to send for persons and papers, to examine upon oath, and to execute and 
perform all other things necessary or proper for carrying out the royal intentions 
18 It should be noticed that the Board was not endowed with any 
power over appeals; this power of hearing appeals was tacitly reserved to the 
Privy Council in the commission. But the power to hear complaints of oppressions 
and maladministrations in the plantations might obtrude into the 
field of purely appellate jurisdiction. 19 
On December 11, 1696, it was ordered in the Privy Council that all plantation 
appeals be heard, as formerly, by a committee, which was to report the 
matters so heard with their opinions thereon to the King in Council. All the 
Lords of the Council or any three or more thereof were appointed a committee 
for such purpose. 20 
The genesis of this appointment requires a slight regression. During the 
Restoration period conciliar committees of limited membership constituted 
the usual mode of procedure, although some instances of committees of the 
whole Council are to be found. Following the Revolution of 1688 there was 
manifest a tendency toward the growth of committees of the whole, with a 
consequent decline in the use of select committees. 21 This development was 
paralleled by the merger of various select committees, largely because of 
identity of personnel. 22 Therefore, as the personnel of each committee became 
identical, there was an accelerated trend toward merger of all committees into 
one great committee of the whole. As a result, when the Board of Trade was 
created, in 1696, appeals were ordered to be heard by a committee which in 
essence was "the" Committee of the Whole. The segregation of colonial administration 
to a particular committee was thus abandoned, and plantation 
affairs were merged with domestic and with matters arising from other dominions 
of the crown outside the realm. 
This Committee of the Whole was given various names, usually descriptive 
of the type of work transacted at a particular meeting, but such variation of 
nomenclature is not to be taken as denoting committee multiplicity. 23 It is, 
however, important to distinguish between this Committee of the Whole and 
the "cabinet council," sometimes termed "the committee." 24 At the accession 
18 See the terms o£ the commission in 4 Doc. 
Rel. Col. Hist. N.Y., 145-48. 
19 See supra, p. 129, for obliteration o£ the distinctions 
between complaints and appeals. 
20 2 APC, Col., #657; see also CSP, Col, 
1696-97, #473. 
21 2 Turner, The Privy Council of England, 
371-76. 
22 Ibid., 376-77. 
23 See Dickerson, American Colonial Government, 
1696-1765 (1912), 84 et seq., for examples 
of the variation of nomenclature and 
for discussion of the significance thereof; see 
also 2 APC, Col., vi-xi; 2 Turner, op. cit., 
383 et seq. We find a recent perpetuation of 
the error of the earlier writers by A. P. 
Newton, see CSP, Col., 7726-27, xiii; ibid., 
'733, x. 
24 See 2 Turner, op. cit., 385. Dickerson falls 
into this error of identity, see op. cit., 85. The 
Committee must also be distinguished from 
the Lords Commissioners for Prize Appeals