The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (7 page)

The implementation of this policy was largely left to a man who became the first imperial civil servant, William Blathwayt. According to the diarist John Evelyn who met Blathwayt in 1687 when his star was in the ascendant, he was a man who had ‘raised himself by his industry, from very moderate circumstances. He is a very proper, handsome person, and very dexterous in business.’ A lawyer by training, Blathwayt had been appointed Clerk of the new Privy Council committee for plantations in 1676; four years later he was made Surveyor and Auditor–General of American Revenues; and from 1683 until 1703 he was Secretary-at-War. His assiduity and experience made him invaluable and so, unshaken by political convulsions, he served successively Charles II, James II, William III and Anne.

In the process and in common with other Stuart bureaucrats he made money from bribes and he was lucky enough to marry an heiress. Her house at Dyrham in south Gloucestershire became his country seat, which he had rebuilt from 1687 onwards in the fashionable baroque style under the direction of a refugee French architect. The interior decoration was striking: his study was panelled in black walnut shipped over by the governor of Maryland; stairs and stairwells were cut from cypress and cedar wood from South Carolina; and the gardens were laid out in the modish Dutch manner (William III had become king in 1689) and planted with imported flora from Virginia.

These exotic gifts were tribute from a land where Blathwayt had imposed the King’s will and consolidated royal authority, often at the expense of local proprietors and assemblies. The agents of his policies were usually men accustomed to giving orders and expecting obedience – army officers. It was their experience as much as their temper which recommended them since their duties included making arrangements for the colonies’ defence.

Until the mid-1670s measures for the safeguard of the settlements in North America and the Caribbean had been haphazard and amateurish. A survey of the military resources of the Leeward Islands, forwarded to London in 1676, revealed their extreme vulnerability. The author, a professional soldier, was dismayed by the tiny garrison of regulars on St Kitts who were ‘in the greatest necessity soldiers ever were, in the sight of the French whose soldiers are well paid, well armed and accoutred’. A polyglot militia was not to be trusted since it was suspected that the French and Dutch volunteers would forget their oaths of allegiance in a crisis. On Nevis there were twenty-two regulars, a small cavalry detachment whose horses were ‘generally used to carry sugar’, and 1,300 militiamen who were ‘the worst for arms he had ever seen’.
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In short, none of the islands could withstand an assault by trained troops.

The need for garrisons of professional soldiers and closer royal supervision of government was evident in North America. In 1676 Virginia was convulsed by an insurrection led by Nathaniel Bacon against the allegedly feeble Indian policy of Governor Berkeley, his corrupt and partial government, and an assembly where, according to the insurgents, ‘all the power is got into the hands of the rich’. To restore order, the government in London had to despatch over a thousand troops, artillery and warships.
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Whilst Virginia faced what was close to a class war, the New England colonies were engaged in interminable frontier wars against the Indians who were getting stronger thanks to French assistance. Indians captured near Fort Pemaquid in New York in 1689 carried French muskets, bayonets, waistbelts, cutlasses. One, speaking in broken English, told an officer that his people ‘no care for the New England people; they have all their country by and by.’
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The colonists could not face these perils without outside assistance, and this uncomfortable fact of life made them acquiesce to a series of measures which reduced the powers of local assemblies and great landlords. Administrative adjustments were conceded, sometimes grudgingly as in New England, but colonial parliaments still retained considerable lawmaking powers. These bodies, it must be added, were representative rather than democratic. Like their English and Scottish counterparts, they were the exclusive preserve of men of wealth and property. The North American and West Indian legislatures were filled with planters, estate-owners, merchants and lawyers who were thought to have the best interests of their colony at heart. These men accepted the supremacy of the King’s governors, judges and officials as the price for protection.

