In February of 1693, with his objective realized and a charter for “Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge” in hand, James Blair began to think of his return from London to Virginia and his next task: to organize, build, and open William and Mary to its first students. Before he could depart England, however, there were a few other things to complete. Having earlier determined that “at first a Grammar school being the only thing that we could go upon,” he had to find a grammar master and an usher to assist the master. Securing the latter apparently caused him no difficulty, but he had less success in identifying someone to “help me to a good English School-master.” With only a brief time left before he embarked for Virginia, Blair settled on a fellow Scottish clergyman, the Reverend Mungo Inglis.^[1]

Blair’s original instructions also required him to obtain a grant of arms, and so he now approached the College of Heralds with his request. On May 16, 1694, the heralds granted the familiar coat of arms that depicts a college building in silver on a green field with a gold sun at half orb against a blue sky.^[2] The commissary had now completed his English mission, not only assuring the charter and English financial backing but also gaining equal assurance that as president for life he would be the dominant fi gur e in shaping the new institution. By the end of March, he was ready to depart Portsmouth.^[3]

The Contest with Governor Andros, 1693–97

Blair returned to an unexpectedly difficult political climate in which to launch the College. His old ally Francis Nicholson, although still a trustee of William and Mary, was now governor of Maryland. The new Virginia governor, Sir Edmund Andros, was an experienced but highly unpopular colonial administrator. He had been a staunch ally of the deposed James II and governor of the Dominion of New England, an ill-fated effort under James to draw the New England colonies and New York together under a single government more firmly subject to royal control. Andros had already displayed enmity toward Nicholson, and he also had the confidence of those English officials who had opposed lavishing so much crown financial support upon the new Virginia college. Although perceived as a strong advocate of Anglicanism in the colonies, Andros gave no sign of equivalent enthusiasm for the College designed to advance that faith.

Hostility between the governor and the commissary was not long in coming, but for the moment Blair pressed ahead with plans for the College. The General Assembly that convened in the fall of 1693 remained enthusiastic. Early in the session, the burgesses heard a reading of the charter, voted congratulations to Blair and gratitude to the monarchs, and overwhelmingly agreed on Middle Plantation as the site for the College. The College thereby became the first public institution, apart from Bruton Parish Church, to occupy the site that before the end of the decade would become the second capital of the colony and take the name of Williamsburg in honor of the king. Middle Plantation had already developed a cluster of stores, shops, and residences, and there were those who were optimistic about its future. It afforded easy access to the York River by way of a landing on Queen’s Creek, as well as to the James by another landing on what became known as College Creek. It also lay at the junction of primitive roads that connected all the more settled areas of the peninsula between the two rivers.

The choice of Middle Plantation as the location of the College, although clearly a happy one, appeared to be less a matter of convenience for its students and teachers than the first step in a well-orchestrated effort to move the capital from Jamestown to the same location. The strategy became more apparent a few years later when on May Day 1699—the year in which the capital was officially moved—five William and Mary students delivered Latin orations in celebration of the successful establishment of their College. The third young orator—possibly Orlando Jones, son of the rector of Bruton Parish and the grandfather of Martha Washington—devoted his remarks to the advantages of Middle Plantation as the chosen site for William and Mary, predicting that “the colledge will help to make the town.” Jones went on to stress not only the cultural and intellectual advantages but also the economic benefits of attracting tradesmen, builders, and laborers to meet the demands of the institution that was under construction. “We have an opportunity,” he declared, “not only of making a town, but such a town as may equal, if not outdo Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charlestown, and Annapolis.” In all that was said and its timing, few listeners would have missed the end purpose of promoting the new location of the capital.^[4]

As a specific location for the College, the trustees settled on a tract of 330 acres belonging to Captain Thomas Ballard and agreed to a payment of £170. The land lay west of Bruton Parish Church and extended to a ravine and stream that was later dammed to create Lake Matoaka. In modem terms it embraced land that lay on either side of Jamestown Road from its beginning at Duke of Gloucester Street to the Lake Matoaka crossing and also extended along one side of Richmond Road and then along a valley and small stream that drained in a southwesterly direction into what would now be the smaller arm of Lake Matoaka. Although all but a few acres of the land would later be sold by the College, much of it was in time reacquired.^[5] While it had discharged its ceremonial obligations respecting the grant of the charter and approved Middle Plantation as a site for the College, the 1693 assembly was far from uniformly supportive of William and Mary. The members did agree to assist it with a provincial tax of 7.5 percent of the value of furs exported from the colony, but they turned aside a potentially far more lucrative tax on liquors.^[6] Andros at the same time refused to follow his instructions from London to support higher salaries for the Anglican clergy.^[7] At the beginning of 1694, Blair complained to Nicholson that the governor “thought it not fit in any of his Speeches to recommend the business of the College, nor the clergy.”^[8]

In the controversy that was obviously building between the two men, the commissary scored one victory over Andros, however. In 1694 the governor received notice that Blair had been appointed to the governor’s council—a result of Nicholson’s lobbying in London and in contradiction to Andros’s own recommendation against it. The appointment almost certainly angered some incumbent councillors who had become allies of Andros. Blair had the support, on the other hand, of those connected to his in-laws the Harrisons, and he duly took his seat in June. The following year he added to his influence by leaving his more remote parish at Varina to become rector of James City Parish at Jamestown, a more prestigious appointment. It also offered an advantageous location that would enable him to live in proximity to the College without having to surrender any of his several sources of income.

Otherwise, Blair’s difficulties in launching the College persisted in 1694 and 1695. Interlopers were claiming parts of the lands that the crown had granted, and period of warfare that came as a result of King William’s War, duties on tobacco shipped to other American ports fell off drastically. Blair tried to put the blame on Andros.^[9] The surveyor general declined to surrender the office that had been given to the College; hence only with his death in 1695 would it prove possible to begin to collect fees for surveyors’ licenses.^[10] The General Assembly of 1695 likewise declined to answer Blair’s request for more support on the grounds that William and Mary was “under no Circumstances of want at present” and the colony “in no Capacity of giving it assistance at this time.”^[11] In addition, the pledges that some forty-two planters and clergymen had made in 1691 remained largely unfulfilled, only about a sixth of the promised total of £3,000 having been paid by 1697. To add personal insult, Andros refused to vacate the house at Middle Plantation owned by the widow of John Page that Blair had rented in preparation for taking up his duties at James City Parish and the College. He was forced instead to rent a house owned by Philip Ludwell and located at Richneck, somewhat over a mile from the College in the direction of Jamestown.^[12]

