The circumstances of the settlement of the various colonies had been such as to render the colonists extremely tenacious of their own privileges, and extremely jealous of any interference from the other side of the ocean. The people of Massachusetts, especially, lived in constant dread of their much-prized charter being taken away from them by the king, from whom it had been obtained, or by the parliament, which considered that it was its province to meddle with and to regulate all things in heaven and on earth. It is quite remarkable that the attitude of the colonies to the home government, during the period of the Commonwealth, no less than in the years which preceded it, was one of jealous suspicion. The charter colonies feared that their privileges would be interfered with, the self-organized colonies were in dread of a _quo warranto_ or a _scire facias_, which would disclose the irregularity of their organizations or the defectiveness of their titles. The godly and judicious Winthrop, the statesmanlike founder and governor of Massachusetts, had died, sorrowing on his death-bed for the harshness in religious matters into which he had been forced; and in his place was the severe and fanatical Endicott, a man of gloomy intensity of nature, a stern logician, a man who neither asked nor granted mercy. The clergy were fanatically devoted to their religious and political peculiarities, and were inferior in wisdom and judgment to the great leader who had come out from England with the early settlers at the beginning of the colony. Cotton was dead, and was succeeded in his office of teacher by John Norton, who differed from his predecessor by the lack of the principal characteristics which had so greatly distinguished him: “Profound judgment, eminent gravity, Christian candor, and sweet temper of spirit, whereby he could very placidly bear those who differed from him in other apprehensions.”[5] Hooker had long since removed to Connecticut, where he had been largely instrumental in founding a more genial commonwealth upon a broader and more liberal basis. Wilson, the first pastor of the church at Boston, was indeed still living, but was a worthy associate of Endicott and Norton, and distinguished then, as he had always been, rather by zeal than by either discretion or Christian charity. By a process of successful exclusions and banishments the community had been rendered tolerably homogeneous, or at least submissive to the theocratical system which had been established. Those who had been defeated in the struggle for existence had gone elsewhere to found new commonwealths, all with a greater amount of religious liberty than that of Massachusetts. The first we hear of the Quakers in New England is in an order of the General Court appointing May 14, 1656, as a public day of humiliation, “to seek the face of God in behalf of our native country, in reference to the abounding of errors, especially those of the Ranters and Quakers.”[6]