When the Restoration happened, Barbados requested to be made a crown colony, thinking its rights would be better protected. In return for giving up his proprietary rights, Willoughby was made Barbados’s first royal governor. Suddenly, Barbadians were faced with the first real imposition to their self-government in well over a decade, and the conflict frustrated both Willoughby and the colonists. Meanwhile, an illegal slave deal with the Spanish ultimately gives Barbados the right to sell slaves to other countries.
Intelligent Speech Conference information! I will be speaking alongside a bunch of other amazing indie educational podcasters at this June 25 event! You can find both ticket information and information about all the speakers at this link.
Early bird ticket price is $20, plus 10% off if you use the code RnR. If you like some of my earlier topics, you will definitely enjoy my presentation. 😉
Transcript
“In former times, we accounted ourselves a part of England, but upon the king’s restoration we were in effect made foreigners and aliens.” This was the reflection of one Barbadian in 1689. It had been easy for colonists to ignore Commonwealth excesses and innovations, because Cromwell’s government hadn’t been the true government of England. When the new king confirmed these policies, though, American colonists started to feel that they were the ones who weren’t truly English.
Introduction
Before I go any further, I want to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s Intelligent Speech conference! For four years, Intelligent Speech has worked to connect independent educational podcasters with fans in an intimate event. This year’s will be online, on June 25 from 9:45am to 6:15pm Eastern Time. Tickets are $30, but if you buy before May 15 they’re $20, and listeners of this show get an additional 10% off by using the code RnR. I hope to see you guys there!
Another quick note is that I’m going to go back to covering one colony or region over the course of a series of episodes like I did before the English Civil War stuff. Connecting things to happenings in England isn’t something that needs to happen with as much detail anymore, and I like the flow better the other way, so we’ll spend the next few episodes on the West Indies before transitioning into our newest colony, Carolina.
And with all that said, it’s time to move on to the episode.
When news of the Restoration reached the West Indies, there was immediate jubilation, but questions quickly emerged about how exactly things would play out. Nowhere were concerns as intense as in Jamaica, where there was the very real worry that in exchange for peace, Charles II would give the colony back to Spain, which was actually an idea that had been discussed before the Restoration. But issues of land ownership, taxation, governance and of course the Navigation Acts all loomed in every colony, with significant implications for their inhabitants.
When the Restoration came, Antigua petitioned for an end to the Navigation Acts, saying that it could become an island even richer than Barbados if they could get the necessary equipment, along with English indentured servants. One of Antigua’s leading planters, and yes, slaveholders was Samuel Winthrop, son of the Massachusetts governor, John. In discussing their economic potential, Winthrop and his associates emphasized their size, the quality of their soil for sugar, their ability to produce salt and saltpeter for gunpowder, their fishing, which was the best in the Caribbean, and their history of exporting cattle to Barbados as evidence of their economic potential. They also asked for more military equipment, saying the guns, powder and ammunition Cromwell had sent them was all defective. They were on the verge of being the regional hub of trade and industry to supply other colonies, and could profit not just from English ones if the Act was withdrawn.
In Nevis, colonists didn’t have official permission to grow sugar, though they had been anyway, and since they sold it to the Dutch, no one was the wiser. But now with things entering a more permanent state, they petitioned for permission and got it. In St. Kitts, not one but two in a long series of fires destroyed Basseterre, one in 1660 and another in 1663, putting questions of policy on the backburner.
But it was in Barbados that the story was most intense, and also of course best documented. Barbados was the biggest, and the richest colony in English America in 1660. It was at the height of its importance, the jewel of an emerging empire. Its wealth was reflected in stately mansions which could rival those of Europe, surrounded by tropical gardens and palm trees. No hints of wilderness danger and unknown remained. The only remaining forests were deliberately left there, and indigenous populations had died out long before the English arrived. It was a place of wealth, sophistication, religious tolerance, political moderation, and also economic brutality.
When England formulated its colonial policy, it was thinking about, salivating over, Barbados. And from the other direction, Barbados had advocated for its interests in a more sophisticated way than any other colony. It had intensity and originality of ideas, without rigidity, and its arguments foreshadowed American Revolution rhetoric. As everywhere, the most hated English change of all was the Navigation Acts, and the Navigation Acts were seen as having been punishment for the colony’s initial refusal to submit to the Commonwealth.
