ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace of history, as she appears in popular table-talk, that the Whig inheritors of the great Revolution of 1688 had a natural sympathy with the American demand for freedom and self-government, that, if they had only had their way, those demands would have been satisfied within the framework of the Empire but that the Americans were compelled into independence by the obstinacy of a stupid King. Nothing could be more false. The Whigs had no intention of establishing beyond the seas a land in which “Government of the people for the people and by the people should not perish from the earth”. On the contrary Lord Shaftesbury, the Whig leader, engaged John Locke, the Whig philosopher, shortly before 1688 to draw up a constitution for the new colonies of the Carolinas. Locke proposed that the colony be handed over to eight proprietors, Shaftesbury himself, Monk, Clarendon, and five others, these proprietors to be called palatine, admiral, chamberlain, constable, chief justice, high steward, and treasurer. To these eight gentlemen one fifth of the land of the colonies was to be given. The next concern should be to provide adequate estates for the resident aristocracy, whose land was to be worked by hereditary serfs bound to the soil. What land was left over was to be sold by the proprietors to freeholders. The grand purpose, said Locke, was to avoid “a numerous democracy”. 85
