[7]
It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his
experiment of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a
charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay. He was very far, as we
shall see, from realizing the import of what he was doing. To the
Puritan leaders it was evident that a great struggle was at hand.
Affairs at home might well seem desperate, and the news from abroad was
not encouraging. It was only four months since the surrender of Rochelle
had ended the existence of the Huguenots as an armed political party.
They had now sunk into the melancholy condition of a tolerated sect
which may at any moment cease to be tolerated. In Germany the
terrible Thirty Years War had just reached the darkest moment for
the Protestants. Fifteen months were yet to pass before the immortal
Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the sorely harassed cause
of liberty a fresh lease of life. The news of the cruel Edict of
Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629, could not but
give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in Europe the
champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well think that
never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as never
since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so
strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation
that was fast becoming intolerable.
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