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CHAPTER 1

The Rages of Francis Nicholson

Three years later, the conversations seemed more ominous than they had at the time. The first was in December 1698, on the day Francis Nicholson again became governor of Virginia. After six years of what he considered exile in Maryland, he should have been elated. Instead Nicholson was troubled by letters he had received from his English supporters. Each counseled him to be “moderate.” The new governor showed the correspondence to his closest ally, William and Mary College president James Blair. “What the Devil,” Nicholson asked, did “they [mean] to recommend moderacon to him.” Knowing the governor’s hot temper, Blair suggested that they had a point. Nicholson would have none of it. “If I had not hampered th’m in Maryland & kept them under I should never have been able to have governed them,” he told Blair: “G—, I know better to Govern Virginia & Maryland than all y’e Bishops in England.”¹

Blair felt uneasy about the conversation. When the issue came up again six weeks later, he again noted the importance of a civil manner. Nicholson replied that he knew how to deal with discontented assemblies. He could even do without them. When the president refused to back down, Nicholson commanded him “in a great passion” never to speak with him about government again.²

The dispute was surprising. The two men had enjoyed a long and fruitful political partnership. While governing Virginia from 1690 to 1692, Nicholson had helped Blair obtain the charter for what became the College of William and Mary and backed him as its first president. But Nicholson was forced to accept a lesser post as lieutenant governor of Maryland. Even after becoming governor two years later, he still dreamed of returning to Virginia. In 1697, Blair, financed by Nicholson, traveled to London to lobby for his return, a trip that led to Nicholson regaining the post. Even after the arguments that marred the governor’s return, the two remained close allies, working together in such matters as moving the colony’s capital to what became Williamsburg.

Figure 2. James Blair (1705). Blair had this portrait painted in England while he was lobbying to have his former ally Francis Nicholson removed as governor in 1705. Soon to turn fifty, Blair had by then been president of the College of William and Mary for a dozen years. John Hargrave, English, Active 1693–c. 1719, Portrait of James Blair (c. 1655–1743), 4/1705. Gift of Mrs. Mary M. Peachy, 1829.001, Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

As time went on, however, what Blair called “the violence of [Nicholson’s] Governm’t” increased. The governor engaged in “continual roaring & thundering, cursing & swearing, base, abusive, billingsgate Language.” He called the colony’s leaders “dogs, rogues, villains, dastards, cheats, and cowards”; its women “whores, bitches, [and] jades.”³

Nicholson’s rages were so extraordinary, Blair warned a correspondent, that his report would seem incredible to people who had not seen them.⁴ But other witnesses reported similar experiences. His “Huffing and Hectoring” was particularly strong, a local minister noted, after the failure of his attempt to woo the teenaged daughter of a prominent family. Though the governor (then in his mid- forties) had pursued her with poems about his “pretty charming innocent dove,” she finally rejected him. A furious Nicholson threatened “to cut the throats of three men” if she married, the bridegroom, the justice of the peace who issued the license, and the clergyman who performed the ceremony. The affair, he declared in a six-hour tirade, “must end in blood.”⁵

Another observer noted a similarly troubling outburst in 1702, when some naval officers assigned to Virginia were staying in the college building. Pacing the halls with one of the guests in the evening, the governor “flew out into … a Passion.” Shouts and curses echoed through the building. Fearing a repeat of the fire that had broken out two days before, one sea captain left his room so quickly that he forgot to bring his wooden leg. The guests, amazed at Nicholson’s “Folly & Passion,” declared that “the fittest Place for such a Man” was “Bedlam,” the fabled London asylum.⁶ According to one of Nicholson’s friendly correspondents, this judgment was not far from that held by the bishop of London, a major figure in the Anglican church, who suggested that the most plausible excuse the governor could make for his behavior might be a claim of insanity.⁷

About the time of the incident (although not entirely because of it), Blair also began to question the governor’s fitness. The problem, he told London officials later in 1702, was not simply the governor’s “passions,” frightening as they were. Nicholson’s rages cloaked his true intentions, “a maine designe” to take further power. Blair’s frustration grew so intense that he finally embarked on another voyage to London. Once again, he succeeded, convincing the British government to relieve Nicholson of his duties in 1705.⁸

Blair’s assessment of the governor’s purposes is difficult to credit. No further evidence of a secret plan has ever appeared. And Blair himself never raised it again. But Nicholson’s violent behavior was more than unfortunate personal idiosyncrasy. As Blair recognized, it expressed an authoritarian vision long present in European culture that had recently become more insistent in England in the wake of seventeenth-century turmoil. Blair’s resistance to Nicholson, furthermore, was deeply intertwined with another, more recent development, the rise of the ideals of politeness.

Figure 3. The original building of the College of William and Mary. As the caption to this 1705 drawing by a French visitor notes, Francis Nicholson lived in this building as well, a setting that probably did not help the relationship between the governor and college president Blair. Franz Ludwig Michel, “Reisebeschreibung nach Amerika,” Burgerbibliothek Bern, Mss.h.h.X.152, p.

The growth of both these changes in America, however, was not simply an echo of far-off English experiences. Further changes within the colonies both increased Nicholson’s frustrations and made his rages more troubling. America first suffered from a widespread failure of colonial governance in these years, difficulties created by governors and other officials seeking to deal with increased imperial expectations. At the same time, a newly confident group of elites in many colonies sought greater power for themselves and their provinces, often seeing imperial governors and governance as primary impediments to their aspirations. Together these political issues and social changes helped provide some of the most important settings for the development of the politics of politeness in America.

Nicholson’s supporters sometimes claimed that his problematic behavior resulted from his unsuccessful love affair. The governor’s harshness may well have had psychological origins. But examining these fits and their historical contexts provides a broader understanding of his actions. Nicholson’s rages were at once expressions of his views about authority; symptoms of increasing tensions between the empire and elites; and stimulus for emerging Virginia leaders to rethink the connections between power and personal behavior by drawing on the ideals of politeness they found so lacking in Nicholson’s outrageous behavior.

