Roche on Nicolson

Reviewed by: The “Infamas Govener” Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution John F. Roche Colin Nicolson, The “Infamas Govener” Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000) Francis Bernard (1712–1779) of Berkshire, England, served Kings George II and III as governor of the provinces of New Jersey (1758–1760) and Massachusetts (1760–1769). His administration in New Jersey was quite successful, but Massachusetts was a very different story. His leadership there was beset by waves of protest against the 1764 Revenue Act, the issue of an Anglican episcopacy for the American colonies, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and the dispatch of British troops to overawe turbulent Boston. Could any royal governor maintain a harmonious administration amid these shocks? Bernard, Dr. Nicolson makes clear, obviously could not: a condemnatory sign displayed in Boston when the “Infamas Govener” retreated to England provides the book’s title. This balanced and highly useful study of the background to the American Revolution is the capstone of the author’s evolving work on the uneasy status of Massachusetts within Britain’s empire in the 1760s and 1770s. Nicolson’s doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh (1988) was a highly detailed analysis of “Loyalism, Ideology and Politics in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1776.” A subsequent initial focus on Bernard, published in the 1991 Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, was followed by a 1996–97 Proceedings article centering on Nathaniel Coffin. Nicolson labels his study a “political biography, not a personal biography like the recent crop of books on colonial governors.” (He does, however, grant a privileged place for Bernard Bailyn’s 1974 study of Bernard’s successor, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson ). He does not ignore Bernard’s career prior to his New Jersey appointment, however, devoting a richly documented first chapter to his subject’s studies at Oxford and the Middle Temple, his initial employments in ecclesiastical law and church administration, and the importance of his marriage to Amelia Offley whose cousin, Viscount Barrington, was instrumental in Bernard’s appointments as colonial governor. Through extensive use of Bernard’s papers (in the Harvard Library) and an impressive array of other primary sources in both Britain and Massachusetts, Nicholson presents, convincingly, a nuanced interpretation of the qualities Bernard brought to his American assignments. He states openly that his book “empathizes” with Bernard’s “predicament. . . to demonstrate why the political bases of royal government eroded . . . during the 1760s and early 1770s.” (P.8). Bernard, Nicolson asserts, was no tyrant and no bigot and he was not involved in any “conspiracy to deprive Americans of their rights and liberties.”(P.5). But his display of cultural arrogance and a profiteering streak alienated political moderates who might have been enlisted as “friends of Government.” While he regarded the Stamp Tax and Townshend duties as unwise exactions, his “metropolitan prejudice” led him to oppose vehemently colonists’ claims that Parliament had no right to enact such legislation. His strong belief in Parliamentary supremacy plus his postulate that the colonists were “virtually” represented there led him to view the constitutional challenges of James Otis and Sam Adams as treasonable and, more, aiming -3- toward armed rebellion. Nicolson shows that this fatal exaggeration, when transmitted to London not only led to the dispatch of British regimens to Boston, as Bernard requested, but led to the Crown’s consideration of his proposals for a drastic overhaul of the Massachusetts charter to strengthen the governor’s hand. Years after Bernard departed Massachusetts (1769) and then formally resigned the governorship (1771), the stringent Massachusetts Government Act of 1774 “clearly encompassed much of what Bernard had been proposing.” (P. 223). Nicolson calls the consequences catastrophic. Near the close of the book the author presents a statistical study of the numerical strength of the “friends of Government” group (those who supported Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson) and an analysis of the numbers of them who, when the war broke out, became Loyalists or remained neutral or turned to the Patriot side (only 14 of 727). At our distance of over 200 years, such exactitude can seem almost too definitive. Yet such exact identification has been a central aspect of Nicholson

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