The English conquest of Jamaica in 1655 demonstrated both the extended reach of the revolutionary state—it was the first colony seized directly by the government—and the fact that it was ill prepared to manage distant possessions. The early years in English Jamaica offered insights to those who sought to create a modern state that would include an imperial component. Yet an imperial state apparatus could not be willed into existence but had to be constructed, as officers sent on the Western Design came to appreciate. In the surviving correspondence, those who led England's Jamaica begged for the support that they required from a distant and increasingly distracted center. Although the peculiarities of the moment somewhat obscured the meaning of Jamaica, as political instability and eventually regime change threw the center into flux, those lessons were nonetheless prescient. Any English state builder or imperial official who dreamed with Oliver Cromwell of a vigorous central state at the heart of an expanding imperial structure had to address the needs signaled by the correspondence out of early English Jamaica.
Jamaica's case diverged from the usual circumstances that formed the state over the early modern era. State formation within Europe and the British Isles stretched over an extended period, as gradual and uneven processes eventually created the modern state. In the British case, much research has explored the relationship of the localities to the state in England or the efforts at forming “a British federated and composite state.”Footnote 1 Within the locales, as Neil Younger described it with regard to the Elizabethan era, “a multitude of tiny acts of government … encouraged a subtle but significant process of acculturation” to the idea of state demands.Footnote 2 Research on England has shown that, far from imposing its newly articulated will on obedient underlings, the state derived out of a series of negotiations between powerful local elites and those managing the emerging needs of the central state.Footnote 3 State formation, rather than the more purposeful state building, better describes the process. In a somewhat parallel fashion, Alison Games has argued that the English established a global presence as a result of “multiple styles of engagement with an emphasis on accommodation,” before the forays of a generation of globally minded men were superseded by a more coercive and centralizing tendency. The colonies that were among the results of these early efforts subsequently went through a truncated version of the process that also gradually drew English locales into closer interaction with the state, as Michael J. Braddick has argued. Established without direct state involvement, colonies formed local elites that then negotiated their relationship to the state as these outposts were drawn into its orbit over time.Footnote 4
A colony seized by the English army at the command of the Lord Protector, Jamaica stands as an obvious exception to the rule of subordinate regions gradually incorporated into an expanding state. The first English men in Jamaica—all employed by the government to conquer Spanish lands and to mold these acquisitions into English colonies—needed the state urgently, as no other colonial outpost had before. Far from possessing acknowledged authority within the locale––authority that the state asked them to forgo in favor of the benefits that came with greater integration––they instead relied on the state immediately and intensively. With an urgency compelled by grave need, they had no time for or interest in gradually negotiating their place within an emerging imperial system. Instead, Jamaica's first English leaders turned to the state for aid, authorization, and legal protection. Indeed, as the island's senior official for much of its first decade—Colonel Edward Doyley—learned, the state lacked the capacity to meet his needs for immediate assistance and support.Footnote 5 Especially in the midst of a failing revolution, the English state fumbled the requirements produced by its conquest. Jamaica's situation revealed the “advanced competencies” that would allow the state to function as an imperial contestant in the Atlantic world and beyond.Footnote 6
The leaders of early English Jamaica penned a cache of plaintive letters calling upon the state to fulfill functions required to maintain a distant military and naval outpost and to transform it into a viable colony.Footnote 7 Desperate letters from St. Jago de la Vega or Point Cagway (later Port Royal) were not the purview of only one man. Still, Edward Doyley, who managed Jamaica's affairs for most of its first eight years, produced numerous missives that clearly articulated the failings of a central government lacking the full apparatus for managing distant possessions. While he wrote, committees established for the first time to direct colonial affairs groped their way toward staffing and procedures that would eventually manage the empire. Meanwhile, the government at the center shifted, causing the newer institutions addressing colonies to wobble, collapse, and perhaps reform.Footnote 8 After many frustrating years of uneven and unsatisfactory responses, Doyley finally turned in desperation to the Admiralty offices about unrelated concerns. An old and solidly established institution, it persisted amidst larger uncertainties.Footnote 9 He desired a central authority not only able (and willing) to authorize him, but also attentive to Jamaica: one that sent commissions and instructions (in addition to shoes), answered correspondence, and protected its agent from calumnies and lawsuits. He needed to root his power and authority; otherwise he was vulnerable to disgruntled merchants, irate naval men, and even foreign traders whose ships were seized. His ideal, a legitimate and stable institutional center that upheld his power and that acknowledged his decisions as an expression of a higher will, did not exist in his experience until after the Restoration. He claimed reluctance and denied his own agency because he lacked the protection that irrefutable authorization brought.
Jamaica's Unique Circumstances
Jamaica as reflected in Doyley's writings may seem an odd choice for making a larger point about state formation and the needs of empire. Doyley's position was extraordinary and his moment arguably unique. His letters bridge the instability of the late revolutionary era and the transition back to royal government. He initially took over the reins of the army and subsequently added responsibility for naval affairs as well as for overseeing the nascent civilian population during the years of Cromwellian rule; he continued to ride herd on a refractory population through the brief shift back to republican government, the collapse of the revolution, and the return of monarchy. Amid these dramatic events, he doggedly dispatched a trove of writings that revealed the needs of the periphery in an early stage of the state's engagement in empire. He asked of the imperial center what all middling officials required in order to do their work, and his requests for support laid out a road map to meeting empire's more pragmatic exigencies.Footnote 10 After it was fully formed and functional, the imperial structure would closely resemble what Doyley requested of his superiors. The messiness of his moment has obscured the significance of the structural changes in the management of empire that Jamaica demanded, but the shifts that he both heralded and tried to further would have far-reaching consequences.Footnote 11
Although the army that landed in Jamaica in May 1655 was responsible for establishing a viable and lasting English colony, Jamaica was unlike any previous English outpost. Seized from the Spanish, it had a long tradition of European settlement and boasted European-style housing, a town laid out in standard Spanish colonial fashion, and such accoutrements of Caribbean economic life as a handful of sugar mills. Yet the men (and a few women) who landed did so as participants in a military conquest. Organized into an army and naval force, the first arrivals worked directly for the state. In theory at least if not in fact, they received rations and pay from the central government. The seven thousand who landed far exceeded those sent on other initial colonial forays, the magnitude of the force dictated by the fact that it represented an army on campaign. Ignobly defeated on Hispaniola, the army's overall numbers already depleted, and many survivors sickened or injured, they arrived with pressing needs along with a mandate to conquer.
