White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (22 page)

One of the catalysts for what was to come took place in the ancient churchyard of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh. Today, tourists visit to stare at the bronze statue of a small dog, Greyfriars’

Bobby, famous for having lain on his owner’s grave for fourteen years during the nineteenth century, before himself being carried off by time. But Greyfriars and its churchyard are famous for more significant events than the story of the relationship between a dog and its owner.

In 1638, a large group of well-established citizens met in the kirk to sign a covenant by which they affirmed their Calvinist views and their opposition to the Catholic Church. Even though Catholicism had ceased to be the official faith of England after the Reformation, many Protestants harboured worries about the new King. He was married to the devoutly Catholic princess Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV of France. The Scottish dissenters believed the Church could be led by no man, only God himself.

They were determined to resist all innovations by Charles, including the introduction of a new uniform book of liturgy.

The resistance within Scotland did not rest solely on religious differences but also on political grounds. Charles packed the Scottish Privy Council – the ruling arm of government in Scotland

– with bishops of his own choosing, so excluding many of the most powerful figures in the land. The common cause between Presbyterians and the nobility was a potent mix.

After the first copy of the National Covenant was signed before the altar of Greyfriars Kirk, further copies were distributed to parishes around Scotland. Soon, many thousands had put their 158

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name to a document that set itself forcefully against the will of the King, a monarch who still adhered to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Eight months after the first signing of the Covenant, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to expel all bishops from the church. This was the starting point for what became known as the Bishops’ Wars.

Charles I’s early life indicated he was not cut out to deal with these complicated times. He was frail and had a bad stammer.

When he acceded to the throne, he took steps to change his image into that of an omnipotent ruler. He commissioned portraits by the painter from Antwerp, Anthony van Dyck. In his acclaimed triple portrait, van Dyck portrayed the King from several angles, in effect, giving him three heads. In the event, Charles was unable to hold on to one.

Although Scottish, Charles hardly visited the country, where the political atmosphere had darkened. Miscalculations within his court, together with the increasingly implacable nature of the Parliamentary and religious dissent arraigned against him, were to spark a catastrophic civil war involving England, Scotland and Ireland, culminating in 1649 with Charles’s divine body being parted from his all-too-fallible head on a scaffold outside his glorious banqueting hall in Whitehall.

It may be unfair to blame Charles alone – or anyone else, for that matter – for the violent mêlée that overtook the kingdom during the Civil War. It was as if the country had reached a point where matters of power and personal conscience had to be determined one way or the other. But even the execution of the King and the foundation of a republic did not resolve matters.

The Scots were suspicious of the forces at work in Parliament in London and of the increasingly radical forms of religion in England. Sentiment swung behind the Crown in the shape of the executed King’s son, named Charles after his father. Although there were many who were wary of a member of the Stuart family, which had been no friend to the Presbyterians, Charles was declared King of Scotland and in June 1650 arrived hopefully from exile in France. Charles publicly and cynically agreed to a new covenant renouncing Anglicanism. In England, this gave his 159

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potential support base a pummelling. Politics in the seventeenth century was a difficult game, especially if one wanted to be king.

Parliament suspected that Charles would now soon raise an army and advance on England.

On a September day in 1650, Cromwell led an army of 16,000

men over the Scottish border. Cromwell’s genius resided in being well prepared. But the self-taught general was not only sensible in preparation, he was also flexible in battle. Perhaps his greatest quality as a commander was that he could inspire his men. At Dunbar, he faced a much stronger Scottish force of 23,000. According to reports, before going into battle Cromwell appealed to the enemy commander to consider his position. After all, Cromwell did not see that he had a quarrel so much with the Presbyterian troops as with Charles himself. ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken,’ he said. The Scots took no heed.

Maybe one group of zealots knew better than to trust another.

Three thousand Scottish soldiers died in the battle and many broke ranks and fled.2 Cromwell’s smaller army won the day.

Cromwell took 9,000 to 10,000 prisoners. About half of them were quickly freed as being too badly injured to remain a threat.

