In a collection of satires printed in 1621, the poet George Wither rejected the imperial-mindedness of statesmen around him. What of ‘America’s large Tract of ground?’ Wither asked, ‘[a]nd all those Isles adioyning, lately found?’Footnote ¹ He spurned the wealth of America and Spain, Wither wrote, for had not Greece and Rome, and more recently the Ottoman Empire, shown the inevitability of decline? The frontispiece to Wither’s motto depicted a man enjoying pastoral simplicity, wrapped in a floral mantle and crowned with laurels, reclining against the pillar of fortitude and constancy. Disdaining luxury and leaving the ‘savages’ in the background to war on their own, the figure impudently pushed the world itself away with a toe.Footnote ²

Although he seemed to reject the expansionist designs of men in the metropolis, Wither could not rebuff the ambitions of his peers without invoking the Atlantic. His depiction of England as a realm that lay apart from or untouched by the world beyond seemed rather like an Eden, blissfully pastoral but irrecoverable. As a member of Lincoln’s Inn, Wither came into contact with a number of gentlemen who promoted expansion. Some of his closest friends were staunch colonial supporters, including the lawyer Christopher Brooke and the poet Michael Drayton, whose Poly-Olbion (1612) celebrated the military prowess of ‘Greate Britaine’.Footnote ³ To many Protestants, colonization and the subordination of the natural world in other territories were not peripheral but central to their understanding of reform. However critical of court corruption and the ‘vanities’ of the gentry, Wither himself wrote dedicatory verses in 1628 to the colonist and poet Robert Hayman, a fellow member of Lincoln’s Inn, encouraging him to sing the praises of English muses ‘e’en from these uncouth shores’ of North America.Footnote ⁴

Significantly, gentlemen often positioned themselves as those best equipped to undertake and oversee colonial initiatives. In practice colonization required the efforts of vast numbers of people. The merchants, captains, sailors, and male and female labourers who travelled to the early plantations were critical to the survival of the English presence abroad, and to the circulation of material goods across the Atlantic. The purpose of this book has been to apply pressure to the political realm: to probe the causes and consequences of imperial intent in Jacobean England, and to put a nascent colonial-mindedness back into the study of English civility and into the consciousness of the ruling elite in the seventeenth century.

The projects under James differed from the joint-stock companies incorporated under Elizabeth because they involved large-scale migration and settlement. Unlike trade-based and ambassadorial activities with Eastern territories, colonization sought to transform America into a ‘new England’, a ‘new Britain’, a ‘Nova Albion’. Land was essential to the English civilizing project, both in physically securing territorial expansion and in giving gentlemen a stake in it. Ireland and America were both part of the civilizing designs of the political elite, but their distinct geographical conditions and local populations led to vastly different experiences on the ground, as in the metropolitan imaginary. The sheer size of American territories, and the discourses of abundance, wealth, and exoticism they engendered, placed the North and South American continents into a dialogue about the global status of the English. Experiences in the Chesapeake led policy-makers and projectors to envisage large-scale plantation industries as a means of producing the goods and financial capital that would allow them to contend with India or Persia. Guiana, not Munster, would bring to ‘London a Contratation house [casa de contratación, house of commerce] of more receipt … then there is now in civill [Seville] for the West Indies’.Footnote ⁵

The young men educated at Oxford and Cambridge in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were the first to grow up with the possibilities of creating an empire beyond the British Isles. Compared to their actual territorial holdings, English imperial claims were greatly inflated. Scholars have viewed the celebrations of empire in the works of Hakluyt and Purchas as aspirational rather than reflective of the state’s priorities.Footnote ⁶ Yet this was the generation who ‘first learned … from the Indians’ and who viewed ‘the Civilizinge of the Indians [as] a matter of the greatest consequence’.Footnote ⁷ As the governor Nathaniel Butler complained to the Earl of Warwick from Bermuda in 1620, gentlemen in London spent a great deal of time discussing Atlantic affairs: ‘I have heard some of them-selves saye that they have every daye spent twelve houres in studying the courses that concerne the Plantations’.Footnote ⁸ The way the English responded to colonizing indigenous peoples does not dilute what Norbert Elias called ‘the process of becoming’.Footnote ⁹ Quite the opposite – this process involved English Atlantic designs. The English engagement with America was not a ‘discovery’ in which the English simultaneously ‘discovered’ themselves. Investigating the early colonial moment reveals a conscious effort at making.

