Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection (The Atlantic World, 5) 900414711X, 9789004147119

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: Connecting and Disconnecting With America
I
II
III
IV
V
Section One: Civilising Society, Reconfiguring Polities
Chapter One: Education, Culture and the Scottish Civic Tradition
I
II
III
IV
Chapter Two: A Man For All Regions—Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Chapter Three: The European Catholic Context of the Revolution of 1688–891: Gallicanism, Innocent Xi, and Catholic Opposition
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Section Two: Transferring Texts and Traditions
Chapter Four: Transplanting Revelation, Transferring Meaning: Reading the Apocalypse in Early Modern England, Scotland and New England
I
II
III
IV
V
Chapter Five: “Religion Stands On Tip-Toe”: George Herbert, the New England Poets, and the Transfer of Devotional Modes
I
II
III
V
VI
VII
Chapter Six: Authority and Interpretation: Cotton Mather’s Response to the European Spinozists
I
II
III
IV
Section Three: the Dutch Connection
Chapter Seven: Idealism and Power: the Dutch West India Company in the Brazil Trade (1630–1654)
I
II
III
IV
V
Chapter Eight: A Natural Partnership? Scotland and Zeeland in the Early Seventeenth Century
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Chapter Nine: Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Seventeenth Century: An Atlantic Partnership?
I
II
III
IV
V
Section Four: Power and Settlement
Chapter Ten: Richard Ligon and the Theatre of Empire
I
II
III
IV
V
Chapter Eleven: Boston Pays Tribute: Autonomy and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1630–1714
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Chapter Twelve: Foreign Penetration of the Spanish Empire 1660–1714: Sweden, Scotland and England
II
III
IV
V
Epilogue: Becoming Atlantic
I
II
III
Index
The Atlantic World

Citation preview

SHAPING THE STUART WORLD 1603-1714

THE ATLANTIC WORLD Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500-1830

EDITORS

Wim Klooster (Clark University) Benjamin Schmidt (University of Washington)

VOLUME V

SHAPING THE STUART WORLD 1603-1714 The Atlantic Connection EDITED BY

ALLAN I. MACINNES AND ARTHUR H. WILLIAMSON

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006

Cover illustration: © The National Museum of Denmark, Ethnographic Collection. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaping the Stuart world, 1603-1714 : the Atlantic connection / edited by Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson. p. cm. — (The Atlantic world, ISSN 1570-0542 ; v. 5) Contains a selection of papers presented at two symposia on the Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714, the first at the Huntington Library, Calif., in Jan. 2001 and the second at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in June 2002. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-14711-X (acid-free paper) 1. Great Britain—History—Stuarts, 1603-1714—Congresses. 2. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History—17th century—Congresses. 3. Great Britain—Intellectual life—17th century—Congresses. 4. United States—Intellectual life—17th century—Congresses. I. Macinnes, Allan I. II. Williamson, Arthur H. III. Atlantic world (Leiden, Netherlands) ; v. 5. DA375.S525 2005 325’.341’009032—dc22 2005050794

ISSN 1570–0542 ISBN 90 04 14711 X © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To Uncle Joe Comeback all is forgiven—almost! & For Enlightenment principles—in darkening times.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................... List of Contributors .................................................................. Introduction. Connecting and Disconnecting with America Allan I. Macinnes

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SECTION ONE

CIVILISING SOCIETY, RECONFIGURING POLITIES Chapter One. Education, Culture and the Scottish Civic Tradition ................................................................................ Arthur Williamson Chapter Two. A Man for all Regions—Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World ............................................ Shona Vance Chapter Three. The European Catholic Context of the Revolution of 1688–89: Gallicanism, Innocent XI, and Catholic Opposition .............................................................. Steve Pincus

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SECTION TWO

TRANSFERRING TEXTS AND TRADITIONS Chapter Four. Transplanting Revelation, Transferring Meaning: Reading the Apocalypse in Early Modern England, Scotland and New England ................................ Kevin Sharpe Chapter Five. “Religion stands on tip-toe”: George Herbert, the New England Poets, and the Transfer of Devotional Modes .................................................................................... Helen Wilcox

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Chapter Six. Authority and Interpretation: Cotton Mather’s Response to the European Spinozists ................................ Reiner Smolinski

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SECTION THREE

THE DUTCH CONNECTION Chapter Seven. Idealism and Power: The Dutch West India Company in the Brazil Trade (1630–1654) ............ Ernst Pijning Chapter Eight. A Natural Partnership? Scotland and Zeeland in the Early Seventeenth Century ........................ Esther Mijers Chapter Nine. Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Seventeenth Century: An Atlantic Partnership? ...................................... Wim Klooster

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SECTION FOUR

POWER AND SETTLEMENT Chapter Ten. Richard Ligon and the Theatre of Empire .... Jane Stevenson Chapter Eleven. Boston Pays Tribute: Autonomy and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1630–1714 ...................................... Mark Peterson Chapter Twelve. Foreign Penetration of the Spanish Empire 1660–1714: Sweden, Scotland and England ...................... Chris Storrs Epilogue. Becoming Atlantic .................................................... Peter C. Mancall Index ..........................................................................................

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the outcome of two symposia on the Shaping of the Stuart World, 1603–1714, the first at The Huntington Library, California, in January 2001 and the second at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in June 2002. We would like to thank Roy Ritchie (W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research), Mary Robertson (William A. Moffet Chief Curator of Manuscripts) and Carolyn Powell, symposium administrator, at The Huntington for their immense support, first class organisation and energising presence. Special thanks for their energy, enthusiasm and efficiency is also extended to Jane Ohlmeyer (now of Trinity College Dublin) and Cathy Shrank (now Sheffield University) for their respective contributions on behalf of Aberdeen both away and at home. The Huntington Library was, as anticipated, magnanimous in its sponsorship of both events. Belying the longstanding reputation of Aberdeen for unstinting parsimony, the University almost exceeded expectations in providing funding for both occasions. Arthur Williamson wishes to thank the CSUS Committee for Research and Creative Activity for its generous support of this project. In addition, we should like to acknowledge financial support from The British Academy in bringing across prominent scholars from America. All but one of the essays in this book have been culled, after a close evaluation, from the twenty-four conference papers. Dr Esther Mijers, a fellow in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, has contributed an additional essay that enriches our discussion of the Dutch connection. The editors decided to include her essay because the Dutch dimension is of such paramount importance to the Anglophone experience in the Atlantic. Inevitably there have been delays, and especially so as one or two scholars sought to refine their manuscripts to the point of irrecoverable editorial hair loss. During all this time Marcella Mulder at Brill Academic Publishers proved herself an absolutely outstanding commissioning editor for her forbearance, understanding and judicious counsel. The preparation of the final typescript and indexing was

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entrusted to Tine Wanning who responded diligently, meticulously and, as deadlines became increasingly absolute, heroically to a variety of academic inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that personify the Atlantic connection.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Wim Klooster is Assistant Professor at Clark University, where he teaches Atlantic History. His publications include The Dutch in the Americas, 1600–1800 (1997) and Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (1998). In addition, he and Alfred Padula edited The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration and Imagination (2004). Allan I. Macinnes is the Burnett-Fletcher Professor of History in the University of Aberdeen. He has written extensively on British state formation, Scottish Jacobitism and Highland clans and clearances. His monographs are Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (1991 & 2003); Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (1996 & 2000); and The British Revolution, 1629 –1660 (2004). He is currently leading the research project, American colonies, Scottish entrepreneurs and British state formation, 1603–1707, which is part of the diaspora programme in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen that is sponsored by Arts & Humanities Research Board, UK. Peter C. Mancall is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. His recent work includes an anthology of sixteenth-century travel literature (Oxford, 2005) and a forthcoming study titled Hakluyt’s Promise to be published by Yale. Esther Mijers received her doctorate in 2002 for a thesis on ‘Scotland and the United Provinces: A Study in Educational and Intellectual Relations, 1680–1730’. She is currently employed as research fellow at the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. Her research interests concentrate on Scottish-Dutch intellectual, political and imperial relations. Mark Peterson teaches history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (1997), and “Puritanism and Refinement: Reflections on Communion Silver in Early New England” William and Mary Quarterly,

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58 (2001). He is currently at work on book about Boston Massachusetts as a global maritime city. Ernst Pijning is assistant professor of history at Minot State University (North Dakota, USA). He earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and he published several articles on illegal trade in colonial Brazil, Dutch-Portuguese relations in the Southern Atlantic, and Brazilian diamonds. Dr. Pijning is currently finishing a book manuscript on contraband trade in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. Steve Pincus is professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: ideologies and the making of English foreign policy, 1650–1668 (1996) and is currently completing a study of the Revolution of 1688–89, titled The First Modern Revolution. He has published a number of essays on early modern politics, culture, and political economy. Kevin Sharpe is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include The Personal Rule of Charles I (Yale, 1992), Reading Revolutions (Yale, 2000) and Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000). He is the co-editor with Steven Zwicker of several influential interdisciplinary volumes and is currently completing a study of Representations of Authority in England, 1500–1700. Reiner Smolinski is professor of early American literature at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, and has published The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather (1995), The Kingdom, The Power, & The Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature (1998) and numerous essays on Puritan eschatology and historiography, Isaac Newton’s millenarianism, Salem witchcraft, early Enlightenment science and hermeneutics. He is the general editor of Cotton Mather’s “Bibliana Americana” (1691–1728), a commentary in manuscript on all books of the bible, to be published in 10 vols for the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Jane Stevenson has variously taught post-Classical Latin, History, Cultural Studies, and Translation in the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Warwick. She is now Professor of Humanity at King’s College, Aberdeen. Her books include Early Modern Women Poets,

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jointly edited with Peter Davidson (Oxford, 1995), The ‘Laterculus Malalianus’ and the School of Archbishop Theodore (Cambridge, 1995), and Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, forthcoming in 2005. She also writes fiction; and her ‘Astraea’ trilogy was specifically concerned with black-white relations in early modern Europe. Chris Storrs is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Dundee. His main field of research is international relations in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, with special reference to Italy, Spain and the Spanish Empire. His publications include War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy 1690–1720 (Cambridge, 1999). He is currently completing a monograph for OUP on Spain’s survival as a European and world power in the reign of the last Habsburg, Carlos II. Shona Vance completed her Ph.D. at University of Aberdeen and has since published articles and essays on Scottish education in the seventeenth century. She undertook post-doctoral work on the European Universities project at Trinity College Dublin and is now an independent scholar. Arthur Williamson, Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento, is the co-editor with Paul McGinnis of George Buchanan The Political Poetry (Edinburgh, 2000) and The British Union: a critical edition and translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De unione insulae Britannicae (Aldershot, 2002). He is the author of “Britain, Race, and the Iberian World Empire” in A.I. Macinnes and J. Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 2002) and “George Buchanan, Crypto-Judaism, and the Critique of Empire,” in Martin Mulsow (ed.) Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2003). He is the author of two forthcoming volumes: Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Shaping of the Modern World and in addition The “Nation Epidemicall”: Scotland and the rise of Anglo-America. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English Literature at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research interests are Shakespeare’s tragicomedies and early modern devotional poetry, autobiography and women’s writing. Among her publications are Women and Literature

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in Britain, 1500–1700 (1996) and Betraying Our Selves: Forms of SelfRepresentation in Early Modern English Texts (2000). She is the editor of a forthcoming new edition of the poems of George Herbert and coeditor of George Herbert, Sacred and Profane (1995).

INTRODUCTION

CONNECTING AND DISCONNECTING WITH AMERICA Allan I. Macinnes

This book results from a careful winnowing of proceedings from two conferences on the Stuart World; the first held at the Huntington Library in San Marino in January 2001, the second at the University of Aberdeen in June 2002. Our authors have been encouraged to explore new agendas and develop new approaches. At the same time they offer original insights into such major themes shaping the Stuart World as civilising, textual transfer, power and settlement. The book’s primary focus on the Atlantic connection relates not only to British, but also to Spanish, French and, above all, Dutch perspectives and interactions. We are not concerned to engage further in the perennial problematicising that has characterised New British History.1 Nor do we intend to refine or redefine “circum-,” “trans-,” and “cis-” divisions of the Atlantic World that seem more systemic than systematic.2 At the same time, we are deeply conscious that the Americas impacted on European not just British consciousness in the course of the seventeenth century. Moreover, this impact was pervasive, being aesthetic and dietary as well as material and constitutional.3 Thus, the British Isles can be viewed as a bridge between Europe and the

1 A.I. Macinnes with J. Ohlmeyer, “Introduction: Awkward Neighbours” in A.I. Macinnes & J. Ohlmeyer eds, The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 2002), pp. 15–35. 2 D. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” in D. Armitage & M.J. Braddick eds, The British Atlantic World (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 11–27. Our authors simply have not found these categories helpful. 3 The number of recorded plants in the mid-sixteenth century was roughly 500, virtually the same as in classical times. By 1623, this number had increased to 6000, but by the time John Ray the English botanist compiled his catalogue of plants eighty years later, nearly 20,000 plants had been identified (H. Lawood, “The New World and the European Civility of Nature” in K.O. Kupperman ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, 1995), pp. 295–323).

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Americas across which ideas, no less than people and goods, moved back and forth. At the same time, the accretion of knowledge from the New World, like the inexorable growth of consumerism, can be attributed to commodity exchange on a global scale that was transforming the landscape, the commercial associations and the political culture of the British Isles.4 The perceived Stuart World at the regal union of Scotland and England in 1603 was certainly not the same as that at the Hanoverian Succession in 1714. Mapping, transoceanic commerce and a growing awareness of the proactive role of the state in determining public policy are the core features of the emergent political economy that shaped the transition to modernity. This seismic move from the dominance of issues of sovereign jurisdiction and confessionalism towards the redefinition of national and colonial interests has encouraged us to expand the framework and broaden the conversation in connecting the British Isles to the Americas. Accordingly, our authors have been exhorted to avoid insularity and introspection, connect domestic and colonial history, and integrate policy and process. Our volume examines the mental worlds that developed competing notions of modernity and the competing paths towards a concept that encompasses not just capitalism, but pluralism and enlightenment. In so doing, we have disconnected from, rather than associated with, several recent historiographic trends concerned with early modern America; most notably ethnic, gender-based and postcolonial analyses that today claim, unconvincingly, the high moral ground in the academy.5 We offer alternative readings on race rela-

4

Some American discoveries, such as the potato, made a significant contribution both to dietary standards, demography and estate management. For the potato could be grown as a source of nutrition that improved survival prospects within small plots of land suitable for rural cottars, village labourers and urban householders. Other plants less beneficial to health, such as tobacco and sugar cane, became major cash crops, and supplemented by cotton, ginger and indigo, the basis of plantations sustained by slave labour in the Americas and innovative manufactures promoting commercial partnerships on both sides of the Atlantic. Coffee houses along with clubs and societies for the promotion of science, the arts, philanthropy and public socialising, were transforming political culture not just in London, Edinburgh and Dublin but also in other provincial centres throughout the three kingdoms (F.J. Fisher, London and the English Economy, 1500–1700 (London, 1990), pp. 185–98; J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 174–5; P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1500–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2001), pp. 40–59). 5 H.A. Veeser ed., The New Historicism (New York, 1989), “Introduction,” pp.

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tions that reflect the diverse impact of European diasporas. Where appropriate we engage with the sweeping cultural constructs of the New Historicism by reconnecting text with context. Although Ireland is only mentioned in passing by a few contributors, particular scrutiny is given in this Introduction to the links between plantations and colonialism, links that have undoubtedly been skewed by the sense of victimhood associated with the Irish experience in the Stuart World.6 The key editorial watchwords are rooted in the intrinsic values of the Scottish Enlightenment—scepticism, common sense and open intellectual inquiry into man (in the generic sense) in society. Scotland, in turn, becomes a useful exemplar to demonstrate that the oceanic context of the Stuart World was not simply about competing and conflicting empires. In order to bring the aspects of modernity that have concerned all our contributors into specific focus, this Introduction concludes with an apposite, if brief, case study of the transnational and international activities of Scottish commercial networks. On the one hand, they were involved in British and Dutch as well as independent enterprises. On the other, they linked the Baltic to the Caribbean and made the Atlantic connection an everyday reality for the Stuart World.

I Our first line of inquiry, Civilising Society, Reconfiguring Polities, sets the scene for the movement from considerations of salvation and civility to that of political economy in the Stuart World of the seventeenth century; a movement which features spiritual as well as commercial adventuring. At the outset of this section, Arthur Williamson cogently

ix–xvi; C. Mazzio & D. Trevor eds, Historicism, psychoanalysis, and early modern culture (New York, 2000), “Introduction,” pp. 1–8; J.E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London, 1994), pp. 1–21. When they abstract cultural history from the public sphere into the stratosphere, the New Historicists and their fellow travellers have crossed over from intellectual space to dreamland. 6 D.J. Baker & W. Maley eds, British identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2002); R.H. Wells, G. Burgess & R. Wymer eds, Neo-historicism: studies in Renaissance literature, history and politics (Woodbridge, 2000); B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield & W. Maley eds, Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of the conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge, 1993).

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demonstrates that the differing views of British reconfiguration at the time of regal union, from the integrationist to the federative, emerged from a Scottish civic tradition that was rooted in Renaissance scholarship and fortified by the Protestant Reformation. Particularly featured are the British visionary endeavours of David Hume of Godscroft who, decades before William Petty advocated a similar policy for Ireland,7 proposed that English ‘colonia’ be implanted in the less developed regions of Scotland. In essence, these were to be exemplary plantations, drawing on the medieval practice of planting towns and devastated districts,8 to promote the improvement not the subjugation of native peoples. Another British visionary, whose Scottish origins have not always been appreciated,9 was Patrick Copland, the subject of Shona Vance’s biographic study. Having developed his educational concerns and strategies while serving as a chaplain in the East Indies from 1613, Copland went on to promote advances in learning in Virginia, Massachusetts, the Bahamas and Bermuda, without ever losing sight of the need to sponsor access to university education in Scotland. As the founder of the Chair of Divinity in Marischal College, the second university in his native Aberdeen, he remained ever wary of the stewardship of his benefaction by a succession of mendacious town-councils. While both Williamson and Vance have focused on the contributions of Protestant Reformers, Steve Pincus offers as a counterpoint the continuing influence of Roman Catholicism. Although often subliminal because of repeated public calls to penalise recusancy, the varying continental strands of the Counter-Reformation had a particular impact on the Stuarts’ British dominions with the accession of James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, as King of Great Britain and Ireland in 1685. He was closely linked in the public perception to Louis XIV, at a time when France had assumed the mantle of universal monarchy from Spain, but its Catholic Church had come

7 J. Kelly, “The origins of the act of union: an examination of unionist opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800,” Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1987), pp. 236–63; Sir William Petty, Britannia Languens, or a Discourse of Trade (London, 1680) & Political Arithmetick (London, 1690) & The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691). 8 M. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (London, 1967), pp. 76–85. 9 N. Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction” in N. Canny ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Empire to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 18–9.

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under severe strain from Gallicanism as well as Jansenism.10 The expulsion of the Protestant Huguenots following the French king’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes certainly paved the way for both Whigs and Tories, supported largely by the Anglican establishment in England, to effect the removal of James in favour of his son-inlaw, William of Orange in 1688–9. Nevertheless, William of Orange also received resolute backing from the papacy. Innocent XI, as later Alexander VIII, unequivocally opposed Gallicanism no less than Jansenism. The second theme, Transferring Texts and Traditions, reflects the increasing impact and interaction between literary criticism and history, with emphasis on exchanges in both directions across the Atlantic Ocean. The cultural as well as the commercial traffic through the British Isles between Europe and the Americas, likewise the processes of civilising, empowerment and settlement, are here represented as textual as well as institutional or commodity transfers. The Puritan challenge, spiritually and structurally to the Anglican establishment in both England and New England, is the main feature of this section. It opens with Kevin Sharpe’s wide-ranging inquiry about reading the Book of Revelation, which takes up the theme of rival British perspectives from Arthur Williamson. James VI & I features as a major protagonist, who justified his succession to Elizabeth Tudor by recourse to biblical prophecy. At the same time, he was not averse to celebrating the regal union by means of the indigenous, secular tradition of prophetic fulfilment, which drew credence from biblical prophecy having been attributed first to the saints of the early Celtic Church, then to fabled wizards whose reputed utterances were transmitted on by historical chroniclers.11 Committed readings of the Revelation that infused the Puritan opposition to his son Charles I particularly reinvigorated biblical prophecy. But it proved no less integral to the identification of New England as a New Israel by

10

J.-F. Schaub, La France Espagnole, (Paris, 2003), pp. 309–19. [ James I] The Whole Prophecies of Scotland, England, France, Ireland and Denmarke (Edinburgh, 1617). P. Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1989), pp. 3–15; H. Rusche, “Prophecies and Propaganda, 1641 to 1651,” English Historical Review, 84 (1969), pp. 752–70. Secular prophecy, which had the immeasurable merit of being recyclable, was woven into the fabric of myth making that had shaped contemporaneous historical perceptions about the British Isles. 11

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such inspired luminaries as John Cotton and later his grandson, Cotton Mather. Helen Wilcox pursues perceptively the inspirational role of spiritual poetry, integral to the creation of the Puritan identity in New England, in her uplifting study on the reception of George Herbert. Here again the family alliance of the Cottons and the Mathers had a powerful impact. Reiner Smolinski takes this seminal presence further with his detailed analysis on the reception of biblical criticism, principally in response to Benedict Baruch Spinoza and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Hobbes. Cotton Mather is here the central figure. His struggle to come to terms with scientific approaches to biblical texts was not always consistent but it did result, nevertheless, in a reaffirmation of the special place of New England in the divine masterplan. On a more material level, the third theme is The Dutch Connection. A convincing case can be made, not least in terms of political economy, that the seventeenth century was the Dutch century.12 However, as Ernst Pijning’s painstaking account of their abortive settlement at Pernambuco in the north east of Brazil makes clear, the Dutch concentrated more on commerce than on plantations primarily by default rather than by design. Yet, as Esther Mijers intriguingly reveals, the Dutch impact on the Stuart World had marked relevance in terms of transoceanic, commercial opportunities for the Scots who regarded the United Provinces in general and Zeeland in particular as their country’s closest trading partners. This Scottish perspective was at diverse times both compromised by and compromising to the English hostility towards the Dutch. Nevertheless, the political and commercial antipathies that resulted in a succession of Anglo-Dutch Wars (in 1652–54, 1664–67 and 1672–74) created on the one hand economic opportunities for the Scots who played off both sides in the Americas. On the other hand, as Wim Klooster incisively demonstrates, Anglo-Dutch political tensions did not necessarily result in the relentless pursuit of economic warfare in the Americas. Indeed, covert collaboration rather than overt hostility was usually the prevailing working practice among English, Dutch and, by extension, Scottish commercial networks in the New World.

12 J.I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: its rise, greatness and fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 307–27, 934–56.

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A pragmatic capacity to adjust, as well as a visually imaginative ability to report, characterised Richard Ligon, whose sojourn in Barbados from 1647 to 1650 has stimulated Jane Stevenson and appropriately sets the tone for the fourth theme, Power and Settlement. Ligon is by no means an uncritical or chaste observer. Despite his courtly aesthetic, he had an unrivalled awareness that considerable adjustment was required in the Stuarts’ American dominions between the Old World and the New; and that the formative shaping needed to be undertaken as much by the latter as the former. Ligon’s standpoint was undoubtedly that of a sojourner rather than a settler. He neither condoned inhumanity nor made an outright condemnation of slavery, though he deeply deplored the planters’ refusal to allow the preaching of the Christian message to their African workforce. He clearly sought a New World built on respect and tolerance rather than oppression, and yet, for all his interest in it, he never went as far in his personal identification with the Caribbean as his contemporary traveller, Thomas Gage, who depicted himself as an EnglishAmerican.13 The particular stamp of Boston on the self-generated commercial growth within the American colonies is the subject of Mark Peterson’s challenging study, which builds upon pioneering work on commercial networks.14 Renewed focus is given to the concept of tribute in the pursuit of territorial expansion. Boston’s exploitive relationship with Native Americans and its profiteering from slavery notwithstanding, commitment to civic virtue and social justice were not abandoned but reinvigorated by the city’s sustained commercial growth during the seventeenth century. The commercial activities of Boston along with the imperial pretensions of the United Provinces, Bourbon France and Stuart Britain have been justified on the grounds that North America and the Caribbean were effectively “beyond the line” of international regulation.15 However, the Spanish imperial presence was far from dormant or declining throughout the seventeenth century as Chris

13 Thomas Gage, The English-American, his travail by sea and land, or, A New Survey of the West India’s (1648). 14 B. Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge Ma., 1979), pp. 112–42. 15 R.S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, (Chapel Hill, 1992), pp. 3–45.

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Storrs emphatically demonstrates. Habsburg Spain not only saw off Swedish endeavours to expand westwards as well as eastwards, but also curtailed the Scottish incursion at Darien on the Panama Isthmus. Although Jamaica was ceded in 1655, English endeavours to expand territorially in the Caribbean and Latin America were also resisted effectively. While the Turks were viewed apprehensively as the main expansionist power to the east until the eighteenth century,16 Spain was not the prototype ‘sick man of Europe’, the label subsequently applied to the Ottoman Empire. Until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Spain remained the prevailing territorial presence in westward expansion.

II From the late fifteenth century onwards, European societies both underwent and perpetrated a series of diasporas. Some were voluntary and relatively benign. Others, like the premeditated annihilation of the Iberian Jewish communities were massively destructive, albeit this catastrophe provided the New World with a culture that was intellectually fecund.17 Still others, like the creation of vast slave systems, were spectacularly brutal. If all these diasporas are to be deemed decisive in the rise of Atlantic capitalism, they are in no sense the same shared experience. Notwithstanding the dehumanizing recourse to slavery and the horrors without mitigation of the middle passage, terms of European engagement varied not only with respect to Africans, Caribs and other Native Americans but also within these ethnic groups. Drawing on Richard Ligon’s account of his sojourn to the Barbados, Jane

16 John Headley, A True and Perfect Relation of a Great and Horrid Conspiracie, discovered by a Jew in Turkie, against the English (London, 1646); Samuel Clarke, The Life of Tamerlane the Great (London, 1653); Giovanni Francesco Busenello, A Prospective of the Naval Triumph of the Venetians over the Turk (London, 1658); A. Hadfield ed., Amazons, Savages & Machiavels. Travels & Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology (Oxford, 2001), pp. 118–20, 166–78. 17 Thomas Thorowgood, Jewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that race (London, 1650) & Digitus Dei: new discoveryes with sure arguments to prove that the Jews (a Nation) or people lost in the world for the space of near 200 years now in America (London, 1652); R.B. Waddington and A.H. Williamson (eds.), The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After (New York, 1994).

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Stevenson illustrates that nobility of bearing, human dignity and an aesthetic appreciation of grace, elegance and taste were not colour coded for the Stuart World.18 She provides a perceptive cultural analysis that directly contradicts the recent reading of Ligon as a writer of pornography whose eroticization of the exotic both masked male sexual aggression and fuelled colonial fantasies through which both African women and American land could be appropriated by Englishmen.19 A further challenge to this engendered perspective on race relations emerges with Mark Peterson’s account of Boston’s commercial pre-eminence in the Americas which resulted in part from its involvement in the Caribbean trade, including trade in enslaved labour. By the 1690s the institution of slavery and the treatment of native peoples as marketable commodities had ceased to be unquestioned assumptions in Puritan New England.20 The attitude of English colonists towards the Native Americans, particularly at the outset of colonial settlement in Virginia and New England, was considerably more informed and respectful, if not deferential, than that of inventive commentators who remained resident in England. Settlers in their persistent territorial encroachments and intermittent commercial dealings with the Native Americans were soon made aware of their need to cope with formidable peoples. No matter how resentful they were that their culture and technology was not demonstrably superior, adventurers and colonial promoters did not condemn the Indians as irredeemable savages or unreconstructed barbarians. 21 Shona Vance highlights the career of Patrick Copland, a colonial promoter who had a humanitarian vision that was not restricted to the Atlantic World. During his service in the English East India Company, he was so greatly influenced by Dutch endeavours at Amboyna to promote schooling for the Indonesian peoples that he became the foremost advocate of colleges in Virginia for Native Americans as well as colonial settlers in the 1620s.22

18

See Chapter 10: Richard Ligon and the Theatre of Empire J. Chaplin, Subject Matter: technology, the body and science on the Anglo-American frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, Ma., 2001), p. 192. 20 See Chapter 11: Boston Pays Tribute: Autonomy and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1630–1714. 21 K.O. Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: the meeting of the English and Indian cultures in America, 1580–1640 (London, 1980), pp. 169–88. 22 See Chapter 2: A Man for all Regions—Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World. 19

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Notwithstanding Copland’s endeavours as a fundraiser in London, the English did not have the same colonial sophistication as the Netherlanders. Dutch settlements included not only surveyors and engineers, but also artists. The adventurous art that resulted was intended to promote these undertakings both aesthetically and commercially, and Ernst Pijning relates the limited success that Dutch Brazil experienced despite wide-ranging cultural, political, and religious innovation.23 Nevertheless, English colonial promoters knew full well that they were unlikely to attract subscribers or hold out the prospect of high dividends for investors if extensive sums were required to be spent on exterminating local populations. Nor would money prove forthcoming unless the environment appeared or was made to appear attractive to colonists and commercially viable. In contrast to the reported atrocities of the Spanish, as later of the French,24 English commentators preferred to stress their mission to civilise through conversion and, less evangelically, through commercial dependence and debt.25 Indeed, at the outset of the seventeenth century English adventurers in the Maritimes soon recognized the need to understand the Micmac culture.26 For their part, Scottish colonists to Nova Scotia in the late 1620s were particularly appreciative of the assistance given them by the Micmacs to secure their settlement in the region of Port Royal. Their dispatch of the chief, his wife and son of their

23 See Chapter 7: Idealism and Power: The Dutch West India Company in the Brazil Trade (1630–1654). 24 Cf. Bartolemé de las Casas, The Tears of the Indians being an historical and true account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above twenty millions of innocent people committed by the Spaniards in the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica &c: as also in the continent of Mexico, Peru & other places to the total destruction of those countries (London, 1656) & Popery truly display’d in its Bloody Colours: or, a Faithful Narrative of the Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the Inhabitants of West India (London, 1689); Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a vast country in America extending above four thousand miles between New France and New Mexico (London, 1698). 25 Cf. Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1615); William Wood, New England Prospects (London, 1634); Thomas Shepard, The Clear Sun-Shine of the Gospel breaking forth upon the Indians in New England (London, 1647); Ferdinando Gorges, America Painted to the Life (London, 1659); Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York formerly called New Netherlands (London, 1670); John Eliot, A brief narrative of the progress of the Gospel among the Indians in New-England in the year 1670 (London, 1681). 26 K.O. Kupperman, Indians and English: facing off in early America (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 1–15.

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newfound allies as a princely family to the British Court in 1631 was a heartfelt gesture of respect not of patronizing condescension.27 In their subsequent, ill-fated venture to the Isthmus of Panama in the 1690s, the willingness of the Scots engaged in the Darien Scheme to treat and ally with the indigenous people is a pertinent pointer that race relations were not a one dimensional story of European exploitation.28 Historians should be wary of presuming that racism was the cause rather than the product of hostile or exploitive encounters between newcomers and local populations. Nevertheless, once antagonism did occur, the relative lack of restraining influences in the colonies stood in stark contrast to a rhetorical tradition that upheld the rights and liberties of the freeborn Englishmen under common law and parliamentary statute. The manifest denial of civil rights to Native Americans did not necessarily equate with a colonial intent to eradicate. The triumph of European perspectives, owed as much if not more to epidemiology than to an ideology that viewed colonial domination as natural.29 As Arthur Williamson maintains, there was no single English, far less British path to the civilized exercise of authority that could be transmitted unequivocally to the colonies within the Stuarts’ dominions.30 Furthermore, while there were transmittable shared perceptions, derived primarily from civic humanism, tempered by historic myth and conditioned by providence and prophecy, it is vital that these perceptions are viewed accurately rather than through a distorting lens.31

27 N.E.S. Griffiths & J.G. Reid, “New Evidence on New Scotland, 1629,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 39 (1992), pp. 492–508. 28 G.P. Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (London, 1932), pp. 129–32, 188–92; [Philo-Caledon], A Defence of the Scots Settlement at Darien (1699); George Ridpath, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Miscarriage of the Scots Colony at Darien (Glasgow, 1700). 29 Chaplin, Subject Matter, pp. 116–56. 30 See Chapter 1: Education and the Scottish Civic Tradition. 31 The depiction of the Algonquian Indians as Picts by Theodor de Brys, as a preamble to the renewed Jacobean endeavour to settle Virginia as Nova Britannia, draws directly from the antiquarian endeavours of William Camden that the Picts were feral Britons who had resisted rather than accepted the civilising influence of the Romans. Accordingly, they were not unreconstructed barbarians, such as the Irish and Scottish Gaels, the heirs to the savage Scythians. Thus the English, as the principal representatives of the civilized Britons had a mission to recover their feral brethren. Clearly, the exotic Algonquians were not irretrievably beyond the pale of civilization (A. Hatfield, “Bruted abroad: John White and Thomas Harriot’s

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It should also be appreciated that the New World redefined the contractual nature of human relationships. This circumstance in turn ensured that the American colonies played a significant, if understated role, in the constitutional development of Great Britain. It was as a colonial administrator for the Carolinas in the 1680s that John Locke commenced work on his contractual theories of government that became the prevailing basis for Whig ideology after the “Glorious” Revolution. It was far less obvious for a man from Wrington that civil society resulted from contract than it was for a man who left Somerset for the frontier society of the American colonies.32 Locke was certainly to the fore in defining the Revolution as the unalloyed triumph for Protestantism, property and progress. But, as Steve Pincus makes clear, Roman Catholicism involved considerable political complexity. Not least was a willingness to countenance resistance to established authority, a circumstance that further subverts claims for a monolithic transmission of a shared cultural heritage throughout the British Atlantic World.33 Catholic involvement simultaneously corrects the all too frequent assumption that there existed an ethnic, confessional definition of national identity through which only Protestants felt entitled to full participation in British political life.34

III In the process of defining the nature of human relationships and national identities, literary criticism has enabled us to perceive altogether new dimensions within the often-conflicted vocabularies of political culture.35 At the same time, literary criticism has also offered

colonial representations of ancient Britons” in Baker & Maley eds, British identities and English Renaissance Literature, pp. 159–77; Camden’s Britannia newly Translated into English with Large Additions and Improvements (London, 1695), pp. cix–cxviii, 885–6. 32 B. Arneil, John Locke and America: the defence of English colonialism (Oxford, 1996), pp. 45–64; R. Ashcroft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London, 1987), pp. 150–95; J. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: an historical account of the argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 96–119. 33 See Chapter 3: Gallicanism, Ultramontanism, and Catholic Opposition: The European Catholic context of the Revolution of 1688–89. 34 C. Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 59–72; L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, 1992), pp. 11–54. 35 D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: poetry, rhetoric and politics, 1627–1660

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significant insight into the interrelation of text and context and broadened our understanding of the early modern perception of reading, plagiarism and providence.36 Yet, even if such analysis has much to tell us about the construction of texts, their distribution and reception,37 can we integrate this kind of inquiry with the questions normally posed by historians engaged in archival research? One potential advantage of integrating literary and historical practice is that it can help overcome the usual dichotomy between the study of economic and non-economic activities. To do so, however, will not require the historian either to become absorbed in the poetics of culture or to accept a cultural language of capitalism that is stronger on projection than definition. If we follow the New Historicists and privilege rhetoric over analysis and, simultaneously, make little or no distinction between primary and secondary historical sources, we will indeed merely be colonising the past.38 It has been long recognised that the textual emphasis of the New Historicists on subversion and containment blurs categories of politics and aesthetics. One consequence is that the complexity and pluralism of political culture become lost to polarised polemic.39 New Historicists are particularly vulnerable to charges of equating religion with ritual and thereby viewing the Reformations primarily in terms of desacrimentalization rather than as a spiritual search for the more efficacious cure of souls. The Bible is not just a text conveying a variety of ideas with different layers of meaning; 40 it is also

(Cambridge, 1999); N. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994); R. Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987). 36 K. Sharpe & S.N. Zwicker eds, Reading, society and politics in early modern England (Cambridge, 2003); P. Kewes ed., Plagiarism in early modern England (Basingstoke, 2003); A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). 37 K. Sharpe, Reading revolutions: the politics of reading in early modern England (New Haven, 2000). 38 C. Gallagher & S. Greenblatt, Practicing new historicism (Chicago, 2000), pp. 1–30; C. Colebrook ed., New Literary Histories: new historicism and contemporary criticism (Manchester, 1997), “Introduction,” pp. 1–19; J.E. Howard & P. Rackin, Engendering a nation: a feminist account of Shakespeare’s English histories (London, 1997), pp. 4, 14, 39–40, 47, 79–80. 39 S.N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: politics and English literary culture, 1649 –1689 (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 1–36; G. Burgess, “The ‘Historical Turn’ and the Political Culture of Early Modern England: Towards a Postmodern history?” in Neo-historicism: studies in Renaissance literature, history and politics, pp. 31–47. 40 R. Strier, Resistant structures: particularity, radicalism and Renaissance texts (Berkley, 1995), pp. 67–79.

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a message of salvation that offers insight into the hopes and fears of people who deeply believed in divine deliverance, judgement and revelation, and who shaped the Stuart World on both sides of the Atlantic. As Reiner Smolinski demonstrates, biblical criticism that moved westwards from Europe after 1650 proved to be both challenging and challenged in New England where its reception bolstered the American sense of uniqueness.41 Efforts to create a prophesied latter-day Israel had encouraged the resistance of English Puritans and Scottish Covenanters to Charles I’s revisionist programme of episcopal authority, clericalism and a sacramental liturgy—and all quite deliberately promoted at the expense of preaching and extempore prayer.42 For the opponents of such religious revisionism and episcopal governance in both England and Scotland, imaginative readings of the bible, particularly the Book of Revelation, were reshaped, as Kevin Sharpe makes clear, by debates across the Atlantic about the meaning of apocalyptic promises.43 Ideas and texts originating in

41 See Chapter 6: Authority and Interpretation: Cotton Mather’s answer to the European Spinozists. 42 A.I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, 1991 & 2003), pp. 21–2, 155–82; M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, 2002), pp. 24–83, 402–13. 43 See Chapter 4: Transplanting Revelation, Transferring Meaning: Reading Apocalypse in Early Modern England, Scotland and New England. Again, however, the pull of the Atlantic connection varied between England and Scotland. In May 1643, the association of a solemn league with a perpetual confederacy had been explicitly laid out in the incorporating articles of the United Colonies of New England, subscribed by four Puritan plantations for common defence against the Dutch, the French and the Indians. Three months later, the Scottish Covenanters, as the price of their armed intervention against Charles I, persuaded commissioners for the English Parliament to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant, which promoted Presbyterianism and confederal union. Despite a common tradition of providential banding by English Puritans and Scottish Covenanters, any ideological connection between the confederal formulations for New England and Britain was purely coincidental. The Scots were principally inspired by the example of Protestant Estates who had reinvigorated confederation for confessional and constitutional purposes firstly in Moravia, Austria and Hungary against imperial power in 1608, then in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and the two Lusatias against territorial integration in 1619 (G. Schramm, “Armed Conflict in East-Central Europe: Protestant Noble Opposition and Catholic Royalist Factions, 1604–20” & I. Auerbach, “The Bohemian Opposition, Poland-Lithuania, and the Outbreak of the Thirty Years War” successively in R.J.W. Evans & T.V. Thomas eds, Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the ‘sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (London, 1991), pp. 176–225; The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, R.S. Dunn, J. Savage & L. Yeandle eds, (Cambridge, Mass, 1996), pp. 429–40). The Puritan interest in England, which

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Britain would not be simply absorbed in the Americas but also reshaped. Spiritual poetry, as Helen Wilcox reveals, was revitalised by its transmission from England to New England.44 The New Historicism has obscured further our understanding of the Stuart World in three decisively important ways. First, there is a pronounced tendency of New Historicists to miss many of the central issues of the period. Too often they simply write bad history. Little account is taken of the polarising impact of universal monarchy, first under Spain until the middle of the seventeenth century and thereafter under France; still less of the varieties of Reformations and Counter-Reformations; and scant regard is paid to the shift in economic power from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic that was demarcated by the opening up of the New World. Claims that the British Isles were united under English suzerainty from 1603 and that England had eclipsed Spain as a major imperial power by 1630,45 are plainly wrong. Chris Storrs demonstrates the relative lack of English penetration of the Spanish Empire by the later seventeenth century; Arthur Williamson shows that the Scottish civic tradition played an important role in the competing constructions of Britain before and after the regal union.46

found political expression through Parliamentarianism, was divided among those prepared to accept a version of Presbyterianism and those who preferred to sustain Independent Congregationalism. The Independents, who sought a more pluralist, if not wholly tolerant, religious establishment in England, took their inspiration from the Puritan communities in New England, the alternative centre for confessional confederation along anglocentric rather than the continental lines advocated by the Scottish Covenanters (W.M. Lamont, “The Puritan Revolution: a historiographical essay” in The Varieties of British Political Thought, pp. 119–45; E. Vallance, “‘An Holy and Sacramental Paction’: Federal Theology and the Solemn League and Covenant in England,” English Historical Review, 116 (2000), pp. 50–75). 44 See Chapter 5: “Religion stands on tip-toe”: Herbert, the New England poets, and the Transfer of Devotional Modes. Simultaneously, the Scottish metrical psalm tradition was translated to Scandinavia as part of the eastward diaspora from the British Isles through the distinctive vernacular contributions of Thomas Kinco, Bishop of Odense in Denmark and Peter Daas, the pastoral pathfinder in northern Norway. 45 Amazons, Savages & Machiavels. Travels & Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630, “General Introduction,” pp. 1–10. 46 In like manner, episodic Scottish incursions in Ireland from Edward Bruce’s attempt to claim the high kingship in the fourteenth century to the deployment of redshanks in the sixteenth did not represent a sustained Scottish endeavour to conquer Ireland (W. Maley, Salvaging Spenser: colonialism, culture and identity (New York, 1997), pp. 136–67). The redshanks were a fighting cadre within the Scottish clans who found seasonable employment in both the Irish resistance to Tudor hegemony

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Second, the New Historicism has typically promoted binary categories and moral judgements quite at odds with historical realities. This sort of distortion is particularly evident in analyses of gender relations. Patriarchal concerns to govern and control women were certainly underwritten by classical and biblical precepts and reinforced by views of citizenship as an exclusively male preserve; an exclusivity furthered by the denial of professional standing to women engaged in medical services and the removal of women for such trades as brewing.47 However, women were not necessarily passive observers in matters of politics, religion and culture. A broader and more informed reading can correct misleading perceptions of women as subordinated and repressed. Such an alternative picture suggests that women writers, though not a cohesive grouping as defined by gender, have a greater interest in resistance than subjugation as a polemical discourse in the seventeenth century; a standpoint that marries appositely with historical work on the impact of women poets in print culture, manuscript circulation and oral tradition, whose work appeared not only in Shakespearean English but all the vernacular languages of the British Isles.48

and the internecine warfare between Gaelic chiefs. (A.I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996 & 2000), pp. 57–9). 47 A. Fletcher, Gender, sex, and subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995), pp. 3–29, 223–55; M.R. Somerville, Sex and subjection: attitudes to women in early-modern society (London, 1995), pp. 8–113; S. Mendelson & P. Crawford, Women in early modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 301–436. 48 B.K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge Ma., 1993), pp. 1–11, 309–15; Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology, J. Stevenson & P. Davidson eds (Oxford, 2001). Women poets in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd were famed and feared for the their social and political criticisms of the ruling elite. In the leading towns of the Scottish Lowlands in the later seventeenth century, women who organised religious dissent through public demonstrations and by private house conventicles were also noted entrepreneurs and property owners (D.U. Stiubhart, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern Western Gàidhealtachd” & H. Dingwall, “The Power Behind the Merchants? Women and the Economy in Late Seventeenth Century Edinburgh” in E. Ewan & M.M. Meikle eds, Women in Scotland, c. 1100–c. 1750 (East Linton, 1999), pp. 152–62, 232–49). Women were no less politically active in the Irish Gaelic society and were established and accepted as traders (both legitimate and piratical) in and around the major Irish towns. Irish women, whether as deserted wives or widows, were deemed no less liable to legal processes for expropriation and transplantation than male landowners opposed to the Cromwellian regime during the 1650s (C. Brady, “Political Women and Reform in Tudor Ireland” & K. Simms, “Women in Gaelic Society during the Age of Transitions” & J.C. Appleby, “Women and Piracy” & M. O’Dowd, “Women and War in Ireland in

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Third, both these features of bad history and history-in-search-ofvictims come together prominently in the New Historicist description of Ireland. The claim that Ireland was a colonial stepping-stone to the Americas is an enticing, challenging but ultimately blinkered proposition.49 It has been taken up uncritically and emotively by New Historicists to propagate not so much an ideology as a discourse of victimhood. The Gaelic Irish, then the Native Americans, are engendered as the oppressed and the subjugated by testosterone-driven English colonists who de-humanised their images in order to brutalise their bodies. Civilisation ceases to be a construct that hugely exercised early modern people, and becomes reduced to a legitimating code for exploitation.50

the 1640s” in M. MacCurtain & M. O’Dowd eds, Women in early modern Ireland (Dublin, 1991), pp. 32–42, 53–111). In England, as in Ireland, women were active as spies and intelligence agents during the civil wars and continued as independent traders in such Atlantic seaports as Bristol dealing both wholesale and retail in such colonial commodities as sugar and tobacco. Whether married, widowed or single, women in rural society throughout the Stuart World were not universally proscribed from holding leases as tenant-farmers, contracting out their labour or working money as creditors ( J. Eales, Women in early modern England, 1500–1700 (London, 1998), pp. 47–59, 73–85; D. Harris-Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 258–9; L. Davidson, “Spinsters were Doing it for Themselves: Independence and the Single Women in Early Eighteenth-century Rural Wales” in M. Roberts & S. Clarke eds, Women and gender in early modern Wales (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 186–209). 49 N. Canny, “Migration and Opportunity: Britain, Ireland and the New World,” Irish Economic and Social History, 12 (1985), pp. 7–32. 50 K. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: gender, race and power in colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), pp. 32–7, 107–244; A. Jones & P. Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualising of Ireland in Early Modern England” in A. Parker, M. Russo, D. Soummer & P. Yaeger eds, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York, 1992), pp. 157–71; M. Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), pp. 1–32; C. Gallagher & S. Greenblatt, “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination” in New Literary Histories, pp. 110–35. This perception of Irish victimhood has in turn fed back into historical writing with such claims as the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366, which prohibited sexual union between the English and the Irish, was still upheld as an ideal by early Stuart as well as Tudor policy makers (Chaplin, Subject Matter, p. 186). Sexual congress with Irish women was certainly deemed to have undermined attempted Tudor plantations in Leinster in the midsixteenth century. But the main point of policy was not sexual congress but the realisation that little could be expected of soldiers as colonists. Intermarriage between Irish and British settlers was not forbidden in the Stuart plantations and by the 1650s, the hope of conversion through marriage was seen as integral to the consolidation of the English interest in Ireland (M. O’Dowd, “Women and the colonial experience in Ireland” in T. Brotherstone, D. Simonton & O. Walsh eds, Gendering Scottish History: and international approach (Glasgow, 1999), pp. 156–71).

