The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  The English church had doctrines, but chief among them were (a) not to be a papist and (b) to follow as gospel whatever was approved by the Crown. Anglicanism was really patriotism with a prayer book—and England’s pirates were nothing if not patriotic. They disparaged or destroyed representations of the Virgin Mary, but venerated Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. They would pray in regular, required meetings aboard ship before they plundered and pillaged for profit, for the defense of the realm, and to punish the deluded followers of the Whore of Babylon. Drake and Hawkins and Walter Raleigh and Martin Frobisher were private commercial adventurers and explorers, yes, but they were all present and commanding ships as naval officers of the Crown against the Spanish Armada in 1588 too. They were men of Queen and Country who believed that by serving themselves and serving England they were serving Heaven’s Command—self-interest, patriotism, and Providence were one.

  One of the chief ideological architects of an English empire2 in the New World was the geographer and Protestant divine Richard Hakluyt the younger. In his Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), he urged on Walter Raleigh’s adventures in the New World, writing that “No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the realm of reason.”3 He laid out the commercial, political, and military benefits of such an empire. Among these were trade and the production of new crops, finding useful employment for unemployed soldiers and beggars, but also bringing liberty to lands now dominated by Spanish “pride and tyranny,” where the enslaved “all yell and cry with one voice, Liberta, liberta,” and where English valor and naval prowess could provide freedom.

  From the beginning, then, the British Empire thought of itself as an empire of liberty.

  Plunder and Plantations

  English sea dogs played Robin Hood in the Caribbean only after England was firmly in the Protestant camp under Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603. As queen of England and Wales and parts of always turbulent Ireland, with a potentially hostile Scotland north of the border, and hostile France and Spain across the Channel, Elizabeth was perpetually looking for ways to keep her enemies off balance. Her most dangerous enemy was Spain. Spain had become a vast overseas empire. By 1521, Mexico had become New Spain; twenty-one years later, the Incan empire had become the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. Spain was also a continental power. It was trying to crush a Protestant revolt (which England supported) in the Spanish Netherlands and was fighting Muslims in the Mediterranean.

  Queen Elizabeth had little interest in bankrolling rival colonies of her own—she couldn’t afford it—but she had a great deal of interest in raiding Spain’s. Her support went to her daring, patriotic, profitable pirates, some of whom doubled as explorers. Martin Frobisher was one such. In his voyages of 1576 through 1578, he set off to find the Northwest Passage, the presumed nautical shortcut to the riches of the East. While finding neither China nor India nor riches, he leant his name to Frobisher Bay and navigated part of Hudson Bay.

  The sea dog Francis Drake, who like Frobisher earned himself a knighthood, not only sailed around the world (1577–80), fighting the Spanish wherever they could be found, but also relieved the Spanish of their gold and silver in Panama and Peru, laid stake to Nova Albion (California, setting the western boundary of what became the “manifest destiny” of America’s continental empire), commanded ships against the Spanish Armada, and eventually met his death of dysentery in 1596 off the Spanish Main, with Spanish ships in his sight.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, another worthy pirate, tried to establish settlements that would provide England with gold and silver mines to rival Spain’s. He tried twice (1585 and 1587) to found a colony at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, but failed. The second failure left the mystery of “the lost colony”—Roanoke abandoned, the only clue being the word CROATAN carved into a tree.

  The Roanoke Mystery

  No one knows what happened to the Roanoke colonists, though they might have fled to Hatteras Island and joined the friendly Croatan tribe. According to some accounts, the English settlers and Croatans intermarried, giving birth to a tribe of light-skinned, fair-haired, grey-eyed, English-speaking Indians. Some have tried to link the Croatans (now extinct) to the Lumbee, a tribe that claims as one of its descendants Heather Locklear, which, if true, speaks well of the English bloodlines of Raleigh’s settlers. It also leads to an interesting and only rarely made argument for the British Empire. Without it we would not have had T. J. Hooker.

  North Carolina’s shores don’t seem so forbidding to us, but in the sixteenth century they seemed rather more so. When Raleigh next attempted to found a colony, it was on the far wilder shores of Guiana, where he expected to find the lost golden city of El Dorado. His adventures met with ridicule back home and no permanent settlement in the jungle.

  The colonies came when enterprising men like Raleigh gave way to enterprising companies, like the Virginia Company, which bankrolled the first lasting English settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. It was followed by the establishment of the Plymouth Bay Colony in 1620, in what is now Massachusetts. The settlers’ motives were various: some were religious dissenters; most, however, were fortune-seekers. What they found, or developed, was humbler fare than the gold and silver raided from New Spain, but it made for a hard-working people. They cultivated tobacco and sugar. They trapped and traded for furs. They fished the rich coastlines or brought timber from the forests. Unlike the Spanish conquistadors, priests, and hidalgos, or the French Jesuits and voyageurs, the English settled the land with their families, staking out farms or establishing towns and shops.

