The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Notwithstanding Riva Agüero’s late show of concern, no new recruits, slaves, or licentious women were ever sent to Santa Catalina. Ojeda’s repeated request for a promotion did eventually meet with a positive response, however: he was appointed governor of the Andean city of Popayán, one of the wealthiest cities in Nueva Granada, and a fitting setting in which to see out the closing years of his long career. But the governor didn’t get to read the letter informing him of his new posting; he died—the records don’t say how or why—shortly before the ship carrying that year’s post reached the island.

  * * *

  In capturing Jamaica the Western Design had struck its first victory, but the Puritan revolution that inspired it had run its course. In April 1653, Oliver Cromwell had moved against the Commonwealth he presided over, denounced the MPs sitting in Parliament as drunkards and whoremasters, and dissolved the assembly. In its place, he and the army’s Council of Officers ordained the Nominated, or Barebone’s, Parliament, named after one of its most devoutly Puritan members, Praise-god Barebone. Like the assembly in Massachusetts, nominations to the new Parliament were confined to the godly. ‘God hath called you to this work by, I think, as wonderful providences as ever passed upon the sons of men in so short a time,’ the Lord Protector told the assembled MPs.19

  Barebone’s Parliament was supposed to usher in the rule of the Saints, but its members’ radicalism, distinct lack of political experience, and the bitter infighting into which they fell earned them widespread ridicule. One pamphleteer branded them ‘pettifoggers, innkeepers, millwrights, stocking-mongers and such a rabble as never had hopes to be of a Grand Jury.’ Another journalist reported Cromwell as saying that he was ‘more troubled now with the fool than before now with the knave.’20 When it became clear that the new Parliament was only hampering his campaign to unify their divided country, the Lord Protector decided to govern without Parliament altogether, advised only by his Council of State.

  The same frustration was evident in his treatment of the army that had brought him victory. Puritanism’s innate hostility to authority was all very well when the highest authority was the king; now that England’s champion of radical nonconformity was in power, his brethren’s argumentativeness became insufferable to him. The Lord Protector had the New Model Army’s godliest officers removed, to the dismay of the many ordinary people who had pinned their hopes on him as a champion of what had come to be known as ‘the Good Old Cause.’ The Puritan Lucy Hutchinson lamented that in the wake of the purge, ‘many of the religious soldiers went off, and in their room abundance of the king’s dissolute soldiers were entertained.’21

  It would be unfair to accuse Oliver Cromwell of becoming as tyrannical as the king he had deposed; Puritan MPs guided only by providence were in no position to put the radical changes they demanded into effect, let alone bring peace to a country weary of war, and perhaps their incompetence compelled him to take matters into his own hands. But Cromwell was undoubtedly better suited to the soldier’s life than he was to the statesman’s. Bereft of new ideas and apparently deserted by providence, the Lord Protector cut an increasingly forlorn figure. He made a heartfelt attempt to reconcile Royalists and Parliamentarians and was feted by the City of London for his efforts. But on the day he rode in state through its streets, the crowds watched him pass in silence.

  Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, probably of malaria contracted in the fens of East Anglia. His son Richard Cromwell made an attempt at maintaining the Protectorate, but even his father’s most steadfast allies had little faith in him, and he resigned his post nine months after coming to power. It fell to the leader of the New Model Army, George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, to open negotiations with the late king’s son, who was living in exile in France. Cromwell had often discussed the idea of restoring the monarchy, believing it to be the only guarantor of property and the social order. But he had dismissed out of hand a proposal to crown Charles Stuart, saying, ‘He is so damnably debauched, he would undo us all. Give him a shoulder of mutton and a whore, that’s all he cares for.’22

  That the heir to the throne was a libertine, a cynic in political matters, and insincere in his defense of the true religion mattered little to a population that had grown tired of Puritan austerity. Following his triumphant return to London, Charles Stuart was crowned Charles II. The diarist John Evelyn was in the Strand on 29 May 1660 to watch the royal procession make its way to Whitehall, and joined the crowds in rejoicing at ‘the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry [and] fountains running with wine…and all this without one drop of blood and by that very army which rebelled against him.’23

