ceipts at the custom-house. In the other relations of life he
was disencumbered of scruples. His abilities were not great, but his
industry was untiring, and he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a
sleuth-hound. As an excellent British historian observes, "he was one of
those men who, once enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in
the passion which is engendered of strife." [37] [Sidenote: The Lords of
Trade] [Sidenote: Edward Randolph]

The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception
at the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor
his message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when
he came to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he
asked, with careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's
choking rage found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind
him that the governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in
Cromwell's army. As we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the
writer would have betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman,
had any clue been given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and
Mather had nothing to say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley.
Everything that Randolph could think of that would goad and irritate the
king, he reported in full to London; his letters were specimens of that
worst sort of lie that is based upon distorted half-truths; and his
malicious pen but seldom lay idle.

While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his
careful handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready
to counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism
in New England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of
the grim verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The
younger Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study
theology, but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he
was a deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in
the storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following
years he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper
he differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son
whose feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned