Removed from the prejudices of his own day and generation, and regarded in the impartial light of history, Sir Edmund Andros appears not as the cruel persecutor that he seemed to the Mathers and the Sewalls, nor as the envious Sanballat that Blair’s fervent Scotch imagination pictured him, but as a single-hearted, loyal English gentleman, of the best type of those cavaliers, devoted to church and king, who, in their horror at the results of puritanism and liberalism in England, were willing to sacrifice if necessary some degree of personal liberty in order to secure the dominion of law.[150] Judging from what we know of him, we should have looked to see him, had he been in England instead of in America at the time of the Revolution, by the side of many fellow Tories maintaining the liberties and the religion of his country. In America, far from the scene of conflict, his duty was to support the government of the king; but the claim of the colonists that, by arresting him, they prevented him from “making an Ireland of America,” is disproved by his immediate and loyal acceptance of the results of the Revolution, and by the confidence the new government immediately reposed in him.[151] The French authorities in Canada, who were in a position to judge his character correctly, have left on record their opinion that it was hopeless to expect assistance from him against his countrymen in the struggle between the two nations that broke out after the abdication of James II. The Chevalier de Callières, Governor of Montreal, wrote to the Marquis de Seignelay as follows: “Chevalier Andros, now Governor-General of New England and New York, having already declared in his letter to M. de Denonville that he took all the Iroquois under his protection as subjects of the crown of England, and having prevented them returning to M. de Denonville to make peace with us, there is no longer reason to hope for its conclusion through the English, nor for the alienation of the Iroquois from the close union which exist with those (the English), in consequence of the great advantage they derive from thence, the like to which we cannot offer for divers reasons. “Chevalier Andros is a Protestant as well as the whole English colony, so that there is no reason to hope that he will remain faithful to the King of England (James II.), and we must expect that he will not only urge the Iroquois to continue the war against us, but that he will also add Englishmen to them to lead them and seize the posts of Niagara, Michillimackinac and others proper to render him master of all the Indians, our allies, according to the project they have long since formed, and which they were beginning to execute when we declared war against the Iroquois, and when we captured seventy Englishmen who were going to take possession of Michillimackinac, one of the most important posts of Canada.”[151]