In December 1624, university tutors in Cambridge made frantic arrangements for a royal visit. Aware of James’ personal preferences and keen to avoid his displeasure, the heads of colleges set clear instructions for their students’ behaviour. Students were forbidden to smoke anywhere near the king. Any who ‘p[re]sume to take any Tobacco in or neere Trinitie Colledge hall’ or ‘neere any place where his Ma[jes]tie is’ faced ‘payne of final expelling [from] ye Univ[er]sitie’.Footnote 1
James’ dislike for tobacco is well known. He denounced its ruinous effects in A counterblaste to tobacco (1604), published shortly after he ascended the English throne. His offhand references to tobacco in subsequent years continued to express his aversion. Proclamations that dealt with the tobacco trade were prefaced by a reminder of how much James detested this ‘new corruption’ of ‘mens bodies and manners’.Footnote 2 When he prepared to attend a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1620, desiring to ‘stir up others by his princely example’, the king ordered that tobacco houses near the west gate of the church be ‘pulled downe to the ground and the sellers and vaultes filled up, that there be noe signe left remaining of any such houses or vaultes there’.Footnote 3
Many scholars have dismissed James’ distaste for tobacco, and anti-tobacco tracts more generally, as the dull rantings of a pedant set on hampering the inevitable. Smoking, after all, proliferated in Jacobean London.Footnote 4 The leaf unfurled its husky, impertinent sovereignty over the metropolis and in port towns in ship barrels and sailors’ pouches, grocers’ shops and medicine cabinets, becoming an object of mass consumption by the 1630s.Footnote 5 Tobacco imports escalated throughout the century, from an estimated 1,250 lbs in 1616 to 500,000 lbs by 1624.Footnote 6 At the Inns of Court, gentlemen discoursed about plays and the law at end-of-term suppers that featured the stuff of still life paintings, the tables piled with chickens, figs, ‘sugar and spice’, almonds, artichokes, oysters, lobsters, and, from the seventeenth century, tobacco.Footnote 7 Like its personification in urban wit poetry, tobacco seems to emerge victorious despite its detractors.
This chapter focusses on the tensions between tobacco’s appeal and the difficulty smoking presented to authorities concerned with reforming manners and maintaining socio-political order. Tobacco and civility, after all, were not obvious associates. Purloined from Native Americans, widely smoked by sailors and travellers, and largely sourced from the Spanish West Indies, the commodity initially offered an evocative parallel to the smoke and incense of Catholic subversion. By the 1620s, however, many Members of Parliament, and eventually the king himself, used tobacco to articulate a larger commitment to empire, particularly after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Beginning with policy-makers’ unease about the disruptive potential of tobacco, this chapter explores the process through which pro-imperial gentlemen navigated their concerns and sought to turn smoking into a legitimate feature of their political culture. Rather than remove the intoxicant from the world of politics, gentlemen used tobacco to express their imperial intent, relating their smoking habits directly to plantation landscapes and the subordination of indigenous groups. To its proponents in Parliament, the tobacco monopoly that the king granted Virginia and Bermuda in 1624 was an assertion of independence from Spain. English-sourced tobacco became a physical manifestation of a civil society bolstered by the successful flourishing of transatlantic plantation.
Tobacco in England
Ambiguities around tobacco and civility were expressed in discourses about health, the body, and socio-political regulation. How and why individuals smoked mattered to political thinkers who frequently drew parallels between the physical body and the body politic, linking the health of the individual to wider society. Descriptions of the plant’s botanical properties and forms of consumption were informed by the contexts of its production and use. Though domestic planting could be lucrative, tobacco brought English consumers into the evocative world of the Chesapeake and the Caribbean. Reports described English travellers sitting ‘all night by great Fiers, drinking of Tobacco, with extraordinarie myrth amongst our selves’ after interacting with Carib women and collecting tropical fruits, infusing the commodity with potent imaginings of the kind of consumption possible through imperial interference.Footnote 8
Sailors returned with tobacco from the Atlantic voyages captained by John Hawkins from the 1560s, and men and women began to grow, smoke, and sell tobacco with increasing frequency. On a certain level, tobacco was one medicinal herb among many, incorporated by physicians, travellers, writers, and planters into a larger understanding of pre-existing medicines. The merchant John Frampton’s translation of the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes’ Joyfull newes out of the newfound world included a botanical illustration of the tobacco plant and a section outlining the virtues of tobacco. Monardes offered a detailed explanation of how tobacco healed headaches, toothaches, swellings, and other ailments. Using ‘stamped leaves’ in particular provided ‘mervellous medicinable vertues’.Footnote 9 Describing how best to apply tobacco to the body in each of these occasions, he concluded that ‘in woundes newly hurte, and cuttes, strokes, prickles, or any other maner of wounde, our Tabaco worketh marvellous effectes’.Footnote 10
Numerous physicians in James’ reign reiterated this belief.Footnote 11 Surviving copies of medicinal treatises show markings and underlining in the pages describing tobacco, where readers jotted down their impressions on tobacco in the margins for easier reference.Footnote 12 Physicians often viewed the temperate consumption of tobacco as capable of removing the aches and discomforts inconveniencing people in their day-to-day lives. Tobacco’s dry consistency seemed well placed to offset the dampened humours caused by illness, as when the traveller Fynes Moryson wrote of Lord Mountjoy, the lord deputy of Ireland, that tobacco prevented him falling ill, ‘especially in Ireland, where the foggy aire … doe most prejudice the health’.Footnote 13 Edward Reynolds, clerk of the privy seal, wrote a letter to his brother in 1606, hoping some of ‘Cosen Bagges tobacco’ would help to combat the pains in his chest with which he had been ‘freshlye assaulted’.Footnote 14 Tobacco offered a practical solution to everyday ailments, including to those who, like Mountjoy or Reynolds, were employed in the service of the state in unfamiliar environments where their bodies might be more vulnerable to disease.
