Still the Council was unsatisfied, and retained its suspicions. Governor Stuyvesant. hearing of the charges against him, wrote at once to the governors of Massachusetts and New Haven, unequivocally denying the plot, and offering to come himself to Boston "to consider and examine what may be charged, and his answers." Should the Council prefer, he would send a delegate to Boston, or they might send delegates to Manhattan to investigate the whole affair. The Council decided to send three commissioners, men of note, to Manhattan. At the same time an army of five hundred men was ordered to be organized "for the first expedition," should "God call the colonies to make war against the Dutch." The New England agents were hospitably received at New Amsterdam. They urged that the meeting should be held in one of the New England colonies, where Stuyvesant "should produce evidence to clear himself from the charges against him." He was to be regarded as guilty until he proved himself innocent. The Puritan agents appear to great disadvantage in the conference which ensued. "They seem to have visited the Dutch," writes Mr. Brodhead, "as inquisitors, to collect evidence criminating the Dutch and to collect no other evidence. And, with peculiar assurance, they saw no impropriety in requiring the authorities of New Netherland, in their own capital, to suspend their established rules of law in favor of those of New England." Governor Stuyvesant repressed every expression of impatience, and urged the most friendly overtures. It may be said that it was manifestly for his interest to do so, for the Dutch colonies were quite powerless compared with the united colonies of New England. The New England agents ungraciously repelled his advances, and at length abruptly terminated the conference without giving the governor an opportunity to prove his innocence. At nine o'clock in the evening they suddenly took leave of New Amsterdam, declining the most friendly invitations to remain, and "cloaking their sudden departure under pretence of the day of election to be held this week at Boston." They left behind them the following menace: "The Commissioners conclude their negotiation by declaring that if you shall offer any injury to any of the English in these parts, whether by yourselves or by the Indians, either upon the national quarrel, or by reason of any differences depending between the United English Colonies and yourselves, that, as the Commissioners will do no wrong, so they may not suffer their countrymen to be oppressed upon any such account." The morning after this unfriendly retirement of the agents, Governor Stuyvesant dispatched a messenger to Boston, with a letter containing a very full reply to the grievances of which the New England colonists complained. In this letter, which bears the impress of frankness and honesty, he says,