ough Morton continued the struggle, and
though, in 1638, the Committee of the Council for Foreign Plantations
(the Laud Commission) again demanded the charter, the danger was past:
conditions in England had become so serious for the King that the
complaints against Massachusetts were lost to view. At last in 1639
Gorges obtained his charter for a feudal propriety in Maine but no
further attempts were made to overthrow the Massachusetts Bay colony.

During the years from 1630 to 1640, the growth of the colony was
extraordinarily rapid. In the first year alone seventeen ships with
two thousand colonists came over, and it is estimated that by 1641
three hundred vessels bearing twenty thousand passengers had crossed
the Atlantic. It was a great migration. Inevitably many went back,
but the great majority remained and settled in Boston and its
neighborhood--Roxbury, Charlestown, Dorchester, Cambridge, and
Watertown, where in 1643 were situated according to Winthrop "near half
of the commonwealth for number of people and substance." From the first
the colonists dispersed rapidly, establishing in favorable places
settlements which they generally called plantations but sometimes towns.
In these they lived as petty religious and civil communities, each under
its minister, with civil officials chosen from among themselves. In the
decade following 1630 the number of such settlements rose to twenty-two.
The inhabitants were almost purely English in stock, with here and there
an Irishman, a few Jews, and an occasional negro from the West Indies.
Nearly all the settlers were of Puritan sympathies, and of middle-class
origin--tenants from English estates, artisans from English towns, and
many indentured servants. A few were of the aristocracy, such as Lady
Arabella Johnson, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Richard
Saltonstall, Lady Deborah Moody, members of the Harlakenden family,
young Henry Vane, Thomas Gorges, and a few others. Of "Misters" and
"Esquires" there was a goodly number, such as Winthrop, Haynes, Emanuel
Downing, and the like. The first leaders were exceptional men,
possessed of ability and education, and many were university graduates,
who brought with them the books and the habits of the reader and scholar
of their day. They were superior to those of the second and third
generation in the breadth of their ideas and in the vigor and
originality of their convictions.

Migration ceased in 1641, and a time of stress a