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Your question is an important one that reflects a changing geographic imagination in our far more global interchange of ideas.The answer is that there are two separate, distinct, definitions of the word city employed in the UK. What causes confusion is that in many cases the two separate definitions overlap spatially.There is a legal definition of a place which is granted city status by the issue of Letters Patent or a Royal Charter. In many cases there are places which are in possession of a great many different charters or letters patent. These are our true cities as identified in English law (also applying to Wales).The second definition is a modern application for an area with extensive and dense urban sprawl.There are a number of urban myths the most repeated of which is that a city needed to have a cathedral, and occasionally it has been said ‘or a university’. These are myths borne of looking at the actuality and inferring cause.The reality is that there is a coincidence in history whereby cathedral towns were raised to the status of city. This was due to the power of influence by those who held the feudal lordship and their relationship to the crown. The church had always been a powerful influence and had exercised considerable secular power. Cathedrals were built in towns established in manors or land belonging to the bishop (in right of his office) or the abbot, or the dean and chapters (in right of theirs).As lords of manors with the rank afforded to senior clerics, they were able to either independently award charters for markets (as in the case of such important bishoprics as Winchester Durham or York) or they were influential with the king sufficiently to acquire a Royal Charter to achieve the same ends. The consequence was that the most senior clerical posts were powerful and able to develop significant wealth creating opportunities - markets and fairs were chief amongst these in cathedral towns.The raising of the status of a place from town to city meant that a charter granting all sorts of rights and privileges which might then be enjoyed either by the corporation this established , or by the ecclesiastical power exercising as a secular power in their fiefdom. City status meant also being raised to the status of a county. Thus the name of the city of London, for example, is the city and the county of the city of London.This is not simply a word game, it was an important factor for having city status meant that the existing administrative powers putative county in which the city stood were no longer applied in the new city. The power of the the king’s sheriff (the shire reeve) of the county no longer applied in the city which was able to appoint its own reeve and hold its own courts.In the modern age very little of the benefit of the status of city in the medieval or feudal sense has any validity. Indeed I personally wonder why places spend money trying to become cities (as they do!) since a modern charter or letters patent are unlikely to grant the same powers that once pertained.Because the clerical lords of manors were powerful and were able to achieve the more independent governance of their key town by obtaining city status to enhance their own wealth creation potential, well, of course they all did it! The status of city was still only granted by the king.The myth about cathedral cities arose because of Henry VIII and his machinations with the church. When he separated the church of England from the authority of the see of Rome he found that it was beneficial also to create more dioceses and so created six new bishoprics. It seems that he was aware that all existing cathedral towns had been raised to the status of city and not wishing his new bishops to be seen as lesser mortals set about creating six new cities in which to house the new cathedrals.Henry was the head of the church and able to appoint bishops, and he was also king and able to grant charters creating the new cities. Most new cathedrals (including the Victorian and those created under Edward VII and George V) saw the granting of city status to their host towns, but this was also a separate action and the orders in council authorising the Letters Patent may be read in the pages of the appropriately dated London Gazette, There was no automatic right involved.The even later creations such as the cathedral in Guildford were not associated with the granting of city status to their host town for example.Cities such as Wakefield whose status was raised to that of city was partially because it was the seat of a new bishopric, but it was also the administrative capital of the West Riding. There had previously been a suffragan bishop in Wakefield, but this was raised to being a full bishopric with a new diocese in 1888, Recently the Anglican church have been considering the reversing of that policy and Wakefield once more being downgraded to suffragan. If there had been a rule about the link between cathedrals and city status then presumably Wakefield would need to have lost that status?Rochester, the second oldest diocese in England after Canterbury, lost its city status when the local administrative area was reorganised in the twentieth century. It remains an ancient bishopric and the cathedral still stands, but the area defined in the charters granting city status was subsumed within a newer enlarged area. The rules meant that the city status might have been granted to the expanded area, but someone forgot to fill in the correct forms - so city status was lost. Further evidence in the cold light of actuality of the distinction between the presence of a cathedral and the status of city.Then we must turn to the second definition. It has become standard as a geographical expression to refer to highly urbanised areas as a city. It does not have the status of city in the sense described above, but it is the more readily understood by most people in the modern world. The city of London is the small area which contains the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, the financial district including the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange and it also contains the central criminal court known as the Old Bailey. Not far to the west containing the Houses of Parliament, most of the foreign embassies, the Royal Palaces: Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace etc., Westminster Abbey (once a cathedral), and the Whitehall office complexes housing most of the important offices of state including the Treasury, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Downing Street there sits the City of Westminster (status granted by Letters Patent by Henry VIII when he raised Westminster Abbey to cathedral status in 1540, but this lasted only 10 years, but the city status remained!).Even then, whilst Westminster was known as an entity, and there were still some fields between London and Westminster, most people from more distant places would have spoken about going to London irrespective of whether they were travelling to London or Westminster. The other nearby towns and villages were being built over and increasingly absorbed into a spreading urban area, so rural Chelsea became part of ‘London’ just like several settlements on the Surrey side of the Thames, such as Southwark. Bit by bit the notion of London encompassed all of these previously separate places. They retained their identities with difficulty because passers-by could no longer see the joins.The emerging idea of ‘The City’ was this growing mass of unbroken built environments filled with people. This idea and this view has been what has become entrenched as the archetypal ‘city’. In modern parlance it is difficult to see past it. If you look at comparative lists of cities, the authors have great difficulties in distinguishing between the core city such as London from the wider metropolitan areas/ The page on Wikipedia about populations in history of towns and cities in England List of towns and cities in England by historical population - Wikipedia you will see that the populations given for some places are simple superlatives. The population of London has never exceeded 6.6 million in the context of the City of London under the control of the Lord Mayor and the Corporation of the City of London.In the mod-nineteenth century as the migrations from country to urban was really taking off due to the impacts of the industrial revolution, the concept of describing the growth of the urban areas became a matter of some import. We begin, in the case of London, to see the first use of the newly formed adjective metropolitan.The population in the area around London and Westminster was becoming ungovernable based on the pre-existing system of parish and the county justices who had jointly presided over most local government for the previous six centuries. The system could not cope with the sheer scale of the population and the demands made on the poor laws, the maintenance of roads, the provision of clean water and the dealing with human waste.The central government (who were based in the locality!) created the Metropolitan Board of Works and in time other Metropolitan boards to take over the responsibilities of the parish vestries and the county bench of justices. The maintenance of the roads had already gone from the county and the parishes through the turnpikes, but these too were problematic and in time these too were taken over by newly created centrally controlled bodies. The legacy today remains with the Metropolitan Police, the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground railway system, and it was taken up by cities in other countries too. However, the various authorities labelled as Metropolitan around London did not share common boundaries, so this added to the growing confusion.In 1888 an Act was passed which created new levels of local government. County Councils and County Boroughs. These new bodies took on many of the responsibilities that the Metropolitan Boards around London had done, but now the idea was nationwide. The newly created County of London was established and the County Council commenced on 1st April 1889. Within a few years the area was divided into Metropolitan Boroughs, each with a local council and a mayor.This state of affairs remained until the second world war. Before that conflict there were already cracks showing in the administration of the county of London and this was due to the continuing expansion of the population and the expansion of the urban sprawl beyond the county boundaries. In 1944 central planners envisaged a ‘Greater London’ concept. It had first to deal with displaced people and the New Towns were formulated to accommodate Londoners and others made homeless during the wartime bombing raids.By 1963 a bill went to parliament to create a new county called Greater London. It came into effect in 1964. Metropolitan Boroughs were, in the main, merged in twos and the County Boroughs and Rural or urban Districts around the edge of the old County of London were merged to form new London Boroughs under the new Greater London Council. Without rehearsing the issues of the following years, but the GLC was finally abolished leaving the London Boroughs as unitary authorities. The strategic planning suffered, inevitably, and a new authority was created alongside the creation of a directly elected Mayor of London. The Greater London Authority were housed in a new complex called ‘City Hall’ - emphasising the new definition of the term city in the context of London. A single mayor (although the mayors of boroughs and the Lord Mayor of London were all still in place!) and an authority in City Hall rather points to the idea that this second idea or definition of ‘city’ in the UK has taken root and is perhaps now the dominant definition.The ideas have now expanded. Greater Manchester, the City Regions of Sheffield and of Leeds are all examples of modern strategic government which are helping to redefine the language and the meaning of the term city.

