doubted right in the sight of God and man. To be governed by rulers of our own choosing and lawes of our own, is the fundamental privilege of our patent.

"A commission under the great seal, wherein four persons (one of them our professed enemy) are impowered to receive and determine all complaints and appeals according to their discretion, subjects us to the arbitrary power of strangers, and will end in the subversion of our all.

"If these things go on, your subjects here will either be forced to seeke new dwellings or sink under intolerable burdens. The vigor of all new endeavors will be enfeebled; the king himself will be a loser of the wonted benefit by customs, exported and imported from hence into England, and this hopeful plantation will in the issue be ruined.

"If the aime should be to gratify some particular gentlemen by livings and revenues here, that will also fail, for the poverty of the people. If all the charges of the whole government by the year were put together, and then doubled or trebled, it would not be counted for one of those gentlemen a considerable accommodation. To a coalition in this course the people will never come; and it will be hard to find another people that will stand under any considerable burden in this country, seeing it is not a country where men can subsist without hard labor and great frugality.

"God knows our greatest ambition is to live a quiet life, in a corner of the world. We came not into this wildernesse to seek great things to ourselves; and, if any come after us to seeke them heere, they will be disappointed. We keep ourselves within our line; a just dependence upon, and subjection to, your majestie, according to our charter, it is far from our hearts to disacknowledge. We would gladly do anything within our power to purchase the continuance of your favorable aspect. But it is a great unhappiness to have no testimony of our loyalty offered but this, to yield up our liberties, which are far dearer to us than our lives, and which we have willingly ventured our lives and passed through many deaths to obtain.

"It was Job's excellency, when he sat as king among his people, that he was a father to the poor. A poor people,

destitute of outward favor, wealth, and power, now cry unto their lord the king. May your majestie regard their cause, and maintain their right; it will stand among the marks of lasting honor to after generations."

The spirit of the people corresponded with this address. Did any appear to pay court to the commissioners, they became objects of derision. Even the writing to the king and chancellor was not held to be a duty; the compact by the charter required only the payment to the king of one fifth of all gold and silver ore; this was an obligation; any notice of the king beyond this was only by way of civility. It was also hoped to weary the English government by a tedious correspondence, which might be continued till the new revolution, of which they foreboded the approach. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the instinct of fanaticism from the soundest judgment; sometimes fanaticism has the keenest sagacity. There were many in New England who confidently expected a revival of liberty after the restoration, and what was called "the slaying of the witnesses." "Who knows," it was asked, "what the event of this Dutch war will be?" The establishment of arbitrary power would bring in its train arbitrary taxation for the advantage of greedy courtiers. A report was spread that Massachusetts was to yield a revenue of five thousand pounds yearly for the king. Public meetings of the people were held; the brave and liberal Hawthorne, at the head of a company of train-bands, made a speech which royalists deemed "seditious;" and Endecott, of whom Charles II. had written to the colony as of a person not well affected, just as the last sands of life were running out, addressed the people at their meeting-house in Boston. The aged Davenport was equally unbending. "The commission," said he from New Haven, "is but a tryal of our courage; the Lord will be with his people while they are with him. If you consent to this court of appeals, you pluck down with your own hands the house which wisdom has built for you and your posterity."

In the elections, in the spring of 1665, the people sustained their government. Richard Bellingham, late deputy governor, the unbending, faithful old man, skilled from his youth in

English law, perhaps the draughtsman of the charter, certainly familiar with it from its beginning, was chosen to succeed Endecott. Meantime, letters of entreaty had been sent to Robert Boyle and the earl of Manchester; for, from the days of Southampton and Sandys, of Warwick and Say, to those of Burke and Chatham, America was not destitute of friends in England. But none of them would perceive the reasonableness of complaining against an abstract principle. "We are all amazed," wrote Clarendon, who was no enemy to Massachusetts; "you demand a revocation of the commission, without charging the commissioners with the least matter of crymes or exorbitances." The statesmen of that day in Massachusetts understood the doctrine of liberty better than the chancellor of England. A century later, and there were none in England who did not esteem the commission an unconstitutional usurpation.

