IN 1763 the royal government was the predominant type in the English colonies which were later to become the United States of America. Of the twelve colonial governments,¹ eight belonged to the class of royal or provincial governments, two were proprietary governments, and two were chartered colonies with elective governors. This condition was, however, the result of very gradual development, inasmuch as the policy of direct control by the crown was finally adopted only after a long period, during which it was the rule to intrust the government, as well as the soil of the colonies, to proprietors or colonizing companies. In no colony was the system of royal government continuous from the beginning. So, too, the form and the powers of the colonial executive were not fixed from the start, but were adopted after various experiments with other forms, and were the result of a gradual limitation of powers at first vague and undefined. The first question to be considered, then, is as to the steps by which the royal government took shape and became the prevailing form in the colonies.

     For the earliest indications of royal policy in regard to the government of the colonies, it is necessary to go back to the sixteenth century. In the patent granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in 1578, the right of government was given to the proprietor substantially without limitation as to internal

affairs.¹ In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh received a charter conferring similar rights, under which the colony on Roanoke Island was organized.² In each of these cases, the government of the colony was left in the hands of the patentee.

     The first permanent English colony was that of Virginia, founded in 1607.³ Here the king at first retained considerable control. The charter to the Virginia Company provided that the governing council in England should be named by the crown, and reserved to the king the right of making from time to time such regulations as he saw fit for the government of the colony. In the exercise of this reserved right, the king issued in the same year a set of “Articles, Instructions, and Orders” for the government of Virginia, providing for a resident council which was to be appointed by the superior council at home.⁴ By the second charter, however, the king resigned these important rights, leaving the governing council to be elected thenceforth by the company, which was now left quite free in the organization of the government in Virginia.⁵

     The period of independence was, however, of short duration. In various ways, which need not be recited in detail here, the company incurred the ill-will of the king, a calamity which was rendered still more serious by internal dissensions. The dissentients soon caused serious charges of mismanagement to be brought against the company. It is true that these were squarely met, and that the people of the colony, far from joining in the attack, as it was hoped that they might do, declared in favor of the existing government.⁶ Still, the case was prejudged. In July, 1623, the attorney-general was directed to inquire whether the conduct of the Virginia Company did not furnish ground for annulling the charter, and, as might have

been expected, the royal law officers gave the opinion desired by the crown.¹ The king then proposed a considerable modification of the old charter, but the company refused to make the concession; whereupon a writ of quo warranto was issued against the company, and in 1624 the charter was annulled.²

     The policy of direct control by the crown was now announced. In August, 1624, King James formally assumed authority by the issue of a special commission to Sir Francis Wyatt and others as the “governor and council” of Virginia.³ In the following year Charles I. came to the throne, and immediately issued a proclamation declaring his intention of maintaining a direct royal government, a declaration which was soon followed by a commission for the government of Virginia by a royal governor and council.⁴ Efforts to secure a renewal of the charter were made without success. As late as 1642 the governor, council, and assembly found it necessary to disavow a petition presented in their names praying for the restoration of the old government;⁵ and the king took the occasion to declare emphatically his adherence to the principle of direct royal control. If the brief revolutionary period of the commonwealth be excepted, royal government in Virginia was now permanently established.

     Elsewhere, however, direct control by the crown was not to come for half a century.⁶ The charter of 1606, which organized the London Company for Virginia, created also the Plymouth Company, which in 1620 was reorganized as the “Council for New England,” with rights of government over the territory granted by the charter.⁷ This latter corporation,

however, lasted only fifteen years, surrendering its patent to the crown in 1635. The Council for New England soon granted large portions of their territory to individuals or to groups of individuals, and in some cases the proprietors of these sections succeeded in securing from the crown rights of government over the territory thus acquired.¹ Two of these grants—that of 1621 to the Plymouth Colony, and that of 1629 to the Massachusetts Bay Company—resulted in the formation of more or less permanent political establishments.²

