_
Sir Edmond Calvert studied the long scrolled document in the light of
the swinging ship's lantern, stroking his goatee as he read and reread
the bold ink script. "Liberty" or "death."
A memorable choice of words, though one he never recalled hearing
before. Would the actions of these planters be as heroic as their
rhetoric?
Or could the part about a "noble death" be an oblique reference to King
Charles' bravery before the executioner's axe? It had impressed all
England. But how could they have heard? The king had only just been
beheaded, and word could scarcely have yet reached the Barbados
Assembly.
One thing was clear, however: Barbados' Assembly had rebelled against
the Commonwealth. It had rejected the authority of Parliament and
chosen to defy the Navigation Act passed by that body to assert
England's economic control of its settlements in the New World.
Wearily he settled the paper onto the table and leaned back in his sea
chair, passing his eyes around the timbered cabin and letting his gaze
linger on a long painting of Oliver Cromwell hanging near the door. The
visage had the intensity of a Puritan zealot, with pasty cheeks, heavy-
lidded eyes, and the short, ragged hair that had earned him and all his
followers the sobriquet of "Roundhead." He had finally executed the
king. England belonged to Cromwell and his Puritan Parliament now,
every square inch.
Calvert glanced back at the Declaration, now lying next to his sheathed
sword and its wide shoulder strap. England might belong to Parliament,
he told himself, but the Americas clearly didn't. The tone of the
document revealed a stripe of independence, of courage he could not
help admiring.
And now, to appease Cromwell, I've got to bludgeon them into
submission. May God help me.
The admiral of the fleet was a short stocky Lincolnshire man, who wore
the obligatory ensemble of England's new Puritan leadership: black
doublet with wide white collar and cuffs. A trim line of gray hair
circled his bald pate, and his face was dominated by a heavy nose too
large for his sagging cheeks. In the dull light of the lantern his thin
goatee and moustache looked like a growth of pale foliage against his
sallow skin.
His father, George Calvert, had once held office in the Court of King
Charles, and for that reason he had himself, many years past, received
a knighthood from the monarch. But Edmond Calvert had gone to sea
early, had risen through merit, and had never supported the king. In
fact, he was one of the few captains who kept his ship loyal to
Parliament when the navy defected to the side of Charles during the
war. In recognition of that, he had been given charge of transporting
Cromwell's army to Ireland, to suppress the rebellion there, and he
bore the unmistakably resigned air of a man weary of wars and fighting.
The voyage out had been hard, for him as well as for the men, and
already he longed to have its business over and done, to settle down to
a table covered not with contentious proclamations but spilling over
with rabbit pies, blood puddings, honeyed ham. Alas, it would not soon
be. Not from the sound of the island's Declaration.
He lowered the wick of the lantern, darkening the shadows across the
center table of the Great Cabin, and carefully rolled the document back
into a scroll. Then he rose and moved toward the shattered windows of
the stern to catch a last look at the island before it was mantled in
the quick tropical night.
As he strode across the wide flooring-planks of the cabin, he carefully
avoided the remaining shards of glass, mingled with gilded splinters,
that lay strewn near the windows. Since all able-bodied seamen were
still needed to man the pumps and patch the hull along the waterline,
he had prudently postponed the repairs of his own quarters. As he
looked about the cabin, he reminded himself how lucky he was to have
been on the quarterdeck, away from the flying splinters, when the
shelling began.
The first volley from the Point had scored five direct hits along the
portside. One English seaman had been killed outright, and eleven
others wounded, some gravely. With time only for one answering round,
he had exposed the Rainbowe' s stern to a second volley from the
breastwork on the Point while bringing her about and making for open
sea. That had slammed into the ship's gilded poop, destroying the
ornate quartergallery just aft of the Great Cabin, together with all
the leaded glass windows.
The island was considerably better prepared than he had been led to
believe. Lord Cromwell, he found himself thinking, will not be pleased
when he learns of the wanton damage Barbados' rebels have wreaked on
the finest frigate in the English navy.
