Reporting on events at Whitehall palace on 6 April 1659, weekly newspaper The Publick Intelligencer depicted a harmonious outcome to a potentially dangerous political confrontation. That evening, ‘in one of the publick rooms of audience’, Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood and others from the general council of the officers of the armies of England, Scotland and Ireland had presented a petition to Protector Richard Cromwell. The Humble Representation began by stressing the patience and forbearance of forces constituted ‘for the just Rights and Liberties, Civil and Religious of our Countreys, and not as a Mercenary Army’, but went on to state dramatically ‘the crying necessities of the Armies for want of pay’ and their perception of ‘the approaching danger’ that all they had fought for since 1642 ‘was in danger to be lost’. ‘The good old Cause against Tyranny and intolerable oppression’ to which they had signed up, which God had endorsed in their victories in the field, and for which there had ‘been such a plentiful powring forth of Treasure, Prayers, Tears, and Blood’ had been publicly mocked. Disaffected cavaliers were assembling; they and the press were on the warpath. ‘The famous Actions of the Parliament, His late Highness, of blessed memory [i.e. Oliver Cromwell], and the Army’ were ‘vilified and evil spoken of’. The beleaguered officers therefore sought from Richard and his Parliament then sitting both arrears of pay and indemnity for their past actions.

Notwithstanding the tension, according to The Publick Intelligencer, Protector Richard – who happened to be Fleetwood’s brother-in-law – received the address ‘with a very great affection and respect to the whole body of Officers which presented it, using many expressions of tenderness and endearment to them, as the old friends of his renowned Father, and the faithful servants of the Publick Interest of these Nations’. He expressed solidarity with them, and indeed ‘so great a satisfaction appeared on either side at this meeting, as that it speaks nothing less then a vigorous asserting of the present Government, to the terror and confusion of the common enemy’. Thus the newspaper offered the reassurance that, no doubt, a constituency of its readers desperately wanted.

Up to that point a fragile political alliance had held somewhat against the odds. Protector Oliver Cromwell had died on 3 September 1658, having recently declined an offer of the crown but also having, in traditional mode, named his eldest surviving son as his successor. The heir’s character and experience were not promising. Although he had done brief military service in 1647-8, he could not begin to match the tactical brilliance, godly dedication, meritocratic outlook and appreciation of his men that had endeared his father to the army. Unlike his brother Henry Cromwell, who earned respect through his competence in governing Ireland, Richard had made next to no impression as an MP in his first Parliament (1654) and little in his second (1656-7). Rare glimpses of his political stance revealed him as more conservative than Oliver, inclining towards Presbyterians antipathetic to the army. He was known to the public principally for his love of hunting and horse-racing; his laziness and self-indulgence exasperated his father. In August 1657 a serious injury sustained in a hunting accident removed him for months from the political stage.

Yet the succession went smoothly, all things considered. Government officials like John Thurloe were quick off the mark with proclaiming Protector Richard and with orchestrating public endorsement. Richard stirred himself to the challenging tasks of maintaining good relations with the officers and finding the funds for paying their arrears. Members of the council of state including Henry Lawrence, Nathaniel Fiennes, Sir Charles Wolseley, Philip Jones and the future naval commander Edward Montagu gave him solid backing.

But financial contingencies necessitated a general election. From the opening of Richard’s Parliament on 27 January 1659, there were contentious issues to negotiate. Through February and March, civilian republicans led by Sir Arthur Hesilrige tried to block the bill for the recognition of the new protector, and it was finally passed subject to a closer definition of his powers. There were heated debates over the existence and composition of the second chamber, set up in late 1657 to replace the abolished House of Lords, and over the inclusion of MPs for Scottish and Irish constituencies, although both were eventually accepted by majority vote. There were objections to the high number of army officers sitting in the Commons. Richard still hung on.

After its up-beat account of 6 April, for the next month The Publick Intelligencer gave little attention to domestic affairs under the weight of foreign news, although it reprinted the officers’ petition, rectifying a printer’s error. It did, however, note an officers’ prayer meeting (13 April); a petition to Parliament by ‘certain persons commonly called Quakers’ and the response – pleasing to conservatives in the House but not the army – ordering them to return to ‘their respective Habitations, and there apply themselves to their Callings, and submit themselves to the Laws of the Nation, and the Magistracy they live under’ (16 April); and a petition from the trained bands (a volunteer force) of London highlighting ‘Designs to the destruction of your Highness [Richard] both Houses of Parliament, the faithful Army, and good people of the three Nations’ (20 April). It then printed without comment Richard’s proclamations dissolving Parliament on 22 April and commanding Catholics and cavaliers to leave London within three days (23 April).