Always keen to benefit from projects and monopolies, James imposed high taxes and attempted to regulate the trade with grants and licences. He granted the Tobacco Pipe Makers of Westminster sole privileges for making and distributing pipes to London, and raised the duties on tobacco by 4,000 per cent, from 2d to 82d per pound.Footnote 15 It was perhaps the fluctuating price of duties and the high price of tobacco that prompted subjects to try to grow their own. In the sixteenth century alone, several thousand printed books in Europe began to incorporate images and stories from the Americas, many describing the uses of tobacco and containing botanical illustrations and instructions on how to grow it.Footnote 16 James initially approved licences for tobacco cultivation across the British Isles, and surviving letters between policy-makers and merchants testify to a number of individuals growing tobacco since ‘a good rent is growne to the kinge’ and proved profitable despite pitfalls.Footnote 17 Charged with household management, women grew tobacco in their gardens for medicinal reasons and smoked recreationally. Before the 1619 ban on English-grown tobacco, one acre of English tobacco could yield anywhere from 29l. to 100l. profit, an inviting prospect to a farmer who made around 9l. a year.Footnote 18
Nonetheless, overindulgence through pipe smoking remained a concern. Pipes changed appearances and behaviour: ‘men looke not like men that use them’.Footnote 19 Those who discouraged tobacco spent a significant amount of ink outlining its adverse effects. Health and disease was still largely understood in relation to the four humours, modelled heavily on the work of the ancient Greek physician Galen. The four complexions – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic – were believed to affect personality and physical characteristics in ways that related to the four elements, rendering bodily imbalance the root of other disorders.Footnote 20 Physicians who discouraged tobacco related the imbalance it caused to the natural humours of the body. Too much tobacco infected ‘the braine and the liver, as appears in our Anatomies, when their bodies are opened’, showing ‘their kidneyes, yea and hearts quite wasted’.Footnote 21
One of the main arguments of the physician who called himself Philaretes was that tobacco not only had physical but also psychological effects. Tobacco was a ‘great increaser of melancholy in us’, opening the mind to ‘melancholy impressions and effects proceeding of that humour’.Footnote 22 Melancholic dispositions arose, Philaretes explained, from black bile, corresponding to the element of the earth and caused by the thickness of a patient’s blood. The unnatural rising of bile or yellow choler by hot and dry tobacco would form sediment in the blood, producing melancholy. The clergyman and physician Eleazar Duncon drew similar conclusions in his treatise: ‘when the blood growth thicke and grosse, the minde is dull and sad’.Footnote 23 Melancholy diminished the ‘principall faculty of the mind’ where ‘Reason is corrupted’.Footnote 24 The dangers of melancholy had political repercussions, considered especially destabilizing to gentlemen whose minds must be fit to run their estates and to participate in governing the realm. While a healthy man possessed uncontaminated blood and a tempered brain, a mind ‘affable, courteous, and civil’, a melancholy man was prone to withdrawing from society, making him ‘repugnant and contrary’.Footnote 25 Quoting Galen, Duncon summarized that ‘the best complexions have the best maners’.Footnote 26
The form and function of pipes directly informed attitudes to consumption. Physicians who prescribed tobacco did not necessarily advocate smoking it. Pipe smoking related directly to Native American, specifically North American, practices. For many physicians, consuming leaves through infusions or pastes offered a more ‘civil’ means of enjoying the benefits of tobacco. Though physicians did recommend the occasional pipe, others called for the ‘leaves [to] be ashed or warmed in imbers’, and it was the custom of breathing in the ‘Nicotian fume’ that seemed to most unsettle John Cotta.Footnote 27 For burns, one doctor advocated making a ‘salve or ointment of Tabacco’, since it ‘anoynt the griefe, & killeth the malignant heat of any burning or scalding’.Footnote 28 Often, boiling or crushing leaves was seen to be the most efficient way to use the plant as a purgative. The sins of pride and contempt for the poor were directly linked to plague in one 1625 pamphlet, but tobacco was not catalogued as one of the country’s sins – instead, it was recommended as a panacea against the plague.Footnote 29 This was not to be smoked, but ‘smelled unto’ and followed by a draught of beer and a restorative walk.Footnote 30
As discourses about health, melancholy, and state regulation suggest, the physical body – its ‘complexions’ and ‘manners’ – was not easily separated from the body politic, and patterns of consumption altered both. The making and distributing of pipes and boxes, and attempts to grow tobacco in English gardens, can be integrated into Joan Thirsk’s discussion of a rising consumer society in early modern England. As Thirsk’s work demonstrates, new techniques of manufacture and cultivation in the second half of the sixteenth century brought an increased market for knitted goods, tobacco pipes, buttons, alum, linen, hemp, flax, and earthenware, all of which stimulated the economy and allowed men, women, and children to sustain a livelihood while acquiring new goods produced in the country.Footnote 31 This economy depended in large part on the skilled labour of migrant communities, many of them religious refugees, and on the vitality through which labourers and middling members of society sought to improve their material conditions of living. Policy-makers sanctioned projects that seemed to offer viable solutions to poverty and idleness while bolstering regional and national economies.Footnote 32 At the same time, tobacco’s association with America invariably contributed to the way that elite and non-elite consumers participated in a burgeoning Atlantic economy.Footnote 33 Sailors, smugglers, pedlars, and merchants played vital roles in circulating tobacco, disseminating the plant from ports to localities while also conveying travel news.Footnote 34
Scholars have turned to the effects of intoxication on the body, examining how social practices around tobacco, as with different kinds of alcohol or, later, coffee and tea, developed in ways that resisted or bolstered state authority.Footnote 35 By situating consumption within socio-political change, these studies have moved away from the cultural materialist approaches of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that focussed on tobacco’s ‘sovereignty’ or dominance over people and economic markets, where an emphasis on the commodification or fetishizing of luxury goods gave little agency to the behaviour of English subjects.Footnote 36 To consider what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘the social life of things’ presents an opportunity to think about exchange and value in relation to their particular contexts and the politics behind them.Footnote 37 This involves an attention to the geopolitics of particular colonies and their relationship to their indigenous inhabitants, as well as a consideration of how metropolitan contexts re-shaped conditions of use.
The archaeological concept of a ‘commodity chain’ is useful for acknowledging the connection between a colonially sourced product and its imperial implications when smoked in England.Footnote 38 This began with the raw material grown from carefully cultivated seeds in different colonial environments, whether the Spanish Caribbean or English Bermuda or Virginia. Since the Spanish learned to consume tobacco from Native Americans in Central and South America and the West Indies, they often smoked in the manner of Mesoamericans, using reed pipes, or in the form of ‘pudding rolls’ or cigars.Footnote 39 Gentlemen were attuned to the realities of cultivation and manufacture, and this contributed to ideas of taste. Preferring the leaf tobacco and pipe smoking gleaned from their contact with Algonquians in North America, the English increasingly branded Spanish tobacco as destructive to their merchandizing. Tobacco from the West Indies, as one author complained, was mixed with ‘juices’ and ‘syrops’ to alter its colour, and ‘in some places they adde a red berry … with which the Indians paint their bodies’.Footnote 40 Such ‘colour and glosse’ masked ‘rotten, withered, & ground-leaves’ that associated Iberian trade with corrupted manufacturing techniques: this ‘filthy leafe’ was ‘solde by the Portugalles residing in London, the same beeing made up in rolles’.Footnote 41 The sourcing and packaging of tobacco, and the stamped and engraved boxes in which members of the elite carried cured tobacco leaves, shaped how consumers re-contextualized the commodity and gave it new meanings in metropolitan spaces.
