Episode Details

In the years after King Philip's War, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reformed itself with everything it had. The ministers had read the war as God's judgment on a backsliding people, and the way back to God's favor was repentance. So the colony searched its own soul, catalogued its sins, renewed its covenants. And while it did, three thousand miles away in Whitehall, a different threat was taking shape — one that had nothing to do with sin, and that no amount of reformation could touch.

This episode is about the charter: the 1629 document the founders had carried across the ocean and used to build a self-governing Puritan commonwealth, the foundation that the generation of the 1680s had inherited and never had to defend. It was the piece of paper that turned a trading grant into a republic — and the Crown had decided to take it back. Not because Massachusetts had sinned, but because it had governed itself as an independent state for fifty years, and the Stuart kings were pulling every self-governing corporation in the empire back under royal control. The City of London had already lost its charter. Connecticut, Rhode Island, the Carolinas, Bermuda were all on the list.

The Crown offered Massachusetts a choice: amend the charter, accept royal authority, and survive as an ordinary colony — or refuse, and lose everything. The colony split. The merchants said negotiate. The ministers and deputies, led by Increase Mather, said the charter could not be amended without surrendering the covenant commonwealth itself. They refused. In October 1684, a court in London annulled the charter while the colony's agents stood mute. Plymouth had never had a charter to lose. Connecticut and Rhode Island were next on the list. The whole structure of self-governing New England was exposed — and what the Crown was planning to put in its place was already on its way. They would call it the Dominion of New England.