The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661

The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661

The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 CARLA GARDINA PESTANA

H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2007 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an age of revolution, 1640–1661 / Carla Gardina Pestana. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-674-01502-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10 0-674-01502-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13 978-0-674-02412-0 (pbk.) ISBN-10 0-674-02412-5 (pbk.) 1. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History—17th century. 2. Great Britain—Colonies—Administration—History—17th century. 3. America—History—To 1810. 4. Plantation life—Atlantic Ocean Region—History—17th century. 5. Plantation life—America—History—17th century. 6. Great Britain—History—Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660—Influence. 7. Great Britain—History—Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660. 8. British—Atlantic Ocean Region—History—17th century. 9. Atlantic Ocean Region—Politics and government. 10. Atlantic Ocean Region—History. I. Title. E18.82.P47 2004 973.2′—dc22 2004052610

To Cody and Anderson

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on Dating and Editorial Method

xi

Map: The English Atlantic, 1640–1661

xii

Introduction: Revolution and the English Atlantic 1 Prologue: The English Atlantic in 1640 1 The Challenge of Civil War

14

25

2 Puritan Ascendancy and Religious Polarization 3

Regicide and Royalist Rebellions

53

86

4 Religious Politics of a “Puritan Revolution” 5 Free Trade and Freeborn English Men

123 157

6 Lost Liberty and Laboring People in the Atlantic World 183 Epilogue: The English Atlantic and the Limits of Restoration 213 Appendix 1. Population Figures, 1640

229

Appendix 2. London Pamphlets about New England, 1641–1649 235 Notes

241

Index

331

Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to thank the institutions and individuals who helped to make this book possible. Research has been supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, through both the Summer Stipend program and the NEH-Huntington Library Fellowship; the Huntington Library, for that fellowship as well as the Kemble and Fletcher Jones fellowships; and the American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Year Fellowship. Ohio State University provided funding and release time from teaching duties in the College of Humanities’ Grant in Aid, Faculty Professional Leave, Special Research Assignment, and the Virginia Hull Research Award; in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ research grant; and in a Mershon Center grant. Archivists and librarians helped me get to the sources I needed to write this book. These include the staff at the British Library, London; Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Friends House, London; the Public Records Office, Chancery Lane, London, and Kew; the Scottish Records Office, Edinburgh; Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Bridgetown; Bermuda Archives, Hamilton; the William Clark Library, Los Angeles; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the John Carter Brown Library, Providence; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; the New York Public Library; and the State Library of Ohio, Columbus. Special thanks must go to the Huntington Library, which has provided me with a scholarly home since my days as a graduate student at U.C.L.A. Portions of this manuscript have been presented at seminars, where I have received criticisms and suggestions from many generous colleagues. Thanks are due to participants in the Early American History Seminar (Huntington Library); Early Modern British History Seminar (Huntington Library); Early Modern Seminar (Ohio State University); McNeil Center Seminar (University of Pennsylvania); Seminar on Early American History and Culture (Ohio State University); University of California Faculty Seminar (U.C. Santa ix

x x

Acknowledgments

Barbara); and the West in Global Perspective Seminar (University of Pennsylvania). I first spoke about this project at the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association, Melbourne; a more supportive group of scholars is difficult to imagine. I thank Donna Merwick for the opportunity to participate in that meeting. I also commend the members of FEEGI (Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction) for creating a stimulating and supportive community in which to explore early modern global history. During the years that I worked on this project, I was fortunate to make my academic home in an intellectually dynamic department. I particularly thank my friends and colleagues Geoffrey Parker, Nate Rosenstein, and Leila Rupp for their advice and good cheer. June Fullmer did not live to see this volume in print, but her support and friendship inspired me early in the project. Joe Lynch graciously translated the snatches of bad Latin that crop up in my seventeenth-century texts. Research assistance from Ray Irwin early in the project and from Michelle Wolfe later proved invaluable. Scholars from well beyond the confines of Dulles Hall have answered my questions about history and historiography. I should especially mention David Armitage, Michael Braddick, Holly Brewer, Nicholas Canny, Barbara Donagan, Wim Klooster, and Jane Ohlmeyer for their generous assistance. Joyce Appleby, David Armitage, Drew Cayton, Ian Gentles, Tom Ingersoll, Richard Johnson, Michael Meranze, Geoffrey Parker, Sharon Salinger, Alan Taylor, and Joe Tiedemann each read all or part of the manuscript at different phases, and I was able to improve it as a result of their suggestions. I am also grateful to the two outside readers for Harvard University Press for excellent advice. I began working on this book shortly after the birth of my son Cody, and I made my first effort to write up my ideas after the birth of my son Anderson. This book has been with me and therefore with them their entire lives. I dedicate it to them with love, for their cheerful support of my work and their great questions about “that other civil war that Mama studies.” Without Don as their father I couldn’t have mothered two wonderful boys while getting tenure and writing a foolishly ambitious second book. For what he makes possible for me and for us, I shall always be grateful.

Notes on Dating and Editorial Method

According to the subjects of my study, the new year began on the twenty-fifth of March, a practice that caused some confusion both then and since. An event that they would have dated 1 January 1648 would be dated by us 1 January 1649. I have therefore indicated both years—1 January 1648/9— which seems the only sure way to avoid confusion. Quotations have been given as they appear in the original with the exception of standard word contractions, which have been silently expanded, and the archaic use of specific letters, which has been silently modernized. So where the seventeenth-century settler in Montserrat wrote “Gour,” I have substituted “Governor.”

xi

Newfoundland

NORTH AMERICA

Maine

Massachusetts Bay

Connecticut

Plymouth Plantation Rhode Island and Providence New Haven Plantations

OC EA N

Virginia

Nova Scotia

Long Island

LA NT IC

Maryland

AT

Bermuda

Eleuthera

Antigua Nevis

Jamaica Santa Cruz Providence Island

Montserrat

St. Christopher

Barbados Tobago Trinidad

Surinam

SOUTH AMERICA

The English Atlantic, 1640–1661, showing all colonial outposts controlled by the English government in these years and the section of the African coast that was the focal point of the English trade in slaves at this time. The more

Scotland

Ireland Wales England

EUROPE

AFRICA

Focus of English trading activity

Cormantin 0

500

1000

North

Miles

minor trade in gold and wood that occurred around the Senegambia region was not disputed, did not supply laborers to the Atlantic settlements, and is not noted here. (Map by Ron McLean)

Introduction: Revolution and the English Atlantic

In the two decades before 1661, England, Scotland, and Ireland experienced civil wars, invasions, regicide, religious radicalism, experiments in non-monarchical forms of government, and, in the end, restoration of the Stuart monarchy. These events have long been recognized as central to the history of England, Ireland, and Scotland. More recently scholars have worked to illuminate how the histories of the three fit together, thinking in terms of “the War of the Three Kingdoms,” for example.1 That the Stuart colonies in the wider Atlantic world also shared in this history has not been widely appreciated or even fully explored. Just as England, Ireland, and Scotland experienced revolution between 1640 and 1660, so too did the colonies. Six plantations2 from Newfoundland to Barbados rebelled against the regime that came to power in England in 1649, a little-known fact that suggests how intimately involved the New World settlements were in the Old World battles that temporarily brought down the Stuart dynasty. The rhythms of revolution at the center and rebellion on the periphery were closely related, and the interlock helped to create a new English-dominated Atlantic world and laid the foundations for empire. The revolution literally gave shape to the English Atlantic. Because the colonies were in a formative period—none had reached the age of thirty-five when Charles I called a parliament to help him put down rebellion in Scotland, and most were little more than a decade old—the signal events in the three kingdoms had a profound effect on subsequent colonial history. Before 1640, colonial expansion and plantation governance had been predicated on minimal Stuart involvement and an increasing royal tendency to bestow colonies on individual noble proprietors. These trends—little engagement by the central government and the farming out of the project of plantation to “colonizing aristocrats”—were reversed, as the revolutionary state took an aggressive role in governing colonies.3 Religious divisions that fueled the conflicts in Scotland, England, and Ireland were imported to the colonies, confronting settlers with renewed drives for conformity as well as with increased diver1

2 2

Introduction

sity. Some settlers, like their counterparts who stayed at home, embraced religious liberty; others fought for moral reformation. By 1660, the Atlantic was the most religiously diverse Anglophone community anywhere. The Atlantic world offered unprecedented opportunities for land ownership and profit to some free settlers, as its economy took shape around the monoculture of the more southerly plantations and the carrying trade that buoyed New England. Yet at the same time, and inexorably bound up with that opportunity, the Atlantic settlements expropriated native land and relied increasingly on unfree labor to work that land. Whether indentured, transported, or enslaved, unfree laborers entering the English Atlantic added to the diversity of the settlements. The growing numbers of non-English who arrived in the colonies after 1642 were far more likely to be either bound or enslaved than those who were ethnically English or had arrived prior to that time. Even as the colonies tilted toward unfree status for a large portion of their inhabitants, leading colonists became more concerned to defend their rights. The expansive revolutionary state forced colonists to discuss the basis of the connections that bound them to the center and heightened their concerns about rights and liberties. By 1660, the English Atlantic was more centralized, more diverse, more divided religiously, and more polarized between those who lacked autonomy and those who had power. Commercial, diverse, inegalitarian, and prickly about its rights, this world was born in the crucible of this revolution.4 Regional variations within the Atlantic shaped the experiences of settlers and native peoples to some extent, but many trends transcended regions and tied the Atlantic together. New England has often appeared in the historical literature as an exception, since its relatively homogeneous population, its shared religious vision, and its unusual relation to the Atlantic economy seem to separate it from other settled regions. Yet every colony boasted adherents to the reformed Protestantism that shaped Massachusetts Bay and most of the other colonies in New England. A vigorous commitment to a pure church and godly preaching was not the exclusive purview of early New England. The same could be said of adherence to the Church of England or the willingness to espouse sectarianism; every plantation included some settlers who embraced each of these positions and others who argued for complete religious liberty. The homogeneity and stability of early New England can be easily overstated, as is demonstrated by the various battles over religion and politics that rocked Massachusetts from the colony’s inception. New Englanders did develop an unusual relationship to the burgeoning Atlantic economy: they carried goods in competition with the merchants of England. Products of their own region that they sold were more likely to be extracted resources—such as fish or lumber—or agriculturally produced foodstuffs. In other regions the local merchant class was less well developed,

Introduction

3 3

but it was the very unusual plantation with no resident merchants at all. Extraction of natural resources added to the economic activities of Newfoundland, newly planted Surinam, and many colonies in between. New England was not unique in this respect either. All colonial regions—with the partial exception of Newfoundland—became integrated into the Atlantic economy; and all profited from unfree labor and expropriated Indian lands. All regions housed residents who worried about their own rights as Englishmen. Every outpost also experienced struggles over toleration, allegiance, and self-definition. In other words, all were members of this new Atlantic world and as such were engaged in the great questions at its heart. This shared experience of living on the periphery at a time of tremendous upheaval at the core profoundly affected residents of all colonies. The English Atlantic world was, in a number of crucial senses, born in these decades. The great movement of peoples (out of England in particular, and to a lesser extent out of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) that populated the Atlantic world began in the 1630s, the period of the so-called Great Migration. Like many other aspects of colonial history, this migration was originally described as uniquely focused on New England, but it was a much broader movement that created or dramatically expanded the population of all the English settlements in the wider Atlantic world.5 People are of course important to the creation of a new community, but they are not the only necessary component. The Atlantic world came to life only after the people residing in these far-flung settlements lost their narrowly transatlantic orientation (looking only to their native land on the other side of the ocean) and began to foster ties to other Atlantic plantations. The creation of that interconnected world was the work of the 1640s. To a great degree the revolutionary events, directly or indirectly, knit settlers together. John Winthrop’s correspondence illustrates how his own world gradually expanded. In the 1620s, Winthrop was living in England and received almost all of his letters from within England. The vast majority of them were from absent family members. These patterns were typical of many lesser gentry families. In the 1630s, after Winthrop moved to Massachusetts, his correspondents resided both in New England and in his native England. By the end of that decade, he was eagerly watching as events unfolded at home, and the number of letters he received from England jumped in 1637 and again in 1640, as family and friends wrote to inform him of the unfolding situation there. Only in 1641 did Winthrop begin to receive letters from other colonies, but by 1646, the number of letters from other Atlantic locations exceeded those from England. Winthrop’s move to Massachusetts expanded his horizons to add New England to his long-standing connection to England (and also to an interest in Ireland not recorded in the surviving letters); but it took war, burgeoning trade, and the

4 4

Introduction

scattering of his own family across the Atlantic basin to further expand his correspondence. Over the course of the 1640s, Winthrop’s world became Atlantic in scope, stretching to include the other colonial outposts along its coasts and on its islands.6 Given the revolutionary nature of changes in England, Ireland, and Scotland at a time when the Atlantic settlements were very new, those events reverberated through the plantations and affected them in a variety of ways. Revolution touched the colonies directly, as when Parliament approached colonial governments requesting declarations of allegiance to its cause or when Quakers poured into the plantations to proselytize for their new faith. The revolution recreated itself in the Atlantic as well. Planters—inspired by local issues as well as by positions on events at home—launched royalist rebellions in six colonies. Elsewhere, feuding factions drew on the language of revolution to castigate enemies as disloyal to the king, the Parliament, or the revolutionary regime. Revolution created new problems for some as it created opportunities for others. Conservative elites attempting to maintain their places in the volatile Atlantic world confronted rebellious underlings whose drive for freedom and prosperity could be justified by using the rhetoric of revolution. In this they shared much with the traditional leaders of London, who rode herd on an increasingly politicized population and came to wonder about the wisdom of supporting the revolution, given the forces it unleashed.7 Colonies could not help but be caught up in the changes occurring in their metropolitan culture, often in spite of the best efforts of local leaders. In more modest ways the colonies influenced the changes overtaking their homeland. Once religious reformers gained the upper hand in England, their compatriots in the colonies hoped to guide them in their decisions about the nature of reform there. By the late 1650s, the Atlantic may have been a haven from the strife of England, but it was also known as a site of unfreedom. The sharp increase in coerced labor in the English Atlantic helped pave the way for the return of the Stuarts by reflecting ill on the various revolutionary regimes. Oliver Cromwell’s effort to conquer Spanish colonies in the West Indies put a severe financial strain on his government and galvanized opposition to it. Jamaica, although it would eventually become the most profitable and important British colony in the Atlantic basin, helped to discredit the revolutionary government. The two-way impact of colonies and metropolis on the unfolding of events in these two decades has not previously been explored. This book began as a self-conscious effort to break out of colonial history in the classic sense of that term. American colonial history has traditionally been conceived as the first (and least significant) chapter in the history of the United States. This emphasis dictated the geographic scope of colonial his-

Introduction

5 5

tory—limiting it to those colonies that would become part of the United States. For many years this emphasis also determined the topical scope of that history, focusing inquiry on those aspects that pointed toward the most cherished qualities of the United States. American colonial history was literally Whiggish in its inception—arising as it did from the need to craft a colonial past suitable for a postrevolutionary American society, one that had won its independence through the work of patriots (or Whigs) who led the thirteen colonies to rebel against Britain in 1776. American colonial history was also Whiggish in its conceptualization, with the evolution of liberty as its chief organizing category. The raison d’être of colonial history was to explain the United States. An Atlantic approach, by denying the centrality of the hallowed thirteen, cannot fit comfortably into this conceptualization. A narrow focus on the mainland colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia assumes that the United States was exceptional, a conviction that is enshrined in many generations of American history writing. A broader perspective reveals the shortcomings of such assumptions and of the arguments erected upon them.8 When I began the research for this book, I described it as a study of “all the English colonies” during the mid-century revolution. Since then scholars have embraced the phrase “Atlantic history” to describe a broadened perspective.9 This book contributes to the field of Atlantic history and indeed bears the mark of many conversations I have had with fellow “Atlanticists” about this topic and the field generally. Much of the lively discussion about the nature of the Atlantic world has suggested that there were, in effect, multiple early modern Atlantic worlds.10 The term “Atlantic” often appears with an adjectival qualifier, such as “black” or “British.” Paul Gilroy’s influential study The Black Atlantic explored the cultural diffusion that occurred as a result of the transoceanic African slave trade. British historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have embraced the term “Atlantic,” often using it as a shorthand reference to the largely Atlantic-based “first” British Empire. Comparatively little discussion of the Dutch, French, Swedish, Portuguese, or Spanish Atlantics has occurred to date. Indeed, scholars of the early modern Dutch have debated whether a “Dutch Atlantic” existed at all.11 In addition to scholars concerned to understand the African slave trade, scholars of British history have emerged as the Atlantic world’s most avid students. The reasons for this enthusiasm are varied, but they have in large part to do with recent changes in how that field is conceptualized and taught.12 Some readers may question whether the Atlantic world I am exploring is best described as “English.” The term was chosen advisedly, as the most accurate descriptor. Although the colonies in the wider Atlantic world began and ended these two decades subject to the king of England, Wales, Ireland,

6 6

Introduction

and Scotland, for much of the period they were controlled from England and, after the regicide in 1649, by a series of English revolutionary governments. Whether ruled by Stuarts or by revolutionaries, the colonies were expected to conform to English law, a stipulation made in many colonial charters.13 Imposing English law was central to the conquest of Ireland as well, and in this (and other matters), parallels between Ireland and the transoceanic colonies are clear. One exception to English political and legal domination in this period would seem to be Nova Scotia (or “New Scotland”), except that the Scottish hold over the colony had been eliminated when Charles I abandoned Nova Scotia to France in 1631. When it came back under “British” rule in 1654, an English expeditionary force under the authority of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell engineered the reconquest.14 Although the primary reasons for using the term are political and legal, “English” Atlantic is also the ethnic descriptor of the majority of inhabitants of these Atlantic outposts. Very few Scots resided in the Atlantic world between their evacuation from Nova Scotia in 1633 and the influx of transported prisoners of war that began in 1651. The Irish were more numerous than the Scots over the entire period, although they too were a distinct minority. The same was true of the smattering of other Europeans living in these colonies. Even African slaves, whose numbers in Barbados rose rapidly from the mid-1640s and had probably reached parity with the white population by 1660, remained a minority presence in the English Atlantic world as a whole.15 English numerical dominance would not last out the century, but at mid-century, these were very literally colonies of (mostly) English peoples. Focusing on that portion of the Atlantic claimed and controlled by England, this study treats only one possible Atlantic world. It does not attempt an extended exposition on the settlements and trading posts controlled by other European states. These colonies come into my story mostly as the neighbors, trading partners, and adversaries of the settlers who lived under English rule. An article could be written on the impact of the revolution on the French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies of the New World, but I have not provided that account here. Europeans who lived under English rule, whether Irish or Scottish, Dutch or French, do receive attention in this study. The non-English inhabitants of these colonies often were their most elusive and interesting residents. One such figure is the oddly named Kempo Sybada, a Connecticut inhabitant described repeatedly as a Dutch man, who joined the English forces sent to conquer the Spanish West Indies in 1654– 55.16 The Irish, who lived in nearly every colony and dominated Montserrat, are a significant non-English group. Because of the focus on the English Atlantic to 1660, Africa plays a much smaller part in this story than it would in a later period or in other sectors of the Atlantic world at this time. English

Introduction

7 7

trade in Africa was minimal in 1640, and when it began to expand after middecade, its early progress is difficult to chart. Hence the African part of the English Atlantic story is somewhat sketchy before 1660, and Africa comes into view largely as a source for the slaves that English settlers, especially those in Barbados, began buying increasingly (from non-English as well as English merchants) during these years.17 Sugar cultivation on Barbados and the revolutionary state’s desire to control colonial trade sparked the new interest in the slave trade, one of many developments in this pivotal period that would shape the future English (and later British) Atlantic world. By focusing on the period prior to the creation of the Royal African Company, I explore the initial moves to integrate Africa into the English Atlantic world, moves which would come to link England, Africa, and the colonies. The mid-century revolution that rocked England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland establishes another broad context for this study. The “troubles” started in 1639, when Scotland rose up against Charles I in opposition to his efforts to remake the Church of Scotland in the image of the Church of England. The Irish rebelled against unpopular religious and economic policies in 1641, further complicating the problems confronting Charles’s government. Before the end of 1642, Charles and a majority of his English Parliament (which he had called to help him put down the Scottish revolt) were at war. By 1649, parliamentary forces had scored victories in two civil wars. A revolutionary remnant of the Long Parliament executed the king as a traitor to the people and declared that henceforth England would have a government without monarchy, bishops, or House of Lords. Not satisfied with this revolutionary remaking of England, the new regime moved to subdue the other kingdoms of the Stuarts—invading, conquering, and occupying both Scotland and Ireland. It also, less famously, subdued the American dominions formerly under the authority of the Stuart king. At home, the new rulers of England, Scotland, and Ireland struggled to achieve a workable constitutional settlement. That government survived until 1653, at which time Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector. This quasi-hereditary rule endured until Cromwell’s son Richard was persuaded to step down in 1659, only months after his father’s death. Commonwealth government resumed, but in 1660 it was brought down in favor of the return of the Stuarts. Charles II, son of the executed king, regained his father’s throne in May of that year.18 This political narrative of events masks some of the radicalism that these years witnessed, as—in the words of contemporaries—the world was “turned upside down.”19 Religious and social innovations as well as political ones were discussed and tried, and conservatives believed that their world was falling apart. Revolution affected those in the Atlantic basin as well as those who had stayed at home.

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Introduction

It remains somewhat controversial to call the changes that wracked the Stuart kingdoms a revolution, although I am persuaded that the radical transformation in government did indeed amount to revolution. Older scholarship confidently referred to these events as revolutionary, either as a “Puritan Revolution”—to underscore the prominence of godly critics of the Church of England—or as a more general “English Revolution.”20 Beginning in the 1970s, revisionist scholarship attempted to demonstrate how “unrevolutionary” England was. Responding to the idea that the revolution marked the culmination of a long-term shift (from feudal and aristocratic to modern and bourgeois), these scholars argued that nothing fundamental to the nature of English society or government was at issue. In particular, historians such as Conrad Russell declared that no long-term causes existed for the civil wars, regicide, and rejection of monarchy, and that therefore these events cannot be understood as revolutionary. This school tends to emphasize the ineptitude and dishonesty of Charles himself as the reason for the breach.21 Revisionism forced scholars who insist on the revolutionary import of these events to deal with the contingent and even inadvertent nature of the changes that occurred after 1640. More recently a number of scholars have resurrected the term “revolution” to describe the events at mid-century, and most of them focus on the dramatic political upheavals that brought down not just a king but also the institution of monarchy itself. Others still use a Marxist framework in the tradition of early writings by Christopher Hill, although the idea that long-term economic and social-structural changes were at the root of the problem is no longer as common as was once the case.22 In my view, at least regicide (even if it was justified by Charles’s violation of the law), the end of monarchy and of a separate house for aristocrats and bishops in the parliament, and the creation of a republic were revolutionary acts. They constituted a “distinct shift in the nature of English government,” as Ann Hughes has argued. Certainly observers in the wider Atlantic world understood the radical transformation of their homeland as extreme, shocking, and unprecedented. The term “revolution” itself came to be used in its more modern sense in this era in relation to the events in England, according to Ilan Rachum. The radicalism of these two decades—including the religious radicalism of Quakers and Muggletonians, the political radicalism of Levellers, and the social radicalism of Diggers—underscores the momentous nature of changes taking place. That the revolution failed in the end, to be replaced by restored monarchy and (relatively) conservative religious settlement, does not minimize the extent of the transformation that was attempted.23 Some scholars of British and Irish history see Ireland as one English colony among many in the Atlantic world, but I have not followed this convention

Introduction

9 9

of including Ireland in the Atlantic world for the purposes of this study. David B. Quinn, Nicholas Canny, and others have underscored the parallels between Ireland, which was technically a kingdom but was treated in some ways like a colony, and the “transoceanic territories,” as Canny labels them. Two shared features are language used to denigrate the natives and the system of planting English (or, in the Irish case, both English and Scottish) settlements that would impose English political, economic, legal, and religious practices. These parallels are instructive, and the similitude is intensified in the period under question.24 The English presence in Ireland dated back to the twelfth century, however, and by the seventeenth had created a political and social landscape that was far more complex than was the case in the “New World” colonies. As kingdoms in their own right, Ireland and Scotland each had its own specific relationship to the Stuart monarchy, and they were not directly analogous to the king’s dominions of Bermuda and beyond. That was true even though they—in common with some rebellious colonies—had to be conquered later by the triumphant English revolutionaries. Although scholars of the “English Revolution” did not recognize the import of Ireland for many years, Ireland is now understood as integrally a part of the problem of the three kingdoms, and much recent scholarship has struggled to fit together the histories of England, Ireland, and Scotland.25 My aim is not to replicate that work on a larger scale but rather to place the heretofore untold story of the wider Atlantic world into the context of recent findings about early modern Britain and Ireland. For my purposes, the major significance of those who remained in Ireland and Scotland lies in the parallels or counterpoints they provide. For example, both Ireland and Scotland, like the rebellious settlements in North America and the Caribbean, were forcibly brought under the control of the English state in the 1650s. Similarly, soldiers deployed to Jamaica were no more interested in being paid in land than were those who fought in Ireland. Irish and Scots people who traveled to English colonies increasingly during these years enter the story by virtue of living in colonies controlled from England and located in the area beyond the archipelago off the northwest coast of Europe.26 The broadest context for this history is neither colonial America nor seventeenth-century Britain but the early modern world and the movement of Europeans and Africans through the Atlantic basin. Revolution at the metropolitan core radically altered both the European home government and the colonial situation. No American colony of any other European state experienced a comparable breakdown at the imperial center until the French Revolution a century and a half later. The colonial context for the French Revolution—primarily island colonies dominated by slave labor—greatly influenced the ways in which revolution at the center affected the periphery, particularly

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Introduction

Haiti, during that struggle.27 The mid-seventeenth century, though a time of general instability, did not produce direct parallels to the crisis that confronted the residents of the English Atlantic. The uprising in France known as the Fronde did not ultimately topple the French monarchy and therefore did not present French colonials with similar dilemmas.28 Portugal’s colonies across the Atlantic (and indeed in Africa and Asia) all threw off their allegiance to Madrid in the 1640s, but only in concert with a revolution in Lisbon that replaced Philip IV of Spain as king of Portugal with John, duke of Braganza, in December 1640.29 The Hapsburgs faced numerous revolts in their possessions (in Europe and elsewhere); but Castile, the heart of the Hapsburg monarchy, ultimately held firm. No Hapsburg lost his head on the executioner’s block, as was the sorry fate of Charles I.30 Not until the late eighteenth century would the American colonial possessions of a European power again face the implications of revolution in their home country. Even the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 was in fact a coup staged by a portion of England’s ruling elite in conjunction with a European ruler with distant claims to the throne, and plantation governments responded by accepting the outcome, usually by ousting the resident representative of the displaced Stuart king.31 From the Atlantic rim, the impact of 1688 did not begin to rival that of 1649. Given the importance of these years both to the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland (which has been widely acknowledged) and to the history of the various Atlantic plantations, it is remarkable that no book exploring these connections in a broad context has been written heretofore.32 Nicholas Canny has suggested that revisionist history in Britain challenged the older assumptions that linked puritan revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic; with the eclipse of revisionism, it may be possible to explore the links that did matter in the seventeenth century.33 Another reason may be the difficulty of finding source material. Most of the standard primary reference works and archival categorization schemes omit or banish to a separate category the interregnum materials; this creates the erroneous impression that sources have not survived. To give only one example: the standard source for early Americanists studying imperial history, the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, abstracts fewer of the surviving documents for the interregnum than for the periods preceding and following it, and many of these are hidden in an often ill-catalogued addendum.34 Without searching the calendar series thoroughly, and without making extensive use of other (often less familiar) finding aids, the scholar would conclude that little evidence endures. Though difficult to locate, sources for this study do exist; admittedly they tend to be spottier on some colonies than on others. In putting together this history, I have used a wide variety of records, ranging from official sources to private

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papers, from polemical pamphlets to weekly news reports. By casting my research nets widely, I was able to haul in sufficient information. I open with a prologue setting the scene in the colonies in 1640 and end with an epilogue that describes that world in the early 1660s. The prologue surveys the plantations just before the outbreak of war in England, at the end of a decade when their number rose sharply and the European population in them grew dramatically through migration. The epilogue sums up the changes that had occurred, examining the state of the English Atlantic at the Restoration. Between are six thematic chapters exploring the history of the revolution in an Atlantic context. The first chapter deals with the most obvious practical political problem presented by civil wars: What should colonial governments do about the need to choose sides? It documents the extent of partisanship in the wider Atlantic as well as the official responses of colonial governments to the controversy. Chapter 2 focuses on religion in the 1640s, when it at first seemed that not only many of the colonies but also England itself might follow the ecclesiastical model adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Bay’s intolerance dashed the hopes that this radical reform movement would become the new orthodoxy. The New England model proved impossible to transfer to other polities that lacked the widespread commitment to godliness characteristic of much of that region. New Englanders launched unprecedented efforts to convert Native Americans to Christianity, as part of a campaign to undermine heterodoxy and revitalize the region’s flagging reputation at home. Whereas the first pair of chapters deals with the 1640s, the third chapter explores the royalist rebellions of the early 1650s, focusing on the three most thoroughly documented cases. Locating these upheavals in the context of each colony’s history, it notes how local tensions helped to shape the response to the demise of Charles I. It also uncovers the Atlantic version of royalism and documents the complete success of the republic’s campaign to subdue the rebel plantations. The rebellions marked a watershed, and once they were put down, the English Atlantic was bound to the new Commonwealth government. Chapter 4 treats the religious policies and practices that the center dictated: the suppression of the Church of England, the promotion of godly reform, and toleration of all Protestants not within the Anglican fold. To these somewhat contradictory directives, colonies responded by pursuing one or two of the goals, but not all three. Reform and suppression of the old established church could be made to work together, as was achieved in the most puritan-influenced colonies. But toleration went well with neither vigorous reform nor complete repression of Anglicanism. A variegated but generally more diverse religious landscape emerged, and the efforts of Quaker missionaries added to the diversity. The 1650s also witnessed a struggle over the nature of the connection be-

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tween the new English government and the former dominions of Charles I, examined in Chapter 5. Once the English government succeeded in quashing rebellions and gaining control of the colonies, it pursued a new policy designed to systematize governance of these outposts. Parliament passed key acts in 1650 and 1651 that severed the existing ties to the center in most plantations and sought to alter the recently established patterns of colonial commerce. Colonial landowners opposed this imperial vision and accused the English government of attempting to enslave planters who sought freedom to trade. The new leaders of Atlantic societies used the ideology of the freeborn English man to claim rights for themselves and to counter parliamentary claims to exercise dominion over them. Distant colonists used this emphasis on shared identity to remain attached to the government of England in spite of its changing nature. The impact of the dramatic rise in coerced labor is explored in Chapter 6. While colonial elites were identifying themselves as freeborn English men, they were importing massive numbers of unfree laborers—political malcontents, prisoners of war, Irish exiles, and African slaves. Those at the bottom of the new Atlantic social hierarchy strove for freedom, and their desire to escape bondage dramatically shaped the emerging English Atlantic world. It was a great irony that the revolution fought against Stuart tyranny at home increased the subjugation of those in the wider Atlantic. Discontented workers ran away, turned to piracy, or—among the soldiers on Jamaica—mutinied. As the revolutionary impulse subsided in despair over the failure to achieve many of its goals, England embraced Restoration. The government of Charles II reaped the benefits of what had been accomplished by the governments that had ruled in his stead between regicide and Restoration. His government declared its intention to reverse changes that it identified as incendiary. The reality saw little reversal but much obfuscation of the original source of the many improvements. The Restoration government embraced innovative trade laws, shorn of their association with those who had opposed early Stuart economic (and other) policies. Charles retained Jamaica, captured by an energetic state on a self-proclaimed mission from God against both Stuart tyranny and Catholicism, in spite of his previous assurances to the Spanish king that he would return it. The new government accepted other changes as well. The reliance on racial slavery in those plantations given to monoculture was not just accepted but furthered by the creation of the first English monopoly slave trade company. The Restoration monarchy opposed both the intolerance and the established faith of most New England colonies and worked—without much success—to replace diversity and dissent with a Church of England establishment. Most changes wrought in the 1640s and 1650s could not be reversed, and Charles II accepted them with more or less

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satisfaction. But his government attacked disloyalty wherever it was perceived. Colonists grabbed the opportunities this animus toward disloyalty created for besting local rivals, just as they had used accusations of opposition to the revolution in the previous decade. Yet the Atlantic plantations remained committed to Englishness, to the need to protect the rights of freeborn English men, and to finding room to maneuver toward greater economic and religious freedoms, just as had been the case in the revolutionary era. The campaign to obscure the importance of this period for the later history of England, Britain, and colonial America began with the Restoration rewriting of the accomplishments of the revolution. Colonists, hoping to retain what they had and to avoid association with the treasonous past, generally embraced this rewriting. Unintentional vagaries of record classification later aided this willful forgetting, so that the history of interregnum colonial initiatives is hard to follow through a bureaucratic maze in which all the signposts were set up in accordance with the system of royal governance. If decisions were made by a Council of State rather than a Privy Council, where are they filed at Kew? If the Interregnum Entry Books contain the needed information, but the Privy Council records claim to cover the whole period while silently omitting all reference to the alternate system that was at work during the interregnum, only the most tenacious (or luckiest) researcher will figure that out. Charles II’s agenda of forgetting while reaping the benefits of his enemies’ many innovative policies has been aided, no doubt unintentionally, by bibliographers less thorough and less knowledgeable than Charles McLean Andrews.35 This book recaptures that history and establishes the significance of these years for the creation of an English Atlantic world and an English imperial system.

Prologue: The English Atlantic in 1640

The English Atlantic world was on the verge of dramatic transformation in 1640. Years of civil war, regicide, and governmental experimentation in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland would bring unforeseen changes to the lives of Charles I’s subjects in twenty-four distinct settlements ranging from Newfoundland, off the northeastern coast of North America, to Trinidad, near the northeastern coast of South America.1 Recent migrants, largely though not exclusively from England itself, peopled this world in 1640. Of the approximately fifty thousand people residing there in 1640, most had arrived in the previous decade.2 The vast majority lived in settlements more than a decade old, since the fifteen founded since 1630 comprised fewer than eight thousand people.3 The Stuart dominions beyond the three kingdoms sprang up opportunistically and therefore were not unified under a single, centralized system. The variegated landscape thereby created did not share a unified purpose or a common nature, but it did have numerous discernible features which established a baseline against which the changes of the two decades that followed can be measured.4 The Stuart dominions in the Atlantic were owned and controlled by powerful men or chartered companies that exercised authority from England. The major exception was the colony of Massachusetts Bay, where the power granted by the king was exercised within the colony itself. In all plantations free men strove to acquire not only access to land but also title to it, and they struggled against company and proprietary policies that aimed to limit their ownership. The colonies were largely ethnically English, as the bulk of the migrants had been drawn from that Stuart kingdom. Plantation residents were subjects of the Stuart king, a fundamental bond that tied each man, woman, and child back to Europe. Ties to England were paramount, and not just politically and psychologically. The economies of these nascent plantation societies revolved around England; ill-developed economies depended on supplies from England, and colonists struggled to exploit resources that could be exported in return. Tobacco, grown in many older colonies for over 14

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a decade by 1640, glutted the English market, but settlers continued to plant it for lack of a better option. Tobacco cultivation as well as the effort to transfer English life to the New World created a demand for servants, and a minority of plantation residents had arrived as servants, usually with short-term labor contracts. Some of them had come involuntarily, generally because they were poor vagrants and therefore subject to transportation to a colony. Few slaves toiled in these English plantations in 1640, and those that did were perhaps as likely to be Native Americans as Africans. Although in England and Wales religion had recently become polarized over the efforts of the king and his clergy to reform the established Church of England, that polarization did not characterize most plantations. The colonies largely continued to encompass a range of Protestantisms within the established church, where the biggest problem was not dissent so much as the challenge of transferring Old World religious institutions to nascent colonial societies. New England churches, while claiming to be within the Church of England settlement, promoted a reformed ecclesiology and praxis that made it unusual. It included a large proportion of migrants hostile to the religious changes overtaking the Church of England, and settlers—including a remarkably large proportion of clergymen—erected churches based on models other than the legally established form in England. In 1640 an interested observer might well have thought the outlines of the world that was emerging in the Stuart Atlantic dominions were clearly visible. It was a world dominated by powerful nonresident men, peopled by recent English migrants, tied by commerce and affinity to England, with a fairly homogeneous faith. Great men—most of whom never gazed upon a single colonial plantation—owned the English Atlantic world and sought to control it. Had the English produced a map of North America and the Caribbean in 1640, most of the mainland coast and all of the islands that were not held by other European nations would have appeared as English territory. They did not, however, produce a map, leaving that work to the Dutch for most of the century.5 From Newfoundland down to Trinidad, a few elite men, three English charter companies, and, in one case, the king himself asserted direct authority over great expanses. Formal proprietary grants covered Newfoundland, Maine, Maryland, and specific islands in the Lesser Antilles, while Trinidad, Piscataqua (New Hampshire), southern New England, and Long Island were claimed by those who purchased rights to grants made to others. Companies controlled Bermuda (also known as the Somers Islands) and Providence Island as well as Massachusetts Bay. The Crown directly ruled Virginia. Even areas with no English presence—such as the mainland north and south of the Chesapeake region, the Bahamas, and various uninhabited leeward islands— were encumbered by English claims. The same was true of regions actively

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controlled by other European powers, since the Dutch and Swedish colonies between the Chesapeake and New England were said to have been illegally planted on English land. Scottish claims to Nova Scotia had not been abandoned in the treaty that assigned it to French Acadia. This inactive claim was the only one of non-English origin in the entire Stuart dominion.6 On parchment, at least, the subjects of Charles I or the king himself laid claim to the entire area beyond the borders of Spain’s American empire. Proprietary colonies predominated in 1640. Classic charter companies, seated in London and directing plantation affairs from afar, governed only Providence Island and Bermuda, most other charters, most notably that for Virginia, having lapsed. In a move that mirrored the autocratic turn under personal rule by Charles I, Atlantic activities shifted from chartered companies toward proprietary ownership by aristocratic men or groups of men during the 1630s.7 By 1640, four individuals—the earls of Carlisle and Warwick, Lord Baltimore, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges—and one proprietary group actively claimed sections of North America or the Caribbean as their private domains. Unlike the predominantly English migrants who resided in their colonies, this group of proprietors included men with extensive Scottish and Irish interests; Carlisle, though he lived most of his life in England, had inherited a Scottish earldom, while Baltimore, who resided on his Wiltshire estate, owned lands in Ireland from which his title derived. The most significant of these “colonizing aristocrats” was Carlisle.8 His letters patent, dated 1627, covered islands in the eastern Caribbean (including Barbados). The Caribbee Islands proprietary held sway over some twenty thousand people by 1640. Lesser proprietaries ranged from Trinidad to Newfoundland. Trinidad was the possession of Robert Rich, the earl of Warwick. Unlike Carlisle, Warwick never received a grant from the king. In 1638 he purchased a patent from the earl of Pembroke; the resulting settlements would prove short-lived. Although Warwick had more extensive interests in America during this period than any other English man (having also been involved in Virginia, Somers Islands, and Providence Island companies as well as the Council for New England), his role as a proprietor was limited, as was the importance of his one lightly populated colony.9 Newfoundland was covered by a 1637 proprietary grant to the Scottish marquis of Hamilton, the earls of Holland and Pembroke, and Sir David Kirke. Kirke himself settled with one hundred colonists at Ferryland on the southeast coast in 1639.10 More populous than Newfoundland, Maine had perhaps five hundred residents, living in three or four coastal villages and as many fishing stations, along the coast between Piscataqua and Casco Bay. The proprietor, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, had received rights of dubious legality from the old Council of New England but had been fortunate enough to have these confirmed by the king.11 Although Maryland had originally been included in the Virginia Company charter, the

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re-granting of that land by the monarch in 1632 was legally uncomplicated, since Virginia had by then become a royal colony and the land was therefore the Crown’s to grant. Still, when colonists dispatched by Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, arrived in 1634, they had to confront the men on Kent Island. Used since the 1620s as a trading post by Virginia resident William Claibourne, Kent Island had recently been settled by him with the help of English backers.12 Maryland, half a dozen years old in 1640, remained on a precarious footing, a high death rate having reduced the population to only about six hundred people.13 In all, nearly half the residents in the Stuart Atlantic of 1640 lived on land owned by a (usually nonresident) proprietor. A few small settlements fell through the cracks in this haphazard system, although it was not clear that such oversights would be allowed to remain for long. New England had once been controlled by the Council of New England, but that group surrendered its charter in 1635. Before doing so it divided its lands among the remaining members. The king had not confirmed the reallocation of the Piscataqua (now New Hampshire) region, southern New England, or Long Island. Settlers in these areas could therefore choose whether to negotiate their own relationship with any beneficiary of the council’s largesse who pressed a claim. Even though the division of council lands was of questionable legality, settlers took a risk in ignoring those claimants. The Piscataqua River settlers (numbering perhaps five hundred) were entirely independent of any English claimant by 1640.14 Those who left Massachusetts Bay to found Connecticut and New Haven did so without authorization from the purported English owners, although John Winthrop, Jr., arriving as the settlement of Connecticut got under way, demanded that the colonizers enter into an agreement with the aristocrats and gentlemen he represented. When that agreement expired a year later, Connecticut was on the same unofficial footing as neighboring New Haven and Rhode Island; all three could be characterized as “squatter” colonies.15 Settlers migrating from Lynn, Massachusetts, to erect the town of Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island, paid the agent of the Scottish earl of Stirling for the right to settle there. Accepting payment may have been the only proprietorial act the earl or his agent ever performed for these one hundred or so colonists.16 In Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Haven, Connecticut, and Long Island, colonists functioned independently of any English proprietor. They often shored up their claims by purchases from or agreements with local Indians. Settlers around the Narragansett Bay (later Rhode Island and Providence Plantations) made a series of such purchases in the mid-1630s.17 The king intended to straighten out this squatter problem by giving Gorges charge of the entire region, a plan that was set aside as the king’s own difficulties at home increasingly demanded his attention.18 The expectations of the great men who owned the settlements contra-

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dicted those of the settlers who lived in them. Planters sought to own the land they worked and to have the say in government that went with land ownership in England, despite the claims of proprietors or charter companies. As one observer put it, settlers objected that English lords “exact rent, and would fain be absolute.” Warwick had trouble getting colonists to accept the governor he sent, acquiescing in 1640 to the popular choice after his own candidate was rejected.19 By 1640, about half of all colonies had created a legislative body that would allow planters a degree of self-government, regardless of the plans of their colonial masters. Residents of Newfoundland, Maine, the smaller islands under Carlisle’s patent, and Providence Island had been prevented from pursuing this course by a strong proprietary presence or by a particularly autocratic company.20 Marylanders had recently made a bid for greater legislative powers, and their third assembly, sitting in 1639, initiated legislation rather than simply confirming acts sent from England by the proprietor, as the colonists had been instructed to do.21 Even Charles I, ruling without parliament at home, had tacitly acknowledged the existence of the Virginia House of Burgesses, which had—in any event—been functioning without explicit permission since his father assumed control of the colony a decade and a half earlier.22 The settlers who chose to migrate to New England had selected a colonial destination that promised not only reformed religion but also the prospect for individual land ownership and local control over government. Efforts to keep the government in the hands of a select group within the Massachusetts Bay Company had failed when the male household heads demanded and got (save for a restriction based on church membership) the right to send representatives to the annual meeting of the assembly. The smaller New England colonies all distributed land freely to household heads and granted some measure of participation in government to the same group. New Englanders were exceptional in escaping from direct intervention by a proprietor or distant charter company, but their goals were shared by leading colonists everywhere who strove for these benefits. Indeed, Karen Kupperman has argued that settlers’ success at achieving these goals was essential to a colony’s survival.23 Almost everywhere, the king, noble proprietors, and charter company members confronted the contradictions between their expectations for handsome rents and extensive authority, on one hand, and the settlers’ desire to own their own land and influence the local political process, on the other. In these infant colonies, the primary economic relationship was with England. All plantations were heavily reliant on the ships that plied the Atlantic seasonally, bringing new settlers and servants as well as essential supplies that could not be produced locally. Those colonies controlled by charter companies were legally limited to trading with ships dispatched by the Providence

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Island Company or the Somers Islands Company, although colonists tried to circumvent this regulation.24 New proprietary colonies, most notably Maryland and Trinidad, received regular visits from ships sent by the proprietor. The trustees of the estate of the earl of Carlisle—creditors to the first earl who had been named trustees prior to his death—sent ships and agents to capture the elusive profits from the trade to Carlisle’s islands.25 New England, while free to trade with all comers, received numerous visits from England in the 1630s, as ships ferried settlers along with needed supplies to the new colonies. The massive out-migration from England helped to bind these new Atlantic settlements to the center, since the passenger-carrying trade vastly increased the number of English ships sailing Atlantic waters. Competition from other European ports was largely Dutch, but English ships were more important before 1640. The London traders whom Robert Brenner dubbed “the interloping merchants” were extremely active in American waters in the decade before the outbreak of the civil war.26 Others worked out of Bristol and Plymouth. The primary crop produced for export by colonists in 1640 was tobacco. It was cultivated in Virginia, Bermuda, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands of St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua, along with some cotton and indigo.27 The boom time for tobacco exporters had passed, and planters were not especially satisfied with the results of their (or their servants’) efforts, but they persisted in growing the crop. Government efforts to curtail tobacco cultivation and to force planters to diversify, such as the edict promulgated on St. Christopher in 1639, were as common as they were ineffective.28 As West Indies planters knew, an export of some sort was essential if they were to maintain trading ties and acquire basic necessities. Most of the Atlantic plantations were literally dominated by English men. Most colonies had a male majority, even in New England, where migrant families helped somewhat to balance the sex ratio. The predominance of the English was not the result of any policy decision but rather arose from the vagaries of migration in the 1630s. Proportionally more English people migrated to the Atlantic world in the 1630s than would be the case at any other time. They were joined by Irish—who especially traveled to the island of Montserrat—as well as a small number of Scots.29 A smattering of other Europeans lived in many colonies as well. More polyglot than the Spanish colonies, where official policy aimed at maintaining a homogeneous population, the English Atlantic world was still predominantly English in 1640. Africans, who would later make up a large proportion of the population in many English-controlled colonies, were relatively few in 1640. Except on Providence Island, where enslaved Africans constituted a majority, they were a small minority in all the English colonies.30 In Barbados, where there were probably more than in many other settlements, Africans numbered only a few hundred

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out of a total population of about ten thousand.31 The same was apparently true in the Chesapeake.32 The English leeward islands, Bermuda, and New England had imported few slaves.33 In some colonies a Native American was a much more common sight than a person of African origin or descent. Especially numerous on the mainland, where colonizers directly displaced native peoples and expropriated their lands in order to establish colonies, Native Americans were a presence in most colonies. At this early date, relatively few lived within colonial society, usually as servants or slaves in settler households; most continued to reside within their own communities despite the devastation of disease and the loss of lands to the intruders. The social structure of the English Atlantic was fairly compressed in 1640. The great men with interests in the plantations rarely visited, much less took up residence. When two well-connected young men traveled to Massachusetts in the mid-1630s, they were exceptions to the rule. Sir Henry Vane, eldest son of an official in the royal household, intended to reside in the Bay Colony but returned home after becoming embroiled in the controversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson, while James Ley, heir to the earl of Marlborough, apparently journeyed to New England merely to satisfy his curiosity and stayed only a few months.34 That elite men chose not to migrate meant that the social hierarchy was not transplanted in toto to the New World. Aristocrats were entirely absent, and even gentlefolk were somewhat thin on the colonial ground. The governors of Newfoundland, Maryland, Virginia, and St. Christopher had all been knighted. Other gentlemen, usually representatives of the minor gentry, such as John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay or Anthony Brisket of Montserrat, occasionally migrated. Generally the free settlers were people of more modest means, who sold all they had in order to finance their removal to a colony. Other migrants who were unable to pay their passage signed indentures to serve for a set number of years (usually four to seven) in exchange for their transportation. These individuals were at best landless laborers who took ship across the Atlantic after migrating within England in search of work. Some servants did not freely sign indenture contracts but were sent to labor in the plantations because their homelessness or petty crimes had brought them to the attention of the authorities. So although the colonies did not boast the top tiers of the English social hierarchy, they did receive some persons from the bottom, the poorest of the poor. Bound servants migrated to all colonies, though the Chesapeake and the Caribbean islands received most of the very destitute, who worked in the fields. In most places, laborers who survived their indentures could expect to receive land. Opportunities were already more constricted in Barbados, where ex-servants sometimes had to sign new indentures to avoid starvation.35 Early arrivals who survived to accumulate property on the islands or in

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the Chesapeake formed the core of the local leadership. Admission into those lofty ranks for ex-servants was closing off by 1640. Still a compression of the English hierarchy, an indigenous social hierarchy was taking shape within plantation society by 1640. The Atlantic world as a whole recreated some of the divisions that rent English Protestantism, even though most individual colonies did not experience internal rifts comparable to those in England. Most polities accommodated a mix of Protestant sensibilities, much as the Elizabethan church had once done. Those who favored affective preaching lived among those who wanted a religious praxis based on the Church of England prayer book. Nowhere had Laudian reforms made a notable impression on plantation worship, and therefore the reaction against those changes was not evident either. Many colonists could be classed as “puritan” in their religious sensibilities, that is, supportive of a reformed Protestantism more akin to that of John Calvin’s Geneva or John Knox’s Scotland than of the England of Charles I. This was true not only for those who had journeyed to New England but for settlers in many other places as well. Providence Island, the Somers Islands, and Virginia all included many migrants and investors who favored reformed religion. Many of the “puritan grandees” interested in colonization had been involved in these and other efforts, and they worked to promote godliness in the plantations.36 But exporting English religion to the New World proved such a difficult challenge that most colonies struggled to make any sort of organized spiritual life available to migrants. Most colonial governors were happy to employ a minister to fill a vacant pulpit, even one who would have been denounced in England for his violation of Laudian strictures. Church of England services proceeded without the substantial church buildings that dotted the English landscape and often without the vestments, communion plate, and other accouterments of worship at home. Because of a paucity of ordained ministers, worship might feature a layman reading from the Book of Common Prayer. That tome, as easily transported as the Bible, was the most likely of those Anglican accouterments to appear in the early colonies. Because no church courts were erected in the English Americas, the laypersons who lived outside of “orthodox” New England experienced a diminution in ecclesiastical oversight of their spiritual and sexual lives at a time when such oversight was on the rise at home. No ecclesiastical hierarchy policed whether ministers wore the surplice, genuflected, or even used the prayer book. Outside New England, religion was not so much divisive as it was institutionally weak.37 With ministers few and just as likely to succumb to disease in this environment as any other migrant, religious worship was often left to the individual believer or household. Much of New England featured reformed churches, representing one end

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of the spectrum of praxis that the Church of England was struggling to contain at home. A large proportion of clergymen in the migrant population facilitated the gathering of churches and the offering of worship services. Harvard College, founded in 1636, promised a continual supply of ministers. The leaders in Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven—both lay and clerical—saw colonization as an opportunity to erect a reformed religious polity. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, settlers in those plantations were watched more closely and disciplined more effectively than they had been in England—and they in turn had responsibility for the watchful care of their neighbors. Since they simplified worship and replaced oversight by bishops with that of the congregation, their praxis transferred more easily into the “wilderness.” The orthodoxies worked out in these three colonies varied somewhat, but all were dedicated to a militant form of Protestantism that had been forged in the fires of the Laudian persecution in England.38 As a result, those determined to adhere to the Church of England were left out of the ecclesiastical community, creating the potential for divisiveness uncharacteristic of the 1630s Atlantic world more generally. Many voted with their feet, either opting to migrate to other colonial regions in the first place or moving out of the core New England colonies as the new orthodoxy emerged. Peripheral settlements like Maine stayed with the Church of England and attracted small numbers of settlers because of it. There too religious life tended to be institutionally weak and comparatively lax, like all the ostensibly Anglican establishments in the colonies. Most plantations enjoyed a fairly harmonious if weakly established religious polity, although a range of ecclesiastical arrangements existed from one end of the Atlantic to the other. A keen observer of the Atlantic scene in 1640 might have predicted a number of future developments, based on the available evidence. The dominance of great men over the New World plantations would have been expected to continue and become stronger. Plans to withdraw the Massachusetts Bay Company charter and bring that entire region under the control of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, though temporarily set aside, clearly pointed the way to a future of powerful proprietaries. Among Gorges’s mandates was to bring New England into line with the other Atlantic plantations as an outpost of Church of England worship and allegiance to the monarchy. Although a Newfoundland proprietor exaggerated when he wrote to Archbishop Laud “that the air of Newfoundland agrees perfectly well with all God’s creatures except Jesuits and schismatics,” he exactly captured Laud’s sense of the proper direction for future colonial development.39 Our hypothetical keen observer might not have expected the religion of the “puritan” New England colonies to be transformed but would have seen no reason to expect the practices endorsed there to spread. At best New England might remain a re-

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formed backwater within a sea of Anglican orthodoxy. Discussion of appointing a bishop for the colonies also indicated that the Church of England would gradually be strengthened there. Other trends might also have been expected to continue: the predominance of English peoples and trading ties, the emergence of a local landowning class that balked at the need for subservience to the powerful proprietors and companies, and the use of servant labor in plantation economies. Whether colonial governors would succeed in weaning their populations away from tobacco cultivation would have been unclear, although future conflict over that issue could easily have been anticipated. What economic niche agriculturally unpromising New England would occupy must have seemed uncertain as well, especially since in 1640 most of its economy served the needs of new arrivals to the region. Everywhere that they held sway, proprietors had their work cut out for them getting resident household heads to pay rents. Perhaps the efforts of the Carlisle trustees to impose duties on exports would have appeared more promising, despite the difficulties they were experiencing in getting these paid. The desire of landed men in all colonies to have a say in local government, which was spreading in 1640, was one area of potential conflict that the colonial watcher could have anticipated. An uprising in favor of a role in government would shortly occur in some of Carlisle’s lesser islands.40 The servant trade, especially to the Chesapeake and southern island plantations, was an economic trend that would have seemed sure to continue. A shift to other labor sources would have been harder to anticipate in 1640. A phenomenal movement of peoples into the English Atlantic between 1630 and 1640 had created a new world there. It was a world of great variety, ranging from the fishing villages of Newfoundland to the tobacco plantations of Barbados. A range of governments held sway over the English Atlantic. Charter companies seated in London appointed governors and councils for some colonies, while squatter settlements lacking any clear authorization from England sheltered individuals who agreed among themselves to be guided by civil compacts. Whereas New England included many more or less intact families, in other locations migration patterns and deaths from disease made family life a rarity. This great variety could mask common characteristics. The settler populations (including servants) had been born elsewhere— usually in England—so that they were by birth the subjects of Charles I. Their subject status bound them to England and to their king. They lived under English law (with some local variations) and tried to recreate English institutions. Like the English they had left behind, they traded with a variety of Europeans, but as residents of English outposts, they carried out most of

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their trade with their fellow countrymen. Some of them, especially in New England, were caught up in English religious conflicts; many others, though aware of these controversies, were more complacent about them. They knew that the powerful men who controlled most of their colonies expected to draw rents or other profits from them, but they aspired to own land and enjoy a measure of personal autonomy reserved in England for a relatively small portion of the population. Those who were servants hoped to outlive their indentures and enter colonial society as free men and women. None of them—not the company members, not the proprietors, not the settlers or the servants, not even the king himself—could have anticipated the changes about to overtake their world. In the next two decades that world would be remade in a revolution no one had foreseen. Nearly all the predictions one could reasonably have made about the nature of the English Atlantic world would be overturned in those years.

1 The Challenge of Civil War

Residents of the Stuart dominions watched with fascination as war engulfed first Scotland, then Ireland, and finally England. The crisis that would lead eventually to civil wars, regicide, and the establishment of a commonwealth was under way by 1640, when an uprising in Scotland forced Charles to call two parliaments in rapid succession after ruling for over a decade without one. Both parliaments, but particularly the second (which sat so long that it was known as the “Long Parliament”), assailed royal policies. By August 1642, relations between the monarchy and Parliament had deteriorated to the point where both sides began to mobilize troops. The first battle was fought at Edgehill in October. War continued for four years, with the Battle of Naseby in June 1645 turning the tide in Parliament’s favor. Finally, Charles surrendered to the Scottish army in June 1646. The Scots handed the king over to their English allies early in 1647, but factionalism within the victorious Parliament and its radicalized army, as well as Charles’s intransigence, stalled negotiations. With radicals gaining the upper hand, Charles escaped in November 1647. His Scots subjects raised another army, this time to fight on his behalf against the increasingly radical English. Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army handily defeated the royalists the following year. By the end of 1648, the king’s forces vanquished and his military cause lost, Charles’s fate lay in the hands of his opponents. The standoff between king and Parliament that marked the first phase of the revolution was nearing its end. Between 1640 and 1648, the English Atlantic was severely divided over the question of allegiance raised by events at home. Colonists at every social level supported either the king or Parliament. In the context of this extensive ideological engagement, colonial governments—like their counterparts in many English and Welsh localities—wanted to remain out of the fray. Leaders across the political spectrum agreed that war would be fatal to their infant plantations. Fearing attack and internal strife, colonial leaders either pursued policies of neutrality or did not act vigorously in support of their official com25

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mitment. Elites ranging from Virginia royalist William Berkeley to Massachusetts parliamentarian John Winthrop chose a policy of noninvolvement. Small and vulnerable colonies had the most trouble following this course, either because they were pulled into the fray against their will or because they saw a chance to strengthen their position by aligning themselves with an increasingly successful Parliament. Maryland experienced severe disruption, in an example of the former case, while Providence Plantation (later known as Rhode Island) used ties to Parliament to its advantage. The ideological fissures in the Atlantic plantations reveal their integration—despite the best efforts of their leaders—into English politics. Colonies that clustered in the king’s or in Parliament’s camp had ties that helped dictate their allegiances. The royalist colonies were all proprietary, endorsing the rule of a sovereign lord over the plantation as well as over the Stuart kingdoms. Pro-Parliament colonies were newer, peopled by those who objected to Stuart policies, and tied to the parliamentarians by client-patron relations. If the reasons for affiliation can be traced to long-standing affinities that connected Atlantic residents back to England, the reasons why colonies tried to avoid civil war were firmly rooted in colonial realities. Most agreed that involvement would be devastating. The few who departed from that position had compelling local reasons to do so. The colonial response to civil war combined engagement with the issues animating the metropole with concerns for the safety and prosperity of the plantations themselves. Between these two poles most colonies favored safety, while at the same time feeling passionately about the drama unfolding at home. When royalists and parliamentary forces went to war in the summer of 1642, they threw settlers and leaders in the Atlantic colonies into an awkward situation. Dependent on England for continued population growth through migration, for most of the trade that fed, clothed, and otherwise supplied their settlements, and for authorization and defense of their plantations, the Atlantic elites knew that civil war at home could be disastrous for their new and vulnerable settlements. Although many settlers—among both the leadership and the population more generally—cared deeply about the crisis of the three kingdoms, no colonial government joined in the affray in any meaningful way. Whatever the official position of a given colonial government—and these ranged from strong support for one side or the other to neutrality—the course each adopted was designed to protect its settlement from becoming involved in the imbroglio. The challenge for most colonial governments was how to stay out of the war and maintain their precarious position in the Atlantic world despite the conflict. The wider Atlantic world was low on the list of priorities engaging the king and the Parliament during the 1640s, and they did little that was overtly in-

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tended to pull the Stuart dominions into their contest. They nevertheless shared a number of assumptions about how the colonies related to the struggles in England. Both Charles I and the leaders of the Long Parliament believed that New England would support the parliamentary cause. Parliament’s leaders in fact assumed that all the migrants who had left England in the 1630s, for whatever colonial destination, had done so out of discontent with Charles’s policies and that the Atlantic rim therefore housed numerous potential allies in their battle with the king. The king did not share this general assessment of widespread discontent with royal rule but instead hoped for loyalty from his New World subjects, at least those residing outside New England. Somewhat contradictorily, both king and Parliament believed that the best way to ensure loyalty in the Atlantic settlements was by capturing the support of the company or proprietor in England that ruled a particular colony. This top-down vision of allegiance may have been especially common in royalist circles, although parliamentarians shared it to some extent as well. Finally, both thought that colonies supportive of their cause could contribute by closing their ports to enemy ships and by punishing visitors or residents who revealed their affinity for the other side. Each hoped to see the colonies adhering to its own camp, and each made a number of small gestures intended to elicit that support. Only when the king became most desperate did he put any real hope in receiving assistance from his American and Caribbean subjects, and they would disappoint him. The colonists’ inability or unwillingness to support his cause would be amply demonstrated. The New World plantations did not always respond as the king and Parliament assumed they would. New England did tend to favor the parliamentary rebels, though not uniformly and not with the energy that Parliament wished. Newer settlements and newly arrived inhabitants were somewhat more inclined to support Parliament than those in older settlements, but the idea that the allegiance of a colony would follow that of its proprietor or company was disproved on numerous occasions. Instead settlers picked their own path through the challenges that faced them in the 1640s. Not all proprietary plantations adhered to the king, but all of those colonies firmly in his camp were in fact proprietary-owned, regardless of any signals coming from the specific proprietor. Although the top-down vision of allegiance did not prove accurate, some colonial leaders may have felt an affinity for royalism that was in keeping with their experience of personal fealty to the proprietor who owned their colony. Finally, the belief that Atlantic settlements would (or indeed could) support the war effort was disproved time and again, and by adherents of both sides as well as by those who formally declared their neutrality. *

*

*

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The residents of the English Atlantic world cared deeply about what was transpiring in their native England in the 1640s. Throughout Europe, and indeed everywhere that Europeans had planted colonies, colonists eagerly sought news of the cataclysmic events unfolding in Ireland, Scotland, and England.1 From the moment the Scots rose up against their king in 1638 to circumvent his ecclesiastical policies, the unfolding crisis riveted their attention. The terms correspondents used to describe the developments captured their import: “great Trialls,” “sad condition,” “perilous tymes.”2 Such language was repeated endlessly, as each new turn of events seemed as portentous as the last. English correspondents obliged the widespread desire for news with detailed letters about the “tymes,” some of which survive.3 Roger Williams enclosed a “paper” on the “English-Scotch distractions”—riots that occurred prior to the outbreak of the first Anglo-Scottish war—in a letter to John Winthrop. Similar exchanges of news occupied the correspondence of the two men until the death of Winthrop in 1649.4 Travelers carried newsweeklies that reported on military and political events, exposing colonists to the burgeoning popular press. Any news that arrived—whether relayed by a ship’s crew and passengers or contained in letters entrusted to them—was shared widely and discussed eagerly. A planter on the Caribbean island of St. Christopher revealed that he knew of the July 1642 appointment of Essex as Lord General of the parliamentary army when he refused to drink a toast to Sir Thomas Warner as Lieutenant General of the Caribbee Islands, stating that he acknowledged “no generall but the Earle of Essex.”5 From George Fenwick in Saybrook Fort (in southwestern New England) to Philip Bell, governor of Barbados, settlers knew enough to deem 1643 “the worst and most dangerous tymes.” Bell was not feeling any better about the state of affairs by 1645.6 People who lived far from the major entrepôts—whether in the hinterland or infrequently visited port towns—pleaded to be kept informed. Concord, Massachusetts, had heard nothing since the Battle of Naseby (June 1645) as of the following December.7 Eagerness to learn what was happening was widespread and continual. Many settlers went beyond curiosity, however, to cheer for one side in the conflict. Royalist sentiments were widely expressed. Plymouth resident George Willard challenged the assistants to the governor to explain why they failed to administer the oath of supremacy.8 Captain William Jennison of Watertown, Massachusetts, “questioned the lawfulness of the Parliament’s proceedings in England” and was “doubtful whether he might take their part against their prince.”9 Acting deputy governor Giles Brent of Maryland offered a toast “to the King sans Parliament.”10 Lord Baltimore worried that his colonists in Maryland would taunt Parliament’s supporters with the sobriquet “Roundhead.”11 One Hingham resident challenged a Massachusetts

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warrant because it was not issued in the name of the king.12 Although ordered by the Somers Islands Company in London to adhere to Parliament, one of the many governors of the Somers Islands (or Bermuda) attempted to put into effect an order from the king, smuggled into the colony without the company’s approval.13 Newfoundland was said to harbor numerous “notorious malignants,” a phrase commonly used to describe royalists.14 Royalist convictions were espoused from Barbados to Newfoundland. Those who endorsed Parliament’s position did so with equal vehemence. Just as the St. Christopher man who toasted the earl of Essex indicated his bias in favor of Parliament, royalist Virginia included a number of inhabitants who cheered on the king’s enemies. Some residents balked at taking an oath of loyalty to the king in 1645. When war with the Indians distracted officials from continuing the systematic administration of the oath to all inhabitants, some observers thought that this interruption had narrowly forestalled violence. Rumors circulating among royalists hinted that parliamentarians, eager to bring down the only Crown colony, had engineered the attack.15 Some residents of the Somers Islands energetically supported the company’s order to adhere to Parliament, informing on the governor’s royalism and implementing religious policies they believed consistent with Parliament’s position.16 An eight-year-old “muletto gyrle” in Bermuda, Sarah Layfield, was presented before the court in 1640 for “foolish and daingerous words touching the person of the king’s majesty.”.17 Presumably young Sarah picked up her information, and quite possibly her views, from listening to adult conversation, but the adults in her life were more discreet and did not, so far as can be determined from the surviving record, come to the magistrates’ attention. Despite the problems with record survival, support for Parliament can be documented in nearly every colony. Vocal support for one side or the other in the contest in England did not translate into official policies or practices intended to assist either the king or Parliament, because colonial governments responded to the civil wars by trying to avoid becoming involved. In doing so, they acted out of a realistic assessment of local circumstances, and they thereby arrived at a position much like that of many county or town leaders in England in the opening stages of the war. The desire to remain neutral was a pragmatic response to the dangers war brought with it. Widespread neutralism, as this position has been called, was once thought to indicate a general lack of engagement in the issues that divided the king from much of his Parliament. More recently, scholars of civil war England have suggested that a desire for neutrality could go hand in hand with deep commitment to one side or the other. Attempted neutrality did not arise from unconcern; indeed, it might be a sign of a severely divided local populace or simply a wish to see the very real differences between king

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and Parliament settled without resort to arms.18 The drive for neutralism in the Atlantic world had similar roots: it was a gesture of self-defense, even selfpreservation, rather than of unconcern. Out of a realistic assessment of the dangers that war in England and on the seas represented to infant plantations, colonial leaders strove to stay out of the conflict. The great distances that separated the plantations from the main theaters of war made it easier for the colonies to remain aloof; but distance also increased the sense of danger.19 Being cut off entirely from England seemed a real possibility in the Atlantic plantations, though it was not one of the concerns of those in the provinces within England and Wales. From the perspective of the Atlantic elite, remaining out of the war had many virtues. On the most basic level, it protected colonies from the consequences of making a poor choice. A plantation that backed the losing side courted retribution by the winner. Sanctions against a colony or punishment of its individual leaders were frightful prospects, and no government or magistrate willingly risked such suffering. Colonies that chose to back the loser might face the loss of charter rights and other privileges that justified settlers’ presence in the New World, protected their claims to land, and authorized their governments. All but a few colonies—New Haven, Connecticut, and Plymouth—had some authorization for their existence.20 Most plantations were supported by authorization, whether in the form of a charter granted to a colonizing company or a patent to a proprietor or group of proprietors. Settlers did not always like all the terms of these arrangements, and some, like the Barbadians, worked to improve them. But charters protected local rights and were therefore appreciated, at least selectively. Henry Ashton’s 1646 letter to the earl of Carlisle makes it clear that colonial governors avoided endorsing any position that would seem a violation of the terms of their charters or commissions. He noted that “some begann to Cavill because there was noe mencon [in a statement from Parliament in support of Carlisle’s right] that your severall grants were from the King . . . but it was resolved then that the words (under the broad seale of England) without nameing the King, was noe new expression, but, according to the old stile.”21 Following the “old stile” afforded protection to skittish leaders nervous about undermining their authority by innovating. Richard Vines, Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s governor in Maine, hoped for direction from England to resolve disputed sovereignty claims, but not if it violated his vulnerable little settlement’s charter rights. Instructions were appreciated, he declared, only “soe far forth as they doe not intrench upon the liberties of Saco.”22 This concern was shared by those who governed chartered boroughs in England itself; they too feared revocation of the cherished charter in times of conflict with the authorities.23 Within the wider Atlantic world, such con-

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cerns to protect the legal foundations of settlements were typical from Maine to Montserrat. Massachusetts was especially anxious to preserve its charter, which gave it unprecedented local autonomy. The charter granted rights beyond those of free born English men, as colonial agent Edward Winslow pointed out, making Massachusetts the legal equivalent of one of those “peculiar and privileged places” within England that enjoyed “special powers of self-government.”24 The king had intended to recall the colony’s charter during the preceding decade, impressing on the Massachusetts elite its vulnerability to such intervention. This knowledge encouraged the government to remain somewhat aloof, and the powers granted in its charter were jealously guarded. In the meantime, Massachusetts was painfully aware that its beloved charter emanated from a suspect source. As Parliament secured numerous victories against the king, this fact became more awkward. In 1646 Samuel Danforth, publishing an almanac with the Cambridge press, included a chronology of past events that listed the Massachusetts charter without reference to the king who issued it. Silence was replaced in the 1649 almanac with a blatant lie. In that year Danforth’s chronology claimed that Parliament (which had not been sitting in spring 1629) had bestowed the cherished charter.25 Danforth seemed primarily concerned, as were many of his compatriots, with maintaining the legitimacy of the charter, regardless of its association with monarchical rule. Protecting charter rights was a central concern that might dictate a neutral course but at least mandated a cautious one. Massachusetts’s less than enthusiastic support for Parliament was largely attributable to this issue. Non-engagement also prevented colonists from acting on false or outdated information. Living an enormous distance from their homeland at a time when it was wracked by civil war, colonials learned what was going on in the three kingdoms only sporadically. News traveled slowly. Letters and even official directives might never arrive on the other side of the Atlantic. Those who ran colonies from afar—whether proprietors, charter companies, or the Crown itself—sent instructions intermittently if at all. In one case a proprietor made the mistake of sending important documents to his colony with the rascal Thomas Morton, who demanded money before he would turn them over.26 As with all early modern correspondence, transatlantic exchanges opened with a history of the correspondence, noting letters sent and received.27 The need to compose such litanies was exacerbated for colonists and their correspondents by the uncertainty of transatlantic communication. The greater distances involved increased exponentially the likelihood that news would go astray. This alone made aligning a colony a tricky task. The royalist newsweekly Mercurius Aulicus accused rebel emissaries of inaccu-

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rately portraying events in England in an effort to win Virginia.28 Misleading a colony would be relatively easy, given how difficult it was to discover the truth at such a distance. Unreliable information complicated the process of figuring out what course to follow in response to unprecedented events. When instructions were contradictory, as was the case during this period of competing claims to rule the plantations, decision making became more difficult still, as John Winthrop noted in his journal when he learned that Virginia had received missives from both sides containing conflicting orders.29 Colonial governments also feared attack, another difficulty that non-engagement helped to avoid. All the Stuart plantations had relatively small populations. By 1640, four major centers boasted a combined population of about 38,000. Massachusetts Bay’s population was the largest of any single political unit with 12,500, but residents were spread over a greater area than the slightly smaller (10,000) population of Barbados. Virginia came next, with a population of 8,000, probably slightly higher than that of the islands of St. Christopher and neighboring Nevis combined.30 These major centers were able to mount some defense, but scattered population and minimal attention to fortifications limited the ability to resist a sustained attack. In southern New England, for instance, only Boston Harbor, Plymouth Plantation, and the mouths of the Connecticut and Mystic rivers boasted fortifications. Bringing in an engineer experienced in fortifications, as John Winthrop, Jr., did with Lionel Gardiner (who constructed the Saybrook Fort on the Connecticut), was unusual.31 Other colonies, with smaller populations and fewer fortifications, had less chance of fending off attackers. In 1646 one West Indian governor complained that his settlers had spread out to reside on their agricultural plots, making it impossible to gather them quickly to defend the island.32 An assault launched on a colony from the sea—as any onslaught would be—not only would stop trade but also might decimate a colony’s main port town. Island colonies were especially vulnerable to blockade, as Barbados would later demonstrate. Neither king nor Parliament ever planned a full-scale assault on a colony as part of its civil war strategy, but fear that they might guided colonists’ choices nonetheless. Warfare on the high seas was a more immediate threat, and all colonies worried about ships being taken. Ships of aligned colonies—or of those that were presumed to be affiliated with Parliament—were routinely attacked. Although an ambitious royal plan in 1644 to cruise Atlantic waters seizing rebel ships was never put into effect, the king and Parliament both issued privateering commissions granting individuals license to take the ships of disloyal owners.33 New Englanders lost so many ships that in September 1644 Boston merchants debated taking a royalist ship anchored in the harbor to make up some of their losses.34 The government decided, however, that this escalation

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of the conflict was ultimately too dangerous, and the merchants agreed to forego their prize. Later the king’s nephew, Prince Rupert, captured a number of colonial ships and was greatly feared in New England as a result of these depredations.35 The maritime war reached across the Atlantic, affecting all plantations and further suggesting the wisdom of non-involvement. Colonial leaders, especially on the mainland, also feared Indian attack, which they believed might be more likely at this time. Some thought that neighboring Indians, if they knew of the disruption in England, would attack a colony, realizing that it could not expect aid. When four New England colonies formed a confederation in 1643, they cited fears of both other Europeans—“people of severall Nations and strang languages”—and the natives. They linked the threats from both groups to the civil war: “by reason of those sad distaccons in England which they have heard of, and by which they know we are hindred, from that humble way of seekeing advise, or reaping those comfortable fruit of protection which at other tymes we might well expecte.”36 Virginians worried that Indians and resident parliamentarians would work together toward the massacre of all of Charles’s loyal subjects. Some even alleged that Parliament’s supporters stirred up the Indian offensive of 1644, telling the natives that the colony could expect no assistance during the civil war. Even John Winthrop heard that the Indians in Virginia had launched their attack aware of the war then raging in England, but he believed that they had figured it out for themselves after two English ships fought in a local river.37 In Virginia’s case at least, royal colony status increased fears of Indian attack. Another advantage of remaining out of the contest was avoiding the possibility of being cut off from intercourse with the wider world. Since colonies were peculiarly dependent on ships for news and trade, they were loath to take a side that would preclude dealing with whatever ships did arrive. Barbadians were anxious for free trade, a concern that mounted as they turned toward sugar production on a large scale, and this motivated their neutrality. The tendency toward neutralism among merchants in England itself arose from a similar source. Many colonies, especially the smaller ones, complained that ships’ captains did not visit them often enough. Under the circumstances, turning away traders was an extreme measure, and one that was rarely taken even by the most partisan colonies. When Sir Thomas Warner allegedly mandated that “noe Londoners might come ashore” at St. Christopher, he made a gesture that few others were willing to emulate. Virginia was unable to uphold its policy of trading only with ships loyal to the king. This dereliction was necessitated by the concern to defend the colony’s basic interests of “Health, Peace and Plenty,” as one 1649 pamphlet describing the colony’s trading activity declared on its title page.38 Governor William Berke-

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ley apparently never used a commission from the king to seize rebel ships. When Lord Baltimore accepted a privateering commission early in the war, the assembly in his province of Maryland opposed its use, concerned, as all planters were, about getting a sufficient number of ships to visit every harvest season.39 Similarly bent on maintaining a free and open trade, Massachusetts Bay asked Parliament that its harbor be made a combat-free zone, so that ships from the warring camps could anchor side by side without engaging in hostilities.40 In 1645, when Parliament gained control of all the trade out of England, its offers of trading privileges to various colonies became more appealing.41 At least until that time, however, the need to keep the essential lines of trade open offered a good reason to avoid championing either side. Affiliation with either king or Parliament could also pose problems in a colony that was divided over the issue of which side to support. Many settlements risked internal conflict if battle were joined. All plantations experienced divisions over the great question of allegiance and struggled to keep differences from erupting into violence. Virginia combated a tendency among colonists to clash over ideological affiliation. A number of inhabitants balked when the acting governor tried to get everyone to swear allegiance to Charles I. In the volatile atmosphere of the Chesapeake, even provocative expressions of the official policy might be punished. The colonist who expressed his royalism in a 1643 toast “to the damnation of [parliamentary leader John] Pymms God and the Confusion of the Parliament” was charged with disturbing the peace.42 The government of Virginia also apparently turned a blind eye to the fact that at least one leading resident sailed with a commission from the earl of Warwick to seize royalist ships, despite residing in a royalist colony.43 Although identified with the king, Virginia generally sought to avoid pushing contrary-minded settlers to the point of war. The situation was not as extreme as in the Channel Island of Jersey, where a royalist governor rode herd on a population that probably favored Parliament, but Berkeley shared some of the challenges faced by Jersey’s Philip de Carteret nonetheless.44 Bermuda, officially pro-Parliament because the company that ran it was so, divided over religious issues that were tied to the political divisions in England. The chaotic state of Bermudian politics made it difficult for the company and Parliament to know what was going on, but at one point the settlers were suspected of royalism.45 Even Massachusetts, its population politically unified to a remarkable degree, witnessed a “tumult” in Boston caused by supporters of the king’s party (many of them crew members of ships then at anchor in the harbor), and its leaders received occasional local criticism for their failure to acknowledge royal authority.46 The dangers of being drawn into the struggle were amply demonstrated in the case of the tiny province of Maryland. Hardest hit of any colony by the

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divisions arising out of the civil wars, Maryland during 1645–46 plunged into a period of anarchy and looting known as “Ingle’s Rebellion.”47 The province was vulnerable for a host of reasons. One involved the difficulties proprietor Lord Baltimore and his appointees encountered while trying to maintain a nonaligned course. In addition, men with grudges against the government saw an opportunity to use its precarious situation to exact revenge. Baltimore, and by implication his province, was especially exposed because his Catholicism made him suspect. Whereas the New England colonies, with their predominantly puritan populations, could do almost nothing to aid Parliament’s cause while still being considered pro-Parliament, so the Catholic Baltimore readily raised suspicions of royalism regardless of his politics. Baltimore’s near-feudal proprietary powers also encouraged such charges. The fact that the wealthiest planters in the province tended to be Catholic, while the labor force was largely Protestant, fueled accusations that Maryland represented popish tyranny. An elite of Protestants and a laboring class of Catholics was a situation much more to the liking of the king’s opponents; such was the situation prevailing in Montserrat and soon to be instituted in Ireland. Richard Ingle, for whom the “rebellion” of 1645–46 was somewhat misleadingly named, harbored a grudge against certain leading colonists by the time he visited in 1645. A ship’s captain who traded in the province regularly, Ingle had returned in late 1643, in a ship tellingly dubbed the Reformation. While in Maryland, Ingle declared that King Charles was no king unless he was joined with Parliament and that Charles’s nephew “Prince Rupert was Prince Traitor & Prince rogue, and if he had him aboard the ship he would whip him at the capsten.”48 Witnesses also claimed that Ingle recounted how he had fought for Parliament at Gravesend and had defied an order arresting him in the king’s name in Virginia. The acting deputy governor of Maryland, Giles Brent, responding as the king commanded, arrested Ingle for high treason. Brent also ordered Ingle’s crew to swear loyalty to Charles, and when they refused, he drank a toast to the king’s health. He apparently intended to send the ship, captained by its first mate, to join the king’s forces at Bristol and offered double wages to the crew to participate.49 Ingle escaped, with the assistance of two leading Marylanders, who may have hoped to circumvent Brent’s ill-advised stand against Parliament. Lesser colonists were eager to prevent the province from becoming embroiled in the conflict, out of either a desire to remain neutral or sympathy for Ingle’s own politics. Three different juries (including a total of twenty-eight men) returned judgments of “Ignoramus”—meaning that the facts could not be known—to six separate charges against Ingle.50 Their findings obviated the need to send Ingle—who was at large at the time anyway—to England for trial and protected him from any further legal action. When Ingle finally departed in spring 1644, colonist

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Thomas Cornwallis went with him, later reporting that he had incurred the wrath of the Maryland authorities for acting on his “affeccon to the Parliament” by helping Ingle escape. To show his thanks, Ingle betrayed and robbed him.51 Ingle’s chance for revenge came in February 1644/5, when he returned to the province with letters of marque granting him authority to seize royalist ships. Broadly interpreting his commission to aid colonists who supported Parliament, he attacked the colony. As the Maryland Assembly would later describe it, what followed was “Heinous Rebellion first put in practice by that Pirate Ingle.”52 In a later statement, Ingle declared that he had acted against the tyrannical deputy governor, Leonard Calvert, who held a commission from the king and was a papist persecutor of Protestants. Virginia resident William Claibourne, still angered over having lost Kent Island to Baltimore in the previous decade, gave Ingle a copy of a royal commission that Calvert had brought from England the year before.53 Details are sketchy about the “time of troubles” that Ingle’s attack set off. A later account described it as “a Civill war between some revolters[,] protestants, assisted by 50 plundered Virginians, by whom M. Leonard Calvert Governour under his brother the Lord Baltamore was taken and expelled.”54 A servant rebellion, at least on the estate of Ingle’s erstwhile ally Cornwallis, fueled the plundering. Others rose against the proprietary once the looting was under way. Claibourne (who considered himself a “plundered Virginian”) took advantage of the collapse of the proprietary government to reclaim Kent Island. Calvert appealed to Berkeley for help, but the neighboring governor was preoccupied with a war against the Powhatans and declined. Calvert himself fled to Virginia. Ingle left the Chesapeake that summer, taking some colonists—among them Jesuits stationed in Maryland—as prisoners.55 Order was not restored until mid-1646, when a temporary government under Captain Edward Hill of Virginia was in place.56 Hill had been elected by the colonists and was later commissioned by Calvert. By the end of 1646, the deputy governor himself returned from Virginia, where he had been living in exile, officially reinstating Baltimore’s government. Maryland suffered during these years because various factors combined to pull the colony into the conflict. In spite of the proprietor’s efforts to remain neutral, he or his deputies slipped when they accepted a royal commission and when they instituted legal proceedings against Ingle as a traitor. The relative weakness of the province, which had a population numbering only in the hundreds, allowed Ingle to overrun it with just two ships, sending the deputy governor fleeing. Divisions within the colony helped to push it into chaos. Brent’s own zeal for the king’s cause led him to prosecute Ingle as a traitor, while those men who came to Ingle’s aid may have been motivated by par-

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liamentarianism, as Cornwallis would later tell the House of Lords, or by a desire to maintain the province’s neutral course. If the elite was divided, the populace was equally so. Ingle claimed that Protestants living in the province sought his assistance against tyrannous and papist proprietary rule. Some Maryland residents who submitted an anti-proprietary petition to Parliament offered evidence in support of his assertion that some residents opposed Baltimore.57 The divisions did not run solely along confessional lines—Cornwallis, who backed Ingle for a time, was himself a Catholic—but the accusations hurled by Ingle and the anti-proprietary faction emphasized the objectionable nature of Catholicism as the root of the problem. Certainly Baltimore’s government was vulnerable in part because of his faith and that of many leading colonists. Ingle and Claibourne both played upon this issue when making their case in England.58 Finally, the servant population, ready to turn on their masters if the opportunity presented itself, added to the disorder. Maryland, thinly settled and internally divided, was vulnerable to the depredations a partisan ship’s captain or a displaced colonizer could commit under cover of loyalty to an English authority. If Maryland’s “plundering time” demonstrated what might happen in a colony that incautiously, even inadvertently, became embroiled in civil war controversies, Barbados offered a different lesson: the benefits of neutrality for the colony that could manage it. Neutrality succeeded only when a colony could declare its policy from a position of strength. Barbados, frequented by Dutch ships that offered good terms, did not need positive relations with each passing English ship, a situation that ironically helped it to greet each arrival with announcements of its commitment to neutrality and free trade. Maryland, thrown into chaos by Ingle, who commanded just two ships, did not act from a position of strength, and Ingle and Claibourne knew it. Barbados—arguably the most significant colony from the point of view of the king and Parliament—offers a well-documented case of a neutral plantation. Barbados was subjected to the most pressure of any colony. The Caribbee Islands were valuable, and Barbados was the most lucrative among them, as it turned from tobacco to sugar cultivation. One Barbadian correspondent remarked in 1645 that rival claimants to Barbados were pursuing designs against Carlisle’s interest in both Oxford (then the center of royal authority) and London (where Parliament ruled). At the time the Caribbees, and their Lord Proprietor Carlisle, were not clearly aligned with either side, so Parliament felt more optimistic about winning the allegiance of the islands than it did about royalist Virginia.59 For some time Barbados tried to play the two sides off against each other. Reasoning that it could offer effective assistance to neither side and needed to trade with both, the government “temporized with al new Commissions,” regardless of who sent them. The gover-

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nor claimed that all the commissions, from whatever source, supplemented those he had previously received.60 Barbados finally responded by articulating an official position of neutrality. In 1645 the freeholders (island residents with sufficient property to vote)61 subscribed to a declaration committing themselves “not to receive any alteration of government, until God shall be so merciful unto us as to unite the king and Parliament.”62 Barbadians may have been motivated by a desire to avert a civil war of their own. The Barbados elite, to avoid potentially dangerous divisiveness, “made a law amongst themselves that whosoever nam’d the word Roundhead or Cavalier, should give to all those that heard him, a Shot and a Turkey to be eaten at his house that made that forfeiture.”63 Despite the humor of Richard Ligon’s description, the law was obviously passed to keep such exchanges from escalating into violence. The island included a substantial number of elite partisans on either side. Men who had fought for either king or Parliament migrated to Barbados during the 1640s, and their presence threatened to draw the planter population into a battle of its own.64 Sitting atop a large servile labor force, made up of bound white laborers and enslaved Africans, the planters feared the effects of division within their own ranks. The shift to sugar entailed the consolidation of more land into the hands of fewer planters, pushing out the small planters who had formerly staffed the militia. With a shrinking militia and a growing number of people at the bottom of society, Barbadian planters feared insurrection. Whatever their political opinions, they set these aside in order to maintain their privileged but precarious position.65 The strategy adopted for maintaining neutrality was to preserve the status quo ante, to retain the current governor and system of governance regardless of who challenged it. The gathering at which all the inhabitants agreed to uphold the government had the quality of a public ritual. The governor explained that “it pleased god so to unite all there minds & harts together, [that] every parish declared themselves resolved.”66 Bell, his letter suggests, rarely found the contentious and ambitious planters he had been appointed to govern united in this way. The strategy of neutrality in the interest of continued unity worked, and Barbados stayed out of the conflict. Other colonies tried to follow Barbados by carrying the widespread impulse toward non-involvement all the way to outright neutrality.67 Nevis may have intended to do so, although little evidence survives to clarify that case. Maryland’s unsuccessful adoption of an evasive stance did not protect it from appearing partisan. Plymouth Plantation, presumed by all observers to be pro-Parliament, remained officially uncommitted and appears to have been deeply uncomfortable with the transformation that would eventually sweep away the king. Two of the four towns that would be incorporated into the Rhode Island and Providence Plantation patent, Aquidneck (later Newport)

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and Portsmouth, may have favored neutrality until about 1647. With the exceptions of Plymouth Plantation and the towns on Narragansett Bay, those colonies that favored neutrality came under intense pressure as a result of the civil wars. The policies adopted in Barbados and apparently Nevis and attempted in Maryland were intended to stave off the dangers associated with partisanship. The widespread desire to stay out of the conflict that characterized the Atlantic settlements went against a number of expectations that the king and his critics in Parliament had about the dominions and the role these played in the crisis unfolding in England. On many points, the assumptions made at the rival centers of power in England did not comport well with New World realities. Both Charles I and parliamentary leaders presumed that New England was firmly within the latter’s camp, an expectation that was met only in part. Parliament expected that many Atlantic outposts would share its criticisms of the king and would therefore be well disposed toward its cause. In fact, the settlements along the Atlantic rim experienced many of the same political fissures—between royalist and parliamentarian—that also divided England and Wales. Either because it was the easiest course or because they put too much stock in the ability of colonial proprietors and companies to dictate policy to their New World governments, both Charles and Parliament assumed that proprietors or charter companies located in England could dictate allegiance to those who resided in the wider Atlantic world. This expectation overrated the power of the central authority and ignored the colonial reality of divided populaces and weak centralized control. Both the king and Parliament hoped that winning the backing of those who resided in the dominions would lead to significant gestures of support, but such was never the case. Whatever else they hoped to get out of the Atlantic settlements, neither king nor Parliament received the material aid of any colonial government. The generalized support for a policy of neutrality put serious limits on what any settlement could or would do. Since the prevalent assumption was that the settlers and governments of New England opposed the king, even before war broke out supporters of the king and his ecclesiastical policies denounced New England as a breeding ground for rebellion and religious radicalism.68 New England ships and cargoes were considered fair game for royalist seizure. Although a complete accounting of their losses is not possible, given gaps in the surviving records, New England merchants clearly felt the loss. Royalist depredations, premised on New England’s disloyalty, may have created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as ship seizures helped to turn the population against the king. Not content to rest on its laurels with New England, Parliament reached out to

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the settlers in the region, offering benefits in exchange for support. The right to trade without paying duties, granted by Parliament even before the war broke out, was a lucrative perquisite, and one that was envied by a number of colonies outside the region.69 Although the king’s party may have pushed New England into Parliament’s arms, Parliament was interested in actively enticing colonies to support it. This presumption of parliamentarianism was correct in a general sense, as no colony north of New Netherland on the Hudson River (other than Gorges’s tiny collection of settlements in Maine) officially espoused the king’s cause. Populated largely by critics of the king’s ecclesiastical policies who had migrated to the region in the 1630s, these colonies generally held the ideological position expected of them. Having left home at a time of growing dissatisfaction with Charles’s personal rule, many colonists approved, at least initially, of the efforts to reform the English church and state launched by the Long Parliament. When war erupted, a number of New Englanders returned to England to take up pulpits or positions in the military that were newly open to individuals of their political and religious views. This reverse migration took most of Harvard’s first graduating class to civil war England.70 In a 1647 pamphlet, Massachusetts resident Nathaniel Ward directly linked exile with fighting against Charles when he queried the king, “Have you not driven good Subjects enough abroad, but you will slaughter them that stay at home?” Others were equally identified with the cause of Parliament in the early 1640s. Thinking about the army the king had gathered to fight the Scots in the late 1630s, New Englander William Hooke suggested it must have been full of “mongrels,” as no true English man would fight reformed religion as it had been called on to do. Anne Bradstreet, in “A Dialogue between Old England & New,” written in 1642 but not published until eight years later, reflected the general support for Parliament. The “Dialogue” attributed the woes of England to the king’s effort to rule without the law and to its unreformed religion. Bradstreet advocated mass execution of the opposition if necessary to achieve reform.71 The prevailing affinity for Parliament was also demonstrated by the practice of declaring days of humiliation and thanksgiving in response to worrisome or joyous events. For all New England colonies known to have declared such days in response to developments on the other side of the Atlantic, none did so in support of the king; all were called to weep over or celebrate the twists and turns in Parliament’s fortunes.72 In these and other ways, New Englanders widely expressed their prejudice in favor of reformed religion and a strong parliament. The belief that Parliament and New England shared a natural bond was so strong that criticism of parliamentary policy on the part of a Massachusetts minister was greeted as a shocking rift between the two parties. In 1644,

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when Nathaniel Rogers criticized Parliament for disrespect to the king, royalists seized upon his letter to deride their opponents in England, indicating how persuasive was the assumption that New England and Parliament were irrevocably joined. The controversy began when Rogers wrote to an unnamed friend who was a member of Parliament, articulating a number of positions that were anathema to the royalists in 1643. He advocated that Parliament renounce all previous legislation passed in support of the Church of England and praised the alliance with Scotland. But he went on to complain of “scornefull dishonour put upon the Name and Person of” the king in a leading parliamentary newspaper, Mercurius Britanicus, which he had seen in New England. Rogers asserted that it might be appropriate to complain about the “actions of his Majesty . . . for your justification: but to put bitter and most contemptuous scoffes upon His royall Person, is . . . against not only the course of Scripture, but one Article of the late Covenant.” Rogers referred to the Solemn League and Covenant in which Parliament’s supporters in 1643 had sworn “to preserve and defend the king’s Majesty’s person and Authority.”73 The letter, published in 1644, led to a vigorous exchange between the leading royalist and parliamentarian newsweeklies. First the royalist Mercurius Aulicus hooted over it, declaring that if New Englanders thought Britanicus was out of line, it must really have overstepped the bounds of propriety. This jab suggested that New England led the way in radicalism, when in fact many colonists were finding it difficult to keep pace with the radicalization of the anti-royal cause. Britanicus editor Marchmont Needham (whom Edmund Morgan quipped had “an undeserved reputation as a political thinker”) responded energetically, devoting more than three pages of his eight-page weekly to a rant against Aulicus and the suggestion that true religion might be on the side of the king. He cited numerous prominent preachers (including Hugh Peter, formerly an occupant of a New England pulpit) who supported Parliament. His innuendo that royalist Oxford produced the pamphlet met with firm denials from John Berkenhead, editor of Aulicus. In the end, Britanicus was reduced to decrying the Oxford weekly for bringing scandal on to Rogers by trying to enlist him in the king’s cause. Both Aulicus’s glee and Needham’s plaintive comment about New England divines being “too much our friends to wound us” indicate the importance of New England’s presumed support for the critics of the king.74 This exchange reveals the significance of New England’s allegiance for both sides in the battle in England. Yet this widespread prejudice in favor of Parliament did not translate into activism for the cause on the part of the colonies as colonies, so the presumptive parliamentarianism of the region meant less than Parliament hoped and

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the king feared. With the exception of tiny Providence Plantation, which eventually embraced Parliament, most colonies hung back from publicly and officially identifying with it. Although the smaller plantations that had been settled without a clear mandate from England might have been expected to seek legitimization from friends in Parliament—as was the case with Providence—the others pondered this course but finally did not take it. Rather Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth attempted to lie low and stay out of trouble.75 Their efforts to remain out of the conflict made it difficult to distinguish between their brand of parliamentarianism and formal neutrality, although subtle differences existed within the group. Massachusetts Bay, by far the largest and most influential settlement in the region (and the only one to enter the civil war years with a clear mandate for its government), also proffered only tepid support for Parliament. It never formally declared its partisanship, never sought confirmation of its charter by Parliament, and never issued writs in any name but its own. The Council of State would eventually question the Bay’s agent, Edward Winslow, about these practices.76 The colony also carefully passed, in its own General Court, any legislation benefiting it that was enacted by Parliament. This strategy, Robert Bliss has argued, was designed to avoid acknowledging parliamentary supremacy over its internal decisions even while the colony benefited from that body’s largesse. With the example of Poyning’s Law in Ireland in mind, Bay colonists had good reason to avoid this precedent.77 With friends of the sort they had in the governments of New England, Parliament might well conclude that it did not need enemies. Unlike its more cautious neighbors, tiny Providence Plantation threw itself vigorously on the side of the king’s opponents. Though not uniformly so, the settlers in the Narragansett towns of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick tended to be more radical religiously and perhaps politically than those in the other southern New England colonies. They did not draw back, then, from the increasing radicalism of England in the 1640s. Roger Williams, foremost founder of the colony, helped to foster liberty of conscience in his native land, publishing in support of it while in London on a mission to secure a charter for the cluster of settlements on Narragansett Bay. In addition to this ideological affinity for the work of reform, the settlers around Narragansett Bay desperately needed powerful allies. Many of the early settlers were exiles from Massachusetts Bay, and Massachusetts and its allied colonies were united in their opposition to a settlement in their midst that they considered irreligious. Massachusetts, Plymouth, and later Connecticut sought control of the land claimed by the Narragansett towns, so townspeople felt besieged by these more populous neighboring colonies. Under these circumstances, settlers were especially eager for legitimization from England.

