PALFREY ON RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE IN THE

COLONY OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY.

A

History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty. By Joan Gorham PALFREY. In three volumes. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1865.

PERFECT historian is a perfect judge, whose summing up includes all important facts and forcible reasoning on both sides. of the question under consideration.

But we have no perfect historians, because we have no perfect men. Our most interesting histories are the works of men who write in the spirit of advocates rather than judges, having a deep personal interest of some kind in justifying transactions, institutions, and personages condemned by others, or in condemning those which others justify and applaud.

Dr. Palfrey's History of New England is a truly great work. It is laid out on a broad scale, and goes so far into details as to make each division of the work a complete treatise. The author intends to give the philosophy of the history. He aims to set forth events, customs, laws, and institutions, in their relation to each other as causes and effects.

Without enlargement upon the merits of his volumes, we will discuss his treatment of the subject of religious intolerance in the early days of the New England Colonies.

In the course of his narrative, he comes to the time when Liberty was wounded in the house of her reputed friends. He has to record that the Governor of the Bay sent home two prominent men, solely because they met with a few others and prayed in a manner different.

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from that of the majority of the company; that the civil government was so organized that only church members could have a vote upon the general affairs of the colony; that a talented and pious minister of the Bay was made an outlaw for life, because, upon some public questions, he set forth religious views which were not accordant with those held by the magistrates; that several persons were banished because from their doctrines in theology and of Christian experience a majority of the General Court dissented; that for holding and teaching what was considered a wrong idea of church ordinances, a whole sect was proscribed, and some of them were imprisoned, fined, whipped, and banished; and that, at a still later day, many persons were severely punished, and some of them were hung, lest the religious opinions which they would have taught, if they had had opportunity, should do harm to the colony.

What view of these doings is taken by the man who is styled by the North American Review, "the Historiographer of New England"?

He well says: "It is no part of the historian's office to frame justifications for acts which he records, but he should endeavor to produce the true explanations of whatever is perplexing." He has justified religious intolerance much farther than this canon allows. His explanations of what is perplexing often seem to us to be only his own conceptions of what ought to have been, rather than a fair statement of what actually was; so that, on the subject under consideration, his pages will mislead one who is not familiar with other histories of the same period.

As his objectionable views are given in the details of his narratives and explanations, our consideration of them must follow the same

course.

The "Company of Massachusetts Bay" was a corporation whose head-quarters were, at first, in London. The Colony of the Bay was a "plantation" or "settlement," under direction of the company. Many of the company were not of the colony. Many of the colony were not of the company, that is, not voters in it.

The company's charter included nothing pertaining to religious liberty. When preparations were making for the establishment of the colony from Holland which settled Plymouth, King James was implored to give an express grant of religious liberty. He refused to do that, but was understood to say that so long as they were quiet citizens of the realm, they should not be troubled in their intended new home on account of their non-conformity. There is no evidence that so much as that was intimated in reference to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay.

For the local affairs of the colony, the company at home organized a subordinate government, consisting of a governor, deputy governor, and thirteen councillors, to be annually chosen. John Endicott, who had previously been in the Bay, was chosen first governor, and, with a company, soon set out for Salem, where he organized the colony in 1628. Five councillors were chosen in England, and the remaining eight were to be subsequently chosen.

In June, 1629, several vessels reached Salem bearing a company of emigrants, among whom were the ministers Higginson and Skelton. On the 20th of July they were chosen by the congregation as their ministers. Note, that on the heads of these ministers "the hands of three or four grave members were laid, with solemn prayer." A few weeks later, on the 6th of August, a church of thirty persons was constituted. The ministers were, to use Morton's word, again. "ordained." The separatist church in Plymouth was present by its delegates, Governor Bradford and others, and gave the new church the right hand of fellowship.

In regard to what the form of their church organization should be, there is no evidence that there was an agreement or even a general understanding before they left England. There has been much dispute on the question, what proportion of the emigrants were members of the Church of England, and what part were Dissenters? The majority were doubtless Puritans, i. e., in favor of great reforms in the state church. The probability is that the body of the emigrants were members of that church when they took their departure for New England. The question whether a man was, generally speaking, a Puritan, or, more particularly, a conformist, a non-conformist, or separatist, was not a question to be answered in England before a man would be cordially received as a member of the company or of the colony.

