Leslie, without giving the source of his information, adds, “Raymond
expressed no concern, but died with a haughty kind of Resolution. Tyson
behaved in a manner more becoming, and seemed penitent for the part he
had acted.” We learn from the “Calendar of State Papers,” that in May
1660 an Order in Council was made “To permit Mary Tyson to repair to her
husband, Lieut.-Col. Edward Tyson, in Jamaica, in the ship _Bear_, now
bound thither, with accommodation for two maid-servants and one
manservant.” Her arrival must have been a sad one. She found her gallant
but misguided husband laid in a rebel’s grave.
Long says that Raymond was probably encouraged in his attempt by the
knowledge that Doyley was not armed with any express commission or power
to punish such offence capitally; and Gardner, thus fortified, says that
Doyley’s action was illegal. But Beeston tells us that “the government
was only by court-martial,” and this surely implied the right to shoot a
rebel. The news of the Restoration reached Jamaica twelve days after the
affair, but Doyley did not receive his commission to act as a
constitutional governor until February 8, 1661.
Leslie makes the outbreak a Cavalier and Roundhead affair, and Bridges
and Hill concur in that view. Gardner, following Beeston, thinks it was
mainly due to a desire for a simple civil life. Long says, “Raymond’s
object, it has been supposed, was to seize the Government himself; but
the real design is not certainly known.” In contradistinction to
Beeston, Long tells us that Doyley was “a steady advocate for pursuing
the cultivation of the island, to which most of the private men were
disinclined.”
The outbreak was probably just as much due to a desire for a more civil
form of government than that favoured by Doyley as to any feeling of
loyalty to the Stuarts; and the fact that Doyley felt compelled to take
precautions for his personal safety in case of defeat may have been
dictated as much by fear of the soldiers’ dislike for him as a martinet,
as of the antipathy of the Roundhead portion of them to him as a
cavalier.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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