Charles Hardy, English-American admiral and politician, 29th Colonial Governor of New York (born 1714)

Admiral Sir Charles Hardy was a Royal Navy officer, politician and colonial administrator who sat in the House of Commons of Great Britain between 1764 and 1780. He served as governor of New York from 1755 to 1757.

The territory which would later become the state of New York was settled by European colonists as part of the New Netherland colony under the command of the Dutch West India Company in the Seventeenth Century. These colonists were largely of Dutch, Flemish, Walloon, and German stock, but the colony soon became a "melting pot." In 1664, at the onset of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, English forces under Richard Nicolls ousted the Dutch from control of New Netherland, and the territory became part of several different English colonies. Despite one brief year when the Dutch retook the colony (1673–1674), New York would remain an English and later British possession until the American colonies declared independence in 1776.