Among the tensions that eventually led to the American Revolution was the Leisler’s Rebellion.
Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) was a political revolution in New York that began with a sudden collapse of the royal government and ended with the trial and execution of Jacob Leisler, a leading New York merchant and militia officer, and his English lieutenant Jacob Milborne.
Though treated as a rebel, Leisler had simply joined a stream of rebellions that had begun in Europe, where the so-called Glorious Revolution in England of November–December 1688 saw King James II driven out by an army led by the Dutch prince William of Orange.
The prince soon became King William III (justified in part by his marriage to James’ daughter, who became Queen Mary). While the revolution happened rather smoothly in England, it provoked resistance in Scotland, a civil war in Ireland, and war with France. This distracted King William from overseeing what was happening in America, where the colonists took events into their hands. In April 1689 the people of Boston overthrew Edmund Andros, the governor of the Dominion of New England—of which New York was then apart.
In June, Andros’s lieutenant governor on Manhattan, Francis Nicholson, fled to England. A broad coalition of New Yorkers replaced the dissolving dominion government with a Committee for the Preservation of Safety and Peace. The committee appointed Jacob Leisler captain of the fort on Manhattan Island at the end of June and commander-in-chief of the colony in August.[1]
Though Leisler did not seize power on his own, the revolution (or rebellion) has been inseparable from his name almost since it began.[2] Supporters of the revolution and its opponents are still referred to as Leislerians and Anti-Leislerians. They themselves used the terms Williamites, supporters of King William, and Jacobites, supporters of King James.
This political split happened in New York because, unlike the New England colonies, New York did not have a preexisting charter on which to base the legitimacy of its revolutionary government. Authority had always been vested in James, first as Duke of York, then as King.
James had added New York to the Dominion of New England. Without James or the dominion, no government in New York had clear constitutional legitimacy. Accordingly, Albany did not initially recognize the authority of the new government. War with France, whose Canadian colony lurked ominously above the northern frontier, added a further challenge to Leisler’s government.[3]
From the beginning, the staunchly Protestant Leisler feared that enemies within and without New York had joined in a conspiracy to put New York under a Catholic ruler, be it the deposed James II or his ally Louis XIV. To combat them, Leisler governed in an authoritarian mode, denouncing those who questioned him as traitors and papists, throwing some in jail and persuading others to flee for their safety. In December 1689 he claimed the authority of lieutenant governor and the committee of safety disbanded. In February 1690 a French raid devastated Schenectady. Under pressure, Albany finally accepted Leisler’s authority in March as Leisler called for a new assembly to be elected to help fund an invasion of Canada. As he bent his government’s efforts on the attack on the French, a growing number of New Yorkers began to see him as an illegitimate despot. His obsession with the Catholic conspiracy grew in tandem with the opposition. In turn, his hunt for Catholic (or “papist”) conspirators only made him seem more irrational and arbitrary to those who doubted his legitimacy. Bitterness within New York increased in reaction against the taxes voted by Leisler’s assembly. After the summer expedition against the French failed miserably, Leisler’s authority withered.[4]
By the winter of 1691, New York was fiercely divided. Counties, towns, churches, and families split over the question: was Leisler a hero or a tyrant? The Anti-Leislerians were not exactly loyalists to the government of King James. But they often were men who had done well under King James’s rule. Leislerians tended to suspect those men precisely for their connections to James and his servants. Scotland and Ireland had already descended into civil war. Would New York join them? Confrontations threatened to break out into open conflict. Alas for Leisler: his opponents had won the political battle for the support of the new English government in Europe. When soldiers and a new governor arrived they took the side of the Anti-Leislerians whose fury led to Leisler’s execution for treason in May 1691. The Leislerians’ outrage at this injustice embittered New York politics for years to come. Instead of a civil war, New York fell into decades of partisan politics.
Explaining the events of 1689–91 in New York has long posed a challenge to historians. Confronted with spotty evidence, they have looked for motives in individuals’ backgrounds and associations, alternately stressing ethnicity, class, and religious affiliation, or some combination of these. In 1689 New York was the most diverse of English colonies in America. English language, churches, and settlers made up only a part of a society that included a large number of Dutch, French, and Walloons (French-speaking Protestants from the southern Netherlands). Though one cannot make absolute generalizations about allegiances, recent work has shown that Leislerians tended to be more Dutch, Walloon, and Huguenot than English or Scottish, more likely farmers and artisans than merchants (especially elite merchants, though Leisler himself was one), and more likely to support stricter Calvinist versions of Protestantism. Factional tensions between elite families also played a role, especially in New York City. While they may not agree on the exact combination of elements, historians agree that ethnicity, economic and religious divisions, and above all family connections played a role in determining people’s loyalties in 1689–91.[5]
Local concerns formed another important aspect of New York’s divisions. At the largest scale, these could pit one county against another, as they did Albany against New York. On a smaller scale, there were also divisions between settlements within a single county, for example between Schenectady and Albany. So far, analysis of Leisler’s rebellion has focused primarily on New York and Albany, the main stages of the drama. Local studies have also looked at Westchester County and Orange County (Dutchess County was uninhabited at the time). Long Island has received some attention because of its role in driving events at certain key moments, but no separate study as of yet. Staten Island and Ulster have remained on the sidelines of research.[6]
Sources
This article examines Ulster County, whose relationship to Leisler’s cause has remained rather enigmatic. It is rarely mentioned in contemporary sources and thus has received little attention from historians drawn to the better-documented and more pivotal corners of the colony.[7] Scraps of evidence exist for Ulster’s involvement, but they tend to be static—lists of names—or opaque—vague references to trouble. There are no narrative sources providing a chronology of local events. Absent are the letters, reports, court testimony, and other such sources that otherwise help us tell a story. Nonetheless, enough scraps of information exist to assemble a picture of what happened.
An agricultural county with very few English or wealthy colonists, Ulster County in 1689 seemed to possess all the elements of a pro-Leislerian population. Ulster did send two Dutchmen, Roeloff Swartwout of Hurley and Johannes Hardenbroeck (Hardenbergh) of Kingston, to serve on the committee of safety that took over after Nicholson’s departure and appointed Leisler commander-in-chief.[8] Additional bits of evidence attest to local engagement with the Leislerian cause. For example, on December 12, 1689, the householders of Hurley pledged themselves “body and soul” to King William and Queen Mary “for the benefit of our country and for the promotion of the Protestant religion.” This indicates that local Leislerians shared Leisler’s understanding of their cause as “in behalf of the true Protestants religion.”[9] The list of names is predominantly Dutch with a few Walloons and no English.[10]
Yet the little we know indicates that Ulster was divided. This impression comes primarily from two statements by revolutionaries. The first is from Jacob Leisler himself. In a January 7, 1690, report to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, Leisler and his council noted “Albany and some part of Ulster County have chiefly withstood us.”[11] The other comes from Roeloff Swartwout. After Jacob Milborne assumed control at Albany in April 1690, Swartwout wrote him to explain why Ulster had not yet sent representatives to the assembly. He had waited to hold the election until Milborne arrived because he “feared a contest about it.” He admitted, “it ought to be a free election for all classes, but I would be loath to allow those to vote or to be voted for who have refused to this day to take their oath [of allegiance], lest so much leaven might again taint that which is sweet, or our head-men, which probably might happen.”[12]
Local historians have instinctively picked up on these divisions without, however, explaining them. A study focused on Kingston notes that the town, “like Albany, tried to remain aloof from the Leislerian movement and it succeeded fairly well.”[13] Another study, focused on the county as a whole, praises Leisler as the man who put an end to the “arbitrary form of government” under James and saw to the election of “the first representative Assembly in the Province,” who raised the issue of “‘no taxation without representation'” a hundred years before the “Revolution” made it a cornerstone of American liberty.[14]
Tensions notwithstanding, Ulster had no open conflict. In contrast to several other counties, where there were tense and sometimes violent confrontations, Ulster was calm. Or so it seems. A dearth of sources makes it very difficult to determine precisely what was happening in Ulster County in 1689–91. It appears in a largely supporting role to the action at Albany in particular, sending men and supplies for its defense. It also had a small defensive post on the Hudson River that was funded by the Leislerian government.[15]
The lack of material on Ulster County’s relationship to Leisler’s rebellion is curious since the early seventeenth-century history of Ulster County is remarkably well documented. Apart from official correspondence, there are local court and church records starting in 1660–61 and continuing through the early 1680s.[16] Then the local sources peter out and do not reappear again with any regularity until the later 1690s. In particular, 1689–91 is a glaring gap in the record. The wealth of local materials has enabled historians to craft a dynamic picture of a contentious community—something that makes the evident placidity of 1689–91 all the more extraordinary.[17]
One local source documents something of the revolution’s impact: the Kingston Trustees’ records. They run from 1688 to 1816 and serve as testaments of political loyalty as well as town business. The records reflect a good deal of activity economy up to March 4, 1689, several days after news of William’s invasion of England had reached Manhattan. Until then they dutifully referred to James II as the king. The next transaction, in May, after the Massachusetts revolution but before New York’s, takes the unusual step of not mentioning a king at all. The first reference to William and Mary comes on October 10, 1689, “the first year of his majesties raigne.” Nothing is recorded for 1690. The next document appears in May 1691, by which time the revolution was over. It is the only transaction for the year. Business resumes only in January 1692.[18] Whatever happened in 1689–91, it upset the normal flow of activity.