  ‘Old, silent George Monck’ went on to become the young king’s most trusted adviser. The Duke of Albemarle was a thoroughly unprincipled operator; he had switched his allegiance from king to Parliament as soon as it became clear that the Roundheads were going to win the war, and he changed sides again when he realized that they were going to lose the peace. As he set about organizing a peaceful return to royal government, the structure of power in England was reconfigured from the top down. Some were pardoned, others were brought out of the woodwork, and more than a few were sent scrambling for refuge in the colonies.

  The Earl of Warwick had also died in 1658, and the surviving members of the Providence Island Company were now old men. Lord Saye had broken with Cromwell over the execution of Charles I, and withdrew from public life thereafter. Had he been able, he might have made good on his promise to move to Providence, but since that was no longer an option, he had to be content with hiding out on the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. He regarded the restoration of the monarchy as the not wholly satisfactory fulfillment of ‘the Good Old Cause’ he had taken up arms to defend in 1642: a balanced constitution of king, lords, and commons. Following the coronation of Charles II, he returned to London, and like many who had sided with Parliament in the war years, did his best to ingratiate himself with the young king, assuring him of his loyalty and scrabbling to find a place for himself in the new scheme of things. In recognition of his cunning, no less than his experience, Charles II made the man he called ‘Old Subtlety’ Lord Privy Seal. His lordship occupied the post for just two years and died at Broughton Castle in 1662.

  With the restoration of king and court, the refinement and exclusivity the aristocracy had enjoyed before the war returned with renewed vigor. The House of Lords renewed its long alliance with the monarch, while the Puritans’ austere morality was confined to the Commons, which has been making a virtue of argumentativeness ever since. Puritans had varied attitudes to their new king. The Bible taught that, like Jesus Christ, even the mightiest prince had been ‘born on a dung hill.’ God’s law should always take precedence over laws passed by Parliament, which they had always regarded as an assembly of ‘silly worms.’ But most Puritans were not political radicals; Charles II might have been a worm, but he was still a royal worm, with a divine right to rule over his subjects.

  Such theological debates were no longer heard in Parliament, for Charles II insisted that all but the most accommodating Puritans be removed from office. But their legacy is hard to overstate. The English owe three centuries of constitutional government to the belligerence of the Puritans in Parliament. Rebellion and intransigence were intrinsic parts of the Puritan creed, and their challenge to the king’s late father was a powerful spur to democracy. Their conviction that anyone, even a child, was capable of appreciating and following the word of God was revolutionary. They expected every Englishman and woman to be able to read the Bible and to enter into a personal pact with God. It was a painful process (the English tendency to self-criticize may well be another aspect of the Puritan legacy), but it raised a man’s self-esteem, at least when he compared himself to the blinkered souls around him. Far from teaching passive resignation to the will of God, Puritanism taught courage and the possibility that mind could win out over matter.
In the eyes of God, a man might be no more than a ‘clod of dust,’ but he was more than the equal of his neighbor, and his social standing became less important the closer he grew to God.

  The belief that God would provide for his people was not particular to the Puritans; nor was the idea that when He didn’t, it was because He was punishing them for their sinfulness. But there was certainly something inherently masochistic in the Puritan psyche. Their belief that God smites those He loves best betrays a fatal combination of self-regard, self-pity, and a strangely perverse pride, which may explain the English love of moaning. There is also something sadistic in the culture of discipline that the Puritans championed; certainly, the distinction they made between the deserving and the undeserving poor can still be heard today in talk of ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers.’ Seventeenth-century strivers heard God’s call and knew that ‘without running, fighting, sweating and wrestling, heaven is not taken.’24 Skivers, or as the English Puritan theologian William Perkins put it, ‘such as live in no calling, but spend their time in eating, drinking and sleeping and sporting,’ were rebelling against God.

