Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  The potential for trouble was symbolically illustrated as early as 1634 when John Endecott, who had been the Massachusetts Bay Company's governor of the settlement at Salem, cut the red cross out of the royal ensign, on the grounds that it was a popish symbol. In spite of considerable concern that this would give `occasion to the state of England to think ill of us',114 Massachusetts managed to hold on to its own distinctive flag, shorn of the offending cross, until the last years of the century."' Such a degree of defiance would have been unthinkable in Spanish America once Gonzalo Pizarro's followers, after flaunting the Pizarro arms in place of the royal arms on their banners, had gone down to defeat. There was, however, a stand-off with the royal authorities in Mexico City, which never reconciled itself to the conventional coat of arms conferred on it by Charles V As proud inheritors of the conquered Tenochtitlan, the city authorities appropriated the Aztec emblem of an eagle devouring a serpent and poised on a cactus, which they deftly placed above the new civic arms. In 1642, after eagles and serpents began to proliferate on municipal buildings, the viceroy, Bishop Palafox, took alarm at these idolatrous symbols and ordered their removal from the city's arms. But the serpent-devouring eagle was becoming a potent symbol of Mexico's distinctive identity, and - never entirely suppressed - it would once more come to rest on its cactus during the struggle for independence. 116

  Clinging obstinately to its flag, Massachusetts, both insolent and obdurate, was to prove a constant thorn in the side of the Stuarts. Already in the late 1630s, when Archbishop Laud's Committee on Plantations challenged the colony's charter, the General Court warned him that `the common people here will conceive that his Majesty hath cast them off, and that, hereby, they are freed from their allegiance and subjection ...'117 In the event it was to be the English and the Scots in the next few years who would free themselves from `their allegiance and subjection' to Charles I.

  The English Civil War and the king's execution in 1649 raised, not only for Massachusetts but for all the colonies, major questions about the exact nature of their relationship with the mother country. Not only did the Civil War sharply reduce the inflow of capital and immigrants to the colonies,"' but it also created fundamental problems of allegiance, and posed questions about the exact location of imperial authority that would hover over the Anglo-American relationship until the coming of independence. No comparable challenge would confront the Spanish empire in America until the Napoleonic invasion brought about the collapse of royal authority in Spain in 1808. The transition from Habsburgs to Bourbons in 1700, which brought conflict to the peninsula, provoked only a few passing tremors in the American viceroyalties.119

  For the colonies, as for the British Isles themselves, the outbreak of the Civil War brought divided loyalties.120 Virginia remained faithful to the king and the Anglican establishment; Maryland briefly overthrew its government in favour of parliament, and descended between 1645 and 1647 into a period of turbulence graphically known as `the plundering time';121 and many New England settlers went home in the 1640s to help establish the New Jerusalem in the mother country and join the parliamentary cause.122 But the absorption of the English in their own affairs during the 1640s gave the colonies even more scope than they had previously enjoyed to go their own way. Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts made the most of the opportunity to press on with the creation of new settlements and to form a Confederation of the United Colonies of New England for mutual defence. 121 The colonies could not, however, count on being indefinitely left to their own devices. As early as 1643 the Long Parliament set up a committee under the chairmanship of the Earl of Warwick to keep an oversight over colonial affairs.

  This committee, although interventionist in the West Indies in response to the activities of the royalists, and supportive of Roger Williams's attempts to secure an independent charter for Rhode Island, was generally respectful of legitimate authority in the colonies. But its activities raised troubling questions about whether the ultimate power in colonial affairs lay with king or parliament. As early as 1621 Sir George Calvert had claimed that the king's American possessions were his by right and were therefore not subject to the laws of parliament.124 This question of the ultimate location of authority became acute after the execution of the king, since several of the colonies - Virginia, Maryland, Antigua, Barbados and Bermuda - proclaimed Charles II as the new monarch on his father's death. Parliament responded to these unwelcome colonial assertions of loyalty to the Stuarts by passing in 1650 an Act declaring that the colonies, having been `planted at the Cost, and settled by the People, and by Authority of this Nation', were subject to the laws of the nation in parliament. 121

  When this Act was followed in the succeeding year by the Navigation Act, it must have seemed to the colonies that the Commonwealth represented at least as grave a threat as monarchy to their cherished rights. Parliament's bark, however, proved fiercer than its bite, and Cromwell turned out to be reluctant to interfere in colonial politics. The colonies therefore reached the Restoration of 1660 relatively unscathed. If anything, they emerged with enhanced confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs as a result of the uncertainties of the Interregnum and the impact of those uncertainties on the authority of royal and proprietary governors. Yet the growing economic importance of the colonies to the mother country, both as markets for English manufactures and as sources of supply for raw materials, meant that sooner or later the restored royal government was likely to make an effort to strengthen its authority over its imperial territories. It was in line with the sharpened perception of the colonies' value to England that the Earl of Clarendon urged on Charles II `a great esteem for the plantations and the improvement of them by all ways that could reasonably be proposed to him'.126

