From pp. 158-159, Chapter 5, "Jamaica," referencing Charles Howard CARLISLE
as the earl of CARLISLE (and I wouldn't have known which earl was being
mentioned unless I followed the Index of page numbers for the two earls of
this book; no designation appears within the body of the work at all, so far
as I can find, except for a partial name in footnote #13 found in the second
paragraph below). This is the last CARLISLE mention other than for Carlisle
Bay of Barbados:
************
Planters and buccaneers alike saw Governor VAUGHAN as an intruder. The
chief sugar planters took charge of the Jamaica Assembly, and this body, so
quiescent under MODYFORD, began claiming all the legislative and taxing
powers enjoyed by the House of Commons at home. The Assembly challenged
VAUGHAN's control over taxation, with the consequence that "my lord and the
island were a year without revenue." The Assembly authorized the
importation of Negroes from interloping slave ships, launched impeachment
proceedings against unpopular crown officials, revised the whole body of
colony laws every session, sent home copies of these laws only after they
had expired, and ignored all commands from the king. Naturally this
behavior vexed the home authorities. In the late 1670s the king's newly
created colonial council, the Lords of Trade, concluded that something must
be done about the Jamaica Assembly, for the independence of this body
bolstered the colonists' roisterous and lawless behavior. "In plain
terms,"
Secretary of State COVENTRY said, "the King intendeth to make a Plantation
of Jamaica and not a Christian Algiers" [footnote # 12: "COVENTRY to
VAUGHAN, June 8, 1676, Add. MSS 25120/74. For a fuller discussion of this
constitutional struggle see WHITSON, *Constitutional Development of
Jamaica,* chaps. 3-5; and THORNTON, *West-India Policy,* chap. 5."].
Therefore the Lords of Trade appointed another governor, the earl of
CARLISLE, and armed him with a new body of forty permanent laws prepared by
the Plantation Office, including a perpetual revenue act. Once CARLISLE got
the Jamaica Assembly to ratify these laws, he and his successors would need
to call few if any further assemblies.
The Jamaicans were not so easily cowed. When CARLISLE presented his
body of laws in 1678 the Assembly voted down every single one, reserving its
sharpest denunciations for the perpetual revenue act. Big sugar planters
like Samuel LONG and William BEESTON led the attack, eloquently insisting
that Jamaicans would never surrender their liberties as Englishmen. LONG
and BEESTON protested with special vehemence when they found that CARLISLE
had allied himself with Sir Henry MORGAN and the buccaneering faction.
CARLISLE soon gave up and returned to England [footnote #13: "A Breviate of
what passed in the Assembly called by his Excellency Charles Earl of
CARLISLE, Governor of Jamaica, ... September 2, 1678, Egerton MSS,
2395/576-583."]. The Lords of Trade were furious, but they saw that they
had to have some support from within the island. So in 1681 they
reappointed Sir Thomas LYNCH to the governorship and instructed him to press
for a settled revenue. "Arguing with Assemblys is like philosophising with
a Mule," LYNCH complained, but in 1683 he wheedled the Assembly into passing
a twenty-one-year revenue act that guaranteed fiscal independence to the
royal governor. This measure was bitterly opposed, according to LYNCH by
"that little drunken silly party of Sir H MORGAN's." LYNCH and his fellow
planters had surrendered much of their old independence, but temporarily at
least they had bested the buccaneers [footnote #14: "LYNCH to William
BLATHWAYT, June 12, 1682, Blathwayt Papers, XXIII; LYNCH to the Lords of
Trade, Nov. 2 1683. C.O. 138/4/181."].