Transcript

Introduction

Music

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
This is episode 295 a constitutional culture, New England and the struggle against arbitrary rule in the restoration empire.
With Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer.
Hi, I’m Jake in just a few minutes.
I’m gonna be joined by Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer, author of the recent book, a Constitutional Culture, New England and the Struggle against arbitrary rule in the restoration empire.
Professor Weimer reached out almost a year ago now when the book was still brand new, but I kept dropping the ball.
So I was glad when she reminded me recently to read the book and set up a talk.
The book focuses on the period just after King Charles, the second returned the Stuarts to the English throne.
And when he sought revenge against Boston Puritans for the execution of his father, King Charles the first, decades before the absolute rule of Edmund Andros, the crown sent four royal commissioners to Boston with secret orders that would upend every facet of public life from voting to worship to the code of laws.

[1:21] The locals weren’t so sure. So they found ways to resist this arbitrary rule.
Our conversation explores how the colonists defended their liberty within the constitutional system of colonial Massachusetts under restoration rule.
But before Professor Weimer joins me, I just want to pause and thank everyone who supports hub history on Patreon much as I love creating this show.
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Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer

 

[2:46] I’m joined now by Adrian Chastain Weimer. She’s a professor of history in the MA program at Providence College where she focuses on 17th Century New England.

[2:58] And part of our conversation that the recorder didn’t capture.
She pointed out that P CS Masters program is affordable and inclusive, which I think is a great thing in a market where too many history jobs are effectively open only to trust fund babies due to the price tag attached to the necessary credentials.
Professor Weimer’s study often examines the intersection between faith and public institutions as well as the relationships between early English settlers and the native communities surrounding them.
Her first book, Martyr’s Mirror examined how New England puritans and minority religious groups envision themselves as persecuted by wider society.
And she’s currently editing the collected works of Daniel Gookin who will make a brief appearance in our conversation today, a constitutional culture weaves together several of these interests explaining how royalists tried to reinsert themselves into New England culture and government during the crisis that followed King Charles the second’s return to the throne during the English restoration.
Professor Weimer, welcome to the show.

Professor Weimer:
[4:01] Thanks for having me.

Jake:
[4:04] For a lot of us, the first century ish of New England history after European settlement gets pretty compressed, we have the pilgrim separatists coming to Plymouth in 1620.
The puritans come to Boston in 1630 and then not much happens for 50 or 60 years until either the revolt against Governor Andros or maybe until we start hanging witches before we get too far into local events and local politics.
Can you maybe start us off with more of a macro view of English politics in the few years after Boston was founded and sort of set the stage for why events were turning against the puritans here in Boston by the 16 sixties.

Professor Weimer:
[4:46] Sure. So almost as early as the Boston Town settlement village was founded, the crown tries to take control of it.
So these people, as many of our listeners will know are pretty much kicked out of England because they’re on the wrong side of both church and state politics.
In the 1630 Charles, the first, the king of England doesn’t like them at all.
So they flee to First Salem in Boston and they start setting up institutions and these institutions are pretty interesting for the time.
They are not what you would have typically seen in England.
I mean, really, for one of the first times English people get to implement the sort of reforms that actually folks have been trying to implement in England for generations.
But because almost all the land is owned by the nobility, it was really difficult to push anything through.
And so from the earliest years in Boston and the Massachusetts Bay colony, people set up what, what I would call a monarchical republic.
So they, they like the king, but they like him at arm’s length and they’re pretty happy, there’s now an ocean in between them.

[6:08] So, you know, they agonize over whether to abandon England, whether to come over across the ocean, they finally decide it’s better to be useful than brought in prison.
And so they come over to Boston and they almost immediately start setting up these reforming institutions.
King gets word of this, gets word of what they’re trying to accomplish, gets word of what’s happening on the ground.
And you know, he’s already pretty mad at puritans in England, Charles the first is not getting along with these puritans and he actually tries to yank the charter as early as 1636 and he appoints a royal governor.
So he has a plan. He has a quo war onto which is this legal case against the charter. He tries to implement it.
He asks them to send back the charter, the actual document with which John Winthrop was smart enough to take with him and Winthrop’s like no way not sending back the charter, not doing it.
And so the king tries to send over this royal governor on a warship to New England to seize the charter himself and take over the colony.

[7:13] And it turns out that the ship is leaky, the ship is unseaworthy and so the royal governor never comes.
And of course, you know, by the late 16 thirties, early 16 forties, England gets embroiled in a lot of high level tension because Charles the first is an absolutist leaning monarch.
So he’s leaning towards arbitrary rule.
He’s trying to rule without parliament.
He’s trying to impose all these taxes without people’s representation.
And so puritans fight on the parliamentary side of the English civil War.
Many other people are involved too but puritans are front and center.
Lots of new Englanders go back to fight. So lots of young men, we have their diaries, they go back and fight on the parliamentary side of the English Civil War, multiple battles, all kind of things happen.
The king in the end gets defeated, refuses to negotiate.
And so the new model army and the folks in charge of England, many puritans involved decide to put the king on trial.
And as we all know, the end of the trial is that the king Charles the first gets executed, which is called the Regis side.
It’s not just puritans who are involved in that, but fast forward through the interregnum and Oliver Cromwell lord protector, lots of interesting Republican experimental rule in England.
Finally, Charles the second son of the executed king back on the throne of England.

[8:39] All everybody’s talking about is the Regis site. When they think of New England, they think of those rebels who helped to kill the former king.

Jake:
[8:45] And this is the moment when Charles the second takes the throne again, we refer to that as the restoration and thus the restoration empire in the subtitle of your book, how did that differ from the previous rule of Charles the first?

Professor Weimer:
[8:59] At first, no one knows how it’s going to differ because Charles the second makes a lot of promises and he issues this document called the Declaration of Breda, which promises toleration and says he wants to heal the nation’s wounds.
And so nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen.
By 1661 you have a new parliament which is an anti puritan parliament.
It’s people who want revenge for the English civil wars and they start passing these laws which basically say if you’re not high church King’s church royalist through and through, then you lose your freedom of worship.
You can’t actually meet to worship in groups. More than five.
You lose your ability to run for office or even vote, you lose your job in the church and the university.
So, I mean, all of a sudden, anybody who’s not high church in line with the King’s politics is basically a second class citizen in England.
And then the question becomes, what’s gonna happen to New England?
Are these people going to get to keep their colony?

