Charles II kept a stronger Parliament within England than his father could have imagined, and he expanded the Navigation Acts, kept the policy of transportation, and pushed the slave trade. When news of the new king’s planned policies reached Virginia, Berkeley rushed to ask that they be revoked or modified to avoid crushing his colony.
Transcript
However they’d come about, Commonwealth innovations made Charles II’s job easier. The same couldn’t be said of all his subjects, though, especially those in the colonies. How he chose to move forward given these conflicting interests would define the future course of not just English, but world history.
Introduction
Charles II returned to an England with a lot of difficult questions to be answered, but he also returned with some advantages that previous generations of leaders hadn’t had. English society had been increasingly divided for generations at this point, but, in a way, the war had had a very cathartic effect on them. Former royalists and former parliamentarians, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Catholics alike had welcomed the Restoration in unison. Whereas Charles I had taken the throne surrounded by people ready to challenge his power, Charles II took it surrounded by people eager to embrace him.
What he had to do was avoid antagonizing anyone in a way that would cause him to lose that popularity or reopen old divisions. And he succeeded!
Even today, the Restoration is one of the more romanticized eras of English history. With the wars over, political and religious ideologies were swept aside in favor of revelry. Theater experienced a renaissance, and science boomed with thinkers like Hooke, Newton, Boyle and others forming the Royal Society. From our story, Richard Norwood was another Royal Society contributor, writing about the timing of tides, how fresh water was obtained in Bermuda, and about the whaling industry there. Some of the greatest fashion, art, architecture, music and philosophy in English history emerged in revivals of those fields. And as England’s colonial presence expanded, novelties like coffee, tea, bananas, and pineapple finally made their way into England.
The pomp and circumstance of English aristocratic culture returned. Charles allowed spectators to watch him dine, and touched for the king’s evil at Whitehall Palace every month. Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are named after him, and the names of his multiple mistresses are remembered to this day. Unlike his father, who was reserved, rule-oriented, shy and devoted to his wife, Charles II was known for his flamboyant extravagance, wit and charm.
And, armed soldiers finally disappeared from the English landscape when Charles paid them and sent them home. He could get away with paying them less than the Commonwealth owed them, so he gave them a healthy, but affordable sum of money and dismissed them. Similarly, he brought home the surviving Western Design soldiers. And English society took yet another step back toward normal.
Scotland also went back to being its own country, with its own parliament, and with Presbyterianism re-established. But, it’s also important to note that Scotland’s economy was now a shambles, especially in the rural areas, where it had collapsed completely.
But like I said, it wasn’t as simple as all that.
The issue was that Commonwealth innovations had actually fixed a lot of problems that Charles’s predecessors had faced. The biggest of these was money. England had been economically behind and its government had been woefully underfunded since the Elizabethan era. Even before that, its situation wasn’t great. Taxes became one of the rallying points for opposition against Charles I, but somewhere along the line, they were going to have to be raised. Now, though, Charles inherited a government that had enough income to do the things it needed to do. And, the Commonwealth had raised taxes so high that Charles could afford to cut them a bit, without going back to their original levels.
Even more than that, though, the health of government funding was because the Navigation Act brought in so much money via customs duties on colonial goods. So whether or not they were fair, whether or not they were appropriate, whether or not colonists approved of them, and even if they had been thought up by the very people who had killed his father, the Navigation Acts were here to stay. And that is a good illustration of the way Restoration politics worked.
Charles II ruled with one goal, and that was to avoid “going on my travels” again. He focused on his own self interest, justified that by saying others did the same, and quickly gained a reputation for secrecy, corruption and disloyalty. It was yet another way in which he was his father’s opposite, and if it sounds cynical, it’s important to remember that he’d been thrown in the deep end of dirty, revolutionary politics at the age of a modern middle schooler. He’d argued in front of Parliament for Strafford’s life, maybe not the best introduction to public life and the best of humanity, and after that he’d fought wars, he’d fled for his life, and he’d lived in exile. And in exile, he’d watched his supporters feud with each other over differences and disagreements. He wanted, above all else, to avoid experiencing that again. Cynical is perhaps my favorite descriptor of Charles II, and that cynicism was well-earned, as was the pragmatism that accompanied it.