Plans were drawn up to disperse the remaining prisoners among the colonies in Ireland, Virginia and Barbados. How many were in fact sent is unknown, for a series of calamities were to overwhelm both plans and the prisoners.

The remaining 5,000 prisoners were force-marched to Durham.

Along the way, 2,000 or more died of illness, exhaustion and starvation. Others simply drifted away. On 11 September, the survivors were herded into various makeshift prisons in Durham, including the castle and the Norman cathedral, one of the most beautiful hymns to the miraculous in northern Europe. For many, the cathedral became their place of death. Army commanders siphoned off the money allocated to feed them. Malnutrition led to disease and the cold sapped the prisoners’ strength. The desperate soldiers ripped up pews and wooden panelling to burn in dwindling efforts to keep warm. Starvation was their chief enemy.

By the end of October, 1,600 had died. Of the remaining 1,400, many were deported to the West Indies as slave labour. How many 160

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is not known but it is safe to assume that not nearly as many were deported as originally planned for.

This was not the only example of Parliament using transportation as a solution to political dissent. The decisive battle of Worcester was fought in 1651 between a combined Scots-Royalist army under the direct command of Charles II, and the Parliamentarian army under the command of Oliver Cromwell. It was to be the final battle for both commanders and a ‘crowning mercy’ according to the victorious Cromwell. Eight thousand Scots soldiers were taken prisoner. While Charles went into hiding, pending his escape to France, the Parliamentarian Council of State charged the Committee for Prisoners to grant a licence for the transportation of the Scots to the West Indies. In 1656, Scottish prisoners who had fought at Worcester and been transported complained that their sentences of servitude were being illegally extended to seven years. A committee of inquiry back in London investigated the matter and upheld their sentences.

Four years later, the Council of State was issuing directives for Scots, Irish, English and other seamen imprisoned in Plymouth Castle to be sent to Barbados, and a further 1,200 men imprisoned in Portpatrick in Scotland and Knockfergus in Ireland were to be sent to Jamaica.

Not all fared badly. Many years later, one of the Scots who settled in New Jersey from around 1680 onwards wrote home that he had had a drink with one of the ‘old buckskin planters’, a Scot who ‘was sent away by Cromwell to New England as a slave from Dumbar [
sic
]. Living now in Woodbridge like a Scottish Laird, wishes his countrymen and his Native Soyle very well tho’ he never intends to see it.’3

Following Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the threat of transportation might have lifted over Scottish dissenters. It was not to be. Charles II, who had only a few years earlier signed a covenant supporting Presbyterianism, quickly moved to re-establish episcopacy, rule of the church by a hierarchy of bishops. For twenty years, the Church in Scotland had been run along Presbyterian lines. Now it seemed that the Scottish wish for the liberty to worship in their own manner was again to be thwarted.

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From the year of the Restoration of the monarchy, concerted efforts were made to enforce Anglican disciplines upon the Church of Scotland. Serious disruption followed. In 1670, a law was passed making it mandatory that anyone with knowledge of conventicles, or religious gatherings, should divulge such information to the authorities. This was widely disobeyed. Soon prisons and tollbooths were overflowing with prisoners. Threats of deportation were widely issued, though just how many people were actually transported is hard to estimate.

One case highlights differences between the Anglican authorities and Presbyterian population. The friends of sixty or more men about to be transported interceded upon their behalf to two of the archbishops. These being ‘good merciful’ men, they reaffirmed the sentence.4 A London merchant, Ralph Williamson, petitioned for the right to sell the sentenced men off for the best price. His request was granted and the Virginia Governor was instructed to waive his colony’s prohibition on criminals so that the Covenanters might be imported. Williamson carried his human cargo to London for sale, only to discover that no ship’s captain on the North Atlantic run would take the Covenanters, for feeling ran high in favour of the dissenters. Money was raised at church services and they were finally returned to Scotland.

Williamson also returned, the poorer and wiser for his pains.

