Empire, Slavery and the End of the Reign 1685
Catherine of Braganza’s Dowry, 1662
When Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1662, her dowry was a turning point in English overseas expansion. The cash — around £300,000 — mattered, but the territory mattered more. The dowry transferred Bombay (modern Mumbai) and Tangier on the North African coast to the English Crown, and gave English merchants trading rights in Brazil and the Portuguese East Indies. England suddenly held two strategic harbours on key world trade routes. Tangier guarded the entrance to the Mediterranean. Bombay opened a deep-water Indian port. Both would shape English imperial reach for the next two centuries.
The East India Company and Bombay
Charles II handed the Crown’s new Bombay possession to the East India Company in 1668 in return for an annual rent of £10. The Company already operated factories at Surat, Madras and on the coasts of Java and Sumatra. With Bombay it gained a fortified port directly under its control. By a series of charters in the 1670s and 1680s the Company received near-sovereign powers in its Indian territories: it could fortify, mint money, raise its own troops, hold courts, declare war on non-Christian princes and make peace. By 1685 the Company maintained around 700 European soldiers in India and the beginnings of an Indian sepoy army. The political form of the British Empire as a chartered company governing for profit was being put in place.
Catherine of Braganza’s 1662 dowry brought Bombay and Tangier to the English Crown. In 1668 Charles II handed Bombay to the East India Company for an annual rent of £10; later charters gave it near-sovereign powers including its own troops, courts and currency.
Tangier: A Costly North African Outpost
Tangier was the dowry’s expensive failure. Held against constant attacks from the Moroccan ruler Mawlay Ismaíl, it required a permanent English garrison and a large mole (a stone breakwater). The cost ran to roughly £1.5 million across the reign — comparable to the entire annual royal income. In 1683 Charles ordered Tangier abandoned; Lord Dartmouth’s expedition, with Pepys aboard, blew up the mole and brought the garrison home in early 1684. Tangier showed both the temptation and the trap of mid-century empire: prestige territory could be ruinously expensive to hold without a sustainable trade purpose.
Hudson Bay and the Fur Trade
In May 1670 Charles II chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company, granting it trading rights and quasi-governmental powers over the entire watershed of Hudson Bay — an area roughly the size of Western Europe, named ‘Rupert’s Land’ after the king’s cousin Prince Rupert, the Company’s first governor. The Company built fur-trading posts at Fort Charles, Fort Nelson and elsewhere, exchanging European goods (axes, kettles, cloth, guns) with Cree and other First Nations peoples for beaver pelts. The North American fur trade tied a vast new region into the English economy and competed directly with the French in Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest commercial company still operating in continuous existence in North America.
Cromwell had seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655 as part of the ‘Western Design’. Charles II kept it. By the 1670s Jamaica had become the centre of two profitable English ventures: sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, and Caribbean privateering. The most famous privateer was the Welsh-born privateer Captain Henry Morgan, who attacked Spanish settlements under commissions from the governor of Jamaica. In 1671 Morgan led around 1,400 men across the isthmus of Panama, sacking Panama City and burning it to the ground. London arrested him to placate the Spanish but quietly knighted him in 1674 and made him Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica from 1674. The line between piracy and policy was very thin under Charles II.
The Royal African Company and the Slave Trade
The reign also brought the English state into the transatlantic slave trade on a new scale. The Royal African Company was first chartered in 1660 as the ‘Company of Royal Adventurers’, and refounded in 1672 with James, Duke of York as governor and Charles II as a major shareholder. By the 1680s the Company was shipping about 5,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic every year. People bought by the Company were branded with the Duke of York’s initials ‘DY’ on the chest. The trade now flowed through royally chartered companies with the Crown as a shareholder — a major escalation from earlier private slaving voyages. By the 1680s the slave trade was the single most lucrative English overseas enterprise.
By 1680 sugar had overtaken tobacco as the most valuable English colonial import, with Jamaica and Barbados between them producing the bulk of supply. Plantations were worked by enslaved Africans shipped under Royal African Company contracts. The economic logic was brutal: a sugar mill needed dozens of skilled and unskilled workers continuously, and the planter class settled on a coerced workforce because indentured European labour was scarce, expensive and unwilling to do field work in tropical heat. By 1685 enslaved Africans outnumbered white settlers on Jamaica by roughly four to one. Profits flowed to London merchants, planters and the Royal Treasury through customs duties on sugar imports.
The Last Years of the Reign 1681–85
Charles II ruled without Parliament from March 1681 until his death. Customs revenue from the booming colonial trade kept the Crown solvent, supplemented by Louis XIV’s subsidy of around £385,000. The Tory reaction after the Rye House Plot in 1683 left him politically unchallenged. By 1685 the Treasury had run a small surplus in the previous year. Charles II died on 6 February 1685, after suffering an apoplectic fit four days earlier. On his deathbed he received Catholic last rites secretly from the priest John Huddleston. The succession passed peacefully to his Catholic brother — James II.
The Reign in Review
Charles II’s twenty-five years had transformed England’s position in the world. England now held Bombay, the Hudson Bay watershed and Jamaica; it had survived the Plague, the Fire and three wars with the Dutch; it had founded the Royal Society and rebuilt the City under Wren. Less happily, the Catholic succession was unresolved, the slave trade had become a state-backed enterprise, and the religious tensions of the Civil War had been postponed rather than solved. James II would inherit a strong Crown and a fragile country. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was already implicit in the unfinished business of his brother’s reign.
Three chartered companies drove English overseas expansion under Charles II: the East India Company (Bombay 1668), the Royal African Company (West Africa 1660/1672) and the Hudson’s Bay Company (Rupert’s Land 1670). All three combined trading monopolies with quasi-governmental powers.