of movement curtailed, Miantonomo’s right to deal with his family’s land how he pleased was now denied.
Samuel Gorton had considerable sympathy with the Narragansett royal family, who were astonished not to be treated as if they were the Bay’s equals. To the colonists’ intense annoyance, Gorton started to tell Miantonomo that the Indian’s peer was Charles I. Lion Gardiner heard from his sachem friends that Miantonomo told his chiefs not to give any more wampum tribute to the English, ‘for they are no Sachems, nor none of their children shall be in their place if they die; and they have no tribute given them; there is but one king in England, who is over them all’. Gorton’s friendship with Miantonomo made him a traitor when the New England colonies were in a state of siege.
Gorton was encouraging Miantonomo to resist the main power in the land. In Edward’s view Gorton and his friends had acted as the Narragansetts’ ‘tutors, secretaries and prompters to suggest their greatness and our weakness to them’.
Feeling so outnumbered in the huge foreign land, and under pressure to save their lives that winter, the New England colonies resembled military garrisons. Loyalty was everything. Fiercely independent views had taken the Puritans to America, but now they were living in a state of siege there was no room for quirky individual thought. At a time of hysteria exacerbated by the Indian threat, and when the success of New England was believed so much to depend on fulfilling the terms of its godly covenant, Gorton could not be viewed rationally. He was perceived as posing a huge danger to the New England mission, though in fact his way of treating Miantonomo as an equal and great chief might indeed have been a better way forward.
For his part Miantonomo was assaulted by angry feelings of grievance. Around thirty years old and at the peak of his powers, in every way he was hemmed in. He kept the peace, although he was said to have hired an assassin to kill Uncas. In fact, had Miantonomo’s life been less circumscribed, his all-consuming antagonism might have come to an end. It is not clear that he still planned to enact a conspiracy against the English – his real focus was on Uncas, whom he was determined to murder – but most colonists believed Miantonomo was continuing to send secret signals to allied Indian tribes that they should be prepared to rise, and that payments to the Mohawks had not ceased.
Edward and the leaders at Boston and Plymouth felt as frustrated as Miantonomo. The New England magistrates wondered who would rid them of this troublesome sachem. The answer was not long in coming.
As Uncas schemed how to accrue more territory and power via the English, fate rolled the dice in his favour. A sachem of Connecticut and a cousin of Miantonomo, Sequasson, was involved in a skirmish with Uncas and the Mohegans. At a time of maximum tension, what was just one of the many little border fights which were part of the Indian pattern of life made the Connecticut settlers fear for their lives and their cattle. Sequasson asked Miantonomo for help. Maddened by not being able to hunt or even move in the country of his ancestors, Miantonomo leapt at the chance to attack his hated rival.
As much as he disliked rules, Miantonomo was nevertheless careful to appear to abide by them. He asked for Boston’s permission – as he had been constrained to by their treaty – to go to war against Uncas. Boston did not veto it. The answer came: it was up to him. Miantonomo did not approach Connecticut. He may have felt such anger at the Treaty of Hartford, which had removed the Pequot country from him at a stroke, that he elected to ignore it. Perhaps tired by treaties which he could not read, he thought one English group’s permission was enough.
In the summer of 1643, with 1,000 men he went after Uncas, who he knew had only 400 or so warriors, pursuing him to the edge of his fort at Shantok, situated between two rivers. The rival chiefs met on the plains below the fort by the Thames River. Throughout the hot August night Uncas’s scouts watched the palisaded fort. The moonlit plain seemed empty, but Miantonomo’s men were hidden in trees and rocks, their faces painted black.
When Uncas saw that he was heavily outnumbered, he asked for a parley. It took place before both armies, which were drawn up facing each other. Uncas asked for single combat. When, as Uncas had predicted, Miantonomo rejected this, Uncas dropped to the ground as if he had been attacked. It was a secret signal. The Mohegans let fly with their arrows, and the unprepared Narragansetts fled. Many of them did not know there was a bend in the river close by. The path unexpectedly came out onto cliffs and a gorge through which ran swirling rapids. It is said hundreds of Narragansetts perished when they fell to their deaths in the foaming Yantic Falls.
While the Narragansett braves were in their usual leather breeches, Miantonomo himself was weighed down by the suit of English armour lent to him by Gortonists who naturally had taken the Narragansetts’ side. He was unaccustomed to wearing heavy armour, which prevented him from escaping quickly. According to John Winthrop, two of his captains saw he was struggling. Hoping to save their own lives, the traitors dragged their leader to Uncas. The ruthless Uncas rewarded them by dashing out their brains.
