territory Gorges retained the portion previously granted to him, and the region between the Kennebec and the Saint Croix north to the Saint Lawrence, though still claimed by the French as part of Acadia, was conveyed to Sir William Alexander (1567?-1640); later, in 1664, this was conveyed to the duke of York, afterwards James II. of England. Gorges named his tract the County of New Somersetshire, and immediately began the administration of government, setting up in 1635 or 1636 a court at Saco under the direction of his kinsman William Gorges. In 1639 he procured for his province a royal charter modelled after that of Maryland, which invested him with the feudal tenure of a county palatine and vice-regal powers of government. He called into existence a formidably large number of officers to govern it, but his charter was in conflict with the other (mutually conflicting) grants of the Council for New England, east of the Piscataqua; and Gorges and his agents met with a determined opposition under the leadership of George Cleeve, the deputy-president of the Lygonia, or "Plough" Patent, which extended along the coast from Cape Porpoise to Casco, and in issuing which the Council for New England had granted governmental as well as territorial rights. Moreover, Puritan Massachusetts, which was naturally hostile to the Anglicanism of Gorges and his followers, interpreted her charter so as to make her northern boundary run east and west from a point 3 m. north of the source of the Merrimac river, and on this basis laid claim to practically the whole of Maine then settled. The factional quarrels there, together with the Commonwealth government in England, made it easy for Massachusetts to enforce this claim at the time, and between 1652 and 1658 Maine was gradually annexed to Massachusetts. In 1672 Massachusetts extended her boundary eastward as far as Penobscot Bay. Ferdinando Gorges, a grandson of the original proprietor, brought before parliament his claim to Maine and in 1664 a committee of that body decided in his favour; but Massachusetts successfully resisted until 1677, when the king in council decided against her. She then quietly purchased the Gorges claim for £1,250 and held the province as a proprietor until 1691, when by the new Massachusetts charter Maine was extended to the Saint Croix river, and was made an integral part of Massachusetts.