The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood
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appeared to be a winning proposition: it would help to establish royal authority in the region and support itself with the revenue from Mason’s lands—which Mason assured Whitehall would be large.15
Of course, no one could deny that this design had certain pitfalls. The thorniest issue concerned the people who believed they already owned the land that Mason now claimed as his own. Not surprisingly, few if any landowners proved hospitable to Mason’s claims, and to make matters worse, the initial commission that established royal government in 1679 gave political power to some of the men most likely to resist the proprietor’s designs, like council members Richard Waldron and John Gilman, two of the colony’s largest landowners. Faced with widespread disobedience, Mason waged a nasty battle with his political rivals, accusing Waldron and Gilman of being enemies of the king for several incriminating statements they had made. The council fought back by ordering Mason’s arrest “to give Answer for his Usurpacon over His Ma[jes]t[ie]s Authority.” In the main, the initial struggle between Mason and his enemies had little to do with royal government. Both sides accepted the king’s authority, and claimed to be the true representatives of the royal interest. They differed on one very discrete issue: whether or not Mason had a right to the land.16
In 1682 the crown appointed a new governor, Edward Cranfield, to break the impasse. The reasons for his appointment are unclear: he was a military man, a minor officer in the queen’s household, who had successfully negotiated with the Dutch in Surinam for the return of some English planters there in the 1670s. Some historians have argued that Robert Mason engineered Cranfield’s appointment, knowing he would support the proprietor’s interest, but there is no positive evidence for that assertion. In the main, historians have castigated Cranfield for his sins but done little to examine his policies, characterizing him as “rapacious,” a tyrant interested only in self-aggrandizement. While Cranfield’s tenure was an undoubted failure, such rhetoric is unfair. In fact, Cranfield was the most principled defender of the royal prerogative working in the colonies during the 1680s, and his detailed correspondence provides a wonderful narrative of how this early experiment in royal government capsized in a sea of religious paranoia and controversy.17
After his arrival in October 1682 Cranfield exhibited many of the same skills that had allowed him to negotiate successfully with the Dutch in Surinam. He set himself up, as his commission dictated, as an arbiter between the proprietor and his purported tenants. If anything—and in spite of historians’ contentions that he was in league with Mason from the beginning—Cranfield sided with Mason’s rivals. He reported that Mason had exaggerated both the wealth and the refractoriness of the king’s subjects in the province. In truth, the colony possessed few resources; the people were generally loyal to the king but poor. Mason’s proposals, meanwhile, had the potential to further impoverish the people. For instance, his attempt to seize common lands from the towns would have meant that ordinary settlers would no longer have any place to graze their livestock. As for Mason’s opponents, Waldron and Martin, the governor found that “although there might have been some Heats of Spirit & undueness of Expression betweene Mr Mason and them while contending about property,” it was “nothing to render them guilty of such disloyalty as they were charged with.” One of Cranfield’s first actions was to restore the two men to their seats on the council.18
Within two months of his arrival, however, everything changed. The conciliatory governor disappeared, replaced by a forceful and unbending advocate of centralization, by brute force if necessary. While some historians have blamed this change of heart on Cranfield’s acquisitive nature—essentially contending that he abandoned the colonists when they refused to pay him enough—such a reading has little relation to the evidence. In fact, Cranfield was very clear about why he changed his mind: the situation in New Hampshire, he came to believe, was not a local dispute about property rights, but part of a transatlantic battle between the king and his enemies. A thorough royalist brought up in the age of civil wars and conspiratorial politics, Cranfield became convinced that a murderous Puritan plot, a “grand combination made up of Church members of Congregationall Assemblies throughout all the colonies in New England” intended to topple the king’s government and, in effect if not in design, hand over America to Charles II’s enemies.19
The governor’s paranoia originated in a series of disputes with local interest groups that, at first glance, had little to do with each other. One rift involved a Scottish ship accused of trading in the colony contrary to the Navigation Acts. Under the recommendation of Edward Randolph, Cranfield prosecuted the ship’s master, but found that since the master belonged to Portsmouth’s Congregational church, the governor could not convince any jury to convict. At the same time, Cranfield ran into loggerheads with the colonial assembly, which refused to pass any of the governor’s revenue bills. In an imitation of his master across the ocean, the governor dissolved the assembly, sparking the resentment of certain members. In a clear signal that he associated this resistance with the Congregationalists’ longstanding antipathy toward monarchy, Cranfield scheduled a colony-wide fast for 30 January 1683, in order to commemorate the execution of Charles I by overly zealous Puritans 34 years before.20
This series of insults did not sit well with members of the assembly. By Cranfield’s own admission, the people of New Hampshire had been fairly well disposed to royal government, only resisting Mason’s designs on their land. Cranfield’s actions convinced some that the new royal government, at least as it was currently composed, was illegitimate, and indicated another kind of plot, orchestrated by “papists,” to erect an arbitrary government in New Hampshire.
The dispute manifested itself in the mysterious actions of one Edward Gove, a member of the assembly and militia lieutenant from the town of Hampton. Gove had led resistance to Mason’s land grab at the Hampton town meeting, but in January his anger toward the regime took on a different hue. Taking away land was just the first step in a general campaign against the country’s “liberties,” one that would culminate with the establishment of Catholicism. On 26 January 1683, Gove began riding around the province in attempt to raise a party to “stand against the governor.” His exact intentions remain murky. Partisan accounts by Edward Randolph and Robert Mason claimed that Gove aimed to kill Cranfield and his allies while they paid homage to their martyred king on 30 January—a report sure to evoke a sympathetic response at Whitehall, but lacking corroboration. More likely, Gove wanted to raise up the militia as a show of force against Cranfield and Mason, a warning that the people of New Hampshire would not give up their land or liberties without a fight. While many people sympathized with Gove, however, he attracted few supporters. Only about a dozen teenage boys joined his cause, and they surrendered before the governor even arrived on the scene.21
Gove’s “rebellion” marked an example of how paranoia could turn a simple property dispute into a cosmic drama in which some people were inclined to take up arms. The rebel’s only written statement, penned in jail to the justices of the court that tried him, revealed a man convinced that New England stood on the precipice of doom. The rambling and barely coherent letter claimed, among other things, that his prison keepers fed him poison, but it ended with an alarmist biblical allegory. “If ever New-England had need of a Solomon, or David, or Moses, Caleb or Joshua, it is now,” Gove wrote. “The tears are in my eyes. I can hardly see.” Statements by his enemies, while biased, help to corroborate this vision of a man who believed New England’s Protestant establishment to be in great danger. According to Randolph’s account, Gove claimed that Cranfield’s governorship was illegitimate because his commission was signed in Edinburgh by the Catholic duke of York, not in London by the king, and that Cranfield himself “was a papist and intended to bring in popery.” In addition, Gove allegedly referred to a theological argument with Cranfield as one justification for the rebellion. The governor, citing the Gospel of Mark, argued for “the necessity of children’s baptism,” complaining that the Congregational system excluded the vast majority of New Hampshirites from the benefits of the sacrament, since only the children of church members could be baptized. Gove considered this “a great imposing upon the Ministry,” and in the fevered atmosphere of January 1683 Gove combined this fear of ecclesiastical innovation with Mason’s land designs, seeing both as elements in a global Catholic plot to extinguish the colony’s civil and religious liberties. Gove may have declared that “his rising in arms was