49. Edward Randolph Versus Massachusetts, 1680-1684

After Randolph established the royal government in New Hampshire, he repaired to Boston, where he took up his duties as collector of customs at the end of January 1680. At Boston, Randolph was treated by the bulk of the populace of Massachusetts as their determined enemy. Complained Randolph: “I am received at Boston more like a spy, than one of His Majesty’s servants... all persons taking liberty to abuse me in their discourses.” His servant was beaten. Efforts were made to prevent the hated official from finding lodgings, but now Massachusetts’ past persecutions came home to roost. Randolph found lodgings—and allies—among the Quakers.

The key to Randolph’s appointed task of enforcing the Navigation Acts was the process of seizure and trial. Any vessel under suspicion of violating the law could be seized by a royal officer, and the owner could not touch the ship or the cargo until the case came to trial. During this period, the owner was, in effect, treated as guilty before so proven. Court action was initiated by filing a formal charge by the informer, the man who detected the alleged violation. Any person could perform the job of informing. If the owner was found guilty, the vessel was ordered sold and the proceeds to be divided among the king, the colonial government, and the informer. In practice, however, violators were allowed to settle for much smaller payments. In Massachusetts Randolph himself was the sole officer and the only one empowered to search shipping.

In May 1680 Randolph seized his first vessel, the Expectation. During the next three years, Randolph seized thirty-six ships charged with violating the navigation laws. All but two of the shipowners were acquitted. No case tried by a jury won a conviction. And as for the Massachusetts magistrates, they tried in every way to obstruct Randolph’s path. They either refused to recognize Randolph’s commission from the Crown or interpreted it very narrowly. They charged to Randolph the costs of special sessions of the courts and payable in advance. In a brilliant counterstroke, the Massachusetts magistrates encouraged the merchants to bring damage suits against Randolph as soon as they won their almost inevitable acquittal in the courts. All the deputies and employees hired by Randolph were systematically harassed, and often boldly imprisoned for trespassing private property.

Randolph, moreover, was none too scrupulous in his choice of vessels to seize. Much of Randolph’s personal income was to come from the revenues collected, as well as from fees of fifty percent of the value of confiscated goods for being his own informer. So Randolph had a direct personal interest in maximizing the severity of enforcement of the Navigation Acts.

There are always people eager to crook the knee to power, and here and there Randolph found his allies. His main confederate was Governor Simon Bradstreet. Along with Bradstreet came several of the magistrates, including Bradstreet’s brother-in-law, Joseph Dudley. But Bradstreet could not intimidate the popular juries. In one case, Bradstreet himself angrily sent the jury out three times in a vain attempt to reverse its verdict of acquittal. At the head of the popular opposition, on the other hand, was the deputy governor Thomas Danforth. It was Danforth who incurred the brunt of Randolph’s frustrated ire. Yet, the opposition was unwilling to push its resistance to the point of directly opposing the incursions of royal power. Thus, in the case of Capt. Peter Lawrence, who forcibly resisted royal seizure and drove Randolph off, the Court of Assistants arrested him summarily. In another case, the jury quickly acquitted the shipmaster for breaking the Navigation Acts, but did fine him for obstructing Randolph in the course of his duty.

By the turn of 1681, the turmoil of the “Popish Plot” and the temporary ascendancy of Shaftesbury and the liberals were over. Tory reaction was again in firm control of the English government. The Crown was once again ready to resume its campaign against Massachusetts, and, of course, it was continually excited to do so by Randolph, Mason, and others. And once again the king, in a message delivered by Robert Mason, ordered Massachusetts to send agents to England. Everyone now knew that drastic modification of the Massachusetts charter would shortly ensue. The smell of doom for Massachusetts was in the air.

At the crossroads, Massachusetts now, in January 1681, began to crumble. Resistance ebbed. Perhaps the Puritans and magistrates had lost much of their spirit of sturdy independence as well as their zeal for persecution. Thomas Danforth argued at length the vital importance of Massachusetts’ taking its stand right here and refusing to send the agents. He warned of the end of “the country’s liberties.” But the bulk of the leadership was caving in. The Puritan church elders; a committee of six leading Puritan ministers headed by the Reverend Increase Mather; and such leading merchants as the magistrate Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton—all argued for submission and for sending the agents. But Danforth perceived that here would be the critical turn, that submission here would mean betrayal of the entire cause. Almost single-handed and alone, Danforth charged the ministers with treason and betrayal of their liberty. He was scoffed at for his supposed extremism. Stoughton and Bradstreet denounced him for going too far. Randolph sneered at him as “the bellows of the Court of Deputies.”

