Introduction
The central theme of this paper will be the multifaceted and multi-layered nature of the spiritual geopolitics that shaped Cromwellian foreign policy, specifically in relation to the Western Design of 1654–55. The decision to launch a major amphibious expedition against Spanish power in the West Indies was approved by the Council of State in July 1654 and launched the following December. This emphatically signalled that Cromwell was moving away from the carefully studied policy of nonalignment between France and Spain that he had pursued earlier in the Interregnum, and was instead drawing towards France and away from Spain. This shift revealed the international nature of Cromwell’s thinking, for he was consciously seeking to defend the religious freedom of those Protestant English merchants who were trading in the West Indies. He regarded Spain, in classic Elizabethan terms, as a malevolent worldwide Empire, whose tentacles encompassed the new world as well as the old. Indeed, the two were intimately connected, for the Western Design also made it all the more important for Cromwell to preserve good relations with France while he was actively engaged in a war against Spain. In this article, I want to emphasise the central importance of Protestantism in connecting the different strands of Cromwellian foreign policy, and to argue that the failure of the Design was understood and interpreted in religious terms just as much as its original aims had been. The main focus of the argument will thus be on the attitudes and perceptions that shaped the framing of the Western Design, and on how Cromwell and his advisers in England reacted to the Design’s defeat and tried to make sense of it, rather than on the actual events in the Caribbean.
Historians have differed over the relative importance of the motives that lay behind the Design, while acknowledging that a number of factors were at work here. Karen Kupperman has underlined the significance of strategic considerations, arguing that Cromwell believed that “until Spain was severed from its sources of riches in the Indies, the danger of attacks on England would remain.”Footnote 1 Carla Pestana places more weight on ideological forces by suggesting that although financial motivations contributed to the Design, it “was most significantly an effort to achieve the religious and political goals that had long animated the group around” Cromwell because “it fulfilled his religious vision of triumphal Protestantism.”Footnote 2 In her recent important study Selling Cromwell’s Wars, Nicole Greenspan writes that “disentangling religious and secular objectives . . . is problematic.” She goes on to argue that “for the Protector and his supporters, the struggle between Protestantism and popery acted as the overarching framework housing temporal action,” and that “Cromwell laboured to satisfy each of these goals—religious, strategic, and economic—within the larger Protestant-popish conflict.” For Cromwell, the Design was thus “an exercise in Protestant imperialism” based on the fact that, to him, “it appeared that English interests specifically, and Protestant interests generally, were best served by an alliance with France and war with Spain.”Footnote 3 This idea of religion as an overarching framework that housed the temporal issues strikes me as very fruitful. It sits comfortably with Pestana’s general approach to the Design, and is one that I want to explore further during the course of this paper.
Motives and Planning
To begin with, it is worth setting out the various motives that apparently combined to drive Cromwell into launching the Western Design. These can be distinguished but not separated, and in essence they can be summarised as the following five considerations. First, there was a long tradition of anti-Spanish sentiment in English foreign policy that can be traced back to Elizabeth I. William S. Maltby has analysed the development of this “Black Legend,” and argued that “in one aspect of his being, Cromwell can be accused of truly mirroring the Elizabethan spirit: his deep and abiding hatred of Spain.” At one level, the Western Design thus marked “a revival of Elizabethan anti-Hispanism.”Footnote 4 Second, the project can be seen in terms of the pursuit of England’s Atlantic and specifically Caribbean interests. Kupperman has shown the continuity that existed here with the ideas that had animated earlier projects such as the Providence Island Company.Footnote 5 Third, the Design represented an attempt to strengthen England financially by weakening Spain’s economy through an attack on her supply lines. This factor was much emphasised in some older accounts, as for example when Frank Strong wrote that “the most powerful motives in bringing about the West Indian expedition were the economic.”Footnote 6 Fourth, the Design was closely associated with strategic considerations within Europe, as it tied in with an English rapprochement with France against Spain. It was thus directly connected to the Franco-English treaties of November 1655 and March 1657.Footnote 7 Finally, there was the idea that underpinned and legitimated all the above, namely that of launching a Protestant crusade against a Catholic power which Cromwell regarded as England’s “providential enemy.” This formed a prominent theme in the public justifications of the Design. It also helps to explain many specific features of the arrangements, such as the fact that during the attack on Hispaniola the English forces used “Religion” as their pass word,Footnote 8 or that in June 1655, at a time when the army was desperately short of food and other basic supplies, the Council ordered “that two thousand bibles of the sort now showed be brought and sent to the souldiers in the West Indies.”Footnote 9 This provision of Bibles, in the belief that it would promote victory, reveals much about the assumptions and priorities of Cromwell and his advisers.
