14 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
British and locked up in the City Hall at New York, 
he tried to mend his fortunes by giving treasonable aid 
to the enemy, and in an elaborate paper he unfolded 
what seemed to him the best plan for overthrowing 
the Americans. General Howe’s secretary, Sir Henry 
Strachey, carried this paper home to England, with 
other papers, and stowed them all away in the library 
of his country house in Somerset. There, after a 
slumber of more than eighty years, Lee’s treasonable 
paper was found, and it became necessary to rewrite 
nearly two years of our military history. Still more 
curious was the career of the manuscript “ History of 
Plymouth,” by William Bradford, one of the first gov- 
ernors of the colony. This precious manuscript was 
used and quoted by several New England writers, and 
came into the possession of the Rev. Thomas Prince, 
pastor of the Old South Church, who died in 1758. 
This learned antiquarian kept his books in a little 
room in the steeple, which he used as a study, and 
bequeathed them to the church.’ After the British 
troops evacuated Boston in 1779, it was presently 
found that the Bradford MS. had vanished. Perhaps 
some officer had read it with interest and confiscated 
it to his own uses. At all events, it turned up in 1853 
in the Bishop of London’s palace at Fulham, and it 
has since been published, as the very corner-stone of 
New England history. A fragment of the same Goy- 
ernor Bradford’s letter-book was found in a grocer shop 
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was published in 1794. 
This reminds one of the first folio of the Spanish his- 
torian Oviedo, printed in 1526. Of this valuable book 
only two copies are known to be in existence, and one 
1 Hill’s “History of the Old South Church,” II., p. 54. 
