Dudley’s longevity rested on more than English ties. His relatively mild temper won him substantial support. Dudley occasionally displayed flashes of anger. He and his son drew their swords on some carters who refused to give way to their carriage in 1705—and, like Nicholson, he received advice from England suggesting that “moderation is a virtue.”75 But Dudley showed a sensitivity to the aspirations of the colony’s leaders that Nicholson never developed. As an early supporter noted, Dudley lacked his predecessor Phips’s “Natural passionateness.”76
Nicholson’s harsh demeanor, by contrast, intensified Virginia’s political difficulties, provoking a bitterness that led each side to work tirelessly to undermine the other. The governor complained that Blair and his group seemed to be following the “the old diabolical saying” (about excrement rather than soil): “Fling dirt enough and some will stick.”77 Yet he himself made numerous charges about his enemies’ “artfull trifling, malitious insinuations, and many notorious falsities.” He pressured the burgesses, grand juries, and ministers to prepare addresses of support.78 Nicholson’s opponents fought back by sending numerous affidavits, letters, and memorials to the home government, leading Nicholson to dub his opponents the “Affidavit Sparks.”79 They also circulated writings in both Virginia and England, including the “ballads, Pasquils & Lampoons … posted upon trees in high roads” cited by Virginia clergy. As they noted there were “Criminations & Recriminations on both sides (God knows).”80
The result was a lengthy standoff. Blair and his allies would not accept the subordinate role that Nicholson demanded of them. Such submission to the governor, Beverley argued, would mean “Slavery and utter ruine.”81 But Nicholson’s views of government allowed no other position, no other result. The contest ended only in spring 1705 when the Board of Trade removed Nicholson—and even then they refused to admit the dangers of his temper. Responding to the governor’s pleas, they issued a public statement that he had done nothing wrong.
Nicholson’s harshness had heightened the problems of an already difficult situation. The imperial government needed to renegotiate its relationship with colonial elites if it wished to expand its power. Virginia’s gentlemen needed not only to come to terms with British expectations but to reconsider how they presented themselves to the broader world as well as to other Virginians. As Nicholson’s supporters rightly complained, provincial leaders were hardly models of self-control. But (as the next section suggests) their difficulties encouraged them to define the link between government and personal demeanor in ways that Nicholson never did. While Virginia’s elite began to explore the ideals of politeness, the governor’s attempts at gaining support, as Blair came to recognize, “appeared more like a design of perpetrating a rape than obtaining a consent.”82
A Publick Callamity
Nicholson’s successor, Governor Edward Nott, seems aptly named. A former army officer of no particular distinction, he arrived in Virginia in August 1705 and died a year later. His list of accomplishments was as short as his tenure. Other than gaining funding for a governor’s mansion and encouraging passage of a widely popular port bill (a measure soon disallowed by the British government), Nott instituted no lasting change or policy initiative.
Yet Virginians found Nott irresistible. A minister just arriving from England about the time of his death observed that the late governor “is very much lamented.”83 Blair reported that the loss “put this poor Country in a great consternation.”84 Virginia’s House of Burgesses erected a monument to him more than a decade later. Cautious representatives removed William Byrd II’s dramatic peroration: “if a Stranger, pity the country: if a Virginian, thy self.” But even the revised inscription still observed that Nott “was deservedly Esteemed A Public Blessing while he Lived & when He Dyed a Publick Callamity.”85
The celebration of Nott went beyond the fact that he was not Nicholson. Many Virginians felt relieved simply that the colony’s most powerful official no longer threatened to kill people. But Nott did more than abandon threats. Although “the divisions … were very hot at his Coming,” Blair noted, Nott helped resolve them through his “very calm healing Temper.”86
Nott’s calmness, like Nicholson’s anger, was not simply a personal trait. Virginians understood Nott’s actions as part of an emerging cultural framework that helped provincial leaders rethink their political experiences, their self-presentation, and their views about anger. The moderation recommended to Nicholson (and revered in Nott) did more than condemn excessive anger. It formed part of an ethic of polite social and political interaction that struggled to keep disruptive emotional reactions within careful bounds. Careful control of aggression also restrained power and helped societies avoid the dangers of arbitrary and absolute rule.
Of course, neither Nicholson nor Nott caused or created this cultural shift, which spanned America as well as the Atlantic. The goals of politeness everywhere remained ideals rather than realities, aspirations rather than descriptions. But they were not divorced from everyday experience. Virginians’ responses to their two governors reveal the experiences and contentions that gave meaning to this emerging ideal of human relationships.
The central theme of the inscription that Byrd prepared for the monument to Nott in 1718 was the late governor’s respect for the boundaries of authority. Nott used his powers “to do good to the People,” Byrd noted, not “to insult and oppress.” With a “passion” only for “doing good” and a concern for “mildness, prudence, and justice,” Nott “was content with the limited Authority of his Commission, and stretch’t not the Royal Prerogative to make his Power absolute, and his Government arbitrary.”87
These descriptions were not simply polite commonplaces. Byrd’s arguments sharply critiqued both Nott’s predecessor and his successor. The legislative committee reviewing the draft removed a number of his more fervent claims, worried that they might be taken as criticisms of their current governor.
Nicholson of course had a different view of his failure to follow the letter of the law. He believed his sacred duty to keep order sometimes required extraordinary measures. You “speak so much of the Prerogative,” noted a concerned supporter in England, “& so little of the law.” Blair complained that Nicholson went even further, speaking “in the most contemptible terms of the English Laws & even use[d] that Expression Magna Charta, Magna F[art]a.”88
Contemporaries often referred to this broad view of official power in another term used by Byrd. “Arbitrary” had originally not been a negative term. It was closely connected with arbitration, allowing a mutually agreed-upon authority to determine an appropriate result without being shackled by technicalities. Since judges had the freedom to consider divine “wisdome & mercy” as well as “Justice,” the Puritan leader John Winthrop noted, they were “Gods upon earthe.”89 By the end of the century, however, the term “arbitrary” had largely lost its positive connotations. Robert Beverley II’s 1705 history praised Nicholson in his first term as governor for being a “strict Observer of the Acts of Assembly, making them the sole Rule of his Judgment.” This “Regularity,” however, broke down in council meetings. There Nicholson had been “Imperious” and “Arbitrary.”90
This issue of arbitrary government lay at the heart of John Locke’s influential critique of the authoritarian ideas that Nicholson continued to hold into the eighteenth century. Locke’s First Treatise on Government, first published in 1689, responded to the late Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a book that defended monarchical power as an extension of the universally accepted authority of the father within the family. Since the king played the same paternal role within the community, he too ruled by “his own will.” As Filmer had argued elsewhere, such arbitrary or absolute government formed “the first and the safest government for the world.”
Locke rejected this approach. Without “settled