Dr. ROBERT CHILD THE REMONSTRANT

My original purpose in this paper was to throw together a few facts about Dr. Robert Child that seem to have escaped the notice of New England historians, such, for instance, as the date of his M.D. at Padua, his friendly relations with Boyle and Hartlib, certain details of his travels on the Continent, his acquaintance with the celebrated Harvard alchemist George Stirk, his authorship of two important treatises on agriculture (which include a number of observations on America), his interest in the development of Ireland under the Commonwealth, and the date of his death. As to his historic clash with the governing forces of the Bay Colony, I supposed, in my guileless ignorance, that the ins and outs of the controversy had been long ago traced by the students of our early annals, and that I could pass over that portion of his life that makes him so conspicuous a figure in our constitutional development with a brief reference to standard authorities. But it soon appeared that I had reckoned without my host. Nowhere was there discoverable an account of the famous Remonstrance of 1646, and of the two resultant prosecutions, that assembled all the res gestae or established the chronology of the affair. It became necessary, therefore, to study this episode afresh, with an open mind, and to weigh the evidence as judicially as might be practicable; and thus, in an unguarded moment, I found myself taking up arms against a sea of troubles.

These troubles, in the main, are of rather recent origin. In an earlier generation, when Palfrey composed his masterly sketch of the Remonstrant imbroglio, it was assumed that two men, or two parties, could disagree and come to grips without imposing upon us the duty of inferring that either of them was altogether in the wrong. But of late — at least in the case of our Remonstrant — animum non caelum mutamus. Generalities have elbowed concrete particulars into the limbo of the discredited. Scholars no longer regard Robert Child as what he was, — an ardent Presbyterian, a disciple of Robert Baylie, eager to extend to all his countrymen the blessings of a rigid conformity, — but as an advocate of general religious toleration and freedom of conscience, principles which he and his party abhorred with all the strength of their earnest souls as the devil’s latest device for the ruin of society and the damnation of mankind. And, on the other hand, I find the fathers of our Commonwealth no longer looked at, in this instance, as the shrewd and valorous (if severe) upholders of a well-conceived plan of civic development, but as a little oligarchy of bigots, conscientiously repressive of everything that we, their descendants, hold to be the inalienable heritage of a freeborn man. The contest between the Remonstrants and the government of the Bay cannot be understood if we approach the subject with any such prejudices. Free speech, the right of petition and appeal, resistance to arbitrary rule, equality before the law, the separateness of church and state, “I am the captain of my soul” — these are principles that may or may not be involved in the controversy of 1646 and 1647; but that controversy was not conducted upon those principles, either by Child and his associates on the one side or by the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay on the other.

Two parties were struggling for the control of England — the Presbyterians and the Independents. Both were right and both were wrong, as is always the case with partisans; but, in the long run, it has appeared — and is admitted — that the triumph of Independency made for the progress of freedom. It was a closely fought match, and never more hotly contested than at precisely that time when Child and the Remonstrants struck their blow for the Presbyterian party. Of course, the Independents, who bore sway in Massachusetts, countered with all their strength. They could not abandon their friends who were fighting for their very existence in the mother country. Principiis obsta was of necessity their motto. The question was not — Shall liberty or bigotry prevail in Massachusetts? It was — Shall Presbyterianism (as it was then, with all its faults) or Independency (as it was then, with all its faults) prevail as a political system among English-speaking men on both sides of the sea? Robert Child is a singularly attractive — even a charming — figure in the life of his time; he fought valorously for his own side when neutrality was a crime; he deserves all honor. But he cannot be judged, in this matter of the Remonstrance, as an individual: he must stand or fall with his party; and what that party was, the bare facts, when we reach them, should determine without argument. It was a party that did not wish either to tolerate or to be tolerated. Its one great principle was domination, for it knew that it was of God and that all other parties were of the devil. Let us admit, if one insists, that the Independents were as bigoted as the Presbyterians. So be it, they were not more bigoted, and there could be no advantage to the Colony in undergoing a revolution that should merely substitute one bigotry for another.

That the state of things was as I have described it, as to parties, needs no argument, for such is the consensus of historians. It remains to show that the Remonstrance was in truth a party affair. For this we may leave the case to the facts of record, to which we will now turn.

Robert Child was born in 1613 in Kent, probably at Northfleet, where his father, John Child, appears to have had a comfortable estate.1 At all events, the Child family was of long standing in the county2 and both Robert Child and his brother, Major John, were well-to-do. Robert was regarded by our ancestors as a “gentleman” and a “person of quality.”3 Robert Child was matriculated at Bene’t College (Corpus Christi), Cambridge, at Easter Term, 1628, as a Pensioner, took his A.B. in 1631–2, and proceeded A.M. in 1635.4 He went immediately to the University of Leyden, where he entered as a Student of Medicine on May 23, 1635, at the age of twenty-two.5 How long he remained at Leyden we do not know, but it is certain that he finished his medical studies at Padua.

Child claimed to have the degree of M.D. from Padua6, and, though modern writers have usually taken his word, a slight shadow still rests upon his title. For this, the language of the Declaration of the General Court (November, 1646) in answer to the Remonstrance seems to be primarily responsible: “The first . . . is a Paduan Doctor (as he is reputed).”7 The words seem deliberately chosen to cast a doubt on Child’s pretensions. Their tone, at all events, had that effect upon Hutchinson, who remarks that “Child was a young gentleman, just before come from Padua, where he studied physic, and as was reputed, had taken the degree of doctor.”8 Winslow, in adverting to the subject, uses a tantalizing “however,” which, while appearing to admit the fact, has really the effect of leaving one’s judgment in suspense: “However he tooke the degree of Doctor in Physick at Padua, yet doth not at all practise, though hee hath beene twice in the Countrey where many times is need enough.”9 I am glad to be able to set the matter at rest. The archives of the University of Padua testify that “Robertus Child, anglus filius Johannis,” passed his examinations for the degree of M.D. on Friday, August 13, 1638.10

Child probably went home soon after getting his medical degree, for what seems to have been his first absence from England lasted “two or three years,” as appears from a curious passage in his treatise entitled “A large Letter concerning the Defects and Remedies of English Husbandry,” written in 1651 and forming the bulk of “Samuel Hartlib his Legacie” published in that year.11 This same treatise gives much incidental information about his travels; but some of the notes may refer to other visits to the Continent, for after his return he probably visited France again some years later, perhaps in 1642.12 “I have travelled twice through France,” he says in the Large Letter,13 and his agricultural observations show acquaintance with almost every part of the country from Normandy to the Spanish border.14 Probably he visited Spain15, and perhaps Flanders16 and Germany.17 Italy he of course knew well.18 Winslow in a somewhat insinuating passage, to which we shall return, declares that “as for Doctor Childe, hee is a Gentleman that hath travelled other parts before hee came to us, namely Italy, confesseth hee was twice at Rome, speaketh sometimes highly as I have heard reported in favour of the Jesuites.” 19 It was fortunate for Child’s reputation that he did not confide to the fathers of the Bay Colony an incident of his Italian experiences that he mentions in another treatise: “As concerning the extraordinary bignesse of Goose livers, it is in Italy amongst the Jews, where I have eaten of them, highly esteemed, but at present not much in credit amongst the Italians, and to my Palate it is not so excellent a dainty.”20 Jews and Jesuits would have made a fine alliteration for the author of New-Englands Salamander to play with.21 Wherever Child went, he kept his eyes open, and he returned to England not only with a medical degree but with a vast store of exact knowledge on agriculture and kindred matters. Something led him to think of visiting New England, and thither he went sometime between 1638 and 1641.

Nothing exists in the way of evidence as to the moment when Child made the acquaintance of the younger John Winthrop. Their friendship may have begun in England when Winthrop was there in 1634 and 1635, or even as early as 1631, the year of his first embarkation for America; but Winslow’s language suggests that Child was a stranger to the New Englanders until he presented letters of introduction.22 After all, it is a question of idle curiosity; for, if they had not met before, they certainly became intimate when Child visited the Bay the first time.

Most authorities have overlooked Child’s first visit to this country,23 but the evidence is decisive. Winslow, writing in 1647, is perfectly clear:

And Child himself, in his first extant letter to John Winthrop, Jr., written in May, 1641,26 speaks of his intention to “returne” to New England.27 This fixes the date of his first visit within the limits just defined. At the end, Child sends his regards to several eminent persons in the Colony, both lay and clerical: “Remēber my service to yo^r father [,] M^r Dudley, M^r Bellingham, M^r Hūphreys — M^r Cotton, M^r Wilson, M^r Peters — ūto whome I am much beholdē.” In a later letter, also written before his second visit, he sends his best respects to Mr. Maverick,28 with whom he was afterwards associated in the Remonstrance. Manifestly, as Winslow has already told us, the letters commendatory had been effective on Child’s first visit, and he had indeed “found good acceptation with the best.” Child’s perambulation of the settlements, undertaken in the same spirit that had guided his European travels, had satisfied him that the new country had resources worth developing, and he was ready to invest something in the plantation.

It is astonishing, in view of this letter of 1641, — even if there were no other testimony available, — that Child should more than once be styled an Episcopalian by recent writers on New England.29 He calls it good news that Laud is in the Tower and sure to be punished severely, rejoices that “Lord p^rlates — deanes, prebends, are fallen,” and looks forward hopefully to a like fate for the bishops.30 In fact, he was a high Presbyterian, as appears abundantly in his later history.

Child’s letter of 1641 offers several other points of interest. It has much to say of books, especially of those relating to chemistry, encloses a catalogue (now, alas! no more) of his “chymicall bookes,” asks Winthrop to send a list of such works on the subject as he possesses, reports on certain volumes which Winthrop had asked him to procure, and announces the sending of several works “from myne own library . . . to ꝑvse till I come to New England.” Alchemy was a subject to which both Child and Winthrop devoted much study, and it is continually mentioned in their correspondence. In due season we shall revert to this topic. The following passage is too important to be abridged: “I Intend, if I haue leysure, to goe to Burdeau, from thence to Tholouse to salute Faber31 — to procure vines and a vigneron,32 who can likewise manage silkewormes if it be possible — if I can doe you any pleasure there, pray let me heare from you speedily. I intend when I returne to you (god willing) to prosecute y^e planting of vines throwly, to try somewhat cōcerning silkewormes, and would to my power helpe forward y^e digging of some good mine, if you haue found any in y^e coūtrey.”33 Of Child’s interest in American mines, which cost him dear, we shall hear more as we proceed. Whether he went to France again before returning to New England we cannot tell, but a sentence in his Answer to the Animadversor34 may refer to such a visit: “I lived in Charanton two leagus from Paris, a whole Vintage, purposely to see how wine was made in France.”35

Undoubtedly Winthrop received the letter of 1641 before he sailed for England by way of Newfoundland on August 3 in the same year.36 He arrived at Bristol on September 2837 and remained in Europe more than a year and a half, in the course of which he visited the Continent and may have attended a few medical lectures or anatomical demonstrations at a Dutch or German university.38 One of the main objects of his sojourn in the mother country was to promote the establishment of iron works in Massachusetts. He raised a thousand pounds for this project,39 Child being one of the investors,40 and the congenial pair must have had many a confabulation. One of these has left a record, for we know that Winthrop told Child of his discovery of black lead at Tantousq,41 and that Child promised to stand a quarter part of the expense in developing the mine.42 We shall hear more of this speculation presently.

In May, 1643, Winthrop set sail for Boston in the ship “An Cleeve” of London, with “many workmen servants & materialls” for iron works. He had lain “many daies at Gravesend,” waiting to be cleared, and, when this formality was over, had been further detained by a scrupulous or interfering port-officer named Robinson, so that he missed a favorable wind and was kept beating about on the English coast above six weeks. After a voyage of more than fourteen weeks he arrived at Boston “neere winter.” It was too late to begin operations, and Winthrop had to maintain the imported workmen in idleness until spring.43 On the way, he had touched at the Isle of Wight, where some of them Seem to have deserted. On this and other matters he wrote from the Isle to Child, whose reply, dated Gravesend, June 27, 1643, has been preserved. He hopes the rest of the voyage to New England “hath bin both spedy and ꝑsꝑous” but fears Winthrop will not have time to get the works started so late in the season. “These times put me to my wits ends well if o^r Iron busines goe on, all is well.” “Pray remember to send me word cōcerning y^e black lead mines.” When he wrote this letter, Child meant to sail for Massachusetts in the next spring.44

On February 25, 1644[–5], Emanuel Downing wrote to the younger Winthrop from London: “Dr. Child purposeth to come over with me, and writes by this shipp of all his owne affaires vnto you.”45 This letter of Child’s is extant and is dated March 1 of the same year. He means to sail for New England soon, perhaps by the following ship. He sends five or six sorts of vines, some prune grafts, and various plants and seeds. When he comes over, he will “vndertake a vineyard w^th all care and industry,” for he is “confident in 3 yeares wine may be made as good as any in France.” (These remarks are worth noting in connection with Child’s distinguished essay on the Defects of English Husbandry, to which we shall come in due season.) He is glad to hear that “y^e Iron workes doe goe on, and y^t o^r hopes encrease,” and reports some changes in the personnel of the English adventurers in the project. Money is scarce, but “we are taking care to provide moneys according to yo^r bills.” Mr. Leader, whom Winthrop knows well, has been invited to go over as manager.46 In fact, though Child did not know it, owing to absence from London, the bargain with Richard Leader had been struck. He was to serve the company for seven years from March 25 at an annual salary of £100.47

Meanwhile the iron works were in progress, though not yet a going concern. Braintree had been selected by the younger Winthrop as the most suitable situation,48 and here, on January 19, 1644, the town of Boston had granted to him and his “partners” three thousand acres of common land “for the encouragement of an iron worke, to be set up about Monotocot River.” These were to be laid out “in the Land next adjoyning and most convenient for their said Iron works.”49 This looks as if the site of the works had already been acquired. Another site was procured at Lynn, at a place called Hammersmith, on the Abousett or Saugus River. At which of the two foundries iron was first manufactured is a vexed question, which we may leave to the local antiquaries.50 Both belonged to the same company, however, which received a monopoly from the General Court in March, 1644.51 Somewhere and somehow £1000 had been spent by the following November; a furnace had been set up, but the forge and “finery” were not ready.52 The management passed from Winthrop to Richard Leader, an expert, in 164553 and from Leader to John Gifford in 1650.54

We need not pursue the annals of this ill-starred speculation, but a few names and dates must be mentioned to make future references intelligible. At first everybody had high hopes, and in May, 1645, the General Court issued a call for Massachusetts subscriptions which reads like a promoter’s prospectus.55 But the concern was under-capitalized and never made any money. Serious trouble began in 1652. Three of the New England owners — Captain Robert Bridges, Henry Webb, and Joshua Foot — were acting as commissioners for the undertakers, and John Beex or Becx was the leading proprietor in London. Neither the Londoners nor the local executive committee were pleased with Gifford’s management, and Gifford was dissatisfied with the state of his accounts.56 To secure Gifford and two large creditors (Webb himself and Jeremy Howchin), the committee, on May 24, 1653, gave them a mortgage of the whole property, real and personal — houses, lands, wharves, forges, furnaces, tools, fuel, iron, cattle, boats, bills receivable, and “all the seruants Scotts or English.”57 A whirlwind of litigation followed, which lasted for several years. Gifford sued the company and the company sued Gifford; countless suits were brought against the company, or Gifford as its agent, by creditors, and some judgments were obtained.58 Gifford was for a time in prison for his debt to the company, but in May, 1656, he was released by the General Court at the request of the Londoners, who had changed their minds about him,59 and he went home to tell his story, whereupon, on July 16, 1657, eight of the English partners, for themselves and the others, attorneyed to their associate John Beex, and Beex in turn entrusted the whole business to Gifford (August 25), who came back to Massachusetts,60 full of fight. In October, 1657, though the works were still in operation both at Braintree and at Hammersmith, the Court declared that they were “not like long to continew,” not being properly supported by the London undertakers, and gave privileges to other parties.61 They went on, nevertheless. In 1658 Gifford got a verdict against Webb for defaming him to the London partners and for unjust imprisonment,62 and as late as 1662 he was attempting to recover damages from the estate of Keayne (deceased) on a similar complaint.63 Soon after the Restoration, the English adventurers were on hand with a petition to the King to right their wrongs, but nothing came of it.64 The best summary of the whole matter is Captain Edward Johnson’s choice piece of unconscious humor: “Divers persons of good rank and quality in England, were stirred up by the provident hand of the Lord to venture their estates upon an iron work, which they began at Braintree, and profited the owners little, but rather wasted their stock.”65 Child was one of those who wasted their stock: he lost £450, as we shall see presently.

Meantime we may return to Child’s letter of March 1, 1644[–5]. A considerable portion is taken up with a learned excursus on black lead, in criticism of an essay that Winthrop had sent him. He advises Winthrop to “dig lustily,” and is still quite ready to “bear the fourth part” of the expense, but “Pray let not out too much cost, till you haue more certainty then as yet you haue.” Child had been talking the matter over with Emanuel Downing and Winthrop’s brother Stephen, both then in England, and he even thinks of “settling himself” where the mine is, if he finds the place agreeable.66 This might lead one to infer that the mine he had his eye on was that at Nashawake (Lancaster), for in June, 1644, the General Court had granted permission for a plantation there to Robert Child and others.67

“I thanke you,” Child continues, “for engaging me in the Lake discovery, and Misticks mines, though as yet we receive no ꝑfit.” The mines in question, I suppose, were at Mistick in Connecticut, where Winthrop had discovered iron ore; he had received authority in 1644 “to make a plantation in the . . . Pequott country . . . & also to lay out a convenient place for iron works.”68

By the Lake discovery Child means the project formed in 1644 by certain Boston merchants to find the great lake supposed to lie in the northwest region of the Massachusetts patent and to engage in the beaver trade, thought to originate there, “which came to all the eastern and southern parts.” At the March court in 1644 this company obtained a monopoly for that purpose for twenty-one years and in May “they set out in a pinnace, . . . which was to sail up Delaware river” as far as possible, whence the expedition was to be continued in skiffs or canoes under the guidance of William Aspinwall; they were stopped by the Dutch and reached Boston, on their return, on July 20.69 Darby Field thought he saw this great lake from the White Hills in 1642,70 and years before, in 1632, Edward Howes had written with enthusiasm of this body of water, expressing the fear that the Dutch would anticipate the English in exploring it.71 Another company for the Lake discovery received similar privileges at the October Court in 1645.72

Summer came, and still Child had not sailed for New England, but his departure was imminent, for on June 23, 1645, Hugh Peter wrote from Deal to the elder Winthrop: “D^r Child is come y^t honest man who will bee of exceeding great vse if the Country know how to improue73 him, indeed he is very very vsefull, I pray let vs not play tricks with such men by our ielousyes.”74 This is a tantalizing passage. By “jealousies” Peter means, of course, suspicions. I cannot avoid the inference that Child’s high Presbyterianism had attracted the attention of the leading men in the Colony with whom he associated on his former visit, and that some report had reached Peter which made him fear that the Doctor might be looked at askance. His warning words, it seems likely, were penned just before Child embarked and perhaps came over by the same ship. At all events, Child was in New England in the following September, and had been here long enough to strike a bargain with Richard Vines, for, on the 30th of that month, Vines conveyed to Child all his rights under the Saco patent, and in October he gave him livery and seisin.75 Whether Child viewed his new possessions at this time, or whether he had surveyed them on his previous visit, we cannot tell. At any rate, he did visit Saco at least once in his life, now or formerly, as we shall see when we examine his agricultural writings.

From October, 1645, to May, 1646, we hear nothing of Child. Then, however, he emerges — Remonstrance in hand. At the risk of repeating many familiar things, I shall run through the history of the Remonstrance, for all the facts have never been brought together in one place, though the story has been told again and again, sometimes with scant regard to accuracy in detail.76

The “Remonstrance and humble Petition” of Robert Child, Thomas Burton, John Smith, Thomas Fowle, David Yale, Samuel Maverick, and John Dand was submitted to the General Court, with a request for an immediate answer, on May 19, 1646,77 which was near the close of that session, but its consideration was postponed until the autumn.78 Major John Child, the Remonstrant’s brother, asserts (no doubt truthfully) that it was “in a peaceable way presented, only by two of the Subscribers,”79 implying, it seems, a contrast to the riotous goings-on that had accompanied the presentation of certain petitions to the Long Parliament in recent years. We shall have occasion to examine the contents of this Remonstrance presently.80 Meantime, suffice it to say that it painted a dismal picture of the civil and religious condition of Massachusetts, described the inhabitants as poverty-stricken and discontented, accused the magistrates of arbitrary and tyrannical conduct, and foretold the utter ruin of the Colony unless certain thoroughgoing reforms were put into operation immediately. The reforms contemplated may be summed up under three heads: (1) that the fundamental laws of England and “such others as are no wayes repugnant to them” should be forthwith established in Massachusetts; (2) that the rights of freemen should be extended to “all truely English” (whether church-members or not); and (3) that all well-conducted members of the Church of England should be received without further tests or covenants into the New England churches, or else be allowed “to settle [themselves] here in a church way, according to the best reformations of England and Scotland,” that is, of course, on the Presbyterian model. If their prayers were not granted, the Remonstrants declared that they should feel constrained to appeal to Parliament for redress.

This document naturally disturbed the magistrates, coming as it did immediately after the efforts of William Vassall to get up petitions to Parliament against the New England government,81 and at a time when Gorton and some of his associates had been in England for at least half a year,82 extending their alliance among the most turbulent sectaries there and pressing their case before the Commissioners for Plantations. Nor was the discomposure lessened by the conduct of the Remonstrants, who, in the interval between the May and the October Court, in 1646, had so industriously circulated their manifesto in the neighboring colonies that, by the end of the year, it had reached “the Dutch Plantation, Virginia, and Bermudas.”83 Soon after the petition was presented, Winthrop received a letter from Winslow (dated June 30, 1646)84 which shows how serious the Remonstrance looked to the Plymouth Colony. “A 2d thing,” writes Winslow, “w^ch moved me to put pen to pap is to entreate you to be better preped (at lest to staue off prejudice against yo^r Goverm^t in the Com̄ittee of Parliam^t) in regard of the peticoners & many others who are very busie, who not onely threaten us as well as you, but grossly abuse us & insult & boast as if the victory were attayned before the enterprise is begun if I may so say: ffor I confesse I r[eceive]d a very proud lr̃ lately w^ch makes me feere things are not to begin.”85 By “better prepared” I suppose Winslow means better prepared than the Bay had shown itself in Gorton’s case, in which the malcontents had the advantage in their first application to the English Commissioners.86 Before the October meeting of the General Court, the administration had received from the Commissioners for Plantations an order (dated May 15, 1646) which favored the Gortonians and appeared to assert such jurisdiction over the Colony as the magistrates regarded as a violation of their chartered rights, as well as an encouragement of appeals to the home authorities.87

On May 15, 1646, the General Court passed a vote recommending a synod of the New England churches,88 and it has been thought that their action was influenced by the Remonstrance,89 but this was not presented until the 19th,90 as it happens, and, anyhow, the elders had brought in a bill proposing the synod at the previous session, in October, 1645, several months before the Remonstrance was drawn up.91 However, at the November session in 1646 the Court did adopt two measures which bear some relation to that document. The first of these was the appointment of a committee to “examine” and “compose in good order” the laws already in force and to suggest others — since we wish to “manifest our vtter disaffecc͠on to arbitrary goũment.” True this committee was but to finish a piece of work begun in 1645, but the mention of arbitrary government undoubtedly glances at the Remonstrance. The second measure was a plan to avoid “all complaints by reason of vnæquall rates,”92 and this, too, was a point that Child and his associates had made. Per contra, a bill enlarging the privileges of non-freemen, which was ready to pass at the May session in 1646, was postponed on account, it seems, of the presentation of the Remonstrance at that time,93 but it became a law at the May session in 1647.94

The persons whom Child induced to join him as signatories were of various opinions in religion, and doubtless had — most of them — no clear idea of his main design, the chief bond of union among them being dissatisfaction with the dominant party. The colonial authorities made much of this divergence of sentiment. Johnson, who, in his Wonder-working Providence, 1654, sides with the magistrates, remarks with some humor, that “the persons were of a Linsiwolsie disposition, some for Prelacy, some for Presbytery, and some for Plebsbytery, but all joyned together in the thing they would, which was to stir up the people to dislike of the present Government.”95

The colonial authorities were not spoiling for a fight, and “an eminent person”96 made some attempt to satisfy the Remonstrants in “a private conference,” which seems to have taken place in 1646, before the October court came in. We owe our account of the incident to Winslow. The eminent person asked the petitioners “what Church government it was they would have? One of them answered, he desired that particular government which Mr. John Goodwin in Colemanstreet97 was exercised in. Another of them said, hee knew not what that was: but hee for his part desired the Presbyterian government. A third of them said hee desired the Episcopall government if it might bee, if not, the Presbyterian: And a fourth told mee himselfe that hee disclaimed anything in the Petition that was against the government of the Churches in New-England, &c. resting and liking what was there done in that kind.”98

No. 1 in this list sounds as if it were John Dand, whom the General Court describes as an “ould grocer of London” with a failing intellect.99 Whoever desired the particular government that Mr. Goodwin was exercised in, ought in all conscience to have been content with New England Congregationalism, for Goodwin was one of the leading lights of Independency. He had been sequestered from St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, in 1645, by the (Presbyterian) Parliamentary Committee “because he refused to baptize the Children of his Parishioners promiscuously, and to administer the Sacrament to his whole Parish,”100 and was at this moment the minister of an Independent church in London. It was a similar refusal on the part of the Massachusetts churches that the Remonstrants alleged as their great ecclesiastical grievance. Dand, then, was badly mixed in his mind, and a mere statement of his position by Winslow was enough to label him (for every intelligent contemporary) as an almost imbecile Mr. Facing-both-ways.