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To elevate their settlements from squatter status to an authorized political unit, the planters sent Roger Williams to negotiate for official recognition. He succeeded, returning to the colony in autumn 1644 with a patent. Apparently the northern towns of Providence and Warwick immediately embraced the commission. For a time the towns on Aquidneck Island—Newport and Portsmouth—led by merchant William Coddington, tried to operate separately from the other towns and the Williams patent. They may have been motivated less out of royalism than out of a desire to remain aloof from the other settlements, especially on the part of Coddington. After the 1645 Battle of Naseby strengthened the claim of Parliament to rule the empire and thereby strengthened the authority of Williams’s 1644 patent, the Aquidneck towns agreed to join the new plantation. Organizing their government according to the 1644 instrument, the Narragansett settlements—sooner or later—located themselves firmly in Parliament’s camp.78 If Providence’s eagerness for authorization reflected its relatively weak position, the aloofness of Massachusetts Bay reflected its desire to maintain its own remarkably strong position, in spite of its affinity for the parliamentary cause. Massachusetts especially approved of Parliament’s cause as it was understood in the early 1640s: reformed religion and the rights of the subject under the law. When swearing in the magistrates elected in May 1643, the government agreed to strike the reference to the king from the oaths of office. John Winthrop explained that the words “You shall bear true faith and allegiance to our sovereign Lord King Charles” caused “scruples” in some, “seeing he had violated the privileges of Parliament, and made war upon them, and thereby had lost much of his kingdom and many of his subjects.” This radical stance was precocious, since it was not until a month later that Parliament began requiring England’s inhabitants to swear to support “the forces raised and continued [by Parliament] against the forces raised by the King without their consent.”79 The Massachusetts magistrates also ordered the royal arms and portrait taken down.80 In 1645 the Massachusetts government passed a law making it illegal to declare loyalty for the king against Parliament. Interestingly, in doing so it upheld the parliamentary fiction that no division between king and Parliament existed, and that the latter was pursuing the proper goals of the monarchy even while making war on the king.81 In Massachusetts, men were brought before the court for speaking in favor of the king or for impugning Parliament, but never the other way around. The magistrates considered turning out Captain William Jennison, the deputy from Watertown, because he “questioned the lawfulness of the Parliament’s proceedings in England.” A man with such views was thought untrustworthy in Massachusetts in 1644, even if he had been a public servant in the colony since its earliest years. The popularity of the parliamentary cause can be seen

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in a contested election for deputy from Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1647. The younger men of the town offended their elders by trying to send to the General Court a man of only twenty-six, impressed by his credentials as a “soldier lately out of the warres in England.”82 Sentiment in favor of Parliament was expressed in these ways, in sermons and private letters, and by acts such as re-migrating to join the fight and declaring fast days to pray for the success of the cause. In spite of all these signs of its sympathy for Parliament, Massachusetts never lifted its hand in support. Obviously the importance of New Englanders’ general preference for the king’s foes did not amount to much in the context of the civil war. At times Parliament extended its assertion that New England favored its efforts against the king to claim that all the migrants of the 1630s had left England in dismay over royal policy and were therefore the natural allies of his opponents. When Parliament moved in 1643 to create a committee to oversee all the foreign plantations, it referred to the concerns that settlers and the Parliament shared in common: “Many thousands of the natives and good Subjects of this Kingdome of England, through the oppression of the Prelates, and other ill affected Ministers and Officers of States, have of late yeeres to their great griefe and miserable hardship bin inforced to Transplant themselves and their families into severall Islands, and other remote & desolate parts of the west Indies.”83 According to Parliament, they were threatened, as were all of the king’s subjects, by “the outragious malice of Papists and other ill affected persons,” and therefore needed protection. In this understanding of recent history, the king’s tyranny had driven some out of England to the Atlantic plantations and, eventually, had forced those who stayed behind to make a stand against his depredations. Parliament’s cause was thus (in this view) the cause of all the exiles who had peopled the English Atlantic world in the 1630s. Although Parliament made too much of the connection between its politics and those of the migrants of the 1630s, the colonies that supported Parliament did tend to be settlements founded since 1629, when reform-minded English men and women despaired of meaningful change at home. The “Great Migration” of the 1630s carried a wide variety of people to destinations throughout the Atlantic basin, but many of them left their homes because they were disturbed by the situation there. With the exception of Bermuda, the second-oldest surviving colony (1612), most of those colonies that supported Parliament dated from the mid-1630s or later, including Connecticut, Providence Plantation, New Haven, Trinidad, Lygonia (in Maine), and Eleuthera. Bermuda was an exception that helped prove the rule: its officially pro-Parliament policy was set by the company in London

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rather than by the colonists themselves, and it met with some local resistance. Parliament had to purge the company of some royalist sympathizers before it could be made to adopt a pro-Parliament position.84 Plymouth Plantation, the New England colony most inclined to neutrality or even closet royalism, was also the oldest in the region. Plymouth was settled in 1620, led by religious separatists who had decamped from England earlier still. Despite its separatist faith, Plymouth was out of touch with the changing political and religious climate in England and could not keep up with the radicalization of the 1640s.85 By contrast, staunchly pro-Parliament colonies, having come into existence after 1629, had direct connections to Parliament or client-patron relationships with some of its leading members. This was true of every colony that can be placed firmly in the parliamentary camp.86 Not all of these colonies were identified by contemporaries as “puritan,” participants in the movement for godly reformation of the Church of England, but all were connected in some way to the discontent with personal rule led by puritan grandees in England. The migration of the 1630s, much of it sponsored or otherwise aided by these grandees, had introduced important ideological fault lines into the Atlantic world. In mild contradiction to the conviction that migrants had carried their politics with them across the ocean to their new homes was the view that settlers would follow the political position dictated to them by the man or men who had charge of their colony. This assumption applied to all those residents in colonies directly under some outside authority. Newfoundland, Maine, and all the colonies south of New England were under the command of a person or group seated in England, and both the king and Parliament tried to sway those individuals in an effort to obtain the support of their colonists. Virginia, it was assumed, would adhere to the king because it was a Crown colony and its people owed their allegiance directly to the sovereign both as his subjects and as residents in the colony. In other locations, having a royalist proprietor was thought to lead directly to royalist colonies and settlers. Such was in fact the case in Newfoundland, since Sir David Kirke lived in the colony and ruled it directly on his own behalf and that of his fellow royalist proprietors. The earl of Warwick, a leading parliamentarian for much of the war period and the Parliament’s appointee as Governor-in-Chief of all the American plantations, presumably dictated policy to his two small and short-lived settlements on Trinidad and Tobago. Beyond these few examples, however, the link between a proprietor’s position and that of his settlers was not a direct one. Ferdinando Gorges, a staunch royalist, sent a kinsman to govern his province in Maine; but young Thomas Gorges abandoned his post to return to England, there to fight on the opposite side in the civil war. The other Maine settlers seem to have been somewhat more wedded to upholding the

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elder Gorges’s royalist policies, although they found it extremely difficult to do so as time went on. Baltimore tried to remain neutral and to keep his province out of the fight, but Maryland was divided as well as weak. The earl of Carlisle, proprietor of the English Caribbee Islands, changed sides, partly in an effort to keep his Caribbean inheritance, but his shifting politics seem to have had little effect on most of the governors under him, much less on settlers.87 Proprietary colonies were apparently more likely to favor the king, but this was not the result of policy dictated by the proprietors themselves, at least not in most cases. The six colonies that supported the king were proprietary colonies.88 This may have been because proprietorial and royal authority went hand in hand. Vesting vast authority in one man, whether king or proprietor, connoted a particular way of conceiving of power relations. Under this system, personal loyalty and obedience were owed the proprietor, just as they were owed to the monarch. The compatibility of these governing systems can be seen in the fact that Charles favored proprietary over company grants during his years of personal rule.89 The proprietors enjoyed greater powers, theoretically, than the king himself was able to exercise in his three kingdoms. Parliamentarians occasionally denounced the power granted to proprietors precisely because these seemed consonant with Charles’s drive for greater authority within his kingdoms. In a 1647 hearing on the legitimacy of Carlisle’s claim to the Caribbee Islands, counsel William Steele’s plea contrasted royal power, properly exercised, in which “all the Subjects are freemen and have p[ro]p[er]tie in their goods and freehold and inheritance in their lands,” with “Monarchie seigniorall and Tyrannicall,” in which “the subjects are villaines and slaves and proprietors of nothing but at the will of their grand Seigniours & Tirants.” The Carlisle patent, being of the latter type, was therefore, in his view, invalid and illegal (and, he might have added, so would the king’s authority be were it found to be so).90 The denunciation of Carlisle’s extensive powers in the West Indies in terms that might be used as well against the king indicates how closely connected the two arenas—the Caribbean and England—were for those involved with the struggle to preserve subjects’ rights. What its detractors saw, in the heightened concern for rights sparked by the crisis of the 1640s, as a flaw in proprietorial government could be seen by royalists as the beauty of the proprietary system. The radicalism of Parliament’s position appalled these noble proprietors, beneficiaries of the Crown and upholders of aristocratic privilege. Warwick, a great lord whose colonies supported Parliament, might seem the exception, although he did not receive any of those he owned outright directly from the Crown but rather purchased them from other aristocrats. Even Warwick would not support the revolution once it became so radical as to condone

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regicide and the elimination of the House of Lords.91 More than any other form of colonial government, proprietaries were compatible with monarchy, and this affinity may help explain their greater inclination toward royalism. Once they perceived Parliament as potentially hostile to proprietorships in general, their ideological affinity for monarchy was strengthened. Although another six proprietary colonies did not hew to the royalist line,92 only Warwick’s tiny settlements on Tobago and Trinidad, Alexander Rigby’s newly created Lygonia in Maine, and possibly Carlisle’s Nevis were supporters of Parliament. Rigby, a proprietor by purchase like Warwick, was dependent on Parliament for his authority. A member of Parliament, he purchased the old Plough Patent for part of Maine in 1643 and so was not a direct Crown beneficiary. In addition, his contested grant was confirmed by Parliament, to which he owed the success of his effort to usurp the rights of Gorges.93 These few exceptions aside, the relative disinclination of proprietary colonies to oppose Charles lent further credence to the argument that proprietaries had a special affinity for royalism. If Sir Edmund Plowden’s plan to settle his 1634 grant on the Delaware River had not been foiled by a mutiny of his servants on the way to the site in 1643, another royalist proprietary might have supported the king. As it was, Plowden almost died of exposure after having been abandoned on an uninhabited island from which he was fortuitously rescued some days later, according to New Sweden’s governor Johan Printz.94 If pro-Parliament plantations tended to be recently settled, often with support from powerful men who had not benefited directly from the king’s largesse in handing out proprietary patents, royalist plantations included a core of proprietary colonies. Thus, the divisions within England in the early 1640s—between those who championed royal authority and a hierarchical view of power relations and those who sought reform—had been exported into the Atlantic world. Carlisle’s proprietary province illustrates the limitation on proprietors’ abilities to dictate allegiance to their settlements. When Charles heard rumors that Carlisle had “alienated the same unto the late Earle of Warwick attainted of Treason,” the king sent James Ley, the third earl of Marlborough, to take over the Carlisle patent. Armed with this claim to royal support, Marlborough sailed to the West Indies with two ships in 1645. He attempted to take all six of the settled islands claimed by Carlisle: Barbados, St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Santa Cruz. Three of the islands—Antigua, Barbados, and Nevis—repulsed him, refusing to acknowledge his authority. Only St. Christopher, Montserrat, and Santa Cruz accepted his government.95 The reason why the six colonies split into two groups was not that they were evenly divided between royal and parliamentary supporters. Rather, each had its own peculiar reasons for acting as it did.

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Antigua rebuffed Marlborough out of loyalty to Carlisle (but not necessarily disloyalty to the king). Barbados and possibly Nevis did the same but were motivated out of a desire to remain neutral. Montserrat was apparently royalist, in part because it was home to a large number of Irish who feared a parliamentary victory just as their compatriots in Ireland did.96 St. Christopher’s motives are not clear, while Santa Cruz was probably most interested in the protection Marlborough’s two ships represented. Unconcerned about or at least unaware of these subtleties, the House of Lords considered those colonies that had accepted Marlborough to be rebelling against its interests, and declared its intention to “reduce” them as a result.97 Marlborough’s tenure proved short-lived when he left the region by 1647, having lost control of all the islands that had once accepted him. The incident gives the most dramatic example of the king using a proprietor to coerce the loyalty of his Atlantic subjects. It did not work well, and its failure underscores the difficulty of this top-down approach to ensuring loyalty. Both king and Parliament wanted to see the many individual expressions of support they received from the wider Atlantic world translated into colonial policies. As Parliament’s appointee to oversee colonial policy, the earl of Warwick, explained, the English plantations were “of special importance, both in order to great and honourable advantages attainable there, if the Parliament interest in them be preserved; as also in respect of the great income of customs and excise for commodities imported thence, which will be otherwise totally diverted to the service of the enemy.”98 Both the monarch and Parliament offered directives about how loyal colonies ought to behave. Colonists should treat the opposition as enemies, at the very least denying them the right to trade. To treat them as traitors, as Charles instructed, would have involved arresting parliamentarians, trying them for treason, and executing them. The Crown and Parliament alike believed that the American plantations should be governed by men loyal to its side, and colonists should throw out governors who were disloyal. Charles heard rumors that Governor Philip Bell—formerly an employee of parliamentary leader Warwick and therefore suspect—and the colony of Barbados “had all turned to the way of the Parliament and wer lik to shake off . . . obedience to his Majeste.” In 1643 he therefore ordered the earl of Carlisle to have Bell replaced with a royalist.99 For his part, Warwick, as Parliament’s Governor-in-Chief of all the American plantations, grew frustrated with Bell’s lack of cooperation and may have considered replacing him with New Englander John Humphrey in early 1644.100 Colonists were to acknowledge the authority of the side they favored and to do all they could to support its war effort and legitimate its political claims. The rumor reported in the Court Mercurie in July 1644 that

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New Englanders were raising an army of ten thousand to aid parliamentarians being abused in Virginia proved false, but Parliament would have been delighted to learn it was true.101 To encourage such initiatives it promised that anyone who did follow the dictates of Warwick’s committee would “bee saved harmless and indemnified.”102 The efforts of Parliament to command the authority previously held by the king were innovative, necessitated by the fact that it was moving into an area that had once been the Crown’s alone to manage. In November 1643 it created the post of Governor-in-Chief of all the American plantations, named Warwick to the position, and appointed a committee to assist him. The creation of this Committee on Foreign Plantations, the first of what would prove to be a long line of committees overseeing the colonies, had far-reaching implications for the management of imperial affairs. The unprecedented powers granted it marked a new direction in policy, as Parliament asserted its right to take over the colonial matters that had once been the nearly exclusive purview of the king. Officially responsible for fielding all colonial business that came before Parliament for the remainder of the decade, it worked intermittently to attract plantations to Parliament’s camp.103 The detailed workings of the committee cannot now be recovered, for few of its records have survived.104 One of its first acts, however, was intended to make Parliament popular with Charles’s subjects in the West Indies: it immediately exempted the inhabitants there from taxes and granted the right to colonists to choose their own governors (pending parliamentary approval). The committee also, somewhat contradictorily, appointed governors for the settled islands then under the Carlisle patent: Barbados, St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua. In at least some (and perhaps all) cases, the men commissioned already held the posts. It further attempted to replace Virginia’s governor Berkeley with a man of its own choosing, but admitted that it would settle for any non-royalist elected by the colonists.105 In 1645 the committee sent representatives to the West Indies to offer appealing terms. After these delegates were rebuffed, Warwick wrote, scolding the colonies in exasperation.106 Repeatedly, Warwick and the committee fired off letters to plantation officials, rehearsing various arguments in favor of parliamentary sovereignty. That God was clearly on the side of Parliament was a favorite theme, reinforced as it scored repeated victories. The surviving correspondence of the committee reveals both the repeated efforts of Warwick to win the allegiance of the colonists and the reality that he was reduced to cajoling them to do so.107 Just as Parliament worked to draw colonies into its orbit, the king was determined to retain the allegiance of his subjects in the New World. He reacted to the initiatives of his opponents. When Parliament created the Warwick committee, Charles lost no time in issuing a declaration denouncing

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the effort to spread “this horrid Rebellion even unto those remoter parts.” He urged “His Majesties Subjects in the Islands and Continent of America” to treat officials sent by Parliament as traitors. Meanwhile the royalist newsweekly Mercurius Aulicus ridiculed the appointment of Warwick. Taking up a theme touched on in the royal proclamation, it asserted that the rebels were eager to prepare a distant refuge where they would flee once they abandoned their dastardly plot to overthrow the king.108 The war in the Atlantic, fought with few ships, was a contest of persuasion more than of arms, and both king and Parliament labored to persuade settlers to support their cause. Despite the ideological fissures lacing the Atlantic basin, colonies contributed very little to the side they supported. Examples of passivity and waffling can be found for even the most committed colonies. Virginia offers a good instance of this. It may have attempted to limit its trade to ships loyal to the king but could not maintain this policy. Once Bristol fell in 1645, no English port remained for traders friendly to the king’s cause. At Christmas time in 1648, Virginia traded with twelve English, twelve Dutch, and seven New England ships, all save the Dutch allied with Parliament. The practice of exclusionary trade reported in 1644 may have been a temporary response to the death of a planter who had been on board a Bristol ship when another out of London fired on it.109 The following year the Virginia assembly both reassured Parliament that it always traded with London ships and pleaded for the removal of sequestrations placed on the English estates of royalists who had migrated to the colony.110 Virginia may have been the most royalist colony, but even its ideological affinity was not as vigorously pursued as the king wished. At mid-decade the Virginia assembly declared residence in America the equivalent of withdrawal from the conflict, denoting the widespread sense that being in a colony took an individual out of the action.111 That their statement was largely accurate can be attributed to the accident of geography, but only to some extent; its truth also derived from explicit efforts on the part of the settlers themselves. Over the course of the war years throughout the Atlantic world, it became increasingly difficult for a colony to pursue any but a pro-Parliament course. The vulnerable colony of Maryland had been punished for its failure to appear sufficiently aligned with Parliament. Ingle, and Claibourne as well, emboldened by the success of Parliament—especially the surrender of the king to the Scots—attacked Maryland in its name. By 1647, the earl of Marlborough had withdrawn from the Caribbean, the Crown colony of Virginia was trading freely with ships from ports controlled by Charles’s enemies, and even vulnerable colonists felt able to associate openly with Parliament’s cause. It was in that year that the settlers in Maine accepted the creation of Lygonia out of the old Plough Patent in defiance of the royalist government of pro-

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prietor Gorges. Also in 1647 a new colony—the only one to come into existence in the 1640s—was founded in the Bahamanian island chain; from its inception, Eleuthera was republican and tolerationist.112 The force of Parliament’s ascendancy was felt in many colonies, either because they bent to accommodate its apparent triumph or because, as with Maryland, they were perceived as failing to bend. The colonists were intensely interested in the wars and rebellions that tore apart the three kingdoms in the decade beginning in 1638. Settlers feared the effects of these events on their homelands and on the colonies they were helping to build. Despite a high level of partisan opinion throughout the Atlantic basin, colonies failed both king and Parliament by their unwillingness to support the war. For Parliament, this passivity mattered less than it eventually did for the king. As he became more desperate, Charles tried to use his subjects in the Americas to enhance his position at home. His most dramatic effort, the mission by Marlborough, failed, and the ostensibly royalist colonies did nothing toward his cause. The king and his son would not give up their hopes that the dominions would assist them but would try again later to draw colonists into the battle. In the meantime, as Parliament gained control of all of England and of the king’s person, it also controlled the seas. By dominating access to the Atlantic world, Parliament held sway over the intercourse between the kingdoms and the dominions. The passivity of the settlers, motivated out of caution rather than indifference toward the outcome, played into the hands of Parliament. Winner would be able to take all, or so it seemed, if the settlers acquiesced to the result of the contest in England. The ideological fissures that divided the Stuart Atlantic through 1648 demonstrate that the divisions in the three kingdoms, but especially those in England, had been exported. Some colonies, organized on the principle of personal loyalty to a lord proprietor and to the king, upheld a monarchical conception of governance. Colonists in those plantations and in others embraced that conception as well. Colonies outside the proprietary nexus had less investment in the politics of personal fealty, as they were governed locally or through the London-based and Parliament-influenced Somers Islands Company. Many settlers in these types of colonies had left England in the 1630s, dismayed by the religious and political changes under way there. They, along with other settlers, sympathized with the criticisms Parliament leveled against the king; they feared tyrannical usurpation of their rights and hoped that Parliament would suppress Stuart abuses of authority. Patterns of governance thus reflected, and may have helped shape, local attitudes. These settlements, though divided ideologically, were almost unanimously united in their fear of being drawn into the war. The drive for non-involvement— sometimes expressed in official neutrality but present nearly everywhere—ex-

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isted in tandem with passionate engagement in the conflicts of the civil wars. Again, aloofness should not be mistaken for unconcern; it arose from practical calculations that pushed aside deeply held beliefs. Colonists continued to care about the outcome in the three kingdoms, even as they stayed on the sidelines of the controversy. The effort of colonial polities to remain unengaged in the wars originated in the prevailing wisdom that infant plantations would be destroyed by involvement; and so colonies of every political stripe tried to lie low. This meant that colonies embraced a sort of inadvertent “de factoism,” in that they seemed willing to accept whatever outcome emerged. As Quentin Skinner has noted, the idea was being articulated in England at this time as well, most notably by Thomas Hobbes, although there it was discussed without reference to the “forraign plantations.”113 With time, Parliament’s successes multiplied. After recapturing Bristol (1645), Parliament controlled all the ports in England and most English shipping. Its dominance of the seas inexorably pulled colonies into its orbit. Plantations moved into this position sometimes against their own inclinations but with a sense of having little choice. As late as 1648 it seemed that colonies would not resist the outcome of events, whatever it turned out to be. Such was not in fact the case, because colonial royalism—both latent and overt—would finally balk at regicide.

2 Puritan Ascendancy and Religious Polarization

Prior to the outbreak of wars in the three kingdoms, the religious situation in the colonies diverged sharply from that in England. In the 1630s England was religiously polarized as well as politicized by the divisions between ascendant Laudians in the Church of England and their marginalized and discontented opponents, called puritans. The term “puritan” was an epithet applied to those who had worked for further reformation of the Church of England since Elizabeth’s time. They had been accommodated within the church under both Elizabeth and James, during which time they promoted Calvinist doctrine, affective preaching, and moral reformation. Charles had taken the offensive against this group, using Archbishop William Laud to institute conformity in church practice and respect for church hierarchy in all the faithful. This policy both alienated many who had formerly lived comfortably under the Church of England and encouraged some to leave England for settlement in the wider Atlantic world. When Charles’s policy was applied to Scotland, it sparked the two “Bishops’ Wars” of 1639–1640. In most of New England, migrants from the discontented puritan camp had erected hegemonic godly church establishments. The reform-minded faithful left behind viewed these new churches and the colonial governments that fostered their creation with envy, wishing that such reformed religious institutions could be established within England itself. In most other colonial settings the 1630s were characterized by a truce between reformers and those who supported a non-reformed Church of England. As had once been the case in England, in most Atlantic settlements puritan and non-puritan believers found common ground in the Church of England. Although the differences between New England and other colonial locations were sharp, within each colony little religious polarization existed. The religious environment of the pre-1640s Atlantic world was comparatively uncontentious. During the 1640s discontented puritans in England gained the longawaited opportunity to reform the English church. Parliament pulled down the ecclesiastical hierarchy, executed the notorious archbishop blamed for the 53

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harassment of the godly, and attempted to reform the national church along lines advocated by its critics. The radicalizing effects of civil war and revolution generated an unexpected outcome: religious experimentation, a highly engaged but balkanized religious polity that could not come together behind a single church order, and a resulting policy of toleration. England thus became religiously fragmented over the course of the 1640s. Some radicals in the Atlantic world, including Rhode Islander Roger Williams, enthusiastically greeted the possibility for complete “soul liberty” and contributed to the discourse about religious changes taking place at home. This transformation had two significant effects on the Atlantic colonies. Throughout the plantations generally, news of what was going on in England (both in terms of religious changes and in terms of the political and military challenge to the king’s rule) contributed to the breakdown of the puritanAnglican truce of the 1630s.1 It also fostered challenges to godly hegemony in New England, with more determined dissent from both radical and conservative sources. The preeminence and regard that New England had commanded among puritans in England gave way to disaffection and rejection. The churches of Massachusetts ceased to be an admired model, and plans to export the reformation from that region to other Anglophone locations foundered. Conditions that allowed for widespread congregational consensus in New England could not be replicated either in England or in other colonies. The politics of toleration that prevailed by necessity in revolutionary England were opposed to the policing mechanisms that maintained New England’s congregational consensus through intolerance and expulsion. Much to the surprise of many observers, by 1649, godly New England and revolutionary England had become estranged on religious questions. The specifics of the truce between puritans and Anglicans cannot be recovered for all colonies. Its existence is sometimes documented only because it broke down during the 1640s. Even in Virginia in the early 1640s, however, little effort went into enforcing conformity among Protestants. After Charles I instructed his new governor William Berkeley to “suffer no Invasions in matters of Religion” there, Berkeley quickly moved against Catholics, no doubt with an eye on neighboring Maryland, but not against the puritans who had always been a presence in the colony. He no doubt carried his Laudian Anglican perspective to Virginia, as April Hatfield states, but he did not act upon it immediately.2 With little local attention to the Laudian campaign to ensure uniformity, order, and respect for hierarchy, the possibility of conflict between those who would support such a campaign and those who would oppose it was minimized. To some extent the truce was dictated by colonial religious conditions. With few ministers, no bishops or church

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courts, and only the most rudimentary of church buildings and furnishings, settlers found it impossible to recreate the Laudian Church of England in its entirety. At this time Anglican worship in the Atlantic outposts pivoted on the prayer book, that easily transportable collection of prayers that might be read aloud at a service by a layperson in the absence of an ordained minister. Nearly as old as the Church of England itself, the prayer book was the pervasive marker of Anglican worship in the colonies. It provided a structure for worship services and a series of set prayers that adherents felt was central to their experience of faith. While Church of English faithful were known by their Book of Common Prayer, puritans were most easily recognizable by their insistence on the preached Word. They might ignore the prayer book altogether (as was the case in New England), or they might supplement it with extemporaneous preaching. The latter was apparently the case in the Somers Islands, where puritan-inclined preachers (including one who had been made to post bond by the Somers Islands Company to adhere to the Church of England) used the prayer book in the early 1640s.3 The supplemental preaching such godly ministers provided was highly valued: one man who resided in Virginia described his community as feeling “scattered in the cloudy and darke day of temptation” without godly ministers. This consternation especially plagued those settlers who had enjoyed preaching in their home parishes prior to migrating.4 As in England, the puritan faithful in the colonies felt bereft if they were unable to hear the Word preached by a reformed minister. Such ministers were present in every colony, as Babette Levy’s research long ago demonstrated, but the supply did not keep up with the demand everywhere.5 Organized alternatives to the Anglican-puritan establishment were rare in 1642. Although the Plymouth Plantation churches functioned much like those gathered in other colonies in the region, they acknowledged their separation from the Church of England as the others did not.6 Catholics openly practiced their faith in Maryland, where Jesuit priests worked among Indians as well as settlers. Even Montserrat, with its largely Catholic population, built a Church of England chapel to advertise the Irish governor’s Protestantism. The predominantly Catholic population there probably subsisted without a priest, and the same was certainly true for the smaller numbers of Irish Catholic servants scattered on other islands.7 A Baptist church, gathered by followers of Roger Williams in Providence on Narragansett Bay in 1639, was the only other organized alternative. Antipedobaptism, or the belief that nonbelievers and therefore infants could not be baptized, was a theological position with some appeal to those in the puritan camp, since both emphasized the purity of the gathered church and the need to screen potential members. Baptists who maintained the reformed belief in limited redemption

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(that only a few would be saved) surfaced occasionally in New England, as they had in puritan and separatist circles in England, arriving at their views in a dialogue with other believers. Some of the settlers who had migrated to Providence after 1635 with the separatist religious leader Roger Williams embraced this position.8 Other dissenters from the New England way as it was emerging in Massachusetts Bay had also moved to the Narragansett region in the 1630s, but the limited evidence reveals that they initially set up churches similar to those in the Bay.9 Reports of dissenters, also referred to as sectarians, disclose their activity in Barbados by the early 1640s, and they probably existed in other colonies as well. But they tended not to be organized or, as far as surviving records reveal, numerous in the late 1630s.10 Colonial elites worried more about religious indifference than radicalism prior to 1642; while it may sometimes have been a coded reference to the latter, the former was perceived as the more pressing problem. New England, home to a highly politicized puritan sensibility, was poised on the eve of the civil war to export its religious praxis. In little more than a decade since Massachusetts Bay had been founded, settlers there and in the adjoining colonies of Connecticut and New Haven had gathered dozens of churches based on a congregationalist model. Every town had a church, each with at least one minister who preached and catechized the population; church attendance was mandatory, but full church membership was reserved for those who could relate an experience of conversion; and the congregation itself handled all church discipline. These churches acknowledged no higher earthly authority.11 Reform-minded Protestants who had stayed in England held these churches in high esteem. Opponents of royal policy cited the fact that Laud and other prelates had driven away their godly brethren as one of their crimes against Charles’s subjects.12 Those who stayed behind decried the sufferings of their exiled co-religionists and envied their freedom to erect pure churches in the wilderness. The Long Parliament praised the region’s “good and prosperous success,” noting that gathering godly churches there was “very happy for the propagation of the Gospel.”13 Rosamond Saltonstall, writing from England to her brother Samuel in New England, assumed that he experienced greater opportunity for spiritual development and a more profound religious life than she did, even though she resided in the household of the earl of Warwick, whose family enjoyed godly preaching by the clergymen he patronized.14 Rosamond’s assumption was widely shared.15 The godly everywhere thought religious praxis in New England especially pure. Massachusetts Bay was well placed to fill the void created by the chronic shortage of ministers for colonial pulpits. With a high ratio of ministers to laity in the population, and with Harvard College graduating its first class of aspiring ministers in 1642, the religious sensibility of New Englanders was

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ready for export into the wider Atlantic world. Other colonial locations, suffering from a shortage of clerics, offered likely prospects for employment. Ministers fanned out from New England to occupy vacant pulpits to the north almost immediately, so that the settlers living under Ferdinando Gorges’s patent heard the Word preached in a puritan fashion despite the Lord Proprietor’s own support for Laud. Pulpits in the West Indies were open to New Englanders as well, and any preacher who chose to could serve as a minister there.16 On their way to England, two Massachusetts ministers went to Newfoundland to catch a ship headed home at the end of the fishing season. While waiting to depart, they preached to the fishermen camping there, “who were much affected with the word taught.”17 The fishing crews’ reaction, though gratifying, was also typical of the reception godly preachers received in many parts of the Atlantic world in the early 1640s. Despite claims to non-separating status, New Englanders and their contemporaries understood their dissent from Anglicanism as part of an ongoing struggle with far-reaching implications. They readily embraced like-minded English people, as when they warmly welcomed Richard Ingle, captain of the Reformation, on a return voyage from the Chesapeake. The agent of the Catholic Lord Baltimore received a correspondingly cold welcome: no one in Boston would extend him credit, as John Winthrop approvingly recorded in his journal. One of the Jesuits working in Baltimore’s Maryland contracted with a New England sea captain to transport him to England, but then became fearful of being thrown overboard, or being forced to go to New England, where he would confront “the very dregs of all Calvinist heresy.”18 Since Massachusetts Bay was widely regarded as an important center for reformed religion, co-religionists who stopped in Boston on transatlantic voyages made sure to hear the preaching of the renowned John Cotton. Visitors from the Somers Islands who attended a particularly controversial sermon at mid-decade were only a handful of the many faithful who heard the revered man speak. Boston came to be considered by the colony’s leaders as a “place of such publicke resort,” and they were attentive to the religious face the town showed to the world.19 Outside New England, religion in the Atlantic basin was far less politicized in 1641. The association of the region with religious radicalism was so strong that, later in the decade, when radicalism overtook England, conservatives would conclude that it would have been better if all the radicals had stayed in New England until efforts to reform the Church of England had been completed.20 Long before other colonial communities had become caught up in the religious politics of the center, New England symbolized aggressive puritanism. In the early 1640s, New England migrants saw the reformation of English churches as part of the larger project they were pursuing in erecting their

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own pure churches. The Bay Colony sent agents to Parliament in August 1641 with instructions not only to arrange aid for the plantation’s troubled economy but also to advance religious reformation in England.21 Thomas Weld and Hugh Peter, ministers who went as two of the three agents, were among thirteen university-educated men who re-migrated to England in the first two years after Charles I called the Long Parliament. Other erstwhile settlers soon followed. With employment opportunities for godly clergymen on the rise after Parliament took control of the ecclesiastical system, many ministers were drawn to the opportunity to assume (or resume) an English pulpit.22 The godly who remained in America still worked for English reformation. New England churches frequently held days of thanksgiving or humiliation to celebrate reforms or to pray for improvements in their homeland.23 One Massachusetts minister characterized the churches as “so many severall Regiments, or bands of Souldiers lying in ambush here under the fearn and brushet of the Wildernes,” ready to attack the enemies of God in England “with deadly Fastings and Prayer, murtherers that will kill point blanke from one end of the world to the other.”24 A cynical observer might have quipped that it was preferable to fight the civil war from the safety of a New England meetinghouse. Still, a sense of engagement with occurrences on the other side of the Atlantic was widespread in New England. Just as leading New Englanders sought to advertise their region’s achievements, the English public was interested in exploring the results of these efforts. As soon as press censorship was lifted in the early 1640s, sermons by New England divines as well as descriptions of the New England way began to appear in London. For the first three years of dialogue on these topics (1641–1643), London presses issued at least twenty-seven works on New England, twenty-two of them by residents of the region and twenty-one of those published to recommend some aspect of its religious life.25 Because works by New Englanders were much in demand, a number of manuscripts, including perhaps all of those that appeared in 1641, went to press without the permission of their authors. John Humfrey, who brought out a pirated version of John Cotton’s Powring Out of the Seven Vials in 1642, asserted that readers would welcome the opportunity its publication presented to get “a taste of the ordinary Weeke-daies exercise, of that Reverend man.”26 The very titles of tracts by New England men invoked the image of that region’s greater religiosity. The English divines who published a letter by Thomas Shepard and called it New Englands Lamentation for Old Englands present errours and divisions27 took for granted that New England condescended to old England on matters of religion. From 1641, when press censorship ended, until the end of the 1640s, at least 125 works issued from London presses dealt with some aspect of New England faith or practice.28 New Eng-

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land authors, hoping to disseminate word of their spiritual life and ecclesiastical forms, published at least eighty-eight works from 1640 through 1649.29 The English reading public’s fascination created a growing market for these publications. Proponents of the New England way published manuscripts by such leading lights as John Cotton and Thomas Hooker in order to further their own positions on church polity or to persuade an English audience of the necessity of reform.30 English interest in the New England churches would continue into mid-decade, with tracts on the region’s religious life rising to fifty in 1644–45. Because the churches in New England had begun their reformation earlier, were led by well-respected clergymen, and were reputed to enjoy great success, the godly elsewhere expected them to offer valuable lessons. The New England churches also may have gained advantage from the Englishness of their experiment. Unlike the Scots, who offered another version of reformed Protestantism, the New Englanders were not tainted by being “foreign” in an age of nascent national chauvinism. The English opponents of Charles I negotiated an alliance with Scots Presbyterians, who were themselves in revolt against the king’s campaign to Anglicanize their churches. This alliance forced Charles to call parliament and prevented him from dissolving it. To reinvigorate the alliance in 1643, Parliament agreed to the Solemn League and Covenant, which pledged religious uniformity between the allies, conditional on concordance with the Word of God. The Scots believed this connoted a promise that the Church of England would be remodeled along Presbyterian lines. Such a reformation would have replaced the hierarchy of bishops and church courts with presbyteries made up of clerical and lay leaders who would set policy and exercise discipline. This interpretation of the obligations arising from the Covenant—and Scottish efforts to realize it—made the Scots unpopular. The English public was always ready to indulge its anti-Scottish prejudices, and the specter of Scots using Parliament’s military necessity to gain control of the English church settlement sparked such feelings. In this climate, the New Englanders—who were in no position collectively to coerce the outcome of ecclesiastical reform but who individually (and as English people) enlisted in the cause—benefited by comparison to the heavy-handed and alien Scots.31 New English religion was, many English assumed, just that—an English version of Protestantism, grounded in the common experience of indigenous opposition to the Stuarts and therefore, in some sense, homegrown rather than imported. In this respect, the New England churches offered a model potentially acceptable to the most chauvinistic English reformer. For a euphoric period in the first years of the Long Parliament, New England stood near the center of the movement to reform the English church.

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Friends of New England suddenly had a say in the affairs of the nation. The men who held power in Parliament would not endorse the New England way in its entirety—the system of congregational church organization and Calvinist doctrine developed in Massachusetts and adopted more or less fully in the Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth plantations—once its major features became clear. They did nevertheless begin the decade supportive of these reformed churches. Lord Saye and Sele, Warwick, John Pym, and other men of their circle were kindly disposed toward New England.32 When Parliament ordered a group of ministers to convene to advise it on religious reformation, it asked three New England ministers—John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport—to participate. All three declined, perhaps because they were worried that “primitive episcopacy,” that is, a more hierarchical church order than the congregational system they had adopted, had strong support. Still, the invitation indicated the esteem in which New England men were held in parliamentary circles.33 Those New Englanders who did return were quickly absorbed into the struggle, some assuming prominent roles. Hugh Peter worked closely with London’s most powerful radicals as well as with parliamentary and army leaders. He recommended the New England way in print in 1646 and presumably informally prior to that.34 Sir Henry Vane, who left Massachusetts in 1637 at the height of the controversy over Anne Hutchinson’s lay ministry, sat in the Long Parliament. He never publicly criticized the colony, remained on friendly terms with Peter and others, and was lauded as “a true frend to N: E:” by John Winthrop.35 Information about New England church practices was eagerly sought, and the views of leading ministers were solicited. Massachusetts Bay leaders exploited this support from their fellow puritans as cover for their own expansion both north and south of the original boundaries of their colony, apparently confident that no one in Parliament would object to the extension of New England’s new orthodoxy.36 The godly in the Somers Islands looked to New England for guidance. In January 1643/4, three of the four ministers in Bermuda renounced their Anglican ordination and gathered a congregational church. The formal gathering of the church culminated a period of preparation, during which the ministers preached reformation and instructed their more godly parishioners on the proposed changes. Prior to gathering the church, they cited the New England example informally, and a number of boys were dispatched to study at Harvard College, including the son of one of the ministers, Nathaniel White.37 Once the new church was gathered, membership was limited to the godly, or, as they were deemed in Massachusetts, “the visible saints.” Switching from a parish system, in which all residents were members, to a congregational system, in which some residents would be deemed unquali-

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fied, unchurched many settlers. The ministers worked to catechize the ignorant and unconverted in hopes of bringing others into the church, and they dropped the use of the prayer book. These efforts were facilitated initially by a supportive governor and by the general movement in England toward reformation, which the Bermuda reformers cited in support of their cause. The congregationalists believed themselves vindicated by divine providence, as when a sympathetic minister unexpectedly appeared there while two of the resident clergy were in England.38 The cause had other support as well. Warwick and other Somers Islands Company members issued a declaration urging a temporary religious settlement on the islands until Parliament made a decision about the recommendations of the Westminster Assembly. Although it did not directly endorse the new gathered church, its statements in favor of Sabbath observance, preaching of God’s Word, catechizing, and vigilance perfectly described the new congregation’s agenda. The Bermuda Independents felt confident to forge ahead, however, because they knew that Parliament (if it followed Christ) would arrive at the same church order they were instituting.39 The changes were unpopular with the majority of the Somers Islanders. They resented being excluded from church sacraments (now dubbed “ordinances”) and being thought in need of additional religious instruction. They wanted the prayer book reinstated. They cited Warwick’s Declaration in support of their own efforts to limit ecclesiastical changes, particularly because it stated that the company did not intend to anticipate the decision of Parliament on matters of religion. This they saw as endorsing their wish to leave the islands’ church order as it had been in 1640. Richard Norwood, schoolmaster of Bermuda, fought the reform of the church. He averred that the New England model was not well enough understood to be implemented in Bermuda and that, in any case, the islanders were not pious enough to follow it. As the anti-Independents maintained to the governor in a petition, all they wanted was to be taught “the wayes of faith and good life, and not trouble our heads with Christ comming to raigne upon earth a thousand yeares personally, with many such like fancies.” What they saw as a church order created out of the “imaginations” of their opponents was, as their own complaint revealed, typical of contemporary congregationalist preaching within the reformed tradition.40 Although the colony would be embroiled in controversy over these issues for the remainder of the decade, New Englanders and their allies everywhere applauded the move toward reformation in the Somers Islands. As one of the ministers involved described it, echoing the title of a recently published pamphlet about New England, “the clear Sunshine of the Gospel begins to irradiate these western parts of the world, where it is like to sit, for which we daily bow the knees of our soulls unto the father of the Lord

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Jesus Christ.”41 Congregationalist reform in the Somers Islands won mention by that indefatigable heresiographer Thomas Edwards, who identified the colony, along with New England and England, as full of errors. Many religious conservatives took the gathering of the church in Bermuda as an example of error run rampant.42 Religious conservatives who aimed at a presbyterian national church saw New England as a source of opposition to their plans. In 1641, Robert Baillie—Scottish advocate for presbyterianism—referred to his most significant opponents as those “who are for New-England way.” This phrase indicated both the lack of a better term (“Independents” would be coined later)43 and Baillie’s sense that those who opposed him promoted the policies of that region. One of four Scottish commissioners sent to England in 1640 was specifically assigned to combat support for the New England system. William Rathband worried that English Independents could cite the New England churches to bolster their cause.44 He furthermore fumed that New Englanders praised their own churches in these culture wars. The upsurge in publications hostile to the New England way that occurred in 1644–45 was largely attributable to this faction.45 The value of the church order erected in New England emerged as a major debating point as the negotiations within the Westminster Assembly—and the agreement not to air differences—broke down.46 On the other side, radical reformers eagerly enlisted New Englanders as their allies, publishing the works of many divines from that region and citing the New England way in support of their position. After trying to work with men who favored other ecclesiastical systems in the Westminster Assembly for six months, the Independents (by 1643 known as such) issued An Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted To the Honourable Houses of Parliament to bolster their position. Its five minister-authors cited the New England churches as one model: Last of all, we had the recent and later example of the wayes and practices (and those improved to a better Edition and greater refinement, by all the fore-mentioned helps) of those multitudes of godly men of our own Nation, almost to the number of another Nation, and among them some as holy and judicious Divines as this Kingdome hath bred; whose sincerity in their way hath been testified before all the world, and wil be unto all generations to come, by the greatest undertaking (but that of our father Abraham out of his own countrey, and his seed after him) a transplanting themselves many thousand miles distance, and that by sea, into a Wildernes, meerly to worship God more purely, whither to allure them there could be noe other invitement.47

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Though not mentioned by name, the New England churches clearly stood as a major (arguably the major) model in support of the Independent position by January 1644. Other polemicists who used the American churches to support their own position included John Goodwin, in his 1645 response to William Prynne’s campaign against independency, and the anonymous author (probably Henry Robinson) of two more tracts published in 1644 and 1645 also answering Prynne.48 New England was, in short, central to the debate over the reformation of the English church. The triumph of the New England way seemed imminent in the early 1640s. The reputation of the region and its church order peaked, with both the ideas and the men who held them enjoying an unexpected prominence. Cotton, the region’s most eminent cleric, has been described as “the darling of the English Independents” in this era. These heady days were a far cry from the experience of the godly in the late 1630s, when they had been hiding their views or trying to slip out of the country undetected. Although Winthrop could not have hoped that New England would serve in this way when he preached his famous “City Upon a Hill” sermon aboard the Arbella, he and other New England leaders came to think that their efforts might play an important role throughout the Atlantic world. Their optimism at this time has been read back onto the migration period, and American popular mythology clings to the idea that the early migrants meant to offer a guide to all of Christendom.49 Such exaggerated expectations were not typical of the 1630s, though they became more common in the 1640s, given the dramatic changes overtaking England in the first half of the decade and the centrality of New England to the ecclesiastical discussion under way there. Just as the brethren left behind in England were eager to discuss the churches erected in the wilderness, so too the faithful in other parts of the Americas looked to New England for guidance and for assistance in staffing and reforming their own religious institutions. A group of Virginians contacted the churches of Massachusetts and New Haven in search of ministers in 1642. Governor Philip Bell of Barbados sent a similar request in the same year, hoping to find godly men to assume the island’s empty pulpits. One of the earliest publications advertising New Englanders’ efforts extolled the region’s role in Christianizing the settlers in other parts of the Atlantic world: Foure more Plantations . . . hearing of the goodnese of God to his people in our parts, and of the light of the Gospel there shinning; have done even as Jacob did in the Famine time, when he heard there was bread in Egypt, he hasted away his Sonnes for Corn, that they might live and not die: in like manner severall Towns in Virginia, as also Barbados, Christophers, and Antego, all of them much about the same time, as if

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they had known the minds of each other, did send Letters and Messengers, crying out unto us, as the man of Macedonia to Paul, Come and help us and that with such earnestnesses, as men hunger-starved and ready to die, cry for bread; so they cry out unto us in the bowels of compassion for the Lord Jesus sake to send them some helpe.50 The anonymous author of this work relished the role of savior to the irreligious or at least unchurched of other plantations. While these requests were necessitated by the perennial problem of vacant pulpits, the men who made them knew that employing New Englanders would import the specific religious politics of that region. The requests came from men with personal ties to New England leaders. Sir Thomas Warner, the governor of “Christopher” (as more conscientious puritans sometimes called it to avoid the “papist” reference to a saint), was an acquaintance and former neighbor of John Winthrop and would entertain one of Winthrop’s sons later in the decade.51 Bell was at one time a protégé of Warwick, having previously governed both the Somers Islands and Providence Island.52 Both were willing (if not actually eager) to welcome the sort of minister New England would send. This willingness made possible the dispersal of a more politicized puritanism from one end of the Atlantic to the other. Where puritans were a minority, the events of the early 1640s caused them to link their own fortunes with those of Parliament. In Virginia the godly were hopeful that once Parliament dismantled the Anglican establishment, the local authorities would be unable to force conformity to the Church of England.53 Only many years later did the Council of State finally write to Governor Berkeley demanding the reinstatement of ousted minister Thomas Harrison. It chided him, “We know you cannot be ignorant that the use of the Common prayer booke is prohibited by the Parliament of England.”54 In Maryland Protestants similarly took heart from the successes of Parliament, anticipating that their position in a Catholic-dominated colony would improve as a result of its intervention. Some of the settlers who supported Richard Ingle’s attack on the province in 1645 hoped that Parliament might redress their situation. Only one Catholic took the oath against Baltimore during the rebellion.55 Protestants were more likely to oppose his authority, and many of them claimed to act on religious grounds. The radical political potential of religion was recognized in Barbados, where a law to minimize debate in the interest of neutrality included prohibitions on “conventicles,” a term that was typically applied to private religious meetings of radical Protestants. Believers in England met to hear godly preaching when it was not available in the local parish church, and more radical groups—such as antipedobaptists—might also have been described as

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meeting in conventicles. Although the exact nature of the groups targeted by this law is unclear, Barbados authorities linked private religious meetings with the exacerbation of political tensions. Barbados maintained a religious establishment, based—perhaps by this time loosely—on the Church of England settlement that predated the outbreak of the civil war. By mid-decade, if not before, islanders were free from “having any ceremonies or human constitutions obtruded upon them in the worship of God.” The government remained committed to the punishment of religious radicals, however. Some colonists found this objectionable, and they pressured the government for complete liberty of conscience, citing a March 1646 order from Parliament in support of their position. This group’s demands were not met; the authorities claimed that they were asking for more than Parliament allowed. Members of this dissatisfied group were presumably among those who met in conventicles around this time.56 In this environment, Virginia governor Berkeley went on the offensive against puritanism. Virginia had been founded nearly four decades earlier by the largely puritan Virginia Company, and godly critics of the church remained a presence after Virginia became a royal colony in 1622. For two decades those with reformist inclinations did not challenge Virginia’s status as a Crown colony or otherwise attempt to undermine the king’s authority there. But in the highly charged 1640s, dissenting from the prevailing doctrines and practices of the Church of England became unacceptable. When a puritandominated parish called New England ministers, it raised the stakes. Previously the parishioners had hoped to receive suitable ministers from England but had been disappointed and so decided to turn to the puritan powerhouse to the north. Berkeley responded to this challenge by driving the ministers who answered the call out of the colony. According to New Englander Edward Johnson, the multitude in Virginia preferred “the fellowship of their drunken companions, and a Preist of their own profession, who could hardly continue so long sober as till he could read them the reliques of mans invention in a common prayer book.”57 The prayer book was indeed key to the policing of conformity in Virginia, as Johnson’s snide remark suggests. Berkeley’s government enforced conformity through it, legislating that any minister who failed to use it forfeited the right to receive tithes. Although disgruntled laity had used tithe strikes to signal their dissatisfaction with a particular minister, this initiative gave official endorsement to what had been an occasional form of lay protest. By contrast, in England, tithe strikes were usually an informal strategy used by the laity to punish ministers who had been “intruded” into local pulpits as part of the effort to pull down the Church of England; no government entity ordered nonpayment of tithes as a way to have laypeople aid in the enforcement of

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central policy. Indeed, when Parliament wished to suppress the Book of Common Prayer, it punished clergy who persisted in using it with fines and eventual imprisonment. The Virginia policy was subtler than driving New England men out of its pulpits. It located the responsibility for enforcement with the individual tithe payer, who could support a puritan minister by continuing to pay, but cleverly exploited any lay anticlericalism by granting the less ardent a legal way to stop paying tithes in certain instances. In many communities the Book of Common Prayer was cherished, so punishing a clergyman who neglected it was an easy way to win widespread support for the enforcement of conformity. Many in England also felt devoted to the prayer book and expressed that devotion when the Parliament declared its use illegal. Only recently have scholars begun to appreciate how dear the liturgy of the Church of England was to many laypeople.58 The politics of religious differences in Virginia were revealed by a debate that occurred shortly after the ministers were forced out, when the Powhatan Indians attacked the colony. According to royalists, the attack was launched after parliamentarians, particularly Sir Francis Wyatt, alerted the natives to the civil war then dividing England. Wyatt allegedly advised the Indians that the time was ripe to cut off the English, who could expect no help from home. Why Wyatt would be the object of such rumors is not clear, although the fact that he was the newly appointed governor of the colony at the time of the 1622 Indian attack may be pertinent. Puritans offered a different interpretation: in their view, God had revealed his displeasure with the persecution of godly ministers by sending the attack. The London press reported that the members of one godly family were able to fortify their home and escape certain death after they correctly interpreted the divine message conveyed through insoluble blood globules in their laundry water. This interpretation, taken as fact in New England, was said to have persuaded at least one Anglican in Virginia. Thomas Harrison, by one account former chaplain to the governor himself, was converted to the opposition viewpoint when he became convinced that God had indeed intended the attack as punishment for persecution. Subsequently driven out of the colony himself, Harrison went on to an illustrious career among the godly, serving as one of Cromwell’s chaplains.59 In this controversy, royalist Anglicans alleged conspiracy and treachery on the part of their foes, while their opponents were on this occasion more interested in the providential meaning of events. Warring explanatory models as well as competing interpretations of the Lord’s message were increasingly common as religious differences polarized. Despite the bright prospects of the early 1640s, the New England churches did not provide the pattern for the reformation of the Church of England or

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even for a majority of the individual churches in England. Parliament never succeeded in fully reforming the established church, and no particular system replaced the edifice that was dismantled during the early 1640s. The Westminster Assembly, though divided, ultimately endorsed a presbyterian polity that became increasingly unacceptable to the majority in Parliament and to other politically active groups. Implementation of its recommendations never resulted in the systematic replacement of the Church of England with a viable national alternative. The failure to follow the New England model was part of this larger failure to replace the Church of England. The New England churches played a major role in the effort to create a new national ecclesiastical polity to replace the one Parliament pulled down in 1641. In the debate over what polity to adopt, New England’s way was analyzed extensively, and the merits and, increasingly, the demerits of the approach were scrutinized. When London’s religious politics polarized over questions of clerical autonomy, exclusionary church practices, and toleration, the New England churches figured prominently in the discussion. In the end, however, the New Englanders’ stance on the question of toleration dominated the discussion, reshaping the region’s image and undermining its influence in the debates of the 1640s. The news that the major New England colonies persecuted those it considered heterodox broke in London in early 1644. Toleration was a central issue in England at the time. The end to an established church and ecclesiastical courts allowed the expression of an unprecedented range of views among the opponents of the king, and the need to form alliances within that group encouraged a degree of toleration. A broad coalition among Independents, Baptists, and others left only the most radical outside the pale, and the suppression of even extremists was impossible given shifting alliances and the rise in principled support for liberty of conscience. New England’s vigorous repression of error therefore put it at odds with its presumptive allies in England. On January 16, a tract titled Antinomians and Familists condemned by the Synod of Elders in New England exposed the harsh measures that were taken against Massachusetts “antinomians” in the 1630s. Brought out initially by an unnamed person hoping to combat burgeoning radicalism by placing the authority of New England squarely behind a policy of suppression, it was quickly reissued with a preface by Thomas Weld under the title A Short Story of the Rise, reign and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines, that infected the Churches of New England. As one of the agents for Massachusetts Bay, Weld felt that the hastily published tract had not served the colony. His criticism was not that broadcasting its intolerance harmed New England’s reputation, but that the unannotated collection of documents generated by the proceedings against Anne Hutchinson and her sup-

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porters was difficult to follow. Hence Weld’s edition simply added a preface that provided additional information about how New England had met this dire threat. Weld clearly believed that the major challenge to New England’s reputation was the accusation that its lax church polity encouraged heresy. To combat this view, he emphasized the rigor of the response to “antinomianism.”60 Weld’s concerns were firmly rooted in the political reality of the 1630s, when the major criticism leveled at religious radicals was that they encouraged anarchy. He “retained,” as one scholar has noted, “the religious prejudices of the England from which [he] emigrated.”61 His concern was also rooted in the conservative circles he frequented in England, circles in which such criticisms continued to be voiced. Lest Londoners conclude that the treatment of Hutchinson and her supporters had been anomalous, another pamphlet, this one by Roger Williams, appeared on February 5 to confirm that suppression of dissent was a settled policy of the Bay Colony. His Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered responded to A Coppy of a Letter of Mr. Cotton of Boston, which had been published without Cotton’s permission in 1643. Both letters had been written during the previous decade, in a correspondence between the two men after Williams’s banishment. Whereas Cotton’s letter to Williams had justified various aspects of New England’s church order, Williams’s reply focused on toleration. Particularly in the preface and the occasional marginalia, written for the 1644 London audience, Williams emphasized Massachusetts’s intolerance. He repeatedly noted that this policy contradicted a movement toward toleration within Parliament. In London at the time, Williams was able to confide, “I am informed it was the Speech of an honourable Knight of the Parliament: what, Christ persecute Christ in New England?”62 Although Weld thought persecution praiseworthy and Williams thought it reprehensible, the publication efforts of both men added to the evidence that New England embraced the vigorous suppression of dissent. Fast on the heels of the publication of information on the Hutchinson and Williams cases, rumors flew through London that the New Englanders had dealt more harshly still with a new wave of dissent. By April 1644, Londoners had word that the Bay Colony had seized, tried, and put to hard labor Samuel Gorton and other residents of Shawmut, a town in the Narragansett region. That men were “in irons for their blasphemies, condemned to perpetuall slaverie,” and had barely escaped the death penalty was a central topic of discussion in London that spring.63 Gorton, along with a group of his supporters, traveled to London to protest the treatment they had received, further advertising the association between Massachusetts and persecution. Gorton’s counteroffensive harnessed the support for liberty of conscience and the growing sympathy for lay preaching that he found in England in

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1644. He related that soldiers had invaded Shawmut, arrested men, and hauled them to Boston for trial. First they were made to listen to Cotton preach against their views, a sermon Gorton critiqued for erroneous application of scriptural truths. That his facility at explicating the Bible was superior to the renowned Cotton’s was a favorite point of Gorton’s.64 Convicted of blasphemy, the men had been put to hard labor in various towns. Later they were released and sent home after the authorities reconsidered the wisdom of scattering followers of such an “arch heretick” throughout their colony, free to preach their blasphemous views.65 The Gorton imbroglio severely damaged the reputation of Massachusetts Bay. For a conservative such as Baillie, the case proved that lax discipline in the congregational system allowed the worst heresies to flourish. Men who favored complete liberty of conscience, such as the radical John Goodwin, or a more limited liberty for all saints, such as leading Independent minister Thomas Goodwin, analyzed the situation differently. Although they believed the congregational church order to be godly, they opposed religious persecution of men known for their piety, as Gorton had been when he resided in London.66 Gorton’s mid-decade sojourn in London proved fruitful: the Committee on Foreign Plantations supported his right to reside in Shawmut unmolested. The Gortonists, returning in triumph to New England, renamed their town “Warwick” in honor of their newfound patron. Although Massachusetts defender Edward Johnson later opined that Gorton and his followers had to hurry back to escape being punished for a blasphemous book about to appear in London, the damage they inflicted clearly hurt the Bay.67 The New England example, which both Goodwins and their compatriots had previously promoted, was fully identified by mid-1644 with intolerance. By that time Presbyterians were swapping stories that even men of their own persuasion, “were they angells for life and doctrine, [if they] will assay to sett up a diverse way from them, shall be sure of present banishment.”68 These stories exaggerated the treatment Massachusetts meted out to its resident Presbyterian critics, who—so long as they focused only on ecclesiastical issues—were treated with circumspection.69 New England suddenly looked as intolerant as England had been under the rule of the Laudian bishops. New Englanders responded by defending their positions on liberty of conscience, toleration, and persecution in tracts, letters, and public statements. A number of scholars have argued that their position has been exaggerated and some of the subtlety of its logic has been lost in the polemic. The major New England colonies would not, however, tolerate as wide a spectrum of beliefs as was tolerated in England at this time. They departed from their allies on this issue. Thomas Shepard wrote to his friend and former colleague Hugh

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Peter shortly after the colonists’ views on these questions came under scrutiny, and his letter bears quoting extensively for its clear presentation of the New England position: I see no more reason to beare with good men in these opinions then in their morall transgressions, for they commonly are coupled together: yow have had experience of the grangreene in New-England & how soone it spread in a little time, & how God hath borne witnesse agaynst that generation. I feare greate sorrowes attend England if they do not seasonably suppresse & beare public witnesse agaynst such delusions . . . I know there may be some connivance for a time while tis tumultuous & while the wars call all spirits thither, but Toleration of all upon pretence of Conscience I thanke God my soul abhors it. The godly in former times never sought for the Liberty of their conscience by pleading Liberty for all.70 While Shepard’s language invokes imagery similar to that shortly to be used by the English heresiographer Thomas Edwards71 in response to the sectarian explosion of the mid-1640s, his explication also reveals that he still thought in pre–civil war terms. Though willing to concede that the exigencies of wartime might temporarily affect the ability to uphold standards, he thought that basic goals and attitudes ought to remain the same. Peter had once worked with him to suppress Anne Hutchinson, the leader of that “generation” whom New England’s defenders believed had been killed at the hands of Indians as God’s “witness” against their heresies. But Peter, after a few years in war-torn England working with radicals, no longer shared Shepard’s viewpoint.72 The association of New England congregationalism with religious persecution had a profound impact on the discussion of church reformation. As Presbyterian Robert Baillie confided to one of his correspondents, “The misorders which are at this time in New England will make the Independents more willing to accomodat and comply with us.”73 He hoped that the position of the Independents would be irrevocably damaged by revelations that their allies opposed toleration, one of their major principles. The Independents concurred with his assessment. As they wrote to the Massachusetts government the following year, they had been made vulnerable to attack by the New Englanders’ policies.74 Many opponents of an Independent church order used their example to argue that the Independents’ advocacy of toleration arose out of their minority status, but that, if they ever gained the upper hand, Independents would prove as intolerant as their New England brethren.75 In a letter to the General Court of Massachusetts, the Independent ministers explained, “It hath beene urged that persons of our way principall

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and spirit cannot beare with Dissentors from them but Doe correct fine imprison and banish them wherever they have power soe to Doe.”76 Conservatives believed that an Independent or congregational system also encouraged religious experimentation, augmenting the numbers of heresies that, under the New England approach, at least, had to be suppressed. Both of these criticisms—that independency led to worse and that the Independents’ commitment to liberty of conscience would last only as long as they were kept from power—were frequently leveled against the erstwhile allies of the New England congregationalists.77 In a particularly interesting twist, Edwards complained in his massive heresiography, Gangraena, that New England vomited forth various heresies that England then eagerly licked up: the odd combination of promoting and persecuting heresy led to an increased number of heretics entering England, there to be embraced by proponents of liberty.78 After the intolerance of the colonial system was exposed, New England and the Independents who had once identified their own fortunes with it lost ground in the struggle to reshape the ecclesiastical order. Independents responded to these criticisms in two ways: privately, they tried to persuade their brethren to alter their course while publicly they worked to de-emphasize the association between themselves and the intolerant New Englanders. The June 1645 letter to the Massachusetts government, sent to protest a law against the “heresy” of Anabaptism, was one in a series of challenges to New England policies on dissent launched by the leading Independent ministers. Their petition against persecuting antipedobaptists had a colonial counterpart: “divers merchants and others” petitioned against the new law proscribing Baptists after the ministers’ petition arrived.79 While a contingent of Bay colonists supported limited toleration, former New Englanders who had re-migrated usually advocated it as well. From the mid-1640s, Hugh Peter regularly admonished his correspondents in New England to accommodate those who dissented on minor matters. His definition of minor dissent revealed the influence that increasingly tolerant and diverse civil war England had on his attitudes. In 1637 he had been one of the ministers who condemned Hutchinson’s views. Within the decade he was making common cause with radicals in the army and in London who held views very similar to hers.80 Peter remained sympathetic to the New England way, but his allies, most of whom had never resided in the New World, were more willing to criticize the region. At the same time that they were writing to New Englanders to ask them to modify their policies, English Independents de-emphasized the extent to which they had patterned their church order on that of New England. By mid-1644 the Independents’ eagerness to link the cause of radical reform to the New England churches had declined dramatically. In March the un-

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named defender of The Apologeticall Narration who authored A Coole Conference felt comfortable declaring that those who created the New England churches had followed God’s Word “close with a great deal of judgment.”81 For him the suffering of New Englanders clearly demonstrated the truth of their views. But by May, when John Goodwin and Thomas Goodwin joined forces (anonymously) to publish M. S. To A. S. With a Plea for Libertie of Conscience in a Church Way . . . And Annotations Upon the Apologeticall Narration, they distanced themselves and the cause of independency from New England. Though willing to engage their Presbyterian critics on some questions about the nature of the New England church order, they also snapped that the New Englanders were “of age to speak for themselves” on their intolerance. In spite of hoping that their brethren would be able to say something on their own behalf on this matter, the authors conceded that intolerance was “the New-England course,” and admonished their opponents in England not to follow them in it.82 From this point forward, the Independents no longer promoted the New England example to support their cause.83 In responding to critics, they were often forced, by the association that they had helped to create, to address aspects of the New England system. Hence, to counter allegations that gathered churches bestowed unseemly power on women members, C. C. The Covenanter vindicated cited “worthy ministers of New-England now present” in England for the information that female members exercised no authority in their churches.84 Responding to Adam Steuart, who had argued that many New England ministers favored a congregational presbytery, M. S. to A. S. averred that only two ministers in all New England did so. In making this point, the authors claimed to have got details from “private manuscripts” as well as a recently arrived letter from Winthrop to Peter.85 Proponents of independency continued to refer to the growing body of writings by New England divines on congregationalism. While it was common to list works by Richard Mather and John Cotton to support specific points, these authors were introduced without the previous fanfare.86 Certainly Independents were no longer waxing eloquent about the great piety and sacrifice that had gone into building New England or lauding the nature of the results it had produced, as they had earlier. Some former champions of New England even attacked it now in print, although most simply refused to engage the topic.87 Later publications promoting Independent church government ignored New England altogether. The most dramatic early indication of this new hesitation to identify too fully with New England can be found in John Cotton’s Keyes Of the Kingdom of Heaven. The work, which appeared for sale in London in June 1644, represented Cotton’s mature statement on church organization. Given the rela-

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tionship between New England congregationalism and English independency and the close relationship between Cotton and leading Independent ministers such as Thomas Goodwin, it seemed natural that Cotton’s English counterparts would see the work through the publication process and produce a preface for it. Goodwin (who had been converted to nonconformity and congregational church order by Cotton himself while the latter was in hiding in London awaiting a ship to New England) and his close associate Philip Nye guided the work into print. Yet their preface, though it generally commended the work, adds, “Onely wee crave leave of the reverend Author and those Brethren that had the view of it, to declare: that we assent not to all expressions scattered up and down, or all & every Assertion interwoven in it; yea nor to all the grounds and allegations of Scriptures; nor should wee in all things perhaps have used the same terms to expresse the same materials by.” Following this disclaimer, Goodwin and Nye listed three major areas of disagreement: prophesying, synods, and power within and between congregations.88 Matters went from bad to worse for Cotton the following year, when the two men who brought out his Way of the Churches of Christ announced that they had placed asterisks alongside passages with which they disagreed. Little wonder that even Cotton subsequently distanced himself from that work as not the mature expression that the earlier published but later written Keyes was. Even the Keyes, however, failed to win the unqualified support of his closest allies in London.89 As the Independents ceased to champion the New England church order, attention to the practices of the region declined more generally. Broad interest in the New England churches was not sustained after 1645. Over the next four years (1646–1649), only eight authors bothered to attack the New England example. This represented a marked drop from the total of twenty publications in 1644 and 1645. This decline occurred as the number of published works issuing from English presses remained high. In 1646 three of the polemicists were non–New Englanders, intent on discrediting the New England way, continuing the campaign that had reached such a pitch during the two previous years.90 The critical authors were more typically men who were personally connected to New England, with a direct stake in the nature of the religious polity there. James Noyes, a minister in Newbury, Massachusetts, advocated presbyterian reform of the New England churches, a project he and his colleague Thomas Parker had first pursued unsuccessfully within the colony. Gorton, having run afoul of the Massachusetts authorities, published Simplicities Defence against Seven-Headed Policy (1646) to broadcast their intolerant policies. Pamphleteer John Child served his brother Robert, who was in a position similar to Gorton’s, by advertising the mistreatment he had received.91 The discussion of New England had become incestuous, more of

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a family squabble than the broad debate it had once been. When Edward Winslow pointed out in 1647 that the New England churches were often taken as a model, he was recalling past glories rather than reporting current reality.92 Although the general concern to promote or dissect the New England example lapsed after 1645, New Englanders themselves remained dedicated to defending their efforts. Residents and former residents produced thirty-five tracts on behalf of their region’s institutions during these four years. Many of the publications responded directly to critics. Cotton’s Way of Congregational Churches Cleared and Hooker’s Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline, published in 1648 separately as well as together, provided important statements of congregational policy. Other works offered belated rejoinders to specific earlier pamphlets, explaining that the distance between old and New England made timely responses impossible. Richard Mather’s Reply to Mr. Rutherfurd appeared fully three years after the tract to which it responded, Samuel Rutherford’s Due Right of Presbyteries. John Cotton came out with Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lambe in 1647, a delayed response to Roger Williams’s 1644 Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience. The time lag caused by the vicissitudes of transatlantic publishing did not affect all of New England’s defenders. Edward Winslow, former Plymouth Plantation governor, was able to fire off a quick reply to the tract by Child since by 1647 he was residing in England as the agent of Massachusetts Bay. His New-England Salamander appeared in a London bookseller’s shop just six weeks after Child’s New-Englands Jonas Cast up.93 With most advocates of the New England way prevented by distance from making timely contributions to the debate, they felt frustrated as their belatedly penned rejoinders arrived in the London print market months and even years after the discussion had moved on. Many must have shared the sense of injury that Winthrop expressed in the late 1640s.94 While these authors directly defended New England against detractors, other pro–New England authors carried on in the tradition of non-polemical religious works. Since these sermons and spiritual guides invariably advertised their authors’ New England connections, such publications indirectly promoted the image of New England as a haven for the godly orthodox.95 Ostensibly apolitical works by eminent New Englanders had been “steady sellers,” with one or two published annually from 1641 through 1644, at least six appearing in 1645 and 1646, and a return to more modest levels of production from 1647.96 The upsurge at mid-decade suggested that one way the friends of New England sought to scotch the criticisms was by dousing them with all the inspirational literature at hand. Thomas Hooker’s well-known talents as a devotional author were called upon in this regard. His works ac-

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counted for five of the six such tracts to appear in 1645, at the height of the bitterness. Devotional literature was a safe, noncontroversial genre, and its rising importance relative to other types of publications revealed New England on the defensive. In much the same way, Church of England adherents would retreat to the safety of devotional literature after their church was proscribed during the 1640s.97 In the end, no party to this debate—neither the “Independent brethren,” their Presbyterian opponents in the Westminster Assembly, nor the New England ministers whose views were bandied about—was satisfied with the outcome. The assembly agreed to an ecclesiastical system that was largely presbyterian, and the documents it generated serve as basic texts for Presbyterians to this day. Yet the decisions made by that assembly had relatively little impact on English polity, in large part because little was done to implement the system the assembly had endorsed. Parliament did little to regulate religious practice or belief, beyond the occasional symbolic book burning; three books by Roger Williams were ordered burned in August 1644. In the wake of this failure, England collapsed into religious anarchy, in the view of conservative reformers, who ironically conceded their admiration for New England’s rigorous discipline.98 By the end of the 1640s, alliances had shifted so that intolerant Presbyterians were among the New England churches’ admirers. As the effort to replace the old Church of England with a new national ecclesiastical policy foundered, Independents were left free to gather congregations. Because leading Independents had failed to institute procedures for making the transition from a parochial to a congregational structure, these churches had to work out their relationship to the existing parish churches on a case-by-case basis. Anglicans were also freer to cling to older practices than reformers liked, with the prayer book a major point of contention in England as elsewhere.99 Even though the settlement within England was provisional and tentative, colonists heard definite messages about which religious practices were winning acceptance, and they applied—or tried to apply—them in their communities. As occasionally happened in the political sphere, disgruntled colonists attempted to harness events on the other side of the Atlantic to their own drive for changes in the plantations. During the 1640s the truce between the Church of England and those who sought to reform it broke down in the colonies. Individuals sought to impose their interpretation of the parliamentary religious settlement in their specific contexts. What this meant differed from place to place as local conditions shaped the reception of ecclesiastical changes. Divisions between Presbyterians and Independents were carried into the

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Atlantic because individuals associated with the presbyterian position took the triumph of the anti-Independent campaign in the Westminster Assembly as a signal that they could attack their colonial foes. In both Massachusetts and the Somers Islands, men emboldened by the assembly recommendation of a presbyterian settlement launched counteroffensives. As his position appeared to be losing in England, Nathaniel White, one of the ministers who had led the congregationalist church reformation in Bermuda, offered rather weakly that he was sure that Parliament would accommodate those of his viewpoint, especially if they “live in those remote parts of the world.” The idea that distant Independents would be tolerated by Presbyterians who opposed them closer to home annoyed the London radical John Goodwin. He and others, including Oliver Cromwell, were working for more general toleration in England than a presbyterian settlement would allow. White also distanced himself somewhat from the newly unpopular New England model, denying direct consultation with his brethren to the north while still acknowledging the similarity between the two church orders.100 Although Presbyterians and Independents had seemed natural allies to the saints gathered into the Bermuda church in the early 1640s—so much so that the opposition to their church order of Presbyterian martyr-hero William Prynne had given them pause101—by the later 1640s the divisions that had characterized the assembly debates had been imported into Bermuda. Despite White’s hopes for accommodation of distant and therefore comparatively harmless Independents, his opponents in the islands claimed that Parliament had in effect decided against White when it accepted the presbyterianism advocated by the assembly. The Somers Islands Company moved against the Bermuda Independents in 1646, dispatching a new governor, Thomas Turner, with instructions to quash the gathered church and impose a presbyterian settlement. It also sent ministers to replace those who had gathered the new church. The Independent ministers were to be silenced if they did not accept the new order; two of them were periodically imprisoned for their defiance, and members of their congregations were prosecuted for failure to attend the established church. Massachusetts, in solidarity with its suffering brethren, called a day of fasting and humiliation in response to this news. The remainder of the Somers Islands populace, those who had complained when sacraments were withheld, were able once again to have their babies baptized and their daughters married in the church. The evocatively titled Servants on Horse-Back was published by one of the ousted ministers, William Golding, who traveled to London to make the Independents’ case against the company and its governor.102 In the name of imposing the parliamentary settlement on the islands, the company went beyond what Presbyterians were able to accomplish in England and, in the process, ignored Par-

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liament’s erastianism altogether. When challenged on this point by White, the governor and his council refused to implement a policy of toleration because the Somers Islands Company had not ordered it. They further stated that all Parliament intended was to grant Independents freedom from ceremonies, not freedom to follow their own understanding of what constituted right worship.103 Not only the anti-Independent faction in Bermuda but also the much smaller one in orthodox New England felt emboldened to demand reforms as the Westminster Assembly and Parliament endorsed presbyterianism over congregationalism. A handful of Massachusetts residents questioned the colony’s policies in a “Remonstrance” dated May 1646. They sought to have church membership expanded so that all residents could participate fully, as would be the case under a presbyterian—or, for that matter, Anglican—establishment. The Remonstrants also objected to linking the franchise to church membership, a requirement that disenfranchised those not deemed among the visible saints. With these criticisms they put their finger on the most controversial aspect of the polity worked out in Massachusetts Bay, raising issues that would divide the colony in subsequent years. Robert Child and the other petitioners also advocated the English legal system over the combination of English and biblically based law that the colonists had developed. They argued for limited religious toleration, although Winslow suggested that they placed added emphasis on this point when they took their case to England, implying that they advocated liberty of conscience only when they thought it would help them.104 The Remonstrants’ challenge followed on the heels of the August 1645 decision in favor of presbyterianism in England, news of which probably reached Massachusetts in the months following the decision.105 Failing to persuade the colonial leaders to revamp their church order and political system, the Remonstrants appealed to Parliament for redress. Although scholars have debated the goals that motivated them, the Remonstrants chose the only practical means of using Parliament’s power to expand Massachusetts church membership in 1646, advocating presbyterianism. Even if some of the Remonstrants were closet Anglicans (as their detractors claimed), their ostensible goal in the religious sector was the presbyterianism recently endorsed by the Westminster Assembly.106 They were most clear in their attack on independency, and they tried to link New Englanders and the recently defeated Independents. “Observe,” directed John Child, in his published defense of the petitioners, “how Independents are all of a peece, for subtilitie, desines, fallacies, both in New-England and in Old.” He warned against importing arbitrary government along with independency from New England. This warning built on the conservative critique of Independents

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then current in London: they would advocate toleration only until they had power, at which time they would emerged as greater tyrants than those they had previously chastised for intolerance.107 Mindful of the Atlantic dimension of religious politics in the 1640s, the Bay’s critics also broadcast their complaints to other colonies, sending the “Remonstrance” to various ports to undermine orthodox New England’s reputation in those places.108 The Bay Colony defended itself against this challenge, and it was in the end largely successful. Within Massachusetts the government responded decisively, characterizing the petition as a slanderous effort to sow sedition. The petitioners were imprisoned, tried, heavily fined, and held in custody until they posted bond or paid their fines. The fines levied against the five men convicted in June 1647 amounted to the total tax collected in a year, as Richard Dunn has pointed out.109 Cotton preached against them, even predicting that if they tried to appeal to England, God would punish them with a hazardous voyage. Winslow later claimed that Cotton came to his topic in the course of a sermon cycle that providentially permitted him to denounce the government’s critics. When Cotton’s prediction of a difficult voyage proved correct, a shipboard struggle ensued over whether casting the petition overboard would save the ship. The petition (or a copy) made it safely to England, however, and the debate over the divine meaning of the difficult oceanic passage was carried on in the London press.110 By the time the “Remonstrance” arrived in London, Winslow was already residing there as agent of the Bay Colony. He had been dispatched shortly before to counter the decision of Warwick’s Committee on Foreign Plantations in favor of Gorton. He quickly responded to the publication of NewEnglands Jonas Cast up, making the colony’s case against the Remonstrants. He also appeared repeatedly before the Committee on Foreign Plantations in defense of the colony, and he proved an effective advocate. The committee ultimately sided with the Bay on this case. It no doubt sought to avoid interfering in the internal affairs of an ostensibly loyal colony at a time when Parliament was interested in wooing settlers to its cause. In addition, since Parliament’s commitment to a presbyterian establishment was waning, the Remonstrants did not get the support for this aspect of their criticism that they must have expected when they initiated their attack the year before.111 Still, Winslow deserved the gratitude of the Bay for his efforts, and he received it. John Winthrop crowed in his journal that he had heard reports that Robert Child had been forced to apologize for boxing the ears of a Mr. Willoughby (formerly a resident of Charlestown, Massachusetts) on the Exchange after they argued over Child’s assertion that New England men “were a Company of Rogues & knaves.”112 The humiliation of Child was the best news Winthrop had received about his colony’s reputation in a long time.

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After the Remonstrance, Presbyterians gave up on winning over Massachusetts Bay, either through eliciting support in the colony or complaining to the center.113 Although it is unsurprising that Parliament’s endorsement of presbyterianism reverberated in Bermuda and the Bay Colony, it is more startling that the transatlantic battles over liberty of conscience directly fueled the efforts to Christianize Native Americans. The immediate impetus for John Eliot’s famous career as a missionary was the decision of the Committee on Foreign Plantations to protect Gorton and his companions against interference from the Bay government. Randall Holden, one of Gorton’s leading supporters, arrived in Boston in September 1646 with documents signed by Warwick and the committee that commanded the colony to grant him free passage back to Shawmut (soon to be renamed Warwick) and to leave the settlement alone. This unexpected decision in favor of their rivals gave added urgency to the Bay colonists’ two-year-old plan to evangelize the Indians. The connection between the Gortonists’ success and Indian missions was multilayered. Gorton himself had used outreach to the Narragansett Indians who lived around Shawmut to further his case in England. Before he left for England in 1644, Gorton got the Narragansetts to declare their submission directly to the king. This ploy was intended to stave off encroachments by the Bay, whose leaders, he explained, were only subjects on a par with these new Indian vassals and therefore held no authority over them.114 Converting Native Americans was seen as a way to pull them into Massachusetts’s orbit, as a counter to Gorton’s alliances. The government accused Gorton of undermining relations with the Indians and threatening to undo the work of orthodox missionaries. Later one mission supporter gleefully reported that some of Eliot’s converts wondered whether Gorton even followed the same Bible, as his theology seemed so strange to them in light of what they had learned from Eliot. Indian missions were also seen as a means of containing a Gortonist threat the colony no longer felt free to obliterate. Finally, Indian conversion could rehabilitate the colony’s reputation in England. The news that Gorton had won support stunned the Bay leadership and persuaded them of the need to improve relations with their erstwhile allies at home. In framing their official denunciation of the Gortonists in response to the documents Holden conveyed, the leaders raised the conversion theme, presenting themselves as the agents of Indian Christianization and their battle against Gorton as part of that larger campaign. This view—if accepted in England— would do much to rehabilitate the colony’s image and justify its intolerance of extremists who might mislead native peoples. At the time the Bay made these claims, the campaign to convert the heathens was just months old, but

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it received particular emphasis because of its potential utility in revitalizing the region’s reputation.115 The idea of converting the natives of America to Christianity had long enjoyed popularity in England. All royal charters and patents for land in the Americas had listed Christianization as a primary goal of English expansion. The Massachusetts Bay charter declared it “the principle end” of the plantation. This theme was frequently reiterated in letters from England.116 Promotional literature on the colonies usually extolled the opportunity to spread Christianity.117 The committee appointed by Parliament to oversee foreign plantations assumed that Christianizing the Indians was a major concern on both sides of the Atlantic.118 Roger Williams justified the publication of his account of Indian language and culture by noting that “a man may, with this helpe, converse with thousands of Natives all over the Countrey: and by such converse it may please the Father of Mercies to spread civilitie, (and in his owne most holy season) Christianitie.”119 Williams’s qualified endorsement of Indian conversion aside, the project was popular in part because of the fascination with Indians and the prospect for their conversion. Within England itself, the work was seen as important and long overdue.120 Not just converting Indians but advertising those efforts contributed to the campaign to revive Massachusetts’s flagging reputation. In spring 1647 Edward Winslow probably had a hand in issuing the first in a series of tracts describing the missionary labors and calling for English support.121 The DayBreaking If Not the Sun-Rising was undoubtedly compiled in New England prior to Winslow’s departure, with the intention that he would have it printed in England.122 During the next two years, Winslow brought out two more tracts on the “glorious progress” of Indian conversions. Besides The Clear Sun-Shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth, a second account would have been issued in 1648, except that the ship carrying the most recent letters was seized by the Prince of Wales.123 While Winslow was seeing accounts into print, he also encouraged the ministers of London to support the missionary effort, winning broad endorsement for the project. The approval of both Presbyterian and Independent ministers, expressed in the preface to a 1649 tract on the missionary effort, no doubt helped Winslow as he lobbied Parliament and the Committee on Foreign Plantations to support the missions.124 Presbyterians were slightly more likely to endorse Winslow’s efforts than Independents (judging by the preface signatories at least), and to do so they had to overcome their sense that converting Indians to independency amounted to a “marred” conversion.125 The July 1649 “Act for the promoting and propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England” created a society to collect contributions to the Indian conversion campaign. Its passage indicated Winslow’s success. Parliament’s ordinance launching the cor-

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poration that would raise funds for the missions praised the “pious care and pains of some godly English of this Nation, Who preach the Gospel to them in their own Indian Language.”126 The delegates of Oxford published an open letter to their ministerial colleagues in England and Wales in support of the corporation, urging “Christian compassion upon the souls of Barbarous Indians, who sit in the shadow and region of Death.”127 That the act to support the gospel among American natives predated that aimed at the Welsh offers further testimony to Winslow’s achievement.128 Drawing together a somewhat unlikely group of allies, Winslow demonstrated that New England’s critics could put aside their objections to commend an Indian conversion campaign. Parliament willingly endorsed the missionary campaign in New England, but its vision for America (and for the three kingdoms of the Stuarts, for that matter) differed from that promulgated there. The constitution of Eleuthera, established around the same time that the first missionary tract issued from a London press, indicates the religious settlement Parliament was envisioning by 1647. The only completely new colonial venture launched by anti-royalists in this decade, Eleuthera reflected the direction of religious change in revolutionary England. The new colony advocated toleration and a congregational church settlement. The plan for Eleuthera reveals the extent of the radicalization of religion among some who opposed the king. Eleuthera would be settled first by persecuted Bermuda Independents and later by troublemakers of various sorts banished from those islands. It came in for severe ridicule by royalists. Mercurius Aulicus was probably referring to it in a tirade of 1649 against a new colony “for propagating and promoting their new-found Religions and whimseys in these new-found-Lands.” Aulicus also rehashed the old idea that Parliament’s supporters sought a place of refuge in the Americas where they meant to flee with their newfound riches once their assault on the king had been defeated.129 The Independents of Eleuthera, despite their continued connection to Massachusetts Bay, did not endorse intolerance. It would have been impolitic to do so in London in 1647 in any event. For their part, New England’s elite read the subsequent hardships of the Eleuthera settlers as a clear indication of God’s thinking about toleration. Still, rumors flew that New Englanders were abandoning that region to take up residence in the new settlement. That colonists from that area were ready to pull up stakes and relocate was regularly reported elsewhere in the Atlantic basin, but such rumors were never true. And never did large numbers of New Englanders in the United Colonies embrace the liberty of conscience advocated for Eleuthera.130 In most parts of the Atlantic world, religious struggles focused on the splits among Protestants—congregationalist versus Presbyterian, tolerationists ver-

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sus their opponents—but in Catholic-controlled Maryland, the meaning of religious changes in England were interpreted in a context of Protestant versus Catholic. Protestants believed that the Lord Proprietor’s power would be curbed or canceled altogether as a result of Parliament’s victories. Baltimore decided to stave off criticism by appointing Protestants to the post of deputy governor, and the first of these, William Stone, tried to arrange a rapprochement between his fellow Protestants and the proprietor. In order to augment the population of the province, Stone invited Protestants who were being harassed in Virginia to move to Maryland. A group migration from southern Virginia established a community on the Severn River in northern Maryland in 1649, which was named “Providence” in typically godly fashion. The celebrated act on religion passed in Maryland in that year was intended to prevent conflicts among the various groups. The act’s list of disallowed epithets reflected the diversity of Baltimore’s England more than Stone’s Maryland, no doubt, but it was also suggestive of the divisions the Lord Proprietor anticipated: “heritick, Scismatick, Idolator, puritan, Independent, Prespiterian, popish prest, Jesuite, Jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calveninst, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist.” Religious tensions, Baltimore knew, had become so highly charged that they could easily lead to violence. Support for toleration, besides making political sense within Maryland, might improve the Lord Proprietor’s reputation.131 In Maryland, it was thus Parliament’s support for Protestantism and toleration that affected the choice of governor and encouraged Baltimore to promote liberty of conscience to protect his position. By 1649, the polarization of religion in the Atlantic world had reached new heights. In that year the puritans of Virginia either left the colony in the exodus to Maryland or faced aggressive measures to coerce their conformity. The appointees of the Somers Islands Company, emboldened by Parliament’s endorsement of presbyterianism, drove out the islands’ Independents. Where Protestants of various sorts had been able to live together in relative harmony in 1640, they now battled over the nature of the church order in their colonies. Puritanism, once subsumed within the Church of England, emerged as a distinctive religious position and then fragmented into Presbyterian and Independent. The more radical, sectarian views being espoused in England were also on the rise. Two antipedobaptist churches—both of them in Rhode Island—had been gathered by the end of the decade, while conventicles of some sort posed a problem to the Barbados authorities. A drift in a more puritan direction overall—indicated by a 1649 decision by the Maine government at Gorgeana (or York) to permit all unchurched settlers to gather congregationalist churches—was accompanied by an increase in controversy over

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religious issues in many locales.132 Royalists blamed all of this, and indeed everything troubling England, on New England. A royalist newsweekly declared, “Religion which not long since embarqued for New England, is now arrived at the Antipodes, where Kings are Subjects, Subjects Kings, Priests common people, common people Priests.”133 Leading New Englanders could only wish they had had such an impact. If they had, the state of Christianity throughout England and the wider Atlantic world would have been different. One strategy pioneered in intolerant New England spread to other regions: that of banishing those with contrary views in order to achieve uniformity and consensus. Both the Chesapeake and Bermuda witnessed such banishments. In Virginia the Anglican establishment authored them, fighting what would prove to be a losing battle against puritan and parliamentarian insurgency, and in Bermuda Presbyterians did the banishing. But everywhere banishment shared the goal of congregational New England: to end religious differences by excising them. Banishment for unpopular views was becoming an Atlantic-wide phenomenon. Although the historian Frederick Jackson Turner identified the availability of land as a factor contributing to the creation of an egalitarian society, one of its effects initially was to permit colonies to practice exclusionary policies.134 Conservatives appreciated the potential of land for fostering social control within their colonies. Massachusetts drove out so many heterodox individuals that it created an enclave of “loose and degenerate” settlers on its southern border. Harassment of Gorton and his fellows was part of a more general campaign to crush Rhode Island, the perceived haven of heterodoxy. English officials, for whom the plantations were more comfortably distant than Rhode Island was from Boston, would soon adopt the banishment policy. They used the Atlantic colonies increasingly as a dumping ground for political malcontents.135 The strength of its exclusionary impulse helps to explain why orthodox New England could not, finally, serve as a satisfactory model for other polities in the Atlantic world. The effort to apply the New England model to England only brought out the fact that the situation in the two places differed utterly.136 In New England, a conservative policy toward religious dissent was combined with an innovative church order that relied on a high level of lay commitment and an unparalleled proportion of reform-minded ministers. There the laity generally respected the ministerial elites as well as magistrates and ultimately deferred to their judgment on hotly contested issues.137 Despite great interest in theological and ecclesiastical questions and a tendency among the laity to debate these issues, the colony was able to erect a generally satisfactory system that fulfilled the desire for frequent preaching and periodic religious revival. Those it could not persuade were formally ban-

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ished or informally pressured into departing. The churches of England and Wales lacked the homogeneity of New England, since the commitment of the laity as well as the ecclesiastical proclivities of the clergy varied enormously. The reformation of the Church of England in a more “puritan” direction required nothing short of a massive educational campaign. Before that could be launched, many clergy would need to be replaced with reformers able to carry out the program. The godly divines of England did not have the luxury of the laity that had selected New England as its destination out of a desire to hear the Word preached properly, nor were they able to begin anew in the wilderness. Instead, they had to work with a lay community that was less educated and more divided than that in New England and with an existing system that resisted reorganization. In the unique conditions prevailing in New England, a radical church order might be successfully combined with a conservative social policy, but in England that combination proved untenable. There the only way to pursue a congregational church order was to couple it with an equally radical policy toward dissent, since the two innovations could be mutually reinforcing. Under such circumstances, independency and liberty of conscience were conjoined, and the New England approach to dissent had to be rejected by the very people who embraced the congregational system. To leading New Englanders, the combination was inexplicable. Other colonial locales also lacked the high level of social and religious cohesion that characterized the United Colonies of New England. The range of ecclesiastical positions within the four United Colonies was narrower than in any other plantations, although of course differences and even outright dissent did occasionally surface there as well.138 Migration to New England had separated the wheat from the chaff through a process of self-selection. Although many people with similar views to those publicly promoted in most New England colonies had traveled to other settlements during the 1630s, those destinations received a wider range of migrants. New England had been profoundly shaped by the religious politics of England from the first, attracting as it did a disproportionate number of those from one end of the religious spectrum. But as the other colonies were drawn into the political battles over the course of the 1640s, they could not eliminate differences as orthodox New England had. Banishment could purge extremists outside of New England, but it would not eliminate difference there entirely. It was less successful still in reducing divisions in other parts of the Atlantic community. Religion was closely intertwined with politics. Conservatives read religious proclivities as a sign of political inclinations (rightly to some extent), so that puritans were assumed to be disloyal to the king. This equation simplified an often complicated dynamic, as the closet monarchical tendencies of the separatist Plymouth Plantation attested. Religion also became caught up in politi-

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cal struggles. Colonists used the changes under way in England to alter religious institutions in their settlements. This process was somewhat analogous to the effort to attach a particular political agenda to the parliamentary cause in order to achieve some local goal; if anything, it was more common in the religious than the political sphere. In Bermuda, not once but twice, as well as in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia, settlers recognized an opportunity to reform their local religious practices by relating their goals to shifting circumstances at home. Largely as a result of these local efforts, the accommodation of modest differences in most colonial locales was strained, at times to the breaking point. The assumption that the state would police religious expression came under fire as well. In England the state mechanisms for policing belief and practice broke down, and throughout the Atlantic world arguments in favor of liberty of conscience were heard. The old assumption that English colonies would routinely establish the Church of England was cast aside, and the Atlantic world became both more and less like the English religious landscape. It was more so in its increasing divisiveness and less so in that specific colonial locales displayed peculiar variations on the predominant trends toward the undermining of establishment, the increasing of diversity, and the endorsement of liberty. These trends would be more fully worked out in the decade to come.

3 Regicide and Royalist Rebellions

In the first months of 1649, revolutionaries killed King Charles I, rejected monarchy and the privileged place of aristocrats in government, and recreated England as a republic “without king or house of lords.”1 With these radical changes, Charles’s opponents rejected compromise and embraced the most revolutionary implications of their struggle against their king. Although their ability to impose their radical resolution of the problems arising from years of civil war and partisan strife was by no means assured, the new Commonwealth succeeded in damping down opposition within England itself. To a great extent, regicide and the creation of a new form of government brought the open conflicts that had marked the 1640s to an end, as the Commonwealth imposed its authority over England, containing widespread dissent through the use of the army and the courts. In the colonies, however, the effect of regicide was precisely reversed. Whereas most plantation governments had contained open expressions of competing political views and had minimized their involvement in the wars prior to 1649, regicide brought political polarization to the Atlantic. Political and military hostilities tore colonies asunder in the three years after the execution of the king in January 1649. Despite the attractions of neutrality that had prevailed in the 1640s, six colonies rejected the authority of the new state in favor of allegiance to Charles II, staging royalist rebellions of varying potency and duration. Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Maryland, Newfoundland, and Virginia departed decisively from the policies they had framed in response to the challenge of civil war. With many within England, even former parliamentarians, horrified by the regicide, the revolutionary government moved rapidly to ensure its continued existence. The standing army and the extent of taxation that the republic inherited from its parliamentary antecedent created an unprecedented governmental presence in England itself. The Commonwealth’s first major concern beyond setting its own house in order was to subdue the Irish, in rebellion since the uprising of 1641. When Scotland declared Charles II king of 86

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both Scotland and England, the English republic set about conquering that northern kingdom as well. Waging war in both Ireland and Scotland, the revolutionary state was also concerned to protect itself from the threat of foreign invasion in support of the Stuart cause. In the two years after the killing of the king, the Commonwealth built up its navy beyond anything English monarchs had ever controlled. At the same time, aware that many erstwhile supporters of Parliament’s cause opposed regicide, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the creation of a commonwealth, the government worked to legitimate its own position. Emerging as a powerful state with victorious armies as well as an impressive navy, it finally turned its attention to the late king’s dominions in the Atlantic world. Both in its relationship to the former Stuart kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland and in its relationship with the former Stuart dominions in the wider Atlantic, the Commonwealth developed an aggressive new policy, the likes of which neither the British Isles and Ireland nor the plantations beyond the seas had ever seen. Putting down opposition in all these locations in order to fortify its position, the new government of England consolidated its power and rendered itself more intrusive than had been the case before. While subduing rebels and drawing all the former dominions into its orbit, the Commonwealth articulated an aggressive imperial agenda. It envisioned the state controlling the governance of the individual plantations as well as their trade, in this arena as in others departing from earlier royal policies.2 Revolution against a tyrant king thus stimulated the creation of a more centralized and rationalized system of colonial oversight and thereby gave added impetus to an imperial approach to the Atlantic plantations. The regicide dramatically reconfigured relations among the kingdoms and dominions of the executed king. The news of the king’s execution stunned colonists, just as it did their counterparts in England and Scotland. Plantations that had been awaiting the outcome faced a stark choice: either accept the revolution in England or stand with the ousted monarchy by championing the late king’s son Charles Stuart. Even in colonies that favored Parliament, settlers struggled with the meaning of this change. They could no longer avoid confronting the radicalism of what was transpiring in their homeland. As many as six colonies drew back from sanctioning the new government of England, declaring themselves instead for the son of the executed monarch. In committing to remain the subjects of the Stuarts, Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Newfoundland, Virginia, and, briefly, Maryland took a bold step—far bolder than Virginia’s declarations of royalism had been in the context of civil war. In allying themselves openly with the disinherited Charles II, these settlements calculated that they could maintain their allegiance to the royal line. They were mistaken, as the English state proved determined to

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compel the kingdoms of the Stuarts as well as “the dominions thereunto belonging” to acknowledge its authority. Colonies that tried to resist the revolution did not ultimately succeed. By 1652 all colonies were officially attached to the revolutionary government at home; but the status of the plan to restructure the empire was as yet unclear. For the colonies, the events of 1649–1652 brought to a head many of the issues that had been left undecided during the civil war years. The question of allegiance—to king or Parliament—was decisively answered, at least for those colonies that chose the former and were forced to accept the latter. The issues that compelled them into the royalist camp ranged from commitment to religious and political tradition to fears of the economic changes that a parliamentary triumph would bring. In Barbados and Bermuda the act of aligning decisively with the Stuarts represented an opportunity to best a local minority faction. Issues at stake in England’s civil wars—such as loyalty, duty, and the relationship of religious commitments to political positions—were finally fought out openly in at least some colonial plantations. The small province of Maryland, because of its Catholic connection, seemed to be on the wrong side of the revolution, despite the proprietor’s efforts to appear otherwise. This identification with popery and tyranny made the colony vulnerable in the highly charged political environment. Other colonies, those with unquestioned credentials as Parliament supporters, were able to stay out of the fighting, although they worried about the implications of a centralized imperial structure. Everywhere colonists struggled to understand what the death of the king and the creation of a non-monarchical government portended. The execution of the king was particularly shocking because colonists had no forewarning of this turn of events. Given the amount of time needed for a ship to travel to any colonial port, no one could have received news of Charles’s impending trial prior to his death. Negotiations between the king and his jailers broke down for the last time only in late December 1648. The decision to try Charles was made public on December 29 and the sentence of death was passed less than a month later, on January 27. Within three days the king was dead, beheaded outside his own Banqueting Hall before a crowd of spectators. Because winter weather and the seasonal shipping demands brought departures to the colonies to a near standstill in December and January, word of the regicide did not circulate widely until months later. When Stephen Winthrop sat down to compose a report for his elder brother John in March, he probably intended to send his letter with the first ship leaving for New England since the king had lost his head two months before. Stephen did not know then that his own father had recently died in Boston. His news arrived in New England by early June. By that time New England-

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ers had heard rumors; these may have circulated as early as 12 May 1649, prompting an order for a military watch over Boston harbor.3 In July the Somers Islands were convulsed by the news, with royalists rising in support of the monarchy. Surviving records do not reveal when planters in the Chesapeake and the West Indies learned of the king’s death, but before the autumn—and probably by midsummer—word had reached both regions.4 That the regicides had erected a commonwealth to replace the monarchy was news that could have arrived as early as late summer, though when that information was widely disseminated is unclear. The Somers Islands inhabitants may not have learned of it for over a year, though colonists elsewhere heard earlier. Everywhere news arrived first as rumor, and only later did settlers receive detailed accounts from sources they felt they could trust. That such portentous news had to be corroborated was made clear when a contingent of Somers Islands royalists declared, “Wee uppon sufficient grounds reports and circumstances are convinced that our Royall Souraigne Charles the first is slaine.” Not everyone in the Atlantic basin shared their sense that this was a “horrid act,” but everyone was concerned to verify reports of this startling transformation.5 Even among the late king’s erstwhile American subjects who supported Parliament through much of the 1640s, many could not condone killing Charles I. A few, like minister John Eliot, rejoiced at the fall of monarchy and cheered for Parliament and the army as both became increasingly radical. Most did not share Eliot’s convictions. In this they were similar to many parliamentarians in England itself. Of 135 commissioners appointed to try Charles, only half had participated in the deliberations, and fewer still signed his death warrant. Sir Henry Vane, for one, refused to countenance the proceedings.6 As Charles’s head tumbled from his shoulders on that cold January day, the crowd reportedly groaned. This reaction and the extensive military preparations surrounding the execution indicated a high level of popular opposition. The day after Charles was buried, a hagiographic account of his life appeared on the streets of London. Eikon Basilike would prove the most popular publication of the revolutionary era, reprinted many times. In his dominions, many found the killing of Charles unsettling. Royalists described it as horrific: a “horrid Act of Slayinge his Majestie”; “unparalel’d treason”; “bloody, traitorous, and rebellious.” One resident of the Somers Islands declared, “Woe bee to him that layes his hands uppon the lords’ anointed.”7 In New England, John Brock interrupted his list of noteworthy events with “King is beheaded! O dreadful Judgement!” while John Hull described regicide as “a very solemn and strange act; and God alone can work good by so great a change.” Bermuda colonist Katherine Marsh believed that “they that had donne it, would never see the face of Christ.”8 Anne Bradstreet’s “Foure

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Monarchies” expresses some of the tentativeness felt by many. The historical monarchs discussed in the poem are praised or criticized individually, so that a good king remains a possibility. Yet the poem opens with a golden age before monarchy and ends with the Romans resolved to try “a new Government.” Although Bradstreet had castigated Charles I in the early 1640s, she was far more subdued at the idea of replacing the familiar institution of monarchy. One preface added to her work in England made a point that Bradstreet herself had not articulated: monarchy signified “Oppression, Tyranny & [the] Sward.”9 John Cotton delivered a 1651 sermon that revealed the unease in New England. Preached in thanksgiving for the victory at the Battle of Dunbar, Cotton’s sermon focused on explaining the divisions among the godly in England. If God supported their cause, the New England faithful assumed, the English would not be incessantly bickering. In his sermon Cotton repeated objections to the regicide that had been voiced in Boston. He referred to it as “a matter of Great thought.” Cotton had heard it protested that the king died at the hands of conspirators, that his killers broke their promise to protect the person of the king made when they subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant, and that only a remnant of the Parliament—and therefore not a legally constituted body—had acted in bringing about his death. Cotton countered these criticisms for his congregation, confiding that he too had struggled over these issues. The victory at Dunbar, since it seemed a divine endorsement of the Commonwealth’s cause, offered a salutary occasion for Cotton to air and answer all these concerns. Presumably aware of this unease, the Council of State ordered one hundred copies of “the Narrative of the Battle at Worcester” sent to New England in the aftermath of that still more decisive battle just one year later. Even New England, the loyalty of which Parliament had long assumed, needed reassurance that God endorsed the new English Commonwealth. With the news of Worcester, even once irresolute Plymouth voted a day of thanksgiving for the “great victories” of Parliament.10 Regicide, though it passed without official notice in most parts of the Atlantic basin, was a topic of intense scrutiny everywhere. The response on the part of colonial governments (as opposed to individuals) to the news ranged from calculated silence to vehement opposition. In the majority of plantations, the government never acknowledged the revolutionary change that had taken place, even after being belatedly instructed by the new Council of State about how to do so. Plymouth Plantation was paralyzed by the news, calling off elections in 1649 to await information from England. Elsewhere colonial elites eagerly gathered information but did not respond to the unprece-

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dented turn of events in any way.11 Failure to act amounted to accepting the outcome as a fait accompli. The only definitive responses came from supporters of monarchy, especially in Bermuda, Virginia, Barbados, and Antigua. The politics of royalist declarations in favor of Charles II were complicated everywhere save in Virginia, which proclaimed the new king’s ascent to the throne as a matter of course. The same may have been the case in Newfoundland, which was under the control of the royalist Sir David Kirke, but records for that small settlement are sparse.12 In Maryland and the Somers Islands, support for monarchy emerged out of factional politics. In siding with Charles II, these settlers upheld tradition in both politics and religion, taking a stand against the innovations associated with revolution. Their governors attempted to suppress faction and maintain an ambiguous stance toward the government in England, but finally all six royalist-identified colonies were drawn into the conflict over declaring their allegiance to Charles II or the new Commonwealth. The tinder of an increasingly resentful royalist population and the radicalizing spark of the regicide created a political conflagration that they could not contain. The ideological fault lines that divided the Atlantic world were clearly revealed in royalist rebellions. Unlike the sporadic efforts to proclaim Charles II in England, the proclamations of these colonial royalists (usually) had the backing of the government and therefore reflected official policy rather than wishful thinking. The Commonwealth’s ability to crush these expressions was by no means assured in 1649.13 Virginia and Bermuda, the two oldest English colonies in the Atlantic, balked at regicide and rejected the changes that they were asked to endorse. Bermuda was the first colony to proclaim Charles II, in July 1649. News of the king’s demise arrived in Bermuda as rumor, without instructions from the Somers Islands Company directing the government how to respond. Once word had spread through the islands, “the country”—a crowd motivated by allegiance to the king and hostility to local Independents—demanded that the governor and council declare for the king, administer an oath of allegiance to all islanders, return the government of church and state to its pre–civil war form, and punish all nonconformists. Although he agreed to all but the last of these immediately, Governor Thomas Turner was slow to proclaim the king, allowing fully six weeks to pass before he did so on 21 August 1649. In September the royalist party seized the Independent ministers and some church members. They also ousted Turner, replacing him with a settler, John Trimingham. In the view of the supporters of the Commonwealth, opposing it rendered Triminigham a “grand Rebell.” Before the year’s end, the remaining Independents had been driven off the island, joining their coreligionists in the inhospitable Bahamian settlement, founded in

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1647. Visitors to Bermuda who expressed anti-monarchical notions were also banished. Such was the fate of a Mr. Pearse, a stranger who declared “it was well that the kinge was cutt off” and “they that had put the kinge to death had done justly.”14 The government, too weak to withstand the English state alone, sent an agent to Barbados to negotiate an alliance. The mission succeeded only in getting permission to purchase ammunition, since Barbados still maintained its neutrality.15 In the Somers Islands, long-standing rivalries between religious factions influenced “the country” to take up arms, since religious conservatives associated the hated Independent minority with parliamentary usurpation. Bermuda’s rebellion offers a clear case of popular royalism in response to regicide. Royalism in Virginia was apparently a foregone conclusion. As the only colony under direct Crown rule, Virginia had the most intimate connection to the monarch. In 1648, while his king languished in prison, Governor William Berkeley demanded religious conformity among Protestants. Blaming them for the king’s humiliation, he drove away radicals residing in Upper Norfolk and Nansemond counties.16 Elite planters feared that the English state would revive the Virginia Company, or at least would oversee the colony’s economic affairs in the intrusive manner associated with company rule. An attempt in Parliament to resurrect the company in the early 1640s cemented the link between monarchy and relief from company exploitation. Whether from personal allegiance, political calculation, or both, many leading Virginians wanted Virginia to maintain its royal colony status. At an unknown date, presumably as soon as he had incontrovertible proof that Charles I was dead, Berkeley proclaimed Charles II. His declaration railed against a “Treason so high and horrid, monstrous, impious and hereticall.”17 Berkeley, unlike royalists at home, was able to articulate publicly his revulsion at the regicide. In October, when the House of Burgesses sat for the first time since the king’s death, it enacted harsh penalties against those who spoke in favor of the killing of Charles I or denied that his son was rightful king of England.18 Virginia royalists were convinced that only religious radicals supported regicide. As a weekly paper in London remarked, Virginia was willing to declare its independence from England if that was necessary to avoid affiliation with a regicidal government. The editor of this scurrilous (and generally unreliable) paper quoted unnamed Virginians as thinking that they “would rather trust our selves to the Woods and Mountaines, nay first to the faith of the Turks, or our neighbour Savages, then to yeeld obedience to these perjured Traytors.” To declare independence from England in this context was in fact to claim affiliation with another source of authority—the “King of the Scots,” as Charles II was styled in this period.19 Virginia nevertheless remained staunchly royalist, prepared to punish anyone who disagreed.

