sent out Captain Henry Hawley to recapture the island. Though the Courteen party refused to allow him to land, Hawley treacherously persuaded Powell to come aboard his ship for a conference and then seized and confined him. With the governor in his hands Hawley had no difficulty in bringing the planters to obedience, and in August 1629 the whole island passed finally under Carlisle's rule and the expropriation of Sir William Courteen was complete. For many years he and his heirs attempted to secure redress in the English courts and from Parliament, but they could get no more satisfaction than did many of the merchants who had incautiously expended money on behalf of the spendthrift earl.1

Things had at first gone more smoothly in the Leeward Islands, where Thomas Warner held the governorship for the lord proprietor. By 1629 there were about 3000 settlers in St Christopher and large cargoes of tobacco were sent home. The English occupied the middle of the island with the French at either end, while one Anthony Hilton had begun planting in the neighbouring island of Nevis. Some of the planters held leases from the Earl of Carlisle for which they paid rents in tobacco, but the best plantations were owned by absentee landlords who were wealthy London merchants like Maurice Thompson and Sir Samuel Saltonstall, who also had interests in Virginia and New England. The estates were cultivated by white indentured servants sent out and maintained at the merchants' expense, and by far the greater part of the profits on the magazines exported for sale to the planters and the cargoes sent home went into the pockets of English capitalists. There was thus from the beginning a radical difference between the islands and the selfcontained northern colonies who had no profits on their labours to pay to outside capitalists.

In the latter part of 1629 Warner received the reward of his services to the Crown and the lord proprietor by royal appointment as Governor of St Christopher for life with full power over the colony subject to ratification by the Earl of Carlisle. Many of the provisions of the grant seem to be modelled on those commonly included in the commission of the governor of a fortress, and this appears reasonable enough when we realise that such an outpost as St Christopher was regarded by the Spaniards as a patent menace to their Caribbean preserves. If Spain had had the power, there is no doubt that she would have used it earlier to clear out the English intruders, but her resources were so exhausted that it was not until six years after the first settlement that Philip III was able to give orders for the attack. France and England were at war, but in the West Indies their interests as intruders in territory claimed by Spain were identical, and repeated treaties were made between the French and English governors in St Christopher to preserve peace between their settlers. The long1 See Williamson, Caribbee Islands, pp. 62-3 seqq.

DECLINE OF SPANISH POWER IN THE CARIBBEAN 173

expected blow fell in September 1629 while Warner was away in England. The heavily armed outward bound Mexican fleet under Don Fadrique de Toledo first appeared off Nevis and compelled its surrender. The crops were destroyed and the settlement burned, and the attack was then directed against St Christopher. The English and French joined forces to defend themselves, but they were outnumbered and could make only an ineffectual resistance. Some of the settlers fled to the hills, but many hundreds of prisoners were taken and both the English and French settlements and plantations were devastated. However the Spanish victory was barren of lasting results, for as soon as Toledo's fleet had departed, the fugitives came out of their hidingplaces and at once began to restore their ravaged plantations. Circumstances had entirely changed since Menendes's vindication of Spain's colonial monopoly in 1569, and now English, French and Dutch settlers streamed into every unguarded island and could not be dammed out. It was as though trickles were pouring in through a score of leaks between the opened seams of some outworn vessel, and though the Spaniards were able to stop here one leak and there another, they could not close them all, and as soon as they had finished anywhere and passed on, the intruders streamed back as fast as ever. Any effective defence required strong and well-armed squadrons cruising almost continuously, and these Spain could neither provide nor maintain. The period of Spanish monopoly in the islands was clearly over, and the West Indies became the cockpit of a struggle between the maritime Powers that was to last until the time of Nelson. Warner returned from England in 1630 to find St Christopher devastated, and he at once entered upon his difficult task of restoring the colony to prosperity. From thence onward until his death in 1649 he remained undisturbed in his governorship. To him is undoubtedly due the chief credit for establishing the English possession of the Leeward Islands on a firm basis. The French had suffered much more than the English in the Spanish raid, and for some years their quarters in St Christopher were only sparsely occupied, but Warner apparently thought it advisable not to attempt to dispossess them, and the island remained divided between the settlers of the two nations with only minor troubles. For many years Warner persistently followed the policy of planting unoccupied islands with English settlers, and St Christopher and Nevis thus became in a very real sense a seed-bed for colonising enterprises in the West Indies.1 Antigua was firmly planted between 1634 and 1636, and Montserrat about the same time, but those colonies remained very weak for more than twenty years. In other islands, notably Santa Cruz and St Bartholomew, Englishmen were competing with French and Dutch settlers for possession, but no permanent plantations were effected.

