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which they sent to the Privy Council, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons and in the letters which they wrote to the Secretary of State, the Treasury, the Admiralty, the Commissioners of the Customs, and the governors and others in the colonies, they upheld the mercantilist point of view, with strict regard for tradition and precedent, and insisted to the end that the colonies should remain, apparently for ever, in a position of dependence and subordination, subservient to the mother country and contributory to her prosperity and power. In reaching their opinions, they sought information and advice from a great variety of sources, including hearings at the Plantation Office and correspondence with departments and officials both in England and America. Among their most influential advisers was their standing counsel, first appointed in 1718, whose rulings on colonial legislation determined in most cases the decision of the King in Council as to the confirmation or disallowance of colonial laws. For example, Francis Fane, K.C., who served in this capacity for twenty-one years and was for a number of years afterwards a member of the Board itself, must always be considered as having played an important part in shaping England's relations with her colonies.1 Although the Council in Committee sometimes altered or refused to accept the recommendations of the Board, its reasons for doing so were not based on any opposition to the policy involved, for the members of the Privy Council were probably as mercantilist as the members of the Board. Though the latter had no executive powers, their influence in shaping executive action was very great. The Plantation Office was a workshop in which was prepared material for many important official documents. Large numbers of Orders in Council, royal warrants counter-signed by the Secretary of State, the Treasury, and the Admiralty, and even occasional royal proclamations and Acts of Parliament found their origin in the activities of this office. The Treasury, with the Commissioners of Customs and the Post Office, the Admiralty, Navy Board and High Court of Admiralty, and the War Office, were all brought into a more or less regular contact with the colonies, particularly in time of war. The Treasury had to do with the disbursement of all moneys appropriated by Parliament to be spent for or in the colonies and had oversight of all revenue there raised for the King's use, such as the 4 per cent. in Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the two shillings a hogshead in Virginia, and certain casual returns that came to the King by virtue of his prerogative. (The revenue in Jamaica seems to have been controlled by the colony itself.2) It received memorials, petitions, and statements of claims in great variety from the colonies, either directly or from the Secretary of State or the Board of Trade, and in

1 Chalmers, G., Opinions of Eminent Lawyers; Andrews, C. M., Introduction to Reports of Francis Fane on the Connecticut Laws, § III (Acorn Club Publications, 1915). 2 C.O. 140/17, Council Minutes, 22 Jan. 1723.

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consequence became interested in many important colonial issues involving expenses incurred in the service of the King. It paid the salaries and contingencies of special agents to America; met in part the cost of civil administration in Nova Scotia and Georgia and of the Royal African Company; made various disbursements for promoting friendly relations with the Indians; and, in conjunction with the Board of Trade, handled the claims of certain colonies to money granted by Parliament as recompense for military co-operation in the capture of Louisbourg and for services rendered during the French and Indian wars. It drafted warrants and commissions touching salaries, contracts, grants and remittances, prize money, transportation of convicts, and other matters relating or not relating to money, and in general controlled all payments by the Exchequer in peace and war. It appointed the Paymaster-General of the Forces, had charge of the customs service, the commissariat and transport service, and the Post Office, though leaving to these subordinate offices the routine management of their own affairs. Its relations with the colonies were conducted as a part of its regular business and the records of its transactions were entered and filed in their proper places in the books and papers of the Board.