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Maryland was the last in 1649 to proclaim Charles II, but its declaration did not represent official policy. Acting Deputy Governor Thomas Greene, in control of the province in the absence of William Stone, made the proclamation. News of the regicide had reached the region sometime previously, but now Greene seized the opportunity to put forward a policy he (and presumably others) supported in opposition to the more noncommittal course adopted by Stone. In doing so, he overstepped the bounds of his commission and defied the prudent pro-Parliament policy of Baltimore.20 Perhaps anticipating this problem, Stone had left a document in the hands of Secretary of State Thomas Hatton, canceling Greene’s acting governorship. Greene somehow prevented Hatton from using it. When Baltimore learned of Greene’s defiance, he declared all actions taken by Greene null and void and discharged him from all offices. Baltimore labored in England to dispel rumors that he and his province were in rebellion. He cited distance and poor communication to explain his colony’s failure to react properly to the execution of the king and the founding of the Commonwealth. Baltimore succeeded in persuading the English government, although his proprietorship continued to be vulnerable to criticism on this and other counts.21 Charles II was likewise persuaded of Baltimore’s bond with his opponents. He named William Davenant—most famous as a playwright—to govern Maryland, taking the right to make the appointment out of the Lord Proprietor’s hands. Davenant, commissioned in February, was captured en route and thrown into the Tower. Eventually released, he would go on to write operas in support of Oliver Cromwell’s foreign policy in the 1650s.22 Greene’s reasons for disagreeing with Baltimore’s strategy were not recorded. He may have feared that a triumphant Parliament would be hostile to Maryland Catholicism regardless of Baltimore’s toleration of Protestants or protestations of loyalty. Greene’s support for Charles II may also have been motivated by a profound sense of personal loyalty, an ethical conviction that could lead him to take a dangerous course because he viewed it as the right one. The surviving evidence does not reveal whether Greene acted on a misguided view of what was prudent or on a desire to do right despite the consequences. In any event, his proclamation ceased to be official policy in the province once Baltimore nullified it, if not before. The royalist proclamations in Bermuda, Virginia, and Maryland all occurred fairly shortly after the regicide became known in those colonies, but the Barbados government did not proclaim Charles II until almost a year later. When tidings first arrived in Barbados, Governor Philip Bell refused to acknowledge the change in the interest of ensuring tranquillity on the island. The following spring, however, a royalist faction among the planters staged a coup, forcing Bell to proclaim Charles II on 3 May 1650. As in Bermuda, the

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proclamation in Barbados marked the victory of a faction; but unlike in Bermuda, where a popular royalist and Anglican uprising prompted the proclamation, Barbados committed to the Stuart king only after a long period of political maneuvering. Then the proclamation seems to have come from the “top down” rather than from the “bottom up,” in that it emanated from an elite faction. The populace rallied to support royalist policy when leaders equated royalism with protection from violence and the loss of political liberty. In Barbados, the struggle over allegiance was thus largely political, though confessional inclinations also played a part in that the royalist elite exploited popular support for the Church of England and fears of religious radicalism.23 Barbados abandoned its official neutrality in May 1650 in the aftermath of an armed confrontation in which Bell agreed to conditions laid down by a party headed by Colonel Humphrey Walrond. Men hostile to Walrond wrote detailed accounts of the triumph of the royalist faction, and these chroniclers laid blame on a few conspirators, perhaps so the islanders generally would appear less blameworthy. They suggested that the malcontents were recent migrants from the ranks of Stuart supporters, who were tainting the island’s political culture with their monarchist views. A politically engaged minority of planters had inclined toward either king or Parliament long before Walrond made his bid for power, however, and the royalists were not all recent arrivals. As Nicholas Foster rather coyly remarked (writing as he was for an English audience in the new Commonwealth), he and his compatriots had occasionally defended the actions of Parliament and the New Model Army against the accusations of Barbados royalists. The situation became increasingly polarized as the Barbadian elite—many of them longtime residents—became more overtly partisan in 1650. Leading up to the takeover, a royalist clique in the assembly enacted legislation requiring colonists to take an engagement and swear an oath, both of which could be used against supporters of Parliament. The oath was said to require the swearer to give up his “birth-righte for lesse than a messe of Pottage.” Beginning as a bill in favor of liberty of conscience, the legislation was altered to force conformity to the government.24 Leaders of the pro-Parliament faction persuaded the governor to forestall the publication of the act and mounted a petition campaign in favor of holding an election for a new assembly. Claiming that these efforts were intended to bring about a coup in favor of Parliament, the royalists took up arms, ostensibly in support of Bell. They characterized those who circulated the petition as heretics, responsible for the king’s death.25 They rallied the populace with assertions that their opponents intended to seize control of the island, kill all the king’s loyal subjects, and impose parliamentary tyranny and Independent religion. Royalists linked the wealthy

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planter James Drax and other leading parliamentarians to the rebellion and ruin that had overtaken England, asserting that similar calamities would befall Barbados if they gained power.26 The texts of some of the “papers” that they scattered around the island survive, giving a sample of their rhetoric: Friends, take my advice, There is in hand a most damnable designe, the Authors are Independents, their ayme is wholly to Casheere the Gentry and Loyall, and to change for our Peace Warre, and for our Unity Division. Colonel Drax that devout Zealot (of the deeds of the Devill, and the cause of that seven headed Dragon at Westminster) is the Agent: . . . I have vowed to impeach him and prosecute him, but not in point of Law; for then I know he would subdue me (but at the point of Sword;) Let me desire such as tender Religion, the Loyall, the safety of the Island, and being of our present Government, they be fore-armed against the pretence of Liberty, for thereby is meant Slavery and Tyranny. But I halfe repent this motion of the Pen, purposing with all expedition to Action. My ayme is Drax, Middleton and the rest. Vivant Rex.27 The handbill warned of social upheaval—the anti-royalists would “Casheere the Gentry and Loyall”—and civil war. It implied that all parliamentarians were religious radicals who would challenge the religious practices of other inhabitants. A call to arms, the broadside threatened the populace with “Slavery and Tyranny” if it did not respond to the danger. This particular handbill was especially menacing, promising to use the sword instead of the law, since the latter would not support an offensive against such powerful men. When these royalists dismissed recourse to the law they parted ways with their English counterparts, who increasingly depicted themselves as the champions of law in opposition to rebels who had overturned the law and unjustly killed the king. The anti-legal rhetoric and the threats of violence in this particular bill made it an appealing choice to reprint in the anti-royalist tract published in London later in the year. It made royalists seem disrespectful of customary practices, violent, and unstable. According to the men who were attacked in them, these “severall libells, and scandalous papers” were distributed widely, their authors “throwing some up and downe, and putting others upon Posts.” The parliamentarians used the same tactic, although none of the papers they distributed have survived.28 Barbados became polarized, just as England had previously done. By late April 1650, Barbados had arrived at precisely the situation that the elite, in the interest of preserving its privileged position, had sought to avoid. Landowners, freemen (free men who lacked sufficient property to vote), and

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some of the more trusted white servants had taken up arms, leaving their residences to muster. Their absence created a dangerous situation, for these men were needed in their parishes to keep the servile population—especially the African slaves and involuntarily indentured Europeans (prisoners of war and criminals)—under control. “Rebel Negro slaves in the woods” were a perennial problem, as was the potential for an uprising of both servants and slaves. The resort to arms therefore contained not only the threat of civil war—“the most Horrid & fearfull” of all wars—but also that of rebellion among the island’s laborers, who greatly outnumbered their masters. The planters had rendered themselves vulnerable by resorting to arms.29 Confronted with armed royalists predicting dire consequences for the island if their fears were not addressed, Bell agreed to proclaim Charles II and purge the assembly of all those disloyal to the king and opposed to religious conformity. The parliamentarians were disarmed, an act which “left [them] to the cruelty of their slaves, who were of ability enough to destroy and murther them, had not god in mercy restrayned their cruelty.”30 The opponents of the Walronds believed that the royalists had either duped or forced the aged Bell into accepting their program. However it was arranged, Bell’s long-standing inclination toward accommodation and neutrality was abandoned in favor of the policies championed by the royalists. Quick on the heels of the royalists’ success, events took an unexpected turn. During the week when Bell lost control of Barbados, Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, was riding unannounced in a ship in Carlisle Bay, ready to take over the governorship in the name of the earl of Carlisle and the king. Willoughby’s intention to visit the island had been rumored for years, and he finally arrived just as the Walronds’ bid for power bore fruit. His presence might seem to have bolstered the royalist faction, yet its leaders were loath to relinquish their newly acquired power to Willoughby when he made his presence known four days later. He came ashore to the sound of trumpets, drank toasts, and had Charles II again proclaimed. According to one hostile observer, the Walronds and their compatriots could not oppose Willoughby and still maintain their pretense of loyalty to the king, but they did not want to lose the advantage they had recently gained. In a remarkable agreement, they persuaded Willoughby to defer assuming his place for three months. Willoughby concurred, apparently uncertain of his ability to force the faction to relinquish power before it had accomplished its goals. An anonymous eyewitness states, however, that the three months were reduced to less than six weeks: “Before halfe the time was expired, his Lordship haveing exceedingly endeared himselfe by his equall & Civill demeanour was desired to take the Goverment into his owne hands, which he did.”31 In the meantime, Willoughby worked to gain control of the other islands

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in the Carlisle domain. His lease from Carlisle and his commission from Charles I included all the islands granted to the earl, Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, Montserrat, St. Christopher, and Santa Cruz being settled at the time. He visited various islands but probably stayed mostly in Antigua. Antigua’s reputation for royalism may have influenced Willoughby in his selection of a temporary haven. Westminster had learned by the following October that “Ashton whoe is governor of Antigua hath proclaymed Charles there, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland.” The new governor of Montserrat, Roger Osborne, accepted a commission from Willoughby for the office he had assumed in 1646 on the death of his brother-in-law Anthony Brisket. If Osborne acquiesced to a proclamation of Charles II, no record has survived.32 Despite Willoughby’s commission for all of the Caribbee Islands, no other plantation acknowledged him. Willoughby pressured St. Christopher, and Ashton worked on it as well as on Nevis. St. Christopher, although it had cited the authority of Charles II when negotiating a treaty with the French in late 1649, resisted the advances of Willoughby in 1650. The islanders claimed to be awaiting word from either Parliament or His Majesty about whether they could retain their former government. They ignored the fact that Willoughby’s arrival could be taken as the response from the king. By January 1651, St. Christopher planters were citing the acts against kingship and trade with royalist colonies to justify their intransigence. At the time they also pointed out that no king had been proclaimed on the island previously, hence no precedent for a declaration existed. This excuse was disingenuous. The previous transfer of royal power, from James I to Charles I, had occurred when the island had been settled for about a year and had not yet received a patent. The official government was set up under Charles I, so the elevation of Charles II was the first real opportunity to proclaim a new king. Despite this resistance, Willoughby may have succeeded in temporarily imposing a governor of his own choosing over the island. If so, his appointee, Sir Sydenham Poyntz, soon concluded that he could not hold the island against the wishes of the majority of inhabitants.33 During the respite they had negotiated, the triumphant Barbados royalists carried out their plan to solidify their hold over the island. The victorious faction first passed an act of indemnity protecting itself from liability for its treatment of its opponents. The purged assembly summoned men the royalists had earlier identified as “Disturbers of the Peace of the Island” to appear before it and levied large fines on nine men. A number of others previously named as rebel leaders had apparently already departed, and it was presumably this group that, the Bermudans heard, were contemplating using the Somers Islands as a staging ground to take Barbados back from the royalists as early as May.34 Before the end of May, the assembly had voted to banish

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ninety-eight “delinquents,” including four women, all married to men also deemed culpable.35 Those delinquents who agreed to pay their fines and cooperate with their banishment would retain control of their estates. The estates of the others were to be sold. Among the men listed were leading planters, all of whom were required to turn in their commissions. The entire group was to depart before the end of July. This deadline, just prior to the scheduled return of Willoughby, was apparently selected on the assumption that he might not support the harsh punishments being imposed. One contemporary account stated that the Walronds simultaneously worked to undermine Willoughby’s reputation with the planters, especially by bringing up his past support for Parliament. Other anti-royalist writers asserted that death sentences were contemplated for some of the leaders of the parliamentary faction. No one was executed for opposing the royalists, however, but many did leave the island early that summer.36 This retributive royalist onslaught came to an end with the return of Willoughby, who—as the authors of the punitive treatment of parliamentarians had apparently anticipated—adopted a conciliatory stance. Among his first acts as governor was to cancel the sequestration of estates and to remove Walrond and another leading royalist from power. Willoughby apparently hoped that he could arrive at an accommodation with the Commonwealth of England. He sent George Marten, a planter and the brother of regicide Henry Marten, as his agent to Westminster. He also may have tried to work through leading London merchants who traded with Barbados, asking them to lobby the government to accept Barbados’s submission with him as its governor. Willoughby seems, at this point, to have been willing to accept the Commonwealth as the de facto power in England, as other royalists were persuaded to do. Yet he also hoped that the great distance and expense involved, in combination with its other concerns, might well keep the Commonwealth from forcibly subduing Barbados, especially if the planters signaled their willingness to cooperate. In addition, he believed that the tropical climate would make it impossible to starve the island with a blockade, or so he reassured his wife when he wrote to her in England.37 Under the best of circumstances, Willoughby’s hopes might not have proved illusory. Although he carried a commission from the Stuarts for the government of the Caribbee Islands, the document predated the regicide and, indeed, the end of the second civil war. With a dated royal commission and a twenty-one-year lease from the proprietor, Willoughby could have considered his position similar to that of many governors of longer standing who acquiesced to parliamentary rule in hopes of retaining their places. His agent, George Marten, was quoted as saying that Willoughby believed he had done no wrong but had only come “to enjoy this right which hee had purchased of the earle of Carlisle.” This position

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conveniently ignored the cancellation of Carlisle’s proprietary patent.38 It is also possible that the conciliatory gestures toward the Commonwealth were calculated less to persuade the Commonwealth government than to win over the Barbados moderates, those planters who had been dismayed by royalist excesses. If Willoughby hoped to enjoy his place without having to stave off a challenge from the English state, he did not count on the influence that banished planters would wield in London. Word of the royalist takeover arrived in London by early July. Newsweeklies printed reports of the events on the island, some conflating the coup and the arrival of Willoughby, in the first July issue.39 Islanders themselves were soon present and began lobbying the government to take Barbados. The merchants who traded with Barbados thought that the island could be easily overawed by the power of the Commonwealth. Fearing the damage that an assault on the island would cause, they favored conciliation. The displaced planters energetically advocated the use of force.40 The planters’ version of events in Barbados, as circulated in London from mid-1650, was published in September in Nicholas Foster’s long and detailed Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island of Barbadas.41 The exiles blamed Willoughby almost as much as the royalists at whose hands they had suffered, arguing that even under Willoughby, the island needed to be subdued. Policies designed to rein in the rebel colonies were developed under the influence of intensive lobbying by exiled planters. They even had their own candidate to replace Willoughby, proposing former New England magistrate Edward Winslow to the council in November.42 Their campaign focused the new regime’s attention on the need to ensure the loyalty of the colonial dominions. The Council of State and Parliament adopted an aggressive policy toward the rebel colonies in autumn 1650, a direct result of the efforts of the exiled Barbadians.43 As a short-term response to the crisis, the council instituted an informal embargo in August. It then hammered out a new policy aimed at bringing the Stuart dominions under its authority. In adopting this course, the councilors followed the strategy advocated by the enraged exiles, not the more conciliatory merchants, who favored giving islanders a chance to reverse their royalist declaration and the banishments.44 Dismissing the concerns of the merchants, the council developed, and Parliament enacted, a plan to force the rebel colonies under its authority. It identified four rebellious colonies—Barbados, Virginia, Antigua, and the Somers Islands (leaving out Maryland, persuaded that Greene’s proclamation was not a legitimate expression of that province’s position)—and ordered an embargo on them. With Parliament still eager to placate its supporters, New England was

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shortly granted an extension to allow time for residents to hear of the embargo before their ships were seized. More important, the 1650 act against the rebel plantations called in the charters of Virginia and Carlisle’s Caribbee Islands, declared the English Commonwealth’s authority to legislate for all colonies, and limited trade. It also established the basis for the later “Navigation Acts.” These principles had far-reaching implications for all colonies, not just those in rebellion.45 The act clearly altered the relationship between center and periphery throughout the empire.46 Under the early Stuarts the colonies had grown up without any central oversight or general plan for their development. As a result, a variety of colonization systems prevailed: company colonies, controlled from London and limited in their trade to company ships; proprietary colonies, controlled by a (usually lone) aristocratic proprietor who exercised less control than a vigorous company; and locally controlled colonies with only nominal ties to England, the system prevailing in most of New England. The king had only indirect control over most colonies, in that he could inform the company or the proprietor that he wanted a particular policy pursued. Even in Virginia he appointed and instructed governors and councilors but left the day-to-day running of the colony, the passage of legislation, and other matters to them and the landowning colonists. Royal plans to set a Governor General over all of New England, floated and set aside in the mid1630s, would have brought that region under a system similar to Virginia’s. The Commonwealth of England’s new policy announced that it would direct all the affairs of the plantations, including legislation and trade, working through the Council of State. This decision inaugurated a new era, creating for the first time the prospect of a centralized administration of all colonies. With this innovation, the structure of the future British imperial system began to fall into place.47 The far more famous Navigation Act of the following year was not the major piece of legislation but in fact only implemented one aspect of the general scheme laid out in the 1650 act. Massachusetts Bay, accepting regicide and the founding of the Commonwealth without comment, objected to the government’s new approach to the colonies. At the time of Charles’s execution, the colony had been more concerned to mark the passing of its longtime governor John Winthrop, whom the deputies of the General Court “accompted worthy of all honnor.” In response to the 1650 act outlining the state’s vision for its relation with the colonies, Massachusetts petitioned Parliament against the plan. The magistrates noted that, upon receiving the “printed proclamation prohibiting Trade with Virginea, Barbados, Bermuda and Antegoe,” they had complied with the embargo, “though to the great losse and prejudice of the whole colonie.” While agreeing to a temporary embargo, they nonetheless objected to other aspects

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of the act, especially provisions allowing the council to appoint governors and commissioners over “all the colonies of the English in America, wherein we finding ourselves comprehended as wrapped in one bundle with all the other colonies; our case being different from all other English colonies in America for ought we know or have heard.” They had also heard that, as part of the reorganization, Parliament wanted the colony to return its royal charter and to accept a new charter, granted under parliamentary authority. The Massachusetts magistrates opposed this proposal. They rehearsed the history of their settlement, emphasizing that they had fled to avoid religious persecution and that they had long suffered for their support of Parliament’s cause. They hoped “it shall goe noe worse with us [under the Commonwealth] then it did under the late King.”48 The idea that the Commonwealth should oversee plantation governments was unpopular well beyond the royalists who were the immediate objects of the new policy. The 1650 act, with its economic provisions and its plans for centralization, focused the royalist critique on the new state’s intrusive plan to control trade. In Barbados and Virginia, royalism and free trade were closely linked in the aftermath of the act. Desire for free trade probably also played a significant role in Antigua’s royalism. For two other royalist enclaves, trade issues were not a major motivation. The unusual economic situations in Newfoundland (which served as a staging ground for the fishing fleet) and the Somers Islands (which continued under company rule with restricted trade regardless) meant that the 1650 act did not have the same impact on those colonies as it did on those that had previously enjoyed freedom to trade with all ships. Even before the passage of the act, Virginia had identified the right to an open trade with the king and the charter privileges that he had granted. The colony’s declaration of fidelity to Charles II was intended to maintain that status quo, protecting the liberty, wealth, security, and peace that the elite in the colony had enjoyed under his father’s rule. Barbadians, though they had not previously identified support for the king with freedom to trade, were as committed as the Virginians to the prevailing economic system. One reason for the neutrality of the 1640s had been the desire to be free to trade with all comers.49 At the time of their coup, the royalists cited ties to the Dutch to demonstrate that the islanders neither needed Parliament nor ought to fear it, as they “would find wayes of protection, viz. by the Hollanders.” The literal truth of this claim was brought home when the Barbadians sent to the Dutch for ammunition.50 Trade relations with other European nations thus enhanced the islanders’ ability to defy Parliament. Willoughby, like all proprietors or their agents who hoped to make a fortune off colonial revenues, had not been an advocate of free trade upon his arrival in the Caribbean. But he soon learned to use unrestricted access to

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trade to garner support in the severely divided island. Under Willoughby all inhabitants engaged to support his government along with freedom of trade and religion.51 In his effort to extend his (and the king’s) control to other islands, he declared to the St. Christopher planters that he had “so well Studied in new Colonies since I resolved to take the care of these Islands uppon me, that my Judgement is fully assured that nothing can be greater friends to us than a full and free Trade with all Nations, especially with our owne.” Willoughby had used this stance to good effect in Barbados, though it failed in St. Christopher. He knew St. Christopher cared about trade, because when planters there originally resisted his overtures, they cited the need to maintain trade as one reason.52 Primed as they were by their royalist declarations and their support for free trade, both Virginia and Barbados issued rousing statements against the new policy when news of it arrived in the colonies. A totally unpopular policy from a highly suspect source, the act received a rhetorical beating from indignant planters. Describing the act as aiming at the enslavement of the inhabitants, Barbadian planters declared that “we can not imagine that there is no meane & base minded a fellow amongst us, that will not perferre an honorable Death, before a Tedious & slavish life.” In Virginia, Berkeley used similar language, referring to “those heavy chaines they are making ready for us.” In his view, “the reason why they talke so Magisterially to us [in the 1650 act] is this, we are forsooth their worships slaves, bought with their money and by consequence ought not to buy, or sell but with those they shall Authorize with a few trifles to Coszen us of all for which we toile and labour.”53 Both declarations invoked enslavement to describe the threat to the free inhabitants of their respective colonies. That Parliament conspired to enslave them was by this time a standard refrain of royalists in England. In the colonial and especially West Indian context, however, this rhetoric took on added significance because of the presence of actual enslaved persons of Indian and African descent.54 In an extended passage, Barbados’s published declaration professed gratitude to the Dutch for the “necessary comfort they bring us dayly, and that they do sell their commodities a great deal cheaper than our own nation will doe.” The statement continues, “We will never be so ungrateful to the Dutch for former helps as to deny them or any other Nation the freedome of our Ports and Protection of our Lawes, wherby they may still (& if they please) embrace a free Trade and Commerce with us.”55 Published in The Hague, the declaration was intended to serve notice to the Dutch traders to the island, known as “Barbadoes-vaerders,” as well as to the English government that Barbados intended to defy efforts to limit its trade. The Virginia assembly issued a similar declaration announcing its intention to “peaceably (as formerly) trade with the Londoners, and all other Nations in

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amity with our Soveraigne; Protect all forraigne Merchants with our utmost force from injury in the rivers: Give letters of Reprisall to any injured with in our Capes.”56 The speech by Berkeley and the accompanying declaration by the assembly were likewise published in The Hague.57 As Berkeley declared to the House of Burgesses, “We can onely feare the Londoners, who would faine bring us to the same poverty, wherein the Dutch found and relieved us; would take away the liberty of our consciences, and tongues, and our right of giving and selling our goods to whom we please.”58 Nothing was to be gained, in his view, but many freedoms—of religion, speech, and especially trade—would be lost by adhering to Parliament. In the royalists’ estimation, remaining the subjects of the Stuarts offered the surest protection of their customary rights. The Council of State realized that simply declaring its right to control the colonies would not quell rebellion, and so it prepared to force the plantations into submission. To reduce Bermuda, the Commonwealth worked through the Somers Islands Company. It appears from the surviving records that the government purged the company membership after the regicide to ensure loyalty to the new regime. Some previously active company leaders retired from public life under the Commonwealth. The earl of Warwick, objecting to the abolition of the monarchy and House of Lords, had been relieved of his positions of authority in February 1649. He may have ceased to be active in the company around the same time. The Council of State directed the company to bring the colony into line, threatening to disband the company and take the Somers Islands under its immediate control if the company could not do so.59 The English government apparently believed that royalism in Newfoundland was largely a result of resident proprietor David Kirke’s proclivities. Although Newfoundland was not named as a rebellious colony, Kirke was arrested and brought to trial in England, probably transported home by the fishing fleet when it sailed the following year.60 The council recommended that a fleet be dispatched to reduce the disaffected plantations. As Jonathan Israel has aptly observed, “Parliament in England was hardly likely to leave the English Caribbean colonies in the hands of royalists, or in tranquil contact with the Dutch [traders], for long.” The navy ultimately sent two fleets in 1651, thirteen ships to the Caribbee Islands under Sir George Ayscue in August and fifteen more to Virginia under Captain Robert Denis in September. The council reportedly financed them out of the estate of the late archbishop of Canterbury.61 When news arrived from Barbados in February 1651 that the exiled planters were energetically opposing his government, that his agent George Marten “was like to be hanged for speaking for him,” and that a victory by Charles II might be imminent, Willoughby abandoned his earlier moderation

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and began to prepare for the island’s defense. A new engagement to support Willoughby’s government was administered to all inhabitants. The engagement did not mention the king, possibly to leave Willoughby some room to negotiate a settlement that kept him in power while abandoning the king’s cause. When a staunch royalist pointed out the omission, Willoughby had him arrested.62 One London paper reported that Barbadians were “in great fear, and in daily expectation of the Parliament of Englands Fleet, and therefore keep very strick’t Watches, and are resolved to stand upon their guard.”63 As they prepared, Willoughby ordered the estates of the banished men again sequestered and the funds used to pay for the defense of the island. The declaration in support of this policy cited the exiles’ work in persuading the king’s enemies to invade Barbados.64 In spite of the existence of a moderate faction, Willoughby was able to persuade Barbados to resist the Commonwealth’s fleet once it arrived. Whatever Willoughby’s true views on the possibility of accommodating the Commonwealth, statements issued in support of the Stuart claim to the island during this time take the moral high ground, asserting the justice of Charles II’s right and the obligation of his subjects. Yet the Barbadians prepared to resist the English Commonwealth with a host of considerations in mind. They were, initially at least, persuaded that Parliament was too busy to bother with them. Proponents of this view pointed out that Virginia and Bermuda had publicly proclaimed the Stuarts some time earlier, and no action had been taken.65 Some Barbadians nevertheless feared that the Commonwealth would punish them for their harsh measures against the parliamentarians. Exiled planters claimed that the leading royalist conspirators had intentionally abused them, knowing that fear of retribution would commit the island to the king. Planters also feared that Parliament intended to meddle in the island’s affairs to a far greater extent than the proprietor or the king ever had. Such concerns animated many, even those who did not wholeheartedly support the king’s cause. Willoughby found it necessary to reassure moderates that he would accept good terms if these were offered—terms that would protect them against the retribution and enslavement that many feared.66 Barbados being the most valuable colony as well as the home of the exiled planters who were lobbying the government, the Commonwealth sent a fleet first to the West Indies. After much delay, Sir George Ayscue arrived in Carlisle Bay in October 1651 to “reduce” Barbados, “this stubborne Island,” to obedience to the Commonwealth. He had finally raced to the island to arrive before merchants who had received permission from the Council of State to accompany the fleet. Just as he sailed up to Barbados, the deputies of the Massachusetts General Court voted to wish him success. His force being in-

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sufficient to take the well-fortified island by storm, Ayscue, on the advice of leading planter William Hilliard, blockaded it. The fleet’s first act was the seizure of Dutch ships trading with the island in violation of the act against rebel plantations.67 Over the course of the three-month-long blockade, Ayscue sent a series of summonses to Lord Willoughby, demanding and cajoling his submission. In responding to these summonses, Willoughby directed his answer to the fleet’s flagship but referred to the Rainbow as one of “his Majesty’s ships.”68 Ayscue’s challenge was to reach beyond Willoughby to persuade the island elite that it had nothing to fear from submission but everything to fear from continued resistance. Willoughby, of course, promoted the conviction that precisely the opposite was the case. Both sides wanted to keep non-elites on the island out of the decision-making process, since royalist and Commonwealth planters both hoped to maintain Barbados’s social hierarchy after the blockade came to an end. The outcome of the blockade, which continued from 16 October 1651 until 11 January 1651/2, pivoted largely on the allegiance of the island’s leaders and the efforts of Ayscue to win them away from Willoughby. Ayscue used the carrot more than the stick, a policy that one observer thought admirably suited to the character of English men. He consistently emphasized that he felt “tender of the good of this Island, to preserve them in their Estates, and liberties.” He presented the Commonwealth as committed to liberty, in which blessing it wanted Barbados to share.69 Ayscue cited the triumph of Parliament to prove that God favored its cause, implying that the Barbadians would be foolhardy to defy the Lord’s chosen. The Barbados assembly responded by scoffing that Ayscue expected them “to believe that thare Government which they have with the utter ruine of our deere Brethren in England set upp is farre better then that under which or Anncistors have these many hundred yeares past lived with out the knoledge or sense of those many Miseries bloudshedd rapines and other oppressions which that bleedine Kingdome yet groanes under.”70 In a declaration that was distributed about the island (apparently by sneaking ashore at night), Ayscue cleverly implied that the rebellion was the work of some “persons amongst you,” allowing most Barbadians to disassociate themselves from the defiance. The declaration assured the inhabitants of Ayscue’s commitment to their safety and liberty, emphasized the power of Parliament, and pointed out the island’s inability to subsist without the Commonwealth’s trade and protection.71 Ayscue wrote to Willoughby on one occasion that he had opened himself to criticism by failing to be more aggressive. He wanted Willoughby to appreciate that he worked to avoid the destruction of the island.72 Whenever possible Ayscue underscored the hopelessness of Barbados’s position. He announced the rout of the king’s forces at the Battle of Worcester

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as soon as that news arrived by express from the Council of State. Willoughby and the planters had previously heard rumors from Dutch merchant ships that the king was advancing upon London. The news of Worcester, confirmed in private letters that arrived at the same time and were forwarded by Ayscue to Willoughby, was a major blow.73 Ayscue had hoped that the outcome in England would have been even more decisive still, but rumors that Charles Stuart was captured proved unfounded. Both the Barbadians and the men of the fleet eagerly sought word of what was transpiring in England, aware that the fate of their own efforts to some extent hung on the outcome of Charles’s attempt to conquer his father’s kingdoms. Ayscue had the advantage, since his blockade allowed him to filter information that reached the island. On one occasion he pressured a newly arrived ship’s captain to confess that, just before leaving Europe with Dutch journals confirming the invasion of England, he had heard of Charles’s rout. As Ayscue observed to Willoughby, “If there were such a Person as a Kinge you speake of, your keepinge this Island signifies nothing to his advantage and therefore believe the Surrender of it would be a small addicon of griefe to him.”74 Ayscue’s challenge, once the news turned in his favor, was to communicate it to the inhabitants. To this end, some prisoners captured from the island by the fleet were informed about the true state of affairs in England before being released to return home with admonitions that they spread the word. This strategy for disseminating information proved the undoing of at least two inhabitants, who were hanged for complying with Ayscue’s instructions.75 Ayscue interspersed more violent tactics among his many conciliatory gestures in order to remind the Barbadians that he could do more harm if he chose. He sent out small contingents to harass the islanders, “giving them often Alarmes to keepe them in continuall Armes” and to unnerved them. On two occasions he launched larger attacks on coastal fortifications, first at “the Hole,” or Hole Town in St. James’s Parish, on 22 November and later at Speight’s Town in St. Peter’s on 7 December. The latter attack occurred shortly after the arrival of the Commonwealth fleet dispatched to Virginia, which stopped en route in Barbados. The appearance of a second fleet momentarily gave the blockaders pause, as they were not expecting it and thought it must be either Prince Rupert’s small royalist fleet or the French. When it proved to be friend rather than foe, Ayscue hoped that the presence of a supplementary force would persuade the islanders to surrender. In assaults on the island he used Scots captured at Worcester, prisoners of war sent for sale as laborers on the island. As he reported to council president John Bradshaw, he paid them and formed them into a regiment.76 Through two months of such efforts, Willoughby and the most ardent royalists remained unfailingly committed to resistance, but other leading

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planters became less so. The moderate party began to think that Willoughby would not consider surrender regardless of the terms offered, in spite of his earlier promise. Ayscue, who seems to have had fairly regular contact with colonists during the blockade, learned by mid-December that a leading planter, Colonel Thomas Modiford, favored a negotiated settlement. One of the exiled settlers who had returned with the fleet managed to write to Modiford suggesting a meeting. After a series of secret meetings, Modiford and other moderate leaders agreed to declare for the Commonwealth if Willoughby refused to negotiate. When Willoughby made a lackadaisical offer to hear Ayscue’s terms but closed the negotiations once he had done so, his lack of sincerity clinched the decision for Modiford and others. On 3 January half a dozen officers and about two thousand men declared for the Commonwealth, preparing, with the help of the fleet, to defend the windward side of the island, where Modiford and other defectors lived. By the time Ayscue felt it safe to come ashore and read his commission, these men had averred that they were willing to “live and dye with the Parliament of England.”77 Six days of torrential rainfall fortuitously prevented a battle between royalist and Commonwealth forces encamped in close proximity. Four days into the deluge, Willoughby agreed to a treaty. By the time the storm abated and fighting was again possible, negotiations were well under way. On 11 January Willoughby capitulated, having accepted favorable terms.78 These returned the estates of parliamentarians but also protected royalists from punishment; Lord Willoughby’s property in the islands, Surinam, and England was specifically sheltered. They also promised free trade with all nations in amity with England and granted the colonists control over taxation. With these concessions, the Barbadians seem to have escaped the more onerous aspects of the central government’s program for empire. Although Ayscue wrote to the Council of State that he had granted easy terms because Willoughby’s forces were greater than his own, Willoughby must have been worried that he could not hold the majority of the inhabitants to the royal cause. He would later be accused of treacherously plotting to give the island to the Commonwealth, but the charge was unfair. For the preceding month he had found it necessary to use increasingly draconian measures to keep the populace in line.79 He no doubt feared more widespread defection. With the islanders openly divided, Willoughby knew that, whatever the outcome of the impending military campaign, the destruction of a great deal of property was likely. With a vested interest in the economic health of the island (as the holder of a long-term lease from Carlisle that he still hoped to make good), Willoughby had reason to avoid widespread violence. The fact that the island’s many servants and slaves were always ready to rebel against their masters (having been caught plotting to do so again two

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years previously) weighed heavily on the elite as they stood on the brink of civil war. In the end, the Barbadians decided, as the historian Thomas Southey observed, that “the destruction of their plantations was to them of more consequence than their loyalty to King Charles.”80 Protecting lives and property had always been a major consideration, whether they chose neutrality, royalism, or surrender. The blockade finally ended without further bloodshed because, by January 1652, the Barbadian elite were persuaded that surrender was the best course for achieving their goals. The well-documented events around the siege of Barbados provide detailed information about the divided allegiance of one plantation’s population. Among the elites three groups existed, two that were partisans and a third, possibly far larger group, of moderates.81 Such a tripartite division was probably typical of many plantations outside New England. Moderates helped to establish Barbados’s neutrality during the late 1640s and move the island to surrender in 1652. The two partisan groups found it difficult to ignore their differences after the regicide. The usual explanation for this shift has been that royalist migration augmented the numbers of the king’s supporters, who ousted the island’s traditional elite in their 1650 coup. Migration in the 1640s did include more royalists than parliamentarians. The leaders of the royalist political offensive were ex-officers in the royal army. Yet even the Walrond brothers and William Byam—prominent leaders who had formerly fought for the king—had lived quietly on the island under neutrality. Other men who joined with them had been in Barbados far longer.82 The partisans cannot be fully identified by the time of their arrival on the island. Rather, regicide and the creation of the Commonwealth politicized both sides. The pro-Parliament planters expected changes in Barbados once the contest had been decided in England; those inclined toward royalism were not willing to accept this outcome. The sluggish response of the new Commonwealth to rebellion in Bermuda and Virginia gave the latter hope. Once the royalists took the offensive, those who were inclined to favor Parliament responded accordingly. The Barbadian elite could agree to neutrality while the outcome in England was uncertain; once the victory of Parliament was assured, some were unwilling to accept defeat.83 The confrontation revealed the self-images of Barbados royalists and their opponents.84 Each side associated its enemies with tyranny and cruelty, its own cause with liberty. Willoughby’s enemies said that he followed his royal “Master’s principles, in Tyranising over the Inhabitants, who like Asses bear their burthens, though not without much groaning.” Each promised peace and prosperity. Each side emphasized duty. These claims spoke to values shared by people of every political stripe. The imagery diverged on other points. Royalists, dedicated to retaining customary arrangements, depicted

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theirs as the party of unity, loyalty, and piety; parliamentarians they characterized as divisive, disloyal, deceitful, violent, and religiously radical. What royalists saw as disruptive, Commonwealth supporters presented as assertive and successful. In their view, the revolution in England had, with God’s blessing, achieved great gains through noble sacrifice. As one Commonwealth supporter said of the Barbados royalists, “The title of King is most of all ador’d by them, not knowing better.”85 Religion also figured in these divisions. Royalists upheld traditional religion, such as the Barbados gentleman who believed that the martyred king’s blood would cure him of scrofula.86 Royalists embraced prayer book Anglicanism because it unified their society and buttressed prevailing social relationships. Their opponents viewed this complacency as anti-Christian and licentious. The Commonwealth supporters repeatedly depicted their foes as drinking healths, invoking images of popular culture as drunken and impious. One news report commented that Barbadians toasted and called for “damnation, as if Hell were not spacious enough to contain them.” This contrast between drunken, irreverent cavaliers and serious parliamentarians spoke volumes to those self-identified as godly. For them the unity central to traditional culture was nothing compared to the piety of those who opposed it. The exiled planters, the Perfect Diurnall took pains to point out, were “Godly and Pious.” Willoughby was particular annoyed by claims to godliness, referring to these men as “runaway bankrupt rogues” and hinting darkly that they might have been in league with the Spanish.87 Barbados royalists saw religion gone awry as the root of all anti-royalism.88 Ayscue and his fellows did not stress the religious changes that would necessarily follow the fleet’s triumph. In that event, they would outlaw the Church of England while permitting freedom for those of less conventional faiths. This new religious settlement was potentially unpopular, and the Commonwealth men did not emphasize it to Barbados inhabitants. Rather they equated their efforts with safety, prosperity, and godliness. Here was the middle ground on which most planters could meet. The successful reduction of Barbados was major news throughout Europe. As was often the case when English eyes were trained on the Atlantic basin, the London papers prematurely printed accounts of the outcome. These accounts may have been based on rumors or they may have been the fabrications of writers eager for a scoop. The Faithful Scout reported success in October (just as the fleet was arriving in Barbados) and months later related the story of the blockade without noting its earlier error. Although its coverage of the siege was especially garbled, other papers also printed premature announcements of victory.89 When victory came, weeklies described the events that brought an end to the blockade. The French Intelligencer offered the

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reading public a dramatic (but not very accurate) version, complete with stormed castles. The Weekly Intelligencer declared the reduction the most newsworthy event of the week.90 Later London weeklies printed summaries of the entire blockade. A Paris newspaper published a translation of a detailed account by Ayscue that had previously been printed in a London paper; the Gazette de France story appeared in a special supplement.91 Individuals in Barbados described what had transpired to their private correspondents. The letter from George Marten to his brother Henry praised Ayscue and the Commonwealth men. Although Marten had previously served as Willoughby’s agent, his sympathies clearly remained with Willoughby’s adversaries. Edmund Ludlow watched this story closely enough that he was able to include a largely accurate description of the conquest in his Memoirs.92 Having secured the surrender, Ayscue had only to verify that all the Caribbee Islands would remain loyal to the Commonwealth. He concentrated his efforts on Barbados, since that island represented, as one London newsweekly put it, “the greatest part of the work . . . in those parts.”93 The Council of State had selected a new Barbados governor before the fleet sailed: Daniel Searle, formerly a London merchant and one of the three commissioners sent to manage the reduction of the island. Ayscue did not hand over power until the island’s affairs were in order. He oversaw the declaration against kingship and the formal acknowledgment of subservience to the Commonwealth. He toured the island to gauge the allegiance of the lesser planters, reporting that the regimental officers claimed to have been misled into opposing Parliament.94 They averred their loyalty to the state. The first assembly, which sat within two months of the surrender, demonstrated greater hostility to the erstwhile royalist leaders than the articles of surrender allowed. It voted, in violation of the articles, to banish Willoughby, the Walronds, Byam, and six others. Aware that its actions were grossly unfair, the assembly justified its course by the specious claim that the royalists had agreed to their own banishment by voting in the election that brought the assembly to power.95 Some islanders felt forced by the might of the English state to accept the authority of the revolutionary regime, while others willingly or even eagerly acquiesced to the new circumstances. Satisfied with the allegiance of the remaining Barbadians, Ayscue departed in early April to visit other Caribbean holdings on his return voyage.96 Antigua was the only other Caribbean plantation calling for Ayscue’s attention. The circumstances there were confused. Parliament’s information that Antigua had joined Barbados in revolt against the Commonwealth was confirmed during the blockade. Alone among the other islands, Antigua did not assist the fleet by providing provisions or care for sick and wounded men. Although Henry Ashton (longtime governor and supporter of the Carlisle in-

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terest) was governor in January 1651, by early 1652, when Ayscue was finishing up in Barbados, Antigua had a new governor. Christopher Keynall had reportedly been a parliamentary army officer as well as settler on Warwick’s Trinidad, and he was probably the displaced governor of Santa Cruz who chafed under royalist Marlborough’s rule in 1645. The Antiguans may have replaced Ashton with Keynall once they realized that the Commonwealth was making good on its promise to reduce the islands. Since Parliament had canceled the proprietary claim and ordered that new governors be commissioned as needed, Ashton’s position as Carlisle’s appointee and a royalist was untenable. A Commonwealth-inspired coup on the island might have been easily accomplished.97 Rather inexplicably, Antigua’s deputies wrote an undated letter to Ayscue between the surrender of Barbados in January and his arrival there in early April asserting that the island had submitted to some unnamed party claiming to represent Parliament. The deputies hoped that this would prove their loyalty, and they asked for the same terms Barbados had received. The only other ships in the Caribbean brandishing commissions from the Commonwealth during this period were those bound for Virginia. Perhaps they visited Antigua after leaving Barbados, but this cannot be confirmed since records of the voyage to Virginia are scanty (the flagship, among others, sank en route). If that was the case, the Virginia fleet may have instated Keynall or, if he was already in office, confirmed his governorship. Alternately, Keynall himself may have come to “reduce” Antigua after the Spanish drove the English off Santa Cruz in 1650. He did not have a commission from Parliament, but had he claimed falsely to represent it, he would not have been the only person to do so. Whoever paid this purported visit, the Antiguans assured Ayscue that they had willingly submitted. In any event, Antigua was prepared to accept Ayscue’s authority prior to his arrival in early April. At that time, citing the fact that Parliament had nullified Carlisle’s claim and had empowered him to commission all the governors in the islands, Ayscue commissioned Keynall. Keynall and his council immediately wrote to the Council of State asserting their loyalty, asking it to forget anything bad it had heard of them, and requesting all the privileges granted the other islands.98 Elsewhere, Ayscue’s efforts were minimal. He commissioned the sitting governors—Roger Osborne of Montserrat, Luke Stoakes of Nevis, and Clemens Everard of St. Christopher. Except that Osborne had been commissioned also by Willoughby, Ayscue’s recognition of these men was the first extra-colonial endorsement of their offices. None had been appointed by Carlisle, each having become governor—by what mechanism is unknown— to replace appointees who died in office. They were all planters. In addition to confirming these governors, Ayscue responded to a request from St.

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Christopher for a settlement of its government. That plantation wanted an annual elected assembly, no laws repugnant to those of England (a standard clause in most colonial charters), and especially no martial law. Having wrested the right to hold an assembly from the autocratic Sir Thomas Warner, they were concerned about protecting their liberties. Who better to endorse these aspirations than the representative of the English Commonwealth? Ayscue agreed to the request and may have offered similar settlements to the other islands.99 Ayscue also attended to the affairs of Surinam, though he never visited that outpost. Although it remained within the English Commonwealth’s orbit, Surinam would be peopled largely by those ousted from Barbados in the wake of the surrender. In 1650 Willoughby had sent men to explore the mainland of South America, or “Guiana.” Subsequently he settled a hundred men there. He claimed the colony by right of “discovery,” and the treaty with the Commonwealth commissioners had verified his right to his estate there. Like many would-be colonizers with shaky claims to a piece of the Americas, he also negotiated with resident “Indian Kings.” When required to leave Barbados in the aftermath of the surrender, Willoughby visited his young colony. Later, when he was caught plotting a royalist uprising in England, the government considered banishing him to Surinam. He would not return to the outpost, however, until after the Restoration. The Commonwealth appointed a governor over the colony to ensure its loyalty, choosing a man “well-affected . . . & very knowing in those parts.” Eventually the attention of the state lapsed, and the settlers would be required to select a governor from among their own number. Late in the 1650s Barbados royalist William Byam governed the colony. It remained under England, however, with no apparent ties to the Stuarts.100 While Ayscue was completing his assigned task, the royalist uprising in the Somers Islands fizzled out. Without being confronted directly for its adherence to the monarchy, Bermuda abandoned the cause. In May following the August 1649 uprising, the Bermuda government had received a letter from the Somers Islands Company (dated January 1649/50) that presumed the planters’ loyalty to both the state and reformed religion but did not explicitly demand a declaration of allegiance to the Commonwealth. The company itself had been thoroughly reviewed by the Council of State, which probably removed some members of questionable loyalty. In January 1650 the company belatedly ordered that parliamentary acts of January through October 1649 creating the Commonwealth and requiring men to swear to uphold its government be put into effect in the islands.101 At the time of writing the letter, the company may not have known of the royalist takeover on the islands.

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The company named a new governor, Captain Josias Forster. This order unseated John Trimingham, the royalist chosen the previous fall. The settlers, in their official letter of thanks to the company for the appointment of Forster, deemed him “so grave and so experienced a gentleman.” Forster had served as governor and secretary on several earlier occasions. The royalists, who considered themselves in rebellion against the regicidal regime but not the company, accepted Forster, though in doing so they violated their own resolution to obey the company only if it was not tampered with by any outside authority.102 For the next year and a half Forster maintained the political status quo, working to quell dissent, and (if his letters to the company can be trusted) to assist the Independents banished to the Bahamas.103 A number of islanders were not happy with the persistent royalism of some of their fellows, and a grand jury presented them for traitorous remarks. One anti-monarchical islander asserted that “the kinge hath sould his subjects” and asked, “If he were Kinge why did hee not goe and take the crowne that we may know him to bee kinge.” Clearly not all dissidents had been banished. Despite some criticism, Forster reported with satisfaction his success as of December 1650: “From a tumultuous rebellious People, perfidious Commanders, and Rabble of a number of new found Seditious Agitators, we are now brought to a People resolvedly bent to Peace and Obedience, a Soldiery onely subject to my Command, . . . and an utter dissolution of that Fraternity of Incendiaries to our wonted Peace and Government.”104 Peace, obedience, and an end to agitation—Forster depicted the islands as a haven in a sea of strife. Bermuda had been called to account, but only in a limited way. Not until late 1651 did the colony receive a copy of the 1650 act naming it as a rebellious colony and debarring all from trading with it. When the opportunity next presented itself, the governor and council wrote to the company asking for information and instructions, especially concerned to know “wither that odium of Rebells and Traitors be taken off from us, Our Conscence beareinge witness that wee are Ignorant of any such Actions or Intensons in us, against any power whatsoever.” Perhaps not until February 1651/2 did Forster receive the (by then year-old) order from the company to proclaim the Commonwealth. When he complied, taking the engagement to the Commonwealth “as that is now established without a kinge or House of Lordes” and administering it to the others, the Bermudans surely knew that Barbados was besieged, if not conquered.105 The islanders dropped their royalism through this gesture of submission. Unlike in Barbados, no effort was made to remove royalist leaders. The authorities seemed willing to overlook the royalism of Bermuda, apparently confident that this less populous and profitable outpost could be controlled by its London-based company. A later investigation by the Council of State heard complaints about this leniency

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and questions about the colony’s loyalty. For the time being, however, Forster continued as governor, and Bermuda suffered no consequences.106 Bermuda’s response to regicide and the creation of the Commonwealth highlights the limited access to information in the Atlantic world, the complicated nature of ties between settlements and the home country, the importance of local issues, and the radicalizing consequences of regicide. For Bermudans, the local Independent movement shaped political as well as religious affairs. Royalism and popular animosity toward independency went hand in hand, and “the country” linked its drive to rid the islands of Independents to its declaration of allegiance to the king. Although the circumstances of this struggle were unique to Bermuda, other colonies drove out unpopular minorities as part of a post-regicide royalist interlude. Hostility toward the parliamentary takeover of the English government continued after the local radicals had been banished, as royalist Bermudans, largely acquiescent earlier, were galvanized by the killing of the king. The general level of unease was no doubt fueled by the rumor that exiled Barbadians intended to invade Bermuda and use it as a staging ground for the reconquest of their own island. In justifying their rebellion, however, the islanders made a fine distinction between their allegiance to the English regime (which they did not acknowledge) and to the company that ran the colony (which they did). It might seem odd that they would emphasize their loyalty to the company, given that some colonists opposed the trade restrictions it imposed. Yet no viable option that would permit free trade presented itself to the hapless Bermudans at this point, so the trade issue probably did not affect this choice. The Independent minority may have been especially eager to see trade restrictions lifted, but much of it was in exile at the moment in any event.107 Leading Bermudans viewed the legal existence of their community as dependent on the monarchy, emphasizing the charter that had established their colony initially. To abandon the king seemed tantamount to forfeiting their government and what privileges they enjoyed under it. By the time they accepted the Commonwealth, they had been assured that the new state was working with the company. They may even have known that their continued refusal to acknowledge the state’s authority was jeopardizing the company’s existence.108 They also knew that Charles Stuart’s efforts to capture the throne had failed and he was living in exile. Under these circumstances, acknowledging the Commonwealth was prudent. It was certainly preferable to throwing themselves on the mercy of another European nation, a course they probably never seriously considered, in spite of the company’s use of the threat to ensure careful treatment of the islands by the Commonwealth government. The governor and council declared their happiness that the Council

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of State had validated the company and asserted their willingness to protect the company’s rights with their blood.109 Bermudans, like all settlers, made decisions to resist and to acquiesce with only sketchy knowledge of the situation at home. They may have known of the regicide but not of the subsequent creation of the Commonwealth when they proclaimed Charles II. Subsequently the trade embargo exacerbated the problem, as information and even company directives were held up with the islands cut off from intercourse with English ports. Ironically, the embargo, imposed by the state for disloyalty, prevented the Somers Islands residents from learning that they had been ordered by the company to acknowledge the authority of that state. Misinformation was also rife, as one colonial observer remarked.110 Once Bermudans did learn of the order, they accepted it, presumably feeling that they had little choice. Whether they were reconciled to the situation or accepted it out of a sense of their own self-interest, they did not indicate. By contrast, the colonists in Barbados had been more committed to royalism, more confident of their ability to withstand the English state, or both. The rebellion in Barbados had to be put down by force, or at least the threat of force, while tiny Bermuda caved in as the islanders’ position became untenable. Virginia did not give up the king’s cause without a fight, or rather without the threat of a fight. Charles II was determined to maintain the tie to Virginia, having written to the colonists to renew the commissions of the governor and council and to instruct them in his policies. He declared his intention to assist all colonists in Virginia who “confirm themselves as Royall Subjects” and to discourage others.111 The planters repaid his attentions with a royalism that was as consistent as any in the Atlantic world. Royalist exiles who arrived in Virginia after the regicide enhanced the colony’s loyalty. The outpost was later referred to as “the only city of refuge left in his Majesty’s dominions in those times for distressed Cavaliers.” One of these migrants wrote an account of his voyage in which he used a parliamentarian among his fellow passengers as his foil: rude and childish, Major Stevens revealed his inclination to social leveling through his disrespectful attitude toward Native American royalty.112 Although the extent of the cavalier exodus to Virginia has been exaggerated, an influx of royalists did occur there, as in Barbados, in the late 1640s and early 1650s. Rumors circulated in London that one of these exiles was forcing settlers to swear allegiance to Charles II or else risk hanging and banishment both.113 When news of the trade embargo on royalist plantations arrived, in March 1651, Governor Berkeley gave a speech against the Commonwealth government and its right to act in Virginia. He identified the fleet as “pirats and Robbers.” The assembly responded by declaring its continued

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allegiance to the Stuarts and explaining the justice of its position.114 By this time Virginia was being lauded in royalist circles as the model of fealty. The earl of Clarendon stated that Berkeley “almost” invited the young king to take sanctuary in Virginia at this time.115 Still, the English Commonwealth government was able to subdue Virginia without bloodshed during the opening months of 1652. Four ships arrived in December and early January, and others joined them subsequently. With the fleet off shore, Berkeley rallied the populace, claiming that Parliament intended to challenge land titles and place Virginia “under a company of Merchants who would order them at pleasure, and keep them from trade with all others.”116 The first ships to arrive countered this “Refuge of lyes” with a propaganda campaign of their own, “sending abroad Declarations and Copies of private Letters, which took well and gave great satisfaction to the People.” Once Edward Courtis arrived, bearing the commissions authorizing the fleet’s work, he noted the preparations to resist the fleet and referred to Virginia as “this poor wicked Country.” Along with Richard Bennett and William Claibourne, he sent a summons to the governor and his council, dated 19 January. The answer that they received was “somewhat milder than was expected, though mixt with some such politick Proviso’s, as they afterward much insisted on, for the continuation of the government in the same hands for another year.”117 The Virginia authorities soon called the assembly, disbanded their soldiers—“of whom there were about 1000 to 1200 in arms at James City”—and opened treaty negotiations. On 12 March the surrender was completed, the Virginians accepting terms similar to those granted Barbados.118 How Virginia moved with such apparent ease from the last bastion of royalism to “due obedience and subjection to the common wealth of England” cannot be known with certainty. The earl of Clarendon, in his history of the rebellion, asserted that the Virginians were well disposed but badly fortified, in contrast to the Barbadians, who did not resist to the extent that they were able, in order to protect their great wealth.119 Robert Beverley, Virginia’s early historian, claimed that the commissioners bribed two of Berkeley’s councilors, threatening to withhold their goods if they did not capitulate. This story is no longer widely accepted. The Virginia elite was divided about what course to pursue. Regicide Edmund Ludlow claimed that his kinsman George Ludlow played the same role in Virginia that Thomas Modiford had played in Barbados. Although the Virginians did not come to the brink of war, with Ludlow calling out his regiment on the Commonwealth side, he may have led a faction that favored surrender.120 Charles II’s supporters were disheartened by recent news: before surrendering on March 12, the Virginians knew that the king had been routed at Worcester the previous Septem-

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ber, dashing hopes that he would conquer England, and that Barbados had surrendered in January, demonstrating that even the strongest outpost could not withstand the Commonwealth.121 Given that Virginia was the last bastion of royal support, accepting the proffered terms may have seemed the only viable option. Virginia surrendered, and the articles stated that the surrender was voluntary. A condition of the surrender was that Berkeley or his agent be allowed to travel to Europe to apologize to Charles II for relinquishing the last of his domains. Colonel Francis Lovelace made the journey promptly, probably giving his account to the exiled king within a few months. Another condition was that the commissioners promised to get Parliament to endorse the terms negotiated. Privately expressed royalism was permitted in the colony for one year from the time of the surrender.122 Two of the three commissioners were residents of the colony, and they remained after the fleet departed to oversee the shift from royalist to republican Virginia. With the surrender of Virginia in March 1652, the Commonwealth had forced the Stuarts’ dominions to acknowledge “due obedience” to the English state. The reduction of Virginia and Barbados and the collapse of royalist pretensions in Antigua and Bermuda brought all colonies—with the possible exception of Newfoundland—into the orbit of the English Commonwealth. Newfoundland represented a special case, given that loyalist ships trolled its fishing grounds and only the small year-round settlement was suspect. The Commonwealth, having previously arrested proprietor Kirke, in June 1652 commissioned four men to take over the government and to render it loyal to England.123 Efforts to found new royalist outposts in this era foundered, and Old World supporters of Charles II ceased to think of America as a refugee where royalism might be openly embraced.124 Laughing at the desperation of the royalist plight, Mercurius Politicus joked that if all of Europe turned republican, Charles might “beg Letters of recommendation from the Commonwealths of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, to the Tobacco planters of America.” With the downturn of royalist fortunes in the Atlantic basin, even the tobacco planters of Virginia were in no position to entertain the son of a king, whom they were to call “Charles Stuart.”125 Beyond the handful of royalist exceptions, the vast majority of colonies were believed to be loyal, and the Council of State did not force them to submit formally to its authority. Most plantations made no declaration of allegiance to the new government. They continued the policy of passive non-engagement they had pursued throughout the 1640s. Either a previously established reputation for support of Parliament or marginality permitted them to avoid public commitment. Some governments—such as that of ostensibly parliamentarian Massachusetts—managed to avoid acknowledging the new

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regime entirely. Again the presumption that the New Englanders supported Parliament protected them from the effects of the revolution at home, and Massachusetts Bay thought that it ought to be sheltered.126 Colonies generally acquiesced passively to the Commonwealth, continuing the uninvolved stance adopted during the civil wars. As the revolution unfolded on the other side of the Atlantic, these plantation governments preferred to observe rather than to support. This favored group succeeded in remaining above the affray. The exception again was Maryland. The Virginia commissioners, finished with that colony, proceeded next to Maryland, with motives that historians have since debated. Their commission interchanged the term “all the plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake” and “Virginia,” either because of a vague sense of geography, for which there is ample evidence in other sources, or because Maryland as well as Virginia was intended. If the latter was the case, men opposed to Baltimore may have arranged the imprecise wording to justify an assault on the proprietary. Maryland had not been included in any enumeration of rebel plantations, and, although the proprietary was under investigation, the Commonwealth had not questioned the loyalty of Baltimore or the settlers.127 One contemporary defender of the proprietary pointed out that the commissioners ought to have known that Maryland was not suspect, as ships were regularly licensed to trade with Maryland when rebellious Virginia was embargoed. Yet Baltimore’s nemesis William Claibourne, along with the other two commissioners, unseated Maryland’s governor and council, citing the fact that the writs in the province were issued in the name of Lord Baltimore rather than the “Keepers of the Liberties of England.” A later justification of their activities published anonymously cited the fact that many of those who had been in office when the king was proclaimed still held office.128 Governor Stone relented on the question of the writs, and Claibourne and Richard Bennet returned to reinstate him in June. This would not prove the end of the troubles in Maryland, where problems of authority and legitimacy would continue to be fought out sporadically for the remainder of the decade. In June 1652, however, Maryland seemed to have escaped relatively unscathed, despite the suspect nature of its government and its religious associations and the potentially damning declaration in favor of Charles II two years earlier by temporary governor Greene. Baltimore even declared it cruel to put Maryland (which had always been loyal to the Commonwealth) under once rebellious Virginia.129 The rebellious plantations were fully integrated into the empire. Parliament eventually approved the articles for Barbados and Virginia, blanching only at provisions that allowed unrestricted trade.130 Settlements that had openly sided with the king were made to acknowledge their obedience in various tangible ways—by taking the engagement to be loyal to the Commonwealth as constituted without king or House of Lords and by changing the

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form of writs. A list of those who subscribed the engagement survives for one Virginia county.131 The Commonwealth government removed from office men who had exercised power during the royalist interlude. Berkeley retired from public life and turned his Jamestown house over to his successor; he accepted that he owed the usurpers passive obedience but not his active support (as many royalists in England also argued). In the Somers Islands, where the leadership quietly dropped its royalism when it became untenable, no purge occurred. Representatives of the state would later address the failure to displace those who had been in government. Baltimore barred Greene from all public office after his declaration in favor of Charles II, but the Maryland government was criticized because others who had held office at the time had not been similarly punished. Willoughby was sent away, along with those royalists behind the coup on Barbados. Among them, William Byam tried to maintain his Barbados estate through the efforts of his wife while he resided in Surinam, although it was reportedly “plundered and ruined.”132 Ayscue was concerned to verify the loyalty of the Barbados militia. Reforming it to his satisfaction, he referred to it as having been “new-Modeld . . . for the security and peace of it.”133 The entire empire, Ayscue’s employers hoped, was being “new-Modeld” to suit it for submission to a republic. The conquest of the erstwhile Stuart dominions was designed to wipe out all open professions of loyalty to the vanquished royal family. The Virginia articles allowed private expressions of royalism for one year, as well as use of the Book of Common Prayer, except the parts regarding kingship, for the same period. Most colonists avoided public expression of their political views, although Isaac Clarke of Barbados was found guilty of treason for royalist statements in 1652.134 Suppressing Anglicanism was a tricky business because the Commonwealth’s official position otherwise was to support religious freedom. One of Ayscue’s first accomplishments upon taking Barbados was arranging the passage of an act for liberty of conscience. But the Church of England, with its overt connection to royalty, was unacceptable. The same reasoning, from the opposite point of view, was at work earlier when the royalists made the Book of Common Prayer the only pattern of “true worship” on the island. Willoughby had eventually abandoned his promise of freedom of worship and returned the island to Church of England adherence only during the siege, since monitoring religious expression helped to detect dissent of various kinds.135 The ability to suppress royalism—both political and prayer book royalism—was an important component of any post-regicide plantation government. That Massachusetts Bay “stifled” royalism in northern New England was taken as an argument in favor of its expansion there.136 Colonial elites were expected to be vigilant about the possibility of royalist plots, just as their counterparts in Britain were.137 In the aftermath of the reduction, the Commonwealth’s new economic

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program for the empire was not implemented and its fate seemed undecided. The Navigation Act, passed in October 1651, outlined a plan for reorganizing economic relations. It built on the general principles that the Commonwealth had the power to regulate trade and to alter the governments of the plantations laid out in the rebel plantations act of 1650. Colonists, Robert Bliss argued, rightly viewed this legislation as overriding local control of trade and other policies. Yet the terms subsequently granted to Barbados and Virginia seemed to cancel this threatened intrusion, and other plantations clamored to partake in the terms.138 Some colonies, like Massachusetts, advocated the older practice of local control. What would become of the new imperial plan after 1652 was unclear. At the moment, even those colonies that had rebelled were not punished. The Commonwealth seemed satisfied to exercise authority over all the dominions formerly subservient to the Stuarts. The biggest concern of the West Indian leaders as Ayscue left the region was retaliation by the Dutch for the ships that had been seized during the blockade.139 The extent of the Commonwealth’s triumph in the Atlantic was revealed by the reception accorded Prince Rupert, the nephew of the late King Charles, when he arrived in May 1652. Parliamentarians had long expected Rupert to visit the West Indies to secure plantations for the king as well as ships and men to support his cause. When, in late 1651, the Virginia fleet sailed from Barbados, the transatlantic rumor network buzzed with the news that Rupert had taken possession of Virginia, or at least an island off its coast—probably a reference to Bermuda—or, alternately, that he had fought Admiral William Penn in the area.140 Rupert, in command of a small fleet, sailed to the Caribbean six months later. One ship’s captain tried to speed ahead to Barbados to warn the islanders, but his efforts proved unnecessary. While working to repair a leaking ship, Rupert and his fleet unintentionally passed Barbados in the night, and the major English island never received a visit from the prince. His presence nevertheless created a flurry of royalist interest. Governor Searle stated that some royalists were willing to join Rupert and that those who were not imprisoned had gone off the island in hopes of meeting him. Rupert missed the chance to enjoy the “good company” of the many prostitutes who had been shipped to Barbados, which one London weekly sneered had been his true purpose in traveling to the West Indies.141 Only later did Rupert learn, from the French on Martinique, that the islands had all surrendered to the republic. Upon hearing this news, Rupert “resolved to visit them as Enemyes.”142 For over six months (June through December 1652) he plied the Caribbean Sea, taking what ships he could, occasionally attacking the “rebel” islands, and seeking out deserted islands or those held by friendly states to shelter him. He hoped to capture a New England ship full of provisions

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but never did. Still, as one London newspaper put it, he played “the Devill upon Dun’s back about St. Christophers.”143 Others referred to him as “pyraticall,” a characterization that denied the authority of those who had sent him even as it accurately described his activities.144 In their reaction to Rupert’s presence, St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua demonstrated that they were—almost without exception—determined to maintain their new relationship with the Commonwealth. St. Christopher continued especially adamant in its allegiance. The government there proclaimed its intention to punish any Dutch who assisted Rupert and even executed an English man who had been with his fleet. English St. Christopher was so thoroughly hostile to Rupert that he eventually became leery of accepting help from the French, who held half of that island, for fear that “the strict league betwixt them and the English” would lead to his betrayal.145 Rupert’s hopes lay more with Antigua, and, when he waited off the coast of that island for three days, the islanders believed that he expected them to join him. One London newsweekly reported that the governor could not rally his neighbors to resist an invasion but had to go to another area of the island to raise men. Some Antiguans, including some councilors, revealed lingering royalist inclinations, asserting that Rupert was their friend “and would do no hurt.” The view did not carry much credibility, especially since the three days’ wait was inaugurated by the capture of the island’s great gun by Rupert’s men, an effort by the islanders to raise a breastworks, their dispersal by the royalists firing on the laborers, and the calling out of parties of horse and foot. Rupert, seemingly bent on doing them some harm, won no recruits.146 Rupert’s West Indian expedition was a failure. He left the area in December 1652, ill, with only one ship and a crew that included just eight of his original men. The English men he had added to his crew could not be trusted. Most of his ships—and his younger brother Maurice—had been lost in a hurricane in September.147 Rumors circulated that he would go to Newfoundland—either in expectation of finding a royalist governor there or because the fisheries were always fertile ground for seizing ships and men.148 In the West Indies, Rupert’s efforts to expand the influence of Charles II and to recruit royalists had failed abysmally. As the Faithful Scout put it, Rupert’s proclamation of Charles in the “Indian Seas” was “merely a shadow without substance.”149 The aptness of that remark demonstrates how thoroughly subdued the West Indian and, indeed, all the Atlantic settlements were by late 1652. The battle for allegiance had been won. Regicide and the royalist rebellions it sparked proved a watershed in the Atlantic. Political divisions that had been largely suppressed in the 1640s were

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exacerbated by the death of the king and Parliament’s triumph. Tensions built up in various colonies over the years—between Independents and religious conservatives in the Somers Islands and Virginia, between supporters of monarchy and Parliament in Barbados, between supporters and opponents of Baltimore’s proprietorship in the Chesapeake region—exploded after they became linked to the incendiary events at home.150 Once the new regime waded into the fray—taking a vigorous but not brutal role in defiance of the expectations of many observers—the empire was officially settled in accordance with the Commonwealth’s vision. The Atlantic colonies became formally opposed to monarchy and to the Church of England which bolstered it. Although royalists continued privately to wish for the king’s return, they did not openly articulate that view. Settlers henceforth learned to live within a republican empire. Aristocrats had, like the king, fallen from power in the Atlantic basin. Noble men who had overseen the expansion into the Atlantic were everywhere in eclipse, with only Baltimore (ironically, the one Catholic proprietor) still enjoying his holdings. Except for the governors imposed by the state on Barbados and by the reformed Somers Islands Company on Bermuda, all the executives in the plantations were locally chosen, and all save Barbados’s Daniel Searle were longtime residents with roots deep in the colonies they ran. The state had declared its intention to step into the vacuum created by the end of royal and the decline of noble influence in the Atlantic. The reduction of Virginia and Barbados indicated that the state meant business, while its mild methods suggested a willingness to work with colonists. Signals about its plans for empire were mixed. The revolutionary Commonwealth had clearly communicated that it would suffer no support for that pretended king, Charles Stuart.

4 Religious Politics of a “Puritan Revolution”

To the extent that England and Wales could be said to have had a national religious policy during the interregnum (1649–1660), it revolved around the potentially contradictory goals of the suppression of the Church of England, toleration of most other Protestants, and promotion of godliness. While the revolutionaries had been unable to agree on the nature of a new national church, all concurred that the Church of England—with its bishops and its built-in support for monarchy—was unacceptable. National efforts to implement a new church order focused largely on the review of prospective and current ministers under a two-part system of “tryers” and “ejectors.” Tryers interviewed prospective ministers for doctrinal purity, moral living, acceptable politics, and rejection of Church of England practices, while ejectors were charged with removing sitting ministers who failed these tests. The system was implemented somewhat haphazardly, appointees were occasionally divided on what constituted problematic doctrine, and few efforts were made to force attendance at services offered by approved ministers. In the absence of a comprehensive national church, and with the proliferation of various sectarian options, English and Welsh men and women were free to make their own choices about their religious commitments. Until Parliament cracked down on the most extreme forms of religious expression with the blasphemy trial of Quaker James Nayler in 1656, policing of radicalism was limited. It remained largely ineffectual even after 1656. Freedom of religious expression resonated with principled arguments in favor of complete liberty of conscience, articulated by radicals in the army, the City of London, Parliament, and others. One of the more frightening prospects for conservatives during the interregnum was the growth of religious radicalism and “soul liberty,” as Quakers and others went largely unchecked in their proselytizing. The English enjoyed (or suffered) a great deal of religious liberty while the authorities advocated but did not fully implement reformed Protestantism and godliness. The messages coming out of England to the colonies about how to handle 123

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religious issues reflected the contradictory nature of the programs pursued there. Only on the need to suppress the Church of England did the authorities give clear and consistent directions to colonial officials. Most colonies found it difficult to suppress Anglicanism while at the same time both promoting godliness and tolerating other Protestants. Those places with thriving (non-Anglican) religious establishments promoted godliness but did not tolerate dissent. Toleration came more easily where the Church of England had previously been supported. Colonial leaders might root out Anglican worship, but replacing it with a system to advance moral reform proved more difficult, as was also the case in England and Wales. By the mid-1650s, the ecclesiastical landscape revealed wide variation, ranging from the thriving but intolerant religious establishment of Massachusetts to the pluralism and minimal oversight of Maryland and Rhode Island. The former followed England’s stated commitment to godly reformation, while the latter pair acted in accordance with England’s example of greater diversity and toleration. The treatment of those charged as witches offered a measure of local commitment to godly reformation. If the reaction to suspected witches demonstrated which communities were most intent on reform and most acutely aware of dangers stalking them, the reaction to Quakers showed how far some were prepared to go in pursuit of godly orthodoxy. Only one colonial government executed Quakers to ensure social and religious purity. Colonial reactions to contradictory directives from the center underscored the local differences that shaped the religious milieu of each colony. Colonies had, in a sense, pursued toleration, reformation, or the suppression of the Church of England already, even before these became part of the religious landscape in England. Some colonies had previously embraced toleration or had created state mechanisms to uphold godliness. Others attempted to embark on these paths under the pressure of revolutionary events. Everywhere, politics and religion were closely intertwined, a link that was most obvious in formerly royalist colonies such as Barbados and Virginia, where the Church of England was to be rooted out. Liberty came least readily to those colonies most deeply committed to reformation, because a commitment to godliness and the suppression of the Church of England in those locales buttressed an interventionist state that rejected toleration as inconsistent with those goals. Such colonies were committed to hunting witches and battling sectarians, projects especially associated with orthodox regimes such as in Massachusetts Bay. The idea behind Massachusetts’s system—that true liberty allowed the godly the freedom to do that which was correct—was challenged by a new, more individualistic conception of liberty as the freedom of individual religious choice. *

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Razing all aspects of the Church of England was easier said than done. In a place like Montserrat, the roots of the Church of England were not deeply planted, and little change was therefore needed. The colony had boasted a handsome Anglican church since the 1630s (built apparently to demonstrate the Irish governor’s commitment to Protestantism) but no minister.1 Pulpits in some other colonies—the other English Leeward Islands, Surinam, Maryland—were similarly understaffed, and thus presented little difficulty for the new leaders of England. Ironically, the first Anglican minister did not arrive to serve the population of Maryland until 1650, timing that landed him on North America’s shores not far ahead of the order to suppress his church.2 In some places the Church of England did need to be rooted out. The surrender terms granted to both Barbados and Virginia required the suppression of the Book of Common Prayer. Barbadians informally enjoyed a reprieve from the ban on the prayer book, for it was in November, almost a year after the surrender, that the books were recalled in accordance with the law passed the previous spring. The magistrates noted that they had waited, “having hitherto out of indulgence complied with the people’s weaknesses.” The “idolatrous” prayer book, they opined, appealed to a “dumb and lazy ministry.”3 In Virginia, the articles of surrender allowed one year’s grace, so long as the majority in a given parish agreed to continued use of the prayer book. Even so, “those things which related to kingshipp or [to] that government [ought to] be not used publiquely.”4 The de-politicized form of Anglicanism permitted for just one year under the articles may have become standard in some parishes for the entire interregnum.5 As late as 1656, settlers continued to observe “the old Holidayes,” those tied to the Anglican calendar, according to one account. In the Somers Islands in 1657 the prayer book was still in use. Colonial conditions—which had put more responsibility for maintaining religious worship onto the individual believer or the local community—created a simplified form of Anglicanism that could be unobtrusively upheld even while it was proscribed. Such activities as observing holidays or reading the prayer book could be pursued without drawing official notice. Negotiating permission to continue their traditional worship demonstrated a commendable loyalty among the colonists, according to geographer and Church of England supporter Peter Heylyn.6 Adherence to the Church of England was explicitly linked to loyalty to monarchy for the first time in the colonies during this period, an association it would carry for many years. From the point of view of Heylyn’s opponents, the Church of England rite as a possible cover for subversive political loyalties was just as suspect in the plantations as it was elsewhere. Anglicans turned militant on one occasion, taking up “swords, canes and cudgels” in defense of the old ways in Barbados. While belatedly confiscating

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prayer books in 1652, the authorities stated that they were “now well hoping that the minds of all good people are well settled, and their eyes opened to see the Christian liberty they now enjoy, and what tyranny and slavery they are freed from.” Their assessment proved overly optimistic, and one minister refused to comply with the order to send in his copy of the Book of Common Prayer. When the Leeward Quarterly Court Justices of the Peace ordered the arrest of Charles Robson, ordained in the Church of England, formerly a prebendary of Salisbury, and then serving as parson in All Saints’ Parish, to their dismay a “distempered multitude” of many hundreds of supporters rescued Robson from the marshal. They were joined by a justice, Major Richard Bayly, who “dismembered himself from the Court” and renounced the warrant he had previously signed calling in the prayer book. The disturbance could not be quelled until the court adjourned, and it had to appeal to the governor for help implementing the anti-Anglican policies. One of the justices, Richard Higgons, referred to the proponents of the Church of England as a “prelatical crew with serpentine subtlety.”7 Although prayer book Anglicanism was dear to some Barbadians, in other colonies no such dramatic incidents were reported, and continued adherence to the Church of England was carried on either privately or without opposition from the authorities. The English state sought to foster toleration in the Atlantic world. Both by example and by prescript, the authorities promoted toleration of all Protestants other than members of the Church of England. The Westminster Assembly of Divines had recommended that the church be reorganized using the presbyterian model. Presbyterians in England and in Scotland were known for their energetic suppression of dissent. Had theirs become the official church of the Commonwealth, the suppression of other viewpoints would have resulted. Reformed in this way, the church in England would have assigned disciplinary powers to regional presbyteries made up of ministers and lay elders, as was the practice in Scotland; it would have aimed to achieve the same level of discipline as did the congregationalists of New England, though by somewhat different means.8 In 1646, however, supporters of the parliamentary cause ranged across so wide a religious spectrum that implementing the assembly’s recommendation would have amounted to political suicide. The church settlement finally endorsed was a “lame Erastian presbytery,” without the power to coerce conformity or morals. Even that was not fully realized, so that the English and Welsh enjoyed an unprecedented freedom. Oliver Cromwell, eventually Lord Protector, supported liberty of conscience for most Protestants (excluding episcopalians and some extreme sects). He declared that once complete reformation had been achieved, the godly would be “merciful as well as orthodox.”9 Although he worked hard to

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reform both religion and society, he did not advocate coercion, and liberty of conscience for all manner of Protestant believers was his official policy. When recording the protector’s death in his journal of public occurrences, Bostonian John Hull muted his praise for this godly leader by noting that he had tolerated error.10 From both the republic and the protectorate the message was: tolerate diversity and avoid religious persecution. Three plantations embraced liberty of conscience. In keeping with the prevailing sentiment in England, the plans for the new colony of Eleuthera in the Bahamanian islands incorporated religious liberty. Having endured “the violent persecution of some ill affected persons” in the Somers Islands before removing to Eleuthera, the settlers wanted to avoid similar problems in their new colony. Name-calling based on religious affiliation was a criminal offense.11 Rhode Island and Maryland also granted “soul liberty” at least to all Christians. Rhode Island’s policy predated the revolution. Roger Williams, founder of Providence Plantation (the nucleus of the later colony), objected on principle to coercion on matters of conscience: he repeatedly likened it to rape. The great variety of beliefs held by early settlers around Narragansett Bay made any policy other than toleration untenable, and the fact that many of the first English inhabitants had run afoul of New England orthodoxy increased support for the broader principle of liberty of conscience.12 As one visitor noted, the colony had “been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinons.” Rhode Island stood out in New England for its toleration and its diversity. When Boston diarist John Hull traveled to the Narragansett region, he reported various encounters with men holding exotic opinions. According to Hull, Samuel Gorton “denieth the Lord’s Christ” and a Mr. Porter of Petaquamscot argued that all shall be saved.13 The commitment to avoiding coercive legislation ran so deep that, when confronted with complaints of Sabbath violation, the government asked the towns to set aside other days for recreation. If children and servants had another day to play, the assembly reasoned, they would not profane the Sabbath, which, it noted, was “offensive to divers amongst us.”14 Providence residents described their blessed situation to Sir Henry Vane in a 1655 letter: We have long drunck of the cup of as great liberties as any people that we can heare of under the whole Heaven. We have not only been long free (together with all English), from the iron yoaks of wolfish Bishops and their Popish ceremonies (against whose cruell oppressions, God raised up your noble spirit in Parliament); but we have sitten quiet and drie from the streams of blood spilt by the warr in our native country. We have not felt the new chains of the Presbyterian tyrants; nor (in this

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colonie) have we been consumed with the over-zealous fire of the (so called) Godly and Christian magistrates They lamented that they did not appreciate these blessings, but instead bickered among themselves. They vowed to commit themselves to “reall endeavours after peace and righteousnesse.” The “(so called) Godly and Christian magistrates” of Massachusetts Bay would have argued that the very liberty the Providence inhabitants and Vane treasured caused the division the former lamented.15 Defenders of orthodoxy believed that nothing good came of such toleration, although the men of Providence considered it their chief blessing. Maryland also instituted an official policy of liberty of conscience. The impetus for the 1649 act guaranteeing religious liberty to Christians came from Lord Baltimore. He could neither attract settlers to his province nor fend off opponents of the proprietary without taking a strong stand in favor of liberty. The act, which was probably sent by Baltimore to the legislature, also promoted Sabbath observance and opposed blasphemy, both popular positions with Protestant reformers. The 1649 act did not initiate an entirely new policy, but described the compromises made in a province with a Protestant majority and a largely Catholic ruling elite. John Langford praised Baltimore’s government for its toleration in a 1655 pamphlet.16 The specifics of the act itself indicate much about the state of religion in the colony. It promised punishment for anyone who harassed another about his or her religion (assuming that the faith in question did not blaspheme or deny the Trinity). Reproachful speeches against the Virgin Mary, the apostles, or evangelists were forbidden. Name-calling was similarly outlawed. The law was intended to stabilize a potentially volatile situation.17 That Catholic proprietor Baltimore was trying to retain his province during a revolution with intensely anti-Catholic undercurrents made the situation in Maryland unusual. But if sparsely populated Maryland displayed anything approaching the degree of diversity the list of banned epithets implied, the province experienced a level of heterogeneity comparable to that of revolutionary England. Despite the importance of Catholicism in Maryland, the reasons for embracing “soul liberty” there shared common features with the forces that drove support for toleration in England. No other colony followed Eleuthera, Rhode Island, and Maryland in a principled expression in favor of liberty of conscience, but others seem to have exercised toleration amid a degree of diversity. Some observers remarked on the tolerant climate in specific colonies. According to Antoine Biet, who arrived in Barbados fearful that his identity as a Catholic priest would put him in peril, both Catholics and Jews lived unobtrusively on the is-

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land: “All are given freedom of belief, provided that they do nothing to be conspicuous in public, to such an extent that on Sunday one is free to do what one wants in his house, no one bothers to see what he is doing. That is why I carried on all of my religious functions with great freedom.”18 Shortly after Biet’s sojourn on the island, the governor and council entertained “the Petition of severall of the Dutch Nation resident in this Island, desiring the liberty & privilege to convene & meet together on the Sabbath day, for Religious Exercises, in the worship & service of God.” The magistrates “ordered that they have Liberty so to do, provided they demean & comport themselves accordingly, & act nothing to the disturbance of the public peace of this Island.”19 Barbados clearly pursued a policy of religious toleration, in keeping with its mandate from the central government. Quaker “convincements” (as they termed conversions) in the Dutchcontrolled English town of Flushing in New Netherland occurred in an atmosphere of tolerance. The townsfolk, having been instructed by the New Netherland governor not to entertain Quakers, wrote a remonstrance defending liberty of conscience. They declared themselves unable to condemn the Quakers as “seducers of the people . . . neither can we stretch out our hands against them.” They noted that their response to the Quaker missionaries was a “case of conscience betwixt God and our own souls . . . for if God justifye who can condemn and if God condemn there is none can justifye.” In case the missionaries proved to be from God, they thought it best “not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title hee appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker.” The remonstrants cited the example of the state of Holland as well as their own town charter, hoping that the colonial government would uphold the standard of liberty. This plea for freedom to hear the preaching of any who “come in love unto us” used a wide array of arguments, biblical, legal, and practical, and it did so in temperate and respectful language. Shortly after drafting this remonstrance, many in the town converted to Quakerism. In Flushing, as in neighboring Rhode Island, a principled commitment to liberty of conscience could offer settlers not only the means to hear the sect’s preaching but also a predisposition to accept its message.20 For many colonies no direct evidence of toleration or persecution has survived, but diversity can at least be documented. Diversity, religious conservatives averred, would naturally arise in the colonies, which drain off “all Opinionists and Inconformists,” who are pulled into peripheral areas “by their own gravity of self-opinion.” One visitor, granting that the Barbadians had achieved liberty of conscience, argued that they abused it. As proof of this abuse Henry Whistler cited the ethnic diversity on the island: “English, french, Dutch, Scotes, Irish, Spaniard thay being Jues.”21 If liberty of con-

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science was desirable but ethnic diversity was not, Whistler saw much to oppose in Anglo-Caribbean society. For him, ethnicity seemed to serve as an indicator of religious affiliation (except in the case of Spanish Jews, who had to be specifically identified as such), but ethnic pluralism was not welcomed. As both Whistler and Biet remarked, Jews were residing in Barbados by the mid1650s. Sephardic Jews settled in various colonies, driven out of Brazil after the Portuguese recaptured it. As Dutch citizens, they settled in New Netherland but also in a number of English colonies, including Barbados, Jamaica, and Rhode Island. While England was debating the wisdom of readmitting Jews, colonies in the Atlantic received a small number of openly Jewish inhabitants with little or no discussion.22 Baptists, a radical religious sect that had expanded rapidly in revolutionary England, had organized at least two churches in Rhode Island by mid-century. They also lived in the Caribbean and perhaps on Long Island. Among the Barbados recruits for Cromwell’s Western Design fleet were a sizable number of “Anabaptists.” The unsympathetic officer who reported this fact blamed sectarian soldiers from the expedition for converting them, but it is likely that some of the colonists had antipedobaptist views prior to encountering the preaching soldiers fresh from Cromwellian England.23 Around the same time, Nevis’s governor was said to be “much perplexed” with Anabaptists, indicating that these ideas were circulating in the islands by 1655.24 Little evidence survives to reveal the response of the larger community to these groups. As far as the records indicate, toleration reigned. Nothing contributed more to the diversity of the English Atlantic than the spread of the newly founded Quaker sect. The message of the Quaker movement was both universalist (all could be saved) and individualist (each person could arrive at truth independently). Ideally suited to the times, it may have numbered sixty thousand converts after just a decade.25 This rapid growth attested to the passion of the early converts, who believed—along with many non-Quakers—that the end times were at hand. To bring about the millennium, the Quakers felt compelled to spread their message, which they did unrelentingly, with impassioned preaching, a confrontational style, and a confidence in the rightness of their cause. Quakers heard a call to disseminate the truth of the light within to the wider Atlantic world beginning in 1655. Publishers of the truth probably visited every settlement, although for one West Indian island and the small English enclave in the Bahamas no records of Quaker visits have survived.26 They “convinced” local residents who went on to found thriving meetings, and some of these American converts became missionaries themselves.27 By the Restoration, both Barbados and Rhode Island were being described as a “nursery of the truth.”28 Most other colonies boasted some conversions.29 In English Jamaica, where the effects of early

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Quaker preaching have not been documented, the military commander there at first welcomed the witnesses, in hopes that they would raise the religious tenor of the island. Later, after seeing the books they brought with them, he realized that they had been accused of conspiring against the English government, and then he was uncertain what to do.30 Quakerism was especially suited to New World conditions outside of those prevailing in central New England. As in the north of England, some colonies offered few spiritual amenities. Where no minister preached, no churchgoers gathered, and no set liturgy could be read, the Quakers’ announcement that ministers, churches, and prayer books were unnecessary hit a resonant chord. For those who were persuaded of its truth, Quakerism explained the unsettling events of recent years. Civil wars, regicide, multiple changes of government, and continued disunity among the godly made sense if they heralded the approaching end of the world. Those who felt alienated from the communities in which they lived, whether for religious or other reasons, might find the Quakers’ confrontational style appealing. Becoming a Quaker allowed converts both to reject those who did not share their new faith and to create community among fellow converts. One convert in Maryland who had previously converted from Catholicism to reformed Protestantism before finding solace with the Quakers described this dynamic: “And then when I had found this beloved life and people, I was like a man overjoyed in my heart; not onely because That I heard that God had raised up such a people in England, but also because I saw the sudden fruits and effects of it, both in my own heart, and in others, insomuch that in a short time we became all to be as one entire family of love, and were drawn together in his life, (which was his light in us) to wait upon him in the stillnesse and quietnesse of our spirits.”31 When the opportunity emerged in fragmented or contested ecclesiastical environments, some residents chose Quakerism.32 Of scarcely less importance than the eradication of the Church of England and the toleration of other Protestant churches was the government’s policy of promoting godliness. The general moral reformation was only modestly successful in England and apparently had even less effect on the other countries within the archipelago.33 The English authorities never launched a program for bringing religious reformation to the Atlantic basin, but they urged others to pursue reform locally. For instance, the Council of State, writing to the governor of Virginia early in 1655, pressed him to take special care of religion in the colony.34 The same body advised Barbadians in 1660 that the English government would think highly of their colony if it promoted godly men over others.35 General comments in favor of godliness and the occasionally explicit instruction were usually all that the authorities contributed to-

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ward the godly reformation of the plantations. Some colonies did not need reform at the time, for they had vigorous non-Anglican religious establishments that had attended to reformation dating back to the 1630s. Others, most notably the Somers Islands, had taken up reform during the 1640s. Colonies where the Church of England had been legally established moved in the prescribed direction but usually with only limited results. The promotion of godliness during the revolution once deemed “puritan” proved uneven across the Atlantic basin. Most of New England fulfilled the fundamental goals of the English religious reformers. Three colonies out of five in the region had broadly similar establishments: Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven. With Maine and New Hampshire absorbed into Massachusetts (and Massachusetts dedicated to reforming those outposts) and Plymouth Plantation limping along behind its better-organized neighbors, the only colony in the region lacking a religious establishment of some sort during the 1650s was Rhode Island. Every colony in “orthodox” New England acted on the assumption that the state had a role to play in supporting religion. Indeed, this assumption was one key component in their identity as orthodox: they not only recognized one way as correct but also thought it the magistrates’ duty to uphold it. At their inceptions, these civil states were shaped by the religious convictions of their founders. All three governments passed laws that regulated morality and supported proper religious observance. In all three, biblical and English legal precedents combined in law codes that reflected Old Testament strictures as well as a shared legal heritage. New Haven went so far as to adopt the Old Testament–inspired code authored by Massachusetts minister John Cotton in “Moses his Judicialls.” One former New Englander observed approvingly that the challenges facing a godly legal system were intense: both they and “we and other Gentile Nations, are loth to be perswaded to dwell in the Tents of Shem, and to lay aside our old earthly formes of Government, to submit to the government of Christ.” In keeping with the goals of reformers in England, these colonies mandated Sabbath observance and respect for parental authority, promoted education and godliness, and punished words or actions defined as irreligious. Blasphemy was a capital crime in all three colonies, as indeed it had become in England in 1648.36 Each government drew up a law code during this period, ostensibly for the use of residents. Those of Massachusetts and New Haven were published, the latter in England, and disseminated information about the particular practices of these reformed polities to other parts of the Anglophone world.37 Former New Englander Hugh Peter advocated legal reform—Bulstrode Whitelocke commented that “none was more forward or lyable to mistakes then Mr Hugh Peters” on this score—and cited the practices of New Eng-

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land as a model for England.38 Success did not make these governments complacent, for they passed additional legislation in the 1650s as needed to meet new threats.39 The civil authorities worked closely with religious leaders to achieve the shared goal of a reformed society. John Cotton, for instance, preached against Baptists who had come from Rhode Island to minister to one of their co-religionists in the Massachusetts town of Lynn. In adding the weight of his considerable reputation to the civil action against these men, Cotton reprised a role he had played against Samuel Gorton and his fellows and against the Remonstrants in the 1640s.40 Ministers justified local policies in sermons and published tracts throughout this period. The Civil Magistrates power by Thomas Cobbet offered a sustained defense of the connection between church and state.41 Although the need for continued vigilance was acknowledged, these colonies enjoyed functioning religious establishments— the only ones in the Anglophone world once the authority of the kirk in Scotland was undermined by the English conquest. There alone, godliness enjoyed sustained support from the state. Many colonists described New England as a haven from the difficulties enveloping England as well as other New World settlements. Ministers everywhere would have envied Peter Buckeley his confidence when he declared his well-schooled, godly congregation the best judge of the worth of his sermons in “this censorious age.”42 Even the problems that troubled orthodox proponents were indicative of a flourishing religious establishment. Church members, having learned the importance of congregational purity, worried that clerical discussions of the need to ease admission requirements might lead to the pollution of their churches. They were prepared to fight modifications that would permit the children of church members greater access to the privileges of membership, those reforms that would come to be known as the “Half-Way Covenant.”43 A related tension revolved around the degree of lay power within the individual congregations. Even signs of disunity strengthened the reputation of New England’s leading cleric: William Hooke reported that Cotton had predicted divisions on his deathbed.44 Problems plaguing the orthodox New England colonies were relatively minor, and the region was set apart by its ability to implement the reform agenda. As in the previous decade, Massachusetts Bay was happy to export its establishment. It gradually took control of the settlements in Maine over the course of the early 1650s and thereby brought these outposts under its watchful supervision. Presentments for Sabbath breaking and neglect of public worship, along with drunkenness, living apart from one’s wife, lying, and swearing, dot the court records. With authorities newly attentive to such problems, the number of cases surged upward.45 Massachusetts pressured

