One wonders… why King James, Duke of Ormond and Windham as names for pirate vessels? Why toast the health of the “Pretender,” James III? James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond and Sir William Windham were both popular Jacobites of the day, adherents of James III, the “Pretender.” So does this have anything to do with the tendency of pirates to be politically conservative and anti-government? According to Snelgrave’s narrative of his capture, it did.
Snelgrave noted that all three of the
pirate captains: Howell Davis in King James, Olivier LeVasseur, then taking command of Duke of
Ormond, and Jeremiah Cocklyn, preparing to outfit Bird or Windham, were Jacobites. They supported
the claim of the ousted Stuart dynasty over that of the foreign Hanoverian
King George I. To be sure, so-called “anti-government” Jacobites were anti-government
only because the current government
was not Stuart! Most pirates never
sought democracy. They were, however, concerned with making their government
“great again” as one popular conservative trope goes.
Davis named his ship, King James,
after the would-be King James III. They even claimed to be serving under his
authority, supposedly possessing his personal commissions. Pirates regularly
drank to the “Pretender’s health.” As Snelgrave noted, they were “doubly on the
side of the gallows, both as traitors and pirates.” They even referred to King
George as a “son of a whore” and a “cuckoldy dog.”[1]
LeVasseur was French; he was born in Calais, France. Catholicism defined his life and nation. It dominated his upbringing,
as it had influenced the Stuarts of England, until the interruption of William
of Orange, the Protestant Dutch king and husband of Mary Stuart, daughter of James II. Though Mary was a Stuart, she had been “reduced”
in her family’s conservative beliefs by her marriage to William. Parliament in
1688 had used this marriage as a bandage for the perceived national wound they had
caused by delegitimizing monarchial succession in England. The “Glorious
Revolution” was bad for Stuarts, but the recent political insurrection surrounding
the accession of the German George I was absolute liberal treason to
Stuart conservatives and their allies! James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormonde was one such conservative patriot – as
viewed by Jacobites, followers of James III or the “Pretender.”[2]
Born the son of Thomas Butler, 6th Earl of Ossory and his wife Emilia, James Butler was grandson of James Butler, 1st duke of Ormonde. Raised in Ireland as a Whig, he yet schooled in
France and afterwards at Christ Church,
Oxford. He served with distinction in the military and attained political
office. But, when Parliament attempted in January and February 1689 to declare
that James II had abdicated his throne, thereby putting William of Orange and his Stuart wife Mary on the throne, he voted
against both motions. Even though the conservatively-perceived horrid deed had
been successful, he yet served William III with similar distinction. Butler appeared to
be loyal to his nation, whatever its politics. Ormonde was appointed
Commander-in-Chief of the Forces and colonel of the 1st Regiment of Foot
Guards. In the Irish Parliament, Ormonde and the majority of peers supported
the conservative or Tory (monarchial) interest. His position as Captain-General
imbued him with great influence during the conservative crisis brought about by
the death of Queen Anne in 1712. Shortly preceding her death, Ormonde began
exhibiting definite Jacobite leanings. When the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 (coincident with an uptick of
British piracy in America) broke out, Ormonde was accused of supporting it.
Rebels invoked his name with the cheer "High church and Ormonde." The
rebellion resulted in Butler’s impeachment for high treason by Lord Stanhope on June 21, 1715. He then fled to
France and joined the “Pretender,” or the would-be James III.[3]
Many wonder at Jacobite names of pirate ships: King James, Royal James, Windham (for Sir William
Windham, a Jacobite whose arrest is attributed with causing the failure of the
Jacobite Rebellion of 1715), and Queen Anne’s Revenge. All of them carry a stubborn Jacobite political message – similar to
that of other conservative manifestos – for the early eighteenth century, that
phrase might have been “Stuart rule will rise again!” Obviously,
the insinuation is to illustrate the descent of conservative West Indian slaving
descendants of Carolina from these same Jacobites. Many privateers and pirates
in America and the West Indies, founded on Stuart traditions and Jacobite in ideology, harbored this
same resentment of the new king, George I of Hanover, a foreign German
Protestant who did not even speak English! This ideology translated directly to
the Confederate States of America’s ailing mourners with the euphemism “The South Will Rise Again!” Jacobitism was clearly a matter of
conservative political pride and America – or Johnson’s “Commonwealth of
Pyrates” – still excells in such pride![4]
Illustrating this pride, wealthy South Carolina gentleman and pirate Richard
Tookerman ordered his crew to fire a salute
to James III (exiled in France with many of his supporters like
Ormonde after 1715) on his, the “Pretender’s,” birthday. Tookerman was not afraid to dine with
