COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE
IMPERIALISM: THE WESTERN DESIGN AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES, 1654–1660
In April 1655, nearly eight thousand English soldiers and sailors, under the command of General Robert Venables, landed on Hispaniola with the intention of capturing the island from the Spanish in a plan known as the Western Design. They hoped to take the city of Santo Domingo, but Venables and his regiments accidentally landed nearly thirty miles from the city and had to march for days though difficult terrain in extreme drought conditions. Almost immediately, the undernourished and ill-trained forces began to drop dead from heat exhaustion, thirst, and dysentery. After two failed attempts on Santo Domingo, in which at least one thousand soldiers lost their lives, Venables and the other leading officers held a council of war to decide how to proceed. In May, the English fleet left Hispaniola and made its way to the Spanish colony of Jamaica, where they initially met little Spanish resistance. Although Spain refused to admit defeat for nearly two decades, by June it was clear that the English intended to stay. But the capture of Jamaica was barely considered a consolation prize by contemporaries. Hoping for bigger glory in Hispaniola, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was deeply disappointed when he learned of the conquest. And although Jamaica proved much easier to overpower, the island’s early years as an English territory were uncertain at best. Disease and guerilla attacks by remaining Spaniards and Maroon communities of former slaves combined to make settling a permanent colony no small task. And it seemed the Protectorate governments were not up to the challenge: by 1661, the island had approximately three thousand white inhabitants and about five hundred black slaves.1
Despite these precarious beginnings, however, the conquest of Jamaica was a defining moment in English imperial policies and projects in the New World. Previously, colonial acquisition in the Americas had been the reserve of trading companies and individual entrepreneurs. But the Western Design was the result of a bold imperial plan on the part of the Protectorate’s Council of State, one that had an enormous impact on the course of English imperial expansion during the second half of the seventeenth century. As this chapter will show, the plan itself embodied a brand of imperialism that emerged during the middle of the seventeenth century, especially among an influential group of colonial merchants and their political allies. Many of these merchants had made their fortunes selling servants and slaves to Virginia and the West Indies and wanted to expand their presence in the growing transatlantic market in servile labor. They also hoped to use the military campaign against Spain to bring existing colonies under stricter metropolitan control, which meshed with the Cromwellian state’s desire for territorial expansion and firm military hegemony. Such plans met resistance, however, in places like Barbados, where planters had developed their own imperial ideal, in which metropolitan authorities by and large did not interfere with the political or economic life of the colonies. This chapter begins with an investigation of Commonwealth imperial policies and the ideals of those men who financed and orchestrated the Western Design. It continues with the Design’s implementation and the problems experienced orchestrating the plan in Barbados. Finally, it considers the conquest of Jamaica and its first years as an English colony and explores the imperial ideologies behind its development. It will show that at the heart of the Western Design was the idea that empire building through territorial acquisition and strict commercial regulation was necessary to expand servant and slave markets and increase England’s national wealth.
COMMONWEALTH IMPERIALISM
The Western Design represented a turning point in English imperial designs because for the first time the English government was directly involved in a plan that aimed to expand the realm across the Atlantic. Many of the same merchant-planters and their allies who had created, sustained, and expanded the transatlantic servant and slave trades to Virginia, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands helped to plan and organize the scheme known as the Western Design. According to the historian Robert Brenner, many of these merchants reached an apex of political influence during the period of the Commonwealth (1649–1653). Many were named to important government committees charged with reorganizing the navy, customs collection, as well as determining Commonwealth commercial policies. These men included the colonial merchant Maurice Thomson and his brother Robert, who was involved in the slave trade as well as interloping ventures in the East Indies; their brother George, who was a member of the Council of State and the head commissioner of the navy; the longtime colonial trader William Pennoyer; his brother Samuel, another merchant; and Martin Noell, who had significant business and family connections in Barbados, and was one of Maurice Thomson’s key business partners. Brenner describes this group as an association of political independents with close connections to radical Puritan elements in and around London, many of whom were involved in colonial endeavors, especially in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Providence Island Company. They attempted to take quick advantage of the political power they gained in the wake of the execution of King Charles I in 1649.2
This group had a two-pronged imperial strategy, with both commercial and military elements. Throughout the Commonwealth period, these men and their political allies were instrumental in influencing legislation that specifically sought to remove the Dutch and other foreigners from carrying English colonial produce and provisioning English colonies with supplies and African slaves. They wanted to reestablish English trades and manufactures that had been disrupted during the 1640s.3 In addition, they aimed to bring those colonies that refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government under stricter metropolitan commercial, military, and political control.
The plans of this merchant group meshed well with those of the Commonwealth government, which had a strong imperialist agenda, including the desire to conquer territory in the Caribbean and the submission of semiautonomous regions within Britain to its authority through land confiscation, forcible settlement, and revenue extraction geared for the benefit of the metropolis. This imperial ideal was apparent in the first instance in Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell’s determination to put an end to the uprising begun in Ireland in 1641 led to brutal attacks on the cities of Drogheda and Wexford in the fall of 1649. In the coming years, the New Model Army under the leadership of Henry Ireton and Charles Fleetwood would exact atrocious assaults on the Irish. After the military conquest of the country was complete in 1652, the English Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, which outlined a policy of forcibly removing not only Catholic Irish but Catholic Old English landowners to designated settlement areas, mostly west of the river Shannon. About three thousand Catholic landowners were forced to surrender their land, which was then handed over to New Model Army officers and personnel in lieu of pay. Land was also designated for English settlers deemed “worthy” by the government to settle in Ireland. In conquering Ireland and orchestrating a massive transfer of landownership based on forced removal and migration, the Commonwealth made its aggressive vision of empire evident.4
After subduing Ireland in late 1649, Cromwell turned his attention to Scotland. Since James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the English had contemplated with varying degrees of seriousness schemes to incorporate Scotland and England into a British polity. Scotland had of course played a crucial role in the Civil War, and when news of the regicide reached Edinburgh, the Covenanters proclaimed Charles II king of the Scots and king of Great Britain and Ireland in February 1649. Fortunately for the English, the Scots were continuously plagued by ideological disunity, and Charles II proved a woefully inadequate military leader and diplomatic strategist. Two crucial defeats of Scottish forces—first at Dunbar in September 1650 and then at Worcester a year later—triggered the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland and the transportation of prisoners of war to the American colonies. After years of negotiations, Scotland was politically incorporated into England in April 1654. Unlike Ireland, it was not subject to a policy of massive resettlement and plantation, but the subjugation of Scotland stemmed from a similar imperial impulse.5