Barbados had, like all English colonies, been able to conduct its own affairs much more independently during the wars and Commonwealth than either before or after. England was embroiled in a revolution, and it wasn’t focusing on activities in colonies half a world away. So colonists had gotten used to doing their own thing. But now the revolutions were over, and the colonies had gone from being everyone’s last priority to being, in terms of economics at least, everyone’s first. And of colonies, Barbados was first and foremost in importance.
Realistically speaking, there shouldn’t have been any post-Restoration drama in Barbados. Willoughby had been removed as governor and his proprietary lease nullified as punishment for his support for the king who was now on the throne. Willoughby had been a popular and effective governor and lord proprietor, and he’d actually lived in Barbados and visited the other islands in his patent while he controlled them, which was almost unheard of. So it should have been fairly simple. Willoughby would return to the position he’d occupied prior to the Blockade of Barbados, and the island would go on with life as usual. But, life isn’t that simple, and in many ways, wealth makes it more complicated.
So when the Restoration was announced, Modiford was the governor, and he wanted to keep the job. Willoughby was back in control of the island, legally, and he would retake the governorship. It was going to be hard to convince Willoughby that Modiford was a better choice for the position than Willoughby, himself, especially because Modiford wasn’t exactly popular on the island thanks to his support of Cromwell’s Western Design.
In order to potentially keep control of Barbados, Modiford needed to do two things. He needed to convince the king that the Earl of Carlisle’s patent, which made him lord proprietor of Barbados and the Leeward Isles, and the patent which Willoughby had leased, was invalid, and then he needed to convince whoever took control of Barbados that he was the best man for the job.
Now, Willoughby had been popular, so Modiford couldn’t oppose his governorship directly. Instead, he played on colonist fears about proprietary government. The biggest of these was property rights, for obvious reasons. Technically, land owned in proprietary colonies was ultimately owned by the lord proprietor, and most Barbadians who owned land had obtained at least some of it while Carlisle wasn’t in control of the colony. That meant that their land ownership could be disputed, and there were clearly some high ranking people in England who wanted to do just that. The Earl of Clarendon, one of Charles’s top advisors, said of Barbados settlers that “these adventurers had, during the civil wars, planted without anybody’s leave, and without opposition or contradiction.”
Worse, Carlisle had just died and Willoughby’s lease would lapse in seven years, so that opened the way for a lot of uncertainty in the foreseeable future. Those were at least moderately legitimate worries, but in contrast to a future defined by them, Modiford then characterized the idea of being a crown colony as a future in which Barbados would be essentially free and independent, directly under the king with no one controlling them in any meaningful way.
Valid or not, that argument persuaded a majority of the population to back his push for Carlisle’s proprietorship to be revoked, and the colonists drafted a petition to the new king calling Carlisle’s patent illegal, and asking him to revoke it and give Modiford a chance as governor. In addition to the legal argument, they highlighted the amount of money that Barbados could raise for the crown if Barbados, as a crown colony, gave the 4% export duty which had previously gone to the proprietor, directly to the king.
The argument that Carlisle’s patent was illegal went back to the earliest days of the colony, when Carlisle had effectively raced Sir William Courteen and the Earl of Marlborough for the right to the island, and gotten control in an extremely underhanded way. There had been a huge fight between Carlisle and Courteen’s factions, both in England’s Courts and in Barbados, where they had led to the island’s starving time. But Carlisle had won, and Courteen and Marlborough had died decades ago, and even when the Commonwealth had reversed the decision and declared them the legitimate owners of Barbados, their heirs had specifically refused to get involved with the colony.
Whether the issue had been obsolete for years or decades, though, Modiford had a few things working in his favor. His close relative was General Monck, now Duke of Albermarle, the man who had ultimately ushered in the restoration. The merchants supported Modiford. And, under his lead, Barbados had offered the king an exorbitant amount of money. 4% on all Barbados’s exports, in addition to the import duties which were already being collected.
So the king asked someone to estimate exactly how much money he was looking at there, and then he started looking into the legality of the patent. And he found it to be invalid, so he revoked it. But, when he reached out to Barbados to ask for that export duty to be finalized, and colonists evaded the issue. They said the person who had written the petition had put that in without permission, and they still needed to decide how much exactly should be sent to the king, given the privations of the Navigation Acts. At this point, Modiford suggested the colony send the king a large sum of money in order to potentially buy the colony’s patent themselves, but colonists refused, saying that that felt a bit too much like buying Modiford power, and they’d gotten the patent revoked which was all they needed.
