Narratives of villainy and virtue: Governor Francis Nicholson and the character of the good ruler in early Virginia.

FRANCIS NICHOLSON, THE ROYAL GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA, WAS A WILDLY immoderate and disordered man. His character was depraved, dissolute, and ungodly. "One might as well pretend to describe an hurricane to one that never saw it," observed the Reverend James Blair in 1703, "as to think to describe the brutality and savageness of his passions." In February 1704 Robert Beverley likened "our poor unfortunate Contry" of Virginia to a "kind good natur'd man [who] nursed vipers in his bed." Beverley described Nicholson, one of the "vipers," as "the proudest man I ever saw," whose most common demeanor was "to hector and Domineer." Such commentators emphasized Nicholson's experience as an officer in the English army unit known as the Tangier Regiment, infamous for its excesses in putting down Monmouth's Rebellion in 1685 and not at all a training ground for leaders respectful of the rights of Englishmen. Nicholson, Beverley reported a year later, told his subjects "that they were dogs, and their wives were bitches; that he knew how to govern the Moors, and would beat them into better manners." (1)

So said his detractors. In the first years of the eighteenth century many highly placed Virginians viciously disparaged Nicholson's character. He was, they charged, the antithesis of the public-minded, self-controlled governor whom Englishmen praised as the ideal ruler. Just a few years after he assumed the governor's office in 1698, Nicholson became the subject of a multitude of critical narratives that were recounted to officials, friends, and patrons in England. His critics depicted him as temperamentally unfit to rule. These descriptions of Nicholson offer a window onto the political ethics of a substantial body of early-eighteenth-century Virginians. In vilifying Nicholson, the authors of these stories revealed their understanding of legitimate authority and the good society.

Historians who have analyzed the animosity toward Nicholson have tended to locate it in the context of the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath, as an expression of Whig political values in the colony of Virginia. An examination of the stories told about Nicholson, however, reveals a battle about more than straightforward matters of government. Though Nicholson's enemies expressed concern for the security of their traditional English rights, the conflicts that provided the dramatic focus of their stories were not framed to illustrate Nicholson's threat to the proper balance of public institutions. Nor did his enemies concentrate on the governor's abuse of political power, although accusations of public corruption did figure into some of their accounts. Instead, the stories are a species of transatlantic political slander, similar in form to attacks on other late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century colonial governors. As in the assault on the character of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, the royal governor of New York in the early eighteenth century, the rhetoric deployed against Nicholson focused on his malignant temperament and personality. Nicholson's enemies structured their narratives to reveal his flawed character, which, they asserted, rendered him an unfit governor. (2)

The political and ethical idiom employed by Nicholson's foes stemmed from older, early-seventeenth-century understandings of the good society. The assumptions that framed late-seventeenth-century Virginians' conception of the duties and responsibilities of the good ruler had achieved wide currency in English thought in the decades prior to the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Incorporated into the practical theology and ethics of post-Restoration Anglicanism, these older conceptions of political order stressed an understanding of human nature derived from Renaissance humanism and ultimately from Aristotle. In this model of the good society, civility flowed down from the top of the social hierarchy, and rulers embodied virtue, thereby setting the pattern to be emulated by their social inferiors and fashioning the civil character of the entire society. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, this older idiom--as re-articulated in and reinforced by moderate Anglican theology--flourished in Virginia and influenced the multitude of stories told about Nicholson. Nicholson's character, not his policies, was the focus of the stories his critics told. Nicholson's character mattered because, in the ethical sensibilities of prominent Virginians, the character of the governed was shaped by the character of the governor. (3)

Nicholson governed Virginia at a liminal moment in the colony's development. The socially prominent planters of early-eighteenth-century Virginia were men whose education and experience of metropolitan England dated from before the Glorious Revolution. As they contemplated passing their authority to a younger generation born in Virginia with little firsthand experience of England, they expressed anxiety for the prospects of English civilization in the colony. The authors of a report to the Board of Trade wrote in 1697 that "the first Stock of Virginia gentlemen ... having had their Education in England, were a great deal better accomplish'd in the Law, and Knowledge of the World" than their descendants. As apprehensive Virginians, in the words of historian Carole Shammas, "grew more concerned about their colony's deficiencies," they naturally turned to England for their image of the good society. To these men, Nicholson's inability to display an appropriate character was dangerous to the colony because the project of erecting a civil society depended upon the temperament of the governor, who was at the apex of the social order. In these sensibilities are found the origins of the ethos of "stewardship," which, according to Jack P. Greene and others, characterized mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. Ironically, in a colony defined early on by individual striving for material success, many of Virginia's most socially prominent gentlemen rejected alternative, market ethics, which grounded visions of the good society in human appetite or aversion to pain. However viciously Virginians competed with one another in the scramble for wealth, especially when the economic stakes were high, they articulated the moral basis of their society in terms other than possessive individualism. The narratives produced by Virginians at the turn of the century emphasized an organically integrated, hierarchical society, not a society forged from the exertions of autonomous individuals. (4)

Francis Nicholson became captain general and governor in chief of Virginia in 1698, and the process by which he acquired the position sheds insight into the controversy that erupted some years later. Nicholson had served in the colonies for more than a decade, initially as an officer under the command of Colonel Sir Edmund Andros in the newly created Dominion of New England. He was a competent soldier, and Andros rewarded him with increasing administrative responsibility. In 1688, when English officials extended the dominion southward to include New York and the Jerseys, they offered Nicholson the position of lieutenant governor over those colonies. The Glorious Revolution resulted in the dominion's dissolution, but Nicholson's patrons in England subsequently secured for him a post as lieutenant governor of New York, and then almost immediately he was named lieutenant governor of Virginia. In 1692, authorities in England transferred him to serve as lieutenant to the governor of Maryland, and in the same year Edmund Andros became governor of Virginia. Nicholson remained in the Maryland position for six years, until he was promoted to the governorship of Virginia. He was thus a remarkably seasoned military officer and colonial administrator, with extensive experience throughout England's continental colonies. (5)

Nicholson's elevation to governor came at the expense of Sir Edmund Andros. By 1697 Nicholson was allied against Andros with the Reverend James Blair, the bishop of London's commissary for Virginia, the senior Anglican clergyman in the colony, and a member of the Governor's Council. Blair, in various letters and memorials, described several confrontations between Nicholson and Andros in the late 1690s, and the factional coalitions between Nicholson, Blair, and Blair's allies among the leading men of Virginia, on the one hand, and Andros and his supporters, on the other, seem to have been common knowledge among Nicholson's English patrons. Blair traveled to England in 1697 to lobby support for the College of William and Mary, but he used his time there to undermine Andros and to support Nicholson. In December 1697 the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London met at Lambeth Palace in London to discuss various allegations against Andros. The meeting at Lambeth represented the culmination of Blair's effort to unseat Governor Andros, and despite the enthusiastic effort that the governor's advocate, the young William Byrd II, mounted in his defense, Blair succeeded in convincing the bishops that Andros "never did any considerable Service to the King, nor the people," and that "he was a great Instrument of arbitrary power...." Andros's dispute with "Dr. Blair in Virginia," the Earl of Bellomont reported to the Board of Trade in April 1699, "brought the resentment of the Bishop of London and the Church (they say) on his head, which is the reason he has lost his government...." Andros resigned, in ill health and under political pressure, in May 1698. (6)

Blair worked to undermine Andros by assaulting his character. "In his private conversation he is a great Encourager of tattlers, talebearers and Sycophants," Blair wrote. "By these methods the ancient kindness, hospitality and good neighbourhood of Virginia is broke off, and a peaceable and quiet Country as ever was in the world is now come to such a degree of faction and animosity, that they scarce none visit one another, or pay common civility." There was a direct connection between the personal deportment of the governor and the behavior of the governed, Blair implied. In a report to the Board of Trade that he co-authored in 1697, Blair likened the ideal governor to "a tender Nurse," whose guidance and good example "is sufficient to take the Management of the Infant Government, till it grow older, and wants other Tutors and Governors to look after it." Andros had failed to provide a good role model, with ruinous consequences for the common civility of the country. In this attack on Andros, Blair rehearsed the later, more elaborate charges that he and numerous others would assert against Francis Nicholson. (7)

During his visit to England, Blair developed a relationship with John Locke, the Whig philosopher of limited government, who served on and lent his considerable prestige to the newly formed Board of Trade from its establishment in 1696 until 1700. Under his urging, the Board of Trade undertook a systematic examination of economic conditions in the colonies. Edward Randolph, the surveyor general of customs in America, wrote a report on Virginia received by the board in 1696 that argued that indentured servants had ceased to immigrate to Virginia because there was an artificial land shortage there. "[M]embers of the Council and others who make an interest in the Government," Randolph wrote, "have from time to time procured grants of very large tracts of land, so that for many years there has been no waste land to be taken up by those who bring with them servants, or by servants who have served their time." Randolph's investigation implied forcefully that the institutions of government in Virginia were open to abuse. (8)

Locke called on other officials, among them James Blair, to comment on Randolph's analysis. In 1697 Blair prepared a briefing paper for Locke in which he substantiated Randolph's findings. Blair wrote that "the great men of the Country have 20, 25, or 30 thousand Acres of Land in their hands, and there is hardly any left for the poor People to take upp...." Blair urged a much stricter accounting of the "great Tracts possessed already," advocating that their owners pay the proper quitrents due to the crown. He also decried "[t]he Arbitrarines of Government" and argued that the governor possessed too much ability to manipulate the council, and hence that the council could not serve as a check upon the potentially tyrannical power of the chief magistrate. A second, similar report to the Board of Trade, presented in 1697 by Henry Hartwell, Edward Chilton, and James Blair, likewise supported the claims that Randolph had advanced in 1696. These authors emphasized the degree to which the land system in Virginia was open to abuse, both "by the Ignorance and Knavery of Surveyors" and by the county clerks, who exercised "great Liberty ... in issuing out Certificates for [land] Rights...." They also noted "there has been great Talk of Concealment of quit-rents," a charge that Hartwell, in a separate letter to the Board of Trade, substantiated in greater detail. These analyses shaped the policies of the Board of Trade. Blair's characterization of Virginia's government undercut the administration of Governor Andros. It also, perhaps, had consequences unintended by Blair, for it immediately influenced the instructions given to the next governor of Virginia, Francis Nicholson. (9)

