Introduction

The seizure of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s colonial charter in October 1684 came as the conclusion to decades of conflict between the colony’s leadership and the Stuart monarchs. Charles II had received an endless barrage of petitions against Massachusetts since his Restoration in 1660. Colonists who conformed with the Church of England complained about the colony’s Calvinist supremacy. Proprietors of neighboring colonies, such as Robert Mason of New Hampshire and Ferdinando Gorges of Maine, had charged Massachusetts with unjustly invading the territories of their patents. Attempts to resolve these problems in the 1660s via a special commission aimed at soliciting voluntary surrender of the Bay Colony’s charter had come to naught. ¹On this commission and its failure, see Adrian Chastain Weimer, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). These unresolved complaints were joined by other, more pressing concerns in the 1670s. King Philip’s War exposed the military weakness of the New England colonies occasioned by their fragmentation into multiple polities, and the inspections of royal customs official Edward Randolph revealed the widespread skirting of the Navigation Acts by colonial merchants.²On the royal response to King Philip’s War, see Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676; for Randolph’s career, see Michael Garibaldi Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676-1703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). Beginning in the late 1670s, a new body of Charles’s Privy Council charged with imperial affairs, the Lords of Trade and Plantations, began a concerted campaign to bring Massachusetts to heel, and to extend royal control over New England. They gained a toehold in the region in 1682, when Charles wrested New Hampshire from the government of Massachusetts and reconstituted it as a royal colony. Massachusetts Bay’s leaders, backed by influential ministers like Increase Mather, refused to surrender the charter despite repeated overtures from the Lords of Trade. The seizure of the colony’s charter in October 1684 represented something of an anticlimax, but it capped off decades of conflict between a crown increasingly committed to centralizing imperial authority and defiant colonists committed to maintaining their earthly Eden.

With the government of Massachusetts, the most populous and wealthiest colony in New England, in the King’s hands, the Lords of Trade began hatching plans for a consolidated colonial government for the region. The charters of Massachusetts Bay’s neighboring colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island were targeted as early as November 8 and were coerced from those colonies shortly thereafter.³“Measures to be Taken after Vacation of Charter” (November 8, 1684) in Edward Randolph, III: 325; the original is in The National Archives of the UK, CO 391/5, f 12r-13v. The project to establish the consolidated colony was delayed by Charles II’s death in February 1685, and by Monmouth’s Rebellion against James II that Spring. Yet by 1686 the plan for the settlement of New England had been finalized. In the place of the heterogenous assortment of colonies from Maine to Connecticut, James was determined to establish a single, consolidated colonial possession. The new colony, called the Dominion of New England, represented a new direction in English imperial governance. Whereas the older charter colonies had been granted autonomy, control over their local religious and military affairs, and the right to convene assemblies, the Dominion reflected James’s absolutist imperial vision. The Dominion did away with colonial assemblies; in the place of mixed constitutional arrangements, all power was concentrated in a royally appointed council. The Dominion was the premier instrument of James II’s imperial policy; similar projects to unify disparate colonial possessions were proposed for the West Indies.⁴See for instance plans for a joint stock to manage the Caribbean colonies during the reign of James II: “An Essay of the Interest of the Crown in American Plantations and Trade” (c. 1685) BL, Add MS 47,131, f 26v-28r; CO 1/67, no 65. I am grateful to Michael Becker for tracking down these other citations on this subject. The governor of this council, Sir Edmund Andros, was a longtime client of James II, having governed James’s proprietary colony of New York from 1674 to 1683. The Dominion consolidated the disparate colonial militias under a single government, improving their coordination and efficiency but placing all military power into the unelected hands of Andros and his council. Andros was trusted with more than just military authority. The absence of an elected assembly meant that all decision-making within the Dominion was concentrated in the hands of the royally appointed governor and council, who had power over taxation, the administration of justice, lands, and religion.⁵On the administration of the Dominion, see Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 71-231.

