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mer solicitation: though all this while, and for many years afterwards, his lordship did not pretend to lay public claim to any part of the propriety. It did not square with this project that appeals should be made to the general assembly, as till then had been the custom. He feared the burgesses would be too much in the interest of their countrymen, and adjudge the inhabitants of the Northern Neck to have an equal liberty and privilege in their estates with the rest of Virginia, as being settled upon the same foot. In order therefore to make a better pennyworth of those poor people, he studied to overturn this odious method of appealing to the assembly, and to fix the last resort in another court. To bring this point about, his lordship contrived to blow up a difference in the assembly between the council and the burgesses, privately encouraging the burgesses to insist upon the privilege of determining all appeals by themselves, exclusive of the council; because they, having given their opinions before in the general court, were, for that reason, unfit judges in appeals from themselves to the assembly. This succeeded according to his wish, and the burgesses bit at the bait, under the notion of privilege, never dreaming of the snake that lay in the grass, nor considering the danger of altering an old constitution so abruptly. Thus my lord gained his end; for he represented that quarrel with so many aggravations, that he got an instruction from the king to take away all appeals from the general court to the assembly, and cause them to be made to himself in council, if the thing in demand was of L300 value, otherwise no appeal from the general court. Sec. 124. Of this his lordship made sufficient advantage; for in the confusion that happened in the end of king James the Second's reign, viz., in October 1688, he having got an assignment from the other patentees, gained a favorable report from the king's council at law upon his patent for the Northern Neck. When he had succeeded in this, his lordship's next step was to engage some noted inhabitant of the place to be on his side. Accordingly he made use of his cousin Secretary Spencer, who lived in the said Neck, and was esteemed as wise and great a man as any of the council. This gentleman did but little in his lordship's service, and only gained some few strays, that used to be claimed by the coroner, in behalf of the king. Upon the death of Mr. Secretary Spenc
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