The Commonwealth’s treatment of its American colonies also reflected this imperial agenda of conquest, submission, and settlement. After the execution of Charles I, colonial governments were uncertain about the direction of the government in England. Many colonists in Virginia and the Caribbean were deeply ambivalent if not overtly hostile to the new regime. Virginia was the first colony to proclaim for Charles II in the autumn of 1649. Sir Philip Bell, the governor of Barbados, remained neutral for as long as possible but was eventually forced to declare for the monarchy after a coup by planters claiming royalist sympathies in the spring of 1650. A number of planters who supported Parliament’s cause then fled for London, where they attempted to drum up support to suppress the rebellion. The response by the Council of State to this insubordination in Virginia and Barbados illustrated the Commonwealth’s forceful imperial policy. After learning of the rebellion in Barbados, the committee of the navy, directed by George Thomson, Maurice’s brother, drew up an act establishing an embargo on all trade to and from the disloyal colonies. This “Act Prohibiting Trade with the Barbada’s, Virginia, Bermuda’s, and Antego” of 1650 was designed to punish disobedient colonies by blocking access to all foreign merchants and markets. Not surprisingly, colonial governments were not happy with the law. The council and assembly of Barbados issued a declaration that innovatively argued that because they lacked representation in Parliament, they should not be “bound by [its] regulations.” It also emphasized the important role Dutch merchants had played in supplying the colony and in helping establish and maintain plantations in recent years, something also emphasized in Virginia’s official reaction. Even the colonial bastion of Commonwealth political and religious ideals, Massachusetts Bay Colony, was dismayed by the act.6
In addition to the embargo, the English government decided that military force would be necessary to ensure colonial compliance with the new regime’s imperial and commercial policies. In 1651 the navy sent a small fleet under the command of Sir George Ayscue to Barbados to force its submission to the Commonwealth. Ayscue, who had led the English naval forces in Ireland, arrived in Barbados in the fall of 1651, and proceeded to blockade the island for three months. There were a few skirmishes, but the royalist governor, Francis, Lord Willoughby, surrendered to Ayscue once the commander of one of his largest regiments, Colonel Thomas Modyford, defected to Parliament’s cause after being promised a place in the island’s new government. By flexing its military muscle, the Commonwealth had won the obedience of a colony on the brink of civil war. The English government also sent a small fleet to Virginia in late 1651, which quickly won submission in early 1652. Although the terms of the surrender granted Barbados the freedom to trade with foreigners, as Robert Bliss has argued, “it was made clear that these [colonial] governments did not exist by virtue of local mandates,” but instead through Parliament’s authority and grace.7 The Commonwealth had a strong imperialist agenda in which colonies were commercially, politically, and militarily subordinate to the metropolitan government.
Traditionally, the 1650 embargo and the subsequent passage of the first Navigation Act in 1651, which prohibited all colonial trade with foreign merchants, have been interpreted as some of the earliest examples of the mercantilist policies that came to define early English imperialism. But they should also be understood as representing a clear vision of empire espoused by the colonial merchants and their political associates on the Council of State and the newly created Council of Trade. There has been a long-standing scholarly debate about the exact influence, if any, of the colonial merchants over the creation and passage of the Navigation Act. I argue that a variety of interests, including the colonial merchants, political and religious radicals, as well as those in charge of diplomatic affairs, orchestrated and supported the Navigation Act and its provisions limiting foreign access to English markets. What unified this disparate group was hostility toward the Dutch for a variety of political, economic, and ideological reasons.8 In his defense of the Navigation Act, Benjamin Worsley, who served on the Council of Trade and had financial interests in Virginia, explained that the act was designed to promote colonial trade in the national interest at the expense of “the Hollanders.” Closely associated with the colonial merchant group, Worsley made the familiar mercantilist argument that because of Dutch commercial success, England had necessarily lost wealth and treasure. To reverse these fortunes, England had to be prepared to fight the Dutch for empire as well as trade, “by weakening their shipping and draining them by degrees of their treasure and coin.” This could be achieved through commercial restrictions, war, or a combination of both. In fact, the Navigation Act of 1651 became law only after the Dutch had rebuffed English overtures to form a political union, which would have eliminated commercial competition between the two countries. Because of this failure, the Council of State and the Council of Trade felt that they were left with little choice but to retaliate, and in addition to passing the 1651 act, war was declared against the Netherlands the following year. The Navigation Act was a clear indication that the English state was now directly concerned with how to promote overseas trade and empire for the benefit of the country using restrictive commercial policies. The willingness of the Commonwealth to utilize strict commercial legislation and military force, or at least the threat of military force, indicated a new imperial direction for the English government.9
THE WESTERN DESIGN: PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION
It is in this context of an aggressive foreign and imperial policy that the desire to wage war against Spain in 1654 must be understood. This overarching strategy—so apparent in the decisions to conquer Ireland, occupy Scotland, and send naval fleets to subdue the American colonies—also influenced the decision to attack Spain in the New World. The government’s imperial agenda became more belligerent in the aftermath of the creation of the Protectorate in late 1653. In becoming Lord Protector, Cromwell effectively became a monarch in all but name, but one equipped with a well-trained modern army and navy and a growing fiscal-military state. One of Cromwell’s first goals as Lord Protector was to end the ongoing war with the United Provinces. He and his allies felt that the Spanish were a much more serious threat to the stability of Europe in general and to England in particular. Although Cromwell was probably personally motivated by strong anti-Catholic prejudice and a sense of religious providentialism, declaring war with Spain was not simply a resurrection of the Elizabethan desire to advance the Protestant cause. For many, Spain had to be defeated because of its desire to establish a universal monarchy and hinder England’s political and economic prosperity.10
While the terms of the Dutch peace were worked out in the winter and spring of 1654, Cromwell and his Council of State turned to discussing the potential costs and benefits of war with Spain. In order to hobble Spain economically, it was decided that it had to be cut off from its supply of bullion from its American possessions. According to notes written by Edward Montagu, the future Earl of Sandwich, at a meeting of the Protector’s Council on April 20, 1654, the possibility of intercepting the Spanish plate fleet carrying New World bullion was one of the major motivating factors for “undertakinge the Designe of Attempting the Kinge of Spaine in the West Indies.” Evidence from this meeting revealed there was also a clear desire, even at this early stage, for empire building. Naval Captains Henry Hatsell and William Limbery, both experienced merchants who had traded in the Caribbean, indicated that it was “very feasible” to take both Hispaniola and Havana, Cuba, from the Spanish in a short amount of time in order to “have command of the Spaniard’s fleet.” In addition, in taking Hispaniola, “our people from New England, Virginia, the Barbadoes, the Summer Islands, or from Europe,” could then settle on that island. Such a plan would also help to pacify Scotland by providing territory to forcibly remove Scots, “being not in our view to be setled without a transplantation of 8 or 10000 bodies of men every yeare.” Although those opposed to the mission, most notably General John Lambert, warned that in retaliation Spain would cut England off from European trade, Hatsell and Limbery replied that “notwithstandinge our warr with the Spaniard in America, it is possible, if not reasonable to expect that wee may have peace and trade in Europe.” In fact, it seemed that the Protectorate was counting on Spain’s inability to finance such a war or maintain any real allies while engaged in hostilities with England.11
