The Mason claim[211] to the province of New Hampshire had been bought by Samuel Allen, a London merchant, and he had become its governor; but the active ruler was his son-in-law, John Usher, who had been the treasurer of Andros’s government, and also, as lieutenant-governor, lived in the province. Memories of old political affiliations had not conduced to make his relations with Sir William Phips, of the neighboring jurisdiction, very agreeable. When Bellomont came he was commissioned to take New Hampshire within his government; and it had fallen in the same way to Dudley’s care. This Boston governor found himself popular in New Hampshire, whose people had opposed the reinstatement of Usher, though this had been accomplished in their spite. Dudley and Usher recriminated, and told their respective grievances, and both made their counter-charges to the home government.[212] Affairs went uncomfortably enough till George Vaughan became the successor of Usher, who now withdrew to Medford, in Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty, in 1726. Upon Rhode Island, Dudley had looked longingly. She would have been brought under his commission but for the exertion of William Penn, then her agent in London. Still, under pretence of consolidating the military strength of the colonies as occasion might require, there was a clause in the commission of Dudley which he construed as giving him command of the Rhode Island militia. Dudley early (September, 1702) went to Newport, and ordered a parade of the militia. Gov. Cranston cited their charter as being against any such assumption of power; and the troops were not paraded.[213] Dudley told the Board of Trade that the colony was “a receptacle of rogues and pirates;” and the people of Rhode Island renewed their fortifications, and sent out their solitary privateer to cruise against French and Spanish. At Dudley’s instigation the Board of Trade (1705) prepared charges of evading the revenue against the colony. Dudley gathered evidence to sustain them, and struggled hard to push the wiry colony to the wall, hoping to crush her charter, and pave the way for a general government for New England, to be the head of which he had not a little ambition. In this Dudley had a confederate in Lord Cornbury, now governor of New York. To him had been similarly given by his commission the control of the Connecticut militia, but a timely prudence saved that colony. Fitz-John Winthrop was now governor,—a second dilution of his race, as Palfrey rather hazardously calls him,—and blameless in purpose always. Dudley’s concert with Cornbury, aimed to crush the charters of both Rhode Island and Connecticut, that each conspirator might get something from the wreck to add to his jurisdiction, utterly failed. In England Sir Henry Ashurst labored to thwart the machinations of Dudley’s friends. In Connecticut Dudley found malcontents who furnished him with allegations respecting the colony’s appropriating unfairly the lands of