The philosophical foundations of the US come from culture of Great Britain of the late 1500s up to about 1760. I just drafted an answer to a very similar question, so this answer belongs here as well.It is this British culture that is the source of all of the philosophies later put into words and action beginning in 1764 and after, in resistance to the claims of the Parliament of Great Britain to have all lawmaking power in America.The founders drew their ideas from the culture, not so much from sitting down and reading Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and John Locke (Treatises of Government, 1689), as many answers likely will say. The philosophies of the founders developed independently of the writers who put those philosophies into words.It isn’t that Hobbes and Locke said something other than the culture was teaching - they put into words much of what the culture was teaching - it is simply that writing as an element of society is not as important as writers (and Quora answer-people are writers) wish it were, and, due to this wishing, thus tend to ascribe to the writing of the past, in hopes that the pattern of importance to society will live on - in their writing.Hobbes, for example, in labeling the concept of the “social contract” as the basis of government, rather than God endowing the current senior male of a family with rightful superiority over all others, was writing at a time after the culture he lived in had already developed the “social contract” idea. Hobbes wrote shortly after the Cromwell faction not only had executed the King, but had adopted a law outlawing kingship altogether.Cromwell’s “Parliament” made a very clear rejection of kingship as a system of government - indeed, it rejected all systems of government that vest all power in a single individual, whether that person is or is not titled a king.On March 17 in the year we would designate as 1649 (but which the people of the time, starting the year-number-advance not on January 1 but later, on March 25, called 1648), two years before Hobbes published Leviathan, Cromwell’s Parliament adopted “an Act for the Abolishing the Kingly Office in England and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging.” Cromwell’s Parliament had already executed King Charles I on January 30.This Act not merely absolved all subjects of any allegiance to the sons of Charles I or to their descendants, but also made a declaration about the nature of kingship that was truly revolutionary:“Office of a King not to be exercised by any one person.“And whereas it is and hath been found by experience, that the Office of a King in this Nation and Ireland, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burthensom and dangerous to the liberty, safety and publique interest of the people, and that for the most part, use hath been made of the Regal power and prerogative, to oppress, and impoverish and enslave the Subject; and that usually and naturally any one person in such power, makes it his interest to incroach upon the just freedom and liberty of the people, and to promote the setting up of their own will and power above the Laws, that so they might enslave these Kingdoms to their own Lust;“Be it therefore Enacted and Ordained by this present Parliament, and by Authority of the same, That the Office of a King in this Nation, shall not henceforth reside in, or be exercised by any one single person; and that no one person whatsoever, shall or may have, or hold the Office, Stile, Dignity, Power or Authority of King of the said Kingdoms and Dominions, or any of them, or of the Prince of Wales, Any Law, Statute, Usage or Custom to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding.“Treason in any person endeavouring to set up any of the late Kings Issue, or any other person to be King.“And it is hereby Enacted, That if any person or persons shall endeavour to attempt by force of Arms or otherwise, or be aiding, assisting, comforting or abetting, unto any person or persons that shall by any ways or means whatsoever, endeavor or attempt the reviving or setting up again of any pretended Right of the said Charls, eldest son to the said late King, James called Duke of York, or of any other the Issue and Posterity of the said late King, or of any person or persons claiming under him or them, to the said Regal Office, Stile, Dignity or Authority, or to be Prince of Wales; or the promoting of any one person whatsoever, to the Name, Stile, Dignity, Power, Prerogative or Authority of King of England and Ireland, and Dominions aforesaid, or any of them; That then every such Offence shall be deemed and adjudged High Treason, and the Offenders therein, their Counsellors, Procurers, Aiders and Abettors, being convicted of the said Offence or any of them, shall be deemed and adjudged Traitors against the Parliament and people of England, and shall suffer, lose and forfeit, and have such like and the same pains, forfeitures, judgements and execution, as is used in case of High Treason.“Representatives.“And whereas by the Abolition of the Kingly Office provided for in this Act, a most happy way is made for this Nation (if God see it good) to return to its just and ancient Right of being governed by its own Representatives or National Meetings in Council, from time to time chosen and entrusted for that purpose by the people,“It is therefore Resolved and Declared by the Commons assembled in Parliament, That they will put a period to the sitting of this present Parliament, and dissolve the same so soon as may possibly stand with the safety of the people that hath betrusted them, and with what is absolutely necessary for the preserving and upholding the Government now settled in the way of a Commonwealth; and that they will carefully provide for the certain chusing, meeting and sitting of the next and future Representatives, with such other circumstances of freedom in choice and equality in distribution of Members to be elected thereunto, as shall most conduce to the lasting freedom and good of this Commonwealth.”I have never seen any trace that any American founder had read this, or even knew specifically about it. They knew in broad terms what Cromwell had done, of course - and they were the descendants of those who had lived through it, either directly in Britain, or as colonists in America at the time.The origin of the British culture including the idea that the people have rights against the king goes all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. A foreigner from France (well, Normandy, there was not so much sense of cohesive nationalism as we have long had) came over, won, and imposed power over the Native Britons. About 20 years after the Conquest, in 1085, William ordered a “great survey” of the people and resources of England and parts of Wales.William’s purpose was taxation of the people of England. England’s political sub-units were called “shires,” and the purpose of the survey, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was to assess “what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.”The Native English called this survey, completed in 1086, the doomsday book - “Domesday Book” - because they saw it not as beneficial to them, to know the state of their own land, but as a final judgment and doom upon them.A sense that the government was from outsiders, and could be resisted, existed and persisted from the earliest times of William and of his descendants. It found signal expression 129 years after the “doomsday” book, in 1215 in the Magna Carta, which succeeding kings re-issued, somewhat changed each time.The English idea of “common law” relied on by judges, and the principle of “binding precedent,” also grew out of this sense that the people are an alternative source of government power. The “common law” is not made by declarations from any king. The king could override it - if he dared risk the people’s anger - but he did not make it. The principle of “binding precedent” kept the “common law” continuously present and meaningful, not subject to the changing opinions of individual judges (perhaps more in theory than in practice, but for us, we are looking at principles, so theory is what matters).The concept of “binding precedent” made the “common law” - laws that the people themselves made, by their conduct, not made by any king - something that the people could rely on long-term.France and Spain never had this experience. While they did have dynastic conflicts, their competing kings were always pretty much “home grown.” Perhaps a foreign-born person would become king - but by means of “home grown” armies. William, by contrast, had come with his own foreign army, and he had installed his own foreign friends into all the offices of nobility.We now leap forward to that most significant event, when King Henry VIII manipulated Parliament to adopt in 1534 the Act of Supremacy, defying the Pope himself to declare not the Pope, but Henry, as the chief representative of Jesus the Christ in England. Henry did this shortly after purporting to divorce Catherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn in 1533. Their daughter Elizabeth was born September 7, 1533 - while Catherine of Aragon was still alive.Here, in Britain, was defiance of higher authority unmatched in European history. This was not merely a Protestant challenge to the idea that the church had an all-powerful head, it was the claim of a new, replacement all-powerful head.Many thoughtful Britons took the lesson, that if the King could defy the Pope, the people could defy the King - at least, as to claiming to be head of worship and of the church.Of course, the Pope did not like this, nor did the kings of France and of Spain - but they raised no quarrel with the legitimacy of Henry to be King. Henry was a rightful king who had gone wrong in doctrine.In the eyes of the Pope, of France, and of Spain, Henry was wed to Catherine of Aragon, until her death on January 7, 1536. Henry executed Anne Boleyn on May 19, 1536.Thus, Henry’s next marriage, to Jane Seymour on May 30, 1536, was legitimate in the eyes of the Pope (except, of course, there was no official Papal authorization for it), because it came after the death of Catherine of Aragon.And this means that the child of Henry and Jane Seymour, Edward, born October 12, 1537, was a legitimate heir to the throne.Here’s why all this matters. When Henry VIII died on January 28, 1547, Edward VI was the legitimate heir and new king in the eyes of the Pope, of France, and of Spain. True, he was persisting in his father’s errors in the faith, but he was, like his father, a rightful king “gone wrong.” Neither the Pope, France, nor Spain attacked him as illegitimate to sit on the throne.When Edward VI died young, on July 6, 1553, his older sister Mary, a legitimate daughter of Henry and Catherine, took the throne. The Pope, France, and Spain accepted her as the next legitimate heir, and made no challenge to her legitimacy to sit on the throne. And they liked her, because she was Catholic, and rejected the “gone wrong” aspect of her father and of her brother.But then Mary died, on November 17, 1558. And who came to the throne?Elizabeth - in the eyes of the Pope, France, and Spain, the bastard daughter of a false marriage done in violation of the dignity of the lawful wife, Catherine of Aragon. Because Elizabeth not merely was the daughter of a flat marriage done while Catherine was alive, she was even born (September 7, 1533) while Catherine was still alive (died January 7, 1536). For 2 and 2/3 years, Catherine had to experience her husband caring for his mistress’ child.And on top of that, Elizabeth “went wrong” in faith as her father and brother had.Thus, from November 1558 forward, Elizabeth was under relentless, persistent, loud assertions from the Pope, France, and Spain, that she had no right to the throne at all, and was a usurper using her position to advance false claims about the true religious faith - about the Lord God Himself.This put Elizabeth into a fundamentally weak position inside England itself. Any lord or noble who started getting unhappy with her rule could just say to himself: “You know, the more I hear the Pope, France, and Spain calling her illegitimate, a usurper of the throne, the more I think they are right. I certainly don’t have to listen to her. In fact, let’s get rid of her.”It is the fact that statements of illegitimacy are made by powerful people that is destabilizing - not whether the statements are “correct on the merits” or not. The statements can become a justification for resistance and rebellion whose actual motivation may be for other reasons - such as too much oppression.We see this principle in action today, as Quora contributor Dima Vorobiev so insightfully made clear, in Putin’s support for Trump. Putin does not want foreign powers calling his seat in power in Russia illegitimate. Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party generally, and most of America’s professors and journalists, are constantly judging and criticizing the morality and legitimacy of people in power, be it government or corporate.Trump just wants to do deals, and he doesn’t care about the internal moral or political legitimacy of the tyrant he’s doing the deal with. He doesn’t care that by doing a deal - indeed, merely by trying to do a deal - he is giving legitimacy to the tyrant. All Trump cares about is whether the tyrant will honor his deals.Queen Elizabeth I, unlike Putin, had no ability to change the Pope, France, or Spain into powers that were no longer claiming that she was illegitimate. And thus, she didn’t have the internal power of enforcement that leaders get if no one outside the country is calling them illegitimate.This made Elizabeth into a sovereign who had to do deals. She had to keep nobles and lords happy by seeing that they were making money while she was Queen.For example, here is an example of an Elizabeth “deal:” in 1564, as an investor, she joined a venture with John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to go privateering around the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Among the “cargo” they captured was enslaved people from Africa, which they sold in Venezuela.Elizabeth was part of this as a business venture, not as a commanding sovereign.Indeed, the House of Commons itself arose as basically a deal-making entity. If the Queen wanted money, she had to make the case for it to the representatives of the people from whom she wanted the money. The Commons House wasn’t intended originally to be a body representing all the people in lawmaking - it was the committee representing those who had the money that the Queen wanted. They would listen to the case, and if they liked it, they would “give and grant” the money to her. This “give and grant” language is still used today.On November 30, 1601, aged Queen Elizabeth convened the Commons House before her, to give what would be her last speech to it. The occasion was widespread dissatisfaction to business monopolies - “patents” or “grants” - that she had given, such that a certain person would have a monopoly to sell wine here and there, another to sell grain here and there, etc. These monopolies were also deals - deals she had made with the individuals who got the patents. Now she had done too many of them, prices were getting too high, large numbers of competent individuals who could do the same work and make money were blocked-out.This speech became known as the Golden Speech, because in it she expressed her desire to be loved by her people, and to be worthy of such love. The key parts for us, now, are:“I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subject and that is a duty which I owe. … I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding Prince, nor yet a waster. My heart was never set on any worldly goods. What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again. … Since I was Queen, yet did I never put my pen to any grant, but that upon pretext and semblance made unto me, it was both good and beneficial to the subject in general though a private profit to some of my ancient servants, who had deserved well at my hands. But the contrary being found by experience... That my grants should be grievous to my people and oppressions to be privileged under colour of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it, I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it.