Jake:
[10:06] You point out in the book that there’s a brief window where Bermuda and New England are sort of the last safe havens for, for puritanism.
It was such a safe haven at first that the Regicides came here.
They were celebrated pretty openly in Boston when Wiley and Goff arrived, I think they were dining with the governor at first.
How does the treatment of the Regicides Act as sort of a bellwether for the, the changing times and the changing relationship of the puritans and the Crown.

Professor Weimer:
[10:34] Great question. So the Regicides, these guys named Wally and Goff, so they signed Charles the first death warrant.
That’s, that’s, I mean, their signatures are on the page.
They, they don’t know yet that there’s going to be a death warrant.
They kind of have guessed that there’s going to be a death warrant because Charles the second and the new what they call the Cavalier Parliament, you know, they, they do give amnesty to a lot of people but explicitly say rides are dead meat.
There’s, there’s just no way we’re going to allow them to continue to live now that we’ve got the king’s son in power.

Jake:
[11:11] Back in England. I think they’re even digging up the Regicides who had died in the meantime and quartering their bodies, you know, months or years after their death.
They were, they were not happy with those Regicides.

Professor Weimer:
[11:23] That is absolutely right. And even people associated with the Regis side.
So not even people who signed the death warrant, but people like Hugh Peter, who’s the former pastor of Salem Massachusetts, really significant figure in early New England institutions.
You know, they, they torture him, they pull his guts out while he’s still alive.
They, they put his head on London Bridge. It’s awful. It’s awful and everybody knows it.

Jake:
[11:48] Before we dig too much into the case of Hugh Peter. Tell me a little bit about how governor indict he was trying to find a middle ground between sort of openly celebrating the presence of somebody who had signed the king’s death warrant and, aggressively tracking down wanted fugitives.
How was he threading that needle at first, at least.

Professor Weimer:
[12:10] So you’re right that John Indica, the governor does openly welcome the Regis sites.
He does hold a dinner party and they are the honored guests, and lots of prominent Bostonians come, you know, the interesting thing about Wally and Goff, the Regis sides is that, you know, the, the Regis side signing the death warrant wasn’t the only thing they did.
They were high up, they were commissioners in Oliver Cromwell’s government.
They were members of this really prominent church in London that, you know, the pastors of that church were very well respected.

The Regicides’ Arrival in Boston

 

[12:46] The regis sites actually come to Boston with letters from the pastors of this London church.
So, you know, they’re, they’re co religionists, their, their piety is respected, they come to church and they start giving a testimony and people recognize their language, you know, they’re part of the same group.
So if you turn these people over to the king, as the king does demand, you know what’s gonna happen to them, they’re going to get tortured and executed.

Jake:
[13:12] Mhm.

Professor Weimer:
[13:15] And so, you know, it’s a real crisis of conscience for Endicott Endicott, you know, it’s, it’s such a privilege.
I get to go into the archives and read all these, you know, manuscript papers and, and Endicott writes and writes and writes and he just agonizes over this decision because he doesn’t want to put his colony at risk.
But he doesn’t want to doom these men who he sees as honored friends.
He doesn’t want to doom them to death.
So they do hang out in Boston for a while. Actually.
They’re in Cambridge and they stay in the home of Daniel and Mary Gin in Cambridge.
And then they kind of get word this is causing ripples in London.
And so they escape to New Haven and then to Hadley Massachusetts, and they end up hiding out in Hadley Massachusetts for a long time in the pastor John Russell’s basement.

Jake:
[14:06] And I have a past episode about their fugitive status that I’ll dig up the episode number of and put in the show notes for our listeners. This week.
You, you started to introduce us to Hugh Peter, who as you pointed out is a former pastor in Salem. So right up the right up the coast from us here.
And that was a name I hadn’t encountered before reading your book almost surprisingly.
Uh as you pointed out, he ended up hanged, drawn and quartered disemboweled is head on a spike on London Bridge.
It was not an era of clean and painless public executions by any means.
What had he done to earn that treatment by the New King?

Professor Weimer:
[14:45] Well, Hugh Peter was one of the most popular preachers in England.
People loved his sermons.
Um, you know, he promoted female theologians, he promoted care for the poor.
He was a really interesting kind of erratic, broad minded thinker.
He also abandoned his wife who had some mental illness.
I mean, he’s a, he’s a complicated guy, but in lots of ways, he comes to represent New England.
He goes to bat over and over again with parliament for the colonies.
So for example, you know, everybody’s trying to get new Englanders to come fight for them in the wars with the Dutch or, you know, various wars in the West Indies.
And Hugh Peter says, no, just leave him alone, let them build their institutions, let them stabilize, let them grow their economy. We don’t need him fighting in every single war.
And so, you know, the colonists really value Hugh Peter as an ally and friend back in England as far as the death of Charles.
The first Hugh Peter is accused of being the actual executioner.
It’s probably not true. But people use Hugh Peter as a punching bag and that’s a representative for puritanism.
So if you don’t like Puritan religion.
Hugh Peter is the guy, you go after.

Jake:
[16:02] Did he take up arms during the civil wars? A chaplain? Gotcha.

Professor Weimer:
[16:05] He was a chaplain and he, but he does recruit soldiers.

Jake:
[16:10] It seems like he becomes beyond being a sort of a stand in for all of New England also sort of a symbol of New England worries about the restoration.
And you point out in the book that he appears in a lot of letters written in New England during these, these years, how did it seems like just the mere mention of Hugh Peter’s eventual fate drive a woman named Hannah Waterhouse to, that seems like the brink of madness.

Professor Weimer:
[16:37] Hannah Waterhouse is in some ways a typical New England farm woman.
I mean, she’s got a whole bunch of kids. She names them after Old Testament Bible figures.
You know, she’s, she’s a pretty typical, um you know, pious, hard working New England farm woman.
Um and like most New Englanders, she, she’s not necessarily anti monarchical, but she gets so upset when she hears about the torture and execution of Hugh Peter, that she basically says, you know, what is everybody in England doing? What are they thinking?
Why didn’t they defend him? Why didn’t people go to arms to defend Hugh Peter?
Why did they just let this happen? And so, so she says if I were a man and I was in England, either I would be the king’s death or he would be my death.
I mean, those are strong words, you know.

