The barbary corsairs, king charles i and the civil war

Historians recognize many constitutional and ecclesiastical conflicts that led to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. But there was another factor that lay thousands of miles away in the Islamic Mediterranean: the Barbary captives, those English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh seamen, captains, and travellers who were captured and enslaved in Morocco and in the Ottoman regencies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli (Libya).1 When Charles I succeeded to the throne in 1625, there were hundreds of these captives among the Barbary corsairs; by 1640, there were thousands.A crisis developed around these captives which historians have not examined in the context of the build-up to the Civil War. K. R. Andrews has argued that the captives and their 'clamorous' relatives had a 'small influence' on the course of events leading up to the Civil War, while other historians have completely ignored them.2 But as this paper will show, unransomed captives of the Barbary Corsairs played an important role in compounding the conflict between King Charles and the London merchants of the Levant and East India Companies. These merchants lost not only their employees to the corsairs, but scores of their ships too, and subsequently blamed the King for not spending the monies raised through customs, tonnage and poundage, forced loans and Ship Money on maritime security. Similarly, seamen's wives and their families blamed the unransoming of their kin on the King and his ministers. Thousands of these disaffected women and relatives, who gravitated to London from all over the realm, and assembled angrily at the docks or in the precincts of Whitehall, found eager supporters among various members of the Commons who had been spearheading the opposition to the King during his 'eleven year tyranny'.The Barbary captives became a cause celebre that exacerbated the social and political unrest in London. By not acting decisively to resolve this foreign policy matter, and by ignoring the numerous petitions that had been presented to him by kinsmen and employers of the captives, the King allowed the Parliamentary opposition to take the initiative in helping, or appearing to help, the captives, and in adding one more cause of contention that precipitated the Civil War.By the time Charles I succeeded to the throne, the attacks of the Barbary corsairs on English and Scottish ships, as well as on the mainland, were causing deep anxiety among ship owners, sailors and coastal inhabitants. In May 1625, the Privy Council learned from St Ives that thirty ships from Salee were near the coast: the inhabitants were afraid that the corsairs would land 'by night among us', and especially that there were no ships from the King's fleet to 'fear them'.3 In August, the Mayor of Poole urged the Privy Council to 'take it into your consideration the [protection of] Newfoundland fleet, being about two hundred and fiftye saile of shippe ... haueng some foure or fiue thousand men belonging to the westerne parte'.4 The Mayor was afraid that 'within this two yeares They [the corsairs] will not leaue his most excellent Majesty saylors to man his ffleet'. Again in that month, the Grand Jury of Devon wrote to Sir Richard Hutton 'praying him to make known to the King or the Council' the danger of corsair depredation.5 The Barbary Corsairs threatened British ships in the mouths of the English Channel, the Bristol Channel and the waterways between Ireland and England: by spreading themselves from Poole around Land's End to the island of Lundy, they endangered all shipping to and from the major western ports of England and Wales.6 In this respect, the corsairs were a serious cause of commercial and maritime destabilization.It was unfortunate for Charles I that his accession to the throne coincided with the Spring season of the year when the weather in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic allowed the corsairs to range far and wide. Furthermore, and for the past few decades, English and other European traders had sailed small ships which made their capture by the North Africans easy: the Christians of the early seventeenth century, wrote the Tunisian historian Ibn Abi Dinar, were not prepared to send out large ships, as a result of which the privateers, who sailed in frigates, were able to capture thousands of them. …