The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 avoid Moodey’s fate. “No public worship, no preaching of the word,” railed one of the governor’s enemies. “What ignorance, profaneness and misery must needs ensue!” In his attempts to allow freedom of worship for Anglicans, Cranfield had effectively shut down the colony’s churches, blackening the reputation of royal government throughout the region.²⁷

      The Moodey debacle was a public relations disaster, and one that only made the more mundane tasks of governance more difficult. Cranfield found it virtually impossible to raise revenue, as the assembly refused to pass any money bills. In the meantime, Robert Mason had just as hard a time convincing New Hampshire’s landowners to surrender their land and become his tenants, eliminating another source of revenue that was supposed to support the province and its executive. With no money coming from England either, Cranfield became desperate. He threatened to take landowners to court and force them to pay quitrents to Mason, charged exorbitant fees in the colony’s courts, and eventually decided to enforce old revenue statutes from before his arrival in the colony, bypassing the legislature altogether. Like his campaign against Moodey, these moves made a fair amount of sense. Cranfield was personally broke. Never a rich man, he had sold his office to travel to New Hampshire. While his critics and historians characterize him as a greedy man intent on making a fortune, he may have never been paid a cent by anyone. Moreover, the government of New Hampshire had no funds to operate. Desperate times called for desperate measures, but these measures only cemented Cranfield’s reputation as a tyrant who aimed to subvert the colony’s constitution.²⁸

      These efforts were all for naught, as the colony’s inhabitants increasingly refused to follow any of their governor’s orders. While there was no repetition of Gove’s rebellion, no angry people taking to the streets and demanding their liberties, Cranfield’s opponents did not completely reject violence. Revenue collectors routinely met resistance, including from women who threatened the men with “scalding water, & red hot spits,” if they attempted to collect taxes. Far worse was the punishment afforded Thomas Thurton, Cranfield’s provost marshal in the last days of December 1684. As he traveled around Exeter trying to serve arrest warrants, an angry mob followed and mocked him, on one occasion untying his horse while he visited a neighbor’s house, and on another occasion stealing his sword. Thurton’s deposition of these affronts reads like the complaint of a schoolboy facing off against bullies: at one point he refused to show his commission to the crowd, out of fear that they would take it and refuse to give it back. The mockery turned serious in early January. Thurton went to the house of Samuel Sherborn to collect a small fine, but found Sherborn in no mood to pay. Thurton and his deputy began to take the offender to jail, but on the way a group of Sherborn’s friends freed him, and took Thurton into custody. Over the course of a harrowing two days, the provost marshal was tied up and imprisoned in a house in Exeter, dragged through the town with a noose around his neck, beaten with a cudgel, and eventually dumped over the border into Massachusetts, where he spent another 40 hours tied up in a stranger’s house. Thurton knew most of his attackers, and he and several witnesses left detailed depositions of the affair, but the state of New Hampshire was such that it proved impossible to bring any of the attackers to court. Thurton, after all, was the face of royal authority, and the people had already demonstrated how much respect they had for him.²⁹

      By this time, in fact, Cranfield had essentially given up on New Hampshire. While agents from the colony worked to discredit him at Whitehall, the governor begged for a new assignment. He cited his deteriorating health, which he blamed on the cold weather, and requested a posting in a more “healthful” climate like Barbados or Jamaica. These later letters revealed a broken man, physically and mentally exhausted by his long political struggle with the New Hampshirites. When the Committee on Trade and Plantations finally appointed him to be customs officer in Barbados, he pronounced it “the greatest happyness that ever I had in my life … to remove from these unreasonable people.” He served with distinction for over a decade in Barbados, where he successfully weathered the Glorious Revolution and the vagaries of politics in the famously tumultuous colony. Indeed, but for his two years in New Hampshire, Cranfield seems to have been a model public servant.³⁰

      The troubles in New Hampshire demonstrated both the possibilities and pitfalls of Whitehall’s new imperial vision. There was no reason why Charles II’s ministers could not build a centralized empire—in New Hampshire, after all, no one denied the king’s theoretical power to rule his plantations. At the same time, however, the volatile political and religious situation across the Atlantic had the potential to complicate imperial plans, especially when people on both sides of the divide insisted on reading every local dispute as an element in a global design. In the midst of this controversy, one issue lurked just beneath the surface: defense against external enemies. On one occasion Cranfield tried, without success, to use fears of an Indian attack to shame the legislature into compliance with his demands. In the next experiment in royal control, on the island of Bermuda, the problem of defense jumped to the fore, causing a dispute perhaps even more dramatic than the one in New Hampshire.³¹

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      If New Hampshire was the most worthless corner of the king’s dominions, Bermuda was not far behind. The island’s 3,600 whites and 5,000 slaves produced low-quality tobacco and served as a way station for ships crossing the Atlantic, but the colony had yet to attain its later reputation as a shipping hub. In terms of politics and religion, Bermuda stood apart. Its rulers, the Somers Island Company (usually known as the Bermuda Company), held the oldest continuous СКАЧАТЬ