The Island that Disappeared Read online

  In 1637, King Charles had extended his campaign for religious uniformity to Scotland. With typical insensitivity, he tried to impose Archbishop Laud’s new prayer book on the Scottish Church. The Scots had their own brand of Presbyterianism; like the Puritans, they believed in a simple liturgy and an active role for preachers, and had no time for the bishops who governed the Church of England. Laud’s new prayer book sparked riots across Scotland. In February 1638, the king’s opponents came together at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh to sign a covenant urging him to reconsider his insistence on religious orthodoxy. More than a plea to respect the Presbyterian tradition, it signaled the Scottish nobility’s determination to resist royal despotism.

  By the following February, Charles was writing to his lords lieutenant in England to raise troops to fight the Scottish Covenanters. But Charles’s reluctance to defend his fellow Protestants on the Continent, who were still being persecuted in the Netherlands, La Rochelle, and throughout the states of Germany, ensured that his call was not well received. He managed to raise an army of eighteen thousand, which marched to the Scottish Lowlands to meet a far superior Covenanter force. Realizing that he was outnumbered, he had little choice but to sign a peace treaty, which bound him to attend a meeting of the General Assembly of the Kirk and the Scottish Parliament, where it was hoped their differences could be ironed out.

  The so-called Bishops’ War seemed to be at an end. But rather than sit with those who had dared to defy him, Charles reneged on the deal and returned to London in a fury. ‘Thereupon,’ wrote MP Edmund Ludlow, ‘hoping that a Parliament would espouse his quarrel, and furnish him with money for the carrying on of his design, he summoned one to meet at Westminster on the 3rd of April 1640.’11 Against his own wishes and in the face of impending bankruptcy, Charles had brought the eleven years of Personal Rule to an end.

  As soon as the new session opened, Parliament was flooded with petitions from frustrated MPs anxious to address the many grievances that had been bubbling up through local government over the course of the 1630s. Bills were proposed to put an end to Archbishop Laud’s religious innovations and the king’s various illegal tax-raising ventures, and to ensure that he would never again try to govern his kingdom without consulting Parliament. The man who emerged as leader of the Commons was the Providence Island Company’s treasurer, John Pym. According to an MP who was present at his first, two-hour-long speech to the House, Pym ‘left not anything untouched—ship money, forests, knighthoods, recusants, monopolies, the present inclination of our church to popery, and more than my memory can suggest to me.’12

  Ship money was not a legal tax, but a form of usurpation, Pym thundered. The king’s insistence on depriving his people of the fruits of their labor had brought them to ‘the condition of slaves.’ Those taxed without representation ‘will easily grow into a slavish disposition, who having nothing to lose, do commonly show more boldness in disturbing than in defending a kingdom.’13 Although the irony would probably have been lost on him, the same words could have come from the mouth of any of the settlers on Providence.

  Under duress and keen to move on to more pressing business, Charles agreed to stop collecting ship money. It was an unprecedented climb down and a major victory for the country’s property owners, but Pym was not satisfied yet and urged the king to address the members’ other grievances. Charles found such insolence unforgiveable; just three weeks into the session, he dissolved the assembly, bringing the curtain down on what became known as the Short Parliament.

  ‘There could not a greater damp have seized upon the spirits of the whole nation than this dissolution caused,’ lamented the Earl of Clarendon.

  But I was observed, that in the countenances of those who had most opposed all that was desired by His Majesty, there was a marvellous serenity…for they knew enough of what was to come to conclude that the King would shortly be compelled to call another parliament, and they were as sure that so many grave and unbiased men would never be elected again.14

  Looking out over the River Thames from the Palace of Whitehall, Charles must have rued the day he granted a patent to the Providence Island Company. After his dismissal of Parliament in 1629, the company had provided an outlet for the energies of ambitious men no longer able to influence national affairs from Westminster. But in the years of his Personal Rule, it had clearly become a disguise for a rather more dangerous creation: England’s first political party, and the first organized resistance to its government. Among the company’s shareholders were twenty-two members of Parliament, most of whom had played prominent roles in stymieing his plans in the Short Parliament. John Pym was leader of the Commons, Lord Saye was leader of the Lords, and every other opponent of his government seemed to own shares in their company. Charles had even heard it said that they were actively colluding with the Scottish Covenanters to undermine his closest allies and advisers. He had the offices of John Pym, John Hampden, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Saye searched for incriminating evidence. Nothing was found, but still his doubts lingered.