Mapping Ulster’s Factions
A review of the county’s mixed origins is crucial to appreciating what happened. Ulster County was a very recent (1683) designation for the region, known previously as the Esopus. It was not colonized directly from Europe, but rather from Albany (then known as Beverwyck). Settlers moved to the Esopus because the land for miles around Beverwyck belonged to the patroonship of Rensselaerswyck and could only be leased, not owned. For those who wanted have their own farm, the Esopus held much promise. For the local Esopus Indians, the settlers’ arrival in 1652–53 was the beginning of a period of conflict and dispossession that pushed them ever further inland.[19]
Dutch Albany was Ulster’s primary influence in the seventeenth century. Until 1661, Beverwyck’s court had jurisdiction over the Esopus. Several of the important families in Kingston in 1689 were offshoots of prominent Albany clans. There were the Ten Broecks the Wynkoops, and even a Schuyler. The otherwise little-known Philip Schuyler, a younger son of the noted Albany family, also moved in.[20] Jacob Staats, another prominent Dutch Albanian, owned land in Kingston and elsewhere in Ulster County.[21] Ties downriver were weaker. Kingston’s leading citizen, Henry Beekman, had a younger brother in Brooklyn. William de Meyer, another leading figure in Kingston, was the son of prominent Manhattan merchant Nicholas de Meyer. Only a few, like Roeloff Swartwout, arrived directly from the Netherlands.
When Director-General Peter Stuyvesant gave the Esopus its own local court and renamed the village Wiltwyck in 1661, he made the young Roeloff Swartwout schout (sheriff). The following year, Swartwout and a number of colonists set up a second settlement slightly inland called New Village (Nieuw Dorp). Together with a sawmill at the mouth of Esopus Creek, known as Saugerties, and a redoubt at the mouth of the Rondout, Wiltwyck and Nieuw Dorp marked the extent of the Dutch presence in the region at the time of the English conquest in 1664.[22] Though Dutch connections dominated, not all of Ulster’s colonists were ethnically Dutch in origin. Thomas Chambers, the first and most distinguished settler, was English. Several, including Wessel ten Broeck (originally from Munster, Westphalia), were German. A few more were Walloons. But most were Dutch.[22]
The English takeover was a profound political change, but it added only slightly to the region’s ethnic mix. An English garrison stayed at Wiltwyck until the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67) came to an end. The soldiers came into frequent conflict with the locals. Nonetheless, when they were disbanded in 1668, several, including their captain Daniel Brodhead, stayed on. They began a third village just beyond Nieuw Dorp. In 1669 the English governor Francis Lovelace visited, appointed new courts, and renamed the settlements: Wiltwyck became Kingston; Nieuw Dorp became Hurley; the newest settlement took the name of Marbletown.[23] In an effort to bolster an authoritative English presence in this Dutch-dominated region, Governor Lovelace gave the lands of pioneer settler Thomas Chambers near Kingston the status of a manor, named Foxhall.[24]
The brief Dutch reconquest of 1673–74 had little impact on the progress of settlement. Expansion into the interior continued with the return to English rule. In 1676 locals began moving to Mombaccus (renamed Rochester in the early eighteenth century). Then new immigrants arrived from Europe. Walloons fleeing the wars of Louis XIV joined Walloons who had been in New York for some time to found New Paltz in 1678. Then, as the persecution of Protestantism in France sharpened on the way to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, came some Huguenots.[25] Around 1680 Jacob Rutsen, a pioneer land-developer, opened Rosendael to settlement. By 1689 a few scattered farms pushed further up the Rondout and Wallkill valleys.[26] But there were only five villages: Kingston, with a population of about 725; Hurley, with about 125 people; Marbletown, about 150; Mombaccus, about 250; and New Paltz, about 100, for a total of roughly 1,400 people in 1689. Exact counts of militia-aged men are unavailable, but there would have been about 300.[27]
Two characteristics are striking about the population of Ulster County in 1689. First, it was ethnically mixed with a Dutch-speaking majority. Every settlement had black slaves, who made up about 10 per cent of the population in 1703. Ethnic differences gave each community a distinctive tenor. New Paltz was a French-speaking village of Walloons and Huguenots. Hurley was Dutch and slightly Walloon. Marbletown was mostly Dutch with some English, particularly among its local elite. Mombaccus was Dutch. Kingston had a bit of each but was predominantly Dutch. So strong was the Dutch presence that by the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch language and religion would displace both English and French. Already in 1704 Governor Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, noted that in Ulster were “many English soldiers, & other Englishmen” who had “been wormd [sic] out of their Interests by the Dutch, who wold [sic] never suffer any of the English to be easy there, except some few that agreed with their principles and customes [sic].”[28] By the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch was replacing French as the language of the church in New Paltz.[29] But in 1689 this process of assimilation had not yet begun.
The second notable characteristic of Ulster’s population is just how new it was. Kingston was barely thirty-five years old, a full generation younger than New York, Albany, and many of the Long Island towns. The rest of Ulster’s settlements were younger still, with some European immigrants arriving on the eve of the Glorious Revolution. The memories of Europe, with all of its religious and political conflicts, were fresh and alive in the minds of Ulster’s people. More of those people were men rather than women (men outnumbered women by about 4:3). And they were overwhelmingly young, at least young enough to serve in the militia. In 1703 only a few men (23 of 383) were over sixty years of age. In 1689 they were a mere handful.[30]
To this outline of Ulster society, we can add a few scraps of information on the local dimensions of the Leislerian divisions. For example, comparing the lists of men granted a militia commission by Governor Thomas Dongan in 1685 with those commissioned by Leisler in 1689 gives a sense of those allied with the revolution. There is a significant overlap (the local elite was, after all, rather limited). However, there were a few small changes and one big difference. Dongan had appointed a mix of locally prominent English, Dutch, and Walloons.[31] Many had proven ties of loyalty to James’s government, such as the Englishmen who commanded the company of men from Hurley, Marbletown, and Mombaccus, who all derived from the occupation force of the 1660s. The Leislerian government replaced them with Dutchmen.[32] A list of Leislerian court appointments (almost all Dutch) rounds out the picture of the men willing and able to work with Leisler’s government—Dutch and Walloons, only some of whom had served as magistrates before the revolution.[33]
Examining these and a few other bits of evidence, a clear pattern emerges. Ulster’s Anti-Leislerians are distinguished by two factors: their dominance in local politics under James and their connections to Albany’s elite.[34] They included Dutch and Englishmen from throughout the county. The Dutch Anti-Leislerians tended to be residents of Kingston while the English came from the former garrison soldiers settled in Marbletown. Henry Beekman, the most prominent man in Ulster County, was also the most prominent Anti-Leislerian. In this, he went against his younger brother Gerardus, who lived in Brooklyn and strongly supported Leisler. Henry Beekman’s Anti-Leislerian credentials became evident primarily after Leisler’s rebellion, when he and Philip Schuyler began serving as Kingston’s justices of the peace after Leisler’s execution. From 1691 for about two decades, Beekman was joined by Thomas Garton, an Englishman from Marbletown, as Ulster’s Anti-Leislerian representatives to the New York Assembly.[35]
The Leislerians were predominantly Dutch, Walloon, and Huguenot farmers from Hurley, Marbletown, and New Paltz. But some lived in Kingston as well. Prominent Leislerians tended to be men like Roeloff Swartwout, who had not held much power since the English conquest. Also they were actively invested in expanding the agricultural frontier further inland, like land-speculator Jacob Rutsen. Only Marbletown seems to have been split, thanks to the presence of the former English soldiers. Hurley was strongly, if not entirely, pro-Leisler. Mombaccus’s opinions are undocumented, but its affinities were to Hurley more than elsewhere. The same goes for New Paltz, some of whose settlers had resided in Hurley before New Paltz was established. The lack of division in New Paltz seems to be confirmed by the continuous leadership both before and after 1689 of Abraham Hasbrouck, one of the original patentees. Hurley’s Roeloff Swartwout was perhaps the most active Leislerian in the county. Leisler’s government made him a Justice of the Peace and Ulster’s excise collector. He was the one chosen to administer the oath of loyalty to Ulster’s other justices of the peace. He helped organize the supply of troops at Albany and visited New York on government business in December 1690. And he and his son Anthony were the only men from Ulster condemned for their support of Leisler.[36]
Family connections underscore the importance of kinship in shaping political allegiances in these communities. Roeloff and son Anthony were convicted of treason. Roeloff’s eldest son, Thomas, signed the December 1689 Leislerian oath of loyalty in Hurley.[37] Willem de la Montagne, who served as Ulster’s sheriff under Leisler, had married into Roeloff’s family in 1673.[38] Johannes Hardenbergh, who served with Swartwout on the committee of safety, was married to Catherine Rutsen, daughter of Jacob Rutsen.[39]
Ethnicity was a factor, though in rather different terms than elsewhere in the colony. This was not an Anglo-Dutch conflict. Dutchmen dominated the parties on both sides. Englishmen could be found on both sides but did not exist in significant enough numbers to make a great difference. The descendants of the garrison supported Albany. The former officer Thomas Garton (who by now had married Captain Brodhead’s widow) joined Robert Livingston on his desperate March 1690 mission to get Connecticut and Massachusetts to help protect Albany from the French and Jacob Leisler.[40] The aged pioneer Chambers, on the other hand, assumed command of the militia for Leisler.[41] Only the French-speakers appear not to have divided among themselves. Though they remained on the margins of events, they evidently supported Leisler to a man. No Ulster Walloon or Huguenot can be found opposing him, and several numbered among his leading supporters. De la Montagne, a prominent supporter in Kingston, was of Walloon origins.[42] In the years after 1692, New Paltz’s Abraham Hasbrouck would join Dutch Jacob Rutsen as the county’s Leislerian representatives to the assembly.[43]
The strong French element was important. Both Walloons and Huguenots had reasons to trust and admire Leisler going back to their days in Europe, where Leisler’s family played a significant role in the international community of French-speaking Protestants. Walloons had been refugees in Holland since the late sixteenth century when Spanish forces secured the southern Netherlands for the Spanish king and Roman Catholicism. From these Walloons came some (like De la Montagne) who had made their way to New Netherland before the English conquest. In the mid-seventeenth century French armies conquered parts of those lands from the Spanish, driving more Walloons to Holland while others headed east to the Palatinate in what is now Germany. After the French attacked the Palatinate (die Pfalz in German, de Palts in Dutch) in the 1670s, several of them made their way to New York. New Paltz was named in memory of that experience. Huguenots driven out of France by persecution in the 1680s reinforced the name’s connotations of war and refuge from French Catholics.[44]
New Paltz bespeaks a special connection to Jacob Leisler. Leisler was born in the Palatinate. Consequently he has often been referred to as a “German.” However, his origins were more closely tied to the international community of French-speaking Protestants than German society. Leisler’s mother was descended from a noted Huguenot theologian, Simon Goulart. His father and grandfather were educated in Switzerland, where they gained familiarity with Huguenot individuals and beliefs. In 1635 the French-speaking Protestant community of Frankenthal, in the Palatinate, had called Leisler’s father to be their minister. When Spanish soldiers drove them out two years later, he served the French-speaking community in Frankfurt. His parents played an important role in supporting Huguenot and Walloon refugees across Europe. Leisler continued these efforts in America with the establishment of New Rochelle for Huguenot refugees in New York.[45]
That Ulster’s French-speaking Protestants supported Leisler should thus be of little surprise. Their association with Leisler and the international Protestant cause was strong. They had known persecution and conquest by Catholics for generations, and so understood Leisler’s fears of conspiracy. Living primarily in New Paltz and the neighboring settlements, they were leading pioneers in expanding the county’s farmland ever further into the interior. They had very little connection to Albany or New York’s elite. French, not Dutch or English, was their main language of communication. New Paltz was a Francophone community for decades before the surrounding Dutch took hold. Thus they were something of a people apart, within both Ulster County and New York colony. The Walloon element also figured in the most peculiar aspect of Ulster’s experience of Leisler’s revolt.