No. 2 must have been Child himself. No. 3 was assuredly Maverick.101 What Maverick wanted it is easy to discover. Having been admitted as a freeman before church-membership was made a prerequisite, he was under no political disabilities, but he did not like the administration, and — not having been in England since the Presbyterian party had borne sway — he may have fondly imagined that direct Parliamentary control under a General Governor or a board of Commissioners would be less oppressive than the rule of the little commonwealth. He was frankly an Episcopalian, but church matters were not his chief concern: what he desired was to abolish the quasi-independence of the Bay Colony, and with this end in view he was quite ready to join hands with a high Presbyterian like Child, the deadly enemy of prelacy. Neither he nor Child, of course, had the slightest sympathy with general toleration or with liberty of conscience, the two bêtes noires alike of Episcopalians and of Presbyterians and of New England Congregationalists.

No. 4 must have been Fowle, whom Brewster doubtless talked with in London. He is described by the General Court as a church member who “will be no freeman” since “he likes better to be eased of that trouble and charge.”102 Politics, then, were not his object; and, since he liked the Congregational system, he can have had no wish to introduce Presbyterianism for its own sake. In 1645 he had been a petitioner “for y^e abrogac͠on or alte^rac͠on of y^e lawesag^nt y^e Anabap^ts, and y^t lawe y^t requires speciall allowance for new come^rs residing here.”103 This shows where he stood: he was really and truly an advocate for liberty of conscience or at least for a large toleration. As such, he is the first of his kind that we have so far discovered in the little band, and we may well ask what on earth he was doing dans cette galère. John Smith, whom Brewster does not characterize, was doubtless of similar sentiments, for he was a Providence man. At all events, his objects can hardly have been political, since he was not an inhabitant of the Bay.

Thomas Burton and David Yale are likewise omitted in Brewster’s catalogue of opinions. They are both compared, in the Declaration of the General Court, to “those who were called by Absalom to accompany him to Hebron”104 — an allusion that escaped nobody in those Scripture-reading days: “And with Absalom went two hundred men out of Jerusalem, that were called; and they went in their simplicity, and they knew not anything.”105

Of Thomas Burton little is known. He is described by the Court as “a clarke of the prothonotaries office, a sojournour . . . , and of no visible estate in the country, one who hath never appeared formerly in such designe, however he hath been drawne into this.”106 The prothonotary was the Chief Clerk of the King’s Bench or the Common Pleas in England. Burton had been in the country for not less than six years and his connections were certainly respectable, for he had married Margaret, daughter of John Otis, great-grandfather of the Patriot.107 Apparently he was not a church-member, or he would doubtless by this time have been admitted a freeman; besides, his membership would surely have been mentioned in the passage that describes him in the Declaration of the Court. He lived at Hingham, and the baptism of his five daughters is on record there (1641–1649).108 Such a record would usually suffice to show that he belonged to the Hingham church, but the pastor of that town, the Rev. Peter Hobart, did not believe in restricting baptism to the children of church-members.109 Since Burton had been prothonotary’s clerk, he was doubtless a member of the Church of England, and probably, like Mr. Hobart,110 he had Presbyterian sentiments. His legal training, too, must have predisposed him to favor the extension of the laws of England to the Colony. Here, then, for the first time, we have a petitioner whose sentiments accorded almost exactly with those of Robert Child, and, in truth, Burton seems to have acted as the Doctor’s right-hand man in the whole case.111

But Burton probably had another reason for joining in the Remonstrance. The troubles incident to a military election at Hingham were a cause célèbre in 1645, and it is quite possible that Burton, like his pastor, was among the eighty-one petitioners who thought themselves harshly treated by the General Court. The Hingham affair was still in hot controversy when Child presented the Remonstrance in May, 1646, for it was on the 18th of March preceding that Mr. Hobart had objected to the validity of the Marshal’s warrant, as not being made out in the King’s name, had declared that he and the other Hingham petitioners “had sent into England unto his Friends the busines, and expected shortly an answer and advice from thence,” and had criticized the government for exceeding its powers, alleging that it was “not more then a Corporation in England.”112 These points, or most of them, were also made in Child’s Remonstrance, and likewise (it would seem) in Vassall’s petition, and the magistrates therefore regarded the Hingham case as closely connected with that of the Child party, and believed that the two groups were not only acting in concert but were also in league with Vassall.113 So convinced were they, indeed, of such an alliance that at the October court in 1646, when they were about to consult the elders about the business of Gorton and Child, Mr. Hobart was accused of having a hand in Vassall’s petition, and though he denied all knowledge of it, was required to withdraw from the conference on the ground that he had shown himself opposed to authority and was at that moment under bonds for his good behavior.114 In substance, though perhaps not in detail, the magistrates were not far astray in their belief, for among the documents carried by Vassall and Fowle to England in the Supply for use in their campaign in Parliament were copies of the Hingham petition of 1645, of the complaint against Mr. Hobart for his acts and speeches on March 18, 1646, of the verdict against him returned on June 2, 1646, and of his sentence to pay a fine of £20.115 Nothing was more natural, then, than for Burton’s name to appear among the signatures of the Remonstrants. In fact, he showed much energy in their cause, and was particularly zealous in collecting a number of special providences to show that God was against the government, until his efforts were checked by a providence on the other side, as all may read in Winthrop’s narrative.116 What became of Burton after the final sentence was passed on the Remonstrants in November, 1647, we have no means of knowing, for there is no mention of him between that date and May 13, 1649, when his daughter Sarah was baptized at Hingham, and with that he disappears from the records.117 I suppose he died soon after. His health had suffered a severe shock in 1646.118

David Yale, the father of the founder of Yale College, came to this country in Davenport’s company with his stepfather, Theophilus Eaton, it appears, in 1637, and was one of the first settlers of New Haven. He was perhaps an inhabitant there in March, 1641, but on June 21 in the same year is described as “now resident in Boston.”119 Children were born to him and his wife Ursula in Boston, according to the town records, in 1644, 1645, and on January 14, 1651[–2]. Elihu, his second son, was born in New England (probably in Boston) in 1648 or 1649.120 On August 23, 1645, David Yale bought of Edward Bendall a fine estate on Cotton Hill in Boston,121 but in 1651 he seems to have returned to London,122 where he spent the rest of his life, though he visited Boston for a short time in 1659.123 His Boston estate was sold by his attorneys in 1653.124 His will is dated July, 1665 (the great Plague Year), but was not proved (by his son Elihu) for thirty-four years.125

Nothing in this biography suggests Presbyterianism, and the only visible reason that emerges for Yale’s joining the Remonstrants is the fact that, not being a church-member, he was a non-freeman and could not have his children baptized. Perhaps that was reason enough, but I wonder whether Yale’s signing was induced by the trial of his mother, the wife of Governor Theophilus Eaton, by the New Haven Church in 1644 for “divers scandalous offences.” By toying with Anabaptist doctrines she had come to entertain scruples which interfered with conformity in church practices. Besides, she had struck her mother-in-law, and slandered her stepdaughter, and declared that “Anthony the neager” had bewitched the beer. In short, she was a little insane126 and had made her house an uncomfortable place for the family. She received a public admonition, and in 1645 she was excommunicated for contumacy and falsehood.127 Her treatment by the church cannot have been pleasing to her son, and he may well have thought some change in the New England system desirable. True, the Presbyterian model, for which Child was so eager, would have handled the case with quite as much severity, but Yale was young, and — so the fathers thought — was as ignorant of what he was about as Absalom’s recruits who went to Hebron “in their simplicity.”

I have dwelt at some length on the extreme diversity of views among the seven Remonstrants, because this has been thought to explode the theory that we are dealing with a Presbyterian movement. The diversity is, at first sight, a little disconcerting to that theory; but a moment’s reflection shows that it is equally disconcerting to any theory that would strive to explain the united action of this ill-assorted group. Two separate questions are really involved: (1) What did the Remonstrants try to do? and (2) Why did they try to do it?

The first question admits of an immediate and strictly definite reply: — They tried to subvert the Massachusetts government, to bring the Colony under the thumb of a Presbyterian Parliament, to impose the Solemn League and Covenant upon all the inhabitants, and to procure the establishment of the (Presbyterian) Church of England as a state church.

Why did they try to do this? That is not so easily answered. There were seven Remonstrants, and only two of them were Presbyterians, Child and Burton. These two we can understand without difficulty, for they strove to accomplish exactly what they believed in — the extension to Massachusetts of all the blessings of a Presbyterian national church established in a Presbyterian state. They signed the Remonstrance with full comprehension of what it meant and in hearty agreement with all its principles. The other five were united only in desiring to see the autonomy of the Bay overthrown; and to bring this about they consented to sacrifice — Maverick his Episcopal tenets, Dand and Fowle and Smith their Congregationalism, Fowle and Smith their principle of toleration or of liberty of conscience. Maverick, perhaps, knew what he was about, for he was certainly a thorough Royalist at heart, and he may have realized that the King’s sole hope lay in the triumph of the Presbyterian party over the Independents. If so, his action is quite intelligible. He was willing to embark with the Presbyterians in order to save the Church and the King, for he could not doubt that the King would throw them overboard, if God gave him strength, as soon as they had served his turn.128 Thus Maverick, a Presbyterian for the nonce, ranges with Child and Burton, and three out of our seven are accounted for. The others, Dand and Fowle and Yale and Smith, belonged in the group only by virtue of their discontent with the administration, which was the sole binding element common to all the Remonstrants.129 The guiding spirit was undoubtedly Child, who was the only man of first-rate intellectual qualities in the coterie. The diversity of views, then, by no means disproves the Presbyterian character of the movement.130 It proves only that, as in all such movements, some are leaders and some are led.

Anyhow, the private reasonings of the “eminent person” with the Remonstrants were of no effect, and the business was taken up again when the General Court assembled on October 7, 1646. A committee was appointed to draw up an answer to Child and his associates, and Edward Winslow was selected to go to England as the agent of the Colony in the Gorton business, as well as in any troubles that might grow out of the Remonstrance. The committee consisted of Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, Richard Bellingham, and Nathaniel Duncan,131 the first three of whom had become personal friends of Child when he visited the Colony for the first time.132

In November, 1646, at an adjourned session, which began on the 4th, at 1 p. m.,133 the Court tackled l’affaire Child in earnest. The Elders were consulted, and gave their opinion of the Remonstrance, but offered no advice as to what judgment should be passed on the petitioners, leaving that question to the Court.134 Yet it is still the vogue to call the Colony a theocracy! The Answer had been prepared in the interim.135 It is an elaborate document, and skilfully drawn, but is too well known to invite comment.136 This was adopted by the Court, not, as Winthrop explains, “by way of answer” to the Remonstrance, because that “was adjudged a contempt,” but “in way of declaration of the Court’s apprehension thereof,” and was afterwards made public 137 and somewhat widely circulated.

A ship, the Supply,138 was about to sail for England, on which Fowle had engaged passage, and Smith, who lived in Providence, was likely soon to return to his home. They were therefore — so the Records inform us — summoned to Court and asked if they “sawe any evill” in the Remonstrance “which they would retract.” When they replied that, on the contrary, “they stood to justify y^e same,” they were required to give securities in £100 each “to be responsall to y^e judgm^t of y^e Courte,” since they might be out of the jurisdiction when the matter came up. Both of them refused and appealed to the Commissioners for Plantations, declaring that they would “engage” themselves to prosecute the appeal. They were taken out of the courtroom, but were called in again after a brief interval and were once more required to give security “to answer y^t matte^r of y^e petic͠on,” but they “refused to answer,” and Fowle argued that the Court was not competent to judge them for any alleged offence against itself, as being a party interested;139 “the^rfore they stood to their appeale for competent justice.” Accordingly they were committed to the Marshal until they should furnish the security required.140 Winthrop affords further details, from which we learn that Fowle and Smith complained that the other Remonstrants had not also been sent for. Thereupon these were summoned, and all, except Maverick, appeared. Probably the Marshal had failed to find him, since there is no evidence that he attempted to escape, and since his absence was not counted against him later.141 Child, “being the chief speaker,” demanded to know what they were accused of, and was informed that “their charge” was not yet ready, but should be forthcoming in due season, and that the present business had to do only with the question of securities for Fowle and Smith. The Doctor again asked “what offence they had committed, for which they should find sureties,” and he was accommodated by the reading of one particularly offensive clause in the Remonstrance. He took a high tone — being young and ardent, and manifestly feeling some scorn for this picayune Parliament — and replied that he and his associates had acted beneath their dignity in petitioning the Court in the first place, whereupon he appealed to the Commissioners. The Governor refused to admit any appeal, as being contrary to the Charter, and “the Court let them know that they did take notice of their contemptuous speeches and behavior, as should further appear in due time.” All were then dismissed, with an injunction to appear when summoned, except Smith and Fowle, who had been “committed to the Marshal,” as we have already seen, but they soon found sureties, and were released before nightfall.142 Though Child’s appearance on this occasion is not mentioned in the record, we may be confident that Winthrop is accurate,143 for the appeal before sentence was later in this same session made an especial ground of accusation against him and all the other Remonstrants except Maverick.

There is an important remark of Winthrop in a letter to his eldest son (November 16, 1646), which seems to have been overlooked by investigators of these events. He writes: “I had thought we should onely haue declared o^r apprehensions concerning the Petition,144 w^th out questioning the Petitioners but, the Dep͞tyes called vpon it, whereupon m^r Fowle was forced to putt in bond to ans^r, &c, & the rest being called, did ꝑ’sently appeale to the Parl^t, etc.: so as we are like to proceed to some Censure for their appeal, if not for the Petition.”145 This shows that the magistrates had not planned to bring the Remonstrants to the bar, but that the Deputies were determined to have them appear. Their bearing when summoned, and the momentous questions raised by their appeal, made “censure” (that is, the passing of some judgment) inevitable.

Soon after this hearing, Fowle went to England in the Supply, as he had intended, and he seems never to have returned to America. The ship sailed on November 9, 1646.146 The passenger list147 included Richard Sadler, Captain Thomas Harding, John Leverett, Herbert Pelham, — who, at his own request, was relieved of the duty of serving as agent of the Colony in association with Winslow,148 — William Vassall, — whom Winslow regards as the chief fomenter of the whole trouble and the constant adviser of the Remonstrants, — Captain William Sayles (late Governor of Bermuda) and William Golding (a minister in that colony), who were charged with the mission of pleading the cause of the Independent churches of the islands with the Bermuda Company, and, if necessary, with Parliament.149 The voyage was tempestuous and full of peril; but, after an almost miraculous escape from shipwreck on the Scilly rocks, the Supply reached Bristol on December 19, 1646.150

A number of documents that concern us went over on the Supply, and their presence occasioned a characteristic incident on the voyage. A few days before the ship set sail, Mr. Cotton of Boston, in his Thursday lecture (November 5, 1646) had mentioned the imminent departure of the Supply and of another vessel that was soon to follow. “If there bee any amongst you my brethren,” he had said, “as ’tis reported there are, that have a Petition to prefer to the High Court of Parliament . . . that may conduce to the distraction, annoyance and disturbance of the peace of our Churches and weakning the Government of the land where wee live, let such know, the Lord will never suffer them to prosper in their subtill, malicious and desperate undertakings against his people.” He declined to advise the passengers, “when the terrors of the Almightie shall beset the Vessell wherein they are, the Heavens shall frowne upon them, the billowes of the Sea shall swell above them, and dangers shall threaten them, (as I perswade my selfe they will),” to “take such a person,” as the sailors in the Bible took Jonah, “and cast him into the Sea; God forbid: but,” he continued, “I would advise such to come to a resolution in themselves to desist from such enterprises, never further to ingage in them, and to cast such a Petition into the Sea that may occasion so much trouble and disturbance.”151 The Rev. Thomas Peters (Hugh’s brother) was so much stirred by this appeal, that, “having shipped his goods and bedding to have gone in the Ship with them, amongst other arguments this was the maine, that he feared to goe in their company that had such designes, and therefore tooke passage to goe rather by way of Spaine.”152

Storms did, indeed, descend upon the ship; the passengers remembered Mr. Cotton’s warning, and Fowle, in the midst of the tempest, when two hundred leagues short of Land’s End, in compliance with the request of “a godly & discreet woman,” took a copy of the Remonstrance out of his trunk and gave it to her, and “referred it to the discretion of others to doe withall as they should see good.” This was after midnight, when all were “wearied out and tired in their spirits.” The woman showed the paper to Richard Sadler and others. They saw at once that “it was not the right Petition,” that is, not Vassall’s petition to Parliament, but “because they judged it also to bee very bad, having often seene it in New England, but never liked the same, cut it in peeces as they thought it deserved, and gave the said peeces to a seaman who cast them into the sea.” Next day the wind abated, but they had divers storms afterward. In short, Winslow tells us, it was “the terriblest passage that ever I heard on for extremitie of weather, the mariners not able to take an observation of sunne or star in seven hundred leagues sailing or thereabouts.”153 This incident suggested the title for Major John Child’s New-Englands Jonas Cast up at London, to which we shall recur. Though one copy of the Remonstrance had thus gone overboard, there was another in the ship, and Vassall had with him his own petitions to Parliament.154 These, however, must be sharply distinguished from Child’s appeal. It does not appear that this appeal was carried to England on the Supply, though that is possible. It was Child’s intention, as we shall see in a moment, to go to England in a few days, and to bring the matter to the attention of Parliament himself. Fowle’s copy of the Remonstrance, as well as certain other pertinent documents, — such as transcripts of the Hingham petition and the proceedings against the Rev. Peter Hobart, the Capital Laws of Massachusetts, and the Freeman’s Oath, all of which (and other papers unspecified) were taken over in the Supply,155 — was obviously intended to be used either in support of Vassall’s petitions, or in influencing public opinion in preparation for Child’s arrival, or in both ways. Nothing of any consequence, however, was done by Fowle or Vassall in England until after the arrival of Winslow, which took place in January, 1647.

But we must return to the proceedings of the November Court of 1646. At that session, the 24th of December was set apart for a day of humiliation “w^th respect to y^e hazordous estate of our native country, y^e trowbles thereof, y^e sad condic͠on of y^e church at Barmuda,156 & ye weighty cases in respect of our churches & com̄onwealth, w^th reference to any that seeke to unde^rmyne ye libe^rtyes of Gods people here in either or both.”157 This was particularly directed against the Remonstrants, and was so understood; and therefore Mr. Peter Hobart, “the pastor at Hingham, and others of his church (being of their party) made light of it, and some said they would not fast against Dr. Child and against themselves.”158 Hobart, Winthrop asserts, was “of a Presbyterial spirit,” that is, he was disposed to “manage all affairs without the church’s advice,” contrary to the Congregational principle.159

About the middle of November, or a little later — near the end of the session, at all events, — all the Remonstrants (except Fowle160) were summoned and “in the open court, before a great assembly” they heard their petition read and listened to the charge against them, which a committee had prepared in the interval. They were accused, (1) on the basis of various expressions in the Remonstrance, of defaming the government and slandering the churches, with attempting to weaken the authority of the laws and fomenting sedition, and (2) on the basis of their behavior when previously summoned, with “publickly declaring their disaffection” to the government in that they refused to answer, and “disclaiming its jurisdiction” by appealing “before they knew whether the Court would give any sentence against them or not.” The charges were distributed under twelve heads.161 The defendants asked time to compose an answer, which they presented in writing later in the same day, probably in the afternoon, the Court reassembling and the attendance of the people still being large. This, as was to be expected, was part defence, part excuse, and part denial, and “the court replied” to it clause by clause “extempore,” as it was read.162 The appeal, which, as we have seen, was brought to their charge as an offence quite distinct from their contempt and the seditious character of the Remonstrance, they justified163 as their right; but they did not answer the important point raised in the Charge — namely, that they had appealed before sentence, and in such terms as to deny the jurisdiction of the Court. This point the presiding officer did not neglect to emphasize in replying to the defendants’ answer.164 Whatever may be thought of the case of the Remonstrants, nobody who has read the documents can hold that they improved it materially by their rejoinder. They were found guilty and sentenced — Child to a fine of £50, Smith to £40, Maverick to £10, and the rest to £30 each; but were informed that “an ingenuous & publicke acknowledgmen^t of their misdemean^ors” would be “accepted as satisfacc͠on for their offences, & their fines not taken.” They rejected this offer, and the Court declared their sentence.165 “Three of the magistrates, viz., Mr. Bellingham, Mr. Saltonstall, and Mr. Bradstreet, dissented, and desired to be entered contradicentes in all the proceedings (only Mr. Bradstreet went home before the sentence),”166 and five of the Deputies were also recorded as contradicentes, two of whom had been leaders in the Hingham disturbances.167 The smallness of Maverick’s fine was due to his not having appealed in November.168 Child’s sentence runs as follows: “Docto^r Childe, as being guilty not only of his offence in the matter of appeale & remonstrance, but also in chardging y^e Cou^r te w^th breaches of p^r viledges of Parliament, & contemptuous speeches & behaviou^r towards them, is fined ffiffty pounds.”169 This refers to his demeanor at the November hearing, for there is no indication that he misbehaved at the actual trial. After sentence they all appealed again.170

The trial seems to have occupied one day, and the sentence was almost the closing act of the session.171 The exact date cannot be determined, since all the proceedings of the session that began on November 4, 1646, are recorded under that single date, but it was certainly later than the 16th,172 and probably several days later.

The sentence, we observe, says nothing about imprisonment or about security for payment.173 This silence is significant. The culprits were set at liberty, as the course of events proves, but they were liable to arrest at any time for their unpaid fines.174 The object of this apparent leniency seems obvious, — to give the offenders plenty of rope. The magistrates suspected a Presbyterian conspiracy against the Charter and the Independent churches, and they kept a sharp eye on Child and his associates.

Child, even before the trial, seems to have had the intention of paying a visit to England in the autumn,175 and this purpose must have been well-known to the leading men in the Colony, with whom he had until recently been on friendly terms. After the trial, he made haste to get ready to go in a ship which was to sail in about a week,176 and he seems to have talked incautiously about what he expected to accomplish by prosecuting his appeal. The evening before his departure, the Council (Bellingham dissenting) decided “to stay the Doctor for his fine, and to search his trunk and Mr. Dand’s study,” whereupon, as Winthrop tells us, “we sent the officers presently to fetch the Doctor, and to search his study and Dand’s both at one instant.” The officers brought Child, and his trunk, which contained nothing contraband, “but at Dand’s they found Mr. Smith” and also certain papers — some of them in Child’s handwriting177 — which deserved all the attention that the fathers of the Colony gave them.

The fact is, Winthrop and his associates had been too clever for Dr. Child. They had given him every opportunity, since his trial, to prepare such documents as he thought would be most effective in England, knowing full well that he would (if liberty of action were allowed him) get these ready before he sailed, in order to fortify them with signatures. This was manifestly their object in postponing his arrest to the eve of sailing. Indeed, their original purpose had been to wait until he had actually embarked: why, Winthrop does not tell us, because he supposes we shall be shrewd enough to infer that any documents seized on shipboard would be not only the last results of the Doctor’s activities but would also, from the circumstances of their seizure, require no proof that they were intended for use in the mother country. I should be ashamed to make so obvious a suggestion, were it not that an eminent New Englander has interpreted the action of the vigilant guardians of our independence in quite another fashion. “One striking characteristic of the theocracy,” writes Mr. Brooks Adams, “was its love for inflicting mental suffering upon its victims. The same malicious vindictiveness which sent Morton to sea in sight of his blazing home, and which imprisoned Anne Hutchinson in the house of her bitterest enemy, now suggested a scheme for making Childe endure the pangs of disappointment, by allowing him to embark, and then seizing him as the ship was setting sail.”178

The papers thus impounded were three in number. There was a petition to the Commissioners for Plantations from some twenty-five “non-freemen” calling for liberty of conscience and for a general governor. This was of no great consequence. Far more significant was another petition, signed by the original Remonstrants, in which, after reciting the harsh treatment they had received, they ask not only for “settled churches according to the reformation of England,” — that is, the Presbyterian reformation, — and for the appointment of a “general governor” or commissioners to regulate the Colony, but for the imposition of “the oath of allegiance and such other covenants” as the Parliament may decide on to test the sentiments of the colonists “to the state of England and true restored Protestant religion,” i. e., of course, the Presbyterian system. This clause, we note, calls for the imposition of the Covenant on the whole Colony! The petition also asked for judgment on the Remonstrance and for answers to certain queries. These, which made up the third document, were openly revolutionary. They concerned, amongst other things, the validity of the charter, inquiring “how it might be forfeited, and whether such and such acts or speeches in the pulpits or in the courts were not high treason.”179 The revolutionary nature of the seized documents admits of no question. William Pynchon, on March 9, 1646[–7], wrote from Springfield to Winthrop, on the receipt of certain “extracts,” which he sent on (as requested) to Edward Hopkins: “I cannot but be much affected with that malignant spirit that breathes out in their endeuors, be[cause] by their manner of proceedinge (though they pretend honest reformation, yet) it seemes to me they would destroy both Church & Com̄onwealth: in laboring for a generall Governor, & in charging treason by Conniuence vppon y^e Court.”180

Child, on being brought before the Governor and Council, “fell into a great passion, and gave big words, but being told, that they considered he was a person of quality, and therefore he should be used with such respect as was meet to be showed to a gentleman and a scholar, but if he would behave himself no better, he should be committed to the common prison and clapped in irons, — upon this he grew more calm; so he was committed to the marshal, with Smith and Dand, for two or three days, till the ships were gone.” He was “very much troubled to be hindered from his voyage, and offered to pay his fine,” but the authorities refused to accept this as sufficient to discharge him, since they “now had new matter and worse against him.”181 He was bound over to the next Court of Assistants. He was not imprisoned, however, but was allowed to lodge at the house of his friend Richard Leader, manager of the iron works, on giving bond in £800 (with three sureties) not to leave the town limits.182 Smith and Dand, refusing to be examined, were not bailed, but committed to prison, “yet lodged in the keeper’s house,” with liberty to receive visits from their friends.183

At the Court of Assistants, in March, 1647, the whole matter was referred to the next General Court, partly because that Court had dealt with the former case (that of the Remonstrance itself), and partly because the new grounds of complaint against the defendants were so momentous, concerning “the very life and foundation of our government.” Smith and Dand were released on bail, after giving security to pay within two months the fine imposed on each of them in the preceding November. Maverick, who had been fined only £10 on that occasion, had exerted himself in the interim to get signatures to the petition to the Commissioners — the same of which a copy was found in Dand’s study. He was therefore summoned to the Court of Assistants, charged with this offence (which, in the view of the Court, involved a breach of his Freeman’s Oath), and likewise bound over to the General Court. “Mr. Clerk,” of Salem, a freeman and a church member, was also summoned and bound over for the same reason: — he had not signed the original Remonstrance, but “had been very active about the petition to the commissioners in procuring hands to it.” Dr. Child, regarded as the chief offender, “was offered his liberty, upon bail to the general court, and to be confined to Boston; but he chose rather to go to prison, and so he was committed.”184

We are now in a position to understand Child’s letter of March 15, 1646[–7], written from Boston to John Winthrop, Jr., “at Pequat River,” immediately after this action of the Assistants:

He asks payment of £40 which he had lent Winthrop, for “this fine & other businesses may cause me to want moneys.”186 “Mallins,” I suppose, was George Munnings, keeper of the Boston prison.187 Child, like Smith and Dand, was obviously lodged in the keeper’s house,188 not in the prison itself.

