Colonial Williamsburg Digital Library

I. Introduction

In considering royal governance in eighteenth-century Virginia from the perspective of the governors who occupied the Palace, three elements provide natural themes for interpretation: (1) the extent of change over the years in the dynamic society and culture of Virginia; (2) the shifting centers of power in the politics of the colony; and (3) the personalities and roles of the governors themselves as political, social, and cultural leaders. Naturally, since we are dealing with history, none of these elements is an independent variable; it is rather the relationships between them that make the story both complicated and fascinating. This theme paper, therefore, while briefly examining economic, social, and political developments in Virginia and while analyzing the relationship between the colony and England during the period 1607 and 1775, will concentrate upon the institutional structure of royal governance in eighteenth-century Virginia. In particular, the paper will especially,concentrate upon the structure which Lord Botetourt found upon arriving in October 1768, and upon his leadership in the political, social, and cultural life of the colony. Physical expansion, economic development, and cultural change are the changing circumstances within which royal governance developed in colonial Virginia. Clearly, politics do not exist in a vacuum. In fact, affairs of state increase in complexity and sophistication with the growth of population and the development of an economy, society, and culture.

Between 1558 and 1763 England grew from a poor, barely consolidated national monarchy on the northwestern fringe of European civilization to become the leading imperial power of Europe and the seven seas. Over a slightly shorter interval, from 1607 to 1775, the English colonies in America grew from a single tiny settlement to nearly two dozen colonies with almost three million people 2 living between Barbados in the West Indies and Hudson's Bay in the Canadian Arctic. The first permanent English settlement was at Jamestown in Virginia, a colony that by the end of the seventeenth century numbered 60,000 persons, of whom more than 6,000 were Negro slaves. Seventy-five years later, at the outbreak of the rebellion that we call the American Revolution, about 500,000 people (of whom nearly 200,000 were black slaves) lived in Virginia, the largest most populous, and wealthiest of the English colonies on the American continent.

Seventeenth-century Virginia evolved from a frontier outpost under military rule in the decade after 1607 to a self-governing colony that by the end of the century produced ever larger crops of tobacco from the labor of white indentured servants and black slaves. Although still overwhelmingly dependent upon England for capital, manufactured goods, and the marketing of its tobacco in the 1690s, the colony had already met and surmounted successive threats to its existence posed by hostile Indians, the absence of a dependable staple, and the heavy mortality that resulted from the colony's climatic and disease environment. This high mortality rate was intensified and prolonged by the sexual imbalance in the population, which consisted predominantly of male British-born bound servants. Seventeenth-century Virginia survived and expanded by using its principal asset, an abundance of fertile soil, while the use of a headright system attracted indentured servants in sufficient numbers not only to meet the demand for tobacco to export, but also to replace those who died in the process. (They had not been replaced by births because of the sexual imbalance and the morbid environment.) By the end of the century no Indians posed a significant threat; tobacco assured Chesapeake inhabitants a reliable source of English capital, credit, and marketing facilities; and a great decline in the sexual imbalance of the early years began to bear fruit 3 in the emergence of new generations of native-born Virginians who were more resistant to the disease environment. After 1675, the introduction of African slave labor on a large scale started to provide the white population of Virginia with a sufficient margin of material well-being to further reduce the impact of mortality, the impermanence of their habitations, and even their dependence on the tobacco staple.

Socially and culturally, seventeenth-century Virginians tried to replicate their English experience. What in the early years of Jamestown had been dreams and pious hopes had begun to be realized by the end of the century. Religion and education offer the best illustrations of this progress. The earliest settlers had included a succession of Anglican priests with Puritan leanings, but by the 1690s the colony boasted an Anglican establishment under the vigorous leadership of Commissary Blair, the official deputy of the bishop of London. A college projected before 1620 gained a royal charter in 1693 and acquired both its first building and a faculty before the government of the colony moved to Middle Plantation in 1700.

The physical expansion of eighteenth-century Virginia may be summarized under three headings: the growth and composition of the population, the extension of settlement, and the increased production of tobacco. Each of these categories, furthermore, lends itself to tabular presentation and for convenience comparable data for the seventeenth century are included. 4

Table Showing the Physical Expansion of Virginia, 1615-1775

Year	Population	Black	Counties	Acres Paying Quit Rents	Tobacco exports in lbs.
1615	under 500	none	none	250
1625	1,300	ca. 30	none		n.a.
1630	3,000	n.a.	none	n.a.	458,000
1635	5,000	n.a.	8	n.a.	n.a.
1640	8,000	250	8	n.a.	n.a.
1650	15,000	500		n.a.	n.a.
1660	25,000	1,000		900,000	9,000,000
1670	30,000	2,000	20	n.a.	n.a.
1675	32,000	2,500		n.a.	12,000,000
1680	40,000	3,000	n.a.	n.a.
1699	60,000	6,000	23	2,000,000	25,000,000
1729	140,000	30,000	30	3,500,000	34,000,000
1755	300,000	120,000	50	6,900,000	48,000,000
1775	500,000	200,000	61	9,000,000	70,000,000

Almost the only necessary commentary on these figures is that during the eighteenth century substantial numbers of British and European immigrants added their numbers to the natural increase of the white population, while after 1730 the annual natural increase of the black population exceeded the number of slaves imported except in a few years of unusually large importation.

The economic development of Virginia in the eighteenth century cannot be summarized simply in tabular form. It can be explained as a change, evolutionary in nature but revolutionary in its consequences, from a staple export economy overwhelmingly dependent in 1699 upon the purchase and marketing of Virginia tobacco by English merchants, to a much more diversified and complex 5 economy, though still dependent upon agricultural exports and imported manufactures and credit, by 1775. Some of these changes can be related to specific Virginia legislation, of which the 1728 coin-rating act and the 1730 tobacco inspection act are the most significant; others, such as the growth of towns and the development of internal trade and transportation networks, are themselves largely the consequences of both changing circumstances and new institutional patterns; still others, such as the increase in economic diversification and regional specialization, are related not only to physical expansion and economic development within the colony but also to changing circumstances in the British empire and in the whole Atlantic commercial community. Briefly, for Virginia the consequences of these changes were: (1) continued but less exclusive dependence upon tobacco exports; (2) a great growth in the exports of other agricultural products, especially grain and other foodstuffs; (3) to a lesser extent, the growth of local extractive and manufacturing industries, such as iron and flour manufacturing, shipbuilding, lumbering, distilling and refining, etc.; (4) the growth of an indigenous merchant class or group; (5) a slight decline in the dependence of the colony upon imported manufactures, capital, and credit; and (6) a significant rise in the per capita wealth of white Virginians.

Physical expansion can be tabulated, and economic development summarized; but the social and cultural changes in eighteenth-century Virginia can scarcely be suggested in the most impressionistic way in the space available. The greatest social changes stemmed on the one hand from the decline of mortality and the increase in the proportion of black slaves in the labor force, which together created in Tidewater Virginia a relatively rigid, hierarchical social structure. A narrow elite of wealthy planters endowed with a vast number of acres and many slaves dominated the hierarchy followed 6 by a broad range of smaller planters holding fewer or no slaves, a small minority of white professionals, skilled craftsmen, and laboring men, and shoals of Negro slaves. On the other hand a renewed immigration of European origin and an increase in intercolonial intercourse together produced greater ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity especially in the backcountry and particularly after 1730. Culturally, likewise, there were two major changes in eighteenth-century Virginia. The first was a shift from an oral/recorded to a written/print culture among free whites, most obviously and earliest in the Tidewater planting elite and emerging towns, more slowly in the backcountry (but with exceptions for some ethnic and religious groups). The second was the greater frequency of contacts, especially of written contacts, between England and Virginia. This led to a convergence of Virginia social and cultural norms toward English ideal types, models, styles, and fashions, most pronouncedly among the elite and least significantly for the blacks. These major cultural changes, in turn, produced two paradoxical and sometimes antithetical results: first, the relatively rapid transmission to Virginia after 1750 of new European ideas and cultural norms; and second, the emergence in Virginia by mid-century, even before there was much intercolonial political activity, of a provincial, proto-American culture.

As the colony of Virginia grew from approximately one hundred inhabitants in 1607 to a half million by 1775, its government also expanded, developed, and changed in its composition, functions, and power. Throughout the seventeenth century, there was a tendency for the royal officials at Jamestown to lose power to the increasingly distant local officers in the counties and on the frontiers; but both the officials at Jamestown and those in the counties depended ultimately upon the distant authority of the crown in England.

The first settlement of Virginia was a fort at Jamestown, and for ten 7 years the colonists lived under military rule. Then in 1618 the Virginia Company granted its colonists one of the rights of Englishmen, the right to participate in law making. They were also granted the basic structure of civil government: assembly composed of the governor, his advisory council, and burgesses representing the various communities of settlers. When the crown assumed direct control of the colony from the bankrupt company in 1624, King James commissioned a governor and a council with instructions similar to those of the company in 1618. Not until the late l630s were the Virginia colonists assured of their rights to a representative assembly and to a share in the making of their laws. Already, however, local necessities had led to the frequent meeting of assemblies in the colony and to the making of many local laws. The assembly created eight counties in 1634 and erected county courts to assume local administrative as well as judicial functions. By the late l630s the assembly was meeting annually, and within a few years the Council and the House of Burgesses began meeting separately as bicameral bodies. Within the government the power of the governor and council tended to decrease and the power of the county courts and the House of Burgesses to increase until with the restoration of Charles II in 1660 when Sir William Berkeley was recommissioned as governor.

Between 1660 and 1696, while successive royal governors struggled to re-establish the authority of the crown in Virginia, the English government in Whitehall and Westminster formulated the framework and administrative machinery of the first British empire. In fact, it is probably fair to call the years 1660 to 1696 the formative years of English colonial policies and institutions. In both economics and politics, these policies required English supremacy and colonial dependence.

