Before much progress could be made in the investigation, after his arrival in London, he died on February 18, 1694-5.[173] The news did not reach Boston till early in May. “People are generally sad,” says Sewall. “Cousin Hall says the talk is Mr. Dudley will be governor,” and the next day mourning guns were fired at the Castle.[174]
Joseph Dudley’s hour of pride was not yet come, though he had intrigued for appointment even before Phips’s death. The protests of Ashurst and Constantine Phipps, the colony’s agents in London, were effectual; and the king was by no means prepared as yet to alienate the feelings of his New England subjects in order to gratify the avenging spirit of Dudley. That recusant New Englander was put off with the lieutenant-governorship of the Isle of Wight, a position which he held for nine years.
The government in Boston upon Phips’s leaving had legally fallen into the hands of that old puritan, the lieutenant-governor, William Stoughton, and in his charge it was to remain for four years and more (November, 1694, to May 26, 1699). It was a period which betokened a future not significant of content. It was not long before Thomas Maule could call the ministers and magistrates hard names, and with his quick wit induce a jury to acquit him.[175] But the spirit of Parliament could not be so easily thwarted. As colonists, they had long known what restrictive acts the mother country could impose on their trade in the interests of the stay-at-home merchants, who were willing to see others break the soil of a new country, whose harvests they had no objection to reap. The Parliament of the Commonwealth had first (1651) taken compulsory steps, and the government of the Restoration was not more sparing of the colonists. King William’s Parliament increased the burden, and the better to enforce observance of its laws they established a more efficient agency of espionage than the Plantation Committee of the Privy Council had been, by instituting a new commission in the Lords of Trade (1696), and had followed it up by erecting a Court of Admiralty (1697) to adjudicate upon its restrictive measures.[176] About the same time (1696) they set up Nova Scotia, which had been originally included in the Massachusetts charter of 1691, as a royal province. The war which was waging with France served somewhat to divert attention from these proceedings. French privateers were hovering round the coast, and Boston was repairing her defences.[177] Not a packet came into the Bay from England, but there was alarm, and alertness continued till the vessel’s peaceful character was established. News was coming at one time of Frontenac’s invasion of New York, and at another of Castin’s successes at the eastward. In August, 1696, when Captain Paxton brought word to Boston of Chub’s surrender of Pemaquid, five hundred men were mustered, but they reached Penobscot only to see the French sailing away, and so returned to Boston unrewarded. The enemy also fell on the Huguenot settlement at Oxford, Mass., and the inhabitants abandoned it.[178] When the aged Bradstreet was buried,[179] they had to forego the honor they would pay his memory in mourning guns, because of the scarcity of powder; and good people rejoiced and shivered as word came in June of the scalping exploit of Hannah Dustin at Haverhill, in the preceding March. In the autumn (November 4) there was nothing in all this to prevent the substantial loyalty of the people showing itself in a celebration of the king’s birthday. The Boston town house was illuminated, and the governor and council went with trumpets to Cotton Hill[180] to see the fireworks “let fly,” as they said. No word had yet come of the end of the war, which had been settled by the peace of Ryswick in September. A month later (December 9, 1697) Captain Gillam arrived at Marblehead from London, and the next day, amid the beat of drum and the blare of trumpet, between three and four in the afternoon, the proclamation of the peace was made in Boston. The terms of that treaty were not reassuring for New England. A restitution of captured lands and ports on either side was made by it; but the bounds of Acadia were not defined, and the Sagadahock country became at once disputed ground. The French claimed that it had been confirmed to them by the treaties of St. Germain (1632) and Breda (1668); but the Lords of Trade urged the province to rebuild the forts at Pemaquid, and maintain an ascendency on the spot.
BELLOMONT.
This follows a contemporary engraving preserved in Harvard College library, which is inscribed: “His Excellencie Richard Coote. Earle of Bellomont, Governour of New England, New York and New Hampshire, and Vice Admirall of those seas.” Cf. the picture of doubtful authenticity in the Memorial History of Boston, ii. p. 175.
As early as August, 1695, word had come that Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, was to be the new governor of Massachusetts. Later it was said that he would not arrive till spring; and when spring came the choice had not even been determined upon. It was not till November, 1697, that he was commissioned governor of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He landed in New York on the 2d of April, 1698, and on the 12th a sloop reached Boston, bringing tidings of his arrival, and three days later the council received a communication from him. For a year and more he stayed in New York, sending his instructions to Stoughton, who as lieutenant-governor directed the council’s action. On the 26th of May, 1699, the governor reached Boston;[181] and it was not long before he manifested his sympathy with the party of which Elisha Cooke was the leader. This gentleman, who was so obnoxious to the Mather party, had been negatived by Phips, when chosen to the council; but on Phips’s withdrawal, his election had escaped a veto, and he now sat at the council board. Mather had succeeded, in 1697, in forcing upon the legislature a charter, in the main of his own drafting, which gave to Harvard College the constitution that he liked, but he manœuvred in vain to secure his own appointment from the General Court to proceed to England to solicit the sanction of the Privy Council; and it was not long before he found that the new governor had vetoed his charter, and in 1701 the assembly legislated him out of office, as the president of the college.
This first blow to the dominance of the Mathers was reassuring, and Bellomont was a leader for the new life to rally about.[182] He was a man of complacent air. He liked, if we may believe him, to hear sermons well enough to go to King’s Chapel on Sundays, and to the meeting-house for the Thursday lectures. He could patronize the common people with a sufficient suavity; and when the General Court, after their set purpose, voted him a present instead of a salary, if he was not much pleased, he took his £1,000 as the best substitute he could get for the £1,200 which he preferred.
Boston, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was not so bad a seat of a viceroyalty, after all, for a poor earl, who had a living to make, and was debarred the more lucrative methods of trade. He reported back to the Lords of Trade abundant figures of what he found to be the town’s resources and those of his government; but the favor which he was receiving from the good people might have been less had they known that these same reports of his set forth his purpose to find Englishmen, rather than New Englanders, for the offices in his gift.