RELIGION COLONISING & TRADE RELIGION COLONISING & TRADE THE DRIVING FORCES OF THE OLD EMPIRE Sr CHARLES LUCAS K.C.B., K.C.M.G. LONDON SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C.:2 1930 Printed in Greal Britain PREFACE THE history of ¢ The Old Empire from the Beginnings to 1783 * has been told at length in the first volume of ‘ The Cambridge History of the British Empire,’ which was published last year. I had the honour of writing a few Introductory pages to this comprehen- sive work, in which, under most able editors, experts on various times and subjects have collaborated with great effect. Possibly it was this connexion which set me thinking what were the main driving forces in the Old Empire as compared with later times. The result of plentiful references to standard writers and of some tesearch is given in this little book. 1930, C. P. LUCAS. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Tar SixtEENTH CENTURY II. Tur SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DOWN TO 1660 14 III. Tue RestorATION ERA 36 IV. 1688-1783 V. SuMMARY INDEX PAGE £ is 77 Uq RELIGION COLONISING ¢& TRADE CHAPTER 1 By ‘ The Expansion of England,” by the name as well as by the substance of his famous book, Sir John Seeley, nearly half a century ago, gave a notable lead to correct understanding of the British Empire. The lesson by this time has been fully learnt that our singular British Commonwealth is the outcome of growth ; that the Empire, with all its endless diversities, 1s an immensely enlarged version of an island in which all the elements of diversity were, and are still, to be found. Early in the book are the often quoted words that we seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the wotld in a fit of absence of mind.’ Perhaps it would be more strictly accurate to say that we did what we did by instinct, the instinct of growth and self-defence ; but, at any rate, premeditated design was wholly wanting. Yet, in the making of the Empire, as in the making of everything human, individual men and women have been concerned, and 2 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE men and women are conscious agents—they have motives for what they make or mar. It may therefore be of interest to try to trace from some of the records of the men of action and of the writings of the different petiods, how far the motives and methods, which were at work in connexion with the Old Empire down to 1783, were of a piece with the views and forces which have since prevailed. The question may possibly be thought to answer itself. Human beings remain human beings all the time with, in the main, the same motives determining actions shaped according to change of time and circumstance. Moreover, condi- tions of life in modern days and in a crowded and ultra- democtatic world have become so immeasurably and progressively more complex than they were a century and a half ago, that it may be considered futile to set earlier and later times side bv side. On the other hand no harm can be done, and possibly some useful guidance may be given or suggestion made by comparison and contrast. It will be readily admitted that the sixteenth century, the hundred years before the British Empire actually began to exist, is an integral part of the history of that Empire. No introduction ever was more completely part and parcel of a whole work than was this Tudor prelude. On the other hand, as historians have pointed out, in the case of the British Empire, far more than other empires, the line is clearly drawn between the preliminary age of adventure and the succeeding age of permanent beginnings : ‘ Never was there a set of men worse adapted for the sober business of estab- lishing a colony or governing a subject race ; yet they THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 3 too were servants of the Empire and cleared a way for those who came after them.” In these terms the late Sir Walter Raleigh, most worthy beater of a historic name, wrote of the voyagers of the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; the words will be found in his delightful essay published in the last volume of the Glasgow (19034) edition of Hakluyt’s ¢ Principal Navigations.” ! Earlier in the same essay he wrote, © Men have travelled, as they have lived, for religion, for wealth, for knowledge, for pleasure, for power and the overthrow of rivals > 2—a comprehensive list of motives, for the Elizabethans in particular, and in general for all men and times. The sixteenth century was Hakluyt’s century, in which and of which he collected records, to stir up his countrymen to what he styled discoveries and notable enterprises by sea. Born, we are told in the ‘ Dictionary of National Biography,” about 1552, he lived well on into the next century, till 1616. He saw, therefore, the actual beginning of the Empire and, what is more, he was a leading adventurer in the London section of the Virginia Company, which founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. In 1582 he published ¢ Divers Voyages touching the Discovery of America” In 1584 he wrote ‘A Discourse concerning Western Planting’ which, however, was not printed until 1877. The first edition, in a single volume, of his great collection, © The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation made by Sea or * Vol. xii, p. 68. In any further reference to quotations from Hakluyt’s Voyages. this edition is implied. 2 Ibid, p. 2. 4 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE Overland,” was published in 1589, and the second edition of the work, expanded into three volumes, was published in 1598, 1599, 1600. One of the earliest sixteenth-century documents in the collection is ¢ A Declaration of the Indies,’ etc., the often quoted letter or ‘ persuasion,’ in which, in 1527, Robert Thotne, an English merchant resident in Seville, urged King Henry VIII to have a route to Cathay sought for by the north. It begins, ¢ Experi- ence proveth that naturally all princes be desirous to extend and enlarge their dominions and kingdoms.’ 1 Here was the simplest and most rudimentary motive for the expansion of England, from the point of view of the King of England. He was presumed to want a larger kingdom, just as in better times for landowners than the present it would have been natural for a small landed proprietor to want to add more acres to his estate ; and inasmuch as the Tudor kings and queens of England and their subjects were, except in Queen Mary’s reign, very much of the same mind, it can be taken that the people of England, like their sovereigns, were more or less wishful to enlarge the English kingdom. This is more than a rather pointless truism. The small size of England in comparison with some other leading countries of Europe was very apparent as the sixteenth century went on its course, and so was the fact that a much smaller country, Portugal, had vastly enlarged its borders and propot- tionately raised its status in the world. Modern his- tory was then very young. By the young size is taken for strength, and peoples cannot afford to ignore 1 Hakluyt, vol. ii, p. 159. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 5 appearances. But it was a matter of fact as well as of appearance. England, in the sixteenth century wholly separate from Scotland, was a small unit. It was a much larger home base, it is true, than Portugal, ot than the Netherlands when the Dutch had achieved their independence; but it was not a big enough unit to face the future without feeling the need for expansion. It is difficult to understand how the soil of England can have been overpopulated in the sixteenth century, and yet the necessity for disposing of the unemployed was a stock argument with advocates of expansion. In his Discourse concerning Western Planting,’ Hakluyt urged °that this enterprise will be for the manifold employment of numbers of idle men,” and that the © discoveries and plantings’ of Portugal and Spain had found honest employment for the whole of their respective peoples.! Similarly, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in his © Discourse to prove a passage by the North-West to Cathaia and the East Indies,” dated 1576, wrote, ‘ Also we might inhabit some part of those countries and settle there such needy people of our country, which now trouble the Commonwealth.” 2 Partly because the world was younger and monarchy had a stronger hold in England in the sixteenth than in the seventeenth century, but largely or mainly because of the difference in personalities, the English people, or the adventurous members of the English people, had in Tudor times, and notably in the reign of * A Discourse concerning Western Planting, written by Hakluyt in 1584. Collections of Maine Historical Society (1877), Second Series, chap. iv, p. 36. 2 Hakluyt, vol. vii, p. 186. 6 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE Queen Elizabeth, a sense of wishing to gain something for, and give something to, their king or queen, which was wholly wanting in the next century. It was a very different matter when the Tudots were replaced by the Stuarts, when a Scottish king sat upon the throne of England, and when the pretensions of James I in his capacity of sovereign challenged contrast with the real greatness of Elizabeth. Among the immense majotity of Englishmen the personal feeling for a personal sovereign either ceased to exist or existed in the form of dislike rather than affection. The first of the Tudors, Henry VII, who, before the sixteenth century began, licensed John Cabot to make his memorable voyage of discovery, by his solicitude for the trading interests of England and for her strength at sea, deserved well of the future empire. So also, in two respects very especially, did his son, Henry VIII, to whom Robert Thorne wrote his letter. His naval and his ecclesiastical policy, both alike, were most fruitful for the coming time. He made a long and lasting move onward towards the creation of a royal navy, and gave every encouragement to English sea-craft and study of the sea. ‘The main outcome of his Church policy as embodied in the Reformation and the total severance of England from the Papacy, was that religion became to Englishmen a most powerful motive of empire. A subsidiary result was that, owing to the dissolution of the monasteries, pauperism and unemployment were greatly increased in England and, as has been seen, it was proposed to provide for the paupets by sending them over the seas. From the days of Columbus onward the lure of gold THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 7 called adventurers across the ocean. The hope of finding treasures of gold, wrote Adam Smith in ‘ The Wealth of Nations,” was the sole motive which inspired the Spanish conquest of America, and the search for new gold mines he denounced as a ruin- ous proceeding, leading in most cases to bankruptcy. Speaking in November 1855 to a working men’s audience on the subject of ‘Our Colonies,” Mr. Gladstone gave love of gold as the initial motive of modern colonisation ; the false idea that gold was to be found in immense quantities in North America, he said, did a work which the true idea never could have done, and the very delusion was made an instrument in the hands of Providence for forwatding the peopling of the vast spaces of America.2 A vain hope of gold in a stone which was brought back from Martin Frobisher’s first voyage to the Atzctic regions gave a great and immediate though wholly baseless impetus to two further voyages. Raleigh, after fruitless attempts to found colonies on more or less sound lines, was in his later days carried away to search for a mythical golden city. All down the centuries the lure of gold has gone on, though in modern times it has not been so much thesearch for gold in unknownand unexplored regions, as the lute of gold, where substantial finds of gold have already actually been made. Ballarat and Kalgoorlie, Klondike, and the Rand bear witness to ! Book IV, chap. vii, Part I. * Address to members of the Mechanics’ Institute at Chester, November 12, 1855, on ‘Our Colonies,” printed in Gladstone and Britain's Imperial Policy, by Paul Knaplund, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History in the University of Wisconsin (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.,1927), see pp. 191-2. 8 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE the attractive power of gold, to the peopling which is the immediate outcome of gold discoveries, to the far- reaching economic, social and political results which have followed in the train of gold. A wholly different motive, religion, was an immense force in favour of making a British Empire ; but it was a force which, in the case of the English in the sixteenth century, and to a large extent later also, operated mote by repulsion than by attraction. In the first chapter of his * Discourse concerning Western Planting,” Hakluyt, as is noted in Sir Walter Raleigh’s essay, tells of being challenged by papists as to how many infidels have been by us converted,” and © albeit I alleged the example of the ministers which were sent from Geneva with Villegagnon into Brazil, and those that went with John Ribault into Florida, as also those of our nation that went with Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake and Fenton; yet in very deed I was not able to name any one infidel by them converted.” This passage is followed by the shrewd remark that the clergy, if set to the work of conversion, would become less contentious.! Conversion of the heathen was in the forefront of Portuguese and Spanish expansion. It gave to their wars and conquests the character of crusades. To the English the crusading impulse was given by antipathy to the particular kind of Christian creed which Portuguese and Spaniards held. Yet conversion was one of the standard motives in the mouths of English advocates of empire in the sixteenth century. That Hakluyt, as a minister of the Church of England, should give a first place among motives 1 Hakluyt, vol. xii, pp. 32-3. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 9 for Western planting to the duty of spreading the Gospel was only to be expected. The enlargement of the Kingdom of God and bringing salvation to the heathen ought, he contended, to be the chief and principal work of the sovereigns of England as being called © Defenders of the Faith.” This was in his Discourse’ in 1584.2 In 1587 he wrote to Raleigh deploring that it was only the ‘ fewest number’ among the would-be discoverers that aimed at ‘the Glory of God and the saving of the poor and blinded infidels,” and he expressed the comfort which he derived from knowing that Raleigh intended to send to Virginia ¢ some such good churchmen as may truly say with the Apostle to the savages “we seek not yours, but you.” ’ 2 Hakluyt was one of a number of men, headed by Sir Thomas Smith and John White, to whom two years later, in March 1589, Raleigh, by a legal document which is not very easy to follow and which seems to be given only in the first edition of ¢ The Principal Navigations,” assigned trading rights in all the lands covered by his patent from Queen Elizabeth, and it may well have been due to Hakluyt that the deed provided for a payment by Raleigh to the assignees of £100 ‘in especial regard and zeal of planting the Christian religion in and amongst the said barbarous and heathen countries, and for the advancement and preferment of the same and the common utility and profit of the inhabitants therein.’ ® But Hakluyt’s 1 2 3 A Discourse concerning Western Planting, chap. i, pp. 8-9. Hakluyt, vol. viii, 2 443. Lo See 1589 edition of the Princival Navisations, p. 815. 10 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE personal influence was not needed to induce English promoters of discovery and settlement in the reign of Queen Elizabeth to raise on high the missionary banner. Among ‘the principal navigations > will be found numbers of passages in which lip service, if no more, is abundantly paid to the call of the mission field. It is in evidence, where it would not be expected, in the records of Frobishet’s voyages. Edward Hay, in his account of Gilbert’s last voyage, argues that, if Cabot’s discovery of the coast of North America had been followed up by exploration inland, no doubt Her Majesty’s territories and revenue had been mightily enlarged and advanced by this day. And, which is more, the seed of Christian religion had been sowed amongst those pagans which by this time might have brought forth a most plentiful harvest.’ 1 In ‘ Christopher Carlile’s Discourse,” written in 1583 in the hope of inducing the Russia Company to take in hand American discovery, the prospect of © reducing the savage people to Christianity and civility’ is coupled with that of providing for the unemployed ; 2 and—to take one more illustration—the discourse written in the same year by Sir George Peckham in connexion with Gilbert’s voyage, when dealing at great length with the ethics of planting’ among savages, lays down that ¢ the use of trade and traffic (be it never so profitable) ought not to be preferred before the planting of Christian Faith.” ® It is certain that a call to evangelise the heathen was prominently put forward in the days of Queen 1 Hakluyt, vol. viii, p. 35. 