Your Excellency has been pleased to confirm, rather than deny or confute, a piece of history, which, you say, we took from an anonymous pamphlet, and by which you "fear we have been too easily misled." It may be gathered from your own declaration, and other authorities, besides the anonymous pamphlet, that the House of Commons took exception, not at the King's having made an absolute grant of the territory, but at the claim of an exclusive right to the fishery on the banks and sea coast, by virtue of the patent. At this you say, "the House of Commons was alarmed, and a bill was brought in for allowing a free fishery." And, upon this occasion, your Excellency allows, that "one of the Secretaries of State declared, that the plantations were not annexed to the Crown, and so were not within the jurisdiction of Parliament." If we should concede to what your Excellency supposes might possibly or "perhaps," be the case, that the Secretary made this declaration, "as his own opinion," the event showed that it was the opinion of the King too; for it is not to be accounted for upon any other principle, that he would have denied his royal assent to a bill, formed for no other purpose, but to grant his subjects in England, the privilege of fishing on the sea coasts in America. The account published by Sir Ferdinando Gorges himself, of the proceedings of Parliament on this occasion, your Excellency thinks, will remove all doubt, of the sense of the nation, and of the patentees of this patent or charter, in 1620. "This narrative," you say, "has all the appearance of truth and sincerity," which we do not deny; and, to us, it carries this conviction with it, that "what was objected" in Parliament, was the exclusive claim of fishing only. His imagining that he had satisfied the House, after divers attendances, that the planting a colony was of much more consequence than a simple disorderly course of fishing, is sufficient for our conviction. We know that the nation was at that time alarmed with apprehensions of monopolies; and, if the patent of New England was presented by the two Houses as a grievance, it did not show, as your Excellency supposes, "the sense they then had of their authority over this new acquired territory," but only their sense of the grievance of a monopoly of the sea.