Providence Island Company

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The Providence Company or Providence Island Company was an English chartered company founded in 1629 by a group of Puritans including Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick^[1] in order to settle Providence Island, off the Spanish Mosquito Coast of what became Nicaragua.^[2]

Besides Lord Warwick, among the twenty shareholders in the Company were William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, and John Hampden, a rich squire from Buckinghamshire. Oliver St. John, a Puritan barrister, represented the Providence Company's interests, and the treasurer was John Pym, a squire from the West Country, of great business acumen. A decade later, the English Civil War would make these names famous. A close kinship group linked several charter members of the Company: Lord Warwick's younger brother Henry, recently made Earl of Holland and a favourite of Queen Henrietta Maria; their half-brother, their mother's natural son, Mountjoy Blount, recently made Earl of Newport, and like Holland a figure at court; their cousin the Earl of Essex and his brother-in-law the Earl of Hertford; ^[3] At the end of the 1630s, around this nucleus and their friends in both Houses of Parliament, meeting in Gray's Inn Lane or Brook House, Holborn, or in the country, ostensibly for Company business, coalesced the first opposition party in English history, formed in resistance to the imposition of Ship Money.^[4]

At the start, the company had a twofold interest, to establish in an ideal commonwealth a God-fearing population,^[5] who were to support themselves with growing tobacco and cotton, and to harry Spanish shipping in the Spanish Main. The Company's regulations for the three islands, of Providence, Henrietta and Association, forbade card-playing and gaming, whoring, drunkenness and profanity. "A carefully chosen minister—a German Calvinist refugee from the Palatinate— was brought home in disgrace for singing catches on a Sunday," C.V. Wedgwood notes.^[6] "The Earl of Warwick and his friends were sincerely trying to create three nests of pirates with the behaviour and morals of a Calvinist theological seminary." The plantation system required African slaves, which involved the Company in the slave trade, but cotton and tobacco failed to be profitable and were replaced by sugar cane. The islands remained a base for privateering, however, under a tacit agreement from the King, whose foreign policy remained officially neutral with regard to Spain, but who agreed, provided that the Company foot any expenses. Prospects for Providence Island brightened at this, sufficiently for the projectors to capitalise the venture with an addition £100,000 in 1637.^[7]

The Providence Company provided support to the Parliamentarians in the build-up to the English Civil War.

From 1631 to 1635, the Company also planted an English colony on Tortuga (also called Association Island), off the coast of San Domingo. In 1635 the Spanish raided the settlement on Association Island and destroyed it. In March 1638 several members of the Company were prepared to emigrate to Providence Island: the Earl of Warwick, Lords Saye and Brooke^[8] Henry Darley, but nothing came of their petition for leave. In 1642, Providence Island was captured by Spain, and the company declared bankruptcy, being disbanded in 1650.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources and references

• WorldStatesman - Haiti
• Karen Kupperman, Providence Island 1630 - 1641: The Other Puritan Colony, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• The Penguin Dictionary of British and Irish History, ed. Juliet Gardiner