     The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company created an organization which was in form very much like that established by the charters to the Virginia Company in 1609 and 1612.³ By its provisions the governor and company were empowered to make all necessary rules for the administration of the colony, and to govern either directly or by a resident governor of their appointment. On the face of the document, the government here, like that in Virginia, seemed to rest in the hands of a commercial company in England; and for a short time precisely this state of things did exist. In April, 1629, at a meeting in London, the company voted to establish “an absolute government at our plantation,” and in accordance with this resolution chose John Endicott as governor and seven others as councillors. For the time being, this governor with his council was invested with full powers of administration in the colony.⁴ The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, however, contained no clause restricting the seat of government of Massachusetts to England. Advantage was taken of this omission to transplant the principal seat of government to the colony. In this way the settlers of Massachusetts, instead of being ruled by a corporation across the

water, became a self-governing community, and the governor came to be, not an externally imposed ruler, but the agent of the voters. Already in Plymouth a self-governing colony had grown up independently of any royal sanction; and these republican models were followed in the younger colonies of New England. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut and New Haven, existed for years without any legal recognition.¹ After the Restoration, however, the consolidated governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island respectively received charters securing them in the possession of their local liberties.

     There were, then, in New England in 1663, after the issue of the Connecticut and Rhode Island charters, three elective governments protected by royal charters,—namely, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Plymouth had no such security, but she had not as yet been disturbed. The royal form had not at that time a foothold in New England. The commission issued by the parliamentary council to Coddington in 1650 for the government of Rhode Island was, it is true, an interesting anticipation of the future policy of direct control by the crown;² but Coddington’s attempt to enforce his claims had proved a complete failure.

     In the southern and middle colonies, founded during the Stuart reigns, the policy of direct control which the crown seemed to have announced by its action in Virginia was apparently abandoned. In 1632 came the charter of Maryland; in 1663, the grant to the proprietors of the Carolinas. In 1664, by the grant to the Duke of York, the conquest from the Dutch, New Netherland, passed into the hands of a private

proprietor;¹ and by the Duke’s releases of the same year the Jerseys passed into the hands of Berkeley and Carteret.² In 1681, on the security of a royal charter, William Penn founded the proprietary colony of Pennsylvania, though the crown reserved the right to declare void, within six months after their delivery in England, legislative acts of the colony inconsistent with the supreme allegiance due to the crown, and reserved also the right to take appeals from judgments given in the province.³

     Until the year 1685, royal governments had been established in but two colonies. In Virginia the crown maintained its control until 1652. The colony was then left largely to itself, having for a few years an elective government. In this period the governor and council were chosen by the assembly, which had become the real source of authority within the colony.⁴ At the Restoration, however, the old order was re-established without a struggle, and from that time to the War of Independence Virginia had a regular succession of royal governors. The second royal government was established in New Hampshire by a commission to John Cutts and others as the “president and council” of the province of New Hampshire, which went into effect in 1680.⁵

     In this brief sketch two general classes of colonial governments which were not under the direct control of the crown have been distinguished. First, there was the proprietary form, in which the governor was nominated by a single man or by a group of men, usually resident in England, who had financial interests in the colony. Such was the government of Virginia before the revocation of its charter in 1624, and such were the later governments of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania. In the second place, there was the elective form, sometimes springing up independently, as in Plymouth, Rhode Island, Providence, Connecticut, and New Haven; and sometimes secured by royal charter, as was the case in Massachusetts

and in the later consolidated governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island.

     In a rough way, the line of division was geographical. The proprietary form never took root in New England, though it played an important part in the colonization of the southern and middle States. The elective form, on the other hand, which held the field in New England during the first half-century of colonization, was never firmly established elsewhere, though there were a few interesting experiments with popular government in other colonies. Thus in Virginia during the commonwealth period there was, as has been seen, a practically independent elective government.¹ Some tendency toward a more popular form of administration also appears in the early history of the Carolinas;² but by far the most interesting example of elective governments outside of New England is to be found in the history of West Jersey.

