Volume 1, Chapter 47. The Crown Begins the Takeover of New England, 1676 through 1679.
It was 1675. The last Dutch war was well over and King Charles II was free to turn his attention
to longer-run concerns. Furthermore, the relatively liberal cabal administration, which had succeeded
Clarendon in the mid-1660s had now fallen to be replaced by the absolutist Earl of Danby.
With the accession of Danby, Charles determined to scrap his relatively tolerant administration
at home, his flirting with liberty for Catholics and dissenters, and to embark instead on an
absolutist course, royalist and theocratic Anglican.
In colonial affairs, with the relatively liberal Shaftesbury now in opposition instead of in
power, Charles determined that absolutism would hold sway there as well. As he looked
overseas, it became obvious what was the stumbling block to absolute royal power, New England.
New England that had the temerity to govern itself without so much as a royal governor
and to trade freely with blithe disregard for the ever-tightening English Imperial Navigation Acts
and at the heart and head of New England, Massachusetts Bay.
Overwhelmingly, the most populous and most prosperous colony,
the successful defier of the King's Royal Commission a decade before,
Massachusetts, the seat of the prosperous rising merchant groups
who were the primary scoffers at restrictive trade laws
and the main thorns in the side of those London merchants
that had pushed through the Navigation Act of 1673,
the purpose of which was to enforce the navigation laws.
It was high time, on many counts, to impose the imperial power on New England.
The first preliminary step in the drive to centralize royal power
over the colonies came in 1675
when the King transferred the handling of colonial affairs
to a new committee of the Privy Council, the Lords of Trade
and Plantations, with more power than previous committees
in the imperial bureaucracy. The Lords realized that the main function of the
goal of absolute power
was to regulate, monopolize and extract
Revenue from Colonial Trade.
The first direct step in King Charles' campaign to seize New England began in 1676, when the
Lords of Trade appointed Edward Randolph to go to New England and check on its situation
and on enforcement of the Navigation Acts.
Randolph also carried a letter from the King to Massachusetts, ordering the colony once
Edward Randolph was the perfect choice for heading in expanded
Imperial Bureaucracy. He was the very model of the royal bureaucrat and placement, dedicated to maximizing the power and plunder of the crown for the benefit of king and self.
He was an arch-royalist and high Anglican. He was grasping and arrogant before his inferiors, while obsequious before his betters.
Edward Randolph was, by marriage, a cousin to Robert T. Mason, the son of John Mason, who was pressing for his old claim over the New Hampshire towns and who was largely responsible for Randolph's appointment. Thus Randolph had a special, personal interest in the assertion of royal authority over the New Hampshire towns and their separation from Massachusetts rule.
Edward Randolph was also a model of the new breed of imperial bureaucrat for another critical reason.
He was a leading official emerging not from the great aristocratic families
but from the ranks of the burgeoning royal bureaucracy itself.
Like such contemporaries as Sir Robert Southwell and William Blathwaite,
Randolph was a creature of the new imperial civil service, and this common experience
forged in this new breed a common class or caste interest, an interest that joined the
power and fortunes of the king to their own. As Professor Hall expresses it, early in the
decade of the 1670s, the great families were being replaced in high government office by
By Men of More Humble Origins, The Permanent Civil Service Was Being Born, These Men Obed
Their Position Not to Family or Wealth, but to the Crown. To the Crown, they returned
a heightened loyalty, and they would expect the same from others. Massachusetts, used
to its independence, treated Randolph's message from the King with its accustomed short shrift.
Mr. John Leverett at first refused to take off his hat for the reading of the King's
letter. When Randolph complained of the extensive violations of the navigation laws of the foreign
ships and the cargo of Spanish wines he had seen in the harbor, Leverett staunchly replied
that English laws were only applicable in what consist with the interest of New England.