  Clarendon's concern for the future development of the colonies, expressed in the creation in 1660 of two advisory Councils, for Trade and Foreign Plantations,'' harked back, as might be expected, to the age of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. But it also took into account the new naval and commercial realities of the Interregnum, and the growth of state power under Cromwell, whose conquest of Jamaica represented an important and potentially lucrative reinforcement of the British presence in the Caribbean. The government of Charles II, at once goaded and hampered by its perpetual need of funds, was to inch its way towards the formulation of a more coherent imperial policy, although this was constantly to be undercut by short-term considerations of immediate financial advantage. A government, for instance, that had ambitions to produce a more uniform pattern of colonial administration, had no hesitation in adding to its complexities by simultaneously creating new colonies on a proprietary basis in order to gratify friends and increase its revenues. Carolina, granted to eight proprietors including the future Earl of Shaftesbury, in 1663; New York, handed over to James, Duke of York, in 1664 after its capture from the Dutch; the jerseys, transferred that same year by the Duke of York to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley; and William Penn's settlement of Pennsylvania in 1681, were all set up as charter colonies. Only Jamaica, its long-term status still uncertain after its seizure from Spain in 1655, was incorporated into the English empire in America as a royal colony.

  Yet in spite of a casualness in the disposal of territory that seems to belie its own perceived best interests, the crown under the later Stuarts was moving, however erratically, towards increased intervention in American affairs, prompted partly by considerations of profit and power, and partly in response to pressures from within the colonies themselves. In an age of system-building, whether in intellectual life or in politics, the creation of a rational and orderly imperial system seemed to offer the best hope of securing maximum benefits from the growing prosperity of the colonies. The France of Louis XIV provided an obvious model as it moved to consolidate and extend its presence in America. But it would be surprising if some at least of Charles II's ministers and officials were not also influenced in their formulation of the new system by the Spanish model, designed to integrate America i
nto a tight imperial framework and to regulate colonial trade to the benefit of the metropolis. In the Council for Trade and Plantations of 1660, and its various successor bodies, culminating in the Board of Trade in 1696, can be seen an embryonic Council of the Indies; in the Navigation Acts and the attempts to enforce them, a Spanish-style monopoly of the transatlantic trade; and in the proposals for a Dominion of New England, which would take shape under James II, the first stage of an ambitious programme for the consolidation of the American colonies into three or four viceroyalties on the Spanish model.121

  Under the new programme that was being slowly forged in London, the New World settlers, who for so long had been left to their own devices, would, for the first time in their collective experience, be brought face to face with the intrusive state. That collective experience, however, in some instances already reached back three generations, and this made the assertion of the royal prerogative in America by the later Stuarts a very different proposition from its assertion by the Spanish crown over the conquistadores and first settlers of Mexico and Peru. The Earl of Sandwich, himself recently returned from an extended embassy in Spain, recognized as much in his `Comments upon New England' of 1671: `They are at present a numerous and thriving people and in twenty years are more likely (if civil wars or other accidents prevent them not) to be mighty rich and powerful and not at all careful of their dependence upon old England.' For this reason he took `the way of roughness and peremptory orders, with force to back them, to be utterly unadvisable. For they are already too strong to be compelled ... And though I apprehend them yet not at that point to cast us off voluntarily and of choice: yet I believe if we use severity towards them in their Government civil or religious, that they will (being made desperate) set up for themselves and reject us.'129

  `They are already too strong to be compelled.' The verdict was perhaps too gloomy. Changing conditions in New England in the 1670s and 1680s - King Philip's War, the threat from the French in Canada, the increasingly complex ties between Massachusetts merchants and the British commercial system - were to make the New England colonists more amenable to the imperial authority in the last years of the century than at the time when Sandwich delivered himself of his `Comments'.13o Yet the instinct to resist was strong, and this was true even of the new colony of Jamaica, which started its life under the British crown with a military government, and - as a conquered island on the model of Ireland - offered unique opportunities for the assertion of the royal prerogative. Already in 1660, with half of the island's British population consisting of settlers from the older colonies, the governor, Colonel D'Oyley, had to promise that taxes would be levied only by their representatives.13' Jamaica's assembly was soon flexing its muscles, and at the end of the 1670s it successfully fought off attempts by the Privy Council to introduce Poyning's Law, a measure originally devised for Ireland and requiring the prior consent of the council to the passage of local legislation. `It was', argued the Speaker, Captain Samuel Long, `against law and justice to alter the constitution Jamaica had so long lived under. 1112 `So long' amounted to some sixteen years of English rule, the earliest of them under military government. English liberties, it seemed, had rapidly taken root in fertile Caribbean soil.

