Benjamin Bullivant

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Benjamin Bullivant was an English doctor and pharmacist. From 1686 to 1688 he was Attorney General of the Dominion of New England .

Life

Nothing certain is known about its origin. According to a contemporary account by John Dunton , he came from a noble family, but later historians have pointed out numerous plagiarisms and errors in Dunton's work, so that it cannot be considered a reliable source. Bullivant probably came to Boston from London in 1685 , apparently bringing his wife with him to New England. It is not documented, but on January 3, 1686 the church records of the Old South Church recorded the baptism of his daughter Hannah. However, unlike almost all of Boston’s long-established citizens, Bullivant was not a Puritan. In 1686 he was one of the founders of the King's Chapel , the city's first Anglican church, and served (together with a Richard Bankes) as its first community leader.

In 1684, King Charles II had suspended the old Massachusetts charter and placed the colony under the rule of a governor appointed by him. In 1686, under his successor James II, all New England colonies were combined with New York to form a crown colony, the " Dominion of New England ". Bullivant quickly made a career as an Anglican newcomer to the new regime. The founding of the King's Chapel was one of the steps with which the dominance of the old Puritan elite in Boston was to be broken. Bullivant practiced first as a doctor, but was in 1686 by the new Governor Joseph Dudley Attorney General ( Attorney General appointed) New England, even though he had no legal training, and after Dudley's replacement by Edmund Andros confirmed in December 1686 in this office. In this role he often came into conflict with the old Puritan elite of the city and made himself very unpopular because of his often mocking and condescending manner. The Mathers, one of the most powerful families in town, harbored a particular grudge against him after Bullivant and the no less hated Edward Randolph tried to arrest Increase Mather . His son Cotton Mather describes the episode in Parentator (1724) and reviles Bullivant as one 'Pothecary Bullivant, a Memorable Justice (and Something else!) . On June 20, 1688, Bullivant was replaced by George Farwell as Attorney General, but appointed Justice of the Peace, and remained one of Andros' closest confidants. In the course of the Boston uprising against Andros in April 1689 , Bullivant was also jailed for a few weeks. After his release, he initially stayed in Boston. His diary from the summer of 1690, which documented what he saw as the arrogant airs of the Puritan elites who had regained power, found its way onto the London Board of Trade . He also sent a petition to the new King William III. , in which he described the circumstances of his arrest, and thus influenced the decision of the king not to reinstate the old Massachusetts charter and instead issue a new charter and appoint Sir William Phips as the new royal governor. In the meantime Bullivant returned to England, but later settled in Boston again, where he practiced as a doctor again. His diary of a trip from Boston to Philadelphia made in 1697, with its descriptions of everyday colonial life, is of some interest for historical scholars as a contemporary document.

Nathaniel Hawthorne portrayed Bullivant in his biographical-literary sketch Dr. Bullivant , which is an attempt to bring to life an obscure person who is just a side note in history. Bullivant also appears in Hawthorne's short story The Gray Champion (1835), which is about the uprising against Andros. Both works emphasize that it was Bullivant's wit and ridicule in particular that made him so hated among the Puritans of Boston.

Fonts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Dunton: The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Late Citizen of London; Written by Himself in Solitude. S. Malthus, London 1705. pp. 134-135.
  2. ^ Charles McLean Andrews: Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690 . Charles Scriner's Sons, New York 1915. p. 171.
  3. ^ Henry Wilder Foote: Annals of King's Chapel from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day . Volume I. Little, Brown and Co., Boston 1882. pp. 46ff.
  4. ^ William T. Davis: History of the Judiciary of Massachusetts: Including the Plymouth and Massachusetts Colonies, the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, and the Commonwealth . The Boston Book Company, Boston 1900. pp. 53, p. 79.
  5. ↑ Cotton Mather: Parentator. Memoirs of Remarkables in the Life and the Death of the Ever-Memorable Dr. Increase Mather. Who Expired, August 23, 1723. In: William J. Scheick (Ed.): Two Mather Biographies: Life and Death and Parentator. Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ 1989. pp. 141ff.
  6. ^ Herbert L. Osgood: The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century . Volume I. Columbia University Press, New York 1924. p. 123.
  7. ↑ Nathaniel Hawthorne: Dr. Bullivant . In: Roy Harvey Pearce, William Charvat et al. (Ed.): The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne , Volume XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse . Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH 1994. pp. 75-83.
  8. ^ Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Gray Champion . In: Roy Harvey Pearce, William Charvat et al. (Ed.): The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne , Volume IX: Twice-Told Tales . Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH 1974. pp. 9-18.
personal data
SURNAME Bullivant, Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English doctor and pharmacist
DATE OF BIRTH 17th century
DATE OF DEATH after 1697