d Davenport, the strait-laced
pastor of the colony, seems to have taken them under his especial
patronage. He seems to have been a kind of provincial Hugh Peters,
though he was not without his virtues: and there was far more fear of
him before the eyes of the local authorities, than there was of King
Charles and his Council. His Majesty was in fact completely browbeaten
and discomfited, when his warrant was afterwards brought into collision
with the will of this doughty little Pope: and to him the regicides owed
it, that they finally died in America.

The government at home seems really to have been in earnest in the
matter, and a royal command was not long in reaching Endicott, requiring
him to do all his power for the arrest of the runaways. He seems to have
been scared into something like obedience, and two zealous young
royalists offering their services as pursuers, he was obliged to
despatch them to Newhaven. So vigorously did these young men prosecute
their errand, that but for the bustling fanaticism of Davenport, they
would certainly have redeemed the honour of the colonies, and given
their lordships at Westminster Hall the trouble of two more state
trials. For its own sake, no one, indeed, can be sorry that such was not
the result. But when one thinks how many curious details of history
would have transpired on the trials of such prominent rebels, it seems a
pity that they could not have been made serviceable in this way, and
then set, with Prynne, to do penance among the old parchments in the
Tower.

The governor of the Newhaven colony, one Leete, lived a few miles out of
the town, but not far enough off to be out of the control of Davenport,
whose spiritual drill had got him in good order for the expected
encounter. That painstaking pastor had, moreover, felt it his duty to
give no uncertain blast of preparation on his Sabbath-day trumpet, and
had sounded forth his deep concern for the souls committed to his care,
should they, by any temptation of the devil, be led to think it
scriptural to obey the king and magistrate, instead of him, their
conscience-keeper and dogmatist. With a skill in the application of holy
writ, peculiar to the Hugh Peters' school of divinity, he had
laboriously pounded his cushion, in some thirty or forty illustrations
of the following text from the prophet Isaiah: "Hide the outcasts,
bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab!
be thou a covert to them fr