These findings contain several implications for the study of James’ reign. Firstly, this calls for a re-assessment of James’ own relationship to his subjects’ expansionist schemes and to Virginia in particular. When compared to more fully fledged articulations of empire following Cromwell’s Western Design, James’ involvement seems minimal. Yet the king helped to develop the Crown’s sense of responsibility towards colonial schemes, partly through his long-standing commitment to the idea of the monarch as a civilizing force. A 1620 portrait of James by the court painter Paul van Somer, commissioned directly by the king and still held in the Royal Collection, depicts the king in a different light than many better-known representations (Figure 8). James’ self-presentation is more dynamically regal than his other portraits and offers a visual corrective to his seemingly passive attitude to power and indeed to empire. Rather than sitting on a chair or reclining with one elbow resting on a table, James stands in the centre with a strong sense of presence, holding his orb and sceptre and wearing his coronation robes and a closed imperial crown. Banqueting House, still under construction at the time, appears complete through the window beyond. The portrait exhibits James’ belief in order, seen in his acceptance of his role as monarch and in the Palladian principles of the neoclassical architecture behind him. When the colonist Henry Colt described a mountain on the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1631 as ‘high above the rest … like the banquettinge house att Whitehall over the other buyldinges’, he used Banqueting House as a point of reference and a place of memory that connected colonists to institutions at home, in some ways demonstrating the success of elite building projects in promoting civil ideologies.Footnote ¹⁰

Figure 8 Portrait of James I by Paul van Somer, 1620.

Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

James viewed his empire as extending beyond the British Isles. He approved of colonial projects, endorsed the conversion of indigenous peoples, and drew on America to articulate political ideas in such writings as A counterblaste to tobacco. James also engaged directly with essential questions of plantation and its relationship to government from 1619, around the time he commissioned the aforementioned portrait. As the king declared over dinner in late 1618, ‘this is the first day that ever I began hartely to love Virginia, & from this day forwarde I will ever protecte and defend ytt’.Footnote ¹¹ James’ attempts to reinforce monarchical sovereignty in debates about colonial government in the 1620s were not abstract but a direct response to Virginian affairs. When Charles I declared that ‘the territories of Virginia, the Somers Islands, and New England shall form part of his empire, and the government of Virginia immediately depend upon himself’, he specifically invoked the judicial decisions made by his father.Footnote ¹²

Innovations in print helped to stimulate expansionist discourse. Referring to later discourses around East India Company print, Miles Ogborn discusses the formation of ‘a colonial marketplace’ of ideas.Footnote ¹³ While it may be too early to find evidence of a ‘colonial marketplace’ in an Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘public sphere’ in Ogborn’s sense, debating America brought issues around territorial expansion into domestic discussions over trade, war, religion, and statecraft. The Protestant state’s endorsement of colonization in polemic and prescriptive literature encouraged subjects to view their providentialism from a colonial perspective. Allusions to colonial events increasingly framed calls to piety and reform while familiarizing readers with America as a topic of fashionable conversation. Scholars now know a good deal about the Virginia Company’s use of print, but much is left to be done on the production and reception of colonial texts, from their role in fostering a sense of shared transatlantic identities among confessional communities to the influence of particular printers and engravers on disseminating colonial news.

At the same time, humanism encouraged gentlemen to rigorously challenge older forms of knowledge in their pursuit of the vita civile.Footnote ¹⁴ Statesmen debated the direction of colonization by drawing on Native American intelligence, the experience of colonists, and the assistance of indigenous guides.Footnote ¹⁵ Alongside rumours and manuscript reports, travel narratives presented a range of often conflicting material that served to spur important debates about empire and polity. Colonies became microcosms for fierce disputes in London about company management, the division of land, and policies of conversion or settlement. These exposed inherent rifts in domestic opinions about structures of government and the extent of monarchical power over English institutions.Footnote ¹⁶

The outpour of goods and of discourses about America in London became part of the debates on political authority that scholars have seen as a defining feature of the early Stuart era. Rarely concerned solely with the colonies themselves, texts purporting to offer a ‘true relation’ of overseas affairs involved the articulation of a range of political ideas, from the nature of monarchical authority to the necessity of governors and general assemblies in managing state interests in invaded territories.Footnote ¹⁷ Colonial news contributed to discussions about the authority of Parliament and the Crown, and about the relationship between the government at Whitehall and the commercial world of the City.Footnote ¹⁸ As chapters have argued at various points, the practicalities of financing and managing early colonization – from tobacco debates in Parliament to the catastrophes around the dissolution of the Virginia Company – impelled statesmen to draw on their imperial ambitions to contest the balance of power between Crown and Parliament to varying levels of success.

