THE WAR WITH SPAIN 229 The expedition then seized Jamaica, which could muster no more than 500 fighting men. All the English force was now needed for the work of colonisation: and since it was more demoralised than ever, there could be no thought of any further undertaking. Penn and Venables, notwithstanding their duty to remain and develop their conquest, returned to England, and Cromwell sent them to the Tower for deserting their posts.1 The "Western Design" had not yielded a tithe of its expected fruits. In Europe it produced results upon which the Protector had not calculated. He seems to have been convinced that as France and Spain were at war with each other they would both put up with any amount of hard usage rather than quarrel with him. While, therefore, Venables was on his way to the West, Blake was sent with a fleet into the Mediterranean to strengthen English interests there, to retaliate upon French commerce for past injuries, and to show in general that English sea power was as formidable there as in home waters.2 Blake fulfilled his mission in such a way as to frustrate a French design for the conquest of Naples, and then with great impartiality sailed out of the Straits of Gibraltar to cruise for the homeward-bound Spanish Plate fleet. Meanwhile Mazarin, as devoid of temper as he was full of craft, persistently turned the cheek to the smiter and offered alliance; but Cromwell held off for a long time rather than subscribe to any agreement which would bind him to connive at the oppression of the Huguenots. Spain acted with more dignity but less worldly wisdom. Philip IV, on receiving in the late summer the news of the attack on Hispaniola, held that that in itself constituted a declaration of war. After a brief delay he recalled his ambassador and detained English merchants and property in Spain; and the Protector was left to make the best of a situation of his own producing. There can be no doubt that Mazarin had made the better choice, humiliating as it was, for England really was the holder of the balance, as the events of the next four years were to show. In October 1655 England and France signed a treaty ending the maritime hostilities which had been waged since 1649. Next year they made an alliance for the conquest of the Spanish Netherlands. The new combination achieved little in 1657, but in 1658 carried all before it, routing Spaniards and Royalists at the battle of the Dunes, capturing Dunkirk, and then making a triumphant invasion of the Spanish provinces which was stayed only by the vanquished suing for peace. At the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), England secured Dunkirk, and France part of the Netherlands, and the age of Louis XIV, the age of Spanish debility and French ascendancy, began. Meanwhile at sea Blake had destroyed a treasure-fleet at Santa Cruz, but English commerce had suffered severely from the Ostend and Dunkirk 1 See Gardiner, vol. I, chap. xiv; Watts, op. cit., Appendices; Firth, C. H., Narrative of Gen. Venables (Camden Soc.). 2 See Corbett, J. S., England in the Mediterranean, vol. 1, chap. xvi. privateers, so that the Spanish War proved far more costly in the end than the Anglo-Dutch contest. To complete the review of the external policy of the Puritans it is necessary to say something of Portugal. In an earlier chapter of this volume1 reference was made to Anglo-Portuguese hostilities arising out of the English claim to trade in West Africa in the early part of Elizabeth's reign. Since 1576 there had been considerable English trade on the Guinea coast with the sanction of successive Governments, a complete disregard of the Portuguese monopoly in the East Indies, and a regular English traffic with the parts of Brazil occupied by Portugal. These matters were unregulated by any treaty until 1642, when John IV, leading the Portuguese revolt against Spanish domination, had been glad to seek the friendship of Charles I. The Anglo-Portuguese agreement of that year recognised English rights in West Africa, allowed a limited English trade in the Portuguese stations in India, and provided for a meeting of commissioners to define the extent of the English Brazil trade. A further clause permitted Portuguese merchants to hire English shipping for their own African commerce.2 John IV's alliance with the Stuarts impelled him to afford shelter to Prince Rupert in 1650, and led to a substantive maritime war in that year between Portugal and the Commonwealth. Blake soon convinced the Portuguese of the unwisdom of their attitude, and negotiations for friendship with England began in 1652. They were still incomplete when the Protectorate succeeded the Commonwealth, and it was left for Cromwell to bring them to an issue in 1654. By the treaty of that year Portugal made great concessions. Compensation was to be paid for the losses of English merchants in 1650; Englishmen in Portugal were to be free from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, not only on board their ships, but in their houses on shore; customs duties were limited to agreed rates, not to be augmented; English ships were to trade freely in Portuguese Africa and India, and with Brazil under certain restrictions; and Portuguese merchants might hire English ships but not those of any other nation. In effect the treaty constituted England the heir to the dying Portuguese Empire and dealt to the ambitions of the Dutch a blow which they were then in no condition to resent. English merchants and shipowners acquired the same footing in the Portuguese colonial trade as the Dutch had acquired in that of England during the Civil War; and, unlike their rivals, the English were never ousted from their gains. The ease with which Cromwell secured this predominance undoubtedly inspired him to make similar demands on Spain. 