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before his arrest he stashed a huge treasure somewhere on the forks of eastern Long Island). In May 1701, after six months of solitary confinement in Boston, followed by a year in London’s infamous Newgate prison, Kidd was hanged for murder and piracy while his erstwhile Whig patrons looked on in stony silence. (Hanged twice, actually, because the first rope broke and he had to be dropped a second time, after which his body was tarred, bound in an iron cage, and left swinging alongside the Thames as a warning to sailors contemplating a pirate life.) Exactly ten years had passed since Leisler’s execution, and it couldn’t have been clearer that the political trail between New York and London was now shorter, and more treacherous, than ever.

Kidd’s fate, like Leisler’s, had been played out on the Anglo-American political stage, before an audience that was increasingly eager for printed news and information. This account appeared on the market very soon after the execution. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

“A VERY WELL HUMOURD AFFAHLE GENT.”

Just weeks before Kidd’s execution, Lord Bellomont died suddenly in New York. By the time his replacement was chosen in 1702, the Tories were back in power in Parliament and Queen Anne had taken the throne. The new royal governor was the queen’s Tory cousin Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury. Former governor Fletcher’s private secretary welcomed him as “a very well humourd Affable Gent.,” and so he no doubt appeared to his political supporters—all the more so after Cornbury removed Bellomont’s Leislerian appointees and resumed the practice of handing out land to backers; the largest ran to two million acres, better than half the size of Connecticut. The large number of New Yorkers belonging to Reformed and dissenting congregations, on the other hand, saw nothing affable about Cornbury or his campaign to impose the Church of England on the colony.

A zealous Anglican like Fletcher, Cornbury favored Trinity Church with a generous portion of Manhattan real estate known as the King’s (or Queen’s) Farm, which stretched up the island’s west side as far as modern Christopher Street. He increased the salary of Trinity’s rector, the Rev. William Vesey, and persuaded the Assembly to raise taxes to pay for it. He welcomed missionaries dispatched by the Church of England’s new Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), chartered by King William in 1701 to invigorate the colonial church. It was, he said, his intention to promote the SPG’s “good and pious designs, to the utmost of my power.”

In 1707 Cornbury ordered the arrest of the Rev. Francis Makemie, one of the founders of American Presbyterianism, for preaching in the city without a license. After languishing in jail for three months, Makemie successfully defended himself under the English Toleration Act (which Cornbury said didn’t apply in New York). In Jamaica, where the Presbyterians had just built a new church, Cornbury evicted the minister, William Hubbard, and replaced him with an Anglican. When the congregation rioted and retook the building, Cornbury barred Hubbard from ever preaching there again.

Cornbury bore down heavily as well on the Reformed Church, despite decades of collusion by its dominies. Claiming the authority to do so under the Ministry Act, he began to fill vacant Reformed pulpits with Anglicans—a tactic, he said, that in conjunction with English-language schooling was the best way to “make this Colony an English Colony, which I am afraid will not easily be done without it.” Under his aegis, Anglicans also took over Dutch Reform missions to the Indians, and when they began to distribute Dutch-language editions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer—suggesting that Netherlanders were also fit objects for proselytizing—the dominies abandoned their collaborationist policy and went over into opposition.

Only a few years after he arrived in New York, Cornbury was tangled in sheets of trouble. Stories began circulating on both sides of the Atlantic about his eccentric, outlandish personal behavior. On one