Print functioned within this broader political culture of patronage and institutional networks. The prefatory poetry in colonial texts and pro-tobacco literature exhorted readers to ‘go, and Subdue’, or to take example from ‘industrious Hakluit,/Whose Reading shall inflame/Men to seeke Fame’, encouraging readers to contribute to colonial projects through a collective sense of participation.Footnote ¹⁹ Members of Parliament referenced their friends by name in printed discourses that urged reform and increasingly articulated the survival of the colonies as a national imperative.Footnote ²⁰ The gentlemen who created elaborate rituals around smoking and performed empire in their social spaces, who formulated projects in the gardens and walks at the Inns or who sat on colonial councils, contributed to the process through which consumption, sociability, and politics worked together to negotiate responses to political problems.Footnote ²¹ In doing so, they opened up new spaces for political debate, and not only in the colonies themselves. The tobacco houses discussed in Chapter 4, for example, can be seen as prefiguring the emergence of coffeehouses as political spaces where subjects met to discuss global politics and economies. Gentlemen therefore used a range of interlocking media, from cheap print to poems to letters, to encourage colonial participation and to put pressure on their peers to accept colonial responsibility.

Policy-makers’ willingness to engage with colonization highlights the imperial intent evident among the gentry and the nobility. Parliamentary historians have acknowledged the growing Protestant interest in overseas affairs that began in the later part of Elizabeth’s reign and escalated in the seventeenth century, much of it related to trade.Footnote ²² Their commercial interests, however, did not prevent gentlemen from demonstrating a commitment to the civilizing project that linked these interests to responsibilities of state. Richard Martin’s ‘great desyre’ for English success in Virginia, that ‘[f]ire’ that ‘flames out to the view of every one’ related the hope of gain to other forms of investment: ‘long and hazardous voyages’ in the service of plantation were framed as personal and providential acts of fulfilment.Footnote ²³ Without this context, the demise of George Thorpe, described in a throwaway line in an overview of the House of Commons (‘the Powhatans slaughtered him’), seems unfortunate, even random.Footnote ²⁴ Projecting Thorpe as a senseless victim of indigenous brutality in another part of the world does little to elucidate his commitment to Protestant expansion, a zeal powerful enough to induce him to settle in Virginia himself. Neither does this brief statement sufficiently situate Thorpe within escalating Anglo–Algonquian conflicts that informed virulent debates in 1620s London. ‘I desire you, & conjure you’, Martin implored William Strachey, to write from Virginia ‘that thereby I may be truly able to satisfy others, & to direct my counsells’ to those at home.Footnote ²⁵

The chapters in this book offered perspectives into how aspirations to colonize America became imbedded in the civil identities of the governing elite. Chapter 1 introduced the project of colonization through elite patronage and the attitudes towards nature and plantation that informed expansion. It sought to explain why individuals in Parliament, the royal court, and the courts of Anne of Denmark and Prince Henry staked a claim in American plantation when its economic benefits were still uncertain and when treatises on trade remained far more optimistic about establishing connections with Europe and the East.Footnote ²⁶ Much of this can be understood through the long-standing relationship between estate management and service to the state. Disdaining mercantile profiteering, which they viewed as offering immediate returns at the expense of longer-term stability, gentlemen considered overseas plantation as extensions of their rising interests in managing and surveying their own lands. Merchants subscribed to this rhetoric, where trade and polity fulfilled each other: ‘a worthy enterprise and of great consequence, [Virginia is] much above the Marchants levell and reach’, wrote Robert Kayll in 1615. ‘And in sure regard of the great expenses … I could wish, that as many of the Nobility and Gentry of the land have willingly embarqued themselves in the labour, so the rest of the Subjects might be urged to help to forme and bring forth this birth, not of an infant, but of a man; nay, of a people, of a kingdom’.Footnote ²⁷

