The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  1654 had not only seen the Dutch humbled, it had witnessed the Portuguese government make far-reaching concessions to British merchants which were tantamount to an admission that Portugal no longer possessed either the will or wherewithal to uphold its old authority in the East or the Americas. Cromwell next considered a blow against Spain in the West Indies. It would simultaneously damage the wealth and prestige of a leading Catholic power, be interpreted as a victory for Protestantism, and expose the emptiness of Spanish pretensions to a commercial monopoly in the region. In preparing what was called the ‘Western Design’, Cromwell was swayed by Thomas Gage, an apostate Dominican friar whose England in America urged the total overthrow of Spanish power in the New World and its replacement by British. He also listened to the more down-to-earth opinions of Sir Thomas Modyford, governor of Barbados, a planter with a knack of extracting private advantage from official policy.

  In many ways the Western Design was a forerunner of many later, aggressive imperial enterprises. Commercial advantage, private greed and a sense of divinely directed historic destiny were intermingled and bound together, not quite convincingly, with a high-minded moral cause. To excuse what was a pre-emptive attack on the territory of a friendly power, Cromwell’s propagandists presented the expedition as an act of revenge for a hundred and fifty years of Spanish and Catholic atrocities in the Americas. ‘We hold our self obliged in Justice to the people of these nations for the Cruelties, Wrongs, and injuries done and exercised upon them by the Spaniards.’3 Cromwell himself sincerely hoped that the expulsion of the Spaniards and their Inquisition would be followed by the arrival of a new and worthier breed of settlers, ‘people who knew the Lord’ from New England and Ulster.

  On Christmas Day 1654 a fleet of seventeen men-o’-war under Admiral Sir William Penn and twenty transports carrying General Robert Venables’s 5,000 strong army, recruited from the Irish garrison, sailed from Spithead. Five weeks later this armada hove to off Barbados. The campaign opened promisingly with the seizure, in the name of the Navigation Laws, of £5,000 worth of Dutch shipping anchored off the island. After picking up some companies of militia from Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the fleet approached its target, Española. The landings were a disaster, with heavy losses among a force already being reduced by malaria and dysentery. In May 1655 an attack was made on what is now Kingston, Jamaica, and succeeded after half-hearted Spanish resistance.

  The capture of Jamaica was a major coup. The island was ideal for sugar cultivation (some of the surviving soldiers were given grants of land for plantation) and strategically well-sited to command the shipping lanes that ran eastwards from Spanish Central America, Cuba and Española. A Spanish attempt to retake the island in 1658 failed and, after years of grumbling, Spain formally ceded it to Britain in 1671. By then there were fifty-seven sugar refineries in operation, with cocoa being developed as a secondary crop, and Port Royal had become a regular anchorage for Royal Navy men-o’-war. Its development as a naval base was swift; by 1690 it was guarded by the loyally named Forts Charles, James and Rupert and in 1739 a dockyard with barracks and store-houses had been built.

  The seizure of Jamaica was part of a wider plan which embraced the occupation in 1659 of St Helena, an outpost on the Cape route to India, and the projected seizure of either Gibraltar or Minorca as a Mediterranean base. Even without these prizes, Cromwell had demonstrated the effectiveness of a bold, global strategy that would be imitated by successive governments which in varying degrees shared his view of Britain’s place in the world.

  His Western Design was followed, on a smaller scale, by Modyford, now governor of Jamaica, who on the eve of the outbreak of the second Anglo–Dutch war in 1665, proposed a scheme for ‘rooting the Dutch out of the West Indies’. His partners in this private enterprise war were local buccaneers who ‘upon my gentleness to them’ were ready to ‘offer life and fortune to His Majesty’s service’.4 The buccaneers were freelance, seafaring cutthroats who lived by piracy and attracted those on the margins of Caribbean society, including former indentured labourers and runaway slaves. Despite Modyford’s assurances, they were a liability when it came to fighting. During a landing on the Dutch island of St Eustatius in July 1665, the volunteers went on strike until the booty had been parcelled out and afterwards, according to an eyewitness, there was ‘great confusion as usually attends such parties whose plunder is their pay and obedience guided by their wills.’ Nevertheless, with the right leadership and driven by an overwhelming greed, the buccaneers could achieve wonders. In January 1671, commanded by Edward Morgan, a sometime indentured servant on Barbados, they attacked and thoroughly plundered Panama City.

  This coup de main gave Morgan the means to make himself a Jamaican planter and to secure a knighthood, respectability and the governorship of the colony. It also, like Drake’s similar exploits a hundred years before, made a deep impression on the public imagination and reinforced that popular image of distant lands as places where quick fortunes were waiting for the energetic and ruthless.

  The belligerent overseas policies of Cromwell and the subsequent piratical war against Spain in the West Indies satisfied nascent British patriotism and, of course, individual cupidity. They were proof, if any was needed, of what could be accomplished by the audacious use of seapower and how it could enrich the country. This idea was not new; it had been first vented in the mid-fifteenth century by mercantilist propagandists who urged the government to ‘keep the seas’; that is, forcefully assert English control over the Channel. Maritime superiority, this time extended far beyond home waters, had been advocated by Elizabethan expansionists and their message gained a new force as Britain’s foreign trade and overseas possessions increased.

