The Pilgrim fathers of New England : $b a historyMartyn, W. Carlos (William Carlos)
History
The Pilgrim fathers of New England : $b a history
Martyn, W. Carlos (William Carlos)
Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Pilgrims (New Plymouth Colony)
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the motto has been superseded by Algernon Sydney’s famous Latin, _Sub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
“Every thing by turns, and nothing long,”
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—
“Whose tongue
Outvenomed all the worms of Nile.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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