The Reverend Marmaduke Matthews, first minister of Yarmouth, was a fiery Welshman, witty, but indiscreet in his speech, who kept his parish in hot water for the six years of his tenure. He quarrelled with the constable; again, four of his opponents were haled before the court as “scoffers and jeerers at religion and making disorders at town meeting,” and were acquitted. Some schismatics tried to form a new society under Mr. Hull, who had been supplanted in the Barnstable church by Mr. Lothrop, but was still a member thereof; whereupon, perplexingly, Barnstable excommunicated him for “wilfully breaking his communion with us, and joining a company in Yarmouth to be their pastor contrary to the counsel and advice of our church.” Hull made an “acknowledgment of sin,” was reinstated, but soon after went to Dover. Lothrop was now supreme at Barnstable, but Yarmouth was not at peace, and under Matthews’s successor, John Miller, another Cambridge man, matters came to the pass of calling a council of conciliation drawn from the distinguished clergy of the two colonies—John Eliot of Roxbury among them—to pass upon these ecclesiastical difficulties. In 1644 came the settlement of Eastham: indeed, there had been some talk of transferring the seat of government thither. There had been growing dissatisfaction with Plymouth; some said that they “had pitched upon a spot whose soil was poor and barren,” and Nauset had long been known to them as a granary whence they drew many of their supplies. On further reflection the place was judged too cramped and too out of the way for a capital town; but seven families of Plymouth adhering to their wish to remove there, land was purchased from the Indians, and a grant was made to them of “all the tract of land lying between sea and sea, from the purchasers’ bounds at Namskaket to the herring brook at Billingsgate, with the said herring brook and all the meadows on both sides the said brook, with the great bass-pond there, and all the meadows and islands lying within said tract.” Among the men coming to Eastham was Thomas Prince, who had come over in the Fortune, and married for his first wife the daughter of Elder Brewster. Prince took up a farm of two hundred acres, that ran from sea to bay, and later when he was elected Governor a dispensation was made in his case, as the law held that the Governor should be a resident of Plymouth. In 1665, however, public affairs forced him to return to the capital, but he still held his Eastham farm. Those who knew Prince testified that “he was a terror to evil-doers, and he encouraged all that did well.” Among “evil-doers” there is reason to believe he included men of other theological views than his own. But the colony elected him three times its governor, and the Plymouth Church set the seal of its approval on his administration. “He was excellently qualified for the office of Governor. He had a countenance full of majesty.”