Sword drawn, trumpet sounding

What happened

Edward Cranfield arrived in October 1682 as New Hampshire's first royal governor and set about ruling by decree. He dissolved the Assembly, imposed taxes on his own authority, and pressed Robert Mason's claim to quitrents on the settlers' land. Edward Gove, a prosperous landowner and Assembly deputy from Hampton, decided the answer was rebellion. He told anyone who would listen that the governor's commission was void and that his own sword was drawn and would stay drawn "till he knew who should hold the government." On 27 January 1683 he rode to Exeter, gathered about a dozen mounted men, most of them young, armed with swords, pistols and guns, and came back into Hampton at their head with a trumpet sounding. The leading men he had called on stayed home. The Hampton militia seized the whole party, and only the trumpeter got away. Gove was tried for high treason in the first days of February, sentenced to a traitor's death, and shipped across the ocean to the Tower of London. Rothbard calls the rising premature: Gove had moved before the colony was ready to move with him. But the resistance did not stop with his arrest. The people refused Cranfield's taxes, nobody would buy the land he seized, and in the end the governor was broken and gone (CiL, pp. 353-356). James II pardoned Gove in 1685 and set him free.