So we might see a surviving New Sweden? This TL just gained a level in awesomeness.
Wait and see! Certainly the New Netherlands isn't going to be in a good position to quash the place, as it did IOTL.
Good to see this back. It's fascinating how some of these early colonies had such few people involved at critical times: you get the impression that one good Indian attack, bad winter and/or bout of plague could have wiped out New Netherland altogether...
Oh, completely. Death rates were quite often horrendous, and even when the main colonies just about survived, smaller ones frequently failed. It took the Dutch about three goes to successfully get a settlement going on Staten Island, for example, let alone all the attempts to settle Maine that never quite got off the ground. As late as King Philip's war in the 1680s, there was a non-trivial risk that New England could have been reduced to a handful of coastal pockets, and the colonists were acutely aware of this; their letters home are constantly fretting about their settlements being surrounded by enemies, starving and on the brink of extinction, and most of the time they weren't exagerating for effect.
It's a great book, and I agree it's more appealing. My favorite data point is that the city had more taverns than houses at one point. Granted, people were probably living in them, but it does say a lot...
Oh, completely- and the diversity of the population was astonishing to go with it.
Well, posit a netherlands that keeps it until 1689. Now it's part of the Anglo-Dutch Union. Will the English seize it then? Nah.
New Amsterdam as a free port amidst the English colonies. Hrm.
They might not sieze it per se, but when the Union splits, are the Dutch guaranteed to get their colony back?
I also wonder about the survival of the New Netherlands compared to its northern neighbour. The English/Scots/British ended up taking, and subsequently returning, Acadia five or six times before they made the conquest stick. And New Amsterdam is of considerably more strategic and commercial importance than Port Royal, and had been on New England's 'to do' list since at least the late 1640s.
Seems to me that a surviving New Netherlands is dependent on repeatedly dodging the same bullet over a considerable period. I'm not saying it's impossible- I could certainly see a surviving New Amsterdam, stripped of everything upriver of Yonkers and acting as a sort of North American Goa (which would be fascinating)- but it seems to me that much more than that gets a bit difficult to engineer.
Why is Cromwell persecuting the people of Providence, exactly? Doesn't seem to be how he acted in England...
Well it's gone into in Chapters 11 and 12, but ITTL Rhode Island, as a non-chartered colony full of troublesome freethinkers, was sat on fairly firmly by the New England Commonwealth in the early 1640s. For a lot of the more hardline puritans, like John Endicott, this was for doctrinal reasons, but as you say, that wasn't Cromwell's style. Indeed, given his later sympathy for the early Quakers ("
I would rather have Mohammedanism permitted, than that one of God's children should be persecuted"), it's difficult to imagine that he would have any genuine theological issue with the Rhode Islanders.
In fact, as usual, Cromwell's considerations are based on a need for control. Saybrook claims the western two thirds of Narragansett Bay, and Cromwell wants to evict the settlers already there and open the region to Saybrugian settlement. He's quite happy to exploit the fears of more orthodox colonies like New Haven and Massachusetts about the Providence Plantation becoming a breeding ground for Heresy etc. In fact, ITTL a good half of the colonists in the region stick around when it becomes part of Saybrook; it's only the determined sectaries like Samuel Gorton who emigrate to found New Providence.
For this reason, if he ends up in control of the New Netherlands Cromwell is unlikely to persecute the Gortonites; he has enough on his plate as it is, and the sectaries are safely on the other side of Raritan Bay in a pestilential marshland nobody wants (New Providence will eventually move to better ground a couple of miles to the east). If they dare to cause trouble or get in Cromwell's way though...