It took Randolph only a week to decide on what should be done with Massachusetts. Smash
it! It was a course he would urge for years. King Philip's war was not quite over and
so now, now was the time to act. He warned, three frigates of forty guns with three catches
well manned lying a league or two below Boston, with His Majesty's express orders to seize
all shipping and perform other acts of hostility against these revolters
would do more in one week's time
than all the orders of King and Council to them in seven years.
To make Massachusetts look even blacker, Randolph Grand
eloquently claimed that the other New England colonies would like nothing
better than a royal governor
general to rule over them.
The plan was a little too abrupt for the Lords of Trade, but it echoed a considerable amount
of influential opinion in England. Before leaving for England, Randolph traveled through
New England trying to round up allies for his campaign to take over the colonial governments
in behalf of the Crown. The motley group of allies that Randolph was able to accumulate
has generally been called the moderate party, a curious concept, since there were neither
moderate nor party. It is difficult to see why these satellites of the crown should be
called moderate, and they were by no means a homogenous party, but a varied group of
individuals collected from different circumstances and occupations. Neither is it true that these
These moderates were the merchants. It is true that the ruling oligarchy of magistrate
gentry and Puritan ministers in Massachusetts generally excluded the merchants, and that
the ranks of Randolph's favorites were drawn from the opponents to the existing regime.
But merchants never form any sort of homogenous class, and they differed on this issue too.
Furthermore, those seeking government privileges or lucrative posts in the bureaucracy perform an economic role entirely different from that of people genuinely engaged in trade.
Those so engaged oppose interference with their trade.
It is highly misleading to lump the two together into the term merchants.
Certainly, a sizable number of colonists cooperated or appeared to cooperate with Randolph, but
they were too multifarious to form a party. Some wanted closer ties with England. Some
wanted religious toleration. Some wanted aristocratic government. Some simply wanted political power.
In each case, Randolph tried to find the factor that would turn the person against the Massachusetts
Government. As in the case of the Royal Commissioners a decade earlier, Randolph found his first
allies outside Massachusetts. Anglicans, especially in the Maine and New Hampshire towns, and
Governor Josiah Winslow of Plymouth, who made Randolph a free man of the colony. Winslow
was motivated by understandable fear of Massachusetts aggression, a fear heightened by the unfortunate
precedent set by Connecticut's swallowing up of New Haven. Plymouth was still in limbo
without a charter and Winslow was anxious to curry favor with the Crown to obtain such
a charter.
Returning to England, Randolph wrote two lengthy reports in the fall of 1676. In these he denounced
Massachusetts in detail and erroneously asserted that the bulk of the people would welcome
from the Capture of the Government by the Crown and the Consequent Overthrow of the
Existing Oligarchy.
But with the theocracy already decidedly on the wane, many Massachusetts citizens undoubtedly
felt that its elimination by such a route would be much too high a price to pay.
Randolph tried to turn every contingency to his anti-Massachusetts designs. Thus, in late
1676, he wrote a series of papers in which he tried to tie in the measures underway against
Bacon's rebellion in Virginia. One paper suggested that the anti-Bacon fleet in Virginia
proceed to Boston to help settle matters there. This time in peril, Massachusetts sent two
In the summer of 1677, the Committee of Chief Justices of the Lords of Trade issued their
report on New England. The Committee recommended for Massachusetts a supplementary charter,
which Boston hailed as a great victory over Randolph's proposals. The Massachusetts General
The Federal Court, cockily triumphant, ignored almost all of the other recommendations of the committee, brushing aside its demands that Massachusetts allow appeals or reviews of its laws to the Crown.
Massachusetts even ignored a royal request of great symbolic, but only symbolic, importance, taking an oath of allegiance to the Crown.
