Ship-money. maritime counties the Acting on these pre block the path? It was resolved that such an army might be, and to meet the cost, recourse was to be had to ship-money. In former times, to meet foreign dangers, the Kings had exacted of the Cinque Ports and the maintaining of ships of war. cedents, Charles now sought to levy a general tax, nominally ship-money, but the yield of which might be applied to any use. With this word, so memorable in the history of English-speaking men, let us turn aside for a while from the tale of the mad race of the Stuarts toward absolutism. Anglo-Saxon freedom was on the point of perishing. Precisely now, in the nick of time, became operative in its behalf a force from America, a force at first scarcely traceable, but destined in time to grow momentous. CHAPTER VIII. THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA. 1607-1700. HORACE WALPOLE, an important figure in England in the eighteenth century, when the news of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga reached England, wrote to the Countess of Ossory, December 11, 1777: "Well, Madame, as I told Lord Ossory the other day, I am satisfied. Old England is safe, that is America, whither the true English retired under Charles I."1 What reason is there in such a statement as this? Horace Walpole asserts that America was more English than England herself, the true English having retired to America under Charles I. Charters of the East In dia and Vir nies. Just at the hour when the Tudors were giving place to the Stuarts, two events took place within about six years of each other, at the time regarded as having the slightest possible ginia Compa- significance, of which however the consequences have been of transcendent importance in the history of the world. These events were the granting of charters to two commercial companies, the one designing to engage in mercantile operations in the East Indies; the other, looking for its field of operations to the coast of America. The 1 Walpole's Letters. first of these charters, granted December 31, 1600, was the foundation of the vast Asiatic empire of England; the second, granted April 10, 1606, the foundation of America. With those charters began the diffusion of the English language, institutions, and influence beyond the narrow bounds of the little island of Britain to the four quarters of the earth. Settlement of In 1607, a colony with no higher purpose than the establishment of a trading enterprise that might be lucrative, fixed itself at Jamestown in Virginia. In the heterogeneous company were few or none actuated by any high principle. A considerable part of those who came in the first years came not of their own free-will, but were deported from England as idlers or, indeed, convicts, of whom the mother-country might conveniently in this way rid herself. In the case of the better class of settlers, who came of their own free-will, the motive for emigration was certainly not discontent with the political or religious conditions at home. They desired simply to make money, and saw in the fur trade, the mines, the agriculture, which they hoped to be able to develop in the new world, a better opportunity for gain than was offered to them elsewhere. With no grievance as to either Church or State, conforming without a murmur to what both demanded, they gave their energies to carrying out schemes of material profit. Far more interesting in connection with the history of Anglo-Saxon freedom, was the body of settlers, who, under the new charter, presently Of Plymouth. came to occupy the country farther to the north. "Give praise to others, early come or late, On their strong lines we base our social health- the home the town-the Commonwealth." 1 At the time when the Jamestown settlers were gaining their foothold, a group of men and women belonging to a sect known as Separatists, dwelling in Lincolnshire, in the east of England, were undergoing persecution. Their station in life was that of yeomen, the lower middle class, below the gentry, but still free-holders, the class to which belonged the tradesmen of the towns and the small farmers who then abounded throughout the country. To the Separatists a faith simpler and less formal than the prevailing Anglicanism was congenial, and in the effort to cherish such a faith they found the hand of the established Church heavy upon them. Through peril and hardship a small band of them made their way to Holland, where, for a decade, under the ministrations of John Robinson, one of the memorable representatives of the spirit of free thought, a spirit which at this time was beginning to stir in the world, they worshipped God not as the bishops prescribed, but as their own consciences dictated. But Holland was not to their mind, and in 1620 came, at Delfthaven, the famous embarkation, of which the result was the establishment of New England. As regards the establishment of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the thing of interest to notice in connec 1 J. Boyle O'Reilly: Poem at Plymouth, August 1, 1889. Revival in New England Anglo-Saxon polity. of the ancient tion with the present subject is that politically they did not reproduce the state of things they had left behind; nor, on the other hand, did they invent something new. In the history of the English-speaking race, the wise reformers have been the true conservatives. conservatives were the Pilgrim Fathers; for in the society which they set up, they went back to old ways which in England itself had been largely forsaken. True of the popular In the earlier part of our study of Anglo-Saxon institutions, we were much concerned with the tunscipe, the fenced village within which Submergence dwelt the community of ceorls, the in England house of the ætheling rising among the moots. humbler homesteads, the huts of læts and theows adjacent, the place for the moot in the centre, beyond the paling or mound the allotments of plough-land and grass-land, and encircling all, the common waste. The tun-scipe was the unit of political organization; an aggregation of them formed the hundred or wapentake; an aggregation of hundreds in turn formed the shire; the shires combined at last into the kingdom. As we come down the centuries, the name township gradually retires, the term parish taking its place; a term denoting the same thing, but bringing into view the ecclesiastical side of the organization, which, through the zeal of the medieval churchmen, played a large part in the lives of men.1 As early as the thirteenth century the vestry-meeting becomes apparent, a tun-moot for church purposes, in which even villeins can join. Matters secular soon come to be 1 Howard: Introduction to Local Constitutional History of the United States, I, p. 31, etc. |