might be easily
asked but less easily answered. Except for Massachusetts and Plymouth,
not a settlement had a legal title to its soil; and except for
Massachusetts, not one had ever received a sufficient warrant for the
government which it had set up. Naturally, therefore, there was
disquietude in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven; and even
Massachusetts, buttressed as she was, feared lest the King might object
to many of the things she had done. Entrenched behind her charter and
aware of her superiority in wealth, territory, and population, she had
taken the leadership in New England and had used her opportunity to
intimidate her neighbors. Except for New Haven, not a colony or group of
settlements but had felt the weight of her claims. Plymouth and
Connecticut had protested against her demands; the Narragansett towns
with difficulty had evaded her attempt to absorb them; and the
settlements at Piscataqua and on the Maine coast had finally yielded to
her jurisdiction. As long as Cromwell lived and the Government of
England was under Puritan direction, Massachusetts had little to fear
from protests against her; but, with the Cromwellian regime at an end,
she could not expect from the restored monarchy a favoring or friendly
attitude.

The change in England was not merely one of government; it was one of
policy as well. Even during the Cromwellian period, Englishmen awoke to
a greater appreciation of the importance of colonies as assets of the
mother country, and began to realize, in a fashion unknown to the
earlier period, the necessity of extending and strengthening England's
possessions in America. England was engaged in a desperate commercial
war with Holland, whose vessels had obtained a monopoly of the carrying
trade of the world; and to win in that conflict it was imperative that
her statesmen should husband every resource that the kingdom possessed.
The religious agitations of previous years were passing away and the New
England colonies were not likely to be troubled on account of their
Puritanism. The great question in England was not religious conformity
but national strength based on commercial prosperity.

Thus England was fashioning a new system and defining a new policy. By
means of navigation acts, she barred the Dutch from the carrying trade
and confined colonial commerce in large part to the mother country. She
established councils and committees of trade and plantations, and, by
the seizure of