The great crisis of 1688 had echoes wherever Englishmen gathered, on the edge of the North American forests, on the islands of the Caribbean, and even in the ports of West Africa and India. Englishmen everywhere followed the gathering storm as well as they could, wondering how it would affect the outcomes of their own quarrels, which ultimately would have to be referred to London. Sometimes they had their own agents in London.
In the eyes of many in London, events in North America and the Indian Ocean were small matters compared with the assault on Spanish wealth and power in the Caribbean, the riches of the slave trade, and the rising sugar production of the islands. Jamaica was one of the newer English possessions in the Caribbean, but it .was by far the largest and potentially the richest, and in 1688 it was the scene of the most improbable transatlantic echoes of the Glorious Revolution, in the singular person of its governor, Christopher Monck, second duke of Albemarle.
In the careers of George and Christopher Monck, father and son, first and second dukes of Albemarle, we can see just what could be accomplished by ability and guile in the maelstrom of the English Revolution. We can also see how vulnerable the ascendance of a noble family was to extravagance, personal dissipation, and changes of political fortune. The father, who had served Charles I as an able commander, had been imprisoned by the parliamentary forces and had agreed to serve them in Scotland or Ireland, but not against his old royalist comrades. He had passed the Cromwell years quietly in Scotland. In the crisis of 1660 he marched on London without revealing his intentions, then made a subtle and well-timed switch to Charles II, who rewarded him with a dukedom and immense gifts of crown lands. In 1669–70 the son’s marriage to a grand-daughter of the duke of Newcastle was followed by the death of both parents. The young duke and duchess soon slipped from the controls his father had sought to leave over them and began to see how much they could spend of their immense fortune. The duke was a drinking, whoring, and brawling crony of James, duke of Monmouth, natural son of the king; one night one of them killed a beadle in a brawl at “a scandalous place,” and they received instant royal pardons.
The young duke of Albemarle became a Knight of the Garter, took his seat in the House of Lords as soon as he was of age, and was a steadfast supporter of the king throughout all the twists and turns of the reign. But he showed little interest in politics or policy and less in religion or books. Hunting, horse racing, gambling, and contests of boxing, football, and so on between his retainers and those of other lords were his favorite pastimes. To accommodate his revels in London and to receive noble visitors in style, he paid twenty-five thousand pounds* for a great mansion, thereafter called Albemarle House. There and at his country houses he entertained many grandees, an ambassador of the sultan of Morocco, Prince William of Orange, and the king himself. He was one of the richest men in the kingdom, with an income of at least fifteen thousand pounds per year, but the expenses of entertaining were immense, and at his level of society people sometimes lost five thousand pounds in a single night’s gambling.
The duke and duchess had no living child. Racing through their fortune at a fantastic rate, they had to sell Albemarle House in 1682. The duchess sank into poor physical and mental health, becoming depressed, anxious, sometimes incoherent. The duke was drinking more than ever and suffered from jaundice, indicating that his life of heavy drinking had damaged his liver. His position at court weakened after James II came to the throne; he had been a steady supporter of Charles’s policies, including James’s right to the throne, but he was also a firm supporter of the Church of England. When James placed a Catholic in command of all his military forces, Albemarle refused to serve under him.
In the spring of 1686 court hangers-on were astonished to learn that the duke of Albemarle had accepted appointment as governor of Jamaica. What could such a great man want with such a distant and insignificant post? Some, especially in Devon, where he was lord lieutenant and had many admirers, thought it was intended as an exile for one who would not go along with the king’s plans. Albemarle himself may have seen advantage in a few years away from a court where he would be in opposition and probably in danger. Moreover, a colonial governor might profit from bribery, manipulation of trade, and grants of land to his favorites, although hardly at a level to compare with the still-massive incomes from Albemarle’s estates in England.
