Charters of incorporation formed a critical connection between the crown and the towns in the early Stuart period. Through charters, both local actors and central authorities expressed ideas about governance, established the bounds of local jurisdiction, and clearly identified and reinforced corporate leaders as the king's direct deputies in urban communities. The corporate charter gave borough governors both a sense of autonomy through legally defined privileges and self-government and a clear and direct tie to the monarch and the powers of the monarchical state. No county or hundred or parish had quite the same relationship with central government and royal authority as did incorporated boroughs. Yet, while charters created strong bonds between corporate boroughs and royal authority, the corporate form also made town governments vulnerable. With liberties and privileges laid out in written “constitutions,” borough governors knew that deviation from their charters in any way could be tested in court or questioned by the royal authority that granted them. Such a challenge to corporate liberties had the potential to reshape borough government – even threaten its very existence – and to realign the relationship between town and crown.

This chapter explores the connection between urban governments and royal authority through an investigation of the legal process of quo warranto. In the context of early modern towns, the term “quo warranto” usually evokes ideas of absolutism and arbitrary authority, an instrument of high prerogative that the later Stuart kings wielded against England's towns and cities. In a drive to control borough governments and the politics of the men who constituted them, both Charles II and James II used quo warranto to reshape corporations, forcing them to surrender their charters. Charles II's government notoriously initiated quo warranto against the charter of the city of London, resulting in a 1683 judgment for the king declaring the seizure of the city's liberties. Paul Halliday has shown that local initiative played a key role in the later Stuarts’ use of quo warranto, but for all of its complexities, it became an important tool of Stuart policy in the later seventeenth century. Historians of the early seventeenth century have paid less attention to quo warranto.