Wednesday in March. "I guess," Hutchinson
writes, "that the Court is prorogued to a particular day with an
intention that something from the King or the Parliament shall be then
laid before them." "Some of the distant members will be on their journey
before the Proclamation reaches them; and if the packet had not had a
better passage than common, my orders would have found the Court
sitting." As a consequence of this unlooked-for prorogation, the main
guard continued to be stationed near the Town-House, until a portion of
it played its tragic part on the memorable fifth of March.

The Lieutenant-Governor was apprehensive that this sudden prorogation
would cause a great clamor; but he judged that the popular leaders were
rather humbled and mortified than roused and enraged by it; and he soon
expressed the conviction that this was the right step. But the favorite
organ of the Patriots, the "Boston Gazette," in its next issue, of
January the eighth, indicates anything but humility. Through it James
Otis, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams spoke kindling words to a community
who received words from them as things. Otis, in a card elicited by
strictures on the "unmanly assault, battery, and barbarous wounding" of
himself by Robinson, declared that "a clear stage and no favor were all
he ever wished or wanted in court, country, camp, or city"; Hancock, in
a card commenting on the report that he had violated the merchants'
agreement, "publicly defied all mankind" to prove the allegation, and
pledged his cooeperation "in every legal and laudable measure to redress
the grievances under which the Province and the Continent had so long
labored"; and Samuel Adams, under the signature of "Vindex," tested the
legality of the prorogation by the terms of the Charter, and adjured
every man to make it the subject of his contemplation. "We all
remember," are his weighty words, "that, no longer ago than last year,
the extraordinary dissolution by Governor Bernard, in which he declared
he was purely Ministerial, produced another assembly, which, though
legal in all its proceedings, awaked an attention in the very soul of
the British empire." He claimed that a Massachusetts executive ought to
act from the dictates of his own judgment. "It is not to be expected
that in ordinary times, much less at such an important period as this,
any man, though endowed with the wisdom of Solomon, at the distance of
three thousand miles, can be an adequate judge