They had behind them no colonial origins document, as was typical of other American outposts, no form of authorization (such as a charter) to guide them. In previous colonial settings, these foundational documents established forms of governance that reflected English local practice. They performed as agreed-upon fictions, positing that governors, colonial legislators, and freemen held certain rights and responsibilities that structured subsequent interactions. With documents that established their existence as variations on English locales, typical colonies proceeded under the authority of leaders whose status sanctioned their preeminent position within their communities. In this way, colonies replicated forms of local governance, even though their leaders invariably lacked the ancient pedigrees or marked social superiority that supported gentry authority in England. Instead, the English entered Jamaica as conquerors, a fact that would be turned against them years later when crown officials decided to treat the island as if it were Ireland, another conquered territory with seriously constrained rights. This insulting equation would not be allowed to stand, but the suggestion highlighted the fundamental difference between Jamaica and other American colonies.Footnote 12 For the moment, Jamaica simply lacked entrenched colonial practices, rooted in familiar ways, to help it weather revolutionary upheavals.
English Jamaica came into existence as the direct action of the revolutionary state without a foundational document to serve as a guide or a buffer. It lacked a recognized civilian elite, with landholdings or other status markers to justify its leadership. Men in the army and navy customarily looked to a distant, supreme authority for instruction, as well as pay, rations, and reinforcements. In the case of Jamaica, the primary customary practice that existed to direct its leaders was military. While this fact provided structure and procedures, the English state stood at the apex of the army's organization and remained central to its continued existence. Doyley, once he emerged as Jamaica's leader, was more vulnerable than other colonial leaders, but he also commanded far greater power, directing a military campaign, a naval war, and the foundation of a new colony. Little wonder that he felt profoundly the imperative to rely on the state.
Doyley did not arrive in Jamaica at the head of the army but rather rose to that position, and eventually to leadership over the entire undertaking. A survivor, Doyley alone among the colonels sent to the West Indies remained engaged in the scheme well into the Restoration. Appointed to the senior staff as a result of his experience in the New Model Army in England and Ireland and through his connection to Robert Venables, general over the expeditionary force, Doyley's seniority, longevity, and skill brought him the command of Jamaica. Initially appointed colonel to Venables's own regiment, Doyley took command of a separate regiment of island recruits in Barbados, once local planter Colonel Lewis Morris withdrew from the post of its colonel. After the defeat on Hispaniola and the landing on Jamaica, Venables quickly returned to England, leaving the army in the hands of Colonel Richard Fortescue, who lived fewer than four months. Doyley assumed Fortescue's place by virtue of his seniority and with the support of the council of officers. Replaced once for ten months when Cromwell sent out Colonel William Brayne, Doyley again commanded after Brayne's death (September 1657).Footnote 13 From that time until he left the island in August 1662, Doyley oversaw the army, navy, and civilian population.
With the English authorities increasingly distracted by other concerns, neither a replacement for Brayne nor authorization for Doyley's command ever arrived in Jamaica. Not only did both Cromwells fail to designate Brayne's successor, they never rescinded the explicit requirement that affairs be run by a three-man commission. Both in England and in Jamaica, the authorities attempted to recreate this structure, first established when the initial force was dispatched. Their efforts were foiled by the high death rate and the departure of various commissioners.Footnote 14 The idea that a no-longer-extant three-man commission was the legitimate form of authority subtly undermined the position of the hapless Doyley. His own legal training, which made him cognizant of the necessity of proper forms, increased his uncertainty. On some occasions, he declined to act altogether because the documents that he took as his guide required three commissioners: “myself of the five only left.”Footnote 15 Holding his position only by virtue of the vote of his fellow colonels and the irregular deathbed designation of Brayne, his failure to receive endorsement made it difficult to force the compliance of recalcitrant officers. He noted of these challenges, “because I have not his highness commission for the supreame command, I am faine to beare.”Footnote 16 The inattention of the state left Doyley to command with only a shaky basis for the powers that he exercised.
The Search for Authorization and Support
Doyley tried to remedy this situation by appealing to Oliver Cromwell for official authorization in 1656. Before Cromwell ignored his request and dispatched Brayne to take charge, Doyley seized the opportunity offered by the death of Robert Sedgwick to put his own name forward. The Lord Protector had sent Sedgwick, signaling his intention to retain the three-man commission, in order to replace Edward Winslow, who died en route to Jamaica before he could take up his post as governor. Arriving in October 1655, Sedgwick found the army in Doyley's hands, William Goodsonn overseeing the navy, and no notable civilian presence for him to govern. Subsequently tapped by Cromwell for the supreme command, he died before he could assume control, while—as Doyley reported—hesitating to do so out of fear of the high death rate and the daunting nature of the task.
To forestall Cromwell's sending another man to take up the duties that he had already shouldered, Doyley wrote to the lord protector, noting his training and experience. A student of the law, he had been occupied with “continuall implyments, not meane ones in civill and martial affairs these fowerteene years past”—that is, since the outbreak of the first civil war in 1642. This background provided him with “experimentall abilities enough to performe the charge Heere, as commander in cheife of the forces, or governor, if I am allowed to be indued with common parts.” He went on to remind Cromwell that his peers had chosen him for the post: “I am already soe by election, succession, and confirmation of the commissioners.” Cromwell the general knew that the support of an officers’ Council smoothed a commander's way. Doyley further observed, considering Sedgwick's dismayed reaction to Jamaica and his quick demise, “That no man out of England will thanke you for it, nor probably live six moneths.”Footnote 17 His abilities, the support of his peers, and his penchant for survival all commended him to the post.
