The Downfall of the Bermuda Company: A Restoration Farce

Abstract

IN i684 Charles II liquidated the Bermuda Company, an unimportant corporation which had been operating England's smallest and secondoldest colony, and took over the plantation himself. He swept many other corporations into the bone yard in the i68o's, revoking their special rights granted by royal charter. It was all legal: Crown lawyers made sensational use of the ancient writ of quo warranto to detect irregularities in any and all chartered groups whose privileges interfered with the centralization of royal power. Scores of English towns and parliamentary boroughs lost their charters, and even the great city of London had to accept humiliating restrictions on its self-government. Likewise in America the chief of the autonomous Puritan corporations, the Massachusetts Bay Company, was dissolved in order to put the refractory New Englanders under direct royal control. Amid such general massacre the Bermuda Company was a minor victim, yet a peculiarly interesting one. Whereas all the domestic corporations were gloriously resurrected in the revolution of T688, and even the Massachusetts Puritans soon got a new charter, the Bermuda Company remained defunct. Its downfall illustrates not merely the ephemeral Stuart onslaught against corporate privilege but also the abiding mercantilist campaign to weave England's disparate colonies into a centralized empire. As for the Bermuda colonists, they experienced an adjustment common throughout late seventeenth-century English America, from autonomy to dependence on the Crown, from isolation to membership in a world-wide imperial system. And yet there is a puzzle about the dissolution of the Bermuda Company. Why did it take so long? The Crown opened prosecution by writ of quo warranto in i679, and took nearly five years to annul the Company charter. By contrast, the quo warranto proceedings against the city of London in i683 lasted only a few months, and even the prosecution of the