ECW 18: Declarations of Independence

When she heard about the regicide, one Bermuda colonist said she thought that “They that done it, would never see the face of Christ.”  

Introduction  

Before we get started, I just wanted to do a little housekeeping.  School begins again next week, and my goal is going to be to do this as a biweekly show going forward, to see if it’s a little more sustainable than releasing weekly episodes.  I’ll do anything I can to avoid another 9 month delay, but do realize that episode release might be a little more erratic for a while.  I really hope I can settle on this biweekly thing as a longterm strategy.  

To a degree, I think that even today, we can comprehend to some extent the shock of regicide.  It’s not completely new at this point, and by and large we don’t believe in the divine right of kings, but we notice when our public figures are murdered or assassinated.  To this day, people remember where they were when they heard that JFK had been assassinated.  Even 150 years after his death, we know the details of Lincoln’s assassination.  It doesn’t take a belief in the divine right of kings to be particularly shocked when someone in a position of authority is killed.  Add to that the fact that this wasn’t a simple assassination.  Plenty of people expected King Charles I to be assassinated.  In fact, he, himself, was prepared for the possibility.  What had happened, though, was done very deliberately, in an organized, planned way, by a large group of people, who then went to take control of the country.  Think about that happening in the present day, and I would venture a guess that your feelings would be pretty similar to the feelings back then.      

The thing we really can’t fathom today, though, is how little colonists could have seen it coming.  A trip across the Atlantic took at least six weeks, and they were only common in certain months.  In contrast, the time period between Pride’s Purge and the execution was only a month, and the time between the trial and the execution was only 10 days.  In all likelihood, colonists got the news of the regicide between April and August, and they almost certainly got all of the news at once, from the coup to the execution.  They would have heard of the second war, and the defeat of the Scots which doomed the whole Royalist side, and probably of the fall of Colchester.  That’s all fairly standard, though.  They might, and I stress might, have heard about the idea being raised at Putney, but officially, the leveller movement had never been anythng more than a group of fringe radicals.                

So, colonists would have spent the winter and spring waiting for news of the treaty with the king and wondering things like, who would concede what?  What would England look like going forward?  What would the role of the king be in government?  But instead, somewhere between April and August, the news was that the King had been beheaded after an army coup and trial, and now England would be governed without one, and without even a full Parliament.          

As we’ll discuss soon, even Massachusetts Bay struggled with this, but in six colonies, the reaction was strong enough to turn into rebellion.  These were Bermuda, Virginia, Maryland, Newfoundland, Barbados and Antigua.  These six colonies said that the king’s death made the prince of wales the new rightful ruler, and declared King Charles II to be the legitimate authority in their colonies.  They didn’t petition Parliament to reconsider.  They didn’t agitate for a change in policy.  What they did was most akin to what Scotland did, which was to say “we’re our own entity, and Charles II is our king.”  Scotland was an independent country, though.  Virginia and Barbados were not.    

This is a really interesting dynamic, because in declaring their non-recognition of the new government, these colonies were de facto declaring independence from England.  As we’ll see, and as Virginia in particular will make very explicit, they were saying that they would take their colonial orders and pay their colonial dues to England’s rightful king, and not its usurping government.       

The details of how this happened differed from colony to colony, but there were also some interesting similarities, so today we’ll go through all six colonies in order.    

Chronologically, the first was Bermuda, where there was an armed rebellion, exile and a new governor.  Colonists there were already willing to go “to Bermuda, rather than be governed by an Independent!” and they had just received several ships worth of Royalist prisoners, so as soon as they heard about the regicide, a large group rose up in arms and started marching on St. George’s.  Leading citizens were a part of the march, and even the island’s militia joined them.  

Once they reached the capitol, the mob ousted all remaining Independents in the Bermudian government.  Then, unencumbered by Independent resistance, Turner declared Prince Charles to be King Charles II, passed a law which required all Bermudians to take an oath of allegiance to the King, and removed governmental protection from anyone who wouldn’t.  Effectively, this meant that Independents had to leave Bermuda, and most of them made their way to Eleuthera or back to England, where they complained to Parliament about their treatment, saying that even Spanish sailors who had been shipwrecked were treated better than Independents in Bermuda.        

