My wife has done a number of transcriptions from legal documents from the seventeenth century, in the Manchester area, UK. These were a great deal easier. In the seventeenth century they would use “ye” (where the “y” is actually a “th” - a different letter). This looks just like a “t”, which as timd says, looks like a personal abbreviation for “the”. If they were from the North of England they might have been in the habit of abbreviating the definite article in speech, too, as in “Trouble at t’Mill!”.
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cool stuff. i might have to start using personal abbreviations and t’ like. 
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The thorn character þ was not available to printers with the 26 lowercase and uppercase characters so they used a y and that usage transferred to handwriting.
I found some old essay notes from the 70s I used a theta θ for “the” amongst many other scribbles.
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I see what you mean. In “resigned” the r looks drastically different. I wonder if that was a normal writing convention then or a personal habit.
Something else I noticed is, every line starts with an open quote mark. I have never seen that before and I have no idea why that was done.
I noticed the quotation mark on every line and found it curious too. I’m not entirely sure what the meaning of it is but maybe this answers it?
Quotation marks were first cut in metal type during the middle of the sixteenth century, and were used copiously by some printers by the seventeenth. In some Baroque and Romantic-period books, they would be repeated at the beginning of every line of a long quotation. When this practice was abandoned, the empty margin remained, leaving the modern form of indented block quotation.[8]
Source: Wikipedia
Based on that my guess is that it’s a long quotation so every line with a " mark means that it is all part of a quote.
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