The Cape forces had been ably led by John Gorham, of Barnstable. A letter to the council, written in October, 1675, shows something of his temper as a man: “Our soldiers being much worn, having been in the field this fourteen weeks and little hope of finding the enemy, we are this day returning toward our General, but as for my own part, I shall be ready to serve God and the country in this just war so long as I have life and health. Not else to trouble you, I rest yours to serve in what I am able, John Gorrun.” Three days later the Court appointed him captain of the second company of Plymouth, of which Jonathan Sparrow, of Eastham, was lieutenant. The commander-in-chief was James Cudworth, of Scituate, who had been a member of John Lothrop’s flock, and had lived for a time in Barnstable and owned salt-works there. He had been disfranchised for his sympathy with the Quakers, and bound over in five hundred pounds to appear at court “in reference unto a seditious letter sent to England, the coppy whereof is come over in print,” which, however, was no more than a full setting-out of the unlawful persecutions. But he was too valuable a man to lose: Scituate was nearly unanimous in his favor, as were Barnstable and Sandwich. In 1666 the Scituate militia, against the will of the Court, chose him captain; in 1673 he was unanimously made captain of the Plymouth forces in a contemplated expedition against the Dutch. His declination of the honor, which he was later to undertake in the Indian war, was not, he declared, “out of any discontent in my spirit arising from any former difference. I am as freely willing to serve my King and Country as any man, but I do not understand that a man is called to serve his country with the inevitable ruin and devastation of his own family.” Cudworth pleaded the care of his farm and his wife’s illness. “She cannot lie for want of breath,” wrote he. “And when she is up she cannot light a pipe of tobacco, but it must be lighted for her. And she has never a maid. And for tending and looking after my creatures; the fetching home of my hay, that is yet at the place where it grew; getting of wood, going to mill; and for the performance of all other family occasions I have now but a small Indian boy, about thirteen years of age, to help me.” “So little of state was there,” is Palfrey’s comment on the artless narrative, “in the household economy of the commander-in-chief in a foreign war.” And again: “It is amusing and touching at once to see how hard, in those days, it was to induce men to be willing to be great.” CHAPTER IV THE FRENCH WARS I