It is revealing that the Protectorate Council turned to Hatsell and Limbery for expert advice. Both men, in addition to being naval officers, had traded with the Spanish in the New World and had ties to the colonial merchant community in London. Others known to have been supportive of waging war against Spain in the New World included Secretary of State John Thurloe and the colonial merchant-planter Martin Noell, who was Thurloe’s brother-in-law. Attacking Spanish America was not a new idea for these men and their associates. Maurice Thomson and the merchant William Pennoyer had orchestrated extraordinarily successful privateering raids against the Spanish at the behest of the Puritan Providence Island Company from 1638 to 1641. In 1641, the year the Spanish recaptured Providence Island from the English, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, a director of that company with known connections to Thomson and a long history of anti-Spanish prejudice, called for the creation of a “West Indie Association” establishing a merchant marine that would have aimed directly for the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. According to Rudyerd, Spanish colonies were the king of Spain’s “[gold] mines in the West Indies, which minister fuel to feed his vast ambitious desire of universal Monarchy.” Fears of Spanish aspirations for universal monarchy had by the 1650s blended with apprehensions that England was losing the empire game to its European rivals and the vast wealth that went along with it. In order to catch up, England had to conquer territory, gold, and trade routes from its enemies in the New World. Jealousy of other nations’ economic and imperial prosperity dominated the political-economic discourse of the 1650s. For some, like the Parliamentarian army officer and pamphleteer Samuel Lambe, war and trade went hand in hand as “chief ways that make a nation rich and flourishing.”12
Although the navy began to provision ships for the expedition to Spanish America, the debate in the council continued on July 20, 1654. Lambert persisted in raising objections about cost and feasibility, but Cromwell insisted that he had been informed “that this designe would cost little more then laying by the shipps, and that with hope of greate profitt.”13 Although the folly of Cromwell’s desire to fight Spain in the New World would soon become apparent, as the historian Timothy Venning has argued, the design made perfect sense for the Protectorate. It would be cheaper and more effective than a continental war; it would utilize soldiers and sailors idled by the end of the Dutch war; and previous experience had shown that relatively small forces could inflict serious damage in the Caribbean. In addition, Cromwell seemed to believe that English merchants were effectively prohibited from trading with the Spanish in the New World and had suffered from Spanish reprisals. Although trading with the Spanish was illegal, plenty of English merchants (presumably Hatsell and Limbery included) managed to trade surreptitiously in Spanish America with a significant level of success. Whether or not Cromwell knew this and chose to ignore it, or was genuinely unaware of the local situation, he embraced the idea that Spain had to be forced to allow Protestant English traders access to their goods and markets. The idea that Spain had regularly broken peace treaties and trade agreements both in Europe and in the New World was utilized as a major justification for the war and might have been encouraged by merchants who wanted even greater access to Spanish wealth.14
Indeed, many colonial merchants were directly involved in the planning and implementation of the Western Design against Spain. John Limbery (William’s brother), Martin Noell, and Maurice Thomson served on an advisory committee organized in August 1654 for planning and financing the Western Design. Other merchants appointed to this committee included Andrew Riccard, William Williams, and William Vincent, who were all involved in the Levant and East India Companies; Riccard and Williams were also both aldermen in the City of London in the 1650s. The fact that such men were involved in the Western Design suggests that some “traditional” merchants were by the mid-1650s also interested in colonial trades. Although many of these merchants were religious Independents or Puritans, they were not necessarily interested in religious reasons for fighting Spain. They wanted to attack Spanish colonies and establish new English ones for their own personal profit and to increase England’s national wealth.15 As merchants, they all hoped to expand English markets in the colonial trades of sugar, servants, and slaves.
The role of colonial merchants in supporting war with Spain in the New World seems apparent. Historian Stephen Saunders Webb, however, has argued that the London-based merchants in fact opposed the war against Spain at first and only came to support it after they received contracts for provisioning the naval fleet. He argues that the vision of empire espoused by these men, in which English colonies would develop large plantations manned by “servile labor” producing agricultural goods for the home market, was emphatically not imperialist. Yet the merchant agenda he outlines was very much imperialist, albeit amorphous and subject to shifting political and ideological allegiances. It was this ideal of conquering new colonies and creating new markets for unfree labor that the Western Design sought to promote. Colonies conquered from the Spanish would provide English merchants with new opportunities to profit from the trade in servile laborers, including an increasing number of African slaves. In fact, the question of the imperial nature of the Western Design seems to have been a concern of some in England during the planning stages. Some worried that Cromwell’s aspirations for overseas territorial conquest would undermine Parliament’s fragile authority and that he even hoped to be crowned “emperour.”16 The politics of the Protectorate and its imperial designs were understood as interconnected by contemporaries.
The influence of the Western Design’s planning committee, made up of so many colonial merchants, also seems to undermine Webb’s assertions. In August 1654 the committee made suggestions for personnel in the existing colonies to oversee and help plan the expedition. Among their proposed commissioners in Barbados were Governor Daniel Searle and Colonel Thomas Modyford, who had switched sides from royalist to parliamentarian during Ayscue’s submission of the colony in 1652. Modyford, who was serving as speaker of the Barbados Assembly, had made a fortune with a five-hundred-acre sugar plantation with nearly one hundred slaves and over two dozen servants, and was connected to both Noell and Thomson through the sugar trade. As early as 1652, Modyford had offered his services to the Commonwealth “to enlarge the English dominions in the West Indies,” and that year had been instrumental in the English plan to colonize Guiana on the northern coast of South America. He envisioned the development of plantation colonies driven by the labor of indentured servants and African slaves as necessary to increase England’s (not to mention his own) power and profit. Other commissioners suggested by the committee included Martin Noell’s brother Thomas, the secretary of Barbados, and Maurice Thomson’s brother Edward, also resident on the island.17 It was partially through such kinship and business connections that men like Noell and Thomson were able to exert so much influence over imperial designs. They had valuable, firsthand information from the colonies, which the Protector and the Council of State took seriously.
