In March the constable went to Hingham to collect the money, [Footnote: 1645-46, 18 March.] but he found the minister indisposed to submit in silence. About thirty people had collected, and before them all Mr. Hubbert demanded the warrant; when it was produced he declared it worthless because not in the king’s name, and then went on to add that the government “was not more then a corporation in England, and ... had not power to put men to death ... that for himself he had neither horn nor hoofe of his own, nor anything wherewith to buy his children cloaths ... if he must pay the fine he would pay it in books, but that he knew not for what they were fined, unlesse it were for petitioning: and if they were so waspish they might not be petitioned, then he could not tell what to say.” [Footnote: _New Eng. Jonas_, Marvin’s ed. p. 5.] Unluckily for Mr. Hubbert he had taken the popular side in this dispute and had thus been sundered from his brethren, who sustained Winthrop, and in the end carried him through in triumph; and not only this, but he was suspected of Presbyterian tendencies, and a committee of the elders who had visited Hingham to reconcile some differences in the congregation had found him in grave fault. The government was not sorry, therefore, to make him a public example, as appeared not only by these proceedings, but by the way he was treated in the General Court the next autumn. He was accordingly indicted for sedition, tried and convicted in June, fined twenty pounds, and bound over to good behavior in forty pounds more. [Footnote: _New Eng. Jonas_, p. 6., 2 June, 1646.] Such a disturbance as this seems to have been all that was needed to bring the latent discontent to a focus. William Vassal had been an original patentee and was a member of the first Board of Assistants, who were appointed by the king. Being, however, a man of liberal views he had not found Massachusetts congenial; he had returned to England after a stay of only a month, and when he came again to America in 1635, he had settled at Scituate, the town adjoining Hingham, but in the Plymouth jurisdiction. Having both wealth and social position he possessed great influence, and he now determined to lead an agitation for equal rights and liberty of conscience in both colonies at once, by petitioning the legislatures, and in case of failure there, presenting similar petitions to Parliament.