In 1614, the lawyer and wit Richard Martin approached the bar in Parliament to deliver a humbling apology. Martin had given members of the House of Commons something of a history lesson, speaking at length of recent geographical discoveries, notions of conquest, previous European colonial efforts, the failed English settlement on Roanoke, and the means through which Virginia might strengthen the English foothold in the Atlantic.Footnote 1 What most displeased the Members of Parliament (MPs), however, was not his detailed account of colonization but the ease with which he had slipped into discussing other matters of state. Martin’s speech fluctuated away from and then ‘fell in again, as it were [to] the Council of Virginia’, speaking ‘as a School-master, to teach his Scholars’.Footnote 2 Colonial supporters from the House of Lords who had accompanied Martin to the Commons were livid. Among clamours for Martin to kneel to deliver his apology, the barrister Francis Ashley maintained that although at fault, Martin ‘had his Heart sound and intire’, and his ‘Love of the State [was] great’.Footnote 3
Martin’s defence of Virginia and subsequent digression offer a glimpse into the entangled nature of early colonial interests in Jacobean London, and into the intensely interpersonal environment in which these projects occurred. Martin’s behaviour risked damaging the Virginia Company’s efforts – and, by extension, the honour and standing of its elite shareholders who were deeply committed to the enterprise. When members of the Virginia Company were asked to leave the chamber while the Commons deliberated Martin’s punishment, the lawyer Christopher Brooke refused, ‘this being a mixed action’ that could not be neatly divided between the integrity of the Lower House and Virginian affairs.Footnote 4 The outcome of the incident is also revealing. Contrary to fears, Martin’s transgression seems not to have damaged colonial support. The speaker of the House of Commons reiterated that Martin had ‘done himself much Right in the Beginning’, and that the ‘Remembrances of the Plantation [were] well accepted, and looked upon with the Eyes of our Love’.Footnote 5
Increasingly, the colonial endorsement of gentlemen and their ‘love of the state’ became difficult to pick apart. In the space of some forty years, from unsuccessful efforts to colonize Roanoke in the mid-1580s to the creation of a royal Virginia in 1624, America, to the English, went from a terra incognita to an integrated component of early seventeenth-century political culture. This book examines how and why this happened, integrating America into the politics and social lives of Jacobean gentlemen and arguing that demonstrations of their civility were increasingly contingent on participating in the colonial. This challenges long-standing assumptions that gentlemen had little interest in the Atlantic prior to larger-scale migration during the reign of Charles I and the civil wars, and establishes a fundamental connection between the proclaimed desire to ‘civilize’ other peoples and changing notions of civility and refinement in London itself. The civilizing project that the English extended to America did more than stimulate colonization in the Atlantic: it created the foundations of an imperial polity at home.
Scholars of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries have long considered the impact of empire on London, acknowledging that questions over the burdens, responsibilities, and economic potential of empire informed how the English understood themselves as a nation and how they conceived of their place in the wider world. Historians, writes Catherine Hall, ‘need to open up national history and imperial history, challenging that binary and critically scrutinizing the ways in which it has functioned as a way of normalizing power relations and erasing dependence on and exploitation of others’.Footnote 6 In Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism, the American historian Jack P. Greene admits that although he sought to shed light on developments in the Atlantic outside the imperial centre, de-centred approaches could at times distract from the fact that metropolitan policy-makers were not just implicated in imperial intervention but often ‘the principal agents of it’.Footnote 7
Many studies of early seventeenth-century English politics have nonetheless kept national and imperial histories separate. Statesmen in Jacobean London are often seen as thinking about and acting on others while remaining untouched by those they sought to colonize. The Jamestown colony under James I is seen as having little or no significance at the time, dwarfed by English travels to a multitude of territories around the world.Footnote 8 Until Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design and the rapid economic growth of English plantations in the Caribbean, English colonization is often considered peripheral to political practice, lacking a unified vision or coherent ideology.Footnote 9 The result has been that fundamental issues about the cost and consequences of creating an imperial polity have remained muted in studies of English socio-political history. American and colonial scholars have examined the complex relationships between peoples, groups, and institutions on the ground, while global history has opened up remarkable studies on the cross-cultural encounters of merchants, chaplains, sailors, and other transoceanic go-betweens and joint-stock company agents with diverse peoples across the globe. Yet the sense remains that colonization happened ‘over there’ somewhere, meaning the English impetus to expand their territories through colonization seems to bear little on shifts in domestic thought and behaviour. A focus on James’ English reign (1603–25) offers a corrective to assumptions that the Jacobean contribution to colonization was haphazard and minimal, and revises the notion that English experiences in America existed outside Jacobean political culture.
This research began with an investigation into why America appeared so frequently in a range of English discourses beyond the expected cosmographies and travel reports. Why did churchmen evoke the practices of indigenous South Americans in sermons about moral corruption, or pamphleteers deem the Gunpowder Treason conspirators ‘tobacconists’? What induced a soldier, in a court deposition, to verbally defend his Protestantism by professing he was no more an atheist than he was a cannibal? Representations of Native Americans featured in unexpected places, appearing on architectural sketches for ceilings and in paintings hanging on walls in royal palaces.Footnote 10 Walking through banqueting halls and chapels, a visitor to Hampton Court in 1599 noticed ‘the lively and lifelike portrait of the wild man and woman captured by Martin Frobisher … and brought back to England’ in the corridors on the way to the inner apartments.Footnote 11 These were the Inuit Arnaq and Kalicho, captured by the English in 1577 along with an infant, Nutaaq. Though the visitor deemed them ‘savages’, clad in skins and ‘Indian dress’, images of these Native Americans were widely replicated, from the colonist John White’s watercolours to their appearance in the ‘America’ engraving by the artist Marcus Gheeraerts the elder, who spent time in London.Footnote 12 Amidst tapestries and tiled floors, tainted glass and ornate tableaux, representations of the people, flora, and fauna of North and South America – including ‘captured’ individuals – inhabited the world of the political elite.