Williamson’s experiences might help to explain the mystery with which we began this chapter: Captain Teddico’s decision to take the
Crown
on a perilous voyage to the Orkneys rather than plot a southerly course to London. For what if Teddico had not intended to take his cargo all the way to the Indies but rather to sell it to American agents in England? Perhaps he had heard about the hostile reception that Williamson had received the previous year and decided to take his human cargo around the north of Scotland and down the west coast to sell in Liverpool or Bristol.

Perhaps he felt the perils of the sea were preferable to the perfidy of London traders.

As the royal will began to be felt, dissent quickly spread, particularly in south-west Scotland, where congregations gathered to hear sermons given by banned preachers. Some of 162

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these religious protestors were of an extreme form of Covenanter and the army was deployed to track down and break up these illegal assemblies. In Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Galloway, the King’s policy led to an atmosphere of suspicion, to informers and the threat of imprisonment or deportation. Some skirmishes exploded into armed rebellion.

In 1679, a troop of dragoons was dispatched to disperse a large conventicle reported to be mustering outside Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. When the dragoons reached the spot that intelligence had indicated, a boggy moor called Drumclog, they were met by a large religious congregation protected by 250 armed men.

The Covenanters were ready for trouble. Armed with an array of weapons ranging from muskets to pitchforks, they managed to see off the dragoons, who found themselves mired in the boggy ground. The victory was not much more than a brief skirmish, with few casualties, but it acted as the catalyst by which many more took to arms. Within a week, several thousand had gathered at Bothwell Bridge, by the Clyde in Lanarkshire.

Instead of forging themselves into an army, however, the rebels turned themselves into a religious debating society. As the government forces gathered, the rebels became increasingly fragmented, bickering over the role of more moderate Presbyterians in their midst – all in the drive to create a spiritually pure ‘God’s Army’. The numbers of combined rebel forces reached at one point perhaps 7,000 or more. But by the time the battle commenced, they were down to 4,000, with many having simply drifted away. In the event, the divine spark was not with the dissenters during the battle. The government forces, commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, now outnumbered them. Numbers hardly mattered, though, for the rebel force was badly commanded and lacked discipline on the field of battle as much as it had beforehand.

With the rebel infantry quickly abandoned by its cavalry, the fight was soon over. Four hundred foot were killed and the army broke into disarray, many fleeing with their commanders.

Monmouth issued orders to prevent more bloodshed and 1,200

rebels were taken prisoner.

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The fate of the prisoners was not dissimilar to that of those imprisoned in Durham Cathedral. They were marched east to Edinburgh, where, as the city’s prisons could not take so many, they were imprisoned in a makeshift gaol at the southern end of Greyfriars Kirkyard. Several Covenanters who were already wanted for crimes against the state were hanged in the city’s Grassmarket. For the remainder, imprisonment soon became a trial of endurance. Their prison amounted to little more than a walled pen, open to the sky, so that the inmates were at the mercy of the elements. Some townsfolk took pity on them and threw scraps of food over the prison walls. But as summer turned to autumn and on to winter, the future looked bleak for the prisoners.

Several hundred of the Covenanters agreed to sign a bond to relinquish their dissenting ways and were set free. Of the remainder, some died. The survivors who still refused to denounce the covenant were sentenced to transportation and slavery in the colonies. These were the men who were shipwrecked in Orkney.

According to
A Cloud of Witnesses
, a compilation of names and stories of numbers of those who were punished for their part in the Covenanting rebellion in 1712, from 1678 onwards

‘there were banished to be sold for slaves, for the same cause for which others suffered death at home, of men and women about 1,700’.5 Of these, many survived their servitude and went on to settle in America. Some of those transported even made it home to Scotland. Among them was the Covenanter farmer John Mathieson, transported for ‘converse with rebels’. Mathieson was one of thirty who were transported to Carolina. He was deported in a ship owned or chartered by a notorious Glasgow merchant, Walter Gibson, in the summer of 1684. Some time before he died around 1709, Mathieson wrote his story, which was published a century later in a collection of dying testimonies.6 ‘I became acquainted with some of these who were declared rebels, and then I was to understand matters better, and be as they were in judgment and practice . . .’