REMONSTRANCE OF THE PLANTATIONS, THE, 1685-88, the constitutional crisis in which the Western Provinces first pressed, in terms Westminster could not comfortably ignore, their objection to bearing the Commonwealth's customs and navigation duties while returning no member to the body that levied them. It is reckoned, before the Severance (q.v.) of the following century, the nearest the Commonwealth came to a genuine breach between its Home and Western dominions, and the manner of its settlement did a good deal to determine the shape the Frame (q.v.) itself would take six years later.
The grievance was stated most forcefully in the Petition of the Fourteen Towns, presented to the Council of State in 1686 by delegates of the principal ports of New England and the Chesapeake, whose merchants had grown considerably more prosperous, and considerably less patient, than the Navigation Act's original framers had anticipated when the Rump first passed it in 1651. Their case was put in a phrase that outlived the petition itself and has been quoted, with approval or with irritation according to the quoter's interest, ever since: that the plantations bore "customs without a voice," a formula whose echo of older English grievances against taxation was noted by contemporaries on both sides of the ocean and was very probably intended.
Westminster's first response was to temporise, and temporised for nearly three years while colonial customs receipts fell and colonial pamphleteers grew bolder; it was only when several provincial assemblies began, in 1688, to debate resolutions questioning whether Westminster's authority over them rested on anything beyond bare force that the Council of State concluded delay had become the more dangerous course. The Remonstrance was accordingly answered not by concession in the moment but by a promise of structural remedy, redeemed three years later in the Second Frame (q.v.) of 1691, which admitted the Western Provinces to representation on the terms the Remonstrance had, in substance, demanded. That the promise took three years to redeem, and that the representation finally granted came bound about with the provincial instructions the Third Frame would not remove for a further century and three quarters, has led at least one Western historian of this contributor's acquaintance to observe that the Remonstrance won its case a good deal more completely in principle than in immediate practice — an observation this contributor, on the documents available, is not disposed to dispute. (E. H. V.)