2 Ibid., p. 143. 3 Ibid. p. 98. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY II Elizabeth as a motive for beginning the Empire. It is equally certain that the plea produced no effect. In the modern Sir Walter Raleigh’s opinion, as given in his essay, John Davis was almost the only English sailor of his time who had a sincere belief that it was England’s mission to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles, and a brilliant passage in the essay sums up the religion of the Elizabethan adventuters in the following words: ¢ These men, though there was little of saintliness in their character, had a religion and fought and suffered forit. It was a religion not wholly unlike that of the later Orangeman, a Protestant compound, made up of fervid patriotism, a varied assortment of hates, a rough code of morals, and an unshaken trust in the providence of God. To the heathen they brought not peace but a sword.” ? Theirs was a very living creed, though it did not enure to the benefit of the American Indians. One of Martin Frobishet’s orders to his captains on his third voyage was that ‘if any man in the fleet come up in the night and hail his fellow knowing him not, he shall give him this watchword, Before the wotld was God. The other shall answer him, if he be one of our fleet, after God came Christ his Son.” # Drake on one or mote occasions ordered the whole ship’s company of The Golden Hind to partake of the Holy Com- munion. Gilbert’s last known words before he was lost in the sea were © we are as near to heaven by sea as by land.’ 4 It was not onlv in the lives and conversations of ! Hakluyt, vol. xii, p. 31. 3 Ibid., vol, vii, p. 323. 2 Ibid. p. 34. 4 Ibid. vol. viii, ». 74. 12 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE individual English adventurers of the sixteenth cen- tuty that religion was in evidence. It was in evidence also in the sphere of companies. A good instance will be found, before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, in the instructions dated May 9, 1553, in the reign of King Edward VI, which were issued by Sebastian Cabot as © Governor of the Mystery and Company of the Merchants Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown.’ Cabot ordained that there should be no blaspheming of God, no filthy talk, gambling, or brawling, that morning and evening prayer should be held daily on every ship, and the Bible or paraphrases to be read devoutly and Christianly to God’s honour, and for His grace to be obtained and had by humble and hearty prayer of the navigants accordingly.’ The Company was licensed by the King and com- mended by letter, which Willoughby and Chancellor took with them to the Princes and potentates whom they might encounter on their north-easterly quest for Cathay. But it was not incorporated by Royal Charter until February 1555 in the following reign, the reign of Queen Mary. Then, as the result of Richard Chancellor having found his way into Russia, they were given a charter, headed ¢ the charter of the Merchants of Russia,” and having for one of its marginal notes the discovery principally intended for God’s Glory.”? In Queen Elizabeth’s reign, in 1566, the Company was thought worthy of having its corporate privileges confirmed by Act of Parliament, the title given to it in the Act 1 Hakluyt, vol. ii, pp. 198-9. 2 Ibid., p. 304. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 13 being The Fellowship of English Merchants for discovery of new trades.’? Commonly known as the Muscovy or Russia Company, it was in its inception and for many years a joint stock company, the first of such companies to be formed in England or among the very first. It heads the lists of corporations whose aim was to carry English enterprise into distant lands beyond the sea ; for the Merchant Adventurers of England, who in the reign of Queen Elizabeth were at the height of their power and wealth, trafficked in the Low Countries and comparatively near home. The great chartered companies were employed for purposes of colonisation as well as for trade : their membership included men in all ranks of life, not merchants only, but statesmen and on occasion Royalties; and as Empire-making agencies they bore rich and abundant fruit in the seventeenth century. ! Hakluayt, vol. iii, pp. 83-91. CHAPTER 1I THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DOWN TO 1660 IN his history of © The English in America,” Mr. Doyle wrote that in the beginning English colonisation of America was urged on by three motives working together, that the Elizabethans, such as Raleigh, Gilbert and Peckham had a vision of a great colonial empire, which was to have three functions. It was to be an outlet for the paupers of England ; it was to balance and control the transatlantic empire of Spain ; and it was to be peopled by colonists who would be missionaries, spreading the light of the Gospel among the heathen natives of Notth America. ‘The actual course of English colonisation,” he continued, © dealt with lower motives and contented itself with more commonplace successes. Its aims, its methods and its results had nothing in common with those imagined by Gilbert and his fellows.’ No doubt, with the actual beginnings of English colonisation, small and usually squalid as they were, and with the merging more or less of individuals in companies, dreams vanished away, and the glamour and romance of the sixteenth century were wanting to the seventeenth. * Doyle, The English in America: The Colonies under the House of Hanover (1907), chap. viii, pp. 411-12. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 15 Moteovet, colonisation, its motives and its methods, must have worn a very different aspect to the actual colonists in Virginia or New England, hard put to it to live from day to day, from that which it presented to would-be colonisers in England. In England, however, the three motives, to provide for the unemployed, to counter Spain and cripple the resources which she drew from America, and finally —in word more than in deed—to convert the heathen, were intermittently more or less operative in the seventeenth century down to the Restoration. Prior to 1660 religion, though not conversion, companies, and Cromwell were the main forces which shaped the infancy and childhood of the Empire. Of the com- panies, the East India Company, incorporated by Queen Elizabeth on December 31, 1600, was formed solely for trade. The primary object of the Virginia Company, incorporated by King James I on April 10, 1606, was colonisation, but with due regard to trade as a necessary consequence of successful settlement. Trade and planting were, in these early years of the Empire, close allies, and to Sir Thomas Smith, the London merchant, who was the first chairman of the East India Company, a tract of 1609, extolling the merits of Virginia, was dedicated as being one of His Majesty’s Council for Virginia and treasurer for the Colony.> 1? There could, however, be no question of planting— of English settlement in the thickly populated Eastern tropics. still less on the West Coast of Africa. The 1 The tract is headed © Nova Britannia >; it is in Force’s Collection, vol. 1. 16 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE sphere of plantation was in the West, beyond the Atlantic. In the West, moreover, plantation by the northern peoples of Europe was not confined to North American regions outside the tropics ; it took root also and grew lustily in the tropical West Indian islands, and on the coast of Guiana. ‘This was within the range of the Spanish empire, whereas the mainland North American colonies, excepting to a certain extent South Carolina, were for all practical purposes outside it, until in the eighteenth century the colonisa- tion of Georgia took place. Antipathy to Spain was ingrained in the Puritan, and when Puritans came within the Spanish sphere this motive for extending the English Empite was very strong. As Professor Newton has shown in * The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans,’ ? it operated with the Putitans of high degree who, in 1630, brought to birth the short- lived Providence colony, and who included such men as Rich, Earl of Warwick, and, as treasurer of the colony, John Pym. Later it powerfully influenced the greatest of Puritan leaders, Oliver Cromwell. But what became the main oversea home of Puritanism, New England, was far removed from the Spanish domain, and there antipathy to Spain brought no appreciable call to action. Of the men connected with the beginnings of the Empire, whom the sixteenth century handed on to the seventeenth, perhaps the best known names are those of Raleigh, Hakluyt and Bacon. The anti-Spanish t The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, by A. P. Newton (Yale University Press, 1914). Reference should also be made to Professor Newton’s chapter on © The Great Emigration, 1618-1648,’ in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. i, chap. v. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 17 motive was strong in Raleigh, and in the end Spanish influence was too strong for him. In Guiana he hoped to create an empire for England and England’s queen at the expense of Spain, and in his © Discovery of Guiana,” written after his return from the Orinoco in 1595, he promised Queen Elizabeth that after small initial expense the enterprise would be amply remun- erative, © for after the first or second year I doubt not but to see in London a contractation house of more receipt for Guiana than thete is now in Seville for the West Indies.’ It is difficult to decide what place should be given to Raleigh among pioneers of the Empire. It stands to his credit that he was the one Elizabethan who really made solid attempts to plant an English colony on the North American coast, for there was little solidity in Gilbert’s venture to New- foundland, and it was at his instance that Hakluyt wrote his ‘ Discourse concerning Western Planting.” Yet he was duped by the baseless vision of an El Dorado, and, gifted as he was, possibly because he was so gifted, he hardly seems to have been the man to coalesce with others on equal terms in carrying through colonisa- tion on prosaic and business-like lines. Furthermore, there was something to seek in his moral character and in his dealings, as there was in a still more gifted man, Francis Bacon.? All the three men who have just been mentioned, Raleigh, Hakluyt and Bacon, were scholarly men. Hakluyt died before the others, leaving England under 1 The Discovery of Guiana, by Walter Raleigh (1595). See Hakluyt’s Voyages, # sup., vol. x, p. 430. * See Dr. Holland Rose’s estimate of Raleigh in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. i, chap. iv, pp. 108-9. 18 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE a debt of gratitude, which grows with the growing years, to an Archdeacon of the Church of England, who lived his life to inspire Englishmen with the high- est motives for Empire. Hisis a very extraordinary case of large and lasting influence produced, not by originality of thought or brilliancy of expression, but by single-minded, patient and patriotic industry in setting forth to his countrymen what had been done, and what it was, as he conceived it, their duty to do. As he was an original member of the Virginia Company, so was Bacon of the Bristol and London Company, formed in 1610 for the colonisation of Newfoundland, and specially associated with the name of the Bristol alderman, John Guy. There are various passages in Bacon’s writings which bear on the Empire, wise and enlightened beyond his day. Take first his letter of advice to King James dated February 25, 1615-6, in regard to the export of cloth. “I do confess I did ever think that trading in companies is most agreeable to the English nature, which wanteth that same general vein of a republic which runneth in the Dutch and serveth to them instead of a company; and therefore I dare not advise to adventure this great trade of the King- dom (which hath been so long under government) in a free or loose trade’! Under government’ meant under the government of a company, the powerful company of the Merchant Adventurers of England, who for generations under their successive patents and charters had controlled the export of * Letters and Life of Francis Bacon (1869), edited by James Spedding, vol. v, p. 259. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 19 English cloth across the Channel. Monopolists they were beyond question, and complaints of their mono- poly caused them for 2 moment to be supplanted by a rival company, which however was wholly unable to carry out its undertakings. It was in Bacon’s © Letter of Advice to the King upon the Breach with the New Company > that the above wotds occur. Whatever may have been the charges against them, it can hardly be doubted that the Merchant Adventurers had done the work of the nation; they had built up a great national export trade in a manner and to an extent which could not have been accomplished by © free ot loose’ trading. Still less would ‘free or loose’ trading have met the case when it became a matter of traffic not across the narrow sea, but across the ocean. All the coming history of the oversea dealings of England was to prove the truth of Bacon’s words that © trading in companies is most agreeable to the English nature.’ No one was more alive than Bacon to © the vantage of strength at sea (which is one of the principal dowries of this Kingdom of Great Britain).” © The wealth of both Indies,” he continues in this same essay, © Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” ‘ seems in great part but an accessory to the command of the seas.’ 1 Similarly in ¢ Considerations touching a War with Spain,” he writes of the Spaniards, ¢ Their great- ness consisteth in their treasure, their treasure in their Indies ; and their Indies (if it be well weighed) ate indeed but an accession to such as are masters by sea.’ 2 1 The Works of Francis Bacon (1870), by James Spedding, vol. vi, 2 2 Life of Francis Bacon (1874), ut sup., vol. vii, pp. 499-500. 20 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE His breadth of view is illustrated by the statement in the essay ‘ Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,’ that ¢ all states that are liberal of naturalisation towards strangers ate fit for Empire,’ 1 His views on colonising are contained mote especially in the well-known essay ¢ Of Plantations,’ 2 and in the letter of advice which he wrote in 1616 to the Duke of Buckingham when the latter became favourite to King James.3 It may be presumed that in the letter of advice he paid more attention to what would be palatable to the King’s man and the King than would be required in the essay. In the letter he suggested that Commissioners should be appointed in the nature of a2 Council to ¢ regulate what concerns the colonies and give an account thereof to the King or to his Council of State.” In 1616 there can only have been three English colonies in existence, Virginia, Bermuda and Newfoundland ; and a Council for Virginia had been constituted before the colony was actually started. Bacon, therefore, was commendably early in suggesting a Council for English colonies generally. Colonies and foreign plantations he con- sidered ‘very Necessary, as outlets to a populous nation.” Both in the letter and in the essay he denounces the wickedness of sending out criminals to be the material wherewith to plant a colony. We think, as he thought, that it is a shameful and un- blessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you 1 The Works of Francis Bacon, ut sup., vol. vi, p. 447. 2 Ibid., pp. 457-60. 3 Letters and Life of Francis Bacon (1872), #t sup., vol. vi, pp. 21-2, 10-52. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 21 plant >; but it was not the view taken by those in authority for mote than two hundred years after he died, and, had it been taken, we ask ourselves whether Australia would have been secured for the Empire. In the letter ¢ schismatics ” ate added to ‘ outlaws or criminals > as © not fit to lay the foundation of a new colony,” and in thus barring the entry of nonconform- ists as well as in the provision that the colonists should not only be governed according to the laws of the realm, whose subjects they must continue to be, but must also be under © the same discipline for Church government,’ he seems to have been modifying his liberal views to suit King James. On the other hand, provisions that planting religion should not be made a pretext for extirpating natives, and that merchants should not be allowed under colour of promoting trade with the plantation to © work upon the planters’ necessities,” bear witness to the writer’s breadth of outlook.? Still stronger witness is contained in the following words from the essay : ° Let there be free- doms from custom till the plantation be of strength ; and not only freedom from custom, but freedom to carry their commodities where they may make their best of them, except there be some special cause of caution.” Evidently he would not have approved of navigation acts in the case of infant colonies. We have seen that, while little was done, though not a little was said, in the direction of converting the heathen by the English of the sixteenth century, on 1 Essay, * Of Plantations,” #2 sup. 2 Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ut sup., vol. vi, pp. 21-2, and PP. 49-52. 