A Terror to Evil Doers

On July 9, 1698, Maryland governor Francis Nicholson faced down one of his most persistent opponents. Gerard Slye had been brought before the governor and his council on charges that he had libeled the governor and plotted against the government. Slye had allied with his stepfather John Coode, a perpetual malcontent who had overthrown the Calvert proprietors almost ten years before and now had set his sights on Nicholson. Slye struck an aggressive tone. With his hands on his hips in what the council minutes considered “a proud Scornful manner,” he informed the governor that he expected to be treated like a gentleman. Slye then sat down across from Nicholson without leave, presenting himself as the governor’s equal. Nicholson disregarded the affront, but could not contain himself when the prisoner addressed him as “Mister” rather than as his “Excellency.” The governor ordered Slye to stand. Did he, the governor demanded, “kn[o]w him to be his most Sacred Majestys Governor of this Province”? Faced to choose between submission and actual rebellion, Slye pulled back, fully acknowledging Nicholson’s authority.⁹

Nicholson’s combative stance served him well. Two days of questioning and browbeating forced the prisoner to admit his attacks on Nicholson. A more formal court prosecution, again overseen by the governor, followed. A weary Slye finally begged Nicholson’s pardon. Whereas before he had sat down with the governor, he now figuratively threw himself at Nicholson’s feet. “Your Excellencys humble Petitioner from the Bottom of his heart is sorry,” he wrote, adding that the governor’s “care prudence diligence & Circumspection may Justly deserve the affections & prayers of your Excellencys long Continuance in the Government.” Presumably prompted by Nicholson, he also included a separate statement that his offenses were not just against the governor but the government as well. Presenting the petition to the council, Nicholson noted that he was happy to see the last admission. Had the crime been against him, “he would have Scorned to have kept him in prison half an hour.” The council expressed concerns about Slye’s sincerity, but Nicholson pronounced himself satisfied. Asking only for bail to ensure Slye’s appearance at trial, he let the prisoner return home. Nicholson’s actions had deftly defused the situation. Slye and Coode did not challenge Maryland’s government for another decade. When Nicholson returned to Virginia later that year, he boasted to a member of the Board of Trade that Maryland was “in profound peace and quietness.”¹⁰

Scholars who have studied the governor’s record often seek to separate his ferocious temper from his faithful devotion to his duty. Nicholson’s unfortunate personal flaws, they suggest, undermined his real abilities as a governor.¹¹ But Nicholson’s loyalty inspired not only his energetic administration, but his extraordinary anger. The strategy that Nicholson used against Slye also drove his rages. Nicholson’s aggressive tone and outrageous fits of passion demanded that subordinates fully recognize and accept his authority. Maintaining respect for government, he held, was not only the central task of governing. It provided the foundation of civilization itself. Nicholson’s anger, like his public persona as a whole, dramatized an authority that he believed brooked no competitors and admitted no questioning.

Examining Nicholson’s outbursts in the context of his career and his views of governing shows that he carefully picked his targets. He never directed his anger at his superiors. Rather than lashing out in blind fury, Nicholson’s anger expressed his faith in the traditional hierarchy of English authority, and in the sacred nature of church and crown.

Nicholson’s extraordinary American career began in early 1687 when he served as captain of a company of troops serving the Dominion of New England, King James II’s attempt to consolidate control over all the northern mainland colonies. The thirty-two-year-old officer had already served in the army for about a decade, in Holland, northern Africa, and England. In his new American post, Nicholson quickly advanced to become deputy governor of New York and the Jerseys (then divided into two colonies). One of the earliest American accounts of his anger comes from this period. A lieutenant who served under him testified in 1689 about the time he was ordered to report to Nicholson’s quarters. The officer, who presumably spoke primarily Dutch, asked his corporal to accompany him. The arrival of the second officer so outraged Nicholson that he threatened to shoot the corporal if he did not leave immediately.¹² Nicholson’s anger could be as long-lived as it was sudden. Even after an unparalleled career that included governorship of four colonies from South Carolina to Canada, rank as general, and even a knighthood, he continued to nurse his grudges against Blair. The former governor (then seventy-two) published a collection of documents in 1727 refuting charges made by the college president some twenty-three years before.¹³

This combination of quick resentment and settled grievances made Nicholson formidable. Not long after the prosecution of Slye, the Maryland legislature objected to the governor’s demeanor. His belligerence in the courtroom, it complained, left jurors “unjustly vexed menaced overawed [and] Deterred.” The legislators admitted Nicholson’s aggressiveness frightened them as well. They “humbly Implore[d]” him that he would “neither Implicitely or Expressly … Menace Deterr or overawe the house or any member thereof from freely debateing.”¹⁴

Maryland legislators, already at odds with Nicholson politically, may have been particularly sensitive to his manner. But other people reported similar fears. The Virginia minister Jonathan Monroe told the colony’s council that he had been riding in the woods in 1704 when the governor appeared and “abused him.” Monroe traveled with him for four miles, fearful that Nicholson might shoot him if he tried to leave.¹⁵ Even the great gentlemen of Virginia’s Council, the proud leaders of the mainland’s wealthiest colony, found Nicholson frightening. “Nobody went near him,” Blair later testified, “but in dread & terour.”¹⁶

Yet Blair was wrong to suggest that Nicholson directed his “rage & fury” at “all sorts of people.” The governor treated his superiors with exquisite caution, proclaiming his loyalty at every turn. “I hope in God,” he wrote in 1697, “I shall never be so great a Rogue as to eat his Ma’tys Bread, & not to the utmost of my power serve him.”¹⁷ Even a request to procure birds for royal gardens led him to issue at least three official orders in two colonies.¹⁸ English officials clearly found such displays of loyalty appealing. Despite numerous complaints, Nicholson’s American career spanned almost forty years.¹⁹

Nicholson expected the same submission to authority from his subordinates that he gave his superiors—and his aggressive demeanor sought to make that expectation clear. Just as Slye needed to know his insolence was unacceptable, so too jurors and legislators needed to realize that they were being watched. Nicholson responded to the discontented Maryland legislators that he only sought to encourage people to do their duty. He asked incredulously whether they “desire to be despotick and [so much] above the Law so as not to be questioned?”²⁰

Nicholson’s response to Slye’s accusation about the governor “Striking people” reveals the hierarchical vision that fed (and, he believed, justified) his anger. Nicholson readily admitted to beating two people. But when Slye raised the case of a “Burroughs,” the governor objected: “What if he had?” Burroughs was “his Servant and his Cook,” therefore his responsibility. The other two cases required more explanation. The first was that of Coode himself, who was not only the leader of the faction supported by his stepson Slye, but a prominent Maryland leader. Yet Coode’s transgression had been substantial. He first arrived drunk at a church service, making a “Disturbance,” and then he “affronted his Excellency in his own house.” Such insolence seemed just cause for physical discipline. Coode himself may have felt the same way. He quickly offered the governor a written apology.²¹ The final incident Nicholson noted suggests even more clearly his goal of upholding authority. While visiting a Captain Snowden, Nicholson observed some of Snowden’s men fighting with swords. Rather than reproving them, Nicholson turned his cane on the captain, the officer responsible for overseeing their behavior.²² The governor later threatened the members of the Virginia council in the same terms, promising that he “would beat them into better Manners.”²³

This lively sense of authority also allowed Nicholson to be generous when his authority was fully accepted. His earlier anger was of a piece with his later magnanimous treatment of Slye after his submission. Nicholson remained popular with many Virginians during both his terms, even after many of the colony’s most prominent leaders turned against him.

