The English Empire in America, 1602-1658

Beyond Jamestown

L H Roper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317313861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century.

1 DEEP BACKGROUND

2. That all other englishe Trades are growen beggerly or daungerous, especially in all the kinge of Spaine his Domynions, where our men are driven to flinge their Bibles and prayer Bokes into the sea, and to forsweare and renownce their relligion and conscience and consequently theyr obedience to her Majestie.

3. That this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as far as wee were wonte to travell, and supply the wantes of all our decayed trades.

4. That this enterprise will be for the manifolde imploymente of numbers of idle men, and for bredinge of many sufficient, and for utterance of the great quantitie of the commodities of our Realme.¹

In 1584, the clergyman Richard Hakluyt famously compiled a ‘particuler discourse’ setting out ‘the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties’ which he presented to Queen Elizabeth I. Alarmed at the advantages the Spanish had gained at the expense of England and Protestantism by their head-start in America, Hakluyt and his patron, Sir Walter Ralegh, presented American colonization as a remedy for a variety of ills and so worthy of royal sponsorship: ‘Western discoveries’ would do everything from increasing trade and customs revenue to drawing Ireland ‘to more Civilitie’ to easing unemployment to curbing the ambitions of Felipe II. The queen received this brief, however, with rather less enthusiasm than its author had hoped; as we know, state support for imperial ventures remained intermittent until the middle of the seventeenth century. The prescience of Hakluyt’s characterization of colonies as entities by which exotic, but useful, commodities could be obtained at lower cost and with much less hazard than through exchange with other countries, along with his conception of the English Empire as ‘a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine’, has brought the tireless promoter considerable long-term significance despite the lack of impression his arguments made in the immediate term.²

It would seem self-evident that the history of Anglo-American colonization arose from the history of early modern England itself. We have a fairly clear idea of the world in which Hakluyt lived, as well as the despairing views the most persistent and prolific of English colonizing advocates had of it. Yet, despite this knowledge, and all of the ink spilled on English ‘state formation’ and the social development of various English colonies, no systematic treatment of the place of the expansion of overseas interests within the context of Tudor-Stuart England exists. Even the emergence of an ‘Atlantic’ perspective, while it has widened the lens trained on the founding of Virginia and its counterparts, has generally preferred to track Mediterranean and African links with what early modern English merchants, explorers, officials and colonists were doing, rather than delving too deeply into what was going on in England, or non-Ottoman Europe in general at the time. The Habsburg service of Captain John Smith, the 1578 ‘battle of the three kings’ at Alcazarquivir in Morocco and the character of the slave trade in Angola certainly had effects on the character of the ‘Atlantic World’. But surely, when considering the character of English overseas activity, we first require a better understanding of the history of the socio-political world which gave birth to colonial variations of it?³

The period in which English settlement in America was conceived and in which it developed – the one hundred years between the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 and the death of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, in 1658 – continues to rank as one of the most enduringly fascinating in human, let alone English, history, if the volume of films which continues to stream from cinema projectors, not to mention scholarly works from university presses, offers any guide. Hakluyt himself, born in 1552, the last year of the reign of Edward VI (1547–53), and, thus, thirty-two years old when he composed his ‘Discourse’ and fifty-four years of age when the Virginia fleet sailed in December 1606, would have celebrated a dazzling array of English achievements, including in 1588 the seemingly miraculous defeat of the Spanish Armada and, eight years before that, the triumphant return of Sir Francis Drake from his circumnavigation of the globe, which the colonial theorist included, of course, in his massive compilation of Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589 and again in 1600.

Contemporaries of Hakluyt with cultural inclinations might have attended productions of such new plays as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra or Ben Jonson’s Volpone. The cleric himself would certainly have been aware of the work begun two years prior to the departure of the Jamestown colonists, under royal patronage, to create a new English-language version of the Bible. As an integral participant in the effort to expand English overseas interests, he had a direct role in the dissemination of the descriptions of the indigenous people of ‘Virginia’ of Thomas Hariot, made available through the efforts of the Flemish engraver Theodore de Bry, and the description of Guiana composed by his patron, Ralegh (languishing in the Tower of London in 1606). In another ten years, the findings of the physician-scientist William Harvey on the workings of the human body would begin to circulate.

