I was hoping someone could clear up this question I have about the Governors that the English sent from their mother country to the colonies. I know Governors sometimes didn't even go to the colonies and instead made decisions from afar but I'm unsure of whether or not they played a role from the very beginning, began appearing at different times depending on the location, or if one specific event caused them to start being put to use in colonial government. Thanks!
The first North Atlantic colonies of Virginia and Plymouth were started by companies which were granted land and charters by the British government- you could say they were something of a corporate affair, with a group of owner/investors, " proprietors", and colonist employees trying to make a profit. The proprietors would appoint a Proprietary Governor, and he would reside in the colony in order to run it. But the proprietors themselves might reside- often would reside- in England: for example, Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley of Stratton, who were granted the area that's now New Jersey. Some colonial efforts could be rather small, their value equally so, and the passing of ownership and authority could be almost trivial, like the colony founded by John Winthrop's son ( who was on the ground) on land passed to him by the Earl of Warwick ( who was in England) in what's now Connecticut, now only to be seen in the name of the town Saybrook. If the proprietors resided in the colony, ( notably the case of the Saybrook and the Boston Bay colony) it gave the colony a good bit more independence of action, and could often reduce chaos: it was a recurring theme of the early colonies that the governor would often be recalled home to defend himself against proprietors' and/or colonists' complaints against him: not only in the English colonies, but the Dutch and French as well.
In 1624 the Virginia colony became a Crown colony. That put the control of it under royal authority, which meant that the king appointed a governor. The conversion of the other proprietary colonies to royal ones mostly took place over the 17th c. . The ones in New England were converted rather late, in 1691, and not always according to their original limits- the Plymouth colony, for example, was put together with the Boston Bay colony to be a part of Massachusetts. I think the last North Atlantic colony to be made royal was New Hampshire in 1708
The governor was the representative of royal authority in the colony, and would be in charge of things like defense. There would be a legislature, sometimes called a house of burgesses, that would represent local interests. The two did not always agree, and in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War that disagreement could be extreme, as when Governor Gage of Massachusetts, a general, essentially put Boston under martial law.