Willoughby wasn’t going to let this go without contesting it, though. I mean of course he wasn’t. He had leased the proprietorship completely fairly. He had governed well. And he had lost a huge amount in fighting for the king’s cause. When he got wind of Modiford’s politicking, he named Humphrey Walrond as acting governor in his place. But, Modiford refused to leave office until everything was decided, and surrounded himself with armed troops to prevent Walrond from doing anything.
And it’s worth taking a minute to note what an odd choice of acting governors Walrond was, and why Willoughby would choose him, of all people. If Modiford wasn’t particularly liked on the island, Walrond was worse. Modiford’s greatest political moments in Barbados had pitted him against Walrond’s excesses. Walrond had been the person who had first broken the neutrality that Barbados had demanded of its settlers during the wars. He had been the person who caused some of the colony’s richest planters to have to go into exile, until Willoughby came. And when Willoughby had first come to the island, he’d been the person who tried hardest to keep him from taking office. He was some combination of angry at the country’s political direction, and simply power hungry, and he’d definitely left his mark on Barbados’s political landscape.
So why Walrond? It was simply process of elimination. Modiford was working against Willoughby at that moment, and Walrond was willing to ally with him, at least for the time being. Daniel Searle genuinely supported Willoughby, but he was a staunch puritan who had both served and believed in the Commonwealth, which was again, deeply unpopular, and who would soon be moving to New England to live among likeminded people. It’s worth noting, if for no other reason than that it makes me happy, that despite Searle’s political loyalty, he had helped Barbados undermine the Navigation Acts, and had ultimately lost his governorship because of that. But, he was fundamentally a Cromwellian, which just wasn’t going to work, so those were the colony’s surviving political leaders, and Walrond was most likely to be able to advocate Willoughby’s position. Plus, he had demonstrated the ability to be more cutthroat than either Searle or even Modiford ever really had.
And to that point, when Walrond got Willoughby’s letter, informing him of the situation and naming him president of the council, he didn’t tell Modiford. He quietly nominated his governing council, and then he published his orders for the whole island to see. And then, when Modiford asked exactly what was going on and asked to see the orders, Walrond told him he could get out of his fortified governor’s house and come see, but he wasn’t going to bring it to him. Modiford hesitated. He saw the trap, and was trying to figure out how to get around it, and when he didn’t immediately come out, Walrond issued orders to his troops, ordering them to disband under penalty of high treason. The troops disbanded and Modiford gave up, but Walrond immediately arrested him for high treason. The case was dropped after two hearings, though, and when he was released, he continued his political agitation.
To balance the competing factions, Barbadians elected members of Modiford’s faction to serve on the colony’s council, and elected Modiford as speaker of the assembly. Walrond accepted this, especially because the first issues to address were things that would unite all the colonists, anyway. They drafted another petition to the king asking for there to be no customs duties being imposed on them without their own consent, as well as yet-another plea for free trade. In this particular request, for the first time, Barbadians emphasized the slave trade in their request for free trade. The Royal African company charged way too much for slaves, they said, and they wanted to be able to get them for cheaper. This became a fairly consistent regular among Barbadian colonists, with Royal African Company prices consistently high enough that colonists preferred to buy from private English merchants, even if they were trading illegally.
And Barbados had become not just England’s most slave-dependent society, but also a hub of the slave trade in the Atlantic world. I’ve mentioned before that that at this point, pretty much all the slaves in the English colonies came via Barbados, with the middle passage of the triangle trade already starting to take shape.
This brought us to the second order of business that arose, which was that the Spanish, who were newly at peace with England, saw this, and their regional government asked Barbados for permission to trade for slaves there. They said it would be cheaper for them to simply buy the slaves from Barbados than to transport them all the way from West Africa, and in fact they would save so much money that they were willing to pay 10% to Barbados’s government for the privilege. And at this point, they wanted to buy 400 slaves for 10,000 pounds, in 1662 money, so a pretty insane amount, to take to Peru.
The question then, was whether Barbados was going to ignore the Navigation Act and agree to the Spanish offer, or whether they were going to follow the law and turn it down. The council refused, but Walrond did it anyway. And he pocketed the 10%, the thousand pounds, himself with the explanation that he alone had incurred the risks of defying the Navigation Act, so he alone should get the reward.