Yet, rather less triumphantly and much more significantly, Hakluyt lived in particularly fraught and deeply uncertain times, as he well knew. Customarily, students of history, especially of the ‘colonial American’ stripe, tend to emphasize the ‘modern’ in their examinations of the ‘early modern’ period, as they are invariably and naturally interested in the nature and history of ‘modernity’ and how things came to be the way they are in North America: the development of constitutional government, ‘liberty’, individualism, commerce, the bureaucratic state, even theatre. Overseas trade and, especially, migration have fit into this schema all too nicely.⁴ Correspondingly, the earlier history of England, certainly prior to 1570, receives very little consideration, even though, as we shall see below, ‘modern’ phenomena manifested themselves routinely in the ‘medieval’ period while, on the other hand, ‘medieval’ socio-political sensibilities remained stubbornly apparent during the early modern period, even in circumstances related to colonization.

Much of the demarcation drawn then and now between medieval and modern – and the general perception that this demarcation sets out a transforming progress in the history of England and elsewhere – arose due to the Reformation. The overthrow of ‘enslaving’ papal authority, the dissolution (and often destruction) of the ‘corrupt’ monasteries, the casting out of ‘superstitions’ – such as, most pointedly, transubstantiation – from divine service (which correspondingly replaced the popish Mass), the publication and dissemination of the Bible in English (rather than Latin), and the correspondingly deeper and more direct involvement of the congregation in their religious experience all counted as progress on the spiritual front. On the secular front, the history of the English people celebrated, by definition, liberation from the ‘tyranny’ exercised by medieval monarchs and barons as well as the chaos of the ‘Wars of the Roses’, and from the ‘feudalism’ which held an illiterate and ignorant peasantry in thraldom and which checked the aspirations of ‘ordinary people’ to better themselves. In sum, such a scenario had no place – and holds no place – in a progressive and ever-progressing world, especially in the ‘New World order’ which ultimately came to include the United States.⁵

Inevitably, then, historians of the expansion of English overseas interests, and of Anglo-American colonization in particular, have paid scant heed to the comprehensive revision of our understanding of pre-Reformation English history which has occurred over the last twenty or so years. For the stereotypical view of a hidebound, insular medieval England finally gave way to a realization that social mobility, the movement of people and commercial activity – all hallmarks of ‘modernity’ – also constituted readily apparent characteristics of English society prior to the Reformation. A demographic explosion, during which the country’s population increased by two to three times during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, triggered, in turn, an increase in cultivated lands, a corresponding increase in rents and prices, ‘a growing dependence on non-agricultural employment and a sizeable increase in both the number and size of markets and towns’. In addition to the creation of over 2,000 ‘weekly village markets and 500 boroughs’, the population of London, by the turn of the fourteenth century, had climbed to between 70,000 and 100,000 inhabitants. At the same time, the amount of circulating specie in England increased tenfold from the eleventh century to £1,100,000. Accompanying these changes came ‘political centralisation, the relative growth of freedom, changes in socio-property relations, and growing occupational diversity, all [of which] encouraged the emergence of factor markets in land, labour and capital’.⁶

These phenomena, in turn, contributed to an increasingly commercial agricultural system, which ‘peaked in aggregate terms in the early fourteenth century’. Even with the onset of severe population decline and economic disruption brought on by the Black Death (1348–50), ‘it is certain that the commercial infrastructure did not disappear or become moribund’ as ‘sharper competition between markets had produced a more lean and rational marketing system’. The elimination of approximately a third of the English population at a stroke placed a substantial damper on these developments but also contributed to the collapse of serfdom in much of the country between 1350 and 1500 which, in turn, accelerated the shift of agricultural production for the market.⁷

