Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (31 page)

By 1640 eight such assemblies had been set up in the colonies, six of them during the period in which Charles I attempted to rule at home without a parliament: Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Connecticut, Plymouth, New Haven and Barbados.63 Pressure for the establishment of these assemblies tended to come from the colonists themselves, although Lord Baltimore's charter for the creation of his proprietary colony of Maryland had already empowered him to make laws with the advice of the assembled freemen.64 Once a colony had been founded, however, it was difficult, as James, Duke of York, would eventually discover in his proprietary colony of New York,65 to withhold permission for the summoning of an assembly when the other British colonies possessed them and were competing for settlers. The Special Court of Assize, petitioning the duke in 1681 against the burden of taxes which it condemned as arbitrary, complained that the inhabitants of New York were `wholly shut out or deprived of any share, vote, or interest in the government ... contrary to the laws, rights, liberties and privileges, of the subject; so that we are esteemed as nothing, and have become a reproach to the neighbours in other of his majesty's colonies, who flourish, under the fruition and protection of his majesty's unparalleled form and method of government, . . . the undoubted birthright of all his subjects.' With his colony in turmoil, his own position in England temporarily weakened, and English legal opinion coming out in support of the independence of local assemblies, James had no option but to give New Yorkers the assembly they demanded.66

New or potential colonists were thus likely to regard the possession of a representative assembly as a visible guarantee that settlement in the New World would not involve any diminution of their English liberties. For the proprietors, too, such assemblies offered certain advantages. While they might well prove obstreperous, they also offered the best means available for committing settlers to the financing and defence of their colony, and served as a convenient forum for the resolution of disputes.

Yet the creation of an assembly in a royal or proprietary colony was sooner or later bound to raise questions about the character and extent of its powers. Just as the Spanish crown could look on its American possessions as `conquered' territories, so the British crown, taking the conquered kingdom of Ireland as a precedent, could regard the Caribbean and North American settlements in the same light. Naturally, British settlers were as eager as Spanish settlers to reject the inferior status implicit in the notion of a conquered territory, and to insist on their entitlement to the rights and privileges that they would have enjoyed had they stayed at home. Where Spanish colonists claimed these privileges by virtue of their own descent from the conquerors, or argued that the pre-conquest character of Mexico and Peru as kingdoms elevated them above mere `colonial' status, English colonists were insistent that the `vacant' lands they had settled fell outside the definition of `conquered' territories. Yet this argument was never fully accepted in England itself, and as late as the 1760s Sir William Blackstone was asserting that not only Ireland but also the American plantations were conquered lands.67

While London might not be amenable to the colonists' arguments, a representative assembly offered them a forum in which they could press for their rights as Englishmen against governors disposed to trample on those rights. Even if English settlers could not resort to the Spanish symbolic procedure of obeying but not complying, it was still possible for them to refuse to comply with a royal order or a governor's instructions on the grounds that the king was misin- formed.68 A governor, as the chief colonial executive, found himself, moreover, in a considerably weaker position than a viceroy or governor in Spanish America, in spite of what often appeared on paper to be substantial powers.

Nominally, a governor in an English royal colony enjoyed extensive powers of appointment and patronage, including the authority to issue grants of land .61 in practice he was liable, like his Spanish counterpart, to find these powers circumscribed by the determination of home officials to encroach on his patronage, and also by the stringent terms of his instructions.70 The already detailed set of royal instructions for governors seems to have become even more constraining to independent action following an attempt at revision in 1752. Horace Walpole commented ironically on those issued in 1753 to Sir Danvers Osborn, the new governor of New York, that they were `better calculated for the latitude of Mexico and for a Spanish tribunal than for a free rich British settlement'.71

