USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > St. Botolph's town; an account of old Boston in colonial days > Part 9
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stay and dine with him, by which means I had the opportunity of hearing him Pray, and ex- pound the Scriptures with his Family. After Dinner, he told me that both for my own, but especially for my Father's sake, whom he said he admir'd above most Men in England, if his Countenance and Recommendation cou'd be of any Service to me, I sho'd not want it: And I have already found the good Effects of it."
So favourably, indeed, were Dunton's books received that he was almost persuaded to take up his permanent residence in Boston. But while debating the matter, he was suddenly seized with a great desire to ramble back to London and once again behold his beloved Iris. So, leaving his good landlord Wilkins to collect the remittances still due him, he sailed for Eng- land, where he arrived early in August, 1686. His whole stay in America covered, therefore, but four months. One of his first acts, after being restored to the arms of his faithful wife, was to send his regards to Comfort Wilkins, with whom he had so often discoursed upon Platonic love, and his " service in a more par- ticular manner to the Widow Brick." Already, he had let it be known that only the excellent health enjoyed by Iris prevented him from making actual love to this " flower of Boston."
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His subsequent career was a bit checkered. A " ramble to Holland, where he lived four months," and up the Rhine, where he stayed, as he himself says, " until he had satisfied his curiosity and spent all his money," occupied the next two years. Then he took a shop op- posite London's Poultry Counter which he opened the day the Prince of Orange entered the city. Here he sold books with varying suc- cess for ten years, publishing, the while, several semi-political pamphlets. The blow of his life came in May, 1697, in the death of Iris. But within twelvemonths he had married another woman, - for her fortune, - and the last years of his life were full of squalid quarrels with this lady and with her mother.
Dunton's always-flowery style of composi- tion seems to have grown more marked as time went on, and the Spectator found his effusions good matter for ridicule. One kind friend tried to tell him this. " If you have essays or letters that are valuable, call them essays and letters in short plain language," this common-sense person counselled, " and if you have anything writ by men of sense and on subjects of impor- tance, it may sell without your name to it."
But Dunton was now sixty and could not give up the old way. To the last his projects had
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the catchword of Athenian appended to them. He died in obscurity in 1733, aged 74. If he had never come to Boston his name would long ago have been forgotten. Even as it is his " Letters " are almost unobtainable. For since the Prince Society of Boston reprinted a very limited edition, forty years ago, the vol- ume has been growing every year more and more rare. To-day only collectors can boast of its possession.
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IX
THE DYNASTY OF THE MATHERS
DUNTON's letters abound, as we have seen, in references to the Mathers, Increase and Cot- ton; and the same thing is true of all the litera- ture of the period. Brooks Adams has cut- tingly observed in his remarkable volume, " The Emancipation of Massachusetts," that one weak point in the otherwise strong posi- tion of the early Massachusetts clergy was that the spirit of their age did not permit them to make their order hereditary. With the Math- ers, however, the priesthood was hereditary, and they constituted a veritable dynasty in the government of Boston. The story of their lives offers a remarkable illustration of power - theological and otherwise - transmitted through at least four generations.
When " the shining light " was extinguished by death, late in 1652, he left a widow who be- came, before long, the second wife of the Rev- erend Richard Mather, minister of Dorchester.
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This Mather had already a theologically minded son named Increase, who had been born in Dorchester in June, 1639, and who, after preaching his first sermon on his birthday, in 1657, sailed for England and pursued post- graduate studies in Trinity College there. Then he preached for one winter in Devonshire and, in 1659, became chaplain to the garrison of Guernsey. But the Restoration was now at hand and, finding that he must " either con- form to the Revived Superstitions in the Church of England or leave the Island," he gave up his charge and, in June, 1661, sailed for home. The following winter he passed preaching alternately for his father and " to the New Church in the North-part of Boston." In the course of that year the charms of Mrs. Mather's daughter, Maria Cotton, impressed themselves upon him and,
" On March 6, 1662, he Came into the Mar- ried State; Espousing the only Daughter, of the celebrated Mr. John Cotton; in honor of whom he did . .. call his First-born son by the Name of COTTON."