Nicholson presented his commission to the council of Virginia on December 9, 1698. He arrived with a strong reputation as a friend of the Church of England. Earlier in the year, when he left Maryland, the House of Burgesses of that colony offered a testimonial to Nicholson' s service, which the governor, no doubt with deep satisfaction, copied in a 1699 letter to his patron, John Egerton, the third Earl of Bridgewater. The Marylanders praised Nicholson's "great care and study ... to promote the practice of piety and worship of almighty God by erecting churches, schools and nurseries of learning both for reforming of manners and education of youth." They noted the various ways in which Nicholson "maintained his Majesty's glory and authority in this province" and praised him for the vigor with which he promoted order and justice in the colony. But they especially emphasized Nicholson's good character and the good example he had set for the colony. They closed by thanking him for his "pious, and just ... noble and benevolent carriage in all things," which, they said, promoted "better parts" in the colony. In this description, Nicholson was "a generous and good governor," indeed the ideal English ruler. (10)

Nicholson's private correspondence with the Earl of Bridgewater revealed, however, that all had not been quite as tranquil in Maryland as the testimonial of the House of Burgesses implied. In August 1688 Nicholson requested of Bridgewater "that what ever articles may be exhibited against me, your lordship would be pleased to suspend your beliefs of them." As would happen in Virginia, Nicholson had provoked the ire of a faction of Maryland gentlemen, who were busily spreading accounts of his administration, "part false, part foolish, and part scandalous and malicious." As Nicholson observed, "they act according to the proverb, fling a great deal of dirt, and some of it will stick." Nicholson dismissed the authors of these calumnies as "papists and jacobites," enemies of stability and order who "are never satisfied with any government, but always endeavoring to raise commotions and rebellions." But he obviously took them quite seriously, for he continued to work to strengthen his ties to his patron in later letters. "I thank God," he wrote from Virginia in February 1699, "that I endeavored [while governor of Maryland], as I hope I shall do here, to discharge my duty to God, his majesty, and you my honorable patron, as also to do the people all good I possibly can." The hierarchy expressed here, the rank ordering of public and personal duty and obligation, would inform Nicholson's conduct throughout his career in Virginia. Nicholson acknowledged his deep gratitude to Bridgewater "for my being advantageously removed hither, whence I hope (God willing) to behave myself that your lordship may never have any cause to the contrary." (11)

Nicholson's instructions as governor of Virginia reflected Locke's Whig philosophy and aimed, among other things, to correct the abuses delineated by the various reports received by Locke and the Board of Trade. Nicholson's instructions limited the ability of the governor to control the council by curtailing his capacity to suspend councillors. They also required Nicholson to contain the power of the council by reducing pluralism in office. In addition, the governor's instructions required him to put a stop to the practice of wealthy, well-connected men engrossing large quantities of land and also to develop better means for collecting quitrents. Nicholson's efforts to follow these instructions contributed to the bitter antagonism that surrounded him over the next several years. (12)

While the conflict between Nicholson and his opponents did not erupt until 1702, relations between Commissary Blair and Governor Nicholson seem to have become strained shortly after Nicholson's arrival in Virginia. In Blair's 1702 memorial to the bishop of London, the first official letter of complaint that he registered against the governor, Blair recounted a heated confrontation that had occurred shortly after he returned to Virginia from England. Blair had carried from England a number of letters addressed to the governor, some of which contained personal advice that apparently offended Nicholson. The bishop of London "and several other of his friends" had recommended he endeavor to moderate his demeanor. "He asked me what the Devil they meant to recommend moderation to him," Blair related. "I answered that his friends were all of opinion that it was the best advice could be given him, for said I they have seen the articles which were exhibited against your Excellency from Maryland and judged that all those ill things they accuse you of proceeded from your passion." Nicholson, according to Blair, responded angrily to this. "I know better to govern Virginia and Maryland than all the Bishops in England, if I had not hampered them in Maryland and kept them under I should never have been able to have governed them." In his conclusion to this dialogue, Blair reported himself telling Nicholson, somewhat sanctimoniously, "I don't pretend to understand Maryland but if I know anything of Virginia they are a good natured tractable people as any in the world and you may do what you will with them by way of civility but you will never be able to manage them in that way you speak of by hampering and keeping them under" (13)

The initial story that Blair narrated to attack Nicholson, then, turned on Nicholson's allegedly unbalanced character. Blair portrayed Nicholson in much the same fashion as he earlier had portrayed Andros. Nicholson's lack of moderation and his insistence on "hampering and keeping them under" rather than on governing with "civility" made him unfit to hold office. The governor's external demeanor hinted at a disordered, unbalanced inward temperament, governed more by passion than by reason.

Blair's disdain for Nicholson, however, stemmed as much from factional politics in Virginia as from Nicholson or Blair's prickly personalities. Blair, by virtue of his status as the bishop of London's commissary, occupied a seat on the Governor's Council of the colony. In 1687 he had married Sarah Harrison, the daughter of Benjamin Harrison I, thereby establishing relationships with a cluster of other significant Virginia families. One of his brothers-in-law was Philip Ludwell II, and he was also connected by marriage to the Burwells, a powerful Virginia family. These men had formed the core of the faction that had supported Blair in his campaign against Andros. Nicholson's actions as governor ultimately threatened their interests and provoked the crisis that marred his final years in Virginia. (14)

Nicholson, upon his arrival in Virginia, vigorously implemented the program contained in the instructions that Locke had drafted for him. William Byrd I, in a letter to Ludwell, commented on the "storme and continual hurry" of business at the capitol, noting, "Councils and assemblies begin to be weekly or monthly.... "Nicholson acted quickly to bar members of the Governor's Council from holding lucrative positions as naval officers or collectors of customs, and he restricted some of the civil privileges that councillors had previously enjoyed. The governor also moved, although less energetically, to address land reform. He called for a county-by-county "rent roll," or list of landholders, in order to facilitate collection of quitrents, and he took steps to limit the size of land grants and to regulate more closely the administration of headrights. He also asserted control over the sale of treasury rights, claims sold directly at the rate of five shilling per fifty acres. Nicholson required surveyors and county clerks to submit all sales of more than one thousand acres to him for approval. William Byrd I, in his capacity as auditor of the colony, reported to Nicholson the "very great abuse" by sheriffs and surveyors, who he claimed systematically under-reported quantities of land. "I conceive a great part of those frauds might be prevented by making of good diligent men to be sheriffs," Byrd had noted. Thus, in order to ensure that these new regulations would be followed, the governor claimed control of the appointment of sheriffs and clerks of the county courts. (15)

By challenging the entrenched institutions of the colony, Nicholson provoked an eruption of factional politics. He curtailed pluralism of office by members of the council, requiring eight councillors to give up office as collectors and a ninth, Robert Carter, to resign his commission as a naval officer. Nicholson's efforts at land reform threatened one of the fundamental arrangements by which Virginia's emergent aristocracy derived its wealth. By 1702 open conflict with the Harrison faction on the council had erupted. In that year Nicholson opened land south of the James River, the Blackwater Swamp, to settlement, and members of the Harrison clan used their connections to engross most of it before it was made available to other planters. Moreover, the College of William and Mary owned a substantial tract of land in the area, and James Blair, as president of the college, hoped to enhance its revenues by selling the land. William Byrd I, among others, complained acidly to Nicholson of the Harrisons' landgrab, writing "I humbly conceive a great part [of the sales] are very irregular and contrary to the intent and meaning of His Majesty's said royal instructions." Nicholson's decision to close the region, amid charges of favoritism and corruption, thus brought the governor into immediate conflict with a well-developed faction of powerful, intermarried Virginia families. (16)

In the midst of the political tensions produced by Nicholson's reform efforts, an ugly confrontation erupted between Nicholson and Blair in the summer of 1702, provoking a spate of competing narratives addressed to church authorities in England. The immediate issue was a funeral oration, delivered by Blair when Virginia received news of the death of King William III, in which the commissary warned of the dangers of absolutist government. Nicholson, all accounts agreed, interpreted the oration personally, as a public rebuke of his administration. Nicholson hastened to assure Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, that his dispute with Blair would not prevent him "from endeavoring to do my duty to my holy Mother the Church of England." The next year, twenty of Virginia's clergymen addressed a lengthy testimonial in support of the governor to Henry Compton, bishop of London, complaining bitingly against Commissary Blair. "His funeral oration upon the death of his late Majesty, and his contemptuous speeches in conversation with several of us and others in the colony are sufficient demonstrations not only of affronting the Governor' s person, but also of lessening him in his authority and undermining him in the dignity of his office." Aware of Nicholson's extensive patronage of the church and of numerous clergymen, they assured their bishop that "his Excy prefers the Glory of God, the interest of the Church and the publick good of the Colony before his private interest or advantage." (17)

Blair, in turn, fired off letters to the archbishop of Canterbury denouncing Nicholson in the most vitriolic terms. "What a storm has fallen upon us, upon the occasion of a funeral oration I pronounced in our College in memory of King William," he noted in a 1702 letter. "It was chiefly occasioned by my making use of that opportunity, to commend the mildness and gentleness of the King's reign, which our great man took to be a tacit reflection on himself for his furious and mad way of Government." The public dispute, however, concealed a deeper animosity, the result of Nicholson's effort to court Lucy Burwell, the daughter of Major Lewis Burwell, who was related by marriage to the Harrison family. In a 1703 memorial Blair noted that while he had heard "strange stories of [Nicholson's] rudeness and abusiveness" as governor of Maryland, he also recollected Nicholson' s vigorous support for the Church of England. Blair was, he wrote, "so blinded with my former good opinion of him" that he long "inclined to the charitable side, had still good hope of him, defended him on all occasions, and took him to be a good man at bottom." The story of Nicholson's "amours," however, "gave such numerous instances of fury, jealousy, and revenge etc. threatening etc. with many other extravagant things of this nature that I really came at last to consider him as a man of the blackest soul and conscience that I had ever known in my life." Blair recounted witnessing "a scene of one of the vilest and grossest sorts of lewdness," which revealed Nicholson's true character. Blair's description of this episode was circumspect, but he left no doubt of his moral outrage and condenmation. Nicholson's "strange lewdness," which he conducted "to a degree of impudence and brutality beyond that of most other men," revealed a fatally flawed character. "He made many base attempts upon persons of honor and virtue," Blair related, "and those with such abundance of rudeness and violence as looked more like a design of perpetrating a rape than obtaining a consent." This was powerful language, coming from the senior clergyman in Virginia. (18)

