As early as August, 1695, word had come that Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, was to be the new governor of Massachusetts. Later it was said that he would not arrive till spring; and when spring came the choice had not even been determined upon. It was not till November, 1697, that he was commissioned governor of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He landed in New York on the 2d of April, 1698, and on the 12th a sloop reached Boston, bringing tidings of his arrival, and three days later the council received a communication from him. For a year and more he stayed in New York, sending his instructions to Stoughton, who as lieutenant-governor directed the council’s action. On the 26th of May, 1699, the governor reached Boston;[181] and it was not long before he manifested his sympathy with the party of which Elisha Cooke was the leader. This gentleman, who was so obnoxious to the Mather party, had been negatived by Phips, when chosen to the council; but on Phips’s withdrawal, his election had escaped a veto, and he now sat at the council board. Mather had succeeded, in 1697, in forcing upon the legislature a charter, in the main of his own drafting, which gave to Harvard College the constitution that he liked, but he manœuvred in vain to secure his own appointment from the General Court to proceed to England to solicit the sanction of the Privy Council; and it was not long before he found that the new governor had vetoed his charter, and in 1701 the assembly legislated him out of office, as the president of the college. This first blow to the dominance of the Mathers was reassuring, and Bellomont was a leader for the new life to rally about.[182] He was a man of complacent air. He liked, if we may believe him, to hear sermons well enough to go to King’s Chapel on Sundays, and to the meeting-house for the Thursday lectures. He could patronize the common people with a sufficient suavity; and when the General Court, after their set purpose, voted him a present instead of a salary, if he was not much pleased, he took his £1,000 as the best substitute he could get for the £1,200 which he preferred. Boston, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was not so bad a seat of a viceroyalty, after all, for a poor earl, who had a living to make, and was debarred the more lucrative methods of trade. He reported back to the Lords of Trade abundant figures of what he found to be the town’s resources and those of his government; but the favor which he was receiving from the good people might have been less had they known that these same reports of his set forth his purpose to find Englishmen, rather than New Englanders, for the offices in his gift.