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Episode 9: Polarization, moderation, and the end of the first Civil War
Today’s episode revolves around a tale of two colonies, Bermuda and Barbados. Two colonies with divided sympathies, and two colonies which distinguished themselves over the course of the first English Civil War. Bermuda, because it polarized much more quickly than most other colonies, and Barbados, because it remained remarkably neutral and moderate.
Introduction
From 1645 to 1646, both of these colonies would face challenges to their reactions to the war. And that’s what we’ll discuss today. We’ll start with Bermuda, because that story is very intertwined with debates going on in England at the time, and what happened there will also put some aspects of Barbados’s experience into perspective.
Because, last time we discussed Bermuda, its congregational ministers had split from the Church and immediately cut off access of the vast majority of the population to any sort of religious ritual. They could listen to preaching, but baptism, communion, weddings, funerals were all off the table for anyone who didn’t agree to the ministers’ new proposed theology, and who wasn’t accepted by the ministers as a visible saint.
The government of the island had sided so strongly with the ministers that the two had created a rather tyrannical little group that seriously bullied Presbyterians and Anglicans, even pushing the island’s sole Presbyterian minister to return to England, and they had evidently driven quite a few of the island’s Presbyterians to try moving to Trinidad. Some had also sent letters and petitions to the Somers Islands Company, and also to William Prynne, who was something of a Puritan hero at this point in time. He was the man whose ears Archbishop Laud had had cut off for statements which seemingly called the Queen a whore. And, he was the lawyer who had prosecuted Laud and had him condemned to death. Prynne was a steadfast Presbyterian, and one of the leaders most strongly opposing the Congregationalist and Independent movements in England. He was also very closely connected to Thomas Lechford, the Presbyterian critic of New England’s Congregationalism.
Now, Prynne was probably personally appalled at what was going on in Bermuda, but he also saw it as an opportunity to illustrate what Presbyterians saw as the dangers of the Independent movement. Bermuda’s Presbyterians equated the Congregationalists’ theology with all sorts of radical religious movements, and said that the ministers would allow people’s children to die without being baptized if they wouldn’t submit to them and agree to that theology. They said the Congregationalist ministers “declare that they are not subject to any human power,” and that in response to the Company’s direct orders to disband the Congregation until Parliament decided on England’s religious future, Copeland in particular had said that he simply wouldn’t obey anyone unless he agreed with them. So they demanded complete obedience, while they themselves denied any authority above them. This was horrifying if you were the average 17th Century Englishman, even if you took out the harassment of people like Richard Norwood and Richard Beake.
And while Prynne published pamphlets on Bermuda, the Company worked to stop Bermuda’s Congregationalists. We don’t know exactly how they went about addressing the complaints, or exactly what the rationale was behind their behavior, but first they appointed two other men to govern along with Sayle, forming a triumverate. The problem was, of the triumverate, two were Congregationalists and one Presbyterian, so the core issue had not been addressed. The sole Presbyterian was still outnumbered. The abuses continued, and the complaints strengthened, sent to Company and Parliament alike.
Petitioners asked the Company very bluntly at this point to “settle such a governor and such a minister as may lead and teach us in the ways of Faith and good life and not trouble our heads with Christ’s coming to reign upon the earth a thousand years personally, with many such fancies. But such ministers as we desire as will submit to that which shall be established by Authority.” In other words, no more of this millenary thought. Either Anglicans or Presbyterians would be fine, but no more Congregationalists, as either governor or minister.
And the Company agreed. In 1645, they did away with Sayle completely, and put the thoroughly Presbyterian Josias Forster back in the position of governor. They didn’t send over Presbyterian ministers right away, but it’s quite possible that they simply had a hard time recruiting any. That has been a continued theme through our story, and the difficulty of recruiting people to go to the colonies was only exacerbated in the years of Civil War.
But things still didn’t get better. Forster was anti-Congregationalist, but he was still only one man. He still had a Council comprised primarily of Congregationalists, and there still weren’t any Presbyterian ministers on the island. And it really seems, from what sparse data there is, that he wanted to reconcile the Presbyterians and Congregationalists. He wasn’t particularly in it for the domination of his personal faction, and he didn’t have a particularly forceful personality. And, you could imagine that he would have felt some awkwardness in treating Congregationalists as the enemy, when he himself was a Presbyterian, a form of Puritan, and at least a moderate Parliamentarian.
So still nothing changed, and residents sent yet another petition to the Company and Parliament, essentially telling them that things still weren’t fixed, and that half measures weren’t going to fix anything. They were either going to have to commit to addressing this issue, or things would get even worse. “One of our ministers,” they told the Company. “Declared publicly that they will maintain what they have begun to the chin in blood.”