     In 1676 the province of New Jersey was divided into two parts. East Jersey went to Sir George Carteret, and West Jersey to William Penn and others in trust for one Edward Byllinge, who had acquired the rights of John, Lord Berkeley, one of the two original proprietors.³ In the following year

the new Quaker proprietors and freeholders issued the so-called “Concessions” of West Jersey, by which all the powers of government were vested in the assembly and a body of elected commissioners.¹ In spite of these provisions, the proprietor, Edward Byllinge, sent out as his deputy-governor one Samuel Jennings; whereupon the assembly drew up a new set of “Fundamentals,” on the acceptance of which by the new governor it agreed “to accept and receive him” as deputy-governor.² From 1683 to 1685 there were annual elections. In 1685, however, the assembly, “reserving their just rights and privileges,” acknowledged the authority of the proprietor’s deputy, John Skene, and the brief line of elective governors came to an end.³

     Of these two classes of governments not under the direct control of the crown, the elective government lies beyond the scope of this work. The proprietary form, on the other hand, approaches so nearly the prevailing type of royal government that the two groups may for most purposes be classed together. It will, therefore, be enough here to note briefly the peculiar features of the proprietary system, those characteristics that distinguish the proprietary governor from his neighbor in the royal province.

     In order to understand the position of the proprietary governor, that of the proprietor himself as set forth in the proprietary charter must first be considered. The charter to Lord Baltimore in 1632 granted the territory of Maryland, with all the rights, privileges, and immunities within that territory which were enjoyed by the Bishop of Durham within the bishopric or county palatine of Durham. Lord Baltimore and his heirs were to hold this palatinate as “true and absolute lords and proprietaries . . . saving always the faith and allegiance and sovereign dominion” due to the crown. The land was to be held in free and common socage, and not

by knight’s service. As the expression of his vassal relation to the crown, the proprietor was to make an annual payment of two Indian arrows and one fifth of the gold and silver found within the colony.¹ Similar language is to be found in the Carolina charter.² In spite of the exemption from knight’s service, the whole phraseology carries us back to the days of feudal society. The principle implied is distinctly feudal, namely, the association of rights in the soil with rights of government; that is, the king parts with a portion of his prerogative, and exempts this particular piece of territory from the ordinary jurisdiction, very much as his predecessors had done when they created the palatinates of Lancaster and Durham.

     In the proprietary charters of New York and Pennsylvania, the powers granted to the proprietor were subject to some important limitations. In New York the crown had reserved to itself the right to receive appeals from any judgments given in the province.³ In Pennsylvania there was the additional requirement that all acts passed by the proprietor and the freemen should be subject to the royal veto for a limited time after their transmission to the crown.⁴ In these charters there is no reference to the English palatinate as the measure of the proprietor’s powers, but the main principle is the same as in the Maryland and Carolina charters. In each case were created private jurisdictions exempt wholly or in part from the ordinary operation of the royal sovereignty. The proprietary governor was, in a sense, not even a public officer at all, but the agent of a private person or group of persons, intrusted, it is true, with the powers and duties of an officer of State, but charged also with the defence and promotion of distinctly private interests. He had at the start scarcely any organic connection with the royal governmental system.

     This is, in essence, the difference between the proprietary

governor and the royal governor. Individual governments might have special peculiarities, but the only essential point of difference between the two classes as a whole lay in the fact that in the one the governor received his authority from a quasi-feudal dignitary or body of proprietors, while in the other he received his authority directly from the crown. The form of his office and the extent of his powers were not necessarily altered by a change from the one relation to the other.

     As a matter of fact, however, the proprietary governments exhibit greater varieties in form than the royal governments, inasmuch as the ownership of a colony offered peculiar opportunities for political experiment. The extent of these experiments varied. There were not many of them in Maryland and New York, though in the former colony some steps were taken in the direction of a partly feudal organization. In the Carolinas, the Jerseys, and in Pennsylvania, however, there were striking instances of this kind of political experiment; indeed each of these colonies had an abundant crop of original, if not workable, constitutions. In the Carolinas there were, first, the tentative propositions of 1663 looking toward a system of popular government;¹ then the “Concessions” of 1665, which reserved to the proprietors the appointment of the executive, but gave to the assembly an unusual degree of control;² and, finally, the various editions of the “Fundamental Constitutions” from 1669 to 1698, with their cumbrous machinery and formidable terminology; their “Palatine’s Court,” “Grand Council,” “Parliament,” aristocratic upper house, “land-raves,” and “caciques.”³ Two of the Carolina proprietors were also proprietors of the Jerseys, where the same tendencies appeared in a similar set of “Concessions.”⁴ In this case, the division of the province between two new sets of proprietors gave rise to another set of fundamental documents. From the West Jersey proprietors came the “Concessions” of West Jersey, modified

by the “Fundamentals” of the West Jersey assembly, while in the eastern division there was another elaborate paper constitution.