Chapter 2 examined the influence of ‘this birth’, a fledgling Virginia, on Jacobean political culture. Prior to mass migration, the Jamestown–London connection offers a case study into the intimacy of the early colonial moment, where the private reflections shared between friends and family about colonial conditions strengthened the commitment to colonize at home. George Percy’s elegant descriptions of Powhatan adornment expressed wonder at the beauty of Algonquian featherwork and claw jewellery, but he also catalogued acts of iconoclasm, brutal warfare, and anthropophagy among the English that served as urgent reminders of the fragility of civility and the necessity of uncompromising governance. From Percy’s ‘Relacyon’ to John Bonoeil’s treatise on silkworm cultivation, gentlemen viewed the civilizing project in America as a project of refinement, one that related the transformation of new landscapes to their own aspirations for service and distinction. This chapter also traced the influence of Algonquian political action on the colony and metropolitan discourse, including the ways in which Londoners responded to Native agency, and ended with a discussion of the function of colonial intelligence as a form of political counsel.

Chapter 3 investigated the relationship between violence and civility, placing post-Reformation debates about orthodoxy and civil society within the context of Atlantic exploration. As litigation cases rose and the state’s civilizing project seemed to be effectively diminishing outbursts of physical violence in England, writers also began to draw on ideas of indigenous cannibalism to criticize domestic socio-economic changes to an unprecedented degree. This reflected the English exposure to Native American belief systems in the Caribbean and South America, but it also reveals contradictions at the heart of the civilizing project, where accusations of cannibal behaviour served to critique the extractive nature of Jacobean projects and increasing disputes over private property. Though the English conveyed a sense of vulnerability when exposed to Native American violence, they also continued to endorse a world of sociability and consumption that hinged on colonial interference and economic exploitation. The English pursuit of civility can only be framed as a story of declining violence when colonial spaces are considered peripheral rather than central to the political realm.

Chapter 4 examined imperial intent and changing attitudes to consumption through policy-makers’ endorsement of the tobacco trade. By using tobacco debates in Parliament to express support for plantation and the Protestant cause at the onset of the Thirty Years’ War, gentlemen turned a subversive American commodity into a ‘luxury of necessity’. The merchant and economic writer Thomas Mun, in a tract later published by his son, lamented the ‘unnecessary wants’ of ‘Silks, Sugars, Spices, Fruits, and all others’ that ‘hath made us effeminate’ and ‘unfortunate in our Enterprises’.Footnote ²⁸ To colonial endorsers in Parliament, their values rooted in a sense of history and pedigree, an empire in America was not the problem but the solution. Trading enterprises would become more successful not only as a result of merchandizing, but through elite regulation and the establishment of hierarchies that could manage the potential for degeneration and disobedience. ‘[C]ivility and knowledge do confirm and not effeminate good and true spirits’, Thomas Roe professed, as he sought marble statues, coral, and gems for his patron, the Earl of Arundel.Footnote ²⁹

The final chapter drew together many of the strands underpinning this book by addressing the role of sociability and Atlantic ‘things’ in shaping behaviour and envisioning what an imperial polity looked like. Within the formative institutions of the Inns of Court, gentlemen used their literary outputs and political performances to claim colonization as a largely masculine enterprise set against Catholicism and the debasement of the king’s own court. Gentlemen learned to behave as colonizers in the social spaces of the metropolis where they circulated pro-imperial poetry and discussed colonial intelligence, fuelled by the actual intoxication of the senses through tobacco. Within these settings, clusters of consumption allowed for a complex self-fashioning that both disdained violence and celebrated conquest, turning the fruits of empire into manifestations of providential favour.

