ber of parishioners to New England, he concluded that he could combat dis-
senters effectively only if he followed them to their new refuge. In 1634, Laud
got the king to appoint a “Commission for Regulating Plantations” under his
leadership to subordinate Massachusetts. Massachusetts’s vulnerability, he
found, was the doubtful legality of its original grant. If he could overturn the
Puritans’ claim to their grant, Laud hoped he could humble them. So he
went to court to sue for repeal of the company’s patent. The court took its
time, but two years later it complied. The king then appointed a governor to
effect Massachusetts’s transformation into a crown colony. Sensing the drift
of affairs and fearing for his life, this man wisely declined to go. There the dis-
pute rested without resolution, as the British became increasingly distracted
by the events leading toward civil war. Meanwhile, thousands more Puritans
moved to Massachusetts.
The civil war; the collapse of the royal government, in which both the
king and Laud lost their heads; and the Puritans’ assumption of power
under Oliver Cromwell seemed literally a godsend to the Puritans in New
England. They took the victory of the Parliamentary forces not only as a
confirmation of the rightness of their cause but also as the completion of
their move toward independence. Marking this, in 1652 they declared
Massachusetts a replica of Cromwell’s new English regime, a “common-
wealth,” and assumed the attributes of a sovereign state. While favoring the
Puritans, Cromwell was not willing to go that far. So the matter rested—the
Massachusetts colony claiming sovereignty and Cromwell’s government
not sanctioning it—until the Restoration.
During the twenty years before the Restoration, New England under-
went a reversal of sentiment. Some of the Puritans had become less willing
to enforce the authoritarian way of life of the colony’s first generation.
Many, indeed, began to evince nostalgia for the “old country.” The zeal of
the first generation abated. Merchants were making money; towns were
prospering; farming, fishing, and fur trading occupied people’s thoughts;
and many were tired of the rigidity and tyranny of the Puritan leadership.
Those developments had already caused what became Connecticut and
New Hampshire to break away from Massachusetts and set themselves up,
without government sanction, as quasi-independent colonies. The Massa-
chusetts regime reacted angrily and took advantage of “those sad distrac-
130 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA