On March 5, 1770, Parliament moved to repeal most of the Townshend duties at the very moment British soldiers fired on civilians in Boston. This episode explores how Charles Townshend’s attempt to tax imports like glass, lead, paint, paper and tea was really a scheme to pay colonial governors and judges from London and strip colonial assemblies of the power of the purse.

The Townshend Acts built a web of control, including writs of assistance, an American customs board in Boston, vice admiralty courts without juries and the suspension of the New York Assembly. Colonists answered with John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts circular letter and non-importation boycotts that cut British exports by nearly 40 percent, while the seizure of John Hancock’s Liberty led to the military occupation of Boston.

• Why Townshend’s external taxes were expected to raise only about 40,000 pounds a year
• The five acts, from the Revenue Act to the New York Restraining Act, and how they worked together
• How vice admiralty court judges profited from the fines they imposed
• The death of 11-year-old Christopher Seider and the road to the Boston Massacre
• Why Lord North kept the tax on tea and how it set the stage for the Boston Tea Party