Jake:
[17:35] Yeah, you can probably get away with that in New England in 1660 ish.
But if you were to speak those words in the streets of London, that, that might be a little seditious. Probably.

Professor Weimer:
[17:44] She does get actually called to court because if you don’t call her to court, you, you’ve basically allowed sedition, which makes you as a magistrate seditious. Um but she’s acquitted.

Jake:
[17:57] There’s a moment where it seems like this safe haven, might continue this sort of puritan bubble that remains in New England decades after the, the restoration after the, the civil wars.
But then that fantasy sort of gets shattered in 1664 in the summer of 1664, 4, I believe, three or four Royal Navy warships come sailing into Boston Harbor and their main cargo isn’t or like supplies.
It’s not trade goods. It’s a group of men.

Professor Weimer:
[18:31] So the frigates are armed. They have members of the royal Navy ready to fight and they have four, these four royal commissioners.

Jake:
[18:40] So tell the listener what that role means. What does it mean to be a royal commissioner to hold a royal commission?

Professor Weimer:
[18:47] So these people were appointed most likely by the Duke of York, who’s the king’s brother, he’s also the admiral of the navy.
And, and he’s a hawk. He is interested in taking over New Netherland and making it part of New York.
And you can see from the Duke of York’s perspective, you’ve got this nice, uninterrupted strip of British claimed coastline except for New Netherlands, which is Dutch.
And so the first thing the royal commissioners do, they stop into Boston and say some threatening things and then they go down and subjugate New Netherlands and turn it into New York. It’s bloodier than most people think.
There’s actually a lot of casualties, especially in the South.
And then they come back up and they tour New England and their commission, which is from the king. It has a royal seal.
It actually says they can take over the New England colonies, militias and take over their courts.
So they have extraordinary powers given to them by the king.
And this is a direct challenge to decades of pretty much functional self rule in the New England colonies.

Jake:
[20:05] I thought it was interesting to read that those orders under the royal seal, were sealed to make a terrible pun that there were public orders and private orders and the public orders are to subjugate New Netherland.
But this other set of orders about taking over the militias and the courts are not public.

Professor Weimer:
[20:28] That’s right. There are public instructions and there are private instructions and the public instructions.
They don’t actually reveal all of them until pretty far into the negotiations.
But they say things like you should investigate the educational institutions.
You could figure out how many of those beautiful white pine straight trees there are for the Royal Navy’s mass, you should, you know, also investigate, you know, all all the kind of typical things that kings would want to know.
What kind of resources can we exploit?
How can we make money here? Who are these people? How does their government function?
The private instructions are different and and this is why Boston is so important because they don’t do this and as much in the other colonies.
But in Massachusetts and specifically in Boston, the private instructions say.

[21:18] You should try to influence their elections, you should try to undermine their right of self government.
And if all goes well, one of the four royal commissioners should finagle their way into the governorship.
And another one of the royal commissioners should slide their way into the head of the militia.
Hence of this, get out to the people of Massachusetts.
But even the public instructions are really, really troubling because whatever else you want to say about puritans, they made a lot of mistakes.
These are people who care a lot about self government.
These are people who care a lot about preventing arbitrary or unbounded rule.
Any rule, that’s not somebody elected by the people.
They have a real problem with. It’s why they fought the English civil wars.
It’s why they’re going to contest just about everything the royal commissioners try to do.

Jake:
[22:11] And even before those private orders become fully known, like you say, there’s this sense of the commissioner’s arrival as, as a threat and a threat to what the Massachusettsian would have considered their constitutional rights.
But I bet a lot of our listeners think of constitutional rights as something that first existed in 1789.
So let’s pause for a second. Let’s talk about what it means to have an unwritten constitution and what it means to, to defend an unwritten constitution against somebody like Richard Nichols.

Professor Weimer:
[22:46] The charter is a signed and sealed royal document.
It enshrines certain liberties which basically say to the people of Massachusetts Bay colony, you get to run your own government.
You, you can’t run it away. That hurts the king.
You still have to give him a percentage of the or everybody still thinks that gold and silver might be found somewhere in Medford or whatever.
But you get to elect your own leaders and write your own loss.
And that is an extraordinary thing.
There’s not that many places in the world in the 17th century where people get to elect their own leaders and write their own laws.
This is all within a monarchical system.

Understanding Liberty in 1660

 

[23:28] It’s not denying the king’s power. But in a way this is why people move to New England is because you get to own land, you get to own your own land and you get to elect your own leaders and that’s really, really valued.
So the constitution that I’m talking about the constitutional culture is about, the liberties and privileges of the people in relationship to the crown.
So it’s a negotiated constitution, it’s unwritten of what can the king do and what can the king not do?
How much local authority do we have? And New Englanders really prize that local authority.

Jake:
[24:06] What would a Massachusetts Puritan have understood their liberties to be, or even liberty to mean?
What did liberty mean in 1660?

Professor Weimer:
[24:17] The people of early New England are, are much more medieval than they are modern.
And we’re always trying to squeeze them into modern boxes and make them out either to be villains or heroes along modern lines.
They, they really live in a, in a medieval world and, and what that means for liberty is that they’re communitarian.
So liberty is what’s good for the whole community.
It’s not liberty that I get to do what I want, that would have been offensive to them if anybody tried to run for election saying you could do whatever you want, you know, they, they understand liberty as the liberty to that.
One of them says it this way to be as good as men could be and should be.
So they want liberty to live up to their understanding of biblical ideals and they want liberty to run their churches without government interference.

Jake:
[25:12] And that’s interesting because one of the very first demands that these commissioners make, runs up against the sort of Calvinist beliefs of Governor Bellingham.
What changes were they looking for at that point? And how does that end up causing religious conflict?

Professor Weimer:
[25:31] So the Royal commissioner demands encompass wide scale changes in religious and civil institutions.
They essentially want these new Englanders to redesign their franchise.
So the franchise in early Massachusetts is often misunderstood.
Um If you think about how, how do you get to vote in England.

[25:59] You either have to have hereditary privilege.
So your dad and your granddad could vote, you know, you’re a member of the gentry or the nobility or, or high up in a borough system.
So, so you have it because of your family privilege or you have a lot of money and you can, you know, make your way into voting rights.
Um So, so wealth is essentially, and family privilege are this threshold to voting in England and New England. They don’t think that’s a fair system.

