Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [82]
Then, in February 1685, Charles II died and the duke of York became King James II. New York was now a royal colony, meaning that the governor, the council, and all other appointive officials would henceforth be named by the crown. Other changes were on the way as well. Shortly after his ascension, James II and the Lords of Trade created the Dominion of New England, a super-colony incorporating all of New England plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New York’s Charter of Libertyes was disallowed, and with it the provincial legislature. Although the city’s new charter survived royal scrutiny, Manhattan’s affairs and fortunes were now inextricably married to those of King James.
The king’s subjects in New York were struggling to make sense of these events when they learned, only months later, that Louis XFV had revoked the Edict of Nantes and unleashed a hurricane of official brutality against French Protestants. Thousands of Huguenots, as they were known, fled the country to England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and America. A small number of them arrived in New York as early as 1686. By 1688 there were two hundred Huguenot families in the city, and they had erected a house of worship, the Eglise du Saint Esprit (originally the Eglise des Refugies Français a la Nouvelle York), on Petticoat Lane (Marketfield Street). Its congregation included Jays, De Lanceys, Boudinots, and other well-to-do merchants and shipbuilders known for their extensive business connections throughout Europe and their visceral hatred of Roman Catholicism. Not surprisingly, on hearing that the new English king had congratulated Louis for his diligence in persecuting them, New York’s Huguenots—along with the great majority of the city’s other Protestants—began to see the outlines of a deep-laid conspiracy, international in scope, against everything they held dear. After 1687, when James II suspended by royal decree all anti-Catholic legislation in England, they were sure of it.
A GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
In August 1688 Sir Edmund Andros returned to New York. He was now governor of the new Dominion of New England, and for the past year or so he had been up in Boston, its capital, bringing one colony after another under its authority. Now it was New York’s turn to submit. Andros removed Dongan from office, broke the provincial seal, hoisted the flag of New England over the fort, and seized all the provincial records. He then returned to Boston, taking the records with him and leaving Colonel Francis Nicholson behind as lieutenant governor. Nicholson, though not a Roman Catholic like Dongan, was no less ardently devoted to the Stuart cause. He was also a passionate admirer of French culture and French political institutions.
The succession crisis in England was meanwhile coming to a head. What had held the Whigs in check thus far was the fact that James II, having no male heir, would in time be succeeded by one or the other of his two daughters, both of whom had remained Protestants. The elder of the two, Mary, was the wife of none other than Prince William of Orange—awkward, to be sure, but preferable, the Whigs figured, to having a Roman Catholic on the throne.
But in the summer of 1688, even as Andros was preparing for his journey down to New York, the queen gave birth to a son. Now faced with the certainty of a Roman Catholic succession, the Whigs reached out to William and Mary for assistance. A Dutch army landed on the coast of England in November 1688 and marched toward