Source of a Scandal
There is one well-documented event from Ulster County in 1689–91. The evidence is in the New-York Historical Society, where a stack of manuscripts in Dutch provides a fascinating account of a sordid story involving women, liquor, and decidedly uncivil behavior. It centers on a Walloon, Laurentius van den Bosch. In 1689 Van den Bosch was none other than the minister of Kingston’s church.[46] Though historians have known about the case, they have not looked too closely at it. It involves a man of the church acting rather badly and seems to have no broader significance other than to reveal him as an unsavory character clearly unfit for his office.[47] But the remarkable thing is that a number of people continued to support him even after he had fallen out with the church in Kingston. As elsewhere in New York, the hostilities evoked by Leisler’s actions manifested themselves in a struggle within the church. But instead of siding with one or the other faction, Van den Bosch created a scandal so outrageous that it seems to have confused the antagonism between Leislerians and Anti-Leislerians and thus blunted somewhat the local fallout of the revolution.
Laurentius van den Bosch is an obscure but not insignificant figure in colonial American church history. He actually played an important role in the development of the Huguenot Church in America, pioneering Huguenot churches in two colonies (Carolina and Massachusetts) and sustaining them in a third (New York). A Walloon from Holland, he wound up in Ulster County quite by accident—on the lam from a series of other scandals in other colonies. The inspiration for his initial move to America is unclear. What is certain is that he went to Carolina in 1682 after being ordained in the Church of England by the bishop of London. He served as the first minister to the new Huguenot church in Charleston. Little is known of his time there, though he evidently did not get along well with his congregation. In 1685 he left for Boston, where he set up that town’s first Huguenot church. Again he did not last long. Within months he was in trouble with the Boston authorities over some illegal marriages he had performed. In the fall of 1686 he fled to New York to avoid prosecution.[48]
Van den Bosch was not the first French Protestant minister in New York. He was the second. Pierre Daillé, his Huguenot predecessor, had arrived four years earlier. Daillé was somewhat ambivalent about the new company. A good Reformed Protestant who would later come out as a supporter of Leisler, Daillé feared the Anglican-ordained and scandal-ridden Van den Bosch might give Huguenots a bad name. He wrote to Increase Mather in Boston hoping that “the annoyance occasioned by Mr. Van den Bosch may not diminish your favor toward the French who are now in your city.”[49] At the same time, it made Daillé’s work in New York somewhat easier. In the 1680s there were French-speaking Protestant communities in New York, Staten Island, Ulster, and Westchester Counties. Daillé split his time between the French church in New York, to which the people of Westchester and Staten Island had to travel for services, and the one at New Paltz.[50] Van den Bosch immediately began to minister to the French Protestant community on Staten Island.[51] But he did not stay for more than a few months.
By the spring of 1687, Van den Bosch was preaching in Ulster County’s Dutch Reformed church. It seems that he may have once again been fleeing scandal. Around March 1688 a “French servant girl” from Staten Island had arrived in Albany and, as his in-law Wessel Wessels ten Broeck told him, “paints you very black, on account of your former evil life at Staten Island.”[52] Wessel was particularly disappointed with Van den Bosch, for he had embraced the minister, along with the rest of Kingston’s high society. Henry Beekman boarded him at his house.[53] Wessel had introduced him to the family of his brother, the Albany magistrate and fur trader Dirck Wessels ten Broeck. In the course of visits and socializing between Albany and Kingston, Van den Bosch met Dirck’s young daughter Cornelia. On October 16, 1687, he married her in the Dutch Reformed Church at Albany.[54] To understand why the people of Kingston were so eager to accept this somewhat shady (and not originally Dutch Reformed) character into its midst, it is necessary to delve back into the troubled church history of the region.
Church Troubles
Religion in the fledgling settlement had begun well. The first minister, Hermanus Blom, arrived in 1660, just as Wiltwyck was coming into its own. But within five years, two devastating Indian wars and the English conquest left the community impoverished and embittered. Financially frustrated, Blom returned to the Netherlands in 1667. It would be eleven years before another minister arrived.[55] During the long years without a minister, Kingston’s church had to make do with the occasional visit from one of the Dutch Reformed ministers in the colony, usually Gideon Schaats of Albany, to preach, baptize, and marry.[56] In the meantime, they tided themselves over with the services of a lay reader who read pre-approved sermons from a printed book—not an ideal situation for those craving the excitement and edification that could come from an actual minister who could write and deliver his own sermons. As Kingston’s consistory later noted, the “people would rather listen to a preached sermon than to the reading of one.”[57]
When Kingston finally found a new minister ten years later, he did not last very long. Laurentius van Gaasbeeck arrived in October 1678 and died after barely a year.[58] Van Gaasbeeck’s widow was able to petition the Amsterdam Classis to send her brother-in-law, Johannis Weeksteen, as the next candidate, thus sparing the community the expense and difficulty of another transatlantic search. Weeksteen arrived in the fall of 1681 and lasted five years, dying in the winter of 1687.[59] New York’s leading ministers knew Kingston would have a difficult time finding a replacement. As they wrote, “there is no church or schoolhouse so small throughout the Netherlands where a man receives so little as they receive at Kinstown.” They would either have to “raise the salary up to that of N[ew] Albany or Schenectade; or else do like those of Bergen [East Jersey] or N[ew] Haerlem, to be satisfied with a Voorlese [reader]” and the occasional visit of a minister from elsewhere.[60]
But then there was Van den Bosch, driven by fortune into New York just as Weeksteen was dying. New York’s leading Dutch Reformed ministers, Henricus Selijns and Rudolphus Varick, could not help but see in this coincidence an opportunity. They quickly recommended Kingston and Van den Bosch to each other. As the consistory of Kingston later complained, it was “with their advice, approval and direction” that Van den Bosch became their minister. Fluent in French, Dutch, and English, familiar with Protestant churches in the Netherlands, England, and America, Van den Bosch must have seemed like an ideal candidate for Ulster’s mixed community. And people would on occasion speak well of him.[61] Who could know that he would behave so badly? By June 1687, Laurentius van den Bosch had “subscribed to the formularies of” the Dutch Reformed Church and become Kingston’s fourth minister.[62]
When Van den Bosch took over, there were only two churches in Ulster County: the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston, which served the people of Hurley, Marbletown, and Mombaccus; and the Walloon church at New Paltz.[63] New Paltz’s church had been gathered in 1683 by Pierre Daillé, but New Paltz would not get a resident minister until the eighteenth century.[64] In short, for most of the previous twenty years there had been no minister living anywhere in the county. Locals had to depend on the occasional ministerial visit for their baptisms, weddings, and sermons. They must have been pleased to have a minister of their own again.
