Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (34 page)

Yet in spite of a casualness in the disposal of territory that seems to belie its own perceived best interests, the crown under the later Stuarts was moving, however erratically, towards increased intervention in American affairs, prompted partly by considerations of profit and power, and partly in response to pressures from within the colonies themselves. In an age of system-building, whether in intellectual life or in politics, the creation of a rational and orderly imperial system seemed to offer the best hope of securing maximum benefits from the growing prosperity of the colonies. The France of Louis XIV provided an obvious model as it moved to consolidate and extend its presence in America. But it would be surprising if some at least of Charles II's ministers and officials were not also influenced in their formulation of the new system by the Spanish model, designed to integrate America into a tight imperial framework and to regulate colonial trade to the benefit of the metropolis. In the Council for Trade and Plantations of 1660, and its various successor bodies, culminating in the Board of Trade in 1696, can be seen an embryonic Council of the Indies; in the Navigation Acts and the attempts to enforce them, a Spanish-style monopoly of the transatlantic trade; and in the proposals for a Dominion of New England, which would take shape under James II, the first stage of an ambitious programme for the consolidation of the American colonies into three or four viceroyalties on the Spanish model.121

Under the new programme that was being slowly forged in London, the New World settlers, who for so long had been left to their own devices, would, for the first time in their collective experience, be brought face to face with the intrusive state. That collective experience, however, in some instances already reached back three generations, and this made the assertion of the royal prerogative in America by the later Stuarts a very different proposition from its assertion by the Spanish crown over the conquistadores and first settlers of Mexico and Peru. The Earl of Sandwich, himself recently returned from an extended embassy in Spain, recognized as much in his `Comments upon New England' of 1671: `They are at present a numerous and thriving people and in twenty years are more likely (if civil wars or other accidents prevent them not) to be mighty rich and powerful and not at all careful of their dependence upon old England.' For this reason he took `the way of roughness and peremptory orders, with force to back them, to be utterly unadvisable. For they are already too strong to be compelled ... And though I apprehend them yet not at that point to cast us off voluntarily and of choice: yet I believe if we use severity towards them in their Government civil or religious, that they will (being made desperate) set up for themselves and reject us.'129

`They are already too strong to be compelled.' The verdict was perhaps too gloomy. Changing conditions in New England in the 1670s and 1680s - King Philip's War, the threat from the French in Canada, the increasingly complex ties between Massachusetts merchants and the British commercial system - were to make the New England colonists more amenable to the imperial authority in the last years of the century than at the time when Sandwich delivered himself of his `Comments'.13o Yet the instinct to resist was strong, and this was true even of the new colony of Jamaica, which started its life under the British crown with a military government, and - as a conquered island on the model of Ireland - offered unique opportunities for the assertion of the royal prerogative. Already in 1660, with half of the island's British population consisting of settlers from the older colonies, the governor, Colonel D'Oyley, had to promise that taxes would be levied only by their representatives.13' Jamaica's assembly was soon flexing its muscles, and at the end of the 1670s it successfully fought off attempts by the Privy Council to introduce Poyning's Law, a measure originally devised for Ireland and requiring the prior consent of the council to the passage of local legislation. `It was', argued the Speaker, Captain Samuel Long, `against law and justice to alter the constitution Jamaica had so long lived under. 1112 `So long' amounted to some sixteen years of English rule, the earliest of them under military government. English liberties, it seemed, had rapidly taken root in fertile Caribbean soil.

