| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Patricia U. Bonomi. The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in association with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1998. Pp. xiv, 290. $29.95.

Parts of this book read like a detective story. But the author, Patricia U. Bonomi, is more than a detective, for she has taken a mystery, long thought to be solved, and made of it an instrument for the examination of politics in colonial New York during the opening years of the eighteenth century. At its simplest, the mystery revolved around the identity of the figure in a painting hanging in the New York Historical Society. The longstanding assumption has been (until recently) that the painting is a portrait of Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, dressed in women's clothes. The identification was apparently made—and a label attached to the painting—at the South Kensington Museum in London in 1867, where it was included in an exhibition of national portraits. 1

Although the attribution had only the flimsiest basis in evidence, it has stuck. Historians of this century have not challenged the identification until Bonomi began her study. Nor have they questioned the common belief that Lord Cornbury was a transvestite and one of the most venal of governors in the American colonies. Bonomi's research casts doubt both on the assumption that Cornbury, dressed in women's clothing, sat for the portrait and on the truism that his conduct as a governor of New York was marked by corruption and authoritarian actions. . . .

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