22 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE the other hand the duty of religious observance among their own people was strongly felt and consistently recognised. So it was in the following century, at any rate prior to the Restoration. On the face of it, it would not have been expected that a company formed not for planting but for trading only would have paid much attention, as a company, to the things of the spirit; but from the first the directors of the East India Company were at pains to keep religion in evidence among their employees, prescribing morning and evening prayers on their ships and providing chaplains for their factories. Sir Thomas Roe, on his memorable mission on the Company’s behalf to the Court of the Mogul Emperor, took with him a chaplain—a minister as he called him. The chaplain died in August 1616, and Roe entered in his diary “Thus it pleased God to lay a great affliction on me and my family for our sins, taking from us the means of His Blessed Word and Sacraments for our neglect of so heavenly benefits, which was to me (God knows my heart) the heaviest punishment I did feel or fear in this country.” He wrote forthwith to the factory at Sutat, to send him another chaplain, ¢ for I will not abide in this place destitute of the comfort of God’s Word and heavenly Sacraments.’ ? It may have been that Roe was an exceptionally devout churchman, but inany case, it is clear that the Company did what could be done to encourage the outward practice of religion. In this same year, 1616, the indefatigable John Smith, ! The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619. Edited in two volumes for the Hakluyt Society by William Foster (1899), vol. i, pp. 245-6 and note. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 23 who had been a great asset to Virginia in the critical first years of that colony, and who gave New England its name, wrote a ‘ Description of New England,’ designed to further the work of its colonisation, which had so far hung fire. In this, as in other of his writings, he was eloquent as to the duty of convert- ing the heathen. ‘Religion, above all things, should move us (especially the clergy), if we were religious, to show our Faith by our works in converting those poor savages to the knowledge of God, seeing what pains the Spaniards take to bring them to their adulterated faith ’ ; and he deplored his countrymen’s ‘ want of charity to these poor savages, whose country we challenge, use and possess.” It will be seen that something substantial was done in New England a little later towards bringing the Gospel to the heathen, but first attention must be given to the driving power of religion in the colonisation of that part of the coast of North America. In a eulogistic pamphlet on New England, written in 1689, the writer claimed that * New England differs from other foreign plantations in respect of the grounds and motives, inducing the first planters to remove into that American desert; other plantations were built upon wotldly interests, New England upon that which is purely religious . . .1 As to the Liturgy, Ceremonies, and Church Government by Bishops, they were and are Nonconformists.”2 New England, 1 A Description of New England, by Captain John Smith (1616), The English Scholar’s Library, pp. 217 and 229. t Force’s Tracts, vol. iv : A Brief Relation of the State of New England from the beginning of that Plantation to this Present Year (London, 10689), p. 3. 24 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE destined to have vital influence on the fortunes of the British Empire, began in effect with the emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. Winthrop, who went out ten years later to be the first governor for the Massachusetts Bay Company, after it had been decided to remove the Company’s seat of government from England to America, was as heart whole as any Pilgrim Father in devotion to religion; but, as men of low estate going forth into the wilderness at the call of God, the emigrants of the Mayflower have been a beacon in history ; they are, perhaps, the most perfect illustration of colonising from religious motives simply and solely, and of those motives producing cen- trifugal action, not only in the first removal from the old home, but also after arrival in the new. New England became a scene of varieties of creed—a field not of religious tolerance and comprehension but of religious differences. According to Heylyn, the biographer of Archbishop Laud, the Puritan refugees in the Netherlands found that © the country was too narrow for them, and the brethren of the Separation desited elbow room for fear of interfering with one another.” Therefore they went to New England. ‘The growth of old Rome and New England,’ he continued, ‘had the like foundation, both sanctu- aries for such of the neighbouring nations as longed for novelties and innovations both in Church and State.” 1 The exact opposite to what New England stood Y Cyprianus Anglicus, or The History of the Life and Death of the Most Reverend and Renowned Prelate William, by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, etc. (1671), by P. Heylyn, D.D., Part II, Book IV, ann. 1638, pp. 345-6. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 25 for stubbornly and in the end irresistibly was em- bodied in the man who was the principal counsellor of Charles I, William Laud. Laud became Atch- bishop of Canterbury in 1633 and died on the scaffold in 1645. In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, under date of April 28, 1634, Laud appeats at the head of a Commission with apparently the widest powers ‘ for making laws and orders for government of English colonies planted in foreign parts’; and two years later, under date of April 10, 1636, he heads another Commission ‘ for government of all persons within the colonies and plantations beyond the seas according to the laws and constitutions there.’ Clarendon wrote of Laud as a man of great parts and courage and exemplary virtues, but who, being assured of the righteousness of his ends, never studied the easiest ways to them. ‘He did court persons too little.” 1 The scrupulous fairness of Dr. Rawson Gardiner has corrected for us the picture of Laud drawn by Macaulay, but none the less Gardiner wrote that of all the men of the time Laud was the least fitted to be entrusted with political power; such was his belief in the unbounded efficacy of external forms and institutions combined with his complete ignorance of human nature. Laud was no bigot as regards men’s beliefs, ‘ but the liberty which he claimed for men’s minds. he denied to their actions.’ 2 ‘ Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1826 ed.), vol. i, pp. 159 and 165. 2 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Disgrace of Chief Justice Colle (1863), 2 vols., vol. ii, chap. x, p. 41, and Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage (1869), 2 vols., vol. i, pp. 195-6. 26 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE His passion was for uniformity of practice. ‘This was, of course, primarily in ecclesiastical matters. In all parts of the world, as far as outward observance was concerned, the Liturgy of the Church of England was to be used exclusively by English subjects. The like course,” wrote Heylyn, also was prescribed for our factories in Hamborough, and those further off, that is to say, in Turkey, in the Mogul’s dominions, the Indian Islands, the plantations in Virginia, the Barbadoes, and all other places where the English had any standing residence in the way of trade.” * Broader by far in his outlook on religious belief than the dog- matic Puritan, nevertheless he laboured, as he said on the scaffold, to keep an uniformity in the external service of God according to the doctrine and discipline of the Church.2 With a man of this type of mind at the head of the State as well as of the Church, the tendency would be in the direction of prescribing out- ward uniformity in State as well as in Church. While Laud was beyond all men the chief apostle of outward uniformity, the protagonist on the other side was John Pym. Gardiner makes religion the keynote of Pym’s life and work, quoting Pym’s own words, that ¢ the greatest liberty of our kingdom is religion.” 3 As Laud stood for uniformity which meant in effect dependence, so Pym stood for the recognition of diversities which meant freedom. These were the two principles which struggled for the mastery in the Old Empire, and attempts to enforce uniformity t Heylyn, ## sap., Part II, Book IV, p. 260. t See Rawson Gardiner, The History of the Great Civil War (1889), vol. ii, chap. xxiv, p. 49. 3 Ibid (1886), vol. i, p. 300. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 27 ultimately wrecked it. But it will be noted that the driving force in these critical early years, whether on the side of uniformity or on that of diversity, was religion. In the Royal Charter granted to the Massachusetts Bay Company by King Charles I in March 1629, conversion of the heathen finds a place towards the end of the Charter. The words used were explicit and notable and may well be quoted. The Company was empowered to make laws and provisions for the directing, ruling and disposing of all other matters and things whereby the said people, inhabitants there, may be so religiously, peaceably and civilly governed, as their good life and orderly conversation may will and incite the natives of that country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind, and the Christian Faith, which, in our royal intention and the adventurers’ free profession, is the principal end of this plantation. This was a striking pronouncement at the outset of a very great English colony, that the principal object of its foundation was to spread the Gospel, and, further, that proselytes were to be made through the object lesson presented by the lives of the white settlers. In New England, in the hands of such men as Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot, missionary work became a reality. Eliot, the apostle of the North American Indians, went out in 1631 with the ship which carried Winthrop’s family, Winthrop himself having gone in the previous year. Eliot set himself ! The Charter will be found at pp. 22-26 of the Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606-1913 (Macmillan Co.. 1018). new edition. 28 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE to learn the Indian languages, eventually translating the Bible into one of the dialects ; and after he had devoted himself for some years to the welfare of the Indians, in 1643 the first of what were known as the Eliot tracts was published in London. The tracts, eleven in number, were not all by his own hand ; the last was published in 1671, and the burden of them was: conversion of the Indians, the dawn of the light of the Gospel among the heathen, and its further manifestations. In July 1649 an ordinance was passed by the Long Parliament with the title ‘A Corporation for the promoting and propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England.” The ordinance recited that it had come to the knowledge of the Commons of England in Parliament assembled that some of the heathen natives of New England had, through the preaching of the Gospel to them in their own language by some godly English, begun to call upon the name of the Lord, and in order to give the good work the support which was needed, Parliament created a Corporation in England to be called The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.” The Corporation was given power to acquire lands not exceeding the yeatly value of two thousand pounds, goods and money, and for its put- poses a general collection was to be made throughout England and Wales. The subscriptions were volun- tary, but a substantial sum was received and invested in land, and the income was applied to providing missionaties and school teachers amongst the natives in New England and New York. The ordinance was SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 29 rendered invalid by the Restoration, but through the efforts of Robert Boyle, friend of religion as of science, by an Order in Council of April 10, 1661, the company received from the King a new Charter of Incorporation, the actual Charter being dated February 7, 1661-2. The title given in the Charter was ¢ The Company for Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts adjacent in America.” Clarendon headed the list of members, which included both churchmen and dissenters, and Robert Boyle was the first governor. The original funds of the Company were in after years supplemented by a bequest from Boyle and by a legacy in the middle of the eighteenth century, which was applicable to natives in the West Indies and other British colonies, as well as in North America. When, by the War of American Independence, the old North American colonies were severed from the British Crown, the Indians in Canada, and very especially the Six Nation Indians, became the principal beneficiaries of the Company, which still works actively for the welfare of the native races of the British Empire, having its London office in Bloomsbury Square.? Thus Puritanism and New England did, at any rate for a while, something substantial to redeem English Protestantism from the reproach of making no converts among the heathen. Yet the charge continued to be made with more or less truth, and an English writer of a pamphlet addressed to Walpole in 1731 asserted that © our priests, though I have been told some of ! The above has been taken from A Sketch of the Origin and the Recent History of the New England Company (Spottiswoode & Co., 1884), by the Senior Member of the Company. 30 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE them have been sent over bya Society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts, never go among the Indians.’ ! Religion was assuredly a powerful, possibly the most powerful, motive in shaping Cromwell’s colonial policy. Inherited Protestant antipathy to Spain and the Spaniards’ creed largely inspired the © Western design.” ‘Truly God’s great enemy is the Spaniard. He is 2 natural enemy.” 2 So he claimed in his speech to Parliament on September 17, 1656, and, over and above actual outrages committed by Spaniards and un- atoned for, he laid stress upon the Spanish refusal to grant liberty of conscience to the English who traded in their Indies. A year previously © a manifesto of the Lord Protector . . . wherein is shown the reason- ableness of the cause of this Republic against the depredations of the Spaniards ’ had been printed. It had been written in Latin by Milton, who was Cromwell’s Latin secretary. Milton similarly rested the case against Spain upon the dangers to which the souls as well as the lives of English traders were exposed in the Spanish Indies ; and as, ‘ what of all is the most momentous and important,” he pleaded the duty of not letting slip ¢ the most noble opportunities of promoting the Glory of God and enlarging the bounds of Christ’s Kingdom; which we do not doubt will appear to be the chief end of out late expedi- tion into the West Indies against the Spaniards.’ 3 1 See below, p. 70, note. * Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches with Elucidations, by Thomas Carlyle (1871), Part IX, p. 180. * The original of the manifesto was in Latin and first printed in 1655. The English translation dated only from 1738. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 31 The late expedition had been much in the Protectot’s mind and great store he set by it, to judge from his letters and speeches as given us by Carlyle. I have, by advice of the Council, he wrote to Speaker Lenthall on September 2, 1654, ¢ undertaken a design by sea, very much (as we hope and judge) for the honour and advantage of the Commonwealth.” 1 In December 1654 the ill-fated expedition under Penn and Venables started for West Indian waters; in April 1655 came the fiasco at Hispaniola ; and in May the capture of Jamaica. Cromwell’s letters show how bitter was his disappointment at the failure at His- paniola, which was in his eyes a divine chastisement for sin; but they also show how resolute and practical was his character, holding fast to the aim which he had proposed to himself, and making the most of such slight gain as had been achieved. ‘We think, and it is much designed among us, to strive with the Spaniard for the mastery of all those seas,” he wrote to Jamaica in November 1655.2 In the previous month he had written to Barbados of his determination ‘to people and plant > Jamaica,? and from every quarter he sought and procured settlers, free or forced, for his newly acquired island. We have sent commissioners and instructions into New England, to try what people may be drawn thence. We have done the like to the Windward English Islands ; and both in England and Scotland and Ireland, you will have what men and women we can well transport.’ 4 He was resolved by 4 Carlyle, ut sup., Appendix No. 28, p. 225. 