WEBVTT NOTE 19. The Founding of Massachusetts Bay 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.800 Volume 1, Chapter 19, The Founding of Massachusetts Bay 2 00:00:06.800 --> 00:00:14.080 When the tiny band of separatists left England in 1608, the great bulk of English Puritans, 3 00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:20.560 despite the persecutions of the early part of the reign of James I, were highly confident of their 4 00:00:20.560 --> 00:00:26.400 future in England and of the potential for reform within the English church structure. 5 00:00:26.400 --> 00:00:32.400 Why then the intense great migration only one generation later? 6 00:00:32.400 --> 00:00:37.400 What had happened to sap the confidence of the English Puritans? 7 00:00:37.400 --> 00:00:46.400 At the beginning of the 17th century, virtually all of England's export trade consisted of unfinished woolen cloths, 8 00:00:46.400 --> 00:00:53.400 which were sent to the Netherlands for finishing and dyeing, and to be re-exported to the North for grain. 9 00:00:53.400 --> 00:01:00.400 of Grain. In the decade following the conclusion of Peace with Spain in 1604, the woollen trade 10 00:01:01.740 --> 00:01:08.740 and hence the English economy flourished. But parliamentary refusal to approve any further 11 00:01:09.660 --> 00:01:16.660 taxes in protest against rising taxation as well as the persecution of Puritan clergy 12 00:01:16.660 --> 00:01:25.620 led in 1614 to the Crown's dissolution of Parliament. In its search for revenue the 13 00:01:25.620 --> 00:01:32.380 Crown then decided to create new monopolies and its meddling in the vital wool trade had 14 00:01:32.380 --> 00:01:41.180 disastrous results. On the proposal of Alderman Cocaine of the Eastland Company the government 15 00:01:41.180 --> 00:01:46.260 suspended the charter of the merchant adventurers and attempted monopoly in the export of 16 00:01:46.260 --> 00:01:52.980 of Unfinished Cloth, and completely prohibited the export of unfinished cloth upon which 17 00:01:52.980 --> 00:02:01.020 the prosperity of England rested. Instead, a new charter was granted to a syndicate of 18 00:02:01.020 --> 00:02:09.060 Eastland Company and Levant Company merchants in a new company, the King's Merchant Adventures, 19 00:02:09.060 --> 00:02:14.980 which had a legal monopoly of the export of finished and dyed cloth, half the profits 20 00:02:14.980 --> 00:02:24.420 The English government failed to realize that the English were not technically equipped for 21 00:02:24.420 --> 00:02:26.820 finishing and dyeing cloth. 22 00:02:26.820 --> 00:02:32.200 The higher cost of finishing woolens in England left an open field for the emergence of a 23 00:02:32.200 --> 00:02:36.480 new competitive cloth industry on the continent. 24 00:02:36.480 --> 00:02:45.180 As a result, English woolen exports fell by a catastrophic one-third in two years, and 25 00:02:45.180 --> 00:02:52.260 the repeal of the prohibition in 1616 could not succeed in reviving the cloth trade. 26 00:02:52.260 --> 00:02:57.820 Not only did the tax-crippled English industry have to compete with the low-cost industry 27 00:02:57.820 --> 00:03:03.500 of the continent, but the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 brought about a 28 00:03:03.500 --> 00:03:09.500 The continent-wide debasement of currencies, a debasement that aided exports from the debasing 29 00:03:09.500 --> 00:03:14.700 countries at the expense of such other countries as England. 30 00:03:14.700 --> 00:03:21.020 Renewal of war in the Netherlands in 1622 further disrupted the vital market there, 31 00:03:21.020 --> 00:03:28.780 and the result was a continuing Great Depression in England in the 20s, a depression and unemployment 32 00:03:28.780 --> 00:03:37.060 concentrated particularly in the cloth-making centers of East Anglia and the West Country. 33 00:03:37.060 --> 00:03:42.740 Fearful of rising political opposition sparked by the Depression, the government tried desperately 34 00:03:42.740 --> 00:03:49.140 to relieve the victims of the Depression by maintaining wage rates at a high level and 35 00:03:49.140 --> 00:03:52.660 keeping failing companies in operation. 