  But the Puritan legacy is broader and subtler than the stereotypical repressed and repressive New Englander suggests. In repudiating the collectivism of Catholic ritual, Puritan ministers made individuals of their followers, and that individualism was the making of many of the entrepreneurs and merchants who would grow rich under Charles II.

  The Puritan Revolution also had a significant impact on the world of finance. Christians had long believed that a man’s investments should not exceed the capital he had at his disposal, and that borrowing and lending money at interest were equally wrong. As a consequence, the Providence Island Company’s ambition had been curtailed by the difficulties it faced in borrowing money. Before the development of the mortgage in the 1630s, the only way of securing capital for serious investment was through savings. Lord Saye did not resort to a mortgage until 1638, by which time he was practically broke. His campaign to legalize money lending and the charging of interest saw him branded as ‘the White Jew of the Upper House,’ but following the Restoration, both were recognized by an act of Parliament. This was a crucial development, both in the history of money and the imperial project that Lord Saye did so much to advance, and it came at a crucial stage in England’s journey to becoming a modern country.

  At first sight, the Providence Island Company shareholders’ cack-handed attempts at raising pomegranates and olives, ardent study of the Bible’s teachings on government, and general indifference to whatever was new about the New World make them unlikely heralds of the modern age. But in casting out the superstition and magic they believed to be latent in the Catholic faith, in favor of a rational approach to understanding God’s purpose for man on earth, Puritan thinkers trained the minds of ambitious men to wrestle with thorny questions. ‘God sees not as man sees,’ said one Puritan minister, ‘and yet he that will judge uprightly ought to see as God sees, and not as man.’25 Although the English gradually stopped looking skyward for guidance after the Restoration, the conviction that God had created an orderly, rational world only grew stronger as England’s scientists found favor under the new king.

  The English love of science was also shaped by the first colonists’ experiences in the Americas. Providence’s Puritans returned to England with gold chains, parrots’ feathers, and smokers’ coughs, but they also brought back a newfound sense of the size and variety of the world. It was a mind-expanding experience, and one that allowed them to shake off the trappings of the medieval world. As a young man, Lord Saye had been one of the first English nobles to visit the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome. By the time he died, the Grand Tour had become a rite of passage; as educated Englishmen reassessed the lessons of antiquity, they learned to think for themselves, both at home and in the colonies.

  Puritanism had a lasting impact on how the English regarded their country, and themselves. Until the Puritan Revolution, books had been weighty affairs that remained cloistered in wealthy men’s libraries. The welter of bills, broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets hawked in the streets of London in the war years were testament to the rising self-esteem, as well as the rising literacy, of the English people. Neither Charles II nor his successors would ever attempt to govern without consulting the people’s representatives in Parliament. But just as importantly, England’s property owners were forced to respect the millions of English men and women who had yet to be represented by the honorable members.

  The Puritan Revolution and the Civil War it gave rise to have been largely forgotten. To the contemporary ear, its theological disputes sound arcane, and the advances it secured are taken for granted. But Puritanism remains crucial to any understanding of the United Kingdom’s rise to world dominance. The Puritan Revolution was the first modern revolution, in that it was driven by ideological conviction, and this had a profound effect on how the English saw themselves and their place in the world. Until the 1620s, when a man spoke of his country, he usually meant the county in which he had been born. But England’s self-appointed role as defender of the ‘true religion’ gave it a distinct national identity. While Puritanism was fervently anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish, it was never parochial. It might have been born in the pulpits of England’s village churches, but as personified in Oliver Cromwell, it had far-reaching consequences for the balance of power in Europe, and the vast empire that Britain would build over the course of the following two hundred years.

