CHAPTER XXI.
“FAREWELL, DEAR ENGLAND.”

With the precious charter in its pocket, the complacent Massachusetts Company strode out of the royal antechamber, and proceeded at once to effect an organization. Matthew Cradock was elected to the gubernatorial chair; and to Endicott, as deputy, was delegated the government of New England.[607]

A letter of instructions was indited. It was unique, and highly illustrative of the benevolent spirit of these builders of states—Conditores Imperiorum—to whose brotherhood Lord Bacon, in “the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of honor,” assigns the highest place.[608] Let us cull some specimen paragraphs from the old parchment: “If any of the savages”—such were the orders long and uniformly followed and placed on record more than half a century before William Penn proclaimed the principles of peace on the borders of the Delaware[609]—“pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our patent, we pray you endeavor to purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion.”[610] Elsewhere the colonial authorities were bidden “particularly to publish, that no wrong nor injury be offered to the Indians.”[611]

Tobacco was held in especial abhorrence, and denounced as “a trade by this whole Company disowned, and utterly disclaimed by some of the chiefest, who absolutely declare themselves unwilling to have a hand in the plantation, if the intention be to cherish or permit the culture thereof.”[612]

Endicott was authorized to expel the incorrigible, using force when necessary. It was also appointed that all labor should cease at “three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, in preparation for the Sabbath.”[613]

The colonial seal was an Indian erect, with an arrow in his right hand, and the motto, “Come over and help us,” peculiarly appropriate in that age. The old seal has been retained by Massachusetts; but the motto has been superseded by Algernon Sydney’s famous Latin, Sub libertate quietem.[614]

“No idle drone may live amongst us;” so ran the colonial statute; and it “was the spirit as well as the law of the dauntless community which was to turn the sterility of New England into a cluster of wealthy, cultured, model states.”

The charter had been granted to the Massachusetts Company in March; in April preparations were hastening for the embarkation of fresh emigrants.[615] It was not difficult to get recruits; for the pinchers of tender consciences grew daily more rigorous. Puritanism saw popery preparing to spring upon it upon one side; it felt the ravenous bite of the Conformists on the other side. It was worse than folly to look to the government for redress; that was the engine of the persecutors. Villiers of Buckingham, that volatile madman, who was

as Pope has painted him, had been recently assassinated. His place in the king’s confidence was now filled by Strafford, the systematizer of tyranny in England, whose audacious genius impelled him to attempt to nationalize despotism, and erected the tenets of absolute power inside of constitutional forms.[616] By his side stood Laud, his Siamese twin, a prelate who assumed to ransack the universe—

The statesman and the priest carried it with a high hand;[617] and the time was not yet when Cozens could say, “The king has no more authority in ecclesiastical matters than the boy who rubs my horse’s heels.”[618]

The suffering Non-conformists, “meted and peeled” at home, heard with rapture of that Puritan colony in the wilderness, governed by men whose opinions accorded with their own, and sheltered beneath the ægis of a royal charter. Emigration began to assume unprecedented proportions;[619] and the Company might have its pick of the best men in the island. But much good seed was left; enough to grow Cromwell, and nourish Hampden, and succor Pym.

By the middle of April, 1629, six ships were ready to sail; and under license from the Lord Treasurer, these were freighted with “eighty women and maids and twenty-six children”—hostages of the fixed attachment of the emigrants to the New World—“and two hundred men, with victuals, arms, tools, and necessary wearing apparel.”[620] They also took on board “one hundred and forty head of cattle, and forty goats.”[621]