Witnesses said Miantonomo stood mute and Uncas jeered at him: ‘If you had taken me … I would have besought you for my life.’
Unable to resist causing mischief and genuinely sorry for Miantonomo, Samuel Gorton added his usual inflammatory ha’p’orth to the stew. He sent a message to Uncas as if from the Boston government, saying Miantonomo must be released. He had considerable sympathy for the magnificent chief who had been personally generous to him. Instead, Miantonomo was borne in triumph to Connecticut by Uncas. On the march to Hartford an exhausted Miantonomo made one final attempt at a pan-Indian rising. He offered a blood alliance to Uncas, the tie which was valued above all others by the Indians. He would marry Uncas’s daughter, and proposed his brother Pessicus should marry one of Massasoit’s daughters to unite all the Indians against the English invaders.
According to some accounts Uncas did briefly pause and think about it before he pressed on to Hartford cunningly to ask the magistrates’ advice as to what should happen to his captive. Miantonomo was interested in religious questions. In conversation with his braves on the issue of where heaven was, he had said that it was not clear – was it to the south-west? Now he might find out for himself.
* * *
A hundred miles away at Boston, the commissioners of the United Colonies met to decide what should be done. They included Edward, who had ridden over from Marshfield. They were all of the same opinion as John Winthrop, who frankly admitted to his diary regarding Miantonomo ‘that it would not be safe to set him at liberty, neither had we sufficient ground to put him to death’. They decided to take advantage of the General Assembly of Elders to ask what they should do. Without any qualms the clergymen ordered death.
This conference met in the utmost secrecy because they worried that if word got out to the Narragansetts, they might kidnap some of the commissioners on their way home and use them as hostages to bargain for Miantonomo’s life. The Mohawks were reported to be within a day’s journey of Hartford waiting for Miantonomo’s signal. It never came.
The commissioners asked Uncas and his men to take Miantonomo away from Hartford jail, where its governor, John Haynes, was holding him, and execute him themselves. They phrased it thus: ‘These things being duly weighed’ they believed that Uncas ‘cannot be safe while Miantonomo lives’ and that by secret treachery or open force his life would still be in danger. Uncas could ‘justly put such a false bloodthirsty enemy to death, but in his own jurisdiction, not in the English plantations’. Because Uncas had shown himself a ‘friend to the English, and in this craving their advice, if the Narragansett Indians or others shall unjustly assault Uncas for this execution, upon notice and request the English promise to assist and protect him, as far as they may against such violence’.
There were many stories about how Miantonomo met his end. One had Uncas’s brother step up behind him unexpectedly on his march to Uncas’s territory and bury a tomahawk in his head. Edward insisted Miantonomo had been put to death in a formal fashion in a house. The death was ‘one blow with an hatchet on the side of the head as he walked easily in the room (expecting no less) which fully dispatched him at once’. There were two Englishmen there to ensure there was no torture, as was the Indians’ usual custom. They were required by the commissioners ‘to give him honourable burial, which they did and had thanks returned by the Narragansetts for those particulars’. How very far Edward had come in twenty-three years to describe the end of the pride of the Narragansetts. Samuel Gorton would muse how peculiar it was that Christian clergymen found it so easy to give the death penalty to an Indian. He wrote sarcastically that Uncas ‘murdered him in cold blood, according to the direction of his Christian advisers’. Most historians nowadays see Miantonomo’s death as judicial murder. The United Colonies got Uncas to do their dirty work and he was more than happy to comply.
* * *
The English had not felt safe while Miantonomo was alive, yet they were no more secure after his death. Miantonomo’s pan-Indian uprising had been thwarted, but the Narragansetts were doubly determined to destroy Uncas. Wild with the desire to avenge their executed leader, they brought New England to the brink of war periodically for many years thereafter. Their heartbreak created a burning hostility to the English that lasted for decades.
A month after Miantonomo’s death scouts and trappers in the woods told the petrified towns they needed to be on permanent professional Indian watch. They braced themselves for bloodthirsty attacks. In Marshfield at a town meeting run by Edward the townsfolk were told to sleep in their clothes with arms ready by their beds on account of ‘imminent danger near to the whole body of the English in this land’. There was to be a watch against the Indians in four parts of the town. The Winslows’ home had a permanent sentry on duty to raise the alarm: one shot meant a neighbouring township had been attacked; two, that the Indians were attacking Marshfield. On the Sabbath all those able to bear arms had to bring them to the meeting house. They begged the colony government for a new barrel of gunpowder.
