The son of respected Virginian gentry, Daniel Parke (1669-1710) had strong ambitions to become governor of Virginia. Although disappointed in this goal, he was offered the governorship of the Leeward Islands. Arriving in Antigua in the summer of 1707, he alienated and antagonised both planters and traders with what was regarded as heavy-handed enforcement of the Acts of Trade, and provoked concerns leading to a riot as early as 1708. He was wounded in an ambush in October 1709 and killed on 7 December 1710, when the assembly and settlers turned on him and stormed the governor’s residence. The assassination of a Crown official by his subjects was a shocking event, much reported on back in England.
Most accounts of Col. Parke’s character show him in an unfavourable light, coming from sources hostile to his Virginian ambitions and alliances, or his time in Antigua. Parke had returned to Virginia from his first trip to England with a mistress and child, and rumours also suggest he had scandalised Antigua by trifling openly with the wives and daughters of planters, settlers and natives. George French, a close friend of Parke, writes more favourably, in reaction to “false insinuations” and criticisms of Parke. In his account French defends Parke’s actions while governor of the Leeward Islands from 1708 to 1710, gives many details of lawsuits, depositions, etc., discusses much-needed reforms carried out by Parke in the face of settler hostility, and describes in detail the cruelty with which Parke was treated in the rebellion: “they use him with the most utmost contempt and inhumanity. They strip him of his clothes, kick, spurn at, and beat him with the buts of their muskets, by which means at last they break his back. They drag him into the streets by a leg and arm, and his head trails and beats from step to step of the stone stairs at the entrance of the house, and he is dragged on the coarse gravelly street which raked the skin from his bones.”
This copy, one of fewer than a dozen in England recorded on ESTC, was transferred to the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library from the West India Committee Library in 1977. It previously belonged to the noted American book collector Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow (1826-1889).
http://www.shl.lon.ac.uk/specialcollections/bookofthemonth/2010_08.shtml
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