In Rhode Island matters went on much as the heterogeneous composition of that colony necessarily determined. Bellomont could find little good to report of her people, and the burden of his complaint to the Lords of Trade touched their propensity to piracy, their evasion of the laws of trade, and the ignorance of the officials.
Bellomont had returned to his government in New York when, on the 5th of March, 1701, he died. It took ten days for the news to reach Boston (March 15), and four days later (March 19) word came by the roundabout channel of Virginia of the declaration of war between England and France. In the midst of the attendant apprehension, on April 7th, mourning guns were fired for the dead governor at the Sconce and at the Castle, and the artillery company gave three volleys in the middle of the town, Col. Townshend, as Sewall in his antipathy does not fail to record, wearing a wig!
When Bellomont had left for New York in May, 1700, the immediate charge of the government had again fallen upon Stoughton. He did not long survive his chief, and died July 7, 1701, in his seventieth year,[188] and from this time to the coming of Dudley the council acted as executive.
It was on Joseph Dudley, to a large party the most odious of all New Englanders, the ally of Andros, that the thoughts of all were now turned. It was known that he had used every opportunity to impress upon the king his fitness to maintain the royal prerogative and protect the revenue in New England. The people of Boston had not seen him for about ten years. In 1691 he had landed there on his way to New York, where he was to serve as a councillor; and during that and the following year he had made some unobtrusive visits to his home in Roxbury, till, in 1693, he was recalled to England to be made lieutenant-governor of the Isle of Wight. With the death of Bellomont his hopes again rose. Ashurst, as the senior of the Massachusetts agents, still opposed him, though his associate, Constantine Phipps,[189] was led to believe that the king might do worse than appoint the aspirant. Dudley was not deficient in tact, and he got some New Englanders who chanced to be in England to recommend him; and a letter, which he used to some purpose, came not surprisingly, considering his lineage, from Cotton Mather, saying quite enough in Dudley’s praise. Elisha Cooke and his friends were not ignorant of such events, and secured the appointment of Wait Winthrop as agent to organize a fresh opposition to Dudley’s purposes. It was too late. The letters which Dudley offered in testimony were powerful enough to remove the king’s hesitancy, and Dudley secured his appointment, which, on the death of the king a few days later, was promptly confirmed by Anne.[190]
The news of the king’s death and the accession of the queen reached Boston, by way of Newfoundland, on the 28th of May, 1702.[191] The new monarch was at once proclaimed from the town house, and volleys of guns and the merriment of carouse marked a new reign. How New England was to find the change was soon sharply intimated. Amid it all tidings came of the capture of three Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians. Later in the same day the eyes of Madam Bellingham, the relict of an early governor, were closed in death, severing one of the last links of other days. Her death was to most a suggestive accompaniment of the mischance which now placed in the governor’s chair the recusant son of Thomas Dudley, that other early governor.
A fortnight later (June 10, 1702), the ship “Centurion,” having Joseph Dudley on board, put in at Marblehead, and the news quickly travelled to Boston. The next day a committee of the council went in Captain Croft’s pinnace to meet him, and they boarded the “Centurion” just outside Point Alderton. Dudley received them on deck, arrayed in a very large wig, as Sewall sorrowfully noted while making him a speech. They saw another man whom they had not heard of, one Thomas Povey, who was to be their lieutenant governor, and to have charge of their Castle. They saw, too, among the passengers, George Keith, the whilom quaker, who was come over on £200 salary, very likely paid by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to convert as many as he could to prelacy.[192] Sewall was not happy during that day of compliments. The party landed at Scarlet’s Wharf amid salvos of artillery, and under escort of the council and the town regiment they proceeded to the town house, where the commissions were published and all “had a large treat,” as Sewall says. Major Hobby’s coach, with six horses, was at the door, a guard of horsemen wheeled into ranks, and so Dudley went to that Roxbury home, whence, as many remembered, he had been taken to be imprisoned.
Dudley was not deficient in confidence and forwardness; but he had no easy task before him. He naturally inclined to the faction of which Byfield and Leverett were leaders; but the insidious and envious Cotton Mather, taking him into his confidence, warned him of these very people. Dudley told them of the warning, and it was not long before the sanctimonious Mather was calling his excellency a “wretch.”
When Dudley made his opening address to the General Court,[193] he could not refrain from saying some things that were not very conciliatory. There were two points on which he raised issues, which he never succeeded in compassing. One of these was a demand for a stated salary. The assembly answered it with a present of £500 against the £1,000 which they had given to Bellomont. No urgency, no threats, no picturing the displeasure of the Crown, could effect his purpose.[194] The war which he waged with the representatives never, as long as the province existed, ended in a peace, though there was an occasional truce under pressure of external dangers.
Another of Dudley’s pleas was for the rebuilding of the fort at Pemaquid, to secure possession of the disputable territory between the Kennebec and Acadia.[195] The deputies were immovable. If the Crown wished to secure that region, it must do it by other sacrifices than those of New England.