They were not deferential. In 1700, a member of the Nevis assembly protested to an army officer that, since there was no law that permitted the billeting of soldiers on his estate, they could work in the fields alongside the negroes in return for their keep. As for the officer’s orders, he could ‘wipe his arse’ with them.
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Such attitudes, coupled with an indifference to the law which was marked in the North American frontier colonies and some Caribbean islands, made the work of governors an uphill struggle and the process of imposing order and inducing submissiveness was often long drawn out. As late as 1775, Colonel Montford Brown, governor of the Bahamas, complained to the government about the prevalence in the islands of crime. The ‘inability and laziness’ of the Bahamanian made it impossible for him to live other than by smuggling and wrecking; that is, luring ships on to reefs and plundering the wreck. No one, it seemed, understood what was meant by an oath – ‘the grand security of the liberty, the property, and the lives of Englishmen’ – and so the courts could not function.
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The Bahamas may have been exceptionally anarchic. Elsewhere, as colonies developed, their inhabitants became profoundly aware of how their industry contributed to Britain’s wealth and power. In 1706 the assemblies of St Kitts and Nevis petitioned parliament for over £100,000 in compensation for losses suffered at the hands of the French. The plantations, it was argued, deserved generous treatment on the grounds of the ‘advantage of trade’ that flowed from them as well as ‘the large Returns they made to the public’ from import and export duties. The House of Commons concurred and voted the sum demanded, no doubt seeing it as a valuable investment.

4

Dispositions of Providence: The Colonists

Britain’s overseas colonies would not have happened without large numbers of emigrants who were prepared to abandon their homes, undertake long and hazardous voyages and then submit themselves to a régime of hard labour in an unfamiliar and often unkind environment. Elizabethan expansionists had likened the process to a bodily evacuation, a spewing out of unwanted and harmful matter.
1
This image was invoked by a visitor to Barbados in 1655: ‘This island is the Dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish: Rogues and whores and such like people are those which are generally brought here.’
2

Up to a point this was true, and some would have added Puritans and Quakers to the indigent, idle and lawless who were coerced into leaving Britain. There were also plenty of so-called voluntary emigrants who had in fact been cozened into crossing the Atlantic. In 1671, a ‘spirit’ admitted to having kidnapped 500 indentured servants annually, and another calculated one year’s haul at 840.
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Even if these confessions were exaggerated, they indicate that among this, the largest category of emigrant, there were large numbers who travelled unwillingly. Their reluctance was understandable, for their future tribulations were vividly set down in a contemporary popular ballad, ‘The Trapann’d [kidnapped] Maid’:

Five years served I, under Master Guy

In the land of Virginny, O,

Which made me for to know sorrow, grief and woe

When that I was weary, weary, weary, O.

I have played my part, both at the plough and cart,

In the land of Virginny, O;

Billets from Wood upon my back they load,

When that I am weary, weary, weary, O.
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This woman was particularly unlucky since female servants were normally allocated domestic work indoors, although in Maryland during the 1650s ‘some wenches that are nasty and beastly’ were ordered to labour in the fields. The temptation to escape must sometimes have been very great, but so were the dangers of recapture on the island colonies or falling into Indian hands in North America. These risks diminished as the colonial population rose and made it easier for the fugitive to find anonymity. One who tried in the 1760s was described by her owner in a Virginian newspaper advertisement:

Between the Sixth and Seventh Day,

Mary Nowland ran away;

Her age I know not but appears

To be at least full twenty years;

The same religion with the Pope.

Short neck, scarce room to fix a rope:

She’s large and round from neck to hips,

Brown hair, red face, short nose, thick lips;

Short, thick and clumsy in her jog

As neat as any fatten’d hog.

Upon her tongue she wears a brogue

And was she man would be a rogue.

Marriage and a household of her own may have been this Irishwoman’s motive for leaving her employer, although by this time the old imbalance between men and women settlers in the colonies had been redressed. In 1704 there were 30,000 men and 7,000 women, 85 per cent of them indentured servants, in Maryland.
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Those free to do so married young; the average age in Maryland was sixteen, twenty-one in Virginia, and brides were frequently pregnant. Indentured servants, who were usually around twenty-four or twenty-five when their terms expired, married later. There was also a high illegitimacy rate despite the humiliating public punishments laid down for unmarried mothers by colonial legislators.