[26:28] So they need some kind of threshold to voting, but they say it’s not going to be wealth.
And so they basically say you need to be a church member. This is true in Massachusetts and in New Haven County, you have to be a church member to vote and that seems initially really exclusive.
But in fact, we have almost no evidence of somebody who wanted to be a church member and kept trying to be a church member and wasn’t admitted that there’s just no, his almost no historical cases.
And so, you know, you don’t come to New England if you don’t, kind of like the religious system are very few people do come to New England who are antithetical to the ideals of the founders.
And so the royal commissioners, when they show up and they ask to change the voting system, they want to make a franchise based on wealth.
And what they’re really, really mad about is that there’s poor people in New England who can vote because they’re church members.
So it’s, it’s galling to them that the c the class structure of society isn’t preserved.

Jake:
[27:31] So along with changing the franchise, expanding the not expanding, restricting who’s going to have the right to vote.
One of the other early changes that they demanded is a change to the way oaths are taken in Massachusetts.
What kind of changes were the commissioners looking for with oaths?
And why did it matter so much?

Professor Weimer:
[27:52] So the royal commissioners actually bring the new oath of allegiance that Charles the second is demanding of people in England and they bring it and they flash it before the Magistrates in Boston.
And they say this is what the king demands of you.
And this is the moment when the royal commissioner, Richard Nichols gets in Governor Bellingham’s face and basically threatens him.
Like if you don’t do this, you’ve got it coming to you.
So the oath, I mean, it’s, uh, it’s a lot of anti Catholic language which you have to figure out why that has political implications, but essentially what it does is squeeze out any room for conscientious resistance.
What Charles the second is doing with oaths in England. And, and this is an oath you have to take to be a professor at Oxford and Cambridge to be a civil officer of any kind in England.
You have to take these oaths which basically say even if the king is a tyrant, I will never resist.
So they don’t want to repeat of the English civil Wars.
Charles the second really, really doesn’t want to end up like his father and New Englanders have a hard time with these oaths.
I mean, for years, they’ve only taken oaths to the colony.
You know, they’re clearly on the parliamentary side of the English civil Wars.
But actually even when Cromwell tries to get them to take oaths, they kind of decline, they’re like, no.

[29:16] Um, so, so they’re really careful about oaths and the Magistrates agonize over this.
But when the royal commissioners start demanding oath that the first one to make the decision is Daniel GUK, same guy who hosted the regis sites in Cambridge.

[29:33] And he says, ok, I’m going to take it, but I’m going to add a clause.
I’m going to take the oath of allegiance, but I’m going to add a clause which basically says I obey the king.
As long as what the king asks, doesn’t violate my previous oath to the colony.
So there’s a line that kings can’t cross. I I stand by the charter by my elected governors.

Jake:
[29:59] So we have changes to oaths. We have an attempt to change who can vote in Massachusetts.
There’s also an attempt to change or expand the sacraments in Massachusetts.

Attempted Changes to Religion

 

[30:16] What alterations to religion were these commissioners looking for?

Professor Weimer:
[30:21] They wanted to change the baptism policy.
So they basically are telling people in early Massachusetts how to run their churches.
And because there’s this clear line by church between church and state.
And one of the reasons these people migrated to New England was to have what they call liberty of the ordinances or the ability to run their own churches according to what they saw as biblical ideals.
That is such a red flag that a royal commissioner is telling you how to run your church that just sets everybody on edge in a really strong way.
So, you know, puritans have designed their churches in a really careful way.
It’s their deepest value.
And so it’s a tough thing for the royal commissioners. Basically, the royal commissioners are wanting to open up a way for high church royalists, wealthy royalist to gain access to political office.
People like the royal commissioners themselves.
And you know, being a part of a puritan church involved accountability where people can call you out if you beat your wife or cheat people in the marketplace.
It’s a, it’s a really intense form of communal, yeah, accountability.
And so the idea was that if church members have access to political office and to the vote, that maybe they’ll have the interest of the people at heart and not just try to fleece everybody that, that’s the idea behind the system.
I’m not advocating it, but I’m just trying to explain how these people thought.

Jake:
[31:50] So against this background, of all these changes that the commissioners are, are demanding changes to the franchise to the oaths that Massachusetts citizens have to swear to worship in, in Massachusetts churches.
We have this very dramatic moment in the book when in May 1665 I like to imagine this horse coming up at full gallop with a trumpeter on, on it, on its back and screeching to a halt outside the dwelling of Commissioner George Cartwright, waking everybody up with this flourish of trumpet and making a bold announcement.

Massachusetts Legislature’s Declaration

 

[32:32] So what had the Massachusetts legislature declared that warranted the sort of early morning disruption?

Professor Weimer:
[32:40] This is a dramatic scene and that everybody hears the trumpets and they read this declaration from the General court.
And at, at this moment, the royal commissioner, negotiations with the Boston elected leaders are not going well and the royal commissioners are demanding that they get to set up a court of appeal that overrides local courts.
So it’s not elected, which already Bostonians have a problem with.
It’s a royal court. It’s not going to operate with trial by jury.
So violates the Magna carta right, going back to medieval England and, and this royal court is essentially going to have the ability to put the entire leadership of Massachusetts on trial.

Jake:
[33:23] What are they gonna be put on trial for? How do you turn the entire leadership of a colony into, into criminals?

Professor Weimer:
[33:30] Yeah. Right. They’re going to be put on trial for failing to prosecute violations of the Navigation Act.
The Navigation Act is how the crown earns money off the colonies.
It’s customs duties on trade and to be fair.
Massachusetts people were not very good at following the Navigation Act.

Patterns of Power

Jake:
[33:51] And this is a pattern for at least a century in Massachusetts from our founding, right up to the revolutionary generation and becomes a, an easy way to put leaders on trial like John Hancock say almost 100 years later.

Professor Weimer:
[34:07] This is so true. And in fact, people like John Hancock are really familiar with the story that I’m telling, they, they know what happened in the 16 sixties and when the royal commissioners try to set up this appeals court.
And so at this point, the the the elected leaders of the Massachusetts Bay colony say we can’t allow this to happen.
We cannot allow them to override our judicial system. And so they write this declaration and this is what the trumpeters read is the.

Jake:
[34:34] And this is on the, on the eve of the court opening, I believe. Right.