To Romantic nineteenth-century writers searching for heroes after the American Revolutionary Wars, Miantonomo was a sympathetic figure. His fate reminded the historian Samuel Drake of Napoleon: ‘We do not say that the English of New England dreaded the power of Miantonomo as much as those of Old England did that of Napoleon afterwards; but that both were sacrificed in consequence of the fears of those into whose power the fortune of wars cast them, will not, we presume, be denied.’
Today a cairn of stones marks the spot where Miantonomo died. One of the most important authorities on the period, Neal Salisbury, believes that Miantonomo’s peaceful prior record and his friendship with Roger Williams indicate that if Uncas had agreed to a pan-Indian front, as Miantonomo had requested on his last journey, there could have been an effective institutional counterweight to expansion by Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. It would have stabilised ‘Indian–European relations in and around what was soon to become Rhode Island’. Handled more thoughtfully after the Pequot War, Miantonomo might have behaved differently.
Roger Williams at the time believed that there were ‘some sparks of true friendship’ there. Miantonomo had just needed to be convinced that ‘the English never intended to despoil him of the country’.
Gorton seems to have been genuinely sad. He reported that the Narragansetts mourned for a year and a half because of the enormity of the crime of executing a great prince. Although Edward disputed this because it reflected so badly on Massachusetts, there was no question that the Narragansetts were devastated. As Edward himself had reported many years previously, mourning was a huge part of Indian culture – it was so heartfelt it drew tears even from the English.
After a while the Narragansett women removed the black from their faces, and came off their knees. They had been wailing night and day. In the royal temple the Narragansett priests spoke continually of their loss.
Narragansetts remained dedicated to avenging his murder. If they did not do so, it would so ‘lie upon their own heads, as to bring more miseries and evils upon them’. It was religiously ordained that they avenge their prince.
In the autumn Miantonomo’s brother Pessicus sent huge amounts of wampum to John Winthrop as a gift, intended to allow them to attack Uncas. Winthrop kept the wampum, but sent back a message that the Bay and all the United Colonies were Uncas’s friend, and vowed to protect him.
In the spring of 1644 Boston demanded the presence of Canonicus, Miantonomo’s uncle, to make it clear that the Bay would take severe measures if the Narragansetts attacked the Mohegans and did not stop sending wampum to the Mohawks. But old Canonicus refused to come to a meeting. Uncharacteristically – for he had always been a man of courtesy – he kept the Massachusetts messengers waiting outside the wigwam in the rain. He did not care if they were insulted. He wanted them to know how grief-stricken the tribe was at Miantonomo’s death. Canonicus was a man of intense emotions. When his own son had died he is said to have burned down his palace. After his nephew’s death he could not bear to meet with the English. It was clear to him that Miantonomo had been right. The English were determined to wipe them out. But the Narragansetts had a wily friend in Gorton.
In the winter of 1643–4, shortly after Miantonomo’s death, Gorton and his associates had been evicted from their homes at Shawomet by the Bay government. They were convicted of sedition and blasphemy – in a court that had no jurisdiction over them, in their view – and sentenced to hard labour in towns nearby. Fears that their anarchic ways might be contagious – as well as many colonists’ considerable disapproval of their persecution – got them released. But worried that their title was still in doubt, Gorton escaped to England. Furious at the way he had been treated, he approached the English Committee for Foreign Plantations to ask that he and his fellow planters be reinstated at Shawomet. Lord Warwick was the friend and sponsor of Puritan colonies, but he also believed in freedom of religion. He told Massachusetts that they must leave Gorton’s settlement alone. As a gesture of gratitude, the Gortonogs – as the Indians called them – renamed it Warwick.
Gorton saw parallels between the oppression of the Narragansetts and his own. He told the Narragansetts they too should put themselves under the protection of the English government. The Puritans were in bad odour back home. He reported, Edward wrote, ‘us to be base and low, out of favour with the king and state’. Gorton played on the fact that any court cases in New England had a higher legislature in the shape of Charles I, a notion that was to become an important part of Indian political thinking. He and his friends drew up a document on 19 April 1644 for the Narragansetts: ‘The Act and Deed of the voluntary submission of the Chief Sachem and the rest of the princes, with the whole people of the Narragansetts, to the government and protection of that honourable state of Old England.’ In theory that meant other colonies must leave them alone. Roger Williams also successfully appealed to Warwick on behalf of all the plantations on and round Rhode Island for a special patent to protect them against Massachusetts.
When the Bay ordered the Narragansetts to court once more to lecture them about attacking Uncas, the tribe responded in writing that they still intended to wage war against Uncas to avenge the death of Miantonomo and others of their people whom he had slain. If they had problems with this, the matter should be referred to Charles I. The letter was signed not with signatures but with symbols: Canonicus’s was a hammer, described as ‘The mark of that ancient Canonicus protector of that late deceased Miantonomo during the time of his nonage [minority or youth]’.
