did nothing but urge compliance. Unconcerned by mere words not backed
by force, Massachusetts continued as before, running its own affairs.
Also during this period, New England had become a “great mart,”
increasingly engaged in overseas trade in fish, lumber, and other items, in
which it paid little or no attention to the regulations, the Navigation Acts,
by which the imperial government sought to control commerce. Massa-
chusetts’s evasion of duties may have cost the royal treasury 100,000
pounds yearly in lost revenues. That fact got London’s attention, and
another mission was sent in 1676.
This mission, like its predecessor, met with evasion, noncooperation,
and threats. Massachusetts had learned that it could simply “stonewall”
when ordered to cooperate. When the head of the mission confronted the
governor, he was told “that the Laws made by Our King and Parliament
obligeth them in nothing but what consists with the Interest of New
England.” In his report, Edward Randolph sought to shame the king into
acting by alleging that Massachusetts had given sanctuary to some of the
people who beheaded Charles I and that, in violation of royal prerogatives,
it had set up a mint to coin its own money. Again, the government issued
statements but did little.
Convinced that the government would continue to do little, Massa-
chusetts imprisoned and threatened to try the chief royal representative,
under its own laws, for the capital offense of “attempted subversion.”
Britain’s lack of a consistent policy—its tendency to waver between action
and inaction, condemnation and sufferance, repression and laxity—was
apparent again in the 1770s, during the confused period before the
Revolution. As it was to do then, the British government in the seventeenth
century allowed, indeed caused, a spirit of rebellion to build up; then in
1684 it attempted to smother the spirit of independence. In that year, an
English court declared the Massachusetts charter null and void. The fol-
lowing year, when the duke of York became James II, he decided to cut to
the heart of the dissidence: to abolish the existing colonial structure and its
alleged “rights” by bringing the northern colonies together in the
Dominion of New England.
The Dominion of New England was to begin afresh without trouble-
some promises and contentious legislatures; it would be governed by a
“Mother England” Loses Touch 133