The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

Whigs—Kirke gained a particular reputation for cruelty in his response to Monmouth’s Rebellion, where he allegedly “Invited 30 Gentlemen to dine with him, and after dinner hanged them up in his hall to satisfie his popish and blood thirsty Cruelty.” Such stories traveled around New England, but in the end the king passed over Kirke—a narrow escape according to Increase Mather, who claimed that “Bloody Kirk would in a few weekes have made horrible slaughters.”⁵⁵

      In the end, however, the coming of royal government to Massachusetts did not bring about bloodshed of any kind. Instead, the change in administration occurred slowly and a bit haphazardly. It also showed the influence of the most hated man in New England, Edward Randolph, who had a very different approach to colonial governance from that of his ideological allies Cranfield and Coney. For all his hatred of New England’s Puritan past, Randolph retained the belief that most New Englanders were naturally loyal, and he recommended giving a great deal of power to reliable local people. He also eschewed extreme tactics like imprisoning opponents or interfering with the region’s religious establishment, which would only play into the hands of his radical enemies. Indeed, Randolph’s moderation eventually set him at odds with Cranfield in particular, who he complained was “of the most arbitrary nature I have heard of.” It seems probable that Randolph used his connections at Whitehall to secure freedom for both Edward Gove and the prisoners from Bermuda, understanding that the creation of martyrs would only hurt his cause. “They are very numerous,” Randolph wrote of the colonists, “and it is far easier to affright them into rebellion than to obedience.”⁵⁶

      The first royal administration in Massachusetts bore the marks of Randolph’s moderation. Rather than Percy Kirke, the king commissioned the most reliable moderate in the colony, Joseph Dudley, to be council president, meaning that control passed to the son of a Bay Colony founder rather than an outsider like Kirke. Dudley’s commission brought howls of protest from his political rivals; outgoing secretary Edward Rawson, for instance, lodged a protest that the new commission violated the colonists’ “rights as Englishmen” because it did not provide for an assembly. The protest never left the council chamber, however, and it seems that historians have noticed the lack of representation much more than ordinary New Englanders did at the time.⁵⁷

      Dudley’s presidency was short-lived, however, replaced at the end of 1686 by the new Dominion of New England. The main difference between the two commissions was that the Dominion extended much farther, incorporating all the New England colonies under one government, and eventually annexing New York and both New Jersey colonies as well. In addition, an outsider, former New York governor Sir Edmund Andros, served as the Dominion’s governor, and he arrived with several regiments of redcoats and some allies from his days in New York. In some ways the Dominion was an experiment in absolutism, planned in James II’s court with little input from people with actual experience in the colonies. More than that, however, it was created to defend the king’s interest against the French. One internal memorandum, written sometime in 1688, made clear that the king had joined the colonies together so that “the Frontiers of his Ma[jes]ty’s Dominions in those Parts, with the Beaver Trade, [would be] more easily secured.” The same report devoted more pages to French pretensions in Hudson’s Bay than to any other single colony, demonstrating the degree to which geopolitics shaped colonial policy in James II’s court.⁵⁸

      The Dominion of New England, in the long run, represented a more focused exercise in royal power than previous regimes in New Hampshire and Bermuda. Andros was a competent administrator not liable to the conspiratorial outlooks of many contemporaries, and he also had the support of royal troops and resources. While he did attempt, and in many ways accomplish, a thorough remaking of the region’s political culture, his correspondence is surprisingly free of the unrest that often accompanied such changes. At the dawn of 1688, advocates of royal government could look with some pride on a system that actually seemed to work. It was only when the new regime failed to deliver on its main promise—defense against external enemies—that conspiratorial fears and partisan divisions once again came to the fore.

       Chapter 2

      Catholics, Indians, and the Politics of Conspiracy

      IN THE SUMMER of 1688 the governor of the Dominion of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, faced a political crisis. A group of hostile Indians had attacked the colony’s northern and western borders, killing and capturing a number of English settlers and causing frightened townspeople to take refuge in garrison houses. Even more alarming than the violence, however, were the colonists’ reactions. In Maine, local officials foolishly imprisoned several Abenaki chiefs, while the people of Marlborough, Massachusetts, assembled in arms without any instruction from the governor. To calm these fears, Andros sent his lieutenant, Francis Nicholson, on a good will tour of the New England backcountry. He assured the people, both English and Indian, that they were safe “under the protection of a greate King, who protects all his Subjects both in their lives and fortunes.” In the eyes of Andros and Nicholson, New Englanders’ hysterics made little sense. The Dominion of New England—a potent union of all the colonies from Maine to New Jersey under the command of an experienced officer—provided the best defense against external enemies that the region had ever possessed. The king and his redcoats, not a motley local militia, would keep the plantations safe.¹

      The crisis in the Dominion represented the first major setback in what had been a fairly successful example of imperial state building. The key to the Dominion was protection, represented perfectly in the new union’s official seal. The design featured James II, “Robed in His Royall Vestments and Crowned, with a Scepter in the Left hand, the Right hand being extended towards an English Man and an Indian both kneeling, the one presenting the Fruits of the Country and other a Scrole.” Above them a flying angel held a banner with the Dominion’s motto, “Nunquam libertas gratior extat,” “never does liberty appear in a more gracious form [than under a pious king].” The monarch received allegiance and tribute and provided protection, which was the key to political stability. Andros and his allies knew that the Dominion’s programs would excite opposition from New Englanders who defined both “liberty” and “piety” in very different ways from James II’s allies. However, they believed that they could keep control as long as they upheld their promise to provide protection—and they were mostly right. Despite some opposition, the Dominion did not fall until subjects began to believe that their leaders were not protecting them at all, and in fact aimed to subvert and destroy the country. The opposition to the Dominion grew as a result of its failed Indian policy; as native enemies attacked the borders, New Englanders turned against their leaders.²

Figure 4. Seal of the Dominion of New England, 1686. William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States (New York, 1879), 3: 9.

      The wave of fear that threatened the Dominion combined several different varieties of popular anxiety. Aside from the popish plot alarms that periodically struck both England and its colonies, settlers in North America also obsessively feared Indian attacks. Europeans and natives had experienced tensions since the newcomers arrived on the continent, but the violence increased during the 1670s. First, in 1675, a coalition of Indians under the Wampanoag sachem Metacom (King Philip) attacked English settlements in New England in response to land disputes and religious tensions, dramatically revealing the region’s vulnerability. The following year Indian attacks on the frontier of Virginia inspired a massive popular revolt against Governor William Berkeley by subjects, led by the upstart Nathaniel Bacon, who believed the governor was not protecting the colony from Indian enemies. While peace had returned to both places by 1677, the legacy of this unrest remained. As a result, the fears of popish plots that crossed the Atlantic after 1678 arrived in places already primed to expect the worst.³

      Popular panics of the 1680s proved particularly powerful because they combined the tropes of antipopery with homegrown racial fears. Increasingly, people became apprehensive of a massive plot that combined papists and Indians into a gigantic, diabolical coalition that aimed to push English Protestants off the continent. This belief did not come naturally; indeed, during the first period of colonization