The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood

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       Chapter 1

      Imperial Designs

      BEGINNING IN THE 1670s administrators in Charles II’s court sought to build a new empire. As an anonymous official noted, proper management of “forraigne Plantations” was of “great consequence … to the prosperity of [the] Nation.” The king’s empire was vast, but poorly regulated. Local officials in the various plantations worked in virtual isolation from authorities in Whitehall, and unlike other European states, England did not have a single office managing colonial affairs before the mid-1670s. The consequences of this oversight were profound; the king lost revenue and power, and colonial subjects languished on their own, as evidenced in the crisis of 1675–76, when New England nearly fell to a coalition of enemy Indians and Virginia experienced a massive civil war. If the empire was to work for the king and his subjects, it had to be brought into line.¹

      The later Stuart reorganization of the empire was a bold exercise in trans-Atlantic state building. It represented one strand of a campaign to augment the crown’s power at the expense of the localities, reflected most notably in the reorganization of dozens of local corporations in England itself. Reformers hoped that England would soon have a much more streamlined state, one that reflected in some form the royal absolutist political philosophies pursued by Louis XIV in France at the same time. In order to do this, the king and his ministers had to reorganize the state on a grand scale, but in addition they had to change English political culture, which included a strong attachment to local customs, privileges, and liberties. If they were to succeed, crown officials had to convince people to view the king and the state in a new way.²

      Thus royal officials had to translate this grand imperial vision in dozens of local contexts. In England the drama played out in counties and towns across the kingdom as local interest groups battled the crown for their privileges. Across the ocean, meanwhile, the theoretical issues were similar but the context very different. Zealous civil servants made the long trip to North America and the West Indies to accomplish what they hoped would be a simple task. The colonies were farther away and there was little money to help imperial officials build an empire, but few people lived in the plantations and they did not have entrenched interest groups like those in Britain and Ireland. Even the oldest colony, after all, was just over seventy years old. The crown began modestly: in 1678 it created a new royal colony in New Hampshire, a tiny outpost in northern New England, sending a minor courtier named Edward Cranfield to lead the colony into stability. Soon afterward, an English court revoked the charter of the Bermuda Company and took that island colony under its control. These minor conquests would pave the way for the royalization of New England, the most argumentative and independent of the colonies, and eventually all of the American plantations.³

      This simple task proved very difficult for administrators to accomplish. In New Hampshire and Bermuda, the governors sent to oversee these changes met serious resistance—especially from the religious dissenters who formed majorities in both places. New Hampshire’s Governor Cranfield quickly ran afoul of prominent landowners and assemblymen, surviving an attempted rebellion in 1683. In Bermuda, meanwhile, Governor Richard Coney managed to alienate virtually everyone, at one point confronting an armed mob right in front of his house, and declaring the colony to be in “actual rebellion.” Beyond the physical perils of office, neither man was very successful at the tasks of governance, whether raising revenue or providing for defense. Put simply, colonial subjects refused to recognize their authority, meaning that both colonies were essentially without governments during much of the 1680s. The new empire did not come together as its planners envisioned; rather than uniting colonial subjects, imperial reform divided them into two hostile and irreconcilable camps.⁴

      These reform efforts proved difficult because they ran into the conspiratorial political culture of popish and Puritan plots that poisoned Anglo-American politics in the Restoration era. Rather than bringing England and the plantations together in a more perfect union, the program of imperial centralization polarized colonists, creating two different factions or parties that took on slightly different forms from place to place but organized themselves around two conspiracy theories. One faction, which can be called the royal party, believed that a Puritan plot threatened the plantations; that Protestant dissenters, heirs to the regicidal impulses of their forebears, intended to undermine the Restoration monarchy and strip the king of his empire. The other side, which might be called the Protestant party, began to see imperial centralization as one plank in a popish plot, a design by Stuart officials, sometimes in collusion with French or Spanish allies, to reduce the plantations to popery and tyranny. With both sides dependent on such conspiratorial visions, the actual task of governance became much more difficult.⁵

      • • •

      In 1685 Nathaniel Crouch, a famous London bookseller known for his condensed histories and devotional tracts, issued a new title, The English Empire in America. The book was inexpensive and small enough to fit in one’s pocket, and its 200 pages contained vivid, if somewhat remarkable stories about the history and present state of England’s overseas plantations. The book would win no points for either originality or accuracy: as in his other histories, Crouch simply reprinted much of his material from other available printed sources, and selected anecdotes aimed at an audience more interested in curiosities СКАЧАТЬ