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The promotion of Irish victimhood as a shaping feature of the Stuart World sets aside crucial historical caveats. The first is that the eagerness of early modern English writers and dramatists to label the Irish as barbarians relates primarily to a European confessional rather than an American racial context.51 The second is that the cultural theme of English civility versus Irish barbarism did not survive into the Restoration era. For, by then, the westward enterprise did not correlate automatically the Gaelic Irish with the Native Americans.52 The representations of Irish barbarism conformed to continental tropes purveyed by practitioners of Counter-Reformation no less than of Reformation, tropes that were rooted in classical constructs of man’s stadial progress from a state of nature to a state of civilisation. Thus, Counter-Reformation propagandists during the 1630s portrayed the contingents of Livonians, Lapps and Scots assisting the Swedish challenge to Habsburg hegemony during the Thirty Years War as barbaric, sylvan forces from the mountainous and heretical north.53 Protestant aversion to universal monarchy as practised by the Spanish Habsburgs and for which Ireland was the backdoor for reversing the Reformation in the British Isles does much to explain the hostility of English commentators to both the savage Gaelic Irish and the degenerate “Old English.” This hostility is usually traced back to Edmund Spenser, who has been routinely demonised as the quintessential apologist for Tudor plantations and English colonialism.54

51 D. Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats and Other White Barbarians” Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), pp. 494–525. 52 J. Kerrigan, “Orrery’s Ireland and the British problem, 1641–1679” in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, pp. 197–225. 53 A.H. Williamson, “Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization, 1519–1609,” Past & Present, 50 (1996), pp. 46–83; M. Rackwitz, “Travels to terra incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in early modern travellers’ accounts” (Ph.D. 3 vols, Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, 2004), I, pp. 39–40, 48–50. Contemporaneous maps can be viewed as essential resources for conquest and colonization as well as governmental administration, with representations of British identities drawing telling demarcations of civility between the Irish and Scottish Gaels on the one hand, and the Lowland Scots and the English on the other (C. Iruc, “Mapping British Identities: Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine” in British Identities and Renaissance Literature, pp. 135–55). However, these representations was mainly the work of Dutch engravers who were familiar with as well as recyclers of European tropes of the uncivilized. 54 B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield & W. Maley, “Introduction: Irish Representation and English alternatives” & L. Jardine, “Encountering Ireland: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and English colonial ventures” in Representing Ireland, pp. 1–23, 60–75; W. Maley, “The British Problem in three tracts on Ireland by Spenser,

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But as Arthur Williamson demonstrates, Spenser was not just articulating the concerns of the English planters. Protestant Reformers in Scotland as well as England also sought a fundamental reconfiguration of Britain in the great war against Iberian world empire. Furthermore, Irish Catholic commentators, such as Geoffrey Keating in the 1630s, and later Roderic O’Flaherty in the Restoration era, when rebutting Protestant charges about Ireland’s lack of civility and piety, were not engaged in a colonial discourse of victimhood.55 Rather, they promoted a discourse of deliverance. Keating was primarily concerned to legitimise the Irish acceptability of the Stuart dynasty by providence, prophecy and genealogy. Charles I, like his father James I before him, should be recognised as the true king of Ireland. In turn, Ireland should be accorded the same equality as England and Scotland in her constitutional association with the Stuart dynasty as a free not a dependent kingdom. While engendering Ireland as the supplicant female, whose honour and virtue the later Stuarts were bound to defend, O’Flaherty was no less adamant in arguing that Ireland, like Scotland, should be an independent kingdom among the Stuarts’ British dominions.56

IV Unfortunately, modern Irish historians have shown a marked aversion towards Ireland as a British dominion and a remarkable propensity to collapse the rise of Atlantic capitalism and the brutalizing experience of colonialism into one another. The result has not only been the huge, growing, and highly distorted search for a continuous, anti-colonial Irish identity based on victimhood and the unquestioned

Bacon and Milton” in B. Bradshaw & P. Roberts eds, British consciousness and identity: The making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 159–84. 55 B. Bradshaw, “Geoffrey Keating: Apologist of Irish Ireland” in Representing Ireland, pp. 166–90. 56 B. Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghearr: Na Stiobhartaigh Agus an tAos Leinn, 1603–1788 (Dubin, 1996), pp. 148–94; B. Ó Buachalla, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, History of Ireland: Foreword (Dublin, 1987); pp. 1–8; B. Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating (Dublin, 2000), pp. 31–40, 83–101; Roderic O’Flaherty, Ogygia; or, a Chronological Account of Irish Events Collected from very Ancient Documents faithfully compared with each other, and supported by the Genealogical and Chronological Aid of the Sacred and Prophane Writings of the First Nations of the Globe, 2 vols (Dublin, 1793), I, pp. xiii–xxii.

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promotion of Ireland as a laboratory for British colonialism that we have already touched upon. Simultaneously, little or no effort had been made to disengage colonialism as a feature of governance from plantations as a form of settlement.57 Generally omitted from this perspective was a colonial endeavour that was to be serviced from Ireland and warranted by patent under the Irish Crown, a process of legitimization that was not available to governors or proprietors of the American colonies. Designated New Albion and located in the Delaware Basin (on Plowden’s island, named after the founder of the venture, Sir Edmund Plowden) this colony was licensed by Lord-Deputy Thomas Wentworth in 1632 and launched by planters from Ireland with prior knowledge of Virginia. New Albion was still recruiting settlers in 1650. Its existence no less than its authorization underlined Ireland’s status as a dependent kingdom rather than an English colony.58 On further examination we will discover several pertinent historical qualifications to the ready acceptance of Ireland as a training ground for colonial America. Indeed, the Jacobean re-establishment of colonial Virginia was launched in 1609 as the planting of New Britain or Nova Britannia in the Americas. The first code of laws for the colony of Virginia Britannia was promulgated in 1612, when the English common law was still being established in Ulster.59 Unlike Ulster, Virginia was viewed as an unwarranted colonial intrusion by the imperial Spanish monarchy and its survival remained uncertain until the 1620s. Undoubtedly, the survival of Virginia as the first

57 Cf. N. Canny, “The Marginal Kingdom: Ireland as a Problem in the First British Empire” in B. Bailyn & P.D. Morgan eds, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 35–66; J.H. Ohlmeyer, “Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories,” American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 446–62. 58 The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches, W. Knowler ed., 2 vols (London, 1739), I, pp. 72–3; Beauchamp Plantagenet, A description of the province of New Albion and a direction for adventurers with small stock to get two for one, and good land freely and for gentlemen and all servants, labourers and artificers to live plentifully (London, 1641, 1648 &1650); “Plowden’s New Albion” in Collections of the New York Historical Society for 1869 (New York, 1870), pp. 213–22; P.W. Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607–1660 (Baltimore, 1998), pp. 102, 424. 59 Nova Britannia: offering most excellent fruits by planting in Virginia. Exciting all such as be well affected to further the same (London, 1609); (Robert Johnson) The New Life of Virginia: Declaring the former successe and present estate of that plantation, being the second part of Nova Britannia (London, 1612); For the Colony in Virginia Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall &c. (London, 1612).

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Stuart colony in the Americas was due primarily to policy initiatives taken in England and the movement of settlers directly from the shires of Devon, Warwick, Stafford and Sussex that clearly stamped the colony as English.60 Still, it was the peripatetic Scottish educationalist, Patrick Copland, who offered practical climatic advice on plantations that clearly demonstrates that too much can be made of temperate Ireland serving as a model for semi-tropical colonies in the Americas. Copland commended the use of Armenians, naturalised in England, to secure remunerative plantations and thereby lay the basis for the future prosperity of that American colony.61 Rather than constitute a single phenomenon based on plantations, colonialism embodies a wide spectrum of settlement and governance. Certainly, the prevailing form of plantation in the Americas, marked by the exploitation of slavery as a capitalist commodity, appears to make European settlement synonymous with human exploitation, economic dependency and environmental degradation.62 However, the concept of plantation can be applied to land reclamation, fen drainage, planned villages and fishing stations. It can involve diverse economic and social activities and is flexible in terms of rural and urban communities. Above all, it is highly transportable, and was carried throughout and beyond the Stuart World. Scottish adventurers who went to Ulster in the early seventeenth century saw themselves not as colonialists, but as planters who sought to consolidate the British multiple monarchy of the new Stuart dynasty. By contrast those Scots who went to Nova Scotia in the 1620s demonstrably envisaged themselves as part of a colonial venture to expand the Stuarts’ British dominions in the Americas.63

60 A declaration of the state of the colony and affaires in Virginia. With the names of the adventurors, and sums adventured in that action (London, 1620); Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622–76, p. 52. 61 B[ritish] L[ibrary], Edmondes Papers, Stowe 172, ff. 307–18 & 174, ff. 170–1; Patrick Copland, Virginia’s God be Thanked (London, 1622) & A Declaration of Monies (London, 1622). 62 Cf. R.H. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: colonialism and global environmental history, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 1997); A.K. Smith, Creating a World Economy: Merchant Capital, Colonialism and World Trade, 1400–1825 (Boulder, 1991); M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975); C.J. Munford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625–1715, 3 vols (Lewiston, 1991); V. Ruben & A. Tuden eds, Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (New York, 1977). 63 N[ational] A[rchives of ] S[cotland], Montrose MSS, GD 220/6/1879 & Hume

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A contemporary clearly able to decouple plantations from colonial ventures was the well-travelled Scot William Lithgow who, in the course of three epic journeys between 1613 to 1632, travelled through Europe, explored Africa and made his way overland through Persia to the frontiers of India. Concerned to integrate British endeavours, Lithgow proposed a wholesale policy of Scottish plantations along the lines of the English fens and the Ulster undertakings. Nobles and gentry should forswear attendance at court and divert their energies towards the improvement of their estates by enclosures, drainage, parks, long leases and low rents.64 Esther Mijers draws a similar distinction. Scots participated actively in Dutch colonial ventures in the Americas in the first half of the seventeenth century. But when the Dutch simultaneously engaged in a fishing initiative that was to be based on the island of Lewis, both the Scots and the Dutch regarded this undertaking as improvement through plantation.65 However, the contribution of Lithgow, “the Bonaventure of Europe, Asia and Africa,” to the shaping of the Stuart World has recently been reduced to that of a caricature. His passing remark that Gaelic Irish women had enormous breasts, has been traduced into a critique that moves beyond victimhood to providing an opening for ethnic cleansing, and even genocide.66 Lithgow was primarily motivated by his outright opposition to the Counter-Reformation, particularly as practised in the Habsburg dominions in Iberia and Italy. His anti-Catholic rhetoric, rooted in his travel experiences, was com-

of Polwarth MSS, GD 158/319, /535; Royal Letters, Charters and Tracts relating to the Cololnization of New Scotland and the Institution of the Order of Knight Baronets of Nova Scotia, 1621–38, D. Laing ed. (Edinburgh, 1857). Moreover, Ireland was not necessary the first nor preferred location for British adventurers, whether they be English or Scottish. James, Marquess of Hamilton had established family interests in Bermuda and Newfoundland before he sought to become a planter in Ulster in the 1630s. Only when Arthur Forbes, Lord Forbes, was frustrated in his efforts to establish a Scottish Calvinist plantation in Sweden by 1638 did he turn his attention to developing his family interest at Castle Forbes, in County Longford (NAS, Hamilton Papers, GD 406/1/246, /350, 377, /381, /383–4, /387, /501–2, /512, /8377, /10086; A. Grosjean & S. Murdoch, ‘Introduction’ in A. Grosjean & S. Murdoch eds, Scottish Communities Abroad (Leiden, 2005), forthcoming). 64 William Lithgow, Scotlands welcome to her native sonne, and sovereign lord, King Charles (Edinburgh, 1633). 65 See Chapter 8: A Natural Partnership? Scotland and Zeeland in the Early Seventeenth Century 66 C. Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 79–91, 108–13.

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pounded by personal torture after he fell into the clutches of the Spanish Inquisition at Malaga in 1626. During his nineteen years of continuous sojourning, he claimed to have visited 48 kingdoms, 21 republics, 10 absolute principalities and 200 islands. Lithgow was no casual observer.67 His comments on Irish physiology, however defamatory, were actually incidental to his real concerns. What truly troubled him during his Irish tour, September 1619 to February 1620, was the corruption of the times, a theme that he by no means restricted to Ireland or the Irish. He found the Protestant clergy from England to be particularly lax in their duties as pastors, that religious knowledge was chronically lacking among Protestants as well as Catholics, and that the people were being rack-rented by landlords and clergy of both denominations. At the same time, plantations in Ireland were under-developed because of technological limitations and because of the disruptive actives of the bandit groups known as wood-kerns.68 We need to recall that Lithgow was a keen observer and an early journalist of exceptional ability. He acted effectively as an “embedded” war correspondent whose meticulous, eye-witness accounts of the siege of Breda in 1637, of the defences of London in 1643 and of the siege of Newcastle in 1645, would shape the meaning of journalism.69 Another war correspondent contemporary with Lithgow was the inveterate Royalist John Cleveland, and like Lithgow he too was a

67 William Lithgow, The Pilgrimes Farewell, to his Native Countrey of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1618) & The Totall Discourse, Of the Rare Adventures, and powerfull peregrinations of long nineteen Yeares Travayles, from Scotland, to the most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Africa (London, 1632). Lithgow also claims that on a visit to Rome in the company of young members of the Scottish Catholic nobility, he was sodomised by the protector of the Scottish mission, Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini, the future Pope Urban VIII. His frequent accusations of pedophilia against Catholic priests has a particularly modern relevance. 68 Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, pp. 427–442; “Scotland’s Tears in his Countreyes Behalf ” (1625) & “The Gushing Tears of Godly Sorrow” in The Poetical Remains of William Lithgow, the Scottish Traveller, [ J.M. ed.,] (Edinburgh, 1863). Incidentally, Richard Guthry, following his eulogy of the Micmacs for their assistance to the illfated Scottish colonial endeavours in Nova Scotia noted as an afterthought that, “There womens breasts hand down in lenth to there bellies” (Griffiths & Reid, “New Evidence on New Scotland, 1629,” p. 508). 69 William Lithgow, A True and Experimentall Discourse, upon the beginning, proceeding and Victorious event of this last siege of Breda (London, 1637) & The Present Survey of London and England’s State (London, 1643) & The Siege of Newcastle (Edinburgh, 1645). Lithgow probably also instituted The Scottish Dove as a newsbook to uphold the Scottish Covenanting perspective in England during the Wars for the Three Kingdoms.

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poet of distinctly limited aesthetic merit. Cleveland constantly turned out anti-Parliamentary poems and squibs during the English civil war, and, as we might expect, he wrote violently anti-Scottish verses in 1643 in response to the Solemn League and Covenant between Parliament and the revolutionary Edinburgh government. His poems vilified Scots as beasts from a northern wilderness, serial regicides and as pestilential rebels and apostates. Like Jews they spread, and as Infection flie, As if the Devil had Ubiquity. Hence ’tis they live at Rovers; and defie This or that place, Rags of Geography. They’re Citizens o’th World; they’re all in all, Scotland’s a Nation Epidemicall.70

Although written in 1643, Cleveland’s anti-Scottish poems first saw print in 1647 when renewed Covenanting intrusions into English politics both consolidated and spread hostility towards the Scots across political divides to the Parliamentarians, especially the Independents, to the New Model Army, and to such celebrated opinion formers as journalists and astrologers.71 The poems were regularly republished throughout the 1650s and well into the Restoration era. They became particularly popular at times of Anglo-French and AngloDutch tensions when the Scots, as close associates of both the French and the Dutch, were less trusted and deemed more troublesome to England than the Irish. Cleveland’s poems were again re-issued at the height of Anglo-Scottish tensions over the failure of the Darien Scheme, when Scotophobia played well on both sides of the Atlantic among colonial administrators as well as among diplomats and government officials.72 Scotophobia, with more than a twist of antiSemitism, endured beyond the Union of 1707 and the Hanoverian 70 John Cleveland, The Character of a London-diurnall with severall poems (London, 1647), pp. 33–40. Cleveland followed up his vituperations against “The Rebel Scot” with “The Scots Apostasie,” which first appeared together in print in multiple editions from 1647 (The Poems of John Cleveland, B. Morris & E. Withington eds (Oxford, 1967), pp. 30–1, 116). 71 D. Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 90–1, 104, 107, 112, 120–1, 125–7, 164; A.I. Macinnes, The British Revolution 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 37–8, 168–72, 187, 195–6. 72 John Cleveland, Clieveland Vindiciae, or Clievland’s genuine poems, orations and epistles (London, 1677) & The Works of Mr John Cleveland containing his poems, orations, epistles (London, 1687 & 1699); Edward Ward, A Journey to Scotland giving a character of that country, the people and their manners (London, 1699); http.//www.mdarchives.state.

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Succession of 1714.73 Are we therefore to conjecture through the distorted lens of the New Historicist that English policy makers facilitating the Holocaust? We think not. We have instead to look at the challenge Scottish commercial networks were posing to the emergent military-fiscal state in England which, in turn, raises questions about circumventing as well as demarcating state power in the Atlantic.

V The essays in this book powerfully encourage an oceanic context for the Stuart World. Yet, as the Dutch remained intent on demonstrating throughout the seventeenth century, the Atlantic Ocean was not a closed sea and the commercial agencies operating within it were not necessarily discrete. Thus, the Dutch viewed their West Indian Company [ WIC] as supplementary to their East Indian [VOC]; likewise the Danes deemed their West India and Guinea Company as a logical corollary to their East Indian and Asiatic endeavours.74 Although the English never sustained a complementary vehicle to their East India Company in the Atlantic, the Cromwellian regime gave serious consideration to just such an entity in the late 1650s.75 Rather than as a separate theatre of competing empires, the Atlantic Ocean can better be seen as an economic zone of surprising, if shifting integration.76 As Wim Klooster makes clear, it simply md.usa/ Archives of Maryland online, Proceedings & Acts of the General Assembly, vol. 19 (1693–97), pp. 545, 582 & Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, vol. 20 (1693–97), pp. 345–55, 569; BL, Papers relating to Trade etc., Sloane MS 2902, ff. 115–6, 171–80, 244; H[untington] L[ibrary, San Marino, California], Bridgewater & Ellesmere MSS, EL 9740 & Blathwayt Papers, BL 6–9; D[ansk] R[igsarkivet, Copenhagen], TKUA, England AII, 34, Politiske Forhold, 1679–1701: State Papers Denmark (1694–1701). 73 A.I. Macinnes, “The British Military-Fiscal State and the Gael: New Perspectives on the ’45” in C. Ó Baoill & N.R. McGuire eds, Rannsachadh na Gáidhlig 2000 (Aberdeen, 2002), pp. 257–69. 74 N. Steensgaard, “The growth and composition of long-distance trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750” in J.D. Tracy ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 102–52; O. Feldbaek & O. Justesen, Kolonierne i Asien og Afrika (Copenhagen, 1980), pp. 31–147, 289–347. 75 BL, Miscellaneous Official Papers relating to the English Settlements in America and the West Indies, Eg. 2395, ff. 86–109. 76 D. Hancock, “The British Atlantic World: Co-ordination, Complexity, and the Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651–1815,” Itinerario (1999), pp. 107–26.

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will not do to postulate an emergent capitalism characterised by mutual hostilities among conflicting national and imperial interests in the Atlantic World. Instead, we encounter traders and networks actively involved in commercial exchange where relations were normally both peaceful and cordial.77 Certainly, there is much to be gained from comparative studies of empire, for such studies broaden our understanding of state formation and also demonstrate that the transmission of goods, people and ideas was not a one-way process. However, a narrow focus on empire results from preoccupation with conflicts for colonial hegemony, such as the territorial aggressiveness of England in competition with Spain (and Portugal), France and the Netherlands or even Denmark and Sweden. Chris Storrs offers a timely corrective to this view that, on the one hand, overstates the weakening grip of Spain in the Americas and, on the other, underplays the integral contribution of other national groups to the colonial endeavours of the major European powers.78 The distinctive activities of the Scots and the Irish, no less than the Flemings, the Norwegians, the Finns, the Poles and the Jews, like that of adventurers from Italian city states or colonists from German principalities, were not exclusively tied to the service of one imperial power. In the case of the Scots, their association with the English in the Americas did contribute to the British character of the Stuarts’ overseas dominions, but did not preclude their association with the Swedes and the Dutch on the Delaware, with the Dutch in Brazil, New Amsterdam, Surinam and Tobago, and with the Danes in St Thomas.79 Thus, while a case can certainly be made for the simultaneous intensification of state authority within the British Isles and the extension of that authority into the Stuarts’ American dominions,80 the

77 See Chapter 9: Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Seventeenth Century: An Atlantic Partnership? 78 See Chapter 12: Foreign Penetration of the Spanish Empire 1660–1714: Sweden, Scotland and England. 79 DR, Vestindisk-guineisk Kampagne, 1671–1755, A 4/465–7, Direktionens correspondence—Supplikationskopibøger (1690–1712); Jeronimy Clifford, The Conduct of the Dutch relating to the Breach of Treaties with England (London, 1760); Narratives of the Netherlands, 1609–1664, J.F. Jamieson ed. (New York, 1909), pp. 66–96, 257–63, 307–8. 80 M.J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 340–419.

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creation of a common elite identity based on shared notions of authority and civility is a far more vulnerable proposition. By the 1690s, the clannish cohesion of the Scottish landed and commercial elite was being described to a wary English Council of Trade and Plantations as the collusive activities of those who “are generally Frugall, Industrious, very nationall, and very helpful to each other agst any Third [party].” Their diligence in securing positions of influence and their disregard for the Navigation Laws were perceived by English merchants, colonial officials, diplomats and ruling ministries as highly threatening. Not only did the Scots challenge the English elites with the Darien Scheme, but also through their expansion into Ireland and the Delaware. If the Scots made a success of Darien, there seemed a real prospect that their domestic market would grow to include Ireland and that their entrepreneurial endeavours in the Delaware would lead to the secession of the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey to form a Scottish middle colony on the American mainland.81 As the Scottish experience makes particularly evident, westward expansion affected not only the constituent British kingdoms and the metropolis of London, but also such provincial centres as Glasgow and Ayr as well as Bristol, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Cork and Galway. However, concentration on westward expansion can seriously obscure the continuing importance of continental connections. The expansion of Scottish commercial networks into Boston, New York and Philadelphia, on the Delaware and Potomac Rivers, and on the Leeward Islands complemented longstanding networks that also operated aggressively throughout Scandinavia and the Baltic, from Bergen via Gothenburg, Danzig and Stockholm and Koenigsberg on to Riga and Narva (later St Petersburg). Core networks linked not only Glasgow and Ayr, but also Edinburgh, Dundee, Montrose, Aberdeen and Inverness to London, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Rotterdam as commercial hubs, which served Scottish mercantile communities both eastwards and westwards. The Atlantic connection certainly contributed to the reinvigoration of Scottish networks in Bordeaux and

81 BL, Papers relating to Trade etc., Sloane MS 2902, ff. 137–8, 218; HL, Bridgewater & Ellesmere MSS, EL 9776–7, 9802–3, 9880; John Cary, A Discourse concerning the Trade of Ireland and Scotland as they stand in Competition with the Trade of England (Bristol, 1695 & London, 1696).

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their installation in Lisbon and Cadiz well in advance of 1707. However, the principal significance of these networks was to facilitate the transfer of the distinctive Scottish trading practice of tramping from the Baltic to the Caribbean and subsequently on to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas in the eighteenth century. This practice ensured that illicit trading, customs evasion and smuggling continued well beyond the Treaty of Union’s concession of free trade with the colonies.82 In terms of an ideology, capitalism can certainly be viewed as a cultural construct intelligible through a language of power, negotiation and control. However, as an operative process in the Stuart World, capitalism represented economic self-interest, the relentless pursuit of profit and the resourceful investment in goods, services and people. Capitalism also evaded regulation, whether by state, municipality or corporation. Thus, the established Bristol merchants in the Atlantic trade found themselves on the defensive in the 1650s from interlopers, based in that city, who combined the pursuit of free trade in indentured servants with a radical spiritual agenda that upheld the free trade in souls.83 Scottish engagement with the Atlantic trade raised interloping from an urban to a national endeavour. As Scottish commercial networks bear out, capitalist evasion of regulation could also be commercially innovative. Glasgow merchants

82 DR, DK, divers breve, documenter og akter, C.63–III, Den af Isack Holmes Fuldmaglig, Seneca Torsen holde Journal paa alle engleske og skotske Skippere saavel fra Vestersoen som fra Østersoen, der har passeret Øresund, 1681–84; NAS, Scott of Ancrum MSS GD 259/4/29 & Andrew Russell Papers, GD 1/885/2, /23 & Journal of William Fraser, London merchant, CS 96/524 & Letter and account book of John Watson, Edinburgh merchant, CS 96/3309; Glasgow City Archives, Glasgow Burgh Court Register of Deeds, B 10/15/1811, /2135, /2155; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, 1683–1775, S. Hazard ed., 10 vols (1851–52), I (1683–1700), pp. 90–1, 527, 550–1; http.//www.mdarchives.state.md.usa/ Archives of Maryland online, Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, vol. 8 (1687/8–1693), pp. 335–7, 358–9; vol. 20 (1693–97), pp. 236–7, 546–7; vol. 23 (1696/7–1698), pp. 11–2, 402, 551; vol. 25 (1698–1731), pp. 73, 80, 96, 98–9 & Proceedings of the Provincial Council, vol. 69 (1679–1680/1), pp. 238–41, 300–9; W.R. Brock, Scotus Americanus: A survey of the sources for links between Scotland and America in the eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 11–2. Instead of making direct journeys to and from the Baltic, Scottish ships were often inclined to travel or tramp around the Baltic picking up and depositing cargoes at diverse ports before returning to Scotland sometimes one or two years or more after their original departure. This tramping routine was transferred to the Americas by the later seventeenth century. 83 Harris-Sax, The Widening Gate, pp. 14–5, 251–77.

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used both consignment and store systems first to break into the staple Atlantic trade in tobacco and then to secure dominance in it. Their participation in this trade since the 1630s seemed compromised by the restrictive English Navigation Acts that were first imposed at the Restoration and then reinvigorated at the Revolution to deter Scottish commercial engagement with the colonies. Under the consignment system the planter bore the risk of marketing, whereas the risk was borne by the merchant under the store system, which tied advances of credit on tobacco sales in Europe to the purchase of merchandise from the colonial store. This latter system, which was particularly suited to the expansion of small plantations along the Chesapeake and into the hinterlands of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, carried higher risks but greater profits. Whitehaven, hitherto third after Bristol and Liverpool in the Atlantic trade, was so eclipsed by Glasgow merchant’s use of the store system in tandem with smuggling through the Isle of Man, that the Cumbrian town actually petitioned for repeal of the Treaty of Union in 1710. Scottish entrepreneurs duly extended the store system perfected by the Glasgow tobacco lords into the Caribbean in order to enhance profits from sugar and rum.84 Capitalism, moreover, led to the creation of a commercial no less than a public sphere in the Stuart World that was achieved partly by monumentality and partly by negotiation. The former manifested itself through commodity exchanges, trades houses and other public buildings for civic improvement, the latter by hiring fairs for labour, competitive roups for tenancies and newspaper advertisements for goods, services and the stimulation of the land market. In turn, capitalism and the commercial sphere mark the growing significance of political economy in defining the paths to modernity. Rather than a single progressive solution as is fundamental to Whigs historically and neo-Whigs historiographically, debate became polarised between land and trade as the engine of economic development. In the case of England the issue was national prosperity; in the case of Scotland

84 Calendar of Treasury Papers (1557–1728), J. Reddington ed., 6 vols (London, 1868–1889), (1708–1814), pp. 117, 170, 229, 241, 252–3, 261; T.M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 55–71; A.I. Macinnes, “Scottish Gaeldom from clanship to commercial landlordism” in S. Foster, A.I. Macinnes & R. MacInnes eds, Scottish Power Centres from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Glasgow, 1998), pp. 162–90.

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and Ireland the issue was national survival. The advocates of trade largely won out with the consolidation of the military-fiscal state at the Revolution. The advocates of land tended to be Jacobites—adherents of the direct Stuart line in exile from 1689—who viewed trade as a zero sum game requiring economic regulation through commercial companies. Their legacy was not so much the continuation of a reunified East India Company from 1708, as the promotion of banking, textile manufacturing and the extractive industries as well as agricultural improvements by the landed interest.85

85

D. Hirst, “Locating the 1650s in England’s seventeenth century,” History, 81 (1996), pp. 359–83; S. Pincus, “From holy cause to economic interest: the study of population and the invention of the state” in A. Houston & S. Pincus eds, A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 277–98; Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660, pp. 219–23.

SECTION ONE

CIVILISING SOCIETY, RECONFIGURING POLITIES

CHAPTER ONE

EDUCATION, CULTURE AND THE SCOTTISH CIVIC TRADITION Arthur Williamson

I can’t believe that there is still such great perversity in human nature that a majority does not want to see all these principles adopted at once; or that, if some are reluctant, they cannot be taught . . . or . . . persuaded. —David Hume of Godscroft, De unione insulae Britannicae, 16051

From its first writing in 1567–68 George Buchanan’s De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus was immediately recognized as an extraordinarily radical tract. Quite quickly it emerged as one of the most radical of the entire sixteenth century. Written to justify the overthrow of Mary Steuart in that year, it provoked at least three major replies before seeing print. During the next two centuries it would be the most frequently banned book in Scotland, and one of the most commonly proscribed books throughout Europe. With its highly articulated notions of civic life and its remarkably wide vision of public participation and direct action in political society, the dialogue soon achieved canonical status within what today is commonly called the Atlantic republican tradition.2 1 P.J. McGinnis and A.H. Williamson (eds.), The British Union: David Hume of Godscroft and the De unione insulae Britannicae (London, 2002), p. 313. Nec certe tanta adhuc hominum perversitas, ut non haec omnia simul iuncta plures velint: aut siqui nolint errore aliquo, et possint, . . . doceri; et . . . persuaderi. Note: As the various Latin texts used in this article have now become readily available and with accompanying translations, the Latin provided in these notes will be sharply excised and limited to larger citations. 2 P.J. McGinnis and A.H. Williamson (eds.), George Buchanan The Political Poetry (Edinburgh, 2000), Introduction; McGinnis and Williamson, The British Union, pp. 1–9; R.A. Mason, “People Power? George Buchanan on resistance and the Common Man,” in Widerstandsrecht in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2002), pp. 163–81. Earlier revisionist views of Buchanan that minimized his radicalism and belittled his significance are today discounted. For an example of such an earlier conservative reading, see Mason, “Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI, and the Scottish Polity,” in John Dwyer et al. (eds.), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 9–33.

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Yet the dialogue’s radicalism extends further than its portrayal of a politics that either electrified or horrified so many contemporaries. Much of the argument in the tract is anchored in an almost boundless commitment to the efficacy of education. Education, learning, and culture underwrote citizenship, and education could overcome virtually any obstacle. In Scotland these obstacles were seen as formidable in the extreme. For literally millennia, deep-seated European tradition deriving from both biblical and classical sources regarded the north as the region of the primitive, the barbaric, the bestial, the satanic. This great commonplace appeared in virtually every European language; it informed a vast range of writing. It shaped thinking in both England and France. As Scotland occupied still more northerly reaches of the globe and was more emphatically defined by its location, the effects there were all the greater. Indeed, sixteenth-century Scots of every political and religious persuasion found themselves exercised to the point of obsession as to whether civilization could be sustained within their cold and remote country. Could it be discovered in the past, could it be created in the future? In addition, within Scotland itself, the further north one went the more the great truism seemed to be born out, for there in the north one encountered the militarized kin-structures of the Highlands, regions reputedly populated with fierce predators and lawless primitives. Even so, the Highlands, it must be stressed, did not embody the problem, but merely typified it. The issue was never simply the Highland line. It was always Scotland itself.3 Huge obstacles, massive disadvantages, an extraordinary burden, to be sure, and yet despite it all, Buchanan declared, Scotland could change.

3 A.H. Williamson, “Scots, Indians, and Empire: the Scottish Politics of Civilization, 1519–1609,” in Past and Present, 150 (February): 46–83. The fashionable “post-colonial” reading, proposed notably by Edward Said, wherein the aborigine is demonized in order to legitimate conquest, simply will not work for Scotland. It probably will not work for Ireland either. A recent instance of this lachrymose approach is provided by Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork, 2001). Regarding France and England, see for example Michael Wintroub, “Civilizing the Savage and Making a King: The Royal Entry Festival of Henri II (Rouen, 1550),” in The Sixteenth Century Journal 29.2 (1998): 465–94, and esp. 473, 491; Z.S. Fink, “Milton and the Theory of Climatic Influence,” in Modern Language Quarterly 2 (1941): 67–80.

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If they [the Scots] were to make even the slightest effort, they would put an end to the notion that in the colder parts of the world men are so far removed from letters, learning, and every cultural pursuit as they are from the sun. Nature may have bestowed nimbler wits and keener minds on the Africans, Egyptians, and many other peoples, but it has not so utterly condemned any nation as to deprive it of all access to virtue and renown.

The great humanist could think of no more telling testimony to human capability than his own experience. He was, after all, “a man of modest ability and almost no resources.” Still worse, he had been “born in an uncultured age”—by which he apparently meant a world at once warlike, priest-ridden, and superstitious.4 Again and again in his writings we find him noting “the infelicity of our birth,” an event that had taken place up in “the British mountains . . . among a rude people.” Later, he says, he faced discrimination in the sense that he had difficulty establishing his credibility: because of his obscure, dark origins, the learned “scarcely and rarely . . . [paid] me heed.” But, for all that, Buchanan still had “achieved something in my struggle against [these] unfavourable circumstances.”5 And in fact so could every man. Precisely for this reason, as Buchanan explained at length in the dialogue that followed these remarks, a civic-minded aristocracy could carry the nation with it, not by either authority or coercion, but by the sheer force of its arguments for the public good. Buchanan went further. 1567–68 was a moment of extraordinary optimism and great hope. Young Thomas Maitland, the other character in the dialogue to whom Buchanan played interlocutor, would not have to face obstacles like those that Buchanan himself had needed to overcome. Revolutionary Scotland would not only create a civic world, but, integral to it, a cultured one. Here was something truly radical: men could build a new society that would tap into human capability and universalize Buchanan’s achievement.

4 Buchanan, De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579), sig. A3r–A3v; The Art and Science of Government among the Scots (De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus), trans. by D.H. MacNeill ([Glasgow], 1964]), p. 15; The Powers of the Crown of Scotland (De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus), trans. by C.F. Arrowood (Austin, 1949), p. 39; Roger Mason is producing what will be the authoritative edition of this work. I am grateful to Dr. Mason for sharing his manuscript translation with me. 5 Buchanan, History of Scotland (Rerum Scoticarum Historia), 4 vols., trans. by James Aikman (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1827–29), 1:9; Political Poetry, pp. 150 (50/3), 116 (35/3), 274 (Appendix B7), 316; De jure regni, sig. A3r.

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Revolution would inherently stimulate learning. A civic world required intimacy with antique values; reform required the liberation provided by scripture; both required a politico-moral “pietas” needed to undergird civilization. An ignorant citizen could only be a contradiction in terms. Buchanan’s dialogue therefore projected a cultural flowering. And so it proved, at least briefly. Buchanan’s political ideas would be popularized through verses like “ane Declaratioun of the Lordis iust quarrell,” while the humanist himself began work on what would eventually become his great history of Scotland. Off the government press would come the first serious edition of Blind Harry’s populist poem the “Wallace” (1570) which would receive an appropriately Calvinist reading, and the following year, apparently, saw the publication John Barbour’s epic the “Bruce.” The collected works of Sir David Lindsay were first published in 1568, reprinted in 1569, and appeared in a new edition in 1571, again with a suitably Calvinist apparatus.6 The range of publication is surprising: from a classical Gaelic version of John Knox’s liturgy, to an extraordinary number of political ballads, to John Davidson’s verse dialogue between a clerk and a courtier that urged a fully-funded, non-hierarchical church and pointed towards the Second Book of Discipline. At a moment so suffused with the values of public life and civic virtue—values imagined as at once learned and popular—the poetry of figures like Harry, Barbour, and Lindsay must have seemed of a piece with contemporary political verse.7 Political revolution came to mean cultural revitalization, much as Buchanan had expected.

6 Cf. Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst, 1994), pp. 145ff. 7 James Cranstoun (ed.), Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1891), 1:57–64; R. Dickson and J.P. Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing: from the introduction of the art in 1507 to the beginning of the seventeenth century (Edinburgh, 1890; reprinted Amsterdam, 1975), chapter 18; The actis and Deidis of the Illuster and Vailzeand Campion, Schir William Wallace (Edinburgh, 1570), esp. p. 180v; Ane Dialog or mutuall talking betuix a clerk and ane Courteour . . . (Edinburgh, 1574); see A.J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade, 1500–1720 (East Linton, 2000). Mann misses the significance of Davidson’s Dialog (p. 151). Also see Mann, “The Anatomy of the Printed Book in Early Modern Scotland,” in Scottish Historical Review 80.2 (2001): 181–200. Mark Loughlin has noted revolutionary Scotland’s literary richness in his essay “‘The Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis’: Maitland, Machiavelli and the Propaganda of the Scottish Civil War,” in A.A. MacDonald et al. (eds.), The Renaissance in Scotland (Leiden, 1994), pp. 226–45. Roger Mason’s essay, “Politics and Polemics: George Buchanan’s Vernacular Writings, 1570–72,” offers a sharply focused discussion of Buchanan’s context and draws a

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To be sure, Buchanan’s new era of civic and literary triumph turned out to be short-lived: the civic-minded regent Moray would be assassinated in 1570, and the event precipitated a legitimiste reaction in both England and Scotland. In the northern realm there would be a prolonged civil war. In these unhappy circumstances Scotland’s ablest minds proved themselves “chamaeleons” rather than citizens, and a newfound pessimism and conservatism subsequently found its way into the great Scottish history. The shifting mood reveals itself starkly in topical political writings, increasingly defensive rather than expansive, and notably in such works as Buchanan’s vernacular writings or the 1571 “Ane Discourse tuiching the Estate present.” Still, even if the revolution’s original idealism faded before the pressure of international politics and the impulse to stability, its achievements nevertheless were of the first magnitude—obscured for us today, no less than in the past, only because of romantic fascination with the fate and “trials” of Mary Steuart.8 Precisely here had lain the fatal difficulty in Mary’s reign. More than anything else, for Buchanan and for James Steuart, earl of Moray, the revolution’s leader and Mary’s half-brother, Mary’s catastrophic misrule and incipient tyranny derived from a no less catastrophic education. Both Moray and Buchanan made determined efforts to convert Mary into a citizen-monarch—Buchanan famously so by reading her selections from Livy after dinner. The significance of Buchanan’s reading to her has been overlooked. Its point was neither learned entertainment nor passive edification, but policy and action. As Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have noticed, “a nobleman or a prince might employ a poor but gifted young man to read and excerpt the classics for him” with the purpose of mediating “modern needs and ancient texts.” “Renaissance readers . . . persistently envisage action as the outcome of reading”—education in the most direct and applied sense.9 Although Buchanan had long before

similar conclusion (The Innes Review 54.1 [spring 2003]: 47–68). Mason goes so far as to claim that “a distinctive Scottish print culture” emerged in the later sixteenth century (p. 67). 8 Most recently—and most egregiously—John Guy, “My Heart is My Own”: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004); the American edition titled, Queen of Scots: the True Life of Mary Stuart. 9 Grafton and Jardine, “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy,” in Past and Present 129 (1990), esp. pp. 35, 40.

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ceased to be a young man, his role here is unmistakable, and without doubt Mary was receiving the best instruction available. At the same time Moray himself provided, or sought to provide, a still more hands-on kind of instruction, yet one very much informed by the same moral principles.10 If they failed, it was not for want of trying. Nor did they regard their failure as resulting from any natural predisposition of character or even of gender. Despite the disabilities inherent in women rulers, disabilities founded on cultural assumptions that no one of either sex seriously contested, neither Moray nor Buchanan thought Mary Steuart’s governance need prove a disaster. Both believed that Mary had been corrupted (irremediably as it turned out) through the dreadful upbringing she had received from the House of Guise. Mary the little girl who had left Scotland at age six, Buchanan insisted, was a wonderful creature who improved her mind to such an extent that she made even nature seem crude and even art unskilful. But Mary the young adult who returned to Scotland at age nineteen was a very different kind of person indeed. As he had her lament in his verses, If my uncle had not been so dangerous to me and so dishonorable, I, Mary, should have been the leading lady of my age. But he disgraced both his own repute and mine as well By those wrongs which turn whole kingdoms upside down.11

The education of her son, the infant James VI, offered far brighter prospects. Education could overcome climate, geography, and, if necessary, even gender.

II Not for the first time had Scots declared their ability to overcome geographical adversity and its cultural consequences. In 1527 Hector

10 Cf. Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (New York, 1966), p. 118; Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (New York, 1983), p. 57; J. Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London, 1988), p. 179. 11 Political Poetry, pp. 122–3. Empirical experience far more than a priori principles about gender difference consistently shaped the outlook of Buchanan and his contemporaries.