Through the ragged opening he could look out unobstructed onto the
rising swells of the Caribbean. A storm was brewing out to sea, to add
to the political storm already underway on the island. High, dark
thunderheads had risen up in the south, and already spatters of heavy
tropical rain ricocheted off the shattered railing of the
quartergallery. The very air seemed to almost drip with wetness. He
inhaled deeply and asked himself again why he had agreed to come out to
the Americas. He might just as easily have retired his command and
stayed home. He had earned the rest.
Edmond Calvert had served the Puritan side in the war faithfully for a
decade, and over the past five years he had been at the forefront of
the fighting. In reward he had been granted the command of the boldest
English military campaign in history.
Oliver Cromwell was nothing if not audacious. Having executed the king,
he had now conceived a grand assault on Spain's lands in the New World.
The plan was still secret, code named Western Design: its purpose,
nothing less than the seizure of Spain's richest holdings. Barbados,
with its new sugar wealth, would someday be merely a small part of
England's new empire in the Americas, envisioned by Cromwell as
reaching from Massachusetts to Mexico to Brazil.
But first, there was the small matter of bringing the existing
settlements in the Americas back into step.
He had never been sure he had the stomach for the task. Now, after
realizing the difficulties that lay ahead in subduing this one small
island, he questioned whether he wanted any part of it.
He swabbed his brow, clammy in the sweltering heat, and wondered if all
the islands of the Caribbees were like this.
Doubtless as bad or worse, he told himself in dismay. He had seen and
experienced Barbados only for a day, but already he had concluded it
was a place of fierce sun and half-tamed forest, hot and miserable, its
very air almost a smoky green. There was little sign among the
thatched-roof shacks along the shore of its reputed great wealth. Could
it be the stories at home were gross exaggerations? Or deliberate lies?
It scarcely mattered now. Barbados had to be reclaimed. There was no
option.
On his left lay the green hills of the island, all but obscured in
sudden sheets of rain; on his right the line of English warships he had
ordered positioned about the perimeter of Carlisle Bay, cannons run out
and primed. He had stationed them there, in readiness, at mid-morning.
Then, the siege set, he had summoned his vice admiral and the other
commanders to a council on board the _Rainbowe_.
They had dined on the last remaining capons and drawn up the terms of
surrender, to be sent ashore by longboat. The island was imprisoned and
isolated. Its capitulation, they told each other, was merely a matter
of time.
Except that time would work against the fleet too, he reminded himself.
Half those aboard were landsmen, a thrown-together infantry assembled
by Cromwell, and the spaces below decks were already fetid, packed with
men too sick and scurvy-ravished to stir. Every day more bodies were
consigned to the sea. If the island could not be made to surrender in a
fortnight, two at most, he might have few men left with the strength to
fight.
The Declaration told him he could forget his dream of an easy
surrender. Yet he didn't have the men and arms for a frontal assault.
He knew it and he wondered how long it would take the islanders to
suspect it as well. He had brought a force of some eight hundred men,
but now half of them were sick and useless, while the island had a free
population of over twenty thousand and a militia said to be nearly
seven thousand. Worst of all, they appeared to have first-rate gunners
manning their shore emplacements.
Barbados could not be recovered by strength of arms; it could only be
frightened, or lured, back into the hands of England.
A knock sounded on the cabin door and he gruffly called permission to
enter. Moments later the shadow moving toward him became James Powlett,
the young vice admiral of the fleet.
"Your servant, sir." Powlett removed his hat and brushed at its white
plume as he strode gingerly through the cabin, picking his way around
the glass. He was tall, clean-shaven, with hard blue eyes that never
quite concealed his ambition. From the start he had made it no secret
he judged Edmond Calvert too indecisive for the job at hand. "Has the
reply come yet? I heard the rebels sent out a longboat with a packet."
"Aye, they've replied. But I warrant the tune'll not be to your
liking." Calvert gestured toward the Declaration on the table as he
studied Powlett, concerned how long he could restrain the vice
admiral's hot blood with cool reason. "They've chosen to defy the rule
of Parliament. And they've denounced the Navigation Acts, claiming they
refuse to halt their trade with the Dutchmen."