Nicholson’s dedication to these larger responsibilities also encouraged his commitment to intellectual and cultural projects. He provided essential support for the new College of William and Mary, the second college chartered in British America. Blair called him “the greatest Encourager … of this Design” in the colony.²⁴ Nicholson’s support of the college continued even after he was moved to Maryland, where he spearheaded the creation of that colony’s first free school. His extensive donations to Church of England ministers and building projects went far beyond his official duties. Virginia’s clergy lined up solidly behind him, even as Blair, the bishop’s official representative in Virginia, sought to have him removed. Ministers in other colonies showed similar support, sending numerous letters to London testifying of Nicholson’s encouragement. A New Jersey minister called him the colonial church’s “nursing Father.” The artist Mark Catesby, engaged in creating a pathbreaking volume describing and picturing American animals, found Nicholson similarly helpful in the 1720s when he arrived in South Carolina. The governor offered an annual pension as long as he held office.²⁵

Like his encouragement of the Anglican Church, Nicholson’s designs for new capital cities in both Virginia and Maryland sought both to strengthen authority and to make plain the structures of power. Nicholson’s early plan for Williamsburg arranged the streets to form a “W,” a visual reminder of the new town’s namesake, King William. In Annapolis, named for William’s sister-in-law and successor, Nicholson placed the capitol, the center of political authority, and the Anglican church, the center of religious authority, on its two highest hills. The city’s other streets were arranged around or radiated from these two centers, representing topographically the significance of what he elsewhere called the “2 inseperables, the Church of Engl’d and monarchie.”²⁶

Nicholson believed such authority, displayed in the streets of the capital (and, he would have said, in the person of the governor), was essential to proper government. When members of the Maryland assembly protested against his treatment of jurors and legislators in 1698, the upper house, clearly representing Nicholson’s position, responded by reminding them that they were responsible for preserving “the pe[a]ce and quiett of the Province.” To do this, the statement explained, government must be, as St. Paul wrote, a “Terror to Evill doers.” Just as jurors should not think that they would go unpunished if they erred, assembly members should not expect “to debate at Random without any reguard to the dignity of his Ma’ty and hon’r of his Governm’t.”²⁷

Although Nicholson himself had scolded the legislators the previous day, he called them in again to accept one of their requests, the need to preserve the House journals: “he looked upon Records,” he told them, “Especially the Records of Supream authority next to the Divine Laws to be sacred.” But he also warned that the survival of government required respect for the governor: “All Rebellions were begun in all Kingdoms and States by scandalizing and makeing odious the p[er]sons in Authority.”²⁸

Like his deep respect for church and monarchy, literally placing them above the people in Annapolis, Nicholson’s concern about uprisings recalled the problems that had plagued England over the past century. Rebels had dethroned (and executed) one king in the 1640s and driven away another in the 1680s. Nicholson began his military career under 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 believed this vigor necessary because royal government in America was so weak. Maryland, which he viewed as “not very well setled either in the Church, Civil, or Military Government,” had been a particular challenge.⁴⁴ But Virginia (although much larger and more established) also required attention. When Nicholson returned in 1698, its government could not pay its expenses from the funds devoted to that purpose. Despite raids on other accounts, the colony had fallen deeply in debt. Five years later Nicholson reported that Virginia had accumulated a surplus of over £30,000, almost twenty times the amount he had paid off.⁴⁵ He boasted in 1705 that he “had more Audits in a Year than any of” his predecessors.⁴⁶

Nicholson showed the same devotion to enforcing trade regulation. Even Edward Randolph, surveyor general of the American customs since the 1670s, was impressed. Despite unbounded scorn for most officials in the colonies, he considered Nicholson “sincere & indefatigable in his Ma’ties service.” The governor’s influence extended beyond Virginia. Besides financing and encouraging Church of England ministers as far north as New York, Nicholson also supported Pennsylvania customs officials struggling against the colony’s notorious inattention to trade rules.⁴⁷

Military preparation received similar attention. Nicholson personally supervised some militia training. Robert Quary, who replaced the deceased Randolph as surveyor general in 1703, judged Virginia’s troops “under far better regulation than any other Governm’t on the Main[land].”⁴⁸ But Nicholson wanted to go further. He created an elite militia force and proposed that the colony sponsor what would have been essentially a professional standing army. When Virginia’s legislature failed to comply with imperial calls for men and money to defend New York from the French and Indians, Nicholson advanced funds from his own pocket.⁴⁹

The governor’s faithfulness seems all the more remarkable in comparison with his counterparts in other colonies. The cautious Nicholson suggested this indirectly through astrological metaphor. Quary was blunter, telling the Board of Trade in 1703 that he had challenged the governor’s opponents to explain the reasons for their virulent attacks: “Hath the Gov’r violated any of the Queens Commands, or Instructions, or acted contrary to them? Hath he omitted any occasion or oppertunity of serving her Majtie or the Interest of the Country?” Quary continued by citing Nicholson’s attention to crown revenues, “acts of Trade,” “illegal trade,” and the militia, certain that even the governor’s enemies could not fault his concern for the empire.⁵⁰

Quary’s vigorous questioning revealed a central difficulty in the case against Nicholson. Lengthy rages and death threats could be terrifying in person, but officials an ocean away found it difficult to believe Nicholson’s behavior posed a serious danger. Unable to identify an outright criminal act, the governor’s opponents compiled long lists of actions they considered “maladministration,” few of which were so far out of bounds that they clearly warranted immediate dismissal.⁵¹ Nicholson was accused, for example, of arbitrarily taking men into custody, opening the mail of suspected enemies, stopping his opponents from going to England, and even listening at windows.

The difficulty for Nicholson’s Virginia opponents was that other governors had acted similarly—and done so in much less defensible ways. While governor of Maryland, Nicholson had himself been taken into custody by his Virginia counterpart, Sir Edmund Andros. Bermuda governor Samuel Day got access to customs officer Randolph’s letters to England by forcing his scribe to surrender the drafts. And Nicholson’s attempts to stop people from traveling to England had never risen to the level of Leeward Islands governor Christopher Codrington. After Codrington discovered that former speaker of the assembly Edward Walrond had written a letter of complaint, the governor threw Walrond into prison, threatened him before the Council, hunted down his son with dogs, and murdered one of his slaves.⁵²

Nor could opponents convincingly argue that Nicholson was driven by self-interest. Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia, completed while Nicholson was still in office, spoke harshly about the governor. But Beverley could not charge him, as he did an earlier governor, with seeking to make “as much [money] as he could, without Respect either to the Laws of the Plantation, or the Dignity of his Office.”⁵³ Other colonies suffered from similarly greedy leaders. Isaac Richier, Bermuda’s second royal governor, jailed the collector of the customs after the official failed to take into account that the ship he was prosecuting for illegal trading had been built by the governor, who had then sold it to a Scottish trader in violation of the Navigation Acts. When the next governor arrived in 1693, he in turn jailed his predecessor in a dispute over salary and perquisites. Richier regained his freedom only after the king had twice ordered his release.⁵⁴

