History of New York City (1665–1783) port British ships evacuated in 1783. The English had renamed the colony the Province of New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665, appointed Thomas Willett the first of the Mayors of New York. The city grew northward and remained the largest and most important city in the Province of New York, becoming the third largest in the British Empire after London and Philadelphia. The Dutch regained the colony briefly in 1673, then finally lost it permanently to the English in 1674 after the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Leisler's Rebellion, an uprising in which
Thomas Willett in 1674, at the age of sixty-nine. He was buried in the Little Neck Cemetery at Bullock's Cove, Riverside area of East Providence, Rhode Island. In his religious views, Willett was an independent. Willett was connected by marriage to the family of John Brown(e), shipbuilder, perennial political office holder, founder of several towns, and one of the wealthiest men in the Plymouth Colony. Although Brown(e)'s origins are uncertain and subject to present debate, he evidently was very well connected in England, as near the end of his life he returned there for several years as executor of the estate of