  Had he openly charged the company’s shareholders with treason, they would have denied it, for in spite of their opposition to the king’s government, they considered themselves his most loyal subjects. In 1628, which was the last time they had had a chance to meet Charles in Parliament, they had been at the forefront of the campaign to put his finances on a firmer footing. But their program had been voted down by traditionalist MPs from the shires, who had a vested interest in keeping central government underfunded and ineffectual. Their opposition to Charles’s government had only become implacable in the last two or three years—but implacable it had indeed become, and it was gathering popular support. When John Pym had his speech to the Short Parliament published, his belligerence found favor with all manner of disaffected people, and tensions began to mount on the streets of London. Anti-Catholic mobs attacked bishops in the street and even tried to drag Archbishop Laud from Lambeth Palace.

  Rather than ease the strife between the king and his people, the end of Personal Rule had only brought it into the open. In June 1640, Charles raised his standard and once again commanded England’s nobles to join him in putting down the threat posed by the Scottish Covenanters. The First Bishops’ War had been the most unpopular military campaign in four hundred years, and the Second Bishops’ War was an even greater fiasco. English nobles who might ordinarily have come to Charles’s aid were horrified by his plan to recruit an army of Irish Catholics to invade Scotland. It was a supremely ill-judged move, as it united the discontented rich and the discontented poor of England in a flurry of religiously inspired jingoism. Hostility to Catholicism had been commonplace for years; in seeking to defeat his opponents in Scotland, Charles was seen to be taking the wrong side in his kingdom’s long-running sectarian dispute with Rome. Nobleman and husbandman had other interests in common—their resentment of arbitrary taxation, for example. But their alliance was not a natural one, and it took all of Charles’s incompetence to hold it together until the outbreak of war the following year.

  Military conscription brought poor men from all over England together, and their numbers taught them their strength. Those who didn’t desert became increasingly insubordinate, demanding better pay and insulting their commanding officers with abandon. Yet when the Earl of Warwick went to talk to a regiment of the king’s soldiers, they told him that they had only insulted the officers after they had declined to take communion with them. Perhaps it was at that point that the earl realized the power that radical Protestantism had given to the poor of England. When one soldier toasted him as ‘the king of Essex,’ he had him arrested, but as he made clear to Charles when they next met, if the order had come from a royalist officer, the entire company would have risen in arms against him. In seeking to unite the country around the royal banner, the king had raised an army of gravediggers.

  Charles’s army met the Scottish Covenanters in battle at Newburn and was roundly defeated. By the end of August, the Scots had
taken Newcastle, and he was forced to call an emergency meeting of his leading nobles at York. He agreed to make peace with the Covenanters, return to London, and recall Parliament again. This would be the Long Parliament, and King Charles would not live to see the end of it.

  Not that regicide was on anyone’s mind in 1640. The Providence Island Company’s members certainly planned something like an aristocratic coup d’état and saw Parliament as the vehicle through which to achieve it. With the help of wise, well-placed friends like Sir Gilbert Gerard and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, John Pym had come up with a radical, thoroughgoing program for raising new taxes for the king’s government. Pym would become chancellor of the Exchequer, and the company’s ally, the Duke of Bedford, would become treasurer. In return for their support in Parliament, they hoped that Charles would strike a more aggressive stance in the Caribbean and provide state funding for empire building on a large scale.

  But the Puritan imperialists were just one of two groups opposing the king in the Long Parliament. Both were determined to resist the tyranny of arbitrary power, but while one was imperialist and visionary, the other was localist and entirely negative. The dominant spirit in the Commons came not from the ambitious but responsible opposition of John Pym, but the small-minded, irresponsible opposition of MPs like Sir Robert Phelips and Sir Francis Seymour. Phelips’s outlook, like that of most country MPs, was rooted in distrust of central government. He resented royal interference in local affairs and wanted to keep things the way they were, whatever the state of Charles’s finances and despite the rising costs of government and war.

