Well, if it’s 11 September, it’s clearly the 315th anniversary of the New York Assembly submitting its list of grievances against the city’s governor, Lord Cornbury: he was corrupt, incompetent, and forever putting on his wife’s clothes.
If one account is anything to go by, he did this in the most inappropriate of circumstances
Another says he only got the job because he was Queen Anne’s cousin, and was “a thief, a bigot, a grafter, [and] a drunk” to such an extent that he helped to cause the American Revolution and inspire the legislation that makes it possible to remove a president from office.
Sadly, both accounts are, apparently, not anything to go by, and are merely printing the legend. He might not have donned so much as one frock, and may simply have been a victim of Whig propaganda.
That last extract is from 1988’s snappily titled Fall From Grace: Sex, Scandal, and Corruption in American Politics from 1702 to the Present, which says he insisted from the start on being called His High Mightiness, and stood up to make a speech at one his first functions:
Then, he opened the New York Assembly dressed in the style of Queen Anne herself, and when questioned about the wisdom of this, replied imperiously:
I think we can all agree that the world would be a better and more entertaining place if all this were true — although he was also accused of selling land to his friends, and oppressing the Quakers, which are admittedly less amusing.
James Grant Wilson’s 1892 tome, The Memorial History of the City of New-York, is equally balanced:
Apparently, he assisted William of Orange in the ‘Glorious Revolution’, not due to “high, patriotic, Brutus-like feeling, but simply … innate baseness of character”, and was made governor of New York as a reward.
However, the Fall from Grace book was written by a TV producer, and James Grant Wilson was a newspaperman. What might we discover if we read, perhaps, a book by an actual historian who goes back to the primary sources…?
In the decades between the Restoration in 1660 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714 with — succession to the throne under repeated challenge — political reputations were more susceptible to attack than in perhaps any other period of modern English history … Politics were further inflamed by the goadings of an emergent Grub Street press, as print was released from prior restraint by the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695. The transatlantic setting, moreover, within which colonial governors functioned was especially likely to breed suspicion and rumor, with communications extending across vast stretches of space and time subject to all manner of mischief. In short, a climate of conspiracy, slander, and general foul play pervaded the public life of the Anglo- American world.
That’s from Patricia Bonomi’s The Lord Cornbury Scandal — The Politics of Reputation in British America, and she goes on to say:
Of what does the evidence for Cornbury’s presumed derelictions consist? Surprisingly little, once it is sifted and isolated for scrutiny. Three colonials, all members of an opposition faction that rose against Cornbury’s imperial program in New York and New Jersey, wrote four letters between 1707 and 1709 relaying a rumor that Governor Cornbury frequently wore women’s clothes. In addition, a few early documents include vague and contradictory charges that he took bribes and misapplied government funds. There the contemporary evidence trails off.
One of the major sources for the more fun version is an 1820 family memoir in which the author remembers her grandmother (who’d been a teenager when Cornbury was governor) repeating the gossip.
Then there’s that portrait of Cornbury in drag at the top of the thread, now owned by the New-York Historical Society. The label stating it’s him was added in 1867, “more than 140 years after Cornbury’s death”.
Nobody knows who it’s of, who it’s by, or where it came from, but everyone knows it’s Cornbury, and reaches for it whenever they have to illustrate something like this from New York magazine in 2012:
What really did for Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, and Viscount Cornbury, was being a Tory appointee after the Whigs took over. It was them/their allies who wrote the letters about his… choice of clothing.
He was recalled in 1708, and — without the protection of high office — was flung into a debtor’s prison (or put under house arrest) for living beyond his means. But he’d had to borrow because the NY and New Jersey assemblies wouldn’t pay his salary.
He was in prison (or under house arrest) for 17 months, apparently, but then his father died — which some accounts say gave him the money to pay off his debts. In fact, the crucial thing he inherited was a peerage, which gave him immunity from civil actions, and therefore freedom.
He went back to England, and Queen Anne gave him a pension “of two thousand pounds a year, a clear sign of appreciation for his imperial service”.
I may be guilty here of relying on one source myself, but seeing as it’s by a Professor Emerita of History at New York University, and comes with 100 pages of notes, I think it… carries more weight than the others.
No, I think the real question here is: assuming this *is* a portrait of a society lady of the early 1700s, was the poor woman safely dead before everyone started saying she looked like a man?