… [I]f my kingly bounties have been abused and my grants turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning, and if any in authority under me have neglected or perverted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offenses in my charge. I … well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great judge. ... There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.”Basically she is saying that she will make no deals that hurt the people - but will keep deals that help the people.Nothing like this developed in France or in Spain, where the kings had always been home-born, and were never challenged by an outside power as being illegitimate usurpers. Those kings could exercise a power of command that the subjects would not challenge as illegitimate - though the subjects might criticize certain ways of exercising it as oppressive or unwise. Thus the French and Spanish kings never really became “deal-makers” with their subjects.Elizabeth reigned a long time, from November 1558 to March 1603 - 45 years. That is a long time to set the tone that the sovereign makes deals - and keeps them; and that the subjects the sovereign makes deals with have a right to hold the sovereign to them.James the Sixth King of that name in Scotland became James I of England, succeeding Elizabeth in England. James I came into an English culture that expected the sovereign to be a deal-maker with the subjects.Meanwhile, the process of discovery overseas, and developing ship technology, and population growth inside Britain, had developed to the point that colonizing North America was feasible.And there were basically two kinds of people in Britain who felt that not only was it feasible, it was desirable.One were money-makers, who felt they could make profits by developing settlements. Nobody had discovered gold in North America, so there was no Royal motivation to send-out military men to seize gold that wasn’t there. But the land was fertile, and had unique natural resources that could be caught and taken back to England.The other was religious - those who had followed-up on the idea that if in matters of faith the King could drop the Pope, the People could drop the King. These dissenters, known variously as Pilgrims or Puritans (they were a bit different, the Pilgrims being gentler), desired a place to live where they would not be so oppressed by new King James I in matters of faith.They proposed to form groups or companies, that would be chartered by King James I.These, again, were deals. This was not the king saying “Let’s form an expedition of conquest in my name. Assemble a fleet, assemble an army, and let’s pick a noble leader to engage in conquest in my name.”Instead, the initiative came from groups of subjects who for personal reasons, whether of profit or of faith, wanted to colonize parts of the king’s claims in North America - provided that the king would confirm, officially, the deals they had made with each other to give form and legality to their venture.King James I made the deals; his successor King Charles I made the deals. Tis went on for some 42 years - until King Charles, having become too much of an oppressor at home, got himself executed in 1649 (by our dating).Whereupon shortly thereafter the Cromwell Parliament outlawed kingship altogether in 1649 (by our dating), in the statute we read above.Whereupon shortly after that, Thomas Hobbes wrote about the “social contract” conception of government, in Leviathan, in 1651.So, through the decade of the 1650s, the Americans lived under no kingship at all. The Cromwell people continued to honor the deals.Moreover, no nobility was established in America. No class of native knights, earls, dukes, etc., was ever created. The feudal social systems of England never good any root in America.And thus, having no people who had any noble titles, no Americans needed the existence of a kingship, which is necessary to maintain the legitimacy of noble titles. There can’t really be dukes of there is no king to grant the duke-ships. True, France and the German regions had some dukes without kings over them, but nothing like that developed in Britain.Cromwell didn’t establish a form of government capable of outlasting his own personality, so a few years after he died, the sons of Charles I came back in 1660, in what is called the restoration: Charles as King Charles II, and his younger brother James as Duke of York. They continued to issue charters - deals - as their uncle James I and father Charles I had.James succeeding his brother as James II, he made the same kinds of mistakes that his father had - too oppressive - although the new element he brought into it was his strong sympathy for Catholicism.James II treated the deals as deals, but through agents in New England, whose actions I studied in detail and wrote up in “America the Great,” he attacked the Massachusetts charter by using a deal-oriented theory: that the Massachusetts charter government had done things beyond the powers of the charter, and thus, not merely were those acts void, but the conduct of adopted illegal acts voided the entire charter. This was an application of a legal doctrine called “scire fascias.”In 1688 James II was forced out by British lords, who invited-in a grandson of Charles I, William, raised in the Netherlands, and having the title Prince of Orange, which referred to a small place in today’s southern France. He was married to a first-cousin, daughter Mary of James II.This was called the Glorious Revolution, and was a very significant event in forming the ideas of the American founding fathers.As part of bringing William in as William III, and Mary, the British leaders adopted a Bill of Rights in December 1689. This put into words, in a formal legal document, a summation of the British rights that had developed during the prior 155 years, since 1534 with Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy regarding the faith.In documents written by the founders, when they write of the “revolution,” this is the revolution they mean.William III, his successor in 1702 his sister-in-law Mary, and her successors King George I and King George II, all continued to treat the deals as deals.Every one of these deals promised substantially more self-government, and far more representatives self-government, than was available to the people inside Britain. This was the primary motivating factor to cause energetic young free white men to leave Britain for a wilderness where they would have to make everything about their own lives from their own labor. If they went, and took the risk, and did the work, and made wealth for themselves, their own legislatures would solely decide how much of their wealth might be “given and granted” in taxes. They would be able to protect the fruits of their own labor.King William III and Queen Mary did not recognize any authority of the Parliament of England or of Scotland, nor did Queen Mary, George I, or George II recognize any authority of the united Parliament of Great Britain after 1707, to make laws that went any further into America than the landward-side-doors of the customs-clearance houses in American port cities, and, as necessary to thwart smuggling that did not go through the customs-houses, along the American coasts.This limitation was necessary to honor the promises made in the charters that the settlers would be protected in the fruits of their labors by their own elected legislatures.Nobody would be fool enough to go from the civilized world of Britain to the risks of the wilderness in America, if by so doing, they lost even the limited protections they had in Britain against the government choosing to take from them as much as it wanted, without them having a power to decide to “give and grant” only so much as they chose. The people of England itself had overthrown two kings - Charles I and James II - precisely for taking too much, without consent. William III, the immediate successor of dethroned James II, the person who directly benefited by the unhappiness engendered against James II, certainly saw that.Thus, from the founding of each colony, up until Parliament began to press its claims in 1764, the Americans understood their relationship to the Crown, and to each other, and to Britain, pretty much exactly as today’s British Commonwealth is conceived: individual separate nations united under one Crown, which has a direct relationship to the government of each nation, without any one parliament, or any one set of ministers, having veto-power over any other.On March 6, 1775, Massachusetts resident John Adams, the future U.S. President, published an essay about this, using the pen-name “Novanglus,” which means “New Englander,” in which he said:“Our charter was granted by king William and queen Mary, three years after the [1688] revolution [the 1691 Charter]. And the oaths of allegiance are established by a law of the province. So that our allegiance to his Majesty is not due by virtue of any act of a British parliament, but by our own charter and province laws. It ought to be remembered, that there was a revolution here as well as in England, and that we made an original, express contract with king William, as well as the people of England [made their contract with king William].“If it follows from thence, that he appears as king of Massachusetts, king of Rhode Island, king of Connecticut, &c., this is no absurdity at all. He will appear in this light, and does appear so, whether Parliament has authority over us or not. He is king of Ireland, I suppose, although parliament is allowed to have authority there. As to giving his Majesty those titles, I have no objection at all: I wish he would be graciously pleased to assume them.”We should note (since studious Quora commenters likely will raise it) that beginning in the mid-1760s, defenders of Parliament’s claims to power would cite a statute of the Parliament of England in 1696, under William III, to render null and void “all laws, by-laws, usages, and customs which should be in practice in any of the American plantations, repugnant to any law made or to be made in the Kingdom.”The actual text of King William III’s 1696 Parliament of England statute, cited as 8 William (Will or Wm.) chapter (or ch.) 22, section 9 (IX), does not mean what advocates of the Parliament of Great Britain, in 1766, said that it meant: that “any law made or to be made in the Kingdom” has this overriding power.The actual text of the complete statute of King William III by the Parliament of England is found online in full on google books in the 1761 book “Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Province of New Hampshire in New England,” at page 158, and it says, as to section 9 (IX) that the colonial laws and practices rendered null and void are only those that conflict with a defined list of prior laws, all of them dealing with customs duties and ship-landing of cargoes: “which are in any ways repugnant to the before mentioned laws, or to any other law hereafter to be made in this kingdom.”The laws “hereafter to be made” necessarily are only those laws similar to those laws cited earlier in the same Act, namely, laws founded solely upon the Parliament of England’s rightful power to regulate ocean-trade – a writ of power then understood to stop at the landward exit-door of the customs-duty houses in the American ports, and understood to intrude only so far into the American coasts as intercept smuggling that avoided the customs-offices in the lawful shipping ports. That is how everyone actually understood the statute for its first 68 years, from 1696 all the way through to 1764, when the Parliament of Great Britain announced that it would adopt a new tax law, the Stamp Act, in 1765.But in 1764, the ministers of Britain, now being in a situation in which, by victory in the Seven Years War over France and Spain, there were no enemy European armed forces in North America, felt that they could assert more power.The basic concept was that it is inherent in the nature of government that there must be one supreme source of law, unimpeded by any other entity of government. A government of divided or limited powers was an impossibility.The chief ministerial advocate of this was Lord Hillsborough. Here (taken from my September 2017 SSRN study) are some key statements:>On 23 January 1768, in London, the new Colony Minister, Lord Hillsborough, addressed a circular letter to each of the governors of the American colonies (the copy I review is to John Penn of Pennsylvania, in the Pennsylvania Archives, but I presume the same letter went to each governor):“His Majesty having been graciously pleased to appoint me to be one of his principal Secretaries of State, and to commit to my care the dispatch of all such business relative to his Majesty’s colonies in America … your dispatches be for the future addressed to me. …“[A]ll possible facility & dispatch should be given to the business of his colonies, and as nothing can more effectually contribute to this salutary purpose than a frequent and full communication of all occurrences that may happen, and a regular and punctual transmission of all acts and proceedings of government, and legislature, and of such papers as have any relation thereto;“I have it in command from his Majesty to recommend this to your particular attention, his Majesty having observed with concern, that this essential part of the duty of his officers in America has scarcely any where been duly attended to, and in several colonies, particularly the Charter and Proprietary governments, almost entirely neglected.”