The Andros Interregnum

The temporary eclipse of charter government between 1685 and 1689 in Connecticut is not well covered in published works. To set the Connecticut experience in its imperial context, see David S. Lovejoy The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) or Viola Barnes, Dominion of New England (1923; reprinted by F. Unger Co. in 1960). Lemuel A. Welles discusses "The Loss of Charter Government in Connecticut," in Papers of the NHCHS 9(1918):90-128. Welles sets the Andros era in the context of the abrogation of city and borough charters in England. A Yale doctoral dissertation, "Sir Edmund Andros: A Study in Seventeenth Century Colonial Administration," by Jeanne Gould Bloom (1962), devotes a major section to the Dominion of New England but focuses on Massachusetts. Nutting's dissertation, "Charter and Crown: Relations of Connecticut with the British Government," mentioned above, is more useful but does not devote much space to the Andros era. There is also Sherman W. Adams, "The Andros Government, The Charter and the Charter Oak," a popular and now much outdated account in J. H. Trumbull, ed., Memorial History of Hartford County (Hartford, 1886).