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memorable occasion he allegedly scattered the patrons of the King’s Arms by riding his horse through the front door and up to the bar. It was charged, too, that he made a habit of addressing the Assembly and strolling the fort’s parapets in female attire. “His dressing himself in womens Cloths Commonly [every] morning is so unaccountable that if hundred[s] of Spectators didn’t dayly see him, it would be incredible,” said Robert Livingston (who in fact never actually witnessed such a scene himself and was only spreading rumors). Cornbury was a casual chiseler, on top of everything else, and soon had city merchants clamoring for him to pay off better than ten thousand pounds’ worth of bills and promissory notes. Lady Cornbury was accused of swiping clothes and jewels from the town’s best-dressed women; the sound of her carriage at the door, people said, was a warning to hide anything of value.

In 1708, when the Whigs won a crushing majority in Parliament, Cornbury’s enemies, rallied by Lewis Morris, persuaded the government to remove him from office. Stephen De Lancey and assorted other creditors immediately had him thrown into debtor’s prison. “A Porter in the streets of London is a happier man than a Governor in America,” Cornbury wailed. He got out only when the timely death of his father made him the third earl of Clarendon, rendering him immune from prosecution. No one shed a tear when he left New York later that same year, except perhaps those unlucky townsfolk who were still trying to collect the money he owed them.

POLITICAL INTERESTS

Cornbury hadn’t yet taken up his post in New York when, in 1702, Parliament renewed the war with France, this time to prevent the grandson of Louis XIV from inheriting the Spanish empire. The War of the Spanish Succession—“Queen Anne’s War” in America—soon blossomed into a kind of national crusade for the great Whig traders and financiers of London, who fattened their purses on military contracts, loans, and colonial commerce.

In New York, on the other hand, city merchants suddenly found themselves up against a Spanish embargo on their exports to the West Indies and mounting losses to enemy privateers. In the first two years of the war alone the French captured nearly thirty New York vessels, about one-fourth of those that worked out of the port. The economy nosedived. “Their Trade is in effect quite gon,” said a contemporary report; “the produce of the Country is of little or noe value, nor is there any markett for it any where.” Local shipyards eventually did some business replacing vessels taken by the enemy; some merchants traded illegally with the French West Indies; and privateering helped cushion the losses. Between 1703 and 1712, New York privateers returned with more than fifty prizes worth as much as sixty thousand pounds, but this was a trifling sum compared to the wages of piracy a decade earlier, and it cost the lives of nearly three hundred seamen, almost half the colony’s total.

The end of Queen Anne’s War was in sight after 1710, when the wheel of political fortune turned again and the Tories won a majority in Parliament. Viscount Bolingbroke, a Jacobite who had become the party’s chief tactician, set out at once to make peace with France and restore the Stuarts to the line of succession. He achieved the former in 1713, but his plans for the latter were foiled by Queen Anne’s death in 1714 and the accession of the Hanoverian George I. In desperation, Bolingbroke cast his lot with a Jacobite rising in Scotland in 1715. (For reasons of commerce as well as defense, the Whigs had engineered the unification of Scotland and England in 1707.) “The ‘15” ended in defeat, however, and from that point forward the Whigs had a firm grip on the government.

As the likelihood of counterrevolution receded and Parliament settled in for a long period of one-party rule, the “heats and animosityes” between Leislerians and anti Leislerians slowly dissipated. Robert Hunter, governor between 1710 and 1719, hastened the process by administering timely doses of both intimidation and compromise