In economics, the English policies which we call "mercantilism" 8 required the subordination of the colonial economies to the well-being of the mother country, and between 1660 and 1696 Parliament in England passed four acts of trade and navigation designed to channel the trade of England's colonies in such a way as maximize their contributions to the prosperity and security of the mother country. These four statutes, which provided the legislative frame­work of the English commercial system from 1696 until 1763 were intended to make the economic development of England's colonies serve her economic needs, not theirs.

In politics, as in economics, the colonies were to be permanently subordinate and dependent, with sovereignty in England and authority over the colonies vested in the crown or in the prerogative branch of government. From 1660 to 1696, the crown pursued a general policy of attempting to centralize its authority over the American colonies and regularize its machinery for dealing with them. From 1675 to 1685 a group of the Lords of the Privy Council known as the Lords of Trade tried to centralize and make uniform British colonial administration in America. They tried to reduce all the American colonies to order and uniformity under the prerogative power of the king, not under any act of Parliament. By and large, the Lords of Trade succeeded very well, until the death of Charles II. With the accession of James II things went downhill and not until the middle of the reign of William III did the English government resume its effort to make its government of the colonies rational, effective, and uniform. In 1696 the Board of Trade was established by the king after Parliament threatened to intervene in his administration of the colonies. The Board of Trade, however, had no executive power to act—it could only advise. So the secretary of state in England for the Southern Department (actually the British minister or advisor to the king who dealt with southern Europe) was also made responsible for dealing with the colonies. And 9 finally, for certain purposes the Privy Council, or general advisory body to the king, had power and authority over the colonies. It may be pointed out here that except for the Parliamentary passage of statutes to supplement the Navigation Acts, the English authorities that dealt with the colonies from 1696 to the American Revolution were prerogative bodies whose dependence was directly upon the crown, not upon Parliament.

During this same period, between 1660 and 1696, in Virginia the governor and council regained political dominance, even though the balance of power within the colony went through several shifts. Of these changes it is sufficient here to say that while the aging Sir William Berkeley lost power in his second administration to his conciliar advisors and ultimately in Bacon's Rebellion to the representatives of an increasingly discontented populace, the succeeding governors enjoyed the benefit of more sweeping grants of executive authority from the crown. On the other hand, after 1676 no English governor of Virginia could count on a term long enough in Virginia to construct a local political base. In the twenty years between 1676 and 1696, however, the leading planters of Virginia contrived very effectively not only to win back some of the political power that they had lost to Governor Lord Culpeper after Bacon's Rebellion but also to initiate a new means of checking the power of the royal governors: their ability to appeal his decisions to his superiors in England.

By the time the Board of Trade was established in 1696, the Virginia opponents of Governor Sir Edmund Andros were quite ready to take their case against the governor to England and to try to influence the king's advisory body for the colonies; and by 1697 the Board of Trade, for its own reasons, called upon three influential Virginians then in London, former Attorney General Edward Chilton, Commissary James Blair, and Councillor Henry Hartwell, 10 to answer certain queries it had received about conditions in the colony. The three Virginians, all British-born but with many years of experience in the colony, used the Board's inquiry as the basis for a position paper in which they argued not only for the removal of Sir Edmund Andros but also for "reforms" which would prevent subsequent governors from abusing the powers of their office.

II. Nicholson and Spotswood versus the Conciliar Oligarchy

Hartwell, Blair and Chilton's answers to the queries of the Board of Trade in 1697, although clearly not an objective and detached account of conditions in Virginia and of the constitution of the colony, became in 1698 the basis for the new instructions issued to Governor Francis Nicholson when he replaced Andros. The use made of that report by the Board of Trade, particularly for writing instructions, was an important influence in the weakening of the political power of the governors of Virginia afterwards. It is no small irony that these "reforms" in many cases emanated from the ringleaders of the conciliar oligarchy who were later to frustrate both Nicholson and Spotswood as governors.

The Board of Trade was designed to offer expert advice to the king and was probably designed so that the king didn't have to take the advice; because it had no authority, it only had the ability to subpoena people to testify and it had the ability to recommend to somebody who had executive authority. But it was composed, from 1696 forward for about ten years, of real experts in colonial policy—people who really knew about the colonies; not because they had been there—that would be expecting too much of the English government in 1696. But at least two of the men who advised the Board of Trade were recognizably experts in colonial government and in politics. John Locke was one of the experts, who as a member of the Board of Trade advised King William III in the last few years of his reign. Another, and more closely identified both 11 with Colonial Williamsburg today and with Virginia in the late seventeenth century, as William Blathwayt, who was William III's Secretary of War. Blathwayt was an old-fashioned, hard-line Stuart bureaucrat—a believer in prerogative and in the power of the royal governor in Virginia to govern and to have advice from people whom he could control. Locke was a new man; and he believed in government by consent far more than Blathwayt. So there was a little tension on the Board of Trade, alleviated by the fact that Blathwayt was never there in the summer because he was in the Low Countries with William III; Locke was never there in the winter because he suffered from what was probably emphysema. So Locke and Blathwayt rarely met.

In 1698, a new governor, Francis Nicholson, came to Virginia with new instructions. Nicholson's instructions said that he was to separate the councillors from their most lucrative offices: the naval office or the job of being the principal customs official in each so-called naval district in Virginia.

Locke's reform instructions removed from the governor both his patronage powers over the councillors and also much of the councillors' direct income as public officials. Now, on the one hand, the governor was weakened because he had no power of coercion over his subordinates. On the other, the councillors were weakened because they had less income. Another reform that Locke asked for was a reform of land granting that would take away from the big-wigs of Virginia the inside track to huge speculative land grants. Nicholson was a reformer, and he intended to make it work. The Council learned that they were going to suffer an immediate cut in their incomes and a significant cut in their private capacity to take up land, and that they might actually have to pay their debts because now they were going to be subject to legal process just like anybody else. They weren't going to have a special consideration 12 by the courts. They were going to have to be amenable to justice. And finally, there was at least a hint that Nicholson intended to govern not according to favoritism but according to a system in which laws would become more important and influence perhaps less. At least, that is what the instructions seemed to indicate.

By 1700, the twelve members of the governor's Council really held the balance of political power in Virginia. Nicholson should have held it if you believe in prerogative and instructions and the royal commission and the constitutional powers attached to his office. But in actuality, he was dependent locally upon the locals, and from his point of view all too many of the locals were Virginia-born. For Francis Nicholson it was a real problem because he had aspirations to be "one of them." But, of course, to them he was unacceptable, since he was His Excellency, the governor. He had been openhanded with his hospitality and influential and friendly with Commissary Blair and all the rest of it. Still, there was a parting of the ways. But before that happened, Nicholson had already given indication that he was going to build his party in Virginia and he was going to do it fairly systematically and rather intelligently, considering that he was an outsider. When Secretary Wormeley died, his obvious replacement was the Deputy Secretary, Edmund Jenings, who had been functioning for Wormeley for four years already. But Jenings didn't get the job of Secretary ad interim from Nicholson. Nicholson very quietly held that post himself in violation of his instructions and clearly against the desires of many people, including perhaps Jenings who otherwise would have had the patronage of some county court clerks whom Nicholson put into office under his own fist. This story is relatively new and perhaps unimportant, with one exception: that is, he was building a network. He was building a network of communication in the colony that would report to him.

13

Second point: Nicholson had a good connection with the House of Burgesses. Not altogether a legitimate connection because many of the clerks who were people of considerable income and status in their communities, were also Burgesses. So, when things got tough in the House of Burgesses, Nicholson apparently used to call people into the Council chamber and show a few blank commissions to these clerks who sat in the House of Burgesses and suggested very strongly that it wou1d be nice if they voted the right way on pending legislation that he had the right to displace the members of the clerical system; and he did (he was really the Secretary) because he had never given Jenings the commission. That glorious time ended in 1702, when Jenings got his own.patent to be Secretary. Then, of course, Nicholson was not in quite such a good position except that Jenings was a sycophant and a pretty limp individual and he was English, which Nicholson liked, so he did his bidding. One final point: Nicholson insisted that the Clerk of the Council be an Englishman. In 1702, then, Jenings becomes Secretary. In 1703, everything blew up in Nicholson's face over the Lucy Burwell affair. By 1705, Nicholson was out as governor. He was out not because he had lost control of public opinion in the colony or of the House of Burgesses, but because the councillors were upset with him and a majority had written home to try and get him out; because commissary Blair had gone home to get him out; but even more importantly, he was out because there had been a change in politics in England.

Those of you who have always seen Virginia history from a Virginia perspective might better remember that all the final decisions were made in London: patronage decisions, office decisions, dismissal decisions, whatever. In 1705 the wan who was riding high was a military hero, the duke of Marlborough. Apparently, he had gotten a tacit agreement from the queen that no one was to be a governor in Virginia except a military man. Furthermore, Marlborough was a Whig. 14 Nicholson had been a bit too hasty in translating himself from a Whig to a Tory earlier in Anne's reign and now he paid the price. He went out as governor.

A nice chap came in. You've probably heard of him—he is buried at Bruton—his name was Nott. He was not a long-lived man (if you'll pardon the expression); he lasted one year. The seasoning caught up with him in his second August and he died, much lamented by the colony because he was a man of peace and quietness. He didn't disturb the Council, and they ruled and he presided. But he died.

Nott's successor as governor was a man named Colonel Robert Hunter. Had Hunter ever reached Virginia the whole eighteenth century might have been different, but Hunter never got here. Carrying his commission he was captured at sea by a French privateer and carried off to prison in France. By the time he was exchanged in 1709, the government had decided that it was New York that needed Hunter, and not Virginia. So off he went to New York. Virginia got another governor after an interregnum by the Council of four years. For four years the Council ruled Virginia under the guidance of Jenings. The Council distributed the colony's lands freely until they were told not to give out any more land until the governor got there, because the law they had passed for the distribution of land had been disallowed by the king.

