Growth of colonial assemblies and self-governance

Beginning in 1702, the Massachusetts General Court in Boston refused to grant Governor Joseph Dudley a permanent annual salary under the 1691 Massachusetts charter. Instead, the lower house insisted on voting Dudley's compensation year by year, turning each salary bill into a negotiation over executive conduct and assembly privilege. That same conflict deepened under Governor Samuel Shute after 1716, when the General Court also defended its claimed right to elect its own speaker without royal interference.

The Massachusetts dispute intensified a constitutional struggle over whether a royal governor answered chiefly to the Crown or had to bargain with a representative assembly that controlled taxation and appropriations. Samuel Shute treated salary independence and approval of the speaker as necessary parts of royal prerogative, while the General Court argued that control of money gave the people's representatives a lawful check on executive power. When Shute left Massachusetts in January 1723 and sailed to London to petition the Crown directly, the departure showed that the quarrel had become a test of institutional authority rather than a mere personal disagreement.

The Crown answered with the Explanatory Charter of 1725, which tried to clarify the 1691 charter and confirmed the governor's right to veto the assembly's choice of speaker. The Massachusetts General Court accepted the Explanatory Charter in form but continued withholding a permanent salary, and by 1728 that practice had become an established colonial precedent that other assemblies cited when defending financial leverage over royal governors.