Dr. ROBERT CHILD THE REMONSTRANT

My original purpose in this paper was to throw together a few facts about Dr. Robert Child that seem to have escaped the notice of New England historians, such, for instance, as the date of his M.D. at Padua, his friendly relations with Boyle and Hartlib, certain details of his travels on the Continent, his acquaintance with the celebrated Harvard alchemist George Stirk, his authorship of two important treatises on agriculture (which include a number of observations on America), his interest in the development of Ireland under the Commonwealth, and the date of his death. As to his historic clash with the governing forces of the Bay Colony, I supposed, in my guileless ignorance, that the ins and outs of the controversy had been long ago traced by the students of our early annals, and that I could pass over that portion of his life that makes him so conspicuous a figure in our constitutional development with a brief reference to standard authorities. But it soon appeared that I had reckoned without my host. Nowhere was there discoverable an account of the famous Remonstrance of 1646, and of the two resultant prosecutions, that assembled all the res gestae or established the chronology of the affair. It became necessary, therefore, to study this episode afresh, with an open mind, and to weigh the evidence as judicially as might be practicable; and thus, in an unguarded moment, I found myself taking up arms against a sea of troubles.

These troubles, in the main, are of rather recent origin. In an earlier generation, when Palfrey composed his masterly sketch of the Remonstrant imbroglio, it was assumed that two men, or two parties, could disagree and come to grips without imposing upon us the duty of inferring that either of them was altogether in the wrong. But of late — at least in the case of our Remonstrant — animum non caelum mutamus. Generalities have elbowed concrete particulars into the limbo of the discredited. Scholars no longer regard Robert Child as what he was, — an ardent Presbyterian, a disciple of Robert Baylie, eager to extend to all his countrymen the blessings of a rigid conformity, — but as an advocate of general religious toleration and freedom of conscience, principles which he and his party abhorred with all the strength of their earnest souls as the devil’s latest device for the ruin of society and the damnation of mankind. And, on the other hand, I find the fathers of our Commonwealth no longer looked at, in this instance, as the shrewd and valorous (if severe) upholders of a well-conceived plan of civic development, but as a little oligarchy of bigots, conscientiously repressive of everything that we, their descendants, hold to be the inalienable heritage of a freeborn man. The contest between the Remonstrants and the government of the Bay cannot be understood if we approach the subject with any such prejudices. Free speech, the right of petition and appeal, resistance to arbitrary rule, equality before the law, the separateness of church and state, “I am the captain of my soul” — these are principles that may or may not be involved in the controversy of 1646 and 1647; but that controversy was not conducted upon those principles, either by Child and his associates on the one side or by the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay on the other.

Two parties were struggling for the control of England — the Presbyterians and the Independents. Both were right and both were wrong, as is always the case with partisans; but, in the long run, it has appeared — and is admitted — that the triumph of Independency made for the progress of freedom. It was a closely fought match, and never more hotly contested than at precisely that time when Child and the Remonstrants struck their blow for the Presbyterian party. Of course, the Independents, who bore sway in Massachusetts, countered with all their strength. They could not abandon their friends who were fighting for their very existence in the mother country. Principiis obsta was of necessity their motto. The question was not — Shall liberty or bigotry prevail in Massachusetts? It was — Shall Presbyterianism (as it was then, with all its faults) or Independency (as it was then, with all its faults) prevail as a political system among English-speaking men on both sides of the sea? Robert Child is a singularly attractive — even a charming — figure in the life of his time; he fought valorously for his own side when neutrality was a crime; he deserves all honor. But he cannot be judged, in this matter of the Remonstrance, as an individual: he must stand or fall with his party; and what that party was, the bare facts, when we reach them, should determine without argument. It was a party that did not wish either to tolerate or to be tolerated. Its one great principle was domination, for it knew that it was of God and that all other parties were of the devil. Let us admit, if one insists, that the Independents were as bigoted as the Presbyterians. So be it, they were not more bigoted, and there could be no advantage to the Colony in undergoing a revolution that should merely substitute one bigotry for another.

That the state of things was as I have described it, as to parties, needs no argument, for such is the consensus of historians. It remains to show that the Remonstrance was in truth a party affair. For this we may leave the case to the facts of record, to which we will now turn.

Robert Child was born in 1613 in Kent, probably at Northfleet, where his father, John Child, appears to have had a comfortable estate.

Child claimed to have the degree of M.D. from Padua

Child probably went home soon after getting his medical degree, for what seems to have been his first absence from England lasted “two or three years,” as appears from a curious passage in his treatise entitled “A large Letter concerning the Defects and Remedies of English Husbandry,” written in 1651 and forming the bulk of “Samuel Hartlib his Legacie” published in that year.

Nothing exists in the way of evidence as to the moment when Child made the acquaintance of the younger John Winthrop. Their friendship may have begun in England when Winthrop was there in 1634 and 1635, or even as early as 1631, the year of his first embarkation for America; but Winslow’s language suggests that Child was a stranger to the New Englanders until he presented letters of introduction.

Most authorities have overlooked Child’s first visit to this country,

And Child himself, in his first extant letter to John Winthrop, Jr., written in May, 1641,

It is astonishing, in view of this letter of 1641, — even if there were no other testimony available, — that Child should more than once be styled an Episcopalian by recent writers on New England.

Child’s letter of 1641 offers several other points of interest. It has much to say of books, especially of those relating to chemistry, encloses a catalogue (now, alas! no more) of his “chymicall bookes,” asks Winthrop to send a list of such works on the subject as he possesses, reports on certain volumes which Winthrop had asked him to procure, and announces the sending of several works “from myne own library . . . to ꝑvse till I come to New England.” Alchemy was a subject to which both Child and Winthrop devoted much study, and it is continually mentioned in their correspondence. In due season we shall revert to this topic. The following passage is too important to be abridged: “I Intend, if I haue leysure, to goe to Burdeau, from thence to Tholouse to salute Faber

Undoubtedly Winthrop received the letter of 1641 before he sailed for England by way of Newfoundland on August 3 in the same year.

In May, 1643, Winthrop set sail for Boston in the ship “An Cleeve” of London, with “many workmen servants & materialls” for iron works. He had lain “many daies at Gravesend,” waiting to be cleared, and, when this formality was over, had been further detained by a scrupulous or interfering port-officer named Robinson, so that he missed a favorable wind and was kept beating about on the English coast above six weeks. After a voyage of more than fourteen weeks he arrived at Boston “neere winter.” It was too late to begin operations, and Winthrop had to maintain the imported workmen in idleness until spring.

On February 25, 1644[–5], Emanuel Downing wrote to the younger Winthrop from London: “Dr. Child purposeth to come over with me, and writes by this shipp of all his owne affaires vnto you.”

Meanwhile the iron works were in progress, though not yet a going concern. Braintree had been selected by the younger Winthrop as the most suitable situation,

We need not pursue the annals of this ill-starred speculation, but a few names and dates must be mentioned to make future references intelligible. At first everybody had high hopes, and in May, 1645, the General Court issued a call for Massachusetts subscriptions which reads like a promoter’s prospectus.

Meantime we may return to Child’s letter of March 1, 1644[–5]. A considerable portion is taken up with a learned excursus on black lead, in criticism of an essay that Winthrop had sent him. He advises Winthrop to “dig lustily,” and is still quite ready to “bear the fourth part” of the expense, but “Pray let not out too much cost, till you haue more certainty then as yet you haue.” Child had been talking the matter over with Emanuel Downing and Winthrop’s brother Stephen, both then in England, and he even thinks of “settling himself” where the mine is, if he finds the place agreeable.

“I thanke you,” Child continues, “for engaging me in the Lake discovery, and Misticks mines, though as yet we receive no ꝑfit.” The mines in question, I suppose, were at Mistick in Connecticut, where Winthrop had discovered iron ore; he had received authority in 1644 “to make a plantation in the . . . Pequott country . . . & also to lay out a convenient place for iron works.”

By the Lake discovery Child means the project formed in 1644 by certain Boston merchants to find the great lake supposed to lie in the northwest region of the Massachusetts patent and to engage in the beaver trade, thought to originate there, “which came to all the eastern and southern parts.” At the March court in 1644 this company obtained a monopoly for that purpose for twenty-one years and in May “they set out in a pinnace, . . . which was to sail up Delaware river” as far as possible, whence the expedition was to be continued in skiffs or canoes under the guidance of William Aspinwall; they were stopped by the Dutch and reached Boston, on their return, on July 20.

Summer came, and still Child had not sailed for New England, but his departure was imminent, for on June 23, 1645, Hugh Peter wrote from Deal to the elder Winthrop: “D^r Child is come y^t honest man who will bee of exceeding great vse if the Country know how to improue

From October, 1645, to May, 1646, we hear nothing of Child. Then, however, he emerges — Remonstrance in hand. At the risk of repeating many familiar things, I shall run through the history of the Remonstrance, for all the facts have never been brought together in one place, though the story has been told again and again, sometimes with scant regard to accuracy in detail.

The “Remonstrance and humble Petition” of Robert Child, Thomas Burton, John Smith, Thomas Fowle, David Yale, Samuel Maverick, and John Dand was submitted to the General Court, with a request for an immediate answer, on May 19, 1646,

This document naturally disturbed the magistrates, coming as it did immediately after the efforts of William Vassall to get up petitions to Parliament against the New England government,

On May 15, 1646, the General Court passed a vote recommending a synod of the New England churches,

The persons whom Child induced to join him as signatories were of various opinions in religion, and doubtless had — most of them — no clear idea of his main design, the chief bond of union among them being dissatisfaction with the dominant party. The colonial authorities made much of this divergence of sentiment. Johnson, who, in his Wonder-working Providence, 1654, sides with the magistrates, remarks with some humor, that “the persons were of a Linsiwolsie disposition, some for Prelacy, some for Presbytery, and some for Plebsbytery, but all joyned together in the thing they would, which was to stir up the people to dislike of the present Government.”