The commissary continued to place the blame for the difficulties that William and Mary faced on Andros, and sometimes as well on the councillors who supported the governor.^[13] But Blair himself was also under attack, first for failure to open at least the Grammar School and get on with the construction of a building and then, after the Grammar School opened, for drawing his full salary of £150 as president when no other part of the institution was in operation.^[14] At one point, according to a report by Nicholson, Blair preached a sermon declaring that those “who withdrew back & did not put forward their helping hand towards the Building of the Colledge would be Damned.” Andros, in his turn, responding to a comment that the College would be a great benefit to Maryland and Virginia, sourly observed, ”Pish, it will come to nothing.”^[15]

The relationship between the two men deteriorated to the point that in April 1695 the other members of council voted to suspend Blair for his attacks on Andros over College and clerical matters. At the instigation of both men, the dispute went to the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, who in the next year ordered Blair reinstated. He then faced a second suspension in 1697 when Parliament transmitted an order that all positions in courts of law or financial affairs in the colonies should be held by subjects born in England, a ruling that in the eyes of other councillors disqualified Blair as a Scot from sitting with them.^[16]

A showdown over Blair’s membership on the council was postponed only as a consequence of his impending departure for England under an authorization from the trustees of William and Mary to seek additional support for the College there. Blair obviously had other purposes in mind, for he had been carefully building his own bloc of support among Virginia leaders hostile to Andros and had kept in regular communication with his old ally Francis Nicholson, who had agreed to cover the expenses of the trip. The two had concluded that they should seek Andros’s removal, by bribery of English officials if necessary, and the restoration of Nicholson to his old post as lieutenant governor of Virginia.^[17]

Blair reached England in the summer of 1697, and within a comparatively brief time, he found an unexpected opportunity to make his case against Andros. In the previous year, the king had replaced the old lords commissioners with a new Board of Trade to oversee the commercial and political administration of the colonies. When Blair arrived, the board was still in the process of finding out all that it could about the colonies. Blair consequently received an invitation to discuss affairs in Virginia from a surprising source, the famous and learned philosopher John Locke, who was a member of the board. To judge from their subsequent correspondence, Blair and Locke must have gotten along well, probably extending their conversations to questions of mutual interest about education. On the matter immediately at hand—Virginia affairs—Locke requested a written version of the commissary’s criticisms and suggestions, which he prepared in a document entitled, “Some of the Chief Greivances [sic] of the present Constitution of Virginia with an Essay towards the Remedies thereof.”^[18]

As a follow-up and in response to a set of questions posed by the board, Blair and two colleagues who were also in England at the time, Henry Hartwell, a trustee of the College and member of the Virginia council, and Edward Chilton, former attorney general of the colony, spent several weeks preparing a fuller response, “An Account of the Present State and Governance of Virginia.”^[19] The three authors, all born in England or Scotland but having resided and held a number of offices in Virginia, wrote from a common perspective. Their view was an imperial one in the sense that they criticized the institutions of the colony for their deviation from the norms of the home country. They advocated the kinds of reform that would encourage trade and economic diversity rather than excessive concentration on tobacco; the establishment of towns to promote commerce; provision for an adequate money supply; a more carefully defined legal and political system; and an established church that was closer in its practices and in the secure position of its clergy to the Church of England. Their vision of a properly administered and structured imperial system did not, however, extend to untrammeled power for the royal governor and his council. The authors’ comments on the church and the College of William and Mary formed but two of the twelve sections of the statement, no more than a tenth of its full length; they were, however, the concluding portions. Here the authors, probably Blair principally, concentrated on strengthening the clergy and improving the government and forms of worship of the church and, in the case of the College, on overcoming the problems the trustees had faced in completing a building, obtaining promised revenues, and defending the institution against Andros and some of the council. With Andros’s appointment, the authors asserted, the trustees “found their Business go on very heavily, and such Difficulties in every thing, that presently upon change of the Governor they had as many Enemies as ever they had Friends.”^[20] The statement by the three men was not, however, cast so much as a frontal attack on the governor personally—only in the discussion of the College did that occur—as a recitation of institutional and structural weaknesses that needed reform. Yet, it provided a starting point for Blair’s campaign to unseat Andros and gained the attention of a powerful group of imperial officials.

Blair, in fact, reserved his most direct attack for a separate “Memorial Concerning Sir Edmund Andros” that was far more pointed. It was the source of an account of Andros’s attempt to arrest his fellow governor, Francis Nicholson, and of the effort of one of his Virginia supporters, Daniel Parke, to provoke a duel with Nicholson. Blair also reported his own dismissal from the council and sought to suggest that the governor and his allies were openly dismissive of the bishop of London or any “church powers.” Once again Blair linked the cause of church and College, clearly intending to mount a major part of his attack through his high ecclesiastical connections.^[21]

Blair’s efforts to undermine Andros reached a climax on December 27, 1697, in a hearing before Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry Compton, bishop of London. Blair appeared with his brother-in-law, Benjamin Harrison III, age twenty-four and a recent student of law at the Middle Temple. Andros, of course, could not defend himself in person but was represented by William Byrd II, the son of an Andros ally on the council, twenty-three years of age and, like Harrison, a recent student at the Middle Temple. An English attorney who attended on Andros’s behalf and a clerk of the Privy Council were also present.

Archbishop Tenison presided over what was hardly an impartial hearing. Although it began with a consideration of accusations against Blair—that he had favored Scottish churchmen and that he had squandered the funds available for constructing a College building—the commissary, aided by Bishop Compton, struck back and moved the proceedings to the charges against Andros. Byrd, as chief spokesman for the governor, found himself constantly on the defensive and unable to bring forward a prepared brief against Blair. Fairly won or not, Blair’s victory was complete.^[22]

Perhaps the ultimate triumph was not quite as total as Blair had wanted, for while he learned early in 1698 that Nicholson would replace Andros in Virginia, the Board of Trade did not restore the commissary to the council, and Andros was permitted the face-saving gesture of requesting permission to return home. The board also delayed the announcement of Nicholson’s appointment.^[23] Nor did Blair accomplish anything specific for William and Mary; the ostensible fund-raising purposes of his trip seemed to have vanished quietly. Nonetheless, he had secured the removal of the hated Andros and boosted his own political power, even without his council seat. Sir Edmund Andros became the first but not the last governor who could blame Blair for his dismissal, but the commissary’s success had come at the cost of some subordination of the religious and educational concerns for which he presumably spoke to political self-interest.

