The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

aborted rebellion changed the nature of Cranfield’s mission, and altered the way that people on both sides viewed the ongoing disputes over taxation and land tenure. Gove and Cranfield each saw the other’s actions not as isolated events, reactions to local circumstance, but as parts of a global conspiracy. It was a battle of two universalisms: one rooted in radical Protestant thought, the other in royalist politics. With both sides so intransigent, there was little hope of compromise, and the situation in New Hampshire only deteriorated in the following months, as the colony’s leading inhabitants divided into two hostile parties.

      Cranfield’s voluminous correspondence from this period allows for a close examination of his changing views of the imperial mission. If he originally considered himself as a neutral arbiter between Mason and the established colonists, such a role was altogether inappropriate in the face of a transatlantic design against the royal interest. The only way to make New England loyal was to refashion its political culture, to purge it of its seditious elements and train the people in loyalty—by force if necessary. Not surprisingly, his plan had a strong economic motive—he called for proper enforcement of the Navigation Acts—but his boldest policy proposals came not in the economic arena, but in the religious one. He believed, like many Tory royalists in the early 1680s, that radical preachers served as anchors of the Puritan Plot, poisoning the people from their true obedience, and he proposed that only by dealing with the ministers could the empire prosper.

      The governor adopted these views during a lengthy residence in Boston, the regional center of sedition. He went there because he was frightened to remain in New Hampshire, believing his life to be in danger, but the time in Boston allowed Cranfield to “pry into the secrets of the faction.” These investigations of the town’s Congregational underworld led him to some dramatic policy proposals. First, he advocated the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, as the rulers of that government used their semi-independence to spread anti-monarchical sentiment around the region. They corresponded with and provided refuge to seditious elements from England, and they had their hands in everything unpleasant, from the Rye House Plot to Gove’s aborted rebellion. Next, Cranfield requested a permanent military presence to enforce the king’s will, a “frigate” that would defend the region not only from foreign enemies, but from domestic ones as well. But more than all these necessary measures, Cranfield demanded the authority to act against “the preachers.” Congregational ministers, he claimed, did the most to excite the people against the king, because they had a captive audience in church each Sunday, and unusual powers of argument and persuasion. There could be no order in the region, Cranfield wrote, until he received a command to “remove all such their Preachers who oppose & indeavour to disturb the peace of this Government. Which method will be necessary to be observed in the Settlement of the Bostoners colony, & also in the Province of Main, from which I can only expect tricks & trouble, till annexed to this Government.”²³

      Cranfield thus aimed not just at the structures of government in the region, but at New England’s political culture: the beliefs and values that informed politics. In doing so, however, he did not make reference to a “New England Way” that distinguished the region from the rest of the empire. On the contrary, he saw the colonies as dumping grounds for the worst people and ideas of English (and Scottish) dissent, a place with a profound and deleterious connection to the wider world. At the same time, Boston served as a conduit, nurturing seditious ideas that could be repackaged and sent to other parts of English America, like New Hampshire or Bermuda. The key institution in this process was Harvard College, the local training ground for ministers. The college sent forth “Rebellious Trumpeters” who spread sedition around New England, meddling with local governments and encouraging everything from violation of the Navigation Acts to the harboring of regicides. Along the way, they excited the people against the established Church of England, as they “term the liturgy a precedent of superstition picked out of the Popish dunghill.” In order to fix the problem, Cranfield demanded the power to turn out ministers and replace Harvard’s faculty with orthodox preachers from England. Moreover, he proposed levying direct taxes in order to pay these Anglican ministers, bypassing the recalcitrant assemblies. Had it been implemented, Cranfield’s all-out assault on Congregationalism would have transformed the region, establishing by fiat the kind of parish structure that existed in England.²⁴

      For the most part, Cranfield’s English correspondents proved hesitant to move ahead on the governor’s extreme proposals. The king’s ministers did continue their legal campaign against the Massachusetts charter—a longtime goal of many Tories—but they would not send a frigate to New England or grant the governor power to turn out ministers. Indeed, they even took a softer line on the rebel Edward Gove than Cranfield believed was prudent. The rebel arrived in London in 1683 a condemned man, sentenced to be drawn and quartered for his act of rebellion. In a city teeming with rebels and traitors, however, this old New Englander was a very low priority. Consigned to the Tower of London, Gove repeatedly petitioned for release, while friends and family members testified that he had a history of mental illness. Soon Gove was given free rein to roam around the Tower grounds, and within a few years he received a full pardon and returned home to New Hampshire. Cranfield was long gone by that time, but he did complain bitterly when he heard of the prisoner’s easy treatment, arguing that “if Gove escape[s] the sentence of the law there is an end of his Maj[es]t[ie]s business in New England.”²⁵

      In the absence of meaningful assistance from his superiors, Cranfield was left floundering for any way to exert the king’s will against those who conspired against him. He chose the worst possible battle, taking on Portsmouth’s articulate Congregational minister in a struggle that made the governor look like a cruel and arbitrary tyrant, and undoubtedly caused many people to think Edward Gove had not been so crazy after all. Since his arrival in the colony, Cranfield had complained about the Reverend Joshua Moodey, who he believed was a covert enemy who encouraged the enemies of the king in New Hampshire, even Edward Gove. Since no evidence linked Moodey to such activity, the governor set a trap for his enemy, one that had the added benefit of furthering his design to establish the Church of England in the colony. He made clear that he expected the colony’s ministers to administer the sacraments according to the custom of the Church of England, meaning that all children could be baptized, and all adults who did not lead “scandalous” lives could receive communion. In addition, he issued a direct challenge to Moodey, stating that he and several other prominent Anglicans would come to receive communion from the minister in December 1683.²⁶

      The governor’s position had a logical consistency that was difficult to refute. Like many outside observers, Cranfield considered New England’s ecclesiastical system hopelessly unfair and even un-Christian, since leaders of most churches limited the sacraments to those who provided direct evidence of being “visible saints.” As a result, the vast majority of children in the colony were not baptized, even though everyone contributed to the minister’s maintenance. In addition, Cranfield believed the Congregationalists were persecutors, particularly against those who advocated “Common Prayer Worship,” and his action only took the logical measure of ensuring that those who worshiped in the national church were not objects of discrimination in a royal colony.

      If Cranfield’s motives made sense, his move nonetheless backfired. Moodey naturally refused to give communion to the governor. In retaliation, Cranfield banned the minister from the pulpit and threw him in the common jail, also sending a letter to the colony’s next most important minister, Seaborn Cotton, that Cranfield intended to seek communion from him as well. The results were predictable: by placing Moodey in prison, Cranfield turned the minister into a sufferer for the faith, the greatest reward for any Reformed cleric. Within days Moodey had advertised his state to friends around New England, not only complaining about the physical conditions, but also warning that such persecution would spread around the region. Soon other New England divines were using New Hampshire as an example of what would happen if the people surrendered to royal government: “The Cup is going round the world,” warned Boston minister Cotton Mather, and would soon come to these remote provinces as well, recreating the familiar horrors of the Laudian persecution that had inspired the first Puritans to cross the ocean, or, even worse, the dragonnades currently rooting out French Protestants. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, all religious services ceased as the colony’s other ministers fled to