Did colonists "resign the power of voting" and have no more right to govern themselves than the Cornish people?
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What Samuel Johnson, the king, and parliament all ignored was the fact that the 13 colonies, unlike later 19th century colonies or some 18th century colonies, were not part of, nor totally possessions of, the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Instead they were conceived when created to be miniature Englands where the English settlers would govern themselves with colonial governors as miniature kings and colonial assemblies as miniature parliaments, and owing allegiance to the distant kingdom of England in return for (and to the degree of) English protection from outsiders.
Pennsylvania was still a proprietary colony, and the governor of Pennsylvania in this case was like a viceroy for the proprietor, living in England, who was even more like a miniature and vassal king of Pennsylvania.
They were considered to be fiefs of the kingdom of England, not parts of the kingdom of England and later of Great Britain.
If Queen Elizabeth II and the cabinet and Parliament of the UK tried to give orders to and make laws for independent nations like Canada or Australia that would be considered an illegal usurpation of power. The case of the colonists was not that strong however.
The colonies were clearly not independent nations before 1776-1783. Instead they were dependencies of Great Britain like the Island of Mann or the Channel Islands are dependencies of the United Kingdom today. It should be noted that the Queen of the UK has every legal right to use the title of Queen of France today, since the Channel Islands are parts of the medieval Kingdom of France that were never conquered by the Valois claimants of the Kingdom of France in the 100 years war or by the French Republic.
Or the relationship could be compared to the present relationship between the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the United States.
In any case the colonists visualized the relationship between the colonies and the kingdom of Great Britain as vaguely similar to the later relationship between the states and the Federal government of the United States. They believed that most political powers, such as the power to tax, were reserved for the colonial governments and the Crown had limited and restricted powers over the colonies. The colonists believed that the gradual increase of royal and parliamentary control over the colonies, followed by the rapid increase after the French and Indian War, was a violation of the original terms of the relationship between the colonies and the home country.
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