Doyley also felt compelled to declare his loyalty. He opened with reference to his basic credentials, as a member of a respectable family dedicated to the cause of the godly: “I am a gentleman of no inconsiderable family, but persecuted theis many years for the cause of religion.” He admitted that he had hesitated over the revolutionary settlement, as originally established after the execution of Charles I, when parliament ended both monarchy and the House of Lords. Yet he declared his support for Cromwell's rule unequivocally and preempted any suggestion that he did so belatedly. “That though I have not been satisfied in all revolutions of late tymes; yet upon your highnes being made protector, I did quitt a good imployment in Ireland, and publiquely declared to Lieut. gen. Ludlowe and others, that I would goe for England, and live and dye with your interest.” Edmund Ludlow as Doyley's source to corroborate his support for Cromwell might seem an audacious choice, as Ludlow himself opposed the protectorate as a “usurpation.”Footnote 18 Yet, if Doyley defended Cromwell's government in the face of Lord Lieutenant Ludlow's opposition, that strengthened his case. The civil employment that he relinquished referred presumably to the lucrative post of transplantation in Galway, which he had just accepted when he returned to England. Following this declaration of loyalty, he proceeded to praise Cromwell: “whatsoever result the Lord hath in his secret councell determined of this undertakeing, yett generations to come shall call you blessed, for soe glorious, soe pious an enterprise.” Aware that addressing the Protector directly might seem disrespectful, he closed “I crave pardon for my boldness, and with my prayers to God to settle your highness in peace here, and establish you in an intire tranquility hereafter.”Footnote 19 In this way he cast himself as the perfect embodiment of loyalty to the protector: godly and dedicated. He aligned himself with the moderate Revolution carried by those who hesitated to go so far as to endorse a republic led only by parliament but able to accept a single leader at the head of the state.Footnote 20
That the state did not validate Doyley's request for authorization—although it mattered greatly to Doyley himself—is most significant as a sign of a larger failure to attend at all to the leadership of Jamaica. Arriving in Jamaica in December 1656, Brayne survived a bit longer than the six months Doyley predicted, dying in early September. From that moment no one in a position to do so in England sent another man to fill the post or authorized anyone already stationed in Jamaica to assume leadership. Arguably the single most significant omission in managing Jamaica was this failure to name a commander. News of Brayne's demise arrived well before Cromwell's unexpected death in September 1658, yet no action was taken. At the time the Protector's Council had designated two committees to manage Jamaican affairs, and though both continued to sit, neither succeeded in addressing this omission.Footnote 21 His son Richard ruled for less than a year, during which time he never turned his attention to Jamaica. The republican government that resumed when power returned to the Rump Parliament was similarly inattentive. The rulers of England had to address this issue, or it went neglected because the management of imperial governance presented a new challenge for which no regular channels for decision-making or action yet existed. The state had no office, no personnel dedicated to overseeing the distant affairs of English polities such as Jamaica, and hence its governance could not be addressed as a routine matter but only as an extraordinary case. The problem was less that Doyley never received validation but rather than Jamaica, having been seized, could easily fall out of sight in the press of other concerns. The state lacked the bureaucracy of empire.
This failure caused those in Jamaica to struggle over how to direct their official correspondence. The initial commissioners experienced no apparent hesitation on this score. William Penn, Robert Venables, and Edward Winslow wrote to Cromwell and, for more routine business, to his secretary, John Thurloe. Penn communicated most often with Admiralty or Navy commissioners, as did his replacement Vice Admiral Goodsonn. Once the original leaders had died or decamped, those left to oversee Jamaica (or sent out to take charge) addressed the same correspondents: Richard Fortescue's only surviving letter before his death went to Thurloe; Sedgwick, arriving in autumn 1655, wrote one letter to the Council of State but otherwise addressed the usual recipients: Cromwell, Thurloe, and Admiralty; William Brayne, dispatched the following year, did the same, save for one letter to Sir John Barrington, who was a member of Cromwell's inner circle. Both Brayne and Sedgwick, like Venables, Penn, and Winslow, had been sent by Cromwell himself.Footnote 22 Unsurprisingly, they saw the lord protector or his secretary as suitable (if not consistently attentive) contacts within the government.
Doyley, who had charge of affairs intermittently from May 1656 and permanently from September 1657, had a more varied set of correspondents, and they moved away from the center of power over time (see Table I). He addressed Cromwell only twice, and never in the protector's last year of life. Doyley relied more on Secretary Thurloe, sending him six surviving letters from March 1656 to November 1658. While he too once addressed the Council of State, far more of his letters went to the Admiralty. This shift occurred in part because he took over naval affairs and in part because—as he remarked—he knew someone was there to answer letters when he doubted that the rest of the government had the capacity to do so. Most tellingly, Doyley by the late interregnum wrote to Thomas Povey, a relatively minor London merchant with limited connections to those who could aid him.Footnote 23 Doyley's reliance on Povey indicates that, Abigail Swingen's argument to the contrary, merchants did not promote Jamaica (much less plan the Design).Footnote 24
Doyley's Correspondents—Surviving Letters in Chronological Order
* A few letters from Doyley survive only in copies addressed to “Right Honorable.” The nature of the business discussed indicates that they are addressed to Admiralty or Navy commissioners.
A & N Commissioners: Admiralty and Navy Commissioners
ADD: Additional MSS, British Library, London
CHC: The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, ed. Peter Gaunt, Royal Historical Society, Camden 5th series, v. 31 (2007)
CO1: TNA, Colonial Office papers.
Egerton 2395: Egerton MS 2395, fol. 169, British Library
GFP: Frederick L. Gay Family Papers, 1374–1822, Box 1, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
HCA: TNA, High Court of Admiralty
SPT: A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq., ed. Thomas Birch, 7 volumes (London, 1742)
Reduced to appealing to Povey, in July 1658 Doyley wrote that he felt like a “Romanist in Purgatory,” trapped in Jamaica and unable to act effectively. Povey had contacted Doyley initially for assistance in an investment scheme; he also requested Doyley's patronage of his brother Richard, who was in Jamaica with the expeditionary force. The two exchanged a number of letters expressing their mutual frustration over the neglect of Jamaica and the inability of the government to manage its distant affairs. Not only with Doyley but more generally, Povey tried to guide colonial officials in navigating the shifting politics of the late interregnum.Footnote 25 For Doyley's part, he lacked not only official authorization from the center but also a clear sense of the political situation there in a time of rapid fluctuation. His efforts suffered from the fact that no official agency existed to which he could turn to report Jamaica's needs. He required a permanent and reliable Colonial Office, or barring that, at least a fully staffed and functional Board of Trade and Plantations. What he had was a heavily indebted Admiralty Office with no authority to act in most colonial affairs and a merchant advocate with no effective power to effect the changes that he required. Little wonder that he declared, “this comand carries with it insurmountable and discontente that I looke uppon myselfe as the Romanist in Purgatory till I bee released.”Footnote 26 Imagining purgatory as a place one spent time simply awaiting liberation, the analogy worked as an expression of Doyley's frustration and isolation.
