“Mr. SPEAKER, His Excellency the Governor is now in the Chair, and directs the Attendance of this House in the Council Chamber.” With these words Governor Hutchinson directed the members of the House to attend the formal opening of the General Court on the 6th of January 1773.  It is with these words that a remarkable episode in the America Crisis began. Governor Hutchinson had not planned to convene the General Court so early as January 1773, however the responses of the various towns of Massachusetts to the Boston Committee’s pamphlet shifted the Governor’s political calculation. The Governor concluded that he must use his authority as His Majesty’s representative in the province to clarify to the elected representatives of the Massachusetts one crucial feature of the British Constitution: that the King in Parliament possesses sovereign authority over all the colonial governments and all the colonial subjects of British America. In the address Governor Thomas Hutchinson developed this theme with eloquence, legal rigor, and consummate clarity.  But neither the Massachusetts Council nor the House of Representatives let matters rest there. Each framed a written reply (on 25 and 26 January 1773), to which the Governor offered an oral rejoinder (on 16 February), to which the Council and House replied (25 Feb, 2 March), and to which the Governor offered his final reply, on 6 March 1773. By dissolving the Council and the House at the conclusion of this speech, the Governor assured that he would enjoy the last word in the exchange.  But newspapers reprinted the exchange throughout the colonies and in London and, after the intensification of the American Crisis, it lived on as one of the definitive statements of the differences that divided American Whigs and British ministry. But for those studying the art of government and administration it offers a different lesson: the danger of government communicating too clearly about the authority that it claims.