The American South and the Atlantic World

3. “A Most Unfortunate Divel . . . without the Prospect of Getting Anything”: A Virginia Planter Negotiates the Late Stuart Atlantic World

3 “A Most Unfortunate Divel . . . without the Prospect of Getting Anything” A Virginia Planter Negotiates the Late Stuart Atlantic World Natalie Zacek In recent years, historians have increasingly sought to understand the connections between the British colonies established in the American South and those of the West Indies, and in particular to develop an explicitly Atlantic framework by which to link the histories of both of these regions to one another, as well as to Africa and the European imperial powers. This essay analyzes the story of one individual, Daniel Parke, in order to explore those relationships as they played out in the career of a Virginia planter turned West Indian colonial governor.1 Specifically, Parke’s experience suggests that, for all of the evidence of common ground, parallels, and continuities between the colonial Americas, broadly conceived, local circumstances sometimes varied tremendously between the constituent parts of the first British Empire. Parke’s tragic history reveals that approaches to imperial government that worked well within the American South were not always successful elsewhere in the Anglo-American world, and reminds us that, within the broad sweep of Atlantic World histories, local contexts mattered a great deal. “A Brutal and Licentious Despot” On the morning of December 7, 1710, a mob estimated to have consisted of four to five hundred men assembled in the streets of St. John’s, the capital of the island of Antigua, and advanced upon the mansion of the governor of the federated Leeward Islands colony (comprising the islands of 62 · Natalie Zacek Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St. Kitts), demanding that Daniel Parke dismiss the regiment of British regular soldiers with whom he had garrisoned his residence, resign his post, and depart the island immediately. When Parke refused to “quit the Government with which he had been entrusted by his Royal Mistress,” Queen Anne, his opponents formed themselves into two assault squads. Captain John Piggott and his men attacked the governor’s mansion from the front, and those commanded by Captain Painter advanced upon it from the rear.2 Parke ordered that the soldiers fire upon the attackers, but the mob, which outnumbered the defenders by at least six to one, soon overwhelmed the grenadiers and broke into the house, where they found that Parke had locked himself in his bedchamber. Piggott and his men broke down the door, at which point Parke shot and killed Piggott, but was almost immediately felled by a bullet wound to his leg. At this point, the story becomes murky. The more sober accounts assert that Parke’s injury was mortal and that Piggott’s men permitted some of the governor’s defenders to transport him to the nearby house of a Mr. Wright, where Gousse Bonnin, a Huguenot physician, bandaged the wound, but these ministrations apparently came too late to prevent the governor’s death from shock and blood loss shortly thereafter.3 However, a number of alternate versions claim that Parke met a considerably more violent end. One account concurs that Parke died in Wright’s home under the care of Dr. Bonnin but states that after the governor was wounded the crowd did not immediately permit his friends to evacuate him, but instead stripped him of his clothes “with such violence that only the wrist and neckbands of his shirt were left on him,” and dragged him down the steps of Government House and into the street, where his assailants, after getting their fill of insulting and reviling him, left him to die of his wounds and of thirst in the heat of the afternoon, at which point Wright and Bonnin were able to ease his end.4 Other variants of the story depict the attackers as rending apart not only Parke’s clothes but his body as well; they “dragged him by the members about his house, bruised his head, and broke his back with the butt end of their pieces.”5 Other versions of the story are still gorier, maintaining that after Parke was felled by his leg wound he was “then torn into pieces and scattered in the street,” and that “some, whose Marriage-Bed, ’tis thought he had defiled, revenged themselves on the sinning Parts, which they cut off and exposed.”6 A Virginia Planter Negotiates the Late Stuart Atlantic World · 63 In the words of the Jamaican planter and historian Bryan Edwards, Thus perished, in a general insurrection of an insulted...