Cromwell’s Imperial Moment

If King James limited Britain’s imperial ambitions, those who favored more extreme actions had an opportunity to re-ventilate them during the years 1625-1629 when the government of King Charles I teetered on the brink of war with Spain.

Then, some Irish exiles, backed by their priests, proposed a Spanish invasion of Ireland in which Irish soldiers in exile would become the invading force.^[2144] At the same time, advanced Protestants in England harkened back to Raleigh and proposed attacks upon Spanish possessions in America and assaults upon Spain itself. Neither party made much progress, but the views of militant Protestants attracted increasing support in England once the government of King Charles sought to impose uniformity of organization, practice, and dogma upon the Protestant churches within each of his three kingdoms. Some English Protestants opted for voluntary exile in North America rather than accept an Arminian church, while Scottish Presbyterians threatened to withdraw their allegiance rather than concede a monarchical imperium in religious matters. Protestants in Ireland were uneasy but remained quiescent given they were an entrenched minority within a kingdom with a majority Catholic population that could be provoked into supporting a Spanish invasion.

These developments led to open conflict between King Charles and his Scottish Calvinist subjects in 1638; they contributed to friction, and ultimately war, between King Charles and his English parliament; and anti-Catholic diatribes articulated in both England and Scotland occasioned such alarm among Irish Catholics that they rose in rebellion in October 1641, ostensibly to defend themselves from a hostile government. Uncertainty also encouraged those English subjects most opposed to King Charles to rekindle Raleigh’s aspirations to promote an English Atlantic Empire.

Some militant English Protestants established a colony on Providence Island, off the coast of Nicaragua, that endured, 1630-1641. These, like Raleigh, assumed that the Native Americans within the Spanish Empire would rise up against their oppressors at the first sight of English Protestant liberators, and they also expected that those Puritans who had fled to North America to escape religious oppression in England would join them in a common assault upon Spanish America. The Providence Island adventurers, initially with approval from the British monarchy, attacked Spanish shipping and Spanish settlements, as they sought also to establish what Karen Kupperman has described as a sequence of forts “lying in the heart of the Caribbean and the mouth of the Spaniards.” In the event, the Spanish authorities destroyed the Providence Island settlement in 1641, and only the more determined participants persisted with English piratical assaults upon Spanish shipping. Other militants— from New England as well as from England—switched their attention to Ireland which, following the 1641 insurrection, they considered another location where Catholics were persecuting Protestants. However, once conflict between the forces of king and parliament got seriously underway in England, these Protestant stalwarts withdrew from Ireland to enlist in the parliamentary armies.^[2145]

These entangled conflicts, known to historians as the Wars ofthe Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652, resulted in the defeat and collapse of the royal cause; the execution in 1649 of King Charles I; and the creation of a Commonwealth under English parliamentary control (and later a Protectorate headed by Oliver Cromwell) that sought by military force to establish a unitary government over all the jurisdictions to which King Charles had held title. This episode changed fundamentally the character both of the English/British state and the empire to which it aspired, which persisted after 1660 when the Commonwealth gave way to the Restoration monarchy of King Charles II.

The most striking innovation was the greater role in government—in the regions as well as at the center—of people with martial experience. This was understandable given that it was Cromwell and his fellow generals who had defeated the armies of the king, asserted English military authority over Ireland and Scotland, and launched an attack upon Spanish power in America. Many of those appointed by Cromwell continued to hold positions in government under Charles II, especially those who had prompted his Restoration. Also several of the new king's appointees to office had been Royalist soldiers both in the Civil War and also during their exile, frequently in the service of Louis XIV of France. Then, after 1688, when the Restoration government, established in the 1660s by Charles II, and modified in the 1680s by his brother James II, gave way to a government chosen by William of Orange, many who were appointed to high office had served this new monarchy both as soldiers in the Netherlands and in assisting him in defeating those in England and Ireland who supported King James. A second innovation was that, following the successive military conquests of Ireland and Scotland by English parliamentary armies commanded by Cromwell and his subordinates, and after the establishment of a single government to rule all parts of the Commonwealth from Westminster, the designation “British” had come to carry the unmistakable connotation of the imposition of English cultural and religious norms upon Scotland and Ireland. And a third discernible change was that people of advanced Protestant opinion, whose counterparts had been described pejoratively as Puritans during the reign of Charles I, would remain active promoters of policy.

The first undertaking of the Cromwellians in Ireland, once they had achieved military victory over all opponents there, was a comprehensive re-plantation of that country whose landed resources were again required to compensate English soldiers—this time those being demobilized from the parliamentary armies.

In this also Cromwell adopted an imperial perspective when he called upon committed Protestants from the Puritan colonies in America to join English and Continental (but not Scottish) Protestants in planting Ireland. In response, some of those who had fought successively in Providence Island, in opposing the Irish Catholic rebels of 1641, and in the English parliamentary armies, returned to Ireland. Then, once the authority of the Protectorate seemed secure in Ireland and later in Scotland, Cromwell launched his Western Design with the dual purpose of challenging the Spanish presence in the Caribbean, and seizing Hispaniola. The outcome of this undertaking appeared a costly fiasco since neither objective was realized, and few appreciated that Jamaica, the only British acquisition from this campaign, would quickly become a major sugar-producing island. Again, as with his resettlement of Ireland, Cromwell encouraged Protestant communities from various locations in the Americas to offer support, and he actually relocated to Jamaica an established settler population from the island of Nevis. The Cromwellians also rounded up thousands of the soldiers from defeated armies in both Scotland and Ireland and forced them into servitude on various Caribbean islands. All such forced, or voluntary, migration constituted proof, as Alison Games has put it, of an “evolving imperial conceptualization” at the highest level within the Protectorate.^[2146] Therefore this Cromwellian moment can be considered critical in determining the future military character of a British state and empire, which would be perpetuated by the Restoration monarchy, and, later again, by the government of William and Mary.

Therefore, continuity was achieved despite the shock presented to the system in 1676 when James, Duke of York, who was to succeed his brother on the throne in 1688, pronounced publicly that he was a Catholic. While his Protestant subjects acquiesced in their future king's conversion, they brought his reign to a summary conclusion in 1689 when the king's wife produced a male heir and, with it, the prospect of a Catholic dynasty.

The throne was then offered to James's Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, Prince William of Orange. This proved to be no more than a political caesura because the existing military complexion of the British state and empire became but thinly masked, as the military titles held by many within the ruling group gave way to noble ones granted by grateful monarchs to those who had supported them.^[2147] However, as Stephen Saunders Webb has demonstrated, the military character of empire was more visible in the Atlantic colonies where almost all governors-general from the mid-seventeenth to the late-eighteenth centuries were men with a proven ability to command, even if they did not always enforce the “garrison government” that Webb associates with them.^[2148] The persistence with military men is unsurprising, given the frequency with which Britain was at war from the 1640s to 1815, and the escalating size of its armies and navies paid for by what John Brewer has dubbed the “military-fiscal state.”^[2149] The military dimension to state power was especially evident in Ireland, where many of Cromwell’s officers persisted as landowners, where Britain stationed its peacetime standing army, and where, as Charles Ivar McGrath has detailed, military barracks became a vital element in the economy and society of most sizable Irish towns throughout the eighteenth century.^[2150]

Therefore, following the innovations introduced by Cromwell, the British state and empire conformed more closely to what Raleigh had encouraged than to what King James I had envisaged. The military power now not only preserved the integrity of a core “British” state with a centrally defined religion and civil order but also asserted its power overseas. This, many still believed, would be achieved at the expense of Spain whose relative weakness they considered a portent that the moment had arrived for Britain to become the prime European imperial power in the Atlantic.

Those most enthusiastic for Cromwell’s Western Design, like those who had backed the Providence Island venture, considered all accretions of overseas power necessary to ensure there would be no interference in British affairs by any Catholic power seeking after universal monarchy: Spain to the mid-seventeenth century and France thereafter until 1815.

Since Cromwell and his immediate successors as rulers in Britain took their imperial responsibilities seriously, they devoted altogether more attention than had their predecessors to the development and maintenance of a British navy to protect and promote British overseas trade as well as overseas settlements. While this evolving state and empire did not neglect trade with Europe and Asia, it attached increasing importance to Atlantic commerce, which was unsurprising given that the Restoration parliament augmented the king’s income by imposing a tariff on specified imports from Britain’s American colonies. Even before then, the government of Oliver Cromwell had registered a re-prioritization when it went to war at sea against the United Provinces. Some contended that the Dutch were not true Protestants, but the prime concern was that the Dutch were preventing Britain from increasing its wealth through foreign trade. War with the Dutch proved popular with English commercial interests, and the first Dutch war, 1652-1654, launched by the Protectorate, was to be followed by two further conflicts, 1665-1667 and 16721674, conducted after the Restoration. The Dutch wars were also associated with a plethora of parliamentary legislation, known collectively as the Navigation Acts, to parallel the trading and exclusionary regulations being enforced by other European governments, including Spain, Portugal, and France. The Navigation Acts, 1651, 1660, 1663, 1672, and 1696, were intended primarily to exclude Dutch traders from conveying specified goods to and from Britain’s overseas colonies, but they did much also to define Britain’s empire and its interests.^[2151]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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