1 Vide supra, chapter п, pp. 41-7. 2 The text is in Rymer, T., Foedera, orig. edn. xx, 523-7. 3 Shillington and Chapman, The Commercial Relations of England and Portugal, pp. 199– 204; for the text of the treaty see Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique, v1, 82-5. The imperial policy of the Protectorate with regard to foreign Powers has necessarily taken precedence of its policy towards the English colonies themselves, but that branch of the subject has now to be considered. Three new colonies were temporarily or permanently acquired during the Interregnum, and of these the first was Surinam. In 1651 Lord Willoughby, then the royalist governor and part-proprietor of Barbados, sent a small expedition to Guiana, the scene of so many English attempts during the early Stuart period. His emissaries reported well of the prospects on the Surinam River, and Willoughby then despatched about a hundred Barbadians to begin a plantation, with an eye to the development of a new proprietorship for himself. The colony took root and prospered. Willoughby himself paid it a visit on his eviction from Barbados in 1652, and then sailed for England to obtain the recognition of his rights. The Commonwealth, however, objecting both to royalism and to proprietorships, had no ear for his petition, and appointed a certain Captain Richard Holdip to govern Surinam. Holdip went to the colony, but is recorded some time afterwards as having deserted it. He cannot have stayed longer than the summer of 1654, for he sailed with Venables's expedition at the close of that year. At the beginning of the Protectorate, Willoughby sought a grant of the proprietorship from Cromwell, but after some negotiations the plan broke down; although in 1657 the Protector offered to let him go to Surinam to enjoy his private property there. Willoughby was not content with this, and preferred to remain at home and engage in royalist conspiracies. So, in and out of the Tower, but never very harshly treated, he continued until the Restoration. Meanwhile Cromwell appointed no governor and did nothing positive to regulate the affairs of the colony, which pursued an autonomous career until 1660. Its planters were chiefly Royalists from Barbados, together with a number of Jews driven successively from Brazil by the Portuguese and from Cayenne by the French. Surinam developed a thriving sugar industry, and since it avoided giving scandal by its royalism and was moreover a settlement of great potential value, the Protector was quite content to let it alone. It evolved a constitution of its own, the planters annually electing an Assembly, and that body a governor, the latter having also the assistance of a council of his own nomination. The second of the new acquisitions was the fruit of the informal war with France. Early in 1654 Major Robert Sedgwick had been sent to New England to organise an attack upon the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Dutch peace nipped this scheme in the bud, and Sedgwick turned his energies in another direction. His commission empowered him to make reprisals on the French for their attacks upon English shipping, and with assistance from New England he captured the fortified posts controlling the French colony of Acadia. Cromwell, despite his later alliance with Mazarin, did not restore the conquest, which remained in English hands until the reign of Charles II. No steps, however, were taken to supplant the French settlers, the motive of the New Englanders being simply to control the fisheries and timber trade of the coastline. Jamaica occupied a larger share of the Protector's attention. He was convinced of its intrinsic value and still dreamed of making it a base for further conquests among the Spanish colonies. But he had learned that the "Western Design" would be of slow accomplishment and that Jamaica must be firmly occupied before anything more could be attempted. To Jamaica were sent accordingly a reinforcement of troops and a number of civilian colonists. Owing to the ill-will of many of the officers in the island, and to the ignorance and mismanagement of the administration both there and at home, a frightful mortality occurred and little progress was made. Jamaica was the first of our colonies to be planted and developed by the State, and the State had to learn by trial and error