The tendency of these various towns was to combine in a commonwealth, but on account of their separate origin the process of union was slow. The source of most of their trouble in their infancy was the grasping policy of Massachusetts. Next to heretics in the bosom of the commonwealth heretic neighbors were especially abhorrent. When in 1640 the magistrates of Connecticut and New Haven addressed a joint letter to the general court of Massachusetts, and the citizens of Aquidneck ventured to join in it, Massachusetts arrogantly excluded the representation of Aquidneck from their reply as "men not fit to be capitulated withal by us either for themselves or for the people of the isle where they inhabit."[6] And neither in 1644 nor in 1648 would Massachusetts listen to the appeal of the Rhode-Islanders to be admitted into the confederacy of the New England colonies.[7] The desire of Massachusetts appeared to be to hold the heretics and their new country under a kind of personal and territorial vassalage, as was interestingly shown in the case of Mrs. Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton. Despite her banishment and excommunication the church at Boston seemed to consider it a duty to keep a paternal eye on Mrs. Hutchinson; and not long after her settlement at Portsmouth sent an embassy to interview her and obtain, if possible, a submission and profession of repentance. The bearers of this message met with an apt reception and returned very much disconcerted. They found Mrs. Hutchinson, and declared that they came as messengers from the church of Boston, but she replied that she knew only the church of Christ and recognized no such church as "the church of Boston." Nevertheless, she continued to be annoyed with messages from Boston till, in order to be quiet and out of reach, she removed to a place very near Hell Gate in the Dutch settlement, and there, in 1643, she, with most of her family, perished in an Indian attack.[8] The authority of Massachusetts over the banished was not confined to religious exhortations. Samuel Gorton, a great friend of Mrs. Hutchinson, was in many respects one of the most interesting characters in early New England history. This man had a most pertinacious regard for his private rights, and at Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Providence his career of trouble was very much the same. But he was not an ordinary law-breaker, and in Providence, in 1641, Gorton and his friends refused to submit to a distress ordained by the magistrates, for the reason that these magistrates, having no charter, had no better authority to make laws than any private person.[9]