The intertwining of these motives, and the central place of religion within them, is evident in the initial debates about the Design within Cromwell’s Council. On 20 April 1654, the Council considered “the grounds of the undertaking the Designe of attempting the Kinge of Spaine in the West Indies.” These stemmed not only from the recognition that Spanish power was “the most profitable of any in the world,” but also from a perception of Spain as “the greatest enemye to the Protestant cause in the world.” The councillors gave careful consideration to “the manner of his gettinge his [the Spanish king’s] treasure” and saw huge advantages in gaining Hispaniola “for the transplanting as much of our people from New England, Virginia, the Barbadoes, the Summer Islands, or from Europe, as we see requisite.” It was also felt that the project was “like to be more acceptable to the people of all sorts and the Parliament then any can be.” The possible economic disadvantages of “the losse of the Spanish trade” were, it was argued, outweighed by the benefits of a French alliance which would prevent a Franco-Spanish treaty and offer “countenance and justification to the Protestant cause and partye.”Footnote 10
On this basis, the Council pressed ahead and on 5 June issued an instruction that “foureteene ships of warre be forthwith prepared for the Westerne Designe, with such a proporcon of victualls ammunition and stores as shalbe necessary. And that the Com[mission]rs of the Adm[iral]ty and Navy doe take order for the same accordingly.”Footnote 11 Yet some influential figures on the Council, especially Cromwell’s close army colleague Major-General John Lambert, remained unconvinced and continued to have nagging doubts about the wisdom and practicality of the Design. On 20 July, Lambert warned that the project was “improbable” and “to[o] farr off.” Cromwell retorted that “God has not brought us hither where wee are but to consider the worke that wee may doe in the world as well as at home,” and stressed “the probabilitye of the good of the designe, both for the Protestants’ cause and utilitye to the undertakers.” Lambert’s response showed great foresight: he denied “the feasibilitye” of the Design, and warned that “besides casualtyes of diseases and wars that men are subject to, New England and the Barbadoes will not flocke to you in Hisp[aniola], unless you be settled there in peace.”Footnote 12 Lambert’s fears about the feasibility of the Design turned out to be extremely well founded. Furthermore, as Carla Pestana and Alison Games have demonstrated, Cromwell’s attempts to encourage state-sponsored migration to the Caribbean proved largely unsuccessful, and as soon as the Design ran into trouble, colonists in other locations such as New England and Barbados were generally reluctant to support it or to resettle in Jamaica.Footnote 13
Cromwell’s strong support for the project ensured that Lambert’s reservations were overridden, however, and on 9 December the Lord Protector issued a formal commission to the commanders of the expedition, Robert Venables and William Penn. This emphasised “the state and condicion of the Englishe plantations and colonies in the westerne parte of the world called America” which “nowe lye open and exposed to the will and power of the Kinge of Spaine,” and the opportunity “for getting ground and gaineing upon the dominions and territories of the said Kinge there.” Cromwell then described “the miserable thraldom and bondage, both spirituall and civill, which the natives and others in the dominions of the said King in America are subiected to and lye under by means of the Popish and cruell Inquisition.” He hoped to be “instrumentall” in delivering them from this, and “to make way for the bringing in the light of the Gospell and power of true religion and godliness into those parts.”Footnote 14
These confident convictions were reinforced by the advice that Cromwell received from Thomas Gage, a former English Dominican friar who had spent much time in southern America and the Caribbean. Gage came from a recusant family, but he turned strongly against his Catholic faith and converted to the Church of England in 1642. Over the years that followed, his testimony led to the executions of at least three Catholic priests in England, and in 1654 he developed a plan for an attack on the Spanish Caribbean.Footnote 15 The Venetian Ambassador Lorenzo Paulucci reported that the Western Design was conceived “thanks to the information of a Dominican friar who has been in those parts and knows them well, who has had many secret conferences with the Protector on the subject.”Footnote 16 Gage submitted a paper to Cromwell in which he argued that “none in conscience may better attempt such an expulsion of the Spaniards from those parts,” and that “this is not a worke so hard and difficult as is by some apprehended.” He asserted that “the Spaniards cannot oppose much, being a lazy, sinfull people, feeding like beasts upon their lusts, and upon the fat of the land, and never trained up to warres.” He optimistically predicted that “such a glorious worke” might “bee a worke of one halfe yeare, if vigorously acted,” and that it could be accomplished “before the Spaniards can joyne any forces, or any supplies from Spaine, which can hardly bee done by that king, having at present so many yrons in the fire here in Europe.”Footnote 17 Such high hopes proved seriously misplaced. Gage sailed with the expedition as Venables’ chaplain, but he died in Jamaica early in 1656 in the epidemic of dysentery and malaria that killed half of the English garrison there.Footnote 18