Still, Blair had not completely forgotten his educational ambitions for William and Mary. Despite John Locke’s ill health during the closing months of the clergyman’s mission, the two had continued to correspond. Blair wrote at least twice to thank him for his support in the matter of replacing Andros.^[24] And John Locke’s last reply of record, which came almost a year after Blair had returned to Virginia, spoke not only of his hope for “the flourishing of the plantations under their due & just regulation” but also of the philosopher’s desire for seeds of “all strange & curious plants” of Virginia and of his interest in obtaining peach stones. Finally, he wrote of his hopes for the new College, observing:

I hope the College grows & flourishes under your care. I would be glad to know whether you carried over with you a Baroscope & Thermoscope . . . for I think a constant registar of the air kept there would not only be of general use to the improvement of natural philosophy but might be of particular advantage to the plantation itself by observations to be made on the changes of the air.^[25]

Constructing the College Building, 1694–1700

James Blair’s growing political preoccupations, coupled with severe financial difficulties and delays in the completion of the first College building, might suggest that William and Mary had scarcely begun to flourish in the manner that John Locke wished. Yet, despite all the problems, work on the building began, however slowly, in 1694, with some initial expenditures for materials, especially bricks.

The Grammar School also apparently opened in 1694. With the master Mungo Inglis and his usher, whom we know only from his surname of Mullikin, on hand from the time they returned with Blair from England in 1693, the trustees began instruction in a temporary building. Since forty-five pounds of College funds were allocated for repair of an existing schoolhouse in Middle Plantation, this structure presumably served until the new College building was ready. The trustees were within a few years able to declare optimistically that the students were achieving “great proficiency in their Studies to the Gen’l Satisfaction of their parents and guardians.”^[26]

The construction of the building did not go as smoothly, in some part because the task from the beginning became enmeshed in the hostility between Blair and Andros.^[27] Too, there were likely few, if any, persons in the colony experienced in the construction of quite so large e a building. At least some of those involved in the early construction came from England. Either Blair before his departure from England or Nicholson, who had remained for a time before taking up his Maryland post, had engaged Thomas Hadley as “surveyor.” Hadley arrived in Virginia by 1695 and began work on the College building. Although the records are scanty, he seems to have continued his work until the fall of 1697—at least Blair reported in a letter in January 1698 that Hadley had not been engaged at the College for about two months.^[28] Three other English workmen can also be identified, one named Pocock ^[29] and two bricklayers, George Cryer and Samuel Baker.^[30]

There was another English recruit who played a significant role in the College design—a gardener, James Road. George London, who was in charge of landscape design at Hampton Court, the great Tudor palace that was undergoing enlargement and improvement under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren, sent Road to Virginia with plans for a College garden and also with instructions to lay it out and then to collect specimens of American plants before he returned.^[31]

In the spring of 1695, as the second anniversary of Blair’s return from England with the charter approached, work on the building still lagged. Blair had just moved from Henrico to the Ludwell house at Richneck, satisfying the wish of the other trustees that he give closer oversight to the College work. Blair was inclined, however, to blame the delays on Andros, who in another demonstration of enmity had removed him from the council in April. Then on May 8, 1695, Blair wrote Nicholson that “we have been taken up three days at James Town about the College business which now looks with as bad an appearance as ever.” He went on to note that Philip Ludwell had declined to undertake the building, privately saying “that he sees no possibility of carrying it on in the Governor’s time.” Blair further observed that after consideration Edmund Jenings had likewise refused the work.^[32]

In the end a building committee drawn from the trustees assumed responsibility for supervising construction.^[33] By late July the land was cleared, and the warring factions came together long enough to hold a ceremony to mark the laying of the foundation, over which the governor presided. As Councillor Ralph Wormeley reported, “Sir Edmund Andros &ca with the best Solemnity we were capable, layd the Foundacon of the College.”^[34] Thereafter, construction moved forward. By April 1697—about the same time that Blair was setting out for England to mount his campaign against Andros—College accounts showed total expenditures of £3,889.1.10 on construction, an excess of about £170 over available funds.^[35] The trustees were able to certify to the governor on April 22 that “we have carried on the building of two sides of the designed square of the Colledge (wch was all wee judged wee had money to goe through with) and have brought up the Walls of the Said building to the roof wch [we] hope in a short time will be finished.” Philip Ludwell, despite his reluctance to assume the role of undertaker for the building, had nonetheless agreed to finish the roof, “haveing promised to Shingle it upon Creditt.”^[36]

Blair was more pessimistic later in the year, when he reported at his December 27 conference with Bishop Compton and Archbishop Tenison on his charges against Andros that “we have got the roof on but half of the Building, the other half we have not meddled with, and how we shall finish what we have built I cannot tell.” The following month he explained that winter weather and a lack of bricks to complete the chimneys had delayed the roofing and that in any event no money remained for further work.^[37] While no records survive for 1698 that relate to work on the building, it seems to have been sufficiently complete to be the setting for the May Day celebration of 1699 and thereafter to be in regular use until it burned in 1705. In February 1700 Blair wrote more optimistically to Archbishop Tenison—to be elected as the second chancellor of William and Mary within three months—that “the subscriptions that were made to our College do now come in apace, so that we are in hopes of having it quite finished before next Winter.”^[38]

The building that stood on the verge of completion in 1700 was not the one that we see today, which is a restoration of the second building, erected after the 1705 fire on the surviving walls of the first building but extensively modified in the process. Recovering an accurate impression of the original structure can be difficult Only one drawing survives, a somewhat crude but for the most part accurate sketch by a Swiss traveler, Franz Ludwig Michel, who came to Williamsburg in 1702. Careful sifting of the limited documentary evidence and the more substantial archaeological evidence provides a better impression, even though architectural historians may disagree on some details.^[39]

As Blair and others noted, the original design of the building called for a quadrangle. Because of financial constraints, but perhaps also because the additional space was not yet needed, the building was constructed in an L-shape with an east range on the front of 46 by 138 feet.^[40] The north wing, containing the hall, now usually termed the Great Hall, was almost certainly 72 feet in length (8 feet longer than it became in the second building) and 32 feet wide. The first building was somewhat taller than its successor. The ground level was 3 feet lower, and the basement windows were larger and more visible. Above were three full floors (one more than in the second building) plus a half-story with dormer windows. Both the third story and the half-story above it seem to have extended above the hall. On the east or main front, the original structure had two balconies, one opening from the second floor and another from the half-story attic; a tall two-story tower; and, because of the basement elevation, a higher entrance to the first floor.^[41]

