William Vassal, a man of fortune, was one of the original assistants named in the Charter of the Massachusetts Company.

He came to Massachusetts with Winthrop's fleet in the great emigration; but for some cause--_possibly from dissatisfaction with the tendencies to Separatism which he witnessed_--he almost immediately returned.

He crossed the sea again five years after, but then it was to the colony of Plymouth.

Establishing his home at Seituate, he there conducted himself so as to come under the reproach of being 'a man of a busy, factious spirit, and always opposite to the civil government of the country and the way of the Churches.'" (Winthrop, II., p.

261.) His disaffection occasioned the more uneasiness, because his brother Samuel, also formerly an assistant of the Massachusetts Company, was now one of the Parliament's Commissioners for the government of Foreign Plantations.
In the year when the early struggle between the Presbyterians and Independents in England had disclosed the importance of the issues depending upon it, and the obstinate determination with which it was to be carried on, Vassal "practised with" a few persons in Massachusetts "to take some course, first by petitioning the Courts of Massachusetts and of Plymouth, _and if that succeeded not_, then to the Parliament of England, that the distinctions which were maintained here, both in civil and church state, might be done away, and that we might be wholly governed by the laws of England." In [93] a "Remonstrance and Humble Petition," addressed by them to the General Court [of Massachusetts], they represented--1.