It is interesting to observe here, in both the Council’s deliberations and in Gage’s advice, the linkage that was made between the religious aims of the Design and the likelihood of its military success. There was an assumption that because the Spanish were “lazy,” “sinful,” and Catholic to boot, the English—the agents of true Protestant religion—would be able to defeat them. God would be on England’s side. As Pestana has written, “the English expected easy victory in Spanish America for two interconnected reasons: God was on the side of righteous English Protestantism and the English character was naturally superior to that of “the Spaniard.”Footnote 19 Their complete defeat at Hispaniola, and their failure to capture Jamaica except very slowly and at great cost, therefore came as a severe shock to the English. In the face of military disaster, the ideology began to operate in reverse, and the defeat was assumed to have spiritual implications for life at home. Again in Pestana’s words, “the shock of that failure raised questions about God’s endorsement of the revolutionary vision, about the godliness of Cromwell and his cronies, and about the worthiness of English character.”Footnote 20 The exploration of those questions over the following months, and some of the answers that were advanced to them, will form the subject of the next section.
Failure, reactions and consequences
English forces sailed for the Caribbean in December 1654, but the troops were poorly trained and supplied, and things soon went badly wrong. In July 1655, news arrived in England that the attack on Hispaniola had been quickly repulsed in late April, and that the capture of Jamaica was only being gradually achieved with great difficulty and heavy losses from casualties and disease.Footnote 21 As England struggled to come to terms with the implications of the Design’s failure, religion was again of crucial significance. Of no one was this truer than of Cromwell himself. Pestana has written that “upon receiving the news,” he “retired for a period of intense prayer in an effort to understand the providential meaning of the disaster.”Footnote 22 In public he was robust, and on 26 October 1655 he issued a declaration defending “the justice of their cause against Spain.” Here he set out at length “the instances of the continuall acts of hostility, and cruelties, exercised by the Spaniards against the English in the West-Indies.” He insisted that “the King of Spain and his subjects, do not account themselves bound to hold any terms of peace with the English in those parts, but continually exercise all manner of hostility against them.” He therefore hoped that “all true hearted English men” would embrace “the precious opportunities which God hath put into their hands for his glory, and the advancement of the kingdom of Christ, which we do not doubt will in the end (all mists being dispelled and cleared) appear to have been the principall end of the late expedition and undertaking against the Spaniards in the West-Indies.”Footnote 23
Four days after this declaration was published, on 30 October, Cromwell vividly expressed his private feelings in a letter to Vice-Admiral Goodson in Jamaica. He began by admitting: “it is not to be denied but the Lord hath greatly humbled us in that sad loss sustained at Hispaniola; no doubt but we have provoked the Lord, and it is good for us to know so, and to be abased for the same.” Cromwell hoped, nevertheless, that the “reproach and shame that hath been for our sins, and through … the misguidance of some” would “work up your hearts to a confidence in the Lord, and for the redemption of His honour from the hands of men who attribute their successes to their idols, the work of their own hands.” He remained convinced that although God “hath torn us, yet He will heal us; though He hath smitten us, yet He will bind us up; after two days He will revive us, in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.”Footnote 24 God’s rebuke to England was in no way an endorsement of Spain, and Cromwell closed by affirming his belief that “the Lord Himself hath a controversy with … that Roman Babylon, of which the Spaniard is the great underpropper.”Footnote 25 As Kupperman has written, Cromwell “never accepted that the failure of the Western Design signaled God’s endorsement of Spain, but he was forced to see it as a rebuke of England.”Footnote 26 In his eyes, England’s defeat did not imply that God was on Spain’s side.
