Massachusetts Bay Colony

New England also resented shifts in government policy as a result of the changing monarchy in London.

Under James II, Massachusetts Bay lost its original charter, which had upheld the Puritan way of life for over 50 years.

A new government imposed royal rule and religious tolerance.

With the overthrow of James II and the Glorious Revolution, the Massachusetts Bay government carried on with no official charter from 1689 until 1691.

When a new charter arrived right in the middle of the Salem witch hunt, it didn't restore all the privileges or policies of the original New England way.

So in other words, in 1692, New England faced economic, political, and religious uncertainty while suffering from several devastating battles on its northern frontier.

Had this landing been made, it is probable the whole history of New England would have been vastly different.

In 1687, Ipswich was the second town in wealth and population in the ancient “Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England,” as all of its legal papers then described the province, and its residents religiously believed that their New England home was far dearer to them than the old English home which had so bitterly persecuted their fathers and mothers fifty years before.

The people who lived in Chebacco Parish in 1687 must have been a sturdy, patriotic, intellectual class.

There are various evidences of this, one of which will here be called to your attention.

The traditions had faded almost entirely out of the minds of the descendants of the actors, and to me it was almost a revelation when, in later years, I found unquestioned historical records deserving of national attention.

One of the actors was my grandmother’s great-grandfather, thus bringing me within four generations of the event, and I feel a personal interest in calling attention to the importance of the action.

The English charter, which was granted on March 9, 1629, to the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay—inhabitants of Boston, Salem, Ipswich, Beverly, Gloucester, and other neighboring towns with good old English names—was remarkably liberal in its terms in very many respects.

Puritan influence prevailed at headquarters in London, and the leading idea of those who procured the charter was to furnish a safe home to the Puritan Independents or Congregationalists, although it was hoped that mines of precious metals might be discovered or that the pine forests and the fisheries might yield some return to the chartered corporation of the Massachusetts Bay Company.

So the actual historical Plymouth colony was very small.

It was dwarfed by the much more powerful Massachusetts Bay colony that arose directly to its north, let alone by the massive and lucrative Virginia colony to the south on the Chesapeake.

And in some ways, it more closely resembled the French colony of Acadia, comprising for several decades no more than a thousand or so colonists in a small string of villages and outposts.

And it survived mainly through trade and diplomatic alliances with the much larger indigenous societies around them.

But as we'll discuss next time, the lawyer Thomas Morton eventually seized control of this colony in a kind of revolution, renamed it Marymount, and made it into a sort of anarchistic haven for revelry and misrule.

So to the Plymouth colonists, this presented a threat not only to their monopoly on trade with the natives, but even to law and order itself.

So in the next section, we'll see how Plymouth dealt with this menace, and then after that, how they dealt with the much larger, more long-lasting challenge that quickly took its place in the form of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a much larger colonial enterprise created by a great migration of Puritans into New England, and which quickly came to dwarf the settlement at Plymouth.

So we'll see how Plymouth colonies survived and persisted in this new landscape of Puritan New England, how they lost the security of the Anglo-Wampanoag alliance and fought a uniquely brutal and catastrophic war against their former allies, and then ultimately how Plymouth lost its autonomy and was swallowed up by their larger neighbor to the north.