The Fort had been given in charge to Nelson, and Colonel Lidgett shared the Governor’s captivity.  West, Graham, Palmer, and others of his set, were placed in Fairweather’s custody at the Castle.  Randolph was taken care of at the common gaol, by the new keeper, “Scates, the bricklayer.”  Andros came near effecting his escape.  Disguised in woman’s clothes, he had safely passed two sentries, but was stopped by a third, who observed his shoes, which he had neglected to change.  Dudley, the Chief Justice, was absent on the circuit at Long Island.  Returning homeward, he heard the great news at Newport.  He crossed into the Narragansett Country, where he hoped to keep secret at Major Smith’s house; but a party got upon his track, and took him to his home at Roxbury.  “To secure him against violence,” as the order expresses it, a guard was placed about his house.  Dudley’s host, Smith, was lodged in gaol at Bristol.

To secure Dudley against popular violence might well be an occasion of anxious care to those who had formerly been his associates in public trusts.  Among the oppressors, he it was whom the people found hardest to forgive.  If Andros, Randolph, West, and others, were tyrants and extortioners, at all events they were strangers; they had not been preying on their own kinsmen.  But this man was son of a brave old emigrant Governor; he had been bred by the bounty of Harvard College; he had been welcomed at the earliest hour to the offices of the Commonwealth, and promoted in them with a promptness out of proportion to the claims of his years.  Confided in, enriched, caressed, from youth to middle life by his native Colony beyond any other man of his time, he had been pampered into a power which, as soon as the opportunity was presented, he used for the grievous humiliation and distress of his generous friends.  That he had not brought them to utter ruin seemed to have been owing to no want of resolute purpose on his part to advance himself as the congenial instrument of a despot.

A revolution had been consummated, and the government of the King of England over Massachusetts was dissolved.  The day after Andros was led to prison, the persons who had been put forward in the movement assembled again to deliberate on the state of affairs.  The result was, that several of them, with twenty-two others whom they now associated, formed themselves into a provisional government, which took the name of a “Council for the Safety of the People and Conservation of the Peace.”  They elected Simon Bradstreet, the last Charter Governor, now eighty-seven years of age, to be their President, and Wait Winthrop, grandson of the first Governor, to command the Militia.  Among the orders passed on the first day of this new administration was one addressed to Colonel Tyng, Major Savage, and Captains Davis and Willard, serving in the Eastern Country, to send certain officers to Boston, and dismiss a portion of their force.  There was probably a threefold purpose in this order:  to get possession of the persons of some distrusted officers; to gratify a prevailing opinion that the exposures of the campaign had been needless as well as cruel; and to obtain a reinforcement of skilled troops at the centre of affairs.