The Scandal
Unfortunately, Van den Bosch was not the man for the job. Trouble began shortly before his wedding, when Van den Bosch got drunk and grabbed a local woman in an overly familiar way. Rather than doubt himself, he mistrusted his wife. Within months he began to openly suspect her fidelity. After church one Sunday in March 1688, Van den Bosch told her uncle Wessel, “I am much dissatisfied at the behavior of Arent van Dyk and my wife.” Wessel answered, “Do you think they are behaving together unchastely?” Replied Van den Bosch, “I do not trust them much.” Wessel proudly retorted, “I do not suspect your wife of unchasteness, because we have none such among our race [i.e. the Ten Broeck family]. But should she be such, I wished that a millstone were tied around her neck, and she died thus. But,” he went on, “I believe that you are no good yourself, as I have heard Jacob Lysnaar [i.e. Leisler] declare.” Leisler had business contacts up and down the coast as well as special ties to the French Protestant community. He was in a particularly privileged position to hear any stories circulating about Van den Bosch, which could have included those then being spread in Albany by the “French servant girl” from Staten Island.[65]
Apart from his uncivil habits, Van den Bosch had a quirky sensibility for a Reformed minister. At some point in the spring or summer of 1688 Philip Schuyler went to have “his newly born infant entered in the baptismal record of the church.” According to Schuyler, Van den Bosch replied, “that he came to him because he needed his ointment.” Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding. Schuyler was perturbed.[66] Dirk Schepmoes recounted how Van den Bosch told him in the fall of 1688 about the ancient Romans beating their wives once a year “on the evening prior to the day they went to confession, because then, reproaching the men for everything they had done during the entire year, they [the men] would be so much better able to confess.” Since Van den Bosch had “quarreled” with his wife the day before, he said he was “now fit to go to confession.”[67] Schepmoes did not appreciate this attempt to make light of wife abuse, as everyone was increasingly concerned by Van den Bosch’s treatment of Cornelia. Another neighbor, Jan Fokke, remembered Van den Bosch paying a visit and saying “that there were two kinds of Jesuits, viz one kind took no wives; and another kind took wives without getting married; and then Dom said: Oh my God, that is the kind of marriage I agree with.”[68] These comments about magical ointments, confession (a Catholic sacrament), and Jesuits did nothing to endear Van den Bosch to his Reformed Protestant neighbors. Dominie Varick would later write that a member of Kingston’s church “told me of a few expressions of Your Rev. (saying that he would affirm them on his own salvation) which would better fit the mouth of a mocker with religion than of a Pastor.”[69]
By the fall of 1688, Van den Bosch was drinking regularly, chasing women (including his servant girl, Elizabeth Vernooy, and her friend Sara ten Broeck, Wessel’s daughter) and fighting violently with his wife.[70] The turning point came in October when he started choking Cornelia one evening after he had celebrated the Lord’s Supper. This finally turned Kingston’s elite against him. The elders (Jan Willemsz, Gerrt bbbbrts, and Dirck Schepmoes) and Deacons Willem (William) De Meyer and Johannes Wynkoop) suspended Van den Bosch from preaching (though he continued to baptize and perform marriages until April 1689).[71] In December they began to take down testimony against him. It had apparently been decided to take the minister to court. Further testimony was collected in April 1689. This was an effort that future Leislerians (Abraham Hasbrouck, Jacob Rutsen) and Anti-Leislerians (Wessel ten Broeck, William De Meyer) cooperated in. De Meyer angrily wrote to the leading Dutch Reformed minister in New York, Henricus Selijns, demanding that something be done. And then the Glorious Revolution intervened.
Definite news of the revolution first reached Ulster at the beginning of May. On April 30, New York’s council, responding to the overthrow of the dominion government in Boston, sent a letter to Albany and Ulster recommending them to “keep the people in peace & to see to their militia well exercised & equipt.”[72] Around this time Kingston’s trustees dropped any overt declaration of loyalty to any sovereign. Neither James nor William seemed to be in charge. News and rumors of the growing unease in and around New York City filtered up along with the constant river traffic, even as stories of Van den Bosch’s deeds spread down. Johannes Wynkoop traveled downriver and “blackened and vilified me in New York and on Long Island,” Van den Bosch complained. Rather than going to court—an uncertain prospect given the shaky political situation—there was now talk of having the other churches in the colony resolve the dispute.[73]
But how? Never before in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church in North America had the moral integrity of one of its ministers been challenged by his congregants. Until now, the only disputes had been over salaries. In Europe there were ecclesiastical institutions to deal with such cases—a court or a classis. In America there was nothing. Over the next several months, as the revolution began, New York’s Dutch ministers tried to come up with a way to deal with Van den Bosch without destroying the fragile fabric of their church. In the days of Dutch rule, when the Dutch Reformed Church was the established church, they might have turned to the civil government for assistance. But now the government, caught in a contested revolution, was of no help.
In Kingston that June, men puzzled over their problematic minister while the revolution on Manhattan took its course: the militiamen occupied the fort, Lieutenant Governor Nicholson fled, and Leisler and the militia proclaimed William and Mary the true sovereigns over New York. The Reverend Tesschenmaker, minister of Schenectady’s Dutch Reformed Church, visited Kingston to inform the people that Selijns had designated him to resolve the dispute. He proposed bringing in “two preachers and two elders of the neighboring churches.” Writing on the same day that Leisler and the militiamen were swearing allegiance to King William and Queen Mary, Van den Bosch told Selijns that “when there is mention made of the expenses to be incurred by a similar call, neither our Consistory nor our Congregation have ears to listen. Well, they say ‘isn’t it enough that we have so long been without the service?’ and ‘shall we still be expected to pay for the quarrels which five persons have introduced among us?’ “[74]
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Already he was displaying a talent for turning his seemingly straightforward case of misbehavior into a politically charged issue pitting the bulk of the congregation against a few of its elite members.
As New York’s government fell apart that summer, the Dutch churches tried to create an authority to handle the Van den Bosch case. In July Van den Bosch and De Meyer sent letters to Selijns saying they would submit themselves to the judgment of the ministers and elders who would come and hear the case. But both qualified their submission to this committee. Van den Bosch submitted legalistically, “Provided the judgment and conclusion of said preachers and elders agree with God’s word and with the Church discipline.” De Meyer retained the right to appeal the decision to the Classis of Amsterdam, which had exerted authority over the Dutch churches in North America since the founding of New Netherland.[75]
De Meyer’s distrust of Selijns added a wrinkle to the emerging split between Leislerians and Anti-Leislerians in Ulster. Selijns was to emerge as one of Leisler’s great opponents. Politically, De Meyer would share this allegiance. But he feared a clerical conspiracy led by Selijns would prevent justice being done to Van den Bosch. He had heard a rumor of Selijns saying that “nobody should think that a Preacher, referring to Dominie Van den Bosch, could not as easily misbehave as an ordinary member.” This was understood to mean that “a minister could not commit any faults (no matter how great they might be) on account whereof he could be absolutely deposed from office.”[76] Rumor and insinuation were undermining both the power of the government to rule and of the church to regulate its members.[77]
It is true Dominie Selijns hoped for reconciliation. He feared Van den Bosch might add to the schism developing in the colony’s church over Leisler. Selijns wrote Van den Bosch of his fear that “through too great imprudence [you] have put yourself in such a condition, that we almost fail to see help”; that “we and God’s Church shall be slandered”; adding a reminder that “to be acknowledged as an example for the flock, and to try to be recognized as such is of too great importance.” Selijns hoped he would learn “what difficulties and troubles may be originated by imprudent preachers, and what judgment may be expected by causing even the least bitterness to the Church of God,” and urged Van den Bosch to “pray Him for the spirit of enlightenment and renewal.” Together with the consistories of New York and Midwout on Long Island, Selijns urged Van den Bosch to examine his conscience and beg pardon if necessary.[78]
Selijns and his colleague Dominie Varick were in the difficult position of wanting to avoid a confrontation while clearly believing Van den Bosch was wrong. They “thought fit not to enquire too deeply into everything, which is undoubtedly to be expected from a meeting of the Classis, where your Rev. will be either deported or at least censured on account of liable accusations.” They wanted, as they put it, “to put the cover on the pot in good time and in hope of greater future prudence, to cover everything with the mantle of charity.” Instead of calling together some sort of classis for what seemed to be a private matter to be resolved by a civil court (and besides, they said, they were not numerous enough to constitute a classis), they proposed that one of them, either Selijns or Varick, go to Kingston to reconcile the two parties “and to burn the reciprocal papers in the fire of love and peace.”[79]
Unfortunately, reconciliation was not the order of the day. Divisions over who could exercise proper authority over whom appeared across the colony. At the beginning of August, Albany’s magistrates set up its own government, which they called the Convention. Two weeks later, the committee of safety on Manhattan declared Leisler the commander-in-chief of the colony’s forces.
