The relationship between towns and the crown in the early seventeenth century was one of both connection and discord. Caroline policies regarding religion, taxation, and other matters affecting corporate liberties generated anxiety in many towns and reveal mistrust about “popularity” on the part of the king and his ministers. Challenges to corporate jurisdiction and borough government grew in the 1630s, altering patterns established under James. Yet those signs of friction should not obscure the many ways that the early Stuart period saw greater integration of the borough corporations into the monarchical state and the participation of urban magistrates (and to some extent townsmen more broadly) in its formation. The tension between protection of borough liberties and the drive to interact beyond borough boundaries was fundamental to urban government in the early Stuart state. The stories of connection and discord must be told in tandem.

Corporate towns had strong incentives to forge connections to the crown and the state more broadly. Their corporate charters, fundamental to their existence, provided a basis for relationship between center and locality. Charters identified borough magistrates as the king's immediate deputies and drew a clear line between the authority of the corporate body and the prerogative power of the monarch. Mayors, bailiffs, aldermen, common councilors, and other town officers stood as agents of the crown within the locality, and they wanted to be seen as such both by the inhabitants of their own towns and by others. Through appeals to the Privy Council, petitions to the king, correspondence with other towns, cultivation of patrons, use of the courts, instructions to their burgesses to parliament, and many other means, provincial corporations worked to ensure their liberties but also ensure their place within the state. Savvy local actors found ways to co-opt royal authority and central institutions to achieve their ends, whether to gain a new charter, settle local divisions, or stave off legal challenges. While protective of their liberties, borough corporations cultivated the bond between town and crown embodied in their charters.

The liberties defined in corporate charters governed political and social order in the towns, but also linked them to the broader concerns for order in the state.