After hearing these arguments, the Committee postponed making any report until a future day. 141 A year later the Lord President, being pressed by the parties to give judgment, summoned the Master of the Rolls and the Speaker of the House to attend at the Cockpit to assist in the determination, but it was not until December 19,1772, that the Committee reported, advising affirmance of the judgment of the 1743 commissioners. 142 The Order in Council followed on January 15, 1773. 143 Thus, sixty-nine years after the date of the issuance of the first commission the cause came to a definitive termination. This case affords an extreme example of the difficulties faced in enforcing an unpopular adjudication against a colony enjoying quasi-sovereignty. Yet the cause is distinguishable in its difficulties in that one party, the Mohegans, although juristically regarded as sovereign, did not enjoy de facto sovereignty. For true perspective on the operation of the royal commission plus appeal as an instrumentality of imperial control let us examine the several controversies between equally "sovereign" colonies. THE MASSACHUSETTS-NEW HAMPSHIRE BOUNDARY DISPUTE While the Connecticut-Mohegan Indians controversy was running its prolonged course, the Privy Council resorted to use of the commission and appeal in settling a boundary dispute between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. 144 In the original charter to the Massachusetts Bay colony the northern boundary was set at "three English myles to the northward of the saide river called Monomack, alias Merrymack, or to the northward of any and every parte thereof." 145 It had been adjudged by the King in Council in July, 1677, that the northern boundary therefore extended parallel to the Merrimac River at a distance three miles to the north and at that river's source became an imaginary line to the South Sea. 146 As a result, when the 1691 Massachusetts charter was drawn, it did not include the latter portion of the boundary description 147 This omission presented a question of interpretation as to whether are well understood, and it is hoped it will not be so here. If it is, actum est with regard to all American Titles. This is one reason among innumerable others why the cognizance of these matters should not be taken here, but that they should be left to their proper Forum, the Courts of Law in America, where all these Circumstances are fully known and understood (MS Conn. Archives, 2 Indians, #277 g, h). 141 PC 2/115/264. 142 PC 2/116/340-41, 513; 3 Trumbull MSS, 89, 102 b, in a. 143 PC 2/117/10. 144 The history of the cause is related with variant completeness and accuracy in Fry, New Hampshire As a Royal Province, 241-64; S. A. Green, The Boundary Line Between Massachusetts and New Hampshire (1894); and by the same author, The Northern Boundary of Massachusetts in lis Relations to New Hampshire, 7 Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc. (N.S.), 11-32; 2 Belknap, History of New Hampshire, 101-73; 2 Hutchinson, Hist. Col. and Prov. Mass. Bay, 290—96. 145 3 Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 1847. 146 19 N.H. State Papers, 303-7. 147 3 Thorpe, op. cit., 1876.