Volume 1, Chapter 60, The Liberalism of Lord Belamont in the Royal Colonies
The settlement after the Glorious Revolution had made New Hampshire a royal colony. Samuel
Allen, claimant to the proprietorship, was named royal governor. Allen's son-in-law,
the wealthy John Usher, served as lieutenant governor and resident executive of the colony.
Usher struggled with the assembly throughout the 1690s. He continually asked it for tax
money, which the assemblymen claimed the colony was too poor to afford, and tried to conscript
troops which they failed to supply. The assembly was thus the spokesman for the liberties of
the people against the exactions of the royal and proprietary executive. Usher's attempts
to collect quit rents was largely futile, as no quit rents could be collected from a
New Hampshire jury. When Usher urged the assembly to raise more taxes, it replied that
it would do so only if Usher would join them in petitioning for a return of the province
to Massachusetts. Finally, mass pressure from the citizens of New Hampshire persuaded Allen
to discharge his generally hated son-in-law and to fill his post in 1697 with the Treasurer
of New Hampshire, William Partridge. Partridge, powerful at court as a heavy supplier of mast
and timber to the Royal Navy, now fought it out with Usher before the legislature for
the office of Lieutenant Governor. The Council and Assembly insisted on Partridge in what
What the rattled usher described as the Piscataqua Rebellion.
The assembly sent its profound thanks to the king for the new appointment.
In regard to the tyrannical usher, the assembly assured the crown that there had been no disturbances
but what he himself had made.
We already noted that Benjamin Fletcher became royal governor of New York in 1692 and that,
Although the convicted Leislerians were allowed their rehabilitation, Fletcher was a staunch
partisan of the old oligarchy.
After the Leislerians received full royal pardon, Fletcher had to let Delanoi and others
take their seats as assemblymen.
He later blamed their obstructions for the allegedly inadequate defenses of the colony.
In addition, Fletcher kept the conflicts alive by threatening to shoot anyone who in the
May 1695 election would dare to vote for Delanoi. In the New York City elections that year,
the despotic Fletcher sent roving bands of soldiers and sailors through the streets threatening
to draft anyone who happened to vote incorrectly. These troops were also made freemen of the
city arbitrarily in order to gain their votes against the popular Leslerian party. Such
Such methods of intimidation were successful in confining public offices to the hands of the minority oligarchy.
Economically, Fletcher feathered his own nest in those of the oligarchy in many ways.
For one thing, in return for lavish bribes, Fletcher granted the protection of New York to pirates, who abounded in that era.
As a result, many prominent New Yorkers accumulated fortunes from piracy.
In addition, huge arbitrary land grants were handed out to favorites of Fletcher, thus
sowing the seeds of trouble for over a century to come. These vast privileges to the landed
oligarchy widened the gulf between the New York oligarchy and the rest of the people.
In 1697 alone, Adolph Phillips received the highland patent of 205,000 acres, a large
William Smith, ally of the oligarchy on Long Island, received a grant of no less than 50 square miles in Nassau County.
Fletcher specialized in buying the allegiance of members of his council.
Thus, one councillor, Captain John Evans, received an enormous tract of 800 square miles in 1694.
and Fletcher made a grant of almost 540,000 acres in the Mohawk River Valley to a Dutch minister, the Reverend Mr. Delius and a group of other members of the oligarchy.
In return for these services, the grantees paid Fletcher large amounts in bribes and intolerable corrupt selling away, as Fletcher's successor described it.
Fletcher received a total of approximately 4,000 pounds sterling in bribes.
Concerning the grants of monopoly privilege that required assembly approval, Fletcher had a more difficult time.
This new democratic institution naturally represented the farmers, the bulk of the New York populace.
The farmers bitterly opposed attempts by the old New York City monopolist
to regain their old flour-bolting and packing monopoly.
So determined was the assembly to secure free trade in flour
that it insisted on refusing to pass any other measure whatever
until Fletcher agreed to this bill.
Finally, under this pressure and after the assembly had bribed Fletcher with 400 pounds,
free trade in flour became law in 1695.
New York City made repeated frantic attempts to regain the flour milling monopoly.
In 1700 it adopted an ordinance placing heavy duties on all flour and biscuits imported into the city from the outlying farms.
But again the assembly refused to pass any appropriation or tax bill until this ordinance was repealed.
Finally, after an unsuccessful attempt to pack the assembly with city representatives,
The New York City merchants had to reconcile themselves to the loss of their monopoly privileges in the flower industry.
Governor Fletcher was also eager to establish the Anglican Church in New York.
He also wanted the assembly to vote taxes for government for the duration of the life of the current king.
The assembly, of course, adamantly refused to do either one.
