The Island that Disappeared Read online

  In February 1642, Charles put Queen Henrietta Maria and their three children on a boat to Holland with the crown jewels. She was sure to find sympathy from monarchs on the Continent, he told her; she should pawn the jewels and use the money to raise an invasion force. But with the navy now at the command of the Earl of Warwick, there was little hope that any troops the queen mustered would make it across the Channel. Although king and Parliament continued to affect friendship and express hopes for an amicable end to their disagreements, each side was now racing to gain control of the armed forces. In March, Parliament issued the Militia Ordinance, which provided for the raising of forces ‘for the safety of his Majesty’s person’ against ‘the bloody councils of papists and other ill-affected persons.’1 Naturally, Charles refused to sign the bill, so Parliament reissued it as a legally enforceable ordinance without royal assent.

  Charles retaliated by issuing the Commission of Array, commanding the country’s lords lieutenant to raise troops, and forbidding his subjects from taking any part in Parliament’s ‘mischievous designs and intentions against the peace of this, our kingdom.’2 As far as the Royalists were concerned, the source of those ‘mischievous designs’ was the Puritans in Parliament. As the tension mounted, staunch opposition turned to outright abuse, and Puritan became a catchall term for anyone who dared to question the king’s authority. Colonel Hutchinson came from a distinguished Puritan family that fought for Parliament during the Civil War. ‘If any, out of mere morality and civil honesty, discountenanced the abominations of those days, he was a Puritan, however he conformed to their superstitious worship,’ he wrote in his memoirs.

  If any showed favour to any godly honest person, kept them company, relieved them in want, or protected them against violent, unjust oppression, he was a puritan. If any gentleman in the country maintained the good laws of the land, or stood up for any public interest, for good order or government, he was a puritan.3

  With king and Parliament making competing demands on the people’s loyalty, neutrality was no longer an option. Families, villages, and entire towns were divided, pulled in one direction by their commitment to the ‘true religion,’ another by their loyalty to the king, and still another by their ties to local nobles and landowners. But the fault lines were far from clear, and they shifted over the course of the war to come.

  On 22 August 1642, Charles declared war on Parliament. The first engagement between the two sides—and the first battle between Englishmen since the War of the Roses—came on the road between Banbury and Kineton, at a dramatic escarpment known as Edgehill. Among the regiments that rallied to the cause of Parliament was Lord Saye’s; all four of his sons enlisted, and the Banbury men who served under them wore uniforms dyed blue with woad grown on his estate. A lifelong opponent of arbitrary government, Lord Saye was destined to play a leading role in the Civil War. According to the Earl of Clarendon, he was ‘the pilot that steered all those vessels that were freighted with sedition to destroy the government.’4 His lordship had mixed motives for going to war: aside from his commitment to Parliament’s right to hold the monarch to account, he had spent as much as £25,000 on his colony, most of which he lost with the Spanish invasion. As a Parliamentary commissioner of the treasury during the war, large sums of money passed through his hands, and since he kept only primitive accounts, he may well have profited substantially.

  The other shareholders also played leading parts in the war with King Charles. Lord Brooke commanded the armies of Warwickshire and Staffordshire (and paid for his soldiers’ upkeep out of his own pocket). Sir Thomas Barrington served under Lord Mandeville, now Earl of Manchester, another prominent shareholder, who headed the armies of the Eastern Association. The company’s secretary William Jessop became secretary to the Admiralty commissioners, and the MP Gilbert Gerard was paymaster to the Parliamentary armies.

  The English Civil War raged for most of the 1640s. Although the fighting was interrupted by cease-fires and negotiations, neither side entered into them confident of securing the concessions they demanded, and they soon returned to the fray. Armies tens of thousands strong fought pitched battles from Lostwithiel in Cornwall to Inverlochy in the Highlands. When Charles’s English reserves flagged, Scottish and Irish soldiers were drafted to bolster them. As the fighting rolled through one year and into another, the death toll rose, and the pillaging of towns and destruction of houses and farms dragged the country into ever-deeper poverty. Yet the cries of the avengers rang louder than the groans of the war-weary. The days of gentle persuasion were long gone: now terror was deployed from street to street, as each side tried to frighten away local support for the other.

  The man who emerged from the ranks of the Parliamentary armies to drag its leaders to victory was Oliver Cromwell. At the start of the war, Cromwell had served under Lord Mandeville, Earl of Manchester, as leader of the cavalry regiment known as the Ironsides. He proved himself an obedient, loyal, and determined officer, and was rapidly promoted. When it came his turn to select the men who would fight at his side, he showed himself a believer in meritocracy, as well as a devout Puritan. Prior to the outbreak of war, the Puritans had pushed aside their less resolute allies in Parliament. Now they did the same on the battlefield.