These differences placed Africans and Native Americans within hierarchies of production. Wit literature and pamphlets circulated fictions of ‘Indian Tobacco’ or ‘pure Indian’ coming from wilful trade or gift-giving in North America, in contrast to the unfree labour in the West Indies. ‘Spanish slaves’ on Iberian plantations, maintained one pamphlet advocating domestic planting, dressed their wounds with the same hands they used to produce cheap rolls.Footnote 42 Of all the plant illustrations that appeared in a botanical book printed in London in 1571, only one included the depiction of a human, where the head of an African man appeared next to the drawing of tobacco.Footnote 43 The African smoked an oversized cigar-like roll that associated tobacco with the enslaved workers on Iberian plantations, perhaps also alluding to the widespread practice among labourers of smoking or chewing tobacco to survive the arduous conditions of plantation life.Footnote 44 From the start, gentlemen in England understood tobacco not just in terms of its medicinal properties or as a source of relief from bodily humours; their tastes were rooted in the colonial.
Incivility and Disorder
The economic potential of tobacco vied with authorities’ awareness of its circulation by non-elite go-betweens such as sailors, and with the knowledge that the plant came from an Atlantic economy whose labour and production depended on non-Europeans. English anxieties about tobacco in the 1610s and 1620s expressed mistrust over the fluid boundaries between English and Native American bodies. ‘Satan visibly and palpably raignes here’, the minister Alexander Whitaker reported from Jamestown in 1613.Footnote 45 Smoking played an important role in North and South American religious ceremonies and social healing, connecting individuals to spiritual realms in ways that seemed incompatible with the Jacobean state’s concern with Protestant conformity.Footnote 46 ‘The Tobacco of this place is good’, summarized one explorer who travelled to the Caribbean with Ralegh, ‘but the Indians [are] Canibals’.Footnote 47
Thomas Hariot, polymath and friend of Ralegh’s, was among those who praised tobacco for its medicinal qualities.Footnote 48 At the same time, Hariot had spent time in Roanoke in the mid-1580s, and his descriptions of indigenous practices highlighted how removed these were from English models of civility. Tobacco, or vppówoc, Hariot wrote,
is of so precious estimation amongest [the Indians], that they thinke their gods are marvelously delighted therwith: Wherupon sometime they make hallowed fires & cast some of the pouder therein for a sacrifice … all done with strange gestures, stamping, sometime dauncing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, & staring up into the heave[n]s, uttering therewithal and chattering strange words & noises.Footnote 49
To detractors, smoking allowed individuals to express a certain contempt for their circumstances or their surroundings in a visual, sensory way that directly related to tobacco’s American provenance. As one physician wrote in 1621, the ‘vaine dreams and visions, which this fume suggesteth’ were akin to the religious ceremonies that ‘bewitched’ North and South Americans and filled them with ‘watonnesse and delight’.Footnote 50 For the first time in history, one could ‘leave the Americans, and come to our Europeans’ to find that the English ‘(well-neare) use the fume of Tobacco with as much excess as [the Indians] doe’.Footnote 51 The tobacco that the Algonquians imbibed in religious ceremonies no longer seemed strange to the English because it was now a widespread custom for a man ‘to become of an English-man, a Savage Indian’.Footnote 52
Anxieties over imitating Algonquians knit domestic conformity to concerns over the success of the civilizing project abroad. The London council advocated a complete eradication of Powhatan temples and burial grounds because they were deemed superstitious and prevented Protestantism from taking root. It hardly seemed consistent to indulge in a plant that Algonquians themselves used to mediate the sacred. As one writer reflected, subjects were concerned that those who imbibed tobacco ‘did seem to degenerate into the nature of the Savages, because they were carried away with the self-same thing’.Footnote 53
Moralists frequently depicted smokers as deliberately placing themselves outside civil society. As such authors maintained, uncivil behaviour might be expected among the ‘savages’ of America, but to choose to behave like Native Americans produced a quite different and altogether more serious problem. The ‘[s]trangers savage Ignorance’ was lamentable, but ‘wilful Arrogance’ far worse.Footnote 54 The Epigrammes and elegies of John Davies and Christopher Marlowe included a praise of tobacco in the same volume as Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s love poetry, as well as passing references to smoking in other poems. Davies referred to tobacco’s ‘heave[n]ly power’, describing its effects as an epiphany-inducing rapture of the senses that would ‘clarifie/The clowdie mistes before dim eies appearing’.Footnote 55 His praise of its sweet fumes enhanced the exoticism of his heady verses, but Marlowe’s own association with tobacco proved somewhat less enchanting. The informer Richard Baines’ damning charges presented to the Privy Council against the playwright quoted Marlowe as saying that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boies were fooles’ in the same indictment that contained Marlowe’s apparent penchant for brutality and irreverent quips about Christ and his followers, specifically Protestants.Footnote 56
A libel against Walter Ralegh and other opponents of the Earl of Essex, likely composed after Essex’s return from Ireland in 1599, branded the smoking Ralegh with similar language to that used to denounce Marlowe. The libel described the debauchery of Ralegh and his coterie: ‘Heele swere by God and worship Devill for gaine/Tobacco boye or sacke to swaye his paine’.Footnote 57 Libels often linked individuals and their foibles to political disorder, and tobacco served to reinforce Ralegh’s subversive behaviour.Footnote 58 The assumption that tobacco was the mark of the rogue manifested itself seventeen years later at Ralegh’s death in 1618. On the scaffold, delivering his final words, Ralegh refuted accusations that he encouraged the death of Essex, denying that he ‘stood in a window over him when he suffered in the Tower, and puffed out tobacco in disdain of him’.Footnote 59 Dying for treason, Ralegh disassociated himself publicly from the idea of tobacco-taking as a gesture of contempt. Yet his need to refute this accusation underlines this association between tobacco and non-conformity, strengthened by stories of the tobacco pouch found in his cell after his execution.Footnote 60
Ralegh, however, was a member of the elite, and his private smoking habits were contrasted to the description by one witness of the ‘base and rascal peoples’ lining up on the streets throwing ‘tobacco-pipes, stones, and mire at him’ during his trial.Footnote 61 Concerns over regulating smoking were largely a matter of status and social position. Though gentlemen might indulge in the pipe in their chambers at the Inns of Court or in their private homes, they condemned the disorders that seemed to arise from tobacco in the hands of the wider population. A debate in the House of Lords in 1621 led to the conclusion that tobacco and ale were now ‘inseparable in the base vulgar sort’, and inevitably accounted for the ‘Idleness, Drunkenness [and] Decay of their Estates’ that resulted.Footnote 62 The threat lay largely in the fact that tobacco was not only smoked in urban areas, where ‘riot and excesse’ were expected, but it had ‘begun to be taken in every meane village, even among the basest people’, remaining outside the regulation of parish authorities.Footnote 63 In 1617, the Lord Mayor of London George Bolles issued a proclamation calling for a reformation of abuses in Newgate Prison. He pointed out that ‘notorious Mutinies and Out-rages’ had been committed by the negligence of the prison guards who allowed their prisoners to become ‘drunke and disordered, permitting them wine, Tobacco, [and] excessive strong drinke’.Footnote 64 The mayor ordered that gaolers and keepers ‘not suffer the taking of Tobacco by the dissolute sort of prisoners in the common gaole’ and that ‘no Tobacco nor Tobacco-pipes, Candles, or other things to fire their Tobacco be brought to them’ so that ‘Mutinies and Insolencies may bee prevented’.Footnote 65 Tobacco does not seem to have been denied to gentlemen in Newgate, and only to ‘the dissolute sort of prisoners’, marking ‘common’ prisoners as those most likely to succumb to uprisings spurred by intemperance and tobacco-taking.
