It enacted two laws which were the principal source of all the party disputes during the following decades. One of these laws established a revenue, and thereby created a precedent which succeeding assemblies did not always consider necessary to acknowledge, while the executive would insist upon its being followed. The other erected courts of justice as a temporary measure, and when they expired by limitation, and a later governor attempted to erect a court without the assent of the assembly, this law, too, was quoted as precedent, but was likewise ignored.
In 1694 the assembly discovered that, during the last three years, a revenue of £40,000 had been provided for, which had generally been misapplied. Governor Fletcher refused to account for it, as, according to his ideas of government, the assembly’s business was only to raise money for the governor and council to spend. This resulted in a dissolution of the assembly, as in the council’s judgment “there was no good to be expected from this assembly,” and very little was done by its successor, elected in 1695. But not satisfied with vetoing the Bill of Rights, the home authorities tried further to repress the growing liberal movement in New York by giving to Fletcher’s successor, the Earl of Bellomont, an absolute negative on the acts of the provincial legislature, so that no infringement upon the prerogatives of the crown might become a law. He was further empowered to prorogue the assembly, to institute courts, appoint judges, and disburse the revenues. The Bishop of London was made the head of all ecclesiastical and educational matters in the province, and no printing-press was allowed to be put up without the governor’s license.
Bellomont, in addressing the first assembly under his administration, made a bid for popular favor by finding fault with the doings of his predecessor, who had left him as a legacy “difficulties to struggle with, a divided people, an empty treasury, a few miserable, naked, half-starved soldiers, being not half the number the king allowed pay for, the fortifications, and even the governor’s house, very much out of repairs, and, in a word, gentlemen (he said), the whole government out of frame.” The assembly was to find remedies, that is, money wherewith to repair all these evils. How they did it is shown by a speech made to them by Bellomont a month later: “You have now sat a whole month ... and have done nothing, either for the service of his Majestie or the good of ye country.... Your proceedings have been so unwarrantable, wholy tending to strife and division, and indeed disloyal to his Majestie and his laws, and destructive to the rights and libertys of the people, that I do think fit to dissolve this present assembly, and it is dissolved accordingly.”
Having come with the best intentions of curing the evils of Fletcher’s rule, and being instructed to break up piracy, of which New York had been represented in England as the very hot-bed, Bellomont soon became popular, and no doubt grew in favor with the people, both by persuading the assembly to enact a law of indemnity for Leisler, whose body, with that of Milbourne, was now granted the honors of a public reinterment, and by bringing Kidd, the celebrated sea-rover, to justice. To-day that which was meted out to Kidd might hardly be called justice; for it seems questionable if he had ever been guilty of piracy.
Bellomont was not allowed to carry out his plans for the internal improvement of the province, for death put an end to his work at the end of the third year of his administration, in 1701. His successor, Lord Cornbury, who entered upon his duties early in 1702 (Lieutenant-Governor Nanfan having had meanwhile a successful contest with the leaders of the still vigorous anti-Leisler party), was sent out as governor by his cousin, Queen Anne, in order to retrieve his shattered fortune. The necessitous condition in which he arrived in New York and his profligate mode of life soon led him to several misappropriations of public funds, which resulted in a law, passed by the disgusted assembly of 1705, taking into their own hands the appointment of a provincial treasurer for the receipt and disbursement of all public moneys. The whole of Cornbury’s administration was occupied with a contest between the assembly and the crown: the former claiming all the privileges of Englishmen under Magna Charta; the latter, through its governor, maintaining its prerogatives, and saying that the assembly had no other rights and privileges “but such as the queen is pleased to allow.” Lord Cornbury’s recall did not mend matters.[472] The assembly of 1708, the last under Cornbury’s administration, had been dissolved, because in its tenacity of the people’s right it had declared that to levy money in the colony without consent of the general assembly was a grievance and a violation of the people’s property; that the erecting of a court of equity without consent of the general assembly was contrary to law, both without precedent and of dangerous consequences to the liberty and properties of the subjects.
The term of Cornbury’s successor, Lord Lovelace, was very short, death calling him off within six months, while the lieutenant-governor, Ingoldsby, was a man too much like his friends, Sloughter, Fletcher, and Cornbury, to improve the state of affairs. With Governor Robert Hunter’s commission there came, in 1710, the answer to the declaration of the assembly of 1708. He received thereby “full power and authority to erect, constitute, and establish courts of judicature, with the advice and consent of the council.” The assembly’s remonstrance had been met by ignoring its author, and this treatment naturally incensed the representatives of the people so much that all the efforts of Governor Hunter, a man of excellent qualities, the friend of Addison and Swift, availed nothing in the way of settling the existing differences.
GOVERNOR HUNTER.
Follows an engraving in Valentine’s N. Y. City Manual, 1851, p. 420. Cf. on the seals of the colonial governors, Hist. Mag., ix. p. 176.