Barbados would never really recover from the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Compared to islands like St. Kitts, it had gotten through the conflict without too much damage, but it had still funded and fought a full theater of war almost alone, and when the war was over, the demands and impositions (not least, the Navigation Acts finally being fully enforced) just kept coming.
This pushed the colony to the point of irreconcilable hostility to England, its king, and its governor. Colonists united and demanded self rule and free trade.
INTELLIGENT SPEECH CONFERENCE!
Transcript
Barbados had fought a theater of war on its own and lost everything in the process, and when they pointed this out to the king, it made them the target of his ire. This left Barbados in a position of antagonism toward England that it wouldn’t fully eliminate for over a century.
Introduction
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And back to the story.
In 1667, William Lord Willoughby arrived in Barbados to try his hand at governing the island in the king’s name. And he intended to govern differently from his brother. He was intimately aware of the island’s dealings and factions, thanks to letters from his family members, but he hadn’t been personally pulled into them. He was able to walk into Barbados with both an understanding of the island and perhaps even more importantly, a sense of distance, and he intended to use both advantages to their fullest.
Soon after arriving, the new governor Willoughby was writing to England extolling the virtues of his brother’s old adversaries. They were politically idealistic, Magna Carta men with the highest of Parliamentary virtues. In fact, they were more politically astute, principled and trustworthy than the people who had been his brother’s and sons’ supposed friends. They had even come to reach out to him before he’d disembarked his ship when he’d first travelled there.
“They tell me that they are all loyal subjects, nor do I doubt but in a short time to make them so, for all the metall’d lads are on my sons’ side.”
Francis Lord Willoughby had been pulled into conflicts against his will. He had been in an extremely difficult and frustrating position, and one made even more frustrating by the knowledge that he had been forced into it because of colonists’ political agitations under Modiford. So his ultimate response had been to double down, keep his friends in the positions of power and come down forcefully on any of those who turned against him.
William was going to do things differently. He would walk in and make friends with all his brother’s opponents. Perhaps they were angry because they’d been pushed out, and perhaps by showing them that he was willing to work with them, he would bring them over to his side. Politics was just a faction fight between the “ins” and “outs,” he theorized, and his brother had alienated some of the island’s best men by pushing them into the “out” group. He brought Farmer back from England, and spent the six week voyage cultivating a friendship with him. He put the son of the old governor, Philip Bell, on the council. Bell had been another member of Farmer’s faction. And he ensured that every single minor administrative office was now given to a different person to distribute power more evenly among people and among factions. If his opponents had this, William felt that they would rise to the occasion and work together.
He had inherited the governorship of an island that was struggling, though. After two years of war, Barbados had lent the king astonishing, no, unfathomable amounts of money sending out multiple fleets full of soldiers which had protected English colonies in the Leeward islands. It had fought a full theater of war virtually alone for two years, and its fighting force was a fraction of its original strength. In a colony of 27,000 English people, only 7,000 survived who were physically able to fight, and of those, only 2,000 were likely to do so if the necessity arose, and that was only because they wanted to protect their own landholdings, not the king’s interests. The 5,000 others were people without land or money, who had finally lost their final bit of hope about staying on the island, and who were ready to leave, anyway. The pressure was mounting, the weirdly experimental governmental system had caused intense factional divisions, and Willoughby wrote home that if he’d come just 10 days later, civil war would have broken out in Barbados thanks to the split governor’s council.
Fortunately, hurricane season followed Willoughby’s arrival, and that was a relief. It gave Barbados a reprieve from potential attack, and it gave Willoughby a chance to immerse himself more fully in the island’s politics, and hopefully affect some change there.
And this combination, along with the arrival of Captain Berry, did reinvigorate Barbados a bit. They raised yet more money for Berry’s expedition, which retook Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat, leaving only St. Kitts and Suriname as lost English possessions. And, Farmer’s faction still showed its position by reducing the amount of support that would be sent to the reclaimed colonies, but Willoughby was ok with this. He knew the colonists couldn’t keep spending as much on the war as they were, even hoping to be paid back. He himself had written to the king saying colonists were lending the king more than he, as the king’s representative, dare borrow, and “yet borrow I must, for your majesty’s revenue is already by your commands more indebted than will be paid during my life.”
