The laws against Roman Catholicks are not executed with that rigour in England 
that the mother should be deprived of the guardianship of her child, much less 
should they be so in the ceded islands where it would be contrary to justice and to 
all sound policy; even a Jewiss has been permitted to be guardian in England, a 
fortiori a Roman Catholick. 117 
Accordingly the decree appealed from was reversed, and it was ordered that 
appellants be appointed guardians on giving security. 118 Whether this statement, 
undoubtedly Wilmot's, is attributable to ignorance of the decided cases 
concerning the extension of the laws of England or to an interpretation of the 
1763 proclamation at variance with that of the crown law officers is not 
known. 119 Even if Wilmot proceeded on the theory that English colonists 
carried the laws of England to Grenada after the cession, the statutes in question 
were in great part "those positive regulations of police, not adapted to 
the circumstances of a new colony," mentioned by Lord Mansfield in Rex v. 
Vaughan. 120 Certainly the statement was not calculated to heal the political 
wounds engendered by a 1768 instruction granting Roman Catholics limited 
participation in the government. 121 But for a person who only the previous 
year had declined the Great Seal and who had expressed impatience with 
religious disabilities 122 the reversal was put upon untenable and patently 
nonlegalistic grounds. Ironically, two years later we find Francis Maseres 
proudly pointing out that his draft of an act of Parliament for settling the laws 
of the province of Quebec had been approved by Wilmot, who was presumably 
regarded as an expert! 123 
STATUTES EXPRESSLY EXTENDING TO PLANTATIONS 
We have spoken thus far of English statutes enacted before colonization and 
the later ones of general purport that failed to mention the plantations. It 
remains to speak of the general acts in which the colonies were included and 
those specifically passed for the colonies alone. In the first group are the Acts 
of Trade; in the second, statutes like the Naval Stores Act, the act restricting 
117 Endorsed on Case o£ Appellant, p. 5. 
us pc 2 / 115 /2oa, 339. 
11 9 A tenuous suggestion can be made that 
Wilmot was aware that Canada had been mistakenly 
included in the proclamation of 1763 
(see Alvord, The Genesis of the Proclamation 
of 1763, 36 Coll. and Res. Michigan Pioneer 
and Hist. Soc, 46-51; 1 Alvord, The Mississippi 
Valley in British Politics [1917], 206-10) 
and that he assumed that the previous opinions, 
given in relation to Canada, had been directed 
toward avoiding the effects of this conclusion. 
But since the proclamation was certainly designed 
to promote settlement in Grenada, with 
protection of the English law as bait, there 
was no damage in assuming blanket extension 
of the laws of England to the island, with 
Roman Catholics protected by the same laxity 
of law enforcement as in England. 
1 20 4 Burr. 2494, 2500. 
32 iSee Coffin, The Province of Quebec and 
the Early American Revolution (1896), 444- 
46; 2 Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 
of the British Colonies in the West Indies 
(1806), 62-64. For the instruction see 1 
Labaree, Royal Instructions, #621. 
122 See Attorney General v. Downing {Wilmot 
1); Evans v. Harrison {ibid., 130). 
123 1 Doc. Rel. Const. Hist. Canada, 532, note.