or themselves or for the people of
the isle where they inhabit."[6] And neither in 1644 nor in 1648 would
Massachusetts listen to the appeal of the Rhode-Islanders to be
admitted into the confederacy of the New England colonies.[7]

The desire of Massachusetts appeared to be to hold the heretics and
their new country under a kind of personal and territorial vassalage,
as was interestingly shown in the case of Mrs. Hutchinson and Samuel
Gorton. Despite her banishment and excommunication the church at
Boston seemed to consider it a duty to keep a paternal eye on Mrs.
Hutchinson; and not long after her settlement at Portsmouth sent an
embassy to interview her and obtain, if possible, a submission and
profession of repentance.

The bearers of this message met with an apt reception and returned
very much disconcerted. They found Mrs. Hutchinson, and declared that
they came as messengers from the church of Boston, but she replied
that she knew only the church of Christ and recognized no such church
as "the church of Boston." Nevertheless, she continued to be annoyed
with messages from Boston till, in order to be quiet and out of reach,
she removed to a place very near Hell Gate in the Dutch settlement,
and there, in 1643, she, with most of her family, perished in an
Indian attack.[8]

The authority of Massachusetts over the banished was not confined to
religious exhortations. Samuel Gorton, a great friend of Mrs.
Hutchinson, was in many respects one of the most interesting
characters in early New England history. This man had a most
pertinacious regard for his private rights, and at Plymouth,
Portsmouth, and Providence his career of trouble was very much the
same. But he was not an ordinary law-breaker, and in Providence, in
1641, Gorton and his friends refused to submit to a distress ordained
by the magistrates, for the reason that these magistrates, having no
charter, had no better authority to make laws than any private
person.[9]

The next year, 1642, thirteen citizens of Providence petitioned Boston
for assistance and protection against him; and not long after, four of
the petitioners submitted their persons and lands to the authority of
Massachusetts.[10] Although to accept this submission was to step
beyond their bounds under the Massachusetts charter, the authorities
at Boston, in October, 1642, gave a formal notice of their intention
to maintain the claim of the submissionists.[11] To this notice Gorton
replied