  The landowners who dominated trade in the sugar islands became very wealthy indeed, and there was an American aristocratic class that held enormous landed estates along the Atlantic seaboard, but the vast majority of British immigrants to the New World came as indentured servants. In some cases their condition was not much different from that of a slave, though with freedom promised after four to ten years of service. They were a varied lot: farmers attracted by cheap land, tradesmen looking for better prospects, the poor and idle swept off Britain’s streets, felons and rebels sentenced to labor in the colonies, and, especially after 1700, the Scotch4 and the Irish, who soon made up the majority of indentured servants.

  Until the eighteenth century, most British immigrants came to the British Caribbean. It had a far higher mortality rate for Britons than the North American mainland, but also offered a greater prospect for riches—sugar plantations were the gold mines of the English colonies. The British colonized St. Kitts (1623), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua and Montserrat (1632), and the Bahamas (1646) and seized Jamaica from Spain (1655). Britain’s empire continued to spread, including attempts to establish mainland plantations in Surinam (which eventually went to the Dutch), British Guiana (Guyana), and British Honduras (Belize). Britain’s Caribbean possessions were pirate’s lairs, sugar plantations, and rum distilleries; they were also battlegrounds, contested territory well into the eighteenth century; and in due course, they became the employers of slaves.

  We Want You for the New World

  Slavery was not an original part of Britain’s colonial system, but the colonists needed workers. The native Indians (those who survived European diseases) were considered unsuitable: shiftless, untrustworthy, and lacking the Protestant work ethic. European indentured servants died in astonishing numbers, victims of malaria, yellow fever, and other calamities. So the colonists adopted the Spanish Caribbean custom of importing slaves from Africa.

  Spain accepted slavery in its colonies even though the Catholic Church had abolished slavery in Europe during the Middle Ages;5 the colonists pleaded necessity, though the Church was dubious. Outside of Christendom, the situation was different. Slavery had never disappeared in the Islamic world—indeed, between 1530 and 1780, roughly concurrent with the Atlantic slave trade, the Muslim Barbary pirates enslaved more than a million whit
e Christian Europeans.6 In Africa, slavery was a long-standing domestic industry, and European slavers tapped into it. The black slaves crossing the Atlantic were usually taken by African warriors and traded by native chiefs for a variety of goods. The slaves were then packed aboard ships where one in ten might die (more in the early years of the trade), eating into the profits, if not the consciences, of the slave traders. It was a dangerous and ugly business. The slave traders’ crews suffered even higher mortality rates than the slaves, mostly from fevers contracted on the West Africa coast: “Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, for few come out though many go in,” went the famous rhyme.

  What a Maroon

  Unlike his son, the founder of Pennsylvania, Admiral William Penn was no Quaker. When he ripped Jamaica from Spanish hands in 1655, he discovered the island was bedeviled by a band of polygamous brigands made up entirely of escaped slaves: the Maroons. The British fought them with redcoats and levies of Miskito Indians (imported from Honduras) until the Maroons were brought to heel by treaty in 1739. In a typical imperial compromise the Maroons were granted their own territory, enlisted as allies to put down future slave rebellions, and became slave owners themselves.

  The African slaves might have been judged hardier and better workers than the native Indians and European indentured servants (the Irish, needless to say, were regarded as particularly incorrigible), but in the Caribbean they too died young, and were often worked to death. Caribbean masters found they could not breed slaves fast enough to replace the loss, so the slave trade grew. Perhaps three million black slaves were brought to British possessions in the New World, and in some of them, especially in the Caribbean, they became the majority.

  The British Empire banned the slave trade in 1807 (enforcing the ban with the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron) and prohibited slavery in nearly every part of the empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which established a process of gradual emancipation that liberated all slaves by 1840 and compensated their owners with cash payments that amounted to twenty million pounds. Nothing in Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade so became the Empire as its leaving of it.

  “Setting the World on Fire”

  The Caribbean dominated British strategic thinking, but it was in the Ohio Territory that, in the famous words of Horace Walpole, a “volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods . . . set the world on fire.”7

  The Seven Years’ War extended from the Caribbean to Africa, from the North American continent (as the French and Indian War) to the Indian subcontinent, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Winston Churchill in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples calls it “The First World War,” and it all began with the action of a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant-colonel named George Washington.8

  Washington was leading his troops to solidify Virginia’s claim to the Ohio Valley against the French. The result was a short, sharp engagement on 28 May 1754 that killed ten Frenchmen (another twenty were captured) and that inspired Washington to write, “I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me there is something charming in the sound”9—a sentiment that many a British imperial officer might have seconded. Less charming was the allied Indian chief who smashed a tomahawk through the skull of a French officer, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, whom Washington was trying to interrogate. The Indian washed his hands in the Frenchman’s brains.

  To the French, Washington’s ambush was an act of murder: Jumonville, they cried, had been on a diplomatic rather than a military mission. His brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, moved swiftly to surround and capture Washington and his men at their hastily constructed Fort Necessity. As part of his surrender, Washington, ignorant of French, signed a document convicting himself of murder.