But Albemarle had another, more exciting reason for going to Jamaica. For several years he had been in touch with Captain William Phips of New England, who was fairly sure he knew where there was a rich and salvageable wreck of a Spanish silver galleon on the north side of the island of Hispaniola. A first attempt to salvage some of the treasure had failed. In 1686 Albemarle, with some fresh information about the location of the wreck, brought together a new set of investors and secured a patent under the great seal of his association’s right to salvage it, and Phips set off with two ships and a few divers whom he had brought back from a voyage to the Indian Ocean. They returned to England in June 1687, bringing treasure worth more than six hundred thousand pounds; Albemarle’s share was about ninety thousand. This is one of a small number of big success stories in the long history of search for sunken treasure on the Spanish Main. In 1686, when results were still unknown, Albemarle had every reason to go to the West Indies himself to keep an eye on the operation and attempt to enforce his patent. By the time he sailed from England in September 1687, it still was likely that more treasure would be salvaged, and with every Caribbean port full of talk of the treasure, there was even more reason to go there and defend his rights. In the end it does not seem that he ever got any additional treasure or income from the wreck.
Albemarle reached Port Royal on Jamaica on December 19. With him were his duchess—whose physical and mental health was not likely to be improved by tropical weather and food and the rough society of a half-pirate colony but whom he certainly was not going to leave behind to cause more trouble for him in England—and his recently designated personal physician, Hans Sloane. Sloane exhibited the fascination of the age with “natural history,” especially with accumulating knowledge of, and objects from, remote parts of the world. He spent his months in Jamaica trying to keep his willful noble patient alive, treating many others of all classes and colors, collecting specimens of tropical plant and animal life, and having sketches made of his more perishable specimens that were to be the bases of the magnificent, meticulous engravings in his A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher, and Jamaica, published in 1707. His collections were one of the foundations of what eventually became the British Museum.
Albemarle was no scholar, but having lived close to the centers of power all his life, he was expert at political ceremony and maneuver. The politics of the little colony was a competition between the interests of the planters, like Francis Price in Lluidas Vale, and those of the Royal African Company and associated commercial ventures. The planters wanted a steady supply of slaves at moderate prices; the company wanted to sell its imports wherever it got the best price for them, which frequently was on the Spanish mainland. Sir Henry Morgan, the famous old pirate turned pirate chaser, generally sided with the planters. Albemarle arrived to confront a colonial assembly dominated by men sympathetic to the company, and a council that had excluded Morgan from its deliberations. He had instructions to bring Morgan back into the council and in general to deal with the grievances of the planters. His opening speech to the assembly on February 16 was extremely brief and bland, but he soon made it clear that he expected it to stay at work and to pass some bills, which he proposed, for the better treatment of slaves and a revision in valuation of the Spanish real that would favor the planters. When the assembly did nothing, he followed the example of Charles II: He dissolved it, ordered a new election, and plunged into the campaign to secure an assembly more to his liking. He got a more tractable assembly, which passed the bills he had proposed, and brought Henry Morgan back into the council. (Hans Sloane’s book contains, among its notes on more than a hundred patients whom he treated in Jamaica, a description of “Sir H.M.,” as sallow, with a protruding belly and a badly disturbed digestion, refusing to cut down on his late-night roistering and drinking.) As in England, electioneering required a great deal of feasting and toasting of the electorate. By the end of the campaign the duke had a severe case of gout and then suffered a relapse of his old liver troubles that almost killed him.
He had scarcely begun to recover when, sometime in August, news of the birth of the prince of Wales reached Jamaica. Before celebrations could be held, Henry Morgan died and was widely mourned. Then, in the middle of the hurricane season, amid the fierce heat, downpours, and deafening thunder of early September, the celebration finally was held. We have no description, but can be sure that a great many huzzahs were shouted, volleys were fired, and above all toasts were drunk. The duke collapsed. Amazingly he survived and on October 1 wrote a businesslike letter to accompany a representative of the assembly who was going to England. Then on October 6 he died.
King James II, in his last month of rule, canceled all the new laws Albemarle had gotten through the Jamaica Assembly. In Jamaica, Dr. Hans Sloane embalmed the duke’s body. He and other friends managed to protect the widowed duchess from all those who were convinced she must have a vast treasure in her household and to take her and her husband’s body back to England in the spring of 1689. The duchess now seems to have been quite out of touch with reality. In 1692 she married a fortune seeker who presented himself to her costumed as the emperor of China. He died a few years later; she died at the age of eighty, in 1734.
