For many years the Massachusetts General Court had passed annual legislation that taxed the income of all royal officials residing in and paid by the province.6 In 1768 the customs commissioners, created by one of the Townshend Acts, were also assessed as resident officials. Although they argued that their salaries were exempt as coming from the crown, not the province, they said that they paid under threat of prosecution by local tax collectors. In 1769, however, they requested Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson to secure them exemption in future. He considered their grievance valid and was inclined to agree in principle; yet he saw no possibility, as he wrote Hillsborough, of convincing the House. The matter was submitted to the law officers of the crown, who reported early in 1770 that all royal officials, whatever the source of their salaries, were subject to any tax levied on them by the province in which they resided. This opinion was forwarded to Hutchinson, and by him to the commissioners.

There the matter rested until February, 1771, when the government suddenly overrode the earlier legal opinion and that of Richard Jackson, counsel to the Board of Trade.7 Hutchinson had been promoted to governor, and his instructions were being prepared; in them was inserted an article forbidding him to assent to any tax bill that did not exempt salaries of royal officials paid by the crown.8 The Governor was taken aback by this article; Whitehall’s reversing itself to support the commissioners, he believed, created a needless political crisis and was a disservice to government.9 But he had no choice. In early July he vetoed the tax bills for that year, and notified the House that he had done so on instruction. In its angry response the House asserted some startling constitutional views: it denied the right of Parliament to create the customs commissioners or to collect any revenue in America, claimed that the provincial charter empowered the House to tax as it pleased, and stigmatized the Governor’s act as an abrogation of the charter.1 These assertions rested upon bold premises. If the commissioners had no legal standing, Parliament had no power to regulate colonial trade. If the Governor violated the charter by obeying his instructions about a tax bill, as about moving the General Court or refusing a salary from it,2 the royal prerogative was circumscribed by whatever interpretations the colonial legislatures might put upon their charters. The position of the Massachusetts House, in short, was a significant logical advance along the road toward independence.3