Episode Details

In 1683, in a colony that had never held an election, under an Irish Catholic governor appointed by a Catholic duke, New York — of all colonies — wrote down a sweeping charter of English liberty: a Charter of Liberties declaring that no man could be taxed without the consent of his own representatives, and that those rights were a possession, not a gift from any king. Within three years it was dead, killed in London by a single change of wording that turned every right into a revocable grant. This is the story of that charter and its undoing, and of the machine the Crown built on the principle the revision proved: that a subject's liberties belong, in the end, to the Crown.

They called it the Dominion of New England, and they gave it the most powerful governor in the history of English America — Sir Edmund Andros, a capable and loyal soldier handed authority over the whole northeast, from the Delaware to Maine, with no elected assembly anywhere beneath him. Andros could manage the Iroquois frontier with real skill. What he could not do was govern by decree a people who had run their own affairs for fifty years. When an Ipswich minister invoked the Magna Carta against a tax laid without consent, a judge told him he had no privileges left but not to be sold as a slave. The Dominion worked, by the Crown's measure. It rested on the king's authority alone — and on nothing underneath.