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Boece had insisted that, in the words of a contemporary translation, “Thay auctouris is na worth, that sayis all peple far fra the sonne ar barbour and miserable.”12 Like Buchanan’s dialogue, Boece’s Scotorum Historia initiated a moment of creativity, this one associated with the court of James V in the 1530s. Like Buchanan, Boece and his translator John Bellenden sought to introduce classical moralism and civic values into Scottish politics. Like Buchanan, Boece and his associates turned to such classical republican writers as Livy, and, just possibly again anticipating Buchanan, even such Italian interpreters of the classical republic as Niccolò Machiavelli. Like Buchanan, Boece inhabited an academic environment serving as a professor and educator. Unlike Buchanan, however, the political world of the Scottish court in 1530s possessed none of the urgency, practicality, excitement, and unprecedented opportunity of the 1567 revolution. The contrast is certainly real: we encounter rhetorical posture rather than revolutionary transformation, more language than direct action and social reconstruction, naive narrative instead of sophisticated theory. Yet Boece nevertheless marked the beginning of a pattern that would have a long life before it. Another such creative moment commenced about 1590 when Presbyterian-reformers (sometimes adopting the freshly invented neologism “patriot”) formed an alliance with the young king James VI. The key figure was Andrew Melville, and the initiating work was neither a political tract nor a formal history of the realm, nor even a theological treatise, but patriotic Latin poetry. The Scottish commonwealth with its shared governance and non-hierarchical church would provide the model to the world. Far from arctic darkness, the new Scotland would emerge the light to the nations. The prospect of a similarly structured Britain resulting from James’s succession to the southern crown promised to be still more exhilarating. Radical Britain might provide the basis for universal reform, lead a sacralized confederation of free states against the universal Habsburg-Papal Empire, realize human destiny, and fulfill apocalyptic prophecy. Seen in this way James’s marriage to Anne of Denmark in 1589 appeared

12 Boece, Heir Beginnis the Hystory and Croniklis of Scotland, trans. by John Bellenden (Edinburgh, 1540?), sig. C5v; Boece, Scotorum historiae a prima gentis origine (Paris, 1527), sig. BB7v (“Haud itaque imperitis illis atque arrogantibus sermonibus lacerrandos existimen quum auersos a Sole vt extreme miseros ac barbaros ludibrio habent”).

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part of a great turning point, securing the dynasty, building the future. The subsequent birth of Prince Henry in 1594 was an event potentially of the greatest importance.13 But Melville’s most significant poetry was neither his celebration of Anne’s coronation nor his remarkable pastoral on the birth of James’s heir, but his abortive national epic, known today as the “Gathelus.” At once Virgillian and yet also emphatically anti-imperial, utterly subverting empire and yet boundlessly expansive, the poem recounted the familiar mythology of Scottish national origins. Recognized as myth—and hence the stuff of poetry rather than of history—the story provided Melville with what Philip Sidney had earlier called an “imaginative ground-plot,” a fiction that presented a greater truth than any narrative could offer. As The Mirror for Magistrates had put it decades before, Thus story writers leave the causes out, Or so rehears them as they wer in dout.14

Through poetry Melville looked to the underlying “spirit” of the events he described and went beyond mere literal historical sequence. The medieval tale itself was straight-forward enough, known to virtually all Scots and to many throughout the British Isles.15 Gathelus, son of the Athenian king, Cecrops, was so high-spirited that his heroic ambition could not find expression within the confines of Attica. Migrating to Egypt with his aristocratic friends, he entered the pharaoh’s service. There he won a major victory against the invading Nubians and was rewarded with the hand of the pharaoh’s daughter, Scota. All presumably would be well but for the succeeding pharaoh’s persecution of the Israelites: the resulting plagues sent the Jews to the East, while Gathelus and his Graeco-Egyptian fol-

13 Melville, STEFANISKION;. Ad Scotiae Regem, habitum in coronatione reginae (Edinburgh, 1590), sig. A2r. Melville, Principis Scoti-Britannorum natalia (On the birth of the ScotoBritannic Prince), reprinted with translation in Political Poetry, pp. 276–81. 14 “An Apology for Poetry,” in G.G. Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), p. 185. Lily Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates, edited from original texts in the Huntington Library (Cambridge, 1938), p. 198 (ll. 27–8). 15 These traditions were widely shared property. In 1619 the Dominican Richard Bermingham made use of the same materials at the court of Philip III to purposes quite opposite Melville’s. Noted in J.N. Hillgarth’s egregious apologia for early modern Spain, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formulation of a Myth (Ann Arbor, 2000), p. 414.

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lowers departed for the west. Settling in what subsequently became Galicia, Gathelus founded a powerful kingdom based eventually at the city of Brigantium. Later still, Gathelus’s two sons Hiber and Hemecus discovered Hibernia where the second son Hemecus would establish an independent kingdom. To this standard account of Scottish origins that had reached back to the fourteenth-century wars of independence and even before, Melville added an altogether original dimension. The two sons embodied two conflicting ideals, two conflicting visions of human destiny and human purpose. Hiber, the leader of the Iberian Gaels, is ruthlessly aggressive and blood-thirsty, striving “to extend his fame and his father’s kingdom by whatever force, by whatever power.” He sweeps through the entire peninsula. Believing himself exalted through divine favor, he seeks “to mount up to the high heavens.” His interests extend to an overseas empire: “Such was his love of fame and his mad desire for domination.” His younger twin is a total contrast. Hemecus, leader of the Hibernian Gaels, wins praise for his “modesty.” He establishes “laws and justice for the people,” and “he exerts himself in handling the shared reins of governance.” Hiber manifestly anticipates the Iberian kingdoms and the Habsburg’s global empire. Hemecus and his successors obviously found Ireland, then Scotland, and ultimately the united British kingdoms. Hiber the exalted, Hemecus the good, the two emerge clearly as the western counterparts to Ishmael and Isaac, the children of an Abramic Gathelus. No less are they archetypes of the contemporary BritishIberian confrontation: civic Britain against hierarchical Spain; an Achaean league against universal empire; the articulate citizen against the obedient subject. Here culminated a long-developing confrontation of the greatest moment, one that promised to fulfill the fullest range of prophecy. For this great struggle, Melville indicated, comprised the prophesied final conflict between Christ and Antichrist at the end of days, and thus the political run-up to the historical redemption, the prelude to the parousia. Mankind’s destiny was working itself out in this massive contest between these two competing “spirits,” these two opposing “streams” within human history, now seemingly in its culmination. The overthrow of the Roman Empire—in its final Habsburgpapal guise—would bring a world without empire, a world redeemed, and lay the foundations for the kingdom of Christ. This was the moment: “Rust blunts the edge of the sword Aeneas wielded.” The

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soteriological and the civic, along with moderation, discipline, virtue and their opposites, became interwoven within the layered metaphors of the “Gathelus.” In more one sense the emergence of Britain would prove an epic event. But civics, Melville insisted, implied civility and civilization. On Melville’s telling, Hemecus emerges not only as a modest, limited, and hence legitimate king, but also almost a kind of professor. In Greek letters or in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Everyone accustomed himself to receive from the mouth of Gathelus All of the master’s teachings howsoever much there might be, Or commit them to memory, Whatever he heard in his native country from the patriarchs of Athens, Whatever secret wisdom he took from the sacred books of Memphis, Whatever he learned when he sat at the feet of Moses, ... And Hemecus took these teachings with him from Cantabria When he went forth into his own kingdom.

From all this arose “the wisdom in the mouths of the Caledonian Druids.”16 It is not clear how seriously Melville took the Druids, though they surely would have emerged as proto-Presbyterians had he completed the poem. Undoubtedly, they describe emblematically if not historically the integral association of politics and learning. Small wonder that Gathelus’s wife, the Egyptian princess Scota, turns out to be a woman outstanding in “character” and “accomplishments”—rather than a rare beauty, as we might have expected—or that Gathelus shares his vision of the future with her. Small wonder that, on his arriving back in Scotland, Melville declined a government job in favour of a professorship. Like Boece and Buchanan before him, Melville’s expectation of cultural flowering in the emerging age of reform and political engage-

16 This paragraph and the previous two derive from his Political Poetry, pp. 284–97. Hiber’s anticipation of the Iberian empire is unmistakable: And now dire Hiber thirsting for gold, And hungrier than Orcus, seizes all things by waging unbridled war. He slaughters great numbers of people and overturns kingdoms, More savage than all others. (p. 296)

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ment would be fulfilled in significant ways. In 1593 John Napier of Merchiston prefaced his magisterial analysis of the Revelation with highly practical and surprisingly candid political advice to King James. The Melvillian moment witnessed still another edition of Lindsay’s works in 1592. In 1594 a second printing of the “Wallace” appeared, one that encouraged a reading at once civic and reformed. This time it contained a frontispiece dotted with stirring epigraphs from Cicero and Ovid. From the fourteenth Philippic, for example, appeared the patriotic expostulation: “O how fortunate a death [to have died for your country], the best way to pay that debt everyone owes to nature!” Or again, “It is most appropriate for the wise to follow with grateful memory the valour of those who have given their lives for their country’s sake.” From the third section of the De finibus appeared the line: “He ought to be praised who finds death for the sake of the republic, who teaches [by his example] that our country is dearer to us than ourselves.” From Ovid’s second book of the Fasti came the simple observation: “He possesses an eternal fame who has won the day.” The preface “unto the gentil reider” adopted a complementary, though quite different voice. William Wallace, to be sure, proved fully comparable to any worthy at any time, whether Gideon or King Arthur. But, more telling to the volume’s editor and printer Henry Charteris, the Wallace story illustrated the sheer power and providence of God. For God “did not cheis Princis & men of greit blude, Authoritie and power,” but instead raised up the insignificant for his purposes—in this case the deliverance of the oppressed.17 The

17 J. Gower (trans.), Ovids Festivals, or Roman Calendar (Cambridge, 1640), p. 33. The Lyfe and Actsis of the Maist illuster and Valzeand Campion William Wallace . . . (Edinburgh, 1594), sig. *iir, *iiiv. Philippica XIV.xii.31: O fortunata mors, quae naturae debita pro patria est potissimum reddita! A saying that has become so well known as to be included in The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations, edited by Norbert Guterman (New York, 1966), p. 59; cf. W.C.A. Ker (trans.), Cicero Philippics (Cambridge, MA, 1957), p. 637. Philippica XIV.xi.30: [illud admirabilis et maius maximque] proprium [senatus] sapientis est, grata eorum virtutem memoria prosequi, qui pro patria vitam profuderunt. Ker, Cicero Philippics, p. 635 (the epigraph compresses the line rendered by Ker as: what is more admirable, and greater, and most encumbent on a wise Senate, is accompany with grateful memory the valour of those that have been prodigal with their lives for their country’s sake). De finibus III.64: [Ex quo sit] laudandus est is, qui mortem oppetit pro Republica, qui doceat chariorem esse patriam nobis, quam nosmetipsos. Cf. H. Rackham (trans.), Cicero XVII: De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (Cambridge, MA, 1914), p. 285 (praise is owed to one who dies for the commonwealth, because it becomes us to love our country more than ourselves). Fasti, II.380: Et memorem famam, qui bene gessit, habet. Cf. J.G. Frazer (trans.),

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“Wallace” would frequently see publication at moments of high levels of political activism—notably in 1640 and 1648. Despite the poem’s violently anti-English attitudes, surprisingly, it was printed when Scots sought close collaboration and even union with England. Scots apparently read it as validating civic ideals and notions of freedom that went beyond Anglophobia. Taken together the frontispiece and the preface combine classical politics with spiritual reform, Cato with Calvin. William Wallace came to exemplify the “pietas” of revolutionary Scotland.

III The values of revolutionary Scotland, it was hoped, would become the principles of an emerging radical Britain. No one promoted this purpose more determinedly than did Melville’s younger associate, David Hume of Godscroft (1558–c. 1630). Hume marks the culmination of the Scottish humanist tradition. He would also develop the fullest and most thorough-going statement about the extraordinary power of education and of its crucial connection to public life. An exile in England with the leading Scottish Presbyterians in 1583–85, Hume and his associates found themselves at one with major English figures such as Francis Walsingham, Philip Sidney, William Davison, and the earl of Leicester in seeing religious reform as a pan-British undertaking.18 Theirs was a common cause—indeed a struggle that extended beyond the British mainland and carried global implications. But far more was at issue than simply sincere Ovid Fasti (Cambridge, MA, 1931), p. 85 (and the success of that day enjoys a lasting fame). The 1640 translation of Ovid surely comes closer to the tone with which contemporaries read it: He laughs; yet griev’d that Remus Fabii Should winnne the game, not his Quintilii The fame continues: they all naked race; And he that got the day hath got the grace. I am grateful to Dr. Linas Eriksonas for alerting me to this edition of Ovid and also for his comments and suggestions about this essay. 18 Gordon Donaldson, “Scottish Presbyterian Exiles in England 1584–85,” in Donaldson, Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 178–90 (originally published in Records of the Scottish Church History Society 14 (1954), 67–80), P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), esp. pp. 275–78. Donaldson’s comment that, for Walsingham, the radical Scots “could do no wrong” (p. 187) is variously revealing.

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religion. Religious reform entailed cultural transformation. Hume subsequently thanked Walsingham for his support during the Scots’ time of crisis through Latin verses that celebrated not only the Englishman’s devotion to “vera pietas” (with its range of meanings) but also and no less to the Muses. Walsingham emerged the “refuge, haven and good guardian” (praesidium, portus, dulce patrocimium) of both. Who is there that doesn’t honor you and respect you with the same love he would have for a father (with the double meaning of “patron”)? /Anyone to whom the Muses and religion are dear? /Surely unless I shall honor you and embrace you with the affection due a father, /Considering that the Muses and religion are dear to you, /Then let me confess myself unworthy the sacred verse, /Nor let me enjoy sincere religion.19

Melville and Hume, no less than Sidney and Edmund Spenser, were regarded as major poets. All of them sought wide reform. All of them adopted a distinctly British perspective. Like his father-in-law, Walsingham, Sidney was directly involved with the exiles and the Scottish cause. Every one of these individuals, as well as those associated with them, saw poetry as integral rather than incidental to what they sought to achieve. Learning in the fullest possible sense lay at the heart of the British reform movement. Narrowly religious accounts of these people and their purposes will consequently only prove distorting. Narrowly national accounts can only prove impoverishing. Hume seems to have regarded the 1603 regal union and the prospect of a new Britain as a Machiavellian “occasione,” an altogether unique opportunity for immediate, far-reaching political innovation and creativity.20 Quite unlike any other unionist literature of the time, Hume’s poetry and his remarkable De unione insulae Britannicae passionately urged a civic and reformed British commonwealth. Further, the new commonwealth would fuse England and Scotland into a common British society, neither English or Scottish. Scots and 19

Quis te non patrio colat, atque obseruet amore,/Cui gratae Musae, grataque relligio?/Certe ego ni patrioque colam, et te amplectar amore,/Dum tibi erunt Musae charaque relligio./Tunc me nec dignum fatear sacrisue carmaenis;/Nec qui sincera relligione fruar. David Hume, Poemata omnia (Paris, 1639), pp. 72–3 (Third Part, “Lusus poetici,” paginated separately). See A.H. Williamson, “Radical Britain: David Hume of Godscroft and the Challenge to the Jacobean British Vision,” forthcoming. My thanks to Paul McGinnis for translating Hume’s two poems to Walsingham. 20 McGinnis and Williamson, The British Union, pp. 59, 91, 277, 293ff, and passim.

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Englishmen would become Britons by the creation of public life through which citizens pursued shared social goods and articulated common purposes. Only within such a politicized, quasi-republican world could there ever be an enduring, workable union, and Hume went on in the second part of the De unione to outline in surprising detail the constitutional and political arrangements by which it might be achieved—whose publication would be suppressed, even in France. Only civic ties rather than dynastic loyalty, the values of the polis rather than of the court, radical enactments rather than tradition, could produce an equitable union, a genuinely British society. No other unionist writing, however ardent, at any point approached such sweeping vision. Hume’s determined civisme reaches further than that of any of his predecessors, whether Boece in 1527, Buchanan in 1567–68, or Melville in 1590. It would require one great legislative act of almost Sinaitic proportions, and yet one in which the peoples of both realms directly participated. If at moments Hume seemed to cast James in the role of a classical legislator, the king still remained a surprisingly modest figure. No Lycurgus, no Solon, and certainly no Moses, James needed only to give his “nod.” Political society would emerge not simply through approbation, but participation. To a surprising extent Britain would be self-created. Hume called for the founding of a new people. His project sought nothing less than to supplant what we today would call Scottish and English “identities.” Yet there could hardly have been a greater Scottish patriot. One of the very earliest to adopt that neologism, Hume resisted James VI and I’s intrusion of bishops into Scotland during the first decade of the seventeenth century as English “tyranny.” Hume took great pleasure in speaking “Scottish,” the northern kingdom’s Anglophone tongue, while southern speech was simply a dialect and possibly an inferior one at that. To learn the latter amounted to no more than “affectation.” Hume even believed, astoundingly, that no form of English had existed in Scotland prior to the thirteenth century and the coming of Edward I. However, none of this in any way qualified his passion for Britain, and Hume is utterly removed from today’s nationalist sensibility, which involves concepts that neither he nor his contemporaries could have understood, much 21 A.H. Williamson, “Patterns of British Identity: ‘Britain’ and its Rivals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715 (London, 1999), pp. 138–73.

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less approved.21 We find not the slightest trace of concern for an imagined Scottish “soul” and any such transcendent categories that would separate Scots from other peoples. Quite the reverse. For intellectual reasons Scottish patriotism generated British consciousness and with it the prospect of a reformed and redeemed world. For practical reasons Britain proved no less compelling. The king would remove to London (that was never a question), and there English influence would become great, perhaps paramount. Almost inevitably Scotland would find itself dominated and provincialised as a result. Only a new people with a shared culture could prevent this. In the end Britain was Scotland’s best hope. Hard as it might be for us to imagine today, no one disputed “conformity to England.” The real issue for Scotland—for the world—was to which England would it be. Hume, no starry-eyed naïf, fully appreciated the manifold challenges to imagining much less creating a civic polity in 1603. King James’s British agenda—traditional, hierarchical, authoritarian— conflicted profoundly with Hume’s central objectives, and the De unione needs to be seen as the patriot response to the True Lawe of Free Monarchies, the republican riposte to the Basilikon Doron. One might with an effort see Scotland as a commonwealth, but the far broader British stage, composed of multiple realms, would prove still harder to conceive as one great city, the polis required by classical political theory. Hume’s constitutional, political, and social proposals were designed to fashion just such a Britain. No less were they intended to overcome the revitalized “absolutist” monarchy increasingly prominent in France, England, Scotland, and so much of Europe by the later 1590s. At the same time his proposals sought to resist the effects of the Counter-Reformation, which by that decade had begun to bite deeply into European culture, and the concomitant retreat from politics of the “new humanism” so tellingly promoted by figures like Michel de Montaigne and Justus Lipsius. Now in Hume’s radical Britain certainly there would take place a massive cultural flowering, of the sort anticipated by Boece, Bellenden, Buchanan, Melville, but on a scale that they could hardly have dreamed. If new Britain would lead the Protestant world—and Hume could easily have said the free world—expansion abroad did not mean militarism at home. Quite the contrary, peace was prerequisite for Scottish and English potential. If Scotland had “fewer able scholars, fewer productive talents” than other countries, or at least

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“not as many as we might have,” this was the cause. Scholarship and learning can only go unrecognized within the upheaval of war. Take away all honor except military glory from the Italians, “and how many superb talents would you find?” Pallas herself would scarcely have loved literature. It’s certain that she wouldn’t have had much time for it. Learning would lie neglected in Greece itself, so it is little wonder that there’s not a great deal here and to that extent we seem less civilized.

In the new Britain men will “move over to the camp of the Muses.” That, however, by no means implied that they withdrew from public life. Just the reverse. They would not do so “as baseborn knaves, nor as cowards . . . but as soldiers ready to do battle henceforth on a different ground, and with a different expense.”22 Learning necessarily comprised a civic activity. The struggle against universal empire, the Counter-Reformation, the Habsburgs, would not be decided simply on the battlefield but also within the realm of letters. Men who, as fighters in the wars between England and Scotland, had formerly worked against the good of this island would now strive for the common interest. Hume had no patience whatsoever for anti-intellectualism—particularly among the aristocracy who were by definition public people. In his history of his own family, the De familia Humia, he blasted the “opinion” that letters were unbecoming aristocrats. In his great History of the House of Douglas he denounced “the perverse and pernitious tenet” that learning might be an impediment to “politick activenesse.” Just as primitivism was not built into Scottish circumstances and character, so too wilfully unlearned aristocrats were not unique to Scotland. If anything they were “especially” a problem in France—probably an oblique reference to Montaigne’s severe separation of private learning from public life.23 Pace Montaigne, public life did not preclude leaning, but was predicated upon it. Like most learned Scots, Hume vigorously dismissed the idea that the Scottish past comprised benighted darkness populated with bar-

22

McGinnis and Williamson, The British Union, p. 87. Vix ipsa literas Pallas amaverit: certe vix iis vacaverit. Iacebit ipsa in Graecia neglecta eruditio; ut minus mirum si hic non plurima sit; et ideo rudiores videamur. 23 Hume, De familia Humia (c. 1611; Edinburgh, 1839), p. 61; Hume, History of the House of Douglas (Edinburgh 1644), part 2, pp. 360–1.

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baric primitives. Nevertheless he was acutely aware that the era before the Reformation remained a “an age of foolishness” preoccupied with fighting and security, “an age of soldiers, not philosophers,” one concerned with “honor and glory” rather than with “what was right and just.”24 If the Douglases found their analogue in the Fabii and the Scipiones of republican Rome, and only lacked the latter’s renown because of the narrow stage on which they acted, military virtue still needed to meld with political virtue and so with culture. No moment in the past became an unqualified model for the present. Now, with society rising on new foundations, Scots could “refute that old charge of ignorance and . . . show that it was never a failing of the Scottish people, but rather of the times.” New Scotland—British Scotland—would become famous for its scholars rather than for its warriors, and Scots would become celebrated for “the civilized virtues” rather than, as in former times, for their bravery.25 The opportunities in the British age seemed all but limitless, and they apparently extended to just about everyone. The conclusions seem extraordinarily meritocractic and populist when Hume declares: “We don’t want men of this kind [of learning and letters] to be as rare as in former times, but to be numerous, indeed to be the entirety of the population.”26 After all, so many achievements seemed to result simply from education. “Nor do I doubt that there were some of small or no name who, given the same chance in life and the same education, could have equalled or surpassed” even the greatest names.27 The implications were emphatically activist. Let not our native land stand in the way of anyone’s ambition. Whoever you are, do not be lacking in yourself, and she [Britannia] will not be lacking to you.28

Familiar ways of thinking crumbled; traditional postures became untenable. The old excuses simply would not do. 24

De familia, pp. iii–iv. McGinnis and Williamson, The British Union, p. 89. 26 The British Union, p. 89. Italics added. Non raros, ut olim; sed frequentes, sed universos: 27 The British Union, p. 83. Nec dubitem fuisse quosdam aut parvi, aut nullius nominis, quibus si eadem sors, ac educatio accessisset, aut aequare illorum quemvis, aut superare potuissent. 28 The British Union, p. 93. nec quenquam patria impediat, quo minus aliquo in loco sit. Tu quisquis es, tibi ne desis, illa non defuerit. 25

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chapter one Nor will there be any person complaining that his native land will stand in the way of his virtue which, if I am not mistaken, was the excuse we used to hear from people born in Scotland.29

Buchanan had indeed become universalized. Now the opening remarks to the De jure regni became articulated, elaborated, and, seemingly, realizable. Hume never imagined a democracy. He could not have imagined a modern world of social mobility. But he did insist on the largest possible levels of social participation and citizen involvement. And that world demanded education on an similarly extensive scale. To be sure, in the new Britain Scots would attend Oxford and Cambridge, and Englishmen would attend the Scottish universities. Few things did more to generate a sense of closeness and society, Hume noted, than warm memories of college days and of friendships formed during the college years. But Scottish universities needed proper funding, especially faculty salaries. “Capable men who are already teaching in these universities shall be suitably rewarded. Others shall be attracted by respectable stipends and honorable terms of employment.” The monies should come from the old church properties, “from the Scottish bishoprics, from the monasteries, and from the spoils and remnants of Papism.”30 Andrew Melville must have smiled. At the other end of the spectrum lay the Highlands and the Isles. Hume was quick to point out that these regions did not distinguish Scotland from other countries. Did not all nations have their primitive regions, their mountain men? “The Alps, the Pyrennees, the Apennines, the Caucasus, and the like; that is, Italy, France, Spain, Asia Minor, etc.,” how did they differ from Scotland and her mountains?31 Nothing need condemn any individual, any nation. No place on earth need be blighted. What were needed was the right institutions and the right determination. Paraphrasing Horace, Hume added . . . what in sum do we find? That mental ability is lacking to us? Or to this clime, or this earth? Or is there anything so wild that it cannot become tame, and, if you train it, that cannot take on a civilized way of life?32

29 The British Union, p. 125. nec quisquam queretur obstare virtuti patriam; quae vetus fuit, aut fallor, nostratum querela. 30 The British Union, p. 215. 31 The British Union, p. 81. 32 The British Union, p. 83.

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Hume’s solution to the Highland problem will be grossly offensive to today’s romantic sensibility. He proposed the establishment of English settlements at Lochaber and in the Isles. Later Lowland Scots would join them, and intermarriage between these two groups would feature high on Hume’s agenda.33 Why in the world did Hume want English people in the Scottish Isles and in the most intractable region of the mainland? Britain was to be one country, one people. Ethnic identity was not something to be invented, savoured, and defined by its (putative) victimhood, but to be overcome for higher, shared purposes and common humanity—very much in ways that anticipate the European Enlightenment. His view is profoundly anti-racist in the sense that it vehemently denied the significance of any such category. Much the same principles informed Hume’s proposed plantations. English settlements in the most remote areas of Scotland would cause English people everywhere to own these regions as part of their country and part of their responsibility. Such settlements, whether English or Lowland Scottish, would not seek to overawe the local inhabitants, but to provide an exemplary model. Let’s see the inhabitants there put aside their ill-will by slow degrees, their uncivilized way of life by the example [of the settlers], and little by little take on the aspect of humanity.34

Adopting the aspect of humanity can only have meant joining the highest form of human association, becoming a citizen. Hume visibly sought assimilation rather than extirpation. There would be no clearances, but, like Buchanan, he envisioned civics and civility supplanting Gaelic traditionalism. Post-Romantic preoccupations with “authenticity,” “higher wisdom,” and “diversity” formed no part of his mental world. More important, the proposal grows out of his notion of governance being at once participatory and also British. Hume had imagined Britain being ruled not simply by a British parliament and a British council, but, in significant ways, also by a number of regional councils. These regional councils differ importantly from late twentiethcentury devolution. The ones in based Scotland—the jurisdiction of

33

The British Union, p. 217. The British Union, p. 223. Sentiat ipsa Barbaries ejus vim et dulcedinem, et se mirari desinat ac amare; exuantque et illinc Incolae consuetudine odium; exemplis feritatem; et humanitatem paulatim induant. 34

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the ones at Carlisle and Edinburgh deliberately straddled the old Borders—drew a fifth of their membership from England, while the ones based in England had a comparable proportion of Scots. Local government combined irreducibly with a British horizon. Perhaps the most striking consequence of Hume’s daring commitment to the civilizing power of education was its egalitarianism and its uncompromising opposition to any kind of discrimination based on blood or regional origins. Hume’s words on the matter are arresting. I do not disparage the individual of any people whatsoever. I would wish that others would refrain from extolling themselves too much and from denigrating those who are different from them. Mindful of justice and humanity, let all, one with another, strive in moderation.35

Hume had in mind Scottish and English people with this comment, but his principles were unquestionably universal. It truly could not matter on Hume’s argument whether one’s first language was English, Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, Norse, Cornish, Manx, Cumbric, or Galwegian. What mattered was one’s participation in public decision taking, and the most important decision of the moment was the creation of Britain itself. Civic involvement, even when wrongheaded, might yet have a positive effect and was a matter of consequence. Nor would I deem any man so inept that he could never come up with good advice, or with things worth our attention. At the very least, a public discussion would clarify the issues. Whoever would wish at some time to declare his opinion would have the opportunity and, by comparing his own [opinion] with those of many others (whether they were the same or otherwise), produce thereby something more carefully worked out. He would then either correct or corroborate what he wants to say. There’s no such thing as excessive diligence here, no consideration of the subject by one and all that can be too free and uninhibited. The creation of the union pertains to everyone, and whatever we devise will last for all time to come. There’s no need for secrecy. The union, a worthy thing in itself, doesn’t require that.36

35 The British Union, p. 83; cf. p. 285. non cuiquam gentium detrecto; vellem nec se alii nimis efferrent; nec nimis aliis detrectarent. Omnesque cum omnibus, recti et humanitatis memores, modestia potius certaremus. 36 The British Union, p. 309. nec tam ineptum fastidierim, ut non putarim posse in apta incidere, et commodum admonere. Sic saltem ventilata res nitesceret, et qui sententiam olim dicturus sit, haberet multorum collatione seu idem, seu aliter sentientium, quod maturius promeret, se aut corrigens aut confirmans. Nulla enim hic

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It is hard not to hear the voice of the Enlightenment in these remarks. We are not, however, hearing the voice of the immediate future. The increasingly authoritarian world of James I, Henri IV, and Philip III lay ahead. Hume represents the culmination and final expression of Scottish Renaissance values, with confidence in the citizen, in public discourse, and in the transforming power of education for the whole of humankind.

IV With the exception of Boece, all these would-be initiators of cultural activity and promoters of learning were poets. With the exception of Bellenden, every one of them wrote in neo-Latin and were deemed by contemporaries to be of European stature. They bear comparison with another quite different poet who altogether rejected their agenda, their values, and their poetry: King James VI and I. Drawing on continental models from largely Catholic courts, James, it is claimed, effected a “literary revolution” during the 1580s (at least for Scotland). Moreover, by promoting “mannerist” modes of allegory the king’s “Castalian band” of poets allegedly turned away from the cold, austere, and “plain” styles encouraged by Calvinism. The bright world the young king encountered with the Counter-Reformer and counter-revolutionary Esmé Steuart, seigneur d’Aubigné, whom he created duke of Lennox, is contrasted starkly with that of his Calvinist captor, William Ruthven, 1st earl of Gowrie.37 Yet the significance of “the Castalian Renaissance” and “James’s cultural revolution” remains ambivalent. Not only has the “Castalian Band” as a coherent group of court poets turned out to be a twentieth-century myth, the king’s interest in poetry itself declined after 1588.38 He wrote less and less during the next decade, almost none after

nimia diligentia, nulla nimis aperta rei consideratio ab omnibus, quae ad omnes pertinet, in omne aevum duratura. Nec celari quicquam opus: non id res postulat per se honesta; 37 Roderick J. Lyall, “James VI and the Sixteenth-Century Cultural Crisis” in J. Goodare and M. Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton, 2000), pp. 55–70, and notably 57–59, 63, 65–6, 68–70. 38 Priscilla Bawcutt, “James VI’s Castallian Band: A Modern Myth,” in Scottish Historical Review 80.2 (2001): 251–59.

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1603. Patronage accordingly declined; in England it would be minimal and hugely disappointing. Rather than support poetry James created a political environment that was openly hostile to such momentous poems as Andrew Melville’s “Gathelus” and Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.”39 Melville and Hume remained active poets in the new century not because of the king but despite him. In Scotland the civic tradition identified itself not only with radical politics but no less with cultural achievement—in ways going far beyond its conservative opponents. At the heart of it all lay an extraordinary confidence in education.

39 See James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (Cambridge, 2000), p. 38 and especially chapter 4; R. Malcolm Smuts, “The Political Failure of Stuart Cultural Patronage,” in G.F. Lytle and S. Orgel (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance, (Princeton, 1981), pp. 165–87, notably 184–5. Also Graham Parry, “Patronage and the printing of learned works from the author,” in J. Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (eds.), History of the Book in Britain IV: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 179. Some of the materials regarding James’s hostility to Spenser are summarized in Wiley Maley, A Spenser Chronicle (Lanham, 1994), pp. 67–8. Contrary to the article about him in The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Andrew Melville continued play an active role in Scottish ecclesiastical politics, despite his exile to France in 1611, right up through the final year of his life in 1622. Although Melville had laid aside his great epic, he continued to write highly influential verses about Scottish and British religious issues. He was a master at epigrams, and the epigram, as Doelman rightly notes, comprised a form of broadside, all the more memorable and effective for being succinct and witty. Continually recycled as new issues arose, poetry often had a much longer life than did pamphlet literature—and was taken very seriously on all sides as a result. Alan R. MacDonald, “Andrew Melville,” in M. Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford, 2001), pp. 417–8. It is unfortunate that such a standard reference work should simply discount Melville’s later career.

CHAPTER TWO

A MAN FOR ALL REGIONS—PATRICK COPLAND AND EDUCATION IN THE STUART WORLD Shona Vance

In his introduction to The Oxford History of the British Empire, Nicholas Canny refers to Patrick Copland, a clergyman, as being “exceptional both in his global view and experience.”1 Canny does not exaggerate: Copland travelled to the far reaches of the Stuart world but recognised no real boundaries in it. He made his mark in Britain, the East Indies and the Americas and in many ways symbolised the connections and tensions between the Old World and the New, while remaining part of both. Throughout, he never lost sight of his one world vision and of the role of the active citizen in that world. That vision was of the establishment of a godly commonwealth and was driven by a belief in the power of education to secure it. Concomitant to this was a conviction of a duty to enable and persuade others to contribute to and to participate in it. A study of the evolution of Copland’s initiatives in this field can cast light not only on his own life and character but also on contemporary perceptions of the function of education in the Stuart world.

I Copland was a Scot, born and educated in Aberdeen.2 Very little is known of his early years, but some detail can be gleaned from incidental remarks in his own letters.3 His father was a merchant of the

1 Nicholas Canny, ‘The Origins of empire: An Introduction’ in Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998) vol. I, Origins of Empire, p. 18. 2 Canny mistakenly asserts that Copland was English. Ibid., p. 18. 3 Several of Copland’s letters to the Council of Aberdeen and to individuals in the burgh are published in vols. I–III of Aberdeen Council Letters, ed, Louise B. Taylor, 6 vols., 1552–1681 (London, 1942–61) (hereafter ACL).

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burgh, and the young Patrick, born in 1572, attended the long established grammar school and was an early graduate of Marischal College where he had been taught by both Robert Howie and Gilbert Gray, the first and second college principals.4 Copland’s experience as one of the early students of Marischal College was a formative one not simply in terms of the education he received, but also in terms of his understanding of the founding principles and early problems of the institution. In his subsequent involvement with the college he would embrace those principles and seek to rectify the problems. George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal, had founded the college in 1593 as a bastion of Protestantism in the religiously suspect north.5 Keith felt that the type of education he had himself received on the continent, one with a humanist concentration on the liberal arts fitted for producing the officers of a godly commonwealth, was distinctly lacking in his own corner of Scotland.6 King’s College in

4 His father’s occupation is identified in Smith’s Oratio, reproduced in Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis. Selections from the Records of the Marischal College and University, MDXCIII–MDCCCLX, 3 vols. Vol. I, Endowments, ed. P.J. Anderson (Aberdeen, 1889), p. 159. (Hereafter FM I). In a letter written in 1615 to David Wedderburn, Grammar school master of Aberdeen, Copland refers to Gilbert Gray as his “worthie and reverend master”; he later also refers to Robert Howie as “my maister.” (ACL I, p. 133; ibid., p. 342). Given that Howie left Marischal College in 1597, Copland must have been in at least the first year of his arts course by then, and is unlikely to have been any younger than fifteen at least by then, but was probably significantly older. See ‘Patrick Copland’ in the New DNB (Oxford, 2004). Like an impressive number of their contemporaries, both Howie and Gray were native Aberdonians of continental academic experience not just as students but as teachers also. For the continental backgrounds of Howie and Gray see James K. Cameron, ‘Some Aberdeen Students on the Continent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ in Paul Dukes (ed.), The universities of Aberdeen and Europe: the first three centuries (Aberdeen, 1995), pp. 58–62 and George Molland, ‘Scottishcontinental intellectual relations as mirrored in the career of Duncan Liddel (1561–1613)’ in ibid., p. 95. While there is nothing to suggest that Copland himself undertook the pereginatio academica of many of his countrymen, his later letters make clear that he had connections with many of them and did not lose interest in their careers or achievements after leaving Aberdeen or indeed Britain. 5 For interpretations of the foundation of Marischal College, see, David Stevenson, King’s College, Aberdeen, 1560–1641: from Protestant Reformation to Covenanting Revolution (Aberdeen, 1990), and G.D. Henderson, The Founding of Marischal College, Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1947). 6 FM I, pp. 60, 61. On Keith’s continental education see, William Ogston, Oratio Funebris in obitum Maximi Virorum Georgii, Marischalli comitis, D. Keith et Altre, etc. Academiae Marischallanae Abredoniae fundatoris et Mecoenatis munificentissimus (Aberdeen, 1623), pp. 11, 12; P. Buchan, An Historical and Authentic Account of the Ancient and Noble family of Keith, Earls Marischal of Scotland; from their origins in Germany, down to 1778 (Peterhead, 1820), p. 51.

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the neighbouring burgh of Old Aberdeen had resisted religious reform for almost a decade after the Reformation and continued to resist the type of pedagogical reform instituted by Andrew Melville at Glasgow and St Andrews.7 Keith’s eventual solution was to found his own university in New Aberdeen. The constitution of this new foundation was drawn up on expressly humanist lines with a key teaching role being accorded to the Principal who was to have a sound knowledge of the Scriptures and of the biblical languages.8 In addition, the foundation acknowledged one of the fundamental principles of educational theory, if not practice, in Reformation Scotland— that the academically able should be fitted to serve the commonwealth regardless of means.9 As well as teaching and domestic staff, the endowment of Marischal College was to provide for six foundation bursars in arts. While the Earl’s aspirations may have been high, the endowment he provided for his foundation fell far short of enabling it to achieve them. The early years of Marischal College were blighted by financial difficulty. Robert Howie, first Principal, whom Copland would later refer to as “my master,” was frequently obliged to go to law to obtain the college dues.10 The Principal, such a pivotal figure in Keith’s vision of his academy, was utterly overburdened and under-paid, and the provision for poor scholars was in reality non-existent.11 That Copland was fully aware of these problems is clear from what he later resolved to do for his alma mater.

7 On Melvillean reform see, R. S. Rait, ‘Andrew Melville and the Revolt against Aristotle in Scotland’, English Historical Review, vol. XIV (1899), and James Kirk, ‘“Melvillian” Reform in the Scottish Universities’ in A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan (eds.), The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan (Leiden, 1994). It is also thoroughly examined in John Durkan and James Kirk, The University of Glasgow, 1451–1577 (Glasgow, 1977). 8 FM I. 9 This belief was firmly articulated by the Protestant Reformers of 1560 in the first Book of Discipline. See The First Book of Discipline, ed. James K. Cameron (Edinburgh, 1972), p. 132. 10 Aberdeen University Library (hereafter AUL), Department of Special Collections, MS M56, College Rentals 1593–1764, pp. 28–33. 11 AUL, MS. M56, College Rentals, 1593–1764, f. 40r, ‘Faltis in the Fundation’. Although this document is undated, the handwriting, which bears strong similarities to that of an account from 1594 in the same volume, and the fact that there is no mention of private endowment of teachers or bursars, suggests a date prior to 1611, when the first such private endowment was made. Subsequent private provision for poor scholars at Marischal College is discussed in Shona Vance, ‘Poverty and the Pursuit of Learning: Poor Scholars in Seventeenth—Century Aberdeen’, History of Universities vol. XVIII/2 (2003).

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What happened to Copland in the years immediately following his university studies is unclear, but he became one of the early band of Scots who made their way south, and their fortunes, in the wake of James VI’s accession to the English throne. In 1612, he joined the English East India Company, first going overseas as chaplain of its tenth voyage.12 He was to remain with the company over the course of several expeditions for almost a decade. When not voyaging overseas, he made his base at Norton in Northamptonshire. There is no record of him returning to Aberdeen in this period, but whether in Northamptonshire, London, or Indonesia, from where he wrote to the council of Aberdeen detailing troubles between the English and the Dutch, matters in his native burgh remained of lively concern to him.13 At an early date, he resolved to put what financial resources he could towards realising the founder’s vision for Marischal College. Ironically, perhaps because its ambitious founder had endowed it with meagre resources, the early decades of the seventeenth century proved beneficial to Marischal College and to education in Aberdeen in general. Scholars whom lack of adequate teaching provision at home had persuaded to go abroad to complete their studies were returning home, some with fortunes already made and others in a position now to make themselves wealthy. The existence of a young, under-endowed and under-developed university in their native burgh presented them with a focus for civic piety, which could reflect and record their own experience and interests. By the time Patrick Copland was in a position, financially, to express his gratitude to his old college, a pattern of educational benefactions—more properly known as mortifications—had already begun to emerge in the burgh.14 Copland would become a key figure in the development and perpetuation of this pattern. In May of 1615, he wrote to David Wedderburn, master of the grammar school of Aberdeen, expressing his desire to gift the burgh 2000 marks Scots (£111 sterling) for the maintenance of four bursars at Marischal College.15 He later wrote 12 John Keay, The Honourable Company: a History of the English East India Company (London, 1991), p. 91. 13 ACL. I, p. 157, 24 February, 1619. 14 Shona Vance, ‘Mortifications (Bursaries and Endowments) for Education in Aberdeen, 1593–1660 and their Implementation in the Seventeenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis (Aberdeen, 2000) examines this in detail. 15 ACL, I, p. 133.