Another set of orders, for Ludgate Prison, indicates similar concerns. Signed by the clerk keeper and numerous bailiffs, it declared that
sundrie abuses & disorders doe daylie arise in the prison by varietie of prison[er]s selling and retailing of tobacco in the same as namelie occasioning late meetings & sitting up in the night not onelie disquieting theire fellow prison[er]s in the house but by the notice that is taken thereof by the watch and passengers in the street w[hi]ch tendes much to the hindrance of the house by the loose of that charitie w[hi]ch hath usually byn given.Footnote 66
Until 1601, the Ludgate orders pertained to the freedoms allowed a prisoner, the conduct of gaolers, and the disorders caused by drinking. It is only after this date that tobacco began to appear in rule books as a matter of concern. Those found trafficking tobacco, since the weed ‘often breedes contention and debate’, were to be fined or ‘sitt in the bolts or shackles’.Footnote 67 The passage cited also indicates that the disorderly behaviour of tobacco smokers prevented benefactors from donating money to the prison, perhaps believing that those who smoked tobacco did not merit charity.
Authorities also condemned the leisure that smoking encouraged. Natural man should abhor idleness, preached one clergyman in 1595, for sluggards were unproductive and therefore ‘as good dead as alive’.Footnote 68 Tobacco-taking was not only perilously ‘intoxicating’, but caused citizens to ‘smoake away … precious time’ better used in diligence.Footnote 69 John Deacon wrote in 1616 that those who smoked excessively or wantonly were nothing but ‘disordered and riotous persons’.Footnote 70 A devotional tract advocating steadfast prayer condemned ‘robbers arraigned and judged over night to die the morrow’ who smoked tobacco to avoid thinking of their deaths.Footnote 71 This must have been a known occurrence during trials and executions. The letter writer John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton about how ‘certain mad knaves tooke tabacco all the way to Tyburn’ as they went to be hanged.Footnote 72 The length between one’s conviction and death was at times very short – Chamberlain noted in 1603 that a captured priest was arrested on the twelfth of February and executed at Tyburn four days later – and spending ‘precious time with this filthie weed’ was therefore unwise.Footnote 73 In terms of gesture, the very act of smoking required the use of the participant’s hands to hold the pipe and bring it to his or her mouth to suck in the smoke. This presented an alternative to the gestures of prayerful repentance so often depicted in woodcuts encouraging penitence before death.
Smoke and Treason
The vaulting wordplay and rhetorical embellishments used in anti-tobacco tracts were intended as a means for individuals to confront the consequences that such a commodity might bring, not just to their physical health, but to their behaviour and actions. Robert Bradshaw’s unpublished advice treatise ‘The way to weldoeing’, written some time during James’ reign, included the story of a captured pirate in Suffolk who ‘being redie to dy sayd that the great love he bore unto tobacko was the furst and chef occasion of his overthrow’, since the ‘importinat delight in taking that harming smoke’ propelled him further into drink, excess, women, and eventually ‘theverie and manie other disordrs’.Footnote 74 ‘Iniqitie’, Bradshaw concluded, ‘shall bring all the earth to a welderness’, one that could only be salvaged by good governors.Footnote 75 Bradshaw associated poor manners with a tendency to disobedience:
[Question] What is the reason thinke you that somanie greatwons as well as small creatturs transgress and break the kings laws [?]
[Answer] becaus they wer not brought up in good manors.Footnote 76
James’ A counterblaste to tobacco (1604) specifically argued that uncivil habits were a danger to the polity. As discussed in Chapter 3, James’ view of monarchical authority was intimately related to the human body and to the personal relationship a subject shared with the king as his liege lord. Though frequently overlooked in discussions of James’ political rhetoric, Counterblaste is a carefully crafted pamphlet with a politically charged core. By yoking ‘savage’ manners to a disregard of kingly orders, James turned smoking into a manifestation of political disobedience and a challenge to royal prerogative.
Part of the danger, James claimed, was the English willingness to abandon duty for self-gratifying pleasure. The wilful adopting of such a ‘savage custom’, ‘having their originall from base corruption and barbarity’, only likened addled Englishmen to ‘beastly Indians’.Footnote 77 James’ repetition of ‘savage’, ‘barbarous’, ‘intemperate’, and ‘beastly’ constructed an image of overwhelming savagery pending over a civil but imperilled realm. Subjects were ‘counterfeiting the maners of others to our owne destruction’.Footnote 78 Tobacco was a seduction that rendered subjects impertinent, uncommitted to serving the monarch if it stood in the way of ‘idle delights, and soft delicacies’.Footnote 79
What lay behind these eccentric hyperboles were attempts to prevent the threats that came from wilful defiance. Though smoke may seem the ‘smallest trifle’, it was tied to ‘greater matters’.Footnote 80 The ‘maners of the wilde, godless, and slavish Indians’ were related to the tendency to be ‘too easie to be seduced to make Rebellion, upon very slight grounds’.Footnote 81 The corrupting nature of tobacco allowed James to use one of his favourite metaphors, that of ‘the proper Phisician of his Politicke-Body’ who sought to ‘purge it of all those diseases’ through ‘a just form of government, to maintain the Publicke quietnesse, and prevent all occasions of Commotion’.Footnote 82 Ultimately, only the king and the tonic of good government could redress society’s monstrosities.