This last appeared in the 25 April-2 May issue. By the following week Richard’s government had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. Absent from the newspaper was an account of another confrontation at Whitehall on 21 April. Responding to an order from Richard that the council of officers be dissolved and attempts by MPs to reorganise the army, Fleetwood and his colleagues had turned out in force demanding the dissolution. Richard had had no option but to capitulate. Without mentioning the protector, The Publick Intelligencer’s 2-9 May issue reported an order from Fleetwood and the council of officers for the printing of their declaration seeking the return of the Long Parliament, terminated abruptly by Oliver and the army in 1653. As Richard remained in residence at Whitehall, afraid to move for fear of apprehension by his creditors, there was confusion over whether the protectorate had ended, but eventually, in mid-July, he vacated the palace with an assurance his debts would be paid. For the time being, the English republic had definitively returned. The next chapter can be followed here.

VL

Further reading

To his Highness Richard Lord Protector … the humble representation of the General Council of the Officers (1659)

The Publick Intelligencer, nos. 171-5 (April, May 1659)

Biographies or further biographies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Nathaniel Fiennes, Charles Fleetwood, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Henry Lawrence, Edward Montagu, John Thurloe and Sir Charles Wolseley are being prepared for publication by the Commons 1640-1660 project.

Late in September 1665, the Great Plague of London claimed its most famous victim. ‘I hear for certain this night’, wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘that Sir Martin Noell is this day dead of the plague in London, where he hath lain sick of it these eight days’ ( The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham, W. Matthews (Oxford, 1971), vi. 245). The name Martin Noell has long since slipped from the national memory, but by the time of the Restoration in 1660 he was the best known, certainly notorious, entrepreneur and financier in all of England.

Noell’s rise to fame and fortune epitomised the transformation that had occurred in English maritime commerce and colonial enterprises since the early 1600s. The younger son of a Stafford mercer, he used his elder brother’s business connections in London, and his own marriage to the daughter of a wealthy City draper, to break into the burgeoning trade with the colonies across the Atlantic. While never straying too far from his London counting-house, he had established himself by the late 1640s as one of the merchant-planters on Barbados, the island at the centre of England’s sugar boom. Noell’s rapid climb from provincial nobody to metropolitan venture-capitalist, though eye-catching, was not unusual among the so-called ‘new merchants’ – men from outside of London’s established mercantile elite, often from small-town backgrounds, who had come to dominate the transatlantic trade in sugar and other colonial merchandise.

The new merchants were well-insinuated with the radical faction in Parliament that executed Charles I in 1649 and established a republican state. With friends in high places, Noell won large government contracts for collecting a range of customs and sales taxes, from which he skimmed a healthy profit. Noell’s friend and business-partner Thomas Povey thought that he had ‘swollen into a much greater person by being a farmer [i.e. collector] of the customs and excise’ ( British Library, Add. ms 11411, f. 39v.). Duties on salt were probably Noell’s biggest domestic earner. As a tax-farmer on salt and an investor in salt-production, he made money from both ends of the industry. Oliver Cromwell’s son and heir Richard Cromwell was not exaggerating when he styled Noell ‘the great salt-master of England’ ( The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, 1655-9 ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society ser. 5, xxxi), 308.)

But Noell’s most marketable asset by the mid-1650s was his value to the house of Cromwell – Britain’s new ruling family. He used his financial resources to make substantial loans to Cromwell’s government to cover its day-to-day running costs and keep the wheels of state turning. In fact, it is likely that the Cromwellian regime depended more upon Noell for ready cash and credit than upon any other individual. Not only that, Noell acted as private money-lender to Protector Oliver himself. Noell’s status as Cromwell’s personal paymaster rendered him (in Povey’s words) ‘considerable everywhere…a person of the most spacious interest of any merchant or citizen [in England]’ (British Library, Add. ms 11411, ff. 41v, 65v.).

Noell’s money bought him political influence. He and Povey were closely involved in directing government policy on the Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados. And Noell played a leading part in organising and financing Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ of 1655 against the Spanish colony of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). One well-informed observer identified Noell as ‘he who suggested the design of the West Indies’ to Cromwell.