"Then we've no course but to show them how royalist rebels are
treated."
"Is that what you'd have us do?" The admiral turned back to the window
and stared at the rain-swept bay. "And how many men do you think we
could set ashore now? Three hundred? Four? That's all we'd be able to
muster who're still strong enough to lift a musket or a pike. Whilst
the island's militia lies in wait for us--God knows how many thousand-
men used to this miserable heat and likely plump as partridges."
"Whatever we can muster, I'll warrant it'll be enough. They're raw
planters, not soldiers." Powlett glanced at the Declaration, and
decided to read it later. There were two kinds of men in the world, he
often asserted: those who dallied and discussed, and those who acted.
"We should ready an operation for tomorrow morning and have done with
letters and declarations. All we need do is stage a diversion here in
the harbor, then set men ashore up the coast at Jamestown."
Calvert tugged at his wisp of a goatee and wondered momentarily how he
could most diplomatically advise Powlett he was a hotheaded fool. Then
he decided to dispense with diplomacy. "Those 'raw planters,' as you'd
have them, managed to hole this flagship five times from their battery
up there on the Point. So what makes you think they couldn't just as
readily turn back an invasion? And if they did, what then, sir?" He
watched Powlett's face harden, but he continued. "I can imagine no
quicker way to jeopardize what little advantage we might have. And that
advantage, sir, is they still don't know how weak we really are. We've
got to conserve our strength, and try to organize our support on the
island. We need to make contact with any here who'd support Parliament,
and have them join with us when we land."
The question now, he thought ruefully, is how much support we actually
have.
Sir Edmond Calvert, never having been convinced that beheading the
lawful sovereign of England would be prudent, had opposed it from the
start. Events appeared to have shown him right. Alive, King Charles had
been reviled the length of the land for his arrogance and his Papist
sympathies; dead, you'd think him a sovereign the equal of Elizabeth,
given the way people suddenly began eulogizing him, that very same day.
His execution had made him a martyr. And if royalist sentiment was
swelling in England, in the wake of his death, how much more might
there be here in the Americas--now flooded with refugees loyal to the
monarchy.
He watched his second-in-command slowly redden with anger as he
continued, "I tell you we can only reclaim this island if it's divided.
Our job now, sir, is to reason first, and only then resort to arms. We
have to make them see their interests lie with the future England can
provide."
"Well, sir, if you'd choose that tack, then you can set it to the test
quick enough. What about those men who've been swimming out to the
ships all day, offering to be part of the invasion? I'd call that
support."
"Aye, it gave me hope at first. Then I talked with some of them, and
learned they're mostly indentured servants. They claimed a rumor's
going round the island that we're here to set them free. For all they
care, we could as well be Spaniards." Calvert sighed. "I asked some of
them about defenses on the island, and learned nothing I didn't already
know. So I sent them back ashore, one and all. What we need now are
fresh provisions, not more mouths to feed."
That's the biggest question, he told himself again. Who'll be starved
out first: a blockaded island or a fleet of ships with scarcely enough
victuals to last out another fortnight?
He turned back to the table, reached for the Declaration, and shoved it
toward Powlett. "I think you'd do well to peruse this, sir. There's a
tone of defiance here that's unsettling. I don't know if it's
genuine, or a bluff. It's the unknowns that trouble me now, the damned
uncertainties."
Those uncertainties, he found himself thinking, went far beyond
Barbados. According to the first steps of Cromwell's plan, after this
centerpiece of the Caribbees had been subdued, part of the fleet was to
continue on to any other of the settlements that remained defiant. But
Cromwell's advisors felt that would probably not be necessary: after
Barbados acknowledged the Commonwealth, the rest of the colonies were
expected to follow suit. Then the Western Design could be set into
motion, with Calvert's shipboard infantry augmented by fighting men
from the island.
