The Lords Proprietors of Carolina

By Susan Keogh

Before there was a North and South Carolina, there was the province of Carolina. The Englishmen who oversaw this vast wilderness in the American colonies were known as the Lords Proprietors. King Charles II provided these eight men of noble blood with a charter to establish a colony there.

The Proprietors were George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle (pictured above), Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton, William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven, Sir George Carteret, Sir William Berkeley, Sir John Colleton, 1st Baronet, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. The Duke of Albemarle’s name was used for Albemarle Point, where Charles Town (modern day Charleston) was first settled. Anthony Ashley Cooper’s name would provide the names of Charleston’s two large, flanking rivers—the Ashley and the Cooper. Each of these men contributed at least £775 sterling, not a small amount in the late seventeenth century, for their Carolina endeavor. These men had “extensive experience at the leading edge of early modern commerce.”

Anthony Ashley Cooper

In S. Max Edelson’s book Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, the author also writes, “The colony’s Proprietors exercised their legal title to Carolina as if the scope of their official authority conveyed the power to implement their schemes for settlement, society, and production. Their dilated visions of exotic commodities, new-world aristocrats, and village communities failed to appreciate how little settlers wished to be subjects.”

The Proprietors envisioned the lowcountry of Carolina as some sort of utopia where a new aristocracy would arise and rule over settlements and farms grouped together. To urge settlers to come to this new world they spread word of fertile soil and wonderful climate, as well as religious freedom. This latter promise enticed some, like the French Huguenots, to come there. The majority of settlers, however, were Englishmen from Barbados where land was becoming scarce due to the sugar plantations there.

The Proprietors had a wide range of ideas on how to make Carolina prosperous and lucrative, most based around agriculture. Silk and wine were two of the ideas nurtured, and commodities like corn thrived. One of the Proprietors’ experimental plantations toyed with growing cotton, ginger, olives, indigo, and sugarcane. The crop that eventually made the colony rich was rice, which thrived in the lowcountry’s flat, marshy land, where rivers, not roads, were thoroughfares in the vast wilderness.

Image attribution LINK

Fifty acres were granted to colonists as well as fifty acres for each free and enslaved dependent. For a small charge, additional acres could be bought, turning a small farm into large landholdings. From these acquisitions, the Proprietors collected quitrents. By 1680, ten years after the start of the colony, about 1,000 white settlers lived in South Carolina. This number would rise to around 6,000 by the end of the century.

Colonists from Barbados accounted for between 300 and 400 of those early settlers. They arrived from a well-established plantation community where shortages of fresh water and arable land made the pull of a new life and opportunity in the Proprietors’ Carolina irresistible. These experienced planters brought their slaves with them and had them planting many of the crops that flourished in the Caribbean—sugarcane, ginger, yams, tobacco, and indigo. In turn, they supplied Barbados with many of the resources it lacked—wood and meat, among other things.

These settlers’ wealthy elites would lead the colony’s revolt against of Proprietary reign. The first thing they did was reject Ashley’s designs of keeping settlers grouped together. The very topography of the land worked against this design—swamps and marshes stretched everywhere, making it impossible to ensure large swaths of arable acreage. So these experienced planters looked for better land, often finding that further inland from settlements like Charles Town, spreading out in resistance to the Proprietors’ scheme of community cohesion.

These colonists “rejected the view of Carolina as a vast plantation in which they were subjects [of the Proprietors]. Instead, they defined the plantation as an independently owned tract in which possession conveyed the power to command people and resources within its boundaries.” This removed them from the hierarchal society Ashley had hoped to engrain and made them into “propertied men who ruled independent domains.” The plantation aristocracy would eventually arise from ranks that had not been envisioned by the Proprietors.

Before rice took root as the driving crop in Carolina in the 1690s, these English planters made money from a familiar source—cattle. “As grossly distorted as Carolina’s version of mixed English farming might appear to agricultural improvers, subsistence-oriented grain production, combined with livestock raising for the market, formed the backbone of the new colony’s economy as it had structured the English rural economy for the better part of two centuries.”

