USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > St. Botolph's town; an account of old Boston in colonial days > Part 6
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But La Tour had meanwhile received his
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ships, and was able with them to rout D'Aul- nay's three vessels. His lady alertly followed up this advantage, visiting France to help strengthen his cause, and coming back by way of Boston. This visit on the part of the re- doubtable madam seems not to have been of her planning, however. She had engaged Cap- tain Bayley to transport her from London to Acadia whither she was anxious to bring, as soon as might be, stores and munitions which should aid her husband. But Bayley chose to put in at Boston.
Promptly Madam La Tour sued him for damages, alleging that the six months con- sumed by the voyage had been an unreasonable length of time and that he had not taken her to Acadia as bargained for. The jury awarded her £2,000, for which Captain Bayley's ship was attached. This proved to be worth only £1,100, however, and it cost the Lady about £700 to hire vessels to convey her and her effects to Acadia. The colony, too, had ulti- mately to pay the damages it had awarded her. For the owners of the ship and cargo which Lady La Tour had attached promptly seized a Boston ship in London to indemnify them- selves and, when it became doubtful whether they would be able to hold her, attached the
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bodies of Stephen Winthrop, the governor's son, who happened to be then in London, and of Captain Joseph Weld, who had been on the jury when the La Tour damages were awarded. Sir Harry Vane nobly came to the rescue of the Bostonians, thus winning from Winthrop the acknowledgment that "both now and at other times Mr. Vane showed himself a true friend of New England and a man of a noble and generous mind."
Meanwhile Lady La Tour had arrived back at her stamping-ground and had offered her husband a very shrewd piece of advice. " Go to Boston, declare yourself to be a Protestant," she counselled, " ask for a minister to preach to the men at the fort, and promise that if the Bostonians help us to master D'Aulnay and conquer Acadia, we will share our conquests with them." This Machiavellian suggestion La Tour seized with avidity, and sailed gaily forth.
Scarcely had he gone when his lady, falling one day into a transport of fury at some un- pleasant turn of events, so berated and reviled the Recollet friars at Fort St. Jean, that they refused to stay under her roof, and set out for Port Royal in the depth of winter, taking with them eight strong soldiers, who were too good
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Catholics to remain longer in such a hotbed of heresy. At Port Royal this little party was most warmly received. D'Aulnay paid the eight soldiers their long overdue wages and lodged the friars with his own priests. Then he plied them all with questions and, learning that La Tour had gone to Boston, leaving only forty-five men to defend his wife and his fort- ress, he saw Heaven's smile at last, and leaped to seize the golden opportunity opened to him.
Every man about Port Royal was hastily mustered into action. Then D'Aulnay crossed the Bay of Fundy with all his force, erected a fort on the west side of the river, and, after delaying for a time in an attempt to win over more of La Tour's men (capturing incidentally a small vessel which had been sent from Boston loaded with provisions and bearing a letter to tell Lady La Tour that her husband would join her in a month), he brought his cannons into position, and made as if he would batter down the fortress. The garrison was summoned to surrender, but when for answer they hung out a red flag and " shouted a thousand insults and blasphemies," accompanying the same with a volley of cannon shots directed by the intrepid Amazon, D'Aulnay could do nothing but fight the thing to a finish. In spite of the gallant
Lauis a Holman
FORT LA TOUR (OR ST. JEAN), ST. JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, FROM A DRAWING BY LOUIS A. HOLMAN
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defence of Madame La Tour, D'Aulnay's su- perior numbers prevailed. All resistance was overcome; the fort was pillaged, and all the survivors of the garrison, including Madame La Tour, were taken prisoners. At first the lady was left at liberty, but after she had been detected in an attempt to communicate with her husband by means of an Indian, she was put into confinement. Then, and then only, did she fall ill. Three weeks later she was dead.