When Spotswood came in, therefore, in 1710 as governor—I might say, really, as Lieutenant Governor,—he had almost all of Nicholson's reforms to start over again. Little progress had been made. The land system still had to be reformed, and the councillors were still sour because they had lost their extra offices. And, he arrived in the midst of a great depression. First, he tried to settle the land system, and he crossed the lines of the principal officers of the revenue in doing this. He crossed the lines of William Byrd II; and he also crossed the lines of a man Spotswood, himself, appointed—Philip Ludwell II as Deputy Auditor. He tried to reform the land 15 system through these sworn officers of the king who held patents under the king, under the Great Seal of England, to do the job—in the case of Byrd; and, in the case of Ludwell who held a deputation from William Blathwayt as Auditor General of the king's Revenue. In trying to bring about reform, Spotswood alienated the very people whose support he needed—and that is the story of Spotswood's whole administration. He was progressive in his views, but Spotswood was not good at getting along with the conciliar oligarchy that controlled the political scene.

In 1719, Spotswood decided to get at the real king-pin of his enemies—"King" Carter. Of course, the public figures who opposed him were primarily the Ludwell-Burwell-Harrison connection; but back in the back, careful to conceal his real power, was the "King." And as the story goes, the "King" had a daughter, the daughter had a husband, and the husband had a job that Spotswood had given him, Naval Officer of the York River. He had done the job very satisfactorily. The "King" was a man of business and his son-in-law was a man of business. But Spotswood wanted to show his displeasure with the councillor cabal that opposed him. So in 1719, he called a meeting of the Council precipitously, with little notice, knowing who could get there and hoping that it would be a majority of his supporters on the Council of whom he had at that time three. He thought that only two of his opponents would come; so he thought he would have a three to two majority in his quorum of five. He called the Council to give him advice as to how to deal with the northern Indians. The Council and Spotswood did not agree because, as luck would have it, one of his three took sick and another one of theirs came, so it was three to two the other way. And they wangled and they talked about what he should do about the northern Indians until it got on toward dark; whereupon, Spotswood said they should send out for candles, because he wasn't finished yet. (I think it must have been the Clerk of the Council, William Robertson, also his private 16 secretary, who stepped out to get the candles.)

While Robertson was gone Spotswood said, "Look, it is dark and we can't do any business, but there is nothing that prevents us from talking." He said, "I have a question to ask. Do you think that Mr. Robertson is qualified to be a naval officer?" The guy was coming back in a few minutes. He was certain to learn from one of Spotswood's supporters that the question had been raised. He would have to answer it somehow, so, indeed, they said, "Surely, he's qualified!" "Good," said Spotswood, "the naval offices are in my gift and I give him the Naval Office at York." "Wait a minute," says Commissary Blair, "that is Nathaniel Burwell's position and he's done no wrong. You can't displace him without our advice." "Oh," said the governor, "it's in my gift and I give it to Robertson." Burwell was out, Robertson was in. What good did Spotswood do himself? Nothing. It was political suicide.

After that incident the Council beat the socks off Spotswood. Really. The Council defeated him politically at every turn, and some of those turns were pretty devious. They read his mail on the way to England; they read his English mail on the way to Virginia. That is not all: Byrd went to England to campaign against the governor. Spotswood couldn't beat the Council; so he followed the old adage "if you cant't beat them, join them;" and in 1720 he suddenly sold out to the Council on the land issue. When he did it, he did it properly.

Spotswood got the Assembly to pass three laws in 1720: one law set up two new counties on the frontier—fairly extensive counties—one (Brunswick) south of the James and the other (Spotsylvania) north of the James. No quit rents for seven years for anybody who settled in one of those counties. Then he passed another law with a marvelous title, "For the Better Securing of His Majesty's Quit Rents." It reduced the level of quit rents immediately to what the colonists had always said the king should have—not too much—the Virginia currency value instead of 17 the English sterling value of the money. Finally, he passed another law which trenched in upon the king's rights to land. He passed all those laws in December, 1720. He had sold out. There was only one problem, they hadn't agreed to admit him to the club.

He made peace with the Council in May and then they had new elections in September for an Assembly that met in November. Spotswood tried to pack the House of Burgesses in the September elections by giving new militia commissions to people who would vote the right way and convince other people to vote the right way. He had tried this sort of thing before, using the tobacco inspectorships. That cost Virginia its first Tobacco Inspection Act. The militia commissions didn't work any better, and the House that convened in November was anti-Spotswood. Worse still, he had lost the Secretary that he had had for years. When he first came in it was Secretary Jenings, a nice, inefficient old man. Spotswood wanted his own man as Secretary, and in two years he had him, Secretary William Cocke. After Cocke died in 1720, the governor held the office himself, and he appointed all the clerks. The story here is the story of a governor who consistently tries to build his own patronage network, his own information network, his own political system in Virginia; and he is frustrated by the locals—the bigwigs—at every turn. Between 1710 and 1722, the Virginia Council ruled the political scene. They ruled it in defiance of the king's instructions, of the royal commission, of the governor's prerogative, you name it; but they ruled.

By 1722, of course, Spotswood, too, was out, and all Virginians knew why. Commissary Blair had made another trip to London. Spotswood was replaced by a Major Hugh Drysdale, a graduate of Queens College, Oxford. Drysdale only lasted four years. The Council ruled, and it ruled in part, because King Carter had been able to buy the one controversial office that had remained in the hands of the governor through thick and thin, the Secretary's post. Down to 1727, when William Gooch 18 was appointed, the Council certainly ruled the colony, but things were changing; and what was changing was not the relationship between governor and Council; what was changing was the relationship between the number of Virginians in the group we call the elite great planters and the availability of seats on the Council. As mortality diminished in the eighteenth century, the councillors lived longer and longer. They lived, if fact, longer than they could work in many cases.

III. The Administrations of Gooch, Dinwiddie, and Fauquier

Governor Gooch was a consummate politician. He was amazingly successful in a diplomatic sense. Some say he sold out, too. But he did it in a much different way than Spotswood; and he would have been admitted into the club had he wanted to join, but he went home instead. In 1730, he was able to secure Tobacco Inspection, not because it was popular, but because he bent every kind of effort as governor to see that it was accepted. He compromised on things; he treated liberally at his house during all seven weeks of the legislative session. It is no wonder that a few years after that, after he had been governor for almost a decade, he wrote that he had yet to make his first thousand pounds as governor. That, too, says something about Gooch. Spotswood came to make his fortune, and thanks to the switch on the land question, he piled up 85,000 acres in his own county; and the Crown did not see fit to take it away from him. Gooch came to rule the colony, and that's what he did.

Gooch, as governor, made a decision somewhere along the line that he was going to do his principal business not with the Council but with the Burgesses. I think he made that adjustment as he made every adjustment, with great diplomacy and tact. He never publicly announced it, didn't even privately write it, but simply recognized the changes that had taken place in Virginia society by the time he came to the colony. By the time Gooch came to the colony there 19 were thirty counties. Those counties sent now not four times as many Burgesses to the Assembly as councillors, but five times as many Burgesses as councillors. Now the House of Burgesses became the active, initiating body of law-givers in the legislature. The government of Virginia in the time of Gooch began to have to pass legislation in areas where it had never had to legislate before, and naturally many of those laws required appropriations. By 1730, in the English-speaking world, it was a well-established fact of over a hundred years of history that taxation laws began in the lower house of the legislature, so that the Council in effect in the 1730s lost its initiative in the legislature in part because of the new needs of government for funds, for activity, for legislation in areas that it had not previously had; and not because they were simply hungry for power. Gooch's relationship with the Assembly was, therefore, very important.

"Gooch did not, however, sellout to the Burgesses as against the councillors. That would be a simplistic interpretation. On key measures such as keeping the capital in Williamsburg, Gooch used those same political skills that he had developed from the beginning to support the Council against the Burgesses. Left to themselves in the 1740s, the Burgesses would have removed the government from Williamsburg and the capital of colonial Virginia would have been somewhere up on the Pamunkey or possibly at Bermuda Hundred if it hadn't been for the legislative role of the Council; which brings us to another point: though it lost its initiative by 1750, the Council did not lose its coordinate powers of legislation. It retained its ability to reject money bills or amend other bills presented to it from the lower house long after it had virtually ceased to have the power to introduce legislation. I could make the point another way: the Coin­rating Act of 1727, which was the keystone of a money economy in Virginia, originated in the Council. It wasn't a taxation bill; it did touch upon the king's prerogative; and, therefore, it could originate in the Council and did. No 20 other really important piece of legislation after that originated in the Council. In fiscal matters, all legislation had to originate with the Burgesses, but by the 1750s, virtually all legislation was originating through the Burgesses.

Gooch retired undefeated by Virginians in 1749 with the general plaudits and well-wishes of everybody in the colony. He had served as governor for twenty-two years. He was beloved by everybody. He was about to sail for home, but the president of the Council who was going to take the office of acting governor, as soon as Gooch had left, became ill and never recovered. So Gooch had to land again and swear in the next man. Unfortunately, the next man was too old. His name was John Custis, and he wrote, "A Consciousness of my Inability has made me long decline all publick Business, and determines me no more to interfere with any Affairs of the Government during the Incapacity I at present labour under." Gooch accepted his resignation and named Thomas Lee to succeed as President. The problem was, of course, that Thomas Lee lived up in the Northern Neck, and he hadn't been next oars, he had been two down on the list and had never expected President Robinson to die. So it took a while. Gooch sailed, Lee became acting governor, and shortly after died. That brought in Lewis Burwell.

In 1751 Virginia finally got another commissioned governor. His name was Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie had been in his earlier days a customs official as well as a partner in an earthenware manufacturing concern in Glasgow. As a customs official he had made his mark in the 1740s by discovering a vast fraud on the island of Barbados in the naval office. Dinwiddie got his reward when he was made Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. Upon arrival he was all the things that you might expect of a Scottish merchant: good at the books, good bookkeeper, thoughtful about money, very glad to have it, anxious to have more of it, interested that the king got all of his, a good servant of the Crown, and all that. He was 21 also a stickler for his rights.