Turner did end up being replaced as governor three or so months after the rebellion, and how that happened isn’t clear.  Thinking of the history we’ve already discussed, my guess is that when news did reach England about what Turner was doing, the Bermuda Company sent orders that he stop being governor.  They’d never quite been comfortable with his leadership.  Then, they either nominated the rebellion leader, John Trimingham, as his replacement, or they nominated an Independent and colonists, who had been saying for years that they would go “to Barbados, rather than be governed by an Independent!” ignored the order and instead nominated Trimingham.      

Either way, they had made their declaration, and they had a governor willing to defend it.  Trimingham sent an envoy to Barbados, proposing an alliance and asking for a supply of arms and ammunition to uphold the Royalist cause.  In other words, they wanted arms and ammunition to defend their separation from the English state if England sent anyone to force them into submission.  We’ve only seen this briefly considered once, but Bermuda was now preparing to fight England in order to defend its separation from the English government.        

Virginia took the matter even further, and was open enough about its plans that newspapers as far away as London were reporting the colony’s willingness to declare independence if that was what it took to avoid affiliation with a regicidal government.  Virginia had also had a second wave of Royalists come to settle, after Parliament had confiscated their estates after the second war and regicide.  Berkeley actively encouraged these to come, and this brought some relatively high ranking Royalists as well as Anglican ministers into Virginia, where they contributed to a cultural boom, and in many ways laid the foundations for the future of Virginian culture.        

There was no need for an armed rebellion in Virginia, but Upper Norfolk and Nansemond counties did expel their remaining puritans, and those people also went to Maryland’s town of Providence.  Berkeley then called an Assembly, and there the colony drafted and passed a declaration of loyalty to “the late, most excellent and now undoubtedly sainted king,” denouncing the “unparallelled treasons” perpetrated against him, and allowing for the punishment of anyone who supported the regicide, made mockery of the king’s memory, or refused to acknowledge Charles II as the legitimate ruler of Virginia.  A few individual counties also added to and expanded on this in their own local proclamations.        

After this was done, Berkeley sent Colonel Richard Lee to formally invite Charles to rule Virginia by returning his old commission and requesting a new one confirming him as governor.  With the same envoy, he also sent requests and suggestions about how best to govern the colony.  He recommended Claiborne be removed from the position of treasurer, and he wanted support in helping defend the colony against military attack from either England or New England.  He had a plan of defense, just needed approval and a little support.  As part of this support, he also encouraged Royalist military leaders to come to Virginia to help him organize any sort of necessary resistance.    

He also started building connections between the court-in-exile and Virginia.  This was easy enough, given the connections he already had.  His brothers and most of his closest friends were at the court, and now there were a handful of royalists in Virginia with similarly deep transatlantic connections also able to help with this.    

Charles responded by sending a new commission to Berkeley to run “our plantations in Virginia, who have carried themselves with so much loyalty and fidelity to the King, our father, of blessed memory,” and including in that commission directions to “build castles and forts of lime and stone for the better suppressing of such our subjects as shall at any time invade those territories.”  

Virginia wasn’t a strong colony by any stretch of the imagination, but more than any, it was serious about doing everything in its power to remain separate from the English government.  

Now, there’s actually a funny thing that’s also worth noting here.  The Virginia Company, and fears of its reemergence, were still helping to motivate the aversion to Commonwealth rule.  They had been a crown colony, and the idea of reconstituting the company had popped up from time to time, so it was not out of the realm of possibility, but the company had been dissolved a generation ago.  I mean we know how bad the Virginia Company’s leadership was, but it’s amazing and hilarious to me that after three decades, two civil wars and a revolution which was unprecedented in European history, avoiding a reconstituted Virginia Company was still a driving motivation in Virginia politics.  So, next time I’m feeling a little embarrassed, I’m going to use that to put my feelings in perspective, ha.  