In addition to choosing commissioners, the committee selected military officers to lead the expedition. They chose General Robert Venables to take charge of the army, and General William Penn to control the naval forces. Venables was a long-serving Parliamentarian army officer whose regiment was instrumental in the bloody siege of Drogheda, Ireland, in 1649. Venables was then stationed in Ulster from 1649 to 1654, where he oversaw the suppression of Irish and Scottish Presbyterian resistance to the English army and state. He was also a close associate of Martin Noell’s. Penn was a naval officer who had also been involved in the conquest of Ireland and led forces in the First Anglo-Dutch War. The son of a Bristol merchant, he also had connections to England’s growing colonial merchant community and was known to have radical religious tendencies and a strongly militaristic and providential view of contemporary politics.18 The selection of Venables and Penn to lead the forces in the West Indies expedition made sense, as they would have been well versed in the agenda of conquest, land confiscation, and forcible settlement espoused by the Cromwellian state.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1654, the planning committee also set about organizing the provisioning of the fleet with food, weapons, and men. This was not without its difficulties, for there were problems finding enough men for the expedition, as well as resistance from those impressed into service. In November 1654, a group of sailors presented Cromwell with a petition complaining that being impressed to serve in this latest expedition was not only unfair to those who had “sacrificed themselves” in previous conflicts, but it was “inconsistent with the Principles of Freedom and Liberty, to force men to serve in Military imployments, either by Sea or Land.” They demanded to be “as free as the Dutch Sea-men” as well as to receive the payment of arrears, which had been delayed for many months. On November 8, Martin Noell agreed to advance £16,000 “at instance of the Protector and Council for two fleet and forces,” presumably to help pay off some of this debt.19 Noell’s advance indicated not only his financial power over the expedition, but his willingness to support the design to the utmost.
To help plan the overall strategy of the Western Design, the advisory committee turned to Colonel Thomas Modyford, the wealthy plantation owner and speaker of the Barbados Assembly. He argued that ultimately the Spanish Main should be the primary goal of the design. To attempt the sparsely populated Spanish islands, as had been suggested at the Council of State meetings, would bring years of arduous work to the English, “whereas on the main you will meet with good towns, well peopled, with a few Spaniards and many Indians, whom they keep in slavery, and who very probably will be faithful to milder masters.” In addition, relatively deserted islands would require constant supplies of English settlers, “which may too much exhaust our native country of men, and render us weak at home.” He continued, “but on the main you have Indians to practice on, whom without dispute, will be politic and rational means be as so many hands gained to the commonwealth.” The primary reasons for attacking “Terra Firma,” however, were financial and strategic. “By settling the islands you provoke the Spaniard, but do not at all disable him of his revenge; but by settling on the main, you do not only take from him the benefit of his pearl, and the mines of gold and silver already open, but also hinder the passage of his treasure from Peru, and lay Peru fairly open to an invasion.” Modyford’s final point elucidated his own opinion about how the plan should be put into effect. “Lastly, it will be necessary, of the person who shall command in chief of these forces, have a power to command all the governors of the English in any part of America; and that his highness’s orders be directed to them to that purpose: and though I verily believe, that every man will be forward to embark on this design, yet it is wisdom to have a power of pressing, which on some extraordinary occasions may be made use of.”20
Modyford’s imperial plan did not mention any religious or providential reasons for going to war. By purposely understating the strength of Spanish forces and population, Modyford portrayed an empire-in-waiting, one that could be developed on the cheap, something that intrigued Cromwell, his ministers, and their merchant allies. It was a plan that would not require moving people from England in the short term, nor would it require many resources to help pay for such a venture. Instead, Native Americans as well as the residents of Barbados and the other existing English colonies would provide the necessary labor in the form of displaced small planters and former servants. But Modyford knew that planters in Barbados might not be willing to allow their own labor force to leave and settle in other colonies. Therefore it was necessary that those in charge of the expedition had total power over local colonial governors and officers to raise forces. Modyford’s suggestions were especially important because much of what he insisted upon was included in the commissions and instructions for those placed in charge of the expedition. Cromwell’s commission to Venables gave him “full power and authority to command the several and respective governors of the islands of Barbadoes, Bermudas, Antegoa, and other the Caribbee islands, and of all other English plantations in America; and all other officers and ministers whatsoever in the said islands and places.” Venables was authorized to implement martial law whenever and wherever he felt necessary and was given the power to impress all people and “such carriages, draughts, boats, and other vessels, as in your discretion shall be thought needful for the conveying and conducting of the said army and forces, or any provisions, or utensils or war, necessary or requisite for the same army.”21 The willingness to grant the officers such extraordinary military powers indicated that the regime was not simply interested in diverting Spanish bullion to England or in religious justifications for fighting a Catholic enemy. It was attracted to the idea of expanding English dominion, trade, and markets across the Atlantic through extensive military force.
Venables was also given broad planning powers over the operation. His official instructions left it up to him to “levy and raise such numbers of souldiers [at Barbados] as shal be found necessary for the better carrying on of this design.” It was also left up to him, in consultation with Penn and the other commissioners, to decide the best plan of attack. One option was to attempt to take one or more of the Spanish islands first, most likely the city of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, “not being considerably fortifyed may probably be possest without much difficulty, which being don, and fortifyed, that whole Island wil be brought under obedience.” This would have had the benefit of attracting English settlers, and providing a springboard for other conquests, including Havana, Cuba, “which is the back doore of the West Indies, and will obstruct the passing of the Spaniards Plate Fleete into Europe.” The second option was to go for the South American continent first, as Modyford had urged, “in one or more places between the River Orinoque and Porto Bello, aymeing therein cheifly at Cartagena, which we would make the seate of the intended design.” Modyford’s vision of empire on the quick and cheap was clear in this second possibility, which provided “houses ready built, a country ready planted, and most of the people Indians, who will submit to you, there being but few Spanyards there as is informed.” Venables’s instructions continued, “You wil be able to put the Country round about under Contribution for the maintenance of the Army, and therewith by the Spoile and other wayes probably make a great present returne of profit to the Commonwealth.” Ultimately, and presumably with the advice of the other commissioners, Venables chose the first option.22 This decision, however, does not diminish the imperial underpinnings of the Western Design as a whole. Both possibilities demonstrated that the campaign was not meant to be a purely military enterprise but was understood as a way to expand English commercial and imperial interests through territorial acquisition, the creation of plantation colonies, and the expansion of the servant and slave trades into new colonial markets.