The typical early modern solution to an inability to influence the central government was the cultivation of a patron, which Doyley appeared unable to accomplish effectively. Having received his position in the army heading to the West Indies through his connection to Venables, Doyley's relationship to the general no longer served his needs after Venables returned to England in disgrace for botching the campaign and abandoning his post. Otherwise, Doyley seems to have enjoyed few close ties to powerful men. He knew both Charles Fleetwood and Henry Cromwell (having worked with them in Ireland) well enough to write to each. Reaching out to Fleetwood got him no relief, and Cromwell remained in Ireland where he might help Doyley with his land there but could offer little aid in matters relating to the West Indies. Later Doyley would trot out a tenuous familial connection to one of Charles II's secretaries, Sir Edward Nicholas, whom he contacted for assistance after the Restoration. His fellow Jamaican official Cornelius Burroughs enjoyed closer ties to those in the interregnum authority structure. He wrote frequently to his cousin Robert Blackborne, the secretary to the Admiralty. Burroughs's many surviving letters reveal how such a relationship might benefit a distant colonial functionary. He peppered Blackborne with requests for advice and assistance as well as help with his private business dealings, not to mention excuses and explanations for criticisms that he feared were being leveled at him.Footnote 27 Doyley lacked a reliable personal relationship that could come to his assistance.
Without a functional imperial bureaucracy created to respond to his requests or a patron who could intervene on his behalf, Doyley remained isolated and neglected. Besides characterizing himself as a Romanist in purgatory, he wrote, “wee are almost afraid, wee are forgot.” Addressing Thurloe during his first stint as commander of the expedition, he cajoled the secretary to aid them: “Wee are a desolate, and almost an abandoned people, and deserve pitty at least, and helpe from our friends.” He boldly asserted that Cromwell's administration owed them a debt, since they suffered for their dedication to his project: “especially considering, that if wee had not had more sence of the nation's honour and our owne then others, wee had from Hispaniola sailed directly to England, and not exposed ourselves to the difficulties and diseases wee have had here.” Footnote 28 His plea aimed to motivate the English organizers of the expedition to act on behalf of the survivors out of a sense of obligation.
The Needs of English Jamaica
Had the state remembered Jamaica, it would have found much to provide. The leadership routinely sent lists of practical items that were desperately needed, ranging from food to material items required of the army or navy. The authorities in England, when they thought about feeding Jamaica at all, assumed that the vast local agricultural potential would feed the troops and the arriving settlers. Rations remained a desperate need far beyond the expectations of English officials. Other items—such as shoes, necessary for troops going on patrol—were often lacking, and on one occasion Doyley reported that the soldiers had to remain in quarters due to the scarcity of footwear.Footnote 29 Naval ships consumed prodigious amounts of ships’ stores and fittings, most of which could not supplied locally. Goodsonn ordered regular surveys of sails so that their deteriorating quality and declining quantities could be documented to the Admiralty. Ships, though, enjoyed the benefit of being able to return to England to have their resupply needs addressed. Doyley did occasionally send ships home that he would have rather retained on the station, because they lacked rations or other necessary materials. The army by contrast was trapped: it could not simply arrive in an English port city to throw itself on the mercy of local Admiralty officials but had to remain in Jamaica suffering dearth and neglect.
Indeed among the few orders dispatched to the West Indian force was a directive to hold the island by detaining the army personnel there. Men pleaded and demanded to be sent home, as their fellows died around them or sank into the misery of hunger and disease. Doyley himself was not immune to the allure of departure, begging in autumn 1657 for permission to return. He volunteered another officer, Francis Barrington, as his replacement. Addressing not only Cromwell but also Fleetwood, then a member of Cromwell's Council, he made the case for his release. Explaining that the dying Brayne had delegated authority to him, he averred “I would have refused to have accepted off, if I could have quitted myself with any honour and faithfullness my countrey, but I am now resolved to go through with,” until the Lord Protector officially discharged him.Footnote 30 He importuned Fleetwood to intervene, arranging for him “a writ of ease” that would permit his escape. Departing without leave constituted a violation of military discipline; Venables, who returned home without permission and with unseemly haste, spent months in the Tower for abandoning his post. Writing to Fleetwood, Doyley declared, drawing upon language that was atypically lavish in its use of Christian rhetoric: “having seen much affliction in this place, and of God's providence, I desire some rest, to contemplate upon the riches of his goodness, and to sequester myself from this tempestuous and troublesome world.” Invoking images of pious retirement, he asserted that “Honors and riches are not the things I aim at; I bless God I have a soul much above them. A good name and a competent livelyhood is all I desire upon earth, and eternal life in heaven. And of statesmen and great commanders, I fear few there be, that will find it.” He begged to be “disrobed of all my titles of honor and great command.”Footnote 31 This plea, like so many others emanating from Jamaica, went unanswered.
