When Dudley made his opening address to the General Court,[193] he could not refrain from saying some things that were not very conciliatory. There were two points on which he raised issues, which he never succeeded in compassing. One of these was a demand for a stated salary. The assembly answered it with a present of £500 against the £1,000 which they had given to Bellomont. No urgency, no threats, no picturing the displeasure of the Crown, could effect his purpose.[194] The war which he waged with the representatives never, as long as the province existed, ended in a peace, though there was an occasional truce under pressure of external dangers. Another of Dudley’s pleas was for the rebuilding of the fort at Pemaquid, to secure possession of the disputable territory between the Kennebec and Acadia.[195] The deputies were immovable. If the Crown wished to secure that region, it must do it by other sacrifices than those of New England. Thus thwarted, Dudley could make them feel that the royal governor had some prerogatives; and so he rejected the councillors which the deputies accredited. All of this thrust and parry was of course duly reported by Dudley to the home government. The situation was perplexing in the extreme, quite as much so to the governor as to the people, who reluctantly received him. It was for the interests of both that the war against the French should not flag, and money was necessary, but the governor claimed the direction of expenditures, while the representatives stood aloof and firm on the “privilege and right of English subjects to raise and dispose of money, according to the present exigency of affairs.” With the clergy and the ministers, Dudley was not less unhappily placed. His interests turned him to the church people, but they could not find that his profession had any constancy. His lineage placed him with the Congregationalists, and he once had the ministry in view, but his sympathies went altogether with the new school, of which Stoddard, of Northampton, was leader in the west, while Colman, the Leveretts, and the Brattles were the spokesmen in Boston. In the election of a president for Harvard, Dudley favored Leverett, the successful candidate, and made a Latin speech at his installation,[196] and Cotton Mather writhed at the disappointment of his own hopes. The governor encountered (1708), for his decisive opposition to the Mathers, a terrible but overwrought letter from the father, and a livelier epistle from the son. He showed in his reply a better temper, if nothing more.[197] In the opinion of all honest patriots, of whatever party, Dudley was later found in company which raised suspicions. The conflict with France begat, as wars do, a band of miscreants ever ready to satisfy their avarice by trading with the enemy and furnishing them with arms. Dudley did not escape suspicion, and he experienced some of the bitterest abuse in talk and pamphlet,[198] though the council and the House, the latter