Nicholson met and fell in love with Lucy Burwell in 1698, shortly after his return to Virginia. He was in his mid-forties, and she was twenty-eight years his junior. Given the age difference and the developing factional animosity, it was to be expected that she would refuse him. In March 1701, Nicholson wrote Lewis Burwell asking leave to court his daughter, "who by her beauty, many extraordinary vertues and rare accomplishments," the governor wrote, "hath charmed me to a degree beyond expression." Burwell responded tersely that she was betrothed to another, "which for me to endeavor to prevent, being consenting to it, will make me seem odious in the sight of God and man." Nicholson was, Burwell wrote, "in an extacy of trouble which [I] am heartily sorry for, but know not how to relieve...." The governor pressed his suit anyway, writing ardently to Lucy Burwell, attesting his love for her, as well as entreating her father to reconsider the match. "Sir," he wrote a few days later to Burwell, "I beg of you to believe that I'm an honest and Sincere man, without either artifice trick or cunning...." (19)

As his romantic prospects worsened, Nicholson became something of a laughingstock, in both Virginia and England. A friend in England reported "it is here said and sneered at by the meanest of those who have come in lately that you still prosecute your amours without the least hopes of success; and it is in truth not a little trouble to us that have a value for you to find out how much it lessens you to make such a rout about this matter." No doubt feeling embarrassed and exposed, Nicholson became hostile. He accused Burwell of intervening with Lucy Burwell to prevent her from marrying him, which Burwell heatedly denied. In a deteriorating atmosphere charged with anger and denial, Nicholson's bitterness toward Burwell increased. By early 1703, Nicholson had realized the futility of his romantic hopes and wrote to Major Burwell requesting the return of his letters to members of the family and terminating his courtship in a series of bitter recriminations against Lucy Burwell and her father. (20)

Nicholson's conduct of this romance became a central element of his opponents' critique of his character. The Reverend Stephen Fouace, for example, related lurid stories describing Nicholson's ungentlemanly management of this affair. Nicholson was "so incredibly jealous in the great concern of his love" that any unmarried man who chanced to be in her company risked bringing upon himself the full "fierceness resentment and violence" of the governor. Indeed, Fouace asserted, "he hath often threatened to have the hearts blood of his mistriss' relations that he thinks do oppose his having of her," and "he swore once to Mr. Blair that if she was married to another he would cut the throats of the minister of the Bridegroom, and of [him] that should give the licence." (21)

Nicholson's romance soured in tandem with the political tranquillity of his administration. Early in 1703, six councillors, most allied with the Harrison family, petitioned Queen Anne for Nicholson's removal. "We beg leave in all humility," they wrote, to relieve us from "the many great grievances and pressures we lie under by reason of the unusual, insolent and arbitrary methods of government as well as the wicked and scandalous examples of life which have been now for divers years past put in practice by his Excellency Francis Nicholson, Esq." Robert Carter, John Lightfoot, Matthew Page, Philip Ludwell, Benjamin Harrison, and James Blair half the council--took this extraordinary step on May 20, 1703, and in so doing raised the factional conflict in Virginia to new levels of caustic intensity. As in the previous struggle against Sir Edmund Andros, a key part of their strategy was to demonstrate the governor's lack of gentlemanly character, thereby establishing that he was temperamentally unqualified to govern. Nicholson's private flaws, they argued, disqualified him from public office. (22)

The charges that the dissident councillors made against the governor were serious. In a lengthy document submitted to the Board of Trade they presented a detailed catalog of Nicholson' s faults. "We shall limit our observations," they wrote, "to his behavior towards ourselves, in the several capacities wherein we act," for to do otherwise, they insisted, "would require a large volume." This document revealed their own vested interests as members of the Governor's Council and as landed gentlemen. Nicholson was an autocrat who "engrosses all power by acting alone in most of the chief affairs of Government." They complained that Nicholson filled important colonial offices--justices of the peace, sheriffs, naval and militia officers--without consulting the council. Moreover, they sharply criticized Nicholson for attempting to reform the land system in Virginia. "Rules of limitation in taking up land have been prescribed to surveyors," they wrote, "against both law and custom." They were especially incensed by Nicholson's closure of the Blackwater Swamp lands. "When the Blackwater Land was opened," they recounted, "and a great many people had been at the charge of purchasing rights of her majesty and of making entries and surveys, he by his private orders contradicted and retracted all, forbidding the surveyors to proceed, without taking any notice to the council." In brief, they complained, Nicholson resorted to every method to "engross all power into his own hands and to render the Council insignificant ciphers." (23)

The six councillors emphasized Nicholson's egregious failings of civil comportment. They devoted the fourth and longest section of their grievance, more than half the document, to a long series of complaints about Nicholson's personal conduct. "His haughty, furious, and insolent behavior to the best gentlemen in the country is more like downright madness than anger or passion," they wrote. His language, they said, was profane, and his demeanor abusive. Many of the charges in this section, unlike the previous ones, were expansively written, with little specific substantiation. From the stories told in subsequent letters and memoranda, however, it is clear that the councillors alluded to particular incidents in the factional disputes of Virginia politics, including the governor's courtship of Lucy Burwell. Their complaints, moreover, illustrate the degree to which the councillors' civil position was threatened by the dispute with Nicholson. "He is," they wrote, "exceedingly self willed and utterly uncounselable by any person or persons whatsoever." By failing to embody civil order, Nicholson threatened the entire structure of civil life in Virginia. A responsible governor affirmed, by benevolent paternalism, the social status of his subordinates. Nicholson's unrestrained passion and contempt for local elites made him "uncounselable" and left the gentlemen of his court without an appropriate civil role. In a society in which civilization emanated from the top, how was Virginia to become civilized? (24)

The memorial against Nicholson was presented to the Queen in March 1704, ten months after it was written. Meanwhile Blair had returned to England to lobby for Nicholson's removal. Blair submitted additional documents to the Queen to buttress the charges against Nicholson, including two personal affidavits, the first dated April 25, 1704, and the second a few days later, May 1. Robert Beverley and Stephen Fouace likewise submitted affidavits supporting the charges in the councillors' original memorial, and also a series of letters from numerous high-ranking Virginians, documenting various aspects of Nicholson's deportment as described in the original complaint. (25)

These documents contained numerous stories illustrating the governor's temper and lack of self-control. Captain James Moody, for example, complained that Nicholson's behavior had been immoderate and passionate almost from Moody's first meeting with him in 1701. When he reported to Nicholson in September of that year, the governor asked him to attend the funeral of Captain Neville, another local naval officer. To honor the deceased, Nicholson lent his own prestige and authority to the occasion by attending personally and calling out the local militia. Moody described the "great concourse of people" who attended the funeral, together with "a great many of the militia, both horse and foot." Nicholson undercut this display of governmental authority, however, by failing to maintain a moderate demeanor. Moody "went out of the Church," he recalled, "where he saw and heard the Governor, in the most outrageous passion that he ever saw, swearing the most horrid oaths and most bitter imprecations, against Mr. Slaughter, the then minister of that parish ..., shaking his horsewhip and threatening to beat the said Slaughter therewith, and to pull his gown over his ears." Moody noted that "upon inquiring the reason of the Governor's so violent passion, there was answer made, that was little, to what was usual with the Governor." (26)

Numerous other writers had similar stories to tell. Robert Beverley, for example, emphasized that he had "heard the governor very profanely curse and swear in the church yards both of James Town and Middle Plantation or Williamsburg, immediately after divine service in church, as well as in many other public places." Somewhat later Beverley noted, "I have heard Governor Nicholson often in public threaten several gentlemen of good repute with ruin and abuse them in vile Billingsgate terms, and nothing is more common with him." George Luke, a commissioner of customs in Virginia, recounted witnessing and being subject to a number of such outbursts. Luke reported in a deposition to the Board of Trade in 1704 that, when departing from a church service in Williamsburg, he "heard the Governor cursing and swearing in a violent manner in the churchyard." Luke described a second incident in which Nicholson stopped him after a church service and "fell into a very exceeding great passion continued in the same for half an hour at least, during which time he uttered very many oaths and curses and gave [Luke] very scurrilous and opprobrious language." Implicit in such stories, but left unstated, was Nicholson's status as a godly man. The governor's disruptive, profane behavior was indicative of a faithless character, whose example was destructive to civil order. (27)

By June 1704 Nicholson was aware that complaints had been leveled against him. Once they became aware of the animosity toward Nicholson, his patrons in England and friends in the imperial bureaucracy apprised the governor of the campaign against him. In letters that he received in the summer of 1704, they offered him advice about how to respond to the various charges. The writers were most concerned to address the allegations that Nicholson was disloyal to the Crown. Nicholson, for example, acknowledged the advice of William Blathwayt, a member the Board of Trade, that he "should take care to answer more particularly what Mr. Blair & others have alleged concerning the public accounts." The pace of transatlantic correspondence caused Nicholson's information on the charges against him to be incomplete and his reaction to be correspondingly slow. He complained on March 6, 1705, that the long delay before he learned of the accusations was by design. His opponents, Nicholson wrote, submitted their petition and supporting documents to the authorities in England at a time "when the ships were all sailed for Virginia, and they were sensible that I could not have any notice of it, and would be a long time before I could make my answer." Nicholson did not learn of the full extent of the grievances against him until December 1704, almost a year after his enemies first leveled their charges and almost two years after the six councillors and their allies prepared their complaints. (28)

Unlike Sir Edmund Andros, the previous governor, Nicholson was ably represented in England. His advocate was John Thrale, the colonial agent for Virginia and an accomplished lawyer. Thrale acted quickly on Nicholson's behalf to challenge the substance of the councillors' allegations, accurately noting that they were vague and largely undocumented. He also demanded that Nicholson be informed of the proceedings and given the opportunity to defend himself and clear his name. Many of the accusations against Nicholson, Thrale said, "are in such generall termes that it is impossible a direct answer" could be made to them. Since the governor was subject to so "many scandalous aspersions" against his good name, of which Nicholson "could not possibly have any notice," Thrale requested that the Board of Trade conduct a formal heating as soon as Nicholson had had the opportunity to respond to the charges. Having carefully reviewed the charges against Nicholson, item by item, Thrale noted that in any case, "no matter of truth charged in this memoriall is of that weight as to subject the Governor ... either to her Majesties displeasure or your Lordshipps Censure...." Sadly for Nicholson, Thrale was in ill health and shortly died, leaving Nicholson without an active representative in England to plead his case. (29)

