Winthrop’s great rival in influence and position was stern Thomas Dudley. His views corresponded far more completely with the theocratic formulas than did those of his mild and somewhat pliant friend. Dudley was bold, aggressive, and dogmatic; and he frequently quarrelled with Winthrop, because that statesman would not hack dissenters with his harsh hatchet, but was cautious, and temporizing, and conciliatory, alike from temperament and from discipline. He was always chosen deputy when Winthrop was elected governor; and on several occasions he held the chief office himself. “He was a man of sound sense, sterling integrity, and uncompromising faith. He was rigid in his religious opinions, and urged the strictest enforcement of the sedition laws. He considered that the various opinions that were struggling to manifest themselves from time to time tended to licentiousness; and he was desirous that his epitaph should be—‘I died no libertine.’”[1042] To paint him in a word, Dudley was an upright and downright man—a “piece of living justice.” Sir Harry Vane did not tarry long in New England; arriving in 1635, he went home in 1637 to lend his name and brains to the dawning revolution, and to carve his spirit on the marble of the ages. But short as was his sojourn on the west of the Atlantic, he stayed long enough to achieve wide honor and to leave plain traces of his genius. He, too, was a Pilgrim, and “it is a singular fact in the history of New England, that, among her pioneers, were such men as Vane, well born, well bred, and able to command a splendid career at home.”[1043] “Sir Henry Vane the younger,” remarks Bancroft, “was a man of the purest mind, and a statesman of the rarest integrity, whose name the progress of intelligence and liberty will erase from the rubric of fanatics and traitors, and insert high among the aspirants after truth and the martyrs for liberty. Almost in his boyhood he had valued the ‘obedience of the gospel’ more than the successful career of English diplomacy, and he cheerfully ‘forsook the preferments of the court of Charles for the ordinances of religion in their purity in New England.’”[1044]