Downtown Looks Back at The Worst Governor of Them All: Edwrd Hyde

by | Jan 6, 2016 | News

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New York has been both blessed and cursed by its leadership, but it never has had bland leaders. Something about the island city tends to jazz things up and attract the ambitious in droves. From Peter Stuyvesant to Mayor Bloomberg, they come (from Holland and Massachusetts, respectively) and are lit up as if on a stage, emerging as larger-than-life figures with the audacity to think they could control such an experiment in mayhem as Manhattan. Boss Tweed was perhaps the most powerful; Jimmy Walker perhaps the most corrupt. Indeed a lengthy and fascinating book could be made of the various mayors and governors of New York over 400 years. William Randolph Hearst, the press magnate, wanted the job, but couldn’t get over the people’s bitter aftertaste of his own brand of “yellow journalism,” which the public well recalled. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former governor Nelson Rockefeller both aspired to higher office, which denied them. Only the Roosevelt cousins (Theodore and Franklin) were able to make the jump to the presidency from the governorship, and no mayor has ever gone the distance to the White House. Fiorello LaGuardia was perhaps the best beloved (especially when he started reading the comics over the radio during a newspaper strike), and John Lindsay, while not admired much these days, was a very decent man with a wonderful campaign slogan, which older readers may recall: simple black lapel buttons with the words in bright white saying “Give a Damn.” Senator Bobby Kennedy wasn’t able to see how far he could have gone, but perhaps our current secretary of state and former senator from New York, Hillary Clinton may yet have a run at some lofty office.

For a truly rotten governor, impossibly high-handed and so crooked he probably needed a corkscrew to get his trousers on, we’d have to cast our spyglass back to the early 1700s and take up the remarkable case of Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury (and later the 3rd Earl of Clarendon).

Now, keep in mind how compact this thriving seaport was at that time. The wall, which was at present-day Wall Street, came down in 1699, and a new city hall was built at the intersection of Wall and Broad

streets. In 1704, we are told, there were 5,000 people living in 750 houses, and many of them were made of brick and stone, lessening the ever-present fear of fire. Sixteen wells were taken over by the authorities, and another 15 were dug to accommodate the increasing population. The houses were tidy, but the streets were a wreck. Eventually homeowners would be required to pave the street in front of their building, and this helped a little, but the chance of being run down by horses and carriages, to say nothing of the roaming packs of almost-wild pigs, hardly lent any coziness to this dark seaport. Footpads (highway robbers on foot) and thugs awaited the unwary after sunset to such an extent that late-night travelers dared go out, if at all, only in pairs or threesomes. In 1697 each house was required to show some light “in the Darke time of the moon,” which went some ways toward promoting safety. Same old New York, eh? It doesn’t pay to wander around after dark with your head in the clouds.

Onto this scene as part of the push for Anglicization of the port city arrived one Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, a well-connected British noble. Indeed, his aunt, Lady Anne Hyde, would later be King James II’s bride, and his grandfather was the 1st Earl of Clarendon. An Oxford graduate and Tory member of Parliament, Hyde was also a member of the Royal Regiment of Dragoons (dragoons being heavily armed and armored cavalrymen), and Master of Horse to Prince George of Denmark. So far his CV would seem to indicate both brain and brawn. But the first thing he did was attack the Dutch Reformed Church, attempting to impose the Trinity Church and its brand of Church of England faith—the official religion of the colony—much to the discontent of Reformed Church followers. Hyde also started handing out huge land grants, never a good sign in a governor, with one of them being as large as half of Connecticut: some two million acres. But there was more to Viscount Cornbury than merely rewarding his backers and punishing people of other faiths.

People began to talk, as they will, about the time he rode his horse into the city’s most prominent coffeehouse, the King’s Arms (just north of Trinity Church on Broadway), which might just indicate high spirits, but it was imputed that there was a lack of sobriety in his actions. Indeed, what might have been passed off as all right in Dodge City in the 1870s was an unusual action for a social meeting place in the New York of the early 1700s, where much business and politics were done. And, after all, horse-and-polo-mad Vanderbilts and Astors of the Gilded Age are shown in one photograph having an entire meal on horseback—but for Hyde, this was just the beginning.

It began to be noised about that the fellow wore dresses . . . indeed, that he liked to wear dresses, and sometimes walked the ramparts of the fort dressed as a woman, or else sprang out from behind a handy tree to alarm passersby with his cross-dressing and loud “shrieks.” Good Lord! This, evidently, was beyond the pale; although transvestism has been with us since the dawn of time, and is largely agreed to be a harmless pastime. Well, it was one thing to be a crooked liar, but quite another to be the queen’s appointed governor in crinoline and lace!

A tidy groundswell of opinion now threatened Hyde’s authority, and those who were not fans of his religious oppressions were hardly taken by his private and not-so-private practices. Fortunately for them, Hyde’s transgressions were fairly manifest, such as the 1,500 pounds for harbor improvements that somehow went missing. He had formerly been very proud of his wife’s ears (!), but her death in 1707 (she rests in the Trinity graveyard) won him little sympathy—not least because it was reported he attended her funeral dressed as a woman. Did he actually open the New York Assembly in a hooped gown and fancy head gear, waving a fan? And the lovely portrait of Viscount Cornbury that is in the possession of the New York Historical Society, could that really be him?

As it turns out, the entire cross-dressing accusation seems to have been a bum rap, just another shovel of mud to be piled on a political leader with a heavy-handed and corrupt way about him. There was no eyewitness testimony—just rumors in letters, and not many of those. Be that as it may, he was recalled to England to face charges of corruption, and saved only by the death of his father, which made him the 3rd Earl of Clarendon, and thus unable to be charged with such things. Oh, nobility does have its uses! This didn’t, however, save him from dying in poverty in 1725.

Can we find a worse governor? It would be hard. Hyde had an agenda when he arrived, and lined his own pockets along the way with a reckless abandon that showed little stealth and no honor. And not for the last time, New Yorkers demanded better leadership and flexed their muscles to an unusual degree. Mere colonies were expected to take the leaders they were offered, and get on with it. But starting in New York, it seemed almost as if new rules applied in the New World, and in time those new rules would include freedom and self-governance. New Yorkers come by their bold audacity honestly, honed over centuries of squabbling, and only bold leaders would prove fit to rule and control such a beehive of activity—and that’s just the elected leaders. After all, neither Robert Moses nor Cornelius Vanderbilt ever stood to election—and, fortunately, both of them had far greater influence on Manhattan than the now-almost-forgotten Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury.

—by Samuel A. Southworth 

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