Not until the spring of 1705 did Nicholson begin actively to defend himself. In an address to the Virginia House of Burgesses, he summarized the dispute, described the nature of the councillors' complaints, and asked for the burgesses' support. Nicholson provided to the Speaker of the House, for the burgesses' perusal, copies of the various petitions, memorials, and affidavits containing the charges against him. He was, he told the house, appalled at the tenor of the petitions. He said, "I had Rather Ly in a Goal and Live upon Bread and water an honest Man Then to have The Greatest honour and Estate in The World and to be Such a man as they have represented Me." Nicholson further protested the councillors' petition by declaring, "If I were Conscious to My Self That The five hundredth part of The Inhabitants here would join in Their petition [and] Memorial to her Majesty and Approve of their Affidavits I Should Think My Self in Duty bound ... to quit the Government ... and to petition her most Sacred Majesty That I may Lay her Majestys Commission to me at her Royall feet...." The burgesses obligingly considered the charges against the governor in a session several days later and voted 27 to 17 on a series of resolutions affirming their continued support for his administration. Nicholson had marshaled support earlier from various militia companies and from the minority on the council who supported him. (30)

Nicholson's stalwart patronage of Anglican clergymen and consistent institutional support for the church served him in good stead during the crisis, and, indeed, the majority of the Anglican clergy in the colony actively defended him. Their accounts of Nicholson's behavior emphasized his steady patronage and nurturance of the Church of England in Virginia. Nicholson, they related, was an ideal governor and a devoted patron and benefactor of the church, not only in Virginia but also throughout the mainland colonies. In these reports, Commissary Blair was the villain, speaking evil of established authority in the colony and thus undermining the dominion of both church and state. In an address to the archbishop of Canterbury, they noted their grief "that our governor (who under her majesty is the greatest support of the church in America) is scandalized and impeached after such an unfair and uncharitable a manner." The various personal incidents that Blair and his allies related with such relish to undermine Nicholson's character were absent from these accounts. The clergymen were removed from Nicholson's routine activities and from the material interests he threatened and were willing to forgive their governor's clumsy courtship of Lucy Burwell and his occasional irascible outbursts. But even though they differed in their assessment of Nicholson, they worked from the same ethical frame as the governor's opponents. (31)

The chief thrust of Nicholson's defense, in his direct responses to the Board of Trade, demonstrated that he understood his responsibilities differently than did either his opponents or his clerical supporters. Nicholson emphasized the priorities he had delineated in his earlier letters to the Earl of Bridgewater--his duty, in rank order, to God, Crown, Patron, and, only last, to the people under his rule. He prepared four letters to the Board of Trade on March 1, 2, 3, and 6--long, detailed statements addressing the allegations against him. Understandably, Nicholson was most concerned to refute those charges that accused him of malfeasance in office or maladministration. The focus of his lengthy correspondence was on vindicating his policies regarding the militia, his handling of official funds, his appointment of councillors, and his overall loyalty. He was especially incensed at insinuations "that there would be a Rebellion here, either by my setting up in the nature of Cromwell or Bacon" and "that the people are so exasperated against me etc., that unless I was turned out of the Government, they would rise...." Nicholson understood himself primarily as an imperial officer and administrator, and he framed most of his comments from that perspective. (32)

The crucial issue raised by Nicholson's critics, however, was his character and not malfeasance in office or maladministration. Addressing such personal attacks was not a priority for Nicholson, judging from the space and detail he gave them in his letters. "[H]ow they came to have such a bad opinion of me now, when they had quite the contrary formerly," Nicholson wrote, "I can't tell except it were that I would not be guided and governed by them and turne secretarys, Auditors, Collectors, Navall Officers and others out of their places, and put them and their friends in...." Nicholson made only the weakest efforts to establish his fitness to rule and to challenge the damning ethical portrait of him painted by his enemies. "I hope I shall not be found to have a cloven-foot, to be a fury or have snakes instead of hair (for both by the petition, memoriall and affidavits they have represented me to be possest with a Legion of Devills)," he argued, "but like another ordinary man both in person and disposition...." Nicholson developed this line of argument further in his letters of March 3 and 6, contesting, if only indirectly and abstractly, the charges against his character. He protested that he was, after all, only a fallible human being. "What is true" in the allegations against him, Nicholson protested, "I hope God willing to be able to justify, abating human frailtys and infirmities. I must owne that I never did, nor do pretend to be a saint, or to have the spirit of a martyr; but I hope in God that I shall prove that I have been, and am an honest man." In these letters, Nicholson predicated his fitness to rule on his loyalty to his superiors in England and his administrative efficiency, and not on the civil model that he set for Virginia's society. (33)

Intriguingly, Nicholson bolstered this line of defense by appending to his letter of March 6 quotations from sermons by John Tillotson and Robert South, two of the most prominent moderate Anglican divines of the late seventeenth century. Tillotson's sermon, entitled "Against Evil Speaking," was especially relevant. "They that will observe nothing in a wise man but his oversight and follies, nothing in a good man but his failings and infirmities may make a shift to render a very wise and good man very despicable," Tillotson had written. The selection Nicholson chose from South was similarly pointed. "Nothing can be imagined more destructive to society" than slander, South wrote. "It robs the public of all that benefit and advantage that it may justly claim and ought to receive from the worth and virtue of particular persons by rendering their virtues utterly insignificant, for good itself can do no good while it passes for evil." Nicholson thus clearly knew and understood the ethical assumptions of his opponents, and to some degree shared them. But as an imperial officer operating in a larger, transatlantic frame, his priorities were elsewhere. (34)

In slandering Nicholson's character, James Blair and his allies called upon an understanding of the good ruler and the good society of long provenance in England. Slander, by its very nature, invokes a moral standard. Political slander draws a connection between character and public behavior. Elite Virginians, faced with the task of constructing a legitimate social order in a fragile and nascent colonial setting, had an essentially conservative agenda. In assaulting Nicholson's character, these provincial Britons drew deeply upon the most traditional standards of British ethical and political thought. When Nicholson's critics envisioned the good society in Virginia, the model they employed was conservative, hierarchical, and organic.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political theory took for granted that sovereignty inhered in the person of the monarch and thus focused attention not on the inevitability of executive corruption but rather on ensuring that the right kind of person exercised authority. The "lawfull good King," wrote no less an authority than James I, "acknowledgeth himselfe ordained for his people" and thus governs with their good always in mind. A tyrant, in contrast, "thinketh his people ordeined for him, a prey to his passions and inordinate appetites." The problem then was to ensure that the man destined to become a ruler possessed the dispositions necessary to remain virtuous, that is, to resist the impulses of appetite. Lurking behind the commitment to absolute monarchy, then, was a commitment to an attenuated version of Thomistic (and ultimately Aristotelian) ethics. The virtuous man suppressed his appetites through cultivation of good habits, directed by practical reason. (35)

The idea that the conduct of the ruler served as an example for the people subject to his authority--which Blair used to attack first Andros and then Nicholson--originated in sixteenth-century pedagogy and political theory. Desiderius Erasmus, writing in 1509 and 1510 as a guest in the home of Thomas More, argued that the comportment of the prince set the standard for his realm. "All men's eyes are upon him," Erasmus wrote. If the prince set a good example, he "gave life and safety to mankind." But even a small lapse "from the Rule of Honesty and Honour reaches farther than himself, and opens a gap to many men's ruin." In this notion of kingship, a monarch ruled not by inspiring fear and awe in his subjects, but rather by displaying his exemplary virtue. This conception of regal authority was pervasive in subsequent British moral discourse. King James's influential Basilicon Doron (1599), for example, popularized this image of the good ruler. James's treatise became the model for a series of advice manuals, aspiring to teach the principles of civility to young gentlemen, that appeared with some regularity throughout the seventeenth century. James emphasized the importance of a monarch acting as a good model for his people. "[Y]our behaviour in your owne person," he advised his son, will "teach your people by your example: for people are naturally inclined to counterfaite ... their Princes maners...." A king, James underscored, "is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold." (36)

English moralists recognized, moreover, that the importance of exemplary personal character extended to every layer of the political hierarchy. In the aftermath of the Tudor reforms and the creation of local administrative bodies, political commentators extended their focus to preparing subordinate magistrates for wielding public power. Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (1531), for example, was not meant solely or even primarily to instruct a king. Elyot aimed to produce civic-minded leaders at all levels. Like Erasmus, Elyot emphasized the duty of men who exercised or possessed authority to set a good example for their inferiors. English civility depended upon the good character and proper deportment of England's governors. Throughout his essay, Elyot argued that prospective governors must master themselves before they could govern others. Young gentlemen who aspired to exercise public authority must subordinate their natural appetites to reason. A ruler had an obligation to exercise "a double governance." First, he must achieve "an interior or inward governance" over "his affects or passions," and only second, "an exterior or outward governance" over the people. Since public manners emanated outward from inward qualities, preparation for rule began by shaping and uplifting the character. (37)

Elyot's understanding of the connection between the character of governors and the civility of the governed exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of Virginians well into the eighteenth century. Charles Hansford praised the good leadership provided by Virginia gentlemen in his long 1752 poem "My Country's Worth." In his celebration of Virginia's accomplishments, Hansford took pains to emphasize the civil pattern established by the colony's leading gentlemen. "A gentleman," wrote Hansford, "is placed so that he/In his example cannot neuter be." Because "vulgar" men will imitate their betters, Hansford warned, gentlemen, placed in a position of moral leadership because of their birth and talents, must be careful to think of the model they set: "[W]hen gentry do live well, / Their bright example is a kind of spell/Which does insensibly attract the crowd/To follow them in virtue's pleasant road." William Stith, in a sermon delivered to the House of Burgesses in 1752, emphasized that good government was founded on the self-mastery of magistrates. "Philosophy professes to teach us, to govern our Passions and command our Appetites," he stated. But private immorality "with still greater Force and Efficacy, lets them loose, and renders them furious and ungovernable." Public order depended on the example of superiors. "The best written discourse, nay even the plainest and most important Instances of Duty," he declaimed, "will lose all their Weight and Influence with the Generality of the People, if they are contradicted by the Lives and Conversations, or even by the unmannerly Scoffs and irreverent Gibes, of their rich and powerful Neighbors." The private morality of gentlemen and the health of the polity were thus, in his analysis, conjoined. "Instead of ... setting Fashions to the lower People in Vice," Stith argued, gentlemen "ought by their Example to lead them on to every Thing, that is virtuous and honest." (38)

