several gentlemen left out that were of the Council last year, who were of good ability, for estate and otherwise, to serve her Majesty, and well disposed thereto, and that some others who were new elected were not so well qualified, some of them being of little or mean estate." Accordingly he struck off five names from the list, those of Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oakes (the agents for the Colony in England twelve years before), Peter Sargent (husband of Governor Phips's widow), John Saffin, a leading citizen of Bristol, and John Bradford, grandson of the Governor of Plymouth. The reasons which he alleged had little application to these men. No one of them appears to have been "of little or mean estate," any more than, in a just estimate," not well qualified." Cooke, at least, was a richer man than the Governor. Besides John Pynchon, who had died since the last election, the Court had left out from the last year's Board John Appleton, Barnabas Lothrop, Nathaniel Thomas, Nathaniel Byfield, and Samuel Partridge, and had substituted for them Edward Bromfield, Samuel Hayman, John Walley, John Saffin, John Bradford, and Thomas Oakes; the last three, rejected by the Governor, being one-half of the newly chosen Counsellors. This measure of his was taken with deliberation, the occasion for it having come seasonably to his knowledge. On the eve of the assembling of the Court, he wrote to the Lords of Trade: "The choice of her Majesty's Counsellors here is within a few days, and the Assembly already chosen for that purpose. There has been apparent methods taken in the choice of Assembly-men, that no such should be chosen as had shown their obedience to her Majesty's command for the rebuilding of Pemaquid, or for the settling of a salary for the support of the government." 1 His reflection

May 10.

"As to the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, which is a charter government, the inhabitants have

1

been always averse to any compliance with the directions that have been frequently sent from hence for set

on the whole was: "It is every day more apparent that nothing will proceed well here till her Majesty will please = to name her own Council. The best men in the Province can have no share in the civil government till then."' His action naturally increased the coldness between him and the General Court, and a proposal which he made for the appointment of a Surveyor-General of lands granted by the Province was bluntly rejected.2

Lord Cornbury, the Queen's cousin, who had now succeeded Lord Bellomont as Governor of New York, informed Dudley of his having intelligence from Albany of a meditated attack upon the settlement at Deerfield by a force of French and Indians. For the present this proved a false alarm; but there was only too much reason to expect trouble along the whole northern frontier. Dudley

with the

Indians.

June 20.

invited the eastern chiefs to a conference, which, accompanied by several considerable men of MassachuConference setts and New Hampshire, he held with them at Casco, then the most remote English settlement that was recovering itself from the devastations of King William's war. The savages made the most friendly professions. "As high as the sun is above the earth," protested their chief spokesman, "so far distant shall our designs be of making the least breach between each other "1 Another said that some French priests had been endeavoring to engage them in hostilities against the English, but that they were" as firm as the mountains, and should continue so as long as the sun and moon endured."2 Some

1 Folsom, History of Saco and II. 41), and at the accession of GovBiddeford, 198 et seq. ernor Dudley he became a Counsellor (Ibid., 376), in which capacity he was personally cognizant of much of that course of events which he relates. His narrative terminates with the pacification in August, 1726, and he died four months after that time.

2 Penhallow, History of the Wars of New England, &c., 2-4; comp. Niles's History of the Indian and French Wars, in Mass. Hist. Col., XXVI. 247. The former work, of which there is a reprint in N. H. Col., I. 14 et seq., is the great English contemporary authority for the events of this second woful decade. Its titlepage bears the fit motto:"Nescio tu quibus es, lector, lecturus ocellis; Hoc scio, quod siccis scribere non potui."

Samuel Penhallow was an Englishman, a pupil, with Daniel Defoe (see above, Vol. III. 547), of the Rev. Charles Morton, with whom he came to New England in 1686 (extract from Penhallow's Diary, in Mass. Hist. Col., XI. 161), being then twenty-one years old. He became a member of Morton's church at Charlestown, but before long established himself in trade at Portsmouth, where he married a daughter of President Cutt, and accumulated what was then thought a large property. When New Hampshire annexed itself to Massachusetts, after the deposition of Andros, he served as Treasurer of the Province (N. II. Provincial Papers,

Samuel Niles graduated at our Cambridge in 1699, the first native Rhode Islander ever bred at a college. ("I was the first that came to college from Rhode Island government." Mass. Hist. Col., XXVI. 274.) He was settled as minister of Braintree in 1711, and died there in 1762. A little time before his death he spoke of his historical compilation to John Adams; but it continued in manuscript, and was lost sight of, till some time after the year 1830 it was found in a box of papers belonging to the Massachusetts Historical Society, who published it in the twenty-sixth and thirty-fifth volumes of their Collections. The treatise, of which the design is announced to be "to give a narrative of the wars in the land from the year 1634 to this present year, 1760," is, as to all the period down to 1745, of extremely little original value, bearing the

July 8.

