Captain William Sayle ( 1590 – 1671) was a prominent English landholder who was Governor of Bermuda in 1643 and again in 1658. As an Independent in religion and politics, and an adherent of Oliver Cromwell, he was dissatisfied with life in Bermuda, and so founded the company of the Eleutheran Adventurers who became the first European settlers of the Bahamas between 1646 and 1648. He later became the first governor of colonial South Carolina from 1670 to 1671.
Life in Bermuda
Bermuda, or the "Somers Isles", was settled by Europeans in 1609 as a result of the wrecking of the Sea Venture, the flagship of the Virginia Company. Although most of the passengers and crew continued to Jamestown, Virginia, the following year on two Bermuda-built ships, the Royal Charter of the company and the boundaries of Virginia were extended to include Bermuda in 1612, when the first governor (at the time, actually the lieutenant-governor) and sixty colonists joined the three men who had remained behind from the Sea Venture. Bermuda's 21 square miles were subdivided into nine parishes (at first called "tribes"). The easternmost, St. George's (where St. George's town was established), was designated "common" or "Crown" land, but the remainder were further subdivided into "shares", each equivalent to a specific share held in the company. The parishes (other than St. George's) were each named for a major shareholder (or "adventurer") in the company. Administration was handed to the crown in 1614, and then in 1615 transferred to a spin-off of the Virginia Company called the Somers Isles Company. The Company appointed a governor, who from 1620 oversaw a House of Assembly that differed from the House of Commons in having no property qualification (due to most land in Bermuda being then owned by absentee landlords). As the House of Assembly consequently governed for the benefit of Bermuda's landless men, a Council made-up of prominent local men appointed by the company was introduced as a combination of upper house and cabinet. This was intended to ensure the balance of power remained with the company, rather than the settlers, but with no other group from which to appoint its members, the council quickly became dominated by men from the same prominent local families that filled the Assembly, and political power rested firmly with this emerging local elite and their descendants until the introduction of universal adult suffrage and party politics in the 1960s.
Although Bermuda quickly became a thriving colony, the growth of tobacco as a cash crop that was the basis of the economy under company administration became unprofitable from the 1620s as Virginia became stable and self-sufficient and England established newer and larger colonies, all of which emulated Bermuda's economy, flooding the English market with cheap tobacco. Few shareholders in the company actually settled in Bermuda, and the land was occupied and worked by tenants and by indentured servants who repaid the cost of their transport to Bermuda with seven years' labour. The more successful settlers (whether they arrived as shareholders or tenants at their own expense or as indentured servants) increased their landholdings by purchasing shares from adventurers who were finding them ever less profitable. Whereas absentee landowners primarily relied on tobacco exports, residents began to switch to maritime trades, replanting the fields that had been cleared from the forest with Bermuda cedar, which was vital to shipbuilding and more valuable than cash crops like tobacco. They also grew food crops and raised livestock for their own consumption, and exported their excess production aboard their new ships for sale in other colonies. This put them at odds with the company, which only earned profits from the tobacco grown for export. This contest between the settlers and the company would end when the settlers took their complaint to the Crown and the company's Royal Charter was revoked in 1684.
Sayle appears to have settled in Bermuda by about 1630. He owned considerable property in the colony, with 165 shares totalling 220.5 acres in Southampton, Smith's, and Pembroke parishes, according to the 1662–1663 survey by Richard Norwood. Among his possessions was the property where the house in Smith's known as Verdmont was built about 1710 off Sayle Road. As one of the colony's most prominent men, he served as a military officer in command of King's Castle, and was at times a member of the council (that combined the roles now performed by the Senate and the Cabinet). By this period, the Somers Isles Company had ceased sending new Governors from abroad, and appointed a succession of prominent residents to the position. Sayle was appointed Governor from 1641 to 1642 and 1643 to 1644, but as an Independent Puritan, aligned with the Parliamentary cause, the Commonwealth and then Oliver Cromwell's Protectorship, he was to be at odds with the majority of Bermuda's dominant elite.