BARBADOS AND THE WESTERN DESIGN
In December 1654, a fleet of thirty-eight ships with about three thousand soldiers and sailors left Portsmouth for Barbados to begin the Western Design. Although the governor of Barbados, Daniel Searle, had been made one of the plan’s commissioners, the arrival of the fleet in January 1655 triggered serious tensions in the colony. As the island’s planters were about to learn, the Western Design reflected the regime’s aggressive imperialist agenda by bringing existing English colonies under stricter control of the Protectorate’s commercial laws and political authority. Venables and Penn were sent with instructions not only to seize military control if necessary, but to rein in illegal trading with foreigners by enforcing the 1651 Navigation Act and condemning foreign ships. Soon after they arrived, the commissioners established a Prize Office in the colony to handle such seizures. The ever-present Colonel Modyford was placed in charge of the office to send the benefits of condemned ships and cargoes back to England. This was an extremely contentious issue for the Barbadians, who claimed they relied on Dutch and other foreign merchants for capital investment in their plantations and to export the island’s sugar, as well as to provide them with provisions and African slaves. English colonial merchants had wanted to end Dutch dominance of trade in the West Indies for years, and the Navigation Acts had been designed to do just that.23 But enforcement had been a serious problem. They wanted Barbados brought into line for the benefit of English merchants, and the Western Design seemed a perfect opportunity to try to achieve this goal. This addition to the commanders’ instructions revealed the aggressive imperial ambitions of the state.
Almost immediately after the arrival of the English fleet, there were significant conflicts between the Western Design’s commissioners and Barbados planters, many of whom were in the colony’s assembly. Commissioner Edward Winslow reported to Secretary of State Thurloe from Barbados that in accordance with his instructions, General Penn had seized and condemned for prize sixteen Dutch ships in February 1655. This resulted in a “tryall at comon law,” where all the island’s lawyers “were taken up for the strangers [the Dutch], and none could be procured for the state.” Not surprisingly, the local jury found for the Dutch merchants who had traded illegally “grounding all upon the articles of Barbadoes,” ignoring the theoretical reach of the Navigation Acts. “The Dutch were courted, and highly prized,” Winslow continued, “and sent home in a triumphant manner, to invite them freely to the trade of Barbados; by which means many more of them are expected before the end of May next.”24
This conflict between competing authorities and jurisdictions established a pattern of confrontation that lasted for the remainder of the century. The Barbadian planters in the assembly were by and large willing to pledge political loyalty to England and the Protector, but they were loath to allow that to extend to the commercial realm. They had been living without significant imperial control or interference over their commerce for nearly thirty years and were both resentful and fearful of what the Western Design represented militarily and economically. This confrontation in 1655 represented a key moment in the evolution of the colonial planter imperial ideal, which embraced a plantation empire based on servant and slave labor but not the state’s attempts at subordinating the colonies to its commercial and political control. The Barbados planters fully understood the imperial implications of the design. “Some of the planters,” reported one commissioner, “being of malignant spiritts (as indeed most of them are) signifie their follyes in venting their calumnious words against not onely the designe, but the powers by which we come and the parties employed in it.”25 On the other hand, the Western Design’s planners equally resented the autonomy of the Barbados planters and their blatant disregard of commercial laws. Their vision of empire was one in which colonies existed to supply England with agricultural raw materials and serve as markets for servile labor and English manufactured goods. For the merchants behind the Western Design, imperial authorities had to do their utmost to remove foreigners from English colonial trade in order to make sure that profits made it to England and English merchants.
Governor Searle and the men of the Barbados Assembly resented the commissioners’ attempts at limiting their established means of conducting trade and commerce. But this was only one area of conflict. As Modyford had urged, Venables was given absolute authority over Searle and local officers in all military affairs. Not only could he impress men into the expedition’s forces without interference from the governor or assembly, but he was also charged with reorganizing the island’s militia as he saw fit, and he had the authority to confiscate the colony’s excise duties for his own use. The most contentious issue was recruiting forces for the expedition. Modyford reported that before any troops had been raised, Venables informed the assembly “that they expected 4,000 men from hence, and did desire, that to avoid the inconveniencys, which might happen by their soldierly way of raysing them, that the assembly would present them with a list of names of the freemen and unengaged.” Modyford continued that “Instead of a fayre complyance, I found such a willfully imbittered party, that instead of debatinge calmely, they fell a clamouring against the quarteringe soldyers in ther houses … and would come to no conclusion but this, [to] let them [the commissioners] beat up drumes and take ther owne course, we wil not assist them.” This is precisely what Venables and the other commissioners set about doing.26
The island’s planters were outraged by the way they were forced to allow four thousand men to leave as soldiers for the Western Design. One officer sent with the expedition, Lt. Col. Francis Barrington, admitted that because recruitment was “left to the discretion of our officers, who endeavoured to gett as many men as they could not valuing who was undone, such was the irregularitie of this carriage that many lost all their servants.” He went on to explain that many recruits who left Barbados had significant debts on the island and used the chance to serve in Cromwell’s army as a means to escape the island’s creditors. Even Modyford acknowledged this had occurred. The men of the assembly placed the blame for their losses squarely on Modyford, who because of his past willingness to switch political allegiances did not have the best reputation on the island.27 One member of the commissioners’ service wrote to Thurloe: “Here’s in the island one Collonel Moodiford and Mr. Nowell, secretary to the island’s affairs, who are hugely distasted by this island; for that they two, as the islanders say, did invite our forces over hither, which our islanders are generally against.” Thomas Noell was “Mr. Nowell,” the brother of the London-based merchant Martin, a close ally of Modyford’s. The actions of both men, with their kinship and business connections to those who had orchestrated the Western Design, alarmed many in Barbados. Modyford’s insistence that the officers in charge of the military expedition have supreme authority over local officers left Governor Searle and the assembly offended and worried for the future. Searle explained to Cromwell that many on the island were concerned that as a result of Venables’s commission, “two powers, the one for the military, the other for the civil, should be here extant, as two distinct authorities over them.”28 Bringing Barbados under the firm grasp of the Protectorate government caused a significant rift in an already fragile relationship between the colony and England. It represented a major turning point in English imperial policy, as the Protectorate tried to bring existing colonies under firmer control. It was also a defining moment in the evolution of the planters’ imperial ideal, which in contrast depended upon a more flexible relationship to metropolitan authorities.