  The turning point came in 1644, as the high command of the Parliamentary armies was mulling the consequences of the inconclusive Battle of Newbury. The king’s forces had been driven back toward Bath, but the battle was not the emphatic victory that it should have been. MP Sir Arthur Haselrig urged Lord Mandeville to give chase to the enemy, but the earl was content to watch them retreat. His lordship had grown war-weary and turned on Sir Arthur, saying, ‘You are a bloody fellow! God send us peace, for God does never prosper us in our victories to make them clear victories.’5

  Cromwell saw that the war would never be won as long as the armies for Parliament were led by ambivalent commanders desperate to find a compromise peace and anxious not to promote poor men to positions of authority. In an unsparing internal enquiry, he accused Lord Mandeville of laziness, incompetence, and, most damning of all, a fear of victory. Cromwell orchestrated his lordship’s demotion and became leader of the Eastern Association in his stead. This was the first step in a thorough reorganization of the army that saw aristocratic commanders like the Earls of Manchester, Essex, and Bedford replaced by men with proven leadership ability.

  For Cromwell, that meant his most God-fearing soldiers. ‘Truly, I think that those who pray best will fight best,’ he once said. Plenty of the men who rose through the ranks under Cromwell’s leadership were ‘poor and of mean parentage, such as have filled dung carts, both before they were captains and since.’6 But even the aristocrats had to admit that Cromwell’s New Model Army was possessed of a remarkable self-confidence. Lord Mandeville observed the serenity that came with their certainty of victory and the evangelism that bound them to their leader. ‘If you look upon his own regiment of horse, see what a swarm there is of those that call themselves the godly. Some of them profess that they have seen visions and had revelations.’7

  The visionary power of the convinced Puritan stemmed from his belief in divine providence. In the years leading up to the outbreak of war, Puritan congregations had been told that God was intervening in the affairs of England on a scale not seen ‘since the first day of the creation of the world.’8 God had delivered his followers from Laudian persecution; now He blessed them with a series of spectacular, even miraculous, victories on the battlefield.

  Cromwell had a devout faith in God, but he was not a clairvoyant, and when it came time to consider the political reforms the country needed, he was an arch-pragmatist. In his memoirs, the Parliamentary commander Edmund Ludlow recalled that in 1648, Cromwell’s high command ‘would not declare themselves either for a monarchical, aristocratical or democratical government, maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, as providence should direct us.’ It was a peculiar combination of activity and passivity, but one typical
of the Puritan frame of mind. After sweeping across the country in 1647, the New Model Army marched on London to put a wholly new set of demands to the king. The Heads of Proposals demanded extensive reforms, including the widening of the franchise, decentralization of power to the regions, full accountability of government ministers to Parliament, and complete religious toleration for the country’s nonconformists.

  The story of the democratic forces stirred by the Diggers and the Levellers, mobilized by the New Model Army, debated at Putney, and put down as part of the postwar settlement is a fascinating one, but this is not the place to tell it. Suffice to say, Cromwell’s role changed following the Parliamentary armies’ victory over the king’s forces. In raising an army capable of defeating the king, Parliament had conjured a genie: the devout religiosity of the majority of English people. For many radical Protestants, the beauty of the true religion lay in its indifference to property, rank, and social status, and this had profound implications for the government of England. Concurrent with the recession, the rise of the Puritans’ culture of discipline and the drift to war, growing numbers of poor people had been politicized. Radical preachers and pamphleteers were disseminating novel ideas about power and politics, and unprecedented numbers of people were stirred by their message. But the widening of the franchise was a demand that few property owners could consent to, Cromwell included. He assured the Parliamentary leaders that he considered his victory to be God’s, not the people’s, and set about returning the genie to its bottle. In so doing, he earned a measure of gratitude from England’s property owners but betrayed ‘the poor and mean of this kingdom, who had been the means of its preservation.’9

  But before the soldiers of the Parliamentary armies would consent to return to civilian life, they demanded their pound of flesh. Among the proposals to emerge from the Putney Debates was the Army Remonstrance of 1648, which called for the trial of King Charles on a charge of high treason. In January 1649, elections were held to return a new Parliament, and the Puritans emerged as far and away the most powerful element. Parliament decreed itself the supreme authority in the country and appointed a lowly provincial judge, John Bradshaw, to become president of the High Court of Justice that was hastily assembled to try the king. ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it,’10 Cromwell said to a Royalist who questioned the court’s legitimacy. Fittingly, the man chosen to bear the sword of state of the High Court was John Humphrey, the last governor of Providence. Days later, John Bradshaw condemned Charles to become the first king of England to be sentenced to death by execution.

  On the morning of 30 January 1649, Charles was led to the scaffold that had been mounted in front of Whitehall Gate. Philip Henry, an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, was in the crowd that gathered to watch the king’s last moments. ‘I stood and saw what was done, but was not so near as to hear anything,’ he later wrote. ‘[But] the blow I saw given, and can truly say, with a sad heart…there was such a groan by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’11

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  Had he been governor of any other colonial settlement in the Americas, Gerónimo de Ojeda would have had a team of stonemasons, carpenters, and laborers ready to build a town in the Spanish style, with streets laid out on a grid around a modest church. But the governor of Santa Catalina de Providencia had neither the skilled craftsmen nor the materials needed, so his soldiers had to be content with squatting the abandoned buildings of New Westminster. So began the only period of occupation by Spanish speakers in the island’s history. Not that their dominion was complete, for they had heard about the community of runaway slaves living at Palmetto Grove from their English prisoners. Rather than flush them out, Ojeda warned his men not to wander the high hills alone.