Though policy-makers often addressed smoking among the ‘lower sort’, James especially targeted ‘our Nobilitie and Gentrie prodigall’, including lawyers and churchmen, who were ‘solde to their private delights’ and who had become negligent in their duties.Footnote 83 The king’s express concern with the behaviour of his male elite is significant. The corruption of the body politic began when its authorities failed in their civic duties to uphold the integrity of the household and the state it mirrored. Given the role of the gentry in extending state authority to the localities, their penchant for ‘private delights’ undermined the fabric of governance. Fears of diluting the civil, Protestant self were expressed as a seductive political menace. More subtle than the threat of war, the pursuit of pleasure would usher its destruction through silken pockets stuffed with West Indian leaves, turning the English, like Native Americans, into ‘slaves to the Spaniards’.Footnote 84 Why doe we not as well imitate [the Indians] in walking naked as they doe?’ James asked. ‘[I]n preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes … yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill?’Footnote 85
James’ tract was concerned with civil order, but Counterblaste also had the foresight to address larger issues over the means of sustaining an imperial polity. The king’s attack on luxury did not wholly disparage wealth, and he scorned indigenous Americans for their seeming disregard of precious metals. He did, however, belittle courtiers and gentlemen who exposed themselves to the influence of Native American cultures, condemning ‘the first Author [of the] first introduction of [tobacco] amongst us’ in a scathing barb against Walter Ralegh.Footnote 86 The fashion for smoking had not been introduced by a ‘King, great Conqueror, nor learned Doctor’ but by a self-seeking man whose allegiances were notoriously slippery, and whose penchant for smoking had been fuelled by his direct exchanges with indigenous groups.Footnote 87 The ‘two or three Savage me[n]’ who had faithfully accompanied Ralegh back to England after his voyage to Guiana had died, James relayed, leaving only their custom alive.Footnote 88 The antiquarian William Camden had also drawn a close connection between smoking and Anglo–Native exchange when he credited the Roanoke survivors, Hariot among them, as ‘the first (that I know of) that brought at their returne into England, that Indian Plant … being instructed by the Indians’.Footnote 89 In reminding his subjects that novelties were the overthrow ‘first of the Persia[n], and next of the Romane Empire’, James wrote in imperial terms.Footnote 90 Decadence would inhibit a transatlantic polity before it even began to flourish.
The association between degeneration and disobedience in other writings continued to engage with the king’s views on tobacco as a marker of political subversion. Writers needed only make a small imaginative leap to envision a realm overrun by the puff of smoke to the scourge of gunpowder and fire. Deacon’s Tobacco tortured (1616) and Josuah Sylvester’s Tobacco battered, & the pipes shattered (1616) equated tobacco with treason by framing it in a narrative that evoked the Gunpowder Treason of 1605. As Sylvester wrote, there were resonances between the smoke of tobacco and the near-explosions beneath Parliament in 1605, when a group of Catholic subjects took their contempt for princely authority to terrifying extremes. The links between smoking ‘heathens’ and Catholic dissidents were hardly lost on Protestants concerned with abolishing idolatry. English writers compared Native American smoke and Catholic incense, and the ‘savage’ fascination with bells, trinkets, and false or misdirected worship: ‘The Divell that hath so many superstitious conceits wherewith to blindfold the Papist, is not unfurnished of vaine impression wherewith to be sot the Tobacconist’.Footnote 91 Detractors and slanderers of the gospel were seen to ‘extoll dumb creatures to the very skies, not much unlike those idolatrous Indians who worship the sun’.Footnote 92
To policy-makers, the Catholic plotters’ tendency towards savage behaviour had given them the confidence to act against their king. The ‘Vanities, Mysterious Mists of Rome’ were equated to that other threat that ‘be-smoaked Christendom’.Footnote 93 In the plot’s aftermath, pamphlets catalogued the execution of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators, where their proclivity for smoking featured as a signifier of their lack of remorse. The imprisoned men were described as impenitently awaiting their trial, where they ‘feasted wither their sinnes … were richly apparelled, fared deliciously, and took Tobacco out of measure’.Footnote 94 In their trial, their remorselessness became part of their stubborn idolatry, for they did not seem to pray ‘except it were by the dozen, upon their beades, and taking Tobacco, as if that hanging were no trouble to them’.Footnote 95 Eleven years after the event, John Deacon made explicit connections between tobacco smoking and the Gunpowder Treason:
The late disordered enterprise of those our intemperate Tobacconists, it was not onely flat opposite to the well-established peace of our soveraigne Lord the King … but very rebellious likewise to his kingly soveraigne it selfe, not onely, because they so desperately attempted the wilful breach of his peace, but for that they so proudly resisted his kingly power, and did thereby most impudently declare themselves very obstinate, and open rebels against his sacred Majestie.Footnote 96
As ‘tobacconists’, the plotters’ intemperance and arrogance induced them to act treasonably, where imbibing ‘Indianized’ tobacco subverted the sacred rule of the king.Footnote 97
Anti-tobacco literature often focussed less on tobacco as a disease than a self-induced harm, representing larger concerns about the internal inceptions of social and political disintegration:
James expressed it similarly in 1619:
[T]o refuse obedience because it is against our mind, is like the excuse of the Tobacco-drunkards, who cannot abstain from that filthy stinking smoake, because forsooth, they are bewitched with it. And this is an excuse for any sinne, they will not leave it, because they cannot leave it.Footnote 99
The seductiveness of disobedience implied that those who took tobacco allowed themselves to be corrupted. To be told by the king himself of the degenerating potential of smoking and to do so anyway made the very act of smoking a possible act of defiance. ‘He that dares take Tobacco on the stage,/Dares daunce in pawles, and in this formall age,/Dares say and do what ever is unmeete’.Footnote 100 Policy-makers seem to have deemed the combination of tobacco and alcohol especially corrosive. In 1618, James attempted to prohibit alehouses from selling tobacco in an attempt to suppress ‘the great disorders daylie used in Ale-houses’ that were enhanced by taking the two together.Footnote 101
As concerns raised in Parliament, prison records, and popular print suggest, authorities mistrusted smokers for operating in often public spaces where subversive ideas could be discussed, where ‘Indianized’ leisure presented ‘our Weale publicke deformed’.Footnote 102 These spaces were often, but not always, associated with taverns and alehouses. The soldier Barnabe Rich claimed that Jacobean London had 7,000 tobacco shops. Ravaged by seventeenth-century fire and twentieth-century war, London has yielded little archaeological evidence, if any, of the location of such shops, their structural frameworks, or how they functioned in relation to surrounding buildings. These do seem, however, to have been entities that were separate from other shops that sold tobacco. Though it was ‘a commoditie that is nowe vendible in every Taverne, Inne, and Ale-house’, as well as by apothecaries and grocers, Rich remarked, there was ‘a Cathalogue taken of all those newly erected houses that have set uppe that Trade of selling Tobacco, in London & neare about London’.Footnote 103 Since sellers ‘are (almost) never without company, that from morning till night are still taking of Tobacco’, these spaces evolved into ‘open shoppes, that have no other trade to live by, but by the selling of tobacco’.Footnote 104
Tobacco shops, wrote the satirist John Earle, were ‘the Randevous of spitting’ where ‘communication is smoke’, a place, scandalously, where ‘Spain is commended and prefer’d before England it selfe’.Footnote 105 The reference to Spain may have alluded to Spanish-imported tobacco in England – which, as another author noted, ‘cannot but greatly prejudice the Common-weale’ – but also to topics of political discourse, including travel news.Footnote 106 Published shortly after Rich’s description of London’s flourishing tobacco shops, a broadside promoting good table manners conveyed authorities’ attempts to regulate subjects’ manners while also disclosing the particular topics of discourse that tobacco seemed to encourage (Figure 5). Printed by the king’s printer Robert Barker in 1615, Table-observations grouped tobacco with rumours or stories – perhaps the ‘long tales’ of travellers returning from Atlantic voyages – and matters of state, suggesting its links to slander and a dangerous meddling in affairs that went beyond displaying indelicate manners.Footnote 107
Figure 5 Table-observations (1615).
