“In 1641 they conspired with the civil authorities of Boston to convert their leading priest into a politician, by appointing him agent to Great Britain. The plot succeeded,
and Mr. Hugh Peters assumed his agency under colour of petitioning for some abatement of customs and excise; but his real commission was to foment the civil discontents, wars, and jars then prevailing between the King and the Parliament. He did not see into the motives of these people; and he felt a strong inclination to chastise the Court and the Bishop of London, who had turned him out of the church for his fanatical conduct.
“On Mr. Peters’s arrival in London, the Parliament took him into their service. The Earls of Warwick and of Essex were also his patrons. In 1644 the Parliament gave him Archbishop Laud’s library, and soon afterwards made him head of the Archbishop’s court, and gave him the estate and palace at Lambeth; all which he kept till the Restoration.
“The people of Boston conducted themselves with ingratitude and neglect towards Mr. Peters; they never paid him any part of the stipend attached to his office, although he discharged the duties of it during twenty years, and obtained from the Protector a charter for the Society for propagating the Gospel in New England, which, by contributions raised in Great Britain, has supported all the missionaries among the Indians to the present time.
“An occurrence at the melancholy close of Mr. Peters’s life evinces his firmness of mind and self-possession.
“The sentences of our law, now barbarous in words alone, were in those days executed with horrors so savage, as to forbid description. The scenes of cruelty were repeated one after the other; and in his own case Mr. Peters, either from design or accident, remained to witness on others the inflictions which awaited himself. At that moment an officer whose heart must have been more obdurate than the hardest flint, or than Marperian rock, inquired of him how he liked the proceeding, and received for answer, ‘Friend, thou doest ill to distress a dying man!’”
St. Mabyn measures 3,846 statute acres.
| £. | s. | d. | |
| Annual value of the Real Property, as returned to Parliament in 1815 | 6051 | 0 | 0 |
| Poor Rate in 1831 | 383 | 1 | 0 |
| Population,— | |||
| in 1801, 475 | in 1811, 560 | in 1821, 715 | in 1831, 793 |