English moralists working in this tradition asserted an Aristotelian psychology, mediated through Thomas Aquinas, that distinguished the base, animalistic nature of unrefined humanity from the higher capacities permitted by exercise of human reason. Erasmus, in his 1529 treatise De Pueris Instituendis (On Education for Children), had explicitly argued that education was necessary to achieve full human potential. Those whose faculties were unrefined by education are "creature[s] quite inferior to the brute animals," Erasmus wrote, because only careful refinement permitted rational faculties to govern passions. "There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality." In the seventeenth century this understanding of human nature pervaded English pedagogical treatises, both in England and in the colonies. In 1688, for example, John Page wrote a lengthy treatise to his son Matthew, the earliest known courtesy manual written in Virginia. Page urged his son to master his appetites, cast in explicitly Christian terms as the urge to commit sin. "We are all subject to distemper and passions because [we are] men," he argued, "but let us order our passions well, because Christian men." Page reserved special censure for "intemperance and drunkenness," which he argued "makes you so like a beast that hath no reason, that at that instant you have no use of reason." Appetite, in the advice of these authors, was to be suppressed whenever possible; the antithesis of civility was bestial savagery or unrestrained passion, which English moralists equated with the baseness of the fallen human soul. Concerns for careful self-discipline and for its artful performance were constituents of British ideals of good rulership well into the eighteenth century. A man's external demeanor advanced his claim to public virtue and hence fitness to hold public power. This was the standard against which James Blair and his allies measured Sir Edmund Andros and Francis Nicholson and found them both deplorably wanting. (39)

The new constitutional order legitimated by the Glorious Revolution shifted attention from the ethical problem of crafting virtuous governors. If sovereignty did not have to inhere in the person of the monarch but could instead be divided or shared within a mixed or balanced constitution, then it became possible to institute mechanisms for protecting the people from the effects of tyranny. English political discourse as it evolved after the Glorious Revolution increasingly emphasized the potential for power to corrupt even the best of men and thus the necessity of devising structures for limiting executive power. "There is something so wanton and monstrous in lawless power, that there scarce ever was a human spirit that could bear it," proclaimed pseudonymous Cato in 1721. "The mind of man, which is weak and limited, ought never to be trusted with a power that is boundless." However, the Whig political idiom that legitimated this constitutional shift did not displace the older Erasmian humanism in Virginia but rather coexisted with it well into the eighteenth century. (40)

The late-seventeenth-century transition in constitutional order corresponded with a period of heated debate in English moral philosophy. From the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century on, one notorious and increasingly influential strain of ethical thought emphasized an egoistic conception of human nature that stressed the inherent self-interestedness of human motivations. Thomas Hobbes, widely condemned as an atheist in the latter half of the seventeenth century, had famously argued that all human motivation stemmed from base desire, thus foreclosing the efforts of English pedagogues to fashion the good man by habituating reason to subdue passion. Even as the drama in Virginia played itself out, Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician, published his satirical poem The Grumbling Hive, or, Knaves Turn'd Honest (1705) in which he argued forcefully for the proposition that private indulgence in vice and immorality contributed to the public good. For Mandeville, human motivations reduced wholly to egoistical self-interest. The moderate divines of the post-Restoration Anglican Church condemned this ethical tradition in strident tones. Anglican social thought, one obvious source of value for Virginia gentlemen anxious to preserve English civilization in their colony, thus represented a conservative ethical position within metropolitan England. The radical egoism of Hobbes and Mandeville, as domesticated by the Scottish Enlightenment, represented the future. (41)

Just as English moral thought was in a state of transition across the late seventeenth century, so too was Anglican theology. Both in England and in Virginia, moderate Anglican theology, which increasingly defined English orthodoxy after the Restoration, broadly encompassed and re-articulated the northern humanist understanding of the good. Starting in the 1640s and 1650s, a number of moderate Anglican divines, including William Chillingworth, Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Allestree, as well as a group of Anglican theologians and philosophers called the Cambridge Platonists, including Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, John Smith, and Henry More, argued for a less extreme vision of human nature than that held by stricter Calvinists, who remained committed to an Augustinian doctrine of human depravity. These moderate Anglicans asserted that human beings, far from being completely depraved, retained some capacity to exercise right reason to interpret scripture and nature. "It is necessary that every man should consider," Taylor urged in his 1650 treatise Holy Living, "that since God hath given him an excellent nature, wisdom and choice, an understanding soul, and an immortal spirit, having made him Lord over the Beasts, and but a little lower then the Angels; he hath also appointed him for a work and a service great enough to employ those abilities." In the moderate Anglican project, the good man exercised godly reason to suppress his ungodly passions, thus inscribing into Anglican ethics the older humanist psychology. (42)

Post-Restoration Anglican theologians were sharply critical of egoist ethics that attributed the sources of human motivation solely to appetite or passion. They believed that unchecked egoism resulted in civic decay. "No principle, or rule of practice is left, beside brutish sensuality, fond self-love, private interest, in their highest pitch, without any bound or curb," wrote the Reverend Isaac Barrow, "which therefore will dispose men to doe nothing but to prey on each other...." Egoism elevated men's lower, brutish nature, at the expense of civility. Moderate Anglican thinkers equated egoism with atheism, which, they thought, encouraged the kind of conduct that political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes described as the essence of human nature. "Every man thence will be a God to himself, a Fiend to each other," said Barrow, "so that necessarily the word will thence be turned into a Chaos and a Hell...." Moderate Anglican churchmen did not attribute human motivations solely to irrational passion; to indulge desire or appetite was fundamentally a conscious, rational human choice. "Wickedness," preached John Tillotson, one of the most influential moderate Anglican theologians, "is a kind of voluntary frenzy, and a chosen distraction." The social conditions that Hobbes ascribed to the "state of nature" were thus hardly natural at all. They derived from human choice, not natural law. Faithless people could not regulate their passions, and lack of faith was reflected in destructive human habits and decisions. "The naughtiness of Infidelity will appear by considering its effects and consequences," Isaac Barrow proclaimed, "which are plainly a spawn of all vices and villanies...." Remove faith, he said, and "no vertue can remain...." In a properly faithful society, on one hand, religion would teach gentlemen to rein in self-centered passions and to exemplify good behavior for their dependents. A society lacking in faith, on the other hand, tended toward the destruction of private virtue and hence of social order and stability. The aphorism Bernard Mandeville would make famous several decades later thus reversed moderate Anglican moral theology. Whereas, for Mandeville, "private vices" produced "public benefits," for these theologians public good stemmed from private virtue. An irreligious governor, like the villainous Nicholson who appeared in the stories of James Moody, Robert Beverley, and George Luke, was a double curse on the people he governed. Not only did he lack the self-control necessary for wise governance, but he also undermined the practice of religion among the people by his own wicked example, fostering faithlessness and its attendant evils. (43)

Early-eighteenth-century sermons demonstrate that Virginia clergymen preached within the moderate Anglican idiom. James Blair asserted the fundamental rationality of the Christian message. The apprehension of religious truth "requires a great deal of sedate Thought to make us in any Degree sensible" of it, he claimed. Until the "innate Principles in our minds" are "excited by Reason and Argument," Blair argued, we know God best "from the Excellency of his Works, and the Holiness of his Precepts." From careful study of the Bible and of nature, a reasonable man could deduce the existence of God. The fall of man was not complete--a remnant of reason remained. Thus, among the ways that "Christians may be said to suppress their Light," Blair argued, was "[b]y neglecting to make use of the Means of Grace, whereby their own Minds may be duly enlighten'd." In the forty-eight surviving sermons of those he preached between 1710 and 1714, Robert Paxton of Kecoughtan, Virginia, argued similarly. God's grace operated "in the minds of men" and disposed them "to comply to reasonable arguments and good motions." The mediation of Jesus made self-control possible, "overswaying bodily and sensual desires, so that we can restrain them and compose irregular passions," and hence allowed the good Christian to perform good works. It was each sinner's responsibility to "freely comply to the dictates of the spirit or of fight reason," Paxton declared. (44)

Virginia churchmen deployed a humanist psychology in which mankind possessed a dual nature--a lower, passionate, bestial nature and a vestige of reasoned, godly nature from before the fall. All creatures have a telos, Blair said. "The chief good of brute creatures consists in sensible things, such as tend to the fattening of the body, and the gratifying the lusts thereof; but the chief good of rational creatures is to enjoy God." Thus, Blair maintained, the rational man must suppress his carnal appetites. Blair condemned the "vain mirth and sottishness occasioned by gluttony and drunkenness," because indulging such appetites hampered "thought and reflection." He who "blindly follows the brutish Appetites" and permits them to "blunt his Understanding," Blair affirmed, "like a brute Beast" can have "no fight Sense of God and Religion." Robert Paxton preached within the same idiom. He analyzed the operation of the passion of anger: "the first motivations of it seem to be mechanical and necessary, the hastiness or slowness of it depends in great measure on the temper of the body and animal spirits." The grace of God permitted us to access our higher nature, however. "He cuts down wickedness at the very root and prevents the act by suppressing the first irregular motions." Constant internal vigilance against the impulses of their lower, animal spirit permitted men to achieve regenerate living. Here the northern humanist pedagogy of Erasmus is incorporated into moderate Anglican theology. The temperate man restrained his animal nature by exercising reason and actively placing his faith in God. (45)