The king was borrowing more than he could ever pay back, but he wasn’t slowing the borrowing or spending. In fact, Charles now instructed Willoughby to pay Bridge’s regiment, which had accompanied him to Barbados, out of the 4.5%, after everything else they’d already paid, and Willoughby point blank told him that this would be impossible. Barbados could not afford to pay his regiment in addition to everything else. Still, the king didn’t send Bridge money, so it would be up to him and the colonists to figure out.
And Willoughby now worked to retake St. Kitts, sending a stream of reinforcements to Berry starting with a ship run by Captain Morris, that old Providence Island indentured servant and privateer, now a Quaker. Five days later, a fleet of 11 ships joined Morris at Nevis with Willoughby’s son, Henry, as its lead. This gave the English control of the seas again, and again, the cost fell largely on Barbados, and the king wasn’t scrambling to pay them back.
They still failed to retake St. Kitts, though, so they decided to head to Suriname, attacking the French at Martinique on the way. They also captured the French island of Cayenne, and took its military equipment for their own use.
The battle was fierce, but the English won, and they left a garrison there while the main force returned to Barbados, the fleet loaded with merchants’ sugar to help the king recoup the cost of the war.
When they returned to Barbados, they learned that the war was over. The English had retaken the seas at the very moment that the French and Dutch were starting to question their alliance. When the French had retaken the formerly-Dutch island of St. Eustatius, or Statia, they’d flown their own flag there with no intention of giving the colony back. The Dutch started to feel that their war effort had done little more than to give a dangerous ally a valuable island, and distanced themselves. The combination of events had led both countries to ask for peace, and the result had been the Treaty of Breda.
The problem was that the treaty had kept all colonial holdings as they were on May 10, 1667, which meant that the English needed to give Suriname, which they had taken after that date, back. The English did get their half of St. Kitts back, in return for England recognizing French claims to Acadia, Nova Scotia. And, the English, perhaps most importantly, got New Amsterdam, but Suriname went to the Dutch. In fact, the treaty had pretty much finalized which countries got which colonies, with few exceptions.
And Barbadians were furious, especially after it’d been such a difficult battle, and especially after … everything else that had happened. Willoughby was even angrier because Suriname just happened to be the only colony where he wasn’t just governor, but lord proprietor. So, he made his feelings known. He ordered his son, Henry, to return and lead the English settlers in moving to Antigua, taking everything they could move with them, and destroying everything that was too big to load onto a ship. This would make it intensely difficult for the Dutch to actually settle the colony.
Henry obliged, and he stayed there for three months doing just that, taking everything he could, and destroying the sugar factories he couldn’t. When the Dutch stopped by Suriname midway through his destruction, Henry refused to leave, saying he hadn’t gotten orders to do so from the governor of Barbados. Maybe the king said something, or maybe not, but he answered to Barbados’s governor. Colonists went to Antigua under their governor, William Byam, whose family helped lead that colony for almost two centuries. Others went to Jamaica, where they formed what survives today as Suriname Quarters. On a random, but interesting, side note here, Suriname produced the first English woman novelist, Aphra Benn, who wrote the book Ooronoco, or the Royal Slave.
The Dutch complained to Charles about Suriname’s destruction, and he strongly reprimanded Willoughby and ordered immediate restitution.
But the war was over, finally. And it was time to recover. And there was a lot of recovery that needed to happen.
Antigua and Montserrat’s plantations had all been burned, and Nevis was overcrowded with refugees, teetering on the brink of starvation. Nevis even voted at this point to risk defying the Navigation Acts to avoid this starvation, by allowing two German ships to trade there and bring them food. And St. Kitts was the worst off of all, saved from starvation only by French military leaders who sympathized with their plight enough to smuggle food in from Martinique. Those same military leaders were refusing to give up the island, though, meaning that the colony which was most devastated of all could not yet begin to rebuild. And it was only a visit from Willoughby which pushed the French to finally give it up. The delay did have one benefit, though, in that England forgot to reimpose the 4.5% duty there.
Barbados didn’t have burned and plundered plantations, but it had been devastated in a different way. The stark realities of life there were now impossible to ignore. The soil was becoming depleted. Laborers and artisans were leaving for Carolina, Jamaica and the other Leewards. Even landowners were going to Carolina. Willoughby warned the king’s privy council that the English population was disappearing from Barbados, and the reason was the pressures applied from London.