2 Ibid, Part IX, p. 148. \ Ibid, p. 148. 8 Ibid. p. 146. 32 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE all means to hold fast to Jamaica, and the taking and holding fast of Jamaica made history. Both the policy and the conduct of the operations against Spain lent themselves to plentiful criticism. In ¢ A Discourse of Trade,” published in London in 1670, the author, Roger Coke, grandson of Lotd Justice Coke, wrote of Cromwell’s break with Spain in 1654, after the Dutch had made peace with her in 1648, and of the consequent loss of British trade in the Spanish West Indies, as, © a folly never to be forgiven in his politics, nor the losses this nation sustained thereby ever again to be repaired.’ That the difficulties of the enterprise had been under- estimated ; that the forces employed were a disorderly medley, ill assorted and inadequately equipped ; that the colonies, or the employing classes in the colonies, were but ill content to have their manhood and their labour supply drawn off for the planting of an island which might be—to Barbados at any rate—an unwel- come rival; that Cromwell’s wholesale deportations savoured of barbarism; all this must be admitted. Yet was he, in Professor Egerton’s words, ¢ a great Imperial ruler, pethaps the only Englishman who has ever understood in its full sense the word Empire.’ ? Minded to oust the Dutch from New Netherlands, if peace had not come too soon for that purpose ; taking and keeping while he lived the French forts in Acadia ; writing to Blake and Montague as to whether an attack on the Spanish Fleet at Cadiz or on Cadiz itself was feasible, or whether any other place be * A Discourse of Trade, Preface, p. Bs. A Skort History of British Colonial Policy (1908), second edition, 3. 64. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 33 attemptable, especially that of the town and castle of Gibraltar’ 1; alone among leaders of England he had at once a definite intention to create by strength of arm an English Empire overseas, and capacity to take practical steps towards effecting his purpose. Soldier, statesman, imperialist—what was the main driving force behind him and his plans ? There can only be one answer, that directly or indirectly, with or without self-deception, it was religion. In all things he re- solved and acted as being an instrument of God’s will, as personally responsible to the Almighty for himself together with the nation committed to his charge. When he shaped his policy against Spain, he was, like the Elizabethans before him, spurred on as fighting for the true Faith, as the champion of right against dark- ness, of spiritual freedom against the bondage of Romish superstition. Among later British statesmen perhaps the one who most nearly approached Cromwell in the extent to which religion penetrated his political views and coloured his foreign and colonial policy was Mt. Gladstone, as far removed from Cromwell in character and temperament as he was in time and cit- cumstance. No less than Cromwell he regarded him- self in all his words and works as an instrument of the Almighty, and both men alike, strong in will and discerning in intellect, inclined to see the finger of God pointing along the path which had already commended itself to them for mundane reasons. Before Cromwell entered on his Western design, the Long Parliament had, in 1651, passed ‘ an Act for Lt Letter of April 28, 1656. Carlyle, ## sup., Part IX, p. 159. 34 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE increase of shipping and encouragement of the naviga- tion of this nation.” This, the first of the series of navigation acts, which so powerfully and in the end so disastrously affected the course of the Empire, provided that no article produced or manufactured in Asia, Africa, or America, whether the produce of English or of foreign colonies, should be imported into England, Ireland, or any English colony or possession except in English, including colonial, ships, in the crews of which Englishmen formed the majority, and that no article produced or manufactured in Europe should be imported into England, Ireland, or any English colony or possession, except either in English ships or in ships belonging to the country in which the articles were produced or manufactured. This was the main purport of the Act, but it contained various other provisions, one of which debarted foreigners from importing into or exporting from any English possession cod, herring, and other kinds of fish for salting. The Dutch had proved to demonstration what nurseries of ships and seamen wete the carrying and fishing trades, and the Long Patliament decided that these trades should, as far as possible, nourish English in preference to foreign shipping. But whether the act was effective and how far, to what extent it promoted English and damaged Dutch interests, and to what extent it contributed to the first Dutch war, has been much questioned by the best modern authorities.! There was nothing new in the terms of the Act. 1 See History, January 1923. © Historical Revisions—The Naviga- tion Act of 1651,” by G. N. Clark. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 35 apart from the width of its scope. For instance, the act of Queen Elizabeth, which in 1566 incorporated the Russia Company, contained a similar provision, ¢ for the better maintenance of the navy and mariners of this realm.’ But it was memorable as making a beginning which, after the Restoration, blossomed into the mercantile system. Under that system trade dictated policy; the Empire was looked upon as a single unit; the colonies were regarded as depend- encies of the Mother Country ; free trade and cheap Dutch carriage were barred, though greatly valued by the colonies; and baneful uniformity became the standard colonial policy of England. Dr. Rawson Gardiner found in this law of 1651 the beginning of an inevitable reaction against Puritan idealism. ‘The new commercial policy,” he wrote, ‘did not profess to have other than material aims. The inten- tion of its framers by the nature of the case was not to make England better or nobler, but to make her richer.’ 1 1 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1894), vol. i, 1649-51, p. 83. CHAPTER III THE RESTORATION ERA In his speech of 1855, which has already been men- tioned,* Mr. Gladstone referred to the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century as the golden age of English colonisation, when, he said, the colonial con- nexion was conceived in the true spirit of British freedom. In particular he commended the early part of the reign of Charles II, maintaining that the true principle of colonial government was never better understood in this country than at that time, and giving as an illustration the liberal charter granted to the colony of Rhode Island. To Mr. Gladstone’s mind Greek colonisation in classical times strongly appealed, as embodying perfect freedom and petfect self-govern- ment. Perfect freedomand petfect self-government he desired to be associated with British colonisation; not the acquisition of dependencies, but the founding of peoples on the English pattern, themultiplying of happy Englandsbeyond the seas, such washis interpretation— a very noble one—of what ought to be the outlook upon the British overseas Empire. He was careful to =xplain that, in his eulogy of the latter part of the L See above, p. 7. THE RESTORATION ERA 37 seventeenth century in connexion with English colon- isation, he was referring to political, not to commercial, policy ; and, speaking of his own time, he argued that trade with a British colony was safer than trade with a foreign country, because in the case of a colony the commercial laws were under the control of the Mother Country, and therefore, the Mother Country of the British colonies being Great Britain, the commercial laws of her colonies would be good laws. He did not note that both the effect and the avowed intent of the navigation laws passed in the reign of Chatles II was to subordinate the political system to the com- mercial ; nor again does he seem to have contem- plated a British colony so free and so self-governing as to take, in the matter of customs tariffs, a line directly opposed to the commercial policy of Great Britain. Yet this came to pass in Canada within four ot five years after his speech. The endowment of the colony of Rhode Island in 1663 with a liberal charter allow- ing the colonists to choose their own governor was, as a matter of fact, apparently dictated by desite to conciliate other provinces of New England than Massachusetts, Massachusetts being feared and sus- pected in England for its determined Puritanism. The reign of Charles II was extraordinarily rich alike in activities and in writings concerned with the Empire. It was a time when new colonies were planted and new acquisitions made ovetseas—the Carolinas, the Bahamas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsvlvania, St. Helena (already informally acquired), and Bombay. But still more prominently it was a time of oversea trade, of outstanding prosperity for the East 38 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE India Company, of new chartered companies, such as the African and the Hudson Bay Companies, and of navigation acts. Trade overshadowed religion as the main driving force and the leading motive at work in the Empire, trade and sea power as at once the off- spring and the foster-mother of trade. The trade outlook in the Mother Country was all in the direction of uniformity, with its concomitant of domination and dependence, and the preamble of the navigation act of 1663 stated in so many words that the act was being passed * for the maintaining a greater correspond- ence and kindness’ between the Kingdom of England and the King’s plantations overseas, ¢ and keeping them in a firmer dependence upon it and rendering them yet mote beneficial and advantageous unto it . , ,’ 1 Aninteresting illustration of the growing importance attached to trade was the publication of © England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade or the balance of our Foreign Trade the rule of our Treasure.” The author, Thomas Mun, who had died in 1641, had been a leading London merchant, a trader in Italy and the Levant, and a director of the East India Company. In 1621 he had published a * Discourse of Trade from England to the East Indies,” being at the time deputy governor of the East India Company. He wrote " England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade’ in or about 1630, but it was not published until 1664, when his son, John Mun, published it ¢ for the common good,’ as he stated on the flyleaf. It was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer of England. Mun was very outspoken, which was possibly the ‘15 Car. IL, cap. 7, 1663. An Act Jor the Encouragement of Trade. THE RESTORATION ERA 39 reason why the treatise had not been published in his lifetime. Contrasting his own countrymen most unfavourably with the Dutch, he spoke of the lewd idleness * of his fellow-citizens of late years besotting ourselves with pipe and pot, sucking smoke and drink- ing healths.”1 It seems strange that this was written shortly after the Petition of Right in 1628, at a time when the strife between King and Parliament was beginning, when Puritanism inspired by religion was gathering strength and men of the type of Winthrop were for conscience’ sake crossing the Atlantic and making their homes in New England. It is well to be reminded that even in the middle years of the seven- teenth century religious and political activities and antagonisms were far from covering the whole field or absorbing the whole life of England, and that with those who were concerned in commerce and who managed the affairs of trading companies trade was the dominant consideration. Mun had the highest admiration for ‘the industrious Dutch,” whose provinces he described as ‘ the magazines and store- houses of wares for most places of Christendom,’ 2 and he discerned, as did others afterwards, that they were the rivals whom England had most cause to fear. His banker friends in Italy, he wrote, wondered why Spain and France only should be regarded by Englishmen as their enemies and the Netherlanders embraced as their best friends and allies, ‘ when in truth (as they well observe) there are no people in Christendom who do more undermine, hurt, and eclipse us daily in our navigation and trades, both abroad and at home.” 3 t Pp. 178-9. 2 P. 183. 3 Pp. 204-5. 40 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE The Dutch, Mun said, wete taking the bread out of our mouths, seeing that fishing was the foundation of their wealth and strength—in the words of a States pro- clamation of 1624, the chiefest trade and principal gold mine of the United Provinces,” 1 and that it was carried out in British waters. “The glory and power of these Netherlanders . . . consisteth in this fishing of herrings, ling and cod in His Majesty’s seas.” #2 It will be remem- bered that in the year 1664, when Mun’s treatise first saw the light, Great Britain went to war with the Nether- lands, and Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, who gave the licence for its publication, and who was then Secretary of State, no doubt welcomed it as a brief against the Dutch, which would carry more weight in that it had not been written for the occasion but over thirty years previously, and as being calculated to bring home to Englishmen the strength of the Netherlands and their menace to England. The advantages derived by the Dutch from their fishing trade at the expense of Great Britain was a favourite theme in the seventeenth century. Writing in 1675, Roger Coke described the Dutch fishing trade as the basis of all their commerce, and wrote of the Dutchmen as for four months in the year following the herring in numerous fleets from Scotland to Yarmouth, and employing threefold more vessels and twofold more mariners than were employed by the English.® In 1680 the author of ‘ Britannia Languens > wrote that ‘ according to modern calculations the mere fishing trade for herring and cod LP. 186. 2 P. 188. ¥ A Discourse of Trade, Treatises III and IV : England's Improve- ments in two parts, Treatise IV (1675), p. 87. THE RESTORATION ERA 41 on the coasts of England and Scotland employs above 8ooo Dutch ships or vessels, 20,000 of their seamen and fishers.” t ‘The fishing trade was the © principal gold- mine of the United Provinces’ in virtue of its double aspect. It was at once in itself a most lucrative kind of industry and commerce, especially to the Dutch, whose narrow borders on land obliged them to look for riches to the sea ; and it was a calling of the utmost importance for purposes of defence, a prolific nursery of ships and sailors. The interdependence of trade and sea power was well illustrated in the case of the Dutch in the seventeenth century, but their fishing industry was practically confined to European waters ; they were not in evidence as fishers on the other side of the Atlantic and on the Banks of Newfoundland.? Here was the English nursery for ships and sailors, and the opposition in England to permanent colonisation of Newfoundland which, after the first few years of spasmodic infant settlements, was strong and bitter, was all in the direction of making the coasts and seas of that island subordinate to considerations of English sea power. But the controversy had not matured when Mun wrote his treatise : there is no contrast between permanent settlement and seasonal fishing in the fol- lowing words. ‘Out fishing plantation likewise in New England, Virginia, Greenland, the Summer Islands, and the Newfoundland, are of the like nature, affording much wealth and employments to maintain \ Britannia Languens, or A Discourse of Trade, ete. (1680), p. 31. * In Britannia Languens, however, pp. 168-9, there is mention of the Dutch having beaten the English out of the Iceland. Newfoundland and Greenland fishing. 42 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE a great number of poor, and to increase our decaying trade.” 1 ‘ England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade *> was by no means taken up only with the Dutch challenge to English trade. It was an able exposition of the importance of foreign trade and of what Mun con- ceived to be the true principles on which that trade should be conducted. There was good common sense in what he wrote. ‘The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule, to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value ” 2; and, while he held that the English ought to supply their own hemp, flax, cordage and tobacco, and that there was advantage in exporting their products in theit own ships, he was free-trader enough to write ‘ that the commetce ought to be free to strangers to bring in and catty out at their pleasure,’ ® and also to suggest that, in order to give employment to the poor, manufactures made of foreign materials in England should be exported customs free. The East India Company, with which he was connected, stood in 1630 for trade only, as Sit Thomas Roe had advised. ‘ Let this be received as a tule,” he wrote home to the Company in 1616, ‘ that, if you will profit, seek it at sea, and in quiet trade ; for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India.’ 