The colonial authorities were not spoiling for a fight, and “an eminent person”

No. 1 in this list sounds as if it were John Dand, whom the General Court describes as an “ould grocer of London” with a failing intellect.

No. 2 must have been Child himself. No. 3 was assuredly Maverick.

No. 4 must have been Fowle, whom Brewster doubtless talked with in London. He is described by the General Court as a church member who “will be no freeman” since “he likes better to be eased of that trouble and charge.”

Thomas Burton and David Yale are likewise omitted in Brewster’s catalogue of opinions. They are both compared, in the Declaration of the General Court, to “those who were called by Absalom to accompany him to Hebron”

Of Thomas Burton little is known. He is described by the Court as “a clarke of the prothonotaries office, a sojournour . . . , and of no visible estate in the country, one who hath never appeared formerly in such designe, however he hath been drawne into this.”

But Burton probably had another reason for joining in the Remonstrance. The troubles incident to a military election at Hingham were a cause célèbre in 1645, and it is quite possible that Burton, like his pastor, was among the eighty-one petitioners who thought themselves harshly treated by the General Court. The Hingham affair was still in hot controversy when Child presented the Remonstrance in May, 1646, for it was on the 18th of March preceding that Mr. Hobart had objected to the validity of the Marshal’s warrant, as not being made out in the King’s name, had declared that he and the other Hingham petitioners “had sent into England unto his Friends the busines, and expected shortly an answer and advice from thence,” and had criticized the government for exceeding its powers, alleging that it was “not more then a Corporation in England.”

David Yale, the father of the founder of Yale College, came to this country in Davenport’s company with his stepfather, Theophilus Eaton, it appears, in 1637, and was one of the first settlers of New Haven. He was perhaps an inhabitant there in March, 1641, but on June 21 in the same year is described as “now resident in Boston.”

Nothing in this biography suggests Presbyterianism, and the only visible reason that emerges for Yale’s joining the Remonstrants is the fact that, not being a church-member, he was a non-freeman and could not have his children baptized. Perhaps that was reason enough, but I wonder whether Yale’s signing was induced by the trial of his mother, the wife of Governor Theophilus Eaton, by the New Haven Church in 1644 for “divers scandalous offences.” By toying with Anabaptist doctrines she had come to entertain scruples which interfered with conformity in church practices. Besides, she had struck her mother-in-law, and slandered her stepdaughter, and declared that “Anthony the neager” had bewitched the beer. In short, she was a little insane

I have dwelt at some length on the extreme diversity of views among the seven Remonstrants, because this has been thought to explode the theory that we are dealing with a Presbyterian movement. The diversity is, at first sight, a little disconcerting to that theory; but a moment’s reflection shows that it is equally disconcerting to any theory that would strive to explain the united action of this ill-assorted group. Two separate questions are really involved: (1) What did the Remonstrants try to do? and (2) Why did they try to do it?

The first question admits of an immediate and strictly definite reply: — They tried to subvert the Massachusetts government, to bring the Colony under the thumb of a Presbyterian Parliament, to impose the Solemn League and Covenant upon all the inhabitants, and to procure the establishment of the (Presbyterian) Church of England as a state church.

Why did they try to do this? That is not so easily answered. There were seven Remonstrants, and only two of them were Presbyterians, Child and Burton. These two we can understand without difficulty, for they strove to accomplish exactly what they believed in — the extension to Massachusetts of all the blessings of a Presbyterian national church established in a Presbyterian state. They signed the Remonstrance with full comprehension of what it meant and in hearty agreement with all its principles. The other five were united only in desiring to see the autonomy of the Bay overthrown; and to bring this about they consented to sacrifice — Maverick his Episcopal tenets, Dand and Fowle and Smith their Congregationalism, Fowle and Smith their principle of toleration or of liberty of conscience. Maverick, perhaps, knew what he was about, for he was certainly a thorough Royalist at heart, and he may have realized that the King’s sole hope lay in the triumph of the Presbyterian party over the Independents. If so, his action is quite intelligible. He was willing to embark with the Presbyterians in order to save the Church and the King, for he could not doubt that the King would throw them overboard, if God gave him strength, as soon as they had served his turn.

Anyhow, the private reasonings of the “eminent person” with the Remonstrants were of no effect, and the business was taken up again when the General Court assembled on October 7, 1646. A committee was appointed to draw up an answer to Child and his associates, and Edward Winslow was selected to go to England as the agent of the Colony in the Gorton business, as well as in any troubles that might grow out of the Remonstrance. The committee consisted of Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, Richard Bellingham, and Nathaniel Duncan,

In November, 1646, at an adjourned session, which began on the 4th, at 1 p. m.,

A ship, the Supply,

There is an important remark of Winthrop in a letter to his eldest son (November 16, 1646), which seems to have been overlooked by investigators of these events. He writes: “I had thought we should onely haue declared o^r apprehensions concerning the Petition,

Soon after this hearing, Fowle went to England in the Supply, as he had intended, and he seems never to have returned to America. The ship sailed on November 9, 1646.

A number of documents that concern us went over on the Supply, and their presence occasioned a characteristic incident on the voyage. A few days before the ship set sail, Mr. Cotton of Boston, in his Thursday lecture (November 5, 1646) had mentioned the imminent departure of the Supply and of another vessel that was soon to follow. “If there bee any amongst you my brethren,” he had said, “as ’tis reported there are, that have a Petition to prefer to the High Court of Parliament . . . that may conduce to the distraction, annoyance and disturbance of the peace of our Churches and weakning the Government of the land where wee live, let such know, the Lord will never suffer them to prosper in their subtill, malicious and desperate undertakings against his people.” He declined to advise the passengers, “when the terrors of the Almightie shall beset the Vessell wherein they are, the Heavens shall frowne upon them, the billowes of the Sea shall swell above them, and dangers shall threaten them, (as I perswade my selfe they will),” to “take such a person,” as the sailors in the Bible took Jonah, “and cast him into the Sea; God forbid: but,” he continued, “I would advise such to come to a resolution in themselves to desist from such enterprises, never further to ingage in them, and to cast such a Petition into the Sea that may occasion so much trouble and disturbance.”

Storms did, indeed, descend upon the ship; the passengers remembered Mr. Cotton’s warning, and Fowle, in the midst of the tempest, when two hundred leagues short of Land’s End, in compliance with the request of “a godly & discreet woman,” took a copy of the Remonstrance out of his trunk and gave it to her, and “referred it to the discretion of others to doe withall as they should see good.” This was after midnight, when all were “wearied out and tired in their spirits.” The woman showed the paper to Richard Sadler and others. They saw at once that “it was not the right Petition,” that is, not Vassall’s petition to Parliament, but “because they judged it also to bee very bad, having often seene it in New England, but never liked the same, cut it in peeces as they thought it deserved, and gave the said peeces to a seaman who cast them into the sea.” Next day the wind abated, but they had divers storms afterward. In short, Winslow tells us, it was “the terriblest passage that ever I heard on for extremitie of weather, the mariners not able to take an observation of sunne or star in seven hundred leagues sailing or thereabouts.”

But we must return to the proceedings of the November Court of 1646. At that session, the 24th of December was set apart for a day of humiliation “w^th respect to y^e hazordous estate of our native country, y^e trowbles thereof, y^e sad condic͠on of y^e church at Barmuda,

About the middle of November, or a little later — near the end of the session, at all events, — all the Remonstrants (except Fowle

The trial seems to have occupied one day, and the sentence was almost the closing act of the session.

The sentence, we observe, says nothing about imprisonment or about security for payment.

Child, even before the trial, seems to have had the intention of paying a visit to England in the autumn,

The fact is, Winthrop and his associates had been too clever for Dr. Child. They had given him every opportunity, since his trial, to prepare such documents as he thought would be most effective in England, knowing full well that he would (if liberty of action were allowed him) get these ready before he sailed, in order to fortify them with signatures. This was manifestly their object in postponing his arrest to the eve of sailing. Indeed, their original purpose had been to wait until he had actually embarked: why, Winthrop does not tell us, because he supposes we shall be shrewd enough to infer that any documents seized on shipboard would be not only the last results of the Doctor’s activities but would also, from the circumstances of their seizure, require no proof that they were intended for use in the mother country. I should be ashamed to make so obvious a suggestion, were it not that an eminent New Englander has interpreted the action of the vigilant guardians of our independence in quite another fashion. “One striking characteristic of the theocracy,” writes Mr. Brooks Adams, “was its love for inflicting mental suffering upon its victims. The same malicious vindictiveness which sent Morton to sea in sight of his blazing home, and which imprisoned Anne Hutchinson in the house of her bitterest enemy, now suggested a scheme for making Childe endure the pangs of disappointment, by allowing him to embark, and then seizing him as the ship was setting sail.”

The papers thus impounded were three in number. There was a petition to the Commissioners for Plantations from some twenty-five “non-freemen” calling for liberty of conscience and for a general governor. This was of no great consequence. Far more significant was another petition, signed by the original Remonstrants, in which, after reciting the harsh treatment they had received, they ask not only for “settled churches according to the reformation of England,” — that is, the Presbyterian reformation, — and for the appointment of a “general governor” or commissioners to regulate the Colony, but for the imposition of “the oath of allegiance and such other covenants” as the Parliament may decide on to test the sentiments of the colonists “to the state of England and true restored Protestant religion,” i. e., of course, the Presbyterian system. This clause, we note, calls for the imposition of the Covenant on the whole Colony! The petition also asked for judgment on the Remonstrance and for answers to certain queries. These, which made up the third document, were openly revolutionary. They concerned, amongst other things, the validity of the charter, inquiring “how it might be forfeited, and whether such and such acts or speeches in the pulpits or in the courts were not high treason.”

