Charles I's Killers in America by Matthew Jenkinson

Author:Matthew Jenkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192552570
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Revisiting the royal commission of 1664

In 1799 Hannah Adams’s Summary History of New-England, From the First Settlement at Plymouth was ‘published according to Act of Congress’. It included the story of Whalley and Goffe and described them in terms very similar to Trumbull’s: ‘gentlemen of distinguished abilities’ who had ‘moved in an exalted sphere’.38 Adams, a distant cousin of President John Adams, retold the story of the regicides’ arrival in Boston, their time in the cave outside New Haven, their journey to Milford, their return to New Haven, and their later residence in Hadley. Fundamentally, she linked their time in hiding to the colonists’ fear that Charles II would remove their liberty and privileges. Adams was convinced that Charles was determined to rule like his father. The colonists’ enemies in England, she argued, ‘gave exaggerated accounts of every interesting occurrence, and the king was prejudiced by their representations’.39 One such ‘interesting occurrence’, presumably, would have been the case study of Whalley and Goffe and their protection, through a variety of means, by colonial authorities.

For Hannah Adams, when Charles II sent the 1664 commission with its four officials—Nichols, Carr, Cartwright, and Maverick—the king’s primary intention was not to advance English claims over Dutch colonies but to reduce the English colonies to ‘the plan of twelve royal provinces, according to the ideas adopted by his father in 1635, and to have a viceroy over the whole’.40 As we have seen, the reality was a little subtler than this. Although the question of jurisdiction was present, neither king nor colonial authority was prepared to concede sovereignty, and each side initially was careful to ensure it did not significantly rile the other. The warships and soldiers that arrived in the summer of 1664 were targeted ostensibly at New Netherland. Although New Englanders might fear that Charles would use this military force against them, the king could always argue that this was a deluded and wilful misinterpretation. After all, his pursuit of the regicides at the time—if we can call it a real pursuit—was careful and measured. The commissioners were to discover who had protected the regicides but not to arrest them. The ‘protectors’ were simply to be encouraged to ‘take the more care for their future behaviour’. This was potentially a sinister threat but it was not an overtly aggressive and intrusive one.

But Hannah Adams allowed no such subtlety in 1799. The 1664 commission was just another example, she suggested, of the British government threatening the independent sovereignty and jurisdiction of New England. The colonies ‘disrelished’ this threat because of their ‘strong aversion to arbitrary power’. Moreover, Adams argued, ‘the inhabitants of New England may emphatically be said to be born free. They were settled originally upon the principle . . . that “all men are born free, equal and independent” ’. The 1664 commission, she argued, ‘excited the irritability natural to a people jealous for their liberty’.41 There can have been few more overt claims to a direct connection between the seventeenth-century European settlement of New England and the American Revolution.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.