Against the conventional wisdom derived from studies of the revolutionary period, Riley long ago showed that bicameralism in America originated not in imitation of the British parliament but rather, in the seventeenth-century New England context, as the result of developments within the typical structure of the English trading companies under which the colonies were begun (Riley 1896, 161–3). More specifically, the division of legislative power between two chambers arose from the evolving independence of the governor and his assistants as a body from the company courts to which they had been originally attached. This is precisely what happened at Boston after the Massachusetts Bay Company was removed in its entirety from London to New England in 1630. There the advocates of non-electoral procedures of accountability of magistrates to freemen were the same constitutional reformers who resisted this bicameral development, though in the end they accommodated themselves to it. They failed in their quest for unicameralism, which their critics on both sides of the Atlantic derided as “democratic,” but they succeeded at least in articulating and institutionalizing robust means of subjecting governing elites to popular control.