non-conformist ministers. Every necessary for the foundation of a permanent colony was carried out by the settlers.
In regard to this important movement of transferring the government of the colony from England to America, the observations of Dr. Robertson are worthy attention: "In this singular transaction," he says, "to which there is nothing similar in the history of English colonization, two circumstances merit particular attention: one is the power of the Company to make this transference; the other is the silent acquiescence with which the king permitted it to take place. If the validity of this determination of the Company be tried by the charter which constituted it a body politic, and conveyed to it all the corporate powers with which it was invested, it is evident that it could neither exercise those powers in any mode different from what the charter prescribed, nor alienate them in such a manner as to convert the jurisdiction of a trading corporation in England into a provincial government in America. But from the first institution of the Company of Massachusetts Bay, its members seem to have been animated with a spirit of innovation in civil policy, as well as in religion; and by the habit of rejecting established usages in the one, they were prepared for deviating from them in the other. They had applied for a royal charter in order to give legal effect to their operations in England as acts of a body politic; but the persons whom they sent out to America, as soon as they landed there, considered themselves as individuals united together by voluntary association, possessing the natural right of men who form a society, to adopt what mode of government, and to enact what laws, they deemed most conducive to the general felicity. Upon this principle of being entitled to judge and decide for themselves, they established their church in Salem, without regard to the institutions of the Church of England, of which the charter supposed them to be members, and bound, of consequence, to conformity with its ritual. Suitably to the same ideas, we shall observe them framing all their future plans of civil and ecclesiastical policy. The king, though abundantly vigilant in observing and checking slighter encroachments on his prerogative, was either so much occupied with other cares, occasioned by his fatal breach with his parliament, that he could not attend to the proceedings of the Company, or he was so much pleased with the proposal of removing a body of turbulent subjects to a distant country, where they might be useful, and could not prove dangerous, that he was disposed to connive at the irregularity of a measure which facilitated their departure."[1]
Winthrop, Dudley, and others had embarked on board the Arbella, so named after the Lady Arbella Johnson, who, with her husband, was also a passenger. They arrived in the Bay in June, and found Endicott at Charlestown, where, at first, they contemplated forming a settlement. The opposite
- ↑ Robertson's "History of America," book x., p 230,—See also, Chalmers's "Introduction to History of Revolt of American Colonies," vol. i., pp. 42, 3.
