#cromwell was not just anyone; he was the most powerful councilor at court and the most direct connection to her father she had

[fideidefenswhore]

After that last ask about Cromwell’s involvement, I’m really curious how you’d characterise Mary’s relationship with him overall?

Because I’ve seen some historians suggest things were - on the whole - more conciliatory, whilst others have seen it as just another bullying minister in a line of them for Mary.

And yeah I’m just interested in how you’d describe it!

The "bullying minister" is more in line with some older pop history, like Carolly Erickson, but Mary's biographers do tend to take a more cynical view...

Chapuys was informed he must persuade Mary to sign the articles [...] The ambassador, his tongue firmly in his cheek, responded that he thought Mary would take more notice of Cromwell, who was like a second father to her. In fact, Cromwell was more like a wicked uncle. He sent Mary a letter that was both uncompromising and threatening. [...] The prospect of abandonment by Cromwell [...] finally broke Mary's resolve.

Her correspondence with him after her capitulation was cordial and warm. But I don't think she would've forgotten that he promoted the cause of her mother's demotion, any more than she would've forgotten for anyone else. She's aware that he's the most influential person with her father at this point, that's why she uses him as an intermediary on matters of finances and such in the coming year(s).

Like her relationship with her second stepmother, I think it's important to consider the self-fashioning: she knows everything she writes will be relayed to her father.

Mary sent Cromwell a letter of thanks in effecting her reconciliation. Surprisingly, she did not take up the offer obviously made by either letter or messenger for new clothes. She told him she had written to her father saying she required no more clothes than her father's favour.

Again, we know she'll be asking Cromwell to ask Henry to send her more funds later in the year, so this could suggest various possibilities...1) she wasn't so destitute of clothes during AB's reign as Chapuys suggested, and/or 2) Henry hasn't been quite so generous absent of her influence as Chapuys has suggested, so she's hedging on asking for anything further than what has been granted on the hope it will be offered and that she doesn't have to later be in the position of 'beggar', and/or 3) she's being intentionally self-abasing/humble as a matter of self-fashioning (not necessarily 'sincerely' thankful).

Mary does thank him for his kindness to her servant and her mother's. But I don't necessarily think this means their relationship was completely beneficial to Mary's well-being...it's likely that as Cromwell is "stringing Chapuys along", he's likewise doing the same to Mary, as late as August that year still telling him that Henry will name her heir to the throne. Charles V seemed to take a more realistic view, even from farther away: "he doubted Cromwell's sincerity in promoting either Mary's marriage to Dom Luis or her restoration the succession".

There's often an anachronism of Mary's life 1536- being 'fairly tranquil'. But what follows is the execution of her chamberlain in connection to the Pilgrimage, and Cromwell was very active in carrying out Henry's will in regards to reprisals for that rebellion. We don't know what she felt about that, nor how much blame she felt was due, and to whom. Maybe she believed, underneath all the courtly politesse towards Cromwell, that much like AB, he was a corrupting influence on her father...or, maybe not. Later on, he's extremely active in the reprisals of the "Exeter Conspiracy", which led to the arrests and executions of many of her supporters and friends. How did she feel about Cromwell's role in this? Again, this is all speculation, but I don't necessarily, personally believe her only emotion towards Cromwell was gratitude.

Elizabeth Seymour asked her to be godmother to her son, but it's hard to know how suggestive that is of Mary being an ally /of an affinity/friendly with the Cromwells, and/or the Seymours. It might also just have been reflective of an honour that Elizabeth wanted conferred on her son; her son was the King's nephew-in-law, it would've been entirely appropriate for his daughter to be his godmother as well, reifying that royal connection.

Cromwell warned Mary (or took her to task, depending on your view) that her lodging foreigners in her household without permission from Henry made her suspect to him. He also instructed her to meet Charles V's ambassadors in 1538, and then to inform him exactly what they had said. Mary seems to have perhaps 'technically' (what did they say, vs what did they write) followed his instructions, but ultimately defied them (she either spoke in a language her ladies did not know, or slipped them a letter apprising them of 'secret matters'). He later sent instructions to 'sound Cleves in regard to a marriage for Mary with the Duke'.

In 1540, Mary thanked him again for looking after her own interests. It was to be the last time she did so. These are Melita Thomas' last remarks on the subject:

From Mary's letters to Cromwell, and the presents exchanged between them, we can infer that they were personally on good terms [...] Mary never sought to undermine or circumvent his power with Henry. It is impossible to know whether, secretly, she hated him as the author of the destruction of papal authority, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or whether she was sincerelly grateful to him for effecting the reconciliation with Henry. [...]

