Governor Belcher of New Jersey (1748-1757), who had been worsted in a heated salary contest in Massachusetts (1730-1741), and had profited by experience, was now one of the few executives who understood how to handle an assembly. By an obliging temper he readily secured the passage of such revenue bills as were essential to the proper defence of the colony in the French and Indian war, and avoided serious dispute. 126. Governors of New England Colonies. Sidenote: Phipps's difficulties in Massachusetts. The brief term of Sir William Phipps (1692-1695), as governor of Massachusetts,--a province then extending all the way from Rhode Island to New Brunswick, with the exception of New Hampshire,--was filled with bitterness and disappointment. At the outset of his career and the inauguration of the new charter (page 176, § 73), the assembly in the absence of any provision under that head, enacted that taxes were only to be levied in the province with the consent of the assembly. Had this rule been accepted by the Crown it would have left little occasion for quarrels between governor and people; its rejection by the home government left the door open to a train of events which ended, eighty-four years later, in continental independence. The witchcraft delusion (page 190, § 80) had stirred the colony to its centre, and Phipps gained no friends from his attitude in that affair; he angered Boston and crippled its political influence by securing the passage of a law (1694) that deputies to the assembly must be residents of the districts they represented; and his temper was so testy that at the time of his recall he was engaged in a quarrel with nearly every leading man in the province. Sidenote: The Earl of Bellomont, and Massachusetts. The Earl of Bellomont came over in 1698 as governor of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. In November the General Court of Massachusetts invited him to visit Boston "so soon as the season of the year might comfortably admit his undertaking so long and difficult a journey." In the following spring (1699) he responded to the call. In Massachusetts Bellomont won favor by siding, as he had in New York, with the popular party, and recommending to his government the introduction of many reforms. In Rhode Island, where he tarried by the way, he found much to dissatisfy him, and reported the people as being ignorant, in a state of political and moral disorder, with an indifferent set of public officials, who were corrupt and abetted the pirates who swarmed in Narragansett Bay. Bellomont promptly devoted himself to the suppression of these sea-robbers, and in the year of his own death (1701) brought the notorious Kidd to the gallows. Bellomont's conciliatory attitude towards Massachusetts did not please the English Board of Trade, which sent him warning that the colonists had "a thirst for independency," as was particularly exemplified in their "denial of appeals."