4 In this matter the Dutch were held up by Roe in the same passage for a warning, not for an example. It hath been also the error of the Dutch, who seek planta- LP, 23. 2 Pp, 11. 3 Pp. 21. \ The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, ut sup., vol. ii, p. 344. THE RESTORATION ERA 43 tion here by the sword.” The East India Company, when Mun wrote, did not own a square foot of Indian soil. Their first territorial possession, the site of Fort St. George at Madras, was not rented until 1639-40, and the island of Bombay had yet to be acquired as part of the dowry of the Portuguese btide of Chatles II, being ceded to the English Crown in 1661, and handed over by the King to the Company by the charter of March 27, 1669. As merchants, no more and no less, the Company were jealous monopolists in India, unrelenting to English interlopers, as they styled those of their countrymen who attempted to trade in Indian seas without becom- ing members of the Company ; but their interests as importers into England of Indian articles, some of which competed or threatened to compete with home products, inclined them to free trade in respect of imports and made them also early opponents of the widespread and long-lived fallacy that a country is impoverished by sending money out of it. “It is not therefore the keeping of our money in the kingdom, but the necessity and use of our wares in foreign countries, and our want of their commodities that causeth the vent and consumption on all sides which makes 2 quick and ample trade’! In the East Indies the Dutch were savagely exclusive in regard to other Europeans, and, at the time when Mun wrote, had the taint of the Amboyna massacre attaching to them, but in the Netherlands they kept, and by the nature and limited extent of their homeland were forced to keep, open or nearly open ports, and down to the time of 1 Mun, pp. 42~3. 44 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE Adam Smith they were the people of Europe who most neatly approached to free trade. Mun saw what strength and riches the policy of unrestricted or lightly taxed imports had brought to the Netherlands; he saw again how the port of Leghorn had risen in conse- quence of the liberal commercial policy of the then Grand Duke of Tuscany ; and he applied the lesson to England, while insisting on the great gain to be derived from trade with distant countries (on which point Adam Smith differed from him), ‘besides the increase of shipping and mariners thereby.” ! In the first years after the Restoration, when Mun’s treatise was published, Clarendon was the principal adviser.of Charles II. He was a member of the General Council of Foreign Plantations con- stituted before the end of 1660, and he claimed to be, and no doubt was, a good friend of the Overseas Empire. He said of himself that ‘at His Majesty’s re- turn and before, he had used all the endeavours he could to prepare and dispose the King to a great esteem of his plantations, and to encourage the improve- ment of them in all the ways which could reasonably be proposed tohim.”2 Doyle’s estimate of his policy towards New England was that it was not a policy conspicuous for liberality or farsighted wisdom. Butit was in the main just and intelligent.” ® We have seen that in 1661-2 Clarendon gave his name in support of The Company for Propagation of the Gospel in New England, and he was one of the eight patentees i 2 LAr Clarendon (Oxford, 1827, 3 vols.), vol. iii, p. 407. 8 The English in America, ut sup.: The Puritan Colonies, vol. ii, D. 150. ¢ Supra, p. 29. THE RESTORATION ERA 45 to whom King Chatles in 1663 made the famous grant of Carolina. Another of these patentees was the foremost states- man of the reign in the matter of extending and improving the Empire. This was Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury. He had a hereditary con- nexion with the Elizabethans, for his mothet’s father, Anthony Ashley, who was clerk to the Privy Council, was deputed by the Government to accompany in a civil capacity the famous expedition to Cadiz in 1596, when Essex was in command on land, Lord Charles Howard on sea, and Sir Walter Raleigh was of the company. Ashley, among others, was knighted on this occasion. From the very beginning of the reign of Charles II, his grandson was most active in oversea matters. He was a member of the Council of Plantations which was called together in the first year of the reign; he was one of the grantees both of Carolina and of the Bahamas, and in either case seems to have been the leading man among the proprietors ; he was a member of the African and Hudson Bay Companies ; and from 1672 to 1676 he was president of a United Council of Trade and Plantations, of which John Locke became secretary in 1673. With Shaftes- bury and Locke combined, there was some semblance of an able Secretary of State for the Colonies, guided in counsel and in draftsmanship by a singularly valuable permanent secretary. Locke first met Shaftesbury at Oxford in 1666, and became a close friend and inmate of his house in 1667. The fre- quency of his handwriting in the Shaftesbury papers shows that, as a secretary, especially on the adminis- 46 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE tration of the Carolina and Bahamas grants, in which the authority of Shaftesbury as leading director was supreme, he gave to his chief unstinted and most effective service, although the fundamental constitu- tions which he drafted for Carolina were quite impracticable. His intimacy with Shaftesbury is of itself enough to show that the latter possessed qualities other than those for which he has been so bitterly criticised in history. ‘The Empire had the benefit of Shaftesbury’s admitted energy and initiative, but he contributed to it also aversion to monopolies, integrity in money matters, and religious tolerance. Some of his letters, whether written for him by Locke or not, are models of wise and frank writing, indicating a large outlook. One instance may be given. To a new governor of Carolina, against whom complaints had been received, he wrote, ¢ You are now upon founda- tions of a larger extent than are usual, and perhaps than in other places you have met with, and, if you will but suit the managements of your government to them and direct it wholly to the impartial prosperity of the whole plantation and all the planters in it, you will remove the jealousies which, I must tell you, some of the plantation have conceived of you, you will oblige the Lords Proprietors, and reap all those advantages which are sure to attend him who is the greatest and most considerable man in a thriving plantation and who hath contributed much to the advancement thereof.” * Shaftesbury, with Locke behind him, was in favour of plantation, of forming new colonies. 1 Letter of June 20, 1672, printed in the Colonial Calendar, America and West Indies, 1669-74, pp. 374-5. THE RESTORATION ERA 47 But most of his leading contemporaties were not of his way of thinking in this respect. When Chatles II took over the Empire from Cromwell, in the fore- front of the plantations was New England, a source of keen anxiety to those in old England who were deputed, in John Evelyn’s words, ‘to advise and counsel His Majesty to the best of our abilities for the well governing of his Foreign Plantations.” Evelyn was appointed one of the Commissioners of Planta- tions, when a Standing Council of Plantations was constituted in 1671, and he continued to serve when in the following year the two Councils of Trade and Plantations were combined under the presidency of Lotd Shaftesbury. What troubled the Commissioners of Plantations was that the New Englanders, being in fact the stiff-backed citizens of Massachusetts, © were able to contest with all other plantations about them, and there was fear of their breaking from all depend- ence on this nation,” and again, ¢ we understood they were a people almost upon the very brink of renounc- ing any dependence on the Crown.” 1 If there was likelihood that the seed of further New Englands would be sown, colonisation was not likely to com- mend itself to those whose temper had been shown by passing the disastrous Act of Uniformity at home. On the other hand, trade had everything to commend it, inasmuch as through the navigation acts trade was to be an instrument for keeping the plantations in subordination to the Crown? Mr. Gladstone L Evelyn's Diary, under dates May 26 and June 6, 1671. % See the circular letter from the King to the Governors of all the plantations dated August 25, 1663: Colonial Calendar, America and West Indies, 1661~8, pp. 155-6. 48 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE curiously misread history when he pitched upon the reign of Charles II as a golden age for planting English freedom overseas. There were some too who, with no love for the navigation acts, and with strong leanings to free trade, nevertheless contended that plantations cartied off Englishmen who were wanted for trade. Roger Coke held that * the trade of England, and the fishing trade, are so much diminished by how much they might have been supplied by those men who ate diverted in our American plantations’; that the peopling of the plantations and the tepeopling of Ireland had drained England, and that attempts at further discovery of new plantations were to be deprecated as well as the project of peopling Carolina.l The verdict of ¢ Britannia Languens ’ on the subject in 1680 was a very wholesale condemnation of colonisa- tion. ‘These plantations may be considered as the true grounds and causes of all our present mischiefs ; for, had our fishers been put on no other employment, had those millions of people which we have lost or been prevented of by the plantations continued in England, the government would long since have been under a necessity of easing and regulating our trade.” 2 Opposed to this docttine that the colonies had disastrously drained England of her population was a treatise on ‘ The Benefit of Plantations or Colonies,’ by William Penn. ¢ Colonies,” he wrote, ‘are the seeds of nations, begun and nourished by the cate of 1 Roger Coke, u? sup. : A Discourse of Trade, in Two Parts (London, 1670) : Reasons of the Decay of the English Trade, pp. 7 and 10. % Britannia Languens, ut sup., p. 176. THE RESTORATION ERA 49 wise and populous countries, as conceiving them best for the increase of human stock and beneficial for commerce. . . . Nor did any of these ever dream it was the way of decreasing their people or wealth. . . . With justice, therefore, I deny the vulgar opinion against plantations that they weaken England; they have manifestly enriched and so strengthened her.’ 1 William Penn was born in 1644 and received the grant of Pennsylvania by Royal Letters Patent in discharge of a Crown debt in March 1680-1, the grant being extended by deeds from the Duke of York (afterwards James II) in August 1682. In modern Pennsylvania, New Jetsey and Delaware he had a wide Geld for colonising, and he set forth the persons whom to his mind ¢ Providence seems to have most fitted for plantations.” It would have been well for England if others had shared his views as to the right treatment of natives. ‘Don’t abuse them but let them have justice and you win them.” 2 Penn did not come into prominence until the later years of Charles II’s reign, and he was then still a young man. Of the men of the Restoration years in England who were con- cerned with the overseas empire, he, more than any other, brought religion into his scheme of life, and it is noteworthy that religion in this case was in its most unorthodox form, that of Quakerism, i See Select Tracts relating to Colonies, BM. 1029¢, 15, No. 4, p. 26. The words quoted will be found also in Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania in America lately granted under the Great Seal of England fo William Penn, ete. (1681). This is in the British Museum among Tracts on the American Colonies (1681-1736), * In A Letter from William Penn, Proprietary and Governor of Pennsyl- vania in America to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that Province resident in London (1683), p. 7. so RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE A writer on trade, who died in 1681, at the time when Penn received his patent, Samuel Fortrey, a French Protestant refugee, contended that © to increase the people of this nation permission should be given to all people of foreign countries, under such restric- tions as the State should think fit, freely to inhabit and reside within this kingdom,’ and that the Protestant religion of England would be an inducement to immi- grants. Any exodus from England would thus be made good by immigration into England. But Fortrey, like almost all the writers of this period, looked on colonies in the light of trade. I conceive no foreign plantation should be undertaken, or prosecuted, but in such countries that may increase the wealth and trade of this nation.” A later writer, Charles Davenant, taking up the same objection, that the colonies drained the kingdom of its people, gave the same answer, that emigration should be balanced by immigration, that England should be made ¢ the Azilum for all oppressed and afflicted persons.’? A man of a very different stamp from Penn, Sir Josiah Child, the well-known autocrat of the East India Company, shared Penn’s view that emigration to the colonies had not weakened and depeopled England. He argued that, if there had been no plantations, the kind of people who emigrated would have gone abroad in any case, that. since the plantations had come Y England's Interest and Improvement considered in the Increase of the Trade of this Kingdom, first published in 1663, fourth edition 1744, pp. 4 and 4o. * Discourses on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England, which more immediately treat of the Foreign Traffic of this Kingdom, Part II, Discourse 111, On the Plantation Trade (1 698), p. 202. THE RESTORATION ERA 51 into being, the population of England had increased, not decreased, and that © every Englishman in Barbados or Jamaica creates employment for four men at home.”? But while Child had the good sense to see the fallacy of the contention that the plantations had robbed England of people who might have been put to more profitable use if they had remained at home, he was very far from being in love with the New England type of plantation. ‘New England,” he wrote, ‘is the most prejudicial plantation to this kingdom,’ 2 and ‘a more independent government from this kingdom than any other of our plantations.’ The same, we have seen, was the view of the Council of Trade and Plantations, over which Lord Shaftesbury presided, and of which John Evelyn was a member. Child saw a menace to England in the fact that New England was good for shipbuilding and was breeding a race of seamen; ‘in my poor opinion there is nothing more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations, or provinces.” * Holding these views, he was consistent in being a strong supporter of the navigation laws. ‘I am of opinion that, in relation to trade, shipping, profit and power, it is one of the choicest and most prudent acts 1 A New Discourse of Trade, by Sir Josiah Child. He was born in 1630 and died in 1699. The first edition was in 1665. It was largely expanded in subsequent editions in his lifetime. The quotations in the text are from an edition of 1804. This quotation is from chap. x., Concerning Plantations, p. 178. Among Select Tracts relating to Colonies in the British Museum, B.M. 1029, 15, is A Discourse Con- cerning Plantations, by Sir Josiah Child, published 1692, and expressing the same views as above. The Tract follows the Tract by William Penn on The Benefit of Plantations and Colonies. 2 P 10%. 3 P. 188. 4 P, 201. 32 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE that ever was made in England, and without which we had not now been owners of one half of the shipping or trade, nor employed one half the seamen that we do at present.’ 1 Plantations he approved, if they were in due subordination to and dependence on the Mother Country, but not otherwise ; and it was the dependence on the Mother Country involved in the navigation laws that commended them to him, as to other English merchants of his time, and not mez- chants only. At a little later date Davenant referred to Child by name and echoed his views. The bent and design of the navigation act, he wrote, was © to make those colonies as much dependent as possible upon their Mother Country,” and he laid down that ¢ colonies are a strength to their Mother Kingdom while they are under good discipline, while they are strictly made to observe the fundamental laws of their original country, and while they are kept dependent on it.” 2 Trade and sea power, trade as nourishing sea power, and sea power as safeguarding and extending trade, that was the main outlook of Chatles II's reign. Plantations were smiled upon—only if they were dependencies and not colonies in the true sense. ‘Trade is now become the lady, which in this present age is more courted and celebrated than in any former by all the princes and potentates of the world, and that deservedly too.” So wrote Roger Coke in 1 P. 106. ? Davenant, ## sup., pp. 85 and 207. Chatles Davenant, eldest son of Sir William ID’Avenant, the poet, lived 1656-1714. Adam Smith quoted him twice in the Wealth of Nations. In addition to Discourses on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England, including Discourse ITI, On the Plantation Trade, published apparently in 1698, he wrote also An Essay on the East India Trade (1697). THE RESTORATION ERA. . . 