CHAPTER V

Vane in New England. Reception at Boston. The Puritan Colonists. Vane chosen Governor of Massachusetts. Difficulties of his Position. War with the Pequot Indians. Ann Hutchinson. Religious Controversy. Vane not re-elected. His Controversy with John Winthrop. Vane returns to England. Fate of Ann Hutchinson. Vane ever a Friend to New England.

IN the same ship which brought Henry Vane there came John Winthrop the younger, the future Governor of Connecticut, and Hugh Peters, the future chaplain of Oliver Cromwell. They held a joint commission from Lord Saye and Sele, and Lord Brook, about claims on the Connecticut founded upon a grant which Lord Saye had gained from the king of 40 miles at the mouth of that river, along the sea coast from the Narrganset river to the south-west. Three townships had already been settled by the Plymouth men on land which might come under the grant. To assert a claim without taking possession seemed a vain formality. The agents, not being willing to disturb the places already taken up, contented themselves with the possession of the mouth of the Connecticut river. Many of the parliamentary party, beginning to lose heart, were casting their eyes upon the Puritan colony across the ocean as a place of refuge should the battle of freedom be lost in the Old World,

Lord Saye and Lord Brook, who had made great disbursements for the colony, were desirous to betake themselves to New England and at the same time anxious to retain their rank as peers. They wrote proposing that a hereditary nobility should be recognised who should form the governing class; but this did not meet with assent amongst the founders of the State from the beginning imbued with republican sentiments.1 Vane landed at Boston on October 6, 1635.

Let us here cast a backward glance upon the Puritan colony now planted along the shores of Massachusetts Bay. A hundred and fourteen years after the continent of North America had been discovered by Cabot a settlement had been made in Virginia in 1607. After many hardships, sufferings, and dangers owing to the lack of experience of the first settlers and the disorderly behaviour of some of them, the colony in three years had taken root on the banks of the James river.

About the same time some congregations of Nonconformists seeking relief from relief from the persecution enforced by Archbishop Bancroft had left the eastern counties of England to dwell in Holland, where their sober industry procured them the means of subsistence. They were still anxious to retain their nationality, which their descendants would in time. lose. How they gained a charter from King James conveying some rights of self-government is not clear; but they did so, and with it they sailed away to seek

1 Winthrop, vol. i., p. 170. The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, by Mr Hutchinson, Lieutenant Governor of the Massachusetts Province, London, 1765, p. 64, and appendix,

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on the shore of the Western Ocean a country where they could in peace worship God after a fashion approved of by their conscience. At the close of autumn of 1620 about one hundred of these Puritan emigrants landed in Massachusetts Bay and founded the town of Plymouth. They were mostly men of small means, the infant colony was poorly provided with supplies for tiding over the hard winter, and one half of them died of cold and exposure ere the spring. The coast had been cleared of its native inhabitants by a desolating plague, so they had not to contend against the wild Indians. They peaceably occupied the lands by the shore and built their cabins, cleared their little farms, and extended their fisheries till their settlement gained a firm footing on the shore of the American continent. The sufferings which these settlers had endured did not deter some of the persecuted Non-conformists in England from following them. Word was passed to the harassed congregations and silenced preachers in England that across the wide ocean, so long thought to bound the habitable world, there was a land where they might practise in peace the reformed faith they regarded as the warrant of eternal life, free from the vain posturings of the ritual and the equivocations of the book of common prayer.

England was in those days far from over-peopled, and it was not in the hopes of earning a better livelihood that these pious men had left her shores to seek a plank hut in the strange land of the west on the verge of an unexplored wilderness. The climate was severe for new settlers; the winter was colder, the summer hotter than in England. The

soil of the new plantation was not fertile, and the value of the land when cleared made poor wages for the labour of clearing it; but it was a freehold on which men could live and bring up their children, and there were wood, and pasture, and fishing, and game, and some trade with the Indians for furs. The little settlement of Plymouth had a slow growth; but the scheme of a new colony on a larger scale received much favour amongst the Non-conformists, and the opponents of the arbitrary royal prerogative, many of whom had begun to despair of the liberties of England. A company was formed, consisting of some wealthy friends of the Puritan cause; merchants subscribed sums of money. Charles I. and his High Commission and Star Chamber could not have been aware of what they were doing in granting a charter to this new company to occupy the land from the Atlantic to the Western Ocean from a line running three miles north of the Merrimac river to a line three miles south of the Charles river. Perhaps they thought that they were getting rid of some intractable adversaries who, still recognising the king's authority in the New World, might be followed and coerced when the malcontents at home had been successfully dealt with.

In the middle of April 1629, licence was obtained from the Lord Treasurer for the sailing of three hundred men, eighty women and maids with twentysix children, provided with victuals, tools, arms, cattle and goats, so that they might gain a firm footing on the new continent. Eleven ships from different ports of England, arrived in Massachusetts before the end of July of the same year; six more

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vessels came before the winter, bringing in all about a thousand colonists. Since the day 2440 years before, when the Phoceans of Ionia, fleeing the yoke of the Persian Cyrus, sailed away to found the city of Massilia, now the greatest port of the Mediterranean, no colony ever had a more memorable origin, a more vigorous growth, and a more illustrious history than Massachusetts.

Captain Wiggin, who had visited the English plantations, thus writes of Massachusetts in 1632:1 "The English, numbering about 2000, and generally most industrious, have done more in three years than others in seven times that space, and at a tenth of the expense. They are loved and respected by the Indians, who repair to the governor for justice. He is a discreet and sober man, wearing plain apparel, assisting in any ordinary labour, and ruling with much mildness." This was John Winthrop, who had been appointed governor in England, and sailed from Yarmouth in 1630. He was a gentleman of good estate in Suffolk, of strict religious principles, naturally calm, self-possessed and persistent, of grave deportment, and well trained in the law. He had now reached the age of forty-two years. He gave his whole mind and fortune to the work of building the new commonwealth.

The founders were careful from the beginning to make bounteous provision of godly ministers. Houses were built for them and salaries assigned. They were all clergymen of thorough Protestant opinions, some of them men of learning and great

1 Captain Wiggin to Secretary Coke, November 19, 1632, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, London, 1860, page 156.