The very suspicion and allegation that the Canadian Government did counteract, by influences and secret representations, the statements of complaining parties to England, roused public indignation as arbitrary and unconstitutional.

Even the insurrection which took place in both Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and 1838 was professedly against alleged partiality and injustice by the _local_ Government, as an obstruction to more liberal policy believed to be desired by the Imperial Government.
But here, in Massachusetts, a colony chartered as a Company to distribute and settle public lands and carry on trade, in less than twenty years assumes the powers of a sovereign Commonwealth, denies to five-sixths of the population the freedom of citizenship, and limits it to the members of one Church, and denies Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and worship to all who will not come to the one Church, punishes petitioners to itself for civil and religious freedom from those who were deprived of it, and punishes as "treason" their appeal for redress to the English Parliament.

Though, for the present, this unprecedented and unparalleled local despotism was sustained by the ingenious representations of Mr.
Winslow and the power of Cromwell; yet in the course of four years the surrender of its Charter was ordered by the regicide councillors of the Commonwealth, as it had been ordered by the beheaded King Charles and his Privy Council thirteen years before.

In the meantime tragical events in England diverted attention from the colonies.

The King was made prisoner, then put to death; the Monarchy was abolished, as well as the House of Lords; and the Long Parliament became indeed Cromwell's "pocket" instrument.
It was manifest that the government of Massachusetts Bay as a colony was impossible, with the pretensions which it had set up, declaring all appeals to England to be "treason," and punishing complainants as "conspirators" and "traitors." The appointment by Parliament in 1643 of a Governor-General and Commissioners had produced no effect in Massachusetts Bay Colony; pretensions to supremacy and persecution were as rife as ever there.