And actually, the turn to a more Parliamentary system served Charles II well, too. He didn’t have any particularly strong ideology about how governments should run, yet another way in which he was his father’s opposite, and by allowing Parliament all the power, and in fact more, that it had demanded from his father, he both avoided conflict with Parliament, and ensured that they were the people who took the blame whenever any of his policies ruffled feathers. Ruffling feathers after everything that had happened was going to be inevitable. Everyone had a different idealized vision of what the Restoration would look like, plenty of these conflicted, and lots of people were going to be disappointed no matter what decision he made on any given issue.
His former supporters had lost everything, and his former enemies now owned it. The old political, religious, economic and social systems had been disrupted, as had old protections for the poor, and no solution to these problems was going to make everyone happy. But that didn’t have to affect Charles’s popularity. “My words are my own,” he said, “but my acts are my ministers’.”
And, as a result of this, the French ambassador described the new English government by saying it “has a monarchical appearance because there is a king, but at the bottom it is very far from being a monarchy.”
And when it came to ruffling feathers, it was also a lot more dangerous to ruffle those of his enemies than of his friends. Royalists were never going to call for the king to be deposed, because at the end of the day, his rule would always be a better and more appropriate choice to them than any possible alternative. Former Parliamentarians, though, might. So when it came time to err and appease, it was the Parliamentarians who won, more often than not.
So royalists who had lost everything to sequestration and the decimation tax now petitioned for their lands to be returned, but the request was refused … by Parliament, of course. It simply wasn’t in Parliament’s power to reverse what had legally been voluntary sales. Nicholas Crispe, that formerly fabulously wealthy Guinea Company leader who had lost everything for the Royalist Cause, now got nothing back and ended up in debtor’s prison. Three years before he died, he asked Charles to pardon him and give him a job in his new Royal African Company, citing his service to the crown, and Charles obliged with a job collecting customs duties, liveable, but not exactly amazing. Crispe’s story was one of many.
And Charles’s government continued transportation as a policy, though he did scale it back a bit. Now it would only be used as a punishment after three offenses, never without a trial, and to prevent anyone too high profile from being transported, an alternative punishment for third offenses was a 100 pound fine. Combined, these meant smaller numbers of people were sent to the colonies, I mean Commonwealth numbers were well over 100,000, and it averted the kinds of PR fiascos the policy had caused Cromwell’s government.
The bottom line with all of this is that Charles II’s Restoration monarchy was almost identical to the Commonwealth’s in form and function. Religious and political fervor were replaced by hedonistic cynicism as the driving motivation, the arts experienced a revival, and empty replicas of old traditions were reinstated, but structurally, Charles’s government bore overwhelming similarity to that which Parliament had been fighting for. In a lot of ways, this meant that the Restoration was the time when the modern form of English government was solidified, if not quite finalized. There would be no more Star Chamber, no more chance of an absolute monarchy in England, and similarly no chance of a theocratic or republican state. King and Parliament would rule together, but Parliament would have the majority of the power.
And circling back to the Navigation Acts, they weren’t just reinstated. They were expanded. They brought in money for the king and government via customs revenue, and they provided an easy market for English exports. They helped to weaken the Dutch, with whom the English were preparing for another war, and they were helping to turn England into a hub of world trade. They appeased the merchants, who tended to be very rich, very powerful, and very Parliamentarian leaning, and they were re-forming England into an empire. Charles’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza had brought as a dowry, among other things, India’s Bombay, or Mumbai, as well as Tangier in Morocco.