The English gardener James Road did not reappear in the record after the single reference to his having been sent out to lay out the College gardens and collect exotic plants. In time, however, extensive gardens were developed on the west side, or rear, of the Main Building so that one descended the steps from the piazza into what Hugh Jones described in 1724 as “the good courts and gardens about it.”^[42] An earlier, if fleeting, reference to the proximity of gardens to the piazza was made by Robert Beverley in 1704, when he described a quarrel between Governor Nicholson and Colonel Edmund Jenings as having taken place in “the garden” nearby. This demonstrates that the first building also had its gardens on the west. Rather than containing primarily ornamental plantings, “it is more probable that a nursery or botanical garden was there, or simple beds for vegetables and herbs.”^[43]

For all the delays and financial problems and even at half its originally planned size, the L-shaped building, once completed, was an imposing structure. From basement to attic half-story it contained about forty thousand square feet in its two wings. ”Even as a fragment,” James Kornwolf comments, “few buildings in the colonies before the Revolution approached it in size.”^[44] There had been compromises, or simply lack of expertise, in its construction, and Governor Nicholson warned of several fire hazards—excessively small fireplaces, a wooden girder running through the middle of one hearth, another with plank laid under it that by 1702 had already overheated and ignited once.^[45] Yet it was the first major building to signal the transformation of Middle Plantation into the new capital city of Williamsburg, and perhaps it was a symbol, too, of James Blair’s ambitions—for the College and for himself.

One cannot easily turn from the construction of the new College edifice to the events that began to take place within its walls without first addressing what one architectural historian has aptly termed “the Wren Problem,” that is, the questions that surround the attribution of the design of the first building to the great architect Sir Christopher Wren. At the time he was surveyor general of the Office of Works and therefore closely involved with the building or rebuilding of many great English public buildings of the period. The designation today of the surviving and restored structure as the Wren Building is a testimony to the strength and persistence of the belief that he either prepared its design or at the least reviewed and approved plans drawn by someone in the Office of Works.

The first known reference to such an association occurred in Hugh Jones’s Present State of Virginia, published after he had returned to England from a four-year stint as a member of the College faculty. Jones wrote:

The building is beautiful and commodious, being first modelled by Sir Christopher Wren, adapted to the nature of the country by the gentlemen there; and since it was burnt down, it has been rebuilt, and nicely contrived, altered and adorned by the ingenious direction of Governor Spotswood; and is not altogether unlike Chelsea Hospital.^[46]

Although Hugh Jones noted that Wren “first modelled” the building, he also stressed the adaptation of the design “to the nature of the country” and the subsequent modification of the post-1705 rebuilding by Governor Alexander Spotswood. Certainly Jones’s association of the building with Wren never caught on in the colonial era, when “the College” or “the College edifice” remained the common designation. In the modem era, especially with the restoration of the second building, the Wren tradition took on a life of its own. In 1931, when the restoration was complete, the Board of Visitors rededicated the building and designated it officially as the Sir Christopher Wren Building. From that time forward, the true connection of Wren has often remained a matter of debate.

No resolution of the issue is possible from the evidence presently available. The case against the Wren attribution rests on the lack of any specific evidence apart from Hugh Jones’s somewhat enigmatic statement and the extent to which the building incorporated features that were generally uncharacteristic of Wren’s best-known work. The argument in favor of Wren is an admittedly circumstantial one, based to some extent on Wren’s official position and close relationship with the monarchs who granted the charter and on a counterinterpretation of the architectural evidence. There the matter seems likely to rest, although James Kornwolf’s recent study of the building has certainly raised the level of probability of some English connection with the building plan, even one with Wren’s Office of Works, if not with the great master himself.^[47]

Several considerations lend support to his position. The building was of a scale that likely exceeded the experience of any builder in the colony in the 1690s. A plan therefore drawn in England, even if it received some modification in Virginia, was almost a necessity. The employment of an English surveyor to oversee construction and of at least some English workmen lends additional credence to the likelihood of an English design. From the time that his campaign for the charter began, if not from his earlier residence in London, James Blair, a protégé of powerful ecclesiastics, should have been familiar with the complex of offices and official residences at Whitehall, where the Office of Works was located. As a royal foundation, the College would have clearly been in a position to call upon the services of such an agency. For a number of reasons, then, the preparation in England of a plan for the College building seems a real possibility.

Establishing a significant connection between such a plan and Wren himself may be a larger order. With his connections to the Anglican hierarchy, Blair moved in circles where meeting the great architect would have been possible. The assignment of the gardener James Road from Hampton Court, where Wren was undertaking major work, to the College project opens up still another possible contact. And despite some architectural features in the College building that Wren would have been unlikely to employ, Kornwolf has identified others—”ratios, proportions, dimensions, and details”—that Wren did use in a number of buildings.

The case likely remains too circumstantial to warrant giving Wren’s name to the building with total assurance, but a basic plan of English origin for the building was more than likely, the association of English workmen with its construction indisputable. The scale and design of the building and the circumstances of its construction added, then, another and more material dimension to the whole group of imperial relationships and influences—the royal charter, strong ties to the church hierarchy, substantial private and public funding from England, the establishment from the first of a faculty on which British clerics were predominant—that imparted a strongly imperial cast to colonial William and Mary. At the same time, Hugh Jones’s other observation, that the College building was “adapted to the nature of the country by the gentlemen there,” almost unintentionally provided a reminder of those more provincial purposes that were also embedded in the original charter. Even in the very physical setting of the College, in some of the questions that surround the construction of its monumental first building, we may not unduly strain the evidence in finding still another expression of the underlying ambivalence of the charter and of the tensions that were to develop between a British imperial culture and that of provincial Virginia.

The Blair-Nicholson Partnership Renewed, 1698–1701

With the College building approaching completion and Andros’s removal as governor, Francis Nicholson’s return to Virginia in December 1698 to take up his second term as governor seemed likely to renew the collaboration with James Blair that had proved so important in the foundation of the College. This time, however, the alliance proved short-lived, but for the moment it seemed to hold promising results for the College and the colony.

