The conquest of Canada led to the loss of the thirteen American colonies. Their original bias towards separation had never been eradicated, and the recurrent quarrels between the various legislatures and their governors had only been prevented from coming to a head by fear of the Frenchmen at their gates and disunion among themselves. Charles II and James II wanted to centralize the New England colonies on a monarchical basis; and they began by attacking their charters in much the same way as they dealt with the Puritan corporations of English cities and boroughs. Those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were forfeited, and these colonies were thus provided with a grievance common to themselves and to the mother-country. But, while the Revolution supplied a remedy at home, it did not in the colonies. Their charters, indeed, were restored; but when the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill similar to the Bill of Rights, the royal assent was not accorded, and the colonists remained liable to taxation without their own consent. This theoretical right of Great Britain to tax the American colonies was wisely left in abeyance until George Grenville's righteous soul was vexed with the thought that colonists, for whose benefit the Seven Years' War had largely been waged, should escape contribution towards its expenses. Walpole had reduced the duties on colonial produce and had winked at the systematic evasion of the Navigation Acts by the colonists. Grenville was incapable of such statesmanlike obliquity. He tried to stop smuggling; he asserted the right of the home government to control the vast hinterland from which the colonists thought that the French had been evicted for their particular benefit; and he passed the Stamp Act, levying internal taxation from the colonies without consulting their legislatures.