Interesting, but I don't think 1) Mary had enough power or influence to undermine or circumvent Cromwell's power, even had she wanted to, and 2) "sincere hatred" and "sincere gratitude" are not mutually exclusive emotions, necessarily. Even if it was more the former, she would have been disabused on the notion (if she held it), that he was the sole influence responsible for the destruction of what/those she held dear (much like she was in 1536); because days after Cromwell's execution, Dr Abell, her mother's chaplain and supporter, and her own former tutor and supporter, Dr Fetherstone, were executed.

[earlyandoftenpodcast]

(Pictured: the territorial changes of Carolina, later split into two colonies. The Albemarle region, where North Carolina was founded, is circled in red.)

We move down south for the creation of North Carolina, the first of the post-Restoration colonies, peopled by hardy outcasts from Virginia. When a dispute over taxation meshes with a constitutional crisis in the young colony, the result is rebellion. Or is it?

>>>Direct audio link<<<

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 14: Culpeper’s Rebellion.

Last time, we wrapped up the first few decades of New England’s history, and I’m afraid I have to issue a small correction. Last episode, I said that in some towns in Massachusetts married women had on average more than 9 children each. That was correct, but what wasn’t correct was when I said that that meant over half of women therefore had more than 9 children. That would’ve been true if 9 had been the median, but it wasn’t the median it was the mean. So that was incorrect. Thanks to tumblr user Deusvulture for catching that.

Today, I’m going to begin a new set of episodes, this time about the Restoration colonies, which were created in the years after the English Civil War. That includes the Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, which were formed out of the Dutch colony of New Netherland after its capture by the English. And it also includes North and South Carolina, which were founded together as a single colony. That’ll be the topic for the next two episodes.

Well, this episode will focus on North Carolina and the next one will focus on South Carolina. From the start, the two were governed separately, even though they were technically part of the same colony. They wouldn’t be formally divided until the 1700s, but I’m just going to call them North and South Carolina, for convenience’s sake.

So. We begin in 1660. With Charles securely on his throne, England was finally escaping the uncertainty of the last two decades. Policy makers had space to look to the future and to look abroad. We’ve already seen how they accepted the Chesapeake colonies and New England back into the fold.

They also took care to strengthen the mercantile system, in order to more tightly bind the colonies to England. Beginning in 1651 under Cromwell, but especially in the 1660s under Charles II, Parliament passed a series of so-called Navigation Acts. The Navigation Acts said that England’s various colonies were only permitted to trade with England itself, and not with anyone else, for instance with the Dutch in New Netherland. And shipping had to be done on English vessels. Another act in the 1670s put a tariff on the export of tobacco. Needless to say, these policies were very unpopular in the colonies, since they were paying more in order to benefit others.

But England didn’t just want to tighten control over its current possessions. Expansion was a goal as well. The King owed a lot of money and a lot of favors, and new land in the New World would be a good way to pay down his debts without actually spending much money. Certainly they coveted New Netherland, which separated their current colonies. But they also wanted to press south from the Chesapeake, into what is now North and South Carolina. The failed colony of Roanoke had been located in North Carolina, but the region was still mostly uncolonized by Europeans.

A group of eight wealthy and well-connected men had approached Charles with a plan to colonize Carolina. One of these men was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury. The Earl of Shaftesbury had in his employ a young John Locke -- the same Locke who would go on to become one of the most important philosophers of the modern world. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Locke doesn’t really enter our story until next episode.

More importantly for today’s story, another one of these investors was our old friend William Berkeley, recently restored to his post as Governor of Virginia and currently in England on business. His older brother John, a close friend of the King, was another of the investors.

These eight men together managed to convince a somewhat reluctant King to give them an extremely generous charter for lands which stretched from Virginia almost down to Spanish Florida. Thus in 1663 they became the Lords Proprietor of Carolina, and they ruled their new province under the same legal terms as Lord Baltimore ruled Maryland. That is, nearly absolutely in principle.

However, the new proprietors of Carolina had no desire to emulate the Baltimores’ active management of their colony. Instead, they wished to operate more as real estate owners. They had the right to all this land, so why not just sit back and let others pay them for it? Let others take on the risks of colonization. Well, there were a few independent expeditions sent to Carolina, but they were slow in coming and the settlements they built didn’t last long anyway. So for a while, there wasn’t too much activity going on.

