Mayflower

England had been left to do pretty much as it pleased. Unlike Virginia, there had never been a royal governor in the northern colonies, and with the outbreak of the English civil war, Puritan New England had enjoyed the benefit of a sympathetic government back in the mother country.
    Then, in 1660, New England’s long-standing autonomy suddenly seemed in jeopardy. With the downfall of the Cromwell regime came the restoration of King Charles II. Since his father had been beheaded by Puritan revolutionaries, the new monarch was not inclined to look favorably on New England. But Charles’s initial interest in America lay elsewhere. The collapse of the wampum trade in America combined with the recent defeat of the Dutch navy in Europe had left the Dutch colony of New Netherland vulnerable, and Charles dispatched royal commissioners to oversee the conquest of the rival colony in 1664.
    Several merchants in Plymouth traded with the Dutch colony but none was more closely linked with New Netherland than Thomas Willett. Willett had served his apprenticeship at the Plymouth trading post in Penobscot, Maine. He had then married the daughter of Massasoit’s confidant John Brown and moved with his father-in-law to Wannamoisett. In addition to being experienced in working with the Indians, Willett, who had immigrated to America from Leiden, was fluent in Dutch. By the 1660s he had established a lucrative trade with New Netherland, and one of the king’s commissioners may have had him in mind when he referred to the inhabitants of Plymouth Colony as “mongrel Dutch.” It was not surprising, then, that once New Netherland became New York in a bloodless takeover in 1664, Willett became Manhattan’s first English mayor.
    The increasing amount of time Willett spent in Manhattan soon became a problem for Massasoit’s son and heir, Alexander. Since he lived so close to the Pokanokets, Willett had no choice but to develop a good relationship with the Indians, and he appears to have become for Alexander what Edward Winslow had been for Massasoit: the Englishman he trusted above all others.
    Willett had inherited Miles Standish’s role as the colony’s chief military officer. But by 1662, he had been replaced by Edward Winslow’s thirty-three-year-old son Josiah. Despite his young age, Josiah was well on his way to becoming Plymouth’s most distinguished citizen. One of the few Plymouth residents to have attended Harvard College, he had married the beautiful Penelope Pelham, daughter of Harvard treasurer and assistant governor of Massachusetts Herbert Pelham. A portrait painted in 1651 when Josiah was visiting his father in England depicts a young man with a handsome, somewhat supercilious face and a shoulder-length shock of reddish brown hair. By the 1660s, Josiah and Penelope had taken up residence in Careswell, the Winslow family estate in Marshfield that was named for the home of Josiah’s great-grandfather back in England.
    Winslow had the polish of an English gentleman, but he had been born in America. Being Edward Winslow’s son, he had come to know the Indians well. But from the beginning of his public career, Josiah had a very different relationship with the leadership of the Pokanokets.
    By the 1660s, the English no longer felt that their survival depended on the support of the Indians; instead, many colonists, particularly the younger ones, saw the Indians as an impediment to their future prosperity. No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims’ children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

    Penelope and Josiah Winslow in 1651
    For his part, Alexander had demonstrated a combativeness of his own. Even before his father’s death, he had ignored Massasoit’s agreement with the colony and sold Hog Island to the Rhode Islander Richard Smith. Then, in the spring of 1662, word reached Plymouth that Alexander had done it again. He had illegally sold land to yet another Rhode Islander.
    Ever since Master Jones’s decision to sail for Cape Cod instead of the Hudson River, Plymouth’s patent had been less ironclad than its magistrates would have liked, despite repeated efforts to secure a new charter from the king. But even if Plymouth’s paperwork had all been in order,