Charter of Union of the American Colonies

The Charter of Union of the American Colonies of 1783 is the constitution of the United Kingdom of America. It is the supreme law of the Realm, the instrument by which the American colonies became a constitutional federation under the Crown rather than a republic outside it, and the source of every lawful authority exercised in the Union.

It is not a declaration of independence and it is not a royal grant. It is a covenant made between three parties: the Crown, acting in a capacity the Charter itself invented; the Parliament of Great Britain, which had legislated for the colonies and agreed to stop; and the Continental Congress, which had petitioned, remonstrated and finally fought, and which accepted the settlement on behalf of the people it represented. The three-party structure is the Charter’s defining feature and the origin of most of its peculiarities, including the fact that no one party can amend it and that its most quoted sentence belongs to the party that no longer exists.

The document was negotiated at Philadelphia over four years, from the Peace of Boston in 1779 to the signing at Boston on 4 July 1783. It runs to about three thousand seven hundred words in eighteen Articles, which makes it short enough to be read in an hour and short enough that a schoolchild learns its Articles by number. It has been amended fourteen times, once in a manner the Realm now regards as a mistake and subsequently repealed. Rather more than half its original clauses stand today exactly as they were engrossed.

Its three mottoes are Ex Pluribus Corona, from many the Crown; Ex Libertate Unio, from liberty union; and E Pluribus Unum, out of many one.

The settlement of 1783

The Charter exists because a war ended without a winner. The Four-Year War of 1775 to 1779 was fought over the questions set out in the Declaration of American Grievances, and it stopped at the Peace of Boston with neither side able to impose terms on the other. What followed was not a treaty of surrender but a negotiation about how thirteen colonies and one Crown might go on sharing a constitution.

The result is a document with an unusual legal character. In form it is an instrument of English public law: it grants, settles, declares and ordains, it speaks of ancient liberties rather than natural rights, and it addresses itself to all to whom these Presents shall come. In substance it does what a written constitution does. It creates a federation, distributes powers between a common government and its parts, entrenches a list of liberties, establishes courts with power to void legislation, and provides a procedure for its own amendment.

That combination is the Charter’s whole originality. Parliament legislates and the Crown assents, in the English manner, but both operate inside a written constitutional cage that neither can open alone. Parliament is not unlimited in the Westminster sense. The Crown is not absolute. Ministers are not exempt. Courts may pronounce an Act of Parliament void, and do so with a regularity that surprises visitors from parliamentary systems and from presidential ones alike.

The negotiations at Philadelphia, 1779 to 1783

The delegates met at Philadelphia and stayed there for four years. Between forty and sixty men sat in the Congress at any time, the number varying as colonies replaced their representatives, and the British commissioners crossed the Atlantic to join them rather than requiring the Americans to come to London. That decision was itself a concession, and it was understood as one at the time.

Benjamin Franklin chaired the American commission, with John Adams and John Jay as equal commissioners and Alexander Hamilton in a subordinate committee role. Richard Oswald and David Hartley led the royal commission, and Edmund Burke led the members of the Commons. The negotiations ran in four phases: the opening settlement of 1779, institutional design in 1780, rights and federalism in 1781, and the final bargains and ratification of 1782 and 1783.

James Madison was the principal constitutional drafter, and the Realm calls him the architect of the Charter. The description is exact rather than generous, and it is also narrower than it sounds. Madison held the pen and gave the instrument its architecture; he did not write it alone and never claimed to. British and American lawyers worked over the same sheets, clauses passed back and forth in several hands, and a great deal of Article XI was negotiated line by line across a table. The engrossed copies are in one clerk’s hand throughout, which has flattered the document with an appearance of single authorship it does not altogether deserve.

The negotiations produced a full record, which was published in the years after the settlement rather than sealed, and which the Realm’s courts cite freely to this day. A judge construing an Article may quote what a delegate said about it in 1781, and nobody regards that as controversial. The Realm never developed the argument about whether founding intentions are admissible, because the intentions were on the public record before anyone thought to ask.

What took four years

The war had been about money and so was the settlement. Article XI, on supply, taxation and public money, consumed more of the four years than any other part of the Charter, and it very nearly ended the negotiations twice.

The difficulty was not the principle. Both sides accepted early that there would be no taxation of Americans by a Parliament in which they were not represented, and the clause that says so, Article IX.3, was agreed in a fortnight. The difficulty was the debts. The colonies owed money, the Crown had spent enormously prosecuting a war it had not won, and a great many private obligations had been repudiated in the fighting. The clause that finally emerged, Article XI.8, committed the new Union to examining and settling those debts rather than repudiating them, and it committed Americans to paying for a war fought against the government they were now agreeing to keep.

That clause is the reason the Charter has a handful of names missing from it. A small number of delegates refused to sign, in each case over the debts, and the Realm has largely forgotten who they were. They are a footnote in the histories and an answer in examinations, and no monument records them.

What each side conceded

The Americans did not get an American Parliament wholly free of the British one at the moment of signing. Article XV.7, which denies Westminster legislation any force in the Union, was drafted as a settlement of the question rather than a repudiation of it, and there were delegates who wanted the repudiation and said so. The Crown did not get a reserved power of disallowance over American legislation, which the commissioners had been instructed to obtain and abandoned in the third year.

The easiest Article was the ninth. Both sides believed in the ancient liberties of Englishmen, both sides had spent a decade accusing the other of violating them, and a list of those liberties was the one part of the settlement on which nobody had to be persuaded of anything. Article IX was substantially agreed in a single session, which is the most revealing fact about it: the rights were common ground precisely because both parties already claimed them, and neither party asked who was included.

Signing, acceptance and commencement

Ratification required all thirteen colonies. A complete draft went out to them in 1782, North Carolina came in during May 1783, and Rhode Island held out until June and was the last to accept. The final plenary adopted the text at the Pennsylvania State House on 21 June 1783.

The Charter was then signed a fortnight later, and not at Philadelphia. It was signed and proclaimed on 4 July 1783 in the Old State House at Boston, in the room where the fighting had ended with the Peace of Boston four years before. The date was chosen deliberately: seven years earlier the Declaration of American Grievances had been adopted, and the settlement was timed so that the anniversary of the complaint became the anniversary of its answer. Contemporaries understood the gesture. Some resented it, on the ground that a grievance was being absorbed rather than admitted, and that argument has never entirely stopped.

