The ship had sailed towards evening; in the night the governor returned. Lyford and his faction “looked blank when they saw Bradford land; but after some weeks, as nothing came of it, they were as brisk as ever, thinking that all was unknown and was gone current, and that the shallop went but to despatch some well-nigh forgotten or belated letters. The reason why Bradford and the rest concealed their knowledge was, to let affairs drift to a natural development, and ripen, that they might the better discover the intentions of the malcontents, and see who were their adherents. And they did this the rather, because they had learned from a letter written by one of the confederates, that Oldham and Lyford intended an immediate reformation of the church and commonwealth, and proposed at once, on the departure of the ship, to unite their forces, and set up a worship on the English model.”[498] The Pilgrims had not long to wait. Oldham, with the natural instinct of a bully, picked constant quarrels, refused to mount guard, and pelted Standish with vile epithets. Lyford, a more cautious knave, had no heart for fisticuffs, but he set up another worship on the Sabbath, and openly celebrated sacraments[499] which were to the Pilgrims instinct with vicious tyranny and idolatrous significance; and to escape from which, they had crossed the channel into Holland, and plunged across the Atlantic into the winter wilderness. The colonists at once acted. Oldham was tamed. “After being clapped up awhile, he came to himself.” Lyford was formally impeached. A court was convened, and the settlers at large were summoned to attend. Bradford himself conducted the prosecution in this primitive trial. He said that, “being greatly oppressed in Britain, the Pilgrims had come to America, here to enjoy liberty of conscience; and for that they had passed through frightful hardships, and planted this settlement on the sterile rocks. The danger and the charge of the beginning were theirs. Lyford had been sent over at the general expense, and both himself and his large family[500] had been maintained from the common store. He had joined their church, and become one of themselves; and for him to plot the ruin of his entertainers was most unjust and perfidious. As for Oldham and his crew, who came at their own charge and for their particular benefit, seeing they were received in courtesy by the plantation, when they came only to seek shelter and protection under its wings, not being able to stand alone, they were like the fable of the hedgehog whom the cony, in a stormy day, from pity welcomed into her burrow; but who, not content to take part with her, in the end, with her sharp pricks forced the poor cony to forsake her own burrow, as these do now attempt to do with us.”[501]