The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts.  His reception at the town-house was a cold one.  Leverett liked neither his looks nor his message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when he came to the signature of the king’s chief secretary of state, he asked, with careless contempt, “Who is this Henry Coventry?” Randolph’s choking rage found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind him that the governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in Cromwell’s army.  As we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the writer would have betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman, had any clue been given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and Mather had nothing to say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley.  Everything that Randolph could think of that would goad and irritate the king, he reported in full to London; his letters were specimens of that worst sort of lie that is based upon distorted half-truths; and his malicious pen but seldom lay idle.

While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his careful handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready to counsel submission to the royal will.  Such was the birth of Toryism in New England.  The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of the grim verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop.  The younger Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study theology, but soon turned his attention entirely to politics.  In 1673 he was a deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in the storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following years he was one of the Federal Commissioners.  In character and temper he differed greatly from his father.  Like the proverbial minister’s son whose feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned in stern bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of life.  Much of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and traitor, is probably undeserved.  It does not appear that he ever made any pretence of love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many like him who had as lief be ruled by king as by clergy.  But it cannot be denied that his suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature that was weak and vulgar.  Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking politician and courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous century, Robert, Earl of Leicester.  His party in Massachusetts was largely made up of men who had come to the colony for commercial reasons, and had little or no sympathy with the objects for which it was founded.  Among them were Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who were allowed no chance for public worship, as well as many others who, like Gallio, cared for none of these things.  Their