George III signed in his own hand, and he signed twice. He was not obliged to do either. The Great Seal would have sufficed, commissioners could have executed the instrument on his behalf, and every precedent pointed that way. Instead the final page carries the royal signature twice over, with a marginal notation distinguishing the capacities: in right of Great Britain, ratifying the imperial settlement, and in right of America, founding the new realm. That second signature is the first act ever performed in the name of the Crown in right of America, and it is the moment the American Crown becomes a legally operative thing rather than a clause. Constitutional scholars have argued ever since about whether the two signatures are simultaneous or sequential, and which came first.

He did not come to America for it, and he never came at all. George III never crossed the Atlantic, nor ever left the island of Great Britain, and the Realm he had made was represented in America by his Governors-General.

Article XVIII.8 required a single instrument rather than a set of counterparts. All three parties signed the same engrossment, and authenticated copies were made afterwards for the Crown, for Parliament, for the Congress and for every Province. The choice was deliberate and it was constitutional rather than clerical: three separately executed documents would have been three agreements, and one sheet carrying three signatures is one covenant.

The Charter commenced at once upon proclamation. Article XVIII.7 nonetheless provided for a rolling commencement, taking effect in any part not then accepting upon its later acceptance, which was drafted while Rhode Island was still out and was in the event never needed. It has since done useful work of a kind nobody intended, because it is the clause under which the Charter reaches places that join afterwards.

What followed was the strangest interval in the Realm’s constitutional history. The Charter was in force from July 1783 and the first Parliament did not sit until 1785, so that for two years the Union existed, had a constitution, and had no Parliament and no government. George Washington was commissioned Governor-General and presided over a Provisional Council that could administer and advise and could not make law, while law was made by the Continental Congress resolving and the Governor-General assenting, neither acting alone. Whether the instruments made that way have any legal standing is a question the Realm has never resolved and has never needed to.

The text of the Charter

The Charter is reproduced below in full, Article by Article, from the enrolled text. Editorial commentary follows each Article and is not part of the document.

The first thing a reader notices is how little it says. The Charter is vague, and deliberately so. It vests the executive government in the Crown without describing how the Crown is to govern. It contains no requirement that ministers hold confidence and no procedure for testing or withdrawing it. It permits the King to commission a representative and says nothing about who that person is or what they do. It provides for a supreme judicial authority in eleven words and leaves Parliament to build one. It names no capital, no political party, no cabinet, no first minister, no term of office and no procedure for a government that has stopped functioning.

Almost every question an American actually has about how the Realm is governed is answered somewhere other than the Charter. That is not a defect of drafting. The delegates at Philadelphia had watched a constitutional crisis arise out of a dispute about what powers were implied by what instruments, and they were writing a settlement that had to be accepted by thirteen colonies with thirteen sets of institutions, a Parliament that had just given up its claim to tax them, and a King. Anything specific was something else to argue about. Anything general could be agreed and left to work itself out.

It worked itself out. The premiership, the Cabinet, collective responsibility, the party system, the civil service, the Governor-Generalship, the eight-year vice-regal term, the caretaker conventions and the rule that a ministry falls when the Commons withdraws confidence are all conventions grown in the space the Charter declined to fill. The document’s brevity is the reason the Realm could move its government from one House of Parliament to the other over the course of a century without amending a word.

The Preamble

The Charter opens in three voices, one for each party to the covenant. The royal recital comes first, the parliamentary recital second, and the answer of the Congress last. The arrangement was itself negotiated, and the order was the subject of a dispute that ran for most of one winter.

The words We the people of these united colonies are the most quoted in the Realm, and they are the Congress’s words rather than the King’s. They are also, strictly, an acceptance rather than a grant: the Congress is answering an offer, not founding a state. Two centuries of American constitutional argument have turned on whether that distinction is real, and the Realm has never fully settled it. What is not in dispute is where the line sits in the document. It is not the opening of the Charter. It is the beginning of the third voice.

The sentence that follows it is the one constitutional lawyers care about more. The Preamble ends by declaring that the Charter stands for the continuance of allegiance by consent rather than by compulsion, and the Congress’s recital is the only place in the document where that consent is actually given. The King offers. Parliament renounces. Neither can consent to allegiance on behalf of the people who owe it. So the third voice does the thing the whole instrument is for: we do of our own will acknowledge George the Third as our King, and do give him our allegiance, which was not his to compel and is not ours to withdraw while this Charter is kept.

The direction of that sentence is the point. The people are not acknowledging a sovereign they already had; they are conferring an allegiance they were entitled to withhold, which is why the Realm can hold a monarchy and a doctrine of popular consent at the same time without either being a polite fiction. Article II.7, which defines allegiance as fidelity to the Crown, the Charter, the lawful Parliament and the peace of the Union rather than submission to arbitrary power, is a gloss on this sentence and nothing else.

It also carries the Charter’s most dangerous clause. While this Charter is kept makes allegiance conditional, and it took the Realm seventy-eight years to find out on what. The polities that rebelled in 1861 argued precisely from this line: that their allegiance had been given to a King and not to a Union, that the Charter had not been kept toward them, and that they might therefore retain the first while discarding the second. The answer, when it came, was Article II.7 read against Article I.4, and it cost the Realm a war to establish that the four things allegiance is owed to are owed jointly and not severally.

A smaller argument has run alongside it since the 1820s and has never been settled. The Congress named a man. George III died on 29 January 1820, and a compact made with a person rather than an office should in strictness have required renewing before it could bind anyone to George IV. Nobody renewed it. Nobody has ever seriously proposed to, and the Realm’s answer, insofar as it has one, is that the succession clause of Article II.8 carries the acknowledgement forward to whoever the King happens to be.

The question arose when it did because George IV’s reign was the first sustained test of whether the founding settlement could become ordinary, and a great many improvised arrangements hardened into convention across those ten years. This one hardened by not being asked about. Constitutional writers describe it as the least examined load-bearing assumption in the Charter, and the standard observation is that a document which took a war to settle the meaning of while this Charter is kept has never troubled itself about our King.

The Articles

The eighteen Articles are subdivided into numbered clauses, and the numbering is original to 1783 rather than a later editorial convenience. The Realm cites the Charter by Article and clause, so that Article XVIII.2 or Article IX.6 is an ordinary phrase in a courtroom, a leading article or a school examination.

Article I.4 is the perpetuity clause, and it is the whole of the Charter’s law on secession. The word itself never appears. What the Charter does is deny the right of departure and then, in the clause immediately following, guarantee every lawful means of complaint, which is the drafters answering the objection before it was made. The two clauses are always read together, and the Realm’s constitutional writing treats them as a single provision.