Puritans as well as dissipated nobles found their echoes across the oceans. Increase Mather, minister of North Church in Boston, president of Harvard College, was most at home in his pulpit, at his writing desk, or on his knees pouring out before God his misery and worthlessness. But when he spent 1688 first a fugitive in his own land and then paying court to a Roman Catholic king, he seems to have suffered no sense of loss of self or distraction from his true vocation.
The central mystery and drama of Mather’s Puritan Christianity were the Covenant between all-powerful God and unworthy Man. It could be maintained only by those who lived godly lives but recognized their own utter unworthiness and, prostrating themselves before a Righteous God, finally became convinced that despite their worthlessness, He had chosen them for salvation. The Covenant between God and Man was a matter not just of individual salvation but also of a Chosen People, who could break it by turning away from God as individuals or by not preserving a pure church of the Elect as the core, the saving remnant, of the Chosen People. Of course the Chosen People might have to defend itself in worldly fashion against the assault of the ungodly, as the kingdom of Israel had done before it broke the Covenant irretrievably.
Increase was the son of Richard Mather, one of the leading ministers of the first generation of Puritans to establish themselves in Massachusetts Bay. Since he grew up in a minister’s family and showed considerable intellectual gifts at an early age, Increase’s choice of a career in the ministry cannot have been in much doubt. He experienced a long time of spiritual doubt that ended when “I gave myself up to Jesus Christ. . . . Upon this I had ease and inward peace in my perplexed soul immediately.” In this hardworking frontier society, few could devote the hours and days to study and prayer that Mather did throughout his life, but no one could become a full church member without having had personal experience of his or her own worthlessness and of God’s saving grace, an experience sufficiently vivid and specific that it could be publicly described to the congregation, all of whom had had to do the same thing before they were admitted to membership. Ordinary Puritans could be as inward and exacting in examination of their own spiritual states and those of their neighbors as Zen abbots or Jesuit novice masters. They had to be sure, each of them, that they were among the Elect, or the Covenant between God and Man might be lost. But they could not be permanently sure, and for Increase Mather and many others, life provided little respite from self-doubt and anguished meditation on “that body of sin which I bear about with me: pride, passion, sloth, selfishness, sensuality, earthly-mindedness, unbelief, hypocrisy.” Puritans did not live lives of withdrawn contemplation, and they might be grateful for, moved by, the blessings of harvest and home or overcome by the immeasurably greater blessing of Jesus’ life and death for the salvation of worthless sinners. Increase Mather almost always was moved to tears by the sacrament of communion. He frequently recorded that in the course of his prayers he was “curiously melted” by a sense of God’s power and mercy. His father’s first book had been entitled A Heart-Melting Exhortation, Together with a Cordial Consolation.
Increase Mather was among those who had been conspicuously at odds with the Governor Andros and the new royal government that London had imposed on Massachusetts ever since 1683. Edward Randolph, a leading figure in the royal government of the colony, had accused him of writing a seditious letter, but Mather had insisted that the letter in question was a forgery; when he went on to say that Randolph himself was the forger, Randolph sued him for defamation, but on January 30, 1688, the suit was dismissed, and Randolph was ordered to pay court costs.
In April 1687 James II had issued a Declaration of Indulgence abrogating the religious requirements for officeholding and the laws against non-Anglican worship, both Roman Catholic and Dissenting. Increase Mather called this “reviving news,” and many in New England shared his optimistic assessment. At his suggestion the Boston ministers sent a letter of thanks to the king and then decided that Mather should go to London to convey their thanks in person and to take the opportunity to present their complaints against Randolph, the governor, and the royal government of Massachusetts. On March 13, 1688, “This day I was strangely melted in my spirit and persuaded that God would be with me in my going for England and that I should there do some service for Him and for His people.” On March 22 he preached a farewell sermon, the text being Exodus 33:15: “If Thy presence go not with me, carry me not up hence.”