Exacerbating matters, the government neglected to pay the men. Before leaving England, they received a quarter of their pay for the projected term of service, with the understanding that they or their dependents in England would receive payments quarterly thereafter. When they did not return, no effort was made to pay them; rumors trickled to Jamaica of desperately pleading wives and hungry children.Footnote 32 When the authorities sent out items necessary to the prosecution of the military campaign (such as shoes, the lack of which had prevented pursuing the enemy), they declared their intention to charge these items to the soldiers’ accounts, effectively reducing the arrears of pay they were owed.Footnote 33 These outrages sparked two mutinies, one in 1656 that resulted in the execution of a well-liked and well-connected young man, and a second in 1660, when two additional officers died on the scaffold. By the latter occasion, Doyley's position was sufficiently eroded (and sympathy for the demands of the mutineers so strong) that he felt compelled to station a ship nearby to take him off the island in the event of a general uprising.Footnote 34 In both 1656 and 1660, the main grievance was being detained without pay. At the time of the latter incident, Doyley explained that some men claimed that they were no longer under military authority. They “trayterously and seditiously dared to infuse into the souldiers principles of liberty and freedome from my power or authority because they have nott theire pay although the said souldiers are inrolled in the parliamt service and in their pay to the ruyne of this Island and the English interest here.” He knew that despite the impossibility of his task he would be blamed: “the losse of this place will inevitably fall upon me.”Footnote 35
Besides the unending nature of the campaign and the inadequacy of support, Doyley struggled against the problems associated with distance. He constantly asked for information, conveyed rumors that he hoped would be corroborated or denied, and noted the frustration that when local needs changed they could not be promptly communicated to England. Slow and incomplete communication represented a problem that, as Anthony Pagden notes, “faced all the European colonizing powers.”Footnote 36 It hampered Doyley's ability to explain himself or to gauge the effects of his efforts to do so. At one point late in the interregnum, he implored, “I beseech yor honors that I may have all such acts of Parliament or Councell sent me as may any waies concerne me to Be active, that I may not walke hoodwinked.”Footnote 37 His letters cautioned his correspondents not to believe the reports of returnees in lieu of the information he sent. Men released from duty in Jamaica, upon returning to England, exaggerated the success of the undertaking, thereby inadvertently undermining his pleas for aid. He noted: “Whatever you hear of our plenty, be pleased to remember, that it is a received maxim amongst those that go home, that to speak well of Jamaica is to hope to get their arrears; but no landman, that ever went liked it so well as ever to return.”Footnote 38 Wondering whether he had the latest information, he also feared that misinformation spread through distant corridors of power.
An unstable state that at the same time lacked the structures necessary to the management of its newly acquired possession proved inadequate for Doyley's purposes. Eventually Britain would build a vast empire and set up state structures to manage it. Jamaica, at the very start of that process, contended with a more fluid situation in the metropole, where first steps toward imperial institutionalization were underway. Aaron Graham argues that political consolidation created functional state structures rather than the rise of bureaucracies, yet whether they followed or led the process, bureaucracies with a mandate and the resources to respond to Jamaica's needs were sorely lacking in Doyley's experience.Footnote 39 Given the inchoate nature of the state's structures, Doyley at times had little idea whom to approach for information and aid. In July 1658, he informed Thomas Povey that the lord protector was too grand to approach directly; Secretary John Thurloe was too busy; and the Committee on America, he believed, had ceased to sit. Povey would eventually advise another correspondent to send his official letters—unaddressed—directly to Povey himself, so that he could insert the name of a recipient appropriate to the moment and deliver them into the proper hands.Footnote 40 Doyley, worrying about the stability of the regime, commented that “It is Pitty a turbulent People at home will not give his highness [leave] to [prosper] into this wth some effort. And it is our great unhappiness to have his good wishes and not his assistance answerable.”Footnote 41 Matters worsened when the senior Cromwell died and later his son's government fell. These “distractions at home” threatened to leave Jamaica completely adrift.Footnote 42 Doyley, confused about the situation in England, followed as well as distance allowed, knowing his latest information was already dated.
Facing Expanded Responsibility
Commanding the army under these circumstances represented a sufficient challenge, but Doyley eventually took charge of the navy as well. His control over the naval forces stationed in Jamaica stretched him not only beyond his area of expertise but also beyond the realm in which he could act as a result of his senior military status or his fellow army officers’ designation of him as their leader. Initially Doyley commanded the army while Vice Admiral William Goodsonn directed the navy. During Brayne's term, Goodsonn departed, and its leadership devolved to Brayne as Cromwell's appointee to serve as supreme commander. Barbados planter Lewis Morris thought that he saw an opportunity in Brayne's departure, requesting that he be made vice admiral. This unsuccessful effort represented Morris's second attempt to have his considerable debts paid by the government in exchange for taking a role on the design.Footnote 43 No one else having been sent or named, Doyley inherited both roles when Brayne died. Doyley deployed ships effectively against two invasion attempts aimed at retaking the island and sent contingents to assailed Spanish towns and shipping on various occasions.Footnote 44 Complaining of the responsibilities that he inherited, Doyley noted “that seamen besides the Antipathy they have to Landmen are at best a kinde of robustious unsatisfied people, especially where there hath been so much cause administered through the unusual wants and neglects here.”Footnote 45 His was a thankless task. Although he came by his naval leadership circuitously, by the late interregnum he thought of the Admiralty as the only stable point of contact in England as his other correspondents within the government slipped away.
In addition to the challenges of riding herd on “robustious” seamen, Doyley worried about naval officers’ greater access to the authorities in England. While Doyley and the army he led were trapped in Jamaica, naval ships returned to England regularly. They did so in the normal course of conducting their business as well as to address needs of resupply and repair that were particularly acute in the Caribbean environment. Captains carried Doyley's letters (and those of others) but they also had the power to represent the situation in Jamaica to powerful men in England. Doyley worried about how his actions might be represented by these men, who had worked for him in Jamaica but had the means to shape his reputation within England. When he pursued unpopular policies in Jamaica—especially if he refused to condemn a prize that naval men seized—he courted their ire.Footnote 46
These concerns came forcefully to the fore in Doyley's dealings with the popular but unconventional ship's captain Christopher Myngs. Sending him home to answer for prize money that had gone missing, Doyley later learned that Myngs had “laden [him] wth calumnies … to wch it is impossible for me to give answer by writing at this distance.” He wrote: “I shall only entreat and humbly offer, that ye Roman policies & governmt may be observed in this, who as they countenanced informers So they always punished calumnies.” After declaring himself unable to respond effectively, he attempted numerous strategies toward that end. He called upon his former colleague Goodsonn, who retained the high regard of the Admiralty office, to assess his character and testify that he had lost money while overseeing Jamaica rather than profiting as he had been accused. He pointed out that he had declined a bribe that Myngs had offered him out of the missing prize money, saying that he would rather Doyley profited than the Admiralty, upon which he wished “a poxt.” Finally Doyley asserted that Myngs was generally disrespectful of authority, listing numerous insults that he had levied against a variety of men. “Admirll Blake was a Coward, his old master Goodson as hipocriticall dissembling or selfe ended knave & a Bufflehead. Majr Thompson a shaclebraine, Majr Bourne a drunken-sott, Coll Clarke a Coward at Jersey, the Commissioners of ye Admiraltie a Crew of corrupt knaves, only Vice-Admirall Lawson, a good Seaman, but a fellow that wants braines, I am ashamed to tell you this his frequent & open discourses of all persons in authority.”Footnote 47 Myngs's expression of contempt for the much lamented hero Robert Blake aimed to shock, but underscoring his admiration for Lawson, who had been associated with a controversial protest of naval policy, did not speak much better of his judgment.Footnote 48 If Myngs castigated various English luminaries, it rendered suspect his many “calumnies” aimed at Doyley himself. Having written a letter recording these offensive insults, Doyley apologized “for this necessary truth and planeness.”Footnote 49 In his vigorous attempt to undermine the veracity of Myngs's representations in order to defend himself, his frustration remains palpable.