  When the MPs first took their seats, the king wasted no time in denouncing the Scottish Covenanters for their treachery, and demanding that the House give him the funds needed to quash their rebellion. But MPs saw no good reason to grant Charles the authority to raise new taxes, if he planned to use the money to fund a war on the very people who had secured their assembly. And the Puritan nobles had reasons of their own to oppose the king’s call to arms: because they had no army to call upon, they had struck an agreement with their Scottish counterparts, whereby a Scottish army would be stationed in England until the coup they planned had been realized.

  ‘We must enquire from what fountain these waters of bitterness flowed,’ John Pym said, with no little guile. ‘What persons they were who had so far insinuated themselves into his royal affections, as to be able to pervert his excellent judgement.’15 Pym already knew the answer to his question: Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford, lord lieutenant of Ireland and lord president of the council established in York. For their lordships’ scheme to stand any chance of success, the king’s most effective operator would have to go. When the House was told that the Earl of Stafford had solicited Spanish help in putting down the Scottish revolt, he was impeached on a charge of high treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Bills were drafted to ensure that, in future, any royal adviser would have to meet with the approval of both Houses, and all taxation without the consent of Parliament was declared illegal. Charles had expected trouble from the Long Parliament, but such hostile and organized opposition to his rule was unprecedented.

  The same spirit of revolt could be felt in the streets outside Parliament. Puritan ministers at the head of a huge crowd presented the king’s government with the ‘root and branch petition,’ which demanded the repeal of the reforms Archbishop Laud had foisted upon the Church of England, and quickly attracted fifteen thousand signatories. The following week, Laud too was charged with high treason and taken to the Tower. With the king’s most powerful ministers behind bars, the political and religious authoritarianism that Charles had brandished like a talisman was losing its power to awe. The Puritan elite and England’s God-fearing, hungry, and impatient masses were each becoming aware of the other’s power.

  * * *

  With England locked in a political and constitutional crisis, the shareholders felt hard pressed to attend to the crisis on Providence, for the MPs among them had urgent business to attend to in the House. The Earl of Warwick was also kept busy, either by discussions with the Scottish Covenanters or his ventures in the Somers Isles, Tobago, and Massachusetts. So it was left to John Pym, Lord Saye, and Lord Brooke to pen a letter to the island council. Although ‘the many public occasions now lying upon us in respect of the sitting of Parliament’ had diverted their attention from Providence, they had no intention of giving up on their colony, they assured the councillors.16

  This was not strictly true. In 1637, the Dutch West India Company had offered the shareholders £70,000 (about £6 million in today’s money) for the island, as part of its plans to steal a march on the Spanish in the Caribbean. The Earl of Warwick had been keen to sell, and even raised the matter with King Charles. But with anti-Spanish feeling running high at court, the king had persuaded him to keep the island. He acknowledged that Providence had become ‘a place of charge rather than of benefit’ to the nation, and suggested that the company reconsider their plans. Shortly afterward, John Pym began drawing up his scheme for the colonization of the Miskito Coast. At the end of 1639, the Dutch West India Company renewed its offer and even upped it to 600,000 pieces of eight. By then, Charles could see what a nest of vipers the Providence Island Company had become, and was more than amenable to the sale. The Earl of Warwick asked his agent in Amsterdam to probe the offer further, but he was unable ‘to bring the proposition to a reasonable issue.’17

  In all likelihood, no offer would have persuaded the remaining shareholders to part with their island. Things clearly could not continue as they were, but whether as a refuge for godly migrants, base for the evangelization of the Miskito Indians, or fortress to protect a future English colony in Central America, Providence remained of vital importance to England’s imperial mission.