D'Aulnay had now robbed his rival of his wife and captured Fort St. Jean, the best tra- ding station in Acadia. The King compli- mented him highly, and when he demanded reparation for the part Boston had taken against him his right to satisfaction was in- directly admitted. Winthrop had learned his lesson. D'Aulnay's stay as described in the governor's Journal makes interesting reading : " It being the Lord's day [of September, 1646] and the people ready to go to the assem- bly after dinner, Monsieur Marie and Monsieur Louis, with Monsieur D'Aulnay [and] his secretary arrived at Boston in a small pinnace and Major Gibbons sent two of his chief officers to meet them at the waterside who con- ducted them to their lodgings without noise or bustle. The public worship being ended the
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Governor repaired home, and sent Major Gib- bons with other gentlemen and a guard of mus- keteers to attend them to the Governor's house, who meeting them without his door carried them into his house, where they were enter- tained with wine and sweetmeats, and after a while he accompanied them to their lodgings being the house of Major Gibbons, where they were entertained that night.
" The next morning they repaired to the Governor, and delivered him their commission, which was in form of a letter directed to the Governor and magistrates. ... Their diet was provided at the ordinary, where the Magis- trates used to diet in Court times; and the Governor accompanied them always at meals. Their manner was to repair to the Governor's house every morning about eight of the clock, who accompanied them to the place of meeting; and at night either himself or some of the Commissioners, accompanied them to their lodgings."
A great deal of ceremony surely for a little place like Boston! But then, D'Aulnay had asked £8,000 indemnity and the government had to look as if it could pay in case it had to. The Commissioners, though, sturdily denied "any guilt " on their part maintaining that
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they had only permitted La Tour to hire the vessels. And they brought counter-charges against D'Aulnay. Finally, it was agreed that the matter be settled amicably and that Boston " send a small present to D'Aulnay in satis- faction." A treaty was accordingly signed. In due time the proposed " small present " was sent. It consisted of a sedan chair which the marauding Captain Cromwell had taken as a prize and presented to Winthrop a few months before. Winthrop gave it to D'Aulnay, as he frankly says, because it was of no value to him!
But the suite of the victorious French lord was sent off with all possible honours just the same " the Governor and our Commissioners accompanying them to their boat, attended with a guard of musketeers, and gave them five guns from Boston, three from Charlestown, and five from Castle Island; and we sent them aboard a quarter cask of sack and some mut- ton. . . D'Aulnay was evidently satisfied with the results of his visit. For he had not in the least expected the large sum of money for which he had asked. All that he wished to make clear to the Puritans was that they should fit out no more expeditions for La Tour. And now, when he had made this point, forced Fortune to crown his life-work and saw ahead
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of him promise of a thriving trade and a con- stantly growing colony,
" Death stepped tacitly and took him."
On the 24th of May, 1650, as he and his valet were canoeing in the basin of Port Royal, not far from the mouth of the Annapolis, their frail craft overturned, and though they clung to it and got astride of it, one at either end, in an endeavour to save themselves, they could not. At the end of an hour and a half D'Aul- nay was dead, not from drowning but from cold, for the water still retained the chill of winter. So Father Ignace, the Superior of the Capuchins, found him. With fitting ceremonies he was buried in the chapel of the fort at Port Royal in the presence of his soldiers, his ten- ants and his sorrowing wife.
That poor, poor wife! For she still had Charles La Tour to deal with, and with him her own life was destined to be linked. That La Tour had friends in France she soon came to know only too well. Through false papers, intrigues and dastardly treachery Port Royal was promptly wrested from her, and she was even persuaded to return to La Tour Fort St. Jean, which her husband had taken fairly in a well-fought fight. Beset with insidious ene-
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mies and tortured beyond endurance by fears for her eight young children, the brave spirit of this lovely woman broke with her heart, and three years after the death of her noble hus- band she married (February 24, 1653) the man who had so long been her tormentor. With him she took up her abode at Fort St. Jean. Of the children for whose sake she had sold herself the four boys were killed in the wars of Louis XIV, and the girls all became nuns. So no single trace of D'Aulnay's blood may to-day be found in the land for which he gave his life and wealth out of the great love he bore France and the Church.