And the Company listened, and sent yet another replacement governor. This time, a man named Thomas Turner, who was wholeheartedly an Anglican, and a Royalist. In fact, he was an Anglican and a Royalist who was living in England at the time, so he had experienced the harshness of the War, and he had no desire to deal with, well, probably any Parliamentarians, but certainly not Congregationalists. He arrived with two Presbyterian ministers, and the kind of commitment the Island’s non-Congregationalists had been hoping for.
Immediately after arriving, he called a special assembly, and three weeks later it met. There, every single Congregationalist, and indeed every single dedicated Parliamentarian, was kicked out of the legislature, and the Governor’s Council. In the course of about a day, Congregationalists went from holding most of the power in Bermuda, to holding absolutely none at all.
And then Turner and his government began retaliating against the Congregationalists. Life seems to have become every bit as unbearable for them, as it was for others under their control. Turner forbade meetings of Independent Congregations, or more accurately I suppose he strongly enforced the Company’s policy forbidding them, imposing a fine of 20 shillings per meeting on anyone who attended such services. When White disregarded the ruling, he was put in jail, and Copeland was put under house arrest.
So now, it was the Congregationalists’ turn to petition to England, and start seeking refuge elsewhere.
So, two Congregationalist ministers, White and Goulding, went to England with their own petition to Parliament asking for support of their Congregationalist Church, bringing letters from other Bermuda Congregationalists supporting their claims, and accusing their opponents, including Forster, of being secret Royalists, an accusation which echoed those leveled at Presbyterians in England, like the Earl of Essex.
The White Goulding mission wasn’t only important for the history of Bermuda. It became one of those moments in American history which also influenced the course of events in England. Because it became the exact moment which signaled the tipping point from Presbyterian to Independent domination of English political and religious life.
When last we discussed English puritan debates and the Westminster Assembly, Presbyterians were firmly in charge. Numbers were on their side, the Scots were on their side, they had more nobility on their side, they had had more time to organize, everything. Parliament leaned Presbyterian, though it would be more accurate to call them Erastian, meaning they were ok with whatever Puritan settlement emerged as long as Parliament was the ultimate religious authority in the country. Congregationalists were mostly people who had spent time in the Netherlands or America, and it was a much more recent Puritan movement. And indeed, the Westminster Assembly had remained essentially pro Presbyterian, just leaving some room for potentially, possibly allowing some of the less radical Congregations the “liberty of conscience” to hold their own Churches with some oversight in the future.
But, since we last discussed England’s religious life, the country had undergone some massive changes, and though they were primarily military and political in nature, they would change the course of England’s religious future.
And it really came down to what was going on in the war. The Presbyterians supported negotiating a peace with the King, and the Independents didn’t. And even more importantly, Parliament’s real domination of the war had come about when it authorized the creation of the New Model Army. The New Model Army was a revolutionary concept in a number of ways, but most important to our story, it became a breeding ground of radicalism. And, it became an unstoppable enough military force to lend that radicalism some credibility. While the Presbyterian Earl of Essex was floundering so much on the field people thought he was secretly working for the King – General Fairfax and New Model Army were cleaning house.
So the average person with even the slightest hint of Parliamentary sympathy could look at Essex, indeed the House of Lords in general, and then over at the New Model Army, and one was a whole lot more impressive than the other. And it was the impressive one which was advocating the Independent movement. So the popularity of the Independents began to rise, everywhere, including in Parliament. And it was in this atmosphere that, well, first, Parliament had to actually decide on what England’s religious future should look like, and second, that White and Goulding came to speak before Parliament. They were a perfect focus of debate.
Prynne attacked them, reiterating all his previous complaints, publishing anything he could get his hands on from the Bermuda anti-Congregationalists, and noting that for all their talk of “liberty of conscience,” when Bermuda Congregationalists had gotten liberty of conscience, they’d denied it to Presbyterians. And they attacked him right back, rejecting accusations of radicalism and equating their Church to those of New England, which were well respected. White also attacked Prynne personally, saying any previous victories Prynne had won for the Puritan cause hadn’t been out of personal quality, but rather personal offensiveness. “A cock fed with garlic,” White dubbed him. “Which overcomes with rankness of breath, not with strength of body.”
