The Island that Disappeared Read online

  Governor Bell read the company’s response with no little concern. He and the other former Somers Islanders were the only members of the advance party with any experience of raising tropical crops. They had planted tobacco confident that it would fetch a good price in the markets of London; the measly return they could now expect forced them to confront their no less measly understanding of the island’s soil and climate.

  *1The Somers Isles are today known as Bermuda. The first settlement was established in 1609, but only lasted for ten months. The isles were resettled in 1612, and the Somers Isles Company was founded in 1615. The saga of the Sea Venture, which was shipwrecked on the Somers Isles while en route to Virginia in 1609, supplied William Shakespeare with the idea for The Tempest.

  *2The number of shareholders reached thirty-four by the mid-1630s.

  *3These days, ‘Catalina’ is used to refer to the small island off the northern tip of Providencia, although some English speakers still call it ‘Ketleena.’

  [2]

  Educating Essex

  AT THE COMPANY’S FOUNDATION, EACH of its shareholders had agreed to ‘harken out’ for the one hundred upstanding men and boys who would make up the first party of settlers on Providence. They would have to have farming, craft, and carpentry skills, for most of the island had yet to be cleared or planted. They were also expected to be God-fearing, for the colony would flourish only with His blessing, and sinful behavior was sure to invite His wrath. The following description of a seventeenth-century manor in Buckinghamshire gives some idea of the hardworking, plain-living ideal that the company wanted to replicate on Providence.

  The household represented all that was best in the puritan way of life. The inhabitants brewed and baked, they churned and ground their meal, they bred up, fed and slew their beeves and sheep, and brought up their pigeons and poultry at their own doors. Their horses were shod at home, their planks were sawn, [and] their rough ironwork was forged and mended.1

  The ideal manor was one in which everyone knew his place. It was also practically self-sufficient, which ensured that members of the household had few distractions, and few sources of temptation.

  John Pym returned to his Tavistock constituency to put the word out in the villages of south Devon, while Lord Brooke went recruiting among his tenants in Warwickshire and Staffordshire, and Lord Saye and Sele did the same in north Oxfordshire. Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, assisted by his cousin Sir Nathaniel Rich and his neighbor Sir Thomas Barrington, went looking for settlers in their home county of Essex. In a county dominated by a handful of wealthy families, none was wealthier than Robert Rich, who was said to be worth £15,000 a year (equivalent to £1.3 million in today’s money). His grandfather Richard Rich had been one of Henry VIII’s most rapacious servants. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the king had given him swaths of land in the county. Robert’s father, also called Robert, had invested the money he made from his tenants in a fleet of ships, and went on to become one of England’s leading privateers.

  For a religious man like Robert Rich, Sr., robbing Spanish ships was more than a way of making money; it was his duty as a good Christian. King James I, who was no Puritan, disagreed. He never believed that the king of Spain was an agent of the Whore of Babylon mentioned in the Bible, or that the Pope was the Antichrist, and thought the best way to pacify the Christian world was by making peace with Spain. But the Spanish king showed little interest in signing a peace treaty, and in the face of his indifference, James found the money to be made from privateering too tempting to resist. Not only did he grant Robert Rich letters of marque authorizing him to attack the Spanish king’s ships, he happily accepted the £10,000 (£960,000 in today’s money) that Rich offered him for the earldom.

  When Robert Rich died in 1618, his title passed to Robert the younger, who became the biggest landowner in one of England’s most prosperous counties. The young earl’s steward recalled that while young Henry Rich chose to pursue a career at the court of King Charles, his brother Robert had always been more concerned with ‘planting colonies in the New World, than himself in the king’s favour.’2 Robert was wealthy, but he was also devout, and his faith gave him an unwavering sense of purpose. After graduating from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which had been established as a training college for Puritan preachers in 1584, he went on to sponsor the careers of some of England’s most uncompromising preachers, who believed that their faith impelled them to do all they could to undermine Catholic Spain. The young earl was also very much a man of action: in 1627, he had sailed for the Azores, where he planned to capture the Spanish treasure fleet as it made its way back to Cádiz. Although he failed to take the galleons, he was said to have been ‘as active and as open to danger as any man there,’ and could ‘as nimbly climb up to top and yard as any common mariner in the ship.’3

  Riding northeast from London to his family seat at Leez Priory near Felsted, the earl and his companions found the roads in a parlous state. Much of Essex was still marshland, and the cottagers who lived on its fringes were often laid low with ague—malaria—carried by the mosquitoes that thrived on the stagnant water.4 The cottagers’ hovels seemed more overcrowded than ever, and they passed many hungry wanderers. As far as the county’s property owners were concerned, cottagers were synonymous with the ‘rascality,’ whose viciousness only seemed to increase in proportion to their rising numbers. So widespread was poaching from the earl’s game reserves that sausages made from poached Essex venison were a well-known delicacy on the streets of east London.

  Husbandmen and cottagers had few opportunities to rise up through the ranks of Essex society, but rising prosperity kept most of them reasonably content. At the turn of the seventeenth century, half the population ate meat daily, the rest ate it at least twice a week, and until the recession hit in the late 1620s, even the earl’s oldest tenants could remember only rising prosperity.