     The peculiar tendency toward the making of elaborate constitutional documents, shown in the West Jersey “Concessions” of William Penn and his Quaker associates, appears again in the various frames of government set up in Pennsylvania. In the intricate constitutional mechanism of Penn’s first “Frame of Government” for Pennsylvania, we have a fair counterpart of the “Fundamental Constitutions” of Carolina. In all these colonies the elaborate machinery passed away, the paper constitutions died an early and natural death, but the popular tendencies embodied in some of the early documents left their impress on the later constitutional development.

     The defects of the proprietary system are not hard to see. The first of these was inherent in the union of the two characters of governor and private proprietor. The proprietor had great landed interests in the colony: he was the landlord, whose financial interests often clashed with those of his tenants. Out of this situation arose the interminable quit-rent controversies, and later the question as to the taxation of proprietary lands, which proved so serious an element of conflict in Pennsylvania and Maryland.¹ The quit-rent troubles were not, it is true, confined to the proprietary colonies. The crown, like the proprietor, had financial interests at variance with those of the colonists, and the royal governor, like the proprietary governor, was bound to become the defender of these interests against the assembly. In the proprietary colonies, however, such conflicts were embittered by a feeling that the strife was obviously one between public and private interests. Then, too, many of the proprietors had undertaken these enterprises as distinctly commercial investments, considering that their right of government was only incidental to their general right of property, and, like that, was to be worked to its full value. Consequently there was a tendency to dispose of colonial offices as purely private property. In Pennsylvania this course was checked by limiting closely the power

of appointment;¹ but in Maryland there seems to have been a regular traffic in minor colonial offices nominally in the gift of the governor. This practice was perhaps at its height in the time of Governor Sharpe, during the French and Indian war. Many appointments were practically taken out of his hands; and offices were sold on peculiar terms, by which the proprietor’s relatives and friends received a certain share of the profits.²

     It would, of course, be unjust to imply that all of the proprietors were influenced by improper motives. The last days of the Virginia Company, the attitude of Penn toward his colony, and the history of Maryland under some of the earlier proprietors furnish conclusive evidence that the possession of proprietary rights and a reasonable desire to protect them were not necessarily inconsistent with some regard for the interests of the colonists. Nevertheless, the proprietors were exposed to peculiar temptations, and the system was one which could work well only under the most favorable conditions.

     As the home government came to exercise a closer supervision over the colonies, especially after the development of parliamentary control through the navigation acts, a second element of difficulty was introduced, namely, the conflict between royal and proprietary interests. In Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Carolinas, and the Jerseys, there was often friction between the proprietary governors and the royal revenue and admiralty officers,³—such, for example, as that which arose in 1681 in Maryland, where Lord Baltimore was charged with obstructing the collection of the royal customs, a quarrel which ended in the killing of one of the royal officers.⁴ Edward Randolph, the most persistent upholder of the British customs laws, asserted in strong terms that the proprietary governments were particularly remiss in the enforcement of the navigation laws.⁵

     A still more serious conflict of interests occurred during the period of the French and Indian wars of the eighteenth century. The assemblies were, of course, frequently called upon for supplies; and when, as in Pennsylvania and Maryland, they passed supply bills which included taxes on the estates of the proprietors, the refusal of the latter to permit such taxes led to prolonged and angry deadlocks.¹ At such times the position of the proprietary governor was peculiarly difficult, compelled, as he often was, to choose between his duty to the crown and his obligations to the proprietor. The royal governor, it is true, was frequently called upon to choose between a refusal of supplies by the assembly and disobedience to his instructions; but the proprietary governor was hampered by an additional set of instructions based, not on constitutional and political grounds, but often on purely selfish interests. How energetic men chafed under such restraints, and how the public interests often suffered, is well illustrated in the correspondence of Governor Sharpe of Maryland. In 1756, in the crisis of the conflict with the French, he wrote impatiently: “If my hands had not been tied up by such Instructions as empty Coffers seem to have dictated I should many Months ago have had a Regiment of Maryland Troops under my Command & in all probability have been enabled to prevent any Incursions of Indians into this Province.”²

