The governor of Bermuda (officially Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Somers Isles (alias the Islands of Bermuda)) is the representative of the British monarch in the British overseas territory of Bermuda.
For the purposes of this article, Governor of Bermuda refers to the local office, although this was originally a Lieutenant-Governorship ("Lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Our Islands in America commonly called or known by the name of the Bermuda or Summer (sic) Islands"; the Lieutenant-Governor of Bermuda was re-titled Governor of Bermuda in 1738), which – like the lieutenant-governorship of the Jamestown colony – was subordinate to the actual Governor located in England. For a period following the 1783 independence of those continental colonies that were to become the United States of America, the remaining continental colonies, Bermuda and the Bahamas were grouped together as British North America, and the civil, naval, military, and ecclesiastic government of Bermuda was made subordinate to the Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the Provinces of Upper-Canada, Lower-Canada, Nova-Scotia, and New~Brunswick, and their several Dependencies, Vice-Admiral of the same, Lieutenant-General and Commander of all His Majesty's Forces in the said Provinces of Lower Canada and Upper-Canada, Nova-Scotia and New-Brunswick, and their several Dependencies, and in the islands of Newfoundland, Prince Edward, Cape Breton and the Bermudas, &c. &c. &c., with the governor of Bermuda again becoming a lieutenant-governor. Although soon restored to a full civil Governorship, in his military role as Commander-in-chief he remained subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief in Halifax, and naval and ecclesiastic links to the Maritimes remained. The military links were severed by Canadian confederation at the end of the 1860s, when the governor of Bermuda, in his office of Commander-in-Chief of Bermuda, was elevated upon the removal of the British Army from Canada and the taking up by the Canadian Dominion Government of responsibility for the defence of all of the former British North American continental colonies excepting Newfoundland. The established Church of England in Bermuda, within which the governor held office as Ordinary, remained linked to the colony of Newfoundland under the same Bishop until 1919.
The governor is appointed by the monarch on the advice of the British government. The role of the governor is to act as the de facto head of state, and is responsible for appointing the premier and the 11 members of the Senate (the upper house of Bermuda's Parliament).
The governor is also commander-in-chief of Bermuda, formerly in control of a large Bermuda Garrison composed of regular army, militia, volunteer, and territorial units, of which only the Royal Bermuda Regiment remains. Until 1867, the governor also held the appointment of vice-admiral of Bermuda.
The current governor is Andrew Murdoch.
The governor has their own flag in Bermuda, a Union Flag with the territory's coat of arms superimposed.
History
Bermuda's settlement began in 1609, with the wrecking of the flagship of the Virginia Company, the Sea Venture. Although most of the passengers and crew ultimately completed their voyage to Virginia, the archipelago was permanently settled from that point, and left in the hands of the Virginia Company. The first intentional settlers arrived in 1612, under Richard Moore, whose appointment was officially as the deputy governor of Bermuda. Sir Thomas Smith remained in England as the first governor and treasurer of Bermuda. A carpenter by trade, Moore ensured the long-term survival of the colony by concentrating on building fortifications, including the first stone forts in the English New World, and developing St. George's Town. Moore brought with him to Bermuda two consecutively numbered boxes. The first, only to be opened in the case of his death, incapacitation or absence from the colony, contained the name of the settler who was to replace him. In the case of that settler also having died, or otherwise being incapable of taking the office, a second was named in the other box. More was also instructed to appoint a Counsell of Six to assist in the governance of the colony. The six appointed Counsellors were Captain Miles Kendall, Captain John Mansfield, Thomas Knight, Charles Caldycot, Edward Waters (some records give his name as Robert Waters),Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of The Bermudas or Somers Islands, 1515–1685, Volume I (1511–1562), by Lieutenant-General Sir John Henry Lefroy, KCMG, CB, LL.D, FRS, Royal Artillery. The Bermuda Memorials Edition, 1981. The Bermuda Historical Society and The Bermuda National Trust. Printed in Canada by the University of Toronto Press. and Christopher Carter (Christopher Carter and Edward Waters were among three men who had first arrived in Bermuda with the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture. They had remained behind when the Deliverance and Patience had departed for Jamestown in 1610 with the remainder of the Sea Venture's passengers and crew, and remained again with the addition of Edward Chard, after the Patience had returned from Jamestown and departed once more in the same year for England, thereby ensuring that Bermuda has been permanently settled since the wreck of the Sea Venture).
