the Royal Commissioners, Leverett, now
Major-General of the Colony, was sent to Maine, with three other
magistrates and a body of horse, to re-establish the authority of
Massachusetts. In spite of the remonstrances of Col. Nichols at New York
(the head of the Royal Commission), the new Government lately set up was
obliged to yield. Several persons were punished for speaking
irreverently of the re-established authority of Massachusetts."
(Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. I., Chap. xiv., pp. 473,
474.) For eleven years the Massachusetts Bay Government maintained this
ascendency against all complaints and appeals to England, when in 1677,
as Mr. Hildreth says, "After hearing the parties, the Privy Council
decided, in accordance with the opinion of the two Chief Justices, that
the Massachusetts patent did not give any territory more than three
miles distant from the left or north bank of the Merrimac. This
construction, which set aside the pretensions of Massachusetts to the
province of Maine, as well as to that part of New Hampshire east of the
Merrimac, appeared so plain to English lawyers that the agents (of
Massachusetts) hardly attempted a word in defence." (History of the
United States, Vol. II., Chap. xviii., pp. 496, 497.)

It has been shown that as early as the second year of the civil war in
England, the Massachusetts Bay Court passed an Act, in 1643, declaring
it a capital crime for any one in their jurisdiction to advocate or
support the cause of the King; some years afterwards they passed an Act
forbidding all trade with the other American colonies who would not
renounce their allegiance to the King; in their addresses to the
Parliament and Cromwell, in 1651 and 1654, as shown above, they claimed,
as a ground of merit for peculiar favour, that they had done their
utmost, by devotional and material aid of men and means, in support of
the Parliamentary, and afterwards regicide party, from the beginning to
the end of the war--so that loyalists as well as churchmen were treated
by them as outcasts and aliens--and now, after having begged, in
language of sycophantic subserviency, the Royal pardon for the past, and
obtained it on certain conditions, they claim the boon but refuse to
fulfil the conditions, making all sorts of excuses, promises, and
evasions for twenty years--professing and promising one thing in London,
doing the opposite in Massachusetts, protracting where they dare not
resist, but pract