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revenue, and placing it in the hands of the receivergeneral, at the mercy of the governor's warrant. It passed several resolves against Leisler, especially declaring his conduct at the fort an act of rebellion ; and Sloughter, in a time of excitement, assented to the vote of the council, that Leisler and Milborne should be executed. The house, according to their opinion given, did approve of what his excellency and council had done."

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Accordingly, on the next day, amidst a drenching rain, Leisler, parting from his wife Alice, and his numerous family, was, with his son-in-law, Milborne, led to the gallows. Both acknowledged the errors which they had committed" through ignorance and jealous fear, through rashness and passion, through misinformation and misconstruction;" in other respects they asserted their innocence, which their blameless private lives confirmed. "Weep not for us, who are departing to our God,"-these were Leisler's words to his oppressed friends,-" but weep for yourselves, that remain behind in misery and vexation ;” adding, as the handkerchief was bound round his face, I hope these eyes shall see our Lord Jesus in heaven." Milborne exclaimed, "I die for the king and queen, and the Protestant religion, in which I was born and bred. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

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1692.

The appeal to the king, which had not been permitted during their lives, was made by Leisler's son; and, though the committee of lords of trade reported that the forms of law had not been broken, the estates of "the deceased" were restored to their families. Dissatisfied

with this imperfect redress, the friends of Leisler per1695. severed till an act of parliament, strenuously but vainly opposed by Dudley, reversed the attainder.

Thus fell Leisler and Milborne, victims to party spirit. The event struck deep into the public mind. Long afterwards, their friends, whom a royalist of that day described as "the meaner sort of the inhabitants," and who were distinguished always by their zeal for popular power, for toleration, for opposition to the doctrine of legitimacy, formed a powerful, and ultimately a successful party. The rashness and incompetency of Leisler were forgotten in sympathy for the judicial murder by which he fell; and the principles which he upheld, though his opponents might rail at equality of suffrage, and demand for the man

of wealth as many votes as he held estates, necessarily became the principles of the colony.

There existed in the province no party which would 1691. sacrifice colonial freedom. Even the legislature, composed of the deadly enemies of Leisler, asserted the right to a representative government, and to English liberties, to be inherent in the people, and not a consequence of the royal favour. This act received the veto of King William. "No tax whatever shall be levied on his majestie's subjects in the province, or on their estates, on any pretence whatsoever, but by the act and consent of the representatives of the people in general assembly convened:"-" supreme legislative power belongs to the governor and council, and to the people by their representatives:"-such was the voice of the most royalist assem

bly that could ever be convened in New York. What 1697. though the enactment was annulled by the English sovereign? The spirit lived, and was openly displayed. It was soon said by a royal governor to the mixed races of legislators in the province, "There are none of you but what are big with the privileges of Englishmen and Magna Charta."

In the administration of the covetous and passion1692. ate Fletcher, a man of great mobility and feeble judgment, the people of New York were soon disciplined into more decided resistance. As to territory, the old hope of extending from Connecticut River to Delaware Bay revived; and, for the security of the central province, the command of the militia of New Jersey and Connecticut was, by a royal commission, conferred on Fletcher.

An address was also sent to the king, representing the great cost of defending the frontiers, and requesting that the neighbouring colonies might be compelled to contribute to the protection of Albany. In the necessity of common defence lay the root of the parliamentary attempt at taxation; for it created the desire of a central will, and this desire looked sometimes to the English monarch as the fountain of sovereignty, sometimes to the idea of a confederacy of the colonies, and at last to the action of parliament. In this age it led only to instructions. All the colonies north of Carolina were directed to furnish quotas for the defence of New York or the attacks on Canada; but the instructions, though urgently renewed, 3 B

1695.

VOL. II.

were never enforced, and were by some colonies openly disregarded.

The

In its relations towards Canada, New York shared the strong passion for conquest which gradually extended to all the colonies. In its internal affairs, bordering on Puritan New England, it is the most northern colony that admitted by enactment the partial establishment of the Anglican Church. The time had passed when religious sects constituted the forms under which political questions were discussed. The Presbyterians had never had dominion in New York, but had originally introduced themselves under compacts with the Dutch government. original settlers from Holland were Calvinists, yet with a church organization far less popular than the system of New England, and having many points of sympathy with the ecclesiastical polity of episcopacy. During the ascendancy of the Dutch, the established authority of their church had often been asserted in an exclusive spirit; when the colony became English, the conquest was made by men devoted to the English throne and the English church, and the influence of churchmen was at once predominant in the council. The idea of toleration was still imperfect in New Netherlands; equality among religious sects was unknown. It is not strange, therefore, that the efforts of Fletcher to privilege the English church were partially successful. The house framed a bill, in which they established certain churches and ministers, reserving also the right of presentation to the vestrymen and churchwardens. The governor interpreted the act by limiting its meaning to the English service, and framed an amendment, giving the right of presentation to the representative of the crown. The assembly asserted it for the people, rejecting the amendment. "Then I must tell you," retorted Fletcher, this seems very unmannerly. There never was an amendment desired by the councilboard but what was rejected. It is a sign of a stubborn ill-temper. I have the power of collating or suspending any minister in my government by their majesties' letters patent; and, whilst I stay in this government, I will take care that neither heresy, schism, or rebellion, be preached among you, nor vice and profanity encouraged. You seem to take the whole power into your hands, and set up for everything."