As this was a religious enterprise, care was taken “to make plentiful provision of godly ministers.”[622] Four clergymen now embarked for Massachusetts Bay. Two of these made no figure on the north shore of New England. Bright was a strict Conformist; and not liking the ecclesiastical proceedings of his comrades, he returned to England in the succeeding summer.[623] Smith was a Separatist; and since these Puritans were not yet “Come-outers,” they were shy of him, so that in landing he went to Nantasket,[624] where we shall meet him again. The remaining two were Mr. Higginson and Mr. Skelton; the first of Leicestershire, the other of Lincolnshire.[625] They were both ardent Puritans, who had held livings in the Church of England, and been silenced for non-conformity.[626] On receiving an invitation to accompany this expedition, they had “esteemed it a call from heaven,” and joyfully assented.[627] “Both of these men,” says Cotton Mather, “were eminent for learning and virtue; and being thus in a sense driven out of England, they sought graves on the American strand, whereon the epitaph might be inscribed that was on Scipio’s: Ingrata patria, ne mortui quidem habebis ossa.”[628] But unlike the ill-used pagan, they had no taunts for their erring country. “We will not say,” cried Francis Higginson, as he stood on deck off the Isle of Wight, and looked back on the receding shores of the fast-anchored island—“We will not say, Farewell, Babylon, Farewell, Rome! but, Farewell, dear England!”[629]

“England did not regret the departure of these Christian heroes, because she did not know her best men. What nation does? To materialists and politicians, these Pilgrims seemed to be visionaries and idealists; impracticable, and in the way. Yet this class is always the life of a nation. We can look back upon them, and surfeit them with praise; but we cannot easily see their mates walking amongst us, treading our own sidewalks, and so learn to cherish, and not kill the prophets.”[630]

Higginson, Skelton, and their future parishioners, landed at Salem “in the last days of June.”[631] Their friends already on the spot gave them a hearty pioneer welcome. Higginson employed his first leisure moments in writing home a transcript of the situation: “When we came first to Naumkeag, we found about half a score of cottages, and a fair house built for the governor. We found also abundance of corn planted by those here, very good and well-liking. The two hundred passengers whom we brought were, by common consent of the old planters, combined together into one body politic, under the same governor. There are in all of us, both old and new planters, about three hundred; whereof two hundred are planted at Naumkeag, now called Salem, and the rest have settled at Massachusetts Bay, beginning to build a town there, which we call Charlestown. But that which is our greatest comfort, and our means of defence above all others, is, that we have here the true religion and holy ordinances of Almighty God taught amongst us. Thanks be to God, we have here plenty of preaching and diligent catechizing, with strict and careful exercise and good and commendable order to bring our people into a Christian conversation with those with whom we have to do withal. And thus we doubt not but God will be with us; and if God be with us, who can be against us?”[632]

On their arrival at Salem, these Massachusetts Pilgrims found no church. It was their first care to erect one; and in the prosecution of this work, they had recourse to the devout Plymouth colonists, their brothers in the faith. Cordial greetings had already been exchanged between these sister colonies. About the time of the arrival of Higginson, “an infection had spread among the northern pioneers, of which many died; some of the scurvy, others of a hectic fever.”[633] Endicott had sent a missive to Plymouth at this time, requesting medical aid, as he had no leech with him. Bradford immediately sent Thomas Fuller, physician to his plantation, and the first in New England—for he was a comer in the “Mayflower”—to the relief of the Salem sufferers, and armed him with an affectionate letter of condolence and Christian sympathy.[634]

These lines, and the prompt despatch of the surgeon, Endicott thus acknowledged:

The chain of friendship thus early welded had an additional link added to it when the Leyden exiles, borne to America in company with Higginson and Skelton, landed from the same flotilla, and pushed from Salem on to Plymouth. Bradford, in reciting this incident, says finely, “Their long stay and keeping back was recompensed by the Lord to their friends here with a double blessing, in that they not only enjoyed them now beyond their late expectation, but with them many more godly friends and Christian brothers, as the beginning of a larger harvest unto the Lord, in the increase of his churches and people in these waste parts, to the admiration of many and the wonder of the world; and that here should be a resting-place for so many of God’s children, when so sharp a scourge came upon their own land. But it was the Lord’s doing, and it ought to be marvellous in our eyes.”[637]

Higginson and Endicott had reached Salem in the latter part of June, 1629. Some twenty days later, Endicott “set apart a solemn day of humiliation for the foundation of a church and the choice of a pastor and a teacher.”[638] The elder Pilgrims at Plymouth were invited to be present, and lend their countenance to the unique ceremony.[639]