An English royal governor was not normally surrounded by the pomp and circumstance of his Spanish viceregal counterpart, although one or two governors compensated for this by bringing a retinue of servants on a truly Spanish scale. James II's governor-general of Jamaica, the second Duke of Albermarle, was accompanied by 150 servants, but Joseph Dudley, appointed governor of Massachusetts in 1702, seems to have found five sufficient.72 A new governor on arrival would be greeted by a seventeen-gun salute from the harbour guns, and a receiving party on the wharf. There would be a procession to the statehouse along a route lined by the local militia, followed by a reading of the governor's commission and his swearing the oath of office. There might be illuminations and fireworks in the evening, but it was entirely in keeping with the relative informality of the proceedings, as compared with those in New Spain and Peru, that the day was likely to end with dinner and entertainment in a local coffee-house or tavern.73

British governors, like their Spanish counterparts, were well aware that they were the physical representatives on American soil of the person of the monarch, although few of them took the identification as far as Lord Cornbury, the governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708, is alleged to have done. On the basis of contemporary charges of cross-dressing he has entered the historical record as having dressed up to resemble his sovereign, Queen Anne, but the atmosphere of early eighteenth-century New York politics was highly scurrilous, and charges of cross-dressing look like no more than attempts by his enemies to discredit him.74

While transvestism may have been a step too far, royal governors were expected to do everything in their power to embody in their own persons the figure of the monarch and sustain an appropriate degree of display. Cornbury himself travelled through his colonial domain in style, often accompanied by a train of local gentry. Everywhere he entertained on a generous scale, and he was careful to reciprocate in full the hospitality accorded him when he was met by Indian chiefs.75 Of around three hundred governors or deputy-governors appointed by the crown during the period of colonial rule, one in every four was a peer, the son of a peer, or the holder of a title'76 and such liberality was expected of men of rank.

From the later seventeenth century the English colonies were being absorbed into what was becoming a transatlantic network of patronage." In Britain, as in Spain, high office constituted a form of outdoor relief for hard-pressed members of the aristocracy. `Governours', wrote Lewis Morris Jr. to the Lords of Trade in 1729, `do not come here to take the air', but `... to repair a shattered fortune, or acquire an Estate. 171 They could look forward to some five years in office to achieve this happy resolution of their problems - a tenure approaching that of a Spanish viceroy, who could normally expect an initial three-year term of service to be extended for a further three years.79 Military and naval service was also a passport to a colonial governorship in British America, while in Spanish America the Bourbons showed a willingness, unlike the later Habsburgs, to select for viceregal appointments members of the lower nobility and even the professional classes who had distinguished themselves in administrative or military service.SO The Spanish crown, however, with its deep suspicion of creole aspirations, did not follow the British crown in countenancing the appointment of colonials to head colonial governments, like Sir Henry Moore, an eighteenth-century governor of New York."

Suspicion, indeed, pervaded the attitude of the imperial authorities in Madrid to every aspect of the government of their American possessions. Too much was at stake for them to run any risks. There were endless opportunities for royal officials to enrich themselves, or to enter into tacit and mutually advantageous alliances with the creole elite. It was for this reason that Philip II ordered in 1575 that viceroys and judges of the Audiencias should not marry a wife from their area of jurisdiction, and Madrid would make desperate if doomed attempts over the years to ensure that the matrimonial prohibitions were upheld, and that royal officials should as far as possible be socially isolated from the surrounding population.82

Spain's officials in America, too, were subjected to numerous checks and controls. Viceroys would report on Audiencias and Audiencias on viceroys, and there was a permanent tension in their relationship which was perfectly capable of leading to a total breakdown of communications between the two, as happened in New Spain during the tumultuous viceroyalty of the Marquis of Gelves between 1621 and 1624.83 All those who felt themselves aggrieved had the right to bypass the local authorities and make their complaints directly to Madrid, and this method of control by accusation and innuendo was reinforced by institutional checks. These took the form of visitas, or visitations, in which a visitor was sent out to inquire into the activities of an official, or group of officials, suspected or accused of irregularities. In addition, all officials at the end of their term of office would be subjected to a residencia, consisting of a judicial review of their conduct during their period of tenure.84

