SECOND FRAME, THE, the constitutional enlargement of 1691 admitting the five Western Provinces — New England, the Hudson, the Chesapeake, Carolina, and the Indies — to representation at Westminster, and the first substantial amendment of the Frame of the Commonwealth (q.v.) since its original adoption. It answered, more fully than its authors perhaps intended, the grievance set out in the Remonstrance of the Plantations (q.v.) of the previous decade: that provinces taxed and regulated from Westminster, and increasingly populous and prosperous in their own right, should have no voice in the body that taxed and regulated them.
Representation was granted on terms the Rota's own committee described at the time as an experiment rather than a settled principle, and the caution shows in the detail. Each Western Province returned senators and tribesmen under written instructions from its own provincial assembly, binding the member's vote on any matter the instructions expressly covered — an arrangement that preserved a considerable measure of provincial control at the cost of a Western delegation that could not always act with the freedom its Home Province colleagues took for granted. A standing Committee of the Plantations was established at Westminster to manage the business between sessions, and from 1701 every third session of the Assembly was designated a Western Session and held at Oceana itself, so that the Commonwealth's Western subjects were not asked, in every instance, to cross an ocean to be heard.
The arrangement served its purpose for the better part of two centuries, though not without friction: the binding instructions that protected provincial autonomy also meant that a Western delegation could arrive at Westminster already committed to a position its own further debate might have altered, a rigidity that became harder to justify as the Atlantic crossing shortened from months to weeks. It was not until the completion of the permanent cable in 1866, and the Third Frame (q.v.) that followed the year after, that the instructions were abolished as no longer necessary to a legislature whose Western members could, by then, take fresh counsel with their own assemblies between one debate and the next. The Second Frame's chief monument is accordingly not any single clause still in force, but the plain historical fact that it kept a rapidly growing Western population inside the Commonwealth's constitution at the very decades when a less accommodating settlement might have driven it outside. (E. H. V.)