According to authorities, tobacco shops were bowers where treasons were whispered and, once spoken, brought into the realm of possibility. The desire to smoke brought subjects to places where they might not otherwise gather.Footnote 108 Here were microcosms within the polity where the king did not possess sovereign jurisdiction, where ‘a man shall heare nothing but Destractions’ and ‘captious and carping speaches’ made with ‘taunting tongues’, so that ‘the wise Surgeons of our State [must] provide for corrosives and cauterismes against these ugly ulcers’.Footnote 109 Tobacco itself was a ‘traitour, and doth treason warke’ by ‘smokie mists polluting … [t]hroughout the body every part imbruing’.Footnote 110 When James ordered the eradication of the tobacco houses on his route to St Paul’s in 1620, he was in many ways exerting his sovereignty over illegitimate or uncivil spaces.
Given its associations with political conversation, it may be that tobacco sellers provided physical sites for public political discourse that prefigured the coffeehouse culture of the mid-seventeenth century. Tobacco sellers created spaces for consumption and discourse at a time when London experienced radical physical alterations, and the shifting spatial topography of the city can offer a category of analysis for the history of civil conversation and political discourse.Footnote 111 These new spaces were occupied by unfamiliar odours and social rituals and, unlike alehouses, stemmed directly from English global expansion, reinforced by the wooden Native Americans that might adorn the facades. Like statues of Africans or ‘blackamoors’, these enticed customers to enter by relating the commodity to the Atlantic world from where the tobacco came.Footnote 112 Intent on controlling the flow of news during the heated Parliament of 1614, Francis Bacon and other statesmen conveyed discord and malicious rumour as the enemy of a functioning polity.Footnote 113 The Virginia Company used print in its considerable efforts to control ‘the malignity of the false’ and the ‘ignorant rumor, virulent envy, or impious subtilty’ that harmed the colonial enterprise, where the abundance of titles promising to offer ‘true’ or ‘sincere’ colonial news inveighed against ‘those Letters and Rumours [shown] to have beene false and malicious’.Footnote 114 These campaigns, though reflecting wider concerns on the part of policy-makers to manage and control information, only fed the vast flow of information that circulated in the metropolis, mingling with the stories of merchants and sailors and fostered by the punchy depth of tobacco itself.
From ‘Pagan’ Plant to ‘Virginia Leaf’
While the state’s embeddedness in the reformation of manners at first seemed to provide an obstacle to the endorsement of ‘bewitching’ tobacco, parliamentary debates over moral regulation and the tobacco trade benefitted from relating the commodity to the colonial. When the Virginia Company’s exactions from customs and impositions expired in 1619, the Crown denied the company’s petition to extend its privileges.Footnote 115 Thomas Cogswell has argued that the ensuing debates around tobacco, both pro and contra, helped to create a ‘political vocabulary’ around colonial administration, litigation, and free trade that were fundamental to sustaining overseas plantation.Footnote 116 This section explores the tobacco debates less through the lens of administration and more through a consideration of policy-makers as consumers, investigating how pro-imperial gentlemen sought to legitimize tobacco smoking by relating the commodity to matters of state. Smoking brought the colonial into the political culture of gentlemen in and around parliament. Unlike the ‘impudent upstarts’, ‘[p]agan in beleefe … Prodigall in wastfull expence’ who puffed their profligate way through the metropolis, the civility of gentlemen smokers came from their ability to relate tobacco to the culture of political participation.Footnote 117
When Edwin Sandys wrote to the Duke of Buckingham in 1620, he presented the survival of the struggling colony in Virginia as a matter of James’ personal honour. The subversions of the other factions, Sandys wrote, were a ‘derogation of his Ma[jes]ties authoritie, & contrary to his Royall Instructions’ as well as a ‘dishartning [sic] of all Adventurors … that [the colony] might not prosper’.Footnote 118 Tobacco created a dilemma for Jacobean policy-makers who condemned the habit but supported colonization.
Throughout his reign, James realized the profitability of tobacco but continued to press for other goods that might eventually replace the colonists’ dependence on the crop. In a dinner conversation between the king and George Yeardley in 1618, as Yeardley prepared to embark to Jamestown to become its governor, one observer reported that:
His Ma[jes]tie then converted his speech to the matter of Tobacco, w[hi]ch though owte of a naturall antipathy hee hateth as much as any mortall man, yet such is his love to our plantation, as hee is content wee should make our benefit thereof upon certaine conditions: Namely that by too excessive planting of it, we doe neglect planting of corne & soe famish o[ur]selves. For, said his Ma[jes]tie, if our saviour Christ in the gospell saith man liveth not by bread alone, then I may well say, Man liveth not by smoke alone. His Ma[jes]ties other condition was, that wee should dayle indeavour o[ur] selves to raise more ritch and stable commodities … that by degrees one might growe into contempte, & soe into disuse of yt that fantasticall herbe.Footnote 119
James contrasted tobacco to industries that he viewed as more commendable foundations for a civil polity, especially silk. Yet the ‘disuse of that fantasticall herbe’ never occurred. This was not because tobacco’s prominence was inevitable, or because fears of savagery were merely rhetorical and ultimately too flimsy to dictate policy, but because James, and the MPs who heavily backed the Virginia Company, consciously found ways to reconcile tobacco with both private pleasure and public good.