Two years after his marriage Increase Mather was ordained pastor of the North Church in Boston and for some twenty years he appears to have performed with notable suc-
INCREASE MATHER
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cess the duties of this important parish. At the same time, he exercised - beneficently on the whole - his great power in the temporal affairs of the colony. For he had good sense and sound judgment, - exactly the qualities, it may be remarked, which his more brilliant son conspicuously lacked.
One of the most attractive traits in the younger Mather's character is his appreciation of his father. Barrett Wendell, who has writ- ten a highly readable Life of Cotton Mather, observes dryly that the persecutor of the witches " never observed any other law of God quite so faithfully as the Fifth Command- ment." And there seems to have been excel- lent reason for this. Increase Mather devo- tedly loved his precocious young son and upon him he lavished a passionate affection which the lad repaid in reverence which was almost worship. The motto of Cotton Mather's life seems indeed to have been, My Father can do no Wrong.
The schoolmaster whose privilege it became to plant the seeds of learning in the mind of this hope of the Mathers was Ezekiel Cheever, whose life Sewall has written for us in the following concise paragraph :
" He was born January 25, 1614. Came over
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to N. E. 1637, to Boston : To New Haven 1638. Married in the Fall and began to teach School; which work he was constant in till now. First, at New-Haven, then at Ipswich; then at Charlestown; then at Boston, whither he came 1670. So that he has laboured in that Calling Skilfully, diligently, constantly, Religiously, Seventy years. A rare instance of Piety, Health, Strength, Serviceableness. The Well- fare of the Province was much upon his spirit. He abominated Perriwigs."
That Cheever was in truth an excellent teacher may be accepted from the fact that he had Cotton Mather ready at twelve to enter Harvard College. And this, too, in spite of the fact that one fault of the lad was "idleness." Warning his son against this fault, Cotton Mather wrote, the " thing that occasioned me very much idle time was the Distance of my Father's Habitation from the School; which caused him out of compassion for my Tender and Weakly constitution to keep me at home in the Winter. However, I then much em- ployed myself in Church History; and when the Summer arrived I so plied my business, that thro' the Blessing of God upon my en- deavours, at the Age of little more than eleven years I had composed many Latin exercises,
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both in prose and verse, and could speak Latin so readily, that I could write notes of sermons of the English preacher in it. I had conversed with Cato, Corderius, Terence, Tully, Ovid and Virgil. I had made Epistles and Themes; pre- senting my first Theme to my Master, without his requiring or expecting as yet any such thing of me; whereupon he complimented me Laudabilis Diligentia tua [Your diligence de- serves praise]. I had gone through a great part of the New Testament in Greek, I had read considerably in Socrates and Homer, and I had made some entrance in my Hebrew grammar. And I think before I came to fourteen, I com- posed Hebrew exercises and Ran thro' the other Sciences, that Academical Students ordi- narily fall upon."
In a later chapter we shall discuss at some length the rules and regulations, the studies and the social life which, all together, consti- tuted a highly important formative influence in the life of this and the other Puritan youth who went to Harvard. Suffice it, therefore, in this place to say that Cotton Mather was put through the mill duly and was able in 1678 to present himself for the bachelor's degree, being at that time the youngest who had ever ap- plied for it. This fact it was, which added to
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his illustrious ancestry, inspired President Oakes to single him out at Commencemcent for the following eulogy delivered in sounding Latin: " The next youth is named Cotton Mather. What a name! Or rather, dear friends, I should have said ' what names.' Of his reverend father, the most watchful of guardians, the most distinguished Fellow of the College I will say nothing, for I dare not praise him to his face. But should this youth bring back among us the piety, the learning, the sound sense, the prudence, the elegant ac- complishment and the gravity of his very rev- erend grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, he will have done his highest duty. I have no slight hope that in this youth there shall live again, in fact as well as in name, COTTON and MATHER."