Andros’s activities in each of these domains fueled colonial resentment towards the Dominion. When a group of leading ministers and former officials from under the charter government, including Cotton Mather and Simon Bradstreet, overthrew the Dominion on April 18, 1689, Mather drew up a Declaration of their grievances. These fell into three interrelated groups – constitutional, economic, and religious. The constitutional structure of the Dominion was, in the view of the colonists, “absolute and arbitrary.” Andros’s commission empowered him “to make laws and raise taxes as he pleased” and to granted him absolute authority over the colonial militia by allowing him to “muster and imploy all persons residing in the territory” (1). This absolute control over the laws and armed forces of the colony made “the people in New-England… all slaves” and enabled Andros to impose economic and religious policies on the colonists. These policies were likewise a source of colonial animosity. Economically, the colonists bristled under “extraordinary and intolerable fees” demanded “from every one upon all occasions, without any rules” (2). Worse than the fees was Andros’s questioning of colonial land claims. Despite decades of possession, promises from Charles II, and acts of the General Court for confirming colonists’ ownership, Andros informed them that “not one man was owner of a foot of land in all the colony” (2-3). Some land was confiscated and given to Andros’s “creatures,” while elsewhere colonists were forced “to take pattents for their lands at excessive rates” (3). Colonists were perhaps most aggravated by the Dominion’s religious policies. To the Calvinist majorities in New England, the introduction of practices more in accordance with the Church of England came as a great threat to their “Israel.” For example, the Declaration notes that the compulsion to swear oaths on the Bible, rather than by upholding their hands, was a “very comprehensive abuse given to us” (2). To a people especially concerned about the incursions of “popery,” swearing on the Bible smacked of idolatry. To the colonists, these popish innovations were deliberate assaults on their religion – they noted that “in the army as well as in the Council Papists are in Commission” (3). Small wonder then that under the Dominion “the Ministers, and the Churches everywhere have seen our sacred concerns… discountenanced” (3). The “gentlemen of Boston” rose up to redress these grievances upon learning of the overthrow of Andros’s master and patron, King James II, in England. On April 18, 1689, they seized the frigate Rose in Boston Harbor and imprisoned Andros and several of his councilors, including former customs official Edward Randolph, in the Boston jail. The Declaration was their attempt to justify their actions.

The central concerns outlined in the Declaration brought together two perennial anxieties in 17th century English politics: popery and arbitrary government.⁶For a discussion of popery and arbitrary government in the English Atlantic world in this period, see Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1-21. To many English people across the empire, these forces worked in tandem. According to one MP “from popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary power… but lay popery flat, and there’s an end to arbitrary government and power. [Arbitrary power] is a mere chimera, or notion, without popery.”⁷Speech of Henry Capel (April 27, 1679) in Anchitell Grey, ed. Debates of the house of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694 (London: Printed for T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1769), VII: 149. In 1678, Titus Oates, a Roman Catholic convert, brought these anxieties to a boil by revealing a fraudulent “popish plot” to assassinate Charles II and reintroduce Catholicism to England.⁸On the plot, see J.P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972). The anxieties stirred up by the plot had provided much of the fuel for the subsequent “Exclusion Crisis,” where the Whig party had endeavored to alter the line of succession by excluding Charles’s Catholic brother, James, from the throne. The Whigs failed in the face of resistance from Charles, and James succeeded his brother in 1685. That James II, in Britain and the empire, began setting up a strong absolutist state, backed by a standing army, while promoting toleration for Catholics, appeared to confirm many Englishmen’s worst fears about the affinity between popery and arbitrary government.⁹On James II’s efforts at absolutist state formation, see Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 118-217. His overthrow in November 1688 by English and Dutch forces led by Prince William of Orange was widely interpreted as a deliverance from “popery and slavery” and a defense of “the laws, religion, and properties” of England’s free-born subjects from “Jesuitical” innovations.¹⁰The Declaration of the Nobility, Gentry, and Commonalty at the Rendevous at Nottingham, Nov. 22, 1688. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A37384.0001.001/1:1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

The Declaration of the Gentlemen of Boston was, in part, an appeal to opinion in England which attempted to claim for Massachusetts Bay, and New England generally, a place in the broader deliverance from popery and arbitrary government accomplished by the overthrow of James II. Andros’s actions in New England and James’s assault on the liberties and religion of English protestants were both part of the “horrid Popish Plot; wherein the bloddy Devoto’s of Rome” intended “the extinction of the Protestant Religion.” After all, New England was “a Countrey so remarkable for the true Profession and pure Exercise of the Protestant Religion,” and so an especially enticing target for papists (1). Increase Mather, minister of Boston’s North Church and Massachusetts Bay’s agent in London at this time, noted that the loss of the colony’s charter and the simultaneous assault on municipal charters in England had been the work of “the same sort of men, and on the same grounds,” namely, “the establishing of arbitrary government.”¹¹Increase Mather, A Further Vindication of New-England, from False Suggestions in a Late Scandalous Pamphlet, pretending to Shew, the Inconvenience of Joining the Plantations Charters with Those of England, 2. This broadside has proved difficult to find in standard online repositories, but a photostat of it is available in Kenneth B. Murdock, Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), between pages 222-223. As the affliction was the same, so was the cure. Rather than simply a colonial rebellion against central authority, the Declaration attempted to paint the Dominion’s overthrow as an action “in compliance with” “the noble undertaking of the Prince of Orange, to preserve the three Kingdoms from the horrible brinks of Popery and Slavery” (3). The colonists, wrote Increase Mather, had “accounted it their duty to embark… in the same cause.”¹²Increase Mather, A Brief Relation of the State of New England, from the Beginning of that Plantation to this Present Year, 1689 (London: Richard Baldwin, 1689), 11-12. In the words of the Declaration, they had sought “to follow the patterns which the Nobility, Gentry and Commonalty… have set before us, though they therein have chiefly proposed to prevent what we already endure” (3-4). By portraying the seizure of their charter and the Andros government as manifestations of popery and arbitrary government in America, the Bay Colonists could depict the overthrow of their royal governor as a local manifestation of the Revolution, and so hope to claim a share in the restoration of liberty promised by the Revolution.¹³More specifically, they sought the return of their charter. R. C. Simmons, “The Massachusetts Charter of 1691” in H.C. Allen and Roger Thompson, eds. Contrast and Connection: Bicentennial Essays in Anglo-American History (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), 72-74. 