1 See Williamson, op. cit. pp. 94-5, 150-3.

The influx of immigrants into the various islands, especially Barbados and St Christopher, between 1630 and 1640 was enormous in comparison with their limited area, and every scrap of cultivable ground was occupied. Despite the excessive mortality that resulted from ignorance of the means of living under tropical conditions, by 1639 there were probably more than 1000 proprietors in Barbados and a total population that is said to have amounted to 30,000 persons.1 In St Christopher and Nevis there may have been as many as 20,000 by 1640 and all the evidence proves that the islands were very densely populated and that the struggle for existence was severe. There was therefore constant unrest among landless men and readiness to re-emigrate in search of better conditions.

The first Lord Proprietor of the Caribbees died in 1636 after conveying almost the whole of his property to trustees to protect it from his many creditors. During the period of his rule there had been practically no interference by the Privy Council with the affairs of the islands, and Carlisle, or rather the syndicates who sheltered themselves behind him, was left unhindered to make the utmost profit out of the planters. From 1635 to 1642, however, there were incessant quarrels between rival claimants to the proprietorship, and the colonists took advantage of them to secure what freedom they could. In 1639 the Earl of Warwick tried to find profit in these dissensions. He had bought up the Earl of Pembroke's derelict rights and with the aid of men from Bermuda and Providence was attempting to establish settlements in Tobago and Trinidad; he endeavoured to get possession of Barbados through the governor, Captain Hawley, and to persuade many of the planters there to move to his new plantations. Hawley was dismissed from the governorship of Barbados by the trustees of the late lord proprietor, but acting, as he claimed, under Warwick's orders he seized the government again and refused to allow the new governor to enter. In order to secure the support of the settlers he summoned a representative Assembly for the first time, "chose burgesses and settled a parliament or in a parliamentary manner as he termed it".2 Thus at a time when no Parliament had sat in England for ten years, Warwick, the leader of the party that was striving for its revival, furthered popular election among the colonists after the fashion of the continental colonies in order to secure their support.

During his governorship Hawley had been tyrannical and extortionate, and the burgesses of the Assembly found as great causes of complaint against him as against the holders of the proprietorship. But the calling of a representative body practically marks the end of proprietary authority in Barbados, and when Philip Bell, a client of

1 See Harlow, V. T., Hist. of Barbados, 1625–85, Appendix B, for discussion of these figures.

C.O. 1/10, no. 72, Huncks to Carlisle, 11 July 1639. Cited by Williamson, op. cit. p. 144.

CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF THE COLONIES 175

Warwick's, came to the island as governor from Providence after its capture by the Spaniards in 1641, affairs were run in much the same way as in Virginia, viz. in accordance with the views of the richer planters, whose first considerations were always for their material prosperity and who desired autonomy because they found it cheaper. As already remarked, the Home Government troubled very little with the affairs of the proprietary colonies, but the great outflow of emigrants from England after 1630 to New England and the West Indies became a matter of grave concern to the Lords of the Council both on economic and political grounds and led to the first serious attempts to provide an organisation for a general imperial control over the colonies. The economic side of the question being considered in a later chapter, our attention can be confined to political matters.

