Massachusetts receives new charter with royal governor

In 1691, William III and Mary II issued a new charter for Massachusetts that took effect with Governor Sir William Phips's arrival in 1692. The charter merged Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Colony, and other territories into the Province of Massachusetts Bay under a royal governor. Unlike the old 1629 charter, the new instrument placed executive authority more directly in the hands of the Crown.

The 1691 charter resolved the immediate crisis created by the fall of the Dominion of New England, but it did so by reducing the political autonomy that Puritan leaders had defended since John Winthrop's era. Massachusetts kept an elected assembly, yet the new governor could veto laws, appoint officers, and represent royal authority in a way the old corporate charter had not allowed. The settlement therefore balanced colonial self-government against a much stronger imperial constitution after the upheavals of 1689.

The Province of Massachusetts Bay created by the 1691 charter became the government that oversaw the Salem witch trials in 1692 and later confronted imperial taxation in the Stamp Act crisis. By replacing the old charter with a royal province, the Crown established the institutional framework that governed Massachusetts until the Revolution.