The trouble with Cromwell's scheme, he now realized, was that it worked
both ways. If Barbados succeeded in defying England's new government,
then Virginia, Bermuda, the other
islands of the Caribbees, all might also disown the Commonwealth. There
even was talk they might try attaching themselves to Holland. It would
be the end of English taxes and trade anywhere in the Americas except
for that scrawny settlement of fanatic Puritans up in "New England."
There would surely be no hope for the Western Design to succeed, and
Edmond Calvert would be remembered as the man who lost England's
richest lands.
While Powlett studied the Declaration, skepticism growing on his face,
Calvert turned back to the window and stared at the rainswept harbor,
where a line of Dutch merchant fluyts bobbed at anchor.
Good God. That's the answer. Maybe we can't land infantry, but we most
assuredly can go in and take those damned Dutchmen and their cargo.
They're bound to have provisions aboard. It's our best hope for keeping
up the blockade. And taking them will serve another purpose, too. It'll
send the Commonwealth's message loud and clear to all Holland's
merchants: that trade in English settlements is for England.
"There's presumption here, sir, that begs for a reply." The vice
admiral tossed the Declaration back onto the table. "I still say the
fittest answer is with powder and shot. There's been enough paper sent
ashore already."
"I'm still in command, Mr. Powlett, whether you choose to approve or
no. There'll be no more ordnance used till we're sure there's no other
way." He walked back to the table and slumped wearily into his chair.
Already waiting in front of him were paper and an inkwell. What, he
asked himself, would he write? How could he describe the bright new
future that awaited a full partnership between England and these
American settlers?
The colonies in the Caribbees and along the Atlantic seaboard were
merely England's first foothold in the New World. Someday they would be
part of a vast empire stretching the length of the Americas. The
holdings of Spain would fall soon, and after that England would likely
declare war against Holland and take over Dutch holdings as well. There
was already talk of that in London. The future was rich and wide, and
English.
I just have to make them see the future. A future of partnership, not
defiance; one that'll bring wealth to England and prosperity to her
colonies. They have to be made to understand that this Declaration is
the first and last that'll ever be penned in the Americas.
He turned and dismissed Powlett with a stiff nod. Then he listened a
moment longer to the drumbeat of tropical rain on the deck above. It
sounded wild now, uncontrollable, just like the spirits of nature he
sensed lurking above the brooding land mass off his portside bow. Would
this dark, lush island of the Caribbees harken to reason? Or would it
foolishly choose to destroy itself with war?
He sighed in frustration, inked his quill, and leaned forward to write.
The Assembly Room was crowded to capacity, its dense, humid air rank
with sweating bodies. Above the roar of wind and rain against the
shutters, arguments sounded the length of the long oak table. Seated
down one side and around the end were the twenty-two members of the
Assembly; across from them were the twelve members of the Council. At
the back of the room milled others who had been invited. Winston was
there, along with Anthony Walrond and Katherine.
Dalby Bedford was standing by the window, holding open the shutters and
squinting through the rain-swept dusk as he studied the mast lights of
the warships encircling the harbor. He wiped the rain and sweat from
his face with a large handkerchief, then turned and walked back to his
chair at the head of the table.
"Enough, gentlemen. We've all heard it already." He waved his hand for
quiet. "Let me try and sum up. Our Declaration has been delivered,
which means we've formally rejected all their terms as they now stand.
The question before us tonight is whether we try and see if there's
room for negotiation, or whether we refuse a compromise and finish
preparing to meet an invasion."
Katherine listened to the words and sensed his uneasiness. She knew
what his real worries were: how long would it be before the awkward
peace between the Council and the Assembly fell apart in squabbling?
What terms could the admiral of the fleet offer that would split the
island, giving enough of the planters an advantage that they would
betray the rest? Who would be the first to waver?
The opening terms sent ashore by Edmond Calvert had sent a shock wave
across Barbados--its standing Assembly and Council were both to be
dissolved immediately. In future, England's New World settlements would
be governed through Parliament. A powerless new Council would be
appointed from London, and the Assembly, equally impotent, would
eventually be filled by new elections scheduled at the pleasure of
Commons. Added to that were the new "Navigation Acts," bringing high
English prices and shipping fees. The suddenly ripening plum of the
Americas would be plucked.