Can you wonder that a boy of sixteen, thus conspicuously praised at the very entrance upon serious life, felt himself to be a person of considerable importance in his community, a man born to sustain a theological dynasty? Of course the ministry was the profession for which he was destined, but, for some seven years after matriculation, he followed the call- ing of a tutor because he was afflicted with a tendency to stammer. Then he began the study
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of medicine. Soon after this he was advised to practise speaking with " dilated delibera- tion," which he did so successfully as com- pletely to overcome the impediment which had bothered him and, possessing already every educational qualification as a preacher, he was thus able (in May, 1685) to become the asso- ciate of his father in the charge of the church in North Square. Before accepting this trust he had kept many days of fasting and prayer, for he had long desired remotely to emulate that Rabbi mentioned in the Talmud whose face was black by reason of his fasting. The fasts observed by Cotton Mather throughout his life were so frequent that his son observes of him in his funeral sermon " that he thought himself starved unless he fasted once a month! "
Such then was the Mather to whom the cele- brated Eliot had extended, at the age of twenty- two, the fellowship of the churches! Ten days after coming into this high estate the young parson was present at a " private Fast " in the home of Samuel Sewall, an occasion which happily supplies us with an authentic glimpse of the manners of the times. For Sewall writes: "The Magistrates ... with their wives here. Mr. Eliot prayed, Mr. Willard preached. I am afraid of thy judgments. -
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Text Mather gave. Mr. Allen prayed; cessa- tion half an hour. Mr. Cotton Mather prayed; Mr. Mather preached, Ps. 79. 9. Mr. Moodey prayed about an hour and half; Sung the 79th Psalm from the 8th to the End; distributed some Biskets & Beer, Cider, Wine. The Lord hear in Heaven his dwelling place."
But of course a young minister of that day - as of this - must very soon, if only in self- defence, take unto himself a wife. Cotton Mather was already matrimonially minded: he had begun to ask " the guidance and blessing of God in what concerns the change of my con- dition in the world from Single to married, whereunto I have now many invitations." These last words we must not take as an evi- dence of Leap Year activity in his parish, but rather as meaning that the young parson de- sired to enter into the state of matrimony but had not as yet met the girl whose charms should draw him thither. His attitude of mind at this stage is singularly like that of the pure young woman of our own time whose heart is still untouched, - and it is in striking contrast to the pronounced dislike with which young men of to-day regard marriage per se.
The girl was now sure to arrive, and so it came about that the year 1686 - troublous
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HOUSE OF COTTON MATHER, WHICH STOOD AT WHAT IS NOW 298 HANOVER STREET
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enough to New England, because Edward Ran- dolph and Joseph Dudley had succeeded in wresting away the Charter - was a decidedly happy one for Cotton Mather. His wooing was very godly, as it was bound to be, but it re- sulted in his bringing home as a wife Abigail, daughter of the Honourable Colonel Phillips of Charlestown. On his wedding day he got up early to ponder; but in spite of his ponder- ing he reached Charlestown ahead of time and had to put in an hour or so in the garden with his Bible while Abigail was being arrayed in her wedding finery. Two Sundays afterwards he preached at his own church in Boston on Divine Delights. This was the very Sunday when Mr. Willard " prayed not for the Gov- ernour."
The implications of this just-quoted entry in Sewall's invaluable Diary are enormous. Now that we have married off Cotton Mather, let us turn aside briefly to consider them. From the settlement of the Colony it had been gov- erned under a royal charter granted, as we have seen, to the governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in 1629. Under this none but church members had been freemen, and as these freemen elected all political officers and developed their own system of law it is clear
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that the government was much more nearly a theocracy than a dependency of the crown. Tacitly, England had agreed to this state of affairs, but this was only because she had been too busy with Civil Wars and internal dissen- sions to do anything else. For the sovereign did not forget by any means that New England was theoretically the private property of the crown by virtue of its discovery at the hands of the Cabots, who had been fitted out with crown money. What rights the Colonists had to the land came, it was argued, from the Char- ter; at best, therefore, their positions could be compared only to that of tenants on a pri- vate estate. From the very beginning, how- ever, the Charter had been contested by some gentlemen who maintained that it had been given originally in violation of previous royal grants to them. Among these contestants was one Gorges, a name we readily recognize as potential in more way than one.
