Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [85]
Leisler never quite made it into the innermost circle of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy, however. One reason was a nasty, protracted dispute with the Bayards and Van Cortlandts over the estate of his wife (who was related to both families). Another was his ardent Calvinism and passionate devotion to the House of Orange, which linked him to anti-English elements in the Reformed Church. During the brief Dutch reconquest of 1673-74, moreover, Leisler had been closely identified with Governor Colve and was thereafter never entirely trusted by the English.
Leisler’s goal in the summer of 1689 was to hold New York for his new sovereigns against the “Popish Doggs & Divells,” foreign and domestic, who threatened it. The identity and motives of his followers cannot be summed up so neatly. Many were second-generation Dutch, born in the city around the time of the 1664 conquest. A few, like Johannes De Bruyn, Abraham Gouverneur, and Nicholas Stuyvesant, were successful merchants; others, such as Cornelius Pluvier, baker, and Johannes Van Couwenhaven, brewer, were well-to-do artisans. Gerardus Beekman, a physician, supported Leisler. So did Samuel Staats, also a physician, who had returned to the Netherlands after the English conquest “rather than endeavor to make himself an Englishman,” then came back again to join Leisler. But this wasn’t simply a Dutch uprising against English oppression. Some prominent Dutch merchants opposed Leisler, as did Dominie Selyns of New York and Dominie Varick of Long Island, while Leisler’s most trusted lieutenants included a number of Englishmen, among them Jacob Milborne and Samuel Edsall, a New Jersey hatmaker and Indian trader. Among Leisler’s followers, moreover, were the shopkeepers, craftsmen, sailors, cartmen, and laborers of every nationality who formed the bulk of the city’s population. Somewhat more than half the militiamen who initially took over Fort James came from England, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, France, Germany, or other parts of North America; outside the city itself, the Stuart-hating villagers of English Long Island would prove to be among Leisler’s staunchest supporters.
What united these disparate insurgents was a rhetoric of loyalty to the Protestant cause that encompassed a broad range of social and political discontents. As Leislerian pamphleteers and spokesmen told the story, they had lived for years in “great dread” that the late King James planned “to Damn the English Nation to Popery and Slavery.” His minions in New York—“our grandees,” Leisler called them—had already made great strides in that direction, aided by Reformed clergymen who collaborated with the English. Then “the Hand of Heaven sent the glorious King William” to save the colony. When the governor and council delayed in declaring for the new government, the people rose up to defend both “the Holy Protestant Religion, and the Rights and Liberties of English men.”
Nowhere was this layering of social and religious resentment more apparent than in the case of Jacob Milborne. Eight years younger than Leisler, Milborne was the son of a tailor who had been deeply influenced by the radical Protestantism that flourished among English working people during the Civil War. Jacob’s brother William was one of the Fifth Monarchy Men who believed that Christ’s kingdom was at hand and in 1661 attempted an armed uprising to prevent the restoration of the Stuarts. He eventually settled in Boston as a Baptist preacher. Jacob, in the meantime, went to America as the apprentice of a Hartford merchant. In 1668 he came down to New York, found work as a clerk for Thomas Delavall, and then went into business for himself.
During the 1670s and early 1680s, Milborne often traveled to Europe as a factor for Delavall and other city merchants, building a modest fortune as well as contacts with powerful English Whigs like Shaftsbury. On both sides of the Atlantic, his loathing for the Stuarts and his egalitarian contempt for