The terms, signed by the admiral, had been ferried ashore by longboat
and delivered directly to Dalby Bedford at the compound. Members of
Council and the Assembly had already been gathering in the Assembly
Room by then, anxious to hear the conditions read.
Katherine remembered the worry on the governor's face as he had
finished dressing to go down and read the fleet's ultimatum. "The first
thing I have to do is get them to agree on something, anything. If they
start quarreling again, we're good as lost."
"Then try to avoid the question of recognizing Parliament." She'd
watched him search for his plumed hat and rose to fetch it from the
corner stand by the door. "I suspect most of the Council would be
tempted to give in and do that, on the idea it might postpone a fight
and give them time to finish this year's sugar while they appeal to
Parliament to soften the terms."
"Aye. The sugar's all they care about. That's why I think we best go at
it backwards." He'd reached for his cane and tested it thoughtfully
against the wide boards of the floor. "I think I'll start by raising
that business in the Navigation Acts about not letting the Dutchmen
trade. Not a man in the room'll agree to that, not even the Council.
I'll have them vote to reject those, then see if that'll bring us
enough unity to proceed to the next step."
Just as he had predicted, the Council and the Assembly had voted
unanimously to defy the new Navigation Acts. They could never endure an
English stranglehold on island commerce, regardless of the other
consequences.
They had immediately drafted their own reply to the admiral's terms, a
Declaration denouncing them and refusing to comply, and sent it back to
the fleet. The question left unresolved, to await this evening's
session, was whether they should agree to negotiate with Parliament at
all. . . .
"I say there's nothing to negotiate." Benjamin Briggs rose to his feet
and faced the candle-lit room. "If we agreed to talk, it'd be the same
as recognizing Parliament."
"Are you saying the Council's decided to oppose recognition?" Bedford
examined him in surprise. Perhaps the business about dissolving the
Council had finally made an impression after all.
"Unalterably, sir. We've talked it over, and we're beginning to think
this idea of independence that came up a while back could have some
merit." Briggs gazed around the room. "I'll grant I was of a different
mind before we heard the terms. But now I say we stand firm. If we bow
to the rule of Parliament, where we've got no representation, we'll
never be rid of these Navigation Acts. And that's the end of free
trade, free markets. We'd as well be slaves ourselves." He pushed back
his black hat, revealing a leathery brow furrowed by the strain. "I'll
wager Virginia will stand with us when their time comes. But the
fleet's been sent here first, so for now we'll have to carry the burden
of resistance ourselves, and so be it. Speaking for the Council, you
know we've already ordered our militia out. They're to stay mustered
till this thing's finished. We'd have the rest of the island's militia
called up now, those men controlled by the Assembly, and have them on
the beaches by daybreak."
Dalby Bedford looked down the line of faces and knew he had gained the
first step. The Council was with him. But now, he wondered suddenly,
what about the Assembly?
As an interim measure, eight hundred men had already been posted along
the western and southern shorelines, militia from the regiments
commanded by the members of the Council. The small freeholders had not
yet mustered. Many of the men with five-acre plots were already voicing
reservations about entering an all-out war with England, especially
when its main purpose seemed to be preserving free markets for the big
plantation owners' sugar.
"I think it's time we talked about cavalry." Nicholas Whittington
joined in, wiping his beard as he lifted his voice above the din of
wind and rain. "I'd say there's apt to be at least four hundred horses
on the island that we could pull together." He glared pointedly across
the table at the Assemblymen, brown-faced men in tattered waistcoats.
"That means every horse, in every parish. We have to make a show of
force if we're to negotiate from strength. I propose we make an
accounting, parish by parish. Any man with a nag who fails to bring it
up for muster should be hanged for treason."
As she watched the members of the Assembly start to mumble uneasily,
Katherine realized that a horse represented a sizable investment for
most small freeholders. How much use would they be anyway, she found
herself wondering. The horses on the island were mostly for pulling
plows. And the "cavalry" riding them would be farmers with rusty pikes.