Child, on being brought before the Governor and Council, “fell into a great passion, and gave big words, but being told, that they considered he was a person of quality, and therefore he should be used with such respect as was meet to be showed to a gentleman and a scholar, but if he would behave himself no better, he should be committed to the common prison and clapped in irons, — upon this he grew more calm; so he was committed to the marshal, with Smith and Dand, for two or three days, till the ships were gone.” He was “very much troubled to be hindered from his voyage, and offered to pay his fine,” but the authorities refused to accept this as sufficient to discharge him, since they “now had new matter and worse against him.”

At the Court of Assistants, in March, 1647, the whole matter was referred to the next General Court, partly because that Court had dealt with the former case (that of the Remonstrance itself), and partly because the new grounds of complaint against the defendants were so momentous, concerning “the very life and foundation of our government.” Smith and Dand were released on bail, after giving security to pay within two months the fine imposed on each of them in the preceding November. Maverick, who had been fined only £10 on that occasion, had exerted himself in the interim to get signatures to the petition to the Commissioners — the same of which a copy was found in Dand’s study. He was therefore summoned to the Court of Assistants, charged with this offence (which, in the view of the Court, involved a breach of his Freeman’s Oath), and likewise bound over to the General Court. “Mr. Clerk,” of Salem, a freeman and a church member, was also summoned and bound over for the same reason: — he had not signed the original Remonstrance, but “had been very active about the petition to the commissioners in procuring hands to it.” Dr. Child, regarded as the chief offender, “was offered his liberty, upon bail to the general court, and to be confined to Boston; but he chose rather to go to prison, and so he was committed.”

We are now in a position to understand Child’s letter of March 15, 1646[–7], written from Boston to John Winthrop, Jr., “at Pequat River,” immediately after this action of the Assistants:

He asks payment of £40 which he had lent Winthrop, for “this fine & other businesses may cause me to want moneys.”

Here we must pause to draw an obvious distinction, which has sometimes been overlooked or ignored. The authorities had two separate cases against Child: (1) that which grew directly out of the Remonstrance itself and his conduct when summoned to answer to it, and (2) that concerning the papers found in Dand’s study. The first was finished at the November Court in 1646 by the imposition of a fine of £50, which still hung over his head, being unpaid; the second, which involved a conspiracy to subvert the government, was now pending and was to be tried at the spring session of the General Court in 1647. It was the fact that the fine of £50 had not been paid which gave the Council a valid ground for arresting Child in November, 1646, when he was about to sail for England, and doubtless (as already suggested) the neglect to exact payment and the liberty of a week or more accorded to the Doctor before the date of his intended sailing (in November, 1646) had been a piece of policy on the part of the magistrates, who, suspecting a conspiracy against the government, wished to give the plotters every opportunity to take such measures and prepare such documents as should make their ultimate purposes clear.

The Court of Elections was held on May 26, 1647. Winthrop was chosen Governor by a plurality of two or three hundred, and the only new magistrate elected was Captain Robert Bridges. Yet there had been “great laboring” by “the friends of the petitioners to have one chosen governor who favored their cause, and some new magistrates to have been chosen of their side.”

Before Winslow sailed for England, Gorton with his two associates, John Greene and Randall Holden, had accomplished much. They had left Rhode Island about the middle of August, 1645, had arrived in England (it seems) toward the end of the year,

Winslow sailed from Boston about the middle of December,

Major Child, being a high Presbyterian,

Just what was being done by Thomas Fowle (the only Remonstrant then in England), by William Vassall (also there), and by English friends of the cause, to get the business before the Parliament or the Commissioners, we cannot make out with certainty.

Before this time, however, Winslow, though he had not yet got a formal hearing, must have filed his documents. These included copies not only of various Gorton papers, but also of Child’s Remonstrance and the General Court’s Declaration in reply; and with them went the protest of December, 1646, addressed to the Commissioners by the Governor and Company in answer to their order of May 15, 1646. This protest covered both cases, Gorton’s and Child’s. It asserted, with a masterly union of deference and frank courage, the doctrine of No Appeal under the Charter, and called upon the Commissioners to recognize that doctrine, not, to be sure, by affirming it in set terms but “by leaving delinquents to our just proceedings, and discountenancing our enemies and disturbers of our peace, or such as molest our people . . . upon pretence of injustice.”

Meanwhile, as we have seen, Robert Child was in confinement at Boston, awaiting the May session of the General Court and looking anxiously for a summons from Parliament that should call him to England to “prosecute his appeal.”

In this letter the Commissioners acknowledge the receipt from Winslow of the Petition and Remonstrance of the Governor and Company in the Gorton case, and continue in these highly significant terms:

The passage here italicized refers in the plainest way to the appeal of Child and his associates, and is a direct and favorable reply to certain dignified and outspoken sentences in the petition of the Governor and Company which Winslow had delivered to the Commissioners. This declares that if Gorton be upheld by the Commissioners, it will endanger the peace of the Colony.

The action of the English Commissioners, however, — as it could not be known to the Magistrates and Deputies at the May session of the General Court, so it was not needed to spur them to decisive action in the case of Child and his associates, for they were confident that they were acting legally and they never lacked courage. Undoubtedly they expected a favorable reply from England, but their action on subsequent occasions — for example, in their treatment of the Commissioners of Charles II in 1665 — shows that they were quite ready to defy the Parliamentary Commissioners now, should these claim any power which the Charter, as our forefathers interpreted it, had lodged in the hands of the Massachusetts authorities.

And so the May court of 1647 began its session on the 26th, and the trial of the Remonstrants was reached in due course. It is important, in view of the prevalent confusion on this subject, to define the issue. The first case, that of the Remonstrance itself, was over and done with, and the penalties had been imposed. The present case, though it had grown out of the former, was quite distinct, and depended on acts discovered and in part committed subsequently to the former trial. These acts, in the opinion of the magistrates, amounted to a conspiracy against the government on the part of Robert Child, John Smith, Samuel Maverick, John Dand, and Thomas Burton. Two of the original Remonstrants were not involved in this second proceeding — Thomas Fowle and David Yale. Fowle had gone to England before the former trial, and had consequently had no part in the subsequent activities that led to the present prosecution. His sureties (whoever they were) were, of course, bound to produce him or settle up, if the Court should call him to bar on the former offence, for which he had never been tried; but it seems clear that the matter was never pressed. How, when, and why Yale dropped out of the case is a mystery. I should be inclined to think he had not signed the petition seized in Dand’s study but for the fact that Winthrop says expressly that it was “from Dr. Child and the other six petitioners.”

One new culprit was expected to stand trial with the rest, having been bound over at the Court of Assistants in March, 1647. This was “Mr. Clerk of Salem the keeper of the ordinary there and a church member.” His offence is equated with Maverick’s by Winthrop, for both were freemen: “These having taken an oath of fidelity to the government, and enjoying all liberties of freemen, their offence was far the greater.” They “had been very active about the petition to the commissioners” (that revolutionary document found in Dand’s study) “in procuring hands to it.”

The exact date of the trial of the conspirators is not determinable. The Court assembled on May 26, 1647, but the trial certainly took place in June,

A very interesting memorial, hitherto unprinted, was submitted to the Court shortly (as it would seem) before a decision was reached. It is docketed, in a hand contemporary with the text: “Deputy^s: motions, 1647,”

Of the fourteen signers, one alone — Jacob Barney of Salem — appears as flatly “contradicens” to the final sentence of the Court; Dummer, Pendleton, Payne, Carlton, Clements, Pelham, and Lothrop are recorded as “somewhat differing from y^e sentence of y^e Courte, in degree only,” and as “desiring their contradicentes might stand on record only as they differed.” They were in favor of lighter fines, and their several opinions are entered.

John Dand, being unable to pay his fine and unwilling to apologize, was put in prison.

Maverick was allowed his liberty for about a month after sentence, but then, not having paid his £150, he was imprisoned.

At the November session of the General Court in this same year (1647) Maverick petitioned for “a review of his Tryall, the reparaco͠n of his Creditt, and remittm^t of fines

As to Smith and Burton, we have no record that proves the payment of their fines, but Maverick asserts, in his Briefe Description of New England,

Meanwhile, in October or November, 1647, the Court had passed the following vote:

The iron works were far from profitable, and such a sale would undoubtedly have been at a great loss. To prevent this, I conjecture, and to square his debt to Child, Winthrop guaranteed to the Colony £40 of Child’s first fine, and had Leader, as Child’s agent, credit him with that amount.

Mr. Brooks Adams remarks with a certain vagueness, that “though the elders accused Childe of being a Jesuit, there is some ground to suppose that he inclined toward Geneva.”

Exactly when Child left New England we do not know. On July 14, 1647, he was still in this country, for on that date he gave to Richard Bonighton a deed for one hundred acres of his Saco purchase from Vines in exchange for a like quantity in another patent,

When Child reached home, if not before, he must have learned of the action of the Commissioners in the Gorton case. Their two letters to the Colony, dated May 25 and July 22, 1647, had virtually settled the fate of the Remonstrance. In the first, they advert plainly enough to Child and his associates, declaring that they have no wish to encourage appeals or to limit the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and admitting that the contentions of the Bay have been in defence of legal privileges under the Charter. The second and final letter reaffirms these expressions: “We did by our said letter declare our tenderness of your just privileges, and of preserving entire the authority and jurisdiction of the several governments in New England, whereof we shall still express our continued care.”