Anglican preachers stressed that, since God gave all humans the faculties to refine themselves and to understand the nature of the divine, every person was obligated to undertake a project of self-improvement. Robert Paxton recommended to his congregation "the equal and uniform practice of every part of our duty." As he went on to emphasize, this entailed "not only ... restraining ourselves from outward acts of sin but ... mortifying the inward inclination to it, ... subduing our lusts and governing our passions and binding our tongues." James Blair condemned roundly those "who neglect to make Use of the several Talents, whether natural or acquired, wherewith they are entrusted; by which Negligence it comes to pass, that their own minds are kept in Darkness." As he consistently emphasized, "it is the Duty of Christians" to nurture within themselves "the Light of divine Truth." Indeed, the Christian obligation to self-improvement extended further. Blair stressed the importance not only of acquiring a correct understanding of Christian truth but also of rejecting falsehood. One of the ways by which Christians "obscure or suppress their Light," Blair noted, was "by neglecting to live up to the Knowledge they have of divine things." By this standard Francis Nicholson was especially culpable, since he clearly understood Christian doctrine but conspicuously failed to live the life that it demanded. (46)

Nicholson's failings were, moreover, dangerous to those he governed. James Blair consistently emphasized in his sermons the obligation of Christians to set a good pattern for those around them. Every person in a position of authority had a duty to "add good example to good Instruction." The parent or schoolmaster who urged his dependents, "tho' never so eloquently, to beware of Passion, of Cursing, Sweating, or Railing, ... will avail little, if he acts continually contrary to his own Precepts," Blair warned. "His bad example will hinder the Operation of his Precepts and rhetorick too; and so it is in all other Virtues and Vices." Blair recognized that social stratification permitted some persons greater time and opportunity to engage themselves in this process of reflection and self-improvement than others. "God has given a plentiful Portion to some Men," he said. Men and women who wielded power or influence had a special obligation to fashion and present themselves as good role models for their dependents. Blair urged those "Persons who by their Prudence, Age, Office, or Authority, have a greater Right and Advantage to advise, command, or direct others; or a greater Interest in them, or Power over them" to strive especially to "instill right Notions" in their subordinates by "savoury and edifying" conversation. "Parents, Teachers, Pastors, Tutors, Guardians, Masters, Mistresses, Relations, Friends and Acquaintances," Blair asserted, diffused "Knowledge and Practice of Religion and Virtue," by means of "Instruction, Advice, or Example." Proper comportment was thus, in Blair's estimation, an obligation of gentlemen and gentlewomen in the upper reaches of British society who could "communicate their Knowledge in their several stations to others, who might be the better for it." For Virginia to become the hierarchical, godly society that Anglican clergymen like Paxton and Blair envisioned, the manners of the men at the top of the social hierarchy were especially important. The example of their moderation ensured a faithful society. (47)

Nicholson governed at a time when Virginia's elite had only recently become established and was attempting, with apprehension and vigor, to erect a self-consciously English society in the colony. Nicholson's conflict with the faction around the Harrison family, for which James Blair was a powerful spokesman, was rooted in both personal animosities and Nicholson's challenge to the faction's self-interest. The material and family interests involved in the opposition to Nicholson should not be permitted to obscure the significance of the rhetoric used to slander his reputation. The language that these men employed to attack the governor was revealing. While clearly familiar with Whig political theory, Nicholson's opponents drew liberally upon other ethical models as well. The vast majority of the stories told to discredit Nicholson focused on his personal character. He was presented more often as an enemy to Erasmian and moderate Anglican ethics than as a political villain.

It is possible that the stories Blair and his allies told about Nicholson did not reflect their vision for Virginia but rather shed insight into their calculations as to the line of argument most likely to be persuasive to authorities in England. However, the continuity between the ethical position Nicholson's opponents adopted in the stories they told, on the one hand, and the practical theology articulated by Blair and other Virginia ministers in their sermons, on the other, implies that this thesis is incorrect. The consistency in Blair's ethics, both in his sermonizing and in his attacks on Andros and Nicholson, suggests that the stories he had to tell about Virginia governors reveal something more than calculated propaganda. Moreover, the authors of the stories about Nicholson wrote for multiple audiences in England, private and public, clerical and secular. Given the multiplicity of audiences, the vivid clarity of the portrait they limed of Nicholson suggests a deeper and more genuine sense of outrage, not a stance adopted solely out of self-interest. A threat to material interests provoked these stories, but their authors chose to frame them within a particular ethical idiom that reflected their assumptions about the proper workings of Virginia society. Their aspirations, of course, included material success for themselves. But they also included political stability and social legitimacy, which in turn required an ideal of an orderly British society, governed by the right kind of men.

The multitude of letters, memoranda, petitions, and depositions in which Blair and his allies told their stories reveals a deep moral outrage and disgust for their governor. The language they chose to frame their opposition and to express their revulsion for the governor sheds insight into the moral values of Virginia's plantation elite just when the eighteenth-century Virginia plantation society was becoming mature. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a significant number of prominent, powerful Virginians rejected a view of human society predicated upon possessive individualism. The planters, merchants, ship captains, and clergymen who opposed Nicholson did not adopt the proto-liberal egoism of radical thinkers like Bernard Mandeville, who in the first decades of the eighteenth century influenced the ethical thought of forward-looking British intellectuals. Rather, the Virginians formulated their understanding of the proper authority and character of governors within a traditional and conservative body of ethical thought derived from Erasmus and his pedagogical successors in England. Men who adhered to this conception of the role of "governors" perceived civilization originating in the good character of the governors at the apex of the local social and political hierarchy. Its most forceful spokesmen in the colony were Anglican priests who re-articulated in the social theology of moderate Anglican orthodoxy older English conceptions of the good ruler. Part of what it meant to be English, at least as Virginians comprehended it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was to be ruled by gentlemen who comported themselves appropriately. Nicholson's failure to meet such a standard of behavior was the focus of the complaints against him, which in turn were instigated by his challenge to the material, political, and social standing of a prominent group of aspiring Virginia families.

(1) Blair to [the Archbishop of Canterbury], [ca. October-November 1703], containing a memorial against Francis Nicholson, Folder 5, Francis Nicholson Papers (1680-1721), (John D. Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Va.) (first two quotations); Robert Beverley, "Narrative" of February 12, 1704, in H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (6 vols.; Richmond, 1925-1966), II, 392 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations); Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, edited by Louis B. Wright (1705; Wright's edition, Chapel Hill, 1947), 107 (last quotation). The soldiers of the Tangier garrison formed the elite core of Charles II's army and were notorious for their savage repression of Monmouth's Rebellion in 1685. See Bruce T. McCully, "From the North Riding to Morocco: The Early Years of Governor Francis Nicholson, 1655-1686," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 19 (October 1962), 534-56; Stephen Saunders Webb, "The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson," ibid., 23 (October 1966), 513-48, esp. 515-20; and Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660-1722 (London, 1993), 12, 13, and 170-71. Professor Emory Evans shared with me the fruits of many years of research in early Virginia politics and society. My understanding of the politics surrounding Nicholson's tenure as governor owes much to his generosity and especially to the chapters on politics in his forthcoming study of elite colonial Virginia families. I would like to acknowledge in addition the generosity of James Henretta, who has mentored this project from its inception. Warren Billings, Edward Bond, Patricia Bonomi, Christopher Doyle, Jeff Forret, Ron Hoffman, Warren Hofstra, James Horn, Jon Kukla, Jack P. Greene, Rhys Isaac, Peter Onuf, James Rice, Thad Tate, Albert Zambone, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History offered cogent criticism of earlier versions of this essay. Participants in a colloquium sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in October 2002 and in a meeting of the Early American Seminar at the University of Virginia in February 2004 provided much useful commentary and rigorous criticism. The staffs of the Carrier Library of James Madison University, the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the John D. Rockefeller Library of Colonial Williamsburg, the Earl Gregg Swem Library of the College of William and Mary, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the State Library of New York, the New York State Archives, and the Virginia Historical Society deserve every recognition for their extraordinary courtesy and professionalism.

(2) Edmund S. Morgan places Whig ideals at the center of his interpretation of the dispute between Nicholson and his Virginia foes. In Morgan's analysis, the key issue of the dispute was Nicholson's effort to reform the militia of the colony, which his opponents understood as an attempt to create a standing army under the governor's sole control. See Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 349-58; and Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988), 138. Stephen Saunders Webb argues that Nicholson supported ideals of "prerogative and social regulation" in opposition to "whig ideals of law and property" and that his efforts to implement this conception of authority, by martial law if need be, brought him into conflict with members of his council. See Webb, "Strange Career of Francis Nicholson," 536-37 (quoted phrases above are on p. 536). In order to sustain his argument, however, Webb accepts at face value the depictions of Nicholson by his political enemies. Given the vitriolic and, in places, hysterical nature of the stories told against the governor, it seems prudent to remain agnostic regarding Nicholson's true character. What should be analyzed are the stories themselves, which are historical artifacts in their own right. The most insightful recent commentary on the imperial politics of slander and character is Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill, 1998), esp. chaps. 4 and 5; but see also Alison Gilbert Olson, Anglo-American Politics, 1660-1775: The Relationship between Parties in England and Colonial America (New York, 1973); and Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

(3) On English attitudes about conduct and civility, see "The humanist debate of 'counsel,'" in John Guy, "The Henrician Age," in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993), 13-22; Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, Eng., 1998); and Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness, and Honour (Cambridge, Eng., 2003). The best treatment of colonial Virginia Anglicanism is the insightful study by Edward L. Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, Ga., 2000), esp. 236-85. For eighteenth-century Anglican practice, Bond's work can be usefully supplemented with John K. Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (Chapel Hill, 2001). In contrast to views that assert the "religious lassitude, indifference, and institutional weakness of Virginia's Mother Church," Nelson argues for the centrality of Anglican practice. "Viewed from its parishes rather than from Williamsburg or London, Virginia's Anglican establishment appears firmly rooted and tightly woven into the daily and commonplace experiences of eighteenth-century Virginians" (quotations on pp. 4 and 7). Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), provides a statement of the contrary position, but see Joan Gundersen's review, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 46 (April 1989), 379-82. In Blessed Company, Nelson echoes Gundersen's devastating critique (pp. 188-89).