By 1700, a large proportion of colonists were native born. Population growth in the Chesapeake basin colonies had been slower than elsewhere thanks in part to the shortage of women and a high death rate. A twenty-year-old immigrant who survived seasoning might expect to live another twenty years, while a locally born Virginian or Marylander who picked up some immunities would survive a further ten years. Life expectancy in the more astringent climate of New England was sixty.

The lack of women was a handicap in the early phases of colonisation, but it was unavoidable. Clearing forests, breaking ground, tending crops and building houses required a male workforce, a fact of life that was reflected in the occupations of those emigrants who were in most demand by settlement companies and proprietors. The most urgent need was always for skilled artisans. On board the
Increase,
which sailed for New England in 1636, were 116 passengers including a butcher, carpenter, clothier, stonemason, ploughwright, sawyer, surgeon, tailor, two linen weavers, a joiner and a dozen farm labourers. There were also, well down the list, twelve men without trades, twenty-four adult women, twenty-six girls under eighteen and thirty boys.
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This distribution of occupation, age and sex was typical, although there was no certainty as to whether it would be reproduced in the colony because of losses during the voyage and acclimatisation.

The ideal colonists were described by the Massachusetts Bay Company in the 1630s as ‘endowed with grace and furnished with means’. The first quality was essential for the fulfilment of the Puritan vision of a settlement peopled with men and women who knew themselves to be chosen by God and therefore were glad to submit themselves to disciplined labour and regulations based on Old Testament texts.

At the same time an immigrant needed cash and a stock of tools. The transatlantic fare was about £5 a person, to which had to be added the price of food during the voyage, and freightage was £4 a ton. An English yeoman farmer with his family and their farming implements and domestic utensils would expect to pay at least £100 for transit to North America. Given that such a man’s annual income might be between £40 and £60, if he wished to emigrate, he would be forced to sell his land. In other words, his decision to leave would have to be final.
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Of course there were many cases where companies subsidised colonists who were, at least for the Massachusetts Bay Company, carefully screened beforehand to weed out the morally unsuitable. One who passed the test was John Dane who, having considered emigration to one of the Caribbean islands, directly asked God for guidance. ‘Utterly forlorn in my spirit’ and anxious to be ‘free from temptation’, he followed current Puritan practice and randomly opened his Bible. He found the text, ‘Come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you shall be my people.’ He immediately left his native Hertfordshire and its temptations and took ship for New England.
8

There were more direct inducements. In 1667 the potential colonist for the Cape Florida settlement was lured with the promise of a hundred acres for himself and a further hundred for each of his children and musket-armed servants (this was Indian country) at an annual rent of ten shillings for every thousand acres. A further fifty acres would be granted for every female servant or slave in his possession.

On the expiry of his contract, every indentured servant was to be given a hundred acres by his master, together with farming tools and two suits of clothing.
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This pledge was deliberately framed to attract men who already enjoyed considerable wealth in England, for they would have had to have provided the costs of shipping and sufficient stocks of food to see themselves and their households through the time it took to cultivate, harvest and market cash crops.

To a large extent the existing, but never inflexible, British social hierarchy was transported across the Atlantic and re-erected in North America and the Caribbean. In the colonies gentlemen commanded the same respect as they did in Britain. One gentleman, who died during the early days of Virginia, had a memorial brass imported for his gravestone which showed him in full armour, an anachronism on the battlefield but still the accepted public token of his social standing. It was set in the floor of Jamestown church from where it was later stolen. Looking back on his childhood in the 1690s, a Virginian farmer recalled, ‘A periwig, in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle-folk.’ The same adornment denoted a gentleman in Britain.