efore came under Mr. Bancroft's
category of "disturbers of the public security," and Mr. Palfrey's
designation of "conspirators;" but was in reality a liberal and a
loyalist, not to King Charles indeed, but to the Commonwealth of
England. I give Mr. Palfrey's statements, in his own words, in a
note.[92]

The spirit and sentiments of Mr. Palfrey are identical with those which
I have quoted of Mr. Bancroft; but while Mr. Bancroft speaks
contemptuously of the authors of the petition for equal civil and
religious rights, Mr. Palfrey traces the movement to Mr. William Vassal,
one of the founders and first Council of the Massachusetts Colony, and
progenitor of the famous Whig family of Holland House. Nor does Mr.
Palfrey venture to question the doctrine or one of the statements of the
petitioners, though he calls them "conspirators."

Mr. Palfrey--very unfairly, I think--imputes to the petitioners a design
to subvert the Congregational worship and establish the Presbyterian
worship in its place; and to give force to his imputations says that a
numerous party in the English Parliament "were bent on setting up
Presbytery as the established religion in England and _its
dependencies_." There is not the slightest ground for asserting that any
party in the Long Parliament, any more than in Massachusetts, designed
the setting up of Presbytery as _the_ established worship in the
"_dependencies_ of England." King Charles the First, on his first
sitting in judgment on complaints against the proceedings of the
Massachusetts Bay Council, declared to his Privy Council, in 1632, that
he had never intended to impose the Church ceremonies, objected to by
the Puritan clergy of the time, upon the colonists of Massachusetts.
Charles the Second, thirty years afterwards, declared the same, and
acted upon it during the quarter of a century of his reign. The Long
Parliament acted upon the same principle. There is not an instance,
during the whole sixty years of the first Massachusetts Charter, of any
attempt, on the part of either King or Commonwealth, to suppress or
interfere with the Congregational worship in New England; all that was
asked by the King, or any party in Massachusetts, was _toleration_ of
other forms of Protestant worship as well as that of the Congregational.
The very petition, whose promoters are represented as movers of
sedition, asked for no exclusive establishment of Presbyterianism, but
for the toleration of both the Episco