36 00:03:52.660 --> 00:03:58.380 The result was only to prolong and intensify the Depression the government was trying to 37 00:03:58.380 --> 00:04:05.740 and Cure. Artificially high wage rates deepened unemployment in the clothing centers and imposed 38 00:04:05.740 --> 00:04:13.360 higher cost on an already high-cost industry. Propping up of inefficient producers wasted 39 00:04:13.360 --> 00:04:20.300 more capital and ruined their creditors, and the domination of inefficient monopoly companies 40 00:04:20.300 --> 00:04:27.660 was tightened at the very time when the industry's salvation could only come from freer competition 41 00:04:27.660 --> 00:04:32.220 and Escape from the Taxation and Regulation of Government. 42 00:04:32.220 --> 00:04:37.740 The overcapitalized monopoly companies were especially hard hit by the Depression. 43 00:04:37.740 --> 00:04:42.740 The East India and Muscovy companies defaulted to their creditors. 44 00:04:42.740 --> 00:04:47.780 And the Virginia Company's difficulties resulting from the government's monopoly of tobacco 45 00:04:47.780 --> 00:04:56.280 sales led to its dissolution, hence the Royal Assumption of Power over the Virginia Colony. 46 00:04:56.280 --> 00:05:00.920 One growing light on the economic horizon was the exportation of the lightweight new 47 00:05:00.920 --> 00:05:09.340 draperies produced free from government control and over which no monopoly company held sway. 48 00:05:09.340 --> 00:05:15.180 Export trade in these new draperies was developing in southern Europe by the 1620s. 49 00:05:15.180 --> 00:05:21.720 The contrast in the fortunes of the two branches of cloth trade was too great to be ignored. 50 00:05:21.720 --> 00:05:28.560 The connection between free trade and economic growth and between privileges and decline 51 00:05:28.560 --> 00:05:32.000 was becoming evident to contemporaries. 52 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:36.740 In successive parliaments, the representatives of the people demanded freedom in economic 53 00:05:36.740 --> 00:05:41.660 and political affairs and the termination of the government's restrictions, monopolies 54 00:05:41.660 --> 00:05:47.840 and taxes that had brought about the depression engulfing the country. 55 00:05:47.840 --> 00:05:53.640 The government responded characteristically by imprisoning the opposition leaders such 56 00:05:53.640 --> 00:06:01.080 as Sir Edwin Sandys and Lord Say and Seal for advocating free trade, radicalism and 57 00:06:01.080 --> 00:06:05.500 interference with tax collection. 58 00:06:05.500 --> 00:06:12.560 The Parliament of 1624 presented a list of grievances in protest against the moratoria 59 00:06:12.560 --> 00:06:17.680 issued to debtors against their creditors, against the increases in government officials 60 00:06:17.680 --> 00:06:24.280 and Taxes, Against Extraordinary Tariffs and Taxes, Against the Government's Use of Informers 61 00:06:24.280 --> 00:06:31.080 and Enforcement of Regulations and Controls, and Against the Monopoly Trading Companies, 62 00:06:31.080 --> 00:06:36.560 which were popularly regarded simply as gangs of thieves from the East India Company to 63 00:06:36.560 --> 00:06:40.400 the Council for New England. 64 00:06:40.400 --> 00:06:46.600 The Parliament concluded by passing the Act Against Monopolies, by which all monopolies 65 00:06:46.600 --> 00:06:51.960 were outlawed and all proclamations furthering them prohibited. 66 00:06:51.960 --> 00:06:57.940 Unlike the depression of the 1550s, which had led to the unquestioned creation of monumental 67 00:06:57.940 --> 00:07:05.440 government controls over the economy, the depression of the 1620s witnessed an attempt 68 00:07:05.440 --> 00:07:11.580 toward liberalization by removing the regulations that had caused the crisis. 