Other governors had difficulty with the military and trade matters that Nicholson handled so diligently. New York’s Benjamin Fletcher had such difficulties asserting control of Connecticut’s militia after he traveled there in October 1693 that he finally threw a naysayer down a flight of stairs.⁵⁵ Massachusetts governor William Phips had attacked the captain of a royal ship earlier that year. After Richard Short reported to Phips that he could not carry out an order, the governor called Short a “Whore,” and beat him with his cane. He continued the attack even after the captain, who had a disabled right arm, tripped on a cannon and lay helpless on the dock.⁵⁶ A few months after the January 1693 incident with Captain Short, Phips also publicly beat the customs collector, Jahleel Brenton, for his action in seizing a ship (the ironically titled Good Luck). Phips only threatened to “drubb” Edward Randolph, the surveyor-general of customs—for once acting in a more restrained way than some other governors, who almost universally hated the rigid and self-righteous official.⁵⁷ Randolph was held for six months by Bostonians during their 1689 uprising against the Dominion. He spent more than seven months in a Bermuda jail a decade later. In between, he was also arrested by the Pennsylvania governor and escaped the same fate in Maryland only by hiding in a swamp.⁵⁸

As Nicholson knew, these difficulties were being carefully watched by imperial officials. Although customs officials like Randolph often proved impervious to criticism, leaders coming under the Board of Trade’s direct control were kept on a tighter leash. The board wrote a scathing letter to Bermuda governor Samuel Day after he jailed Randolph, removing the governor from office soon after he complied.⁵⁹ Phips suffered a similar fate after news of his attacks on royal officials reached England. In the same March 1705 week that Nicholson wrote his extended justifications, the Board of Trade recommended the removal of a Church of England minister in Newfoundland whose angry outburst had helped set off a mutiny in the garrison; wrote a letter to the lieutenant governor of Bermuda ordering him to live in peace with the formerly disrespectful secretary of the colony; and examined eleven affidavits from Barbados accusing the governor of tyranny and thirty-two documents attempting to refute the charge.⁶⁰

Nicholson’s opponents in Virginia, however, could find little comfort in this broader context of new demands and problematic governors. They were facing a man who threatened to destroy their reputations, take away their possessions, and even kill them—who would accept nothing less than complete subordination to the sacred will of the queen. Unfortunately, Nicholson understood as little of the larger context of the situation as his opponents. While they failed to recognize the imperial pressures that drove his already authoritarian outlook, Nicholson refused to accept the existence of newly confident colonial elites who refused the status of mere subjects—and now had the strength to resist their governor’s demands.

As Blair complained in 1702, Nicholson scorned “the best Gentlemen we had in the country.” considering them “no more than the dirt under his feet.” Nicholson sneered that the province’s smaller landholders had little regard for the colony’s leaders, fully aware that their grandparents (and sometimes their parents) had also been common people. Virginia’s “rouges” had risen to power, the governor asserted, by kidnapping their servants and “cheating the people.”⁶¹

Although elite Virginians considered these characterizations “most contemptable,” they knew they contained more than a measure of truth. By English standards, the worthies the governor referred to “the mighty Dons” were still raw parvenus not far removed from the “primitive nothing” that Nicholson threatened to reduce them to. They had built their fortunes over the past generation or two through forced labor whose origins were not far from kidnapping—the sweat of not just the English indentured servants that aroused Nicholson’s indignation, but also the Africans and the Indians taken from Carolina villages who made up the majority of field workers after 1700.

Nicholson’s dismissive descriptions would have seemed even more plausible in the years before his first arrival in 1690. Particularly after the restoration of England’s monarchy in 1660, Virginia’s gentlemen struggled (often unsuccessfully) both to establish authority in the colony and resist the power of a resurgent empire. Holding power in Virginia was difficult enough. Colonial leaders had worried about the presence of an enormous number of white indentured servants, particularly when several plans for rebellion were discovered in the 1660s. The growth of African slavery in succeeding decades, driven partly by these anxieties, only raised further fears about what Governor Berkeley termed “the giddy multitude.” Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 posed the most direct challenge to the colony’s leadership. Though himself wealthy and powerful, Nathaniel Bacon had little respect for Virginia’s other leaders. Like Nicholson, he contrasted their “vile” backgrounds when “they first entered the country” with the “sudden rise of their estates” since. Bacon aroused such support that he was able to capture and burn Virginia’s capital city.⁶²

Although Virginia’s gentry defeated the rebellion, they had to contend with unwelcome attention from the English government. The troops sent by imperial authorities in response to the Virginians’ call for aid arrived too late to be of use, and the commission of inquiry that accompanied them soon blamed the unrest not on the rebels but the regime they had rejected. Crown policy increasingly focused on taming unruly Virginia leaders, demanding permanent revenue for the colonial government, strict limits on the powers of the House of Burgesses, and even royal approval before passing legislation. Delay (and, at a crucial point, a sympathetic governor) prevented the most substantial structural changes. But Virginia’s leaders still lost significant power in these years. Governors in the 1680s assembled the legislature less than once a year.⁶³

The provincial leaders who challenged Nicholson’s governorship at the turn of the century no longer faced such dire difficulties. They often belonged to wealthy and politically active families who had given them a broader education in the ways of the larger English world. Just as important, they were often strong enough to pass along their political status, a continuity seen in the growing number of leaders bearing their parent’s name. A Benjamin Harrison had served in the House of Burgesses as early as 1642. His son, Benjamin Harrison II, entered the body in the 1670s and was chosen for the council in the 1690s. Benjamin III in turn received an English legal education before serving as the colony’s attorney general, holding the position for five years before Nicholson turned him out in 1702.⁶⁴

Robert Beverley II, who lost his post as clerk to the House of Burgesses a year later, belonged to a similarly significant family. Both his father and his elder brother had held the position, with the latter going on to become the speaker of the body. The father of his late wife served on the Council at the same time. Beverley’s trip to England in 1703 allowed Nicholson to choose another clerk. The outraged Beverley joined in the lobbying campaign against Nicholson, as well as publishing the first substantial history of a British colony by a native-born American.⁶⁵

The man who emerged as the leader of the anti-Nicholson camp, James Blair, seems an unlikely member of this increasingly powerful and interconnected group. As a Scot, he belonged to a distrusted minority; as a parish minister, he held his position at the whim of local leaders. Yet within two years of his 1685 arrival, the young clergyman had convinced Sarah Harrison, daughter of Benjamin Harrison II, to marry him, even though she was already betrothed to another. This alliance with the wealthy and influential Harrison family gave Blair colonial ties that equaled his impressive British connections. Blair had gained the attention of the bishop of London after being forced to flee Scotland because of a political dispute. The bishop, whose responsibilities also included the colonies, soon appointed Blair his representative in Virginia. Blair’s lobbying for the college and its presidency, and his attack on Governor Andros all relied heavily on the bishop’s support. The crucial meeting in that case (in which Blair was supported by Benjamin Harrison III) took place before the bishop and the archbishop of Canterbury. By then, Blair had also developed close ties with John Locke, the philosopher and political thinker who served on the Board of Trade during those years. Nicholson’s own correspondence with Locke seems to have begun only because of Blair. In this broader world, it was not clear which of the two Virginia leaders was more important. William Byrd II, who opposed the minister’s lobbying for the return of Nicholson in both England and Virginia, considered Blair the primary figure in the relationship. He told the hearing that the minister expected to “be able to lead [Nicholson] by the nose as much as he pleases.”⁶⁶