Objects played an active role in shaping civility and social distinction in an imperial polity. This was evident in what gentlemen brought with them to places like Jamestown. From writing utensils and paper for record-keeping to the large chests with locks and keys intended to preserve them, glass drinking cups to Chinese porcelain, the ‘need of society’ was embedded in the use of, and accessibility to, certain objects.Footnote ³⁰ The place of American objects in elite sociability in London is perhaps even more revealing. As discussed in the Introduction, access to foreign goods was indicative of widening global networks of trafficking and exchange that reached far beyond America. In terms of wealth and financial possibility, European exports and spices, textiles, and porcelain connecting England to Eastern trades dominated the marketplace. In a vast, interconnected world of ships and agents, objects acquired by cultural go-betweens in their travels were often valued in ways that related to the personal experience of travel and encounter.Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, colonial goods – shells, feathers, carved bone and claws, beaver furs – conveyed particular associations to metropolitan gentlemen. These exhibited proof of an alluring world existing just beyond ‘those petty English plantations in the savage islands in the West Indies’ and evoked verdant landscapes waiting to be exploited through English industry, settlement, and rule.Footnote ³²

The acquisition and circulation of things is accompanied by the echoes of what do not survive. Dyed animal skin clothing, anthropomorphic terracotta pipes, or quartz crystal arrowheads might appear in cabinets of curiosities, but they were not incorporated into elite ideas of refined sophistication the way Chinese porcelains or Indian calicos were. Wampum belts, viewed by indigenous groups as living, sacred objects that signified pacts of friendship and co-existing but non-interfering worldviews, were valued insofar as they might be used as monetary currency or as contracts of indigenous submission. Algonquian tombs, religious artefacts, or pearls believed to have been artlessly worked were consistently deemed less precious to Englishmen than sassafras or chunks of ambergris.

The emotional and spiritual power of eagle or parrot feathers, if not their beauty and lustre, were lost on those who appropriated ceremonial objects. Mantles and featherwork in London often served as material tokens of ostensible submission. ‘The robe of the King of Virginia’ in the collector and gardener John Tradescant’s collection reputedly came from the ceremonial ‘crowning’ of Wahunsenacah, who in fact refused to willingly bend a knee to the English.Footnote ³³ Francis Drake took the ‘peeces of the shels of pearles’, bone, and red feathers presented to him by the Miwoks in California as proof that they revered him as a god.Footnote ³⁴ When Nicholas Saunders wrote to Cecil about the pedlar wearing what he took to be an artefact from the West Indies, he understood the object to have been stolen or taken in battle: a captain who had gone ‘w[i]th S[i]r Frauncys Drake in the last voyadge … tould me that there was such a hatt taken in that action of an Indian king’.Footnote ³⁵ For some Brazilian groups, the word for nudity translated as ‘without feathers’ or ‘without earrings’.Footnote ³⁶ To be stripped of such objects was to be socially incomplete, as one Tupi man iterated in 1613 when he regarded his enslavement ‘without paint and with no feathers fastened to my head or on my arms or wrists’ as worse than death.Footnote ³⁷ South American featherwork or Algonquian ‘crowns’ in the metropolis were not just curiosities; some were spoils of war. Taking objects and depriving individuals of their traditions reinforced political authority and contributed to the material politics and particular aesthetics of civility that accompanied empire.

What emerges from this study is the instrumental role that political friendships and social habits played in furthering and normalizing colonization in intersecting public and private spaces. Some of Ralegh’s last words on the scaffold were to his friend the Earl of Arundel, who had boarded Ralegh’s ship before his departure to Guiana. Ralegh recalled how Arundel ‘took me by the hand, and said you would request one thing of me, which was, that whether I made a voyage good or bad, I should not fail, but to return again’.Footnote ³⁸ When the brothers Edward and Thomas Hayes sought to further ‘the business of planting Christianitie among heathens’ in 1606, they informed Robert Cecil that regardless of his support, they planned to circulate copies of their proposal in Parliament, and to ‘div[er]s o[u]r frendes, members of the same’.Footnote ³⁹ These were not just court-centred friendships; they stemmed from a number of institutional affiliations and confessional or family alliances that suggest more permeable and overlapping boundaries.