69 00:07:11.580 --> 00:07:16.580 The movement for the abolition of the government's monopolies and regulations became a major 70 00:07:16.580 --> 00:07:22.140 were part of the 17th century constitutional struggle in England and had a significant 71 00:07:22.140 --> 00:07:27.580 influence on the American colonists, whose migration was a fruit of the government's 72 00:07:27.580 --> 00:07:34.380 controls. However clear the principles of liberalism had become, the struggle for their 73 00:07:34.380 --> 00:07:42.500 realization in the 17th century had hardly begun. The accession of Charles I to the throne 74 00:07:42.500 --> 00:07:49.500 England in March 1625 ushered in a period of conflict that was to span the mid-17th 75 00:07:49.500 --> 00:07:54.860 century. The financial difficulties of the new government were greatly increased when 76 00:07:54.860 --> 00:08:01.860 England decided to enter the Thirty Years War by attacking Spain in 1625. 77 00:08:03.980 --> 00:08:09.260 The English government had remained behind the scenes in the early phases of the war, 78 00:08:09.260 --> 00:08:15.160 acting through diplomacy and subsidies, despite the pressure of Puritan opinion for greater 79 00:08:15.160 --> 00:08:21.240 aid to the Calvinist forces of Germany, which had gone to war with Austria and to the United 80 00:08:21.240 --> 00:08:26.520 Provinces, which had renewed the war with Spain and had suffered heavy defeats by the 81 00:08:26.520 --> 00:08:29.360 two Habsburg powers. 82 00:08:29.360 --> 00:08:34.160 When the English government intervened in an alliance of the Lutheran powers of Northern 83 00:08:34.160 --> 00:08:40.640 in Europe with the anti-Hapsburg Catholic powers of Southern Europe, it tried to use 84 00:08:40.640 --> 00:08:48.600 the excitement of war preparations as a convenient means of gaining taxes from Parliament. However, 85 00:08:48.600 --> 00:08:54.800 the Parliament refused to be stampeded by the crisis of European Protestant fortunes 86 00:08:54.800 --> 00:09:01.200 and refused to vote taxes until the government had redressed grievances, especially in church 87 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:08.000 reform. For the major authority in government on ecclesiastical matters was Reverend William 88 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:16.400 Laude, Archbishop of Canterbury, who strongly opposed Puritanism in doctrine and in practice, 89 00:09:16.400 --> 00:09:24.000 and who had embarked upon a policy of eliminating all churchmen suspected of Puritan sympathies 90 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:30.680 and promoting those whose theology and devotions the Puritans considered Catholic in origin. 91 00:09:30.680 --> 00:09:43.680 The persecution of the Puritan clergy was matched by imprisonment of the press leaders and of merchants who refused to pay the taxes that Parliament had refused to approve. 92 00:09:43.680 --> 00:09:51.680 Moreover, the people were conscripted or had soldiers quartered in their homes if they refused to pay these taxes. 93 00:09:51.680 --> 00:10:13.680 It was this climate of increasing religious and political persecution placed on top of the continuing economic depression that led the Reverend John White, a mildly Puritan minister from Dorchester and founder of the Dorchester Company, to revive the project of a settlement on the coast of New England. 94 00:10:13.680 --> 00:10:28.680 of England. A settlement was projected to form a colony of West Country Puritans who would find refuge without having to submit to the tyranny of the religious and social conformity of the separatists at Plymouth. 95 00:10:28.680 --> 00:10:38.680 Surely if the relatively humble separatists could succeed in America, the far wealthier and more powerful Puritans could succeed all the more. 96 00:10:38.680 --> 00:10:46.680 The old Dorchester Company was bankrupt, but in 1628 White formed the New England Company 97 00:10:46.680 --> 00:10:53.680 with other Puritans and with old Dorchester Associates and secured a grant from the Council for New England 98 00:10:53.680 --> 00:11:00.680 of all the land between three miles south of the Charles River, which runs through Boston, 99 00:11:00.680 --> 00:11:06.680 and three miles north of the Merrimack, now the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. 