The returning governor was determined to resist such dependence. Unfortunately for Blair—and for the well-being of Virginia—the governor could only imagine a relationship involving superior and subordinates. Obedience was a common theme in the governor’s tirades. When Harrison’s successor as attorney general suggested that one of Nicholson’s commands might be illegal, “the Gov’r in great wrath took him by the Collar swearing that he knew of no Laws we had but would be obeyed without hesitation or reserve.” Angered by another gentleman, he complained that “he must hang one half of these rogues before the other would learn to obey his commands.”⁶⁷ The governor delighted in an unlikely story he had heard about Blair’s wedding ceremony in which the bride three times refused the traditional promise to obey her new husband. Needless to say, Nicholson did not admire Sarah Blair’s supposed independence so much as the idea that the man who more than anyone else had challenged his leadership had himself faced insubordination within his own household.⁶⁸

Figure 4. Sarah Harrison Blair, painted on a 1705 trip to London with her husband, was part of a prominent Virginia family that would include two nineteenth-century American presidents and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Her brother served as the colony’s attorney general until Governor Nicholson removed him from office. John Hargrave, English, Active 1693–c. 1719, Portrait of Mrs. James Blair, née Sarah Harrison (c. 1670–1713), c. 1705. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Mary M. Peachy, 1829.002 Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

The clash, however, was not just between two men who sought to command. It was also between two larger groups, the imperial government and colonial elites, with each side seeking greater control—and each believing the other side’s demands (at least at times) dangerous and illegitimate. And, although Virginia offered a particularly intriguing pair of central adversaries, similar controversies took place in all parts of British America.

A number of American colonies had also experienced crises of authority in the 1670s and 1680s. Jamaica, after being taken from the Spanish in the 1650s, became a haven for marauding pirates. Carolina’s government was briefly overthrown in 1677, while New England’s Indians began what was known as King Philip’s war two years earlier in 1675, the same year Chesapeake nations began their attacks on Maryland as well as Virginia—and the year before Nathaniel Bacon set up a force to fight back before turning on the latter’s government. For Massachusetts leaders just as much as for Virginia, these clashes raised the problem not only of physical survival during the war, but of political survival afterward—in the northern colony’s case, because of the high taxes necessary for recovery. A few years later, England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution set off another series of American upheavals as Boston elites overthrew the Dominion government, and New York and Maryland toppled their regimes as well.⁶⁹

The aggressive colonial policies of Charles II and James II sought to rein in these problematic provincial elites. The attempt to remake Virginia’s governance followed a policy suggested earlier (and on a larger scale) in Jamaica, where the royal governor sought to push through laws that would have made the colonial assembly virtually unnecessary. After this program failed, a new Jamaica governor deliberately removed established leaders from their position in favor of less wealthy and well-connected men who would presumably be more loyal. English rule in New York, recently captured from the Dutch, showed a similar disregard for the province’s notables. The duke of York did not even create a legislative body there—and he failed to include one in the Dominion of New England he established when he became king in 1685.⁷⁰

Despite these difficulties, however, a number of other colonies besides Virginia also developed more stable local leadership. A powerful native-born elite emerged in Maryland and the Caribbean Leeward Islands during these same years. And Jamaica’s leaders, facing an intense imperial offensive against their power, grew strong enough to mount an English lobbying campaign on a scale that dwarfed Blair’s efforts—emerging with unprecedented control over English colonial policy. Other colonies, however, followed more troubled routes to stability. Provincial elites in both New York and (as Chapter 2 notes) the Carolinas remained weak until far into the new century.

Massachusetts, where provincial leadership developed earlier than in other colonies, offers a particularly telling comparison with Virginia. The contemporary governorship of Joseph Dudley created similar discontent. But Dudley had deeper roots in his colony. Son of a Massachusetts governor, Dudley had been part of the provincial leadership since his young adulthood, even serving in the London delegation that unsuccessfully opposed the revocation of the colony’s charter. But his decision to serve as the temporary governor of New England in the Dominion and then (alongside Nicholson) as a member of its council aroused intense anger. He was imprisoned along with Andros when Bostonians overthrew the government in 1689. Both were sent to England, where Dudley remained in virtual exile for more than a dozen years.

Although Dudley was a native rather than a newcomer, his 1703 return to Massachusetts as governor was more divisive than Nicholson’s restoration to Virginia five years earlier. While the latter’s reappointment was widely celebrated, Dudley’s commission reopened old political wounds. Still the two governors shared a common desire to strengthen royal government. Dudley collected more money during his governorship than the colony had raised in all its previous history. His opponents complained that impoverished New Englanders were being forced to sell even the feathers from their beds to discharge their tax bill.⁷¹ Both governors, furthermore, saw the Anglican Church as a central part of strengthening royal power. Although personally a Congregationalist, Dudley carefully steered patronage to church members. His strong sense of duty almost matched Nicholson’s. “The strongest command,” Dudley told colleagues, was “a request from a superior.”⁷²

Like Nicholson as well, Dudley aroused strong ministerial opposition. He faced ferocious attacks from the father-and-son combination of Increase and Cotton Mather. Although the two ministers were Dissenters rather than members of the church, the elder Mather shared with Virginia’s commissary both strong English connections and a history of successful lobbying.⁷³ The Mathers, however, failed to dislodge their governor. Dudley stayed in office for thirteen years and was finally removed only when the death of Queen Anne required an explicit renewal of his commission. Dudley’s greater success depended upon two significant advantages over Nicholson. The Massachusetts native’s 1690s exile helped him develop strong English ties that even Nicholson found difficult to match. By the time the latter returned to Virginia as governor in 1698, he had been in America for almost a dozen years, with only a single return visit lasting less than a year. Dudley moved back to Massachusetts in 1703 with the strong support of Lord Cutts, who had earlier given him the post of lieutenant governor of the Isle of Wight and sponsored his election to Parliament. No other mainland-born American colonial served in either position. Dudley’s support of the Church of England proved similarly astute, helping to keep his Dissenter opponents from developing the close ties to the ecclesiastical hierarchy that served as the foundation of Blair’s political strength.⁷⁴