After this, it might well have seemed hopeless for Child to prosecute his appeal. But he was an ardent soul, and no doubt received help from his family and friends, especially his brother the Major. At all events, by March or April, 1648, Child had given up the fight, for in May three ships arrived from England in one day, bringing word by the passengers, and also by letters from Winslow, that the struggle was over. Child had “preferred a petition to the committee [i. e., the Commissioners for Plantations] against us, and put in Mr. Thomas Fowle his name among others; but he, hearing of it, protested against it, (for God had brought him very low, both in his estate and his reputation, since he joined in the first petition).” This application to the Commissioners had come to nothing. News also came of an encounter on the Exchange, in which Child had told Francis Willoughby that the people of New England “were a company of rogues and knaves.”

In consequence, perhaps, of his reverses of fortune, Child seems to have sold Vines’s Saco patent, about this time, to John Becx and associates, the proprietors of the iron works,

It was, of course, largely the efforts of Winslow in gaining the support of men of influence, as well as in presenting the Gorton case, along with Child’s, to the Commissioners before the Doctor’s arrival, that had doomed Child’s final attempt. Four pieces of contemporary testimony may close this episode in our hero’s career. The Apostle Eliot wrote in the Records of his church at Roxbury under 1647: “God so graciously prospered m^r Winslows indeavours in England, against Gorton & his complices, y^t all theire great hopes were dashed; and they among vs, a little pulled in theire heads, and held theire peace.”

On July 14, 1648, Herbert Pelham wrote from England to Winthrop:

Maverick, about 1661, in a paper drawn up to serve as ammunition in his campaign against the liberties of New England, shall be the last witness, for the proverb says that losers must have leave to talk:

“Now,” in the passage that I have italicized, must refer to the time of writing. If so, we have merely an assertion that Maverick himself has come to England as the representative of the petitioners, whose cause has languished for all these years; but he can hardly have meant to pose as agent for the seven Remonstrants, for Child and Burton were dead, Fowle and Yale had dropped the business years before, and Maverick and John Dand seem to have been the only members of the group who were pursuing the affair. At about this same time, thirteen persons who found themselves aggrieved by the New England authorities petitioned the Council for Foreign Plantations for redress. Among them were Edward Godfrey (formerly Governor of Maine), John Gifford (agent for the iron works),

In estimating rights and wrongs in the controversy between the Bay and the Remonstrants, it is inevitable that historians should take sides. Maybe it is likewise inevitable that, in so doing, many of them should instinctively espouse that cause which appears, at first face, to embody resistance to a narrow and provincial tyranny and to represent civic freedom and liberty of conscience; but I am inclined to think more caution might have been used in accepting the Remonstrants as authentic champions of these noble principles. Certain it is, at all events, that we cannot pass judgment as if the antithesis were between liberality on the one hand and bigotry on the other. Our ancestors of the Bay believed — on good grounds — that they were grappling with a conspiracy to overthrow the government, both civil and ecclesiastical, under which they desired to live. This they suspected from the outset, and their initial suspicions were completely justified by the documents which, in the second stage of the affair, they seized at Dand’s lodgings, for these proved beyond a peradventure that Child hoped to procure from Parliament the abrogation of the Charter (as forfeited for non-fulfilment of its conditions), the trial of the magistrates for high treason, the supersession of the Governor and Company by a General Governor under the immediate control of Parliament in all things (without chartered privileges) or by a Board of Parliamentary Commissioners, and the establishment of Presbyterianism as the state church. These objects, all of them plainly avowed in the seized documents, were for the most part expressed or implied in the original Remonstrance,

We, their descendants, who enjoy the fruits of that independence, need not be too harsh in criticizing those who founded and transmitted it. But let us not get ahead of our reasoning. I am not maintaining that the Colony was the abode of liberty for the individual, as we understand it. That is another question, which does not logically arise at any stage of the present discussion. The issue was quite different. Child desired to bring the Colony under the Parliamentary thumb; he desired to reduce it to the position of a civic corporation in the mother country — to that of London, for example, though without the chartered privileges and immunities which that city enjoyed. To the colonists, on the other hand, it was a prime object, though remaining a part of the Empire, to achieve the position of an independent state, something like Canada now-a-days, for example, or New Zealand. On this issue there was, of course, no possibility of compromise, nor can there be any doubt which of the two objects was the more desirable in the long run. The logic of events has settled that problem, and theoretical considerations have no standing. We may admit that the little commonwealth that our ancestors were establishing was narrow and bigoted at the moment; and that some of the changes that Child believed in would have been salutary may also — for argument’s sake — be conceded. Still, it remains true that it was better, in the long run, to keep that commonwealth independent and to let it work toward the light in its own way, however slowly, than to destroy its autonomy at one blow, even if such destruction brought about the reform of certain abuses. We honor our ancestors, I repeat, for successfully resisting the royal Commissioners of 1664, who came hither with just such powers as Child’s proposed Commissioners of Parliament would have wielded if they had been appointed, and again in 1689 for ousting Andros, who realized at length the alternative desire of Child for a General Governor. How then can we condemn them for thwarting a similar attempt at subjugation in 1646 and 1647? We shall not, I trust, be deluded by the mere name of a Parliament, for the Long Parliament in 1646 was far more arbitrary in its temper than Charles II in 1664, and every bit as arbitrary as James II, who appointed Andros.

Winslow four times asserts in plain terms that permission to form Presbyterian churches was offered to the Remonstrants in open court. In Hypocrisie Unmasked he writes: “Not long before I came away certaine discontented persons in open Court of the Massachusets, demanding that liberty,

Let it not be forgotten that at this very moment the utmost that the moderate Presbyterians in England were willing to grant was that, when the Presbyterian system had been established by law, such Independents as wished might be allowed to form and support their own separate churches, whereas the thoroughgoing Presbyterians (like the Scottish Baylie, whom Major Child quotes with approval

Winslow did not miss this point: there is very little in this whole affair that he did miss. In Hypocrisie Unmasked, addressing an English (not a colonial) audience, after explaining how, some years before, certain Scottish Presbyterians had received permission to settle in Massachusetts and to organize their own churches in their own way, he remarks that by this it “will easily appeare how wee are here wronged by many; and the harder measure as wee heare imposed upon our brethren for our sakes, nay pretending our example for their president [precedent].” Then, when he has told of the offer to Child and the Remonstrants, he concludes with a trenchant suggestion, though moderately and even ironically put: “So that if our brethren here [i. e., in England] shall bee restrained they walking peaceably, the example must not be taken from us, but arise from some other principle.”

Of course, the magistrates, with a passionate interest quite justified by the crisis, were watching the life-and-death struggle in England, both in Parliament and out, between the Presbyterians and the Independents; and they were well aware that Massachusetts was deeply and even essentially involved in the contest. New England was regarded by the Presbyterian party in the mother country as the true nidus of the Independent germ, and to New England the English Independents looked for cooperation and effective aid. Only four years before, in 1642, an appeal had come from “divers Lords of the upper house, and some thirty of the house of commons and others from the ministers there, who stood for the independency of churches,” begging for the presence of Cotton, Hooker, and Davenport to advance the cause in England. And in the very year (1645, July 1) that preceded Child’s Remonstrance, the elders of the churches throughout the United Colonies met at Cambridge to “examine the writings which some of them had prepared” in answer to many books from England, a part of which were “in maintenance of the Presbyterial government (agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines in England) against the Congregational way, which was practised here.”

So much for generalities — now for one or two concrete matters involved in the case of the Remonstrants — or rather, in their two cases, for we must never forget that there were two distinct trials for different (though connected) acts, and two distinct sentences.

It is continually asserted, or implied, that Child and his friends were punished for petitioning the General Court,

Child’s party, of course, complained that they were punished for petitioning, but our forefathers knew better. Child was himself informed by the Court, at a preliminary examination, when he contended that “it was no offence to prefer a petition,” that the Remonstrants “were not questioned for petitioning, but for such miscarriages, etc., as appeared in their petition and Remonstrance.”

The second point is that of the appeal to Parliament, or to the Commissioners for Plantations — which amounts to the same thing. Here Child and his friends made a bad mistake in tactics, of which the magistrates took instant advantage. They put in their first appeal at the wrong moment and in a wrong way, and thus got into an altogether false position. Without waiting for the decision of the Court on the charges of contempt and sedition, or even for a formal arraignment, they “refused to answer” and appealed to the Commissioners in England, and this was of course construed as a denial of jurisdiction, as in fact it was and was meant to be. In the language of the charge brought against them in the first case, they “publicly declared their disaffection [to our government], in that, being called by the Court to render an accompt of their misapprehensions and evil expressions in the premises, they refused to answer; but, by appealing from this government, they disclaimed the jurisdiction thereof, before they knew whether [the court] would give any sentence against them, or no.”

Whether or not an appeal would lie from the General Court to Parliament was a question on which the magistrates had made up their minds.

With the coming-in of Parliament the situation became peculiarly embarrassing, both with regard to sovereignty in general and with regard to the right of appeal. Fears were past from King and Council, and the Parliament was friendly. It was requisite, therefore, to keep its favor and at the same time to maintain the position that appeals could not be made.

As the Civil War progressed, however, and as Parliament became more and more nearly absolute, — while, in the strife of parties on both sides of the water, disaffection or dissatisfaction with the colonial government increased with the growth of a mixed population, — the moment was inevitably approaching when this doctrine of No Appeal must be decided. It came up in the case of Captain Stagg when he made prize of a Bristol ship in Boston harbor, and was asserted as undoubtedly sound “in causes of judicature,” but here a conflict of authority was avoided by some very close reasoning, into which we need not enter.

The Gortonian petition, which the Commissioners had received and on which they had taken provisional action, was to all intents and purposes an appeal from the Bay to Parliament; and the fathers of the Colony were shrewd enough, in forwarding their own protest to the Commissioners by the hands of Winslow, in December, 1646, to bring this Gorton appeal into connection with the case of Child. For, since Child had not appealed (in November, 1646) until the Commissioners’ action in the Gorton matter had become known in Boston, it was reasonable to assert that his boldness in appealing before judgment had been encouraged, if not suggested, by that action. And the two cases were particularly advantageous ones, from the Massachusetts point of view, on which to raise the general question. For the Gortonians were sectaries of a sort that Parliament would be unlikely to encourage when all the documents were laid before it, particularly that extraordinary manifesto of Randall Holden addressed “To the great and honoured Idol Generali, now set up in the Massachusets.”