In the event, the Western Design was a fiasco – partly because profiteering by Noell and other contractors had deprived the expedition of vital supplies and equipment. Repulsed from Hispaniola with heavy losses, Cromwell’s troops took Jamaica as a consolation prize. Not that Noell was complaining. He had taken his usual cut regardless, and he was further rewarded with a grant from Cromwell of 20,000 acres on England’s new colony. The seizure of Jamaica would provide a massive boost to the English sugar-industry and to the slave trade that sustained it.

Noell’s plantation in Barbados was well-supplied with enslaved Africans to work the sugar-canes. But it was what he euphemistically termed his ‘Christian servants’ on the island, and the circumstances of their presence there, that landed him in trouble with his fellow MPs following his election for Stafford to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659. Noell was forced to defend himself against accusations in the House that he had violated English ‘liberties’ as a contractor for transporting royalist prisoners to indentured servitude on Barbados. The victims of his ‘most unchristian and barbarous usage’ alleged that they been ‘bought and sold…from one planter to another…as horses and beasts’ (Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), iv. 255-73). Noell admitted transporting prisoners to the island, but denied that he had effectively sold them into slavery or that they had been harshly treated. Indeed, he claimed that labour conditions for indentured servants on Barbados were better than those of the ‘common husbandman here’. The really hard work, the ‘grinding at the [sugar]-mills and attending at the furnaces or digging in the scorching island’, was mostly undertaken by African slaves, he insisted – and as he well knew, no one in the Commons cared about them.

Noel shrugged off his grilling in the House, and he would emerge from the downfall of the protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 similarly unscathed. Pepys was surprised in 1662 to hear that Noell had been knighted, but he conceded that the former Cromwellian was still ‘a very useful man’ (Pepys Diary ed. Latham, Matthews, iii. 190.) In 1663, Noell invested heavily in England’s foremost slave-trading venture, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, and he and Povey lobbied the crown hard during the early 1660s for the establishment of a royal-sponsored West Indian company ‘for the better regulating and improving of foreign plantations’(British Library, Egerton ms 2395, ff. 107-12, 270-2; Add. ms 22920, f. 22.). Noell’s debts at his death in 1665 amounted to over £30,000 – millions in today’s money – and included the sum of £1,747 he owed ‘on a contract’ for slaves (London Metropolitan Archives, CLA/002/01/002, f. 156v; CLA/002/02/01/0500.).

Through his loans and counsel to the Cromwellian regime, Noell did more than anyone of his day to draw the state into the hitherto largely private business of colonisation and trade in the Atlantic. Securing Britain’s base in the Caribbean would prove vital in the march to global empire and represents Cromwell’s, and Noell’s, most enduring legacy to the nation – one that we are still struggling to come to terms with today.

D.S.

Further reading:

The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham, W. Matthews (Oxford, 1971).

The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, 1655-9 ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society ser. 5, xxxi).

Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), iv. 255-73; available online at https://www.british-history.ac.uk/burton-diaries

As noted in the first blog, the transportation of slaves from West Africa grew proportionally with the development of the Caribbean as an important component of the English colonial economy; and as noted in the second, there was a lively political discourse in 1640s and 50s England centred on liberties and slavery, even if much of it was rhetorical. Only on occasion did the compartmentalized worlds of English liberties and overseas slavery collide in Parliament, much to the discomfort of MPs.

One such episode came in March 1659. Unhelpfully to the Cromwellian government, the chairman of the committee of grievances, Thomas Tyrrell MP, brought before the House a petition by Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, two men claiming to speak for 70 more ‘freeborn people of this nation’. They had been transported in 1655 to Barbados for their part in a royalist rising in the west of England. Their petition described their nearly six-week voyage from Plymouth to the island, where as ‘the goods and chattels’ of English government officials they had been sold, each for over half a ton of sugar, and put to work in the sugar mills and furnaces. They had been transported, as the custom was with most white labourers sent to the colonies, as indentured servants, a status which was supposed to offer them certain protected conditions of service.

Indentured servitude was the dominant form of master-servant relations in the West Indies outside slavery. In most respects this form of service encouraged grossly uneven bargains favouring the masters, but English servants without capital secured a passage to an overseas region of economic growth otherwise completely beyond their means. No doubt a minority made good in the West Indies.

