But unfortunately the legal limits and meaning of this freedom were never determined. Had they been, our Revolution need not have come. Monarchs continually attempted to stretch hither the royal prerogative, but how far this was legal was not then, and never can be, decided. The constitutional scope of a monarch's prerogative in England itself was one of the great questions of the seventeenth century, and remained serious and unsettled through the eighteenth. Applied to America the problem became angrier still, partly because giving a charter--and the colonies were all founded on such gift--was an act of prerogative. English lawyers never doubted that acts of Parliament were valid in the colonies. The colonists opposed both the king's and the Parliament's pretensions, and held their own legislatures to be coordinate with the Houses at Westminster. They claimed as rights the protection of habeas corpus, freedom from taxation without their consent, and all the Great Charter's guarantees. It was the habit of English theorizing on the subject to allow them these, if at all, as of grace. Repudiating the pretence that they were represented in Parliament, they likewise denied all wish to be so, but desired to have colonial legislatures recognized as concurrent with the English--each colony joined to the mother-country by a sort of personal union, or through some such tie as exists between England and her colonies to-day. Massachusetts theorists used as a valid analogy the relation of ancient Normandy to the French kings. Though no longer venturing to do so at home, monarchs freely vetoed legislation in all the colonies except Rhode Island and Connecticut. It was held that even these colonies were after all somehow subject to England's oversight. On the subject of taxation there was continual dispute, misunderstanding, recrimination. The colonies did not object to providing for their own defence. They were willing to do this under English direction if asked, not commanded. Direct taxation for England's behoof was never once consented to by America, and till late never thought of by England. The English navigation laws, however, though amounting to taxation of America in aid of England, and continually evaded as unjust, were allowed by the colonies' legislative acts, and never seriously objected to in any formal way. CHAPTER VII. SOCIAL CULTURE IN COLONIAL TIMES [1750]