ls to the higher courts or the
King himself in England. They seize upon and claim the promise of the
King to continue the Charter, but evade and deny the fulfilment of the
conditions on which he made that promise.]

[Footnote 142: But they rejected the King's commission of inquiry,
refused the information required; and they modestly pray the King to
accept as proof of their innocence and right doings their own
professions and statements against the complaints made of their
proscriptions and oppressions.]

[Footnote 143: The threat at the beginning of this, and also in the
following paragraph, is characteristic; it was tried, but without
effect, on other occasions. The insinuations and special pleading
throughout these paragraphs are amply answered in the letters of Lord
Clarendon and the Hon. R. Boyle, which follow this extraordinary
address, which abounds alternately and successively in affected
helplessness and lofty assumptions, in calumnious statements and
professed charity, in abject flattery and offensive insinuations and
threats, in pretended poverty amidst known growing wealth, in appeals to
heaven and professed humility and loyalty, to avoid the scrutiny of
their acts and to reclaim the usurpation of absolute power.]

[Footnote 144: Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol.
VIII., Second Series, pp. 49-51.]

[Footnote 145: Collections of Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol.
VIII., Second Series, pp. 103-105.]

[Footnote 146: The petition entire is inserted above, pp. 153-159. Mr.
Hutchinson gives this petition in the Appendix to the first volume of
his History of Massachusetts Bay, No. 16, pp. 537-539; but he does not
give the King's reply.]

[Footnote 147: Mr. Endicot died before the next election. He was the
primary cause of the disputes between the Massachusetts Bay Colony and
the Parent Government, and the unrelenting persecutor of all who
differed from him in religious worship. He was hostile to monarchy and
all English authority from the beginning; he got and kept the elective
franchise, and eligibility to office, in the hands of the
Congregationalists alone, and became of course their idol.

The King's suggesting the election of a Governor other than Endicot was
a refutation of their statements that he intended to deprive them of
their local self-government. The following is Neal's notice of the death
of Mr. Endicot: "On the 23rd of March, 1665, died Mr. John Endicot,
Governor