Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/262

 step—gave bloody proof that the Loyalists were really in for trouble, he abandoned his splendid seat and fled like a frightened rabbit. Nothing short of London was safe enough for him. But even under the immediate protection of his sovereign he could not escape the King of Terrors; and in six short years, ere the Revolution was fairly over, good dinners and costly wines were for him no more.

While his breath remained to him, Isaac Royall always strenuously asserted that he was no Tory refugee who had shaken off the dust of a rebellious province, but a good citizen of “The Bay,” temporarily detained in England on business! That attitude he maintained even in his will, wherein he left a number of charitable and educational bequests for the benefit of his old friends and neighbors. Prominent among them was a gift of two thousand acres of his lands in Granby and Royalston, Massachusetts, to Harvard College, “to be appropriated towards the endowing a Professor of Laws in said Colledge, or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, which ever the said Overseers and Corporation shall judge to be best for the benefit of said Colledge.”

More than thirty years elapsed before those country