Island Prisoners of the English Republic

This chapter shows how the victors in the civil wars emulated the royalist regime by isolating enemies in island prisons. Victims of the Commonwealth and Protectorate included cavalier conspirators sent to the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands, religious radicals held on the Isle of Wight and Scilly, and dissident army officers exiled to Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man. Revolutionary England supported a chain of offshore prisons, where inmates often likened themselves to the godly prisoners of Scripture. Sufferers included the Leveller John Lilburne, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers, the Unitarian John Biddle, and the republican Robert Overton. Some construed their prison island as Patmos, and Oliver Cromwell’s England at Babylon.

Refuge and Resistance in Times of Troubles

This chapter examines the military history and political allegiance of England’s islands in the age of civil wars and revolution. When English loyalties fractured in the 1640s, the islands too became divided between king and parliament. Some changed hands several times in this often-overlooked theatre of operations. The Isle of Wight and Guernsey (except its castle) were swiftly secured for parliament, but Jersey, the Isles of Scilly, Anglesey, and the Isle of Man became royalist strongholds, until they eventually fell. Defeated cavaliers found refuge in the islands, before retreating to the Continent. The presence of Prince Charles on Scilly and then on Jersey in 1646, and his return to Jersey after the regicide as king-in-exile, made those islands places of national, dynastic, and diplomatic significance.

Puritan Martyrs in Island Prisons

This chapter examined the material conditions and spiritual responses of the first victims of island incarceration in the reign of Charles I. When the state imprisoned the lawyer William Prynne on Jersey, the minister Henry Burton on Guernsey, and the physician John Bastwick in the Isles of Scilly for the crime of seditious libel, it raised their profile as ‘puritan martyrs’ and pioneered a new kind of political detention. Their experience shed new light on London’s use of its island facilities. Bastwick’s isolation was most acute, but Burton and Prynne found means to write during three years of punitive exile, while family members lobbied on the prisoners’ behalf.

Interregnum Assets

This chapter examines the garrison governments that managed most islands during the 1650s, following parliament’s victory in the English civil war. Customary constitutional arrangements were overridden, and island culture became both anglicized and militarized, as the revolutionary state sought to incorporate the periphery into a national administration. While giving lip service to local traditions of law and governance, the republican regime in London appointed English army officers to rule the islands. The new military governors had limited tolerance for insular peculiarities, which nonetheless survived their administrations. Island constitutional issues, as always, were shaded with ideological preference and laced with self-interest, as inhabitants of Jersey, Guernsey, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Wight, and the Isle of Man sparred with their masters in London.

God’s Islands

This chapter examines the religious culture and ecclesiastical arrangements of various island communities, showing how devotional activities and godly discipline were affected by politics and custom. The Isle of Wight was part of the Diocese of Winchester, with patterns of conformity and dissent similar to those of the mainland. Lundy was extra-parochial, and forgotten by the bishops of Exeter. The Scillies, too, belonged to the diocese of Exeter, but episcopal influence was almost invisible. The Isle of Man had its own bishop, but godly conformity was rarely attained. Religious radicals reached most islands in the decades of revolution, and lingered or revived in the later seventeenth century. The Channel Islands, as ever, were anomalous, having adopted a Presbyterian discipline under Elizabeth I. Jersey was brought into conformity with England’s prayer book and canons, at least officially, in the reign of James I, but Presbyterianism continued in Guernsey until the Restoration. Each island experienced conflicts in the later seventeenth century over worship, discipline, conformity, and dissent. The disputes of laity and clergy, deans and bailiffs, and governors and the godly formed an offshore drama against the continuing development of the national Church of England.

Introduction

The Introduction locates major islands in the seas around England and indicates how their relationships to the rest of the kingdom reflected legacies of history, jurisdictional peculiarities. constitutional arrangements, foreign wars, and commerce. It previews island involvement in the stresses and struggles of English history associated with state formation, Reformation, Revolution, Restoration, and modernity. The Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man and other offshore territories were difficult to administer and sometimes prone to neglect. Yet their strategic positions gave them value and importance that far outweighed their size. Though English governments saw the islands as appurtenances or dependencies of the state, the islanders more often regarded their homes as privileged places.

Charles I on the ‘Ile of Wait’

This chapter deals with the remarkable year-long imprisonment of King Charles himself on the Isle of Wight, after his defeat in the English civil war. It examines the conditions of the king’s confinement in Carisbrooke Castle, his relations with his captors, and his attempts to escape from the island that a contemporary cartoonist called ‘the Ile of Wait’. The Isle of Wight became a centre of national attention during this fatal twilight of the Stuart regime. Aided by royalist intriguers, including his servant Henry Firebrace and the spy Jane Whorwood, the king sought to outwit his keeper, the parliamentary governor Robert Hammond, without success.

Fortress Islands

This chapter traces the military history of England’s islands from Elizabethan times to the civil war. It considers the vulnerability of the islands to foreign invasion and their utility as bases of English power. Fortifications were regularly strengthened in times of threat and suffered neglect in intervals of peace. Militarized islands had garrison economies, with substantial investment from London. This chapter examines the shifting deployment of ordnance and soldiery, the condition of castles and garrisons, and their role in England’s wars. Some of the jurisdictional issues addressed in earlier chapters had implications for national security, as island governors marshalled forces and braced for attack.

Lundy

This chapter serves as a micro-history of a little-known island, and as a prologue to the main account. The questions of ownership and jurisdiction, defence and occupation, piracy, dependence, and independence that troubled this small outpost in the Bristol Channel prefigured the problems of the rest of England’s island fringe. Colourful occupiers of Lundy Island included the pirate king Thomas Salkeld, the mining entrepreneur Thomas Bushell, and the puritan politician Lord Saye and Sele. Long held by the Grenville family, Lundy saw a civil war in microcosm in the mid-seventeenth century, as royalist and parliamentary forces vied for control. It then suffered long periods of neglect, interspersed by attempts at pasturage, occasional raids by marauders, and short-lived assertions of sovereignty.

Islands in an Island Empire

This concluding chapter returns to the problem of anomalous and competing jurisdictions in a world of quickening economy, expanding global ambition, and extended foreign wars. Looking forward through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the present, it considers the survival and mutation of distinctive offshore legal arrangements, amid the changing relationships of the archipelagic periphery, the metropolitan core, and the international order. Like other parts of the expanding British world, the islands gave allegiance to English authorities while maintaining their distinctive characters. Island communities prospered with naval, military, and commercial investment, and developed as desirable places to live or visit. From London’s point of view, the islands could appear as liabilities as much as assets, resources as well as responsibilities, costs as much as benefits. Though modernized and better connected, England’s islands remain, to varying degrees, as they always were, strange, separate, and perversely independent.