(4) Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia, and the College, edited by Hunter Dickinson Farish (Williamsburg, 1940), 45. For the anxieties of elite Virginians during the transition to a native-born elite, see Carole Shammas, "English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia," in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979), 274-96 (quotation on p. 295). On the origins of the Virginia gentry, see Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, 1959); John C. Rainbolt, "The Alteration in the Relationship between Leadership and Constituents in Virginia, 1660 to 1720," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 27 (July 1970), 411-34; and Martin H. Quitt, "Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation," ibid., 45 (October 1988), 629-55. Jack P. Greene's analyses of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, an abiding focus throughout his long career, may be found collected in Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, 1992), and Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, 1994). Greene develops his analysis of "stewardship" in "Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia," ibid., 259-318, esp. 267-79. Rhys Isaac's magisterial account in The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982) dovetails nicely with Greene's analyses, establishing what I take to be the current scholarly consensus on the political, social, and cultural order of eighteenth-century Virginia. On elite competition in eighteenth-century Virginia, especially for land, see Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times (New York, 1999); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999); and T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980).

(5) Webb, "Strange Career of Francis Nicholson," 513-48; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia. Vol. I: The Tidewater Period, 1607-1710 (Chapel Hill, 1960), 334-36. The political struggles that characterized Nicholson's tenure in office are ably described in David Alan Williams, "Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia Politics, 1698-1750" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1959), 1-78.

(6) Quotations are from [James Blair], "A Short character of Sir Edmund Andros's conduct ... relating to the Government of Virginia," n.d., Volume XI: Virginia, General Correspondence, Continental Colonies, Fulham Papers (Lambeth Palace Library, London), Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm, reel 590, document 21 (Library of Virginia, Richmond), as described in Survey Report No. SR 00577; and Governor the Earl of Bellomont to the Council of Trade and Plantations, April 13, 1699, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series. Vol. XVII: America and West Indies, 1699 ... (40 vols.; London, 1860-1939), 138. For an excellent and concise analysis of the conflict between Blair and Andros, stressing the importance of imperial politics, see Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (White Plains, N.Y., 1986), 146-54. Other surveys of the dispute include Morton, Colonial Virginia, I, 350-55; Louis B. Wright, "William Byrd's Defense of Sir Edmund Andros," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 2 (January 1945), 47-62; and Parke Rouse Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1971), chap. 6. The transcript of the meeting at Lambeth Palace can be found in "A true account of a Conference at Lambeth, Dec. 27, 1697," in "Correspondence of the Bishop of London, with some miscellaneous papers, 1679-1771," Fulham Papers, in Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm, reel 590, document 187, Survey Report No. SR 00577. See also James Blair, "A Memorial of Sir Edmund Andros's Conduct towards The Clergy, and the Colledge of William and Mary in Virginia," 1697, Fulham Papers, in Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm, reel 590, document 187, Survey Report No. SR 00577. An account of Blair's suspension from the Governor's Council, probably written by Blair, may be found in Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, Present State of Virginia, 37-39. Further discussion of the conflict between Nicholson and Andros may be found in "Copys of several letters written to me [Francis Nicholson] from Mr. Byrd, with my answer to his first; and one of his to Benjamin Harrison Esq." [includes William Byrd to Francis Nicholson, London, October 3, 1697; Francis Nicholson to William Byrd, Annapolis, June 8, 1698; William Byrd to Francis Nicholson, Lincoln's Inn, October 10, 1698; and William Byrd to Benjamin Harrison, London, September 12, 1699] in "Correspondence of the Bishop of London, with some miscellaneous papers, 1679-1771." Thomas Tenison, the archbishop of Canterbury, championed Nicholson for the Virginia governorship, at least partly at Blair's urging; see Archbishop Tenison to Bishop Compton, May 21, 1698, Fulham Papers.

(7) [Blair], "Short Character of Sir Edmund Andros's conduct ..." (first two quotations); Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, Present State of Virginia, 21 (remaining quotations).

(8) Michael Kammen, ed., "Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century: An Appraisal by James Blair and John Locke," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 74 (April 1966), 141-69 (Randolph quotation on p. 143); Rouse, James Blair of Virginia, 110-16; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 151-54. Randolph wrote a series of reports to the Board of Trade, as did Colonel Robert Quary, detailing abuses of the Navigation Acts and other violations of imperial policy throughout the continental colonies. With regard to Virginia, see Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 134-35; and Anthony S. Parent Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill, 2003), 40-48.

(9) Blair's essay is reprinted in Kammen, ed., "Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century," 153-69 (quotations on pp. 154-55, 156, and 159); Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, Present State of Virginia, 17 and 58; Hartwell to Lord Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, September 13, 1697, Colonial Office, America and West Indies, Board of Trade, Virginia, Class 5, Volume 1309 (British Public Record Office, Kew; hereinafter records from the colonial office will be referred to as CO with the appropriate class, volume, and folio numbers following), transcripts in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. For the administration of quitrents and land grants under Andros and Nicholson, see Morton, Colonial Virginia, I, 362-65.

(10) "To his excellency Francis Nicholson Esq. and Governor and Guardian of his Majesties Province and Territory of Maryland," Ellesmere Collection (Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.). This is the copy that Nicholson made for the Earl of Bridgewater; Nicholson endorsed it on February 4, 1698/99, as a true copy of the original. Steven Saunders Webb argues that "Nicholson's primary aim in his very generous benefactions to Anglican churches and church colleges in the colonies throughout his career was to support the teaching of political obedience to a new generation of colonial leaders." Webb, "Strange Career of Francis Nicholson," 521. While political obedience was certainly important to Nicholson, it does seem likely that his religious convictions were more generous and less cynical than Webb implies. For alternate readings of Nicholson's philanthropy, see Bruce T. McCully, "Governor Francis Nicholson, Patron Par Excellence of Religion and Learning in Colonial America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 39 (April 1982), 310-33; and James D. Kornwolf, "'Doing Good to Posterity': Francis Nicholson, First Patron of Architecture, Landscape Design, and Town Planning in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1688-1725," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 101 (July 1993), 333-74.

(11) Francis Nicholson, Maryland, Port Anapolis, to the Earl of Bridgewater, August 19, 1698; Francis Nicholson, Virginia, James City, to the Earl of Bridgewater, February 4, 1698/99. Both letters are in the Ellesmere Collection. Nicholson expressed a similar hierarchy of duty in other letters. See the discussion in James B. Bell, The Imperial Origins of the King's Church in Early America, 1607-1783 (Basingstoke, Eng., 2004), 48.

(12) See Kammen, ed., "Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century," 150-53; Morton, Colonial Virginia, I, 361-63; and Williams, "Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia Politics," 3-32. The Board of Trade's instructions to Nicholson are discussed in some detail in Williams, "Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia Politics," 4-21. The text of Nicholson's instructions may be found in CO 324/26. The full text of several letters to and from Blair may be found in Rouse, James Blair of Virginia. See Blair to Nicholson, June 2, 1698, and Blair to Locke, February 8, 1698/99, ibid., 113 and 114-15. See also Blair to [the Archbishop of Canterbury], [ca. October-November 1703], containing a memorial against Francis Nicholson, Folder 5, Francis Nicholson Papers.

(13) "Mr. Commissary Blair's Memorial against Governor Nicholson, 1702," in William Stevens Perry, [ed.], Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church. Vol. I: Virginia (5 vols. in 4; Hartford, Conn., 1870-1878), 75-80.

(14) Rouse, James Blair of Virginia, 34-35 and 133.

(15) Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 158-53; William Byrd I to Philip Ludwell, July 6, 1702, and William Byrd I to Francis Nicholson, October 21, 1703, in Marion Tinling, ed., Correspondence of the Three William Byrds (2 vols.; Charlottesville, 1977), I, 186 (first and second quotations), 188 (third quotation), and 189 (fourth and fifth quotations). On treasury rights, see Parent, Foul Means, 47.

(16) Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 161-62; Williams, "Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia," 19-21; William Byrd I to Francis Nicholson, October 21, 1703, in Tinling, ed., Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, I, 188 (quotation).

(17) Nicholson to Tenison, July 28, 1702; Peregrine Cony [writing on behalf of Nicholson] to Tenison, July 22, 1702; Clergy of Virginia to Bishop Compton, August 25, 1703, with some signatures added on September 22, all three in the Fulham Papers. When news arrived in Virginia of the death of William III and the accession of Queen Anne, Nicholson arranged for ceremonies to mourn the King and to celebrate the new monarch. During this pageantry Blair delivered the funeral sermon that so offended the governor. Francis Louis Michel, a Swiss traveler in Virginia, observed the ceremony and recorded a vivid description of the several-day event. See William J. Hinke, ed., "Report of the Journey of Francis Louis Michel, from Berne, Switzerland, to Virginia, October 2, 1701-December 1, 1702, Part II," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 24 (April 1916), 125-29.

(18) Blair to Archbishop Tenison, July 13, 1702, Fulham Papers (first quotation); Blair to [the Archbishop of Canterbury], [ca. October-November 1703], containing a memorial against Francis Nicholson, Folder 5, Francis Nicholson Papers (all other quotations). On August 26, 1703, Nicholson complained bitterly that "it appeared Mr. Blair had misrepresented him in England, and insinuated as if this Country was dissatisfied with his Excellency's Government with several other aspersions." McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, II, 335.

(19) Quotations are from Nicholson to Major Burwell, March 14, 1700/1701; Burwell to Nicholson, March 15, 1700/1701; and Nicholson to Major Burwell, March 21, [1701]. These letters are part of an extensive correspondence among Nicholson, Lewis Burwell, and Lucy Burwell, in the Francis Nicholson Papers. Many have been reprinted in Polly Cary Legg, [ed.], "The Governor's 'Extacy of Trouble,'" William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd Ser., 22 (October 1942), 389-98 (quotations are on pp. 391,392, and 393 in that order). For recent interpretations of this episode, see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), 254-55 and 448n15-16; and Albert Louis Zambone, "Francis Nicholson's 'Immoderate Passion': Love, Morality, Moderation and Anglicanism in Colonial Virginia," (M. St. dissertation, Oxford University, 2002).

(20) Anonymous letter, December 8, 1702, Francis Nicholson Papers; Legg, [ed.], "Governor's 'Extacy of Trouble,'" 393-95.

(21) Fouace to Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, September 28, 1702, Fulham Papers, on Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm, reel 590, document 95, Survey Report No. SR 00577.

(22) Council of Virginia to the Queen, May 20, 1703, CO 5/1314/3, transcript in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

(23) A Memoriall Concerning the Mal-administrations of his Excelly. Francis Nicholson ...," May 20, 1703, CO 5/1314/5, transcript in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

(24) Ibid.

