Plymouth, which had never had a royal charter, was endeavoring, through the agency of Ichabod Wiswall,[159] the minister of Duxbury, who had been sent over to protect their interests, to make the most of the present opportunity and get a favorable recognition from the king. Between a project of annexation to New York and Mather’s urging of an alternative annexation to the Bay, the weaker colony fared hard, and its ultimate fate was fashioned against its will. In the counsels of the four agents Cooke was strenuous for the old charter at all hazards, and Oakes sustained him. Mather’s course was professedly a politic one. He argued finally that a chance for the old charter was gone, and that it would be wiser to succumb in season to the inevitable, in order better to direct progress. When it came to a petition for a new charter, Oakes so far smothered his sentiments as to sign it with Mather; but Cooke held out to the last. [Illustration: ELISHA COOKE, THE ELDER. This follows a red-chalk drawing in the gallery of the American Antiquarian Society, which had belonged to the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem, who was born in Boston in 1759, and died in Salem in 1819.] Meanwhile, Massachusetts was governing itself, and had enough to do in looking after its frontiers, particularly at the eastward, where the withdrawal of the troops which Andros had placed there became the signal for Indian outbreaks. New Hampshire, weak in her isolation, petitioned to be taken under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and was (March 19, 1690) for the time being annexed.[160] Connecticut, destined to save her charter by delays and a less fiery spirit, entered upon a career characterized in the main by dignified quiet. Though she participated in some of the tumult of the recurrent Indian wars, and let her bitterness against episcopacy sometimes lead to violent acts, she had an existence of much more content than fell to the lot of the other New England colonies.[161]