Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/61

 1685-9] Governor Andros. 29 character and of some colonial experience, a brave soldier, and more honest than most public men of that day, but wholly wanting in the intelligence and power of conciliation needed for the task before him. As a staunch churchman he was certain to be unacceptable to the people of Massachusetts. In Rhode Island and Plymouth, where there was no influential class tenaciously wedded to political privilege, Andros met with little or no resistance. In Connecticut, when Andros presented himself and demanded the surrender of the charter, it was refused and the document itself hidden, if tradition be true, in an oak-tree. The struggle against Andros in Massachusetts, where the township of Ipswich refused to pay taxes levied without the consent of the representatives, bore considerable like- ness to the proceedings of the revolutionists eighty years later. In each case the colonists were not so much resisting actual oppression as warring against a system under which gross oppression would become possible. In each case popular opinion was stirred up by exaggeration and even slander. Thus Andros, a staunch churchman and a loyal and gallant soldier, was accused of seeking to convert the Indians to Popery and of encouraging them to massacre the settlers. In each case the administrators were tactless and blundering, and by their half-hearted tyranny at once excited opposition and failed to crush it. The parallel is incomplete in that, in the first instance, happily for both countries, the drama was cut short by external intervention, instead of working itself out to its natural climax; while the encroachments planned by James and entrusted to Andros were more far-reaching and more destructive to liberty than anything devised by George III and his advisers. Representation was swept away; all administration, legislation and taxation were vested in the governor and council. That council was, as vacancies arose, to be nominated by the King. Moreover all sense of security in property was overthrown by an instruction given to Andros to require that fresh titles to land should be taken out and paid for. There was no regular machinery left through which the whole colony could make a formal and constitutional protest. The townsmen of Ipswich, in their public meeting, protested against a rate levied by any authority but an elected assembly. For this action six of the leading men were fined and declared incapable of office ; and an order was issued that no town should hold a meeting more than once a year. Increase Mather, an Independent minister of distinction and practical ability, was thereupon sent to England to plead the cause of the colonists. Like Penn, he accepted as genuine that policy of toleration whereby James was trying to win the good-will of the dissenters, and ingratiated himself with some of the most unscrupulous of James' supporters, though, unlike Penn, he did not pursue that policy so thoroughly and so overtly as to forfeit the good-will of those soon to be in power. C'.J. I.