Here we must pause to draw an obvious distinction, which has sometimes been overlooked or ignored. The authorities had two separate cases against Child: (1) that which grew directly out of the Remonstrance itself and his conduct when summoned to answer to it, and (2) that concerning the papers found in Dand’s study. The first was finished at the November Court in 1646 by the imposition of a fine of £50, which still hung over his head, being unpaid; the second, which involved a conspiracy to subvert the government, was now pending and was to be tried at the spring session of the General Court in 1647. It was the fact that the fine of £50 had not been paid which gave the Council a valid ground for arresting Child in November, 1646, when he was about to sail for England, and doubtless (as already suggested) the neglect to exact payment and the liberty of a week or more accorded to the Doctor before the date of his intended sailing (in November, 1646) had been a piece of policy on the part of the magistrates, who, suspecting a conspiracy against the government, wished to give the plotters every opportunity to take such measures and prepare such documents as should make their ultimate purposes clear.

The Court of Elections was held on May 26, 1647. Winthrop was chosen Governor by a plurality of two or three hundred, and the only new magistrate elected was Captain Robert Bridges. Yet there had been “great laboring” by “the friends of the petitioners to have one chosen governor who favored their cause, and some new magistrates to have been chosen of their side.”189 Only a few days before, Child was still looking for good news from England. “I hope,” he wrote to John Winthrop, Jr., on May 14, “when we heare from England to be com̄aunded from hence, to prosecute o^r Appeale before y^e Parliam^t & y^t o^r Cause may be heard before indifferent Arbiters, till w^ch time I suppose I shall remayne in my ould Lodging in y^e prison.”190 But no such summons arrived, for Winslow had been busy in the interim.

Before Winslow sailed for England, Gorton with his two associates, John Greene and Randall Holden, had accomplished much. They had left Rhode Island about the middle of August, 1645, had arrived in England (it seems) toward the end of the year,191 had presented their case to the Commissioners for Plantations, and on May 15, 1646, had procured two orders for reinstatement in their Narragansett lands.192 Holden, arriving at Boston on September 13, had presented the first of these orders, which served him as a passport through the Massachusetts jurisdiction, and the other had been sent over by the Commissioners and had reached the hands of the magistrates.193 Winslow’s mission in England was to reopen the Gorton case, as the agent of the Bay, and incidentally to bring the Child affair to the attention of the Commissioners, or to oppose the efforts of the Remonstrants if they had got the start of him. Gorton had not returned to America with Holden. He doubtless expected some further move on the part of the Massachusetts Court, and he remained in England to fortify his case. His famous book, Simplicities Defence against Seven-headed Policy, addressed to the Commissioners, was licensed on August 3, 1646, and published as early as November 7th.194

Winslow sailed from Boston about the middle of December,195 and “had a comfortable passage and landfall,” so that he must have reached London in January, 1647. He did not get a hearing before the Commissioners until sometime between May 5 and July 22.196 Meanwhile, his facile pen was kept busy. Gorton’s Simplicities Defence was waiting for him on the bookstalls, and he dashed off a reply, Hypocrisie Unmasked, also addressed to the Commissioners, which was issued between February 22 and March 25.197 This was answered in its turn by Major John Child, in his New-Englands Jonas, which was also written (at least in part) before the latter date,198 though not published until after the legal new-year, as its imprint. (1647) shows. Thomason bought it on April 15,199 which was perhaps the very day of publication. Winslow instantly retorted with New-Englands Salamander, which was also issued in 1647 — as early as May 29.200

Major Child, being a high Presbyterian,201 had no sympathy for Gorton, whom he describes as “a man notorious for heresie,”202 but, in advocating the cause of his brother, he felt bound to oppose Winslow’s doctrine of No Appeal.203 Besides, there were some passages in Hypocrisie Unmasked that alluded to the Remonstrants. In particular, Winslow had contended that Presbyterians, as such, were under no disabilities in Massachusetts,204 and this point the Major thought it desirable to controvert in the interest of his brother and the other petitioners.205

Just what was being done by Thomas Fowle (the only Remonstrant then in England), by William Vassall (also there), and by English friends of the cause, to get the business before the Parliament or the Commissioners, we cannot make out with certainty.206 Fowle and Vassall had been in England ever since December 19, 1646, and something had doubtless been attempted in the way of bringing influence to bear on individual Commissioners or Members of Parliament. Vassall, who believed in universal toleration,207 probably joined forces with Gorton, but Major Child and his circle would have gone to the stake before they would have coöperated with a Familist. We know that Vassall took over with him in the Supply one or more petitions to Parliament which called for certain reforms that were also demanded by the Remonstrants, but these were drawn up, it seems, before the Remonstrance was prepared, and were certainly neither in the name nor in the behalf of Child and his associates.208 Vassall’s petition, a copy of the Remonstrance, and other pertinent documents, as Major Child informs the world in his New-Englands Jonas, arrived safely on the Supply, “and are here in London to be seen and made use of in convenient time.”209 The Major’s present tense applies, of course, to the moment of writing, that is, to some time between February 1 and March 25, 1647 — certainly before the latter date. His language indicates, I think, that the friends of the Remonstrance had not yet submitted their case to the Commissioners.

Before this time, however, Winslow, though he had not yet got a formal hearing, must have filed his documents. These included copies not only of various Gorton papers, but also of Child’s Remonstrance and the General Court’s Declaration in reply; and with them went the protest of December, 1646, addressed to the Commissioners by the Governor and Company in answer to their order of May 15, 1646. This protest covered both cases, Gorton’s and Child’s. It asserted, with a masterly union of deference and frank courage, the doctrine of No Appeal under the Charter, and called upon the Commissioners to recognize that doctrine, not, to be sure, by affirming it in set terms but “by leaving delinquents to our just proceedings, and discountenancing our enemies and disturbers of our peace, or such as molest our people . . . upon pretence of injustice.”210 Vassall’s petitions may or may not have been before the Commissioners when Winslow submitted his papers, but, if so, they were a thing apart, and not a branch or member of the Child agitation, nor did they involve the question of appeal. We know nothing of their history before the Parliament or the Commissioners, except that they were rejected.211

Meanwhile, as we have seen, Robert Child was in confinement at Boston, awaiting the May session of the General Court and looking anxiously for a summons from Parliament that should call him to England to “prosecute his appeal.”212 By an odd coincidence, on May 25, 1647, the very day before the Court of Elections was held in Massachusetts, the English Commissioners, who must have given Winslow at least a preliminary hearing, indited a letter to the Governor and Company which sounded the death knell to all Child’s hopes.

In this letter the Commissioners acknowledge the receipt from Winslow of the Petition and Remonstrance of the Governor and Company in the Gorton case, and continue in these highly significant terms:

The passage here italicized refers in the plainest way to the appeal of Child and his associates, and is a direct and favorable reply to certain dignified and outspoken sentences in the petition of the Governor and Company which Winslow had delivered to the Commissioners. This declares that if Gorton be upheld by the Commissioners, it will endanger the peace of the Colony.

The action of the English Commissioners, however, — as it could not be known to the Magistrates and Deputies at the May session of the General Court, so it was not needed to spur them to decisive action in the case of Child and his associates, for they were confident that they were acting legally and they never lacked courage. Undoubtedly they expected a favorable reply from England, but their action on subsequent occasions — for example, in their treatment of the Commissioners of Charles II in 1665 — shows that they were quite ready to defy the Parliamentary Commissioners now, should these claim any power which the Charter, as our forefathers interpreted it, had lodged in the hands of the Massachusetts authorities.

And so the May court of 1647 began its session on the 26th, and the trial of the Remonstrants was reached in due course. It is important, in view of the prevalent confusion on this subject, to define the issue. The first case, that of the Remonstrance itself, was over and done with, and the penalties had been imposed. The present case, though it had grown out of the former, was quite distinct, and depended on acts discovered and in part committed subsequently to the former trial. These acts, in the opinion of the magistrates, amounted to a conspiracy against the government on the part of Robert Child, John Smith, Samuel Maverick, John Dand, and Thomas Burton. Two of the original Remonstrants were not involved in this second proceeding — Thomas Fowle and David Yale. Fowle had gone to England before the former trial, and had consequently had no part in the subsequent activities that led to the present prosecution. His sureties (whoever they were) were, of course, bound to produce him or settle up, if the Court should call him to bar on the former offence, for which he had never been tried; but it seems clear that the matter was never pressed. How, when, and why Yale dropped out of the case is a mystery. I should be inclined to think he had not signed the petition seized in Dand’s study but for the fact that Winthrop says expressly that it was “from Dr. Child and the other six petitioners.”216 Perhaps this is a slip of the pen. At all events the list of culprits given in a contemporary memorial omits his name,217 and he is not mentioned in the record of the sentence.218

One new culprit was expected to stand trial with the rest, having been bound over at the Court of Assistants in March, 1647. This was “Mr. Clerk of Salem the keeper of the ordinary there and a church member.” His offence is equated with Maverick’s by Winthrop, for both were freemen: “These having taken an oath of fidelity to the government, and enjoying all liberties of freemen, their offence was far the greater.” They “had been very active about the petition to the commissioners” (that revolutionary document found in Dand’s study) “in procuring hands to it.”219 In the opinion of the magistrates, then, they had been guilty of perjury as well as of conspiracy. William Clark had been chosen by the inhabitants of Salem to keep the town ordinary on April 7, 1645,220 and in the following October the General Court appointed him Lieutenant of the Military Company of Salem and Lynn.221 But alas! at the Quarter Court held at Salem on February 18, 1646, he was “advised to forbear being offensive in suffering a shuffling board in his house, occasioning misspending of time.”222 We are not obliged to infer that this incident threw him into the arms of the malcontents, but thought is free.223 He died before May 26, 1647, thus escaping trial for conspiracy, and his widow was allowed to continue the ordinary at Salem.224

The exact date of the trial of the conspirators is not determinable. The Court assembled on May 26, 1647, but the trial certainly took place in June,225 and sentence was not pronounced until after the 9th.226 There was more or less public sentiment in favor of the defendants, and an escape or rescue was feared, as is shown by the following entry in the records of this session:

A very interesting memorial, hitherto unprinted, was submitted to the Court shortly (as it would seem) before a decision was reached. It is docketed, in a hand contemporary with the text: “Deputy^s: motions, 1647,”228 and is signed by fourteen members of the House of Deputies. The document proves that there was considerable difference of opinion in the Court itself, and contains so many curious details that I reproduce it in full from the original in the Archives:229

Of the fourteen signers, one alone — Jacob Barney of Salem — appears as flatly “contradicens” to the final sentence of the Court; Dummer, Pendleton, Payne, Carlton, Clements, Pelham, and Lothrop are recorded as “somewhat differing from y^e sentence of y^e Courte, in degree only,” and as “desiring their contradicentes might stand on record only as they differed.” They were in favor of lighter fines, and their several opinions are entered.240 Pendleton, Payne, and Carlton thought Child had been already punished enough by his imprisonment.241 The sentence (which was probably followed by an appeal242) runs as follows:

John Dand, being unable to pay his fine and unwilling to apologize, was put in prison.245 He petitioned the November Court (1647) to remit the penalty, and it was voted that if, before or at the next Quarter Court, he shall tender “such acknowledgement” as shall be approved by that court and by all or a majority of a committee of seven Deputies [named], and shall also give security to the Auditor General for £50 “to be paid into y^e Treasurer w^th in 6 months now next coming, he shall yⁿ be discharged.”246 Dand, however, still refused to offer a satisfactory apology and remained in jail until May, 1648, when, having made the requisite amende, he was “ffreed from his imprisonm^t, & his fine readyly remitted him.”247

Maverick was allowed his liberty for about a month after sentence, but then, not having paid his £150, he was imprisoned.248 From a curious petition presented by his daughter to Andros in 1688, it appears that he was resolved not to pay at all, and that, fearing that the authorities would seize his estate of Noddle’s Island, “he made a deede of Gift of the s^d Island to his Eldest sonne,” Nathaniel, “not w^th any designe to deliver the s^d Deede to him but only to p^rvent the seizure of itt.”249 After twelve days’ confinement, however, he paid his fine and was discharged.250

At the November session of the General Court in this same year (1647) Maverick petitioned for “a review of his Tryall, the reparaco͠n of his Creditt, and remittm^t of fines251 imposed on him,” but got no answer.252 He repeated his application in October, 1648, whereupon the Deputies voted that he ought to be heard and the Magistrates (October 25) consented.253 The result was a vote of the Deputies “that on M^r Samuell Mauerickes acknowledgment of his error his fine shalbe Remitted,” but apparently the Magistrates refused to concur.254 The matter came up again at the May Court in 1649, and on the 4th, in response to Maverick’s “request” for “a review of his cawse, whereby he might either cleere himself or be satisfyed in the evidence form̑ly ꝑduced against him,” the General Court appointed May 9 “for hearing him.”255 There is no record concerning the business on the 9th, but Maverick’s petition of May 8, 1649, is in the Archives. It alleges that he was charged with “conspiracy and periury” at a court held in May and June, 1647, protests his innocence, and asks that his fine of £150 may be repaid.256 In another document of May 8, 1649, Maverick specifies what he conceives to be a number of errors in a record of the trial of 1647 which had been furnished him by the Secretary.257 Again there was no result, and apparently the Court was displeased with the high tone of the petitioner, for a “second petition,” much humbler in style, came before it on May 16th. Maverick now throws himself upon the Court’s mercy: “Being confident and experimentally assured of yo^r clemency to others in the like kind, I am bold rather to crave yo^r mercy in the favorable remittance of my fines then to stand either to justify myself or ꝑceedings, w^ch, as they have (contrary to my intenc͠ons) prouved ꝑjudicyall and very offencive, so it hath binn, is, & willbe, my greife and trouble.” The Deputies voted to abate £100, but the Magistrates did not concur, for they “cannot finde that the petitioner hath so farr acknouledged himself guilty of his offence . . . as doth give them such satisfac͠on as might moove them to take of any parte of his fine.” 258 In the June court of 1650 Maverick petitioned again “for the remittinge or mitigation” of his fine of £150, and this time the Court voted to abate it £75.259

As to Smith and Burton, we have no record that proves the payment of their fines, but Maverick asserts, in his Briefe Description of New England,260 that the Remonstrants “were fined 1000^li, a[nd] Notw^tstanding they Appealled to England, they were forced to pay the same.”261 One notes, by the way, that, in his venomous arraignment of the Colony in this paper, he suppresses the fact that Dand’s £100 was remitted and that £75 of his own £150 was finally returned to him. Still, his statement that the fines were exacted is certainly true (though not the whole truth) in his own case, and probably also with respect to Child’s £200. This inference is confirmed by Child’s expressed wish, soon after his return to England, that his fines might be “restored” or “returned.”262 He even commissioned Richard Leader, agent and manager of the Lynn and Braintree iron works — a venture in which Child was one of the original partners263 — to approach the authorities on the subject.264 And he returns to the matter in his last extant letter to the younger Winthrop, August 26, 1650.265 We may be sure, then, that Child was not allowed to leave Massachusetts until he had paid his £200. His former fine of £50, however, was still unpaid when he departed. It has been thought that John Winthrop, Jr., stood security for this sum. The facts, however, are rather more complicated, and illustrate, in an amusing fashion, how scarce cash was in old New England. Winthrop had borrowed forty pounds of Child in London. On March 15, 1647, Child asked for the money, explaining why he needed it; he repeated his request on May 14, offering to accept whatever Winthrop could send in lieu of coin, “as peage, if it be good, & other kinds of provisions at price currant.” Finally, writing from Gravesend, on May 13, 1648, he approves of Winthrop’s act in having “paid in ye 40^ƚ to M^r Leader” and adds, “We are now totally euen.”266

Meanwhile, in October or November, 1647, the Court had passed the following vote:

The iron works were far from profitable, and such a sale would undoubtedly have been at a great loss. To prevent this, I conjecture, and to square his debt to Child, Winthrop guaranteed to the Colony £40 of Child’s first fine, and had Leader, as Child’s agent, credit him with that amount.268 The Bay was an indulgent creditor — and very properly so — to the younger Winthrop, who also claimed a set-off on account of a payment he had made in England for the Colony;269 and it appears by the records that he was still indebted for that portion of Child’s fine in October, 1650,270 and also in October, 1651, when the debt was forgiven him as a recompense for his services in England.271 Whether the odd £10 was ever collected from Child we have no means of knowing.

Mr. Brooks Adams remarks with a certain vagueness, that “though the elders accused Childe of being a Jesuit, there is some ground to suppose that he inclined toward Geneva.”272 I have too much respect for our forefathers’ common sense and knowledge of the world to believe that they seriously took Child — who they knew was a high Presbyterian — for an emissary from the Jesuits. But they may have been willing to dally with this surmise, and perhaps even to repeat it as a ground for odium. That there was suspicion in some minds is indubitable from what Winslow told Major Child viva voce and afterwards printed in New-Englands Salamander,273 and from the Apostle Eliot’s entry (1646) in the records of the First Church in Roxbury: “This yeare arose a great disturbance in the country by such as are called the Petitioners a trouble raised by Jesuited agents to molest the peace of the churches & Com.w.”274 To be sure, the same session of the General Court that sentenced Child in June, 1647, passed a law excluding Jesuits from the Colony;275 but this action may well have been due to general fears of the Pope and of “Papists,” sharpened by reports which had often come from Portugal and the Azores. Cotton, writing in 1647, informs his English readers that “some of the Jesuites at Lisborn, and others in the Western Islands have professed to some of our Merchants and Mariners, they look at our Plantations, (and at some of us by name) as dangerous supplanters of the Catholick cause.”276 One of the merchants in question, as we learn from Winthrop, was a Mr. Parish, who arrived at Boston from the Madeiras in 1642. He had lived in those islands “many years among the priests and Jesuits, who told him, when he was to come hither, that those of New England were the worst of all heretics, and that they were the cause of the troubles in England.”277 Into the criss-cross intrigues in which the King and his supporters entangled themselves in 1645 and 1646 — with the Presbyterians of Scotland, with the English Presbyterians (both orthodox and Erastian), with the Roman Catholics of Ireland and France, and even with the Pope, — we need not enter;278 but the effect of those intrigues on the public mind was unsettling. So ramified and intertwined were they that, as some of them came to light from time to time and others were imagined or guessed at, either of the two great Protestant parties, the Presbyterians and the Independents, might naturally suspect the other of negotiating with Rome. It is just possible, then, that our fathers imagined Child an intermediary between the Presbyterians and the Jesuits, but they can hardly have fancied in their wildest moments that he was actually a member of that society.

Exactly when Child left New England we do not know. On July 14, 1647, he was still in this country, for on that date he gave to Richard Bonighton a deed for one hundred acres of his Saco purchase from Vines in exchange for a like quantity in another patent,279 but by ca. October 27 he had departed “into Europe,” as the Court order proves.280 I think he sailed before September 12th.281 An odd detail of his passage to England may be mentioned, because it has escaped the curiosity of previous students. In his Large Letter on Husbandry, 1651, Child remarked: “I should thank any Merchant that could inform me in some trivial and ordinary things done beyond Sea, (viz.) how they make Caviare out of Sturgeons Rowes? in Muscovia, how they boil and pickle their Sturgeon, (which we English in New-England cannot as yet do handsomely?).” 282 In his comments on this Letter, Dr. Arnold Boot declared that the receipt for caviare may be found in Purchas his Pilgrims, “second Tome, page 1420.”283 Replying, Child says:

When Child reached home, if not before, he must have learned of the action of the Commissioners in the Gorton case. Their two letters to the Colony, dated May 25 and July 22, 1647, had virtually settled the fate of the Remonstrance. In the first, they advert plainly enough to Child and his associates, declaring that they have no wish to encourage appeals or to limit the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and admitting that the contentions of the Bay have been in defence of legal privileges under the Charter. The second and final letter reaffirms these expressions: “We did by our said letter declare our tenderness of your just privileges, and of preserving entire the authority and jurisdiction of the several governments in New England, whereof we shall still express our continued care.”285

After this, it might well have seemed hopeless for Child to prosecute his appeal. But he was an ardent soul, and no doubt received help from his family and friends, especially his brother the Major. At all events, by March or April, 1648, Child had given up the fight, for in May three ships arrived from England in one day, bringing word by the passengers, and also by letters from Winslow, that the struggle was over. Child had “preferred a petition to the committee [i. e., the Commissioners for Plantations] against us, and put in Mr. Thomas Fowle his name among others; but he, hearing of it, protested against it, (for God had brought him very low, both in his estate and his reputation, since he joined in the first petition).” This application to the Commissioners had come to nothing. News also came of an encounter on the Exchange, in which Child had told Francis Willoughby that the people of New England “were a company of rogues and knaves.”

In consequence, perhaps, of his reverses of fortune, Child seems to have sold Vines’s Saco patent, about this time, to John Becx and associates, the proprietors of the iron works,287 in which he still retained an interest.288

It was, of course, largely the efforts of Winslow in gaining the support of men of influence, as well as in presenting the Gorton case, along with Child’s, to the Commissioners before the Doctor’s arrival, that had doomed Child’s final attempt. Four pieces of contemporary testimony may close this episode in our hero’s career. The Apostle Eliot wrote in the Records of his church at Roxbury under 1647: “God so graciously prospered m^r Winslows indeavours in England, against Gorton & his complices, y^t all theire great hopes were dashed; and they among vs, a little pulled in theire heads, and held theire peace.” 289 Bradford, under 1647, thus records the facts as he saw them:

On July 14, 1648, Herbert Pelham wrote from England to Winthrop:

Maverick, about 1661, in a paper drawn up to serve as ammunition in his campaign against the liberties of New England, shall be the last witness, for the proverb says that losers must have leave to talk:292

“Now,” in the passage that I have italicized, must refer to the time of writing. If so, we have merely an assertion that Maverick himself has come to England as the representative of the petitioners, whose cause has languished for all these years; but he can hardly have meant to pose as agent for the seven Remonstrants, for Child and Burton were dead, Fowle and Yale had dropped the business years before, and Maverick and John Dand seem to have been the only members of the group who were pursuing the affair. At about this same time, thirteen persons who found themselves aggrieved by the New England authorities petitioned the Council for Foreign Plantations for redress. Among them were Edward Godfrey (formerly Governor of Maine), John Gifford (agent for the iron works),295 John Baxe (one of the chief adventurers in the same speculation), and our old friend John Dand the Remonstrant.296 On March 4, 1661, the Council directed the attendance (on the 11th) of Godfrey and Gifford, as well as Maverick and Captain Breedon, “with such papers and writings as together with their own particular knowledge may give information of the present condition and government . . . of New England.” 297 We are at liberty to conjecture that Maverick’s Briefe Description was one of the papers submitted on the 11th, when the hearing was duly held and the same four persons, with Captain [John] Leverett, Thomas Bell, and Mr. [Joshua] Wollnough were ordered to attend on the 14th.298 After this there seems to have been a lull for a couple of years, but Maverick did not despair. On August 1, 1663, he petitions the King, alleging that he has lived many years in New England, “and with many others suffered great wrongs from those who have the rule,” and on the 30th he renews his application, in behalf of himself and “many thousand loyal subjects there.”299 He has “for near three years been a constant solicitor for relief from his Majesty,” and now “prays that some persons may be speedily sent over to regulate all things there now out of order, being assured that if relief appear not they will either rise in arms one part against the other or remove to the Dutch or other places.”300 We may have all the sympathy we choose for Maverick’s grudge without crediting him with cautious veracity in this prognostication. Commissioners were in fact appointed in 1664, with Maverick as one of them, and they did their best to regulate New England — with what success in Boston everybody knows. Soon after his appointment, Maverick petitioned again, thanking the King for the honor, and acknowledging the receipt of £250 “towards his setting forth.” He asked for somewhat more of the royal bounty, however, since he had expended at least £500.301 I mention this because it throws some light on the passage just quoted from the Briefe Description, in which Maverick appears to represent himself as one “now sent home [to England] at great Charges” by the Remonstrants to prosecute their old appeal.302 Clarendon’s letter of March 5, 1665, warning him not to indulge his personal enmities in his official acts would be good reading at this point, but is too long to quote.303 On May 31, of that same year, Governor Bellingham, in the name and by the order of the General Court, wrote to Sir William Morrice complaining against Maverick “for calling them traitors again and again, and [for] threats destructive to them.”304 I have always been unable to understand why our ancestors should be so much glorified for resisting and thwarting Maverick and his fellow-conspirators in 1664 and 1665, when they are so much blamed for resisting and thwarting Maverick and his fellow-conspirators in 1646 and 1647. On both occasions they proved their quality as clever and courageous administrators at a moment of crisis. The political points at issue were precisely the same, and we ought not to judge the earlier case like sentimentalists and reserve our common sense for the later.