There was only one real center of population, and that was in North Carolina. These settlers lived along the Albemarle Sound, which was an estuary about 80 miles south of Jamestown. Basically it was the next big body of water if you moved down the coast. They had been there since the 1650s, so before the colony of Carolina was actually created. The settlers of the Albemarle were mostly former servants who had come down from Virginia in search of land, plus some Quakers.

I’ve mentioned before the importance of good harbors in the development of colonial America. Well, the harbors in North Carolina were terrible. The Albemarle Sound was too shallow, and its constantly shifting sandbars were a serious danger to shipping. So the region languished economically. Goods had to be shipped to Virginia before they could be exported to England, raising costs. And you could hardly even get to Virginia by land, since the two areas were separated by the so-called Great Dismal Swamp, which lived up to its name.

So there was plenty of land in North Carolina, yes, but there wasn’t much you could do with it, at least not profitably. Thus there were few migrants. The population was perhaps a thousand in 1660. And those who did come were often outcasts from Virginia. Runaway servants, debtors, etc. The region therefore developed a reputation for unruliness. A later governor of Virginia said that North Carolina “alwayes was and is the sinke of America, the Refuge of our Renagadoes”.

The region was all backcountry, basically. Isolated farms in a big swamp. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, went there on a missionary expedition, and his journals describe a rough people living in very rough terrain. He mentioned one woman who would “carry a gunn in the woods and kill deer, [and] turkeys . . . shoot [down] wild cattle, catch and tye hoggs, [and] knock down beeves [slaughter cattle] with an ax.’’ Apparently, she could ‘‘perform the most manfull Exercises as well as most men in those parts.’’ So not quite the aristocratic gentility of Virginia’s First Families.

But although the region was poor, it was more egalitarian than the other southern colonies. Three quarters of North Carolinians owned land, a huge contrast to Virginia at this point. Naturally, there were few servants and slaves. And relations with the Indians were actually pretty good, perhaps thanks to the fact that unlike elsewhere, there wasn’t a huge ongoing influx of new settlers.  

Probably North Carolina wasn’t too different from the outskirts of Virginia, the parts furthest away from the big plantations. But in Virginia those outskirts didn’t have power, while North Carolina was nothing but those outskirts. So the happenstance of how the border was drawn wound up making a big difference in the development of an independent political culture.

When William Berkeley returned to Virginia, he was tasked by the other proprietors with the administration of North Carolina, because he was so much closer. He was in charge of laying out the basic structure of government, as well as appointing a governor. Unsurprisingly, he kept very close to the familiar Virginian model of doing things. Governor, Councilors, an Assembly with powers of taxation. All that good stuff. The man he chose to be governor, John Drummond, had, interestingly enough, started out as an indentured servant. He had even tried to escape once, only to be caught and publicly whipped in punishment. But he had risen through the ranks after attaining his freedom, serving in various government posts.

The new Governor Drummond went south, to the Albemarle. There may have been some rudimentary government before he arrived, but it wouldn’t have been much.

We don’t have many records of his time in office, but he may have been a bit of a populist, as befits a former indentured servant. According to Noeleen McIlvenna, “folklore holds that he invited every man in the region to the first meeting of the Albemarle Assembly in February 1665, a gathering held under an oak tree on a knoll overlooking Hall’s Creek in Pasquotank.” And later on, the Assembly, which was unicameral, would just meet in member’s homes, since there was no capitol building. And courts were sometimes simply held in taverns as well.

You won’t be surprised to hear that North Carolina had a quite different political culture than in the Chesapeake, despite their common origins. There were no big planters to appease, so the laws reflected the interests of smaller freeholders. For instance, a law was passed limiting the size of plantations to no more than 660 acres, to prevent the formation of large estates like in Virginia. Another law was passed protecting debtors, who were after all common in the province. Laws ultimately had to be approved by the proprietors, but in general the Assembly did its own thing with little outside interference.

However, the greater availability of land and the greater political openness weren’t enough to overcome the Albemarle’s considerable economic disadvantages and the colony showed no signs of growth, dashing the hopes of the Lords Proprietor. And after a few years Drummond and Berkeley had a falling out. Berkeley removed him from office and Drummond returned to Virginia.

