Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [86]
Like his brother, who took part in the Boston uprising that toppled Andros and the Dominion of New England, Milborne threw himself into the struggle to defend his new sovereigns against their enemies. His pronouncements on social equality and the popular basis of political authority—far more extreme than anything ever heard from Leisler himself—soon made him one of the city’s most conspicuous and controversial figures.
As for Leisler’s “grandees,” whose version of events is more fully recorded, they knew, without a shadow of doubt, what they were up against. “Hardly one person of sens & Estate. . . do countenance any of these ill and rash proceedings,” Nicholson had said after giving up the fort, striking a note that would be played over and over again by Leisler’s opponents and victims in the months and years to follow. Thirty-six merchants, including a half-dozen deacons of the Reformed Church, sent an address to William and Mary depicting the Leislerians as “a Rable . . . who formerly were scarce thought fit to bear the meanest offices among us.” Still other “men of quality” and “Persons of Note” scoffed at Leisler’s “ignorant Mobile,” his “most abject Comon people,” his “drunken crue,” his “Olleverians” (a reference to Oliver Cromwell’s supporters). Van Cortlandt spoke grimly about the approach of “people’s Revolutions.”
To Nicholas Bayard, perhaps his most vitriolic critic, Leisler was a man of Cromwellian insolence, driven by “unsatiable Ambition,” unable to accept “the station nature had fitted him for, and placed him in, but his soaring, aspiring mind aiming at that which neither his birth nor education had ever qualified him for.” Jacob Milborne was a “dark politician” who had an “affected ambiguous way of expressing himself [which] renders him unfit for the conversation of any but the vulgar, who in this age are so apt and ready to admire and applaud that they understood not.” The rest of the insurgents, Bayard continued, were “poor ignorant innocent and senseless people who suffer them to be ruled and hectored by about twenty or thirty ill drunken sots.” (Bayard also alleged that the insurgents were egged on by a woman, Trijn Jans, and women appear to have been among Leisler’s most active and vocal supporters.)
“KILL HIM! KILL HIM!”
Something very like a “people’s Revolucion” did indeed appear to be approaching New York between the autumn of 1689 and the spring of 1691. When the Committee of Safety called for a general election of local officers in September 1689, it decided (perhaps at Milborne’s urging) to broaden the range of elective positions: justices of the peace and militia captains were to be chosen directly by voters for the first time, triggering a dramatic shift in the distribution of political power in the city. Bakers, bricklayers, carpenters, innkeepers—workingmen heretofore thought unfit for public responsibility—captured a majority of seats on the board of aldermen. Johannes Johnson, carpenter, became sheriff, and William Churcher, bricklayer, became marshal. Peter Delanoy, a Huguenot and one of Leisler’s inner circle, was elected mayor of the city. Joost Stol, the militia ensign who had led the initial takeover of the fort, accepted the crucial task of presenting the Leislerians’ case in London.
Scenes of open class conflict now became commonplace in the city. Bands of Leislerian rebels waylaid grandees who ventured out of doors, ransacked their homes and stores, intercepted their mail, and hauled them off for questioning. Bayard was arrested, marched in irons around the parapets of the fort, then thrown into jail for almost a year. Arrest warrants went out