Episode Details

In 1681, the king's own customs collector stood trial for treason in New York — charged by the colony's merchants with levying war on free Englishmen, for the crime of collecting the duties his sealed commission ordered him to collect. The richest harbor in English America belonged outright to the Duke of York, brother and heir to the king. He had a governor, a fort, a garrison, and a collector on the dock. And he could not get his money off the wharf.

This is the story of how a colony with no charter, no assembly, and no vote brought the future king of England to the edge of an empty treasury without firing a shot. The Duke owned New York as private property and governed it from across an ocean, by instruction, with no elected body and no voice for the governed. The English towns of Long Island asked for an assembly and were refused; they asked again, and a governor had their petition burned. Edmund Andros bound the Iroquois to the Crown with a chain of silver and jailed a fellow governor over a customs line. And the merchants, refused every other way, found the one thing a government without consent cannot do. What they made the Duke do about it — and why he, of all men, could be made to do it — is a lesson he would carry with him toward a throne.