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CHAPTER VII

THE BEGINNINGS OF AN IMPERIAL POLICY, 1649-1660

ATTEMPTS to deal with British policy are usually open to the criticism that at most periods and in most departments of State activity it is difficult to prove that a policy was ever consciously formulated and acted upon. This is particularly true of some phases of imperial affairs in the mid-seventeenth century. There is a mass of ascertained facts bearing upon oceanic history, and there is also a great volume of essays and pamphlet literature by irresponsible writers, urging various courses upon successive Governments; but there is a remarkable deficiency of State papers by which it might be rigorously proved that English statesmen worked upon a great imperial policy, or did more than make opportunist moves as need arose. We look in vain among the State papers of the Interregnum for any programme from the hand of a man who had power to execute his thoughts, like that which Colbert penned to Mazarin in 1653: "We must re-establish or create all industries, even those of luxury; establish a protective system in the customs; organise the producers and traders in corporations; ease the fiscal bonds which are harmful to the people; restore to France the marine transport of her productions; develop the colonies and attach them commercially to France; suppress all the intermediaries between France and India; develop the navy to protect the mercantile marine". Colbert thought out these plans and others in minute detail, and then took office and put them into practice; and Colbertism is a demonstrated policy which can be treated almost with the precision appertaining to a physical science.

The English way was different. English statesmen were not original or even logical thinkers. They did not construct a system and subordinate all means to its perfecting. Subjectively and consciously, they may have had no permanent policy for the advancement of the State, but only a number of expedients, temporary and shifting: yet, objectively and in practical effect, a policy is there. The drift of English opinion was powerful and unmistakable, and opportunists were more sensitive to it than abstract thinkers would have been. The views of an army of pamphleteers and memorialists, from the fifteenth century onward, are on record. Their cumulative effect is traceable, without any straining of the truth, in the actions of statesmen from Henry VII to the Restoration. And the Puritans of the Interregnum,

1 Weber, H., La Compagnie française des Indes, p. 100.

freed by circumstance from many shackles of the past, brought them more fully to the stage of action than the Stuart kings had been able to do. To that extent the Puritans may be credited with working out a policy for the old colonial Empire, although they often acted upon principles they might themselves have been puzzled to formulate.

The past had a great influence upon these conservative revolutionaries, who in the political sphere conceived themselves as fighting, not to overturn their world, but to rescue the ancient liberties of England endangered by a usurping tyranny. They were as well versed in their country's history as in her laws. Their minds were steeped in the glories of the Elizabethan Age when, as it seemed to them, Protestant England was free and united and her name had rung through the world. Their present task of destruction was hateful to them; they shuddered at the things their duty called them to do. Nine men in every ten of them were horrified at the execution of the King. "I have sought the Lord that He would rather slay me", said Cromwell in 1653 as he expelled the Parliament, "than put me upon the doing of this work." It was with relief that they turned to the external task of building an empire of the sea in fulfilment of the Elizabethan promise. The gospel of that empire was ready framed. Hakluyt and Peckham, Gilbert and Raleigh, Malynes and Mun and many another had laid it down in phrases which they knew by heart. The doctrine was so much the fabric of all their minds that they had little need to write each other minutes upon it. Recent influences, too, bore weight with them, things they had seen in their own time. The shameful story of Amboyna and other harsh proceedings in the East had engendered in many a resolve to settle accounts with the Dutch. This was a cross-current giving rise to confusion of purpose, yet strong enough to leave its permanent trace upon policy. It conflicted with, and momentarily overcame, the mightier impulse to do battle with Antichrist in the shape of the Catholic Powers, to create a Protestant alliance in which England's part should be to wrest tropical America from the hands of Spain and to divert its wealth to the service of the godly people of the world. The Commonwealth, fighting for its life, was patriotically materialist and anti-Dutch. The Protectorate, having achieved a breathing-space, could afford to be idealistic, although it could not keep its idealism untainted by sordid motives. The economic view, therefore, will not alone illuminate the policy of the Puritans. Patriotism and religious fervour must enter into the calculations of those who would seek to appreciate their work for the Empire and to understand wherein and why they succeeded and failed.

When, a few weeks after the death of Charles I, the Rump enacted "that the People of England and of all the dominions and territories thereunto belonging are...a Commonwealth and Free State”, it

1 Carlyle, T., Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, III, 195; Firth, C. H., Cromwell, p. 323.

THE ENEMIES OF THE COMMONWEALTH

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was apparent that a struggle would be needed to make good the words. The monarchs, whether of Spain and Portugal in the west, or of Denmark and Russia in the east, were aghast at the tragedy of Whitehall; France patronised the royalist exiles and began an unofficial maritime war against English commerce; the United Provinces with their stadholder, a son-in-law of the dead King, sheltered his heir and recognised his right to the English throne; and, backed by the approval of all these Powers, Prince Rupert commanded a revolted squadron of the Commonwealth's fleet and set forth to continue the Civil War upon the sea. If the continent had been at peace, a coalition might have enthroned Charles II within a year. But, fortunately, France and Spain were engaged in a war which neither had any immediate prospect of winning; Spain also had not yet consented to recognise the independence of Portugal under the House of Braganza, and the stadholder, William II, had still to consolidate his position against the republican party in Holland, the wealthiest province of the Dutch Netherlands. The foreign enemies of the Commonwealth were thus at odds among themselves, and bold statesmanship might render ineffective their hostility to England. Meanwhile, within the British Isles, Scotland had dissociated herself from English courses and had proclaimed Charles II king, whilst Ireland remained in a welter of anarchy of ten years' duration, with the Royalists standing forth as the most considerable among her many factions.