Next was Maryland, and if not as overtly determined as Virginia, Maryland risked more than any other colony for its loyalty.  As we’ve seen time and again, Maryland had always been under more scrutiny than any other colony.  The most recent example of Marylanders being singled out, was that Giles Brent had been forced to leave Maryland after his estates were sequestered by Parliament.  That’s not something I’ve heard of happening to any other colonists who spent the war in America.  Unless I’m very much mistaken, it didn’t even happen to William Berkeley, even though he actually went back to England and fought for the King for a year.  Meanwhile, Baltimore was still in England, desperately trying to protect the colony and his ownership of it, and a declaration for the king would effectively doom that.              

In addition, the colony had an ever-increasing population of Puritans.  Some, recently from England, recruited by Lord Baltimore, were happier to play by the rules.  Given fact, and the timing of their move, which was just after the irrecoverable collapse of the Presbyterian movement in England, it’s a fair bet that these were mostly Presbyterians instead of Independents.  The recent transplants from Virginia, on the other hand, immediately started challenging the colony’s government once they arrived.  After getting permission to settle, the exiled Virginians immediately refused to sign the oath of allegiance, claiming “it was an oath to support a government which upheld antichrist,” and knowing the colony was too weak to actually enforce the rules against 300 of them.  After being kicked out of Virginia and welcomed in Maryland on the basis of religious liberty, these people protested extending that same freedom to the Catholics and Anglicans who had founded the colony in the first place.  They simply occupied the land, got no formal grants, paid no taxes, refused to participate in the colony’s General Assembly, and made themselves a lingering threat to Maryland’s already-tenuous stability.          

Because of all of that, the declaration for Charles II did happen in a fascinatingly different way in Maryland.  So, just to orient ourselves in time, news of the regicide reached the Chesapeake around August of 1649.  In September the new governor, William Stone, went to Virginia for three months, leaving his deputy governor, the devoted Catholic Royalist Thomas Greene, in charge.  The November meeting of the General Assembly quickly and easily declared the colony’s allegiance to Charles II as their rightful leader, and “to further the common rejoicing of the inhabitants upon that occasion,” declared a general pardon to all citizens for all offenses.  This, I’m sure, was specifically meant to appeal to Puritans who hadn’t been following the colony’s rules.                      

Stone returned in time for the next Assembly, but he didn’t address the issue, and simply went about managing the day-to-day affairs of the colony, refining Assembly procedures and so forth.  These things actually weren’t quite as trivial as I just made them seem, because they did solidify the form of government which Maryland would use until the colony did actually get independence after the Revolutionary War, but the point is, Stone allowed the declaration of submission to Charles II instead of the English government, to stand.  It was, I think, a very clever evasion, and though I am always working with limited documentation doing this podcast, and therefore can in no way prove that, there’s not a doubt in my mind that it was intentional.      

The Virginia exiles, though, were extremely displeased by the declaration of loyalty, and they weren’t persuaded to accept it by the removal of punishments that they already had no intention of accepting.  While everyone else seems to have supported or at least accepted the declaration, Providence residents reported all of the actions of Maryland’s government to England, and then started spreading rumors in Maryland that the Rump Parliament was about to overthrow the local government.  

Next was Newfoundland.  Here, the declaration was very much a top-down thing.  The colony’s leadership had always been almost exclusively Royalist, and its population was from a royalist-leaning part of England, Devon, but its miniscule population was mostly comprised of seasonal fishermen, a handful of people who catered to them, and a handful of ships’ crews who stayed over winter.  Most of the population was too preoccupied with the hardships of everyday life to make a stand, and as English ships were now almost exclusively Parliamentarian, opposing the new English government would be risky, too.  

Proprietor David Kirke, though, did declare Newfoundland for Charles II and even sent some ships to deal with any conflict resulting from the action.  Prince Rupert was in the area attacking Parliamentarian ships, so Kirke’s idea was that these ships would join forces with Rupert’s fleet.  Kirke may have been dedicated to the king’s cause, but thanks to Newfoundland’s size, proximity to New England and its non-permanent nature, this was the most minor of the rebellions we’ll discuss today, and made virtually no impact on either Newfoundland or England.            

That, however, brings us to Barbados, and news of the regicide there tore the colony apart in a much more extreme way than it did any other colony, and it was only after a year of strife that the colony made its declaration.  The strife, though, wasn’t really Royalist versus Independent.  It was the result of a small group of people manipulating already-heightened emotions in a bid for power, and very nearly getting it.                

The story of Barbados’s declaration starts with one of the many distressed cavaliers who had made their way to the colony after the first Civil War, a man named Guy Molesworth.  Molesworth was a perfect example of the embittered royalists who fled to the island.  He was in his 30s, the oldest son of a wealthy Northamptonshire family, had served as an officer under Prince Rupert’s brother, Maurice, and he had lost everything to the war and sequestration.  And it’s worth noting that by everything, this means everything his family had built over the course of generations, which had been passed down to him.  It was a big, deeply personal loss.  He’d then moved his wife and daughters to Barbados, and spent the next couple years building up a new source of wealth, and he was even selected to be the colony’s treasurer.  There was nothing particularly wrong with Molesworth’s character, but he was bitter, angry and indignant, and he was by nature an abrasive type of person.  Making friends with the island’s Parliamentarians wasn’t exactly on his to do list, and if you were to try to identify the person who was most likely to incite a rebellion and kick out Barbados’s Parliamentarians, thanks to his unpleasantness alone, you might assume it would be him.      

And that’s exactly what a man named Humphrey Walrond accused him of doing after the regicide.  Walrond was a new arrival, arriving in Barbados at almost exactly the time that news of the execution did, and he was nowhere as distinguished a cavalier or person as Molesworth.  A new world meant a new start, though, and he and his brother labeled themselves moderates, and set about making friends with the colony’s elite, Parliamentarian and Royalist alike, paying particular attention to Bell and Drax.    

While royalists reeled and fumed over the regicide, the Walronds told Drax that Molesworth was trying to stage a servant rebellion, and that he had declared that “it would never be well in this island until the Roundheads’ estates were given to the poor Cavaliers.”  To understand how feasible this was, we need to remember that a huge number of servants at this point were Royalist victims of transportation, people who had, for their loyalty to the king or some minor offense, been condemned to indentured servitude in a colony where manual labor was particularly gruelling.  They could easily be incited to rebellion, and there had in fact been an attempted rebellion a couple years before.  In the face of such threats, the Walronds said, Drax and the Parliamentarians should ally with them and defend Barbados.    

Bell wasn’t convinced, but Drax was, and he rallied Barbadian Parliamentarians to circumvent Bell’s authority and go after Molesworth.  They constituted themselves a court martial, and imprisoned Molesworth for three months while the Walronds interrogated and intimidated people into backing their accusations against Molesworth.  Even with the intimidation, there weren’t enough people who would agree to the Walronds’ story, so instead of being executed, Molesworth was banished.  As the ship carrying him away left, it was attacked by a pirate, who took what little he had managed to rebuild, and he never recovered financially.  He moved to Virginia, where he was happily embraced, and he lived there until the Restoration.  Then, he moved back to England, and long story short, his caustic bitterness pushed him to say things that caused him to be court martialed yet again and sentenced to death.  Because that sentence was also a bit of a stretch, it was commuted, and he returned home only to be sent to debtor’s prison.  When finally released from there, he got a job as a dockworker in London, where he worked until his death.  Awful story, and all of that was fundamentally caused by the Walronds’ accusations, and those accusations were false.      

