Gorges, though a stanch supporter of the Church of England, was in close relations with the Puritan peers. He and Warwick were having constant dealings, as both were active in the Council for New England, and his son John was a brother-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln, in whose house, as we have seen, the Massachusetts project took shape. There is nothing to indicate any hostility upon his part to the Massachusetts colony until 1632; and the several emissaries whom he secretly sent there were probably dispatched for the sole purpose of seeing whether or not the settlers were encroaching upon the lands claimed by himself and his son Robert, whose rights, it will be recalled, he specifically reserved when he consented to the granting of the Massachusetts charter. The grantees of that instrument, however, denied that the Gorges rights had any legal validity, and claimed and occupied the disputed land as their own. A quarrel was, therefore, inevitable, and as the Puritans, it must be confessed, had little respect for legality themselves, they could, when need required, be counted upon to take such steps as they might see fit to oppose any action of Gorges. Winthrop had been scarcely a month on the shores of the Bay, when another newcomer arrived in the shape of one of the most picturesque and mysterious characters who were ever to stroll on Boston Common. Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight of the Sepulchre (somewhat whited), suddenly appeared, with no ostensible business, but with that unexpected phenomenon in the Puritan colony, a pretty young mistress. To be sure, he called her cousin, but it was soon suspected, as Bradford somewhat quaintly wrote, that “she (after the Italian manner) was his concubine.”[351] In spite of the fact that a late defender has claimed that “he was unfitted for the quiet pleasures of domestic life,”[352] he seems to have made some efforts in that direction; for the authorities soon received word from London to the effect that he had two wives there, who were then in conference, and of whom one was calling loudly for his conversion, and the other for his destruction.[353] On the first of March, 1631, it was ordered by the Massachusetts court that he and seven others should be sent prisoners to England by the good ship Lyon;[354] but the knight, getting word of what was proposed, fled to the Indians.[355] Some weeks later he was taken into custody by the Plymouth people, who asserted that they had found on his person evidence that he was a Roman Catholic.[356] While he was lodged in jail in Boston, letters addressed to him by Gorges, as well as one to the absent Morton, came into the hands of Winthrop, who opened them, and decided that they indicated a design on the part of Gorges to regain possession of his land—an ambition not wholly unnatural.[357] Whether or not the authorities decided that it was wiser that Gardiner should not appear in England to add his testimony to that of Morton, nothing further seems to