What made merchants richer and more powerful, also made the king richer and more powerful. So like so many things, they’d transition seamlessly into the same role in Restoration England, as they’d occupied in the Commonwealth. Warwick’s Committee for Foreign Plantations was replaced by the commissioners and Lords of Trade and Plantations.
So, where the Navigation Act of 1651 had said that all trade must be conducted via English Merchants, the 1661 Act kept that rule and added that most colonial products must be sold within England before being sold to other countries. So even if an English merchant wanted to buy Virginia tobacco and sell it to the Netherlands, he would have to sell it to another English merchant, and that person could sell it to the Dutch. There were exceptions to this rule, but all of those exceptions were exports of the colonies in and surrounding New England. They were fish, meat, grain and lumber, which were mostly sold from New England and Newfoundland to Southern Europe or exchanged for slaves in Africa and the Dutch West Indies.
A couple years later, the Staple Act of 1663 went even further and forced colonists to buy all their supplies, whether necessities or luxuries, from England. The exceptions were salt and wine, which could come from Southern Europe, so again a New England-focused trade, and horses, which could come from Ireland and Scotland.
And connected to the Navigation Acts, the slave trade would also remain. In fact, now it would be even more directly backed by the king than it had been by the Commonwealth government. The Guinea Company was replaced by the Royal African Company, and put under the control of his brother James, Duke of York. The new company declared the slave trade to be one of its primary objectives. And the Restoration government actively worked to make colonies adopt slavery as a labor source. It forbade colonial governments from restricting or banning slavery. It also allowed colonists to buy slaves on credit, making it a much more accessible labor source than indentured servitude for poorer colonists.
The driving force behind all colonial decisions under the Commonwealth had started to become what was good for England, without regard for what was good for the colonies. This policy continued during the Restoration. While people went into debt planting tobacco with no relief, the government subsidized Caribbean Indigo, which never made a profit but provided blue dye that wealthy Englishmen wanted. And, while the Navigation Acts pushed Virginia back into seemingly inescapable poverty, they allowed New England to flourish.
And, though I’ll have to cover this in another episode, Charles started dismantling proprietary grants and claiming those colonies for the crown. Baltimore would continue to own Maryland, and New England and Bermuda were left alone for the time being. Meanwhile, he gave friends and creditors new proprietary grants to American colonies. This included giving Virginia’s Northern Neck to a group of friends.
Obviously, there were a lot of people who were disappointed by the decisions of the Restoration government, especially former cavaliers, and perhaps none more than the colonists. And among colonists, none more than those of Virginia.
When Virginia heard what was happening, Berkeley immediately planned to go to England. It was so much bad news, so fast, that it provoked another round of rumors that the king was getting ready to revive the Virginia Company. I kind of find it funny that even in 1661, that was the colony’s greatest fear, that four decades after the company had been disbanded, that was the worst case scenario that entered colonists’ minds when English government actions pushed colonists to panic, but what’s really important is that Charles II had done that.
The Navigation Acts had already pushed Virginia into an economic decline, even though colonists had disobeyed it when they could. If they continued, they would push the colony into economic freefall. The price of tobacco in England was already lower than it had ever been, and a lot of this had to do with a dramatic oversupply. Virginia had four times as many people in 1660 than it did in 1642, and Maryland had twenty times as many people. Combined, their numbers meant the Chesapeake had five times as many people as it had before the wars, and almost all of these people were growing tobacco.
And this is because, just like early settlers, the vast majority of people had come without any real skills that would help them make a living in the New World. Whether they were distressed cavaliers or transported indentured servants, it didn’t matter. Tobacco was easy to grow, and they were surrounded by people who could teach them to grow it, so they learned and continued the practice.
But, the result of all of this was that there were over 50,000 tobacco planters in the Chesapeake alone, vying for the business of a few dozen English merchants. Meanwhile, a year’s supply of tobacco surplus was already stored in England. That trade imbalance gave merchants the distinct upper hand, and enabled them to sell tools at a high enough price, and buy tobacco at a low enough price, to drive even the most diligent planters into debt. People went without shoes and winter clothes, and still they couldn’t make ends meet. Fortunately, they grew most of their own food, but they still needed the tools to be able to do that, and those tools came from England.