They were fighting both for the future of Bermuda and that of England, at a time when Independents were very much increasing in strength, but hadn’t yet won tangible power. But less than two weeks after White and Goulding published their response to Prynne, the Commons granted their petition. They sent it to Warwick’s Committee on Foreign Plantations to hammer out the details. That committee was extremely evenly divided between Presbyterians and Independents, but under the Presbyterian Earl of Warwick, they went even farther than Parliament’s initial decision – granting Bermudian Independents the freedom to preach anywhere they went in the New World, as long as they were obedient to the civil magistrate. This effectively set the stage for allowing Congregationalists to preach freely in all American colonies. And, it would be very difficult to do that and then deny that liberty to Congregationalists at home, too.
And indeed, it was just a months after making this decision that Parliament officially reconvened its Committee for Accommodation, whose job it was to figure out exactly how to allow Independents liberty of conscience in England while still protecting the country from serious heresies. And the next spring, it officially rejected the Westminster Assembly’s purely Presbyterian proposal for England’s Church governance. Just a few months after the White Goulding mission, Independents had won.
The Book of Common Prayer had been abolished, lay preaching had been banned. Bishops had been banned and their lands confiscated. And now, the Westminster Assembly had been gutted, and with it the burgeoning Presbyterian Church of England.
But in Bermuda, the fights continued. The Presbyterians hated the Congregationalists, and the Congregationalists hated the Presbyterians. Things had devolved into a situation of pure spite and hatred, and the Island was consumed in a bitter feud. When Norwood wrote to Prynne in 1647, he said that both sides were doing whatever they could to harm the other. And so we leave Bermuda, every bit as divided as it was before, though now with a more even division of power.
In contrast to Bermuda, when we left Barbados, Governor Philip Bell was steering an emphatically neutral path through the murky years of war. The most iconic policy to enforce and illustrate Barbadian neutrality was the Turkey Rule, which mandated that everyone caught using the derogatory words “cavalier” and “roundhead” throw a party for everyone who heard them, serving a pig and a turkey. Very cute, set the tone, though obviously a lot more leadership went into it than that. Bell, himself a moderate Parliamentarian and Presbyterian, was far more fundamentally the same rigid, moderate, rule-focused person he’d been in Bermuda and on Providence Island, and he was very much in his element leading Barbados at such a divisive time.
And, in 1645, Barbados was still plugging away in much the same manner. It was continuing to work on its sugar production, which was just on the verge of becoming the fabulously profitable commodity we think of it as being. And this was starting to cause the types of social changes which infamously went along with that.
And to fully understand what’s going on in Barbados in 1645, we again have to go back to England, at least briefly. This time, though, it’s not about a major political battle. Instead, it’s really about the fallout of the war for individuals on the defeated side, namely, the Royalists.
Barbados, if you recall, was a proprietary colony. Along with most of the other English Caribbean Islands (the biggest exception being Trinidad), it was owned by the Earl of Carlisle, though ownership of Barbados in particular had been disputed before the war.
Carlisle was a Royalist. And as it began to win the war, Parliament began to sequester Royalist estates. Essentially, this meant it seized Royalist properties, and gave the property back if the Royalist pledged not to fight Parliament again, and paid a fine, which was determined by the worth of the estate and how much support they’d given the Royalist cause. It had announced this policy, if you recall, back in 1642, and had set up committees to implement it in 1643, the same year as they set up Warwick’s committee in charge of the American Colonies.
Carlisle was one of the early Royalists whose estates were sequestered, in large part because of his Colonial interest, and after the sequestration, Parliament declared that it was in control of his Caribbean colonies. This, incidentally, is when the King tried to send over new leadership for Barbados, the Earl of Marlborough, which Bell and Barbados rejected. Though, incidentally, St. Kitts, Montserrat and Santa Cruz all accepted Marlborough. St. Kitts, though we don’t know a huge amount about its history at this time, consistently seems to be firmly in the Royalist camp, and this is a perfect example of that, as is its policy in 1646, of not allowing London-based ships to dock, or Londoners to land in the colony. Nevis always leaned more toward Parliament, though it had unsuccessfully tried to remain neutral, and it also rejected Marlborough. Interestingly, Antigua also rejected him, and Antigua is another colony whose actions skew decisively Royalist, but for Antigua, accepting Marlborough meant rejecting Carlisle, and Antigua was loyal to its Proprietor. But, back to Barbados, Bell wanted to maintain neutrality, and that meant rejecting the King’s commission. Much to the Earl of Warwick’s chagrin, though, it also meant rejecting Parliament’s proposed leadership changes in Barbados.
First, his Committee for Foreign Plantations started passing bills which would encourage allegiance to Parliament, things like potential tax and customs breaks, and the authorization for colonies’ inhabitants to elect their own governors, a longstanding source of dispute in almost every colony. That said, this election would always be subject to Parliamentary approval, so it wasn’t a real increase in self determination, but it was meant to make Parliament’s increasing authority over the colonies more attractive.
