internal stability, and the close of the Dutch wars in 1675 brought years of peace abroad. By these two causes the council was enabled, more freely than in the first years after the Restoration, to bend its energies toward the administrative aspects of empire. The royal order to sit once a week was not followed with regularity, yet the committee averaged fifty sessions a year for the first decade.[1] The greatest attention to colonial and commercial questions was manifested in the years 1676 and 1677, when the number of sittings reached the high figures of eighty-nine and seventy-one respectively.[2]
The passions of politics were not without their distracting influence on the committee. During the mad times of the Popish Plot in 1678 the sessions for the year fell to the low figure of twenty-nine. The Lords of Trade frankly confessed that "the multiplicity of affairs in Parliament and the prosecution of the Plot" forced them for the moment to suspend action on pressing colonial matters.[3] Colonial autonomy, imperilled by aggressive central control, now as before found temporary relief in the turn of English politics. Massachusetts, defiant in spirit and conduct, took full advantage of the situation to thwart the attacks on her precious charter.[4] But if political mutations worked to the benefit of colonial self-direction, imperial control suffered thereby. Governors in the royal colonies of the West Indies, anxiously awaiting instructions, wrote home in complaint of the sacrifice of the urgent needs of remote provinces to domestic politics.[5] And during the next six years, when the Test Act and the Exclusion Bill raised political and social issues that bred factious discontent, the sessions ranged from thirty-five to forty-five a year, marking a significant decline from the good record of the first few years.[6] After all, in the first
- ↑ March, 1675, the committee appointed for its "constant dayes of sitting Thursdayes in the forenoone, and oftener as the occasion shall require". L. T. J., I. 8.
- ↑ This record compares very favorably with that of the active Council of Plantations of 1670–1674. Andrews, Brit. Comm., pp. 101, 110.
- ↑ Cal. St. P., Col., 1677–1680, §§ 912, 1014, 1028.
- ↑ Massachusetts gave as one reason for not sending agents in response to the royal demand that "we understand His Majesty and Privy Council are taken up with matters of greater importance". Ibid., 1677–1680, § 1388; 1681–1685, § 126.
- ↑ Ibid., 1677–1680, §§ 894, 974, 975.
- ↑ In 1682 the lieutenant-governor of Virginia wrote home complaining that "Nothing has been concluded here for near two years, which one could think was time enough to give notice to this poor Colony"; and the governor of Jamaica in 1683 declared that he had sent home frequent reports but had received no reply. Ibid., 1681–1685, §§ 550, 1065.
