Episode Details

The charter was gone — annulled by a London court in 1684. But a charter is paper, and for a year and a half the loss was an abstraction. This episode is about what happened when it arrived.

It arrived as Sir Edmund Andros, royal governor of the Dominion of New England, who landed in Boston in December 1686 with red-coated soldiers and a commission to make laws and raise taxes as he pleased. No assembly. No election. No appeal. The government that had run since 1630 was dissolved in an afternoon. Then the Dominion reached into ordinary life: land titles declared void unless repurchased from the Crown, town meetings restricted to once a year, taxes levied without consent. When the town of Ipswich and its minister John Wise refused the tax on the grounds that Englishmen could not be taxed without representation, Andros had him jailed — and an official told him, "you have no more privileges left you than not to be sold for slaves." Anglican worship was forced into a Puritan meetinghouse; King's Chapel was raised on the founders' graves.

The episode follows Increase Mather slipping out of Boston in disguise to petition the king, the Glorious Revolution that swept James II away, and the April 1689 Boston revolt that overthrew Andros in a morning. Cotton Mather's declaration reframed the revolt as God's deliverance of his chosen people from the Scarlet Whore — the covenant framework converting a political event into cosmic vindication. But what the colony actually received was the 1691 charter: a royal province with an appointed governor, a property franchise, and established religious toleration. Plymouth absorbed. The covenant commonwealth, as a political fact, was over. Increase Mather argued he had preserved the essential thing in the elected assembly, making in 1691 the same case he had made in 1662 — that a covenant which bends survives. His critics said a covenant modified past recognition was no covenant at all.

This is the season finale. It closes where the season began — with the children of the covenant — and lands the wage the whole season has been counting: what the founders built out of experience, their children inherited only as form, and a covenant cannot be inherited the way a farm is. The substance slips out of the form in the handing down. What the children kept was the language. And the language went looking for a new house, as it always does, in every generation that inherits more than it has earned.