Lucius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877, with a genealogical register

[107] spent great estates and many lives, for the planting, peopling, and defending themselves and his Majesty's right therein. The abovesaid royal grant being made not only to the gentlemen named in said letters patent, but also to all such others as they shall admit and make free of their society, making them one body politic by the name of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, and under that name are empowered to make laws and ordinances for the good and welfare of said company and for the government and ordering of the said lands and plantation, and the people that shall inhabit therein, as to them shall seem meet. We further declared that, by the said Governor and Company, the lands petitioned for by Edward Randolph Esq. are granted to Cambridge, then called Newtown, and by the said town have been orderly distributed among their inhabitants, the grants and settlement whereof upon the several proprietors and their names as they stand entered upon the Town Book we do hereby exhibit to your Excellency and the Council. If further evidence be required of the same, or of our possession and improvement thereof, plainly evincing that those lands are neither vacant nor unappropriated, as the petitioner hath most untruly represented, we are ready to present the same, if your Excellency shall please to appoint us a time for so doing.

Your Excellency have not required of us to show or demonstrate that the formalities of the law have been, in all the circumstances thereof, exactly observed, nor do we judge it can rationally be expected of a people circumstanced as the first planters were, by whom those matters were acted in the infancy of these plantations; they not having council in the law to repair unto, nor would the emergencies that then inevitably happened admit thereof; and, as we humbly conceive, nor doth the law of England require the same of a people so circumstanced as they then were. But from the beginning of this plantation [they] have approved themselves loyal to his Majesty, and in all respects have intended the true ends of his Majesty's royal grant, and, through God's great blessing on their endeavors, raised here a plantation that redounds greatly (as is now well known in the world) to the honor and profit of the crown. And his late Majesty, by his letters sent to the Governor and Company, accordingly declared his royal acceptance thereof, with promise of protection in our long and orderly settlement of this Colony, as his Majesty was graciously pleased to term the same: