The World полностью

Descended from the sister of Henry VIII’s enforcer Thomas Cromwell, his family were rich from the distribution of monastic loot that had survived the beheading of the vicegerent in spirituals; his rich uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, knighted by Queen Elizabeth held court at a great mansion, Hinchingbrook, that often hosted James I and Prince Charles, both of whom young Cromwell would have seen, but he inherited little from his father. Ten years earlier he had married Elizabeth Boucher, uncouth daughter of a well-connected puritan merchant who gave birth to nine children. Following fitful legal studies, he found himself in the midst of a cascade of crises: after being elected MP for Huntingdon, he argued with the gentry, left the town and suffered valde melancholicus, a nervous breakdown. His only expertise was in horseflesh, an invaluable gift when he took command of cavalry. Redemption came with a Damascene conversion through which this ‘chief among sinners’ believed himself ‘among the congregation of the first born’, chosen by God to be one of the Saints predestined for heaven. He wrote endlessly about God and providence, yet he was surprisingly loving and tolerant of his children, even though as a believer he worried that his fun-loving favourite daughter Bettie ‘seeks her own vanity and carnal mind’. While Cromwell always presented himself as a plainspoken everyman raised by God – a portrait repeated by most historians – he was not quite what he seemed: gruff, mercurial and confrontational, he tended towards the cyclothymic, swinging between elation and despair.

As Charles seemed to have triumphed over Parliament and puritans, Cromwell was typical of those who dreamed of a ‘pilgrimage’ to a new Promised Land and he was probably distantly acquainted with the greatest advocate of colonization with whom he would be intimately linked: Robert Rich, earl of Warwick. Splendidly rich, gorgeously attired, supremely well connected, an early investor in both the East India and Virginia companies and admiral of his own anti-Spanish privateering flotilla, Warwick was a puritan sympathizer and innovative colonial entrepreneur. Intense, foxy, wearing a spur-shaped beard on the end of his chin, he was a man ‘of courage for the greatest enterprises’, playing the key role in two great events – the foundation of America and the fall of Charles I.

While the first colonists are often portrayed as humble hymn-singing puritans, the creation of America was always a joint venture of grandees and people: after the starvation of Jamestown, it was a series of aristocrats who rescued Virginia and confronted the Powhatan peoples, who struck back with a series of massacres. But it was the planting of a new crop, tobacco, originally from south America and now re-exported from Europe, that gave the colonists their livelihood – and their biggest landowner was Warwick, proprietor of the Richneck tobacco plantation.

At just this time, 1630, seventeen ships bearing a thousand settlers led by an affluent puritan leader called John Winthrop, who had been sacked from office by Charles, arrived in New England to found the commonwealth of Massachusetts, envisioning a theocracy inspired by the Jerusalem of the biblical Israelites – ‘a city on a hill’. Warwick and his ‘godly friends’ had invested in the Massachusetts Bay Company. In March 1628, Charles granted Warwick land for a new company, the New England Company, and the earl now backed others, Saybrook in Connecticut, and Providence in Honduras/Nicaragua.

New England had been founded by accident. In 1620, two ships of ultra-puritan Pilgrims, the Mayflower and the Fortune, sailed for Virginia but instead arrived in New England where they founded a settlement, Plymouth. The settlers tried to create a sacred community while falling out among themselves about what that meant. During the 1630s, a further 21,000 settlers followed. Yet it was not only puritans who found America.

In 1632, Charles authorized a Catholic politician, George Calvert, Baron Baltimore – like Warwick an early investor in the Virginia and East India companies – to found a colony originally to be called Carola after the king. Charles renamed it Maryland after his wife.^* Exhausted by his voyages, Baltimore died in 1632, his son Cecil succeeding him as First Lord Proprietary, Earl Palatine of the Provinces of Maryland and Avalon in America, and sending out two ships, the Ark and Dove, with two Jesuits and 200 settlers, followed by his younger brother as governor.