In the midst of these events, Van den Bosch penned a long letter to Selijns, making his own conspiratorial views plain and dashing Selijns’s hopes for reconciliation. Instead of regret, Van den Bosch offered defiance. He denied that his enemies could prove anything significant against him, insisted that he was the victim of a slanderous campaign waged by De Meyer, Wessels ten Broeck, and Jacob Rutsen, and claimed to “have composed and written my Apology, in which I extensively explain and prove all the before mentioned things.” His persecution complex leaps off the manuscript: “they dealt with me worse than the Jews dealt with Christ, excepting that they could not crucify me, which makes them feel sorry enough.” He assumed no guilt. Instead he blamed his accusers for depriving his congregation of his preaching. He felt that it was De Meyer who needed to submit to reconciliation. If De Meyer refused, then only “a definitive sentence of a classical meeting, or of the political Court” could restore “love and peace” to the congregation. Van den Bosch’s closing remarks show how far he was from accepting Selijns’s reconciliatory approach. Reacting to the remark that “imprudent preachers” could cause trouble in a congregation, Van den Bosch wrote “I think that instead of imprudent preachers your Rev. intended to say imprudent boors viz. Wessel Ten Broeck and W. De Meyer, who are the cause of all these troubles and difficulties … for it is known to everybody here that Wessel Ten Broek and his wife have seduced my wife, excited her against me, and against my will have maintained her in their house.”[80]
Van den Bosch’s narcissism is palpable. At the same time, he provides hints of how his case was being folded into the mistrust developing between the county’s inhabitants and their elite in Kingston. “Through their evil actions against me they have confirmed the evil reputation held of them by the people of this province,” he wrote. He claimed that he had the support of all in the congregation save “four or five individuals.” Outside intervention was necessary because the congregation was “too much embittered against my opponents, because they are the cause of my not preaching.”[81] Van den Bosch never seems to have understood the developing split between Leislerians and Anti-Leislerians.[82] His was a personal vendetta. But there must have been something persuasive in his accounts of persecution. In September, an Anti-Leislerian writing from Albany noted that “New Jersey, Esopus and Albany with severall of the Townes on long Island would never concur or approve of Leyslaers Rebellion altho’ severall factious and seditious poor people are amongst them who could finde no leader.”[83] Inadvertently, Van den Bosch seems to have stepped into the Leislerian leadership gap. For, by presenting himself as the victim of men known for their sympathies for Albany and opposition to Leisler, he was becoming something of a Leislerian hero. Moving out of the shelter of Kingston’s elite, he now drew a number of supporters who would stick with him through the next two and possibly even three years.
Van den Bosch’s “Leislerian” credentials may have been enhanced by the fact that he drew the enmity of those who were also Leisler’s enemies, like Dominie Varick. In time Varick would be imprisoned for his opposition to Leisler. More capable of confrontation than Selijns, he wrote Van den Bosch a stinging reply. Varick made it clear that there were abundant rumors from very trustworthy sources about his bad behavior and that it was unlikely for a number of reasons that the desired classis could be convened in Kingston. Worse, he had found the tone of Van den Bosch’s last letter insulting to Selijns, “an aged, experienced, learned, pious and peace-loving preacher, who, during a very long time, especially in this country, has rendered, and still is rendering, great services to the Church of God.” Van den Bosch had clearly lost the support of his fellow ministers. Varick concluded, “Don’t you, Dominie, have enough enemies now, in your Reverend’s own house and congregation without trying to create adversaries among your Reverend’s fellow preachers?”[84]
Van den Bosch realized he was in trouble, though he still could not admit to any fault. Now that he could no longer count on his fellow ministers, he made a gesture at the reconciliation they had urged on him months earlier. He responded to Varick, saying that the classis would not be necessary. He would simply forgive his enemies. If this did not work, he would have to leave.[85]
This last-ditch effort to stave off a conviction did not save Van den Bosch from being judged by his fellow churchmen. But it did give the New York area churches grounds for not going to Kingston.[86] As a result, the “ecclesiastical assembly” that met at Kingston in October 1689 did not embody the full authority of the colonial Dutch Church, merely that of the ministers and elders of Schenectady and Albany. Over the course of several days they collected testimony against Van den Bosch. Then, one night they discovered that Van den Bosch had stolen many of their documents. When he refused to admit the obvious, they refused to continue hearing his case. Claiming that he “could not with profit or edification” continue as minister of Kingston, Van den Bosch resigned.[87] Dominie Dellius of Albany would pick up the longstanding tradition of assisting Kingston’s church “from time to time.”[88]
In a letter to Selijns—his last—Van den Bosch complained that “instead of settling our affairs,” the “preachers and deputies of New Albany and of Schenectade” had “made them worse than they were before.” He claimed to be outraged that they had dared judge him without Selijns and Varick being present and refused to accept their condemnation. Nonetheless, he had resigned, saying he “could not live in any further troubles, that they should look for another preacher, and that I should try to find happiness and quiet in some other place.” Varick, Selijns, and their consistories regretted that the situation had ended as poorly as it did, but found Van den Bosch’s departure acceptable. They then raised the difficult question of how Kingston was going to be able to find a new minister. The salary it offered was small and the attractions of Kingston few to potential candidates from the Netherlands.[89] Indeed it would be five years before Kingston’s next minister, Petrus Nucella, arrived. In the meantime, there were those determined to retain their minister, even if he’d fallen out with Kingston’s consistory.
The Struggle
Van den Bosch did not go away. The absence of the churches from New York and Long Island from the assembly at Kingston, and the abrupt way in which Van den Bosch resigned before he could be dismissed, left enough doubt open about his case to legitimate support for him for the next year or more. This was closely linked to popular support for Leisler’s cause. In November Leisler’s lieutenant Jacob Milborne stopped in Ulster County as part of a mission to rally the “country people” from all around Albany to the Leislerian cause.[90] On December 12, 1689, even as the men of Hurley swore their allegiance to King William and Queen Mary, Ulster’s Leislerian sheriff, William de la Montagne, wrote to Selijns that Van den Bosch was still preaching and baptizing and had even announced publicly “that he intends to administer the Holy Supper.” De la Montagne noted that Van den Bosch’s ministrations were causing “great discord in the local congregation.” Clearly, Van den Bosch did not have the support of Leislerians like De la Montagne, who also displayed a certain disdain for the common farmers. “Many simple minded ones follow him” while others “speak evil,” De la Montagne wrote with disapproval. To put an end to these divisions, De la Montagne asked a statement from Selijns “in writing” as to whether or not it was permissible for Van den Bosch to administer the Lord’s Supper, believing his “advice will be very valuable and may lead to quieting the discord.”[91] Selijns would write a number of statements to Hurley and Kingston over the next year making clear the judgment of the New York church that Van den Bosch was unfit to practice his office.[92] But it made no difference.
Who supported Van den Bosch and why? A virtually anonymous bunch, never named in the correspondence or writing a word in his favor in any known source, they could be found across Ulster, even in Kingston. Evidently his greatest backing was in Hurley and Marbletown. A man from Marbletown who had been a deacon in Kingston’s church “separated from us,” Kingston’s consistory wrote, “and collects the alms among his audiences.” The consistory thought part of the appeal was that people would rather hear Van den Bosch preach than listen to the lay reader (probably De la Montagne[93]) read. With him still preaching on Sundays somewhere in Ulster, attendance at Kingston’s church was “very small.”[94] Ulster’s Dutch Reformed church was experiencing a veritable schism.
Van den Bosch’s appeal in Hurley and Marbletown shows he had the support of the farmers who made up the bulk of Ulster’s Leislerians. The condescension evident in the magistrates’ correspondence about them indicates that some sort of a class divide played a role in how people were reacting to him. This was through no conscious effort on Van den Bosch’s part. Van den Bosch was no populist. At one point (drunk) he “slapped his behind and shoes, and filliped his thumb, and said, the Farmers are my slaves.”[95] By this, Van den Bosch meant all the inhabitants of Ulster, including the Wynkoops and De Meyer.
Ethnicity may have been something of a factor. After all, Van den Bosch was a Walloon preaching in a Dutch Reformed church in a predominantly Dutch community. Most of the men who opposed Van den Bosch were Dutch. Van den Bosch had ties of sympathy to the local Walloon community, and the notable Du Bois clan of New Paltz in particular. He married his Walloon servant girl, Elizabeth Vernooy, to a Du Bois.[96] His Dutch friend, riverboat captain Jan Joosten, also associated with the Du Bois.[97] Perhaps Van den Bosch’s Walloon roots created some sort of bond with the local Walloons and Huguenots. If so, it was not one that Van den Bosch himself deliberately cultivated or was even very conscious of. After all, many of the men he felt would support him in his troubles were Dutch: Joosten, Arie Roosa, a man “worthy of belief,”[98] and Benjamin Provoost, the member of the consistory he trusted to tell his story to New York.[99] At the same time, at least some Walloons, such as De la Montagne, opposed him.