The tensions between controlling behaviour and endorsing the colony were apparent in debates in the House of Commons in April 1621. Jerome Horsey complained that the ‘vile weed’ had hardly been present when he first became an MP in the 1590s, and he advocated the complete eradication of the trade.Footnote 120 But, Thomas Jermyn contended, resisting Spain and redressing the dire situation in Virginia were more pressing issues. Though he ‘loveth Tobacco as ill as any’, it was ‘fit to be given [to] Virginia’.Footnote 121 A substantial number of MPs supported suppressing tobacco altogether, but their desire to ‘banish all Tobacco’ and ‘pull it up by the Roots’ because of ‘the spoiling of the subjects Manners by it’ met John Ferrar’s rejoinder that ‘4,000 English there … have no Means, as yet, to live’ without it.Footnote 122 ‘Give it some Time’, urged the diarist and administrator John Smyth, an investor in the Virginia and Somers Islands companies who had helped to finance settlements in the Chesapeake, ‘else we overthrow the Plantation’.Footnote 123
Before John Rolfe, Ralph Hamor, and other colonists in Virginia began sending their own crops to England from the mid-1610s, the English largely consumed Spanish tobacco. They spent an estimated 44,000l. on tobacco in 1616, up from 8,000l. when James first ascended the throne.Footnote 124 Policy-makers recognized the weakness of this dependence. They were, in essence, investing in a commodity that bolstered a country whose Catholicism was a perceived threat to English activities in the Atlantic, not to mention to England itself. In addition, an estimated 60 per cent of tobacco consumed in England in the 1610s was sold illegally, evading James’ customs and inciting numerous proclamations censuring those who thought it fit to ignore the king’s laws.Footnote 125
The expiring contract presented opportunities for gentlemen like Thomas Roe to present new projects and monopolies, at a time when the competing aims of plantation in the Virginia Company were contributing to vicious debates about colonial management among London councillors. ‘In all contracts’, wrote the MP Edward Ditchfield, ‘especially of so publique nature, there are two principall qualities thought most considerable, Justice and Profit’.Footnote 126 Ditchfield served on the parliamentary committees for free trade and tobacco impositions with Sandys and saw the failed attempts to set up iron, silk, and wine industries in the colonies as the result of ‘sundry misaccidents’ that required a serious revision of policy.Footnote 127 The failures in Virginia were not the result of a lack of support from English councillors, who ‘transported thether at their owne charge, upon the a foresaid hopes and incouragements’, but from the ‘fatall blow of the Massacrie [of the English in 1622] and the great molestations and disheartenings of the company and Adventurers’.Footnote 128
The debates conducted in Parliament reveal how deeply entangled colonial and domestic policies had become. Members of Parliament circulated copies of the merchant and colonial promoter Edward Bennett’s treatise on the damaging effects of trade with Spain. Samuel Purchas referenced Bennett in Purchas his pilgrimes (1625), guiding his readers to Bennett’s tract and displaying his own awareness of contemporary political debate.Footnote 129 ‘It may be some man seeing this, will thinke, I am interressed in the Virginia Company,’ Bennett proclaimed. ‘But the Worshipfull of the Company know the contrary. It is the zeale I beare to the good of the State in generall that makes me speake’.Footnote 130 The rhetoric of the common good met with contentious disagreement from those who preferred Spanish tobacco, but Bennett held firm: ‘I defie the perticular gaines that brings a generall hurt’.Footnote 131
Importing tobacco from Spain, Bennett maintained, was the chief cause of scarcity of bullion in England itself. In Parliament, Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar advanced tobacco as a means of salvaging the colony while curbing Spanish power. A petition presented by the Commons and recorded by Ferrar in May 1624 reminded the king that regulations around tobacco were related to much larger state affairs:
It is generally knowen, that the West Indies are at this day almoast the onely Fountayne, and Spayne as it were the Cesterne … But since this weede of Tobacko hath growen into request, they have payde (as their Proverb is) for all our Commodities with Their Smoake; And the rayne of there silver to us … hath beene in a manner dried upp, to the loss of a Million and a halfe in mony in theese fifteene yeares last past.Footnote 132
This ‘miserable’ condition had destabilized English trade, with ‘mony transformed into a Smoking weed’.Footnote 133 The Commons asked James ‘that the Importation of Tobacko, may be prohibited from all parts … save your Majestys Dominions’.Footnote 134 Where James had stated in 1604 that ‘idle delights’ were ‘the first seedes of the subversion of all Monarchies’, Members of Parliament now deliberately framed tobacco as a marketable commodity under monarchical control.Footnote 135
The royal proclamation following the decision to grant a monopoly on colonial tobacco announced that banning all tobacco not grown in America served the interest of James’ loyal subjects in Virginia and ‘the rest of our Empire’.Footnote 136 Foreshadowing the Navigation Acts of 1651, this was consistent with an emerging ‘economy of empire … determined by reasons of state’.Footnote 137 Virginia and Bermuda, James reasoned, ‘are yet but in their infancie, and cannot be brought to maturitie and perfection, unlesse We will bee pleased for a time to tolerate unto them the planting and venting of the Tobacco’.Footnote 138 Though James built up a language of clemency towards his loyal subjects in the colonies, his dealings with his Privy Council show how concerned he and other members of the elite were with finding the best means to regulate importations while also securing high financial returns. The solicitor-general Robert Heath summarized this in a letter to Buckingham: ‘the contract for Virginia tobacco … will be a work both hon[oura]ble & p[ro]fitable if it be well managed’.Footnote 139
In ultimately granting the Virginia Company a monopoly over tobacco in 1624, Parliament and the king acknowledged that though it might be an objectionable commodity, tobacco was also less of a danger than the ‘Romish rabble’, those ‘right Canniballes’ who were impeding the flourishing of the Protestant realm both at home and abroad.Footnote 140 Several years before, Edward Cecil had commented on the virulent Hispanophobia in England following the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, telling Parliament he believed ‘the Catholique king’ represented ‘the greatest enimie wee have in respecte of our Religion’ and ‘the greatest enimie we have in regard of the state’.Footnote 141 In terms of Spanish designs for a universal monarchy, ‘England is the greatest Impediment in [Philip IV’s] way’, and Cecil brought home this threat by referencing events in recent memory, where ‘the houses of Parliament wherein we nowe sitte doe have a Recorde against them in their unmatchable treason, the powder plott’.Footnote 142 He meticulously catalogued the cruelty of Catholics in their various dominions, played out in the Continent’s religious wars but soon to affect England too. The outpour of accounts of Spanish horrors in the Indies published in the 1620s further reinforced that this crises was unravelling on a global scale. Investment in colonization projects – including Cecil’s own 25l. contribution in 1620 – further connected support for Virginia with actively opposing Spanish rule.Footnote 143
Debates in the Commons indicate MPs’ real concerns with regulating behaviour, but also their increased recognition that the desire to check Spanish power was not easily separated from the need to keep Virginia English. The 1622 attack had devastated the resources that colonists had spent years cultivating, including glass and wine industries. Policies towards Algonquians became more punitive. The Virginia Company was bankrupt and in a state of collapse. A wealthier state would be in a position to exercise greater control, while the immediate concern of losing a presence in North America, alongside the promise of financial returns to company investments, rendered tobacco an accepted means of strengthening political authority. As the English Protestant polity looked westwards, the king himself acknowledged ‘tobacco’ as critical to ‘our Empire’, placing the commodity within the debates about colonial policy and sovereign authority discussed in Chapter 2.