Correspondingly, this ‘marketing system’ meant a continuation of earlier patterns of urbanization – not just in London, whose pre-eminence continued to increase exponentially – and migration of the Middle Ages. While the founding of colonies in a later period obviously permitted the expansion of the geographical scope of English migration to beyond the seas, it has become quite apparent that English people have always been on the move and that towns of various sizes have always attracted migrants. Seaports from Exeter to Newcastle to Bristol and inland towns from York to Coventry to Salisbury, linked by a network of water and land routes, possessed the natural symptoms of urban life, including shops and markets, taverns and municipal governments devised by royal charter quite early on. Towns also cooperated and competed with another for commerce and resources.⁸

These municipal endeavours reflected the continued striving of individuals to advance themselves during the Middle Ages (and before). Degree of success in trade, of course, always provides the readiest means for social mobility along with the readiest means of social decline, although the inherently unsettled nature of commerce always placed it beneath the relative security of landed wealth in contemporary idealizations of social character. Prior to the mid-sixteenth century, English merchants primarily involved themselves in domestic agricultural production and in the export of woollen textiles to Continental markets, especially Antwerp. The acquisition of land and the ‘rationalization’ of agricultural production, notably through enclosure, provided another significant avenue of mobility, especially for aspiring yeomen, while the seizure and redistribution of monastic lands following the Dissolution enabled supporters of the Crown to augment their estates substantially. As commentators, such as Sir Thomas More in 1516, observed and as the recurring protestations which periodically convulsed the countryside manifested, a substantial number of people had reservations about the effects of agricultural ‘improvement’: it appeared both to facilitate inordinate gain for some individuals at the expense of others and to further the erosion of the reciprocity between degrees of rank which underpinned an essential sense of community and, in the worst case scenario, threatened the dissolution social order and established religion. For John Winthrop, leading light of the Massachusetts Bay Company writing some thirty-five years after Hakluyt and over a century after More, colonization came to provide a means for stemming this threat and creating a godly model of Christian charity.⁹

The continuing increase in population after 1500, however, accompanied by increased migration, only aggravated the fears of social collapse. According to the leading estimate, England contained 2,773,851 people in 1541, 4,253,325 in 1606 (the year in which the Virginia Company received its charter) and 5,140,743 in 1660, despite the recurrence of plague, smallpox and other epidemic diseases. Indeed, Hakluyt himself weathered plague outbreaks in 1563, 1578, 1592–3 and 1603. His descendants had to cope with the return of the disease in 1625, 1636 and 1665. The cleric had already surpassed the average life expectancy of thirty-eight years for the period at the time the Virginia ‘first fleet’ sailed. The population of London continued to outpace that of the country at large, thanks to in-migration, despite horrifying mortality: the capital recorded 220,716 baptisms and 239,221 burials between 1600 and 1624 (the country as a whole recorded 3,504,446 baptisms and 2,744,538 burials during this period), although its population grew from between 61,000 and 75,000 in the mid-sixteenth century to over 200,000 by the beginning of the seventeenth.¹⁰

These demographics, compounded by the consecutively disastrous harvests of 1596 and 1597, generated dire socio-economic effects: scholars of the period regard the ‘nasty nineties’ – just a decade before the founding of Jamestown – as the worst for most ranks of English people until the aftermath of World War II. This situation arose, notwithstanding, for instance, the adoption of the Poor Law of 1597, due to the combination of high prices and low wages generated by the fundamental reality of more people: as many as ‘two-fifths of the total population of four million fell below the margin of subsistence’. Dearth and the costs of waging indeterminate war in Spain, the Low Countries and, above all, Ireland combined to render the position of many ‘ordinary’ English people increasingly desperate, for ‘while the population of the nation between 1541 and 1656 nearly doubled, the price of essential commodities over the span more than tripled’. The collapse of England’s long-standing trade with the Low Countries after 1550, punctuated by the siege and sack of Antwerp (1576–82) during the Dutch Revolt, added further fuel to these problems especially in the south-east part of the country.¹¹