Article II is the Charter’s central invention and the clause that makes the Realm a country rather than a possession. II.2 creates the separate capacity, II.5 forbids British ministers from reaching into American government, and II.9 is the prohibition that the Realm’s lawyers reach for most often. II.3 is the clause from which the Governor-Generalship grew, and it is worth noticing how little of it is there. The Charter permits the King to commission somebody to represent him and stops. It does not name the office, does not style its holder, does not fix a term, does not say who may be appointed or how they may be removed, does not require the appointment to be made at all, and does not list a single function beyond those the King cannot conveniently perform at a distance. The Governor-General is nowhere in the Charter and never has been.

Everything the Realm now takes for granted about the office grew afterwards, out of a permission: the eight-year convention, the resignation of every other office, the precedence below only the Crown, the commissioning of ministries, the reserve powers. The most important thing the Charter did for the office was to leave it alone.

The Article does not use the words Crown in right of America, and neither does any other part of the Charter. The doctrine had no name in 1783 because it did not yet exist to be named. What the drafters wrote was a description of a practice they wanted followed: that the King holds the government of America in a capacity proper to it, takes American advice on American business, and takes it from nobody else. The heading of the Article is simply of the Crown.

The formula appears on the document exactly once, and not in the text. It is in the marginal notation beside the two royal signatures, distinguishing the capacities in which the King executed the instrument, and it is written in the ordinary legal English of the period, in which a man might hold anything in right of somebody else. A clerk needed to record which signature was which. That note is the earliest surviving use of the words that later became the name of the whole doctrine.

The seed in the text itself is elsewhere, in Article XV.4: the Crown may be one in person, yet distinct in right. From those eight words, from the marginal note, and from two centuries of practice, the Realm assembled the term of art it now uses everywhere. This article uses it throughout in its modern sense, as the Realm does, and it should not be read back into the 1783 text as though the drafters had it.

II.8 was thought a formality for a century and a half. It is now the most discussed clause in the Article, because it contemplates in plain words the possibility that the two successions might part, and provides for it by handing the question to the Parliament of the Union. On 26 September 2028, the day after the aircraft carrying Ernest V was lost east of Newfoundland with the King aboard, the House of Commons referred to the law officers the question whether anything that had happened in consequence engaged it (Kittyhawk).

III.3 is the only geographical instruction in the Charter, and it is a river rather than a city. The drafters could not agree on a site and settled the argument by naming the water instead, leaving the choice of the exact place to be made afterwards. The seat that was eventually built upon it is New Westminster, and the Columbia District exists because the Charter required a capital on the Potomac and said nothing whatever about who should govern it.

Article IV ends there, and the omission is the most consequential thing in the Charter. There is no confidence clause. The document that founded the Realm does not say that ministers must hold the confidence of anybody, does not say they must resign when they lose it, does not name a vote, does not define confidence and does not mention the Prime Minister, an office it never contemplated. Everything the Realm knows about how ministries are made and unmade is convention resting on nothing written, and the Charter’s silence is why the Governor-General’s judgement about who commands the Commons is a genuine determination rather than a clerical one.

It names no chamber either, because it names nothing. Nothing in the Charter says which House a government is answerable to, and for the first seventy years of the Realm the question was not treated as settled. The government of the United Kingdom of America was formed in the House of Lords.

Where government was formed

The modern rule, that a ministry lives and dies by the confidence of the Commons, is not what the Charter established and not what the Realm originally practised.

Benjamin Franklin led the first Ministry from the floor of the Commons in 1785. The great offices of state and the weight of the Cabinet subsequently lay in the Lords, and the Crown looked to the upper House in assembling a ministry. The premiers themselves continued to sit in the Commons. The exception was Thomas Jefferson, who took the Marquessate of Monticello late in 1803 and governed his final months from the Lords.

The Commons held the money throughout, and that is the thread that eventually pulled everything else across. Franklin’s first budget had established that the Ministry needed the permission of the Commons to spend before any other constitutional norm was settled, and a chamber that can refuse supply can in the end refuse a government. Through the first half of the nineteenth century the practical centre of gravity moved: ministries that could not carry the Commons found they could not govern from the Lords whatever their majority there, the weight of the Cabinet moved towards the elected House, and the convention hardened without anybody legislating it.

The migration was complete by the era of the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859. A Realm that had rationalised its constituencies and was moving toward a mass electorate could not sustain a government formed in a chamber nobody voted for, and after 1859 the question was no longer arguable. The Charter had not changed a syllable, because there was no syllable to change. What moved was the practice, and the practice was all there had ever been.

The Realm’s constitutional writers regard this as the clearest demonstration of how its constitution actually works. The Charter is amended fourteen times in two hundred and forty-five years, and the single largest change in how the country is governed was made without amending it at all.

The chamber Article V creates is treated at length in the House of Lords.

V.3 is the establishment of the Church of America, and it is the only place in the Charter where a church is mentioned at all. The clause establishes by assumption rather than by declaration: it does not say that the Church is established, it says that its bishops shall sit because it is. The Realm’s religious settlement rests on that oblique sentence, on the freedom of conscience secured in Article IX, and on the fact that no polity has ever been permitted an established church of its own.

Article V is also the Charter’s most amended provision, and the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1859 dropped the adjective from the chamber’s name, so that the House of Lords American of the Charter is the House of Lords of ordinary speech. The original wording stands in the enrolled text.

Article VI never mentions the Prime Minister. It never mentions the Cabinet either, or collective responsibility, or the office of First Lord of the Treasury, and the Realm’s entire executive apparatus stands outside the founding text. The premiership was an English habit in 1783 rather than an office, and the drafters did not think it their business to constitute one. The result is that the most powerful working position in the Realm has no constitutional existence at all, a fact the Prime Minister article treats at length and which every premier learns early.

VI.5 is the clause a polity Premier reaches for when a federal minister exceeds an authority, and it is quoted in intergovernmental correspondence more often than any other line in the Charter.

Article VII is the federal settlement, and VII.6 with VII.7 is the reason the Realm can contain two kingdoms, three republics, several commonwealths, four grand duchies and a march without any of them being at risk from the others. The form of government of a polity is entrenched against the federation, not merely protected by custom. Parliament cannot vote away the Kingdom of Alaska’s monarchy, the Republic of Vermont’s republic or Texas’s presidential constitution, and a Charter amendment cannot do it either without the consent of the polity concerned.

The clause is old, it was inserted at the insistence of the smaller colonies, and it has never been tested, because no ministry has ever proposed the thing it forbids.

VIII.3 is the clause the Realm relies on whenever it acquires anything. The Charter follows the acquisition automatically and immediately, so that there has never been an American argument about whether the constitution reaches a newly admitted place. The Territory of Loreto, bought from Mexico under the Treaty of La Paz and admitted in 2027, was inside the Charter on the day of admission and its inhabitants held Article IX rights from that morning. The objections raised at the time were about the wisdom of the purchase and the position of the people who lived there, not about whether the Charter applied to them.

VIII.5 is the licence for everything the Realm has since become. The drafters wrote in the vocabulary of 1783 and then admitted, in a single clause, that the vocabulary would not hold. Grand Duchies, Kingdoms, Commonwealths, Marches, Republics and Territories all stand on it.

Article IX is the most litigated part of the Charter by a wide margin, and it is the part most people can quote. It is also the part that has done the most damage by what it left out.

The Article says the people, and in 1783 it did not say who they were. It was read from the beginning to exclude the enslaved, and the reading was made by the same courts that enforced it generously for everybody else. IX.5 secures civil standing by the due course of law to persons whom the law of eight polities held to be property, and the contradiction was visible to contemporaries, argued in print within a decade, and not resolved for eighty-two years. The Realm’s treatment of that failure is given below, and it is not a footnote to the Article. It is the largest single fact about it.

X.10 is the Realm’s judicial review, and two features of it are easily missed. The power belongs to any court rather than to the supreme judicial authority alone, so that a magistrate may in principle decline to apply an Act of Parliament. And the power is expressly limited to the extent of the contradiction and no further, which is why the Realm’s courts void provisions far more often than they void whole statutes.

X.8 is what makes the Crown a defendant. The Crown in right of America appears in Charter litigation regularly, loses regularly, and complies, and the Realm regards the ordinariness of that as one of the Charter’s quieter achievements.

Article XI took longer to agree than any other part of the Charter, and it is the reason the negotiations ran to four years rather than two. The original quarrel had been about money, the war had been fought about money, and both sides arrived at Philadelphia understanding that whatever else the settlement contained, it would be judged on whether it answered the question that had started the fighting.

XI.8 is the clause that nearly ended the negotiations altogether. The colonies had debts, the Crown had debts, and the war had produced a great deal more of both. A provision that the debts should be examined and settled rather than repudiated committed the new Union to paying obligations that many of its people regarded as the enemy’s, and the delegates who refused to sign the Charter refused very largely over this clause.

XII.7 is the two-key provision, and it is the constitutional origin of the rule that the armed forces may be deployed domestically only on the authority of the Prime Minister and the Governor-General together. Neither can do it alone. The Charter names neither of them: it requires the ministers on one side and the King’s representative on the other, which is the only place in the whole document where that representative is given anything to do. The clause was written by men who had watched an army used against a civilian population and who had, in the years immediately before, been that population.

It has been invoked once. Al Gore ordered a cordon around the bombed districts of New York on 1 May 2006 with the concurrence of Government House, and the Realm has spent the years since arguing about whether a precedent set in an afternoon can be unset at all.

Article XIV is the Charter’s best-drafted failure. XIV.2, XIV.4 and XIV.6 forbid taking by any route other than lawful compact, XIV.5 removes the private speculator, XIV.7 gives the Native Nations standing to sue in the Realm’s own courts, and XIV.8 stakes the honour of the Crown on the keeping of the bargains. It is a stronger text than anything the colonial administrations had been held to, it was better than what was afterwards given, and it did not prevent the century that followed.

What it changed was the method. Dispossession in the Realm proceeded by treaty rather than around it, which meant coerced negotiation, purchases made at prices set by the buyer, and compacts signed by delegations chosen for their willingness to sign. The forms were observed. The observance was the point, because a Realm that had promised in its founding document to proceed lawfully had to produce documents, and the documents survive. They are the evidentiary basis of the modern claims, and Article XIV is now used against the government far more successfully than it ever restrained it.

XV.4 is the most famous line in the Charter after the Preamble, and it is eight words long. The Crown may be one in person, yet distinct in right is the doctrine that permits a shared monarch without a shared government, and it is the Realm’s chief contribution to constitutional thought. It has since been borrowed, in substance if not in wording, by every realm that shares the Crown.

XV.5 is the clause that let the Realm decide its own wars. A common monarch does not commit America to Britain’s quarrels, and the Realm has entered every war of the modern era by its own decision, taken by its own Parliament.

Article XVI is the Charter provision the Realm is proudest of and the one most often accused of not working.

XVI.7 is the absence that matters most: the Realm has no decree power. An emergency in the United Kingdom of America confers only what statutes already passed have provided for, and a ministry facing a catastrophe governs with the laws it had the day before. This is why the emergency of 1 May 2006 produced enormous activity and almost no new authority, and it is why the government of that afternoon had to keep Parliament sitting rather than send it home.

XVI.5 has been tested by rebellion, by two world wars and by the worst attack in the Realm’s history, and it has held every time in the sense that the courts have never permitted a right to be extinguished. Whether it has held in the sense that matters to a person wrongly listed by a security service, and never told, is the argument of the present decade.

XVIII.5 is why the Realm has no religious test for office. The clause guarantees that an affirmation is as good as an oath and that nobody may be required to profess what they do not believe, and it did that in 1783, at a time when Catholics could not sit at Westminster. It is the single provision on which the Realm’s claim to have been ahead of its parent rests most comfortably.

XVIII.8 is the clause that produced the single engrossment, and it has done a surprising amount of work. Requiring one instrument rather than three counterparts is what makes the Charter a covenant instead of a bundle of parallel agreements, and it is why no party can claim to hold its own Charter distinct from the others. There is one document, all three signed it, and the copies each government enrolled are copies of the same sheet.

It also settled a question nobody had to litigate. Because the parties hold authenticated copies rather than originals of their own, the dissolution of the Continental Congress in 1785 removed a signatory without removing anything from the instrument. The master engrossment is held in the Parliamentary Archive at New Westminster, and Parliament holds it as the Congress’s legal successor rather than as one of three claimants. That succession was not merely a lawyer’s construction. The first Elections Act carried the Congress’s sitting delegates directly into the first House of Commons alongside newly elected members, for the opening Parliament only, so that the body which had accepted the Charter on the people’s behalf walked into the body that inherited it.

The closing formula

The three mottoes are a negotiated settlement in miniature, one for each party. Ex Pluribus Corona, from many the Crown, was the King’s. Ex Libertate Unio, from liberty union, was Parliament’s. E Pluribus Unum, out of many one, was the Congress’s, and it is the one the Realm actually uses. The other two survive on stonework, on the state arms and in the formal style of documents, and most Americans could not translate them.