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that his intention had been to give aid to poor scholars “such as once I was myself.”16 But as well as being motivated by his own personal experience of scholarly poverty, he may also have been acting consciously in emulation of those who had gone before him. The response of the council when presented with Copland’s offer was to ask him to change his mind. While thanking him for his generosity, they inquired whether he might be prepared to amend his intentions and bestow the money instead for the use of the Principal and Masters, “seeing thair is provisioun maid alreddie for ten bursaris and na competent provisioune as yit for principall nor maisteris.”17 They may more than once have regretted their request. Copland’s terms for agreeing to their suggestion were that his money should only be used for the support of a Principal who met the foundation charter’s requirements for a learned divine and linguist.18 This in itself was hardly a bad thing, but Copland became deeply distrustful and at times contemptuous of the council’s efforts to find suitable candidates for the Principalship following the death of his old master, Gilbert Gray, whom he had greatly admired. Not content to bask in the reputation of a generous and pious benefactor of his native burgh, he was determined to see his own gift and those of others like him properly employed. For the next thirty years, Patrick Copland would be the unwanted conscience of Aberdeen Town Council in its dealings with Marischal College. Essentially, what he endowed in three instalments totalling 6000 marks Scots [ £333 sterling], was a Chair of Divinity at the college.19 In the early years of the chair’s existence, the founder’s expectations of it became clear: it was to be filled by men of high academic credentials and wide experience who would uphold the Presbyterian form of church government and who would facilitate the spread of the gospel throughout the north-east of Scotland through the training of able ministers. Because of their essential role in the training of ministers, the establishment of chairs of divinity was fundamental to plans for the erection of a godly commonwealth in Scotland,

16

ACL, I, p. 132. Chronologically, this letter came after that referenced above. FM I, p. 167, Extract from Town Council Register, Vol. 47, p. 201, 21 June, 1615. 18 ACL, I, p. 132. 19 The three texts making up Copland’s full mortification are printed in FM I, pp. 159–165. 17

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and as such proved a popular focus for civic piety throughout the country.20 The chair did not come into being immediately on the first instalment of Copland’s mortification, but evolved over time. In the first instance, the council instituted a readership in Divinity and appointed to it Mr William Forbes.21 In his person, Forbes continued the connections between Marischal College and northern and central Europe. He had himself travelled in Germany and the Low Countries, studying at continental universities including Helmstedt and Leiden.22 Copland regarded him as holy, learned and sufficiently well qualified for the position, and was happy to release his money for the payment of Forbes’s stipend.23 Forbes became Principal of Marischal College in March 1620, but his transfer to a charge in Edinburgh in 1622 presented the council with a problem, as Copland remained adamant that his money could only be used for the support of a Principal who was a linguist and theologian. Copland wrote to the council in 1622, re-iterating this point, and promising the college more money if the council complied.24 He also made reference to his kinsman, Walter Donaldson, whom he appears—quite without authority—to have canvassed for the vacant Divinity professorship in Aberdeen. Donaldson was at this time principal of the Huguenot academy at Sedan, but the increasing pressures on the Huguenots and their academies in France may have persuaded him of the desirability of returning to Scotland.25

20 Bruce McLennan, ‘Presbyterianism Challenged: A Study of Catholicism and Episcopacy in the North East of Scotland, 1560–1650’ Aberdeen University Ph.D. thesis, 2 vols., 1977, unpubl., vol. I, 234, points out that the principals of Edinburgh and Glasgow taught divinity until 1620 and 1641 respectively, when chairs of Divinity were founded in those institutions, and that an Act of General assembly of 1616 had stipulated that while Aberdeen remained without a theological school, all candidates for the ministry should attend St Mary’s College, St Andrews. For brief details of initiatives to bolster Divinity teaching at Glasgow and Edinburgh through private benefaction at this period see Vance, Thesis, Appendix, ‘Mortifications for education at King’s College, Old Aberdeen, at Edinburgh College and at the University of Glasgow between Reformation and Restoration’. 21 FM I, p. 156. 22 Selections from Wodrow’s Biographical Collections: Divines of the North-East of Scotland ed., Robert Lippe (Aberdeen, 1890), 246; Henderson, Religious Life, p. 62. 23 FM I, p. 170. 24 Aberdeen City Archive, Council Register (Hereafter ACA, CR), vol. 49, 522, 01 March, 1620; ACL, vol. I, pp. 189–91. 25 Donaldson had accompanied Arthur Johnston, (the mathematician William’s brother) to Sedan in 1603. W.D. Geddes and W.K. Leask (eds.) Musa Latina Aberdonensis

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Loyalty to his native burgh made him ready to accept a smaller salary in Aberdeen than he might command elsewhere, and, concluded Copland, not illogically, if you can have a learned and painefull man of your owne Towne who hath given good proofe of his learning and dilligence abroad, I sie not why hee should not be entertained before any other.26

Yet his canvassing for Donaldson appears to have come to nothing, as he was soon casting around for another suitable candidate. His frustration regarding Donaldson was merely a precursor to the anger provoked in him by the town’s intransigence on the question of episcopal government, and what it meant for their college in terms of the loss of highly able and experienced personnel. This manifested itself when Copland’s attentions turned to Robert Boyd who had enjoyed a successful career as a pastor in France prior to his taking up a teaching position at Saumur in 1608.27 He had left Saumur in 1614 and returned to Glasgow, where he succeeded Principal Sharpe.28 A refusal to submit to the liturgical innovations known as the Five Articles of Perth led to Boyd’s withdrawal in 1621 from his position at Glasgow University and then in 1622 from Edinburgh.29 By October 1623, Copland was attempting to attract Robert Boyd to Aberdeen. The council’s attitude to his efforts infuriated him, for it was clear that they, no more than Glasgow or Edinburgh, would consider a man who openly refused to accept episcopal government.

(3 vols. Aberdeen, 1892–1910), vol. III, xviii; DNB vol. XV, p. 215. It was to the upheavals in France in 1621 that Wodrow attributed John Cameron’s return to Scotland from Saumur, where he held the chair of Divinity—“The occasion of it was plain. The confusions and disorders in France were so great, that the students at Saumur, and other parts of France, were obliged to retire and scatter themselves the best way they could.” Robert Wodrow, Collections upon the Lives of the Reformers and Most Eminent Ministers of the Church of Scotland, vol. II (Glasgow, 1848), p. 154. On the worsening situation of the Huguenots in France, see E.K. Hudson, ‘The Protestant struggle for survival in early Bourbon France: The case of the Huguenot Schools’, Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, Jahrgang 76 (1985), p. 287. 26 ACL, I, p. 191. 27 Jacques Pannier, ‘Scots in Saumur in the Seventeenth Century’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, vol. V (1935), p. 141. 28 J. Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow from its foundation in 1451 to 1909 (Glasgow, 1909), p. 85. 29 Coutts, University of Glasgow, p. 87; Wodrow, Collections upon the Lives of the Reformers, vol. II, pp. 165–9, details Boyd’s experiences at Edinburgh, and the ideological objections to his tenure of the Principalship there.

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chapter two Unto what passe,” demanded Copland, “have your Lordly lordes brought the estate of god’s Kingdome with you . . .? Must France and other countries bereave you of yor peerles of inestimable value? What this portends, I cannot divine . . .30

What Copland could not divine was already happening. The increasingly tense religious atmosphere in Scotland, where King James’s episcopal policy was being pressed against much opposition, meant that religious politics rather than academic ability, experience, or even kin and connections were beginning to dictate the pattern of appointments to university positions, particularly to chairs of theology.31

II By this point the tide had turned in Copland’s own life, and while he kept very much abreast of developments in academia at home and on the continent, his own personal interests were taking him westwards to the Americas. An episode fairly early on in his time with the East India Company offers an indication of the direction his interests would take and is relevant to his later initiatives in promoting free schools in the Americas. On his return from his first voyage as chaplain with the East India Company, a court minute of the Company dated 19 August 1614 records a recommendation that, The Indian youth brought home by Captain Best and taught by Mr Copland to read and write, to be sent to school and instructed in religion, that hereafter he may be sent home to convert some of his own nation.32

In 1615, Copland wrote to the company informing them of the boy’s continuing progress and asking for instructions regarding his baptism, “being of opinion that it were fit to have it publicly effected, being the first fruits of India.”33 After consultation with the Archbishop

30

FM I, p. 173, 27 October, 1623. On James’s episcopal policies, see Gordon Donaldson, Scotland, James V–James VII (Edinburgh, 1965), pp. 198–211, but esp. pp. 205–11. Shepherd, Thesis, Chapter 7, pp. 299–308, briefly discusses individual instances of the effect of political and religious upheaval on academic tenure in seventeenth century Scotland. 32 Calendar of State Papers—Colonial: East Indies 1513–1616 (London, 1862), p. 316, Court Minutes of the East India Company, August 19, 1614. 33 Ibid., p. 421, July 18, 1615. 31

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of Canterbury, the boy was baptised Peter Pope in December 1616, his name having been chosen by the king. In 1617, Copland accompanied the voyage on which Peter Pope returned to India.34 In some ways this seems an almost perfect vignette of the colonialist approach to education. Yet it was far from being a new approach, and far from being restricted to new territories thousands of miles distant. Rather, it was a version of what the Stuarts and the Tudors before them had been attempting with the Native Irish for decades and the Stuarts with the Scots of the Gàidhealtachd since the end of the sixteenth century. In both Scotland and Ireland, the Stuart administration sought to use education in the English tongue and Protestant religion to integrate Scots and Irish Gaels into the legal system and cultural practices of the ruling administration. Initially in Scotland, a programme of fostering conformity in matters of law and religion was carried out in the context of an awareness that the most effective ministers in Gaelic areas would be Gaelic speakers.35 James was persuaded to pursue a similar policy in Ireland, where Lord Deputy Sir Arthur Chichester argued for the encouragement of the native Irish to Trinity College and initiated means of supporting them financially as a means towards the education of their co-linguists and their ultimate conversion to Protestantism.36 Such ideas would be highly relevant to those of the Stuart era involved not only in trade with the East but also in the attempted colonisation of the New World. It would appear that Copland’s own thoughts soon began to turn westwards, in the direction of the New World of the Americas. Through the agency of Sir Thomas Dale, late governor of the Virginia

34

Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. VII, (December, 1893), p. 107. Cf. Donald Withrington, ‘Education in the Seventeenth Century Highlands’, in L. MacLean (ed.), The Seventeenth Century in the Highlands (Inverness, 1986), p. 60; A.I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 603–1688 (East Linton, 1996), p. 65; J. Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’ in A. Pettegree, A. Duke and G. Lewis (eds.), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 231–53; Jane. Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those rude partes”: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s-1640s’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire (vol. I Oxford, 1998), p. 134; Victor Edward Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages (Edinburgh, 1983), Chapter 1, esp. pp. 4–6, 10. J. Kirk, Patterns of Reform: Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 280, 478. 36 Alan Ford, ‘Who went to Trinity? The early students of Dublin University’ in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin, 1998), p. 63. 35

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Company and Sir Thomas Gates, he had become interested in the plantation of Virginia. In the course of a voyage home from Japan in 1621, off the Cape of Good Hope, he took his first initiative on behalf of the Virginia Company, organising a collection to assist in the planting of the colony.37 The Virginia Company had been granted its charter in 1606 and the first attempt at colonisation had been made in the following year. Severe initial demographic and economic difficulties threatened the very existence of the colony and called into question the viability of the project. The establishment of military discipline and increasingly profitable involvement in the tobacco trade had been instrumental in setting the colony on a more secure footing. A new regime under Sir Edwin Sandys from 1619 sought to change the complexion of the colony with the establishment there of an elected assembly.38 Moves were already underway to create educational structures in Virginia, and the planned establishment of a university college at Henrico was an integral part of efforts to secure civic institutions there.39 In 1618, King James had licensed the levying of a special contribution throughout England for the erection of a college “for the training up of the children of those infidels in true religion, moral virtue, and civility, and for other godliness.”40 Despite the term

37 Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. 7 (1893), p. 107; Bibliographia Aberdonensis, p. 314; Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Rev. Patrick Copland, rector elect of the first Projected College in the United States: A Chapter of the English Colonisation of America (New York, 1871), p. 29. The subtitle of this book is more accurate than its title; as a biography of Copland, it is not particularly satisfactory, the author acknowledging in his preface that he could ascertain neither the place of birth or of death of Patrick Copland. It does, however, shed valuable light on Copland’s connections with the New World, which cannot be found in print elsewhere, references to him in such works as Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Founding of Harvard College (Cam. Mass., 1935) being incidental. The chief merit of Neill’s Memoir is that it prints Copland’s most famous sermon, ‘Virginia’s God be thanked’ almost in its entirety. 38 T.O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558–1983 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 15–18. 39 See letter from the Virginia company to the authorities in Jamestown, November 18, 1618, quoted in Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 15. Comparisons, if not exact parallels, can obviously be drawn with the use of education in the territorialisation of contemporary Central Europe. Peter Baumgart, ‘Die Anfänge der Universität Helmstedt im Spiegel ihrer Matrikel (1578–1600)’ Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch, vol. 50, 1969, discusses the foundation of the university of Helmstedt in terms of Duke Julius’ attempts to consolidate his lands. Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638. Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000), pp. 17–20, portrays the background against which the decision to erect an academy to further the process of confessionalisation and the consequent strengthening of the state (in this instance the Academy of Herborn in the county of Nassau-Dillenberg) was made. 40 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 15.

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‘infidels’, this approach to the education of the indigenous people of Virginia is resonant of the sentiment behind the foundation of schools and scholarships throughout Stuart Britain and indeed contemporary Europe.41 ‘True religion’ in this case would, of course be Protestantism; ‘moral virtue’ would be the behavioural standards without which the social fabric and understood social structures would be threatened; and ‘civility’ was an understanding of and commitment to the perpetuation and operation of these values and structures. The educational scheme would therefore have a dual purpose. One element would be the education of the natives in Protestant religion and European values. The other would be the training of functionaries to man the appropriate religious and civic institutions within the colony. The plan to found a university obviously necessitated provision for schooling in Virginia, and this prompted private individuals to make benefactions for education at more elementary levels, particularly for the children of the indigenous peoples of the colony. One of the most valuable of these came from a benefactor going by the cheerless pseudonym of “Dust and Ashes.” He appears to have raised £500 sterling amongst his friends for the maintenance of a convenient number of young indians taken at the age of seven years, or younger, and instructed in the reading and understanding the principles of religion unto the age of 12 years, and then as occasion serveth, to be trained and brought up in some lawful trade with all humanity and gentleness until the age of one and twenty years and then to enjoy like liberties and privileges with our native English in that place.42

Faced with the duty of accommodating the ideal to the practical, the Virginia Company decided the money should be invested in plantations already underway. Indian children in its care who were found to be apt for academic education were to be enrolled in the college and prepared for taking up fellowships there. Those who were not were to be “put to trades and be brought up in the fear of God and the Christian religion.”43

41 Shona MacLean Vance, ‘Godly Citizens and Civic unrest: tensions in schooling in Aberdeen in the era of the Reformation’, European Review of History, 7 (2000), pp. 123–126. 42 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 23. 43 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 25.

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This echoed the idealised scheme for education of the young which had its roots in Reformation Europe and a clear parallel set out by the Scottish reformers of 1560 in the Book of Discipline, and had much in common with charitable schemes for the education of the poor at home.44 The belief underlying such ideal systems was that all should be enabled to serve God according to their calling in a manner which preserved order in society and provided society with the functionaries it required at all levels. The necessity of doing this within a Christian—Protestant—framework was common to all these schemes, but in territories selected for colonisation, the securing of the native population for the Reformed religion was seen to be an essential tool in gaining the acquiescence of these peoples to the new order.45 Again, as the case of the Tudors and Stuarts in Ireland demonstrates, this was as fundamental to plantation initiatives in the Old World as it was in the New.46 It was never expected that the scheme would work smoothly. A particular concern was that there was no legal way of keeping the children from running away to their parents or friends, or being stolen away by them. As the Company acknowledged, “as natural affection may inforce in the one and the other.”47 Nevertheless, the ‘conversion of the Infidelles’ remained a matter of great concern to ‘Dust and Ashes’, as did the employment of his benefaction—in addition to the original £500 sterling endowment, he had also gifted £50 to ensure the proper administration of the fund.48 At around 44 The First Book of Discipline, ed. James K. Cameron, (Edinburgh, 1972). Any children brought under such a scheme would effectively find themselves in a position similar to those supported out of charitable bequests to poor children in Scotland. For instance, a prominent Aberdeen woman, Jean Guild, gifted money for the support and education of orphans in the burgh, who were to be trained in the fundamentals of religion and taught to read, write and sew, and “all such as may fitt them for ane vertuos calling of traid of lyff according to thair sex,” girls until they were fifteen, boys until they were eighteen. ACA, CR vol. 53/1, p. 209, 11 April, 1649. 45 See Vance, ‘Godly Citizens’, pp. 123–6. 46 See endnote 37, above; also, R. Gillespie, ‘Church, State and Education in Early Modern Ireland’ in M. O’Connell, ed., Education, Church and State, Dublin, 1992, pp. 40–59. 47 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 26. 48 Concerns about the mismanagement of such charitable bequests for education were not misplaced; the Aberdeen mortifications, of which Copland’s was one of the most prominent, were at times seriously mismanaged, though not always through the fault of the administrators. Vance, Thesis, Chapter 4. The problem was widespread. At Basel, Bonifacius Amerbach, Erasmus’ heir and first administrator of his

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the time of Copland’s collection for the Virginia Company at the Cape of Good Hope, Dust and Ashes was urging the company to put the money he had already given it to its intended use. Alternatively, he promised to make his initial £550 gift up to £1000 if the Company would “procure that some of the male children of the Virginians, though but a few, be brought over into England here to be educated and taught, and to wear a habit as the children of Christ’s Hospital do.” If this was not done, the initial £550 was to be given to a free school where native Virginians and English children should be taught together.49 The Company had a greater grasp in the difficulties inherent in such plans than did their benefactor, and planned to invest the moneys in an ironworks, a proportionate sum of the profits to be used for the educating of 30 of the native children.50 However, it was soon made clear how difficult a thing it was at that time to obtain any of their children with the consent and good liking of their parents, by reason of their tenderness of them, or fear of hard usage by the English, unless it might be by a treaty with Opachankano, their King.

Evidently, the Virginia Company would not follow the approach taken by Copland and the East India Company to the education of Peter Pope. It wrote to Dust and Ashes trying to explain such difficulties, pointing out to him that experience had shown that transporting these children to England for their education “might be far from the Christian work intended.”51 One can only speculate that Copland, who had accompanied Peter Pope on his return journey to India in 1617 and who was by now heavily involved in the

great bequest to the city, made arrangements for the transfer of the administration of the Erasmusstiftung to the university of Freiburg in the event of any attempt to misuse the money. L. Felici, ‘The Erasmusstiftung and Europe: The Institution, Organisation and Activity of the foundation of Erasmus of Rotterdam from 1538–1600’, History of Universities, vol. XII (1993), p. 32. In Protestant Nimes, one of the duties of the ‘advocatus pauporum’ was to ensure that benefactions to the poor were not embezzled for other uses. Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘Organizational Endeavour and Charitable Impulse in Sixteenth Century France: The Case of Protestant Nimes’, French History (1991), p. 6. 49 Neill, Patrick Copland, pp. 39–41. 50 Ibid., p. 43. 51 Ibid., pp. 44–5.

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Company’s educational initiatives, might have been the subject of this experience.52 Very shortly after its initial correspondence from ‘Dust and Ashes’, the Company also, in April 1620, received a report that Nicholas Ferrar, one of its former managers, had died and left £300 sterling in his will towards converting native children in Virginia, which would be paid when 10 native children were placed in the college.53

III Clearly therefore, benefactions had steadily been finding their way to the Virginia Company by the time Patrick Copland took his first steps on its behalf off the Cape of Good Hope in 1621. None of the Virginian plans had, however, advanced very far, and hearing of the lack of schools and churches in the colony spurred him to action. He immediately organised a collection amongst the officers and men on his ship. As a Virginia Company minute records, he had been pleased, as well by his own good example as by persuasion, to stir up many that came with him in the ship called the Royal James to contribute towards some good work to be begun in Virginia . . . he had already procured . . . 70 pounds to be employed in that way, and had also written from cape Bona Speranza to divers partes in the East Indies to move them to some charitable contribution thereunto.54

In understanding the methods employed by Patrick Copland in furthering the causes he believed in the key words here are “example,” “persuasion” and “stir up.” Copland was adept at all three and this extract typifies the manner in which Copland responded to what he perceived to be a need, a lacuna in the fabric of the Christian commonwealth. When he took up a cause, he would first lead by example, making a donation himself; he would then expect those around him to do the same, and finally, he would embark on a campaign of attempt52

Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. VII (1893), p. 107. Ibid.; Neill, Patrick Copland, pp. 27–8. 54 Virginia Company Minutes, recording Copland’s return from the East Indies and the interest he had taken in the Company’s welfare, 1621, quoted in Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 30. 53

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ing to apply psychological or social sanction, through letters or personal entreaties, on those whom he felt should also be contributing to the cause. The application of psychological and social sanctions was possible and effective in Stuart society because of the pervasive importance of visibly religious behaviour and an often institutionalised obsession with status. Where Scottish Calvinism was concerned, this psychological sanction came into force most obviously in relation to good works. Justification by faith had replaced justification by works. However, many early Scottish Calvinists came to believe that good works were the necessary effect of true faith. Concomitant to this belief was the need for assurance that one was of the elect. In order to gain assurance and, just as importantly, to make clear one’s assurance of election to others, one must live an actively good life. It was not enough to feel assurance, one also had to demonstrate it.55 Such views clearly found favour with Patrick Copland, and not only did he act on them, he also preached them to others. Copland put his persuasive talents in this field to the benefit of the Virginia Company. In April 1622, the company asked Copland to preach a sermon of thanksgiving before its members. The sermon he preached in London on 18 April 1622, was a tour de force and an object lesson in Calvinist rhetoric. A fruitful source for the student of early modern Britain, for present purposes it offers invaluable insights into Copland’s powers of persuasion and understanding of his target audience.56 He appealed to public vanity and civic pride in exhorting them to add to their other plentiful good works, and

55 The issue of the Scottish Calvinist approach to works is complex, and cannot be treated at length here. Gordon Marshall, Presbyteries and Profits: Calvinism and the Development of Capitalism in Scotland 1560–1707 (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 49–56, discusses the works of John Craig, John Davidson, and Robert Bruce, who, preaching from the 1570s to the 1630s, argued that good works were a manifestation of true faith. On the ‘psychological sanction’, see Marshall, Presbyteries and Profits, 16. Similarly, John Morgan in Godly Learning, Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 21, talks of the “externalization . . . of the drive for edification,” as helping the puritan to “judge the visibility of his own grace also in terms of that of others.” 56 As practical incentives Copland opened before his congregation the prospect of over-population, famine, underemployment, disorder and disease which otherwise faced the metropolis and the English countryside. In a similar vein, he hinted darkly that all they had already invested might be lost should they not redouble their efforts to consolidate it. Neill, Patrick Copland, pp. 68–9; p. 60.

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‘preach your munificence through all the world’.57 He also held before them the prospect of divine and earthly approbation, And . . . seeing that so many of the Lord’s worthies have done worthily in this noble action; yea, and seeing that some of them greatly rejoyce in this, that God hath inabled them to helpe forward this glorious worke, both with their prayers and with their purses, let it be your greife and sorrow to be exempted from the Company of so many honourable minded men, and from this noble plantation, tending so highly to the advancement of the Gospell, and to the honouring of our dread Soveraigne, by inlargeing of his kingdomes, and adding a fifth Crowne unto his other four . . .58

To his appeal to the purses and the elective conceit of his Jacobean congregation Copland thus added the application of both a psychological and a social sanction: in short, in his efforts to stir them up to acts of benevolence, he used every trick in the book. Prior to this, Copland’s own initial collection of £70 sterling taken at the Cape of Good Hope had been increased to £100 by an anonymous donation.59 Initially, the ultimate destination of the donations had been unclear, the company being unsure whether to apply the funds to the building of a church or a school. Eventually, it was decided that it should be used for the erection of a public free school for the planters’ children. The other donations had been concerned with the children of ‘Infidels’, but this school plan sought to address the needs of the planters themselves. It was noted that such a school which, being for the education of children and grounding them in the principles of religion, civility of life, and humane learning, seemed to carry with it the greatest weight and highest consequence unto the plantations, as that whereof both church and commonwealth take their original foundation and happy estate, this being also so like to prove a work most acceptable to the planters, through want whereof they have been hitherto constrained to send their children from thence hither to be taught.60

It was also recommended that the school, which was to be built at

57

Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 72. 59 J.F.K. Johnstone and A.W. Robertson (eds.), Bibliographia Aberdonensis: being an account of books relating to or printed in the shires of Aberdeen, Banff, Kincardine or written by natives or residents or by officers, graduates or alumni of the Universities of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1929), vol. I, p. 314. 60 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 33. 58

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Charles City, should act as a feeder to the college at Henrico, where scholars coming from the Company’s free school should be eligible for fellowships and scholarships.61 Copland, rather naively perhaps, was hopeful of persuading the East India Company to give material support to the Virginia school scheme. In this he was to be disappointed. A minute of the East India Company notes the request but records the feeling that any such support would be better directed towards their own members’ needs.62 The Company did not however forbid its individual members from contributing, and a significant number must have done so, because the school was to be known as the ‘East India school’, and children of members of the East India Company were to be preferred to places there. Copland had also written to “divers factories in the East Indies to stir them up to the like contribution towards the performance of this pious work.”63 The Virginia Company itself ear-marked 1000 acres of land for the support of the school. For his efforts and initiatives on behalf of schooling in the colony, Patrick Copland was admitted as a free brother of the Virginia Company, granted 300 acres of land there, rent-free, and appointed ‘Rector of the intended College in Virginia for the conversion of the Infidelles’.64 Copland secured the mastership of the school for a friend of his whom he had presented to the Company as “a very good scholar of his acquaintance.”65 The Company, with an eye to basic utility as well as classical learning, was also keen that a teacher of writing and arithmetic, to instruct the children in “matters of account,” should accompany the master. It appears that the writing master was to be paid in much the same way as someone in his position at home would have been—by the parents of the individual children he taught rather than by the institutional body who employed him—the Company itself undertook simply to pay his passage. The master and children of the school were also to be provided with the

61

Eliot Morison, Harvard, p. 413. CSPC, America and West Indies, 1675–1676, Addenda 1574–1674, p. 67, 13 December, 1624. 63 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 32. 64 Eliot Morison, Harvard, p. 414; Bibliographia Aberdonensis, vol. I, p. 314. Court Minute of the Virginia Company 3 July, 1622 in Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 80. 65 Ibid., p. 47. 62

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books they would need.66 One book which had been produced specifically with the Virginia school in mind was “A Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles,” written by a young Puritan minister, John Brinsley, who hoped his book could be adapted “for all functions and places, and more particularly to every ruder place, as to the ignorant country of Wales, and more especially to that poor Irish nation.”67 Clearly he regarded the latter two peoples as being as in need of his help as were the Native Americans and the unschooled Virginian colonists. On the very day the plans for staffing the school were finally approved in London, the Company got news of the safe arrival of eight of its ships and 800 colonists in Virginia in December, 1621, prompting Copland’s great sermon of thanksgiving and exhortation.68 It must have been a high point in Patrick Copland’s life.

IV Copland’s increasing interests and involvement overseas did little, if anything, to dampen his concern for educational progress in his native burgh, on whose behalf he also appears to have used his powers of persuasion to good effect. In February, 1619, for instance, the burgh council of Aberdeen received a letter from Patrick Copland telling them that one David Chamberlaine had left them 1000 merks Scots [ £56 sterling] for the maintenance of Marischal College in whatever manner the provost, baillies and council thought most convenient.69 Chamberlaine was unusual amongst the College’s benefactors in that he was not a native Aberdonian, although he had spent at least part of his childhood there. He may well have attended the grammar school, but his name does not appear in the extant matriculation lists for King’s and Marischal Colleges, and by the time of his matriculation in the medical faculty of Leiden, at the age of 23 in 1613, he classified himself as ‘Anglo-Londoniensis’.70

66

Ibid., pp. 48–49. Quoted in Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 37. 68 Ibid., p. 49. 69 ACL I, p. 157, letter from Patrick Copland to the Council of Aberdeen, 24th February, 1619. 70 R.W. Innes-Smith, English-speaking Students of Medicine at the University of Leyden (Edinburgh, 1932), p. 43. 67

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Despite this, he retained an association with the burgh, and was admitted burgess there in 1616. Chamberlain was surgeon on the Royal James; Copland of course, was at that time the ship’s chaplain.71 There is a clear lack of pedagogical aim to Chamberlaine’s legacy, and a conventional element to his act of piety. This might always, of course, simply indicate the hasty deathbed testament of a young man who had not expected to die so soon. However, there must be at least a suspicion that the young surgeon was under pressure from his ship’s zealous chaplain to perform such an act. Copland was certainly not averse to pressurising the sick and dying on the matter of the disposal of their wealth, for he was clearly instrumental in obtaining a significant legacy from Thomas Reid for the burgh and college of Aberdeen. Onetime master of Aberdeen Grammar School, continental scholar and teacher and, ultimately, Latin secretary to James I, Reid, on his death in 1624, left to the burgh of Aberdeen his entire library of around 1350 books to be placed in Marischal College.72 In addition, he left the sum of 6000 merks [ £333 sterling] whose annual interest was to be employed for the maintenance of a librarian to look after them.73 His act of benevolence had been reluctant and hard won. Reid’s reluctance to leave anything to the college sprang from his distrust of the council’s management of the gifts in their trust. It was a distrust which Copland very much shared. Copland had written to the Council from London on the 14 May 1624, a letter begun while Thomas Reid was still

71

J.F. Kellas Johnston, ‘The Aberdeen University Educator’, in P.J, Anderson (ed.), Studies in the History and Development of the University of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1906), 355. 72 Old DNB, p. 878; H.F. Morland Simpson (ed.), Bon Record: Records and Records and Reminiscences of Aberdeen Grammar School (Aberdeen, 1906), p. 34; J.K. Cameron, ‘Some Scottish Students and Teachers at the University of Leiden in the late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’ in G.G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton, 1996), pp. 127–8; MLA, III, 315; Calendar of State Papers Domestic Series, of the Reign of James VI, 1611–18 (London, 1858), p. 538; H.J.H. Drummond, A Short-title Catalogue of the Books Printed on the Continent of Europe 1501–1600 in Aberdeen University Library (Oxford, 1979), p. 306. The extracts from Reid’s will pertaining to his benefactions to the town are printed in FM I. 73 Reid’s legacy of books, and the adequacy of the early librarians employed by his gift are analysed by I. Beavan, ‘“The Best Library that ever the North Pairtes of Scotland saw”: Thomas Reid (Latin Secretary to James VI) and his Books’ in P. Isaac and B. McKay (eds.) The Reach of Print (Winchester, 1998), and ‘Secretary Thomas Reid and the Early Listing of his Manuscripts; or, did the Librarians make matters worse?’ Northern Scotland, 16 (1996), pp. 175–85.

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alive, and finished in the knowledge that he was dead. In the letter, Copland asked for evidence that his mortification was being properly employed and not embezzled or diverted to another use. He went on to say, rather ambiguously, “For, this is one of the manie causes: yea, indeed the alone cause why Mr Thomas Reed (with whome I have dealt) is so slack in doing you good.”74 A postscript to the letter announces Reid’s death and legacy.75 In a later letter he again spoke of Reid’s lack of enthusiasm “for doing anything in the tyme of his health for the flourishing of your schooles: although both my selfe and others dealt verie earnestlie with him to that effect.”76 It would be interesting to know Thomas Reid’s views on Patrick Copland’s persistent agitation on behalf of Marischal College; certainly, his final months cannot have been peaceful ones.

V By this time, though, Copland had already seen the destruction of his own hopes for the establishment of schooling in Virginia. Unbeknown to him and his congregation as he had preached his sermon of thanksgiving in April 1622, an Indian massacre of settlers upon the college lands had left the colony desolate.77 Nevertheless, Copland had still been determined to go to Virginia, writing to the magistrates of Aberdeen in 1623 that were there as many Devils in Virginia as there be men and trees there, thither would I go: for my life is not deer to mee to doe God service there, or anywhere els, wheresoever hee calls mee.78

However, with the king’s subsequent revocation of the company’s charter in 1624 much of the investment was lost and the Indian college scheme over.79 For Copland, who would have been rector of the first college in the Americas, this must have been a great dis-

74

ACL, I, p. 225. This postscript is not included with the transcript of the original letter by Louise Taylor in ACL, but can be found in FM I, p. 174. 76 ACL, I, p. 234, 22 September, 1624. 77 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 82. 78 ACL I, p. 221, 27 October, 1623. 79 Eliot Morison, Harvard, pp. 412–4. 75

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appointment, but it did not discourage him from his efforts to bring education to the New World, and he followed his call elsewhere. A subsidiary of the Virginia Company had established itself in the Somers Islands—Bermuda—and the planters took with them the £300 bequest of Nicholas Ferrar for the establishment of a school.80 In 1626, Copland, with his wife and daughter, joined them as one of the colony’s ministers.81 Settled in Bermuda, he opened a school. Little is known about this school other than that he sent to London for a large number of catechisms for his scholars.82 The catechism was a fundamental tool both in teaching literacy and reformed religious principles. A basic resource in English—that is, reading and writing as opposed to grammar—schools, it was also an essential means of inculcating reformed religious principles into the wider community. A literate, or simply catechised child could act as teacher to an illiterate or uncatechised parent, and it was common in reformed churches for schoolchildren to make public repetition of the catechism for the benefit of their elders.83 Despite the fact that all his fortune accumulated with the East India Company was now gone, much of it having been ploughed into the Somers Islands venture without any likelihood of profitable return, Copland declared himself thankful, in a letter to the council of Aberdeen in 1633, that he had not wasted his wealth but used it in “setting forth Gods works in these westerne parts of the world as wel as I have done somewhat towards the furthering of letters and lerning in your Towne.”84 While this might have been a fitting epitaph to Copland’s life and career, events did not allow him to spend his final years reflecting on his achievement. Rather, the religious vicissitudes, which would wrack his homeland and incidentally severely hamper the filling of his chair of Divinity at Marischal College, made their way across the ocean to his Bermudan idyll. In 1637, a new minister, Nathaniel White, arrived in the colony, bringing with him his Independency.85 In time he managed to convert two of the island’s other three

80

Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. V, 2, (1891). Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. VII, 107, (1893). 82 Jean Kennedy, Isle of Devils—Bermuda under the Somers Island Company 1609–1685 (London, 1971), p. 177. 83 See Vance, ‘Godly Citizens’, p. 130. 84 ACL, vol. II, p. 1, 1 January, 1634. 85 Kennedy, Isle of Devils, p. 185. 81

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ministers to his cause. Patrick Copland was the last to be persuaded, but persuaded he was.86 These individuals renounced their ministry in the Church of England on 1 January 1643.87 Copland had always been deeply suspicious of hierarchical church government, as indeed his interference in the matter of the selection of a Principal for Marischal College shows. In the Somers Islands, he and his ministerial colleagues attempted to use the well-worn method of beginning catechising in schools to spread their Independency amongst the population at large.88 By this time the principle island school was one founded by Nathaniel Rich, a prominent member of the Somers Islands Company, who had died in 1637 leaving five shares of his Bermudan estate for the establishment of a free school on the island. Its schoolmaster was Richard Norwood who had been a teacher in London.89 Having fled factionalism in England, ironically on the same boat that had brought the Reverend White to the islands, Norwood was reluctant to comply with the wishes of the Independents. His school, where pupils boarded and learned grammar, writing and arithmetic, appears to have been popular and successful, but he was not personally able to withstand the antipathy of the Puritan ministers and the campaign of their supporters to undermine him. Eventually, he was hounded from his post.90 The ascendancy of the Independents was short-lived. In 1646, a reaction against them saw them forbidden to hold services in any of their meeting places. Copland was imprisoned for a time for his non-compliance.91 In the following year, Copland and around 70 other independents left the Somers Islands and headed south with the intention of colonising the Bahamas island of Eleuthera. Conditions on Eleuthera were harsh, not lending themselves to an independent economic existence for the Puritan colony. Their fellow Congregationalists in Boston sent them a provision ship in 1651, which found the colony in dire straits but Copland still alive and preaching. Out of gratitude, the Somers Islands Company made a donation, known as the Eleuthera donation, to Harvard College, where the son of the

86 87 88 89 90 91

Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. V, 2, (1891). Kennedy, Isle of Devils, p. 185. Ibid., pp. 188–90. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 191; Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. VII, (1893), p. 108.

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Congregationalist leader was then studying. Eventually, the Eleuthera colony was abandoned, and many of the colonists returned to Bermuda, although some took up the offer to go instead to Jamaica. It is thought that Copland probably died in Eleuthera at some point prior to the colony’s dissolution.92

VI He had come a long way, and fallen very hard, since the days of his affluence in the East India Company and his correspondence with intellectuals and divines at the time of his foundation of a chair of Divinity at Marischal College. Yet in all that time and through all his vicissitudes he had not forgotten his hometown, his alma mater, or the benefactions he and others had made. His last known letter to the magistrates of Aberdeen is dated 1647, the year of his imprisonment in Bermuda and prior to his departure for the Bahamas. In many ways it makes sad reading, but it is also characteristically robust, and above all, revealing of the times. He has heard his chair of Divinity lies empty. He berates the council for their mismanagement of his gift, and, indeed, hints at corruption on their part. He laments their lack of communication with him over many years, and his disappointed hopes that those “dark Cymmerian corners in that North part of Scotland might be illightened by the torches kindled in that schole by my gift.”93 He was right, his chair was not at that time filled, partly because of financial mismanagement but mainly because a poisonous factionalism had so taken hold that it was nigh on impossible to persuade anyone of principle to consider a Divinity chair in Aberdeen.94 His native burgh was utterly ravaged by civil war and incessantly changing occupation by opposing forces.95 Copland, writing “from my studye in Pagets Tribe in Somer Islands” gave little appearance of being aware of any of this. Instead, he assured his correspondent that “the clear sunshine of the Gospel begins to

92 Neill, Patrick Copland, p. 93; Kennedy, Isle of Devils, p. 196; Eliot Morison, Harvard, pp. 129, 449 (Eleuthera Donation). 93 ACL, vol. III, pp. 30–31, 12 February, 1647. 94 Vance, Thesis, chapter 5, section II studies this in detail. 95 See ibid., chapter 4, section III: ii, for analysis of the effects of the civil war on the ability of the town’s finances to allow it to meet its educational obligations.

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irradiat these western parts of the world where it is like to sit for which we dayly bow the knees of our soulls to the father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”96 The Old World may have been proving itself beyond redemption, but at the end of his life, Patrick Copland clung tenaciously to his belief in the New. Throughout his efforts to secure the establishment of a godly commonwealth, he may often have been angered or disappointed by the human failings that hindered his ideal, but he retained an unswerving commitment to his cause. His efforts on behalf of Marischal College and the East India, Virginia and Somers Islands Companies were always tempered by local circumstances, but the aim was ultimately the same. All of his schemes were based upon the same broad reformed Protestant educational principle. This principle was readily adaptable at the national and colonial level to meet the needs of the expanding Stuart hegemony. It is important to note, though, that even at an early stage, partially driven no doubt by a pragmatic understanding of the likely consequences, colonists were not entirely blind to the moral ambiguities of what they were attempting to do. The extent to which Copland, and those individuals and institutions with whom he joined were successful in their efforts to shape the Stuart World, is another question.

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ACL, III, p. 31, 12 February, 1647.

CHAPTER THREE

THE EUROPEAN CATHOLIC CONTEXT OF THE REVOLUTION OF 1688–891: GALLICANISM, INNOCENT XI, AND CATHOLIC OPPOSITION Steve Pincus

“If the Pope is concerned at all about the Prince of Orange’s enterprise,” the Marquis de Lavardin wrote to Louis XIV, “it is in the fear that it won’t succeed. . . . [the pope] hopes almost openly that this Catholic monarch [ James II ] will be thrown out of his rightful throne.” Indeed, Lavardin told his king, “if the Prince of Orange was fighting a holy war against the infidel, one could not wish him greater success than we do here [at Rome].”2 “Instead of being sorry as we ought at the news we still receive from all parts of Britain,” confirmed the Scots Catholic William Leslie from Rome, “we rather rejoice in our bosom at them.”3 Two months earlier James II’s agent John Lytcott had reported from Rome that rumours “of the designs of Holland against England give great gusto to this court.”4 Why was Pope Innocent XI interested in seeing the first openly Roman Catholic King of Great Britain and Ireland overthrown in favor of a Dutch Protestant? Was Papal opposition to James VII and II anything more than personal pique? What relation did Catholic opinion in Rome have to Catholic opinion in the British Isles?

1 I am grateful for the suggestions and criticisms of Johann Somerville, Susan Stokes, and Abby Swingen. All of the translations from French are my own unless otherwise specified. 2 Lavardin to Louis XIV, 17/27 December 1688, in E. Michaud, Louis XIV et Innocent XI, 3 vols. (Paris, 1883), 3 vol. II, p. 129. 3 William Leslie (Rome) to Charles Whyteford, 8/18 January 1689, S[cottish] C[atholic] A[rchives, Edinburgh], BL 1/123/17. Sir Robert Southwell heard a similar report second hand: Sir Robert Southwell, “A Short Account of the Revolution,” F[olger] S[hakespeare] L[ibrary, Washington D.C.], V.b.150, Vol. I, f. 1v. 4 John Lytcott (Rome) to earl of Sunderland, 6/16 October 1688, P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice, London], SP 98/17, unfoliated. Lord Thomas Howard went so far as to blame Pope Innocent XI for “all the revolutions now in England” (Monthly Account, December 1688, p. 91).

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These questions have infrequently been asked. In fact, scholars have rarely taken James’s Catholicizing policies seriously.5 This is in part because many scholars are convinced that a Catholic king was doomed to failure in the Protestant British Isles.6 Certainly papal giddiness at William of Orange’s invasion of England, does not accord well with accounts of the Revolution of 1688–89 as a popular antiCatholic putsch, as one of the great battles in the struggle between the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Those few scholars who have analyzed Catholic sentiment in the reign of James II have noted profound divisions between court and country Catholicism, but these divisions are defined by differences in style and political strategy, not differences in ideological commitment.7 While both John Miller and J.R. Jones treat the country Catholics as “an essentially residual community,”8 and therefore lacking clear ideological orientation, they and others are more precise about the views of the court Catholics. First, court Catholicism was in no way absolutist. James’s religious views, it is said, bore no resemblance to the absolutist pretensions of French court Catholicism.9 Second, most recent scholars have emphasized that James II and his court were

5 For one recent exception, see Lisa Clark Diller, “Faith and toleration in late seventeenth-century England” (University of Chicago Dissertation, 2003). 6 “The driving force behind the successful attack on the Stuart monarchy [in 1688],” argues Brian Magee, “was provided by the very widespread hatred and fear of the Catholics and of the Catholic religion” (“The Protestant Wind,” The Month, July-August 1941, p. 334). James II and English Catholics inevitably became “the universal scapegoat,” according to Eveline Cruickshanks (The Glorious Revolution, (London, 2000), p. 16). This was because under James II “the threat of popery was,” Jonathan Scott has claimed, “the danger posed by counter-Reformation Catholicism to a beleaguered and defensive Protestantism” (England’s Troubles (Cambridge, 2000), p. 209). 7 J.R. Jones observes that there were “serious divisions” between “the conservative, recusant aristocracy and gentry of the provinces” who were “inert, defensively minded, and intellectually negligible” on the one hand and “the fashionable and cosmopolitan court section” on the other (The Revolution of 1688 in England, (New York, 1972), pp. 79–80). John Miller, in his careful analysis of English Catholicism, also finds “divisions” between the “country” Catholics, who feared “for their estates,” and the “’court’ Catholics” who “urged James to press ahead” (Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688, (Cambridge, 1973), p. 206). 8 The phrase is Jones’s, The Revolution of 1688, p. 80. 9 Miller asserts that “it is wildly implausible” that James and his circle “should have tried to create an absolute monarchy in England,” in part because that may well have benefited his detested Dutch nephew in the long run (Popery and Politics, p. 197). Eveline Cruickshanks agrees that James’s Catholic policies “differed radically from those of Louis XIV” (The Glorious Revolution, p. 21).

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sincere in their commitment to religious toleration. James, scholars now agree, had no interest in following Louis XIV and imposing Catholicism by force.10 In fact, there were deep ideological divisions within the English (and Scottish) Catholic communities and these divisions can only be understood by placing both James II’s supporters and his Catholic opponents within the context of European Catholicism. Eveline Cruickshanks maintains rightly that “the Revolution of 1688–89 should be seen in the context of European history, rather than as a purely British affair,” but the European context informed James II’s actions as much as William III’s.11 Geoffrey Scott is also right that James’s “devotional life” can only be understood “within the trends in European Catholicism.”12 But again, not only James’s piety but also his attitudes towards absolutism and toleration can only be properly understood in a European context. European Catholics in the later seventeenth century were deeply divided by the conflict between Louis XIV and Pope Innnocent XI. James II clearly sided with the French King in that conflict. His closest advisors were well known to have deeply Francophile sympathies. French Gallicanism, enunciated not only in France but in the British Isles as well, had very clear positions on royal power and the possibility of religious pluralism. While English supporters of Innocent XI did not publish their

10

Miller, Popery and Politics, p. 197. Miller, it must be said, does not go as far as others in describing James’s views. James, he maintains, “was not a tolerationist in the sense that he believed that honest differences of opinion could be or should be permitted within a state . . . in fact he believed the opposite.” (Ibid., p. 201). However, Miller later wrote that “without James II’s conversion, toleration would not have been established as early as it was.” “Miller, “James II and Toleration,” in E. Cruickshanks ed., By Force or Default? (Edinburgh, 1989), p. 24. J.R. Jones has claimed that Catholic preachers, in keeping “with the official atmosphere of toleration which James was establishing,” replaced anti-Protestant polemic with “calm vindications” (The Revolution of 1688, p. 89). W.A. Speck insists that so profound was the king’s commitment to toleration that “James’s sincerity need not be doubted when he deplored the consequences of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV” (Reluctant Revolutionaries, (Oxford, 1988), p. 178). This accords with Malcolm V. Hay’s insistence on James II’s “natural inclination to tolerance” (Winston Churchill and James II, (London, 1934), p. 47). 11 Cruickshanks, Glorious Revolution, p. 25. 12 Geoffrey Scott, “The court as a Centre of Catholicism,” in E. Corp ed., A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 238–9. I dissent from Michael A. Mullet’s view that English Catholicism can only be understood to have “a European profile after 1688” (Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 82).