Massachusetts voted to send agents, and Randolph took the opportunity of traveling to England to wage his campaign against Massachusetts in person. After arriving in England in spring, Randolph asked the king for a quo warranto to invalidate the Massachusetts charter. He proposed that he be allowed to nominate a president and council of the colony to be a transitional substitute, and then he suggested that the king appoint a governor general for all New England. After considerable difficulties, Randolph did secure a new and rather more extensive commission, explicitly authorizing him to enforce all the Navigation Acts and to collect miscellaneous Crown revenues. As a result, when Randolph returned to New England in late 1681, he was greeted with even more hatred than before. One local versifier put Boston’s sentiments as follows:

Welcome, Sir, welcome from the eastern shore,

With a commission stronger than before,

To Play the horse-leech; rob us of our fleeces,

To rend our land, and tear it all to pieces...

Boston, make room, Randolph’s returned, that hector,

Confirmed at home to be the sharp Collector...

So royal Charles is now about to prove,

Our Loyalty, Allegiance and our Love,

In giving license to a publican

To pinch the purse... to hurt the man.

Now Massachusetts, having already tried to gain some favor from the king by repealing the fanatical Puritan laws against keeping Christmas and punishing Quakers returning from banishment with death, attempted a shrewd maneuver: it would pass a Naval Office Law enacting the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, thereby making them Massachusetts’ own. This would enable Massachusetts itself to appoint the naval officer to enforce the acts, and to undercut and bypass Randolph completely. The Navigation Act of 1673 was ignored, because it was the only statute that gave Randolph his legal foothold in America. The General Court itself would appoint the naval officer; the hard-core opposition did not want appointive power to rest in the hands of Randolph’s ally, the opportunist Governor Bradstreet. Furthermore, the informer was at last made fully liable for any damages resulting from false seizure.

This Naval Office Law was pushed through the General Court in early 1682 at the insistence of the House of Deputies, which was under the firm control of the popular opposition, and over the stubborn resistance of the more timorous and opportunistic upper house, the Council of Magistrates. The magistrates were almost evenly split between the opportunists and the popular opposition.*

It did not take long for Edward Randolph to make a severe protest against the Naval Office Law. He reiterated the full force of his royal commission as well as the invalidity of the Massachusetts law. The opposition party now took measures to proceed against Randolph, who expected imprisonment at the very least, knowing that as a rider to the Naval Office Law there had been reenacted the death penalty against subversion—a clear warning to the likes of Randolph.

But once again timorousness won out over bold action for independence and against royal tyranny. Growing stronger, the opportunists were able to squash the proceedings against Randolph, and were also able to reelect their leader Bradstreet over Thomas Danforth the following May. Bradstreet had never administered the Naval Office Law, and now, emboldened by his victory, he counterattacked and maintained that the Naval Office Law somehow did not affect Randolph’s powers.

But now, in June 1682, Randolph grew overconfident, and tried to press his advantage by putting the General Court of Massachusetts to the test. He propounded a series of blunt questions that would force the court to state directly its views as to which laws, English or American, ruled the colony. But the House of Deputies simply refused to answer, and the Council thought Randolph had gone too far and reprimanded him for abusing the laws and government of Massachusetts. The battle of Randolph vs. Massachusetts was still stalemated.

In the meanwhile, Massachusetts’ two agents, the opportunist Joseph Dudley and the oppositionist Capt. John Richards, had arrived in England and Danforth’s gloomy prophecy was beginning to come true. In England Tory reaction had set in with a vengeance. Charles II ruled without Parliament, and the religious Dissenters were vigorously persecuted. The Lords of Trade now wasted little time; at the end of 1682 the fatal question was put to Massachusetts: Would Massachusetts empower its agents to make revisions of the charter, or, failing that, would the charter be dissolved altogether?

Massachusetts now tried desperately to placate the Crown. It repealed the Naval Office Law in early 1683, and conceded Randolph’s explicit authority to search and seize vessels. Massachusetts, nobly, would not yield on the crucial issue; even if it had to die, it would not commit suicide. It would not allow its agents to revise its precious charter. As the oppositionist magistrate Samuel Nowell explained to John Richards, “If we do give you the power required, (and) you do make use of the power to answer demands, we do then pull down the house ourselves, which is worse than to be passive only.”

Once again, Randolph rushed back to England to administer the coup de grace to the independence of Massachusetts. The Lords of Trade decided in June to recommend a quo warranto against the Massachusetts charter; the writ would be drawn up by Randolph and the attorney general. The writ would mean that Massachusetts would be forced to appear in court to defend its behavior, and the verdict of such a trial would, almost certainly, go against the colony. On Randolph’s suggestion the king offered Massachusetts one last chance—if it would now submit to revision, the quo warranto would not be executed and the king would “regulate” the charter for everyone’s benefit. Randolph hurried back to Massachusetts to present the royal offer.