Fletcher also had no success in exerting his will over the Connecticut militia, to the
rule of which he had a royal claim.
Ordered in 1693 to place its forces at his disposal, Connecticut absolutely refused.
The embittered Fletcher announced to England that the laws of England have no force in
this colony, they set up for a free state.
of Chastising Connecticut, the Crown, in effect, removed Fletcher's authority.
By the mid-1690s, the three royal colonies of the North, Massachusetts, New Hampshire
and New York, were all suffering under Tory oligarchs, Staughton, Allen and Usher, Fletcher,
and conflicts raged between them and the Liberal Assemblies.
In the meanwhile, the Tories were rapidly losing favor in the home country.
The Tories were being replaced in political favor by the more liberal Whigs.
The naming of the Whig William Popple as Secretary of the New Board of Trade signified a decline
in the influence of the powerful Tory bureaucrat, William Blathewaite.
By 1695, the King had decided to bring unity to his strife-torn royal colonies by appointing
Being a common governor over all of them, the highly influential liberal, Whig, Robert
Coote, Earl of Belmont, friend of the great liberal philosopher John Locke. News of the
appointment of Belmont was greeted with joy by the liberal forces in these colonies, and
with heart-rending anguish by Dudley and Staunton in Massachusetts, by Fletcher in the New York
and by Alan and Usher in New Hampshire. William Penn, Peter Delanoi of New York and the Winthrop
brothers Fitzjohn and Waite were also jubilant. Bellamont was known to have been bitterly
anti-Dudley and anti-Andros and a staunch defender of the Lislarian Revolution. In fact, he had
in the New England Colonies, The New England Colonies, The New England Colonies, The New
in New Hampshire in July of the same year. This common appointment, incidentally, did
not mean that the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York were amalgamated
as under the dominion. Instead, each kept its separate political institutions, but simply
had a common governor. Lord Bellamont lost no time in aligning himself with the popular
from Massachusetts, Wade Winthrop traveled to New York with two other delegates of the
General Court to greet the new governor. He later wrote to a friend of Bellamont's noble
character. In his inaugural speech in the Bay Colony, Bellamont boldly attacked Charles
Bellamont associated with such liberal leaders as Winthrop and Elisha Cook. He deplored with
equal fervor the Puritan fanatics and the Tory oligarchs. The grateful General Court
voted Bellamont a very large salary of £1,500, the largest sum that Massachusetts ever voted
for a Colonial Governor before or since.
Unfortunately, Bellamont did not have enough time to exert any real impact on Massachusetts.
He left the colony after little more than a year, in the summer of 1700, and he met
his untimely death the following spring.
Bellamont's impact on New Hampshire was considerably greater, despite the short span.
For Belemont decisively confirmed the relatively liberal William Partridge as lieutenant governor
in place of the Tory, John Usher.
Belemont was totally disgusted with the proprietary party and with Allen's persistent attempts
to grant him huge bribes and to divide the province with him.
Belemont curtly told Allen, I would not sell justice if I might have the world, and he
And he denounced Blathwaite for being on Alan's payroll. Under Bellamont's aegis, the courts
of New Hampshire gave short shrift to Alan's proprietary presumptions, and Partridge and
the Assembly reconfirmed all the land titles that Alan had tried to dislodge. Alan took
his case to the King, and the proprietary claims were to drag on for an additional half-century,
What never again was proprietary feudalism to come close to imposing itself on the settlers
and landowners of New Hampshire.
Bellamont had, in effect, delivered a decisive blow to proprietary predation in New Hampshire.
Lord Bellamont spent most of his all-too-brief tenure in New York, and there had the greatest
impact.
In the first place, Bellamont launched a determined and uncompromising attack on the land grants
to the oligarchy. In the short time that proved to be available to him, he accomplished a
remarkable amount. He publicly deplored the fact that three-quarters of the land of New
York had been placed in the hands of less than a dozen men because of the large land
and Land Grants, Fletcher's corruption and arbitrary subsidies were denounced, and Bellamont
managed in 1699 after bitter struggle to drive through the council the invalidation of many
of the Fletcher grants.
The Mohawk grant to Delius and Company and the land gifts to Bayard, Evans and others
were invalidated.
The Delius grant was considered particularly unfortunate, for dispossessed Indians were
forced to leave and began trading with the French.
The grant, therefore, had aroused the hostility of the Albany fur traders, as well as the
Leslarians.
Lord Bellemont had to overcome the implacable opposition of three council members, themselves
the recipients of huge land grants from Fletcher, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, Robert Livingston,
and William Smith. Because of this opposition, Bellamont was unable to get many other Fletcher
as well as previous grants annulled. He was, however, able to get the crown to impose a
1,000-acre limit on future grants, to annul extravagant grants, and to require forfeiture
of lands that had not been settled and improved within three years. Much of Bellamont's short
was concerned with cracking down on piracy and on the connivance of the New York oligarchy in that organized theft.