Michelle O’Callaghan argues that the rise of friendship manuals and the language of love and trust between men encoded values that helped to define ‘the class identity of gentlemen’ from the later sixteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ These values also served the political culture of imperial participation by conveying a particular vision of transatlantic masculine sociability whose fraternal bonds were influenced by the language of wit coteries. Strachey was ‘a fytt Achates for such an Aeneas’ as Lord de la Warr, Martin wrote, referring to the faithful traveller and companion to Virgil’s classical hero.Footnote ⁴¹ When Drayton wrote a poem to send off his friend George Sandys to Virginia, he praised Sandys’ resolution to continue translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the banks of the James River, and urged Sandys to ‘impart your skill/In the description of the place, that I,/May become learned in the soyle thereby’.Footnote ⁴² Drayton linked a knowledge of husbandry to plantation but also to the ‘industry’ of literary composition, one with distinctly classical resonances: ‘Let’s see what lines Virginia will produce;/Goe on with Ovid … /Intice the Muses thither to repaire,/Intreat them gently, trayne them to that ayre’.Footnote ⁴³

As Chapter 3 demonstrated in relation to cannibalism, discourses about the violent rupturing of civil society often expressed factionalism as a personal attack against humanist models of friendship, and against the bonds created by shared living in the vita civile. This reflected early modern political theories about authority stemming from the ordered patriarchal state, but it also suggests that male friendships were integral to how gentlemen understood the relationship between colonization and state-building. One manuscript treatise from the 1620s thus insisted that investing in Virginia would ‘marrye Virginia to the Soveraignetie of England’, but that the best means to do so would be to ‘spurre on manie that have good estates in England to plant there, and to drawe their freindes [sic] and kindred w[i]th them’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Friends were ‘apt instrumentes’ to ‘farther our pollitick end of houlding Virginia to England’.Footnote ⁴⁵

This understanding of male friendship as an instrument of expansion recognized all three elements of Aristotle’s theory of friendship, where trusted bonds between men served a political necessity, reflected a greater good, and provided a source of pleasure.Footnote ⁴⁶ When colonial promoters described friendship as a part of how colonization might be effected, they viewed this relationship as a political necessity but also as a component of the ideal society they wished to create. Before the arrival of larger numbers of women in America, gentlemen celebrated male friendships as an essential means of securing political control while simultaneously enjoying relationships that reflected the highest forms of civility in Greco-Roman thought. The colonist Robert Cushman, writing for audiences in New England and London in 1621, argued that self-love was anathema to plantation, whereas ‘the sweetnesse of true friendship’ ensured its success.Footnote ⁴⁷ Cushman’s title promised to discuss the importance of friendship alongside ‘the state of the Country, and condition of the SAVAGES’, thereby linking the civilizing function of masculine relationships to the development of plantation. Cushman opened his text with a quote from Romans 12:10 advocating brotherly love, and urged that men must be of one heart, echoing classical discourses about perfect friendship uniting hearts as one.Footnote ⁴⁸ This fraternal view of the world marked the language of transatlantic civility and the values of gentlemen planters long after the Jacobean era.

It is tempting to dismiss such literature as evocative but inconsequential, unrelated to the brutal business of effecting empire. Fantasies of bloodless conquests and pleasure gardens seem far removed from evidence of colonists licking the blood off dead Native Americans for sustenance, or reports of soldiers shooting Algonquian women in the rivers of the Chesapeake. But what often allowed opulent colonial imaginings to intermingle with the fraught knowledge of colonial conditions was, in the end, civility itself. Gentlemanly celebrations of their own refined sense of self and nation defined the English civilizing project, underpinned by the belief that to ‘be a man’ required demonstrations of subordination and control.

By 1628, the writer and Newfoundland colonist Robert Hayman could position himself on the cusp of a more integrated colonial world united by friendships between men in London and America. The generational aspect explored at various points in this book emerges strongly in Hayman’s narrative. Hayman had been inspired to explore the world beyond England after an encounter with Francis Drake in his boyhood, where Drake bestowed on him an orange and a kiss. Hayman’s publication contained a mix of poems encouraging plantation intermixed with memories of his time and friendships at the Inns of Court, referencing Wither, Drayton, and the colonist George Calvert, who had served as James’ secretary of state.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dedicated to King Charles, Hayman focussed less on the logistics of plantation management and more on cultivating a transatlantic society sustained through close personal ties. The colonial promoter William Vaughan penned the prefatory verse, ‘To my deare Friend and Fellow-Planter’, and Hayman composed verses ‘To a worthy Friend, who often objects to the coldnesse of the Winter in Newfoundland’, and ‘To the right Honourable Sir George Calvert, Knight, late Principall Secretary to King JAMES … and Lord of Avalon in Newfound-land’. These poems created a world that was recognizably English – and elite – but also influenced by life in America. With its references to nymphs and muses, West Indian iguanas and wooded plantations, the tract envisaged a hybrid, shared environment between gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic. While some men sought to evade the challenging duties of colonization, such behaviour was ‘lamentably strange to me’, and ‘[i]n the next age incredible ’twill be’.Footnote ⁵⁰ By the next generation, Hayman believed, England and America would be fully engrained, a disconnect between them impossible to fathom.

