was to be the last day of their session, they sent a message to the Governor requesting that he "would be pleased to give the Assembly an opportunity to come together the beginning of October next." He was not to be advised on that matter, and he only replied: "Gentlemen of the House of Representatives, I shall always consult his Majesty's service as to the time of meeting the General Assembly, and govern myself accordingly." In a message of the House to the Governor, and a speech of the Governor to the Court on the last day of the session, the House argued their right and that of the Council to have each an agent in Great Britain chosen by itself, without that concurrence of the Governor which would be necessary to the appointment of an agent for the Province; and the Governor maintained the validity of royal instructions as a guide to the course which, under instructions, he had taken in respect to compensation to agents and to the place of holding the Court. In respect to his disallowance of the tax-bill on account of its bearing on the Commissioners, he said that he thought it would be more convenient for them to have the objection to it stated while that objection could be at once removed, than to have it enacted and sent to England, there to be repealed by the King, as it was unquestionably liable to be by the charter.

This Court was not called together, as the House had desired, early in the autumn,' but only a little before the

1 Hutchinson relates (Hist., III. 347) that in the autumn of 1771 his customary proclamation for an annual Thanksgiving was ill received. Most of the Boston ministers refused to read it to their congregations, and several in the country. The Reverend Mr. Cook, uncle of Governor Hancock, took for his text on this occasion these words from the book of Nehemiah (ix. 36, 37): "Behold, we are servants this day, and for the

land that thou gavest unto our fathers to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof, behold! we are servants in it; and it yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins; also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in great distress." We were therein called upon to give thanks for the continuance of our Civil and religious

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time when its legal term of service was to expire.

1772.

At the opening of the session, which again was April. held at Cambridge, the House voted not again to make the request, proposed now only in the most forbearing language, "that, in consideration of the many inconveniences which attended the sitting of the General Assembly there, it might be adjourned to its ancient, usual, and only convenient place." The Governor introduced the subject into his speech, by announcing that he should now have been at liberty to make the removal had it not been claimed as a matter of right. "If," said he, "you shall desist from it [the claim of right], and the removal of the Court to Boston shall, for other reasons, be judged expedient, I have authority to acquaint you that his Majesty will allow me to comply with your wishes." But the Court had no mind to withdraw from the ground which it had taken in respect to the validity of royal instructions, nor even explicitly to retract, though they were willing to abstain from urging, the old interpretation of the law said to designate the place for legislative sessions; and the Governor's ingenious overture led to nothing but an explicit reassertion of the doctrine respecting royal instructions, and a renewal of the assertion of the sensibility of the House to "a very great grievance, which they hoped would soon be fully redressed." In a copious argument, set forth in moderate terms, the Governor, in his speech on dissolving the Court, defended the view on which he had acted respecting the force of instructions to a colonial Governor from the King.

privileges, and for the increase of our trade and commerce. Such a pal pable affront to people who are daily complaining of the abridgment of their liberties and the burthens upon their Commerce, gave universal disgust, and the proclamation was treated with greater contempt than anything of the kind had ever before

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been in this part of the world. Out of twenty Congregations in this Town it was read but in one, and even there by far the greater part of the people signified their contempt by leaving the Church the moment the Parson began to read it." (Letters of Palfrey to Wilkes, of October 80 and November 20.)

1772. May.

.

.

Two days before the assembling at Cambridge of the new General Court for its spring session, the voters of Boston, at a town meeting, instructed their Representatives as to the conduct expected of them in the existing state of affairs. By illegal taxation, they said, "we are degraded from the rank of free subjects to the despicable condition of slaves. . We have the highest reason to believe that a part of the very money unjustly taken from us is applied to support him [the Governor] in a state of independence of the people over whom he presides. . . He considers himself bound to obey instructions sent to him from the other side of the Atlantic. . . . . By an instruction our legislative body are restrained from meeting at their ancient and established seat.. By an instruction our fortress Castle William, built and for a long time supported by the Province for its defence, has been delivered to troops over whom the Captain-General of the Province has declared he has no control. . . . . Under the influence of an instruction the Governor has refused his consent to a tax-bill for defraying the necessary charges of government, because such persons as the British Minister was pleased to point out were not expressly exempted from bearing their due proportion of said tax. . . . . An instruction is pleaded for refusing the grant for the payment of our agent at the Court of Great Britain. Thus we are to be cut off even from complaint." And they directed their Representatives to exert their utmost influence, in the Court about to assemble, for the redress of these and other wrongs; and especially to promote a full and plain representation of them to the King; "pleading

1 The Representatives of Boston were Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and (for the first time) William Phillips. Mr. Phillips took the place of James Otis, who was now disabled, and with

drawn from public life. There appears to have been a trial of strength with the party of prerogative at this time, and Adams was returned by only 505 votes out of 723.

with him with that freedom and firmness which the justice of the cause and the exigencies of the country demand;" and to this end, to procure the enacting by the whole legislature of a law for compensation to agents, and failing in this, "to obtain a Resolve of the House for a brief for raising a sum sufficient for the defraying the charges of an agency.'

The first subject to receive the attention of the House, after the choice of its officers and of Counsellors, was again its absence from its "accustomed ancient place" for meeting. To their "earnest request" to be transferred thither, the Governor now replied that, though it was impossible to agree with them in their opinion of his obligation in the matter, yet he would take it into consideration; "and if it shall not," he continued, "appear to me necessary for his Majesty's service and the good of the Province to continue the Court in some other place than the town of Boston, I will comply with your desire and. remove it there." The first result of his consideration appeared in a proceeding which on further thought he viewed with regret. He desired the House to explain whether, in their expression of the opinion that there had been no necessity for convening the Court at Cambridge, they had referred to its first removal from Boston or to the repetition of that measure in the present year. Whatever was the purpose in this inquiry, the House embarrassed him by their brief reply the same day that they did not see their language to have been equivocal, and that they had no explanation of it to give. He told them as promptly that he thought the uncertainty which he felt as to their meaning would be a sufficient justification for his refusal to do anything. And so the matter rested for ten days. But this hasty judgment did not commend itself to his mature reflections. He laid the question and his instructions in respect to it before the

1 Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Society for January, 1871, pp. 9-12.

Council, who were only too happy to advise him unanimously that he was at liberty to comply with the desire of the House.1 And so the protracted and punctilious controversy came to an end. Without further reference to the past, or any explanation of the cause of his altered views, the Governor adjourned the Court to Boston.

But the dispute which principally occupied the government during this session, was upon the lawfulness of the Governor's deriving his maintenance from any other source than grants of the General Court of the Province. Understanding "that his Excellency had not given his consent to a bill passed both Houses the last year for granting the sum of £1,300 for the support of his Majesty's Governor," the House sent him a message "praying that he would be pleased to acquaint the House whether provision was made for the support of his Majesty's Governor of this Province otherwise than by the Acts and Grants of the General Assembly." They had to repeat the request before they got an answer; and even then it came tardily, on the day of their adjournment to Boston. It was that the King had made provision for him, as he had informed them, more than a year before, that Parliament had enabled him to do.

The House raised a Committee to report on his message containing this avowal, and sent a copy of it to the Council for their consideration and action. They accepted the report of their Committee to the effect that the charter of the Province was a contract between the Province and the King; that one stipulation of it was that the Province and not the King should maintain the Governor, which agreement they had punctually and liberally fulfilled; that this dependence of his on the Province was an essential security for the Province's freedom; and that a Governor otherwise provided for was not such a Governor as the Charter prescribed, " and consequently not, Hutch., Hist., III. 357.