Two series of instructions were issued to the Commissioners for their guidance, the one public and the other confidential, as was also the custom of Massachusetts in sending agents to England. In the first, it was ordered that the Commission should consider the best means for reducing the Dutch, investigate the condition of the Indians and of public education, and see that the Navigation Acts were observed, and that, according to the laws of England, no one was debarred from the free exercise of his religion. In the confidential instructions, these points were repeated with additional details, the Commissioners being further required to examine the various charters and the laws passed; to have, if possible, a General Assembly elected in Massachusetts, in which the members would be favorably inclined toward the King, and to have an acceptable governor and commander of the militia appointed or elected. They were to try to secure the coöperation of the other four colonies, and, in both sets of orders, were instructed to avoid giving offense.[[814]] The King also wrote a conciliatory letter to each of the colonies, in which he spoke of the calumnies against them, the difficulty of settling boundary disputes among themselves, and other matters requiring investigation and settlement.[[815]] In the commissions issued to Nicolls and the others, they were empowered to hear complaints and appeals, and to take measures for settling the peace of the country.[[816]]

In Massachusetts the news of the sending of the Commissioners created considerable alarm, and the General Court passed orders that none of their force of under-officers or soldiers should be allowed to land, except unarmed and in small numbers. The fort on Castle Island was ordered to be manned and prepared, sentries posted, and the charter hidden.[[817]]

In July, the Commissioners arrived at Boston, and presented their commissions and the King's letter to the Court, together with that part of their instructions which related to raising a force against the Dutch. The request was complied with, and the Court also hastily passed a new election law, which ostensibly made the franchise independent of a religious test, but which in practice could have no such effect. According to the new law, all church members, regardless of property qualifications, were given the franchise, as before, but non-church members were required to be freeholders and householders, to present certificates signed by ministers that they were orthodox in belief and not vicious in their lives, to be elected as freemen by the General Court, and to possess an estate which paid a tax of ten shillings in a single levy. There were other requirements, also; but the fact that not one man in a hundred was said to have the property qualification required only from non-church members showed the farcical nature of the law. The enactment has sometimes been called “shrewd”; but, in reality, it deceived no one, least of all the Commissioners, and its obvious disingenuousness served only to prejudice the case of the colony still further. Yet, in writing to the King, the colonial government stated that, in passing this law, they had applied themselves “to the utmost to sattisfy” him in “so farr as doth consist with conscience of our duty towards God, and the just liberties and priviledges” of their patent.[[818]]

Nor was the character of the rest of the petition, or of the letters which they wrote, asking aid, to Boyle, the head of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, and to Lord Clarendon, of a sort likely to improve the opinion held regarding the colony. It was obviously impossible to comply with their request to withdraw the Commission. In a just and temperate reply, the King pointed out that investigation by such a body had been the only method left to the English government to inform itself as to conditions in the colonies. Nor did Boyle take any different view of the matter; and Clarendon wrote of the petition: “I am so much a friend to your colony, that if it had been communicated to nobody but myself, I should have disswaded the presenting the same to his Majesty”; and pointed out the impossible character of the complaints and demands.[[819]]

The double nature of the Commissioners' duties now served to interrupt their work in Massachusetts; and until the beginning of the following year, they were occupied at New Amsterdam, and on the Delaware, in settling matters in the conquered Dutch colony—among others, the adjustment of its boundary with Connecticut. The case of the boundary between that colony and Rhode Island also came up; and although the final disposition was left for the home government, it was settled, in so far as the colonies were concerned, by erecting the disputed territory into a separate province, to be known as the King's Province. The jurisdiction was given to Rhode Island, while the claims of Massachusetts and the Atherton Land Company were properly declared invalid.[[820]]

Letter from the Earl of Clarendon to the Governor of Connecticut
Original in Massachusetts Historical Society

Throughout their dealings with Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Plymouth, the Commissioners had met with little or no opposition; and it was only upon their reassembling at Boston, about the first of May, 1665, that the real struggle began.[[821]] Endicott had recently died, and Bellingham had been elected governor. The negotiations between the new government and the Commissioners, however, were entered upon with some bad feeling upon both sides. The Commissioners had previously asked that all the inhabitants be summoned to attend the Court, in order that the King's views might be made known to them directly; but this somewhat impossible plan had been discouraged, if not secretly hindered, by the colonial government, and many false statements regarding the Commission had also been circulated, tending to throw discredit upon them—all of which they naturally resented.[[822]]

The Commissioners now made known all of their public instructions, and the Court made answer to their various requests and accusations. In regard to some of the minor matters, such as public education, there was no difficulty; but in regard to the more important ones, except issuing writs in the King's name, the colony virtually had no case. The new oath of allegiance, which the Court had had drawn up, had been purposely vitiated by the insertion of a clause referring to the charter, and can be considered only as an attempt to deceive the Commissioners and the home government, which it failed to do. As to ecclesiastical matters, the Court stated merely that they followed “the word of the Lord,” which, as they denied any interpretation of that word except their own, meant that they followed their own opinions, and refused to allow any one else to have any. Their statement, in a later paper, that “the authority here have not imposed upon church or people any one particular forme or order, for the restreijning or limiting them in the exercise of their devotions towards God,” and their reference to “the great freedome” in religious matters, is startling in its distortion of the truth, in view of the laws then on their statute-books, and of their consistent course of persecution, from the Brownes in 1628 to the last Quaker hung in 1660. In response to another request of the English government, at this very time, they flatly denied permission to any law-abiding citizen to use his prayer-book, on the ground that “it will disturbe our peace in our present enjoyments.” Referring to the Navigation Acts, they could make no better defense than to say that they were not conscious that they had “greatly violated the same,” and that any laws apparently against them had been repealed.[[823]]

It is needless to follow the details of the controversy, which culminated in the struggle over the question of appeals. These had already been heard in Rhode Island by the Commissioners, under the authority of somewhat conflicting clauses in their instructions and commissions; and it was now undertaken to hear two in Boston. One of them concerned an individual, who seems to have been of a worthless sort, and the other, a violation of the Navigation Act. The General Court refused to allow the proceedings, claimed a breach of the charter, and officially warned all citizens not to attend the hearings, which were never held, as the Commissioners had no force to uphold their authority, even had they cared to employ it.[[824]] Soon after this, the Commission left Boston, both the colony and the King's officers making long reports to the government in England.[[825]]