The English Civil War
In the 1640s, Bermuda was divided by conflict between the episcopal Church of England and revolutionary Independent Puritans and Presbyterians. This was the same as the conflict between Bermudian Royalists and Parliamentarians, as the English Civil War extended into the English colonies. In Bermuda, most of the settlers had already become estranged from the Somers Isles Company as those shareholders who had remained in England had barred those who lived in Bermuda from having any say in the management of the company (as only those who attended the company's annual general meetings in England were able to vote upon its policies). This meant that, although most land was by then owned by residents like Sayle, their interests were thwarted in order to ensure maximum profits for the shareholders in England. As most of the shareholders in England sided with Parliament (the officer in Bermuda usually referred to as the "Governor of Bermuda" was actually the "Lieutenant-Governor of Bermuda", with the office of "Governor" held at the time held by one of the largest absentee adventurers, Lord High Admiral of the Parliamentary navy Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick) when war broke out, most Bermudians saw their interests as aligned with the Crown's. The military force in Bermuda was composed of nine companies of militia infantry and the volunteer artillery that manned the coastal batteries. This was a part time force, able to be mobilised during war or emergency, and with all of the officers and other ranks being Bermudians.
As the Crown and the Church of England attempted to assert their authorities, similar conflicts took place in other parts of the English realm leading up to the Civil War and the Interregnum, as well as in English-ruled Ireland (where native Irish Catholics and royalists would be suppressed after the 1649–1653 Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and from where Presbyterian settlers from the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, resenting the Crown's attempts in the 1630s to bring them under Episcopalian authority, had begun to re-emigrate to North America where they became known as Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish).
From 1644 to 1646 (interrupted by a brief governorship by Captain Josias Forster, who had been loathed by the Independents), Bermuda was governed by The Triumvirate of Captain William Sayle, Stephen Paynter, and William Wilkinson, all of whom were Independents whose rule was resented by the larger part of the population. They established a minority rule that both the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians found tyrannical, resulting in their alliance against the Independents (whereas in England the Presbyterians had allied with the Independents under Parliament against the Royalist Episcopalians).
On 14 May 1645, moderate Richard Norwood wrote to the Governor and Company in London:
Also in 1645, Robert Huson, Thomas Jennings and Richard Sothworth composed a "Humble Petition & Declaration of general inhabitants of the Plantation and Colony in the Somer Islands" to the Governor and Company in London accusing the Independent Governors and clergymen of "arrogating to themselves unlimited power, in seeking to draw the inhabitants of this Plantation to worship their imaginations contrary (as we conceive) to the laws of god & man", and "for our Divines declare that they are not subject to any human power; & in particular Master Copeland affirms, 'That if the King Parliament & Synod shall command any uniformity in the church, other than this, which is here set on foot by them, they will obey none". They wrote that "it is a grievance under which we groun, that the Triumvirate Government cast upon us at first & now continued procures a scorn & contempt upon us from all other Plantations, with other just exceptions which we omit, but especially that you have by the continuance of Government put upon us a yoke insupportable", and "you have continued such Governors, two of which have submitted to the Independent Covenant and have set up a Supreme Governor in their Church, that will neither wait upon King or Keyser (in their own words)".
To end the strife in the colony, the Somers Isles Company, in 1645, appointed Captain Thomas Turner, reputed a moderate, as Lieutenant-Governor (the office of "Governor" was held at the time by Lord High Admiral Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick). Turner arrived at Bermuda in April, 1646. Royalist John Vaughan was appointed Secretary, replacing Henry Smith, on 25 April 1646, and Independents were removed from Government. The Independents found Turner as objectionable as the Royalists had the Triumvirate.
In June, 1646, Captain William Sayle and William Golding, who had been an Independent preacher to the congregation in Bermuda, went to London to present a petition by Bermuda's Independents to the High Court of Parliament, "that your Petitioners may not languish under an usurped power; nor the power and honour of Parliament be trampled on, by the vilest of our English Nation". The Petitioners' complaints were not only against local Royalists, but also against the predatory commercial practices of, and interference by, the Somers Isles Company.
Turner was accused, in Golding's 1648 pamphlet "Servants on horse-back" (containing the 1646 petition to Parliament), of maintaining the military against local Independents even while having little concern of a foreign threat:
The event Golding described took place in October, 1647, when Sayle arrived with "diuers passengers, And vppon information had of store of armes and ammunicon wch they had on board". Sayle delivered letters from Parliament and the Somers Isles Company, and addressed the Governor and Council at John Trimingham's house, advising that in London he had found religious toleration, and that the "Episcopall ministers did preach, the presbitterians did preach, and the Independents did teach, And where the presbitterians taught he could neuer find above a half score people, but all the rest constantly full and then he proceeded howe he had obtained free trade for the Inhabitants here, and being required to showe his warrant for it he said that some of the company opposed it, but he left his lawer to try it with them, and that my Lord of warwicke had bin for it this 18 yeares". With no official document to support his assertion regarding free trade, Governor Turner told him "it is contrary to our commission and our oath, the wch I will maintain inviolable by Gods assistance soe longe as I haue to do with the gournment".