Instead, Massachusetts repeated its own independent oath of fidelity. Massachusetts' only concession
was to agree to enforce the Navigation Acts in the colony, a very sore point with the
Crown. But here Massachusetts staunchly insisted on its view of its own absolute right to make
The Committee of Chief Justices also decided to reject the Mason claim to New Hampshire.
and also rejected the right of Massachusetts to rule there. This left New Hampshire explicitly
in limbo, but with the implicit threat of being converted into a royal colony. Massachusetts
expected, however, that the end of the Mason threat would soon result in the acknowledgement
of its own jurisdiction over New Hampshire. For the main towns, however, the committee
decided to acknowledge the Gorgias claim. At this point the king received shocking news.
King Charles had hoped to buy the main charter back from Gorgias and then grant the area
as a proprietary gift to his natural son, the Duke of Monmouth. But Massachusetts now
executed a brilliant maneuver, purchasing all of Gorgias' rights to Maine for 1250
pounds cash. Massachusetts now had an excellent royal title to the Maine towns and it later
proceeded to enforce that title by trying to collect quit rents from the Maine settlers.
At the turn of 1678, a clamor grew on all sides for the reopening of the Massachusetts
case. Overconfident, Massachusetts itself wished to push on to final victory the official
incorporation of New Hampshire, and Randolph wished to bombard the Lords of Trade with
anti-Massachusetts arguments to reverse the decisions of the previous year. Finally, the
The report of Massachusetts maneuver in Maine angered the committee and moved it to a general
re-evaluation of New England affairs.
At the reopened proceedings of the committee, Randolph maneuvered masterfully.
He first attacked the personal acts of the Massachusetts agents and he discredited on
the agents, then turned the Bay Colony itself.
Here he stressed the colony's insistence that only Puritan Church members could vote, and
especially its lofty rejection the previous fall of the committee's proposals, a point
well calculated to inflame the committee against Massachusetts Bay. Randolph also warned that
Massachusetts' imposition of an oath of fidelity was a direct threat to his own informers in
in the Colony. By May 1678, Randolph's victory over Massachusetts was complete. The King
insisted on the oath of allegiance in the colony, which Massachusetts finally accepted
in October. But most important, the Attorney General's advice was accepted. Massachusetts'
Randolph's crimes and violations were sufficient to void its charter, and the Crown prepared
to sue to nullify the charter in the courts.
To complete the route, Randolph was himself appointed over Massachusetts' bitter protest
to be the collector of customs for New England, the first salaried bureaucrat to be stationed
by the Crown in that region.
Randolph's task was primarily to enforce the collection of duties from the Navigation Acts.
The decisions in the spring of 1678 spelled the beginning of the end of independence in
Massachusetts and New England.
At this point, with the jubilant Randolph prepared to distribute patronage to his friends,
events in England forced another turn, a postponement of the destruction of the Massachusetts
In 1678, Titus Oates and his friends touched off a mighty wave of anti-Catholic hysteria with his elaborate hoax of a popish plot to assassinate the king and impose Roman Catholicism upon England.
This hysteria was manipulated by a relatively liberal country party headed by Lord Shaftesbury to ride briefly back into power.
The Earl of Danby was impeached and sent to the Tower, and Shaftesbury became President
of the Privy Council in early 1679 and a member of the Lords of Trade.
In view of this, the Committee of the Lords of Trade realized that it had to postpone
indefinitely its plans for crushing Massachusetts.
The Lords contented themselves with urging the colony to adopt liberty of conscience,
especially of Anglican conscience to repeal the religious restrictions on voting and to
impose the oath of allegiance.
They also decided to move quickly on New Hampshire.
The Lords of Trade made New Hampshire a new royal colony with a president appointed by
the king, an assembly and a council of nine of whom six were to be appointed by the crown
and the three others to be selected by those six.
Robert Mason was persuaded to acknowledge the land titles of existing settlers
in return for yearly feudal quidrant
of not more than six pence on the pound
and the vital timberlands were to be reserved to the ownership of Mason.
Edward Randolph finally returned to New England
after delay of more than a year
To take up his post and to put the royal government of New Hampshire into effect, Randolph was
instructed to administer an oath to uphold the Navigation Acts to each of the four colonial
governors of New England.