give an adequate protection to colonies and commerce. It averaged forty sessions a year during 1689–1696, a record below that of 1675–1685, yet the demands were far greater. The sittings ranged from twenty-six to fifty-five a year; they were held at the irregular intervals of from one to six a month, sometimes more and occasionally none. This was not altogether due to indifference; the committee of the whole council worked hard, but the scope of its undifferentiated business overtaxed its capacities. It has been said that William of Holland borrowed England on his way to Versailles. Be this as it may, the immediate necessity of restoring order at home and redressing the balance of power in Europe so occupied the committee that commerce and colonies inevitably suffered from inadequate attention.[1] What measure of defense they did receive was due in no small degree to the ceaseless activity of the merchants and colonial agents in pleading and urging their claims and dangers.[2]
No less serious was the break in the line of competent personnel and the loss of cohesion in the plantation committee. There appeared around the plantation board after 1685 few of the older group that had been actively engaged in the work of expansion and had given momentum to imperial political centralization. Death had taken Anglesey, Bridgewater, Carteret, Downing, Francis North, Radnor, and Rupert. The attentive Craven ceased to come. But it was an unwise king who soon removed the active and skilled Clarendon, Compton, Halifax, and Rochester to make way for the crafty, time-serving Earl of Sunderland, the brutal Jeffreys, and others whose servility to an arbitrary domestic policy was of greater moment than the advancement of the best interests of the empire.[3] As in the time of George III., so in that of James II., the advent of a ruler and personal advisers of narrow vision and small experience in the statesmanship of empire provoked relations which the colonies refused to endure. Again, it was natural for William III. to draw his ministers and officials from, the supporters of the Revo-
- ↑ A memorialist declared that if the war so employed every agency of government that the concerns of trade were neglected, if the ministry "is taken up with higher Business", it became the wisdom of Parliament to make timely provision for the protection of commerce. Br. Mus., Harleian MSS. 1223, no. 9, ff. 184–188.
- ↑ For the activities of the colonial agents, see Cal. St. P., Col., 1689–1692, 1693–1696, passim.
- ↑ Evelyn, Diary, September 8, 1686; Burnet, Hist. of his Own Time (1857), pp. 419, 434, 436; Foxcroft, Halifax, I. 451 ff. The chief members of the plantation committee under James II. were Sunderland, Jeffreys, Middleton, Godolphin, Powis, Huntingdon.