But, their saving the island from Molesworth had sufficiently ingratiated the Walronds to Barbadian Parliamentarians that they were put in charge of a Committee of Public Safety.  They also got their ally, William Byam, put in Molesworth’s old position of secretary.  With that foundation of power, they immediately flipped their accusations and announced that they’d discovered a Roundhead plot to drive all Royalists from the island and finally declare Barbados’s allegiance to Parliament.  Now, the Walronds actually did what they’d accused Molesworth of planning, and led a push for Parliamentarians to be banished and their estates confiscated.  They took the issue to the General Assembly, which was now filled with Royalists.  

The thing you need to realize going forward is that the Royalists of Barbados did, in fact, have very strong desires for the colony, as they did everywhere, and independent of anything the Walronds said.  They were horrified by the regicide.  They didn’t like the Independents, and the evidence would suggest that Barbadian Independents were particularly odd in their outlook, associating with the Familists and later Quakers.  If they had to choose between being governed by King and Commonwealth, they very much wanted the former, partially for ideological reasons, and partially for reasons that people who might be more ideologically aligned to the Parliamentarians would agree with.  They feared the ever-present and now growing threat that the Commonwealth might restrict Barbadian trade, the source of their wealth.  The Walronds had easily pushed the Parliamentarians to join them by playing on existing fears, and now they were doing the exact same thing with the Royalists.  The Walronds’ push wasn’t like the Royalist rebellions we’ve seen in any other colony.  It achieved some Royalist aims, but was fundamentally a power play on the part of a very small group of people in the colony.  The Walronds manipulated people by playing up very real fears, and promising the fulfillment of very strong hopes.    

So when they went to the Assembly, most Royalists didn’t agree to the Walronds banishing their opponents, but, after a few days of persuasion, they had convinced just enough people to gain a majority.    

The strongest opponent of their push was another Royalist exile, named Thomas Modyford.  Urging refusal of the plan, he gave a speech, asking colonists to seek peace and compromise, which would also lead to plenty, in the true Barbadian way.  Then, he submitted a bill advocating that the Barbadian government simply leave people alone as long as they would submit to its authority.  The act gained traction, but the Walronds modified it until it did exactly the opposite of what Modyford had intended – declared that Independents must leave Barbados.      

Drax then led a petitioning effort to demonstrate the general opposition to the law, including among Royalists, and ask Bell to order an immediate election.  This election would still be won by Royalists, but not those who agreed with the Walronds.      

Bell accepted the petition, and in response, the Walronds set their sites on him.  They declared him a Roundhead and started publishing pamphlets criticizing him and accusing Drax of leading a Roundhead plot.  Like their accusations against Molesworth, their accusations against Drax were convincing enough that even moderate Royalists were pretty sure it was true.  The only way to stay safe, they now insisted, was to rise up in arms and destroy Barbados’s government, where the pretense of liberty “meant slavery and tyranny.”  Then, they could replace it with better leadership, and declare their allegiance to Charles II.    

Most places didn’t actually do anything, but near the Walronds’ home, they did prepare to riot.  “They swear God d*** them, they will sheath their swords in the hearts of all those who will not drink a health to the Figure II, and another to the confusion of the Independent doggs.”  

After being the governor who first made Barbados a successful colony, and who had kept it together during all the years of war, Bell had now lost control, and he would never regain it.  He issued a proclamation condemning the pamphlet war, which he said was “raised on purpose to beget intestine and civil broyles,” and ordering the punishment of anyone who continued the chaos, including the death penalty for anyone who rose in arms.  He authorized Drax to form a militia, and Drax immediately arrested Edward Walrond and William Byam.  

In response, a group of Royalists started advancing on Bridgetown, and in response to that, Bell commissioned both Drax and Modyford to raise troops to oppose them.  The two showed down, but it was Bell who ordered his forces to back down, and Bell accepted the Walronds’ terms of peace.  Independents would be disarmed, the use of the Prayer Book mandated, and the magazine at Bridgetown run by not just Royalists, but Walrond allies.  20 Barbadian Parliamentarians would also stand trial for conspiring against the island’s Royalists.  Finally, it was time that Barbados declare for Charles II as its rightful monarch.      

When he capitulated, everyone except the Walronds’ party abandoned the aging governor, and the Walronds started preparing to take complete control of the island.  