33 1670 in the Preface to the Reader of his “Discoutse of Trade’! As we have seen, he objected to plantations as having, in his opinion, damaged English trade, but for a similar reason he equally objected to navigation acts and to the monopolies secured by chartered com- panies. He was an out and out free trader. Though defending the navigation acts, Child also, like the leaders of the East India Company generally, had strong leanings to free trade so far as concerned im- ports from India into England. In the case of India the advantages or disadvantages of colonisation did not arise ; trade had it all its own way. ‘The twenty years, 1660-80,” we are told, ‘ may be regarded as the golden age of the [East India] Company while still a non-political, non-territorial trading body.” 2 As merchants, unembarrassed by territorial liabilities and in full favour of the Crown—for the King himself was a shareholder—they acquired immense wealth, of which a vivid account has been given by Macaulay in the eighteenth chapter of his history, Child being a byword for the amount of his riches and for the ostentation with which they were displayed. A bene- ficiary of the Company in a modest way was John Evelyn, who tells us in his diary that in 1657 he invested Lsoo in their stock and twenty-five years later, in 1682, sold out £250 for £750. Up to this time, in the modern history of England there had been no such profits from traffic across the ocean to and from East or West ; India gave birth to modern capitalism L Roger Coke, ut sup., p. 32, etc. * An Historical Geography of the British Dependencies, vol. vii, India, by P. E. Roberts, Patt I, p. 41. 54 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE as based on ocean-borne commerce, and trade became the dominating influence of the reign of Charles II. It overshadowed colonisation, except where and when colonisation ministered to trade, and religion was relegated to the background as an Empire-making force. CHAPTER IV 1688-1783 Tue Revolution of 1688 drove out the Stuatts and, by the settlement under which William and Mary came to the throne of England, Parliament gained immensely in power. Henceforward the holders of royal grants and the directors of chartered companies were not merely dependent upon royal favour; they had to reckon also with the House of Commons, which meant not less but, if possible, more corruption.! Further, as the excesses of the reign of Charles II had been due to reaction against Puritanism, so before the end of the seventeenth century reaction set in against these excesses. In his diary, under date November 24, 1699, John Evelyn wrote, ¢ Such horrible robberies and murders were committed as had not been known in this nation. Atheism, profaneness, blasphemy, amongst all sorts, portended some judgment if not amended, on which a society was set on foot, who obliged themselves to endeavour the reforming of it in London and 1 Reference should be made to Macaulay’s pages on Parliamentary corruption as a system which he dated from 16go, and from the ascendancy of Danby, then Marquis of Caermarthen. Chap. xv of the History, in the 1855 edition, vol. iii, pp. 541-7. 56 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE other places, and began to punish offenders and put the law in more strict execution, which God Almighty prosper.” The first meeting of the founders of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the eldest of the missionary societies of the Church of England, was held on March 8, 1698-9 ; and it would seem that the entry in Evelyn’s diary referred to this Society, unless he had in mind what a late secretary of the S.P.C.K.! described as its ‘direct antecedents.’ These were religious societies founded in London and Westminster in connexion with the Church of England about 1678, and societies for reformation of manners, including both churchmen and nonconformists, about 1691. It is interesting to recall that Part I of the * Pilgrim’s Progress > was first published in 1678, and Part II in 1684. In 1701 the S.P.C.K. gave birth to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to which the work of providing clergy for the plantations was handed over. Under date May 3, 1702, Evelyn entered in his diary, Being elected a member of the Society lately incorporated for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, I sub- scribed £10 per am. towards the carrying it on.’ The most prominent among the founders of the S.P.CK. was Dr. Thomas Bray.? He was born in v A Chapter in English Church History, S.P.C.K. Minutes and Cor- tespondence, 1698-1704, edited by the Rev. Edmund McClure, M.A., Preface. * See the account of Dr, Bray given in the History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1698-1898, by W. O. B. Allen and Edmund McClure, pp. 15-16, etc.” See also Public S piret illustrated in the Life and Designs of the Reverend Thomas Bray, D.D., late Minister of St. Botolph Without, Aldgate, London, 1746, B.M. Biographical Tracts, London, 1719-46, 491, c. 18. The author was Samuel Smith, L.L.D., Rector of All Hallows, London. 1688-1783 57 Shropshire in 1656, went to Oxford, was ordained and given a living in Warwickshire, and then came to London on the strength of reputation acquired by published lectures. In April 1696 he was invited by the Bishop of London to go out as his commissary to the colony of Maryland, and he started in December 1699. By that time the S.P.C.K. had been founded and was at work ; and either before Bray went out or after his return—for there seems to be some confusion of dates—he planned the S.P.G. He made his visit to Maryland conditional upon being given assistance in providing parochial libraries for the ministers who should be sent to the colony and, as he was leaving England, he founded libraries at the seaport towns at which his ship called, Gravesend, Deal and Plymouth. His design was to institute lending libraries for the clergy both at home and overseas, and together with it he contemplated providing schools for negroes, for he held that civilising coloured men was a necessary preliminary to their conversion. In later life his philanthropic interest in prisoners and unemployed brought him into touch with Oglethorpe. His intense zeal for providing libraries for the clergy meant that in his view ignorance was the mother of vice and knowledge the highroad to Christianity. Thus the S.P.C.K. started with promotion of know- ledge in its title and in the forefront of its work, and with education of poor children—the provision of charity schools in the true sense—engrossing in early days the main energies of its founders. = A circu- lar letter, which they issued in 1699, attributed the decay of religion and the increase of vice in great ’ 58 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE measure to ‘the barbarous ignorance observable among the common people, especially those of the poorer sort.” 1 In 1695 the largest minded and at once the most upright and the most merciful of the statesmen of the Restoration era died, Halifax, the Trimmer, as he was proud to be known. His guiding hand had been strongly felt in the terms under which William and Mary were brought to the throne of England. © Our Revolution,” wrote Lord Macaulay in his History, ‘as far as it can be said to bear the character of any single mind, assuredly beats the character of the large yet cautious mind of Halifax’; 2 and his verdict upon the Trimmer’s political life as a whole was that he © almost invariably took that view of the great questions of his time which history has finally adopted.” ® Always an unswerving friend of freedom, he urged with refer- ence to the New England colonies that the same laws which were in force in England should be applied in countries overseas inhabited by Englishmen, but otherwise there is no evidence that he took such interest in colonies and colonising as was taken by his great adversary Shaftesbury. Like most of his contemporaries, he contemplated the Empire in terms of trade and sea power. In his famous ‘Rough Draught of a New Model at Sea,” published in 1694, he wrote, ‘It is no paradox to say that England hath its root in the sea, and a deep one too, from whence it sendeth its branches into both the Indies. . . . We ! History of the Society, 1698-1898, uf sup., p. 43. ? Macaulay, History of England (1855 edition), vol. iii, chap. xi, p. 17. 8 Ibid., vol. iv, chap. xxi, p. 544. 59 are to consider, we are a very little spot in the map of the world and make a great figure only by trade, which is the creature of liberty. . . . The Navyisof so great importance that it would be disparaged by calling it less than the life and soul of Government.’ Over forty years later, Bolingbroke, in ‘The Idea of a Patriot King,” written in 1738 and published in 1749, wrote of trade and sea power in much the same terms as Halifax. ‘The situation of Great Britain, the character of her people, and the nature of her Govern- ment, fit her for trade and commerce. Her climate and her soil make them necessary to her well-being. By trade and commerce we grew a rich and powerful nation, and by their decay we are growing poor and impotent. As trade and commerce enrich, so they fortify our country. The sea is our barrier, ships are our fortresses, and the mariners that trade and com- merce alone can furnish are the garrisons to defend them.’ 2 1688-1783 Before the seventeenth century went out, in 1696, the year after Halifax died, a Board of Trade and Plantations was created by King William III, which lasted until it was swept away by an Act of 1782, passed at the instance of Edmund Burke, in view of the coming independence of the North American colonies. The title of the Board told the facts of the case. Until the Old Empire came to an end, for fully three-quarters of the eighteenth century, trade con- Y The Complete Works of George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, edited, with an Introduction, by W. Raleigh (1912), pp. 169, 172, 175. 2 [etters on the Spirit of Patriotism and on the Idea of a Patriot King (Clarendon Press, 1917), with an Introduction by A. Hassall, Student of Christchurch, p. 116. 6o RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE tinued to lead plantations ; and those colonies which were plantations in the true sense, human plantations, if not considered, as they were by not a few English- men, to be a net loss to the Mother Country, were valued in terms of trade. The British Empire overseas inspired Chatham to appeal to British patriotism and to the nobler instincts of his countrymen, but its economic value expressed itself to him no less than to Walpole in terms of trade. The eighteenth century was -for England a century of exceptionally strong contrasts, of immense gains and losses, a century of force, of conquest 2nd defeat, on the face of it a most materialist century. Amidst its many wars there was one long interlude of comparative peace, when Robert Walpole was in power, and Walpole was pre- eminently an embodiment of materialism and a high ptiest of trade. Yet it was an age which produced William Law, Oglethorpe and John Wesley. The eatly years of the century, which saw the victories of Matlbotrough, saw also two very notable and most salutary coalitions. The first was the Union of England and Scotland, dating from May 1, 1707. It is true that Scottish sentiment resented the Union, and sore feeling at the loss of legislative independence lasted long in Scotland. But the Union put an end once for all to ruinous national competition between the two peoples, and it obviously promoted the interests of the Lowlands and the trading classes, bringing immense expansion to Glasgow as an Atlantic port.1 1 ¢ The opening a free trade, not only with England, but with the plantations, and the protection of the fleet of England, drew in those who understood these matters and saw there was no other way in view to make the nation rich and considerable. Those who had 1688-1783 As years went on, even Jacobite Highlanders, tactfully handled, found openings to their mind as hard-fighting soldiers in Highland regiments of the British Empire ; and in colonising, in trading, and, after the Old Empire had passed away, very conspicuously in the mission field, Scotsmen gave to the British Commonwealth an invaluableelementofinitiative, strength and endurance. Not comparable to the Union of the two Kingdoms, but still of first-rate importance to British trade and prestige in the East was the union of the two tival East India Companies, which was completed in 1708. The palmiest days of the old East India Company, as a purely trading company, ended with the Stuarts. As directed by Sir Josiah Child, who lived till 1699, and who was a master of the art of wholesale cortup- tion, the Company had with good cause made many enemies ; and the Whigs favoured a counter associa- tion which was incorporated in September 1698 with the title of ¢ The English Company trading to the East Indies.” The title of the old Company, under which it had been incorporated by Queen Elizabeth, was © The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies,’ and, as against its new competitor, it was known as the London company. But both private interests and public policy pointed to compromise and combination ; and after an interval of friction and negotiation, finally ended by an award by the Lord High Treasurer, Earl Godolphin, in 1708, the two associations were combined under the title 61 engaged far into the design of Datien, and were great losers by it, saw now an honourable way to be reimbursed, which made them wish well to the Union and promote it.” Bishop Burnet's History of his own Time (Oxford, 1823), vol. v, pp. 278-9. 62 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE of ‘ The United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies.” This was ¢ The Honout- able East India Company,” which under successive charters made history on a great scale until, after the Mutiny, it was brought to an end in 1858. It has been seen ! that from the first the East India Company were at pains to make provision for the spiritual welfare of their employees. When the new Company was incorporated in 1698, the terms of its charter were almost the same as those of the charters of the old Company, with the exception that a provision was inserted for the maintenance of ministers and schoolmasters. This was found no obstacle to the amalgamation of the two companies, for ‘the old Company, though not bound by such a provision in any of their charters, had fully recognised their responsi- bility in that respect. A chaplain had always formed part of the establishment at a principal station or fac- tory, and various books of divinity were sent out from time to time. . . .”# ‘The provisions were accordingly continued, after the companies had been united, the intent being to have a chaplain at every large factory and on every ship of soo tons and upwards, and where, as at St. Helena, schoolmasters were required, to provide them also. The chaplains, of course, varied greatly in character and kind. There were among them men who should never have been employed, as well as others who succumbed to temptation and a hot climate. We read of a man who, after he had been 1 See above, p. 22. % See Charters relating to the East India Company, with Preface by John Shaw (Madras, 1887), printed for the Government of Madras, The quotation is from the Preface, p. xiii. 1688-1783 approved by the Bishop of London, was in 1700 sent out by the directors of the new (the English) Company for service at the factory of Hoogly in Bengal, and who ran off as soon as he got on shore. ‘We understand,’ wrote the authorities at Hoogly, © he is a very lewd drunken swearing person, drenched in all manner of debaucheries.” tHe must have been an exceptionally bad specimen, but there were also cases of respectable men who were nevertheless quite unsuitable : such, it would seem, were a chaplain and schoolmaster sent out to Bombay in 1669, the year in which the island passed into the Company’s possession, and of whom an account is given in a letter from Surat of January 1671-2. But, in spite of misfits, the fact remains that the directors of the East India Companies considered qualified clergy to be an integral part of their establish- ment; and through the eighteenth century they looked also somewhat beyond their establishment and showed themselves markedly well disposed to the missionary efforts of the S.P.C.K. in India. The directors of the old Company, in 1691, sug- gested to their Board at Fort St. George, Madras, that a church should be built there for Protestant black people and Portuguese and slaves; and in the following year they wrote that they were sending out for this church two ministers who had studied Portuguese. At a much earlier date, during the Protectorate, in February 1658, the old Company had addressed a 63 t See The Diary of William Hedges, etc. edited for the Hakluyt Society by Col. Yule (2 vols., 1778-9), vol. ii, ccx. 2 Ipid., vol. ii, ccexvii. What follows in the text below is either supplied from or corroborated by these volumes, which are full of : formation but badly in need of a new edition. 