And with all this organized, in December of 1643, Warwick wrote a letter to Bell and his Council, demanding Barbados’s allegiance to Parliament. Carlisle’s estates had been sequestered, and at the time they wrote the letter his property hadn’t been returned. Parliament was offering some incentives and benefits to encourage this allegiance. And they knew Bell was a moderate Puritan and Parliamentarian anyway, so this should be a no brainer. They were owned by Parliament, and they should declare their loyalty. A couple months later, though, they got Barbados’s response. Bell explained that Barbados was not in a position to aid either King or Parliament, and that they were dependent on supplies and provisions from England. They had decided to be neutral for their own safety and wellbeing. They hadn’t accepted the King’s commission, and they had continued to trade with Parliamentary merchants, so Parliament really had no business interfering with them, and should just leave them alone. They weren’t a Royalist colony. They were a neutral colony, and they would stay that way.
By the time Bell’s response arrived, sequestration had had its desired effect on the Earl of Carlisle. He paid his 800 pound fine, and then not only did he abandon his support of the Royalist cause, he became an active Parliamentarian. And with Carlisle on their side, Warwick’s committee started to push even harder for Barbados to abandon its neutral course.
This is the time that Warwick considered replacing Bell with John Humfrey, the former New Englander who he’d picked to lead Providence Island in 1641, and a man who would go on to be a personal assistant to Oliver Cromwell, and a participant in the trial of the King. But this plan didn’t get too far.
By March of 1646, though, as we really pick up our story, Warwick and his committee had prepared a trio of commissions to try to push Barbados to declare its loyalty for Parliament. Parliament was victorious, and it was time for Barbados to declare its true allegiance. Why was Barbados singled out for this treatment? I’m not sure, but it kind of makes sense. It was growing to be one of the most attractive American colonies, and it also wasn’t the kind of overtly Royalist hornet’s nest that Virginia was. It was the biggest neutral colony, run by a long time associate of Warwick, owned by a now Parliamentarian, and therefore a pretty logical place for Parliament to start asserting its colonial authority.
But, Barbados was far more committed to its neutrality than Carlisle had been to his Royalism.
So, when the commissioners arrived in Barbados, they presented the first commission, explaining that Barbados was back under Carlisle’s proprietorship, and Carlisle was a Parliamentarian, so they should obey their proprietor and profess allegiance to Parliament. Warwick pushed Bell “to seriously consider of what is propounded in the general letter, the holding out an opportunity to procure the former neutrality of the Barbados to be forgotten, which if it should continue will not possibly admit at this time a tolerable Interpretation.”
In other words, if Barbados continued its neutrality, it would be interpreted as disloyalty, but if Barbados declared for Parliament, its previous loyalty wouldn’t be questioned.
And, I don’t really know what response Warwick was expecting, because even after reading about Bell’s character 350 years later I could tell you that wasn’t going to convince him. And it didn’t. Bell explained that the residents of every individual Barbados parish had voted that nothing would change on Barbados until King and Parliament were reunited. Barbados had declared its honor for Parliament, “but yet their allegiance to the King.” And they had decided “not to receive any alteration of government, until God should be so merciful unto us as to unite the King and Parliament.
Now in the context of 1646, that was the kind of talk which got Presbyterians accused of being secret Royalists. It was neutral, but it was the kind of firm, unapologetic neutral in the face of Parliamentary victory which prompted Warwick to question Barbados’s true allegiance. I mean there were more and more Independents willing to say more and more openly that there shouldn’t be a King at all, and in fact, the growing popularity of this notion had pushed quite a few people who had initially been Parliamentarians to switch allegiance to the King. Though Barbados couldn’t have anticipated it at the time, this was the kind of statement which would almost de facto push their colony into the Royalist camp a few years down the line, even though they didn’t intend it at the time.
But undeterred, Warwick’s men pulled out the second commission, which offered liberty of conscience to all Barbadians, indeed, the same liberty of conscience which had come about as a result of White and Goulding’s mission, but Bell responded that Barbados already respected freedom of worship. They didn’t allow blasphemy, heresy or the intentional preaching of known errors in the fundamentals of Faith. They had clamped down on rabble rousers and real extremists, and they required inhabitants to attend some form of public preaching on Sundays, but that was about it. Barbados had already developed a system of limited toleration, and they didn’t need English Parliamentarians messing with it. All the religious disputes going on in England, and Barbados had already settled them in a way that left pretty much everyone on the island content. Again, you have nothing to offer us, and we don’t need your interference, go.
