with the Indians, and they were sure to have more of the same; there were French settlements to the north-east of them, and Dutch and Swedish to the south-west, with some of which, or with all together, there might be complications. England was distant and engrossed in her own civil strife: what security was there unless in some political union of all the parts of New England among themselves? Hence, after much negotiation, a formal agreement at Boston (May 19, 1643) in a body of Articles, establishing a CONFEDERACY OF THE FOUR COLONIES OF PLYMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS, CONNECTICUT, AND NEW HAVEN, under the name of THE UNITED COLONIES OF NEW ENGLAND, and settling the Constitution of that Confederacy. Its executive for all the purposes of the confederacy, as distinct from the independent governments of the colonies severally, was to consist of a Court of eight Commissioners, two from each colony and duly qualified by church-membership in that colony. This Court, with one of its own body elected by itself as President, was to meet once a year, or oftener, as might be required, in some principal town of the colonies in succession, but with a preference of frequency to Boston. The first Commissioners, elected in 1643, were Edward Winslow and William Collier for Plymouth, John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley for Massachusetts, George Fenwick and Edward Hopkins for Connecticut, and Theophilus Eaton and Thomas Gregson for New Haven; and, by their election, Winthrop was called to the first Presidency.1

Of course, this bold union of the Colonies among themselves was liable to be questioned by the Crown and Parliament of England; and, to justify and explain it, there had to be a new despatch of accredited agents to London. Not as one of these, but on an errand of his own, connected with theirs and yet a little in conflict with it at first, there came over one more American, whose return, though it was to be but for a temporary visit, deserves particular notice.

The reader remembers our distinction between the Four Colonies and certain outlying Plantations on their borders.

1 Palfrey, I. 623-634, and II. Appendix.

Well, of those outlying Plantations only one patch came within the new Confederacy-that patch of the present New Hampshire where there were the rising towns of Exeter, Dover, &c. The inhabitants of those settlements had recently attached themselves to Massachusetts, and came into the Confederacy as part of that colony. But there remained positively excluded from the Confederacy the Plantations farther to the north-east, in what is now the State of Maine, and also the Plantations south-west of Massachusetts and Plymouth, in the Narraganset Bay country, interposed between these colonies and Connecticut and New Haven. Their exclusion was deliberate. The confederate New Englanders looked askance upon these Plantations, as running a different course from themselves "both in their ministry and civil administration," and hoped either to tame them into conformity by refusing to traffic with them, or to bring them into submission by actual force. The complaint against the Maine people was partly that there was a Royalist and Prelatic leaven among them, and partly that they had given refuge to heretical Separatists like Wheelwright and Hanserd Knollys. The complaint against the Narraganset Bay people was even more indignant. There, in Portsmouth and Newport, the two towns of Aquetnet or Rhode Island, were the wrecks of the dispersed Antinomians or Hutchinsonians of Boston, increased by other restless recruits, and struggling hard with their own dissensions. There, at the head of the Bay, close to this two-towned chaos of Rhode Island, which he had himself induced thither, but with his own little chaos of Providence immediately around him, was the arch-Individualist, Roger Williams. He was the most loveable of men, certainly; he and the good and orderly Winthrop of Massachusetts could not but like each other, and kept up a friendly correspondence, despite their differences; and he had been of excellent service to the colonies, hard as had been their treatment of him, by his generous and laborious negotiations for them, more than once, with his pets, the Indians. Still what an experiment he was bent on-that of the organization of a community on the unheard-of principle of absolute religious