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views as openly, they were able to make their positions well known. It was this deep ideological division among British Catholics, a division in which both sides had claims to cosmopolitanism, that explains not only Innocent XI’s celebrations of William’s arrival in November 1688, but in turn explains in part William’s own sympathy with (and protection of ) elements within the British Catholic community. Critical and understated divisions within the British Catholic community during the reign of James made it easier for William to implement religious toleration and damper confessional politics on both the domestic and foreign fronts.

I Europeans were keenly aware by the later 1680s that there was no love lost between His Most Christian Majesty Louis XIV and the Pope Innocent XI.13 By late 1687 tensions between the courts of Versailles and Rome had escalated out of control. The Pope refused to receive the new French Ambassador, the Marquis de Lavardin. In January 1688, the English ambassador in Paris, Bevil Skelton, reported that “the Pope has excommunicated Monsieur de Lavardin.”14 Louis XIV was predictably outraged. He publicly declared he would take measures that “perhaps would not be very agreeable to the Pope.”15 Rumors spread that those measures included a French invasion of papal territories and that the French King intended “to throw off the Pope’s authority.”16 For his part Innocent XI let it be known that he “firmly expects the worst his M[ost] C[hristian] M[ajesty] can do to him and that he will meet all the force he sends against him with a crucifix.”17 While no French troops arrived to sack Rome,

13 “That which makes most noise now is the dispute between France and the Court of Rome,” observed George Etherege of the European political scene (George Etherege (Ratisbon) to Earl of Sunderland, 9/19 January 1688, H[arvard] T[heater] C[ollection, Cambridge Ma.], fMS THR 11, p. 237). 14 London Newsletter, 17 November 1687, FSL, Lc 1884; London Newsletter, 22 December 1687, FSL, Lc 1896; Bevil Skelton (Paris) to Sunderland, 4/14 January 1688, PRO, SP 78/151, f. 131r; Michaud, Louis XIV et Innocent XI, vol. II, pp. 242–247. 15 Skelton (Paris) to Sunderland, 10/20 December 1687, PRO, SP78/151, f. 123r. 16 London Newsletter, 3 January 1688, FSL, Lc 1903; London Newsletter, 14 January 1688, FSL, Lc 1908; London Newsletter, 28 January 1688, FSL, Lc 1914. 17 Peter Wyche (Hamburg) to Lord Middleton, 3 February 1688, B[ritish] L[ibrary, London], Add. 41826, f. 260v.

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and Louis XIV never repudiated the Pope’s authority, relations between Paris and Rome remained icy. “We must expect another Pope before we see an end to this matter,” correctly observed the English envoy and playwright George Etherege.18 Tensions between the Papacy and the French King did not subside over the course of the fateful year of 1688.19 Louis XIV enraged the Pope by invading the Papal city of Avignon in September. The Papal court “is now in the height of resentment for Avignon, and the Bishop taken away prisoner,” reported the English envoy at Rome John Lytcott, “so that the Pope cannot but be exasperated more and more, and if he is not able to resist with temporal arms ‘tis apprehended he will employ the spiritual.”20 The Pope and his propagandists denounced Louis XIV to all who would listen. Innocent himself called the French King “the common enemy of West-Europe.”21 His propagandists accused Louis of seeking to be “the Universal Monarch of Europe.”22 No wonder then that the Dutch diplomat Everard van der Weede, Heer van Dijkveldt, kept a portrait of Innnocent XI in his chamber, dubbing him the “Protestant Pope.”23 Not only did Innocent XI fear and loathe Louis XIV, he also detested the increasingly Francophile Society of Jesus. Both the Scottish Catholic William Leslie and the Scottish Protestant Gilbert Burnet concluded that in Rome the Jesuits “are looked upon as

18 George Etherege (Ratisbon) to the Marquis d’Albeville, 16/26 April 1688, I[ndiana] U[niversity], Albeville MSS. 19 Louis infuriated the Pope by forcing the election of his candidate, William von Furstenberg, as Bishop-Elector of Cologne. Innocent XI claimed that the appointment was “an intrusion, a usurpation, and simoniacal” (Quoted in Michaud, Louis XIV et Innocent XI, vol. III, p. 168); Jones, The Revolution, p. 206; J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution, (London, 1972), p. 250. By August 1688 European observers agreed that the struggle over Cologne created “all the likelihood of a war in those parts” (? to Thomas Felton, 18 August 1688, BL, Add. 39487, f. 21v; Bevil Skelton (Paris) to Sunderland, 15/25 August 1688, PRO, SP 78/151, f. 200v). 20 John Lytcott (Rome) to Sir Richard Bulstrode, 29 September/9 October 1688, BL, Egerton 3683, f. 160r; J[ames] Fr[aser] (London) to John Ellis, 16 October 1688, BL, Add. 4194, f. 382v; Michaud, Louis XIV et Innocent XI, vol. 3, pp. 195–196; Pierre Blet, Les Nonces du pape a la cour de Louis XIV ([Paris], 2002), p. 159. 21 Mercurius Reformatus, 26 June 1689, p. [1]; The Intrigues of the French King at Constantinople, (London, 1689), pp. 23–4. 22 Edmund Bohun, The History of the Desertion (London, 1689), pp. 4–5; The Politicks of the French King Lewis the XIV Discovered (London, 1689), pp. 2–3. The former repeats a claim from Papal propaganda, the latter is a translation of a papalist tract. 23 Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, W.E. Buckley ed., (Westminster, 1890), p. 166.

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rather adversaries than friends to this court.”24 In particular, the Pope feared that the Jesuits “stir up the Princes against this court, and especially France in their present conjunctures that Rome may have its mortification.”25 At the heart of the tension between Louis XIV and Innnocent XI was a conflict over sovereign authority.26 Their struggle began with a dispute over the right of the regalia, the right to enjoy the revenues of vacant bishoprics and to appoint clerics to fill the benefices dependent on those sees.27 By insisting on his rights to the regalia, Louis XIV was said by the defenders of the papacy “to have snatched out of [the Pope’s] hands the Patrimony of the Church.”28 Drafted by French bishops, including Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet of Meaux, in 1682, the Declaration of the Clergy of France, defended Louis XIV’s position and denied both the Pope’s temporal power and his infallibility.29 For his part, Innocent XI disapproved of the violent measures adopted by Louis XIV in order to reconcile the Huguenots to Roman Catholicism. Despite attempts by the French court, with the apparent complicity of the Pope’s secretary Cardinal Cybo, to keep Innocent XI ignorant of the forced conversion of the Huguenots the Pope eventually learned of the extent of the dragonnades. He responded by

24 William Leslie (Rome) to Louis Innes (?), 15/25 April 1687, SCA, BL 1/105/8; Gilbert Burnet, “Reasons against the Repealing,” 1687, in A Collection of Eighteen Papers Relating to the Affairs of Church and State During the Reign of King James the Second (London, 1689), p. 3. 25 William Leslie (Rome) to Melfort, 3 March 1688, SCA, BL 1/116/5. 26 It is true that some contemporaries thought the conflict was purely personal. The Abbey Le Gendre, for example, blamed the tension between Innocent XI and Louis XIV on “ressentiment.” But as a Gallican, Le Gendre had a vested interest in denying the possibility of real theological differences between Paris and Rome: Memoires de l’ Abbe Le Gendre, M. Roux ed., (Paris, 1865), p. 38. 27 I am relying heavily on the helpful discussion of this issue in R.J. Maras, Innocent XI: Pope of Christian Unity (Notre Dame, 1984), pp. 107–29. 28 The Present French King Drawn to the Life (London, 1690), p. 71; The Spirit of France and the Politick Maxims of Lewis XIV (London, 1689), pp. 14–15. 29 Memoires de l’Abbe Le Gendre, p. 45. In 1687, Louis XIV had also sought to limit the Pope’s authority in his own dominions. Louis XIV’s ambassador refused to relinquish the so-called diplomatic franchises that extended diplomatic immunity to the entire quarter that housed the French embassy. Louis XIV was in effect preventing the pope from asserting sovereignty within his own city (Peter Wyche (Hamburg) to Middleton, 5 April 1687, BL, Add. 41826, f. 96v; Newsletter from Rome, 12 May 1687, PRO, SP 85/12, f. 187r; London Newsletter, 29 November 1687, FSL, Lc 1888; William Westby, Memoirs, 26 January 1688, FSL, V.a. 469, f. 7v).

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elevating one of the most vocal French opponents of the dragonnades, Bishop Le Camus of Grenoble, to the dignity of Cardinal in 1686.30 The Francophobe pamphlet The Spirit of France was right to suggest that Innocent XI thought the conversion of the Huguenots “should have been carried on by reasonings, and good examples, and not by force and violence.”31 Contemporaries were well aware that these Franco-Papal tensions, and the Pope’s antipathy for the Jesuits had potentially significant consequences in the British Isles;32 and it was not only James II’s courtiers who anxiously followed the steadily deteriorating relations between the French monarch and the Pope. “I am heartily sorry for the too too great appearance of an ugly breach” between the Pope and Louis XIV, wrote the Scottish Catholic Alexander Dunbar from Edinburgh. This was because the breach was doing much “hurt of the Church of God . . . whereof we begin to find in this island the sad effects, which I am afraid are just beginning.”33 Political and ideological tensions between the King of France and the Pope provided the context in which James II and his court discussed Catholics and Catholicism in the later seventeenth century. As Louis XIV and Innocent XI took increasingly entrenched and belligerent positions, contemporaries were well aware that they fundamentally disagreed about royal sovereignty and the proper way of dealing with religious minorities. Both of these issues, of course, were central concerns in the British Isles as well.

II James II left little doubt about his ideological sympathies in the struggle between Innocent XI and Louis XIV. He increasingly surrounded 30 L. O’Brien, Innocent XI and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, (Berkeley, 1930), p. 130. I have relied on O’Brien for his detailed account of Innocent XI’s attitudes. There is also evidence that Innocent XI explicitly informed Dutch diplomats of his abhorrence of Louis’s actions. 31 The Spirit of France, p. 69. 32 “We are as impatient to hear how the great affair betwixt the Pope and the French monarch is to be determined as you can possibly imagine us to be,” wrote James Fraser from London to Sir Robert Southwell, 15 December 1687 (FSL, Vb287(39)). 33 Alexander Dunbar (Edinburgh) to Louis Innes, 30 October 1688, SCA, BL 1/111/8.

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himself with Jesuit and Francophilic advisors, while keeping the papal Nuncio and Francophobic advisors at arms length. James, it is now clear, was deeply influenced by French Catholicism. He had made his abjuration in 1669 to the French-based Jesuit Father Edward Simeon.34 Throughout his life James expressed “great affection” for the Jesuits.35 He maintained a warm and intimate correspondence with Louis XIV’s Jesuit confessor, Pere La Chaise.36 Soon after his accession to the throne, James’s political alliances fell into line with his devotional sympathies. Within weeks of his brother Charles II’s death, James created a separate Roman Catholic cabinet council that included his old friends Richard Talbot (the future Earl of Tyrconnel) and Henry Jermyn, Lord Dover.37 It was soon clear, however, that “the Catholics were not in complete agreement among themselves.” The French Ambassador, Paul de Barillon, characterized the split as between “the more talented” party that had the king’s ear on the one hand and “the rich and established Catholics” on the other. In all of his dispatches, Barillon made clear that the Jesuits were in league with those offering “the wisest” counsel.38 The well-informed London Presbyterian Roger Morrice 34 Father Francis Sanders, An Abridgement of the Life of James II (London: R. Wilson, 1704), p. 13; Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, H. Foley (editor), vol. V. (London, 1879), p. 5; Edward Gregg, “New Light on the Authorship of the Life of James II” English Historical Review, 108 (1993), p. 959. 35 Letter from a Jesuit of Liege to a Jesuit of Freiburg, 2 February 1688, Beinecke [Yale University, New Haven], Osb MSS 2/Box 5/Folder 109. 36 Bevil Skelton (Paris) to Sunderland, 19/29 November 1687, PRO, SP 78/151, f. 117v; Letter from a Jesuit of Liege, 2 February 1688, Beinecke, Osb MSS 2/Box 5/Folder 109. One scholar has suggested that the Jesuits were the “guiding spirit in James’s conversion and devotional life” and in the 1680s James certainly developed a serious interest in Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the influential Bishop of Meaux (G. Scott, “The court as a Centre of Catholicism,” in Edward Corp ed., A Court in Exile, pp. 242, 247. See also, Mullett, Catholics in Britain, p. 81). 37 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 5 March (NS) 1685, PRO 31/3/160, f. 70r. Tyrconnel’s career in Ireland made clear his credentials as a zealous and Francophilic Catholic. Bonrepaus characterized Dover as “spirited and zealous” though dissipated with gambling: Usson de Bonrepaus (London to Marquis de Seignelay, 1/11 February 1686, PRO 31/3/164, f. 36. 38 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 2/12 November 1685, PRO 31/3/162, f. 10v; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 3/13 December 1685, PRO 31/3/162, ff. 44–5; Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 13/23 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 12v. Jones and Miller appear to have taken their characterizations of the court/country split among English Catholics largely from Barillon’s account. Barillon’s description of the composition of the two parties appears to have been reliable. But his characterization of their views needs to be read as the writings of a partisan, see Usson de Bonrepaus (London) to Marquis de Seignelay, 7/17 January 1686, PRO 31/3/163, f. 55r.

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knew that there was a struggle at court between “the Jesuitical interest under the King of France here,” including the new arrivals Father Warner and Father Morgan, and the “Pope’s interest” or “antiJesuitical party.” By 1687, Morrice learned, the Jesuits supported by Father La Chaise and Louis XIV had “quite borne down and broken the strength of the Pope and Italian interest with us.”39 All commentators now agreed that James II took his advice exclusively from the French party among the Catholics. William Leslie complained bitterly from Rome that James II had a “blind preoccupied passion to only give ear to Jesuits and not hear others.”40 Barillon reported triumphantly to his master that “the Catholic Cabal,” by which he meant the pro-French faction, “has entirely prevailed, and all the credit and all the authority is in their hands or those who openly favor them.”41 In Germany James II was universally thought to be a “bon françois.”42 “All, even the very best Protestants at Whitehall,” Roger Morrice confided despairingly to his journal, “make their court entirely to Father Peters, Warner, Morgan, White, or some other Jesuit for no other person have any interest at all.”43 The Dutch Ambassador Van Citters agreed that the Jesuits “daily increase in credit at the court.”44 Though the Jesuits did not have a monopoly of influence at court,45 all of James’s advice tended in the same direction. “The Jesuits and all the regulars, even

39 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 9 April 1687, D[octor] W[illiams] L[ibrary, London], MSS 31 Q , p. 87. The Scottish Augustinian and Abbot of Ratisbon, Placidus Fleming, who had spent a good deal of time at James II’s court, concluded that the Jesuits “are there omnipotent and carry all before them like a torrent, without keeping any measures with the clergy or with us” (Placidus Fleming (Ratisbon) to Mr. Whyteford, 13/23 March 1688, SCA, Bl 1/111/9). The eighteenth century Catholic historian Charles Dodd, who had access to a range of Catholic manuscripts that are no longer extant, agreed that “affairs were managed entirely by a cabinet council” that consisted or recent converts “and hot-headed Catholics” (The Church History of England (Brussels, 1742), Vol. III, pp. 415–6). 40 William Leslie (Rome) to Louis Innes, 5/15 April 1687, SCA, BL 1/105/18. See the similar account from Walter Innes: Walter Innes (Rome) to Mr. Whyteford, 23 August/2 September 1687, SCA, BL 1/103/7. 41 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 6/16 January 1687, PRO 31/3/168. 42 George Etherege (Ratisbon) to Lord Taaffe, 2/12 1687, HTC, f MS THR 11, p. 69. 43 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 26 November 1687, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 210. 44 Arnoud Van Citters (London) to States General, 1/11 May 1688, BL, Add. 34512, f. 78r. 45 Miller, Popery and Politics, p. 236.

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the Benedictines though professed enemies to the Jesuits, are in the French interest,” observed the Scots spy James Johnstone.46 James II surrounded himself with advisors who, invariably, had close ties to the French court and to French Catholicism. One of the most prominent, and most controversial of the king’s advisors was the Jesuit, Father Edward Petre, who came from an old English Catholic aristocratic family, but had lived in France for many years before James II’s accession.47 His sympathy for France and French Catholicism was never in doubt. Both the French Ambassador Barillon and the special envoy, Usson de Bonrepaus, were convinced of Petre’s “veneration” of Louis XIV.48 Those in the papal party, by contrast, complained that Petre was “too attached to the interests” of Louis XIV.49 When Father Petre was admitted to James’s English Privy Council in November 1687, Roger Morrice saw it as a signal to the Pope “that he is governed by the Jesuits and not by his faction, and to let the King of France know as much, who will be greatly satisfied therewith.”50 Nor was there much doubt of the extent of Petre’s influence over James. Both the Protestant Earl of Ailesbury, Thomas Bruce, and the author of the Jesuit provincial letters agreed that Father Petre had the new king’s ear from the outset of his reign and soon became James’s confessor.51 As a result, James II’s courtiers “thought no one had a greater part of the King’s confidence.”52 46

James Johnstone (London) to ?, March 1688, BL, Add. 34515, f. 58r. Jones, The Revolution of 1688, p. 81. He had been imprisoned during the Exclusion Crisis but never brought to trial. 48 Barillon (London) to louis XIV, 11/21 November 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 51r; Bonrepaus (London) to Marquis de Seignelay, 1/11 February 1686, PRO 31/3/164, f. 36r. 49 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 7/17 June 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 22r. 50 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 12 November 1687, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 200; London Newsletter, 12 November 1687, FSL, Lc 1882. 51 Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 121; “Annual Letters of the Province, 1685–1690,” in Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. V, p. 276. Father Petre replaced the apparently apolitical Father Mansuet, and was rewarded with elegant chambers at Whitehall (Ailesbury, Memoirs, p. 99; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 21 February/3 March 1687, PRO 31/3/168, f. 37r; Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 8 January 1687, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 41). 52 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 11/21 November 1686, PRO, 31/3/167, f. 50v. Surely James’s repeated appeals to the Pope to confer a cardinal’s cap on Father Petre confirms the Jesuit’s special relationship with his king ( James II to the Pope, 16 June 1687, in Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. V, pp. 277–78; William Blathwayt (Whitehall) to Sir Robert Southwell, 12 November 1687, Nottingham University Library, Pw V 53/57; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 22 November/2 December 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 56r). 47

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Nevertheless, James relied almost as heavily on the Scottish Drummond brothers as he did on Father Petre. James Drummond, Earl of Perth, was James’s Lord Chancellor in Scotland and was widely known to be the king’s chief minister north of the Tweed.53 His brother John, Earl of Melfort, served James II as Secretary for Scottish affairs and as an increasingly influential advisor. Melfort was a man of remarkable talent. Roger Morrice thought him “a man of great abilities and policies and craft, and was a principal man in laying down and promoting the late methods both in Scotland and England for the setting up of the dispensing power and all things depending thereupon.”54 The Dutch Ambassador Van Citters knew that Melfort was the man “to whom the King now listens most.”55 Both Drummond brothers were new converts to Catholicism in the reign of James II. And both owed their conversion in part to Bossuet, the influential French Bishop of Meaux.56 Melfort, who converted several months after his brother, also maintained close contacts with France. He appears to have conducted a regular and secret correspondence with the Marquis de Seignelay, one of Louis XIV’s secretary of state. Melfort was also known to be working politically with

53 Barillon (London) to Louis 14, 24 September/4 October 1685, PRO, 31/3/161, ff. 53–54; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 1/11 March 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 4r; J. Miller, James II (London, 1978), p. 210; B. Lenman, “The Scottish Nobility and the Revolution 1688–90” in R. Beddard ed., The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), p. 144. 54 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 8 December 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q , pp. 339–340; Morrice, Entering Book, 2 March 1689, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 485. William Fuller, who as a servant of William, Marquis of Powis, had a chance to observe many of James II’s most private debates, agreed that Melfort was “a man of most penetrating wisdom, sober, honest and zealous for his royal master’s service.” He added, “no noble person at court had more frequently the King and Queen’s ear than my Lord Melfort had” (William Fuller, Autobiography, Beinecke, Osborn fc 66, p. 15). 55 Van Citters (London) to States General, 2/12 November 1688, BL, Add. 34510, f. 163r. 56 “The excellent book of the Bishop of Meaux, explicating the doctrine of the church,” Perth wrote to Anne Huntly of his conversion, “was such a great help to me, that I should kiss the feel of this honorable bishop everyday” (Perth to Mme de Crolly, 1685, in Correspondance de Bossuet, C. Urbain & E. Levesque eds, vol. III. (Paris, 1910), p. 544; F. Gaquere, Vers L’Unite Chrestienne: James Drummond et Bossuet (Paris, 1963), pp. 22–8). Perth wrote to Bossuet himself on 12 November 1685, “One would have to close one’s eyes to the light to avoid the truth, so clearly is it exposed by your excellent pen” (Correspondance de Bossuet, Vol. III, p. 160). Perth’s admiration for Bossuet resulted in a lifelong correspondence between the two men (Gaquere, Vers L’Unite, pp. 52–160).

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Louis XIV’s Jesuit confessor Father La Chaise.57 James II’s employment of the Drummond brothers reflected both his ability to rely upon clever and competent administrators and his ideological attachment to French Catholicism.58 Not only did James choose advisors with a French Catholic commitment, but he made sure that his sons shared his Gallican orientation. James’s illegitimate son James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, recalled that “as soon as I was seven years old [I] was sent into France, to be educated there in the Catholic, apostolic and Romish religion.” In 1684 he returned to France “and by the advice of Father Peters” was placed at the Jesuit school at La Fleche.59 James similarly immediately appointed his own French Jesuit chaplain, Louis Sabran, secretly to baptize and serve as chaplain to his legitimate child and heir, James Francis Edward.60 James did all he could to make French Catholic writings generally available. The King’s printer, the recent Catholic convert Henry Hills, printed a wide variety of translations of French works, including those of Bossuet.61 Bonrepaus, apparently on orders from the Marquis de Seignelay, also had translated a number of Gallican controversial works into English.62 Bonrepaus had an eager and expert

57 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 14/24 January 1686, PRO 31/3/163, f. 12v; Bonrepaus (London) to Seignelay, 1/11 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 52r; Bonrepaus (London) to Seignelay, 5/15 April 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 133r; Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 7 July 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 283. 58 Van Citters (London) to States General, 2/12 November 1688, BL, Add. 34510, f. 163r; Van Citters (London) to States General, 6/16 November 1688, BL, Add. 34510, f. 167v. It is true that Melfort and Petre came into conflict in June 1688. But that conflict was over their respective assessments of Sunderland’s reliability—both pursued Francophilic policies (Perth to?, 10 June 1688, SCA, BL 1/117/13; Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 7 July 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 283). 59 James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, Memoirs of the Marshal Duke of Berwick (London, 1779), Vol. I, pp. 1–2. 60 Dodd, Church History, vol. III, p. 493; Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus Foley, vol. V, p. 292. Apparently James originally hoped to have James Francis Edward educated by Jesuits as well (A Court in Exile, p. 257). 61 London Newsletter, 18 October 1687, FSL, Lc 1871; Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 18 February 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 239(3). The number of French Catholic works, both attributed and unattributed, printed by Hills is too long to list here. Barillon thought Hills’s English edition of Bossuet’s Exposition of the Doctrine of the Catholic Church was having “a very good effect” (Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 11/21 March 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 11r). 62 Bonrepaus (London) to Marquis de Seignelay, 8/18 February 1686, PRO 31/3/164, f. 57.

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translator, Henry Joseph Johnston, one of the sixteen Benedictine monks James had installed at St. James’s palace.63 Just as the French Catholic group was winning the battle for control of James’s agenda at home, so by the autumn of 1686 they had achieved hegemony over James’s foreign service. James set the tone in September 1685 when he appointed Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine as his ambassador to Rome. The French Ambassador Barillon’s assessment that Castlemaine had “great confidence in him” was undoubtedly partisan.64 Castlemaine had long been “a noble and cordial friend” of the Jesuits.65 Barillon thought that in Rome the General of the Jesuits “guided his conduct.”66 Contemporaries were well aware that such a man was hardly calculated to curry favor with Innocent XI.67 His instructions from James insisted on the same rights of royal appointment that had provoked Innocent’s anger against Louis XIV.68 Castlemaine’s own views of European politics could not have been closer to those of the French King and further from the Pope’s. In Rome he told Cardinal Cybo that Innocent’s differences with Louis XIV were “frivolous” and that the Catholic world should unite in war against the United Provinces which were nothing but “a haven for rebels, pirates, and heretics.”69 James’s decision to appoint Ignatius White, Marquis d’Albeville, to replace Bevil Skelton as ambassador to the United Provinces was another great victory for the French faction. D’Albeville was not only an old and trusted servant of the Stuart cause,70 but also a 63 Geoffrey Scott, “A Benedictine Conspirator: Henry Joseph Johnston” Recusant History, 20 (1990), pp. 58–62. Johnston had been professed as a monk in Lorraine in 1675, and had consequently acquired a familiarity with French catholic apologetic. After his own conversion in 1685, the Earl of Perth employed Johnston to translate and defend the writings of favorite Catholic expositor, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet. 64 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 19/29 October 1685, PRO 31/3/161, f. 68. 65 Father Peter Hamerton, “An Account of the Beginning and Progress of Oates’ Plot,” in Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. V, p. 23. 66 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 21/31 December 1685, PRO 31/3/162, f. 69r. 67 James Wellwood, Memoirs, 3rd edition (London, 1700), pp. 181–2. 68 Miller, James II, pp. 152–153. It should be noted that Castlemaine not only allied himself with the Jesuits when in Rome, but he also associated himself with the deeply Francophilic Order of the Knights of Malta (D.F. Allen, “Attempts to Revive the Order of Malta in Stuart England” Historical Journal, 33 (1990), p. 947. 69 Quoted in F.A.J. Mazure, Histoire de la Revolution de 1688 en Angleterre. (Paris, 1825), vol. II, p. 241. 70 E.S. De Beer, “The Marquis of Albeville and his Brothers” English Historical

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trusted agent of the French Ambassador Barillon.71 D’Albeville again accepted money from France just prior to his departure for the Netherlands, making “all possible engagements” with Barillon.72 Once in the United Provinces d’Albeville met “nightly” with the French Ambassador d’Avaux to coordinate their efforts.73 They clearly shared the same opinion of the United Provinces. D’ Albeville thought that James II always “needed a pretext in hand to declare war against Holland, when the occasion presented itself.”74 The appointment of Bevil Skelton to replace Sir William Trumbull as ambassador to France was only an apparent contradiction of James’s new policy to employ exclusively Catholics in foreign affairs.75 Skelton’s pathological hatred of the Dutch was legendary, making him an enemy of the Papal Nuncio and the ‘country’ Catholic group. Almost as importantly he conducted himself as a Catholic in France. The Augustinian Abbot of Ratisbon, Placidus Fleming assured Charles Whyteford, the assistant principal of the Scots College in Paris, that “you will certainly find him your very good friend” even though he was unable to verify rumors that Skelton “had made public profession of the Catholic faith.”76

Review, 45 (1930), pp. 397–408; Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 13/23 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 14r; Bonrepaus (London) to Marquis de Seignelay, 1/11 February 1686, PRO 31/3/164, f. 36r. 71 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 23 August/2 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 1v. 72 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 13/23 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, ff. 13–14. The Spanish Ambassador, Don Pedro de Ronquillo, had good reason to be “furious” with Albeville’s appointment, knowing full well that he “was in the interests of France” (Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 26 August/5 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 4r). 73 Robert Yard (Whitehall) to d’Albeville, 8 April 1687, IU, Albeville MSS; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 1/11 November 1686, PRO, PRO 31/3/167, f. 43; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 28 February/10 March 1687, PRO, PRO 31/3/168, f. 44v. 74 These were the observations of Bonrepaus, quoted in Mazure, Histoire de la Revolution, vol. II, pp. 331–332. D’Albeville did both James II and the French a good turn when he secured the “reentrance into the bosom of the Catholic Church” of James’s envoy in Hamburg Peter Wyche. It was no surprise, given the ideological orientation of James’s increasingly Catholic diplomatic corps, that Wyche attended services at the French Resident’s chapel in Hamburg (Peter Wyche (Hamburg) to d’Albeville, 10/20 May 1687, IU, Albeville MSS). 75 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 26 July/5 August 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 48v; Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 5/15 August 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 53v; Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 9/19 August 1686, PRO, PRO 31/3/166, f. 54v. 76 Placidus Fleming (Ratisbon) to Charles Whyteford, 11/21 January 1687, SCA,

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James II not only surrounded himself with Catholic advisors, but he surrounded himself with advisors who had a very particular orientation in the European Catholic debates. Just as the increasingly hostile conflict between Louis XIV and Innocent XI forced European Catholics to take sides, so James II was compelled to choose between the Pope and the French King. While it is true that James consulted a wide variety of British and European Catholics, those Catholics were invariably on the French side of this epic dispute. No wonder Louis XIV insisted that “though there is no treaty” linking himself to James, “nevertheless the ties of agreement since his coming to the throne, have formed a more strict one than if stipulated by a formal treaty.”77

III Powerful evidence indicates that James and his court were just as taken with the ideological implications of French Catholicism as they were with its devotional precepts. The deeply influential Bossuet was well known not only for his defense of Catholicism against its Protestant detractors, but also for his enthusiastic support of royal absolutism. Bossuet’s role in the Gallican pronouncements of 1682 and his celebration of the effects of the Edict of Nantes were not unknown in Whitehall.78 Cardinal Armand-Jean Richelieu’s equally absolutist Testament Politique was known to be “the most admired book that our great men here have seen of a long time.”79 Another popular author at James II’s court was the former Jesuit, Louis Maimbourg, who was “forced to quit his order” because he “supported the temporal power of sovereigns” against “the usurpations and encroachments of the papacy.”80 “Neither Popes nor Councils can ever depose kings,”

BL, 1/101/2; Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 12/22 August 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 57v. 77 Louis XIV to Barillon, 30 September 1688, in John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, 2nd edition (London, 1771), Vol. II, Appendix, Part I, p. 234. 78 Scott, “A Benedictine Conspirator,” p. 62; P. Riley, “Introduction,” in P. Riley ed., Bossuet: Politics Drawn from Holy Scripture, (Cambridge, 1990), pp. xli–lvii. 79 James Fraser (London) to Sir Robert Southwell, 31 December 1687, FSL, V.b. 287(43). 80 John Dryden in his translation of Maimbourg’s The History of the League, (London,

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according to Maimbourg, because “Jesus Christ and the apostles” were the “first that have taught us that the Church and the Popes have nothing at all to do with temporal affairs.”81 The sincere loyalty of the primitive Christians to the Roman Emperors proved unequivocally, reasoned Maimbourg, that it was “the express command of God made to us in Scriptures of obeying our Princes, whoever they be.”82 The English publications of Catholics favored by James II enunciated the same absolutist ideology advanced in the Gallican tradition. In pamphlet after pamphlet and sermon after sermon, James’s Catholic supporters exalted the power of kings. The Benedictine James Maurice Corker, who lived in St. James’s palace during the later 1680s, denied that Catholics “believe that the Pope hath any direct, or indirect authority over the temporal power and jurisdiction of Princes.”83 The Roman Catholic Recorder of Gloucester Charles Trinder agreed that in England there was “a monarchy, wherein the King has all the power.”84 John Wilson, whose work was published by the Catholic royal printer Henry Hills, agreed that “the Kings of England are absolute monarchs.”85 No one spoke more clearly than the French educated Jesuit and royal chaplain Edward Scarisbrick. The absolute authority of princes, he preached is spoken to all kings, to all sovereign powers, under what form soever; and so it is to all people, in all places, at all times, and for ever; without any sort of condition, limitation, or restriction, in respect of customs, degrees, or any political sanction, or provisions.86

1684), postcript, p. 48. Dryden issued his translation by the express command of Charles II. Maimbourg enthusiastically condemned Bellarmine and Suarez because “they most dangerously follow the conduct of heretics” in allowing resistance to kings (A Discourse Concerning the Foundation and Prerogative of the Church of Rome, translated by Archibald Lovell, (London, 1688), p. 352). 81 Maimbourg, A Discourse, pp. 345, 350–1. 82 Ibid., pp. 347–8. 83 James Maurice Corker, Roman-Catholick Principles, [1687], p. 4. On Corker’s relations with James, see Scott, “A Benedictine Conspirator,” p. 60. 84 Charles Trinder, The Speech, 8 January 1688 (London, 1688), p. 4. 85 John Wilson, Jus Regium Coronae, (London, 1688), p. 7. 86 Edward Scarisbrick, “Catholic Loyalty,” 30 January 1688, in A Select Collection of Catholick Sermons Preach’d Before Their Majesties, (London, 1741), vol. I, p. 235. Scarisbrick claimed this “the truly Catholic doctrine of that Society whereof the author hath the honor to be a member.” (Ibid., p. [226]. On Scarisbrick, see Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. V, p. 350.

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James’s Catholic supporters insisted that there were no circumstances under which the king might be resisted. John Dryden, Catholic poet laureate and historiographer royal insisted that “the people are not judges of good or ill administration in their King; for ’tis inconsistent with the nature of sovereignty that they should be so.” The king, in Dryden’s view, “is only punishable by the king of kings.”87 Contemporaries were aware that Gallicanism under Louis XIV was more shrill and more friendly to the king’s powers than previous theories of absolutism. This was also the case in the Catholicism of James II’s court. First, James’s Catholic apologists insisted upon an active as well as a passive obedience to the king. Philip Michael Ellis, a Benedictine inhabitant of St. James’s, preached before the King and Queen that one who “behaves himself merely passive to the community” was “a monstrous member of the common-wealth, and is obliged to restitution, that is to rectify, and atone for his former coldness and indifferency.”88 The newly created English Catholic Bishops made this obligation explicit in 1688. “You lie under not only [the obligation] of a passive obedience to His Majesty’s orders relating to the government,” the Bishops informed English Catholics in their first pastoral letter, “but also of an active and cheerful concurrence with him therein.”89 Second, James II’s French-influenced court Catholics denied that subjects had the right to question (or

87 Dryden, postscript to Maimbourg, History of the League, 1684, p. 2. Dryden continued to translate French catholic texts at the king’s behest after James’s accession: see J.A. Winn, John Dryden and His World, (New Haven, 1987), pp. 412, 421–2. Dryden was converted to Catholicism by Corker (G. Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment, (Bath, 1992), p. 13). “A sovereign power, or absolute monarch,” agreed John Wilson, “if he offend against these [positive] laws, is unaccountable to them, as having no superior in his dominions but God” (Jus Regium Coronae, pp. 6–7). “Is his government heavy upon us by oppression, by injustice, by all sorts of vexations?” asked the Jesuit court preacher Scarisbrick. “The good and the bad prince are creatures both of the same power, stamped with the same impress, and as inviolably sacred the one as the other” (“Catholic Loyalty,” 30 January 1688, in A Select Collection, vol. I, p. 238). 88 Philip Michael Ellis, Sermon, 5 December 1686, in A Select Collection, vol. I, p. 83. Ellis was himself French educated: Joseph B. Gavin, “An Englishman in Exile” Recusant History, 15 (1979), p. 11. Scarisbrick agreed that when it came to loyalty “sins of omission are sins of commission.” “The want of love and affection is a grand failure of duty,” he thundered from the pulpit, “neuters are lost to the end and service of government; and men grow cold by example” (“Catholic Loyalty,” 30 January 1688, in A Select Collection, 1741, vol. I, p. 252). 89 A Pastoral Letter from the Four Catholic Bishops to the Lay-Catholics of England (London, 1688), p. 6.

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petition against) the king’s policies. “We conjure you all to abstain from speaking or acting anything that may seem to have the least indecent reflection upon the government,” wrote the Catholic Bishops in their pastoral letter. The people had no right to question or query. “Their duty is not to approach [the] persons [of kings] but with respect, nor discourse of their Councils but with submission.”90 James II’s Catholic advisors did not merely discuss the theoretical possibilities of royal power. They sought to put those powers into practice. Both the Scottish Proclamation and English Declarations of Indulgence drew heavily on language developed in the Gallican Catholic tradition. Contemporaries were keenly aware that the Scottish Proclamation’s insistence that “all our subjects are to obey without reserve” was an ideological innovation.91 Gilbert Burnet quickly identified the provenance of the new language. All princes, even the most violent pretenders to absolute power, till Lewis the Great’s time, have thought it enough to oblige their subjects to submit to their power, and to bear whatsoever they thought good to impose upon them, but till the days of the late dragoons, it was never so much as pretended, that subjects were bound to obey their Prince without reserve.92

Manifestly, the ideological backdrop for the Scottish Proclamation was the Gallican insistence on active rather than merely passive obedience. Similarly, the warning in the English Declaration of 1687, “that nothing be preached or taught . . . which many any ways tend to alienate the heart of our people from us or our government” strongly echoed the prohibitions against political criticism in the

90 Ibid., 1688, p. 7. Scarisbrick was no less cautious. “Wherever you find private meddlers in politics, commenting upon the king’s prerogatives, or haranguing to the people upon the subject of mal-administration; know it to be a seditious post and practice, that they have taken up for the undermining of the crown” (“Catholic Loyalty,” 30 January 1688, in A Select Collection, vol. I, p. 254). “To deface the character of your temporal or spiritual superiors,” agreed Philip Ellis, “is so much worse than prophaning churches and robbing altars” (Sermon, 5 December 1686, in A Select Collection, vol. I, p. 77). 91 A Proclamation, 12 February 1687 (Edinburgh, 1687). 92 Gilbert Burnet, “Some Reflections on His Majesty’s Proclamation,” 1687, reprinted in A Collection of Eighteen Papers Relating to the Affairs of Church and State During the Reign of King James the Second (London, 1689), pp. 10–11. This pamphlet was widely copied during James’s reign in both England and Scotland. For one example, see Hertfordshire Record Office, D/EP F 26.

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Gallican texts.93 It was no doubt these kinds of sentiments that lay behind the creation of the Ecclesiastical Commission and the prosecution of the Seven Anglican Bishops in June 1688.94 James’s attitude towards parliament in both England and Scotland was deeply influenced by his Gallican connections. “The Catholic Lords have forcefully represented the inconveniences of calling a Parliament,” Barillon informed his master in September 1686, “they made it clear that no good could be hoped for as long as the court was divided.”95 Similarly, the Drummond brothers thought the best hope for “placing the Catholics in security” in Scotland lay with avoiding Parliament and acting on the king’s prerogative.96 The strategies pursued in the two kingdoms developed from the same ideological roots. It was hardly surprising that in England the recent Catholic convert, Sir Nicholas Butler, sought to remake the English corporations by deploying commissioners “with a power not unlike that of the Intendants of provinces in France.”97 One of James’s most intimate advisors clearly hoped to go much further in exalting royal authority. Sir Edward Hales, who was one of the Lords of the Admiralty, deputy governor of the Cinque Ports, lieutenant of the Tower of London, and a recent Catholic convert left a detailed plan for augmenting royal power.98 Hales advised James to “abolish” parliaments because “these popular assemblies are inconsistent with monarchy as well as justice.”99 Hales wanted to replace the English county militia with “dragoons.” He also hoped to massively increase the intelligence powers of the state. “Lord Lieutenants should have

93

His Majesties Gracious Declaration (London, 1687), p. 2. (4 April 1687). It should be no great surprise that Louis XIV “very much applaud[ed]” the incarceration of the seven bishops: Bevil Skelton (Paris) to Sunderland, 16/26 June 1688, PRO, SP 78/151, f. 182v. 95 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 13/23 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 11v. 96 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 13/23 September 1686, PRO 31/3/167, f. 13r. 97 Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, pp. 174–175. 98 On Hales, see Dodd, Church History, vol. III, p. 416. Hales was a very close friend of the Earl of Melfort. 99 Sir Edwrad Hales, Treatise on Government, 1692, A[rchbishop of] W[estminsters’s] A[rchives London], Old Brotherhood Papers, Book III/258. This text is discussed by Daniel Szechi, “A Blueprint for tyranny? Sir Edward Hales and the Catholic response to the Revolution of 1688,” English Historical Review, 116 (2001), pp. 342–67. 94

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some in every suspected family to send him notice of what passes,” and each Lord Lieutenant should keep a file on “every man of any figure in his county, of what estate, what parts, what interest, what relations, what he is fit for.” The ideal, Hales made clear, was “to reduce the government of our counties nearer to that of the provinces of France and consequently strangely increase the king’s power.”100 English court Catholicism, then, bore a remarkable resemblance to French Catholicism. Just at the moment that papal propagandists were calling for limitations on the powers of kings, the Catholic sermons and pamphlets promoted by James II and his court emphasized the unquestionable absolute authority of their king. The court Catholics of James II’s reign were not shy about exalting royal absolutism or about parading their close ideological associations with the court of Louis XIV. Their aspirations, it is clear, were far more than distant dreams. Much of James’s political achievement was based on the Gallican ideology. But even that achievement paled in comparison to what some of his intimate advisors intended.

IV French Catholicism also influenced the attitudes that James and his court had towards religious toleration. While it has been fashionable of late to emphasize the sincerity of James’s commitment to liberty of conscience—and there can be no questioning his deep affection for the Quaker, William Penn—the king’s attachment to French Catholicism placed limits on that commitment. French Catholic writings were not tolerationist. Bossuet, who was so influential in court Catholic circles hoped to soon hear that no former Huguenot “absents himself ” from Catholic services.101 Louis Maimbourg praised Louis XIV for “the reduction of the remnant of our Protestants.”102 Of course, neither Bossuet nor Maimbourg acknowledged that force had been used in the miraculous conversion. “Not one of you hath suffered violence either in his person or

100

Sir Edward Hales to Earl of Melfort, 27 May 1692, AWA, Old Brotherhood papers, Book III/253. 101 [ Jacques Benigne Bossuet], A Pastoral Letter from the Lord Bishop of Meaux [London, 1686], p. 36. 102 Maimbourg, Discourse, sig. [A6r].