Furthermore, Barbados had just spent 100,000 pounds to fight the war, split evenly between their own defense and the defense of the Leewards, and they’d lost much, much more than that. They were also sustaining refugees from Nevis, they also didn’t have enough food, and ultimately it was only trade with New England that had kept Barbados from starvation. All of this on the shoulders of 20,000 English settlers. A month before the war ended, Willoughby wrote to the king saying that Barbados had raised “as much as they were able without making mutiny at land,” and saying that he’d had to charge merchants 6 shillings extra per hundred pounds of sugar in order to raise more. They had refused, and he’d eliminated the customs duty in exchange for that 6 shillings. If he hadn’t, he said, “I know not what might have followed.”
The Navigation Act was also now fully enforced, causing the price of sugar to drop by 20%. This had ironically been enabled by the very war Barbados had given up so much to fight. The Dutch lost most of their trading posts in the Americas, which led the Dutch West Indian Company to collapse, and this had enabled England to fully enforce its merchants’ monopoly. The French had established a similar law, too, and the two countries now became each other’s main rivals.
“The merchants bring no commodities to us, but draw off all their engagement in sending empty ships only to freight away our sugars, which also if sent upon our own accompts yields so contemptible a rate, yet it is good as nothing, for the merchants having us in their power that we can send our sugars nowhere else, and so having the market in themselves to send it for other countries, they sell it for what they list.” The merchant monopoly, Barbados said, would crush them.
But like Virginia’s, Barbados’s pleas would fall on deaf ears. They didn’t even ask for a full repeal, just that they be allowed to sell to other countries using English ships, paying the customs in Barbados. And, they wanted to be able to trade with Scotland.
The colony’s male population had suffered severely, and this affected both security and economic productivity due to the lack of laborers. The only place it could realistically get non-slave laborers was Scotland. They didn’t want to be wholly reliant on slaves, but regardless the Royal African Company wasn’t sending enough for the labor demands of the island. England wasn’t giving them any indentured servants, and they didn’t want any more Irish people. You have to remember that Cromwell’s primary goal in Irish transportation had been the attempted genocide of Irish Catholics, and the thought of using transportees as laborers had been, in England at least, an afterthought. The Irish had come to the Americas fully averse to cooperation with the English in large part because of that. They were “lazy” at best, and rebellious at worst, and Barbados didn’t want to deal with any more of them. Scottish people had been on the island for 15 years at this point, and they were the best workers there. Scotland was suffering economically, so people might be willing to move there, and they just needed permission from Charles, who was king of both England and Scotland, though they were separate countries. The Navigation Acts prevented this, and they needed that to change.
Barbados wasn’t devastated in the way that St. Kitts was, but it was at the end of its rope.
“The planter has been reduced to a mean estate, his courage brought low, his labor not recompensed, most much impoverished, and the best disabled to manure above two thirds of their land,” the assembly explained to the king.
And Willoughby laid out a plan to revitalize the colony. First, it needed to transfer 1/10 of its land from the richer sort to the poorer, to help create a yeoman class which would ultimately help Barbados retain its white community.
Willoughby told the king that the lack of free trade with Scotland, free trade in slaves, and free trade with other countries through English merchants, would utterly ruin the English West Indies. He didn’t ask that the Navigation Act be repealed completely, simply that it be scaled back in a way that would allow Barbados to survive, but the king said no. Actually, more specifically he told Willoughby that Barbados could buy servants from Scottish merchants as long as he didn’t actually give the Scottish merchants sugar in return. First, they would have to get money for the sugar from English merchants, and then they could pay that money to the Scots. This meant that nothing changed, because it was not a feasible solution for either Colonists or Scottish merchants.
So the war left Barbados with problem after problem after problem, and to add to all of this, while Willoughby was on a trip to negotiate for the release of St. Kitts and oversee rebuilding in the Leewards, an accidental fire in Barbados had burned St. Michaelstown to the ground again and exploded the public magazine, which had destroyed buildings in all directions and caused damage in excess of 300,000 pounds.
