Late in the autumn of 1688, the Governor had led a thousand New-England soldiers into Maine against the Indians.  His operations there were unfortunate.  The weather was cold and stormy.  The fatigue of long marches through an unsettled country was excessive.  Sickness spread among the companies.  Shelter and hospital-stores had been insufficiently provided.  The Indians fled to the woods, and there laughed at the invader.

The costliness, discomforts, and miserable ill-success of this expedition, while they occasioned clamor in the camp, sharpened the discontents existing at the capital.  Suspicions prevailed of treachery on the Governor’s part, for he was well known to be without the excuse of incompetence.  Plausible stories were told of his being in friendly relations with the murderous Indians.  An apprehension that he was instructed by his Popish master to turn New England over to the French, in the contingency of a popular outbreak in England, was confirmed by reports of French men-of-war hovering along the coast for the consummation of that object.  When, in mid-winter, Andros was informed of the fears entertained at Court of a movement of the Prince of Orange, he issued a proclamation, commanding His Majesty’s subjects in New England, and especially all officers, civil and military, to be on the alert, should any foreign fleet approach, to resist such landing or invasion as might be attempted.  Not causelessly, even if unjustly, the Governor’s object was understood to be to hold New England for King James, if possible, should the parent-country reassert its rights.

Of course, no friendly welcome met him, when, on the heels of his proclamation, he returned to Boston from the Eastern Country.  He was himself so out of humor as to be hasty and imprudent, and one of his first acts quickened the popular resentment.  The gloomy and jealous state of men’s minds had gained some degree of credit for a story that he had furnished the hostile natives with ammunition for the destruction of the force under his command.  An Indian declared, in the hearing of some inhabitants of Sudbury, that he knew this to be true.  Two of the townsmen took the babbler to Boston, ostensibly to be punished for his license of speech.  The Governor treated the informers with great harshness, put them under heavy bonds, and sent one of them to jail.  The comment of the time was not unnatural nor uncandid:—­“Although no man does accuse Sir Edmund merely upon Indian testimony, yet let it be duly weighed whether it might not create suspicion and an astonishment in the people of New England, in that he did not punish the Indians who thus charged him, but the English who complained of them for it.”

The nine-days’ wonder of this transaction was not over, when tidings of far more serious import claimed the public ear.  On the fourth day of April, a young man named John Winslow arrived at Boston from the Island of Nevis, bringing a copy of the Declarations issued by the Prince of Orange on his landing in England.  Winslow’s story is best told in the words of an affidavit made by him some months after.