Weston’s break with the company in London soon followed. The adventurers held a meeting early in 1622, when the majority agreed to put into the common fund what we might call an additional assessment of one third of their original holding of stock. Those anxious to go on with the business believed it should not be hindered by the laggards, so they resolved to break off the joint stock as soon as the shareowners in the colony should agree. This report of a decision to break up came from Weston and his supporters, but it proved premature, as indeed Bradford suspected so strongly that he did not show their letter to more than a handful of intimates in counsel. Instead, Weston got out. He wrote in April 1622: “I have sold my adventure and debts unto them so as I am quit of you, and you of me....” The company’s reaction was that they were “very glad they are freed of him, he being judged a man that thought himself above the general....” Not unrelated to his coming in person to New England in disguise and under an assumed name may have been a large debt he owed the Crown for alum; a Treasury warrant accused him of withdrawing beyond the seas with the purpose of taking his estate after him. Weston’s subsequent projects for colonizing and trading in New England for some time created problems for the settlement at Plymouth. The Pilgrims’ leaders more than repaid him for his early support by receiving his men kindly and rescuing his rival colony on Massachusetts Bay from imminent destruction by the Indians. When the promoter himself arrived at their door, virtually destitute, but convincing in his excuses, they fitted him out with enough furs to begin trade again. Master John Peirce was the next to quarrel with his fellow adventurers in London. A member of the Clothworkers’ Company, Peirce claimed that he once employed more than a hundred persons. He was the merchant who had received patents for the Leyden settlers from the Virginia Company in 1620 and later from the Council for New England. He had helped negotiate the terms of agreement between the merchants and the planters. It was under his name that they held the right to take up land around Plymouth. This had made him important enough for Cushman to dedicate _Mourt’s Relation_ to him. In April 1622, according to the story Bradford told, a version accepted uncritically by many writers, Peirce secretly obtained from the Council for New England a new grant, making the associates hold the lands at Plymouth as his tenants, rather than of the Council. The London adventurers objected and forced him to assign the grant to their Treasurer, now James Sherley, in return for which Peirce demanded £500. The impression is left that Peirce deceived the company and that they were justified in breaking with him.