could be no trouble; she had never had a charter, but had existed on sufferance from the outset.  In 1687 the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were rescinded, but the decrees were not executed in due form.  In October of that year Andros went to Hartford, to seize the Connecticut charter but it was not surrendered.  While Sir Edmund was bandying threats with stout Robert Treat, the queller of Indians and now governor of Connecticut, in the course of their evening conference the candles were suddenly blown out, and when after some scraping of tinder they were lighted again the document was nowhere to be found, for Captain Wadsworth had carried it away and hidden it in the hollow trunk of a mighty oak tree.  Nevertheless for the moment the colony was obliged to submit to the tyrant.  Next day the secretary John Allyn wrote “Finis” on the colonial records and shut up the book.  Within another twelvemonth New York and New Jersey were added to the viceroyalty of Andros; so that all the northern colonies from the forests of Maine to the Delaware river were thus brought under the arbitrary rule of one man, who was responsible to no one but the king for whatever he might take it into his head to do. [Sidenote:  Sir Edmund Andros] [Sidenote:  The Charter Oak]

The vexatious character of the new government was most strongly felt at Boston where Andros had his headquarters.  Measures were at once taken for the erection of an Episcopal church, and meantime the royal order was that one of the principal meeting-houses should be seized for the use of the Church of England.  This was an ominous beginning.  In the eyes of the people it was much more than a mere question of disturbing Puritan prejudices.  They had before them the experience of Scotland during the past ten years, the savage times of “Old Mortality,” the times which had seen the tyrannical prelate, on the lonely moor, begging in vain for his life, the times of Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg, of Claverhouse and his flinty-hearted troopers, of helpless women tied to stakes on the Solway shore and drowned by inches in the rising tide.  What had happened in one part of the world might happen in another, for the Stuart policy was the same.  It aimed not at securing toleration but at asserting unchecked supremacy.  Its demand for an inch was the prelude to its seizing an ell, and so our forefathers understood it.  Sir Edmund’s formal demand for the Old South Meeting-House was flatly refused, but on Good Friday, 1687, the sexton was frightened into opening it, and thenceforward Episcopal services were held there alternately with the regular services until the overthrow of Andros.  The pastor, Samuel Willard, was son of the gallant veteran who had rescued the beleaguered people of Brookfield in King Philip’s war.  Amusing passages occurred between him and Sir Edmund, who relished the pleasantry of keeping minister and congregation waiting an hour or two in the street on Sundays before yielding to them the use of their meeting-house.