Because Randolph was seeking to prevent Mather’s departure by having him arrested again for defamation, he slipped out of his house on the night of March 30 in a wig and a white cloak. Later he heard that one of Randolph’s men had recognized him but had felt powerless to lay a hand on him. He stayed quietly at a house in Charlestown and on April 4 boarded a ketch from which he transferred to a ship for England. While he was gone, his wife fasted repeatedly and prayed for his success and for relief for God’s beleaguered Chosen People in New England.
From April 17 to 19 the ship was surrounded by icebergs, “one of them as big as Egg Rock at Lynn in New England and higher than that. It overset in our sight, having many gulls upon it.” Off Cornwall the ship was boarded by some “barbarously uncivil” fishermen, who would give no directions until Mather gave them four half crowns.
Arriving in London on May 25, 1688, Mather was given excellent guidance by other Dissenters who saw opportunity in James’s policies, including William Penn. He found the Catholics at court, including Father Petre, the king’s confessor, very courteous. “How often did I think of that Scripture, They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.’ . . . Those serpents, contrary to their natures, were so far from hurting me, as that they were very kind to me.” On May 30 Mather waited on the king in the Long Gallery at Whitehall and read to him the address of thanks he had brought from New England. The king replied that he intended to seek from Parliament “a Magna Charta for liberty of conscience.”Admitted the next day to the “King’s Closet"-that is, his private apartments-he said to him, “Your Majesty’s subjects in New England are a people that were persecuted thither on the mere account of religion. Inasmuch as Your Majesty has delivered them from the fears of a future persecution, they are transported with joy and dutiful affection to Your Majesty, and there are many hundreds of them who are desirous that I should assure Your Majesty of it.” He then went on to inform the king about New Englanders who had been fined or imprisoned by the royal government because they refused to swear on the Bible and about other abuses of that government. He had three more such interviews; at the last, on October 16, the king told him “that property, liberty, and our College [Harvard] should all be confirmed to us.” All this time, Mather recalled later, “Many a day . . . did I sit apart in my chamber in London, not only to pray for a blessing on my family, and that God would in His due time return me to them again, in all which he has been entreated by me, but to pray that liberty, and prosperity, and a good government might be restored to New England.”
On February 17, 1689, “as I was praying alone in my chamber, I was marvelously melted and could not but with tears say, God has saved New England. The thing is done. God has done it. My God, and the God of New England has heard prayer and delivered that His people.” He already was hard at work getting to know all the key men in the Convention Parliament and eventually William and Mary themselves; when he finally sailed for Massachusetts in 1692, he had obtained a new charter for Massachusetts Bay, complete with permission for that government to incorporate Harvard College.
In this time of grand visions and projects, there was another Protestant plan for a new beginning in America represented at the court of James II in 1688. The story of William Penn, Pennsylvania, and Penn’s role as King James’s adviser and ally on the issue of toleration offers a striking counterpoint to the anxieties of Mather. In English eyes, Penn’s Quaker beliefs and practices were more radical and less deserving of toleration than Mather’s strict Calvinism. But Penn was more at ease in the snake pit of the court and in the intricate maneuverings of high politics than was Mather. By birth, experience, wealth, and power, Penn belonged at court. In 1688 he was at court almost every day and sometimes had hours of private conversation with the king. Quakers did not remove their hats for any authority, even the king; Penn seems to have dealt with the problem by going to court bare-headed. He had a fine carriage and a big house, where many with business at court came to call on one so obviously in royal favor.
The story of the two William Penns, father and son, also runs in baroque counterpoint to that of the dukes of Albemarle: a father who gained power through naval command rather than military, a son who knew how to dress well and spend money but preferred books and prayer to bearbaiting and who, instead of ruining his health and the family fortune, became one of the most creative religious and social leaders of his time. The father, Admiral William Penn, won notable victories against the Dutch for both Cromwell and Charles II, commanded an expedition that failed to take Hispaniola for Cromwell and took Jamaica instead—another counterpoint with the Albemarle story—and commanded the squadron that went to Holland to bring the future Charles II back to England in 1660. The younger William, despite his profoundly antiauthoritarian convictions, never lost his aristocratic tastes and habit of command and drew astutely on his heritage as Admiral Penn’s son in his dealings with Charles II and with James, duke of York, whose special sphere of interest and power was the navy.
