Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T08:12:39.742Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Western Design and the spiritual geopolitics of Cromwellian foreign policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2016

David L. Smith
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper explores the multi-faceted nature of the spiritual geopolitics that shaped Cromwellian foreign policy in relation to the Western Design of 1654-5. It stresses the central importance of Protestant religion as a motivating force and argues that the failure of the Design was interpreted in religious terms just as much as its original aims had been. A number of motives combined to drive Cromwell into launching the Western Design. These included: the ‘Elizabethan’ tradition of English anti-Spanish policy; the pursuit of England’s imperial/colonial interests in the Caribbean; an attempt to strengthen England financially by weakening the Spanish economy; the search for security within Europe by allying with France against Spain; and, underpinning all these, the launching of a Protestant crusade against a power that Cromwell regarded as England’s ‘providential enemy’. The failure of the Design in the summer of 1655 was perceived in similarly religious terms. Just as recent scholarship on Britain’s internal conflicts of the 1640s has emphasised the central role of religion and its inseparability from other issues, so the same phenomenon is evident not only in the motives for the Western Design but also in how its defeat was perceived and interpreted.

Keywords

Oliver CromwellWestern DesignFranceSpainreligion
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 40 , Special Issue 2: Spiritual Geopolitics in the Early Modern World , August 2016 , pp. 279 - 292
Copyright
© 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

David L. Smith is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has published extensively on seventeenth-century British history.

References

Bibliography

Unprinted primary sources Google Scholar
The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. State Papers Domestic, Interregnum. TNA SP 18.Google Scholar
SP 18/72/10, Council proceedings, 5 June 1654.Google Scholar
SP 18/100/42, Cromwell’s instructions to the Major-Generals, 22 August 1655.Google Scholar
The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. Council Papers, Interregnum. TNA SP 25.Google Scholar
SP 25/76, 129, Council proceedings, 9 June 1655.Google Scholar

Printed primary sources

Abbott, W. C., ed. Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937–47.Google Scholar
Birch, Thomas, ed. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq. 7 vols. London, 1742.Google Scholar
[Cromwell, Oliver.] A Declaration of His Highness. London, 25 May 1655.Google Scholar
[Cromwell, Oliver.]. A Declaration of his Highness, by the advice of his Council; setting forth, on the behalf of this Commonwealth, the justice of their cause against Spain. London, 26 October 1655.Google Scholar
[Cromwell, Oliver.]. A Declaration of His Highness. London, 21 November 1655.Google Scholar
[Cromwell, Oliver.]. A Declaration of His Highness. London, 13 March 1656.Google Scholar
[Cromwell, Oliver.]. A Declaration of His Highness the Lord Protector and the Parliament. London, 23 September 1656.Google Scholar
Firth, C. H., ed. The Clarke Papers: Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, Vol. 3. London: Camden Society, 1899.Google Scholar
Firth, C. H. The Narrative of General Venables. London: Camden Society, 1900.Google Scholar
Guijo, Gregorio M. de. Diario, 1648–1664, edited by Manuel Romero de Terreros. 2 vols. Mexico: Editorial Porrua, 1952.Google Scholar
Henderson, Frances, ed. The Clarke Papers: Further Selections from the Papers of William Clarke. Vol. 5. London: Camden Society, 2005.Google Scholar
Hinds, Allen B., ed. Calendar of State Papers Venetian, Vol. 30, 1655–1656. London: H.M.S.O., 1930.Google Scholar
[Jessey, Henry.] A Narrative of the late proceeds at White-Hall, concerning the Jews. London: 1656.Google Scholar
Lomas, S. C., ed. The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle. 3 vols. London: Methuen, 1904.Google Scholar
Morland, Sir Samuel. The History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont. London: 1658.Google Scholar
Vane, Sir Henry. “A Healing Question propounded and resolved upon Occasion of the late publique and seasonable Call to Humiliation.” In John, Baron Somers, A Collection of scarce and valuable Tracts, edited by Walter Scott. 13 vols. London: 1809–15.Google Scholar
Wright, Irene A. “Spanish Narratives of the English Attack on Santo Domingo 1655.” In Camden Miscellany, vol. 14. London: Camden Society, 1926.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Boyer, Allen D. “Gage, Thomas (1603?–1656).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Braddick, Michael J., and Smith, David L., eds. The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Coulton, Barbara. “Cromwell and the ‘Readmission’ of the Jews in England, 1656.” Cromwelliana (2001): 21–38.Google Scholar
Crabtree, Roger. “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy.” In Cromwell: A Profile, edited by Ivan Roots, 160–189. New York: Macmillan, 1973.Google Scholar
Crome, Andrew. The Restoration of the Jews: Early Modern Hermeneutics, Eschatology, and National Identity in the Works of Thomas Brightman. London: Springer, 2014.Google Scholar
Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Gardiner, S. R. History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656. 4 vols. London: Longman, 1903.Google Scholar
Greenspan, Nicole. Selling Cromwell’s Wars: Media, Empire and Godly Warfare, 1650–1658. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012.Google Scholar
Hutton, Ronald. Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Jackson, Clare. Charles II: The Star King. London: Penguin, 2016.Google Scholar
Katz, David S. The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Katz, David S. Philo-Semitism and the Re-admission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Lane, Kris E. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.Google Scholar
Maltby, William S. The Black Legend in England: The development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Morrill, John. “William Dowsing, the Bureaucratic Puritan.” In Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, edited by John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, 173–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Osterman, Nathan. “The Controversy over the Proposed Readmission of the Jews to England (1655).” Jewish Social Studies 3 (1941): 301–328.Google Scholar
Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Pestana, Carla Gardina. “English Character and the Fiasco of the Western Design.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2005): 1–31.Google Scholar
Pincus, Steven C. A. Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Prior, Charles W. A. and Burgess, Glenn, eds. England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.Google Scholar
Robertson, James. “Cromwell and the Conquest of Jamaica.” History Today 55 (2005): 15–22.Google Scholar
Smith, David L. “Diplomacy and the Religious Question: Mazarin, Cromwell and the Treaties of 1655 and 1657.” E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 11 (2014): http://erea.revues.org/3745.Google Scholar
Strong, Frank. “The Causes of Cromwell’s West Indian Expedition.” The American Historical Review 4 (1899): 228–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, S. A. G. The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean. Kingston: Jamaica Historical Society, 1965.Google Scholar
Taylor, Stephen, and Tapsell, Grant, eds. The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays for John Morrill. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Worden, Blair. God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar