With the enthusiastic support of the Bishop of London and of Governor Nicholson, Blair had worked out a plan of reform. He would found a college to educate young Virginians for the ministry; he would secure an act of Assembly increasing the ministers' salary; he would enforce ecclesiastical discipline; he would give the clergy a voice in the government by procuring a seat in the Council for the Commissary. Going to England, he gained the backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other prelates, and through them of King William and Queen Mary.[20]
Their Majesties granted a charter for the college, permitted it to be named William and Mary, gave £1,985.14.10 out of the quit rent fund, 10,000 acres of land, the revenue of one pence a pound on tobacco exported from Virginia to any other colony, and a salary for the Commissary from the quit rents. So Blair returned in triumph and took his seat beside the great men of the Council. But it was a triumph which won him the enmity of Andros. The Governor, no doubt, was jealous of his influence in high circles in England, and he viewed with alarm the diversion from the use of the government to the college and the clergy of urgently needed funds. With the opening of the year 1694 the government was facing a deficit with no way of meeting it except by the hated levy by poll, or by drawing on the quit rents.
Soon Blair was complaining that Andros was trying to obstruct his reforms for the clergy. There must have been stormy scenes in the Council meetings, with Blair hurling accusations at the Governor, and the latter denying them. The President of the College "could not be obliged by all endeavors to contain himself within bounds," wrote Andros to Secretary Shrewsbury. "His restless comport I ever passed by till the whole Council ... faulting him as unfit to be in the Council, I thought it my duty ... to suspend him."[21]
But Andros did not reckon on Blair's influence in England. Undoubtedly the Commissary wrote the Bishop of London of his suspension, and the Bishop complained to the Lords of Trade. In due time Andros received a rebuke from the King. He had appointed Blair to the Council "the better to enable him to promote and carry on" the "good and useful" work of founding a college. Now he found that his gracious intentions had been discouraged by his suspension. "Our will and pleasure is that forthwith upon the receipt hereof you take off the said suspension."[22] It was a bitter humiliation for Andros when, in August, 1696, Blair produced the King's letter and resumed his seat.[23] So bitter, in fact, that he dared a second time to oust the hated Commissary. At a meeting of the Council in April, 1697, Blair asked whether a recent act of Parliament did not debar him from sitting in the General Court since he was a native of Scotland. Whereupon the Council, with a promptness he probably did not expect, voted that not only did it do so, but that it made him ineligible for the Council as well.[24]
Blair's answer was to take ship for England, there to lay his complaints before the English prelates and through them before the Board of Trade. To the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Salisbury, and the Bishop of London he undoubtedly poured out his complaints of Andros—that he was an enemy of the college, that he did not support the efforts to secure better livings for the clergy, that he had disobeyed the King's express orders to keep him in the Council. This ecclesiastical lobby was too much for Sir Edmund. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, he wrote that he wished to come home because of ill health. On May 31, 1698, his resignation was accepted and Francis Nicholson named to succeed him as Governor General.[25]
When Andros bade Jamestown goodbye and set sail for England, a full decade had passed since the Glorious Revolution, time sufficient for one to judge its effect upon self-government in Virginia. Some of the losses of the Second Stuart Despotism had not been regained. The act of 1680 giving the Crown a perpetual revenue had not been repealed; the judicial powers of the Assembly had not been restored; the efforts to secure a charter for the colony had been abandoned; the Burgesses had not regained the right to name their clerk.
Yet the gains far outweighed these failures. Of first importance was it that the Assembly itself had been preserved with most of its rights and privileges. It still could initiate legislation, it alone could initiate money bills, it could determine the uses of all appropriated funds, it could appoint the Treasurer. The petitions of the Assembly to the Throne were no longer cast aside with scorn as in the days of Charles II and James II, but were given careful consideration. The battle for liberty had not yet been won, many bitter struggles lay ahead, but the gains made under the mild rule of King William and Queen Mary were vital to the eventual victory.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1660-1693: 370.
[2] CO5-1318.