savages perishing in their burning dwellings. Of 700 Pequots only five escaped with their lives, while of the English only two were killed and sixteen wounded. The tribe was all but wiped out of existence. Never had the Indians heard of so terrible a vengeance, and never again till the time of King Philip's war, eight-and-thirty years later, dared the Indian lift his hand against the white man.

The overthrow of the Pequots removed the one obstacle to the consolidation of New England. The Connecticut settlements were no longer isolated, separated from their friends along the coast by the intervention of barbarous tribes, but were brought into direct communication with the rest of the English from the mouth of the Connecticut river to Boston Bay. The rest of the Pequot Indians, to the number of some 200 warriors with their families, submitted to the English in 1638, and at a conference held at Hartford, in September, were divided between the Mohicans and the Narragansetts. So that the conditions were now reversed, and the Indian tribes in their turn detached and hemmed in, and the way prepared for that last wave of migration which brought to an end the great Puritan exodus from England to America.

About a month after the storming of the Pequot stronghold, this last detachment, consisting of a company of wealthy London merchants with their families, arrived in Boston. The two most prominent men among them were Theophilus Eaton, a member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and John Davenport, the pastor of this migrating community. The two men had known each other before they came together in this enterprise, for Eaton was the son of the minister and Davenport the son of a former mayor of Coventry. After graduating at Oxford, Davenport obtained the living at Coleman Street, London, where his preaching attracted both public attention and official surveillance. When charged to Secretary Conway with

being puritanically affected, he denied the charge, saying, 'I have persuaded many to conformity-yea, my own father and uncle, who are aldermen of the city of Coventry, and were otherwise inclined.' In 1628, writing to Lady Mary Vere, he tells her of the troubles gathering round him; the new Bishop of London, Dr. Laud, has a particular aim at him, and he expects ere long to be deprived of his pastoral charge in Coleman Street. 'But I am in God's hands,' says he, 'not in theirs; to whose good pleasure I do contentedly and cheerfully submit myself. If it be His will to have me laid aside as a broken vessel, His will be done.' In later years we find him explaining his position to this same lady: The truth is, I have not forsaken my ministry, nor resigned up my place, much less separated from the Church; but am only absent awhile to wait upon God for the settling and quieting of things, for light to discern my way; being willing to lie and die in prison, if the cause may be advantaged by it; but choosing rather to preserve the liberty of my person and ministry for the service of the Church elsewhere. . . . The only cause of my present suffering is the alteration of my judgment in matters of conformity to the ceremonies established; whereby I cannot practise them as formerly I have done; wherein I do not censure those that do conform. I know that I did conform with as much inward peace as now I do forbear; in both my uprightness was the same, but my light different. In this action I walk by that light which shineth unto me.'

..

From 1634 till 1637 we find him in Holland, but in the latter year one of the informers of the time reports: Mr. Davenport hath lately been in these parts, Braintree, and at Hackney, not long since. I am told that he goeth in gray like a country gentleman.' When spies were thus on his

1 State Papers, Dom.

Birch MSS., 4275.

State Papers, Dom.

track clearly he must go ; we learn, therefore, that he arrived in Boston by the ship Hector, June, 1637. In concert with his friend Theophilus Eaton, whom Winthrop describes as a man of fair estate and of great esteem for religion and wisdom in outward affairs,' he spent some months in seeking the best site for a new settlement. This they found at length at Quinnipiack, on Long Island Sound, where they made two successive purchases of land extending eight miles north-east and five miles south-west of the river and running ten miles inland. In this way the town of New Haven came to be founded in the spring of 1638. The next year two other parties of emigrants, each forty in number, and each, like New Haven, joined together as an independent church, settled at Guildford and Milford, both settlements placed on lands purchased from the Indians. In 1640 Stamford on the mainland was added to the group, and in 1643 the four towns were made to constitute the republic of New Haven, to which Southold, on the western shore of Long Island, and Branford were afterwards added. With the advent to power of the Long Parliament in 1640, and the consequent downfall of Archbishop Laud, the reason for the Puritan exodus ceased, and the exodus itself came to an end. Since the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, the population had grown to 26,000 souls, and after 1640 for more than a century there was no considerable migration to this part of North America. These twenty years and these 26,000 people constitute the formative period and the determining element of New England and American life. Those who believe in a philosophy of history and seek to trace it in the course of events cannot fail to see the special significance of the time. The Dutch had already erected Fort Amsterdam on the island at the mouth of the Hudson, which was afterwards to bear the great commercial city of New York. The French had settled at Port Royal, in Nova Scotia, and had established a

trading post with the Indians at Quebec. If, therefore, the power of England and the English spirit of freedom were to become dominant on the great continent of America, the beginnings must be made during the years with which we have been dealing. Not less significant were the men than the time. Those who came over were almost without exception deeply religious men. It has been truly said that it was religious enthusiasm that secured the preponderance of the continent for men of the English race. As England grew in manufacturing skill and in commerce through the coming of the Huguenots whom religious persecution drove on to English soil, so the great republic of the West feels to this day the coming of the moral and religious influence of the men who, in the seventeenth century, valued freedom of conscience as their most sacred possession. The pick and flower of the nation from which they came, their spirit still lives. Had the emigration not started when it did, the solid and godly element there is in American life would not have been what it is. On the other hand, had that emigration continued longer, had England been depleted to exhaustion of her noblest blood, as France was when her Huguenots were banished or slain, her great struggle for constitutional freedom in the seventeenth century might have ended other than it did. That would have been a calamity not for England alone but for the world. It has been well said that the decisive victory of Charles I., the triumph of Stuart despotism, would have been like the Greeks losing Marathon or the Saracens winning Tours.

XII.

THE UNITED COLONIES.

HAVING followed the rise of the colonies round Massachusetts Bay and in the Connecticut Valley, we may now return to see how the people of the Plymouth Plantation were faring meanwhile. Since the year 1627, when De Rassières paid the visit he himself described, the settlers seem to have been steadily prospering, if we may judge from the fact that in the autumn of 1632 they held a thanksgiving festival, at which they rejoiced 'in an especial manner;' this, too, in spite of 'a plague of mosquitoes and rattlesnakes.' The colony was already beginning to spread beyond its original boundaries; for as their cattle increased the people moved farther and farther in search of pasturage. At first these visits were mere summer sojourns, but eventually they led to the erection of dwellings where the winter could be spent, and to the grief of Governor Bradford issued in the separation of many from the parent settlement. In 1632 permission was given for the organisation of a church nearer home for those who had thus moved some five miles to the north, of which church Elder Brewster was to have the oversight; but the court at Plymouth, which granted this permission. insisted that settlers so far distant from the protection of the fort on Burial Hill should be every man of them armed. As an additional precaution against surprise their houses were palisaded, and a line of defence was built across the entrance of the Nook.