Yet the narrative of the Dominion offered by the Mathers did not go uncontested. Edward Randolph, languishing in the Boston jail, wrote to William Blathwayt, Secretary to the Lords of Trade, offering an account of the tumultuous state the colony had entered after the overthrow of the Dominion, upsetting the Declaration’s claim of a fait accompli in emulation of the revolution in England. In his first letter to Blathwayt – signed from the common jail in “N[ew] Algiers” – Randolph caricatured the colony as given over to mob rule: “here is a violent & bloody zeal stird up in the Rabble acted and managed by the preachers.” Randolph described the persecution and mob violence which collaborators with the Dominion government faced following its overthrow. Joseph Dudley, who had served on the Dominion’s advisory council, had his fence “broak down” and was thrown into jail. Samuel Shrimpton, an Anglican merchant who had welcomed the coming of the Dominion, feared “his house would be pulled down by the rabble.” The house of Captain Nicholas Paige was set upon by a group of “women, boyes, & negroes” who “broak all the windows;” it was a sign of how disordered New England had become that servants of the crown were now challenged by women, children, and Africans (Randolph Letter 1). “All matters,” Randolph warned, were “accommodated to the present humour of the Rabble, who cry out that the sword governs.” As Randolph presented it, the overthrow of the lawful Dominion of New England had given way to anarchy and disorder.

Perhaps even more distressing to Blathwayt was the colony’s military posture. In a second letter written from the Boston jail, Randolph warned that Saco, in the Province of Maine, had come under attack by “the Indians,” (the Wabanaki Confederacy) resulting in over 70 colonists’ killed or captured and a rout of the colonial forces. According to Randolph, the damage done in Maine (“our Eastern parts”) already exceeded 30,000 l. Worse still, the French colonists in Quebec had learned of the overthrow of James II, and the beginning of hostilities between England and France known as the 9 Years’ War. “We are now an Easy prey to the French,” Randolph wrote, “unless care be taken from England to secure this Country.” Randolph did not neglect to mention that this military instability was a consequence of the rebellion: “had Sir Edmund Andros continued in the Government wee had long since put an issue to the Indian Warr [and] brought all the French as far as St Croix under the obedience of the Crown of England” (Randolph Letter 2). According to this influential colonial agent, the overthrow of the Dominion had led to anarchy within Massachusetts and made the region vulnerable to attacks by Native Americans and the French. In Whitehall, Randolph’s depiction won out over that offered by the Mathers. Increase Mather’s pleas for the restoration of the original colonial charter were rejected, chiefly because influential ministers like the Earl of Nottingham and William Blathwayt believed that an autonomous Massachusetts would defy the Navigation Acts and undermine the military effectiveness of the region. In place of the old charter, William III granted a new charter with a royal governor and a legislative assembly which would act as the foundation of colonial government in Massachusetts until the American Revolution.

Questions to consider as you read these documents:

• How is Randolph’s analysis of the situation influenced by his many years of conflict with the government of Massachusetts Bay? How should this impact our faith in his description of the colony?
• What did Massachusetts owe to England? Did Massachusetts violate the terms of its charter?
• How genuine do you think the connection is between the overthrow of James II and the overthrow of the Dominion? Do you think the colonists are cynically exploiting the Revolution in England, or do you think they actually perceived their actions as part of the overthrow of absolutism?
• How do these documents speak to the indeterminacy of the empire in the late 17th century – who it was meant to serve and how it was meant to be organized? How does the Declaration reflect a different vision of the empire from Randolph’s letters? Who was “right”?
• What do these documents reveal about the place of Indigenous People, Africans, and women in the struggle for Massachusetts Bay’s autonomy?