In 1752, he met the Burgesses and, indeed, they were very kind to him. They gave him a present. Shortly after that he suddenly discovered that it was necessary to charge a fee on the issue of every land patent of one pistole. Now there is a history here that I had better tell. It has two parts. The pistole is worth in Virginia currency one pound, one shilling and six-pence. The history here is that when Lord Howard of Effingham came in in the 1680s, he tried to charge a fee for land patents, too. The House of Burgesses protested. Lord Howard got sore at the House and removed their speaker and their clerk. One of the Council—Philip Ludwell I—resigned from the Council and went home as a special agent of the Burgess, and got the then English officials to deny Lord Howard his fee on land patents for putting on the Seal of Virginia. So when Dinwiddie came in there was a history that the Virginians knew. They knew their history; they knew a lot about history and they never forgot a precedent. So when Dinwiddie came in and put on a pistole fee for signing land patents they knew what he was doing. He knew, too, because there were approximately a million acres of land being held in Virginia under warrant of survey with no patent issued; and if he was to get that fee he would suddenly come into some hundreds of pounds. The king, of course, would come into a million additional acres on the quit-rent roll; and all the land speculators would have to come up with all the necessary numbers of pistoles to get their patents for land that they didn't want to pay quit-rents on, plus all the other fees for a land patent which were considerable. One of these land speculators was closely connected to some of the grandees of government. His name was William Stith; you may have heard of him, he was a historian. He was president of the College; he was a reverend; and he campaigned against the pistole fee. William Stith was promptly excoriated by a member of the Council who said that Mr. Stith's orthodoxy was in question as well as his democratical tendencies 22 expressed against the pistole fee and the governor's right to take it. The Council supported the governor on the fee. They voted for it.

When the House of Burgesses heard about it in six separate petitions of grievance from as many counties, in 1753, they decided that it would be necessary to send a special agent to England to convince the Lords of Trade that the pistole fee was a grievance and should be removed. They chose the agent, and they voted him a salary by resolution of the House of 2,500 pounds. Peyton Randolph was his name. He was a member of the House. He couldn't be on the Council because as Attorney General he had to plead cases before the General Court, but he was a member of the House of Burgesses. He was also a servant of the Crown. When Dinwiddie heard that Peyton Randolph, the Attorney General, was going home to plead the case for the colony's House of Burgesses, he hit the roof, and appointed George Wythe as acting Attorney General. Randolph went home, published pieces in the newspaper that suggested that Dinwiddie was just a hair-bit grasping. This case finally came before the Privy Council of England in 1754 for decision, and they were almost as wise as Solomon. They decided in favor of the governor, Dinwiddie, except (1) he was not to take a pistole for any land patent under one hundred acres; (2) he wasn't to take a pistole for any land patent that was pending when he came into the government; and (3) he was not to take a pistole for any land west of the Blue Ridge. He did not get many pistoles really—some, but not many. On the other hand, obviously the Burgesses had lost because the government decided in favor of the governor. So, they weren't too happy, either. They were even less happy because the Privy Council, the Board of Trade, the Secretary of State, the officials in England all decided that after 1756 nobody in Virginia was to get more than a thousand acres of land from the king at any one time. Land speculation was finished, they thought.

The thing to recall here about the pistole fee is that after this incident 23 (in which the Council supported the governor) the Council of Virginia was able to get exactly one law initiated, and it was a relatively minor one. The Council's power of legislative initiative disappeared at the very point where Dinwiddie had clashed head-on with the Burgesses. From that time forward the Council was of very little consequence in a legislative way; it was finished. In fact, so far finished that in Botetourt's time, in 1768 or 1769, somebody wrote to the Virginia Gazette the nasty suggestion (anonymous, of course) that the Council really, since they were creatures of prerogative, had no right to be in the legislature at all. The suggestion was not acted upon, but it was not far from reflecting the truth.

One more thing about the relationship of the governor to the Burgesses ties in directly with the question of how we got into the Revolution. You will recognize that by the time Dinwiddie heard what had happened to the pistole fee, we were well into the French and Indian War. Braddock's defeat had occurred, and the Virginia Assembly had started raising large sums of money to fight the war in the West. Under the Virginia Constitution, the governor of Virginia was supposed to have the sole right to sign all warrants for the expenditure of public money, even money raised by the Assembly. But in 1746, when the colony raised 4,000 pounds to support an expedition against Canada, Governor Gooch had been very ill and had not been able to attend the Assembly. In his absence, the presiding officer of the Assembly was none other than our old friend, President of the Council John Robinson; and the Speaker of the Assembly was none other than our young friend, Speaker John Robinson, Jr.—father and son. The Assembly passed a law raising 4,000 pounds for the expedition. There was no money in the Treasury—there was supposed to be, it just wasn't there. They had to raise it by taxes and they had to spend it for this expedition. The power was given to a committee of the Burgesses by law to oversee the expenditure of the money. 24 When money was appropriated in 1754 and 1755 for the next war, the Virginians naturally recurred to the precedent and made the expenditure of the money dependent upon a committee of the Burgesses and the Council, not named by the Council, not named by the governor, and not including the governor. They had gone the next step toward control of taxes and expenditure by the lower house of the Assembly. Dinwiddie was furious. He wanted to veto—to refuse to sign—the act, but he knew that if he did, the savages would be in Winchester tomorrow. George Washington told him that (Dinwiddie didn't like him, either). The committee was named; the committee had to authorize all expenditures.

Dinwiddie passed from the scene in 1758. He took ship for England. He was old and tired and sick. Poor chap, he almost certainly had Parkinson's disease. He was replaced by a charming person, Francis Fauquier—literate, scientific, a knowledgeable figure of the Enlightenment. Fauquier came into a bad situation. He faced the second drought in three years, and Virginia had to do something about that because their tobacco crops burned up in 1755 and again in 1758. In 1755 the Assembly had passed a law that made tobacco worth only sixteen shillings, eight pence per hundred weight, legally, for payment of debts. To put it another way, tobacco was legally worth only two pence per pound under the act. So they were called two-penny acts. The first one in 1755 had deprived the clergy of the rise in price of tobacco, and some of them had protested, saying it was unfair that they should bear the brunt. They were told privately that it was a general calamity and they should bear their share of the brunt. It happened again in 1758 and they protested again. Some of the clergy took it to England on appeal, and got the law disallowed in England because the law had been passed (it was a temporary law for ten months) without a suspending clause, which was illegal. The governor of Virginia was not allowed by his instructions to pass any temporary law without a clause in it suspending 25 its operation until His Majesty's pleasure was known. Obviously, if you are trying to meet the emergency of a drought and prevent people getting rooked for tobacco they don't have, you have to do it right away; that is what the Virginians did; but the governor, when he signed the act into law, violated his instructions. When he was asked about it from England, he said, "Dinwiddie did it in 1755." They said, "That is not good enough." He said, "But the Council told me I should do it," and they said, "You don't have to listen to your Council; you do have to obey your instructions." They told him as well that if he did it again it would cost him his job and a fine of 1,000 pounds sterling, and he would never hold another. They also sent him the disallowed law, as a final insult, in the care of the clergyman who went home to procure its disallowance, the Reverend John Camm. When Camm came back to the colony he came by what can only be called a circuitous route, so that the news of the law's disallowance had preceded him to Fauquier's door by six months. When he came to Fauquier's door with the disallowance in his hand and handed it to Fauquier, the governor took one look at it and said, "Look, it is dog-eared. It's worn at the creases; it has been opened, and I heard about it six months ago. Where have you been?" Camm's excuse was lame; whereupon Fauquier at the door of the Palace says to his head servant, Edward Westmore, "Bring me my servants. Bring all my servants. Bring my Negroes. Where is the boy?"—the boy being an underaged Negro. When he got them all there together, the governor said, "Now see, mark that man. He is never to darken my door again." Governor Fauquier was not known for his friendship to the Anglican clergy; nor, if you read their correspondence, for his piety; and certainly not for his orthodoxy.

By 1763 Virginia and the British authorities—the prerogative powers of the governor and the actual political power of the Assemb1y—had reached a 26 breaking point. The colony was unable to provide through its legislation for necessary activities of government because of British interference. On the other hand, it was quite clear that the governor could only get accepted legislation that the Burgesses were willing to pass. The Council was very nearly out of it. They were also very nearly out of it because the Council in general had been declining in influence, at least since the time of Gooch, and in prestige. The really valuable office now in Virginia was Speaker and Treasurer: that became quite clear in 1766 when Robinson unfortunately died—f an operation for kidney stones in the bladder—owing the colony 140,000 odd pounds, a lot to take out, even if you have been Speaker and Treasurer for upwards of twenty-eight years.

In sum, the governor's relationship with the Burgesses depended a lot on his powers as a politician and diplomatist. Fauquier was a politician and a diplomatist. He passed the litmus test—he wrote his own letters. He also passed the litmus test when they gave him a present—he didn't stick on a fee. And they gave him a present too, when he came in; a violation of the rules, but he got a present.

By the time Francis Fauquier died in 1768, the focus of political power in Virginia resided in the House of Burgesses. Of the governors since Spotswood, only Dinwiddie before 1754 had made a conscientious, though vain, effort to assert the powers of his commission and instructions ipsissima verba. As for the Council, which had dominated the political scene from the l690s to the 1730s, its declining political power was reflected accurately in its sharply diminished legislative role after the Pistole Fee affair of 1752-1754.

The prerogative structure, institutions, and policies of English colonial government assumed that English sovereignty and colonial dependence wou1d remain unquestioned in the American colonies; but in Virginia after the 27 middle of the eighteenth century English authority was openly questioned and Parliamentary supremacy came to be absolutely denied. The governor and Council in Virginia, the king and his ministers in England still commanded their allegiance in the abstract, but in reality the locus of political power for Virginia had shifted to the colony.

IV. The Institutional Structure of Royal Government in Virginia from 1696-1768

The royal governors in Virginia served three roles. First, as a living symbol of the sovereignty of the English crown, and the values of English culture. Second, the governors were the central link in the chain of communication through which English policies and instructions came to Virginia and through which those responsible in England for the government of the colony received their official advices of affairs in Virginia. Third, the governors were the chief executives responsible for the day-to-day operations of the increasingly complex processes of government in the colony.