What should Massachusetts do? Once again a great debate broke out between the opportunists and the oppositionists. The opportunists took the age-old line of a spurious “realism” to scoff at devotion to principle. Thus, Peter Bulkeley expressed his puzzlement at such consistency and purist extremism: “By such [apelike] overfondness, we are hugging our privileges and franchises to death and prefer the dissolution of our body politic, rather than to suffer amputation in any of its limbs.” To Bulkeley the opposition appeared ignorant and simplistic: “Many of these men, being very ignorant in such affairs, do not well understand the matter... nor have a clear prospect of the effect and issue of not resigning ourselves to the King, and so are rather to be pitied than marked out.”

But, as Professor Hall aptly points out, “In truth, these ignorant fellows, the freemen and their deputies, understood well enough. They could hardly have failed to foresee the consequences of submission, especially since Cranfield was playing the royal leech in New Hampshire.” *

And not only were Cranfield and Mason plundering and persecuting Puritan ministers in New Hampshire, but already Capt. William Phips, master of the Rose, on which Randolph had returned to Boston, was giving orders to all the merchant ships in the harbor. The consequences of English rule were foreseeable enough. The opposition argued against voting for the colony’s own suicide; true Englishmen “who are under a limited monarchy” should never consent to be “in misery and slavery.”

By December Massachusetts had made its fateful decision. The magistrates voted for submission by a small majority. But virtually the entire House of Deputies voted repeatedly against submission, and now, in a turnabout, they were backed by a substantial majority of Puritan clergymen. Even Increase Mather, who had been denounced for preaching submission the year before, now joined the independence cause and became one of the prime leaders of the opposition party.

Randolph again sailed for England with the news, and now the Crown executed a piece of legal trickery to avoid giving Massachusetts even the right to appear in court in its own defense. By changing the writ, * the Crown was able to declare the Massachusetts charter annulled, and did so on October 23, 1684. The boom had finally been lowered on Massachusetts; the Crown had at last dissolved the Bay Colony’s charter.

Edward Randolph’s war against Massachusetts now entered an entirely new phase. His first objective—to smash the independent government of Massachusetts—had been achieved. But now there remained his next and final objective: to take control of Massachusetts and, indeed, of all New England, and to rule the land for the profit of himself and the Crown. Energetic as always, Randolph lost no time in putting the next phase of his grand design into effect. He found a perfect ally in the opportunist leader Joseph Dudley, who had gone to England to represent the interest of Massachusetts and had stayed to represent his own. In fact, Randolph and Dudley had worked out a plan for Massachusetts and New England as early as the summer of 1683. The plan proposed a governor general and a Council for all New England, and all were to be appointed by the king. The Council was to be selected, however, from the elected magistrates of the various New England colonies. There was to be no New England Assembly. The Massachusetts government would continue to be elected by the freemen, but the franchise was to be narrowed to those owning over four hundred pounds in assets. The governor general would have the power to veto the seating of any elected official. The governor general would also have the ultimate appellate judicial power. The militia would be ruled by royal officers. All landowners would pay a yearly quitrent to the king. This Dudley-Randolph plan in effect provided for an absolute royal despotism (ruling along with handpicked colonial satellites) over all of New England, but with a thin and hollow façade of democracy and home rule.

Such leading merchants as Richard Wharton and William Stoughton now lined up with Dudley, ready and eager to enjoy the privileges won by political favor. Richard Wharton was typical of this group. Formerly opposed to Randolph’s enforcement of the navigation laws, Wharton now saw where the power lay and determined to gain himself some of its perquisites. Massachusetts, however, was increasingly balking at the promised new dispensation. Although Bradstreet was reelected in the May 1684 elections, it was only by a hairbreadth over Danforth; and Dudley, the main leader of the opportunists, lost his post as assistant—Stoughton resigned his place in sympathy. Nonetheless, Randolph and his cohorts spent the summer and early fall happily working out their plans for the takeover of New England.

*Roughly, the general lineup of the Council of Magistrates was as follows: for the Naval Office Law were Thomas Danforth, Daniel Gookin, Humphrey Davy, John Richards, Samuel Nowell, James Russell, Bartholomew Gedney, Samuel Appleton, and Peter Tilton.

Against the law, Governor Simon Bradstreet (who refused even to participate in swearing in the naval officer), Daniel Denison, William Stoughton, Joseph Dudley, Peter Bulkeley, John Hull, John Pynchon, William Brown, and Thomas Savage. There were two Saltonstalls on the Council, Richard Jr., in the popular opposition party, and Nathaniel in the opportunist party.

*Michael Garibaldi Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676–1703, p. 80.

*The Crown got a writ of scire facias et alias, which it could use to speed a judgment in the Court of Chancery without giving Massachusetts any time to prepare a defense.