Peace after discord is the fragment everybody knows. The full sentence is quoted in Parliament and at Charter Day services, and the first clause alone appears on war memorials, in school halls and above the door of more than one courthouse.

Amendment

Article XVII is the hardest lock in the Realm’s constitution and it has been opened fourteen times.

An amendment must pass both Houses of Parliament, then be approved at a referendum held on a day set aside for that purpose and no other business, then receive Assent in the name of the Crown in right of America.

The Charter does not use the word referendum, which did not exist in English in 1783. Article XVII.4 requires the amendment to be submitted to the people in their several towns, counties and assemblies, which is the machinery a country of 1783 had for asking its whole population a question, and which the Realm has administered as a single national ballot since the franchise reforms made one practicable. The modern name arrived with the modern method. The requirement did not change. The referendum requires a double majority: a majority of the people voting, and a majority of the people voting in a majority of the parts of the Union. A proposal may be brought by either House or by popular petition, the petition threshold being fixed by ordinary statute.

Three features of the procedure do most of the work.

The House of Lords holds an absolute veto. Article XVII.3 requires passage by both Houses without qualification, and none of the ordinary machinery for overriding the Lords applies to a Charter amendment. The Lords cannot merely delay. The manifesto convention, which stops the upper House from blocking a commitment put before the electorate, has never been held to extend to the Charter, and the Realm has never resolved whether it should.

The double majority protects the small polities, and it has killed more amendments than the national vote ever has. A proposal may command a comfortable national majority and still fail because it cannot carry twenty-five of the forty-nine, and several have.

The entrenched core is an absolute bar. Article XVII.8 places the representative character of Parliament, the supremacy of the Charter, the due course of law and the lawful liberties of the people beyond amendment altogether. This is not a heightened threshold. There is no majority that reaches them. Article XVII.9 adds a second bar of the same kind for the form of government of any polity, which cannot be altered without that polity’s own consent.

The Realm treats amendment as a grave and generational act rather than as constitutional maintenance. Referendums draw higher turnout than general elections, which is unusual, and they are deliberately not held on polling day, so that a constitutional question is never decided as an appendix to a change of government. The Charter has not been amended since 1989.

The fourteen amendments

Amendments are added in order rather than woven into the original text, are cited by number and year together, and under Article XVII.7 the superseded words remain in the enrolled Charter so that the change can be seen. The Realm therefore reads its constitution as a document with visible scars, which was a deliberate choice in 1783 and is now regarded as one of the drafters’ better ones.

A Fifteenth Amendment is before the Commons. Rosa Delgado, a Labour and Social Democratic backbencher from Illinois, has introduced a private member’s bill that would move the American Rights Act into the Charter, so that a court could void an Act breaching it instead of only declaring it incompatible, and members of four other parties have signed it. The ministry has said that it cannot take the bill up and will support a motion sending the question to a select committee.

The Fourth Amendment, 1873

The Fourth is the most consequential change ever made to the Charter, and the circumstances of its passage are the reason it was possible at all.

Slavery was abolished in the Realm by statute, not by the Charter. The Emancipation Measure received Assent from Governor-General Edward Everett on 1 January 1865, after the rebellion had collapsed, and it ended legal ownership. It did not entrench anything, and an ordinary statute can be repealed by an ordinary majority. The Fourth Amendment put emancipation beyond the reach of a future Parliament and added a guarantee of equal protection.

It was carried through the House of Lords by Abraham Lincoln, by then the 1st Duke of Springfield, four years after he had left the premiership and eight years before his death. It passed under the enforcement ministry of Ulysses S. Grant. And it received Assent from Frederick Douglass, in the first year of a Governor-Generalship that had begun on 15 February of the same year, from a man who had been born the property of a Maryland household and had escaped it at twenty.

The double majority was cleared because Reconstruction held the window open. The polities that had rebelled were governed under reconstructed arrangements, and the electorates that would later have refused the amendment were not the electorates that voted on it. This is the uncomfortable fact at the centre of the Realm’s proudest constitutional moment, and its historians state it plainly: the Fourth Amendment passed because it was put to the country during the only years in which it could have passed.

The window closed within a decade. Douglass spent the second half of his term assenting, on advice, to lawful measures that narrowed enforcement of the guarantee he had himself proclaimed, and said so in general terms in public while declining to obstruct ministries holding the confidence of the Commons.

The Seventh and the Ninth

The Seventh Amendment of 1919 prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, and the Ninth Amendment of 1933 repealed it. It is the only repeal in the Charter’s history and the only amendment the Realm is embarrassed by.

The embarrassment is structural rather than moral. Under Article XVII.7 the Seventh’s words remain in the enrolled Charter, struck through and superseded but present, so that the Realm cannot tidy the episode away. What it demonstrated was that the amendment procedure, designed to be almost impossible, could be cleared by a sufficiently organised movement on a question of ordinary policy, and that the constitution offered no protection whatever against being used for something it was not for. Every subsequent argument about whether the Charter is too easy to amend begins in 1919.

Amendments that failed

Several proposals have passed both Houses and been rejected by the people, and the double majority has done most of the killing.

The most significant modern failure came in 2008. In the aftermath of the May Day Bombings of 2006 the succeeding ministry brought forward an amendment that would have qualified Article XVI.5, so that rights secured by the Charter might be restricted during a declared emergency where the security of the Union required it. It was, in substance, a proposal to remove the non-derogable core.

It passed the Commons. It was mauled in the Lords and passed narrowly. It was defeated at the referendum, failing both the national majority and the polity majority, and it is the only occasion on which the Realm has been asked to weaken its own liberties and has answered.

The Realm’s memory of the episode is not pride. It is embarrassment that the proposal was made at all, by a government that had watched the worst attack in the Realm’s history and reached for the one thing the constitution had always refused. The security settlement that followed was built entirely from ordinary statute, which is where it remains, and the argument about whether that settlement respects Article IX is the live constitutional question of the present decade.

The Charter in the courts

The most surprising thing about constitutional law in the United Kingdom of America is how dull it is.

The courts void Acts of Parliament routinely. It is ordinary business rather than a constitutional crisis, it happens several times in most years, and it attracts no more public attention than any other judgment unless the subject matter is itself contentious. Under Article X.10 the power belongs to every court and not only to the Royal American Supreme Court, and it is expressly confined to the extent of the contradiction, so what the courts usually strike is a provision, a subsection or a schedule rather than a statute entire.