Some historians credit the Proprietors with introducing rice to Carolina. However, its origin more likely should be credited to the enslaved Africans who toiled in the colony. Many of these slaves came from regions of Africa where rice was grown and eaten daily. While these slaves couldn’t have imported the seeds themselves, they certainly had more innate knowledge of cultivating it than their English masters. How such seeds arrived is left to legend, with various stories told.

As the Barbadian planters grew in power, they dominated the Commons House of Assembly and eventually were able to end Proprietary rule in 1719. No doubt their burgeoning power came from the growing value of rice as an exported commodity and the Proprietors’ continued frustration with their economic and social experiment not going according to plan, stymied by independent-thinking settlers. King George I converted the colony’s status to that of a royal colony.

“Planters did not reject the projecting vision for Carolina’s development outright, but as they managed independent plantations, they ignored its goals and left open-ended the ultimate social and economic product of their individual enterprises,” Edelson writes. This independent spirit in the American colonies would eventually lead to its struggle to break from England.

[all images in the Pubic Domain unless otherwise stated]

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When Susan Keogh won an elementary school writing contest and a trip to a regional young writers conference, she hadn’t realized that experience was the beginning of a love affair with words. Keogh was raised in a large family where reading was encouraged. Through her mother’s interest in history, Keogh grew to admire such authors as Michael Shaara and Bruce Catton, a fellow Michigan writer who focused on the American Civil War. So it was no wonder that her first writing credit was a featured article in the magazine America’s Civil War.

Keogh’s most recent time period of historical interest is early colonial America.  She has crafted a series of novels that center around the adventures of Jack Mallory, a young Englishmen who is both pirate and eventually the patriarch of a large rice plantation in the colonial province of Carolina.

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon: from Commoner to Chief Minister

By Cryssa Bazos

Few commoners experienced the meteoric rise in power and influence that Edward Hyde saw. In his career, he had been named Chancellor and advisor to King Charles II, elevated to the peerage as Earl of Clarendon and grandfather to not one but two reigning monarchs, Queen Mary II (1689 to 1694) and Queen Anne (1702 to 1707). He was at heart a historian and a prolific writer; his writings formed a foundation for our understanding of the English Civil War. His most notable history was the History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. But with any unprecedented rise, one must be mindful of the sudden drop.

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
by Adriaen Hanneman;
National Portrait Gallery; NPG 773

Edward Hyde was born in 1609 to a respectable middle-class family of politicians and lawyers from Wiltshire. He continued the family calling and studied law at Oxford, where upon the completion of his studies, he was admitted into the Middle Temple. In the years leading up to the civil war, he was elected to Parliament and spoke up for moderate reform. When the lines were finally drawn, his loyalty aligned him with King Charles I.

During the first Civil War, Hyde was named to the King’s Privy Counsel and given the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1645, with episodes of plague and an encroaching enemy threatening them, the King appointed Hyde as the Prince of Wales’ guardian (the future Charles II), to see his son and heir safely to the west. This was the beginning of a trusted and close advisory relationship between Hyde and Charles II. Together with Richard Fanshawe, the Prince’s secretary, the party fled to Cornwall, and Hyde continued on to Jersey with the Prince. Following the execution of Charles I, Hyde fled to the Continent with his wife and children.

Charles II (de Champaigne)
by Philippe de Champaigne; Licensed under
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Hyde was a staunch Royalist and Anglican, firm in his opposition to the Crown’s enemies. When Charles II sought an alliance with the Presbyterian Scots to win back his throne, Hyde did not support the young King’s choice of bedfellows, nor did he accompany him to Scotland. His reservations proved to be astute. Charles had been little more than a royal prisoner, and by the time he had seized some measure of control over his campaign, it was too late to stop the Cromwellian tide. With the King’s defeat at Worcester, on September 3, 1651, and the Prince of Wales' subsequent narrow escape to the Continent, the Royalist cause was left in shambles.

