Lords Proprietors
The proprietors, or owners of the colony of Carolina, were mostly Royalists, men who had supported the Stuarts before and during the English Civil War. They were rewarded for their devotion when Charles II was restored in 1660. William Berkeley was the Governor of Virginia; he and Sir George Carteret had been Lords Proprietors previously of New Jersey. Sir John Colleton had holdings in Barbados and was a member of the Royal African Company which was involved in bringing African slaves to the colonies. He died in 1666 before seeing a permanent colony established in Carolina. Lord Craven was a soldier, patron of the arts, and member of the Royal Society. The Earl of Clarendon had been Lord High Chancellor to Charles I and was the father-in-law of James, Duke of York, the future James II. The Duke of Albemarle had actually been a supporter of Cromwell but threw his support behind Charles II once Cromwell was gone. Lord Berkeley, brother of Sir William, was a more traditional Royalist, loyal to the Stuarts, and who served as the president of the Council for Foreign Plantations, making him quite influential in the colonies. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, like the Earl of Clarendon, had been a supporter of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell but came to feel it best to have Charles II on the throne. He was very active in the colonization of the Americas, having investments in Barbados and Hudson Bay as well as Carolina. Although he supported Charles II early on, he ended up dying in exile in Holland because he did not agree with some later policies of the king. Like many Protestants, he feared the eventual succession of Charles’s brother, James, a devout Catholic.
The Earl of Shaftesbury’s importance to the colony is indicated by the names of the two rivers that meet at Charleston, the Ashley and the Cooper, both named after him. He, along with his secretary, philosopher, and sometime physician, John Locke, created the “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” a document which defined the colony’s government and social structure even to the point of creating a perpetual landed aristocracy. The Constitutions provided for an unwieldy, multi-layered administrative structure that was impractical at best, dysfunctional at worst, and not designed to deal with the day to day needs of the colony. It may well be the single most ill-advised piece of work ever created by Locke, yet it did have one redeeming feature, a provision for religious tolerance uncommon in the majority of the colonies. While the Constitutions recognized the Anglican Church as the official church of the colony, it specifically called for tolerance of other religions, even non-Christian native ones. This religious tolerance made Carolina attractive to those outside the mainstream Anglican faith, such as other Protestants and Jews.
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