THE CONQUEST OF JAMAICA AND
PROTECTORATE IMPERIALISM
The English fleet, supplemented by about four thousand men from Barbados and another twelve hundred from the Leeward Islands, headed for Santo Domingo on Hispaniola in April 1655. In their hurry to begin the expedition, Venables and Penn left Barbados without sufficient provisions of arms and food. After missing their target of Santo Domingo, Venables and his regiments had to march for days through rough and unfamiliar territory, and within a few short weeks at least one thousand soldiers were dead. After regrouping, Venables, Penn, and the other commissioners decided to head for another Spanish island, and in May the fleet made its way to Jamaica, where they met little Spanish resistance. Upon taking Jamaica, Venables and his officers immediately set about defending their actions to Cromwell and the imperial authorities. Rather than focus on the disaster of Hispaniola, they attempted to describe Jamaica as a desirable acquisition. Three weeks after landing on the island, Commander Daniels wrote to Thurloe that Jamaica “far exceeds all others in America for fertility in all manner of things, fruits and cattle, horses so good as any in England.” Similarly, Venables and Captain Gregory Butler explained that Jamaica “lyeth more advantageously for the annoying the Spaniard on every side, than Hispaniola; neither is it inferiour in itself, for we find it to abound with store of fish, fowls, cattle, fruits of all sorts usual in these parts.” They optimistically added they had heard there was a silver mine on the island. Major Robert Sedgwick, a commissioner and Puritan who had lived in Massachusetts, wrote from Barbados, “Many think Jamaica a more considerable island than Hispaniola.” Thomas Modyford joined the chorus supporting Jamaica’s prospects. “It hath an excellent harbour,” he explained, “and is accounted the most healthful and plentiful of them all. It will be sooner filled [than Hispaniola], and is far more convenient for attempts on the Spanish fleet … And believe it, this will more trouble the court of Spain than ten of the other.”29
Jamaica’s geographic position in the center of the Caribbean Sea and apparently boundless potential, however, could not disguise the fact that English soldiers and sailors could barely survive on the island. Many of the same letters that explained how Jamaica could be transformed into an important and successful colonial settlement also described the hunger, disease, and death that accompanied the English troops there. Supplies were slow in coming and those that did arrive were woefully inadequate and at the point of rotting. The results were disastrous. Major Sedgwick wrote to Cromwell shortly after arriving on the island in November 1655, “Soldiers die daily, I believe 140 every week; and so have done ever since I came hither. It is strange to see young lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the grave, snatched away in the moment with fevers, agues, fluxes and dropsies, a confluence of many diseases.” Sedgwick offered by way of explanation: “The truth is, God is angry, and the plague is begun, and we have none to stand in the gap … there hath been, I fear, in all this design nothing but wrath and heavy displeasure.” Adding to his misery, Sedgwick complained that the soldiers were unwilling to plant food for their own survival. “I believe they are not to be paralleled in the world,” he later wrote, “a people so basely unworthy, lazy and idle, as it cannot enter into the heart of any Englishman.” Venables similarly lamented in a letter to Martin Noell, “Our wants [are] great; our difficulties are many; unruly raw Soldiers, the Major part, ignorant; Lazy dull Officers that have a large Portion of Pride, but not of Wit, Valour, or Activity.” Circumstances were so dire that both Penn and Venables left Jamaica for England separately in June, Penn because he felt there was nothing more to be done, and Venables because his own health had deteriorated.30
Despite the horrendous circumstances on the ground, the commissioners had little choice but to hold out hope for Jamaica’s future and felt it was of the utmost importance to transform the island from a military garrison into a permanently settled plantation colony. This had been the goal of the Western Design from the beginning. Although not nearly as large as Hispaniola, Jamaica’s size of 4,411 square miles, twenty-six times the size of Barbados, made it all the more promising to its promoters. From Barbados, Modyford urged “his highness and the council to send speedy and great supplies of men, arms, ammunition, and clothes [to Jamaica] … I hope our nation will not draw back, having thus far entered.” Even the pessimistic Sedgwick expressed hope that the island not be abandoned because “if some good encouragement were given to increase planters here, [Jamaica] might be well.” Many of the officers set about making this transition a reality. After the departure of Venables and the death of Major General Richard Fortescue in October 1655, Colonel Richard Holdip was left in charge of the island. He managed to turn his army regiment into a functioning plantation at Liguanea, near Spanish Town. Sedgwick, who had worked as a merchant in Boston, was also active in advocating a plantation future for Jamaica and did his best to encourage civilian immigration.31
Word of the devastating loss at Hispaniola reached England in July 1655. Upon learning of the failure of his design, Cromwell fell into despair. Like Sedgwick, he felt that God was angry with the English and specifically with him.32 When Penn and Venables arrived in England in September, they were called before Cromwell and the Council of State to answer for their apparent failures. In his frustration, Cromwell threw the generals into the Tower of London for abandoning their forces and for failing to capture the Spanish plate fleet on their return voyages. But despite his deep disappointment and spiritual self-doubt, the Protector chose to hold on to Jamaica rather than abandon it. In fact he proceeded to declare war against Spain officially, as planned in October, claiming the Western Design was not a new war but a continuation of old wars against Spain in the New World. Perhaps he agreed with Thomas Modyford’s assertion: “I am most confident, that if this place be fully planted, which in three or four years may with ease be done, his highness may do what he will in the Indies.”33
Cromwell and others decided that the problem was not in the imperial designs of his ministers and merchant allies, but rather the men recruited to execute the plan. “If we look with an impartial eye,” explained one pamphlet in late 1655, “upon the major part of those that came out of England to be (as indeed they were) raw Soldiers, Vagabonds, Robbers and runagate servants, certainly these Islands must be the very scum of scums, and mere dregs of corruption.” Many of the commissioners blamed those recruited in Barbados and Saint Christopher in particular. “I believe they were a people much bound up in the thoughts of their own strength,” wrote William Godfrey from Jamaica in April 1656, “not considering the power of God’s ability in subverting their covetous expectations of Indian treasure into dust.” As late as September 1656 a newsletter to William Clarke, secretary to the army in Scotland, reported that “there were not left of the land soldiers upon Jamaica above 1,500 … some dying before being over-run with a spirit of laziness that they have not wrought anything in a way of a plantation.”34
Jamaica clearly needed a fresh supply of people. In order to succeed, the colony had to be perceived as friendly to nonmilitary interests, such as planters and merchants. There were many official plans to populate Jamaica with settlers from as early as two months after the initial conquest. In August 1655, Cromwell issued a proclamation to encourage the settlement of the island by offering “that every planter or adventurer to that island shall be exempt and free from paying any excise or custom for any manufactures, provisions, or any other goods or necessaries, which he or they shall transport to the said island of Jamaica.” The proclamation also declared that it was the goal of the English state to transform Jamaica from a military outpost by “the constituting and settling of a civil government” as quickly as possible. In addition, Cromwell encouraged the governors of other English colonies to help settle the island. In a letter to the governor of Bermuda, Vice Admiral Goodson indicated that Jamaica would be happy to welcome settlers from that colony, and intimated that a number of settlers under the leadership of Governor Luke Stokes of Nevis planned to leave that colony for better prospects in Jamaica. Cromwell also sent Captain Daniel Gookin, an influential Puritan and occasional resident of Massachusetts, to New England in December 1655 with the purpose of recruiting settlers for Jamaica. To encourage Bostonians to move, Gookin arrived with a proclamation promising “Ships for transportation; a sufficient proportion of Land to them and their heirs for ever near some good harbour in the said Island; Protection (by Gods blessing) from the enemies; a share of all the Horses, Cattle and other beasts, wild and tame upon the place freely, Together with other Priviledges and Immunities.” Officers in Jamaica promised to assist Gookin to send the settlers to the new colony.35