Cromwell returned to these themes in another letter that he wrote at about the same time to Luke Stokes, the Governor of Nevis. Here he admitted that the Design “hath miscarried in what we hoped for, through the disposing hand of God, for reasons best known to Himself, and, as we may justly conceive, for our sins,” but he nevertheless insisted that the cause “will be owned by Him, as I verily believe: and therefore we dare not relinquish it, but shall, the Lord assisting, prosecute it with what strength we can, hoping for a blessing for His name’s sake.”Footnote 27 In the meantime, as he told Major-General Fortescue around the end of October, it was essential that England respond to “the reproof God gave us at St Domingo, upon the account of our own sins as well as others” by ensuring that “all manner of vice may be thoroughly discountenanced and severely punished; and that such a frame of government may be exercised that virtue and godliness may receive due encouragement.”Footnote 28 The Design’s defeat thus had urgent implications for the conduct of the nation at home.
This connection figured prominently in a series of public declarations that Cromwell issued between November 1655 and September 1656 announcing days of “solemn fasting and humiliation.” In the first of these (21 November 1655), after acknowledging the “late rebukes we have received,” he expressed the hope that “notwithstanding all our provocations, the Lord may be pleased to return a smile upon us,” and that those who were “entrusted with the great affairs of the nation” might “be used as instruments in his hand for the continuance and increase of the reformation, and the security and settlement of these nations.”Footnote 29 Four months later (13 March 1656), Cromwell issued a second declaration which admitted that
the Lord hath been pleased in a wonderful manner to humble and rebuke us, in that expedition to the West Indies, which although we apprehend was not in favour of the enemy, yet gives us just reason to fear, that we may have either failed in the spirit and manner wherewith this business hath been undertaken, or that the Lord sees some abomination, or accursed thing by which he is provoked thus to appear against us.
In the hope that “the Lord would pardon the iniquities both of magistrate and people in these lands,” and “prosper our undertakings as formerly by his own blessed presence,” he therefore announced another “day of solemn humiliation and prayer.”Footnote 30 In the third declaration (23 September 1656), Cromwell and the second Protectorate Parliament fervently desired that God would “for his own name’s sake be pleased, to remove whatever accursed thing there is amongst is, and that as he is our God, so we may be his people.”Footnote 31 These declarations lent all the more force to Cromwell’s instructions to the Major-Generals, established in August 1655, to “encourage and promote godliness and vertue, and discourage and discountenance … all profanes and ungodliness.”Footnote 32
The reference to an “accursed thing” in the declaration of March 1656 inadvertently prompted a personal criticism of Cromwell that wounded him all the more deeply because it came from a former friend and ally, Sir Henry Vane the Younger. The following May, Vane published a pamphlet entitled A Healing Question Propounded in which he explored what the “accursed thing” might be that had provoked God’s rebuke. Vane warned lest “those very tyrannical principles and antichristian reliques which God by us hath punished in our predecessors, should again revive, spring up afresh, and shew themselves lodged also and retained in our bosomes.” And he asked “if these things should ever be found amongst us . . . shall we need to look any further for the accursed thing?” He cited the story of Achan (Joshua, chapter 7), who had “taken of the accursed thing” by stealing gold and silver and “a goodly Babylonish garment” following the fall of Jericho. This “caused the anger of the Lord to kindle against Israel, and made them unable to stand before their enemies, but their hearts melted as water.” To Vane, the defeat of the Western Design implied the existence of a similar “sin of Achan” within England: “thus far the Lord is concerned, if such an evil as this shall lie hid in the midst of us.” Vane criticised the Protectorate for placing too much authority “in a single person, or in some few persons,” and warned of “the arbitrary will and judgement of those that bring themselves into rule by the power of the sword.”Footnote 33 Blair Worden has shown how this criticism made Cromwell extremely sensitive to charges of pride, greed and ambition, and thus may well have contributed to his decision to reject the kingship in 1657.Footnote 34 Mindful of the “sin of Achan,” he insisted that he “would not build Jericho again.”Footnote 35
The Design’s defeat had a number of other important consequences. It appears to have given impetus to Cromwell’s moves towards the readmission of Jews to England, which culminated in a conference that met several times in December 1655.Footnote 36 For some time, Spanish and Portuguese Jews had been coming to England to escape persecution, but in the context of war against Spain their presence took on greater significance. In August 1655, Cromwell issued letters of denization to one of the leading Spanish Jews in England, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, while another, Simon de Caceres, submitted a plan for fortifying Jamaica the following month.Footnote 37 At the end of October, the prominent Amsterdam rabbi Mennaseh ben Israel published Humble Addresses … to His Highness the Protector, formally requesting that Jews be allowed to live in England and enjoy full legal and religious rights. Cromwell referred the matter to the Council which in turn appointed a committee of its own members to consider it. This committee did not feel itself competent to consider the issue and so Cromwell called a conference of leading ministers, lawyers, and merchants. This conference met at Whitehall five times in December, and although opinion at these meetings was divided, Cromwell’s personal support for readmission was nevertheless evident. This probably reflected his abhorrence of the persecution of Jews by Spain and Portugal, and may well also have been on millenarian grounds. According to one near contemporary report, he “showed a favourable inclination towards our harbouring the afflicted Jews,” and professed that “he had no engagements but upon scripture grounds.”Footnote 38 Sensing the conference’s inability to reach a formal conclusion, Cromwell dissolved it and thereafter turned a blind eye to the arrival of Jews in England, to which the lawyers at the conference had advised that there was no legal impediment. Their lives were further eased in the spring of 1656 by the case of Antonio Rodriguez Robles, a Spanish Jew living in London, who was denounced as a Spaniard. The Admiralty Commissioners ruled that Robles was a Jew rather than a Spaniard, and thus not the subject of a state with which England was at war. In that same year, Cromwell also gave permission for those Jews who returned to open a synagogue and their own burial ground.Footnote 39 Despite the lack of any formal declaration of Jewish toleration or freedom of worship, much was thus achieved informally, and the context of the Western Design and the war against Spain appears to have encouraged this trend.
In terms of international relations, the failure of the Western Design made Cromwell draw steadily closer to France, leading to the signing of treaties in November 1655 and March 1657.Footnote 40 Interestingly, one of the key obstacles to this rapprochement had been the massacre of about 270 Protestant Vaudois in Piedmont by Duke Charles Emmanuel II of Savoy, a client of the French king, in May 1655.Footnote 41 Cromwell protested to Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, who intervened on behalf of the Vaudois, and in August 1655 the Treaty of Pignerol ended hostilities between the Duke of Savoy and the Vaudois, guaranteeing the latter the right to worship in freedom.Footnote 42 Cromwell saw the Piedmontese massacres as another manifestation of the threat posed by international Catholicism. On 25 May 1655, he ordered “a day of solemn fasting and humiliation” in recognition of “the sad calamitous estate of our poor brethren, as also of the future danger upon all the Protestant Churches in general.”Footnote 43 Later, in his declaration of 13 March 1656, he talked not only of the Western Design but also of “the condition of the Protestant Churches abroad, the members whereof have very lately been massacred in Piedmont . . . for no fault, but being Protestants,” and he lamented that “the designes upon the whole [Protestant] interest by the popish party almost in all places of Europe, and their grounds of their quarrel and persecution for religion,” were “more clear and avowed then in many years before.”Footnote 44 An important aspect of Cromwell’s alliance with Louis XIV was his belief that France had a much better record than Spain in its treatment of Protestants. As Cromwell explained to Johann Friedrich Schlezer, the agent of the Elector of Brandenburg, he preferred France to Spain, “because though so many hundred families of the Reformed church lived in France, they were well treated and protected there, whereas the Spanish policies only tended to burden their consciences extremely and to extirpate entirely all who professed the Evangelical truth, either overtly by force or by secret machinations.”Footnote 45
The Western Design thus fitted together with a French alliance as part of a defence of the Protestant interest in both the old world and the new. Religion formed a common thread which tied together the different components of Cromwellian foreign policy.Footnote 46 Certainly in the context of war with Spain it suited Cromwell’s strategic interests to keep France on side and to take as positive a view as possible of French treatment of the Huguenots. He nevertheless seems to have remained haunted by the fate of the Piedmontese Protestants. According to one contemporary report, as he lay dying in September 1658 “he was distracted and in those fits would cry out, “What will they do with the poor Protestants in Piedmont, in Poland and other places?”Footnote 47
The international dimension of Cromwell’s outlook was also evident in his opening speech to the second Protectorate Parliament on 17 September 1656. This was a lengthy utterance, and the first time that Cromwell had addressed Parliament since the failure of the Western Design became known in England. Cromwell told the assembled members “truly, your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is. He is a natural enemy. He is naturally so; he is naturally so throughout, by reason of that enmity that is in him against whatsoever is of God.” There was nothing accidental about this: it was “providentially so; God having disposed it so to be, when we made a breach with the Spanish nation, long ago.” He declared that “no sooner did this nation reform that which is called (unworthily) the reformed religion after the death of Queen Mary [in 1558], by the Queen Elizabeth of famous memory—we need not be ashamed to call her so!—but the Spaniards’ design became, by all unworthy, unnatural means, to destroy that person, and to seek the ruin and destruction of these kingdoms.” Cromwell deplored not only “the several assassinations designed upon that lady, that great queen” but also Spain’s “attempts upon Ireland” in the late 1580s and 1590s. He thus associated himself with the Elizabethan war against Spain between 1585 and 1604, and he remained noticeably ambivalent about the Treaty of London by which James I had ended that war in August 1604: “Truly King James made a peace; but whether this nation, and the interest of all Protestant Christians, suffered more by that peace than ever by Spain’s hostility, I refer to your consideration!”Footnote 48
Turning to more recent times, Cromwell went on to argue that Spain was “that party that brings all your enemies before you . . . for it is now, that Spain hath espoused that interest which you have all hitherto been conflicting with—Charles Stuart’s interest.” Spain “hath an interest in your bowels” because “the papists in England . . . have been accounted, ever since I was born, Spaniolised,” and he thought it “true and certain that the papists, the priests and Jesuits, have a great influence upon the Cavalier party.”Footnote 49 As Cromwell and Mazarin moved closer towards an alliance in 1654–55, Charles Stuart and the exiled Court decided to leave France. In the summer of 1655, the Western Design prompted Charles to see Philip IV of Spain as a potential ally and to settle at Bruges and Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands. There, in the spring of 1656, Charles reached an agreement with Philip whereby the latter would make 6,000 troops available to him for an attempt to regain his throne.Footnote 50 Cromwell deplored the fact that the King “hath espoused Charles Stuart, with whom he is fully at agreement,” and asked, “can we think that papists and Cavaliers shake not hands in England?”Footnote 51
The flip-side of Cromwell’s abhorrence of Spain, Charles Stuart, and the Cavaliers—and similarly global in its implications—was his commitment to the “Protestant interest.” Cromwell told the second Protectorate Parliament that “all interests of the Protestants, in Germany, Denmark, Helvetia and the Cantons, and all the interests in Christendom, [are] the same as yours.” By contrast, the Pope’s “designs are known all over to be nothing else but endeavours to unite all the popish interests in all the Christian world, against this nation above any, and against all the Protestant interest in the world.” He complained that his attempts to secure “liberty of conscience” for those Protestant English merchants who were trading in the West Indies had been rebuffed: “we desired but such a liberty as that they might keep their Bibles in their pockets, to exercise their liberty of religion to themselves, and not to be under restraint, but there is not liberty of conscience to be had from the Spaniard; neither is there satisfaction for injuries, nor for blood.”Footnote 52 Cromwell interpreted the Western Design as part of a long-term, worldwide conflict between the “Protestant interest” and the forces of Catholicism spearheaded by Spain and the Papacy. His perspective from London was thus couched in terms of spiritual geopolitics on a truly global scale.
