Note 659 — Chapter XI · THE DEFEAT OF THE THEOCRACY

Palfrey's far-fetched theory, that the whole affair was engineered by Clark in order to acquire a grievance to be used in England later, has no foundation whatever in any contemporary conjecture, and in any case would not alter in the slightest the facts so far as Massachusetts is concerned. It is of interest only as showing to what lengths that colony's clerical historians have gone in their efforts to defend in New England everything which they condemn in old England, and to treat the Massachusetts settlers as saints instead of very human Englishmen of the seventeenth century. Palfrey, History, vol. II, pp. 350, 354.