Plantation and migration, forced or otherwise, characterized Cromwellian imperialism, and plans to populate Jamaica with hardy laborers and godly servants coincided with similar efforts in Ireland. Often these endeavors involved the same people and families; Daniel Gookin’s brother Vincent, for example, was instrumental in promoting English settlement in Ireland. As in the case of Ireland, promoting migration to Jamaica often involved the Scots. Sending people from Scotland to the New World had been part of the original discussions of the Western Design in the spring of 1654. In a letter to Thurloe in September 1655, Lord Broghill, Lord President of the Council of Scotland in Edinburgh, indicated that there was a proposal to send people from Scotland to Jamaica. “If I doe not mistake,” Broghill noted, “there are three sorts of persons to be exported, viz. such men, as are to be recruits; such as are to be planters; and such women, as will go over with their husbands, or will adventure to seek husbands there.” In addition, in the spring of 1656, Cromwell established a “committee for managing the affairs of Jamaica” that included Martin Noell and Thomas Povey, the merchants and army officers Captains Thomas Alderne and Stephen Winthrop, and Colonel Tobias Bridges. In June 1656 they issued a report to Cromwell urging him “to support Jamaica as your principal fort and settlement in the West Indias.” They suggested that Scottish Highlanders be sent to the island by contracted merchants, presumably Noell and Povey themselves. The English were also encouraged to migrate, and by 1657 pamphlets promoted the commercial potential of planting in Jamaica and argued that the settlement of the colony was in the “Public Interest.”36
The Protectorate seemed committed to promoting Jamaica’s development into a successful plantation colony. The only plan that came to fruition, however, was the scheme to transplant fourteen hundred people with Governor Stokes from Nevis. Although it was clear to the Western Design’s commissioners and planners that the permanent settlement of the island was of the utmost importance, Jamaica’s transition from military conquest to plantation colony was by no means certain. Despite official encouragements and proclamations, few people were willing to risk death from war or disease to settle on Jamaica. Without serious financial and administrative support from England, Jamaica could never develop into a viable colony for soldiers, merchants, or planters. The men of the Jamaica committee grew increasingly impatient with the Protector. The tone of a report issued by Noell, Povey, Winthrop, and Bridges in June 1656 betrayed a growing frustration, “for as yet Jamaica looks only like a garrison, and rather as an Army then a colony.” They perceived a lack of serious interest on the part of the Protectorate with the development of Jamaica and with the management of imperial affairs generally. Colonel Edward D’Oyley, who arrived in Jamaica to help fortify the island in late 1655, lamented to Thurloe that “wee are a desolate, and almoste an abandoned people.”37
There were, of course, good reasons for this apparent neglect. By the spring of 1656, the government lacked the necessary funds to continue carrying out the war with Spain. Constant fears of further Spanish attacks made diminishing the military presence on the island impossible. In 1657 and 1658, in fact, the Spanish attempted to reconquer the island but were thwarted by successful campaigns led by D’Oyley. D’Oyley, a close friend of Thomas Povey, was a staunch Parliamentarian and New Model Army officer who was sent to Barbados in March 1655 to raise a regiment for the design and arrived in Jamaica later that year. He quickly rose through the army ranks and by 1657, due in part to the deaths of so many of the other officers, was in charge of the colony. D’Oyley became one of the most vocal proponents of Jamaica’s need for civilians, especially planters and merchants, to settle on the island. In October 1656, as commander in chief, he convened a council of war to decide “the disposal of ye several regiments of ye Army in places convenient within this island for and towards their settlement by way of planting.” Other remaining officers also actively tried to promote planting. Lt. Col. Francis Barrington, for example, had hopes of building a “sugar work” as early as 1657. The situation on the ground was slow to improve, however, and D’Oyley continued to send letters describing a desperate want of provisions, arms, ammunition, and, most of all, people on the island.38
The situation in Jamaica was well known in England. One pamphlet from September 1655 claimed that the Western Design “is now indeed the discourse of the Nation.” There were plenty of people who were skeptical of the execution of the entire plan, which became a focus for critics of the Protectorate throughout 1655–1656. Many argued that Cromwell’s imperial plans smacked of monarchical aspirations. Others felt that Jamaica was a distraction from more important domestic political and economic concerns. One observer maintained that the entire Western Design was part of an imperial scheme orchestrated by Cromwell and his cronies to crown him emperor of a vast British dominion, which included Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies. “It remained only,” the author concluded, “that he should make himself Lord Paramount, King or Emperor over the whole, and the succession of his heirs.”39
The exorbitant costs of the war, the poor execution of the design, and the militaristic direction of the government were the primary topics of debate when Cromwell was forced to order the election of a new Parliament to fund the war in the summer of 1656. There was a proliferation of pamphlets on the Spanish war and its consequences. One urged people not to be afraid to vote their consciences against Cromwell’s candidates, and appealed to the popular memory of the tragedy that befell the army and navy in Hispaniola and Jamaica. It urged people to remember “the cries of your poor brethren the honest Sea men, the wall and bulwark of our Nation against foreigners, who have so freely ventured their lives upon all accounts and calls, and are now barbarously forced from their wives and children to serve the ambitious, and fruitless designs of one man?” Others embraced Cromwell’s imperialist stance in the West Indies. “It is true, He is a Great Conqueror,” one sycophantic sympathizer wrote, “yet his Mercy and Goodness are his best Arms and strongest Forces; for no bounds can be set to a Royal Gentlenesse, and the Jurisdiction of a Prince’s love is unlimited.” In the event, many of the MPs elected to the Second Protectorate Parliament in 1656 were deemed too hostile to the regime, and at least one hundred members were blocked from attending. One purged MP condemned Cromwell’s “Kingly” aspirations, and warned people to “recollect at what vast charge he hath maintained those fleets and Armies for these two last years against the Spaniard.” The fact that the Western Design played such an important role in the 1656 elections illustrates that the regime’s imperial plans and the execution of the war against Spain concerned many in England. Not only were people troubled with the conduct and costs of the war and the terrible state of English forces, but some were also apprehensive of what the conquest of Jamaica and its development into a plantation colony meant for the Protectorate and the fragile English republic.40
Considering the desperate situation on the ground in Jamaica, the mounting opposition at home for the design, as well as the difficulties promoting the colony, it seems reasonable to ask why Cromwell and his ministers decided to keep Jamaica. It clearly would have been much simpler and cheaper to have abandoned the design altogether. Traditionally, historians have focused on Cromwell’s religious convictions and anti-Catholic prejudices; to have given up Jamaica and the entire design would have been an admission of Protestant defeat, which he was unwilling to make. As evidence, they turn to Cromwell’s opening speech to Parliament in September 1656, in which he described Spain as England’s “natural enemy,” and “a State that you can neither have peace with, nor reason from,” that supported the interests of the exiled Stuarts at home and abroad. For example, Karen Ordahl Kuperman has emphasized the providential nature of Cromwell’s Puritanism on his imperial decisions in the Caribbean. She places the Western Design and the ultimate decision to stay and settle Jamaica as part of a larger Puritan transatlantic imperial mission. The New England colonies were always considered a temporary stopping point in this mission, she claims, for the real goal of the Puritans was the establishment of a permanent colony in the West Indies.41 After the loss of Providence Island to the Spanish in 1641, the decision to stay and settle Jamaica was a culmination of this godly obligation.
