In accordance with these views, a charter of great liberality was at once granted to Connecticut, and by the same instrument the colony of New Haven was deprived of its separate existence and annexed to its stronger neighbour.  As if to emphasize the motives which had led to this display of royal favour toward Connecticut, an equally liberal charter was granted to Rhode Island.  In the summer of 1664 Charles II. sent a couple of ships-of-war to Boston harbour, with 400 troops under command of Colonel Richard Nichols, who had been appointed, along with Samuel Maverick and two others as royal commissioners, to look after the affairs of the New World.  Colonel Nichols took his ships to New Amsterdam, and captured that important town.  After his return the commissioners held meetings at Boston, and for a time the Massachusetts charter seemed in danger.  But the Puritan magistrates were shrewd, and months were frittered away to no purpose.  Presently the Dutch made war upon England, and the king felt it to be unwise to irritate the people of Massachusetts beyond endurance.  The turbulent state of English politics which followed still further absorbed his attention, and New England had another respite of several years. [Sidenote:  Founding of Newark]

In New Haven a party had grown up which was dissatisfied with its extreme theocratic policy and approved of the union with Connecticut.  Davenport and his followers, the founders of the colony, were beyond measure disgusted.  They spurned “the Christless rule” of the sister colony.  Many of them took advantage of the recent conquest of New Netherland, and a strong party, led by the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, migrated to the banks of the Passaic in June, 1667, and laid the foundations of Newark.  For some years to come the theocratic idea that had given birth to New Haven continued to live on in New Jersey.  As for Mr. Davenport, he went to Boston and ended his days there.  Cotton Mather, writing at a later date, when the theocratic scheme of the early settlers had been manifestly outgrown and superseded, says of Davenport:  “Yet, after all, the Lord gave him to see that in this world a Church-State was impossible, whereinto there enters nothing which defiles.”

The theocratic policy, alike in New Haven and in Massachusetts, broke down largely through its inherent weakness.  It divided the community, and created among the people a party adverse to its arrogance and exclusiveness.  This state of things facilitated the suppression of New Haven by royal edict, and it made possible the victory of Wenlock Christison in Massachusetts.  We can now see the fundamental explanation of the deadly hostility with which Endicott and his party regarded the Quakers.  The latter aimed a fatal blow at the very root of the idea which had brought the Puritans to New England.  Once admit these heretics as citizens, or even as tolerated sojourners, and there was an end of the theocratic state consisting of a united body of believers.  It was a life-and-death struggle, in which no quarter was given; and the Quakers, aided by popular discontent with the theocracy, even more than by the intervention of the crown, won a decisive victory.