Sunday · November 15, 2026

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A new charter folds Massachusetts and Plymouth into one crown province

Increase Mather asked for the old Puritan charter back; William and Mary gave him a different colony instead.

For two years Massachusetts had governed itself without any valid charter, ever since colonists threw out the despised royal governor Edmund Andros in 1689. On October 7, 1691, William III and Mary II settled the question by issuing a new charter for the Province of Massachusetts Bay, merging Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Maine, and other territories into a single royal province. The crown would now appoint the governor; voters would qualify by property, not church membership. Plymouth, which had governed itself for seventy years without ever holding a royal charter, ceased to exist as a separate colony…

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More from October 7

American bombs fall on Afghanistan; Bush says "time is running out"

Air strikes hit Taliban defenses and al-Qaeda camps as U.S. special forces move in to back the Northern Alliance.

Ninety-eight American prisoners are shot on a Wake Island beach

The civilian contractors had survived twenty-two months of occupation; their captors gave no warning before the killing.

A Navy memo floats a plan: push Japan into firing the first shot

Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum sends his superiors eight ways to pressure Tokyo, and admits Washington isn't ready to declare war without one.

The only British officer on the field is dead within the hour, and his men have nowhere left to run.

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Read the full October 7 edition →Everything that happened on October 7 →

More from Colonial America

Congress bans British trade; twelve colonies sign the Continental Association

Tea goes first, then nearly everything else Britain ships across the Atlantic.

The Congress breaks up; the colonies now have a boycott and a date to reconvene

Fifty-six delegates close seven weeks at Carpenters' Hall with a trade embargo, a petition to the king, and the promise to meet again come spring.

William Penn steps ashore at Philadelphia, a city that exists only on paper

He had landed at New Castle days earlier; now he comes to the ground he has already named for brotherly love.

Aboard the Mayflower, 41 passengers bind themselves into a "civil Body Politick"

Storms have blown the ship off its course for Virginia, and some aboard are saying that no one has the power to command them.

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