Cromwell’s religious convictions and sense of providentialism, as well as his deep disappointment over the humiliating failure to capture Hispaniola, were certainly important factors that contributed to the decision to keep Jamaica. But the continued influence of colonial merchants over Protectorate imperial affairs should not be discounted. Seizing territory and trade routes from the Spanish and creating new plantation colonies as markets for servants and slaves had been their goal all along, and abandoning what the army and navy had managed to capture was not an option, as far as they were concerned. Those who had orchestrated the Western Design, however, grew increasingly disillusioned with its execution and what they perceived as a lack of serious interest in promoting Jamaica on the part of the Protectorate. In 1657, Martin Noell, Thomas Povey, and their associates attempted to make serious changes to the Protectorate’s imperial administration by proposing the formation of a joint-stock West India Company. The company was envisioned for the “checking ye pride of the Spaniards” and “ye improvement of [England’s] distant Dominions” in the West Indies. They proposed creating a company with Parliament’s approval, designed with the purpose of promoting English commercial interests as well as settlement of more colonies. At first, the English navy would provide the necessary ships and ammunition, but once the company was established, it would be able to maintain itself through privateering raids on the Spanish plate fleet. According to the plan, the Protectorate would encourage the manning of such ships, but it would not incur any additional expenses by paying the recruits, as the seamen would be hired on the privateering standard of “no purchase, no pay,” meaning that all income would come from plunder, “which is the greatest encouragement and temptation that can be applied on such occasions.” Privateering, although seemingly at odds with commercial interests, was in reality another component of the merchants’ understanding of empire as a fierce game of international competition. In fact, Noell and Povey’s associates had been involved in privateering raids against the Spanish in the Caribbean decades earlier.42
According to the company’s designers, the benefits to England would be manifold. First, it would ease the cost of maintaining and defending overseas colonies, especially “carrying on ye settlement of Jamaica.” It would disrupt Spanish trade and force a commercial settlement between the two nations that would benefit England. In addition, the English state would profit from the prizes taken, as legally one-fifth of all condemned cargoes went into the Protectorate’s coffers. The company would also send servants “collected of vagabonds, beggars or condemned persons, & proceed with them to Jamaica.” These merchants continued to exploit the idea that England was overpopulated and popular fears of social disorder that went along with it. The major justification for the company, however, was that it would provide the cash necessary for maintaining Jamaica, which “must certainly be of vast expense to the State.”43
This scheme for a joint-stock privateering company, licensed by Parliament, established to provide the financial support necessary for Jamaica’s development, is a revealing example of mid-century imperialist ideology espoused by the Western Design’s chief architects. They were not alone in believing that empire building, through colonial settlement and joint-stock company sponsorship, should be a primary concern of the state. John Bland, who later became governor of the English colony in Tangier, wrote in 1659 that a good way “to nourish and increase Trade and Commerce in this Nation, is, the carrying on, and settling by publicke hand all Forain plantations.” According to Bland, the best way for the state to go about this was to promote trading “Companies and Corporations, the only Foundation and Pillar upon which a lasting Monument of Trade and Manufactories is to be built and preserved.” By encouraging colonization and trade, “this Nation will find an admirable remedy for the disburdening it self of our supernumerary people which increase among us, without fomenting wars to be rid of them.” Similarly, Samuel Lambe wrote in his 1657 pamphlet, “The people of England increasing so much notwithstanding the late wars, and the Land (though full of plenty) not increasing with them being an island, witness the many … daily going for Ireland and the Plantations, and yet there is no miss of them.”44 This imperial ideal of state-sponsored trading companies moving England’s superfluous populations across the Atlantic matched the goals of men like Noell and Povey and their proposed West India Company.
After they presented this proposal to the Council of State in 1659, however, it appears to have been lost in the political chaos of the time. With the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the political upheavals of the last Protectorate governments, Noell and Povey grew more discouraged over the state’s failure to support Jamaica. Povey wrote to his friend Colonel D’Oyley in Jamaica, explaining his deep disappointment. “It must be sadly observed that no affaire of consequence was ever in any age engaged in by this nation undertaken with less controle, conducted with less prudence, attempted with less courage, prosecuted with less success, and attended from time to time with less care and assistance from the state, then this Expedition, which was entered into with soe much noise and braverie that it startled almost all the known world.” Povey continued, “The old Protector and his Council were so much ashamed of the miscarriages of the first enterprize and were soe vexed and busyed in encountering those numerous ill consequences which have arised out of it, that they almost wholy did cast of[f] the thoughts of it, and as it were diserted it as unprofitable and remote and hopeless consideration.” Noell and Povey both hoped that a new regime would help them realize their imperial vision, “as it was never the interest of the State to ingage in soe vast and important a designe.”45
CONCLUSION
For all of its contemporary uncertainty, the conquest of Jamaica in 1655 was a key component of the imperial direction of the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments. The conquest of Jamaica galvanized an imperial vision in which the acquisition of overseas territory and its economic exploitation with servile labor explicitly characterized England’s imperial policies and became the direct concern of the burgeoning imperial state. It fundamentally changed England’s imperial outlook. The men who had orchestrated and financed the Western Design, including Martin Noell, Thomas Povey, Thomas Modyford, and Edward D’Oyley, wanted to capture territory from Spain in order to expand their markets in sugar, servants, and slaves. They also wished to assert imperial and commercial authority over existing colonies. In doing so they brought Barbados planters, who were developing their own imperial ideology, into conflict with the metropolis and the imperialism that the Western Design represented. Initially, the colonial merchants and their political allies found their plans of conquest and commercial control meshed with those of the Protector and hoped to develop Jamaica into a plantation colony as well as a base for privateering operations. They were deeply disappointed, however, with what they perceived as the government’s failure to cultivate the island’s full economic potential. These men could only hope that the imperial aspirations of the restored monarchy would better coincide with theirs.