Dr. Bullivant: (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches")Hawthorne, Nathaniel
History
Dr. Bullivant: (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
New England -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Anecdotes
Among the foremost advocates of the royal usurpations was Dr. Bullivant.
Gifted with a smart and ready intellect, busy and bold, he acquired
great influence in the new government, and assisted Sir Edmund Andros,
Edward Randolph, and five or six others, to browbeat the council, and
misrule the Northern provinces according to their pleasure. The
strength of the popular hatred against this administration, the actual
tyranny that was exercised, and the innumerable fears and jealousies,
well grounded and fantastic, which harassed the country, may be best
learned from a work of Increase Mather, the "_Remarkable Providences of
the Earlier Days of American Colonization_." The good divine (though
writing when a lapse of nearly forty years should have tamed the
fierceness of party animosity) speaks with the most bitter and angry
scorn of "'Pothecary Bullivant," who probably indulged his satirical
propensities, from the seat of power, in a manner which rendered him an
especial object of public dislike. But the people were about to play
off a piece of practical full on the Doctor and the whole of his
coadjutors, and have the laugh all to themselves. By the first faint
rumor of the attempt of the Prince of Orange on the throne, the power of
James was annihilated in the colonies, and long before the abduction of
the latter became known, Sir Edmund Andros, Governor-General of New
England and New York, and fifty of the most obnoxious leaders of the
court party, were tenants of a prison. We will visit our old
acquaintance in his adversity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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