“I need not tell you of a picked jury and the penal laws are invading our American sanctuary without the least regard to the toleration, which should justly alarm us all.”
At the trial, in the following June, the prosecution relied on the royal instruction to Cornbury, rather than on the ministry act, as though conscious that said act, while establishing a church, yet inflicted no penalties for non-conformity.
Makemie defended himself, producing licenses from the Governors of Virginia and Maryland, contending that there was nothing in the English common or statute law to hold him, and nothing in the laws of New York against the liberty he had exercised.
As to the Governor’s ecclesiastical authority, he argued that it could not exist without the due promulgation of law.
The plea of Makemie was so forceful that a jury “Packed to convict” was won over to his cause and unanimously acquitted him. The court, however, would not release him until he had paid all the costs, which, together with his expenses, amounted to £83, as sufficiently heavy burden, for which he must yet have had great compensation in the consciousness that he had fought a great fight and won a great victory in the cause of human liberty. Never again did a New York Governor attempt to silence any orderly preaching of the Gospel.
To Cornbury the issue of the case brought a bitter mortification, and he seems to have been seriously alarmed for the consequence to himself from the reports of the trial made by Mr. Makemie and his friends in England and the Colonies.
Writing to the lords of trade in October, 1707, he denied that Makemie had applied to him for a license, and said: “I entreat your Lordship’s protection against that malicious man, who is well known in Virginia and Maryland to be a disturber of the peace and quiet of all places he comes into; he is a Doctor of Physic, a Merchant, and attorney or counsellor at law, and, which is worse of all, a disturber of governments.”
It does not appear that Makemie ever took any action against Cornbury, nor was it needed to the damage of his Lordship’s reputation, which his course had so deeply stained.
The trial being over, Makemie seems to have continued on his journey to New England, as he addressed a letter to Lord Cornbury from Boston in July, 1707, and, according to a bequest in his will made soon after, “Mr. Jedediah Andrews, Minister at Philadelphia, is given my new cane, bought and fixed in Boston.” This will was signed April 27th, 1708, in which he refers to his wife and two daughters, Elizabeth and Anne Makemie.
Some time between this and August 4th, when the will was ordered to be recorded, Makemie died, with a solemn declaration of attachment to his mother church and so ended the career, at the age of fifty, of one of the greatest men who ever came to our shores in the interest of the protestant religion and it is safe to say had he lived in the times of the Revolution, he would have been one of the many of his fellow countrymen who went forth to fight for the flag of this new nation and raised their voices in behalf of human liberty.