Conclusion
Just as recent scholarship on Britain’s internal conflicts of the 1640s has emphasised the central role of religion and its inseparability from other issues,Footnote 53 so the same phenomenon is evident in the spiritual geopolitics that shaped Cromwellian foreign policy during the 1650s. Specifically in relation to the Western Design, the idea of spiritual geopolitics offers a helpful way to understand not only the motives that lay behind Cromwell’s decision to undertake the project but also the ways in which he and his contemporaries perceived and interpreted the Design’s defeat.
This mode of thought was not of course confined to Cromwell and his circle, or indeed to English Protestants. In New Spain, the ebb and flow of military fortunes during the course of the Western Design prompted a parallel acknowledgement of divine intervention that formed a mirror image of the story recounted in this article. In Santo Domingo, the anniversary of the English forces’ departure was thereafter celebrated with an annual solemn festival of rejoicing and the distribution of 500 pesos among the city’s poor.Footnote 54 Similarly, Gregorio Martin de Guijo, canon of the cathedral in Mexico City, recorded in his diary that news of the English defeat on Hispaniola prompted the ringing of bells and thanksgiving services at the cathedral. By contrast, when England subsequently captured Jamaica he wrote “prayers are ordered in all the churches.”Footnote 55 In both cases, success or failure in battle was again perceived as a direct reflection of God’s judgements.
This process of putting religion back into the story is significant because it illustrates an important point about how causation was understood in the seventeenth century. Here we can draw a parallel with John Morrill’s research on William Dowsing, the Parliamentarian iconoclast. Dowsing perceived a direct connection between his iconoclastic activities and Parliament’s military fortunes. To the seventeenth-century mind—perhaps especially to the seventeenth-century Puritan mind—these phenomena appeared to be closely linked. Morrill writes that Dowsing “would have believed that in some measure Fairfax was given victory on 25 January 1644 at Nantwich [in Cheshire] over the troops returned from Ireland because on that day he, William Dowsing, wrought destruction of images at Orford, Snape and Saxmundham” in Suffolk.Footnote 56 The Council’s order of two thousand Bibles in June 1655 for the beleaguered troops in Jamaica rested upon an analogous assumption about the nature of causation. There was a perceived link between England’s military fortunes and her spiritual health.
This concept of causation is apparent not only in Cromwell’s confidence that the godly English could defeat the Spanish, but also in the inverse idea—keenly felt by both himself and his critics—that defeat in the Caribbean pointed to something fundamentally wrong and disordered at home. The defeat of the Western Design thus had not only military significance. Something else was at work—an “accursed thing,” a “sin of Achan”—and this helps to explain why the defeat was so unsettling and disturbing for Cromwell and his advisers. To understand fully the workings of spiritual geopolitics in the seventeenth century, it is important to appreciate this kind of causal link between actions and developments that nowadays would seem at best only obliquely related, if at all, but which in that era appeared connected in ways that were not merely direct but that also bore witness to the providential workings of God in the affairs of this world.