Besides naval men whom he sometimes crossed, Doyley oversaw the expanding civilian sector. Jamaica slowly developed a civilian population, drawing traders to the growing port town on Point Cagway (later Port Royal). The original plans for the design—and the reason for the three-man minimum to act as commissioners—envisioned a tripartite division among the army, navy, and civilian leadership. Within a few months of arriving, all three designees were dead or departed: Winslow (the civilian commissioner) had died, while Venables and Penn left. Cromwell tried to keep the system in operation, sending Sedgwick to replace Winslow promptly after learning of his death. With time and further deaths, Doyley became the only man overseeing all three areas, the navy and the civilians coming to him by happenstance.Footnote 50 While Stephen Saunders Webb cited Doyley's expanded duties as a sign of an intentional change in how England handled its emerging empire, inaugurating a military “governor-general” model, Doyley experienced the shift as unintended consequence of a disease environment that killed other leading men and an increasingly neglectful centralized state that failed to support the campaign.Footnote 51 By 1660, the civilian population stood at approximately 2,200, a remnant of the number that had been settled.Footnote 52 Despite its small size and anemic growth rate, the civilian presence, especially in the emerging port town of Cagway, created a need for land deeds and trade regulation, among other necessities. In 1661, after years with responsibility over all three realms, Doyley succinctly summarized the challenges of his position: “I have had a very hard taske to command Souldrs without pay Seamen without provision and the vulgar without Lawe.”Footnote 53
While the “vulgar” might have been difficult to command without laws, the nascent merchant community proved most bothersome. Cagway, built by the English on an unstable spit of land that stretched out into Cagway (formerly Caguaya, now Kingston) Harbor, was located to facilitate recourse to shipping—initially naval or merchant ships that brought supplies at the behest of the state and eventually vessels that came to trade. Early Jamaica was comparatively poor, and merchants at first had little interest in stopping there. As the residents mastered the production of the island's agricultural surplus—based on the labor not so much of the civilian population initially as on that of the soldiers who were required to work the land as part of their military duties—it drew some traders. Along with other locations in the region that London merchants serviced insufficiently, Dutch traders put in an occasional appearance, and evidence suggests that Doyley sometimes allowed their commerce under cover of the need to repair a ship or similar possible subterfuges.Footnote 54 Naval successes against the Spanish infused prize money into the local economy, permitting naval men and privateers to purchase alcohol in the tippling houses. When seamen, whose access to cash was intermittent and limited, frequented these establishments, Doyley had to intervene to stop traders from extending them excessive credit.Footnote 55 In early 1660, when Doyley imposed an unpopular tax on liquor to supply a military offensive that he could not otherwise fund, he turned to his Council, made up of his fellow army officers, for support.Footnote 56 Senior officers had by this time received grants of land, and therefore they straddled military and civilian worlds, which meant that, however odd it was to use an officers’ council to endorse taxation, they did represent a sector of the emerging landed elite.Footnote 57
Merchants’ recourse to the law made Doyley cautious. He annoyed Myngs over his unwillingness to condemn prizes, an activity that opened him to lawsuits. As he explained, “I may probably be represented something too cautious (if not cool and careless in this thing); but the little knowledge I have in the law (wherein I was bred), together with my experience in England and Ireland, puts in my mind how hardly actions (though well intended) irregularly done, do find approbation and indemnity.”Footnote 58 Without authorization that would indemnify him, Doyley dreaded the potential consequences of a misstep: “Finding, that peace is approaching, when the law of the land shall prevail over the soldier, whose forwardness shall find rather a check than countenance, and though a thing be lawful to be done, yet it must be done lawfully, durst not adventure to subject myself to the merchants lash, and be a perpetual prisoner for doing what I cannot justify.”Footnote 59 Such fear of later reprisal haunted Doyley's tenure. As he noted here, powerful merchants (in this case foreign traders) could use the courts to exact retribution. He asked—not for the first or last time—that any “power” sent while he commanded “be very positive and punctual; for I dare not act otherwise, least after all my services I be paid with an accusation of acting arbitrarily.”Footnote 60 Although his hesitation annoyed Myngs, who returned to England with nothing good to say of Jamaica's hapless commander, Doyley had been wise to avoid a decision. After a long (and, Myngs complained, destructive) delay, the Admiralty judged only one of Myngs's contested seizures a legal prize. Doyley, had he acted, could have been held responsible.
Managing the merchants as best he could, Doyley observed yet again that the colonial leader “at that distance cannot speake for himselfe,” a problem particularly if his policies affected London merchants with the power and access to oppose him effectively. By the end of his tenure, he described how “knowing my Authority such as would hardly bear me out against an United body of Richmen was forced the omitting the putting in Execution that Law which had proved of exceeding benefit to the Place.”Footnote 61 Trained in the law as he was, Doyley appreciated the dangers that “an United body of Richmen” posed.
His vulnerability caused Doyley to curtail his activities, hesitant to act decisively on the most controversial matters “if I bee not owned by some authority.” As he explained, “I am only a Patient heere, baited almost to death for not actinge. But am resolved to venture rather the fury of the Populary, then to act without Power, beeing very well acquainted wth ye difficulty I may say impossibility, for a single person to get an Act of indempnity, for medlinge wthout Authoritie.”Footnote 62
He returned to the theme of the fate of the overreaching soldier after peace was concluded: “And I very well knowe, that souldiers if they behave them selves much better then ours have done for those Eleaven yeares last past, shall in times of Peace be looke upon in ye worst Sence, and I can truly say though I am cautious yet I am neither affrayd, not sorry for it, I shall however adventure by any meanes excepting taking away Life, to use my endevour to keepe ye publike peace.”Footnote 63 When he wrote these words, although he had no way to know it, a king sat on the throne, posing a new set of challenges to Cromwell's forces in Jamaica.