the business in which private enterprise was now fairly expert, but in which it had bought painful experience in the early days of Virginia. When the course of the undertaking is compared with the contemporaneous story of Surinam, a surprising contrast is apparent. On the Surinam plantation there was no public expenditure, and the inhabitants, with some assistance from Lord Willoughby, quickly became selfsupporting; neither is there any record of serious disasters during the formative period. In Jamaica, on the other hand, despondency and apathy overhung the colony like a cloud. The difference may to some extent be that between good and ill luck, but it lay also in the type of colonist employed and the conditions of work imposed upon him. The pioneers of Surinam were old hands who had learned their business in Barbados, they knew exactly how to set about their new task, and they worked from the outset for their individual advantage. Those of Jamaica were of a poor type, unused to tropical conditions, relying upon pay and supplies provided by the State, and lacking any incentive to render themselves independent of those aids. An army on service is a communistic body-all efforts and all means are devoted to a common end. When such a body is faced with the task of making a colony upon virgin soil, as it was in Jamaica, it is out of its element and its discipline is apt to break down, and without discipline it perishes. There lies the essential difference between the planting of Jamaica and that of the Lesser Antilles and Surinam. Not until 1657-8, with the introduction of experienced colonists from Nevis and Barbados, did Jamaica begin to emerge from its period of disaster. A less resolute Government than that of the Protectorate would have abandoned it before that date. The history of the undertaking showed clearly that a rabble was no more fit for colonisation than for conquest. Of the older colonies under the Protectorate the imperial history THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 233 is almost a blank, although there were some transactions of local importance. The New England group, Virginia, and Maryland enjoyed fairly complete self-government, maintaining more or less the policy of the Navigation Acts,1 but otherwise taking little part in imperial affairs. Bermuda remained under the jurisdiction of its chartered company, twice reorganised during the Interregnum. Newfoundland, under its royalist governor, Sir David Kirke, had been hostile to the Puritan party in the Civil War. In 1651, therefore, the Commonwealth recalled Kirke, and thenceforward the island was controlled by commissioners appointed by the Puritan Governments; but there was in this period no settlement of the questions long at issue between the colonists and the seasonal fishermen from the English ports. St Christopher, Nevis and Montserrat remained under the governorship of local men recognised by the Protectorate. All three were in possession of elected Assemblies by 1660, but it is uncertain whether those institutions were evolved before or after 1649. They were probably of spontaneous growth, since there is no record of any authorisation by an English Government for their establishment. Only in Barbados is there any sign of a keen debate on imperial questions. There the Puritan, Daniel Searle, remained governor from 1652 to the eve of the Restoration. By the terms of the capitulation of 1652 the colony, whilst electing an Assembly with control of taxation, received a governor of home appointment. The Barbadians were dissatisfied with the arrangement and sought to argue that since corporations in England elected their own chief magistrates, colonial communities should have the same privilege. It was the old view of the homogeneity of the rights of Englishmen irrespective of their place of residence, but its force was weakened by the fact that its exponents held extremely separatist ideas about their duties as Englishmen, notably in the matter of the Navigation Acts. Before April 1660 Barbados gained a step towards administrative independence by securing the right to elect its council as well as its Assembly. With the Restoration this privilege was abolished, but it is of interest as showing the general tendency of the Interregnum.2 Under this cloak of political principle individual advantage was, in fact, the real inspiration of the Barbadian leaders. The same may be said of the planters of Antigua, whose squabbles with a harassed governor, Christopher Keynell, in the same period have been rather unwarrantably dignified with the appellation of a political conflict. In spite of a theoretical centralisation of control, Cromwell's real attitude towards those colonies whose condition was stable was that of Walpole in the next century-quieta non movere. His organisation of the colonial department of the Home Government was therefore designed chiefly with an eye to the affairs of Jamaica, and of the Caribbees as they affected Jamaica. The attempts of the Common1 Beer, Origins, chap. xii. 2 Harlow, pp. 124-6. 3 See Andrews, op. cit. |