Now the question of independence was in the minds of all. The small planter as he set out his tobacco crop debated it with himself; the blacksmith talked it over with his client as he shod his horse; it was the topic of conversation in the church yard before the sermon began; the members of the convention debated it as they rode along the muddy roads. In May, 1775, Dunmore wrote: "It is no longer to be doubted that independence is the object in view."[56] But in this he was wrong. The colonists did not want independence. They were Englishmen, most of them, speaking the English language, living under English law, attached to English institutions. They had hardly ceased to speak of England as "home." They looked to the British navy for protection, they were keenly alive to their economic dependence upon the mother country, they were weak and disunited. The colonies went into the war hugging the hope that there might yet be reconciliation, with Washington referring to the British soldiers as the Ministerial troops, and the American chaplains, in public services, praying for the King. The colonies, in taking up arms, sought only to maintain existing conditions. The King and the Ministry were the real revolutionists, not the Americans. It was Washington who wrote in 1769, that "at a time when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, something should be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our ancestors." Washington by no means considered himself a rebel. He was championing the British constitution and American rights under it against the illegal aggressions of a reactionary Ministry. But the war had not been long in progress before the people saw that they must preserve their freedom at the bayonet's point, or make abject submission. When, in the summer of 1775, Richard Penn and Arthur Lee went to England with the last effort of Congress for reconciliation, the so-called Olive Branch, they were rebuffed. The King and his Ministers refused to see them. While they were in London a proclamation was read at Palace Yard and Temple Bar by heralds, prohibiting all intercourse with the colonies. Moreover, the ties of reverence and affection gave way rapidly before the anger and bitterness of war. The news that the King was purchasing troops from certain German rulers for use against them aroused the Americans to fury. Angry men gathered everywhere, in the coffee houses, on the village greens, or around the courthouses to discuss the burning of Portland in the midst of a Maine winter, or the arming of the slaves by Dunmore.