The Charter of 1662

Perhaps the most exhaustive accounts of Connecticut's attempts to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the Crown are in the biographies of the John Winthrops, Sr. and Jr., by Richard Dunn and Robert Black, listed in the "Biographies" section below. But there are shorter good accounts in general histories, and one excellent monograph: Albert Carlos Bates, The Charter of Connecticut: A Study (Hartford: CHS, 1932). This seventy two-page work is the outgrowth of a generation of study by the State Librarian. Bates discusses the process of issuing charters in seventeenth-century England, the Warwick Patent and other precursors, and the Charter itself. Bates condensed his work and published it in the Tercentenary series (pamphlet III, 1933) with some additional material by Charles M. Andrews on the passage of the Charter through the seals. A longer, excellent work is Clarence Winthrop Bowen's "The Charter of Connecticut," in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, 1912). Mary Jeanne Anderson Jones relied on it heavily in her more readably available Congregational Commonwealth. A University of North Carolina dissertation by Parker Bradly Nutting, "Charter and Crown: Relations of Connecticut with the British Government, 1662-1776" (1972), deals with boundaries, trade, war, judicial appeals, and religion. The relations were not smooth, and Nutting makes it clear that too many historians of colonial Connecticut have given insufficient attention to this phase of our colonial development.