Vane lost his position to the elder John Winthrop in the 1637 election. The contentious election was marked by a sharp disagreement over the treatment of John Wheelwright, another Hutchinson supporter. Winthrop won in part because the location of the vote was moved to Cambridge, reducing the power of Vane's Boston support. In the aftermath of the election Anne Hutchinson was put on trial, and eventually banished from the colony. Many of her followers seriously considered leaving after the election. At the urging of Roger Williams, some of these people, including Hutchinson, founded the settlement of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island in the Narragansett Bay (later named Rhode Island and joined to Providence to form the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations). Vane decided to return to England, apparently with the notion that he would acquire a royal governorship to trump the colonial administration. Before his departure, he published "A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration", a response to Winthrop's defence of the Act of Exclusion; this act was passed after the election to restrict the immigration of people with views not conforming to the colony's religious orthodoxy.