ack. This
decision left the four towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith
in 1679 proceeded to erect them into the royal province of New
Hampshire, with president and council appointed by the crown, and an
assembly chosen by the people, but endowed with little authority,--a
tricksome counterfeit of popular government. Within three years an
arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire
to acts of insurrection. [Sidenote: Royal province of New Hampshire]

To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
1652--the same year in which she began coining money--Massachusetts
had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II.,
took it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke
of Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had
responded, Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded
to Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When
the king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to
Boston, commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on
repayment of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that
the people should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand
without consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was
enjoined to put in force the royal orders of seventeen years before,
concerning the oath of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and
the prohibition of the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: The Gorges
claim]

This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place
was filled by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great
integrity, and held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those
that had been chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of
the great Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he wa