As it has sometimes been asserted — how erroneously we have seen — that the Remonstrants were fined and imprisoned for petitioning the General Court, so we hear now and again that they were punished for appealing. The late Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as I understand him, avers that an appeal to Parliament, in this and other cases, “was looked upon and treated in Massachusetts as a crime, and as such was punished.” And, though he acknowledges that “the stubborn spirit of independence behind” this denial of right was “what made New England,” he cannot refrain from the query: “Yet would Verres have dared to make a crime of the complaint a Roman citizen had proffered to the Senate and People of Rome?”

Thus I vindicate Verres from the charge that he would have respected the right of appeal to Rome. Our ancestors, in the cases of Child and Maverick, the record will also vindicate from the charge of treating an appeal to Parliament as a crime. Child appealed twice once, in his first case, before sentence, with contemptuous denial of the Court’s jurisdiction. In this appeal Maverick was not concerned, and Child, as we have seen, was not punished for appealing, but for appealing at such a moment and in such a way as to make himself guilty of high contempt. The second appeal, in which both shared, was at the end of the first case. It was treated as an offence in Maverick’s case only, because it violated his oath as a freeman.

Note that Samuel Maverick, who knew at least as much about these transactions as our local iconoclasts, was under no misapprehension about the charges against him. Referring, in a formal document, to the second trial (on the first, he had escaped with a mulct of only £10), he avers that he was convicted of “conspiracy and perjury.” And he was quite correct. Child’s actions — after the first case, that of the Remonstrance itself, had been disposed of — amounted to a plot against the government, and therefore the records speak, with stern but exact judgment, of “Dr. Child’s conspiracy,” and in this conspiracy Maverick was unquestionably implicated. As to perjury, all one has to do is to read the Freeman’s Oath, which, Maverick had taken, to determine that question.

The prevalent opinion seems to be that Child presented his Remonstrance of 1646 in good faith and with a sincere desire to procure from the colonial authorities the blessings of civil liberty and freedom of worship. One plain fact has often been strangely overlooked: namely, that Robert Child, who was no fool, did not intend that his Petition and Remonstrance should be favorably considered by the General Court. Merely to read the document — a temptation which some scholars appear to have resisted — will convince anybody that he could have had no such hope or purpose.

For the Court to give the petition a favorable hearing would have been to admit that the colonists had violated their Charter and neglected their oath of allegiance, inasmuch as they had not yet established “a setled forme of government according to the lawes of England;” that the inhabitants, under the system that prevailed, could not have “a sure and comfortable enjoyment of [their] lives, liberties, and estates, according to [their] due and naturall rights as freeborne subjects of the English nation;” that the magistrates appeared to cherish “an overgreedy spirit of arbitrary power,” such as was “detestable to our English nation and to all good men” and was “at present a chief cause of the intestine warre” in the mother country, — in short, a disposition like that of Charles I himself; that the people lived in constant fear of “illegal commitments, unjust imprisonments, taxes, rates, customes, levyes of ungrounded and undoing assessments, unjustifiable presses, undue fynes, unmeasurable expenses and charges;” that the limitations on the franchise and on eligibility to office were causing “many great inconveniences, secret discontents, murmurings, rents in the plantations,” and even “fears of perpetual slavery and bondage;” that the church polity of Massachusetts occasioned “an ocean of inconveniences, dishonor to God and to his ordinances, . . . encrease of anabaptisme and of those that totally contemn all ordinances as vaine, fading of Christian graces, decrease of brotherly love, heresies, [and] schismes;”

We need not here inquire whether the allegations were true or false, and the requests reasonable or unreasonable, for that is not the point. The point is rather that Child, who was on his second visit to the Colony and was intimately acquainted with its leading men,

When, at the end of the Remonstrance, he declared that, in case the petition were rejected, he and his associates should “be necessitated to apply [their] humble desires to the honourable Houses of Parliament,” he was not indulging in a mere threat: he was expressing, none too guardedly, the real purpose that he had in mind in presenting his Remonstrance. And the threat itself would be a powerful argument when he went to the Commons. “You see, gentlemen,” so he could argue, “how slightly these rebellious colonists hold your authority. I assured them that I should appeal to you if they were not just to me, and they threw out my petition all the same!” Indeed, the whole Remonstrance, if read with all the circumstances in mind, reveals itself at once as a paper intended, from the first, for the eyes of the Presbyterian party in England, both in the Parliament and out, who had long looked askance at New England as a stronghold of Independency. Only in form was it addressed to our General Court.

And the nature of the petition that was to come before Parliament, on the basis of the clearly foreseen rejection of this extraordinary Remonstrance, is not a matter of conjecture, for we know the contents of the papers seized in Dand’s study on the eve of Child’s intended sailing. After a recital of their bitter experiences, the Remonstrants petition the Commissioners not only for the extension to Massachusetts of the laws of England and for liberties like those of English freeholders, but “for settled churches according to the reformation of England,” — that is, for the introduction of the Presbyterian system, — for the appointment of “a General Governor or some honorable Commissioners” to take charge of the Colony, and for the imposition upon all of the oath of allegiance “and other covenants which the Parliament shall think most convenient, to be as a touchstone to try our affections to the state of England and true restored Protestant religion.” This last request is particularly notable. What Child had in mind was that the colonists should be forced to take the Covenant! After this, one thinks, we should hear no more of Child as one of the noble army of martyrs to liberty of conscience and freedom of speech.

These papers, it may be, were drawn up after the Remonstrance had been rejected and its subscribers fined, and may have been more drastic on that account, but there is every reason to suppose that, so far as the petition to the Commissioners is concerned, it represents substantially what Child had originally intended to bring before Parliament, though he had since decided to bring the matter before the Commissioners.

Nor were the fathers of our commonwealth in doubt, even before they seized Child’s and Dand’s papers, that the Remonstrants (or their ringleaders) intended to nullify the Charter and to reduce the Colony to a condition of absolute dependence on the will of a Presbyterian majority in Parliament. When Child told the Court, in November, 1646, “that they [the Remonstrants] did beneath themselves in petitioning to us, etc., and in conclusion appealed to the Commissioners in England,” the Governor replied that “he would admit no appeal, nor was it allowed by our charter, but by this it appeared what their aim was in their petition; they complained of fear of perpetual slavery,

That Robert Child’s sentiments were violently anti-independent comes out clearly in the papers already examined. Their testimony is corroborated by the pamphlet issued by his brother the Major. Note, for instance, the closing words: “I shall desire the Reader by all that hath been said, to observe how Independents are all of a peece, for subtilitie, designs, fallacies, both in New-England and in Old.”

Major Child’s citation of Mr. Baily seems to have made slight impression upon the minds of the more recent investigators of New England history, but it deserves a moment’s pause, for it shows us where he stood and thus gives the plainest indication of the real purpose of the whole agitation. A quotation or two from Baylie’s famous Dissuasive will be more than enough:

After this we are not surprised to find the excellent Baylie (whom I greatly admire for his clearness and force of style, and for the frankness with which he joins issue with everything that makes for liberty of conscience and freedom of speech) spending a whole chapter to prove that “Independence is contrary to the Word of God.”

But what are “Errours”? Baylie leaves us in no doubt on this point, for he enumerates several aberrant sects that appear to him equally dangerous: — the Canterburians (i. e., High Churchmen of Laud’s temper), the Antinomians, the Anabaptists, the Libertines, and the Independents. And, as he puts the Independents at the top of the climax, so he does not hesitate to explain their bad eminence: “That so much-extolled Independency,” he calls it, “wherein many Religious souls for the time do wander, which is the chief hand that opened at first, and keepeth open to this day the door to all the other Errours that plague us.” Still, he has hope: Independency is likely to be suppressed by the strong hand of the law, and Presbyterianism, which alone is of God, will soon be established by God’s mighty arm throughout the land. “Yet here is our Comfort, That, in answer to our Supplications, the Lord hath stirred up the hearts of those who have power effectually to minde that which we are confident will prove the Remedy of these and many more of our present Evils: I mean, The setting up, without further Delay, of the Lords Government in his own House, over all the Land.”

All this, to be sure, is in the Preface to the printed sermon, but the actual discourse addressed to the Lords breathes the same sentiments:

Among these heretics and patrons of error, be it understood, the Independents have a chief place in Baylie’s mind — “the Independents,” he says, “the Brownists, or the Anabaptists, or any of the Heterodox Societies.”

Baylie’s Dissuasive appeared the year before the Remonstrance was presented. All such books came to New England without delay and the task of answering them devolved in large measure upon the Massachusetts divines. Indeed, John Cotton was penning his reply to Baylie and Rutherford

The friendship between Child and the younger John Winthrop was not disturbed even by the outcome of the trial of June, 1647.

Child’s letter of 1648 is dated at Gravesend, but he was then lodging at the house of one Dr. Garbet at Hogsdon, which was close by and was also in the neighborhood of Northfleet, where he was born and where his elder brother the Major still lived, doubtless on the hereditary estate. Manifestly Garbet was an alchemist, and he was an old friend of Winthrop’s.

The following account is from a tract printed June 2, 1648:

A letter of June 2, 1648, runs as follows: “On Thursday the first of June, our Army marched towards Rochester, whereby the way we found a passage over a Bridge neare Norfleel maintaind by about 600. foot, whereof Major Child had command, his Excellency commanded out a party of 200 horse, 100. foot mounted behind them; Major Husbands having the command of them, and after some dispute, we gained the passe, and the enemy fled, about 20. killed, and 30. prisoners taken.”