Professor Weimer:
[34:37] That’s right. Yeah, it’s, it’s right before the court is supposed to be and they read this declaration and you can imagine a crowd gathering and people are what’s going on.
And, and the declaration basically says there are lines that kings cannot cross this appeals court that the royal commissioners want to set up is a violation of our charter.
It violates our rights as Englishmen which we brought with us from England, which date all the way back to the Magna carta.
Kings cannot do this. They can’t violate the Charter.
Now, if you’re the royal commissioners, you say, well, I mean, didn’t the king sign the charter? So he gets to interpret it.
If you’re somebody in the Massachusetts Bay colony in Boston, that’s not how you see the constitutional relationship working.
You think that once you have certain rights that you get to hold on to those rights and actually they say this later that to let those rights go is a form of self destruction.
That’s actually immoral and impious to hold on to your right of self government is actually your Christian duty.

Jake:
[35:45] That response, that the trumpeter was announcing. What happens to the Court of appeals?

Professor Weimer:
[35:54] It is shut down. There is not one single Bostonian who’s willing to show up to that court.
So the royal commissioners are sitting there thinking they’re going to have a court of appeals and get to, you know, really show their strength and nobody shows not one.
Bostonian shows up to the royal commissioner court.

Fussing Royalists

Jake:
[36:14] What does that mean for the commissioners when you flex that royalist muscle and nothing happens. What do you do next?

Professor Weimer:
[36:23] Well, they are furious, they start fussing and fuming about these puritan New Englanders being regicidal fanatics who are going to start another civil war.
They actually turn to the law code and, and this is where they’re, they really are crossing a constitutional line because it says in the charter, you get to write your own laws.
The royal commissioners outline a whole set of revisions to the law code.
And you know, they, they basically give the king a whole lot more power.
So if somebody dies without an heir, they say all that person’s land and money is going to go to the king.
So then the king is going to be able to institute a patronage network and give land in the Massachusetts Bay colony to royalist favorites and build these big estates and, and, and you know, you can imagine the, the people of Boston are really, really not happy with these revisions to the loo.

Jake:
[37:25] I thought it was very funny as the commissioners were sort of demanding changes to the laws of Massachusetts.
The first step is ok, show us the laws of Massachusetts and nobody could not.
The commissioners, not the general court, not, the governor could actually produce a book of the Colonies laws at least at first.

Professor Weimer:
[37:48] There are a lot of copies of the Massachusetts Law Code. There had just been a recent book printed on the Cambridge Press.
I mean, pretty much all kind of people in early New England can read.
It’s one of the most literate places in the world in the 17th century.
And lots of people have printed copies of the law code. In fact, they’re really proud of this.
You know, the 1641 body of liberties.
The law code is one of the oldest printed law codes in the world.
Lots of people have a say, you know, the lock code was sent out to the people for comment before they revise it.
So, so New Englanders have copies of the lock code sitting on their shelf, not one person is willing to loan one to the royal commissioners.
So finally, the royal commissioners is kind of embarrassing, but they have to go beg the court for a copy and, and eventually the court gives them one.

Jake:
[38:41] I suppose you can only stall so long on a front like that.
Once they cough up the book, then the commissioners have a lot of changes that they’re demanding.
But it, it seems like some of the changes are really focused on resources, on land, on forests, on money or the, the mint.
And on the way that Massachusetts conducts diplomacy or war and diplomacy, why are those, the areas where the royalist interests were, were the most threatened by Massachusetts laws?

Professor Weimer:
[39:10] The fact that they’re coining their own money is a big deal.
It’s seen as a usurpation of sovereignty is what the royal commissioners say.
They want them to be dependent on England for their currency.
But there was just never enough coin to go around.

Demands and Revisions

 

[39:27] And so, you know, you had to met, they, they minted their own coins.
The royal commissioners also have an eye on those old growth forests up in Maine.
At this very moment, the English and the Dutch are at war, New Netherland getting conquered as part of that.
The war in its broader scope is also about control of the slave trade on the West African coast. So the king has a monopoly on the slave trade.
He’s trying to take those slave ports on the West African coast from the Dutch.
So this is a war that’s not going well.
And the royal commissioners know that the Royal Navy needs those masks.
They need those white pine, you know, 3 ft in diameter, 300 ft in height.
I mean, these are amazing resources for the Royal Navy.
And so one of the things they try to change in the law code is basically saying the king can have access to those forests whenever he wants to and, and New Englanders have no intention of giving up those resources up in Abenaki territory in Maine.

Jake:
[40:34] I thought it was interesting along with the demands for changes to law to Sacrament to franchise and the attempt to set up the appeals court.
The commissioner’s arrival, I guess, sort of re arrival back into Boston after going to the other New England colonies.
It’s time to correspond with the 1665 election, like you said, at the top of our interview, they are very focused on trying to get preferably one of the commissioners elected in one of the top jobs.
So how are they finding freemen of the colony to be their allies?

Professor Weimer:
[41:11] Well, the Roy commissioners have a big budget and the first thing they try to do is wine and dine the big merchants, you know, people in Salem, which is a real hub for the, you know, there’s a bunch of wealthy merchants hanging out up there.
Um, you know, one of the royal commissioners is a guy named Samuel Maverick and he actually arrives in what becomes Boston before everybody else. And.

Jake:
[41:36] Yeah, the, the commissioners generally are outsiders in New England but not Samuel Maverick. He’s the ultimate insider.

Professor Weimer:
[41:42] No, he’s been there a long time. In fact, he’s one of the only people in the colony who has the franchise, even though he’s not a full church member just because he was there so early.

Jake:
[41:53] And I’ll point our listeners to it again.
I’ll, I’ll dig up the episode number and I’ll, I’ll put a link in this week’s show notes.
We do have a, a past dark episode that involves Samuel Maverick and his attempts to use rape to create what he called a breed of African Americans who make it as enslaved for profit.
So, not always the person who our podcast has looked on with the, uh, most kindly eyes.

Professor Weimer:
[42:17] Samuel Maverick is a major slaver in the Boston area.
And uh in fact, there’s pretty good evidence that some of the law codes that are instituted in Boston around the issue of slavery are trying to limit people like Maverick from creating what he called a breeding industry.
It’s really awful language.

Insider Outsider Status

 

[42:38] So Samuel Maverick is not somebody who’s on good terms with the Massachusetts Bay government.

