GOVERNORS' INSTRUCTIONS 419 colonies. The Board of Trade, in whose office these instructions were drawn up, sought assistance from many quarters. It called on former governors, merchants, and colonists resident in England. It sometimes allowed the appointee to make suggestions, as in the case of Alured Popple, its former secretary, whom it permitted to draft many clauses. It introduced articles composed or revised by the Admiralty, the Treasury, the Commissioners of the Customs, the Auditor-General of the Plantation Revenues, and the Bishop of London. Thus the instructions were a co-operative affair, the product of many official minds, expressing the best that the British authorities could bring forth. They were not mere formal documents, drafted to cloak a more liberal policy on the part of these authorities. The Secretary of State rarely meddled with matters of civil administration in the colonies, and the Board of Trade, in its hundreds of letters to the governors, adhered with the utmost tenacity to a strict interpretation of the text. It is doubtful whether the Board ever wittingly or intentionally connived at a governor's departure from the literal interpretation of his orders. On the contrary, it not infrequently reprimanded him for violation of his instructions, when, as sometimes happened, he was forced to yield to pressure from the Assembly, and it was constantly reminding him of the fact that the instructions, representing the "true principles of a colonial constitution", were given him to be obeyed. There was no discrepancy between the policy laid down in the instructions and that adopted by the Board in its correspondence with the governors. In the eighteenth century the instructions generally followed a common pattern, admitting alterations only in matters of arrangement and detail. Though in the twenty-five years before the American Revolution three attempts were made to revise them (1752, 1768, 1782), only once, in 1752, under Halifax as president of the Board of Trade, was any serious effort expended upon them, and even then none of the changes, though numerous, was marked by any modification in the mercantilist point of view held by the Board of Trade and by British officials generally. Probably the mercantilist tendencies in England were never stronger than during the period of twenty years from 1755 to 1775. Thus, during a critical time when the colonial Assemblies were losing their respect for the King's instructions and denying their mandatory character, the authorities at home, determined to preserve unchanged the dependent status of the King's possessions across the seas, were insisting more strenuously than before on a complete obedience to the King's instructions and the full maintenance of the royal prerogative in the colonies. The failure of the Board of Trade to seize the opportunity of 1752 to adapt the instructions to the needs and sentiments of the colonists aroused resentment in America and became a landmark in the divergence which was taking place between that which was English and that which was American. The English system was already breaking down before the persistent refusal of the colonists to accept in its entirety a method of control that was already showing itself opposed to their convictions and ill-adapted to their needs. With his commission and instructions in hand, the governor prepared to set sail for his post across the Atlantic. The Admiralty furnished a vessel for his transportation and for that of his family, his servants, and his belongings, often covering a wide selection of household furnishings, and the voyage lasted for six or seven or even more weeks. Arriving at his destination, he was greeted with the respect due to one of his station, and after a proper exchange of greetings and compliments was escorted to the town hall or government house or other building in which was the council chamber. There he read his commission, took the required oaths, and administered the same to the members of the council. Following English precedent, he then issued a proclamation announcing his appointment and requesting all officials to retain their posts until further orders. After this proclamation had been read from the balcony or steps to the assembled people, the procession reformed, and the governor was conducted to a neighbouring tavern where entertainment was provided at the expense of the public purse. The celebration, accompanied by speeches and fireworks, sometimes lasted for several days, the details of which were printed in the local newspapers, if such there were, and formed a fitting subject for local congratulation and gossip. The first branch of the administration with which the governor came into official contact was the provincial council, a body which more nearly resembled the Privy Council than it did the House of Lords, and in the eyes of the British Government was deemed scarcely less important than the governor himself. It was composed of leading men of the colony, "of good life, well affected to the government, of good estates and abilities and not necessitous people or much in debt",1 and in numbers ran from ten to twenty-eight, with a quorum of from three to seven. It was made up largely from the provincial aristocracy, but it did not represent the colony. Its members were appointed by the Crown, on representation from the Board of Trade after approval by the Privy Council. The governor had an important part in naming his council, but so did the Secretary of State and others who sent in recommendations to the Board, so that the governor was never certain of the extent of his own patronage. Sometimes he was ordered, to his chagrin and loss of local prestige, to reinstate a councillor whom he had suspended. The councillors served in three important capacities: as an advisory board to the governor, when sitting as an executive body; as the upper house of the legislature, when sitting as council in Assembly; and as a court of chancery 1 From the governors' instructions, e.g. N.Y. Col. Docs. v. 125. PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 421 with the governor (as early as 1641 in Barbados1) and the highest court of appeals in the colony, when exercising judicial functions. But they had no executive powers apart from the governor, and even in the case of the latter's death or absence, where there was no lieutenant-governor, and the headship of the colony devolved, after 1707,2 on the president of the council, they were not expected to do much more than keep the government going until the governor returned or the next incumbent arrived. Their legislative independence was considerably curtailed by the governor's habit of sitting and voting with them when acting as an upper house, as in New York, Massachusetts, and North Carolinaa right not recognised in some of the colonies-and by the insistence of the lower house that they had no power to initiate legislation or to originate or amend money bills. În Barbados, the lower house frequently conferred with the council on money bills and occasionally the council amended such measures. Certainly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the lower house did not insist on the sole right to originate bills of this kind. Many battles royal were fought over this question, first in Jamaica3 and later in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, St Christopher, and elsewhere, for the Board of Trade ruled in 1706 that the council had "as much to do in framing bills for the raising and granting of money as the Assembly has", and in 171820 the King sent a general instruction to that effect to all the governors. But this instruction was not