The Admiralty played a more conspicuous part than the Treasury, for upon it rested the burden of colonial defence on the naval side. It despatched squadrons into American waters and carried on a voluminous correspondence with admirals, vice-admirals, captains, commanders, and lieutenants, as well as with colonial governors. Under direction from the King, as expressed in Orders in Council or instructions from the Secretary of State, it controlled the movements of ships, determined the times of sailing, and kept watch over the execution of its orders. It was in constant communication with the Navy Board, Victualling Board, Medical Board, and Transport Office, and kept in touch with other branches of admiralty administration in matters connected with equipment, victualling, and supplies. It provided frigates for patrol in American waters, men-of-war for convoying merchant fleets back and forth across the Atlantic, and transports for soldiers in time of war. It supplied colonial sea-captains with Mediterranean passes, sought to suppress piracy and to check illicit trade in America, issued letters of marque and reprisal, and in time of war co-operated with the colonies, furnishing ships, frequently with indifferent success, for such expeditions as those against Port Royal, Quebec, Cartagena, and Louisbourg. It provided vessels for the transportation of royal governors, arranged for the packet service to the West Indies in the early part of the century and to the continental colonies after 1757, saw to the collection of the sixpenny Greenwich Hospital duty imposed by Act of Parliament in 1698 and extended to America in 1729, and was responsible for the marines while on the men-of-war.

England's insular position and the wide expanse of water that separated her from her Plantations rendered the Navy the main support of her commercial supremacy and national strength. For that reason Englishmen sought from the colonies raw materials for the building of their ships, advocated the enumeration of naval stores from America, and later granted elaborate bounties that there might be a sufficient supply of masts, bowsprits and spars, pitch, tar, turpentine and resin, and hemp for cordage. The Navy Board, whose business it was to build and equip the ships, inspected these supplies, criticised the tar as too hot, the pitch too thin, the turpentine short in weight, or the lumber warped and green, encouraged the production of saltpetre and potash, and sought to promote in America whatever would relieve the mother country from dependence on the European market. Sometimes, but not often, the Board purchased or rebuilt for the Royal Navy ships that had been constructed in New England ship yards. With the High Court of Admiralty, sitting at Doctors' Commons, the colonies came into occasional contact, as colonial suits on appeal were heard there as late as 1767.

Except in time of war, the War Office, at the head of which was the Secretary at War, who took his orders only from the Privy Council or the Secretary of State, had very little to do with the colonies. There were certain companies located at Placentia, Annapolis Royal, New York, Charleston, St George's (Bermuda), Providence (Bahamas), St John's (Antigua), and Kingston (Jamaica). Some of these were regular regiments of foot, others grenadiers, and still others, independent companies of fusiliers. The latter were raised separately from the regulars for special service gencrally out of England. They were recruited at large or from other regiments, were on the establishment, English or Irish, and were paid out of funds appropriated by Parliament. Among them were invalids, that is, soldiers disabled by wounds or disbanded after twenty years in the army and unfit for further active service.1 Those at New York-the four independent companies were ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-paid and made very poor soldiers as New York learned to her sorrow." British troops sent to America before the middle of the eighteenth century were neglected and almost forgotten because responsibility for their maintenance was to all appearances so divided among the Privy Council, the Secretary of State, the Board of Trade, and the War Office as to rest very lightly anywhere. The Board of Ordnance was supposed to supply these troops with their arms and accoutrements, just as it sent over, at the command of the King, ordnance, ammunition, and supplies to the various forts in the colonies from New Hampshire to Barbados. But both functions it performed very badly.

1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1711-12, nos. 95, 231; B.T. Journal, 1709-14, p. 525; 1714-18, pp. 28, 29, 201.

2 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1701, no. 1, i; 1702, no. 994; 1702-3, no. 29.

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In truth, there was very little military or naval protection for the colonies before 1756, for England in the first half of the eighteenth century was poorly organised for efficient action in any direction. Not only were the offices of administration widely scattered between Whitehall and the City, at a time when communication was slow and difficult, but corruption, maladministration, and delay prevailed widely, and rivalry and jealousy prevented co-ordination and cooperation among the different departments and offices. With the Admiralty Board at Whitehall, the Navy Office in Seething Lane, the Victualling Office at the end of East Smithfield, the supply of ordnance at the Tower, the officials concerned in despatching a fleet were so far apart as to render mutual action difficult and rapid action impossible. Orders and instructions waited days and even months for execution. The Secretary at War carried little responsibility and performed few duties other than those of a routine character In all matters of policy he was overshadowed by the Privy Council and the Secretary of State. The Treasury was notoriously slow in making payments, either in England or America, while the PaymasterGeneral of the Forces and the Paymaster of Marines spent much time in lining their own pockets and neglecting the interests of sailors, soldiers, and marines, just as the Treasury itself neglected clerks, postmen, labourers, and other lesser folk. The system of administration in England, in all that concerned the colonies, was slow, ineffective, and characterised by a prevailing official attitude of indifference and irresponsibility.