>On 13 February 1768, in London, future 1stUS Congress Senator William Samuel Johnson wrote Connecticut Governor William Pitkin III in Connecticut at Hartford, to report in detail on his recent meeting with the new Colony Minister, Lord Hillsborough (Wills Hill). Governor Pitkin received this on April 18, 1768:“As soon as Lord Hilsborough publicly entered upon his office of Secretary of State for the American department [officially appointed February 27], I thought it my duty to wait upon his lordship and congratulate him upon his appointment to that important office, and to recommend the Colony of Connecticut to his lordship’s favor and protection. …“[H]e said, we were a very free Colony … we were very deficient in our correspondence, seldom writing to his Majesty’s Ministers … they were often quite in the dark about us, and seemed to have too little connection with that Colony.“I assured him, in answer, that I believed he might depend upon it that everything was communicated which the government there could imagine it fit to trouble the King’s Ministers with … from the nature of our constitution, his lordship would see that fewer occasions would occur of troubling the King’s Ministers with our affairs than in those governments immediately under the Crown, which must necessarily be, in some sort, actually administered by the Ministers themselves; and if in any cases real delays had happened [various excuses justified the delays].“He seemed pretty well satisfied with this apology, but then proceeded to a much more interesting subject. He had, he said, in his circular letter, requested that a copy or our colony laws should be sent him …. I told him, I believed the colony had several times sent over the printed law book; that I thought there was one or more at the Plantation Office, and imagined they might even be had in England.“He replied, however that might be, as his was a new office, it would be necessary that a copy should be lodged there; and he thought it the duty of government to send it, and transmit from time to time, not only the laws that should pass, but all the minutes of the proceedings of Council and Assembly, that they might know what we were about, how government was administered, and rectify whatever might be amiss.“I said, if his Lordship wanted a copy of our laws for his private perusal, or to remain in his office for the information of his secretary and clerks, or to be referee to whenever any affairs of the colony were under consideration, I did not doubt the colony would send him one of their law books … but if his Lordship meant to have the laws now in force there, and those which should hereafter pass, transmitted (as from the colonies immediately under the Crown) for the inspection of the Ministry as such, and for the purpose of approbation or disapprobation by his Majesty in Council, (which I saw very plainly was what he was driving at,) it was what the colony had never done, nor thought themselves obliged to do, and I was persuaded would never submit to; and if his Lordship would be pleased to attend to the charter granted us by King Charles II., I did not doubt he would be clearly of the opinion, that the colony were thereby vested with a complete power of legislation, and that their acts needed no farther approbation, nor were subject to any revision; and in point of fact, his Lordship well knew that those laws had never been re-examined here, that the colony had been for more than a century in the full exercise of these powers, under the eye and with the approbation of government here, without any the least check or interruption, except in a single instance [referring to actions by an agent, Edmund Andros, of about-to-be-deposed King James II, in 1687], in such times, and under such circumstances, as I believed his Lordship would not mention but with detestation, much less consider as a precedent.“He said, he had read our charter with some attention, and he knew what powers we had exercised under it; that it was very full and expressive, but there were such things as extravagant grants, which were therefore void; and however great a latitude of expression was made use of in it, still there might be a doubt, perhaps, what would really pass by it in legal construction; that he believed I would admit there were many things which the King could not grant, as the inseparable incidents of the Crown, &c.; and it might deserve consideration whether some things which King Charles had pretended to grant to the Colony of Connecticut were not of that nature, particularly the power of absolute legislation, which tended to the absurdity of introducing imperium in imperio, and to create an independent state.“I replied, that, for the purpose of his argument, I apprehended it was not necessary either to admit or deny that there were some prerogatives of the Crown so inseparably incident or annexed to it that they could not be granted away, (upon which subject some lawyers had, however, refined so much as to render themselves very unintelligible,) since nobody had ever reckoned the power of legislation among those inseparable incidents of the Crown; all lawyers were agreed, that it was a peculiar and undisputed prerogative of the Crown to create corporations, and that the power of law-making was incident to every corporation, at least in some degree … founded in the reason of things … that every corporation in England enjoyed it as really, though not so extensively, as the Colony of Connecticut, they to their particular purposes for which they were created, we to ours ….“That the colony charters were in several respects of a higher nature, and founded upon a better title than even those of the corporations of England, particularly that those here were mere acts of grace and favor, whereas those in America were granted in consideration of very valuable services done, or to be performed, which having been abundantly executed, at immense expense by the grantees, by the peopling and cultivation of a fine country, to the vast extension of his Majesty’s dominions, and the prodigious increase of the trade and revenues of the Empire, they must now be considered as grants upon valuable consideration, sacred and most inviolable. …“Parliament, as well as the Crown, having for more than a century acquiesced in the exercise of the powers claimed by it [the Connecticut government], this would amount to an approbation, so that the colony had now a Parliamentary sanction, as well as a title by prescription, added to the royal grant; by all which they must be effectually secured in the full possession and exercise of all their charter rights.“His Lordship endeavored to distinguish between the ordinary corporation powers (in which he would admit the power of making by-laws was included) and that legislative power exercised in the charter colonies, upon which he was pretty full; and I still endeavored to avail myself of those distinctions in favor of my argument, upon this principle, that the very creating of a corporation for the purpose of establishing a colony included in its idea the full power of legislation, the government of a colony being a more extensive and complicated object than that of a single city or town, and necessarily requiring more full and absolute powers, which it must therefore be injudicious to limit by comparing them strictly with those of corporations for inferior purposes.“Finally, upon this point, his Lordship said, these were matters of nice and curious disquisition, and required a longer time for full discussion than he could then well spare; he seemed, however, to yield the necessity of any royal approbation as requisite to the validity of our laws, but still insisted that (admitting the validity of King Charles’s grant) they ought to be regularly transmitted for the inspection of the Privy Council, and for disapprobation, if found within the saving of the charter, ‘repugnant to the laws of England;’ that those who claimed under the charter must admit the force of that limitation of their legislative powers, at least, and that alone would render it necessary that their laws should be transmitted and inspected here.“Upon which I begged leave to observe to his Lordship, that the colony did not apprehend that any extrajudicial opinion of his Majesty’s Ministers, or even of the King’s Privy Council, could determine whether any particular act was within that proviso or not; that this could only be decided by a court of law, having jurisdiction of the matter about which the law in question was conversant; that though perhaps we should not contend, but that, if the General Assembly [of Connecticut] should make a law repugnant to a statute of Great Britain, (not in the sense of diverse form [from], but flatly, and in terms contradictory to it,) such law, by the saving in the charter, might be void, yet a declaration of the King in Council would still make it neither more nor less so, but be as void as the law itself; because its being void or not depended merely upon the restraining clause in the charter, not upon any authority reserved to the Crown, or the Privy Council, to decide about it, from which they were by other words in the same charter clearly and expressly excluded; that therefore the only method which could be taken in such case must be for the persons aggrieved by such act to bring their action at law, in such manner as to bring in question the validity of such act of Assembly, when the court before whom the trial should be, could fairly and legally determine upon it; that this might be done in the courts of law in the colony, and I doubted not would be very fairly decided there, and leave no room for an application here, or, if the contrary should ever happen, the interposition here (if any) I conceived must be in the judicial only, not by any means in the official way.“As against the Crown, especially, the charter grant was completely, and to all intents and purposes, conclusive; King Charles II. had, for himself and his successors, absolutely granted all their power, by which the Crown must be bound, and forever estopped to say that there was any ground for the Privy Council, or any of the King’s Ministers, who were still but the delegates of the Crown, and acting in behalf of it, and by authority derived only from thence, to interpose in confirming or disannulling the laws of that colony, and consequently there could be no manner of [or] occasion for transmitting our acts to his Majesty’s Ministers, or for their giving themselves any trouble about them.“The judicial power of the Privy Council … his Lordship did not mention, nor indeed, as he had stated it, did it properly belong to the argument ….“As to the minutes of Council and Assembly … I told his Lordship that there were none kept, but only in short notes … perfectly unintelligible unless the colony sent their Secretary, after every session, to explain them ….“His Lordship said that we had a very particular method of doing business; that he had not seen these things quite in the light which I had endeavored to place them in, and he feared we were in danger of being too much a separate independent state, and of having too little connection with or subordination to this country, upon which our security and well-being depended; that, however, these things merited a farther consideration; he hoped, at least, the colony would send him their laws, and we might perhaps talk farther upon these subjects, upon some future occasion ….