The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (6 page)

The establishment of Commonwealth in 1649 may be reckoned as marking a major turning point in the history of the empire. The next eleven years witnessed continuous and dynamic government activity to preserve and enlarge Britain’s overseas possessions and their trade. There was legislation to assert the total dominance of Britain over all aspects of colonial commerce; an ambitious programme of naval rearmament; a challenge to Dutch seapower; and a partially successful offensive against Spain in the Caribbean.

One thing was clear to the ministers and civil servants who framed these policies: Britain’s colonies and the new transatlantic commerce they were generating were a vital national asset to be coveted, protected and extended, if necessary by aggression. At every turn, the government was influenced by the prevailing economic dogma, mercantilism. This assumed that a limit existed to global trade and measured a nation’s wealth in terms of its self-sufficiency. Autarky, especially in raw materials, was also an indicator of a country’s international status since it released it from dependence on other powers and allowed it to accumulate a surplus of treasure. For this among other reasons James I and Charles I had been willing to charter colonies which, their promoters hoped, would provide alternative sources for commodities previously imported from Europe. They were largely mistaken, but, unexpectedly the American and Caribbean settlements offered products for which there appeared a growing but finite continental market. If trends already detectable during the 1640s continued, Britain would soon become the focus of a transatlantic commerce based upon tobacco, sugar, fish and the new traffic in slaves.

The future of this commerce was by no means assured. Britain’s position in North America was vulnerable: the French had already begun to penetrate the St Lawrence basin, and further south the Dutch had a toehold in what is now New York. The Dutch also posed another threat for, temporarily disengaged from European conflicts after 1648, they were free to increase their already vast merchant fleet and become the world’s main sea carriers.

In broad terms the government aimed to tighten commercial links with the colonies, which were compelled to conduct all their seaborne trade through Britain and in British-owned ships. This was the objective of the Navigation Acts of 1649 and 1660, the Staple Act of 1663 and the Plantation Act of 1673. Non-British carriers were banned from conveying goods of any kind between Britain and its colonies or between individual colonies. At first, ‘British’ meant English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish but in 1660, when Scotland and England again became separate kingdoms under one king, Scottish shippers were included in the interdict. As well as being given a monopoly of colonial freightage, British shipowners were given the right to Royal Navy protection by an act of 1649 which was confirmed at the Restoration.

Although keeping the title Royal Navy, the British fleet was now a national force at the disposal of those subjects with foreign and colonial business interests. The act had originally been introduced to suppress royalist privateers, but by 1680 warships were regularly escorting British merchantmen in the Mediterranean as a deterrent against Algerine pirates; policing the Yarmouth, Iceland and Newfoundland fisheries; and patrolling in Atlantic and Caribbean waters.
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Henceforward, the navy would be an instrument of commercial and colonial policy.

Extensive protection to merchant shipping required additional warships. From 1650 onwards, the government embarked on a ship-building programme which continued after the Restoration; in 1679 the navy possessed 86 ships and double that number by 1688. Much of the credit for this must go to Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, who strove to eliminate corruption within the navy’s bureaucracy and create a formidable fleet that could be swiftly mobilised and manned in the event of war against France, Spain or the Netherlands.

It was the Dutch with their huge merchant marine who were seen as the greatest danger to British commerce, at least before 1680. They were most vulnerable in the English Channel and North Sea through which their vessels had to pass on their way to Amsterdam and it was here that they were challenged by the Royal Navy. The three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652-4, 1665-7 and 1672-4 were inconclusive. The successes of the first, achieved by Admiral Blake, were offset by the attack on the Medway ports in 1666 when British shipping was seized and burned. This humiliation was outweighed by the occupation and subsequent annexation of New York.

While British broadsides may not have substantially harmed the Dutch, the latter’s position of economic strength was deceptive. Unlike their rival, they had few colonies and no single staple such as sugar or tobacco upon which to rely and, as the wars demonstrated, their carrying trade could be disrupted at will by Britain. Moreover, from the mid-1660s the Dutch were driven to divert more and more of their surplus wealth into the fortification of their southern, landward frontier against France.