  Life on the island soon began to grate. The Spanish soldiers bickered with their Portuguese counterparts, who wanted to go home, and both sides complained of being abandoned by their superiors in Cartagena. During the winter of 1643, the island’s Portuguese surgeon emerged as the leader of a plot to kill Gerónimo de Ojeda and join the foreign pirates living on the Miskito Coast. The governor got wind of the conspiracy just in time to avert a mutiny, and had the surgeon and seven other ringleaders shot. A further eleven Portuguese were condemned to six years in the galleys at Cádiz, but they escaped punishment when the ship transporting them to Spain was hit by a storm that sent all hands to the bottom of the Atlantic.

  The English migrants to Providence might have balked at building forts and roads, but their Spanish counterparts, whether noble hidalgo or common peón, regarded all forms of manual labor as beneath them and left the business of sowing, cultivating, and harvesting to the fifteen Africans that General Díaz Pimienta had left behind. But fifteen slaves were incapable of supplying food sufficient to feed an entire garrison, so Ojeda told his men that they would have to work the land or starve. The slaves showed the younger conscripts how to tend corn, beans, and yucca, and where to find the deer and wild pigeons that lived in the woods, while the older soldiers learned the rudiments of animal husbandry.

  For the Africans, the Spanish regime was less onerous than the English, and in time, they even reached some accommodation with their new masters. In the evenings, they gathered around the fire pit to smoke a little tobacco together. The absence of women afflicted them with loneliness no less than it had the English, but few ships visited, for the soldiers had nothing to sell and no money to buy the new clothes and strong liquor they dreamed of, let alone prostitutes.

  Once a year, Governor Ojeda sent a letter to his superiors in Madrid. He began his dispatch with a reminder that he had been a loyal officer of the Armada Real for over twenty-five years, had fought in many battles and sustained several injuries. Then he described conditions on the island and listed the supplies his men needed, most important of which were women, ‘to avoid the great damage that can otherwise result.’ His letter traveled with the supply ship that, in theory at least, visited Santa Catalina once a year. If he were lucky, he would receive a reply two years later.

  One year, he received a letter from the governor of Cartagena, who informed him that he was mooting the idea of dispatching some ‘unattached or licentious ladies…so that the soldiers will carry out their duties with greater pleasure.’12 But nothing came of the governor’s proposal. As for Ojeda’s request that new recruits be sent out to relieve the garrison, he admitted that nobody in the city could be persuaded to live on the island, ‘except by force.’13 Ojeda rarely received the provisions he had asked for, and all he got in the way of reinforcements was the occasional stowaway from the galleons, rebellious slave, or criminal, who was invariably ‘condemned to serve on the island without hope of leaving, even after completing his term.’14

  The little garrison on Santa Catalina was practically forgotten in Madrid. The Consejo de Indias only kept it going to defend the island from the English—although, as one official admitted, the only reason the pirates had not taken it back was that they had not tried. Although none of them dared say as much, officials in Cartagena believed the king would be better off dismantling the forts and sending the garrison somewhere it could be put to better use. Yet in spite of his superiors’ indifference, Ojeda continued to send them regular requests for new recruits, fresh supplies, and female company. After receiving his letter of 1646, an official at the Consejo de Indias noted in the margin that it was ‘word for word the same as his letter of ’44.’

  Gradually, the soldiers grew resigned to their isolation. Some of them even came to see the advantages of island life, for while Madrid and Lisbon labored under the continual threat of plague, and the denizens of Cartagena suffered regular outbreaks of smallpox and dysentery, no epidemic ever reached Santa Catalina. Resignation soon turned to apathy. When the chief of the guardacostas (the Spanish coastguard) visited the island from Cartagena in 1648, he was shocked by the neglect into which Fort Warwick had been allowed to sink. The garrison had built their
principal redoubt, El Castillo Santa Teresa, next to the English fort, but the chief of the guardacostas was not impressed. ‘The fortifications on the island are of such little importance that they can be considered non-existent,’ he reported. The so-called castle was ‘little more than the summit of a hill,’ and its weapons and munitions were deficient in both quantity and quality.15

  By 1660, many of the veterans of 1641 had died of old age, leaving just a hundred men still able to bear arms. In a letter to the king, Governor Ojeda lamented that such was their misery that many of them were deserting the island, ‘risking their lives to cross 60 leagues of water on little more than a log.’ Even those that reached the Miskito Coast ‘ended up more dead than alive,’ he wrote, and most were ‘lucky enough not to be eaten by Indians.’16

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  Being at war with their king, the chief financiers of England’s fledgling empire were in no position to mount an expedition to wrest back control of Providence. But in July 1641, just two months after Andrew Carter and the other settlers were taken to Cartagena, the Earl of Warwick had given Capt. William Jackson command of the three-hundred-fifty-ton Charles and a fleet of five smaller vessels, and told him to avenge the Spanish invasion. Jackson, a man ‘stern almost to the point of cruelty and not overburdened with scruples,’ had been a frequent visitor to Providence before its capture. He set sail on what would become a groundbreaking, three-year voyage.