The May Day observance of 1699 was the first fruit of the resumption of the partnership between the two men, offering an opportunity both to celebrate the launching of the College and to advance the relocation of the capital. Within six weeks of Nicholson’s return, the statehouse at Jamestown burned. At the opening of the next session of the General Assembly on April 27, 1699, Nicholson appealed for the earliest possible erection of a new government building. Then, in an ostensibly unrelated action, he announced a day of rejoicing on May 1 at the College to which he invited the members of the assembly that they might be “Eye Witnesses to one of His Majesty’s Royal bounties and favors” and “Ear Witnesses of the royal favor and Improvement of our Youth in Leaming and Education.”^[48]

The five young Grammar School students who addressed the legislators, College trustees, governor, and president at the “Scholastick Exercises” played their part in a well-orchestrated event. The first speaker emphasized the value of learning to the public good by increasing both knowledge and virtue and insuring the proper conduct of public affairs. Whereas the first oration emphasized the classical and traditional sources of such learning, the second stressed the advantages—among them economy, safety, and suitability—of Virginia students receiving that education in the colony rather than abroad. The third address, probably given, as we have noted, by Orlando Jones, spoke to the best means of promoting Virginia education, but fixed especially upon the need for such study to take place in the setting of a good town, a place of “business” and “action,” not in a more remote comer of the world. It followed, of course, that Middle Plantation, converted into a flourishing capital town, would provide such a location. The two remaining speakers sought to promote the College itself and establish its necessary relationship to those who exercised the powers of government. The fourth emphasized the contributions already made to William and Mary by individuals and members of the assembly. The last orator urged continuing encouragement of William and Mary “that the natives of America takeing example from us, may be excited to the Study and exercise of Leaming and virtue, and may confess and acknowledge that the Colledge of William and Mary in Virginia is the Mansion house of virtue, the Parnassus of the Muses, and a Seminary of excellent men.”^[49]

The May Day exercises set forth, in effect, three basic objectives: encouragement of support for the College, demonstration of its successful and useful beginning, and, most important, the value of its linkage to government and public affairs through the relocation of the capital. In the case of the first, Blair was able to say within a few months that the subscriptions pledged to the College some years earlier were now beginning to come in.^[50] In October 1700 even the hostile Sir Edmund Andros was credited with providing £56.7.6 for “Sashing the College,” and in the same accounts came recognition of a gift of £500 for a student scholarship from Francis Nicholson, who had previously promised his library to the College upon his death.^[51]

With respect to its increasing success in establishing itself, the College began to receive favorable, if sometimes exaggerated, notice. The London Post Boy published a notice in March 1700 of a letter from Virginia reporting that “the University which has been lately founded there” had so increased in enrollment that there were plans to enlarge it. And the English historian John Oldmixon some years later described a commencement in 1700 at William and Mary attended by “a great Concourse of People.” The account continued, “Several Planters came thither in their Coaches, several in Sloops from New-York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. It being a new thing in America to hear Graduates perform their Academical Exercises, the Indians themselves had the Curiosity to come to Williamsburg on this Occasion, and the whole Country rejoiced as if they had some Relish of Learning.”^[52] A more sober assessment of the state of the College came, however, in a report on the 1702 enrollment which listed twenty-nine students, all enrolled in the Grammar School under the tutelage of the master Mungo Inglis, an usher, and a writing master.^[53] Whatever the true condition of the College, Mungo Inglis and his scholars by the end of 1700 had completed their move into the new building. Governor Nicholson, concerned moreover at the failure to proceed to more advanced instruction, had asked Archbishop Tenison in the same year for assistance in finding a professor who could teach both mathematics and philosophy (that is, for the present to fill the two philosophy chairs with a single appointment), although nothing came of the effort for another decade.^[54] But it could be said that in just over five years of its opening, William and Mary had a usable principal building and a sizeable number of students in the Grammar School.

These educational beginnings appeared somewhat modest, however, when placed alongside the outcome of the third purpose of the May Day gathering of 1699—the effort of Nicholson, Blair, and others to relocate the seat of government in proximity to the College. The assembly was already on notice that the governor wanted to get on with a replacement for the burned statehouse, and the third student speech demonstrated how far the campaign to abandon Jamestown in favor of Middle Plantation had proceeded. The governor followed by formally recommending to the assembly on May 18 “the placing of your public building . . . somewhere at Middle Plantation nigh his Majesty’s Royall College of William and Mary,” while Benjamin Harrison, Jr., saw to it that the members heard another reading of the student oration. On June 7 “An Act directing the building of the Capitoll and the City of Williamsburgh” passed.^[55]

The grandiose reference to a “Capitoll,” employing classical terminology rather than the customary and mundane designation of statehouse, and to a “city” where only a crossroads settlement existed set the tone for Nicholson’s ambitious conception of the new seat of government. It was, moreover, the governor’s second venture in town planning, since he had a few years earlier taken the lead in relocating the Maryland capital from St. Mary’s City to the newly designed town of Annapolis, although there he had no college as an anchor on which to fix the new seat of government.^[56]

At about the same time as the May Day observance, Nicholson had a surveyor, Theodorick Bland, already at work on a survey (dated June 2, 1699) of lands that adjoined those of the College to the east. Bland’s survey also identified the main street of Williamsburg and the location of the new capitol, as well, of course, as the site of the new College building.^[57] The act of June 7, moreover, was specific about the total acreage of the town—283 acres in all, although 220 in the town proper—and about the dimensions and shape of the capitol.^[58] Nicholson’s plan for Williamsburg located the College building and the capitol at opposite ends of a main street and provided a baroque plan with some streets on diagonal lines making a cipher of the letters W and M, combined with a traditional gridiron for the other streets.^[59] Later modifications removed the diagonal streets, but, as John Reps noted, the Nicholson plan still “retained a formal grace and distinctive character.”^[60]

From the perspective of the College, what was most significant was the manner in which Blair and Nicholson had realized their objective of linking William and Mary with a new “metropolitan” center for Virginia and how effectively the plan both symbolized and helped the actual achievement of the political and cultural integration of the College, the local community, and the provincial political structure. In one respect—the use of the College building as a temporary seat of government while construction went forward on the first capitol building—that integration manifested itself from the very beginning. After the legislation establishing the new capital town passed in June, the governor and council on October 27, 1699, issued a proclamation requiring all sessions of the assembly or the General Court to take place in Williamsburg after May 10, 1700.^[61] A design for the new capitol was almost certainly completed by the time of the June legislation, but it required all of 1700 and more than half of the following year to assemble materials and hire workmen. Consequently, the laying of the foundation did not take place until August 8, 1701. Final completion of the capitol required until the end of November 1705, although a part of the building was in use from April 1703.^[62]

In the interim the General Court and the legislature had by law to sit in Williamsburg from May of 1700, so on April 24 the College, as had no doubt been envisioned, came to the rescue. On that date the council journals recorded an offer from the “Trustees and Governours . . . of whatsoever Rooms within the said Colledge shall be wanted for the use of the Country to hold their Generall Meetings and Assemblyes till the Capitol be built and fitted.”^[63] The council began its sessions in the College building on the following October 17 and continued to sit there through October 1703 , while the House of Burgesses first met in the hall on December 5, 1700, and remained until it opened its April 1704 session in the new capitol.^[64]

During those same months, the incomplete condition of the capitol occasionally required the use of the College building for other public events. We know of one in particular from an engaging description of it in the journal of Franz Ludwig Michel. As it turned out, the Swiss traveler found himself in Williamsburg on the occasion of Governor Nicholson’s official observance of the death of King William and proclamation of the succession of Queen Anne to the throne. Custom dictated that governors make a great deal of these occasions, and Nicholson, a flamboyant man in any event, was entirely willing to oblige. The ceremony which took place at the front of the College building was, as Michel described it, indeed elaborate, perhaps at times overreaching itself.

