Despite these enmities, he managed to negotiate several treaties of the Covenant Chain with the Iroquois, establishing a long-lived peace involving the colonies and other tribes that interacted with that confederacy.

Andros agreed to confirm the existing property holdings and allow the territory's Dutch inhabitants to maintain their Protestant religion.

[21] Andros used the outbreak of King Philip's War in July 1675 as an excuse to go by ship to Connecticut with a small military force to establish the duke's claim.

It also led to charges in New England that Andros provided arms to Indians allied to King Philip (as the Wampanoag leader Metacom was known to the English); in fact, Andros provided gunpowder to Rhode Island that was used in the Great Swamp Fight against the Narragansetts in December 1675, and specifically outlawed the sale of munitions to tribes known to be allied to Philip.

An offer by Andros to send New York troops into Massachusetts to attack Philip was rebuffed based on the idea that it was a covert ploy to assert authority over the Connecticut River again.

During this visit, he was knighted as a reward for his performance as governor,[36] and he sat in on meetings of the Lords of Trade in which agents for Massachusetts Bay defended its charter, and gave detailed accounts of the state of his colony.

[37] The southernmost territories of the duke, roughly encompassing northern Delaware, were desired by Charles Calvert, Baron Baltimore, who sought to extend the reach of his proprietary Province of Maryland into the area.

At the same time, Calvert was seeking an end to a frontier war with the Iroquois to the north, having persuaded the intervening Susquehannocks to move to the Potomac River, well within Maryland territory.

[38] Furthermore, the Lenape, who dominated Delaware Bay, were unhappy with seizures of their lands by Virginia and Maryland settlers, and war between these groups had been imminent in 1673 when the Dutch retook New York.

[50] Possibly based on orders given to him during his visit to England, Andros began to assert New York authority over East Jersey after George Carteret's death in 1680.

In a dispute centering on the collection of customs duties in ports on the Jersey side of the Hudson, Andros, in 1680, sent a company of soldiers to Philip Carteret's home in Elizabethtown.

[61] In a brief work, Sir Edmund Andros, historian Henry Ferguson attested[62] to the fact that the deliberation of certain policies by an assembly of legislators may have proven inefficient.

This work consumed so much time that Andros, in March 1687, issued a proclamation stating that pre-existing laws would remain in effect until they were revised.

Plymouth's relatively poor landowners were hard hit because of the high rates on livestock, and funds derived from whaling, once sources of profit for the individual towns, were now directed to the dominion government.

Many protests were made that the town meeting and tax laws were violations of the Magna Carta, which guaranteed taxation by representatives of the people.

Andros attempted to compel the certification of ownership by issuing writs of intrusion,[78][79] but large landowners who owned many parcels contested these individually rather than recertifying all of their lands.

Nicholson, an army captain and protégé of colonial secretary William Blathwayt, came to Boston in early 1687 as part of Andros' honor guard and had been promoted to his council.

Dominion governance of the Jerseys was complicated because the proprietors, whose charters had been revoked, had retained their property and petitioned Andros for what were traditional manorial rights.

His objective was to disrupt trade between the English at Albany and the Iroquois confederation, to which the Seneca belonged, and to break the Covenant Chain, a peace Andros had negotiated in 1677 while he was governor of New York.

[citation needed] During Andros's presence in New York, the situation in Maine deteriorated again, with groups of colonists raiding Indian villages and taking prisoners.

These actions were taken per a directive issued by dominion councillors remaining in Boston, who ordered frontier militia commanders to take into custody any Abenaki suspected of participating in the raids.

[91] Faced with this discord, Andros returned to Maine with a significant force and began constructing additional fortifications to protect the settlers, including Fort Andross.

[94] The old Massachusetts colonial leadership, restored due to the rebellion and headed by ex-governor Simon Bradstreet, then summoned Governor Andros to surrender, for his safety because of the mob which they claimed "whereof we were wholly ignorant".

The exact reasons for this hostility are unclear: one contemporary wrote that Nicholson "especially [resented] Sir Edmund Andros, against whom he has a particular pique on account of some earlier dealings".

Andros' management of colonial defense and Indian relations was successful: Virginia, unlike New York and New England, was not attacked during the war.

[117] Blair's complaints, many of them vague and inaccurate, went to London, where proceedings into Andros' conduct began at the Board of Trade and the Church of England ecclesiastical courts in 1697.

[122] The historian Michael Kammen states that Andros failed in all of his roles in the colonies: ...in part because he was neither ruthless enough to cow his provincial subjects into submission nor ingratiating enough to win himself a broad base of local support.

Although he was disliked in the colonies,[58] he was recognized in England as an effective administrator by implementing the policies that he had been ordered to carry out and advancing the crown's agenda.

The biographer Mary Lou Lustig notes that he was "an accomplished statesman, a brave soldier, a polished courtier, and a devoted servant", but his style was often "autocratic, arbitrary, and dictatorial", he lacked tact, and he had difficulty reaching compromises.

"[126] Andros appears in several episodes of The Witch of Blackbird Pond in which his conflict with the Connecticut colonists forms the background to the protagonist's more personal problems.