Historical Precursors
The Massachusetts Bay Colony received its first royal charter in 1629, with the founding of Boston following the arrival in 1630 of Governor John Winthrop and a fleet of principally Puritan settlers. The colony's governance was based on this charter, which included the establishment of a "council of assistants". The assistants were a body of magistrates who not only decided judicial cases, but also played a role in the colony's lawmaking. The assistants were elected by the colony's freemen.
After the colony's original charter was revoked in 1684, there was the short-lived Dominion of New England (1686-1689), which was succeeded in the territories of modern Massachusetts and Maine by the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The charter for the province called for "eight and twenty assistants, or counsellors, to be advising and assisting to the governor" who were to be chosen annually by the Great and General Court. It further specified that the council was to assume the duties of the governor in the absence of both the royal governor and lieutenant governor (who were appointed by the crown), and enumerated some of the specific issues on which the council was to advise the governor. During the provincial period, the relationship between the governor and council was sometimes difficult, since the council represented colonial interests which diverged from the crown interests of the governor.
Read more about this topic: Massachusetts Governor's Council
Famous quotes containing the word historical:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)