Such leading oligarchs and anti-leslarians as Frederick Phillips, Thomas Willett, Thomas Clark, and William Smith were all denounced for piracy.
and six oligarch-counselors, including William Nichols, Nicholas Bayard and Captain Gabriel
Minvier, were suspended by Bellamont for the same reason. Bellamont began more as a determined
opponent of the oligarchy than as an ardent Lislarian, but his furious struggle with the
oligarchy inevitably made him leader of the Lislarian party in the colony. Bellamont also
Belemont also endeared himself to the Lisslerians in 1698 by rescuing Lissler and Milburn from
their graves near the scaffold and rebaring their bodies with pomp and ceremony near
a Dutch Reformed church.
When Belemont arrived in New York, he found the assembly dominated by the oligarchy.
Even though the assembly was a relatively democratic organ, much of the rural electorate
represented the feudal manners rather than the tenants living on them.
To carry through his land reform program, Bellamont needed a liberal assembly, and he
obtained the defeat of the Jacobite party in the 1699 election.
He did this partly by holding all voting on the same day, thus preventing the customary
practice of a man's voting in every county in which he owned property.
In fact, Belemont issued a proclamation for a truly free election and charged that the
people have been heretofore interrupted in their freedom of elections.
After Belemont removed the councillors implicated in piracy, it was this assembly that drove
through the Belemont land reforms.
The assembly also compensated some former Leslarians for expenses, pardoned the remaining
The Grateful Assembly also voted the large sum of £1,500 as salary to Bellamont. It
was the Leslarian Assembly, incidentally, along with Bellamont, that had put the severe
and successful pressure on New York City to end its tax on rural flour. The Assembly,
However, did belie its general anti-monopoly record by prohibiting the importing of empty
casks into the city of New York, thus, in effect, granting a monopoly of cask-making
to the Coopers of New York City.
It should be noted that after the death of Leisler, the Leslerian party did not have
to suffer any of the embarrassing contradictions of Leisler's own dictatorial and warmongering
program.
The movement now blossomed forth as a truly liberal one, with a major emphasis on freedom
as over against monopoly privilege, whether in flour or in land.
Indeed, Bellamont's goal in land reform envisioned not only invalidating all the land grants,
but also cutting the public domain into small plots and granting them free and clear to
to Individual Settlers, thereby anticipating the libertarian homestead program.
Bellamont recognized that the repressive landed monopoly in New York would drive away potential
settlers in droves to neighboring colonies, where land was free, abundant and unengrossed
by privilege.
The landed oligarchs of New York were so worried by Bellamont's thoroughgoing plans for land
and Reform that they hired a lawyer, John Montague, to plead their cause in England.
Montague continued the feudal landowners' traditional policy of confusing their arbitrary
property claims granted by government privilege with the rights of private property itself.
He did not point out that arbitrary land grants sharply conflicted with the genuine property
Rights of Past and Future Settlers. In one important respect only did Bellamont betray
the liberal cause and thereby undercut his own liberal support. This was his emphatic
determination to enforce the Navigation Acts. This, of course, was in keeping with the new
tightening of imperial mercantilism put through in the last analysis by the Whiggish merchants
of England, eager to gain monopolistic privileges for themselves. Here Bellamont made common
cause with the Tory Edward Randolph, who as Surveyor General of the Customs praised Bellamont's
rigor in enforcement and denounced Fletcher's laxity. Using his office for plunder, Fletcher
had not been particularly interested in enforcing regulations. This attempt to enforce the hated
Navigation laws alienated the merchants of New York from Bellamont and split the liberal
movement in the colony. The merchants in the assembly threatened to vote no more taxes
and to tear down the customs house. Many actually fled the colony and moved to the east New
Jersey port of Perth Amboy. Large-scale petitions of merchants and others asked for Bellamont's
The Anglican minister, Rev. William Vessey, led in this hypocritical attack, and Vessey
Vessi was to remain the leader of the High Church Party in New York for many years thereafter.
In a counterattack, Bellamont unsuccessfully tried to have Vessi removed from the post
on the ground of Jacobite sympathies. When the Reverend Mr. Delius, who had lost his
huge land grant, was suspended by the assembly from his church post, the wrath of the Dutch
Church fell on Bellamont's head. Petitions poured in, in behalf of Delius. They came
from the elders, deacons and members of his Albany Church, as well as from many others,
including Fletcher in England, diligently trying to blacken his successor's reputation.