  The recession could not have come at a worse time. The last fifty years had seen rapid population growth in England. It was also a time of land hunger, for many landlords were keen to move into sheep farming, which meant planting hedges and building fences to create enclosures in which their sheep could graze. As land that had once been planted with wheat and barley was given over to sheep, the common land that cottagers depended on became the target of land grabs by unscrupulous landowners.

  It was a time when ‘sheep ate men.’ Many husbandmen were no longer able to raise food crops for themselves and had to find work on neighboring manors. For many of them, it was their first taste of working for a wage. From the Black Death until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, England’s yeomen had worried about the cost and scarcity of labor—so much so that the government even introduced a maximum wage for laborers. But with so many landless cottagers forced to look for paid work, the labor shortage became a glut. Wages fell, families went hungry, and those unable to find work had no choice but become squatters on land they had once held in common with their neighbors. The entire county was said to be ‘filling up at the bottom.’5

  Under normal circumstances, the county’s cottagers and husbandmen had better prospects than most, for they lived within a few days’ walk of prosperous towns like Braintree, Chelmsford, and Colchester, where wool gathered from sheep raised on enclosed land was brought to be washed, spun, and woven. But with Europe consumed by the Wars of Religion, seaborne trade was at risk of attack by pirates, and the wool trade was thrown into a terrible recession.

  Directly or otherwise, half the population of Essex depended on the trade for a living. In 1629, the county’s cloth workers saw their wages cut by over a third. Many were forced to sell their beds to buy food, and employers kept to their houses for fear of running into their poverty-stricken workers in the street. Robert Hammond, an unemployed wool comber from Braintree, had resisted the temptation to rob, riot, or turn vagrant, but his patience was wearing thin. ‘It is hard to starve,’ he lamented,

  I took no lewd course to wrong any ma
n, nor yet to run about the country as others have done. I never stirred, but kept my work, and it is nothing else which now I crave: to maintain my charge, that I may take no unlawful course.6

  According to the town corporation of Colchester, wandering paupers were ‘the principal cause of the great poverty within this town.’7 Yet the jobless were not allowed to leave their home county. If a jobless man like Robert Hammond wanted to look for work beyond the borders of Essex, he had to apply for a pass from the local magistrate; anyone caught on the road without one could expect to have his ears bored. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have found it hard to come by a skilled counterfeiter like Davy Bennett, a pockmarked young man known to drift the county’s back roads. For a fee, Davy would forge a pass and even carried a bag of counterfeit magistrates’ seals under his cloak. Armed with a forged pass, a jobless man could make his way to London. By the middle of the century, one in six Englishmen had done just that.

  * * *

  Rising numbers of poachers, jobless cloth workers, and hungry migrants—‘sturdy rogues’ in the parlance of the day—made the property owners of Essex anxious. In better days, those unable to support themselves could count on the benevolence of their neighbors, for Christian charity was the bedrock on which the village hierarchy stood. But with so many new faces tramping the county’s roads, the ‘middling sort’ was feeling less generous. In the words of a popular ballad of the day, ‘Neighbourhood nor love is none / True dealing now is fled and gone.’8

  Those sent away empty-handed from a yeoman’s door were often heard to utter ‘the beggar’s curse.’ This made the householder feel guilty, but it also induced fear, for only the devil could fulfill the beggar’s curse (God only came to the aid of the submissive poor). If a yeoman’s milk curdled or his hens failed to lay in the days following the beggar’s visit, the blame would fall on the devil and the poor wretches he had tempted to do his bidding. Prosecutions for witchcraft had peaked at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, but the 1630s saw another flurry of witch baiting.

  Not everyone succumbed to the hysteria: William Laud, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, blamed the recession not on witches or divine wrath, but grain speculators. But Laud’s rational skepticism was thin on the ground in a county as stagnant and God-fearing as the Essex of 1630.

  Prior to the dissolution of Parliament in 1628, Puritan MPs like the Earl of Warwick’s cousin Sir Nathaniel Rich had raged at the sloth of the poor in the House, but also at the avarice of the rich: Sir Nathaniel believed that the root cause of England’s misfortunes was the terrible sinfulness of its people, for un-Christian behavior provoked God’s anger. Not for the first time, Puritan MPs called for the punishment of blasphemy to be made more severe, and urged that ‘excess in apparel’ be made illegal.9

  Instead, the king’s Poor Law made a multitude of provisions for the poor: the rates were increased, workhouses were restocked, and the laws governing apprenticeships tightened up. Thereafter, the poor were better treated, grain stocks better administered, and local government improved. Charles also established a Commission for Depopulation, with powers to impose fines on landowners whose enclosures had led to the loss of land previously dedicated to food crops. Unfortunately, the commission’s work was undermined by the dire state of the king’s finances. Anxious to raise money without recalling Parliament, Charles began selling exemptions to the law, which boosted his coffers but did nothing to stem the tide of landless laborers pouring into English towns and cities.