Though Van den Bosch certainly did not know or care, he was providing the farming villages with something they wanted. For thirty years Kingston had presided over their religious, political, and economic life. Van den Bosch’s preaching and ministering in Dutch (and possibly French), allowed the outlying villages to establish an unprecedented degree of independence from Kingston and its church. After all, having a church was a significant step in community autonomy. The Van den Bosch affair marked the beginning of a struggle against Kingston’s hegemony that would last well into the eighteenth century.[100]
The colony-wide breakdown of authority in church and state under Leisler’s rule allowed Van den Bosch to remain active through the fall of 1690 and quite possibly well into 1691. In the spring of 1690 Kingston’s consistory complained that he was preaching not just at Hurley and Marbletown, but even at people’s houses in Kingston, causing “many dissensions” in the church. This was around the time when, with the Anti-Leislerian forces weakened, Roeloff Swartwout felt it safe to elect representatives to Leisler’s assembly. Months later, in August, Kingston’s consistory bemoaned that “too many unruly spirits” were “pleased to fish in the presently troubled waters” and disregard Selijns’s written statements. It also wrote to the Classis of Amsterdam to lament the “great breach in our church and only God knows how it is to be healed.”[101] Selijns wrote the Classis in September that “unless your Reverences in your official capacity sustain us—for we in ourselves are without authority and quite powerless—by censuring said Van den Bosch in an open Classical letter sent to us, it may be expected that all things will decline, and the disintegration of the church continue.”[102]
The Classis of Amsterdam was bewildered by the whole affair. After receiving Selijns’s request for help in June 1691, it sent deputies to research its role in New York Dutch church affairs since the English conquest. They found “no instance that the Classis of Amsterdam has had any hand in such business.” Instead, local magistrates and consistories had taken action. So the Classis did not reply. A year later, in April 1692, the Classis wrote to say that it was sorry to hear about the troubles in Kingston’s church, but did not understand them or how to respond to them.[103]
Van den Bosch’s career as a (unwitting) figurehead of local resistance depended heavily on the larger political situation in the colony, even if it did not figure directly in his case. With suspicious rumors and factional bitterness the order of the day, Van den Bosch was able to turn his controversial case into a local cause of defiance against Kingston’s elite. The run of documents about the Van den Bosch affair stops at the end of October 1690. Van den Bosch’s support, or at least his ability to defy the local authorities, did not last much longer, perhaps a year or so at most. Once a new political order had been secured in the wake of Leisler’s execution, his days in Ulster County were numbered. The deacons’ accounts, left blank since January 1687, resume in May 1692 with no mention of him. A brief notice in the ecclesiastical correspondence from October 1692 says he had “left Esopus and gone to Maryland.”[104] In 1696 word arrived that Van den Bosch had died.
Back in Kingston, the local elites patched over the hole that Van den Bosch had made in their social network. How his wife Cornelia had coped in the intervening years we do not know. But by July 1696, she was married to one of her champions, the blacksmith and consistory member Johannes Wynkoop, and had conceived a daughter.[105]
Conclusion
The Van den Bosch scandal had confounded the prevailing Leislerian divide. His outrageous conduct towards women and his disrespect for the local elite actually brought together leading Leislerians and Anti-Leislerians in the common cause of defending a shared sense of propriety. Men with Anti-Leislerian associations did spearhead the attack on Van den Bosch, in particular William de Meyer, the Ten Broeks, the Wynkoops, and Philip Schuyler.[106] But known Leislerians also opposed him: locals Jacob Rutsen (whom Van den Bosch counted as one of his great enemies) and his friend Jan Fokke; Schenectady’s Dominie Tesschenmaker, who led the investigation; De la Montagne, who complained of his continued activities; and last but not least, Leisler himself, who had nothing good to say about him.
The Van den Bosch affair created a significant local distraction that must have blunted the power of local factionalism. Several key figures who were divided over the colony’s Leislerian politics were united in their opposition to Van den Bosch. On the other hand, others who agreed about Leisler disagreed about Van den Bosch. By cutting across the political factionalism of the time, Van den Bosch forced local elites to cooperate who otherwise might not have, while also driving a wedge between Leislerian leaders and their followers. Together this had the effect of muting the ideological differences while heightening local issues, in particular the dominance of Kingston and its church over the rest of the county.
Ulster County thus had its own peculiar set of divisions in 1689, and they would persist for years after Leisler’s execution. Over the next two decades, different pairs of delegates, Leislerian and Anti-Leislerian, would be sent to New York’s assembly, depending on the prevailing political wind. At the local level, the unity of the county’s church was broken. When the new minister, Petrus Nucella, arrived, he seems to have sided with the Leislerians in Kingston, as he did with those in New York.[107] In 1704 Governor Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, explained that “some of the Dutch since their first settling by reason of a division that has happened among them are well inclined to the English Customs & the Established Religion.”[108] Cornbury took advantage of these divisions to intrude Anglicanism into Ulster, sending an Anglican missionary to serve at Kingston. One the most prominent converts would be the Dutch Reformed minister sent over in 1706, Henricus Beys.[109] If Laurentius Van den Bosch can be credited with bestowing a legacy to Ulster, it would be in his peculiar talent for taking advantage of the divisions within the community and bringing them into the heart of its church. He did not cause the fractures, but his failure to even try to heal them made them an abiding part of Ulster’s colonial history.
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Acknowledgments
Evan Haefeli is an Assistant Professor in the History Department of Columbia University. He would like to thank the staffs of the New-York Historical Society, the New York State Archives, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, the Ulster County Clerk’s Office, the Senate House State Historic Site in Kingston, the Huguenot Historical Society of New Paltz, and the Huntington Library for their kind research assistance. He thanks the Huntington Library and the New-York Historical Society for permission to quote from their collections. For their helpful comments and criticisms, he thanks Julia Abramson, Paula Wheeler Carlo, Marc B. Fried, Cathy Mason, Eric Roth, Kenneth Shefsiek, Owen Stanwood, and David Voorhees. He also thanks Suzanne Davies for editorial assistance.
1.� A useful brief overview of events can be found in Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 198–231.
2.� Leisler did not seize power, though this is how his opponents portrayed it from the beginning. Common militiamen made the initial move when they occupied the fort at Manhattan. Simon Middleton stresses that Leisler only took over after the militiamen initiated action, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 88–95. Indeed, when first challenged in July by what authority Leisler acted as he did, he replied, “by the choice of the people of his [militia] company,” Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parson, 1853–87), 3:603 (hereafter cited as DRCHNY).
3.� John M. Murrin, “The Menacing Shadow of Louis XIV and the Rage of Jacob Leisler: The Constitutional Ordeal of Seventeenth-Century New York,” in Stephen L. Schechter and Richard B. Bernstein, eds., New York and the Union (Albany: New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the US Constitution, 1990), 29–71.
4.� Owen Stanwood, “The Protestant Moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of 1688–1689, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46 (July 2007): 481–508.
5.� Recent interpretations of Leisler’s rebellion can be found in Jerome R. Reich, Leisler’s Rebellion: A Study of Democracy in New York (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Lawrence H. Leder, Robert Livingston and the Politics of Colonial New York, 1654–1728 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Charles H. McCormick, “Leisler’s Rebellion,” (PhD diss., American University, 1971); David William Voorhees,” ‘In behalf of the true Protestants religion’: The Glorious Revolution in New York,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1988); John Murrin, “English Rights as Ethnic Aggression: The English Conquest, the Charter of Liberties of 1683, and Leisler’s Rebellion in New York,” in William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright., eds., Authority and Resistance in Early New York (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1988), 56–94; Donna Merwick, “Being Dutch: An Interpretation of Why Jacob Leisler Died,” New York History 70 (October 1989): 373–404; Randall Balmer, “Traitors and Papists: The Religious Dimensions of Leisler’s Rebellion,” New York History 70 (October 1989): 341–72; Firth Haring Fabend, “‘According to Holland Custome’: Jacob Leisler and the Loockermans Estate Feud,” De Haelve Maen 67:1 (1994): 1–8; Peter R. Christoph, “Social and Religious Tensions in Leisler’s New York,” De Haelve Maen 67:4 (1994): 87–92; Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
6.� David William Voorhees, ” ‘Hearing … What Great Success the Dragonnades in France Had’: Jacob Leisler’s Huguenot Connections,” De Haelve Maen 67:1 (1994): 15–20, examines New Rochelle’s involvement; Firth Haring Fabend, “The Pro-Leislerian Farmers in Early New York: A ‘Mad Rabble’ or ‘Gentlemen Standing Up for Their Rights?’ ” Hudson River Valley Review 22:2 (2006): 79–90; Thomas E. Burke, Jr. Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, 1661–1710 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
7.� As a result, local historians have done little more than relate the usual grand narrative of events while plugging in the occasional mention of Ulster, with no analysis of local dynamics. The most extended narrative can be found in Marius Schoonmaker, The History of Kingston, New York, from its Early Settlement to the Year 1820 (New York: Burr Printing House, 1888), 85–89, which does have a pro-Leisler tenor when pressed; see 89, 101.
8.� On the composition of the committee of safety and the ideological context in which Leisler and his supporters acted, see David William Voorhees, ” ‘All Authority Turned Upside Down’: The Ideological Context of Leislerian Political Thought,” in Hermann Wellenreuther, ed., The Atlantic World in the Later Seventeenth Century: Essays on Jacob Leisler, Trade, and Networks (Goettingen, Germany: Goettingen University Press, forthcoming).
9.� The importance of this religious dimension has been particularly emphasized in the work of Voorhees, ” ‘In behalf of the true Protestants religion.’ ” For further evidence of Swartout’s religious sensibility, see Andrew Brink, Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663 (Philadelphia, Pa.: XLibris, 2003 ), 77–78.
10.� Peter Christoph, ed., The Leisler Papers, 1689–1691: Files of the Provincial Secretary of New York relating to the Administration of Lieutenant-Governor Jacob Leisler (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 349 (Hurley declaration). This reprints an earlier translation of the declaration, but does not include the date; see Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parsons, 1848–53), 2:46 (hereafter cited as DHNY).
11.� Edward T. Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York, 7 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: James B. Lyon, 1901–16), 2:986 (hereafter cited as ER).
12.� Christoph, ed. The Leisler Papers, 87, reprints DHNY 2:230.