The founding case is Amory v. the Collector of the Port of Boston (1799), decided under Chief Justice Ellsworth, a customs challenge in which the Court asserted the void power of Article X.10 and then applied it as narrowly as the facts allowed. Amory did not invent judicial review and is never described as having done so. The power was an express grant in the Charter from 1783, and what the case established was that the grant had teeth: that a court would actually refuse to apply an Act of Parliament, and that Parliament would accept it. The Realm’s constitutional review therefore begins not with a confrontation over a great question but with a revenue dispute nobody wished to defend, and the case is taught as much for its restraint as for its holding.

No schools of interpretation

The Realm has no originalism and no living constitutionalism. It has no named schools of Charter interpretation at all, no jurisprudential movements with adherents and journals, and no confirmation controversies in which a candidate’s method is examined.

Judges read the Charter clause by clause, in the manner of statutory construction, giving words their settled legal meaning and reaching for context when the words will not resolve the question. There is no doctrine that the instrument must be read as an organic whole, and attempts to import one have not taken. The published records of the Philadelphia negotiations are cited freely, by both sides of any argument, without anybody suggesting that recourse to them is improper. The Realm never had to develop a theory about founding intentions because the intentions were printed and on the shelf.

The consequence is a jurisprudence that is technical, unglamorous, and almost entirely unpoliticised. Judges divide, and they publish their dissents, and the divisions do not track party. A ministry does not know how the Court will decide a case from the identity of the judges hearing it, and the Realm regards that as the normal condition of a court rather than as an achievement. The dominant approach is a pragmatic middle that irritates the few academics who would prefer a theory.

Parliament’s answer

Article XVIII.2 makes contrary legislation void, and there is no clause permitting Parliament to override the Charter by saying so. What exists instead is a practice, and a narrow one.

When a provision is struck, the ministry may bring the matter back with an express declaration that Parliament has considered the constitutional objection and has narrowed the provision to meet it. The courts then examine the new version afresh, on its own terms, and have sometimes struck that down too. It is not a notwithstanding power and it confers no immunity. It is a formalised second attempt, it is used perhaps once in a decade, and its uses are remembered because the Realm dislikes them.

Parliament has never simply defied a judgment. Ministries have complained, delayed, and complied.

Suing on the Charter

A person may sue directly on the Charter, and may also sue under the American Rights Act of 1866, and the two routes differ in what they deliver. The Charter voids. The Rights Act remedies. A litigant who wins on the Charter alone establishes that a provision cannot stand; a litigant who wins under the Rights Act obtains damages, an order, or an enforceable direction against the body that wronged them.

This is the answer to a question the Charter’s structure invites: if Article IX declared the liberties in 1783, what was left for 1866 to do? The answer is that a declaration of liberties tells a court what to strike down and gives an injured person nothing. For eighty-three years Article IX was a shield against legislation and not a sword in anybody’s hand, and the Rights Act’s achievement was to convert a constitutional prohibition into a personal claim.

The Crown is a defendant like any other under Article X.8. The Crown in right of America appears in Charter litigation regularly and loses regularly.

The liberties and the polities

Until 1962 the Charter’s liberties bound the Union and not its parts.

This was the settled construction from early in the Realm’s history and it followed from the text. Article IX is addressed to the common government, Article VII reserves to the polities everything not granted away, and the courts held that the liberties of the Charter restrained Parliament in New Westminster and left a polity free to govern its own people as its own constitution allowed. The American Rights Act of 1866 reached further than the Charter did, and much of the Realm’s rights litigation in the intervening century was conducted under the statute because the constitution would not stretch.

The consequence is the single largest fact about the Realm’s domestic history. Federal segregation never existed. Polity segregation did, lawfully, for as long as the Charter did not reach into a polity’s own arrangements, and the Fourth Amendment of 1873 did not change that, because it guaranteed equal protection against the Union.

The Eleventh Amendment of 1962 extended the Article IX liberties against the polities, and closed a gap that had stood for eighty-nine years.

Article XVI under strain

Article XVI.5 provides that no emergency shall abolish the rights secured by the Charter, and it has never been read down.

The provision was strained hardest not by either world war but by the rebellion of 1861 to 1863, when five polities took up arms and the Realm’s own courts sat in a country at war with part of itself. The rebels’ constitutional position made the strain worse rather than better. They did not claim a right to secede, which Article I.4 denies in terms. They declared themselves independent of the Union while professing continued allegiance to the Crown, which was an attempt to set Article II’s allegiance against Article I’s perpetuity, and to keep the King while discarding the Parliament and the compact.

The argument failed everywhere, including abroad, and its failure is the reason no foreign power extended recognition. But it obliged the Realm to answer, in wartime, what allegiance to the Crown in right of America actually consists of, and Article II.7 supplied the answer: fidelity to the Crown, to the Charter, to the lawful Parliament and to the peace of the Union, jointly and not severally. A person cannot keep the first and discard the rest.

Habeas corpus was never suspended during the rebellion. Article IX.6 would have permitted it, by Act of Parliament and for a stated time, and the Commons would not pass the Act. The forms were kept. The Realm’s constitutional writing treats that as the most important thing about the period, and treats the treatment of individual detainees as a separate and considerably less creditable question.

What the Charter excluded

The Charter of 1783 secured a longer list of liberties than any comparable instrument of its century and it did so for a smaller set of people than its words suggest. Both things are true and the Realm now teaches them together, after a long argument about whether it should.

Slavery

The Charter never mentions slavery. The word does not appear, no euphemism stands in for it, and no clause protects, limits, regulates or acknowledges the institution in any form.

The silence was deliberate and everyone at Philadelphia understood it. Eight of the colonies held slaves in 1783 and would not enter a union that abolished the practice; several delegates from the northern colonies would not sign a document that endorsed it. The settlement was to write neither, and the negotiations record delegates saying so in terms. It was a price knowingly paid for a union, by men who could see what they were paying with.

What the silence produced was an argument the Charter could not settle. Article IX.5 secures civil standing by the due course of law, Article IX.1 gives the ancient liberties of free subjects to the people, and neither clause says who the people are. From the first decade, counsel argued that an enslaved person within the Union held Article IX rights that no polity law could take away. The argument won occasionally, in particular courts, on particular facts, and unpredictably. It never won generally, and the wins changed nothing beyond the individuals concerned.

The construction was settled against those litigants in 1839, when the supreme judicial authority held that the liberties of Article IX attached to persons recognised as subjects by the law of the place where they stood, and that the Charter’s silence left that recognition to the polities. The judgment was short, technically orthodox, and correct on the authorities. It is the worst thing the Court has ever done, and it is the reason the Realm insists that a constitutional court’s ordinary competence is no protection against its ordinary cowardice.