In estimating rights and wrongs in the controversy between the Bay and the Remonstrants, it is inevitable that historians should take sides. Maybe it is likewise inevitable that, in so doing, many of them should instinctively espouse that cause which appears, at first face, to embody resistance to a narrow and provincial tyranny and to represent civic freedom and liberty of conscience; but I am inclined to think more caution might have been used in accepting the Remonstrants as authentic champions of these noble principles. Certain it is, at all events, that we cannot pass judgment as if the antithesis were between liberality on the one hand and bigotry on the other. Our ancestors of the Bay believed — on good grounds — that they were grappling with a conspiracy to overthrow the government, both civil and ecclesiastical, under which they desired to live. This they suspected from the outset, and their initial suspicions were completely justified by the documents which, in the second stage of the affair, they seized at Dand’s lodgings, for these proved beyond a peradventure that Child hoped to procure from Parliament the abrogation of the Charter (as forfeited for non-fulfilment of its conditions), the trial of the magistrates for high treason, the supersession of the Governor and Company by a General Governor under the immediate control of Parliament in all things (without chartered privileges) or by a Board of Parliamentary Commissioners, and the establishment of Presbyterianism as the state church. These objects, all of them plainly avowed in the seized documents, were for the most part expressed or implied in the original Remonstrance,305 as the magistrates were not slow to discern, though their modern critics have been less keen of sight. In short, the object of the Remonstrants, from the beginning, was to abolish the independence of the Bay Colony, and the object of the General Court, from the beginning, was, in opposing them, to maintain that independence, which they regarded as vital to their happiness and prosperity.

We, their descendants, who enjoy the fruits of that independence, need not be too harsh in criticizing those who founded and transmitted it. But let us not get ahead of our reasoning. I am not maintaining that the Colony was the abode of liberty for the individual, as we understand it. That is another question, which does not logically arise at any stage of the present discussion. The issue was quite different. Child desired to bring the Colony under the Parliamentary thumb; he desired to reduce it to the position of a civic corporation in the mother country — to that of London, for example, though without the chartered privileges and immunities which that city enjoyed. To the colonists, on the other hand, it was a prime object, though remaining a part of the Empire, to achieve the position of an independent state, something like Canada now-a-days, for example, or New Zealand. On this issue there was, of course, no possibility of compromise, nor can there be any doubt which of the two objects was the more desirable in the long run. The logic of events has settled that problem, and theoretical considerations have no standing. We may admit that the little commonwealth that our ancestors were establishing was narrow and bigoted at the moment; and that some of the changes that Child believed in would have been salutary may also — for argument’s sake — be conceded. Still, it remains true that it was better, in the long run, to keep that commonwealth independent and to let it work toward the light in its own way, however slowly, than to destroy its autonomy at one blow, even if such destruction brought about the reform of certain abuses. We honor our ancestors, I repeat, for successfully resisting the royal Commissioners of 1664, who came hither with just such powers as Child’s proposed Commissioners of Parliament would have wielded if they had been appointed, and again in 1689 for ousting Andros, who realized at length the alternative desire of Child for a General Governor. How then can we condemn them for thwarting a similar attempt at subjugation in 1646 and 1647? We shall not, I trust, be deluded by the mere name of a Parliament, for the Long Parliament in 1646 was far more arbitrary in its temper than Charles II in 1664, and every bit as arbitrary as James II, who appointed Andros.

Winslow four times asserts in plain terms that permission to form Presbyterian churches was offered to the Remonstrants in open court. In Hypocrisie Unmasked he writes: “Not long before I came away certaine discontented persons in open Court of the Massachusets, demanding that liberty,306 it was freely and as openly tendred to them; shewing their former practices by mee mentioned; but willed not to expect that wee should provide them Ministers &c. for the same, but getting such themselves they might exercise the Presbyterian Government at their libertie, walking peaceably towards us as wee trusted we should doe towards them.”307 Major Child did not venture to deny this allegation, but he tried to throw doubt upon it. “This,” he retorted, “is strange news to us here, for we hear not one word of that offer from those Petitioners, although here are letters from some of them dated since Mr. Winslows comming from thence, that relates that Dr. Child & others of them remained still in prison, save that D. Child hath the liberty to be confined to M. Leders house upon security of 800.l. bond given for his abiding there.”308 And so, in New-Englands Salamander Winslow reiterated his assertion: “I heard them demand in Court the Presbyterian government, and it was granted them.”309 And again: “Let the Reader know that the Presbyterian Government was as freely tendered them by the Governour in the open Court without any contradiction of any the Assistants or other, as ever I heard any thing in my life.”310 And finally, — “For . . . the late tender of the Court of the Massachusets to their Petitioners for the enjoyment of it311 at present, themselves providing for it, ’t is not so strange as true: But whereas they say, they hear not of the latter (being since they came away:) ’T is false; I have told them, and they may heare it by many others.”312

Let it not be forgotten that at this very moment the utmost that the moderate Presbyterians in England were willing to grant was that, when the Presbyterian system had been established by law, such Independents as wished might be allowed to form and support their own separate churches, whereas the thoroughgoing Presbyterians (like the Scottish Baylie, whom Major Child quotes with approval313) wished to withhold even that degree of toleration and, reviving the Laudian practice under another name, to force the Independents to conform or take the consequences. All this was better known to the rulers of the Bay than it seems to be to many of their critics now. They knew also (and so did Child when he presented his Remonstrance on May 19, 1646) that on the 5th of March the House of Commons had passed an ordinance establishing Presbyterianism in England,314 and they may well have known also that the Lords had assented on the 14th.315 They were well aware that bare toleration was all that Congregationalism could expect of a Presbyterian Church of England, and that it would have to fight hard to achieve even that measure of freedom. They would have been weak indeed if they had not stood to their guns in America. And why should we be offended at them for thinking that they were doing Presbyterians full justice if they allowed them precisely the same privileges in Massachusetts that the Congregationalists in England, in the most favorable prospect, might hope to receive from the Presbyterians there? It’s a poor rule that won’t work both ways!

Winslow did not miss this point: there is very little in this whole affair that he did miss. In Hypocrisie Unmasked, addressing an English (not a colonial) audience, after explaining how, some years before, certain Scottish Presbyterians had received permission to settle in Massachusetts and to organize their own churches in their own way, he remarks that by this it “will easily appeare how wee are here wronged by many; and the harder measure as wee heare imposed upon our brethren for our sakes, nay pretending our example for their president [precedent].” Then, when he has told of the offer to Child and the Remonstrants, he concludes with a trenchant suggestion, though moderately and even ironically put: “So that if our brethren here [i. e., in England] shall bee restrained they walking peaceably, the example must not be taken from us, but arise from some other principle.”316 From what other principle, he tellingly refrains from specifying.

Of course, the magistrates, with a passionate interest quite justified by the crisis, were watching the life-and-death struggle in England, both in Parliament and out, between the Presbyterians and the Independents; and they were well aware that Massachusetts was deeply and even essentially involved in the contest. New England was regarded by the Presbyterian party in the mother country as the true nidus of the Independent germ, and to New England the English Independents looked for cooperation and effective aid. Only four years before, in 1642, an appeal had come from “divers Lords of the upper house, and some thirty of the house of commons and others from the ministers there, who stood for the independency of churches,” begging for the presence of Cotton, Hooker, and Davenport to advance the cause in England. And in the very year (1645, July 1) that preceded Child’s Remonstrance, the elders of the churches throughout the United Colonies met at Cambridge to “examine the writings which some of them had prepared” in answer to many books from England, a part of which were “in maintenance of the Presbyterial government (agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines in England) against the Congregational way, which was practised here.”317 Child himself arrived in that same summer or in the autumn, and lost no time in identifying himself with the Presbyterian opposition, for his Remonstrance was presented to the General Court in the following May. At home the parties seemed almost to counterbalance, but in the Colony the Independents were at present in control. The issue was well defined in England, and our Massachusetts forefathers were better informed than some of their descendants as to what it was.318 They would have been not only cowards, but traitors to their friends in England as well as to themselves, if they had not opposed all such movements as that of Child and his associates; and they would have been blind leaders indeed if they had failed to see the purpose and significance of the particular agitation in which Child was taking the lead.

So much for generalities — now for one or two concrete matters involved in the case of the Remonstrants — or rather, in their two cases, for we must never forget that there were two distinct trials for different (though connected) acts, and two distinct sentences.

It is continually asserted, or implied, that Child and his friends were punished for petitioning the General Court,319 and much rhetoric has been expended (not to say wasted) in denouncing our fathers for such a violation of one of the most precious of all civic rights. Many scholars seem to forget that the right of petition, as we understand it, has got itself defined and established by dint of a long course of development. Let us give all credit to Child and the Remonstrants for doing their part — though with motives quite different from those of constitutional reformers — to advance the ideas of the world on this vital question of republicanism; but let us not be too hasty in condemning our forefathers for observing the only rules they knew or could know. Their Court was a little Parliament, and they followed Parliamentary precedents in this regard. Again and again, in the critical years between 1640 and 1646, the House of Commons had rebuked or punished petitioners for breach of privilege in cases in which to-day, with our present principles, such action would seem monstrous. To petition at all, on some subjects, was thought offensive, and no matter how proper the subject of any given petition, Parliament always showed extreme sensitiveness to anything in the manner of expression, or in the bearing of the petitioners, that might be actually or technically a contempt. It was even a contempt, and therefore punishable, to criticize the character or conduct of a member of the House. There can be no question what would have happened to any group of petitioners who had dared to present to the Commons a document embodying the assertions and conceived in the style that Child ventured upon in his Remonstrance. They would have been sent to the Tower incontinently and would hardly have got off without heavy fines. And, apart from language and matter, there was, in this case, such conduct on the part of the Remonstrants when called before the magistrates, though not when brought into Court for their judgment, as the most lenient of modern judges could hardly have refrained from treating as contempt of court. In this regard, we must not forget that the General Court was not merely a legislative body, but actually a court of judicature, civil and criminal, and that — whatever liberties are accorded to petitioners before a legislative assembly to-day — our judges are still sensitive, and have a power to punish for contempt which is quite as arbitrary as that which Parliament exercised in the seventeenth century — be it the English Parliament or our little parliament of the Massachusetts Bay.

Child’s party, of course, complained that they were punished for petitioning, but our forefathers knew better. Child was himself informed by the Court, at a preliminary examination, when he contended that “it was no offence to prefer a petition,” that the Remonstrants “were not questioned for petitioning, but for such miscarriages, etc., as appeared in their petition and Remonstrance.”320 Winslow, in defending the Colony, points out with perfect clearness the necessary distinction: “There were none committed for petitioning, but for their Remonstrance and the many false charges and seditious insinuations tending to faction and insurrections sleighting the government &c.”321 And he then particularizes, so that there can be no doubt what expressions were contemptuous and seditious. Winslow was addressing not a colonial but an English circle, and he knew well that every intelligent reader would see at a glance how such a series of expressions as he quotes or cites would have been regarded by Parliament. So much for the right of petition and the question of contempt.322

The second point is that of the appeal to Parliament, or to the Commissioners for Plantations — which amounts to the same thing. Here Child and his friends made a bad mistake in tactics, of which the magistrates took instant advantage. They put in their first appeal at the wrong moment and in a wrong way, and thus got into an altogether false position. Without waiting for the decision of the Court on the charges of contempt and sedition, or even for a formal arraignment, they “refused to answer” and appealed to the Commissioners in England, and this was of course construed as a denial of jurisdiction, as in fact it was and was meant to be. In the language of the charge brought against them in the first case, they “publicly declared their disaffection [to our government], in that, being called by the Court to render an accompt of their misapprehensions and evil expressions in the premises, they refused to answer; but, by appealing from this government, they disclaimed the jurisdiction thereof, before they knew whether [the court] would give any sentence against them, or no.”323 This point was also made with perfect distinctness in the official letter of the Governor and Company to the Commissioners.324

Whether or not an appeal would lie from the General Court to Parliament was a question on which the magistrates had made up their minds.325 They held that under the Charter the judgment of the General Court was final, and they regarded the establishment and maintenance of this principle as necessary to the safety of their plantation. Of course they knew that it was a ticklish point, but they were quite right in supposing that it was vital, and they were bold accordingly in its assertion, though they had until very recently avoided raising it directly. Almost at the beginning they had been accused of setting up a separate state and renouncing the laws of England as well as its Church,326 and throughout the pre-Parliamentary period they had lived in constant danger of having their power superseded or nullified by Commissioners or a commissioned Governor.

With the coming-in of Parliament the situation became peculiarly embarrassing, both with regard to sovereignty in general and with regard to the right of appeal. Fears were past from King and Council, and the Parliament was friendly. It was requisite, therefore, to keep its favor and at the same time to maintain the position that appeals could not be made.327 Nervousness on this point showed itself in 1640 (or 1641) when the authorities declined to accept the well-meant advice of friends in England that they should petition for additional privileges. “We declined the motion, for this consideration, that if we should put ourselves under the protection of the parliament, we must then be subject to all such laws as they should make, or at least such as they might impose upon us.”328 This passage in Winthrop led Governor Trumbull, “one of the most deliberate assertors of the American revolution,” to remark, most pertinently, as it happens, to our present purpose: “Here observe, that as at this time, so it hath been ever since, that the colonies, so far from acknowledging the parliament to have a right to make laws binding on them in all cases whatsoever, they have ever denied it in any case.”329 Through the help, at first, of friends in England, and later by a Fabian policy of no less courage than shrewdness, they had managed to retain their Charter, in spite of attempts to procure its recall by Order in Council in 1632330 and 1634,331 of its abrogation by quo warranto in 1635,332 and of continual demands to surrender it (in 1634,333 1638,334 1639335), until Parliament took up the reins of government and in effect reaffirmed it in 1641.336 And during all this period they had, when occasion rose, shown themselves ready to resist a Commission or a commissioned Governor by force of arms if need were.337 Thus by tract of time, improved with rare political skill at every turn, the colonists had succeeded in establishing a de facto rule (which they were prepared to defend de jure) that there was no appeal to England against sentences or judgments passed in Massachusetts; but they had so far contrived (except in the Gorton case) to prevent this question from coming to a direct issue in the mother country. That they had such points in mind at the outset is shown by Winthrop’s remark that Winslow, in 1635, was ill-advised in petitioning the Council “for a commission to withstand the intrusions of the French and Dutch,” since “such precedents might endanger our liberty, that we should do nothing hereafter but by commission out of England.”338

As the Civil War progressed, however, and as Parliament became more and more nearly absolute, — while, in the strife of parties on both sides of the water, disaffection or dissatisfaction with the colonial government increased with the growth of a mixed population, — the moment was inevitably approaching when this doctrine of No Appeal must be decided. It came up in the case of Captain Stagg when he made prize of a Bristol ship in Boston harbor, and was asserted as undoubtedly sound “in causes of judicature,” but here a conflict of authority was avoided by some very close reasoning, into which we need not enter.339 And then, in Child’s Remonstrance, presented in May, 1646, the Court found itself confronted with a distinct threat to appeal to “the honourable houses of Parliament” if the petitioners should not receive a satisfactory response; and, before the matter had been taken up by the Court, the disquieting news came that Samuel Gorton and two of his fellows who had gone to England and appealed to the Commissioners for Plantations against their treatment by the Bay authorities, had met with a large measure of success. For there arrived by Captain Wall’s ship on September 13, 1646, shortly after the presentation of the Remonstrance to the May Court, a letter from the Commissioners (dated May 15 in that year), which was instantly sent to the Governor by Randall Holden, its bearer. It was an order to allow the Gortonians to land and to proceed unmolested to their settlement on Narragansett Bay. By the same ship, or immediately after, came another order from the Commissioners, dated ten days later (May 25, 1646), to reinstate the Gortonians in their settlement. The first of these orders, after some hesitation, was quietly obeyed in so far that Holden, who seems to have come alone, was allowed to go in peace, but the second — Gorton himself being still in England — was made the special subject of Winslow’s commission, as we have already seen.340

The Gortonian petition, which the Commissioners had received and on which they had taken provisional action, was to all intents and purposes an appeal from the Bay to Parliament; and the fathers of the Colony were shrewd enough, in forwarding their own protest to the Commissioners by the hands of Winslow, in December, 1646, to bring this Gorton appeal into connection with the case of Child. For, since Child had not appealed (in November, 1646) until the Commissioners’ action in the Gorton matter had become known in Boston, it was reasonable to assert that his boldness in appealing before judgment had been encouraged, if not suggested, by that action. And the two cases were particularly advantageous ones, from the Massachusetts point of view, on which to raise the general question. For the Gortonians were sectaries of a sort that Parliament would be unlikely to encourage when all the documents were laid before it, particularly that extraordinary manifesto of Randall Holden addressed “To the great and honoured Idol Generali, now set up in the Massachusets.”341 This was a paper which the Commissioners must at once recognize as the kind of thing no legislative or judicial body could be expected to accept with patience. And as to Child, the fact that in his Remonstrance he had also used offensive language (though of a different kind) and had included the threat of an appeal, as well as the error in tactics he had committed in appealing before judgment and in expressing his contempt for the jurisdiction, would go far to put him out of court with Parliament and the Commissioners. Thus this crisis, as it demanded that the Massachusetts authorities should at last make a firm stand on the invalidity of appeals, and should state their doctrine with perfect clearness, so it afforded them an uncommonly favorable opportunity to do both. As we have noted, their representations, under the skilful handling of the astute Winslow, elicited a reply from the Commissioners which practically, though not in express terms, conceded the point and established the doctrine of No Appeal, which the Colony had long cherished as one of the most valuable of its chartered rights. And this reply coincided almost to a day with Child’s appeal after conviction on the second case against him, at the May Court in 1647. That appeal, therefore, was a practical nullity at the moment when it was made.

As it has sometimes been asserted — how erroneously we have seen — that the Remonstrants were fined and imprisoned for petitioning the General Court, so we hear now and again that they were punished for appealing. The late Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as I understand him, avers that an appeal to Parliament, in this and other cases, “was looked upon and treated in Massachusetts as a crime, and as such was punished.” And, though he acknowledges that “the stubborn spirit of independence behind” this denial of right was “what made New England,” he cannot refrain from the query: “Yet would Verres have dared to make a crime of the complaint a Roman citizen had proffered to the Senate and People of Rome?”342 The implied comparison does not please me, nor am I altogether satisfied with the classical allusion. For I cannot forget the climax of Cicero’s terrific denunciation of the wicked proconsul — the case of that Gavius of Consa who, because he threatened to take his wrongs to Rome, was scourged and tortured, though he protested his Roman citizenship, and finally was crucified. “Nullus gemitus, nulla vox alia illius miseri inter dolorem crepitumque plagarum audiebatur, nisi haec, ‘Civis Romanus sum!’” And Verres set up the cross on the Strait of Messina, that, since Gavius said he was a Roman citizen, he might see Italy and his home as he hung there dying. “Monumentum sceleris audaciaeque suae voluit esse in conspectu Italiae, vestibulo Siciliae, praetervectione omnium qui ultra citroque navigarent.”343

Thus I vindicate Verres from the charge that he would have respected the right of appeal to Rome. Our ancestors, in the cases of Child and Maverick, the record will also vindicate from the charge of treating an appeal to Parliament as a crime. Child appealed twice once, in his first case, before sentence, with contemptuous denial of the Court’s jurisdiction. In this appeal Maverick was not concerned, and Child, as we have seen, was not punished for appealing, but for appealing at such a moment and in such a way as to make himself guilty of high contempt. The second appeal, in which both shared, was at the end of the first case. It was treated as an offence in Maverick’s case only, because it violated his oath as a freeman.344

Note that Samuel Maverick, who knew at least as much about these transactions as our local iconoclasts, was under no misapprehension about the charges against him. Referring, in a formal document, to the second trial (on the first, he had escaped with a mulct of only £10), he avers that he was convicted of “conspiracy and perjury.” And he was quite correct. Child’s actions — after the first case, that of the Remonstrance itself, had been disposed of — amounted to a plot against the government, and therefore the records speak, with stern but exact judgment, of “Dr. Child’s conspiracy,” and in this conspiracy Maverick was unquestionably implicated. As to perjury, all one has to do is to read the Freeman’s Oath, which, Maverick had taken, to determine that question.345

The prevalent opinion seems to be that Child presented his Remonstrance of 1646 in good faith and with a sincere desire to procure from the colonial authorities the blessings of civil liberty and freedom of worship. One plain fact has often been strangely overlooked: namely, that Robert Child, who was no fool, did not intend that his Petition and Remonstrance should be favorably considered by the General Court. Merely to read the document — a temptation which some scholars appear to have resisted — will convince anybody that he could have had no such hope or purpose.

For the Court to give the petition a favorable hearing would have been to admit that the colonists had violated their Charter and neglected their oath of allegiance, inasmuch as they had not yet established “a setled forme of government according to the lawes of England;” that the inhabitants, under the system that prevailed, could not have “a sure and comfortable enjoyment of [their] lives, liberties, and estates, according to [their] due and naturall rights as freeborne subjects of the English nation;” that the magistrates appeared to cherish “an overgreedy spirit of arbitrary power,” such as was “detestable to our English nation and to all good men” and was “at present a chief cause of the intestine warre” in the mother country, — in short, a disposition like that of Charles I himself; that the people lived in constant fear of “illegal commitments, unjust imprisonments, taxes, rates, customes, levyes of ungrounded and undoing assessments, unjustifiable presses, undue fynes, unmeasurable expenses and charges;” that the limitations on the franchise and on eligibility to office were causing “many great inconveniences, secret discontents, murmurings, rents in the plantations,” and even “fears of perpetual slavery and bondage;” that the church polity of Massachusetts occasioned “an ocean of inconveniences, dishonor to God and to his ordinances, . . . encrease of anabaptisme and of those that totally contemn all ordinances as vaine, fading of Christian graces, decrease of brotherly love, heresies, [and] schismes;”346 that “all things in the Colony” were “growing worse and worse, even to the threatning . . . of no less than final ruin” — “the Gospel much darkened,” “Christian charity and brotherly love almost frozen,” “secret discontents fretting like cankers,” “merchandizing and shipping by speciall providence wasted,” “husbandry now withering,” “villages and plantations much deserted,” credit “almost lost,” “strife and contention now rife,” and our brethren in England in “just indignation” and “flying from us as a pest.”347 Furthermore, for the Court to grant the specific requests or demands embodied in the Remonstrance would have meant that the whole body of English laws should be substituted for the colonial code; that the Colony should cease to regard itself as a free state, and should reduce itself to the condition of “other corporations of England;” that all English denizens not now admitted to full rights should be forthwith accorded them, or released from the liability to taxation; that members of the Church of England should enjoy all the privileges of church-members in the Colony without being required to take the covenants of the colonial churches, or else should be allowed to “settle themselves” in accordance with the Presbyterian system.348

We need not here inquire whether the allegations were true or false, and the requests reasonable or unreasonable, for that is not the point. The point is rather that Child, who was on his second visit to the Colony and was intimately acquainted with its leading men,349 must have known perfectly well that his petition would be refused — that the administration could not grant it without giving up principles and purposes which they held most tenaciously, and for whose sake they had emigrated in the first place. His intention clearly was, not to persuade the government to adopt certain reforms which would be equivalent to a revolution, but to furnish himself with a grievance which should enable him to appeal to Parliament with telling emphasis. This appeal he meant to urge in person, backed by the whole Presbyterian party, then in the majority in the House of Commons — a party of which his brother Major John Child was an important member.

When, at the end of the Remonstrance, he declared that, in case the petition were rejected, he and his associates should “be necessitated to apply [their] humble desires to the honourable Houses of Parliament,” he was not indulging in a mere threat: he was expressing, none too guardedly, the real purpose that he had in mind in presenting his Remonstrance. And the threat itself would be a powerful argument when he went to the Commons. “You see, gentlemen,” so he could argue, “how slightly these rebellious colonists hold your authority. I assured them that I should appeal to you if they were not just to me, and they threw out my petition all the same!” Indeed, the whole Remonstrance, if read with all the circumstances in mind, reveals itself at once as a paper intended, from the first, for the eyes of the Presbyterian party in England, both in the Parliament and out, who had long looked askance at New England as a stronghold of Independency. Only in form was it addressed to our General Court.350

And the nature of the petition that was to come before Parliament, on the basis of the clearly foreseen rejection of this extraordinary Remonstrance, is not a matter of conjecture, for we know the contents of the papers seized in Dand’s study on the eve of Child’s intended sailing. After a recital of their bitter experiences, the Remonstrants petition the Commissioners not only for the extension to Massachusetts of the laws of England and for liberties like those of English freeholders, but “for settled churches according to the reformation of England,” — that is, for the introduction of the Presbyterian system, — for the appointment of “a General Governor or some honorable Commissioners” to take charge of the Colony, and for the imposition upon all of the oath of allegiance “and other covenants which the Parliament shall think most convenient, to be as a touchstone to try our affections to the state of England and true restored Protestant religion.” This last request is particularly notable. What Child had in mind was that the colonists should be forced to take the Covenant! After this, one thinks, we should hear no more of Child as one of the noble army of martyrs to liberty of conscience and freedom of speech.351 Along with this petition was to go a copy of the original Remonstrance, which was a sweeping denunciation of the Colony and its whole government, both civil and ecclesiastical. There was also a paper of queries, intended for the Commissioners, asking, among other things, “about the validity” of the Massachusetts patent, “and how it might be forfeited,” and whether certain specified “acts or speeches in the pulpits or in the Court were not high treason.”352

These papers, it may be, were drawn up after the Remonstrance had been rejected and its subscribers fined, and may have been more drastic on that account, but there is every reason to suppose that, so far as the petition to the Commissioners is concerned, it represents substantially what Child had originally intended to bring before Parliament, though he had since decided to bring the matter before the Commissioners.353 It is impossible not to infer that, from the beginning, Child’s design was, if he could, to impose Presbyterianism on the Colony as the legally established system as well as to effect such a radical change in the colonial government as should abolish the Charter and put an end to the large degree of independence which the Bay had thus far enjoyed. The Remonstrance itself was simply a means to this end.