Jamaican elite in Port Royal, including the governor’s own son and local widow, Mrs. Pendergrass. After all, Tookerman lived in still conservative, Stuart-loving
America, far from a “traitorous” foreign king! He signaled to his first mate to
fire Adventure’s guns by waving a
handkerchief from Mrs. Pendergrass’ window as they sat enjoying a meal at her dining table. He did this
twice without hesitation and with direct instructions to the contrary from the
Royal Navy in Kingston Harbour. Capt. Edward
Vernon of HMS Mary learned of his misdeeds in South
Carolina, Virginia, and the Leeward Islands. He arrested him and returned him to England,
but Tookerman successfully sued Vernon for false arrest and won![5]
Not all Tories, conservatives, Catholics, or loyal Stuarts were prone to give up their lives and country for the cause. Historian E. T. Fox describes three levels of Jacobitism:
The first consisted of “hard-core, ideologically committed Jacobites… [who] brought up their children to follow the true [Stuart] path after them.” The second layer were those who were driven to Jacobitism by disillusionment with the Hanoverian regime and whose allegiance might therefore be temporary, while the third was comprised of “adventurers,” “desperate men” who turned to Jacobitism to repair their own misfortunes and who had “little or nothing to lose and everything to gain if the Jacobites won, which guaranteed their enthusiasm for the cause when it was in the ascendant.”[6]
Richard Tookerman’s story revealed one basic truth: radically conservative Jacobites had
not lost every adherent to the cause after 1715, even in the courts of Great
Britain. Author Colin Woodard even raised the possibility that
pirate Charles Vane had negotiated directly with powerful Jacobite politicians and military officials – a
possibility that also hinted at Vane’s higher political station. Still,
pirates, especially more thoughtful gentlemanly types, were perhaps more
capitalistic “adventurers” than ideologically roguish radicals. Though they
certainly harbored conservative political resentments, profit stood as most
important, more inticing to their finely-honed pecuniary greed, as it would for
generations to come in America. This factor probably best tells the tale of
pirates’ Jacobite tendencies – and, indeed, the later American rebellion for
“freedom” from an arguably liberal British “tyranny.”[7]
As a Frenchman from “a bourgeous family [who] received an excellent
education,” LeVasseur symbolically honored the
sacrifices of James Butler, then in
exile in France with his so-called “Pretender” king, James III.[8] Duke of Ormond was a name
befitting this particular pirate as well as any other Jacobite name. It had special meaning to the French
compatriot and brother of these conservative English rebels in the Americas.
[1] William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave
Trade (London, 1734), 193-288; Richard Sanders, If a Pirate I Must Be...: The True Story of Black Bart, King of the
Caribbean Pirates
(Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 2007), 31.
[2] A good explanation of the divisive politics
reminiscent of the Trump administration in today’s America is found in Frank
O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century:
British Political and Social History, 1688-1832 (London: Arnold, 1997),
43-51; Extreme conservatives or Tory Jacobites of 1715, at the time of the
hurricane that set off massive piracy in America, were quite similar to the
extreme “Neo-Confederate” Republicans of today’s America, with similar rebellious
anti-government ideology. Racism, however, was the new element then and still
highly significant today, owing to America’s unique economic reliance in the 17th-19th
centuries upon chattel slavery. Still reeling from Parliament’s assertion of power
over the monarchy in 1688, it was no coincidence that Jacobite conservatives
again rebelled in 1715, as the Confederacy in America did in 1861 over slavery,
or Trump voters did in 2016 essentially in reaction to an African-American
president. Racism remains America’s most persistent illness.
[3]; "James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 11 May 2012; The
hurricane on 30 July 1715 spilled a tremendous amount of Spanish silver on the
east coast of Florida and essentially
started the uptick in piracy. Those mariners in America who felt betrayed by
Whigs in Parliament, essentially favored conservative or Jacobite politics. They
greedily opposed liberal reforms against piracy, seen as a valid path to riches
in Stuart-founded America.
[4] Windham information from: Lloyd Charles Sanders, The Possibility of a Stewart Restoration on
the Death of Anne: The Stanhope Prize Essay for 1880 (London: T. Shrimpton, 1880), 19.
[5] Baylus C. Brooks, Quest
for Blackbeard: The True
Story of Edward Thache and His World (Lake
City, Florida: Baylus C. Brooks, 2016), 453-468.
[6] E.T. Fox, "Jacobitism and the 'Golden
Age' of Piracy, 1715-1725," International Journal of Maritime History,
XXII, No. 2 (December 2010), 278.
[7] Colin Woodard, The Republic of
Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (Orlando, 2007), 102-103, 196 and 230-231.
[8] Laura Nelson, The
Whydah Pirates Speak (Colorado: Laura Nelson, 2015), 50.
