Tea Sets and Tyranny. Steven C. Bullock

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СКАЧАТЬ the son of the first of these monarchs and came to America under the second. Nicholson continued to believe royal control was under threat in America. As Blair noted, the governor viewed the continent as “haughty, tainted with republican notions & principles, uneasy under every Governm’t, & … ready to shake off their obedience to England.”²⁹

      Blair may have exaggerated Nicholson’s position, but only slightly. The governor protested to the Board of Trade that accepting his opponents’ objections to his militia policy would lead to the “mere Skeleton of a [royal] Government.” If Virginians controlled their own military, they could use it “in the same manner as the Parliament did to King Charles the First” in the 1640s, first overthrowing and then executing him.³⁰ Nicholson, of course, believed Blair the key figure in these plans. The minister had “hoped to [create] an Army” of followers by “sound[ing] the Trumpett of Rebellion [and] Sedition.”³¹

      These concerns placed Nicholson in the mainstream of contemporary conservative thinking. The restoration of monarchy and established church in 1660, when Nicholson was only five years old, led to a flood of warnings from Tories and church leaders about the dangers of disobedience and rebellion. Pamphleteers and preachers alike insisted on the divine authority of both monarchy and church. Restraints on the king’s power could be dangerous, they warned, especially since even the people’s liberty originated in royal generosity.³²

      Nicholson’s political views affected his manner as well as his message. King James I, nearly a century earlier, had given similar advice about anger to his son. “Where ye finde a notable injurie,” he counseled, “spare not to give course to the torrents of your wrath.” Quoting a Biblical proverb, he noted that “The wrath of a King, is like to the roaring of a Lyon.” Although the ruler should be humble, that humility should not stand in the way of “high indignation” at evil doers. Kings (and by extensions other rulers) were like gods and fathers in their displays of righteous wrath and discipline.³³ Machiavelli’s The Prince had similarly confronted the issue earlier in its famous discussion of “whether it is better to be loved or feared.” Although being hated is always bad, he counseled, being feared was more productive than either love or hatred: “men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared … fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”³⁴ Nicholson’s angry looks and terrifying rages sought the same hold on his subordinates, the same sense of irresistible power. As he told a priest who had criticized him, “You are now insolent and proud, but I’ll humble you & bring down your haughtiness.”³⁵

       In the Queen’s Name

      “If I were given to astrology,” Nicholson told the Board of Trade in March 1705, “I should fancy” that something new was happening. Perhaps, he suggested, “some Malignant Constellations were in opposition to the Governing Planets in these parts of our Hemisphere.” Such an event would explain why there have been “Complaints against most if not all the Governors” in America in recent years.³⁶

      Nicholson’s comment marked one of the few attempts at humor in a long (and often painful) plea that he be allowed to remain in office. The astrological reference allowed him to suggest, without explicitly criticizing his superiors, that he needed to be judged within a larger context of his peers. Although the governor’s unusually hot temper and strongly authoritarian views fueled the conflict between the governor and his opponents, both the origins and results of this harshness went beyond both Nicholson and Virginia. The decades of the 1690s and 1700s were particularly difficult times for English colonial governors. Along with increasing demands from imperial authorities, governors in Virginia and a number of other places also had to deal with resistance from increasingly powerful colonial leaders who were themselves seeking more say in their government. Virginia’s elites over the previous decades had developed resources that allowed them to resist even Nicholson’s relentless attempts to bully them into submission. The result was a dysfunctional situation in which Nicholson’s angry demands for obedience merely stoked further resistance—a vicious cycle of suspicions and cross-purposes that might well have seemed, in Nicholson’s metaphor, like constellations and planets “in opposition.”

      Nicholson expressed his own view of his role in his constant references to monarchical authority. He would send messages stating: “his excellency commands you in the queen’s name to come to him immediately.” Owners of boats or horses needed for the governor’s use were approached in the same way. “Whatsoever other command he gives, though no manner of way relating to the government,” Blair complained, “they are all given in the queen’s name.”³⁷

      The phrase was particularly galling because Nicholson’s orders often seemed less the monarch’s wishes than the governor’s whim. One man was summoned from forty miles away only to be kept waiting for days. Horses were impressed for the use of visitors and their servants when they could easily have been hired. Surely, Blair argued, the governor should reserve the queen’s name for higher purposes, rather than rendering it “cheap and contemptible” by using it on “frivolous” occasions.³⁸

      Nicholson rejected the distinction. All his actions, he believed, sought to fulfill his responsibility representing the monarch he almost invariably referred to as “most sacred.” He told the Board of Trade as he left Maryland in 1698 that he had done nothing unusual or particularly praiseworthy. It was simply “my bounden Duty to his Majesty: and [I] am heartily sorry that I have not been able to doe more.” The same devotion had led Nicholson’s commander in the 1680s to employ him in carrying urgent messages on the long trip from Northern Africa to London.³⁹

      The governor’s fervor was especially useful in a time of revolutionary change. The American colonies had been effectively autonomous before 1670. American leaders and English officials communicated only irregularly, and the central government exerted power only intermittently. After 1670, however, in what one historian has called “the end of American independence,” the English government under King Charles II and his brother, the future James II, sought further control. James, who had ruled without a legislature in New York, eventually extended this lack of representation to the Dominion of New England that brought together all the northeastern colonies. As part of the Dominion’s military and political leadership, Nicholson served in the vanguard of this change.

      Although the young officer left America in the wake of the 1688 Glorious Revolution that removed James II, Nicholson’s absence, unlike his royal master’s, was only temporary. In 1690 the new monarchs appointed Nicholson lieutenant governor of Virginia, operating as governor in all but name. The move signaled clearly that the goal of reshaping the colonies would not end with James’s departure. William and Mary rejected their predecessors’ radical remodeling of governments, allowing, for example, the northern colonies to resume their separate governments. But the new monarchs also expected more from the colonies and their governors than ever before. The efforts to regulate trade and to expand military and fiscal capacities included not just England, but its American colonies as well. Charles and James had attempted to bring the colonies to heel; William and Mary sought to make them active participants.⁴⁰

      Not surprisingly Nicholson threw himself into meeting these new expectations. He reported to the Board of Trade regularly and at length. A July 1699 letter to that body included not just the requisite report on politics and the economy, but both a broad analysis of Virginia’s history and extended thoughts about how to arrange the files in the province’s offices. In support, he attached fifty-four additional documents. He provided sixty in his June 1700 letter, sent from aboard a ship he had personally helped retake from pirates.⁴¹ “We have not from any Governour So Exact accounts as from you,” an impressed member of the Board of Trade had marveled several months before.⁴² Even Blair had to admire this dedication. He later testified that he had hesitated to oppose the governor because of his “vigor & dilligence in stirring about & driving on the business of his Government.”⁴³

      Nicholson СКАЧАТЬ