Brigadier-General William Cosby was an Irish soldier who served as the British colonial governor of New York from 1732 to 1736.
20 Facts About William Cosby
2.
In 1735, William Cosby accused publisher John Peter Zenger of sedition and libel for publishing unflattering reports about William Cosby.
3.
William Cosby was born in Stradbally Hall, Queen's County, Ireland, in 1690.
4.
In 1709,19-year-old William Cosby travelled to Italy and earned money by gambling in card games.
5.
In 1711, William Cosby married Grace Montagu, a lady with connections at the British court as a sister of George Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax.
6.
William Cosby had a home in Soho Square and one in St Leonard's Hill near Windsor, Berkshire.
7.
In 1717, William Cosby was promoted to colonel of the Royal Regiment of Ireland.
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Lewis Morris 8.
William Cosby's administration was unremarkable in most respects, but he ran into difficulties when he illegally seized a Portuguese ship and attempted to appropriate its valuable cargo of snuff for his own benefit.
9.
The interim governor, who would serve until William Cosby arrived in America, was Rip Van Dam.
10.
When William Cosby arrived in New York, he demanded that the acting governor, Van Dam, turn over half the salary he had received during his term to William Cosby.
11.
Van Dam replied that he would not do so unless William Cosby turned over half of the fees he had reaped from the office while in England.
12.
William Cosby dismissed Van Dam from the provincial council and named loyalist James De Lancey the new chief justice.
13.
Meanwhile, William Cosby secured an adequate salary for himself by refusing to call for new elections to the New York General Assembly.
14.
William Cosby failed either to secure Cosby's dismissal as governor or to secure his own reappointment as chief justice.
15.
William Cosby pushed out the settlers, forcing them to repurchase their properties, and then, as supreme judicial official of the colony, rejected the popular pleas led by Lewis Morris.
16.
The Iroquois tribes benefited from William Cosby's dereliction, reorganising their Six Nations confederation as a powerful military threat.
17.
William Cosby was initially buried in a vault at Ft.
18.
William Cosby was a moderate loyalist of the court party, a former representative in the Provincial Council.
19.
Eighteenth-century observers believed that Governor William Cosby was motivated by two goals: defending British interests and building his private fortune.
20.
The British Crown's governors in British North America were seldom popular, but to some colonists, William Cosby became a symbol of just how oppressive such governors could be.