In histories written from either the Royalist perspective or with Jersey as the principal focus, Sir George is seen as the hero of the defence of the Island against Parliament’s forces.
He is also recognised as a man whose loyalty was ultimately rewarded when, after the Restoration, he became Vice-chamberlain of King Charles II’s household, Treasurer of the Navy and the recipient of gifts of land in the Americas.
A different vision of Sir George is presented in a book entitled Robert Blake, Admiral and General at Sea, written by Hepworth Dixon and published in 1852.
This study of the great Parliamentary seafarer is said to have been based on family and state papers, and although it portrays Sir George as a man of courage and principle, it also has no qualms about what he was in the eyes of his Commonwealth adversaries – a pirate.
A chapter of Dixon’s study is devoted to what he describes as corsair Cavaliers, characters more often called privateers in Jersey literature.
After Parliament had triumphed in the Civil War, some Royalists eager to maintain the struggle by any means possible – and no doubt earn a living at the same time – took to the sea and raided shipping in the Channel.
Under the Commonwealth it was clearly inconceivable that they operated under letters of marque, those licences for piracy issued by the state, so in the broadest terms they can be characterised as pirates.
One of their bases was the Isles of Scilly, in particular the islands of St Mary and Tresco, which had been heavily fortified.
But their fort, earthworks and guns eventually proved no match for a squadron led by Admiral Blake, who used novel tactics to break Royalist resistance.
As well as landing troops for a direct assault, he also sailed some of his men of war into a narrow rock-strewn channel to bombard the defences.
This was in contravention of the military doctrine of the day, which said that warships could not hope to engage shore batteries successfully.
After his victory in Scilly in 1651, Blake turned his attention to the Channel Islands, other haunts of the ‘pirates’.
Jersey in particular was a substantial Royalist stronghold and the base for lucrative pirate operations in the Channel – so much so that St Aubin’s Bay was sometimes packed with prize vessels.
It is possible that Parliament would in any circumstances have wanted to scotch resistance in Jersey, but there can be little doubt that the damage that the corsair Cavaliers were doing to trade made Blake’s mission against the Island all the more pressing.
However, if Scilly had been a challenge, Jersey was always going to be a tough military nut to crack.
It was defended not only by two strong castles – Mont Orgueil and Elizabeth Castle – and Carteret’s forces but also by a sea full of then uncharted rocks.
The Island’s powerful tides were also a challenge for slow, unmanoeuvrable sailing ships.
Blake would have been fully aware of these problems and would also have known that although Mont Orgueil was in essence a medieval fortification, Elizabeth Castle was widely regarded as being impregnable.
As Major Norman Rybot’s plans of the castle, published in his 1934 study, show, only the outermost of two islets at the eastern end of St Aubin’s Bay was strongly fortified at that time.
The inner islet, which today also has ramparts and emplacements, was the site of a small strongpoint, Fort Charles, an old windmill and a bowling green.
In spite of this, the castle was formidable, having gun platforms offering the advantage of commanding altitude over any vessel entering into the bay and being barely in effective range of artillery ranged on the shore.
It was not until October 1651 that Blake’s flotilla was ready to sail for Jersey – though by that time the Battle of Worcester and the defeat of the future King Charles II had ended any realistic hopes of a Royalist recovery.
Carteret, however, was adamant that the Island should be defended, and his determination might well have been bolstered by the adverse conditions that he knew would be encountered by an invasion force.
Channel Island waters are often battered by storms and heavy swells in autumn and early winter.
However, he was handicapped by being in command of a force which realised that the Royalist cause in England was already lost.
In the event, Blake’s ships did encounter harsh weather and for days efforts to land the 4,000 troops in the Parliamentarian force were thwarted by surf, in particular in St Ouen’s Bay, where he first dropped anchor, but also in St Brelade’s Bay.
But he made the best of conditions by sailing from one place to another, obliging the Island’s defenders to march to and fro to cover potential landing sites as the threat shifted.
This Carteret’s forces did – to the point at which men began to desert the ranks to seek shelter from incessant drizzle and to sleep.
After a three-day standoff, Blake’s force, under their commander, Colonel Haynes – though some accounts say Heane – managed to land late at night, using flat-bottom boats which had been brought over from Plymouth.
