ne district ... 260

Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261

Massachusetts answers the king's peremptory message ... 262

Secret treaty between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263

Shameful proceedings in England ... 264

Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter; and accordingly it is
annulled by decree of chancery, June 21, 1684 ... 265

Effect of annulling the charter ... 266

Death of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir
Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267

The charter oak ... 268

Episcopal services in Boston ... 268, 269

Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269

The tyranny ... 270

John Wise of Ipswich ... 271

Fall of James II ... 271

Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272

Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273

Need for union among all the northern colonies ... 274

Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed to Massachusetts ... 275

Which becomes a royal province ... 276

And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276

The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the spirit
of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278

THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.

It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was
in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the
Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of
Orestes, better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne
to the splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly
pension of $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a
world. As 324 years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome,
and as the political headship of Europe after that happy restoration
remained upon the German soil to which the events of the eighth century
had shifted it, nothing could seem more natural than the habit which
historians once had, of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended,
as it had begun, with a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up
as a great landmark dividing modern from an