In the first of these roles the governor used formal ceremonies and his personal example to illustrate the authority and the cultural leadership of England. In the second, he served as a vital channel of communications, but also as a filter and at times as a diplomatic representative between the mother country and the colony. In the third, the governor functioned as the final authority in Virginia in matters civil, military, naval, fiscal, judicial, and, sometimes, religious (subject always to being overruled by superior authority in England). The governor was a man with many responsibilities and many powers, but his actual power was limited. His greatest influence was more likely to be exerted by example and by skillful diplomacy than by references to his sovereignty or that of the English crown.

This chapter will examine the structure of the governmental hierarchy 28 over which the governor presided, the powers and responsibilities assigned to him, and his relationship to other persons in the governmental system and in the colony at large. In colonial America, it is important to remember, the best government was seen as a mixed or balanced government, and the actual powers of government were not only divided into more than three branches but also into two levels of government: the provincial government in America and the central government in England.

When we think of the structure of royal government in Virginia it may seem convenient to think of the royal governor, the Council, which also served as the upper house of the Virginia Assembly, and the Burgesses, which composed the lower house of the Assembly, as colonial counterparts of the king, the Lords, and the Commons in the English Parliament. But it is misleading to think of it that way in the eighteenth century because the real division of governmental power in the American colony was between the provincial government in America and the central government at home. In theory, the royal governor was much more powerful in his colony than the king was in England, because the colonial governor retained prerogative powers that the English Parliament had wrested from the king in the seventeenth century. But in actuality, the royal governors in the colonies lacked the final authority that makes an executive powerful. This was true in almost every aspect of the governor's executive decisions, nearly all of which were subject to being reviewed and overturned by the superior executive power of the central government in England. The royal governor, in fact, served two masters: one local and always theoretically inferior to him, but actually one which had become by Botetourt's time more powerful than he; the other distant, in England, and always superior to him.

Virginia's government from 1699 to 1775 rested, in theory, on the 29 commissions and instructions issued to each royal governor or lieutenant governor (serving as full governor in turn). The commission was what is called a formal, diplomatic document. The commission provided the governor with his powers, which in the late seventeenth century were very broad. First, the governor had the power to represent the king in all ways in the colony: in granting land; in naming officers to places of trust in the government; in calling, proroguing, and dissolving the Assembly; in giving or denying assent to the laws passed by the Assembly. In the late seventeenth century, the governor even had the right in certain circumstances to declare war or make peace on the frontiers. Second, he was the chief military officer of the crown in the colony—the commander-in­chief, as he was still titled as late as Lord Botetourt's time. He raised and commanded all the militia and the land forces of the colony, and he appointed all the military officers by commission "during his pleasure," which meant that those commissions ran as long as he wanted them to run. He also had the authority to build or demolish fortifications and to say how much should be spent on them. Third, he was the admiral in Virginia, the vice-admiral of the Virginia seas. He could command, in the seventeenth century, all ships and seamen, naval vessels and merchant vessels alike. He could lay on and take off embargoes to keep ships in harbor or to let them proceed to sea. In short, he could do anything that belonged to the office of the Lord High Admiral in England. Fourth, he served in Virginia as the counterpart of the Lord Treasurer in England. He issued every order for the payment of public money in the colony. Fifth, he was the Lord Chancellor, or Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of the colony, which was used to make all grants of commissions and land. And, as Lord Chancellor, he was also the Lord Chancellor in the judicial sense of head in Virginia of the Court of Chancery. Sixth, he served in Virginia as the final appeal in a judicial sense. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench and Common Pleas, 30 as it would have been in England, was in Virginia the presiding officer of the Virginia General Court where the governor presided when he sat—the only court in Virginia prior to 1710 that could take from any Virginian his life or his limb, unless he was black. Seventh, as president of the Council, the governor was the manager of all the executive affairs at the Council Board. He presided at every meeting where he was present in the Council. Eighth, because there was no bishop in Virginia, the governor was in charge of all ecclesiastical affairs. The governor, who was called the Ordinary for this purpose, signed all marriage licenses. He also had the right of presenting ministers for induction into their parishes and was in charge of all probates and administrations of wills and decedents. Finally, he had the right to discipline the established Anglican clergy.

In the late seventeenth century, in theory, many of these powers were his alone as the local representative of the king's prerogative. But for others he had help. First, he had the royal Council, which, by the 1690s, was a group of twelve (occasionally, thirteen) men who were to be of good life, loyal to His Majesty, people of good estate (meaning wealth), and to be sure it was liquid, they were also to be not necessitous or much in debt. That became, ultimately, a difficult kind of Virginian to find on the eve of the Revolution in the upper crust of plantation society. Many people had vast estates but were not very liquid. The Council had not one but three responsibilities to help the governor. First, in his executive position their advice and consent—even in the seventeenth century—was necessary in order for the governor to do certain things. By the end of the period of royal government in Virginia, the governor had to have the advice and consent of the Council or other local officials for nearly everything he did. The Council also served as the upper house in the local representative Assembly that the governor's commission assured to the colony. Finally, they 31 served a judicial role in the local government of Virginia. They constituted the highest court of appeals in civil cases and equity cases, chancery proceedings under the presidency of the governor; and they constituted also the only court in Virginia before 1710 that could deprive a white freeman of life or limb. Originally the Council was named by the governor with the consent, in effect, of the king. By the 1690s they were named increasingly on the nomination of the governor, but only with the consent of the Board of Trade and the Secretary of State. The Council, therefore, like so much else, crept out from under the power of the governor, and at the same time they also crept out from under his discipline. He no longer controlled necessarily their selection, nor could he discipline them as he had before.

The third institutional given of the royal government, which became the most important single organ of government in eighteenth-century Virginia, was the House of Burgesses. Its structure and privileges, as the eighteenth century progressed, were very similar to an English House of Commons. They had a Speaker, they had committees, they had a clerk, and clerks of committees, and a Sergeant at Arms, and Doorkeepers; but here again it was the seventeenth­century parliament that was created in the colonies by the governor's commission. Originally, the Speaker had to be acceptable to the governor. Second, in the 1680s on advice from England, the governor seized the right to appoint the clerk of the House of Burgesses so that the governor thought he had access to secret information that he should not have otherwise had. He soon learned that he had the form but not the substance. Finally the House of Burgesses adopted procedures of its own, intended to make it more like a little Parliament. If too much pressure was brought to bear on the House in its formal structure, it would dissolve itself and go into a Committee of the Whole, still preserving the freedom of debate but no longer making the Speaker responsible for any of 32 its misdoings. Thus, if you recall Patrick Henry in 1765, it was in committee that he made most of his preposterous and treasonable suggestions.

Among the powers of the House of Burgesses was some little control over its representation and its election; ultimately its personnel came to be controlled by itself (except for the clerk, who still had to be certified by the governor). Perhaps the most important officer in the colony of Virginia except for the governor was the Secretary. The Secretary's office was nearly everything for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia. It was where all of the records of the colony were kept, where most transactions of government were recorded, and where until later all the permanent records of the colony were concentrated. The Secretary from the very beginning of the colony had enormous responsibilities for communication to the mother country, for preserving the results of that communication, for the keeping of the record, and especially for what was most important throughout seventeenth-and eighteenth­century Virginia—for preserving the records of land patents, land grants, and the general court. The Secretary's office had become by the l690s the most important single office of government in Virginia. The Secretary of Virginia was considered to be in the late seventeenth century the next most important official after the governor and was nearly always a member of the Council.

The Secretary's office played another role in the colony that was not official. It was the training ground in the colony for those who kept the government together for the colonial bureaucracy … clerks who staffed not only many of the other offices in the capitol but also every county court in Virginia. The Secretary's office, therefore, served not only a very important recordkeeping function and a very important function in the communication with the mother country, but it also served a fundamentally important function in keeping uniform the process of law, the extension of government, the spread of representation, 33 and all those other functions that expanded as the colony did.

The king had in Virginia two basic sources of permanent revenue: one for himself and one for his governor. The permanent source of revenue for the king in Virginia was the so-called quit rent of two shillings on every hundred acres of land. The second royal officer, the Deputy Receiver General, collected that revenue, and by the time of the American Revolution the king of England was getting from the colony of Virginia about £6,000 pounds sterling just from the quit rent. The other revenue that the governor got of a permanent sort was established for Lord Thomas Culpeper in 1680. Culpeper was given £2,000, the income on the export tax of two shillings a hogshead on every hogs­head of tobacco exported from Virginia. The Receiver General over saw the collection of that sum also.

The third royal officer was the Deputy Auditor, the deputy of the Auditor General of the Plantation Revenues in England. The Auditor General collected 5 percent and in the late eighteenth century he did nothing for it except to have the right connections. The deputy in Virginia actually had to work—twice a year. In fact, it was a little more complicated than that; in time, he also had to keep the records on which the quit rent system was based. Therefore, he had more of a responsibility than just auditing the accounts of the Receiver General twice a year. His job could, however, be fulfilled rather routinely.

The fourth officer under the governor, usually a councillor, was the Commissary of the Bishop of London. The bishop was the ecclesiastic in England who had jurisdiction over all the Anglicans in the colonies. In that sense, his commissary was theoretically a powerful figure. But actually, because he was not a bishop himself and never was able to establish an ecclesiastical court in Virginia, the Commissary's power depended almost exclusively on his 34 clout among the grandees of Virginia. The first Commissary of any significance was James Blair. After Blair was a succession of commissaries who were virtually nonentities.

Those four officers were nearly always members of the Council. The Attorney General, the next man, was never a councillor. If he had been he would have had to sit in the General Court and could not have pleaded the king's causes. Peyton Randolph was Attorney General from 1744 until 1766, when he became Speaker of the House. The attorney General's salary was not very large, so he was also usually named as the Chief Judge of the local Court of Vice-Admiralty. The governor generally delegated his powers to conduct maritime judicial proceedings in the colony to the Attorney General in his capacity as Judge of the Court of Vice-Admiralty.