Over the next eight years, Hyde became a trusted advisor to the King in exile. In much the same way that Cromwell’s spymaster, John Thurloe, groomed a network of spies and intelligence that spread beyond England, Hyde performed a similar service for Charles, though to a lesser extent. To be fair, Thurloe retained complete control of his operation, whereas Hyde had to manoeuvre around rival Royalist factions who resented a commoner’s proximity to the King and who were desperate to deliver the crown to Charles. Hyde was caught between the Queen mother’s people (Henrietta was a great meddler in her son’s affairs) and the faction led by Prince Rupert, with both rival groups actively trying to discredit him. This would become routine even during the Restoration.

In November 1653, responding to an increasingly dysfunctional Parliament back in England, Hyde encouraged the formation of the Sealed Knot, which became the official Royalist organization to restore Charles to the throne. Its founding members were John Belasyse, Richard Willis, William Compton, Henry Hastings, John Russell and Edward Villiers. Reports and instructions were passed through Hyde. The group’s mandate was very much a reflection of Hyde’s moderate policies and at odds with the more action orientated Royalist factions. In the end, the Protectorate proved unsustainable. Following the death of Oliver Cromwell and the disposition of his heir, Richard, the monarchy was restored.

A few months after the Restoration, the Hyde family were at the centre of a royal scandal. Hyde’s eldest daughter, Anne, had entered into a secret liaison with the King’s brother, James, the Duke of York, and had become pregnant. Anne Hyde claimed that James had promised her marriage, though he initially denied it. The couple secretly married on September 3, 1660, causing a major scandal when it was finally discovered. Hyde was horrified. Though Anne was his favourite daughter, a father’s affection did not blind Hyde to the loss of opportunity for England. James was as an asset to England and should have been an instrument to solidify foreign alliances. The scandal gave Hyde’s critics the opportunity to accuse him of orchestrating the affair.

Peter Lely [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Initially, Hyde profited from his daughter’s marriage. Within a year, he became the 1st Earl of Clarendon. Over the next few years, Anne would give birth to daughters Mary and Anne, who would one-day reign as Queens of England. But in the meanwhile, his enemies were looking for ways to remove him from Royal favour.

On July 10, 1663, Hyde was impeached of high treason in the House of Lords. The articles ranged from the political—profiting from policies to the disadvantage of the nation; to the absurd: promoting Charles’s marriage to a barren Queen; to the ridiculous: encouraging Popery (oddly enough, he has been incorrectly credited with the religiously intolerant Clarendon Code which did not favour Catholics). After four days of deliberation, the impeachment was dismissed.

Rather than this eliminating his political problems, it galvanized his detractors and made them more determined to oust him from his position. Concerted rumours of his impending retirement together with his attempt to curtail Charles’s merry court succeeded in eroding his position. In August 1667, the privy seals were taken from him, and the King’s favourite mistress, Barbara Villiers, jeered at him as he left.

Plans to once again impeach Hyde over the second Dutch War reached him in time and he fled to France before they could arrest him. After his departure, an Act of Banishment was passed against him in November 1667. Sadly, he was never allowed to return to see his children and died in France on December 9, 1674.

From commoner to Chancellor to Chief Minister and finally to banished exile, Edward Hyde worked relentlessly to represent the Crown until the rival factions succeeded in bringing him low. In the end, history would remember him as a scholar, historian and grandfather of Queens.

References:

Historical Inquiries Respecting the Character of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England, by George Agar Ellis

Diary of Samuel Pepys

Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640-1660, by Geoffrey Smith.

Royalist Conspiracy, by David Underdown

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Cryssa Bazos is a historical fiction writer and 17th Century enthusiast with a particular interest in the English Civil War. For more stories about that period, visit her blog.