ion. A declaration was drawn up by order of the Court, in answer to
the petition, and in vindication of the Government--a proceeding which
at this day would not appear for the honour of the supreme authority.
The petitioners were required to attend the Court. They urged their
right of petitioning. They were told they were not accused of
petitioning, but of contemptuous and seditious expressions, and were
required to find sureties for their good behaviour, etc. A charge was
drawn up against them in form; notwithstanding which it was intimated to
them, that if they would ingenuously acknowledge their offence, they
should be forgiven; but they refused, and were fined, some in larger,
some in smaller sums, two or three of the magistrates dissenting, Mr.
Bellingham,[85] in particular, desiring his dissent might be entered.
The petitioners claimed an appeal to the Commissioners of Plantations
in England; but it was not allowed. Some of them resolved to go home
with a complaint. Their papers were seized, and among them was found a
petition to the Right Honourable the Earl of Warwick, etc.,
Commissioners, from about five and twenty non-freemen, for themselves
and many thousands more, in which they represent that from the
pulpits[86] they had been reproached and branded with the names of
destroyers of Churches and Commonwealths, called Hamans, Judases, sons
of Korah, and the Lord entreated to confound them, and the people and
magistrates stirred up against them by those who were too forward to
step out of their callings, so that they had been sent for to the Court,
and some of them committed for refusing to give two hundred pounds bond
to stand to the sentence of the Court, _when all the crime was a
petition to the Court_, and they had been publicly used as malefactors,
etc.

"Mr. Winslow, who had been chosen agent for the colony to answer to
Gorton's complaint, was now instructed to make defence against these
petitioners; and by his prudent management, and the credit and esteem he
was in with many members of the Parliament and principal persons then in
power, he prevented any prejudice to the colony from either of these
applications."[87]

Mr. (Edward) Winslow, above mentioned by Mr. Hutchinson, had been one
of the founders and Governors of the _Plymouth_ colony; but twenty-five
years afterwards he imbibed the persecuting spirit of the Massachusetts
Bay colony, became their agent and advocate in London, and by the
prestige wh