Episode Details

For six years Edward Randolph tried to collect the king's customs in Boston, and for six years the city beat him — every ship he seized returned by a colonial court, every smuggler acquitted by a jury of his friends. Randolph wrote it all down and sent it home, with a conclusion that sharpened each year: Massachusetts did not believe England had the right to command it. In the winter of 1685 those reports reached a new king. James II was nothing like his easygoing brother Charles — rigid, serious, a Catholic who had governed New York for twenty years without an assembly and thought the model sound, and who had just crushed a rebellion and watched leniency curdle into revolt.

This is the story of how the Crown named the disease and chose the cure. The diagnosis came down to a single object — the charter — read by London as a revocable license and by Boston as a sacred covenant almost beyond the king's reach. The Lords of Trade had their indictment in three counts: trade evaded, authority denied, protection demanded and obligation refused. The prescription was total: revoke the charters, abolish every assembly, weld the northern colonies into one royal Dominion governed from the top. James approved it without hesitation. All that remained was to choose the man who would carry it to Boston — and the king already had him in mind.