Nicholson’s comment marked one of the few attempts at humor in a long (and often painful) plea that he be allowed to remain in office. The astrological reference allowed him to suggest, without explicitly criticizing his superiors, that he needed to be judged within a larger context of his peers. Although the governor’s unusually hot temper and strongly authoritarian views fueled the conflict between the governor and his opponents, both the origins and results of this harshness went beyond both Nicholson and Virginia. The decades of the 1690s and 1700s were particularly difficult times for English colonial governors. Along with increasing demands from imperial authorities, governors in Virginia and a number of other places also had to deal with resistance from increasingly powerful colonial leaders who were themselves seeking more say in their government. Virginia’s elites over the previous decades had developed resources that allowed them to resist even Nicholson’s relentless attempts to bully them into submission. The result was a dysfunctional situation in which Nicholson’s angry demands for obedience merely stoked further resistance—a vicious cycle of suspicions and cross-purposes that might well have seemed, in Nicholson’s metaphor, like constellations and planets “in opposition.”
Nicholson expressed his own view of his role in his constant references to monarchical authority. He would send messages stating: “his excellency commands you in the queen’s name to come to him immediately.” Owners of boats or horses needed for the governor’s use were approached in the same way. “Whatsoever other command he gives, though no manner of way relating to the government,” Blair complained, “they are all given in the queen’s name.”37
The phrase was particularly galling because Nicholson’s orders often seemed less the monarch’s wishes than the governor’s whim. One man was summoned from forty miles away only to be kept waiting for days. Horses were impressed for the use of visitors and their servants when they could easily have been hired. Surely, Blair argued, the governor should reserve the queen’s name for higher purposes, rather than rendering it “cheap and contemptible” by using it on “frivolous” occasions.38
Nicholson rejected the distinction. All his actions, he believed, sought to fulfill his responsibility representing the monarch he almost invariably referred to as “most sacred.” He told the Board of Trade as he left Maryland in 1698 that he had done nothing unusual or particularly praiseworthy. It was simply “my bounden Duty to his Majesty: and [I] am heartily sorry that I have not been able to doe more.” The same devotion had led Nicholson’s commander in the 1680s to employ him in carrying urgent messages on the long trip from Northern Africa to London.39
The governor’s fervor was especially useful in a time of revolutionary change. The American colonies had been effectively autonomous before 1670. American leaders and English officials communicated only irregularly, and the central government exerted power only intermittently. After 1670, however, in what one historian has called “the end of American independence,” the English government under King Charles II and his brother, the future James II, sought further control. James, who had ruled without a legislature in New York, eventually extended this lack of representation to the Dominion of New England that brought together all the northeastern colonies. As part of the Dominion’s military and political leadership, Nicholson served in the vanguard of this change.
Although the young officer left America in the wake of the 1688 Glorious Revolution that removed James II, Nicholson’s absence, unlike his royal master’s, was only temporary. In 1690 the new monarchs appointed Nicholson lieutenant governor of Virginia, operating as governor in all but name. The move signaled clearly that the goal of reshaping the colonies would not end with James’s departure. William and Mary rejected their predecessors’ radical remodeling of governments, allowing, for example, the northern colonies to resume their separate governments. But the new monarchs also expected more from the colonies and their governors than ever before. The efforts to regulate trade and to expand military and fiscal capacities included not just England, but its American colonies as well. Charles and James had attempted to bring the colonies to heel; William and Mary sought to make them active participants.40
Not surprisingly Nicholson threw himself into meeting these new expectations. He reported to the Board of Trade regularly and at length. A July 1699 letter to that body included not just the requisite report on politics and the economy, but both a broad analysis of Virginia’s history and extended thoughts about how to arrange the files in the province’s offices. In support, he attached fifty-four additional documents. He provided sixty in his June 1700 letter, sent from aboard a ship he had personally helped retake from pirates.41 “We have not from any Governour So Exact accounts as from you,” an impressed member of the Board of Trade had marveled several months before.42 Even Blair had to admire this dedication. He later testified that he had hesitated to oppose the governor because of his “vigor & dilligence in stirring about & driving on the business of his Government.”43
Nicholson believed this vigor necessary because royal government in America was so weak. Maryland, which he viewed as “not very well setled either in the Church, Civil, or Military Government,” had been a particular challenge.44 But Virginia (although much larger and more established) also required attention. When Nicholson returned in 1698, its government could not pay its expenses from the funds devoted to that purpose. Despite raids on other accounts, the colony had fallen deeply in debt. Five years later Nicholson reported that Virginia had accumulated a surplus of over £30,000, almost twenty times the amount he had paid off.45 He boasted in 1705 that he “had more Audits in a Year than any of” his predecessors.46
Nicholson showed the same devotion to enforcing trade regulation. Even Edward Randolph, surveyor general of the American customs since the 1670s, was impressed. Despite unbounded scorn for most officials in the colonies, he considered Nicholson “sincere & indefatigable in his Ma’ties service.” The governor’s influence extended beyond Virginia. Besides financing and encouraging Church of England ministers as far north as New York, Nicholson also supported Pennsylvania customs officials struggling against the colony’s notorious inattention to trade rules.47
Military preparation received similar attention. Nicholson personally supervised some militia training. Robert Quary, who replaced the deceased Randolph as surveyor general in 1703, judged Virginia’s troops “under far better regulation than any other Governm’t on the Main[land].”48 But Nicholson wanted to go further. He created an elite militia force and proposed that the colony sponsor what would have been essentially a professional standing army. When Virginia’s legislature failed to comply with imperial calls for men and money to defend New York from the French and Indians, Nicholson advanced funds from his own pocket.49
The governor’s faithfulness seems all the more remarkable in comparison with his counterparts in other colonies. The cautious Nicholson suggested this indirectly through astrological metaphor. Quary was blunter, telling the Board of Trade in 1703 that he had challenged the governor’s opponents to explain the reasons for their virulent attacks: “Hath the Gov’r violated any of the Queens Commands, or Instructions, or acted contrary to them? Hath he omitted any occasion or oppertunity of serving her Majtie or the Interest of the Country?” Quary continued by citing Nicholson’s attention to crown revenues, “acts of Trade,” “illegal trade,” and the militia, certain that even the governor’s enemies could not fault his concern for the empire.50
Quary’s vigorous questioning revealed a central difficulty in the case against Nicholson. Lengthy rages and death threats could be terrifying in person, but officials an ocean away found it difficult to believe Nicholson’s behavior posed a serious danger. Unable to identify an outright criminal act, the governor’s opponents compiled long lists of actions they considered “maladministration,” few of which were so far out of bounds that they clearly warranted immediate dismissal.51 Nicholson was accused, for example, of arbitrarily taking men into custody, opening the mail of suspected enemies, stopping his opponents from going to England, and even listening at windows.
The difficulty for Nicholson’s Virginia opponents was that other governors had acted similarly—and done so in much less defensible ways. While governor of Maryland,