Background
George Clarke, the son of George Clarke, was born in 1676 in Somerset, England.
George Clarke, the son of George Clarke, was born in 1676 in Somerset, England.
Clarke was in early youth articled to an attorney. In 1701 he was a resident of Dublin where he became involved in a quarrel with a merchant, for which he had to pay damages of three guineas. He was a nephew of William Blaithwait whose well- known influence in matters of patronage in connection with plantation affairs was doubtless responsible for Clarke’s appointment to the office of Secretary of the Province of New York. Arriving in New York on July 23, 1703, he remained, except for a brief visit to England in 1705, for forty-two years. He was therefore very far from being an absentee sinecure-holder. Of no brilliance of gifts or striking force of character, it was rather by a long course of steady attention to the opportunities of his position in the province, coupled with painstaking assiduity in keeping contact with important sources of political and social influence in England, that he finally became a significant figure in New York provincial history.
About 1705 he took up his residence on Long Island where he purchased nearly 100 acres of land and erected a villa. Here he spent a great portion of his time, leaving the details of his office to be attended to by his deputy. As landmarks in his official career may be mentioned his appointment in 1716 to membership in the Council of New York, and, in 1718, to the commission to run the Connecticut boundary line, and as deputy for New York to the Auditor General of the Plantations, Horace Walpole. Probably through this latter connection he became a frequent correspondent of the Duke of Newcastle.
By 1736 he had amassed a considerable fortune, in small part from the fees of his offices, but much more as a result of extensive dealings in land, for which those offices afforded peculiarly favor able opportunities. Throughout these same years he had consistently made himself useful to the successive governors in the domain of provincial politics, and yet, till Cosby’s administration, 1732-1736, he had managed to keep on fairly good terms with the provincial leaders.
The peculiar circumstances of his accession to the headship of the provincial government as lieutenant-governor in 1736, after the violent excesses of the Cosby administration, brought him, however, to the center of a local situation full of dangerous popular passion. By adroit management, made possible by his acquaintance with the local scene, he was able after a time to reduce the tension. But he was obliged to yield entirely to the ambitions of the Assembly for complete control of provincial finance. It was while he was lieutenant-governor that the precedent was firmly established of supporting the provincial government by annual grants of revenue instead of for terms of three or five years, and of making specific appropriations by legislative act instead of appropriations in general terms supplemented by resolves requesting particular applications. The attainment of this precedent by the Assembly constituted a crisis of the first order of importance in the constitutional development of New York as a royal province.
Clarke also abandoned the practise, formerly prevalent, of presiding in the Council when the latter sat as a legislative body. His “interest" at home proved insufficient to obtain for him more than the commission as lieutenant-governor and he was succeeded in the headship of the province by George Clinton to whom the seals and commission were delivered September 1743. Henceforth Clarke took no further part in public affairs. On his voyage home in 1745 he was taken prisoner by the French, but his losses incident to this occasion as well as those from the “African Plot” fire in New York in 1741 were made up—and more, according to his enemies—by a Parliamentary donation. He was said to have made a fortune of £100, 000 in America. He certainly was able to purchase a handsome estate in Cheshire, and at his death was buried in Chester Cathedral.
In 1705 Clarke was married to Anne Hyde, who was distantly related to the Clarendons and so to Queen Anne and to Lord Cornbury, who was at that time governor of New York.
