When the Quakers Holden and Copeland, driven from Boston and whipped at Plymouth, came to Sandwich, they found soil ready tilled for their planting. The church there, said to have been “the most bigoted in the county,” had been wrecked by the bitter feud between liberals and “hard shells,” and its minister, a graduate of Emmanuel, Cambridge, “a man of great piety and meekness,” had retired to the more congenial atmosphere of Oyster Bay, Long Island. But the churchmen of Sandwich, as was the custom of their race, thirsted for religion, and in reaction against the old doctrines, the liberals there went over in a body to the simple tenets of the Quakers. In a year no less than eighteen families professed the new faith; but in the meantime authority had not slept. The marshal of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, was one George Barlow, a renegade Anglican priest; nor had his colonial record been a savory one. At Boston, in 1637, he had been “censured to be whipped” for idleness; at Saco, on complaint that he was “a disturber to the peace,” he was forbidden “any more publickly to preach or prophesy”; and later when he turned lawyer at Plymouth, it was affirmed in open court “that he is such an one that he is a shame and reproach to all his masters; and that he, the said Barlow, stands convicted and recorded of a lye att Newbury.” When Copeland and Holden arrived at Sandwich, Barlow had been prompt to hale them before the selectmen, to be duly whipped. But the village fathers, “entertaining no desire to sanction measures so severe towards those who differed from them in religion, declined to act in the case.” Nothing daunted, Barlow presented his prisoners at Barnstable before Thomas Hinckley, then assistant to Governor Prince and later to succeed him in office.