In the seventy years of their independence, the Pilgrims worked out, by sober and deliberate progression, a plan of government that was a model of statehood, and they had the advantage over other colonies that they were constrained by no formal royal patent. When their agents had gone over from Holland to obtain the king’s consent to their undertaking, James was ready to concede that “the advancement of his dominions” and “the enlargement of the gospel” were an honorable motive; the idea of fishery profits was no less to his liking. “So God have my soul,” quoth he, “an honest trade. ’Twas the Apostles’ own calling.” But a formal grant to the despised Separatists was another matter, and they had to be content with a hint that “the king would connive at them and not molest them provided they behaved themselves peaceably.” They were willing to take the chance that the king’s word was as good as his bond: for if later there should be a purpose to injure them, they shrewdly reasoned, though they had a seal “as broad as the house floor,” there would be “means enow found to recall or reverse it.” And they secured financial backing in London, obtained permission from the North Virginia Company to settle on their coast, then “casting themselves on the care of Divine Providence, they ventured to America.” Divine Providence, apparently, decreed that they should be free of even such slight restraint as the permission of the North Virginia Company, and instead of settling near the Hudson they were driven to the New England coast. But they took care in the Compact and in all succeeding legislation to affirm their loyalty to the English Government. Though England had been none too tender in her treatment of them, they recognized and meant to abide by the essential justice of English law, and to profit by the stability that a strong bond with the Home Government could give them. Moreover, in these men flourished the British instinct to make whatever spot of the globe they should elect as home “forever England.” They themselves for eleven long years had fretted as expatriates in an alien land. “They grew tired of the indolent security of their sanctuary,” wrote Burke of them, although as a fact they had worked hard enough for their daily bread, “and they chose to remove to a place where they should see no superior.” In any case they meant that their children should be English rather than Dutch, and they had refused overtures from Holland to settle in Dutch territory.