100 00:11:06.680 --> 00:11:25.680 Immediately, John Endicott and a major financier of the company, Matthew Craddock, were sent out, with settlers, to take control of the Naumkeeg settlement, by then renamed Salem, and for Endicott to supersede, Conant, as governor. 101 00:11:25.680 --> 00:11:43.680 John Endicott's idea of rule was that God had chosen him as a fit instrument for establishing a new canine for the chosen people, by rooting out all lesser folk, red and white, preferably by means of the pillory and the whipping post. 102 00:11:43.680 --> 00:11:54.680 His major struggle was to cripple the livelihood of the old settlers by prohibiting their tobacco culture and beaver trade, turning these over to the New England Company. 103 00:11:54.680 --> 00:12:02.680 The old planters could only protest in vain that they were becoming slaves to a monopoly company. 104 00:12:02.680 --> 00:12:09.680 During the spring of 1629, still harder-lying Puritans immigrated to the New England colony, 105 00:12:09.680 --> 00:12:16.680 and their ministers established a quasi-separatist church based on a congregational covenant. 106 00:12:16.680 --> 00:12:22.680 Old planters, who refused to go this far from the Church of England and embrace the covenant, 107 00:12:22.680 --> 00:12:31.680 Many of the old planters expelled from Salem by Endicott moved to Reverend William Blackstone's settlement at Boston and Charlestown. 108 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:41.680 Migration under the New England Company was small, but the rush of events soon intensified Puritan desires to seek a haven in the New World. 109 00:12:41.680 --> 00:12:49.320 Migration under the New England Company was small, but the rush of events soon intensified 110 00:12:49.320 --> 00:12:53.680 Puritan desires to seek a haven in the New World. 111 00:12:53.680 --> 00:13:00.520 Having added a war against France in 1627 to the conflict with Spain, the Crown was 112 00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:06.940 obliged to call Parliament into session to provide financing for the war effort. 113 00:13:06.940 --> 00:13:12.640 Parliament took the occasion to present a petition of its grievances to be met before voting 114 00:13:12.640 --> 00:13:21.480 taxes for the King's adventures. The Petition of Right, June 1628, denounced taxation without 115 00:13:21.480 --> 00:13:28.380 consent of Parliament, arbitrary arrest without benefit of habeas corpus, and the quartering 116 00:13:28.380 --> 00:13:35.740 of the government's soldiers upon the people. Insistence upon these libertarian demands 117 00:13:35.740 --> 00:13:42.740 before Supply of Revenue led to the King's dissolution of Parliament in March 1629 and 118 00:13:43.580 --> 00:13:50.580 to the Crown's arrest of the leaders of the opposition. Thus, English Puritans faced the 119 00:13:52.500 --> 00:13:59.500 gloomy prospect of greatly intensified repression at home, at the hands of the absolute royal 120 00:13:59.500 --> 00:14:05.500 and its prerogative courts of the High Commission and the Star Chamber. 121 00:14:05.500 --> 00:14:12.500 Puritan gloom was further deepened by the aggravated plight of their fellow Calvinists on the European continent. 122 00:14:12.500 --> 00:14:17.500 England's military operations against France and Spain had failed, 123 00:14:17.500 --> 00:14:24.500 especially in trying to relieve the French Huguenots, Calvinists, besieged by the French Crown at La Rochelle. 124 00:14:24.500 --> 00:14:30.500 The Eugenots were forced to surrender to the French forces in October 1628. 125 00:14:30.500 --> 00:14:36.500 Early the following year, the Protestant powers in Germany concluded a humiliating peace, 126 00:14:36.500 --> 00:14:44.500 issuing from the almost uninterrupted string of losses they had suffered in the first decade of the Thirty Years' War. 127 00:14:44.500 --> 00:14:53.500 Finally, the Calvinist United Provinces in the Netherlands were undergoing serious losses at the hands of the Spanish Army. 128 00:14:53.500 --> 00:15:01.500 Thus, everywhere in Europe, the Catholic powers were triumphant and the Protestants suffering losses. 