ourt of justice for
the King's trial, on which occasion they gave a divided vote. Four were
members of the committee of religion, the most important committee of
Parliament; and one, the counsellor, John White, was its chairman.

A question had been raised, whether the company had a right, and was
legally competent, to convey the charter across the ocean, and execute
on a foreign soil the powers conferred by it. Certain it is that no such
proceeding is forbidden by the letter of the instrument; and a not
disingenuous casuistry might inquire, If the business of the company may
be lawfully transacted in a western harbor of Great Britain, why not
under the King's flag in a ship at sea or on the opposite shore? It
cannot be maintained that such a disposition of a colonial charter would
be contrary to the permanent policy of England; for other colonial
charters, earlier and later, were granted--Sir William Alexander's,
William Penn's, Lord Baltimore's, and those of Rhode Island and
Connecticut--to be kept and executed without the realm.

As to the purpose of the grantor, those were not times for such men as
the Massachusetts patentees to ask what the King wished or expected, but
rather how much of freedom could be maintained against him by the letter
of the law or by other righteous means; and no principle of
jurisprudence is better settled than that a grant is to be interpreted
favorably to the grantees, inasmuch as the grantor, being able to
protect himself, is to be presumed to have done so to the extent of his
purpose. The eminent Puritan counsellor, John White, the legal adviser
of the company in all stages of this important proceeding, instructed
them that they could legally use the charter in this manner. Very
probably it had been drawn by his own hand, in the form in which it
passed the seals, with a care to have it free from any phraseology which
might interfere with this disposition of it. Certainly Winthrop and his
coadjutors may be pardoned for believing that it was legally subject to
the use to which they put it, since such was the opinion of the crown
lawyers themselves, when, in the second following generation, the
question became important. In the very heat of the persecution which at
length broke down the charter, the Chief Justices, Rainsford and North,
spoke of it as "making the adventurers a corporation upon the place,"
and Sawyer, attorney-general in the next reign, expressed the same
opinion--"The pate