No British governor in colonial America had serious reason to fear such draconian proceedings. Slanders and innuendoes might fly to and fro across the Atlantic, but the casual attitude of successive British administrations to so many aspects of colonial life was far removed from the legalistic approach adopted by the Council of the Indies in Madrid, the majority of whose members were professionally trained Roman Law jurists. Yet even if a British governor was not exposed to the constant scrutiny and intrusive investigations from the imperial centre to which his Spanish counterpart was condemned, the authority he could command in his area of government was likely to be less.

He was expected to govern with the advice of a council, usually of twelve members, drawn from among the colonists, and also doubling as the upper house of colonial assemblies. Governors and councils often worked well together, but even when a governor's relations with his council were good, he had to move with caution, if only because the councillors were unlikely to approve measures prejudicial to their own interests and those of the colony's elite.85 It was precisely to counteract this kind of local pressure that the Spanish crown had placed its restrictions on the judges of an Audiencia - the nearest equivalent to the governor's council - forbidding them to acquire land or marry in the area of their jurisdiction.

A British royal or proprietary governor was also at a serious disadvantage in matters of finance. In Spanish America, royal administration was financed by income from the crown's fifth of the production of precious metals and its share of the church's tithes. It could also count on the annual per capita tribute paid by the Indians, together with a set of dues levied on the transatlantic trade.86 It was true that the settlers and their descendants were exempt from direct taxation as a reward for their services in conquering and settling the land, but, as the costs of administration rose, the crown sought to introduce various forms of indirect taxation. This process began in 1575 with the levying in New Spain of one of Castile's most important taxes, the alcabala, a sales tax initially set at 2 per cent. In 1591 the tax was extended to Peru, where its introduction provoked strong resistance. 87

In Spanish America, as in Spain itself, the crown was forced to turn to merchantfinanciers to advance funds in anticipation of revenues still to be received. In many respects, however, it was successful in developing an effective imperial fiscal system, particularly in terms of its ability to respond to changing requirements. A network of regional treasury offices (cajas reales) was set up, with royal officials controlling the collection and registration of revenue under the supervision of a principal treasury office located in a viceregal capital or a major administrative centre. Regional treasuries would pay their surplus funds into the principal treasury. By 1600 fourteen of these regional treasury offices were in existence, and a further seventeen were created in the seventeenth century. Each caja possessed its own area of jurisdiction, and treasuries were added, and sometimes eliminated, as circumstances changed. The discovery of new silver deposits, or new-found prosperity in some outlying region of empire, was likely to be followed by the establishment of a caja real. The system possessed a further element of flexibility in providing the opportunity for the transfer of cash from one region to another in the light of local needs. The Mexican treasury, for example, in addition to the annual remittance of `surplus' funds to Spain, was called upon to subsidize some of the more impoverished outposts of empire, like the Caribbean islands, Florida and the Philippines, by the transfer of funds, known as situados. While the system lent itself to exploitation by merchants and local officials who were in the fortunate position of being able to lay their hands on the monies remitted to their region, in principle the mechanism for the redistribution of tax revenues made it possible to allocate resources, and especially resources for defence, in response to imperial priorities and requirements.88

Colonial government in British America, by contrast, lacked a strong and independent fiscal base, and there was no apparatus for the allocation of resources at the imperial level.89 In the absence of silver mines and of a densely settled Indian tax-paying population, government had necessarily to be funded by the colonists themselves. Although quit-rents were payable to the crown in royal provinces where the king claimed an immediate title to the soil, they met only a fraction of the costs of government, even in the colonies where such rents were collected.90 As a result, governors were forced to turn to colonial assemblies for money, including in some instances their own salaries. It was precisely to avoid this kind of financial dependence on the colonists that Ferdinand and Isabella had set themselves against the creation of parliamentary institutions in America.