(Signed)
Ri. Shilton.
55. Excursus: For a Comparative Study of Charters
Notes upon the Charter for the Company of Westminster for the Plantation of the Island of Providence
December 4/14, 1630
This very important charter has never been printed. An abstract in the Colonial State Papers seemed so significant that the editor of this volume secured a complete transcript of the charter from the manuscript in the British Record Office. On that transcript, the notes below are based.
The colony of Providence Isle was of little weight, and the charter of the proprietary Company, accordingly, has received scant attention. That document, however, issued twenty-one months later than that of the Massachusetts Bay Company, is in many ways the culmination of the series of grants to English corporations for colonizing purposes. All the powers granted to proprietaries in earlier charters, including those which were dropped out in the Massachusetts charter, reappear here; and in some important matters there is much new detail. A study of this document removes the last possible basis for the claims of the older New England historians that the Massachusetts charter was in any peculiar way adapted to the purpose of a transfer to America.
1. Puritan membership.—The incorporators comprise the Earl of Warwick, Lord Say and Sele, Sir Nathaniel Rich, Oliver St. Johns, and John Pym,—all prominent leaders of the Puritan party, more prominent than any Puritans in the Massachusetts Company.