Jake:
[42:43] Yeah, he’s, he’s an insider. He’s been here but he’s not a full part of the Puritan community by any means.

Professor Weimer:
[42:50] No, in fact, he’s one of the strongest critics and he’s was back in London and he gets audiences at various points with Charles the second, the new king.
He basically says to the king, these Bostonians are seditious.
There is no way you’re going to pull them into line unless you station frigates, warships in Boston Harbor permanently.
So he’s like, Yank the charter send a royal governor. Done so.
So he’s already somebody they know is talking smack against them in London.

Jake:
[43:23] With this sort of unique insider outsider status.
What was his role to play in the run up to the election in 1665.

Professor Weimer:
[43:33] Samu Maverick with a nice budget from the crown had been going all over New England, meeting with merchants trying to raise a royalist party in the colony?

[43:46] You know, aren’t you frustrated with those leaders?
Don’t you dislike people like Endicott and Bellingham? Don’t you think it’s so restrictive to live here.
Don’t you dislike the franchise and its connection to church membership?
And he spends a lot of money actually, uh, meeting with these people, often they meet on Sunday mornings.
Um, so people skip church and meet with Maverick and Maverick really thinks he’s going to be successful.
In fact, we have his letters and he’s like, I can’t believe this didn’t work.

[44:16] You know, I really thought I was going to find all these disgruntled people, especially among the people who don’t have the vote.
You know, especially young men who don’t have the franchise yet.
They haven’t gotten brave enough, brave enough to go up before a puritan church and talk about their experience of grace.
He says, I really thought these people were going to be mad about the local government and want to raise up a royalist contingent and Maverick just isn’t able to do it.
He, he just, I mean, almost, I mean, there are, there are some wealthy merchants who are troubled and there are some non voters who are frustrated.
But actually what ends up happening is the non voters go directly to the Magistrates and deputies, their elected leaders and they say, listen, this colony is imperfect.
There’s some laws we would like to change. But all in all we have a good life here and we want you to resist the royal commissioners and defy the king’s demands.
Essentially, we stand with you and they not only say that they say we’re willing to fight.
Don’t let these royal commissioners push you around.

Jake:
[45:23] When Mavericks efforts are unsuccessful, there’s something I thought was pretty funny in the book.

Quaker Involvement

 

[45:30] It, it’s this sort of last ditch effort to use a group of Quakers led by Elizabeth Hooton or, or Houghton to sway the election.
And I thought it was funny because this is a time when, Quakers were again the ultimate outsiders, they’re seen as disruptive, they, you know, speak out during church services and town meetings and they were subject to everything from being branded, publicly whipped, having their earlobes split and a handful of martyrs had been hanged on Boston common for, for behavior like that.
These aren’t the taste makers and in Boston.
So what was enlisting this group of Quakers supposed to do for the commissioners to help them sway the election?

Professor Weimer:
[46:18] Well, this is one of those odd things about Boston history that you just couldn’t make up.
So one of the royal commissioners, a guy named George Cartwright was actually neighbors of one of these elite Quaker women who happened to be in the colony at the time as a missionary.
And you know, she would do things like she interrupted John Endicott s funeral and told everybody they were going to hell, you know, she, she is a fiery prophetic type and, and she actually had gone to Charles the second herself, and, and gotten Charles the second to say Elizabeth Hooton, you can buy land anywhere in the English colonies.

[46:57] Of course, nobody in Boston is going to sell our land. But you know that.
So, so Elizabeth Hooton was neighbors back in England with one of the royal commissioners, George Cartwright.
And she essentially offers her services as an unofficial spy for the royal commissioners.
Why they thought a Quaker would have, would have access to intel? I don’t know.
But, but she, she said these, these letters are in the Society of Friends Library in London.
They’re so great to read. I mean, she is incredible but she sends all this intel to the royal commissioners and she basically says they’re all seditious if you want loyal subjects.
Look at us, Quakers, we are loyal and, you know, Quakers are, uh, their relationship to government of any kind is really problematic because they basically, you know, their view of the law is if I don’t think the law is just, I don’t have to obey it.

[47:45] They don’t like government in any form and they’re kind of burn it down type folks.
And so, you know, there’s a reason they’re kicked out of almost every colony except Rhode Island, which only kicks them out because then they think maybe they won’t come.
So, you know, I, I love Quakers. I’m, I’m fascinated by Quakers, but it’s just this odd moment in Boston history when Elizabeth Hooton sets herself up on the side of the royal commissioners as this royalist.
So she and when that Christiansen and this other group of Quakers are invited by the royal commissioners to Boston, right in the middle of this election season, the negotiations this hot moment in Boston history.
And they’re basically wanting to stage a political spectacle in which puritans look bad in which puritans.
If the Quakers can provoke the puritans to say something seditious in front of the royal commissioners.
That’s an awesome moment for the Quakers.

[48:43] And so they do it, they try to stage this whole political spectacle and um and, and one of the Magistrates slips.
He’s like, man, we’re going to, I wish I could whip those royal commissioners on the Quakers backs and everybody goes, oh, shoot.
So the Quakers are successful in that moment.

Jake:
[48:59] Successful in tempting somebody into seditious speech. But what happens with the election itself?

Professor Weimer:
[49:06] And the election everybody’s watching, you know, are, are the royal commissioners going to show up with a royalist party?
Are the Quakers going to stage some kind of rebellion or you know what’s going to happen? Nobody knows.
And in fact, overwhelmingly the vote goes for Bellingham and the exact same Magistrates who have been running the colony all along the people support their elected leaders.
They have no interest in crown interference in their colony.

Post-Election Fallout

Jake:
[49:37] So, despite the disruption of the Quakers, despite all the money that Samuel Maverick spent, there’s essentially no change following the election of 1665.
So it sounds like in a way the commissioners had to scale back their ambitions a little bit.
And they also had to turn to other priorities.
With this unsuccessful attempt to sway the election.
They wouldn’t tell colonial leadership what those priorities were.
It seems like they were sort of eking them out in drips and drabs and just saying one project at a time without revealing everything else that they were holding back.
Why do you think they had this gradual approach or this sort of secretive approach to, to just, ok, somebody has made seditious speech, that’s my top priority.
And then now Regicides are our top priority and now enforcing the navigation acts.
Why is this cards close to the to the best approach, the choice that the commissioners make?