Trade with the Dutch had delayed this freefall, but Virginia was perilously close to it. In 1660, tobacco prices were as low as they’d ever been. By 1661, the freefall had started. By 1664, prices were so low that they barely covered the two shilling export duty. This meant that planters were left with nothing, and the only money entering the colony went to the Burgesses and county Justices of the Peace. Those people then lent the money to the farmers, meaning farmers were going into debt, too, while even the richest Virginians were making virtually no money. And prices were still dropping. They wouldn’t reach their lowest until 1668.
And as the prices dropped to these unprecedented low levels, this desperation was starting to create a positive feedback loop. Trade with the Dutch had stalled that, but when the Restoration started, so did the loop. Desperate planters sold everything they could, from quality leaves to improperly cured leaves, to rotten stems shoved into barrels in the hopes that no one would notice. This both increased the tobacco supply even further, and gave Virginia tobacco a bad reputation in England, so merchants were willing to pay even less for it. Berkeley could explain this to people as much as he wanted, and he could pass laws against selling worthless tobacco at the General Assembly, but at the end of the day, if selling a barrel of rotten stems let you buy your kid a pair of shoes, or more dire still, the tools you needed to grow food, the law of supply and demand wasn’t going to stop you from selling it.
When the Restoration had been announced, Virginians had immediately negotiated a trade agreement with the Dutch at New Netherland in anticipation of being allowed to trade with foreign markets again and stabilize the Virginia economy. Meanwhile, Berkeley had, in his time out of office, actually managed to cultivate crops that would allow Virginia to diversify its economy with a little investment. He had even grown silk, the ultimate Virginia economic dream. But people were at the point of selling rotten tobacco stems to survive. They couldn’t invest either time or money into diversifying, even if they wanted to.
So Berkeley went to England to stop the Navigation Acts. He had connections, including two brothers on the king’s Privy Council, as well as a solid understanding of Virginia’s needs, and he’d also been named as one of the commissioners on the new Council for Foreign Plantations. He called an election for a new Assembly, named the man who would act as governor in his absence, gathered some cloth made from silk he’d grown as a gift to the king and proof of his success, and sailed to England.
And soon after arriving, he attended his first Council meeting. There, commissioners assured him that there were no plans to revive the Virginia Company. They asked him all about conditions in Virginia, and then asked him to write down his answers for them in the next couple of weeks. Berkeley agreed to their request, but held off. He had to hold his cards close to his chest until he knew exactly how to best advocate for his colony.
Next, he gathered a group of merchants sympathetic to the idea of opening up free trade, at least for Virginia. And with that group behind him, he spoke with the Privy Council to ask that the Navigation Act be repealed. And perhaps surprisingly, the Council agreed almost immediately to allow Virginia to trade with foreign merchants. That was ideal, a best case scenario, but as soon as this policy had been declared, another group of merchants demanded it be reversed. And this group was full of far more powerful and influential merchants than Berkeley’s allies were, so just as quickly as Virginia had been allowed free trade, the right was taken away again.
But Berkeley was actually ready for this. He had a plan b, a set of proposed policies which, even if the Navigation Act were to remain in place, would negate their most severe effects on the Virginia economy. He spent a few months regrouping to lay out his case for those, and while he did, he immersed himself in London society. He even wrote a play, which was performed, and which Samuel Pepys even wrote about in his famous diary. Pepys’s diary is one of our main primary sources for the Restoration period, giving us perhaps the best glimpse we have into everyday life and attitudes of the time. Regarding Berkeley’s play, The Lost Lady, Pepys said he saw it twice. The first time, he didn’t like it much because he was distracted by the fact that four of his office clerks were sitting in more expensive seats than he was. The second time, though, he was able to sit in a dark place where no one could see him, and he liked it more. During that performance, a woman did accidentally spit on him, but she was pretty, so he wasn’t bothered. Restoration attitudes, in a nutshell.
