rt the investigation which they
dreaded into their proceedings; that the King, whatever may have been
his misdoings towards his subjects in England, treated his subjects in
the colonies, and especially in Massachusetts Bay, with a kindness and
consideration which should have secured their gratitude; that the
moment, in the matters of dispute between the King and his Parliament
(and in which the colonies had no concern), the scale appeared to turn
in favour of the Parliament, the rulers of Massachusetts Bay renounced
their allegiance to the King, and identified themselves as thorough
partizans of the war against the King--that they suppressed, under the
severest penalties, every expression of loyalty to the King within their
jurisdiction--offered prayers for and furnished men in aid of the
Parliamentary army--denounced and proscribed all recognition, except as
enemies, the other American colonies who adhered to their oaths of
allegiance to the King; that when Cromwell had obliterated every
landmark of the British constitution and of British liberty--King,
Lords, and Commons, the freedom of election and the freedom of the
press, with the freedom of worship, and transformed the army itself to
his sole purpose--doing what no Tudor or Stuart king had ever presumed
to do--even then the General Court of Massachusetts Bay bowed in
reverence and praise before him as the called and chosen of the Lord of
hosts.[113]

But when Cromwell could no longer give them, in contempt to the law of
Parliament, a monopoly of trade against their fellow-colonists, and
sustain them in their persecutions; when he ceased to live, they would
not condescend to record his demise, but, after watching for a while the
chances of the future, they turned in adulation to the rising sun of the
restored Charles the Second.

The manner in which they adjusted their denials and professions to this
new state of things, until they prevailed upon the kind-hearted King not
to remember their past transgressions, and to perpetuate their Charter
on certain conditions; how they evaded those conditions of toleration
and administering the government, and resumed their old policy of
hostility to the Sovereign and of persecution of their Baptist and other
brethren who differed from them in worship, and in proscribing them from
the elective franchise itself, will be treated in the following
chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: Neal says: "Certainly never was country mo