n; and the disturbers of the public security were
summoned into its presence. Robert Child and his companions appealed to
the Commissioners in England. _The appeal was not admitted._" "To the
Parliament of England the Legislature remonstrated with the noblest
frankness _against any assertion of permanent authority of that
body_."--Hist. U.S., Vol. I., pp. 475-477.]

[Footnote 89: By the "people" here Mr. Bancroft must mean the members of
the Congregational Churches (one-sixth of the whole population), for
they alone were _freemen_, and had all the united powers of the
franchise--the _sword_, the _legislation_--in a word, the whole civil,
judicial, ecclesiastical, and military government.]

[Footnote 90: But Mr. Bancroft seems to forget that in less than forty
years after this the Charter was revoked, and that very system of
government was established which the General Court of Massachusetts Bay
now deprecated, but under which Massachusetts itself was most prosperous
and peaceful for more than half a century, until the old spirit was
revived, which rendered friendly government with England impossible.]

[Footnote 91: Mr. Hutchinson says: "The Earl of Warwick had a patent for
Massachusetts Bay about 1623, but the bounds are not known." (History of
Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I., p. 7.)]

[Footnote 92: Mr. Palfrey says: "While in England the literary war
against Presbytery was in great part conducted by American combatants,
their attention was presently required at home. William Vassal, a man of
fortune, was one of the original assistants named in the Charter of the
Massachusetts Company. He came to Massachusetts with Winthrop's fleet in
the great emigration; but for some cause--_possibly from dissatisfaction
with the tendencies to Separatism which he witnessed_--he almost
immediately returned. He crossed the sea again five years after, but
then it was to the colony of Plymouth. Establishing his home at
Seituate, he there conducted himself so as to come under the reproach of
being 'a man of a busy, factious spirit, and always opposite to the
civil government of the country and the way of the Churches.'"
(Winthrop, II., p. 261.) His disaffection occasioned the more
uneasiness, because his brother Samuel, also formerly an assistant of
the Massachusetts Company, was now one of the Parliament's Commissioners
for the government of Foreign Plantations.

In the year when the early struggle between the Presbyterians and
Independe