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other New England colonies, most notably Plymouth, to adopt its practices on specific problems such as ministerial maintenance and the punishment of heresy. The government even supported—albeit modestly—the campaign to convert Native Americans, though the program was not popular with settlers. The missions to the Indians strove not just to make the natives into Christian men and women but also to pattern them upon godly English men and women. This impulse to monitor the conduct of potential converts was in keeping with the more general drive to reform manners. Given the cross-cultural component of their journey into Christianity, Native Americans faced a greater challenge than did other objects of reform; the uninitiated rarely found it easy to satisfy the demands of godly reformation, however.46 The Somers Islands and Plymouth Plantation moved during this era toward the sort of religious establishment that the three orthodox New England colonies boasted. Plymouth had not originally pursued a reform agenda, although others in the region recognized its churches as broadly orthodox. Plymouth’s unique history helps explain its initial lack of attention to this project, so dear to the founders of Massachusetts, New Haven, and Connecticut. The religious separatism of some of the first settlers, their experience as exiles in the tolerant Netherlands, the tenuous legal basis for the settlement, and the presence of a large number of “Strangers” in the plantation all discouraged the creation of a vigorous polity supporting reform. By 1650, however, Plymouth was prepared to move in the direction charted by some of its neighbors. The situation in England made this course of action safer than it would have been in 1620; other New England colonies, especially Massachusetts Bay, pressured it to adopt similar policies; and the growing threat of radicalism offered a compelling argument in favor of greater vigilance.47 In 1650 Plymouth legislated against setting up a church without permission from the magistrates, vaguely referring to an effort to gather a Baptist church as “many scandalus practises [Risen up].” At the same time, a law prohibited vilifying the churches and the ministers. A year later church attendance was mandated.48 In June 1655 longtime Governor William Bradford threatened to resign if the colony did not redouble its attention to religion. Another spate of legislation followed.49 Although Plymouth never became the mirror image of the other United Colonies, it moved closer to their policies. By the mid-1650s, congregationalism could be described as legally established in Plymouth, and the plantation also boasted some of the reform policies that usually accompanied such an establishment. The Somers Islands adopted a reformist posture in the 1650s, although the route to this policy was more tortuous than Plymouth’s. Founded with a puritan-inflected Anglican establishment (much like its parent colony, Virginia), the Somers Islands witnessed an ecclesiastical coup in the 1640s, when

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the colony’s churches were transformed into Independent congregations almost overnight. The resulting controversy led in the early 1650s to the banishment of the congregationalist minority. The Bermuda churches then adopted a more conservative but still reformist posture. The religious settlement of the mid-1650s included a heavy emphasis on policing morality and promoting godliness. The relations between church and state were similar in many respects to those developed in New England, although the churches themselves were no longer exclusive, gathered congregations but inclusive, parish-based churches. The authorities remained concerned about moral offenses and were dedicated to ensuring conformity. This combination was closely akin to the Scots presbyterian system. In May 1650 the governor, Josias Forster, declared, “The Government is reduced to its ancient bounds in a peaceable, quiet and orderly posture.” But the Somers Islands colony returned to “its ancient bounds” with a difference: the prayer book was proscribed, and the courts aggressively pursued the social reform agenda that animated many in England, among them Cromwell himself, as well as the orthodox New Englanders. Michael Jarvis has observed that the number of cases intended to promote morality “presented to Bermuda’s courts during Forster’s [eight-year] term in office is staggering.”50 In keeping with this new emphasis, grand juries convened from 1652 brought forward cases of Sabbath breaking, swearing, blasphemy, and drunkenness. Presentments often identified these offenses as “abhomynable sinne,” betraying the religious basis for concern.51 Although its route had been circuitous, Bermuda had an identifiably orthodox establishment after 1651. The trail blazed by Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Haven and followed by Bermuda and Plymouth offered a path to reformation that all colonies might travel after 1652. Evidence that this mandate to promote non-Anglican worship and moral reformation was followed is sketchy, but most governments seem to have attended to it, at least to some extent. Barbados retained the parish-based system that had been in place under the Church of England, and the governor and his council occasionally addressed church affairs such as the appointment of ministers, the deposition of church lands, and the need to divide a sprawling parish.52 As soon as the royalist revolts had been suppressed, morality legislation was passed in Barbados as well as Virginia. Virginia mandated Sabbath observance and forbade “Drunkeness, [Sw]earinge, Scandalous Livinge and the like.” Barbados passed a similar law, although it was worded in such a way that the enumerated offenses committed on a day other than the Sabbath might be tolerated.53 Barbadians were no doubt divided on the question of reform, but supporters of reformation resided there as in all colonies. John Bayes had supported the “reduction” of Barbados in part because it would pave the way for a “religious government”

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that would promote “Christian liberty.” By this he presumably meant the liberty to do what was right, in much the same sense that John Winthrop had defined the term some years earlier. Bayes thought former Plymouth Plantation magistrate Edward Winslow the ideal governor to guide Barbados toward reform. Some Barbadians spoke with the vocabulary of radical Protestant reformers, such as those who penned a 1653 letter to Oliver Cromwell which opened, “Praise the Lord of hosts that hath guarded you safe through soe many deaths, and preserved you (as his chosen instrument) to perfict the great worke he hath in hand.” As a warrant issued in Barbados in 1652 averred, “The sunshine of the Gospel breaking forth, its high time for the mists of superstition to vanish away.” The metaphor echoed a famous statement by the English Independent Lord Brooke as well as the Indian conversion tracts issuing from New England, and the determination it evinced was typical of reformers throughout the Atlantic basin.54 Possibly the most basic measure to promote reformation was regulating activities on the Sabbath. One of the first acts aimed at reformation by the Long Parliament addressed the issue, and all the major New England colonies took this problem seriously.55 Rhode Island’s government heard complaints from inhabitants upset by disregard for the Sabbath, although its prohibition on forcing conscience rendered it unable to take decisive action.56 The Barbados legislature passed Sabbath observance laws shortly after Ayscue gained control of the island in 1652. The preamble to the new law declared that “many loose, idle, and wickedly inclined people instead of serving God on the Sabbath, spend the same in Riot, Drunkenness, Swearing, Cursing, Whoreing, Shooting, Gaming, Quarreling, and many other vitious and ungodly courses, whereby ignorance prevails, and the just judgements of God maybe expected to fall on this Land.”57 Three years later, the legislation seems to have had some effect. A 1654 visitor to Barbados reported that the Sabbath was “inviolably kept. Mainly in the morning, no one is seen in the country-side or the taverns in towns, for if someone was met in a tavern, both the drinker and the tavern-keeper would be severely punished.”58 Still, in 1656 the governor’s council ordered that “the laws for the observance of the Sabbath already in force, be published” again.59 Virginia, after acknowledging the Commonwealth of England, legislated Sabbath observance with equal dispatch. By 1654 colonists there were said to be “great observers of the Sabbath.”60 In 1655 Antigua deputies agitated for better Sabbath regulation, asserting “that the Lords day is generally sett apart for debauched & drunken practices, without any care taken for restraint thereof, & on that daye negroes are suffered by their Masters to convent togather in great numbers & drunken routes.”61 Surinam eventually prohibited Sabbath travel.62 Nevis’s 1659 law did not required attendance at worship services, asking only

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that those who did not attend stay home so as not to offend those who did mark the day as a religious one.63 Increased attention to Sabbath laws offer one indication of the modest success of the effort to reform Anglo-Atlantic society. Heightened concern about godliness also led to a spate of witchcraft trials, centered in those areas most committed to promoting reform. Throughout the Atlantic world, people believed in witchcraft and the potential for witches to harm their neighbors. Such beliefs were widely held in England, Wales, and Scotland; James I even authored a tract on the topic. All colonial governments for which evidence survives outlawed witchcraft.64 Yet prosecution of this crime required a conjunction of circumstances and as a result was rare. In order for a witch to be tried, a community had to share suspicions about an inhabitant (who was most likely a middle-aged or older woman), individuals had to bring their suspicions to the authorities, and local magistrates had to entertain the accusation of witchcraft. These three elements—a suspected witch, an accuser, and a state apparatus bent on ferreting out witches—did not come together until 1647, in Connecticut, when Alice Young of Windsor was executed. She died as events at home in England were taking a troubling turn: peaceful resolution of the differences between king and Parliament seemed increasingly unlikely and a second civil war was in fact looming. Young’s death kicked off a wave of trials in Connecticut and Massachusetts that resulted in as many as eleven executions between 1647 and 1656. By 1651, the deputies to the Massachusetts General Court were so alarmed by the prospect of witches in their midst that they called for a day of humiliation to pray for relief from witchcraft and strange opinions as well as for the state of England, Ireland, and Scotland.65 That these orthodox New England colonies, having long practiced watchful oversight and believing deeply in witches, should have experienced a flurry of executions may not be surprising. Carol Karlsen has noted that the upsurge of alarm came just after a major (and well-publicized) witch scare in England in the mid-1640s. The scare was centered in a region of England, Essex, that had seen much puritan agitation before the wars, and a number of New Englanders hailed from that area. Word of the trials, as well as the startling fact that witches had been found to use a demonic version of the covenant that was the basis of gathered churches, no doubt reached the plantations and alerted colonists to the dangers.66 In Connecticut and in Massachusetts (but not, for some reason, in New Haven) this information and a general sense of unease about the events in England combined with preexisting local concerns and led to the discovery of witches.67 The alarm about the dangers caused by witches spread beyond New England to other areas engaged in reformation. In the Somers Islands between

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1651 and 1655 six people were executed as witches, the first ever in the colony’s comparatively long history. This sudden attention to supernatural dangers coincided with the governorship of Josias Forster, the solidification of a reformed religious establishment, and the start of a campaign of moral reform. The most notorious of the executed witches, John Middleton, delivered a detailed confession of his many sins beyond that of witchcraft—including “when I was aged 16 yeares I buggered a heifer”—that must have made ardent reformers pleased to be rid of him on numerous counts.68 When reformed religion gained the upper hand, a witch scare often resulted. Such was the case when the Covenanters took control of Scotland in the late 1630s, inaugurating an “intense period of witch-hunting.” Witch-hunting in Essex, England, in the 1640s might be similarly explained, as the reformist minority triumphed just before Matthew Hopkins, the famous “witch-finder,” started his work.69 If a witch scare demonstrated the ascendancy of religious reformers in a given area as well as the worry they felt about the direction of change in England, the tepid response to witch accusations in some locales may demonstrate the reverse. Rhode Island, the one New England colony staunchly opposed to the orthodox establishments of the other settlements in the region, never executed a single witch. Indeed, the colony harbored a number of suspected witches who had fled there to escape prosecution. Plymouth seems not to have been plagued by witches either.70 In Maine, recently taken over by Massachusetts, references to witches and one unsubstantiated accusation cropped up for the first time.71 This may be an indication of heightened awareness, imported from Massachusetts, but it also implies a certain lack of interest, since the suspicions led nowhere. In Virginia some evidence indicates that the populace, especially in the traditionally puritan county of Norfolk, was worried about witches in the 1650s. But the magistrates did not take these concerns seriously except as slander cases in which the suspected witch was treated as the victim and the suspicious neighbor as the guilty party.72 William Pynchon, proprietor and justice of his town of Springfield, treated witchcraft similarly, as did both the Plymouth and Maryland magistrates on the rare occasions when they confronted such cases. Not only did Maryland not prosecute witches, but also it prosecuted a pair of ship’s captains who had allowed suspected witches to be murdered on route to the province. One Maryland woman hounded by witchcraft accusations reported that a puritan minister in the province kept the suspicions against her alive after the case was dismissed as slanderous. Perhaps the Reverend Francis Doughty took extra care to keep an eye on Joan Mitchell because her late husband had been found guilty of atheism and blasphemy.73 That Doughty disregarded the province’s general lack of concern to harass the suspected

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witch in his neighborhood suggests that his personal reformist zeal included a compulsion to be wary of witches. Had those with his views controlled the local justice system, Mitchell and others might well have died. With the odd exception of New Haven, a campaign of moral reform and a concern about witches went together in the Atlantic world in the 1650s. Community watchfulness—the effort to police the entire community to ensure that a myriad of unacceptable activities were avoided—included watching for signs of witchcraft. Colonies bent on reformation would thus be attentive to the dangers witches personified. Turning up a witch, who represented a particular sort of threat to the community, involved a more complicated process, however, than identifying the neighbor who drank to excess or profaned the Sabbath. Witchcraft accusations drew upon deep-seated fears that the supernatural world was being turned against the godly, that an enemy of God was attacking a community from within. Witchcraft scares indicated not only zeal (which always characterized Massachusetts, Connecticut, and, for that matter, New Haven) and fear of women’s power (which was integral to early modern European culture) but also a sense of crisis. In Scotland, concerns over witches rose in 1643 (at the time of the Solemn League and Covenant) and 1649 (the regicide and the response of the Covenanters to it) as well as around the time of the Restoration. In the colonies, the period from the late 1640s, when the revolution in England seemed to slide inexorably toward regicide and ever-greater radicalism, and the mid-1650s, when some modicum of stability appeared to have been achieved under Cromwell’s protectorate, was a time of heightened concern about the events at home. What Robin Clifton wrote of anti-Catholic panics in this period might also be said of the witch scare: “Anxiety over national politics was the indispensable background for panics.” The godly in the wider Atlantic world wondered what had gone awry, whether God was still with their compatriots in England. These insecurities fostered the suspicion that Satan was especially active and led to increased vigilance against suspected witches.74 Only where the revolution was embraced and its outcome fretted over did witchcraft suddenly become a problem. When the deputies of Massachusetts prayed for an end to witchcraft and a positive outcome to events in England, Ireland, and Scotland, they revealed the dual locus of their concerns. Whatever advances in reform were achieved, they were accomplished, outside of New England, despite major problems in staffing churches. Reformed religion relied on godly preaching. Preaching fostered religious conversion, instructed congregations about doctrine and proper living, and inspired reform. As one reform-minded Barbadian put it, “The conquest and submission [of Church of England followers] are both imperfect, till a Gospel Ministry be settled to win the people (which are pliable and apt to receive im-

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pression) to a Gospel submission.”75 No gospel ministry meant no reform. Without ministers, congregations were reduced to reading aloud set prayers (an adequate solution in the Church of England, with its liturgy, but not in the reformed churches that disdained such formalities), hearing lay preachers, or forgoing services altogether. When the grand jury in Norfolk County, Virginia, presented the entire county for failing to observe the Sabbath, it noted that in the absence of a minister, nothing was being done to mark the day.76 Others subsisted without ministers, and some communities must have taken the option adopted by the Norfolk residents. Nonattendance could still be a problem where preaching was offered. Father Antoine Biet, visiting Barbados, observed that “very few people in the country leave their plantations in order to hear a sermon.”77 In such an environment, launching a program of godly reform was difficult. Without the educational component offered by the minister, all that remained of religious reform was the coercive arm of the state. The local authorities could choose to punish or overlook infractions of laws designed to further reform, but they could do little else to advance the cause, unless they were able to hire ministers and teachers to provide guidance. Where reform was reduced to punishment and lacked any element of encouragement and instruction, it was bound to be unpopular. Hostility to the reformers’ agenda predated the revolution in England. Traditionalists loathed the self-styled “saints,” active prior to 1640, for their opposition to customary pastimes and their insistence on godliness. This hatred crossed the Atlantic, where it could flare up in response to anyone who aggressively pursued a reformist agenda. It ran as an undercurrent through the efforts to achieve reform outside orthodox New England. Such sentiments may have motivated a Maine man, at a time when Massachusetts Bay was taking over the region, to declare that “he hoped to live so long as to wett his bulletts in the blood of the Saynts.”78 Forcing reformation or even outward conformity on a recalcitrant population was no easy task. One New Englander declined to serve as a minister in the Caribbean, citing the reputed wickedness of the people there.79 Reform could not move forward without ministers, but ministers could chose not to work where reform was not well received. The need for ministers was a problem not only in the Atlantic basin but in England, Wales, and Ireland as well. The successive governments in England from 1649 onwards sought to supply the pulpits of England and Wales with well-trained men who shared the reformist agenda. They wanted to replace those loyal to the Church of England with godly men of Independent or Presbyterian leanings. Too few acceptable ministers were available to staff the pulpits in their homelands, though advances were made during the 1650s.80 The shortage of qualified ministers allowed some Anglicans to continue in their places and left other pulpits empty. The same was true in the colonies.

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The dearth in England encouraged ministers who had previously migrated to New England or to other colonial locations to return to take up places at home or in Ireland. This reverse migration further drained the supply of clergy. Harvard College having graduated its first class in 1642, orthodox New England alone had an overabundance of ministerial candidates. Many of them joined the return migration, occupying pulpits in the former kingdoms. Given the good positions available there, few could be persuaded to endure the hardship of a colonial pulpit.81 Colonial authorities continually lamented the lack of competent ministers everywhere outside New England. In the Somers Islands, where reformation was high on the government’s agenda, finding teachers and ministers was a recurrent problem.82 At one point the Somers Islands Company thought that the shortage might be solved with ministers trained at Harvard and wrote “to the majestrates of New England and churches there to be helpfull” on that score.83 Eventually “readers” and lay preachers staffed pulpits until more qualified men could be located.84 In 1656 Dutch visitors to an English town on Long Island observed a service for about twenty-five people conducted without a minister. One man delivered extemporaneous prayers, before and after another man “read a sermon from a printed book composed and published by an English minister in England.” The meeting closed with the singing of a psalm. Residents of St. Christopher complained that their governor allowed debauched persons to serve as ministers.85 In Virginia the problem of staffing pulpits was endemic. The few qualified men who did migrate did not necessarily survive the “seasoning” period to carry out their work. The burgesses passed a law to encourage migration of clergymen in 1656.86 A Barbados justice of the peace, having confronted an Anglican mob supportive of the prayer book, hoped to sound “an alarum to stir up true, zealous ministers of the Gospel to come over for our supply.”87 As had been true in Protestant Europe generally after the Reformation and was true in parts of England and Wales in the 1640s, staffing problems stalled reform.88 How colonists behaved when bereft of godly ministers is not evident from the surviving records. Reformers feared that they lapsed into debauchery and irreligion. Comments abound describing colonists, especially in Barbados and the Chesapeake, as debauched. One chronicler declared Virginians “the farthest from conscience and morall honesty of any such number together in the world,” while of Barbados another said that he found “the people thereof most sottishly ignorant in the things of God.”89 General Robert Venables described Barbados recruits as “the most prophane, debauched persons that we ever saw, Scorners of Religion.”90 But such remarks were often penned by men pursuing other agendas. Venables, for instance, was trying to absolve himself of responsibility for the poor conduct of his troops. In Surinam, political opponents branded one another as blasphemers and atheists, which

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clearly revealed that orthodoxy was valued but may say relatively little about the actual beliefs of those accused. Virginian Edward Hill, candidate for speaker of the House of Burgesses in 1654, was investigated for blasphemy and atheism. He was acquitted, but this did not stop a member of the house from later declaring, “The mouth of this House is a devil.” Forced first to apologize on bended knee, this member then lost his seat, his charges deemed unwarranted.91 Despite the accusations hurled about the Atlantic world, only one colonial man was actually found guilty of atheism. Captain William Mitchell was discharged from the Maryland Council as “atheistic and scandalous.” The term “atheist” did not necessarily refer to a denial of the existence of God but might instead connote one who questioned the existence of a cosmic system of rewards and punishments, the existence of heaven and hell. The wideranging case against Mitchell included a suggestion that he questioned at least the existence of the Trinity, for it was charged that “he wondred that the world had been Soe many hundred Years deluded with a Man and a Pigeon which . . . Mitchell attributed to our Saviour Christ and the holy Ghost.”92 Although the authorities worried that such views would become widespread, no evidence indicates that they did. The insistence of Baltimore that his government disavow the wealthy and well-connected Mitchell suggests that such views would have been rooted out wherever they were publicly voiced. Fears raised by the proliferation of radical sects increased official vigilance, and outright atheism clearly was not commonplace.93 Indifference to organized religion was more widespread. In Barbados in 1654, Father Biet conversed with Captain James Holdip, “one of the eldest on this island,” who told him, “It is enough to believe that there is a God, and that Jesus Christ died for us.”94 Holdip’s approach, though minimalistic, nonetheless acknowledged the main propositions undergirding Christianity. His faith was perfectly suited to the tolerant environment of interregnum Barbados, and indeed Biet went on to describe that toleration. Biet did not say how Holdip’s easygoing identification of the essentials of Christianity translated into religious observance, or even if it did so at all. As a Roman Catholic, he believed that Holdip’s formulation omitted much that was essential to true religion. Holdip’s response could be read as a defense of Protestantism, because it privileged personal faith above all else. His position, vaguely Christian and seemingly unflappable, may have been characteristic of many. Under other circumstances Biet might have argued with him. But in Barbados in the 1650s, a Catholic priest trying not to draw attention to himself simply recorded his observations, taking refuge in the role of amateur ethnographer and foregoing that of polemicist. *

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The contradictions in the agenda of toleration, liberty of conscience, and reformation were most apparent to the staunchest proponents of the last of these. For defenders of orthodoxy (howsoever that was defined in a given instance), tolerating alternative views was anathema. In this view, promoting godliness involved the vigorous suppression of error. Colonies that upheld this view allowed silent dissent from prevailing beliefs but treated publicly expressed opposition as sin and, depending on the views expressed, heresy. An individual with doubts was expected to seek out his or her minister for counseling. Ideally these interviews would lead the doubter to embrace the dominant view. At least he or she should accept the need for prayerful submission to God’s will as expressed in the local churches. The approach assumed the hegemony of the established faith. Everyone was to accept its godliness, along with the corollary that objections arose from personal weakness or willful sin. The choices presented to the individual believer were two: wholehearted acceptance of the establishment or deference to the wisdom of its architects on the grounds that they knew better what the Lord required. Massachusetts settler Edward Johnson thought that disagreement could arise from only two possible causes: dissenters were either confused Christians who would prove malleable or aggressive proselytizers for their errors who were not open to persuasion.95 Those in the latter category had to be suppressed. As Perry Miller pointed out, orthodox New England’s 1648 statement of its practices, the Cambridge Platform, “enshrined the doctrine that civil authority must restrain and punish corrupt and pernicious opinions.”96 Massachusetts Bay was deeply committed to this position. Leading minister John Cotton explicated the official policy in a pamphlet exchange with Roger Williams. Williams depicted persecution as creeping under “Mr. Cotton’s Patronage & Protection,” like the wily old serpent who authored it in the first place.97 Other ministers also published on the subject. When confronted with dissent, the Bay government did not shirk what it perceived to be its duty. In the early 1650s the government, having occasion to act in cases involving heresies of various sorts, repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to upholding orthodoxy. One major controversy surrounded the publication of a tract by leading western Massachusetts resident William Pynchon. Pynchon published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650) in London to promote his views on the meaning of Christ’s death. He argued that Christ died for everyone, so that salvation was—potentially at least—universally available. This position contravened the belief in limited redemption, a fundamental tenet of the reformed Protestant tradition associated with John Calvin and with the orthodox New England churches. Pynchon’s arguments, if accepted, would have resulted in major changes in those churches, including the relaxation of admission requirements.98 The response to Pynchon was

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swift and predictable. The book arrived in Boston in October 1650, and, after taking a few days to examine it, the General Court ordered Pynchon to publish a retraction “to be printed and dispersed in England.” As they would later explain, Pynchon’s prominent position as major landowner and magistrate of Springfield made it urgent for the colony to disassociate itself from the views expressed in the tract. Pynchon at first seemed willing to cooperate, but later, after receiving encouragement from some in England, he demurred. Although he lived at a distance from Boston and exercised an unparalleled degree of personal power over Springfield, Pynchon still found it necessary to leave Massachusetts or recant. He returned to England, publishing other works proclaiming his views and criticizing his erstwhile allies in New England. Various people in England thought Massachusetts had gone too far in its treatment of an eminent man who had written an intellectual treatise intended to open dialogue, but defenders of orthodoxy remained adamant that heresies of any sort required a vigorous response.99 Pynchon’s case was anomalous because of his powerful position on the frontier of the colony and the nature of his views, but Baptists presented the Bay with repeated challenges. Antipedobaptism, especially the “Particular Baptist” variety, represented the most likely “error” into which residents might fall. Laypeople in New England cherished the purity of their churches, and they believed that a conversion experience was necessary for church membership. This emphasis on church purity and individual conversion might lead to antipedobaptism—the idea that only believers (and therefore only adults capable of a conversion experience) should be baptized. This was essentially the Particular Baptist position, and a thoughtful member of an established church might arrive at it as a result of scripture reading and private contemplation. The alternative antipedobaptist position, that of the General Baptists, held, with William Pynchon, that general redemption was possible. This variant, widespread in England and present in Rhode Island, did not influence the orthodox New England colonies to any extent at this time. Clerical leaders in Massachusetts feared defections to the Particular Baptist ranks, however, since they grappled with issues dear to New England congregationalists.100 When Baptist conversions occurred in New England, the colonial ministers and civil authorities responded in accordance with their obligation to suppress error. Plymouth, previously fairly lax in its response to dissent, reacted to the establishment of a Baptist church under preacher Obadiah Holmes in 1650. Holmes was persuaded, like many radicals before him, that the climate of Rhode Island would be more congenial, and he left Rehobeth to join the Baptist church at Newport.101 In Massachusetts, the authorities dealt with twenty-six colonists holding Baptist views between 1639 and 1654 and gen-

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erally succeeded in dissuading, silencing, or expelling them. A much-publicized case occurred in 1651, when three Rhode Island Baptists—among them Holmes—traveled to Lynn, Massachusetts, to minister to William Witter, a blind and aging Baptist living there. Their visit brought Witter’s convictions to the attention of the authorities, while the Rhode Islanders, by holding a worship service in Lynn, necessitated an official response. One of the Baptist visitors, John Clarke, described the subsequent trial and punishments in a pamphlet, Ill Newes from New-England. The tract’s title page famously announced that “while old England is becoming new, New-England is become Old,” a reference to the rising toleration in the former and continued intolerance in the latter.102 A more dramatic antipedobaptist challenge involved the conversion of Harvard President Henry Dunster. Dunster nearly converted the young minister, Jonathan Mitchell, who tried to disabuse him of his error. Dunster ultimately could not be dissuaded, and he left his post at Harvard and retired to Scituate, in Plymouth Plantation. His choice of Scituate indicates the greater tolerance that still prevailed in Plymouth as well as that colony’s eagerness to employ highly educated ministers, even those of questionable orthodoxy.103 Massachusetts Bay also felt called upon to deal with a blasphemer in a 1654 case that caused considerable controversy. In June of that year, Benjamin Sawcer asseverated, “Jehova is the Devel, and hee knew noe god but his sworde, and that should save him.” These shocking opinions clearly violated the colony’s capital blasphemy statute, so that by uttering them Sawcer risked death. Presented by a grand jury “for not haveing the feare of God before his eyes” in “wittingly and willingly blasphem[ing] the sacred name of God,” Sawcer was thrown into prison. At his trial, the “Jury of life and death” overturned the grand jury finding, concluding instead that Sawcer was drunk and spoke in ignorance. The magistrates, displeased with this verdict, asked the deputies of the General Court to hear the case. At their meeting in October, the deputies divided. This then threw the case to the entire General Court (that is, to the deputies and magistrates together). But apparently before the case could be decided Sawcer escaped. His escape, on the eve of a probable conviction by the magistrates, saved him from death. The General Court called the jailer to account for the escape and attempted to trace Sawcer’s whereabouts to a ship in the harbor, but nothing further came of their efforts to bring Sawcer to justice.104 It would seem remarkable that the jury could find that Sawcer acted in ignorance—and the magistrates seem not to have anticipated the decision—except that Sawcer was not a resident of Massachusetts. As a soldier in a small expeditionary force sent to join New England soldiers in an assault on New Netherland during the Anglo-Dutch War, Sawcer had only recently arrived in

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New England. He therefore had not had the benefit of the godly preaching and instruction that Bay residents routinely enjoyed. The jury found it perfectly reasonable to suppose that Sawcer spoke derisively of the deity without realizing the import of what he said. Clearly he did not impress the jurors as well instructed in matters of religion. His own petition, written before the final trial and after many months in a Boston jail, played to the prejudices of New Englanders about the special religiosity of their society. He professed himself “shamefully ignorant of God.” As he observed, “You may wonder it should bee soe, but soe it is though I have had some meanes of knowinge more than I doe, and I thanke God I now know more of God then I did when hether I first came, and I dare not speake or thinke evelly of the name of God soe farre as I know him.” After four months in jail, Sawcer had no doubt received many visits from local clergy, who made sure he knew more of God “then [he] did when hether [he] first came.” Sawcer may have been aided in his escape by those who feared the wrath of the Lord Protector if the government killed “a true borne subject of England: a subject of his Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector” who was in the colony at Cromwell’s behest “to serve my nation in these remote Corners of the world.” But the impetus to pardon Sawcer initially arose from the conviction that a man from England might not know what he was saying and thus might be held to a different standard when he blasphemed.105 The Sawcer incident offers a tantalizing glimpse of lay standards. The laity generally supported the colony’s policy of intolerance, as much evidence attests.106 But in this case the jurors and some deputies seem to have been genuinely impressed by the ignorance of this hapless soldier and disinclined to hold him accountable. If they acted out of mercy, it was a mercy grounded in a profound confidence about the godliness of their own society and the sinfulness of places beyond it. True to their earlier history, the leaders of the orthodox New England colonies opposed the introduction of Quakerism, determined that the movement would not find a warm reception in their region. The records of the Massachusetts Court of Assistants’ deliberation against an early wave of Quakers to arrive on their shores were published in England, timed to influence the James Nayler blasphemy trial by providing evidence of the great resolve shown by the New England authorities.107 Over the next four years, the confrontation between New England orthodoxy and the Quaker witnesses escalated, until the Bay Colony finally executed three English men and a Rhode Island woman: William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson (October 1659), Mary Dyer (June 1660), and William Leddra (March 1661).108 The execution of these witnesses (along with the whipping, incarceration, and mutilation of many others) marked the peak in the repressive policies of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Throughout its history, the government had

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been committed to crushing dissent. In the preceding decade, the authorities had marshaled considerable state power to suppress Baptists and Gortonists. Before the advent of the Quakers, the challenge posed by radicals had been limited. The Quakers, however, were bent on confronting authority and preaching to the populace. The authorities worried about the seduction of a heretofore godly laity. One rather bizarre argument against the sect’s work in the region was that since the colonists were receptive to the Quaker message, the witnesses ought not to come and take advantage of that receptivity.109 Unlike every other radical who had previously disturbed the peace of the orthodox Bay Colony, the Quakers would not give up their quest to witness against New England and spread news of the light. They refused to recognize the hegemony of the New England way, recognition the authorities took for granted. In the Quaker invasion of Massachusetts, an immovable orthodoxy met the irresistible force of religious enthusiasm, with fatal results. Throughout the 1650s, Bay Colony intolerance continued to receive attention in England, most of it disapproving. Sir Richard Saltonstall, member of the original Massachusetts Bay Company and former resident of the colony, wrote to ministers John Cotton and John Wilson in 1652 to report on the negative image that New England had developed for its persecuting ways. Cotton’s pamphlet exchange with Roger Williams and John Clarke’s Ill Newes from New England had brought this intolerance to the forefront again, and New England’s reputation was not enhanced by these reports. Quakers published a veritable flood of anti–New England tracts intended to advertise the colonial governments’ harsh response to their missionary campaign.110 Living in the more tolerant and diverse homeland, Saltonstall thought it obvious that Massachusetts ought to tolerate kindred spirits, “Anabaptists, Seeker, Antinomians and the like.”111 He persuaded neither Cotton, Wilson, nor for that matter Ezekial Rogers, who asserted in his will that he was “an Unfeigned Hater of al the Base Opinions of the Anabaptists & Antinomians and all other Phanatick Dotage of the Times.”112 Former colonial governor Sir Henry Vane also published against New England intolerance, and when he became too busy to rebut his respondents, his friend Roger Williams did it for him.113 Presbyterians, coming at the problem from a different angle, might use the evidence of intolerance to prove not, as Cotton hoped, that the colony was meeting the threat of radicalism with appropriate vigor but that the congregational way encouraged heresy. Many Presbyterians, however, approved of the determination shown by the Bay Colony and wished that their own magistrates would perform as admirably.114 Despite opposition to their policies, orthodox New Englanders remained committed. With John Davenport, they agreed that vigilance was necessary against all heresies being “revived” in these troubled times.115 Unpopular or not, these New England col-

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onies were committed to stamping out public dissent. Theirs were the least tolerant plantations, on a continuum that ranged through a generally tolerant middle ground to complete liberty. Although New England became notorious for its persecution of Quakers, elites in many parts of the Atlantic basin eventually worked to halt the sect’s expansion. Mild harassment began in Maryland in 1658, but once again religious contention was tangled up in political divisions. When Lord Baltimore regained control of his province and could again demand an oath of allegiance, Quakers refused because they opposed oaths on principle. Yet, since the new Quaker community included many who had previously chafed under Baltimore’s rule and complained about the oath to uphold his government, their new scruple against oath taking appeared suspiciously like their earlier opposition to the proprietor. Under these circumstances Baltimore’s new governor, Josiah Fendall, prosecuted those who would not swear. Three Maryland planters asked that visiting Quakers be whipped out of the colony, a punishment that was used on missionary Thomas Thurston and that was evocative of initial measures taken in Massachusetts.116 In 1658 the governor of Nevis initiated a campaign against the sect. At the same time it was rumored among Quakers that traveling witnesses had been incarcerated in Virginia. In 1660 the recently reinstated governor Berkeley oversaw a more ambitious crusade against Quakers.117 The first reported visit to Bermuda resulted in one missionary being thrown in jail for harassing the minister. In June 1660 the Barbados Council enumerated its “Reasons against . . . the Quakers,” including that they refused to do their civil duty, they opposed Christianity and the law, and they proselytized far too much. It decided to fine those who would not participate in militia training days, an especially sore point on an island with too few white inhabitants to meet an invading force, much less keep the slave population under control.118 Even Rhode Islanders discussed whether some measure needed to be taken to check Quaker expansion. In the end they concluded that they could act only if the Quakers directly challenged their government, and then only on the advice of England. Otherwise they would maintain their long-standing policy of toleration.119 Plymouth Plantation, heavily influenced by Massachusetts Bay but uncertain that it wanted to follow its more powerful neighbor down the road to persecution, struggled over how to receive the Quakers. Although the government had recently instituted some components of a religious establishment to counter the rise of antipedobaptism and the perceived decline in religiosity, Plymouth residents were not fully persuaded that the path charted by Massachusetts was best. The government permitted the first Massachusetts Quaker convert, Nicholas Upshall, to stay in Plymouth for the winter after he

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was ejected from Boston. He apparently used the opportunity to proselytize in Sandwich, and a meeting was established there by February 1657.120 Plymouth was slow to enact laws against the sect, waiting until that June (after some residents had been convinced and Quaker visits from neighboring Rhode Island were on the rise) to put in place legislation that the other United Colonies had enacted eight months earlier. At least two officials— James Cudworth and Timothy Hatherly—opposed persecution, and, after almost two years of publicly advocating tolerance, they were removed from office. Plymouth freemen were themselves divided over whether Cudworth, at least, should remain as a magistrate, signing petitions for and against him. From mid-1658 and the ouster of Hatherly and Cudworth, Plymouth moved toward increased persecution of Quakers, although it never went as far as its northern neighbor. That year the government saw the need to build a workhouse or jail for the first time, in order to contain Quakers and other “vagabonds” plaguing the colony. As late as 1659, it still hoped for success with suasion, sending four men to a Quaker meeting to talk the adherents out of their errors.121 Plymouth also tried such novel measures as legislating that all witnesses travel on foot, in order to slow the spread of their opinions.122 A remarkable letter written by Cudworth, a former militia captain, reveals resentment about the expectation that other plantations would duplicate the Bay Colony’s stringent response to the Quakers. After describing the incremental passage of anti-Quaker legislation in Plymouth, Cudworth concluded “in the Massachusets . . . after they have Whipp’d them, and Cut their Ears, they have now, at last, gone the furthest step they can, They Banish them upon pain of Death, if ever they come there again. We expect that we must do the like; we must Dance after their Pipe: Now Plimouth-Saddle is on the Bay-Horse . . . we shall follow them on the Career: For, it is well if in some there be not a Desire to be their Apes and Imitators in all their Proceedings in things of the Nature.”123 Others no doubt shared Cudworth’s resentment, among them the other discharged magistrate, Timothy Hatherly, and the fifty-four petitioners who sought to have Cudworth continued in office. Hostility toward the powerful Bay Colony clearly undermined its attempt to ensure a uniform response to the threat. Depending on how deep anti-Massachusetts sentiments ran in Plymouth, they might even explain the willingness of some colonists to embrace the sect. This factor, added to the plantation’s separatist traditions and its proximity to heterodox Rhode Island, could account for much of the Quakers’ success in Plymouth. Liberty for the individual believer and an organized program in support of godliness were inversely related. This correlation was unsurprising to conservatives, who had long feared that the “free aire of the New World” would lead to heresy and debauchery. The principled commitment to liberty of con-

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science in Rhode Island and Maryland was counterbalanced by a principled commitment to its opposite, the suppression of error, as in Massachusetts Bay.124 The colonies in the former group coupled their commitment to liberty in matters of conscience with a laissez-faire attitude toward moral reform. The places that achieved the ideal of liberty neglected neighborly oversight of all sorts of transgressions. At the other extreme, colonies such as Massachusetts that evinced unstinting support for godly reformation included within that the necessity to coerce conformity to true religion. Between the two extremes lay those colonies that tolerated a variety of religious views, from antipedobaptism to Judaism, and pursued a modest measure of reform. The colonies in this broad middle group, including Virginia, Barbados, the other Caribbean island colonies, and Surinam, never gave any indication that they confronted resident sectarians with anything like the ferocity of Massachusetts Bay. They neither executed witches nor coerced conformity. They did make efforts to see the Sabbath upheld and other reformist issues addressed, but they did not achieve the level of commitment to these goals that characterized orthodox New England. Although both godliness and freedom of association increased in the 1650s Atlantic, the tensions between them set limits on what could be accomplished.125 The support for both godliness and toleration that England seemed to dictate embodied a fundamental contradiction. Some people in England, including Cromwell, wanted both toleration and reform. But the most zealous reformers, both there and in the wider Atlantic world, tended to be more conservative than Cromwell on dissent. This group prevailed in orthodox New England, establishing polities that pursued the reformation of both manners and belief. Others in England and Rhode Island, energetically advocating freedom of conscience, evidenced little concern over godliness. Some, like Roger Williams, advocated liberty out of a sense that most people, including those who might hold the reins of state power, had no knowledge of the true faith, which was the exclusive preserve of a small minority. In such cases support for liberty had little in common with modern values respecting individual rights and much to do with the drive to protect the privileged few from the damned many. In the Atlantic basin as at home, the attempt to couple reform and toleration met with only limited success. Colonists were far more likely to evince a strong commitment to one or the other or else a rather desultory willingness to have a bit of both. The tensions between godliness and toleration can be seen in Maryland’s struggles at mid-decade. The province was committed to toleration in order to protect Catholics and also attract non-Catholic residents. The provincial government supported Christianity in a vague, general way, and concerned itself with spiritual affairs only by policing violations of the toleration statute.

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This approach rendered religion a private affair and apparently had a dilatory effect on the institutional development of all faiths. Anglicans, congregationalists, and Catholics all lived in Maryland by 1654, and they may have been joined by English sectarians, Dutch Reformed Protestants, and others.126 Maryland, both pluralistic and tolerationist, did little to support reformation and much to uphold the liberty of private conscience. What Baltimore created in Maryland realized the fears of the orthodox New Englanders, turning their own priority on its head. Maryland could be said to have most fully realized the state-endorsed policy of liberty of conscience, but this did not in the end protect Baltimore’s province. Although many Maryland Protestants accepted the situation without complaint and even actively supported Baltimore’s policies, some opposed the presence of Catholics in the province and the privileges granted to them.127 Popular anti-popery was a major component of the revolutionary agenda, and its currents ran deep in English Protestant culture. The Irish Rebellion and Charles’s plans to use Irish Catholics to fight Parliament fueled popular animosity.128 Opposition to popery traveled into the Atlantic with the settlers and servants who migrated there. Orthodox New England voiced its anti-Catholicism with particular vehemence. Nathaniel Ward advocated a general massacre of the Irish, one of a number of authors to express profound hatred.129 When Captain William Jackson sailed, on orders from the earl of Warwick, through the Spanish West Indies in the early 1640s, he made a point of despoiling Catholic religious objects in settlements he attacked.130 While Catholics were tolerated in a number of colonies in the 1650s—ranging from Montserrat, with its largely Irish Catholic laboring population, through Barbados, with an estimated two thousand Catholics in 1654, to Bermuda, with a lone Catholic man—their situation was precarious almost everywhere. Bermuda’s one Catholic arrived in 1656 and was, after discussion, allowed to “abide amongst us, behaveing himselfe as a Christian man ought to doe, void of offence tuching papistry tenetts.”131 On Barbados, one Catholic layperson thought he could get a crowd to beat up his nemesis, the Catholic cleric Antoine Biet, simply by identifying him publicly as a priest.132 Anti-Catholic prejudice clearly survived the Atlantic crossing and shaped attitudes in the plantations just as in England. Even in Maryland, run by a Catholic proprietor and settled by men and women who were aware of this fact when they made the decision to migrate, these prejudices endured. The anti-Catholics in Maryland objected when the proprietor encouraged immigration by the Irish, as it would foster the “Romish religion” there. They repeatedly expressed fears of popish “seduction” of the “poor ignorant Protestants.” Those Protestants in Maryland who opposed the proprietary finally concluded that living under papist rule

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violated the “liberty of English subjects” and threatened them with enslavement.133 Protestants who had migrated from Virginia after Berkeley’s 1648 crackdown on dissent particularly opposed the proprietary. Ironically, the toleration law to which they objected had been passed in part to make them feel comfortable taking up residence in the province of a Catholic proprietor. Certainly those settlers from Virginia came into Maryland fully aware of Baltimore’s Catholicism, as his supporters would point out. The situation in Maryland reached a crisis in 1654, when anti-Catholic residents sought outside help to combat the proprietary power exercised by Deputy Governor William Stone. Baltimore appointed Stone when he decided that a Protestant governor was necessary to protect his interests. Serving after the parliamentary commissioners to Virginia had reduced Maryland, Stone used a new form of writ dictated by the commissioners and did not administer the customary oath to Lord Baltimore. In 1654, when Stone learned that Cromwell, the new Lord Protector, meant to uphold Baltimore’s interests, he took that opportunity to return to the original form of writ (citing the proprietor’s authority) and to reimpose an oath of fidelity to Baltimore. Settlers in northern Maryland, around the Severn River, complained to the former parliamentary commissioners, Virginians Richard Bennet and William Claibourne, objecting especially to the oath, which they thought asked them to “maintain Popery and a popish Anti-Christian Government, which we dare not do, unless we shold be found traitors to our country, fighters against God, and covenant breakers.”134 They saw Stone’s reassertion of Baltimore’s authority over the province as forcing them under the antichrist, and they claimed to fear “Popish violence.”135 The commissioners intervened and succeeded temporarily in wresting control from Stone. On July 20 Stone stepped down, and the commissioners appointed nine men to rule Maryland. This nine-man commission immediately outlawed the practice of the “Popish religion” and disenfranchised Catholics. It replaced broad toleration with a law limiting liberty of worship to Protestants, following the prevailing practice in England. Maryland’s new governors passed moral reform legislation, including support for Sabbath worship, and they eliminated the “Saint” in “Saint Mary’s County.” They also renamed Anne Arundel County, originally named for the proprietor’s wife and home to the largest concentration of their own supporters, with the quintessentially puritan moniker “Providence.”136 The new governors attended to godliness and limited toleration. In the view of their enemies, they were “Arbitrary and Barbarous,” unable simply to enjoy their liberty, unsatisfied until they had limited the freedom of others.137 Bloodshed—in the Battle of the Severn—came when Baltimore’s supporters roused themselves to oppose this coup. With prompting from Baltimore

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and indirect encouragement from Cromwell, Stone rallied the supporters of the proprietary. With Stone trying to reimpose his authority and the commissioners resisting, the two factions came to blows on 25 March 1655. About two hundred men under Stone were defeated by a smaller force under Captain William Fuller, who had support from a ship anchored in the Severn River. Not only did the force under Stone suffer heavier losses in the fighting, but also a number of them were later executed despite having surrendered to quarter. The killing would have been worse except that the women in the anti-proprietary camp begged that mercy be shown their opponents.138 Both sides in the conflict emphasized religion as the central point at issue. One defender of the proprietary thought that the hands of Baltimore’s supporters had been tied “lest the cry against the papists (if any hurt was done) would be so great, that many mischiefs would ensue.” The anti-proprietary forces especially stressed the religious aspect of the controversy. They had been threatened, they claimed, by a vicious papist onslaught that they turned aside with God’s help. The papists marched chanting “Hey for Saint Maries,” while their opponents countered with the Protestant-inflected sentiment “God is our strength.” The anti-Baltimore forces accused their foes of having enlisted the aid of “a great number of Heathen,” a grave breach of the loyalty that ought to unite all English men against the alien Indians. When these “Papist and other desperate and bloody fellows” were defeated, the victors collected Catholic paraphernalia from the battlefield.139 The commissioners saw themselves as fighting a holy war, and the outcome justified their effort. They were gleeful that the Jesuits had to sneak out of Maryland to hide in Virginia, thereby losing all their property. The Jesuits agreed that the battle was motivated by prejudice against Catholics.140 The Battle of the Severn was in large part a battle over religion. In Maryland, then, a broad toleration, motivated by political expedience, foundered on the hostility of the faction closest in political sympathies to those who held power in England. There, as elsewhere, moral reformation was consistent with an assertive Protestant impulse that was vehemently anti-Catholic. Eradicating popery was one way of going about reformation, and fears of powerful Catholics galvanized opposition. Where Catholics were on top, tensions in a revolutionary empire guided by radical Protestant reformers become too great. For this reason too, land seizures in Ireland targeted elites, who were forced to leave, while their tenants and servants—the poorer Irish Catholics—generally remained behind to labor in the English settlements. The contrast between Maryland and relatively undisturbed Montserrat, where most residents were Catholic but those who exercised power were not, was telling. Maryland Protestants sought to brush the papists with the tar of disloyalty to the revolutionary regime, associating them with the cavaliers and

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Charles I. One anti-proprietary account claimed that Catholics under Stone derided their opponents with epithets like “Round-headed Rogues,” the same terms royalists used against parliamentarians during the previous decade’s wars.141 To be a papist or to defend the proprietary was tantamount to opposing the revolution. By the mid-1650s in the Atlantic world, colonists were struggling with contradictory mandates from the center, which were not fully realized anywhere. These pulled in different directions in various colonies, depending on local circumstances. In Massachusetts, with its fully functional establishment, toleration was a dead letter, but Anglicanism was suppressed and reformation encouraged. In Maryland, either liberty of conscience or reformation had the upper hand depending on who was in power at the moment. Anti-popery had been given a boost by the success of the revolution, so that Catholics in power represented a vulnerable anomaly. Most places cut a middle path, with a degree of toleration that sometimes exceeded that in England but with less institutional support for religion than reformers hoped to see. An unknown number of settlers were without formal religious institutions, either because the Church of England had been suppressed without anything taking its place, or because the established church had never sunk very deep roots. What arrangements the unchurched made for private worship is impossible to know. The Quaker missionary campaign in the Atlantic world filled this vacuum to some extent. It accomplished more than permanently associating Massachusetts with intolerance. The Quakers (and other civil war–era radicals who journeyed to the colonies) increased diversity by introducing their movement to every settlement by the early 1660s. This Quaker diaspora marked the most dramatic exportation of the radical religious innovation of revolutionary England, though certainly not the only one. Diversity, already a feature of many colonies by the mid-1650s, rose precipitously in the wake of the Quaker missionary campaign. Traveling witnesses, converting people all over the Atlantic and visiting many different Quaker enclaves in the colonies, created a transatlantic network of like-minded religious radicals. Their network, like the trading ties that bound various colonial regions, would have a lasting impact. From the perspective of the Quakers themselves, the outreach of the 1650s launched meetings that would serve as the nucleus of a New World Quaker community. Traveling preachers would continue to move through the Atlantic world, although they would focus increasingly on ministering to the faithful and decreasingly on witnessing against non-Quaker errors. The martyrdom of the witnesses on Boston Common would shape the Society of Friends (soon to emerge out of the Quaker movement), influencing its self-

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image, focusing its hagiographic tradition, and serving as a linchpin of its historiography.142 When the Quaker witnesses confronted the scions of Massachusetts orthodoxy, the major forces in the transatlantic religious currents were already arrayed against one another. New Englanders, identified with reformed religion working with a sympathetic state committed to uphold orthodoxy and promote godliness, represented the more conservative impulse. When reformers throughout the Atlantic followed English Independents and New England missionaries to the Indians in using the metaphor of the light dawning, they envisioned the spread of the gospel and reformed Protestantism. The inward light of the Quakers, while it partook of the same millennial zeal that inspired reformers, offered a more radical proposition. This light dictated a departure from all prevailing ecclesiastical forms and a rejection of reformed Protestantism. The Quakers represented one of the more innovative movements that arose from this revolutionary ferment. Predictably the two collided. Beneath that tragic clash, however, lay profound similarities in the two movements. New England orthodoxy and Quaker dissent both found strength in their convictions and in the rightness of their causes. Both sought to impose their views on others, New England orthodoxy through the campaign to export its way and Quakers through convincement. The New England way had earlier lost the contest to draw the blueprint for the reformed churches of England because it could not win broad endorsement in a milieu that was capable of generating Quakerism. The spiritual innovation inherent in that movement (and in the world that spawned it) was alien to the measured spiritual life of the New England saint. Unable to accommodate the toleration of the Quakers’ England, the New Englanders withdrew to pursue their way in peace. The Quakers disturbed that withdrawal, showing more determination to reform New England than the New Englanders had to reform England. In confronting Quakers, the defenders of New England orthodoxy faced their own failure to reform England, in the flesh. In killing Quakers, they vindicated their own former hopes for a better England and ensured their own infamy. The English Atlantic in the 1650s enacted all the religious impulses present in what S. R. Gardiner dubbed “the puritan revolution” at the same time that it revealed the contradictions inherent within them.143 The balancing act required to pursue godly reform, toleration, and the suppression of the Church of England ultimately collapsed in England, while each colony spun off in one or two but never all three of these directions. Some embraced soul liberty more completely even than was the case in England. Others maintained and furthered reformist agendas, with little or no concern for permitting greater freedom to dissenters. Only in those places where the Church of

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England had never been planted was it a simple matter to fulfill the revolutionary commitment to its suppression. Otherwise—in Barbados, Virginia, and the Somers Islands—vestigial Anglicanism lingered, as it did in England and Wales. Receiving contradictory messages, colonists were free to pick and choose. Only in the extreme case, such as intolerance that proceeded as far as killing Quakers, were people in the wider Atlantic world challenged for their choices. Within limits, colonies could be more or less tolerant, more or less committed to state support of reformation, without being punished. Killing Quakers and promoting the Church of England were the two unpardonable acts. Only the former was openly embraced, not coincidentally by the strongest state-church establishment in the Anglophone world. Massachusetts raised the revolutionary commitment to godly reformation and policing belief to an art form, shunning the opposite impulse to allow conscience the freedom to decide. The martyrdom of four Quaker witnesses was only the most dramatic demonstration of the contradictory nature of revolutionary religious messages.

5 Free Trade and Freeborn English Men

The successful revolutionaries in England had ambitious plans for the former kingdoms and dominions of the late Charles I. The Commonwealth of England claimed complete authority over the settlements in the wider Atlantic world, conceptualizing itself as possessing all the power once wielded by the king. The Commonwealth wanted to remake the loose conglomeration of colonies that it had seized into a centrally governed and commercially integrated empire. In much the same way, the Commonwealth intended to integrate the formerly disparate three kingdoms of the Stuarts, pursuing similar policies toward the entire world they ruled. With merchants serving both in Parliament and on the Council of State, the Commonwealth passed legislation intended to funnel all colonial trade into English merchants’ coffers. Its innovative trade policies, laid out in the Navigation Act of 1651, kept the Atlantic trade open to all English merchants but tried to restrict it only to them. The Lord Protector, who came to power in 1653, endorsed the Commonwealth’s approach to colonial trade and somewhat strengthened its enforcement.1 Cromwell was determined to enhance English power in the wider Atlantic world, and he went beyond the Commonwealth in launching an offensive military campaign against the Spanish West Indies. This “Western Design” brought the full force of the revolutionary state’s power into the Atlantic arena. The design placed major demands on colonists, as they were asked to contribute support for English imperial schemes for the first time. The reach exceeded the grasp of both the Commonwealth and the protector, for these economic and imperial visions were far more easily articulated than realized. Despite the difficulties they experienced in trying to put their visions into practice, the goals articulated during the interregnum had important implications for the future. Trade and imperial policies that imposed economic restrictions and military demands on New World settlements pointed the way toward the imperial future of commercial oversight and regular military contributions from often resistant settlers. Colonists throughout the Atlantic settlements proposed a different rela157

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tionship between their plantations and the English government. Rather than subordinating the peripheries to the core, they argued for mutual ties based on shared English identity. They used the language of the “rights of freeborn English men” to appeal to revolutionaries’ commitment to upholding liberty and to present themselves as the equals of those at the imperial center. They based their resistance to limitations on trade and to demands that they participate in the Western Design on claims of customary liberties, although these liberties (and the land ownership that made them possible) were often only as old as the plantations in which they lived. More widespread landowning in the colonies made freeborn English status, which was in England itself the exclusive purvey of a limited few, available more broadly, and this created new demands for the benefits of independent propertied status. This colonial dream of an empire among equals conflicted with the central authorities’ goal of a powerful state dictating policy to subordinates in Bridgetown or Boston just as in Dublin or Edinburgh. The central government’s grand plans for the empire as well as the colonists’ thinking about the privileges that accrued to their English identity were both furthered by the revolution. The men who ruled England in the 1650s saw the interregnum as their opportunity to implement various policies they had long advocated, whether the encouragement of trade or the pursuit of an anti-Spanish, expansionistic imperial agenda. At the same time, colonists were forced to reconsider the basis of their connection to England, which provided an opportunity to think about their goals for the relationship. Although Lord Willoughby had, in 1651, confidently equated English origins with subject status, declaring that he “knew no supreme authority over Englishmen, but the King and by his Commission,”2 a year later no English person, unless he or she resided with the exiled court on the European continent, lived under the king or by his commission. With this change, the subject status that all plantation inhabitants held in common had been eliminated. A new basis for tying the English Atlantic together was needed. Shared Englishness came to the fore to fill that gap. Through it settlers resisted becoming subjects of the successive governments in Westminster, striving instead to be accepted as equals. Their egalitarian vision was compatible with one of the main goals claimed for the revolution, the suppression of tyranny and the protection of liberty. It bound the Atlantic world and cast the relationships within it in a light that best served the needs of politically engaged colonial landowners. Settlers everywhere had become accustomed to an unregulated trade during the 1640s and were loath to give it up. War disrupted commerce in the Atlantic. When challenged later for trading with anyone and everyone, planters

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would argue that they had been driven to do so. War made trade uncertain, so that at times fewer ships from England plied colonial waters. As Samuel Shepard wrote to Sir Thomas Barrington in 1643, “the extreme danger and Hazard in transporting any thing from heare to England as the state of the Kingdome p[re]sents it selfe” dampened trade.3 The New Englanders took advantage of this decline in English merchant activity, which corresponded with the downturn in migration and the resulting financial crisis in their region. In particular, they exported timber, farm produce, livestock, and fish that other colonies needed. Boston became “the very mart of the Land, French, Portugalls and Dutch, come hither for Traffique,” colonial booster Edward Johnson proudly declared. With the shipbuilding materials that the New England forest yielded, the colonists also began constructing their own ships to carry these supplies. In December 1643 John Winthrop recorded in his diary the departure of a convoy of five ships, three of which had been built in New England.4 By 1650, New England commerce was so well developed that the Council of State noted the region’s stature as a center of trade. In 1651 George Gardyner described Boston as “fairly built, the great street is neer a half mile long, full of wel-furnished shops of Merchandise of all sorts.”5 The well-stocked larder of a wealthy Barbados planter as Richard Ligon admiringly described it contained food from old and New England, Virginia, Russia, and Holland, giving some indication of the extent of island trade.6 Merchants from many ports, especially Dutch and Flemish, benefited, establishing a carrying trade between various English colonies and Europe. The lucrative Caribbean trade even drew the Irish: beginning around 1650, Irish beef exports were shipped to the islands.7 The trading patterns developed during the war years had literally created an Atlantic economic network, and colonists were eager to continue exploiting their commercial ties, regardless of any plans emanating from the imperial center. Colonists considered an open and free trade a matter of survival. Plantation owners in the Chesapeake and the West Indies needed buyers ready to take their crops when these were harvested. This time constraint alone encouraged them to trade with any ship that presented itself at an opportune moment. Waiting for ships—as the Somers Islanders complained they were forced to do—meant that the tobacco, indigo, or sugar produced by others would get to market first, reducing the price that their crop could command. Some produce, such as fresh fruit, had to go as soon as it was picked or there was little point in sending it at all.8 Transatlantic trade was a risky business. From the merchants of New England to the sugar magnates of Barbados, colonial elites wanted the freedom to choose what to grow, where to ship it, and with whom to trade, since it gave them a degree of control while operating in the increasingly complex and precarious Atlantic economy. They be-

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lieved that there was no substitute for being in a colony when deciding what to buy and when to sell, and they resented any effort to limit their ability to enter into economic transactions. Although their situation differed from the staple crop agricultural regimes of colonies farther south, New Englanders needed free trade as well. Because their trade with other English colonies did not technically violate the rules that limited trade to the English, laws restricting trade with foreigners did not hamper their intercolonial commerce. They were especially reliant on trade with the West Indies, where their agricultural produce and livestock fed the servants and slaves who toiled in the tobacco and sugar fields. In fact, Alan Taylor has observed that the two parts of the Chesapeake economy (growing food for local consumption and tobacco for the Atlantic market) were achieved by New England and the West Indies working in tandem.9 But New Englanders traded beyond the English colonies, carrying on a brisk business in white oak staves with the wine-producing islands, for instance. Because they were developing a diverse export economy and a carrying trade, New Englanders were in a unique position, competing more directly with merchants in the homeland than with their fellow colonials. The reality of that direct competition was underscored when New England merchants took advantage of their region’s custom-free trade (granted by act of Parliament in 1643) to sell in England tobacco grown elsewhere without paying customs. Parliament enacted a custom on the “New England tobacco” to halt this practice in 1650.10 Free trade benefited New Englanders, too, as the paean to the region’s economic development penned by Edward Johnson attests: They have not only fed their Elder Sisters, Virginia, Barbados, and many of the Summer Islands that were prefer’d before her for fruitfulnesse, but also the Grandmother of us all, even the firtil Isle of Great Britain, besides Portugal hath had many a mouthful of bread and fish from us, in exchange of their Madeara liquor, and also Spain; nor would it be imagined, that this Wilderness should turn a mart for Merchants in so short a space, Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal coming hither for trade, shipping, going on gallantly, till the Seas became so troublesome, and England restrain’d our trade, forbidding it with Barbados, &c.11 Johnson’s description demonstrates the vibrant trade that New England carried on in the 1640s, and the sour note at the end betrays the hostility to regulation felt throughout the Atlantic basin. The men at the helm of state had ambitious plans for the Atlantic settlements, far exceeding anything either Charles I or James I had ever attempted. Shortly after the creation of the Commonwealth, the Council of State an-

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nounced its authority to cancel all existing charters and to replace these with new foundations for government. The earl of Carlisle’s claim to the West Indian islands was eliminated, and the state took over his power to appoint governors and establish policy. Lord Baltimore’s authority was similarly threatened, and he succeeded in fully regaining control of Maryland only after he entered into a humiliating agreement with some Virginia residents to protect his claim.12 The trade regulations threatened in 1650 and legislated in 1651 were unprecedented. Sending out fleets to subdue rebel colonies and altering their governments to suit the new republic was similarly unparalleled. The Western Design, Cromwell’s ambitious scheme to conquer the Spanish West Indies, placed demands on colonies to supply men, materials, and other support the likes of which no plantation had ever seen. The presence of a military garrison and, for a time, a naval squadron in Jamaica introduced a level of state power into the region that had ramifications for the other English settlements.13 Like Charles I before him (and anticipating the unpopular actions of James II), Cromwell considered naming a Governor General over all the New England colonies.14 Despite the fact that the Articles of Surrender allowed Virginia to elect its own governor, Cromwell informed the colonists that he intended to appoint a governor to ameliorate the “unsettleness through the looseness of the government” that he had been informed they were experiencing.15 The English state intruded into colonial affairs in numerous ways that the Stuart kings had not. The agenda for the Atlantic world, ambitious as it was, proved difficult to realize for many different reasons, but the leadership in England made their goals clear from the outset and took decisive steps toward achieving them. Students of the interregnum governments disagree about how innovative their policies were, but in matters of colonial regulation and defensive capabilities, most maintain that these governments departed dramatically from that of the early Stuarts. The Commonwealth government of 1649–1653 relied on time-tested mechanisms for reviving a depressed economy. It permitted many monopoly companies established under the Stuarts to remain in business, although it may have sought to review and regulate them in new ways. It was in the areas of colonial trade and military and naval buildup that these governments made the most dramatic strides. The Navigation Acts, regulating colonial trade by limiting it to English merchants and English ships, were innovative and aimed especially to stop Dutch trade with English colonies. The need to prevent a Stuart invasion from either Ireland or Scotland and to patrol the seas for royalist enemies pushed the Commonwealth to retain a large army and build up its naval capacity.16 The latter development in particular directly affected the colonies when the Commonwealth sent out fleets to subdue royalist rebellions (1651) and when Cromwell as Lord Pro-

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tector dispatched a mighty force to conquer the Spanish West Indies (1654). Although the interregnum governments faced serious difficulties when it came to implementing their vision for the empire, the plans that they laid out sparked a transatlantic conversation about the place of the colonies in the revolutionary regime. Settlers debated what the new leaders in England said they intended to do, articulating their own version of the relationship between the core and the periphery. To justify this bold new approach, the revolutionary government offered two explanations: that it assumed the place of the king as ruler of the dominions, and that it had (as the representative of the people of England) planted the colonies anyway. The first argument was based on the Commonwealth’s right by conquest. Having providentially defeated the tyrant Charles, the victors had gained control over his kingdoms and his dominions. God’s repeated endorsement of their cause, demonstrated through a string of military successes in wars against Charles I and later against the Irish, the Scots, and Charles II, proved that the Lord wanted them to rule all the Stuart world. Oliver Cromwell, who became Lord Protector in 1653, found this idea especially appealing and relied on it to justify the increasingly prominent role he played until his death in 1658. Royalist Virginia governor William Berkeley questioned the logic of the position that the Commonwealth or Cromwell had legitimately replaced the king as ruler of his dominions through the right of conquest. Likening the relationship of king and subject to that of landlord and tenant, Berkeley argued that just because Parliament and its army had wrongfully attacked the landowner did not mean that the tenants now owed the attackers rent.17 Some of Charles’s former subjects, including Berkeley himself, had to be forcibly brought under the control of the English state— to accept, in Berkeley’s analogy, that the republic had become the legitimate landowner. By 1653, however, Westminster ruled all that the king had once commanded. Victory in England and the conquest of Ireland, Scotland, and a few recalcitrant colonies gave England’s rulers, or so they averred, the powers that the king had once exercised. To use the terminology recently explored by David Armitage,18 they asserted that imperium followed dominium. Hence they issued and revoked charters, appointed governors, and set economic policies. When the Virginia assembly agreed in 1652 to replace “God save the King” with “God save the Common Wealth of England,” the change portended more than the adaptation of older forms to new circumstances.19 The Commonwealth wanted to be understood as standing in the king’s stead, with all the powers that implied. Under the monarchy, colonies were attached to the person of the king or to appointees under his direction, and Parliament had no relation to them. During the revolution, one of the many

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powers Parliament engrossed was the management of the king’s dominions. The act that created the Commonwealth did so for “the People of England, and of all the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging,” a formulation that subordinated the people of the dominions to the new rulers of England in much the same way that they had once been subjected to the king.20 Later the relationship of the Lord Protector to the colonies was described in similar language. When the English forces on Jamaica summoned the Spanish to give up a fort, they claimed to act in the name of “the Mighty Prince, the Protector of England, [and of] the Dominions thereunto belonging.”21 Under Cromwell, the language used to denote authority was patterned on royal precedents, but the idea of the colonies as dominions subservient to England itself carried over from the Commonwealth period into the protectorate. Writs, once issued in the name of the king, were to run first in the name of the “Keepers of the Liberties of England” and later in the name of the Lord Protector, in the colonies as in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.22 The reformulation of the relationship between core and periphery that this entailed gave Parliament, the Commonwealth, and later the Lord Protector the power once exercised by the king, canceling the king’s authority as it did so. The extent of state authority had not been diminished, even as the identity of the ones wielding power changed. The second justification offered by Parliament and the republican governments of the period beginning in 1649 was that they, as the representatives of the people of England, had planted the English colonies. This argument relied on a history of colonial development that obscured the role of individuals in favor of collective responsibility. The 3 October 1650 “Act for prohibiting Trade with the Barbadoes, Virginia, Bermuda and Antego” declared that the colonies “were planted at the Cost, and setled by the People, and by the Authority of this Nation.”23 Attributing responsibility for the plantations in this general way ignored any royal contribution to the process, of course, but it also overlooked the role of specific investors (including proprietors, company members, and merchants) and planters (those who actually migrated to live in the “plantations”). By transferring responsibility from individuals to the people as a whole, the rulers of the new Commonwealth justified its own claim to rule the Stuart empire and asserted its claim as well to some of the profits generated by trade within it.24 This strategy brushed aside claims made by colonial merchants and planters, and it undermined their assertion that they should reap the profits of these plantations. Colonists from Barbados to Massachusetts Bay responded to these claims and offered a different interpretation of colonial development and the nature of the relationship between core and periphery. When Parliament claimed au-

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thority over the colonies by asserting that the people of England generally had settled the plantations and so Parliament as their representative ruled them, Barbadians responded that only particular English people—themselves—had done the hard work of colonizing their island. As they sarcastically observed, “Certainly we all know that we the now Inhabitants of the Island were and still are that People of England the which with great hazard of our persons and at our great cost and charges have setled and inhabited this place and shall we therefore be subjected to the wills of those that stay at home?” Their contribution gave them superior claims to govern the island and decide its policies, claims that they promoted in the face of parliamentary efforts to control their plantation.25 What Parliament presented as the collective work of the people at large, Barbadians attributed to specific men who had been directly involved in the settlement. As one observer put it: “They went out hence haveing onely publick leave for it as a free people, to digg out their owne fortunes, in a Strange Land, which they possessed & Improved at their own charge without the publick purse, & never had so much as protection from hence . . . But they have allwayes defended themselves by their owne Lawes, & Rules of Government, as hath from time to time best Suited with their little common Wealth.”26 Having done the work, they expected to reap the benefit. Other colonists were quick to concur with this view.27 To the idea that they were subordinate to the men who now ruled England, colonists responded by emphasizing their rights as freeborn English men. The self-identity of the English at this time was bound up with their understanding of their superior rights and privileges. The virtues of their legal system, the basis of their vaunted rights, had been a point of pride since at least the medieval period.28 The English gloried in their liberties, which they believed set them apart from other Europeans and indeed all other peoples. Sir John Lenthall’s claim—“we are the freest people in the world”—was typical.29 Enjoyment of these rights was not just a birthright, as it had long been styled. It was also a benefit of membership in the revolutionary empire, according to the declarations of those who held the reins of power in Westminster. The Commonwealth government dubbed itself “the Keepers of the Liberties of England,” and colonists expected that, were it to live up to this title, their own rights would be safeguarded as well. Freeborn status came to those who had control over their own person, usually because they were adult males who owned enough property to avoid subordination to another. Landowners in the Atlantic world qualified on these general grounds and sought to claim the attendant benefits. The demand to have the land they owned in the New World settlements treated as the equivalent of English land was similar to the claims that Irish lands and titles made one a noble on a par with the English aristocracy; in both cases men with status on the periphery tried to

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carry that status to the metropole, and both met with some resistance. With regard to the Atlantic, Jack Greene has pointed out that settling was self-empowering for these newly landed (and politically active) men.30 In this transatlantic dialogue, they used their status as freeborn in a democratizing way, to equate their position with that of other freeborn men, whether they were English landowners or even the rulers of interregnum England. Given that lesser landed men held unprecedented positions of power in the revolutionary state, the claims of colonists, at least elite colonists, to equality with them were not outlandish. Many of the men who ran the Atlantic plantations were the social equals of those who controlled the Commonwealth of England and of Cromwell himself. The rise of lesser gentry to positions of power in the 1640s and 1650s lent added truth to colonial demands for equality rather than subjugation.31 According to the version of the center-colonial relationship common in the colonies, the people of the English Atlantic world were linked to those at the center by ties of ethnic identification and shared culture. A similar argument had been attempted by the Irish Parliament in the early 1640s, but its use of Englishness, relying on the centrality of the common law, allowed the subordination of the Irish to the English Parliament as makers of that law. The colonists in the Atlantic world framed their position somewhat differently, attempting to avoid, indeed to argue against, the possibility of such subordination.32 The fact that most prosperous colonists had been born not in an Atlantic plantation but in England (which distinguished them from those of English descent in Ireland at this time) played a role in shaping this view. John Hammond described colonies as “such parts of the unknown world, as have been found out, setled and made flourishing, by the charge, hazzard and diligence of their own brethren.” That they now lived at a great distance from England created a tendency to think of them as “people of another world or enemies,” but Hammond emphasized that they were indeed brethren.33 This argument undermined Parliament’s effort to claim credit for peopling the English Atlantic and made a counterclaim for the status and significance of those who had risked all in going to a colony. Colonists repeatedly stated that they were bound to England and to other English people everywhere. Massachusetts Bay, not generally known for its inclusive impulses, declared itself “brethren by nation” to other English people.34 Dissident New Englanders also used their Englishness in attempts to gain acceptance. Rhode Islanders, unpopular for their willingness to countenance religious radicalism, sought common cause with “all our countrymen in New England” or even “our lovinge countrymen.”35 The much-reviled Samuel Gorton and his fellows also used the term “Countrymen” to emphasize their bonds to other New Englanders.36 Barbados planters writing to Cromwell

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declared themselves to be “Englishmen of as clear and pure extracts as any,” and they expected their pure English blood to warrant them a certain place in the political community.37 Colonials increasingly emphasized shared Englishness as a way to ensure a degree of equality between themselves and others in the Atlantic world. At an earlier date, all had been subjects of a monarch. In the 1650s, however, monarchy had been pulled down, and that subjugation had ended. No one in the English world was any longer a subject, and that included the colonists on the Atlantic periphery as well as those who had remained at the center. Rhetoric about rights echoed from one end of the English Atlantic to the other. When ministers in New England refused communion to some, one early commentary on the religious practices there declared that this violated the “liberties of English subjects.”38 A discussion of religious controversy in Bermuda used the same rhetoric: Independents were tyrants, lording it over “Free-borne English Subjects.”39 Authors of the Remonstrance, battling the Bay Colony government in the 1640s, repeatedly declared that their rights were violated by restrictive franchise policies.40 An oath required in Maryland was said to be “contrary to . . . the conscience of true English subjects.”41 In Maryland, Catholicism and the sweeping powers of the Lord Proprietor were equated with tyranny “against the Laws & Liberties of the English Nation.”42 Robert Sanford in Surinam Justice asserted that the fact that the residents of that South American colony were English men entitled them “to the priviledges of our Charter.”43 Barbadians considered it the “Liberty and Priviledge of the Free-born English-men” to have an annual assembly election.44 In moves that some scholars have seen as prescient, given the outcry against “taxation without representation” in the 1760s, colonists from as far apart as New England and the West Indies observed that Parliament did not represent them since they sent no members to it. The Barbados planters, in fact, challenged Parliament’s initial effort to gain control over the empire by demanding to know how it could legislate for Barbados when the island was not allowed representation.45 In this case, royalists threw language dear to the revolutionaries in the faces of those Parliament men who sought to link their cause to traditional rights. Everywhere colonists drew upon the conception that being English meant enjoying rights. They equated their English ethnicity with the privilege of liberties—liberties that were usually styled “English liberties.” In doing so they were thinking of a number of specific liberties that they enjoyed and sought to protect, including participation in local government, local control over a variety of decisions, and protection of property rights. In these concerns they were quite similar to county-level leaders in England itself, who opposed efforts of the central government to increase its authority,

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whether it was the government of Charles I or one of the revolutionary regimes that succeeded him.46 Colonial liberties were guaranteed to some extent by participation in legislative assemblies, which were part of the political system in all but a few colonies. Although no colony was older than half a century, and no assembly had sat continuously for as much as three decades, settlers in many locales thought of their assemblies as protected by “ancient privilege.” This argument by analogy equated their own colony-specific rights and institutions to the “ancient constitution” that was said to ensure the rights of English men at home.47 Assemblies were the major institutions through which landowning settlers expressed their views and promoted specific policies. St. Christopher’s small planters created a holiday to mark the day when Governor Thomas Warner had pardoned leaders in the agitation for an assembly. Warner saw this annual celebration as an expression of contempt for his authority.48 Not only in St. Christopher but also in a number of other colonies, the right to be represented in an assembly had been hard won and was therefore especially valued. Elected assemblies were conscious of their rights and were prepared to safeguard them. From the moment of his appointment by the Commonwealth in 1651 until he was superseded by the appointment of planter Thomas Modiford in 1660, Daniel Searle rode herd on the Barbados assembly, a body that was ever ready to defend its rights. The Antigua deputies were prepared to govern their island alone when their governor, Christopher Keynall, departed without their permission and appointed a deputy governor to serve in his absence. The Virginia assembly met in a private session to discuss whether to accept Richard Cromwell as the successor to his father, Oliver, when news of the latter’s death arrived. In an eccentric assertion of the supremacy of the Maryland assembly, Baltimore’s deputy governor staged a “kind of pigmie Rebellion” (as one opponent derisively put it), stepping down on the eve of the Restoration in order to be reappointed by the assembly, which he declared held all authority in the province.49 Planters not only embraced but also often expanded on their rights and their role in local government during this period. Politically active colonists had become accustomed to controlling specific policies locally, and they wanted to continue to do so after the death of Charles I. Trade policy was, in most places, a matter of local concern before 1650, and the question of who controlled it would become a focal point of conflict between the state and the plantations during the 1650s. Settlers or their local leaders made appointments to certain offices—including that of governor in some locations but at least lesser offices in almost all—and planters fought to keep that power in colonial hands. For instance, the Barbados planters bitterly opposed an effort to impose a Provost Marshal on their col-

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ony, citing their accustomed privileges in defense of their position. Prior to 1657, the duties of Provost Marshal had been divided among a number of locally appointed Barbados residents. In that year, however, Martin Noell, a London merchant who sat on Cromwell’s Council of State, arranged to have Cromwell put the post in the hands of one man, William Povey. Povey owed various men, including Noell, considerable sums of money, and Noell intended the appointment to give Povey the wherewithal to pay off his debts. Noell realized, as he wrote to the island’s governor Daniel Searle in August 1657, that the appointment of Povey would seem to usurp the prerogative of the governor and the magistrates, who had traditionally made the appointment. Noell knew whereof he spoke because he had spent nearly two years getting the commission confirmed over the objections of Searle himself, as well as those of various leading planters then in England; all agreed that Povey ought not to hold the office “by Pattent from heere.” Yet, having finally succeeded in pushing through the appointment, Noell hoped that the authorities in Barbados would take it well.50 Stamped, as the appointment was, with the Great Seal of England, its master minder expected it to win the respect (if not the affection) of the Barbadians. Much was also made of the fact that Barbadians then in England had been consulted for expert advice on the scheme, as if their involvement amounted to local support.51 Noell’s plan offended the colonial elites because it disturbed the accepted relationship between the periphery and the center, a relationship in which authority ideally emanated from London but was exercised in America.52 Hence Thomas Povey missed the point when he opined that the Barbadians ought not to object because the Lord Protector had selected a man with popular support (not to mention one who happened to be Povey’s own brother). He was in fact well aware that it was a constitutional issue, as he had earlier explained to his brother.53 Politicized colonists could be just as vigilant in safeguarding their customary liberties as any of their countrymen in England. Protection of property was a fundamental right, and one that propertyowning settlers were especially concerned to defend. Ownership of land ensured personal autonomy and granted political privileges within England and in the colonies. Outright (or freehold) land ownership was relatively rare in England, and hence political participation was limited. When English settlement of the Atlantic world began, its organizers expected freehold ownership to be at least as exclusive in the plantations as it was in England. Peopling the plantations with tenants who worked land owned by elite nonresident men would achieve low levels of land ownership despite the apparent availability of land. Proprietors’ and company members’ efforts to retain control of the land in their colonies had not generally succeeded. As New England resident George Fenwick characterized settlers’ attitudes toward the prospect of pay-

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ing rents for their lands, “it would not be borne, we must all heare be independent supreame lordes of our own land.” Even in the Somers Islands, where much of the land continued to be owned by nonresident company members, allotments were being sold directly to the most prosperous residents (who made up the local elite and served as governor or on the governor’s council).54 In other colonies unencumbered land ownership was more common still, and the proportion of the white male population that owned land was higher than in England, sometimes (as in New England) dramatically so. When the state granted land to soldiers in Ireland and Jamaica, it tried to manipulate the widespread desire for land to foster settlement in recently conquered and potentially unappealing locations. The typical English method for laying claim to a new colony was settling and improving it.55 In the original scheme for colonization, however, the men who built the fences and thereby legitimated possession under common law were not to be the beneficiaries of that possession. They were to possess the land for the benefit of the earl of Carlisle or the member of the Somers Islands Company, under the authority of the king. Direct claims to land ownership by the settlers themselves collapsed that three-tiered system into a two-tiered one of settlers under the direct authority of the king or, as it turned out, the Keepers of the Liberties of England. As English-born owners of colonial lands, colonists were eager to see their land ownership as well as their status as freeborn English men affirmed by the revolutionary state. The core New England colonies—those four that were members of the United Colonies of New England—had a complicated relationship to this rhetoric of rights and Englishness. Settlers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Haven, and Plymouth Plantation wanted their rights protected, just as other landowning colonists did. Massachusetts inhabitants were especially concerned to have their charter defended, since it was the basis of local government institutions and land distribution policies. New Englanders referred to themselves as freeborn in dialogues with the central authority in England. Yet New Englanders—especially those who led Massachusetts Bay—believed themselves better than mere freeborn English men in that they were also saints. The centrality of their religious identity pressed against their ethnic English identity. It was an irony that the most purely English colonial region, ethnically speaking, should be the only one to consider an alternative construction of identity more central than its Englishness. When forced to choose between being English and being godly, they often favored their religious over their civil identity. In Massachusetts, non–church members, regardless of the amount of land they held, were not permitted to participate in the political system. This, the Remonstrants pointed out in their 1646 peti-

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tion, was a clear violation of customary rights. The Remonstrance controversy highlighted the tension between the identities of English man and saint.56 New England saints, however, saw their identity as members of the godly community in terms of the superior claims it gave them. During the revolution, and especially after the triumph of the king’s foes in 1649, New Englanders expected better treatment by virtue of being self-identified members of the godly community. Colonial leaders throughout the Atlantic world could demand (and often receive) protection of their liberties based on their status as freeborn English men, but the leaders of New England bolstered those claims by referring to their settlement’s special religiosity. Thus, in responding to Parliament’s plans to impose its authority over all the plantations in 1651, Massachusetts observed that it expected at least as good treatment from Parliament as it had ever received from the king.57 Not only had Parliament fought for justice against an unjust king (and so would accord justice to those who lived in the plantations), but also it had an affinity for the godly, and so would treat New England well for that reason too. Parliament, the commonwealth governments of 1649–1653 and 1659– 1660, and the protectoral government of 1653–1659 were all sensitive to accusations that they denied liberties. All claimed to represent justice and the protection of rights against a monarch who had trampled the cherished liberties of freeborn English. They were all therefore eager to support the rights of colonists, and they sometimes found it easier to offer support in the colonial setting that they denied to English men living at home. Just as the republic’s stated commitment to liberty and the common law opened itself to criticism in England when it appeared to violate that commitment, so too it found itself similarly vulnerable in the colonies if it seemed to waver from its support for liberties there.58 When the Commonwealth ordered that all writs issued under its authority run in the name of “the Keepers of the Liberties of England,” it perfectly captured the concern to promote English freedoms. All the regimes that ruled England from 1649 were receptive to popular opinion on matters of governance within the colonial context. This position was not simply ideologically driven but was also a practical solution to the problem of allegiance. Successive regimes in England followed the path of least resistance by approving virtually any locally chosen governor they had occasion to consider. The fleets dispatched in 1651 and in 1654 (the latter in connection with the Western Design) routinely approved the governors whom inhabitants had chosen, apparently without seriously challenging them on the question of allegiance. If a governor could demonstrate that he had the support of the settlers, the confidence of his fellow colonists carried weight. Christopher Keynall therefore carefully documented support for his

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governorship on Antigua when he sailed to England amid criticism of his policies and his irregular departure. That support helped him to persuade the Lord Protector to renew his appointment and send him back to the island with concessions designed to ease the islanders’ many worries. It was important for the stability of the empire that settlers be united in support of their governor, and arguably never more so than in a revolutionary period, when rival claimants to rule England and its empire posed a continual threat to the state. That being the case, the state willingly endorsed those who could demonstrate popular support, which further empowered the male landowners of the Atlantic world. Even the views of the bedraggled soldiers on Jamaica were used to condone the command of Edward Doyley, who wrote that he had “the advantage of the affection of the people here, beyond any that yet ever commanded.”59 The affection of the people, which the successive governments in England patently did not enjoy, was valued nonetheless. The competing ideas of colonists as subordinates and as equals undergirded disagreements about policy during the 1650s. If the Commonwealth (or later the Lord Protector) ruled the colonies as dominions, then it could regulate trade, recall colonial charters, appoint governors, and otherwise command its subjects as it pleased. If the colonists were the equals of the leaders of England, they were entitled to a far greater say in the management of their own affairs. The disagreements over imperial policy, especially trade policies, that characterized interregnum politics can be traced back to these differing interpretations of the nexus of authority and the relationship between core and periphery. Colonial elites advocated for their own authority and continued control over local affairs in accordance with their view of the proper relations within the empire. The Commonwealth’s bold new trade policy was laid out in the 1651 Navigation Act. Robert Bliss aptly described the policy as both nationalistic and individualistic: it was nationalistic in that trade was restricted to the English and individualistic in that all English traders were granted equal opportunity to engage in the trade.60 In the view of those who set the policy, it furthered the revolutionary agenda of enhancing English liberties. The Stuarts had favored a monopolistic approach to trade, especially the most lucrative trades. James I and Charles I had both granted monopolies to companies that then held exclusive rights to a specific trade. This system was not usually followed in the trade to the Atlantic colonies under the Stuarts, in part because the trade was not lucrative initially and in part because Charles bestowed tracts of land on his favorites, who were then to take the profits that the resultant trade generated through rents on land or direct taxes on trade. Because proprietors proved unable to capture control of their colonies’ trade in the way that the most successful companies (such as the Somers Islands Company)

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had done, much of the American trade continued to be open to any merchant who wanted to participate.61 The Navigation Act was innovative in legislating an open trade and forswearing monopolistic control. Atlantic commerce would continue to be treated as the enterprise of individuals. This, in the view of the Commonwealth government and its merchant supporters, represented a “free trade,” in contrast to the exclusionary monopolies that dominated in many other sectors of the economy. No interregnum government abandoned the principles set down in the legislation of 1650 and 1651. They all continued to ignore planters’ pleas for liberty to trade with all nations in amity with England. When Antigua’s economy was reportedly on the verge of collapse in 1656, the Committee on Trade allowed it free trade, clearly an emergency measure. On occasion Cromwell followed Parliament’s earlier example, excusing a colony from paying customs. This benefit was intended as an assistance program, to help a colony such as Jamaica weather a difficult period.62 In general, however, the state continued to pursue the goal of exclusive trade relations with the English Atlantic settlements. In their schema, the plantations were to traffic with the English only (even the Scots and Irish were excluded), and customs were to be collected on all appropriate items. This system sent business to the merchants and revenue to the government, benefiting both. Ships that violated these provisions were to be seized and their goods sold, with the income going into the state’s coffers and the pockets of those who made the seizures. The system was intended to provide the planters with a degree of choice over financial matters, the merchants an opportunity to profit from the colonial trade, shipbuilders and sailors work, and the state much-needed revenue. Designed to navigate between the contradictory demands of English merchants on the one hand and colonial planters and traders on the other, the policy may have satisfied neither, but it would shape trade relations within the empire for the next century. Differences over trade were fueled to some extent by competing meanings adhering to the phrase “free trade” itself on either side of the Atlantic. Planters understood it to mean freedom to trade with merchants of all nations or, in the case of the New England merchants who were involved in a carrying trade, freedom to take their goods to any port. English merchants, however, wanted to limit colonists to trading exclusively with them, and through their role in the Commonwealth government they were able to exact trade provisions to their liking. They could characterize the resultant trade as “free,” since planters retained the power to choose among competing merchants out of England. In this view, only the Somers Islanders labored under an unfree trade, since only they were limited to traffic with company ships that set prices. The competition among English merchants for the

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trade of other colonies seemed, in contrast to the Somers Islands monopoly, free. Colonists tended to equate the position of the Somers Islands planters under a company monopoly with the restrictions that the London merchant interests placed on them through enforcement of the Navigation Act. The English merchants interested in the American trade had once praised it as a free and unfettered trade (in contrast to the trading companies that were closed to small traders), but they argued just as vehemently in the 1650s for state regulation and even occasionally exclusive trading rights. In their frustration with the situation in the Caribbean in the late 1650s, some among this merchant community suggested creating new monopoly companies for the Atlantic trade. This would necessitate a policy reversal, as they would be abandoning the freedom they had been willing to grant the colonists in their choice of trading partners. But such proposals marked a change from the typical position on the colonial trade among leading merchants in the interregnum.63 The example of the Somers Islands, the one colony that continued under a company, indicates the reason for the widespread hostility to monopolistic trading practices. Residents of the islands criticized various aspects of company rule at one time or another, but their continuous refrain was the problem with trade. The company ship did not arrive at the most propitious moment for shipping crops, or it failed to bring the goods the colonists needed or to sell these at affordable prices. The imposts placed on tobacco exports were too high, so that the planters reaped no profits. As a result of the trade monopoly, settlers were indebted to the company and thus unable to leave the islands. At one point the company ordered its deputy governor to stop all out-migration, fearful that profits would plummet if too many colonists went to the newly established (and short-lived) colony of St. Lucia. Inhabitants were, as a petition presented to Parliament in 1646 averred, “restrained from the liberty of their persons.” For its part, the company believed that planters withheld their crops, doing business illegally with other ships.64 One colonist defended this illegal trade, noting that “the truth is, had not providence put the inhabitants into a way of weaving Cotten, which they buy for Porke, Beefe, and Fish, of one ship or other (upon hard tearmes) trading between them and Barbadoes, the Inhabitants had long since turned Adamites [nudists] out of necessity.” The company did not want to see Bermuda follow the New England trajectory (though in some respects it was suited to do so) and sought to prevent the development of a carrying trade by the islanders. On one occasion, it permitted residents to build a pinnace, but then restricted their use of it, “as though they had said, you shall build a vessell (if you will) to looke upon, and undoe your selves, but shall have no encouragement to employ her.”65 Although residents tended to overstate the case against the

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company monopoly, the Somers Islands situation represented the nightmare of a highly restricted trade, one that all colonial elites feared. One observer characterized that colony as “a pretty prison” for its unusually restrictive policies.66 With the extreme case of Bermuda before them, planters were confirmed in their commitment to unfettered trade. Throughout the 1650s, colonists remained committed to free trade, pursuing it in violation of the wishes of the English government. They occasionally asked for it outright, but more often they simply traded as freely as possible without debating the legality. That the central government had only a limited ability to enforce its policies and was often distracted by its own repeated crises made it easier for colonists to sidestep the regulations.67 Ample evidence suggests that the navigation restrictions placed on the colonies were often honored in the breach.68 The small Swedish colony on the Delaware River negotiated a free trade agreement with St. Christopher in 1654, a clear violation of parliamentary trade acts. Trade with the Dutch continued even during the Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). As long as foreign ships that traded illegally in the colonies did not subsequently call at English-held ports where the navigation laws were being enforced, they did not face penalties.69 When Cromwell sent a fleet to conquer the Spanish West Indies in 1654, it seized numerous ships that were trading in violation of policy. Edward Winslow submitted a report of the situation he found upon arriving in Barbados in early 1655: When we came to Barbados, which was the 29th of Jan. wee found all things out of order upon the place: our English merchants neglected, a free trade entertayned with strangers; and though a seisure was made some tyme before we came upon some strangers estates, as trading contrary to the statute, and the governor’s assistance required, it was by him referred to a tryall at comon law, where all the atturneys of the court were taken up for the strangers, and none could be procured for the state; but the English merchants that pleaded the state’s cause, did it thoroughly, being sufficiently able. Yet nevertheles, though the act of the 3d of October 50, which you sent with us, and the other of the 9th of October 51, were both pleaded, the jury found for the strangers against parliament and state, grounding all upon the articles of Barbadoes.70 Rumors subsequently circulated in England that the Barbados governor had been imprisoned and shipped home to answer for the Dutch trade. Not surprisingly, the prize office established during Winslow’s sojourn on the island confronted an uncooperative populace.71 The Barbados prize commissioners petitioned the Admiralty to grant them power to decide cases, a change that

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would allow them to avoid the civil court system on the island and thereby circumvent popular opposition to their work.72 As far as the Caribbean case was concerned, the London pamphleteer who criticized Cromwell for a comparative lack of commitment to enforcing the Navigation Act missed the mark. The minimal enforcement under the protectorate was an improvement over what the Commonwealth government had been able to accomplish.73 In Winslow’s own New England, colonial governments were no more eager to enforce the new legislation. Although Massachusetts Bay eventually prohibited trade with the Dutch in a show of (modest) support for the Anglo-Dutch War effort, it repealed that prohibition as soon as the war ended. The following year, Captain John Leverett brought in a Dutch ship, the Prophet Samuel, in accordance with English if not Massachusetts Bay law. The General Court censured him, charging “that such actings (without the consent or allowance of authoritie heere established) is “a confronting of this government, and tends highly to the infringing of our liberties, discouraging of trade, and destructive to our comfortable being heere.” Roger Williams wondered, when he heard rumors that Leverett was bound over to appear before the court, “whether it be for that [taking the ship] or words” that he presumably spoke when initially challenged about it. The court objected to Leverett’s assumption that English laws regulating trade would be enforced in the colony.74 Leverett’s ignorance of the extent of local intransigence on trade law might be partially attributable to the fact that he moved back and forth between England and New England, having recently returned as one of Cromwell’s commanders of a force intended to attack New Netherland. His effort to enforce protectoral policy while in New England was no less than Cromwell would have expected, and Leverett had a better sense of how the colony’s refusal to conform would be received in Westminster. As Leverett’s experience indicated, colonial governments were more likely to punish colonists who seized ships that traded in violation of English law than they were to enforce these laws themselves. As late as 1659, John Winthrop, Jr., was uncertain how to enforce the laws in his capacity as governor of Connecticut.75 With English law permitting the seizure of foreign cargoes and colonial governments by and large ignoring these regulations, some enterprising colonists tried to take matters into their own hands. These men apparently could not bear to let a richly laded vessel sail away if they thought they could take it and receive a portion of the proceeds from the sale of its cargo. In April 1653 Captain Edward Hull of Massachusetts Bay captured the ship belonging to Kempo Sybada, an inhabitant of Pequot, Connecticut (who was trading legally according to both English law and colonial custom), on the pretext that he was Dutch. With the help of Roger Williams and John Winthrop, Jr., who documented his status as an inhabitant, Sybada was eventually able to

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replevin his ship from the Rhode Island man to whom Hull had sold it.76 Rhode Island seems to have had more than its share of entrepreneurs willing to enforce maritime law by themselves. For half a decade the government there contended over the right to seize ships and how best to dispose of them, finally declaring all such seizures illegal unless commissioned by both the central colonial authority and the government of England.77 The difficulty for aspiring colonial privateers was that they were selfappointed enforcers of English maritime law living in colonies that did not support that enforcement. Colonel Francis Yeardley and Nathaniel Batts in Maryland, like Edward Hull and John Leverett in New England, suffered the consequences of their zeal (or greed) when local governments opposed their efforts.78 A complicated case in Virginia was settled only when the government abandoned its own policy and granted an aggrieved ship’s captain permission to seize a Dutch ship to make up for the loss he had sustained when an overeager inhabitant took his ship.79 One enterprising group of English merchants asked for a commission so that its ship could cruise Virginia waters and seize any vessels trading there illegally. This effort to take maritime policing into private hands did not earn the Lord Protector’s endorsement, but the petition suggested that enforcement of the laws was widely known to be lax and that some merchants who traded with the Chesapeake thought seizing ships that traded illegally might prove more profitable than trading directly with the Virginians.80 The English merchants who asked for permission to cruise Virginia’s waters went through official channels to accomplish what some colonists attempted unofficially. Colonial governments frowned upon all such efforts. The inability of the state to enforce the navigation laws and to force all colonists to trade exclusively with English merchants was a constant source of irritation to the merchants. The London newsweeklies reflected this view when they complained that the Barbadians were inordinately, even irrationally, attached to the Dutch trade.81 An anonymous author (apparently a merchant with connections to the Committee on Foreign Plantations under the protectorate) laid out both the planter and the merchant positions on trade in a document aimed at “Reconciliation and generall satisfaction.” After straining to be fair to both views, the author came down decisively in favor of exclusive trade. He argued that the merchants had lost much through investment in the early phase of colonial development, could supply all that was needed (and could do so better than the Dutch), and needed exclusive trading regulations to compete with other nations that did the same. He concluded weakly that something ought to be done to sweeten the bitter pill for the planters but was at a loss as to what to suggest.82 The merchants’ view— nicely encapsulated in the document’s dismissal of the free trade promised

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Barbados (“notwithstanding any Articles”)—received a full hearing throughout the 1650s, as leading merchants served on committees to oversee the colonies under the Commonwealth and the Lord Protector.83 Merchants’ frustration over this state of affairs reached new heights during the protectorate, after the conquest of Jamaica opened up a new area that the merchants were eager to exploit. Trade was thus a focus of contention in the interregnum period. Parliament, acting at the behest of its merchant supporters, enshrined in policy the anti-monopolistic but nationalist principles of the American trade. Their approach to trade would have a long history, carrying over from the first to the second British Empire. Within England itself, the trade policy seemed the opposite of the royal favoritism that had benefited a few subjects to the exclusion of many.84 In the colonies, however, the nationalist component of the trade represented a reversal. Most colonists involved in transatlantic trade had been free to do business with any merchant, so long as his homeland was at peace with England, but even that limited provision had been ignored at times. Under the new system, colonists were restricted in their trading partners in what seemed to them a clear violation of their customary liberties. They fought these changes with reference to their own status as freeborn English men. They also ignored the policy when they could, which apparently occurred fairly often. In the regulation of trade, the revolutionary state’s reach exceeded its grasp. Colonial settlers were relieved that this was so and were dismayed on the occasions when the state’s grasp caught them in acts of defiance. It was a situation fraught with tensions, and they were tensions that would become a permanent feature of the English Atlantic’s political landscape. If trade was the major area of ongoing conflict over the issue of colonial authority versus state power, the Western Design launched by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1654 was the single most important event for forcing colonial elites to confront this question. The design was an unprecedented attack on the Spanish West Indies, intended to bring these colonies under English control. Never before had the English state assaulted a colonial plantation held by another European power. Previous colonization efforts had been privately financed with limited state endorsement and had focused on unoccupied lands on the periphery of Spanish America. In the Western Design, the long-term goal was nothing less than the complete conquest of Spain’s Atlantic empire. From the perspective of Cromwell and his advisers, an attack on the Spanish West Indies had much to recommend it. Capturing the great wealth generated by Peruvian and Mexican silver mines would not only strengthen the state but also undermine the ability of the Spanish king

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to make war.85 The design, were it to succeed, would solve Cromwell’s financial difficulties, cement the reputation of his regime, and create suitable work for the bloated naval forces.86 Although such prosaic concerns contributed to it, the design was most significantly an effort to achieve the religious and political goals that had long animated the group around the protector. It seemed the proper culmination to years of effort that had gone into capturing control of England’s destiny and pushing it in the desired direction.87 This ambitious project placed major demands on many colonies, forcing them to confront the state’s expectations that they would render cooperative support for a design not of their own making. Barbados and Nevis were the two colonies most deeply affected by the design. Whereas a majority of Nevis’s settlers accepted an invitation to reside in Jamaica somewhat later in the unfolding of the design, Barbados was pulled into the scheme immediately, and largely against the will of the island’s leaders. Barbados hosted the large expeditionary fleet for many months when it first arrived in the Caribbean in early 1655. Since the planters had been unexpectedly thrust into the position of playing host to three thousand men, it is not surprising that they accorded the fleet a tepid welcome. Matters were not helped when the commissioners ordered the immediate seizure of sixteen Dutch ships trading with the island in violation of the laws limiting commerce to English ships. The establishment of a prize office to try such cases both then and in the future, the preemptory reorganization of the island’s militia, and the quartering of troops all proved unpopular. Army commander Robert Venables exacerbated the situation with his autocratic manner, as when he described the uncooperative leading planters as “a company of geese.”88 Even without insults from Venables, the plantocracy found its autonomy challenged by the presence of the fleet enforcing trade regulations, recruiting soldiers for the expedition, and altering island policies. Because recruitment threatened to draw off the freemen of lesser means, leading Barbadians refused to cooperate. The expedition commanders then launched their own recruitment effort without that cooperation, which led to the enlistment of more debtors and servants than might otherwise have been the case. Not only the Barbados plantation owners, who had the most to lose, given their island’s comparative prosperity, but most Anglo-Caribbean leaders as well feared retribution from the Spanish once an attack was launched. For these reasons the planters were “no great well-wishers to this expedition, fearing it may spoil this Island.”89 One officer of the design wrote home that most planters were “malignant spiritts” who spoke against both the project and the protectorate. Although only one “leveller” living on the island had to be tried for treason, the majority did not embrace the design as Cromwell had assumed they would.90 Colonists in other locations were similarly unwilling to support the design

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as fully as expected. On other islands the initial effort to recruit troops may have gone somewhat more smoothly, because leaders on those smaller islands either had less to fear from lost population (given their lesser reliance on slave labor and therefore their lesser dependency on shrinking militia units to police the enslaved population) or were more easily cowed by the presence of heavily armed state ships bearing explicit instructions from the Lord Protector. But after the expedition had been routed on Hispaniola and experienced only partial success in conquering Jamaica, colonists from Connecticut to Antigua were generally unwilling to join the state-sponsored migration program for any colonist willing to take up residence in Jamaica. Only the Nevis settlers responded to Cromwell’s invitation, and when most of them died in the first year, the lack of cooperation shown by others seemed fully vindicated. On some islands the hostility among the elites to the ongoing settler recruitment effort was so great that public announcements of the terms on offer were sometimes blocked. Although settlers willingly sold produce to Jamaica, where soldiers and the few settlers who had been recruited were in danger of starvation, they were unwilling to sacrifice anything in support of the design, explicit orders from Cromwell or any state representative notwithstanding.91 The largely unsuccessful effort to sell the Jamaica project to settlers drew on the vocabulary of Englishness as well as that of godliness. Promoters of the design repeatedly described it as a work that was dear to the hearts of all English men.92 The inability to prosecute fully the military campaign on Hispaniola and Jamaica was also often described as a failure of Englishness. Cromwell believed that all true English men should support the design, but he framed this goal in terms of the need to eliminate Catholicism, and especially Spanish Catholicism, from the New World. For Cromwell, the design was an appropriate mission in part because it fulfilled his religious vision of triumphal Protestantism.93 For this reason, he anticipated that New Englanders would be particularly supportive of his project. He sent Daniel Gookin as his agent to New England, to try to enlist settlers to move to Jamaica. Gookin only managed to arrange a visit to the island by a group of scouts, who reported such a discouraging assessment of the situation that no one would agree to go. This refusal greatly annoyed Cromwell, who was especially eager for godly colonists to help him realize his vision for Jamaica. In refusing, the New Englanders revealed the limits of their identification with other English people, since fear of being tainted by sinful fellow settlers played a part in the decision not to migrate. Cromwell offered godly New England men the power to reform the other settlers on Jamaica, seeing this as a way to promote his imperial and religious goals at once.94 New Englanders still refused to move, embracing the safety afforded by the marginality of

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their region, which created a haven for their experiment in creating a godly society. Forced to choose between their identity as English (with a responsibility to participate in imperial projects) and their identity as an exclusive community of saints, they chose the comparative safety of sainthood. In doing so, they withdrew from the wider Atlantic arena, embracing godly isolation. In this respect, Cromwell’s conquest of Jamaica (and the New Englanders’ refusal to support it, despite the fact that it was promoted by their godly leader) heralded an end of sorts to New England’s engagement in the greater Atlantic world; hence, the historian William Robertson’s choice to end his history of New England with the conquest of Jamaica may not be as incongruous as it seems at first glance.95 The acquisition of Jamaica would eventually be seen as beneficial to the English state, but the campaign was deemed a failure in Cromwell’s own time. The expedition took no valuable Spanish holding, squandering a costly and unsuccessful attempt at conquering the major island of Hispaniola before retreating to the more marginal Jamaica. General Venables badly botched the landing at Jamaica, allowing the Spanish settlers to escape with their goods and slaves and paving the way for five years of guerrilla warfare against the English troops. The soldiers’ ill health resulted in extraordinarily high casualty rates, and the diseased and starving troops longed to leave the island. As one hostile Spanish observer put it, “Men died like brute beasts. This is not so serious for those who have lived liked beasts, obdurate in offenses against the Divine Majesty.” Under the circumstances, it was little wonder that settlers generally chose not to relocate to the island. Save for the tragic exceptions of the Nevis settlers and of the poorest Anglo–West Indians who enlisted in the original expeditionary force to escape poverty on their islands, the entire English Atlantic world kept the project at arm’s length. The military presence on Jamaica allowed the island’s use as a base from which to launch assaults on the Spanish-held mainland, and the navy raided Spanish settlements, following a quasi-piratical course that some thought was beneath the dignity of the protectorate. Despite a few profitable seizures of Spanish goods by the navy, Jamaica proved a drain on Cromwell’s treasury as well as a source of serious embarrassment.96 The Western Design, though it did not live up to Cromwell’s hopes for it, created an unprecedented state presence in the region. The Spanish governor of Florida was sufficiently impressed by the fleet that he launched an ambitious campaign to fortify St. Augustine, which so oppressed the local Indians that they rebelled.97 Not only in Barbados but also throughout the Caribbean, in the wake of the fleet’s appearance trade laws were enforced as never before. Just as the Barbadians feared, the attack on Hispaniola led to war between England and Spain. Fortunately for them the Spanish never attacked

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their island. Spaniards presumably stopped trading there, however, putting an end to an illicit commerce that had been carried on during peacetime. The presence of an English naval force and an army command in Jamaica drastically increased the reach of the state. The impact of their presence would have been even more strongly felt had ocean currents not slowed travel from Jamaica east across the Caribbean Sea to the English islands in the Leeward chain. When the navy did visit, it served as a reminder of the long arm of the revolutionary state, a reminder many settlers would have chosen to avoid. More than any other development of this era, the design underscored the reality that the English state wielded enormous power, far beyond what many other state rulers could command and dramatically more than Charles I had ever been able to muster. The naval war, fought first by a remnant of the navy that stayed in the region after the landing on Jamaica and then by privateers recruited by the state’s officials, had a chilling effect on colonial trade, particularly the contraband trade with non-English ships. The distances that usually minimized the impact of the English state on its colonies were reduced to a considerable extent by the state’s increased presence in the region from early 1655 until the Restoration. Given the unprecedented intrusiveness of the state and the powerful impact of the Lord Protector’s policies on the Atlantic world, it might seem that the colonists who envisioned a more egalitarian empire based on shared Englishness lost their battle. Unwelcomed attentions from the state—a state that did not generally consult with colonial leaders prior to making its decisions— marked the experience of many plantations. Yet appeals to the rights of freeborn English men made a powerful impression on the leaders of revolutionary England, setting limits on the level of coercion they would employ and inclining them toward compromise with settlers who opposed official policy. The state, though more powerful than ever before, still had a limited reach. Distance and the logistical problems associated with maintaining policies that lacked popular colonial support placed effective constraints on the implementation of central policy. England’s leaders remained open to the claims of shared Englishness and sought to employ this rhetoric to accomplish their own goals, as when Cromwell appealed to the pride in their Englishness to motivate colonials to participate in his cherished design. Above all, leading settlers did not want to be treated as a conquered people, like the Irish. In the sense of the term “empire” that denoted a defeated people subordinated by the victors, they did not want their colonies to be seen as imperial possessions at all, but instead as “plantations,” the term they had always used to describe the process of uprooting English peoples and replanting them in the wider Atlantic world.98 Rather than be viewed as analogous to the Irish, they

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wanted to be included in the revolutionary political community, among the men who had a say in policy making and whose rights were acknowledged and protected. Emphasizing the partnership that bound plantation leaders and the leaders of England helped to secure for the former their place in the political community. Their claims to the benefits of Englishness, though first framed in this era of revolution, would have a long history, one extending far beyond the Restoration of the Stuarts.

