Whether the expedition which Carlyle speaks of as “the unsuccessfulest enterprise Oliver Cromwell ever had concern with,” resulting in our gaining possession of Jamaica, was the outcome of his foreign policy or of religious motives, is not quite clear, but we know that the general who succeeded Venables drew up a formal request, asking that “godly, sober and learned ministers” should be sent out to them, prefacing his request with the words, “Forasmuch as we conceive the propagation of the Gospel was the thing principally aimed and intended in this expedition.” Commending General Fortescue for his “faithfulness and constancy in the midst of other’s miscarriages,” the Protector, alluding to the reproof of God given them in their repulse at St Domingo, characteristically bewails the reports he has received of their avarice, pride, and debauchery, and hopes that a special regard may be so exercised, that virtue and godliness may receive due encouragement, etc.
Whatever zeal for religion the conquerors possessed apparently exhausted itself in iconoclastic outbursts similar to the manner in which the Independents in England earned for themselves immortal obloquy in the mutilation of sacred buildings. Here the victorious soldiers destroyed every Roman Catholic place of worship in the island.
About this time heavy mortality thinned the troops; but the land became repeopled by Cromwell’s coercive Irish campaigns. Two thousand men and women were shipped to Jamaica, whilst in Scotland the sheriffs had orders to “apprehend all known idle, masterless rogues and vagabonds, male and female, and transport them to the island.” The Spaniards, noting the ravages which sickness was making in the troops of their victors, made a futile attempt to regain the island, but General D’Oyley defeated them in 1658 at Rio Nuevo.
In 1666, with the accession of the Merry Monarch, Lord Windsor took measures for the encouragement of an orthodox ministry. Laws were passed regulating ecclesiastical matters and providing liberally for clerical support, all colonies and plantations being then within the episcopal jurisdiction of the Bishop of London.
In 1681, and afterwards, instructions to successive governors declared that “no minister be received in Jamaica without license from the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of London.” But the Jamaica Assembly, which sat two hundred and two years, appreciating the security at which their distance from Whitehall gave them, were by no means a mild and docile legislative body. The absurdity of not being able to get rid of an undesirable clergyman, without the permission of a bishop residing 4000 miles away, caused the passing of an Act which questioned the right of the Bishop of London to suspend either ab officio, or a beneficio, from the island.
Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the State Church in Jamaica was firmly established on a legal basis. In a history dealing with ecclesiastical matters of this period, it appears that the Church was regarded by the Assembly who voted the necessary funds for its maintenance as a respectable and ornamental adjunct of the State. Possibly if the clergy had shown great signs of missionary zeal, its very existence would not have been tolerated. Apparently at this date they ministered almost solely to the whites. The legislators who voted supplies were almost all of them planters, therefore slave-owners. They were, one would imagine, sufficiently intelligent to perceive that Christian teaching, if spread amongst the blacks, would inevitably tend to produce discontent and a sense of ill-treatment. Probably they would have sympathised with Lord Melbourne, who, at a later date, accidentally found himself listening to an evangelical sermon, in which sin and its consequences were sternly depicted, when he expressed his disgust in these words: “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.” That the condition of the Church in Jamaica was deplorable during the eighteenth century is undoubtedly true, although there were here and there bright examples of a higher standard of life than ordinarily prevailed. In Long’s “History,” written in 1774, we read that there were seldom wanting some who “were equally respectable for their learning, piety, and exemplary good behaviour, others have been detestable for their drinking, gambling, and iniquity.” He further declares that “some labourers of the Lord’s vineyard have at times been sent who were much better qualified to be retailers of salt-fish, or boatswains to privateers, than ministers of the Gospel.” Another writer, speaking of the clergy, says they were “of a character so vile that I do not care to mention it.” Without enlarging further on the wickedness prevailing in Jamaica, it will be but fair to remember what was the tone of society in England at this epoch, and we assuredly do not err when we say that in Georgian times religion had reached its low water-mark.
In the days of Erastianism when a bishop was enthroned by proxy, chosen because he could play a good hand at cards, or because he was bear-leader to some scion of aristocracy, or, like Blomfield or Marsh, good controversialists who could toss a Calvinist, or gore an Evangelical, one could scarcely imagine such worthy successors of the Apostles, as they drove to Court functions (even the most impecunious of them) in their carriages with four horses, or discussed the latest scandal over the port that stocked the episcopal cellars, taking great trouble to select fitting men for curacies in a remote island they were never likely to set foot on.
The low state of morals amongst both clergy and laity in England in the eighteenth century is notorious. The poor were left in a state of ignorance and degradation which, in these days, it is difficult to credit. Decency was scarcely known. Profligacy reigned in the highest circles of society. In Lord Holland’s “Memoirs of the Whig Party” we read that at the wedding of the heir-apparent he was so drunk that his attendant dukes could scarcely support him from falling. In Georgian times the conversation and jokes of the first gentlemen in Europe were such that would disgrace a self-respecting stableman in these days, whilst the drinking bouts of the age exceeded anything known in English history previously. Sir George Trevelyan’s lines describe the situation so aptly that I cannot refrain from quoting them:
“We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men.
For every glass of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten.