The American Department consults the Solicitor and Attorneys General, who investigates and advises the Privy Council on the legal and constitutional options available. 

The Crown turns to a centuries-old institution of investigation, the Royal Commission of Inquiry.

This commission will be made up of the chiefs of the supreme courts of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, the judge of the vice-admiralty of Boston, and the Governor Joseph Wanton of Rhode Island.

The Dockyard Act, passed three months earlier in April, allows those suspected of burning His Majesty's vessels to be tried in England, but this is not the law that i used against the Gaspee raiders; they are charged with treason.

The task of the commission is to determine against which colonists there is sufficient evidence for their trial in England.

The Commission is unable to obtain sufficient evidence and declares their inability to deal with the case.

Colonial Whigs are alarmed at the prospect of Americans being sent to England for trial.

John Allen, a little-known visiting minister to Boston, preaches a sermon at Second Baptist Church that utilizes the Gaspee Affair to warn listeners about greedy monarchs, corrupt judges and conspiracies at high levels in the London government.

This sermon is printed seven different times in four colonial cities, becoming one of the most popular pamphlets of Colonial British America.

Along with the incendiary rhetoric of numerous colonial newspaper editors, the pamphlet awakens colonial Whigs from a lull of inactivity in 1772, thus inaugurating a series of conflicts that is to culminate in the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren form a committee in November in response to the Gaspee Affair and in relation to the recent British decision to have the salaries of the royal governor and judges be paid by the Crown rather than the colonial assembly, which removes the colony of its means of controlling public officials.

In the following months, more than a hundred other committees will form in the towns and villages of Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts committee has its headquarters in Boston and under the leadership of Adams becomes a model for other radical groups.

The meeting when establishing the committee gives it the task of stating "the rights of the colonists, and of this province in particular, as men, as Christians, and as subjects; to communicate and publish the same to the several towns in this province and to the world as the sense of this town".