By the time Charles II ascended the throne New England had become so prosperous that the opponents of the Charter could not let the matter longer alone, and there appeared in Boston as their agent, Edward Randolph, " the evil genius of New England," with a letter requiring the governor and Assistants of Mas-
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sachusetts at once to send representatives to England, there to answer the claims of those who contested their rights. The contest thus begun lasted until 1684, a period of nearly nine years, during which Randolph made no less than eight voyages to New England, the colo- nists sending back to London meanwhile innu- merable long-drawn petitions.
But the blow fell at last and on June 18, 1684, the Court of Chancery decreed that the Charter should be vacated. In the Colony it- self there had appeared, by this time, a party which favoured submission to royal authority. This party had been built up chiefly by the exertions of Randolph and at its head was Joseph Dudley, a son of the Colony's second governor. He, as " president of New Eng- land," was now named to succeed Simon Brad- street, the last governor elected by the people of the colony, - and the last survivor, as well, of the magistrates, who, nearly sixty years before, had founded the government.
It was a goodly heritage for which Randolph and his tools had fought. From the day that Winthrop landed, the Puritan State of his ideal had risen steadily, and Boston, its chief town, was now a thriving and well-built settlement. Moreover, it was distinctly an English town,
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for the migration had been unmixed, and, va- ried as were the religious beliefs of its inhab- itants, they agreed perfectly in their love of English names for their streets, English flow- ers for their gardens, English furniture for their rooms and English architecture for their homes. But they had few books, no amuse- ments, and no intellectual interest except relig- ion. " The people of Boston," as Henry Cabot Lodge remarks in his excellent study of that city's rise and development, " practically went from work to religion and from religion to work without anything to break the monotony ex- cept trouble with England and wars with the savages. ... And now the charter, under which they had enjoyed power and exercised independence was taken from them."
If we read Sewall's account of those days in the spring of 1686 with this great impending change in mind the brief entries become dra- matic in the extreme. He tells us how the Rose frigate arrived in Nantasket on the 14th of May; how Randolph came to town by eight in the morning and took coach for Roxbury, where Dudley lived; and how, with other mag- istrates, he himself was summoned to see the judgment against the charter with the great seal of England affixed. He tells how, on the
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following Sunday, Randolph came to the Old South Church, where Mr. Willard, in his prayer, made no mention of governor or gov- ernment; but spoke as if all were changing or changed. He tells how, the next day the Gen- eral Court assembled, and how Joseph Dudley, temporarily made President of New England, exhibited the condemnation of the Charter and his own commission, how the old magistrates began to make some formal answer and how Dudley refused to treat with them as a court. There is a note of very real pathos in Sewall's picture of that sorrowful group of old magis- trates, who, when Dudley was gone, decided that there was "no room " for a protest: " The foundations being gone what can the righteous do? "
So, for seven months, Joseph Dudley was President of the Provisional Government of New England, and during those months the birthdays of the king and queen were celebrated by the royalists in Boston, and to Episcopa- lians was granted the right to hold services in the east end of the Town House. The Puritan Pepys, as Sewall has well been called, duly notes these developments, telling us that on Sunday, May 30, he sang "the 141 Psalm . . . exceedingly suited to the day. Wherein there
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is to be worship according to the Church of England, as 'tis called, in the Town House, by countenance of Authority." In August Sewall has grave doubts as to whether he can con- scientiously serve in the militia under a flag in which the cross, cut out by Endicott, has been replaced; and three months later he an- swers his own question by resigning as captain of the South Company. A few Saturdays be- fore this the queen's birthday had been cele- brated with drums, bonfires and huzzas, thereby causing Mr. Willard to express, next day, " great grief in's Prayer for the Profanation of the Sabbath last night."
Then, on Sunday, December 19, while Sewall was reading to his family an exposition of Habakkuk, he heard a great gun or two, which made him think Sir Edmund Andros might be come. Such proved to be the case. The first governor sent out from England had arrived " in a Scarlet Coat laced." That day Joseph Dudley went to listen to Mr. Willard preach, and had the chagrin of hearing that personage say, " he was fully persuaded and confident God would not forget the Faith of those who came first to New England."