“[I] left him not well to find that he had entertained such ideas, and was in danger of such opinions, as you see, from the tenor of his conversation … [ideas which had] been revolving in his mind ever since he was at the Board of Trade… as this nobleman is now at the head of all American affairs… I imagined it might be of some use to acquaint you … to see what loose, mistaken notions those who are esteemed very great men (and really are so in many respects) are capable of entertaining of colony rights ….”When Lord Hillsborough asserted that the promises of King Charles the Second in the Connecticut charter were “extravagant grants, which were therefore void,” he effectively said that the promises in the charter were lies, and that Parliament and the ministers and the king could act as if those promises never existed, despite the truth of what Johnson asserted, that the promises “were granted in consideration of very valuable services done, or to be performed, which having been abundantly executed, at immense expense by the grantees, by the peopling and cultivation of a fine country, to the vast extension of his Majesty’s dominions, and the prodigious increase of the trade and revenues of the Empire.”It is true that Lord Hillsborough concluded this discussion by saying that “these things merited a farther consideration,” which might mean that he had not finally concluded that the charter promises were “extravagant grants, which were therefore void.” However, as we will see, and as Johnson wrote, there never was a “farther consideration” – Lord Hillsborough always spoke and acted as a man who had unshakably decided that the charter promises were “extravagant grants, which were therefore void.”There had never been a duty to send “a regular and punctual transmission of all acts and proceedings of government” from each colony for review by ministers chosen by the Parliament of yet another of the governments all under the same king. In the colonies in which the governor was appointed by the king (chosen by the ministers), the king might direct his governor to do this, but that would be a personal obligation of the individual, not of the colony itself as a legal entity. In the proprietary and charter governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island, there was no such individual in existence (the governors there not being appointed by the king) and thus no such duty attached even to specific individuals.Colony Minister Lord Hillsborough thus asserted a duty applicable to colonies as legal entities that did not exist and had never existed. On this false foundation, he then made a complaint that the supposed pre-existing duty “has scarcely any where been duly attended to, and in several colonies, particularly the Charter and Proprietary governments, almost entirely neglected.” Hillsborough thus made a basis of complaint about bad conduct by colony leaders that was a false complaint, because there had never been any such duty, and thus there was no neglect of duty.Making a complaint of bad performance of duties in the past is the usual path by which someone who wants to fire the current officials, and replace them with his own favorites, seeks to build the case for firing. And that is what Colony Minister Hillsborough was doing here.Concoct a new duty; assert that the duty had always existed; criticism the current office-holders for having failed to perform their duty in the past; and castigate and denounce them if they fail to begin now to perform that duty in the present or into the future; and then fire them. This is a standard manipulation technique, in which the subject of discussion is always the targeted person, and never the person who is trying to control and dominate that person.This, in fact, is a repeat of the pattern used in 1684 against Massachusetts, in the “scire fascias” proceeding to vote the earlier Massachusetts Charter on ground of failure to perform duties never before thought to exist in that Charter.More fundamentally, when Colony Minister Lord Hillsborough spoke of the colonies as “his Majesty’s colonies,” he meant something far more significant than merely the polite formulations of words that are used when a democracy operates within the forms of royal government. When people referred to the Parliament of Great Britain as “his Majesty’s Parliament,” they did not mean thereby that the king owned Parliament and that he had a right to give unlimited orders to Parliament or to its individual members. The king could not command the individuals in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords how to vote on particular bills, or what to say about particular matters of public concern.Not so with the American colonies. When Colony Minister Lord Hillsborough used the words “his Majesty’s colonies,” he meant ownership and control – the right to give orders to the colonies as governments, and to the individuals within each colony government, and to all the individuals living within the colonies.The ministers in London would never have dared to speak and act in this fashion so long as the French and the Spanish had large armed forces on the continent of North America – and in fact they did not, except briefly during the reign of King James the Second, who by applying the same attitude within Britain itself, got himself overthrown and exiled. So long as France and Spain held large portions of North America, the leaders in London needed the active aid and support of the Americans, and thus, treated the Americans with respect.It was only after the expulsion of the French and the Spanish from Canada and from Florida in 1763 that the leaders in London began to feel that they could now command and order the Americans.In essence, what Lord Hillsborough asserted over America was the kind of power that William the Conqueror had asserted over England in 1066.The entire British history over 700 years, of limitations upon the sovereign, of rights of the subjects enforceable against the sovereign, and of the sovereign as a deal-maker with subjects, who honored the deals - all this, the London ministers and the Parliament of Great Britain threw-away in 1764, just as stated by Lord Hillsborough in January and February 1768, as quoted above.The American descendants of the original British colonists would have no more claim to that 700 years of British constitutional history than would the Natives of India, or the Natives of Africa.And that is how the American founders developed they philosophies that they put into effect.

The culture of Great Britain of the late 1500s up to about 1760 is the source of all of the ideas later put into words and action beginning in 1764 and after, in resistance to the claims of the Parliament of Great Britain to have all lawmaking power in America.In most of my Quora answers regarding the time from 1764, I have relied on the extensive research I did into that period as written-up and posted on SSRN in Sept. 2017.However, in an earlier research project, I studied the founding period, and especially the effort in the mid-1680s to the early 1690s to revoke the charter of Massachusetts Bay colony, which generated massive resistance. This is available to the public on amazon kindle is a massive unedited compendium (which the few who have looked at it find indigestible) that - long before Trump and for very different reasons - I titled “America the Great.”Sometimes for Quora answers I copy from parts of that, or at least rely on it, as I did recently in a reply to a comment someone made about the Civil War, that secession was legal and thus Lincoln was the military aggressor. I examine the history of American state-making and government-making in “America the Great,” because we made more than 100 governments in order to arrive at our current 53 - 50 states, the federal government, the District of Colombia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (the scattered still existing small territories count as yet more).SO - with that claim to research credibility behind me, here is my answer.The founders drew their ideas from the culture, not so much from sitting down and reading Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and John Locke (Treatises of Government, 1689), as many answers likely will say.It isn’t that Hobbes and Locke said something other than the culture was teaching - they put into words much of what the culture was teaching - it is simply that writing as an element of society is not as important as writers (and Quora answer-people are writers) wish it were, and, due to this wishing, thus tend to ascribe to the writing of the past, in hopes that the pattern of importance to society will live on - in their writing.Hobbes, for example, in labeling the concept of the “social contract” as the basis of government, rather than God endowing the current senior male of a family with rightful superiority over all others, was writing at a time after the culture he lived in had already developed the “social contract” idea. Hobbes wrote shortly after the Cromwell faction not only had executed the King, but had adopted a law outlawing kingship altogether.Cromwell’s “Parliament” made a very clear rejection of kingship as a system of government - indeed, it rejected all systems of government that vest all power in a single individual, whether that person is or is not titled a king.On March 17 in the year we would designate as 1649 (but which the people of the time, starting the year-number-advance not on January 1 but later, on March 25, called 1648), two years before Hobbes published Leviathan, Cromwell’s Parliament adopted “an Act for the Abolishing the Kingly Office in England and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging.” Cromwell’s Parliament had already executed King Charles I on January 30.This Act not merely absolved all subjects of any allegiance to the sons of Charles I or to their descendants, but also made a declaration about the nature of kingship that was truly revolutionary:“Office of a King not to be exercised by any one person.“And whereas it is and hath been found by experience, that the Office of a King in this Nation and Ireland, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burthensom and dangerous to the liberty, safety and publique interest of the people, and that for the most part, use hath been made of the Regal power and prerogative, to oppress, and impoverish and enslave the Subject; and that usually and naturally any one person in such power, makes it his interest to incroach upon the just freedom and liberty of the people, and to promote the setting up of their own will and power above the Laws, that so they might enslave these Kingdoms to their own Lust;“Be it therefore Enacted and Ordained by this present Parliament, and by Authority of the same, That the Office of a King in this Nation, shall not henceforth reside in, or be exercised by any one single person; and that no one person whatsoever, shall or may have, or hold the Office, Stile, Dignity, Power or Authority of King of the said Kingdoms and Dominions, or any of them, or of the Prince of Wales, Any Law, Statute, Usage or Custom to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding.“Treason in any person endeavouring to set up any of the late Kings Issue, or any other person to be King.“And it is hereby Enacted, That if any person or persons shall endeavour to attempt by force of Arms or otherwise, or be aiding, assisting, comforting or abetting, unto any person or persons that shall by any ways or means whatsoever, endeavor or attempt the reviving or setting up again of any pretended Right of the said Charls, eldest son to the said late King, James called Duke of York, or of any other the Issue and Posterity of the said late King, or of any person or persons claiming under him or them, to the said Regal Office, Stile, Dignity or Authority, or to be Prince of Wales; or the promoting of any one person whatsoever, to the Name, Stile, Dignity, Power, Prerogative or Authority of King of England and Ireland, and Dominions aforesaid, or any of them; That then every such Offence shall be deemed and adjudged High Treason, and the Offenders therein, their Counsellors, Procurers, Aiders and Abettors, being convicted of the said Offence or any of them, shall be deemed and adjudged Traitors against the Parliament and people of England, and shall suffer, lose and forfeit, and have such like and the same pains, forfeitures, judgements and execution, as is used in case of High Treason.“Representatives.“And whereas by the Abolition of the Kingly Office provided for in this Act, a most happy way is made for this Nation (if God see it good) to return to its just and ancient Right of being governed by its own Representatives or National Meetings in Council, from time to time chosen and entrusted for that purpose by the people,“It is therefore Resolved and Declared by the Commons assembled in Parliament, That they will put a period to the sitting of this present Parliament, and dissolve the same so soon as may possibly stand with the safety of the people that hath betrusted them, and with what is absolutely necessary for the preserving and upholding the Government now settled in the way of a Commonwealth; and that they will carefully provide for the certain chusing, meeting and sitting of the next and future Representatives, with such other circumstances of freedom in choice and equality in distribution of Members to be elected thereunto, as shall most conduce to the lasting freedom and good of this Commonwealth.”I have never seen any trace that any American founder had read this, or even knew specifically about it. They knew in broad terms what Cromwell had done, of course - and they were the descendants of those who had lived through it, either directly in Britain, or as colonists in America at the time.The origin of the British culture including the idea that the people have rights against the king goes all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. A foreigner from France (well, Normandy, there was not so much sense of cohesive nationalism as we have long had) came over, won, and imposed power over the Native Britons. About 20 years after the Conquest, in 1085, William ordered a “great survey” of the people and resources of England and parts of Wales.William’s purpose was taxation of the people of England. England’s political sub-units were called “shires,” and the purpose of the survey, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was to assess “what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.”The Native English