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diffused to operate as a corporate polity. By the century’s end the claim of Virginia’s gentlemen burgesses to represent a wider commons of other gentlemen and substantial freeholders, indeed to represent their neighborhoods, their county communities, was not only more plausible than it had been before, but a good deal safer. 70 Colonists’ changing political self-regard was replicated in England, where the
civil war in England. Because Governor Bell wanted a firmer basis for government than the compact of 1645, he looked forward to the day when ‘God shalbe so Mercifull unto us as to unite the King & Parliament’. Nor could the island’s rising sugar barons count on the traditional local ties which sustained some English county communities in their efforts to minimize the disruptive potential of civil war by
, 1660–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper, The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales (Hatfield: University of Hertforshire Press, 2012). 28 The ancient group includes the seals of West Florida (1764), Island of St John (later Prince Edward Island