The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to the colony. In terms of religion, most people were dissenters of one kind or another, but the colony maintained a parish structure that gave at least an appearance of conformity to the Church of England. Nonetheless, several of the island’s ministers had ties to Boston.³²

      Like New Hampshire, Bermuda came to the attention of Restoration imperialists as a result of the efforts of several private interests. Throughout the 1670s parties in both London and Bermuda labored to break the Company’s monopoly; by the early 1680s a Tory lawyer named Francis Burghill had become the leading advocate of royal government in the region. The Bermuda Company was a small, insignificant operation, but Burghill found plenty of sympathizers in Charles II’s court who aimed to curb local corporations of any kind, especially those with historical ties to Puritanism or dissent. Burghill’s grievances resembled those used against the Massachusetts Bay Company at the same time. The Bermuda Company, he claimed, was tyrannical—it oppressed the king’s subjects and took their property without due process of law. Company leaders were also guilty of economic mismanagement, especially in their stubborn refusal to allow Bermudians to export tobacco except in one annual company “magazine ship.” Finally, Company leaders were traitors, adherents to the old Puritan cause who would betray the colony to the king’s enemies in a heartbeat. Burghill contended that an old Company governor allowed the Dutch to scout out the island’s harbors and fortifications during the Third Anglo-Dutch war, and that the Company also harbored a number of known rebels. The foremost example was William Milborne, a Baptist radical who had lived on the island for many years and had once publicly compared King Charles II to a dog. The colony’s governing council suspended Milborne for his seditious speech, but according to Burghill, the very fact that such a man was allowed to maintain a position of influence painted the Company as hopelessly disloyal.³³

      If the case against the Bermuda Company appeared to be a classic example of Tory empire building, a closer look reveals a more complicated picture. Indeed, most of Burghill’s allies on the island were not Tories or royalists, but radical dissenters—including the island’s ministers and even William Milborne himself. These radicals, most of whom had lived in Bermuda for decades and were a bit out of touch with English politics, had both economic and political grievances against Company rule, which they compared to the “Grand Signiurs”—meaning that that paragon of arbitrariness, the Ottoman sultan. But they seem to have given little thought to the realities of royal government. As the last Company governor, Richard Coney, noted, the people of Bermuda believed that the coming of royal government would lead to less, rather than more regulation. “They aim at the sole Government themselves,” Coney complained, “many of them saying His Ma[jes]ty will not concern himself with them, a small Island of Rocks, and such poor people as they are God bless him hee hath enough to doe at home, they can look after themselves.”³⁴

      This odd partnership succeeded in breaking the Company and turning Bermuda into a royal colony, but not without some tension. Burghill’s letters to his Bermudian allies reeked of condescension and frustration. He berated them for failing to send enough money or sufficient evidence to prosecute the case against the Company, and he also chided them for their dedication to Whig political principles at a time when these ideas had little purchase in the Stuart court. On one occasion, the Bermudians requested that the king give them complete control of the island’s judiciary, a request Burghill considered to be a major affront to the king’s authority. “Is it reasonable,” Burghill asked, “to thinke the Kinge willbe Setting up Comon welthes in any of his Dominions at this tyme of Day?” Such rhetoric was bound to strengthen the hand of the Company, who could easily paint Bermudians as disloyal subjects. On the island, meanwhile, Company advocates also attempted to use Whig, anti-Catholic rhetoric to urge people to resist royal government, claiming that the end of Company rule would lead to “Loss of their Landes, Poperey & voyalence.”³⁵

      The breaking of the Company led to a period of profound chaos in Bermuda. It is easy to read these events, like those in New England, as disputes between local interest groups and overbearing outsiders, but in fact such an interpretation would be too simple. Bermudians had successfully worked with metropolitan agents—including some with very different political principles—in their efforts to break the Company, and the issues of dispute were even clearer than in New Hampshire. A sympathetic royal governor could have easily brought the island to an accommodation with the new imperial system, merely by opening up the island’s trade and giving leading inhabitants a modest voice in local affairs. After all, most people had earnestly desired royal governance, even if they had little sense of what it entailed. As it happened, though, Bermudian politics fell victim to the same process that struck New Hampshire—people began to view local events in global terms, as manifestations of a larger battle between cosmic forces intent on world domination. And as in New England, the Bermudian political nation polarized into two hostile factions.

      The Bermudian crisis was driven by two sets of international events. The first centered on the Caribbean islands and especially the Bahamas, a true periphery of the empire that had longstanding connections to Bermuda. Throughout the early 1680s, English and Spanish mariners menaced each other in spite of official peace between the two kingdoms, usually justifying their conduct by claiming that the other side violated international law by engaging in piracy. The struggle culminated in two Spanish strikes, the first devastating New Providence Island in 1684, the second destroying the Scottish Covenanter community at Stuart’s Town, South Carolina, in 1686. In both cases, the Spanish claimed to be retaliating against piratical assaults on St. Augustine and surrounding Indian missions, and English officials forbade their own subjects from fighting back. Nonetheless, word of these incidents spread alarm across the English Atlantic, as refugees dispersed as far away as New England. In a conspiratorial time, such attacks could only feed into fears of a generalized popish conspiracy against Protestantism, especially when so many of the victims were dissenters. Bermuda welcomed many survivors from these assaults, and the close proximity of the incidents combined with Protestant zeal only increased the fear of an imminent Spanish invasion.³⁶

      The second outside influence came from the uncertain state of English politics around the time of the fall of the Bermuda Company. In February 1685 Charles II died, leaving the throne to his Catholic brother James. Most subjects accepted the succession with little apparent alarm, but a minority of radical Protestants in both England and Scotland refused to countenance the accession of a popish monarch. During the summer of 1685 two prominent nobles—the duke of Monmouth in England and the duke of Argyll in Scotland—led expeditions aiming to overthrow the new king. Both rebellions failed miserably, and the two ringleaders died as traitors within months. In the American colonies, however, where European news was often out of date and unreliable, the rebellions caused a minor crisis, as many people came to believe—by a combination of wishful thinking and inaccurate news—that Monmouth and Argyll had succeeded and that the King James set to take the throne was the Protestant Monmouth rather than the Catholic York.³⁷

      Monmouth’s level of support in the colonies is difficult to ascertain. No one openly admitted favoring the duke’s cause, and the writers who claimed widespread support for Monmouth in America were all imperial officials attempting to blacken the colonists’ reputations and underscore their own loyalty. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the rebellions caused a great deal of confusion and excitement. In Boston, according to one report, Congregationalists welcomed the news of the victory of the “Protestant Prince,” calling it “an answer of their prayers.” In Virginia—not usually considered a center of radical Whig thought—the news of the invasion “so farr Imboldened” the people “that their Tongues runn at Large and Demonstrated the wickedness of their harts.” The governor responded by issuing a proclamation against the spreading of rumors. In Bermuda, speculation about Monmouth combined with fear of the Spanish and local political uncertainty to inspire a true rebellion, a temporary chaos that again revealed the limits of imperial policies.³⁸

      The crisis in Bermuda owed much to the policies and personality of the island’s governor, Richard Coney. While his initial commission came from the Bermuda Company, Coney owed his appointment to the king, who essentially forced the Company to appoint him, and СКАЧАТЬ