To Connecticut, the controversy with Massachusetts was fraught with benefits. The commissioners, desirous to make friends in the other colonies, gave no countenance to a claim advanced by the duke of Hamilton to a large part of its territory, and, in arranging the limits of New York, though the charter of Clarendon's son-in-law extended to the river Connecticut, they established the boundary, on the main, in conformity with the claims of Connecticut itself. Long Island went to the duke of York. Satisfied with the harmony which they had secured by attempting nothing but for the interests of the colony, they saw fit to praise to the monarch "the dutifulness and obedience of Connecticut," which was "set off with the more lustre by the contrary deportment of Massachusetts."

We shall soon have occasion to narrate the events in which Nicolls was engaged at New York, where he remained. In February, 1665, Carr, Cartwright, and Maverick, the other commissioners, returning to Massachusetts, desired that, at the next general election day, the whole male population might be assembled in Boston, to hear the message from the king. The proposal was rejected. "He that will not attend to the request," said Cartwright, " is a traitor."

The nature of the government of Rhode Island, and its habitual policy of relying on England for protection, secured

to the royal agents in that province a less unfavorable reception. Plymouth, the weakest colony of all, too poor to "maintain scholars to their ministers," but in some places making use of "a guifted brother," stood firm for independence, although the long-cherished hopes of the inhabitants were flattered by the promise of a charter, if they would but allow the king to select their governor from among three candidates, whom they themselves should nominate. The general assembly, after due consideration, "with many thanks, and great protestations of loyalty to the king," "chose to be as they were."

In Massachusetts, the conference between the two parties degenerated into an altercation. "It is insufferable," said its government, "that the colony should be brought to the bar of a tribunal unknown to its charter." In May, the royal commissioners asked categorically: "Do you acknowledge his majesty's commission?" The colony declined giving a direct answer, and chose rather to plead his majesty's patent.

Tired of discussion, the commissioners declared their intention of holding a court to decide a cause in which the colony was cited to appear as defendant. The general court of the colony forbade them to proceed. On the twenty-third of May, the morning fixed for the trial, they were preparing to go on with the cause, when a herald stepped forth, and, having sounded a trumpet, made proclamation in the name of the king and by authority of the charter, that the general court of Massachusetts, in observance of their duty to God, to the king, and to their constituents, could not suffer any to abet his majesty's honorable commissioners in their designs.

The herald sounded the trumpet in three several places, repeating his proclamation. We may smile at this ceremony; yet when had the voice of a herald proclaimed the approach of so momentous a contest? It was the dawning strife of the new system against the old system, of American politics against European politics.

The commissioners could only wonder that the arguments of the king, his chancellor, and his secretary, did not convince the government of Massachusetts. "Since you will misconstrue our endeavors," said they, "we shall not lose more of

VOL. I.-26

our labors upon you;" and so they retreated to the north. There they endeavored to inquire into the bounds of New Hampshire and Maine, and to prepare for the restoration of proprietary claims; but Massachusetts was again equally active and fearless; its governor and council forbade the towns on the Piscataqua to meet, or in anything to obey the commission, at their utmost peril.

On the first of August, the general court of Massachusetts, as petitioners, thus addressed their complaints to the king: "Your poor subjects are threatened with ruin, reproached with the name of rebels, and your government, established by charter, and our privileges, are violated and undermined; some of your faithful subjects dispossessed of their lands and goods without hearing them speak in their cases; the unity of the English colonies, which is the wall and bulwark under God against the heathen, discountenanced, reproached, and undermined; our bounds and limits clipped and shortened. A just dependence upon and allegiance unto your majesty, according to the charter, we have, and do profess and practice, and have by our oaths of allegiance to your majesty confirmed; but to be placed upon the sandy foundations of a blind obedience unto that arbitrary, absolute, and unlimited power which these gentlemen would impose upon us, who in their actings have carried it not as indifferent persons toward us, this as it is contrary to your majesty's gracious expressions and the liberties of Englishmen, so we can see no reason to submit thereto."

In Maine, the temper of the people was more favorable to royalty; they preferred the immediate protection of the king to an incorporation with Massachusetts, or a subjection to the heir of Gorges; and the commissioners, setting aside the officers appointed by Massachusetts and neglecting the pretensions of Gorges, issued commissions to persons of their selection to govern the district. There were not wanting those who, in spite of threats, openly expressed fears of "the sad contentions" that would follow, and acknowledged that their connection with Massachusetts had been favorable to their prosperity. In the country beyond the Kennebec, which had been recently granted to the duke of York as a province, the commissioners