At first the Lords of Trade favored the sending of a supplemental charter and the extending of a pardon to the colony; but as the evidence against Massachusetts accumulated, they began to consider the revision of the laws, the appointment of a collector of customs and a royal governor, and even the annulment of the charter itself. In short, they determined to bring Massachusetts "under a more palpable declaration of obedience to his Majesty." The general court of the colony, although it had said that "any breach in the wall would endanger the whole," was at last frightened by the news from England and passed an order in October, 1677, that the laws of trade must be strictly observed, and later magistrates and deputies alike took the oath of allegiance prescribed by the Crown, promising to drop the word "Commonwealth" for the future. The members of the assembly wrote an amazing letter, pietistic and cringing, in which they prostrated themselves before the King, asked to be numbered among his "poore yet humble and loyal subjects," and begged for a renewal of all their privileges. At best such a letter could have done little in England to increase respect for the colony, but any good results expected from it were completely destroyed by the serious blunder which the colony made at this time in purchasing from the Gorges claimants the title to the province of Maine, which with New Hampshire had recently been declared by the chief justices of the King's Bench and Common Pleas to lie outside of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. This attempt to obtain, without the royal consent, a territory which the legal advisers of the Crown had decided Massachusetts could not have, only strengthened the determination of the authorities in England to bring the colony into the King's hand by the appointment of a royal governor. For the moment, however, the uprising of Bacon in Virginia and the Popish Plot in England so distracted the Government that it was obliged to slight or to postpone much of its business. It did succeed in settling the perplexing question of New Hampshire, for, having obtained from Mason a renunciation of all his claims to the Government, though leaving him with full title to the soil, it organized that territory as a colony under the control of the Crown.