Humphrey Walrond’s rebellion in Barbados occurred more than 350 years ago. Historians can either dismiss the similarities to today’s more extreme conservative activists or argue similar conditions produce similar responses or that there are direct connections from person to person.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
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