By this time, several Native Americans also lived in England as servants, guests, and intelligencers, including in the households of Walter Ralegh and James’ secretary of state, Robert Cecil.Footnote 13 References to the Chesapeake, tobacco, and cannibals, and slurs about ‘savage’ or ‘Indian-like’ behaviour, could be found in commonplace books, Parliament speeches, wit poetry, sermons, popular print, cabinets of curiosities, and court masques. Over the course of this research, it became apparent that these references, while intriguing in and of themselves, were the result of a much larger process of domestic change. On one level, they catalogue the far-reaching effect that English colonization, and the first sustained encounters with Native American peoples, had on English discourse, politics, and sociability in the earliest decades of contact. However, these were not just manifestations of curiosity about other peoples and places, but reflect imperial intent. By extending the civilizing project, so integral to post-Reformation humanistic reform and political stability, to America, English gentlemen began to view their own civil integrity in relation to the project of empire, and they began to fashion themselves accordingly.
Expansion and the Civilizing Project
To interrogate civility and America in the Jacobean metropolis is to delve into the heart of the troubled relationship between nascent imperialism and English concepts of honour and political identity. Like studies that focus on the abolition of slavery without placing due emphasis on the intentionality behind its beginnings, so an understanding of civility and its implications for participation in civil life is incomplete without acknowledging the fraught, often conflicting ideas that operated within this term.Footnote 14 The enduring myths of a trade-based empire undergirded by common law rather than exclusion, liberty rather than conquest, do not match up to the knowing endorsement of subjugation that emerges from civility’s political meanings. Neither do such narratives fully explain the elite’s commitment to empire for centuries after. By the eighteenth century, the English view of themselves as ‘a Race of Men, who prefer the publicke Good before any narrow or selfish Views – who choose Dangers in the defence of Their Country [and] an honourable Death before the unmanly pleasures of a useless and effeminate life’ was an entrenched prototype of the ideal gentleman.Footnote 15 This ‘Race of Men’ equated ‘Birthright’ to bringing ‘Good Manners’ and Protestantism to distant parts of the world, refracting the language of colonial treatises and pro-imperial poems constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The discussion of the civilizing project in this book is a means of exploring the dual sense of English identity that emerged as a result of expansion and reform. The Reformation fractured ideas of a unified Christian Europe. Henry VIII’s break from Rome imbued the English monarch with claims to religious and political sovereignty while leaving many practical questions over what such sovereignty entailed. Humanists turned to history and queried the language, literature, and institutions of their own past in the hopes of understanding what it meant to be English.Footnote 16 The Reformation also shifted the relationship between the English and the rest of the British Isles, where Ireland and parts of Scotland remained resistant to the religious and political reforms of the late Tudor state. Colonization was in many ways the large-scale consequence of changing strategies for domestic governance, where the Tudor governing regime drew on the concept of civility to subject individuals to the authority of the state.
Even as the English looked to their past and their borders to form their identity, increased trade routes and travel impelled them to profess their legitimacy on a global stage. Proud of their status as an island nation while acutely aware of their inferior reputation in the eyes of many Europeans, the English began to assert a sense of national feeling influenced by Protestantism and inflected by a larger international cosmopolitanism.Footnote 17 A desire to contend with the status of other European nations, and what J. H. Elliott calls the imperial envy of the English, propelled their outward-looking ambitions in the Atlantic.Footnote 18 The frontispiece to the 1625 edition of the geographer and clergyman Samuel Purchas’ Purchas his pilgrimes depicted James wearing an imperial crown and his son Charles stepping forward to accept the call to further effect the plantation projects begun by his father. Psalms 147:20 appeared below him, reinforcing the English belief of themselves as providentially elect: ‘He shewed his word unto Jacob, and he hath not dealt so with any nation’.Footnote 19 Purchas’ frontispiece depicted Scotland and England as united realms, but he also mapped English spaces in Newfoundland, Virginia, Guiana, Brazil, and Peru, challenging the territories claimed by the French in Florida and by the Spanish in New Spain. The works of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas embodied what J. G. A. Pocock describes as the English belief that they were ‘occupying a moment and possessing a dimension in sacred history’, one in which each individual was called to act.Footnote 20 To many Jacobean Englishmen, colonization was a national imperative.
The humanist ‘re-discovery’ of England played an important role in how imperial-minded gentlemen conceived of colonization. As Colin Kidd argues, the outward-looking ideological imperatives of the English were shaped by conceptions of their own history, marked by repeated conquests and new settlements by the Romans, Saxons, and Normans.Footnote 21 Humanists drew on classical models and histories to mould their national image. The imperial language of ancient Rome heavily influenced political thinkers in Elizabethan England, where imperium related both to territorial expansion and to the power of the monarch at home.Footnote 22 Coins and portraits, courtly performances and the frontispieces of books likened Elizabeth and James to classical emperors, often crowned with the closed imperial crown of Roman rulers. Elizabeth and James were compared to the emperor Constantine, not only for his ability to rule but also for his desire to create a Christian empire that involved a concerted attack on the pagan world.Footnote 23
Elizabethan and Jacobean antiquarians including William Camden, John Selden, and Robert Cotton were also lawyers and politicians, and did not see history as distinct from, but integral to explaining the legitimacy of English customs.Footnote 24 English statesmen and colonists claimed they were well placed to ‘civilize’ Native Americans since they themselves had benefitted, and continued to benefit, from having been civilized by Roman occupation.Footnote 25 ‘[F]or his Majesty to reach his long royall armes to another World’ in the present moment was to do as the Romans had done, since the ‘Roman Empire sowed Roman Colonies thorow the World, as the most naturall and artificiall way to win and hold the World Romaine’.Footnote 26 The antiquarian Henry Spelman, an active officeholder and treasurer of the Guiana Company in 1627, sent his own nephew Henry to Virginia in 1609, where Henry learned Algonquian languages and became an important mediator in Anglo–Algonquian relations. Even more so than the Greek polis, the Roman pursuit of the civil life involved a demonstrable interest in empire and the exportation of their customs abroad, in models that Jacobeans demonstrably sought to emulate.Footnote 27