So-called `garrison government' by army officers might, if systematically pursued as a policy objective, have laid the foundations of a more autocratic system of imperial rule in British America.133 This would have brought it more into line with French Canada than with Spanish America, where - outside Chile and the frontier regions - there was little military presence at any level before the eighteenth century. But it is easier to see in the appointment of military men to colonial governorships a form of outdoor relief for the superannuated and unemployed than a carefully thought-out design to impose royal power on the colonies, although professional soldiers certainly had their uses when colonists proved obdurate. The despatch of a thousand-strong expeditionary force from England to crush Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, for example, gave the crown the opportunity to curb the powers of the Virginia assembly, remodel the colony's system of government, and secure a grant of a perpetual duty on tobacco exports which yielded a substantial permanent revenue. 114 Yet if the crown was thinking in terms of continuing garrison government, it did not achieve its aims. In 1682, with their pay badly in arrears, the troops had to be disbanded.13'

Government ministers and officials in the London of Charles II, however, were itching to get their hands on a greater share of American revenues, and were busily hatching schemes to secure a greater degree of royal authority over the crown's wayward transatlantic possessions. Sent out on a fact-finding mission to the colonies in 1676 by the newly established Privy Council committee, known as the Lords of Trade, Edward Randoph, who was to have an important career as a royal official in America, was horrified by the lack of respect shown to the crown in Massachusetts, and looked forward to the day when `it shall please his Majesty fully to resolve upon the reducing this Plantation to their due Obedience'.136 This day looked like dawning exactly ten years later, when Sir Edmund Andros, a military man and a former governor of New York for James, Duke of York, arrived in Boston as the first royal governor of the newly created Dominion of New England. 117

The decision to consolidate the New England colonies into a single dominion under a royal governor was an attempt by the authorities in London to resolve through a dramatic intervention in colonial life the various problems that had exercised them since the Restoration.13' The traditional lack of respect for the crown in Massachusetts; the perennial shortfall in the royal revenues; the desire to impose closer control over the increasingly lucrative transatlantic trade; the growing costs of colonial defence at a time of war with France - all these suggested the desirability of introducing some uniformity into the existing patchwork of colonial government, and of grouping the New England colonies together into a union under a single governor. Randolph's activities in the colonies in the early 1680s suggested that there were significant groups in colonial society, like the moderate Puritans and Anglican merchants, who would welcome reform and would be ready to co-operate with the royal authorities to bring it about.139 If Andros played his cards well, he could capitalize on these divisions to strengthen royal influence through a centralized form of government, and similar policies might in due course be extended to the Middle Colonies and those of the South.

Yet the dangers were obvious, and had already been foreshadowed in the proprietary colony of New York, where the Duke of York had replaced Andros as governor by an Irish Catholic, Colonel Thomas Dongan, a former lieutenantgovernor of Tangier. In conceding the New Yorkers an assembly, the duke tied the concession to a grant large enough to pay off the public debts and provide sufficient revenue to support the government and the garrison in perpetuity. When writs for the assembly were sent out in September 1683, Easthampton was one of the towns to instruct its representatives to stand up for the maintenance of `our privileges and English liberties'. Drawing for its inspiration on Magna Carta and the 1628 Petition of Right, the assembly proceeded to draw up a `Charter of Libertyes and Privileges', designed to establish the colony's government on a firm contractual basis. The charter was rejected by the Duke of York, and in October 1684, in what looked like the beginnings of a systematic assault by the crown on colonial charters along the lines of its assault on chartered corporations in England, the charter of Massachusetts was revoked.140

The accession of the Duke of York to the English throne in 1685 inevitably heightened the fears of the colonies that a Catholic conspiracy was afoot for the imposition of arbitrary rule in America. The instructions given Governor Andros by James II in 1686 for the establishment of the Dominion of New England included the introduction of major changes in the system of land tenure, the establishment of religious liberty, which could only be seen as a devious attempt to promote popery, and the abolition of representative assemblies. It was already too late for this. New revenue-raising attempts quickly ran into resistance, as in Essex County, where the town government of Ipswich voted that `it did abridge them of their liberty as Englishmen'.14'