  As well as calling for naval supremacy, the early followers of what would later be called the ‘Blue Water’ school of foreign policy and strategy warned governments to shun continental entanglements that squandered the nation’s treasure and brought no visible profit. In his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies (1711), Jonathan Swift contrasted the costly, laborious and inconclusive campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders and Lord Peterborough in Spain with the dashing enterprise of Bristol-based privateers. ‘Inflamed by a true spirit of our age and industry’, they had ravaged Spanish shipping and taken the Acapulco treasure ship. Far better, claimed Swift, to concentrate national resources on the navy and employ it for a piecemeal conquest of the Spanish Indies rather than pour cash and men into unwinnable wars in Europe.

  In essence, he had put a case that would be repeated by others throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nature had separated Britain from the continent by the sea and through the ingenuity and perseverance of her people she had become dependent on seaborne trade and colonies for her wealth. In the event of a continental war, Britain’s first concern was always the preservation of her overseas resources and the destruction of her adversaries’. The commitment of men and material to any European theatre of war was a secondary consideration, since gains there did little or nothing to assist maritime security or commerce.

  * * *

  The conflicts with the Netherlands had given British statesmen and commanders their first taste of waging a global war, although the struggles in the Caribbean and North America had been peripheral and small in scale. Even so, it was virtually certain that at some time in the future European wars were bound to become global contests between empires with each side seeking to hinder its opponents’ commerce and seize their colonies. To meet such an emergency it was vital that the government asserted its control over the colonies and took measures for their defence.

  It was, argued Charles II’s Treasurer, the Earl of Danby in 1664, a matter of urgency that arrangements were made to ‘bring about the Necessary Union of all Plantations in America which will make the King great and extend his royal empire in those parts.’5 There was more to Danby’s proposal than the assertion of the power of London over distant settlements; close direction of
colonial government would facilitate the raising of local revenues which would be needed to foot the bill for the colony’s defence.

  The implementation of this policy was largely left to a man who became the first imperial civil servant, William Blathwayt. According to the diarist John Evelyn who met Blathwayt in 1687 when his star was in the ascendant, he was a man who had ‘raised himself by his industry, from very moderate circumstances. He is a very proper, handsome person, and very dexterous in business.’ A lawyer by training, Blathwayt had been appointed Clerk of the new Privy Council committee for plantations in 1676; four years later he was made Surveyor and Auditor–General of American Revenues; and from 1683 until 1703 he was Secretary-at-War. His assiduity and experience made him invaluable and so, unshaken by political convulsions, he served successively Charles II, James II, William III and Anne.

  In the process and in common with other Stuart bureaucrats he made money from bribes and he was lucky enough to marry an heiress. Her house at Dyrham in south Gloucestershire became his country seat, which he had rebuilt from 1687 onwards in the fashionable baroque style under the direction of a refugee French architect. The interior decoration was striking: his study was panelled in black walnut shipped over by the governor of Maryland; stairs and stairwells were cut from cypress and cedar wood from South Carolina; and the gardens were laid out in the modish Dutch manner (William III had become king in 1689) and planted with imported flora from Virginia.

  These exotic gifts were tribute from a land where Blathwayt had imposed the King’s will and consolidated royal authority, often at the expense of local proprietors and assemblies. The agents of his policies were usually men accustomed to giving orders and expecting obedience – army officers. It was their experience as much as their temper which recommended them since their duties included making arrangements for the colonies’ defence.

  Until the mid-1670s measures for the safeguard of the settlements in North America and the Caribbean had been haphazard and amateurish. A survey of the military resources of the Leeward Islands, forwarded to London in 1676, revealed their extreme vulnerability. The author, a professional soldier, was dismayed by the tiny garrison of regulars on St Kitts who were ‘in the greatest necessity soldiers ever were, in the sight of the French whose soldiers are well paid, well armed and accoutred’. A polyglot militia was not to be trusted since it was suspected that the French and Dutch volunteers would forget their oaths of allegiance in a crisis. On Nevis there were twenty-two regulars, a small cavalry detachment whose horses were ‘generally used to carry sugar’, and 1,300 militiamen who were ‘the worst for arms he had ever seen’.6 In short, none of the islands could withstand an assault by trained troops.