     The mere intervention of a third party between the province and the crown seems to have been felt as a grievance. This was true at least in Pennsylvania, where the crown had reserved to itself a veto on legislation,³ and where the proprietor also had the right of assent or veto. There was no trouble so long as the proprietor was present; but when in his absence he reserved the right of rejecting laws approved by his deputy, there was vigorous opposition. The proprietor was

finally obliged to yield on this point;¹ but he retaliated by imposing limitations on the governor’s power of assent to legislation, clinching them by the requirement of a bond for the due observance of all such instructions.²

     In Maryland and the Carolinas, where the crown had reserved no veto, there was similar opposition to the exercise of the proprietary veto, inasmuch as the colonists claimed that the acts of an agent bound his principal. In Maryland the assembly regarded it as a serious grievance that there should be no one in the province capable of giving a final assent to legislation, and in 1681 a bill was passed by the lower house, making the governor’s assent final in legislation. The bill was thrown out by the council, which defended the proprietary veto as necessary to the security of proprietary rights. The proprietor agreed, however, that during his absence his assent or dissent should be published within eighteen months.³ The same view as that held in Maryland was taken by the assembly of South Carolina; and when the proprietary government was finally overthrown, the proprietor’s right of veto was cited as one of the grievances that justified revolutionary action.⁴ The veto by the proprietor was not, it is true, essentially different from that by the crown in the royal governments; but, as the charters gave the right of legislation to the proprietor and the freemen,⁵ it was felt that the absence of the proprietor ought not to add a second veto.

     In addition to these difficulties of the proprietary system, the proprietors in many cases proved their inability to maintain stable and efficient governments. This circumstance was strikingly true in the Carolinas, where the proprietors seemed almost helpless to deal with the turbulent population. Edward Randolph, for whose partisanship some allowance must perhaps be made, wrote that North Carolina at the end of the seventeenth century was on the verge of anarchy.¹ The people of South Carolina, in their petition for a royal government, urged among other reasons for the change the desire for royal protection from the Spanish and Indian invasions which were then threatening the colony.² A similar state of things existed in New Jersey, whither the crown was called upon to send governors capable of enforcing law and order.³

     Besides all these elements of weakness which worked against the proprietary system, there were other circumstances in the situation which rendered the transition to the royal government peculiarly easy. The various experiments in constitution-making had for the most part proved failures; and as a result there grew up in the proprietary colonies political organizations very similar to those in the royal governments. In all these colonies there was, for example, a governor nominated by the proprietor, with a nominated council and an elective assembly. Thus the only step necessary in the transition from proprietary to royal government was the resumption by the crown of the prerogatives which it had intrusted to the proprietor. The changes in the internal constitution of the colony were very slight.

     In the last years of the Stuarts, the policy of direct royal control began to be aggressively pushed. In one case, that of New York, the change came naturally, without a contest; for when James, Duke of York, became king, New York ceased

to be a proprietary colony and became a royal province. In most cases, however, the new policy included measures much more aggressive, which took shape, now for the first time, in a definite and determined attack upon the charters all along the line. The blow fell first upon Massachusetts.

     Massachusetts, almost from the beginning, had been compelled to face attacks, open or secret, upon the charter of 1629. As early as 1634, Gorges had urged the establishment of royal governments in New England.¹ Legal processes had been begun against the charter, and more than once Massachusetts had stood on the verge of a catastrophe from which she had been saved only by skilful diplomacy and a fortunate combination of circumstances.² The unfriendly attitude of the crown after the Restoration excited new apprehensions, but for a few years the company held its ground. At last, however, the blow fell. In 1681 the king reinforced his demands for a change in the colonial constitution by threatening to annul the charter;³ in 1683 a writ of quo warranto was issued against it;⁴ in the next year the case was transferred to the Court of Chancery; and before the year was over the charter was annulled.⁵ For a time, however, the old charter government was allowed to go on, until the new king, James II., by his commission to Joseph Dudley, organized the first royal government in Massachusetts.⁶ Dudley’s title was that of president, and he was supported by a council also nominated by the crown. Besides Massachusetts Bay, the commission included New Hampshire, Maine, and the King’s Province; and in the following year, 1686, Sir Edmund Andros received a new commission, which included also the colony of Plymouth.⁷

     Proceedings had already been begun against other colonial charters. Rhode Island and Connecticut were brought under royal control, and in 1688 Andros received a commission as governor of New England, which was then defined so as to include New York and the Jerseys.¹ Orders had also been issued for the prosecution of quo warranto writs against the governments of Connecticut, Rhode Island, East and West Jersey, Maryland, Carolina, and Delaware.² Thus, within two years after the accession of James II., proceedings had been entered upon against all the proprietary and charter governments, with the exception of Pennsylvania. In general, then, it may be said that the new royal policy included two things: first, the substitution of royal for proprietary and charter governments; and, secondly, a process of consolidation, as illustrated by Andros’s commission as governor of the greater New England.