Restoration, Authorization, and Indemnity
After struggling under the disability that came with his lack of authorization for years, Doyley found at the Restoration that his failure to receive any previous commission served him well. In presenting himself to the royal government he claimed that he had always acted in the king's interest. He accepted the preeminent position in Jamaica out of a sense of personal responsibility for the men consigned there, men whom he recast as Charles's much abused subjects (rather than as representatives of the protector).Footnote 64 The lack of authorization that had been a source of insecurity became a point of pride, as Doyley repositioned himself as a dutiful royal servant. The moment he learned of the Restoration—long before he received any direct communication, much less a commission from the new government—he switched to describing himself as “comander in chiefe of his Maiesties forces there att Jamaica.”Footnote 65 At the same time, based on informal news of monarchy's return, he made everyone swear an oath to Charles II, in which they promised “to behave ourselves as true and loyall subiects to his most sacred Maiesty and thankfull servants for this soe great a favour and Mercy.”Footnote 66 The flexibility (even opportunism) displayed over the preceding years came into play with his quick embrace of a royal resolution to the Revolution. The work of revising his history in accordance with this new image was not exclusive to Doyley. Many people who had acceded—some with alacrity—to the revolutionary changes of the previous decades recast themselves as having longed for the Restoration.Footnote 67 He eagerly turned to the newly crowned king, asking to be welcomed into the normal order as his subject and representative.
As soon as he knew of the king's return, Doyley sought out a prospective patron to intervene with the monarch. For this time-honored approach, he chose his wife's kinsman, Sir Edward Nicholas, one of Charles's secretaries; did he know as he wrote that Nicholas was one of the more vindictive Restoration officials?Footnote 68 Doyley penned an account of the Jamaica campaign that rewrote its history to appeal to royalists’ sympathies. We are, he described,
the Remaines of a far greater number, most Gentlemen of good families, whom ye Jealousy of the later General Cromwell and hatred for not complyinge wth him in betrayinge his Trust breakinge that oath wee had solemnly sworne in ye presence of ye most high God, and not takinge other engagements contradictory hath in a manner banished hither, of whom though doubtles he intended an utter destruction God hath yet preserved a command by admirable providence against ye constant and vigorous whome a voluntarie not compelled obedience is rightly due.Footnote 69
With this declaration, Doyley did much to author the myth that the design participants had all been royalists, exiled by Cromwell in the hopes of killing them or at least ridding himself of them. In the uncertainty of the early Restoration, Doyley laid to rest any fears that the king may have had that the remnant of Cromwell's army on Jamaica represented a base of opposition, as Doyley assured the king that they applauded his return. His gambit relied on the hope that the king would find it convenient to believe this revision. Since the purpose of the Act of Oblivion forgiving all but the regicides was to encompass as many of the revolution's supporters in the Restoration settlement as possible, Doyley even from the distant vantage point of Jamaica correctly interpreted the politics of the moment. No one promulgating this myth at the time or the many who have repeated it since have thought fit to explain why Cromwell would bestow a mighty fleet on his enemies.Footnote 70
Not wanting to rely entirely on his revisionist self-presentation, Doyley went on to admit that everyone in Jamaica ought to beg the king's pardon:
I could say much of my selfe and others and of our sufferings upon this account, but that I intend not to excuse our past Error (wch all ingenious men must at least acknowledge) But rather by our future Loyalty and service make it appeare wee Judge our selves too faulty and therefore must for ever magnifie and gratefully acknowledge his Majesties transcendent favour in his gracious pardon and promise of our Arreares, in which though wee have no cause to doubt but that wee are included, Yet an assurance thereof, under your Honor hand would infinitely comfort and confirme us.Footnote 71
With a mixture of apology, promises of future good behavior, and cagey intimations that the recent pardon and promise of arrears was unquestionably intended to apply to them as well as to those stationed closer to home, Doyley touched every controversial point in one convoluted sentence. The ploy, which so perfectly fit the Restoration project of exploiting revolutionary acquisitions while obscuring their origins, worked.
Doyley, aware that his role in Jamaica made him legally vulnerable, nevertheless waited to request indemnity until two years after returning home. He petitioned Charles II for protection from law suits, possibly prompted by the fact that the officers and crew of the Diamond demanded compensation for losses related to a contested prize seizure. Errors and omissions in the relevant documents make the somewhat confused case difficult to evaluate. The Diamond, having returned to Jamaica under Captain Richard Whiting and apparently with orders from James, the Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, to enforce the Navigation law against ships found illegally trading, seized the Martin Van Rosen, a Dutch slave ship in Cagway Harbor in February 1661/2.Footnote 72 Doyley and the island's council had previously granted the ship permission to trade for monies “sufficient for provisions and repairs by the sale of negroes.”Footnote 73 Such orders might be genuine, issued in response to a dire need, but they often covered contraband trade—a common practice wherever commerce was limited throughout the Caribbean. According to a later—and in some obvious respects inaccurate—statement by the Diamond’s people, Doyley ordered a “recovery and retrieval,” taking the ship back and permitting at least part of the cargo of African slaves to be sold. The events occurred, as the “Narrative” that was apparently associated with the petition explained, after Doyley had been commissioned the king's governor and knew that Lord Windsor would replace him.Footnote 74
“A partiqular Narrative off ye buying, & forfeiture of ye ship of Negroes—Jamaica,” an undated and unsigned document, gives an unflattering portrait of Doyley as flagrantly disregarding legal niceties. The image it conveys is hard to square with Doyley's legal training, his repeated attention to such details in his many letters, or the king's apparent support of him. It depicts Doyley as running roughshod over the advice of his Council (which it alleged had opposed the sale of the slaves); it also asserts that he denied the Diamond’s authority to seized foreign traders in his jurisdiction. If Doyley said that the Diamond was protected by the council order granting the Marin van Rosen an exemption, then this latter allegation might misrepresent or misunderstand his opposition. The “Narrative” quotes intemperate speeches that Doyley purportedly made to his council (without explaining how this information would be known to the unidentified author) and claims that he personally bought the slaves for resale but left them on the ship until the Diamond’s untimely arrival. Many aspects of this anonymous and undated account being problematic, its oddest assertion must be the claim that a Spanish vessel—the first to sail into Cagway Harbor since England seized the island from Spain seven years before—appeared just in time to buy most of the slaves. Less implausible is the allegation that Doyley sold slaves to leading planter and army officer Major John Cope (characterized for good measure as “a Quaker and an ancient rebell”), a man who may have been Doyley's relation.Footnote 75 Some conflict occurred in the Council around this time, sufficiently dismaying to one of its members that “Captne [John] Harrington delivered a Paper to be satisfied of some past proceeding of our Governour.” The governor promised to return an answer, but in the meanwhile spent “some time with the Councill endeavor[ing] to clear the severall objections.”Footnote 76 Harrington made his complaint just before the Diamond sailed.Footnote 77 Whether Harrington objected to some aspect of this incident or some other controversial action altogether cannot be known. Clearly the author of the “Narrative” (whoever he might be) wanted to undermine Doyley's reputation by presenting him as disloyal and corrupt. Although he was ordered to satisfy the men's claims, Doyley also succeeded in his request for indemnity, suggesting that Charles did not adopt the view of Doyley that the “Narrative” promoted.