Colonization implicated the political elite in a significant way, requiring sustained regulation and oversight. This began with Ireland. Henry VIII’s self-conscious declaration of political legitimacy and his rejection of papal authority necessitated more vigorous campaigns to instil conformity as the state began to look beyond its borders.Footnote 28 The influential Elizabethan statesmen Francis Walsingham and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as well as Elizabeth’s keeper of the privy seal, Thomas Smith, and Cecil’s son, Robert, oversaw the colonization of Ireland in the second half of the sixteenth century. Irish scholars have established how humanism and the Reformation shaped English colonial intervention and provoked varying levels of resistance and accommodation on the part of local peoples. This involved attempts to subject the Gaelic Irish, but also the Catholic ‘Old English’ descendants of the twelfth-century Norman conquest of Ireland, to Protestant visions of reform. The humanist statesman Francis Bacon, like the colonist Edmund Spenser, portrayed the colonization of Ireland as a civilizing project modelled on Greco-Roman political histories and the imperial ambitions of Rome.Footnote 29 The language of savagery set against the civilizing initiatives of the English state provided consistent rhetoric in favour of colonization among policy-makers and their agents.Footnote 30
Events in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) led to more stringent policies against the Irish, and influential treatises by Richard Becon and John Davies argued that the English colonization of Ireland had hitherto failed precisely because colonists were accepting and even imitating the mores of local inhabitants.Footnote 31 Interactions between the New English, Gaelic nobility, Irish tenants, town dwellers, and Old English were characterized by negotiation as well as brutality, depending on the policies of individual governors and their rapport with local populations.Footnote 32 Nonetheless, English colonization altered the Irish landscape. Even during the atrocities of the Cromwellian regime in the 1640s, poetry explicitly attributed the destruction of Gaelic ways of life to James’ reign and to the violent redistribution of land: ‘[James] ordered their lands to be measured with ropes, he replaced the pure Irish with Saxons, and transplanted them all’.Footnote 33 As attorney general in Ireland, Davies emphasized the reforming power of the law and the responsibilities of authorities to inaugurate English institutions and values to ensure the success of colonization. At the same time, the initiatives on the part of the English were frequently imperiled and only partially successful. The contracted military campaigns and failures to assimilate Gaelic cultures only deepened the English belief in the importance of conformity in upholding an ordered civil society.
This book picks up policy-makers’ civilizing impetus as they began to apply it further west. The English believed Irish landscapes and industries could be financially beneficial to the state, but the ‘newness’ of America and the competition among European states to claim its sizeable territories added to its appeal. The ‘fourth part of the world’, unknown to the very Greeks and Romans whose authority and civil refinement captivated early modern individuals, seemingly lay ready for possession, infusing Elizabethan and early Jacobean discourse with a sense of opportunity and optimism. Colonial promoters expressed an awareness that their era offered a distinct moment of opportunity. ‘No nation in Christendom is so fit for this action [of colonization] as England’, pressed Edward Hayes in 1602, ‘by reason of … our long domesticall peace’.Footnote 34 While later Elizabethan colonial projects were hampered by war with Spain, the Anglo–Spanish peace treaty of 1604 allowed the English to devote unprecedented energy to American colonization. New investment opportunities from 1600 reflected this intent. The Virginia Company (1606), the Newfoundland Company (1610), the Somers Islands/Bermuda Company (1615), and the Amazon Company (1619) were Jacobean innovations, contributing to a pitch of interest in America at the time. ‘I knowe of some and heare of more of our nation who endevoure the findinge out of Virgenia, Guiana and other remote and unknowen Countries’, complained the king’s lord deputy in Ireland, Arthur Chichester, in 1605, while neglecting the ‘makinge Cyvell of Ireland’.Footnote 35
A focus on the Atlantic is not intended to diminish the many relations that the English had with the rest of the world. The global turn in early twenty-first-century historiography has emphasized broad patterns of movement and global connectivity, focussing on diasporas and migration patterns, company agents and other go-betweens.Footnote 36 As Hakluyt and Purchas’ vast travel compendia indicated, English aspirations in North and South America were part of a much larger project of trafficking and exchange. Europeans first turned to America in their search for India. The interest in spices and silks is apparent in many surviving maps of the time, where the label ‘Oriens’ reinforced the European desire to orient themselves, quite literally, towards the East. Prior to the establishment of sugar plantations in the Caribbean from the 1630s, pursuing trade with the Ottoman and Mughal empires far outweighed the economic potential of the English Atlantic.
The westward enterprises can be placed within multiple processes of global exchange that were relational, but distinct. Rather than pitting the Atlantic as an alternative approach to English post-Reformation history, America becomes a vital component of the Protestant vision of reform that emerged from the upheavals and traumas of religious and political controversies in Europe and beyond. When gentlemen copied excerpts from geographies in their commonplace books (‘Africa is greater than Europe. Asia then Africa. and America bigger then all’), or purchased engravings that personified America as a woman awaiting possession, they perpetuated widely accepted geopolitical assumptions about a civil Europe engaged with other parts of the globe in a series of interconnected but specific relationships.Footnote 37 The English celebrated American plantation as a vital means of sourcing the commodities that characterized Eastern wealth while opposing Catholic ascendancy in the Atlantic. Virginia’s soil and climate rivaled that of Persia, wrote James’ silkworm expert John Bonoeil, and was not silk the staple commodity of ‘that great Empire’, forming the ‘sinewes of the Persian state’?Footnote 38 The vast American continents, not Ireland, would allow the English to become global contenders, turning ‘the Easterne world … Spectators of the Western Worth’.Footnote 39
As the first permanent English colony in America, Virginia held particular importance to statesmen and emerges as a major influence on Jacobean articulations of their emergent transatlantic polity. Travelling from Cape Cod to the Chesapeake, one gentleman called Jamestown ‘the London colonie’, highlighting its strong associations with the metropolis.Footnote 40 The Virginia Company years (1606–24) align closely with James’ English reign (1603–25), rendering it a distinct feature of the era. Not only did the colony provide the first large-scale American export for England – tobacco – but it was to be a point of entry for the creation of an English Atlantic, a land base where the English could begin the industries, trades, and settlements that would enable them to transplant their civil society. The English were ‘growing and multiplying into kingdomes’, with Virginia the portal to ‘New England, New found land … and other Ilands [that] may be adopted and legall Daughters of England’.Footnote 41
