with an oath, that "Bacon and Bland shall die." Bland was convicted March eighth, and executed on the fifteenth, at Bacon's Trench, near Jamestown, with another prisoner, Robert Jones. Three others were put to death on another day at the same place. Anthony Arnold was hung on the fifteenth of March, in chains, at West Point. Two others suffered capitally on the same day, but at what place does not appear, probably in their own counties.[320:A] In the month of April, Secretary Ludwell wrote to Coventry, the English secretary of state, "that the grounds of this rebellion have not proceeded from any real fault in the government, but rather from the lewd disposition of desperate fortunes lately sprung up among them, which easily seduced the willing minds of the people from their allegiance, in the vain hopes of taking the country wholly out of his majesty's hands into their own. Bacon never intended more by the prosecution of the Indian war than as a covert to his villanies." The commissioners, who assisted in the trial of these prisoners, now proceeded to inquire into the causes of the late distractions; they sat at Swan's Point. The insurgents, who comprised the great body of the people of Virginia, had found powerful friends among the people of England, and in parliament; and the commissioners discountenanced the excesses of Sir William Berkley, and the loyalists, and invited the planters in every quarter to bring in their grievances without fear. Jeffreys, one of the commissioners, was about to succeed Governor Berkley. In their zeal for investigation the commissioners seized the journals of the assembly; and the burgesses in October, 1677, demanded satisfaction for this indignity, declaring that such a seizure could not have been authorized even by an order under the great seal, because "they found that such a power had never been exercised by the king of England"--an explicit declaration of the legislative independence of the colony. Their language was stigmatized by Charles the Second as seditious.[321:A]