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, Nicholson had himself been taken into custody by his Virginia counterpart, Sir Edmund Andros. Bermuda governor Samuel Day got access to customs officer Randolph’s letters to England by forcing his scribe to surrender the drafts. And Nicholson’s attempts to stop people from traveling to England had never risen to the level of Leeward Islands governor Christopher Codrington. After Codrington discovered that former speaker of the assembly Edward Walrond had written a letter of complaint, the governor threw Walrond into prison, threatened him before the Council, hunted down his son with dogs, and murdered one of his slaves.52
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
