It appears, that when he visited Boston, before the war, he succeeded in persuading the government,--as, no doubt, was the truth of the case,--that notwithstanding the old league of his father, renewed by himself, or rather by force of it, he was still independent of Plymouth. "These successive engagements were agreements of amity, and not of subjection any further, as he apprehended." He then desired to see a copy of the treaty, and requested that one might be procured for him. He knew, he added, that the praying Indians had submitted to the English; but the Pokanokets had done no such thing, and they were not subject. The letter of the Massachusetts to the Plymouth Government, written just after this interview with the sachem, is well worthy of notice. "We do not understand," say the former, "how far he hath subjected himself to you; but the treatment you have given him, does not render him such a subject, as that, if there be not present answering to summons, there should presently be a proceeding to hostilities." Philip had himself the same notion of a Plymouth _summons_; and yet either policy or good feeling induced him to _visit_ the Plymouth Governor, in March, 1675, for the purpose of quieting the suspicions of the Colony; nothing was discovered against him, and he returned home. He maintained privately the same frank but proud independence. He was opposed to Christianity as much as his father was, and would make no concessions upon that point. Possibly the remembrance of Sassamon might have rankled in his bosom, when, upon the venerable Eliot once undertaking to convert him, he took one of his buttons between his fingers, and told him he cared no more for the Gospel than for that button. That he was generally more civil, however, may be inferred from Gookin's statement; "I have heard him speak very good words, arguing that his conscience is convicted &c." The sachem evidently made himself agreeable in this case.