Berkeley’s next choice for governor, Samuel Stephens, had actually been born in Virginia in the early 1620s, but he had even worse luck. He died suddenly in 1670 and his wife quickly remarried to Governor Berkeley. Berkeley was losing his interest in Carolina, so instead of appointing a third governor he just let the Assembly there nominate an acting governor instead.

The proprietors other than Berkeley were also losing their interest in the Albemarle.

I’ll discuss this more next episode, but it was around this time that the proprietors decided to take a more active role in the colonization of South Carolina. Their hopes that others would do the hard work for them hadn’t panned out, and so they decided to fund a new settlement on their own. The south was starting to seem more promising than the north.

They also wrote, with the help of John Locke, a new, very elaborate constitution for Carolina. This constitution technically applied to the Albemarle, but in practice it never went into effect there. (It also never really went into effect in the south, but I’ll talk about that next time.) The whole thing was basically suspended indefinitely, since it was far too complex to be workable in such a small society. So without a formal constitution in place, North Carolina’s government was authorized instead by various sets of instructions sent over by the Lords Proprietor. But those instructions left a lot of gaps, since they were dealing with specific issues here and there rather than laying out broad principles of government. So basically they were constitutionally winging it.

But here’s how things worked in general, at least at the start.

There was a governor at the top, of course. In principle he would be chosen by the proprietors, but in the event of a vacancy the Council could appoint an acting governor, which happened often enough.

Below the governor was the Council. Some of the Councilors were appointed by the governor, while others were appointed by the elected Assemblymen, which gave the people a somewhat larger share in the higher levels of government than elsewhere in the South at the time. Like in the early days of Virginia, the Councilmen were necessarily fairly close to the people of the colony, and not in a social class of their own.

Below the council were the elected delegates to the Assembly. North Carolina was divided into four regions, each of which could elect four representatives to the Assembly. A few other minor posts like constable were elected as well, although there were no local governments yet, since there was no need.

All freemen could vote, not just those who owned land. And it’s unclear whether voting was by ballot or not.

So, overall, not too complicated, though perhaps more complicated than you’d expect for such a small colony. There were serious weaknesses, though. Most especially, the procedures for selecting new governors were seriously confused. These sorts of ambiguities helped turn a rivalry between two factions into a small, bloodless rebellion, which broke out at almost exactly the same time as both Bacon’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War.

The narrative of Culpeper’s Rebellion is rather confused. The two main accounts I’ve seen differ substantially, but I’ll try to synthesize everything as best I can. Just know that the sources are a bit thin and that they require some guesswork to turn into a narrative.

I mentioned that the English government was starting to to more strongly enforce the mercantile system. The colonies could now trade only with England, and only on English ships, plus they had to pay more in taxes. There were even new taxes on trade between the colonies themselves.

North Carolina was particularly hard hit, since its tobacco had to be sent up to Virginia before it was exported to Europe. Naturally, smuggling soon took off, often thanks to the help of New England merchants. Even members of the Council in North Carolina were happy to participate in smuggling. But in general, the colonists were concerned, and not just about the Navigation Acts. They were worried about taxes. They were worried that the Lords Proprietor would take a more active hand in governing the region. They were worried about falling back under the domination of Virginia. Basically, they were worried.

But for a few years nothing much came of those worries. Smuggling had allowed them to avoid the costs of the Navigation Acts, and in any case no one had cared enough about North Carolina to bother enforcing the new rules. No one had really asked them to collect customs and so the government just hadn’t.

But finally, word came down to the acting governor, John Jenkins, that the Albemarle had to shape up and start enforcing the law. So Jenkins appointed some men to collect the revenue, including one guy with the excellent name Valentine Bird. But neither Bird nor anyone else actually bothered to do their job and no money was raised. That maintained their popularity with the common folk, at least.

It seems like North Carolina was dividing into two factions. On the one side, you had most of the colonists in what might be called the anti-proprietary faction, which was opposed to the interests of the proprietors and opposed to the enforcement of the Navigation Acts. That included men like Governor Jenkins, as well as John Culpeper himself, after whom the rebellion would be named, although he wasn’t the main leader or anything.

Culpeper was a surveyor from Barbados who had settled in South Carolina in 1670. He was a member of the Assembly there, but he soon became disenchanted with the leadership in Charleston. After he helped lead a failed protest against the governor, he was stripped of all his land. So he headed north to the Albemarle and settled there instead. He continued his anti-authority streak by becoming one of the leaders of the anti-proprietary faction.

