THE ENEMIES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 209 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. CHBE I 14 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. THE COLONIES IN 1649 211 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." 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. 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. Since 1642 the colonists had enjoyed political autonomy and an open trade with all the world; and so long as King and Parliament were at war that liberty was unassailable. But now that the Roundheads had won, their backers among the London merchants would be certain to demand a reimposition of restrictions; and the planters revolted, not against the Commonwealth as such, but against the overlordship of the English mercantile interest. Since, however, rebellion needs the spur of moral enthusiasm as well as of material advantage, the royalist standard floated over the movement. But had the King been victorious, it might well have fallen to him to despatch an expedition to reduce colonists resisting him in the name of the Bible and liberty. Virginia, Maryland and Bermuda all repudiated the Commonwealth in 1649. In the Caribbee Islands the revolt was limited to Barbados and Antigua and was delayed until the following year. In Barbados it was more determined than anywhere else, partly by reason of the density of population and the defensibility of the coast, partly because a really fanatical royalism actuated the leaders and lent moral strength to the economic calculations of the rest. The island had become the chosen home of royalist refugees from England. Its own preference hitherto had been for the neutral attitude it had formerly expressed, although it was quite ready to resist any attempt from home to curtail its liberty. But in the spring of 1650 the royalist faction overruled Philip Bell, the governor, and banished the known Puritans of the community, fining and confiscating to a merciless extent. In the midst of these proceedings there arrived Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, with a commission from Charles II and a lease of the Caribbean proprietorship from its nominal owner, the Earl of Carlisle. Willoughby took command and proclaimed the King, and afterwards went on to secure the Leeward Islands. He was successful at Antigua, which had been developed largely by Barbadians, but failed at St Christopher, Nevis and Montserrat. St Christopher, since the death of its founder Sir Thomas Warner in 1649, had been governed by Major Rowland Redge, who determined to maintain neutrality; Nevis and Montserrat, connected with it by personal ties, followed its example. Willoughby returned to Barbados to organise an active defence, by which he hoped at least to bring the Commonwealth to a compromise. Thus, with Prince Rupert still at large, the Civil War had entered upon an oceanic phase in which it was by no means certain that the Commonwealth would be able to bring its crushing military force to bear upon its opponents. During these events New England maintained essentially the same attitude, modified only in externals, as that of her southern fellowcolonies. The New Englanders were Puritans by religion and certainly not Royalists, and so lacked any ostensible cause of quarrel with the Puritans of England. But they had achieved as complete an autonomy as had the royalist planters of the south, and they had no MERCANTILE PRINCIPLES 213 more intention of surrendering it to their friends at home than had those royalist rebels to their enemies. Massachusetts had instantly perceived the implication of the Parliament's claim to be the paramount authority in the Empire. As early as 1642 she had declined an offer of favourable legislation by the Puritans at Westminster "lest in after times...hostile forces might be in control, and meantime a precedent would have been established". The New Englanders had felt quite competent to deal with a distant King, whose prerogative could be little more than a name in colonies which appointed all their own officers of state, but to be subject to the English House of Commons might mean the ultimate relinquishment of colonial rights of legislation. New England was therefore verbally cordial to the Commonwealth, whilst letting it be understood that she would submit to no interference with her liberties; and since she had no very valuable trade with Europe there was the less incentive for English statesmen to molest her. Such were the problems confronting the new CommonwealthEuropean disapproval, Scottish and Irish hostility, maritime war with Rupert and the privateers, and finally, the colonial revolt-and we have now to turn to the principles and methods of its statesmen in dealing with them. The principles, as has been said, were of no recent growth. On the economic side, they were directed to the increase of the national wealth and can be grouped under the designation of the mercantile system. But mercantilism, as the term is commonly employed, had a wider scope than the mere acquisition of wealth. Wealth needed defence, and thus the defensive power of the nation must also come within the purview of the economist. Foreign trade could never be secure without the shield of a powerful navy, but at the same time it seemed possible to arrange by suitable legislation that trade itself should produce some of the elements of which naval power was composed. In earlier times the warship had been simply a merchantman adapted for the purpose, and the idea still held force that the possession of large merchant ships was a national asset; for the dockyards which could build them could also build warships. There was thus an incentive for mercantilists to promote those trades which employed large ships-that is, the long-distance colonial trades. Still more strongly did this motive work with respect to the men. The man who could sail a merchantman could sail a warship, and gunnery was a craft whose rudiments were easily acquired. The State needed thousands of seamen in time of war, but could not afford to pay them in time of peace. Therefore it was essential to promote the employment of seamen in commerce, and the commerce of long voyages was the best for the purpose, since it occupied more men than that of short voyages for the transportation of a given quantity of stuff. In another aspect considerations of defence required that the country |