Professor Weimer:
[50:35] One of the things that’s a priority for the royal commissioners and actually for the restoration Empire, Charles, the second’s Empire in general is that they really like to control the flow of information.
Uh They really like to control, who knows what, when and to direct how information gets out.
So there is the same, you know, this is the same regime back in London that shuts down a lot of newspapers.
So basically the only newspapers you have in the early reign of Charles, the second are crown controlled newspapers, you know, and in general for, for a long time in England, puritans are the ones who criticized the king.
They criticize the bishop. They don’t mind taking risks.
They’re, they’re in people’s uh space in terms of, you know, they’re really outspoken. They think lots of people should have a say in politics.

[51:29] The royalists, especially under Charles the second are just done with it.
They’re done with ordinary people having a say in politics.
Of course, they think the English civil wars were a disaster, the interregnum, you know, rule this Republican experiment under Oliver Cromwell, that was a disaster they think.
And so they just want elites to run the show. They really just want, if you’re not really, really at the top informed, uh you know, in, in royalist circles, that’s who gets to have a say. So.
So the royal commissioners are acting in line with their culture of royal is when they’re trying to restrict the flow of information.
I think also, you know, they’re trying to see how far they can go and, and they’re, they’re pretty angry at this point with the Magistrates and deputies.
I think they expected that they could awe them.
I think, you know, they show up in their beautiful royalist clothing, their gorgeous linen fabrics, um, they, you know, buckles, all these valuable things that would have, they were expected to intimidate and I think they’re really surprised when the Magistrates and deputies aren’t intimidated.

Jake:
[52:43] As the commissioners are releasing their demands one at a time and controlling that flow of information, eventually they come around to a disagreement with the puritan hardliners over how our colonial laws and the implementation of this colonial laws treats the Massachusetts and other nations whose traditional homelands lay within Bay colony claims.
What were the commissioners hoping to gain by framing Puritan law as, as unfair to, to native Americans?
And how much of the difference was real and how much of it was just an attempt to embarrass the colony?

Professor Weimer:
[53:21] The re commissioners are trying to claim the moral high ground with regard to native Americans.
So they come in and you’re absolutely right. They’re trying to embarrass the Magistrates and deputies, the elected leaders in Massachusetts.
And they, they say you have mistreated the native Americans.
We want to investigate whether you’ve kept your treaties.

Moral High Ground

 

[53:42] Um You know, the king wants to make sure that these people are treated fairly, and, and you know, if, if you read that just coming in blind, you’re going to think, oh, wow, these guys are so wonderful and upstanding if you actually watch what the royal commission and, and let me just say Massachusetts had some hard questions to answer.
It made them nervous for good reason. They had made a lot of mistakes.
I will say the royal commissioners in their own negotiations with native Americans are very different than their speech.
So they go down to Narragansett, they meet with the Great Satam Picus.
And they basically say because of this one letter that was sent by Samuel Gorton, the founder of Warwick Rhode Island 20 years earlier that Narragansett lands belong to the King.

[54:37] So they, they essentially take away Narragansett sovereignty and, and what they’re actually trying to do, they rename Narragansett country, the king’s province, and they try, they try to carve out a royalist space within the heart of Narragansett country.
Um They do similar things elsewhere as they go up, they try to take over New Hampshire and Maine later on in the book and Missouri.
And uh so one of these royal commissioners, especially sir Robert Carr really, really, really wants this piece of land.
He wants to create his own little feudal feudal kingdom in this beautiful piece of land called Warwick Neck and the Shamit tribe whose Saty is Pum, that’s their ancestral homeland.
And sir Robert Carr just won’t give up. He keeps throwing money at Palm.
Um, he keeps throwing money at Pham’s son and he’s like you got to get off this land.
I want this land for my family back in England, my son back in England wants this land.
And it’s interesting Palm, you know, has to make a choice. Is he, is he going to be a royalist?
Is he going to submit to this royal commissioner in hopes of maybe the king having his back at some later point or is he going to resist?
And actually he goes to these two people, John Elliott in Massachusetts and Roger Williams in Rhode Island, both of whom have some fluency in, in his dialect, not total but some and, and he’s like, what should I do?

[56:06] What do you and both John Elliott and Roger Williams say pretty much the same thing.
They say palm, hold your ground and we’ve got your back and they actually are willing to send troops to keep sir Robert Carr, the royal commissioner from taking over shame uh taking over Palm’s territory.
If you only read the Royal Commissioner writings and arguments, you get this impression of people who are pro native.
So that’s one side. If you look at what they do, it, it’s actually something quite different.
The Puritan led colonies are by no means innocent with regard to their treatment of native people.
The PT war was horrific and there’s going to be another war in a decade, King Phillips or Medics war, which is even more horrific.
So, so I’m not trying to say Massachusetts Bay has the moral high ground.

Complex Alliances

 

[57:01] But the interesting thing about this situation and also with regard to the Massachusetts and the Nip Monk parts of the Nip Monk.
Um and the Shaw Mets is they had alliances with Massachusetts Bay and Massachusetts Bay was actually supplying them with arms to fight the Mohawk.
So the the alliances are more complex than, than it first seems.

Jake:
[57:27] In your Boston chapter, you’re careful to point out that the Bay Colonists were not declaring independence from the Crown, but that they were looking for a constitutional settlement with the Crown.
What would a just settlement have looked like to, to a typical Massachusetts Puritan during this period?

Professor Weimer:
[57:50] They liked the way things were in the 16 fifties. They like coining their own money.
They like evading the Navigation Act. So actually they are willing to pay a little more.
And you know, I said the royal commissioners go off in a huff, which is true.
They try to take over against a country in New Hampshire Maine.
But the, the Massachusetts Bay leaders, no, that they need to do something fast to win the favor of the king that they know that these royal commissioners are going to say awful things about them in London.
And they eventually do, one of the royal commissioners gets captured by a Dutch pirate.
That’s another story. He eventually ends back in London. And, and he says these people are a mess. They are completely seditious.
So, so the people in Boston know they need to do something and, and so they say, you remember those beautiful forest, those white pine trees.

[58:46] Let’s send the king some mass from the Royal Navy.
And so, you know, in terms of the, the constitutional settlement, they get that they need to contribute to the Empire. They understand that.