obeyed, the Assembly in North Carolina declaring that for the council to amend money bills was "contrary to the custom and usage of Parliament and...tends to infringe the rights and liberties of the Assembly who have always enjoyed uninterrupted the privileges of framing and modelling all bills by virtue of which money has been levied on the subject by an aid for his Majesty". The Board in reply declared vehemently that no Assembly in the Plantations ought to pretend to all the privileges of the House of Commons, "which will be no more allowed than it would be to the councils if they should pretend to all the privileges of the House of Lords". But there was never any danger, either in the West Indies or on the mainland, that the members of the council would make any such pretension. Though their influence varied in the different colonies, due to the personal prominence of the members, who in New York and Virginia were a powerful clique, bound together by inter-marriage, blood relationship, and common interests, and holding office for life, nevertheless as an institution they were completely overshadowed by the governor and the Assembly. Representing neither the colony nor the King, lacking both responsibility and 1 Bell and Parker, Guide, p. 334. 2 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1706-8, nos. 575, 697, Iv, v, 831, i, 948, i. * C.O. 137/10, 11, 13; 138/14, 16. The instruction was first sent to Jamaica in 1718. N.Y. Col. Docs. IV, 1171-3; N. Carolina Recs. v, 287, vi, 909; Smith, W. R., South Carolina as a Royal Province, pp. 289-90, 294-5, 306-12, 317-19, 321-9. executive authority, and exercising only a negative influence on the passage of laws, the colonial council was never able to grow into a constitutional body comparable with either the House of Lords or the Privy Council. The members stood for honour and dignity, personal influence and family pride, but though they struggled at times to control the governor and to resist the Assembly, they never succeeded in winning more than an occasional and temporary victory. Never had they the full confidence either of the King or of the colony. The real test of the governor's influence was evinced not in his dealings with the council but in the skill with which he was able to preserve friendly relations with the Assembly. This representative body had started as a small rudimentary group of delegates, exercising no more power than they possessed by grant of company or proprietor, for the purpose of co-operating with the governor and council in matters of legislation. After corporate and proprietary control had come to an end in Virginia and Barbados, the Assembly was continued by the King in his instructions to his governors, but received little attention in England until, in the period from 1675 to 1680, the Lords of Trade began to investigate, more carefully than had any council before that time, the conditions of government in America. Following the failure of the "Poynings's Law" experiment in these two provinces, the Assemblies, which had at no time been seriously menaced by that attack upon their local independence, established their right to exist, and finally, after the Revolution of 1689, were recognised everywhere as essential to the proper organisation of a royal province. From this time forward every set of instructions to the governors contained specific details regarding the calling of the Assembly and its constitution and powers-details which steadily increased in number and precision as the years passed. But the Board of Trade and the Privy Council had no intention of allowing the Assembly to get beyond control. Taking the position that the popular branch of the government owed its very existence to the King's will and pleasure, they deliberately circumscribed its powers in the governor's instructions in order to demonstrate its inferiority as a law-making body. According to these instructions, the governor was empowered to summon, prorogue, and dissolve the Assembly and even to control adjournment, if the period was longer than from day to day.1 In the early years the Assembly in Barbados controlled its own adjournment, but towards the end of this period it got into the habit of asking the governor's permission to adjourn. This early peculiarity may, perhaps, be explained by the fact that the Assembly sat for but a few days at a time, so that frequent meetings and frequent adjournments were necessary. The governor 1 A frequent subject of dispute in most of the colonies. 2 Frere, G., Short History of Barbados, p. 96. POSITION OF THE ASSEMBLY 423 could refuse to approve its choice of speaker, could issue writs of election, determine membership, and select the place of meeting.1 He had the right to suggest legislation, could scrutinise very closely the character of the laws passed, and was expected to veto such as were not in accord with his instructions or were repugnant to the laws of England. By successive instructions and by decisions of the Crown lawyers or of the counsel to the Board of Trade, the Assembly was forbidden to concern itself with any matter that lay outside the province it represented or which trespassed upon the prerogative of the King or the powers of Parliament. It could not interfere in any way with the laws of trade or discriminate in favour of the colonists at the expense of British merchants engaged in colonial trade. It could not pass private acts without a clause saving the rights of the Crown, bodies politic and corporate, and all private persons, nor could it pass these and other acts, the nature of which was specified, without first obtaining the King's consent or introducing a suspending clause binding the colony not to enforce the act until the King's will were known. Thus the freedom of the Assembly was hedged in at many points by the instructions which the King sent to his governor, and it was against the barriers which such instructions set up that the Assemblies in the royal colonies in the eighteenth century fought with all the resources in their possession. They opposed ministerial mandates" and government by instructions on the ground that such were inimical to the liberties of a free people, and would have no more of them than could be helped. But the Privy Council and the Board of Trade viewed the instructions as a fundamental part of the constitution of a royal colony, to be obeyed as the commands of the King. It may be said with much justice that the question of the King's authority as expressed in his instructions to his governors lay at the very centre of the colonial conflict. Even if an act of Assembly passed safely the tests that the British authorities imposed upon it in the instructions--tests which they deemed wholly warranted because "founded on the principles of reason and justice”—it had still to face a further exercise of the prerogative in the right which the King reserved to himself of confirming or disallowing the act after it was received in England. The practice came into use slowly and was not fully adopted before the eighteenth century, but it proved an efficient form of colonial control, in many ways beneficial to the colonists themselves. Particularly in the earlier period, it prevented the colonists from passing hasty and illconsidered legislation that was often obscure, loosely worded, and even technically poor and contradictory, and it served to improve legislation and to prevent local retaliatory measures in matters of general concern. The English authorities would not tolerate any acts 1 Another subject of dispute, particularly in Massachusetts Bay (Acts and Resolves, 11, 234 ǹ.) and Jamaica (C.O. 138/20). 2 A.P.C., Col. m, 164. |