Discovery and Settlement of the New World 23nor or the royal authority in England. In actual practice, however,
these elected assemblies exerted considerable authority. Since they en-
acted local taxes they had the power of the purse, which they used to
compel the governor to heed their demands. They could deprive him of
his salary, for example, or the salaries of his assistants. He, in turn,
could dismiss them and call for new elections; but he could not compel
them to pass laws they opposed.
James II did attempt to exercise greater control over several northern
colonies in 1686 , when he created the Dominion of New England, con-
sisting of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hamp-
shire. Later he added the colonies of New York and New Jersey. He
appointed Sir Edmund Andros governor of this dominion, and granted
him the power to enact laws, including taxes. The loss of the consider-
able freedom the colonists had enjoyed engendered resentment and
anger. And Andros himself was a mistake. Arbitrary, contemptuous of
individual rights and traditions, he exercised dictatorial rule over the
settlers and soon came to grief.
King James was hated both in America and in England, especially
for his defiance of Parliament and its laws. He was overthrown in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. As a Catholic in spirit if not in fact, he
was feared by many Protestants, who revolted when James’s wife gave
birth to a son who would inherit the throne, most probably as a Cath-
olic. So Parliament invited James’s daughter Mary, a Protestant, and
her husband, William of Orange, to take the English throne as a pair.
When word of James’s overthrow reached Boston, the colonists arrested
Andros and terminated the Dominion of New England. The colonial
governments and local offi cials were reestablished. The Parliament in
England made no attempt to resurrect the dominion.
The action of James II in establishing the Dominion of New En-
gland to bring the northern colonies under closer supervision, and the
action of his pre deces sor, Charles II, in creating a Council of Trade
and a Council of Foreign Plantations, by which a favorable balance of
trade with the colonies could be achieved, were not simply expressions
of political ambitions or goals. Actually they reflected economic need.
These monarchs hoped to acquire wealth for England, and that meant
gold and silver. To achieve such wealth necessitated a favorable balance
of trade, wherein the money owed to a nation would be paid in specie.