Tea Sets and Tyranny. Steven C. Bullock
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authority from his subordinates that he gave his superiors—and his aggressive demeanor sought to make that expectation clear. Just as Slye needed to know his insolence was unacceptable, so too jurors and legislators needed to realize that they were being watched. Nicholson responded to the discontented Maryland legislators that he only sought to encourage people to do their duty. He asked incredulously whether they “desire to be despotick and [so much] above the Law so as not to be questioned?”20
Nicholson’s response to Slye’s accusation about the governor “Striking people” reveals the hierarchical vision that fed (and, he believed, justified) his anger. Nicholson readily admitted to beating two people. But when Slye raised the case of a “Burroughs,” the governor objected: “What if he had?” Burroughs was “his Servant and his Cook,” therefore his responsibility. The other two cases required more explanation. The first was that of Coode himself, who was not only the leader of the faction supported by his stepson Slye, but a prominent Maryland leader. Yet Coode’s transgression had been substantial. He first arrived drunk at a church service, making a “Disturbance,” and then he “affronted his Excellency in his own house.” Such insolence seemed just cause for physical discipline. Coode himself may have felt the same way. He quickly offered the governor a written apology.21 The final incident Nicholson noted suggests even more clearly his goal of upholding authority. While visiting a Captain Snowden, Nicholson observed some of Snowden’s men fighting with swords. Rather than reproving them, Nicholson turned his cane on the captain, the officer responsible for overseeing their behavior.22 The governor later threatened the members of the Virginia council in the same terms, promising that he “would beat them into better Manners.”23
This lively sense of authority also allowed Nicholson to be generous when his authority was fully accepted. His earlier anger was of a piece with his later magnanimous treatment of Slye after his submission. Nicholson remained popular with many Virginians during both his terms, even after many of the colony’s most prominent leaders turned against him.
Nicholson’s dedication to these larger responsibilities also encouraged his commitment to intellectual and cultural projects. He provided essential support for the new College of William and Mary, the second college chartered in British America. Blair called him “the greatest Encourager … of this Design” in the colony.24 Nicholson’s support of the college continued even after he was moved to Maryland, where he spearheaded the creation of that colony’s first free school. His extensive donations to Church of England ministers and building projects went far beyond his official duties. Virginia’s clergy lined up solidly behind him, even as Blair, the bishop’s official representative in Virginia, sought to have him removed. Ministers in other colonies showed similar support, sending numerous letters to London testifying of Nicholson’s encouragement. A New Jersey minister called him the colonial church’s “nursing Father.” The artist Mark Catesby, engaged in creating a pathbreaking volume describing and picturing American animals, found Nicholson similarly helpful in the 1720s when he arrived in South Carolina. The governor offered an annual pension as long as he held office.25
Like his encouragement of the Anglican Church, Nicholson’s designs for new capital cities in both Virginia and Maryland sought both to strengthen authority and to make plain the structures of power. Nicholson’s early plan for Williamsburg arranged the streets to form a “W,” a visual reminder of the new town’s namesake, King William. In Annapolis, named for William’s sister-in-law and successor, Nicholson placed the capitol, the center of political authority, and the Anglican church, the center of religious authority, on its two highest hills. The city’s other streets were arranged around or radiated from these two centers, representing topographically the significance of what he elsewhere called the “2 inseperables, the Church of Engl’d and monarchie.”26
Nicholson believed such authority, displayed in the streets of the capital (and, he would have said, in the person of the governor), was essential to proper government. When members of the Maryland assembly protested against his treatment of jurors and legislators in 1698, the upper house, clearly representing Nicholson’s position, responded by reminding them that they were responsible for preserving “the pe[a]ce and quiett of the Province.” To do this, the statement explained, government must be, as St. Paul wrote, a “Terror to Evill doers.” Just as jurors should not think that they would go unpunished if they erred, assembly members should not expect “to debate at Random without any reguard to the dignity of his Ma’ty and hon’r of his Governm’t.”27
Although Nicholson himself had scolded the legislators the previous day, he called them in again to accept one of their requests, the need to preserve the House journals: “he looked upon Records,” he told them, “Especially the Records of Supream authority next to the Divine Laws to be sacred.” But he also warned that the survival of government required respect for the governor: “All Rebellions were begun in all Kingdoms and States by scandalizing and makeing odious the p[er]sons in Authority.”28
Like his deep respect for church and monarchy, literally placing them above the people in Annapolis, Nicholson’s concern about uprisings recalled the problems that had plagued England over the past century. Rebels had dethroned (and executed) one king in the 1640s and driven away another in the 1680s. Nicholson began his military career under the son of the first of these monarchs and came to America under the second. Nicholson continued to believe royal control was under threat in America. As Blair noted, the governor viewed the continent as “haughty, tainted with republican notions & principles, uneasy under every Governm’t, & … ready to shake off their obedience to England.”29
Blair may have exaggerated Nicholson’s position, but only slightly. The governor protested to the Board of Trade that accepting his opponents’ objections to his militia policy would lead to the “mere Skeleton of a [royal] Government.” If Virginians controlled their own military, they could use it “in the same manner as the Parliament did to King Charles the First” in the 1640s, first overthrowing and then executing him.30 Nicholson, of course, believed Blair the key figure in these plans. The minister had “hoped to [create] an Army” of followers by “sound[ing] the Trumpett of Rebellion [and] Sedition.”31
These concerns placed Nicholson in the mainstream of contemporary conservative thinking. The restoration of monarchy and established church in 1660, when Nicholson was only five years old, led to a flood of warnings from Tories and church leaders about the dangers of disobedience and rebellion. Pamphleteers and preachers alike insisted on the divine authority of both monarchy and church. Restraints on the king’s power could be dangerous, they warned, especially since even the people’s liberty originated in royal generosity.32
Nicholson’s political views affected his manner as well as his message. King James I, nearly a century earlier, had given similar advice about anger to his son. “Where ye finde a notable injurie,” he counseled, “spare not to give course to the torrents of your wrath.” Quoting a Biblical proverb, he noted that “The wrath of a King, is like to the roaring of a Lyon.” Although the ruler should be humble, that humility should not stand in the way of “high indignation” at evil doers. Kings (and by extensions other rulers) were like gods and fathers in their displays of righteous wrath and discipline.33 Machiavelli’s The Prince had similarly confronted the issue earlier in its famous discussion of “whether it is better to be loved or feared.” Although being hated is always bad, he counseled, being feared was more productive than either love or hatred: “men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared … fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”34 Nicholson’s angry looks and terrifying rages sought the same hold on his subordinates, the same sense of irresistible power. As he told a priest who had criticized him, “You are now insolent and proud, but I’ll humble you & bring down your haughtiness.”35
In the Queen’s Name
“If I were given to astrology,” Nicholson told the Board of Trade in March 1705, “I should fancy” that something new was happening. Perhaps, he suggested, “some Malignant Constellations were in opposition to the Governing Planets in these parts of