Maintaining Autonomy

 

[58:58] But they also really like writing their own laws and electing their own leaders.
So they want to maintain their monarchical republic.
They want to maintain colonies where they get to run the show in a way that is loyal to the king.
But a king who’s not too close, a king who doesn’t, doesn’t get to, uh, to tell them, you know, especially how to run their courts or run their churches.
So, yeah, they do end up sending the mass and uh the king at a certain point demands Bellingham.
And this other guy Hawthorne come to London in person to be held accountable, for the Bostonians actions.
And you have this another difficult moment where the elected leaders have to decide.
Are we going to send our governor and one of our Magistrates, I mean, he could easily have ended up with his head chopped off.
He could have easily ended up in the tower of London.
They refuse the king’s demand, they will not send their elected leaders to London.
They send mass instead. And actually one ship’s captain is really pretty witty.
He actually Christens, one masked Bellingham and the other massed Hawthorne.

[1:00:14] And amazingly, the Royal Navy is so desperate for these masks that for the moment, uh the king lets it slide and Massachusetts gets to maintain its semi autonomy for the next 20 years.

Jake:
[1:00:26] Yeah, I was shocked that, that, that seemed to work.
It seemed like there would be an immediate royalist takeover of the colony.
But like you said, it, the institutions stood.
How did Massachusetts go from, uh, what seemed like a victory over the commissioners to punitive rule by Andrews twentyish 25 years later.

Professor Weimer:
[1:00:50] The interesting thing is a lot of the same people who are involved in defying the royal commissioners in the 16 sixties.
It’s the same people who are involved when the king sends Edmund Andros to govern this super colony, the Dominion of New England that stretches from New Jersey to Maine.
So Andros comes in and tries to shut down local government.
He tries to tax every piece of paper, every commodity, you know, he takes away almost everything they value and he puts a bunch of royalist New Yorkers in charge which to a Bostonian is. Oh, yeah.

Jake:
[1:01:30] It’s no better than, than it is now, I guess.

Professor Weimer:
[1:01:32] Hard to take. So the same people are still around Bellingham, still around Guin, still around Hawthorne is still around.

Dominion of New England

 

[1:01:41] Same guys are still around and you know, lots of people and lots of colonies are upset about the Dominion of New England about the crown’s overreach in the middle of the 16 eighties.
But the interesting thing about New England is they’re so ready.
I mean, these people know their history, they know what happened 20 years earlier, they are ready, they know what arbitrary rule looks like.
They know what Andrews is doing is unconstitutional.
I mean, the charter’s been yanked but they know it’s wrong and, and they mobilize so fast, they are incredibly unified and of course they imprison Governor Andrews.
He escapes, he goes down to Rhode Island, they imprison him again.
And thankfully, William and Mary come to the throne of England and things end up. Ok?

Jake:
[1:02:29] Just in time. Well, I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask what the lessons were that might have been passed down.
We, we mentioned before that somebody like John Hancock who stands trial in front of an admiralty court, a court that’s basically outside the bounds of Massachusetts law.
What lessons would, would that generation? And I look at somebody like John Adams who finally writes down a constitution, right? Our modern Massachusetts constitution.
What lessons about constitutional government?
Would that later founding generation take from the 16 sixties?

Professor Weimer:
[1:03:06] Well, the fascinating thing is they know these stories. So one of the letters that the Massachusetts Court sends to the king asking him to recall the Royal Commission, basically saying, you know, surely King, you didn’t intend this, you know what the royal commissioners are trying to do.
That letter gets reprinted in Boston newspapers at the time of the Stamp Act crisis.
So there’s a strong, I mean, new Englanders know their history.
They, they study these documents, these documents were available in books as early as you know, the middle of the 18th century before that they’re circulated in manuscript form.
So Bostonians are have a strong sense of their own history and, and in particular, they have a strong sense of moments when their forebears have stood up to arbitrary rule.
They, they are able to articulate the grounds of their liberties.
Why do we have liberties? Why do we have self government?
What are the moments when various people try to take it away? How do we respond then?

Lessons of History

 

[1:04:11] And that very much informs their response to parliament at the time of the Stamp Act and going forward.

Jake:
[1:04:19] Well, I just want to thank you again for spending much time late on a Friday evening with me to record this interview.
If people wanna follow you or follow your work online, where should they look for you?

Professor Weimer:
[1:04:33] I’m on Twitter, I’m on blue sky You’re welcome to email me at my Providence College account.
I love talking with people about history.

Jake:
[1:04:43] And are there any book events where people can come out and find out more about you and your work?

Professor Weimer:
[1:04:51] Yes, I have two book events coming up this spring.
I’m giving a talk at the Barrington Rhode Island Public Library in March where I’ll talk about the shame and native side of the story and pom hums negotiations with the commissioners.
I’ll talk about that more in depth and then I’m giving a talk in Boston in April at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts which meets in a beautiful historic home in the back bay.
It’s worth coming just to see the house, not just to see me.
So those are both open to the public.

Jake:
[1:05:26] Well, I’ll make sure to post links to your Blue Sky and Twitter in the show notes this week, as well as the details of those upcoming book talks.
And those can be found at hubor.com/two 95.
Uh Professor Weimer, I just want to say again, thank you very much for joining us today for telling our listeners about a often forgotten chapter of, of Boston history or New England history and again, for spending so much time with me on a Friday evening.

Professor Weimer:
[1:05:58] It was a great pleasure. Thank you.

Jake:
[1:06:01] Well, that about wraps it up for this episode to learn more about Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer and the book a Constitutional Culture.
Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/two 95.
I’ll include a link to purchase the book, of course, as well as links to Professor Weimer’s Twitter and blue Sky profiles.
If you’d like to hear her speak at the Barrington Library or the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, I’ll have details of those events as well.
Plus, I’ll have links to our past episodes about the regicides in Boston, about Mary Dyer and the Quaker martyrs, the revolt against Governor Edmund Andrews and Samuel Maverick’s role in creating the slave trade in Boston.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubor.com.
We are Hub History on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram though.
I haven’t been very active on social media lately.
I’m not yet on blue sky, but you can find me on Mastodon as at hub history at better dot Boston or for simplicity.
Just go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you’d never miss an episode.
If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review.
If you do drop me a line and I’ll send you a Hub history sticker as a token of appreciation.

Music

Jake:
[1:07:27] That’s all for now, stay safe out there listeners.