called this survey, completed in 1086, the doomsday book - “Domesday Book” - because they saw it not as beneficial to them, to know the state of their own land, but as a final judgment and doom upon them.A sense that the government was from outsiders, and could be resisted, existed and persisted from the earliest times of William and of his descendants. It found signal expression 129 years after the “doomsday” book, in 1215 in the Magna Carta, which succeeding kings re-issued, somewhat changed each time.The English idea of “common law” relied on by judges, and the principle of “binding precedent,” also grew out of this sense that the people are an alternative source of government power. The “common law” is not made by declarations from any king. The king could override it - if he dared risk the people’s anger - but he did not make it. The principle of “binding precedent” kept the “common law” continuously present and meaningful, not subject to the changing opinions of individual judges (perhaps more in theory than in practice, but for us, we are looking at principles, so theory is what matters).The concept of “binding precedent” made the “common law” - laws that the people themselves made, by their conduct, not made by any king - something that the people could rely on long-term.France and Spain never had this experience. While they did have dynastic conflicts, their competing kings were always pretty much “home grown.” Perhaps a foreign-born person would become king - but by means of “home grown” armies. William, by contrast, had come with his own foreign army, and he had installed his own foreign friends into all the offices of nobility.We now leap forward to that most significant event, when King Henry VIII manipulated Parliament to adopt in 1534 the Act of Supremacy, defying the Pope himself to declare not the Pope, but Henry, as the chief representative of Jesus the Christ in England. Henry did this shortly after purporting to divorce Catherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn in 1533. Their daughter Elizabeth was born September 7, 1533 - while Catherine of Aragon was still alive.Here, in Britain, was defiance of higher authority unmatched in European history. This was not merely a Protestant challenge to the idea that the church had an all-powerful head, it was the claim of a new, replacement all-powerful head.Many thoughtful Britons took the lesson, that if the King could defy the Pope, the people could defy the King - at least, as to claiming to be head of worship and of the church.Of course, the Pope did not like this, nor did the kings of France and of Spain - but they raised no quarrel with the legitimacy of Henry to be King. Henry was a rightful king who had gone wrong in doctrine.In the eyes of the Pope, of France, and of Spain, Henry was wed to Catherine of Aragon, until her death on January 7, 1536. Henry executed Anne Boleyn on May 19, 1536.Thus, Henry’s next marriage, to Jane Seymour on May 30, 1536, was legitimate in the eyes of the Pope (except, of course, there was no official Papal authorization for it), because it came after the death of Catherine of Aragon.And this means that the child of Henry and Jane Seymour, Edward, born October 12, 1537, was a legitimate heir to the throne.Here’s why all this matters. When Henry VIII died on January 28, 1547, Edward VI was the legitimate heir and new king in the eyes of the Pope, of France, and of Spain. True, he was persisting in his father’s errors in the faith, but he was, like his father, a rightful king “gone wrong.” Neither the Pope, France, nor Spain attacked him as illegitimate to sit on the throne.When Edward VI died young, on July 6, 1553, his older sister Mary, a legitimate daughter of Henry and Catherine, took the throne. The Pope, France, and Spain accepted her as the next legitimate heir, and made no challenge to her legitimacy to sit on the throne. And they liked her, because she was Catholic, and rejected the “gone wrong” aspect of her father and of her brother.But then Mary died, on November 17, 1558. And who came to the throne?Elizabeth - in the eyes of the Pope, France, and Spain, the bastard daughter of a false marriage done in violation of the dignity of the lawful wife, Catherine of Aragon. Because Elizabeth not merely was the daughter of a flat marriage done while Catherine was alive, she was even born (September 7, 1533) while Catherine was still alive (died January 7, 1536). For 2 and 2/3 years, Catherine had to experience her husband caring for his mistress’ child.And on top of that, Elizabeth “went wrong” in faith as her father and brother had.Thus, from November 1558 forward, Elizabeth was under relentless, persistent, loud assertions from the Pope, France, and Spain, that she had no right to the throne at all, and was a usurper using her position to advance false claims about the true religious faith - about the Lord God Himself.This put Elizabeth into a fundamentally weak position inside England itself. Any lord or noble who started getting unhappy with her rule could just say to himself: “You know, the more I hear the Pope, France, and Spain calling her illegitimate, a usurper of the throne, the more I think they are right. I certainly don’t have to listen to her. In fact, let’s get rid of her.”It is the fact that statements of illegitimacy are made by powerful people that is destabilizing - not whether the statements are “correct on the merits” or not. The statements can become a justification for resistance and rebellion whose actual motivation may be for other reasons - such as too much oppression.We see this principle in action today, as Quora contributor Dima Vorobiev so insightfully made clear, in Putin’s support for Trump. Putin does not want foreign powers calling his seat in power in Russia illegitimate. Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party generally, and most of America’s professors and journalists, are constantly judging and criticizing the morality and legitimacy of people in power, be it government or corporate.Trump just wants to do deals, and he doesn’t care about the internal moral or political legitimacy of the tyrant he’s doing the deal with. He doesn’t care that by doing a deal - indeed, merely by trying to do a deal - he is giving legitimacy to the tyrant. All Trump cares about is whether the tyrant will honor his deals.Queen Elizabeth I, unlike Putin, had no ability to change the Pope, France, or Spain into powers that were no longer claiming that she was illegitimate. And thus, she didn’t have the internal power of enforcement that leaders get if no one outside the country is calling them illegitimate.This made Elizabeth into a sovereign who had to do deals. She had to keep nobles and lords happy by seeing that they were making money while she was Queen.For example, here is an example of an Elizabeth “deal:” in 1564, as an investor, she joined a venture with John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to go privateering around the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Among the “cargo” they captured was enslaved people from Africa, which they sold in Venezuela.Elizabeth was part of this as a business venture, not as a commanding sovereign.Indeed, the House of Commons itself arose as basically a deal-making entity. If the Queen wanted money, she had to make the case for it to the representatives of the people from whom she wanted the money. The Commons House wasn’t intended originally to be a body representing all the people in lawmaking - it was the committee representing those who had the money that the Queen wanted. They would listen to the case, and if they liked it, they would “give and grant” the money to her. This “give and grant” language is still used today.On November 30, 1601, aged Queen Elizabeth convened the Commons House before her, to give what would be her last speech to it. The occasion was widespread dissatisfaction to business monopolies - “patents” or “grants” - that she had given, such that a certain person would have a monopoly to sell wine here and there, another to sell grain here and there, etc. These monopolies were also deals - deals she had made with the individuals who got the patents. Now she had done too many of them, prices were getting too high, large numbers of competent individuals who could do the same work and make money were blocked-out.This speech became known as the Golden Speech, because in it she expressed her desire to be loved by her people, and to be worthy of such love. The key parts for us, now, are:“I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subject and that is a duty which I owe. … I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding Prince, nor yet a waster. My heart was never set on any worldly goods. What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again. … Since I was Queen, yet did I never put my pen to any grant, but that upon pretext and semblance made unto me, it was both good and beneficial to the subject in general though a private profit to some of my ancient servants, who had deserved well at my hands. But the contrary being found by experience ... That my grants should be grievous to my people and oppressions to be privileged under colour of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it, I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it. … [I]f my kingly bounties have been abused and my grants turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning, and if any in authority under me have neglected or perverted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offenses in my charge. I … well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great judge. ... There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.”Basically she is saying that she will make no deals that hurt the people - but will keep deals that help the people.Nothing like this developed in France or in Spain, where the kings had always been home-born, and were never challenged by an outside power as being illegitimate usurpers. Those kings could exercise a power of command that the subjects would not challenge as illegitimate - though the subjects might criticize certain ways of exercising it as oppressive or unwise. Thus the French and Spanish kings never really became “deal-makers” with their subjects.Elizabeth reigned a long time, from November 1558 to March 1603 - 45 years. That is a long time to set the tone that the sovereign makes deals - and keeps them; and that the subjects the sovereign makes deals with have a right to hold the sovereign to them.James the Sixth King of that name in Scotland became James I of England, succeeding Elizabeth in England. James I came into an English culture that expected the sovereign to be a deal-maker with the subjects.Meanwhile, the process of discovery overseas, and developing ship technology, and population growth inside Britain, had developed to the point that colonizing North America was feasible.And there were basically two kinds of people in Britain who felt that not only was it feasible, it was desirable.One were money-makers, who felt they could make profits by developing settlements. Nobody had discovered gold in North America, so there was no Royal motivation to send-out military men to seize gold that wasn’t there. But the land was fertile, and had unique natural resources that could be caught and taken back to England.The other was religious - those who had followed-up on the idea that if in matters of faith the King could drop the Pope, the People could drop the King. These dissenters, known variously as Pilgrims or Puritans (they were a bit different, the Pilgrims being gentler), desired a place to live where they would not be so oppressed by new King James I in matters of faith.They proposed to form groups or companies, that would be chartered by King James I.These, again, were deals. This was not the king saying “Let’s form an expedition of conquest in my name. Assemble a fleet, assemble an army, and let’s pick a noble leader to engage in conquest in my name.”Instead, the initiative came from groups of subjects who for personal reasons, whether of profit or of faith, wanted to colonize parts of the king’s claims in North America - provided that the king would confirm, officially, the deals they had made with each other to give form and legality to their venture.King James I made the deals; his successor King Charles I made the deals. Tis went on for some 42 years - until King Charles, having become too much of an oppressor at home, got himself executed in 1649 (by our dating).Whereupon shortly thereafter the Cromwell Parliament outlawed kingship altogether in 1649 (by our dating), in the statute we read above.Whereupon shortly after that, Thomas Hobbes wrote about the “social contract” conception of government, in Leviathan, in 1651.So, through the decade of the 1650s, the Americans lived under no kingship at all. The Cromwell people continued to honor the deals.Moreover, no nobility was established in America. No class of native knights, earls, dukes, etc., was ever created. The feudal social systems of England never good any root in America.And thus, having no people who had any noble titles, no Americans needed the existence of a kingship, which is necessary to maintain the legitimacy of noble titles. There can’t really be dukes of there is no king to grant the duke-ships. True, France and the German regions had some dukes without kings over them, but nothing like that developed in Britain.Cromwell didn’t establish a form of government capable of outlasting his own personality, so a few years after he died, the sons of Charles I came