Myles Cooper

Cooper was educated at The Queen's College, Oxford where he later served as chaplain. Ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1761, he attracted the influence of several high clergymen, including Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, who recommended him for service in the American colonies. Cooper was thereby sent to New York in 1762 to assist Samuel Johnson, president of King's College, which was an Anglican establishment. Cooper was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy, and a year later he had assumed the college presidency.

Cooper was chosen to replace his predecessor in the position of College President primarily because the Governors of the institution believed he would be far easier to control. Indeed, Cooper was not entirely engaged in the educational mission of King's, possessing a larger cache of alcoholic beverages than books, and more frequently engaging in the urban life of New York.

Still, the college prospered under Cooper's tenure, creating, among other things, the second medical college in the Americas, in 1767. Judge Thomas Jones wrote that "under his tuition was produced a number of young men superior in learning and ability to any that America had ever before seen," and George Washington, whose stepson John Parke Custis attended King's, wrote of Cooper that he was "a gentleman capable of instructing him [Custis] in every branch of knowledge."

He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1769.[1]

While in the American colonies Cooper floated several grandiose schemes that were never realized:

Cooper, who was a conservative with Tory sympathies, did not take warmly to the growing revolutionary spirit in the colonies. He authored, with several other Anglican clergy in New York, political tracts arguing that all forms of resistance to the Crown constituted treason. His pamphlet A Friendly Address to all Reasonable Americans on our Political Confusions; in which the Necessary Consequences of violently opposing the King's Troops, and of a General Non-importation, are fairly stated was later answered in best-selling tracts by Alexander Hamilton and Charles Lee.

For his Loyalism, Cooper, along with other prominent New York Tories, were issued death threats admonishing them "to flee for your lives, or anticipate your doom". Of Cooper, in particular, this party evidenced a desire of "seizing him in his bed, shaving his head, cutting off his ears, slitting his nose, stripping him naked, and setting him adrift". In May 1775 Cooper was confronted by an angry mob from which he managed to escape by boarding a British naval ship anchored in New York harbor. Rumors persist that this was due to the assistance of Alexander Hamilton, though these have been shown to lack the weight of substantive evidence. Cooper fled to England that same month, where he engaged in numerous professions. His only subsequent association to America was his claim that he was owed pay for his tenure as college president, as well as a poem he composed about his flight.

Cooper died in Edinburgh, Scotland.

• Myles Cooper at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)

• Biographical Sketches of King's College Notables
• King's College Timeline
• "Myles Cooper: Ecclesiastical Placeman" from "Tory Prologue: King’s College in Revolutionary America 1754 - 1776" by Robert A. McCaughey