6 Lost Liberty and Laboring People in the Atlantic World

The English Revolution was ostensibly fought to put an end to Stuart tyranny, yet ironically it led directly to a sharp increase in unfreedom in the wider Atlantic world. Such was the case politically in Scotland and Ireland, where the governments were firmly subordinated to that of England after each was conquered in the early 1650s. Unfree labor increased as well. Indentured servants continued—as they had before 1649—to travel into the Atlantic to be employed on New England farms, Virginia and Bermuda tobacco plantations, and Barbados sugar estates. But they were joined by other bound laborers, those who were forcibly transported because they were caught plotting or taking up arms against the government or were subject to transportation during the campaign to subdue Ireland. The pace of free migration declined, held steady, or increased slightly, depending on the region, while the numbers of bound laborers rose sharply during these years. The interregnum governments used prisoner transportation, from the battlefield, from Ireland, and from the criminal courts of England and Scotland, to rid themselves of unwanted individuals. The government also reorganized the heretofore limited trade with Africa and encouraged English merchants to begin exploiting the trade in slaves in order to satisfy the needs of Barbados planters. The role of the English revolutionaries in fostering the trade in unfree peoples became a source of scandal late in the interregnum, contributing to the general disillusionment that paved the way for the Restoration. The landed settlers who demanded respect for their rights from the revolutionaries joined them in benefiting from the massive trade in unfree labor. The position of landowning colonists depended on their ability to participate profitably in the transatlantic trade that brought slaves, convicts, and indentured servants to the colonies. Like the colonial elite that sold and bought their persons or their time, the men and women being traded wanted freedom from subordination. The (often involuntary) settlers at the bottom of the colonial social hierarchy strove to achieve freedom and the financial security that came with land ownership. The massive influx of laborers therefore 183

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placed enormous pressures on available land and stretched the geographical limits of English colonization. Conflicts with Native American, Dutch, and Spanish claimants to the land resulted. Plantation society was shaped in large measure by the need to accommodate this burgeoning population, as colonial leaders worked to maintain the steady stream of laborers into the colonies and to deal with the various threats their presence brought. The English Atlantic world took shape in this atmosphere of rising unfreedom and ongoing struggles over rights. The desire for self-determination was felt up and down the newly created social scale throughout the English Atlantic. The aspirations for freedom of slaves, bound servants, and debtors shaped the society they were helping–often against their own wishes—to build. As ex-servants resisted servile employment and strove for independence, their former masters turned to using slaves, whom they would never have to grant their freedom. The desire of lowly settlers to own land exacerbated the drive to expropriate the lands of Native Americans, causing repeated clashes with indigenous populations. The need to defend elite interests against uprisings and runaways placed demands on colonial governments to police their populations and provide internal security. The questions of rights and liberties and the fears of enslavement that elites expressed had their corollary in the aspirations of those below them in colonial society. As elites struggled to present themselves as the equals of the men who ruled the English Atlantic world, they were insulted to find themselves lumped in with those who had been transported to labor in their fields. Colonial leaders wanted to create a community of interest and identification with those who held the reins of power, but they had to fight against the increasingly common image of Atlantic communities as sites of liberty lost, populated by the scum of the earth. The legacy of this era of draconian labor practices and heightened concern over rights would remain central to the English and later the British Empire in the Atlantic. During the 1640s and 1650s, the Atlantic proved its capacity as a nearly insatiable market for labor. Prosperous colonists from Massachusetts to Surinam sought to buy the labor of transported prisoners as well as servants. In Barbados, where sugar had been cultivated since the early 1640s, the supply of workers from England, Scotland, and Ireland—whether voluntary or involuntary—was insufficient. Barbados planters therefore began importing large numbers of African slaves. When colonial elites demanded their rights and sought to maintain local control over trade and other matters, they were thinking among other things of their need to acquire laborers. Those who threatened to take away their rights as freeborn English men were in effect threatening to deprive them of the ability to buy slaves and other coerced laborers. As they tussled with merchants and England’s rulers over the profits

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generated by the burgeoning Atlantic economy, they also presided over a massive movement of people into the English-controlled settlements in the Atlantic basin. Migration into the English colonies shifted in favor of bound labor during the 1640s. This development occurred in two parts: the rate of voluntary migration slowed with the end of the “Great Migration” of the 1630s, while the movement of unfree labor continued and even rose.1 In the early 1640s the flow of people out of the Stuart kingdoms into the Atlantic shifted, with a marked diminution in the proportion of voluntary migration to the northern mainland colonies. The outbreak of war in England drastically reduced the influx into New England as potential migrants chose to remain in England, hoping that the situation there was improving. That migration stream reversed itself (from New England back to England) after 1642, as some erstwhile settlers threw their lot in with Parliament during the civil wars.2 The impact of this sudden drop in New England–bound settlers was so dramatic that the region experienced a depression. The rudimentary colonial economy having developed initially around supplying the needs of the newly arrived, the abrupt end to migration sparked a financial crisis.3 Although the decline in migration of free settlers also affected other colonial regions, the drop had less impact on more southerly destinations. Free migration into these regions fluctuated over these two decades, apparently rising at the end of the civil wars, at least in the Chesapeake.4 In addition, because they absorbed large numbers of bound laborers, the Chesapeake and the West Indian colonies did not experience the same sharp decline in overall migration that New England did. The areas that received most of the migrants between 1642 and 1660 were those with a high and growing demand for unfree labor.5 Quantifying immigration into the Atlantic basin for these two decades is made difficult by the paucity of sources. In generalizing about mid-century migration, scholars have largely relied on lists prepared for London in 1635 and for Bristol beginning in 1654. The situation for other times and places must be inferred from other records. It is not possible to document the migration of most of the people who traveled to the Atlantic plantations in these two decades (or, for that matter, at any time in the seventeenth century); yet migration continued during these years, and a judicious use of sources permits some generalizations about its nature and extent. The domestic State Papers list between four thousand and five thousand transported, mostly in the 1650s; the Colonial Papers enumerate over six thousand, but many more entries in these sources give no number but refer vaguely to “prisoners.”6 Because the colonial regions that continued to receive large numbers of migrants were those

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with high demand for bound labor, it can be extrapolated that many of the involuntarily transported went to those destinations. The plantation economies of the West Indian islands and the Chesapeake created a demand for servants that merchants worked to fill. New Englanders were also eager to receive servants, but the trade into that region was modest in comparison to the volume of servants moving into colonies farther south. Headrights (land allotments paid to migrants or their sponsors) recorded for servants brought into the Chesapeake indicate that bound laborers continued to arrive in that region throughout the century, but especially in the period before 1660.7 The demand for laborers in Barbados was even higher, exacerbated by high mortality and low birthrates among slaves; sugar cultivation increased both demand and the death rate after it was introduced in the early 1640s. The relative decline in voluntary migration by free settlers meant that bound laborers came to dominate the movement of peoples. Because the demand for labor was so great, and because the indentured servant system did not yield a sufficient supply, planters and their suppliers turned to other, more coercive mechanisms for recruiting laborers during the 1640s and 1650s. Accurate information about labor conditions was slow to spread to potential servants, but, as working people became aware of problems in particular New World destinations, recruiters had more difficulty lining up volunteers to travel as laborers to those ports.8 One method of overcoming the shortage was to enact laws within the colonies that provided for an involuntary term of service as a penalty for various offenses, including debt and petty theft. In this, Anglo-Atlantic law departed from early-seventeenth-century English precedents. Any Barbados man who fathered a child with a servant woman owed her master three years of his own labor, for example. Anyone stuck in prison because of an inability to pay fees or fines was placed as a servant to pay off that debt. This law followed Mosaic precedent, as the New Haven colonists appreciated, but it was adopted even in those colonies that did not revise their law codes along biblical lines. In early Antigua, the punishment for the servant who became pregnant by a nonChristian (that is, an Indian or African) was especially severe. She owed double her contracted time to her master, as compared to the servant who did not become pregnant but was caught engaging in intercourse with a “heathen,” who had to serve only one additional year. In Jamaica, killing livestock that freely roamed the island was punishable by a three-year term of service to the owner of the dead animal. Irish ex-servants with “no constant or settled place of abode” who were caught visiting homes or plantations where their country men or women worked as servants could be whipped and sentenced to a year’s service in Barbados.9 A second strategy was to trick free people into service. Ships’ captains hired to remove soldiers from Jamaica (where

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many were clamoring to go home) allegedly took them to Virginia to be sold as indentured servants. Soldiers impressed for the Western Design had initially feared that the purported military campaign was a hoax and that they were to be sold to fight for “some foreign prince” or into slavery. That some may have been sold as laborers after surviving their grueling experiences in Hispaniola and in Jamaica suggests that these fears were based in a New World reality.10 In England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, coercive methods of labor “recruitment” moved to the fore. Paupers, prisoners of war, political dissidents, and Irish Catholics were all sentenced to labor in the colonies in an effort to rid their homelands of their presence and to increase the pool of workers. Colonial planters had purchased indentures for criminals and the vagrant poor since the earliest years of colonization. From its first decade, the Virginia Company had taken the destitute off the streets of London, as well as convicts whose sentences were commuted to “transportation”—deportation and a stint of forced labor.11 The practice continued and expanded in the 1640s and, especially, the 1650s. One of the earliest efforts by Hugh Peter, while he served as agent for Massachusetts, was to arrange for destitute children to be sent there as servants. This undertaking was unusual in that the children were not destined for staple crop plantation labor and the recruitment campaign was treated as an act of charity, with funds collected to pay transportation costs. It was later rumored that the children involved had been kidnapped and then misused in the colonies. One of the children was murdered by an overzealous master bent on correcting him. Unlike the Peter project, the usual recruitment was strictly a business enterprise, with little pretense at charitable intentions and no attempt to garner public support.12 Many of the people who were shipped to the colonies against their will went as a result of official and semi-official transportation. The authorities continued to order the transportation of prisoners and the destitute, as they had before the war. Other colonizing governments, such as that of Sweden, had similar policies.13 In 1646 the keeper of Winchester House Prison sought permission from the House of Lords to discharge prisoners (confined only for various misdemeanors) to the keeping of Captain William Fortescue—“a gentleman of quality” active in the Atlantic trade—so that he could transport them to Barbados.14 As for paupers, they were similarly assumed to have no say in the matter of their departure. Lord Broghill observed to Cromwell’s secretary John Thurloe that beggars could be sent regardless of their wishes, a policy he may have utilized in Scotland, which he then governed.15 The diarist Ralph Josselin laconically reported hearing in the 1650s that “they took up many loose wenches at London, to send over to Jamaica.”16 Such mass deportation, while perhaps newsworthy, did not upset the general public as the

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kidnapping of randomly collected children (potentially of all social classes) did. One young son of an elite family had been kidnapped in a port city and shipped to Virginia in 1646, a story that came to light only later when he published his experiences.17 The wars that wracked the three kingdoms added to the numbers of men available for forced transportation. As early as 1643 one London newsweekly reported that all cavalier prisoners in and around the city were to be transported to prevent them from serving as a fifth column to the royalist army.18 In 1648 the royalist Mercurius Elencticus threatened its enemies, “those Bloody Villaines,” with sale to Barbados as “slaves” in return for similar treatment accorded the loyal Welsh.19 Scots prisoners were shipped in 1648, by order of Parliament. In that year too, Mercurius Melancholicus accused “the sanctified Babes” of intending to send the king to Barbados to “strip Tobacco for his Living” and to sell all cavaliers as slaves there. The astrologer William Lilly thought he saw a prophecy about men made merchandise fulfilled in the sale of Scots prisoners of war to Barbados in 1648.20 The following year witnessed an increase in prisoner shipments, with the Somers Islands receiving numerous consignments. Many other prisoners apparently went directly from the battlefield, without specific order of Parliament.21 While Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Cromwell noted that armed insurrectionists taken there would be sent to “the Tobacco Islands” to work.22 As Mercurius Politicus reported in 1650, Virginia and Barbados were the favored destinations for these laborers.23 After the royalist defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, many prisoners were transported. Even New England received a sizable number at that time. The first blacksmith in Springfield, Connecticut, was a Scots prisoner, his indenture bought by John Pynchon. Other New England–bound prisoners of war were employed in the Saugus ironworks, one of the region’s most heavily capitalized projects, and one that relied on bound labor.24 A group of Scots prisoners later claimed that they had been duped into longer terms of service in Bermuda than the state had mandated, but the justices would not let them out of their contracts.25 After Parliament’s decisive victory in 1651, shipments continued. The government shipped rebels routinely, especially to Barbados and, by the late 1650s, to Jamaica.26 In 1654 the Perfect Diurnall printed a report from Dalkeith (English headquarters in occupied Scotland) that recommended sending “Rebels to Barbados, [which] will something tame these wilde people.”27 Four years later the commander of the army in Jamaica similarly declared that there was “no place fitter to tame such restless spirit.”28 Records from the 1650s mention traitors, pirates, vagabonds, felons, and rebels among those serving time in the West Indies.29 According to Edmund Ludlow, tyrannous major generals under the protectorate frequently used threats of transporta-

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tion to stifle dissent. Many observers accused Cromwell of pursuing this policy.30 Royalist observers in Europe referred to transportation as a policy that forced the king’s supporters “to worke and begge in a strange land.” The Roman Catholic priest Antoine Biet, who visited Barbados in 1654, claimed that not only royalist prisoners but also their families were laboring there.31 Martin Noell, one of the most successful London merchants trading in America, received numerous contracts to transport prisoners.32 In 1657 a “Report Concerning the Affaires of America” urged the Lord Protector to send Scottish Highlanders as servants to be handed out to the army officers on Jamaica in lieu of their pay.33 Like Scotland, Ireland yielded prisoners who could be forced to labor. During the Irish rebellion, a Protestant vicar attempted to persuade Irish rebels to abandon their vengeful course and seek refuge in America; the gentlemen seemed to consider the idea, but others had to return to him to ask “what country that America was.”34 Later in the decade, rebels would go, whether they knew what country America was or not, with little choice in the matter. While reconquering Ireland in the campaign of 1649–1652, Cromwell ordered prisoners sent to the islands to work. After Ireland was subdued, the English moved to clear large stretches of the country for Protestant settlers either by transplanting Irish Catholic residents to a reservation within Ireland, in Connacht, or by transporting them to America. The plans for Ireland mandated transportation for widows, orphans, and others left destitute by years of war and by the departure of a large number of soldiers at the end of the conflict. Transportation never attained the limits allowed in the policies adopted by the conquering English, but thousands were sent to the plantations as laborers in the 1650s. Henry Cromwell’s famous offer of a thousand Irish girls for Jamaica was made possible in this context: “Although we must use force in takeinge them up, yet it beinge so much for their owne goode, and likely to be of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not in the least doubted, that you may have such number of them as you shall thinke fitt to make use uppon this account.”35 One shipment of Irish boys included children so young that a Virginia woman tauntingly asked a boy if his “Master brought some cradles to have Rocked them in.” Eventually the authorities came to rely more heavily still on transportation to solve their Irish problems. The death sentence for those who refused to be transplanted within Ireland was soon changed to transportation.36 In 1655 a policy aimed at Irish rebels who murdered “loyal” residents allowed for the transportation of four randomly selected papist rebels from any area where unsolved murders occurred.37 The commissioners for Ireland repeatedly dispatched imprisoned priests.38 Many of the Irish went to the West Indies, where Montserrat had long been predominantly Irish and most islands had sizable and growing

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contingents of Irish laborers. Those who were shipped to early Anglo-Jamaica under a commuted death sentence might just as well have stayed at home to suffer execution, given the atrociously high death rate there among new arrivals.39 Other Irish went to Bermuda, where they proved “a disruptive influence.” Virginia enacted a law in the late 1650s to make the indentures of Irish servants longer than those granted to others.40 The supply of laborers from Ireland, Scotland, and England was insufficient to meet colonial needs, despite the multitude of strategies used to force workers into plantation labor during these years. Although the death rate for newly arrived Britons in the islands and in the Chesapeake improved after the initial period of colonization had passed, numerous laborers invariably died during the voyage or the “seasoning” period. The deaths of so many laborers during their term of service blurred the line between a sentence of seven years and one that was for life. Those who survived, however, eventually won their freedom and had to be replaced. Planters sought to buy laborers regularly, either to replace those who were lost through death or termination of their contract or to augment their labor force in order to cultivate sugar on a grand scale. The demand seemed endless, but the supply from the former Stuart kingdoms was not. Despite the many subterfuges used to augment the supply of laborers, after about 1650 the British Isles and Ireland could not yield enough workers to keep the sugar works running and the tobacco moving to market. Given problems with supply, planters, especially in Barbados, where the demand rose most rapidly, turned increasingly from the 1640s to African slaves.41 Enslavement of African as well as Indian people represented the most extreme form of coerced labor practiced in the Atlantic basin. Slaves worked in the colonies from a very early date, initially making up a small portion of the overall workforce. Scholars have debated how the institution of slavery came to be adopted by the English in America, since it no longer existed in their homeland by the early seventeenth century.42 Some evidence indicates that the boundaries between slavery and freedom were more permeable at first, when slaves were few and the system was not yet well articulated. This was probably truer of the small number of slaves who arrived in New England, the Chesapeake, and Bermuda before 1660 than of those who went to the West Indies. It was apparently not true of the short-lived Providence Island Colony, which, prior to its conquest by the Spanish in 1641, had relied heavily on enslaved African labor.43 By the mid-1630s the governor of Barbados and his council had decreed that all “Negroes and Indians, that came here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Contract was before made to the contrary.”44 Although some Indians and Africans may have been bound by temporary labor contracts and some slaves became free, slavery as an institution was associated solely with non-Europeans.

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The shift toward increased reliance on slave labor that occurred first in Barbados was linked there to the development of a highly profitable sugar industry. The introduction of sugar has received enormous scholarly attention, as it did at the time from contemporaries. Two planters, James Holdip and James Drax, reputedly led the move to sugar cultivation. As early as 1643, Holdip was, according to one report, “bound for England to apply hymselfe to his Majestie to grant that noe other Sugars may bee imported into his Majestie Dominons but such as are made upon the Barbados, and they will be bound to furnish the Kingdomes with as much a[nd] as good as all other Sugars.”45 Holdip’s effort to arrange an exclusive market for Barbados sugar failed (not the least because the king had other things on his mind), and his promise to supply all of England’s sugar was probably unrealistic at this early date anyway. But the sugar industry continued to develop, so that by decade’s end, according to Richard Ligon, it had been perfected.46 Given that sugar was not yet widely cultivated and that the demand for it was on the rise, the planters who could afford to make the transition to sugar profited enormously. Over the long term, a few successful planters consolidated their landholdings and edged out many of those with less acreage. Those who were squeezed out might then migrate to other colonies.47 The prospect for great profit fueled not only the drive to purchase slaves but also the continuing demand for labor from Europe. At the time of the royalist rebellions, Barbados, with the most brutal labor regime in the Atlantic basin, exhibited the most intense alarm about the prospect that the English state intended to enslave the island’s planters. The rhetoric of liberty held particular power at this moment: planters criticized policies that would deny them access to cheap labor and therefore to continued prosperity. That prosperity relied heavily on the enslavement of African laborers. Scholarship on the shift to sugar and slaves has focused on the economic incentives that drove it—rising prices for indentured servants, falling prices for slaves, and shrinking supply of the former.48 In these accounts, the decision to become slave masters was automatic, made by rational actors—“profit maximizers”49—motivated by a desire for economic gain. Planters were swept up by the prospect of great wealth, and they began buying slaves, employing them to cultivate sugar, and expanding their landholdings to increase the acreage they had planted in cane. Yet these early sugar magnates were in fact called upon to defend their decision, and particularly the close economic ties to non-English traders that the new sugar-and-slaves regime involved. In articulating a rationale for their actions, they drew on the language of liberties, linking their right to continued access to slave labor to the rights of freeborn English men. This rhetorical move offers an example of the sort of compartmentalized thinking that allowed planters to enslave Africans while decrying threats to their own liberty, but it is more than that.50 The rhetoric assumed

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the audacity of treating an English man as one would treat an African, and created not simply compartments but a hierarchy, placing English (and other Europeans) over non-English others. The presence of their slaves showed the Barbadian planters the perils of lost liberty, making their rhetoric more shrill and their fears more intense. Slave masters knew whereof they spoke when they decried enslavement. English merchants eager to capture the American trade did not merely assert that they could supply all the needs of the planters, they strove to do so. The heightened interest in the slave trade in the 1650s coincided not just with the sugar boom in Barbados but with the merchants’ efforts to command all the trade with the islands. Prior to the early 1640s, the limited English trade with the West African coast focused on gold, exotic wood, and other goods. This trade was the monopoly of the Guinea Company. In the 1640s interlopers challenged the monopoly, although “company and interlopers combined were unable to satisfy the West Indian demand for slaves.”51 After 1650, the English government (acting at the behest of interested merchants) paid more serious attention to the African trade and the English role in it. Responding to a 1649 petition complaining of the Guinea Company, the Council of State threw open part of the West African coast to all English traders and ordered the company to redouble its efforts in the area left under its control.52 After this, the volume of English trade in slaves rose as merchants tried to live up to their assertion that they could supply everything the colonists needed, and could do so better than the Dutch. Documentation of the early African slave trade into the English West Indies is sparse, even more fragmentary than that involving the workers brought from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.53 The conventional wisdom has long been that the Dutch supplied the English in Barbados with slaves either from their plantations in Brazil or directly from their trade with Africa. The willingness of the Dutch to permit slave purchases on credit was thought to have been especially attractive to planters shifting over to sugar. More recent research into Dutch sources suggests that their role in the development of Barbados has been overemphasized, in terms of both sugar production technology and labor.54 Barbadians got their first slaves from various suppliers: traders from England and eventually New England who brought cargoes of slaves to sell on the open market, ships’ captains with whom the planters contracted in advance to bring them a supply of slaves, Dutch traders, and traders from other European nations. Scattered evidence for all of this varied activity exists in the surviving record. When Lord Willoughby became governor of Barbados in 1651, he dispatched a ship’s captain to “Guinnie” for slaves who could be put to work building fortifications in anticipation of an attack by the English Commonwealth.55 Barbados planters

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also purchased some slaves who were not African. Mainland colonial governments shipped Native Americans for sale in “the Western Islands” after military campaigns yielded up captives who could be sold.56 Slave ships also visited the mainland to capture potential laborers who were then sold in Barbados, but such raids apparently occurred only on a small scale.57 The first settlers on Barbados invited Indians living in South America to reside with them and teach them the ways of tropical agriculture; when representatives of the earl of Carlisle gained control of the island in 1629, they enslaved these Native Americans.58 The majority of slaves coming into Barbados, however, were from Africa, and their numbers rose over the course of the civil war and interregnum periods. David Eltis estimated that “between one and two thousand Africans a year arrived in Barbados in the 1640s, rising to 2,000 a year in the 1650s. By 1660 the island’s white and black populations were in rough balance.”59 Prior to 1640, slaves in Barbados had probably numbered only in the hundreds. The arrival of five hundred African slaves early in 1642 was a noteworthy event, remarked on in a letter a planter wrote to the trustees of the earl of Carlisle’s estate.60 Save for Providence Island (which had been captured by the Spanish in 1641 with a black majority), Barbados was the first English colony to invest heavily in slave labor. In making this shift in the 1640s, Barbados marked out a path that the other islands and the Chesapeake colonies would later follow. By 1660, when there were probably twenty thousand black slaves in Barbados, the other four Anglo-Caribbean islands in the Lesser Antilles collectively had just two thousand, Virginia had one thousand, and Jamaica had five hundred. The black population of Barbados surpassed the white shortly after 1660, but not until 1680 and 1690 would the same be true of Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, respectively. The Chesapeake never achieved a black majority, although Africans and African Americans would come to make up more than one third of the population in those colonies in the eighteenth century. The Somers Islands appear to have been similar to the Chesapeake in this respect.61 The servants and slaves caught up in this booming trade entered colonial society involuntarily, but, assuming they survived the seasoning process that killed some new arrivals, they too aspired to freedom and self-determination. Servants and slaves generally did not plainly state their goals and concerns for the historical record, and few documents presenting their perspective survive. Yet it is possible to see what working people throughout the Atlantic wanted by using sources that document how they acted. From New England to Surinam, the people at the bottom of society sought to ameliorate their condition. When the opportunity presented itself, they grabbed the chance to con-

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trol their own lives and livelihoods. This desire manifested itself in different ways, depending on prevailing circumstances, but everywhere this drive for a modicum of self-determination shaped the goals of the least fortunate in the Atlantic world. The laboring people who were imported into the English Atlantic in such large numbers in the 1640s and 1650s wished to end their servile status; many of them worked to become independent members of colonial society. At the end of a term of service, servants became free. This was true whether they had come to a plantation with an indenture contract or as the result of forced transportation. The settler population thus included growing numbers of ex-servants, formerly unfree laborers who had earned their freedom at the end of a set terms of years. Usually landless and often impoverished when they achieved freedom, they hoped to become small planters, owners of their own land. Land brought the hope of supporting oneself and one’s family. It promised a degree of autonomy. To be self-supporting was to call no man master. Smallholders throughout the colonies strove for such autonomy. Their aspiration was to join the “middling sort” who enjoyed this kind of personal independence. This group made up the majority of New England’s population and a smaller proportion of the populations of other colonies. The desire to live free guided the African slave as well as the white servant. In some colonies in 1650 it was possible for a man of African descent to become a small landowner. Anthony and Mary Johnson gained their freedom in Virginia sometime before 1650, and the couple acquired a modest estate on the colony’s eastern shore.62 What the Johnsons achieved, others sought. Unscrupulous men found it easy to entice slaves away from Barbados with promises of freedom elsewhere; once they had the escaped slaves on board ship, however, they proceeded to offer them for sale in another colony.63 Of course, some enslaved Africans wanted nothing more than to return home. An unknown number of slaves committed suicide, believing that death would transport them back to the land of their ancestors. Ligon describes one planter’s effort to disabuse his slaves of this idea in order to halt the rapid diminution of his labor force that would result from widespread suicide.64 The same focus on returning home motivated royalist gentlemen who worked to get back to England, there to resume plotting to restore the monarchy, except that the slaves saw no hope of returning in this life and so opted to rely on the guarantee that they would do so in the next. Other slaves, who did not share this belief or were unwilling to take such a drastic measure, focused their efforts on salvation in this world, reconciling themselves to the new land in which they inadvertently found themselves. Their best hope in some cases was to become free and to pursue a livelihood as a small landowner, as the Johnsons did. Free blacks are known to have resided in Ber-

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muda, Virginia, and Maryland, and they probably lived on other small islands as well. In Barbados, where the prospects for freedom and independence were poor, escaped slaves practiced maroonage (or escape to remote areas) for as long as that option was viable. As Barbados became not just a society with slaves but a slave society, the prospects for black freedom became more dismal.65 Jamaica, once the English invaded, hosted a number of sizable maroon communities that would continue as an independent presence well into the eighteenth century.66 The yearning for autonomy and the opportunity to own land motivated a mutiny among soldiers on Jamaica on the eve of the Restoration. The Spanish were not fully expelled from the island for five years after the invasion, and soldiers were kept in arms for that entire period. The men were not paid, nor were they free to leave the island. While they remained as an occupying army, others came to the island as free men and women to participate in its settlement. Pirates, invited by the commander Edward Doyley to use Jamaica as their base of operations to make up for the departure of the English fleet, tempted the soldiers with the promise of easy wealth. Merchants and settlers, attracted by the prospects of trade and land on the newly conquered island, also exploited opportunities. The soldiers, who had been conscripted in England or had signed on from one of the other islands, regarded the civilian population with envy and resentment. Finally they revolted, declaring that “they would live no more as an Army [and] they would have the island settled in Collony’s & make Constables & civil Officers.”67 They hoped to take up land and begin the work of planting or join the buccaneers who were preying on Spanish ships and towns. Some of the recruits had been servants who had joined the army in order to get their freedom and the riches that Spanish plunder promised, but the goals of freedom and wealth had not been realized. With the mutiny of 1660 they made another bid for freedom and for a chance to live as independent landowners in colonial society. The mutiny was put down, the leading conspirators were executed, and the goals of the soldiers were disappointed once again. At the Restoration, however, they would receive freedom, land, and even some back pay, in the form of a “gift” from the king.68 Land was thus central to the aspirations of all those at the bottom of the colonial social scale. While the colonies absorbed massive numbers of unfree laborers who wanted and had some hopes of gaining their freedom, the pressure to expand colonial boundaries continually mounted. Though not the only factor driving expansion, since land speculation by elites was also important, the aspirations of the middling sort and those beneath them in the social hierarchy dramatically increased the demand for land. The population of all the English-controlled colonies rose sharply over the twenty years from 1640

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to 1660: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard estimate that it rose almost threefold over that period.69 On the mainland, such growth propelled expansion to the west and north. Expansion in the Chesapeake followed the waterways, moving inland along their courses. Settlement in New England pushed deeper into the interior with the founding of each new town. Population increase in the islands continued until all the suitable land had been brought under cultivation. Barbados was deforested by 1660 as a result. As pressure on land became acute in these islands, those who hoped to acquire land had to move away. Alfred D. Chandler estimates that during these two decades nearly ten thousand persons left Barbados for the Leeward Islands, New England, the Chesapeake, Surinam, and Jamaica.70 In the Somers Islands, population growth quickly depleted the supply of arable land. By 1640, Bermuda had already become a source of settlers for other colonies, and men and women left there to participate in an ill-fated attempt to plant St. Lucia as well as numerous other plantations.71 Not all the migrants were ex-servants, of course, for some of the pressure to expand (especially in New England) arose from natural increase of the population; but former servants were a major segment of the population of all the colonies south of New England, and they did much to drive the expansion in the Chesapeake and the West Indies. Expansion led to conflicts with Native Americans, who were anxious to put a stop to it, and in some cases succeeded in doing so. The inhabitants of the South American region the Europeans called “Surinam” (today’s eastern Venezuela) drove out the first English settlers who set up a colony there.72 Numerous island colonies had to be abandoned after attacks by Carib Indians. The Caribs used a number of islands on which they did not maintain year-round settlements, and they attacked any European settlement established on one of these islands. In addition, they wished to maintain a buffer zone around their own principal islands and tried to vanquish any settlement that came too close. Caribs prevented English expansion onto the islands of Maria Galante (1640), Tobago (1640), and St. Lucia (1641), as well as at least one settlement attempt on Barbuda. The Caribs would have liked to eliminate the English on Antigua as well, but despite frequent forays (including one that resulted in the kidnapping of a leading planter’s wife and children), they were unable to reclaim it. Island defense, however, was a constant concern for Euro-Antiguans.73 One historian of Montserrat believes that there must have been similar raids on that island until the early 1650s, although no record of such attacks survives for either Montserrat or Nevis. On St. Christopher, the French and the English who divided the island negotiated a treaty of mutual defense to forestall Indian attacks. After the first decade, when the English massacred the resident Caribs and fended off retalia-

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tory attacks, the Caribs may have given that island up for lost.74 Mainland North American colonies similarly confronted Native American resistance to expansion, as many scholars have documented.75 The English settlers in Surinam, the only South American colony claimed by the English, also feared Indian war in the late 1650s.76 Overlooking this history of sporadic Anglo-Indian warfare, the anonymous author of a statement detailing how to build an empire declared that the English concentrated their efforts in areas where the natives were too weak to resist. Once settlers arrived in Virginia, New England, Antigua, St. Christopher, Montserrat, and Nevis, the natives simply withdrew, according to this account.77 Settlers in all those locations no doubt wished it had been so easy to expropriate Indian lands. The relationship between labor, land, and slavery was clearly articulated in 1645 by sometime colonial resident Emmanuel Downing, who wrote to advise his brother-in-law John Winthrop on the best course to pursue: “I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee get into a stock of slaves suffitient to doe all our busines, for our Childrens Children will hardly see this great Continent filled with people, soe that our servants will still desire freedome to plant for them selves, and not stay but for verie great wages. And I suppose you know verie well how wee shall maynteyne 20 Moores [Africans] cheaper then one Englishe servant.”78 As Downing realized, the prospect of owning land, free for the taking as far as the English were concerned (at least until elite land speculators became involved), made it difficult to keep servants, for they had other aspirations. Downing neglected to mention that Native Americans occupied the continent that even the settlers’ grandchildren would be too few to fill. The claims of Indians, despite intermittent warfare and the continual threat of war, struck him as a minor point. Colonists and colonial promoters typically overlooked native claims and even the very presence of Indians. Although New England would not follow his advice by adopting slave over free or temporarily bound labor, other regions were already in the process of doing so. What slave masters found, however, was that slaves also wanted freedom, and the land that made independence possible, just as much as white servants did. When masters turned to slave labor, they soon had to create draconian codes in order to keep their slaves in bondage. Residents of all the colonies, however desperate their position, felt the same desire for self-determination. The most obvious way that servants and slaves made their bid for freedom was by running away. Debtors, too, frequently ran, facing as they did a term of service if they were unable to pay their debts. Running away was endemic in early America: every colony had laws against it. The governor’s council in Barbados frequently took up the matter of regulating servants and slaves, and

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the question of runaways was one of the major problems the system confronted. That workers would desert the sugar plantations if they could came as no surprise, but every colony, regardless of the work its bound labor force performed, dealt with runaway workers. Massachusetts included among the various duties of the constable the responsibility to return runaway servants and the power to impress men and boats to do so.79 In a study of servant protest in colonial New England, Lawrence Towner found that all types of bound workers—whether apprenticed, indentured, or enslaved—ran away. Not surprisingly, however, those with apprentice contracts were least likely to run. Rather they used the legal system to resolve their problems, a strategy that was facilitated by the fact that they often had relatives to intercede on their behalf.80 Other workers simply left, in hopes of finding better circumstances for themselves elsewhere. The runaway who was captured was, in many colonies, subjected to an increased term of service. Unlike in England, where the law required them to make up only the time lost, New World runaways faced a far longer term after deserting. One option runaways might pursue was to hire themselves out under improved conditions to another master. Colonial governments punished enticing servants away from their rightful masters, aware that in this labor-poor economy the temptation to do so was intense. The penalties for enticing servants closely followed English law, according to Richard B. Morris.81 Although the move to a new master was advantageous for the servant if it meant a shorter contract with better provisions, signing on for additional service time was a necessary expedient for men and women who could not otherwise feed and clothe themselves. Contracts the servant had a hand in negotiating (whether in England prior to sailing or in a colony) were more advantageous than those that were assigned by the authorities. Running away to a new position in the servile labor force often had something to recommend it, even if the ultimate goal of freedom had to be postponed. Where opportunity existed, however, both servants and slaves made the bid for complete freedom. A runaway might be able to live as a free person within colonial society, on its margins, or even entirely separated from it. On the mainland, runaways might hope to leave colonial society behind and live among the neighboring Indians. “The return of runaways had been an early subject of diplomacy between the English and the Indians,” Towner notes. In Connecticut, a penalty of three years’ imprisonment was ordered for anyone who went to live with the Indians, an effort to close off this escape route.82 Other colonies similarly worked to prevent the departure of their laborers to the native community. Runaways occasionally found Native Americans less than hospitable. In one New England case, an Indian allegedly murdered a servant he found wandering in the woods, which led to a conflict over English jurisdiction in such matters.83

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Another option was to join the ranks of the pirates who frequented colonial waters, especially in the West Indies where piracy was most common.84 Captain William Jackson, who sailed through the Caribbean on a privateering voyage sponsored by the earl of Warwick, collected men from St. Christopher and Barbados. Among the 1,500 to 2,000 men clamoring to join his crew on Barbados were the more desperate and discontented of the island’s residents, including debtors if not runaway servants.85 Piracy did not necessarily entail a life permanently beyond the law. Shaky colonial economies encouraged officials to look the other way so long as those with ill-gotten gains behaved reasonably well while spending their booty. Plymouth governor William Bradford noted that pirate Thomas Cromwell’s prizes gave a boost to the local economy, even though the man clearly deserved his death from a fall on his rapier that the Lord providentially bestowed on him later.86 Pirates, mostly French and English, gathered off the coast of Hispaniola, on the island of Tortuga, well situated to attack Spanish shipping. Their ranks were filled with seamen who had left the employ of legitimate trading ships as well as with poor debtors and ex-servants. They were often referred to as buccaneers, a term that indirectly suggested the group’s origins in the runaways who ended up on the margins of the West Indian settlements. “Buccaneer” comes from bouccan, meaning barbeque or smoke, and was applied to men who had fled plantation society to live off the cattle that roamed some islands. When the Spanish made a concerted effort to drive out these men beginning in about 1640, the displaced buccaneers turned to piracy, and the name “buccaneer” went with them. Tortuga continued as an important pirate haven through the late 1650s, when Colonel Edward Doyley invited the pirates to make Jamaica their base.87 Maroonage, living in the woods and other wild places beyond the reach of colonial government, offered another avenue for leaving colonial society entirely. In 1648 one plantation promoter, eager to steer prospective migrants away from Barbados to his own colonization project on the mainland, described that island as plagued by “many hundred Rebell Negroe slaves in the woods.” Six years later, despite the diminishing availability of uncultivated land on which to hide, the governor found it necessary to launch a hunt to capture runaways who remained at large.88 Antiguan slaves “hid in the jungled hills around Boggy Peak in the southwest corner of the island.”89 Jamaica boasted a sizable maroon population well into the eighteenth century. Slaves who had abandoned their Spanish masters shortly after the English invasion in 1655 formed the nucleus of this population, which would grow by natural increase and with the addition of other runaways. It was apparently with the English experience of Jamaican maroons that the Spanish word entered the Anglo planters’ vocabulary.90 Though not at this time using the term “maroons,” the mainland colonies apparently had an analogous situa-

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tion, in which escaped debtors and servants set up independent enclaves in the hinterland. The deputy governor of Maryland, for instance, complained in early 1647 of “Rebells and Robbers” who fled the province but returned to raid it for cattle.91 The presence of Native Americans made the complete independence of island maroonage difficult on the mainland. There runaways were more likely to live with Indians or take up residence in another plantation. Slaves and servants often fled to a neighboring colony, where they hoped to be out of the reach of the law. Responding to the labor shortage, prospective masters were tempted to hire those who turned up without asking questions. Magistrates in adjoining plantations tried to work out reciprocal arrangements to ensure the return of runaways; the Winthrop correspondence contains numerous references to efforts to get servants sent back to their legal masters. In a strange reversal of the trend toward depriving people of their liberty by shipping them to a colony, one London servant ran away from his master and traveled to Massachusetts in hopes of being free.92 The Confederation of the United Colonies of New England was created in part to facilitate servant returns, and the four member colonies fretted that runaways would head for Rhode Island, the only plantation excluded from the confederation in southern New England. Since the four had intentionally ostracized Rhode Island, they had created their own problems on this score. New Netherland was also a popular destination for runaways, both from New England and from the Chesapeake area. One of the many sources of contention between English New Haven and the neighboring Dutch was the harboring of runaways. Leonard Calvert, deputy governor of Maryland, proposed a runaway exchange to the government of New Netherland. When Calvert’s own province posed a threat to Virginia masters, since it was close enough for servants and slaves to use as a haven, a fugitive servant agreement was negotiated between Maryland and Virginia as well.93 Getting to another jurisdiction presented special challenges to island servants and slaves. Because St. Christopher was divided between the French and the English, laborers in one jurisdiction could easily flee to the other. Agreements about returning servants were eventually negotiated to prevent the attrition of the unfree labor force in each sector. On other islands, getting to a different plantation necessarily involved a boat, and boat theft was a perennial occurrence. Such theft was a major concern, not only for the loss of the property in the boat but also for the loss of the servant’s labor or the slave’s person that often accompanied it. Boats were also stolen in the Chesapeake to aid the escape of runaways there.94 A most dramatic case occurred in 1653 when a group of debtors and servants stole a Spanish ship that was riding at anchor in Carlisle Bay. They sailed to New England, where they

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claimed the ship and its cargo as a prize, legally seized. Barbados governor Daniel Searle wrote to Massachusetts Bay to ask for the ship’s return. The Bay government proved uncooperative, but the Barbados authorities arrested some of the men when they unwisely returned to the island.95 In a fairly typical example of interracial comity, a group of Bermudan servants and slaves stole a boat with the intention of fleeing in September 1658, but they were caught and ordered whipped.96 Without stealing a boat, runaways could try to leave by boarding a ship that was conducting business on their island. Laws penalized ships’ captains for taking servants or debtors out of many colonies. Barbados instituted a pass system that documented the departing resident’s freedom to leave, and captains who took on passengers without such passes could be punished. The same was true in New Haven.97 Seven Bermudan slaves managed to make it all the way to England, where they were rounded up (at considerable expense) and shipped back to the islands they had escaped.98 However they managed to get away, debtors threatened with servitude along with runaway servants and slaves reached other colonies with a frequency that alarmed colonial elites. Sir Thomas Warner, governor of the English section of St. Christopher, accused the French governor of Guadeloupe of harboring English and Irish who had run away from their creditors on St. Christopher.99 Runaway debtors were trying to collect from their own creditors in such numbers by 1642 that Antigua punished attorneys who brought suits in the island’s courts on behalf of those who had fled the island to escape payment of their own debts. Such audacious measures were no doubt pursued out of a desperate desire to set themselves up in their new plantation.100 English military men stationed on Jamaica captured Barbados runaways who had stolen a small vessel in order to win their liberty. When the commanding officer in Jamaica was recalled at the Restoration, he stopped in Virginia on his return voyage, where he saw many men who had fled Jamaica over the preceding five years.101 Virginia experienced increased incidents of running away in the 1650s and resorted to branding and shaving the heads of recidivists to prevent further departures.102 Servant and slave runaways were an established feature of the colonial labor regime, but particularly in the Chesapeake and the West Indies, where the life of a laborer was extremely onerous. The Western Design allowed a mass exodus of servants, if not slaves, from the various West Indian islands. The fleet sent out by Cromwell in the winter of 1654–55 carried instructions to recruit additional men from the islands. Many servants and debtors seized the opportunity to escape. General Robert Venables offered freedom to any bondservant who enlisted, provided he had less than nine months left to serve. Servants with more time remaining on

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their contracts were taken as well. The planters subsequently complained of the depletion of the white labor force. Some 3,000 to 4,000 took advantage of this opportunity from Barbados alone. Another 1,200 were picked up at St. Christopher and the other English islands in the Lesser Antilles. When the design proved a dismal failure, the officers blamed, among other things, the poor quality of the recruits, many of them “old beaten runaways,” for the outcome.103 With none of the recruits properly drilled or armed, the effort to blame the men of modest means who signed on from the West Indies for the failure of this ill-conceived and poorly managed campaign smacks of elitism and special pleading. Their reasons for joining, however, were consistent with servant and slave actions throughout the Atlantic world: they sought freedom and an opportunity to establish themselves as independent householders. In signing on for the Western Design, many of them died in that attempt. With the goals of freedom and autonomy in mind, relatively few of the enslaved or indentured workers in the Atlantic participated in armed insurrection. Rebel slaves and servants relished retribution against their oppressors, but rebellion was a far more risky avenue to freedom. Although the individual runaway stood a chance of slipping away undetected, men who rose in rebellion called the united power of all plantation elites down upon their heads. It was therefore a desperate measure. From 1641 to 1660, only a few rebellions or attempted rebellions have been documented. Barbados faced the most serious threat of armed insurrection. Its labor force was the largest in proportion to the overall population, while work conditions under large-scale sugar cultivation were more onerous than for tobacco workers, who were the majority elsewhere. Richard Ligon described Barbados planters as making ready for a siege by their “Christian servants, or Negro slaves.” The leading planters’ homes could be fortified to fend off attack. Planters even made preparations to throw scalding water down on besieging slaves.104 Servants conspired to revolt in the late 1640s, motivated by their sense that they were made “to endure such slavery,” according to Ligon. One of the servants who knew of the conspiracy revealed it to his master on the eve of the uprising. News sent from master to master around the island foiled the revolt. Ligon reported that eighteen men, “the first leaders and contrivers of the plot, were put to death, for example to the rest.” In the aftermath of this narrow escape, the assembly voted to set aside 15 November 1649 as a day of thanksgiving for deliverance from the “late insurrection of servants.”105 In late 1652 Barbados reportedly legislated against the importation of Irish “Tories” as servants because of an insurrection.106 The minutes from the Barbados Council survive for early 1654 to late 1658, and during that time the council adopted various measures to prevent revolts by servants and slaves. After the Western Design fleet drew off the “better affected freemen,” the elites worried that an

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uprising had become more likely. The governor wrote in 1655 to warn Cromwell of the possibility of a royalist coup led by high-ranking prisoners who might organize their disgruntled fellow servants.107 The workers were restive, and the planters were nervous as a result. Barbados slaves planned a major insurrection in 1659, which was prevented only at the last minute. Ten years before, Ligon had wondered why the slaves, “being more than double the number of Christians . . . [and] accounted a bloody people” (whose brutalization he documented in detail), did not commit “some horrid massacre upon the Christians, thereby to enfranchise themselves, and become Masters of the Island.” He decided that lack of weapons, the extent of their enslavement, and the difficulty newly arrived Africans experienced in trying to communicate across linguistic barriers prevented them from making a bid for freedom.108 A decade after Ligon’s departure from the island, the slaves had sufficiently overcome the problems with access to weapons and communication to plan a major revolt. This “barbarous Combination” and its suppression received extensive coverage in the London press based on letters from the island. The leader of the planned revolt was said to have been a “Prince” in his own country, where he had led great armies to victory. This information was reported not to suggest that unjustly enslaved royalty might rise up against their oppressors, but to point out the great threat such a skilled leader posed to the planters and others who profited from the sugar industry.109 The African prince played the role that Governor Searle feared elite royalist servants might: such men had the skills and breeding the planters thought necessary to orchestrate a successful conspiracy. The plot was only discovered with God’s assistance, a Barbados letter writer reported. The prince was executed as the ringleader. One account confidently declared that he died “for attempting against their Lives, whom he was bound by the Lawes of Nature to preserve.”110 After the revolt was put down, the planters renewed their efforts at patrolling for “stragling Negroes” and at checking for arms, “Spears, Lances, Clubs [and] knives.”111 Although Barbados was the center of insurrectionist activity, planters in other locales also feared revolt, and for good reason. Maryland servants took advantage of Ingle’s Rebellion (1645–46) to rise up against their masters, looting and running away; they contributed to the anarchy that was said to prevail in that colony for over a year. A 1657 runaway attempt by a group of Maryland servants bordered on armed insurrection, for, along with the boat they stole to make good their escape, they took “Gunns powder Shott” with which to thwart any effort to recapture them. In spite of this precaution, they were captured (apparently without a fight) and returned to servitude.112 Bermuda slaves plotted an insurrection in 1656. Like the Barbados servants of 1649, they were given away by some of their fellows, who bolted at the last

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minute. At a trial on 1 November 1656, three men were reprieved because, as “Instruments of the discovery of the plot,” they were considered “worthy of the favor of life.” The principal conspirators were identified as two slaves, Black Tom and Cabilecto, and a free man, William Force. All were sentenced to hang. Force, however, was threatened and possibly tortured—“putt to it to the uttermost”—in an effort to get him to reveal more. When he refused, Governor Josias Forster nevertheless commuted his sentence to banishment on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. In the aftermath of this conspiracy, Forster proclaimed that any African slave caught out at night without his master’s permission was to be killed “then & theire without merceye.”113 In the same year an anonymous author seeking to promote trade in Virginia warned of the possibility that the poor in that colony would combine with the Indians to attack the wealthy planters. A plot to capture the governor and council of Nevis was foiled in 1658, but the details are not sufficiently clear to reveal whether the rebels were disgruntled laborers or more substantial men.114 By the standards set elsewhere, the challenges confronting New England masters were relatively tame. The bound population made up a far smaller proportion of the population than was the case in the Chesapeake or the island colonies. Few slaves lived in New England prior to 1660, and these were at least as likely to be Indian war captives, especially the women and children taken in the Pequot War of 1636–37, as imported Africans. Servants, too, were less likely to be transported criminals and prisoners of war. Once in New England, bound laborers were dispersed into households that included generally not more than a few servants each. Unlike in the sugar and tobacco plantations, servants in New England rarely lived in sizable groups performing labor entirely distinct from that of the family that employed them. The iron industry was an exception, but it was small and absorbed relatively few servants. Every household head was expected to take charge of his servants, seeing to their education and being held responsible for their conduct. A master who failed to provide proper oversight would be hauled before the courts, and men were routinely punished for neglecting these duties.115 Although unfree labor in New England was structured in such a way that armed revolt was far less likely, the authorities remained vigilant nonetheless. Magistrates routinely passed laws intended to keep potentially rebellious servants and children under control.116 Even though they oversaw a less volatile social system, New England’s elites and household heads worked to keep their servile population under control. They largely succeeded because of the nature of the social system, with its preponderance of family farms and the relatively slight reliance on an indentured or enslaved labor force. Save for the enslaved Indian captives and a few imported Africans, New England had not developed a permanent class

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of servile laborers, so that most bound workers there could hope for eventual freedom and even a modest competency.117 When the authorities sentenced Samuel Gorton and his followers to hard labor in various New England towns after convicting them of heresy, this radically new policy failed. The “heretics,” uncontrolled by the household authority that usually monitored deviant behavior, preached to the townsfolk and came close to converting a few. The so-called “Gortonists” were soon sent away, to prevent the contamination of the population. Barbados could incorporate dissidents, absorbing them into the plantation labor pool, where, if they survived the seasoning period, they could be kept down through brute force. Massachusetts Bay had no such option. Its system worked because the vast majority of residents supported it and could be relied on to monitor the few discontented laborers in their midst. Rather than put dissidents to hard labor, the Bay generally banished them—wanting their ill influence even less than it desired their labor. Gorton represented a special case, since he was a nonresident thought to be contaminating the larger region. By drawing him into the Bay Colony, the authorities then discovered what should have been obvious: they lacked the mechanisms for keeping disruptive men at hard labor. The Gortonists might have been shipped to labor in an island plantation, but New England conditions were simply not suited to a policy of hard labor.118 Although it was considered a less desirable colonial region because it did not hold out the prospect of great wealth to a fortunate few, New England’s way was amenable to people of modest means who wanted a chance to support themselves and a family. Everywhere in the Atlantic basin the local leaders abhorred the social fluidity that characterized most early colonies. An identifiable elite group ran most colonies, although demographics hampered its ability to bequeath its status to its descendants in the manner of the eighteenth-century colonial elite.119 These early leaders hoped to see the social system solidify with themselves (and their offspring) at the top. They therefore confronted the aspirations of those below them with little sympathy. St. Christopher’s Sir Thomas Warner scoffed at the pretensions of men who had “gotten estates here out of nothing.”120 The exception was New England, where aspirants were likely to be the descendants of the first migrants rather than more recently arrived laborers; but even in New England, society’s leaders did not want settlers of modest means rising above their station. Sumptuary laws, which punished those who dressed as befitting a man or woman of higher social status, addressed one aspect of the problem of upstart colonists below the level of the elites.121 Colonial leaders from Maine to Surinam believed a social hierarchy necessary and salutary. Though they might acknowledge the differences between elite status in England and the wider Atlantic, they expected their position at the

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pinnacle of local society to grant them authority within that society. They occasionally underscored the fact that they had created a society out of nothing, out of “wilderness,” as the New Englanders often repeated. They believed that their contribution to the work of plantation building ought to ensure them a degree of autonomy within the empire. In many cases their hard work (along with good timing, connections, and health) was also the basis for their position within colonial society. While colonial elites saw themselves as set over the working people who toiled for them, English observers often viewed the Atlantic world, especially south of New England, as populated by the dregs of society. The supposedly low quality of the typical migrant affected the image of the social order in the Atlantic. As Henry Whistler put it in a famous passage about Barbados: “This Illand is the Dunghill wharone [whereon] England doth cast forth its rubidg [rubbish]: Rodgs and hors [Rogues and whores] and such like peopel are those which are gennerally Broght heare. A rodge in England will hardly make a cheater heare: a Baud brought over puts one a demuor comportment, a whore if hansume makes a wife for sume rich planter.”122 Another chronicler noted that Barbados and other island colonies had long been “a receptacle for such vermin” as England sent out and that they in turn were by the early 1650s ready to “vomit forth of their superfluities into other places.” He cleverly referred to men from Barbados as “barbarians,” a play on the island’s name that revealed his prejudices against settlers there.123 Lionel Gatford identified Virginia residents as “the very scum and off-scouring of our Nation, vagrants, or condemned persons.”124 Because the policy of transportation was widely known, it influenced the perception prevalent in England. Colonial leaders chafed at the insinuation that all migrants were dissolute or that the presence of some “scum” marred their society at all levels. They preferred to emphasize the great service they performed by taking troublesome persons off the hands of the authorities in England, Scotland, and Ireland.125 These conflicting images—disreputable colonists on the make versus responsible elites helping to relieve one of the England’s major domestic problems—capture the tensions surrounding the issue of self-determination. The transatlantic struggles over the extent of local autonomy revolved in part around this difference in perception. Planters presented themselves as the allies and, in this period of republican government and the eclipse of aristocratic influence in the Atlantic, the equals of the rulers of England. They envisioned themselves ruling their plantations in cooperation with the Commonwealth. Whereas the government of England wanted to treat them as subordinates, with no claim to exercise power locally, they sought control over local affairs. To dismiss their claims to authority, English observers tended to minimize the distinction between colonial elites and the “scum” they routinely dispatched to work in New World fields. Impressed by the vol-

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atility and fluidity of plantation society, they saw a community of upstarts. Planter elites embraced distinctions that allowed them to defend their place within colonial societies and in the larger Atlantic world. Both imperial officials and colonial laboring peoples challenged them. When they complained that the former intended to enslave them, they were also painfully aware that the latter sought to gain control over their own lives and choices within the volatile Atlantic economy. Only by dismissing their claims as unworthy of notice were sugar and tobacco planters able to justify their own attempts to create a less volatile social order beneath them. The massive shift toward unfree labor in the Atlantic world that took place during the revolutionary era created two difficulties for the authorities in England. The first was that as a policy for exporting threats to political stability, the transportation of prisoners was not fully thought through. The authorities eventually had to revisit the system to make sure it achieved their political—as opposed to economic—goals. When they sent individuals whom they hoped never to see again to Barbados to be sold as laborers, the authorities did not contemplate what would happen when the labor contracts expired. Servants who arrived without prearranged indentures served longer terms generally than those who voluntarily entered into contracts before embarking. Such terms could be lengthened if the servant was found guilty of crime or, in the case of a woman, if she gave birth during her term of service. But none of these contracts stipulated a life term. No European in the English Atlantic endured full-blown slavery, nor, save possibly for the Scottish colliers, did anyone in the British Isles or Ireland. Indeed, when the Dutch governor of Seara sent fifty Portuguese prisoners to be sold in Barbados as slaves, they were freed by the governor of Barbados because he believed that Europeans should not be so treated.126 So, assuming the laborer lived out the term of service, he or she would be free. The poverty of former servants worked to keep them in their original colony, where they eked out a living as nominally free laborers who hired themselves out to planters. The debts they incurred often tied them to a specific locale, preventing them from taking advantage of land available elsewhere. These colonists rightly feared being forced into servitude again to pay their debts.127 Authorities in England generally confronted how debt limited migration only when they wanted to relocate settlers to populate a particular plantation, such as Jamaica.128 Otherwise, colonial governments dealt with the problem as best suited creditors. Legislatures enacted various laws to keep debtors from departing without paying, and on the island colonies they were aided in this effort by the natural barrier created by the sea, which hampered debtors’ attempts to flee.129 Despite these obstacles, it was still possible for ex-servants, once free, to acquire the wherewithal to return home. In Barbados one Scots plantation owner, James Browne—who disgusted English officials erroneously believed

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held high office on the island—was said to be freeing prisoners transported from his homeland, some of whom returned to Scotland and created difficulties for General Monck there.130 In a highly celebrated case at the end of the decade, royalist conspirators transported after the 1655 Salisbury rising returned to England to petition for redress.131 A young nobleman from the European continent, who had fought under Charles II at the Battle of Worcester and was transported afterward, persuaded his master and some European merchants who were trading in Barbados that he was the wellconnected man he claimed to be. As a result he won his freedom.132 His experience pointed to the problem of social status in the application of this system: even Barbados planters hungry for workers blanched at subjecting elite men to the drudgery of field labor. Gentleman servants were more likely to earn their freedom and arrange their return home because their social status gave them a claim on the assistance of other gentlemen. These were men who had been transported for their dangerous political views, as opposed to petty theft or vagrancy. These were the men Cromwell, Monck, and their fellow leaders least wanted returning. Although it may generally have been true, as the royalist historian the earl of Clarendon averred, that “their treatment was such that few of them ever returned to their own country,” those few who did were too many from the point of view of the interregnum rulers.133 By 1655, the authorities in England, though they increasingly relied on the policy of transportation to rid themselves of troublesome individuals, had become aware of this problem. In transporting Irish priests to Barbados, the government officials stationed in Ireland directed the ships’ captains appointed to remove them to take special care “that they may be so employed as they may not be at liberty to return again into this nation, where that sort of people are able to do much mischief by having so great an influence over the Popish Irish here, and of alienating their affections from the present government.”134 In the same year, aware of reports from Scotland of trouble stirred up by returnees, Oliver Cromwell, by that time Lord Protector, wrote to the governor of Barbados, Daniel Searle, scolding him for letting transported prisoners of war go free after their terms of service had expired. Searle replied that he had never received orders authorizing him to detain such men indefinitely, adding that he was currently holding a few since learning of the protector’s displeasure. Searle then proceeded to explain the indentured servant system to Cromwell, noting that as currently constituted, an indenture contract did not ensure that undesirables would be permanently detained.135 Indentured service in the colonies and transportation had converged because planters wanted labor, merchants wanted to collect the fees for supplying that labor, and the government wanted to rid itself of the unemployed and political antagonists. The occasional repatriation of condemned men proves that

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the fit between the economics of labor recruitment and the politics of transportation was not perfect. A second difficulty for the English authorities in relying so heavily on transportation to solve its political and military problems at home arose from the popular hostility toward the policy and toward the government as a result of it. Animosity generally focused on accusations that young people were being taken without the permission of their parents or guardians. One critic of the practice said that even Native Americans condemned spiriting children away to America.136 The popular outcry led Parliament in 1645 to pass an ordinance against kidnapping children. Since the only remedy the ordinance provided was the search of all ships riding at anchor, the problem was clearly linked to the trade in plantation servants.137 To quell the rumors that children were being forcibly shipped, the Admiralty Court sent its marshal to check all ships in London in May 1645. He found only twelve beggar boys bound for Barbados. Although they were willing to go, the Admiralty Court publicized their names so that any concerned adult who wanted to intervene would be able to do so.138 The Middlesex County Records include many references to spiriting and to fears of spiriting; this crime of kidnapping potential laborers for shipment to the colonies seems to have been dominated by women in the years before the Restoration.139 John Hammond, on observing the misery of the London poor, declared himself loath to mention the prospect for self-improvement in Virginia “for fear of the cry of, a spirit, a spirit.”140 In 1657 authorities interviewed a shipload of servants and found that eleven were being held against their will. Two of the women were willing to go, but only if they could go ashore to collect their clothes before the ship sailed.141 In another scandal, soldiers in London were caught preparing to ship people to Jamaica illegally. That the men implicated were from Cromwell’s own regiment added to the outrage.142 Not only “spirit,” applied to a person who kidnaps, but also “barbados,” for the act of spiriting someone away, entered the language at this time, in reference to the practice of nabbing laborers intended for the colonies.143 Prisoner transportation to plantations came to be widely known and roundly hated by opponents of the government. Much evidence from occupied Scotland supports this claim. In one clash a Scotsman involved in killing captured soldiers reportedly said “that he had no Barbadoes to send them to, but would send them either to Heaven or Hell.”144 In 1654 prisoners on board a ship for Barbados rose up against the crew as they were leaving Scotland. Only a rescue launched by the crew of an accompanying ship prevented their success.145 General Monck offered temporarily to set aside the wellknown policy of transporting rank-and-file soldiers captured in an engagement in order to encourage men to lay down their arms as he worked to quell

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an uprising in 1654–55.146 Examples of popular hostility toward transportation could be multiplied, for it was expressed on numerous occasions. So many people were shipped to the colonies in the 1640s and 1650s that the English Caribbean islands became associated with the idea of lost liberty in the popular imagination. The press did not focus on the injustice of African or Native American slavery, although these were becoming more common in the English Atlantic at this time. Rather it depicted the Atlantic as a place of English enslavement. Many different types of evidence document this development, including two bizarre pamphlets published in 1655. These fictional accounts purporting to be factual news reports were among many such outlandish tracts published during this era. Three Great and Bloody Fights and A great and wonderful Victory exhibit the widespread concern about the prospect of English slavery. After Cromwell dispatched a large navy and army on the Western Design in the winter of 1654–55, the English public anxiously awaited news of both the details of the plan and its outcome. At the time, given the vagaries of relations with the major European powers, it was unclear who Cromwell was more likely to attack, the French or the Spanish. Eager to scoop the story, the two anonymous pamphlet writers produced highly sensational and entirely inaccurate reports, and these fictitious accounts demonstrate the association between America and English enslavement. Both relate how the fleet sent by Cromwell attacked French West Indian settlements where English men and women were kept as slaves.147 The former account offered the additional and appalling information that their French captors tortured the hapless English; the latter noted that the French forced their slaves (both English and Native American) to fight in defense of the island. The first account, which provided such detailed information as the names of the islands in question, announced that Martinique had already been handily taken while St. Christopher was currently under siege. A great and wonderful Victory was more vague as well as more optimistic: it declared that the English had captured an unnamed colony and seized great riches in the process. In these fantastic relations the authors drew on fears of loss of liberty and projections of that loss onto the remote and exotic Caribbean islands to fabricate information for which the public was eager. Both accounts present the English as intensely vulnerable. These fabrications are highly revealing of how the English reading public conceived of the Atlantic world at mid-century.148 A major scandal associated with the Atlantic praxis of unfreedom rocked the interregnum government in 1659, highlighting the implications of coerced labor policies for the liberties of English men. Marcellus Rivers, perhaps in the company of a fellow Salisbury gentleman, Oxenbridge Foyle, made it back to England from exile in Barbados. The two had been among those transported after John Penruddock’s ill-fated royalist uprising in 1655.

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In England they petitioned Parliament on behalf of all transported prisoners, representing them as unjustly enslaved English men. Rivers, Foyle, and the many others transported as convicts, prisoners of war, and royalist conspirators were not literally chattel slaves. Rivers and Foyle had been sold as indentured servants for a set period, during which they retained basic rights. But indentured servitude in the colonies was more onerous than in England even under the best circumstances, and those who were compelled into long-term indentures to perform field labor endured a relatively degraded form of service. That men of gentle birth had been subjected to such treatment shocked the English public. The case of Rivers and Foyle helped turn popular opinion against the government. It also facilitated the association of the protectorate with tyranny and degraded labor. The petition and a companion pamphlet, published to sway public opinion, drew on the rhetoric of the rights of freeborn English men. It brought the degradation of New World labor into public view.149 The petitioners equated their appalling experiences with those of enslaved Africans in Barbados in a calculated attempt to shock. As one participant in the parliamentary debates observed, the idea that English persons had been enslaved like so many Africans “almost set the nation in a flame.”150 The genteel status of the two leading petitioners made their plight a scandal, since elite men were not to be treated as they had been, whatever their political offenses. The contrast between the expected status of a freeborn English man and that of the slave was drawn repeatedly and with great indignation. A pamphlet on the case, Englands Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize (1659), dwelled on the fact that the prisoners were treated like animals or common English criminals. Especially egregious was the alleged lack of a fair trial, which denied a basic English right. Criminals and later prisoners of war had been transported to the colonies in the past, but these people had been either duly convicted or captured in arms. Rivers and Foyle denied that they and their fellows fell into either category. Instead the men had been summarily condemned to transportation and servitude, “a thing not known amongst the cruell Turks, to sell and enslave these of their own Countrey and Religion, much lesse the Innocent.” Such references to the tyranny of the Turks were increasingly deployed in criticisms of the government.151 Members of Parliament fulminated against the outrages described by the petitioners. Martin Noell, himself responsible for the transportation of many men, declared, “I abhor the thoughts of setting 100£ upon any man’s person”—meaning, of course, any English man’s. “The selling of a man is an offence of a high nature,” declared another member, who was also thinking only of his fellow English. Vane, recently released from prison and sitting as an M.P., denounced the enslavement of Rivers, Foyle, and the others as nothing short of “Barbarous.”152 Both the Lord Protector under whom these pol-

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icies had been pursued and the Barbados planters who put these men to hard labor were implicated in these denunciations. Edmund Ludlow would later observe that Cromwell had lightly dispensed of English lives in the West Indies and English liberties at home. The case of Rivers and Foyle could be said to demonstrate that he had disregarded English liberties both at home and in the West Indies.153 If such practices were allowed to continue, one parliamentarian complained, “our lives will be as cheap as those [of] negroes.”154 The outcry targeted Cromwell (who was by this time dead), but in fact the system of prisoner transportation had been a feature of every government to come to power since 1649. The public scandal contributed to the disillusionment that paved the way toward the Restoration. The Restoration, however, would not put an end to the transportation of political prisoners to the Caribbean islands. The society that took shape in the English Atlantic world was marked by tensions over freedom and its opposite, over the desire to retain the rights of freeborn English men and the determination to deny autonomy to others. Along with other tensions—over the push for liberty of conscience and the need to define religious orthodoxy and godly living, over the desire for local autonomy and the drive for continued connection to a source of European authority—these issues profoundly affected the world that the English controlled in the wider Atlantic basin. In some respects it was a world that departed radically from European practices. The degree of diversity was unprecedented, as were the prospects raised by vast tracts of seemingly available land. In other ways it was a world that participated in trends that were also shaping England at this time, including the displacement of aristocratic authority, the formal embrace of revolutionary forms of government (accompanied by informal resistance to them in some circles), and the association of forbidden adherence to the Church of England with loyalty to the royal cause. The tensions within the English Atlantic between the aspirations of landowners, aspiring landowners, and those who labored for them may have been unique. But in the case of Rivers and Foyle, in which the tensions were depicted in terms of the lost liberty of innocent gentlemen, the central evils in the English Atlantic world represented all that had gone wrong with the revolution. The attack on Stuart tyranny and religious coercion was supposed to bolster liberties, protect property, and promote godliness. The scandal of Salisbury gentlemen enslaved in Barbados suggested just how far astray the revolution had gone. With this, the unfreedom of the exotic and distant Atlantic world was brought forcefully close to home, confronting the English political community with the excesses of the revolution and the danger of liberties lost.

Epilogue: The English Atlantic and the Limits of Restoration

The twenty-four men elected to the General Court in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1663 unanimously agreed that the box in which the King’s gratious letters weare enclosed be opened, and the letters with the broad seale therto affixed, be taken forth and read by Captayne George Baxter in the audiance and view of all the people; which was accordingly done, and the sayd letters with his Majestyes Royall Stampe, and the broad seale, with much gravity held up on hygh, and presented to the perfect view of the people, and then returned into the box and locked up by the Governor, in order to the safe keeping of it.1 This ritual demonstrates that the Restoration had come to the wider Atlantic world, as colonists revived or created solemn ceremonies to enact the authority of the king. But the moment was also highly revealing of the radically transformed context within which that so-called Restoration occurred. At the time of the outbreak of civil war in England, the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations did not exist. It subsequently won a charter from Parliament, even as that body engaged Charles I in a bloody civil war. The world of these colonists had literally been created during the years of revolution: their economic transactions, political activities, social milieu, and religious culture had all taken shape in the previous two decades. The collections of towns that made up the plantation in 1663 included not a single church or clergyman affiliated with the Church of England, most residents adhering to one of a variety of sectarian groups coming to be known as “dissenters” in England. The king could command the loyalty of these subjects, and they expressed it effusively, but they lived in a world not of his making.2 He had not even been in a position to oversee its creation. That he accepted that world more or less as he found it, leaving its religious, political, and economic structures largely intact, indicates the limits of Restoration in the wider Atlantic world. 213

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The royal government ostensibly sought to turn back the clock in the English Atlantic, erasing the signs of revolution and reasserting allegiance to monarchy and support for the Church of England.3 Charles, like the interregnum governments that ruled before him, wanted to ensure the loyalty of the plantations. His earliest colony-related act was to confirm Berkeley’s position as governor of Virginia, a reward for loyalty as well as a gesture reattaching that colony to the Crown.4 A month later, in response to a petition from merchants trading in the island colonies, Charles created the Committee for Foreign Plantations to hear all such petitions and handle other colonial business.5 From that point forward, most colonial business was conducted in response to requests from the governments of the plantations themselves (for charters, freedom from proprietary rule, and like) or from interested parties in England (for governors to be retained or replaced, proprietary governments to be reinstated, New England to be punished for its rebelliousness against authority and its persecution). The Restoration government thus adopted the use of the standing committee to oversee colonial affairs, developed first in the interregnum. The royal government, like the governments that had preceded it, wanted colonial officials to acknowledge its authority, especially by proclaiming the king’s ascent to the throne and administering the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy. Rumors that the revolution was on the verge of collapse had been circulating in the colonies since at least autumn 1659, so the news that Charles had indeed returned did not come as a complete surprise.6 Distracted by concerns closer to home, the Restoration government took some time to demand whether its Atlantic subjects had duly acknowledged its authority. Just as during the interregnum, news of momentous change at the center moved through the Atlantic unaccompanied by instructions. Plantations responded initially to the news as each saw fit. Some colonies quickly proclaimed the king: Barbados, Jamaica, the Somers Islands, Virginia, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Surinam. These most eager plantations can be divided into two groups: those finally free to act on royalist inclinations, and those desperate for the support of central authority, whosoever might be holding the reins of power. In formerly royalist colonies, continued local support for the king helped to smooth the way to Restoration. Barbados, Bermuda, and Virginia had been sites of royalist rebellions a decade earlier. News of the Restoration had arrived in Barbados by July 1660, along with Modiford’s commission from the king to continue as governor. It was read, the king was proclaimed, and the assembly was called in his name. Modiford greeted the assembly with, “You have been summoned in his Majesties name, the sweet sound whereof hath not for almost these ten years been heard in this Island,” a fact that the

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London press was pleased to report. Modiford then went on to characterize the “rash follies” and “rebellious errors” of the interregnum years. He required all assembly members to subscribe to the Oath of Allegiance. The king’s arms were put up in place of the state’s. When Humphrey Walrond became governor under the authority of Lord Willoughby that December, he proclaimed the king all over again.7 Berkeley proclaimed the king in September 1660, presumably shortly after word of Restoration arrived in the Chesapeake. When the Virginia House of Burgesses met in October 1660, Berkeley was newly styled “his Majesties Governor.” He had been elected to the seat he once held by royal commission the previous year despite his continued royalism, which had become a boon.8 In keeping with the best royalist and Anglican practice, the burgesses voted to set aside January 30, the anniversary of Charles I’s death, as a perpetual fast day and May 29, the anniversary of his son’s birth and of the Restoration, as a day of celebration.9 They also declared themselves deserving of death for their 1652 capitulation to Parliament.10 The Somers Islands heard of the Restoration via Barbados on 24 September 1660, and two days later the council scheduled the proclamation for 2 October. This was before the company order to make the proclamation, dated September, could have arrived from London.11 Residual royalism explains some of this support for Restoration, while a profound disillusionment with the chaos of the previous eighteen months encouraged others to accept the change as inevitable. Surinam, too new to have sponsored a royalist revolt, and Plymouth, always unsure about regicide, also quickly acknowledged the king’s authority. The date when Surinam heard about the Restoration is unknown, but by May 1661 rumors that it had occurred caused the elected governor to cancel all future elections on the grounds that the new Parliament had continued all officers until further notice. Although his machinations could be viewed as self-serving, his ability to use the Restoration to transform his elected office into an ongoing post bespoke widespread support for complying with royal policies.12 Plymouth, though never openly royalist, had been taken aback by the radicalism of the revolution. Its quick declaration of the king may have arisen from a long-standing discomfort with the excesses of 1649. There is no indication that Plymouth wanted to court royal favor in the hope of protecting its own interests, as it sent no agent or address to the king. It did call a special court in October 1660 to proclaim Charles II and altered the form of all writs.13 Inexplicably, the colony only returned consistently to regnal dating in 1668.14 These five colonies eagerly acknowledged the king, since some settlers at least had long been ready to do so. Colonies that were especially dependent on the favor of the central government—Jamaica as a poorly supplied military outpost and Rhode Island as a

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colony at odds with its neighbors—quickly proclaimed the king upon receiving the news. Jamaica heard on 15 August 1660 and immediately proclaimed the king, consuming one tun of brandy in the process.15 Official word of the Restoration did not arrive until the first anniversary of the event itself, on 29 May 1661.16 The commander Edward Doyley began using regnal dating in his official journal in January 1661/2, sixteen months after he proclaimed the king.17 Rhode Island proclaimed Charles, ordered all writs to run in his name, and adopted regnal dating at the first General Court after receiving word of the king’s return (October 1660). The government also commissioned John Clarke to ask for the renewal of the plantation’s charter.18 The supporters of the Gorges proprietary in Maine hoped to improve their fortunes at the Restoration. Seeing an opportunity to regain their independence from Massachusetts Bay, they declared theirs the legitimate government in the region in December 1661, and their first act (on Christmas Eve) was to proclaim the king.19 In the end it availed them nothing, but at the moment they appeared to have seized the opportunity to regain what they had lost over the preceding decades. Many colonies were slower to act or never acted at all, for reasons that the central authorities sought to understand. Maryland proclaimed the king in November 1660, two months after neighboring Virginia. The proclamation pointed out that Charles II did not need them to make him king but that they were happy to show their obedience.20 The remaining New England colonies were far slower than Rhode Island and Plymouth had been. Connecticut proclaimed the king at the General Court meeting on 14 March 1660/1, noting that a smaller, informal meeting of deputies and magistrates had recently agreed to send an address to Charles II as soon as possible.21 The Massachusetts General Court did not order the proclamation until August 1661, after a committee had considered the colony’s rights and duties under the charter (and after the colony had heard that it was being criticized for disloyalty).22 Only in response to specific and repeated instructions did the colony issue writs in the king’s name, in early 1663.23 New Haven, having heard that the king was affronted that it had neither approached nor proclaimed him, took the odd step of writing to Massachusetts to explain its actions. It proclaimed the king in August 1661, noting that Massachusetts had done so already.24 No records survive for Antigua, Montserrat, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or St. Christopher. The king received no addresses from any of these governments before the end of 1661. No evidence that they objected to the Restoration survives, although if they were dragging their feet like some New England colonies, that cannot be documented. The earliest surviving document from Nevis regarding the Restoration is a 1664 petition to Francis Lord Willoughby, but the council and assembly made up for any tardiness with particularly effusive language.25

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The king’s ability to reassert his authority over his Atlantic dominions and to have that authority accepted was uncertain only in sections of New England. Massachusetts and New Haven especially gave cause for concern. Damned first by their religious affiliation, these colonies did not help their reputations by the succor they gave to escaped regicides. Because they carried the onus of their religious orientation, these colonies (but not the Caribbean colonies whose reaction to Restoration cannot be documented) were viewed as questionable in their loyalties. Anti-puritan prejudice was strong in Restoration England and fueled calls for retribution.26 This onslaught raised concerns that the region would be officially punished for its alleged role in the revolution. Although the punishment exacted turned out to be relatively mild, the attacks on New England gave the impression that the region did not represent a safe haven for radicals, and few migrated there in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration.27 Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell, outlawed regicides, were exceptions to this general rule. Their flight to New Haven increased the negative associations surrounding the region and undermined New Haven’s hold on independent status. Although they later attempted to deny it, New England leaders knew of the fugitive status of the regicides from the moment they arrived in Boston. This did not stop the Massachusetts governor from embracing Whalley and Goffe in the street and escorting them to his home. At least one of the king’s advisers thought New England could serve as a dumping ground for the opposition, and he suggested that Charles announce his intention to ignore the transgressions associated with the region, in order to encourage dissenters to migrate there.28 The re-migration to England from New England that had occurred in the early 1640s did not reverse itself at the Restoration.29 Although radicals in England did discuss New England as a possible haven, few ultimately used it as such.30 Restoration was ultimately accepted throughout New England, in spite of the qualms many in the region had about the return of the king. Massachusetts never sent in its charter for reconfirmation (fearing revocation or alteration), but it did eventually accept the Restoration and comply, however grudgingly, with most of its provisions. New Haven ceased to exist, in part as a result of sheltering regicides. The machinations of John Winthrop, Jr., who arranged for the Connecticut charter to absorb its southern neighbor, also played a major role. In other cases, colonists did scramble to appear loyal. The Massachusetts General Court suppressed John Eliot’s millennial tract urging the creation of a biblically based government for England and praising the revolution.31 Massachusetts ceased to present itself as deserving special treatment because of its commitment to godliness—since that association hurt rather than helped it in the context of Restoration politics. Instead its leaders highlighted either the shared Englishness they had once subordinated

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to godliness or their great sufferings as migrants to the wilderness. Neither of these ways of framing their identity offended Restoration sensibilities in the way that claims to superior godliness would have done.32 Colonies might be more or less cooperative with the king’s agenda, but within three years of the Restoration they were all vowing their allegiance to his majesty Charles II. Along with acknowledging the king’s authority, Restoration policy required that the colonies reinstitute the Church of England. The king’s government largely left this task to the colonies themselves, just as the earlier mandate to tear it down had relied on local initiative. Intervention from the center occurred only in Jamaica, where no Church of England establishment had previously been attempted, and in New England, where concerted opposition to its mere presence created obstacles. The Council for Foreign Plantations ordered five ministers dispatched to Jamaica and funds set aside to pay them.33 Not all colonies were eager to see the change, especially those that had never had a Church of England establishment. William Hooke had written to his former neighbors in New England as early as March 1659 about his worries that many in England wanted to return to the old way of worship, so the order to restore the church did not come as a complete surprise. By October 1660 the Boston colonists had heard of the plans to reinstate the church in England. The following month leading resident John Hull held a private day of humiliation for “the state of our native country, it being like to come . . . under the bishops; the church countenancing the old liturgy, and formalities again to be practised.”34 In a gesture designed to rally the community to New England’s distinctive way, a Boston church held its first covenant renewal ceremony the following January, as its sense of being threatened by events in England increased rapidly.35 Charles II ordered Massachusetts Bay to tolerate communicants in the Church of England and to extend to them all political rights. Not until August 1664 (after the king had written again to command their cooperation) did the General Court comply; the new law stated that anyone wishing to vote needed certificates from both the minister and the selectmen of his town verifying that he was an orthodox property owner.36 The law would accomplish the king’s desired effect only if the ministers distributed certificates to those not in communion with their own churches. How this law was implemented is difficult to document, but it did contribute to a sudden rise in the number of freemen admitted to the colony’s rolls in 1665. These men were probably orthodox noncommunicants. No known Quaker was granted freeman status under the new law.37 As in the 1640s, when advocates used the changes in England to force changes in their own plantations, some governments moved to reinstate the Church of England without specific directives to do so. In Barbados, where residents reported seeing an apparition of Charles I wearing first a helmet and

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then a glorious crown, lay enthusiasm for the Church of England (and its martyr, Charles I) survived the interregnum. The revival of the old church may have motivated Daniel Searle, the Commonwealth’s governor of Barbados, to consider leaving the island, where he had settled as a planter after stepping down from the governorship, for New England in 1660.38 Virginia immediately ordered each parish to purchase a Bible, two copies of the Book of Common Prayer, and appropriate church ornaments. The burgesses also addressed the shortage of ministers, setting aside land for a free school and college in which to train prospective clergy. Vestries were to establish salaries to pay ministers in any parish that was without a clergyman and to appoint laymen to read the Church of England service book and to catechize children where a minister was unavailable. Virginia also petitioned the king to send ministers and to allow a collection in England to support a college in the colony where ministers could be trained.39 Somers Islanders did not show much initiative but accepted the orthodox ministers sent out by the company after the Restoration without apparent comment. One minister who had served on the island in the 1650s ceased to do so after 1660; another possibly unordained preacher was dismissed in 1662.40 Dropping obviously offensive incumbents and accepting more suitable replacements when these could be found was the extent of most Restoration-era ecclesiastical reconstruction efforts. The authorities in charge of reinvigorating the Church of England would probably have been satisfied with the religious profession of Robert Sanford of Surinam, who said his only religion was “obedience to the lawfull Power.”41 Adherence to the church had become a symbol of loyalty to monarchy during the previous decade, and it would continue to be so in the Restoration era and beyond. Institutional barriers continued to limit the extent to which the Church of England could be exported to the Atlantic plantations. With the shortage of ministers, colonial churches had difficulty obtaining appropriate clergymen. Restoration ecclesiastical policies eventually drove numerous men out of English, Welsh, and Irish pulpits, and many of those places could not be immediately filled. With demand in the kingdoms once again high, few men were interested in chancing an Atlantic migration in search of a position. A handful of men driven out of their pulpits withdrew to the colonies to continue their work in the ministry. John Myles, minister of a Baptist church in Wales, migrated with much of his flock to Plymouth, and there they founded the town of Swansea. Although clergymen with New England backgrounds might have returned to the colonies once the opportunities dried up in England or Ireland, those who migrated after 1660 tended not to be returnees.42 Colonial churches ostensibly attempting to attract Church of England clergy accepted ministers ejected in England for lack of a better option. The Suri-

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nam church employed John Oxenbridge from 1662 until the Dutch took that colony in 1667. Oxenbridge then went to Barbados for a few years before repairing to Boston, where he served until his death in 1674.43 A dearth of suitable clergymen, combined, in a place like Boston, with a lack of interest in employing such divines, put severe limits on the expansion of the Church of England. Many devotees went back to the simple prayer book faith of an earlier era, a faith some of them had never left. Although the Restoration authorities alleged that they wanted to turn back the clock on the Atlantic world, as if the “unpleasantness” of the previous two decades had never occurred, they were in fact enamored with many of the resultant changes and were either unable or unwilling to relinquish them. The population in the plantations had nearly quadrupled from 1640 to 1660.44 All facets of colonial life—economic and imperial, political and religious—had changed profoundly, and the majority of these transformations were accepted at the Restoration. The king retained Jamaica, despite rumors that he would not.45 He adopted wholesale the economic and imperial policies authored by the “usurpers” and embraced most of the economic structures that had developed during the interregnum. He acknowledged the local elites that had risen to power since 1640 and confirmed their landholdings and their right to meet in legislative assemblies. He dashed the hopes of proprietors, who expected to return to their former positions of lordship over much of the Atlantic world, instead following Parliament’s practice of canceling proprietorships to assume direct control of plantation governments. He accepted and even protected the religious diversity that had sprung up during the revolution. The Atlantic world had been transformed by its experience of revolution, and the king largely accepted those transformations. Charles I had lost three kingdoms and assorted dominions, but Charles II regained a fairly integrated empire, united by trade networks, commercial policies, and an imperial vision. The colonists themselves had taken advantage of the distractions of the 1640s to create trade networks that bound together the economies of the West Indies and the Chesapeake with that of New England. The development of New England as a shipping and mercantile center was most unexpected, as was the rise of sugar that fueled the Barbados economy. The trade in African slaves had grown from a scarcely existent practice largely controlled by the Dutch in 1640 to a booming commercial undertaking increasingly in English hands. The interregnum governments and the merchants who had a say within them had created colonial commercial policies that tried to funnel that trade into English coffers. By 1660, the number of Africans in the English-controlled colonies had reached 36,000, the vast majority of them slaves toiling in Barbados (27,000). Although Barbadians hoped it would be otherwise and asked for free trade,46

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the Restoration government welcomed both the bustling Atlantic trade and the regulations imposed on it. The only problem with the slave trade, as far as the new government could see, was that independent men of modest means had entered it. The king excluded these lesser men by granting control of the trade to his brother James, duke of York, and other nobles in the newly organized Royal African Company.47 A powerful commerce-based empire along the lines envisioned and fostered under the interregnum governments suited Charles, and he was happy to borrow heavily from the policies and initiatives of the previous two decades. While Ireland and Scotland lapsed back into their old relationship with the Stuarts, resuming the status of kingdoms within a composite monarchy, the plantations would continue after 1660 in the relationship forged over the preceding two decades. They were the semiautonomous dependencies of a powerful central state. With a monarch now at its head, the Restoration empire inherited most of its features from the interregnum. It was recognizably the entity that would later be known as the “first British empire.”48 Charles and his successors also accepted his expanded empire’s praxis of unfreedom. He not only accepted and promoted the slave trade but also endorsed the practice of transporting criminals, the poor, and the politically discontented to colonies. Inundated with petitions, Charles’s government financed the return of some transported royalists in the early 1660s. Yet, just as disloyalty to the Commonwealth and protectorate had resulted in the forcible transplantation of many royalists in the 1650s, so after 1660 could opposition to the king’s governance lead to transportation. Convicts, Quakers, and rebellious Scots were all sentenced to labor in the colonies under the later Stuarts, continuing a policy borrowed from Charles’s and James’s predecessors.49 Protests against labor conditions also carried over from the earlier period. Those who earned their freedom continued to desire land and autonomy, and their aspirations threatened a renewal of the Indian wars that relentless territorial expansion had brought in its train. After 1660, discontented servants might be labeled “Oliverian,” even though they continued in a tradition of protest that dated back at least to Oliver Cromwell’s time.50 Tarring those who desired freedom with the brush of the usurper damned all social and political criticism in the Restoration era. Under Cromwell, plantation owners had been just as eager as they would be later to find effective means to keep their laborers down. Jamaica was another legacy of the Restoration. The fruit of the Cromwellian imperial vision of anti-popish English hegemony in the Atlantic world, Jamaica was supposed to be returned to Spain at the Restoration. The soldiers stationed there, expecting to be released from service on the island and returned to their homeland, were overjoyed at the news of Charles’s return. Yet

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Charles quickly decided to keep all the new domains: Jamaica, the Bahamas (settled by exiles from Bermuda), and Surinam (settled by Lord Willoughby of Parham during the brief period while he was Carlisle’s governor in Barbados). The king sent “a gift” of money to all the surviving soldiers of the Western Design so as not to acknowledge that back pay was owed to them.51 Now paid, the soldiers could be dismissed (and could be expected to go peaceably), and a militia of more trustworthy planters committed to island prosperity and the king would henceforth protect Jamaica. Cromwell’s army, the privateers attracted to the island on his watch, and merchants who invested in it formed the basis of island society under Charles II. As they worked to draw a profit out of Jamaica in the coming decades, they would move it toward the Barbados sugar plantation model. Jamaica would eventually be the most profitable island colony, with an exploitive labor regime of the sort that had first emerged in Barbados in the revolutionary years. As with imperial and economic changes, Charles accepted the political reality that confronted him at the Restoration. His father had already indicated a willingness to accept resident landowners represented in a legislative assembly as the way to organize local politics in Virginia, and Charles II acquiesced to the widespread adoption of that system upon his return. With landowning as the basis of social power as well as of most men’s livelihood, colonists in many locations were eager to have their land rights confirmed against challenges from proprietors and other potential threats. As in Ireland and England, land ownership was a fraught issue in the Restoration Atlantic, and Charles moved to confirm local rights as had been done (at least tacitly) by the Commonwealth and protectoral governments.52 To the surprise of many, including the proprietors themselves, Charles resumed the revolutionaries’ attack on proprietary governments. Many former benefactors of the monarchy hoped to regain their Atlantic grants and pleaded with the king to restore their rights. Only Lord Baltimore, who still exercised authority in his province of Maryland (despite a poorly documented uprising involving his own appointed governor just prior to the Restoration),53 succeeded in retaining his grant. Otherwise proprietary colonies that had come under state control in the 1650s were subsumed as royal colonies after the Restoration. The Caribbee Islands were taken over by the Crown, although a complicated agreement was worked out to allow creditors of the Carlisle estate island revenues for some years, and Willoughby was allowed temporarily to resume the governorship.54 The extant charter companies—Massachusetts Bay and Somers Islands—continued to function just as they had done under interregnum governments. The king’s penchant for creating royal colonies did not extend to New England, interestingly. There he allowed the two newly chartered colonies to follow largely in the pattern set

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by Massachusetts Bay, in which local governance and company governance were conflated, except that Rhode Island and Connecticut were permitted to choose their own governors and councils only “for the tyme being,” a caveat that opened the way for appointed governors at some future date.55 The empire would become yet more centralized and organized before a monarch would exercise that option. Religion was the final aspect of life in the Atlantic world that Charles largely accepted as he found it. Restoration policy on religion in the plantations worked at cross-purposes. In this it was similar to interregnum policy. On the one hand, the government saw the reimposition of the Church of England as part of the project of ensuring allegiance to the king. This position gained strength over the first years of the Restoration as associations between religious and political radicals favored those who sought revenge. The king’s apparent preference, on the other hand, was to allow religious liberty. Because the king had more control over colonial policy than over policy in England itself, his inclinations did nothing to quell the diversity that had grown up in the dominions, especially in the previous two decades. He ordered his governor of Virginia “not to suffer any man to be molested, or disquieted in the exercise of his religion.”56 Given the king’s own views and the widespread diversity in the colonies, the Atlantic world continued to be as religiously diverse as it had been during the interregnum. One visitor to Barbados in 1661 described an established faith based on the Church of England but also the presence of many “heretics” drawn to the freedom available there.57 Lord Windsor, governor of Jamaica, granted liberty to all Protestants in Jamaica and allowed Quakers to avoid military service by paying for others to serve in their stead.58 Willoughby also announced a policy of liberty of conscience for his colony of Surinam, in an effort to attract settlers that drew at least two London freewill Baptist families. They found the toleration to their liking but wished that greater care were taken of community morals. Again, where liberty flourished, moral reformation received little attention. Policies at the center encouraged a few dissenters to migrate to the periphery, such as the radical London upholsterer and freewill Baptist who went to Surinam. Others were transported as punishment for repeat offenses. From April 1664 for three years, the penalty for a third offense against the conventicle law was a fine of £100 or transportation to a colony, save for Virginia and New England.59 Charles also continued the policy of government support for the efforts to convert New England natives to Christianity. New England won backing for this policy because Christianizing natives was widely popular not only in interregnum England and Wales but also in the Restoration era. The regicide Colonel Goffe attended an Indian lecture when he arrived in New England,

224 224

Epilogue

only a few steps ahead of the commissioners dispatched to bring him to justice for his part in the execution of Charles I. He was drawn to a sight that the godly in England had been longing to see for over a decade.60 Supporters of the project labored to make it palatable to the king.61 Thomas Thorowgood dedicated his 1660 Jews in America (which suggested that Indians, as descendants of Jews, ought to be converted) to Charles and tried to disassociate reformed religion from anti-monarchical sentiments so that Charles II could support the New England missions.62 The commissioners for the project in New England dedicated first the New Testament (1661), and later the whole Bible (1663) that it published in the Algonquian language, to the new king in a transparent effort to gain his approval for the project. Clarendon was apparently pivotal in saving the lands of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel, thereby making it possible to continue to finance the work.63 Accepting what had been accomplished while denying its revolutionary origins became a major agenda of the Restoration. Hence the Navigation Act of 1660 has often been treated as if it arose fully formed out of the Restoration mind, instead of being borrowed from the Commonwealth. Similarly, the Royal African Company’s origins do not include the opening of the African trade to the English in the 1650s by independent merchants who were subsequently displaced by the company. Many contemporaries worked to establish the illusion of continuity. Agent John Clarke continued the fiction that the parliamentary committee under the earl of Warwick that granted Rhode Island’s first charter had done so for the king and that the charter had been a “royal” grant. This position, though common in parliamentary circles in the early 1640s, had been rejected subsequently even by the Rhode Islanders, as when in 1659 they described their charter as arising from Parliament alone with no contribution from the king.64 Charles II responded in kind, stating in the new charter that he was continuing the policies of his “royall progenitors,” who had encouraged the migration to New England. That Charles I had promoted migration by forcibly reforming the national church and persecuting those who would not cooperate was conveniently set aside.65 Many people reworked the history of the previous two decades, especially to highlight their own loyalty to the Stuarts.66 Even Massachusetts made this attempt. Samuel Cheever’s poetical abilities were strained beyond their meager limits when he filled his 1661 Cambridge almanac with a long, old-fashioned allegorical poem that seemingly attempted to defend New England’s actions during the interregnum and since.67 If the reality of the Restoration was continuity with the regimes that preceded it, the official history posited that the interruption in Stuart rule had never even occurred. In the tradition of regnal dating that identified the first year of Charles II’s rule as the twelfth year of his reign, revolution was banished from memory.

