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The accession of William and Mary delivered a mortal blow to the Stuarts’ absolutist ambitions and affirmed the force of parliamentary sovereignty and English liberties over the claims of hereditary succession. Yet few in Parliament tolerated the philosophical abstractions and leveling sentiments of radical Whigs, such as the notion that all Englishmen possessed a natural right to found their political order anew. Parliamentarians justified the Glorious Revolution with claims to ancient rights and customs that gave the 1688 settlement a Janus face: Englishmen looked to an immemorial past and the conservation of ancient liberties to legitimate a novel constitutional monarchy and radical departure in the nation’s political life.1 The security of English rights henceforth depended on the trust vested in the king and Parliament and on the constitution’s capacity to check and balance the authority and interests of royalty, nobility, and the commons. Above all it rested on obedience to the rule of law. As the eighteenth-century oracle of Whig political thought, Edward Blackstone, had it, the constitution required “that the community should guard the rights of each individual member, and that . . . each individual should submit to the laws of the community . . . [for] without which submission of all it was impossible that protection be certainly extended to any.”2 The metropolitan mood and the pressure of a new war with France guided the revision of imperial government in post-Leislerian New York City. In March 1691, Henry Sloughter assumed command of the colony for the crown, assembled an advisory council, and arranged elections for a provincial assembly.3 The arrival of Benjamin Fletcher the following year signaled a return to gubernatorial graft and cronyism: “To recount all his [Fletcher’s] arts of squeezing money both out of the publick and private purses,” the Chapter 3 “Diverse necessaries and conveniences work found and provided”: Trading in a Craft Economy, 1691–1730 Leislerian Peter Delanoy averred,“would make a volume.” The Tory governor took “a particular delight in having presents made to him declaring [that] he looks upon ’em as marks of their esteem of him, and he keeps a catalogue of the persons who show that good manners, as men most worthy of his favor.” The men Fletcher favored most were the anglicized Dutch, English, and French anti-Leislerian merchants, such as the Stephen van Cortlandt, Frederick Philipse, Nicholas Bayard, and Lewis Morris, who received lavish grants of millions of acres of land in return for their loyalty and service as counselors and business partners.4 Fletcher’s administration was disturbed by two controversies that exhibited the themes of conservative restoration and radical departure that informed metropolitan political debates: the campaign to restore the city’s flour-bolting monopoly (which the Leislerians had suspended) and the establishment of the Anglican Church in New York. Following the return of royal rule, the municipal government appealed for the restoration of the bolting monopoly in petitions bristling with justifications that drew upon precedents dating back to the Dutch era, city charters and laws issued since the English conquest, and evidence of urban prosperity gleaned from shipping and tax records.5 The mayor and aldermen identified the city’s commercial fortunes with the provincial common good and asserted what they believed to be a customary—and, ergo, morally justifiable and legally enforceable— right to the bolting monopoly. Unfortunately, the defenders of the city’s “antient rights and privileges” did not reckon with the lobbying of the manorial landlords who had been favored by Fletcher’s largesse and who now secured the governor’s support for a campaign against the monopoly. As merchants and crop shippers, Van Cortlandt, Philipse, and others had bene- fited from urban privileges; as landowners and crop growers, they joined established upriver families such as the Schuylers and Livingstons in denouncing the bolting monopoly as “a grievance and a violation of the people’s property.”6 In return for Fletcher’s support against the bolting monopoly, the upriver landowners fell into line behind the governor’s establishment of the Anglican Church under the 1692 Ministry Act. When sections of the Assembly objected to the governor’s plans to appropriate public funds for the construction of an Anglican church, Fletcher denounced his critics, invoking long-standing rights and privileges: “There are none of you but are big with the privileges of Englishmen and Magna Charta which is your right” growled the governor, but “the same law doth provide for the Religion of the Church...

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