The news of the king’s death and the accession of the queen reached Boston, by way of Newfoundland, on the 28th of May, 1702.[191] The new monarch was at once proclaimed from the town house, and volleys of guns and the merriment of carouse marked a new reign. How New England was to find the change was soon sharply intimated. Amid it all tidings came of the capture of three Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians. Later in the same day the eyes of Madam Bellingham, the relict of an early governor, were closed in death, severing one of the last links of other days. Her death was to most a suggestive accompaniment of the mischance which now placed in the governor’s chair the recusant son of Thomas Dudley, that other early governor. A fortnight later (June 10, 1702), the ship “Centurion,” having Joseph Dudley on board, put in at Marblehead, and the news quickly travelled to Boston. The next day a committee of the council went in Captain Croft’s pinnace to meet him, and they boarded the “Centurion” just outside Point Alderton. Dudley received them on deck, arrayed in a very large wig, as Sewall sorrowfully noted while making him a speech. They saw another man whom they had not heard of, one Thomas Povey, who was to be their lieutenant governor, and to have charge of their Castle. They saw, too, among the passengers, George Keith, the whilom quaker, who was come over on £200 salary, very likely paid by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to convert as many as he could to prelacy.[192] Sewall was not happy during that day of compliments. The party landed at Scarlet’s Wharf amid salvos of artillery, and under escort of the council and the town regiment they proceeded to the town house, where the commissions were published and all “had a large treat,” as Sewall says. Major Hobby’s coach, with six horses, was at the door, a guard of horsemen wheeled into ranks, and so Dudley went to that Roxbury home, whence, as many remembered, he had been taken to be imprisoned. Dudley was not deficient in confidence and forwardness; but he had no easy task before him. He naturally inclined to the faction of which Byfield and Leverett were leaders; but the insidious and envious Cotton Mather, taking him into his confidence, warned him of these very people. Dudley told them of the warning, and it was not long before the sanctimonious Mather was calling his excellency a “wretch.”