13.� Philip L. White, The Beekmans of New York in Politics and Commerce, 1647–1877 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1956), 77.
14.� Alphonso T. Clearwater, ed., The History of Ulster County, New York (Kingston, N.Y.: W .J. Van Duren, 1907), 64, 81. The oath of loyalty sworn September 1, 1689, is reprinted in Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, New York (Philadelphia, Pa.: Everts and Peck, 1880), 69–70.
15.� Christoph, ed., Leisler Papers, 26, 93, 432, 458–59, 475, 480
16.� Most notably, Peter R. Christoph, Kenneth Scott, and Kevin Stryker-Rodda, eds., Dingman Versteeg, trans., Kingston Papers (1661–1675), 2 vols. (Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1976); “Translation of Dutch Records,” trans. Dingman Versteeg, 3 vols., Ulster County Clerk’s Office (this includes deacons’ accounts from the 1680s, 1690s, and eighteenth century as well as several documents related to the Lutheran church of Lunenburg). See also the excellent discussion of primary sources in Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston and Ulster County, N.Y. (Kingston, N.Y.: Ulster County Historical Society, 1975), 184–94.
17.� Brink, Invading Paradise; Fried, The Early History of Kingston.
18.� Kingston Trustees Records, 1688–1816, 8 vols., Ulster County Clerk’s Office, Kingston, N.Y., 1:115–16, 119.
19.� Fried, The Early History of Kingston, 16–25. Ulster County was created in 1683 as part of a new county system for all of New York. Like Albany and York, it reflected a title of the colony’s English proprietor, James, Duke of York and Albany and Earl of Ulster.
20.� Philip Schuyler acquired a house and barn lot between those of Henry Beekman and Hellegont van Slichtenhorst in January 1689. He inherited a house lot from Arnoldus van Dyck, of whose will he was executor, February 1689, Kingston Trustees Records, 1688–1816, 1:42–43, 103.
21.� Kingston Trustees Records, 1688–1816, 1:105; Clearwater, ed., The History of Ulster County, 58, 344, for his land in Wawarsing.
22.� Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 152–62; Andrew W. Brink, “The Ambition of Roeloff Swartout, Schout of Esopus,” De Haelve Maen 67 (1994): 50–61; Brink, Invading Paradise, 57–71; Fried, The Early History of Kingston, 43–54.
23.� Kingston and Hurley were associated with Lovelace’s family estates in England, Fried, Early History of Kingston, 115–30.
24.� Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 15. Foxhall, erected in 1672, did not join the ranks of the great New York estates. Chambers had no direct descendants. He married into a Dutch family, which eventually lost interest in preserving the manor and with it the name of Chambers. In the 1750s his Dutch step-grandchildren broke the entail, divided the estate, and dropped his name, Schoonmaker, History of Kingston, 492–93, and Fried, Early History of Kingston, 141–45.
25.� The Dutch element prevailed at Mombaccus, which is originally a Dutch phrase, Marc B. Fried, Shawangunk Place Names: Indian, Dutch and English Geographical Names of the Shawangunk Mountain Region: Their Origin, Interpretation and Historical Evolution (Gardiner, N.Y., 2005), 75–78. Ralph Lefevre, History of New Paltz, New York and its Old Families from 1678 to 1820 (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1992; 1903), 1–19.
26.� Marc B. Fried, personal communication and Shawangunk Place Names, 69–74, 96. Rosendael (Rose Valley) evokes the names of a town in Dutch Brabant, a village in Belgian Brabant, a village with a castle in Gelderland, and a village near Dunkirk. But Fried notes that Rutsen named another property Bluemerdale (Flower Valley), and suggests he was not naming the area after a Low Countries village but was instead “something of an anthophile,” 71. Saugerties had perhaps one or two settlers in 1689. It would not be a proper settlement until the Palatine migration of 1710, Benjamin Meyer Brink, The Early History of Saugerties, 1660–1825 (Kingston, N.Y.: R. W. Anderson and Son, 1902), 14–26.
27.� There were 383 men of militia age in 1703. My population estimates are extrapolated from the 1703 census, when Kingston had 713 free and 91 enslaved people; Hurley, 148 free and 26 enslaved; Marbletown, 206 free and 21 enslaved; Rochester (Mombaccus), 316 free and 18 enslaved; New Paltz (Pals), 121 free and 9 enslaved, DHNY 3:966. With the probable exception of some enslaved Africans, there was very little immigration into Ulster in the 1690s, so virtually all of the population increase would have been natural.
28.� State of the Church in the Province of New York, made by order of Lord Cornbury, 1704, Box 6, Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Ca.
29.� Lefevre, History of New Paltz, 44–48, 59–60; Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York: Becoming American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 174–75.
30.� DHNY 3:966.
31.� New York Colonial Manuscripts, New York State Archives, Albany, 33:160–70 (hereafter cited as NYCM). Dongan made Thomas Chambers major of horse and foot, reinforcing the longstanding English policy of placing this Anglo-Dutch figure at the head of Ulster society. Henry Beekman, who had lived in Esopus since 1664 and was the eldest son of the New Netherland official William Beekman, was made captain of the horse company. Wessel ten Broeck was his lieutenant, Daniel Brodhead his cornet, and Anthony Addison his quartermaster. For the foot companies, Matthias Matthys was made the senior captain for Kingston and New Paltz. The Walloon Abraham Hasbrouck was his lieutenant, though also with the rank of captain, and Jacob Rutgers the ensign. The outlying villages of Hurley, Marbletown, and Mombaccus were combined into a single foot company, dominated by Englishmen: Thomas Gorton (Garton) was captain, John Biggs lieutenant, and Charles Brodhead, son of the former English army captain, ensign.
32.� NYCM 36:142; Christoph, ed., The Leisler Papers, 142–43, 345–48. Thomas Chambers remained major and Matthys Mathys captain, though now only of Kingston’s foot company. Abraham Hasbrouck was promoted to captain of New Paltz’s company. Johannes de Hooges became captain of Hurley’s company and Thomas Teunisse Quick captain of Marbletown’s. Anthony Addison was promoted to captain. He was valued for his bilingual skills, being made “council and translateur” of Ulster’s court of oyer and terminer.
33.� NYCM 36:142; Christoph, ed. The Leisler Papers, 142–43, 342–45. These included William de la Montagne as county sheriff, Nicholas Anthony as the court’s clerk, Henry Beekman, William Haynes, and Jacob bbbbrtsen (noted as a “goed man” in one Leislerian list) as justices of the peace for Kingston. Roeloff Swartwout was collector of the excise as well as the JP for Hurley. Gysbert Crom was Marbletown’s JP, as Abraham Hasbrouck was for New Paltz.
34.� These loyalties would persist. Ten years later, when Albany’s church was plagued with a controversy surrounding its Anti-Leislerian minister Godfridus Dellius, at a time when Leislerians were again in power in the colonial government, Kingston’s Anti-Leislerians stood up in his defense, ER 2:1310–11.
35.� Schuyler only seems to have held the office for about a year, leaving Beekman alone after 1692, Kingston Trustees Records, 1688–1816, 1:122. Beekman and Schuyler are listed as JPs on a document copied in January 1691/2. But after 1692 there is no further sign of Philip Schuyler. By 1693, only Beekman is signing as JP. Schoonmaker, The History of Kingston, 95–110. See also White, The Beekmans of New York, 73–121 for Henry and 122–58 for Gerardus.
36.� Though the death sentence remained in force for ten years, Swartwout died a peaceful death in 1715. Christoph, ed., Leisler Papers, 86–87, 333, 344, 352, 392–95, 470, 532. On Swartwout’s less-than-stellar post-conquest career, see Brink, Invading Paradise, 69–74. Shortly before Roeloff died, he and his son Barnardus were listed in Hurley’s 1715 tax list, Roeloff at a value of 150 pounds, Barnardus at 30, Town of Hurley, Tax Assessment, 1715, Nash Collection, Hurley N.Y., Miscellaneous, 1686–1798, Box 2, New-York Historical Society.
37.� Christoph, ed. The Leisler Papers, 349, 532. For other evidence of Swartwout’s involvement with the Leislerian government, see Brink, Invading Paradise, 75–76.
38.� Brink, Invading Paradise, 182.
39.� Lefevre, History of New Paltz, 456.
40.� DRCHNY 3:692–98. For Livingston’s mission, see Leder, Robert Livingston, 65–76.
41.� Christoph, ed., Leisler Papers, 458, has the November 16, 1690, commission to Chambers to raise Ulster men for service in Albany.
42.� Brink, Invading Paradise, 173–74.
43.� NYCM 33:160; 36:142; Lefevre, History of New Paltz, 368–69; Schoonmaker, History of Kingston, 95–110.
44.� On the distinction between Walloons and Huguenots, see Bertrand van Ruymbeke, “The Walloon and Huguenot Elements in New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century New York: Identity, History, and Memory,” in Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 41–54.
45.� David William Voorhees, “The ‘Fervent Zeal’ of Jacob Leisler,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 51:3 (1994): 451–54, 465, and David William Voorhees, ” ‘Hearing … What Great Success the Dragonnades in France Had’: Jacob Leisler’s Huguenot Connections,” De Haelve Maen 67:1 (1994): 15–20.
46.� “Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, 1689,” Frederick Ashton de Peyster mss., Box 2 #8, New-York Historical Society (hereafter cited as Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch). In 1922 Dingman Versteeg compiled a paginated manuscript translation of the letters that currently lies with the original manuscripts (hereafter cited as Versteeg, trans.).
