The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson

Abstract

IN Francis Nicholson's day, strange meant added or introduced from outside, adventitious, external. For the English colonist viewing Nicholson as an outside force obtruded into local politics and society, as adventitious in his representation of a royal authority whose scope was questioned by some American political leaders, as concerned with the external functions of defense, diplomacy, and intercolonial co-operation, Nicholson's career in America was indeed strange. During Nicholson's years in public life, from i678 to I728, the royal governors were the tools of the Crown when the Crown symbolized authority to the English, notoriously the most rebellious people of the western world. To preserve social order the Crown turned to the only disciplined force available, the army, and installed army officers as governors and soldiers as garrisons for the strategic places of the realm, whether English towns, African ports, or American colonies. The Revolution of i688 neither blunted this drive of the executive to impose social order nor removed the army as the ready instrument for its purpose. During much of the remaining forty years of Nicholson's career, the Crown progressively tightened its control of the colonies through imperial administrators who conceived of government as an army duty and whose political and social ideas were largely formed by military posts. These posts included a variety of governorships in England, on the continent, and in every area of the empire, governorships which were viewed as paramilitary positions by the Crown and treated as such by the officers in government. Army commissioners inaugurated the imperial service of most royal governors, more than 6o per cent of whom, in Nicholson's lifetime (i655-I728), were career army officers.1 Officers who served in the same