*

England in the 1620s stood poised on the brink of large-scale change. Those ‘petty English plantations’ in the Caribbean that Francis Wyatt mentioned in 1626 were soon to become lucrative sites for sugar and tobacco.Footnote ⁵¹ Thousands of men and women settled in North America in the 1630s in waves of migration that drastically changed the demographics of earlier colonization. The recorded presence of Africans in the English Chesapeake in 1619 numbered around twenty, but the concentration of these Africans on certain plantations is indicative, suggesting a correlation between forced African labour and the estates’ status-conscious owners.Footnote ⁵² A defence of slavery appeared at the start of a 1638 pamphlet about a hurricane on St Christopher’s (St Kitt’s) by the London ‘water poet’ John Taylor, who maintained that forced servitude was a productive condition whereby ‘savages’ became ‘civil’, a means through which many nations had been ‘happily brought to Civility’.Footnote ⁵³ While freedom made ‘barbarous’ nations licentious cannibals, ‘being conquer’d and overcome [taught] the laudable Experience of Tillage and Husbandry’.Footnote ⁵⁴ While not ‘all are civiliz’d’ in the world, Taylor concluded, such as ‘in America, and in divers Islands adjacent’, the English were well-poised to do unto others as ‘more civiller Nations did conquer, tame, and teach us’.Footnote ⁵⁵ England as a once-conquered island, fit for conquering, was by now an ingrained component of political rhetoric, one that gained particular force from recent expansion and the entrenched assumptions behind such victories.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the development of plantations and the formation of an English colonial elite were well underway. The beginnings of the ‘great houses’ era from the 1640s to the 1660s, characterized by formidable building projects such as William Berkeley’s Green Spring plantation in Virginia, connected the gentlemanly ‘need of society’ to rising consumption, forced labour, and estate-building in North America and the Caribbean.Footnote ⁵⁶ When gentlemen in the mid-seventeenth century praised the production of tobacco and silk, ordered landscapes, and industrial diversification as a means of contending with the luxuries of Persia, they were celebrating the civil order that earlier projectors and statesmen had envisaged from the start.Footnote ⁵⁷ In their aspirations for colonial participation and display, governors like Berkeley showed themselves to be a product of this early imperial moment. Born two years after James’ accession to the throne, and as a participant in the literary culture of the Middle Temple in the late 1620s, Berkeley was shaped by the networks of colonial enthusiasm engendered in the metropolis, where gentlemen had articulated the importance of land management and the subjugation of other peoples as vital to their projects and as desirable components of status.

As George Wither knew when he wrote his satires, here was a realm that increasingly understood itself by looking outward. Within a vast array of interlocking global interactions, colonization impelled policy-makers to think about themselves as rulers of other territories and peoples, and committed the Crown and Parliament to colonial management in America. Shortly after the publication of Wither’s book, George Wyatt, proud father to the Virginia governor Francis, corresponded from the Kentish countryside with his son on Algonquian stratagems of war and collected verses written by the parish vicar lauding Francis’ virtuous duty abroad. Employing the metaphor of the beehive so popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean notions of the perfect commonwealth, the elder Wyatt now included a new emphasis in this model of industry and governance. For good or ill, those armed to defend the realm and protect its orthodoxies – ‘skild and resolvd to fight’ – now faced new directions, reflected in the closing lines of Wyatt’s poem: ‘To gather Wax and Hony to their Hive … To drink thos Nectars gladdinge God and men … Their young broode, they in colonise [colonies] out send’.Footnote ⁵⁸ To Wyatt, the colonies offered fragrant ‘[n]ectars’ that benefitted the hive, and the agents who would bring about domestic prosperity were young men like his son, committed to affairs of state. The dissolving bounds between societies and peoples that occurred as a result of colonization, however, transformed the English realm far more than it succeeded in assimilating those who lived beyond it.