On the morning of the first day of what proved to be a two-day event, two thousand foot and horse troops—at least this was Michel’s estimate—assembled in formation. Commissary Blair, whom Michel described as “the bishop,” delivered a funeral sermon, and the secretary of the colony then read the formal proclamation announcing the death of the monarch. Thereupon, the governor, clad in mourning, appeared on horseback, and musicians played from the first floor landing and the two balconies of the building. In the afternoon the less somber part of the observance got under way. The musicians replaced their subdued music of the morning with “a lively tune,” and Nicholson, having exchanged his somber clothes for a blue uniform covered with braid, reappeared on another mount. Then the secretary read the proclamation of Anne’s accession. Afterward, the more prominent of those in attendance went to an entertainment given by the governor, while those of lesser rank received a glass of rum or brandy. In the evening a fireworks display came off less well when “the rockets refused to fly up, but fell down archlike, so that it was not worth while seeing,” although Michel observed that most people still “praised them highly.”

Michel had watched from the steep cupola of the College building and chose to stay there overnight rather than return two miles to his lodging. A second, perhaps less exciting day of celebration followed, but, all in all, with due allowance for Michel’s exaggeration and the fiasco of the fireworks, it had been an ambitious observance for the new capital town and almost certainly the most spectacular public event that had yet taken place at the College.^[65]

The Break between Blair and Nicholson, 1701–1705

The observance of Queen Anne’s accession proved to have a more ominous side, for it signaled the opening of an irreparable breach between the two men who had appeared to be the closest of collaborators in the founding and promotion of William and Mary. In truth, mutual suspicion between James Blair and Francis Nicholson had been building for some time, but perhaps until this moment both saw an advantage in cooperation. With the College built and the relocation of the capital accomplished, this no longer seemed as necessary.^[66]

From the time of his first trip to England in the early 1690s, Blair had begun to use his influence privately and somewhat tentatively to keep Nicholson from being returned to Virginia, even as the two collaborated on the effort to secure the charter. As the time for his return to Virginia approached, Blair wrote an English official, presumably Secretary of State Nottingham: “Thinking the peace of the Colony wherein my lot is cast to be endangered by Col. Nicholson’s temper, I wrote to Mr. [William] Blathwayt about it, who communicated the letter to you; and accordingly I find that Colonel Nicholson is stopped. I think this [i.e., assignment to Maryland] much better than to send him to Virginia.”^[67] Again, on the eve of his return from his second trip to England in 1698—on this occasion after having lobbied energetically and successfully for Nicholson’s reassignment to Virginia—he secured letters from the archbishop of Canterbury and several others counseling the governor to conduct himself with moderation. Blair presented Nicholson with the letters upon the governor’s arrival in Virginia and then sent a somewhat self-serving letter to the archbishop making much of his own friendly counsel and reporting in detail Nicholson’s heated response to the letters. The governor, he reported, “replied very hotly ‘G——, I know better [how] to Govern Virginia & Maryland than all the Bishops in England.'”^[68]

Blair’s ability to harass the governor only increased when he gained readmission to the governor’s council on June 1, 1701, by crown warrant In his five-year absence, the council membership had shifted markedly away from Andros’s old confederates who had opposed the commissary, of whom only three remained, while Blair’s relatives and their allies had gained strength.^[69] With Blair ensconced once again on a council with whose members Nicholson was frequently in contention, the relationship between the two men deteriorated rapidly. This was the period, too, when the College and the offices of government shared a single building. Blair later complained that Nicholson crowded into it all the offices of government, as well as lodging for officials, and “had all his public treats in their hall to the great disturbance of the College business.”^[70]

So it was that the grandest “public treat” of all, the commemoration of William’s death and Anne’s succession, may well have provided the final spark. The specific matter that allegedly touched it off was a thinly veiled attack on Nicholson in the commissary’s funeral oration, although later efforts to turn up a copy of the exact text were never successful, despite Blair’s insistence that he had sent copies to both Archbishop Tenison and Bishop Compton. The governor’s sharp reaction to the sermon, in the view of the commissary, was the consequence of an assumption by Nicholson that Blair’s praise in his sermon of the mildness of King William’s reign reflected unfavorably on the governor’s own “furious and mad way of Government” Praise of William conceivably may have appeared, too, to be a criticism of Nicholson’s refusal to proclaim William in the colony of New York at the first news of the Glorious Revolution.^[71]

With the battle joined, Blair set out now to undermine Nicholson and secure his removal as he had that of Andros. He lost no opportunity—of which he had a good many—to make the most of the governor’s impetuous conduct and quick temper. He complained to Tenison that “we never had near so much storm & tempest, tornado’s & Hurricanes” as the colony now experienced. Nicholson, he continued, “governs us as if we were a company of Galley slaves by continued roaring & thunderings, cursing & swearing, base, abusive, billingsgate language.”^[72]

There followed at the end of 1702 still another confrontation, which occurred like the funeral oration in the setting of the College, but on this occasion directly involved the students and College affairs. It stands as one of the legendary episodes in the early history of William and Mary. The College, which had an interminable Trinity term stretching from early summer to the end of the year, adopted a traditional custom at English schools, one that had its origins far back in the Middle Ages. This was the so-called ”barring out,” a ritualistic and symbolic locking of the masters out of the student quarters until they agreed to begin the scheduled Christmas vacation early. Although Blair later claimed that the custom had at first been tolerated and then quickly abandoned at William and Mary, students and faculty maintained that by 1702 it had been followed every year at Christmas except for 1700, when the General Assembly had been using the building for most of December and the term had ended early anyway.

About two weeks before Christmas in 1702, Blair claimed to have been awakened in the middle of the night by the sounds of hammering and the driving of nails. Calling two servants, he went off to investigate and found the boys had barricaded themselves in a room from which they shouted to the president not to attempt to break in, as they possessed shot and were prepared to fire. Blair later claimed that a gun had been fired and one of the servants wounded in the eye, although the door had not been opened. Whether it was, as Blair charged, some further and serious plot of Governor Nicholson, who had given the boys money for food, drink, and candles, or whether the president magnified out of all proportion an accepted schoolboy prank was uncertain. Blair determined, in any event, to make the most of the episode. The ensuing war of words and investigation settled nothing. It only exacerbated the hostility between Blair and Nicholson.

