BY

HENRY GARDINER.

EDITED WITH NOTES BY

CHARLES EDWARD BANKS, M. D.

LONDON.
1660.

PRINTED FOR THE GORGES SOCIETY, PORTLAND, MAINE.

1884.

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY COPIES.

Nafifty

FROM THE PRESS OF

STEPHEN BERRY, PORTLAND, ME.

INTRODUCTION.

This tract, which has been selected by the Council of the Gorges Society as the initial volume of its series. of reprints, is one of the many political pamphlets showered upon the public at the Restoration, and is an excellent expression of the temper of that party in English politics which was to reassume the reins of government after an enforced retirement. For a decade the loyal servitors of the Stuarts had been obliged to await that happier day when the throne of the realm should claim its own, and when the exiled monarch recrossed the straits of Dover to enter his metropolis, the printing presses began to groan under the pressure of work that had been stifled during the Protectorate. Every cavalier with a "claim" sought at once to attract the attention of the court with printed petitions, memorials, grievances, remonstrances and other similar forms of address in which petitioners "ever pray," and Charles the Second found the foot of his throne as thickly strewn with claims and petitions as had been

the

the deluge of roses that scented the streets of London. in his triumphal march to Whitehall. Of such character is "New England's Vindication," a polemical composition devoted to an arraignment of the Puritanical element which had thus far controlled the destinies of New England. Since the death of Charles the First, the Puritan leaders in the colonies had been left to deal, undisturbed, with the problems of domestic concern, and the results were everywhere fatal to the sympathizers with loyalty. So effectually had the governments of Maine and New Hampshire, always loyal to the Crown, been usurped by the Roundheads of Massachusetts that, as stated by the author, "We that first ventured must petition our sometimes servants to be good to their Master's Children."

To present to the "merrie monarch" a picture of the oppression under which loyalists were then existing in the colonies this book was printed, and the reader can judge of the effect which it may have had upon him after a perusal of the text. It is evident that the author had something to communicate, but the process of imparting it to others is painful, and the style grows complicated until his ideas and facts become involved in a tangle of unreasonable rhetoric.

It is stated upon the title page that Henry Gardiner

is