Doyley's 1664 petition to the king, whether or not it was prompted by the Diamond case, gave Doyley another opportunity to present his personal history.Footnote 78 Having, in an ironic twist, found it helpful that he failed to secure his frequently sought endorsement from the revolutionary regime, Doyley exploited his lack of official position under the king's enemies. He asked that the king indemnify him from legal challenges arising from actions taken during his years in command, prior to his receipt of the king's commission. Using language typical of royal petitioners, Doyley invoked the “late evill tymes and his knowne principles of Loyalty.” He noted that as a younger son he had been “constrayned” to seek his fortune through his own industry. He emphasized that he never received any preferment once he was in Jamaica but was instead elected to the office. He alleged that he was overlooked because Cromwell “makeing discovery of his forward inclinations to your Maties Service would never trust the Government of that place to his Handes.” He went on to explain why he acted under the circumstances: “obliged by the common maximes of nature and rules of prudence [he] was compelled upon such irresistible emergencies and Accidents of tymes to continue the exercise of authority without the formality of a Commission, and in doeing thereof to procd to some acts of Justice against some mutinous and Seditious persons and other offenders.” Now he faced the danger of being held liable “and obnoxious to many.” To protect him from these “mischiefes and disturbances,” he needed the shelter of his Majesty's “gracious protection.”Footnote 79 He asked for a pardon to cover all he did or caused to be done from the time he began acting as governor and commander in chief until the king officially appointed him to those offices in June 1661. Doyley deftly used his inability to gain a commission that he desperately wanted in order to present himself as a closet royalist and a continual champion of the king's cause.
Conclusion
Edward Doyley's tribulations arose from the coalescence of various forces. First, he rose to lead Jamaica at a moment on the verge of repeated regime changes. The protectorate that dispatched the Western Design force collapsed within a few years, prompting a period of upheaval that ended with the restoration of monarchy. Those shifts at the center distracted the government from the problems of Jamaica. Second, Jamaica proved an unexpected drain on state resources that even the lord protector who initiated the campaign was unprepared to cover. Cromwell thought that a triumphal sweep through the wealthy Spanish Americas would bring money into English coffers, but instead funds flowed out and demands for spending mounted. These issues—regime change and expense—do not entirely explain Doyley's problems, however. Underlying it all was the fact that Cromwell's imperial reach had exceeded his state's grasp. The English government's capacity had increased enormously in recent decades—driven by civil wars, wars in Ireland and Scotland, and naval war with the Dutch—but it had yet to develop the institutional structures necessary for managing empire at a distance.
The underlying problem—beyond the fact that no recognized and stable central authority legitimized his power—lay in the absence of a more fully formed and functional state. The project Cromwell undertook in Jamaica demanded a bureaucracy designated to manage distant colonial affairs. Doyley longed for a stable point within the state to which he could turn with confidence that his letters would be received, read, and addressed. Despite vast growth in the capacity of the state over the previous decades, England still lacked regular mechanisms for managing colonies. First parliament and then the protector appointed committees, which were not only new and changeable, but also given to issuing reports. They lacked power to enact their recommendations. Later and partially in response to the needs of Jamaica, mechanisms and structures would be put into place. Appropriately, one of the first bureaucrats to oversee this work later in the century would be the nephew and ward of Doyley's correspondent Thomas Povey. Doyley desperately desired the services that William Blathwayt would later provide. Blathwayt would be instrumental in realizing the dream of a functional imperial apparatus that his uncle and Doyley shared.
Jamaica's early history might seem a case more appropriate to a discussion of state building than of state formation. Charles Tilly noted the importance of warfare in building up the state's capacity.Footnote 80 In Tilly's analysis, Jamaica represents the demands warfare places on the state; yet Jamaica also reveals that, when a ruler's war-making requires an expansion of government, that expansion can be a slow and labored process. Doyley's predicament arose from an unresponsive state, in which political fluctuation and over-extension left Jamaica unattended. Jamaica's circumstances were further complicated by distance, slow communication, and a high rate of attrition among the expedition's leaders, leaving Doyley to lead without authorization even as he lacked the necessary support that a more responsive state might have provided. Jamaica's situation was thus more tenuous than that of Ireland, where the state remained vigorously engaged.Footnote 81 Given that Jamaica was also in a long transition into colonization, Doyley found himself facing some of the classic dilemmas associated with state formation as well: the need to balance local and central expectations and demands. His unfortunate position involved representing a state that did not fully own or support him while trying to manage a refractory army, a “robustious” navy, and a litigious merchant population. He had, in a sense, the worse of both state building—war making without the necessary expansion of state resources—and state formation—negotiation between the locale and the state—exacerbated by the fact that his locale was a newly conquered island far from home.
State formation as a negotiated process between center and periphery assumes gradual exchange, and a colony (like an English county or town) able to manage its own day-to-day survival without the immediate aid of the central government. Jamaica came into the English orbit through a markedly different route, and it demanded more of the center. Although the state had yet to build up sufficient capacity to manage the affairs of Jamaica, the pressure Doyley and others place on it encouraged it to do so. Rather than a process of negotiated expansion, early Jamaica represented a case of unmet needs and unanswered letters crying out for attention.
