frontier posts in order to protect the northern colonies as one might who had hopes to be one day the general governor of the English colonies. They intrigued in such a way that he lost popularity, when he had none too much of it. He seemed generous, if we do not narrowly inspect his motives, when he said he would pay the Virginia share of the war money, if the assembly did not care to, and when he gave half of a gratuity which the assembly had given him, to help found the college of William and Mary. This last act had a look of magnanimity, for James Blair, who had been chiefly instrumental in getting the college charter, and who also in a measure, as the commissary of the Bishop of London, disputed Nicholson’s executive supremacy, had laughed at his Excellency for his truculent ways. The governor had opposed the “Cohabitation” policy as respects towns, and a certain Burwell affair, in which as a lover he was not very complacent in being worsted, had also made him enemies powerful enough to prefer charges in England against him, and he was recalled,—later to be met in New England and Acadia, and as Sir Francis Nicholson to govern in Carolina. His service in Virginia was interrupted by his career in Maryland, ending in 1698, during which Sir Edmund Andros ruled in the larger colony. This knight’s New England experience had told on him for the better; but it had not wholly weaned him from some of his pettish ways. He brought with him the charter of the College of William and Mary, and had the infelicity to find in Blair, its first president, the adversary who was to throw him. This Scotchman was combative and stubborn enough for his race, and equally its representative in good sense and uprightness. Blair insisted upon his prerogatives as the representative of the bishop, and taking the grounds of quarrel with the governor to England he carried his point, and Nicholson was recalled from Maryland to supply the place of Andros. The new college graduated its first class in 1700, and at about the same time Claude Philippe de Richebourg and his Huguenots introduced a new strain into the blood of Virginia. The accession of Queen Anne led to the conferring of the titular governorship in 1704 upon George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney, who was to hold the office nominally for forty years. For five years the council ruled under Edward Jenings, their president, and when, December 15, 1704, he made his proclamation of the victory of Blenheim, it was a satisfaction to record that Colonel Parke, of Virginia, had been the officer sent by Marlborough to convey the news to the queen.[607]