occasion of
anxious care to those who had formerly been his associates in public
trusts. Among the oppressors, he it was whom the people found hardest to
forgive. If Andros, Randolph, West, and others, were tyrants and
extortioners, at all events they were strangers; they had not been
preying on their own kinsmen. But this man was son of a brave old
emigrant Governor; he had been bred by the bounty of Harvard College; he
had been welcomed at the earliest hour to the offices of the
Commonwealth, and promoted in them with a promptness out of proportion
to the claims of his years. Confided in, enriched, caressed, from youth
to middle life by his native Colony beyond any other man of his time, he
had been pampered into a power which, as soon as the opportunity was
presented, he used for the grievous humiliation and distress of his
generous friends. That he had not brought them to utter ruin seemed to
have been owing to no want of resolute purpose on his part to advance
himself as the congenial instrument of a despot.

A revolution had been consummated, and the government of the King of
England over Massachusetts was dissolved. The day after Andros was led
to prison, the persons who had been put forward in the movement
assembled again to deliberate on the state of affairs. The result was,
that several of them, with twenty-two others whom they now associated,
formed themselves into a provisional government, which took the name of
a "Council for the Safety of the People and Conservation of the Peace."
They elected Simon Bradstreet, the last Charter Governor, now
eighty-seven years of age, to be their President, and Wait Winthrop,
grandson of the first Governor, to command the Militia. Among the orders
passed on the first day of this new administration was one addressed to
Colonel Tyng, Major Savage, and Captains Davis and Willard, serving in
the Eastern Country, to send certain officers to Boston, and dismiss a
portion of their force. There was probably a threefold purpose in this
order: to get possession of the persons of some distrusted officers; to
gratify a prevailing opinion that the exposures of the campaign had been
needless as well as cruel; and to obtain a reinforcement of skilled
troops at the centre of affairs.

The Council felt the weakness of their position. They held their place
neither by deputation from the sovereign, nor by election of the people.
They hesitated to set up the Colonial Charter again, for it h