Epilogue

225 225

This denial and distancing from the radical past may also explain why the revolution was often blamed on New England. In 1660, an anonymous pamphlet published in London presented New England, along with Geneva, Münster, and Amsterdam, as the source of “phanatical Principles.”68 George Downing succeeded in switching sides at the Restoration by blaming his energetic support of the revolution on his New England childhood.69 The only two men exempted from the general pardon who had not signed the death warrant or indeed played any official role at the king’s trial were both former New England men: Sir Henry Vane and Hugh Peter.70 When Fifth Monarchists revolted in 1661, terrorizing London before being captured, tried, and executed, accounts made much of the New England background of the ringleader, Thomas Venner.71 Those in Maine who sought independence from Massachusetts characterized the behemoth to the south as “a receptacle [of] Hugh Peter, Vane, Venner, Baker, Potter, who fly thither . . . for shelter, and keep us loyal subjects out of possession.” Blaming the problems that had beset the three kingdoms since 1642 on a distant dominion no doubt aided the healing process within England itself. Placing the origins of the revolution at a safe distance worked hand in glove with denying any long-term causes, as Richard Cust and Ann Hughes point out in showing how revisionism echoed royalism.72 Yet the Atlantic world of 1660 was very much a product of the previous two decades. In 1640, Charles I’s colonial subjects had numbered some fifty thousand people, most of them recent arrivals and the overwhelming majority of them of English origins. In 1660, the colonial population had risen to two hundred thousand. Many of these people were non-English, and the bulk of those who had arrived since 1640 had come in some state of unfreedom. The enslaved African population of Barbados had just surpassed its free population, and the reliance on slave labor and the major commitment to slavery was a new development.73 The number of African slaves in Barbados in 1660 equaled more than half the total population of the entire Englishcontrolled Atlantic two decades earlier. A rising dependence on slavery and convict labor was accompanied by an insistence on rights for the resident landowners in the colonies—rights to land ownership and political participation that the king recognized in the Restoration settlement. Slavery and freedom were already knit together in this society. The colonial environment was diverse in other ways as well: its religious diversity was unrivaled anywhere else in the king’s realm, save perhaps for polyglot London. Such had not been the case in 1640. Regional economic identities, intensive trade networks, and centralized trade regulation had all been born in the revolutionary decades as well. Charles II ruled an empire of plantation economies and commercial net-

226 226

Epilogue

works, an empire of landowners conscious of their rights and ready to defend them, an empire of slaves, and an empire in which religious dissenters were better organized and more numerous than his own Church of England adherents. All of that he owed to the time of the “late unpleasantness.” Although he would return to the practice of his father and grandfather and bestow vast tracts of land on his supporters (including his own brother the duke of York), Charles would never succeed—nor would he seriously try—to remake the empire in accordance with the semi-feudal vision that had once animated it. His Atlantic dominions would be commercial and diverse, wedded to slave labor and the rights of the local landowner. Although he made little attempt to change that, he never acknowledged the revolutionary origins of the Atlantic world he ruled after 1660.

Appendices Notes Index

Appendix 1 Population Figures, 1640

Population estimates for the first years of colonization must be based on what little contemporary information is available, and the reliability of these figures varies widely. To complicate matters, modern scholars often presented estimates without explanation. This appendix therefore explains how I arrived at my figures. Approximately 50,000 of Charles I’s subjects resided in the Western Hemisphere, scattered in the various settlements, moving from north to south.1 Newfoundland Maine Piscataqua (including Dover, Exeter, and Strawbery Banke) Massachusetts Plymouth Providence Plantation Aquidneck Connecticut New Haven Long Island Maryland Virginia Bermuda St. Christopher Nevis Antigua Montserrat Marie-Galante St. Lucia Barbados Providence Island Trinidad

200 500 500 12,500 2,300 100 500 1,600 800 200 600 8,100 2,000 3,650 3,900 450 2,000 100 200 10,000 350 300

Total

50,850

Newfoundland, 200: includes 100 newly arrived settlers plus an unknown number of colonists remaining in three other settlements that had been 229

230 230

Appendix 1

previously established and largely abandoned, totaling probably a few hundred. See Gilliam T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 116–117, 95–96. This population was augmented seasonally by the fishing fleets. Maine, 500: Estimated at about 1,000 in 1650, Maine’s population was well below that in 1640. In that year, Europeans resided in four villages and a number of fishing camps. See John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 103. Piscataqua (later New Hampshire), 500: The three independent towns of Dover, Strawbery Banke, and Exeter had probably fewer than 150 adult men in 1640. Because men certainly outnumbered women in the first two of these (men having been sent over to develop the region rather than to colonize), the total population was presumably well under the figure of 750 that the same number of men in a healthy population with a balanced sex ratio would imply. See Joseph B. Felt, “Statistics of Population in Massachusetts,” in Collections of the American Statistical Association, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Boston, 1845), 144. The estimate of 1,000 made by Albert H. Hoyt in 1876, and accepted as recently as David E. Van Deventer, The Emergence of Provincial New Hampshire, 1623–1741 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 62, is clearly too high. Massachusetts Bay, 12,500: In spite of the migration of as many as 21,200 into the region by 1643, the figure of 12,500 for 1640 is fairly widely accepted. See David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 68, 70, 50n; Robert Paul Thomas and Terry L. Anderson, “White Population, Labor Force, and Extensive Growth of the New England Economy in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 33 (1973): 657. Plymouth Plantation, 2,300: With 122 freemen living in six towns in 1637 and 219 freemen in eleven towns in 1643, Plymouth was experiencing its own miniature population boom in 1640, based largely on overflow population from Massachusetts. In 1643, the number of males over the age of fifteen was enumerated at 619, a figure that has long been taken to mean that the population had reached 3,000 by that year. Assuming that the number of immigrants per year remained roughly constant over the six-year period and that the ratio of militia members to freemen did the same, there would have been about 2,300 people residing in Plymouth in 1640.2 See Felt, “Statistics,” 143, for the figure 122; and Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 11, for the figure 219. For the census of

Appendix 1

231 231

fighting men, see Plymouth Records, vol. 8, Miscellaneous Records, 187–196. The source of the commonly accepted figure of 3,000 for 1643 is John Gorham Palfrey, The History of New England, 5 vols. (Boston, 1858–1890), 2:5–6, 6 n. 1. Providence Plantation, 100: Estimated to have a population of 100 by 1640 by Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribners, 1975), 20, 25. Aquidneck, 500: This settlement included the two towns of Pocasset (later Portsmouth) and Newport. John Winthrop put the population in 1644 at “above 120 families,” up from 80 men and their families in 1638. These figures suggest a population rising from 400 to at least 600 during that six-year period; in 1640 it might have reached 500. See Winthrop Journal, 516; James, Colonial Rhode Island, 25. Connecticut, 1,600: The growth curve in Connecticut would have been quite steep in 1640, since the three original towns had only been founded in 1636. By 1637 these towns contained, according to one estimate, about 800 people. In 1642 Lord Saye and Sele put the population of the region at 2,000, but exactly which settlements he referred to is unclear. See Greene and Harrington, American Population, 47. The population of Connecticut was very close to that of Plymouth (estimated at 3,000) in 1643, according to the military levy taken in that year. Hence the population in 1640 was on the rise from 800 to between 2,000 and 3,000 over the period 1637–1643. If it rose steadily from 800 to 2,500 over the six-year period, it would have doubled every three years, and in 1640 it would have been about 1,600. New Haven, 800: Although New Haven would boast a population roughly five sixths that of Plymouth or Connecticut by 1643, it was newly planted in 1640. In that year New Haven was two years old, Menunkatuck (later Guilford) was a few months old, and Wepowaug (later Milford) was being planned. The group that originally came to settle New Haven numbered 250, but they had been joined by others from Massachusetts. A different group set up the second town. Hence an estimate of 800 by the end of 1640 is perhaps justifiable. See Isabel MacBeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 55–57; Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1634–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 22–26; Greene and Harrington, American Population, 47. Long Island, 200: The English started two towns on Long Island in 1640, Southampton and Southold. The former was settled by 40 families, according to John Winthrop. John Trusloe Adams puts the total there between 100 and 200 people. The latter town was sponsored by New Haven and would later become a New Haven town. The settlers in Southampton were driven

232 232

Appendix 1

off by the Dutch, and many of them relocated in Southold for a time. The high end of the Adams estimate is probably appropriate for both towns in that first year. See Winthrop Journal, 327; John Trusloe Adams, History of the Town of Southampton (Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Hampton Press, 1918), 48–50; Peter Ross, A History of Long Island, 3 vols. (New York: Lewis Publishing Company 1902), 904, 134–135. Maryland, 600: The population of Maryland was about 600 in 1640. See Russell R. Menard, “The Immigrants and Their Increase: The Process of Population Growth in Early Colonial Maryland,” in Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland, ed. Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 89, fig. 4.1; Aubrey C. Land, Colonial Maryland: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1981), 8, 26. Virginia, 8,100: Virginia’s population estimates for this year vary from 7,500 to over 10,000, with Edmund Morgan making a strong case for 8,100. See Franklin B. Dexter, “Estimates of the Population in the American Colonies,” PAAS, n.s., 5 (1889): 23. 42; Menard, “Immigrants and Their Increase,” 89; and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 404, table 1, 400. Bermuda, 2,000: A Spanish naval officer shipwrecked on the island in 1639 estimated the households at 290, which would suggest a population of 1,450. See Juan de Rivera, “Shipwrecked Spaniards 1639. Greviances against Bermudians,” trans. L. D. Gurrin, BHQ 18 (1961): 25. Other estimates suggest a higher figure. Michael Jarvis puts the number at 2,500; “‘In the Eye of All Trade’: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Bermudian Society, 1612–1800” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1998), 763. William Castell (who had apparently never been there) thought 1,000 English lived in Bermuda in 1644; A Short Discoverie of the Coasts and Continent of America (London, 1644), 41. St. Christopher, 3,650: The island (68 square miles) was shared between the French and the English, with a separate government over each sector. The English section of the island was densely populated. In 1642 its governor stated that he commanded 1,600 fighting men; assuming that the percentage of men (44%) prevailing in the Leeward Islands later in the century was the same during this period, the total English population would have been 3,636, rounded up here to 3,650. See Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 121, for the figure 1600, and 127 for the Leeward population in 1678. Using the census reproduced by Dunn, I calculated the cumulative percentage on all islands of men (44%), women (24.5%) and children (31.5%).

Appendix 1

233 233

Nevis, 3,900: No contemporary estimate of the Nevis population exists for this period. In a 1639 petition Carlisle stated that the islands under his command were peopled by 20,000 planters. “Planters” usually meant colonists as opposed to the later, more narrow meaning, owner of a plantation. Officially these islands included all those under the Carlisle patent: St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Barbados. Deducting the figures for the other islands from the total of 20,000 leaves Nevis with a population of 3,914 (or 3,900) at this time. See petition of the earl of Carlisle et al. to the Privy Council, May? 1639, abstracted in CSPC, 295.3 Antigua, 450: At the time of an Indian attack in 1640 that killed 50 people, Antigua was said to have had just 30 families, which, in the Caribbean at mid-century, might translate into only about 100 people. But an estimate of 750 in 1646 and of 1,200 in 1655 suggests that 100 in 1640 is probably low (as does the fact that the loss of half of its tiny population did not bring the settlement to an end in 1640). Assuming a continuous growth rate (overwhelmingly through immigration) from 1640 to 1655, the figure for the former year would be 450. Vere Langford Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua, 3 vols. (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1894–1899), 1:xix. Montserrat, 2,000: Montserrat, dominated by Irish Catholics, had a Catholic population of 3,000 in 1646, according to the estimate of a priest working as a missionary there. Given a white population of only 2,700 in 1678 (and a total population of less than 2,800), the Jesuit’s estimate was apparently high; hence my estimate of 2,000. See Aubrey Gwynn, “Early Irish Emigration to the West Indies, Part 2,” Studies 18 (1929): 656; and Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 127. Marie-Galante, 100: An attempt was made by Thomas Warner to establish an English settlement on this small island (58 square miles), but the Caribs soon drove off the party (of unknown size) sent to colonize it. One hundred settlers seems to be typical of a modest attempt like this. See Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: European and Island Caribs, 1492–1763 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 47. St. Lucia, 200: A two-year-old settlement was faring poorly in 1640, when 140 settlers arrived to reinforce the colony. Two hundred settlers may have been on the island after the reinforcements arrived. See the Privy Council response to Captain Philip Bell’s request, 29 November 1640, in Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1613–1680 (Hereford: H. M. Stationery Office, 1908), 290; James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 152–153. Barbados, 10,000: Peter Hay, the proprietary agent, put the population of Barbados at close to 10,000 in 1640. Dunn asserts that it was not much more than 8,700 in 1639, arguing that previous estimates by scholars have been

234 234

Appendix 1

too high. See Sugar and Slaves, 55 n. 25. Also see “The Population of Barbados,” JBMHS 13 (November 1945–February 1946): 3–20. “Some Observations on the Island Barbados” estimates the 1643 population at 18,600 (white) men, clearly an excessive figure if Hay and Dunn are accurate for 1639–1640; Jerome S. Handler and Lon Shelby, eds., “A Seventeenth-Century Commentary on Labor and Military Problems in Barbados,” JBMHS 34 (1973): 117–121. Providence Island, 350: When the Spanish took the island in 1641, they found 350 English settlers (as well as 381 slaves). Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 338. Trinidad, 300: Probably fewer than 300 settlers remained in 1640, the remnant of a group that originally settled Tobago. Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 115.

Appendix 2 London Pamphlets about New England, 1641–1649

List of 125 London publications about New England, 1641–1649, by year Year

Author

Title

Residence

Position

1641

Chauncy, Charles [Cotton, John] [Cotton, John]

Retraction of Mr. Charles Chauncy Abstract of the lawes of New England Coppy of a Letter of Mr Cotton of Boston Way of Life God’s Mercie Mixed With His Justice Reasons against the Independant Government New World, or, The New Reformed Church Danger of Desertion Poor Doubting Christian

NE NE NE

Pro Pro Pro

NE NE Non-NE

Pro (*) Pro Anti

Non-NE

Pro

NE NE

Pro Pro*

Brief Exposition of . . . Canticles Churches Resurrection Modest and cleare answer to Mr. Balls discourse Powring Out of the Seven Vials True Constitution of a particular visible Church Profession of the Faith of That Reverend and worthy Divine Plain Dealing Chiefe Grounds of Christian Religion

NE NE NE

Pro* Pro Pro

NE NE

Pro Pro

NE

Pro

Ex-NE NE

Anti Pro*

New Englands First Fruits Letter of Many Ministers in Old England Letter of Mr. John Cottons Doctrine of the Church Soules Preparation (6th ed.) Whole Prophecie of Daniel Confutation of Infants Baptisme

NE Non-NE

Pro Anti

NE NE NE NE Non-NE

Pro Pro Pro* Pro Anti

Cotton, John Cotton, John Edwards, Thomas Homes, Nathaniel Hooker, Thomas Hooker, Thomas 1642

Cotton, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Davenport, John Lechford, Thomas Rogers, Ezekiel

1643 Ash, Simeon, and William Rathband Cotton, John Cotton, John [Hooker, Thomas] Huit, Ephraim Lambe, Thomas

235

236 236 Year

Appendix 2

Author

Title

Residence

Position

[Mather, Richard]

Apologie of the Churches in NewEngland Church-Government and ChurchCovenant Discussed Key into the Language of America

NE

Pro

NE

Pro

NE

Anti

C. C. The Covenanter Vindicated Antinomians and Familists Coole Conference Tryall of the New-Church Way in New England and In Old Keyes Of the Kingdom of Heaven Sixteene Questions Antapologia Anatomy of Independency Short Answer to A. S. MS to A. S. With a Plea

Non-NE NE Unkn Non-NE

Pro Pro Pro Anti

NE NE Non-NE Non-NE Non-NE Non-NE

Pro Pro Anti Anti Pro* Pro*

Apologeticall Narration Faithful Covenanter Modest and Brotherly Answer

Non-NE NE NE

Pro Pro Pro

True Copy Of a Letter Full Reply Briefe Narration Certain briefe Observations Letter Discovering the Cause Due right of Presbyteries Reformation of Church-Government Some Observations . . . Upon the Apologeticall Narration Answer to a libell Second Part of the Duply Answer to W. R. His Narration Short Story of the Rise, reign and ruine Bloudy Tenent of Persecution Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed Queries of Highest Consideration

NE Non-NE Non-NE Non-NE NE Non-NE Non-NE Non-NE

Anti Anti Anti Pro Pro Anti* Neutral Anti

Non-NE Non-NE Ex-NE Ex-NE

Anti Anti Pro Pro

NE NE NE

Anti Anti Anti

Dissuasive From the Errours of the Time Second part of that Book call’d Independency Not Gods Ordinance Vindiciae Clavium Covenant of Gods Free Grace

Non-NE

Anti

Non-NE

Anti

Non-NE NE

Anti Pro*

[Mather, Richard] Williams, Roger 1644

Ball, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Edwards, Thomas [Forbes, Alexander] Goodwin, John Goodwin, John, and Thomas Goodwin Goodwin, Thomas, et al. Hooker, Thomas Mather, Richard, and William Tompson Parker, Thomas Prynne, William R[athband], W[illiam] [Robinson, Henry] Rogers, Nathaniel Rutherford, Samuel Scotland, Church of [Steuart, Adam] Steuart, Adam Steuart, Adam Welde, Thomas [Welde, Thomas] [Williams, Roger] Williams, Roger Williams, Roger 1645

Baillie, Robertt Bastwick, John

[Cawdrey, Daniel] Cotton, John

Appendix 2 Year

Author

Title

Residence

Position

Cotton, John [Gillespie, George]

Way of the Churches of Christ Wholesome Severity reconciled with Christian Liberty Innocency and Truth Triumphing Together New-Englands Sence Breife Exposition of the Lords Prayer Exposition of the Principles of Religion Heavens Treasury Opened Immortality of Mans Soule Saints Guide, In Three Treatises Essence and Unitie of the Church Reply to a Confutation Fresh Discovery Moderate Answer New Englands Lamentation Sound Beleever Brief Narration of the Practices of the Churches in New-England Mercurius Americanus Truth gloriously Appearing Christenings makes not Christians

NE Non-NE

Pro Anti

Non-NE

Pro*

NE NE NE

Pro Pro Pro*

NE NE NE Non-NE NE Non-NE Non-NE NE NE Ex-NE

Pro* Pro Pro* Anti Pro Anti Pro Pro Pro* Pro

NE Non-NE NE

Anti Pro Anti

Plea for Congregationall Government Gospel-Covenant Irenicum Conference Mr. Cotton Held Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience Grounds and Ends of the Baptisme of the Children Milk for Babes Gangraena The Second Part of Gangraena Anapologesiates Antapologias Simplicities Defence against SevenHeaded Policy Heautonaparnumenos Visions and Prophecies of Daniel Mr. Peters Last Report Treatise of Mr Cottons, Clearing certaine Doubts Hypocrisie Unmasked Private-men no Pulpit-men

NE

Pro

NE Non-NE Non-NE NE

Pro Pro Pro Pro

NE

Pro

NE Non-NE Non-NE Non-NE NE

Pro Anti Anti Anti Anti

NE NE Ex-NE Non-NE

Pro Neutral Pro Anti

Ex-NE Non-NE

Pro Pro

Goodwin, John Hooke, William Hooker, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Hooker, Thomas [Hooker, Thomas] Hooker, Thomas Hudson, Samuel Phillips, George Prynne, William [Robinson, Henry] Shepard, Thomas Shepard, Thomas [Welde, Thomas] Wheelwright, John White, Nathaniel Williams, Roger 1646

237 237

[Baxter, Richard?] Bulkeley, Peter Burroughs, Jeremiah Cornwell, Francis Cotton, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Edwards, Thomas Edwards, Thomas Goodwin, John [Gorton, Samuel] [Hooker, Thomas] Parker, Thomas Peter, H[ugh] Twisse, William Winslow, Edward Workman, Giles

238 238

Appendix 2

Year

Author

Title

Residence

Position

1647

Child, John

New-Englands Jonas Cast up at London Bloudy Tenent, Washed Reply to Mr Williams his Examination Severall Questions of Serious and Necessary Consequence Singing of Psalmes Incorruptible Key Reply to Mr. Rutherfurd Temple Measured Mr. Peters Last Report Day-Breaking if Not The Sun Rising Simple Cobler of Aggawamm Word to Mr. Peters New-Englands Salamander

Non-NE

Anti

NE NE

Pro Pro

NE

Pro

NE NE NE NE Ex-NE NE Ex-NE Ex-NE Ex-NE

Pro* Anti Pro Anti Pro Pro Pro Pro* Pro

Good news from New-England Defence of the Answer

NE NE

Pro Pro

NE

Pro

NE

Pro

NE

Pro

NE NE

Pro Pro

Shepard, Thomas Shepard, Thomas Shepard, Thomas

Just Vindication of the Covenant and Church-Estate Way of Congregational Churches Cleared Survey of the Summe of ChurchDiscipline Responsio ad totam quaestionum Breif and excellent Treatise Containing the Doctrine of Godliness Certain Select Cases Resolved Cleare Sun-shine of the Gospel First Principles of the oracles of God

NE NE NE

Pro* Pro Pro*

[Mather, Richard] Hooker, Thomas Peter, Hugh Shepard, Thomas Winslow, Edward Winslow, Edward

Platform of Church Discipline Covenant of Grace Opened Most Pithy Exhortation Theses Sabbaticae Danger of Tolerating Levellers Glorious Progress of the Gospel

NE NE Ex-NE NE Ex-NE Ex-NE

Pro Pro* Anti Pro Pro Pro

Cotton, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Cotton, John Gorton, Samuel Mather, Richard Noyes, James Peter, Hugh [Shepard, Thomas?] [Ward, Nathaniel] [Ward, Nathaniel] Winslow, Edward 1648 Allin, John, and Thomas Shepard Cobbet, Thomas Cotton, John Hooker, Thomas Norton, John Norton, John

1649

* Denotes a tract somewhat ambiguous or apolitical in content.

Appendix 2 Summary by year Year

Position

Total for year

1641

NE Pro: 7 (incl. 2 ambiguous or apolitical) Non-NE Pro: 1 Non-NE Anti: 1

9

1642

NE Pro: 7 (2 ambiguous or apolitical) Ex-NE Anti: 1

8

1643

NE Pro: 7 (1 ambiguous or apolitical) NE Anti: 1 Non-NE Anti: 2

10

1644

NE Pro: 6 NE Anti: 4 Ex-NE Pro: 2 Non-NE Pro: 5 (2 ambiguous or apolitical) Non-NE Anti: 9 (1 ambiguous or apolitical) Non-NE Neutral: 1 Unknown Pro: 1

28

1645

NE Pro: 11 (5 ambiguous or apolitical) NE Anti: 2 Ex-NE Pro: 1 Non-NE Pro: 3 (1 ambiguous or apolitical) Non-NE Anti: 6

23

1646

NE Pro: 7 NE Anti: 1 NE Neutral: 1 Ex-NE Pro: 2 Non-NE Pro: 3 Non-NE Anti: 4

18

1647

NE Pro: 6 (1 ambiguous or apolitical) NE Anti: 2 Ex-NE Pro: 4 (1 ambiguous or apolitical) Non-NE Anti: 1

13

1648

NE Pro: 10 (2 ambiguous or apolitical)

10

1649

NE Pro: 3 Ex-NE Pro: 2 Ex-NE Anti: 1

6

Total: 125

239 239

240 240

Appendix 2

Residence totals (of 124 with known residence) New England: 75 Pro: 64 Anti: 10 Neutral: 1

Ex–New England: 13 Pro: 11 Anti: 2

Position totals (of 105 with strongly stated positions) Pro: 71

Anti: 34

Non–New England: 36 Pro: 12 Anti: 23 Neutral: 1

Notes

Abbreviations A. B., Brief Relation

Acts of Commissioners

Acts and Ordinances

AHR Andrews, British Committees

Andrews, Colonial Period

Barbados Council Minutes

BCR BDBR

BHQ BL Bodleian Canny, Origins of Empire

A. B., A Brief Relation of the Beginning and Ending of the Troubles of the Barbados with the True Causes Thereof (London, 1653) Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, vols. 1, 1643–1651, and 2, 1653– 1679, ed. David Pulsifer, in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, [vols. 9 and 10], (Boston, 1859) Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, 3 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1911) American Historical Review C. M. Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622– 1675, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 26, nos. 1–3 (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press 1908) Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1934– 1938) Barbados Minutes of Council, Lucas Transcripts, 7 February 1653/4–21 December 1658, microfilm edition, UNESCO Mobile Microfilm Unit, 1960 Colonial Records, Bermuda, Bermuda Archives, Hamilton, Bermuda Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller, 3 vols. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982–1984) Bermuda Historical Quarterly British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford University The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 241

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Notes

CEB CMHS Connecticut Records

Correspondence of RW

Coventry Papers CP Craven, Southern Colonies

Cromwell, Writings & Speeches CSPC DNB

“Doyley’s Journal”

“Father Antoine Biet’s Visit” Foster, Briefe Relation

Harlow, Colonising Expeditions Hay Papers HJ HMC Hull, “Observable Passages”

Colonial Entry Books Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, Prior to the Union with New Haven Colony, May 1665, ed. J. Hammond Trumball (1850; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968) The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1629–1682, ed. Glenn W. La Fantasie (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988) Coventry Papers, vol. 76, microfilm, reel 63, ACLS British Mss. Project, Bath 1 Colonial Papers Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1669, vol. 1 of A History of the South ([Baton Rouge]: Louisiana State University Press, 1949) The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Wilbur Cortez Abbott, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937–1947) Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1574–1660, ed. Noel Sainsbury (London, 1860) Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1908–9) “Coll Edward Doyley’s Journal of his Proceedings during the time he held the chief Command in the Island of Jamaica, [19 November 1655–27 May 1662],” Additional Mss. 12423, British Library, manuscript transcription on deposit at the Library of Congress “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” ed. and trans. Jerome S. Handler, JBMHS 32 (1967): 56–76. Nicholas Foster, A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island Barbadas, in the WestIndies (London, 1650) V. T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667, ser. 2, vol. 56 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925) Hay of Haystoun Papers, National Archives of Scotland, SRO Historical Journal Historical Manuscripts Commission John Hull, “Some Observable Passages of Providence Toward the Country,” Archaelogia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 31 (1857): 165–205

Notes Hutchinson, History

Hutchinson Papers IEB JAH JBMHS JHR Kavenagh, Foundations

Maine Records

Maryland Assembly

“Maryland Council”

Maryland Narratives “Maryland Provincial Court,” 1

“Maryland Provincial Court,” 2

Massachusetts Records

Memorials of the Bermudas

MHM NEHGR NEQ New Haven Records, 1

243 243

Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1764), vol. 1, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936) The Hutchinson Papers, 2 vols., Publications of the Prince Society (Albany: Prince Society, 1865) Interregnum Entry Book (SP 25) Journal of American History Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society Jamaica Historical Review W. Keith Kavenagh, comp., Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973) Province and Court Records of Maine, 5 vols., ed. Charles Thornton Libby (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1928–1931) Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, January 1637/8–September 1664, ed. William Hand Browne, in Archives of Maryland, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1883) “Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1636– 1667,” ed. William Hande Browne, in Archives of Maryland, vol. 3 (Baltimore, 1885) Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684, ed. Clayton Colman Hall (New York, 1953) “Judicial and Testamentary Business of the Provincial Court, 1637–1650,” ed. William Hande Browne, in Archives of Maryland, vol. 4 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1887) “Judicial and Testamentary Business of the Provincial Court, 1649/50–1657,” ed. William Hand Browne, in Archives of Maryland, vol. 10 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1891) Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 5 vols. in 6 (Boston, 1854) J. H. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somer Islands, 2 vols. (1877–1879; reprint, [Hamilton?]: Bermuda Historical Society, 1932) Maryland Historical Magazine New England Historical and Genealogical Register New England Quarterly Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven, from 1638 to 1649, ed. Charles J. Hoadley (Hartford, 1857)

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Notes

New Haven Records, 2

New Netherland Narratives

OED PAAS PCSM Plymouth Records

PMHS PRO Proceedings of Parliaments

QH Rhode Island Records

SP SRO State Papers of Thurloe Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War

Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth

Tanner Venables Narrative

Virginia Burgesses

Virginia Statutes

VMH&B

Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven, from May, 1653, to the Union, ed. Charles J. Hoadley (Hartford, 1858) Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909). Oxford English Dictionary Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, 12 vols., ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David B. Pulsifer (Boston, 1855–1861) Proceedings of Massachusetts Historical Society Public Record Office, Kew Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, vol. 1, 1542–1688, ed. Leo Francis Stock (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1924) Quaker History Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation in New England, vol. 1, 1636–1663, ed. John Russell Bartlett (Providence, 1856) State Papers Scottish Record Office, Registry House, Edinburgh A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq., 7 vols., ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1742) Bernard C. Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War, pt. 2, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 25, nos. 4– 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1907) Bernard C. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth: A Chronicle of the Years 1649–1658, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 29, no. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1911) Mss. Tanner, Bodleian Library, microfilm collection, Oxford University The Narrative of General Venables, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1900), reprint ed., Royal Historical Society, Publications, n.s., 60 (1965) Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619– 1658/9, ed. H. R. McIlwaine (Richmond: Colonial Press, 1915) The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, 13 vols., ed. William Walter Hening (Richmond, 1819–1823), vol. 1, 2d expanded ed. (New York, 1823) Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

Notes to Pages 1–5 Winthrop Journal

Winthrop Papers

WMQ

245 245

The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1996) Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, vols. 4, 1638–1644, 5, 1645–1649, 6, 1650–1654, ed. Allyn Bailey Forbes and Malcolm Freiberg (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1944, 1947, 1992) William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.

Introduction 1. J. G. A. Pocock, “The British Problem and the War of the Three Kingdoms,” in The British Problem, c. 1534–1717: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 176. 2. The term “plantation” is used throughout this work as a synonym for “colony” in the way that it was used in the seventeenth century. Occasionally the term is also used to denote individual “plantations,” privately owned agricultural enterprises that usually cultivated a primary crop for the market. The context ought to make clear which usage is intended. 3. The phrase is Robert Brenner’s in Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 270. 4. Robert M. Bliss has argued that empire emerged in this century of revolution in spite of the center, which was too unstable to exert much control; see Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 2– 3. During the mid-century revolution, however, the state was more powerful and more purposeful than had been the case under the early Stuarts. 5. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 6. Based on an analysis of Winthrop Papers. Record high numbers of letters received from England in 1637 (28) and 1640 (28) contrast with a previous high of 11 (1636) and a total of 26 for all other years between 1630 and 1639 combined. The first letter from a transoceanic settlement came in 1627 (from Barbados), when Winthrop was still in England, but the next one did not arrive until 1641 (New Netherland); after that, letters from other colonies arrived annually, peaking at 6 in 1648, the year before his death. Nicholas Canny makes the point about the early importance of Ireland to the Winthrops; see “Fashioning ‘British’ Worlds in the Seventeenth Century,” in Empire, Society, and Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, ed. Nicholas Canny et al., Pennsylvania History 64, supplement (1997): 26–29. 7. But Keith Lindley finds London leaders divided as well in Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, Hants.: Scolar Press, 1997). 8. For recent examples of the exceptionalist argument that focus only on the colo-

246 246

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes to Pages 5–6 nies that would become the United States, see Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Kevin P. Phillips, The Cousins Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999). The most common Atlantic approach focuses on that which moved about the oceanic basin: information, as in Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); people, as in the many studies of the African slave trade, including Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); or trade goods and those who carried them, as in Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum, 1648–1713 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998). For an effort to create categories that encompass the various possible types of Atlantic history, see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (London: Palgrave, 2002), 11–27. Robin Law and Kristin Mann discuss how best to conceptualize the African relation to the Atlantic in “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” WMQ 56 (1999): esp. 307–312. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario 23 (1999): 48–69. See the same issue of Itinerario for an exchange about the nature of Atlantic history, framed largely in terms of the empires of various European states. David Armitage et al., “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective,” AHR 104 (1999): 426–500. But see also Conrad Russell, “Is British History International History?” in The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbors, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 62–69. For an effort to combine the two, see James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (New York: Cassell, 2000). Charles I, “Charter of the Massachusetts Bay, March 4, 1628/9,” and “Charter of Maryland Granted to Lord Baltimore, June 20, 1632,” in Kavenagh, Foundations, 1:52–53, 2:759. John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 38–39; David Armitage, “Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542– 1717,” Past and Present 155 (May 1997): 34–63, describes Scottish engagement in colonization schemes, documenting high levels of activity in colonies beyond Ireland in the 1620s and again in the 1680s; see 46, 48, 50, 51. T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine, “Scottish Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 86; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter

Notes to Pages 6–9

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

247 247

Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 75–76; population statistics in David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4–5. He died in London in 1659, leaving estates in England, Holland, other parts of the Low Countries, Jamaica, and New England. See his will, printed in NEHGR 49 (1895): 135–136. English colonists routinely described Sybada as Dutch; see Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London, Connecticut (New London, 1852), 68. David F. Marley, Pirates and Privateers of the Americas (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1994), 369, suggests that he was Frisian in origin. Larry Gragg, “‘To Procure Negroes’: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–60,” Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995): 65–84; P. E. H. Hair and Robin Law, “The English in Western Africa to 1700,” in Canny, Origins of Empire, 254–255; Thomas, Slave Trade, 175, 196–198. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), provides a narrative. An oft-repeated phrase that provided Christopher Hill his title: The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972). Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution, 1603–1660 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1883); Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (London: Heineman, 1976). Conrad Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973); and Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). A collection of Russell’s essays is titled Unrevolutionary England (London: Hambledon Press, 1990). John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1976), also contributed to the revisionist position. Hill retained a sense of the revolutionary nature of those events, even after he ceased to cast them in terms of a bourgeois revolt against feudalism. See, for example, Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Ann Hughes, “The English Revolution of 1649,” in Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West, 1560–1991, ed. David Parker (New York: Routledge, 2000), 34–52, quotation from 35; Ilan Rachum, “Revolution”: The Entrance of a New Word into Western Political Discourse (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999), 89. For a recent work framing the controversy in Marxist terms, see James Hulston, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (New York: Verso, 2000). David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, Folger Library Monographs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), chap. 9; Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 29. Jane Ohlmeyer, “A Laboratory for Empire? Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny, Oxford His-

248 248

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

Notes to Pages 9–10 tory of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26–60. I thank Jane Ohlmeyer for permitting me to see this essay in advance of its publication. In describing Britain and Ireland in this way, I am avoiding the more expansive and less accurate term “Atlantic archipelago” coined by J. G. A. Pocock; this small island chain was only one of a number of Atlantic archipelagos, and certainly not the most prominent, geographically speaking. See J. G. A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 603. Surprisingly, none of the scholars who commented on the piece noticed this issue (ibid., 622–626). Laurent DuBois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Philip P. Boucher describes the refusal of Philippe Lonvilliers de Poincy to accept his dismissal from the post of governor of St. Christopher as the “colonial Fronde”; see “The ‘Frontier Era’ of the French Caribbean, 1620s–1690s,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 213. Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 16–18. J. H. Elliott, “Revolts in the Spanish Monarchy,” in Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 109; J. I. Israel, “Mexico and the ‘General Crisis’ of the Seventeenth Century,” Past & Present 63 (1974): 53–57; Geoffrey Parker, The World Crisis in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Richard S. Dunn notes one colonial exception, the governor of the Leeward Islands, who resigned; see “The Glorious Revolution and America,” in Canny, Origins of Empire, 445. A series of dissertations, generally focusing on one colony or region, were produced beginning in the 1970s, but many of these (some of them excellent) remain unpublished. Those that were published usually appeared in the Garland Publishing Outstanding Studies in Early American History series: Francis J. Bremer, Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (1989); Timothy J. Sehr, Colony and Commonwealth: Massachusetts Bay, 1649– 1660 (1989); Jon Kulka, Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619–1660 (1989). The most ambitious among the unpublished studies is Steven Douglas Crow, “‘Left at Liberty’: The Effects of English Civil War and Interregnum on the American Colonies, 1640–1660” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974). Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” JAH 86 (1999): 1100. CSPC. Any scholar of the early modern British Atlantic world ought to liberate herself from the calendar series anyway, as the abstracts often skip interesting material (because it was complicated or offensive to nineteenth-century sensibilities).

Notes to Pages 13–14

249 249

35. His description of changes in government and its record system remains an invaluable guide; see Andrews, British Committees.

Prologue 1. These included Maine; Dover, Exeter, and Strawbery Banke (all in present-day New Hampshire, then sometimes referred to as the Piscataqua region); Massachusetts Bay; Plymouth; Providence Plantation and Aquidneck, both in presentday Rhode Island; New Haven; the united Connecticut River Valley towns; one independent town, Southampton (on Long Island); Maryland; and Virginia. Island settlements were Newfoundland, Bermuda, St. Christopher (now St. Kitts), Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, Marie-Galante, St. Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad, and Providence Island (now Isla de Providencia). This grouping treats the three independent towns in present-day New Hampshire as separate entities but subsumes Hampton, which was founded out of Massachusetts Bay and incorporated as a town in it, within the Bay Colony. It also assumes Maine as a unified province, even though Ferdinando Gorges’s efforts to bring all the region under his authority had only just got under way in 1640. This list differs from the map that appears in the text. The map shows those settlements that gained a foothold in the English Atlantic and had a sustained career as independent entities. Settlement attempts on Marie Galante and St. Lucia would prove short-lived, and therefore these islands are not shown. The separate towns in the Piscataqua region would shortly be absorbed into Massachusetts Bay (as indeed a fourth town, Hampton, had been already), and they are therefore not depicted. In addition, the map labels colonies that would host English settlements subsequent to 1640, including Eleuthera, Surinam, and Jamaica as well as (short-lived later efforts on) Santa Cruz and Tobago. 2. Karen Kupperman, “The American Colonies: Another British Kingdom,” Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 278; David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 68–69. Population estimates for this period are notoriously unreliable, but 50,850 total was arrived at using the best estimates for each of the population centers included in this study. Estimates are given in Appendix 1. 3. See Appendix 1. The fifteen, with dates of founding, were Newfoundland (1637), Maine (1639), Strawbery Banke (1631), Exeter (1638), Providence (1636), Aquidneck (1638), Connecticut (1636), New Haven (1638), Southampton (1640), Maryland (1634), Antigua (1632), Montserrat (1632), Marie Galante (1640), St. Lucia (1638), and Trinidad (1639). The cumulative population for these settlements, according to Appendix 1, was only 7,683, about 15 percent of the total. Since only two of the three Piscataqua towns are included in this total, two thirds of the 500 estimated population (or 333) was used for those towns. 4. Michael J. Braddick, “The English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625–1688,” in Canny, Origins of Empire, 299–301, 296.

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Notes to Pages 15–17

5. Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping and Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America,” WMQ 54 (1997): 563–570. 6. On the area between the Chesapeake and New England, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on Five Hundred Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 129. A 1629 grant covered south of the Chesapeake and the Bahamas; Michael Crayton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, vol. 1, From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 68. New England, according to the grant to the Council for New England, extended to the Chesapeake, and therefore encompassed the Dutch settlement of New Netherland; A. P. Newton, The British Empire to 1783 (London: Methuen & Co., 1935), 81–82. Various proprietors vied for the Delaware region; C. A. Weslager, The English on the Delaware, 1610– 1682 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 72–83. On Nova Scotia, see John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 49–51. 7. Technically only an aristocrat could be granted proprietary privileges, which were quasi-feudal in the extent of personal power they bestowed. See Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:244. 8. Robert M. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 317. 9. The sole account of the early settlements on Tobago and Trinidad, contained in Sloane Mss. 3662, PRO (reprinted in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions), is contradictory, but by 1640, Captain Massam, leader of the 1639 settlement attempt, had died in an Indian attack and the only remaining settlement was on Trinidad (see 115, 127–128). The grant to Pembroke, which Warwick bought in 1638, also listed Barbados, but the Carlisle claim was upheld over that of Pembroke. On Warwick’s unsuccessful 1639 bid to buy that island, see James A. Williamson, Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 45–47; Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 44–47. 10. Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 11–17; Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:223n. 11. Henry S. Burrage, The Beginnings of Colonial Maine, 1602–1658 (Portland, Me., 1914), 289–290; Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:424–425; Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 103. 12. Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:303–307. Also see Bruce C. Steiner, Beginnings of Maryland, 1631–1639, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 21, nos. 8–10 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1903), 81–85. 13. Russell R. Menard, “The Immigrants and Their Increase: The Process of Population Growth in Early Colonial Maryland,” in Law, Society, and Politics in Early

Notes to Pages 17–19

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

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Maryland, ed. Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 89. Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:320–329, 417–420; David E. Van Deventer, The Emergence of Provincial New Hampshire, 1623–1741 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3, 5–9. See Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:71–82, 91–94; Isabel MacBeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 44–50, 52. Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:417, 2:164; James Truslow Adams, History of the Town of Southampton (Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Hampton Press, 1918), 48–50. Those who planted Southampton got John Winthrop to give his legal opinion on the earl’s rights to the land; this move, unusual in that it constituted voluntary support for a proprietary interest, was part of the effort by these settlers to sidestep Dutch claims (Adams, History, 262–263). Stirling may have sent Andreas Forrester of Dundee to govern his holdings; in 1647 the government of New Netherland sent Forrester to Holland as a prisoner for attempting to do so. See New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, vol. 4, Council Minutes, 1638– 1649, trans. Arnold J. F. Van Laer, ed. Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1974), 443–445. Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribner, 1975), 18–20, 25–56. The same strategy was used by others; Frank Esposito, “The Lenape and the Swede: Indian and White Relations in the Delaware River Region, 1638–1655,” New Jersey History 112 (1994): 4. Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:420–423. Commission of Gorges as governor of New England, dated 23 July 1637, in Kavenagh, Foundations, 1:95–96. A good summary is contained in Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland, 53–55. Isaac Jogues, Novum Belgium: An Account of New Netherland in 1643–4, ed. with an introduction by John Gilmary Shea (New York, 1862), 28; Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 19–20. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 122–129. Maine’s “General Court” was made up of counsellors at this time; see Province and Court Records of Maine, 3 vols. (1928; reprint, Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1991), 1:42. Also see Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:202–204. On the Leeward Islands, it is difficult to determine when the assembly in each began to sit. For instance, the founding of Antigua’s assembly went unrecorded, but by the early 1650s, it was functioning fully and issuing petitions. See Antigua deputies to Sir George Ayscue, n.d. [1652?], Coventry Papers, 58v. Steiner, Beginnings of Maryland, 103–107. Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:202–204. Kupperman, Providence Island, 125–126; Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty in New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 23. Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:227, 447, 472. J. Harry Bennett, “Peter Hay, Proprietary Agent in Barbados, 1636–1641,” JHR 5 (1965): 9–29.

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Notes to Pages 19–21

26. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution. 27. By 1637, cotton and indigo outstripped tobacco in Barbados; see Hilary M. Beckles, “The Economic Transition to the Black Labor System in Barbados, 1630–1680,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1987): 226. 28. J. H. Bennett, “The English Caribees in the Period of the Civil War, 1642– 1646,” WMQ 24 (1967): 360. 29. Scots migration to the American colonies was negligible prior to 1648; T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine, “Scottish Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteen Centuries,” in Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 78; L. M. Cullen, “The Irish Diaspora,” ibid., 126–127; Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 1997). Although migration out of the British Isles as a whole would be higher in the 1650s, the proportion of Scots and Irish would account for a larger share of that migration surge. See Henry A. Gemery, “Markets for Migrants: English Indentured Servitude and Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. P. C. Emmer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), 35, table 1. 30. When the Spanish took Providence in 1641, they found 350 English and 381 slaves (some of the latter may have been Indians rather than Africans); Kupperman, Providence Island, 338. 31. David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7. 32. Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), 98. Also see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British North America, 1607– 1789, Needs and Opportunities for Study series (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 136, table 6.4. 33. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 121; Juan de Rivera, “Shipwrecked Spaniards, 1639. Greviances against Bermudians,” trans. L. D. Gurrin, BHQ 18 (1961): 26; Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 15–18, 20. 34. J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times (1612– 1662) (Boston: Gambit, 1973); DNB, s.v. James Ley, third Earl of Marlborough (1618–1665). 35. Hilary M. Beckles, “The Economic Origins of Black Slavery in the British West Indies, 1640–1680: A Tentative Analysis of the Barbados Model,” Journal of Caribbean History 16 (1982): 50. 36. Babette M. Levy, “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” PAAS, n.s., 70 (1960): 69–348. 37. James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), chap. 9.

Notes to Pages 22–28

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38. For an overview of the “New England way,” see Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 39. See Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 11–17; Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:223n. Quotation from W. Noel Sainsbury, preface to Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. 2, 1661–1668 (London, 1880), xxxxvii. The total yearround population of the island is unknown, but, given this history, it was probably not very large. 40. For the uprising, see “The Agrivances of ye Inhabitants of this Island . . . Unto Sr Thomas Warner,” 8 February 1641[/2]; Sir Thomas Warner to Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, 1 April 1642, Hay Papers, GD34/939(2, 3).

1. The Challenge of Civil War 1. Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, introduction to The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–2; Philip A. Knachel, England and the Fronde: The Impact of the English Civil War and Revolution on France, Folger Library Monographs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967). For other Europeans bringing news, see William Johnson to Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, 19 January 1642[/3], Hay Papers, GD34/923 (36). 2. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr., ca. 3 December 1648, Correspondence of RW, 260; William Hallam to Capt. Daniel Llewellin, n.d., “Old Letters of the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 8 (1899–1900): 238; George Fenwick to Sir Gilbert Ferrar and Sir William Marsham, 10 November 1643, Seabrook, Egerton Mss. 2648, fol. 1v, BL. 3. In addition to the Winthrop correspondence, see, for example, Robert Trelawyne to John Winter and to the Governor and Counsell of the Province of New Somersettshire [Maine], both dated 29 June 1641, in Documentary History of the State of Maine, vol. 3, The Trelawny Papers, ed. James Phinney Baxter (Portland, Me.: Bailey and Noyes, 1884), 272–278; Thomas Weld to [Massachusetts Bay], 25 September 1643, [London], NEHGR 36 (1882): 39; Thomas Barrington to Mr. Shepard and to Mr. Rogers, both dated June 1644, Egerton Mss. 2648, fols. 74–74b, BL; John Barrington to Goodman [Ezekial] Rogers, 25 April 1646, Egerton Mss. 2648, fols. 120–121; Nehemiah Wallington to James Cole, 22 August 1650, Sloane Mss. 922, fols. 173–176, BL. 4. Roger Williams to Governor John Winthrop, ca. 14 June 1638, Correspondence of RW, 165. 5. Johnson to Hay and Hay, 19 January 1642[/3]. For news disseminated verbally, see [Warwick] to Philip Bell, n.d., Stowe Mss. 184, fols. 124–125, BL. For newsweeklies, Nathaniel Rogers, A letter discovering the cause of Gods continuing wrath against the nation (London, 1644), 9. The explosion in the popular press is documented in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 6. Quote from George Fenwick to Sir Thomas Barrington et al., 24 May 1643, Egerton Mss. 2646, fol. 240, BL. The sentiment is similar to that of Philip Bell,

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Notes to Pages 28–30 who labeled the times “troublesome and dangerous,” in his letter to Archibald Hay, 25 August 1643, Hay Papers, GD34/940 (3); see also Bell to Hay, 21 July 1645, GD34/924 (33). Thomas Flint to a Divine in London, 9 December 1645, True Informer 44 (21– 28 February 1645/6), 349. Plymouth Records: Court Orders, vol. 2, 1641–1651, 17. Winthrop Journal, 518–519. Henry F. Thompson, “Richard Ingle in Maryland,” MHM 1 (1906): 127, 129. “An Act concerning Religion,” Maryland Assembly, 244–247. John Child, New-Englands Jonas Cast up at London (London, 1647), 6. Nathaniel White, Truth gloriously Appearing, From Under The sad and sable Cloud of Obloquie. Or, A Vindication Of the Practice of the Church of Christ in the Summer-Islands ([London], 1645), 69. Proceedings of Parliaments, 177. Mercurius Civicus 104 (15–22 May 1645), 929; Virginia Burgesses, 71; [John Ferrar], A Perfect Description of Virginia: Being A full and true Relation of the present State of the Plantation, their Health, Peace, and Plenty (London, 1649), 11. David R. Ransome in an unpublished paper has demonstrated that this pamphlet, long attributed to Governor William Berkeley, was in fact written by John Ferrar, the former deputy of the Virginia Company. See Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), chap. 5, n. 27. I thank both scholars for their communications on this subject. White, Truth gloriously Appearing, 69. BCR, 1: page number omitted, indictments dated 6 October 1640. At this time a child Sarah’s age could be held criminally liable for these words. See Holly Brewer, “Constructing Consent: How Children’s Status in Political Theory Shaped Public Policy in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1994), 329–331. J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650 (1976); revised as The Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648 (New York: Longman, 1999). For a criticism, see Ann Hughes, “The King, the Parliament and the Localities during the English Civil War,” in The English Civil War, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, Arnold Readers in History (New York: Arnold, 1997), 261– 286; also the introduction to the same volume, 14–16. On the former point, the involvement of both king and Parliament in the locales described by Martyn Bennett in “Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Creation of Rival Administrations at the Beginning of the English Civil War,” in The English Civil War, ed. Peter Gaunt, Blackwell Essential Readings in History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 167–183, was of an entirely different sort and extent from what either could generally manage in the colonies. Also see Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 125–127. Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:71–82, 91–94; Isabel MacBeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 44–50, 52. Henry Ashton to the earl of Carlisle, [1646], Hay Papers, GD 34/933[/3], 7.

Notes to Pages 30–33

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22. Richard Vines to John Winthrop, 4 August 1645, Winthrop Papers, 5:40. 23. Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 3. 24. Edward Winslow, New-Englands Salamander (London, 1647), 9; Winthrop Journal, 527n.78. See also the secret instructions to Edward Winslow, reproduced in Winthrop Journal, 677–679. Here the reference to chartered boroughs in England is explicit. 25. Samuel Danforth, MDCXLVII. An Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1647 (Cambridge, Mass., 1647); MDCXLIX (Cambridge, Mass., 1649). On the revocation plan, see Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:420–423. 26. Thomas Gorges to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, [September? 1641], in The Letters of Thomas Gorges: Deputy Governor of the Province of Maine, 1640–1643, ed. Robert E. Moody (Portland, Me.: Maine Historical Society, 1978), 55. 27. Ashton to Carlisle, [1646], 1. The governor of the Swedish colony between New Netherland and the Chesapeake on one occasion did not hear from Sweden for two years and four months. See “Report of Governor Johan Printz, 1647,” in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1912), 120. 28. Mercurius Aulicus, 6 January 1643[/4]: 757–75[8]. 29. Winthrop Journal, 502–503. 30. See Appendix 1. 31. Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 105, 90. Contemporaries were very concerned about fortifications; see, for instance, John Smith’s rendition of the forts of Bermuda in The generall historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summers Isles (London, 1624), map detail opposite 168. 32. Ashton to Carlisle, [1646]. 33. “Information of Miles Causton of the George, 1 February 1643[/4], in The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 1, HMC, 13th Report, Appendix, pt. 1 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1891), 168; “The humble Remonstrance of the Ro. Earl of Warwick, Lord High Admiral of Engl. to both Houses of Parliament,” 10 February 1643, Proceedings of Parliaments, 152–153; “A Proclamation for taking Prizes at Sea in the Time of this Rebellion,” 9 May 1644, in Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. 2, Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646, ed. James F. Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983): 1034–36. An example of a privateer commission, Charles I to Leonard Calvert, 26 January 1643/4, is printed in “Two Commissions,” MHM 1 (1906): 211–216. 34. Winthrop Journal, 539. Winthrop reports other ship losses; see, for instance, April 1645 for an attack by Irish royalists; September? 1645, for a fishing ship seized off Newfoundland, 573, 598. 35. For ships from New England taken by the Prince of Wales in 1648, see Edward Winslow, The Glorious Progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians in New England (London, 1649), Bv; and from Somers Islands, see William Golding, Servants on Horse-Back: or, A Free-People bestrided in their persons, and Liberties, by worthlesse men ([London], 1648), 18.

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Notes to Pages 33–35

36. “Articles of Confederation,” 29 August 1643, Acts of Commissioners, 1:3. 37. Mercurius Aulicus (31 August 1644): 1136; Mercurius Britanicus 51 (27–30 September 1644): 406; [Ferrar], Perfect Description of Virginia, 11; Winthrop Journal, 508. 38. [Ferrar], Perfect Description of Virginia. 39. Thomas Copley, Giles Brent, and Margaret Brent, “Libel of Thomas Copley and the Brents against the Reformation,” in Thompson, “Richard Ingle in Maryland,” 136–140. 40. Massachusetts Records, 3:31–32. 41. Parliament, Die Sabbathi 23 Januarii 1646 (London, 1646), also printed as Whereas the severall Plantations in Virginia, Bermudas, Barbados (London, 1646). Mercurius Aulicus accused Parliament of abating the excise on Virginia tobacco in an effort to seduce the colony (6 January 1643[/4]: 757–75[8]). 42. Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1640–1645 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 297. 43. Virginia Statutes, 1:355. Also see the law relieving parishioners of tithing to ministers who did not use the prayer book (341–342); Craven, The Southern Colonies, 228–229, 232; BDBR, s.v. Thomas Harrison (1618–1682). On parliamentarian Captain Stegg, see Jon Kukla, Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619– 1660 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 145. 44. Raoul Lempriere, History of the Channel Islands (London: Robert Hale & Company, 1974), chap. 7. 45. Michael Jarvis, “‘In the Eye of All Trade’: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Bermudian Society, 1612–1800” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1998), 225–229. Many of the surviving records are reprinted in Memorials of the Bermudas; but the editor, J. H. Lefroy, equated religious conservatism with royalism on very little evidence. 46. Winthrop Journal, 525. 47. The best general summary remains Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War, 48–65. Also see “Maryland Provincial Court,” 2:231–241; “Maryland Council,” 164–174; Matthew Page Andrews, History of Maryland: Province and State (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1929), chap. 3; George Boniface Stratemeier, “Thomas Cornwaleys: Commissioner and Counsellor of Maryland” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University, 1922), published as The Catholic University of America Studies in American Church History 2 (1922): esp. 106; Edward Ingle, Captain Richard Ingle: The Maryland ‘Pirate and Rebel,’ 1642–1653, Maryland Historical Fund Publication, no. 19 (Baltimore, Md.: J. Murphy & Co., 1884), 1–53; Thompson, “Richard Ingle in Maryland,” 125–140. 48. “Maryland Provincial Court,” 2:239. Ironically, Baltimore had, in 1642, sent a letter to his brother the deputy governor in care of Ingle. See Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore to Leonard Calvert, 21 and 23 November 1642, The Calvert Papers, vol. 1, Maryland Historical Fund Publication, no. 28 (Baltimore, Md.: J. Murphy & Co., 1888), 211. 49. Thompson, “Richard Ingle in Maryland,” 127, 129; Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War, 33. For Ingle’s defying the arrest order in Virginia, see Ames, County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, 301–302.

Notes to Pages 35–37

257 257

50. The second inquest could not reach a decision on its third charge and was eventually excused, after being adjourned to a second meeting. By the time the charge was presented to its successor jury of inquest, the accusation had been softened. Compare jury charges, “Maryland Provincial Court,” 1:239, 241. A finding of Ignoramus meant that the case could not be decided then or reopened in the future. 51. Cornwallis was fined £1,000, the largest fine that could be levied in Maryland, while James Neale, who participated in the liberation of Ingle, was soon reinstated on the Governor’s Council and was not otherwise punished. See Cornwallis’s deposition to the House of Lords, reprinted in “Maryland Council,” 166–167; on the differential treatment of Cornwallis and Neale, “Maryland Provincial Court,” 1:246, 249, 251, 252, 255–256. 52. Maryland Assembly to Baltimore, 21 April 1649, Maryland Assembly, 238. 53. The commission named Calvert in the preamble but authorized him to work in Virginia with Governor Berkeley. Although he and Berkeley may have used the commission, no record exists that they did so. Ingle did not accuse Calvert of acting on the commission, only of having it. See Charles I, Commission to Calvert, 26 January 1643/4, 211–216; Ingle’s petition to the House of Lords, printed in “Maryland Council,” 165–166. See Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War, 49, for Claibourne giving him the commission. On Claibourne and Kent Island, see Craven, Southern Colonies, 196–198. 54. Beauchamp Plantagenet, A Description of the Province of New Albion ([London], 1648), 6. 55. Ingle, Captain Richard Ingle, 26–29. The pardon, dated 4 March 1647, mentions “sundry Inhabitants”; see “Maryland Council,” 195. Also see Craven, Southern Colonies, 233–234; Clifford Lewis, “Some Recently Discovered Extracts from the Lost Minutes of the Virginia Council and General Court, 1642– 1645,” WMQ, 2d ser., 20 (1940): 69; Proceedings of Parliaments, 202–203. 56. Hill was apparently the man sent from Virginia to fetch back settlers who had gone to Maryland; he would later serve as speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses. See Proceedings of Parliaments, 171; Virginia Statutes, 323; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 1, The Tidewater Period, 1607–1710 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 175. 57. See Proceedings of Parliaments, 171. 58. On divisions generally on the eve of Ingle’s rebellion, see Russell R. Menard, “Maryland’s ‘Time of Troubles’: Sources of Political Disorder in Early St. Mary’s,” MHM 76 (1981): 124–140. Also see the petition of Richard Ingle, reprinted in “Maryland Council,” 165–166; Proceedings of Parliaments, 195. The focus on popery in 1645–46 may help to explain the estrangement of Cornwallis and Ingle by that time. Captain Hill, elected governor by Marylanders, was the first Protestant to govern. 59. William Hay (alias Powrey) to Archibald Hay, 5 July 1645, Hay Papers, GD34/ 924 (32). See the discussion on how to bring Barbados as well as Virginia under Parliament’s authority in June 1644, Proceedings of Parliaments, 155; also 146. See Barbados Merchants and Planters, Petition to the Committee of Lords and Commons for Foreign Plantations, [1647?], printed in Journal of the House of

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60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

Notes to Pages 38–40 Lords, 9:50, asking for the right to settle a new government in Barbados. For pressure on Barbados, see the Warwick Correspondence, Stowe Mss. 184, esp. fols. 123–127, BL. A. B., Brief Relation, 1. On the difference between freemen (free individuals without the ten acres required to vote) and freeholders (owners of ten or more acres who could vote), see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 92. Philip Bell et al. to the earl of Warwick, October 1646, printed in Proceedings of Parliaments, 190–191. Also see Philip Bell to Archibald Hay, 21 June 1645, Barbados, Hay Papers, GD34/924 (33). Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History Of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 57. Ligon’s point was how convivial these men were, in spite of their “severall Perswasions”—“though,” he laconically remarked, “after I came away it was otherwise” (58). The law described by Ligon may have been “An Act prohibiting any irreverant discourse, between the king and the Parliament, and conventicles, May 1, 1645,” the text of which no longer survives. See Richard Hall, comp., Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados. From 1643, to 1762, inclusive (London, 1764), 450. If so, the title implies that it linked radical religion (“conventicles”) and divisiveness. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 79, calculates that half of the parliamentarians and more than half of the royalists had migrated to the island during the 1640s. Also see the discussion in Foster, Briefe Relation, 3. Out-migration from Barbados was under way by the 1640s; Alfred D. Chandler, “The Expansion of Barbados,” JBMHS 13 (1946): 106–136; Ligon, True & Exact History, 29. Also see Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644– 1713,” WMQ 47 (1990): 503–522. Bell to Archibald Hay, 21 June 1645. I am not persuaded that neutralism signified disinterest in the war. See Ann Hughes, Politics, Society, and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Ballads contained in the Mss. Ashmole 38 Collection at the Bodleian include a number from the prewar era lampooning New England for its leveling impulses and smug piety; see “New England grace,” n.d., fol. 104, and “Let all ye . . . ,” n.d., fol. 225b. Also see Antibrownistis Puritanomastix, The Speech of a Warden ([London], 1642). One satirical tract published in London but listing royalist Oxford as the place of publication in 1643 was dated from Boston in New England, further connecting silly religious views and that region; see Abednego Canne [pseud.], A New Windmill (Oxford [i.e., London], 1643). Massachusetts Records, 2:34; Mercurius Britanicus 60 (2–9 December 1655): 477. William Sachse, “The Migration of New Englanders to England, 1640 to 1660,” AHR 53 (1948): 251–278; Harry S. Stout, “The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and Their Return to England, 1640–

Notes to Pages 40–42

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

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1660,” Journal of American Studies 10 (1976): 151–176; Andrew Delbanco, “Looking Homeward, Going Home: The Lure of England for the Founders of New England,” NEQ 59 (1986): 358–386. On general support, see Francis J. Bremer, Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989). [Nathaniel Ward], The Simple Cobler Of Aggawam in America (London, 1647), 57; William Hooke, New-Englands Sence, of Old-England and Irelands Sorrowes (London, 1645), 10; Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America (London, 1650), 183, 186, 187–190, 188. Bradstreet, and New England public opinion generally, would not hold to this gruesome solution for the duration of the decade. Melissa Weinbrenner, “Public Days in Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1685: Reasons behind the Ritual and the Ironic Results,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 26 (1998): 73–94; Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendships in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 144–145. On one occasion, some of the magistrates objected to “the often reiteration of them for the same cause, but they would not contend with the elders about it, but left the churches to their liberty”; Winthrop Journal, 423. Rogers, A letter discovering the cause of Gods continuing wrath, 9. Rogers’s letter bears the date 17 December 1643 (which George Thomason used as its publication date), but it probably appeared closer to the first printed reaction to it in July 1644. The text of the oft-reprinted Covenant is available in J. P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 263–266, quoted passage on 264. Mercurius Aulicus (to 20 July 1644): 1089–90; (to 10 August 1644): 1113. Mercurius Britanicus 46 (29 July–5 August 1644): 359–362; 49 (26 August–2 September 1644): 387; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 79. On Needham, see Blair Worden, “‘Wit in a Roundhead’: Marchmont Needham and the Civil Wars,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 301–337. Sketchy evidence suggests that attempts that ultimately went nowhere may have been made, one by Plymouth, one by New Haven, and one possibly by the town of Pequot on its own. See Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked: By A true Relation of the Proceedings of the Governour and Company of the Massachusets against Samuel Gorton (and his accomplices) (London, 1646 [1647]), 82; New Haven Records, 1:211; and Thomas Peter to John Winthrop, Jr., June 1648, Winthrop Papers, 5:233. On this point more generally, see James M. O’Toole, “New England’s Reactions to the English Civil War,” NEHGR 129 (1975): 3– 17, 238–249. Hutchinson, History, 1:149–150. Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 48. Poyning’s Law of 1495 subordinated the Irish Par-

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78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

Notes to Pages 43–45 liament to the English Crown, requiring that all meetings of parliaments and all legislation be approved in advance by one of its agents. See T. W. Moody, “Early Modern Ireland,” introduction to A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), xlv–xlvi. Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967). On the early history of Rhode Island, see Raymond Dye Irwin, “Saints, Sinners, and Subjects: Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in a Transatlantic Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1996); Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribner, 1975), chap. 4. C. M. Andrews believed that the whole colony hung back from erecting a government, to avoid wholehearted commitment to Parliament’s side, until 1647; see Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:25–26. James thinks that only the two island towns did so; see Colonial Rhode Island, 60. Andrews notes that Coddington went to England in 1642 (2:11) but not whom he approached. I can find no evidence of this visit. Newport did issue at least one legal document with regnal dating, but that was in 1639; see Rhode Island Records, 93. Winthrop Journal, 432. Quotation from The Vow and Covenant Appointed by Lords and Commons (June 29, 1643), in David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1999), 120. The book of the general lawes and Libertyes (Cambridge, Mass., 1648), demonstrate that Massachusetts officeholders swore to God, not to the king; indeed, they made no reference at all to England as a source of authority. Samuel Maverick, “A briefe description of New England” [1660], NEHGR 39 (1885): 42. Although Maverick’s account dates from the Restoration, this offense is included in the middle of a list of others that are known to have occurred in the 1640s. Child, New-Englands Jonas, 6; Massachusetts Records, 69. Winthrop Journal, 519, 119n, 616–617, 687. An ordinance . . . Whereby Robert Earle of Warwicke is made governour in chiefe, (London 1643). John Pym, in A Speech Concerning the Grievances of the Kingdome (London, 1641), 18, struck a similar note. Also see Proceedings of Parliaments, 147–149. Warwick, long a member of the company, apparently became its governor as a result of the purge. The ousted governor, Edward Sackville, the fourth earl of Dorset, joined the king in early 1642; DNB, s.v. Sir Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset (1591–1652). Dorset was governor of the company in 1639, when he sent a letter that is reprinted in Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:560; Warwick was governor by October 1644 (586). This argument is similar to that made by Stephen Foster, “English Puritanism and the Progress of New England Institutions, 1630–1660,” in Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History, ed. David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 3– 37, in which he shows that the timing of a person’s departure from England

Notes to Pages 45–47

86.

87.

88. 89.

90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

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during the 1630s affected his or her degree of radicalization. See also Susan Hardman Moore, “Popery, Purity, and Providence: Deciphering the New England Experiment,” in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 257–289. I am extending the argument both temporally and spatially. This would include Bermuda, Trinidad, and Eleuthera as well as Lygonia and the other New England colonies. The small island colony of Nevis, if it did feel an affinity for Parliament, did so for reasons that cannot now be recovered. On Kirke’s royalism, see Proceedings of Parliaments, 177, dated 24 March 1645/6; Ralph Greenlee Lounsburg, The British Fishery at Newfoundland, 1634–1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 96–97. On Gorges and his settlers, see Vines to Winthrop, 4 August 1645; James Phinney Baxter, “Memoir of Sir Ferdinando Gorges,” in Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine, 3 vols. (Boston: Prince Society, 1890), 1:174, 194. In 1645, when the court at Saco declared John Bonithon a rebel, it pronounced him “outlawed & uncapable of any of his Majesties lawes.” See Maine Records, 1:90. Inquests were impaneled in the name of the king and the Lord Proprietor until after the civil wars; abandoned by the proprietary, the colonists impaneled one in the name of the king only. See Maine Records, 1:43, 73, 87, 109. On the situation in Carlisle’s province, see Carla Gardina Pestana, “A West Indian Colonial Governor’s Advice: Henry Ashton’s 1646 Letter to the Earl of Carlisle,” WMQ 60 (2003): 387–389. Of course, another six that did not declare for the king were also proprietary. On the nature of proprietary government, see Andrews, Colonial Period, vol. 1, chap. 4; Newton Mereness, Maryland as a Proprietary Province (New York: Macmillan, 1901). Michael J. Braddick deems this sort of government (as well as company government) government by “license”; see “English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625–1688,” in Canny, Origins of Empire, 305. “Councell Steeles plea,” in “Brief Collection of the Deposition of Witnesses and Pleadings of Counsellors at Law in a difference depending in Parliament between the Merchants Inhabitants and Planters in Barbados on the one part, and the Earl of Carlisle Lord Willoughby pr. On the other part,” 15 March to 9 April 1647, Mss. Rawlinson C94, Bodleian, 15. Andrews points out the proprietor’s great power in Colonial Period, 2:197. DNB, s.v. Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick (1587–1658). After the monarchy was overturned, Baltimore’s government, constituted in a way similar to monarchy, was said to be inconsistent with Commonwealth government. See The Lord Baltemore’s case (London, 1653), 173–174. That is, Barbados, Lygonia, Maryland, Nevis, Santa Cruz, and Trinidad. John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 111–113. Lewis, “Some Recently Discovered Extracts,” 70–73; “Report of Governor Johan Printz, 1644,” 101–102. Charles I, “Earle of Marleborough ppet,” 3 March 1645, in Docquets of Letters Patent and Other Instruments, ed. William Black (London, 1836), 401. For

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96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

104.

105.

Notes to Pages 48–49 Marlborough’s mission, see letters in the Hay Papers, esp. William Hay (alias Powrey) to Archibald Hay, 5 July 1645, GD34/924 (32); 20 September 1645, GD34/945; William Powrey (formerly Hay) to Archibald Hay, 2 October 1646, GD34/923 (39); Bell to Archibald Hay, 21 July 1645; and Ashton to Carlisle, [1646]. For a convenient summary, see J. H. Bennett, “The English Caribbees in the Period of the Civil War, 1642–1646,” WMQ 24 (1967): 373– 375. For Marlborough’s commission as Charles’s admiral, authorizing him to put down all rebellions, see Charles I, “Earle of Marleburgh Commission,” 11 November 1643, in Black, Docquets of Letters Patent, 98–99. Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1997). Proceedings of Parliaments, 1:175, 190. “Reduce” in this context probably meant to return to a former and proper position. It could also be used in reference to suppressing rebellion. “Remonstrance of the Ro. Earl of Warwick,” 10 February 1643, 152–153. The new Barbados governor was to be Edward Carewe Skipwith; see Charles’s orders to him, issued 28 November 1643, Hay Papers, GD34/944(1). Bennett, “The English Caribbees in the Civil War,” 371, 367. This preference for New Englanders was typical. Humphrey had sailed to Providence Island as its governor in 1641 but arrived after the Spanish had driven away the English. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 322–325, 341. Court Mercurie 3 (10–20 July 1644). Ordinance . . . Whereby Robert Earle of Warwicke is made governour, 6. Andrews, British Committees, 21–22; also Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 49–51. The earl of Carlisle viewed Warwick’s appointment as governor over all the plantation as a ploy to replace Carlisle himself as proprietor of the Caribbees. See his letter to Captain [Philip] Bell, 5 January 1643/4, Bristol, Hay Papers, GD34/ 941. Warwick had previously made such an attempt; see James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 109–111. An exception is a volume of correspondence that includes letters written to colonial governors and others. Warwick Correspondence, Stowe Mss. 184, fols. 123–127, BL. The letters are copies, without headings, dates, or signatures uniformly included. Those with dates are from either 1646 or 1648. The author seems in some cases to be Warwick and in others to be the committee as a whole. Alison Gilbert Olson has argued that after 1646 Warwick alone did most of the work, and that he gradually lost his enthusiasm for the project; see Anglo-American Politics, 1660–1775: The Relationship between Parties in England and Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 19–22. For an account of its proceedings, see Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 9, 1646– 1647 (n.p., n.d.), 51; for the commission to Thomas Warner, 24 November 1643, naming him to the post he had held since the 1620s, see CP, CO1/10: 254–255, PRO; [Warwick] to Virginia, n.d., and also Warwick to Captain Mathews, n.d., Stowe Mss. 184, fol. 124, BL. The governors of the major Caribbean islands during this time were Antigua’s Henry Ashton, Barbados’s

Notes to Pages 49–54

106.

107.

108.

109.

110.

111. 112.

113.

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Philip Bell, Montserrat’s Anthony Brisket, Nevis’s Jacob Lake, and St. Christopher’s Warner. See “Report on the State of the Caribbe Islands,” in Proceedings of Parliaments, 189–190; Warwick to [Cour.] Barbads.” n.d., Stowe Mss. 184, fol. 125, BL. Perhaps the treatment of Captain Fuller in Barbados, at issue in [Warwick] to Bell, n.d., fol. 124 and fols. 126–127, is related. Stowe Mss. 184, fols. 124, 125–126, BL; also see his to Barbados (and other Caribbee Islands?), 27 March 1646, Stowe Mss. 184, fol. 123, BL. For God on Parliament’s side, see Committee to the Govr & Counsell of [ ], n.d., Stowe Mss. 184, fol. 125, BL. Charles I, “Proclamation to Give Assurance unto All his Majesties Subjects,” in British Royal Proclamations Relating to America, 1603–1783, ed. Clarence S. Brigham, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 12 (1911): 94–96; Mercurius Aulicus ([5]–11 November [1643]): 634; also (8–14 October [1643]): 567; Mercurius Bellicus 22 (20–27 June 1648): 3; Mercurius Elenticus 3 (26 April–3 May 1648): 180. David Pietersz DeVries, “Voyages from Holland to America, A. S. 1632 to 1644,” in Historic Chronicles of New Amsterdam, Colonial New York, and Early Long Island, ed. Cornell Jaray (Port Washington, N.Y.: n.d.), 126; [Ferrar], Perfect Description of Virginia, 14. Proceedings of Parliaments, 182, under date of 17 March 1645/6. This was the first time since the outbreak of war that Virginia had approached Parliament. It may be significant that the speaker of the assembly at the time was Samuel Mathews, who was Warwick’s recommendation to replace Berkeley and who would later openly identify with Parliament. Samuel Mathews et al., 17 March 1645/6, Proceedings of Parliaments, 182– 183. Fulmer Mood, “A Broadside Advertising Eleuthera and the Bahama Islands, London, 1647,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, vol. 32, Transactions (1937): 82. Quentin Skinner, “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), 79–98. But see also Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England, 152–154.

2. Puritan Ascendancy and Religious Polarization 1. Patrick Collinson prefers the pairing “puritan” and “formalist”; see The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1635 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 110. The term “Anglican” was in use at this time, although it was uncommon; it is used here in the sense that it would be used in subsequent historical periods. 2. Charles I, “Instructions to Sir William Berkeley . . . and to the Council of State there,” [August 1641?], CEB, CO5/1354, 219–236, PRO; Virginia Statutes, 268–269; April Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 111. For

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

Notes to Pages 55–56 the English context, see Nicholas Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: Macmillan, 1973), 119–143; idem, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chap. 8; Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, “Introduction: After Revisionism,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603– 1642 (New York: Longman, 1989), 5–6, 8, 21–26; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in England Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 5. A. C. Hollis Hallett, Chronicle of a Colonial Church, 1612–1826: Bermuda (Pembroke, Bermuda: Juniper Hill Press, 1993), 41. See the description of worship in the islands in Joan de Rivera, “Shipwrecked Spaniards 1639. Grievances against Bermudians,” ed. and trans. L. D. Gurrin, BHQ 18 (1961): 26–27. The “long prayer” recited at the beginning of the service de Rivera describes was presumably the prayer book rite, followed by a chapter read from “a book” as well as by a sermon. This constituted a blending of Anglican and puritan approaches. In New England nothing was recited. For a lay reader of the prayer book in Bermuda, see Nathaniel White, Truth gloriously Appearing (London, 1645), 36. William Durand to John Davenport, 15 July 1642, “Two 1642 Letters from Virginia Puritans,” ed. Jon Butler, PMHS 86 (1972): 108. Babette Levy, “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” PAAS, n.s., 70 (1960): 69–348. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), esp. chap. 2. Michael Graham, “Meetinghouse and Chapel: Religion and Community in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 246–247; Donald H. Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1997), 43–44; Aubrey Gwynn, “Early Irish Emigration to the West Indies (1612–1643),” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters, Philosophy, and Science 18 (1929): 377–393, 648–663. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 10–11; Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 65–67. Raymond Dye Irwin, “Cast Out from the ‘City upon a Hill’: Antinomian Exiles in Rhode Island, 1638–1650,” Rhode Island History 52 (1994): 12. James Parker to John Winthrop, 24 June 1646, in Winthrop Papers, 5:84. For a different view, see Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984); and David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). This general description obscures a few of the differences between these colo-

Notes to Pages 56–58

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

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nies; for instance, Connecticut apparently did not limit membership as Massachusetts Bay did. For a general description, see James F. Cooper, Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 1. When contemporaries thought about “New England,” they referred in particular to Massachusetts Bay, the most populous of the region’s colonies, although such statements would have applied more or less as well to the other colonies in league with the Bay and promoting similar religious establishments: Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth. John Milton, Of Reformation in England (London, 1641), reprinted in Prose Works of John Milton, ed. J. A. St. John, 5 vols. (London, 1848), 2:399–401. Also see Proceedings of Parliaments, 104. Proceedings of Parliaments, 140. Rosamond Saltonstall to Samuel Saltonstall, 22 April 1644, in The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815, vol. 1, 1607–1789, ed. Robert E. Moody (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972), 136–137. See, for instance, John Barrington to Goodman [Ezekial] Rogers, 25 April 1646, Egerton Mss. 2648, fols. 120–121, BL; Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 100–101. David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 72, 185–187. For opportunities open to New England men, see Larry Gragg, “Puritans in Paradise: The New England Migration to Barbados, 1640– 1660,” Journal of Caribbean History 21 (1988): 159–160. Also see Thomas Gorges to William Vassall, 19 May 1643, in Letters of Thomas Gorges: Deputy Governor of the Province of Maine, 1640–1643, ed. Robert E. Moody (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1978), 130; John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Harvard University, vol. 1, 1642–1658 (Cambridge, Mass., 1873), 30. Quoted in Eleanor Bradley Peters, Hugh Peter: Preacher, Patriot, Philanthropist (New York, 1902), 19. Andrew White quoted in “Extracts from the Annual Letters of the English Province of the Society of Jesus,” Maryland Narratives, 135. Massachusetts Records, 4, pt. 2, 114; Winthrop Journal, 388, 398; Edward Winslow, New-Englands Salamander (London, 1647), 17. Thomas Edwards, Antapologia: Or, A full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644), 191; also Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive From the Errours Of the Time (London, 1645), 90. Raymond Phineas Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peter, 1598–1660 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954), chap. 7; Roger Howell, “Thomas Weld of Gateshead: The Return of a New England Puritan,” Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser., 48 (1970): 311. Harry S. Stout, “The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and Their Return to England, 1640–1660,” Journal of American Studies 10 (1976): 151–176. Richard P. Gildrie, “The Ceremonial Puritan: Days of Humiliation and Thanksgiving,” NEHGR 136 (1982): 14–15; Connecticut Records, 99; John Ende-

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24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

Notes to Pages 58–60 cott et al., “Petition to the Parliament in 1651,” printed in Hutchinson, History, 429. William Hooke, New-Englands Sence, of Old-England and Irelands Sorrowes (London, 1645), 19. This sermon was apparently preached in 1642; W. DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 153–154. Of the twenty-six, only five were anti–New England. With one exception, the writers had never resided in New England or were ex-New Englanders who had left the region dissatisfied. The twenty that were supportive of the New England way included eleven written by John Cotton. See Appendix 2. I[John] H[umfrey], preface to The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (London, 1642); page number omitted; Winthrop Journal, 402. Also see John Allin and Thomas Shepard, A Defence of the Answer made unto the Nine Questions (London, 1648), 2. Published in London in 1645; see the title page and first page for the title bestowed in England. My survey of the literature identified 125 titles that addressed New England churches in some way, all but two of which took a stance in favor or opposed. Eighty-eight took a position supportive of New England orthodoxy (if only by printing a sermon by some New England divine, which at least implicitly recommended the experience of the godly in that region). See Appendix 2. These calculations include residents and ex-residents of the region, the overwhelming majority of whom produced works praising the New England way. See A Coppy of a Letter of Mr. Cotton of Boston; Thomas Hooker, The Danger of Desertion; and also An Abstract of the lawes of New England by John Cotton, though not attributed to him in this edition. The Abstract erroneously purports to list the current laws rather than Cotton’s proposal (never acted upon) to reform them. The Retraction of Mr. Charles Chauncy offers another example by a less well known divine. H. R. Trevor-Roper, “Scotland and the Puritan Revolution,” in Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), 392–444; William S. Hudson, “The Scottish Effort to Presbyterianize the Church of England during the Early Months of the Long Parliament,” Church History 8 (1939): 272–276; Edward M. Furgol, “The Military and Ministers as Agents of Presbyterian Imperialism in England and Ireland, 1640–1648,” in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. John Dwyer et al. (Edinburgh: John Donald, [1982]), 95–115; Bruce P. Levack, The Formation of the British State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 199–201; J. T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan Gentry during and after the Civil Wars (New York: Routledge, 1988), 113. No one has linked anti-Scottish prejudice to the reputation of New England that I am aware. Valerie Pearl argued that S. R. Gardiner underestimated the hostility toward the Scots; see her “Oliver St. John and the ‘Middle Group’ in the Long Parliament, August 1643–May 1644,” English Historical Review 81 (1966): 498. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 8. Kup-

Notes to Pages 60–61

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

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perman overstates the extent of the division between the Providence Island grandees and the New England puritans through 1641. The intolerance of Massachusetts Bay was not widely understood immediately after the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, nor was the extent of clerical autonomy as fully developed or advertised as she suggests. Some of these differences came to the surface only later, as the New England way was widely discussed. Like the Providence Island Company members’ intolerance of the Quakers, their criticisms of the New England way were largely a later phenomenon. See esp. 247–254. In a related article, “Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies,” HJ 32 (1989): 17–33, Kupperman explores the points that were at issue prior to 1642. Notably, liberty of conscience was not among them. Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of The Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the “Grand Debate” (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985), 125–126; Winthrop Journal, 403–404; Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendships in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 132–135. On the early attention to primitive episcopacy, see Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 140–147. Hugh Peter, Mr. Peters Last Report (London, 1646), 14. Winthrop Journal, 608. The term “New England’s new orthodoxy” applies to those colonies (all members of the United Colonies) that agreed on church organization and general statements of doctrine, enshrined in the Cambridge Platform of 1649. See Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933). The strategy of extending Massachusetts’s authority worked in New Hampshire in the early 1640s; it would work in Maine in the early 1650s; but it was less successful in the region of the Narragansett Bay in the mid-1640s. Richard Norwood, “An Advertisement to such as have care of the Conservation of true Religion,” implies that New England was frequently cited in exchanges on the islands; in William Prynne, Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious New Wandring-Blasing-Stars, & Firebrands (London, 1645), pt. 2, 19. Also see Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, 1636–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 39–41, 78. Prynne, Fresh Discovery, pt. 2, 15. Published by the opponents of the church with other documents, as A declaration of the Right Honourable Robert, Earle of Warwicke . . . to the Colony and Plantation there, dated 23 October 1644 [London, 1645?]. It is also included as a broadside in CP, CO1/XI, 10, PRO. John Cotton similarly commented about the Church of England that if it followed its own dictates it would be more like the New England churches in The Way of the Churches of Christ In New-England (London, 1645), 111–113. Somers Islands inhabitants, “To the Honourable Governour and Company of Adventurers,” published with Declaration of the Right Honourable Robert, Earle

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41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

Notes to Pages 62–64 of Warwicke, 9, 5; Prynne, Fresh Discovery, pt. 2, 19–20, 3; White, Truth gloriously Appearing, 69, 101. Patrick Copland to Robert Blair, 12 February 1646/7, WMQ, 2d ser., 9 (1929): 301; Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:579–587, 594, 600, 603–608; Prynne, Fresh Discovery, 31–32. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), 2, 191; Baillie, A Dissuasive, 108; Prynne, Fresh Discovery, pt. 2, 3. For later conservative use of the gangrene image, see Robert Pulford et al., “A declaration and ye humbe Request,” [June] 1648, BCR, 3:26. Robert Baillie to the Presbytery of Irvine, 15 March 1641, in The Letters and Journal of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–1842), 1:311; Baillie to his wife, 5 November 1640, ibid., 1:269. See also Simeon Ash and William Rathband, A Letter of Many Ministers in Old England (London, 1643). “Independent” was meant to be derogatory, as Bremer points out in Congregational Communion, 140. Richard Norwood would not use it until his letter of 15 May 1647 to William Prynne, CP, CO1/11:19–20v, PRO. W[illiam] R[athband], A Briefe Narration of Some Church Courses (London, 1644), A3. These publications included works by Robert Baillie, John Bastwick, Daniel Cawdrey, Thomas Edwards, Alexander Forbes, Samuel Hudson, William Prynne, William Rathband, Samuel Rutherford, and Adam Steuart, as well as New England minister Thomas Parker. A[dam] S[teuart], Some Observations and Annotations Upon the Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644); Edwards, Antapologia; William Prynne, A Full Reply to Certain briefe observations and anti-queries (London, 1644); Bremer, Congregational Communion, 132–139. Thomas Goodwin et al., An Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644). John Goodwin, Innocency and Truth (London, 1645); [Henry Robinson?], Certain Brief Observations (London, 1644), and A Moderate Answer to Mr. Prins full Reply (London, 1645). Although the Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 2 vols. (London, 1908), attributes the latter two tracts to Goodwin as well, the Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, comp. Donald Goddard Wing, 3 vols. (New York: Index Society, 1945–1951), and the Huntington Library catalog give Robinson as the likely author. David Como, “Puritan Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early-Seventeenth-Century England,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, Studies in Modern British Religious History, vol. 2 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), 85; Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 72–74. New Englands First Fruits (London 1643), 18. Various authors have been identified for this tract, including Thomas Weld, Hugh Peter, and Henry Dunster. On Warner’s connection to Winthrop, see Winthrop Journal, 425n. Philip Bell’s governorships are listed in David P. Henige, comp., Colonial Gover-

Notes to Pages 64–66

53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

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nors from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970). Bell eventually attracted enough ministers to Barbados; see P. F. Campbell, The Church in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century (St. Michael: Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 1982), 105, 107. John Brock considered taking a pulpit in the Caribbean; see “The Autobiographical Memorandum of John Brock, 1636–1659,” ed. Clifford K. Shipton, PAAS 53 (1943): 102. For “Christopher,” see Winslow, New-Englands Salamander, 25. Durand to Davenport, 15 July 1642, 109. Council of State to the Governor of Virginia, 11 October 1649, IEB, 94:483, PRO; Kevin Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife in the Early Chesapeake,” VMH&B 109 (2001): 23–27. Lord Baltimore to Governour William Stone, his Council and the Assembly, 26 August 1649, Maryland Assembly, 270–271. For widespread anti-popery, see Peter Lake, “Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” reprinted in The English Civil War, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Arnold, 1997), 181–210. The dating of these events is difficult because dates of many of the laws from this period have been lost (along with the text of some). See Philip Bell et al. to the earl of Warwick, October 1646, Proceedings of Parliaments, 190–191; Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados. From 1643, to 1762, inclusive, comp. Richard Hall (London, 1764), 450 and also 4 for an act to uphold the Church of England against all those who had “declared an absolute dislike” of it. The act is printed (without attribution) in Campbell, The Church in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century, 54–55. The law uses the phrase “in His Majesty’s name” and so might have to do with the royalist rising in the early 1650s. If it does date from the 1640s, the reference to the king may be part of an effort to leave the Barbados constitution as it had been before the wars. In England, at least, what was meant by “the Church of England” changed over the course of the 1640s, so it is difficult to know whether this law defended the traditional church or some reformed version of it. On sectarian activity in Barbados, see Parker to Winthrop, 24 June 1646, 84. [Edward Johnson], A History of New England (London, 1654), 228; “Two 1642 Letters from Virginia Puritans.” Virginia Statutes, 341–342; John Morrill, “The Church in England, 1642– 1649,” in The Nature of the English Revolution (New York: Longman, 1993), 170–173; “Ordinance for taking away the Prayer Book,” 4 January 1644/5, and “Ordinance for the Effectual Putting into Execution the Directory of Publique Worship,” 26 August 1645, Acts and Ordinances, 1:582–583, 755– 757; White, Truth gloriously Appearing, 69; Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Edward L. Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 144. The experience of colonial Anglican worship (albeit for a later period) is captured by John K. Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishoners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), esp. chap. 14. News report in Mercurius Civicus, 104 (15–22 May 1645): 230–231; [John-

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60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

Notes to Pages 68–70 son], History of New England, 227–228; Winthrop Journal, 508; Samuel Danforth, MDCXLVIII, An Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1648 (Cambridge, Mass., 1648); BDBR, s.v. Thomas Harrison (1618–1682). On Wyatt, see Craven, Southern Colonies, 146. Antinomians and Familists condemned by the Synod of Elders in New England (London, 1644); A Short Story of the Rise, reign and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines, that infected the Churches of New England (London, 1644). Thomason (Catalogue of Pamphlets) noted on his copies that Antinomians appeared on January 16, 1643/4, Story Story on February 19 and again on August 6. Besides the preface by Weld, the latter consists of documents written mostly by John Winthrop at the time of the controversy; David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2d ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 199–200. Weld also responded to Presbyterian criticisms with An Answer to W. R. (1644) and (publishing anonymously) A brief Narration (1645). Paul, Assembly of The Lord, 123. Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London, 1644), 1 (marginalia). Letters and Journal of Robert Baillie, 2:168. These events occurred during the previous autumn; Massachusetts Records, 2:41, 46, 52. See [Samuel Gorton], “Post-script,” in Simplicities Defence against SevenHeaded Policy (London, 1646), 107; idem, An incorruptible Key ([London], 1647). Quoting Thomas Cobbett, in Gorton, Simplicities Defence, 45 (marginalia). Letters and Journal of Robert Baillie, 2:183–184; BDBR, s.v. John Goodwin (ca. 1593–1665), Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680). [Johnson], History of New England, 203. Just before returning, Gorton published An incorruptible Key, although Johnson’s comment better fits the treatment accorded Simplicities Defence. See Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 288–290. Letters and Journal of Robert Baillie, 2:168. On Gorton’s eventual success, see Robert Emmet Wall, Jr., Massachusetts Bay: The Crucial Decade, 1640–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 150–152. Three ministers in Massachusetts advocated presbyterianism in the early 1640s. For a discussion of a conference in Newbury on this issue, see Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, 70–71. Cooper implies that the critics were emboldened by the direction of change in England, but since the conference predated news of the Solemn League and Covenant and any decisions by the Westminster Assembly, official support for presbyterianism at home could not have been the impetus for the meeting. Dutch ministers in New Netherland believed that no Presbyterians could be found in New England as of 1657; see J. Megapolensis and S. Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, 5 August 1657, in New Netherland Narratives, 397. Thomas Shepard to Hugh Peter, 27 December 1645, NEHGR 39 (1885): 373. See also Conrad Wright, “John Cotton Washed and Made White,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History, ed. F. Forster Church and Timothy George (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 338–350; Mark Goldie, “The Theory of Reli-

Notes to Pages 70–72

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

87.

271 271

gious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peters Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 33–68. Edwards, Gangraena. For the contested interpretation of Anne Hutchinson’s death, see Gorton, Simplicities Defence, 23; and Henry Stubbe, Malice Rebuked (London, 1659), 54 (marginalia). Michael Winship identifies Shepard as the force behind the attack on Hutchinson in Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7–8. Letters and Journal of Robert Baillie, 2:143. Thomas Goodwin et al. to the General Court in Boston, [June 1645], Winthrop Papers, 5:23–25. See, for instance, John Bastwick, The Second Part of that Book call’d Independency Not Gods (London, 1645); 30–31; S[teaurt], Some Observations, 64. See also Prynne, Fresh Discovery, pt. 2, 1, 6. Goodwin et al. to the General Court, 24. Scottish Dove [12/17] (2–9 February 1643/4): 135–136; Ash and Rathband, A Letter, A2. Edwards, Gangraena, 147–148. Unfortunately, only the names of the most prominent signatories have been preserved; Massachusetts Records, 3:51. Goodwin et al. to the General Court, 23–24; Hugh Peter to John Winthrop, Jr., 4 September [1646], 102, and to John Winthrop [April 1647], 146–147; “The Examination of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown” and “A Report of the Trial of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson before the Church in Boston,” in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, esp. 319–321, 331, 347, 379, 384. Female radicalism may have been another matter. A Coole Conference Between the Scottish Commissioners Cleared Reformation, and the Holland Ministers Apologeticall Narration, brought together by a well-wisher to both (n.p., 1644), 8, 5. [John Goodwin and Thomas Goodwin], M. S. To A. S. With a Plea for Libertie of Conscience . . . (London, 1644); the John Carter Brown catalog states that John Goodwin wrote the section called “A Plea for Libertie . . .” and Thomas Goodwin wrote “Observations,” in which the discussion of intolerance appeared. To investigate this point, I surveyed the publications of the authors of the Apologeticall Narration—Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge—for references to New England. C. C. The Covenanter Vindicated from Perjurie (London, 1644), 23. [Goodwin and Goodwin], M. S. to A. S., 7, 8. Presumably the two were Newbury ministers Thomas Parker and James Noyes. For examples of discrete citations, see C. C., 35; [Robinson?], Certain briefe Observations, 6, and Moderate Answer, 22; Goodwin, Innocency and Truth, 65 (marginalia). For an attack, see John Goodwin, Anapologesiates Antapologias (London, 1646), 94. My interpretation here is at odds with that offered by Bremer in

272 272

88. 89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95.

96.

97.

98.

Notes to Pages 73–75 Congregational Communion, 164–165. I am looking at a broader segment of the puritan community in England and at the immediate political reaction, distinct from the long-term ability of ministers to remain friends. Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, “To the Reader,” preface to John Cotton, Keyes Of the Kingdom of Heaven (London, 1644), page number omitted. Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 191–192. N. H. and I. H., preface, Cotton, Way of the Churches of Christ, (London, 1645), page number omitted. Edwards’s Gangraena continued the conservative attack on religious Independents and sometimes included New Englanders. William Twisse published Treatise of Mr Cottons, Clearing certaine Doubts Concerning Predestination (London, 1646) to counter a manuscript by Cotton that he believed was encouraging Arminianism in England. James Noyes, The Temple Measured (London, 1647); Gorton, An incorruptible Key; and John Child, New-Englands Jonas Cast up at London (London, 1647). Edward Winslow believed that William Vassall (the alleged mastermind of the Remonstrants’ plot) was the true author of New-Englands Jonas; see his NewEnglands Salamander, 5; Wall, Massachusetts Bay, 189n. Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, by a true Relation of the Proceedings of the Governour and Company of the Massachusetts against Samuel Gorton and his accomplices (London, 1646), 103. It was something of a throwback when, in January 1649/50, the Somers Islands Company assumed that Massachusetts would help Bermuda by supplying ministers; see its letter to Governor Josias Forster, 1 January 1649[/50], Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:3. Mather’s tract appeared 8 May 1647, Rutherford’s at some time in 1644, Williams’s in July 1644, Cotton’s in May 1647, Child’s on 15 April 1647, Winslow’s on 29 May 1647. Dates are from notations made on the tracts by George Thomason (see Catalogue of Pamphlets). Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 54–55; [Richard Baxter?], Plea for Congregationall Government (London, 1646). John Norton, Brief and excellent Treatise Containing the Doctrine of Godliness; Ezekial Rogers, Chiefe Grounds of Christian Religion; and Thomas Shepard, Certain Select Cases Resolved, and The first Principles of the oracles of God: all published in London in 1648. See David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 49–52, for the phrase “steady sellers.” Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 127–129. Also see Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 233. The burned books were The Bloudy Tenent, Queries of Highest Consideration, and Cottons Letter Lately Printed; see Avihu Zakai, “Religious Toleration and Its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the Issue of Toleration during the Eng-

Notes to Pages 75–77

99. 100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

273 273

lish Civil War,” Albion 21 (1989): 33. Edwards’s Gangraena is a good example of this ambivalence toward New England. Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chap. 6. White, Truth gloriously Appearing, 75, 52–53. The latter passage reads in part: “Yet the Lord was pleased by a gracious providence to direct us, that we differ not from them in any one substantiall, as we have heard by those that have come unto us from them; which will appear in this, that they gave us the right hand of fellowship, and own our Church as a Sister-Church, yea, as they have since written unto us, they have filled their mouths, and pulpits to, with the high praises of God for what he hath done for us.” See also John Goodwin, A Short Answer (London, 1644). On Cromwell, see Barry Coward, Cromwell, Profiles in Power (New York: Longman, 1991), 34–35. Prynne, Fresh Discovery, pt. 2, 8–9. One of Bermuda’s Independent ministers, Patrick Copland, was a Scotsman with a presbyterian background who had established divinity school lectures in Aberdeen; Copland to Blair, 12 February 1646/7, 301–302. See the summary of these events in Hallett, Chronicle of a Colonial Church, 50– 54. Also see William Rener to Alexander Pym, 9 May 1646, in Caribbeana 2 (1912): 14; William Golding, Servants on Horse-Back: or, A Free-People bestrided in their persons, and Liberties, by worthlesse men ([London], 1648), esp. 8–10. On the importance of daughters’ marriages solemnized in the church, see White, Truth gloriously Appearing, “Occasional Additions,” 24v; and, on ordinances generally, “To the Right Honourable the Committees of both the Honourable Houses of Parliament for the English Plantations on the Coasts of America. The Humble Petition of the Inhabitants of the Colony and Plantation of the Sommer-Islands,” published with Declaration of the Right Honourable Robert, Earle of Warwicke, 11–12. See council meeting minute, 6 December 1648, BCR, 3:32; “Answer,” [1646], in Golding, Servants on Horse-Back, 16–17. For the shifting views of conscience in this period, see Keith Thomas, “Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39–56. On the Remonstrants, see Wall, Massachusetts Bay, chaps. 5 and 6; Winthrop Journal, 624–625, 647–670, 703; Massachusetts Records, 3:88–94, 113, 114, 219, 256; Winslow, New-Englands Salamander, 2. William Vassall advocated toleration; see Edward Winslow to John Winthrop, 24 November 1645, Winthrop Papers, 5:55–56; and Winslow, New-Englands Salamander, 1–2, 5, 21. Hutchinson, History, 124, endorses this view of the Remonstrance controversy. Reuben Aldridge Guild, editor of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 2:134 n. 48, argued that John Cotton had not heard about the August 1645 decision for over a year afterward, because he implied in A Reply to Mr. Williams his Examination (London, 1647) that Parliament supported congregationalism. More likely Cotton was intentionally avoiding reference to this defeat or was even reading Parliament’s subsequent failure to implement presbyterianism as tacit support for independency.