What became of Major Child after this defeat we do not know, but he escaped on foot, unwounded — as we have seen — and probably managed to make his peace with the authorities. Anyhow, we hear no more of him for a couple of years.

Before we return to the Doctor, we may as well follow his brother’s fortunes so far as they appear in the records. If the Major’s offence was overlooked for a time, he was at all events not relieved from suspicion. On November 20, 1650, a certain John Bulfinch laid an information against him, alleging that he had been “a commissioned officer” in the Kentish revolt and had aided the Royalists on other occasions. Accordingly an order was issued (January 1, 1651) that his estate should be “seized and secured” and that the rents should remain in the tenants’ hands. But the Major clearly had powerful friends and, though his activity in the uprising was notorious, he was able to put up a good fight pro domo. On the 7th of January he got permission to “hold his estate on security,” to have a copy of the charge, and to examine witnesses before the County Committee.

We must now return to Dr. Robert Child, whom we left in May, 1648, at Dr. Garbet’s house in Hogsdon, Kent, busy with chemical experiments and contemplating the life of a general practitioner in his native county. He was on friendly terms with the scientific circle to which Boyle and Hartlib belonged, and was deeply engaged, as we shall see presently, in alchemical speculations, as well as in the more practical study of agriculture, then attracting much attention in England. In this same letter to Winthrop he mentions “an Ingenuous young man of my acquaintance” who “hath newly invented double writing, so y^t a man can write 2 or 3 Copyes or more as soone & as fairely as one, he hath a pattent graunted in y^e Parliam^t for 14 yeares, by y^e next y^e invention will be com̃on.”

On August 26, 1650, Child wrote again from Gravesend. The letter is long and interesting. It expresses an eager hope that their correspondence may continue and deplores the fact that they can “sildome write.” Heretofore Child’s extant letters have begun with the formal “Sir” or “Worthy Sir,” but this time he addresses Winthrop as “Loving freind.” He has not yet quite abandoned his wish to return to New England:

A postscript gives a large budget of European news and closes with a notable passage:

No further letters on either side are known to be in existence, but I am glad to be able to prove (as I shall do shortly) that these two choice and congenial spirits were never estranged.

The scheme for a society of scholars came to nothing, nor, so far as I can discover, did the Kilkenny project ever take shape. At all events, Child did not go to Ireland immediately. William Coddington, after his return from England with his commission as “Governor of Acquedneck, alias Rhode Island, and Quinnungate Island,” wrote to John Winthrop, Jr., on February 19, 1651[–2], that he had met Child several times in England, doubtless in London and probably in 1650 or 1651:

We have still further traces of Child in 1651. On March 7, Elias Ashmole makes the following entry in his Diary: “I went to Maidstone with Dr. Child the physician. And 3 Hor. post merid. I first became acquainted with Dr. Flood.”

In 1651, at the request of Milton’s friend Samuel Hartlib, who had a passion for issuing little books and was particularly interested in projects for the improvement of English agriculture and industry, Robert Child composed an essay entitled “A Large Letter concerning the Defects and Remedies of English Husbandry written to Mr. Samuel Hartlib,” which forms the bulk of a volume published in that same year under the title, Samuel Hartlib his Legacie.

This essay gives one a highly favorable impression of Child’s powers as an observer and a practical man of science. Interpreting the word “husbandry” in a large sense, he treats not only of every department of farming and gardening — implements, fertilizers, the chemistry of soils, rotation of crops, methods of sowing and planting, diseases of wheat with their cause and cure — but of stock-raising, vine-growing, wine-making, orchards, forestry, fishponds, mines, clay for pottery, building stone, mineral springs, bee-keeping, and silkworms. He deplores the neglect of meadows, the existence of so much waste land which might be brought under cultivation, the remissness of farmers in acquainting themselves with foreign methods, their ignorance of many useful plants that are native to the country, their reluctance to try experiments and compare notes. Many plants and some animals might be introduced into England with profit. Black foxes, musk-cats, sables, minks, martens, and the “musk-squash” might be raised for their fur. Even elephants might be useful as traction-engines. He dilates particularly on the silkworm, which, as he thinks, experience has shown will thrive in England. “Divers Ladies, Gentlewomen, Scholars, Citizens, &c. have nursed up divers wormes to perfection, though they have had little skil in the managing of them; and likewise not such accommodations as are necessary for them; and more would they have done, if they could have had Mulberry-leaves. I am informed that one near Charing-Crosse maketh a good living by them: as also another by Ratliffe-Crosse; and therefore if we can bring up an 100, why not a 1000, yea 100000, if we had food for them?”

Child’s treatise is a kind of index to his European travels, and we have already resorted to it for information on that score.

This essay of Child’s — the Large Letter — is dated at the end “Anno 1651” in the first edition

Nor is the author’s name mentioned anywhere in the volume. The same is true of the second edition (1652),

Even without this, however, we should be able to identify the author, for Hartlib himself ascribes the essay to Dr. Child in a letter to Boyle, May 8, 1654.

Child wrote the Large Letter before he went to Ireland.

Hartlib instantly published a second edition (1652), in which he reprinted Child’s Large Letter and the other contents of the first edition, with an Appendix containing (1) Boot’s ten letters (or extracts from them) under the title of Annotations upon the Legacie of Husbandry and (2) An Interrogatory Relating more particularly to the Husbandry and Naturall History of Ireland.

Child responded by composing a series of observations on Boot’s critique, which were printed by Hartlib in the third edition of the Legacy (1655) under the title “An Answer to the Animadversor on the Letter to Mr. Samuel Hartlib of Husbandry.”

In this Answer to Boot Child has a good deal to say about New England products. A few extracts are worth making.

There was an outbreak of this disease in Boston in 1646

Here is a remark which points a moral for the dry days that are coming. Child is speaking of making beer without malt:

Henry Stubbe, however, the Warwick physician, gives a rather alarming account of this potato tipple:

The following notes confirm what Winslow says about Child’s peregrination of New England, though we cannot be sure to which of his two visits they apply. They derive additional interest from the fact that in 1645 Child purchased Vines’s Saco patent.

And he goes on to show how sassafras is not sufficiently described by any botanist, so far as he knows.

Snakeweed, supposed to be a cure for the venom of the rattlesnake, attracted much attention from naturalists and physicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, as one may see, for instance, in the Philosophical Transactions and in the writings of Cotton Mather.

The following extract concerning black lead is of quite peculiar interest — personal as well as historical:

In tracing Child’s career we have several times encountered references to the younger Winthrop’s black lead.

We should have more of Child’s observations on American natural history but for an accident in transportation: “In New-England I have seen a Plant with good success used for Sarsaperilla, . . . but concerning this plant and divers others, which grow in New-England, I cannot give you that account I desire, because my seeds and papers unhappily miscarried.”

The Interrogatory which Hartlib prepared for Child’s use in gathering materials for a natural history of Ireland covers most things in nature and includes some matters of curious interest. Under Maccamboy is the inquiry “Whether there be such a thing at all, that this herb should purge the body meerly by external touch, or whether it be a fable, what particular observations have been taken for or against it, . . . and in what place it groweth?” Under Poisons, Hartlib asks, of course, for “particular observations of the Antipathy of the Irish earth and Aire, against all poisonous creatures.” Under Patricks-Purgatory, he requests a “perfect description of the Logh, Island, Caves, and the whole proceedings there, during the Justiceship of the Earle of Corke, and the Lord Chancellour Loftus.” Under Barnacles are several questions, all directed toward an elucidation of the venerable legend of the geese that develop out of these marine crustaceans. Sir Kenelm Digby, who was probably a friend of Child, as he was of Hartlib and Boyle and the younger Winthrop, could have answered the questions authoritatively. So at least Lady Fanshawe thought in January, 1649:

The learned world was particularly interested in these bernicle geese. The very learned Father Athanasius Kircher — pace tanti viri dixerim — communicated a high-fantastical theory on the subject to Robert Southwell in 1661.

Gerard Boot, the elder brother of that Dr. Arnold Boot who wrote Animadversions on Child’s Large Letter, was a native of Gorinchem in Holland

Hartlib was eager to have Gerard Boot’s fragmentary work completed, for he thought such a treatise would be of great benefit to the “improvers” of Ireland under the Commonwealth. His Interrogatory was meant to encourage the gathering of material for this purpose. He looked to Arnold Boot as the natural continuator, and in 1653 his hopes were high, for towards the end of that year the Doctor started from Paris for England

Child certainly went to Ireland either in 1651 or more probably in 1652.

Soon after Child’s death, Hartlib wrote to Boyle: “By that, which I read concerning Dr. Child’s husbandries in the work of Ireland, I see what a good foundation of life he hath laid for that honest country calling. But I doubt the colonel cannot shew us any more observations or directions of his in writing, besides what is extant already from his own hand; though this would have improved clover, flax and woad, upon many more lands than his own.”

Even in the lifetime of his father, Arthur Hill had distinguished himself as a progressive landlord, for Sir William Brereton, in 1635, records a visit to “a brave plantation” which he held on a long lease from Lord Chichester: “This plantation is said doth yield him a £1000 per annum. Many Lanckashire and Cheshire men are here planted; with some of them I conversed. They sit upon a rack rent, and pay 5s. or 6s. an acre for good ploughing land, which now is clothed with excellent good corn.”

Child, as we may now infer, was serving Colonel Arthur Hill as agricultural expert, with his headquarters perhaps at what is now Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast.