The significant lesson of this whole episode so far as Boston history is concerned lies, how- ever, in the fact that what was, properly speak- ing, an international matter took place wholly within the borders of the town; and that Mas- sachusetts assumed, throughout, the attitude of a completely independent government, deal- ing with D'Aulnay and La Tour just as inde- pendently and in the same manner as Charles and Buckingham dealt with the Huguenots and the French monarchy. We shall do well to recall this incident later on in Boston's history and contrast it with the claims made by Eng- land in regard to her attitude of " protection."
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VII
FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD
CRITICS of the Puritans, taking their text from Mrs. Heman's poem, are disposed to judge harshly, on the ground of inconsistency, that band of earnest Christians, who, coming here because they had been persecuted in Eng- land persecuted in their turn those who ven- tured upon a spiritual angle in any degree different from their own. Such critics are, however, confusing the ideals cherished by our forefathers with their own ideals for them. They never claimed that their object in coming here was to secure for all men the boon of freedom in religion. On the contrary, they said quite plainly that the object of their emi- gration was to escape oppression for them- selves. Upon that they laid the emphasis; and with that they stopped.
Far from being inconsistent they adhered through fire and water to their own self-de- fensive principle. All their legislation, all the
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arrangements of their society were framed to secure this object. It was in accordance with this that they reserved to themselves the right of admitting only whom they pleased as free- men of the colony; and it was to this end that, a little more than a year after their arrival, they " ordered and agreed that, for time to come, no man should be admitted to the free- dom of the body politic, but such as are mem- bers of some of the churches within the limits of the same." To them such an ordinance seemed the one and only way of forming the Christian republic towards which their hearts yearned, a community in which the laws of Moses should constitute the rules of civil life and in which the godly clergy should be the interpreters of those rules.
Of course, the weakness of the system lay in the fact that the clergy were only men. And being men, of like passions with ourselves, they grew, by the very deference they fed upon, into creatures insatiate for power. But piti- fully narrow though they were; revoltingly cruel though they soon came to be, it should nevertheless be borne in mind that they were, in almost every case, sincere. They believed that they were conserving the great good of Christian amity in persecuting relentlessly all
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who differed from them, - and so, girding up their loins, they gave still another turn to the screw !
And now, having said in their defence all, as I honestly believe, there is to be said, I can with a clear conscience, record their persecu- tions and paint as darkly as I must the horrors of that terrible era. To understand it all we must bear in mind the fact that, not only was the number of clergy among the emigrants to Boston and vicinity large, but being men of un- usual gifts, that they of necessity exercised an enormous influence in this " Christian repub- lic." Moreover, the magistrates themselves were, in a large number of cases men imbued with what we may call the ecclesiastical feel- ing. When Governor Dudley, for instance, came to die, there were found in his pocket these lines which showed his own cast of mind to have been fiercely bigoted :
"Let men of God in Courts and Churches watch O're such as do a Toleration hatch, Lest that Ill Egg bring forth a Cockatrice, To poison all with heresie and vice."
The " cockatrice " which most powerfully agitated Boston was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, delicately characterized by the Reverend
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Thomas Welde as "the American Jezebel." To students of history calmly examining to- day the testimony on both sides, Mrs. Hutch- inson stands out however as a gentlewoman of spotless life, kind heart, brilliant mind and superb courage. That she had a good deal of that intellectual vanity possessed by most clever women is also plain. And she had be- sides - and it was this which more than any- thing else occasioned her banishment - a tongue which could and did lash furiously those whom she disliked. Comparing with her own clergyman - the Reverend John Cotton - the host of other clergy then in the Massa- chusetts colony, she found between them a great gulf fixed; and she said this quite dis- tinctly to the groups of people who used to come to her house opposite the place where the Old South Church now stands, to hear her discuss Mr. Cotton's sermons.
Mrs. Hutchinson came to the colony (in the autumn of 1634) primed for religious discus- sion. Her father had been Francis Marbury, a minister, first in Lincolnshire and afterwards in London, and in the scholarly and theological atmosphere of his house she had, for years, been accepted as the intellectual equal of his ministerial friends. Theology, indeed, was as
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the breath of life to her and she hinted in no uncertain way to some Puritan ministers who were on the vessel during her journey to New England that they might expect to hear more from her in the new world. For she regarded herself as one with a mission.