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goods,” Bossuet confidently informed the new converts.103 Their denial of the existence of the dragonnades did not, of course, imply any condemnation of conversion by force. Force, they were suggesting, was a last resort that was fortunately unnecessary in this case. The language with which the French Catholics discussed the Huguenots left little doubt of the limits of their tolerance. Bossuet referred to the Protestant Reformation as a “deplorable apostasy which hath torn from the church whole nations, and which seems to prepare for the kingdom of Antichrist.”104 Catholic literary production promoted by James and his court was no friendlier to religious toleration. The Catholic convert Joshua Basset, in a text published by the royal printer Henry Hills, sneered that in tolerant Holland he “saw such a medley of faiths, that it looked to me as Babel might have done, when God confounded their language.”105 The English Jesuit William Darrel described the Protestant Reformation as a “disease.”106 This was, in part, because for these English Catholics as for the French Catholics, Protestantism and political rebellion were ineluctably yoked. John Dryden observed that “both the French and English Presbyterians were fundamentally and practically rebels.”107 John Betham, who was both a doctor of the Sorbonne and future preceptor of the Prince of Wales, predicted that God will have no tolerance for those who refused to accept the blessings of the one true faith. “God will not have patience to expect their natural death,” he warned, “but will hurry them away without

103

Bossuet, Pastoral Letter, p. 3; Maimbourg, History of the League, sig. a4v–[a4r] Bossuet, Pastoral Letter, pp. 2–3. The French Jesuit Dominique Bouhours was no less concerned about the implications of Protestantism. The Protestants, Bouhours recalled, “having shaken off the yoke of ecclesiastical obedience, and of allegiance to their sovereigns . . . abandoned themselves to all those disorders, which men are capable of, when they are governed by the spirit of lying.” This was inevitable because “the manners of men generally grow corrupt by the same degrees that they loose their faith; so were these new heresies followed by a general licentiousness” (The Life of St. Ignatius, (London, 1686), pp. 1–2). 105 Joshua Basset, Reason and Authority, (London, 1687), p. 12. 106 William Darrel (SJ), A Vindication of St. Ignatius, (London, 1688), sig. A2r. 107 Dryden, History of the League, postscript, p. 8. “This so great decay from the ancient vigor of our government, and the man difficulties in which it is of late so deeply involved, have arisen principally, if not purely, from the course of religion,” posited the Catholic recorder of Gloucester Charles Trinder. Since he dated the decay from Henry VIII’s succumbing to his “unbridled appetite,” Trinder left his auditors and readers in little doubt as to the quarter from which the religious troubles emanated (Speech, 8 January 1688, pp. 5–6). 104

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the least warning.”108 The actions and statements of Catholics close to James were likewise far from friendly to toleration. The Earl of Castlemaine publicly displayed at Rome “his Majesty’s picture with John Calvin under his feet.”109 Sir Edward Hales, though he made no specific comment about toleration among the general population, left no doubt that the state could not be religiously pluralist. The Cabinet Council, which Hales thought was the only proper forum for policy making, “must be all of a piece, uniting in the king’s interest and loving one another like brothers, therefore they must all be Catholics.”110 Similarly “the great offices should be all in Catholic hands for these are the only sorts of me the king may rely upon in all seasons.”111 There is good reason to suppose that James himself shared these views. It is true that James had long favored liberty of conscience. He told William Penn “it always my principle that conscience ought not to be forced and it was always my judgment men ought to have the liberty of their conscience.”112 Nevertheless, it is clear that for James liberty of conscience was a means to an end, not a deeply felt principle. James sincerely believed that with proper religious teaching his subjects would convert to Catholicism. Over and over again he informed the French Ambassador Barillon that “he would do all he could to advance the Catholic religion,” and that “his principal goal was the establishment of the Catholic religion.”113 Fortunately, James claimed, the Protestants had left him with ecclesiastical powers— powers not far distant from those being claimed by Louis XIV in his struggle against Innnocent XI—“greater than those enjoyed by

108

John Betham, Sermon, 6 January 1686, in A Select Collection, vol. I, p. 215. George Etherege (Ratisbon) to Mjr. Maule and Mr. Wynne, 28 February/10 March 1687, HTC, fMS THR 11, p. 83. The French-based Commissary General of the Irish Capuchins, Lawrence Dowdall, described the newborn Prince of Wales as “the Messiah of Great Britain, whose cradle is the tomb of heresy and schism”: Lawrence Dowdall (Champagne) to James II, 22 June/2 July 1688, PRO, SP 78/151, f. 190r. 110 Sir Edward Hales to Melfort, 27 May 1692, AWA, Old Brotherhood papers, Book III/253. 111 Sir Edward Hales, Treatise on Government, 1692, AWA, Old Brotherhood papers, Book III/258. 112 James II’s answer to William Penn’s Speech, 24 May 1687, BL, Add. 5540, f. 43. This statement is confirmed by James’s close friend the Earl of Ailesbury (Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 169). 113 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 10/20 September 1685, PRO 31/3/161, f. 47r; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 11/21 March 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 10v. 109

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Catholic Kings in other countries.”114 One Jesuit reported that James told him privately “that he would convert England or would die a martyr.”115 James’s response to Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was hardly what one would expect from someone committed to the principle of liberty of conscience. Far from expressing outrage at the French King’s reversal of a century-old policy of religious indulgence, Barillon reported that James “could not have been more overjoyed” at seeing what Louis XIV had done “to destroy heresy in his kingdom.”116 James celebrated each report of the mass conversions of French Huguenots.117 Following Bossuet’s lead, James chose to deny the extent of violence perpetrated by Louis XIV’s dragoons. He had Jean Claude’s gory Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants of France publicly burnt as an infamous libel.118 More than once James told the French ambassador that Louis XIV’s successes increased his own “zeal and ardour” for the “advancement of the Catholic religion in England.”119 114 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 12/22 July 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 40v. James apparently was quite taken with the arguments advanced in one French treatise based on Augustine’s epistles on the Donatist question in which he justified imperial power to impose religious uniformity (Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 7/17 January 1686, PRO 31/3/163, f. 8v). As Mark Goldie has pointed out these were exactly the arguments advanced against toleration in the 1670s by English high churchmen: see “Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in O.P. Grell, J. Israel & Nicholas Tyacke eds, From Persecution to Toleration, (Oxford, 1991), pp. 335–368. Goldie notes how powerful this argument for intolerance was in the French Catholic polemic of the 1680s (Ibid., pp. 338–339). 115 Letter from Jesuit of Liege to a Jesuit of Freiberg, 2 February 1687, Beinecke, Osb MSS 2/Box 5/Folder109. 116 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 19/29 October 1685, PRO 31/3/161, f. 66r. Barillon was sure that these sentiments came “from the bottom of his heart.” 117 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 21 September/1October 1685, PRO 31/3/161, f. 51r; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 8 October/18 October 1685, PRO 31/3/161, f. 60v; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 4/14 January 1686, PRO 31/3/163, f. 7r. While James did officially welcome Huguenot refugees to England, they could only receive support if they willingly conformed to the Church of England ( Jones, The Revolution of 1688, p. 112). James admittedly condemned the dragonnades to the Dutch and Spanish ambassadors. He may well have been telling everyone what they wanted to hear. Nevertheless, the balance of evidence strongly suggests he was much more willing to open his heart to the French than either the Dutch or Spanish. 118 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 10/20 may 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 8v. Jean Claude, An Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants of France (London, 1686); Jones, The Revolution of 1688, p. 113. 119 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 1/11 October 1685, PRO 31/3/161, ff. 57–58; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 25 March/4 April 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 17v.

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James himself expressed views of Protestantism reminiscent of the views of Gallicans and English court Catholics. In a volume of James’s writings published posthumously by his Jesuit confessor Francis Sanders, the king explained that the Protestant reformation owed its origins and success to the worst of motives. “Pride was the occasion that Luther and Calvin revolted from the Church their Mother,” he wrote. In the lay people it was avarice that engaged them to follow these false guides, and to embrace their doctrine, to enrich themselves with the spoils of so many churches, which they robbed and whose possessions they took away by force.120

The consequences of such a pernicious social movement were entirely predictable to James. “Since what they call reformation has been introduced among us,” James wrote of the advent of Protestantism in Britain, “all the world knows the disorders it has caused there, and how our isle has been troubled by a variety of sects in the Church, and several rebellions in the state.”121 James and his Catholic supporters clearly did not shy away from anti-Catholic polemic. His court was not suffused with an aura of religious tolerance. Nor were James’s own views the sentiments of one who was convinced of the moral imperative for liberty of conscience.

V French Catholic thinking did not, however, achieve hegemonic status during the reign of James II. Many Catholics opposed James’s policies. Far from being led by cautious men, temperamentally unwilling to risk unsettling their provincial tranquility, the opposition took their cue from the Italian papal nuncio and the Spanish ambassador. Both James and his Catholic opponents had cosmopolitan ideological positions. Catholic opposition to James was part and parcel of the papal struggle against the policies and practices of Louis XIV.122

120 James II in Sanders, An Abridgement of the Life of James II, pp. 176–7. James’s writings were appended to the end of Sander’s biography. 121 Ibid., p. 174. Although James stopped short of explicitly calling for the eradication of British Protestantism, he made his own predilections clear. “When we begin ill,” he cautioned referring to confessional allegiance, “and take not the right way, we ought not to wonder if we always go more and more astray.” 122 Much remains to be done in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of Innocent XI’s position.

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Innocent XI was well known to be a critic of James and his policies. This was because Innocent knew James to have sided with the Gallican faction.123 Both the Frenchman Eustache Le Noble and the king’s friend, the Earl of Ailesbury, agreed that “the little indulgence which his Holiness had for King James proceeded from his intimate union with the King of France.”124 The Pope treated the ambassador from the first openly Catholic monarch of Great Britain and the first of either England or Scotland for over a century with the utmost contempt. By all accounts the Earl of Castlemaine had to wait out innumerable delays to receive a papal audience, and when he was at last admitted “the Pope was seasonably attacked with a fit of coughing, which broke off the ambassador’s discourse.”125 The Pope’s affectation gave a good indication of his policy predilections. Barillon soon reported to his master that “people are very dissatisfied here with the harshness with which the Pope has refused everything that the Earl of Castlemaine has asked of him on behalf of His British Majesty.”126 In particular, Innocent XI refused first to make Father Petre a bishop and then a cardinal, despite repeated personal pleas from James. Observers were unanimous in their belief that Innocent would never willingly prefer a Jesuit or a member of the French faction.127 Unsurprisingly, papal opposition to James’s ambassador in Rome was soon mirrored by criticism of the British court in London by the papal nuncio. Just as the papal envoy Ferdinando D’Adda was arriving in London in November 1685, Barillon warned that “ministers of the Pope and people entirely attached to the court of Rome

123 The Earl of Ailesbury recalled that “Innocent the eleventh disapproved all that was done here” (Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 152; see also Edward Gregg, “France, Rome and the exiled Stuarts, 1689–1713,” in A Court in Exile, p. 17). James Wellwood recalled that Innocent XI “was not over-fond” of James because he had “an aversion in his nature to a faction he knew King James was embarked in” (Memoirs, pp. 183–4). 124 Eustache Le Noble, The History of Father La Chaise, (London, 1693), p. 342; Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, pp. 165–6. 125 A Memorial of God’s last Twenty-Nine Years Wonders in England (London: J. Rawlins, 1689). Licensed: 29 June 1689, p. 116; Wellwood, Memoirs, pp. 178, 180. 126 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 14/24 June 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 25; see the similar report in London Newsletter, 31 May 1687, FSL, Lc 1814. 127 Barillon (Windsor) to Louis XIV, 17/27 June 1686, PRO 31/3/166, f. 26v; William Lesley (Rome) to Louis Innes, 5/15 August 1687, SCA, BL 1/105/18; J. Hill (Paris) to Sir William Trumbull, 15 February 1688, Berkshire RO, D/ED/C33; Louis Innes (London) to Charles Whyteford, 17 February 1688, SCA, BL 1/113/11.

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are not well disposed to France.”128 It was soon clear that there was no love lost between D’Adda on the one hand and Father Peters and the Jesuits on the other.129 It was equally clear that D’Adda’s distaste was ideological more than personal. The Scottish Catholic Richard Hay lamented that D’Adda often publicly “did no other thing but cry out against the French as heretics.”130 In general D’Adda found much to fault in James’s catholicizing policies. He discussed James’s actions with Ailesbury, with whom he was quite friendly, “in a lamenting tone.”131 Barillon also noted D’Adda’s resistance to a variety of James’s policy initiatives.132 The ambassador of His Most Catholic Majesty shared the papal nuncio’s ideological proclivities. Don Pedro de Ronquillo and D’Adda were known to work together against the dominant French Catholic faction at court.133 At his first audience with the new king Ronquillo was said to have warned James against taking advice from “the several priests about him.”134 Already by the end of 1685 Ronquillo was publicly deploring the English king’s treatment of Parliament. He went so far as to proclaim that “the safety of the monarchy depended on Parliament”—a statement as radically opposed to the Gallican pronouncements on sovereignty as possible.135 Ronquillo

128

Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 26 November/6 December 1685, PRO 31/3/162, f. 38r. He did not formally become nuncio until 1687. 129 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 28 February/10 March 1687, PRO 31/3/168, f. 40v; Van Citters (London) to States General, 11/21 November 1687, BL, Add. 34510, f. 61r; ? (London) to Dijkveldt, [ January 1688], Warwickshire Record Office, CR 2017/C7, f. 17r. 130 “Father Hay’s Memoirs of his Own Time,” in Genealogie of the Hayes of Tweeddale, R.A. Hay ed., (Edinburgh, 1835), p. 82. 131 Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 165. James Wellwood also reported that the papal nuncio “had too much good sense to approve of all the measures that were taken [by James]” (Memoirs, p. 179). 132 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 15/25 February 1686, PRO 31/3/164, f. 17v. In particular D’Adda was known to have been extremely critical of the controversial proceedings against Magdalen College in 1687 and James’s use of the dispensing power (Sir Robert Southwell (Kingsweston) to Earl of Weymouth, 16 January 1688, Longleat House, [Warminster, Wiltshire], Thynne MSS 15, f. 219v; Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 152). 133 Bonrepaus (London) to Marquis de Seignelay, 21/31 January 1686, PRO 31/3/163, f. 78r; Bonrepaus (London) to Seignelay, 15/25 February 1686, PRO 31/3/164, f. 85r. 134 Wellwood, Memoirs, p. 152. 135 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 30 November/10 December 1685, PRO 31/3/162, f. 41; Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 4/14 March 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 6v.

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complained to all who were willing to listen “that the King of England was entirely devoted to the King of France, and had made a private league or contract with him, for the destruction of Germany, Flanders and Holland.”136 It was hardly surprising, then, that the Spanish ambassador was providing copies of William’s Declaration of Reasons to “whosoever desired them” in late 1688.137 The papal nuncio and Spanish ambassador had a good deal of support from segments of the English Catholic community. Many English Catholics had long been averse to the Jesuits. During the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, many English Catholics “began to calumniate the Jesuits, whom they would have exterminated forthwith by fire and sword.” 138 Little had changed by James’s reign. The Presbyterian Roger Morrice knew that “most of our English papists do secretly like and favour the anti-Jesuitical faction.”139 In the newly consecrated Catholic chapel at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, a priest delivered a sermon whose “whole discourse ran against the Jesuits.”140 After the Revolution the Earl of Tyrconnel, himself no critic of the Jesuits, admitted that even among Catholics “this age will not bear being too fond of Jesuits.”141 The deep-rooted antipathy of many British Catholics to Jesuits provided fertile ground for the development of ideological opposition to the French-style Catholicism promoted by the court. “All those displeased with the good intelligence with France think that the King is moving too quickly with respect to Catholicism,” reported Barillon.142 The Dutch Ambassador Van Citters, who could have 136 “A Copy of a Letter,” 1689, Bodleian, [Oxford University], Rawl D91, pp. 15–16. 137 Bohun, The History of the Desertion, p. 35. There is some evidence to suggest that the imperial ambassador was taking a similar line in late 1688 (A New Declaration of the Confederate Princes and States (London, 1689), pp. 19–20; Dr. Thomas Lane (Vienna) to Sunderland, 7/17 October 1688, BL, Add. 41842, f. 144r). 138 Annual Letters of the English Province, 1678/9, in Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Father Hamerton recalled that “most Catholics” at that time castigated Jesuit “principles as pernicious to government, and leading to sedition” (“An Account of the Beginning and Progress of Oates’s Plot,” in Ibid.). 139 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 9 July 1687, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 160. 140 “Father Hay’s Memoirs of His Own Time,” Genealogie of the Hayes, pp. 57–8. 141 Tyrconnel (Dublin) to Queen Mary, 2 April 1690, BL, Add. 38145, f. 16v. 142 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 11/21 March 1686, PRO 31/3/165, f. 11r. A Jesuit intelligencer concurred, noting that “several Catholic Lords represented to the King that the His Majesty was moving too quickly and too zealously for the reestablishment of his faith” (Letter from a Jesuit of Liege to a Jesuit of Freiberg, 2 February 1687, Beinecke, Osb MSS 2/Box 5/Folder 109).

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agreed with his French colleague on little else, commented that “most moderate Catholics have always, and hitherto without effect, endeavoured to bring His Majesty to other maxims.”143 The Protestant commentators Daniel Defoe and James Wellwood both noted that James was supported by a minority of Catholics, a minority Wellwood identified as “chiefly the bigots of some religious orders and the new converts.”144 “The Papists who have estates begin to have qualms,” observed George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, who was always well informed about political manoeuvres, “and would be willing to stop a career which maybe so dangerous to them in the conclusion.”145 Many Catholics followed Innocent XI in their abhorrence of the appointment of Father Petre to the English Privy Council.146 Indeed, many individual Catholics were willing to make known their opposition to James’s Gallican-inflected policies.147 Thomas Nicholson, the episcopal head of the Scottish mission, warned from Padua that “the forwardness of some may do harm.”148 The Catholic gentleman Sir William Goring of Sussex “reproached his friends of the same religion for their folly and vanity, adding, ‘you will ruin us all by it’.”149 Both George Calvert, Lord Baltimore and George

143 Van Citters (London) to States General, 24 January/3 February 1688, BL, Add. 34512, ff. 68–69. The London gossip Cary Gardiner added that “the moderate Papists I hear is [sic] much dissatisfied with the present proceedings” (Cary Gardiner (London) to Sir Ralph Verney, 7 December 1687, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Verney RSS (read on microfilm held at Princeton University)). 144 Wellwood, Memoirs, sig. [A8r]; Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of Publick Transactions in the Life and Ministry of his Grace the Duke of Shrewsbury (London, 1718), pp. 12–13. 145 Halifax to Weymouth, 21 February 1688, Longleat House, Thynne MSS 15, f. 53r; Halifax (London) to Prince of Orange, 12 April 1688, PRO, SP 8/1/Part II, f. 203r. 146 Roger Morrice noted along with many others that Petre “meets with far greater opposition, not only from the aversion of the English nation, but from Count Dada and all the anti-Jesuitical papists than could be foreseen” (Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 1 September 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q, p. 290; Van Citters (London) to States General, 18/28 November 1687, BL, Add. 34510, f. 64r; Cary Gardiner (London) to Sir Ralph Verney, 30 July 1688, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Verney MSS (read on microfilm at Princeton University)). 147 “Earl Sunderland and Father Peters govern all and tis thought things cannot go worse for the King;’s interest and of that of the catholic religion,” moaned John Irvine and Louis Innes, “you cannot imagine with what violence things are carried here” ( John Irvine and Louis Innes to Charles Whyteford, Spring 1688, SCA, BL 1/114/4). 148 Thomas Nicholson (Padua) to ?, 22 January/1 February 1687, SCA, BL 1/96/2. 149 Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 152.

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Gordon, Duke of Gordon let it be known that they were “of the anti-Jesuitical and anti-French faction and for the Pope’s faction, and have had ill treatments therefore for some years past.”150 Both William Powis, Marquis of Powis and Charles Middleton, Earl of Middleton had little influence at court before the Revolution because they opposed the policies of the Gallican group.151 Just as the French-tinged Catholics surrounding James enunciated a clear ideological position, so the Catholics who were drawn to the Pope and the Habsburgs developed an alternative set of aspirations. By 1685 it was clear that those Catholics “who are closest to the court of Rome” were advising that should the king “join with the interests opposed to France, he would have the hearts of the people and great support from Parliament.”152 These Catholics wanted “an accommodation with the Prince of Orange and Parliament,” and thought of themselves as “good Englishmen” who opposed giving the King “too much absolute authority” at the expense of the “privileges and liberties” of the nation.153 James’s November 1685 speech to Parliament in which he announced his intention to keep Roman Catholic officers illegally in the army elicited a wave of criticism from this group of Catholics.154 Still more Catholics, such as the wealthy Marquis of Powis, opposed the appointment of the Francophilic Earl of Tyrconnel as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.155 Catholic opposition to James’s plans to repeal the Test Acts and pack Parliament

150 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 15 December 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 351. 151 William Fuller, Autobiography, Beinecke, Osb MSS f c 66, pp. 15–16; Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 148. On Middleton, see Memoirs of the Secret Service of John Mackey (London, 1895), p. 136. Powis’s opposition was so well known that when a virulently anti-Catholic mob came before his London house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1688, the mob spared it because some cried out “let it alone, the Lord Powis was against the Bishops going to the Tower” (The London Mercury). 152 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 3/13 December 1685, PRO, 31/3/162, ff. 44–5. 153 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 16/26 March 1685, PRO 31/3/160, ff. 95–96. Similar sentiments were ascribed to some English Catholics in Philanax Verax, A Letter to the King when Duke of York (London, 1688), pp. 5–6. 154 Lord Bellasis asked the Earl of Ailesbury “who could be the framer of this speech? I date my ruin and that of all my persuasion from this day” (Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, p. 126). Ailesbury thought this was “the sense of the old and landed Roman Catholics.” See also, Sir Henry Hunloke (Wingermouth) to Earl of Huntingdon, 14 July 1688, Huntington Library, [San Marino, Ca], HA 6949. 155 William Fuller, Autobiography, Beinecke, Osb. Fc 66, pp. 16–17.

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was more widely known. The anti-French Bishop John Leyburne was among those who were extremely pessimistic about James’s chances for success.156 While many Catholics agreed to serve their king as Lord Lieutenants and JPs, many more did not.157 By June 1688, a number of Catholics opposed James’s decision to defend his dispensing power by bringing the Seven Anglican Bishops to trial.158 From the perspective of Catholics opposed to France and critical to the Jesuits, James II’s policies were both politically unwise and ideologically offensive. These Catholics, whose views were in line with the sentiments of the Italian papal nuncio and the Spanish ambassador, detested the French-style absolutist policies advocated by James and his French-influenced advisors.159 Placidus Fleming, the Scottish Augustinian and Abbot of Ratisbon, “attributes all the misfortunes of the late king to the ill counsel he took from the Jesuits” and in particular Father Petre whom he deemed “one of the chief causes of all this trouble.”160 Scholars have long known that Protestants friendly to James had blamed his demise on French and Jesuit counsels. Well-connected Roman Catholics made the same points. By the late 1680s, it is clear, a significant segment of the Roman Catholic community in Britain shared Innocent XI’s concerns about royal absolutism and conversion by force.

156 Van Citters (Westminster) to States General, 1/11 November 1687, BL, Add. 34512, f. 65r. 157 James Johnston (?) to ?, 8 December 1687, Nottingham University Library, Pw A2112c; Van Citters (London) to States General, 3/13 January 1688, BL, Add. 34510, f. 77v. The Catholic historian Charles Dodd reported after perusing a variety of private manuscript collections that “I don’t find that all the Catholics were unanimous with relation to the Test” (Church History, vol. III, p. 420). One contemporary pamphleteer also thought that many Catholics “doubt whether it their interest that it should be repealed or not” (Reflexions on Monsieur Fagel’s Letter. 12 January 1688. (1688), p. 3). 158 David Lindsay (London) to Louis Innes, 28 May 1688, SCA, BL 1/117/1; Van Citters (London) to States General, 1/11 June 1688, BL, Add. 34510, f. 123r. 159 Father Conne lamented in London in November 1688 that “all the mischief come upon us by [our] own faults,” meaning the advice of James’s chosen Catholic advisors (P. Conne (London) to Louis Innes, 29 November 1688, SCA, BL 1/110/6). 160 H. Hughes (Ratisbon) to Earl of Nottingham, 4/14 December 1690, PRO, SP 81/106, f. 29r; Placidus Fleming (Ratisbon) to Louis Innes, 8/18 December 1688, SCA, BL 1/111/15.

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VI Deep divisions within the international and domestic Catholic community help to explain the peculiar history of Catholicism in England (and Britain more generally) after the Revolution of 1688–89. Traditional accounts of the Revolution as the triumph of British Protestantism against the Counter-Reformation’s last gasp in Britain are difficult to accord with John Bossy’s conclusion “that English Catholics during the century after 1688 were not on any reasonable judgment an oppressed minority.”161 In Scotland, too, Allan Macinnes has found that, far from the expected pogrom, “no sustained or indiscriminate reprisals were exacted” against Catholics.162 William and most Williamites never saw the Revolution of 1688–89 as an anti-Catholic crusade. Well aware of the divisions within the Catholic community, William’s trusted friend the Sieur Dijkveldt sounded out British Catholics as well as Protestants as potential supporters of the Prince of Orange.163 William’s army in 1688, as Jacobites never tired of pointing out, had “Popish officers” and chapels where “Papists go in great numbers to mass.”164 Anti-Catholic violence was in fact pervasive in late 1688, but none of it was at William’s behest. William had made it known before his arrival that “he never was nor is for oppressing any, no not the Papists in their consciences.”165 When anti-Catholic violence did occur in the heady days of 1688–89, William and his regime did all in their power to limit the effect. Rioters were arraigned for damage to Catholic property.166 “Care hath been taken to hinder several

161

J. Bossy, “English Catholics after 1688,” in From Persecution to Toleration, p. 370. A.I. Macinnes, “Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707,” in Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1987), p. 58. 163 Barillon (London) to Louis XIV, 17/27 March 1687, PRO 31/3/168, f. 55v. 164 England’s Crisis: Or, The World Well Mended. [September 1689], pp. [1–2]. Robert Ferguson later claimed, with some plausibility, that William’s army had “double the number” of Catholics that were in that of Britain’s Catholic King (History of the Revolution (1706), p. 2); see also E. Cruickshanks, “The Revolution and the Localities,” in By Force or Default (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 28–9; John Childs, The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution (New York, 1980), p. 21. 165 William Carstares to James Stewart, [ July 1687], PRO, SP 8/2/Part II, f. 28; Robert Southwell (Kingsweston) to Earl of Weymouth, 12 January 1688, Longleat House, Thynne MSS 15, f. 215v; Gaspar Fagel, A Letter (Amsterdam, 1688), pp. 1–2. 166 London Newsletter, 1 January 1689, FSL, Lc 1955. Lord Delamere worked hard to prevent his troops from defacing or pillaging Catholic chapels (Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 8 December 1688, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 338). 162

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priests and other Catholics from being ill used,” reported The Dilucidator, because “the Prince hath declared his intentions that he means not that anyone should be ill used barely for his religion.”167 When the judges went out on circuit in the summer of 1689 the attorney general Sir George Treby specifically requested that Catholic recusants be treated leniently.168 Williamite newspaper writers and pamphleteers in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution also called for tolerance to Catholics. The author of King William’s Toleration advocated toleration “for the private peaceable recusant.”169 Another pamphleteer urged that “if those of the Church of Rome cannot be argued out of their religion, and become proselytes to the Protestant doctrine and discipline, they must remain where they are.” No violence could be used against them.170 Both Mercurius Reformatus and The Athenian Mercury made the case for toleration in their pages, though both were known for their deeply Protestant commitments.171 Despite the fulminations of Catholic Jacobites and the French court, most Europeans of an anti-Gallican persuasion were convinced that post-revolutionary England would not be unfriendly to Catholics. The Spanish ambassador “gives out in his memoirs that the Prince of Orange does no harm to the Catholics,” reported one well-connected observer.172 Servants of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold also claimed that “the Catholics had never so much freedom and are not troubled in the least for religion.”173 Pope Innocent XI himself appears to have been convinced that “the bloodshed and persecution of Catholics in England should cease, and that their religion should prosper under [William’s] protection and government more than it would have done under that of King James.”174 167 The Dilucidator, No. 2, [19/29] January 1689, p. 30. When some of the militia harassed a Catholic gentleman in Cheshire, the Earl of Drogheda made sure “they were severely punished more than the common law would have done” (Earl of Drogheda (Chester) to Earl of Shrewsbury, 25 June 1689, PRO, SP 32/1/98). 168 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 13 July 1689, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 591. 169 King William’s Toleration (London, 1689), p. 15. 170 The Pastoral Letters (London, 1689), sigs. [a5v–a6r]. 171 Mercurius Reformatus, 3 July 1689, p. [2]; The Athenian Mercury, 15 August 1691, p. [1]. 172 Charles Whyteford (Paris) to Walter Leslie, 28 January/7 February 1689, SCA, BL 1/126/6. 173 Walter Lorenzo Leslie (Rome) to Charles Whyteford, 16/26 April 1689, SCA, BL 1/123/7. 174 “A Copy of a Letter,” 1689, Bodleian, Rawl D 91, pp. 19–20. (This document was written by a Roman Catholic).

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Protestant observers of very different persuasions thought the Revolution had tangible benefits for Catholics despite occasional antiCatholic violence. Robert Ferguson, who had become an ardent Protestant Jacobite, opined that “King William was able to do infinitely more for Popery in England . . . than they would on any terms have endured from King James.”175 James Wellwood, who as a passionate Williamite could have agreed with Ferguson on little else, thought, all things considered, that the Roman Catholics “will find their condition a great deal happier” under William’s rule.176 The Williamite regime’s comparatively gentle treatment of Catholics is both remarkable and puzzling. It is true of course, that William had geopolitical reasons not to offend his continental Catholic allies in the struggle against Louis XIV.177 But the deep ideological divisions within the British Catholic community, divisions between Gallican and Papalist groupings, do much to explain both the attitude of William and the Catholic community. William knew well that he could count a wide variety of Catholics among James’s opponents. And, many Catholics both within Britain and on the continent knew that only William could provide an alternative to the Gallican policies being pursued by James and his court.

VII In the weeks and months immediately following William’s arrival in England it became increasingly clear that contemporary Catholics did not share the conviction of modern historians that a great struggle was taking place between the forces of Reformation and CounterReformation in the British Isles. Innocent XI spent his last months assuring his fellow Italians that “the French King makes not that war upon the account of religion.”178 Innocent, wrote one of his earliest biographers, was sensible that this was not a religious war, as the Jesuits would insinuate, who have labored the exaltation of France, but that the French king had ravished something from most of his neighbors as

175

Ferguson, History, p. 2. [Wellwood], Mercurius Reformatus, 1689, sig. B[1]v. 177 This case is advanced in Jonathan Israel, “William III and Toleration,” in From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 129–70. 178 Roger Morrice, Entering Book, 8 June 1689, DWL, MSS 31 Q , p. 569. 176

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James II’s flight to France did not fundamentally alter continental Catholic sentiment. William Leslie complained that the Pope and his courtiers will do “all that they can against France in whatsoever kind.”180 His brother Walter Lorenzo agreed that “if we could here destroy and sacrifice the King of England’s interest, providing the English joined against France, we would willingly do it,” and he added starkly, “Assure yourself we would crucify Christ again to be revenged on the French.”181 James’s agent in Rome, John Lytoctt, drew the same conclusion. “Provided France may be suppressed,” he wrote, the Pope “seems willing to sacrifice all other considerations and interests.”182 Innocent’s death in 1689 changed little.183 The Earl of Melfort was especially explicit about the extent of political continuity. “The Jesuits are so hated at this court that it is incredible,” he wrote to James from Rome.184 They “are generally so passionate against France,” he added of the Papal court, that “they look at nothing but what may bring down their height.”185 Continental Catholics did more than politely applaud William’s success and the demise of Britain’s Catholic monarch. The Pope worked assiduously to encourage a multi-confessional alliance to oppose “the French tyrant” and his ally James II. Innocent XI, one observer noted, “hath given leave to the Emperor to raise contributions on the clergy to carry on the war against the Turk and the

179

The Life and Reign of Innocent XI late Pope of Rome (London, 1690), p. 68. William Leslie (Rome) to Charles Whyteford, 19 February/1 March 1689, SCA, BL 1/123/18. 181 Walter Lorenzo Leslie (Rome) to Louis Innes, 16/26 April 1689, SCA, BL 1/123/9. 182 John Lytcott (Rome) to Sir Richard Bulstrode, 21 may 1689, BL, Egerton 3683, f. 173r. 183 “The French do think, or would have the world think that the Pope is theirs,” reported Joseph Hill, but despite his polite statements about James Alexander VIII “won’t give more than the last did to his assistance” ( Joseph Hill (Rome) to Sir William Trumbull, 10 November 1689, Berkshire Record Office, D/ED/C33). 184 Earl of Melfort (Rome) to James II, 12/22 July 1690, BL, Lansdowne 1163B, f. 91v. 185 Earl of Melfort (Rome) to James II, 12/23 April 1690, BL, Lansdowne 1163A, f. 81r; Melfort (Rome) to Mary of Modena, 1/11 April 1690, BL, Lansdowne 1163A, f. 60v; The Present French King Demonstrated an Enemy to the Catholick as well as Protestant Religion (London, 1691), pp. 11–12. 180

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French king, and hath also written to the Catholic cantons of Switzerland to join with the Protestant cantons and with the Emperor against France.”186 The Pope was known to have funnelled large sums to the confederate princes fighting France in 1689, “but has refused to send anything to King James.”187 The King of Spain, who had William III’s coronation publicly celebrated in Messina, was thought by the French to have directed “considerable sums” to William himself.188 In the view of one well-informed English observer, James’s actions had convinced the Pope and a wide variety of Catholic princes “to unite with his now Majesty of England against a Prince of their own religion, when they saw he had embraced a design which would certainly end in his and all their ruins, and which would raise France to such an height of power, as could never be retrieved.”189 Catholic opposition to James and his regime, as extensive as it was, was not merely geopolitical. This was because the Catholicism promoted by James and his court was deeply Gallican in orientation. James did all he could to surround himself with French-educated and Gallican-leaning clerics and lay advisors. These were men (and in a few cases women) deeply influenced by the teachings of Bossuet, La Chaise and Maimbourg. The Catholicism practiced at James’s court was hardly conventional and non-controversial. In a wide variety of sermons and pamphlets James’s favorite Catholic apologists defended a theory of royal power that had strong affinities with the claims advanced by Louis XIV. Not only did these defenders of monarchy insist on passive obedience to the king, they also demanded that the king’s subjects obey their master “without reserve.” While it is true that many Catholics who preached and taught in England and Scotland during James’s reign sought to avoid conflict with Protestants and emphasized themes of moral improvement, those

186 A Brief Account, 19 February 1689, Bodleian, Rawl D1039, ff. 22–23, 77r; “A Copy of a Letter,” 1689, Bodleian, Rawl D 91, p. 13 (Catholic pamphlet); William Leslie (Rome) to Charles Whyteford, 8/18 January 1689, SCA, BL 1/123/17. 187 London Newsletter, 25 April 1689, FSL, Lc 2007; Walter Lorenzo Leslie (Rome) to Charles Whyteford, 9/19 April 1689, SCA, BL 1/123/6; Mercurius Reformatus, 26 June 1689, p. [2]. 188 The French King’s Declaration of War by Sea and Land against the Spaniards (1689) 5/15 April 1689, p. 2; Walter Lorenzo Leslie (Rome) to Charles Whyteford, 16/26 July 1689, SCA, BL 1/123/14. 189 Bohun, History of the Desertion, pp. 5, 132–133.

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closest to James were far more aggressive. Far from creating a tolerant environment, these Gallican-influenced Catholics openly blamed Protestantism for the moral and political failings of the last century. James may have had a deeply felt commitment to liberty of conscience, but he himself also harbored deep resentments about the nefarious consequences of the Protestant Reformation. French Gallicanism provoked more papally-inclined Catholics to enunciate an alternative vision for the Church and society at large. Just as the court Catholicism in the 1680s cannot be properly understood without appreciating its continental context, so the opposition to that French-tinged Catholicism had continental roots. ‘Country’ Catholics, as historians have called them, were not isolated ‘littleBritainers’ but were enunciating concerns about James’s policies that were closely tied to arguments advanced on the continent. In Britain the papal nuncio and the Spanish ambassador led the opposition to French Catholicism. These men were sceptical of the exalted claims made for royal power and worried that their violent abhorrence of Protestantism would lead to British dragonnades, and perhaps civil war. It was this Catholic opposition that made it possible for William to convince Catholic statesmen and Catholic soldiers to support his cause. British historians have so long been fixated on the extent of Protestant anti-popery in the British Isles that they have missed the profound and significant divisions within the British Catholic community. These divisions, in turn, cannot be understood without placing them in their full European context. Only by doing so can we make sense of Abbe Le Gendre suggestion that the conflict between Innocent XI and Louis XIV “dethroned James II, King of England.”190

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SECTION TWO

TRANSFERRING TEXTS AND TRADITIONS

CHAPTER FOUR

TRANSPLANTING REVELATION, TRANSFERRING MEANING: READING THE APOCALYPSE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND NEW ENGLAND Kevin Sharpe

Where the older historiography on exploration and colonisation emphasised the authority and control of the mother country, recent scholars write of connections and exchanges in both directions and of cultural as well as commercial traffic between the Old World and the New. Moreover, authority and settlement are now presented in both worlds as textual as well as institutional processes. Traditionally the author and book stood in intellectual history as controlling authorities that determined meaning for domestic readers and transferred meaning to other people, cultures or subordinate territories and communities. In a Whig history of England and America, Magna Carta or John Locke’s Treatises on Government (c. 1681) are often presented as texts that wrote the American constitution and structured American politics and values. More recently, however, scholars working in that interdisciplinary field called the history of the book have questioned the model of stable textual authority and transference and have drawn attention to the complex multiplicities of acts of authorship, to the instabilities of textual production, the diffused authority of textual interpretation, most of all the role of readers in determining meanings.1 The authority of texts, we have come to see, lay not simply—not even primarily—with authors, but with a variety of agents involved in the process of producing, distributing and consuming books: with the connections and exchanges

1 For a study that emphasises the instabilities of print see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998). I would like to thank Allan Macinnes, Peter Mancall and Steven Zwicker for their helpful comments on this essay.

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in the commerce of print in which the reading subject exercised as important and potent a role as the author.2 That Whig historiography and the more recent transatlantic textual criticism have followed complementary trajectories is no coincidence. For some critics have argued that, especially in early modern Europe, power (the capacity to enforce one’s will) as well as authority (the cultural processes that determine acquiescence) were textually constituted: that is that power depended upon codes and traditions as much as on armies and institutions.3 This of course was all the more the case when transatlantic distances made the enforcement of royal will even harder in the colonies than in the outlying regions of the mother country and so perforce at times rendered the interpretation as well as enforcement of government orders a local matter. Authority was—and remains—a hermeneutic process: an exchange, sometimes a contest, between authors and readers, authorities and citizens, about the meaning and interpretation of texts and traditions, one that is always being renegotiated.4 Though the fortunes and fates of texts depended upon acts of authority, such as imprimatur, licence and censorship, the practice of authority involved the compliance of readers of all the scripts of state, not only constitutions and canons.

I In the early modern Christian world, the most important text and authority was, of course, the Bible. On the Bible was founded the authority of the word, of kings—and indeed the rights and duties of colonisers. The Bible, however, was not a text that offered up clear, unambiguous meaning; its books of prophecy and parable were coded and veiled; the Bible foregrounded reading as an act, a Christian duty, of interpretation, of determining meaning. In early modern Europe, the division of Christendom into Catholic and Protestant, and then into a myriad of religious movements and sects, stemmed from different interpretations of Scripture; and, in turn, different 2 See K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), introduction. 3 See, for example, P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle eds., The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996). 4 For a fuller statement of such an argument see my Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London, 2000).

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denominations favoured and authorised different translations of the Bible—the Catholic Vulgate, the Lutheran Bible, and the Geneva text. The King James Version of 1611 offered a new standard not only for England, but also for the Stuart’s British dominions.5 Along with these variant texts, a multiplicity of commentaries and glosses explicated the meaning of Scriptural books and passages in different, sometimes directly contradictory, ways for readers of various persuasions in a variety of circumstances. The more obscure and visionary the biblical book, the more it provoked an industry of exegesis; the harder it was to fix the meaning, the more it was open to readings and to applications to the readers’ circumstances and sympathies. If no biblical book was of greater importance to Christians than the Revelation of St John, no book was more coded or drew as much attention to hermeneutic processes and their relation to truth, salvation and the last things. Where early Protestants insistently read Revelation to identify Rome as the Antichrist, the Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritans and radicals came to find in it a denunciation of the hierarchies of the Church of England. And where, in the age of the Royal Society, some insisted on rational scientific exegesis of the text, others claimed the authority of personal inspiration as the key to discovering meaning. The commentaries on and interpretations of Revelation clearly disclosed how acts of reading were temporal and ideological, how they shifted with the changing historical circumstances in which individuals and factions found themselves.6 Time, however, is only one of the circumstances of reading and interpretation. And it is certainly no more important than the locales or geographies in which hermeneutic and exegetical acts are performed. At the simplest level, even within a country, the discrepancies between metropolis and province, town and country, with their different levels of literacy, access to books, communications and communities, fundamentally influenced modes of reading, as well as what was read.7 In early modern Europe geographies were religious as

5

See D. Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading The English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven and London, 2004) and C.A. Patrides, English Biblical Translation (1975). 6 K. Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Politics in Early Modern Britain’, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 122–163. Thus, the Revelation of Richard Hayter’s polite culture is a very different text to that which the Jacobean Puritan William Perkins glossed as support for his campaign for a preaching ministry. 7 Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, Society and Politics, pp. 8–10.

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well as territorial; and, as well as Catholic and Protestant states, there were Catholic and Protestant regions, or Jansenist or Huguenot enclaves, not to mention cities like Amsterdam which were notorious as centres of many faiths—or none. These geographies and locales determined, as they were in turn fashioned by, the books and communities of readers and ultimately by local acts of interpretation, by how readers read in their communities. If the early modern maxim cuius regio cuius religio places too much emphasis on the capacity of early modern rulers to determine faith, we might offer a reformulation (eorum legendes, eorum religiones) that geographies shaped habits of reading and they, in turn, belief. Certainly those English Puritans who lamented the “dark corners of the land” identified ungodly terrains as those in which the word was not preached, understood or read.8 In the case of the Bible, geography and locale were not only conditions of reading but very much part of what was being read—of the message of Scripture. As much as it is a book of time, of creation, fall and eschatology, the Bible is a text of myriad geographies and journeys: paradise and exodus, Promised Land and Babylon, Judea and Jerusalem. In many instances, and especially in the case of Revelation, places, such as river, or wilderness, are indeterminate and it is left unclear whether even those named—the holy Jerusalem, for example—are specific or symbolic, in this case of arrival and reconciliation with Christ.9 Just as the understanding of biblical events was shaped by the reader’s own moment in time, so the meaning of biblical geography was influenced by the reader’s own locale. Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden’s prophetic acclamation as lion of the north was founded on Scripture; while in England civil war radicals were said to expect Armageddon “about Preston or Warrington Bridge.”10 With Revelation both the sites of reading and the inter8 C. Hill, ‘Puritans and the “Dark Corners of the Land”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 13 (1963), pp. 77–102. 9 See, for example, G.H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise In Christian Thought (New York, 1962). 10 On Gustavus Adolfus, see A Letter Sent from Sarjeant Major John Forbes from the King of Swedens Army (1631) (www.lukehistory.com/resources/sgtforbs.html) where the author writes: ‘Here the Holy-ghost doth describe the joy and rejoycing of all the faithfull for the destruction of the Romish superstition’ and quotes Revelation chapter 18:12 ‘I take it this generation doe live in that age this prophecy shall be fulfilled.’ See also, A. Gill, The New Star of The North Shining Upon The Victorious King of Sweden (1632), which relates astrology to biblical prophecy. B. Capp, ‘The Political

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pretation of biblical geography were directly connected to the text of scripture that was favoured. While modern commentaries point out that there is no need to do so, and other translations did not, the Geneva Bible interpreted the seven hills on which the woman sits in Rev 17:9 as Rome, as indeed the notes throughout identify the Antichrist with the papacy. What Rev 11:8 merely calls “the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt,” the Geneva annotations gloss as “that is, openly at Rome”; what the text calls Babylon, the commentary reads in every instance as Rome. Where in antiquity the names were used to designate vaguely any northern population, and where Luther was inclined to see the Turks signified by Gog and Magog,11 through the notes to the Geneva Bible readers were led to take them as the pope and the papacy. Through the notes compiled by exiles from Marian England to Geneva, or indeed of the Huguenot Franciscus Junius to the 1602 edition, the anti-Catholic apocalypticism of the continental Reformation was translated, in both the geographical and textual senses, to England.12 However, popular though it was and remained, in England, the Geneva Bible competed with other translations of Scripture: Miles Coverdale’s Bible, Henry VIII’s Bible and, after 1611, the King James Authorised Version, which was—quite deliberately—published without notes or commentary. Moreover, in England the Scriptures were, for the most part, expounded and read within the community of the Anglican Church, which all were obliged to attend and of which the successive heads were as keen to distance themselves from the radical reformation of Geneva as from the papacy in Rome.

II The story was not the same throughout the British Isles. Under the leadership of one of the returning exiles, John Knox, the reformation in Scotland was driven by a militant apocalypticism that never Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, in C.A. Patrides and J. Wittreich eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester, 1984), p. 113. 11 K. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530 –1645 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 17–19. In the book of Ezekiel Magog is described as a northern kingdom; see chapters 38 and 39. 12 See M. Betteridge, ‘The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and its Annotations’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 14 (1983), pp. 41–62.