129 00:15:01.500 --> 00:15:06.500 As the Puritan leader John Winthrop concluded during 1629, 130 00:15:06.500 --> 00:15:14.500 all other churches in Europe are brought to desolation and it cannot be but the like judgment is coming upon us. 131 00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:21.500 A secure sanctuary in America seemed to be vital for Puritan survival. 132 00:15:21.500 --> 00:15:28.000 and Tribal. Seeing their plight, the Puritans were able to persuade Charles I to grant a 133 00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:36.000 royal charter in March 1629 to the Massachusetts Bay Company, the more powerful successor of 134 00:15:36.000 --> 00:15:41.760 the New England Company. Coincidentally, the charter was granted just four days after King 135 00:15:41.760 --> 00:15:50.400 Charles' dissolution of Parliament. The old unincorporated company had now become an incorporated 136 00:15:50.400 --> 00:15:57.400 Body-Politik, with power to govern its granted territory. The old grant of land was reconfirmed. 137 00:15:58.420 --> 00:16:04.160 The new company was to appoint the governor, deputy governor, and council, and make laws 138 00:16:04.160 --> 00:16:10.840 for its settlers. The company promptly sent out a fleet of colonists to Salem. With the 139 00:16:10.840 --> 00:16:17.840 arrival of this fleet, Salem immediately attained to a larger size than the decade-old Plymouth 140 00:16:17.840 --> 00:16:26.120 By 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony totaled a little over 500 people. 141 00:16:26.120 --> 00:16:31.720 Massachusetts Bay Company and Colony, however, developed far more rapidly than their founders 142 00:16:31.720 --> 00:16:38.840 had foreseen, thanks to the unexpectedly overwhelming interest in emigration among the Puritans 143 00:16:38.840 --> 00:16:41.420 of East Anglia. 144 00:16:41.420 --> 00:16:47.940 The East Anglians were the most numerous and most extreme of the English Puritans, reaching 145 00:16:47.940 --> 00:16:52.200 virtually the point of separatism from the Church of England. 146 00:16:52.200 --> 00:16:58.880 As dedicated Puritans, the East Anglians had been embittered by Archbishop Laud's anti-Puritan 147 00:16:58.880 --> 00:17:04.380 movement within the Church of England and by widespread growth of a liberal Dutch theology 148 00:17:04.380 --> 00:17:10.980 in the universities and among the upper classes, a theology stressing free will and religious 149 00:17:10.980 --> 00:17:18.180 and Distoloration. Such doctrines were highly suspect to the Calvinist Puritans bent upon 150 00:17:18.180 --> 00:17:26.300 predestination and extirpation of heresy. For a long while, however, the East Anglians 151 00:17:26.300 --> 00:17:32.100 had been indifferent to the emigration movement, for East Anglia had not been as widely hit 152 00:17:32.100 --> 00:17:39.140 by the Depression of the 1620s as had the West Country and other manufacturing centers 153 00:17:39.140 --> 00:17:46.140 The reason for the relative prosperity was that East Anglia was the center for the production 154 00:17:48.580 --> 00:17:54.860 of the lighter new draperies, which had not been crippled by taxation, monopoly privilege 155 00:17:54.860 --> 00:18:00.760 or stringent state regulation. However, the wars with France and Spain interrupted the 156 00:18:00.760 --> 00:18:07.760 markets for East Anglian textiles while moving the state in its frantic search for revenue 157 00:18:07.760 --> 00:18:13.960 to bring taxes and controls upon the new drapery industry. 158 00:18:13.960 --> 00:18:19.320 Production of new draperies in East Anglia dropped by a startling two-thirds between 159 00:18:19.320 --> 00:18:28.680 1628 and 1631, and tens of thousands of spinners and weavers were thrown out of work, increasing 160 00:18:28.680 --> 00:18:33.520 the poor tax burdens upon the country farmers and gentry. 161 00:18:33.520 --> 00:18:38.640 Injustice and disorders by the workmen made things still worse. They led the government 162 00:18:38.640 --> 00:18:44.400 to impose further taxes and minimum wage rates upon the manufacturers to force merchants 163 00:18:44.400 --> 00:18:51.400 to buy textiles and to prohibit export competition with the monopoly companies. With sudden economic 164 00:18:52.560 --> 00:18:59.360 distress and injustice added to unwelcome political and religious trends, the Puritans 165 00:18:59.360 --> 00:19:14.360 A decisive conference of Puritans took place at the Puritan's Intellectual Center, Cambridge University, at the end of August 1629. 