Outside the council chamber, the incorporation of tobacco into elite sociability created new assemblages of goods and demonstrations of taste. Elaborate rituals of consumption served to separate gentlemanly smoking from Native American practices and the habits of the ‘lower sort’. The publication of the London poet Anthony Chute’s Tabacco in 1595 is evidence of how quickly gentlemen integrated tobacco into their wit coteries, where pipes appeared alongside heraldic designs, crowns, laurel leafs, and swords.Footnote 144 Personalized tobacco boxes or pouches accompanied other accoutrements including flint, steel, tongs, and pipes.Footnote 145 Thomas Dekker included a description of the process of smoking in his humorous mock-conduct manual, The guls horne-booke (1609), where ‘our Gallant must draw out his Tobacco-box, the ladell for the cold snuffe into the nosthrill, the tongs and priming Iron: All which artillery may be of gold or silver (if he can reach to the price of it)’.Footnote 146 Cheaper boxes might be made of wood, while those most likely to endure were wrought with gold, silver, and ivory, often engraved with names, messages, mottos, or the faces of monarchs. A gold tobacco box from the second half of the seventeenth century, engraved with the face of Charles I, materially conveys the weight and importance of tobacco in a gentleman’s self-presentation while connecting the object to royalist sympathies.Footnote 147 The box’s bright metalwork and large size – eight centimetres long and six centimetres wide – suggests it was intended to be visually admired even as it served a practical function.
The tobacco debates in Parliament, in other words, did not happen in isolation. Referencing the quality of tobacco and the importance of provenance in dictating taste, Dekker’s text situated tobacco and its associated cluster of goods within a broadening world of circulation and exchange. Though poking fun at fashion-seeking gentlemen lurking around ‘the new Tobacco-office, or amongst the Booke-sellers, where [you] inquire who has writ against this divine weede’, the humour in the rambling tale of young men loose in London hinged on its recognizability, on the popularity of such shops and booksellers, and on the lively exchange of rumours about overseas interests.Footnote 148 Knowing ‘what state Tobacco is in towne, better then the Merchants … gaine Gentlemen no meane respect’.Footnote 149
By creating a colonial monopoly on the trade, the commodity, to the metropolitan English, ceased to be a Native American one. Re-packaging an indigenous plant as a marker of colonial intervention allowed gentlemen to reconcile two seemingly conflicting things: intoxication and industry, pleasure and political good. John Smith commented that the average English planter in Virginia was ‘applied to his labour about Tobacco and Corne’ and that colonists no longer ‘regard any food from the Salvages, nor have they any trade or conference with them’.Footnote 150 By the 1620s, Smith claimed, Algonquians were completely absent from the process of growing, cultivating, and trading tobacco with the English. Tobacco was an herb ‘whose goodnesse and mine owne experience’ induced Ralph Hamor to praise the ‘pleasant, sweet, and strong’ qualities of his ‘owne planting’.Footnote 151
Since the ‘languishing state of the colonies’ relied on metropolitan support of their only successful industry, gentlemen could frame tobacco less as an idle luxury than a ‘taste of necessity’.Footnote 152 Having removed the plant from its biggest danger – that it was produced and smoked by ‘savages’ who exhibited behaviour unbefitting English subjects – it became possible to accept tobacco into society with more ease while continuing to advocate moderation and industry. Instead of a ‘pagan’ plant, tobacco was a ‘Virginia leaf’, grown by enterprising Protestant planters whose industriousness kept the colonies alive. This allowed Protestant policy-makers to distinguish their colonial efforts against Spain’s encomienda system, endorsing Virginia as a stronghold against the extractive cruelty seen to characterize Spain’s imperial aims and coercive labour force.
Yet under the harmonious fictions and the weighty language of public good expressed in parliamentary debate, the demand for tobacco necessitated greater labour forces than colonists could sustain on their own. From Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler reprimanded London councillors’ unreasonable requests for tobacco, particularly when life on the island remained precarious. The plantations were plagued by infestation and suffering from poor management, and the ‘Ilands … continually require trimmeinge’.Footnote 153 ‘All the negroes left’, Butler wrote, ‘let them be delivered to the right honourable the Erle of Warwick … as his lordship himselfe shall direct’, for he did not know how to provide for them.Footnote 154 It was the whims of gentlemen in London and the ‘charge’ to himself that most aggravated Butler: ‘Informe me then, I beseech you … how are your negroes to be kept from going naked?’Footnote 155
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Over the course of James’ reign, moral concerns over tobacco’s capacity for inducing bodily and even spiritual corruption were subordinated to the greater need for economic prosperity and security against other European powers. MPs’ attempts to regulate tobacco expressed concerns at how subjects might behave and what they might talk about when they met to smoke, relating tobacco to anxieties over social unrest and managing political news and rumour. In many ways, gentlemen could endorse an American intoxicant while continuing to disparage its use among the ‘common sort’ because the practice of smoking developed alongside the theories and policies about plantation, authority, and the law discussed in previous chapters. Intent on maintaining traditional systems of hierarchy and deference and grappling with the perceived dangers of tobacco on the body politic, pro-colonial gentlemen drew on broader ideas about civility to articulate refinement through industrious cultivation, one that resisted assimilation and operated independently from indigenous manufacture.
In the contested political climate of the 1620s, amid the laughter, heckling, and scribbling that enlivened Parliament sessions and tavern sociability, gentlemen used economic debates about tobacco to bring colonization into this theatre of dispute and mediation. Political pressures and personal desires informed the speeches of those who stood before the Commons to make a case for the value of tobacco in sustaining an English America. ‘All our riches for the present doe consiste in Tobacco’, John Pory reported to his friends from Jamestown in 1619. To John and Nicholas Ferrar, Sandys, and other Virginia Company supporters in Parliament, to fail to support the tobacco monopoly was to abandon the colonial enterprise and their friends who had gone to carry it out.
The performance of civility, if correctly handled, could be enhanced rather than damaged by incorporating tobacco within it. ‘[T]his smokes delicious smack’ evoked ‘Westerne winds’ and the ‘fertile earth … of plenteous corne’, bringing colonial aspirations into the households, taverns, and council chambers where gentlemen debated politics.Footnote 156 Though sourced from Native Americans whose practices were thousands of years old, tobacco ‘is thought a gentleman-like smell’.Footnote 157 Tobacco, pipes, and finely wrought boxes made from costly materials became part of an assemblage of goods that displayed the wealth of gentlemen while exhibiting their access to colonial trades and intelligence. As the next chapter explores, these Atlantic ‘things’ fuelled gentlemanly sociability while operating in dialogue with political treatises, conduct manuals, and wit literature.
The gentry’s support of the colonial monopoly is indicative of their imperial intent. According to the oral history of the Virginia Mattaponi, John Rolfe married Pocahontas primarily to access the secret knowledge about curing and processing tobacco, information that Powhatan religious leaders or quiakros carefully guarded but might share with trusted members of their communities.Footnote 158 The English nonetheless continued to describe Native Americans as a ‘scattered people’ and ‘ignorant’, voicing their responsibility to ‘discover the country, subdue the people, bring them to be tractable civil and industrious, and teach them trades that the fruits of their labours might make us recompence’.Footnote 159 This idea of making them civil and industrious to benefit us went to the heart of metropolitan ideas about the making of a successful polity, where gentlemen sought to establish an infrastructure of plantation industry intended to enhance the civil identities of those who governed.
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