Those who later insisted that the barring-out custom was well established at William and Mary argued, moreover, that guns and swords had always been a part of the ceremony without any intention to use them. They likewise pointed out that the governor had often provided refreshment for the entertainment which usually followed the students’ demonstration and that the president himself in the past had often joined in. After the incident assumed such major proportions, one of the governor’s defenders wrote a satirical statement ridiculing Blair’s charges. There was essentially no one who could substantiate Blair’s version of the barring-out incident, but he continued to claim he had been in physical danger and to make the episode a major part of his mounting accusations against Nicholson.^[73]

The barring-out incident, however much one may suspect that Blair at the least was guilty of exaggerating its importance, nonetheless provided an occasion for hardening the division between the supporters of both men. Nicholson, well known for his explosive personality, had made other enemies with justifiable grievances against him. Other members of council than Blair’s immediate circle had fought him. Robert Beverley, the historian, became an especially virulent opponent, attacking the governor for falsely claiming to support the College when its enrollment had actually declined. Another opponent who did the governor’s cause great damage was the Reverend Stephen Fouace, rector of Yorkhampton Parish, a College trustee, and one of Blair’s few clerical supporters in the colony, who fled back to England in 1702 after Nicholson threatened him. There Fouace’ s testimony successfully undermined the governor.^[74] Blair had his enemies, too, but they were often fellow clergymen, such as Mungo Inglis, who were less able to cause him political damage either in England or Virginia than were the governor’s opponents.

Blair’s accusations rested on other grounds as well. He continued to charge that the governor had run up the College debt and acted in such a way that parents would not enroll their sons in the Grammar School. He also quarreled with Nicholson on religious affairs. Finally, on May 20, 1703, Blair and five other councillors petitioned the queen, seeking an investigation and removal of the governor and promising to supply more detailed evidence through persons from the colony who were in England.^[75] Leaving nothing to chance, Blair also departed on a third trip to England, determined to deal with Nicholson as he had with Andros. He remained there several months, from July 1703 to the end of March 1704, before submitting the petition from the six councillors to the Board of Trade. Soon thereafter Blair also filed a number of affidavits detailing the charges, two of his own plus several from those who shared his hostility to the governor.^[76]

Nicholson, like Andros before him, had no opportunity to defend himself in person, and every move he made to respond from the colony went awry in an almost incredible series of misadventures. First, John Thrale, the Virginia colonial agent, represented him at an initial hearing but fell ill and died before he could resume his testimony. The Board of Trade then sent the affidavits filed against the governor to Virginia in June 1704 on a vessel that did not reach the Chesapeake until December. Nicholson decided to delay his response for several months, until after an April 1705 session of the assembly, and the letter he sent to the board to inform it of his plan went aboard a vessel that was seized by the French, whereupon the captain threw overboard all of the correspondence that he was carrying. By the time Nicholson had sent his own affidavits, Blair had persuaded the Board of Trade to wait no longer. On April 5, 1705, it removed Nicholson and commissioned Edward Nott as the new lieutenant governor of Virginia. It must have afforded Nicholson scant comfort when the board assured him that its decision was not based on information presented against him and indicated no displeasure with his performance.^[77]

Blair had nonetheless scored another triumph, and Nicholson found himself thrust out of office without any real opportunity of defending himself. Much later, in 1727, no doubt still smarting from his treatment, he published a London edition of the affidavits and other evidence he had collected for his defense.^[78] Even when one has examined the voluminous papers from both sides, the evidence can hardly settle the merits of the case of either protagonist.

The most immediate question, however, is not the unanswerable one of personal right or wrong, but rather that of how the College fared in the contest. How far was the president its shield and protector against a hostile governor? What was the extent of Nicholson’s interest in the institution that he, too, had helped found and of which, to Blair’s discomfort, he continued to be a lifetime trustee? Underneath his sometimes intemperate outbursts, Francis Nicholson did seem genuinely committed to the welfare of the College before Blair engineered his dismissal. As a trustee he regularly attended meetings of the group even while he was governor of Mary land. Back in Virginia he continued his efforts on behalf of William and Mary. In the absence of any known move by Blair to fulfill the terms of the Boyle bequest, Nicholson in 1700 engaged two Indian traders to help recruit Indian students. At the same time that he reported this effort to Archbishop Tenison, he also sought assistance in finding a master to teach mathematics and philosophy in order to institute instruction at the college level alongside the Grammar School.^[79] While Nicholson’s assertion that he had given a total of £2,652.6.11 to William and Mary  between 1699 and 1702 was disputed by Blair, the governor, who had an unusual record of philanthropy among early eighteenth century imperial officials, seemed to have dealt generously with the College. Nicholson, moreover, was able to carry a vote of the trustees of the College in June 1705—after his fate was sealed but before Blair had returned from England—that deprived Blair of his presidential salary. This was a final demonstration that the governor was not without support in the colony.^[80]

Also revealing, given Blair’s interrelated leadership of the church as commissary and of the College as president, was the overwhelming hostility of the Virginia clergy toward their appointed leader. After Blair’s opening convocation of 1690 that had strongly endorsed his college proposal, he did not call a second convocation until his triumph over Nicholson and return from England in the summer of 1705. In the interim Blair had put forward a major program for improving the condition of the clergy, coupled with higher standards of clerical education and more rigorous enforcement of their moral standards, but the General Assembly of 1699 put off action on it.^[81] While his fellow clerics approved some of Blair’s plan, they bitterly opposed other features; in the end, however, the accelerating conflict between Blair and Nicholson diverted attention from any serious effort at clerical reform.