Child died, it seems, between February and May, 1654. In a letter to Boyle, dated February 28, 1653–4, Hartlib expresses the hope that Child will finish Gerard Boot’s Natural History of Ireland,

I have passed lightly over Child’s alchemical pursuits in order not to complicate too much our study of this remarkable man. They did not interfere with his practical, every-day interests — medicine, mining, agriculture, speculation in colonial iron works; nor were they inconsistent with mundane engrossment, for a time, in English American politics. This observation is not without significance. Why somebody has not paid serious attention to the alchemical studies of the early New Englanders

We have slight occasion, then, to take the defensive, and none at all to apologize for our great-grandfathers as if their zeal in alchemy were merely a picturesque and amiable weakness. It is much to the credit of New England intellectual life in the seventeenth century that the younger Winthrop could meet Robert Child and Sir Kenelm Digby on their own ground in these speculations; that George Stirk could go to London in 1650 with so thorough a knowledge of alchemical principles and processes that he was able to impose on the world his splendid fiction of the adept Eirenseus Philalethes, who still rules royally in the counsels of occultists; that Jonathan Brewster, our Plymouth elder’s son, was in 1657 in hot and sanguine pursuit of the grand elixir in his cabin on the Connecticut frontier with the Indians howling at his kitchen door;

Child’s interest in alchemy and in the occult appears in the earliest letter of his that we possess — that addressed to his friend Winthrop in 1641

As to the younger John Winthrop, he began these studies early in life, for they loom large in the letters he received from the friend of his youth, Edward Howes, from 1628 to 1644.

The epitaph in Mather’s Magnalia also testifies to Winthrop’s reputation as a successful alchemist:

This signifies that, whether or not Winthrop was really an adept in alchemy (that is, whether or not he had found the philosopher’s stone), he was “an adept in the true sense” because he had now learned the secrets of the heavenly kingdom. The same belief is hinted at in Mather’s interminable epitaph on Four Winthrops, in his “Hades Look’d into,” 1717, a funeral sermon on Wait Winthrop:

But the most striking of all tributes is a vivid passage in President Stiles’s Diary, June 1, 1787. Stiles is speaking of “the Governors Ring, as it is called, or a Mountain in the N. W. corner of East Haddam:”

The younger Winthrop had more than a thousand books “in a chamber” in Boston in 1640. We owe our knowledge of the extent of his library to the fact that there was “corn of divers sorts” in the same chamber and that the mice were busy. One of the volumes consisted of “the Greek testament, the psalms, and the common prayer . . . bound together. He found the common prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two other touched, nor any of his other books, though there were above a thousand.”

The most exciting of Child’s utterances on occult subjects occurs in a letter to Winthrop, written on May 13, 1648, soon after his return to England:

This reveals Child as in close contact with the latest scientific news from the Continent. The “fratres R. C.” are, of course, the Rosicrucians, who ever since 1614 had been making a vast stir in Europe. One of the greatest of them was, like Child, a Kentishman — Dr. Robert Fludd, who died in London in 1637. I should like to think that Child knew him and, indeed, nothing is more probable. Both Winthrop and Edward Howes were deeply interested in Fludd’s works, of which Howes gives Winthrop a catalogue in 1632: he calls him “the famous and farre renouned English man of our tymes.”

But it is pretty certain that the person meant is one “Dr. Euer.”

The report that Child quotes about the Emperor of Germany was founded on a strange occurrence at Prague in January, 1648. A certain Johann Conrad von Richthausen (so runs the tale) displayed to the Emperor Ferdinand III a grain of red powder which he averred was the true philosopher’s stone. With this one grain, in the Emperor’s presence, three pounds of quicksilver were transmuted into about two pounds and a half of pure gold. From this alchemic gold the Emperor caused a medal to be struck of the value of three hundred ducats, and upon Richthausen he bestowed, somewhat later, the grotesque title of Baron Chaos — Freiherr von Chaos.

The Duke of Holstein mentioned in Child’s budget of alchemical news was Frederick III of Holstein-Gottorp, a rather magnificent personage in his day, who succeeded in 1616 and died in 1659. He appears to have been a correspondent of the younger Winthrop’s, doubtless on scientific topics.

The rumor which Child mentions, that “Helia Artista is born,” signified the appearance of a divinely enlightened adept to whom was revealed the secret of the elixir. There was a saying, derived from Jewish tradition, “When Elias shall come, he shall make all things plain,”

Indeed, this same Cooper, in the same dedication, unconsciously bestows the title Elias the Artist upon George Stirk also. For he cites “our late English Phœnix, or Elias Artisto Anonymon, in his book of The open entrance to the shut Pallace of the King.” This is the Introitus Apertus, the most famous of the treatises of Philalethes, — and Philalethes, as I am prepared to prove, was George Stirk and none other, though Cooper did not know it.

This little excursus on Elias the Artist will, I trust, be forgiven when I point out its pertinency. We have it on Child’s own word, as the letter shows, that he was not Helias Artista himself and that he had never solved, or pretended to solve, the momentous problem of transmutation. This testimony may suffice to quiet forever a strange and romantic rumor which was current in scientific circles on the Continent soon after Child’s death and which still echoes dimly among students of the occult and the pseudonymous. This is the report that Child was Eirenæus Philalethes (or Philaletha), that mysterious adept who discovered the secret of transmutation in 1645 at the age of twenty-three, wrote several books on the subject, — including the thrice-famous Introitus Apertus ad Occlusum Regis Palatium, — and wandered for years about Europe in disguise, occasionally performing the miracle of transmutation.

About the middle of the sixteenth century there occurred, on the Continent, three supposed cases of the successful transmutation of metals. Each was attested by a perfectly reputable witness who was then (and should be now) above suspicion of fraud or lying. Just what actually happened in a chemical way, or just what tricks were played by the transmuters, we are not called upon to explain. It is enough for us to feel sure that something did occur each time, and that silver or gold was found in the crucible.

The earliest of the three cases is that of Claude Berigard, an eminent French physician, born in 1578, who spent a good part of his life as Professor of the Aristotelian Philosophy in Italy, first at Pisa, afterwards at Padua. Berigard himself gives an account of the affair in his Circulus Pisanus, a commentary on Aristotelianism published in 1643. When he was living in Pisa, he received from an acquaintance one dram of a powder resembling wild poppy in color. Berigard worked the experiment in person, and took every precaution against being deluded, for he well knew that in many former instances gold had been secretly introduced into either the materials or the utensils. The result was convincing, for by means of the powder he turned ten drams of mercury into fine gold.

Now George Stirk, soon after his removal from Boston to London, which took place in 1650 or 1651, had exhibited various alchemical manuscripts in Latin which he said were the work of an adept who chose to call himself Eirensæs Philalethes. Stirk’s story was that these had been given to him in New England by a friend of his who knew the adept well. This story he printed in 1654 in the preface to Part I of a versified treatise, The Marrow of Alchemy,

In the course of this lively interchange of learned chitchat, Stirk’s known friendship with the much-travelled Dr. Robert Child, coupled with the fact that they had met in America,

Thus wrote Hertodt’s English correspondent. Hertodt himself had nothing to add as to the identity of Philalethes, but he did assert that he had found his works a deceptive guide, and this utterance soon elicited an anonymous reply, also published in the Ephemerides: “I will not quarrel with anybody,” says the apologist, “as to whether Starkey or Childe was the author of the tracts which circulate under the name of Philaletha, . . . but I do maintain that nobody can have written them qui non habuerit penitissimam Cherniæ arcanorum notitiam.”

From the publication of Hertodt’s letter until the present time, the name of Child has continued to be associated, off and on, with the works of Philalethes. In Sloane MS. 2558 there is a copy of Stirk’s Marrow of Alchemy (made from the printed book) which has “Dr. Child” written in an eighteenth-century hand

There is a curious piece of evidence which shows that the erroneous identification of Eirenæus Philalethes with Child made its way to America and that scientific men in Boston about the beginning of the nineteenth century had recognized this Child as the Remonstrant. I find the evidence in certain alchemical books that once belonged to Judge Samuel Danforth.

Judge Danforth’s career as a public man is well-known. He was the son of the Rev. John Danforth of Dorchester, and was born in that town in 1696. He graduated at Harvard College in 1715, was Selectman of Cambridge 1733–1734, 1737–1739, Representative to the General Court 1734–1738, Member of the Council 1739–1774, Register of Probate for Middlesex County 1731–1745, Judge of Probate 1745–1775, Judge of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for Middlesex 1741–1774. He was also a Special Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1735 and of the Superior Court in 1753.

Convincing testimony to Danforth’s alchemical ardor exists (though heretofore overlooked) in a fragment of his library still preserved in the Boston Athenæum.

Dr. Danforth inherited his father’s alchemical library,

Again in the same volume, after the printed words “Catalogus Librorum editorum Authore Æyrenæo Philalethe Cosmopolita,”

All these scribbles appear to be in the same hand that wrote “Sam^l Danforth’s 1799” in the Opus Tripartitum, and if so, they show that Dr. Danforth had got hold of the erroneous idea, common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the right name of Philalethes was Child, and that he identified this Child with the celebrated Remonstrant.

By 1698, however, another identification had come before the public, for in that year Georg Wolfgang Wedel, in the preface to his edition of the Introitus Apertus, declared that Philalethes was commonly thought to have been an Englishman named Thomas de Vagan.

The real Thomas Vaughan, a devout and highly-esteemed occult philosopher, was born in 1622 and killed himself by an alchemical accident in 1665, but neither his record nor the known limits of his career could preserve his name from an astonishing profanation in 1895, when Léo Taxil

But we are not at the end of our comedy of errors. In a singular work, with a singular title, Die Edelgeborne Jungfer Alchymia, by Johann Conrad Creiling,

Creiling’s combinations have met with all the success that their irresponsible ingenuity deserves. In 1832 Karl Schmieder, Professor at Cassel, published his famous History of Alchemy. Schmieder believes that it is possible to transmute base metals into silver and gold, and that the secret was passed down from generation to generation among a select circle of initiates. He is inclined, therefore, to ascribe the three famous cases just mentioned — those of Berigard, Morgenbesser, and Gross — to one and the same philosopher, who may well have been identical with a certain unnamed adept from whom the great chemist van Helmont received the philosopher’s stone. And this personage Schmieder would like to think was the mysterious wanderer Eirenæus Philalethes. For him he constructs a wild biography, which is a patchwork made up of all the blunders and credulous guesses that I have briefly registered. It is very likely, Schmieder thinks, that Philalethes passed under five names in his travels — Thomas de Vaughan, Thomas Vagan, Childe, Dr. Zheil, and Carnobie; when he was in America, where he met Starkey, he called himself Childe.

