However this may have been, progress was thenceforward rapid. In April Lechmere produced a schedule of debts, which have at this day a somewhat suspicious look, and when they were allowed, he petitioned the legislature for leave to sell land to pay them. Winthrop appeared and presented a remonstrance, which “the Assembly, observing the common course of justice, and the law of the colony being by application to the said Assembly, when the judgments of the superior courts are grievous to any person... dismissed,” and immediately passed an act authorizing the sale, and making the administrators’ deed good to convey a title. Then Winthrop was so incautious as to make a final effort: he filed a protest and caution against any illegal interference with his property pending his appeal, declaring the action already taken to be contrary to the common and statute law of England, and to the tenor of the charter. The Assembly being of the opinion that this protest “had in it a great show of contempt,” caused Winthrop to be arrested and brought to the bar; there he not only defended his representations as reasonable, but avowed his determination to lay all these proceedings before the king in council. “This was treated as an insolent contemptuous and disorderly behaviour” in the prisoner, “as declaring himself _coram non judice_, and putting himself on a par with them, and impeaching their authoritys and the charter; and his said protest was declared to be full of reflections, and to terrifie so far as in him lay all the authorities established by the charter.” So they imprisoned him three days and fined him twenty pounds for his contemptuous words. This leading case was afterward elaborately argued in London, and judgment was entered for Winthrop, upon the ground that the statute of distribution was in conflict with the charter and therefore void; but as Connecticut resolutely refused to abandon its own policy, the utmost confusion prevailed for seventeen years regarding the settlement of estates. During all this time the local government made unremitting efforts to obtain relief, and seems to have used pecuniary as well as legal arguments to effect its purpose; at all events, it finally secured a majority in the Privy Council, who reversed Winthrop v. Lechmere, in Clark v. Tousey. The same question was raised in Massachusetts in 1737, in Phillips v. Savage, but enough influence was brought to bear to prevent an adverse decision. [Footnote: _Conn. Coll. Rec._ vii. 191, note; _Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc._ 1860-62, pp. 64-80, 165-171.] A possible distinction between the two cases also lay in the fact that the Massachusetts act had received the royal assent.