By What Authority - The King's Diagnosis

American Political History · May 1, 2022 · 21m

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…