Royal instructions

Royal instructions are formal instructions issued to Governors of the United Kingdom's colonial dependencies, and past instructions can be of continuing constitutional significance in a former colonial dependency or Dominion.

Traditionally the royal instructions were issued to a Governor to:

Royal instructions were a commonly used legal instrument of British imperial law used in the governing of the empire's colonies. Royal instructions delegated to colonial governors the legal capacity to exercise the Crown's royal prerogative and set out the limits and conditions within which that prerogative was to be exercised.

The royal instructions given to a colonial governor were one of three documents normally used for constituting the government of a colony, the others being the letters patent or order in council constituting the office of governor and commander-in-chief, and the governor's commission obliging him to follow the instructions he received from the Privy Council in London. As explained in the book, Royal Government in America, it is "The British authorities clearly looked upon the instructions as constitutional documents of the greatest importance which all members of the colonial government were expected to obey." For example, when, in the late 1750s, the Governor of Virginia approved three Acts in contravention of regulations incorporated into his royal instructions, the Privy Council struck down the Acts and admonished the Governor, reminding him that his instructions in this regard were “coeval with the Constitution of the British Colonies” and formed "an Essential part of that Constitution and cannot be sett aside a without subverting Fundimental Principle of it."

As at 1945 there were eight legislative councils which had been constituted by royal instructions: Falkland Islands, Gambia, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nyasaland, Seychelles, Straits Settlements and Uganda; while others had been constituted by order in council, letters patent, local ordinance or by act of the imperial parliament at Westminster.

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