God, not Admiral Blake’s battleships, was given credit for the navy’s victories in 1652–4, or so ran the official proclamation which marked the signing of the peace treaty with the Netherlands. It concluded that ‘the dispensations of the Lord have been as if he had said,
England
thou art my first-born, my delight among nations.’ It is easy to see the hand of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, behind such sentiments which reflected a new, triumphalist and expansionist mood in the country. Late-Elizabethan ideas of national and Protestant destiny were in the process of resuscitation and translation into action at the hands of Cromwell, who throughout his life had a profound sense of serving a Divine Providence. He also had a vision of a godly, industrious nation whose Protestant faith and commerce qualified it for a pre-eminent position throughout the world.

1654 had not only seen the Dutch humbled, it had witnessed the Portuguese government make far-reaching concessions to British merchants which were tantamount to an admission that Portugal no longer possessed either the will or wherewithal to uphold its old authority in the East or the Americas. Cromwell next considered a blow against Spain in the West Indies. It would simultaneously damage the wealth and prestige of a leading Catholic power, be interpreted as a victory for Protestantism, and expose the emptiness of Spanish pretensions to a commercial monopoly in the region. In preparing what was called the ‘Western Design’, Cromwell was swayed by Thomas Gage, an apostate Dominican friar whose
England in America
urged the total overthrow of Spanish power in the New World and its replacement by British. He also listened to the more down-to-earth opinions of Sir Thomas Modyford, governor of Barbados, a planter with a knack of extracting private advantage from official policy.

In many ways the Western Design was a forerunner of many later, aggressive imperial enterprises. Commercial advantage, private greed and a sense of divinely directed historic destiny were intermingled and bound together, not quite convincingly, with a high-minded moral cause. To excuse what was a pre-emptive attack on the territory of a friendly power, Cromwell’s propagandists presented the expedition as an act of revenge for a hundred and fifty years of Spanish and Catholic atrocities in the Americas. ‘We hold our self obliged in Justice to the people of these nations for the Cruelties, Wrongs, and injuries done and exercised upon them by the Spaniards.’
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Cromwell himself sincerely hoped that the expulsion of the Spaniards and their Inquisition would be followed by the arrival of a new and worthier breed of settlers, ‘people who knew the Lord’ from New England and Ulster.

On Christmas Day 1654 a fleet of seventeen men-o’-war under Admiral Sir William Penn and twenty transports carrying General Robert Venables’s 5,000 strong army, recruited from the Irish garrison, sailed from Spithead. Five weeks later this armada hove to off Barbados. The campaign opened promisingly with the seizure, in the name of the Navigation Laws, of £5,000 worth of Dutch shipping anchored off the island. After picking up some companies of militia from Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the fleet approached its target, Española. The landings were a disaster, with heavy losses among a force already being reduced by malaria and dysentery. In May 1655 an attack was made on what is now Kingston, Jamaica, and succeeded after half-hearted Spanish resistance.

The capture of Jamaica was a major coup. The island was ideal for sugar cultivation (some of the surviving soldiers were given grants of land for plantation) and strategically well-sited to command the shipping lanes that ran eastwards from Spanish Central America, Cuba and Española. A Spanish attempt to retake the island in 1658 failed and, after years of grumbling, Spain formally ceded it to Britain in 1671. By then there were fifty-seven sugar refineries in operation, with cocoa being developed as a secondary crop, and Port Royal had become a regular anchorage for Royal Navy men-o’-war. Its development as a naval base was swift; by 1690 it was guarded by the loyally named Forts Charles, James and Rupert and in 1739 a dockyard with barracks and store-houses had been built.

The seizure of Jamaica was part of a wider plan which embraced the occupation in 1659 of St Helena, an outpost on the Cape route to India, and the projected seizure of either Gibraltar or Minorca as a Mediterranean base. Even without these prizes, Cromwell had demonstrated the effectiveness of a bold, global strategy that would be imitated by successive governments which in varying degrees shared his view of Britain’s place in the world.