64 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE circular letter to Oxford and Cambridge, asking for help in finding chaplains on the ground that they had ‘ resolved to endeavour the advance and spreading of the Gospel in India.’ 1 Nothing, however, seems to have come of it. Richard Baxter is credited with being the first to suggest to the Company missionary work among the natives of India. This was in 1660, the year of the Restoration, and it is stated that his scheme of evangelisation was taken up later by Robert Boyle, who was a director of the East India Company.? It has been told above 3 how Boyle came to the help of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, when at the Restoration the act of the Interregnum, under which it had been constituted, became invalid. The S.P.G. had taken over from the S.P.C.K. the charge of finding clergy for the Plantations, but India was outside the scope of its work. The first Protestant missions in India originated with a King of Denmark, just as, many years later, in 1792, another King of Denmark was the first European sovereign to prohibit the slave trade to his subjects. The Danes had owned Tranquebar on the eastern (the Coromandel) coast of Southern India since 1616, when it was bought from the ruler of Tanjore, and the first two missionaties arrived there in the middle of 1706. It was a Lutheran mission and seems to have been largely manned by ' Quoted in 4 History of the Church of England in India since the Early Days of the East India Company (S.P.CK., 1924), by Eyre Chatterton, D.D., Bishop of Nagpur, and in The Church in Madras (Smith Elder, 1904), by the Rev. Frank Penny, p. 35. See also The Diary of William Hedges, ut sup., II, cecli. % See Chatterton, pp. 32-3. 3 Ut sup., p. 29. 1688-1783 Germans. After 1709 the S.P.CK. took it under its wing,? possibly owing to Court influence, for Queen Anne’s consort, Prince George of Denmark, had a German chaplain. The S.P.C.K. subsidised the work, and the East India Company was most liberal in providing cost of passages and of freights, as when the Society sent out a printing press and printer in 1711. In 1726 a leading member of the Tranquebar staff, a talented linguist, Schultze by name, decided to begin mission work at Madras, and the S.P.C.K. took over the new mission and its founder. It seems to be a fair conclusion that in the eighteenth century down to 1783 in India, which had always been pre-eminently a sphere of British trade as opposed toBitish settlement? more work was done in the direction of evangelising the natives than in the plantations. But it should be botne in mind that Protestant mission work was mainly carried on in Southern India, and that in the eighteenth century, though very slowly up to about 1750, the East India Company developed out of an association of traders into territorial magnates and administrators of dependencies. It is reasonable to suppose that this development may have been accom- panied by sense of responsibility towards their depend- ants, until after 1750 the era of Clive brought with demoralising rapidity a flood of conquest and dominion and in Bengal an orgy of oppression and wickedness. Then it was that the term ‘nabobs’ (a corruption of Nawab) was coined to denote retired servants Gs Lt See History of the Society, ut sup., pp. 258, etc. * But in 1671 a despatch from India spoke of Bombay as 2 colony. See Robetts, # sup., Part 1, p. 76. 66 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE of the East India Company, enriched by ill-gotten gains, Though in the Old Empire the West was, roughly speaking, a sphere of British settlement as opposed to the East, which was patently a sphere of British trade, the existence of the navigation acts testified that there was no lack of trade in and with the West. But, until the eighteenth century was on the threshold, the imported wealth which tainted public life in England came more especially from the East—the sphere of trade. It has been seen that the West Indies, in spite of tropical conditions and climate, were a scene of early British colonisation no less than was the coast of North America; but, after the middle of the seven- teenth century, when sugar was becoming the staple product of the West Indian islands, and notably of Barbados, trade in the sugar-growing British islands began gradually but surely to dominate, if not to run counter to, settlement. The case of Jamaica stood alone. This island was on a much larger scale than the other West Indian islands and presented more openings, as a head- quarters of privateering and asa depotand distributing centre for the slave trade. It received from various sources constant small accessions to its white popula- tion. But in the smaller islands the numbers of the white residents tended at best to remain stationary and tather to dectease than to grow, both actually and markedly so in proportion to the number of slaves. [n the eighteenth century absentee planters living in England and leaving their West Indian estates with their human chattels under the control and at the mercy 67 of agents, became a standing evil. They were an evil both to the colonies to which they owed but did not discharge responsibilities, and to England where a West India interest was created, as powerful as the Nabobs, probably more so, and still more tainted inasmuch as the basis of West Indian wealth and influence was slavery and the slave trade. The three great cities of London, Liverpool and Bristol profited by and supported the slave trade, and therefore backed up the West India interest, which was bound up with it. ‘The treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which gave to Great Britain the contract, the Assiento, for supplying Spanish America with slaves, confirmed her as a leader in this wicked traffic, and it would be idle to look on the West Indian colonies between 1713 and 1783 as other than a sphete of trade, closely linked to West Africa, a sphere of trade in its worst and grossest form. In the beginning these West Indian islands had been as much colonies as was New England : they were now in strong contrast to the New England colonies ; and meanwhile, through the perverse stupidity of the British Government or owing to the criminal selfish- ness of the merchants in the Mother Country, trade in the case of the mainland North American colonies was largely traffic contrary to the law. The navigation acts, defensible during the infancy of the colonies, became more and more indefensible when the colonies had become adult communities, conscious of their con- stantly growing strength and of what was due to them as British citizens. Yet the more they grew, the more the commercial restrictions imposed upon them by the Mother Country were tightened, were resented, and 1688-1783 68 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE endured only through being evaded. Though the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century included British successes overseas, most memorable alike in number and in kind, trade in its ugliest forms darkened the path of Empire. When the British Government of the day cast up the accounts of the Seven Years War and decided which of the spoils taken from France should be retained and which should be restoted, it was decided to keep Canada and to give back the rich sugar island of Guadeloupe. The reasons for the decision were various and complicated, but the fact of very common knowledge remains that Guadeloupe was set in the balance against Canada, so omnipresent and overpowering were trade con- siderations in the eighteenth century. Yet no such considerations, no thoughts of gain of any kind, were in James Oglethorpe’s mind when, in 1732, he set his hand to the colonisation of Georgia. His was a very long as well as a vety noble and useful life. Born in December 1696, he lived for eighty-nine years, and died on July 1, 1785, having survived the Old Empire. The respect and affection with which heinspired Dr. Johnson, who was avowedly willing to be his biographer, was a great tribute to his worth. He was a soldier of distinction and a philanthropist, having, as a young member of the House of Commons, fathered and presided over a Parliamentary Com- mittee of inquiry into the condition of the debtors’ prisons ; and he conceived the plan of a colony which would at once provide homes and livelihood for paupets from these prisons, and be of value from a military point of view. These conditions were fulfilled 1688-1783 69 on the southern side of South Carolina, which was exposed to the possibility of Spanish attack from Florida. Here Oglethorpe and his associates, includ- ing Thomas Coram, who had lived in New England, and who later was the father of the Foundling Hospital, obtained a grant from the Crown, being in- corporated by charter in June 1732, as trustees for the colonisation of Georgia. They were to administer the colony for twenty-six years, after which it was to pass to the Crown. The scheme is described by Mr. Doyle as ¢ the first attempt to devote a colony systematically and exclusively to the relief of pauperism,’ and Oglethorpe himself as ¢ the founder of modern philanthropy.” In his reference to the subject in one of the chapters which he contributed to the Cambridge Modern His- tory, Doyle points out, as other writers have pointed out also, that, in the double object of relieving distress at home and forming a barrier against Spain, Ogle- thotpe’s scheme was in some sort a reversion to the views of the Elizabethan time.? Oglethorpe himself had a strong strain of the knight-errantry which was in evidence in the earlier age, and in his designs colonisa- tion was the prime element, religion was greatly con- cerned, but trade had little place. In October 1732 he took out a first party of carefully chosen inmates of the debtors’ prisons, over one hundred in number, arriving at his destination on the Savannah river in February 1733. The story of his administration con- tains various points of very great interest, but they i The Colonies under the Hosuse of Hanover, chap. viii, pp. 417-18. * The Cambridge Modern History (1903), vol. vii: The United States, chap. ii, pp. 61-3. 70 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE cannot be followed up here. The English paupets were supplemented by various other species of colonists. Highland soldiers were a great source of strength, and among other immigrants were a small number of persecuted Protestants from Central Europe, refugees from the Archbishopric of Salzburg, whom the S.P.CK. were instrumental in sending out. Under circumstances of extraordinary difficulty which might have been expected to make a fiasco inevitable, Oglethorpe, whether as soldier or as beneficent auto- crat, must be judged on the whole to have achieved marked success. He administered the colony for ten years till 1743, and in 1752, before the term of their charter expired, the trustees handed over Georgia to the Crown. One feature in the story is of special concern in connexion with the subject of this book. As we all know, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and Whitefield all came on the stage in the infancy of Georgia, but no missionary work was done by them among the natives. That was not to come? until the Old Empire had 1 The main body of these persecuted Protestants were received into Prussia. See Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great. Book IX, chap. iii, and Book X, chap. vi. ® Reference has already been made above on pp. 29-30, to the letter written to Sir Robert Walpole, and published in 1731 by F. Hall on The Importance of the British Plantations in America io this Kingdom, etc., see Select Tracts relating to Colonies, No. 8, B.M., Catalogue 1029, E. 15. The writer is emphatic on the value of the plantations and also on the loyalty of the people, ¢ especially where there are few ot no clergy’ (p. 23), and he condemns the clergy as never going among the Indians. Our priests, though I have been told some of them have been sent over by a society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts, never go among the Indians ; nor did I ever hear of any one Indian converted to the Christian faith by an English priest except by Dr. Mather in New England, who from the joy of his heart 1688-1783 passed away and until Wesley had first converted England. Nor was there any more fruitful result from the visit, two or three years earlier, of Bishop (then Dean) Berkeley to Rhode Island, and his scheme for a college in Bermuda, where men should be trained ‘ for the better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations, and for converting the savage Americans to Christianity.” He went out in 1728, commended by the S.P.C.K., having been granted a Royal Charter for his college, and having secured private subscrip- tions and the promise of a Parliamentary grant. But the grant was never forthcoming, and after three years spent in Rhode Island, he came back to England in 1731, without having even landed in Bermuda. The middle forty years of the eighteenth century, the years which followed the age of Walpole, included both the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence—Britain’s greatest success and her most signal failure. They were emphatically years of trade domination, but still there were minds’ at work, ill content with the conditions and the outlook. Adam Smith had been for years engaged in writing the * Wealth of Nations >—the Bible of free trade, before it was eventually published in 1776. In it he quoted Sir Matthew Decker, author of ‘ An Essay on the causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade, conse- quently of the value of the lands of Britain and of the means to restore both,” which was begun in 1739, and of which a second edition was published in 17409. 71 boasted the conversion of two Indians,” etc. (p. 59). He reprobates English treatment of the natives except in Pennsylvania, the people of which province, he says ‘are the only people who have treated the savages with justice and humanity > (p. 84). 72 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE Decker proposed © to lay one tax on the consumers of luxuries and take off all our other taxes, excises and customs, and when that is done to make all our ports free.” 1 He was eloquent as to the harm done to British trade by high customs duties and, like Roger Coke, attacked the monopolies of chartered companies, their * past villainies,” as he pleasantly phrased it. He attacked also the navigation act. © As this act makes our navigation dear, it for that reason deprives us of the fishing trade, the great nursery of seamen.” He advised that the British colonies should be allowed to export their raw products direct in British ships to any part of Europe, inasmuch as if they were given such a field for their unmanufactured articles, they would cease to wish to manufacture, and it would result in ‘ preventing the people in our plantations on the Continent rebelling for ages to come.’ Writing when rebellion had already begun, Adam Smith advocated giving the colonists representation in the British Parliament ; and for many years past others had given similar advice. Benjamin Franklin had favoured such a course, and it was very strongly urged by Thomas Pownall, who wrote with authority as having been Governor of Massachusetts and other American colonies. The first part of his book on ‘The Administration of the British Colonies > was published in 1764, the year after the Peace of Paris was signed, confirming to Great Britain the rich fruits of the Seven Years War. He pleaded that Great Britain may be no more considered as the kingdom of this isle only, with many appendages of provinces, 4 Second edition (Dublin, 1749), pp. 45, 53-4, 75 and 179. 73 colonies, settlements and other extraneous parts, but as a grand marine dominion, consisting of our pos- sessions in the Atlantic and in America, united into a one empire, into a one centre where the seat of government is.” * The Preface to the second part of his work was dated November 1774, and in this volume he wrote that ¢ A British union of all the British Dominions, by admitting the American colonies into Parliament, has been now for near twenty years repeatedly recommended to this country by those who knew the circumstances of both countries as they stood related to and connected with each other’? ‘I very seriously recommended such a British union,” he wrote on an earlier page, as the only sure means which would prevent the certain alternative of an American union distinct from and independent of Great Britain.’ Edmund Burke ridiculed any plan which would have involved holding elections through the length and breadth of great spaces on the other side of the Atlantic and transporting the elected members across the ocean to sit in a House of Commons in London as wholly impracticable, if only on account of the time which must have been spent in the process ; and impracticable it must surely have proved, hadit been put to the test, in the eighteenth century. Nor in the later generations of the Empire, though difficulties of distance have been and are being largely removed, has colonial representation in the House of Commons of the Mother Country ever commended itself, except 1688-1783 Ls The Administration of the British Colonies, Part 1 (fifth edition, (774), p- 10. 2 Juid., Part II (1774), p. 82. 8 Ibid., p. 8. 74 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE on paper. Inany case in the middle of the eighteenth century the remedy, if remedy it could be accounted, was proposed too late. What had been wanting and what might conceivably still have held the Empire together was set forth in Burke’s noble speeches. The time ctied aloud for relinquishment by the Mother Country of all dictation in any form to the American children of her household, and for full recognition of the plain fact that those children, having come to manhood, must be accorded the freedom inherent in British citizenship, and be subject to no restraint or payment, unless imposed by themselves in their own lands and in their own way. The subject is beyond the scope of the present book, but it is not beyond its scope to note that freedom of trade for and with the colonies and political equality for the colonies presented themselves to writers and thinkers at the time of crisis as close akin, as two aspects of one and the same fact. Conversely, under the mercantile system trade domination meant political domination also. What killed the Old Empire was dominance of trade in its most vicious, insolent and godless guise, exulting in the appalling wickedness of the slave traffic, instilling poison into the heart of the Empire, from the West through the West India interest, from the East through the nabobs. Since the Restoration trade had always, with constantly growing strength and insistence, called for and supported the specious but most disastrous principle of uniformity in the dealings of the Mother Country with the colonies, which meant a dominant Mother Country and dependent colonies. In the course of the friction and the strife which tore 1688-1783 75 -he Empire asunder, on one point and another there were many and strong excuses to be made for Great Britain ; but at the back of it all was the fundamental mischief that the outlook on the Empire had been distorted by trade; that trade carried to hideous lengths had caused the English genius for making new homes and carrying liberties across the sea to be held suspect, and had deadened the call of religion. The Old Empire fell, and deserved to fall. Its fall was finally proclaimed in the treaty of 1783, which recognised the independence of the North American colonies. But even before 1790 was reached, there were already signs that a better time was at hand. The first British settlers in Australia were planted on the shore of Sydney Harbour in January 1788. Itis true that in origin this was a convict settlement, but none the less it made 2 new beginning of British colonisation which won a continent for our race. A few months earlier, in May 1787, a colony for freed slaves had been planted at Sierra Leone on the West Coast of Africa. Again, this was an effort at colonisation on British initiative, though for coloured men. Moreover, the enterprise had been dictated by religion or by philan- thropy inspired by religion, it raised the flag of freedom at what had been the earliest centre of British slave trading and while slave traders were still busy on the spot, and it was a notable step forward in the direction of antagonism to the worst traffic in the world. We have seen that, as long as the Old Empire lasted, little answer could be given to the charge, which had so troubled Richard Hakluyt, that Protestants had done little or nothing towards converting the heathen. 76 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE This had been beyond question the rule, though excep- tions’have been noted in the foregoing pages, and from the earlier part of the eighteenth century onwards the Motavians in particular gave a noble illustration of Protestant enthusiasm and capacity for missionary work. But before the century ended Protestant mis- sionaty societies began to multiply abundantly in Great Britain—the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society, the Scottish Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society, all between 1792 and 1800, and in 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society. These societies and others following went zealously to work. It seemed as though some pent up religious force had at long last been set free in England and Scotland, which was to carry the Gospel message to all the dark men and into all the dark places of the world. CHAPTER V SIIMMARY In the foregoing pages the three main motives of forces which made or marred the Old Empire have been taken to be trade, colonising or making new homes, and religion. Trade carried to an extreme and allied to attempted uniformity has been set down as the fundamental evil which wrecked the Old Empire. Trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has developed to an amazing degree both in bulk and in variety, and no bounds can be set to the possibilities of scientific invention, which was beginning to make itself felt before the Old Empire ended. But whereas in the Old Empire trade, in the form of the trading interests of the Mother Country, came to be the enemy of overseas liberties, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the hands of Sir Robert Peel, preceded by Huskisson and followed by Gladstone, it came, as free trade, to be the promoter of those liberties almost to the extent of what the overseas peoples themselves considered to be indifference to the tie of Empire. As has been seen, Gladstone valued colonies in the sense that he valued reproductions of England and 1 See above, pp. 36-7. 78 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE English liberties overseas, and most assuredly he valued trade. But he did not value Empire in the sense of dominating other lands and peoples, and in the matter of trade he considered that the best service which could be rendered both to the Mother Country and by the Mother Country to all parts of her Empire was the greatest possible freedom of trade. The latest developments of the Empire into a Common- wealth of self-governing and self-taxing equal partner nations, with coloured dependencies, notably India, beginning to exchange dependence for equality and partnership, find no parallel either inside or outside the Empire at any earlier time or in any part of the world. But it is certain that while trade considera- tions, preferences and the like have been carefully kept in view, the vast changes which have taken place have not in any way been dictated by trade. Tradekilled the Old Empire, but it has been given no chance of killing the new. Turning to colonising, there was a very large revival and increase of colonisation when the Napoleonic wats were ended and the New Empire had got into its stride. South Africa had been added to Canada and Australia as a part of the Empire which called for and in 1820 received British settlers, and New Zealand was yet to be annexed and peopled with British stock, while in the great spaces of Canada and Australia there was, as there still is, room for many millions of the race. But an entirely new factor was brought into nineteenth-century emigration from the British Isles by the existence of the United States, a legacy from the Old Empire. Here was a British SUMMARY 79 country, though not inside the British Empire, much mote developed, mote accessible than or at least equally accessible with any of the countries within the Empire, offering mote opportunities except for those who had the instincts of pioneers and almost equal opportunities for them also, and presenting a special attraction not only to the growing number of emigrants who came through from the continent of Europe to the Atlantic ports of Great Britain, but also very especially to citizens of the British Isles who, like the Irish, had no love for the British Government. The result was that for about the last half of the nine- teenth century the volume of emigration from the British Isles to the United States, either direct or through Canada, very greatly exceeded the total number of those who went to all the home-giving countries of the Empire put together. It has been abundantly seen? that in the beginnings of the Empire the planting of colonies was recom- mended as a means of providing employment and relieving distress. ‘The same motives, more solidly grounded, operated eatly in the nineteenth century, and have been operating more or less ever since, not least at the present day. The substitution of machinery in factories for cottage industries, which brought starvation to the handloom weavers of northern England and southern Scotland in the years between Watetloo and the Reform Bill, gave a great impetus to crossing the sea. ‘There must have been in these years mote widespread and acute distress than at any time in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. 1 See above, pp. 5, 6, 14, etc. 80 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE Yet, if allowance be made for the immense growth in population in more modern times, it seems safe to say that in the story of the Empire no outgoing, no effort at British colonisation ever was so determined, so effective and so prolific of history as the movement or movements—for the Puritan movement did not cover the whole transplantation—which came to pass in the first sixty years of the seventeenth century. Never was the will to make new homes oversea so strong in England as in these years, among not the poorest only or mainly—and after all even the pilgrims of the Mayflower were not of the poorest—but among middle- class citizens of position and substance. It must be remembered that going into the wilderness was then a far more complete and terrifying reality than in after years, when there was less of the unknown ; the will to cross the ocean must, therefore, have been more determined than, probably, either before or since. Neither before nor since were political and religious causes ever combined in favour of colonisation in such strength as when the Puritans settled in New England, but the supreme driving force was religion. The temper of the founders of Massachusetts was expressed in the words of the younger Winthrop. * For myself I have seen so much of the vanity of the world that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveller that hath lodged in the best or in the worst findeth no difference when he cometh to his journey’s end.’ ! Under date August 21, 1629, Life and Letters of Jobn Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, at their Emigration to New England, 1630, by Robert C. Winthrop (1864), chap. i, Pp. 307. SUMMARY 31 Religion has never exercised such concentrated strength in the New Empire as it put forth in the Old, never so much in the Old Empire after 1660 as before. This does not mean unmixed praise for the earlier years of the Old Empire as compared with later times. There is the criticism to be made that the driving power of religion in England was greatest when it was most directed to enmity and severance, and when there was least toleration. But the same might be said with equal truth of all countries and, whether religion made for good or harm, there can be no doubt as to its strength as a driving force in the Empire prior to 1660. It may have been the perpetual antagonism of Protestant sects to one another over and above their standing antagonism to popety, which diverted their attention from the duty of preaching the Gospel to the heathen. ‘This was the greatest sin of omission in the Old Empire, as trade was the source of its greatest positive crimes. INDEX Arrican Company, 38 American colonies, 3, 16, so, 67, 73 Australia, 75, 78 Bacon, 18~21 Bahamas, 37 Baxter, Richard, 64 Berkeley, Dean, 71 Bermuda, 20 Board of Trade and Plantations. 3 Bolingbroke, Idea of a Patriot King, 59 Bombay, 37, 43 Boyle, Robert, 29, 64 Bray, Dt. Thos., 56-57 Britannia Languens, 40-41, 48 Burke. Edmund, 73-74 Casor, 6, 10 Cabot, S,, 12 Canada, 68, 78-79 Carolinas, 37, 45-46 Chaplains, 22, 62-64 Chartered Companies, 12, 13, 15, 27, 29, 55, 72 Child, Sir Josiah, 50-53, 61-65 New Discourse of Trade, so f. Christopher Carlile’ s Discourse, 10 Clatendon, 29, 44 Coke, Roger, Discourse of Trade, 32, 40, 48, 52 Colonies and Plantations, 7, 10, 15 £., 20 f., 23, 25, 31, 37f, 47f, 50 £, 60, 72-75, 78 Companies, 18 Company for Propagation of the Gospel, 28-29, 44, 64 Coram, Thos., 69 Gonsglh of Trade and Plantations, 44 I. Cromwell, 16, 30-33 Customs, 37, 72 Danisu Missions, 64 Davenant, Charles, On Public Revensies, 50, 52 Davis, John, 11 Decker, 72 Doyle, The Englishin America, 14, 44, 69 Drake, 11 Dutch, 32, 34, 39-43 East India Company, 15, 22, 42 f, 53, 61-65 Eliot, John, 27 Elizabethan voyagets, 3, 11 Emigration, 31, 48, 50, 80 Empire, 17, 32, 33, 35, 73, 78 England in XVIth century, 4 Evelyn, John, 47, 51, 53, 55 FisuinG Trade, 34, 40 f. Fortrey, Samuel, England’s In- terest, 50 Franklin, Benj., 72 Free trade, 42, 44, $3, 6o #., 71, 74» 77 Frobisher, 7, 10, 11 GARDINER, Dr. 25, 35 Georgia, 16, 68—70 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 10. 11, 14 Passage by N.W. #0 Cathaia, 5 Gladstone, 7, 33, 36-37, 47, 77 Gold, 7 Guadaloupe, 68 Guiana, 16, 17 84 Haxrurr, 3, 9, 17-18, 75 Divers Voyages, 3 Discourse concerning Western Planting, 3,5, 8 f., 17 f. Principal Navigations, 3—4, 9 Halifax, 58 Rough Draft, 58 Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 24, 26 Hudson Bay Company, 38 InD1a, 62-65 JamArca, 31, 66 Laub, 25-26 Leghorn, 44 Libraries, 57 Liturgy, 22, 23, 26 Locke, John, 45 £. Long Parliament, 28 MARYLAND, 57 Massachusetts Bay Co., 24, 27, 47, 80 Mayflower, The, 24 Merchant Adventurers, 13, 18 £. Missions, 8 f., 14, 21, 23, 27-29, 56, 64 £., 70 12., 75 £. Mun, Thos., England's Treasure, 28—~44 Natives, attitude to, 9, 21, 23, 49, 57 Navigation acts, 34, 37, 38, 47, 51-53, 67, 72 New England, 15, 16, 24, 27-29, 47, 51, 58 Newfoundland, 18, 20, 41 New Jersey, 37, 41, 49 New York, 37 New Zealand, 78 OGLETHORPE, Go, 68-70 PARLIAMENT, §5, 72 Peckham, Sit G., 10, 14 Penn, Wm., 48-50 Pennsylvania, 48 INDEX Portugal, 4, 8 Pownall, Thos., Administration of British Colonics, 72-73 Puritans, 16, 28, 80 : Pym, John. 16. 26 RALEIGH, 7, 9, 14, 17 Religion, 6, 8, 11, 23 f., 26, 54, 62~65, 6g, 80 f, Religious observance, 22-24, 26 Rhode Island, 36-37, 71 Roe, Sir Thos., 22, 42 Russia Company, The, 10, 12 SEA powet, 19, 34, 52, 58 f. Shaftesbury, 45 £., 58 Sierra Leone, 75 Slave trade, 66-67, 74 Smith, Adam, Wea/th of Nations, 7» 44, 71 Smith, John, Description of New England, 23 Smith, Sir Thos., g, 15 South Africa, 78 Spain, 8, 14, 16, 19, 30-33 S.P.CK., 561, 64t. 71 S.P.G., 56 f.,, 64, 70 5. Sugar, 66 THORNE, Robt., A Declaration of the Indies, 4, 6 Trade, 15, 18, 34-35, 37 ff., 48, 52, 54, 58-01, 67 f,, 74, 77 Tudors. 6 UnempLoYED and emigration, §, 6, 10, 14, 68, 79 Uniformity, 26, 35, 38, 74 Union of England and Scotland. 6o United States, 78 f. VIRGINIA, 3, 15, 20 WALPOLE, 60 Wesleys, 60, 70 West Indies, 16, 66 f. Winthrop, 24, 27 Printed in England af THE BALLANTYNE PRESS by SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & Co, LTD. LCoichestar, London & Eton 7 F LZ 0 nN ] 0 nN 0 > 9) “i t ? INDEX \J - — lo ®) i .)) i 5 mt r= 2 0 oo Ca) oo nN > rd % a ican Company, 38 erican colonies, 3, 16, 59, 7,75 stralia, 75, 78 CON, 18-21 aamas, 37 tter, Richard, 64 ele, Dean, 71 rmuda, 20 ard of Trade and Plantations, 9 lingbroke, Idea of a Patriot King, 59 mbay, 37, 43 vle, Robert, 29, 64 ¥, Dr. Thos, 56-57 . ‘annia Languens, 40~41, 48 ike, Edmund, 73-74 30T, 6, 10 ot, S,, 12 1ada, 68, 78-79 olinas, 37, 45-46 «plains, 22, 62-64 «tered Companies, 12, 13, 15, 7, 29, 55, 72 ld, Sir Josiah, 50-53, 61-65 New Discourse of Trade, so f. istopher Carlile’ s Discourse, 10 rendon, 29, 44 ve, Roger, Discourse of Trade, 2, 40, 48, 52 onies and Plantations, 7, 10, sf, 20f, 23, 25, 31, 371, 7 f, 50 £., 60, 72-75, 78 npanies, 18 npany for Propagation of the sospel, 28-29, 44, 64 am, Thos., 69 neil of Trade and Plantations, af. = = Cromwell, 16, 30-33 Customs, 37, 72 Danse Missions, 64 Davenant, Charles, O# Public Revenues, 50, 52 Davis, John, 11 Decker, 72 Doyle, The Englishin America, 14, 44, 69 Drake, 11 Dutch, 32, 34, 39-43 East India Company, 15, 22, 4z £, 53, 61-65 Eliot, John, 27 Elizabethan voyagers, 3, 11 Emigration, 31, 48, 50, 80 Empire, 17, 32, 33, 35, 73, 78 England in XVIth century, 4 Evelyn, John, 47, 51, 53, 5% FisaiNg Trade, 34, 40 £. Fortrey, Samuel, England's In- terest, §O Franklin, Benj., 72 Free trade, 42, 44, 53, 00 7. 71, 74, 77 Frobisher, 7, 10, 11 GARDINER, Dr., 25, 35 Georgia, 16, 68-70 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 10, 11, 14 Passage by N.W. to Cathaia, 5 Gladstone, 7, 33, 36-37, 47, 77 Gold, 7 Guadaloupe, 68 Guiana, 16, 17 0 wa Id ~) 0 nn os] 0 >