In Rhode Island and Connecticut the old charters were reassumed. In Connecticut, as there had been little break when Andros came, so now there was little trouble when he departed. Secretary Allyn had managed the affairs of the colony before the “usurpation”; Secretary Allyn had been the chief intermediary between Andros and the people; Secretary Allyn continued to manage Connecticut affairs after Andros had gone. The particularists succeeded in getting possession of the government, in spite of the opposition of a strong minority, and Connecticut, like Massachusetts, returned to her insignificant but precious independence.[143]
Andros succeeded in escaping once, but was arrested in Rhode Island, and returned by the magistrates there to the revolutionary leaders in Boston. By these he was kept in prison for nearly a year, and then sent to England, where, as has been said, no one appeared against him.[144] Hutchinson complains that the Massachusetts agents were misled by their counsel, Sir John Somers. When one considers that Somers was one of the greatest lawyers the bar of England has ever known, one is inclined to believe that he knew his clients’ case was too bad to take into court.[145]
The government of William and Mary found nothing to condemn in Andros’s conduct, and showed their appreciation of his services by sending him out, in 1692, as governor of Virginia, adjoining to the office at the same time the governorship of Maryland.[146]
He exhibited here the same qualities that had characterized his government in New York and New England; intelligent aptitude for business, love of regularity and order, zeal for honest administration, and consequently some degree of severity upon offenders against the navigation laws who were often men of good birth and position, and last, though not least, a great dislike of the interference of meddling ecclesiastics with matters of state. He reduced the records of the province to order, finding that they had been seriously neglected; and when the State House was burned, he provided a building for them, and had them again carefully sorted and registered. He encouraged the introduction of manufactures and the planting of cotton, and established a legal size for the tobacco cask, an act which protected the merchants from arbitrary plundering by custom house officials in England, but which was used by his enemies to form the basis of an accusation of defrauding the revenue. He was on the best of terms with the prominent men of the Dominion, and he left behind him a pleasant memory in Virginia among the laity, and among those of the clergy who were not under the influence of Commissary Blair. The quarrel with Blair was an unfortunate one, for, though meddlesome and dogmatic, he was working for the higher interests of the colony; but the evidence he himself supplies of the temper of his proceedings explains Sir Edmund’s antipathy.
He was recalled to England in 1698, and was worsted in his contest with Blair, having been unfortunate enough to bring upon himself the resentment of the Bishop of London. The record of the trial is preserved at Lambeth, and has been printed in this country, and a perusal of it will convince most readers that Sir Edmund received very hard usage, and might have complained, in the words of the lawyer who was defeated in a contest with Laud, that he had been “choked by a pair of lawn-sleeves.”[147]
The rest of his life was passed at home. The government still showed their confidence in him by appointing him the Governor of Guernsey.[148] He lived quietly, passing a peaceful old age, and died in February, 1714 at the age of seventy-six. His continued interest in the welfare of the colonies, in the service of which he had passed so many years, is evidenced by the fact that his name appears among the members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.[149]
Removed from the prejudices of his own day and generation, and regarded in the impartial light of history, Sir Edmund Andros appears not as the cruel persecutor that he seemed to the Mathers and the Sewalls, nor as the envious Sanballat that Blair’s fervent Scotch imagination pictured him, but as a single-hearted, loyal English gentleman, of the best type of those cavaliers, devoted to church and king, who, in their horror at the results of puritanism and liberalism in England, were willing to sacrifice if necessary some degree of personal liberty in order to secure the dominion of law.[150]
Judging from what we know of him, we should have looked to see him, had he been in England instead of in America at the time of the Revolution, by the side of many fellow Tories maintaining the liberties and the religion of his country. In America, far from the scene of conflict, his duty was to support the government of the king; but the claim of the colonists that, by arresting him, they prevented him from “making an Ireland of America,” is disproved by his immediate and loyal acceptance of the results of the Revolution, and by the confidence the new government immediately reposed in him.[151]
The French authorities in Canada, who were in a position to judge his character correctly, have left on record their opinion that it was hopeless to expect assistance from him against his countrymen in the struggle between the two nations that broke out after the abdication of James II. The Chevalier de Callières, Governor of Montreal, wrote to the Marquis de Seignelay as follows:
“Chevalier Andros, now Governor-General of New England and New York, having already declared in his letter to M. de Denonville that he took all the Iroquois under his protection as subjects of the crown of England, and having prevented them returning to M. de Denonville to make peace with us, there is no longer reason to hope for its conclusion through the English, nor for the alienation of the Iroquois from the close union which exist with those (the English), in consequence of the great advantage they derive from thence, the like to which we cannot offer for divers reasons.