Captain Kidd, his Associates and Career-Governor Hyde and his Administration

The piracies of Kidd were long known in England before the Company noticed them. At length the matter became so scandalous that they felt it necessary to vindicate their character. The belief was general that the king, the earl, the "lord of the manor," and their associates had shared the plunder with Kidd, and the odium of complicity in piracy rested heavily upon them. They needed a scape-goat, and Kidd was made the victim. He appeared openly in the streets of Boston, unsuspicious of real danger, for he had his king's commission in his pocket, and Bellamont was his business partner. But the governor, expressing horror at his crimes, ordered his arrest, and very soon the pirate appeared before the earl a prisoner in irons.

Kidd now saw that he was to be sacrificed, and he sought to win the earl's favor and aid, by telling Bellamont where he had hidden the treasure. In immovable firmness at that critical moment lay the governor's safety; and he turned a deaf ear to the prayers of the prisoner with bowed head, and the entreaties of his wife who begged for mercy, human and divine, for her erring husband. There was a struggle between the pride and fear, and the better nature of Bellamont. The former triumphed. Kidd was sent to England and tried for murder and piracy. Convicted of the former, he was hanged. So the penalty of the sins of omission, at least, of the monarch and nobles and rich civilians, were borne by the commoner on the scaffold. The earl received the buried treasure, and at his coffers its history ends in impenetrable mystery.

The king and the earl died soon after Kidd perished, and Sir Edward Hyde, uncle of Queen Anne, who was then monarch of England, became governor of New York. He was a libertine and a knave, who cursed the province with misrule for about seven years. He was a bigot, too, and persecuted all denominations of Christians outside of the Church of England. He embezzled the public money, involved himself heavily in debt, and on all occasions was the persistent enemy of popular freedom. "I know no right which you have as an assembly," he said to the representatives of the people, "but such as the queen is pleased to allow you." That was in 1705, the year when that Assembly won the first substantial victory for democracy over absolutism or despotic rule. They obtained from the queen permission to make specific appropriations of incidental grants of money, and to appoint their own treasurer to take charge of extraordinary supplies. That was a bold and important step in the direction of popular independence and sovereignty.

So the very vices of the governor disciplined the people to resistance of oppression, and secured to them the recognition of rights which might have been postponed for many years. The governor, who was weak-minded, mean-spirited and vacillating, was so overpowered by the indomitable will of the people-a hardy, mixed race-that he meekly submitted to reproof, and in his poverty of soul and purse humbly thanked the Assembly for simple justice. In 1708, the queen, yielding to the wishes of the people, recalled him. When he left the chair of state his creditors cast him into prison, where he remained until the death of his father made him Loard Cornbury. Then he was released by the unjust law of England yet in force, which will not permit a peer of the realm, and consequently a member of the House of Lords, to be arrested for debt.

Lord Lovelace was Hyde's successor. With his brief administration began those contests between democracy and absolutism in the province of New York which ended only with the victory of the former at the close of the old war for independence. Already the political friends of Leisler had achieved a signal triumph over his enemies. Colonel Bayard and others, who had published libels on the royal lieutenant-governor (Nanfan) before Hyde's arrival, had been arrested by that energetic officer and tried for and convicted of treason under a law which these men had made in 1691 to meet Leisler's case. Bayard was sentenced to be "hanged, drawn and quartered," but was reprieved until the pleasure of the monarch should be known. When Hyde arrived, soon afterward, he reversed the attainder, and the offender was set at liberty. The power of the self-constituted aristocracy was broken, and their controlling influence disappeared. When Lovelace came, and the crown demanded a permanent revenue without appropriation, the legislature of New York, in the exercise of popular sovereignty or rule of the people, and taking the ground that "taxation without representation is tyranny," would raise only an annual revenue for specific purposes. From that time, until 1732, the royal representatives, unable to resist the will of the people, as expressed by the Assembly, allowed democratic principles to grow, flourish, and bear fruit.

From Lovelace to Cosby, there were three governors-Robert Hunter, William Burnet and John Montgomery-and three acting governors. The first was a literary man, fond of good cheer, but unfitted by temperament to be governor of New York at that crisis. He brought with him three thousand German Lutherans from the Palatinate of the Rhine, who had been driven from their homes by the persecution of Louis the Fourteenth. These settled in different parts of the province of New York, and in Pennsylvania. They were chiefly the ancestors of the German population of the latter State.