liberty combined with perfect civil democracy! Organize! Williams and organization were a contradiction in terms! What had he had about him in Providence but turmoil from the first-a turmoil lately quite maddening, even to Williams himself, from the vagaries of a certain Samuel Gorton? This Gorton, originally a clothier or tailor in London, then one of the Boston Antinomians, then a trouble in New Plymouth till they banished him, then a torture even to the Rhode Islanders till they publicly whipped him, had at length flung himself upon Providence and the neck of Roger Williams. It was a sore trial for that arch-libertarian. "Master Gorton, having foully abused high and low at Aquetnet," wrote Williams to Winthrop, Mar. 8, 1641-2, "is now bewitching and bemadding poor Providence." Some of the Providence people even appealed to Massachusetts, desiring to be taken into the protection of that colony, so as to be under some sort of effective government, and delivered from Williams and his principle of Liberty. Massachusetts liked the proposal, and began to stir in it. But Williams had faith in his principle; a sufficient number both of the Providence people and of the Rhode Islanders had faith in it; and in 1643 it was resolved to send over Williams himself to England, to represent their case to the King and Parliament, and endeavour to procure a charter uniting all the Narraganset Bay settlements into an independent colony. As Williams could not safely embark from a New England port, he went to wait for a ship in the Dutch possessions, southwest from New Haven. Here he found Mrs. Hutchinson and her family, who had just migrated from Rhode Island for more freedom or better living among the Dutch. Here also he was of use to the Dutch as a peacemaker between them and the Indian tribes of their neighbourhood. At length, in June 1643, he sailed from New Amsterdam, now New York, in a Dutch ship, bound for England. It is a pity he could not have taken poor Mrs. Hutchinson and her family with him! In the voyage he amused himself with writing a “Key to the Language of America, or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England, together with brief observations of the Customs, Manners, and Worships

of the Natives." When he reached England, they were lamenting the death of Hampden. Vane, however, was Williams's chief personal friend in England, the man to whom he and his constituents looked for most aid in the business that had brought him over. He remained in England about a year, or till Sept. 1644, and during much of that time he was Vane's guest.1

PRESBYTERIANISM AND INDEPENDENCY IN JULY 1643 THEIR PROSPECTS IN THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY.

I regard the arrival of Roger Williams in London about Midsummer 1643 as the importation into England of the very quintessence or last distillation of that notion of Church Independency which England had originated, but Holland and America had worked out. Our history of Independency in all its forms, on to this quintessence or last distillation of it in the mind of a fervid Welsh New-Englander, who might now be seen, alone or in young Vane's company, hanging about the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, has not been without preconceived and deliberate purpose. For, in most of our existing studies and accounts of England's great Revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century, I know not a blunder more fatal, more full of causes of misapprehension and unfair judgment, than that which consists in treating Independency as a sudden new phenomenon of 1643, or thereabouts, when the Westminster Assembly met. Not so, as we have seen. For sixty years before 1643 Independency had been a traditional form of Anti-Prelacy in the English popular mind, competing with the somewhat older Anti-Prelatic theory of Presbyterianism, and, though not possessing the same respectability of numbers and of social weight, yet lodged inexpugnably in native depths, and intense with memories of pain and wrong. It did happen, in 1643, when Prelacy was removed from the

1 Palfrey, I. 606-9, and II. 116-123; Gammell's Life of Roger Williams, pp. 105-119; and Memoir of Williams by Edward Bean Underhill, prefixed to

the Hanserd Knollys Society's reprint of the Bloody Tenent of Persecution (1848).

nation, and the question was what was to be substituted, that this native tradition of Independency found itself dashed against the other tradition of Presbyterianism, in such conditions that Independency seemed the pretender and upstart, while Presbyterianism seemed the rightful heir. This arose partly from the fact that Presbyterianism had mass and respectability in her favour, was at home on the spot, and had her titles ready, whereas Independency had been a wanderer on the Continent and in the Colonies, had contracted an uncouth and sunburnt look, had been preceded by ugly reports of her behaviour in foreign parts, had changed her name several times, and was not at once prepared with her pedigree and vouchers. Partly, however, it arose from the omnipotence at that moment of Scottish example and advice in England. Anyhow, for the moment, Independency was at a disadvantage. She seemed even to doubt her chance of obtaining a hearing. Nevertheless, she was to be heard, and fully, in the course of time. Not a form of Independency, not a variety in her development that has been described in the preceding narrative, from Brown's original English Separatism, on through Robinson's Congregationalism or Semi-Separatism antagonizing Smyth's extreme Separatism and Se-Baptism in Holland, and so to the consolidated Robinsonian Independency of the New England Church, with its outjets in Mrs. Hutchinson's Antinomianism and Roger Williams's absolute Individualism, but were to have their appearances or equivalents in the coming controversy in England, and to play into the current of English life.

The medium through which this Independency, and whatever it involved, had to assert themselves and press for a hearing was, first of all, the Westminster Assembly. An important inquiry therefore is, How did the Assembly, in respect of its constitution at the time of its first meeting, stand related beforehand to the controversy between Presbyterianism and Independency?

Inasmuch as the Assembly was a creation of the Parliament at a time when the nation was divided between Parlia