Between sermons the President went down the harbour to welcome Sir Edmund. The
SIR EDMUND ANDROS
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next afternoon the king's appointee landed in state, and was escorted to the Town House by eight militia companies. Here a commission was read, declaring his power to suspend coun- cillors and to appoint others, - and vesting the legislative power in him and his Council thus appointed. Then he took the oath of allegiance and stood by, with his hat on, while eight coun- cillors were sworn. The same day he de- manded accommodation in one of the meeting- houses for the services of the Church of Eng- land !
Andros was a gentleman of good family, had served with distinction in the army, had mar- ried a lady of rank and for three years had very successfully ruled as governor of New York. When James came to the throne he quite naturally turned to him as a person well fitted, by his previous American experience - as well as by his well-known personal devotion to the Stuarts - to preside acceptably over the New England colonies. But, New York was not Boston then any more than to-day and, as ill luck would have it, Andros from the very start, made mistakes which soon caused him to be one of the best-hated men Massachusetts had ever known. Scarcely had he set foot in the town when he proceeded, as we have seen, to assail
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the religious sensibilities of the Puritans. All forms and ceremonies, symbols and signs were to them marks of the Beast, and it was a cruel shock, after what they had suffered to get away from the Church of England, to have a priest in a surplice conducting in their Town House a service hateful to them, to see men buried according to the prayer-book and to learn that marriages, which they had made a purely civil contract, must henceforth be solemnized by the rites of the church. Even worse was the en- forced celebration of royal anniversaries and the reappearance of old sports upon certain holidays.
Samuel Sewall was the type of a class of well-to-do Puritans, who were, on the whole, inclined to be submissive to the new govern- ment, but he shows himself to have been hurt in a tender spot by many of the things Andros did. His Diary may well enough be held to reflect the deep feeling of many. As early as November, 1685, he sees the change coming and records that " the Ministers Come to the Court and complain against a Dancing Master who seeks to set up here and hath mixt dances, and his time of Meeting is Lecture-Day; and 'tis reported he should say that by one Play he could teach more Divinity than Mr. Willard
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or the Old Testament. .. . Mr. Mather [In- crease] struck at the Root, speaking against mixt Dances." Early in September, 1686, we read, " Mr. Shrimpton ... and others come in a Coach from Roxbury about 9 aclock or past, singing as they come, being inflamed with Drink: At Justice Morgan's they stop and drink Healths, curse, swear, talk profanely and baudily to the great disturbance of the Town and grief of good people. Such high-handed wickedness has hardly been heard of before in Boston."
With ill-concealed exultation the old diarist notes that the people, for the most part, refused to observe Christmas and the other imported holidays, but kept the shops open, brought fire- wood into the town and generally went on with their business as under the old régime. But some annoyances they could not avoid. On the " Sabbath Feb. 6, 1686-7," he writes, " Be- tween half hour after eleven and half hour after twelve at Noon many Scores of great guns fired at the Castle and Tower suppose upon account of the King's entering on the third year of his Reign. ... This day the Lord's Super was administered at the middle and North Church; the rattling of the Guns during almost all the time gave them great
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disturbance. 'Twas never so in Boston be- fore." Again he says on "February 15 1686-7, Jos. Maylem carries a Cock at his back with a bell in's hand, in the Main Street; sev- eral followed him blindfold, and under pre- tence of striking him or's cock, with great Cart- whips strike passengers and make great dis- turbance." By countenancing such practices as these did Andros inflame every possible prejudice against the crown he fain would represent.
But the horse-play of Shrove Tuesday, with its suggestions to the Puritans of Papacy and the hated days of Laud, was only a forerunner of what Andros really purposed : i. e. a Church in which the service of his king and country should be fittingly carried on! Pending the erection of such an edifice Sir Edmund deter- mined that, regardless of the wishes of the pop- ulace, he would have his prayer-book service read in one of the three meeting-houses of the town and on " Wednesday March 23 " Sewall tells us, " the Govr sends Mr. Randolph for ye keys to our Meetingh. yt may say Prayers there. Mr. Eliot, Frary, Oliver, Savage Davis and self wait on his Excellency; shew that ye Land and House is ours, and that we can't consent to part with it to such use; exhibit an
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