The Narragansetts could not know that Charles I was about to be defeated and would be in no position to defend them. They remained recalcitrant and defiant. Around the same time the Powhatans in Virginia launched a final attempt to drive the English out of their lands. It seemed as if all the English colonies were at risk of perishing.
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Anne Hutchinson’s husband had died in 1642. Worried about her own position vis-à-vis an expansionist Massachusetts, she decided to move from Rhode Island to New York state, into remote territory disputed between the Dutch and Indians. But there she and all but one of her children were surrounded by Indians and scalped.
This was interpreted as God’s judgement on her. Thomas Weld, the revered minister at Roxbury, wrote he had never heard of the Indians in those parts attacking like that, ‘therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman, to make her and those belonging to her an unheard of heavy example’.
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After a year of skirmishing and raids, the Narragansetts surrounded Uncas in his fort at Shantok, intending to starve him out. A messenger was sent to Pessicus, Miantonomo’s successor, to tell him to move away. Loath as they were to go to war again, the United Colonies felt duty-bound to defend what Edward described as ‘Uncas our confederate’. The Narragansetts received the messengers from the commissioners with contempt. They said there would be no peace without Uncas’s head. The English should not try and assist Uncas or they would ‘procure the Mohawks against them’. They threatened that ‘they would lay the English cattle on heaps as high as their houses, and that no Englishman should stir out of his door to piss, but he should be killed’. Canonicus remarked fatalistically that ‘the young Sachems, being but boys, will need war, and so set all the country in Combustion’.
An army of 300 men assembled at Boston. It was the last military outing for peppery Myles Standish. Amongst the fray were Massasoit and his men. It was a fearsome-looking troop commanded by Edward Gibbons which made its way west to meet the men of Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven.
Just before the Massachusetts troops arrived Myles Standish saw the Rhode Islanders take the Indians into their houses even though they were armed. He sent Roger Williams a furious message which ‘required them to lay aside their neutrality, and either declare themselves on the one side or other’. But the Narragansetts lost their nerve at the thought of such a great army coming against them. They sued for peace.
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At Providence, however, the tender friendship between Roger Williams and Canonicus continued. Williams was particularly distraught about the treatment of the Narragansetts. He continued to see them as peaceful people, as he would report in a book written for the English market. A Key into the Language of America was a study mainly of the Narragansett tribe and the Algonquian language intended to show the humanity of the Indians. Written on board ship on his way to England to get his charter, and published in 1644, the book became a bestseller in the England of the Civil War. The reason he could be so empathetic with the Indians was that they were descended from Adam. For him, it was ‘admirable to see, what paths their naked, hardened feet have worn through the wilderness, even in the most stony places’. He could not help contrasting the Indians’ kindly treatment of him with the colonists’: when ‘the hearts of my countrymen and friends and brethren failed me’ God stirred up ‘the barbarous heart of Canonicus to love me as his son to his last gasp’. As far as he was concerned, ‘Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies etc.’ But that was increasingly not the position of the English.
The fact that the Indians were barbarians did not matter – Roger Williams had concluded, after much soul-searching, that the true uncorrupt church had vanished with the Apostles. In his 1645 tract Christenings Make Not Christians, he wrote how his friendship with the Indians meant he could have converted the whole country. But to convert them ‘from one false worship to another, and the profanation of the holy name of God’, was pointless. In his view man had to wait for the next Revelation, whenever that would come.
In A Key, trying to demonstrate the Indian word wunnaumwayean, meaning ‘if he say true’, Williams wrote:
‘Canonicus … once in a solemn oration to myself in a solemn assembly, using this word, said, “I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English since they landed; nor never will”. He often repeated this word “wunnaumwayean”: “If the Englishman speaks true, if he means truly, then shall I go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posterity shall live in love and peace together”. I replied, that he had no cause (as I hoped) to question Englishman’s, “wunnaumwauonck”, that is faithfulness, he having had long experience of their friendliness and trustiness. He took a stick and broke it into ten pieces, and related ten instances (laying down a stick to every instance) which gave him cause thus to fear … I satisfied him on some presently, and presented the rest to the governors of the English, who I hope will be far from giving just cause to have Barbarians question their “wunnaumauonck”.’