Berkeley’s main endeavor, though, was to write out the document that the commissioners had requested of him. Instead of simply jotting down a few notes, though, he wrote and published his full case for diversifying Virginia’s economy. He timed the publication to coincide with his next Privy Council appearance, and distributed copies to king, commissioners and council.
In lieu of the Navigation Act being repealed, Berkeley said Virginia needed the following policies to address the trade imbalance with the merchants and allow Virginia to recover.
The first policy was a moratorium on tobacco imports for a year to reduce the oversupply of tobacco in England. This had to be mandated by the English government, though, because if Virginia did it alone, Maryland and the Island colonies would just fill in the gap they left. Virginia had asked for Maryland’s cooperation in this, but Maryland had refused. In discussing this, Berkeley insinuated that Maryland had been built on land that was originally Virginia’s, and that while he didn’t fundamentally have a problem with that, he did have a problem with the fact that Maryland’s refusal to cooperate with him was now causing such severe problems.
Second, some English farmers had started planting their own tobacco, and that just needed to stop.
Third, by regulating trading locations, England could foster the formation of cities in Virginia. This would enable more skilled labor to move to Virginia, which would make the colony more self-sustaining, as well as enable it to export manufactured goods like leather, yarn, pitch, tar and silk. Three of Berkeley’s allies wrote their own pamphlets about the importance of these policies. Two were merchants, and one was an Anglican minister who emphasized the positive effect towns would have on Virginia’s religious and civil society.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, Berkeley said there needed to be a law which made it illegal for merchants to trade for tobacco any time other than late spring, and which required them to sail away from Virginia in convoys to reduce the risk of piracy. This rule would enable Virginia farmers to negotiate a fairer price for their tobacco in the long term, because as it was, they couldn’t even negotiate a fair price by the standards of the time.
With the current situation, planters didn’t know when the next ship would arrive. They were desperate to sell on the first ships to arrive in their area, because it was possible that no other ships would show up. Merchants knew that planters were desperate, so they could pit them against each other and in doing that buy tobacco for unreasonably low prices, even by the standards of the time. Planters, afraid they wouldn’t be able to sell their crops in time to buy any necessary supplies, prioritized selling fast over getting a fair price. They sold what they could as fast as they could, for whatever the merchants would give them for it, because if they didn’t, the merchants would just go buy from someone else. They went without winter clothes because the risk otherwise was starving because they had no farming implements. Meanwhile, merchants’ greatest financial risk, and one which was clearly used as a talking point in tobacco negotiations, was piracy. So, forcing the ships to sail in groups would reduce this, too. But again, this rule had to come from England, because Maryland wouldn’t cooperate, and if Virginia implemented it unilaterally it would simply be giving up trade for no benefit to themselves.
This set of policies, Berkeley said, would allow the Virginia economy to stabilize instead of going down the dark, dark road it was currently on.
And Berkeley emphasized that he was not only asking these things for Virginia’s wellbeing. If Virginia could make enough money to survive by selling tobacco, its economy would stabilize and then it could actually diversify. He had brought proof of the fact that Virginia could produce silk, and he’d also raised flax, hemp, cattle for leather, horses, sheep for yarn, rice, pitch and tar, and Virginia could also produce iron. With a little skilled labor, that meant it could produce even more commodities, as well as the tools needed for Virginia to be self-sufficient and economically productive. And as this diversification developed, and Virginia produced valuable commodities that England would love to have, Virginia would grow to be an affluent place that could serve as a big market for English goods, in fact, the biggest in the colonies. Within seven years, he said, it could be buying more English exports than Barbados did. Berkeley didn’t elaborate on this on this argument, but in 1660, Virginia had more English people than Barbados did because so much of Barbados’s population was made up of slaves. Slaves weren’t going to be buying English exports. Planters could, and indentured servants could once they had their freedom, and that’s who populated Virginia.