(25) Blair's affidavits can be found in CO 5/1314/7 and 8, transcripts in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Beverley and Fouace submitted affidavits to the Board of Trade on April 28, 1704; see Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series. Vol. XXII: America and West Indies, 1704-1705, pp. 104-5. The full text of the letters from high-ranking Virginians may be found in CO 5/1314/14 and 15, transcripts in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

(26) "Deposition of Captain James Moody," CO 5/1314/9, transcript in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

(27) CO 5/1314/10 and 13, transcript in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

(28) Writing to William Blathwayt in March 1705, Nicholson acknowledged Blathwayt's "very extraordinary kindness to me, especially concerning the affair of Mr. Blair etc which I am very sensible of, not only by your own letters of the 6th of June and 23 of August last, as likewise in a letter which I had from his Grace the Duke of Bolton, and others from Mr. Perry, Mr. Wilcocks, etc." Francis Nicholson, Virginia, to William Blathwayt, March 7, 1704/1705, Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library (first quotation in text); Governor Nicholson to Council of Trade and Plantations, March 6, 1704/1705, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series. Vol. XXII: America and West Indies, 1704-1705, p. 433 (second quotation).

(29) "Answer of John Thrale in Behalf of Nicholson," May 1703, Folio 9, Volume 51, Series A-1894, Colonial Manuscripts (New York State Archives, Albany). Berthold Fernow, a well-regarded nineteenth-century scholar, transcribed this document for the Virginia Historical Society, and it was subsequently published in "Papers Relating to the Administration of Governor Nicholson and to the Founding of William and Mary College," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 7 (January and April 1900), 278-86 and 386-91 (first quotation on p. 388; second, third, and fourth on p. 390); for reference to Fernow and this document, see ibid., (October 1899), 153.

(30) Transcript of a speech by Governor Nicholson to the Virginia House of Burgesses, May 1, 1705, in H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1702/3-1705, 1705-1706, 1710-1712 (Richmond, 1912), 101 (quotations); minutes for session of Saturday, May 5, 1705, ibid., 107-8; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 168; "Justices of Gloucester County to Nicholson" and "Petition of Certain Justices of Middlesex County," Folios 15-51, Volume 51, Series A-1894, Colonial Manuscripts (New York State Archives); Governor Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 6, 1704/1705, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series. Vol. XXII: America and West Indies, 1704-1705, pp. 429-36; McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, II, 391-95, 414--42.

(31) "Address of the Clergy to Nicholson," "Address of the Clergy to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations," "Address of the Clergy to the Archbishop of Canterbury," and "Address of the Clergy to the Bishop of London," Folios 15-51, Volume 51, Series A-1894, Colonial Manuscripts (New York State Archives).

(32) Governor Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 1, 2, 3, and 6, 1704/1705, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series. Vol. XXII: America and West Indies, 1704-1705, pp. 397-402, 403-6, 411-28, 429-37 (quotations are from pp. 429-30 and 432).

(33) Memorandum, attached to Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 3, 1704/1705, CO 5/1314/ 43 (iii)(b) (all quotations), transcript in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

(34) Attachment, Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 6, 1704/1705, CO 5/1314/44 (ii).

(35) James VI and I, "Basilicon Doron," in Johann P. Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 20 (quotations); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 19-21; Howell A. Lloyd, "Constitutionalism," in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 254-97, esp. pp. 258-64. On the ethics articulated by Thomas Aquinas, which provided an important foundation to English humanism, I have found especially useful the classic account by Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by L. K. Shook (Notre Dame, Ind., 1994).

(36) Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, translated and edited by Lester K. Born (New York, 1968), 139-40; Erasmus, Praise of Folly, translated by John Wilson (1688; reprint, London, 1913), quoted in Born's introduction, 12; and James VI and I, "Basilicon Doron," in Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings, 20 and 49 (quotations from King James on these two pages in this order). See also Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York, 1970), 58-67. W. Lee Ustick traces the influence of James's work on later seventeenth-century courtesy books. See Ustick, "Advice to a Son: A Type of Seventeenth-Century Conduct Book," Studies in Philology, 29 (July 1932), 409-41. On the indivisibility of sovereignty in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century English thought, see Lloyd, "Constitutionalism," esp. pp. 279-83. On English pedagogy, see Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Modes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, Eng., 1998).

(37) Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, edited by Stanford E. Lehmberg (London, 1970), 4-5 and 183 (quotation). See also Pearl Hogrefe, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Elyot, Englishman (Ames, Iowa, 1967), esp. pp. 107-56; and Stanford E. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot: Tudor Humanist (Austin, Tex., 1960).

(38) James A. Servies and Carl R. Dolmetsch, eds., The Poems of Charles Hansford (Chapel Hill, 1961), 63 (first quotation) and 64 (second quotation); William Stith, The Sinfulness and Pernicious Nature of Gaming (Williamsburg, Va., 1752), 20 (first two quotations from Stith), 24 (third and fourth quotations from Stith), and 14 (fifth and sixth quotations from Stith).

(39) Desiderius Erasmus, "On Education for Children/De Pueris Instituendis," in Erika Rummel, ed., The Erasmus Reader (Toronto, 1990), 73; John Page, Deed of Gift to My Dear Son, Captain Matt. Page (Philadelphia, 1856), 64 (first two quotations from Page) and 76 (last quotation from Page). For comparison, see Louis B. Wright, ed., Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962); Henry Peacham, "The Complete Gentleman," in Virgil B. Heltzel, ed., The Complete Gentleman, the Truth of Our Times, and the Art of Living in London (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962); and Richard Braithwaite, esq., The English Gentleman: Containing Sundry excellent Rules or exquisite Observations, tending to Direction of every Gentleman, of select ranke and qualitie: How to demeane or accommodate himselfe in the manage of publike or private affaires (1630; reprint, Bristol, Eng., 1994). For the classical origins of this conception of self-identity, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self." The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), chap. 6. With regard to John Page, Deed of Gift to My Dear Son, containing advice addressed by Page to his son in the late seventeenth century, Bishop William Meade reviewed the provenance of the original manuscript in the preface to the 1856 printing, which also contains two Page family letters. The first is from John Page to his son Matthew Page; the second, dating from the nineteenth century, is from Governor John Page of Virginia, the first John Page's great-great-grandson. The latter discusses the disposition of the manuscript in the eighteenth century. The elder John Page presented this lengthy treatise to his son, Matthew, in 1688, and it remained in the Page family for several generations. The Page family made the manuscript available to William Stith, the president of the College of William and Mary, and to William Dawson, the commissary of the bishop of London, in the 1750s, but it remained unpublished for another hundred years or so, until it came to the attention of Bishop Meade. Meade then published it in 1856, almost 170 years after John Page first set pen to paper.

(40) John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letters: Or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and other Important Subjects, edited by Ronald Hamowy (4 vols. in 2; Indianapolis, Ind., 1995), I, 180 (both quotations from letter no. 25, dated Saturday, April 15, 1721).

(41) For brief accounts of the development of English ethical thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York, 1966), 121-77; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind., 1988), 209-325; Taylor, Sources of the Self, chaps. 13-16; Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, chaps. 15-19; and Shelley Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688--1740 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992). On Mandeville and his influence in the eighteenth century, see the useful introductory essay by F. B. Kaye in Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1924; 2 vols., Indianapolis, 1988), I, xxxviii-cxlvi. On the ethical positions of late-seventeenth-century Anglicanism, see W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660-1700 (Athens, Ga., 1993); Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780. Vol. I: Whichcoate to Wesley (Cambridge, Eng., 1991); John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660-1750 (London, 1976); John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646-1689 (New Haven, 1991); John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor, eds., The Church of England, c. 1689-c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, Eng., 1993); William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688-1832: Unity and Accord (London, 2001), esp. chap. 2; B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, Eng., 1998); and Tina Isaacs, "The Anglican Hierarchy and the Reformation of Manners, 1688-1738," Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (July 1982), 391--411.

(42) Taylor, as quoted in Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 21; and Spellman, Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 20-29, 54-71. On the moral philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists, see Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 194-214. For a discussion of Anglican understanding of virtuous citizenship after the Glorious Revolution, see Bunt, Virtue Transformed, 39-63; and Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, I, 9-24.

(43) Isaac Barrow, "Of the Evil and Unreasonableness of Infidelity," in Irene Simon, ed., Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson, Selected Sermons (2 vols.; Pads, 1976) I, 396 (quotations from Barrow); John Tillotson, "The Folly of Scoffing at Religion" and "The Wisdom of Being Religious," ibid., II, 413, 419, and 421. The conviction that fallen humanity possessed the agency to choose between Satan and God was a staple of seventeenth-century Puritan belief. See the insightful discussion in Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. On the emergence of secular ethics as an alternate basis of identity in the early eighteenth century, see E. J. Hundert, "The European Enlightenment and the History of the Self," in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self." Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), 72-83; and Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000), 156-83, 205-29. On seventeenth-century atheism and reactions to it, see Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion.

(44) James Blair, Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount, Contained in the Vth, VIth and VIIth Chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel, Explained: And the Practice of it Recommended in divers Sermons and Discourses (4 vols.; London, 1740), I, 132 (first four quotations) and 459--60 (fifth and sixth quotations from p. 459). This volume was originally published in 1722 and contains sermons delivered by Blair from the early 1700s forward (copy in Library of William Byrd II, Virginia Historical Society). Robert Paxton, Sermon 7, "Of Fortitude and Resolution," Sermon 11, "Of Salvation," and Sermon 12, "On Living a Good Life" in "Sermons Preached in Virginia," MS AM 1561 (Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.).

(45) Blair, Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount, I, 225 (first quotation), 132 (second and third quotations), 231 (fifth and seventh quotations), 232 (fourth and sixth quotations), 235-36, and 456; Paxton, Sermon 3, "Of Anger."

(46) Paxton, Sermon 12, "On Living a Good Life"; Blair, Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount, I, 456 (third, fourth, and fifth Blair quotations), 459 (second Blair quotation), and 460 (first Blair quotation).

(47) Blair, Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount, I, 460 (fourth, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh quotations), 463 (first three quotations), and 464 (fifth, sixth, and seventh quotations).

MR. HARDWICK is an associate professor of history at James Madison University.