166 00:19:14.360 --> 00:19:24.360 In the Cambridge Agreement, a group of Puritan leaders from East Anglia agreed to join the Massachusetts Bay Company and to immigrate to America 167 00:19:24.360 --> 00:19:29.480 if the officers were to be chosen solely from immigrants to New England 168 00:19:29.480 --> 00:19:34.240 and if the company charter were to be carried with them to the New World. 169 00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:38.340 Moreover, the Puritan stockholders remaining in England agreed to sell 170 00:19:38.340 --> 00:19:42.560 all their shares in the company to the immigrants. 171 00:19:42.560 --> 00:19:47.860 The Massachusetts Bay Company could now be completely located in New England 172 00:19:47.860 --> 00:19:51.120 as a self-governing Puritan colony. 173 00:19:51.120 --> 00:19:53.160 This was a legal action 174 00:19:53.160 --> 00:19:58.600 Because the Puritans had cleverly persuaded the King not to specify the location of the 175 00:19:58.600 --> 00:20:01.360 Company in the Charter. 176 00:20:01.360 --> 00:20:07.080 John Winthrop, a leading East Anglican attorney, was appointed Governor of the Company, and 177 00:20:07.080 --> 00:20:13.240 John Humphrey, brother-in-law of the highly influential Earl of Lincoln, Deputy Governor. 178 00:20:13.240 --> 00:20:18.800 When Humphrey decided to remain in England, he was replaced by Thomas Dudley, the steward 179 00:20:18.800 --> 00:20:20.800 of the Earl of Lincoln. 180 00:20:20.800 --> 00:20:28.000 Although the Rev. John White did send some West Country Puritans to Salem during 1630, 181 00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:34.980 the vast bulk of the Great Puritan exodus of the 1630s, the Great Migration, came from 182 00:20:34.980 --> 00:20:41.960 East Anglia. It must be noted that by no means all of the great wave of Puritan emigrants 183 00:20:41.960 --> 00:20:49.920 from East Anglia in the 1630s chose to go to Massachusetts Bay. A greater number moved 184 00:20:49.920 --> 00:21:04.560 The Great Migration of Puritans began immediately, and 17 ships sailed from England in 1630 alone. 185 00:21:04.560 --> 00:21:10.640 They settled not only in Salem, but all along the Massachusetts coast, founding such towns 186 00:21:10.640 --> 00:21:18.560 as Watertown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Medford and Newtown, later Cambridge. 187 00:21:18.560 --> 00:21:25.600 In the 1630s, from 20,000 to 25,000 people immigrated to Massachusetts. 188 00:21:25.600 --> 00:21:35.080 By 1640, 9,000 remained, deducting emigration from Massachusetts back home or to other lands, 189 00:21:35.080 --> 00:21:38.200 while only 1,000 people lived in Plymouth. 190 00:21:38.200 --> 00:21:46.880 Thus, by 1630, the two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, had managed 191 00:21:46.880 --> 00:21:53.880 to win for themselves virtual self-governing status, independent of English control. 192 00:21:54.160 --> 00:22:00.160 Like Virginia, the New England colonies began as chartered companies. But the Virginia Company 193 00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:06.000 continued to rule the colony from England, being finally expropriated and superseded 194 00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:13.000 by the Crown in 1620. The New England settlements, in contrast, were strongly impelled by religious 195 00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:33.000 by religious motives. Hence the Plymouth Pilgrims and Separatists were only loosely controlled by the parent company and soon bought out that company completely, while the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Company transferred itself to and completely blended with the colony in America. 196 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:45.000 According to the Massachusetts Bay Charter, the governor, deputy governor, and council of assistants were to be elected by the whole body of stockholders or freemen. 