The statesman and the priest carried it with a high hand;[617] and the time was not yet when Cozens could say, “The king has no more authority in ecclesiastical matters than the boy who rubs my horse’s heels.”[618] The suffering Non-conformists, “meted and peeled” at home, heard with rapture of that Puritan colony in the wilderness, governed by men whose opinions accorded with their own, and sheltered beneath the ægis of a royal charter. Emigration began to assume unprecedented proportions;[619] and the Company might have its pick of the best men in the island. But much good seed was left; enough to grow Cromwell, and nourish Hampden, and succor Pym. By the middle of April, 1629, six ships were ready to sail; and under license from the Lord Treasurer, these were freighted with “eighty women and maids and twenty-six children”—hostages of the fixed attachment of the emigrants to the New World—“and two hundred men, with victuals, arms, tools, and necessary wearing apparel.”[620] They also took on board “one hundred and forty head of cattle, and forty goats.”[621] As this was a religious enterprise, care was taken “to make plentiful provision of godly ministers.”[622] Four clergymen now embarked for Massachusetts Bay. Two of these made no figure on the north shore of New England. Bright was a strict Conformist; and not liking the ecclesiastical proceedings of his comrades, he returned to England in the succeeding summer.[623] Smith was a Separatist; and since these Puritans were not yet “Come-outers,” they were shy of him, so that in landing he went to Nantasket,[624] where we shall meet him again. The remaining two were Mr. Higginson and Mr. Skelton; the first of Leicestershire, the other of Lincolnshire.[625] They were both ardent Puritans, who had held livings in the Church of England, and been silenced for non-conformity.[626] On receiving an invitation to accompany this expedition, they had “esteemed it a call from heaven,” and joyfully assented.[627] “Both of these men,” says Cotton Mather, “were eminent for learning and virtue; and being thus in a sense driven out of England, they sought graves on the American strand, whereon the epitaph might be inscribed that was on Scipio’s: _Ingrata patria, ne mortui quidem habebis ossa._”[628] But unlike the ill-used pagan, they had no taunts for their erring country. “We will not say,” cried Francis Higginson, as he stood on deck off the Isle of Wight, and looked back on the receding shores of the fast-anchored island—“We will not say, Farewell, Babylon, Farewell, Rome! but, Farewell, dear England!”[629]