crown colony

Coat of arms of King James I. In 1624, the Crown revoked the royal charter earlier granted to the Virginia Company, and assumed direct government of the colony. A Crown colony or royal colony was a colony governed by England, and/or later by Great Britain or the United Kingdom, as part of the English and later British Empire. Such colonies usually had a governor representing the Crown and thus holding executive power of the territory; this person was appointed by the UK Government (through the monarch), and governed the relevant territory with or without the assistance of a locally appointed or elected council. In some cases, especially in larger colonies, this council was split into two: an executive council and a legislative council, and the executive council was similar to the Privy Council that advises the monarch. Members of executive councils were appointed by the governors, and British citizens resident in Crown colonies either had no representation in local government, or limited representation in a lower house. In several Crown colonies, this limited representation grew over time. As the House of Commons of the British Parliament has never included seats for any of the colonies, there was no direct representation in the sovereign government for British subjects or citizens residing in Crown colonies.

The administration of Crown colonies changed over time and in the 1800s some became, with a loosening of the power of royal governors, self-governing colonies, within which the sovereign state (the UK Government) delegated legislation for most local internal matters of governance to elected assemblies, with consent of the governor, overseen by the Colonial Office and the Board of Trade and Plantations. The Colonial Office gave way to the Dominion Office for some of these territories in 1925. Elected lower houses had their beginnings in the House of Burgesses of the Colony of Virginia in 1619 and the House of Assembly of the Parliament of Bermuda in 1620. While initially limited in government even with an elected lower house, over the centuries in some Crown colonies, more independent authority was given.