Lord Earl Granville, the Foreign Minister of the British Crown, manifested in his Letter to the Foreign Minister of Madrid. Evidence to this was the official correspondence of Lord Earl Granville, British Foreign Minister at the time, in his letter to the British Minister in Madrid dated January 7, 1882 explaining the character of the Charter Grant of the British North Borneo Company, as follows:
“The British Charter, therefore, differs essentially from the previous Charters granted by the Crown to the East India company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the New Zealand Company, and other Associations of that character in the fact that the Crown in the present case assumes no dominion or sovereignty over the territories occupied by the company, nor does it purport to grant to the Company any powers of government there over; it merely confer upon the persons associated the status and incidents of a body corporate, and recognizes the grants of territory and the powers of government made and delegated by the sultan in whom the sovereignty remains vested… As regards the general feature of the undertaking, it is to be observed that the territories granted to the Company have been for generations under the government of the Sultan of Sulu and Brunei, with whom Great Britain has had Treaties of Peace and Commerce…
The above letter was done by the British Foreign Minister to explain and respond to the Spanish protest regarding the grant of Royal Charter to the British North Borneo Company. It was not the Spanish crown who made the protest alone; also the Dutch government protested the same. Again, Lord Granville maintains, in his letter to the Dutch, that the British North Borneo Company was a mere administrator, and that “British Government assumed no sovereign rights whatever in Borneo.�
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