197 00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:57.000 This sounds highly democratic on paper, but the stumbling block was that only 12 stockholders migrated to America, and all were officers of the colony. 198 00:22:57.000 --> 00:23:10.000 Since any new Freeman had to be selected by the existing Freeman, the natural tendency was to perpetuate a closed oligarchy and to select few new members. 199 00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:20.000 Rumblings of popular resistance occurred as early as the fall of 1630, when 109 settlers petitioned to be made Freeman of the company. 200 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:37.000 The Freeman gave in to this request but completely vitiated its effect by mendaciously claiming that the Charter had put all power into the hands of the Council of Assistants who could choose the Governor and Deputy Governor and make all the laws. 201 00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:43.000 Moreover, the Assistants were to hold office permanently on good behavior. 202 00:23:43.000 --> 00:23:49.000 The only function of the Body of Freeman, it was alleged, was filling vacancies in the Council. 203 00:23:49.000 --> 00:24:03.000 By thus failing to show the Freeman the text of the Charter, a dozen Puritan oligarchs managed to keep absolute control of the colony's affairs for great lengths of time. 204 00:24:03.000 --> 00:24:10.320 In addition, though in violation of the Charter, only Puritans were admitted to the Body of 205 00:24:10.320 --> 00:24:16.600 Freeman, thus ensuring domination of the churches and the broad body politic by the church elders. 206 00:24:16.600 --> 00:24:24.120 From the beginning, the authorities had trouble from the newly burgeoning smaller towns. At the 207 00:24:24.120 --> 00:24:31.280 beginning of 1631, a tax of sixty pounds was levied upon each settlement to pay for frontier 208 00:24:31.280 --> 00:24:48.000 The Great Old English Ground that no community may be taxed without its own consent. 209 00:24:48.000 --> 00:24:54.880 As the Watertown protesters eloquently declared, it was not safe to pay monies after that sort, 210 00:24:54.880 --> 00:25:00.560 for fear of bringing themselves and posterity into bondage. 211 00:25:00.560 --> 00:25:07.040 Here was the first tax strike in America, long anticipating the episode in Surrey, Virginia. 212 00:25:07.040 --> 00:25:13.880 In 1632, the government bowed to the strike after an apology was extracted from the resistors 213 00:25:13.880 --> 00:25:19.000 and the freemen assumed the power to elect the governor and the assistants, though the 214 00:25:19.000 --> 00:25:25.360 governor had to be chosen from the ranks of the assistants, and also to make tax levies. 215 00:25:25.360 --> 00:25:32.020 Or rather, this power was assumed by the representatives of the freemen, direct democracy now being 216 00:25:32.020 --> 00:25:34.960 held impractical in the large colony. 217 00:25:34.960 --> 00:25:39.160 And two deputies were elected from each town in Massachusetts. 218 00:25:39.160 --> 00:25:44.960 For over a decade, the deputies and the assistants sat in the same house of the legislature, 219 00:25:44.960 --> 00:25:50.880 the general court, but then separated into two houses of that court. 220 00:25:50.880 --> 00:25:57.440 In the following year, political conflicts intensified in the colony as opinion polarized 221 00:25:57.440 --> 00:26:06.240 two camps. Thomas Dudley, backed by the elders, accused Governor Winthrop of leniency and 222 00:26:06.240 --> 00:26:13.480 of being negligent in instituting the absolute and complete tyranny of the Lord Brethren. 223 00:26:13.480 --> 00:26:22.040 Dudley called, characteristically, for heavier fines, severe whippings, more frequent banishments. 224 00:26:22.040 --> 00:26:28.680 On the other hand, many of the free men continued to grow restive at the oligarchic rule, and 225 00:26:28.680 --> 00:26:36.240 the leading Puritan divine, Rev. Thomas Hooker, arrived in Massachusetts to stand aghast and 226 00:26:36.240 --> 00:26:40.840 protest at the tyranny of the colony's magistrates. 