The 1659 petitioners complained that whatever assurances had been given them in 1655, in fact they had been sold into slavery. The petition provoked a range of reactions in the chamber when it was read. A number of serving MPs had been involved in suppressing the 1655 rising, and had pertinent things to say about the circumstances of the transportation.

Some reminded colleagues of the threat to the state which the petitioning cavaliers had represented in 1655; others were keen to remind MPs that none were sent to the colonies ‘without their consent’. An old soldier, Richard Browne, won the sympathy of the House when he complained that as a victim of the cavaliers his own petition should be heard instead of theirs. One Member insisted that the lot of the indentured servants was not all that hard – ‘they were civilly used, and had horses to ride on’ – and was keen to point out that in fact the work was mostly done by the black slaves.

More were affronted that exiled cavaliers had been allowed to petition at all, and some republicans in the House applauded that; but the leading republican, Sir Henry Vane, who incidentally had colonial experience as governor of Massachusetts, 1636-7, argued that hostility to the king’s cause should not blind MPs to the barbarous treatment of the petitioners.

Whatever barely-contained political differences between them simmered away in this Parliament, republicans and rigid Presbyterians could unite in criticism of the Cromwellian government for making slaves of the petitioners. ‘I would have you consider the trade of buying and selling men’, urged the Cornish Presbyterian Hugh Boscawen. Referencing St Paul, whose Roman citizenship had protected him from the fate of slaves in Rome, Boscawen asserted the rule of law and protections of prisoners after trial: ‘A Roman ought not to be beaten. We are miserable slaves if we may not have this liberty secured to us.’ But this fell a long way short of an expression of human rights: it was the degradation of white transportees that appalled him, not the existence of black slavery in Barbados.

Most of the parliamentary day was devoted to this debate, but as with many debates in 1659, this one petered out with nothing resolved. The surviving evidence suggests that as a result of this debate, no perceptions had been modified. A week later, the Presbyterian MP, Arthur Annesley, in a speech complaining about the scale of the national debt, predicted that if nothing was done about it, ‘our children shall … be bond slaves’. This was a speech in the idiom of 1640: the size and cost of government threatened English liberties in England. It would be many decades before brutal slavery beyond England’s shores began to trouble parliamentarians.

S R

Further Reading

Paul Lay, Providence Lost. The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (2020)

Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s bid for Empire (2017)

Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (4 vols 1828), available online here

On 8 February 1659 the journalist Gilbert Mabbott reported the latest developments in Parliament to Henry Cromwell, the lord deputy of Ireland based in Dublin. Among other news he included the brief statement that the Commons ‘committed one King, a vintner in London, for sitting 3 days in Parliament, he being no Member thereof’ (Henry Cromwell Corresp. 447). What lay behind this extraordinary incident?

The protectorate Parliaments of the 1650s had seen many MPs elected and then excluded by the Cromwellian regime, most notably in 1656, when as many as 98 of the 460 Members returned were kept out of the House by order of the protectoral council. These were not only suspected (or ‘crypto’) royalists but also those ‘rigid’ Presbyterians who had caused difficulties for the government in the previous session in 1654-5, and a small number of republicans who sought, by causing disruption, to bring down the protectorate and re-establish the commonwealth. Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, which met in January 1659, was rather different, as the right of the council to exclude MPs had ended under the terms of the revised constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, and instead the vetting of the membership was left to Parliament itself. The process was at best ad hoc. In a further complication, the 1659 Parliament had reverted to the old franchise, allowing more MPs to sit, and many of them were new to the Commons, whether young men or political rookies. It was amid the chaos of the opening days of the session that the discovery of an impostor caused alarm in the chamber.

William King, a vintner living at the Royal Exchange Tavern near Stocks Market in London, had been approached by a City alderman, Sir John Dethick, who told him he had been elected as an MP. Believing him, King sat in the House for three days, and was seen distributing a pamphlet to MPs. On 5 February, being ‘observed sitting in the House as a Member, and not being well known, was observed by some Members, who desired the Serjeant to watch when he went out, and ask him whether he was a Member or not’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 77n). He was brought to the bar of the House and questioned, before being sent to Newgate prison. He was released after a petition by his father, Ralph King, citizen and vintner, on 7 February.