Virginia informed many of the approaches to colonization that followed. The puritan George Mourt wrote in 1622 that the colonists’ hopes for Massachusetts would be effected through ‘the example of the hon[ourable] Virginia and Bermudas Companies’ whose ability to overcome a litany of failures ‘may prevaile as a spurre of preparation’.Footnote 42 English Separatists, sailing from the Netherlands, received permission to settle south of Cape Cod in 1619, arriving in Plymouth in 1620. The official charter for the Massachusetts Bay colony did not appear under James, but under Charles. Given this book’s focus on state politics, the communities that began to prosper in New England in the last few years of James’ reign – many of them created to escape Jacobean politics and what they saw as the corruptions of the Anglican Church – had a less demonstrable impact on metropolitan political thought and practice in this period, though this changed after the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649. In the poet Thomas Carew’s court masque of 1634, ‘the plantation in New-England’ served as a place to send dissenters, not aspiring statesmen. As the character Momus quipped, the colony had ‘purg’d more virulent humours from the politique body’ than West Indian drugs had purged physical bodies at home.Footnote 43
As this book argues, something is lost when colonization is viewed solely as another form of global exchange. The stated method of ‘civilizing’ others as a means of extending territorial authority politicized the enforcement of manners and social habits. Different dynamics of power were inherently at play, leaving deep wounds and legacies. Native American scholarship refers to indigenous peoples’ persistent refusal to be subsumed by settler colonialism as ‘survivance’.Footnote 44 This term refers to the ability of Native groups to not only endure trauma but to thrive in spite of it, while also making clear that the flourishing of indigeneity into the present day happened despite Europeans’ persistent attempts to eradicate their ways of life. While the political elite’s conceptions of civility were repeatedly challenged by those they sought to colonize, ignoring the intent behind colonization presents a skewed understanding of how English civility developed in the seventeenth century. Rather than viewing the enforcement of civility as a process – which implies its fulfilment – the ‘civilizing project’ explored in this book is a means of focussing on the beliefs and ambitions of statesmen and the effect of colonization on their understanding of themselves. When the Virginia Company councillor Nicholas Ferrar made a list in the 1620s of all the languages spoken in the king’s dominions, he included ‘[t]he language spoken by the savages in the Virginia plantation’ and ‘[t]hat other kind also spoken in New England’.Footnote 45 To Ferrar, English colonies in eastern North America were a part of the English nation.
Civility and the Jacobean Polity
The popularity of Atlantic and global history has in some ways discouraged joined-up studies of colonization and the practice of politics in England. Whereas American scholars tend to view the early colonies as the prelude to the foundation of a new republic, English political historians often assume that American schemes were the fancies of merchants and poets, largely outside the domain of concerted political interest before the mid-seventeenth century. The global activities of merchant corporations were profoundly important in developing overseas governance, but it is equally important to recognize the active and willing role that policy-makers played in bringing imperial interests into state institutions. Gentlemen sought to contend with expansion, not only in the formal structures of metropolitan government but also in grappling with wider questions about their responsibilities in asserting their authority abroad. While scholars, therefore, have raised attention to the lack of a coherent vision of empire in Elizabethan England and pointed to policy-makers’ frequent invocation of classical writers like Tacitus, who expressed concern at the moral corruption that empire engendered, these ambiguities should not obscure policy-makers’ clear desire to participate in the political project of empire.Footnote 46 Though Pocock and others established the insufficiency of the ‘one-way imperial success story’ in understanding English identity in this period, a sense remains that the English acted on others but that the colonial experience bore little on elite self-perception.Footnote 47
Coming from a long line of Scottish kings who expressed their authority in imperial terms, James actively promoted civility as a means of transforming individuals into obedient subjects.Footnote 48 He fashioned himself as a learned and civilizing king, though centuries of historiography have turned his earnestness into something of a joke. James has never been considered the embodiment of the classical Renaissance prince. He hates dancing and music, wrote one ambassador of the eighteen-year-old Scottish king in 1584, his manners ‘very … uncivil’.Footnote 49 A controversial Latin text published anonymously on the Continent in 1615 viciously attacked the correlation between James’ bodily carriage and his inner morality. The authors described James’ physicality in scathing detail, lingering on the king’s disproportionate features. ‘You appear to have been made more by design than by chance, more for the needs of a scholar than a king’, the discourse went. ‘Your body does depart from the basic principles of nature … [Those who fault it] are surely too delicate and certainly unable to comprehend that this is the beauty of a man … even if it seems an ugly or very near ugly thing’.Footnote 50 Contemporaries portrayed James as playing at civility while unaware, in his indulgent lasciviousness, of his own appalling deformities.
Although James was criticized for failing to embody courtly grace, his conception of civility went beyond manners to fundamental ideas of civil, godly order, and he championed the monarchy as a civilizing force in ways that encouraged empire. James’ reputation has benefitted from more favourable assessments of his reign over the past few decades.Footnote 51 At the same time, the enduring attention to issues around authorship, frictions with Parliament, and Anglo–Scottish Church disputes have continued to sideline the place of overseas involvement in the king’s conception of sovereignty. In 1598, James urged his son and heir, Henry, to ‘follow forth the course that I have intended … planting civilitie’ in the lives of the ‘barbarous and stubborne sort’.Footnote 52 As Jane Ohlmeyer argues, James’ civilizing initiatives were based on strong personal conviction. He retained an interest in affairs in Scotland and Ireland and frequently invoked the duties of his nobility to promote civility as a method of rule.Footnote 53 Before becoming king of England, James sent his royal favourites in Scotland to carry out missions into the Highlands and the Hebrides, using a coterie of ‘Gentlemen Adventurers of Fife’ in attempts to quell the Isle of Lewis in the 1590s. This reflected a nascent pattern of expansion in which the king used high-ranking members of the court in campaigns to restore order to the territories claimed by the Crown.Footnote 54 The intervention of the English in Shetland, Orkney, the Isle of Man, and the Anglo–Scottish borders, as in Munster and Ulster and then America, indicated aggressive attempts to push ‘the political frontier gradually westward’.Footnote 55
Although vehemently contested by lawyers and MPs in England, James’ commitment to the notion of a unified ‘Britain’ created a language of imperial sovereignty that writers and policy-makers frequently drew upon. The cartographer John Speed praised ‘the royall Person of our now-Soveraigne’ for unifying ‘Britannia’, where ‘[t]he Cordes of whose Royall Tents, we pray, may be further extended, that those naked Virginians may be covered under the Curtaines of his most Christian Government’.Footnote 56 Merchants too fostered this conceit. The motto on the arms of the Merchants of Virginia, en dat Virginia quintam, or, ‘behold, Virginia gives us a fifth dominion’, referred to English claims to territories beyond England, Ireland, Scotland, and France.Footnote 57 This made explicit Virginia’s prime role in the English imaginary as a cornerstone of the transatlantic polity.