William Hutchinson, the husband of this lady, was the type of man who is always mar- ried by strong-minded magnetic women. Win- throp has nothing but words of contempt for him, but there is little doubt that a sincere attachment existed between the married pair and that Hutchinson possessed sterling char- acter and solid worth as well as a comfortable estate. In their Lincolnshire home the two had been parishioners of the Reverend John Cot- ton and regular attendants at St. Botolph's Church. When Cotton fled to escape the tyr- anny of the bishops, the Hutchinsons decided to follow, and when the Reverend John Wheel- wright, who had married Mrs. Hutchinson's daughter, began to be persecuted in his turn their departure was naturally hastened.
Promptly upon their arrival in Boston both Hutchinsons made their application to be re- ceived as members of the church. This step was indispensable to admit the pair into Chris- tian fellowship and to allow Mr. Hutchinson
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the privilege of engaging in business and otherwise exercising the rights of a citizen. He came through the ordeal easily enough but, in consequence of the reports already spread concerning her extravagant opinions, his wife was subjected to a most searching examina- tion. Finally, however, she, too, was pro- nounced a " member in good standing " of the congregation over which her beloved John Cotton served as associate pastor. And now she was ready to enter upon the career which soon divided Boston into two violently opposed factions and which ended by the withdrawal to England of the brilliant young Governor Vane and by the banishment from the colony of her with whom he had sympathized.
Even so far back as 1635 Boston seems to have been capable of great enthusiasm over a woman who could persuasively present " some new thing." The doctrine advanced by this woman was certainly an arresting one for that day. For, cleverly interwoven with what was ostensibly only a recapitulation of the sermon preached the Sunday before, ran constantly the astonishing proclamation that there are in this world certain " elect " who may or may not be ordained clergy and that to them are given direct revelations of the will of God. Now the
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ministers of New England were formalists to the core and the society which they dominated was organized upon the basis that if a man had a sad countenance, wore sombre garb, lived an austere life, quoted the Bible freely, attended worship regularly and took off his hat to the clergy he was a good man. Such a man alone might be a citizen. To admit, therefore, that, in place of these convenient signs of grace, - " works " as they were called, - one must rest salvation upon the intimate and so necessarily elusive relation between man and his God was to preach political as well as spiritual revolu- tion. The logical result of accepting Mrs. Hutchinson's doctrines would have meant noth- ing less than the annihilation of those conve- nient earmarks by which the " good " and the " bad " in the community could be readily dis- tinguished, - the " good " marked for civic advancement and the " bad " for the stocks and banishment.
At first the far-reaching import of the lady's views seems not to have struck her hearers. All the leading and influential people of the town flocked to her " parlour talks " and, for a time, she was that very remarkable thing - a prophet honoured in her own community. For the matter of her " lectures " was always
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pithy and bright, the leader's wit always ready and " everybody was there," - which counted then for righteousness just as it does now. Hawthorne's genius has conjured up for us the scene at one of these Hutchinson gather- ings so that we, too, may attend and be among the " crowd of hooded women and men in stee- ple hats and close-cropped hair ... assembled at the door and open windows of a house newly- built. An earnest expression glows in every face ... and some pressed inward as if the bread of life were to be dealt forth, and they feared to lose their share."
Unfortunately Mrs. Hutchinson found the transition between the abstract and the con- crete as easy as every other descensus Averni. From preaching against a doctrine of " works " she soon dropped into sly digs at the pastors who defended this belief. "A company of legall professors," quoth she, " lie poring on the law which Christ hath abol- ished." No wonder it began to be noised abroad that the seer was casting " reproach upon the ministers, ... saying that none of them did preach the covenant of free grace but Master Cotton, and that they have not the seale of the Spirit and so were not able min- isters of the New Testament."
