[ 138 ] STEVE J. STERN rigidly to insure equal privileges for all groups in the society. Instead it involved an ongoing appraisal of realities, balancing privilege and political power. Anglican and Dutch Reformed churches may have received charters of semi-establishment, but no other denomination in New York's colonial period had the support of a group powerful enough to obtain a charter. Seventeenth-century pluralism did not imply equality for all; nor did it imply that primary group allegiances remained stable over long periods of time. People who were Dutch could also be, for example, Albany residents, or members of the merchant elite courted by England. With the satisfaction of the Dutch provincial interest by the 1680s, these competing, non-ethnic allegiances would shape the response to political fluidity in 1689. Only a threat to an established right or an opportunity to win a new privilege (the Anglican church issue in the 1690s) reawakened the Dutch provincial interest after the 1670s. Study of the sources of unity and division among Dutch New Yorkers illustrates much in New York history. The loyalties (ethnic, sectional, class, status) which tended to unite or divide the Dutch also conditioned the activities of other groups in the New York population. Moreover, a consideration of Anglo-Dutch politics, 1664-91, and its stimuli should dispel the notion of a passive Dutch population accepting a smooth transition to English rule. To be sure, the Dutch were hardly belligerent nationalists. They had a sense of the possible and opted to bargain for rights and privileges rather than to suffer the wrath of a superior military force. Motivated largely by materialism, conquered by a people who were not especially alien to them,54 greeted by a policy of accommodation, the Dutch found it in their interest to seek a modus Vivendi with their conquerors. To call the Dutch passive, however, is to ignore the growth of the Dutch provincial interest in New York politics, and the tensions that flared into violence at Kingston in the 1660s and at New York City in the 1680s. More careful analysis of the reality of Dutch life, 1664-91, leads instead to a case study of limits and possibilities in pluralism, the problem posed by New York's great "mixture of nations!' 64 By this I mean, for example, that Anglicans did not constitute a strong negative reference group in Dutch history. A Catholic conquest of New York might have aroused negative emotions intense enough to prevent the possibility of reconciliation.