  The need for garrisons of professional soldiers and closer royal supervision of government was evident in North America. In 1676 Virginia was convulsed by an insurrection led by Nathaniel Bacon against the allegedly feeble Indian policy of Governor Berkeley, his corrupt and partial government, and an assembly where, according to the insurgents, ‘all the power is got into the hands of the rich’. To restore order, the government in London had to despatch over a thousand troops, artillery and warships.7 Whilst Virginia faced what was close to a class war, the New England colonies were engaged in interminable frontier wars against the Indians who were getting stronger thanks to French assistance. Indians captured near Fort Pemaquid in New York in 1689 carried French muskets, bayonets, waistbelts, cutlasses. One, speaking in broken English, told an officer that his people ‘no care for the New England people; they have all their country by and by.’8

  The colonists could not face these perils without outside assistance, and this uncomfortable fact of life made them acquiesce to a series of measures which reduced the powers of local assemblies and great landlords. Administrative adjustments were conceded, sometimes grudgingly as in New England, but colonial parliaments still retained considerable lawmaking powers. These bodies, it must be added, were representative rather than democratic. Like their English and Scottish counterparts, they were the exclusive preserve of men of wealth and property. The North American and West Indian legislatures were filled with planters, estate-owners, merchants and lawyers who were thought to have the best interests of their colony at heart. These men accepted the supremacy of the King’s governors, judges and officials as the price for protection.

  They were not deferential. In 1700, a member of the Nevis assembly protested to an army officer that, since there was no law that permitted the billeting of soldiers on his estate, they could work in the fields alongside the negroes in return for their keep. As for the officer’s orders, he could ‘wipe his arse’ with them.9 Such attitudes, coupled with an indifference to the law which was marked in the North American frontier colonies and some Caribbean islands, made the work of governors an uphill struggle and the process of imposing order and inducing submissiveness was often long drawn out. As late as 1775, Colonel Montford Brown, governor of the Bahamas, complained to the government about the prevalence in the islands of crime. The ‘inability and laziness’ of the Bahamanian made it impossible for him to live other than by smuggling and wrecking; that is, luring ships on to reefs and plundering the wreck. No one, it seemed, understood what was meant by an oath – ‘the grand security of the liberty, the property, and the lives of Englishmen’ – and so the courts could not function.10

  The Bahamas may have been exceptionally anarchic. Elsewhere, as colonies developed, their inhabitants became profoundly aware of how their industry contributed to Britain’s wealth and power. In 1706 the assemblies of St Kitts and Nevis petitioned parliament for over £100,000 in compensation for losses suffered at the hands of the French. The plantations, it was argued, deserved generous treatment on the grounds of the ‘advantage of trade’ that flowed from them as well as ‘the large Returns they made to the public’ from import and export duties. The House of Commons concurred and voted the sum demanded, no doubt seeing it as a valuable investment.

  4

  Dispositions of Providence: The Colonists

  Britain’s overseas colonies would not have happened without large numbers of emigrants who were prepared to abandon their homes, undertake long and hazardous voyages and then submit themselves to a régime of hard labour in an unfamiliar and often unkind environment. Elizabethan expansionists had likened the process to a bodily evacuation, a spewing out of unwanted and harmful matter.1 This image was invoked by a visitor to Barbados in 1655: ‘This island is the Dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish: Rogues and whores and such like people are those which are generally brought here.’2

  Up to a point this was true, and some would have added Puritans and Quakers to the indigent, idle and lawless who were coerced into leaving Britain. There were also plenty of so-called voluntary emigrants who had in fact been cozened into crossing the Atlantic. In 1671, a ‘spirit’ admitted to having kidnapped 500 indentured servants annually, and another calculated one year’s haul at 840.3 Even if these confessions were exaggerated, they indicate that among this, the largest category of emigrant, there were large numbers who travelled unwillingly. Their reluctance was understandable, for their future tribulations were vividly set down in a contemporary popular ballad, ‘The Trapann’d [kidnapped] Maid’:

  Five years served I, under Master Guy

  In the land of Virginny, O,

  Which made me for to know sorrow, grief and woe

  When that I was weary, weary, weary, O.

  I have played my part, both at the plough and cart,

  In the land of Virginny, O;

  Billets from Wood upon my back they load,

  When that I am weary, weary, weary, O.4

  This woman was particularly unlucky since female servants were normally allocated domestic work indoors, although in Maryland during the 1650s ‘some wenches that are nasty and beastly’ were ordered to labour in the fields. The temptation to escape must sometimes have been very great, but so were the dangers of recapture on the island colonie
s or falling into Indian hands in North America. These risks diminished as the colonial population rose and made it easier for the fugitive to find anonymity. One who tried in the 1760s was described by her owner in a Virginian newspaper advertisement:

  Between the Sixth and Seventh Day,

  Mary Nowland ran away;

  Her age I know not but appears

  To be at least full twenty years;

  The same religion with the Pope.

  Short neck, scarce room to fix a rope:

  She’s large and round from neck to hips,

  Brown hair, red face, short nose, thick lips;

  Short, thick and clumsy in her jog

  As neat as any fatten’d hog.

  Upon her tongue she wears a brogue

  And was she man would be a rogue.

  Marriage and a household of her own may have been this Irishwoman’s motive for leaving her employer, although by this time the old imbalance between men and women settlers in the colonies had been redressed. In 1704 there were 30,000 men and 7,000 women, 85 per cent of them indentured servants, in Maryland.5 Those free to do so married young; the average age in Maryland was sixteen, twenty-one in Virginia, and brides were frequently pregnant. Indentured servants, who were usually around twenty-four or twenty-five when their terms expired, married later. There was also a high illegitimacy rate despite the humiliating public punishments laid down for unmarried mothers by colonial legislators.