with an easy faith, assuming the son to be the heir of ancestral virtue, loaded him with their honorable trusts; and while the business of the hour was to acquire a reputation to be used for future profit, he applied himself to that acquisition with a diligence which commanded an unsuspecting trust. While he was rendering himself eminently capable of effective treachery, the British court had been informing itself how much his treachery would be worth. When his power to wrong and distress the native country which had confided and taken pride in him had been well ascertained, he had no reluctance to this more lucrative service; for the lust of gain had silenced all misgivings, and by constitution he had sufficient courage to be not only without scruples, but without shame. Thomas Hutchinson, two generations later, was so like him as to be quite unconscious of the condemnation which he was pronouncing when he said of Dudley that "he had as many virtues as can consist with so great a thirst for honor and power." When the world grows wiser, great mental faculties and great personal achievements will less dazzle its judgment, and it will be less easily deluded to regard useful acts done for an aspirant's own advantage as compensation for unworthy acts done as soon as his own advancement demands a sacrifice of his honor and of the general welfare. It will come to see that the devotion of great powers to base uses is only worthy of scorn and loathing. CHAPTER XI. Hampshire. 1702. July 13. IN New Hampshire Dudley was not unwillingly received as Governor, when he came thither soon after re- Dudley turning to America from his service in the British in New Parliament. In that Province such causes for resentment as had made him unwelcome in Massachusetts had been little operative at the time of their occurrence, and had been lost sight of in the lapse of years. In a letter to the Lords of Trade he commended in warm terms the liberality of the Province," which bore the proportion but of the eleventh part to Massachusetts," yet had voted "five hundred pounds to begin the reform of their fortification" at the mouth of the Piscataqua, and had granted him an annual salary, for the whole period of his commission, of a hundred and sixty pounds, which he said was as much as they could 1 For Dudley's commission for New Hampshire, see N. H. Provincial Papers, II. 366 et seq. — Partridge, in a letter of April 17, 1702, informed the Lords of Trade that the Province was grateful for the appointment. (British Colonial Papers.) - Joseph Smith, of Hampton, a pragmatical person (N. H. Provincial Papers, II. 207, 263, 265, 591), was a friend of Dudley, and in the following year was recommended by him for the post of Counsellor of the Province. Sept. 22, 1701, Smith wrote to John Usher in London: "As for the old Revolution pillars among us, they begin to shake and tremble at the news of Colonel Dudley's coming 1703. Dec. 19. afford, and as much for them as ten times the amount would be for Massachusetts. In other respects they satisfied him less, as he informed the Lords of Trade with much explicitness. The courts disappointed him by not 1704. condemning goods seized for alleged violation of Feb. 11. the Navigation Laws. "So it is, my Lords, that the judges are ignorant and the juries stubborn, that it is a very hard thing to obtain their just service to the crown, all which will be prevented if your Lordships please to let me have a judge of Admiralty settled here."2 Claim of Next to the exposure to inroads from the French and Indian enemy, already described, the main subject of concern to the people of New Hampshire was the pending controversy for their lands with Allen, the assign of John Mason. It was now about to be brought to an issue. Dudley was not unfavorable to the claim of the settlers; and the liberality of the Assembly, at the same time that it reciprocated his good-will, bespoke his future favor. Lieutenant Allen's son-in-law, Usher, succeeded in obtaining a reappointment to be Lieutenant-Governor of New Governor Hampshire, notwithstanding the opposition of the agent of that Province; and Partridge withdrew from public affairs to attend to the increase of his fortune Usher. signified her "expectation that, in regard of our receiving our good subjects of that Province [New Hampshire] under our immediate protection and government, they do forthwith settle a constant and fixed allowance on our Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of our said Province for the time being, and that the same be done without limitation of time." (N. H. Provincial Papers, III. 251.) Accordingly the vote above referred to was passed October 6. (Ibid., 230; comp. 305, 308.) 