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Notes to Pages 77–80

106. Good News from New-England (London, 1648), 13–15. They did defend “the Church of England,” but that phrase could be used to refer to the church as it had been reformed by Parliament; see Child, New-Englands Jonas, 23. 107. Child, New-Englands Jonas, 24, 20–21. 108. Winslow, New-Englands Salamander, 6. 109. “A Declaration of the General Court holden at Boston 4 (9) 1646, concerning a Remonstrance and Petition,” in Hutchinson Papers, 1:223–247; Winthrop Journal, 670 n. 84; Massachusetts Records, 3:90–91, 113; Winslow, New-Englands Salamander, 10. 110. Winslow, New-Englands Salamander, 15, 1; Child, New-Englands Jonas, 18–20. 111. Wall, Massachusetts Bay, 219–220. On the move away from a presbyterian settlement, see Morrill, “The Church in England, 1642–1649,” 148–149, 155–158. 112. Winthrop Journal, 705–707. 113. Indicative of this defeat was the migration of William Vassall to Barbados. See Gragg, “Puritans in Paradise: The New England Migration to Barbados, 1640– 1660,” 157, 163. Others departed as well, including Robert Child. 114. Pessicus et al., “The Act and Deed of the voluntary and free submission . . . unto the Government . . . of England . . . 19 April 1644,” in Rhode Island Records, 134–136. 115. Winthrop Journal, 673; Henry Whitefield, ed., The Light Appearing more and more (London, 1651), 33. See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 234–238; and Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. 44–45. Eliot’s letter arguing against toleration, dated 9 July 1649 and reprinted in Light Appearing, 16, contradicted the goal of improving New England’s reputation by associating it with Indian conversion rather than intolerance. 116. “The Charter of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629,” in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 3:1845–60. Matthew Craddock raised this issue with Governor Endecott in a 1629 letter; see Massachusetts Records, 1:384–386. 117. [William Castell], Petition of W. C. ([London], 1641). 118. A letter in the Warwick correspondence, dated either June or January 1648, makes this point; see Stowe Mss. 184, fol. 123, BL. 119. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), preface, page number omitted. Williams did not believe conversion likely to occur soon, nor did he labor toward it in any sustained way; see his Christenings make not Christians (London, 1645). See also Council of State to Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1654, printed in Rhode Island Records, 290–291, stating that Williams was better on this issue than the Bay Colony. 120. Roger Williams accused the New Englanders of leaving Indians in their unbelief while forcing the faith of Christians in The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, discussed, in A Conference between Truth and Peace ([London], 1644), 103. Even the Indians were asking about the slowness of the set-

Notes to Pages 80–83

121.

122.

123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131.

132. 133. 134.

275 275

tlers; see Thomas Shepard, Cleare Sun-shine of the Gospel (London, 1648), 34– 35, pagination from Sabin’s reprint, Quarto Series, no. 10 (New York, 1865). All the early tracts justified the delay, for instance, [Thomas Shepard?], DayBreaking If Not the Sun-Rising of the Gospel (London, 1647), 15–16. Also see Thomas Thorowgood, Digitus Dei: New Discoveryes (London, 1652), c2. [Shepard?], Day Breaking If Not the Sun-Rising, appeared on 6 April 1647, according to Thomason, Catalogue of Pamphlets. Authorship has been variously attributed to John Eliot (which is clearly an error, given internal evidence) and John Wilson, as well as Shepard. J. Williams T. Youngs, Jr., made a strong case for Shepard, who is known to have written another tract the title of which continued the sunshine metaphor; see “The Indian Saints of Early New England,” Early American Literature 16 (1981): 253–254. For other publications, see Shepard, Cleare Sun-shine; Edward Winslow, Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians (London, 1649); and the related tract by Anthony Tuckney et al., To our Reverend and deare Brethren (Cambridge, 1649). William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 11. Nathaniel Ward, who had arrived back in England in the first half of 1646, wrote a preface of a few sentences for the work, but otherwise it contained no prefatory matter or indication of its sponsorship. Winslow, Glorious Progress, Bv. He stated in Glorious Progress that he got the work in print to move stalled parliamentary action on the project (see A2-v). Robert Baillie in his 1655 Disswasive From the Errors of the Time (London), 17, was critical of Independent fitness. Baillie (who did not sign and was no longer in London to be asked) declared congregationalist conversion of Indians “marred” in his earlier (1645) Dissuasive From the Errours Of the Time, 60 (marginalia). An Act For the promoting and propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ In New England (London, 1649), 1. Ed[ward] Reynolds, To our Reverend Brethren the Ministers of the Gospel in England and Wales ([Oxford], 1649), [1]. Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundation of Modern Wales, 1642–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 49. Mercurius Aulicus, no. 2 (21–28 August 1649): 15 [13, mispaginated). Winthrop Journal, 720–721; [John Ferrar], A Perfect Description of Virginia: Being a full and true Relation of the present State of the Plantation, their Health, Peace, and Plenty (London, 1649), 12. [Nathaniel Ward], The Simple Cobler Of Aggawamm in America (London, 1647), 4, believed that God “blasted” any colony that embraced toleration. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 9–11. The act was sent over by Baltimore for enactment by the assembly; see Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War, 114–118. It is printed in Maryland Assembly, 244–247. Maine Records, 1:136–137. Mercurius Gallicus 3 [12 May 1648]: 20. Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in

276 276

135. 136.

137. 138.

Notes to Pages 83–89 Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office and American Historical Association, 1894), 199–227. For a Plymouth law banishing those who would not take the colony’s oath, see Plymouth Records, 2:43, 68. Occasionally contemporaries commented on this problem; Edwards noted that New England was “farre from being a Kingdome and Nation”; see Antapologia, 29. For a recent analysis, see Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xiv–xv, 204–205. Samuel Symonds to John Winthrop, 6 January 1646[/7], Winthrop Papers, 5:125–127. See, for instance, New Haven Records, 1:255–258.

3. Regicide and Royalist Rebellions 1. Proceedings of Parliaments, 207–208; S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, vol. 1, 1649–1650 (1903; reprint, Adlestrop, Gloucestershire: Windrush Press, 1988), 1–9. 2. Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648– 1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–11; Robert M. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 12. 3. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 38, table 1.6; Stephen Winthrop to John Winthrop, Jr., 16 March 1648/9, Winthrop Papers, 5:320. Roger Williams, writing to John Winthrop, Jr., 26 May 1649, spoke of confirmation of these reports; see Correspondence of RW, 1:288. Plymouth had certainly heard of the regicide by 6 June 1649; Plymouth Records: Court Orders, vol. 2, 1641–1651, 139. Massachusetts Records, 3:162. 4. Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:650. The Virginia House of Burgesses referred to the regicide in October; Virginia Statutes, 359–361. See also Charles II to Sir George Yeardley et al., Councillors of Virginia, 14 May [1649], Coventry Papers, 30–31. 5. “Proposition made by the country,” BCR, 3:39. 6. John Eliot to Henry Whitefield, 8 July 1649, in The Light appearing more and more (London, 1651), reprinted in CMHS 3 (1834): 120–121; The Christian Commonwealth (London, [1659]), for instance, preface, B–Bv; Sarah Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1646– 1659 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); J. H. Adamson and H. F. Follard, Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times, 1613–1662 (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 284–285. 7. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 112–113. Quotations from “Governor & councillors Answer to the countreys proposition,” BCR, 3:40; Virginia Statutes, 360;

Notes to Pages 89–93

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

277 277

Owen Rowe to the Council of State, n.d. [1656?], CP, CO1/13: 45–45v, PRO; BCR, 3:48. For a later use of similar language, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 26–28. John Brock, “The Autobiographical Memoranda of John Brock, 1636–1659,” ed. Clifford K. Shipton, PAAS, n.s., 53 (1943): 101; Hull, “Observable Passages,” 172. Thomas Hutchinson overstated the objections to regicide in New England in his History, 134. See also BCR, 3:48. Anne Bradstreet, “Foure Monarchies,” in The Tenth Muse (London, 1650), R. Q., unpaginated preface. Francis J. Bremer, “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I,” WMQ 37 (1980): 117–122; IEB, 30 September 1651, 23:6, PRO; Plymouth Records: Court Orders, vol. 3, 1651–1661, 5. Plymouth Records, 2:139. This generalization can be applied with assurance only for those colonies with surviving, official records. Louis D. Scisco, ed., “Testimony Taken in Newfoundland in 1652,” Canadian Historical Review 9 (1928): 239–251, did not mention any royalist proclamation made after the death of Charles I. For New England, see James M. O’Toole, “New England Reactions to the English Civil Wars,” NEHGR 129 (1975): 7. David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 16. Committee for America, “Remonstrance agt ye Persons chosen into places of Authority in the Somers Islands by the Bermudas Company,” September 1658, CP, CO1/13:122–124, PRO; BCR, 3:48. A. B., Brief Relation, 2. See Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 9–10; also Council of State to the Governor of Virginia, 11 October 1649, IEB, 94 (letter book), 483, PRO. Printed in Man in the Moon 37 (2–9 January 1650): 297–298. On the alleged government response, see ibid., 38 (9–16 January 1650): 300–301. Virginia Statutes, 359–361. For a declaration at the county level, see Lyon G. Tyler, “Virginia under the Commonwealth,” WMQ, 1st ser., 1 (1892–93): 189– 190. Man in the Moon treated the statement quoted here as having been written in Virginia, but it is at least as likely to have been the work of the editor’s own pen. See ibid., 37 (2–9 January 1650/1): 297–298. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 12; “Maryland Council,” 243– 244. Baltimore to William Stone and the inhabitants of Maryland, 6 August 1650, in Maryland Assembly, 313–314; The Lord Baltemore’s case (London, 1653), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, 175. See also Edward C. Papenfuse et al., eds., A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, 2 vols., Studies in Maryland History and Culture (Baltmore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), s.v. Thomas Greene (?–ca. 1651/2). Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant: Poet Venturer, 1606–1668 (1935; reprint, New York: Octagon, 1971), 110–119; Susan J. Wiseman, “‘History Di-

278 278

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

Notes to Pages 94–97 gested’: Opera and Colonialism in the 1650s,” in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 189–204. N. Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados (Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887); Liam Seamus O’Melinn, “The English West Indies and the English Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991); Gary A. Puckrein, “The Acquisitive Impulse: Plantation Society, Factions, and the Origins of the Barbadian Civil War (1627–1652)” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1978). See Foster, Briefe Relation, 3–4; also A. B., Brief Relation, 1. For the idea that the older planters were all respectful of the people’s views and had run the island in accordance with them (a sort of nascent republicanism among anti-royalists), see Perfect Diurnall 30 (1–8 July 1650): [350]. On the bill, see Puckrein, “Acquisitive Impulse,” esp. 159–160. Foster, Briefe Relation, 76. Ibid., 23–25, 26–27. Ibid., 24–25. Ibid., 24. For their opponents also distributing papers, see Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 148. The quotation regarding civil wars is from Willoughby to the government of St. Christopher, 23 December 1650, Tanner 56, fol. 240, BL. For the use of independency as a threat, see Giles Sylvester, “Letter from Barbados by Ye Way of Holland Concerning Ye Condiccon of Honest Men There, 9 August 1651,” in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 48. [Beauchamp Plantagenet], A Description of the Province of New Albion (London, 1648), 5; Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 45–46. Foster, Briefe Relation, 43–44, 47. Intelligence dated 10 February 1647/8, Mss. Clarendon 30:290, Bodleian. The hostile observer was A. B., Brief Relation, 5. For the shorter time, see “An Essay. Evenly Discussing the Present Condition and Interest of Barbadoes,” Ayer Ms. 276, Newberry Library, Chicago, microfilm copy, 2. O’Melinn presents an alternative but little supported account of Willoughby’s movements in “English West Indies,” 277–279, 288 n. 38. Also see Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 48. Francis Willoughby to St. Christopher’s Council and Assembly, 1 June 1650, Tanner Mss. 56, fol. 209, BL, was dated from Barbados. Edward Blagge to Col. Fitzeames, 10 August 1650, in HMC, The Manscripts of Rye and Hereford Corporations, 13th Report, Appendix, pt. 4 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1892), 387. On Montserrat, see Francis Lord Willoughby to Colonel Osborn, 19 February 1660[/1], in “Documents Relating to the Irish,” ed. Aubrey Gwynn, Analetica Hibernica 4 (1932): 242–243. Rowland Redge et al., “The Agreement of both Nations English & French concerning the bounds of Sandy Point Division, [18]/28 October 1649,” Egerton Mss. 2395, fol. 37, BL; George Ayscue to [William] Lenthall, 27 February 1651/2, Tanner Mss. 55, fol. 153, BL; St. Christopher to Lord Willoughby, 13 June 1650, Tanner Mss. 56, fol. 209v, BL, and same to same, n.d. [1651?], fol.

Notes to Pages 97–99

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

279 279

210, BL; St. Christopher Assembly, “The Answeare which was made unto the proposicons of Collonell Henry Ashton and Collonell Thomas Ellice,” 31 January 1650/1, Tanner Mss. 56, fol. 210v, BL; Willoughby to St. Christopher Council and Assembly, 1 June 1650. Also see Willoughby to the government of St. Christopher, 23 December 1650, Tanner Mss. 56, fol. 240, BL, responding to the refusal to submit; and Rowland Redge to James Hay, earl of Carlisle, 22 April 1651, St. Christopher, Tanner Mss. 54, fols. 44–45v, BL. Information on Poyntz as governor is so sketchy that it cannot be definitively confirmed. See “From Aboard the St. John at Barbados, 3 February 1651[/2],” Faithful Scout 61 (12–19 March 1651/2): 475–476; John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), 2:19, 24; Bulstrode Whitlocke, Memorials of the English Affairs . . . from the Beginning of the Reign of King Charles the First . . . [to the] Restauration (London, 1682), 503. Whitlocke described the inhabitants of St. Christopher as “generally well affected to the Parliament.” George Ayscue to [John] Bradshaw, 19 October 1651, CP, C01/11, 90v, PRO, noted a contest over the governorship of that island after the death of Redge. For a speech Poyntz is said to have delivered as governor, see Faithful Scout 222 (6– 13 April 1655): 1770. Poyntz died at St. Christopher on 11 April 1660, age seventy-seven; P. Pacifique de Provins, Breve Relation du Voyage Des Iles De L’Amerique, ed. P. Godefroy de Paris (Assisi: Collegio S. Lorenzo Da Brindidi dei Minori Cappuccini, 1939), 16n. Henry Shelle et al., Proposition sent to the Governor, 1 May 1650, in Foster, Briefe Relation, 41; on Bermuda, see Josias Forster to the Somers Islands Company, 7 September 1650, 10, and Somers Islands Inhabitants to the Somers Islands Company, [1650?], Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:10 and 17. See the list in Foster, Briefe Relation, 67–70. Puckrein, “Acquisitive Impulse,” provides an analysis of the group (giving the number exiled as 122) in “Appendix C: Roundheads and Cavaliers: A Statistical Glimpse,” 219–225. A. B., Brief Relation, 4, 5–6; Foster, Briefe Relation, 63–65. The anonymous and undated “An Essay. Evenly Discussing the Present Condition and Interest of Barbadoes” supported accommodation with Willoughby; see Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 174–175; Willoughby to Lady Willoughby, [9 August 1651], in Memorials of the Great Civil War in England from 1646 to 1652, ed. Henry Cary, 2 vols. (London, 1842), 315–317 (date from the original in Tanner Mss.). The view that dispatching a fleet was unlikely was widely held in Barbados, according to Severall Proceedings in Parliament 79 (27 March–3 April 1651): 1197. On de facto authority, see Quentin Skinner, “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), 79–98. John Bayes to [John Bradshaw, president of the Council of State], November? 1650, CP, C01/11, 71–72, PRO; Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 102–103. Perfect Passages of Every Daies Intelligence 2 (5–12 July 1650): 11; Perfect Diurnall 30 (1–8 July 1650): 349. “The Motives and Reasons which have incouraged the merchants to make their

280 280

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

Notes to Pages 99–102 humble addresses to the Parlyament” [February 1650], CP, CO1/11, 78–78v, PRO; Sylvester, “Letter . . . Concerning Ye Condiccon of Honest Men, 9 August 1651,” 50. Foster’s Briefe Relation, collected by George Thomason, who dated each item, came out on 17 September 1650. Foster was among those banished under the 23 May act. Foster’s own marital irregularities would subsequently end his chances of a career in the Commonwealth Admiralty; see Larry Gragg, “Bigamy on Barbados? The Case of Nicholas Foster,” Journal of Caribbean History 29 (1995): 1–10. [John Bayes], “Humble Proposalls of severall Barbadeans,” CP, CO1/11:69, PRO. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 186–187. The decision to send a fleet was made in August and September; see IEB, 123:224, 226, 229; 10:2, PRO. See the petition to the Council of State, 20 November 1650, CP, CO1/11:62, PRO. Merchants allowed to accompany the fleet to trade if the island was reduced surely supported Ayscue’s policies that resulted in little destruction of property. “An Essay. Evenly Discussing the Present Condition and Interest of Barbadoes,” 3v–4v, 6, 6v–7v, summarized the two approaches and favored conciliation. On the temporary embargo, see IEB, 27 August 1650, 123:224, 226, 229, PRO. Ships to Virginia were stopped temporarily before the parliamentary act but then allowed to proceed if the captain posted bond. See IEB, 1, 8 March, 1649/50, 10, 14 August 1650, 64:52–53, 123:129v–130, 8:69, 80, PRO. For the act itself, see Acts and Ordinances, 2:425–429. On New England, see Council of State, “The Draught of a Licence for ye Inhabitants of New England to trade to Barbados &c,” 28 November 1650, SP25/13:79–82, PRO. Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 60–64. I emphasize here the practical functioning of an imperial system rather than the theoretical underpinnings of empire, pace David Armitage in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context 59 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Massachusetts Records, 2:162; J[ohn] E[ndecott] et al., on behalf of the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court, “Petition to the Parliament in 1651,” in Hutchinson, History, 429. Also see Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 61–62. For neutrality, see letter from Philip Bell et al., dated October 1646, printed in Proceedings of Parliaments, 190–191; A. B., Brief Relation, 1, 2, 35–36, 75. One contemporary, in an effort to excuse their royalism, claimed that the Barbadians were better at trade than at politics; see “Essay. Evenly Discussing the Present Condition and Interest of Barbadoes,” 1–1v. Foster, Briefe Relation, 83; Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 175. The engagement was sent to the St. Christopher assembly and was preserved with “The Answeare which was made unto the proposicons.” Willoughby to government of St. Christopher, 23 December 1650; cf. Wil-

Notes to Pages 102–105

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

281 281

loughby to St. Christopher Council and Assembly, 1 June 1650, fol. 209; John Watkins et al. to Willoughby, 13 July 1650, Tanner Mss. 59, fol. 209v, BL. A Declaration Set forth by the Lord Lieutenant Generall the Gentlemen of the Councell & assembly (The Hague, 1651), 3; “Speech of Sir Wm. Berkeley, and Declaration of the Assembly, March, 1651,” VMH&B 1 (1893–94): 75–77. In Mercurius Pragmaticus 22 (8–15 February 1648): 43. For royalist rhetoric of enslavement, see a selection of printed handbills in Foster, Briefe Relation, 24– 34. A Declaration Set forth, 2 [mispaginated]; different wording is in Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), app. G, 773– 775. “Speech of Sir Wm. Berkeley, March, 1651,” 81. The Virginians published in both English and Dutch; see Sir William Berkeley, The speech of Sir William Berkeley, Governour and Capt: Generall of Virginia to the Burgesses in the Grand Assembly at James Towne on the 17 of March 1651. Together with a Declaration (The Hague, 1651), and De reden van de eerw[aerdigen]. Sir Wilhelm Berkley gouverneur . . . tot James Stadt op den 27 maert 1651 gedaen (The Hague, 1651?). “Speech of Sir Wm. Berkeley, March, 1651,” 77. The purge of the company was hinted at in its letter to Josias Forster, 1 January 1649/50, Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:2, 3; also see 1:675; and the order in IEB, 25 June 1653, 27 June 1653, 69:411, 416, PRO. Warwick was listed by J. H. Lefroy as possibly the governor of the company in 1653. See DNB, s.v. Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick. On Newfoundland, see Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprises in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 239. The original lists included far fewer ships; see Proceedings of Parliaments, 218–219, 226. Letter from Barbados printed in Perfect Account 70 (28 April–5 May 1652): 554, 555. On Archbishop Laud, see Proceedings of Parliaments, 219–220. A. B., Brief Relation, 6–7; Puckrein, “Acquisitive Impulse,” 183. Faithful Scout 35 (12–19 September 1651): 269. Also see Severall Proceedings in Parliament 79 (27 March–3 April 1651): 1197. It is not clear when this incident occurred. I am following Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, in dating it March 1651. See Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1661–1668, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London, 1880), 364. The 12 September 1651 declaration is reprinted in Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 206–207. Foster, Briefe Relation, 83; Severall Proceedings in Parliament 79 (27 March–3 April 1651): 1197. Also see Willoughby to Lady Willoughby, [9 August 1651], 317. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 200. Severall Proceedings in Parliament 125 (12–19 February 1651/2): 1941; Mercurius Politicus 49 (8–15 May 1651): 794; Massachusetts Records, 3:240–241; A. B., Brief Relation, 8; “Mr. Hilliard’s proposals for reducing Barbados,” 1650,

282 282

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

Notes to Pages 105–107 CP, CO1/11: 74–75, PRO. On Dutch ships, see esp. Mercurius Politicus 79 (1– 11 December 1651): 1266, 1368–69; 90 (19–26 February 1651/2): 1429–30; Letters and Papers Relating to the First Dutch War, 1652–1654, 6 vols., Publications of the Naval Records Society (London, 1899–1930), 1:75–76; Severall Proceedings 125, 1946–47. Mercurius Politicus 89 (12–19 February 1651): 1422. A. B., Brief Relation, 8; George Ayscue to Francis, Lord Willoughby, 17 October 1651, printed in Several Proceedings in Parliament 125 (12–19 February 1651/2): 1944. Also see Mercurius Bellonius 3 (18–25 165[1/]2): 25 [mispaginated]. George Ayscue, Daniel Searle, and Michael Pack to the Gentlemen Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Island of Barbados, 31 October 1651, CP, CO1/11:98– 99v, PRO; Ayscue to Francis Lord Willoughby, 12 November 1651, ibid., 102v–103; Barbados Assembly, Declaration, 4 November 1651, CP, CO1/11, 103v, PRO. Ayscue et al. to the Gentlemen Freeholders and Inhabitants of Barbados, 31 October 1651, printed as “A Declaration From the Commissioners appointed by Authority of Parliament, to the Gentlemen, Inhabitants, and free People of the Island of Barbadoes,” Severall Proceedings in Parliament 125 (12–15 February 1651/2): 1945; also see Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 215; Faithful Scout 57 (13–20 February 1651/2): 445. Ayscue to Willoughby, 12 November 1651. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 219–222; IEB, 9 September 1651, 96:510, PRO; Ayscue to Willoughby, 12 November 1651; George Ayscue to [John Bradshaw], President of the Council of State, Barbados, 18 February 1651/2, Tanner Mss. 55, fols. 141–141v. On the Dutch rumor, see Mercurius Politicus 89 (12–19 February 1651): 1422. For news of Worcester, see William Hingston to Robert Jordan, 16 December 1651, in HMC, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 2, 13th Report, app., pt. 2 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1893), 30. George Ayscue to Lord Willoughby, 14 November 1651, CP, CO1/11, 104, PRO. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 228. George Ayscue to John Bradshaw and the Council of State, 31 October 1651, CP, CO1/11:96–97v, PRO; Perfect Account 70 (28 April–2 May 1652): 555; Ayscue to [Bradshaw], 18 February 1651/2, 141–141v. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 234–39. For exchanges between Ayscue and Willoughby on 25–29 December, see CP, CO1/11:106v–110, PRO. Also see Mercurius Politicus 99 (22–29 April 1652): 1565 [mispaginated]. For the agreement, see Richard Pearce et al., Articles of Agreement Had, Made and Concluded (London, 1652). Also see Ayscue’s letter of 26 February 1651/ 2, Mercurius Politicus 99 (22–29 April 1652): 1565 [mispaginated]; Michael Pack to John Bradshaw, 18 February 1651[/2], CP, CO1/11:121–121v, PRO. News of the “reduction” reached England less than two months later; Perfect Account 63 (10–17 March 1651/2): 496.

Notes to Pages 107–110

283 283

79. ? Carrington to the King [Charles II], 16–26 February 1657, Mss. Clarendon 53:296–296v, Bodleian. Willoughby was probably open to the option of keeping his place under the Commonwealth as an alternative to being kicked off the island. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 228. 80. Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (1827; reprint, London: Cass, 1968), 1:329. 81. “A Briefe Description of the Ilande of Barbados” (1650 or 1651?), in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 45. 82. Puckrein, “Acquisitive Impulse,” 219–225. 83. O’Melinn makes the argument that the confrontation on Barbados was started by the supporters of the Commonwealth, especially Drax, who attacked the royalist planter Guy Molesworth in an effort to implicate him in a servant conspiracy in 1649; see “English West Indies,” 266–267. Less can be said about the allegiances of men below the elite. Conflicting assessments range from support for surrender to continued resistance. See Mercurius Politicus 88 (5–12 February 1651/2): 1408; Perfect Account 70 (28 April–2 May 1652): 556. 84. Royalist views were given in Foster, Briefe Relation, 9–11, 27–28; Willoughby to the government of St. Christopher, 23 December 1650; “A Briefe Description of the Ilande of Barbados,” 46. Commonwealth views in Foster, Briefe Relation, 13, 104; Letter from Barbados, 19/9 August 1651, Tanner Mss. 54, fols. 153–154v, BL; Ayscue to Willoughby, 17 October 1651; Ayscue et al., “Declaration to the inhabitants of Barbados”; George Ayscue et al., “To the inhabitants of the Island of St. Christophers,” 14 October 1651, Severall Proceedings in Parliament 125 (12–19 February 1651/2): 1942–43. Also see Ed[ward] Courtis et al., “From Aboard the Ginny Friggat in Mary-Land,” 24 March 1651/2, VMH&B 11 (1903–4): 33. 85. Mercurius Politicus 89 (12–19 February 1651): 1423; Lord Willoughby to George Ayscue, 13 November 1651, CP, CO1/11, 103v PRO; Ayscue to Willoughby, 14 November 1651, 104; Mercurius Politicus 90 (19–26 February 1651/2): 1431. 86. Newsletter, 29 July 1653, Mss. Clarendon 46:130–133v, Bodleian. 87. A. B., Brief Relation, 8, 35; Mercurius Politicus 89 (12–19 February 1651): 1422; Perfect Diurnall 44 (30 September–7 October 1650): 453; Willoughby to Lady Willoughby, [9 August 1651]. These differences can be traced in David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). The hospitality that Richard Ligon praised in a wealthy Barbados planter such as Walrond was also part of this ethic; see Ligon, True & Exact History, 35. This was not limited to royalists, of course, for Drax was said to “live like a Prince” (34). 88. Foster, Briefe Relation, 76. For the formulation of the same relationship on the other side of the political divide, see Britannia Triumphalis (London, 1654), 11. 89. Faithful Scout 40 (17–24 October 1651): 312; 50 (26 December 1651–2 January 1651/2): 391. Also see Mercurius Politicus 74 (30 October–6 November 1651): 1188. 90. Faithful Scout 61 (12–19 March 1651/2): 475–476; Weekly Intelligencer 64 (9–

284 284

91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

96. 97.

98.

99.

100.

Notes to Pages 110–112 16 March 1651[/2]): 388–389; French Intelligencer 17 (9–16 March 165[1/ ]2): 128. Perfect Account 70 (28 April–2 May 1652): 554–555; “Journal de ce que n’est passe en la navigation de la Flote du Parlement d’Angleterre vers l’Isle de Barbades,” Gazette de France, 68, supplement (7 June 1652): 543–552. For other foreign interest in the news, see “Advices from London, the 28th March, 1652,” in Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, vol. 28, 1647–1652, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1927), 220. George Marten to Col. Henry Marten, 28 March 1652, HMC, Manuscripts of Rye and Hereford Corporations, 398; The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow . . . 1625– 1672, ed. C. H. Firth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 1:296–298. Weekly Intelligencer 65 (9–16 March 1651/2): 388–389. Searle does not appear to have been in Barbados prior to sailing with the fleet in 1651. See Mary Anne Everett Green, comp., Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, etc., 1643–1660, 5 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1889–1892), 2:714–715; George Ayscue to [William] Lenthall, Barbados, 27 February 1651/2; and to [John Bradshaw], 18 February 1651/2, Tanner 55, fols. 153, 142v, BL. The others were Edward Walrond, Colonel Henry Shelly, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Guy, Colonel Thomas Ellis, Captain William Farmin, Captain Henry Boucher, and Captain George Usher. [John Jennings, comp.], Acts and Statutes of the Island of Barbados (London, [1654?]), 63–66. Ayscue to Lenthall, 27 February 1651/2. Ashton’s date of death is not known, so it is possible that his death made way for a different governor. The latest reference to him is dated January 1651; see “The Answeare which was made unto the proposicons.” Antigua deputies to George Ayscue, n.d. [1652?], Coventry Papers, 58v; Ayscue to [Bradshaw], 18 February 1651/2, 142; George Ayscue, Commission, to Christopher Keynall, 3 April 1652, Mss. Rawlinson A29:394–395, Bodleian; Christopher Keynall et al. to the Council of State, 4 April 1652, Coventry Papers, 54–55. Santa Cruz fell to the Spanish on 10 August 1650; Southey, Chronological History, 1:322 Furthermore although Keynall was on Santa Cruz in 1646 (see Henry Ashton to the earl of Carlisle, [1646], Hay Papers, GD34/93 [3]) and was governor of Antigua by early 1652, it is not recorded when he came to Antigua. John Wilkins, Sr., on behalfe of the St. Christopher Assembly, petition to George Ayscue, 12 April 1652, Coventry Papers, 59–59v. The settlement dictated to Antigua was later debated; see Antigua, “The Case” against Governor Christopher Keynall, in “Petition to the Lt. General, at the Barbados,” [1655], 10, Mss. Rawlinson A29:378–381, Bodleian. Willoughby to Lady Willoughby, [9 August 1651]; Pearce et al., Articles of Agreement; IEB, 22 November 1652, 131:69, PRO; “Reasons Offered by the Lord Willoughbie why hee ought not be confined in his settlement upon Serranam” and “Reasons why Surranam Should be permitted to Subsist,” printed in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 177–183; John Scott, “Description

Notes to Pages 112–115

101. 102.

103. 104.

105.

106.

107.

108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

113.

285 285

of Guyana,” [1668?], Sloane Mss. 3662, 40v–41, BL. See DNB, s.v. Francis Willoughby, fifth baron Willoughby of Parham (1613?–1666). Copy of a Petition From The Governor and Company of the Sommer Islands (London, 1651), 29–30, 15–16, 9. Somers Islands Inhabitants to the Company, [1650?], Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:15–17. For Forster’s history of service, see Julia E. Mercer, comp., Bermuda Settlers of the Seventeenth Century: Genealogical Notes from Bermuda (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1982), 57–59. Copy of a Petition, 16. BCR, 3:58–59. These indictments also addressed past anti-monarchical statements, as in the case of a George Washington, who was alleged to have made treasonous statements in 1648. Josias Forster to the Somers Islands Company, 20 December 1650, in Copy of a Petition, 12. Josias Forster et al. to the [Somers Islands] Company, 1 January 1651/2, CP, CO1/11:100–100v, PRO. This letter stated that they had “long since” seen the act. The previous surviving letter written to the company was dated December 1650. (See Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:17–20.) For the company vote, see Copy of a Petition, 9. The council that took the engagement referred to the order from the company as if it were newly arrived. The company had voted fully a year earlier to issue such an order. Council meeting minutes, 25 February 1651/2, Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:673–674. Rowe to the Council of State, [1656?]; Committee for managing his Highnesses’ Affaires in America, report on Somers Islands, 14 September 1658, CP, CO1/13:120v, PRO; and “Remonstrance against the Persons chosen into places of Authority in the Somers Islands,” 122–124. Forster served as governor until 1659. Also see Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:42, 57, 68–69, 83, 85–86. Copy of the Petition, 29–30. William Golding, Servants On Horse-Back: or, A Free-People bestrided in their persons, and Liberties, by worthlesse men ([London], 1648), argued for free trade, as did William Sayle when he returned to the islands in 1647; BCR, 3:5. Copy of a Petition, esp. 6, for the insurrections jeopardizing the company. Ibid., 6, 7, 21. George Withers to John Danvers, 18 July 1651, ibid., 26–30. See Charles II to Sir George Yeardley et al., Councillors of Virginia, 14 May [1649]; Charles II to William Berkeley et al., 3 June 1650, CEB, CO5/1354: 238–247, PRO. A Narrative of the Indian and Civil Wars in Virginia, In the Years 1675 and 1676 (Boston, 1814); reprinted in Tracts and Other Papers, comp. Peter Force, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1836), 34; [Henry] Norwood, “A Voyage to Virginia,” ibid., 3:31, 41–42. Norwood himself found American royalty somewhat laughable but still worthy of some respect; see esp. ibid., 3:44, 45, 46, 37. See Mercurius Bellonius 3 (18–25 February 165[1/]2): 25 [mispaginated]. Sir Thomas Lunsford, named in the report, migrated to Virginia in 1649; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 1, The Tidewater Period, 1607–1710 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 125, 166–167.

286 286

Notes to Pages 116–118

114. Courtis et al., “From Aboard the Ginny Friggat,” 33; “Speech of Sir Wm. Berkeley, and Declaration of the Assembly, March, 1651,” 75–81. 115. Royall Diurnall 3 (4–11 March 1649/50); Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 5:263. 116. Courtis et al., “From Aboard the Ginny Friggat,” 33. For their instructions, see John Bradshaw, Instructions to Captain Robert Denis et al., State Papers of Thurloe, 1:197–198. 117. Courtis et al., “From Aboard the Ginny Friggat,” 33, 34; “Poor wicked country,” Faithful Scout 70 (14–21 May 1650): 550. 118. For the articles, see Virginia Statutes, 363–367; also Proceedings of Parliaments, 230–231. They were printed in Mercurius Politicus 103 (20–27 May 1652): 1615–17. 119. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, 5:262–263. 120. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, 2d ed., rev. (London, 1722), 52; Morton, Colonial Virginia, 172 n. 69; Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 1:298. 121. Berkeley earlier used incorrect news of royalist victory to bolster the colonists’ commitment to the king; see Courtis et al., “From Aboard the Ginny Friggat,” 33. For the Barbados outcome as key to developments in the other plantations, see Mercurius Bellonius 3 (18–25 February 1652): 25 [mispaginated]. 122. Virginia Statutes, 267–268, 363. The second set of articles listed permission to report to Charles II as its second term (“Articles for Surrendering Virginia,” 365–366). See the Petition of Francis Lovelace and the Pass to Francis Lovelace, dated May 1652 and 10 May 1652, respectively, reprinted in VMH&B 11 (1903–4): 40–41. Also see William Berkeley to Charles II, 14 May 1652, Mss. Clarendon 43:111–112v, Bodleian. 123. IEB, 16 June 1652, 29:11–14, PRO. 124. Two efforts to found new royalist colonies occurred during these years. An island adjacent to America “to be called New Jersey” was the first attempt, between September 1649 and February 1650; see DNB, s.v. Sir George Carteret (d. 1680); Whitlocke, Memorials, 440 [mispaginated]; Perfect Diurnall 23 (13– 20 May 1650): 243 [mispaginated]. New Albion (north of the Chesapeake) was unsuccessfully attempted for a second and third time in 1649 and 1650. See Clifford Lewis, “Some Recently Discovered Extracts from the Lost Minutes of the Virginia Council and General Court, 1642–1645,” WMQ, 2d ser., 20 (1940): 75–76. Also see “Report of Governor Johan Printz, 1647,” in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1912), 120. Willoughby’s Surinam settlement might also be counted here, as he perhaps envisioned it as a royalist enclave when he first arranged its settlement. 125. Mercurius Politicus 3 (20–27 June 1650): 40–41. 126. E[ndecott] et al., “Petition to Parliament in 1651,” 428–430. 127. See IEB, 10:78, PRO, for the order to call in all the patents of “the pretending proprietors” with special reference to Maryland in October 1650. Lord Baltemore’s case argues for the loyalty of Baltimore to the Commonwealth; see p. 179

Notes to Pages 118–121

128.

129. 130.

131.

132.

133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143.

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for the commission by Charles II to William Davenant to govern Maryland owing to Baltimore’s rebellion. On opposition to Baltimore’s government within the colony just prior to this, see Baltimore to William Stone, 6 August 1650 and August 1651, Maryland Assembly, 327–328. John Langford, A just & cleere Refutation of a false and scandalous Pamphlet Entituled Babylons fall in Maryland (London, 1655), 256–257; Courtis et al., “From Aboard the Ginny Friggat”; also see the account in Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 53–59; and Virginia and Maryland, or, the Lord Baltamore’s printed Case, uncased and answered (London, 1655), 198. Lord Baltemore’s case, 177. Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 7, From August the 15th 1651, To March the 16th 1659 (1813), 166, 173. In Barbados, Willoughby (already banished from the colony in violation of the articles) was not permitted to continue as governor. Anything prejudicial to a third person or any other plantation was disallowed. For Virginia, the provision allowing all privileges of other plantations was sent to committee. Woodford B. Hackely, ed., “The Northumberland Oath 1652,” VMH&B 39 (1941): 33–36. According to Derek Hirst, the engagement was a major political error; see England in Conflict, 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London: Arnold, 1999), 264–265. Berkeley’s approach was similar to that described by David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1999), 155; “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 63. Mercurius Politicus 99 (22–29 April 1652): 1565–56 [mispaginated]. Virginia Statutes, 364–365; Petition, [June] 1652, CP, CO1/11:141v, PRO. Richard Hall, comp., Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados. From 1643, to 1762, inclusive (London, 1764), 464, 462; Foster, Briefe Relation, 109. Yorke, Kittery, Welles, Saco, and Cape Propus Inhabitants, Petition to Oliver Cromwell, 27 October 1658, in Hutchinson Papers, 2:32. For rumors of a plot in Barbados in 1658, see “Intelligence from Mr. [George] Downing,” 16 August 1658, n.s., The Hague, State Papers of Thurloe, 7:313– 315. Bliss, Revolution and Empire, esp. chap. 3; Antigua deputies to Ayscue, [1652]. Mercurius Politicus 144 (10–17 March 1653): 2295; 145 (17–24 March 1653): 2310. “From aboard the St. John,” Faithful Scout 61 (12–19 March 1651/2): 476; French Intelligencer 18 (16–23 March 165[1/]2): 131; Faithful Scout 6[2] (19– 26 March 1651/2): 480, 482. Daniel Searle to the Council of State, 30 June 1652, CP, CO1/11:155v, PRO; Mercurius Pragmaticus 2 (25 May–1 June [1652]): 16. Weekly Intelligencer 75 (25 May–1 June 1652): 478; “Prince Rupert’s Voyage to the West Indies,” Additional Mss. 30,307, fol. 20, BL. Faithful Scout 93 (22–29 October 1652): 734. In addition to the accounts already cited, see “From Aboard the Hart,” 16 July 1652, Mercurius Politicus 116 (19–26 August 1652): 1818–20, and “From Antigua, commonly called Antigo,

288 288

144. 145.

146. 147. 148.

149. 150.

Notes to Pages 121–125 Novem. 26,” Mercurius Politicus 144 (10–17 March 1653): 2294–95; “Prince Rupert’s Voyage,” 22v. Mercurius Politicus 144 (10–17 March 1653): 2294; 145 (17–24 March 1653): 2309. “Extracted out of a Journal Kept Of the Prince’s Own Ship,” in Memoirs of Prince Rupert, and the Cavaliers, 3 vols., ed. Eliot Warburton (London, 1849), 3:543. Later Gregory Butler complained that St. Christopher governor Clemens Everard must have cooperated with Rupert; see “Grievances by Greg Butler, against Everard,” [1659], CP, CO1/13:154–155, PRO. The little evidence dating to Rupert’s visit suggests otherwise, however. Mercurius Politicus 144 (10–17 March 1653): 2294; “From Antigua,” ibid., 2294, 2295; “Extracted out of a Journal,” 544–545. “Extracted out of a Journal,” 546, 544; Mercurius Politicus 145 (17–24 March 1653): 2310; “Prince Rupert’s Voyage,” 21v. Mercurius Politicus 116 (19–26 August 1652): 1820. Parliamentary commissioners instructed to defend the fisheries against Rupert had taken Newfoundland the previous summer; Cell, English Enterprises in Newfoundland, 1577– 1660, 122–123, 121. Faithful Scout 6[2] (19–26 March 1652): 480 (mispaginated). This analysis is similar to that offered on the Somers Islands in Copy of a Petition, 6.

4. Religious Politics of a “Puritan Revolution” 1. Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1997), 43. Catholics had no priest either. 2. Lawrence C. Wroth, “The First Sixty Years of the Church of England in Maryland, 1632–1692,” MHM 11 (1916): 14. 3. Richard Higgons to Henry Scobill, 21 January 1652/3, reprinted in P. F. Campbell, The Church in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century (St. Michael: Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 1982), 166–167. On England, see Isabel Rivers, “Prayer-Book Devotion: The Literature of the Proscribed Episcopal Church,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 198–214. 4. Richard Pearce et al., Articles of Agreement Had, Made and Concluded (London, 1652); Virginia Statutes, 364; “Instructions to the Commissioners,” 26 September 1651, VMH&B 11 (1903–4): 38. 5. William H. Seiler, “The Anglican Parish in Virginia,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 124; George Maclaren Brydon, Virginia’s Mother Church and the Political Conditions under which It Grew (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1947), chap. 13. 6. John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, The two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia, and Mary-land (London, 1656), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, 290; Somers Islands assizes, November 1657, BCR, 3, page number omitted; Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie (London, 1652), bk. 4, 113.

Notes to Pages 126–128

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7. Higgons to Scobill, 21 January 1652/3, 167–168, 166–167. 8. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), chap. 8; James F. Cooper, Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36–39. 9. Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 148. Oliver Cromwell, “Speech at the opening of Parliament,” 17 September 1656, in Cromwell, Writings & Speeches, 4:278. Official support for liberty of conscience is discussed in Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr., 12 July 1654, Winthrop Papers, 6:403. For Cromwell’s attitudes and goals, see Jeffrey R. Collins, “The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell,” History 87 (2002): 18–40. 10. Hull, “Observable Passages,” 186–187. Hull seems to have written a wholly positive assessment, then gone back later to add a negative note on the toleration issue. Perhaps his conversations in Boston caused him to reassess. Samuel Gorton dedicated one of his pamphlets to Cromwell; see An Antidote Against the Common Plague of the World (London, 1657), a2–a3. Cromwell did on one occasion privately defend New Englanders against a member of his council who styled them rigid persecutors; see John Leverett, “Audience with Cromwell,” 1 December 1656, in Cromwell, Writings & Speeches, 4:345. 11. Henry Lawrence, “To the Commander and Cheife of the English Fleete in America,” 23 December 1656, Order Book, IEB, 77:949, PRO; Articles and Orders, made and agreed upon the 9th Day of July, 1647 (London, 1647), reprinted in Fulmer Mood, “A Broadside Advertising Eleuthera and the Bahama Islands, London 1647,” PCSM 33, Transactions, 1934–1937 (1937): 82. 12. For soul rape, see Roger Williams, Queries Of the Highest consideration (London, 1644), 3; The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, discussed, in A Conference between Truth and Peace ([London], 1644), n.p., 95; and The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (London, 1652), pt. 2, 190–192. He also likened it to forcing daughters into the “marriage beds” of those they could not love; Bloudy Tenent, 144. Elsewhere he graphically described forced conscience as the equivalent of forcing men into sex with ugly, deformed, impudent whores and strumpets; see The Examiner defended (London, 1652), reprinted in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 7:268. This sexual imagery worked off the fact that religious communion was, for Williams, evocative of consensual sex, so that forced communion brought to mind its antithesis. Ecstatic sexualized metaphors for describing union with Christ were common; see Margaret W. Masson, “The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690–1730,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (1976): 304–315. 13. Samuel Maverick, “A briefe description of New England,” NEHGR 39 (1885): 44; John Hull, “Some Passages of God’s Providence,” Archaelogia Americana 3 (1857): 150–151. 14. Rhode Island Records, 279–280. 15. Gregorie Dexter, town clerk, on behalf of the Town of Providence, to Sir Henry Vane, 27 August 1654, printed in Rhode Island Records, 288–289. On Massa-

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

Notes to Pages 128–130 chusetts having “wise and godly men” who knew how to deal with the likes of Vane, see Richard Baxter, A Key for Catholicks (London, 1659), 331. For liberty as cover for licentiousness, see William Arnold to [Massachusetts court], 1 September 1651, Rhode Island Records, 234. John Langford, A just & cleere Refutation of a false and scandalous Pamphlet Entituled Babylons fall in Maryland (London, 1655), 260. The act is printed in Maryland Assembly, 244–247, and discussed in Craven, Southern Colonies, 234–236; and in Steiner, Maryland during the English Civil War, 114–118. “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 69. Barbados Council Minutes, 8 November 1654, 67. R. Ward Harrington, “Speaking Scripture: The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657,” QH 82 (1993): 106–107, 105. Hamon L’Estrange, Americans no Jewes (London, 1652), 69; “Extracts from Henry Whistler’s Journal of the West India Expedition,” Venables Narrative, 146. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 108. Also see Wilfred S. Samuel, “Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados, 1680,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 13 (1936): 1–47. But they did have restrictions placed on their activities eventually; see Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1642–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 147, 326. On the readmission of the Jews, see Henry Mechoulan and Gerard Nahon, introduction to Menasseh Ben Israel: The Hope of Israel, trans. Richenda George (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 56–61. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 10–11. For Long Island, see [Johannes] Megapolensis and [Samuel] Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, 25 October 1657, New Netherland Narratives, 396–397. For the Caribbean, see J. Berkenhead to John Thurloe, 17 February 1654[/5], Barbados, State Papers of Thurloe, 3:158, and J. Daniell to ?, 3 June 1655, Jamaica, 3:507. Gregory Butler to Oliver Cromwell, [1655], State Papers of Thurloe, 3:754. Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985), 27. There were Quakers in Barbados and probably Maryland (1655); Massachusetts, Nevis, Antigua (1656); Plymouth, Long Island, Rhode Island, Virginia, Surinam (1657); Connecticut, Jamaica, St. Christopher, New Haven (1658); Bermuda, Newfoundland (1660). I have not been able to document activity in Montserrat; but given that Quakers visited the nearby islands of Antigua, St. Christopher, and Nevis, it is unlikely that it was neglected. Sources for this information: Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies, with Isaac Sharpless and Amelia M. Gummere (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 27, 28, 43, 51, 57, 61; Kenneth L. Carroll, “Persecution of Quakers in Early Maryland (1658–1661),” QH 53 (1964): 67–80; Barbara Ritter Dailey, “The Early

Notes to Pages 130–131

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

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Quaker Mission and the Settlement of Meetings in Barbados, 1658–1700,” JBMHS 39 (1991): 24–46; Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptist in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Plymouth Records: Court Orders, vol. 3, 1651–1661, 111; James Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America, 2 vols. (London, 1850, 1854; reprinted in 1 vol., New York: Arno Press, 1972), 342; John Tomkins and John Field, Piety Promoted, 4th ed. (Dublin, 1721), 248; [Humphrey Norton], New-England’s Ensigne (London, 1659), 52–53; Edward Doyley to John Thurloe, 28 February 1657/8, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:834; Isabel MacBeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 95–96; BCR, 3:[540?]; Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:132–133; William C. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism (London: Macmillan, 1923), 335–337. See, for one example, DNB, s.v. John Rous (fl. 1656–1695). The letter from Rous to Margaret Fell, 3 September 1658, reprinted widely, including in Maria Webb, The Fells of Swarthmoor Hall, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: H. Longstreth, 1896), 176–177, mentions that he left Barbados in the company of another converted inhabitant. He authored A Warning to The Inhabitants of Barbados, Who Live in Pride, Drunkenesse, Covetousness, Oppression, and deceitful dealings (London, 1656). Phrase (applied in this case to Barbados) in George Rofe to Stephen Crisp, 16 November 1661, in Charlotte Fell-Smith, Steven Crisp and His Correspondents, 1657–1692 (London: E. Hicks, Jun., 1892), 30–31. On Massachusetts, see Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts, chap. 1; and Jonathan M. Chu, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985); for Maryland, Kenneth L. Carroll, “Maryland Quakers in the Seventeenth Century,” MHM 48 (1952); 279–313; and Michael Graham, “Meetinghouse and Chapel: Religion and Community in SeventeenthCentury Maryland,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 242–274. For Virginia, Kenneth L. Carroll, “Quakerism on the Eastern Shore of Virginia,” VMH&B 74 (1966): 170–189; and Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies. For Long Island, Peter Ross, A History of Long Island, 3 vols. (New York: Lewis Publishing Company, 1902), 1:368, 922, 920, 932, 166–167, 528–530, 362–363, 168; Charles Frederick Holder, The Quakers in Great Britain and America (New York: Neuner Co., 1913), 352–353; and Massachusetts Governor and Magistrates to the Commissioners of the United Colonies, 2 September 1656, Hutchinson Papers, 317–318; and Harrington, “The Flushing Remonstrance,” 104–109. For New Haven, New Haven Records, 2:242–247, 276, 412–415. On Newfoundland, John Davenport to John Winthrop, Jr., 28 September 1659, CMHS, 3d. ser., 10 (1844): 25–26. Doyley to Thurloe, 28 February 1657/8. Charles Baily, A True and Faithful Warning unto The People and Inhabitants of Bristol (London, 1663), 11. For Quakers in Oyster Bay, see Ross, History of Long Island, 922, 920, 932. Although Shelter Island became a center for traveling Quakers, the proprietor,

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33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

Notes to Pages 131–133 Nathaniel Sylvester, and his wife, Gissel Brinley Sylvester, may not have been members; one of the co-investors in the island was Thomas Rous, a Barbados convert to the sect. See Ralph G. Duvall, The History of Shelter Island (Shelter Island Heights, 1932), 19–22. Ann Hughes, “The Frustrations of the Godly,” in Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, ed. John Morrill (London: Collins and Brown, 1992), 86; Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), chap. 8. Council of State, “To the Governor and General Assembly of the English Plantation of Virginia,” 4 January 1654[/5], IEB 75:27–28, PRO. Council of State, “To the government of Barbados,” 6 February 1659/60, Letter Book, IEB 99:36, PRO. Worthington C. Ford, ed., “Cotton’s ‘Moses His Judicialls,’” PMHS, 2d ser., 16 (1902): 274–284; William Aspinwall, preface to John Cotton, An Abstract of Laws and Government (London, 1655), page number omitted. Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606–1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 5–15; Acts and Ordinances, 2:1133–36, and for other laws in the same vein, 1:420–422, 2:387. Connecticut’s code was distributed in manuscript to the towns; Andrews, Colonial Period, 2:124. For published versions, see The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes (Cambridge, Mass., 1648); New-Haven’s Settling in New-England and some Lawes for Government (London, 1656). Bulstrode Whitlocke, The Diary of Bulstrode Whitlocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding, Records of Social and Economic History, n.s., 13 (1990): 274. Massachusetts Records, 3:357. For the struggle over who could preach, for example, see ibid., 317, 343–344, 357. See John Clarke, Ill Newes from New-England (London, 1652), 26. Accolades for Cotton during this period were frequent and fulsome. See Charles (?) Scott, preface to John Cotton, Practical Commentary (London, 1656), page number omitted; William Aspinwall, preface to Cotton, Abstract of Laws; Robert Baillie, The Disswasive from the Errors of the Time (London, 1655), Av; Giles Workman, Private-men no Pulpit-men (London, 1646), 3. In a pamphlet debate between John Elmeston and Simon Hendon, the title page of the former’s Censure of That Reverend and Learned man of God, Mr. John Cotton (London, 1656) revolves around the authority of Cotton and his stand on specific issues. John Norton declared him “a glory to both Englands” in Abel Being Dead, Yet Speaketh (London, 1658), 41. Thomas Cobbet, The Civil Magistrates power (London, 1653), was dedicated to Cromwell. Peter Buckeley, The Gospel-Covenant, 2d ed. (London, 1651), preface. See Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). The reform allowed the baptized children of church members to seek baptism for their own children even though they had not become full members themselves. Richard Blinman was critical; see “An Answer to divers Reverend Elders,” [1657], Manuscript Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. For

Notes to Pages 133–136

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

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fears of what would be made of these ideas in England, especially by former resident and self-appointed New England expert Giles Firmin, see A Disputation (1659), preface, page number omitted. Firmin rehashed the old question of whether Anglican ordination needed to be renounced and used the New England case; see Separation Examined (London, 1652), 16. William Hooke to Oliver Cromwell, 3 November 1653, State Papers of Thurloe, 1:564–565. On fear of disunity, also see Firmin, Separation Examined, B1; of decline, John Brock, “The Autobiographical Memoranda of John Brock,” ed. Clifford K. Shipton, PAAS, n.s., 53 (1943): 102; Thomas Cobbet, A Fruitfull & Usefull Discourse (London, 1656), A4v. Maine Records, vol. 2, York County Court Records, 12–14. Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” WMQ 31 (1974): 33–34, 41–42. The Virginians thought of conversion of Indians in somewhat similar terms, while doing even less about it; see Warren M. Billings, ed., “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, April 1652, November 1652, and July 1653,” VMH&B 83 (1975): 72. Massachusetts Governor and Magistrates to the Commissioners of the United Colonies, 2 September 1656, 317–318; the commissioners’ response, [1656], ibid., 318–320. Plymouth Records, [vol. 11], Laws, 1623–1682, 57, 57–58; ibid., vol. 2; Court Orders, 1641–1651, 162; Edwin S. Gaustad, Baptist Piety: The Last Will and Testimony of Obadiah Holmes (Grand Rapid, Mich.: Christian University Press, 1978). George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 67–68. Michael Jarvis, “‘In the Eye of All Trade’: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Bermudian Society, 1612–1800” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1998), 231. See Forster’s letter in Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:13. BCR, 3:128–132, 223 (quotation), [476v], and page number omitted. Barbados Council Minutes, 59, 122, 354, 398–399, 435. Billings, “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes,” 32; [John Jennings], Acts and Statutes of the Island of Barbados (London, [1654]), 79. Also see Barbados Council Minutes, 28 May 1655, 112. [John Bayes], Humble Proposals of severall Barbadeans, submitted to the Council of State, 22 November 1650, CP, CO1/11, 70, 69, PRO. On Winthrop, see Winthrop Journal, 587–89. Also see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of the Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies,” HJ 32 (1989): 19, 26; Barbados Assembly to his Excellency Oliver Lord Cromwell, [September 1653], Egerton Mss. 2395, fol. 175, BL; warrant dated 12 November 1652 and printed in Appendix III: “The Letter of Richard Higgons,” in Campbell, Church in Barbados, 167; Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A Discourse opening the Nature of that Episcopacie (London, 1641), 122; [Thomas Shepard?], Day Breaking If Not the Sun-Rising (London, 1647); Thomas Shepard, Cleare Sunshine (London, 1648). Charles Harding Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

Notes to Pages 136–138 (1900; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 342; Richard P. Gildrie, The Prophane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 114–117. For the broad context within England, see Ronald Hutton’s discussion in The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. 208. Rhode Island Records, 279–280. [Jennings], Acts and Statutes of Barbados, 79. “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 68–69. Barbados Council Minutes, 14 August 1656, 255. Billings, “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes,” 32; Hammond, Leah and Rachel, 286–287. Antigua deputies, “Copie of Severall Proposalls to Ye Governor & Ye Councell,” 13 October 1655, Mss. Rawlinson A29:386–387, Bodleian. Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice (London, 1662), 18. “Lawes, Regulations and Orders in force at the Leeward Islands from 1668 to 1672,” CO154/1:5, PRO. James VI, Daemonologie (Edinbugh, 1597); Chapin, Criminal Justice, 182. Also see Terry Tucker, “Witchcraft in the Somers Isles,” BHQ 21, no. 3 (1964): 68. Massachusetts Records, 3:239. For the conjunction of factors that led to prosecutions, see Clive Holmes, “Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (New York: Mouton, 1984), 85–111; and Julian Goodare, “Witch-Hunting and the Scottish State,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. Julian Goodare (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 123–124. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987), 27. On the covenant, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), 444. The major text of the English trials is Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (London, 1647). New Haven dealt with a few suspected witches, including calling one woman before the court on three separate occasions. The magistrates took bond for good behavior and banished one suspected couple but executed no one. See Frederick C. Drake, “Witchcraft in the American Colonies, 1647–62,” American Quarterly 20 (1968): 701, 703. It could be that New Haven was so small and so attentive to its public morality that situations that might have festered in another colony, eventually to develop into a witchcraft charge, were nipped in the bud in New Haven. Edward Johnson, for one, admired the colony’s greater strictness; see A History of New-England (London, 1654), 124. On the role of the magistrates there, see Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1634–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Memorials of the Bermudas includes an appendix which selectively reprints the court materials; see “Appendix 10: Witchcraft in the Somers Islands, 1650–

Notes to Pages 138–141

69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81.

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1696,” 2:601–629. The editor, J. H. Lefroy, omitted all references to sexuality, however, including the sodomy reference, which can be found in BCR, 3:178. Interestingly, the Somers Islanders alone among the colonies to prosecute witches used the ordeal by water, a folk tradition then out of favor in New England. See BCR, 3:107, 163. John Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50–51. On Hopkins, see Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), chap. 9; and Jim Sharpe, “The Devil in East Anglia: The Matthew Hopkins Trials Reconsidered,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, Past and Present Publications (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 237–254. See annotated list in Drake, “Witchcraft in the American Colonies,” 694–725; for escape to Rhode Island, 708. Maine Records, 2:56, 82, 86. See Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 146. Joseph H. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1639–1700): The Pynchon Court Record (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 219–220; Drake, “Witchcraft in the American Colonies,” 706, 702. I am aware of William Lamont’s admonition not to equate puritans with witch-hunters, but the more general project of godly reformation did lead to an increased concern over witches in the wider Atlantic world and, I would argue, elsewhere as well. See his Puritanism and Historical Controversy (London: UCL Press, 1996), 191, 172, 162. Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 73; Robin Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” Past & Present 52 (1971): 44. On Satanic plots, see Richard Mather, Summe of Certain Sermons (London, 1652). For a related argument about the scares in England at this time, see Sharpe, “The Devil in East Anglia,” 250–251. Higgons to Scobill, 21 January 1652/3, 168. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, 142. “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 68. Maine Records, 1:164; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Brock, “Autobiographical Memoranda,” 101, 102. Also see “A Breife Description of the Islande of Barbados,” (1650 or 1651?), in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 43. Hughes, “Frustrations of the Godly”; Claire Cross, “The Church in England, 1646–1660,” in Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), 99–120. Megapolensis and Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, 25 October 1657, 401– 402. For the few exceptions, see Larry Gragg, “Puritans in Paradise: The New

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82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Notes to Pages 141–143 England Migration to Barbados, 1640–1660,” Journal of Caribbean History 21 (1988): 154–167; John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass., 1873), 1:77. Somers Islands Inhabitants, Petition to Oliver Cromwell, [1657], considered in council March 25, 1657/8, CP, CO1/13:93, PRO. Somers Islands Company (Committee appointed by the Council of State) to Josias Forster, 1 January 1649/50, Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:3. A. C. Hollis Hallett, Chronicle of a Colonial Church, 1612–1826: Bermuda (Pembroke, Bermuda: Juniper Hill Press, 1993), 59–65. “Journal of Brian Nuton, Captain Lieutenant; Cornelis van Ruyven, Secretary; and Carel van Brugge, Commissary,” 29 December 1656 to 1 January 1657, in Correspondence, 1654–1658, ed. and trans. Charles T. Gehring, New Netherland Document Series (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 115. “Articles of Complaint against Coll. Clement Everard,” CP, CO1/13:151–152, PRO. Hammond, Leah and Rachel, 286–87; Seiler, “The Anglican Parish in Virginia,” 129–130; Virginia Statutes, 418. Higgon to Scobill, 21 January 1652/3, 168. Geoffrey Parker, “Success and Failure during the First Century of the Reformation,” in Success Is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 233. George Gardyner, A Description of the New World (London, 1651), 101; Mercurius Politicus 90 (19–26 February 1651/2): 1431. On Virginia, see also the lament of [Lionel Gatford], Publick Good Without Private Interest (London, 1657). [Robert Venables] “Relation concerning the expedition of the West Indies,” Additional Mss. 11410, fol. 85v, BL. [William Byam], An Exact Relation of The Most Execrable Attempts of John Allin (London, 1665), 1–2; Sanford, Surinam Justice, 36; Alexander Philip Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), 1:277. Lord Baltimore to William Stone, 26 August 1651, Maryland Assembly, 332– 334; “Maryland Provincial Court,” 2:173; Nigel Smith, “The Charge of Atheism and the Language of Radical Speculation, 1640–1660,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wooton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 134. A Dutch Reformed minister thought atheism common among the English on Long Island; Johannes Megapolensis to the Classis of Amsterdam, 18 March 1655, Narratives of New Netherland, 391– 392. Massachusetts Records, 4, pt. 1, 78 “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 68. [Johnson], History of New-England, 105–106. Perry Miller, The New England Mind, vol. 2, From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 9. Williams, Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody, 25–26. William Pynchon, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (London, 1650); see also his Meritorious Price of Mans Redemption (London, 1655). John Norton re-

Notes to Pages 144–147

99.

100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108.

109. 110.

111.

112.

113. 114.

297 297

sponded in Discussion of that Great Point in Divinity, The Sufferings of Christ (London, 1653) to the first Pynchon work. Also see N[icholas] Chewney, AntiSocinianism (London, 1656). For the colony’s treatment of Pynchon, see Massachusetts Records, 4, pt. 1, 29– 30, 48–49, 72. For its justification of the treatment, see preface to Norton’s Discussion of that Great Point in Divinity, page number omitted. Samuel Whiting and Thomas Cobbet to John Eliot and Samuel Danforth, 2 August 1654, Curwen Family Manuscript Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Also see Brock, “Autobiographical Memoranda,” 103, for a layman’s concerns. When Governor John Endecott confronted John Clarke about his heresies, Endecott seemed a bit muddled about the nature of them, at least according to Clarke’s account in Ill Newes from New-England, 5. Plymouth Records, 2:162; Gaustad, Baptist Piety. Clarke, Ill Newes from New-England; Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts, 4–6, 48; McLoughlin, New England Dissent, chap. 1. Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 106–108. Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630– 1692, ed. John Noble and John F. Cronin, 3 vols. (Boston, 1928), 3:34–38. Petition dated 25 October 1654, ibid., 3:36–37. Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts, 34–35. In May 1652 the law punishing denial of the truth of the Bible with death had been modified to make the punishment a fine and whipping for the first offense, death for the second. See Massachusetts Records, 3:259–260. Mercurius Politicus 34 (18–24 December 1656), 1066–69. Massachusetts Records, 4, pt. 1, 345–346, 383, 419; Thomas Wilkey to George Lad, 26 March 1661, in George Bishop, New England Judged. The Second Part (London, 1667), 28. Also see [John Josselyn], Chronological Observations of America (London, 1674), reprinted in CMHS, 3d ser., 3 (1883): 389. John Norton, The Heart of New England Rent (1659; enlarged ed., London, 1660), 61, 84. Francis Howgill, The Popish Inquisition Newly Erected in New-England (London, 1659); [Humphrey Norton], New-England’s Ensigne (London, 1659); George Bishop, New England Judged, Not by Man’s, but the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1661), and New England Judged: The Second Part. For a rare defense of Massachusetts penned by a nonresident, see Laurence Claxton, The Quakers Downfall (London, 1659), 44. Sir Richard Saltonstall to John Cotton and John Wilson, [1652], in The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815, ed. Robert E. Moody, in CMHS, 80–81 (Boston, 1972, 1974), 1:1648–49. See editor’s note on the Williams link. Ezekial Rogers, Last Will and Testament, dated 17 April 1660, proved 26 March 1661, Suffolk County Manuscript Probate Records, Boston Public Library. Williams, Examiner defended, 192–194. Baillie, Disswasive, 43–44; Daniel Cawdrey, The Inconsistencie of the Independent way (London, 1651), av–a2.

298 298

Notes to Pages 147–149

115. John Davenport, The Knowledge of Christ Indispensably required of all men that would be saved (London, 1653), preface. Similar to Davenport’s was Richard Mather’s comment in The Summe of Certain Sermons, A3. For other examples, see Brock, “Autobiographical Memoranda,” 104. Edward Winslow worried about the wrong done to New Englanders by their negative image; see Hypocrisie Unmasked, by a true Relation of the Proceedings of the Governour and Company of the Massachusetts against Samuel Gorton and his accomplices (London, 1646), A2v. 116. Fendall’s council moved against the Quakers for their refusal to take the oath in July (during the visit of Thurston and fellow Quaker Josiah Coale). See “Maryland Council,” 8 July 1658 and after, 348, 349–350, 352–353, 362. Also see F[rancis] H[owgill], The Deceiver of The Nations Discovered (London, 1660), 14–27, 17–18. Howgill equated Maryland with “those uncircumcised men of New England” (13). 117. The history of Nevis is too little known to explain why Governor James Russell began harassing the Quakers in 1658; see Joseph Besse, A collection of the Sufferings of the people Called Quakers, 2 vols. (London, 1753), 2:352, 370; Robert Clarkson to Elizabeth Harris, 14 January 1657/8, in Kenneth L. Carroll, “Elizabeth Harris, the Founder of American Quakerism,” QH 57 (1968): 105. On Berkeley, see Virginia Statutes, 532–533. 118. Witnesses mentioned a planned visit to Bermuda in February 1658. See Barbara Ritter Dailey, “The Early Quaker Mission and the Settlement of Meetings in Barbados, 1658–1700,” JBMHS 39 (1991): 29; A. Day Bradley, “Friends in Bermuda in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 54 (1976): 3–11. On Barbados, see “Journal of the Proceedings of the Governor and Council of Barbados from the 29th of May 1660,” CEB, CO31/1, 12, PRO. 119. Although the discussion was intended in part to mollify the United Colonies (see Rhode Island to Commissioners of the United Colonies Commissioners, 13 October 1657, Rhode Island Records, 376–378), there was also some concern about the extent of Quaker expansion. See Raymond Dye Irwin, “Saints, Sinners, and Subjects: Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in Transatlantic Perspective, 1636–1665” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1996), chap. 7. For the decision, see Rhode Island General Assembly to Massachusetts Bay, 13 March 1657[/8], Rhode Island Records, 378–380. 120. Plymouth Records: Court Orders, vol. 3, 1651–1661, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124– 126, 127, 129, 130, 138–140, 147, 149, 154. 121. On Cudworth, see ibid., 130, 189, and George Bishop, New England Judged, Not by Man’s, but the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1661), 128–129; Plymouth Records [vol. 11], Laws, 1623–1682, 120, 124. On Hatherly, see Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies, 61. For other evidence of division within the colony, see Court Orders, 3:183, 188, 189. 122. Plymouth Records, [vol. 11], Laws, 1623–1682, 126. 123. Bishop, New England Judged, 129–30. Ellipses are used to remove parenthetical remarks that I take to be Bishop’s editorializing, identifying Massachusetts and “the Bay-Horse” as references to “Boston Colony.”

Notes to Pages 150–152

299 299

124. For the “free aire,” see David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Eleuthera has been left out of this discussion because, although its principles were laid out in the surviving “Articles and Orders,” nothing is known of practice in the colony. 125. When the two sentiments did not go together in New England, residents protested. One New Haven resident complained that the government punished Quakers but “could suffer whoring, drinking, or drunkennes.” The accused lived in the Quaker hotbed of Southold on Long Island, which was only nominally under the control of New Haven. See New Haven Records, 2:412. 126. James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 386– 388. Efforts to attract Dutch, French, and Italian settlers may have brought in Catholics as well as other sorts of Protestants. See “Maryland Council,” 231– 232; Virginia and Maryland, or Lord Baltamore’s printed Case, uncased and answered (London, 1655), 216–217. 127. Langford, Just & cleere Refutation, 274–275. Langford remarked that “better quality” Protestants than those who opposed Baltimore took and kept the oath to him in Maryland (255). 128. John Milton, Of Reformation (London, 1641), reprinted in Prose Works of John Milton, ed. J. A. St. John, 5 vols. (London, 1848), 2:400. For popular anti-popery combining with support for Parliament and leading to violence, see John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: Colchester Plunders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 129. [Nathaniel Ward], The Simple Cobler of Aggawamm in America (London, 1647), 72–73; William Hooke, New-Englands Sence, of Old-England and Irelands Sorrowes (London, 1645), 31; Nathaniel Rogers, A Letter, Discovering The Cause of Gods continuing wrath against the Nation (London, 1644), 1; Peter Buckley et al. to Oliver Cromwell, 31 December 1650, CMHS, 4th ser., 2 (1854): 115. 130. “A Briefe Journall; or, a Succint and True Relation of . . . that Voyage Undertaken by Captaine William Jackson” [1645], in The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, ed. Vincent T. Harlow, Camden Miscellany 13 (1923): 7. 131. Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World; “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 58–59, 61, 62, 63; BCR, vol. 3, page number omitted, also in Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:98. 132. “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 59. 133. Virginia and Maryland, 200; Mary fforde, in “Maryland Council,” 169, 171; “Maryland Provincial Court,” 2:354–355, 3 April 1654; Richard Bennet and Samuel Matthew, “Objections against the lord Baltimore’s patent,” [1656?], State Papers of Thurloe, 5:482–483; Roger Heaman, An Additional brief Narrative Of a late Bloody Design Against The Protestants in Ann Arundel County, and Severn in Maryland (London, 1655), 3. 134. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 77. 135. “A breviat of the proceedings of the lord Baltimore and his officers and compliers in Maryland against the authority of the parliament,” n.d. [1656?], State

300 300

136. 137. 138. 139.

140.

141. 142. 143.

Notes to Pages 152–159 Papers of Thurloe, 5:486–487; also Leonard Strong, Babylon’s Fall in Maryland (London, 1655), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, 236. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 76–84; and see Maryland Assembly, 20 October 1654, 341–344. Langford, Just & cleere Refutation, 256. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth, 96–101. John Hammond, Hammond versus Heamans (London, [1655]), 3; Virginia and Maryland, 204; Strong, Babylon’s Fall in Maryland, 244, 239; Heaman, Additional brief Narrative, 2, 11. The chanting papists may have added “Hey for our Wives” or even “Hey for two wives,” a fact that was emphasized by Heaman and challenged by Hammond. See Hammond versus Heamans, 16. “Extracts from the Annual Letters of the English Province of the Society of Jesus,” Maryland Narratives, 141–142. Marie de L’Incarnation identified with Maryland Catholics; see Word from New France: The Selected Letters of Marie de L’Incarnation, ed. and trans. Joyce Marshall (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 234. Heaman, Additional Brief Narrative, 9. Carla Gardina Pestana, “Quaker Executions as Myth and History,” JAH 80 (1993): 441–469. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution, 1603–1660 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1883).

5. Free Trade and Freeborn English Men 1. His views on the Dutch War were a different matter. See Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 10. 2. Statement printed in Mercurius Politicus 90 (19–26 February 1651/2): 1430. Willoughby here invokes the classic conception of membership in a political community based on legiance; the move to Englishness as a substitute avoids the modern version, that membership is based on consent, and seems to represent an intermediate stage. James H. Kettner discusses legiance and consent in The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pt. 1. 3. Samuell Shepard to Sir Thomas Barrington, 25 December 1643, Egerton Mss. 2648, fols. 10–11, BL. Besides the general destructiveness of wartime on trading patterns, ships were occasionally stayed, as in August 1648, when the revolt of part of the navy in the Downs led Parliament to hold all ships. See Proceedings of Parliaments, 204–206. 4. [Edward Johnson], A History of New-England (London, 1654), 43; Winthrop Journal, 490. The records kept by Boston notary William Aspinwall from 1644 to 1651 offer an excellent source for charting the development of trade during this era; see A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston Containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644 to 1651, ed. William H. Whitmore and Walter K. Watkins (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1903). Samuel Maverick, “A briefe description of New England,” NEHGR 39 (1885): 47, emphasizes the trade in livestock. On produce, see Darrett B. Rutman, “Governor Win-

Notes to Pages 159–162

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

301 301

throp’s Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay,” WMQ 20 (1963): 396–415. For the economy generally, see Daniel Vickers, “The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society, 1600–1775,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 231–232; and Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. For the impact of the civil wars on the penchant for open trade, see John J. McCusker, “British Mercantilist Policies and the American Colonies,” in Cambridge Economic History, 1:344–348. Council of State, “Draught of a License,” 28 November 1650, SP 13, 79–82, PRO; George Gardyner, A Description of the New World (London, 1651), 91. Boston’s trade was the only aspect of New England noted by Samuel Clarke in A Geographical Description of all the Countries in the known World (London, 1657), 173. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 37. Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 59; R. C. Nash, “Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” WMQ 42 (July 1985): 329–356. This was an example used by the residents of the Somers Islands; see William Golding, Servants On Horse-Back: or, A Free-People bestrided in their persons, and Liberties, by worthlesse men ([London], 1648), 5. Alan Taylor, American Colonies, Penguin History of the United States (New York: Viking, 2001), 176. Proceedings of Parliaments, 140–142, 215 n. 370, 216–217; Severall Proceedings in Parliament 39 (20–27 June 1650): 556–557; Charles F. Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence: Brown University, 1973), chap. 5. [Johnson], History of New-England, 208. Proceedings of Parliaments, 219; Maryland Assembly, 369–371. Stephen Saunders Webb, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Webb has exaggerated the centrality of garrison government in colonial history. On Jamaica, which offers his best example, it was widely viewed as a temporary and unfortunate expedient, in the colony as at the imperial center. Charles Edward Banks, Colonel Alexander Rigby: A Sketch of His Career and Connection with Maine (Portland, Maine, 1885), 55. Oliver Cromwell to the Governor and Council of Virginia, 31 August 1658, IEB, 78:818, PRO. J. P. Cooper, “Social and Economic Policies under the Commonwealth,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), esp. 126, 133, 135, 141; Robert M. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 12. William Berkeley, The speech of Sir William Berkeley, Governour and Capt: Generall of Virginia (The Hague, 1651 [1652?]).

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Notes to Pages 162–164

18. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context 50 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63, 138. 19. Warren M. Billings, ed., “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, April 1652, November 1652, and July 1653,” VMH&B 83 (1975): 28. 20. ”An Act Declaring and Constitution the People of England to be a Commonwealth and Free-State,” [19 May 1649], Acts and Ordinances, 2:122. The wording also appears in “An Act . . . for Constituting a Counsell of State for the Comonwealth of England,” [13 February 1648/9], 3, and “An Act for the abolishing the Kingly Office,” [17 March 1648/9], 18. Not surprisingly, “An Act for increase of Shipping and Encouragement of the Navigation of this Nation,” [9 October 1651], 559–562, was even more specific: “or any other lands, islands, plantations, or territories to this Commonwealth belonging, or in their possession.” Charles I articulated the relation of colonial subject to king in the “royal Proclamation for Virginia (13 May 1625)”; see English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955), 236. For a discussion of subjects attached to the body of the king, see Keechang Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–144, 178–181; and, for changes in this period, see D. Alan Orr, Treason and the State: Law; Politics, and Ideology in the English Civil War, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 208– 209. The constitutional implications were laid out by Charles Howard McIlwain in The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 21–26. I am indebted to Barbara Black for a conversation that helped me to clarify these issues. 21. Edward Doyley, A Brief Relation of a Victory, Obtained by the Forces under the Command of Gen. Edward Doyley (Edinburgh, 1659), 4. 22. Antigua, “An Act for repealing,” in Mss. Rawlinson A29:402, Bodleian, dated 23 May 1653 and July 1655?; document dated 6 December 1652, reprinted in Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1781, ed. William P. Palmer (Richmond, 1875), 1–2; Rhode Island Records, 261; “Maryland Provincial Court,” 2:182, 194–195; John Horn Stevenson and William Kirk Dickson, eds., The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland under the Commonwealth, A.D. 1652–1659 (Edinburgh, 1804), 1, 112; “Commission and instructions,” [25 December 1650], Acts and Ordinances, 2:495. 23. Acts and Ordinances, 2:425. 24. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 48–50, 65, 147. 25. A Declaration Set forth by the Lord Lieutenant Generall the Gentlemen of the Councell & assembly (The Hague, 1651), 2 [mispaginated]. On the subsequent history of this argument, see Michael Kammen, “The Meaning of Colonization in American Revolutionary Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970): 337–358. 26. “An Essay. Evenly Discussing the Present Condition and Interest of Barbadoes,” Ayer Ms. 276, microfilm copy, Newberry Library, Chicago, 2v–3.

Notes to Pages 164–166

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27. “A paper concerning the advancement of trade,” [1656], State Papers of Thurloe, 5:80–81. Also see “By the Governor, counsell, & Burgesses of the Grand Assembly in Virginia, Aprill the 5th 1647,” Virginia Burgesses, 74; J[ohn] E[ndecott] et al., “Copy of a petition to the Parliament in 1651,” in Hutchinson, History, 428–429. 28. R. R. Davies, First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093– 1343 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). On its later history in an Atlantic context, see Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208–230. 29. Proceedings of Parliaments, 256; the account of the debate contained therein is based largely on Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. John Towill Rutt, 4 vols. (London, 1828). For a statement of the protections due to English men, see Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice (London, 1662), 47. 30. On the attempt to carry aristocratic status from one kingdom to another, see Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Politics and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 14. 31. Ann Hughes, “The English Revolution of 1649,” in Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West, 1560–1991, ed. David Parker (New York: Routledge, 2000), 35; also see 45 on the significance of laws and liberties to lesser folk generally. Without his successes on numerous battlefields, Cromwell himself would have continued as an obscure country gentleman, of similar status to many colonial leaders. 32. Conrad Russell discusses the Irish case in The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 383–386. 33. John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, The two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia, and Mary-land (London, 1656), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, 283. On this point more generally, see Jack P. Greene, “Revolutions in the Americas: The American Revolution,” AHR 105 (2000): 95. 34. “A Declaration of the General Court holden at Boston 4 (9) 1646, concerning a Remonstrance and Petition,” Hutchinson Papers, 1:245. 35. Rhode Island to United Colonies’ Commissioners, 13 October 1657, Rhode Island Records, 376–378; John Sanford for the Rhode Island General Court to Captain Denison and Thomas Stanton, 4 July 1654, ibid., 362–363. 36. Edard Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, by a true Relation of the Proceedings of the Governour and Company of the Massachusetts against Samuel Gorton and his accomplices (London, 1646[/7]), 26; also see 30. 37. Barbados Assembly to his Excellency Oliver Lord Cromwell, [September 1653], Egerton Mss. 2395, fol. 175, BL. 38. Good Newes from New-England (London, 1648), 20. 39. William Prynne, Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious New Wandring-Blasing-Stars, & Firebrands (London, 1645), pt. 2, 11. 40. John Child, New-Englands Jonas Cast up at London (London, 1647), 5, 9, 11,

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41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

Notes to Pages 166–168 12, 19. Ironically one issue that helped set the conflict in motion was that of the Hingham minister who wanted to impose tithes. Virginia and Maryland, or, Lord Baltamore’s printed Case, uncased and answered (London, 1655), 218–19. Also see Roger Heaman, An Additional brief Narrative Of a late Bloody Design Against the Protestants in Ann Arundel County, and Severn, in Maryland (London, 1655), 3. Virginia and Maryland, title page. Sanford, Surinam Justice, 47. A. B., Brief Relation, 21. Assembly elections were made annual by law in 1660, to allow voters to get rid of unacceptable representatives. Richard Hall, comp., Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados. From 1643, to 1762, inclusive (London, 1764), 26. Declaration Set forth by the Lord Lieutenant Generall the Gentlemen of the Councell & assembly, 2. For other statements equating Barbados’s assembly with Parliament, see Ligon, A True & Exact History, 101; “A Briefe Description of the Ilande of Barbados,” (1650 or 1651?), in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 45. That they were jealous of local rights does not mean that they were conservative opponents of the revolution by any means (although some of course were, both in England and in the colonies). For support of the cause so long as it did not violate cherished rights, see Ann Hughes, “Coventry and the English Revolution,” in Town and Countryside in the English Revolution, ed. R. C. Richardson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 69–99. On the discussion of the ancient constitution in the context of revolutionary England, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Glenn Burgesse, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Basingtoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992). I am grateful to participants in the West in Global Perspective Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for the idea of an argument by analogy. William Johnson to Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, 19 January 1642/3, Hay Papers, GD34/923 (36). Thomas Povey to Daniel Searle, 4 January 1657[/8], 8 January 1657[/8]; to William Povey, 4 January 1657/8, Additional Mss. 11411, fols. 55, 53–55, 51v–53, BL; Joseph Lee et al. on behalf of Antigua, Petition to Daniel Searle, 1655, and “Petition to the Lt. General, at the Barbados,” [1655], Mss. Rawlinson A29:376–377 and 378–381, Bodleian; Virginia Statutes, 509–11; George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Mary-land (London, 1666), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, 382; Craven, Southern Colonies, 297–299. Martin Noell to [Daniel Searle], 27 August 1657, Additional Mss. 11411, fols. 45–45v, BL, and to William Povey, 22 November 1655, 7–7v. See Thomas Povey to Daniel Searle, 27 August 1657, Additional Mss. 11411, fols. 41v–43, BL. Thomas Povey to William Povey, 4 January 1657/8, Additional Mss. 11411, fol. 51v, BL. Thomas Povey to Daniel Searle, 8 January 1657/8, Additional Mss. 11411, fol. 54v; to William Povey, 10 November 1655, 8v, BL.

Notes to Pages 169–173

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54. George Fenwick to Sir Gilbert Gerrard and Sir William Marsham, 10 November 1643, Egerton Mss. 2648, fol. 1, BL. Information on councilors was gleaned from Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:627, 643, 648–649, 673; 2:77, 120, 138; and BCR, 5, pt. B, 9, 29; and compared to list of landowners in Norwood’s 1663 survey, printed in Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:718–731. On this issue more generally, see Michael Craton, “Property and Propriety: Land Tenure and Slave Property in the Creation of the British West Indian Plutocracy, 1612– 1740,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (New York: Routledge, 1995), 498–512. 55. Giving land in lieu of pay in Ireland was an old policy; see Michael MccarthyMorrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583– 1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 53–55. Also Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 1, esp. 35. 56. Child, New-Englands Jonas, 9. 57. J[ohn] E[ndecott] et al., on behalf of the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court, “Petition to Parliament in 1651,” in Hutchinson, History, 429. 58. John A. Shedd, “Thwarted Victors: Civil and Criminal Prosecution against Parliament’s Officials during the Civil War and Commonwealth,” Journal of British Studies 41 (2002): 168. 59. Doyley to Oliver Cromwell, 12 September 1657, State Papers of Thurloe, 6:512. 60. Robert M. Bliss, English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 57–60. The order creating a council to decide how best to promote and regulate trade, dated 1 August 1650, charged it to consider “whether it be necessary to give way to a more open and free trade than that of companies and societies, and in what matter is fittest to be done.” 61. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 113–115. Also see Nuala Zahediah, “Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 (1999): 145. 62. Committee of Trade, “Answer to Keynall’s proposals,” 2 May 1656, CP, CO1/ 12, 155, PRO; Oliver Cromwell, “Proclamation of the Protector relating to Jamaica,” 31 August 1655, in Cromwell, Writings & Speeches, 3:816. Also see Daniel Gookin, To all Persons whom these may Concern in the Several Townes, and Plantations of the United Colonies, in New-England ([Cambridge, Mass.], 1656); this broadside advertising prospects for settlement in Jamaica to New Englanders is Mss. Rawlinson A38:265–255, Bodleian. And see Daniel Gookin to John Thurloe, 21 and 24 January 1655[/6], 10 May and 24 July and 20 June 1657, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:440, 449; 5:6–7; 147–148, 6:362. 63. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution. Thomas Povey’s papers include a number of anonymous proposals for setting up private companies to oversee or expand the Anglo–West Indian holdings, at least one of which Clarendon heard rumors of on the continent; see “A proposition for the Erecting a West India Company and the better Serving the Interests of this Commonwealth in America,” n.d., Egerton Mss. 2395, fols. 87–88, BL; “Proposition for ye Improving ye Interests of this Commonwealth in America,” n.d., Egerton Mss. 2395, fols. 91–92, BL;

306 306

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

Notes to Pages 173–174 “Proposition for the Improvement of the English Interest in the West Indies,” n.d., Egerton Mss. 2395, fol. 110, BL; Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, State Papers, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1767–1786), 3:581–582 (dated 14 October 1659); Martin Noell et al., “Petition to the Councell of State,” 24 April 1660, Egerton Mss. 2395, fol. 171, BL. The 1646 petition is printed in Golding, Servants on Horse-Back, 1–2, 4–6, 7; see also 2, 4, for discussion of trade and out-migration. Other sources include Josias Forster to the Company, 20 December 1650, in Copy of a Petition From The Governor and Company of the Sommer Islands (London, 1651), 12–13; and “To the Honourable Governour, and Company of Adventurers of the City of London for the Plantation of the Sommer-Islands. The Humble Petition and Declaration of the generally Inhabitants of the Plantation and colony in the Sommer-Ilands,” 5–9 of an untitled pamphlet ([London, 1645?]) that opens with a reprint of A declaration of the Right Honourable Robert, Earle of Warwicke . . . To the Colony and Plantation there. This petition, a postscript, and another petition are appended to the previously published Declaration (London, 1644), but all four items are here consecutively paginated; see 8 for a discussion of trade. For illegal trade with the Dutch, see record of a meeting of the Somers Islands Company, 24 April 1652, CP, CO1/11, 134–34, PRO, and related order dated 29 April 1652, 135. Golding, Servants on Horse-Back, 7, 5. On later Bermuda trade, see Michael Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680–1783,” WMQ 59 (2002): 585–622. The colonists did the same to shipwrecked Spaniards; Joan de Rivera, “Shipwrecked Spaniards 1639. Grievances against Bermudans,” trans. L. D. Gurrin, BHQ 18 (1961): 19, 20, 21–22. A Somers Islands Company member sought freedom to trade privately with the islands; Alison Grant, “Bermuda Adventurer: John Delbridge of Barnstable, 1564–1639,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 3 (1991): 1–17. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, chaps. 3 and 4. On resentment of the company, see Golding, Servants on Horse-Back. For the quotation, see [Beauchamp Plantagenet], A Description of the Province of New Albion (London, 1648), 5. For the threat of free trade (ignoring the fact that such a trade already took place), see Samuel Mathews, agent for Virginia, et al., Petition to the Council of State, [28 May] 1653, CP, CO1/12, 13, PRO; also “Reason why the English Plantacons abroad ought to be encouraged and the planting of Tobacco in England . . . prohibited,” ibid., 14. In 1660 Virginia complained that some traders were trying to deny it free trade, in violation of the articles; see Virginia Statutes, 535. The Barbados assembly asked for free trade, leading the governor to apologize for its boldness; see John Bayes, To the committee ‘ffor Foreign Affaires,’” 4 February 1652/3, Barbados, CP, COI/12, 7–8, PRO; Daniel Searle to Oliver Cromwell, 4 April 1657, State Papers of Thurloe, 6:169. For a hesitant endorsement, see [Lionel Gatford], Publick Good Without Private Interest (London, 1657), esp. 13–14. Virginia Statutes, 513n; Daniel Searle to Massachusetts Bay government, 4 November 1653, in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 23; “Accounts

Notes to Pages 174–175

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

307 307

of debts owed to the Lord Protector on St Christophers, 1652–55,” and “An Account of the Strangers Goods,” 1656, Egerton Mss. 2395, fols. 69–75, 78– 82, BL; John Brock, “The Autobiographical Memoranda of John Brock,” ed. Clifford K. Shipton, PAAS, n.s., 53 (1943): 104; Philip Payne, Peter Marett et al., Petition to the Council of State, [25 January 1659], CP, CO1/13, 149, PRO; also see supporting documents following the petition. Anthony Rous, Petition to Oliver Cromwell and his Council, 18 November 1656, CP, CO1/13, 51, PRO; describes Dutch trade as illegal but implies that Portuguese trade was allowed. Johan Risingh, “A Short Narrative concerning the Journey to New Sweden in America,” in Stellan Dahlgren and Hans Norman, ed., The Rise and Fall of New Sweden: Governor Johan Risingh’s Journal, 1654–1655, in Its Historical Context, Acta Bibliothecae R. Universitatis Upsaliensis, vol. 27 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988), 144. For ships that did put in at ports in Britain where cargoes were seized, see IEB, 15 March 1654/5, 103:725, PRO. For some reason the ships were ordered released with their lading on that date. Garret Tisen, although a free denizen of Jamaica with permission from the English commander there to transport tobacco, found his cargo subject to seizure also. See his Petition Cromwell, 1657, CP, CO1/13, 68, PRO; also related documents, dated 3– 15 September 1657, 68–72; IEB, 106:184, PRO. Edward Winslow to John Thurloe, 16 March 1654[/5], Barbados, State Papers of Thurloe, 3:249. William Penn to the Navy Commissioners, 17 March 1654/ 5, CP, CO1/32, 58–59, PRO, describes seized ships being fitted out for the state’s use, so some were clearly commandeered, regardless of the islanders’ views. “An extract out of severall Letters from Barbados dated 12 & 14 March,” [1655], Harley 6845, BL, fol. 198. And see Thomas Modyford et al., To the Commissioners of the Admiralty, 7 June 1655, CP, CO1/32, 63, PRO; 9 August 1655, Additional Mss. 18986, fols. 205–206; and 14 August 1655, CP, CO1/32, 71; also 72–80, PRO. Modyford et al., to Admiralty Commissioners, 9 August 1655; Helen J. Crump, Colonial Admiralty Jurisdiction in the Seventeenth Century, Imperial Studies 5, ed. A. P. Newton (New York: Longmans, Green, 1931), 96, 102. Steven Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” AHR 103 (1998): 722–723, uses this pamphlet by John Streater to demonstrate the protectorate’s relative hostility to commerce, but the situation was more complicated than Pincus’s paradigm allows. Massachusetts Records, 4, pt. 1, 120–121, 197, 227, 229, 234; Roger Williams to John Winthrop, Jr., 23 March 1654/5, Correspondence of RW, 434. Leverett apologized, and the court restored his various offices. John Winthrop, Jr., to John Richards, 12 December 1659, CMHS, 5th ser., 8 (1882): 56–57. By this time New England had had its share of difficult cases, including an incident involving one of Winthrop’s brothers. A powerful London alderman in England had sued Stephen Winthrop in 1645 for his role as court clerk in a Massachusetts Bay Colony decision about a visiting ship. See Proceed-

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76.

77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86.

Notes to Pages 176–178 ings of Parliaments, 160–167, esp. 162–163; Winthrop Journal, 539–540, 547– 552, 607–608; Stephen Winthrop to John Winthrop, Jr., 1 March 1644[/5], 27 March 1646, Winthrop Papers, 5:13, 69–70. Correspondence of RW, 392, 394n, 399n; [George Francis Dow, ed.], Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County Massachusetts, vol. 1, 1636–1656 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1911), 314–318, 322. The case was ultimately decided in Sybada’s favor. Rhode Island Records, 387–390, 425. Also see Winthrop Papers, 6:288–289n. For privateering generally, see Howard M. Chapin, Privateer Ships and Sailors: The First Century of American Colonial Privateering, 1625–1725 (Toulon: G. Mouton, 1926). One seizure by Connecticut inhabitants was upheld in court; Connecticut Records, 239. For the case involving Yeardley and Batts, see “Maryland Provincial Court,” 2: 312–313. Jon Kukla, Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619–1660 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 173, 174–175. John Jeffreys et al., Petition to the Lord Protector, 2 January 1654/5, CP, CO1/12, 86, PRO. Weekly Intelligencer 93 (8–15 May 1655): 3; Perfect Diurnall 283 (7–14 May 1655): 4344–45. “The State of the Differences as it is pressed between Merchants and the Planters in relation to free trade att the Charibee Islands And the meanes of Reconciliation and generall satisfaction proposed,” n.d. [1655–1658], Additional Mss. 11411, fols. 3v–5v, BL. For an opposing view suggesting that the English state’s desire for a monopoly was unfair, see “Essay. Evenly Discussing,” 9v–10. “State of ye Differences,” 5. Also see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, chap. 12. On interregnum committees, see Andrews, British Committees. Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History, Studies in Modern History (New York: Longman, 1993), 34–35. Certain Passages 98 (11–18 May 1655): 6–7. For a similar sentiment regarding the expedition of William Jackson, see “A Briefe Journall; or, a Succint and True Relation of . . . that Voyage Undertaken by Captaine William Jackson” [1645], in The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, ed. Vincent T. Harlow, Camden Miscellany 13 (1923): 15–16. General accounts of the design are in S. A. G. Taylor, The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (1965; reprint, London: Solstice Productions, 1969); and Hans-Christoph Junge, Flottenpolitik und Revolution, Publications of the German Historical Institute 6 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980). From the Spanish side, see Irene A. Wright, “The Spanish Resistance to the English Occupation of Jamaica, 1655– 1660,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 13 (1930): 117– 147. Bernard Capp notes that Spanish gold could be used to pay off the army and navy in Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648–60 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 87. Also see R. C. Thompson, “Officers, Merchants, and Foreign Policy in the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 12 (April 1966): 152; an intercepted

Notes to Pages 178–181

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

95.

96.

97.

98.

309 309

letter, June [1645], in State Papers of Thurloe, 2:413–425; “A Letter concerning the Expedition of Pen and Venables against the Island of Hispaniola,” in A Collection of Letters and State Papers from the Original Manuscripts, comp. Leonard Howard, 2 vols. (London, 1756), 1:1–21. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design,” WMQ 45 (1988): 70–99; David Armitage, ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Language of Empire,’ HJ 35 (1992): 531–555. T[homas] Moddiford to [?], 20 June 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 3:565–566. On quartering troops, see Weekly Intelligencer 93 (8–15 May 1655): 3. Thomas Modiford to his brother, 6 July 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 3:621; Mercurius Politicus 256 (3–10 May 1655): 5223. John Berkenhead to John Thurloe, 17 February 1654[/5], State Papers of Thurloe, 3:157. Also see Hall, Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 466. Taylor, Western Design, 18, 21, 115–119. Oliver Cromwell to Fortescue, October 1655, in Cromwell, Writings & Speeches, 3:857; John Phillips, dedication to Oliver Cromwell, in Bartholomew de Las Casas, The Teares of the Indians, trans. John Phillips (London, 1656). Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies.” Gookin, To all Persons whom these may Concern; Daniel Gookin to John Thurloe, 20 June 1657, and 24 July 1656, State Papers of Thurloe, 6:362, 5:148; “Leverett’s Audience with Cromwell,” Cromwell, Writings & Speeches, 4:345. David Armitage, “The New World and British Historical Thought: From Richard Hakluyt to William Robertson,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 69. Quotation from Julian de Castilla, “The English Conquest of Jamaica: An account of what Happened in the Island of Jamaica, From May 20 of the Year 1655, when the English Laid Siege to it, Up to July 3 of the year 1656,” trans. Irene A. Wright, Camden Miscellany 13 (1923): 20. On the naval campaign, see William Goodson’s letters in State Papers of Thurloe, vols. 3 and 4. For Cromwell’s crisis over Hispaniola and Jamaica, see Blair Worden, “Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan,” in History, Society, and the Churches, ed. Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 125–145. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Ruling ‘The Republic of Indians’ in Seventeenth-Century Florida,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 141. For different versions of the term “empire” in play during these years, see James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800, Studies in Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), esp. 8, 14, 100, 132, 146. For the Irish case, see Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 9. In that context, the colonists were analogous to those Protestants planted in Ireland from England and Scotland on the lands of displaced Catholics. See also Jack P. Greene, “‘The same liberties and privileges as Englishmen in England’: Law, Liberty, and Identity in the Construction of Colonial English and Revolutionary America,” in Articulating

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Notes to Pages 181–185 America: Fashioning a National Political Culture in Early America, ed. Rebecca Starr (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 45–90.