  With central government stymied by a lack of resources, and local government in the pocket of the local landowner, it fell to the parish to come up with an effective response to the crisis. The stipend offered the typical church minister was pitifully small, and consequently the clergy attracted few learned men. Most church ministers were what Puritans called ‘dumb dogs’—incapable of preaching. But in the parishes where the Earl of Warwick held sway, the minister was sure to be a Puritan, and he knew very well what was required if England was to pull itself out of the mire. Casting a critical eye over his congregation, he could only wonder at how far they had strayed from the Gospel. For many churchgoers, and especially the poor, God was simply a talisman: a lucky charm to be wielded as protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For a minister, however, Sunday service was more than a weekly ritual of mumbling one’s way through the catechism and lighting candles for dead relatives. Until his flock attained a personal relationship with the Lord, they would never know the heart of ‘the true religion.’

  The process by which a man came to terms with original sin was painful for all concerned—but to be called a ‘painful’ preacher was the highest praise a Puritan minister could hope for. If he could bring some pain into their souls, his congregation would see that their idleness, drunkenness, and lechery were not harmless amusements, but way stations on the road to hell.

  A painful preacher could not wish for a more receptive audience than the one that gathered in a typical Essex village church, for the county was considered the most Protestant in all England. Long before the Reformation, the people of Essex had demanded an English-language Bible that they could read for themselves, and preachers who would help them to understand what God wanted of them. Following publication of the authorized version in 1611, the word of God became daily reading for many, who were soon intoxicated by the poetry of the Bible and the hope for a heaven on earth.

  In the eyes of the Puritans, the Church of England was still riddled with vestiges of Catholicism, which they regarded as a creed designed by man, not God. According to the Puritan divine Richard Sibbes, the Church of Rome ‘knew that children must have baubles, and fools trifles, and empty men must have empty things. They saw what pleased them and the cunning clergy thought, “We will have a religion fit for you.”’10 Catholicism perverted Scripture to pander to man’s love of worldly pleasures and smother the pangs of his guilty conscience. If England were to become materially rich, it would first have to become spiritually pure, and that meant driving its people onto the path of righteousness.

  * * *

  To anyone familiar with the stereotypical Puritan, with his prurient attitudes toward sex and drink, the liberal good humor of the Earl of Warwick and his ‘loving friends’ at the Providence Island Company will come as some surprise. Robert Rich’s daughter-in-law called him ‘one of the best-natured and cheerfullest persons I have in my time met with.’ Even the Royalist Earl of Clarendon, the first historian of the English Civil War, who hated the earl, admitted that he was ‘a man of pleasant and companionable wit and conversation [and] a universal jollity.’11

  Nor were the Puritan grandees particularly prudish, as shown by a letter Sir Thomas Barrington wrote to his wife: ‘My dearest, in obedience, in love, in all virtue, there is no mean to be held, nor can there be excess.’12 His wife was no wallflower either: Lady Judith’s letters show her to have taken a distinctly unladylike interest in the art of war, being full of the gory details of the battles being waged by persecuted Protestants in Europe.

  Sir Thomas and his wife certainly would not have approved of illicit sex, but only because sex between an unmarried young couple invariably led to bastard offspring, and since neither parent would find work in the house of a good Christian, the child would likely be raised in the workhouse, which was funded by poor rates levied on property owners like the Barringtons. Once he was out of sight of his social inferiors, however, Sir Thomas drank, danced, and went to the theater just as often as his neighbors. His account books show him to have paid fiddlers, harpists, and morris dancers to entertain him at home. He even bought a case of Irish whiskey and employed the services of a Welsh conjurer.

  What gets overlooked in the rush to mock the Puritan psyche is their determination to impose a culture of discipline on themselves, and especially on the poor. It was a message that went down well with ‘the middling sort’—the merchants, lawyers, and local government officials who felt hemmed in between the corrupt rich and the idle poor—w
hich may explain why Puritanism in Essex was strongest in the cloth towns where many of them lived.

  Understandably, the culture of discipline that the Puritans wanted to impose did not sit well with most of their countrymen and women. A typical Church of England minister felt quite at home in the alehouse, for religious devotion and merrymaking were tightly woven into the fabric of daily life. In London and the Country Carbonadoed, Donald Lupton describes a typical alehouse of 1632:

  You shall see the history of Judith, Susanna, Daniel in the lion’s den, or Dives (?) and Lazarus painted upon the wall…It may be reckoned a wonder to see or find the house empty, for either the parson, churchwarden or clerk, or all are doing some church or court business usually in this place.

  No wonder the typical landlady ‘prays the parson may not be a puritan.’13 To a good Puritan, this conflation of the sacred and the profane was sacrilegious and a hypocritical cover for debauchery. Drinking ale after church was all very well in times of plenty, but times of dearth called for austerity. Good Christians had a duty to help the poor, but those who refused to seek the light had to be punished. According to Arthur Hildersam, a Puritan preacher and friend of the Barringtons, ‘The poor in all places are for the most part the most devoid of grace.’14 The poor were weak in the face of temptation, and no amount of mollycoddling would fortify them. As Matthew 10:34 taught them, ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’