John Winthrop the Younger was contracted as the colony's first governor, but quickly left Saybrook after failing to enforce its authority over Connecticut's settlers.

With Winthrop gone, Lion Gardiner was left in charge of Saybrook's considerable fort, defending it when it was besieged during the Pequot War.

Fenwick negotiated the colony's sale to Connecticut in 1644 after interest in colonization dried up due to the investors' involvement in the English Civil War.

[2] Dutch efforts to colonize the area were revived in 1632 when New Netherland director Wouter van Twiller sent Hans Eechyus to purchase land at the mouth of the Connecticut River from the local Indians.

[3] In 1631 Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, president of the Council for New England, granted a patent to a group of Puritan noblemen giving them the right to all the land from the Narragansett Bay to the Pacific Ocean.

[7][6] John Winthrop Jr. of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was hired to remove the Dutch from the area and did so with a group of twenty men and two cannons.

When his men found the coat of arms of the Dutch West India Company nailed to a tree, they took it down and replaced it with a shield with a smiling face.

Winthrop was given no instructions on incorporating these settlers into the colonial government and was unwilling to acquiesce to the gentlemen investors' demands of securing large plots of lands for themselves.

[16] As the fort was being constructed, Gardiner's wife Mary gave birth to a son, David, the first European child born in Connecticut.

[21] After selling the colony, Fenwick returned to England where he served as a colonel in the Civil War and became Member of Parliament for Morpeth and later governor of Berwick-upon-Tweed.