That there was considerable doubt in the minds of those in authority in New England as to the manner in which the news of their high-handed and ferocious persecution of the Quakers would be received by the Home Government is evident from a letter written by Captain John Leverett, London Agent for Massachusetts, to Governor Endicott and the General Court, 13th of September, 1660. After some discourse on other matters he continues: Yᵉ Quakers I hear have been with yᵉ King concerning your putting to death those of theyr Frᵈˢ executed at Boston. Yᵉ general vogue of people is yᵗ a Govʳ will be sent over. Other rumours yʳᵉ are concerning you, but I omit yᵐ, not knowing how to move & appeare at Court on your behalf. I spoke to Lᵈ Say & Sele to yᵉ Eˡ of Manchester &c. Yʳˢ in all faithfulness to serve you, JOHN LEVERETT. Some Quakers say yᵗ they are promised to have order for yᵉ liberty of being with you. News of the sufferings of Friends in New England had indeed reached their Friends in the old country; Edward Burrough[55] had obtained audience of the King and represented in powerful though simple language the story of their inhuman treatment. His appeal resulted in the issue of a Mandamus by the King, dated Whitehall, 9th day of September, 1661, to John Endicott, and the Governors of the other Colonies,[56] commanding that all Quakers condemned to death or imprisoned should be sent to England for trial; Edward Burrough urged that this order should be sent with all speed, but the King objected, in his usual spirit of procrastination, that he had “no occasion at present to send a ship thither.” Burrough, however, was given permission to send the Mandamus by the hand of a messenger of his own choosing; he at once decided that Samuel Shattuck,[57] of Salem, a Quaker exile from the Colony, should return as the bearer of the King’s message. English Friends at once chartered a vessel belonging to Ralph Goldsmith,[58] himself a Quaker. After a tempestuous voyage of six weeks the vessel reached the American shore. As she lay anchored in Boston Harbour one Sunday morning in October, 1661, Captain Oliver,[59] a Boston official, boarded her, and on his return to the town it is said he reported: “There is Shattock and the Devil and all.” The Mandamus was delivered in person by Samuel Shattuck to Governor Endicott and the immediate result was that, shortly after, many Quaker prisoners were set at liberty.[60] Whittier, in his poem, _The King’s Missive_, gives us a beautiful word picture of the incident and its setting; one can imagine how the weary prisoners “paused on their way to look on the martyr graves by the Common side,” and how surpassingly lovely the landscape seemed to eyes so long accustomed to the gloom of the prison-house for The autumn haze lay soft and still On wood and meadow and upland farms, and