The actual
administration, both civil and military, was in the hands of a naval
officer of experience, Sir George Carteret, or de Carteret, cousin and
brother-in-law to the Seigneur of S. Owen, a large manor on the western
side of the island. This family, distinguished in island history ever
since it abandoned its fief of Carteret on the coast of Normandy to
follow the fortunes of John Lackland, when the Duchy was confiscated by
Philip Augustus, was by far the most powerful in the island. Its only
possible rival, the house of Lempriere, of Maufant, had espoused warmly
the cause of the Parliament, and had consequently met with reverses when
the Carterets, who were royalist, effected the revolution mentioned in
our Prologue.

It only remains to be added that the people at large were not at all
warmly attached to either of the parties to the Civil War. The language
of the majority was an old form of French, now reduced to the condition
of a patois; the more educated classes studied the laws and language of
France. The proceedings of the Courts and the services of the Church
were conducted in modern French, and the sympathies of the community
were divided between a mundane attachment to England, and a religious
leaning to the creed of the Huguenots, of whom a great number had sought
refuge on their shores. Hence the Jersey folks were indifferently
submissive to royalty, the only form of English government of which,
till these days, they had heard; but they by no means shared the
High-Church fervour which had animated the late unfortunate King. Their
ultimate motive, as is common to human nature, was for their own
interests; and although the influence of the Carterets had kept them,
for the most part, nominal followers of the cause of royalty, men like
Michael Lempriere and Prynne had good reason for believing that they
would, in the long run, favour those who seemed the best friends to
Jersey. Let them not be blamed for this. Their love for England was very
much founded upon fear of France. By observing the attitude of the
Scottish borderers of a slightly earlier period, an Englishman of the
seventeenth century could imagine the attitude of the Jersey mind
towards the "Normans," by which name they were accustomed to designate
their feudal and aggressive Catholic neighbours the Lords and Ministers
of the French Kingdom. Even as the Grahams and Scotts of Tweedside stood
at arms against each other on either bank of the dividi