Historians’ conception of political change in this period owes much to the sociologist Norbert Elias’ work on civility and state formation, a connection he believes was fundamental to the creation of modern European society.Footnote 58 To Elias, the ‘civilizing process’ brought manners and the individual body into discourses about the body politic. Mastering strict codes of conduct allowed individuals to access spheres of political power and to assert authority in governing others. Elias attributes this shift to the sixteenth century, when aristocratic values moved from a martial, knightly ethos of courtliness to new codes of manners and principles of shame. Elias attributes particular importance to the humanist Desiderius Erasmus’ On civility in children (1530), which established manners as essential to priming members of the nobility for politics.Footnote 59
It has become commonplace to criticize Elias’ confidence in the progression of civilization, but historicizing his claims do not make them a less useful departing point. While few scholars today draw a linear correlation between a ‘civilizing process’ and the concept of civilization, historians have established the prominence of civility as a tool in the formation of the early modern state.Footnote 60 As Anna Bryson finds, ‘civility’ in late sixteenth-century England began to supplant other terms in the vocabulary of manners while retaining politically charged meanings.Footnote 61 This internal shift occurred precisely at the time that the English also looked to ancient Rome for their articulations of empire. Rooted in classical political philosophy, gentlemanly civility evoked the necessity of social order and celebrated participation in the common good. This did not just involve the monarchy and the court. Urban, town-dwelling individuals were deemed more civil than those beyond the city, while ‘savages’ were frequently characterized as living beyond the pale of human society and outside the bounds of citizenship. Far from being a term used among the elite alone, litigations and parish court records suggest that early Stuart subjects regarded civility an important form of social currency. Appealing to the civility (or the incivility) of others became a means of articulating honour and good standing across communities, as when women defended their reputations by professing their chastity and by using modest speech.Footnote 62
The political weight behind civility and savagery differed from other terms the English used to describe incivility, such as ‘heathen’ or ‘pagan’. These were largely biblical terms that denoted non-Christians, particularly polytheists. While ‘pagan’ resonated with the classical past, ‘heathen’ played a particularly central role in post-Reformation theological debate, closely associated with Old Testament language and widely employed by puritans to discuss providentialism and salvation.Footnote 63 For this reason, ‘heathen’ frequently appeared in the writings of colonists in New England, especially during conflict with the Pequots in the 1630s. Both terms also evoked classical discourses about the East and its luxuries to denounce the hazards of indulging in sensual pleasures that distracted from contemplating the spiritual. Frequent encounters with non-Christians through trade and expansion added potency to long-standing English associations between heathenism and religious error, but also with dangerous extravagance.
While ‘heathen’ or ‘pagan’ were sometimes used interchangeably with ‘savage’, the political language of the English civilizing project overwhelmingly drew on ideas of savagery. This is evident in the recurrent manner in which Native Americans were labelled ‘savages’. Since English civility involved a concept of historical development, of ‘a civil state of polity and society [emerging] out of an original condition of savagery’, grouping the complexities of Native American societies under a single word served to dismiss their cultures while expressing colonial intervention as a positive act.Footnote 64 Colonial literature informing readers ‘How the Salvages became subject to the English’ perpetuated myths of passive Native Americans while propagating fundamental beliefs about the necessity and seeming success of the civilizing project abroad.Footnote 65 While Catholics often viewed conversion as an immediate aim achieving colonial ascendancy, English Protestants voiced that they themselves had been ‘first Civilized by the Romane Conquests, and mixture of their Colonies with us [brought] Religion afterwards’.Footnote 66 Protestant evangelism was an entrenched obligation in joint-stock company charters, providing a moral framework through which civil society would be upheld and successfully governed. At the same time, conversion involved time, education, and rigorous self-searching through theological query, something that could only come after Native Americans were better integrated within English society. It was communication – civil conversation – that the New England colonist Roger Williams saw as laying the groundwork for conversion, for ‘by such converse it may please the Father … to spread civilitie (and in his owne most holy Season), Christianitie’.Footnote 67
In her study of early modern masculinity, Alexandra Shepard illustrates how men in early Stuart England increasingly defined themselves through social distinction and civility.Footnote 68 Self-control became a manifestation of the ability to manage and govern one’s household and, by extension, the state.Footnote 69 Colonization inflected these expressions of authority. Plantation, preached William Crashaw in 1609, would bring Algonquians ‘1. Civilitie for their bodies, 2. Christianity for their soules. The first to make them men: the second happy men’.Footnote 70 In its role in ‘making men’ and displaying the right to rule, the civil body became equated with virtuous manhood, one that distinguished itself from other bodies, whether those from invaded territories or social inferiors including women. Write not to me ‘of your Savages’, the poet Michael Drayton wrote to his friend, the colonist George Sandys, for ‘[a]s savage slaves be in great Britaine here/As any one that you can shew me there’.Footnote 71 In 1628, the Newfoundland colonist Robert Hayman drew on decades-old tropes about uncivil women and untamed landscapes, where a ‘rude’ Newfoundland, when ‘decked with neat husbandry’, would be like a ‘sluttish’ woman made ‘pretty pert … with good cloathes on’.Footnote 72 By the early seventeenth century, American ‘savages’ and domestic social differentiation were already being melded together in ways that connected imperial success and household authority.