6. Lost liberty and Laboring People in the Atlantic World 1. I am following James Horn’s definition of free settlers as those who arrived unencumbered by contractual obligations on their labor; see “‘To Parts Beyond the Seas’: Free Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century,” in “To Make America”: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ida Altman and James Horn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 87– 89. In this formulation, all other migrants are unfree, either temporarily (indentured servants) or permanently (slaves for life). The issue of volition is slightly different: some unfree temporary laborers arrived against their will, such as transported criminals, defeated soldiers, paupers, and kidnapped servants; others voluntarily signed contracts, doing so with greater or fewer alternatives and more or less accurate information about destination and work conditions. 2. Harry S. Stout, “The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and Their Return to England, 1640–1660,” Journal of American Studies 10 (1976): 151–172; William L. Sachse, “The Migration of New Englanders to England, 1640 to 1660,” AHR 53 (1948): 251–278; David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 8. 3. Marion H. Gottfried, “The First Depression in Massachusetts,” NEQ 9 (1936): 655–678. Also see Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 44–49. Comments on this development in the correspondence of New Englanders are legion, since settlers had to justify their failure to pay their English creditors; see, for instance, George Fenwick to Sir Thomas Barrington et al., 10 October 1642, Egerton Mss. 2646, BL. 4. For key sources often cited to support the royalist migration thesis, see [Henry] Norwood, A Voyage to Virginia, in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origins, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, comp. Peter Force, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C., 1844), tract no. 10, 3–4; George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland (London, 1666), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, esp. 371–372, 375. And see Moderate Intelligencer 215 (26 April–2 May 1649): 2017. The critique of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) by James Horn in “Cavalier Culture? The Social Development of Colonial Virginia,” WMQ 48 (1991): 238– 245, discusses Fischer’s acceptance of the cavalier myth as fact. For the rise in general numbers, see James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 136–137. Russell R. Menard noted that many of the free migrants coming into Maryland were ex-servants from Virginia; see “Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1975), 217, 223.

Notes to Pages 185–186

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5. On New England, see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Cressy, Coming Over, chap. 2. On the Chesapeake, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1976), 159; Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), 14–15. Craven saw a rise again after 1648. Menard found the decline to be less sharp, especially in relatively newly settled Maryland at the beginning of the 1640s; but the migration stream he looked at was predominantly bound, so its continuation supports the overall point I am making here about the shift toward unfree labor. See Russell Menard, “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 105. David Eltis thinks that most of the 1640s migration out of England went to Barbados as laborers; see “Labour and Coercion in the English Atlantic World from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” in Wages of Slavery: From Chattel Slavery to Wage Labour in Africa, the Caribbean, and England, ed. Michael Twaddle (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 215. Eltis sees the shift toward coerced (by which he means prisoner) migration to the sugar islands beginning in 1650; see “SeventeenthCentury Migration and the Slave Trade: The English Case in Comparative Perspective,” in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Jan Lucansen and Leo Lucansen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 99– 100. 6. Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series [of the Commonwealth], 13 vols. (London: Longman, 1875–1886), 1:95; 2:346, 423; 3:105, 432; 7:30; 1655, 62, 107–108, 393; 10:86; CSPC, 319, 339, 360, 387, 399, 401, 407, 409, 421, 426, 430, 431, 433, 446. 7. For New England, see the reaction to the arrival of a ship with ninety Irish servants with indenture contracts for sale in 1653; Winthrop Papers, 6:313, 309, 329. And see Marsha Lynn Hamilton, “‘As good Englishmen’: ‘Strangers’ in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2001), 25, 81–95, 135–148. The drop after 1660 is mentioned by Eltis, “Seventeenth-Century Migration and the Slave Trade,” 98. Menard, “British Migration to the Chesapeake,” 111, 113, identified the date of the shift as 1670, although opportunity declined after 1660. On the London register, see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); on Bristol, see David Souden, “‘Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds’? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North America, and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bristol,” Social History 3 (1978): 23–41. One hundred thirty-one people claimed 625 fifty-acre allotments in one Virginia county from 1650 to 1661; see W. Preston Haynie, ed., Records of Indentured Servants and of Certificates for Land, Northumberland County, Virginia, 1650–1795 (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1996). 8. For an introduction to the indentured servant system, see David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York: Cam-

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

Notes to Pages 186–188 bridge University Press, 1981). On lengthening terms as an explicit attempt to keep servants in bondage, see Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 216. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (1946; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 437; Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606–1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 52– 53; [John Jennings], Acts and Statutes of the Island of Barbados (London, [1654]), 18, also 17, 33; “Lawes, Regulations and Orders in force at the Leeward Islands From 1668 To 1672,” CO154/1, 49–50, PRO; Council Meeting, 20 October 1656, “Doyley’s Journal,” 100–101; Barbados Council Minutes, 332, 373–374. A reference to Exodus (22:3) was made in the New Haven law code; see New-Haven’s Settling in New-England (London, 1656), s.v. “Burglary, and Theft.” On the rumored sale of soldiers, see Robert Tillingham to Mr. [Robert] Blackbourne, 7 and 12 August 1656, CP, CO1/33, 7, 8, PRO; IEB, 25 July 1656, 77:286, PRO. For the fears among soldiers of being sold prior to the sailing of the fleet, see Francis Barrington to [Sir John Barrington?], 14 July 1655, Egerton Mss. 2648, fol. 245, BL. This may be related to another rumor; see “Two Spanish Documents of 1656,” JHR 2 (October 1652): 31. Also see Robert Sedgwick to Thurloe, 24 January 1656, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:454. Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947); also see James Davie Butler, “British Convicts Shipped to American Colonies,” AHR 2 (1896–97): 12–33. Raymond Phineas Stearns, “The Weld-Peter Mission to England,” PCSM, vol. 32, Transactions, 1933–1937 (1934): 213–216, 237–238; Proceedings of Parliaments, 139–140; [John Josselyn], Chronological Observations of America (London, 1674), reprinted in CMHS, 3d ser., 3 (1883): 387. Also see Winthrop Journal, 429, 528–530. On interregnum transportation, see Derek Hirst, “The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain,” Journal of Modern History 66 (1994): 480–482. “Report of Governor John Printz, 1644,” in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1912), 106–107. Proceedings of Parliaments, 175–176. Lord Broghill to John Thurloe, 18 September 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:41–42. The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane, Records of Social and Economic History, n.s., 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 363. Kenneth L. Carroll, “From Bond Servant to Governor: The Strange Career of Charles Bayly (1632?–1680),” Journal of the Friends Historical Society 52 (1968–1971): 19–38. Certain Informations 29 (31 July–7 August 1643): 225; 30 (7–14 August 1643): 234. Mercurius Elencticus 30 (14–21 June 1648): 236. Proceedings of Parliaments, 206–207, 209–211; Mercurius Melancholicus 44

Notes to Pages 188–189

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

313 313

(19–26 June 1648): 264–265; William Lilly, Monarchy or No Monarchy in England (London, 1651), 43. Perfect Occurrences 96 (27 October–3 November 1648): 713–714; Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer 331 (September 25–October 2, 1649): 1518. [Oliver Cromwell], A Declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (London, 1650?, 204. Also see Cromwell, Writings & Speeches, 2:124–128; 3:140, 174– 175, 305, 368. Mercurius Politicus 4 (27 June–4 July 1650): 58. IEB, 10 September 1651, 22:42, PRO; “A German Indentured Servant in Barbados in 1652: The Account of Heinrich von Uchteritz,” ed. Alexander Gunkel and Jerome S. Handler, JBMHS 33 (1970): 92; John Cotton to Oliver Cromwell, 28 July 1651, Hutchinson Papers, 2:264–265; Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 85–87. Petition of William Stewart and other Scotsmen, Quarter Sessions, 16 September 1656, BCR, 4:21. For instance, see IEB, 3 September 1655, 76:263–264, PRO; Perfect Diurnall 274 (5–12 March 1655): 4219. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 219, table 7.11, find that the peak migration out of England occurred during these years. Of course, not all those who left England went to the colonies, so their statistics cannot be translated directly into a population increase in the Atlantic plantations. Perfect Diurnall 230 (1–8 May 1654): 3513. Also see Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 91. Edward Doyley to John Thurloe, 10 November 1658, Cagway, Jamaica, State Papers of Thurloe, 7:499–500. For political prisoners, see Publick Intelligencer 5 (29 October–5 November 1655): [80]59; for treasonous prisoners, see Oliver Cromwell to John Barkstead, 16 May 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 3:453–454; for pirates, see IEB, 19 October 1654, 103:586, PRO; for vagabonds, prisoners, and others, see IEB, 14 August 1656, 77:329–331, PRO, and Acts and Ordinances, 1098–99; for felons and rebels, see Acts and Ordinances, 1250–66, and Proceedings of Parliaments, 241. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow . . . 1625–1672, ed. C. H. Firth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 2:3. Lorenzo Paulucci, Venetian Secretary in England, to Giovanni Sagredo, Ambassador to France, 28 June 1655, and Giovanni Sagredo, Venetian Ambassador to England, to the Doge and Senate, 3 December 1655, in Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in other Libraries of Northern Italy, vol. 30, 1655–1656, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London: Longman, 1930), 72, 148. Brasy to Dodd [Dr. Moore to Clarendon], 9? September 1659, Mss. Clarendon, 64:114–115v, BL. “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 66. He also met French men who had been tricked into indentured service (73 n. 15). Eltis, “Seventeenth-

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32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

Notes to Page 189 Century Migration and the Slave Trade,” 100, describes prisoners as a “steadily rising share of all English emigrants leaving for the sugar islands after 1650”; but the data in his table 1 (drawn from Peter Coldham’s Emigrants in Chains) clearly overlook many of the examples documented here, which would make the increase sharper still. See IEB, 1 March 1655 and 22 May 1656, 103:705, 733; 105:140–142, 150, PRO. On Noell’s career, see Robert M. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 163, 175–176, 192, 514, 589. Tobias Bridge et al., “Report concerning the Affaires of America,” 2 June [1657], Egerton Mss. 2395, fol. 123, BL. The decision to launch the Western Design may have been taken in part to drain off eight thousand to ten thousand Scots to ensure peace, if the discussion in “Edward Montague’s Notes on the Debates in the Protector’s Council Concerning the Last Indian Expedition,” in The Clarke Papers: Selected from the Papers of William Clarke, ed. C. H. Firth (New York: Longman’s, Green, 1899), 205, can be believed. Peter Gaunt questioned the authenticity of this much-used source in “‘The single person’s confidants and dependents’: Oliver Cromwell and His Protectoral Councillors,” HJ 32 (1989): 550 n. 35. George Creichtonn, Deposition dated 15 April 1643, in A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, from 1641 to 1652, ed. John T. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Dublin: for the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1879–1880), 1:539–540. I thank Geoffrey Parker for sharing this reference with me. Henry Cromwell to John Thurloe, 11 September 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:23–24; also see his letters of 18 September (40) and 25 September (534–5), and John Thurloe to Henry Cromwell, n.d. [1655] (75). In October 1655 the Council of State ordered a thousand Irish girls and youths sent to Jamaica; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic [Commonwealth], 9:431. Surviving sources make it impossible to state unequivocally whether this particular shipment ever occurred. Patrick J. Corish, “The Cromwellian Regime, 1650–60,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 362–364, 383– 384; Joseph H. Williams, Whence the “Black Irish” of Jamaica? (New York: Dial Press, 1932), 18; Aubrey Gwynn, “Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters, Philosophy, and Science 19 (1930): 607– 623; 20 (1931): 291–305; Robin Clifton, “An Indiscriminate Blackness’? Massacre, Counter-Massacre, and Ethnic Cleansing in Ireland, 1640–1660,” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levine and Penny Roberts (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 123. Archives of Maryland, vol. 46, Proceedings of the Provincial Court, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard C. Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 478; John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865), 3d ed. (Dublin: Mellifont Press, 1922), 88–93, 99, 101, 145–146; also see Williams, Whence the “Black Irish” of Jamaica? 18, 21–32; IEB, 1 April 1653 and 24 September 1653, 41:45 and 70:405, PRO.

Notes to Pages 189–191

315 315

37. Perfect Proceedings 295 (17–24 May 1655): 4676–79. See also Perfect Diurnall 275 (12–19 March 1655): 4232. 38. Robert Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, Being a Selection of Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), 477, 549, 553, 555–556. 39. Perfect Diurnall 275 (12–19 March 165[4/]5): 4232. Two out of three of the first settlers, those recruited from Nevis, died in the first year on the island; see S. A. G. Taylor, The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (1965; reprint, London: Solstice Productions, 1969), 118. 40. Virginia Bernhard, “Bids for Freedom: Slave Resistance and Rebellion Plots in Bermuda, 1656–1761,” Slavery and Abolition 17 (December 1996): 187; Virginia Statutes, 538, 411, 471. 41. Barbados utilized every conceivable form of labor, including the practice, largely unknown in the wider Atlantic world, of tenant farming in producing sugar; see Russell Menard, “Law, Credit, the Supply of Labour, and the Organization of Sugar Production in the Colonial Greater Caribbean: A Comparison of Brazil and Barbados in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158. 42. Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). 43. T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Virginia Bernhard, “Beyond the Chesapeake: The Contrasting Status of Blacks in Bermuda, 1616–1663,” Journal of Southern History 54 (1988): 557; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 165–180. 44. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 228. 45. Thomas Robinson to Thomas Chappel, secretary to the earl of Carlisle, 24 September 1643, St. Christophers, Hay Papers, GD34/939 (6). 46. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 85. Also see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985). 47. In addition to Wood, Origins of American Slavery, and Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, see Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82–83; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 252; Hilary McD. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 20–21; Richard Bean and Robert Thomas, “The Adoption of Slave Labor in British America,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry Gameny and Jan Hogenden (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 377–398; David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge University Press,

316 316

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

Notes to Pages 191–192 1986), 9, 13; Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 586. On relative costs, see Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 149–153; David W. Galenson, “Labor Market Behavior in Colonial America: Servitude, Slavery, and Free Labor,” in Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past, ed. Galenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 52–96. The economic model is somewhat complicated in Eltis, “Seventeenth-Century Migration and the Slave Trade,” 87–109; and idem, “Labour and Coercion in the English Atlantic World,” 207–226. Hilary McD. Beckles and Andrew Downes, “The Economics of Transition to the Black Labor System in Barbados, 1630–1680,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1987): 231; Wood, Origins of American Slavery, 49–50. Winthrop D. Jordan uses “The Unthinking Decision” as a chapter title in White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), chap. 2. Kupperman, Providence Island, 178. Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1974), 56; George Frederick Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa (Lancaster, Pa.: New Era Printing Company, 1919), 6–7; J. W. Blake, “The English Guinea Company, 1618–60,” Proceedings and Reports of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, 2d ser., 3 (1945–46):14–27. Order from the House of Commons to the Council of State, 14 April 1648, CP, CO1/11, 23, PRO; [Samuel Vassall et al.], “A Remonstrance humbly presented to the Hounble Councell of State,” [December 1649?], ibid., 25–26v; “The humble answear of the Guinny Company unto the Remonstrance,” 25 May 1650, ibid., 29–30. See also Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy under the Cromwellian Protectorate (London: Cass, 1962), 115; Cecil T. Carr, introduction to “Select Charters of Trading Companies, 1530–1707,” Publications of the Selden Society 28 (1913): xliv–xlv; Robert Porter, “The Crispe Family and the African Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 74. David Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom (New York: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1999), is relatively thin for the period before 1660. It records only thirty-four voyages from 1640 to 1660, of which twenty-one are known to have embarked an estimated 5,157 slaves. These slavers included twelve “British” (with 2,676 slaves), six Dutch (1,879 slaves), and three Portuguese (602 slaves). These figures underestimate Dutch involvement, because the Dutch-language sources have not been systematically exploited; and they probably miss many voyages, including some by Europeans of other nations (the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Courlanders), for which there is some evidence of activity on the African coast in this period. I am indebted to an e-mail communication with Steven Behrendt, one of the team of scholars who compiled it, dated 19 March 1998, for some of this analysis. For the conventional interpretation, see Ligon, True & Exact History, 85; [John Scott], “The Description of Barbados,” Sloane Mss. 3662, verso of fols. 59–54, BL; Harley Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account Of The Rise and Growth of the

Notes to Pages 192–194

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

317 317

West India Colonies, And of the Great Advantages they are to England, in respect to Trade (London, 1690), 13–4, 36. For overemphasis on the Dutch, see Ernest van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596–1650,” in Gameny and Hogenden, The Uncommon Market, esp. 571–575; John C. Appleby, “A Guinea Venture, c. 1657: A Note on the Early English Slave Trade,” Mariner’s Mirror 79 (February 1993): 84–87; Larry Gragg, “‘To Procure Negroes’: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627– 60,” Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995): 65–84. ? Carrington to [Charles II], 16/26 February 1657, Madrid, Mss. Clarendon 53:296–296v, BL. On the varieties of sources, see Gragg, “To Procure Negroes,” 70–73; Appleby, “Guinea Venture”; William H. Whitmore and Walter K. Watkins, eds., A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston Containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644 to 1651 (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1903), 220, 287, 290–291, 300–301. For activity by the duke of Courland, see Alexander V. Berkis, The Reign of Duke James in Courland, 1638–1682 (Lincoln, Neb.: Vaidava, 1960), esp. 53–54. See Clifford Lewis, ed., “Some Recently Discovered Extracts from the Lost Minutes of the Virginia Council and General Court, 1642–1645,” WMQ, 2d ser., 20 (1940): 69. Some arrived via other New World plantations; see “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit,” 67; Ligon, True & Exact History, 52. Gregory Butler to Oliver Cromwell, n.d. [1655], State Papers of Thurloe, 3:754; Elaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 3–6, 8–9, 12; Jerome S. Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 8 (1969): 38–64. Also see George Gardyner, A Description of the New World (London, 1651), 159–160. See Henry Powell’s petition [1648?], in “Papers Relating to the Early History of Barbados,” ed. N. Darnell Davis, Timehri: Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of British Guiana 5 (1891): 53–55. Eltis, “Seventeenth-Century Migration and the Slave Trade,” 96. James Browne to James Hay and Archibald Hay, 17 January 1641[/2], Barbados, Hay Papers, GD34/940 (1). Gragg finds no references to slaves in the surviving documents for the 1630s, nor for 1640, the first year for which a large number of deeds are available; references began to appear in 1642. See Gragg, “English Slave Trade to Barbados,” 70. Gary A. Puckrein put the slave population at two hundred in 1638 (as compared to two thousand servants) in Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 31–32. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 226, 312. On the Chesapeake, see David W. Galenson, “The Settlement and Growth of the Colonies: Population, Labor, and Economic Development,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 164. On the Somers Islands, see Bernhard, “Bids for Freedom,” 203. On Providence Island, see Kupperman, Providence Island. Breen and Innes, “Myne Owne Ground,” chap. 1; Melinda Lutz Sanborn, “An-

318 318

63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

Notes to Pages 194–196 gola and Elizabeth: An African Family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” NEQ 72 (1999): 119–129. [Jennings], Acts and Statutes of the Island of Barbados, 47. Ligon, True & Exact History, 51. For another perspective, see John Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” WMQ 60 (2003): 273–275. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1–2, 18–20. Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), chap. 2. The maroon community apparently also included some who had been free under the Spanish, both blacks and a few whites. Ibid., 17; John Morrino and Lawrence Lopis, Examination, 19 February 1655[/6], in William Goodson, “Records of the Court marshals on board the Torrigton at Jamaica, June 1655 to June 1656,” Mss. Rawlinson A295, fol. 77, Bodleian, Harvester Microfilm 60. Thomas Povey et al., “To the Committee of the Council for the Affaires of Jamaica,” 17 October 1658, Egerton Mss. 2395, fols. 157–158, BL; “A Journal kept by Coll. William Beeston from his first coming to Jamaica,” 27 April 1660– 6 July 1680, Additional Mss. fol. 23, BL; Richard Holdip et al., “Severall considerations to bee humbly represented to his Highnese the Lord Protector and Councell in behalfe of the Army in America,” [1655], in [Robert Venables], “Relation concerning the expedition of the West Indies,” Additional Mss. 11410, 112v–114, BL. Carla Gardina Pestana, “Mutiny and the Western Design, 1655–1661,” in Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective, ed. Jane Hathaway (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), 63–84. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, Needs and Opportunities for Study series (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 218, fig. 10.1. Their estimate for the beginning of the period is somewhat higher than mine; see Appendix 1. John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 319–320; Alfred D. Chandler, “The Expansion of Barbados,” JBMHS 13 (1946): 114; Jerome S. Handler and Lou Shelby, eds., “A Seventeenth-Century Commentary on Labor and Military Problems in Barbados,” JBMHS 34 (1973): 119. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic, 118, 160. Scott, “Description of Guyana,” 40v. For Marie-Galante, see Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 47. For Tobago, see Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 115. For St. Lucia and Barbuda, see James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 152–153; Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 45, 34–35. For Antigua, see William Johnson to Sir James Hay

Notes to Pages 197–199

74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

319 319

and Archibald Hay, 30 September 1641, Hay Papers, GD34/937; “Declaration of the passages at Antigua,” [1655?], Mss. Rawlinson A29:382–385, Bodleian; Pacifique de Provins, Brève Relation du Voyage Des Iles De L’Amérique, ed. P. Godefroy de Paris (Assisi: Collegio s. Lorenzo Da Brindisi dei minori cappuccini, 1939), 40–42; “The humble Peticon of diverse Merchants and other Adventurers to Antigua, To his Highness Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland,” n.d., Additional Mss. 11411, fol. 1, BL. Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1997), 28; Williamson, Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patent, 22–25, 74. For the Carib role in general, see Hilary McD. Beckles, “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century,” in Canny, Origins of Empire, 219, 233–234. Peter Mancall, “Native Americans and Europeans in English America, 1500– 1700,” in Canny, Origins of Empire, ed. 337–342. For worries that the Dutch would incite the Indians, see Cornelius Melijn et al., “A Sartificate of Indians that were hired to kill of the people of Statn Eylant,” 28 June 1652, Huntington Library Mss. (HM 21419), Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; William Hooke to Oliver Cromwell, 3 November 1653, State Papers of Thurloe, 1:564– 565; Augustine Herrman, “Journal kept . . . during his Embassy,” 30 September (n.s.) to 21/11 October 1659, printed in Maryland Narratives, 317–318. Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice (London, 1662), 6–7. “Considerations how ye interest of ye English nation bee advanced & improved in ye West Indies,” [September] 1655, Mss. Rawlinson A30:171–174, Bodleian. Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop, [August 1645?], Winthrop Papers, 5:38. Using slaves was also considered in early Maine; see [Thomas Gorges] to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, [19 May 1642], in Letters of Thomas Gorges: Deputy Governor of the Province of Maine, 1640–1643, ed. Robert E. Moody (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1978), 95. Massachusetts Records, 4, pt. 1, 326–327. Lawrence W. Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,” WMQ 19 (1962): 213–215. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America, 414–434. For a case in Barbados, see Barbados Council Minutes, 335. Towner, “Servant Protest in Puritan Society,” 212; Connecticut Records, 78; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 74. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 334–336. Winthrop Journal, 84, 85, 87; Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 62–63, 176–177. “A Briefe Journall; or, a Succint and True Relation of . . . that Voyage Undertaken by Captain William Jackson to the Western Indies or Continent of America,” in The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, ed. V. T. Harlow, Camden Miscellany 13 (1923): 2. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 345–346.

320 320

Notes to Pages 199–201

87. See the OED, s.v. “buccan” and “buccaneer.” Also see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 159– 161; Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750, Latin American Realities (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 97, 99–102. 88. [Beauchamp Plantagenet], A Description of the Province of New Albion ([London], 1648), 5; Faithful Scout 163 (10–17 March 1654): [1342?]. See Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Revolts and Conspiracies in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Nieiwe West-Indische Gids 56 (1982): 8–10; and, in the same journal, “Escaping Slavery in a Caribbean Plantation Society: Marronage in Barbados, 1650–1830s,” 71 (1997): 183–225. 89. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 259. 90. Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, Jamaica, 1655–1740,” Social and Economic Studies 19 (1970): 289–325. 91. “Maryland Council,” 178. 92. Winthrop Papers, 4:287–288, 393, 463, 499; 5:40–41, 95, 164, 165. 93. “Articles of Confederation,” 29 August 1643, Acts of Commissioners, 1:6–7. Runaways were listed before escaped criminals in the articles. Also see Cornelis Van Tienhoven, “Answer to the Representation of New Netherland,” New Netherland Narratives, 370; New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, vol. 4, Council Minutes, 1638–1649, trans. Arnold J. F. Van Laer, ed. Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974), 91– 92, 143–144, 247–248, 470–472; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 299; letter to the Governor of New Netherland, n.d. [1643?], “Maryland Council,” 134, but also see 377; Craven, Southern Colonies, 198. 94. Barbados Council Minutes, 224–25; Josias Forster, Proclamation, 17 November 1653, BCR, 3:181; Horn, Adapting to a New World, 360; Winthrop Journal, 355; and Hilary Beckles, “From Land to Sea: Runaway Barbados Slaves and Servants, 1630–1700,” Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 86–88. For ships running aground, necessitating the rescue of runaways, see Jacob Alrichs to Petrus Stuyvesant, 18 March 1658, in Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Delaware Papers (Dutch period): A Collection of Documents pertaining to the Regulation of Affairs on the South River of New Netherland, 1648–1664 (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1981), 117. 95. Daniel Searle to [John Endecott?], 4 November 1653, in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1970), 21–23; Barbados Council Minutes, 277–278. 96. BCR, 3: page number omitted. 97. [Jennings], Acts and Statutes of the Island of Barbados, 22, 23; New-Haven’s Settling in New-England, s.v. “Seamen, &c.” 98. Owen Rowe et al. to William Sayle, 11 October 1659, BCR, 4:127. 99. Orders, 6 August 1659, “Doyley’s Journal,” 320–321; Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies, 3 vols., reprint ed. (London, 1827), 1:298. 100. “An act against Indebted Runn Awayes Sueing for thare Credt: by Attorneyes,”

Notes to Pages 201–205

101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

118. 119.

321 321

12 November 1644, “Lawes, Regulations and Orders in force at the Leeward Islands From 1668 To 1672.” “The Relation of Colonell Doyley upon his returne from Jamaica dictated to the Lord Chancellor,” n.d., Additional Mss. 11410, fols. 12v–13, BL. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 152. C. H. Firth, preface to Venables Narrative, xxiv–xxvi, xxviii–xxix; Taylor, Western Design, 17. Ligon, True & Exact History, 29. Ibid., 43–46; Hall, Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados, 461. Also see Jill Sheppard, “The Slave Conspiracy that Never Was,” JBMHS 34 (1974): 190–197. Perfect Diurnall 160 (27 December 1652–3 January 1653): 2396. For the mass deportation of all Irish from St. Christopher, see Morgan O’Bryen et al., Petition to the Privy Council, 26 June 1661, in Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1613–1680 (Hereford, 1908), 311–312. Barbados Council Minutes, 133–134, 161–162, 196, 214–215, 336–337, 361, 364–365, 367–368; Winslow to Thurloe, 16 March 1654/5; Searle to Cromwell, 18 September 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:39–40. Ligon, True & Exact History, 46. Weekly Intelligencer 18 (30 August–6 September [1659]): 142; Publick Intelligencer 190 (29 August–5 September 1659): 696. Publick Intelligencer 190:696; Weekly Intelligencer 18:142. Publick Intelligencer 190:696. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America, 167. BCR, 3: page number omitted. Also see Bernhard, “Bids for Freedom,” 186– 187. “A paper concerning the advancement of trade,” [1656], in State Papers of Thurloe, 5:80–81; “The Committee to whom the matter touching the prisoners sent from Nevis is referred,” Report [13 January 1658/9], CP, CO1/35, 129, PRO. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996), 31–32, 51–52. Connecticut Records, 78; Massachusetts Records, 3:355. Margaret E. Newell, Race Frontiers: Indian Slavery in Colonial New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming); Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” WMQ 47 (1990): 3–29. Robert Emmet Wall, Jr., Massachusetts Bay: The Crucial Decade, 1640–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). This generalization is based on lists of those who served as governor or councilor for five colonies, drawn from Barbados Council Minutes; Edward C. Papenfuse et al., comp. The Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Robert E. Wall, The Membership of the Massachusetts General Court, 1630–1686 (New

322 322

120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

127.

Notes to Pages 205–207 York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 55–58; Cynthia Miller Leonard, comp., The General Assembly of Virginia (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1978). For the Somers Islands, councilors gleaned from Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:627, 643, 648–649, 673; 2:77, 120, 138; and BCR, 5, pt. B, 9, 29; and compared to list of landowners in Norwood’s 1663 survey, printed in Memorials of the Bermudas, 2:718–731. For the later emergence of an elite, see Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959), 90–115; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691– 1776, New World in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 238, 239. Bailyn and Burnard both look at American-born men committed to a genteel lifestyle and able to pass on their status to their descendants. That the early elite was English-born and less secure demographically does not obviate its power or its social and political role. See Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 49–55; and Martin H. Quitt, “Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation,” WMQ 45 (1988): 629–655. Sir Thomas Warner to Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, 1 April 1642, Hay Papers, GD34/939 (3). Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fisherman: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 68–74. Sumptuary laws were repealed in 1644; see Massachusetts Records, 2:84. “Extracts from Henry Whistler’s Journal of the West Indies Expedition,” Venables Narrative, 146. I. S., A Brief and Perfect Journal of the Late Proceedings and Success of the English Army in the West-Indies (London, 1655), 6. [Lionel Gatford], Publick Good Without Private Interest (London, 1657), 4. James Drax and William Hilliard, Petition to Parliament, n.d., Severall Proceedings of State Affaires in England 272 (7–14 December 1654): [4312–14]. Southey, Chronological History, 1:295; David Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,” AHR 98 (1993): 1399–1423; Baron F. Duckham, A History of the Scottish Coal Industry, vol. 1, 1700–1815: A Social and Industrial History (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 1970), chap. 9. On servants and their prospects, see Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic, chap. 3. Because of this situation, the earl of Carlisle offered poor ex-servants in Barbados land on one of his other islands as part of his bid to retain control of his plantations; see A Declaration By James Earl of Carlile, Lord of the Caribee Islands, or Province of Carliola (London, 1647). The state paid the debts of ex-servants willing to migrate to Jamaica as part of its effort to recruit settlers for that colony. See Luke Stoakes to Robert Sedgwick, 12 March 1655/ 6, Nevis, and idem to Oliver Cromwell, 29 May 1656, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:603, 5:66–67. Akenson assumed that the parameters of the system as used in the West Indies were well known in England; see If the Irish Ran the World, esp.

Notes to Pages 207–209

128. 129.

130.

131.

132.

133.

134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139.

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52–53. But if such were the case, the exchange between Searle and Cromwell discussed later in this chapter does not make sense, and neither does the evident dismay of the authorities at the return of some servants. On debt leading to loss of liberty, see Richard Tank[rode] to Brother [James?] Wishert, 27 August 1642, Antigua, Hay Papers, GD34/923 (37). For a different sort of debtclientage system developing in New England, see Vickers, Farmers and Fisherman, 5, 115–116. A Declaration By James Earl of Carlile. “An act against Indebpted Runn Awayes Sueing for thare Credt: by Attorneyes,” 12 November 1644, 56. Also see [Jennings,] Acts and Statutes of the Island of Barbados, 127. George Monck to John Thurloe, 29 May 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 3:488. Browne was only a lieutenant colonel (Barbados Council Minutes, 24) and had served on the council in 1641 and 1650; see Gary A. Puckrein, “The Acquisitive Impulse: Plantation Society, Factions, and the Origins of the Barbadian Civil War (1627–1652)” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1978), 222, table 2. Also see Monck to Thurloe, 20 November 1655, State Papers of Thurloe, 4:221. D. F. Dow discusses one Captain Wishart who was at large in Scotland from 1655 to 1657 after returning from Barbados; Cromwellian Scotland, 1651–1660 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1979), 226. Englands Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize. Represented in a Petition to the High and Honourable Court of Parliament, by Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, Gentlemen, on the behalf of themselves and three-score and ten more Free-born Englishmen sold (uncondemned) into slavery (London, 1659); the resultant parliamentary debate was recorded in Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. John Towill Rutt, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 4:254–273. Also see Marcellus Rivers to Major General Browne, n.d. [1659/60?], State Papers of Thurloe, 1:745–746. Gunkel and Handler, “A German Indentured Servant,” 94–95. This account incidentally indicated that merchants from German-speaking areas of Europe traded freely in Barbados after its reduction in 1652. Edward, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and civil wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 6:379; Barbados Council Minutes, 214–215. Quoted in Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 555–556. Searle to Cromwell, 18 September 1655. [Gatford], Publick Good Without Private Interest, 4–5. Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Migration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious NonConformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1992), 46–47. Also see Acts and Ordinances, 681–682. True Informer, n.s., 4 (17 May 1645): 30–31; Charles Baily, A True & Faithful Warning (London, 1663); A Seasonable Warning (London, 1663). Women were implicated in seventeen of twenty-eight cases from 1645 to 1660; Middlesex County Records, vol. 3, 1 Charles I to 18 Charles II, ed. John Condy Jeaffreson ([London]: Middlesex County Records Society, 1888), 100, 181–

324 324

140. 141.

142. 143.

144.

145. 146. 147.

148.

149.

Notes to Pages 209–211 182, 184–185, 224, 229–230, 233, 239, 253, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260–261, 262, 263, 266, 269, 271, 273–274, 277–278, 279, 302–303, 306. The nine cases between 1661 and 1666 all involved male defendants, one of whom was charged in company with his wife (315–381 passim). Why women should have dominated in the interregnum but not after is unclear. John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, The two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia, and Mary-land (London, 1656), reprinted in Maryland Narratives, 297. IEB, 78:60, PRO; Col. Francis White and Major John Miller [of the Committee for America], Accompt of the passengers on the Conquer, August 1657, CP, CO1/13, 64–65v, PRO. IEB, 6 August 1657, 78:60, PRO. For “spirit,” OED cites Bulstrode Whitelocke’s 1682 Memorial referring to a 1645 usage regarding the ordinance against spiriting away children; see also White and Miller, Accompt of the passengers on the Conquer. For “barbados,” see OED, and William Gorge to George a Laon, 31 May 1655, “An intercepted letter,” State Papers of Thurloe, 3:495. Games seems to suggest that the word was in use in the 1630s, but her source does not in fact use it; see Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic, 77, citing Jennings Cropper Wise, Col. John Wise of England and Virginia (1617–1695) (Richmond, Va.: The Bell Books and Stationery Co., 1918), 29–30. Weekly Post 194 (29 August–5 September 1654): 1554. Potential servant-prisoners dreaded Barbados, as indicated by the 18 January 1655/6 petition by Edward Penruddock and George Duke requesting that they be sent to Virginia over Barbados; see their petition to the Council of State, CP, CO1/12, 140, PRO. Their petition succeeded, according to the order in the IEB, [22 January 1655/6], 104:481, PRO. Penruddock (brother of the colonel who led the failed royalist rising of 1655) managed to get back to England by 1659, where he was arrested before Sir George Booth’s rising in August. See David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 25, 267. Severall Proceedings of State Affaires 257 (24–31 August 1654): 4070. Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, 132. Three Great and Bloody Fights (London, 1655) and A great and wonderful Victory (London, 1655). Peter Gaunt has questioned the authenticity of the notes on a debate in Cromwell’s council about whether to oppose Spain or France; see “Edward Montagu’s Notes,” 203–208; and Gaunt, “Oliver Cromwell and his protectoral councillors,” 550 n. 35. But as these tracts reveal, there was popular confusion about the target regardless of the veracity of the notes. For Cromwellian foreign policy, see Philip Aubrey, Mr. Secretary Thurloe: Cromwell’s Secretary of State, 1652–1660 (London: Athlone Press, 1990). Richard C. Simmons, “Americana in British Books, 1621–1750,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 370–371. Englands Slavery was published anonymously but contains many signs of having been authored by Rivers, who was then in England to submit the petition included in the pamphlet. See also Proceedings of Parliaments, 247–263, for the debate over whether to hear the petition at all.

Notes to Pages 211–216

325 325

150. Proceedings of Parliaments, 252. 151. Englands Slavery, 7; also see 3, 5, 11, 12, 19, 22. For these references, see Glenn Sanders, “‘A plain Turkisk Tyranny’: Images of the Turk in Anti-Puritan Polemic,” in Puritanism and its Discontents, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 167–193. 152. Proceedings of Parliaments, 1:250, 260, 253. For a different interpretation on the class dynamic of the case, see Hilary McD. Beckles, “English Parliamentary Debate on ‘White Slavery’ in Barbados, 1659,” JBMHS 36 (1982): 344–353. 153. Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 1:416–417. 154. Diary of Thomas Burton, 4:268.

Epilogue 1. Rhode Island Records, 509. Or so they seem to have meant when they wrote “neme contra decente.” 2. John Clarke, “Petition . . . to the King,” [1661?], Rhode Island Records, 488. 3. David L. Smith, “The Struggle for New Constitutional and Institutional Forms,” in Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, ed. John Morrill (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), 32. 4. Warrant to the Attorney General, CSPC, 481. 5. “Order appointing a Committee for Plantation Affairs,” 4 July 1660, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. 3, London Documents (Albany, 1853), 30; Acts of the Privy Council: Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1613–1680 (Hereford: H.M. Stationery Office, 1908), 295; the petitioners ask for James Russell to be continued as governor of Nevis. A year earlier a Colonel Ward had been recommended; see IEB, 27 September 1659, PRO. 6. John Davenport to John Winthrop, Jr., 28 September 1659, CMHS, 3d. ser., 10 (1844): 25–26; William Leete to John Winthrop, Jr., 24 April 1660, CMHS, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 543–544. 7. “Journal of the Proceedings of the Governor and Councel of Barbados From the 29th of May 1660. To the 30th of November 1686,” CEB, CO31/1, 15– 17, PRO; CSPC, 496; Parliamentary Intelligencer 43 (15–22 October 1660): 674, 675. 8. Lyon G. Tyler, “Virginia under the Commonwealth,” WMQ, 1st ser., 1 (1892– 93): 196; Virginia Statutes, 2:9. 9. Virginia Statutes, 2:24, 25. 10. Jon Kukla, ed., “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, October 1660,” VMH&B 83 (1975): 87–88. 11. BCR, 3: page number omitted, 4:33. 12. Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice (London, 1662), 1, 20. 13. Plymouth Records, vol. 11, Laws, 1623–1682, 129. See also vol. 3, Court Orders, 1651–1661, 144. 14. Ibid., vol. 7, Judicial Acts, 1636–1692, 130, 144. 15. “Doyley’s Journal,” 426, 432, 458. Beeston says it was 17 August and that the proclamation was greeted with joy because the soldiers expected to go home. William Beeston, “A Journal kept by Coll. William Beeston from his first coming to Jamaica,” 27 April 1660–6 July 1680, Additional Mss. 12430, 24, BL.

326 326 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

Notes to Pages 216–217 Beeston, “Journal,” 24. “Doyley’s Journal,” 483. Rhode Island Records, 432–434. Maine Records, 1:195. “Proceedings of the County Court of Charles County, 1658–1666,” in Archives of Maryland, vol. 53, ed. J. Hall Pleasants (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1936), 102–103. Writs continued to run in the name of the Lord Proprietor. See Maryland Assembly, 395, 461. Connecticut Records, 361–362. Massachusetts Records, vol. 4, pt. 2, 30–31. Hutchinson, History, 191. New Haven Records, 418–423. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. 5, 1661–1668, 204–205. Samuel Maverick, “A briefe description of New England,” NEHGR 39 (1885): 40–42. David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 50–51, 69. Also see Nehemiah Bourne to John Winthrop, Jr., 19 April 1662, CMHS, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 305–306. Thomas Hutchinson believed that some left England for New England but also that some settlers left New England for the safety of New Netherland at this time; see Hutchinson, History, 193–194 n. 193. No evidence of an influx of settlers into New Netherland survives for this period. Any new settlers probably augmented the extant English towns, as no additional towns were founded at this time. Joyce D. Goodfriend places the English population in New Amsterdam/New York in 1664 at 4.5 percent; Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 16. The Dutch government did attempt to recruit English settlers whose consciences were oppressed (presumably by the Restoration religious settlement). See “Act of the States General and Conditions offered by the Dutch West India Compy to Settlers in New Netherlands,” 14 February 1661, and “The Copie of the Conditions and privileges graunted,” in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New-York, 3:37–39. John Davenport to John Winthrop, Jr., 11 August 1660, CMHS, 3d ser., 10 (1844): 39; Mss. Clarendon 75, fols. 451–452, Bodleian. For instance, John Langdon Sibley, comp., Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, vol. 1, 1643–1658 (Cambridge, Mass., 1873), 72–73, 194– 195, 412–414; 93, 98–100, 173–174, 228–229, 234; 381, 475–476; 82–85, 157–158, lists only three who lost their posts in England and immediately returned to New England. Another three found other work in England and migrated back to New England only years later. Two seemingly conformed, while two others managed to continue preaching despite harassment. John Davenport to William Goffe, 1 January 1662, CMHS, 4th ser, 8 (1868): 199–200. Thomas Prence scolded Winthrop for defending Connecticut rather than the interests of the region more generally; Thomas Prence to John Winthrop, Jr., 29

Notes to Pages 218–220

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

327 327

September 1661, CMHS, 5th ser., 1 (1871): 392–393; John Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth (London, [1659]), in CMHS, 3d ser., 9 (1846): 128. “The humble Petition and Address of the General Court sitting at Boston in New-England, unto the High and Mighty Prince Charles the Second, and presented unto his Most gracious Majesty, Feb. 11.1660[/61],” in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 2d ed., rev., ed. Walter Scott, vol. 7 (London, 1812), 457–459. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 5:42, 83, 118. William Hooke to John Winthrop, Jr., 30 March 1659/60, CMHS, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 592; John Hull, “Some Passages of God’s Providence,” Archaelogia Americana 3 (1857): 151–152; and for news arriving first in October, Hull, “Observable Passages,” 195. Hull, “Observable Passages,” 198; also, for the related fast day, 199. Charles II to Massachusetts, 28 June [1662], Hutchinson Papers, 2:100–104; Massachusetts Records, vol. 4, pt. 2, 117–118. Massachusetts Records, vol. 4, pt. 2, 581–582. Nor were any of those currently organizing the colony’s first Baptist church listed; see Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chaps. 1 and 2. Thomas Vaughan, “Upon Friday night betweene Eight and Nine,” [13 July 1660], Ashmole Mss. 240:276, Bodleian; Lyon Gardner to John Winthrop, Jr., 5 November 1660, CMHS, 4th ser., 7 (1865): 64–65. Virginia Statutes, 2:29–32. Also see R. G., Virginia’s Cure: Or An Advisive Narrative concerning Virginia (London, 1662). J. H. Lefroy, “Notices of the Clergy in the Somers Islands under the Bermuda Company, 1612–1685,” Memorials of the Bermudas, 1:691, 693–695, 707– 709. Sanford, Surinam Justice, 44. On the difficulties of reinstating the Church of England within England itself, see Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). John Davenport, note dated 21 June 1661, and to William Goffe, [July 1662], in Letters of John Davenport, ed. Isabel MacBeath Calder (New Haven: Yale University Press 1937), 198–201; William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 90. DNB, s.v. John Oxenbridge (1608–1674). This estimate of population increase is based on my own calculations for 1640 of almost 51,000 (see Appendix 1) and on the figures in John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, Needs and Opportunities for Study Series (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 218, fig. 10.1. McCusker and Menard excluded Surinam, where the settlers probably numbered well under 1,000. Their own figure for 1640 is higher (70,000) and would reduce the increase over this period to three times rather than four. John Evelyn, Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

328 328

46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

Notes to Pages 220–223 1955), 3:257; “Some Considerations why his Majestie should keepe & supply Jamaica,” Harley Mss. 3361, 49, BL. “Journal of Barbados,” 26; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 103, 136, 153, 154, 203. See its grant, dated 11 September 1661, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 5:56. J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 48–71; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1, 148–149. This point speaks more to the “empire” portion of the “First British Empire”; the “British” part had to await the 1707 Act of Union. See Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 3 n. 6, for a discussion of older histories that treated 1660 as a watershed; my work, like his, argues against this interpretation. Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 159, 98, 96, 175–203. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705), ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 69. Samuel Barry et al., “The Distribution of the Royal Donative which King Charles sent to the Officers and Soldiers of Jamaica,” 17 October 1662, Additional Mss. 12430, fols. 18–19, BL. On Barbados, see Sir Robert Harley to Sir Edward Harley, 11 September 1663, HMC, 14th Report, appendix, pt. 2: The Mss. of his grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 2 (1894), 277. Land distribution increasingly occupied the orders in “Doyley’s Journal”; see, for instance, 26 November 1660, 441. On England and Ireland, see John Miller, The Restoration and the England of Charles II, Seminar Studies in History, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1997), 17; S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 13–15. For “Fendall’s rebellion,” see Craven, Southern Colonies, 297–299. James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 212. “Charter of Connecticut, April 23, 1662,” and “Charter of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, July 8, 1663,” in Kavenagh, Foundations, 1:113, 122. The governors named in the charters were John Winthrop, Jr., and Benedict Arnold. Instructions dated 12 September 1662, quoted in J. M. Sosin, English America and the Restoration Monarchy of Charles II: Transatlantic Politics, Commerce, and Kinship (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 37. “A Swiss Medical Doctor’s Description of Barbados in 1661, the Account of Felix Christian Spoeri,” ed. and trans. Alexander Gunkel and Jerome S. Handler, JBMHS 33 (1969), 6. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 5:111. Henry Adis, A Letter Sent from Syrranam, to His Excellency, the Lord Willoughby

Notes to Pages 224–225

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

329 329

of Parham (London, 1664); Acts of the Privy Council, 335–36; Proceedings of Parliaments, 321n. Hutchinson, History, 139. Commissioners of the United Colonies to Charles II, September 1661, Acts of Commissioners, 2:255–259; The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New. Translated into the Indian Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1663), dedication. Thomas Thorowgood, Jews in America (London, 1660), dedication. C. D. Gilbert, “‘God Preserve . . . New England’: Richard Baxter and His American Friends,” Journal: United Reformed Church History Society 5 (October 1993): 149. Rhode Island to Richard, Lord Protector, 1659, Rhode Island Records, 414– 416. Clarke, “Petition,” 487; Charles II, “Charter of Rhode Island,” in Kavenagh, Foundations, 120. For example, address to the king, “Journal of Barbados,” 25. Cheever’s poem marked the first time a New England almanac attempted extended commentary on current events or a poem of such length, but identifying the allegorical figures and pinpointing their meaning is a thankless task. S[amuel C[heever], MDCLXI. An Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1661 (Cambridge, Mass., 1661). In attempting to figure out the meaning of Cheever’s poem, I benefited from conversations with other readers at the Huntington Library, including Steve Pincus, Rachel Weil, and John Stedman (who termed it “old-fashioned”). For claims that Massachusetts treated royalists well, see John Endecott, The Humble Petition and Address of the General Court sitting at Boston in NewEngland, Unto the High and Mighty Prince Charles the Second (London, 1660), reprinted in Scott, Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 7:458. Hugh Peter said the same about his dealings with the late king and royalists, and he was still drawn and quartered for treason. See The case of Mr. Hugh Peters (London, [1660]), 4. For failure to proclaim Richard Cromwell as evidence of loyalty to the king, see Hutchinson, History, 179n. Don Pedro de Quixot, or in English the Reverend Hugh Peters (London, 1660); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1976), 187. Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 147. [John Josselyn], Chronological Observations of America (London, 1674), reprinted CMHS, 3d ser., 3 (1883): 390. One former New England resident did sign the warrant, Colonel Vincent Potter; see William Sachse, “The Migration of New Englanders to England, 1640 to 1660,” AHR 53 (1948): 274. A Relation of the Arraignment and Trial of those who made the late Rebellious Insurrection, in A Complete Collection of State Trials, comp. T. B. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1811–1826), 6:110; and Kingdomes Intelligencer, esp. 3 (14–21 January 1660/1): 41; also 2 (7–14 January 1661): 19. For the New England reaction, see Hull, “Observable Passages,” 5 May 1661, 200–201. Edward Godfrey to Thomas Povey, 1663, quoted NEHGR 13 (1859): 263. The quotation opens: “a receptacle of by Hugh”; ellipses replace a Latin phrase

330 330

Notes to Pages 225–233

of debatable meaning: “con sacer in sacro.” Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, “Introduction: After Revisionism,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989), 14–15. 73. McCusker and Menard’s figures for Barbados in 1660 are 26,200 whites and 27,100 blacks; see Economy of British America, 153.

Appendix 1 1. This list does not include the pirate base on Tortuga. By 1640, Tortuga was serving as a base for a mixed group of English and French pirates under the leadership of an Englishman named Willis. That population was transitory, so that it arguably did not constitute a “settlement”; in addition, no figures exist for the numbers of English pirates active in the region at this time. See David B. Quinn and A. N. Ryan, England’s Sea Empire, 1550–1642 (Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1983), 199; Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (1827; reprint, London: Cass, 1968), 1:281, 287; J. H. Parry and P. M. Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963), 58–59. My total for the North American mainland colonies is similar to that compiled by Stella H. Sutherland and summarized in series Z 1–19, in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1168, despite some discrepancies in the figures for specific colonies. My overall total (including colonies beyond North America) is lower than that in John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 218, fig. 10.1; the reason for this difference cannot be determined based on the information they provide. 2. The second of these propositions (that the ratio of militia men to voters remained roughly constant) is more questionable than the first, because new arrivals can be counted among those able to bear arms immediately, but qualification for the franchise was probably achieved more slowly. If this assumption throws the figures off, it would be in the direction of rendering the final figure too high. 3. I cannot square this conclusion with Dunn’s sense that “St. Christopher remained the most heavily populated island in the Leeward group in the 1640s and 1650s,” except to note that the English sector of that island would have been much more densely populated than the smaller but entirely English-controlled island of Nevis. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 121.

Index

Acadia, 16 Accounts, false news, 109–110, 210 Adamites, 173 Admiralty, 175, 209 Africa, 6–7, 38, 183, 192–193 African royalty, 203 Africans, 12, 19, 20, 186, 192, 193. See also Slaves: African Agents, colonial: for Massachusetts, 30, 42, 58, 78, 187; for Barbados, 98, 103, 110 Allegiance: divisive, 3, 25, 34, 94, 170; sought, 4, 49, 214; assumed, 35, 38, 39– 42, 117–118; thought to follow, 45, 47; to monarchy, 87–88, 91, 115, 213; explored, 110; denied, 114; to parliament, 121 All Saints Parish (Barbados), 126 Almanac, 31, 224 Anabaptists. See Antipedobaptism; Baptists Ancient constitution, 167 Andrews, Charles McLean, 13 Anglicans. See Church of England Anglo-Dutch War, 145–146, 174, 175 Anne Arundel County (Maryland), 152 Anti-Catholicism, 57, 88, 93, 128, 139, 150– 154, 178, 179 Anti-clericalism, 66 Antigua, 47, 49, 97; economy of, 19, 101, 172; royalism in, 48, 101, 110–111, 121; possible coup in, 111; deputies, 111, 167; attacked, 121, 196; religion in, 136; Indians and, 196, 197; maroons in, 199 Anti-Independents, 75, 76, 77–78, 94; Bermuda, 61, 76–77, 82, 114 Antinomians, 67, 147 Antipedobaptism, 55, 144, 149, 150 Aquidneck. See Newport (Rhode Island) Aristocracy/aristocrats: attacked, 86, 87; eclipsed, 122, 206, 212, 220, 222–223 Aristocratic proprietors, 1, 14, 16, 17, 100 Aristocratic “puritans,” 21, 45

Armitage, David, 12 Army: Scottish, 25; parliamentary, 28; royal, 108, 188. See also New Model Army Articles of Surrender: Barbados, 107, 110, 118, 119, 120, 125, 161; Virginia, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 161 Ashton, Henry, 30, 97, 110, 111 Assembly, 18, 166, 167, 220, 222, 251n20. See also specific colonies Atlantic: connections, 3–4, 100, 114, 158, 159; economy, 3, 18–19, 159–160, 207, 225; black, 5; Dutch, 5; English, 5, 6; territorial claims in, 15; unfreedom and, 44, 184; significance of control of, 51, 52; image of, 83, 117, 206–207, 210, 212 Atlantic world: social structure in, 205–207; contrasted to England, 212 Authority: nature of, 46–47, 162, 206–207; parental, 132 Authorization for colonial government, 30, 42, 43 Ayscue, George, 136; commands expedition, 103, 104–108, 109, 110; settles governments, 110–112, 119; departs, 110, 112, 120 Bahamas, 15, 51, 127, 222. See also Eleuthera Baillie, Robert, 62, 69, 70 Baltimore, Lord, Cecil Calvert, 116; proprietary of, challenged, 17, 82, 118, 157, 161; political calculations of, 28, 34, 35, 46; hostility toward, 57, 64, 82, 118, 122, 151; supports parliament, 93, 118, 119; disavows Mitchell, 142; retains Maryland, 161, 222 Banishment, 83–84; from orthodox New England, 54, 149; from other colonies, 92, 115, 204; from Barbados, 97–98, 99, 104, 110, 119; from Europe, 112

331

332 332

Index

Baptists: in Rhode Island, 55, 82, 130, 144– 145; in England, 67, 130, 223; opposition to, 71, 130, 133, 147; in other colonies, 130, 134, 144–145, 219, 223; in Wales, 219 Barbados, 16, 97; population in, 6, 19–20, 32; charter, 30; trade, 33, 101–102; neutrality in, 37–38, 48, 64, 94, 101; social structure in, 38, 105, 205–206; relations with center, 47–48, 49, 110, 163–164, 168, 174, 178; sectaries in, 56, 64–65, 82, 223; relations with other colonies, 92, 114; assembly, 94, 96, 97–98, 105, 110, 202, 214–215; royalism in, 94–96, 102–105, 109, 115, 119; leased, 99–97, 107; planters, 99, 103, 104, 165–166; religious liberty in, 102, 129–130, 150; moderates in, 104, 107, 108; divided politically, 107, 108, 122; Church of England in, 109, 223; terms sought, 111; importance of, 111; religious diversity in, 130, 142, 148, 151; religious reform in, 136, 150; Council, 148, 197, 202; recruits in, 178–179, 199; labor in, 187, 188, 190, 191, 208–209, 210–212; maroons in, 199; revolt in, 202– 203; Restoration and, 214–215 Barbados, as verb, 209, 324n143 Barbuda, 196 Barrington, Thomas, 159 Bates, Nicholas, 176 Bayes, John, 135–136 Bayly, Richard, 126 Bell, Philip, 28, 38, 48, 63, 64, 93–94, 95, 96 Bennett, Richard, 116, 118, 152 Berkeley, William, 36; relations with center, 26, 33–34, 49, 64; on religion, 54, 65–66; royalism, 92, 102–103, 115–116, 117, 162; governorship and, 119, 214; Restoration and, 214, 215 Berkenhead, John, 41 Bermuda, 15, 16, 64, 120; reformed religion in, 21, 55, 60–62, 76, 85, 132, 134–135; pro-parliament views in, 29, 44, 113; religious divisions in, 34, 92, 114, 122; royalism in, 34, 113, 114; relation with center, 44; Church of England in, 55, 61, 62, 125, 219; relations with other colonies, 57, 60, 76, 97; religion in, 76–77, 148, 151, 264n3; social structure in, 169; labor in, 187, 188, 190, 208–209, 210–212; revolt in, 203–204; Restoration and, 214, 215

Beverley, Robert, 116 Bible, 21, 69, 79, 219, 224 Biet, Antoine, 128–129, 130, 140, 142, 151, 189 Bishops, 7, 22, 56, 59, 69 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 5 Black Tom, 204 Blasphemy, 69, 123, 128, 132, 138, 141– 142, 145–146 Bliss, Robert, 42, 120, 171 Blockade, 98, 105, 106–107, 109–110, 113, 120 Bloudy Tenent (Williams), 74 Bloudy Tenent, Washed (Cotton), 74 Boggy Peak (Jamaica), 199 Book of Common Prayer: supported, 21, 55, 75, 125–126, 141, 219; proscribed, 61, 64, 126, 135; as test of loyalty, 65–66, 119 Boston, 57, 79, 88, 159, 220; Harbor, 32; church, 218 Bradford, William, 134, 199 Bradshaw, John, 106 Bradstreet, Anne, 40, 89–90 Brazil, 130, 192 Brenner, Robert M., 19 Brent, Giles, 28, 35, 36 Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion (Foster), 99 Brisket, Anthony, 20, 97 Bristol (England), 19, 50, 52, 185 Brock, John, 89 Broghill, Lord, Robert Boyle, 187 Brooke, Lord, Robert Greville, 136 Browne, James, 207 Buccaneers, 199. See also Pirates Buckley, Peter, 133 Byam, William, 108, 110, 112, 119 C. C. The Covenanter Vindicated, 72 Cabilecto, 204 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 10 Calvert, Leonard, 36, 200 Calvin, John, 21, 143 Calvinism, 53, 57, 60 Cambridge Platform, 143 Canny, Nicholas, 9, 10 Caribbean, 15, 16, 46, 140, 220 Caribs, 196–197 Carlisle, earl of, James Hay, 16, 30, 37, 46, 47–48, 96, 98, 110–111 Carlisle Bay (Barbados), 96, 104, 200 Carlisle estate, trustees of, 19, 23, 222 Carlisle patent, 16, 30, 49, 99, 100, 111, 161

Index Carteret, Philip de, 34 Catholicism, Roman, 35, 37, 54, 55, 64, 82, 93, 131, 142, 150–151 Chandler, Alfred D., 196 Charles I: calls parliament, 1, 25, 59; relations with colonies, 6, 18, 26, 27, 29, 37, 39, 45–48, 100; characterized, 8, 35, 43, 44, 90; commissions, 16, 34, 36, 97; escapes, 25; surrenders, 25, 50; New England and, 27, 31, 224; trial, 88–89; as martyr, 218– 219 Charles II, 80; regains throne, 7; accepts Atlantic world, 12, 220–223, 225–226; defeated, 114, 208; relations with colonies, 214, 217, 218, 224; follows revolutionaries’ precedent, 214, 218; on religion, 218, 223–224. See also Dunbar, Battle of; Worcester, Battle of Charlestown (Massachusetts), 78 Charter boroughs (English), 30 Charter company, 14, 16, 100. See also Massachusetts Bay Company; Somers Islands Company; Virginia Company Charters, colonial, 6, 30–31, 43, 80, 112, 129, 214, 222–223 Cheever, Samuel, 224 Child, John, 73, 74, 77 Child, Robert, 73, 77, 78 Children, 127, 186, 188, 189, 204, 209 Church: membership, 18, 56, 60, 77, 133; courts, 59 Church of England, 7; support for, 2, 12, 22, 23, 75, 77, 94, 125, 156, 212, 214; suppression of, 11, 41, 75, 109, 119, 122, 123, 124, 131, 154, 155–156; reform of, 15, 53, 57–60, 61, 65, 66–67, 75, 84, 123; inclusive, 53, 55, 65, 82; conformity to, 75, 64, 65–66, 92; equated with loyalty, 125, 219; tolerated, 218; restored, 218– 219, 220, 223 Church of Scotland, 7, 211 Civil Magistrates Power (Cobbet), 133 Civil war, fear of: in Barbados, 38, 95, 107, 108; in Maryland, 152–154. See also Severn, Battle of the Civil wars: English, 7, 26, 45, 88, 98, 131, 137, 213 Claibourne, William, 17, 36, 50, 116, 118, 152 Clarendon, earl of, Edward Hyde, 116, 208, 224 Clarke, Isaac, 119 Clarke, John, 145, 216, 224

333 333

Clear Sun-Shine of the Gospel, 80 Clergy: as migrants, 15, 56, 219; shortage of, 21, 57, 125, 140, 141, 219; maintenance of, 56, 65–66, 134, 219; and reformation, 57, 60, 76, 80–81, 84, 123, 146; seek employment, 58, 141 Clifton, Robin, 139 Cobbet, Thomas, 133 Coddington, William, 43 Colonies: founded, 14, 45; squatter, 17, 43; as refuge, 50, 81, 115, 127, 133, 189; as subordinate, 162–163; and plantations, 245n2 Colonists, characterized, 141–142 Commissioners: Scottish, 62; to Barbados, 110; to Newfoundland, 117; to Virginia, 117, 118, 152–154; in Maryland, 152–153 Committee on Foreign Plantations, 44, 49, 69, 78, 79, 80, 176; revived, 214, 218 Commonwealth of England, 93, 94; imposes authority, 86–87, 91, 114, 119; assessed, 90, 102–103, 104; relations with colonies, 98–99, 100, 101, 103, 112, 120, 157, 160–163, 170, 171–172; divisive, 108 Concord (Massachusetts), 28 Congregationalism: as New England polity, 56, 60, 72, 84; exported, 61–62, 75, 134; assessed, 64, 71, 72–73, 147; divisive, 81, 134–135 Connacht (Ireland), 189 Connecticut, 6, 198; relations with center, 17, 30, 42, 44; religion in, 56, 60; witchcraft in, 137; Restoration and, 216 Connecticut charter, 217, 222–223 Connecticut River, 32 Conventicles, 64, 82, 223 Coole Conference, 72 Cornwallis, Thomas, 36, 37 Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel, 80–81, 224 Correspondence, 3–4, 28, 31, 49, 71, 106, 110, 200 Cotton, John, 132; reputation of, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 72–73; defends policy, 68, 74, 143, 147; preaching, 69, 78, 90, 133 Council for New England, 16, 17 Council of State, 13, 107, 111, 117; authority of, 42, 99, 103; in colonial affairs, 64, 100, 104, 110, 113–114, 159, 161, 192; loyalty and, 90, 106; godliness and, 131 Courtis, Edward, 116 Court Mercurie, 48

334 334

Index

Covenanters, 138, 139 Criminals, 20, 96, 188, 204, 208, 211, 221 Cromwell, Henry, 189 Cromwell, Oliver, 7, 93, 136, 146; relations with colonies, 6, 152, 153; as general, 25; as Lord Protector, 66, 157, 161, 162, 189; on religion, 76, 126, 135, 150; death of, 127; and Western Design, 177–181; as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, 188, 189; on political dissent, 208, 211–212 Cromwell, Richard, 7, 167 Cromwell, Thomas, 199 Crops, 14–15, 19, 159, 160, 173, 202, 204, 207. See also Sugar Crowd action, 91, 114, 125, 141, 151 Cudworth, James, 149 Cust, Richard, 225 Customs, 160, 172 Dalkeith (Scotland), 188 Danforth, Samuel, 31 Davenant, William, 93 Davenport, John, 60, 147 Day Breaking If Not the Sun-Rising, 80 Debtor, 178, 186, 187, 199, 201, 207 Declaration (Warwick), 61 De factoism, 52, 98 Defense, 32, 101. See also Fortifications Delaware River, 47 Denis, Robert, 103 Devotional literature, 75 “Dialogue between Old England & New, A,” 40 Diggers, 8 Distance, 31, 93, 98, 131 Diversity, religious, 128, 129–130, 154–155, 212, 223, 225 Dixwell, John, 217 Doughty, Francis, 138–139 Downing, Emmanuel, 197 Downing, George, 225 Doyley, Edward, 171, 195, 199, 216 Drax, James, 44, 191 Drunkenness, 133, 135, 136, 139 Dunbar, Battle of, 90 Dunn, Richard S., 78 Dunster, Thomas, 145 Dutch, 15, 121, 141; colonies, 6, 16, 129, trade, 19, 37, 101, 103, 176, 192; merchants, 50, 101, 102; ships, 105, 120, 175, 176; press, 106; colonists, 129, 130 Dutch Reformed Church, 129, 151 Dyer, Mary, 146

Edgehill, Battle of, 25 Education, 61, 132, 139, 146, 204, 219 Edwards, Thomas, 62, 70, 71 Eikon Basilike, 89 Eleuthera, 44, 51, 81, 92, 127, 128, 130, 204 Eliot, John, 78, 89, 217 Elite: status contrasted, 205–206; nature of early colonial, 322n119 Eltis, David, 193 Embargo, 99, 100–101, 115 Empire: vision of, 87, 100, 157, 163, 171, 179, 221; resisted, 101, 107; benefit of, 105; creation of, 118–119, 120, 122, 157, 160–161, 167–168, 221; versus plantation, 181–182; advice about, 197; accepted, 220, 221 England, 3, 7, 81, 82, 130; Indian conversion in, 8–81, 224; ties to, 18, 26; localism in, 29–30; religious settlement in, 53–54, 123, 124, 126–127, 141; contrasted to New England, 83–84, 155; witchcraft in, 137–138 Englands Slavery, 211 English: character, 105; ethnicity, 19, 114, 129, 158, 165, 166, 169 Englishness, 13, 59, 153, 158, 165–166, 179–182, 217 Equality claimed, 158, 164–165, 171, 181– 182, 184, 206–207 Erastianism, 77, 126 Error, religious, 142–146 Essex (England), 137 Essex, earl of, Robert Devereux, 38 Ethnic pluralism, 130 Everard, Clemens, 111 Execution: performed, 106, 121, 124, 195, 204; threatened, 115, 149, 190; averted, 146, 204 Expedition: to rebel colonies, 103, 161; to Barbados, 104–105, 109; to Virginia, 106, 111, 115–117 Faithful Scout, 109, 126 Fast days, 40, 58, 76, 137, 215, 218 Fendall, Josiah, 148 Fenwick, George, 28, 168 Ferryland (Newfoundland), 16 Fifth Monarchists, 225 Fisheries, 57, 101, 103, 117, 121 Florida, 180 Flushing (New Netherland), 129 Force, William, 204

Index Forster, Josias, 113, 114, 135, 138, 204 Fortescue, William, 187 Fortifications, 32, 116, 180, 192, 202 Foster, Nicholas, 94, 99 “Foure Monarchies” (Bradstreet), 89–90 Foyle, Oxenbridge, 210–212 France, 6, 9–10 Franchise, 77, 152, 218 Freeborn status, 158, 164, 169, 184, 211 Freedom: of speech, 103; sought by laborers, 184, 193–194, 197, 202, 212, 221 French, 106, 120, 210; colonists, 97 French Intelligencer, 109 Fuller, William, 153 Gangreana (Edwards), 71 Gardiner, Lionel, 32 Gardyner, George, 159 Garrison government, 301n13 Gatford, Lionel, 206 Gazette de France, 110 General redemption, 127, 143, 144 Gilroy, Paul, 5 Godliness: in New England, 2, 124, 132– 134, 143, 217–218; in colonies, 2, 124, 134–136, 149–150, 153–154, 155–156; in England, 123, 155; as goal, 131–140, 152, 155–156, 212, 223; as identity, 169–170, 179–180 Goffe, William, 217, 223 Golding, William, 76 Goodwin, John, 63, 69, 72, 76 Goodwin, Thomas, 69, 73 Gookin, Daniel, 179 Gorge, Thomas, 45 Gorges, Ferdinando, 16, 17, 22, 30, 45–46, 47, 57 Gorton, Samuel, 78, 133; persecuted, 68–69, 83, 205; views of, 73, 127, 165; wins support, 79 Gortonists, 147, 204 Governor-in-Chief, 45, 48, 49. See also Warwick, earl of Governors: appointed, 47, 49, 110, 111, 112, 170, 214, 215; elected, 49, 91, 111, 112, 122, 170 Gravesend (England), 35 Great and wonderful Victory, 210 Great Migration, 3, 44, 185 Greene, Jack P., 165 Greene, Thomas, 93, 99, 118, 119 Guadeloupe, 201 Guinea Company, 192

335 335

Hague, The, 102, 103 Haiti, 10 Half-Way Covenant, 133 Hamilton, Marquis of, James, 16 Hammond, John, 165 Harrison, Thomas, 64, 66 Harvard College, 22, 40, 56, 60, 141, 145 Hatfield, April, 45 Hatherly, Timothy, 149 Hatton, Thomas, 93 Headrights, 186 Heylyn, Peter, 125 Higgon, Richard, 126 Highlanders, 189 Hill, Christopher, 8 Hill, Edward, 36, 142 Hilliard, William, 105 Hingham (Massachusetts), 28 Hispaniola, 179, 180, 187, 199 History: colonial American, 4–5; Atlantic, 5; Marxist, 8; Irish, 8; Whig, 65 Hobbes, Thomas, 52 Holden, Randall, 79 Holdip, James, 142, 191 Hole Town (Barbados), 106 Holidays, 125 Holland, 129, 134, 159 Holland, earl of, Henry Rich, 16 Holmes, Obadiah, 144–145 Hooke, William, 40, 133, 218 Hopkins, Matthew, 138 Hughes, Ann, 8, 225 Hull, Edward, 175–176 Hull, John, 89, 127, 218 Humphrey, John, 48, 58 Hutchinson, Anne, 20, 60, 67–68, 70, 71 Ill Newes from New England (Clarke), 145, 147 Independents, 51, 62, 136; English, 62–63, 67, 70–73, 75, 155; views of, 69, 71, 73; Eleuthera, 81; Bermuda, 91, 92, 113, 114 Indian(s), 17, 20, 153; efforts to convert, 11, 55, 78, 81, 134, 136, 155, 223–224; war with, 29, 36, 66, 196–197; alliances with, 33, 153; increased fear of, 33, 66; royalty, 112, 115; captives, 196; living among, 198, 200; attitudes of, cited, 209 Information, 114, 115. See also Correspondence; News Ingle, Richard, 35–37, 50, 64, 203 Ingle’s Rebellion, 35–37, 50, 64, 203

336 336

Index

Interregnum entry books, 35–37, 50, 64, 203 Intolerance, 67–72, 79, 83–84, 143–149, 154. See also Anti-Catholicism; Persecution Ireland, 3, 16; and colonies, 6, 8–9; social structure in, 35; relations with England, 161, 189 Irish, 151, 153, 159; colonists, 6, 12, 19, 48, 129, 186, 201; image of, 181–182; “Tories,” 202 Iron industry, 188, 204 Israel, Jonathan, 103 Jackson, William, 151, 199 Jamaica, 9, 12, 163, 171, 172, 186; reputation of, 4, 179–181, 187; soldiers in, 12, 171; religion in, 130–131, 218, 223; settlers sought, 178, 179–180, 207; labor in, 188, 189, 190; maroons in, 195, 199– 200; pirates in, 199; runaways, 201; Restoration and, 214, 215–216, 220, 222; social structure in, 222 James II, 161, 221 Jamestown (Virginia), 116, 119 Jarvis, Michael, 135 Jennison, William, 28, 43 Jersey (Channel Island), 34 Jews, 128, 129–130, 224 Jews in America (Thorowgood), 224 John, Duke of Braganza, 10 Johnson, Anthony, 194 Johnson, Edward, 65, 69, 143, 159, 160 Johnson, Mary, 194 Josselin, Ralph, 187 Judaism, 150 Jury: trial, 35, 145–146, 211; grand, 113, 135, 145 Karlsen, Carol, 137 Keepers of the Liberties of England, 118, 163, 170 Kent Island, 17, 36 Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (Cotton), 72 Keynall, Christopher, 111, 167, 170–171 Kidnapping, 187, 188, 193, 194, 209 Kingship, 119 King’s touch, 109 Kirke, David, 16, 45, 91, 103, 117 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 18 Labor: unfree, 2, 33, 183–184, 185–186, 190, 191, 204–205, 221, 310n1; market,

184–185, 192–193; death rate and, 186, 190; contract, 198 Laborers, 20, 38, 96, 106, 121. See also Servants; Slaves Laity, 83–84, 133, 144, 146, 147 Land: Indians’, 2, 20, 184, 196–197, 221; Jamaican, 9, 169; purchases, 17, 112; titles, 116, 220, 222; Irish, 153, 164, 169, 222; conflicts over, 184, 196–197; laborers seek, 194, 195–197, 207, 221; English, 222 Land ownership: in colonies, 2, 14, 158, 164–165, 168–169, 212; as basis of status, 18, 158, 164–165, 168, 222; aspiring to, 20, 194–197, 212; in England, 158, 164, 169 Langford, John, 128 Laud, William, 22, 53, 56, 103; reforms of, 21, 54–55, 69 Law, English: in colonies, 6, 77, 132, 175– 176, 186, 198; valued, 43, 95, 164; dismissed, 95, 112, 176 Layfield, Sarah, 29 Leeward Islands, 125. See also individual colonies Legal code, 132 Legislation: against king sans parliament, 43; against conventicles, 65, 223; for the promoting and propagating the Gospel, 80; concerning religion, 82, 128; against kingship, 83, 97; of indemnity, 97; against rebel colonies, 99, 100, 102, 113, 120, 163; biblical, 132, 186; against runaway creditors, 201 Lenthall, John, 164 Levellers, 8, 178 Leverett, John, 175, 176 Levy, Babette, 55 Liberty, 101, 105, 108, 149–150, 158, 164, 170, 210–212; defined, 124; Christian, 136 Liberty of conscience, 84, 155–156; in Eleuthera, 8, 127; in Rhode Island, 42, 127–128, 148; advocated, 54, 65, 67, 69, 123, 150, 212; abused, 71, 77, 78, 94, 129; in Maryland, 82, 127–128, 151, 154; as policy, 102, 119 Ligon, Richard, 159, 191, 194, 202, 203 Lilly, William, 188 Limited redemption, 55–56 Localism, 29–30, 166–167 London, 19, 37, 50, 67, 68, 78, 106, 110, 185; radicalism in, 4, 71, 123, 225; colonists in, 42, 95, 99; diversity in, 225 Long Island, 15, 17, 129, 130, 141

Index Lords, House of, 7, 47, 48, 87, 103, 187 Lovelace, Francis, 117 Ludlow, Edmund, 110, 116, 188, 212 Ludlow, George, 116 Lygonia (Maine), 44, 47, 50 Lynn (Massachusetts), 17, 133, 145 M. S. to A. S., 72 Maine, 15, 16, 30, 40, 45, 50–51; religion in, 57, 82, 132, 133, 140; Restoration and, 216 Major Generals, 188 Marie Galante, 196 Marlborough, earl of, James Ley, 47–48, 50, 51, 111, 220 Maroonage, 195, 199–200, 203 Marten, George, 98, 103, 110 Marten, Henry, 98, 110 Martinique, 210 Maryland, 15, 16–17, 19; assembly, 18, 34; civil war in, 26, 36, 118, 152–154; political position of, 28, 38, 136; revolt in, 35–37, 152–154, 203–204, 222; social structure in, 35; religion in, 37, 82, 85, 124, 125, 127, 128, 148, 150–154; Council, 142; labor in, 200; Restoration and, 216 Massachusetts Bay Colony: charter, 14, 22, 31, 42, 80, 101, 169, 217; relations with center, 30, 31, 34, 42, 43, 58, 67, 100; population, 32; relations with other colonies, 42, 68–69, 79, 81, 83, 200; General Court, 42, 44, 70, 100, 104, 137, 144, 145–146, 175, 217; religion in, 56– 61, 63, 76, 84–85, 124; reputation of, in England, 79–80, 117–118, 147–148, 217– 218; witchcraft in, 137–138; deputies, 139, 145–146; Court of Assistants, 146; Restoration and, 216 Massachusetts Bay Company, 15, 18 Martinique, 120 Mather, Richard, 72, 74 Mathews, Samuel, 263n110 Maurice, Prince, 121 McCusker, John J., 196 Memoirs (Ludlow), 110 Men, 19, 98, 164–165 Menard, Russell R., 196 Merchants, 32, 33, 159; African trade and, 6– 7, 183, 192–193, 221, 224; English, 19, 50, 104, 110, 172, 192; Dutch, 37, 50, 159, 174; New England, 39, 50, 71, 160, 172, 192, 220; policy and, 98, 99, 157, 174, 176–177; Spanish, 200 Mercurius Aulicus, 31, 41, 50, 81

337 337

Mercurius Britanicus, 41 Mercurius Elenticus, 188 Mercurius Melancholicus, 188 Mercurius Politicus, 117, 188 Meritorious Price (Pynchon), 143 Middlesex County Records, 209 Middleton, ———, 95 Middleton, John, 138 Migrants, 15, 27, 44, 45, 63, 82, 108, 115 Migration: transatlantic, 3, 14, 19, 23, 38, 44, 84, 108; reverse, 40, 58, 71, 185, 217; declining, 159, 183; unfree, 185–186; between colonies, 196, 200, 207, 219; debt and, 207 Militia, 38, 110, 116, 119, 148, 178, 222 Millennialism, 130, 131, 217 Miller, Perry, 143 Missionary efforts, 11, 55, 78–81, 155. See also Quaker: missionaries Mr Cottons Letter, 68 Mitchell, Joan, 138–139 Mitchell, Jonathan, 145 Mitchell, William, 142 Modiford, Thomas, 107, 116, 167, 214– 215 Monarchy, 7, 14, 86, 89–90, 91, 103, 122 Monck, George, 208, 209 Monopoly, 161, 171, 173 Montserrat, 6, 19, 20; social structure in, 35, 153; relations with center, 47–48, 49, 97, 111, 121; religion in, 55, 125, 151; labor in, 189–190; Indians and, 196–197 Moral reform. See Godliness Morgan, Edmund S., 41 Morris, Richard B., 198 Morton, Thomas, 31 “Moses His Judaicals” (Cotton), 132 Muggletonians, 8 Murder, 138, 187, 189, 198 Mutiny, 12, 195 Myles, John, 219 Mystic River, 32 Narragansett Bay, 17, 127 Naseby, Battle of, 25, 28, 43 Native Americans. See Indians Navigation Act, 100, 120, 157, 161, 170– 172, 173, 175; of 1660, 224 Navy, 87, 103, 161, 180–181 Naylor, James, 123, 146 Needham, Marchmont, 41 Netherlands, The, 129, 134, 159 Neutrality, 25, 29, 33, 37–39, 51, 86, 92, 94, 96, 108

338 338

Index

Nevis, 19, 32; relations with center, 38, 47, 49, 97, 111, 121; religion in, 130, 136, 148; settlers to Jamaica, 178, 179; Indians and, 196, 197; plot in, 204; Restoration and, 216 Newbury (Massachusetts), 73 New England, 18, 19, 20, 26, 100; economy, 2, 59, 159–160, 175, 185, 220; churches, 15, 21–22, 53, 54, 58, 62–63, 75, 83–84; presumed parliamentarian, 35, 38, 39–42, 117–118; fosters radicalism, 39, 41, 57, 62, 71, 82, 217–218, 225; clergy, 41, 57, 65, 75; religion in, 53, 58–61, 126, 132– 133; image of, 56, 58–60, 69, 72, 74–75, 78; out-migration expected from, 81, 179– 180; as poor model, 83–84; on Englishness, 169–170, 217; labor in, 188, 190, 204–205; and Indians, 197; social structure in, 204–205; Restoration and, 214, 217–218 New England Salamander (Winslow), 74 New-Englands Jonas Cast Up (Child), 74, 78 New Englands Lamentation, 58 Newfoundland, 18, 57; economy, 3, 101; relations with center, 15, 16, 20; royalism in, 29, 45, 103, 117, 121 New Hampshire. See Piscataqua New Haven: relations with center, 17, 30, 42, 44; religion in, 56, 60, 63, 132, 135; on witches, 137, 139, 294n67; relations with other colonies, 200; Restoration and, 216, 217 New Model Army, 25, 71, 89, 94, 123, 161 New Netherland, 129, 130, 145–146, 175, 200; English colonists in, 326n27 Newport (Rhode Island), 38, 42, 43, 144 News, 28, 31, 54; of events, 79, 99, 106, 109–110, 116, 121, 210; of regicide, 87, 88–89, 91, 93; of Restoration, 214, 221 New Sweden, 16, 47, 174 Noell, Martin, 168, 189, 211 Norfolk County (Virginia), 138, 140 Norwood, Richard, 61 Nova Scotia, 6, 16, 216 Noyes, James, 73 Nye, Philip, 73 Oath: of allegiance, 29, 34, 91, 214, 215; of office, 43; against Baltimore, 64; by royalists, 94; for Commonwealth, 110, 112, 113, 118; for Baltimore, 148, 152, 166 Oliverian, 221

Orthodoxy, 132, 135, 144, 147, 155–156, 212 Osborne, Roger, 97, 111 Oxenbridge, John, 220 Oxford, 37, 41, 81 Paris, 110 Parish-based church system, 60, 77, 135 Parker, Thomas, 73 Parliament, 11, 25; seeks support, 4, 37, 49, 78; activities at center, 11, 25, 45, 103, 112; success, 26, 31, 34, 37, 43, 50–51, 52, 105, 108; garners support, 26, 27, 40– 43, 44–45, 89, 94; relations with colonies, 27, 39, 41–42, 44, 45, 48, 56, 101, 117, 160–161; trade concessions by, 34, 39–40, 49, 160; criticized, 41, 90; and religious reform, 53–54, 56, 60, 64, 65, 68, 76–77, 78; on Indian conversion, 80– 81; Irish, 165 Parliamentarianism: characterized, 108–109, 115; colonial, 229, 36, 94, 117 Pearse, Mr., 92 Pembroke, earl of, Philip Herbert, 16 Penn, William, 120 Penruddock, John, 210 Pequot (Connecticut), 175 Pequot War, 204 Perfect Description ([Ferrar]), 254n15 Perfect Diurnall, 109, 188 Persecution, 69, 101, 143–145, 154–155. See also Intolerance Petaquamscot (Rhode Island), 127 Peter, Hugh, 72, 187; political activities of, 41, 58, 225; views of, 60, 69–70, 71, 132 Philip IV, 10 Pirates, 12, 121, 180, 188, 199, 330n1 Piscataqua, 15, 17, 132 Plough Patent, 47, 50 Plowden, Edmund, 47 Plymouth: 30, 42; political positions in, 38, 45, 90; relations with other colonies, 42, 127, 149; religion in, 45, 55, 60, 132, 134, 144, 148; Restoration and, 214, 215 Plymouth (England), 19 Poor, the, 15, 187, 204, 209, 221 Population, 37; make-up, 6, 19–20; in 1640, 6, 14, 16, 17, 19–20, 32, 327n44; distribution, 14, 16, 17, 32; ratios, 56, 202, 204; growth, 193, 195–196, 220, 225 Portsmouth (Rhode Island), 39, 42, 43 Portugal, 10 Portuguese, 130, 207

Index Potter, Mr., 127 Povey, William, 168 Powhatan, 36, 66 Powring Out of the Seven Vials, 58 Poyning’s Law, 42 Poyntz, Sydenham, 97 Prayer book. See Book of Common Prayer Preaching: and puritans, 21, 55, 57, 61, 84, 139–140, 146; radicals and, 64, 68, 130; for political purposes, 69, 133 Pregnancy, 186, 207 Presbyterian, 59, 75, 80; settlement, 62, 67, 75–79, 126; on persecution, 69, 71; in New England, 73; on dissent, 76, 82, 126, 147 Press: English and New England, 58–59, 73– 75; English, 66, 81, 104, 109, 110, 203, 215; French, 110 Priest, 55, 153, 189, 208 Printz, Johan, 47 Prisoners of war, 12, 96, 106, 185; transported, 184, 187, 188, 189, 204 Privateer, 34, 35, 175–176, 195, 199 Privy Council, 13 Prize office, 174–175, 178 Proclamation of Charles II: in Scotland, 86– 87; in colonies, 91–93, 96, 97, 101, 104; at Restoration, 214 Promotional literature, 80, 199 Proprietary: grants, 15, 16, 37, 214; colony, 19, 26, 27, 45, 46, 100 Prostitutes, 120 Providence (Maryland), 82, 152 Providence (Rhode Island), 42, 43, 55, 56, 127–128 Providence Island, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 64, 190, 193 Providence Island Company, 19 Providence Plantation. See Rhode Island Providentialism, 199, 203; favors orthodoxy, 6, 61, 66, 70, 78, 81; favors revolution, 49, 105, 109, 162 Provost Marshal, 167–168 Prynne, William, 63, 76 Pym, John, 34, 60 Pynchon, John, 188 Pynchon, William, 138, 143–144 Quaker: movement, 4, 130–131, 148, 149, 154–155; missionaries, 11, 123, 129, 130– 131, 146–147, 148–149, 154–155; martyrs, 124, 146, 154, 156; conversion, 129, 131, 148–149, 154

339 339

Quakers, 8, 218, 221, 223 Quinn, David B., 9 Rachum, Ilan, 8 Radicals, religious, 92, 94, 142, 151; rise of, 64–65, 70, 82, 123 Rape metaphor, 127, 289n12 Rathband, William, 62 Rebellion: in Scotland, 1, 7, 25, 28; in Ireland, 7, 86, 151 Recruits, 201–202 Regicide, 7; radicalism of, 8, 131, 139; response to, 11, 52, 89–93, 100, 114 Regicides, 89, 116, 217, 224 Rehoboth (Plymouth), 144 Religion, equated with politics, 84–85, 92, 109, 114, 223 Remonstrance, 77–79 Remonstrants, 77–79, 133, 166, 169–170 Reply to Mr. Rutherford (Mather), 74 “Report Concerning the Affairs of America,” 189 Republicanism, 51, 86, 88, 117, 119, 206 Restoration, 11, 12, 112, 130, 139, 201, 212, 213–226 Revisionism, 8, 10 Revolt: of planters, 33, 167; of laborers, 36, 47, 96, 107–108, 184, 202–204, 221; fear of, 38, 95–96, 202–203; shipboard, 209. See also Ingle’s Rebellion Revolution: English, 4, 7, 8, 9, 131, 139, 183, 212, 214; American, 5; Puritan, 8, 155; French, 9; Glorious, 10 Rhode Island: relations with center, 17, 39, 42, 44; charter, 42, 213, 216, 222–223, 224, religious radicals in, 42, 82, 130, 133, 144–145; relations with colonies, 83, 165, 200; religious liberty in, 124, 127, 132, 136, 148; on witches, 138; Restoration and, 213, 214, 215–216 Rigby, Alexander, 47 Rights: concern over, 2, 3, 12, 46, 51, 166– 167, 225; response to, 11, 52, 86–89, 92, 100, 114 Riot, 34, 136 Rivers, Marcellus, 210–212 Robertson, William, 146 Robinson, Henry, 63 Robinson, William, 146 Robson, Charles, 126 Rogers, Ezekial, 147 Rogers, Nathaniel, 41 Roxbury (Massachusetts), 44

340 340

Index

Royal African Company, 7 Royalism: colonial, 28–29, 40, 43, 108; characterized, 94, 108–109 Royalist: colonies, 26, 27, 45–48, 87–88, 101, 214–215; uprising (England), 112, 210; colonies attempted, 117, 286n124; coup feared, 203 Royalist rebellion, 1, 4, 11, 86–99; in Bermuda, 89, 91, 99, 108, 112–115, 119, 214; in Antigua, 91, 99; in Barbados, 91, 93–99, 214; in Newfoundland, 91, 103; in Virginia, 91, 92, 99, 108, 115–117, 119, 214; in Maryland, 93, 99; quelled, 103, 104–108, 109–112, 115–117, 119, 135 Royalists, 106, 119, 154; views of, 83, 104, 108; in rebellion, 91, 92, 93, 94 Rumors, 49, 106, 114, 115, 121, 215, 220 Runaways, 12, 96, 184, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203; transatlantic, 200, 201 Rupert, Prince, 33, 35, 106, 120–121 Russell, Conrad, 8 Russia, 159 Rutherford, Samuel, 74 Sabbath: regulation, 61, 128, 132, 133, 136– 137, 150, 152; breaking, 127, 135, 139, 140 St. Augustine (Florida), 180 St. Christopher, 20, 32; economy, 19, 102, 174; political positions in, 28, 33, 47–48, 97, 121; revolt in, 33, 167; relations with center, 47–48, 49, 111–112, 121; assembly, 112; French, 122, 196, 200; religion in, 141; Indians and, 196–197; recruits, 199, 202; fugitive slave agreement in, 200; social structure in, 205; besieged, 210; population debated, 320n3 St. James’s Parish (Barbados), 106 St. Lucia, 173, 196 St. Peter’s Parish (Barbados), 106 Salisbury (England), 126 Saltonstall, Richard, 147 Saltonstall, Rosamond, 56 Saltonstall, Samuel, 56 Sandwich (Plymouth), 149 Sanford, Robert, 166, 219 Santa Cruz, 47–48, 97, 111 Sawcer, Benjamin, 145 Saybrook Fort (Connecticut), 28 Saye and Sele, Lord, William Fiennes, 60 Scituate (Plymouth), 145 Scotland, 7, 9, 162, 187, 209; religion in, 53, 59, 133, 135; supports Charles II, 86–87, 208; witchcraft in, 138

Scots, 6, 19, 106, 129, 207, 221; prejudice toward, 59 Seara (Brazil), 207 Searle, Daniel: as governor, 110, 122, 167, 201; views of, 120, 168, 208, 219 Seekers, 147 Separatism, 45, 55, 56, 134, 149 Sequestration, 50, 98, 104, 107 Sermon, 57, 78, 90, 133, 140. See also Preaching Servants, 115, 127, 178, 184, 186, 209, 220; former, 20–21, 186, 194, 196, 199, 207, 322n127; indentured, 20, 183, 186, 187, 194, 198, 207, 208, 211; resistance among, 36, 37, 47, 107–108, 194, 197, 200–203; female, 186; enticing, 198; fugitive agreements, 200; gentlemen, 208, 209–212 Servants on Horse-Back (Golding), 76 Servitude, as legal penalty, 186, 197, 198, 207 Severn, Battle of the, 82, 152–154 Severn River (Maryland), 82, 153 Shawmut. See Warwick (Rhode Island) Shepard, Samuel, 159 Shepard, Thomas, 58, 69–70 Ships, 50, 88, 105, 106, 118, 121, 153, 159, 209; seized, 32–33, 39, 80, 100, 120, 175–176, 178; wrecked, 111 Short Story, 67 Simplicities Defence (Gorton), 73 Skinner, Quentin, 52 Slave code, 197 Slavery, rhetorical use of, 102, 104, 152, 191–192, 207, 210–212 Slaves: African, 6, 12, 190, 191–192, 193, 225; resistance among, 107, 148, 194–204; Indian, 115, 190, 193, 204; English, 210 Slave trade, 5, 7, 183, 184, 190–193, 220– 221 Social structure, 20–21, 195–196, 205–207. See also specific locations Society of Friends, 154–155. See also Quaker Sodomy, 138 Soldiers, 12, 44, 171, 178, 180, 209, 221– 222. See also Prisoners of war Solemn League and Covenant, 41, 59, 90, 139 Somers Islands. See Bermuda Somers Islands Company, 122, 222; trade and, 19, 101, 114, 171–172, 173; relations with government, 29, 51, 91, 103, 112– 113; purged, 45, 112; religion and, 55, 61, 76–77, 82, 141

Index Southampton (Long Island), 17 South America, 112, 196–197 Southey, Thomas, 108 Spain, 10, 221 Spanish, 109, 111, 129, 163, 195, 210; colonies, 4, 19, 117, 177, 179, 180 Speight’s Town (Barbados), 106 Springfield (Massachusetts), 138, 144, 188 Steele, William, 46 Stephenson, Marmaduke, 146 Steuart, Adam, 72 Stevens, Major, 115 Stirling, earl of, William Alexander, 17 Stoakes, Luke, 111 Stone, William, 82, 93, 118, 152–154 Stuart, Charles, 117. See also Charles II Subject status, 23, 103, 104, 114, 166 Sugar, 7, 9, 59, 162, 187, 198, 209; production, 33, 37, 220, 222 Sumptuary laws, 205 Surinam, 107, 119; relations with center, 112; religion in, 125, 136, 141–142, 150, 223; Indians and, 196, 197; Restoration and, 214, 215, 222 Surrender: of Barbados, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 117; of Virginia, 116, 117, 136, 215 Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (Hooker), 74 Swansea (Plymouth), 219 Sweden, 187 Sybada, Kempo, 6, 175–176 Synods, 73 Taxation, 49, 78, 86, 107, 166 Taylor, Alan, 160 Tenant farming, 315n41 Thanksgiving days, 40, 58, 90, 202, 215 Thorowgood, Thomas, 224 Three Great and Bloody Fights, 210 Thurloe, John, 187 Thurston, Thomas, 148 Tithe strike, 66 Toleration, 11, 66–71; conflict over, 3; in colonies, 11, 54, 76, 82, 93, 124, 127– 128, 223; advocated, 77; in England, 123, 126, 155–156 Tortuga, 199 Trade: restrictions, 50, 114, 159, 172–173; policy developed, 87, 157, 158, 171–172; policy enforced, 100, 120, 167, 176–177, 180–181 Trade, free: sought, 33, 34, 101, 103, 159– 160, 174, 220; enjoyed, 37, 158–159,

341 341

177; promised, 102, 107; denied, 114, 173–174, 221; defined, 172–173 Traditional culture, 109, 140 Transportation, 183, 185, 187, 188–189, 194, 206, 208, 221; of Irish Catholics, 187, 189–190; of political prisoners, 187, 203, 208, 211, 212, 221; of Scots, 188, 189; used to stifle dissent, 188–189, 206, 208–209, 212; flaws in policy of, 207–209; and religious radicals, 221, 223 Treaty: Barbados, 107, 112; Virginia, 116 Trimingham, John, 91, 113 Trinidad, 14, 19, 44, 45, 47, 111 Trinity, doctrine of, 128, 142 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 83 Turner, Thomas, 76, 91 United Colonies of New England, Confederation of, 33, 81, 84, 134, 149, 200 United States, 4–5 Upper Norfolk County (Virginia), 92 Upshall, Nicholas, 148–149 Vagabonds, 149, 188, 200 Vane, Henry, 20, 60, 89, 127–128, 147, 211, 225 Venables, Robert, 141, 178, 180, 201 Venner, Thomas, 225 Vines, Richard, 30 Virginia, 15, 17, 20, 35, 83, 100, 209; House of Burgesses, 18, 116, 142; puritans in, 21, 54, 55, 63, 85; political views in, 29, 34, 45, 115, 117, 119; relations with center, 32, 50, 162, 167, 215; Indians and, 33, 36, 66, 197; trade, 33, 176; religious conformity in, 65–66, 82, 148, 219; royalism of, 92, 102–103, 215; charter, 100, 101; religion in, 141, 150; labor in, 187, 188, 189, 190, 200; social structure, 206; Restoration and, 214, 215 Virginia Company, 16, 65, 92, 100, 116, 134, 187 Wales, 115, 81, 84, 123, 124, 126, 141, 219 Walrond, Edward, 96, 97, 108, 110 Walrond, Humphrey, 94, 96, 97, 108, 110, 215 War: maritime, 30, 32–33, 158–159; of England with Ireland, 86; of England with Scotland, 86–87; of England with Barbados, 104–105, 106. See also AngloDutch War Ward, Nathaniel, 40, 151

342 342

Index

Warner, Thomas, 28, 33, 64, 112, 167, 201, 205 Warwick (Rhode Island), 42, 43, 68–69, 79 Warwick, earl of, Robert Rich, 50, 60, 64, 78, 151; as proprietor, 16, 18, 45, 46–47, 111; and privateering, 24, 199; as Governor-in-Chief, 45, 48, 49, 79, 224; and Somers Islands Company, 61, 103; rejects revolution, 103 Watertown (Massachusetts), 28 Way of the Churches of Christ (Cotton), 73, 74 Weld, Thomas, 58, 67–68 Western Design, 130, 170; participants in, 3, 178, 179–180, 186–187, 201–202; as new policy, 157, 161–162, 177–178, 180–181; demands on colonies, 158, 161, 178–180 Westminster Assembly, 60, 61, 62, 67, 75, 76, 77, 126 Whalley, Edward, 217 Whistler, Henry, 129–130, 205 White, Nathaniel, 60, 76–77 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 132 Willard, George, 28 Williams, Roger, 28, 56, 75, 175; advocates liberty of conscience, 42, 54, 68, 74; relations with center, 43, 175; on religion, 55, 127, 150; and Indians, 80; on persecution, 143, 147, 150 Willoughby, Lady, 98 Willoughby, Mr., 78 Willoughby of Parham, Francis, Lord: as governor of Barbados, 96–99, 101–102,

103, 104–108, 192; views of, 109, 158; defeated, 110, 119; at Restoration, 215, 216, 222 Wilson, John, 147 Wiltshire (England), 116 Windsor (Connecticut), 137 Windsor, Lord, Thomas Hickman Windsor, 223 Winslow, Edward: agent for Massachusetts Bay Colony, 30, 42, 74, 78; publishing of, 74, 80; on religion, 74; on Remonstrants, 77, 78–79; candidate for governor, 99, 136; on trade, 174–175 Winthrop, John, 20, 26, 32; correspondence of, 3–4, 28, 72, 197, 200; views of, 33, 43, 56, 60, 74, 78, 136, 159; Thomas Warner and, 64; death of, 88, 100 Winthrop, John, Jr., 17, 32, 175, 217 Winthrop, Stephen, 88 Witches, 124, 137–138, 150, 294n67 Witter, William, 145 Women, 98, 139, 153, 187; as kidnappers, 209 Worcester, Battle of, 90, 105–106, 116–117, 188, 208 Writs, 118–119, 152, 163, 170, 215, 216 Wyatt, Francis, 66 Yeardley, Francis, 176 York (Maine), 82 Young, Alice, 137