On the other hand, you had a smaller number of men in the proprietary faction. They were led by a man named Thomas Eastchurch. The proprietary faction supported the collection of customs and the rights of the Lords Proprietor. I don’t think that the proprietary faction loved the proprietors or anything. For instance, another leader of the faction, Thomas Miller, an Irish apothecary, called them “turned fooles or sotts.” It’s just that the proprietary faction saw more benefit in sticking with the current arrangement. (Plus both men had personal grievances against a large number of their fellow colonists, which may have led them naturally into opposition. It’s easy to look back at the struggles of the past and assume they were all about ideology, but personal quarrels could matter just as much, especially in such a small colony.)

In any case, in 1674 Jenkins’s term as acting governor expired and he stepped down. The Proprietors, busy with other affairs, neglected to name a replacement. Elections were held and Eastchurch, who became Speaker of the Assembly, took it upon himself to begin acting as governor, although he didn’t actually become the acting governor, which would have required approval from the Council, I believe.

So even though Eastchurch’s authority was dubious already, he went well beyond just attending to routine administration. Not only did he begin enforcing the Navigation Acts and collecting customs, he also had the former governor Jenkins arrested on no particular charges.

Naturally, this outraged the colonists, who began plotting among themselves about what to do. Pretty soon they broke former governor Jenkins out of jail. The colonists then elected him “Generalissime”. He took command of the little rebellion and together they took back control of the government from Eastchurch, who fled to England to complain.

Okay, but let’s take a step back. I called this a rebellion, but were they actually rebelling against the proprietary government? After all, Eastchurch appeared to be seriously overstepping his authority. Now, the legal situation here is complicated but I’ll try to explain it as best I can.

As far as I can tell, the actual legal situation was this: there was no actual legal situation. North Carolina was still technically under the authority of John Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions, but those had been indefinitely suspended in practice. And as we’ve already seen, the proprietors had been lax in doing things like “making sure to appoint a governor” or “formally authorizing the Assembly”. As a result, the existence of any government at all in the Albemarle was of dubious legitimacy. Things went okay for a few years, since both the colonists and the proprietors were content to just keep things going the way they were, but when that amity broke down, the constitutional problems suddenly became acute.

Eastchurch had claimed the powers of the governor, but that was arbitrary. Even the Assembly that had made him Speaker had been elected under technically improper circumstances. Of course Jenkins and his faction didn’t have any real authority either. No one did, as best I can tell. They did claim popular support, which was true, although Carolina was no democracy. I guess if they’d wanted to, they could’ve claimed to be operating under a social contract in the absence of higher authority, like the Mayflower colonists, but that would’ve just moved the dispute to the realm of philosophy.

But even if the anti-proprietary faction lacked real authority, it certainly had real power. After taking back the Albemarle they then accused Eastchurch’s associate Miller of treason and blasphemy, for some anti-monarchical things he had said. Culpeper took him up to Virginia to stand trial, I guess since Berkeley was a proprietor, but this was right as Bacon’s Rebellion was breaking out. Governor Berkeley quickly acquitted Miller, who also left for England to join Eastchurch.

By the way, John Drummond, the first governor of North Carolina was still in Virginia at the time. He became one of Bacon’s biggest supporters, and after the rebellion was suppressed he then became one of the 24 men old Governor Berkeley had executed. It was a very up and down career I suppose.

Anyway, while in England, Eastchurch and Miller met with the Lords Proprietor of Carolina and convinced them that they were in the right and that the anti-proprietary faction was in the wrong, which was probably not too difficult. The proprietors officially made Eastchurch governor and sent him back to Carolina.

But while he and Miller were sailing back, they stopped at the island of Nevis [NEE-vis] in the Caribbean. There, Eastchurch quickly met and married a widow with a “considerable fortune”. Eastchurch suddenly found that he had better things to do than try to run a dirt poor, marginal colony where most people hated his guts and so he deputized Miller to go and govern North Carolina in his stead, although this was an illegal appointment, since the Council had to approve acting governors when the real governor was absent. So again, North Carolina lacked proper authority.

But when Miller arrived in the Albemarle he nevertheless summoned the current Assembly to notify them that he was now acting governor, and then he dismissed the Assembly and refused to recall them. He began running things on his own, appointing his friends to various offices and fining people for violations of the Navigation Acts. He had his opponents convicted on various charges without proper trials. And when he called for new elections to the Assembly, he used those convictions to disqualify his enemies from holding office, as well as making other alterations to electoral procedures which had no basis in law.

