The good people of Massachusetts had not long got over their thanksgiving for the suppression of the Scottish rebellion when, just about sunset, October 3, 1716, a gun in the harbor told of Shute’s arrival. Two days later, at the town house, he laid his hand on the Bible, “kissing it very industriously,” as Sewall records, and swore to do his duty. On the following Sunday he attended King’s Chapel, and on Thursday he was present at the usual lecture of the Congregationalists, when he heard Cotton Mather preach.[220] He seemed very docile, and doubtless smiled when Mather’s fulsome address to him was paraded in a broadside; very docile, too, when he yielded to Sewall’s entreaty one evening that he would not go to a dancing-master’s ball and scandalize his name. But on November 7 (1716), in his set speech to the legislature, there were signs of trouble. New England had peace on her frontiers, and that was not conducive to quiet in her domestic politics. The conflict came, and Shute was hardly equal to it. The legislature could look to a support nearly unanimous of almost a hundred thousand people in the province, being not much short of a quarter of the entire population of the English colonies; and a people like the New Englanders, who could annually export £300,000 worth of products, were not deficient at least in business courage. Shute’s instructions as to the demands he should make were not novel. It was the old story of a fixed salary, a house to live in, the command of the Rhode Island militia, the rebuilding of Pemaquid, and the censorship of the press. The governor brought their financial plight to the attention of the House, and they voted more bills of credit. He told them of other things which he and the king expected of them, and they did nothing. So he prorogued them. It was incumbent on the Crown governor to encourage the production of naval stores, as a means of diverting attention from manufactures, which might injure the market in the colonies for English products. One Bridger had already made himself obnoxious, and been suspected of malfeasance as “surveyor-general of woods,” in Dudley’s time, and it was far from conciliatory to a people who found the Crown’s right to mast-timber burdensome[221] that Bridger appeared in the train of Shute with a new commission. The surveyor was arraigned by the younger Elisha Cooke, who was now succeeding to his father’s leadership, and Shute defending him, a rather lively contention followed, which was not quieted till Dummer, in England, finally got Bridger removed.[222] To one of Shute’s speeches the House made a reply, and Shute threatened he would prevent their printing it. [Illustration: ELISHA COOKE, THE YOUNGER.