Memorials and counter-memorials, printed and manuscript, were pressed upon Parliament, by which that body was now urged to restore, and now implored to deny, the vacated charter. It was at this juncture that Mather, with two other agents, petitioned the king for a new charter; and the law officers reporting favorably, the plan had already been committed to the Lords of Trade at the time when Phips appeared in London. With the assent of the king, the framing of a new charter was entrusted to Sir George Treby, the Attorney General, who was instructed to fortify the royal prerogative, and to make the jurisdiction include not only Massachusetts, but the territory of New Plymouth and all that region, or the better part of it, lying east of the present State of New Hampshire, and stretching from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. It was the dawn of a new existence, in which the province, as it now came to be called, was to be governed by a royal governor, sent to enforce the royal prerogative, to administer the navigation laws in the interests of British merchants, to gratify the sectaries of the Established Church, and to embarrass the old-fashioned theocracy. The chief power reserved to the people was that of the purse,—an important one in any event, and one that the legislative assembly knew how to wield, as the years which followed proved. Mather professed to think the new charter—and it perhaps was—the best result, under the circumstances, to be attained. He talked about the colony still having a chance of assuming the old charter at some more opportune moment. Cooke, the champion of the old conditions, was by no means backed in his opposition by a unanimity of feeling in the colony itself; for many of the later comers, generally rich, were become advocates of prerogative, and lived in the hope of obtaining more consequence under a changed order of society. Connecticut and Rhode Island were content, meanwhile, with the preservation of their own chartered autonomy, such as it was. Thus affairs were taking a turn which made Phips forget the object of his visit. Mather seems to have been prepared for the decision, and was propitiated also by the promise of being allowed to nominate the new governor and his subordinates. Phips had been Mather’s parishioner in Boston, and was ambitious enough to become his creature, if by doing so he could secure preferment. So Sir William Phips was commissioned Governor; and as a sort of concession to the clerical party, of which Mather himself was the leader in Boston, William Stoughton was made Lieutenant-Governor. Isaac Addington became Secretary. Bradstreet was appointed first assistant. Danforth, Oakes, and Cooke, the advocates of the old charter, were forgotten in the distribution of offices.