wholesome, that we have not one sick since we touched the land. If Virginia had but horses and kine, and were inhabited with English, no realm in Christendom were comparable to it."* CHAP. L Such is the glowing description, furnished by one of the The Planting colonists, of the land of promise which they had gone to of Virginia. take possession of. No wonder that disappointment speedily followed. Lane, and the whole body of the Virginian settlers precipitately deserted "the paradise of the world,” and when the first ship, despatched by Raleigh from England to his new colony, arrived, laden with all needful stores and provisions for the infant settlement, they searched in vain for the sanguine dreamers, who had pictured in such extravagant terms the possessions won by them in the New World. Raleigh was not discouraged by the failure of this attempt at the colonization of Virginia. He learned wisdom from experience, and even thus early adopted the policy on which alone the true basis of successful colonization has ever been founded. The golden dreams which deluded the first European colonists of America were akin, alike in object and results, to the old alchymist's search for the philosopher's stone. The painful alchymist lost not only the gold he was in search of, but the wealth of knowledge and of substantial commercial treasure which the researches of modern chemistry have disclosed; and in like manner the Spanish colonists slighted the treasures of a genial climate and a fertile soil, while chasing the phantom of an illusive "land of gold." The superior wisdom and sagacity of Raleigh were manifested by the adoption of a totally different policy. "He determined," says Bancroft, "to plant an agricultural state; to send emigrants with wives and families, who should at once make their homes in the New World; and, that life and property might be secured, he granted a charter of incorporation for the settlement, and established a municipal government for the city of Raleigh. The company, as it embarked, was cheered by the presence of women; and an ample provision of the implements of husbandry gave a pledge for successful industry."+ Ralph Lane, in Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 311. Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. 1. p. 43. CHAP. I. It is not our object to follow out these early schemes for the colonization of America, in which the courage and enterprise of Englishmen were displayed in defiance of the selfishness or the timidity of their rulers, and the Saxon race was firmly planted in the western hemisphere. Other motives than commercial enterprise or the base lust for gold, were destined to plant amid the wilds of the New World the germs of free institutions, and the rudiments of that great nation which is rapidly extending over a vast continent the descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon race. CHAPTER II. THE PIONEERS OF LIBERTY. True liberty is still the birth of time, The bud upshooting through the frosty rime; The world shall yet rejoice, as consecrate To virtues flourishing therein sublime. Quit ye as men, be true then, who would fight In this so holy cause; think ye a soul Weighed down by beggarly lusts can have a right D. WILSON. Rise of the CHAP. II. IT is not necessary for our plan that we should follow out here the history of the narrow and bigoted policy of the Stuarts, which so largely contributed to the new developement of colonization under the Christian exiles of New England. The history of the English Puritans, which forms so large a part of this volume, supplies an accurate and carefully written digest of the annals of nonconformity, from the pen of one well suited to the task. There the CHAP II. reader will learn of the rise of a small but resolute community of conscientious Nonconformists, in the north of England, towards the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Even thus early had these men despaired of effecting such changes in the Church of England as they deemed essential to its purity and accordance with New Testament models, and resolved, "whatever it might cost them, as the Lord's free people, to join themselves by covenant into a church state." Such English Covenanters were not confined to this body of Nonconformists in the north, though they peculiarly merit attention; nor are the pilgrim-colonists of England their sole descendants. In the portion of this volume devoted to the history of the Puritans, we trace the like principles maintained with fidelity by many others, in defiance of sufferings and ignominous death. Udal, Copping, Thacker, Johnston, Greenwood, Barrow, and the gentle Penry, "the first, since the last springing of the gospel in this latter age, that publicly laboured to have the blessed seed thereof sown in those barren mountains of Wales;" all these, and many more brave confessors, endured imprisonment and ignominious death in the struggle for a pure church in England. The object they aimed at, though not always distinctly understood by themselves, was the separation from the church of those secular elements which the peculiar forms established under the royal reformers of England's ecclesiastical polity, had riveted more securely even than under the papal sway. They sought to establish the law, within their own sphere, at least, and by their example, that membership in a Christian church could pertain, of right, only