Historic Events of Colonial DaysHolland, Rupert Sargent
History
Historic Events of Colonial Days
Holland, Rupert Sargent
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Officers came out from England in 1664, charged, among other duties,
with the arrest of the fugitive judges, and the friends of the regicides
thought it best that they should leave Milford for some new hiding
place. So in October they set out for the small town of Hadley, on the
frontier of Massachusetts, a hundred miles from Milford, and so distant
from Boston, Hartford and New Haven that it was thought that no one
could trace them there. They traveled only at night, lying hidden in the
woods by day. The places where they stopped they called Harbors, and the
name still remains attached to one of them, now the flourishing town of
Meriden, which bears the title of Pilgrim's Harbor. They reached Hadley
in safety, and were taken in at the house of John Russell, a clergyman.
He gave them room in his house, and there they spent the rest of their
lives, safe from royal agents and spies in the small frontier
settlement. So three of the men, who, doing their duty as they saw it,
had voted for the execution of King Charles I, found a refuge in the
American wilderness from the pursuit of his son, King Charles II.
Ten years later a very different sort of man came to the colony of
Connecticut. King Charles I had made large grants in America to his
brother the Duke of York, and among other territory that which had
belonged to the Dutch, called New Netherland. The Duke of York made
Major Edmund Andross, afterward Sir Edmund Andross, governor of all his
territories, and sent him out to New England. With full powers from the
Duke, Andross expected to do about as he pleased, and rule like a king
in the new world.
By way of making a good start Edmund Andross at once laid claim to all
the land that had belonged to the Dutch and also to that part of
Connecticut that lay west of the Connecticut River. Unless the settlers
in that part of Connecticut consented to his rule he threatened to
invade their land with his soldiers. Now the people of Connecticut had
received the boundary of their colony in an early grant, and though they
already had the prospect of a war with the Indians under King Philip on
their hands, their governor and his council determined to resist the
cutting in two of their colony.
Word came to Hartford that Andross was about to land at the port of
Saybrook and intended to march to Hartford, New Haven and other towns,
suppress the colonial government and establish his own. At once colonial
soldiers were sent to Saybrook and New London, and Captain Thomas Bull,
in command at the former place, strengthened the fortifications there to
resist the Duke of York's new governor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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