Nor were the fathers of our commonwealth in doubt, even before they seized Child’s and Dand’s papers, that the Remonstrants (or their ringleaders) intended to nullify the Charter and to reduce the Colony to a condition of absolute dependence on the will of a Presbyterian majority in Parliament. When Child told the Court, in November, 1646, “that they [the Remonstrants] did beneath themselves in petitioning to us, etc., and in conclusion appealed to the Commissioners in England,” the Governor replied that “he would admit no appeal, nor was it allowed by our charter, but by this it appeared what their aim was in their petition; they complained of fear of perpetual slavery,354 etc., but their intent was, to make us slaves to them and such as themselves were, and that by the parliament and commissioners.”355 There could be no clearer pronouncement. The Court understood that the Remonstrance was a move in the Presbyterian campaign, and that it was intended from the outset for presentation to the Parliamentary authorities in England. Its rejection was a foregone conclusion: it was drawn up to be rejected and thus to serve as the basis of an appeal.

That Robert Child’s sentiments were violently anti-independent comes out clearly in the papers already examined. Their testimony is corroborated by the pamphlet issued by his brother the Major. Note, for instance, the closing words: “I shall desire the Reader by all that hath been said, to observe how Independents are all of a peece, for subtilitie, designs, fallacies, both in New-England and in Old.”356 Or take the following dictum, which discloses the actual personage whose tenets ruled the Major’s life and opinions: “We have cause heartily to pray, That (as Mr. Baily sets forth in his book of Dissuasive from the Errors of the times) as from New-England came Independencie of Churches hither, which hath spread over all parts here; that from thence also (in time) Arbitrary Government in the Commonwealth may not come hither.”357

Major Child’s citation of Mr. Baily seems to have made slight impression upon the minds of the more recent investigators of New England history, but it deserves a moment’s pause, for it shows us where he stood and thus gives the plainest indication of the real purpose of the whole agitation. A quotation or two from Baylie’s famous Dissuasive will be more than enough:

After this we are not surprised to find the excellent Baylie (whom I greatly admire for his clearness and force of style, and for the frankness with which he joins issue with everything that makes for liberty of conscience and freedom of speech) spending a whole chapter to prove that “Independence is contrary to the Word of God.”361 “Liberty of Conscience,” he declares, “and Toleration of all or any Religion is so prodigious an impiety, that this religious Parliament cannot but abhorre the very naming of it.”362 After digesting these tough morsels of Presbyterian doctrine, one can hardly read with a straight face the strictures passed upon our fathers by those scholars who maintain that Child and his fellows were contending for free speech and religious liberty.363 But, lest some one may think that Baylie’s arguments were academic — that he was upholding a theoretical system, not aiming to establish a social and political tyranny — let me quote from a sermon which he delivered in this same year (1645) before the House of Lords, and which he published at their request.364 First, note his opinion as to the propriety of tolerating “errors,” that is, divergencies from the Presbyterian doctrine and discipline:

But what are “Errours”? Baylie leaves us in no doubt on this point, for he enumerates several aberrant sects that appear to him equally dangerous: — the Canterburians (i. e., High Churchmen of Laud’s temper), the Antinomians, the Anabaptists, the Libertines, and the Independents. And, as he puts the Independents at the top of the climax, so he does not hesitate to explain their bad eminence: “That so much-extolled Independency,” he calls it, “wherein many Religious souls for the time do wander, which is the chief hand that opened at first, and keepeth open to this day the door to all the other Errours that plague us.” Still, he has hope: Independency is likely to be suppressed by the strong hand of the law, and Presbyterianism, which alone is of God, will soon be established by God’s mighty arm throughout the land. “Yet here is our Comfort, That, in answer to our Supplications, the Lord hath stirred up the hearts of those who have power effectually to minde that which we are confident will prove the Remedy of these and many more of our present Evils: I mean, The setting up, without further Delay, of the Lords Government in his own House, over all the Land.”

All this, to be sure, is in the Preface to the printed sermon, but the actual discourse addressed to the Lords breathes the same sentiments:

Among these heretics and patrons of error, be it understood, the Independents have a chief place in Baylie’s mind — “the Independents,” he says, “the Brownists, or the Anabaptists, or any of the Heterodox Societies.”367 One more quotation may suffice; it gives the practical application of all that precedes: “All Christians are obliged to the uttermost of their power to quench the fire of Heresie and Schism; but above all other, we have a speciall obligation for this duty.”368 What he particularly wishes to quench — if we had any doubt about it — we could learn from a clause in the Dissuasive: “that lamentable Independency which in Old and New-England hath been the fountain of many evils already, though no more should ensue.”369 Away with Independency, and the other heresies and schisms will be easily crushed!

Baylie’s Dissuasive appeared the year before the Remonstrance was presented. All such books came to New England without delay and the task of answering them devolved in large measure upon the Massachusetts divines. Indeed, John Cotton was penning his reply to Baylie and Rutherford370 at the very time that the troubles with the Remonstrants were in full swing.371 Our ancestors knew what high Presbyterianism meant and they recognized it when they saw it. Some of their descendants and critics are not so well-informed or not so vigilant. Otherwise, Child would never have been glorified as a champion of religious liberty. Why, Major Child rejects this imputation as a “false report” invented by Winslow and the New Englanders to injure the repute of the Remonstrants in the mother country! “They give out of my Brother and others,” he exclaims with indignation, “that they desire a Toleration of all Religioun.”372 Nothing could have seemed a worse slander to a conscientious Presbyterian of Baylie’s school.373

The friendship between Child and the younger John Winthrop was not disturbed even by the outcome of the trial of June, 1647.374 Soon after Child left America, Winthrop sent him a letter (dated October 25, 1647) informing him that he had paid Leader the borrowed £40. Child replied, but, fearing his letter might miscarry, he wrote again on May 13, 1648, lest “intelligence betwixt us” might be broken. “If I had not quarrelld in y^e country,” he writes, “I should have bin willing to haue ventured an 100^l or two vpon yo^r mine of ♄,375 but shall not haue any thing to doe with y^t country hereafter in this kind, vnles my fines be restored, w^ch I had destinated to this end, & yet will adventure them w^th you, if they be returned. I am not so offended w^th y^e country but I may be reconciled, & passe by such iniuryes as I haue there received, knowing to doe good for evil is Xian-like.” The tone of the letter is affectionate and he sends his “best respects to yo^r wife, brother, father, & all o^r freinds.”376 Winthrop’s reply (March 23, 1648[–9]) mentions the black lead but avoids the subject of the fines: “I have not beene at Boston since last Spring:377 have done nothing yet about the ♄ mine; because of y^e difficulty in y^e beginning exept a plantation were neere, or a good stocke. It can be well forborne a yeare or 2, w^ch because of your departure I have not minded to raise by other adventure.”378

Child’s letter of 1648 is dated at Gravesend, but he was then lodging at the house of one Dr. Garbet at Hogsdon, which was close by and was also in the neighborhood of Northfleet, where he was born and where his elder brother the Major still lived, doubtless on the hereditary estate. Manifestly Garbet was an alchemist, and he was an old friend of Winthrop’s.379 Child was tranquilly working at a “few experiments,” probably chemical, and when they were finished he thought he should “settle in Kent, and follow [his] calling, being almost weary of rambling.” In his budget of news we find one significant item: “The army is much divided, y^e people much displeased w^th y^e Parliam^ts proceedings. Essex hath lately declared so much, & other Countyes begin to speake higher language.” One of these counties, though Child does not say so, was Kent itself, and his brother the Major was in the thick of the troubles. At the end of this very month the Kentishmen rose in arms against the Parliament and so bestirred themselves that their defeat was celebrated by their opponents as a great victory; as indeed it was, for they threatened London, and if London had fallen into Royalist hands, what would have become of English history?380 Only one incident in the short campaign concerns us here, but that is lively enough and made some noise at the time. We have several reports about it from the field — for there were war correspondents even in those days, and news-pamphlets took the place of the modern extra.

The following account is from a tract printed June 2, 1648:

A letter of June 2, 1648, runs as follows: “On Thursday the first of June, our Army marched towards Rochester, whereby the way we found a passage over a Bridge neare Norfleel maintaind by about 600. foot, whereof Major Child had command, his Excellency commanded out a party of 200 horse, 100. foot mounted behind them; Major Husbands having the command of them, and after some dispute, we gained the passe, and the enemy fled, about 20. killed, and 30. prisoners taken.”384 A report dated Rochester, June 5, 1648, states succinctly: “On June 1 Major Husbands with 300 tooke Norfleete bridge, from Major Child, killed 20 and took 30 prisoners.”385

What became of Major Child after this defeat we do not know, but he escaped on foot, unwounded — as we have seen — and probably managed to make his peace with the authorities. Anyhow, we hear no more of him for a couple of years.386 Meanwhile we must turn a leaf backward. In 1645 one “Major Childe,” obviously the same man that we have just seen fighting hard amongst the Royalists, had been a trusted officer on the Parliamentary side, and his soldiering had not been confined to his own county. On April 14 of that year the Committee of Both Kingdoms sent him orders: “Upon information just received of commotions in Kent, . . . to march back with the trained bands of Kent under your command, and there obey such further directions as you shall receive from this Committee or that of Kent.”387 We ought never to wonder that anybody — anybody! — should have changed sides in England between 1645 and 1648. But Major Child had not changed sides. He was a high Presbyterian in 1645, when he fought under Parliamentary orders; he was a high Presbyterian in 1647, when, in New-Englands Jonas, he quoted Robert Baylie, the most thoroughgoing of Scottish doctrinaires, against the Independents, and wound up his tract with the pregnant sentence, “I shall desire the Reader . . . to observe how Independents are all of a peece, for subtilitie, designs, fallacies, both in New-England and in Old;” and he was a high Presbyterian when, in 1648, he led his troop against the Parliamentary forces in the Royalist uprising. Times had changed, but the Major was still the same. His party, in its hatred of Independency and its fear of the growing power of the army, which was Independency’s stronghold, was ready to throw itself into the arms of the King, but its representatives in Parliament still hesitated, and the Major, like many other gentlemen in his county and elsewhere, thought that the time for debate was past and the moment for action had come. Technically, then, he was fighting against the Parliament; in reality, however, he was supporting, wisely or unwisely, the reaction which his own party in Parliament longed for, but which it was too weak, too timid, or too politic to bring to the arbitrament of the sword. A contemporary tract entitled A Letter from a Gentlemen in Kent,388 written to exculpate the insurgents and to claim indulgence for them on the part of the authorities, describes the revolt as directed not against Parliament but against the Independent faction.389 Major Child’s share in the Kentish insurrection, then, is most instructive. It dispels any doubts that may linger in our minds as to the real politics of his brother Robert’s conspiracy against the civil and ecclesiastical government of Massachusetts. We do not need this evidence, but it comes to hand unsought, in welcome confirmation of the inferences that the documents in the case have already forced us to draw.

Before we return to the Doctor, we may as well follow his brother’s fortunes so far as they appear in the records. If the Major’s offence was overlooked for a time, he was at all events not relieved from suspicion. On November 20, 1650, a certain John Bulfinch laid an information against him, alleging that he had been “a commissioned officer” in the Kentish revolt and had aided the Royalists on other occasions. Accordingly an order was issued (January 1, 1651) that his estate should be “seized and secured” and that the rents should remain in the tenants’ hands. But the Major clearly had powerful friends and, though his activity in the uprising was notorious, he was able to put up a good fight pro domo. On the 7th of January he got permission to “hold his estate on security,” to have a copy of the charge, and to examine witnesses before the County Committee.390 The law, we should remember, obliged the informer to prosecute the case himself. Soon after, it seems, fresh charges of “delinquency” were “instigated” by a neighbor, one Henry Payne of Milton-juxta-Gravesend,391 and the Major was imprisoned. We have the order for his release passed by the Council of State on May 20, 1651. Colonel Twisleton and Mr. Parker of Gravesend are instructed as follows: “Upon some information received, we thought fit to restrain the liberty of Major John Child of Northfleet, but upon considering his petition, we are inclined to discharge him on security; you are to take his recognizance in 1,000l., with two sureties in 500l. each, to appear before the Council when commanded, and to be of good behaviour.”392 On the 28th Child petitioned that two witnesses might be summoned to invalidate Payne’s testimony: his own “fidelity,” he declares, “is known by his constant employment for the State, as commander of towns, etc.” On June 11th he once more asked “to be made responsible on good security for his estate, it being seized, and his rents in the tenants’ hands, whereby he and his family are in some want.” The request was granted. On October 8, Bulfinch the informer, begged for a hearing in the case, and this was ordered.393 Here the record ends, but it is clear that Child managed to keep his estate until the Act of Oblivion came to his relief in 1652. This appears from the lament of Colonel Nicholas Devereux of Westminster, March 24, 1652. This gallant warrior “complains that though he has entered 27 cases in the book of information, yet the Act of Oblivion has cut him off from the benefit of his discoveries, though many cases had been entered two years, and were ready for judgment; that of Major John Child, of Kent, was 1,000l. to his ‘prejudice.”394 In 1654 Child was again in confinement, for in that year the petition of “Mary, wife of Major John Child, prisoner in Upnor Castle, Kent, for her husband’s release,” was referred to the appropriate committee395 — result unknown. Five years later, on the eve of the Restoration, he appears in the Government service. On August 2, 1659, the Council of State issued a warrant for the payment of £20 to “Major Child” (doubtless the same man) “for intelligence” and the Committee for Examinations was to confer with him;396 on August 5th the Council voted that he should “secure suspected persons.”397 This is the last we hear of our Major, but we may hope that King Charles forgave these lapses, in view of what had gone before.

We must now return to Dr. Robert Child, whom we left in May, 1648, at Dr. Garbet’s house in Hogsdon, Kent, busy with chemical experiments and contemplating the life of a general practitioner in his native county. He was on friendly terms with the scientific circle to which Boyle and Hartlib belonged, and was deeply engaged, as we shall see presently, in alchemical speculations, as well as in the more practical study of agriculture, then attracting much attention in England. In this same letter to Winthrop he mentions “an Ingenuous young man of my acquaintance” who “hath newly invented double writing, so y^t a man can write 2 or 3 Copyes or more as soone & as fairely as one, he hath a pattent graunted in y^e Parliam^t for 14 yeares, by y^e next y^e invention will be com̃on.”398 This was Dr. (later Sir) William Petty, destined to be one of the founders of the science of political economy, whose “pentograph” was then a new thing. Petty speaks of the contrivance in a little tract entitled The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib, for The Advancement of some particular Parts of Learning, published early in 1648.399 Child’s letter also contains some thrilling alchemical news, to which we shall later return.400

On August 26, 1650, Child wrote again from Gravesend. The letter is long and interesting. It expresses an eager hope that their correspondence may continue and deplores the fact that they can “sildome write.” Heretofore Child’s extant letters have begun with the formal “Sir” or “Worthy Sir,” but this time he addresses Winthrop as “Loving freind.” He has not yet quite abandoned his wish to return to New England:

A postscript gives a large budget of European news and closes with a notable passage:

No further letters on either side are known to be in existence, but I am glad to be able to prove (as I shall do shortly) that these two choice and congenial spirits were never estranged.

The scheme for a society of scholars came to nothing, nor, so far as I can discover, did the Kilkenny project ever take shape. At all events, Child did not go to Ireland immediately. William Coddington, after his return from England with his commission as “Governor of Acquedneck, alias Rhode Island, and Quinnungate Island,” wrote to John Winthrop, Jr., on February 19, 1651[–2], that he had met Child several times in England, doubtless in London and probably in 1650 or 1651:402 “I sawe Do^r Child who did inquire diuers tymes very affecshonately how the Pequite Sachem did, & would haue had me for to haue taken yo^r plantation in to my Com̄istion w^ch I would not doe w^thout order.”403 Coddington had a short and inglorious career in his ill-gotten governorship, and I should be sorry to think that Child seriously advised him to take Winthrop’s Connecticut colony under his ægis. The Doctor was certainly in a jesting vein when he dubbed Winthrop “the Pequit sachem,”404 and the advice he gave to Coddington must have been part of the jest. Whether the budding Governor was humorist enough to understand, is a problem that I must leave to the Rhode Island pundits, for his words may be taken either way.

We have still further traces of Child in 1651. On March 7, Elias Ashmole makes the following entry in his Diary: “I went to Maidstone with Dr. Child the physician. And 3 Hor. post merid. I first became acquainted with Dr. Flood.”405 Ashmole was one of the most enthusiastic students of alchemy in that age, and a general virtuoso, so that he and Child had much in common. Another alchemist in Child’s circle was young George Stirk (or Starkey) of the Harvard Class of 1646. Stirk was the son of the Rev. George Stirk of Bermuda,406 who died in 1637, and he had been especially recommended to the care of the elder Winthrop by the Rev. Patrick Copland, at whose instance, it seems, he had come to Harvard for his education instead of going to England.407 He began to study chemistry, in his spare hours, in 1644, while still an undergraduate,408 and was encouraged by the younger Winthrop, who lent him books from his well-furnished library.409 In 1647, the year of Child’s second trial, we find Stirk practising medicine,410 presumably in Cambridge or Boston, and he was certainly established in Boston in 1648–1650.411 Child probably knew him in this country, and when (in 1650 or 1651) Stirk went to England to follow his profession there, it was Child who introduced him to Robert Boyle. This appears from Stirk’s own words in dedicating his Pyrotechny Asserted and Illustrated (London, 1658) “To the Honourable, Virtuous, and most accomplished Gentleman, Robert Boyl, Esq; My very good Friend.” The address begins: “Since it was my good fortune first by the occasion of our mutual Friend, Dr. Robert Child, (whose memory being a man most learned and ingenuous, I honour,) to kiss your Honours hand, your love to me hath ever continued so real and constant, that if I should not take such notice of it, as to my power to acknowledge it, I should worthily deserve the black note of infamy.” The introduction apparently took place in 1651.412 In this same year (or more probably in 1650) Dr. John French dedicated to Child his English translation of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy,413 one of the most famous of all works on natural magic.

In 1651, at the request of Milton’s friend Samuel Hartlib, who had a passion for issuing little books and was particularly interested in projects for the improvement of English agriculture and industry, Robert Child composed an essay entitled “A Large Letter concerning the Defects and Remedies of English Husbandry written to Mr. Samuel Hartlib,” which forms the bulk of a volume published in that same year under the title, Samuel Hartlib his Legacie.414

This essay gives one a highly favorable impression of Child’s powers as an observer and a practical man of science. Interpreting the word “husbandry” in a large sense, he treats not only of every department of farming and gardening — implements, fertilizers, the chemistry of soils, rotation of crops, methods of sowing and planting, diseases of wheat with their cause and cure — but of stock-raising, vine-growing, wine-making, orchards, forestry, fishponds, mines, clay for pottery, building stone, mineral springs, bee-keeping, and silkworms. He deplores the neglect of meadows, the existence of so much waste land which might be brought under cultivation, the remissness of farmers in acquainting themselves with foreign methods, their ignorance of many useful plants that are native to the country, their reluctance to try experiments and compare notes. Many plants and some animals might be introduced into England with profit. Black foxes, musk-cats, sables, minks, martens, and the “musk-squash” might be raised for their fur. Even elephants might be useful as traction-engines. He dilates particularly on the silkworm, which, as he thinks, experience has shown will thrive in England. “Divers Ladies, Gentlewomen, Scholars, Citizens, &c. have nursed up divers wormes to perfection, though they have had little skil in the managing of them; and likewise not such accommodations as are necessary for them; and more would they have done, if they could have had Mulberry-leaves. I am informed that one near Charing-Crosse maketh a good living by them: as also another by Ratliffe-Crosse; and therefore if we can bring up an 100, why not a 1000, yea 100000, if we had food for them?”415 The silkworm, by the way, was a timely topic. It was in the very next year that Hartlib put forth that fascinating little volume in which, on the strength of Virginia Ferrar’s experiment, an attempt was made to convince the planters of Virginia that silkworms would pay better than tobacco.416 Elephants and silkworms may not be suited to the British climate, but very few of Child’s suggestions are vagaries. His essay is full of good things, and was highly commended by no less an authority than the Rev. Walter Harte, the author of the celebrated Essays on Husbandry (1764)417 which Thomas Hollis characterizes in a manuscript note 418 as “Written like a Good man, a Scholar, and a Gentleman.”

Child’s treatise is a kind of index to his European travels, and we have already resorted to it for information on that score.419 He often refers to New England. “Bees thrive very much” there, he tells us.420 There is a kind of oats “which in New England serveth well for Oatmeal without grinding, being beaten as they come out of the barn.”421 Summer wheat “is sowen abundantly” there “in April and May, and reaped ordinarilly in 3 moneths.”422 He had observed the “Palmer-worms, which is a kind of great black Cater-piller, (which I have seen destroying much in New-England);”423 this was in July, 1646.424 “In New-England, where there is no Chalk nor Limestone, they are compelled to burn Oyster-shells, Cockles, to make Lime; or else they could hardly build any houses.”425 This reminds us of the ordinance passed in 1705 by Dangerfield, now Truro, that “inasmuch as great damage is done by persons digging shells out of the proprietors’ lands, to sell and transport, which shells might otherwise be of use to the inhabitants to make lime, a fine be imposed of 6d. pr. bushel.”426 Among the animals that Child wishes to have introduced for their fur, we recognize the American muskrat, under its Indian name — so he spells it — of Musk-Squash,427 and may recall, if we like, the strange story of the musquash and the cat which Cotton Mather sent to the Royal Society in 1716.428 Two longer extracts may serve as their own apology:

This essay of Child’s — the Large Letter — is dated at the end “Anno 1651” in the first edition435 and signed in blank:

Nor is the author’s name mentioned anywhere in the volume. The same is true of the second edition (1652),436 but in the third (1655) the signature is —

Even without this, however, we should be able to identify the author, for Hartlib himself ascribes the essay to Dr. Child in a letter to Boyle, May 8, 1654.438 The connection of this interesting treatise with Robert Child the Remonstrant seems to have escaped the notice of most New England historians and antiquaries; but I am sure it was known to our lamented associate Frederick Lewis Gay, for the Harvard College copy of the third edition of the Legacy, which prints the signature, came from his library.

Child wrote the Large Letter before he went to Ireland.439 The volume that contains it (Samuel Hartlib his Legacie) was published in 1651, and came out before July 1, for on that date Dr. Arnold Boot, a distinguished Dutch physician and Hebraist, then living in Paris, wrote to Hartlib, thanking him for a copy and highly, commending the tract, which he had “perused instantly à capite ad calcem.” Boot followed up this letter with nine others, dated from July, ¹²/₂₂ 1651, to January ³/₁₃, 1652, and the series formed a running commentary on Child’s essay. His notes, in the main, touched points in which he disagreed with some matter of detail, but he praised the whole book as “a most excellent piece; and from the beginning to the end fraught with most excellent observations and experiments.”