Very quickly, resistance in the Island was subdued, but Carteret and a substantial force sought the sanctuary of Elizabeth Castle and soon made it clear that they would continue to resist.
Blake, eager to return to the tactics which had scored success in the Scillies, sailed many of his ships into St Aubin’s Bay, allowing his pilots to take them as close as possible to the castle so that they could open a bombardment.
This they did, and although it showed no sign of reducing the fortifications, one shot, from Blake’s flagship, Victory – though other sources name his principal ship as the oddly named Happy Entrance – smashed the castle church tower and stone splinters killed and injured many defenders.
Lady Carteret was so alarmed by this that she urged surrender, but instead she and other non-combatants were evacuated to St Malo.
In spite of Blake’s lucky shot, he realised that the castle was nowhere near surrender, so he sent to England for heavy mortars, which, as many readers may be aware, dropped explosive shells directly into the castle without having to batter down the walls.
Rybot writes that the largest mortar – which might have been the one to send its payload crashing through the roof of the old church and into the powder magazine and stores – propelled a shell containing thirty or forty pounds of gunpowder into the air using a propellant charge of ten pounds.
Whichever mortar did the damage, it produced a result that Blake’s ships and the forces on shore had been unable to achieve – the eventual capitulation of Carteret’s garrison.
The Royalists were granted honourable exile in France and Blake went on to further maritime triumphs against the Dutch, in the Mediterranean and at Santa Cruz in the Canaries.
Carteret, meanwhile, appears to have been a born survivor. He served as an admiral in the French navy and endured a period in the Bastille before the end of the Commonwealth allowed him to put what many would have regarded as his pirate past behind him and become one of the most influential figures in Restoration England.
It is dangerous to judge historical figures by contemporary values, but Sir George Carteret clearly had moral standards which would raise eyebrows today.
He profited from the transatlantic slave trade, having been party to a finally unsuccessful bid to establish an English-owned African trading company, and he was also complicit with a scheme which set out to establish what amounted to a feudal structure in the American colonies.
After being granted stewardship of lands in Virginia, the Carolinas and what was to become known as New Jersey, Sir George and others who shared his good fortune devised a political system which had more in common with 12th century Europe than any new world order.
With no regard at all for the democratic values which, in an admittedly primitive form, Cromwell had espoused, Sir George and his fellow colonial entrepreneurs favoured a rigid division of society with a figure called the Palatine at its summit.
Below him was a class of landowners called the Landgraves, a title borrowed from Germany on the grounds that no English noble ranks were to be used in America.
Then came the Caciques, a native American term for chiefs, who were to be the ‘nobility of the province’.
Beneath them were lords of the manors, who, in parallel with Jersey custom, would administer justice through a manorial court, and preside over tenants, or leet men.
Leet men and women were not to leave their land without permission of their lord and their offspring were to be condemned to maintain their status ‘to all generations’.
They could, however, draw comfort from being notionally superior to the lowest of the colony’s classes, slaves transported from Africa.
This ‘Grand Model’ was widely praised in England, but it never became a practical reality because, during Carteret’s era, too few people settled in the American colonies to make it a practical structure.
If Carteret’s idea of social stability failed to take hold and was ultimately displaced and made ridiculous by the USA’s radically different model of democracy, he and his fellow American landowners can be credited with a genuine achievement.
If, in the 18th century, General James Wolfe ensured that Canada was to be a British rather than French possession, in the 17th century Carteret and others were responsible for establishing England and the English language as dominant forces in what was to become the United States.
The colonies in the Carolinas, Virginia and New Jersey might have suffered greatly as Europeans tried to establish a foothold on the fringes of a new and hostile continent, but the English presence – coupled with events back in Europe – finally made sure that Spanish and Dutch aspirations in the northern part of the New World died a death.
It can be argued that had it not been for Sir George Carteret and a small number of his contemporaries, present-day America north of America and south of the Canadian border might have been speaking principally Spanish, perhaps with some significant Dutch enclaves.
* Dixon’s book on Blake has been digitised by Microsoft and can be downloaded from the internet.