  In 1755, General Edward Braddock arrived from England. He took Washington as his aide and vowed to avenge the Virginian’s defeat, clear the Ohio Valley of Frenchmen, and even march into Canada. It was an epic march (among his wagon drivers were Daniel Boone and future American general Daniel Morgan), but as it turned out, the sixty-year-old Braddock—a stout, choleric veteran who had been in the army since he was fifteen—never made it to Canada. In fact, he never made it out of the Ohio Valley. His men were massacred in a well-placed French and Indian ambush that left more than 60 British and American officers—and all but 459 of his 1,400 other ranks—killed or wounded. Washington heard plenty more zinging bullets that day: four pierced his clothes and two shot horses from beneath him. Among the dead was General Braddock. Washington had him buried in an unmarked grave on their retreat to prevent the Indians from desecrating the corpse. Washington’s gallant leadership in extracting what was left of Braddock’s army made him something of a popular hero—a fame that would later make him a general, though not in the king’s service. The greater hero of the war, however, was an Englishman named James Wolfe.

  Imperial Summit: Wolfe at Quebec

  When Winston Churchill appointed R. A. “Rab” Butler president of the Board of Education in 1941, he told him, “I should not object if you could introduce a note of patriotism into the schools. Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec.”10 If Braddock’s defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela represented the military disaster that so often began British imperial wars, James Wolfe’s winning of Quebec represented the stunning victory by a memorable commander that so frequently ended them.

  Ginger-haired, skinny, with a pointed nose, weak chin, and a history of bad health, Wolfe hardly looked the hero. He was eccentric and so emotionally volatile that some doubted his sanity. But for all that, he was extremely capable, ambitious, intelligent, and dedicated to self-improvement of body (through martial exercises) and mind (he taught himself Latin and mathematics and read deeply in both literature and military strategy). He was an experienced soldier—commissioned at thirteen and seeing his first combat at sixteen—and chivalrous. In a famous incident, he refused to kill a captured and wounded Highlander after the Battle of Culloden, though ordered to do so. He was truly an officer and a gentleman. But most of all he had the patriotic faith that was the lifeblood of the empire: “For my part, I am determined never to give myself a moment’s concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty is pleased to order us upon. It will be a sufficient comfort . . . to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if not, that is but a few days more or less, and that those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die admirably.”11

  At the Battle of Quebec (1759) Wolfe, a thirty-two-year-old brigadier general, found his apotheosis. The night before his surprise assault behind Quebec City, he recited Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a County Churchyard,” which ends with the line “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” To his assembled brigadiers, he said, “Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than taken Quebec.”12

  Rabid Redcoat

  “Mad is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals.”

  King George II, defending James Wolfe to the Duke of Newcastle, cited in Robin May and Gerry Embelton, Wolfe’s Army (Osprey, 1997), p. 34

  But take Quebec he did. He snuck his troops past French sentries by night, lined his redcoats up on the Plains of Abraham to the skirl of bagpipes, and then waited as the French marched out to meet him. When they were only forty yards distant, the redcoats fired, in what the British military historian Sir John Fortescue wrote was “the most perfect [volley] ever fired on any battlefield, which burst forth as if from a single monstrous weapon, from end to end of the British line.”13 A second volley tore through the French. The Britons advanced and fired, advanced and fired, until they were ordered to charge. Wolfe, shot first through the wrist, then in the groin, and finally in the chest, was led away, mortally wounded. An officer told him, “The enemy, sir. Egad, they give way everywhere!” Wolfe gave his final orders and said: “Now God be praised, I will die in peace!”14 He died the conqueror of New France. With the Treaty of Paris ending t
he Seven Years’ War in 1763, the entirety of Canada was ceded to Britain.

  An Empire of Their Own

  One Frenchman, at least, recognized that Wolfe’s victory would be troublesome for the British Empire. Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, noted that “Delivered from a neighbor they have always feared [the French], your other colonies [the Americans] will soon discover that they stand no longer in need of your protection. You will call them to contribute toward supporting the burden which they have helped to bring on you, they will answer by shirking off all dependence.”15 That was exactly what happened.

  The Americans of the Thirteen Colonies saw a vast imperial domain stretching before them; the only thing standing in their way was the reluctant Mother Country that was more interested in appeasing the Indians of the frontier than fighting them. In 1769, The American Whig editorialized, “Courage, then Americans! The finger of God points out a mighty empire to your sons.... The day dawns, in which this mighty empire is to be laid by the establishment of a regular American Constitution. . . .”16

  John Adams, like many of the founding fathers, saw this future clearly:Soon after the Reformation, a few people came over to the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire to America.

  It looks likely to me: for if we can remove the turbulent Gal-licks, our people, according to the exactest computations, will in another century become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have, I may say, all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain mastery of the sea; and then the united force of all Europe will not subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera.17