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to exempt the exports and imports of the colony from all taxation, both Houses of Parliament passed an Act for the appointment of a Governor-General and seventeen Commissioners--five Lords and twelve Commoners--with unlimited powers over all the American colonies. Among the members of the House of Commons composing this Commission were Sir Harry Vane and Oliver Cromwell. The title of this Act, in Hazard, is as follows: "An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament: whereby Robert Earl of Warwick is made Governor-in-Chief and Lord High Admiral of all those Islands and Plantations inhabited, planted, or belonging to any of his Majesty the King of England's subjects, within the bounds and upon the coasts of America, and a Committee appointed to be assisting unto him, for the better government, strengthening and preservation of the said Plantations; but chiefly for the advancement of the true Protestant religion, and further spreading of the Gospel of Christ[77] among those that yet remain there, in great and miserable blindness and ignorance."[78] This Act places all the affairs of the colonies, with the appointment of Governors and all other local officers, under the direct control of Parliament, through its general Governor and Commissioners, and shows beyond doubt that the Puritans of the Long Parliament held the same views with those of Charles the First, and George the Third, and Lord North a century afterwards, as to the authority of the British Parliament over the American colonies. Whether those views were right or wrong, they were the views of all parties in England from the beginning for more than a century, as to the relations between the British Parliament and the colonies. The views on this subject held and maintained by the United Empire Loyalists, during the American Revolution of 1776, were those which had been held by all parties in England, whether Puritans or Churchmen, from the first granting of the Charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay in 1629. The assumptions and statements of American historians to the contrary on this subject are at variance with all the preceding facts of colonial history.[79] Mr. Bancroft makes no mention of this important ordinance passed by both Houses of the Long Parliament;[80] nor does Hutchinson, or Graham, or Palfrey. Less sweeping acts of authority over the colonies, by either of the Charters, are portrayed by these historians with minuteness a
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