So, Warwick’s men pulled out the third commission, and this one was a bit more stick than carrot. It simply ordered Barbados not to trade with Royalists anymore. It explained Bristol had fallen, Royalists were now little more than targets for Parliamentary privateers, so Barbados was ordered to deny them trade. And, because Barbados hadn’t been cooperative, they were authorized “to call the Governor and some of the Council into question for some pretended acts of injustice here past.” In other words, they were prepared to set up a court of inquiry against Bell and the Council. They’d offered to forget everything if Barbados would declare its allegiance to Parliament, but now they would investigate everything if the colonists didn’t back down.
Warwick may have intended to intimidate Barbadians into submission, but all this accomplished was to irritate them into further defiance. Part of the reason for Barbados’s rigid neutrality is that it did have both Royalists and Parliamentarians. The longstanding political divisions on the Island had caused huge problems in the years before the war had started, and now it was an even more fragile society thanks to the added socio economic pressures. Barbados could easily get pulled into severe and destructive clashes, and Bell was in large part responsible for preventing that. And Barbadians by and large recognized this. Parliamentarians complained about seeing Bell investigated by people who were so obviously inferior to him and who were conducting biased investigations. Royalists had even more reason to be antagonistic. It was a very poorly played hand from start to finish, and Warwick’s attempts were thoroughly rebuffed.
But it wasn’t over. When the commissioners returned to England, Warwick responded by appointing a group of experienced ships’ captains to keep Royalists away from Barbados and ensure the Island couldn’t trade with them. This dramatically reduced the number of ships actually entering Barbados’s ports, and therefore the amount of food and supplies that the colony was able to import. Barbados needed that food and those supplies, so it compensated by increasing trade with New England, and also the Dutch. This fueled the rumblings of English merchants who thought colonists should be required to trade with English ships. “Divers worldly minded persons wilfully neglect to ship their merchandise in English vessels, but employ house-moores and danes to drive their trade in foreign vessels,” read one petition to Parliament.
As 1646 came to a close, Warwick was still trying to convince Bell to declare Barbados’s allegiance to Parliament, ever more ominously explaining the hopelessness of the Royalist cause, the benefits of doing so, and the dangers of refusing. “I was in hopes ere this time to have received advertisement of the Islands’ rendering a perfect obedience to Parliament, which would certainly have much advantaged and secured the Interest and Trade of the Inhabitants,” and that “You will, I suppose, by those that are now going from hence to be informed of the true state of affairs here, which if well considered may rationally and strongly advise the deserting of whatever may disoblige the Parliament’s Care and respect towards you, whereof I have you seriously to consider.”
But Barbados wouldn’t budge, and even James Drax, a far more committed Parliamentarian than Bell, wrote to Warwick emphasizing his own personal loyalty to the Parliamentary cause, but explaining that Barbados still intended to remain neutral. And, in response, Warwick again replied that he hoped the hopeless position of Royalists in England would cause them to reconsider that position.
This type of sheer, unyielding defiance is something we’ll see again from Barbados, and we’ll actually see some of the earliest inklings of the Revolutionary spirit come out of this colony, interestingly enough. And looking at how this story plays out, you can sort of see why. Barbados had found a unity of purpose that transcended the Civil War going on in the mother country, and an independent identity which in at least some ways proved more important than its societal divisions. There will certainly be tests and even changes to this in the future, but this is a fairly significant thing.
And that really brings us to the end of the First English Civil War, and I suppose a little beyond its end. It’s a war which historians have traditionally characterized as a Gentleman’s War, with chivalry and each side seeing the other as a worthy opponent, though modern historians have rejected that interpretation because there was actually a gradual escalation of massacres and shocking violence on both sides. The gloves were still on, though, ideologically, politically and even militarily. The radicals have mostly been confined to the fringes of our discussion. Most of what we’ve talked about, and even what we haven’t talked about, has been stuff you could logically expect from a war. But it doesn’t stay that way. Next week, we’ll move into the second phase of the conflict, the Second English Civil War, and it’s a whole different thing.
Now, I said I’d do my best to update you on the rest of the Caribbean this episode, and the records really, really are very sparse, and I might not have even found all of the information that does exist. I am giving you literally everything I have been able to find, though, and I spend a fair amount of time looking for information! But just a few days ago, I found a little tidbit that is just an unbelievably perfect transition into our discussion over the next few weeks. Because in 1645, a 56 year old Royalist who had been captured at the fall of Bristol, was taken prisoner and sold as an unwilling indentured servant to Thomas Warner, governor of St. Kitts, for four years. That was the earliest implementation I’ve found of a policy called transportation, something which will be a massive part of our story as war number two starts, and the gloves come off.