Bermuda was the second permanent English colony established (as an extension of the first, Jamestown, Virginia, which had been settled in 1607). Bermuda was administered under Royal charters by the Virginia Company, and its successor, the Somers Isles Company, which appointed the colony's governors until the Crown revoked the charter and took over administration in 1684. With the transfer to the Somers Isles Company in 1615, Sir Thomas Smith remained in England as Governor and Treasurer of Bermuda, and Captain Daniel Tucker was sent to Bermuda in 1616 aboard the George, in consort with the Edwin, to succeed Moore as Deputy Governor. Twenty-four Assistants were also appointed. By the 1630s, the Somers Isles Company had ceased sending Governors to Bermuda and had begun appointing prominent Bermudians, such as William Sayle, to the position.
The Crown maintained the system of government established under the company: an elected parliament (originally a single House of Assembly, which held its first session in 1620) and a privy council under a governor. The Privy Council, made up of the chief justice, certain senior civil servants, and appointees, was also known as the Governor's Council and the Legislative Council (most of its responsibilities are now filled by the Cabinet and the Senate of Bermuda, with the council now only an advisory body for the governor). The last company-appointed governor was reappointed by the Crown. In 1707 the British state was created by the union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland, and Bermuda thereby became a British colony. Since the 1783 independence of Virginia, it has been Britain's oldest colony. Following US independence, Bermuda became an imperial fortress, with an important Royal Navy base and a large military garrison to guard it."The Andrew and the Onions: The Story of the Royal Navy in Bermuda, 1795–1975", Lt. Commander Ian Strannack, The Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, The Bermuda Maritime Museum As such, the policy of the government until the 1950s, when the Royal Naval Dockyard was reduced to a base (in 1951) leading to the final closure of the regular army's Bermuda Garrison in 1957, had been to appoint (often retiring) senior military (or occasionally naval) officers as Bermuda's governor and commander-in-chief. On the rare occasions when a civilian was appointed to the role, it was only as governor – with operational command of the garrison in the hands of the senior lieutenant-colonel in Bermuda, who was appointed brigadier and subordinate to a military commander elsewhere. Since the 1964, those appointed governor and commander-in-chief have tended to be prominent career-politicians at the ends of their political lives.
Prior to the creation of the lower (and, originally, only) house of the Parliament of Bermuda, the House of Assembly, in 1620, the governors ruled supreme, and were often draconian. Governor Daniel Tucker, formerly of Virginia, who arrived in 1616, was notorious for his harshness, having many islanders hanged, maimed, or whipped on the slightest provocation. One Bermudian, John Wood, was hanged for airing his views on the governor in church. Governor Tucker's personal boat was reportedly stolen by five islanders, one named Saunders, who left a note saying they were on their way to England, or Davy Jones' Locker, either place being preferable to Bermuda under Tucker's rule. On reaching England, they complained about the harshness of Tucker's rule, though their complaints fell on deaf ears. Governor Tucker also, reportedly, used his oversight of the surveying of Bermuda to enrich himself and future generations of Bermudian Tuckers with prime real estate when he appropriated the overplus (surplus) land left after Richard Norwood's 1616 survey of the colony. Much of this land, forming an estate known as The Grove, would still be in the hands of his relatives during the American War of Independence.
For the remainder of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the real political power in Bermuda lay in the elected parliament and the appointed Council, both dominated by members of Bermuda's wealthy commercial class. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Somers Isles Company had ceased sending governors from overseas, and instead appointed Bermudians such as William Sayle from this same local elite; a policy which ended after the Civil Wars, during which Bermuda tended to the Royalist side.
The Adventurers in England, many of whom were Parliamentarians, had exerted their authority over the preceding two decades to strangle Bermuda's emerging maritime industry, and the Bermudians' animosity towards the Adventurers in England consequently further acted to place them on the side of the Crown (The Somers Isles Company had tended towards the Royalist side in 1647, but was in the Parliamentary camp by 1649, and Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, one of the major shareholders of the Somers Isles Company, was appointed Lord High Admiral of the Parliamentary navy from 1642 to 1649, and was related to Oliver Cromwell by the marriage of his grandson and heir to Cromwell's daughter).
In a letter to Alexander Pym at Derby House, Westminster, dated 9 May 1646, William Renner wrote:
A Triumvirate replaced Captain Josias Forster as Governor of Bermuda in 1647. The members all being religious Independents, they established a minority rule that both the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians found tyrannical, resulting in their alliance against the Independents (whereas in England it had the Presbyterians had allied with the Independents under Parliament against the Royalist Episcopalians). To end the strife in the colony, the Somers Isles Company appointed Captain Thomas Turner Governor in 1647, and Independents were removed from Government.