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New England gets partitioned, 1635

Z

zaffre

fdril
Location
Massachusetts
Pronouns
he/him
Some more sacred codtent: you may know that Plymouth, as with most of the early British colonies, was set up as a joint-stock company and, as with most of the early joint-stock companies, failed miserably and was disbanded in 1635, with the result being that Plymouth was able to somewhat ambiguously govern itself without a formal charter as a Puritan theocracy for several decades until it was bundled into Massachusetts.

But what you do not know (did anyone know the other bit) is that this only emerged as a stop-gap after the original plan - a partition of everything between "Virginia" and "Nova Scotia" into eight proprietary colonies - spontaneously fell through. To wit: it is February 3rd, 1635. You are the Plymouth Council of New England, a group of lords who don't have anything better to do legitimate businessmen who are understandably frustrated that New England is turning into one giant boondoggle that is too busy doing things like cut the St. George's Cross (popish) out of flags and avoid starvation to provide any return on investment. So what do you do? Pizza time. Slice the whole region into eight separate patents, to be granted to different members of the Council and all administered by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, with the goal being to override the awkward failures of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. And as far as lines on a map go:

1616540129667.png

Some sources cite as many twelve patents here (and come up with borders) but having dug all the way to the actual text of it, yeah, eight. The only ones that even *vaguely* stuck were Ferdinando Gorges' "New Somersetshire" as an antecedent to Maine and John Mason's New Hampshire (with different borders, mind you) although Hamilton's heirs did contest "New Cambridge" and piss off Connecticut several decades later and Lord Alexander's "Canada" and "Isle of Sterling" (Long Island, which he also got for some reason) at least have names. I couldn't even come with that much for the other four.

So what happened? The original charter *was* surrendered, Ferdinando Gorges was appointed Governor General of New England and Mason Vice Admiral, a writ of quo warranto (what warrant) was decided against Massachusetts, and the Council somehow assembled the funds for a ship to bring Gorges, his household, and a thousand (!) soldiers over to the New World to that end. And then when they were launching the ship it broke. Mason died, unrelatedly, Charles and Archbishop Laud were starting to become distracted by, er, matters at home, and between one thing and another it all sputtered out and left Plymouth in a useful legal limbo for the next five decades.

But beyond hipster placenames and interesting borders - if that ship had sailed, the shit would absolutely have hit the fan. Ferdinando Gorges landing in Boston with a thousand soldiers to personally administer an Anglican proprietary colony is going to be an existential threat to the Puritans beyond even, well, Edmund Andros. And they have an window that by Andros' time had closed - not resistance, or revolution, but emigration: New Netherland is religiously tolerant and right there. This is already a period when settlers are moving westward per religious disputes en masse, and under the circumstances I think a reflection of the Pilgrims' original flight to Leiden would have been more than plausible, maybe even likely. But what about the English Civil War, you ask? That speeds up the migration, with an active Royalist governor who lives until 1647 and an establishment that holds onto power until 1652. You might see some settlement between then and the Restoration (yes, butterflies, but I think you need a pretty airtight POD for the Stuarts to stay in exile forever and ever) but at this point the Hudson and Connecticut valleys are the premiere destination of most religious migrants while Gorges has inadvertently condemned his patents to being cold, feudal backwaters, and with the balance of population so decisively changed I suspect it is (puritan-flavored) New Netherland that swallows New England rather than the other way around.

So yes, this is actually that darkest of timelines - a New Yorkwank.

What happens next?
 
Dan1988 said:
Isn't that the same strategy the Portuguese used in colonial Brazil, early on, when it too failed to deliver on its promises?
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It was the initial model for almost all of the European colonies, I think - emphasis on initial, since I usually take a fairly contingent approach to history but I think any attempt to set up a feudal proprietor colony on the American mainland is pretty much bound to fail; you just have too few people willing to be peasants and too many people willing to be lords.
 
Good find @zaffre !

Redolegna said:
Ok, I've got to ask:




Look, I know the reason for Irish names popping up in the Spanish and then South American nobility, but what gives here?
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Andros was from Guernsey, so it's all @Guernsey Donkey 's fault, while Gorges is an old Norman family (so actually the Normans are to blame for both of these) and there were a lot of incongruous first names going about at that time.

Also the Gorges family crest makes them look like hypnotic supervillains (I think it's supposed to be a whirlpool as the Latin word for whirlpool sounds like the family name):

184px-Heraldic_gurges_%28whirlpool%29_Gorges.svg.png
 
OwenM said:
Is New Netherland able to swallow its immigrants linguistically, would be my first question?
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Historically speaking, New Netherland was basically laissez-faire when it came to language usage, because it was never a homogenous society to begin with. Heck, its first governor was a native Anglophone from Germany.
 
OwenM said:
Is New Netherland able to swallow its immigrants linguistically, would be my first question?
Click to expand...

My assumption is no, both because, as @Dan1988 puts it, New Netherland was pretty laissez-faire on matters of language, but also because the timescale is, as with everything in early New England, severely compressed. 1635 is just fifteen years since the Mayflower landed and settlements have been springing up like weeds; even a decade of people making the (substantially easier) decision to head a little further west is going to swamp the Dutch population - and in a decade no one's going to have stopped speaking English.

That said, the ECW is going to be the beginning of the end for large-scale religious migration from England and if the United Provinces manage to hold onto their colony after 1664, I think you can make a decent case that the balance will tip back the other way, albeit with more than a little strife in the process. All a bit nebulous, but I will freely confess that my motivation in coming up with this was to see if we could end up with a non-anglophone Eastern Seaboard (found some interesting stuff on New Sweden and Nova Dania, but that's a thread for another day) and it's proving a much tougher ask than expected.
 
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