47.� Jon Butler The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 65, gives the case the most attention of any historian so far: a paragraph.
48.� Butler, Huguenots, 64–65, and Bertrand van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 117.
49.� Butler, Huguenots, 64.
50.�Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of New Paltz, New York, trans. Dingman Versteeg (New York: Holland Society of New York, 1896), 1–2; Lefevre, History of New Paltz, 37–43. For Daillé, see Butler, Huguenots, 45–46, 78–79.
51.� He was working there by September 20, when Selijns mentions him, ER 2:935, 645, 947–48.
52.� Wessel ten Broeck testimony, October 18, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 71.
53.� He was living with the Beekmans in 1689; see testimony of Johannes Wynkoop, Benjamin Provoost, October 17, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 60–61.
54.� “Albany Church Records,” Yearbook of the Holland Society of New York, 1904 (New York, 1904), 22.
55.� Fried, Early History of Kingston, 47, 122–23.
56.� For a description of religious life in a small rural community without regular access to a minister, which makes the important point that the absence of a minister does not indicate the absence of piety, see Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 133–64.
57.� Kingston Consistory to Selijns and Varick, spring 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 79.
58.� Van Gaasbeecks’s story can be followed in ER 1:696–99, 707–08, 711. Contemporary copies of the petitions to Andros and the Classis are in Edmund Andros, misc. mss., New-York Historical Society. Laurentius’s widow, Laurentina Kellenaer, married Thomas Chambers in 1681. His son Abraham, adopted by Chambers as Abraham Gaasbeeck Chambers, entered colonial politics in the early eighteenth century, Schoonmaker, History of Kingston, 492–93.
59.� On Weeksteen, see ER 2:747–50, 764–68, 784, 789, 935, 1005. Weeksteen’s last known signature is on the deacons’ accounts of January 9, 1686/7, “Translation of Dutch Records,” trans. Dingman Versteeg, 3 vols., Ulster County Clerk’s Office, 1:316. His widow, Sarah Kellenaer, remarried in March 1689, Roswell Randall Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Registers of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston, Ulster County, New York (New York:1891), Part 2 Marriages, 509, 510.
60.� New York Consistory to Kingston Consistory, October 31, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 42.
61.� Varick mentioned that “somebody” had praised Van den Bosch highly before the “troubles in Esopus broke out,” Varick to Vandenbosch, August 16, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 21.
62.� Ecclesiastical Meeting held at Kingston, October 14, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 49; Selijns to Hurley, December 24, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 78.
63.�Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of New Paltz, New York, trans. Dingman Versteeg (New York: Holland Society of New York, 1896), 1–2; Lefevre, History of New Paltz, 37–43.
64.� Daillé made occasional visits but did not live there. In 1696 he would move to Boston. See Butler, Huguenots, 45–46, 78–79.
65.� Wessel ten Broeck testimony, October 18, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 70. Lysnaar is a common spelling of Leisler in colonial documents, David Voorhees, personal communication, September 2, 2004.
66.� Ecclesiastical Meeting held at Kingston, October 14, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 51–52.
67.� Ecclesiastical Meeting held at Kingston, October 15, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 53–54.
68.� Ecclesiastical Meeting held at Kingston, October 15, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 68–69.
69.� Varick to Vandenbosch, August 16, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 21.
70.� Deposition of Grietje, wife of Willem Schut, April 9, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 66–67; Marya ten Broeck testimony, October 14, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 51; Lysebit Vernooy testimony, December 11, 1688, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 65.
71.� In June Van den Bosch referred to “the confusion which for nine months has agitated our congregation” and left the people “without the service,” Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns June 21, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 5–6. For the baptisms and weddings, see Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Registers, Part 1 Baptisms, 28–35, and Part 2 Marriages, 509.
72.� DRCHNY 3:592.
73.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, May 26, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 2.
74.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, June 21, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 5.
75.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, July 15, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 3–4; Wilhelmus De Meyer to Selijns, July 16, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 1.
76.� Ecclesiastical Meeting held at Kingston, October 14, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 50; Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, October 21, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 38.
77.� Pieter Bogardus, whom De Meyer charged with spreading the rumor, later denied it, Selijns to Varick, October 26, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 37. The New York churches rebuked the “Upland” churches for giving credit to De Meyer’s reliance on “hearsay,” Selijns, Marius, Schuyler and Varick to the Churches of n. Albany and Schenectade, November 5, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 43–44.
78.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, August 6, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 7–17; Consistories of New York and Midwout reply to Van den Bosch, August 14 & 18, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 18–18f.
79.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, August 6, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 7–17; Consistories of New York and Midwout reply to Van den Bosch, August 14 & 18, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 18–18f.
80.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, August 6, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 7–17.
81.� Laurentius Van den Bosch to Selijns, August 6, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 9, 12, 14.
82.� He did, along with most other Ulsterites, both pro- and anti-Leisler, take the oath of allegiance on September 1, 1689, DHNY 1:279–82.
83.� DRCHNY 3:620.
84.� Varick to Vandenbosch, August 16, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 19–24.
85.� Vandenbosch to Varick, September 23, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 25.
86.� Varick later explained to Kingston’s consistory that Van den Bosch had written a letter “in which he sufficiently rejected our meeting, so that we judged that our coming to you would have greatly prejudiced our congregation, and would not at all have benefited yours,” Varick to Kingston Consistory, November 30, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 46–47.
87.� Ecclesiastical Meeting held at Kingston, October 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 49–73; Dellius and Tesschenmaeker to Selijns, 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 32–34.
88.� ER 2:1005.
89.� See the correspondence in Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 36–44.
90.� DRCHNY 3:647.
91.� De la Montagne to Selijns, December 12, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 76.
92.� Selijns to “the Wise and Prudent gentlemen the Commissaries and Constables at Hurley,” December 24, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 77–78; Selijns & Jacob de Key to elders of Kingston, June 26, 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 81–82; Kingston’s consistory to Selijns, August 30, 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 83–84; Selyns and consistory to Kingston, October 29, 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 85–86.
93.� De la Montagne had been the voorleser, or reader, in the 1660s and seems to have continued in this function through the 1680s, Brink, Invading Paradise, 179.
94.� Kingston elders to Selijns, spring(?) 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 79–80. See also Selijns and New York Consistory to Kingston Consistory, October 29, 1690, which urges Kingston “to admonish the neighboring churches of Hurly and Morly not to identify themselves with this evil,” Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 85.
95.� Wessel ten Broeck testimony, October 18, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 71a.
96.� “Lysbeth Varnoye” married Jacob du Bois on March 8, 1689, with Van den Bosch’s blessing, Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Registers, Part 2 Marriages, 510. Further evidence of her connection to the Walloon community is that, when she gave testimony on Van den Bosch’s behavior on December 11, 1688, she swore it before Abraham Hasbrouck, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 65.
97.� NYCM 23:357 records Joosten’s request to settle in Marbletown in 1674. Thereafter he witnesses a number of baptisms involving Rebecca, Sarah, and Jacob Du Bois, along with Gysbert Crom (Leisler’s justice for Marbletown) and others, Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Registers, Part 1 Baptisms, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 19, 20. For Crom’s commission—he did not have one before—see NYCM 36:142.
98�Van den Bosch to Selijns, August 6, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 7. Arie was the son of Aldert Heymanszen Roosa, who brought his family over from Gelderland in 1660, Brink, Invading Paradise, 141, 149.
99�”Benjamin Provoost, who is one of our elders, and who is at present at new York, will be able to inform your Rev. verbally of our affairs and condition,” Van den Bosch to Selijns, June 21, 1689, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 5.
100�Randall Balmer, who does not mention Van den Bosch, provides an overview of some of the divisions, attributing them to the Leislerian conflict, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), passim.
101�Kingston elders to Selijns, spring(?) 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 79–80; Kingston consistory to Selijns, August 30, 1690, Letters about Dominie Vandenbosch, Versteeg trans., 83–84; ER 2:1005–06.
102�ER 2:1007.
103�ER 2:1020–21.
104�”Translation of Dutch Records,” 3:316–17; ER 2:1005–06, 1043.
105.� There is no marriage record for Cornelia and Johannes preserved in either Kingston or Albany. But on March 28, 1697, they baptized a daughter, Christina, in Kingston. They would go on to have at least three more children. Cornelia was Johannes’s second wife. He had married Judith Bloodgood (or Bloetgatt) in July 1687. Judith died sometime after giving birth to her second child in 1693. Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Registers, Part 1 Baptisms, 31, 40, 49, 54, 61, 106. Johannes Wynkoop is noted as blacksmith, October 1692, when he buys some property near Wessel ten Broeck’s land, Kingston Trustees Records, 1688–1816, 1:148.
106.� Schoonmaker, History of Kingston, 95–110, for Ulster’s Pro- and Anti-Leislerian assemblymen. Jan Fokke witnessed the baptism of Jacob Rutgers’s (Rutsen’s) son Jacob in November 1693, Hoes, ed., Baptismal and Marriage Registers, Part 1 Baptisms, 40.
107.� ER 2:1259.
108.� State of the Church in the Province of New York, made by order of Lord Cornbury, 1704, Box 6, Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Ca.
109.� Balmer, Babel of Confusion, 84–85, 97–98, 102.
By Evan Haefeli