Council or to the provisional court. Government was back in Pennsylvania — with a vengeance.

Taxation would very soon be back too. William Penn, a close friend of the recently deposed King James II of England, was in deep political trouble at court. Angry with Penn, peeved at the anarchism and the pacifism of the colony, and anxious to weld the northern colonies into a fighting force for attacking the French in Canada, King William, in late 1692, named Benjamin Fletcher governor of both New York and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, no longer under the proprietary of William Penn, was now a royal colony.

Governor Fletcher assumed the reins of government in April 1693. As in other royal colonies, the Council was now appointed by the Governor. Fletcher convened the Assembly inMay, and was able to drive through a tax bill because of his and the Council’s power to judge all the existing laws of Pennsylvania, and of a threat to annex the colony to New York. Taxes had arrived at last; archy was back in full force, and the glorious years of anarchism were gone.[6]

But a flurry of anarchism remained. In its 1694 session, the Pennsylvania Assembly decided to allocate almost half its tax revenue to the personal use of Thomas Lloyd and of William Markham, whom Fletcher had appointed as his Deputy-Governor. Infuriated, Fletcher dissolved the Assembly. After a year of imposition, taxes had again disappeared from Pennsylvania.

Disgusted, Fletcher lost interest in Pennsylvania, which after all these years was decidedly a poor place for raising tax revenue.