orship there upon
all the inhabitants, and especially when their Charter gave them no
authority whatever in the matter of Church organization.[66] They went
to New England avowedly for liberty of worship; and on arriving there
they claimed the right to persecute and to banish or disfranchise all
those who adhered to the worship of the Church to which they professed
to belong, as did their persecutors when they left England, and which
was the only Church then tolerated by the laws of England.

When it could no longer be concealed or successfully denied that the
worship of the Church of England had been forbidden at Massachusetts Bay
and its members disfranchised; and when it now came to light that the
Charter had been secretly transferred from England to Massachusetts, and
a new Governor and Council appointed to administer it there; and when it
further became known that the Governor and Council there had actually
prepared to resist by arms the appointment of a General Governor and
Royal Commission, and had not only refused to produce the Charter, but
had (to "avoid and protract") not even deigned to acknowledge the Privy
Council's letter to produce it, the King was thrown upon the rights of
his Crown, either to maintain them or to have the Royal authority exiled
from a part of his dominions. And when it transpired that a large and
increasing emigration from England was flowing to the very Plantation
where the Church had been abolished and the King's authority set at
defiance,[67] it became a question of prudence whether such emigration
should not be restricted; and accordingly a Royal Order in Council was
issued forbidding the conveyance of any persons to New England except
those who should have a Royal license.

This Order has been stigmatized by New England writers as most
tyrannical and oppressive. I do not dispute it; but it was provided for
in the Royal Charter, and the writers who assail King Charles and his
Council for such an Act should remember that Cromwell himself and his
Rump Parliament passed a similar Act eighteen years later, in 1653, as
will hereafter appear; and it is a curious coincidence, that the same
year, 1637, in which the King ordered that no person should be conveyed
to New England without first obtaining a certificate that they had taken
the oath of allegiance and supremacy, and conformed to the worship of
the Church of England, the Massachusetts General Court passed an
ordinance of a much more