Before establishing sustained plantation economies, English categorizations of human difference depended more on what Colin Kidd calls ‘ethnic theology’ than on later concepts of race.Footnote 73 While Africans in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England might occupy roles similar to those of servants, the label ‘blackamoor’, like descriptions of Native Americans’ ‘tanned’ or ‘tawny’ skin, nevertheless depended on categorizing people based on skin colour.Footnote 74 John Hawkins’ and Francis Drake’s voyages involved trafficking humans, and English merchants, seafarers, and policy-makers were well aware of the presence of enslaved Africans and Native Americans in the West Indies and Central and South America.Footnote 75 While the English found no indigenous inhabitants when they first landed in Bermuda in 1609, they quickly brought Africans and Native Americans to the island as skilled tobacco cultivators and pearl divers.Footnote 76 In London, the appearance of Native American iconographies on tobacco advertisements and shop signs, and the depiction of ‘blackamoors’ smoking pudding roll tobacco (the cigar-like methods of packaging and imbibing tobacco in Spanish colonies) created visual primers that normalized conceptions of human difference and the knowing exploitation of human labour in the Atlantic. Writing from Barbados in 1631, the Essex gentlemen Henry Colt noted that the sun never ‘tannes the skin … I never ware gloves, & yett my hands were never whiter’.Footnote 77 Even before institutionalized slavery in English America, civil gentlemen sought to demonstrate the value of remaining white.
Politics, Sociability, and Taste
Early modern political practice was imbedded in the social.Footnote 78 The state relied on networks of affiliations to sustain and extend its authority, where a large administrative apparatus linked Parliament and the Privy Council to officeholders in towns and parishes.Footnote 79 The social life of politics involved increasing dialogue about political affairs through a range of media, where the circulation of print, manuscript, and news increased political awareness among subjects in the metropolis and the localities.Footnote 80 As Felicity Stout argues, using Russia as a case study, travel literature began to inform the practice of politics in new ways during this time.Footnote 81 Humanist statesmen understood history and travel writing to serve practical functions in the vita activa. Merchants, travellers, diplomats, and sailors carried and circulated news that generated discussion and participation in state affairs. Fantastical imaginings of faraway nations gave way to valuing observation-based knowledge, where diplomacy and trade stimulated a proliferation of treatises and reports about global politics.Footnote 82 Ideas of civility and legitimacy of rule were constructed against and through an awareness of other territories and political systems, so that writing about other states and nations became a way of mediating events and encouraging strategic decision-making.Footnote 83
Reconstructing the world of Jacobean political actors therefore necessitates a wide range of material, including print and manuscript sources that served different though often complementary functions in the practice of statecraft. Jacobean statesmen relied on intelligence-gathering from a range of informants and sources to provide reliable news. Diaries, correspondences, and other forms of the ‘political gaze’ through observation gained ascendancy over traditional modes of counsel such as political philosophy and advice literature.Footnote 84 The privy councillor and bencher Julius Caesar collected letters from his brother-in-law Captain John Martin in Jamestown alongside copies of the Virginia Company’s printed propaganda. To study one mode of discourse in isolation risks presenting a skewed picture of political participation and colonial promotion. An approach focussing purely on Virginia Company print, for example, downplays the role of elite networks and manuscript circulation at a time when gentlemen still disdained print as the recourse of lesser political actors. ‘In publishing this Essay of my Poem’, Drayton wrote in Poly-Olbion (1612), ‘there is this great disadvantage against me; that it commeth out at this time, when Verses are wholly deduc’t to Chambers, and nothing esteem’d in this lunatique Age, but what is kept in Cabinets, and must only passe by Transcription’.Footnote 85 Among the many concurrent modes of communication, popular politics and the ‘public sphere’ operated alongside state-level decision-making that continued to occur in ‘chambers’ and ‘cabinets’.Footnote 86
This is not to obscure the social depth of political participation at this time. Attitudes to empire emerged from a multiplicity of agendas, voices, and places. Non-elite men and women successfully participated in the political life of the realm through patronage, petitioning, and trade.Footnote 87 Anne of Denmark cultivated colonial interests at her court, and several women invested in the Virginia Company and offered financial support for ships or Algonquian schools. As policies towards plantation began to favour sustained settlement in the late 1610s and early 1620s, women began migrating to the colonies in greater numbers. Whether travelling to America, consuming tobacco, overseeing projects, or investing in joint-stock companies, English subjects quickly became participants in a budding imperial system. The social and political worlds of metropolitan gentlemen contributed one part of this complex process through which the English envisaged and enacted empire.
The body politic comprised overlapping corporate bodies, in formal and informal networks held together by sociability and civil conversation.Footnote 88 The term ‘political culture’ as it is used in this book probes the relationship between state and society, between political ideas and how they operated in practice. Political scientists have employed this concept to interrogate ‘a combination of practice and discursive dimensions’ including writing, thought, and behaviour.Footnote 89 Investigating Jacobean political culture does not imply a uniform or single vision of politics in England, but incorporates a range of values, pressures, and experiences that shaped political environments in the metropolis. Moving beyond the dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘other’ often apparent in print polemic, the relational aspect of political culture encourages a deeper consideration of how gentlemen confronted, both imaginatively and actually, the non-English peoples they proposed to govern.
