royal official: the “captain generall and governor in chief.” Sir Edmund
Andros took the strongest possible view of his powers and very soon man-
aged to antagonize even those who had initially welcomed him. Insensitive
to local opinion, he flaunted his power even in Puritan Boston by comman-
deering a Congregational church for Anglican services, thus resurrecting in
America the very issue that had caused the Puritans to quit England. Even
more than most royal officials, he quickly earned a reputation for corrupt
practices.
Corruption might ultimately have brought him down, but what actually
did so was the arrival of news from London: James II had been overthrown
and had fled the country; Prince William of Orange had invaded England;
the “Glorious Revolution” had begun. The news became known in Boston
on April 18, 1689, and before the end of the day a mob seized the governor
and most of the royal officials. The townsmen were spurred on by Robert
Small, a carpenter from the Royal Navy frigate Rose.Small organized a gang
of armed men and managed to seize the ship’s commander; thus incited,
mobs of Bostonians surrounded the fort, and soon companies of militia
were assembling at the town center. The old Puritan leadership put itself at
the head of the insurgents and by the end of the following day had resumed
command of the entire colony. The governor’s final humiliation came when
he was apprehended as he attempted “to make an Escape in Woman’s
Apparel, and pass’d two Guards, and was stopped at the third, being dis-
covered by his Shoes, not having changed them.”
Having overthrown James II’s appointee, the Bostonians set up a
“Council of Safety” composed of twenty-two prominent citizens but for
months were unable to subdue the mobs who roamed the streets. Thus it
was that beginning in the 1660s Massachusetts began to carry out activities
which would be echoed with eerie precision there in the 1760s, on the eve
of the Revolution.
In the 1660s, with Massachusetts in turmoil, the aggrieved and dispos-
sessed Indians, inspired by the French, struck back at—the settlers who
had been taking their lands. All along the frontier, they burned houses,
killed livestock, and scalped settlers. In terror, large numbers of settlers fled
the frontier. In Boston itself, government virtually ceased to function; there
it was not Indians but foreign merchantmen and even pirates who took
134 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA