The Empire Reformed. Owen Stanwood
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“What ignorance, profaneness and misery must needs ensue!” In his attempts to allow freedom of worship for Anglicans, Cranfield had effectively shut down the colony’s churches, blackening the reputation of royal government throughout the region.27
The Moodey debacle was a public relations disaster, and one that only made the more mundane tasks of governance more difficult. Cranfield found it virtually impossible to raise revenue, as the assembly refused to pass any money bills. In the meantime, Robert Mason had just as hard a time convincing New Hampshire’s landowners to surrender their land and become his tenants, eliminating another source of revenue that was supposed to support the province and its executive. With no money coming from England either, Cranfield became desperate. He threatened to take landowners to court and force them to pay quitrents to Mason, charged exorbitant fees in the colony’s courts, and eventually decided to enforce old revenue statutes from before his arrival in the colony, bypassing the legislature altogether. Like his campaign against Moodey, these moves made a fair amount of sense. Cranfield was personally broke. Never a rich man, he had sold his office to travel to New Hampshire. While his critics and historians characterize him as a greedy man intent on making a fortune, he may have never been paid a cent by anyone. Moreover, the government of New Hampshire had no funds to operate. Desperate times called for desperate measures, but these measures only cemented Cranfield’s reputation as a tyrant who aimed to subvert the colony’s constitution.28
These efforts were all for naught, as the colony’s inhabitants increasingly refused to follow any of their governor’s orders. While there was no repetition of Gove’s rebellion, no angry people taking to the streets and demanding their liberties, Cranfield’s opponents did not completely reject violence. Revenue collectors routinely met resistance, including from women who threatened the men with “scalding water, & red hot spits,” if they attempted to collect taxes. Far worse was the punishment afforded Thomas Thurton, Cranfield’s provost marshal in the last days of December 1684. As he traveled around Exeter trying to serve arrest warrants, an angry mob followed and mocked him, on one occasion untying his horse while he visited a neighbor’s house, and on another occasion stealing his sword. Thurton’s deposition of these affronts reads like the complaint of a schoolboy facing off against bullies: at one point he refused to show his commission to the crowd, out of fear that they would take it and refuse to give it back. The mockery turned serious in early January. Thurton went to the house of Samuel Sherborn to collect a small fine, but found Sherborn in no mood to pay. Thurton and his deputy began to take the offender to jail, but on the way a group of Sherborn’s friends freed him, and took Thurton into custody. Over the course of a harrowing two days, the provost marshal was tied up and imprisoned in a house in Exeter, dragged through the town with a noose around his neck, beaten with a cudgel, and eventually dumped over the border into Massachusetts, where he spent another 40 hours tied up in a stranger’s house. Thurton knew most of his attackers, and he and several witnesses left detailed depositions of the affair, but the state of New Hampshire was such that it proved impossible to bring any of the attackers to court. Thurton, after all, was the face of royal authority, and the people had already demonstrated how much respect they had for him.29
By this time, in fact, Cranfield had essentially given up on New Hampshire. While agents from the colony worked to discredit him at Whitehall, the governor begged for a new assignment. He cited his deteriorating health, which he blamed on the cold weather, and requested a posting in a more “healthful” climate like Barbados or Jamaica. These later letters revealed a broken man, physically and mentally exhausted by his long political struggle with the New Hampshirites. When the Committee on Trade and Plantations finally appointed him to be customs officer in Barbados, he pronounced it “the greatest happyness that ever I had in my life … to remove from these unreasonable people.” He served with distinction for over a decade in Barbados, where he successfully weathered the Glorious Revolution and the vagaries of politics in the famously tumultuous colony. Indeed, but for his two years in New Hampshire, Cranfield seems to have been a model public servant.30
The troubles in New Hampshire demonstrated both the possibilities and pitfalls of Whitehall’s new imperial vision. There was no reason why Charles II’s ministers could not build a centralized empire—in New Hampshire, after all, no one denied the king’s theoretical power to rule his plantations. At the same time, however, the volatile political and religious situation across the Atlantic had the potential to complicate imperial plans, especially when people on both sides of the divide insisted on reading every local dispute as an element in a global design. In the midst of this controversy, one issue lurked just beneath the surface: defense against external enemies. On one occasion Cranfield tried, without success, to use fears of an Indian attack to shame the legislature into compliance with his demands. In the next experiment in royal control, on the island of Bermuda, the problem of defense jumped to the fore, causing a dispute perhaps even more dramatic than the one in New Hampshire.31
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If New Hampshire was the most worthless corner of the king’s dominions, Bermuda was not far behind. The island’s 3,600 whites and 5,000 slaves produced low-quality tobacco and served as a way station for ships crossing the Atlantic, but the colony had yet to attain its later reputation as a shipping hub. In terms of politics and religion, Bermuda stood apart. Its rulers, the Somers Island Company (usually known as the Bermuda Company), held the oldest continuous patent in the New World, but their membership was severely depleted and they paid little direct attention to the colony. In terms of religion, most people were dissenters of one kind or another, but the colony maintained a parish structure that gave at least an appearance of conformity to the Church of England. Nonetheless, several of the island’s ministers had ties to Boston.32
Like New Hampshire, Bermuda came to the attention of Restoration imperialists as a result of the efforts of several private interests. Throughout the 1670s parties in both London and Bermuda labored to break the Company’s monopoly; by the early 1680s a Tory lawyer named Francis Burghill had become the leading advocate of royal government in the region. The Bermuda Company was a small, insignificant operation, but Burghill found plenty of sympathizers in Charles II’s court who aimed to curb local corporations of any kind, especially those with historical ties to Puritanism or dissent. Burghill’s grievances resembled those used against the Massachusetts Bay Company at the same time. The Bermuda Company, he claimed, was tyrannical—it oppressed the king’s subjects and took their property without due process of law. Company leaders were also guilty of economic mismanagement, especially in their stubborn refusal to allow Bermudians to export tobacco except in one annual company “magazine ship.” Finally, Company leaders were traitors, adherents to the old Puritan cause who would betray the colony to the king’s enemies in a heartbeat. Burghill contended that an old Company governor allowed the Dutch to scout out the island’s harbors and fortifications during the Third Anglo-Dutch war, and that the Company also harbored a number of known rebels. The foremost example was William Milborne, a Baptist radical who had lived on the island for many years and had once publicly compared King Charles II to a dog. The colony’s governing council suspended Milborne for his seditious speech, but according to Burghill, the very fact that such a man was allowed to maintain a position of influence painted the Company as hopelessly disloyal.33
If the case against the Bermuda Company appeared to be a classic example of Tory empire building, a closer look reveals a more complicated picture. Indeed, most of Burghill’s allies on the island were not Tories or royalists, but radical dissenters—including the island’s ministers and even William Milborne himself. These radicals, most of whom had lived in Bermuda for decades and were a bit out of touch with English politics, had both economic and political grievances against Company rule, which they compared to the “Grand Signiurs”—meaning that that paragon of arbitrariness, the Ottoman sultan. But they seem to have given little thought to the realities of royal government. As the last Company governor, Richard Coney, noted, the people of Bermuda believed that the coming of royal government would lead to less, rather than more regulation. “They aim at the sole Government themselves,” Coney complained, “many of them saying His Ma[jes]ty will not concern himself with them, a small Island of Rocks, and such poor people as they are God bless him hee hath enough to doe at home, they can look after themselves.”34
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