Governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire
Dudley served as governor until 1715. His administration was marked, particularly in the earlier years, by regular conflict with the general court. Upon instruction from the colonial office, he was to gain a regular salary for the governor. He and all of the succeeding royal governors were unsuccessful in extracting this concession from the provincial legislature, and it became a regular source of friction between representatives of crown and colony. Dudley pressed his complaint in letters to London, in which he complained of men "who love not the Crown and Government of England to any manner of obedience". In one letter to his son Paul, then the provincial attorney general, he wrote "this country will never be worth living in for lawyers and gentlemen, till the charter is taken away." This letter was discovered and published, fueling provincial opposition to his rule. Dudley also angered the powerful Mather family when he awarded the presidency of Harvard to John Leverett instead of Cotton Mather, and consistently vetoed the election of councilors and speakers of the general court who had acted against him in 1689, further increasing his unpopularity in Massachusetts. In contrast, his tenure as governor of New Hampshire was popular; its legislature specifically praised him to the queen after learning of complaints levelled against him by his Massachusetts opponents.
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“Three years ago, also, when the Sims tragedy was acted, I said to myself, There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of Massachusetts,—what has he been about the last fortnight? Has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake?... He could at least have resigned himself into fame.”
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