Hartlib instantly published a second edition (1652), in which he reprinted Child’s Large Letter and the other contents of the first edition, with an Appendix containing (1) Boot’s ten letters (or extracts from them) under the title of Annotations upon the Legacie of Husbandry and (2) An Interrogatory Relating more particularly to the Husbandry and Naturall History of Ireland.440 To the Annotations he prefixed a signed epistle “To his worthy and very much Honoured Friend, the Author of the large letter of Husbandry,” from which it appears plainly that Child was now in Ireland. He calls Boot’s letters (which follow) to Child’s notice, and continues:

Child responded by composing a series of observations on Boot’s critique, which were printed by Hartlib in the third edition of the Legacy (1655) under the title “An Answer to the Animadversor on the Letter to Mr. Samuel Hartlib of Husbandry.”442 This Answer comes immediately after Boot’s letters, which are headed “Dr. Arnold Beati’s, Annotations upon the Legacy of Husbandry.”443 Beati is a mere misprint for Boate, the English method of spelling the Doctor’s surname.444 There is no possible doubt about the writer. In the Table of Contents he is called Dr. Arnold Boat, and in a letter to Boyle (May 8, 1654), Hartlib thus announces this third edition:

In this Answer to Boot Child has a good deal to say about New England products. A few extracts are worth making.447 We may begin with a curious medical note:

There was an outbreak of this disease in Boston in 1646451 while Child was here, and he alludes to the cases in the Remonstrance as a, sign that God is displeased with the administration.452

Here is a remark which points a moral for the dry days that are coming. Child is speaking of making beer without malt:

Henry Stubbe, however, the Warwick physician, gives a rather alarming account of this potato tipple:

The following notes confirm what Winslow says about Child’s peregrination of New England, though we cannot be sure to which of his two visits they apply. They derive additional interest from the fact that in 1645 Child purchased Vines’s Saco patent.455

And he goes on to show how sassafras is not sufficiently described by any botanist, so far as he knows.456

Snakeweed, supposed to be a cure for the venom of the rattlesnake, attracted much attention from naturalists and physicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, as one may see, for instance, in the Philosophical Transactions and in the writings of Cotton Mather.460 Child regarded this plant as likely to flourish in England:

The following extract concerning black lead is of quite peculiar interest — personal as well as historical:

In tracing Child’s career we have several times encountered references to the younger Winthrop’s black lead.465 Winthrop, when in England in 1641–1643, had roused his interest in the mine.466 It was at Tantousq or Tantiusques, in the southern part of the present town of Sturbridge in Worcester County, and, as Child remarks in the passage just quoted, was given to Winthrop by the General Court of Massachusetts. There is a record of this action at the session of November 13, 1644: “Mr Iohn Winthrope, Iunior, is granted y^e hill at Tantousq, about 60 miles westward, in which the black leade is, and liberty to purchase some land there of the Indians.” 467 In the next year, just before he visited the Bay for the second time, Child was eager to invest money in the project. He wrote to Winthrop on March 1, 1645, after talking with Emanuel Downing and Stephen Winthrop, and warned him not to expect too much from the enterprise, but he expressed his readiness to stand a quarter of the expenses. He adds a learned discourse on the subject, quoting “Cesalpine,” as in the extract just given from the reply to Boot.468 Downing and Winthrop’s brother Stephen were at this time acting as promoters in the mother country.469 On June 16 of the same year, Richard Hill writes to Winthrop from London on the subject. He has heard from Winthrop by letter, and has also been talking with Downing and Stephen Winthrop: “I . . . am glad to heare you haue soe well spent your time as I vnderstand you haue, in ffinding out that mine of black Lead.” Specimens had been sent to England and Hill had tested them. The substance yielded about a shilling a ton in silver. “If itt yealded any Lead mettle itt would bee somthing like, but as itt is, it is only to bee gathered by Quicksiluer as I conceaue.” A larger quantity, some four or five hundredweight, is needed for a definitive test.470 Later, during his troubles in New England and thereafter, Child returns more than once to the subject of the Tantousq mine. He was still eager to invest in it in 1650, if the authorities of the Bay would apply his fines to that object, and his letter of August 26, 1650, proves that Winthrop had so far done nothing to develop the property.471 Winthrop’s letter of 1649 shows no great alacrity in proceeding,472 but later, in 1658 and 1659, there was a vigorous though troubled attempt to get to work.473 The subsequent history of the mine down to the beginning of the present century, when (in 1902) a fresh attempt was made to operate it, has been told in a very interesting paper by Professor George H. Haynes.474 I am informed that the mine has now lain idle for several years.

We should have more of Child’s observations on American natural history but for an accident in transportation: “In New-England I have seen a Plant with good success used for Sarsaperilla, . . . but concerning this plant and divers others, which grow in New-England, I cannot give you that account I desire, because my seeds and papers unhappily miscarried.”475

The Interrogatory which Hartlib prepared for Child’s use in gathering materials for a natural history of Ireland covers most things in nature and includes some matters of curious interest. Under Maccamboy is the inquiry “Whether there be such a thing at all, that this herb should purge the body meerly by external touch, or whether it be a fable, what particular observations have been taken for or against it, . . . and in what place it groweth?” Under Poisons, Hartlib asks, of course, for “particular observations of the Antipathy of the Irish earth and Aire, against all poisonous creatures.” Under Patricks-Purgatory, he requests a “perfect description of the Logh, Island, Caves, and the whole proceedings there, during the Justiceship of the Earle of Corke, and the Lord Chancellour Loftus.” Under Barnacles are several questions, all directed toward an elucidation of the venerable legend of the geese that develop out of these marine crustaceans. Sir Kenelm Digby, who was probably a friend of Child, as he was of Hartlib and Boyle and the younger Winthrop, could have answered the questions authoritatively. So at least Lady Fanshawe thought in January, 1649:

The learned world was particularly interested in these bernicle geese. The very learned Father Athanasius Kircher — pace tanti viri dixerim — communicated a high-fantastical theory on the subject to Robert Southwell in 1661.477 But later in that same year Dr. Worthington was able to tell Hartlib that the great naturalist Ray and his company, had recently visited “the Bass Island, and both saw and fed on the Soland geese, but they found all was not true which is usually reported of them.”478 The modern inquirer may slake his thirst with Mr. Henry Lee’s exposition in Sea Fables Explained.479 As for St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Hartlib’s appetite for facts had been whetted by Gerard Boot’s brief account of this celebrated place of pilgrimage and of its destruction in 1632 by Loftus and Cork. The documents that he desired may now be found in Canon O’Connor’s book.480

Gerard Boot, the elder brother of that Dr. Arnold Boot who wrote Animadversions on Child’s Large Letter, was a native of Gorinchem in Holland481 and an M.D. of Leyden.482 He removed to England ca. 1630483 and for nearly twenty years was established as a general practitioner in London, where in 1648 he had a house in “Crooked Friars.”484 In 1646 he was admitted a licentiate of the College of Physicians.485 His interest in Ireland arose partly from his having invested a large share of his estate in the Irish forfeited lands486 — the so-called Irish adventure in which so much money was made and lost in the latter part of the seventeenth century.487 Arnold Boot, who was two years his junior,488 practised in Dublin with much success from 1636 to 1644,489 having Strafford and Archbishop Ussher among his patients,490 when he went to Paris and settled there.491 In 1644, on his way to France, the Dover boat in which he had embarked was captured by a privateer in the Parliamentary service,492 and he was detained in London from early in May to late in October.493 Probably he lodged with Dr. Gerard. At all events, they had many talks about Ireland, and Dr. Gerard, who had never visited that country, wrote the First Book of his Naturall History in 1645 on the basis of their conversations and of subsequent intercourse with several gentlemen who had been driven out by the “bloody combustions” there. He meant to add three more books, but he never carried out his plan. He sent the manuscript to Dr. Arnold, who returned it with editorial improvements.494 In 1647 (July 16) the House of Commons ordered that Dr. Gerard be appointed “Physician of the Army in Ireland” and be sent to Dublin;495 but there was some delay. Finally, in 1649, he was appointed State Physician for Ireland and “Doctor to the hospital at Dublin,” and he went over late in the year.496 He died at Dublin on January ^9/₁₉, 1649–50.497

Hartlib was eager to have Gerard Boot’s fragmentary work completed, for he thought such a treatise would be of great benefit to the “improvers” of Ireland under the Commonwealth. His Interrogatory was meant to encourage the gathering of material for this purpose. He looked to Arnold Boot as the natural continuator, and in 1653 his hopes were high, for towards the end of that year the Doctor started from Paris for England498 His final destination, apparently, was Dublin, where he may have expected to succeed his brother as State Physician. He reached Dieppe — but I must let Hartlib tell the story — he is writing to Boyle, February 28, 1653–4: “I need not tell you again (for I hear, that you know it already) that Dr. Boat, when he was come as far as Diepe towards England, being let blood by those common butchers of human kind, departed this world: which really is a very great loss to the commonwealth of learning.”499 The butchers thus pilloried are merely those physicians or surgeons who followed the old drastic method of treatment. Hartlib favored the new school, which walked in the footsteps of Paracelsus and van Helmont, eschewing huge doses, violent purges, and phlebotomy, and relying on so-called chemical remedies.500 Dr. Boot’s death may safely be referred to the latter part of 1653.501 It left Hartlib in doubt how to procure the completion of Gerard Boot’s work, and his thoughts turned instinctively to Child. He writes to Boyle (February 28, 1653–4) that he is “utterly at a loss” how to go on “except Dr. Child from Ireland succeed him [Arnold Boot] in the pursuit of that weighty subject,” and again, in the same letter, he protests: “I must now most solemnly call upon you, on the behalf of the Natural History of Ireland, which, if yourself and Dr. Child do not take professedly to task, I fear will never be perfected to any purpose; at least, if so much could be done in it, as to have all the interrogatories judiciously answered . . . it would be a considerable addition to a second edition of this imperfect work.”502

Child certainly went to Ireland either in 1651 or more probably in 1652.503 What was his particular inducement we do not know, though it is a good guess that he was invited by a certain large landowner with whom, as we shall see presently, he was afterwards associated there. Perhaps, however, the design of the Commonwealth for “planting” that country with English settlers is reason enough, for Ireland was at this time a land of promise for all the investors, speculators, and projectors in England. Child’s friend, Robert Boyle, who had large Irish estates, went over in 1652.504 Two other friends of his, Dr. (afterwards Sir) William Petty and Benjamin Worsley went over to take government positions in 1652 — Petty to be physician to the army and Worsley to act as Secretary to the Commissioners.505 Worsley was already well acquainted with Ireland, where he had been Surgeon-General to the Army from 1641 to 1645.506 Child’s friend Richard Leader, with whom he seems to have lodged in Boston and at whose house there he was certainly at one time confined.507 had been in Ireland before his appointment as manager of the iron works, and must have spoken favorably of that kingdom. Leader, at all events was an enthusiast on the subject. In 1650 he wrote to John Winthrop, Jr., from Barbadoes: “For my owne part I see no place so good as Ireland, either for p’fitt or pleasure; Where I intend to steere my course so sone as I cann withdraw what I have oute of this westerne parte of the world.”508 The agricultural and industrial possibilities of the new plantations would have been a strong attraction to a man of Child’s tastes, and his fortunes needed repairing.

Soon after Child’s death, Hartlib wrote to Boyle: “By that, which I read concerning Dr. Child’s husbandries in the work of Ireland, I see what a good foundation of life he hath laid for that honest country calling. But I doubt the colonel cannot shew us any more observations or directions of his in writing, besides what is extant already from his own hand; though this would have improved clover, flax and woad, upon many more lands than his own.”509 These sayings are uncommonly Orphic, even for Hartlib, but luckily his remark in a letter to Winthrop — that Child at the time of his death was “living with Esquire Hill”510 — gives us the answer to the riddle and thus enables us to understand what Child’s occupation was in Ireland. Esquire Hill and the Colonel are manifestly one and the same person — to wit, Colonel Arthur Hill, son and successor of Sir Moyses Hill of County Down. Colonel Hill had been appointed one of the Commissioners of Revenue for Ulster in 1651,511 and his duties were much concerned with the sequestration of forfeited estates and the repeopling of the county with new planters. In this capacity he had a strong interest in husbandry. He had also every motive to study the subject on his own account, for he had succeeded to the family estates and was a great landholder. The Marquesses of Downshire are his descendants,512 and their holdings in Ireland and England were worth nearly £100,000 a year in 1883.513

Even in the lifetime of his father, Arthur Hill had distinguished himself as a progressive landlord, for Sir William Brereton, in 1635, records a visit to “a brave plantation” which he held on a long lease from Lord Chichester: “This plantation is said doth yield him a £1000 per annum. Many Lanckashire and Cheshire men are here planted; with some of them I conversed. They sit upon a rack rent, and pay 5s. or 6s. an acre for good ploughing land, which now is clothed with excellent good corn.”514

Child, as we may now infer, was serving Colonel Arthur Hill as agricultural expert, with his headquarters perhaps at what is now Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast.515 Boyle had doubtless been writing to Hartlib about the value of Child’s services to Hill in the great enterprise of planting Ulster. Probably Child had himself invested something in Irish lands. A Robert Child subscribed £50 for the Irish adventure on July 19, 1642, and there is a reference to this same transaction in a record of March 10, 1651–2,516 which must be close to the time when our Robert Child went to Ireland. The name occurs again in a list of adventurers dated July 20, 1653, shortly before his death.517

Child died, it seems, between February and May, 1654. In a letter to Boyle, dated February 28, 1653–4, Hartlib expresses the hope that Child will finish Gerard Boot’s Natural History of Ireland,518 but in writing to Boyle on May 8 he speaks of him as “the late Dr. Child.”519 His friend the younger Winthrop did not hear of his death till some years later, for in 1661 Hartlib wrote to him, apparently in response to something in a letter of Winthrop’s, perhaps an inquiry: “I wonder that you have not heard of D^r Rob. Child who dyed in Ireland about 3. yeares agoe living with Esquire Hill. He was a singular lover of your Person and a most vseful honest Man in his kind.”520 Child seems never to have married. He was certainly a bachelor when he was in New England,521 and we hear nothing that would lead us to infer that he ever took a wife.

I have passed lightly over Child’s alchemical pursuits in order not to complicate too much our study of this remarkable man. They did not interfere with his practical, every-day interests — medicine, mining, agriculture, speculation in colonial iron works; nor were they inconsistent with mundane engrossment, for a time, in English American politics. This observation is not without significance. Why somebody has not paid serious attention to the alchemical studies of the early New Englanders522 — Winthrop and Child and Stirk and Brewster and Avery, not to mention later investigators, like President Stiles and Judge Danforth and Dr. Æneas Munson523 — I do not know; but I suspect it is because alchemy ranges with witchcraft in the thoughts of most of us and we feel that this is a case in which “least said, soonest mended” is a sane maxim. In fact, however, there is no connection between the two subjects. Witchcraft looks backward: it reverts to the abysm of time; it reminds us (not much to our self-satisfaction) of the pit of primeval savagery out of which we are digged, of the miry clay that still adheres to the hem of our rationalistic garments; it is our vital link with Ashantee and the juju-men of the West Coast. But alchemy looks forward: it is experimental science in the making — science that does not yet acknowledge its finite bounds, but aspires star-eyed to the illimitable possibilities. Child’s lifetime coincided with the eager stirrings of the scientific instinct in England. Had he lived a few more years, he might well have been one of the founders of the Royal Society, like his friends Boyle and the younger Winthrop. For a physician not to study alchemy in those days was a sign that he was either a reactionary or a fossil.

We have slight occasion, then, to take the defensive, and none at all to apologize for our great-grandfathers as if their zeal in alchemy were merely a picturesque and amiable weakness. It is much to the credit of New England intellectual life in the seventeenth century that the younger Winthrop could meet Robert Child and Sir Kenelm Digby on their own ground in these speculations; that George Stirk could go to London in 1650 with so thorough a knowledge of alchemical principles and processes that he was able to impose on the world his splendid fiction of the adept Eirenseus Philalethes, who still rules royally in the counsels of occultists; that Jonathan Brewster, our Plymouth elder’s son, was in 1657 in hot and sanguine pursuit of the grand elixir in his cabin on the Connecticut frontier with the Indians howling at his kitchen door;524 that William Avery at Boston in 1684 was patiently searching for the alkahest or universal solvent and had taught his son Jonathan to be “an assiduous labourer at the chemical fire.”525

Child’s interest in alchemy and in the occult appears in the earliest letter of his that we possess — that addressed to his friend Winthrop in 1641526 — and it emerges unabated in his latest extant letter to the same correspondent, that of August 26, 1650:527 “Cornel. Agrippa de Occult pħio [Philosophia] is coming forth in English,528 & Sendivogius,”529 so he notes as an item of scientific intelligence, along with an announcement of the great Harvey’s book de Generatione530 and Dr. Bate’s treatise on the rickets.531 And he mentions Thomas Vaughan twice: — first, by way of literary news, “One Vaughan an Ingenuous young man hath written Anthroposophia, & is printing pħio Adamitica,”532 and again, near the end, in a kind of intellectual S.O.S.: “If you see a Booke called Anthroposophia, tell me, if you can, what the metaphysicall subiect is, which is the great question now amongst vs which is the perfection of all things.” Thomas Vaughan, brother of the mystical poet, killed himself accidentally by exploding a mercurial compound.533 Experimentation and occultism, since (as we fondly think) divorced, were then joined in loving union. John Heydon (the friend of George Stirk, who was the friend of Robert Child) was an attorney who cast figures by geomancy and astromancy for the benefit of his clients, and found they served to increase his practice.534 Much later, President Stiles of Yale was reputed to know the great secret, but felt constrained to protest (with coram Deo veritas) that he was ignorant whether such a thing was even possible.535

As to the younger John Winthrop, he began these studies early in life, for they loom large in the letters he received from the friend of his youth, Edward Howes, from 1628 to 1644.536 When he met Child, then, Winthrop was doubtless already well versed in the science, and we have no reason to suppose that his faith was ever shaken. When he died, in 1676, he had long enjoyed the reputation of having discovered the mighty secret of the Hermetic sages. This comes out plainly in the Funeral Tribute published in that year by Benjamin Tompson, “Learned Schoolmaster & Physician & y^e Renowned Poet of N. Engl.:”537

The epitaph in Mather’s Magnalia also testifies to Winthrop’s reputation as a successful alchemist:

This signifies that, whether or not Winthrop was really an adept in alchemy (that is, whether or not he had found the philosopher’s stone), he was “an adept in the true sense” because he had now learned the secrets of the heavenly kingdom. The same belief is hinted at in Mather’s interminable epitaph on Four Winthrops, in his “Hades Look’d into,” 1717, a funeral sermon on Wait Winthrop:

But the most striking of all tributes is a vivid passage in President Stiles’s Diary, June 1, 1787. Stiles is speaking of “the Governors Ring, as it is called, or a Mountain in the N. W. corner of East Haddam:”

The younger Winthrop had more than a thousand books “in a chamber” in Boston in 1640. We owe our knowledge of the extent of his library to the fact that there was “corn of divers sorts” in the same chamber and that the mice were busy. One of the volumes consisted of “the Greek testament, the psalms, and the common prayer . . . bound together. He found the common prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two other touched, nor any of his other books, though there were above a thousand.”542 Many volumes that belonged to him I have examined in the New York Society Library543 and in the libraries of Yale University and the Massachusetts Historical Society. His collection was rich in alchemical and occult books, which he lent freely to other investigators. One volume, a German translation of the Antimonii Mysteria Gemina of the famous Alexander von Suchten,544 bears Child’s autograph on the title-page: “Rob Child his booke 1636.” John Winthrop (H. C. 1700) has also written his own name with Dee’s famous monadic symbol (likewise used by John the Connecticut governor) on the same page. Child and his friend Winthrop exchanged their treasures from time to time, by way of loan or gift, and it is pleasant to be able to read von Such ten’s treatise in a copy that has been reverently handled by these two eager students of Hermetic philosophy.

The most exciting of Child’s utterances on occult subjects occurs in a letter to Winthrop, written on May 13, 1648, soon after his return to England:

This reveals Child as in close contact with the latest scientific news from the Continent. The “fratres R. C.” are, of course, the Rosicrucians, who ever since 1614 had been making a vast stir in Europe. One of the greatest of them was, like Child, a Kentishman — Dr. Robert Fludd, who died in London in 1637. I should like to think that Child knew him and, indeed, nothing is more probable. Both Winthrop and Edward Howes were deeply interested in Fludd’s works, of which Howes gives Winthrop a catalogue in 1632: he calls him “the famous and farre renouned English man of our tymes.” 547 At first sight Fludd seems a likely candidate for identity with the mystical doctor whom Howes mentions so reverently in 1635:

But it is pretty certain that the person meant is one “Dr. Euer.”549

The report that Child quotes about the Emperor of Germany was founded on a strange occurrence at Prague in January, 1648. A certain Johann Conrad von Richthausen (so runs the tale) displayed to the Emperor Ferdinand III a grain of red powder which he averred was the true philosopher’s stone. With this one grain, in the Emperor’s presence, three pounds of quicksilver were transmuted into about two pounds and a half of pure gold. From this alchemic gold the Emperor caused a medal to be struck of the value of three hundred ducats, and upon Richthausen he bestowed, somewhat later, the grotesque title of Baron Chaos — Freiherr von Chaos.550

The Duke of Holstein mentioned in Child’s budget of alchemical news was Frederick III of Holstein-Gottorp, a rather magnificent personage in his day, who succeeded in 1616 and died in 1659. He appears to have been a correspondent of the younger Winthrop’s, doubtless on scientific topics.551

The rumor which Child mentions, that “Helia Artista is born,” signified the appearance of a divinely enlightened adept to whom was revealed the secret of the elixir. There was a saying, derived from Jewish tradition, “When Elias shall come, he shall make all things plain,”552 — “That Proverbial Prediction of the Jews,” as Henry More calls it, “touching their expected Elias, Elias cùm, venerit solvet omnia.”553 Elias Artista, therefore, became a term among alchemists for him who should solve their desperate problem. Paracelsus gave wide currency to the phrase.554 For an English example, take the work called “Cheiragogia Heliana. A Manuduction to the Philosopher’s Magical Gold: by Geo. Thor. Astromagus” (London, 1659). “Theophrastus,” writes Thor, “sayes thus: That, That is not In It, we may attain by the help of the Other: by, It, meaning the magnetick Spirit of the World, which is the Philosophers True Magnesia. And That (sayes he) will follow the Captain of Art (that is, Helias the Artist) close.” 555 Works were published under the name of Elias Artista.556 In 1666, Johann Friedrich Helvetius, an eminent physician, was visited at the Hague by a nameless wanderer who gave him a little bit of the philosopher’s stone, by means of which Helvetius was able (so he thought) to succeed once in making gold out of lead. He published his experiences in a tract called The Golden Calf,557 and throughout he calls his mysterious visitor Elias Artista. With reference to this incident, William Cooper, in his Philosophicall Epitaph (1673), addresses Child’s friend Elias Ashmole in a lofty strain:

Indeed, this same Cooper, in the same dedication, unconsciously bestows the title Elias the Artist upon George Stirk also. For he cites “our late English Phœnix, or Elias Artisto Anonymon, in his book of The open entrance to the shut Pallace of the King.” This is the Introitus Apertus, the most famous of the treatises of Philalethes, — and Philalethes, as I am prepared to prove, was George Stirk and none other, though Cooper did not know it.

This little excursus on Elias the Artist will, I trust, be forgiven when I point out its pertinency. We have it on Child’s own word, as the letter shows, that he was not Helias Artista himself and that he had never solved, or pretended to solve, the momentous problem of transmutation. This testimony may suffice to quiet forever a strange and romantic rumor which was current in scientific circles on the Continent soon after Child’s death and which still echoes dimly among students of the occult and the pseudonymous. This is the report that Child was Eirenæus Philalethes (or Philaletha), that mysterious adept who discovered the secret of transmutation in 1645 at the age of twenty-three, wrote several books on the subject, — including the thrice-famous Introitus Apertus ad Occlusum Regis Palatium, — and wandered for years about Europe in disguise, occasionally performing the miracle of transmutation.

About the middle of the sixteenth century there occurred, on the Continent, three supposed cases of the successful transmutation of metals. Each was attested by a perfectly reputable witness who was then (and should be now) above suspicion of fraud or lying. Just what actually happened in a chemical way, or just what tricks were played by the transmuters, we are not called upon to explain. It is enough for us to feel sure that something did occur each time, and that silver or gold was found in the crucible.

The earliest of the three cases is that of Claude Berigard, an eminent French physician, born in 1578, who spent a good part of his life as Professor of the Aristotelian Philosophy in Italy, first at Pisa, afterwards at Padua. Berigard himself gives an account of the affair in his Circulus Pisanus, a commentary on Aristotelianism published in 1643. When he was living in Pisa, he received from an acquaintance one dram of a powder resembling wild poppy in color. Berigard worked the experiment in person, and took every precaution against being deluded, for he well knew that in many former instances gold had been secretly introduced into either the materials or the utensils. The result was convincing, for by means of the powder he turned ten drams of mercury into fine gold.558 The second experiment took place on February 24, 1649, at Chur in Switzerland, in the presence of the apothecary Michael Morgenbesser; it was worked by a traveller from Genoa and produced silver from lead.559 The third transmutation was effected in 1650 at Geneva in the presence of Pastor Gross; the adept was an Italian, who turned a mixture of tin and mercury into gold.560 On the basis of these and other similar events, many scientific men, it seems, soon came to believe that a mysterious adept was adrift on the Continent, who used various disguises, and from time to time introduced himself (now by one name, now by another) to some student of the art and either effected transmutation or furnished the powder (known as the philosopher’s stone) which enabled one to work the chemical miracle.

Now George Stirk, soon after his removal from Boston to London, which took place in 1650 or 1651, had exhibited various alchemical manuscripts in Latin which he said were the work of an adept who chose to call himself Eirensæs Philalethes. Stirk’s story was that these had been given to him in New England by a friend of his who knew the adept well. This story he printed in 1654 in the preface to Part I of a versified treatise, The Marrow of Alchemy,561 a work which he then pretended was written by the friend in question, but which he afterwards acknowledged as his own composition.562 Stirk allowed copies of the manuscripts to circulate among students of alchemy, and they excited a lively interest, both in England and on the Continent. He died in 1665, and two years later Johann Lange published at Amsterdam the most important document of the group, the Introitus Apertus ad Occlusum Regis Palatium, ascribing it on the title-page to “an anonymous philosopher Philaletha.” In this work the concealed author describes himself as a true adept who had discovered the art of gold-making in 1645 at the age of twenty-three. Other editions and other tracts followed, appearing at different places, and under various editorship, and conjectures were freely emitted as to the identity of Philalethes, who was generally regarded as an authority of the first rank. Inquiries directed by Continental scholars to learned friends in England elicited much information about George Stirk, who had been a familiar figure in London scientific circles, as well as divers guesses as to Philalethes and Stirk’s relations with him. It was the current opinion that Eirenæus Philalethes was an Englishman, now wandering incognito in foreign parts.