His Western Design was followed, on a smaller scale, by Modyford, now governor of Jamaica, who on the eve of the outbreak of the second Anglo–Dutch war in 1665, proposed a scheme for ‘rooting the Dutch out of the West Indies’. His partners in this private enterprise war were local buccaneers who ‘upon my gentleness to them’ were ready to ‘offer life and fortune to His Majesty’s service’.
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The buccaneers were freelance, seafaring cutthroats who lived by piracy and attracted those on the margins of Caribbean society, including former indentured labourers and runaway slaves. Despite Modyford’s assurances, they were a liability when it came to fighting. During a landing on the Dutch island of St Eustatius in July 1665, the volunteers went on strike until the booty had been parcelled out and afterwards, according to an eyewitness, there was ‘great confusion as usually attends such parties whose plunder is their pay and obedience guided by their wills.’ Nevertheless, with the right leadership and driven by an overwhelming greed, the buccaneers could achieve wonders. In January 1671, commanded by Edward Morgan, a sometime indentured servant on Barbados, they attacked and thoroughly plundered Panama City.

This
coup de main
gave Morgan the means to make himself a Jamaican planter and to secure a knighthood, respectability and the governorship of the colony. It also, like Drake’s similar exploits a hundred years before, made a deep impression on the public imagination and reinforced that popular image of distant lands as places where quick fortunes were waiting for the energetic and ruthless.

The belligerent overseas policies of Cromwell and the subsequent piratical war against Spain in the West Indies satisfied nascent British patriotism and, of course, individual cupidity. They were proof, if any was needed, of what could be accomplished by the audacious use of seapower and how it could enrich the country. This idea was not new; it had been first vented in the mid-fifteenth century by mercantilist propagandists who urged the government to ‘keep the seas’; that is, forcefully assert English control over the Channel. Maritime superiority, this time extended far beyond home waters, had been advocated by Elizabethan expansionists and their message gained a new force as Britain’s foreign trade and overseas possessions increased.

As well as calling for naval supremacy, the early followers of what would later be called the ‘Blue Water’ school of foreign policy and strategy warned governments to shun continental entanglements that squandered the nation’s treasure and brought no visible profit. In his pamphlet
The Conduct of the Allies
(1711), Jonathan Swift contrasted the costly, laborious and inconclusive campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders and Lord Peterborough in Spain with the dashing enterprise of Bristol-based privateers. ‘Inflamed by a true spirit of our age and industry’, they had ravaged Spanish shipping and taken the Acapulco treasure ship. Far better, claimed Swift, to concentrate national resources on the navy and employ it for a piecemeal conquest of the Spanish Indies rather than pour cash and men into unwinnable wars in Europe.

In essence, he had put a case that would be repeated by others throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nature had separated Britain from the continent by the sea and through the ingenuity and perseverance of her people she had become dependent on seaborne trade and colonies for her wealth. In the event of a continental war, Britain’s first concern was always the preservation of her overseas resources and the destruction of her adversaries’. The commitment of men and material to any European theatre of war was a secondary consideration, since gains there did little or nothing to assist maritime security or commerce.

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The conflicts with the Netherlands had given British statesmen and commanders their first taste of waging a global war, although the struggles in the Caribbean and North America had been peripheral and small in scale. Even so, it was virtually certain that at some time in the future European wars were bound to become global contests between empires with each side seeking to hinder its opponents’ commerce and seize their colonies. To meet such an emergency it was vital that the government asserted its control over the colonies and took measures for their defence.

It was, argued Charles II’s Treasurer, the Earl of Danby in 1664, a matter of urgency that arrangements were made to ‘bring about the Necessary Union of all Plantations in America which will make the King great and extend his royal empire in those parts.’
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There was more to Danby’s proposal than the assertion of the power of London over distant settlements; close direction of colonial government would facilitate the raising of local revenues which would be needed to foot the bill for the colony’s defence.