July 23.

suspicious circumstances were observed, but the parties separated in apparent friendship, and Dudley returned to congratulate the Court on the happy result of the expedition. The House made a grant to him of three hundred pounds "towards his support in the management of the government." The Council returned the vote, with a request to have it reconsidered. The House sent it back unaltered. The Council returned it a second time, with the inquiry" whether it was a gratuity, or payment for service, and for what time." The House refused to depart from the ground which it had taken. On the advice of the Council the Governor accepted the grant, and the Court was prorogued.1

July 27.

July 31.

Beginning

war.

Before it met again in the autumn, the Indians had committed outrages, which turned out to be the beginning of another terrible ten years' war. No act of the colonists provoked it. A party of English vaga- of a new bonds on the Penobscot plundered a house belonging to a half-breed son of the Baron de Castine, who was now in France; but the action of the government of Massachusetts on the son's complaint was such that he expressed himself fully satisfied, and it was not pretended that this incident had any connection with more serious disorders

Magnalia, VII. 82-84); or an omission (Ibid., 85, 86). And the same was his treatment of Penhallow's narrative, not only of the second ten years' war in Queen Anne's time, but of the disturbances (1719–1726) in the next reign (Penhallow, 81135; comp. Hist. Soc. Col., XXXV. 337-365), when he might seem to have reached an age to be capable of better work than that of a mere copyist.

same relation to Morton's Memorial, a condensation (Ibid., 231, 232; comp. Church's Entertaining Passages, Hubbard's Indian Wars, Mather's Magnalia, and Penhallow's History, as that which exists between the Histories of Hubbard and Winthrop. The reader who will compare Niles's account of the woful decade in King William's time (Hist. Col., XXVI. 206-245) with Mather's of the same events (Magnalia, VII. 64-93) will find the former to be to a great extent a mere transcript of the latter, with occasionally an interpolation (Hist. Col., XXVI. 220-224); a strain of reflection (Ibid., 233, 234); II. 42.

1 Collection of Proceedings, 10.
2 Williamson, History of Maine,

which broke out in the eastern country about the same time.

French intrigues

with the Indians.

1698.

Oct. 3.

The calamities which were impending had a quite different source. Neither at the French court, nor by its military or ecclesiastical servants in Canada, had it been supposed that the war between New England and New France had been any thing more than suspended by the treaty of Ryswick. In the five years that had since elapsed, preparations for the renewal of hostilities had at no time been remitted by the soldiers and priests at Quebec and Montreal. "In the present juncture," thought the Count de Frontenac, when he had had six months to reflect on the news of peace," there August. is nothing better to be done than to inspire the Iroquois with distrust of the New-Englanders."1 Villebon, Governor of Nova Scotia, wrote home to the French ministry that he had not force enough to obstruct the restoration by the English of the fort at Pemaquid, and of the settlements along the Kennebec, but that he hoped to accomplish that object by means of the neighboring savages. Frontenac died, and the Nov. 28. inconstant Iroquois, relieved from the terror of his name, showed a disposition to withdraw from engagements which they had made with him.3 De Callières, his successor, pursued with scarcely less skill his method of alternate intimidation and caresses. He piqued the savages with the assurance that the English claimed them as subjects, while the French respected them as voluntary allies. He invited some of their chiefs to MonSept. 8. treal, and obtained their consent to a sort of treaty which he persuaded them need not disturb their friendly relations with the English. He lost no opportunity for establishing priests and missionary stations among them,

1700.

1 Charlevoix, II. 229.

2 Ibid., 235.

3 Ibid., 237.

2

Ibid., 242, 247, 364. 5 Ibid., 252.