The annexed autograph is from a MS. in Harvard College library [5325.23], entitled: A Memorial offered to the General Assembly of his Majesties Colony of Connecticut hold in Hartford, May ye 10th, 1716, By Gurdon Saltonstall, Esq., one of the Trustees in Trust of the Mohegan Fields in the Township of New London, for the use of Cesar, Sachem of Mohegan & his Indians, upon the occasion of ye sd Cesar’s Complaint to ye sd Assembly of wrong done him and his Indians in and upon the sd Fields.
It was during Dudley’s time that the emission of paper money had begun to have a portentous aspect. These financial hazards and disputes, as turning people’s thoughts from old issues, had the effect to soften some of the asperities of Dudley’s closing years of service.[217] He ceased to wrangle for a salary, and omitted to reject Elisha Cooke when again returned by the House in 1715 as a member of the council.[218] Massachusetts had grown much more slowly than her neighbors, and five or six thousand of her youth had fallen in the wars. This all meant a great burden upon the survivors, and in this struggle for existence there was no comforting feeling for Dudley that he had helped them in their trials. The puritan class was hardly more content. Sewall’s diary shows the constant tribulation of his representative spirit: sorrowed at one time by the rumor of a play in the council chamber; provoked again on the queen’s birthday at the mocking of his efforts to check the drinking of healths with which it was celebrated on Saturday night; and thankful, as he confessed again, that he heard not the salutes on the Lord’s Day, which were paid to Nicholson when he finally set sail for England.
It was the 15th of September (1714) when news came of the death of Queen Anne. A sloop sent from England with orders was wrecked on Cohasset rocks, and the government was left in ignorance for the time being of the course which had been marked out for it. Dudley’s commission legally expired six months after the sovereign’s demise, if nothing should be done to prolong it. As the time came near, a committee of the council approached him to provide for the entrance of the “Devolution government,” as Sewall termed the executive functions, which then under the charter devolved on the council. Dudley met the issue with characteristic unbending; and some of his appointees knew their places well enough to reject the council’s renewal of their commission, being still satisfied with Dudley’s, as they professed. His son Paul besought the ministers to pray for his father as still the chief executive, and intrigued to prevent the proclamation of the council for a fast being read in the pulpits. In March what purported to be a copy of an order for his reinstatement reached Dudley by way of New York. It was quite sufficient; and with an escort of four troops of horse clattering over Boston neck, he hurried (March 21, 1715) to the town house, where he displayed and proclaimed his new commission. His further lease of power, however, was not a long one.
WILLIAM DUMMER.
After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston.
There were new times at the English court when the German George I. ruled England; when he gave his ugly Killmansegge and Schulenberg places among the English peeresses, and the new Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendall simpered in their uncouth English. The Whig lords must now bend their gouty knees, and set forth in poor German or convenient—perhaps inconvenient—Latin what the interests of distant New England required. We may well suspect that this German dullard knew little and cared less when it was explained to him that the opposing factions of the private and public bank in his American province of Massachusetts Bay were each manœuvring for a governor of their stripe. We may well wonder if he was foolish enough to read the address of the ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, or the address even of the General Court, which came to him a little later. His advisers might have rejoiced that Increase Mather, pleading his age, had been excused from becoming the bearer of these messages, or of that of the ministers, at least.[219]