  The empire was built on a policy of aggressive, state-backed mercantilism and colony building, first promoted as part of Cromwell’s Western Design. Although the Western Design was interpreted as a failure at the time, Cromwell’s decision to prioritize English sea power resulted in a string of successes closer to home. Adm. Robert Blake in the Mediterranean and Vice Adm. William Goodson in the Baltic made the seas safe for English merchant shipping and paved the way for the establishment of English naval bases at Tunis and Gibraltar. The navy also managed to subdue the pirates of Dunkirk and Algiers, a feat that no other European power had been able to accomplish. By the time Cromwell died, England was Europe’s preeminent maritime power, and the way was clear for Charles II to capitalize on the capture of Jamaica, a colony that would make Englishmen rich like no other.

  The historian Christopher Hill describes how Cromwell marks the transition from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the nation. He also suggests that the archetypal eighteenth-century Englishman, John Bull, was basically ‘Oliver Cromwell minus ideology.’26 It is not a flattering comparison, but at least Cromwell was happy to be portrayed ‘warts and all.’ Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the empire builders who would take John Bull as a role model in the years to come.

  *His son was the Quaker who went on to found Pennsylvania.

  [13]

  The Rise of Port Royal and the Recapture of Providence

  THE END OF ENGLAND’S PURITAN Commonwealth also marked the end of the idealistic phase in English empire building. Despite the Lord Protector’s best efforts, Jamaica failed to attract Puritan settlers from New England, and the seven nonconformist ministers that he sent to the island soon died of disease. With the restoration of the monarchy, the colonies swore allegiance to the new king, and the Caribbean lost its religious purpose for the English.

  Oliver Cromwell might have been the architect of the Western Design, but the man who turned the blueprint’s vaunting ambition into the prosaic reality of slave ships and sugar plantations was one of its less devout exponents, Col. Thomas Modyford. Born the first of five sons of a former mayor of Exeter, Modyford was a barrister by training but became commander of a Royalist regiment during the Civil War. Smarting from a series of defeats and finding little to like in the grim austerity of Puritan England, he decided to seek his fortune in Barbados. In 1648, he spent £7,000 on a five-hundred-acre estate; its previous owner had bought it for just £200, but that was in the days before sugarcane was planted on the island. Still, i
t was a canny investment, for Barbadians were making annual returns of 50 percent on their plantations, and he soon became rich.

  Despite the part Modyford had played in Charles I’s army, when the king was executed in 1649, he switched his allegiance to the Parliamentarians, claiming that he had always ‘utterly abhorred and abjured the interest of the Stuarts.’ By the time of the Restoration, he had risen to become speaker of the Barbados Assembly. Such an ambitious, unscrupulous operator was always at risk of falling foul of political developments in England, but Modyford was an opportunist of the highest order, and was quick to swear loyalty to Charles II. His switch failed to win over the new king, however, who had him arrested and charged with high treason, and he was only released at the intercession of George Monck, who happened to be his cousin. The Privy Council ordered that Modyford ‘be not disturbed or further prosecuted for anything he had formerly acted,’ and ‘be permitted to enjoy the full benefit of His Majesty’s Gracious Act of Oblivion.’1 As the name suggests, the act was the new king’s way of letting bygones be bygones. It offered a general pardon to all those who had committed crimes during the Civil War, with the exception of those found guilty of the regicide of Charles’s father, murder, piracy, buggery, rape, and witchcraft.

  Since George Monck also happened to be chairman of the Committee for Foreign Plantations, when the time came to appoint a new governor of Jamaica, he proposed that the job be given to his young cousin, Thomas Modyford. The island offered unlimited opportunities to the ambitious, and the speaker of the Barbados Assembly was well placed to act as its recruiting sergeant. Modyford rounded up a gaggle of footloose servants and impoverished freemen, who were soon joined by Irishmen driven into exile by Cromwell’s plantations in Ireland. Together, they formed a corps charged with overseeing the African slaves who were being shipped to the island in ever-greater numbers. He sailed for Jamaica in June 1664, taking eight hundred Barbadians with him. Lady Modyford and the eighty members of his private household followed shortly afterward.