back in 1660, in what is called the restoration: Charles as King Charles II, and his younger brother James as Duke of York. They continued to issue charters - deals - as their uncle James I and father Charles I had.James succeeding his brother as James II, he made the same kinds of mistakes that his father had - too oppressive - although the new element he brought into it was his strong sympathy for Catholicism.James II treated the deals as deals, but through agents in New England, whose actions I studied in detail and wrote up in “America the Great,” he attacked the Massachusetts charter by using a deal-oriented theory: that the Massachusetts charter government had done things beyond the powers of the charter, and thus, not merely were those acts void, but the conduct of adopted illegal acts voided the entire charter. This was an application of a legal doctrine called “scire fascias.”In 1688 James II was forced out by British lords, who invited-in a grandson of Charles I, William, raised in the Netherlands, and having the title Prince of Orange, which referred to a small place in today’s southern France. He was married to a first-cousin, daughter Mary of James II.This was called the Glorious Revolution, and was a very significant event in forming the ideas of the American founding fathers.As part of bringing William in as William III, and Mary, the British leaders adopted a Bill of Rights in December 1689. This put into words, in a formal legal document, a summation of the British rights that had developed during the prior 155 years, since 1534 with Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy regarding the faith.In documents written by the founders, when they write of the “revolution,” this is the revolution they mean.William III, his successor in 1702 his sister-in-law Mary, and her successors King George I and King George II, all continued to treat the deals as deals.Every one of these deals promised substantially more self-government, and far more representatives self-government, than was available to the people inside Britain. This was the primary motivating factor to cause energetic young free white men to leave Britain for a wilderness where they would have to make everything about their own lives from their own labor. If they went, and took the risk, and did the work, and made wealth for themselves, their own legislatures would solely decide how much of their wealth might be “given and granted” in taxes. They would be able to protect the fruits of their own labor.King William III and Queen Mary did not recognize any authority of the Parliament of England or of Scotland, nor did Queen Mary, George I, or George II recognize any authority of the united Parliament of Great Britain after 1707, to make laws that went any further into America than the landward-side-doors of the customs-clearance houses in American port cities, and, as necessary to thwart smuggling that did not go through the customs-houses, along the American coasts.This limitation was necessary to honor the promises made in the charters that the settlers would be protected in the fruits of their labors by their own elected legislatures.Nobody would be fool enough to go from the civilized world of Britain to the risks of the wilderness in America, if by so doing, they lost even the limited protections they had in Britain against the government choosing to take from them as much as it wanted, without them having a power to decide to “give and grant” only so much as they chose. The people of England itself had overthrown two kings - Charles I and James II - precisely for taking too much, without consent. William III, the immediate successor of dethroned James II, the person who directly benefited by the unhappiness engendered against James II, certainly saw that.Thus, from the founding of each colony, up until Parliament began to press its claims in 1764, the Americans understood their relationship to the Crown, and to each other, and to Britain, pretty much exactly as today’s British Commonwealth is conceived: individual separate nations united under one Crown, which has a direct relationship to the government of each nation, without any one parliament, or any one set of ministers, having veto-power over any other.On March 6, 1775, Massachusetts resident John Adams, the future U.S. President, published an essay about this, using the pen-name “Novanglus,” which means “New Englander,” in which he said:“Our charter was granted by king William and queen Mary, three years after the [1688] revolution [the 1691 Charter]. And the oaths of allegiance are established by a law of the province. So that our allegiance to his Majesty is not due by virtue of any act of a British parliament, but by our own charter and province laws. It ought to be remembered, that there was a revolution here as well as in England, and that we made an original, express contract with king William, as well as the people of England [made their contract with king William].“If it follows from thence, that he appears as king of Massachusetts, king of Rhode Island, king of Connecticut, &c., this is no absurdity at all. He will appear in this light, and does appear so, whether Parliament has authority over us or not. He is king of Ireland, I suppose, although parliament is allowed to have authority there. As to giving his Majesty those titles, I have no objection at all: I wish he would be graciously pleased to assume them.”We should note (since studious Quora commenters likely will raise it) that beginning in the mid-1760s, defenders of Parliament’s claims to power would cite a statute of the Parliament of England in 1696, under William III, to render null and void “all laws, by-laws, usages, and customs which should be in practice in any of the American plantations, repugnant to any law made or to be made in the Kingdom.”The actual text of King William III’s 1696 Parliament of England statute, cited as 8 William (Will or Wm.) chapter (or ch.) 22, section 9 (IX), does not mean what advocates of the Parliament of Great Britain, in 1766, said that it meant: that “any law made or to be made in the Kingdom” has this overriding power.The actual text of the complete statute of King William III by the Parliament of England is found online in full on google books in the 1761 book “Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Province of New Hampshire in New England,” at page 158, and it says, as to section 9 (IX) that the colonial laws and practices rendered null and void are only those that conflict with a defined list of prior laws, all of them dealing with customs duties and ship-landing of cargoes: “which are in any ways repugnant to the before mentioned laws, or to any other law hereafter to be made in this kingdom.”The laws “hereafter to be made” necessarily are only those laws similar to those laws cited earlier in the same Act, namely, laws founded solely upon the Parliament of England’s rightful power to regulate ocean-trade – a writ of power then understood to stop at the landward exit-door of the customs-duty houses in the American ports, and understood to intrude only so far into the American coasts as intercept smuggling that avoided the customs-offices in the lawful shipping ports. That is how everyone actually understood the statute for its first 68 years, from 1696 all the way through to 1764, when the Parliament of Great Britain announced that it would adopt a new tax law, the Stamp Act, in 1765.But in 1764, the ministers of Britain, now being in a situation in which, by victory in the Seven Years War over France and Spain, there were no enemy European armed forces in North America, felt that they could assert more power.The basic concept was that it is inherent in the nature of government that there must be one supreme source of law, unimpeded by any other entity of government. A government of divided or limited powers was an impossibility.The chief ministerial advocate of this was Lord Hillsborough. Here (taken from my September 2017 SSRN study) are some key statements:>On 23 January 1768, in London, the new Colony Minister, Lord Hillsborough, addressed a circular letter to each of the governors of the American colonies (the copy I review is to John Penn of Pennsylvania, in the Pennsylvania Archives, but I presume the same letter went to each governor):“His Majesty having been graciously pleased to appoint me to be one of his principal Secretaries of State, and to commit to my care the dispatch of all such business relative to his Majesty’s colonies in America … your dispatches be for the future addressed to me. …“[A]ll possible facility & dispatch should be given to the business of his colonies, and as nothing can more effectually contribute to this salutary purpose than a frequent and full communication of all occurrences that may happen, and a regular and punctual transmission of all acts and proceedings of government, and legislature, and of such papers as have any relation thereto;“I have it in command from his Majesty to recommend this to your particular attention, his Majesty having observed with concern, that this essential part of the duty of his officers in America has scarcely any where been duly attended to, and in several colonies, particularly the Charter and Proprietary governments, almost entirely neglected.”>On 13 February 1768, in London, future 1stUS Congress Senator William Samuel Johnson wrote Connecticut Governor William Pitkin III in Connecticut at Hartford, to report in detail on his recent meeting with the new Colony Minister, Lord Hillsborough (Wills Hill). Governor Pitkin received this on April 18, 1768:“As soon as Lord Hilsborough publicly entered upon his office of Secretary of State for the American department [officially appointed February 27], I thought it my duty to wait upon his lordship and congratulate him upon his appointment to that important office, and to recommend the Colony of Connecticut to his lordship’s favor and protection. …“[H]e said, we were a very free Colony … we were very deficient in our correspondence, seldom writing to his Majesty’s Ministers … they were often quite in the dark about us, and seemed to have too little connection with that Colony.“I assured him, in answer, that I believed he might depend upon it that everything was communicated which the government there could imagine it fit to trouble the King’s Ministers with … from the nature of our constitution, his lordship would see that fewer occasions would occur of troubling the King’s Ministers with our affairs than in those governments immediately under the Crown, which must necessarily be, in some sort, actually administered by the Ministers themselves; and if in any cases real delays had happened [various excuses justified the delays].“He seemed pretty well satisfied with this apology, but then proceeded to a much more interesting subject. He had, he said, in his circular letter, requested that a copy or our colony laws should be sent him …. I told him, I believed the colony had several times sent over the printed law book; that I thought there was one or more at the Plantation Office, and imagined they might even be had in England.“He replied, however that might be, as his was a new office, it would be necessary that a copy should be lodged there; and he thought it the duty of government to send it, and transmit from time to time, not only the laws that should pass, but all the minutes of the proceedings of Council and Assembly, that they might know what we were about, how government was administered, and rectify whatever might be amiss.“I said, if his Lordship wanted a copy of our laws for his private perusal, or to remain in his office for the information of his secretary and clerks, or to be referee to whenever any affairs of the colony were under consideration, I did not doubt the colony would send him one of their law books … but if his Lordship meant to have the laws now in force there, and those which should hereafter pass, transmitted (as from the colonies immediately under the Crown) for the inspection of the Ministry as such, and for the purpose of approbation or disapprobation by his Majesty in Council, (which I saw very plainly was what he was driving at,) it was what the colony had never done, nor thought themselves obliged to do, and I was persuaded would never submit to; and if his Lordship would be pleased to attend to the charter granted us by King Charles II., I did not doubt he would be clearly of the opinion, that the colony were thereby vested with a complete power of legislation, and that their acts needed no farther approbation, nor were subject to any revision; and in point of fact, his Lordship well knew that those laws had never been re-examined here, that the colony had been for more than a century in the full exercise of these powers, under the eye and with the approbation of government here, without any the least check or interruption, except in a single instance [referring to actions by an agent, Edmund Andros, of about-to-be-deposed King James II, in 1687], in such times, and under such circumstances, as I believed his Lordship would not mention but with detestation, much less consider as a precedent.“He said, he had read our charter with some attention, and he knew what powers we had exercised under it; that it was very full and expressive, but there were such things as extravagant grants, which were therefore void; and however great a latitude of expression was made use of in it, still there might be a doubt, perhaps, what would really pass by it in legal construction; that he believed I would admit there were many things which the King could not grant, as the inseparable incidents of the Crown, &c.; and it might deserve consideration whether some things which King Charles had pretended to grant to the Colony of Connecticut were not of that nature, particularly the power of absolute legislation, which tended to the absurdity of introducing imperium in imperio, and to create an independent state.