Hooted down the street

What happened

In June 1705 a Rhode Island privateer, Captain John Halsey's brigantine Charles, brought a prize into Newport under a commission from Governor Samuel Cranston. Rhode Island's elected governors had been issuing such commissions on their own authority, and Joseph Dudley, the royal governor at Boston, meant to stop it: the Queen had told the colony it had no admiralty power, and Dudley's judge of admiralty, Nathaniel Byfield, crossed to Newport on 27 June to try the case himself. Byfield held his court, declared Cranston's commission illegal and void, and then, on Dudley's advice, condemned the prize to the captors anyway, saving the Lord High Admiral's share. Byfield wrote that it appeared to be a Spanish ship; Rothbard has it French. Then about eighteen "lusty fellows" drew up to the table where he sat and handed his Register a paper defending the governor's commission. Byfield took it out of the man's hand, let nobody read it, and dismissed the court. By his own report to the Queen's secretary of state, when he came out he "was hooted down the street by those fellows that offered the paper," and the government of Rhode Island took no notice at all (Rhode Island Colonial Records III, p. 539). Rothbard cites the scene for Rhode Island's disdain for war and the state and its refusal of Dudley's admiralty (CiL, p. 470). Dudley's campaign against the charter failed, and Rhode Island went on commissioning its own privateers.