The connecting link between the Crown and the royal colony was the governor, the active agent of the prerogative in America. The governors were divided into three groups: provincials, military and naval officers, and English members of the office-holding class at home, similar to those who were carrying on the real government of England herself. Among the 321 governors-general, governors, and lieutenant-governors were two dukes, nine earls, two viscounts, thirteen barons, five "courtesy" viscounts or lords, six other sons of peers, and forty-seven baronets or knights. There were at least thirtyeight matriculants of Oxford or Cambridge or other British or continental universities, and eleven graduates of American colleges. There were at least twenty-one members of the Inns of Court and eleven Fellows of the Royal Society. Forty-five had had parliamentary experience. Of the 250 men from many different walks and ranks of life, who received their appointments after 1685, a few were "greedy proconsuls" (Fletcher, Cornbury, Parke, Cosby, Crowe); more were men of mediocre powers, lacking tact, ability, and political common-sense (Sloughter, Belcher, Shute, Cranfield, Reynolds); while others were guilty of conduct that led to their peremptory recall (Douglass, Josiah Hardy). Two committed suicide while in office (Osborne, Elliot). By far the greater number, however, were

CHBE I

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men of honour, who did their best in an impossible situation. No one can study the careers of the Codringtons, father and son, Stapleton, Thomas, Payne, Nicholson, Spotswood, Gooch, Shirley, Pownall, Bellomont, Dudley, Sharpe, Eden, Ellis, Wright, the Popples, Grenville, the Wentworths, Hunter, Tryon, Monckton, and Moore, to name only the more conspicuous among them, without realising that they were conscientiously trying to do their duty and represented a fairly high type of official equal to those holding similar office in England at the same time. But they stood for a different idea of government from that which was gradually shaping itself in America-government by royal grace and favour instead of government by consent of the governed--and legally were obliged to direct their administration according to the wish and will of the executive authorities at home. They came to their respective colonies endowed with powers that placed them at the head of the government and made them the source of all authority, for without their consent the colony could not function legally as a political organism. They received their commands from men who were 3000 miles away, had never been in America, had no understanding of the convictions that were slowly taking form in the minds of the colonists, and, even if they had understood these convictions, would not have sympathised with them. In all the West Indian colonies, and in all but four of those on the mainland, the system of government, framed in England according to certain preconceived notions regarding a royal colony, was based on ideas already established as to what such a government should be.

Though the appointment of a governor was made in the name of the King, and though the Secretary of State, except for the years from 1752 to 1761, when the Board of Trade controlled patronage,1 generally exercised the right of nomination, many influences, personal and political, were brought to bear to aid one candidate or another.2 In 1754, when the Earl of Albemarle, titular governor of Virginia, died, no less than five British noblemen, we are told, were mentioned for the post. There were always a number of applicants for the Secretary to choose from, and in some cases the competition took the form of a scramble for office. On the other hand, between 1702 and 1737 thirteen appointees failed to enter upon their governorships. One was bought off, four died before sailing, one was drowned in the Thames, one was drowned en route, and one was captured by the French; but in the cases of the others the reasons are not known. It is quite likely that they got better posts.

The instructions which the governor received, though legally the private orders of the King, were in fact a composite draft, showing the handiwork of nearly every prominent official who had to do with the 1 A.P.C., Col. IV, 154-7.

2 Lincoln, C. H., Correspondence of William Shirley, 1, passim.

3 Brit. Mus., Newcastle Papers, Add. MSS, 32,737, ff. 505-6, 514.
4 Matthews, A., "Elizeus Burges" Proc. Col. Soc., Mass. XIV, 360–372.

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