In 1647 when Canonicus was dying – perhaps of a broken heart – he sent for Williams ‘and desired to be buried in my cloth, of free gift’, and so he was. Williams saw Canonicus as a great man. On 5 October 1654, when once again Massachusetts was threatening war against the Narragansetts, he reminded them of the persistent loyalty of the statesman who ensured his people had never shed English blood. To him the Narragansetts’ ‘late, famous long-lived Canonicus’, ‘their prudent and peacable prince’, had qualities comparable to Boston’s ‘prudent peace-maker, Mr Winthrop’. Canonicus’s funeral was celebrated with the same ‘most honourable manner and solemnity, (in their way)’, as the English laid Winthrop to sleep.
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The days of trustful intimacy had passed. The rising power amongst the Narragansetts was Ninigret, the chief of a smaller tribe closely linked to the Narragansetts, the eastern Niantics.
The only existing painting of Ninigret shows a childlike figure in a headband and a pair of red shorts. But nothing about Ninigret was childlike. He was cunning personified. Recognising the inferior size of his tribe, his attitude was to play for time. While appearing to agree pleasantly with all points of treaties at the moment of making them, in practice he completely ignored them. Hostages were sent who were not royal children; the wampum was never delivered. Ninigret was not in the same heroic mould as Miantonomo. As a result he was a good deal more successful.
In behaviour recognisable 300 years later to leaders such as Gandhi who had no political power but the support of their people, the Narragansetts embarked on what has been described as passive resistance. A pattern developed: troops were sent and at the last moment the Narragansetts appeared to capitulate. A cold war developed and continued for over two decades with the English threatening war, but never having to wage it.
New men such as Humphrey Atherton, whose name was to become notorious for illegally taking Indian land, treated the Narragansett leaders discourteously. On one occasion Atherton stormed into Pessicus’s wigwam, held him by the hair and demanded wampum holding while a pistol to him. It was a different era.
Passaconaway, sachem of the Pennacook people by the Merrimack River, made a point of paying tribute and submitting to the Bay. In 1660 he gave an apocalyptic warning to keep the peace with the English. ‘Hearken to the words of your father,’ he said.
‘I am an old oak that has withstood the storms of more than a hundred winters … I who have had communion with the Great Spirit dreaming and awake – I am powerless before the Pale Faces … I commune with the Great Spirit. He whispers me now – “Tell your people, Peace, Peace, is the only hope of your race. I have given fire and thunder to the pale faces for weapons. I have made them plentier than the leaves of the forest, and still shall they increase! These meadows they shall turn with the plow – these forests shall fall by the axe – the pale faces shall live upon your hunting grounds, and make their villages upon your fishing places!” The Great Spirit says this, and it must be so! We are few and powerless before them! We must bend before the storm! The wind blows hard! The old oak trembles! Its branches are gone! Its sap is frozen! It bends! It falls! Peace, Peace, with the white men – is the command of the Great Spirit – and the wish – the last wish – of Passaconaway.’
In 1646 Penelope Pelham was a thirteen-year-old girl a little worried by the Indians but not much. The possibility of sinning was much more alarming, as her stepmother Elizabeth, now married to her father, Herbert Pelham, was very godly and a little stern. The family lived in Cambridge on the corner between Dunster and South streets with a view to the marshes and the Charles River. Her father’s land was near the new towns of Sudbury and Framingham, named after their home towns in East Anglia.
The Civil War in England had caused the economy of New England to go into free fall. The intricate web of debts and bills of exchange which reached across the Atlantic very nearly disintegrated beneath the onslaught of falling prices and foreign commodities becoming unaffordable. Elizabeth and Herbert Pelham went back to East Anglia. Herbert needed to attend to his inheritance from his first wife’s family, the Waldegraves. He had a lawsuit pending against his brother-in-law, who had moved into his property, the manor house Ferriers at Bures St Mary. Most likely he was excited because his father-in-law, Colonel Godfrey Bossevile, was on a number of important committees in the new regime. That might advance his fortunes.
Herbert may have always seen New England as a speculative venture and never intended to live there forever. But for his teenage daughter Penelope, who had left England when she was five, Massachusetts was home. An atmosphere of submission to the Lord who held the colony in His mighty hand was the background to her upbringing. For the old and the scholarly, Satan was always lurking. New England could be a harsh place for anyone with ideas of their own after the horror of the Anne Hutchinson scandal. Public learnedness in women fell under suspicion for a generation. At her trial Anne had been told: ‘you have stepped out of your place; you [would] rather have been a husband than a wife, and a preacher than a hearer’.
Along with her brother Nathaniel – who was to be educated at Harvard before looking after the Pelham estates – Penelope elected to remain in Boston. They were to reside at their aunt Penelope Bellingham and Governor Bellingham’s house while the rest of the family took a ship back to England. Penelope liked being part of a close-knit community in Boston, privileged and protected by her position as Governor Bellingham’s niece.