Dudley’s longevity rested on more than English ties. His relatively mild temper won him substantial support. Dudley occasionally displayed flashes of anger. He and his son drew their swords on some carters who refused to give way to their carriage in 1705—and, like Nicholson, he received advice from England suggesting that “moderation is a virtue.”⁷⁵ But Dudley showed a sensitivity to the aspirations of the colony’s leaders that Nicholson never developed. As an early supporter noted, Dudley lacked his predecessor Phips’s “Natural passionateness.”⁷⁶

Nicholson’s harsh demeanor, by contrast, intensified Virginia’s political difficulties, provoking a bitterness that led each side to work tirelessly to undermine the other. The governor complained that Blair and his group seemed to be following the “the old diabolical saying” (about excrement rather than soil): “Fling dirt enough and some will stick.”⁷⁷ Yet he himself made numerous charges about his enemies’ “artfull trifling, malitious insinuations, and many notorious falsities.” He pressured the burgesses, grand juries, and ministers to prepare addresses of support.⁷⁸ Nicholson’s opponents fought back by sending numerous affidavits, letters, and memorials to the home government, leading Nicholson to dub his opponents the “Affidavit Sparks.”⁷⁹ They also circulated writings in both Virginia and England, including the “ballads, Pasquils & Lampoons … posted upon trees in high roads” cited by Virginia clergy. As they noted there were “Criminations & Recriminations on both sides (God knows).”⁸⁰

The result was a lengthy standoff. Blair and his allies would not accept the subordinate role that Nicholson demanded of them. Such submission to the governor, Beverley argued, would mean “Slavery and utter ruine.”⁸¹ But Nicholson’s views of government allowed no other position, no other result. The contest ended only in spring 1705 when the Board of Trade removed Nicholson—and even then they refused to admit the dangers of his temper. Responding to the governor’s pleas, they issued a public statement that he had done nothing wrong.

Nicholson’s harshness had heightened the problems of an already difficult situation. The imperial government needed to renegotiate its relationship with colonial elites if it wished to expand its power. Virginia’s gentlemen needed not only to come to terms with British expectations but to reconsider how they presented themselves to the broader world as well as to other Virginians. As Nicholson’s supporters rightly complained, provincial leaders were hardly models of self-control. But (as the next section suggests) their difficulties encouraged them to define the link between government and personal demeanor in ways that Nicholson never did. While Virginia’s elite began to explore the ideals of politeness, the governor’s attempts at gaining support, as Blair came to recognize, “appeared more like a design of perpetrating a rape than obtaining a consent.”⁸²

A Publick Callamity

Nicholson’s successor, Governor Edward Nott, seems aptly named. A former army officer of no particular distinction, he arrived in Virginia in August 1705 and died a year later. His list of accomplishments was as short as his tenure. Other than gaining funding for a governor’s mansion and encouraging passage of a widely popular port bill (a measure soon disallowed by the British government), Nott instituted no lasting change or policy initiative.

Yet Virginians found Nott irresistible. A minister just arriving from England about the time of his death observed that the late governor “is very much lamented.”⁸³ Blair reported that the loss “put this poor Country in a great consternation.”⁸⁴ Virginia’s House of Burgesses erected a monument to him more than a decade later. Cautious representatives removed William Byrd II’s dramatic peroration: “if a Stranger, pity the country: if a Virginian, thy self.” But even the revised inscription still observed that Nott “was deservedly Esteemed A Public Blessing while he Lived & when He Dyed a Publick Callamity.”⁸⁵

The celebration of Nott went beyond the fact that he was not Nicholson. Many Virginians felt relieved simply that the colony’s most powerful official no longer threatened to kill people. But Nott did more than abandon threats. Although “the divisions … were very hot at his Coming,” Blair noted, Nott helped resolve them through his “very calm healing Temper.”⁸⁶

Nott’s calmness, like Nicholson’s anger, was not simply a personal trait. Virginians understood Nott’s actions as part of an emerging cultural framework that helped provincial leaders rethink their political experiences, their self-presentation, and their views about anger. The moderation recommended to Nicholson (and revered in Nott) did more than condemn excessive anger. It formed part of an ethic of polite social and political interaction that struggled to keep disruptive emotional reactions within careful bounds. Careful control of aggression also restrained power and helped societies avoid the dangers of arbitrary and absolute rule.

Of course, neither Nicholson nor Nott caused or created this cultural shift, which spanned America as well as the Atlantic. The goals of politeness everywhere remained ideals rather than realities, aspirations rather than descriptions. But they were not divorced from everyday experience. Virginians’ responses to their two governors reveal the experiences and contentions that gave meaning to this emerging ideal of human relationships.

The central theme of the inscription that Byrd prepared for the monument to Nott in 1718 was the late governor’s respect for the boundaries of authority. Nott used his powers “to do good to the People,” Byrd noted, not “to insult and oppress.” With a “passion” only for “doing good” and a concern for “mildness, prudence, and justice,” Nott “was content with the limited Authority of his Commission, and stretch’t not the Royal Prerogative to make his Power absolute, and his Government arbitrary.”⁸⁷

These descriptions were not simply polite commonplaces. Byrd’s arguments sharply critiqued both Nott’s predecessor and his successor. The legislative committee reviewing the draft removed a number of his more fervent claims, worried that they might be taken as criticisms of their current governor.

Nicholson of course had a different view of his failure to follow the letter of the law. He believed his sacred duty to keep order sometimes required extraordinary measures. You “speak so much of the Prerogative,” noted a concerned supporter in England, “& so little of the law.” Blair complained that Nicholson went even further, speaking “in the most contemptible terms of the English Laws & even use[d] that Expression Magna Charta, Magna F[art]a.”⁸⁸

Contemporaries often referred to this broad view of official power in another term used by Byrd. “Arbitrary” had originally not been a negative term. It was closely connected with arbitration, allowing a mutually agreed-upon authority to determine an appropriate result without being shackled by technicalities. Since judges had the freedom to consider divine “wisdome & mercy” as well as “Justice,” the Puritan leader John Winthrop noted, they were “Gods upon earthe.”⁸⁹ By the end of the century, however, the term “arbitrary” had largely lost its positive connotations. Robert Beverley II’s 1705 history praised Nicholson in his first term as governor for being a “strict Observer of the Acts of Assembly, making them the sole Rule of his Judgment.” This “Regularity,” however, broke down in council meetings. There Nicholson had been “Imperious” and “Arbitrary.”⁹⁰

This issue of arbitrary government lay at the heart of John Locke’s influential critique of the authoritarian ideas that Nicholson continued to hold into the eighteenth century. Locke’s First Treatise on Government, first published in 1689, responded to the late Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a book that defended monarchical power as an extension of the universally accepted authority of the father within the family. Since the king played the same paternal role within the community, he too ruled by “his own will.” As Filmer had argued elsewhere, such arbitrary or absolute government formed “the first and the safest government for the world.”

