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CHAPTER VIII

THE COLONIES AFTER THE RESTORATION,

1660-1713

THE story of the old colonial Empire can be viewed in two aspects: the

one, the development of the Empire as a unity, with administrative departments, political regulations, and Acts of trade and navigation; the other, the growth of the colonies as separate organisms with peculiar aspirations and interests, inhabited in time by communities nationally distinct from the people of the parent State. The second of these aspects during the half-century after the restoration of Charles II forms the chief subject-matter of the present chapter. The bonds of empire are described elsewhere; here we are concerned with the centrifugal forces destined to burst them.

The greatest of these forces was the divergence of national development. The colonists under Charles I were true Englishmen, the great majority born in England. They were at variance with the mother country on many matters, but they understood her, and she understood them; thought flowed in the same channels on either side of the Atlantic. There followed twenty years, from 1640 to 1660, during which the young communities lost touch with the old. Until the Battle of Worcester the colonies followed their own devices with scarcely a pretence of control from home; and thereafter the Puritan statesmen contented themselves with a formal allegiance, a somewhat perfunctory observance of the Navigation Acts, and an almost complete colonial autonomy in internal affairs. The imperial policy of the Interregnum was more a promise than a performance, a promise which had to await settled times for its fulfilment. Meanwhile a colonial-born generation arose, still mingled with home-bred immigrants, but constituting a growing element in the population and open to few of the contacts existing in times of peace. The Restoration renewed some of these contacts, but not the greatest of all, the continued emigration in due proportion of the home population. Englishmen, it is true, still went overseas, but the emigrants were nearly all of peculiar classes not representative of the nation as a whole, whilst much of the new settlement was accomplished not by them but by the internal migrations of the colonists. There was, after the Restoration as before it, a favourable field for the growth of specialised local types. Two causes contributed to national divergence, the introduction of foreigners into the colonies, and the difference of the colonial environment from that of the mother country. The former was important but must not be exaggerated, for a vigorous nationality can assimilate considerable foreign strains without being radically affected.

Environment was a much more powerful agent of change, and manifested itself in many forms. Climate, diseases, food and drink dictated novel habits of daily life; occupations unknown in England introduced new economic problems and called for independent thinking; in colonial society the presence of black slaves or white bondservants or uncivilised natives, and the absence of a hereditary upper class, altered the gradations known at home and opened responsible positions to men who would have had little share in the framing of public opinion had they lived in England; and in some communities religion moulded citizenship, and it was religion of a type not tolerated on the English side of the Atlantic. The list of environmental factors might be extended, but the above instances are sufficiently suggestive. In the several colonies they varied in their proportionate effects, but in all they exerted an influence upon the corporate character. New immigration was scanty, there were hardly any of the present-day contacts provided by easy travel, quick mail services, literature and political speech-making, and as the generations passed the colonists were moulded more and more by their surroundings and less by the dimming memories of the England their fathers had left. Those memories themselves became in time a dividing force, for the mother country was in no static condition; she was moving rapidly along lines of her own. The third generation of New Englanders thought of old England as the land quitted by the Pilgrim Fathers, the land of Shakespeare and the early Stuarts; but the reality, the England of William III and Anne, of Addison and Swift and Defoe, of stockjobbing and journalism, was widely different. Environment therefore produced divergent characteristics. The English of the mother country developed in one direction, their cousins overseas in many others, and varying colonial types arose, having in common only this difference from the parent stock. This was the problem of statesmanship which the old Empire scarcely recognised and never solved. Charles II and his advisers found much colonial business awaiting their attention, and they made a vigorous effort to consolidate an Empire whose cohesion had loosened under their predecessors. Their decisions led to important consequences in the established colonies and to rapid expansion in new directions. To consider the different fields in the order of importance which statesmen attached to them it will be necessary to begin with the West Indian Plantations, whose richest unit, Barbados, ranked as "the principal pearl in His Majesty's crown".

In the Lesser Antilles, the Caribbee Islands granted to the Earl of Carlisle by Charles I, an urgent problem demanded settlement. The proprietary rights had been in abeyance since the outbreak of the Civil War at home, with the result that the colonists had long ceased to pay the proprietor's dues and had come to regard themselves as freeholders. During this period the colonial society had been trans

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formed. Before 1640, when tobacco had been the staple crop, there had been a large number of petty planters employing a few white bondservants apiece. These planters had been poor and of little political weight, and had had no elective Assembly. The introduction of sugar planting had consolidated the small holdings into large estates owned by a comparatively few rich men who were substituting negro slaves for indentured servants. The majority of the dispossessed tobacco planters fell to the status of employees or re-emigrated to try their fortunes elsewhere; white immigration declined, and with it the numbers of the white population; and the wealthy plantation owners, some of whom lived in England, whilst all had business connections there, formed a powerful oligarchy able to make their influence felt at court and to rule the islands through the elected Assemblies which during the Interregnum had everywhere taken root. In the first generation the planters had been at the mercy of an absolute proprietor. By 1660 they felt strong enough to resist the revival of the proprietorship and believed that they would do better as immediate subjects of the Crown.

