Nor could opponents convincingly argue that Nicholson was driven by self-interest. Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia, completed while Nicholson was still in office, spoke harshly about the governor. But Beverley could not charge him, as he did an earlier governor, with seeking to make “as much [money] as he could, without Respect either to the Laws of the Plantation, or the Dignity of his Office.”53 Other colonies suffered from similarly greedy leaders. Isaac Richier, Bermuda’s second royal governor, jailed the collector of the customs after the official failed to take into account that the ship he was prosecuting for illegal trading had been built by the governor, who had then sold it to a Scottish trader in violation of the Navigation Acts. When the next governor arrived in 1693, he in turn jailed his predecessor in a dispute over salary and perquisites. Richier regained his freedom only after the king had twice ordered his release.54
Other governors had difficulty with the military and trade matters that Nicholson handled so diligently. New York’s Benjamin Fletcher had such difficulties asserting control of Connecticut’s militia after he traveled there in October 1693 that he finally threw a naysayer down a flight of stairs.55 Massachusetts governor William Phips had attacked the captain of a royal ship earlier that year. After Richard Short reported to Phips that he could not carry out an order, the governor called Short a “Whore,” and beat him with his cane. He continued the attack even after the captain, who had a disabled right arm, tripped on a cannon and lay helpless on the dock.56 A few months after the January 1693 incident with Captain Short, Phips also publicly beat the customs collector, Jahleel Brenton, for his action in seizing a ship (the ironically titled Good Luck). Phips only threatened to “drubb” Edward Randolph, the surveyor-general of customs—for once acting in a more restrained way than some other governors, who almost universally hated the rigid and self-righteous official.57 Randolph was held for six months by Bostonians during their 1689 uprising against the Dominion. He spent more than seven months in a Bermuda jail a decade later. In between, he was also arrested by the Pennsylvania governor and escaped the same fate in Maryland only by hiding in a swamp.58
As Nicholson knew, these difficulties were being carefully watched by imperial officials. Although customs officials like Randolph often proved impervious to criticism, leaders coming under the Board of Trade’s direct control were kept on a tighter leash. The board wrote a scathing letter to Bermuda governor Samuel Day after he jailed Randolph, removing the governor from office soon after he complied.59 Phips suffered a similar fate after news of his attacks on royal officials reached England. In the same March 1705 week that Nicholson wrote his extended justifications, the Board of Trade recommended the removal of a Church of England minister in Newfoundland whose angry outburst had helped set off a mutiny in the garrison; wrote a letter to the lieutenant governor of Bermuda ordering him to live in peace with the formerly disrespectful secretary of the colony; and examined eleven affidavits from Barbados accusing the governor of tyranny and thirty-two documents attempting to refute the charge.60
Nicholson’s opponents in Virginia, however, could find little comfort in this broader context of new demands and problematic governors. They were facing a man who threatened to destroy their reputations, take away their possessions, and even kill them—who would accept nothing less than complete subordination to the sacred will of the queen. Unfortunately, Nicholson understood as little of the larger context of the situation as his opponents. While they failed to recognize the imperial pressures that drove his already authoritarian outlook, Nicholson refused to accept the existence of newly confident colonial elites who refused the status of mere subjects—and now had the strength to resist their governor’s demands.
As Blair complained in 1702, Nicholson scorned “the best Gentlemen we had in the country.” considering them “no more than the dirt under his feet.” Nicholson sneered that the province’s smaller landholders had little regard for the colony’s leaders, fully aware that their grandparents (and sometimes their parents) had also been common people. Virginia’s “rouges” had risen to power, the governor asserted, by kidnapping their servants and “cheating the people.”61
Although elite Virginians considered these characterizations “most contemptable,” they knew they contained more than a measure of truth. By English standards, the worthies the governor referred to “the mighty Dons” were still raw parvenus not far removed from the “primitive nothing” that Nicholson threatened to reduce them to. They had built their fortunes over the past generation or two through forced labor whose origins were not far from kidnapping—the sweat of not just the English indentured servants that aroused Nicholson’s indignation, but also the Africans and the Indians taken from Carolina villages who made up the majority of field workers after 1700.
Nicholson’s dismissive descriptions would have seemed even more plausible in the years before his first arrival in 1690. Particularly after the restoration of England’s monarchy in 1660, Virginia’s gentlemen struggled (often unsuccessfully) both to establish authority in the colony and resist the power of a resurgent empire. Holding power in Virginia was difficult enough. Colonial leaders had worried about the presence of an enormous number of white indentured servants, particularly when several plans for rebellion were discovered in the 1660s. The growth of African slavery in succeeding decades, driven partly by these anxieties, only raised further fears about what Governor Berkeley termed “the giddy multitude.” Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 posed the most direct challenge to the colony’s leadership. Though himself wealthy and powerful, Nathaniel Bacon had little respect for Virginia’s other leaders. Like Nicholson, he contrasted their “vile” backgrounds when “they first entered the country” with the “sudden rise of their estates” since. Bacon aroused such support that he was able to capture and burn Virginia’s capital city.62
Although Virginia’s gentry defeated the rebellion, they had to contend with unwelcome attention from the English government. The troops sent by imperial authorities in response to the Virginians’ call for aid arrived too late to be of use, and the commission of inquiry that accompanied them soon blamed the unrest not on the rebels but the regime they had rejected. Crown policy increasingly focused on taming unruly Virginia leaders, demanding permanent revenue for the colonial government, strict limits on the powers of the House of Burgesses, and even royal approval before passing legislation. Delay (and, at a crucial point, a sympathetic governor) prevented the most substantial structural changes. But Virginia’s leaders still lost significant power in these years. Governors in the 1680s assembled the legislature less than once a year.63
The provincial leaders who challenged Nicholson’s governorship at the turn of the century no longer faced such dire difficulties. They often belonged to wealthy and politically active families who had given them a broader education in the ways of the larger English world. Just as important, they were often strong enough to pass along their political status, a continuity seen in the growing number of leaders bearing their parent’s name. A Benjamin Harrison had served in the House of Burgesses as early as 1642. His son, Benjamin Harrison II, entered the body in the 1670s and was chosen for the council in the 1690s. Benjamin III in turn received an English legal education before serving as the colony’s attorney general, holding the position for five years before Nicholson turned him out in 1702.64
Robert Beverley II, who lost his post as clerk to the House of Burgesses a year later, belonged to a similarly significant family. Both his father and his elder brother had held the position, with the latter going on to become the speaker of the body. The father of his late wife served on the Council at the same time. Beverley’s trip to England in 1703 allowed Nicholson to choose another clerk. The outraged Beverley joined in the lobbying campaign against Nicholson, as well as publishing the first substantial history of a British colony by a native-born American.65
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