So splendid a piece of constructive fiction, fortified in its details by so much citation of learned authors, the world has not willingly let die. Figuier repeats it, almost word for word, with additions, in his vastly entertaining book L’Alchimie et les Alchimistes.

My task is finished. I have followed the career of Robert Child from his birth to his death, and have even ventured to register the posthumous fictions that have associated themselves with his name. Few characters in our colonial annals are so multifariously interesting, and none, I think, appeals more congenially to a modern student.

COMENIUS AND HARVARD COLLEGE

More than two centuries ago it was asserted that John Amos Comenius, the famous Bohemian scholar, was offered the presidency of Harvard College. This somewhat startling statement, twice made by Cotton Mather, apparently slumbered unnoticed by writers on either Comenius or the College for over a century and a half. It was dug out of the Magnalia in 1860, again lost sight of, then once more — twenty-five years later — came to light, and the stirring events in Europe during the past five years have called renewed attention to it. Mather’s passage in the Magnalia deserves a more careful consideration than has been accorded it. It reads as follows:

There is no mention of this episode in the histories of Harvard College by Peirce (1833), Quincy (1840), Eliot (1848), or William R. Thayer (1890), nor in later works relating to the College. Before examining the passage in the light of contemporary evidence, it will be well to bring together some remarks that have been called out by it in the past fifty-nine years. In an article printed in 1860 we read:

In 1885 Edmund de Schweinitz, Bishop of the Unitas Fratrum, said:

“It may not be generally known,” remarked William H. Payne in 1886, “that Comenius was once solicited to become the president of Harvard College. . . . This was on the resignation of President Dunster, in 1654.”

In 1892 Professor Paul H. Hanus — who, however, later changed his opinion — wrote:

Comenius, asserted Samuel G. Williams in 1892, “was summoned to England, to Sweden, and to Hungary for aid in the bettering of learning and improvement of schools; and in 1654 he was offered and declined the presidency of Harvard College, his fame having reached even far distant America.”

In 1896 James P. Munroe remarked:

In the same year (1896) Count Lützow said:

Finally, in 1899, Count Lützow, ignoring his previous statement that Comenius had had thoughts of coming to this country as a missionary, repeated the familiar story, but with curious variations:

In all the above accounts, as well as in numerous other accounts that have appeared since 1896, the sole authority given for the statement is Mather’s Magnalia, and no other authority has apparently ever been cited.

Disappointing as are the early records of Harvard College, from their meagreness and from the haphazard way in which they were kept, it so happens that they throw important light on the resignation of Dunster and the election of his successor. As both Mr. Hanus and Mr. Monroe content themselves with merely stating that the records do not corroborate Mather’s story about Comenius, and as Mather’s own account, though correct enough so far as it goes, is not complete, the evidence is here given in full.

Dunster’s resignation, addressed “To the worshipful and honored Richard Bellingham, Esq. Governor of the Massachusetts Colony, with the rest of the honored Assistants and Deputies in General Court at Boston now assembled,” and dated June 10, 1654, concluded as follows:

In the College records, under the same date (June 10, 1654), we read:

In Answer to a writing presented to this Court by m^r Henry Dunster, wherin amongst other things therin conteyned, he is pleased to make a resignation of his place as Præsident, This Court doth order that it shall be left to the care & discretion of the Overseers of the Colledge to make provision (in case he persist in his Resolution more then one month & informe the Overseers) for some meet p^rson to carry an end that work for the p^rsent & also to act in whatever necessity should call for untill the next Sessions of this Court, when wee shall be better enabled to settle what will be needfull in all respects with reference to the Colledge: and that the Overseers will be pleased to make returne to this Court at that time of w^t they shall do herein.

At a meeting of the Overseers held October 24, 1654:

M^r Henry Dunster after sundry conferences that had passed between the Overseers & himself made his finall Resignation in these following words.

This Resignation of M^r Dunsters was voted & consented to by the Overseers the 24^th of the 8^th 1654.

At the same meeting of the Overseers, on October 24, 1654:

At a meeting of the Overseers held November 2, 1654:

The condition having been accepted, “The Rev^d m^r Charls Chauncy was,” on November 27, 1654, at a “meeting of the Hon^d & Rev^d Overseers of Harvard Colledge, at the College Hall in Cambridge,” “solemnly inaugurated into the place of President.”

It thus appears that Dunster’s resignation was first presented on June 10, 1654; that it was not immediately accepted; that the Overseers were empowered by the General Court to make provision, in case Dunster persisted in his resolution more than one month, for some “meet person” to carry on the college work, etc.; that on October 24 Dunster, after conferences with the Overseers, made his final resignation, which was accepted on the same day; that on the same day (October 24) the Overseers appointed Richard Mather and John Norton to confer with Chauncy with a view of offering the presidency to him, and also committed the care and government of the College to the Fellows; and that on November 2 the Overseers instructed Mather and Norton to tender the place to Chauncy, who accepted and was inaugurated on November 27. It is obvious, therefore, that if Cotton Mather meant that the presidency was offered to Comenius in 1654 — and that is the interpretation always placed on Mather’s words

But because Comenius could not have been offered the presidency in 1654, must Mather’s story therefore be wholly rejected? It could hardly have been invented, and must have had some basis. What was this basis?

“Comenius,” said Mather in 1702, “was indeed agreed withall, by our Mr. Winthrop in his Travels through the Low Countries, to come over into New-England, and Illuminate this Colledge and Country, in the Quality of a President: But the Solicitations of the Swedish Ambassador, diverting him another way, that Incomparable Moravian became not an American.” By “Swedish Ambassador,” Mather apparently meant Count Axel Oxenstiern, who, born in 1583, became Chancellor in 1611, and died on August 28, 1654. But the passage just quoted is not the only one in which Mather told the story. A quarter of a century later — to be exact, in 1726 — he again returned to the subject, using words which hitherto have escaped notice. Speaking of the churches of New England, he said:

Here, it will be observed, there is no allusion either to “our Mr. Winthrop” or to the Low Countries, but the reference to Sweden is repeated. Now it is known with certainty that in 1642 Comenius, then in England, was “diverted” to Sweden.

Before pursuing this episode, let us inquire into the identity of “our Mr. Winthrop,” who travelled in the Low Countries. He has been identified as Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts,

Winthrop was not at Cambridge University,

Winthrop’s first visit was made in 1634–1635. Leaving Boston in October, 1634,

The younger Winthrop was in London on July 7, 1635,

Winthrop’s third visit was made in 1661–1663.

In his reply, dated New Amsterdam, July 5, 1661,

In a letter dated July 23, 1663, Thomas Willett reminded Winthrop that “ate yowar going for Holland, thar was a parshall of wampon sente, and allso som lefte bey yowar selfe when you went awaey.”

That Winthrop and Comenius met in September, 1661, is possible, even probable; but even if they did, no formal offer of the presidency of Harvard could have been made to Comenius, since there was no vacancy in the office from the inauguration of Chauncy on November 27, 1654, to his death on February 19, 1672, fifteen months after the decease of Comenius. Moreover, in 1661 Winthrop had no official connection with Harvard, while Comenius was then a man of nearly seventy.

There remains to be considered Winthrop’s second visit in 1641–1643. Leaving Boston August 3, 1641,

Besides being the son of the Governor of Massachusetts, the younger Winthrop, then thirty-five years of age, was already a man of note on his own account; he had gone to England on public business in 1634–1635, returning with a commission from Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and “divers other great persons in England, to begin a plantation at Connecticut, and to be governor there;” he was in correspondence with many celebrated persons in Europe; and during his stay in Europe from September, 1641, to May, 1643, he must have met many distinguished men, though unfortunately only one of his letters during that long period has been preserved.

It has already been said that Comenius was in England in 1642. What took him there can best be told in his own words:

The object of Comenius’s visit to England having failed, “his position was unpleasant. On the strength of Hartlib’s invitation and assurance that funds would be forthcoming, he had given up his post in Lissa. Hopes of universal colleges and pecuniary support were now vanishing into thin air, and he found himself with baffled expectations, a wife and daughters to support, and a rapidly emptying purse.”

Indeed, it is quite within the bounds of possibility that they were travelling companions for a portion of Comenius’s journey from London to Norrköping.

Before the decision of Comenius to accept the invitation to Sweden was reached, may not Winthrop have suggested to Comenius his coming to America? No formal offer of the presidency of Harvard could have been made, because no vacancy occurred in the office from the time of Dunster’s appointment on August 27, 1640, to his resignation on October 24, 1654. But this does not preclude the possibility that the matter was discussed between Comenius and Winthrop, the latter suggesting that when a vacancy did occur the place might be offered to the former. It has been objected that Winthrop had no authority to make an offer. “I fail to find,” says Mr. Monroe, “that he had anything to do with the management of Harvard College.”

The pastime of picking flaws in Cotton Mather’s statements is too easy to afford much amusement. The passage under discussion, it seems to me, is distinctly one the basis for which is to be found in a tradition. A college boy of thirteen when the younger Winthrop died in 1676, Mather of course could not have derived the information from Winthrop himself. But Mather was an intimate friend of the younger Winthrop’s sons John and Wait and of Wait’s son John,