     The Revolution of 1688 put a stop to these proceedings; but William III. did not altogether abandon the policy of his predecessor. To him, as the head of the great European alliance against Louis XIV., careful organization and concentration of forces in all quarters must have seemed highly desirable. The first period of the great conflict between England and France for the possession of. the North American continent was just beginning, and clearly a well-organized system of royal governments was far better adapted to meet such a test than the old aggregation of proprietary and charter colonies. Moreover, the navigation acts could be better enforced by royal governors than by irresponsible proprietary agents. Thus, although Rhode Island, Connecticut, and, for a time, the Jerseys were allowed to retain their independent governments, the establishment of royal governments in Massachusetts and New York was a substantial and permanent result of this first war upon the charters.

     The positions of the Maryland and Pennsylvania proprietors were complicated by personal considerations. Lord Baltimore

was a Roman Catholic; and Penn’s relations with James II. were such as to arouse suspicion in the minds of the dominant party. In Maryland, an unfortunate emphasis was given to the religious element by the rebellion in that colony, which was conducted on ostensibly anti-Catholic lines.¹ At length, in 1689, the Committee of Trade and Plantations recommended that measures be taken to bring the “proprieties” of Carolina, Maryland, and Pennsylvania “under a nearer dependence on the Crown”;² and in 1690 the attorney-general was ordered to proceed by scire facias against the charter of Maryland.

     A new theory was now formulated to justify royal interference. Chief Justice Holt, being called upon to give an opinion, declared that, “it being in a case of necessity,” the king might appoint a governor in Maryland, though the proprietor could not be deprived of his income from the province a except through forfeiture.³ This theory was more distinctly stated by the law officers of the crown a few years later when the solicitor-general made a report on the charters of Connecticut and New Jersey, giving his opinion “that notwithstanding any thing in the said Charters or Grants, there Majesties by virtue of their Prerogative and Soverainty over those Colonies, which is not granted from the Crown to the Gov^r and Company, nor to the proprietors by any of the Chart^rs may appoint Governors for these places with such Powers, and authorities for the Government thereof . . . as their Majesties shall in their great wisdom judge reasonable.”⁴ A similar opinion was given by the crown law officers some years afterwards, upon complaint made against the governments of Rhode Island and Connecticut. They declared that there was nothing in the charters which could “exclude your Majesty (who has a right to govern all your subjects) from naming a Governor on your Majesty’s behalf, for those colonies at all times.”⁵ This statement is one of great interest, asserting as it does within the field of colonial government that right of the crown to govern all its subjects which in England had during the middle ages gradually

been secured against the hostile forces of local privilege and feudal anarchy. It is the recognition of this principle which chiefly distinguishes the modern State, whether it be an absolute monarchy or a representative republic, from the feudal organization of the middle ages.

     It has been very commonly thought that this policy of securing direct control by the crown was inspired by the natural hostility of a tyrannical government to the local liberties of the colonies; but it must not be forgotten that, taking the colonies as a whole, the change was distinctly in the interest of better government. Royal tyranny may have been bad enough; but in the long run it was far better than the control of private and, to a large extent, irresponsible proprietors. May it not be said, too, that this union in dependence upon the crown worked in some measure toward that sense of common political interests which, imperfect as it was, was yet the indispensable condition for success in the struggle for independence, and paved the way for the “more perfect union” of the federal constitution?