“I replied, that, for the purpose of his argument, I apprehended it was not necessary either to admit or deny that there were some prerogatives of the Crown so inseparably incident or annexed to it that they could not be granted away, (upon which subject some lawyers had, however, refined so much as to render themselves very unintelligible,) since nobody had ever reckoned the power of legislation among those inseparable incidents of the Crown; all lawyers were agreed, that it was a peculiar and undisputed prerogative of the Crown to create corporations, and that the power of law-making was incident to every corporation, at least in some degree … founded in the reason of things … that every corporation in England enjoyed it as really, though not so extensively, as the Colony of Connecticut, they to their particular purposes for which they were created, we to ours ….“That the colony charters were in several respects of a higher nature, and founded upon a better title than even those of the corporations of England, particularly that those here were mere acts of grace and favor, whereas those in America were granted in consideration of very valuable services done, or to be performed, which having been abundantly executed, at immense expense by the grantees, by the peopling and cultivation of a fine country, to the vast extension of his Majesty’s dominions, and the prodigious increase of the trade and revenues of the Empire, they must now be considered as grants upon valuable consideration, sacred and most inviolable. …“Parliament, as well as the Crown, having for more than a century acquiesced in the exercise of the powers claimed by it [the Connecticut government], this would amount to an approbation, so that the colony had now a Parliamentary sanction, as well as a title by prescription, added to the royal grant; by all which they must be effectually secured in the full possession and exercise of all their charter rights.“His Lordship endeavored to distinguish between the ordinary corporation powers (in which he would admit the power of making by-laws was included) and that legislative power exercised in the charter colonies, upon which he was pretty full; and I still endeavored to avail myself of those distinctions in favor of my argument, upon this principle, that the very creating of a corporation for the purpose of establishing a colony included in its idea the full power of legislation, the government of a colony being a more extensive and complicated object than that of a single city or town, and necessarily requiring more full and absolute powers, which it must therefore be injudicious to limit by comparing them strictly with those of corporations for inferior purposes.“Finally, upon this point, his Lordship said, these were matters of nice and curious disquisition, and required a longer time for full discussion than he could then well spare; he seemed, however, to yield the necessity of any royal approbation as requisite to the validity of our laws, but still insisted that (admitting the validity of King Charles’s grant) they ought to be regularly transmitted for the inspection of the Privy Council, and for disapprobation, if found within the saving of the charter, ‘repugnant to the laws of England;’ that those who claimed under the charter must admit the force of that limitation of their legislative powers, at least, and that alone would render it necessary that their laws should be transmitted and inspected here.“Upon which I begged leave to observe to his Lordship, that the colony did not apprehend that any extrajudicial opinion of his Majesty’s Ministers, or even of the King’s Privy Council, could determine whether any particular act was within that proviso or not; that this could only be decided by a court of law, having jurisdiction of the matter about which the law in question was conversant; that though perhaps we should not contend, but that, if the General Assembly [of Connecticut] should make a law repugnant to a statute of Great Britain, (not in the sense of diverse form [from], but flatly, and in terms contradictory to it,) such law, by the saving in the charter, might be void, yet a declaration of the King in Council would still make it neither more nor less so, but be as void as the law itself; because its being void or not depended merely upon the restraining clause in the charter, not upon any authority reserved to the Crown, or the Privy Council, to decide about it, from which they were by other words in the same charter clearly and expressly excluded; that therefore the only method which could be taken in such case must be for the persons aggrieved by such act to bring their action at law, in such manner as to bring in question the validity of such act of Assembly, when the court before whom the trial should be, could fairly and legally determine upon it; that this might be done in the courts of law in the colony, and I doubted not would be very fairly decided there, and leave no room for an application here, or, if the contrary should ever happen, the interposition here (if any) I conceived must be in the judicial only, not by any means in the official way.“As against the Crown, especially, the charter grant was completely, and to all intents and purposes, conclusive; King Charles II. had, for himself and his successors, absolutely granted all their power, by which the Crown must be bound, and forever estopped to say that there was any ground for the Privy Council, or any of the King’s Ministers, who were still but the delegates of the Crown, and acting in behalf of it, and by authority derived only from thence, to interpose in confirming or disannulling the laws of that colony, and consequently there could be no manner of [or] occasion for transmitting our acts to his Majesty’s Ministers, or for their giving themselves any trouble about them.“The judicial power of the Privy Council … his Lordship did not mention, nor indeed, as he had stated it, did it properly belong to the argument ….“As to the minutes of Council and Assembly … I told his Lordship that there were none kept, but only in short notes … perfectly unintelligible unless the colony sent their Secretary, after every session, to explain them ….“His Lordship said that we had a very particular method of doing business; that he had not seen these things quite in the light which I had endeavored to place them in, and he feared we were in danger of being too much a separate independent state, and of having too little connection with or subordination to this country, upon which our security and well-being depended; that, however, these things merited a farther consideration; he hoped, at least, the colony would send him their laws, and we might perhaps talk farther upon these subjects, upon some future occasion ….“[I] left him not well to find that he had entertained such ideas, and was in danger of such opinions, as you see, from the tenor of his conversation … [ideas which had] been revolving in his mind ever since he was at the Board of Trade… as this nobleman is now at the head of all American affairs… I imagined it might be of some use to acquaint you … to see what loose, mistaken notions those who are esteemed very great men (and really are so in many respects) are capable of entertaining of colony rights ….”When Lord Hillsborough asserted that the promises of King Charles the Second in the Connecticut charter were “extravagant grants, which were therefore void,” he effectively said that the promises in the charter were lies, and that Parliament and the ministers and the king could act as if those promises never existed, despite the truth of what Johnson asserted, that the promises “were granted in consideration of very valuable services done, or to be performed, which having been abundantly executed, at immense expense by the grantees, by the peopling and cultivation of a fine country, to the vast extension of his Majesty’s dominions, and the prodigious increase of the trade and revenues of the Empire.”It is true that Lord Hillsborough concluded this discussion by saying that “these things merited a farther consideration,” which might mean that he had not finally concluded that the charter promises were “extravagant grants, which were therefore void.” However, as we will see, and as Johnson wrote, there never was a “farther consideration” – Lord Hillsborough always spoke and acted as a man who had unshakably decided that the charter promises were “extravagant grants, which were therefore void.”There had never been a duty to send “a regular and punctual transmission of all acts and proceedings of government” from each colony for review by ministers chosen by the Parliament of yet another of the governments all under the same king. In the colonies in which the governor was appointed by the king (chosen by the ministers), the king might direct his governor to do this, but that would be a personal obligation of the individual, not of the colony itself as a legal entity. In the proprietary and charter governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island, there was no such individual in existence (the governors there not being appointed by the king) and thus no such duty attached even to specific individuals.Colony Minister Lord Hillsborough thus asserted a duty applicable to colonies as legal entities that did not exist and had never existed. On this false foundation, he then made a complaint that the supposed pre-existing duty “has scarcely any where been duly attended to, and in several colonies, particularly the Charter and Proprietary governments, almost entirely neglected.” Hillsborough thus made a basis of complaint about bad conduct by colony leaders that was a false complaint, because there had never been any such duty, and thus there was no neglect of duty.Making a complaint of bad performance of duties in the past is the usual path by which someone who wants to fire the current officials, and replace them with his own favorites, seeks to build the case for firing. And that is what Colony Minister Hillsborough was doing here.Concoct a new duty; assert that the duty had always existed; criticism the current office-holders for having failed to perform their duty in the past; and castigate and denounce them if they fail to begin now to perform that duty in the present or into the future; and then fire them. This is a standard manipulation technique, in which the subject of discussion is always the targeted person, and never the person who is trying to control and dominate that person.This, in fact, is a repeat of the pattern used in 1684 against Massachusetts, in the “scire fascias” proceeding to vote the earlier Massachusetts Charter on ground of failure to perform duties never before thought to exist in that Charter.More fundamentally, when Colony Minister Lord Hillsborough spoke of the colonies as “his Majesty’s colonies,” he meant something far more significant than merely the polite formulations of words that are used when a democracy operates within the forms of royal government. When people referred to the Parliament of Great Britain as “his Majesty’s Parliament,” they did not mean thereby that the king owned Parliament and that he had a right to give unlimited orders to Parliament or to its individual members. The king could not command the individuals in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords how to vote on particular bills, or what to say about particular matters of public concern.Not so with the American colonies. When Colony Minister Lord Hillsborough used the words “his Majesty’s colonies,” he meant ownership and control – the right to give orders to the colonies as governments, and to the individuals within each colony government, and to all the individuals living within the colonies.The ministers in London would never have dared to speak and act in this fashion so long as the French and the Spanish had large armed forces on the continent of North America – and in fact they did not, except briefly during the reign of King James the Second, who by applying the same attitude within Britain itself, got himself overthrown and exiled. So long as France and Spain held large portions of North America, the leaders in London needed the active aid and support of the Americans, and thus, treated the Americans with respect.It was only after the expulsion of the French and the Spanish from Canada and from Florida in 1763 that the leaders in London began to feel that they could now command and order the Americans.In essence, what Lord Hillsborough asserted over America was the kind of power that William the Conqueror had asserted over England in 1066.The entire British history over 700 years, of limitations upon the sovereign, of rights of the subjects enforceable against the sovereign, and of the sovereign as a deal-maker with subjects, who honored the deals - all this, the London ministers and the Parliament of Great Britain threw-away in 1764, just as stated by Lord Hillsborough in January and February 1768, as quoted above.The American descendants of the original British colonists would have no more claim to that 700 years of British constitutional history than would the Natives of India, or the Natives of Africa.And that is where the American founders got their ideas.