In the course of this lively interchange of learned chitchat, Stirk’s known friendship with the much-travelled Dr. Robert Child, coupled with the fact that they had met in America,563 was likely at any moment to suggest the attachment of Child’s name to these tracts in some fashion; but the first extant testimony to any such connection dates from 1677. In that year (or perhaps in 1676) a distinguished Moravian physician, Johann Ferdinand Hertodt von Todtenfeld — an ominous name for a doctor! — sent to the Breslau Ephemerides a Latin epistle on Philalethes, including an extract from a letter received from an English colleague. The extract may be closely translated as follows:

Thus wrote Hertodt’s English correspondent. Hertodt himself had nothing to add as to the identity of Philalethes, but he did assert that he had found his works a deceptive guide, and this utterance soon elicited an anonymous reply, also published in the Ephemerides: “I will not quarrel with anybody,” says the apologist, “as to whether Starkey or Childe was the author of the tracts which circulate under the name of Philaletha, . . . but I do maintain that nobody can have written them qui non habuerit penitissimam Cherniæ arcanorum notitiam.”565 Hertodt’s paper and the reply, appearing as they did in the transactions of an important academy, attracted instant attention. There are three contemporary (or almost contemporary) copies of both communications, in three different hands, in Sloane MS. 646 in the British Museum,566 and Manget reprinted them both in 1702.567 In 1683 Johann Otto von Helbig defended the works of Philalethes against Hertodt, but admitted that he knew nothing of the author except that a London friend had lately informed him that he believed the adept to be still living in one of the islands under English rule.568 In 1684 Wilhelm Freiherr von Schröder mentioned Hertodt’s attack on Philalethes without approval.569

From the publication of Hertodt’s letter until the present time, the name of Child has continued to be associated, off and on, with the works of Philalethes. In Sloane MS. 2558 there is a copy of Stirk’s Marrow of Alchemy (made from the printed book) which has “Dr. Child” written in an eighteenth-century hand570 at the foot of the title-page under the imprint, and (in the same hand) there is a note on the blank page opposite the title-page: “it is supposed Eireneus Philalethes name was Bartlet who was acquainted with Dr. Child.”571 Fuchs in his Repertorium, 1806–8, identifies Philalethes with “Childe.”572 The same notion is mentioned, though the writer does not commit himself, in the ludicrously incorrect account of George Starkey (Stirk) in the Dictionary of National Biography.573

There is a curious piece of evidence which shows that the erroneous identification of Eirenæus Philalethes with Child made its way to America and that scientific men in Boston about the beginning of the nineteenth century had recognized this Child as the Remonstrant. I find the evidence in certain alchemical books that once belonged to Judge Samuel Danforth.

Judge Danforth’s career as a public man is well-known. He was the son of the Rev. John Danforth of Dorchester, and was born in that town in 1696. He graduated at Harvard College in 1715, was Selectman of Cambridge 1733–1734, 1737–1739, Representative to the General Court 1734–1738, Member of the Council 1739–1774, Register of Probate for Middlesex County 1731–1745, Judge of Probate 1745–1775, Judge of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for Middlesex 1741–1774. He was also a Special Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1735 and of the Superior Court in 1753.574 For a long time (at least from 1743 to 1768) he was one of the Commissioners of the Land Bank.575 It is interesting to remember that he was on the committee appointed by the General Court for the rebuilding of Harvard Hall after the fire of 1764.576 He died at Cambridge on October 2, 1777. The Judge was a Tory, and as such he received the appointment of Mandamus Councillor on August 9, 1774, which he was forced to resign on September 2. This he did in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in the presence of a crowd of some four thousand people, who listened quietly to the old man’s feeble voice. The scene is described in a letter from Dr. Thomas Young to Samuel Adams written two days later577 Danforth’s alchemical studies have attracted less attention. Dr. John Eliot remarks with dry brevity: “He was said to be a great natural philosopher and chymist.”578 More to the point is the testimony of President Stiles, who thus records his death under date of October 3, 1777: 579 “Last week the Hon. Samuel Danforth Esq. of Cambridge died in Boston, æt. 81 & supra. He was deeply studied in the Writings of the Adepts, believed the Philosophers Stone a Reality and perhaps for Chemical knowledge might have passed among the Chemists for a שם בּעל.”580

Convincing testimony to Danforth’s alchemical ardor exists (though heretofore overlooked) in a fragment of his library still preserved in the Boston Athenæum.581 He was in the habit of annotating his books. His marginalia exhibit his hand as it was at different periods of his life, and sometimes the same volume shows considerable differences in both ink and penmanship, so that these comments represent a long course of study, begun when he was a young man. Some of the books were obviously used as laboratory manuals. In Stirk’s Pyrotechny,582 in particular, the stains, and the brittle leaves at the end, show plain traces of the action of the Judge’s chemicals. The Opus Tripartitum 583 also exhibits signs of constant thumbing, and all three of its tracts are plentifully underlined and annotated in the Judge’s hand. Several other volumes have Danforth’s manuscript notes, some of which are highly interesting: I hope to return to them some day. Meantime our immediate concern is with the next possessor of these volumes, the Judge’s eldest son, Samuel Danforth, M.D., who, like his father, was a Royalist.584 He was born at Cambridge in 1740, graduated at Harvard College in 1758, and practised medicine for many years in Boston, where he died in 1827.585 His eminence as a chemist was locally celebrated. He received the degree of M.D. from Harvard in 1790.

Dr. Danforth inherited his father’s alchemical library,586 and I think that he too once believed in the philosopher’s stone.587 His signature — “Sam^l Danforth’s 1799” — occurs in the Judge’s copy of Opus Tripartitum (1678), a collection of three tracts. The printed title-page designates the writer, in the ablative, as “Autore, Anonymo sub Nomine Æyrenæi Philalethes, natu Angli, Habitatione Cosmopolitæ.” Under the last two words Dr. Danforth has written “D^r Robert Child.” On the special title-page of the Experimenta de Præparatione Mercurii Sophici (in the same volume) we have the following state of things:

Again in the same volume, after the printed words “Catalogus Librorum editorum Authore Æyrenæo Philalethe Cosmopolita,” 589 is written “anglice D^r Robert Child.” At the end of the last tract in the volume (the Vade-Mecum Philosophicum) is written “Script in Boston Nov-Angliae.”590 Again, under the words “Authore Anonymo Philaletha Philosopho” printed in the half-title of the Introitus Apertus in the Musæum Hermeticum,591 occurs the manuscript entry: “or D^r Robert Child sometime a resident in Boston.” Finally, under the name Eyræneus Philaletha Cosmopolita on the title-page of Secrets Reveal’d,592 the Doctor has written “D^r Robert Child” and in the margin: “he fled to New England where he was persecuted as a Church of England man — see Hutchinsons History.”

All these scribbles appear to be in the same hand that wrote “Sam^l Danforth’s 1799” in the Opus Tripartitum, and if so, they show that Dr. Danforth had got hold of the erroneous idea, common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the right name of Philalethes was Child, and that he identified this Child with the celebrated Remonstrant.

By 1698, however, another identification had come before the public, for in that year Georg Wolfgang Wedel, in the preface to his edition of the Introitus Apertus, declared that Philalethes was commonly thought to have been an Englishman named Thomas de Vagan.593 The error is patent. Thomas Vaughan (1621–1665), twin brother of Henry the poet, wrote under the name of Eugenius (not Eirencœs) Philalethes, and all his works are well known. We have already found Child citing two of them in a letter to Winthrop.594 But, absurd as it is, the error had considerable currency. It is repeated, for example, in the title-page of a German translation of the Introitus Apertus published at Hamburg in 1705;595 and it is mentioned in 1742 by the abbé Lenglet-Dufresnoy, who, however, does not commit himself, remarking of Philalethes that “son nom, sa personne, sa vie, ses ouvrages, tout est chez lui un paradoxe indéchiffrable.”596 The confusion between Eugenius and Eirenseus Philalethes, though often rectified,597 has persisted to very recent times. One finds “Philalethe Irénée” in Larousse (1874) unhesitatingly equated with “Thomas de Vaughan ou Waghan.” 598 Hermann Kopp, in 1886, remarked that it has not been determined whether Philalethes was really, “as most have supposed,” an Englishman named Thomas Vaughan;599 and as late as 1896, Mr. E. K. Chambers, though not convinced that Eirenæus (as well as Eugenius) was Thomas Vaughan, was yet by no means sure that he was not.600

The real Thomas Vaughan, a devout and highly-esteemed occult philosopher, was born in 1622 and killed himself by an alchemical accident in 1665, but neither his record nor the known limits of his career could preserve his name from an astonishing profanation in 1895, when Léo Taxil 601 made him a choregus of Satanism. According to the spurious Mémoires d’une ex-Palladiste, ascribed to “Miss Diana Vaughan,” high priestess of the Luciferians, but really concocted by Taxil, and published in monthly numbers by the Librairie Antimaçonnique at Paris, Vaughan was fourth successor to Faustus Socinus as Grand Master of the Fraternity of the Rose Cross and was the organizer of “la Franc-Maçonnerie, telle qu’elle est aujourd’hui.” In 1645 he got himself substituted at the last moment for the regular headsman at the execution of Laud, offered to Lucifer the blood of that “noble martyr” (with which he had soaked a sacred corporal), and secured in return a contract, signed by Lucifer and himself, enabling him to make gold and assuring him of a life of Hermetic knowledge for thirty-three years. After this infernal consecration he wrote the Introitus Apertus. On the 25th of March, 1678, his term was up and he was carried off by the devil.602 The extraordinary hoax of which these memoirs formed a part extended over a period of twelve years and affords one of the most amazing instances of human gullibility on record, but does not here concern us. Taxil owned up in a public address of unexampled cynicism delivered on April 19, 1897.603 What makes his fiction pertinent to our present study is that it is founded, to a large extent, on the acceptance of Thomas Vaughan as Eirenæus Philalethes. Undoubtedly the blunder has had its effect in developing the notion that our mysterious adept changed his name whenever the fancy took him, and thus has fostered the idea that a number of successful transmutations in the seventeenth century were worked by Eirenseus Philalethes in disguise. Petræus, in 1717, declared that “the late Baron Urbiger” (himself a very shadowy personage, thought by many to have been a Borghese604) asserted stoutly that King Charles II had told him that Eirenæus Philalethes made projection in his own royal presence;605 and Lenglet-Dufresnoy, in 1742, mentioned an opinion that he was the wandering stranger who gave Helvetius the powder of projection in 1666.606 This idea Taxil utilized in his Luciferian romance, including the incident in his account of Thomas Vaughan and adding the statement that Vaughan forthwith initiated Helvetius as a Luciferian.607

But we are not at the end of our comedy of errors. In a singular work, with a singular title, Die Edelgeborne Jungfer Alchymia, by Johann Conrad Creiling,608 which appeared anonymously at Tübingen in 1730, the author avers that the writings of Philaletha have become “as familiar to alchemists as their daily bread, and have met with general applause from the majority. . . . By some (among them Wedel) his name is given as Thomas de Vagan; by others (Hertodt, for instance) as Childe or Dr. Zcheil, residing in America. Certain it is that Georgius Sterkey, an apothecary in London, who died . . . of the plague in 1665, published the tracts in question, and perhaps wrote some of them himself. In the tract Medulla Alchymiæ he . . . gives information which shows that he did not obtain these writings (much less any of the tincture) directly from the adept, . . . but that the adept Childe gave some of the incomparable tincture, in English America, to Thomas de Vagan, or Vagan to Childe or to some other person,” and so on.609 Creiling, one sees, had been consulting George Stirk’s Marrow of Alchemy, and, unaware of the elaborate mystification which that book involves, he has rigged an ingenious combination. Since both Vaughan and Child had been put forward, by different authorities, as the real Philalethes, he inferred that one of the two (probably Child) was the anonymous adept celebrated by Stirk in his preface, and that the other (probably Vaughan) was the friend mentioned ibidem as the disciple of this adept and as the author of the Marrow itself. The outlandish name Dr. Zcheil is merely Creiling’s gallant attempt to spell Child phonetically in German.

Creiling’s combinations have met with all the success that their irresponsible ingenuity deserves. In 1832 Karl Schmieder, Professor at Cassel, published his famous History of Alchemy. Schmieder believes that it is possible to transmute base metals into silver and gold, and that the secret was passed down from generation to generation among a select circle of initiates. He is inclined, therefore, to ascribe the three famous cases just mentioned — those of Berigard, Morgenbesser, and Gross — to one and the same philosopher, who may well have been identical with a certain unnamed adept from whom the great chemist van Helmont received the philosopher’s stone. And this personage Schmieder would like to think was the mysterious wanderer Eirenæus Philalethes. For him he constructs a wild biography, which is a patchwork made up of all the blunders and credulous guesses that I have briefly registered. It is very likely, Schmieder thinks, that Philalethes passed under five names in his travels — Thomas de Vaughan, Thomas Vagan, Childe, Dr. Zheil, and Carnobie; when he was in America, where he met Starkey, he called himself Childe.610

So splendid a piece of constructive fiction, fortified in its details by so much citation of learned authors, the world has not willingly let die. Figuier repeats it, almost word for word, with additions, in his vastly entertaining book L’Alchimie et les Alchimistes.611 Kiesewetter, in 1895, goes over the same ground in his Geschichte des Occultismus,612 with the same string of names, including Childe and Zheil, and so does Gessmann in 1900.613 Mr. A. E. Waite, in The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887), informs us that Vaughan “adopted various pseudonyms in the different countries through which he passed in his wanderings as an alchemical propagandist. Thus in America he called himself Doctor Zheil, and in Holland Carnobius.”614 None of these scholars seems to recognize Child and Z(c)heil as the same name differently spelled.615 Caillet, who equates our adept with Vaughan, remarks with solemn caution: “On a prétendu que Vaughan s’était fait appeler en Amérique ‘le Docteur Zheil’ et en Hollande ‘Carnobe.’ Il n’a pas laissé d’écrits sous ces noms, à ma connaissance.”616 An unverifiable reference in Ferguson’s Bibliotheca Chemica (1906) introduces another factor into the confused equation: “Bacstrom says distinctly that his [Eirenæus Philalethes’] name was Winthorp and that he was Starkey’s patron.”617 Who Bacstrom was I cannot discover.618 He deserves our gratitude, however, for bringing in the name of the younger Winthrop, who, as we know, was a friend of both Stirk and Child, who were also friends of each other. As a matter of fact, as I hope to prove when time serves, Eirenæus Philalethes was the creation of George Stirk’s teeming brain and not too scrupulous conscience, and the works ascribed to him, so far as they ever existed, were of Stirk’s own composition.

My task is finished. I have followed the career of Robert Child from his birth to his death, and have even ventured to register the posthumous fictions that have associated themselves with his name. Few characters in our colonial annals are so multifariously interesting, and none, I think, appeals more congenially to a modern student.

COMENIUS AND HARVARD COLLEGE

More than two centuries ago it was asserted that John Amos Comenius, the famous Bohemian scholar, was offered the presidency of Harvard College. This somewhat startling statement, twice made by Cotton Mather, apparently slumbered unnoticed by writers on either Comenius or the College for over a century and a half. It was dug out of the Magnalia in 1860, again lost sight of, then once more — twenty-five years later — came to light, and the stirring events in Europe during the past five years have called renewed attention to it. Mather’s passage in the Magnalia deserves a more careful consideration than has been accorded it. It reads as follows:

There is no mention of this episode in the histories of Harvard College by Peirce (1833), Quincy (1840), Eliot (1848), or William R. Thayer (1890), nor in later works relating to the College. Before examining the passage in the light of contemporary evidence, it will be well to bring together some remarks that have been called out by it in the past fifty-nine years. In an article printed in 1860 we read:

In 1885 Edmund de Schweinitz, Bishop of the Unitas Fratrum, said:

“It may not be generally known,” remarked William H. Payne in 1886, “that Comenius was once solicited to become the president of Harvard College. . . . This was on the resignation of President Dunster, in 1654.”622

In 1892 Professor Paul H. Hanus — who, however, later changed his opinion — wrote:

Comenius, asserted Samuel G. Williams in 1892, “was summoned to England, to Sweden, and to Hungary for aid in the bettering of learning and improvement of schools; and in 1654 he was offered and declined the presidency of Harvard College, his fame having reached even far distant America.”624

In 1896 James P. Munroe remarked:

In the same year (1896) Count Lützow said:

Finally, in 1899, Count Lützow, ignoring his previous statement that Comenius had had thoughts of coming to this country as a missionary, repeated the familiar story, but with curious variations:

In all the above accounts, as well as in numerous other accounts that have appeared since 1896, the sole authority given for the statement is Mather’s Magnalia, and no other authority has apparently ever been cited.628 The first person to question the accuracy of the statement was Professor Will S. Monroe. In an article on Comenius written in 1892, Mr. Monroe made no allusion to the story, though he then certainly knew about it.629 Soon, however, his doubts were aroused; and in 1894, in an article called “At Comenius’ Grave,” he said: “Whether he taught in twenty cities, as Michelet maintains, and whether he was called to the presidency of Harvard College, as Cotton Mather asserts (but which the present writer seriously doubts), does not concern the limits of this article.”630 The “doubts” soon became certainties, and in an article printed in 1896631 and in a book published in 1900632 Mr. Monroe gave his reasons for concluding that the alleged invitation had never been extended to Comenius. These reasons were not considered conclusive by Mr. James H. Blodgett in 1898,633 but Professor Hanus was convinced by them and in 1899 retracted his former opinion:

Disappointing as are the early records of Harvard College, from their meagreness and from the haphazard way in which they were kept, it so happens that they throw important light on the resignation of Dunster and the election of his successor. As both Mr. Hanus and Mr. Monroe content themselves with merely stating that the records do not corroborate Mather’s story about Comenius, and as Mather’s own account, though correct enough so far as it goes, is not complete, the evidence is here given in full.

Dunster’s resignation, addressed “To the worshipful and honored Richard Bellingham, Esq. Governor of the Massachusetts Colony, with the rest of the honored Assistants and Deputies in General Court at Boston now assembled,” and dated June 10, 1654, concluded as follows:

In the College records, under the same date (June 10, 1654), we read:

In Answer to a writing presented to this Court by m^r Henry Dunster, wherin amongst other things therin conteyned, he is pleased to make a resignation of his place as Præsident, This Court doth order that it shall be left to the care & discretion of the Overseers of the Colledge to make provision (in case he persist in his Resolution more then one month & informe the Overseers) for some meet p^rson to carry an end that work for the p^rsent & also to act in whatever necessity should call for untill the next Sessions of this Court, when wee shall be better enabled to settle what will be needfull in all respects with reference to the Colledge: and that the Overseers will be pleased to make returne to this Court at that time of w^t they shall do herein.636

At a meeting of the Overseers held October 24, 1654:

M^r Henry Dunster after sundry conferences that had passed between the Overseers & himself made his finall Resignation in these following words.

This Resignation of M^r Dunsters was voted & consented to by the Overseers the 24^th of the 8^th 1654.637

At the same meeting of the Overseers, on October 24, 1654:

At a meeting of the Overseers held November 2, 1654:

The condition having been accepted, “The Rev^d m^r Charls Chauncy was,” on November 27, 1654, at a “meeting of the Hon^d & Rev^d Overseers of Harvard Colledge, at the College Hall in Cambridge,” “solemnly inaugurated into the place of President.”640

It thus appears that Dunster’s resignation was first presented on June 10, 1654; that it was not immediately accepted; that the Overseers were empowered by the General Court to make provision, in case Dunster persisted in his resolution more than one month, for some “meet person” to carry on the college work, etc.; that on October 24 Dunster, after conferences with the Overseers, made his final resignation, which was accepted on the same day; that on the same day (October 24) the Overseers appointed Richard Mather and John Norton to confer with Chauncy with a view of offering the presidency to him, and also committed the care and government of the College to the Fellows; and that on November 2 the Overseers instructed Mather and Norton to tender the place to Chauncy, who accepted and was inaugurated on November 27. It is obvious, therefore, that if Cotton Mather meant that the presidency was offered to Comenius in 1654 — and that is the interpretation always placed on Mather’s words641 — the statement cannot possibly be true. It is conceivable that immediately after June 10 the Overseers placed themselves in correspondence with Comenius, but there is no evidence that this was done, and Dunster clearly remained in charge of the College until his final resignation on October 24, since it was not until then that the College was committed to the care of the Fellows. Besides, even if Comenius had been written to in June, a reply could hardly have been received before October 24.

But because Comenius could not have been offered the presidency in 1654, must Mather’s story therefore be wholly rejected? It could hardly have been invented, and must have had some basis. What was this basis?

“Comenius,” said Mather in 1702, “was indeed agreed withall, by our Mr. Winthrop in his Travels through the Low Countries, to come over into New-England, and Illuminate this Colledge and Country, in the Quality of a President: But the Solicitations of the Swedish Ambassador, diverting him another way, that Incomparable Moravian became not an American.” By “Swedish Ambassador,” Mather apparently meant Count Axel Oxenstiern, who, born in 1583, became Chancellor in 1611, and died on August 28, 1654. But the passage just quoted is not the only one in which Mather told the story. A quarter of a century later — to be exact, in 1726 — he again returned to the subject, using words which hitherto have escaped notice. Speaking of the churches of New England, he said:

Here, it will be observed, there is no allusion either to “our Mr. Winthrop” or to the Low Countries, but the reference to Sweden is repeated. Now it is known with certainty that in 1642 Comenius, then in England, was “diverted” to Sweden.

Before pursuing this episode, let us inquire into the identity of “our Mr. Winthrop,” who travelled in the Low Countries. He has been identified as Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts,644 as Governor John Winthrop, Jr., of Connecticut,645 and as Wait Winthrop,646 the son of Governor John Winthrop, Jr., of Connecticut. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts was never, so far as is known, on the Continent, he came to this country in 1630, he never returned to Europe, and he died in 1649. Wait Winthrop was born on February 27, 1642. Hence those two Winthrops must be eliminated. There can be no reasonable doubt that “our Mr. Winthrop” was Governor John Winthrop, Jr., of Connecticut.647 Born on February 12, 1606, in 1627 he joined the ill-fated expedition under Buckingham to the Isle of Rhé, and in 1628 and 1629 he travelled on the Continent. Mather says of him:

Winthrop was not at Cambridge University,649 nor was he, in 1628–1629, either in France or in Germany, though he had been in the former country earlier and was in the latter country in 1642.650 Leaving London about June 11, 1628, he went by sea to Leghorn, thence by sea to Constantinople, thence by sea to Venice, thence by sea to Amsterdam, thence to Flushing, and thence by sea to London, which he reached in August, 1629.651 Early in 1628 Comenius went to Lissa, Poland, and there remained certainly until 1640.652 In 1629 Winthrop was a young man of twenty-three, while Comenius had not yet attained fame; but even if, of which there is no evidence, the two met in that year, obviously nothing could have been said about the presidency of an institution that did not come into existence until seven or eight years later. Two years after his return to England from Holland, Winthrop came to New England, reaching Boston in November, 1631;653 and in New England he remained, with the exception of an occasional trip to Europe, until his death on April 5, 1676. It has been stated that “his public duties obliged him repeatedly to visit England,”654 but this is an exaggeration, since in the forty-five years he lived in New England he visited Europe only three times, though apparently other trips were contemplated.655 As he had relatives and friends living in the Low Countries, and as he had already once been there himself, we should naturally expect him to visit them again, and this he certainly did on at least two of his three trips.

Winthrop’s first visit was made in 1634–1635. Leaving Boston in October, 1634,656 he had an eventful experience, which, under date of October, 1635, his father thus related:

The younger Winthrop was in London on July 7, 1635,660 embarked on the Abigail on July 10,661 and reached Boston about October 6, “with commission,” as his father wrote, “from the Lord Say, Lord Brook, and divers other great persons in England, to begin a plantation at Connecticut, and to be governor there.”662 On this journey he did not, so far as is known, go to the Continent, though he may have done so.663 Comenius was living at Lissa at that time, and certainly was not in England. But even if Winthrop and Comenius met or corresponded, nothing could have been said or written about the presidency of a college that was not founded until 1636.