A central claim of this book is that colonization in America infused expansionist discourses with the language of political duty but also encouraged gentlemen to lavishly imagine how plantation might improve the civil life. Rich studies have emerged on the administrative or mercantilist side of imperial policy and its intellectual origins.Footnote 90 The charters and laws made in the council chamber were in many ways the product of other kinds of less formal interactions between individuals and their social networks, where sociability and consumption helped to drive the appeal of expansion. Gentlemen celebrated the bonds of friendship and trust that made civil society not only necessary but satisfying, and they related this to their conception of politics, equating ‘[p]oliticke government’ to ‘Civilitie [or] Civile societie’.Footnote 91 While relying on aspirations to good, civil society also encompassed what was ‘profitable’ and ‘pleasant’ as well as what was ‘honest’.Footnote 92 The politics of manners was not just about constraint, therefore, but also about pleasure, involving those ‘passions’ or senses that gentlemen celebrated when they met together to drink, socialize, share poetry, and smoke. When Crashaw preached his sermon to colonial promoters in London, he declared that ‘he that hath 1000. acres, and being a civill and sociable man knowes how to use it, is richer then he that hath 2000. and being a savage, cannot plow, till, plant nor set’.Footnote 93 This not only defended English intervention in Virginia on the grounds of improvement – ‘when they are civilized [they will] see what they have received from us’ – but it drew a connection between plantation, civil order, and ‘the social man’.Footnote 94
The ‘social man’ performed civility in the things he wore, carried, and possessed. The economic reality of consumption and the demand for ‘things’ saturated discourses about civility and must be seen as having a profound effect on developments in political culture. Attitudes towards civil refinement in London arose not through the separation, but the overlap, of Whitehall and the commercial sphere of City merchants.Footnote 95 The Greco-Roman model of civility centred on urban centres partly because of their proximity and access to goods, and gentlemen expressed a taste for material consumption while praising the effects of trade in achieving political stability abroad.Footnote 96 Situating ‘the desire, appropriation, and use of things’ within the social lives of statesmen is crucial to explaining the imperial-mindedness of gentlemen at this time.Footnote 97 Self-presentation depended on an array of textiles, dyes, drugs, spices, pigments, skins, and foods, linking civility to the ability to access markets and sustain manufacture. Archaeologists at Jamestown have uncovered an overwhelming number of European-made objects at the fort, including signet rings, silver grooming tools, armour, books, silk fragments, locks, keys, and even a Roman lamp, thought to have belonged to a gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities, all evidence of the immense effort gentlemen took to replicate their lives in England.Footnote 98
As Noah Millstone maintains, political culture should include an assessment of material culture embedded in practice, taking into account imbalances of power and developments in political thought.Footnote 99 Comparative anthropology and material culture complicates the rhetoric of free trade, liberty, and other ostensible benefits championed by endorsers of the civilizing project.Footnote 100 What gentlemen did with objects, and which they valued, mattered to their expressions of civility. Absence can be as indicative as what does appear in inventories, portraits, and archaeological sites. While they valued Eastern goods like Chinese porcelain or Indian textiles, Londoners and colonists alike showed less appreciation for indigenous-made artefacts. Descriptions of Tupi or Algonquian peoples as ‘naked’ distracted from the jewellery, shells, and dyed and embellished animal skins that circulated in Anglo–Native American exchanges and played an important part in indigenous self-expression and social cohesion. Tobacco, a sacred indigenous intoxicant, became equated with sociability only after gentlemen re-contextualized and re-packaged the commodity in specific ways, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. The civility that emerged from expansion involved inherent tensions and the possibilities of ruthless exploitation.
‘Betweene the olde world and the newe’
By 1600, the two entities of Westminster and the City of London were the ‘emergent centre of industry and empire’.Footnote 101 As a major port city, London brought together the local, national, and international, where frequent waves of migration shaped the character of the city and its parishes.Footnote 102 Within the ancient Roman city walls, merchants and guilds contributed substantial funds to colonizing expeditions. For news, individuals gathered at Paul’s Walk and its nearby printers’ shops to procure recent accounts of Bermuda shipwrecks or raids on Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. In November 1622, colonial councillors were charged with finding rooms for their meetings in the commercial environment of the New Exchange, built earlier in James’ reign, where they discussed trade and Anglo–Algonquian relations with colonial governors, captains, and investors.Footnote 103 At Paul’s Cross, sermons about the Virginia enterprises exposed large and diverse audiences to the Virginia Company’s expansionist aims. Political interest in colonization stretched far beyond London, from the family ties of West Country explorers to the port cities of Bristol and Plymouth. Centralized decision-making, however, happened at the royal court and Parliament, and the London ‘season’ brought the nobility and the gentry to the metropolis, dictating changing tastes and fashions. Unlike Elizabeth, James did not travel on progress, further influencing the nobility’s desire to acquire permanent residences in London.Footnote 104
Here, gentlemanly aspirations to state-level careers converged with the pleasures that the city afforded. London provided many of the spaces – council chambers, private residences, taverns, playhouses, tobacco shops, printers, libraries, gardens, churches – where subjects encountered, debated, and performed America. Young, moneyed gentlemen came to the metropolis to debate the politics of the realm and to seek preferment in the context of refined urbanity, and these social milieus are key to understanding the rising imperial-mindedness of the elite. The building projects of courtiers who benefitted from the redistribution of medieval Church lands also created spaces for colonial promotion. Walter Ralegh, Robert Cecil, George Villiers, Thomas Howard, and Henry Wriothesley all had households on the Strand, where they offered patronage to colonial supporters, oversaw extravagant entertainments that celebrated conquest, furnished their cabinets of curiosities, and provided meeting places for company meetings. Cecil employed Richard Hakluyt as his personal chaplain. Ralegh encouraged Thomas Hariot to compile his Algonquian dictionary in London with the help of resident indigenous interpreters, and supported the French Huguenot artist Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, who had been to Florida and produced vivid drawings of its peoples.
Living, breathing cross-cultural exchange existed alongside stylized depictions of indigeneity in woodcuts, watercolours, and engravings. The images in the 1590 edition of Hariot’s A briefe and true report, a text that gentlemen in the metropolis frequently cited and discussed, trapped Algonquians within stylized mannerist forms, conveying a sense of civility and abundance that drew on the values of classical antiquity (Figure 1). At the same time, these engravings, like the Algonquian depicted at St James’ Park in a traveller’s album amicorum from the mid-1610s, were enlivened by the presence of Native Americans and their objects in households like Ralegh’s.Footnote 105 As Coll Thrush points out, colonization was ‘an urban process’, and it is a pervasive myth of colonial discourse that Native Americans operated purely outside these metropolitan spaces.Footnote 106
Figure 1 Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). Although this is a highly stylized image, important elements of Algonquian lifeways are evoked in the deerskin clothing, tobacco pouches, feathers, and corn.