Although the commissary retained a nucleus of support among the clergy, the overwhelming number increasingly sided with Nicholson, probably the consequence of a mixture of conviction, anti-Scottish bias, and receptivity to the governor’s deliberate efforts to win them over. Nicholson even convened his own convocation of the clergy in March 1700, where he won strong support notwithstanding his scrutiny of their certificates of ordination and demands for their good conduct.^[82] In addition to letters attacking the commissary that individual clergymen sent to English bishops, twenty clerics sent a protest to the bishop of London in 1703, and six self-styled “English” ministers accused Blair of altering the language of their addresses to Governor Nicholson. By that time the underlying issue was almost certainly Blair’s desertion in that year of the fight to secure permanent induction of ministers in their appointments and prevent vestries from keeping them on annual contracts, whereas Nicholson had fully embraced the right of induction.^[83]

Blair sailed for England leaving behind a restive clergy increasingly allied with the man whose removal the president and commissary now sought and would achieve. With his return the fight resumed. Two weeks after Governor Nott took office, Blair called a convocation of the clergy. Despite a message of support for the commissary from Bishop Compton that the governor read and Blair’s own effort at reconciliation, the meeting was stormy. Those in attendance divided twenty-three to six against Blair, the dissidents remaining in close touch with Nicholson, who had not yet left the colony. Ultimately, the convocation adjourned leaving separate versions of its minutes, one set written by Blair on behalf of the minority and the other—a savage and at times satirical denunciation of the commissary—prepared by Solomon Whateley, rector of Bruton Parish.^[84]

Through these years of controversy, the College continued to operate with a single faculty member, the generally respected Mungo Inglis, assisted by his usher and the writing master. While it stretches the truth to speak of a president who had lost the confidence of his “faculty”—an implicitly collective term—Inglis increasingly chafed at what he perceived as Blair’s neglect of the College while the master labored endlessly with the students in the Grammar School. “Is it nothing,” he asked the Visitors in a letter, probably written in 1704, “to be (all year long except the breaking up) Confin’d to the College from 7 to 11 in the morning; and from 2 to 6 in the afternoon, and to be all day long spending ones Lungs upon a Compa[ny] of children, who (many of them) must be taught the same things many times over[?]” Inglis’s frustration at Blair for continuing to draw his own salary while reducing the master’s drove him into the Nicholson camp, especially after the president’s nephew withdrew from the Grammar School, followed by five or six others who were the sons of Blair supporters. The students were a third of his total enrollment, and all but young John Blair had boarded with him. Finally, on August 8, 1705, Inglis wrote to the displaced Nicholson of his resignation from the faculty and his lack of hope for the future of the College:

I have learnt, by 12 years experience, that the intended College of William and Mary will never arrive at any greater Perfection than a Grammar School while Mr. Blair demands & takes his salary yearly as President while it is only a Grammar School & while there remains no more money behind than will barely pay the Usher & Writing Master & myself . . . so that there is not the least probability that ever the College will ans[wer] the design in the Charter while things continue as they are.^[85]

Blair countered these charges in a letter to Edward Nott in which he asserted that young John Blair had been moved from his College residence because he had been “Exceedingly Run down by his School fellows” and from his enrollment in the Grammar School, after efforts were made to persuade him to sign a statement against his uncle. Blair likewise affirmed his intention to fulfill the charter and make the College more than a Grammar School.^[86]

Nevertheless, Inglis’s disenchantment with the College carried conviction. At James Blair’s moment of seeming triumph, William and Mary was languishing. Blair presumably had no wish for it to fail, but the College seemed to play an increasingly smaller part in his expanded political agenda, as did his responsibilities as commissary and leader of the Anglican clergy of Virginia. On neither of his two most recent trips to England had Blair appeared to give much attention to the College or the church. Rather, he had employed his considerable influence with the Anglican hierarchy for other ends. He had made scant efforts to fulfill the terms of the Boyle bequest by finding Indian students. He seemed indifferent to efforts to increase the faculty by filling either of the philosophy chairs; nor did he teach moral philosophy himself.

Insofar as the College had prospered, it had done so largely by playing a central role in the relocation of the seat of government, which put the College in a closer relationship with the political life of the colony. Blair’s own career seemed to follow a similar trajectory. Through a succession of steps—marriage into a leading provincial family, alliance with an emerging group of political leaders of Virginia, appointment on two occasions to the council, success as a maker and destroyer of royal governors—he had become a powerful political figure in the colony who also enjoyed influential English connections. Without overtly repudiating his ecclesiastical and educational responsibilities—quite possibly convincing himself that he was finding a more effective way of fulfilling them—Blair increasingly embodied the values and objectives of the provincial leadership, at some cost to the College.

Francis Nicholson, on the other hand, would in all likelihood have done himself in as a consequence of his recklessness and lack of self-control even had there been no James Blair, but the contest between the two men had significance broader than the deep personal animosity that developed. The governor, whatever his personal deficiencies and authoritarian tendencies, was a dedicated imperialist of at times surprising vision, concerned with the church, the College, and the development of his new capital as both symbols and vital institutions of an imperial system. Within the stricter confines of the history of the College itself, Nicholson, more than he may have realized in the heat of personal confrontation, spoke for a more imperial and religious purpose for the College than Blair, whose vision was becoming increasingly provincial. In the contest between these two formidable adversaries, the two fundamental purposes that the charter had outlined were beginning to diverge.

At his moment of triumph in the fall of 1705, Blair might have calculated some of the costs of his victory over Nicholson. He presided, though with his coveted salary suspended, over a College without a faculty, and with a declining enrollment in its single component, the Grammar School. Within a matter of weeks, he found himself presiding as well over a College without a building, for on the night of October 29, fire gutted the College building that several persons, including Francis Nicholson, had warned was a firetrap. The fire swept rapidly through the structure, leaving only a part of its exterior walls standing. Governor Nott moved quickly to appoint an investigating committee of twelve burgesses and six councillors, who collected a quantity of evidence and then proved unable to reach any conclusion about the cause from a mass of uncertain and conflicting detail.^[87]

Given the recent disputes, charges and countercharges from partisans of both sides began immediately. Not surprisingly, they included accusations of arson, which, if not proved, have neither been completely dispelled. Mungo Inglis was quick to seek to incriminate the president himself and rushed to keep Nicholson informed of the disaster and of the opportunity it might give him to reassert his influence over College affairs.^[88] Blair had not been staying in his rooms, which were occupied by Colonel Edward Hill on the night of the fire, nor was he at his Richneck residence. There was testimony to the effect that the fire began in or near Blair’s rooms, but a conflicting statement from Hill noted that he had left the room, discovered the fire, and had time to return and recover his possessions before it reached that part of the building. Other accounts reported three men dressed as gentlemen running from the blaze. No one produced convincing evidence of how the fire began, but the previous warnings of fire hazards from Nicholson and others provided an argument for a less sinister cause of the destruction.

For the first, although certainly not the last, time the College seemed on the verge of complete collapse. The absent Nicholson remained as rector until the end of his term on March 25, 1706, and by Governor Nott’ s testimony the remainder of the trustees were unable to do anything. Nor were there any funds for rebuilding.^[89] Thomas Hearne, an Oxford don, wrote in his diary upon learning of the fire that, had it survived, in all probability the College “would in some time have grown very famous.”^[90] Those who had witnessed the loss of the College building and known of the controversies of the preceding three years could scarcely have disagreed with Heame’s pessimistic view about the future of William and Mary.