In the incessant constitutional controversy that filled the reigns of the first two Stuarts colonial affairs were at first made a battleground of the English political struggle. The Parliamentarians under the lead of Sir Edwin Sandys attempted to bring Virginian affairs before the House of Commons on the implied ground that the grievances of the colonists differed in nothing from those of subjects within the realm, and like them must properly be presented to the King in Parliament. But the Crown refused to accept this view and both in 1621 and 1624 definitely denied the competence of Parliament to consider colonial grievances. When Virginia became a royal province, the colonists preferred to consider their grievances in their own Assembly and present them by direct petition to the Crown rather than involve‹ them in the welter of English disputes. There was no conscious adoption of a policy, but distance had already produced its inevitable effect in a separation of interests. The policy of the rulers of Massachusetts was, on the other hand, from the beginning, a conscious one of separation. After the violent dissolution of Parliament in 1629 it seemed as though the old constitutional rights of Englishmen had gone like those of France and Spain, and many of those who passed across the Atlantic were minded to save what they could of their ancient liberties from the peril of royal tyranny. The first ten critical years of the founding of the new colonies coincided with such an intermission of Parliament as England had never known before, and only beyond the ocean could men meet in constitutional assembly tox debate their affairs. The effect was one of profound importance. The struggle for control that arose seemed to be one between free commonwealths wherein the ancient liberties had been preserved and an autocratic monarch ruling with irresponsible prerogative. Englishmen of the Opposition like Oliver Cromwell saw New England as a land of freedom, and some like Sir Henry Vane fled thither with high political hopes. The course of events differed widely from what was foreshadowed in 1629, but the ten years of personal government did

their work, and thenceforward the conception of America as the land of refuge against kingly tyranny was permanently rooted in the national consciousness.

The practical consequence of the intermission of Parliament was that the only organ of government to consider colonial affairs was the executive, i.e. the King with his personal ministers of the Privy Council who suggested or worked out his policy. It has been the tradition of colonial historians to attribute every governmental mistake in the colonial field to the incompetence or tyranny of James I or Charles I. In reality it seems certain that colonial affairs interested either very little save when they interfered with questions of high policy, as when North's Guiana enterprise obstructed James's designs for the Spanish match or the General Courts of the Virginia Company became a forum for the parliamentary opposition. Charles I's personal intervention in directly colonial affairs was usually confined to securing some profit for one of his courtiers like Carlisle. Some of his ministers, however, paid considerable attention to such matters, and more than once we can vaguely trace efforts to work out a policy, though nothing of the sort persisted until the next period when Warwick and others infused Cromwell with some of their colonial enthusiasm. The affairs of the rapidly growing outer Empire, in fact, secured little attention from English statesmen in their preoccupation with foreign policy and the absorbing constitutional struggle.

From time to time we find indications that small committees of the Privy Council were entrusted with special tasks in regard to the Plantations as they were for trade, and usually the committees for both matters had much the same personnel. But this was the customary way in which the Privy Council dealt with its executive tasks, and no committee had a continuing or separately organised existence. It was not until the menace to the policy of the Government of the nonconformity and separatism of Massachusetts became apparent that a special body was commissioned to supervise general colonial affairs. The impetus came from Sir Ferdinando Gorges who was stirred into action by the success of rival settlements in a region which he had vainly tried for years to colonise. In 1632, in conjunction with certain persons expelled by the Massachusetts magistrates, Gorges petitioned the Government for redress against the colonists, whom he and his protegés accused of having separated themselves from the lawful authority of Church and State and of intending to rebel against the King. The indictment was far too serious to be dismissed without careful enquiry by the Privy Council, and a committee was instructed to hear the evidence of the petitioners and to examine witnesses who could speak for the colonists. After a careful enquiry Gorges's petition was dismissed, but when in the following year Laud with his passion for legality and determination to enforce ecclesiastical discipline through