227 00:26:40.840 --> 00:26:47.840 The struggle came to a head in 1634. A paper by Israel Stroughton denounced the government 228 00:26:47.840 --> 00:26:55.800 oligarchy for monopolizing power. They made the laws, disposed lands, raised monies, punished 229 00:26:55.800 --> 00:27:03.000 offenders and so forth at their discretion. Neither did the people know the portent. The 230 00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:08.480 magistrates responded by burning the paper, but the argument would not thus be stifled. 231 00:27:08.480 --> 00:27:14.480 Finally, a committee from each of the eight towns in Massachusetts Bay sent representatives 232 00:27:14.480 --> 00:27:19.960 to insist on the opening of the hitherto secret charter for the colony. 233 00:27:19.960 --> 00:27:25.720 When they then discovered that the law-making power was fully and legally vested in the 234 00:27:25.720 --> 00:27:32.400 free men rather than in the assistants, the general court from then on assumed full jurisdiction 235 00:27:32.400 --> 00:27:34.720 for the making of laws. 236 00:27:34.720 --> 00:27:41.600 The magistrates made sure, however, that not the total body of freemen, but the more malleable 237 00:27:41.600 --> 00:27:47.720 deputies in the general court were actually to make the laws. 238 00:27:47.720 --> 00:27:53.240 For a while, the general court, especially the deputies in the lower house, was furious 239 00:27:53.240 --> 00:27:59.560 at the lengthy betrayal, and led by Israel Staunton as Speaker of the Deputies, it deposed 240 00:27:59.560 --> 00:28:04.880 George Winthrop as governor and levied fines on some of the assistants. 241 00:28:04.880 --> 00:28:11.720 But the number of free men was still restricted to Puritan church members by an Act of 1631 242 00:28:11.720 --> 00:28:17.840 and a law five years later prohibited any new churches from existing in the colony without 243 00:28:17.840 --> 00:28:21.560 securing the consent of the authorities. 244 00:28:21.560 --> 00:28:28.560 The loosening of the oligarchic rule in Massachusetts was therefore not very great. 245 00:28:29.560 --> 00:28:35.480 Indeed Dudley, who had replaced Winthrop as governor, quickly prohibited Stoughton from 246 00:28:35.480 --> 00:28:41.280 any public office for a three-year period. Soon the General Court was all too happy to 247 00:28:41.280 --> 00:28:45.680 return Winthrop to office and depose Dudley. 248 00:28:45.680 --> 00:28:51.760 A threat of English overlordship vanished in 1635 upon the dissolution of the Council 249 00:28:51.760 --> 00:28:58.120 for New England. The Council had failed financially. Its doom had been assured when its fishing 250 00:28:58.120 --> 00:29:05.120 The crown, indeed, was thinking along similar lines. England was getting very worried about 251 00:29:28.120 --> 00:29:32.120 The Lord's Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in General 252 00:29:32.120 --> 00:29:36.120 In 1634, the Lord's Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in General 253 00:29:36.120 --> 00:29:40.120 as Privy Council Committee under the chairmanship of the formidable Archbishop Laude 254 00:29:40.120 --> 00:29:44.120 moved firmly against the colony. 255 00:29:44.120 --> 00:29:48.120 Authorized to control the colonies as well as emigration, 256 00:29:48.120 --> 00:29:52.120 the Commission moved in the spring of 1635 257 00:29:52.120 --> 00:29:56.120 to revoke the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. 258 00:29:56.120 --> 00:30:05.720 The English courts severely rebuked the officer of the Massachusetts colony for not appearing 259 00:30:05.720 --> 00:30:12.800 at the trial and decided to revoke the colony's charter in 1637. 260 00:30:12.800 --> 00:30:17.640 Massachusetts prepared to arm to repel an English attack, but it was saved from such 261 00:30:17.640 --> 00:30:23.960 a confrontation by the beginnings of the Puritan Revolution the following year, a revolution 262 00:30:23.960 --> 00:30:30.960 A generation that hopelessly distracted the English government from Massachusetts affairs for fully a generation.