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 ''chusetts Hist. Coll''. iii.; cf. , English in America, i. 161). The special charges brought against Winslow were that he, not being in holy orders but a mere layman, had taught publicly in church and had celebrated marriages. He admitted his occupation of the pulpit ‘for the edification of the brethren,’ but pleaded that he had solemnised marriages only as a civil contract in his capacity as a magistrate, and in the absence of a licensed minister. For these offences he was in July committed by Laud's order to the Fleet prison. Thence in November he addressed a petition to the privy council (Cal. State Papers, Colonial, 1574–1660, p. 157), which procured his release and his consequent return to New Plymouth.

Winslow was chosen governor again for 1636 and also for 1644, and two years later the colony of Massachusetts prevailed upon him to return to England in their behalf to answer some not ill-founded complaints of cruelty, raised by Samuel Gorton and others, and to defend them against the charges of religious intolerance and persecuting tendency by which they were assailed (Life and Letters of John Winthrop, 1867, ii. 347). His Plymouth associates, including Bradford, appear to have disapproved of his mission (, Hist. 1650, ad fin.;, Pilgrim Republic, 1888, chap. lv.). He sailed from Boston in October 1646, and was not destined again to revisit the settlement which he had made in Marshfield, and to which he had given the name of Careswell, after the ancestral seat of the Vanes. Upon arriving in London he lost no time in issuing a harsh answer to the party of toleration in ‘Hypocrisie Unmasked: by a True Relation of the Proceedings of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts against Samuel Gorton, a notorious Disturber of the Peace.’ Appended to this was a chapter entitled ‘A Brief Narration of the True Grounds or Cause of the First Plantation of New England,’ which supplied the first connected account in print of the preparations in Leyden for removal to America, and incidentally preserved the substance of John Robinson's farewell address to the departing portion of his flock. The whole tract was reissued without change in 1649 as ‘The Danger of tolerating Levellers in a Civill State’ (the supplementary chapter was reprinted in Young's ‘Chronicles of the Pilgrims,’ 1841). John Child and William Vassall [see under ], whose ideas of toleration were considerably in advance of his time, assailed Winslow's championship of New England religious policy in ‘New England's Jonas cast up at London’ (1647), and Winslow, who held the pen of an able controversialist, retorted in his pungent ‘New England's Salamander’ (1647, pp. 29, 8vo).

In the meantime Winslow had attended several meetings of the commissioners for the affairs of New England. In answer to the charge that the Massachusetts rulers were intolerant or arbitrary, he had been specially instructed to say that they had four or five hundred express laws as near the laws of England as may be, and when they had no law they judged by the word of God; while in reference to the offending scheme for a general government for New England, he was to assert for that colony the autonomous rights given them by their charter (cf., Journal, ed. Savage, ii. 306). The Earl of Warwick and Sir Henry Vane, both friends of New England, were now on the committee, and Winslow appears to have made a very favourable impression both for his clients and for himself; this was confirmed by the active assistance he gave to the puritan movement for propagating the gospel in New England. A charter of incorporation for a society with this object bears date 27 July 1649, and Winslow dedicated to the parliament in this same year a little tract called ‘The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians of New England.’ His friend ‘President Steele’ (of the new Gospel Society) wrote to the New England commissioners that Winslow was unwilling to be longer kept from his family, but that his great acquaintance and influence with members of parliament required his longer stay. During his four years' service Massachusetts had paid him only 300l.; in view of his labours for the Indians he now received an additional 100l. But the ‘courtly pilgrim’ found more remunerative employment in England. He was appointed a member of the committee for compounding, and when, in April 1650, the committees were reorganised, he was put upon the joint board of ‘The Committee for Sequestration and Advancement of Money and for compounding with Delinquents’ at a salary of 300l. a year (Cal. Proc. Comm. Advance of Money, 1888, Pref. p. xi). In September 1651 the council ordered a hundred narratives of the battle of Worcester to be delivered to him for transmission to New England (Cal. State Papers, Colonial, 1574–1660, p. 362). During March and April 1652 he was endeavouring, but apparently without complete success, to obtain an exclusive grant for New Plymouth of the whole of the river Kennebec (ib. pp. 376, 378, 379). In July upon his petition a supply of ammuni-