Royal Colonies

ROYAL COLONIES

ROYAL COLONIES were established in North America by England, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The colonies were controlled by the king of the sovereign nation, who named a governor to each colony and, in English colonies, a council to assist him. The Crown was also responsible for appointing colonial judges, usually for life, though by 1760 they could be removed from office at will. The Crown controlled all unsold public lands, and the royal governor retained the power to disperse those lands. As a representative of the Crown in the colonies, the governor—who also could be removed at will by the king—and the council derived their authority from two key documents, the colonial commission and the set of royal instructions.

Some of the royal governors who worked at the will of the British Crown were well-trained bureaucrats. Others were just as likely to have gained their appointments solely through patronage. A majority of the royal governors had been born in England rather than the colonies; several chose to rule in absentia, despite instructions to the contrary. The average term for governors was five years. Although several royal governors developed positive and productive relationships with their colonial assemblies, most struggled to maintain control 3,000 miles from the Crown that had granted them the authority to rule.

In royal colonies, as in charter and proprietary governments, the assembly was popularly elected according to varying definitions of franchise. Though the governor and his council theoretically controlled appropriations and expenditures, in reality colonial assemblies undermined that power over time. By 1720, most colonial assemblies had wrested from the governor the power to initiate legislation, including laws governing taxation and the management of colonial revenue. With the exception of Georgia, established as a form of trusteeship supported directly by Parliamentary appropriation, most royal governors depended upon the assemblies for financial support. Colonial legislatures thus were in a position to challenge the authority of royal governors, most who lacked a network of patronage appointees sufficient to enable them to manipulate the local government.

By the eighteenth century, even as royal colonies became the standard form of colonial government, the governors themselves had begun to lodge complaints with the Crown that the assemblies were gaining too much power as governing bodies in and of themselves. Additionally they reported that the assemblies were much too inclined to reflect the will of the electorate rather than the king. Partially in an attempt to diffuse some of the financial control wielded by colonial assemblies, an act of Parliament in 1767 made colonial governors, councils, and judges independent of the assemblies; thereafter, they were paid directly from colonial revenue.

In theory, and according to royal instructions, laws passed by colonial assemblies had to be approved by both the governor and the Board of Trade in England. In practice, however, the vagaries of both distance and an inefficient hierarchy meant that years could pass before laws to which England objected could be repealed. Colonial assemblies learned rapidly how to articulate and defend their own interests.

With the exception of New France, established as a French royal colony in 1608, and several of the Caribbean islands, all of the original seventeenth-century Dutch and English colonies were corporate or proprietary. Between settlement and the American Revolution, however, the royal colony became the standard form of colonial government. By 1775, only Pennsylvania and Maryland (which had been a royal colony briefly from 1690 to 1715, until the proprietor converted to Anglicanism) retained their proprietary status, and only Connecticut and Rhode Island remained corporate colonies.

A majority of the original North American colonies were corporate. Virginia, established initially under a charter granted to the Virginia Company in 1607, was the first to cede its control to the Crown, in 1624. New Netherland, settled by the Dutch under a corporate charter in 1613, became a proprietary colony under the Duke of York upon English conquest, and became a royal colony in 1685 with the accession to the thrown of James II. Plymouth (1620, annexed by Massachusetts in 1691), Massachusetts Bay (1630), Connecticut (1635), and Rhode Island (1636) were all established according to religious charters; Massachusetts Bay became a royal colony under its second charter in 1691, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.

Seventeenth-century proprietary colonies included Pennsylvania (on land granted to William Penn by Charles II in 1681), Maryland (Catholic, granted by Charles I to proprietor George Calvert, lord Baltimore and his heirs in 1632), New Jersey(given in two parcels by James, duke of York to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret), and Carolina (granted by Charles II to eight proprietors in 1663). Each would eventually become royal colonies. New Jersey became a single royal colony in 1702. Carolina was recognized as two distinct proprietary areas—North and South—according to a commission granted to Virginia agent Philip Ludwell, recruited by the proprietors in 1691. They became separate proprietary royal colonies in 1701. South Carolina became a royal colony in 1719, North Carolina in 1729.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Greene, Jack P. The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.

Labaree, Leonard Woods. Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System before 1783. 2d ed. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1964.

———, ed. Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670– 1776. New York: Octagon Books, 1967.

Leslie J. Lindenauer

See also Colonial Assemblies ; Colonial Councils ; Colonial Policy, British ; Proprietary Colonies .