And three days after the explosion, Bridge’s regiment returned to Barbados. They’d been paid one month’s salary for a year of service, and the king was still insisting that Barbados not only pay their arrears, but also quarter them. They were hungry, they needed clothes, and they needed a place to stay, and the king had put all of that responsibility on Barbados. They would normally have been billeted at the taverns, but those had just been destroyed in the explosion so they would have to be quartered in people’s homes. This was the last straw, not just because it was a demand of yet-more money on an already exasperated and exhausted people, but also because Barbadians suspected that the king had sent Bridge’s regiment in part as a military force meant to intimidate them into submission to the crown. And the king fueled these suspicions by refusing to disband them, and he fueled resentment even further by ordering colonists to pay them immediately out of the 4.5%, and giving Bridge authority to collect the duty.
The colonists responded to these demands by simply refusing to acknowledge the soldiers’ existence. Bridge eventually convinced them to take in the ordinary soldiers on security for payment, because the ordinary soldiers weren’t responsible for any of this, but the officers were shunned, and the threat always lingered that the colonists might throw out the soldiers, too.
Whatever was left, Charles said the colonists could pay for their own public expenses after all, totally ignoring that colonist loans to fund the war had added up to five years worth of the duty, even before the inflation of sugar prices. Now he was asking them to spend even more.
Willoughby protested this, saying “Your majesty will be satisfied that the 4.5% is not sufficient to do all things, and that as yet I have had nothing towards my (own) support. But I live in hope, for I know I serve a just master, but to keep soldiers in good order without pay is impossible.”
And to add insult to injury to insult to injury, the rest of the Leeward Islands were now uniting with the merchants in asking to be separated from Barbados and put under a different patent, under a different government. These people said that Barbados had no interest in the welfare of colonies which were fundamentally trade rivals. Willoughby’s London agent stopped this for a while by pointing out that without Barbados the Leeward colonists would have been completely wiped out. But the idea was now out there.
When news of the St. Michaelstown fire reached London, though, merchants realized that Barbados might actually cease to exist as a colony, and if it did, they would be hurt more than anyone except the colonists, themselves. They now pushed Charles to help Barbados, with suggestions including sending a supply of guns and ammunition to replace its magazine, as well as freely importing black and white labor, abolishing or moderating the 4.5%, and giving a bit of money to colonists who were living in abject poverty, but the king again refused.
These mounting pressures tested Willoughby’s policy of conciliation, which failed spectacularly. Farmer’s faction returned with a vengeance, and now most of his brother’s old friends, upset by his lack of both success and of loyalty, joined them. Barbadians united in expressing nothing but hostility to the governor and all external authority, and it was unlike anything that had ever happened before.
People couldn’t even work for the government anymore without being treated as traitors to the colony. Willoughby tried to court one man’s support by nominating him as judge of the exchequer, but the man did nothing with the position and simply resigned it after three months, “supposing it would prejudice him with his faction.” During the next assembly, when discussing what to do with Bridge’s regiment, this same man stood and declared “that he would neither give nor lend the king a farthing if he could help it.”
United, the planters accused Willoughby of mismanaging the St. Kitts battle, and writing to London for his recall, demanding instead self-rule. They wanted the 4.5% gone, and they’d be willing to pay one lump sum to be rid of it forever, which effectively meant letting the king off the hook for the debt. They wanted a charter constituting Barbados as an independent corporation with all the powers formerly held by Carlisle, along with freedom of trade. Basically, the legal status that Massachusetts enjoyed, plus free trade.
William Lord Willoughby was in a far worse position than his brother had been, because at least his brother had maintained a group of allies, and William was now all but alone. Quite frankly, he had underestimated his brother, who was emotional at the end, yes, but fundamentally one of the most effective governors in early American history. William was furious that the finger was being pointed at him after he’d worked so hard to court everyone’s approval, and I’m sure he was panicking, too. He prepared to send the ringleaders to neighboring colonies, and sent his son William, along with two of his few remaining supporters, James Drax, and a Mr. Bowden to negotiate with the king directly. He asked the king to sharply rebuke Barbados in order to strengthen his position, and asked for permission to leave Barbados personally to defeat the intrigues against him.
The king granted this permission, and he sailed for England in early 1669, leaving Christopher Codrington as acting governor in his place.
And that’s where we’ll stop for today. Next week, we’ll take a quick look at what the pirates, I mean privateers, were doing during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a story which will excitingly take us back to Providence Island!