Abolition came by statute, in the Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865, and was entrenched by the Fourth Amendment of 1873. From 1839 to 1865 the Charter was construed to permit what its plain words appear to forbid, and no court corrected it.

The Native Nations

Article XIV is a better text than the Realm deserved and a worse record than the text promised.

The Article forbids any general taking, requires lawful compact for every dealing in Native land, licenses the Crown alone to purchase, gives the Native Nations standing to sue upon their treaties in the Realm’s own courts, and stakes the honour of the Crown on keeping them. It is a markedly stronger text than the colonial practice that preceded it. The Article descends from the Proclamation of 1763, which the Crown’s negotiators insisted on carrying into the Charter at Philadelphia. The Article did not stop the dispossession of the nineteenth century.

What it changed was the method, and the Realm’s historians differ about whether that mattered. Because the Charter required lawful forms, the dispossession proceeded through them: treaties negotiated under duress, purchases at prices the buyer set, compacts executed by delegations chosen for their willingness to execute them. The paperwork was kept because the Charter demanded paperwork.

That paperwork is now the basis of the modern claims. Article XIV.6 provides that Native treaties shall not be abrogated by implication, XIV.7 gives the standing to enforce them, and the courts have in the last half-century treated the honour of the Crown as a justiciable standard rather than a sentiment. The Article is used against the government far more successfully than it ever restrained it. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1989 wrote into the Charter the rule that a treaty is read as the nation understood it. It began as a private member’s bill that both front benches let through, and it was passed without asking the nations, who have no count in a Charter referendum. The Navajo Republic, which stands outside the polity structure altogether, holds its position as a treaty matter under Article XIV rather than as a constituent part of the Union.

Women

The Charter does not exclude women. It does not mention them, and the silence is the whole of the problem.

Article IX speaks of the people and every person, Article IV.2 provides that members are chosen by the people according to such laws as shall be made, and the franchise was left entirely to the polities. Nothing in the text bars a woman from voting, and campaigners made exactly that argument through the second half of the nineteenth century: that no amendment was necessary, that the Charter already contained what was being asked for, and that what stood in the way was polity legislation and not the constitution.

They were probably right and it did them no good. Because the franchise was a polity matter and the Charter did not reach into polity arrangements, the argument had nowhere to go. Many of the western polities enfranchised women decades before the Realm did, some of them long before, and the disparity became the campaign’s strongest evidence. The Sixth Amendment of 1913 secured the federal franchise for all adult women, roughly doubled the electorate and moved not a single seat, because the constituency quota counts population rather than electors.

Religion, property and place

The Charter’s record is better here, and the Realm says so.

There is no religious test for office anywhere in the document. Article XVIII.5 provides that no oath may compel a profession of belief and that an affirmation is in every case as good as an oath, which it did in 1783, at a time when Catholics could not sit at Westminster. The Church of America is established under Article V.3, its bishops sit as Lords Spiritual, and no polity has ever been permitted an establishment of its own or a religious test of its own.

Property qualifications for voting were left to the polities and were general in the early Realm. The Charter neither required nor forbade them.

Territories and the Columbia District have never been outside the Charter. Article VIII.3 extends it automatically upon admission, to the place and to all persons in it, without further enactment, and the Realm has consequently never had an argument about whether its constitution follows its flag. When the Territory of Loreto was bought from Mexico and admitted in 2027, the Charter reached its inhabitants on the day of admission. The objections raised then were about the wisdom and the morality of purchasing a populated peninsula, not about the legal position of the people on it.

The reckoning

The Realm has apologised twice for the Charter’s failures, and separately. The Crown apologised at the Little Bighorn in 2023, for the frontier wars fought in its name, in the manner it had apologised for South Africa in 1999. Parliament apologised in its own right, on its own motion, because a covenant of three parties cannot be answered for by one of them.

Whether the Charter’s monarchical form made any of this better is argued about and generally answered yes, cautiously, and in a narrow sense. Abolition came by parliamentary majority rather than by conquest, and the rebellion its prospect provoked was shorter and less ruinous than the drafters of 1783 had feared. Article XIV gave the Native Nations a text to litigate on rather than a bare doctrine of discovery to be crushed by. Neither fact rescues the record, and the Realm’s own account is that the Charter of 1783 was in advance of its century, was construed against the people it might have protected for most of the following one, and was made honest by amendment rather than by interpretation.

The judgement the Realm’s historians reach is that the Charter promised more than any comparable instrument of its century and delivered a good deal less than it promised, and that the distance between the two is the most instructive thing about it.

The Charter in public life

Charter Day

Charter Day falls on 4 July, the anniversary of the signing, and it is one of the Realm’s two national days. The other is the King’s official birthday, and the division of labour between them is that Charter Day belongs to the country and the birthday belongs to the Crown.

The day is kept with fireworks, speeches and parades. It is a public holiday throughout the Union, the polities add their own observances to it, and in most places it is a family occasion involving a great deal of food and very little constitutional reflection.

The formal element is an address by the Sovereign, delivered to the Realm and broadcast by the American Broadcasting Corporation, which by convention speaks to the condition of the Union rather than to the politics of the year. The Governor-General attends a service and a ceremony at New Westminster. The Charter itself is read aloud in full every 4 July in the Old State House at Boston, in the room where it was signed, a reading that takes a little under an hour, and the ABC carries a documentary in the evening.

What people actually know

Public knowledge of the Charter is thinner than the ceremony suggests. Most adults can quote the famous lines, We the people of these united colonies and peace after discord, and rather few could give the subject of any Article by number. Surveys on the point are conducted periodically and are always mildly embarrassing.

Civics is taught in schools, the curriculum being a polity matter and the coverage therefore uneven, and an official plain-language edition of the Charter is published and distributed free. The text is short enough that the plain edition is a convenience rather than a necessity, which is a point the Realm makes with some pride.

Framed copies hang in courts and legislatures. They are not general in schools, offices or private houses, and a household displaying one would be thought slightly odd.

Quoting the Charter is ordinary in Parliament, in a courtroom and in a leading article, and faintly ridiculous anywhere else. A member of the Commons who cites Article VII in a debate on polity powers is speaking normally. A person who cites it in an argument in a public house is making a joke, and is usually understood to be.

Founding and memory

Veneration of the founding generation is strong, and comparable in temperature to any other country that had one. George Washington, who was commissioned the first Governor-General in 1783 and created 1st Duke of Mount Vernon in November of that year, is the central figure, and the Realm’s founding iconography is substantially his.