  So-called `garrison government' by army officers might, if systematically pursued as a policy objective, have laid the foundations of a more autocratic system of imperial rule in British America.133 This would have brought it more into line with French Canada than with Spanish America, where - outside Chile and the frontier regions - there was little military presence at any level before the eighteenth century. But it is easier to see in the appointment of military men to colonial governorships a form of outdoor relief for the superannuated and unemployed than a carefully thought-out design to impose royal power on the colonies, although professional soldiers certainly had their uses when colonists proved obdurate. The despatch of a thousand-strong expeditionary force from England to crush Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, for example, gave the crown the opportunity to curb the powers of the Virginia assembly, remodel the colony's system of government, and secure a grant of a perpetual duty on tobacco exports which yielded a substantial permanent revenue. 114 Yet if the crown was thinking in terms of continuing garrison government, it did not achieve its aims. In 1682, with their pay badly in arrears, the troops had to be disbanded.13'

  Government ministers and officials in the London of Charles II, however, were itching to get their hands on a greater share of American revenues, and were busily hatching schemes to secure a greater degree of royal authority over the crown's wayward transatlantic possessions. Sent out on a fact-finding mission to the colonies in 1676 by the newly established Privy Council committee, known as the Lords of Trade, Edward Randoph, who was to have an important career as a royal official in America, was horrified by the lack of respect shown to the crown in Massachusetts, and looked forward to the day when `it shall please his Majesty fully to resolve upon the reducing this Plantation to their due Obedience'.136 This day looked like dawning exactly ten years later, when Sir Edmund Andros, a military man and a former governor of New York for James, Duke of York, arrived in Boston as the first royal governor of the newly created Dominion of New England. 117

  The decision to consolidate the New England colonies into a single dominion under a royal governor was an attempt by the authorities in London to resolve through a dramatic intervention in colonial life the various problems that had exercised them since the Restoration.13' The traditional lack of respect for the crown in Massachusetts; the perennial shortfall in the royal revenues; the desire to impose closer control over the increasingly lucrative transatlantic trade; the growing costs of colonial defence at a time of war with France - all these suggested the desirability of introducing some uniformity into the existing patchwork of colonial government, and of grouping the New England colonies together into a union under a single governor. Randolph's activities in the colonies in the early 1680s suggested that there were significant groups in colonial society, like the moderate Puritans and Anglican merchants, who would welcome reform and would be ready to co-operate with the royal authorities to bring it about.139 If Andros played his cards well, he could capitalize on these divisions to strengthen royal influence through a centralized form of government, and similar policies might in due course be extended to the Middle Colonies and those of the South.

  Yet the dangers were obvious, and had already been foreshadowed in the proprietary colony of New York, where the Duke of York had replaced Andros as governor by an Irish Catholic, Colonel Thomas Dongan, a former lieutenantgovernor of Tangier. In conceding the New Yorkers an assembly, the duke tied the concession to a grant large enough to pay off the public debts and provide sufficient revenue to support the government and the garrison in perpetuity. When writs for the assembly were sent out in September 1683, Easthampton was one of the towns to instruct its representatives to stand up for the maintenance of `our privileges and English liberties'. Drawing for its inspiration on Magna Carta and the 1628 Petition of Right, the assembly proceeded to draw up a `Charter of Libertyes and Privileges', designed to establish the colony's government on a firm contractual basis. The charter was rejected by the Duke of York, and in October 1684, in what looked like the beginnings of a systematic assault by the crown on colonial charters along the lines of its assault on chartered corporations in England, the charter of Massachusetts was revoked.140

  The accession of the Duke of York to the English throne in 1685 inevitably heightened the fears of the colonies that a Catholic conspiracy was afoot for the imposition of arbitrary rule in America. The instructions given Governor Andros by James II in 1686 for the establishment of the Dominion of New England included the introduction of major changes in the system of land tenure, the establishment of religious liberty, which could only be seen as a devious attempt to promote popery, and the abolition of representative assemblies. It was already too late for this. New revenue-raising attempts quickly ran into resistance, as
in Essex County, where the town government of Ipswich voted that `it did abridge them of their liberty as Englishmen'.14'

  New Englanders would not have found much cause for comfort in the response of judge Joseph Dudley to one of the Essex County defendants: `They must not think the privileges of Englishmen would follow them to the end of the world. 142 The colonists, however, were well aware of the growing resistance to the government of James II in the mother country. In defying judge Dudley and asserting their claims to equality of status with their English brothers and sisters, they transformed the English struggle for the preservation of English religion and English liberties into a common Atlantic cause. When news reached America of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 they were ready for action. Revolution in Britain was followed by upheavals in the colonies - most notably in Massachusetts, New York and Maryland - and the overthrow of the hated Andros, whose arrogant, arbitrary and secretive character had alienated even his natural supporters. The experiment of centralized government in a Dominion of New England had come to a humiliating end.143

  The Stuart invasion of colonial liberties ended in failure, partly because the imperial policies pursued by the crown were inconsistent and erratically pursued, but also because of deep divisions within British political culture of the seventeenth century. The Civil War had exposed the fissures in English politics and society, and these fissures, although papered over, persisted after the restoration of the monarchy. The Lords of Trade, for instance, were divided between those who favoured a forceful assertion of royal prerogative and supported the Anglican establishment, and those who were inclined by conviction and tradition to support a strong parliament and to side with the dissenters.144 Such political and religious divisions militated against the formulation and pursuit of a coherent policy designed to enhance royal control over the colonies, and gave the representative bodies already well entrenched in America room to manoeuvre when they felt themselves threatened by the power of the crown.