The colony, now a royal province, endeavoured nevertheless still to maintain the principles of democratic liberty in the new code which was drawn up by the General Assembly, but which was utterly disapproved and rejected when sent to England. Mason also found it next to impossible to establish his claims even to unappropriated lands, and returning to England, sent over one Cranfield, a needy adventurer, as his agent and as governor of the province, with a mortgage on the whole for twenty-one years, the crown being a party to the arrangement and receiving from Mason one-fifth of all quit-rents for the support of the government, which revenue was allowed to Cranfield as his salary. Full of the hope of speedily making a large fortune, Cranfield arrived in the province, but only to find that he had to deal with men of a determined and patriotic spirit, ready in every way to oppose his aggressions under whatever form they might appear. The people were vexed with lawsuits and the imposition of fines from one end of the province to the other. In vain the governor made use of every subterfuge to raise money and to intimidate; now on the pretence of invasion, now by prosecutions regarding church discipline, now by the terror of an approaching Indian war. It was to no purpose; he had to deal with a people firm as the granite mountains of their land, and from their steadfastness, rather than from the character of these bulwarks of nature, New Hampshire to this day retains the appellation of the Granite State. It was impossible to gather the illegal taxes which Cranfield imposed. Associations were formed to resist their collection. At one town the sheriff was driven away with clubs, and his officer threatened with spits and scalding water by the irate and determined farmers’ wives, whose household goods he was about to distrain upon; in another place he was despoiled of his signs of office, and with a rope round his neck, conveyed out of the province. Cranfield was soon as glad to withdraw from “these unreasonable people,” as he termed them, as Mason had been before him.