     The doctrine laid down by Chief Justice Holt was soon put into general operation. In Pennsylvania, Governor Fletcher of New York assumed control on the authority of a royal commission;¹ and although Penn succeeded with some difficulty in recovering his rights of government, yet a precedent had been set which might be cited on future occasions. The proceedings in Maryland were more serious. In 1691 the crown issued a commission to Sir Lionel Copley as governor of Maryland, thus establishing a royal government, without however depriving Lord Baltimore of his property rights in the soil.² The charter still stood; and finally, twenty-four years later, a Protestant Lord Baltimore was allowed to resume the government of the province.³ In the Jerseys, the proprietary government had been restored after the revolution of 1688, but its position was by no means secure. There was a general feeling of discontent with the proprietary régime, and frequent petitions

for the appointment of a royal governor were made.¹ The situation was further complicated by the existence of factions among the proprietors.² As early as 1687 the proprietors had made propositions looking toward the surrender of the government, but with a reservation of their property rights.³ Finally terms of surrender were arranged, and in 1702 New Jersey became a royal province.⁴

     Similar causes brought about similar results in the Carolinas. In South Carolina, the oppressive treatment of the dissenters by a party which received the support of the proprietors, and the proprietors’ veto of popular measures, combined to develop the spirit of opposition. Furthermore, the invasions by the Spaniards and Indians seemed to show the inability of the proprietors to maintain an effective defence of the province. At length the growing discontent culminated in the rebellion of 1719, when the popular party assumed control in the name of the king, and a provisional government was chosen to serve until the crown should take final action.⁵ The crown, on the other hand, as early as 1706, had taken steps toward the overthrow of the proprietary government. In 1705 the House of Lords, after declaring null and void certain acts against dissenters, had urged the crown “to use the most effectual Methods to deliver the said Province from the arbitrary Oppressions under which it now lies.” The Lords of Trade had then recommended the institution of legal proceedings against the charter in the Court of Queen’s Bench, and the queen had issued instructions to the law officers of the crown, although nothing came of them at the time.⁶ Finally the uprising of 1719 gave the crown its opportunity. The regency in council declared that the proprietors had forfeited their charter, and ordered the attorney-general to take out a writ of scire facias

against them.¹ The crown, without waiting for final action by the courts, then proceeded to exercise its authority in South Carolina by the appointment of Francis Nicholson as governor.²

     Of all the proprietary governments, that of North Carolina had been the most notoriously inefficient. In this colony the authority of the proprietors almost lapsed at times; and in 1711 there was practically a state of war between conflicting claimants to the government.³ The proprietary system, however, dragged out a wretched existence until 1729, when the long negotiations between the crown and the proprietors came to a close, in the final surrender of both provinces to the crown.⁴

     The surrender of North Carolina marked the last stage in the course begun by Charles II. At one time or another the crown had set up its own governors in every one of the proprietary and charter colonies; and at the end of this period of transition all but four colonies had been brought into the class of royal governments. Of these, two, Pennsylvania and Maryland, represent the proprietary government, and two, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the charter government. Even these four were not altogether secure from attack. In 1702 an act of Parliament was proposed for bringing the proprietary governments into closer dependence upon the crown; but although the proposition was supported by the Board of Trade, it came to nothing.⁵ Again, complaints made by Governors Dudley of Massachusetts and Cornbury of New York

against the governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island, brought out the report of the crown law officers already referred to, declaring the right of the crown to “govern” all its subjects.¹ In 1711 the adoption of a uniform plan of colonial government was spoken of as desirable but impracticable, “the purchasing proprietyes and takeing away of usurpations being a work of time and trouble.”² As late as 1721 the Massachusetts agent in London, Jeremiah Dummer, published his “Defence of the New-England Charters,” designed to meet an impending attack on the charter governments; and even long afterward there was an unsuccessful attempt in Pennsylvania to overthrow the proprietary government of that colony.³

     Those proprietary governments which were permitted to continue were nevertheless subjected to a considerable degree of royal control. By the navigation laws the colonial governors were made, to a considerable extent, the administrators of these trade regulations; and by the statute 7 & 8 William III. it was provided that all governors of plantations should be approved by the crown.⁴ Thus the proprietary governor himself became in a measure a royal officer responsible to the crown. It is interesting to note that, in spite of the policy of direct royal control so generally adopted, in 1732, three years after the surrender of the Carolina charter, the crown by its charter to the Georgia trustees recurred temporarily to the old proprietary system. The charter of Georgia had, however, a saving clause, in the provision that after twenty-one years the government of the colony was to revert to the crown. Consequently in 1754, without a contest and as a matter of course, Georgia became a royal province.⁵