And on May 7, the assembly voted the transaction to be illegal, calling it a case of corruption and bribery. They reported the case to England, and England said that the transaction had been fine. They specified that the selling of slaves to the Spanish was ok, as long as the Spanish didn’t supply any necessities or anything that Barbados could get from English merchants in exchange. So, they could sell surplus slaves as long as they still bought everything they could from English merchants.
This, in contrast to Virginia’s tobacco …
Practically speaking, this was a great deal for the king, because all it did was increase the demand for slaves, which could only legally be sold by his brother, head of the Royal African Company. So then the only question was, who deserved the thousand pounds.
And this is the point at which Willoughby returned. He’d reached a compromise with the king in which Barbados would remain a crown colony, but he would be the royal governor for the last seven years of his lease. In that time, he and Carlisle’s heir would split a portion of the colony’s export duty revenue, after which Carlisle’s heir would get all of it. Descendents of Carlisle’s old rival, the Earl of Marlborough, would also get some money every year, and eventually all of those things would end and the crown would get everything. So in short, the king got the colony, everyone else got enough money to make them happy, and Willoughby remained governor of Barbados.
Legal issues decided, Willoughby had been able to return to Barbados so he took control back from Walrond, and ordered Walrond to return the thousand pounds. Walrond argued, and finally refused, repeating the argument that he’d run the risk alone, so he should profit alone. In reality, he, like a lot of colonists, was deeply in debt. And when Willoughby didn’t accept the argument, Walrond rode his horse around the island, trying to recruit friends for an armed rebellion. But I mean, no one was going to risk their lives so that Walrond could keep a thousand pounds from what had been an illegal transaction. He was arrested, escaped, and sailed for England in the middle of the night, vowing to get justice done. In England, his creditors came after him to try to get their money, and to avoid debtor’s prison he again fled. This time, he went to the Spanish West Indies, and he died not too long afterward.
So Willoughby was back at the colony’s helm, but this time he was a royal governor. As lord proprietor, even though it was a lease, he had been in complete control of the colony. So under Willoughby, the colony had effectively been self-governing. Under the Commonwealth, the English government hadn’t been able to exert any real authority there, so it was de facto self governing. But now, as a royal governor, Willoughby was acting on behalf of the king, advocating the king’s interests in Barbados. The days of semi-autonomy were over, and they were over under a king who specifically wanted to get as much money as he could from his colonies.
As much as Willoughby was dedicated to Barbados’s interests, it was now fundamentally his job to serve the king’s interests, and the first issue he’d have to deal with was the touchiest one – money. Willoughby’s first task as royal governor was to get the assembly to agree to give the king a permanent stream of revenue from the island in the form of an export duty. Instead of calling a new assembly, he simply summoned the one which had met under Walrond, and spent his time discussing the issue with the most influential colonists. Colonists weren’t exactly thrilled with the notion, in part because they already lost profits to England’s import duty, so this was doubling up on taxes. And in part, it was because the extra duties would make their sugar more expensive, and therefore less competitive.
Willoughby’s first proposal was an export duty of 10%, and the speaker of the assembly, Samuel Farmer, replied that that would pretty much eliminate planter profits on all sugar sold in the island. He might be able to get the assembly to give him half that. When the assembly finally met, it took three weeks of exhausting debate before the assembly would agree to an export duty of 4.5%.
Ultimately, the deciding factor in colonists’ acceptance of the duty had been the agreement that the island’s administration and defense expenses, including building a sessions house and prison, as well as fixing its forts, would be paid by the king using that money. The king would still have money left over, but colonists could pay the duty knowing that they wouldn’t have to raise other taxes to do things like running their general assembly or paying their governor. The proprietary government had never done this, so even if they were now paying the king more than they’d ever paid in the past, they would be getting more for their money, so it was ok.
They were even willing to negotiate for a higher rate in exchange for the elimination of the Navigation Acts, but that never happened.
The problem was that the king never upheld his end of the bargain. He kept all the money, and colonists were still forced to raise extra taxes to keep their government going. This meant they had to pay dramatically more in taxes than before, and it increased Barbadian antagonism toward England, and toward England’s representatives in the colony, meaning its royal governors.
This 4.5% duty ended up becoming an infamous one in Barbados’s history, imposed whether or not the colony could afford it, for the next 160 years. And Willoughby’s position with the colonists was thoroughly undermined. Barbadians had pushed to become a crown colony because they thought it would give them more liberty, but the reality was the opposite. And even though Willoughby had been the person who fought against the ending of his own proprietorship, colonists were now upset with him for his participation in the royal government that they had requested.
