‘His unhappiness lay in this, that his doctrines were so cloudily formed and expressed, that few could understand them, and therefore he had but few true disciples. Mr. Sterry is thought to be of his mind, but he hath not opened himself in writing, and was so famous for obscurity in preaching (being, said Sir Benjamin Rudyard, too high for this world and too low for the other) that he thereby proved almost barren also, and vanity and sterility were never more happily conjoined’ (a clerical pun). ‘This obscurity was by some imputed to his not understanding himself; but by others to design, because he could speak plainly when he listed. The two courses in which he had most success, and spake most plainly, were his earnest plea for universal liberty of conscience, and against the magistrate’s intermeddling with religion, and his teaching his followers to revile the ministry, calling them blackcoats, priests, and other names which then savoured of reproach.’ [1] [1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 76.] His zeal for liberty of conscience and disrespect for ministers were early called into play by his experience as governor of Massachusetts. The eldest son of one of the most successful courtiers of the time, he had, when a boy, shown a soul that would not fit his position. ‘About the fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age,’ he said of himself on the scaffold, ‘God was pleased to lay the foundation or groundwork of repentance {292} in me ... revealing his Son in me, that ... I might, even whilst here in the body, be made partaker of eternal life.’ In this temper he was sent to Oxford, where he would not take the oath of supremacy, and was consequently unable to matriculate. He then spent some time at Geneva. On his return, his nonconformity gave such offence to the people about court, that the powers of Laud were applied in a special conference for the purpose, to bring him to a better mind. The final result is best stated in the words of a court clergyman: [1] ‘Mr. Comptroller Vane’s eldest son hath left his father, his mother, his country, and that fortune which his father would have left him here, and is, for conscience’ sake, gone to New England, there to lead the rest of his life, being but twenty years of age. He had abstained two years from taking the sacrament in England, because he could get no one to administer it to him standing. He was bred up at Leyden; and I hear that Sir Nathaniel Rich and Mr. Pym have done him much hurt in their persuasions this way.’