In reality, the kingdom’s population had returned to pre-Black Death numbers by the mid-sixteenth century, but the gap of two centuries rendered the earlier demographic experience outside of the reckoning of later commentators and it was the perception of those commentators that unprecedented numbers of unattached people roamed England threatening their ‘betters’ with begging, crime and even rebellion over their circumstance.¹² The Reverend William Harrison, for instance, claimed in 1587 that it was ‘an easy matter to prove that England was never less furnished with people than at this present’ by checking the decline in the number of tenancies. Moreover, he observed, a palpable number of the realm’s ‘cities and towns [had become] either utterly decayed or more than quarter or half diminished’. These observations, however, did not quell either the purported threat posed by the seemingly indiscriminate movement of masterless men (and women) or the inability of government to address that threat. Hakluyt had these issues firmly in mind when he promoted Western planting.¹³

The pursuit of status and wealth – which, it should be noted, has never been restricted to a particular element in English society – meant, by definition, competition and required the subordination and control of ‘inferiors’. It also, then, entailed a further erosion, aggravated by the Reformation and the Dissolution as well as by population increase, of the ideal of reciprocity between social orders. In 1500, the impoverished could and did seek relief from monasteries and other religious establishments as well as from fellow Christians duty-bound to render assistance in hope of receiving salvation. After 1560, despite the intentions of the proponents of the Church of England that the reformed establishment would step into the shoes of the old faith, no entity assumed entirely the charitable functions of the old church. Moreover, for the increasing number of English people who professed adherence to the beliefs of John Calvin, the salvation equation no longer required a ‘good works’ factor. The absence of this requirement further reduced the need to give to the less fortunate, especially those who adhered to a different doctrinal persuasion.

Indeed, the extent and character of the Reformation itself remained a notoriously and frustratingly open question, notwithstanding the fervent exhortations of the enemies of the papal Antichrist and the ceaseless attempts by governments to herd their subjects into a reformed orthodoxy. Instead of a seamless transfer from papal to kingly governance of religion and the creation of a theology to which all loyal English people would subscribe, the ultimate establishment of Protestantism only further refracted the spectrum of religious belief. Within this refraction, people could find themselves compelled to conform as the government shifted its religious tack; and they could convert from one creed to another, both for reasons of conscience and, alarmingly to contemporaries, for reasons of convenience. This reality further bred suspicion of others and a corresponding concern about the future of society if such beliefs and their followers were allowed to fester.¹⁴

Seventy years after the first attempt of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer to devise an English church and just over a year before the three ships sailed off for Virginia, the continuing existence of committed ‘papists’ – and the threat that group posed – had its clearest demonstration in the ‘miraculous deliverance’ of the nation from the Catholic plot intended to blow up those, including the new king, James I, attending the opening of parliament in November 1605.

The ‘Guy Fawkes’ conspiracy also manifested the mutually deep fear and loathing that had developed between many ‘papists’ and Protestants. This sentiment, in turn, rendered consistently problematic the various attempts which had been made from various tacks, including the ‘King James Bible’, to establish a wholly satisfactory religious settlement under the government of the Crown. Hakluyt subscribed wholeheartedly to the theology and government of the Jacobean Church of England. Others, however, craved a ‘further reformation’: they might have conformed outwardly, yet maintained a private conscience oriented towards popery or Presbyterianism or they might have held separatist tendencies, holding, in accordance with the Gospel of St Matthew (22:21), that state control over the church necessarily polluted the latter with worldliness; they might also have held rad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Deep Background
• 2 Genesis
• 3 Birth Pangs
• 4 Fatal and Near-Fatal Attractions
• 5 An Empire of ‘Smoak’
• 6 Some Measure of Success
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index