They increasingly resisted his leadership, and he grew more and more frustrated with the whole situation. A good example of the tension involved a friend of his named Robert Harley, who he had worked with on royalist plots to overthrow Cromwell. When Willoughby had returned to Barbados, he made Harley chancellor. Three months after Harley took the position, he refused to seal a writ from Willoughby, and Willoughby exploded, even accusing his old friend of accepting bribes. Harley immediately apologized and reversed his position, but Willoughby didn’t accept it. Harley ended up returning to England to argue his case before the king, and Willoughby simply said it was “because he couldn’t remain here to do as he listed,” compared him to Walrond, and washed his hands of him.
Willoughby then took some time to visit the other islands which had been under the same patent as Barbados, leaving his nephew Henry as acting governor there. In each of the Leewards, he ensured colonists had to pay the same 4.5% tax as Barbados so they were all playing on an even playing field. He did not, however, agree to pay public expenses from that tax given how everything had gone in Barbados. In St. Kitts, Willoughby also enforced religious toleration and brought back the Quakers the colony had banished. This led to a growing Quaker community there over the next few years.
The story of Suriname, you might want to skip if suicide is a sensitive issue for you, it’ll take about two minutes. In Suriname, a disgruntled and desperate colonist tried to assassinate him, and succeeded in wounding him severely enough that he was incapacitated for several months. Suriname was actually not a royal colony, and Willoughby was still one of its lords proprietors, with the other being one of the Earl of Clarendon’s sons, but it had lived in a state of virtual independence over the previous decade, and a sense of isolation unlike any other colony experienced. Almost no one in England even knew it existed. When Willoughby arrived, he found the colony in decent shape. Colonists, who had mostly moved there from Barbados, had founded the town of Paramaribo 60 miles downstream from the capital of Torarica. They were growing sugar, and had the industry to refine it, as well as a population of several thousand people. The colony was rough, though. Conflict there was harsher and more brutal than it was in already-genteel Barbados. The man who tried to kill Willoughby had been tried for blasphemy and dueling. He’d asked Willoughby to let him off, and when Willoughby promised to investigate, he’d felt that was too slow and after a shockingly profane verbal tirade, attacked him with a cutlass. Then he’d turned the sword on himself, and drunk some poison.
When he returned to Barbados, Willoughby started to arrange for Barbadians to be able to go to other colonies and islands. Poorer people, freed indentured servants, younger sons and other people who couldn’t find a place on the island, now contributed to a massive expansion of the empire. Barbadians tried to found a colony in St. Lucia, which would act as an extension of Barbados, run by Barbados’s government, and they negotiated with the local Carib Indian population for this. The French in Martinique opposed the plan, saying that after their own failed attempt to colonize the island, they’d always maintained a small presence on the island. Barbados sent settlers anyway, but the settlement didn’t do well and everyone eventually left or was killed by the Caribs.
More successfully, though, Barbados sent a huge amount of people to Carolina, where they founded Charlestown. And, lots of them started going to Jamaica. Jamaica was kind of different, though. It was a rival to Barbados, not under the same patent or proprietary grant, and the pressures of the Western Design as well as its status as a naval base had already encouraged Barbadian resentment of the colony.
This resentment had been renewed in 1662, when Jamaica’s new governor, Lord Windsor, had stopped in Barbados to recruit workers. Under the king’s orders, he had done this by offering, in short, to eliminate the debt of anyone who went. This meant that anyone who owed anyone money could simply leave and not have to pay, and it meant that a lot of Barbadians again lost a lot of money for no reason other than to settle Jamaica. They expressed their dissatisfaction, but they couldn’t really do anything about it.
Modiford became perhaps the most important Barbadian to move to Jamaica. He moved there after losing the governorship of Barbados, and took 800 people with him. He not only became Jamaica’s governor, but he became the man who made the colony successful. And next week, that’s what we’re going to talk about.
Before we go, I’m just going to do one last reminder about Intelligent Speech, and say you can find more information about it in the episode description, on my social media, or on the website, americanhistorypodcast.net. There, you can also find links to my Patreon and buymeacoffee accounts to support this show. But as always, thank you first and foremost for listening. Have a wonderful week!