  As ever, much would depend on the fate of the other Puritan colony. Ties between Providence and Massachusetts had grown close over the course of the 1630s. Much of the cotton and tobacco and many of the slaves shipped from Providence were sold in Boston, and the town had become an entrepôt for the dispatch of hides, tallow, and sarsaparilla to England. Following the company’s move into privateering in 1636, merchants on both sides of the Atlantic had been making good money from the trade in stolen Spanish ships, cargoes, and slaves.

  After 1637, however, trade had slowed to a trickle, as the New England economy first slowed and then lurched into a full-blown recession. Migration to Massachusetts fell dramatically, and many of its settlers sold up and went looking for a more promising location for their divinely inspired efforts. Thomas Gorges, the young Puritan governor of Maine, visited Boston in 1641 and found the place ‘in a distracted condition, men unresolved in their minds what to do, some for the West Indies, some for Long Island, and some for old England.’

  Lord Saye interpreted the downturn in the colony’s fortunes as a sign that God had withdrawn His favor. He exchanged a series of angry letters with John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, in which each claimed his colony to be the divinely sanctioned refuge for followers of the true religion. According to Lord Saye, the recession in New England was proof that ‘God appointed Massachusetts only for a temporary abiding place, and did not mean His people to settle there forever.’ Winthrop retorted that his lordship was only trying to ‘enthrall’ the New Englanders ‘to advance other men’s posterity.’ It was an argument neither side was prepared to lose, with each man accusing the other of willfully misinterpreting the Bible to justify their claims. In his last letter to Winthrop, Lord Saye signed off by expressing his hope that the New Englanders would ‘carry themselves moderately, be content with their own freedom and leave others to theirs.’18

  In March 1641, the Providence Island Company named John Humphrey as the island’s new governor. Captain Humphrey was an excellent choice; he had been one of the original organizers of the Massachusetts Bay Company and had risen to become sergeant major general, the most senior military post in the colony. He was well liked and highly influe
ntial, and the company hoped that their appointment of so prominent a Puritan would encourage colonists ‘of the middling sort’ to journey south from New England. Once sufficient numbers of them were settled on Providence, they too could move to the mighty English colony that the company planned to build in Central America. In his letter notifying Captain Humphrey of his appointment, Lord Saye flattered him that governorship of Providence was ‘below his merit’ and encouraged him to pursue any designs he might make on the Miskito Coast.19 Humphrey returned the compliment, saying that his lordship clearly had ‘the deep dye of Christ’s blood’ on him.

  John Humphrey had always had his doubts about the long-term viability of the colony in Massachusetts, and already had two hundred good Christians willing and able to accompany him to Providence, with the prospect of many more to follow. His recruitment drive provoked bitter arguments; while many New Englanders were ready to believe that the soil and climate of Central America were better than those of Massachusetts, moving to their lordships’ island would mean a return to tenant farming and government from London. News of how the soldiers and sailors on the island council had combined to stymie the Old Councillors’ efforts had been quick to spread. They also knew about the bad-tempered letters that Lord Saye had exchanged with the governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, and many of them had only harsh words for those who decided to journey south with John Humphrey. ‘They wanted a warmer country, and every northwest wind that blew, they crept into some odd chimney-corner or other to discourse of the diversity of climates in the southern parts,’ said one weather-beaten New Englander.20

  The shareholders were incredulous that anyone would choose to own a piece of cold, rocky New England when they could rent land on balmy, fertile Providence. But Humphrey advised them not to put ‘clogs or burdens’ on the New Englanders ‘any more than they have here been acquainted with, either in civil or ecclesiastical matters.’21 The newcomers were not to be fobbed off with idle promises; they wanted land of their own, as well as a voice in how the colony was run. Desperate to find new blood among the impoverished but godly farmers of Massachusetts, the company relented. Over the past ten years, the shareholders had made several modifications to the island’s constitution: their tenants no longer had to hand over half of their produce in rent, and by 1638, they could lease land for just twenty pounds of tobacco a year. Now the shareholders went a step further, offering migrants the chance to become freehold landowners, with a say in drafting laws. They even agreed to disband the council of war and give more power to the Old Councillors.