I am rightly informed, was so insolent as to justify all he had done, acknowledging no supreme power in England but a Parliament, and many things to that purpose. You have had a true account of all and if he has given new occasion to be hanged, certainly he is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way. Think of this and give me some account of it to-morrow, till when I have no more to say to you.

C. R."

The end soon came. Sir Harry was by this time in the Tower and the king was thirsting, as he very well knew, for his blood. When it was suggested to Vane that he might save his life by making submission to Charles he answered simply, "If the king does not think himself more conserved for his honour and word than I am for my life let him take it." And indeed nothing could have availed. His trial was long but unfair from beginning to end and, even when he came to the block, looking very handsome in his black clothes and scarlet waistcoat, he was given none of the privileges usually accorded those about to die. Pepys, who was on hand for the execution as for most other interesting spectacles that happened during his lifetime, describes, with every

mark of admiration, the bearing of the prisoner, adding further, loyalist though he was, that "the king lost more by that man's death than he will get again for a good while." Another loyalist exclaimed in admiration, as he watched the dignity of those last moments, "He dies like a prince." To which I can only add, after reading his wonderful prayer for those who had betrayed him, that he died like the Prince, that Prince of Peace whose principles he had all his life advocated and whose sublime example he followed even in the hour of his death.

VI

HOW WINTHROP TREATED WITH THE LA TOURS

SCARCELY had Winthrop been chosen governor for the fourth time when (June, 1643) there came to Boston to entreat help against his rival, Charnissay D'Aulnay, Charles La Tour, one of the lords of New France and perhaps the most picturesque figure in the early. history of this continent. The manner of this powerful Frenchman's arrival in Boston was most disconcerting to the Puritans. For he came in a French armed ship and sailed straight up the harbour, past a fort in which there was not a single person to answer his military salute! Had he been an enemy he might easily have sacked the town.

As it was, he made his début in Boston in a charmingly simple fashion. For coming toward his ship as it sailed up the bay was discerned a boat containing Mrs. Gibbons, the wife of Captain Edward Gibbons, going with her children to their farm. One of the gentle

men on La Tour's vessel recognized her and told La Tour who she was. Whereupon the lord of New France had a boat of his own fitted out and proceeded to follow the lady to her landing-place. Mrs. Gibbons, not knowing the strangers, hastened from them as fast as she could and put in at Governor's Island, so called because it was the summer home of the Winthrops. But it happened that the governor and some of his family were on the island at the time, so La Tour was able, by having pursued her, the more speedily to get in touch with the very person whom he had come to see! While he was telling his story over the hospitable supper-table, Mrs. Gibbons returned to town in the governor's boat and spread the news of the stranger's informal arrival, so that when La Tour, later, took the governor up to Boston in his own boat, they were met by three shallops of armed men, come out to escort them ceremoniously into the town.

Before proceeding to describe the negotiations which went on between Winthrop and this representative of a foreign state, let us, however, digress a bit and learn who this La Tour was and why he had come to Boston. To make the matter clear one must go back to the very beginnings of the settlement of

New France and retrace the story of Champlain's second expedition to the St. Lawrence, when in 1604 he sailed under De Monts (to whom the King of France had granted the land), in company with Baron de Poutrincourt, Pontgravé and divers merchants, priests and Huguenot ministers. This variously assorted company on exploration and colonization bent settled on St. Croix Island, in the mouth of St. Croix River, now the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. There they passed their first winter in America. But the next year they crossed the Bay of Fundy and founded Port Royal on the wooded shore of Annapolis Basin, in the very heart of that country where

the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

It was a wonderfully peaceful land which they found; and so it continued to be even when the colonists suffered most from want and privation - until the passions of ambitious men and the schemings and counterschemings of rival branches of the priesthood