The other provincial officials without royal commissions were the Treasurer of the colony and the Surveyor General. The Treasurer became necessary as soon as the colony began to raise revenue itself. Down to the 1690s the Treasurer was probably named by the governor, and after that time the custom was for the Treasurer to also be the Speaker of the House of Burgesses. It was not until 1723 that the House finally claimed and maintained its right to name its Speaker as the Treasurer of Virginia.

From 1699 to 1729 the Surveyor General of the colony was named by the rector and visitors of the College of William and Mary. When the president and faculty of the College became a legal corporation under their charter in 1729, the College assumed the rights and responsibilities formerly exercised by the Surveyor General.

The third kind of provincial official without a royal commission was the agent in England. In Botetourt's period there were two agents, one for the governor and the Council and one for the House of Burgesses.

35

Finally, there were local officials who in theory were named by the governor or in the case of the county clerks, by the secretary of the colony. In actuality these officials were named by the local officials who were already in Virginia, except for the clerks. The secretary could appoint whomever he pleased as clerk without interference.

By the time Lord Botetourt became governor in 1768, although his commission still enumerated many of the powers that the governors had had in the late seventeenth century, Botetourt retained only rather limited power. To be more specific, the governor still had the right to grant land in the name of the king, but only east of the line established by the royal proclamation of 1763 and only in parcels of 1,000 acres or less to any individual. The governor's patronage powers had shrunk until he had the right to appoint only a very few inferior officers: the clerk of the council, the clerk of the House of Burgesses, and the keeper of the public jail. The governor retained the right to call, prorogue, and dissolve the Assembly and to the extent permitted by his instructions, the power to give or refuse his assent to laws the Assembly had passed. But the governor was no longer styled the commander-in­chief of his province, because after the appointment of General Braddock in 1755 a commander-in-chief of the British regular army had been permanently stationed in the American colonies. The governor kept his power to command and to call into service the Virginia militia, but he was virtually forced to appoint as officers in it Virginians resident in the counties where they were to serve. The governor had also lost all power over the vessels of the Royal Navy on the Virginia station, though he retained his commission as Vice Admiral with its power to erect a court of Vice Admiralty for maritime cases, and he could still commission privateers and empower their officers to rule their crews by martial law in time of war. In theory the governor retained the sole 36 power to issue warrants for the payment of money in the name of the colony, but since 1746 committees named by the House of Burgesses had controlled the expenditure of most of the money raised by taxes in the colony. Unlike his predecessor, Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier, Lord Botetourt kept the great seal of Virginia in his own custody, and there is some evidence that the clerk of the council affixed it to documents requiring certification by the governor and collected the resultant fees for his use. By his commission Lord Botetourt retained the right to collate clergy of the established church to vacant parishes, but not since the seventeenth century had any governor made good such a right. In other respects as well the governor's share in the control of the Anglican church had declined since the time of Nicholson. Although Lord Botetourt continued to draw an income from the fees for marriage licenses, the rising number of Protestant dissenters and the declining condition of the established church also weakened the governor's prestige as its leading patron.

V. Governor Lord Botetourt as the King's Representative in Virginia

By 1768 Virginia was becoming a center of discontent in the British American colonies. Francis Fauquier died in March 1768 after a lingering illness. John Blair, who was almost eighty-two at the time, became acting governor of Virginia. The House of Burgesses was already dominated by a group of fiery, debt­ridden patriots. In the spring of 1768 the Virginia Assembly submitted an address to the king, a memorial to the House of Lords, and a remonstrance to the House of Commons for redress of American grievances in which the Council had concurred.

When this series of messages reached England, not far behind the Massachusetts circular letter of February 1768 that called for American resistance to British tyranny, a new situation had arisen in England's government 37 itself. For the first time in the history of the British Empire a Secretary of State had sole responsibility for the English colonies that were directly governed from England. The incumbent in January 1768 was the earl of Hillsborough. He was a hard-money-man and extremely obstinate, and he was not exactly a skillful political thinker, either in his own or the national interest. His reaction to the Massachusetts circular was to send his own letter to the governors (actual and acting) of the American colonies. This letter stated that any assemblies that introduced any discussion leading to the acceptance of the principles of the Massachusetts circular would be dissolved. Hillsborough's response, therefore, was vehement when in June 1768 he learned that the Virginia Assembly had joined in the petitions against the Townshend Acts. He wrote to Blair, asking where he had been when these measures passed through the House and the Council.

Hillsborough concluded that Blair obviously could not cope and that a governor was needed in Virginia. He immediately thought of a gentleman well known to the ministry who had a real need to be absent from England, Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt. Botetourt wanted employment out of the realm, and Hillsborough needed a governor. It is true that the ministry had to deal with the awkward fact that Sir Jeffrey Amherst already was governor of Virginia, and that he had not done anything wrong. But Sir Jeffrey had always been an absentee governor, and because he outranked the commander-in-chief of the English army in America, General Gage, Amherst would not even consider going out to Virginia. Amherst asked for honorable and lucrative compensation for his loss of office and income. Hillsborough refused and allowed the appointment of Lord Botetourt to become publicly known.

At the end of August Botetourt was on his way to Virginia. He arrived on October 25 at Hampton after a passage of just over eight weeks. Botetourt had sent his first letter back to Hillsborough from mid-ocean (he 38 was a very diligent man). The message was Botetourt to the core: "The wind is directly in our teeth and we're making little progress but we expect to be there shortly. And everybody is getting along just as well as you could possibly expect." On the morning of October 26 he received a fifteen-gun salute from the Virginia representative of the mercantile firm of Osgood, Hanbury and Company, exactly four more than he had received when he left England. He now had precedence in Virginia over everybody in America except a touring member of the royal family or the commander-in-chief of the English army in America. That same day he had lunch at Hampton and set out for Williamsburg. By the end of the afternoon he had done all the right things. He had announced himself as governor; he had taken the oath of office; he had publicly dined with the most dignified leaders of the colony. Botetourt had begun his administration.

He also had had his first look at the Palace. Some of his effects had already arrived on a merchant vessel, but his servants had not been able to come to Williamsburg as fast as he did. He traveled by Wilson Miles Cary's chariot, and the servants traveled by cart with the baggage. So he spent the first night at the Palace, but no cooking facilities were set up yet. He wasn't able to entertain himself and he wasn't able in effect, really, to enjoy life in the Palace that first week. So he dined out in the town almost every night. He wrote enthusiastic notes back to Hillsborough, and all these notes were charming and optimistic. As the first full governor that Virginia had had since 1705, he was met with enthusiasm and good humor, and he returned every single bit of the civility and the decorum.

Botetourt opened his instructions, no doubt, on the ship or before, but he met the Council formally the day after his swearing in. His instructions had failed to name his Council as most governors' instructions did. His didn't because he was told to make inquiries as to whether or not they were going to 39 continue to do what they had done in the spring of 1768—protest parliamentary supremacy and parliamentary taxation. Botetourt decided quickly that he was not likely to get a more loyal group of councillors than the ones he had. That, indeed, was a wise and politic choice.

His instructions also said that he was to call an Assembly, and the instructions went on to say that he was to read to the Assembly a speech that was provided for him by his superior, Hillsborough. The speech could be summarized as follows: "You Virginians must understand that Parliament is the supreme legislature of the empire, that the Declaratory Act was not passed in a moment of pique and that the Declaratory Act of 1766 is the cornerstone of the constitution of all the British colonies in America; and it said that Parliament had the right to legislate for the American colonies, in any case whatsoever." Everybody knew he was alluding to taxation. Botetourt's instructions also ordered him to call an Assembly, read them this speech, and insist that if in any circumstances they should consider or debate the question of parliamentary supremacy, that they would be dissolved.

Upon arrival Botetourt promptly dissolved the previous Assembly, meeting under Blair, because every new governor coming in was expected by the colonists to dissolve the old Assembly and issue writs for a new election. The elections were held right away. But he didn't call the Assembly to meet until what he thought would be a convenient time—early May after the tobacco had been transplanted, after the planters could afford to leave their plantations and come to Williamsburg. At the end of the General Court session in the spring of 1769 Botetourt met his Assembly and delivered the speech, except that he didn't deliver it the way it was given to him. He chopped off the conclusion, Hillsborough's rather wooden explanations to the Virginians that they would have to accept the Declaratory Act. Botetourt substituted instead conciliatory language of his 40 own and strongly suggested that he had come to Virginia for the good of the colony, and that the king had promised that always in future the full governor would reside in Virginia.

On May 15 or 16 it was decided that the Virginia delegates would have to consider the matter of parliamentary supremacy. The House dissolved into a committee of the whole, which debated and came to some resolves. The governor got wind of it. He went down to the Capitol and sent the clerk of the Council to the House of Burgesses and asked them to attend him.

But in 1769 when the Burgesses were dissolved, they walked out in a body down the street to the Raleigh Tavern, back into the Apollo room, and as a group of private gentlemen who simply happened to be overwhelmingly former Burgesses, they selected Peyton Randolph as chairman of the committee and proceeded to enter into an association. May 19, 1769, is the beginning of the transition in Virginia from legal to extralegal government. It marked a significant milestone in the American Revolution in Virginia. It is the point at which the king's governor not only could not control much politica1 power, but really lost control of what he had always had: the right to call, prorogue, or dissolve the Assembly. The assembly had been dissolved, but they had in effect changed their venue and not anything else. They had changed only a little bit by going down the street and starting over as a private body.

Botetourt, of course, was unhappy; he immediately decided that he would have to inform Hillsborough of what had happened. Publicly he did that almost immediately. He sat down and wrote a letter, and being a good politician, he showed it to leaders of the patriot party. What he didn't tell them was that the next day he wrote another letter to Hillsborough saying, "This is what has happened. If you intend to do anything about it, you had better do it and not talk about it. Declarations only irritate." This was a very direct way of 41 saying that the Declaratory Act had not been a useful invention and a very indirect way of saying, "It's your responsibility, not mine, as to how you are going to respond to what the Burgesses have done."