Admiral Penn had been granted estates in Ireland both by Cromwell and by Charles II. It was in Ireland that the younger William had his first encounter with the wandering religious teachers and the small, wary networks of religious enthusiasts that formed the Society of Friends, the Quakers. They were the most singular and enduring product of the wild religious enthusiasms of 1640s England, drawing on the deepest reserves of Christian spirituality to open visions of individual integrity and social peace and justice that seem as alive and elusive today as they did in 1688. They rejected all forms of religious authority and ceremony, sitting quietly in their meetings until someone was moved by the Inner Light to speak. They dressed soberly, refused to take part in warfare in any way, did not take their hats off in worship or as a gesture of respect to social superiors, allowed women to speak in meetings and to preach, addressed others as “thee” and “thou,” and refused to swear oaths, thinking it presumptuous to call on God in support of an affirmation. Early Quakers mostly were people of modest education and social standing, little interested in sustained argument or theological subtlety, frequently moved by the Holy Spirit to interrupt church services, to preach on street corners, or to ride into a town calling out, “Woe to all sinners.” Their disruption of church services, the excitement that accompanied their street preaching, and their refusal to swear oaths often landed them in jail. The presence among them of a son of a highly influential admiral was most unusual.
Young William Penn attended his first Quaker meetings in Ireland in 1667, standing silently in respect when he agreed with a speaker. He flashed his lordly ways to expel a soldier who came to harass the Quakers, was arrested, released, thrown out of his father’s house, and arrested in London for writing a pamphlet that attacked all established churches and even found the doctrine of the Trinity unnecessary. In 1670 he was arrested for speaking on the street and in a famous trial completely outmaneuvered and outargued the inept judge and won an acquittal from the jury. In the 1670s he made two trips to Holland and Germany seeking ties with like-minded religious groups and continued to produce a stream of polemical pamphlets, overwrought in invective and excessive in erudition; a full bibliography of the works he produced during his lifetime, mostly short pamphlets, runs to 157 titles.
In the sectarian and anti-Catholic agitation of the 1670s the Quakers, seen by the court and by Anglicans in general as the most wild-eyed and rebellious of all Protestant sects, faced deepening hostility and repression. Admiral Penn had died in 1670, but the younger William was well known at court and always was given a hearing out of respect for his father. Still, he could not do much to ease the lot in England of his beleaguered people. A few Quakers had begun to settle along the Delaware River in 1675, and William Penn now was inspired to seek in America a grant of land where the Quakers could take refuge. Charles and James liked the idea; they could justify it to a degree as compensation for salary never paid to the admiral and show their broad-mindedness and generosity to troublesome subjects. If the colony succeeded, some of those subjects would be settled a long way indeed from London. Their generosity was staggering; the colony had an area of forty-five thousand square miles. William could not even object to their decision to name it Pennsylvania, since it was done ostensibly in honor of the late admiral. The charter did not give Penn powers as absolute as Lord Baltimore had in Maryland to the south, but still, he could shape things pretty much as he wished. And although he sold land at modest prices, he still made over nine thousand pounds, almost a million dollars at today’s prices, most welcome since his tastes and way of life had little Quaker modesty about them and he was deeply in debt. Later the expenses of running the colony and some bad management decisions destroyed any profit from it; Penn’s many talents did not include those of a businessman.
More important, Penn soon was talking of his colony as his “Holy Experiment” where Quaker pacific and antihierarchical principles could be put into practice. We should not be surprised to find such a marvelous combination—the heritage of holiness and the openness to experiment—inspired by the piety and the radical individualism of the Quaker way. In his first draft of a governmental structure the people were to elect their delegates to the assembly and give them specific instructions as to how to vote. The Frame of Government that ultimately was adopted still provided a broad electorate for the assembly; but voters could not instruct their representatives, and the assembly shared power with a smaller council.