New Englanders would not have found much cause for comfort in the response of judge Joseph Dudley to one of the Essex County defendants: `They must not think the privileges of Englishmen would follow them to the end of the world. 142 The colonists, however, were well aware of the growing resistance to the government of James II in the mother country. In defying judge Dudley and asserting their claims to equality of status with their English brothers and sisters, they transformed the English struggle for the preservation of English religion and English liberties into a common Atlantic cause. When news reached America of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 they were ready for action. Revolution in Britain was followed by upheavals in the colonies - most notably in Massachusetts, New York and Maryland - and the overthrow of the hated Andros, whose arrogant, arbitrary and secretive character had alienated even his natural supporters. The experiment of centralized government in a Dominion of New England had come to a humiliating end.143

The Stuart invasion of colonial liberties ended in failure, partly because the imperial policies pursued by the crown were inconsistent and erratically pursued, but also because of deep divisions within British political culture of the seventeenth century. The Civil War had exposed the fissures in English politics and society, and these fissures, although papered over, persisted after the restoration of the monarchy. The Lords of Trade, for instance, were divided between those who favoured a forceful assertion of royal prerogative and supported the Anglican establishment, and those who were inclined by conviction and tradition to support a strong parliament and to side with the dissenters.144 Such political and religious divisions militated against the formulation and pursuit of a coherent policy designed to enhance royal control over the colonies, and gave the representative bodies already well entrenched in America room to manoeuvre when they felt themselves threatened by the power of the crown.

Where the Council of the Indies in Madrid, for all its factional divisions, was united in its determination to uphold the royal authority, some ministers and officials in London spoke the language of the prerogative while others spoke the language of liberty and consent. These divisions ultimately made it impossible for the later Stuarts to realize, by means of Whitehall's proposed system of Dominion government, Charles I's original ambition of introducing `one uniforme Course of government' in the American plantations. The Revolution of 1688 decisively reaffirmed the primacy of the principle of representation on both sides of the English Atlantic. It also ensured the definitive acceptance, however reluctant, of religious pluralism as a necessary component of the political and social ordering of the British Atlantic community. For that community after 1688 there could be no turning back.

Family and hierarchy were the twin pillars supporting the social structure of Early Modern Europe. The ordered family, under the control of the head of the household, patterned the state in microcosm, just as the state, under royal government, was a microcosm of the divinely ordered universe subservient to its Maker. Some in this universe were born to rule and others to obey; or, as John Winthrop expressed it in his famous sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity, said to have been preached on board the Arbella, but more probably in Southampton before the ship's departure: `in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection." The doctrine of degree, transplanted to Spanish America and more recently to the English dominion of Virginia, now crossed the north Atlantic again, this time in the Arbella to Puritan New England.

Yet the New Englanders would find, as Spanish Americans and Virginians had found before them, that old European certainties and new American realities did not necessarily coincide. During the Peruvian civil wars, Hernando Pizarro, in a rousing speech to his infantry soldiers before they engaged in battle with the army of his rival, Diego de Almagro, told them that he understood, `they were saying among themselves that soldiers without horses counted for little when it came to the distribution of land; but he gave them his word that no such thought had ever crossed his mind, because good soldiers are not to be judged by their horses, but by the valour of their persons. Therefore whoever showed himself brave would be rewarded in conformity with his service; for not to possess horses was a matter of fortune, and no disparagement of their persons.'

The extent to which such words represented a dangerous subversion of traditional notions of the proper ordering of society is suggested by a passage in a sermon preached by a New England minister, William Hubbard, in 1676: `It is not then the result of time or chance, that some are mounted on horse-back, while others are left to travel on foot. That some have with the Centurion, power to command, while others are required to obey.'3 God's design was clear, and was spelled out by an early viceroy of Peru when he wrote that, `in conformity with other republics it is necessary that there should be persons of different quality, condition and estate, and that not all should be equal, just as for the good government of the human body not all members are equal.'4 Yet could this grand design be as successfully sustained in the New World as in the Old? Hernando Pizarro's words gave an early warning of the difficulties.