Francis Nicholson - Dominion Lieutenant Governor

Dominion Lieutenant Governor

In 1688 the Lords of Trade extended the dominion to include New York and East and West Jersey. Nicholson was commissioned the dominion's lieutenant governor, and traveled with Andros to New York to take control of those colonies. Nicholson's rule, in which he was assisted by a local council but no legislative assembly, was seen by many New Yorkers as the next in a line of royal governors who "had in a most arbitrary way subverted our ancient priviledges". Nicholson justified his rule by stating that the colonists were "a conquered people, and therefore ... could not could not so much claim rights and priviledges as Englishmen".

Nicholson was at first seen as an improvement over the Catholic Thomas Dongan, the outgoing governor. However, the province's old guard was unhappy that Andros removed all of the provincial records to Boston, and then Nicholson alarmed the sometimes hardline Protestant population by preserving the trappings of the chapel in Fort James that Dongan and the handful of New York's Catholics had used for worship. In response to a rumored Dutch invasion of England (a rumor that turned out to be true), Nicholson in January 1689 ordered the provincial militias to be on alert to protect the province for the king. Unknown to Nicholson, events in England had already changed things.