Virginia could have as robust an economy as New England, and as profitable an economy as Barbados, if only Charles would adopt the policies he’d laid out. And he wouldn’t even have to get rid of the Navigation Acts. And while Berkeley was probably overstating this, he made a good case for there being a fair amount of truth to his argument.
And he added that if Charles would follow up these policies with a little bit of investment, something he could pay for with an extra penny on tobacco duties, or if not investment, a debt moratorium for four years to enable planters to invest what they’d otherwise have to pay on existing debt, progress could go even faster. Virginia could be not just stable, but thriving, within seven years. Like I said, that’s probably overstating how fast Virginia could turn around, but not by all that much. It didn’t take a decade for Barbados to go from its own “starving time” to being fabulously wealthy. If Virginians could survive, they could thrive.
Berkeley had the highest of hopes for Virginia, but instead, it was a colony of 40,000 people, the richest of whom were poor by English standards, and getting poorer, and the poorest of whom were hanging by a thread, and getting deeper and deeper into debt to pay for that thread.
“We cannot but resent,” wrote Berkeley. “That 40,000 people should be impoverished to enrich little more than 40 merchants, who being the only buyers of our tobacco, give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please, and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates, than any other men have slaves. For they find them meat, drink and clothes, [whereas] we furnish ourselves and our seamen with meat and drink, and all our sweat and labor, as they order us, will hardly procure us coarse clothes to keep us from the extremities of heat and cold. Yet if these pressures of us did advance the customs, or benefit the nation, we should not repine, but that it does the contrary to both, I shall easily evidence when commanded.”
Of these things, Charles agreed to prevent tobacco growing within England, and he did. As for the rest, he agreed that it would be really great if Berkeley did them, but offered no help, nor even the promise of enforcement of any policies Berkeley managed to pass. Baltimore appeared before the Privy Council to speak against the idea of a trading moratorium, and even some of Berkeley’s allies wouldn’t back him up on the idea of regulated trading times. Charles said that Berkeley should negotiate with Baltimore and the merchants to try to pass what he could, but offered no help with either negotiations, or enforcement in the extremely unlikely event that everyone would agree to Berkeley’s plans. But of course, Charles supported the ideas enough that it couldn’t be his fault if Berkeley failed.
And though Berkeley didn’t know it at the time, the favorites to whom Charles had given Virginia’s Northern Neck leased their rights to a group of Bristol merchants. This created another group of people who would have to agree with Berkeley’s ideas in order for them to pass, and that group was also merchants. It pushed the idea of diversification even further out of reach.
But, in honor of Virginia’s steadfast loyalty to the royal cause, Charles did give the colony a nickname. He dubbed it the Old Dominion, which it of course uses to this day. Charles also gave Berkeley a bit of a raise, as well as a new set of orders which conformed better to how Berkeley ran and wanted to run Virginia, as well as a stake in a brand new colonial venture. A group of people, including Berkeley’s brothers, as well as Monck and the Earl of Clarendon, had collectively become the lords proprietor of a new colony, to be located just south of Virginia, called Carolina. Berkeley was a great addition to the venture because he’d be living near Carolina and had experience in the area.
And with all that decided, Charles and his advisors ordered Berkeley to return to Virginia, and Berkeley couldn’t get there fast enough. The trip to England had been slow, frustrating, and ultimately a dismal failure, nickname aside.
But that’s how the Restoration worked. Greed and corruption, obfuscated by a little bit of money here, and an empty gesture there. The Restoration had done what Cromwell hadn’t been able to. It dispersed the Army, solidified the empire, and defeated Berkeley, Virginia, and the cavaliers.
And it wasn’t long after Berkeley returned to Virginia that surviving colonial accounts started describing him as looking old and frail.
Next week, we’re going to start exploring how Barbados and the West Indies fared during the Restoration.