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The "stubborn temper" of the house was immovable ;

and, two years afterwards, that the act might not be construed too narrowly, it was declared that the vestrymen and churchwardens of the church established in New York might call a dissenting Protestant minister. Not a tenth part of the population of that day adhered to the Episcopal church; the public spirit demanded toleration; and if, on the one hand, the English church succeeded in engrossing the provision made by the ministry acts, on the other, the dissenters were wakened to jealousy, lest the Episcopal party, deriving countenance from England, might nourish a lust for dominion.

The differences were tranquillized in the short administration of the kindlier earl of Bellamont, an Irish peer, with a sound heart and honourable sympathies for popular freedom. He arrived in New York after the peace of Ryswick, with a commission extending to the borders of

Canada, including all the northern British possessions, 1698. except Connecticut and Rhode Island. In New York, Lord Bellamont, who had served on the committee of parliament to inquire into the trials of Leisler and Milborne, was indifferent to the little oligarchy of the royal council, of which he reproved the vices and resisted the selfishness. The memory of the wrongs of Leisler was revived; and the assembly, by an appropriation of its own in favour of his family, confirmed the judgment of the English parliament.

The enforcement of the acts of trade, which had been violated by the connivance of men appointed to execute them; the suppression of piracy, which, as the turbulent offspring of long wars and of the false principles of the commercial systems of that age, infested every sea from America to China,-were the great purposes of Bellamont; yet for both he accomplished little. The acts of trade, despotic in their nature, contradicting the rights of humanity, were evaded everywhere; but in New York, a city, in part, of aliens, owing allegiance to England, without the bonds of common history, kindred, and tongue, they were disregarded without scruple. No voice of conscience declared their violation a moral offence; respect for them was but a calculation of chances. In the attempt to suppress piracy, the prospect of infinite booty to be recovered from pirates, or to be won from the enemies of England, had gained from the king and the Admiralty a commission for William Kidd, and had deluded Bellamont into a

partnership in a private expedition. Failing in his hopes of opulence, Kidd found his way as a pirate to the gallows. In the House of Commons the transaction provoked inquiry, and hardly escaped censure.

On questions of finance, the popularity of Bellamont prevented collision by an honest promise," I will pocket none of the public money myself, nor shall there be any embezzlement by others ;"-and the necessity of the promise is the strongest commentary upon the character of his predecessors. The confiding House of Representatives voted a revenue for six years, and placed it, as before, at the disposition of the governor. His death interrupted the short period of harmony in the colony; and, happily for New York, Lord Cornbury, his successor, had every vice of character necessary to discipline a colony into selfreliance and resistance.

Of the same family with the queen of England; brotherin-law to a king, whose service he had betrayed; the grandson of a prime minister; himself heir to an earldom, -Lord Cornbury, destitute of the virtues of the aristocracy, illustrated the worst form of its arrogance, joined to intellectual imbecility. Of the sagacity of the common mind, of its firmness, he knew nothing; of political power he had no conception, except as it emanates from the self-will of a superior; to him popular rights existed only as a condescension. Educated at Geneva, he yet loved episcopacy, as a religion of state subordinate to executive power. And now, at about forty years of age, with self-will and the pride of rank for his counsellors, without fixed principles, without perception of political truth, he stood among the plebeians of New Jersey and the mixed people of New York as their governor.

The royalists anticipated his arrival with the incense 1702. of flattery; and the hospitality of the colony, which was not yet provoked to defiance, elected a House of Assembly disposed to confide in the integrity of one who had been represented as afriend to Presbyterians. The expenses of his voyage were compensated by a grant of two thousand pounds, and an annual revenue for the public service provided for a period of seven years. In April, 1703, a further grant was made of fifteen hundred pounds to fortify the Narrows, "and for no other use whatever." should Lord Cornbury regard the limitations of a provincial assembly? The money, by his warrant, disappeared

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