To make a long story short, Botetourt decided that it was such an important message that only Hillsborough should receive it. He apparently enlisted the services of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and sent him with this dispatch to England. Somehow, rumors of what he had said began circulating in the American newspapers and in the American colonies. We don't know how the word got out or who he talked to. We do know that a Maryland newspaper reported the week after the lieutenant sailed that Botetourt had sent a warship to England with an announcement of the dissolution and a call for ships and troops. A couple of weeks later, the news was published in Boston that he had asked for ships and troops to suppress the liberties of the Virginians.

When Hillsborough got the message, he had just sent Botetourt a letter, ironically, at the very same time the Assembly was being dissolved in Virginia. The ministry in England had decided in May to repeal the Townshend duties with the significant exception of the tax on tea, which they kept as a token of parliamentary supremacy and of the real meaning of the Declaratory Act. Botetourt was told also in that letter that he should call an Assembly to meet, quickly. Indeed, he had to, and before he got Hillsborough's advice to call a new Assembly, Botetourt called for new elections and a new Assembly in 1769 because the Assembly of May 1769 had not done the country's business before it was dissolved.

By 1769 Virginia also needed if not an annual, at least a very regular, meeting of its Assembly. Therefore, Botetourt was forced to do what Hillsborough had told him to do. When Botetourt dissolved the Assembly of 1769 in the spring, he asked Hillsborough to please write him another speech. This time Hillsborough must have let somebody else write the speech, because it was 42 short, very bland, and said, in effect, that he hoped the Assembly would work with diligence and moderation to meet the needs of the community.

The Assembly met in 1769 in the fall and everything went just splendidly. Botetourt wasn't told that if they talked about parliamentary supremacy he would have to dissolve them. Of course, they did talk about parliamentary supremacy, but he wasn't there and he did not hear about it, officially; he didn't do anything about it. So the Assembly went on to the end of the session and passed the laws that became the laws of May 1770 at the finish of the Assembly.

Botetourt as governor came in with a commitment to reform the judicial system of Virginia, particularly in the county courts. Justice had become very dilatory in Virginia in the late 1760s. There were several good reasons for this. Virginia had just been through what amounted to five years of depression. When a colony is depressed, people don't like to pay their debts, and when you have to sue people to get them to pay, there is a tendency for them to drag out the legal action. When those indebted are justices of the peace there is a tendency for them to stay home and not come to court. So some of the county courts had not been meeting with any great regularity for lack of a quorum; the justices simply wouldn't serve. Botetourt came in to change that and, as usual, he started at the top. He started with himself and with the General Court. The story is told that when Botetourt came in, the General Court found itself meeting several hours earlier in the morning and sitting at least an hour later in the afternoon. He introduced more expeditious justice into the General Court. Botetourt also decided to reform the county courts, and he had the Secretary send out a circular letter to all the county clerks, who were under the Secretary's jurisdiction, asking them to return to the Secretary every year an account of those justices who did not sit, those justices who, named in the commissions, refused to qualify by taking the oath of office, and those justices 43 in the commission who had died since the commission had been issued. Botetourt proceeded with the Council's and with the Secretary's help, and when these lists came back, the governor revised the list of the county justices to make them more efficient.

Botetourt also presided, of course, at the General Court. James Parker, the Scottish Norfolk merchant, was an interested party in a case that went before the General Court and he reported Botetourt's presiding activities in this case. Parker was friendly enough with the governor to know him socially and to see him outside the Court. Parker was not sure that the General Court would give him justice. Parker said he hoped that in time to come the people on the other side of the case—the people of Norfolk—would recognize that we were all bound by the same laws and that the people they referred to as "foreigners" had as good a claim to protection and justice as if their ancestors had first settled this colony. Said the governor, "I would not live a day in any country where the law was partially executed. I do believe there is not one of the judges as well as myself but what will hear this matter fully and judge it with impartiality according to its merits, and I shall always be glad to hear that the gentlemen of Norfolk who have been injured do not depart from that moderation with which they have hitherto conducted themselves." That's a direct quote from Botetourt. That says something about the man's character, and about his performance.

In September 1770 Botetourt took sick. It was not thought at first to be serious. In October, early in the month, they published a little squib in the Virginia Gazette that his lordship was indisposed, but that he would be around again soon. On October 12, a Friday, the doctors who had been called in decided that his case was hopeless. On Saturday he went into convulsions; on Sunday he had moments of lucidity but was unable to make a will. Late on 44 Sunday he went into a coma, and on Monday morning at 1:00 a.m., he died at the age of fifty-three. He had been marvelously successful as the governor of Virginia; he never thought he had much power—and he didn't—but he had a tremendous political sense of how to cope with the situation in the colony, and he had the ability also to constantly put before Hillsborough the best possible interpretation of what was going on in the colony.

VI. John Hurray, Earl of Dunmore: The Last Royal Governor of Virginia

When Botetourt died, the news was immediately sent to England. The president of the Council, of course, was still John Blair, but he knew by this time (he was pushing 85) that he couldn't cope. In 1770 Blair resigned which brought into office as president of Virginia the elder of the two Nelson brothers who were on the Council, William Nelson, known to my Scottish friends in Norfolk as "Old Wiggy"—I think because of the way he wore his wig, but also because of his politics. Old Wiggy became the acting governor of Virginia and immediately notified Hillsborough that Botetourt was dead and that the appointment of a new governor was needed. Hillsborough wasted no time in selecting a replacement. He had just the man in mind: the governor of New York, John Murray, earl of Dunmore, who had arrived in New York months after he had been appointed to that government. It is true that Hillsborough did not send him out in a ship of the line, but it is also true that Dunmore had been very dilatory about taking up his new post. He had gotten there finally about the time Botetourt took sick with his fatal illness. Hillsborough wrote Dunmore in early December 1770 that Botetourt had died and that the king had issued him a commission as governor of Virginia. This news reached Dunmore in New York the following spring, and somehow he heard that the governor of North Carolina—Tryon—had been appointed to succeed him in New York. Dunmore, at the time, preferred to stay in New York, 45 but Hi1lsborough obviously thought that Dunmore was just the fellow—just the right man to send.

Lo and behold, along about in September a yacht shows up at Hampton with a cargo of Dunmore's furnishings from New York to be sent up to the Palace. Two or thr weeks later, here comes his Lordship himself with his private secretary, Captain Edward Foy. Dunmore and Foy arrived and went to the Palace together, and Dunmore called a meeting of the Council at the Palace, proclaimed his commission and took the oaths of office, and swore the Councillors present in the Palace; and then entertained the Councillors to dinner.

There is a slight contrast between the way in which Botetourt came in very publicly and in the right place, the seat of government, the Capitol, and went through those motions that he had and the fact that Dunmore did it rather differently, rather privately. Dunmore was like that. He was not a man of business; he did not have much presence; one might often say that he did not have much dignity and perhaps this is the time to suggest that if he was not anxious to leave New York there were a number of New Yorkers who were not hesitant to te1l the Virginians what they were getting. The news of Dunmore had preceded him to Virginia—the little stories, like the time he and his cronies had demolished the Chief Justices's coach and docked the coach horses' tails. That kind of frolic at the hands of the governor was not a good advertisement.

Dunmore started off in Virginia on the wrong foot. The Virginians knew that he hadn't wanted to come. They knew his reputation. They were not terribly anxious to see him. When he got here he wasted little time in trying to fulfill the promises that he had made to his confidant, Captain Foy, his private secretary, and to his clerk, Mr. Menzies, a Scotsman who did a1l his Lordship's writing for him. His Lordship was literate; he was educated within the necessary bounds of literacy; he was not, like Botetourt, a patron of learning or himself an intellectual in any sense, but, he was a perfectly rational, 46 literate person. But he didn't write his own letters. Menzies did that and Foy was his chief confidant and there were those nasty enough in New York to suggest that if the two of them together possessed any real brains that it was Foy who had the brains and should have been the governor and just happened not to have the title.

Dunmore, when he met his first Virginia Assembly in 1772, sent a message to them that said, "Since I have arrived here my clerk has taken fees for filling out the necessary papers that people have to get from the governor. These fees have been customarily established. I promised him 500 pounds, when I came down, per annum." Yet in that first six months Dunmore was in office, some Virginians who had come to get commissions filled out, when they were asked for the fee had demurred paying or had paid under protest saying there was no law for the establishment of these fees as there is for every other fee in Virginia and that the governor was trying to take fees without law, and that was a tax. So, Dunmore sent a list of the fees to the Assembly to the House of Burgesses and asked them directly to please pass these fees into law for him so that his clerks could be properly rewarded for their services. The House of Burgesses had a well-established procedure for handling everything, and ever since Dinwiddie they had a well-established procedure for handling fees of whose validity there was some question. A committee was established to which the list of fees from Dunmore was referred. A week or so later the committee reported back to the House that there doesn't seem to be any justification in law for these fees. Then the House as a whole sent a very polite message to Dunmore saying, "Dear Governor Lord Dunmore, we cannot find any proper grounds in history, custom, usage or anything else for your taking these fees. We suggest, politely, that you discontinue those fees."

What could the poor guy do? He had asked for legislative sanction, and he had been told that this was not possible. Well, he needed that money, and he promised the clerks who worked for him nice tidy sums. So he sat down and he 47 indited a letter to the Secretary of State. He said, "Look now, what's happened. I went to the Assembly for this and the Assembly told me that I can't have them, that my clerks can't take them; and, because I want to get along with these good people I have to accept that. But wait a minute now. Somebody has to pay for those services." He explained that it was necessary that there be a contingent charge of government given to him out of the two shillings a hogshead. We all know, that in the early '70s the export of tobacco was larger than it had been for sometime. By the time the letter got back to England, Hillsborough was gone, and a new man named the Earl of Dartmouth was in. Dartmouth read this letter and scratched his head and then he wrote to Dunmore and said, "Look, in the first place, all you need to ask for fees by the rights given you as Governor under your commission is the consent of the Council. You never should have gone to the Assembly. But, now that you have gone to the Assembly and it has become public linen, I really am not prepared to say anything about it."