Among the five councillors chosen in England, to be associated with Endicott in the affairs of the Bay, were two brothers, John Brown and Samuel Brown, the one a merchant and the other a lawyer. Morton says they were "among the number of the first patentees, men of estates, and men of parts and port." There is every reason for believing that they were chosen councillors with due regard to their character, and to all the interests which should properly be considered in the commencement of so momentous an enterprise. the close of a long and important document sent by Governor Craddock, President of the company in England, these brothers are particularly commended to the regard of Governor Endicott, not as specially needing it, but as specially worthy of it.

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When these brothers had witnessed the proceedings in the formation of the church and the ordination of the ministers, they concluded that it could not be a branch of the church to which they, and probably a majority of the emigrants, had belonged at home. Supposing that, in an English colony, they would have the common rights of Englishmen in England, they met with some others of the same preference, and read the Book of Common Prayer.

The brothers were immediately summoned before the Governor and the ministers. The Browns expressed the opinion that the church and the ministers were "separatists," and would become "Anabaptists." The ministers averred that they did not separate from the church, but only left off its corruptions. "The governor and council, and the generality of the people," says Morton, "did well approve the answers of the ministers." Deciding that what the brothers had done "tended to mutiny and faction," the governor sent them home in the returning ships,—a method of reasoning conclusive if not satisfactory. On their return voyage they must have had interesting reflections on the difference between the nature of liberty and the name, between a man's demanding a privilege for himself and his according it to others as their right.

The Tree of Liberty, whose delicious fruit and refreshing shade they came so far to enjoy, extended wide its branches and waved its cordial welcome. But when, one pleasant Sabbath morning, they began reading the dear old Prayer Book in unison with the mother church, from which the Salem church denied that they had separated, their sheltering tree becoming strangely and violently agitated, writhed and swayed so furiously about their heads, that they were fairly whipped away from these shores, where alone that wonderful tree was reputed to grow and thrive.

We have often patiently listened to the ecclesiastical successors of Skelton and Higginson, as they have denied that there was religious persecution in New England. We have heard third-rate historians ask, “Did the Puritan church do any more than the English Church had done?" We have noticed how Bancroft dashes by this passage of New England history with the mere question, "Should they give up the very purpose which brought them here?"

What does "the historiographer of New England" say to this? We must expect elaborate explanation and even apology in abundance. To all that we will most willingly give ear. We must hear him through, should he even attempt the justification of Endicott's proceeding. This is what we understand him as intending to do. Making all allowance for the historical style in which the writer says

what he supposes the original actor would say, if present,—a style which Dr. Palfrey uses very largely,—still, after all possible allowance on this score, he seems to us to be, in the case of Endicott versus the Browns, too positively a justifier of the intolerant magistrate. We understand him to insist that, under the circumstances, the government of the colony did what was right and expedient.

He says, "Endicott and his friends were in no mood to tolerate this schism." We deny that the action of the Browns is properly styled schismatic. No agreement had been entered into, either in England or on the voyage, that when they landed they would be separatists or non-conformists in any other sense than they had been in England. A majority of the Puritans were yet in the English Church. If, then, there was schism at Salem, it was not on the part of the Browns, but on the part of Higginson, Skelton, and the small number of thirty persons who had broken from the English Church, and had been welcorned by the church at Plymouth, which was unquestionably separatist.

Dr. Palfrey proceeds: "No civilized man had a right to come or to be within their chartered limits except themselves, and such as they, in the exercise of an absolute discretion, saw fit to harbor." (I, 300.) His favorite thought is that this was "the home," "the estate" of the colony, to an exclusive possession of which they had the same right that any one of them ever had to his house and farm in Old England. This was the "home" of the colonists. "No one had rights there but themselves." But who were "themselves"? Were not the Browns colonists, and companyists, and patentees? If three of the councillors had been in favor of reading prayers, and had determined that Endicott and the other two councillors should go back to England, would that decision have been right on the ground that this was the "home" of the colonists? What law or agreement had the Browns disregarded, by reason of which they had forfeited their right to stay in the home they had come so far to enjoy?

While the colonists had here a home, they claimed that they were organized and empowered as a "body politic." When the Watertown people were making themselves so much at home as to refuse to pay a tax levied for the fortification of Newton, the authorities were summoned to Boston, and very gravely informed by Governor Winthrop "that this government was in the nature of a parliament."

A home which is also a commonwealth is not quite so exclusively the "castle" of the people as is the private house of a citizen, which even the king must not enter without special permission.

Palfrey means to say that the charter itself expressly gave them the right to send away whom they would, whether they had a good