Debating - and creating - authority; the failure of a constitutional ideal in Massuchusetss Bay, 1629 - 1649

In the tight frame of its first twenty years, Massuchesetts Bay dramatically altered its constitutional order. Founded as a theocracy, in which magisterial authority was derived from God and magisterial power strictly limited by divine command, by the end of the 1640s the colony had become an oligarchy, led by magistrates who created their own authority and defined the limits on their almost unlimited power.