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It was, however, in Cotton's house and not in her own that Mrs. Hutchinson made the fatal admission for which she had afterward to pay so dear. The elders had come to Bos- ton in a body to see how far Cotton "stood for " the things his gifted parishioner was preaching and, in the hope of clearing the whole matter up, the clergyman had suggested a friendly conference with Mrs. Hutchinson at his house. The interview took place, the lady cleverly parrying all attempts to make her say indiscreet things. But finally, the Reverend Hugh Peters having besought her to deal frankly and openly with them, she admitted that she saw a wide difference between Mr. Cotton's ministry and theirs and that it was because they had not the seal of the Spirit that this difference arose. If Mrs. Hutchinson had not thought herself in confidential intercourse with those who were men of honour as well as clergymen, she would never have put the thing thus bluntly. But the event proved that her confession was treasured up to be used against her, - and that there were many in the colony who chafed as she did, under the power of those preaching this " covenant of works." For promptly the liberals, whose mouthpiece she had unconsciously become, blossomed out
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into a sturdy political party led by the enthusi- astic Vane. The part which he played in the controversy has already been touched upon in the previous chapter and the brave way in which he fought against the decree which would banish the incoming friends of Wheel- wright there described.
But it all availed nothing. The theocracy had been attacked and the clergy sprang like one man to its defence. Even Cotton, after a little, ranged himself on the side of his order as against the woman who lauded him above his brethren. The " trial," in the course of which Mrs. Hutchinson was condemned, is one of the ghastliest things in the history of the colony. The prisoner, who was about to be- come a mother, was made to stand until she was exhausted, the while those in whom she had confided as friends plied her with end- less questions about her theological beliefs. Through two long weary days of hunger and cold she defended herself as well as she could before these "men of God," but her able words availed nothing; she had " disparaged the ministers " and they were resolved to be revenged. Though Coddington pointed out that " no law of God or man " had been broken by the woman before them, she was none the
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less banished " as unfit for our society." So there was driven out of the city she had adopted the most remarkable intellect Boston has ever made historic by misunderstanding.
Roger Williams was another great and good man of whom the city founded by Winthrop soon proved itself unworthy. Just here seems as good a place as any to attempt some ex- planation of the change that had come about in Winthrop's character. His letters to his wife show him to have been tender and gentle, but he was certainly relentless in his attitude towards Mrs. Hutchinson, - though all the time more than half persuaded that what she said was true. The fact is that Winthrop's very amiability made him subject to men of inflexi- ble will. His dream had been to create on earth a commonwealth of saints whose joy should be to walk in the ways of God. But in practice he had to deal with the strongest of human passions and become himself intolerant for the sake of leading an intolerant party. The exigencies of life in America seem to have made him more and more narrow as the years went by, but he appears to have repented, at the last, of his tendency towards intolerance; for, being requested on his death-bed to sign an order for the banishment of some person
JNILA000 8
LaN3: X010018
ROGER WILLIAMS
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for heterodoxy, he waved the paper away, say- ing, " I have done too much of that work al- ready."
Williams, though, was one whom he perse- cuted with a will. He had been glad to have him come to Boston and he recorded his ar- rival -in the Journal of February, 1631 - as that of "a godly minister." But he did not then know what startling doctrines the new arrival was to set forth or how iconoclastic to the state would prove this clergyman's earnest conviction that, in all matters of religious be- lief and worship, man was responsible to God alone. Scarcely had Williams set foot in Bos- ton when things began to happen. In the first place, he was thoroughly convinced that the Puritans had done wrong in holding commu- nion with Church of England folk, whose power and resources were constantly employed in crushing the spirit of true piety. So he re- fused to join with the church at Boston until its congregation had declared repentance for having had communion with the churches in England.
His chief offence against the state, however, was in immediately promulgating the principle for which he all his life contended, i. e. that the magistrates had no right whatever to impose
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civil penalties upon those who had broken only church rules. From the point of view of Bos- tonians of that day any man holding this opin- ion was by that very fact unfitted for the office of a minister among them. Consequently, the magistrates opposed with all the authority at their command the settling of Williams in the Salem pulpit to which he had now been called. His history from this time on does not prop- erly belong to a book about Boston; but it is worth noting that he was persecuted for being, among other things, a believer in adult bap- tism and that against the Anabaptists, as they were called, were directed some of the most cruel persecutions ever waged in the Saint Bo- tolph's Town of New England.
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