Poor Dunmore. That was the spring of 1772, and in February the Assembly had refused him the fees for his clerk. In May there was an executive meeting of the Council. Guess where? Not in the Council Chamber—oh no, at the Palace. It's alright if the governor is sick, for him to meet the Council at his home to save foot­steps, but he wasn't sick. He asked the Council to meet him there and a couple came. I don't know whether he asked them all to come and most of them said they couldn't be bothered, or whether they were too busy or whether he only asked a couple of them to come. That Council meeting is a very remarkable one because there is a whole series of lists of applications for land grants. The first one was Mr. Corbin and 58 other people whose names were listed and they were all people that you can identify as being legitimately by office or friendship or family as in the governor's interest. Then, there was another application 48 from John Randolph and ninety-nine others, in this case not named, and they wanted 100,000 acres. Captain Edward Foy and thirty-nine other gentlemen not named, wanted 40,000 acres. Then another person named Daniel Adolphus Massot with nineteen other persons not named applied for 20,000 acres. The next person, James Menzies and nineteen other persons not named, asked for 20,000 acres. To make a long story short, when the Council meeting broke up, action on those petitions for land had been deferred. Even the Councillors who were there thought that the governor was asking for a bit much, so action was deferred. Remember, he had not heard yet that Hillsborough was out. So he went to his closet and dictated to Menzies: "You know when I was in New York I was on the verge of getting a rather large land grant. Now that I've come to Virginia it seems to me that one of the best ways I could ingratiate myself with the people would be to help them expedite the settlement of land in the west." He didn't say that the Council refused outright to support this, but he says, "Could you approach the Board of Trade and see if I could get a grant for 100,000 acres on the waters of the Mississippi, and Captain Foy 40,000 acres in the same place." I might point out as a final footnote to this episode of the Council meeting that as far as I know it was the last executive meeting of the Council that Robert Carter of Nomini, Governor Dunmore's next-door neighbor in the Carter/Saunders house ever attended except during sittings of the General Court. I strongly suspect that not long after Lord Dunmore arrived in Virginia Robert Carter found it impossible to live in such close proximity to his Lordship. He had been a personal friend of Botetourt's and Fauquier's. They had exchanged pleasant social visits on many occasions. The governor was in the habit of dining with Carter. Shall we say, I don't know that Dunmore was invited a second time that way. Carter disappeared from the Council as a force.

Let's shift the scene forward just about a year. Dunmore in 1773 was 49 meeting his Assembly for the second time. There was a necessity to meet that Assembly in 1773 because there had been trouble with the Virginia currency; it had been counterfeited by a gang of counterfeiters in Pittsylvania County out in the hinterland. The gentlemen in Pittsylvania were clever rogues and they had counterfeited the currency well enough so it had taken in a lot of people for a considerable amount of time. The gang in Pittsylvania was caught red-handed. The problem was they were very well connected in Pittsylvania County. They included a number of local people of some substance. So to be sure that justice was done, Dunmore engaged in what turned out to be a very dubious procedure. He had them returned to Williamsburg for examination without an examination trial in the county. This left him open to charges of violating the Constitution. He later defended himself. But he had done something that was just a little doubtful in following the course of the law.

In the Virginia Assembly in the spring of 1773, Thomas Jefferson's brother­in-law, Dabney Carr, suggested that there should be a committee appointed to consider the question of whether it would be a good idea to set up an inter-colonial committee of correspondence to be sure that every threat to American liberty in any one colony was immediately known in every other colony. There was no great originality in Dabney Carr's idea. Sam Adams had put it into effect within Massachusetts the year before. Nonetheless, Dunmore apparently failed to realize the significance of what Dabney Carr was proclaiming or asking. Carr was simply saying that if we have already established in Virginia the extralegal government locally, the logical next step is to extend the extralegal government intercontinentally, that really is what he was saying. And that is what they did, because it went through the House of Burgesses just like that. Apparently, it never registered on Dunmore that anything had happened in that Assembly and he sent the resolutions—the journal—home and did not say anything about it. But Hillsborough was not there any longer; 50 Dartmouth was, and he read the journals. He sent a letter back to Dunmore saying, "Where were you when the Assembly was meeting? Why didn't you realize what they have done?"

Dunmore, in the meantime, having been frustrated in getting anything for his clerks, decided he would go for slightly bigger game. In 1772, he wrote to Hillsborough and he said, "You know, the Secretary of the province has the nomination of every county court clerk in the province. That gives him a great deal of patronage for which there is no legal precedent." The long and the short of it was that Dunmore, not the Secretary, should have the patronage of every county clerk in Virginia. It would give the governor some muscle, politically, but he didn't say that the Secretary also got 1/6 of every clerk's annual income.

Hillsborough got the letter, and he must have sent the Under-Secretary to look at the records. The answer came back to Dunmore: it is pretty obvious from the patent given by the King to the Secretary in England that he has the absolute right to nominate his deputy in Virginia. The system which has so long prevailed shall not be disturbed. Well, Dunmore was persistent if not very politically ept. He didn't take no for an answer. As soon as Hillsborough disappeared, he sat down and wrote Dartmouth a letter; he recited the song and dance again for Dartmouth's sake in great detail. Dartmouth, who was a kind and gentle man, wrote back and said, "I'm very sorry."

Dunmore continued to seek money, because he found his income was not quite that 4,000 pounds he had been told it was. For one thing, the King in 1773 reinforced the Proclamation of 1763 against land grants west of the Appalachians. In a circular letter to every governor he wrote, "No more patents at all west of the proclamation line until His Majesty's pleasure is known." When Dunmore got that letter he was really upset. He had, of course, some inkling of 51 the fact since he had not heard anything from his request for 100,000 acres for himself and 40,000 for Foy. He was really disturbed to get these new orders not to sign any land patents because he got a pistole for every land patent. Though he didn't buy the rules of the game—he couldn't take them for the western lands—he still got a pistole for signing land patents. He thought that he should at least get some income from the land business.

The new orders were intended to stop things for a while, and in 1774 it became clear why. In 1774, at the very time that Lord Dunmore was on his way to Fort Pitt and, ultimately, to an expedition against the Indians to clean out the recalcitrants from within the treaty lines, the English government decided unilaterally to change the rules for the granting of land in all of continental America. A very desirable change from the standpoint of the Crown; they simply doubled what the King would get out of it—doubled the fees on granting land and doubled the quit-rent when it was granted. You can imagine the enthusiasm with which the new regulations were received in America. While Dunmore was out there making it possible for everybody to move into previously disputed territory, the Crown told him nobody was to have anything at all beyond 1,000 acres, and they were to pay double what they had ever paid for it before. This was an absolute order England told the governor. "And by the way, your Lordship, the Board of Trade has decided that your petition for 100,000 acres and Captain Foy's for 40,000 acres cannot be granted."

He wrote one more letter to Dartmouth and said, "The patent officer who is Secretary for Virginia is very old and your Lordship will understand that one of the reasons I have had so much trouble with these colonists is that I don't have the power of patronage in Virginia. If your Lordship will listen to me, it would be so easy to overturn in England the decision which is only a custom of dubious legality by which the Secretary in Virginia names the county clerks. 52 This would give me the handle to a kind of patronage which would enable me to combat these restless and rebellious people who have now gone to the lengths of forming into conventions and associations." Dunmore got an answer back: "It is true that you have offered us a possibility for the future when the present patent holder of the Secretaryship shall not be in being. But at the moment there is nothing we can do about it."

The governor had put his hand, I think, on one of the reasons the office of royal governor in Virginia was one of enormous responsibility and very little power; because, after mid-century, the royal governor had the right by law in Virginia—by local legislation—to appoint the Keeper of the Public Jail, and very little else. As a contemporary historian and witness in Virginia said in his personal memoir of Virginia history, the governor of Virginia by Dunmore's time had the appointment of only two officials—the Clerk of the Council and the Clerk of the House of Burgesses. Neither my statement nor Edmund Randolph's statement is the literal truth. The governor could appoint a few other people. But what Randolph said was that every other person, aside from these very few insignificant offices, the governor could appoint only with the advice and consent of the local Councilor subject to being overruled at home in England by somebody with better pipelines to the ministry and to the king. The governor simply did not have much political power. In the first place he didn't have the power of patronage. Secondly, Dunmore had lost control of the governmental process in Virginia. When he dissolved the Assembly it had already become a habit for the Burgesses to walk down the street and reconstitute themselves as an extralegal body under slightly different auspices with slightly different purposes. And, after June 1, 1774, they began to erect in every county parallel extralegal bodies. If you look at the membership of those bodies and look at the previous membership of the county courts; if you look at the clerks of committee 53 and look at the clerks of the county—except the few very old men who were operating by deputy—if you look at those personnel, there was a subtle shift of government in Virginia taking place, from royal legitimate government to extralegal government by committee. This became in 1775, of course, extralegal government by a committee of safety in Virginia.

Long before Lord Dunmore appealed futilely to the loyalty of Virginians and found himself forced to seek safety on H.M.S. Fowey in York River, the governors had experienced the waning power of royal authority in Virginia. Seen from the perspective of the governors, the economic, social, and cultural development of the colony had been accompanied by a diminution of their own power, from the high water mark of Lord Culpeper's brief tenure in the l680s to the ignominious flight of Lord Dunmore from the Palace under cover of darkness in the early morning of June 8, 1775. Yet what the governors had always had was the illusion, not the reality of power. The inherent conflict in Virginia between the rights of Englishmen, including the rights to local self-government, to government by consent of the governed and to equality before the law, and the English insistence on English political sovereignty and colonial economic dependence could not be resolved. In a century and a half, the governors saw themselves reduced from the king's viceroy to his representative in Virginia. Over the same span political power crossed the Atlantic and came to rest in the lower house of the legislative branch of government—the Virginia House of Burgesses.