Governor Bellamont

When the troops were assembled, Fletcher stepped forward to take the command, and ordered Bayard to read his excellency's commission. At that moment Captain Wadsworth ordered the drums to be beaten. "Silence!" angrily cried the petulant governor, and Bayard began to read again. "Drum! drum! I say," shouted Wadsworth; and the sonorous roll drowned the voice of Bayard. Fletcher, in a rage, stamped his foot and cried "Silence!" and threatened the captain with punishment for insubordination. Whereupon Wadsworth stepped boldly in front of the governor and said, while his hand rested on the handle of his sword: "If my drummers are interrupted again, I'll make the sunlight shine through you. We deny and defy your authority." The cowardly governor sullenly folded up his commission, pocketed it and the affront, and with his retinue returned to New York in a very angry mood. He complained to the king. The matter was compromised by making Fletcher commander of the Connecticut militia only in time of war.

During the whole of Fletcher's administration of seven years, party rancor, kindled by the death of Leisler, burned intensely, and, at one time, menaced the province with civil war. At the same time it was threatened with a destructive invasion by the French and Indians from Canada, under the guidance of the venerable Count Frontenac, the energetic governor of that province. These foes were then traversing the wilderness in northern New York, seeking for a passage through the country of the Five Nations to the English settlements below. Fortunately the governor listened to the wise advice of Mayor Schuyler, of Albany, who had a marvellous influence over the Iroquois Confederacy; and under his leadership, about three hundred English and as many Mohawk warriors beat back the foe to the St. Lawrence. They so desolated the French settlements in the vicinity of Lake Champlain, slaying about three hundred French and Indians at the north end of the lake, that Frontenac was glad to remain quiet at Montreal.

Although the New York Assembly was filled with the bitter enemies of Leisler, they, as boldly as he, asserted the supremacy of the people, and would suffer no encroachments on colonial rights and privileges. They rebuked the interference of the governor in legislation, by insisting upon amendments to bills, and drew from him, on one occasion, the reproachful words which tell of their independence and firmness: "There never was an amendment desired by the Council Board, but what was rejected. It is a sign of a stubborn ill-temper." With that "stubborn ill-temper" of the Assembly, Fletcher was almost continually in conflict; and when, in 1698, he was superseded by the Earl of Bellamont, he seemed as glad to leave the province as the people were to get rid of him.

Bellamont was an honest and energetic Irish peer. He had been on the Committee of Parliament appointed to make inquiry concerning the trial and death of Leisler, and was well acquainted with the questions which divided the factions. He rebuked the little aristocratic oligarchy who had hovered around Fletcher; and his wise and liberal course strengthened the republican cause. It opened the way to just legislation, and the ascendency of liberal men in the Assembly. That body, in the year 1700, on receiving a letter from the king, asking them to indemnify the family of Leisler from a "gracious sense of the father's services and sufferings," confirmed the verdict of Parliament in favor of the innocence of the martyr by granting the request.