In addition to the better-known examples of two abducted eastern Native Americans, the young Powhatan/Pamunkey woman Pocahontas (also known as Matoaka and Amonute), and the Pawtuxet man Tisquantum (Squanto), scholars have uncovered dozens of North and South Americans who walked the streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean London. In the 1580s, a man named Towaye was in London, along with the Croatan Manteo and Wanchese of Roanoke.Footnote 107 An Abenaki sagamore, or Algonquian leader, arrived in London in 1605 and lived in the household of the jurist John Popham.Footnote 108 Captain Christopher Newport exchanged the boys Totakins and Namontack for several English youths who lived among the Algonquians to learn their language for diplomatic purposes.Footnote 109 Totakins lived in the household of the Virginia Company merchant Thomas Smythe, while the puritan minister William Gouge kept an Algonquian woman christened Mary.Footnote 110 In 1622, the minutes for the council of New England included an order ‘to Leonard Peddock to take over with him a boy, native of New England, called Papa Whinett, belonging to Abbadakest, Sachem of Massachusetts’.Footnote 111 In 1610, the puritan MP Edwin Sandys lamented that the young Algonquian boy Nanawack had been living in London for several years, where he ‘heard not much of Religion, but saw and heard many times examples of drinking, swearing, and like evills, [and] remained as he was a meere Pagan’.Footnote 112 Attempts at ‘civilizing’ and converting Algonquians operated beyond the abstract, and indicate much about the attitudes and aspirations of the English who housed them.
The indigenous presence in London reflected the increased contact that the English had with large numbers of diverse Native American groups in the Atlantic. In Virginia, this included the thousands of Algonquians within and beyond the dominant Powhatan confederacy.Footnote 113 South America and the Caribbean also remained important spaces for Anglo–indigenous encounters. Carib and Tupi groups featured in Jacobean anti-Spanish propaganda, discourses about commodities and production, and articulations of violence and cultural difference. As Chapter 3 argues, discussions of the practice of cannibalism in Jacobean discourse were often the result of the English directly entering Native American spaces. Drawing on historical anthropology helps to redress the older historiographical usage of ‘the natives’, a blanketing term that obscured the complexities of indigenous societies and risked effacing Native American agency. This book cannot, nor should it, offer an indigenous perspective on the history of colonization, but it does raise attention to Native American peoples, practices, and terms that Jacobean writers regularly engaged with when they debated civility and state policies.
Rather than offer a complete or chronological study of the colonies, this study traces the concepts, motifs, and objects that animated and spurred domestic debates over conformity and social order, rituals of violence, and political participation. Though they developed distinct identities, New England, Bermuda, Newfoundland, the Chesapeake, and failed colonies like Roanoke and Guiana remained overseen by many of the same councillors in London, contributing to the elite’s sense of governance and political participation through colonial oversight. Even as godly ministers petitioned to build their ‘new Jerusalem’ in America, colonial projects in Massachusetts continued to be influenced by courtiers including George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, Ferdinando Gorges, and Thomas Howard, fourteenth Earl of Arundel, many of whom drew on the language of civility and hierarchical order to advocate their authority over both unruly colonists and Native Americans.Footnote 114 Certain commonalities in elite attitudes to governance raise attention to the interconnectedness of the civilizing project, one that created enduring structures and expectations even after the English sought to colonize other parts of the globe.
Taken together, these chapters probe how policy-makers increasingly committed their civil designs to those of empire, setting structures and expectations in place that endured well beyond these initial Western projects. The first chapter presents an overview of the expansionist projects endorsed by gentlemen in Whitehall, Parliament, and the localities, and relates the enthusiasm for overseas plantation to the rise in domestic surveying and estate management. Chapter 2 examines the influence of Virginia on political debate in London. The Jamestown–London connection was vital to substantiating English claims to an imperial polity, and its setbacks and failures shaped the articulations of empire that emerged as a result. Chapter 3 approaches Norbert Elias’ claims about violence and state authority through the remarkable proliferation of accounts of cannibalism in Jacobean discourse. Drawing on Elias’ discussion about civility and the monopolization of force, this chapter establishes how writers drew on Carib and Tupi ethnography to articulate the necessity of the law in the fraught confessional climate of the 1610s and 1620s.
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to how gentlemen incorporated America into their expressions of masculine sociability. Chapter 4 charts the changing policies towards tobacco that emerged in parliamentary debates about moral regulation and consumption. Despite tobacco’s association with political subversion, pro-imperial MPs increasingly understood it as essential to their colonial designs. Tobacco consumption became a manifestation of imperial intent, integrated into the broader political culture of parliamentary debate and its related sociability. The final chapter turns to the coteries and friendships in and around the Inns of Court, where urbane young gentlemen brought colonial interests and commodities within provocative re-definitions of civility. The sense of moral responsibility that developed alongside a celebration of fraternal sociability and literary composition created a distinct vision of civil manhood that did not eschew but subordinated the allure of America to English political life.
In 1597, seventeen years before his disastrous performance in Parliament, Martin had played the coveted role of the Prince d’Amour in the raucous Christmas revels at the Middle Temple. Epitomizing graceful civility – ‘[w]it, and Beauty in their exact perfection’ – the ‘prince’ paraded through the hall in command of the forces of Venus, but the classical and chivalric resonances in the performance existed alongside the geographical realities of invaded and explored territories from Florida to the Amazon.Footnote 115 Like an earlier performance from the 1590s, where Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, hosted an entertainment for Elizabeth that centred on the arrival of an ‘Indian Prince’ from Greater Amazonia, orators praised the queen for ‘civilizing her subjects’ and demonstrating ‘infinite moderation in counterpoising the uneven parts of the world’.Footnote 116 England was an island ‘[s]eated betweene the olde world and the newe/A land … no other land may touche’.Footnote 117 The establishment of colonies in America in subsequent decades quickly revealed the impossibility of such fantasies of bloodless conquests and willing submission to ‘wit refined’. Nor were the English inclined to remain inhabitants of an isolated island. Instead, they imagined new boundaries and balances of power. ‘Virginia and Summer Ilands seeme to this English bodie as two American hands’, Purchas wrote in 1625, ‘two Armes to get, encompasse, embrace’.Footnote 118 This image of America and England as one body, hands outstretched to embrace and encompass the world, invites a re-consideration of the Jacobean body politic, in terms of its ambitions and in the ardent ways in which such aspirations were expressed. The personal bonds between gentlemen that drove politics and expansion at this time laid the foundations for a vision of civil society that bonded England and America together.
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