Locke rejected this approach. Without “settled standing Laws” constraining leaders, he warned, people were slaves, a status he held was only acceptable for prisoners taken in warfare. “Absolute Arbitrary Power” created a nightmarish situation when a leader could “force [the people] to obey at pleasure the exorbitant and unlimited Decrees of their sudden thoughts, or unrestrain’d, and till that moment unknown Wills without having any measures set down which may guide and justifie their actions.”⁹¹

The unpredictable Nicholson posed just such a danger. An English correspondent warned the governor in 1702 that his harsh words and actions were risky in the current political environment. In the past, he suggested, “a more violent treatment would not only have been endured even by Englishmen, but perhaps would have been well enough approved of.” But “the case is quite altered now,” especially since the Glorious Revolution. If you should be charged with “arbitrariness” in Parliament, he warned Nicholson, not even your merits or your friends “will be able to save you.”⁹²

Nott by contrast seemed to embody the opposite ideals. He was known, a clergyman noted, for his “Exactness in doing Justice to all Persons” and his “great Moderation.”⁹³ The last term had by then become central to discussions of governance. “Moderation” had previously referred to regulation and control. Massachusetts’s earliest law code provided that church elders “guided and moderated” church assemblies. By the middle of the century, moderation also came to mean something larger and more politically pressing, freedom from overt and harsh partisanship.⁹⁴ Late seventeenth-century discussions of religion used the term to criticize a narrow orthodoxy that accepted only a limited range of Protestant beliefs, in particular noting the post-Restoration laws that pushed numerous Puritan-inclined ministers out of their Church of England pulpits. In calling for greater toleration, the Quaker leader William Penn in the 1680s wrote both “a plea for moderation” and “a perswasive to moderation.”⁹⁵ Daniel Defoe twenty years later published “Moderation maintain’d.” The religious associations of the term may well have been part of the reason the enthusiastically high church Nicholson resented letters recommending moderation.⁹⁶

As these letters also suggested, however, moderation referred to government as well as religion. A minister who had noted Nott’s death in Virginia also witnessed the aftermath of Governor Edward Tynte’s demise in South Carolina four years later. With partisans promoting competing elections to choose a temporary governor, “violent Proceedings” seemed a distinct possibility—until one of the contestants agreed to end the contest, earning the author’s commendation for “his Moderation.”⁹⁷ Blair’s 1702 sermon on the death of King William similarly celebrated the same qualities in noting “the mildness and gentleness of the King’s reign.” As with Byrd’s use of the term “arbitrary,” this was not an apolitical argument. An angry Nicholson accused the clergyman of attacking William’s predecessors Charles II and James II—and suspected that Blair was also referring to him.⁹⁸

The ideal of moderation included a distinct way of thinking about the boundaries of legitimate power. Earlier theories of authority tended to emphasize the broad powers and responsibilities of magistrates. In practice, however, common religious values, local connections, and personal ties often restrained the exercise of power. By the late seventeenth century, however, the balance between broad theory and limited practice became deeply problematic. English revolutions, American rebellions, and the expanding reach of the English state, all within an Atlantic world both drawn together and pulled apart by increasing trade and communication, made older conceptions of power difficult to defend except in extreme forms—although this did not stop people from trying to do so. Tory politicians and Anglican Church leaders endlessly preached the obligations of nonresistance and unlimited submission in the wake of the Civil War. Some political philosophers attempted to make the same case. Filmer, drawing on Jean Bodin’s argument about the indivisibility of sovereignty, rejected any restriction on monarchical authority. These proponents of absolutism found even Thomas Hobbes suspect. Although Hobbes (born the same year as Filmer) was gratifyingly clear on the obligation to obey government, he traced this duty to communal agreement rather than divine authority.⁹⁹

Facing the new imperial demands, however, emerging Anglo-American leaders found political theories emphasizing obedience to central authority troubling.¹⁰⁰ But they did not therefore turn to promoting the rebellions that Nicholson believed resulted from such opposition. Calling instead for moderation in exercising power and responding to diversity, the emerging ideals of politeness provided a means of opposing authoritarianism that proved widely popular. “It were to be wished indeed that we could all be of one opinion,” admitted South Carolina governor Charles Craven in the early 1710s, “but that is morally impossible.” Instead, he continued, people should “agree, to live amicably together,” by “consult[ing] the common good, [and] the tranquillity of our province.”¹⁰¹ The Boston minister Benjamin Colman provided a fuller description of such leadership in 1737. “The spirit of Constancy & Resolution, Authority & Government,” he told Harvard’s governing board in discussing the qualities of a college president, needed to be combined with “the Man of Prudence & Temper, Moderation, & Gentleness, Modesty humility & Humanity.”¹⁰²

As Colman suggested, such attitudes also had implications beyond politics. Rather than (like Nicholson) seeking to emphasize authority and precedence at every turn, the ideals of politeness rejected the harshness of naked power. Instead, as a later author stated, politeness sought to “make persons easy in their behaviour, conciliating in their affections, and promoting every one’s benefit.” A student club at Harvard in 1722 called for meetings to “be Managed with Temper & Moderation.” Rather than “Contempt,” they commended “a Deference Paid to Each other.” Having experienced the “Feuds and Heart-burnings” that Beverley attributed to Nicholson’s administration, Blair similarly called on his parishioners to adopt “an … affable, courteous, kind, and friendly Behaviour to Men.” A properly controlled person, he suggested, would have “no Fierceness or Haughtiness in his Countenance, no Rudeness or Haughtiness in his Speech, [and] nothing that is insolent or affronting in his Action.”¹⁰³

Soon after Nott arrived in August 1705, James Blair called a meeting of the colony’s clergy. He faced a difficult situation. His archenemy Nicholson remained in Virginia, waiting for a suitable ship to England, and continuing to meet with Virginia’s ministers. Their friendly relationship with the ex-governor contrasted sharply with their antagonism toward Blair. The commissary chose the text of his sermon with an eye toward reconciliation. The significance of Jesus’ call to “take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart” would have been readily apparent to contemporaries. As Blair noted elsewhere, meekness was “a right Government of the Passion of Anger.”¹⁰⁴

Despite his good intentions, Blair’s sermon did not go well. In praising the new governor “as studious of union & quiet,” Blair could not resist an invidious comparison with Nicholson who had instead sought “Party & faction.” A hostile clergyman present at the meeting later complained that, although Blair had criticized Nicholson, the commissary himself had used “overawing methods” in his “Sermon of meekness.”¹⁰⁵

Polite ways of thinking about political and social relationships also recommended an emotional demeanor that best served these ideals. Even more than his ideas and perhaps even his actions, Nicholson’s unbounded anger had seemed to embody the harshness of arbitrary rule. Treating people generously through more carefully controlled expression, Blair and other people argued, worked better than seeking to frighten them into submission. Contemporary discussions of these issues by Blair and Boston’s Mather family reveal the relevance of Nicholson’s behavior to some of the central issues of personal and political relationships.

