1628 it conveyed certain territory to a group of English Puritans, thereby enabling Endicott to begin the settlement at Salem. In 1629, Captain John Mason received from it a grant in what is now New Hampshire, and Gorges himself tried to build up a colony in Maine. In 1635, after an ineffective existence, the Council gave up its charter.

CHAPTER IV

PLYMOUTH AND MASSACHUSETTS BAY

Because of the importance of religion-or rather controversial theology-in the settlement of New England, the beginnings of colonization there were to a certain extent a part of the great Protestant movement which had turned Europe upside down. And, because English Protestantism was primarily the interest of the middle class, merchants and artisans, the settlement of New England was also a product of the great social change sweeping over England during the seventeenth century. Reference has been made to the expansion of English industry and commerce during the Tudor period. The men who were gathering the profits had already passed the nobles in wealth, and in many instances in learning and culture. But entrance to the social world, to which many aspired, remained in the hands of the nobles, who persistently refused to admit these interlopers of an inferior class. Excluded from this feudal society, the middle class leaders bethought themselves of other fields, in which they might find scope for their determination to lead and to manage. They turned naturally to Parliament, and tried to secure the election of as many of their associates as possible to the House of Commons, the doors of which could not be closed by the nobility.

PURITANISM

Likewise they turned to the Church, trying to make it over that it might conform somewhat more nearly to their own ideas and theories. They were impatient of the authority exercised by the bishops, the allies of the nobles in society and in the House of Lords, and of the distinctive trappings of the Episcopal system: robes, forms, and ceremonies. They did not wish to leave the Church, except as a last resort. What they wanted was still a national Church, but one in which the nobles and the bishops should be subordinated to the middle class. Puritans they were called, because of their desire to reform the things that were. They were their own masters in the business world, and their sense of superiority-perhaps due to

unconscious protest against the supercilious attitude of the nobles— turned them to their own consciences and to the Bible in matters of religious belief. With this state of mind, they tried to secure the appointment of Puritan clergymen in the churches, just as they aimed at the election of Puritan laymen to Parliament.

There is nothing more exasperating to a self-respecting human being than to find himself persistently ignored, or worse yet, ridiculed, by those to whom mere custom accords a higher rating than his own. Because the Puritans felt this scorn of the nobles, they instinctively developed certain reactions against it. Because others refused to be duly impressed with a sense of his real worth, the average Puritan was all the more impressed with it himself. Thus came the conceit, which was no insignificant trait in Puritan character. Again, because those whom the world regarded as his superiors were given to enjoying the luxuries and pleasures of this life, the Puritan was driven, perhaps unconsciously, to make a virtue of self-denial and abstinence, that his own qualities might shine forth more brightly. These virtues of his he proclaimed loudly and far, insisting that they were the only true and proper guides for human conduct. Because the world. ignored him, or laughed at him, he would mold the whole world after his own pattern. Then who would laugh? Nobody, so at least the non-Puritans thought, as they observed these impassive, reserved, cold-blooded moralists go their ways.

Even the children in Puritan families were sometimes impressed with an awful conviction of their own wickedness, and loaded down with the weight of their own sins. As John Bunyan described his own childhood, even at the age of nine or ten, "these things did so distress my soul . . . that I was often much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith, yet could I not let go my sins." It is not surprising that, when the parents actually believed in the damnation of infants, the children should develop unhealthy, morbid notions of sin.

For these enthusiasts the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination had a peculiar charm, and the more imaginative among them found pleasure in depicting the tortures of the nonelect. Even as late as the days of Jonathan Edwards, a congregation of New England Puritans could take deep satisfaction in the favorite sermon of that divine, which described the horrors of the unsaved soul: "O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held

over in the hand of God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell: you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder.”

But these unlovely characteristics bring out only one side of the Puritans. They were, according to the English historian, Macaulay, "the most remarkable body of men, perhaps, which the world has ever produced. The odious and ridiculous parts of their character lie on the surface. . . . Those who roused the people to resistance; who directed their measures through a long series of eventful years; who formed, out of the most unpromising materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen; who trampled down King, Church, and Aristocracy; who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion, made the name of England terrible to every nation on the face of the earth-were no vulgar fanatics."

Deeply impressed with the seriousness of life and of death, the Puritan had no time to waste on what he considered non-essentials, either in religion or in politics. Worship he would reduce to "four bare whitewashed walls and a sermon," and government he would free from the incubus of a king and nobility. The rule of the elect should supersede that of the well-born. These were the people who turned English society, government, and Church, upside down, and their spiritual kinsmen founded new commonwealths in a new world.

Theologically the Puritans were not all in agreement. Some preferred to remain in the Anglican Church, and to reform it from the inside; others demanded Presbyterianism; while still others would have nothing to do with any existing organization. These Separatists demanded complete religious independence for every parish.

THE PILGRIMS

The group of Separatists known as Brownists gained more fame than the others, because of their daring experiment in settling on the New England shore. Finding life made miserable for them in England, in 1608 they went to Holland, just one year before the truce between Holland and Spain was due to expire. In spite of having gone to the Low Countries at this unpropitious time when war might be renewed within a few years, these Englishmen remained over ten years. The cause of their withdrawal may have beer the well

grounded fear that their children would lose their identity as Englishmen, or it may have been the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War which threatened to engulf all Europe. Whatever the reason, the Separatists decided to try their hands at American colonization. After giving due consideration to the Dutch colonies of Guiana and New Netherlands, they finally decided to remove to the northern part of the London Company's colony. Unable to secure a charter, they got a patent, which allowed them to settle in Virginia. The Separatists themselves could not finance the enterprise, so they borrowed £7000 from some London merchants. They finally set sail in 1620, and in November they landed on Cape Cod, a long way from their destination. Just why they changed their plans has never been satisfactorily explained.

Their status in New England was not especially favorable. The patent which they had secured applied only to Virginia, consequently they had no legal right to settle in New England. But they decided to stay, in spite of the absence of organized government, and in spite of the want of shelter and supplies.

They could easily remedy the lack of government. Before they left the Mayflower, they drew up the Compact, by which they agreed to form "a civill body politick." And by virtue of this agreement, so the document went on, they proposed to make laws, and to create offices which might be needed for the good of the settlement.

Legally they had a perfect right to enter into this Compact, because they found themselves in a part of the British possessions where no government existed. But this was merely an agreement among themselves, not between them and the king. The Compact could not and did not free them from the operation of the laws of England, or from the English government. Legally they were squatters with no rights which the English government was bound to respect. They did not wish to separate completely from England, otherwise they would have picked some part of the world for their colony which was not owned by the English Crown. They were not long in realizing that their situation was so precarious as to be impossible, and in 1621 they secured a patent from the New England Council. In 1630, they got a second patent from the same organization, in order to have their territorial limits more clearly defined. This was necessary, because of the ambitious plans of the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Company.