Dudley himself, Deputy Governor, who went to Massachusetts Bay in the same fleet of eleven ships with Governor Winthrop, wrote to his patroness, the Countess of Lincoln, several months after his arrival, and in his letter, dated March 12, 1630, explicitly denies the existence of any such changes in their worship as had been alleged; that they had become "Brownists [that is, Congregationalists] in religion," etc., and declaring all such allegations to be "false and scandalous reports;" appealing to their friends in England to "not easily believe that we are so soon turned from the profession we so long have made at home in our native land;" declaring that he knew "no one person who came over with us last year to be altered in judgment or affection, either in ecclesiastical or civil respects, since our coming here;" acknowledging the obligations of himself and friends to the King for the royal kindness to them, and praying his friends in England to "give no credit to such malicious aspersions, but be more ready to answer for us than we hear they have been." Dudley's own words are given in note.[51] The only escape from the admission of Dudley's statements being utterly untrue is resort to a quibble which is inconsistent with candour and honesty--namely, that the Brownist or Congregational worship had been adopted by Endicot and his party before the arrival of Dudley; but the scope and evident design of his letter was to assure the Countess of Lincoln and his friends in England that no new Church worship had been established at Massachusetts Bay, when the reverse must have been known to Dudley, and when he, in support of the new Brownist or Congregational worship, became a fierce persecutor, even to old age, of all who would not conform to it; for, as Mr.Bancroft says, "the rugged soul of Dudley was not mellowed by old age." But while Dudley, in Massachusetts, was denying to his English friends the existence of ecclesiastical changes there which all history now declares to have taken place, the "Patriarch of Dorchester," the father of the whole enterprise--the Rev.John White, a conformist clergyman of the Church of England, even under Archbishop Laud--wrote and published a pamphlet called "The Planters' Plea,"[52] in which he denied also that any ecclesiastical changes, as alleged, had taken place in the Massachusetts Plantation, and denounces the authors of such allegations in no measured terms.

This pamphlet contains a "Brief Relation of the Occasion of the Planting of this Colony." After referring to the third, or "great emigration under Winthrop,"[53] the author proceeds: "This is an impartial though brief relation of the occasion of planting the colony; the particulars whereof, if they could be entertained, were clear enough to any indifferent judgment, that the suspicious and scandalous reports raised upon these gentlemen and their friends (as if, under the colour of planting a colony, they intended to raise a seminary of faction and separation), are nothing than the fruits of jealousy of some distempered mind or, which is worse, perhaps savour of a desperate malicious plot of men ill affected to religion, endeavouring, by casting the undertakers into the jealousy of the State, to shut them out of those advantages which otherwise they might expect from the countenance of authority.

Such men would be entreated to forbear that base and unchristian course of traducing persons under these odious names of Separatists, and enemies of Church and State, for fear lest their own tongues fall upon themselves by the justice of His hand who will not fail to clear the innocency of the just, and to cast back into the bosom of every slanderer the filth that he rakes up to throw into other men's faces.

As for men of more indifferent and better minds, they would be seriously advised to beware of entertaining or admitting, much more countenancing and crediting, such uncharitable persons as discover themselves by their carriage, and that in this particular to be men ill affected towards the work itself, if not to religion, at which it aims, and consequently unlikely to report any truths of such as undertake it."[54] This language is very severe, not to say scurrilous; but it is the style of all Puritan historians and writers in regard to those who complained of the Puritan Government of Massachusetts.

Not even Messrs.