Blair addressed the issue of meekness more extensively (and less troublingly) in another sermon on meekness, a discussion of the beatitude “Blessed are the meek” that formed part of the lengthy series of addresses on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount he published in 1722. Like Increase and Cotton Mather, Blair rejects the idea that anger is bad in itself, comparing it to sheep-herding dogs that can be dangerous but very useful if trained properly. The ministers differed, however, on the proper uses of anger. The Mathers both focused on what Cotton calls “holy Anger,” passionate hatred for sin. Blair instead presents it as a tool of government that should only be unleashed on “such [things] as Reason has before taught it are Enemies.” In particular, subordinates (perhaps thinking of the students and slaves he himself commanded) could sometimes need “a Bark of Reproof” or even “a gentle Pinch of Punishment.” “If in the whole Management of Anger we keep a good Command,” he commented, it can be “of excellent Use in the Government both of larger and lesser Societies.”¹⁰⁶

All three ministers also agreed that what Cotton Mather called “ungoverned anger” was dangerous, requiring some counterforce to control it.¹⁰⁷ Not surprisingly, the Mathers stressed the need for God’s grace. Blair, by contrast, highlighted the role of reason. He traced the origins of meekness to “an inward Calmness and Tranquillity of Mind.” But despite this less supernatural view, he did not consider internal moderation an end in itself. Rather it led to “affable, courteous, kind, and friendly Behaviour to Men.” The meek man is “not censorious or captious, hasty or precipitate; he has the Civility and Patience to give Men a fair Hearing, and to hear them to an End.”¹⁰⁸

Contemporaries distinguished such outward calm under provocation from other established views. As the seventeenth-century English religious writer Richard Allestree lamented, proponents of aristocratic honor seemed to feel that a self-respecting gentleman “passes for a Phlegmatick foole” if his “blood boyles not at the first glimpse of an Affront.”¹⁰⁹ A number of leading Virginians besides Nicholson held this ideal in practice if not in theory. According to an account that the governor preserved among his material on his enemies, the nickname given to Robert Carter referred to more than his great wealth. Carter could be generous to flatterers, the description noted, but he used other people “with all the haughtiness & insolence possible, in contempt of him he is sometimes called King Carter … even to his face.”¹¹⁰

Blair similarly noted Daniel Parke, another council member, as a model of such aristocratic touchiness, portraying him as a man who prided himself on his “quick resentment of every the least thing that looks like an affront or Injury.” Parke, he complained, “carried everything with an high hand in his violent blustering manner.”¹¹¹ Before leaving for England in 1697, he had manhandled Blair’s wife in church and even horsewhipped Nicholson, then governor of Maryland, at a college board meeting. Blair’s later warnings about the dangers of neglecting meekness may even have referred at least indirectly to Parke’s fate. Appointed governor of the Leeward Islands in 1706, his stormy four-year tenure ended when his subjects, weary of his heavy-handed rule and his numerous sexual liaisons, shot and killed him in the street, making him the only English governor in America ever to meet such a fate.¹¹²

In the traditional classification of the humors, the opposite of such choleric temperament was a phlegmatic disposition insensible to provocations. But such a person did not fit the ideals of moderation either. Politeness instead celebrated a well-honed sensitivity to moral and sociable sentiments, a sympathetic response to other people’s actions. William Byrd wittily described the problems of this position in his third-person description of himself as someone whose moderation may have been too moderate: “His soul is so tun’d to those things that are right, that he is too ready to be moved at those that are wrong. This makes him passionate, and sorely sensible of Injurys, but he punishes himself more by the resentment than he do[e]s the Party by revenge.”¹¹³

Such meekness, Blair argued, formed the foundation not just of genteel character but also of social existence itself. Government existed primarily for the protection of the meek. Proper rule forced “Oppressors … to keep in their Horns, and let their meek and peaceable Neighbours enjoy their own in Quiet.”¹¹⁴ Meekness went beyond leaving people alone, however. It was “always joined,” he suggested, with “all other social and good-natur’d Virtues.” Balance, moderation, and willingness to live within limits of law all depended on the restraint of anger. “There is no Passion,” he argued, “more inconsistent with Society and good Government.”¹¹⁵ Not surprisingly, then, contemporaries considered moderation the antithesis of anger. When Blair ten years before had complained to the council that he had been afraid to bring up college business with Governor Andros because he had always responded angrily, the council disagreed. “His Excell’ys answers to Mr. Blair when spoke to,” they judged (perhaps not convincingly), “were w’th great moderation and Calmness.”¹¹⁶

When Lord Lovelace, the governor of New York and New Jersey, died in 1709 (three years after Nott), his political ally Lewis Morris celebrated his “sweet and happy temper.” The governor, in Morris’s view, had been “so meek, so free from Arbitrary Principles, so just, so temperate; so fine a Man that my own and Countrey’s loss is inexpressible.” Like Nott, Lovelace had followed a difficult and unpopular governor. Lord Cornbury, Morris noted, had generally chosen harshness instead of “soft indearing measures.” “My Lord Lovelace,” Morris suggested, “wou’d (had he lived) have convinc’t this end of the World, mankind cou’d be govern’d without pride and ill nature or any thing of that superb and haughty demeanor which the Governors of Plantations are but too much Masters of.”¹¹⁷

The meek and temperate leadership celebrated in Nott and Lovelace did not become universal after them. Morris, despite his celebration of these values, was himself a prickly man even after he became governor of New Jersey in the late 1730s. But both Morris and Blair recommended the same cultural values—the rejection of ill nature, arbitrary rule, and haughty leadership, and the celebration of moderation. In the years after the turn of the century, these ideas became central to the ways colonial elites thought about their governments, their societies, and themselves, a cultural language that operated alongside the more familiar legal language of government powers and public liberty—and a rich set of ideas that could be used not just to critique other people but to shape one’s self.¹¹⁸

These ideals were particularly valuable for American leaders because they provided a means of dealing with their major relationships. The rages of governor Nicholson brought Virginia leaders literally face to face with the difficulties of imperial domination. Especially in a time when Britain more often sent Nicholsons than Notts, colonial elites bore the brunt of making this new relationship with England work, of finding a modus vivendi between their own aspirations and those of the empire. Polite values provided a set of values that made colonial elites recognizable to imperial leaders as gentlemen rather than backward provincials.

Polite interactions were also useful within the colonies. The ideals of moderation and meekness helped focus attention on the need to be aware of their impact on other people, to consider the needs and concerns of both their peers and common people.¹¹⁹ “Rash threatening speeches filled with scornfull reflections, and reproaches, spoken publickly behind a mans back, and anger and brow beatings to ones face, are not I believe likt by any man,” a New York official who experienced the rages of Lord Cornbury observed: “such treatment begetts a Contempt in the People.”¹²⁰ Blair made a similar point the following year, noting that the short experience Virginia had with Nott (and he might have added, its longer and less successful experience with Nicholson) proved that “A Calm and moderate temper suits best with this Country.”¹²¹