The canonical image of the settlement is Benjamin West’s The Signing of the Charter of Union, painted well after the event by the American-born painter to the King. It is substantially invented. The room is wrong, the light is theatrical, and West assembled a group portrait of men who were not all present on the same day, several of whom he painted from other likenesses. Historians have complained about it for two centuries and it remains the picture in every schoolbook.

Two rooms have a claim on the Realm’s memory and neither is much visited. Boston keeps the Old State House, where the war ended and the Charter was signed, and it draws its crowds on one day a year. Philadelphia keeps the Pennsylvania State House, where the thing was actually argued out over four years, and is overshadowed by both.

The Realm’s constitutional pilgrimage, such as it is, goes to the capital. The master engrossment is held in the Parliamentary Archive at New Westminster, and the Charter is on public display in Parliament, freely and on most days of the year. What the Crown and the Provinces hold are the authenticated copies made in 1783.

The engrossment is faded and legible, having been kept adequately rather than well for its first century and properly since.

The Charter as an argument

Protest movements in the Realm both invoke the Charter and reject it, and which they do is a reliable indicator of what they want.

Movements seeking enforcement of something the Charter already contains quote it constantly, and Article IX is the standard idiom of American public complaint. Movements seeking something the Charter does not contain, or which regard the settlement itself as the source of the grievance, tend to argue past it, and a small number argue that a document negotiated by men who owned people cannot be the measure of anything.

The Realm’s answer to that argument, when it bothers to make one, is the Fourth and the Eleventh Amendments: that the Charter was made honest by being changed, that the changing was done by the people it had excluded, and that a constitution which can be corrected is a different object from one which cannot.

The Charter appears in the national epic Boston, and the settlement rather than the war is the film’s subject.

The Charter at present

The Realm regards the Charter as its principal contribution to constitutional thought and says so without much modesty. The specific claim is Article XV.4: that the Crown may be one in person yet distinct in right, and that a shared monarch therefore need not mean a shared government. Every realm that shares the Crown now runs on some version of the doctrine, and it was drafted at Philadelphia in the early 1780s by men trying to solve a much smaller problem.

The live argument

The constitutional question of the present decade is whether the security settlement built after May Day 2006 is compatible with Article IX.

The settlement was made entirely from ordinary statute, the amendment that would have qualified Article XVI.5 having been defeated in 2008. It is therefore, on its face, subject to the whole of the Charter and to the courts. The difficulty is that its characteristic harm is invisible. A person wrongly recorded by a security service, and never told, has no occasion to litigate, and Article IX.5’s due course of law is a poor remedy for an injury nobody discloses. Article X.9, that justice shall be neither sold, denied nor delayed, is quoted in this connection more than it has been in a century.

The argument has not been resolved and shows no sign of resolving. What can be said is that the Charter held in the sense it was written to hold: nothing was suspended, no right was abolished, Parliament sat, and the Realm was not asked to accept an emergency constitution. Whether that is the same as the Charter working is a separate question with a less comfortable answer.

Republicanism, and the question nobody asks

Organised republicanism in the Realm is small and marginal. It exists, it is respectable, and it has never approached the strength required to put anything to a referendum.

That is fortunate, because nobody knows what would happen if it did. Article XVII.8 places the representative character of Parliament, the supremacy of the Charter, the due course of law and the lawful liberties of the people beyond amendment absolutely. It does not name the Crown. Whether the Crown is inside the entrenched core by implication, since the Charter’s whole structure rests on it, or outside it because the drafters listed four things and the Crown is not among them, is the question the Realm’s constitutional lawyers most enjoy and most carefully avoid answering.

The same uncertainty attends the reverse case. If Great Britain were to end its own monarchy, Article II.8 provides that the American succession follows the British so long as the two remain the same, and that if they differ the Parliament of the Union determines the American succession. The clause was thought a formality for a century and a half. It is now read as the most quietly consequential sentence in Article II, because it contemplates the two Crowns parting and provides for it in a single line.

Too hard, or too easy

Both arguments are made about Article XVII and both have evidence.

Those who say the Charter is too hard to amend point to the double majority, to the absolute veto of an unelected House, and to a constitution untouched since 1989. Those who say it is too easy point to 1919, when an organised temperance movement cleared every one of those obstacles for a question of ordinary policy, and the Realm spent fourteen years undoing it.

The Realm’s settled view, insofar as it has one, is that the procedure is about right and that the 1919 episode was a failure of judgement rather than of design. It holds this view comfortably, and has not been seriously tested on it in the lifetime of anyone now voting.

Strength and weakness

The Charter’s greatest structural weakness is the one the drafters chose. The entire working executive of the Realm stands outside the founding text. There is no Prime Minister in the Charter, no Cabinet, no collective responsibility, no civil service and no rule about what happens when the head of government cannot function, and the Realm’s answers to all of those questions are conventions developed outside the text. The arrangement has held since 1783. It is not written down, and the Realm’s constitutional writers return to that fact in every generation without ever quite recommending that anything be done about it.

Its greatest strength is an absence of a different kind. Article XVI.7 gives the Realm no decree power at all. A ministry facing catastrophe governs with the statutes it had the day before, and cannot make law by proclaiming an emergency. Everything else in the Charter can be argued about. That clause has never been amended, never been evaded, and never been tested to destruction, and the Realm’s constitutional confidence rests on it more heavily than on anything else in the document.

Trivia

See also

• The Four-Year War, 1775 to 1779: the war whose settlement at the Peace of Boston this Charter completed
• The Philadelphia Negotiations, 1779 to 1783: the four-year congress that drafted, bargained over and ratified this instrument
• The French Revolution: where Article XV.5 and Article II.5 were first tested, from 1793
• The Declaration of American Grievances, 1776: the founding complaint whose articles the Charter’s Preamble answers point by point
• American Rights Act, 1866: the statute that turned the Article IX liberties into personal claims with remedies
• Parliament of the United Kingdom of America: the legislature constituted by Article III
• Royal American Supreme Court: the supreme judicial authority provided for in Article X.3, sitting since 1783
• Governor-General: the office the Charter never names, implied by the bare permission in Article II.3
• Prime Minister: the office the Charter never mentions at all
• Parliamentary Reform Act 1859: the statute entrenched by the Eighth Amendment of 1924
• Order of the Charter: the Realm’s principal order, named for the Charter and entrenched in it by the same amendment’s error
• May Day Bombings: the attack after which the Realm was asked to weaken Article XVI.5, and refused
• Treaty Nations of the United Kingdom of America: the nations Article XIV addresses, and the statutes built on it
• Law and the Charter: the constitutional order of the Realm, in overview

Categories

Law · The Charter · Constitutional Law · Institutions · The Founding · Crown-in-Parliament