The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was deep and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain ecclesiastical intercourse with the South Church.  But by 1682 it had become apparent that the king and his friends were meditating an attack upon the Puritan theocracy in New England.  It had even been suggested, in the council for the colonies, that the Church of England should be established in Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal clergymen should be allowed to solemnize marriages.  Such alarming suggestions began to impress the various Puritan churches with the importance of uniting their forces against the common enemy; and accordingly in 1682 the quarrel between the two Boston societies came to an end.  There was urgent need of all the sympathy and good feeling that the community could muster, whereby to cheer itself in the crisis that was coming.  The four years from 1684 to 1688 were the darkest years in the history of New England.  Massachusetts, though not lacking in the spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as she did eighty years later.  Her attitude toward the Stuarts—­as we have seen—­had been sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes silent and sullen, but always independent.  At the accession of Charles II. the colonists had thought it worth while to send commissioners to England to confer with the king and avoid a quarrel.  Charles promised to respect their charter, but insisted that in return they must take an oath of allegiance to the crown, must administer justice in the king’s name, and must repeal their laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members and prohibiting the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote:  Founding of the Old South Church, 1669] [Sidenote:  Demands of Charles II.]

When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to administer justice in the king’s name, but all the other matters were referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of sight.  When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied with the king’s demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in trivial altercations with the royal commissioners.  The war with Holland and the turbulent state of English politics operated for several years in favour of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during all this time their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and accusations.  Apart from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint were the restriction of the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of England were shut out; the claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs of Mason and Gorges, whose territory Massachusetts had absorbed; the infraction of the navigation laws; and the coinage of pine-tree shillings.  The last named measure had been forced upon the colonists by the scarcity of a circulating