to men of Christian character; that its ministers must, of necessity, be alone Christian men. beth's macy. supre Such were the principles which excited the indignation Queen Eliza of Queen Elizabeth and her subservient courtiers, as well indeed they might. Henry VIII. overthrew the dominion of the Pope of Rome in England, only that he might establish in his person a pope of her own; and Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, was not a whit behind her despotic sire. She valued her ecclesiastical, even more than her civil supremacy, and looked upon those who laid claim to greater liberty of conscience than it suited her arbitrary CHAP. II. will to concede to them, as rebels who were leaguing to wrest from her the most valued half of her empire. Queen Elizabeth derived these opinions no less from her education than from the almost universally received dogmas of the period; nor was she countenanced in them alone by the subservient and courtly priests of the dominant church. Such men as Cartwright and Udal, the Fathers of English Presbyterianism, were scarcely less inimical to the more enlarged views advocated by Robert Brown, and afterwards more consistently by Robinson and others, than the most pliant churchmen of the Court. It was only when the cruelty of the legal oppressions to which these early Protestant confessors were subjected, roused the natural instincts of humanity to protest against the excesses of legal oppression, that the Government met with any check to its The peculiar tyranny. The peculiarity of Queen Elizabeth's position, position. however, is worthy of special notice, as supplying an important element in the source of such proceedings. To the Roman Catholic subjects of the English crown Henry VIII., Edward, Elizabeth, James, and Charles, appeared alike as usurpers of the prerogative of the Supreme Pontiff when they claimed to themselves the spiritual supremacy, as head of the Church, which had formerly belonged to him, and still remains an ill-defined anomaly among the royal prerogatives of England. But Queen Elizabeth was not only an intruder on the papal prerogative, in the eyes of English Roman Catholics she was an illegitimate descendant of the profligate Henry VIII., and utterly incapacitated from succeeding to his throne; nor can the legal casuist who calmly investigates the whole history of Henry's intercourse with the fair maid of honour of his first Queen, deny that the English Catholic had reason on his side. Queen Elizabeth was accordingly placed in a false position, which, while it bound her by indissoluble ties to the Protestant cause, incited her to guard with peculiar jealousy those prerogatives which had been wrested from the Pope. When the Roman Catholic challenged her spiritual supremacy, she regarded him as no less distinctly denying her legitimacy, and pronouncing her a usurper; and when, at the very opposite extreme of religious parties, the conscientious Congregationalist demurred at the constitution of the state-church, he was placed in the same category with the CHAP. II. protesting Catholic, and looked upon and treated as a rebel. the Stuarts. The accession of the vain and weak pedant, James VI., Accession of while it removed the possibility of challenging the legitimacy of the succession, in no way affected the opinions it had given rise to. That imbecile monarch clung with no less pertinacity to the prejudices than to the assumed prerogatives of his predecessor; and the claimant of liberty of conscience was equally subjected, under his reign, as in that of Elizabeth, to all the penalties of open rebellion. It was at the very close of Queen Elizabeth's long and The first stage of the prosperous reign, that these humble and little-noticed pio- pilgrims. neers of religious liberty in England found the yoke of bondage too galling to be longer endured. With patience worthy of the followers of Him who endured for us all the indignities and wrongs that the enmity of sinful nature and devilish malice could devise, they had borne confiscations, imprisonments, mutilations, and cruel deaths, not only without murmuring, but with uncomplaining and even thankful submission. Henry Barrow, the son of a gentleman of good estate in Norfolk, had united with his old friend and fellow-student at Cambridge, Mr John Greenwood, in holding secret assemblies for religious worship in Islington, then a quiet village, at some distance from the English capital. It is a place memorable in the history of the English sufferers for conscience' sake. It was a retreat of the persecuted Protestants while Mary's martyr fires raged in Smithfield, and kindling piles were preaching to thousands throughout England with stronger eloquence than the voices they were destined to quench. In Elizabeth's and James's reigns we frequently find it the chosen shelter of persecuted Nonconformity; and in the lives of the ejected ministers of St. Bartholomew's day, it is no less often referred to, as the refuge of the persecuted Puritans of the Restoration Government. It was, in fact, the first stage in the pilgrimage of those who at length found a final resting-place beyond the Atlantic. formist confessors. Both Barrow and Greenwood were apprehended in con- Nonconsequence of these Islington meetings, and committed to the dungeons of Newgate: their crime was forming churches and conducting religious worship contrary to law; and to |