desirable to suggest possible respectability and moral rectitude in any member of the conservative party of Revolutionary days, it must be done under the less historically disgraced title,—­loyalist.  In fact, then, as always, two parties stood contending for principles to which honest convictions made adherents.  If among the conservatives were timid office-holders and corrupt self-seekers, there were also of the Revolutionary party blatant demagogues and bigoted partisans.  The logic of success, though a success made possible at last only by exterior aid, justified the appeal to arms begun in Massachusetts before revolt was prepared or thought imminent elsewhere.  Now, to the careful student of the situation, it seems among the most premature and rash of all the rebellions in history.  But for the precipitancy of the uprising, and the patriotic frenzy that fired the public heart at news of the first bloodshed, many ripe scholars, many soldiers of experience, might have been saved to aid and honor the republic, instead of being driven into ignominious exile by fear of mob violence and imprisonment, and scourged through the century as enemies of their country.  In and about Lancaster, then the largest town in Worcester County, the royalist party was an eminently respectable minority.  At first, indeed, not only those naturally conservative by reason of wealth, or pride of birthright, but nearly all the intellectual leaders, both ecclesiastic and civilian, deprecated revolt as downright suicide.  They denounced the Stamp Act as earnestly, they loved their country in which their all was at stake as sincerely, as did their radical neighbors.  Some of them, after the bloody nineteenth of April, acquiesced with such grace as they could in what they now saw to be inevitable, and tempered with prudent counsel the blind zeal of partisanship:  thus ably serving their country in her need.  Others would have awaited the issue of events as neutrals; but such the committees of safety, or a mob, not unnaturally treated as enemies.

On the highest rounds of the social ladder stood the great-grandsons of Major Simon Willard, the Puritan commander in the war of 1675.  These three gentlemen had large possessions in land, were widely known throughout the Province, and were held in deserved esteem for their probity and ability.  They were all royalists at heart, and all connected by marriage with royalist families.  Abijah Willard, the eldest, had just passed his fiftieth year.  He had won a captaincy before Louisburg when but twenty-one, and was promoted to a colonelcy in active service against the French; was a thorough soldier, a gentleman of stately presence and dignified manners, and a skilful manager of affairs.  For his first wife, he married Elizabeth, sister of Colonel William Prescott; for his second, Mrs. Anna Prentice, but had recently married a third partner, Mrs. Mary McKown, of Boston.  He was the wealthiest citizen of Lancaster, kept six horses in his stables,