So when the elections were held, the colonists ignored Miller’s changes and just elected anti-proprietary men anyway. However, Miller only counted those votes that had been cast according to his new rules, and so he declared his faction to be the victors regardless.

In response to these outrages, the settlers once again began meeting in secret to figure out how to get rid of Miller, this time partly under the leadership of John Culpeper. The rebels soon captured Miller yet again, along with his top officials. They then issued a manifesto, called the “Remonstrance from the inhabitants of the Pasquotank area concerning their grievances against Thomas Miller”, signed by 30 men. Their very first complaint was that Miller had “denied a free election of an Assembly”. The rest of the brief complaint was about taxation and abuses of office of course, but it’s notable that elections made the list.

The counties of the Albemarle then elected a new Assembly under the old rules. The anti-proprietary faction, of course, won handily. A few hotheads wanted to declare the Fundamental Constitutions overthrown, but cooler heads prevailed. They did prepare to try Miller for treason and blasphemy again, but as this was all happening word came that Eastchurch had just arrived in Virginia and was preparing to assert his authority as governor. Unlike Miller, Eastchurch had a much stronger claim to legitimate authority.

The Carolinians nevertheless prepared to raise a militia against any invading force, but then Eastchurch promptly got sick and died. And in any case Berkeley’s replacement as governor was none too keen on sending troops through the Great Dismal Swamp.

But with that threat out of the way, yet another one cropped up. One of Miller’s men escaped custody to Virginia and then to England, where he too appeared before the proprietors. He tried to paint the rebellion as an uprising of the lower classes against lawful government, which might pose a threat to English control of its other colonies. But this time the anti-proprietary faction sent representatives as well. They plead their case and pledged loyalty to the proprietors.

The proprietors just wanted this to go away. They didn’t want to waste time on an unprofitable part of their colony any more than they had to. One of the old proprietors had sold his share in Carolina to another man, Seth Sothel [SO-thul]. This new proprietor agreed to go to the Albemarle and serve as governor, which seemed to the Lords Proprietor like a neat way to resolve the issue, but while en route to North Carolina, Sothel was kidnapped by Turkish pirates and taken to Algeria. (Really. Pirates abducted the governor of North Carolina. But he’ll be back in a later episode, by the way.)

So instead of Sothel, the proprietors instead named as governor John Harvey, a longtime resident of the Albemarle who had remained neutral in the crisis. North Carolina finally, after several years, had a governor with uncontested authority who was actually physically present in the colony. They also sent instructions formally authorizing the government.

That should have resolved things, but then Miller escaped from prison, where he had been stuck for two years after he had been convicted on those treason and blasphemy charges. He too went to England, but instead of going to the Lords Proprietor he went to the Privy Council, the King’s top advisors. This was a serious escalation, and the Privy Council took the matter seriously. Well, they didn’t care about who ran North Carolina so much as about that lost customs revenue. It wasn’t much money really, but the Crown didn’t want to let them get away with it nevertheless. They delegated the matter to the Committee of Trade and Foreign Plantations to investigate.

As it happened, John Culpeper, who had been appointed as North Carolina’s new customs officer, was in England at the time and he was arrested. He was the only North Carolinian at hand and so at his trials he sort of represented the rebellion as a whole. Because he was the only major figure to be charged with anything, the rebellion came to be named after him, but he wasn’t the equivalent of Bacon or anything. There was no single leader. But it was still Culpeper who stood trial, first for the missing money and then for treason.

You’d think that the proprietors would have sided with Miller and the proprietary faction, but actually they didn’t. Men like Miller were an annoyance who made them look bad. They had supported him and Eastchurch before but they had nothing to show for it. Mostly they just wanted peace and quiet and to make money. The proprietary faction, through its unpopular misrule, had disrupted that. The proprietors preferred to work with men who could actually get support within the colony, so long as they paid their taxes.

So the Lords Proprietor actually sided with the colonists’ right to rebellion, surprisingly enough, though not with their failure to collect customs revenue. The proprietors said that Miller had not been properly in charge, and so rebellion against him wasn’t actually treasonous. If Eastchurch had ever made it back, then rebelling against him might have been treasonous, but he didn’t, and so the power vacuum had remained. This might have actually been the case, though it’s difficult to work through all the legalities, but it’s still a surprise. After all, the anti-proprietary faction was clearly the one acting in contradiction to the will of the proprietors, even if they weren’t technically rebelling.