The parliamentary party had always derived its main support from London, and London lived by carrying on three-quarters of the foreign trade of the country. Rupert and the royalist and French privateers were therefore foes of the first magnitude, whose suppression would be likely to tax the maritime resources of the Commonwealth. But before any steps had been taken to deal with them, news began to come in which showed that in default of yet more naval activity an entire lucrative branch of London's commerce would be cut off at its source. The western colonies, with the exception of New England, were, or were likely to be, in revolt. Of these colonies the most important in contemporary eyes were Barbados and the Leeward Islands-St Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat and Antigua. All of them had been, as we have seen, included in a proprietary province granted by Charles I to the Earls of Carlisle, and all had been left very much to their own devices since the second earl's power to control them had collapsed at the beginning of the Civil War. These island colonies had been founded as tobacco plantations, and in this business they had been so successful as seriously to endanger the prosperity of Bermuda and Virginia, the pioneer producers of tobacco. By 1636 tobacco had become a drug in the market and it had been advisable to look for a new staple. Cotton had for a time promised well, but was soon found to command only a limited market owing to technical difficulties in its spinning and weaving.

CHBEI

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Then, just as the Civil War broke out, the Lesser Antilles found their vocation in sugar-planting, introduced by Dutchmen whose sugar industry in Brazil was being destroyed by the Portuguese reconquest of that colony. Sugar rapidly transformed the social aspect first of Barbados and then of the Leeward Islands. Its cultivation was best practised on large estates needing considerable capital for their equipment. The tobacco planters had been for the most part small twenty- or thirty-acre men, relying upon the labour of their own hands and of a few indentured white servants. The sugar estate was commonly of 500 acres, with labour organised in large gangs, with wagons and draught cattle, roller crushing machines worked by windmills or horse power, stillhouses containing great copper tanks and boilers, a personnel of overseers, clerks, engineers and coopers, and a dominating mansion for the wealthy owner of the whole. The indispensable basis was soon found to be the negro slave, although a transition period of some twenty years elapsed before he had ousted the white servant as the standard unit of labour. For the fortunate few who moved with the times an era of dazzling profits set in, and, had the Empire been at peace, the manufacturers, merchants and slave traders of the mother country would have shared the gains with the planters. In fact, a small band of London merchants did participate in the sugar boom, but rather because they had been wise enough to buy sugar estates and instal agents to work them than because the new trade as a whole flowed through the London custom house. For the Civil War had relaxed imperial control and had reduced to a dead letter the regulations of Charles I which had sought to confine the colonial traffic to English ports. In the main it was the Dutch who engrossed the new trade of the Caribbean. The capitalists of Amsterdam were bigger men than their London competitors. They gave long credit, equipping the planters with the new machinery and with slaves from the West African stations which they were wresting from the Portuguese. The London interest in the transformed colonies was therefore inferior to that of Amsterdam, and the most promising of all the imperial undertakings was rapidly falling within the economic sphere of the United Provinces.

Politically also, the English connection was almost dissolved. The Earl of Carlisle was a royalist, and the parliamentary statesmen had suspended his proprietary rights, although they had as yet hesitated to make a final decision by annulling them. The planters had no love for the earl, and cheerfully pocketed the dues which they owed him; but they had no mind to submit to the control of Parliament without compulsion, for they knew very well that the established colonial doctrine would require in some form or other the restriction of their trade to English channels, and they had now come to regard an open trade as necessary to their prosperity. They assumed, 1 See Ligon, R., True and Exact History of Barbados, London, 1657.

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therefore, an attitude of detachment and intimated that the factions. in the mother country must compose their differences before they, the colonists, could think of recognising either King or Parliament; meanwhile, they would govern themselves.1 Barbados in this matter voiced the feelings of the rest. It was a galling impertinence for the victors of Naseby to receive from a unit no larger than the Isle of Wight, but it had this justification, that Parliament had then no fleet to spare for the Caribbean.

The continental Plantations, Virginia and Maryland, were of less importance in the imperial scheme. Virginia in 1649 had only half the population of Barbados, and Maryland bore much the same relation to St Christopher; moreover, there had been in them no economic revolution like that which brought sudden wealth to the Caribbees. In Virginia the tobacco economy had been perforce adhered to, and, partly by reason of favourable customs rates, partly owing to the absence of proprietary tyranny like that of the Earls of Carlisle, the Virginian planters had attained a condition of modest prosperity. Local legislation had favoured the growth of a class of substantial planters. Royalist sentiment predominated, largely through the influence of Sir William Berkeley, a popular Cavalier appointed governor by the king in 1640: but it was a royalism which had no enthusiasm for close imperial control, for Virginia had always had a hankering after trade with the Dutch, and could indulge it without restraint when the wars began at home.2 Maryland suffered from religious dissensions leading to revolt by the Puritan party against the representatives of Lord Baltimore, the Catholic proprietor. For some time the rebels were in the ascendant, but by 1649 the proprietor's interest had regained strength with the result that the colony declined to recognise the authority of Parliament. The step represented the local triumph of a faction and was taken against the wish of Baltimore who, from his standpoint in England, saw clearly that an ephemeral success would be dearly bought in the outcome. The tobacco colony of Bermuda suffered from like dissensions, but from a different cause. It was the property of a chartered company, most of whose members were on the parliamentary side. Dislike of the Company's rule thus encouraged royalism among the colonists, for the victory of the King might offer a chance of the dissolution of the Company.

The above considerations clear the ground for an estimation of the colonial revolt which broke out in 1649-50 against the newly declared Commonwealth. Although royalist sentiment played a certain part in it, the stronger motive was impatience of any imperial control.

1 Governor and Council of Barbados to the Parliamentary Commission for Plantations, October 1646, Lords' Journals, IX, 51.

? Act of Virginia legislature, 1643, legalising Dutch trade. Beer, G. L., Origins of Brit. Colonial System, p. 350.

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