Altho the account of the affair is traditional, it is difficult to see any good grounds for impeaching it on that account.  It supplies, in the simplest and most natural manner, a blank in the Hartford proceedings of Andros which would otherwise be quite unaccountable.  His plain purpose was to force Connecticut into a position where she must either surrender the charter or resist openly.  He failed:  the charter never was in his possession; and the official records assign no reason for his failure.  The colony was too prudent, and Andros too proud to put the true reason on record.  Tradition supplies the gap with an exactness which proves itself.

Having done all that men could do, Treat and his associates bowed for the time to superior force.  Andros was allowed to read his commission, and Treat, Fitz-John and Wait Winthrop, and John Allyn received appointments as members of his council for New England.  John Allyn made what the governor doubtless considered to be the closing record for all time.  But it is noteworthy that the record was so written as to flatter Andros’s vanity, while it really put in terms a declaration of over-powering force, on which the commonwealth finally succeeded in saving her charter from invalidation, it is as follows: 

“At a General Court at Hartford, October 31st, 1887, his excellency, Sir Edmund Andross, knight and Captain General and Governor of His Majesty’s territories and dominions in New England, by order of His Majesty James the Second, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, the 31st of October, 1687, took into his hands the government of the colony of Connecticut, it being by His Majesty annexed to Massachusetts and other colonies under his excellency’s government.

  “FINIS.”

The government was destined to last far longer than either the governor or his government.  But, while it lasted, Andros’s government was bitterly hated, and with good reason.  The reasons are more peculiarly appropriate to the history of Massachusetts, where they were felt more keenly than in Connecticut; but even in Connecticut, poor as was the field for plunder, and distant as it was from the “ring” which surrounded Andros, the exactions of the new system were wellnigh intolerable to a people whose annual expense of government had been carefully kept down to the lowest limits, so that, says Bancroft, they “did not exceed four thousand dollars; and the wages of the chief justice were ten shillings a day while on service."...

April, 1689, came at last.  The people of Boston, at the first news of the English Revolution, clapped Andros into custody.  May 9, the old Connecticut authorities quietly resumed their functions, and called the assembly together for the following month.  William and Mary were proclaimed with great favor.  Not a word was said about the disappearance or reapeparance of the charter; but the charter government was put into full effect again, as if Andros had never interrupted it.  An address was sent to the king, asking that the charter be no further interfered with; but operations under it went on as before.  No decided action was taken by the home government for some years, except that its appointment of the New York governor, Fletcher, to the command of the Connecticut militia, implied a decision that the Connecticut charter had been superseded.