But according to McIlvenna, it was easier for the proprietors to side with the victorious rebels, so that’s what they did. North Carolina mostly mattered to them insofar as it affected their control over South Carolina, where the money was being made. Apparently keeping the Albemarle quiet was deemed wiser than trying to teach them a lesson.

Anyway, at the trials the proprietors openly supported Culpeper and opposed Miller. In fact, during Culpeper’s treason trial, apparently Lord Shaftesbury “unexpectedly appeared at the Tryall as a witness for the Defendant.” Thus, Culpeper was acquitted and no one was actually punished. As for the customs revenue, some compromise was worked out.

That was essentially the end of the matter, although Miller pressed the issue further, accusing even the Lords Proprietor of colluding with the rebels. Needless to say, his charges went nowhere.

So what was the end result of Culpeper’s Rebellion? What, if anything, had been accomplished?

Well, I’d say that the outcome was fairly ambiguous. The colonists had more or less forced a change in leadership, yes, but in terms of policy the victory seems much more minor. They were, after all, still enmeshed within the overall mercantile system of England, and sooner or later the taxman would prove unavoidable. Nothing about North Carolina’s fundamental situation had changed. That being said, a certain degree of restlessness in the colony was perhaps useful, since it showed that the North Carolinians weren’t just pushovers. Their interests had to be taken into consideration, otherwise they could cause considerable annoyance.

Culpeper’s Rebellion reminds me in particular of the Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey in Virginia back in the 1630s. In both cases there was an ambiguous legal situation with two sides both claiming to be the proper government. In both cases a widely hated governor was ousted in a quick armed coup by the men of the region. That little uprising helped the Virginians win back their Assembly, but it wasn’t a revolution or anything.

When you compare the Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey and Culpeper’s Rebellion to Bacon’s Rebellion, though, you can see why the bloodthirstiness of William Berkeley was rather shocking to contemporaries. Obviously minor rebellions weren’t that uncommon. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they were an accepted part of government or anything, but they were clearly a somewhat regular occurance. The colonists, since they had only a limited say in government, would therefore have to go outside the law to get their grievances taken seriously. And officials, aware that the “rebels” weren’t generally looking to overturn the whole social order, would therefore be relatively merciful when handing out punishments, if only to appease the rest of the colony. The law was important, yes, but it was only one ingredient in the successful running of a colony. Which side of Culpeper’s Rebellion had been legally in the right was in fact a somewhat secondary question.

Obviously this sort of thing could get out of hand, as it did in Maryland sometimes, and in Bacon’s Rebellion. Left unchecked, a rebellion can become a revolution, after all. But excessive harshness could kill a colony’s prospects just as surely. So minor rebellions were an occasional part of life in the colonies, a threat to the existing order, but not an existential threat.

Next episode, we’ll continue the story of the Carolinas, jumping down south to the new settlement of Charleston. Plus a look at the life of the English philosopher John Locke, and his impact on the American colonies. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume II by Charles M. Andrews

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government by David Armitage

"The Sinke of America": Society in the Albemarle Borderlands of North Carolina, 1663—1729 by Jonathan Edward Barth

Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia by Warren M. Billings

History of Elections in the American Colonies by Cortlandt F. Bishop

The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689 by Wesley Frank Craven

Declaration of Independence

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

Thomas Hobbes by Stewart Duncan

The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina by Richard S. Dunn

Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery by James Farr

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina

Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America by Vicki Hsueh

A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660–1713 by Noeleen McIlvenna  

Algernon Sidney: A father of the Declaration of Independence by David Kopel

Legal Aspects of Culpeper’s Rebellion by Mattie Erma E. Parker

Upheaval in Albemarle: The Story of Culpeper's Rebellion 1675-1689 by Hugh F. Rankin

Remonstrance from the inhabitants of the Pasquotank area concerning their grievances against Thomas Miller

Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy by Sharon A. Lloyd and Susanne Sreedhar

In Charleston, Coming to Terms With the Past by Ron Stodghill

Locke's Political Philosophy by Alex Tuckness

The Influence of John Locke's Works by William Uzgalis

John Locke by William Uzgalis

Colonial South Carolina: A History by by Robert M. Weir

American Nations by Colin Woodard