2 Ibid. 8 His commission, dated June 10, 1703, is in N. H. Provincial Papers, II. 406.- In April, 1703, William Vaughan, the agent, presented to the Lords of Trade a memorial against the appointment of Usher. “Mr. Usher," he said, "hath got himself universally hated in the Province by managing a suit against the interest of all the people of the whole Province." He asserted that Usher had impressed members of the Assembly, and sent them to do garrison duty. 1 Dudley's letter, in British Colo- (British Colonial Papers.) nial Papers. 1702. at Newbury, where, after some years, he died.' Partridge had written to thank the Lords for appointing Dudley to be Governor of New Hampshire, and April 17. Dudley had expressed himself to the same author 2 3 1703. 1704. 1705. ity in terms of commendation of his subordinate in Aug. 5. office; but, on the other hand, he declared himself pleased with the reappointment of Usher, and rendered to him a service which, as the parties then stood, was more material, by pronouncing a claim which he was urging on Massachusetts for a sum due in the settlement of his accounts, as former Treasurer of that Province, to be "very plain and just." Usher did his duty not ill in respect to the conduct of the war; but his antagonistic position in the controversy about the lands was fatal to his good standing with the Assembly, and they would do no more for him than to pay the rent of two rooms for his official residence when he came to New Hampshire, and provide penuriously for the cost of his journeys to and from Boston, where for the most part he continued to reside.* Before the Queen's Privy Council, to which he had appealed, Allen failed to make out his case, for want of being prepared to show that Mason, whose rights he represented as assign, had ever been in legal possession of the lands in dispute. The Council referred him back to the courts of New Hampshire, where accordingly, as a test question, he presented his claim by a writ of Allen's of ejectment against Richard Waldron, for lands held by the latter in the town of Exeter. The people 1 He went to England meanwhile. (N. H. Provincial Papers, II. 408, where his name is on the memorial against Dudley. See above, 303.) 2 "He [Partridge] is very sincere and industrious, in my observation, in every thing that imports her Majesty's service, since my arrival, however it was before." (Letter of Litigation claim. Dudley to the Lords, in British Colonial Papers.) 8 Letters in British Colonial Pa pers. raised no question with Allen as to the property of lands lying beyond the bounds of their townships. But this concession would not satisfy him; he coveted the towns which they had labored and suffered in cultivating and defending for two-thirds of a century. Dudley had orders to demand from the jury a special verdict on some points, to the end of facilitating an appeal to the Privy Council, if the verdict should be against the claimant. But, when the Governor was expected at the trial, he was detained (not unwillingly, it was thought), first by an alarm of an Indian inroad, and then by illness. The jury decided against Allen, and gave no special verdict. To avoid another troublesome appeal, the Assembly proposed a compromise. They offered to Allen that they would relinquish all pretension to any lands except such as were included in their four towns, and in Newcastle and Kingston, which were in progress of settlement; and that they would set off to him five thousand acres within those six districts in consideration of a quitclaim to be given by him of the rest, and pay him two thousand pounds "current money of New England" in two yearly instalments.2 May 3. May 5. He died before this agreement, so advantageous for him, could be concluded, and the controversy was inherited by his son, who received permission from 1 "Colonel Dudley went so far as Newbury, where, being seized with a violent fit of the gravel, did not proceed further." (Short Narrative, &c.) by the Council of Plymouth to the death of Thomas Allen, son of Samuel, in 1715, are related in a pamphlet, published in Boston in 1728, entitled "A Short Narrative 2 N. H. Provincial Papers, III. of the Claim, Title, and Right of the 274-276. 8 Allen died the day after Dudley communicated the proposal to him; "and so the appeal and trial and compromise all ended." (Dudley to the Lords of Trade, July 25, 1705, in British Colonial Papers.) — The transactions relating to Allen's claim, from the alleged grant to John Mason Heirs of the Hon. Samuel Allen, to the Province of New Hampshire in New England, transmitted from a gentlewoman in London to her friend in New England." The writer expresses the hope (p. 1) that "the heir, in a little time, will be of age, and capable to prosecute his right.” |