The 20th of July arrived. The first part of the day was spent in prayer and preaching; the latter portion was devoted to the ecclesiastical election.[640] “It was after this manner,” says Gott—who had come over with Endicott, and was afterwards a deacon in the Salem church—in a letter to Bradford rehearsing the proceedings: “the persons thought of, who had been ministers in the English Establishment, were questioned concerning their calling to preach. They acknowledged that there was a twofold calling, the one inward, when the Lord moved the heart of man to take that calling upon him, and fitted him with gifts for it; the other outward, and from the people, when a company of believers are united in a covenant to walk together in all the ways of God, and all the male members are given a free voice in the choice of their church officers. Now we, being persuaded that these two men were so qualified as the apostle speaks to Timothy, ‘A bishop must be blameless, sober, apt to teach,’ we think we may say, as the eunuch said unto Philip, ‘What should hinder my being baptized, seeing there is water?’ and he believed. So those servants of God, clearing all things by their answers, and being thus fitted, we saw no reason why we might not freely give our voices for their election. Therefore every fit member wrote in a note the name of him whom the Lord moved him to think fit for a pastor; and so likewise the name of him whom they would have for a teacher. Mr. Skelton was chosen pastor, and Mr. Higginson teacher; and they accepting the choice, Mr. Higginson, with several others, laid hands on Mr. Skelton, using prayer therewith; after which there was an imposition of hands on Mr. Higginson by Mr. Skelton and the rest.”[641]

Bradford, “and some others with him, coming by sea,” and being “hindered by cross-winds,” could not reach Salem in the beginning of the ceremony, but “came into the assembly afterwards, and gave them the right hand of fellowship, wishing all prosperity and a blessed success unto such good beginnings.”[642]

Some days after this election, Mr. Higginson drew up “A Confession of Faith and Church Covenant.” Thirty persons assented to it, and a self-constituted church was planted in the wilderness.[643] This transaction has determined and colored the whole religious constitution of New England. It was a bold and aggressive act. But the Pilgrims had always objected to the ceremonial law of the home Establishment; and now, being in the Western wilds, they felt free to form their ecclesiasticism on what they conceived to be a more authentic model. “In their position, such words as ‘Non-conformity’ and ‘Separatism’ ceased to be significant. It was only important that they should conform to their view of the Bible; and their determination to do so was not shaken by the thought that in doing so they must separate, not in spirit, but in discipline and usage, from a church three thousand miles away.”[644]

The New England theocracy was begotten of these proceedings.[645] “The emigrants,” remarks Bancroft, “were not so much a body politic as a church in the wilderness, with no benefactor around them but Nature, no present sovereign but God. An entire separation was made between church and state—at least in theory; religious worship was established on the basis of the independence of each separate religious community; and these rigid Calvinists, of whose rude intolerance the world had been filled with malignant calumnies, subscribed a covenant cherishing, it is true, the severest virtues, but without one tinge of fanaticism. It was an act of piety, not of study; it favored virtue, not superstition; inquiry, and not submission. The communicants were enthusiasts, but not bigots.”[646] They declared that “the Holy Scriptures only were to be followed, and no man’s authority, be he Augustine, Tertullian, or even Cherubim or Seraphim.”[647]

This entire transaction gave dissatisfaction to some at Salem. Finally, John and Samuel Brown, “two brothers, the one a merchant, the other a lawyer, both men of parts, estate, and figure in the settlement, gathered a company separate from the public assembly.”[648]

Mutual bickerings ensued. A breach of the peace was threatened.[649] Then Endicott interposed. He sent the Browns home to England, and thereby restored quiet.[650]

The brothers Brown, on reaching England, carried a lusty impeachment to the archiepiscopal throne, then occupied by Laud.[651] The Massachusetts Company, alarmed by the clamor, wrote letters of caution to Endicott: “Beware! ’tis possible some undigested counsels have been too suddenly put in execution, which may have ill-construction with the state here, and make us obnoxious to any adversary;”[652] which shows, not that the island Puritans did not sympathize with bluff Endicott’s action, but that they dreaded lest it might provoke a hostile government to give their pet colony its coup de grâce.