There is little doubt that William King was mentally disturbed. According to Edmund Ludlowe (MP for Hindon), ‘the man was distempered in his head to that degree, that his relations were often obliged to bind him by hand and foot’ (Ludlow, Mems. ii. 54). Guybon Goddard (MP for Castle Rising) concurred, noting that King had a history of illness, ‘having been distracted and being little better now’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 85n), and this diagnosis is supported by his rambling and incoherent answers to the House, and by the leniency with which his crime was treated: he was released into his father’s custody just two days later. But there were also suspicions that he was being duped by others, and something more sinister was afoot. As James Launce (MP for Mitchell) put it, ‘he is but the fool in the play’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 78).

Many MPs thought that King was a stooge of the republicans, not least because the pamphlet he had distributed was the anti-protectorate Twenty Five Queries. William Goodrick (MP for Thirsk) first raised the allegation that ‘this is the person that owned the pamphlet… which has treason in every line. It questions the nomination of his highness [i.e. Richard Cromwell], reflects likewise on this House, as if some Members were about the betray the liberties of the people. It reflects upon the army, as if no commission were of force since the protector’s death’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 78). Goodrick was followed by Colonel Edward Grosvenor (MP for Westminster), who wanted King to be sent to the Tower as a traitor. Colonel John Birch (MP for Leominster) summed up the mood of the House: ‘Haply this man may neither be a wise man nor a fool’ adding that he should be examined further: ‘it may be he will discover more’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 80). MPs’ suspicions were only allayed when evidence of King’s mental illness was presented to the Commons.

Despite handing out an inflammatory pamphlet, there was no evidence to link King with political radicalism. That did not mean that the republicans did not seek to exploit the situation. Edmund Ludlowe put the incident firmly within the context of a serious debate about the enforcement of an oath on MPs instituted by the Humble Petition, which many opponents of the protectorate refused to take. This debate ‘was at length interrupted by the discovery’ of King, and the distraction proved useful for Ludlowe and his friends, as ‘by this means the Assembly was diverted from resolving to impose the oath’ (Ludlow, Mems. ii. 53-4). The interventions of leading republicans in the House lends some support to Ludlowe’s claims. Once the King affair had been concluded, George Starkey (MP for New Windsor) called for the debate on the oath to be resumed, but Sir Arthur Hesilrige (MP for Leicester) moved ‘not to take it up so late; let us rise and have pity on ourselves, the better to be prepared on Monday’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 82), and he was seconded in this by another opponent of the regime, Colonel Robert Bennett (MP for Launceston). Abandoning the debate on the oath suited the republicans just fine.

But what of Alderman Dethick? Dethick was a London alderman who had served as lord mayor in 1655-6 and was knighted by Oliver Cromwell in September 1656. He was a prosperous merchant who made it his business to maintain amicable relations with whatever regime was in power, and kept out of politics, declining to sit as an MP during the protectorate. It is interesting that he was knighted again by Charles II after the Restoration, and he may have had royalist sympathies during the 1650s. Having said that, Dethick’s motives in persuading William King to take a seat in the Commons chamber are not obvious from the evidence available. One possibility is that Dethick was using King to make a satirical point about the crypto-royalists recently returned as MPs, and this is hinted at by Ludlowe’s account that the alderman had told his dupe that ‘he had seen the name of one King upon the list of returns’ (Ludlow, Mems. ii. 53). The significance of King’s surname was obvious to others, with Guybon Goddard noting that the case ‘was talked of as ominous abroad, that in the beginning of a Parliament we had called a King to the bar and committed him to Newgate’ (Burton’s Diary, iii. 85). Alternatively, Dethick may have been playing an elaborate practical joke. If so, no one in this self-conscious and divided House of Commons found it remotely funny.

PL

Sources:

Commons Journals, vii. [https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol7]

Burton’s Diary ed. J. T. Rutt (4 vols. 1828) [https://www.british-history.ac.uk/burton-diaries/vol3]

E. Ludlow, Memoirs ed. C.H. Firth (2 vols. 1894)

The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society, 5th ser. xxxi, 2008)

Mercurius Politicus, no. 553 (3-10 Feb. 1659), pp. 215-6.

Biographies of Robert Bennett, John Birch, Thomas Burton, Henry Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Guybon Goddard, William Goodricke, Edward Grosvenor, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, James Launce, Edmund Ludlowe and George Starkey are being prepared by the House of Commons 1640-1660 section.