were overcoming their difficulties in
Massachusetts, the Council for New England were struggling with the
London Company to maintain the monopoly of fishing and fur trading on
the North Atlantic coast granted to them by their charter. The London
Company complained to the king in 1620 and to Parliament in 1621, but
the king refused any relief, and prevented Parliament from interfering
by dissolving it.[6] Thereupon, the Council for New England,
appreciating the danger, made a grand effort to accomplish something
in America. As a preliminary step they induced the king to publish a
proclamation, November 6, 1622, against all unlicensed trading and
other infringements upon the rights granted them,[7] and shortly
afterwards sent out Francis West as admiral to reduce the fishermen on
the coast to obedience. West came to America, but found them "stuberne
fellows,"[8] and he returned in about a year to England without
effecting anything.

During his absence the Council for New England set to work to send out
a colony under Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando; and, June 29,
1623, a division was made among twenty patentees, of the North
Atlantic coast from the Bay of Fundy to Narragansett Bay.[9] In
September, 1623, Gorges arrived at Plymouth attended by an Episcopal
minister, William Morell, and a company of settlers, whom he planted
at Wessagusset. He remained in New England throughout the winter, and
in the effort to exert his authority had a long wrangle with Weston.
In the spring of 1624 he received news from his father that
discouraged his further stay. It seems that in March, 1624, a
committee of Parliament, at the head of which was Sir Edward Coke, had
reported the charter of the Council for New England as a national
grievance, which so discouraged the patentees that most of them
abandoned the enterprise, and it became, in the language of the elder
Gorges, "a carcass in a manner breathless."[10] After Robert Gorges'
departure most of his party dispersed, some going to England and some
to Virginia, but a few remained at Wessagusset, which was never
entirely abandoned.

The relations between the colony and the London merchant adventurers,
never very pleasant, became more unsatisfactory as time went on. The
colonists naturally wanted to bring over their friends at Leyden, but
the partners regarded Robinson as the great leader of the
Independents, and London was already rife with rumors of the heretical
character of the