Penn himself sailed for Pennsylvania in 1682. He found his little colony thriving and was delighted by the climate and the abundance of nature. These responses come through with his usual verve and the touch of a natural public relations man, in his Letter to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders, published in London in 1683. Even more striking than his catalogs of crops, animals, and native plants are his descriptions of the Delaware Indians, with whom he had several meetings and with whom he strove to deal on terms of friendship and equity: “For their persons, they are generally tall, straight, well built, and of singular proportion; they tread strong and clever, and mostly walk with a lofty chin. . . . Their language is lofty, yet narrow, but like the Hebrew. . . . But in liberality they excel; nothing is too good for their friend. Give them a fine gun, coat, or other thing, it may pass twenty hands before it sticks; light of heart, strong affections, but soon spent . . . they never have much, nor want much.” He also described the oratory and procedures of their councils. Trying to fit them into the biblical story of mankind, he suspected that they were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
In 1684 a territorial dispute with Lord Baltimore seemed to require Penn’s active presence at court, and he returned to England. He was an effective and well-connected courtier, and the dispute was settled largely in his favor. When Charles II died in February 1685, many were dismayed by the accession of an openly Catholic king, but Penn was optimistic about the prospects for wider religious toleration. “Pardon me, we have not to do with an insensible prince, but one that has been touched with our infirmities: More than anybody, fit to judge our cause, by the share he once had in it. Who should give ease like the prince who has wanted it?” That is, James, as a believer in a proscribed religion, could be counted on to have real sympathy for others in similar situations. Moreover, Penn’s own influence at court was stronger than ever, since James as lord high admiral had had an especially close relation with Admiral Penn. Penn respected James because he practiced his religion openly, unlike his dissembling brother, and James respected Penn’s directness of speech. Both were deeply serious in their religious beliefs and impatient with the hypocrisies and dissemblings of politics.
Penn wrote a series of pamphlets urging James to grant wide religious toleration. In 1686 he was sent by James to try to persuade William of Orange to support broader toleration, with no success. Penn had a hand in the decision to issue the Declaration of Indulgence in 1687, and he wrote another pamphlet to urge Parliament to ratify it. He was more concerned with the principle of toleration than with the ambiguities of parliamentary and royal prerogative. He knew that some Catholics had wild ideas of bringing England back under the Church of Rome, but he did not think the king was among them. He argued that in the long run it was in the interest of the king and of all English Catholics, who were, after all, less than 1 percent of the population, to adopt and stick to a policy of toleration. Neither he nor his king seems to have fully grasped the visceral force of English popular anti-Catholicism and the way it had been given new fuel by the persecutions of the Huguenots. Most historians have been baffled and dismayed by the spectacle of the great Penn “taken in” by what they see as the obviously insincere manipulations of James II. But more recent views of the rather inglorious ambiguities of the Glorious Revolution have disposed some to think that perhaps Penn knew what he was doing and that if the people of England had been willing to stomach a Catholic king and hedge him around with guarantees of religious freedom, they might have achieved in 1689 a more comprehensive toleration, including both Catholics and Quakers.
Through 1688, advising the king, trying to head off the disastrous measures proposed by the Catholic hard-liners, he also was juggling the affairs of Pennsylvania, where he was installing a new deputy who was not to the liking of the settlers; corresponding with the bishop of Ely about the difficulties of some Quakers in that area; and receiving a petition from some English landowners in Ireland condemning his consorting with the papists. The Glorious Revolution was a disaster for Penn. He was charged with treason several times and spent long periods in hiding in the years that followed. He was in Pennsylvania again from 1699 to 1701, and he spent his last years back in England. His Holy Experiment was becoming a more conventional place, with more conventional problems, including settler-Indian conflicts, but it never entirely lost its Quaker heritage or the open and democratic political culture he had sought to foster.
*Comparisons of sums of money in the seventeenth century and today are full of difficulties. According to one useful estimate, one pound in the 1680s would have bought goods worth nearly one hundred dollars today.