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held sway in England. Knox’s “conviction that the world was divided into two armed camps stayed with him, and so too did the belief that the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation had a peculiar significance for his own times” and country.13 Knox saw it as his role to denounce Rome and to pave the way for the victory of Christ foretold in prophecy. His legacy, along with the Geneva Bible which remained the version favoured in Scotland, was a strong sense in the northern kingdom of the interrelationship between past and present, prophecy and affairs of state, and a belief too that it would be prophets more than princes who would fight Antichrist to secure Christ’s kingdom. The importance of Revelation to the Reformed Kirk and State in Scotland is nowhere better evidenced than in the attention given to the text by King James VI. In 1588, in the wake of the Spanish armada, James published a commentary on the seventh to tenth verses of the twentieth chapter of Revelation, the verses dealing with the final battle and defeat of Satan.14 In what was intended as a testament of his devotion to true (Protestant) religion, and a marking of a clear distance from his Catholic mother Mary at a critical time in Europe, James presented himself as champion of the war against the popish Antichrist. In the spirit of Knox, James read Revelation as a text for the time—for “this our last age.”15 James was principally concerned with “what we should learn of all”—the application to the times which he fully understood was an important matter for kings.16 In what he called a “sermon,” James explained how the passages pointed to the release of Antichristian errors and to “nations following them . . . hating the truth.”17 As Satan waged a last battle against the elect, James had no doubt that it was the pope who was here figured, stirring up princes like the Habsburgs who were his “slaves” to persecute the faithful—in France and Germany, as in Flanders.18 But God, he assured readers, protected his chosen and promised “deliverance of his kirk in this world and perpetual glory

13

Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 125. James VI, A Fruitful Meditation Containing A Plain and Easy Exposition or Laying Open of the VII, VIII, IX and X Verses of the 20th Chapter of the Revelation, in Form and Manner of A Sermon (Edinburgh, 1588). 15 James VI, Fruitful Meditation, sig Aiii. 16 James, Fruitful Meditation, sig. Aiii v. 17 James, Fruitful Meditation, sig. [Aiv]. 18 James, Fruitful Meditation, sig. Bii. 14

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of the same in the world to come.”19 Since God assured victory in the world, the text, James urged, exhorted men to fight “for maintenance of the good cause God has clad us with and defence of our liberties, native country and lives”20—to militant action on the European stage, not least in defence of Protestant rulers and nations. In the preface to the “Christian Reader,” Patrick Galloway, minister of Perth, hinted at the forthcoming publication of ‘a greater work’ and ‘larger proof of his majesty’s meaning . . . in that same argument’.21 The reference is almost certainly to A Paraphrase Upon The Revelation of The Apostle of St. John, a work directed to the international church militant composed in 1588 but not actually published until 1616,22 in which James explicitly named the papists as their “common adversaries” and defied any to refute his interpretation.23 James was concerned—to assert the centrality of Revelation and to clarify its meaning and application: “how profitable this book is for this age.”24 No less than with his sermon on chapter 20, in his paraphrase James reasserted his Calvinist faith, founded on election and reprobation, his belief in the prophecy of a final struggle and his sense that some nations, notably Scotland united with England in Great Britain, were chosen to “shake off the yoke” of the Egyptian monarchy.25 Summarizing the argument of chapter 17, he describes how “the angel expounded to John this vision of the pope . . . and clearly declares the author and manner of his destruction.”26 In this case, however, for all its ardent apocalypticism, the form of James’s text suggests his desire to emphasise not only the authority of Scripture but his own. Here in the paraphrase, the king speaks as a prophet in the voice of St John and in royal as well as apocalyptic terms. “I declare you,” James writes, “my name the oftener lest the authority of the book should be called in doubt, through the uncertainty of the writer.”27 In a spirit very different from Knox, James connects his royal authority with prophecy and presents his position as

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

James, James, James, In The James, James, James, James, James,

Fruitful Meditation, sig. [Biv]. Fruitful Meditation, sig. [Biv]. Fruitful Meditation, sig. Aii. Works of The Most High and Mighty Prince James (1616), pp. 7–72. Works, p. 2. Works, p. 5. Works, pp. 13, 35. Works, p. 53. Works, p. 71.

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king as that of godly exegete—“I am commanded to write.”28 In the paraphrase, the militant apocalypticism of the Scottish Reformation was rewritten to emphasise the role of a godly Constantine who might lead the British elect in their spiritual warfare.29 The royal claim was repeated explicitly in another Scottish treatise on Revelation that appeared under the influence of James’s commentaries and was published with royal licence and royal arms.30 In his dedication to James, John Napier observed how John entrusted the great work of the destruction of Antichrist to the “kings of the earth” and how his subjects looked to him to lead the battle against “the apocalyptic sea and city.” Combining oblique criticism with praise, Napier exhorts James to reform court and country and to “purge . . . all suspicion of papists”; but, like him, he emphasises the role Reformed princes are to play in the destruction of Antichrist.31 In his exegesis of the text, Napier assigned dates to periods and events, future as well as past, and in so doing he made Revelation a text of his own times: the seventh trumpet, he opined, had sounded in 1541; the destruction of abbeys in England, Scotland and France about 1560 had pulled down one of the dominions of the papistical empire; the defeat of the armada in 1588 and the murder of the Duke of Guise in 1590 were prognoses of the fall of Babylon.32 As a consequence, Napier invited speculation about the future not in vague or symbolic terms but as detailed predictions. As Katharine Firth writes, ‘Not only did Napier write more plainly than many of his predecessors, but he also greatly accelerated expectation’.33 For Napier the time of Revelation was come and the time for action was now. During the 1590s, apocalyptic fervour reached a new height in Scotland as a series of events appeared to presage the final battle. After the defeat of the Spanish armada, many ships of which were destroyed in Scottish waters, the birth of Prince Henry in 1594 was

28

James, Works, p. 71. See D. Fischlin, ‘“To Eat The Flesh of Kings”: James VI, Apocalypse, Nation, Sovereignty’ in D. Fischlin and M. Fortier eds., Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit, 2002), pp. 388–420. 30 John Napier, A Plain Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (Edinburgh, 1593). 31 Napier, Plain Discovery, sigs. A3–A4. 32 Napier, Plain Discovery, pp. 12, 154, 179, 223. 33 Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 148. 29

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interpreted as a sign. “You press under your foot the triple crown of the papacy,” the Presbyterian Andrew Melville prophesied as he greeted a new prince whom he saw as forging the Scots and English into a “single body of Scoto-Britannic people.”34 As Arthur Williamson has shown, the prospect of a united Scotland and England, two nations that, as Napier had observed, had resisted Rome, fuelled apocalyptic expectations. In the minds of Melville and those who thought and read like him, “Britain emerged with a deeply apocalyptic mission, indeed as a state fundamentally conceived within religious terms.”35 Together with James’s own avowed interest in the role of godly princes in the war against Antichrist, the expectation of the union of the British kingdoms as unfolding of apocalyptic prophecy ran high. In the southern British kingdom, however, events had forged a different environment for the interpretation of Revelation. Unlike in Scotland, the impetus for the English Reformation had emerged not from below but from the king; and not from a fervour for religious reform but a dynastic need to secure a divorce and an heir. Though apocalyptic hopes were raised during the brief reign of Edward VI, and even during the Marian persecutions, which were read as Satan’s war against the saints, events did not bear out those hopes. For all that John Foxe greeted her as a godly ruler in the battle against Antichrist, Elizabeth favoured a church settlement that contained too much of the whore of Babylon for the taste of her more godly subjects. Neither on the international nor domestic stage did Elizabeth fulfil the expectations of Foxe or the authors of the Geneva Bible who dedicated their translation to her in the hope that it would spur her to perform her role in the fulfilment of prophecy. The queen refused almost to the last to aid the Dutch in their war against the Habsburgs and at home seemed ever more concerned to temper the heat of religious controversy than to advance apocalyptic strains. Even after the defeat of the armada, the queen eschewed action on

34 Quoted in A.H. Williamson, ‘Britain and The Beast: The Apocalypse And The Seventeenth Century Debate About the Creation of The British State’, in J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin eds., Millenaranism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Volume III: The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, And Everyday Anglo-American Life In The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dordrecht, 2001), pp. 15–28, quotation, p. 16. See also A.H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979). 35 Williamson, ‘Britain and The Beast’, p. 16.

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the European stage. Though figures like Edward Hellwis identified her as the woman of Revelation 12, Elizabeth in her published prayers, quite unlike James VI, displayed no interest in apocalypse and the Church of England establishment in general steered clear of the book of Revelation.36 The most significant commentator on Revelation during the 1590s was in fact a leading Puritan critic of the Elizabethan settlement. Though significantly his commentary was not published until the next reign, William Perkins preached extensively on Revelation in Cambridge in 1595.37 Like James’s, the epistle dedicatory to Perkins’s commentary stressed the “application” of the text as “fit and pertinent to our times.”38 But in the different circumstances of Elizabethan England, his reading was quite other than royal exegesis in Scotland. Rather than the authority of a godly Constantine, Perkins emphasised the subordination of princes to Christ and the role of the godly as true priests and kings. And rather than a godly nation full of apocalyptic expectancy, Perkins took his country as one in Ladoceia’s condition, “in danger to be spewed out of Christ’s mouth” as unreformed and degenerate.39 As he wrote without equivocation: As lukewarm water troubleth men’s stomachs, so do we trouble Christ and therefore are like to be cast out even as that is. We may flatter ourselves and think that all is well . . . but know it, we are in danger of a most grievous judgement, namely, to be cut off from Christ.40

For English Puritans like Perkins, no less than Scottish ministers like Melville, the succession of a king from Scotland, brought up in the Kirk and a contributor to the apocalyptic literature that he read as prophecy of the godly cause, represented revived hopes of a more vigorous campaign against the Antichrist. Not only were Perkins’s own writings on Revelation freely published in 1604 and 1607, King James’s published Works of 1616 publicised his exegeses of apoca-

36

Capp, ‘Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, p. 97. W. Perkins, A Godly and Learned Exposition or Commentary Upon the Three First Chapters of the Revelation. Preached in Cambridge by that Reverend and Judicious Divine, Master William Perkins, ann. Dom. 1595 (1607). 38 Perkins, Godly and Learned Commentary, epistle dedicatory to Lady Elizabeth Montagu, sigs. Aiii–Av. 39 Perkins, Godly Commentary, p. 196. 40 I quote from Perkins, Godly Commentary, 1604 edition, p. 310; cf. 1607 edition, p. 196. 37

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lypse, which were placed at the beginning of the volume, as important representations of his kingship. Even in Scotland, however, James’s apocalypticism was articulated with different emphases and in different contexts to that of Perkins or Melville. As his poem “Lepanto” had—somewhat notoriously—suggested, James did not damn all papists as horns of the beast and could on occasions stress the need for Christian unity to counter the threat of the Turk.41 He had even shown favour to Catholics, which astounded the Kirk.42 When he succeeded to Elizabeth’s throne, not least because he was fully aware of the different religious topography of his new kingdom, James tempered his earlier apocalypticism, or rather complemented it with other discourses and ambitions, principally his quest for a reunification of Christendom.43 In his own speeches on the union of England and Scotland, James manifested none of the apocalyptic expectation that had fired Puritans and Presbyterians. As Williamson points out, the Scottish courtiers Sir William Alexander and James Maxwell, while still “deeply immersed in sacred prophecy,” posited a very different vision of apocalyptic Britain, with King James and Prince Henry as leaders of a Christian crusade against the Ottoman Empire rather than Rome.44 James I soon made it clear which side he supported after he unified the British monarchy.45 He made peace with Spain, long regarded by the godly as the principal arm of the beast. Though he met with the Puritans at Hampton Court, James rejected almost all their demands for further reform of the church and under his first archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, sought strictly to enforce conformity and to support the authority of his bishops. Most importantly, James’s anxiety about the Geneva Bible, especially its notes equivocal about the power of kings, led him to commission a new authorised Bible that, to say the least, muted the strident apocalypticism of some Geneva annotators.

41 James VI, ‘Lepanto’ in J. Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland (2 vols, Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1955–8), I, pp. 197–259. In ‘the authors preface to the reader’, James refers to the notoriety caused by his apparent praise of the ‘foreign popish bastard’, Don John, p. 198. 42 W.B. Patterson, King James VI and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), chapter 1. 43 Patterson, King James VI, passim. 44 Williamson, ‘Britain and The Beast’, pp. 18–19. 45 Williamson, ‘Britain and The Beast’, p. 19.

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As Brown Patterson has persuasively argued, rather than a militantly anti-papal policy, James cast himself as the champion of a reunified Christendom and of a European conciliarism as the means to effect it, while preserving the authority of elect kings and nations from the ultramontane claims of Rome. If James I did not change the fundamental beliefs he held as James VI, the new English as well as new British locale in which he articulated them, still more acted on them, was quite other than it had been in Scotland. In the northern kingdom to champion apocalypticism was to enhance royal authority by making (in James’s case, writing) a place for the king as godly ruler.46 In England, from Henry VIII on, the monarch was Supreme Head of the church and the champions of militant apocalypticism were critics of that royal supremacy, not to mention of the hierarchy of archbishops and bishops that James famously identified with the authority of kings.47 In England, therefore, James’s apocalyptic beliefs did not translate into that action on the world stage for which many had hoped.48 Indeed as the outbreak of the Thirty Years War appeared to herald the final battle between Christ and Antichrist, the king pursued a pragmatic neutrality which to some appeared as collusion with the forces of darkness. Their fears and suspicions were not allayed by James’s readiness in conducting a balanced diplomacy to pursue a Spanish marriage for his son, still less by his rethinking the question whether the pope really was the Antichrist figured in Revelation.49 Disappointment hardly begins to describe the reaction of the godly to these changes—in both England and Scotland. When James made his only return visit to Scotland in 1617, the people of the town of Dumfries called upon him to fulfil Christian eschatology and to lead a crusade against the beast.50 It may be that in the northern kingdom, James’s failure as king of Great Britain to act as the godly

46 See K. Sharpe, The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in K. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 134–142; Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, foreword and introduction. 47 In the well-known adage he uttered at Hampton Court, ‘No bishop, no king’. 48 On Ralegh, see Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 180–194. 49 A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought (Cambridge, 1995), part 1; K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, in K. Fincham ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 23–50. 50 Williamson, ‘Britain And The Beast’, pp. 17–18.

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Constantine he had represented himself as being sharpened the Kirk’s suspicion of kingly power that was to explode into Presbyterian revolution in the reign of his son. Certainly in England, where, since Foxe, the hopes of a church militant lay with a godly ruler, James’s actions, or perhaps one should say inaction, effected a fundamental change that helped to shatter the fragile peace of the church and state.51 Quite simply, some found themselves forced to conclude that England was not the elect nation chosen to be the New Jerusalem, the holy place of Revelation chapter 21.52 One may begin to discern this process in the writings of Thomas Brightman, the Cambridge Puritan who wrote A Revelation of The Revelation in the first decade of the century.53 Brightman retained some sense of Foxe’s belief in England as an elect nation, with a special place in apocalyptic history; but, in Firth’s words, his expression of his country’s special election “was given more in the terms of hope than conviction.”54 Perhaps disenchantment led him to stress the role of godly magistrates as well as princes. Towards the close of his long commentary, he pointed out ‘fearful signs and evident prognostications that this departure of the glory of God from amongst us is at the very doors’.55 Brightman associated the defeat of the Antichrist less with England than with the conversion of the Jews: ‘after the Jews are called and a new church is made, God will wipe away all tears’.56 And rather than in his own country Brightman was published in Latin at Frankfurt, then in English at Amsterdam and directed his commentary to the Reformed churches of Germany and France as much as Britain.57 Brightman’s sense that “the woman fled into the wilderness where she hath a place prepared of God” pending the final victory of the saints might not figure England, was not only to translate the meaning of Revelation but transfer a whole apocalyptic understanding to another people and place.58 51

See too W. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (1969). See verses 2 and 10 and compare Ch. 3:12. 53 T. Brightman, A Revelation of The Revelation (Amsterdam, 1611, second ed. 1615; references are to the second edition). Brightman wrote the work between 1596 and 1610, see Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 166. 54 Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 168. Brightman feared that, after Edward and Elizabeth, superstition was returning to the Church of England (Brightman, Revelation, pp. 390–1). 55 Brightman, Revelation, p. 877. 56 Brightman, Revelation, p. 710. 57 Brightman, Revelation, epistle dedicatory to reformed churches, sigs. A2–4. 58 Revelation Chapter 12 verse 6. 52

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From the first voyages of discovery, the New World had, understandably, been invested with apocalyptic significance: Columbus indeed promised Queen Isabella that he would find there enough gold to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem.59 During the religious wars in Europe that followed the Reformation, the existence of a land beyond the conflict served to endow the Americas with a sense of purity and promise; and, of course, the discovery of a primitive people in need of Christian mission fuelled apocalyptic as well as evangelical zeal. For most of the first century of the history of exploration, Europeans (Spaniards and Portuguese, later French and English) saw themselves as translating civilisation and religion from their homelands, extending the mission of their chosen nations to the ends of the earth as prophesied in Revelation 7:1. This was very much the case with the first English colonisation and remained the perception in Virginia where settlers continued to regard England as the elect nation.60 From about the first decade of James I’s reign, however, when they began to doubt whether the apocalypse would be fulfilled in England, some Puritans began to invest the new world with a sacred meaning as the place where the last battle would be fought and won and the new Jerusalem established. A tendency to see the new world in apocalyptic terms in England was by no means confined to Puritans. In his Clavis Apocalyptica, one of the most influential English exegeses of Revelation, published in Latin for scholars in 1627, the impeccably orthodox Joseph Mede suggested that it would be in the New World that Gog and Magog would rise against the saints.61 But where Mede saw little prospect of the New World becoming the chosen land, his correspondent, the Puritan and future prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, William Twisse, discerned that the plantations in America might be the promised holy land.62 It was this view that increasingly took hold in English Puritan circles and led some to read America as the sacred wilder59

Force and Popkin, Millenarian Turn, pp. viii–ix. See A. Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, 1992) chapter 3. 61 S.J. Stein, ‘Transatlantic Extensions: Apocalyptic in Early New England’, in Patrides and Wittereich, Apocalypse, p. 266. J. Mede, Clavis Apocalyptica (1627). 62 Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 223–4; See Twisse’s preface to the 1643 translation and Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, p. 139. 60

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ness of Revelation (chapter 12: 6, 14) to which the woman, representing the true church, should fly to be nourished far “from the face of the serpent”. This sacralization of the New World, alongside the corresponding Puritan desacralization of England and Europe, led to an entirely new type of colonisation—what Avihu Zakai has called the Exodus model—and to a refigured apocalyptic geography.63 Those Puritans who decided on emigration to a new England would translate with them the text of Revelation which they would read in their new land in ways quite different from interpretations in their old. The revolutionary hermeneutic change may be traced in the writings of John Cotton, an Emmanuel Cambridge scholar who from 1612 was vicar of St Botolph’s Boston in Lincolnshire. For more than a decade, Cotton had ceased to observe Church of England ceremonies and was connected with those circles of Puritans emigrating to America.64 In 1630 those organising John Winthrop’s fleet to New England invited him to preach a sermon at Southampton. Although he was to preach regularly on Revelation, in the sermon he published as Gods Promise to His Plantation, Cotton preached on the seventh chapter of the second book of Samuel: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them.” Cotton assured the migrants and the larger community of his readers that the journey had God’s warrant. He compared them to the first planters of the Christian church, urged them to win the natives to Christ and saw them becoming “trees of righteousness” in their new land.65 At this point, far from thinking of joining them, Cotton used language that indicates that he had not yet despaired of England fulfilling its mission as elect nation. “Be not unmindful of our Jerusalem at home,” he exhorted them, and he promised, “As God continueth his presence with us . . . so be ye present in spirit with us.”66 Two years later,

63 Zakai contrasts the Exodus type of migration, based on Israel’s flight from Egypt, with the Genesis type of God’s promise to his chosen nation and its mission. See Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, pp. 9–10 and 65–8, 99–101. For a classic contemporary exposition of the sacred mission see J. Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, written aboard The Arbella in 1630, printed in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 3rd Series, 7, (Boston, 1838), pp. 31–48. I owe this last reference to the kindness of Peter Mancall. 64 For a life see L. Ziff, The Career of John Cotton (Princeton, 1962). 65 John Cotton, Gods Promise to His Plantation (1630), p. 15. 66 Cotton, Gods Promise, p. 18.

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facing persecution by the Court of High Commission for his nonconformity, Cotton took ship to follow Winthrop’s band and to preach in a new Boston. In the new geography of New England, as others, Cotton was to find in Revelation a very different prophecy and a different ecclesiology and politics. Before he or they were transplanted, however, the migrants encountered an experience that drew attention to their remove to the furthest corners of the world: the ocean passage. By no means all, or most, of the passengers were Puritan, but for any Christian familiar with a scriptural discourse that rendered the path to salvation as a journey and the assaults on faith as a storm, the voyage took on religious significance. For the Puritans, it represented, in David Cressy’s words, “a series of tests and revelations.”67 To the godly a safe passage was evidence of divine protection, while the taunts of more worldly passengers who did not join them in prayers underlined the Puritans’ sense of themselves as different, an elect band. A sense of the voyage as transformative experience, of the ocean as a hermeneutic geography, is borne out by the ubiquity of marine and nautical metaphors in New England sermons and tracts.68 For some, too, the voyage may have represented a cleansing of old world impurities and a baptism into a new spiritual life in what, after travel, they were more inclined to treat as a sacred land. If that were the case in 1630, news over the next decade of Laudian ceremonialism, stricter enforcement of conformity and punishments of the godly at home, can only have confirmed a feeling of the righteousness of their actions and the sanctity of their mission in a new apocalyptic space and time—a time in which, from 1638 in Scotland, then in Ireland and England, the old world and church were thrown into confusion. In 1642, John Cotton published two treatises on Revelation that bring into sharp focus the consequences of reading a familiar text in a new geography and circumstance. In The Church’s Resurrection Or The Opening Of The 5th and 6th Verses Of The 20th Chapter Of The Revelation, Cotton showed how far he had travelled—exegetically as

67 D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 6; quotation, p. 144. See too William Bradford, A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England (1622). 68 Cressy, Coming Over, pp. 163–5.

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well as geographically. Influenced by Brightman, he associated the resurrection of the church with the conversion of the Jews, a theory given further impetus by the speculation advanced, and later fully outlined by James Thorowgood, that the American Indians were the lost tribes of Israel.69 But far from following an English apocalyptic tradition that had emphasised the leadership of a godly prince, Cotton asserted that God did not give the keys of the bottomless pit to magistrates but to spiritual governors.70 Nor were those spiritual governors the hierarchy of the church at home. Episcopal terrains, Cotton preached, were “plantations God hath not planted”; those who doted on bishops “undermine all reformation” and served not Christ but Antichrist.71 It was in New not Old England that there was to be a “resurrection . . . from resting in forms.”72 There the church was “but a company, a body of godly persons,” demonstrating signs of saving grace, and all were “spiritual priests and kings unto God.”73 To those tempted to return to their native country, as it was rent by civil war, Cotton presented a choice between sacred and reprobate communities, Jerusalem and Babylon.74 In The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, Cotton glossed Revelation chapter 16 which he took as “very fit and necessary for this present age.”75 Here, denouncing James’s ecumenism as a vain and misguided attempt to bring heaven and earth together, Cotton praised the likes of Perkins at home and Gustavus II Adolfus on the world stage, as agents of the Lord.76 Cotton now interpreted the fifth vial as poured onto the bishops, first by the likes of Theodore Beza and Thomas Cartwright, now by the Scots who heralded the downfall of Antichrist’s kingdom;77

69 J. Cotton, The Church’s Resurrection Or The Opening Of The 5th and 6th Verses Of The 20th Chapter Of The Revelation (1642), p. 8; T. Thorowgood, Jews in America, or Probabilities That the Americans Are of that Race (1650). I am grateful to Claire Jowitt for bringing this work to my attention. See C. Jowitt, ‘Radical Identities? Native Americans, Jews and The English Commonwealth’ in T. Kushner ed., Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt (1998), pp. 153–180. 70 Cotton, Church’s Resurrection, p. 4. 71 Cotton, Church’s Resurrection, p. 15. 72 Cotton, Church’s Resurrection, p. 21. 73 Cotton, Church’s Resurrection, pp. 9, 11. 74 Cotton, Church’s Resurrection, p. 21. 75 J. Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials (1642), title page. 76 Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Second Vial’, p. 27, ‘The Fourth Vial’, p. 5. 77 Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Fifth Vial’, pp. 4–5.

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the removal of episcopal pomp he saw as making way for the conversion of the Jews and so for Armageddon.78 When all the vials were poured out, he promised his auditors, they would see the true church was not a cathedral nor a diocesan church with bishops but “congregational only,” with pastors and teachers.79 In Cotton’s developing exegesis of apocalypse, the true saints were those who had “come out of England” for “liberty and purity of ordinances.”80 Cotton read the Prayer Book rebellion and the formation of the Covenanting movement in Scotland as signs of Antichrist’s imminent fall and prayed for his native country in which God was enacting great things.81 Though he urged his listeners to stay in America, he asked them now “to help with that light we have so there may be no more refuges of lies in that land” of England.82 Not long before he had despatched emigrants with the injunction to think of the Jerusalem at home; now the apocalyptic geographies were reversed. Rather than being an outpost of an elect nation, Revelation revealed New England as the model for reform of the old, the hope of its rescue from the paws of the beast. Indeed Cotton’s commentaries were exported to England allegedly from notes taken by members of his congregation. Published in London, Cotton’s works were thrown into the pamphlet controversies that raged in and between the British kingdoms. The Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie, for example, denounced Cotton as “if not the author, yet the greatest promoter and patron of Independency” and the two engaged in a polemical exchange that led Cotton to a full justification of the American congregational system as well as of his reading of the apocalypse.83 Just as Cotton took with him to the new world a tradition of reading Revelation practised by the likes of Perkins and Brightman, so his own re-readings in his New England home were re-circulated back into the debates over the nature of the true church and religious settlement in the British kingdoms that followed the collapse

78

Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Sixth Vial’, pp. 22–5. Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Seventh Vial’, pp. 11, 16. 80 Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Third Vial’, p. 24. 81 Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Fifth Vial’, p. 11. 82 Cotton, The Pouring Out of The Seven Vials, ‘The Seventh Vial’, p. 17. 83 Ziff, Career of John Cotton, p. 177. See L. Ziff ed., John Cotton On The Churches of New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Cotton’s commentaries as conveyed to London were printed for Henry Overton and sold at his shop in Pope’s Head Alley to English readers. 79

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of the Church of England and the abolition of episcopacy. For much of the 1640s, especially after the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant that brought the Scots into the civil wars in 1643, Presbyterians struggled to establish a national church, opposed by Independents and sects who dominated in the ranks of the army. John Cotton’s important interventions in those debates were founded on his reading of apocalypse that had shown him that the congregational way was the road to the New Jerusalem. In The Keys Of The Kingdom Of Heaven, Cotton questioned the excessive power of synods and elders and wrote to assert the independency of each congregation and its members.84 And in a full response to Baillie and Samuel Rutherford’s The Due Right Of Presbyteries, entitled The Way Of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648), Cotton argued that independency “had been bred in the womb of the New Testament.”85 Citing Revelation 14 on the souls who follow the lamb, Cotton recalled the “so long and hazardous . . . voyage” to “a land of liberty,” and expressed his pride at how, by their preaching to the Indians, his church had, as the Jesuits themselves acknowledged, become “dangerous supplanters of the Catholic cause” and enemies “to the antichristian world.”86 But in 1648 the Catholic was not the only antichrist. Cotton wanted also to vaunt how the churches of New England had made others question and reject episcopacy, just as earlier Cartwright in old England had influenced him to begin to do. Quoting Revelation and his own gloss on the seven vials, he asserted the congregational discipline to be the way to the last victory: for where it was “there would be no place nor way open for the advancement of Antichrist nor for the usurpation of episcopal prelacy.”87 Having “suffered this hazardous and voluntary banishment into this remote wilderness,” the members of the congregational churches had made

84 Cotton, The Keys Of The Kingdom Of Heaven in Ziff, John Cotton On The Churches, pp. 72–3, 107. Published in London in 1644, again to be sold by Henry Overton, Cotton’s treatise carried a preface by the puritan Thomas Goodwin, preacher to the Council of State and chaplain to Cromwell who, according to Cotton Mather, had met John Cotton just before his departure to New England and Goodwin’s own flight to Holland. 85 Cotton, The Way Of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648) in Ziff, John Cotton On The Churches, p. 184. 86 Ziff, John Cotton On The Churches, pp. 199–200. 87 Ziff, John Cotton On The Churches, pp. 207–8, 303. 88 Ziff, John Cotton On The Churches, p. 304.

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“a little sanctuary.”88 And though he did not deny the help of others—even the Presbyterian Scots—in showing the light, Cotton insisted that it was the New England way that England must follow; for it was Christ’s model revealed in apocalyptic prophecy and now realized in Cotton’s own time and place.89 Among the works of Cotton that were printed first, or only, in England and published to address English circumstances were the important texts of sermons he had delivered weekly at his Boston church on the thirteenth chapter of Revelation.90 The language of commerce serves only to underscore the traffic in exegesis. In his Exposition of the 13th Chapter of the Revelation, Cotton advocated a new individual hermeneutics of apocalypse. Though acknowledging that readers were often not satisfied with any one interpretation, Cotton was sure, following the promise of chapter 1 verse 3, that “so much light God casts almost into the head of every man that takes this book in hand . . . that he adds some light more than hath been brought before.”91 The light Cotton added in this text was very much cast from a New England that had developed a patriotic sense of identity from its sacred mission into the wilderness. It was the New Englanders, Cotton asserted, who had cast off the monster of Babylon and the “diocesan or national church” which was “but an image of the great beast.”92 To those who yet hankered after their old country or who “look at things as mean and poor here,” he urged a counting of spiritual riches and asked: “will you go back to Egypt?”93 Only in America could men find the true church and perhaps a true polity, too, in which the prerogatives of rulers were limited and the Lord entrusted his chosen with “establishing jurisdictions and lib-

89 Ziff, John Cotton On The Churches, p. 306. The text was published in London with a preface by the Independent minister and millenarian, Nathaniel Holmes. 90 John Cotton, An Exposition Upon The 13th Chapter of the Revelation (1656). In the preface to the ‘Christian reader’ of this Exposition, printed for Timothy Smart at the Hand and Bible in The Old Bayly, and for Livewell Chapman at the Crown in Pope’s Head Alley, Thomas Allen pointed up the exchange between old and new England exegetes of Scripture. Identifying the influence on Cotton of the English puritan divines Sibbes and Preston, Allen, who attended Cotton’s sermons on Revelation, now presented him as an authority on Scripture for readers in England where, he wrote, “the very name of Cotton is enough to set a high price upon what ever hath that stamp” (Cotton, Exposition, “To the Reader”). 91 Cotton, Exposition, p. 4. 92 Cotton, Exposition, p. 20; cf. p. 18. 93 Cotton, Exposition, p. 20.

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erty for well ordering our families and townships’.94 Now, while praising “holy Brightman,” Cotton dissented from his interpretation of Revelation in one important respect.95 He calculated that the time of the woman going into the wilderness fell in the time of Elizabeth and that the year 1655 would see another blow dealt against the beast.96 In the wake of the Puritan migrations to New England, and as the convulsions in Scotland and England were unfolding as Cotton preached, he feared an assault on the colonies: “if wars come against New England,” Cotton warned, “it will be from principalities” which might have to be resisted.97 For, though some advocated yielding to Caesar in matters of worship, Cotton instructed his countrymen, “it will not be safe for you to receive the image of any other church than that which Christ hath established.”98 In old England, even with a parliament, it remained “a very difficult thing to have the state ruled by apostolical judgement.”99 Only in New England where “neither the pope nor the king hath power to make laws to rule the church” could God’s truth be pursued and his apocalyptic prophecy be fulfilled.100 Reading Revelation over the decade after he fled, John Cotton had become ever more certain that only New England could be the New Jerusalem of chapters 3 and 21.101

IV John Cotton died in 1652, a little before his predicted date for Armageddon and just a year before his native country embarked upon the experiment he did much to influence—the rule of the saints in the Barebones assembly.102 It was the high point of millenarian

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Cotton, Exposition, pp. 13, 77. Cotton, Exposition, p. 87. 96 Cotton, Exposition, pp. 90–93. 97 Cotton, Exposition, p. 111. 98 Cotton, Exposition, p. 257. For all the recital of passive obedience, the implications of Cotton’ s position were radical. 99 Cotton, Exposition, p. 259. 100 Cotton, Exposition, p. 261. 101 “And therefore,” he exhorted, “let us not leave . . . till in family, church and commonwealth we have set a pattern of holiness,” a pattern not only for England but “to those who shall succeed us” (Cotton, Exposition, pp. 77, 242). 102 Cotton predicted that the beast would fall in 1655. 95

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excitement in England; correspondingly, the collapse of the assembly signalled a conservatism not only in the realm of ecclesiastical politics but also in biblical hermeneutics that sought to dampen apocalyptic expectations.103 In New England, for all the spiritual anxiety of contemporaries, the mid century is seen as marking a new era of prosperity and confidence—of a confidence that owed not a little to a clear self perception, based on reading Scripture, of living in a sacred land.104 In the revisionist historiography of colonial America, it is this second generation, rather than that of Winthrop and Cotton, that invented the myth of New England as the land of the woman in the wilderness, the refuge from the dragon.105 More recently, however, Avihu Zakai has powerfully restated Perry Miller’s original thesis of a “founding errand” on the part of the first generation of American Puritans and posited, against the argument of an invention mid-century, the continuity of ideology and belief in apocalyptic mission: “the redemptive, prophetic flight of the church of the wilderness passed without change from the first to the second and third generations of Puritans in New England.”106 While Zakai’s critique of revisionism is in the main convincing, the second and third generations of New England Puritans were conscious of living in different circumstances to the founding migrants. And in consequence they read, and reinterpreted, and applied, the book of Revelation differently. But, as with the founding fathers, the second generation of American Bible readers were fashioned not only by their own circumstances and moment but also by place: by their own locales and by the remembered or imagined geographies of their mother country which still cast its shadow over their interpretation of Scripture. The year 1660 that seemingly witnessed an end of millenarian hopes in England marked in America the “height” of “apocalyptic and eschatological consciousness.”107 The contrast, however, did not simply manifest the difference traditionally described between an old

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Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations’, pp. 140–3. Stein, ‘Transatlantic Extensions’, pp. 272 ff. 105 See, for example, R. Middlekauf, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals (New York, 1986). See too T.H. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, 1988). 106 Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, p. 158, cf. chapter 5 and passim. 107 Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, p. 196. 104

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England in which a more secular, rationalist culture replaced the zeal of the sects and a New England where all were ever more confident of their apocalyptic mission.108 In his election sermon to the General Assembly of Massachusetts, the pastor of Roxbury, Samuel Danforth seemed anxious to counter the possible attractions to many of an England again at peace and enjoying a vibrant commercial and cultural life. Reminding his auditors that “we came not hither to see men clothed as courtiers,” Danforth, concerned about the worldliness of his congregation, laid emphasis on the position of America as a wilderness, a land of “wild woods and deserts,” and stressed the riches of a New England colony that had been formed out of a special religious mission and enjoyed a unique spiritual life.109 Had they not, he asked, braved “the vast ocean” in hope and search of “the pure and faithful dispensation of the gospel and kingdom of God?”110 “The times,” he continued, “were such that we could not enjoy it in our own land: and therefore . . . we left our country, kindred and fathers houses and came . . . where the Lord hath planted us.”111 But the temptations of Epicureanism and atheism arose anew, and even in America, the preface to his sermon detected “a laodicean lukewarmness in the matters of God.” The strains of the earlier English Puritans’ disappointment at a promise unfulfilled begin to sound as the preacher sought to recall his audience to their mission and former zeal.112 Danforth’s address marks a turning point in the history of what is known as the “American Jeremiad,” a sermon based on the biblical lamentations of Jeremiah.113 For its theme is not the special godliness of the congregation but their lapse from the piety of their fathers into worldliness. In the shifting history of this genre,

108 A lively debate about the extent to which post-Restoration England was in any measure a more secular state was initiated by J.C.D. Clark’s English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985). See now his revised second edition, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000). 109 S. Danforth, A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand Into The Wilderness (1671), pp. 9–10, 17, 18. 110 Danforth, A Brief Recognition, p. 17. 111 Danforth, A Brief Recognition, p. 17. 112 Danforth, A Brief Recognition, Thomas Shepherd’s address to the ‘Christian Reader’, sig. A2v. 113 See S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wisconsin, 1978).

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the readings of Revelation are central. So too were the heirs and successors of the first American exegetes of apocalypse. Increase Mather, the Dorchester, Massachusetts clergyman and first president of Harvard College who named his son after Cotton (his father-inlaw) was preoccupied with Revelation, apocalypse and the mission into the wilderness from the early years of Restoration in England to the turn of the century and beyond. In his The Mystery Of Israel’s Salvation (1669), preaching on the establishment of Christ’s kingdom after the pouring of the sixth and seventh vials, Mather made clear that he expected the Lord shortly.114 The time was at hand “when all Israel shall be saved, and then will converting work go on gloriously all the world over, even amongst Indians . . . ”; then, he promised using language that connected geography with apocalyptic time, the world may be ‘termed a new world’.115 Contrasting his own country with an old England where he interpreted the Great Fire as part of the fourth vial, Mather assured Americans that Brightman’s prediction that “some faithful ones of God in a wilderness” would have special advantages to understand these mysterious truths of God had been realized in “such of us as are in exiled condition.”116 St John had led them there, he continued, to witness the destruction of Rome. Over the following years, Mather preached and wrote to sustain belief in New England’s apocalyptic mission and to counter the influences, not least from England, of rational scepticism and worldliness that, he feared, infected the new world as well as the old. In 1677, for example, pointing to things “that look with an ominous aspect upon poor New England,” he called upon the people to renew their covenant with God, to make them “the Lord’s covenant people [who] are in the Revelation said to have the name of God and the name of Christ on their foreheads.”117 Subsequently in The Necessity

114 Increase Mather, The Mystery Of Israel’s Salvation (1669), epistle to the reader, pp. 1–2. Mather did distance himself from the discredited English millenarians. 115 Mather, Mystery, pp. 62, 65. 116 Mather, Mystery, pp. 160, 163–4. Mather argued for revelation against a rationalist or naturalist approach in The Mystery of Christ Opened and Applied in Several Sermons (Boston, 1686). 117 Increase Mather, Renewal of Covenant The Great Duty Incumbent on Decaying or Distressed Churches (1677), p. 4. Two years later, praising the first American generation of ‘Abrahams’, Mather quoted Revelation 2:5 (“Remember from whence thou art fall and repent and do the first works”) to recall a lost generation from apos-

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Of Reformation, presenting New Englanders as akin to the Jews, and cataloguing the sins of profanity, Sabbath-breaking and intemperance they perpetrated, Mather warned that, like the Israel of the Old Testament, “we are a perishing people if we reform not.”118 Corrupting with drink the Indians whom an earlier generation had come to convert as part of its mission symbolised for Mather the New Englanders’ fall and the need for redemption.119 As time passed and approached what he believed would be the last days, his tone became more strident. In Heaven’s Alarm To The World (1681), he prophesied that the ruin foretold in Revelation chapter 8: 10 hung over them;120 in a 1688 Narrative Of The Miseries of New England, he feared that England under James II would deliver sinful New Englanders into the hands of the papist French.121 But as crisis came and passed, Mather held onto his personal conviction that he belonged to a people chosen to make the way for Christ’s kingdom. In 1689, as William of Orange took the throne in England, he could write again of “the Almighty’s most wonderful blessing and prospering New England and his gospel among the heathen there, which to me looks like the beginning of the fulfilling those many prophecies in Holy Writ concerning them.”122 Though struggles continued, writing in 1700 on The Order Of The Gospel, he felt confident that Brightman’s reading of Revelation had been “fulfilled in what has come to pass in this American desert.”123 In particular, for Mather America had seized from Antichrist control of the church by establishing a congregational system in which “the essence of a minister’s call is the mutual election between him and his people”—a system Mather later promoted on his visits to England and Scotland as a model for all Christian churches.124 In the circumstances of post-Revolutionary

tasy to apocalyptic mission (A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy (1679), pp. 56, 57 and passim). 118 Increase Mather, The Necessity Of Reformation (1679), preface ‘To the Much Honoured General Court of the Massachussetts Colony’, no pagination; pp. 2–3. 119 Mather, Necessity Of Reformation, pp. 6, 9–10, 12. 120 Increase Mather, Heaven’s Alarm To The World (1681), p. 7. 121 Increase Mather, A Narrative Of The Miseries of New England (1688), pp. 3–5 and passim. 122 Increase Mather, A Brief Relation of the State of New England from the Beginning of That Plantation to This Present Year, 1689 (1689), p. 18. 123 Increase, The Order Of The Gospel (1700), p. 7. 124 Mather, Order Of The Gospel, pp. 91, 135–8, 142.

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England, Mather could find common accord with Presbyterians and some others of the old world.125 But his sense of the rightness of the New England way and of the sanctity of his country remained strong. Increase Mather’s combination of pride in the New England mission and denunciation of those who lapsed from it was his spiritual bequest to his son, Cotton Mather, named after his maternal grandfather, whose life he wrote. Cotton Mather, a prolific preacher and author, published no fewer than 50 works in which eschatology played a central role.126 As a third generation New Englander, he contributed to the New World apocalyptic mission by combining biblical exegesis with a religious history of the colony that charted and illustrated biblical prophecy as it had unfolded there, and that established a native pantheon of divines for an American church. Mather’s life work, his Magnalia Christi Americana: or The Ecclesiastical History of New England From 1620 To 1698, combined a narrative of providences (such as the success in promoting the gospel to the Indians) and afflictions with the lives of divines and governors and the history of the seminary, Harvard College.127 While lamenting and admonishing against backsliding, it yet saw for New England a great future, described in apocalyptic terms: “There is a resolution and a reformation at the very door, which will be vastly more wonderful than any of the deliverances yet seen.”128 For Mather, a review of the New England past pointed up the mission to the wilderness and his country’s chosen place as the site of the last glorious battle; as he put it in Theopolis Americana, “our glorious Lord will have a holy city in America.”129 Though in many respects he followed as well as piously recounted the works of his father, Cotton Mather’s reading of apocalypse was

125

Mather, Order Of The Gospel, p. 142. R. Smolinski ed., The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of ‘Triparadisus’ (Athens, Georgia, 1995), p. 5. See T.J. Holmes, Cotton Mather: A bibliography of his Works (3 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1940) and also Reiner Smolinski’s chapter below. 127 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: or the Ecclesiastical History of New England From 1620 unto . . . 1698 (1702). An edition in 2 volumes was published in 1853 (Hartford, Conn.). The Magnalia was as important for American history and nationalism as the works of Bale, Foxe and Parker had been to the Tudor English church and state. 128 Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), p. 101. 129 Cotton Mather, Theopolis Americana: An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City (Boston, 1700), p. 43. In this work Mather declared that they were entering the time when the vials were about to be poured out, p. 4. 126

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undertaken in altered circumstances, changed over his long life, and was shaped by the shifting relations between the colony and mother country. Even more than Increase Mather, he felt the need to support prophecy and revelation against the scepticism of the rationalists; his Triparadisus has been described as “a hermeneutical bulwark against the allegorising deists.”130 To strengthen the cause of revealed religion, he took up the early eighteenth century philological scholarship of William Whiston, and the science of Isaac Newton and the Royal Society, as well as the texts of Joseph Mede and others.131 By the end of his life, he revised the eschatological views he had inherited from his father as well as his own earlier position. For one, Mather came to renounce belief in the conversion and restoration of the Jews as the herald of Christ’s second coming.132 And Cotton’s nationalism, forged by his experience and his writing of American history, led him to dissatisfaction with Mede’s casting of America as the land of Gog and Magog where Satan would rise to attack the saints. “I that am an American,” he wrote in a new language of self identity, “must needs be loath to allow all America still unto the Devil’s possession.”133 Against Mede, Cotton Mather read from scripture that America was the land promised, and he interpreted the Salem witches as the Devil’s last attempt to secure a place that was destined to be the land of his destruction. Cotton Mather’s American identity was still formed out of, rather than in conflict with, England. The intellectual and scholarly influences on him—Thomas Burnet as well as Whiston—were English as much as American; as he figured the palaces of the holy city he thought of the great houses of Britain.134 As well as cultural, the ties to the

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Threefold Paradise, pp. 10–18, quotation at p. 16. In Cotton Mather’s own words: ‘we have indeed a sect of metaphorists of whom I would intreat that they would not so metaphorise the holy city as utterly to evaporate it’ (Ibid., p. 246). 131 Mather often cites William Whiston, author of An Essay on The Revelation of St. John (1706) as well as several works on ‘Scripture Prophecies’ and Newton. He also refers to papers of the Royal Society (e.g. Threefold Paradise, p. 209) and even the notorious sceptic and libertine, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Ibid., p. 165). 132 Threefold Paradise, pp. 296–7. 133 Threefold Paradise, p. 291. And, he repeated, ‘one that is an American as I am, will hardly give that of Mr Mede: that the American hemisphere will escape the conflagration; and that the people there shall not be partakers in the blessedness of the thousand years’ (Ibid., p. 42). 134 Threefold Paradise, p. 247; see too p. 237.

