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 mosphere of the plantations. There were no Puritans there to bother him. Virginia had made its own laws against Puritan practices—and enforced them.

Never was a monarch who would have been better pleased with having about him actual slaves—men and women whose bodies he would have owned. His sway must have spread northward as far as the border of the French possessions, for though New England was Puritan, it bent reluctantly to the sway of the Commonwealth, seeming to scent in the Roundhead sovereignty a kind of rival that threatened to take over its half-won autonomy. A kingship exercised in America would probably have suited the men of New England very well.

In all likelihood the throne would in due time have been transferred to the mother country. But its erection here, even for a few years, must have infused into the character of the