Owing to the death of Mason, and the failure of Gorges's plans for Maine, the settlements north of Massachusetts were without a settled government, and the inhabitants do not seem to have had the ability to create a stable one for themselves, which was so marked a characteristic of those in Massachusetts and Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven. We have already seen how Massachusetts, by an unwarrantable construction of her charter, had begun to lay claim to all the land of New Hampshire and Maine lying eastward of the most northerly source of the Merrimack, although the whole course of the Crown and Council for New England at the time of the grant showed that such a claim was absolutely untenable. Nor, in the beginning, had the Massachusetts leaders dreamed of making it,[522] and it was, in fact, as Professor Osgood says, “more clearly an usurpation than was any later act of the crown which affected New England.”[523] The decision, otherwise favorable to Massachusetts, of the English Chief Justices in 1677, declaring the interpretation claimed to be utterly without warrant, and reassigning the lands to the heirs of the two original patentees, seems entirely just.[524] Footnote 522: _Cf._ letter of Emanuel Downing, already cited, asking for an extension of the charter limits northward, in 1633. _Cal. State Pap., Col., 1675-76_, p. 74. Footnote 523: Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. I, p. 377. Footnote 524: _Acts Privy Council, Colonial_, vol. I, pp. 723 _ff._ Palfrey's statement that the charter, “literally interpreted,” endowed Massachusetts with the lands claimed is hardly borne out by the facts. _History_, vol. I, p. 587. _Cf._, however, Burrage, _Colonial Maine_, p. 364.