New England historians have always found it difficult to admit that there could be any good in a man who adhered to the fortunes of the Stuarts, or who worshipped in the church over which Laud had been primate. But the time that has elapsed since the period of struggle should have mitigated, if not utterly extinguished, the ancestral hostility of Puritan and Prelatist. Men are learning (under the influence of commemorative festivities) to revise their opinions in regard to the harshness and unloveliness of the Fathers of New England; and it is to be hoped that, before long, justice may be done to the honesty of conviction and conscientiousness of purpose that inspired those who have been so long described as “malignants.” Is it too much to hope that men will be able to see that the Englishmen who charged with Rupert, and the Englishmen who prayed and smote with Oliver, were both contending for a principle which was dearer to them than life--the principle of stern resistance to the violation of constitutional law? If we honor the men who hated the arbitrary government of the Stuarts, it is unfair to condemn those who hated the far more arbitrary government of the Rump and the Protector. Edmund Andros was born in London, December 6, 1637, of a family that was eminent among the adherents of Charles I.[102] His father, Amias Andros, was the head of the family; he possessed an estate upon the island of Guernsey, and was royal bailiff of that island. His mother was Elizabeth Stone, whose brother, Sir Robert Stone, was cup-bearer to the unfortunate Elizabeth the dispossessed Queen of Bohemia and Electress Palatine, and was also captain of a troop of horse in Holland. At the time of Edmund’s birth, his father was marshal of ceremonies to the king;[103] and the boy was brought up in the royal household, very possibly on terms of intimacy with the young princes whom he afterwards served, who were only slightly his seniors. For a time he is said to have been a page at court; but if this be true, it must have been when he was extremely young, as court life ceased to have charms, if not absolutely to exist, after the civil war broke out in 1642, and at this time the boy was but five years old.