The Crown nevertheless had obligations to the proprietorship, the second Earl of Carlisle having fought as a royalist and suffered for the cause. At the crisis of his fortunes he had leased half his rights to Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, who had joined the royalist side when it offered little prospect of advantage. In 1660 Carlisle and Willoughby urged their claim and secured a provisional recognition, but as Carlisle died without issue his rights passed to the Earl of Kinnoul. The planters' spokesmen resisted strongly, and other parties became clamorous: the creditors of Carlisle, who claimed payment out of the proprietary revenue; the Earl of Marlborough, whose family had been assigned a pension from the same fund; and the descendant of Sir William Courteen, the original founder of the Barbados colony. The planters' contention was that the proprietary patent had been invalid from the outset, since Barbados and St Christopher had been colonised before its issue; and that even if good it should be forfeited for tyrannical and illegal use. The Earl of Clarendon, to whom fell the task of effecting a settlement, believed that this contention would be vindicated by a trial at law, but he saw also that the other claimants had a moral right to satisfaction. After a patient investigation he imposed a compromise in the following terms. Kinnoul and Willoughby surrendered the patent into the King's hands. His Majesty then abdicated all proprietary rights on condition that the planters, through their Assemblies, should vote a permanent revenue. Willoughby was to receive half this revenue and to be governor of the islands for the remaining seven years of his lease. The other half was to provide pensions for Kinnoul and Marlborough and to pay off the creditors of the deceased Earl of Carlisle, the Courteen claimant alone receiving nothing. The entire revenue

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except the Kinnoul pension, which was perpetual, was to revert to the Crown as the liabilities became discharged.1 The planters thus became freeholders, and the islands royal colonies. In 1663 Willoughby went out to complete the settlement and induced each of the island Assemblies in turn to fulfil the bargain by voting a 43 per cent. duty on the export of their produce.2 The step once taken was irrevocable, for legislation needed the assent of Assembly, council, and governor, and until the nineteenth century no governor was permitted by his instructions to agree to the repeal of the duties.

Francis, Lord Willoughby, was an able governor with a regard for his subjects' interests as well as his own. He supported the planters' protest against the enumeration of sugar in the Navigation Act of 1660 and frankly told the King that whoever had advised that measure was rather a good merchant than a good subject. He had other difficulties not of his own creation. The planters expected the bulk of the 4 per cent. duty to be spent upon local needs and conceived that they had voted it for that purpose, but the Crown held that it was a composition for the proprietary dues and ordered Willoughby to ask the Assemblies for further grants for local defence;3 since the proprietorship in its effective period had spent nothing upon the islands and had drawn a large profit from them.

The war of 1665-7 bore hardly upon the Caribbean colonies. Fighting with the Dutch began early in 1665, and in April a Dutch fleet under de Ruyter visited Barbados. He was beaten off by the land defences, but afterwards captured some shipping at Nevis and Montserrat. In the following year France joined in the war as an ally of the Dutch. The French of St Christopher conquered the English portion of that colony after savage fighting. Willoughby sailed from Barbados to the rescue, but was lost in a hurricane with the flower of the island's force. Soon afterwards a French fleet raided Antigua and Montserrat, destroyed the plantations and carried off the slaves. Nevis alone remained intact. William Willoughby succeeded his brother in the peerage and the governorship, and receiving naval support recovered Antigua and Montserrat in 1667, but failed to recapture St Christopher. Meanwhile Surinam, Willoughby's proprietary colony in Guiana, had fallen to a Dutch attack. It was a serious loss, for Surinam had prospered as a sugar colony since the Restoration and promised well for the future. The English in the West Indies hated the French far more than the Dutch, and the inhabitants of Surinam had hastily surrendered to the Dutch rather than fall into the hands of "the merciless French", who were known to be approaching. The treaties of Breda ended the war in 1667.

1 Clarendon's Life, Oxford, 1759, pp. 490-6; Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, 1, 362-5. Higham, C. S. S., Leeward Islands under the Restoration, p. 13; Harlow, V. T., Hist. of Barbados, pp. 128–46.

3 Harlow, pp. 147, 157, 160-1.

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243 England and France made a mutual restitution of conquests, but England and the United Provinces agreed to retain what they had taken at the date of the negotiation.1 Before its conclusion was known in the West Indies Willoughby had sent an expedition which recovered Surinam, but by the terms of the treaty it had again to be given up and has since been a Dutch possession. The island colonies were restored to England. They were impoverished and despairing. Barbados was financially almost bankrupt and had lost many of her men. The Leeward Islands had been gutted by their French conquerors, and the work of settlement had to be recommenced. Antigua was resettled by the refugees from Surinam, who were already sufficiently West Indians to entertain no thought of returning to the mother country.

The struggle in the West Indies bore a different aspect from that in European waters. In the latter it was an Anglo-Dutch contest in which France bore little part; but in the West the English and the French were the protagonists, a foreshadowing of the conflicts of the eighteenth century. The English and French courts were as yet merely playing at war with one another, but the prize of the sugar trade had forced them to be serious in the region where it was an operative factor.

The Barbadians complained that after the war their plight received little sympathy from home. It is evident that in spite of the absentee estate owners living in England there was a lack of liaison. The line of cleavage was between the planter and the merchant, and the nonresidents were chiefly men of mercantile interests. The resident planters were aggrieved not only by the need for supplementing the 41 per cent. with other taxes, but also by the Navigation Acts, the slaving monopoly of the Royal African Company, the engrossment of all island patronage by the King's ministers, and the quartering of a regiment in Barbados. A strong home-rule movement therefore manifested itself in opposition to Willoughby, and in 1668 the malcontents asked the King to abolish the 4 per cent. and the trading restrictions and to grant a charter whereby the late proprietary rights should all be vested in the inhabitants as a corporate body. Since those rights covered the whole field of administration, this proposal would have amounted to what is now called Dominion status, and it naturally received no countenance from the Home Government at a time when imperial policy was seeking to tighten the bonds of empire. It is, however, interesting as showing the views entertained at this date by an intelligent body of colonists; and along these lines the Barbadians continued to agitate for several years. The inspiration was purely economic; the sugar trade was depressed and offices were being given to outsiders, and nothing else mattered. The fact is 1 Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique, vol. v, pt 1, pp. 42-5. 2 Harlow, p. 196. 3 Ibid. chap. v, passim.

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