Watching the events unfold, though, was Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham.  He was anchored in Carlisle Bay, waiting for the most strategic time to introduce himself and the twin commissions he bore – one from Carlisle, and the other from Charles II, declaring him the new proprietor and governor of Barbados, respectively.  Now, he decided, was the time.  He landed and announced that by order of the king and lord proprietor, he was now the leader of Barbados.      

At the moment that the Walronds were emerging victorious, a new leader had arrived who was everything the Royalists wanted in a leader, and perhaps more.  Willoughby wasn’t against the King – in fact he had specifically gone out and gotten his commission from him instead of Parliament.  He had fought for the King, and this had also led to his property being sequestered, and his family living in poverty, so he had sacrificed for the king in the way that the other Royalists of the island had.  He supported the declaration for Charles II, and was willing to defend it.  The Walronds had been close to seizing power for themselves, but now the man standing in their way wasn’t an Independent, or the aging Bell – it was an esteemed and accomplished leader from England.        

The Walronds used their remaining momentum to push the Assembly to put a three month stay on Willoughby as governor, saying “he was once a Roundhead, and might be again,” and that they needed to have some time to evaluate him before accepting him as leader of the colony.  They would use this time to try to salvage their victory, but Willoughby had other islands to visit, and his own strategies to consider, so he didn’t fight the stay, but agreed to return in three months.  

When Willoughby left, the Walronds brought the 20 named Parliamentarians to trial, and most of them simply left Barbados rather than go through the inevitable.  Those that remained were fined exorbitant amounts, from five to 80,000 pounds of sugar, followed by the sequestration of their estates, and the passing of legislation hostile to Puritans.  Then, they tried to establish a strong political base who would reject Willoughby and support their leadership.  They promised poor Royalists shares of all the confiscated wealth.  Then, bizarrely, they told the Island’s remaining Parliamentarians that if they were put in charge, they would work to set up a popular government, saying this had been their goal all along.      

As they were doing all of this, Willoughby was touring the other islands he now controlled.  He pushed each island to hold its own legislative Assemblies rather than leaving governance to the governor’s council, alone.  His commissions, though, were rejected in every colony that leaned Parliamentarian.  Since Carlisle’s ownership was only nominal at this point thanks to the 1647 court case, Willoughby’s lease didn’t entitle him to control anything.  Interestingly, even St. Kitts refused to recognize Willoughby, because their Royalist diehard governor Thomas Warner had died a few months earlier and been replaced by someone whose main goal was to avoid conflict, which meant accepting the new Commonwealth.  Only Antigua accepted him as the legitimate proprietor.  Their governor, Henry Ashton, had been appointed by Charles I to help end the devastating conflict of Barbados’s earliest years, and he was consistently loyal to the Royalist cause.  He had led the colony in proclaiming Charles II and expelling the colony’s Independents with very little opposition, and now he accepted Willoughby with similar ease.      

When Willoughby returned to Barbados, he forged an alliance with Modyford, and together, they upheld the declaration for the king while depriving the Walronds of their government offices and returning property to both remaining and returning Barbadian Parliamentarians.  

So by 1650, there were 6 colonies who had effectively declared themselves independent from the English Commonwealth, and instead declared that their true legitimate authority was the uncrowned king living in the Netherlands.  

In response, the Rump passed an Act for Restricting Trade, which forbade all ships from all nations from trading with Virginia, Bermuda, Barbados and Antigua, and allowing privateers to pray on any ships which actually did trade with them, a particularly enticing prospect in the sugar-producing Caribbean islands.  Newfoundland wasn’t targeted because Parliament simply punished Kirke, and Maryland would be addressed separately, too.     

It will take several episodes for this story to fully play out, but for now what we have is six colonies toying with the idea of being ruled by a government other than the one ruling England, and in the Act for Restricting Trade, as we’ll soon see, a step toward the Navigation Acts.  And next week, we’re going to start looking at the beginnings of what we think of when we think of the British Empire.