The Glorious Revolution in America

14 The Glorious Revolution in New York and Maryland

14 The Glorious Revolution in New York and Maryland To Lieutenant Governor Nicholson in New York the overthrow of Andros at Boston could not have come at a worse time. But probably for any royal governor, no time was favorable for being on the wrong side of rebellion. By April 26, 1689, news of the goings on at Boston had reached New York, and Nicholson read a copy of the Massachusetts Declaration to his handful of councillors on that day. All told, Andros had appointed eight New Yorkers to his Dominion council in 1688, but he had taken several of them to Massachusetts with him, and they, of course, were imprisoned along with him in April, while Brockholls, the army officer and a Catholic, was seized by the soldiers at Pemaquid in Maine. Two other resident councillors in New York begged off from serving late in May, leaving only Nicholas Bayard, Stephen Van Cortlandt, and Frederick Philips available to do business in an emergency, and one occurred shortly.1 1. CSPCoL, 1688-1692, Addenda, #2734; Hall, Leder, and Kammen, eds., The Glorious Revolution in America, p. 107. 251 252 The GloriousRevolutionin America Reaction to the alarming news from Boston and Connecticut took several forms in New York. It began in early May in Suffolk County on the eastern half of Long Island where one might expect it. For years the settlers there had been at odds with the government and its restrictions upon their trade; they had hoped to separate themselves from the Duke's colony and join their Congregational friends in Connecticut, where a good many of them had originated, a wholly improbable dream given Governor Dongan's schemes for annexing Connecticut and New York's inability to pay its own way as it was. Boston's Declaration , announcing the revolt and imprisonment of Andros, startled Suffolk County people into a bold declaration of their own.They reviewed their longstanding grievances under arbitrary government and, citing the revolution in England and the turnover at Boston, agreed that duty to God dictated a securing of the colony's forts at New York and Albany against a "forraign ennemy" and placing them into hands they could trust. Besides demanding a return of tax money lately extracted from them, they encouraged the seizure of all enemies to public peace and prosperity and the "fundamental laws of our English nation." 2 As they had led the struggle for a charter in 1683to guarantee their English liberties, Long Islanders led the way again in 1689to protect the colony from a government which denied these liberties, particularly when both mother country and mother colony had set the pattern of revolt. The New England disease spread quickly. The council might have kept the peace, it claimed, had not the "seed of sedition . . . blazed from thence to some outward skirts of this province." Setauket on Long Island had "shoocke" off the government by the middle of May, and a little later the council was alarmed by "uprores" in all parts of the colony, provoked, the members claimed, by the libelous reports from Boston. Actually,Francis Nicholson and his skeleton council were in no position to keep the peace, once New England had overthrown the Dominion. They had sat on the "strange" news of William's invasion of England, first heard by way of Philadelphia, since as long ago as early March in order to avoid tumult. Despite their government's silence, the colonists learned it by rumor and then fact from other colonies. Nicholson's source of official information had been choked off, first by Increase Mather's efforts in London and then by Andros' imprisonment at Boston. As April turned into May the council found itself more and more isolated from New York colonists, who under2 . C.O. 5/1081/3; CSPCoL, 1688-1692, #104. For an uprising among the Queen's County militia about this time, see C.O. 5/1081/3A; Hall, Leder, and Kammen, eds., Glo. Rev. in Am., pp. 103-4; Jerome R. Reich, Leisler's Rebellion, A Study of Democracy in New York, 1664-1720 (Chicago, 1953), p. 56 and n. 10. The Glorious Revolution in New York and Maryland 253 standably suspected that Nicholson and his friends deliberately suppressed the news owing to loyalty to James.3 The council's control grew more and more tenuous for a variety of reasons. While the local and specific causes of...