Winthrop’s third visit was made in 1661–1663.664 He sailed in July, and reached England late in September, 1661.665 He signed a document in London on April 7, 1663,666 left there April 9,667 and was back in Connecticut in June.668 About 1647 Comenius returned to Lissa, but in 1650 settled at Saros-Patak in Hungary, where he remained until 1654, when he once more returned to Lissa. On April 29, 1656, that town was sacked by the Poles, and Comenius’s books, writings, and property were destroyed. He himself went to Silesia, then to Frankfort on the Oder, then to Stettin, then to Hamburg, and finally to Amsterdam, where, under the protection of Laurence de Geer, the son of his former patron, he lived from 1656 until his death on November 15, 1670.669 Did Winthrop visit the Low Countries in 1661–1663? In a letter to Governor Stuyvesant dated June 21, 1661, Winthrop said:

In his reply, dated New Amsterdam, July 5, 1661,671 Stuyvesant wrote:

In a letter dated July 23, 1663, Thomas Willett reminded Winthrop that “ate yowar going for Holland, thar was a parshall of wampon sente, and allso som lefte bey yowar selfe when you went awaey.”673 The presumption that Winthrop sailed from New Amsterdam to Holland in 1661 is made a certainty by the account of “Issues debtor to Powder delivered from the first May, A° 1661, to the last of November, as appears by the Gunner’s Delivery Book,” which shows that one hundred and fifty-nine pounds of powder were expended at the time of his departure:674

That Winthrop and Comenius met in September, 1661, is possible, even probable; but even if they did, no formal offer of the presidency of Harvard could have been made to Comenius, since there was no vacancy in the office from the inauguration of Chauncy on November 27, 1654, to his death on February 19, 1672, fifteen months after the decease of Comenius. Moreover, in 1661 Winthrop had no official connection with Harvard, while Comenius was then a man of nearly seventy.676

There remains to be considered Winthrop’s second visit in 1641–1643. Leaving Boston August 3, 1641,677 he was a fortnight in reaching Newfoundland, where he spent three weeks, and then sailed for Bristol, arriving there on September 28, 1641.678 Returning, he left England in May, 1643, but, owing to untoward circumstances, did not reach Boston until about September.679

Besides being the son of the Governor of Massachusetts, the younger Winthrop, then thirty-five years of age, was already a man of note on his own account; he had gone to England on public business in 1634–1635, returning with a commission from Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and “divers other great persons in England, to begin a plantation at Connecticut, and to be governor there;” he was in correspondence with many celebrated persons in Europe; and during his stay in Europe from September, 1641, to May, 1643, he must have met many distinguished men, though unfortunately only one of his letters during that long period has been preserved.680 Moreover, he then was, had been for some years before, and continued to be for some years afterwards, a magistrate of Massachusetts.681 Finally, it can be shown that in the autumn of 1642 he visited both Germany and the Low Countries — a fact of which we should be ignorant but for the accident that the goods and books he shipped from Hamburg to Amsterdam were captured by a Dunkirker. In a letter dated at the Hague, November 1, 1642, Sir William Boswell, British resident at that place, wrote to Sir Henry De Vic, British agent at Brussels, as follows:

It has already been said that Comenius was in England in 1642. What took him there can best be told in his own words:

The object of Comenius’s visit to England having failed, “his position was unpleasant. On the strength of Hartlib’s invitation and assurance that funds would be forthcoming, he had given up his post in Lissa. Hopes of universal colleges and pecuniary support were now vanishing into thin air, and he found himself with baffled expectations, a wife and daughters to support, and a rapidly emptying purse.”685 At this time he is said, but perhaps on uncertain authority, to have been asked by Marin Mersenne686 to go to France, but declined. But an invitation to go to Sweden, given by Ludwig de Geer, a Dutch merchant then living at Norrköping, Sweden, was accepted. Leaving London in June, 1642, Comenius, apparently by way of Holland and Germany, reached Norrköping in August, and was almost at once summoned to Stockholm by Chancellor Oxenstiern, after which he took up his residence at Elbing in Prussia, which he reached in November.687 Though there is no proof that Comenius and Winthrop met in 1641–1642, yet attention should be called to certain coincidences. They both reached England in the same month — September, 1641. The former had come on the invitation of Samuel Hartlib, who later was a personal friend and correspondent of Winthrop’s and may well have been so in 1642.688 Both remained in England some seven months, both were in Holland and Germany in the summer or autumn of 1642.689

Indeed, it is quite within the bounds of possibility that they were travelling companions for a portion of Comenius’s journey from London to Norrköping.

Before the decision of Comenius to accept the invitation to Sweden was reached, may not Winthrop have suggested to Comenius his coming to America? No formal offer of the presidency of Harvard could have been made, because no vacancy occurred in the office from the time of Dunster’s appointment on August 27, 1640, to his resignation on October 24, 1654. But this does not preclude the possibility that the matter was discussed between Comenius and Winthrop, the latter suggesting that when a vacancy did occur the place might be offered to the former. It has been objected that Winthrop had no authority to make an offer. “I fail to find,” says Mr. Monroe, “that he had anything to do with the management of Harvard College.”690 This objection is not so serious as it seems. The first board of Overseers, appointed on November 20, 1637, consisted of six magistrates, among them Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, and six ministers; and on September 27, 1642, the board was reorganized so as to include the magistrates and the teaching elders of the six next adjoining towns. Thus from that date until 1650, the younger Winthrop was entitled as a magistrate691 to take his seat as an Overseer, though whether he ever did so is not known. But it is to be remembered that in the early days of the College, the legislature constantly took a hand in the management of its affairs,692 even to the ignoring of the College charter itself. By that instrument, dated May 31, 1650, the Corporation consisted of a President, a Treasurer, and five Fellows, and the Corporation was authorized “to elect a new President, Fellows, or Treasurer, so oft, and from time to time, as any of the said persons shall die or be removed.” Nevertheless, as we have already seen, Dunster’s final resignation in 1654 was made to the Overseers, the selection and the election of his successor was placed by the General Court wholly in the hands of the Overseers, and even Chauncy’s successor in 1672 may have been elected not by the Corporation but by the Overseers.693 Indeed, nearly a quarter of a century went by before the Corporation exercised what now is its unquestioned right “to elect a new President.” Thus the influence of the younger Winthrop as a magistrate and as the son of the Governor of Massachusetts would have been much greater than as a Fellow, had he held that position, since for many years the Fellows were practically merely Tutors.

The pastime of picking flaws in Cotton Mather’s statements is too easy to afford much amusement. The passage under discussion, it seems to me, is distinctly one the basis for which is to be found in a tradition. A college boy of thirteen when the younger Winthrop died in 1676, Mather of course could not have derived the information from Winthrop himself. But Mather was an intimate friend of the younger Winthrop’s sons John and Wait and of Wait’s son John,694 preaching a funeral sermon on each of the two former (in 1707 and 1717 respectively695); through his father Increase Mather and his grandfather Richard Mather, the latter of whom became an Overseer in 1642 and took an active part in the selection of Dunster’s successor in 1654, he must have been saturated with all the gossip pertaining to Harvard College; and he appears to have made rather a specialty of the traditions of the Winthrop family. This was readily acknowledged by the late Robert C. Winthrop, who in 1864 wrote: “Now, Cotton Mather was certainly in the way of knowing something about the facts which he states in regard to the Winthrop Family. . . . The family traditions, at least, must thus have been abundantly familiar to him.”696

I have endeavored to set forth, of course merely as a conjecture, a possible explanation of Mather’s story that may be plausible. It should be added that another suggestion has been made in a question recently asked me by a correspondent. “Do you not think,” he writes, “that the projected college at New Haven was the one really concerned?” Sporadic efforts to found a college at New Haven were made between 1648 and about 1660,697 after which nothing further is heard of the affair for many years.698 Cotton Mather was not born until 1663, and it is doubtful in the extreme whether he had ever heard of these abortive efforts. At all events, there can be no possible doubt that in his mind it was Harvard College over which Comenius was asked to preside. His exact words are, “and Illuminate this Colledge” — that is, Harvard College, of which (and which alone) he was writing the history,699 which was the only college in existence not only in New England but in this country700 during the lifetime of the younger Winthrop, and the only one in New England at the time when Mather’s passage701 was written.702 In 1634–1635 and in 1641–1643 Winthrop could hardly have invited Comenius to be head of an institution which was not thought of until 1648. John Davenport was one of those who pushed the scheme in 1660, at which time Winthrop was Governor of Connecticut703 and must have known about his friend’s cherished plan. But in 1661 Comenius was, as already stated, a man of nearly seventy.

Three other questions may be asked, the replies to which will not be without interest. First, was Comenius personally known to any of his New England contemporaries? So far as direct evidence is concerned, this question must be answered in the negative.704 Nevertheless, it is not only possible but probable that Comenius was known personally to the younger Winthrop, and he may well have met, especially during his residence at Amsterdam from 1656 to 1670, other New Englanders.

Secondly, did Comenius correspond with any of his New England contemporaries?705 It was Samuel Hartlib who had invited Comenius to come to England in 1641, and less than twenty years later Hartlib and Winthrop were on terms of intimate friendship. How long had this friendship lasted? On April 15, 1661 — or several months before he went to England in that year — Winthrop wrote to Thomas Lake: “I make bold w^th you to transmitt by your hand to Colonell Temple those books . . . w^ch you will receive heerw^th (want of fitt artists heere must be my excuse that they appeare in that dessolate forme); they were sent me before winter, from the great intelligence of Europe, M^r Samuell Hartleb, a Germā gentlemā, as conteinig something of novelty.”706 In a letter to William (afterwards Lord) Brereton dated November 6, 1663, Winthrop spoke of some proposals “w^ch I had formerly hinted to M^r Hartlib in a letter frō home”707 — that is, before his departure for England in 1661. In a letter to Winthrop dated September 3, 1661, Hartlib, evidently not knowing that his correspondent would arrive in London that very month,708 said: “Our Publique Miseries and my privat condition (to speak of no Particulars at present) are such that yet I must answer briefely your most loving Letters of Octob. 25, 1660 & May 10, 1661. I heartily thank you again for y^e barrel of Cramburies w^ch was very safely delivered to mee. The present of the Indian Corne I have not received to this day, but professe mys. highly oblieged to your generous courtesy.”709 In a letter to Winthrop dated August 11, 1660, John Davenport said:

Thus Winthrop and Hartlib were in correspondence before August, 1660, in which year Winthrop wrote “most loving letters,” clearly showing that the two men must have been friends of long standing. In a letter to Winthrop dated August 19, 1659, Davenport wrote:

And on December 6, 1659, Davenport again referred to the books mentioned in the letter just quoted:

The “booke concerning bees,” which Winthrop “desired,” was no doubt Hartlib’s Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees, and the other four books were all edited or published by him.718

Hence in 1659 Hartlib was an “ancient and honored friend” of Davenport’s. May he not also have been an “ancient and honored friend” of Winthrop’s? Various facts indicate that such a conclusion is highly probable. Winthrop himself spoke of Hartlib as “the great intelligence of Europe,” a position acquired by him soon after his coming from Germany to England about 1628; and “no person,” as our associate Professor Kittredge puts it in a letter to me, of “John Winthrop, Jr.’s scientific interests, family position, and character, if in England at all, could have escaped Hartlib’s acquaintance.” It will be recalled that in 1642 Sir William Boswell characterized Winthrop not as an American colonist, not as a New Englander, not even as the son of the Governor of Massachusetts, but as “a Suffolk gentleman and student in physic.”719 Winthrop’s studies had begun at an early age. In 1628 he was giving medical advice;720 before he left England in 1631 he was corresponding with Edward Howes on medical and chemical subjects;721 immediately on his arrival here he was requested to send over some “Indian creatures alive;”722 by 1636 he was known to the Kefflers (or Kuffiers), who were correspondents

of Hartlib;723 and before 1641 he was well known to Dr. Robert Child,724 who was also a personal friend of Hartlib’s.725 In a letter to Winthrop dated January 31, 1655, Sir Kenelm Digby, who knew all the scientific men in England, declared that he would not let “the fauourable conueyance of M^r Downing . . . escape me without saluting you, to reuiue me in y^r remembrance, and to wittnesse that j retaine faithfully the respects j haue euer had for you since j haue had the happinesse to be acquainted w^th y^r great worth,” hoped that “att my coming into England,726 j should haue had the comfort of finding you here,” urged Winthrop “to delay no further time in making y^r owne country happy by returning to it,” and expressed his “great affection.”727 Obviously, the friendship here had been of long standing.

Another early link between Winthrop and Hartlib is found in George Stirk, afterwards famous in Europe under the name of Starkey. When sent here from Bermuda, he was committed to the special care of Governor Winthrop of Massachustts;728 he graduated from Harvard College in 1646; he was practising medicine in Boston In 1647 and 1648;729 while here he doubtless made the acquaintance of Dr. Robert Child through the younger Winthrop; on going to England he met Robert Boyle certainly as early as 1652, perhaps in 1651,730 having been presented to him by Child;731 almost immediately after his arrival in England Stirk, as Cardilucius testifies,732 made Hartlib’s acquaintance (which is also acknowledged by Hartlib in letters written in 1654);733 and in 1655 Stirk contributed two letters to Hartlib’s Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees.734

In his letter to Winthrop of September 3, 1661, Hartlib said: “Mr. Comenius is continualy diverted by particular Controversies of Socinians & others from his main Pansophical Work, but some weekes agoe hee wrote that hee would no more engage hims. in any Particular Controversy, but would refer y^em all to his Pansophical Worke.”735 It is reasonable to suppose that Comenius and Winthrop met in 1661, for both were then at Amsterdam, the former was famous, while the latter was the most distinguished American then living; and it is probable in the extreme that they met in 1642. But however that may be, we are not left to conjecture as to the fact of Winthrop’s having corresponded with Comenius as well as with Hartlib. The John Winthrop who graduated from Harvard College in 1700 is usually, to distinguish him from others of the same name, called John Winthrop, F.R.S., though no fewer than three John Winthrops were Fellows of the Royal Society.736 The Harvard graduate of 1700 was the son of Wait Winthrop, who was the son of John Winthrop, Jr.737 In 1741 was published the fortieth volume of the Philosophical Transactions, with a dedication written by Dr. Cromwell Mortimer, then Secretary of the Royal Society. This dedication “To the Honourable John Winthrop, Esq; Fellow of the Royal Society, &c. &c.,” reads in part as follows:

And in a footnote to the words “the strict Correspondence he afterwards cultivated,” Dr. Mortimer adds: “As might appear from the great Treasure of curious Letters on various learned Subjects still in your Hands, E. gr. from . . . Ds. Comenius. . . . Many of which you have given me the Pleasure of perusing; besides a great Number which it would take up too much Room here to recite.” Dr. Mortimer’s list of Winthrop’s correspondents contains the names of no less than eighty-two distinguished persons, among them Boyle, Lord Brooke, Clarendon, Charles II, Cromwell, Sir Kenelm Digby, Galileo, Glauber, Hartlib, van Helmont, Kepler, Dr. J. S. Kuffeler,739 Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, Oldenburg, Dr. Pell,740 Prince Rupert, Lord Saye and Sele, Dr. George Starkie, and Sir Christopher Wren. As Galileo died in 1642, van Helmont in 1644, and Kepler in 1630, Winthrop must have begun early to correspond with celebrated men.

The succession of the Winthrop papers was presumably from Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts to his son, John Winthrop, Jr.; from John Winthrop, Jr., to his son, John Winthrop; from the latter John Winthrop, who had no son, to his brother Wait Winthrop; and from Wait Winthrop to his son, John Winthrop, F.R.S. If the letter or letters that passed between the younger John Winthrop and Comenius — letters which were in existence in 1741, which very likely had been seen by Dr. Mortimer, and which may perfectly well have been seen by Mather — are ever recovered, who knows but what they will corroborate Cotton Mather’s discredited story at least to the extent of proving that a discussion or correspondence took place between Winthrop and Comenius in regard to the latter’s coming to this country and becoming President of Harvard when a vacancy occurred?741

Thirdly, to what extent were Comenius’s works known to New England scholars and used in New England schools and colleges in the seventeenth century and early in the eighteenth century? Did his fame, as was asserted in 1892, reach “even far distant America”?742 On this point there is an abundance of evidence. “Though Comenius himself did not come to America,” remarks Mr. Hanus, “his textbooks, especially the Janua, did come. They seem to have been used as text-books here in Massachusetts; perhaps in Harvard College itself, more probably in the Boston Latin School.”743 It was not the text-books alone, however, that early found their way across the Atlantic. John Harvard, as is well known, came to New England in 1637 and died in 1638, leaving half of his estate and all of his books to the infant College. In the list of the latter is “Anchorani porta linguarum.”744 Our associate Mr. Potter745 thinks that this was undoubtedly the copy of Comenius’s Porta Linguarum Trilinguis published at London in 1631 and listed in the Catalogue printed in 1723, where (as in the above list) it is entered under the name of the editor, Joannes Anchoranus.746 Thus within two years after the founding of the College and within one year after its actual beginning, the College owned at least one of Comenius’s works. The Catalogue of 1723 gives three other books by Comenius,747 but of course it is impossible to say how long they had been in the library. In the inventory of the estate of William Tyng, made on May 25, 1653, is found a copy of “Janua Linguarum.”748 The Rev. Samuel Lee, who died in 1691 and whose library was sold in Boston in 1693, owned two of Comenius’s works — “Comenij Physica” and “History of the Bohemian Persecution.”749 In his letter to Winthrop of September 3, 1661, which, it will be remembered, contained an allusion to Comenius,750 Hartlib said:

This book by Comenius was published at Amsterdam in 1660. A copy of the same book was bought by Increase Mather in London, was sent to his father in January, 1661, and is now owned by the American Antiquarian Society.753 It bears on a fly-leaf the following inscription:754

Many books by Comenius have found their way to American libraries, some of which are worthy of notice.755 Several were owned by different members of the Mather family.756 In the Boston Athenæum is a copy of Historia Revelationum (1659), which has three signatures on the title-page: “J G Percival,” who of course was James Gates Percival; “Richard Salters,” which is the autograph of the Rev. Richard Salter who graduated at Harvard College in 1739; and “John Norton,” here reproduced:757

The Boston Public Library has a copy of Janua Linguarum Trilinguis (London, 1685) which has on the title-page the words “Ex libris Thomæ Berry 1710;” and on the first page of the Prsefatio, in the hand of Judge Sewall, the words “August. 17. 1703;” and also the signatures “Iosephum Sevallum,” “John Rogers,” and “Iosephum Sevallum” again, the last two with a line through each. Thomas Berry of the Class of 1685 married Margaret Rogers, daughter of President John Rogers (H. C. 1649), and their son Thomas Berry graduated at Harvard in 1712.758 Perhaps the book belonged to the elder Thomas Berry and passed from him to his brother-in-law John Rogers of the Class of 1684, or to the latter’s son, John Rogers of the Class of 1711.759 Joseph Sewall entered the Boston Public Latin School in 1696 760 and graduated at Harvard in 1707. Judge Sewall describes how he took his son to Cambridge:

The Judge may have taken the book out to Joseph on August 23.

A copy in the Yale University Library of Janua Linguarum Reserata (London, 1672) has on a fly-leaf the words “Timothy Stevens his Book, Anno 1681.” It is a fair guess that this was the Rev. Timothy Stevens who graduated at Harvard in the Class of 1687 and settled at Glastonbury, Connecticut.763

In the same library is a copy of “A Reformation of Schooles, Designed in two excellent Treatises: . . . translated into English, and published by Samuel Hartlib, for the general good of this Nation” (London, 1642), on a fly-leaf of which are the words “Sam Andrews, his booke.” This may well have belonged to the Rev. Samuel Andrew who graduated at Harvard in 1681, settled at Milford, Connecticut, and became Rector of Yale College;764 or to his son Samuel Andrew, who graduated at Yale in 1711;765 or to the latter’s son Samuel Andrew, who graduated at Yale in 1739 and to whom his grandfather in 1717 left by will his library.766

It is the Harvard College Library, however, that owns the largest number of books by Comenius, most of which were given to the College soon after the destruction of the library by fire in 1764.767 The chief benefactors in this line were the Rev. John Barnard of Marblehead of the Class of 1700, and Middlecott Cooke of the Class of 1723. The latter was a son of Elisha Cooke (H. C. 1697), who was a son of Elisha Cooke (H. C. 1657), who was a son of Richard Cooke.

A copy of Janua Linguarum Reserata (London, 1650) has on a flyleaf “Elisha Cooke his Booke;” in another place “Elkanah Cooke his B;” on another fly-leaf “Elkanah Cooke;” and finally, on the same fly-leaf as the last, the following:

Elkanah Cooke was a younger brother of the first Elisha Cooke, and no doubt the book was used by them at the Boston Public Latin School.768 Born in 1640 or 1641,769 Elkanah Cooke signed documents in 1656, 1658, and 1660,770 after which all trace of him is lost, and, as he is not mentioned in the will of his father, dated December 18, 1673,771 the presumption is that he died young.

Among the many Comenius books given by the Rev. John Barnard is a copy of Physicse ad Lumen divinum Reformatse Synopsis (Amsterdam, 1645), on the fly-leaves of which are written “John Barnard Ejus Liber Anno Domini 1693;” and “John Barnard His Book Anno Dom 1696;” and also the following:

John Barnard entered the Boston Public Latin School in 1689,772 and graduated at Harvard in the Class of 1700. John Swift graduated at Harvard in 1697.

On a fly-leaf at the beginning of a copy of Janua Aurea Linguarum (Amsterdam, 1649) is inscribed:

“From the Quinquennial Catalogue,” remarks Mr. Hanus, “it appears that John Phillips was a member of the class of 1735, John Davenport [who graduated in 1721] was a tutor from. 1728 to 1732, and Josiah Swan was a member of the class of 1733. If these are the worthies named on the fly-leaf it looks as if the freshman was induced to ask the tutor to step up to the junior’s study for liquid refreshments. Those must have been happy times!”

On fly-leaves at the end of the same book is written:

We have here what is perhaps the only extant autograph773 of an Indian student at Harvard College in the seventeenth century — a student, moreover, of whom, oddly enough, the younger Winthrop himself gave a very interesting account. In a letter to Robert Boyle dated November 3, 1663, Winthrop wrote:

The two Indians whose exercises were thought worthy of being sent to the Royal Society, though apparently not hitherto identified, were unquestionably Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Jacoomis, both of the Class of 1665. The former duly graduated, being the only Indian whose name adorns the Quinquennial Catalogue, though by that fatality which seemed to pursue the educated Indians he died of consumption the following year; while Joel met with a tragic death shortly before the Commencement at which he was to have graduated. Their story, as written by Daniel Gookin in 1674, is worth repeating:

Finally, the New York Society Library owns two of Comenius’s books which no doubt were once in the possession of the younger Winthrop — indeed, may possibly have been given to him by Comenius himself. These are Physicæ ad Lumen divinum Reformatæ; Synopsis (Amsterdam, 1645), and Janua Linguarum (London, 1652).780

Nor were the scholars of New England content with merely buying the works of Comenius or with using them at school or college, — they also studied them and quoted them in their own books. Thus in “A Defence of the Answer and Arguments of the Synod Met at Boston in the Year 1662. Concerning The Subject of Baptism and Consociation of Churches,” published at our Cambridge in 1664, Richard Mather more than once cited Comenius’s Ratio Disciplinæ.781 In his Discourse Concerning the Subject of Baptisme, published at Cambridge in 1675, Increase Mather wrote:

How Cotton Mather in a book published in 1726 imitated in his title the same work by Comenius has already been pointed out.783 And in 1738 Samuel Mather cited the same work.784

Whatever may be thought of the views expressed in this paper, at least there can be no doubt that the fame of Comenius did indeed reach “even far distant America.”

CATALOGUE OF JOHN HARVARD’S LIBRARY

In the Record Book of Harvard College known as College Book No. I there occurs on pages 264–258 a list of the books bequeathed to the College by John Harvard.785 This list, formerly erroneously supposed to be in the handwriting of President Dunster, bears the following heading:

The change from “Hervertus” to “Harvardus” shows a curious uncertainty in the mind of the writer as to at least the Latin form of the benefactor’s name. The list comprises 250 entries, each numbered in pencil in a later hand. These are very brief, usually confined to a single line, but on the other hand often including several works by an author and occasionally books by more than one author. The entries are made usually under the author but sometimes under the title, with no attempt at uniformity. The arrangement is alphabetical only under the first letter. The nature of many of the entries would indicate that the binder’s titles were used, and some of the errors make at least plausible the suggestion that the list was taken down by dictation.

Some years ago our colleague Mr. Andrew McF. Davis printed this list, with identification of many of the baffling titles.786 But for his excellent pioneer work the present writer would never have undertaken the task of compiling a catalogue of John Harvard’s library. The Catalogue of the College Library published in 1723787 has been one of the main sources of identification, for it is a fairly safe assumption that if a title given in the Harvard list reappears in this Catalogue it is the book and edition that John Harvard owned. Rather over half of the titles have thus been found. Unfortunately, this Catalogue gives only the briefest of titles, often hard to recognize owing to abbreviation, and has many misprints, especially in the dates. Beyond these sources, the usual library catalogues and bibliographies have been used, e.g., the catalogues of the British Museum, the Bodleian, Trinity College (Dublin), the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the bibliographies of Lowndes, Watt, Jöcher, etc. And occasionally some bookseller’s catalogue would by chance furnish a clue to a cryptic title. But there still remain some forty titles that are either wholly unidentified or whose identification is uncertain. Some of these are from entries that are so vague as to render any attempt to discover the book out of the question: see “Christianity” (no. 58), “H” (no. 15), and “N. Test. Lat.” (no. 157). Others, “Chareus in Epist.” (no.61), or “Household Phys.” (no. 104), ought to be found, but so far have eluded my researches.

The size of Harvard’s library has been variously estimated. Quincy788 said there were 260 volumes; Mr. Davis in 1888789 gave the number as “evidently over 300,” but twenty years later revised his figures and said there were 373 volumes.790 This confusion arises partly from counting titles rather than volumes and partly from the uncertainty in the list itself. A count made from the present attempt at a catalogue shows that there were 400 volumes, representing 329 titles.

But one, or at most two, of John Harvard’s books escaped the fire that destroyed the Library in 1764: Downame’s Christian Warfare against the Devill, World and Flesh (no. 78), and, possibly, the English Statutes of 1587 (no. 69). But many of the others have been replaced from time to time, until now the Library (including the Andover-Harvard Theological Library) has over sixty per cent of the identified titles. Attempts have been made of recent years to pick up the rest, but without much success. Lists have been sent the rounds of the English booksellers with only meagre results. One dealer told me he recognized many of the titles as those of books he had sold for waste paper. Of the books now represented in the Library, 111 are the same editions that Harvard had and 85 are in other but contemporary editions.

A few words may be given to the general character of the books as revealed by the catalogue. Nearly three-quarters of the collection is theological. About half of these consist of biblical commentary, about equally divided between the Old and the New Testaments, and mainly in Latin. While there are a number of volumes of sermons, there is comparatively little of religious controversy. The works of several Jesuit writers stand out among those of Puritan divines. The classics are well represented, — often, rather curiously, in English translations, as Chapman’s Homer, Holland’s Pliny, and North’s Plutarch. There are a number of grammars and dictionaries, Greek, Hebrew, and English, and half a dozen books of extracts, or phrases, as Ocland’s Anglorum Prælia, La Primaudaye’s French Academy, and Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence. These last are probably among the books of Harvard’s schoolboy days. English literature and history find scanty place in this library, — Bacon’s Essays and the poems of Quarles and Wither representing the former, and Camden’s Remaines and a tract on the Plague and another on the Gunpowder Plot (see nos. 132 and 158) covering the latter field. There is some science, some scholastic philosophy, and several medical books. A few books on logic and two on law are also to be found in the collection. It is worth noting that 86 books, or over one-fourth of the whole library, were printed in or after 1630.