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old country were bonds of political allegiance—to “our good king on the British throne.”135 When he prophesied that “the fall of the new popish Babylon will be accompanied with the loss of her American interest,” Mather probably imagined a godly Anglo-American empire rising from the subjection of France and Spain.136 Yet, Cotton Mather, in his biblical hermeneutics as much as his ecclesiastical history, wrote an American future as well as an American past: a future in which the fulfilment of its prophetic role would override all other allegiances and obligations. Over the course of the following decades, events rendered England and America very different geographies of scriptural exegesis. As in the mother country the Church of England entered a period of spiritual torpor, New England witnessed a popular evangelical revival— a reaction to the more secular spirit denounced in the jeremiads.137 As in Cotton Mather’s writings, the millennial enthusiasm that accompanied it was coloured with a strong American nationalism. But now it was a nationalism fashioned increasingly in opposition to an England, which, with the rise of deism and arianism, appeared to be more the Antichristian Egypt than an elect nation. As political tensions compounded these differences, the book of Revelation was reread in New England, not now as a text for unity, but as a manifesto for resistance and rebellion.138 Though it signified differently to succes-

135 Threefold Paradise, p. 172. The manuscript of his Triparadisus was sent for printing to John Wyat, a nonconformist bookseller and publisher in St. Paul’s Yard, London. 136 Mather, Theopolis Americana, p. 47. 137 Stein, Transatlantic Extensions’, p 286. 138 Threefold Paradise, pp. 298, 422. Preaching on 17th January 1776, Rev. Samuel Sherwood took up the theme of The Church’s Flight Into The Wilderness (printed in D.R. Williams ed., Revolutionary War Sermons (New York, 1984), no. 8). In the very different circumstances in which he found himself, he delivered ‘observations on Scripture prophecies showing that sundry of them plainly relate to Great Britain and the American colonies and are fulfilling in the present day’. Sherwood’s text was Revelation chapter 12, verses 14 to 17, which he promised might afford ‘much support to God’s people in times of great distress’ (Church’s Flight, p. 9). Central to Revelation, Sherwood reminded readers, was the fall of the popish Antichrist. But, he now insisted, interpretation could not limit the beast simply to Rome; rather it symbolised more generally any “persecuting tyrannical power,” and in particular that of Britain under Stuart kings (Ibid., pp. 14–15). Apocalyptic prophecies of trials and sufferings Sherwood now read as a description of the American colonies in their relations with England. In language with charged political freight, he spoke of New England as the safeguard of “civil and religious liberties” as well as of the true church (Ibid., pp. 15, 41). Sherwood argued that the floods of the dragon had

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sive generations, the wilderness of Revelation was for the seventeenth century New Englanders America, just as it had been England for the Tudors. And where in England the apocalyptic tradition had emphasised godly rulers, in America, even more than in Scotland, it supported clerical oversight of civil authority and ultimately a republic.

V Just as readers and exegetes struggled to translate the ‘time and times and half a time’ or to square the thousand years or 1260 days (Rev 11:13) with a contemporary calendar, so they endeavoured to identify precisely the places and spaces of Revelation. And just as time was read into as well as out of biblical prophecy, so geographies were a condition of reading as well as what interpreters strove to read and understand. As one critic observes, place and space are central to Revelation and inseparable from time: “space in this narrative is the place of a conversion,” of the last temporal things.139 For most Protestants, reading and hearing the word was the means to conversion. But the spaces as well as moments of reading were vital in determining the nature of conversion—more broadly in shaping spirituality, identity and public life. Like the ‘wilderness’ of John

been poured forth by the English governors in Boston and New York, and in actions like the Quebec Bill by which England supported France against American territorial claims (Ibid., pp. 31, 33). He depicted contemporary political acts and tensions between England and the colony, that is, as part of apocalyptic history; and as he pictured the envious dragon bent on devouring the saints, he quoted Revelation 11. 3–5 to argue: “if any man hurt them, he must . . . be killed” (Ibid., p. 41). The time was coming when Babylon the great would fall to rise no more. ‘These commotions and convulsions in the British empire’, Sherwood concluded, ‘ may be leading to the fulfilment of such prophecies’ (Ibid., p. 49). Sherwood’s sermon was, as he said, a text of the moment. But his apocalypse was, too, very much one read on and out of American soil, of “the earth [which] has ever helped the woman since her arrival to these shores” (Ibid., p. 31). Where in England, for all John Wesley’s endeavour to translate it from the America he had experienced, apocalyptic fervour was tempered and pacified by Enlightenment rationalism, in New England, Revelation had become—not for the first or last time—a call to arms (See C. Burden, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (Basingstoke, 1997) p. 9 and passim). 139 Jacques Sys’s ‘L’Espace Apocalyptique’, Graphe, 1 (1992), pp. 79–104, quoted in Burden, Apocalypse, p. 28.

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Cotton and the Mathers, the frontier has been—and remains—a defining space of American exegesis: of nation, the world and the last things. Latterly, ‘space’ itself has been, and is, a defining hermeneutic condition. Like other texts, Scripture was transferred from the old world to the new. But a recognition of common texts and traditions should not dull our sense of how through translation—movement to another place—those texts and traditions were re-read and reinterpreted. Or indeed of how Atlantic textual exchanges fashioned new modes and models—of piety and power.

CHAPTER FIVE

“RELIGION STANDS ON TIP-TOE”: GEORGE HERBERT, THE NEW ENGLAND POETS, AND THE TRANSFER OF DEVOTIONAL MODES Helen Wilcox

George Herbert was ten years old and living in London when James VI of Scotland acceded to the English throne in 1603. Two years later he began to attend Westminster School, from where he witnessed the crisis of the Gunpowder Plot, an early reminder of the vulnerability of the Stuart monarchy. In 1609 he left London and began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. His earliest known writings are two New Year sonnets addressed to his mother in 1610, in which the seventeen-year-old student complains that contemporary poetry addresses all its attention and energies to secular love and fails to honour God: My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, Wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn, Besides their other flames? Doth Poetry Wear Venus Livery? only serve her turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and layes Upon thine Altar burnt? Cannot thy love Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise As well as any she? Cannot thy Dove Out-strip their Cupid easily in flight? . . .1

In this intensely imagined rivalry between the Cupid of earthly affection and the Dove of the Holy Spirit, the young Herbert resolved to take the side of the Dove, vowing that his “poor Abilities in Poetry, shall be all, and ever consecrated to Gods glory.” 2 He went on to produce perhaps the greatest collection of devotional lyrics in English, The Temple, first published in 1633. 1 George Herbert, Works, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 206. All further references to Herbert’s writings are taken from this edition. 2 Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), p. 20.

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Just over a century after Herbert’s resolution to convert all that secular poetic “heat” into passionate divine lyrics, the New England minister and intellectual leader, Cotton Mather, wrote from Cambridge, Massachusetts with strikingly similar sentiments in his diary on 27 September 1713: the Minds & Manners of many People about the Countrey are much corrupted by foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey. By way of Antidote, I would procure poetical Composures full of Piety, & such as may have a Tendency to advance Truth and Goodness, to be published, & scattered into all the corners of the Land.3

Though the style, context and practicality of Mather’s comments differ greatly from Herbert’s outraged verse, there is a clear link of principle between the two views expressed a century and an ocean apart. By investigating the publication and distribution of Herbert’s work, and examining how it was received in the writings of the new American communities, this chapter explores the ways in which the poetic ideals of George Herbert and Cotton Mather, at the beginning and end of the Stuart period in England and New England respectively, came to be connected. This case study of the absorption of literary and devotional modes is also offered as a means of observing patterns of cultural transfer in the expanding Stuart world.4

I After writing his New Year sonnets in 1610, George Herbert went on to a notable career at Cambridge as student, college lecturer, fellow of Trinity and finally university orator. He did not, however, proceed to a position in public life as might have been expected, but instead was ordained in the Church of England and worked as a priest in the small parish of Bemerton, near Salisbury, until his 3 Cited in Cotton Mather’s Verse in English, ed. Denise D. Knight (Newark, 1989), p. 11. 4 I am grateful to the organisers of the conference, “Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connections,” held at the Huntington Library in January 2001, for the opportunity to explore this aspect of the early reception of Herbert’s work. I am also indebted to the editors of this volume, to Prof. Jonathan Post of the English Department at UCLA, and to my Groningen colleagues in the “Historische Kring,” for their commentary and insights.

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premature death in 1633. The Temple, his posthumously published volume of lyrics, quickly became popular, going through five editions in the first five years after his death and managing to appeal to a remarkably broad readership. Charles I was comforted by the poems when in prison at the last days of the Civil Wars; at the opposite end of the political and devotional spectrum, Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain, Peter Sterry, recommended to his son that he should “reade the scriptures . . . and Mr. Herbert.”5 The lyrics were cited, praised and imitated by men and women from Royalists to Republicans and from Catholics to Quakers. In many ways they were treated as a new kind of scripture, with Herbert seen as a contemporary Psalmist, the “sweet singer of our Israel.”6 Extracts from Herbert’s Temple went on to be published as hymn-texts and devotional alphabets, translated into Latin, set to lute accompaniments, and treated to many other reworkings as signs of the readers’ admiration for the achievement of what he in 1610 had called “layes” for God’s altar. With the additional publication of Herbert’s prose work A Priest to the Temple in 1652, and Izaak Walton’s Life of Mr. George Herbert in 1670, Herbert the man was turned in retrospect into the ideal of the Stuart priest, poet and gentleman in the days before the Commonwealth. This summary account of Herbert’s seventeenth-century reputation has so far centred on his enormous popularity in England. How impressive, on the other hand, were his American connections? Interestingly, Herbert had significant associations with the New World during his own lifetime, which seem to have laid the foundations for the reception of his work in America after his death. In the early 1620s he was closely linked with the leading figures in the Virginia Company, who included his stepfather, Sir John Danvers, and his good friend Nicholas Ferrar.7 It is quite likely that Herbert’s poem

5

Peter Sterry, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 290, p. 43. See my “ ‘Heaven’s Lidger Here’: Herbert’s Temple and Seventeenth-century Devotion,” in Images of Belief in Literature, ed. David Jasper (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 153–68. Herbert’s devotional aesthetic in turn inspired other authors, such as the visionary poet of the 1650s, Henry Vaughan, and infiltrated the work of so many writers that it is almost possible to speak of a “school” of Herbert in the seventeenth century: cf. Robert H. Ray, “The Herbert Allusion Book,” Studies in Philology, 83.4 (Fall, 1986). 7 See Jeffrey Powers-Beck, “Religion on Tiptoe: Sir John Danvers, the Virginia Company, and ‘The Church Militant’,” in Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue (Pittsburgh, 1998), pp. 189–221. 6

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“The Church Militant” dates from this period, though it was not published until its inclusion as the third section of The Temple more than ten years later. The poem traces and predicts, in apocalyptic mood, the movements of the Christian church across the world, and makes very specific reference to America: Religion stands on tip-toe in our land, Readie to passe to the American strand. When height of malice, and prodigious lusts, Impudent sinning, witchcrafts, and distrusts (The marks of future bane) shall fill our cup Unto the brimme, and make our measure up; When Sein shall swallow Tiber, and the Thames By letting in them both pollutes her streams: ... Then shall Religion to America flee: They have their times of Gospel, ev’n as we. My God, thou dost prepare for them a way By carrying first their gold from them away: For gold and grace did never yet agree: Religion alwaies sides with povertie.8

Herbert’s dynamic vision of the church’s future is full of anticipation, as the idea of religion “on tip-toe” to move on to America vividly suggests. The expression has nothing to do with quietness or timorousness; it vividly indicates a readiness to move on, conveying a sense of imminence.9 Herbert’s poetic analysis of the religious situation, however, is remarkably even-handed. He criticises the European churches and expects with dread the “bane” which they will face, while he promises “Gospel times” for the Americans, whose poverty, he notes ironically, will assure them grace. On the other hand, those on the “American strand” must also expect sin to follow the church wherever she goes—even across the Atlantic. When Nicholas Ferrar was preparing The Temple for publication after Herbert’s death in 1633, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University (whose printer was to publish the poems) intervened with an objection to the lines referring to the westward movement of religion towards America. He was clearly troubled by the idea that

8

George Herbert, Works, pp. 196–7. The phrase “on the tip-toes of expectation” was used by Thomas Fuller, The Holy War (1639), 2.9.60. As Fuller clearly knew Herbert’s poem (see below, p. 151), it is possible that his use of the phrase was itself an echo of “The Church Militant.” 9

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they might be interpreted prophetically and thereby used (or abused) by those critical of the English church. The importance of Herbert’s— and Ferrar’s—early American connections may be symbolised by the fact that Ferrar refused to allow The Temple to be published without the couplet which claimed that religion was “on tip-toe,” ready to leave England for “the American strand.” As Walton reported, Ferrar “would by no means allow the Book to be printed, and want [these lines].”10 Eventually, the Vice-Chancellor gave way, commenting: I knew Mr. Herbert well, and know that he had many heavenly Speculations, and was a Divine Poet; but, I hope the World will not take him to be an inspired Prophet, and therefore I License the whole Book.11

Subsequent history, however, confirmed that the Vice-Chancellor’s suspicions were more accurate than his hopes. Within two years, William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, censured one Samuel Ward of Ipswich for preaching in distinctly Herbertian terms that “Religion and the Gospel stood on tiptoes ready to be gone.”12 His prophetic preaching led Ward to be arrested and imprisoned, and he died before being released. Nor was it only the Puritans who found resonance in Herbert’s dramatic sense of America’s importance to the church’s progress. In 1646 the Royalist Thomas Fuller preached in Exeter and echoed Herbert’s statement that the church would continue to move westwards, adding: “Onely God forbid we should make so bad a bargaine, as wholly to exchange our Gospel for their Gold, our Saviour for their Silver.”13 The pattern of this argument is identical to Herbert’s, though Fuller extends the reference to American gold to include silver too, with an ominous echo of Judas’s sale of Christ for thirty pieces of silver suggesting his own despair at England’s spiritual state in the 1640s. Herbert’s reputation in England as the foreteller of American religious experience was again confirmed in 1652 when his first biographer, Barnabus Oley, expressed the hope that the devotional poet would prove “a true prophet for poor America, not against poor England.”14

10

Walton, Life, p. 75. Ibid. 12 Ward’s words were cited by William Prynne, Canterburies Doome (London, 1646), p. 361. 13 Thomas Fuller, Feare of Losing the Old Light (London, 1646), p. 12. 14 Barnabus Oley, “A Prefatory View of the Life and Vertues of the Authour,” Herbert’s Remains (London, 1652), B4r. 11

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When the seventh edition of The Temple came out in London in 1656, it included an “Alphabeticall Table for ready finding out chief places” which reveals fascinating evidence of the way in which the poems were then read. If one looks up “America,” one is directed to “The Church Militant” for “America’s conversion calculated ” and “Their parting with their Gold prepareth them for the Gospel.” Entries under “Christian Religion” include a reference to “when it shall pass over to America,” and under “Religion” the reader is shown where to find “her removal hence to America foretold” in the poems.15

II The earliest references to copies of Herbert’s books crossing the Atlantic come from the Virginia Company, with which members of the Ferrar family continued to be connected until well into the 1650s. This is a very apt context for the sale of Herbert’s books, since religion and trade were seen to go hand in hand from the beginning of the settlement. The 1610 declaration summed up the Company’s activities as “by way of marchandising and trade, [we] doe buy of them the pearles of the earth, and sell to them the pearles of heaven.”16 In the book trade from England to Virginia, Herbert’s poems came to fulfil the role of “pearles of heaven”; religious culture thus played its part in the mercantile adventure, being a commodity to be exchanged for the fruits of the American soil. In 1649, for instance, John Ferrar (the brother of Herbert’s friend and executor, Nicholas) sent a package of 197 books to Virginia, including Bibles, collections of sermons, and copies of The Temple.17 A 1650 letter to John’s daughter written by one Edward Johnson from his house “in Mulberry Islands Parish upon James River in Virginia” confirms the arrival of such a parcel: “Herbert’s poems I received and at the opening of it I went into the Church & fell down on my knees to pray for you and your religious family.”18

15

George Herbert, The Temple, 7th edition (London, 1656), I1v, I3r, K1v. A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia (London, 1610), p. 6. 17 A.L. Maycock, Chronicles of Little Gidding (London, 1954), p. 75. 18 Ibid. 16

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This unusually frank account of the reaction of an early modern reader of Herbert’s work is revealing in two important ways. First, there is a striking contrast between Johnson’s matter-of-fact initial comments on some unnamed books on the one hand, and his rapturous response to “Herbert’s poems” on the other; opening The Temple led him directly to church and on to his knees. This evocation of a spiritual response to the book foreshadows the powerful impact that Herbert’s poems would later have on the more Puritan readers in the New England colony.19 Second, Johnson’s 1650 letter betrays a telling emphasis on the connection between Herbert’s poetic piety and the “religious family” of the Ferrars. Johnson’s immediate reaction upon reading the poems is to pray thankfully for the Ferrar family, who were clearly very influential in the reception of Herbert in America. Not only had they sent copies of The Temple to Virginia, but they had also been instrumental at earlier stages, copying out the manuscript of the poems and ensuring the publication of The Temple complete with its American “prophecy.” What was so special about Herbert’s poems that they should be published intact after his death, and could bring a Virginian settler to his knees? The English Presbyterian, Richard Baxter, wrote in 1681 that Herbert’s poems combine “Heart-work and Heaven-work” in one book,20 and this phrase offers an excellent summary of the unique combination of the personal and the doctrinal in Herbert’s devotional poetry. The three parts of The Temple —“The Church-porch,” “The Church” and “The Church Militant”—between them offer a broad range of religious experience. In the opening section there is moral teaching; in the central section, the focus is on personal spirituality, expressed in dialogue with God in exquisite lyric form; and, finally, the volume ends with a versified vision of religion in “militant” action throughout the history of the world. “Heart” and “heaven” are not only represented in the variety of the tripartite structure of The Temple, but are also brought side by side within individual lyrics. In “The Flower,” for example, the speaker’s “shrivel’d heart” recovers “greennesse” in a spiritual “spring,”

19 Readers reacting to Herbert in New England were less likely than Johnson to set his work in an ecclesiastical context. While Johnson was moved by reading Herbert to enter the church building, Herbert’s New England readers tended to be drawn rather into the metaphorical inward temple of the soul: (see below, p. 191). 20 Richard Baxter, Poetical Fragments (London, 1681), A7v.

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through the power of God to lift the ordinary Christian “up to heaven in an houre.” There is no hiding the fact that writing is itself seen as life-asserting, allied with the “budding” of a spring flower. Behind the poem and the poet’s art, of course, lies the divine text— “Thy word is all, if we could spell”—but Herbert also frequently draws on the homely tradition of aphoristic wisdom.21 It was undoubtedly this capacity to be witty and skilful while at the same time writing in an appealingly simple and personal manner which attracted many among Herbert’s early following. He could surprise and inspire, as well as challenge and comfort, his readers. By 1662 these lyrics were gracing the library of Jonathan Mitchel, the Fellow and “Glory of the [Harvard] Colledge,”22 and later in the same decade Herbert’s works were present in the New England libraries of Increase Mather and Charles Chauncey.23 In 1679, Herbert’s poems were listed in an inventory of the books and other items belonging to the late Daniel Russell of Charlestown,24 and even as late as 1711—a century after Herbert’s earliest poems were written, and only three years before the end of the Stuart era—the New England judge and diarist Samuel Sewall sent to London for an order of books which included “Two Herbert’s Poems.”25 Although Herbert’s poems seemed “old” in 1711, it is unlikely that Sewall’s buyer had any difficulty in finding the two copies requested, since

21 George Herbert, Works, pp. 165–7. The range of emotions and tones in the poem is wide; we hear of enormous “wonders” and the resurgence of inner life, but there is no disguising the speaker’s wintry suffering and “grief.” At times the language appears effortlessly spontaneous, while at others there is an intense consciousness of its own art: when the speaker feels renewed, this is expressed as “I once more smell the dew and rain,/And relish versing.” 22 Mitchel’s ownership of The Temple is recorded in MS Middlesex Court Files, docket 15, 284; see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of New England, 1620–1730 (New York, 1956), p. 139. The accolade for Mitchel is from the titlepage of Cotton Mather’s Life of the Reverend and Excellent Jonathan Michel (Boston, 1697). 23 See Donald E. Stanford, Edward Taylor (Minneapolis, 1965), p. 22. Chauncey and Mather were early presidents of Harvard; Chauncey had been a contemporary of Herbert as lecturer in Greek at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1620s, before moving to New England. 24 MS Middlesex Probate Court Files, docket 2, 775; see Morison, Intellectual Life, pp. 138–9. 25 Samuel Sewall, Letter-Book, cited in Thomas Goddard Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620 –1730 (New Haven, 1920; reprinted New York, 1966), p. 176.

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The Temple had been reprinted (in its thirteenth edition) just two years earlier and would still have been readily available from early eighteenth-century booksellers.26 Sewall was by no means alone in continuing to admire Herbert’s works towards the end of the Stuart age in America. There is fascinating evidence of developing admiration for Herbert’s works in one of his New England readers, Increase Mather, during the later seventeenth century. Almost twenty years after he had first acquired The Temple for his library (in 1664), Mather added Herbert’s prose work, A Priest to the Temple (in its 1675 edition) to his collection.27 This not only provides insight into the growth of a New England library, but also indicates a continuing and broadening interest in Herbert as writer and religious thinker. Increase’s son, Cotton Mather, observed that it was important to study “written published Treatises” in addition to the Bible, in order to gain “ye fullest Testimony” of Christian experience.28 The evidence of the Mather library suggests that Herbert’s treatise on the life and calling of a country parson could serve alongside the scriptures, as well as the poems of The Temple, as sources of inspiration and spiritual witness. By the early eighteenth century, Herbert’s works were also to be found in the official library of Harvard College, perhaps not surprisingly since Increase Mather and Charles Chauncey were both presidents of the college. The College Laws stipulated that the library should only contain the works of authors who “doe best agree with the Scripture truths.”29 The presence of Herbert’s work in Harvard Library, therefore, represents the ultimate stamp of approval, confirming not only individual fondness for his writing but also the acceptable status of his doctrine and devotion in the cultural community of the New England faithful.

26 The 1709 edition, however, marked the end of Herbert’s first wave of popularity; the next edition of The Temple did not appear until 1799. 27 Noted by Abram E. Cutler, “Poetical Prognostics,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 27 (1873), pp. 347–8. Wright, Literary Culture, mistakenly refers to this as another copy of Herbert’s poems (p. 52). 28 Cotton Mather, Notes of Sermons (1686), Huntington MS 15212 (Mather Family Collection U 8 A4), p. 83. 29 This rule was added to the College Laws by Chauncey; see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939), p. 98.

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One of the primary functions of Herbert’s poetry seems to have been to endorse the American vocation to be the favoured site of Christian faith and purity. In 1647—even earlier than the first recorded sale of copies of The Temple to readers across the Atlantic30— Herbert’s promise of religion’s westward progression to the New World was cited in an elegy to commemorate the distinguished American divine, Thomas Hooker.31 The Rev. Ezekiel Rogers took the opportunity to celebrate Hooker’s achievements by referring to America’s status as a place of honest faith illuminated by the teachings of ministers such as Hooker himself. Recalling Herbert’s account in “The Church Militant” of the exchange of gospel truths from Europe for gold from America, Rogers sums up this spiritual repayment for the settlers as . . . one Rich Pearl, which Heaven did thence afford, As pious Herbert gave his honest word;32

The English poet’s piety is used here as a source of authority to confirm the heavenly blessings afforded to those in the new country. As the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor in 1633 had feared, and many of Herbert’s early English readers perceived, the lines from “The Church Militant” were being taken as a promise. Poetry, seen as prophecy, has now become history, in a self-confirming process for the settlers; their devotional reading has been transformed into justification for their actions and achievements. This progressive sequence from reading to self-endorsement may also be discerned in the work of Daniel Gookin, writing his Historical Collections of the Indians in New England in 1674. Gookin’s father was an early settler in Virginia, but Daniel had moved north to Boston in 1644, from where he worked with the “Indian people” living around “the bounds of the Massachusetts,” whom he saw as exist-

30 This suggests, of course, that some settlers arrived with their own copies of Herbert’s poems in the goods they brought with them. 31 Hooker was the author of, among many other works, The Application of Redemption (London, 1656), announced on the title-page as “being his seventeenth book made in New England.” 32 The elegy was first printed in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana: the Ecclesiastical History of New-England from Its First Planting (Boston, 1702), III, pp. 67–8.

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ing “in darkness and the shadow of death.”33 In recounting his sense of vocation to convert these native Americans, Gookin refers to two textual authorities, the Bible and Herbert: And it is a thing to be desired, that the word of God’s grace, declared in the gospel of his Son, may run and be glorified . . . and thereby we may see the predictions of the scriptures fulfilled,—that our Lord Jesus Christ shall become salvation unto the poor gentiles, unto the ends of the earth; and that seraphick prediction of holy Herbert, that excellent poet, be accomplished, which he elegantly declared: . . . Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, Ready to pass to the American strand . . .34

Gookin’s use of Herbert’s authority represents one of the most outspokenly positive treatments of this famous couplet. Herbert’s “prediction” is set alongside those of the “scriptures” which are to be fulfilled in the conversion of the Indians; his prophecy has taken on a biblical status and is unequivocally perceived as “seraphick,” that is, not merely angelic but from the highest order of the angels. Herbert’s message is seen to be perfectly in tune with the prophecies of Christ himself. This construction of Herbert by a profoundly admiring New England reader proves to be even more interesting when the context of Gookin’s text is considered. It was dedicated in manuscript to Charles II, the Stuart monarch on the throne in London in 1674: though a “poor” work, it is a “testimony” of “affection” towards the King. In his dedicatory epistle, Gookin acknowledges that his work is most unworthy to kiss your royal hands, being so meanly apparelled in an Indian garb. But the matter therein contained, being a true account of the progress of the gospel among the poor Indians, within your dominions, and that under the influence of your royal favour, this, as I conceive, is not unmeet for your Majesty’s knowledge.35

Gookin is presenting to the English monarch an account of the religious progress in his “dominions” now that the light of the gospel has advanced across the Atlantic. This is not so much religion “on

33 Daniel Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, 1674 (1792 edtn., reprinted with notes by Jeffrey H. Fiske, Towtaid, 1970), p. 31. 34 Gookin, Historical Collections, pp. 31–2. At this point Gookin quotes 22 more lines from “The Church Militant.” 35 Gookin, Historical Collections, dedication, p. xiii.

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tip-toe,” to borrow Herbert’s original phrase, as the next stage in the process, when the activities of Charles’s ministers already in the New World are “apparelled in an Indian garb.” The cultural complexity here is fascinating: the words of Herbert, poet of the preCivil War Stuart world,36 are being used in an entirely new context to endorse Gookin’s vocation to convert the American Indians. As the century wore on, one might have expected the citations of Herbert’s renowned “Church Militant” passage to occur less frequently, the settlement of New England growing more established and Herbert’s poetry becoming relatively old-fashioned. On the contrary, however, the end of the seventeenth century witnessed an increase in the number of references to the transfer of religion to the “American strand.” By 1686, Cotton Mather’s manuscript notes of sermons he heard in Boston included an ominous quotation from a fellow preacher who pointed out that, after one godly generation in New England, “Religion was ready to expire”;37 a dark echo of Herbert’s prophecy, suggesting that it had proved too heavy a burden for those charged with maintaining religious observance in the colony. The difficulties they would face had also been hinted at in “The Church Militant”—there would be “crimes” as well as “vertuous actions” (l. 262)—but this line was rarely quoted in the earlier optimistic references to Herbert’s poem.38 In Joshua Scottow’s 1694 Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony, however, the promise and the threat contained in the English poet’s words were both invoked. Scottow talks initially of a “Super-humane” design in their initial westward motion, “as Divine Herbert in his Temple Prophetically Sang.”39 The manner of Scottow’s reference to Herbert turns him into an inspired Psalmist whose words underline the divine agency in the early struggles of the settlers. But Scottow also faces up to the sense of spiritual decline in the colony by the 1690s, reminding his readers that “Holy Herbert in his Pious Poems foretold of us”

36 According to Walton (Life, p. 39), Herbert received encouragement from Charles I for his ordination. 37 Cotton Mather, Notes of Sermons, p. 18. 38 George Herbert, Works, p. 197. 39 Joshua Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony Anno 1628. With the Lord’s signed Presence the first thirty Years (Boston, 1694), p. 8. These words are followed by quotation of the “Religion on tip-toe” couplet from “The Church Militant.”

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how “Sin shall Trace and Dog” the church in America.40 Herbert’s prophecy, when read in full, contained within it a painful reminder of their vulnerability as well as their vocation. In the last years of the Stuart period, both aspects of the poet’s vision of American religion were again to be heard in the texts of New England writers, but this time in separate texts. In the preface to the great “Ecclesiastical History of New-England,” Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, published in 1702, it is evident that Herbert’s words offered a framework for an understanding of New England’s history: I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand.41

Three years later, on the other hand, the New England poet Michael Wigglesworth wrote despairingly on his death-bed: Farewel, New-England, which have Long Enjoy’d The Day of Grace, but hast most vainly toy’d, And trifled with the Gospels Glorious Light; Thou mayst Expect a dark Egyptian Night.42

The imagery of a cycle of light and darkness in religious history is also taken from Herbert’s “Church Militant.” Religion is seen as moving like the sun from east to west, leaving the areas behind it in darkness. To the settlers who had experienced what Wigglesworth recalled as the brightness of “the Gospels Glorious Light” in New England, the contrast with the perceived decline in “Grace” in the twilight of the Stuart era was cause for shame and despair. They had “toy’d,/And trifled” with their great opportunity, and now the negative side of Herbert’s prophecy had come to haunt them.

IV Although Herbert’s “Church Militant” functioned as a vital source of self-conception for the New England settlers, his “prophetic” words 40 Scottow, A Narrative, p. 71: echoing Herbert’s “Church Militant” l. 260, Works, p. 197. 41 Mather, Magnalia, C1r. 42 Cited by Cotton Mather in his funeral sermon for Michael Wigglesworth, A Faithful Man, Described and Rewarded (Boston, 1705), p. 46.

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were by no means the only aspect of the poet’s work cited by his admirers in colonial America; nor did they constitute the most significant connection between him and his readers in the New World. Herbert’s most fundamental influence on the settlers derived from the fact that The Temple offered them justification for the use of verse in matters of faith. This was a crucial issue for a Protestant community, amongst whom Psalm singing was one of the most fundamental and reassuring communal activities. In 1640 the first American book of metrical Psalms, informally known as the Bay Psalm Book, was published; it was described as “a plaine and familiar translation of the psalmes and words of David into english meter.”43 Its early date indicates the necessity of the metrical psalms to the spiritual life of the settlers, but they were careful to state that they had not “taken liberty or poeticall licence to depart from the true & proper sence of Davids words.”44 Their top priority was thus biblical allegiance and accuracy; poetic quality was a secondary concern. As the preface explains, If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that Gods Altar needs not our pollishings.45

The wonderful defiance of the statement—for who would dare to suggest that human artistry could ever improve “Gods Altar”?—nevertheless betrays the hidden tension always present in religious verse: the intense but often strained relationship between devotional accuracy and the “pollishings” offered by artistic skill. This vexed issue is one of the central concerns of Herbert’s writing throughout The Temple, borne out in his achieved simplicity of style as well as in his direct comments on the subject.46 Herbert’s authority was invoked to justify metrical psalms and scriptural hymns in England in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.47 However, as his work became more widely known

43 The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640) (Chicago, 1956), **2v. 44 Whole Booke of Psalmes, **2r. 45 Whole Booke of Psalmes, **3v. 46 He asks tellingly in the lyric, “Jordan (I),” “Is there in truth no beautie?” (George Herbert, Works, p. 56). 47 William Barton, A Century of Select Hymns (1659), A3r–A4v. In 1644 Barton had used Herbert’s “23d Psalme” in his Book of Psalms in Metre, p. 19.

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in New England, Herbert became the colonial Americans’ champion of the use of verse for religious purposes. His poems seem to argue for a plainness of intention and style, setting spiritual quality above artistic refinement.48 This apparent licence for regarding devotional truth as more important than poetical skill—a dangerous principle in the hands of lesser poets than Herbert—gave support to more than metrical Psalm translations; it offered crucial justification for the writing of original poetry on religious subjects. Furthermore, the first stanza of the opening section of The Temple, “The Church-porch,” outspokenly claims that such poetry can have a practical function, winning readers to the Gospel through their enjoyment of the verse: Thou, whose sweet youth and early hopes inhance Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure; Hearken unto a Verser, who may chance Ryme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure. A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice.49

The poet or “Verser” here appears to take on the role of a tempter, drawing in the reader by means of a “bait” which is the pleasure of poetry itself. This is a virtuous seduction, however, whose purpose is to use the pattern and beauty of a lyric to transform the reader’s “delight” into spiritual benefit. As the closing couplet makes clear, religious poetry can be justified on the grounds that it is effective—more effective, indeed, than many a sermon. Devotional verse is preaching without the pain. This endorsement of the high moral function of poetry was to become central to New England culture. Michael Wigglesworth’s poem on death and judgment, The Day of Doom (1662), was the first American best-seller and was commended to its readers with the following “Prefatory Lines” written by the Pastor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jonathan Mitchel: A Verse may find him who a Sermon flies, Saith Herbert well. Great Truths to dress in Meeter, Becomes a Preacher; who mens Souls doth prize, That Truth in Sugar roll’d may taste the sweeter.

48 As he states in “A true Hymne,” “The finenesse which a hymne or psalme affords,/Is, when the soul unto the lines accords” (George Herbert, Works, p. 168). 49 George Herbert, Works, p. 6.

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It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Mitchel’s reference to Herbert as the authority licensing New England religious poetry.51 The poet can play the role of a “Preacher” in this strange new world, and gospel “Truths” can be properly dressed in “Meeter.” Poetry is not seen as an unnecessary or intrusive “pollishing,” as was implied in the preface to the Bay Psalm Book; on the contrary, it is now praised as a means of winning souls to “bliss.” In its second stanza, Mitchel’s poem expounds the details of how a good religious poem should be made, and the ways in which it appeals to the reader: In Costly Verse, and most laborious Rymes, Are dish’t up here Truths worthy most regard: No Toyes, nor Fables (Poets wonted Crimes) Here be; but things of worth with Wit prepar’d. Reader, fall too; and if thy tast be good, Thou’lt praise the Cook, & say, ’Tis choicest Food.52

While Herbert speaks in “The Church-porch” of the “pleasure” of poetry, and the “sacrifice” which is achieved through this “delight,” Mitchel uses metaphors of “choicest Food” for the spiritual nourishment of the reader, who is encouraged to “fall too” [sic] and taste this poetic meal.53 It is perhaps to be expected that the New England poet would avoid Herbert’s language of sacrifice (with its more Catholic overtones) and instead make use of the familiar experiences of settler life: awareness of costs, the need for labour, and the necessity of food. In both cases, however, what the religious poet has “dish’t up” is not the artificial “Toyes, nor Fables” that poets are

50 Jonathan Mitchel, “On the following Work, and It’s Author,” in Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom (Boston, 1662), p. 10; this text is taken from Michael Wigglesworth, Poems, ed. Ronald A. Bosco (Lanham, 1989), p. 299. 51 As a later line in this prefatory poem boldly asserts, “In these vast Woods a Christian Poet Sings,” and the assumed rightness of this activity (in a land where “whilome Heathen wild were only found”) was inspired by Herbert’s example (Mitchel, stanza 8, in Wigglesworth, Poems, p. 300). 52 Mitchel, in Wigglesworth, Poems, p. 299. 53 It is possible that Mitchel also had in mind the closing words of the main part of Herbert’s Temple (“The Church”), that is, the last line of the lyric “Love (III)”: “So I did sit, and eat” (Works, p. 189).

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often accused of manufacturing, but the “sweetness” of biblical or spiritual truth itself.54 Mitchel’s commendation of Wigglesworth as a poet who knew, as Herbert did, that poetry could succeed where sermons fail, shaped and determined the reputation of The Day of Doom. When preaching Wigglesworth’s funeral sermon in 1705, Cotton Mather echoed Mitchel’s description of the poem when he called it “Truth’s dressed up in a Plain Meeter.”55 This suggests how fundamental the prefatory poem was in offering a way of justifying the activities of the “Christian Poet” in New England, and therefore just how deeply Herbert’s ethical view of poetry underpinned the practices of writing and reading religious verse in the colony. When Increase Mather wrote about the impact of Wigglesworth’s words, he recalled the ideal of the preacher-poet as established by Herbert, claiming that the “deceased Pastor” could still speak to the people of New England “by his Divine Poems, which are (I suppose) in many of your Houses.”56 In contrast to the public nature of preaching, so important in the early days of the colony, the private reading of poetry is upheld as the next step in the civilising of the community.57

V Herbert’s poetry thus provided authoritative justification for the devotional poetry produced in Stuart New England. This does not mean that the religious verse written by colonial Americans is necessarily like Herbert’s poetry (though some certainly is). Rather, many early American religious writings were produced in the spirit of Herbert’s devotional mode—that is, with a sense of didactic purpose, and with confidence in the rightness of using one’s poetic gifts for others’

54 See line 4 of the first stanza: truth may “taste the sweeter.” Compare also the last lines of Herbert’s “Jordan (II)”: the poet should “copie out” only the “sweetnesse” of Christ’s love (103). 55 Cotton Mather, Faithful Man, p. 24. 56 Increase Mather, biography of Wigglesworth prefacing his son Cotton Mather’s Faithful Man, A2r. 57 The books of the New Englander Daniel Russell, which included the works of Herbert, Wigglesworth and Bradstreet, typify the combination of devotional poets read by the settlers (MS Middlesex Probate Court Files, docket 2, 775; see above, p. 154).

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spiritual gain. Like the speaker in Herbert’s lyric “The Flower,” they could, without a guilty conscience, “relish versing.”58 Among the specific aspects of Herbert’s Temple which were relished by New England readers and writers, the capacity of the lyrics to express, and thereby transcend, physical and spiritual difficulties seems to have been an important source of inspiration. Herbert’s collection contains five lyrics on “Affliction,” his largest group of poems with the same title.59 It is highly significant that Jonathan Mitchel, in the third stanza of his prefatory poem to The Day of Doom, described Michael Wigglesworth as turning to verse under the influence of affliction: David’s affliction bred us many a Psalm; From Caves, from mouths of Graves that Singer sweet Oft tun’d his Soul felt Notes: For not in’s Calm, But Storms, to write most Psalms God made him meet; Affliction turn’d this Pen to Poetry, Whose serious strains do here before thee ly.60

As the final couplet suggests, it was suffering that led Wigglesworth to write. Equally significant are the parallels drawn here by Mitchel between the poet and the Psalmist, “that Singer sweet,” to whom Herbert was also frequently likened.61 Indeed, the idea expressed in the third and fourth lines, of the devotional poet writing most fruitfully during “Storms” rather than in “Calm” times, is a recollection of Herbert’s sentiments as expressed in his lyric, “The Bag.” He writes with great certainty, of God and the poet simultaneously, that “Storms are the triumph of his art.”62 The influence of Herbert’s writing on many New England poets may be further discerned in a relatively simple matter: their choice of stanza form. The first part of The Temple, “The Church-porch,” comprises seventy-seven stanzas in iambic pentameter rhymed a,b,a, b,c,c. Although the main body of The Temple, “The Church,” represents an astonishing display of creativity and variety in lyric stanza

58

George Herbert, Works, p. 166. Many other poems within “The Church” assert how “Affliction shall advance the flight in me,” cf. “Easter-wings” (George Herbert, Works, p. 43). 60 Mitchel in Wigglesworth, Poems, p. 299. 61 See, for example, Oley, Herbert’s Remains, a11v: “our Authour (The sweet singer of the Temple).” 62 George Herbert, Works, p. 151. 59

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forms, it was the sturdy and unchanging stanza form of “The Churchporch” to which most New England poets were attracted. The reason for this was probably two-fold: its relative ease as a written structure, and its firm association with the idea of the efficacy of religious verse. Mitchel used it for example, in the prefatory poem that opened with the restatement of Herbert’s preacherly poetic principle. Among numerous other examples, Edward Johnson chose the “Church-porch” stanza for the meditative verse contained in his Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour (1654), and in 1677 Urian Oakes used the same stanza form for an elegy on his New England colleague Thomas Shepard.63 In these cases the poets were not writing in the same vein as Herbert, but in the stanza form with which they had been familiarised through “The Church-porch” and in the spirit of confidence in their right to create religious verse which his poem had instilled into the community. Herbert’s poetic principles and habits also authorised the early American poets in their use of homely references, which became such a notable feature of their verse. In his prose work, A Priest to the Temple, Herbert had written that “things of ordinary use,” such as “a plough, a hatchet, a bushell,” could be “washed, and cleansed, and serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths” in sermons and, by implication, in poems.64 His own poetry is full of skilfully employed metaphors taken from familiar everyday life: the natural world, music, the household, money and even card-games. The New England poets followed in this tradition, sometimes perhaps to an excessive degree, but more importantly for our interests, they consciously justified the practice in the same terms as Herbert. Richard Steere, for instance, wrote of Metaphors, Similes, Comparisons Drawn from those Temp’ral Things that are in sight, To signify to us Heav’ns unseen Glory.65

63 Urian Oakes, An Elegie upon the Death of the Reverend Mr. Thomas Shepard (Cambridge, MA, 1677), ed. W.L. Washburn (Aiken, 1902). For further echoes of Herbert’s poetry in the elegy, see John T. Shawcross, “Some Colonial American Poetry and George Herbert,” Early American Literature 23.1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 40–2. 64 George Herbert, Works, p. 257. 65 Richard Steere, “Earths Felicities, Heavens Allowances,” The Daniel Catcher (Boston, 1713), ll. 451–3. Steere also made regular use of the stanza form of “The Church-porch”; see Robert Daly, God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 20–1.

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The shared source for this principle is, of course, ultimately the Bible, particularly the parables, but the intermediary for Steere and his contemporaries, who explicitly put the idea into practice in religious verse, was George Herbert. It would be misleading to reduce Herbert’s influence on his New England followers to only the practical, formal and homely aspects of his poetry. The poet of The Temple was, after all, also the former public orator of Cambridge University, a talented rhetorician and learned scholar whose poetry is renowned for its quiet but distinctive wit. Although it is true that every group of Herbert’s readers remade him to a certain extent in their own image—and in New England that tended to involve emphasis on his commitment to the use of verse for didactic purposes—the early American poets were also attracted to certain aspects of the wordplay present in his lyrics. In particular, New England elegies made prominent use of anagrams. This technique of teasing out hidden truths from within the letters of a word, which Herbert used for sacred names such as Jesus and Mary, was a popular aspect of wit with respect to settlers’ own names and was seen as the skill of revealing truths out of “meer Nothings.”66 In an elegy for Mary Sewall, who died in 1710, Herbert’s poetry was explicitly invoked to endorse this traditional witty practice. John Danforth made use of the anagram from Herbert’s poem on the Virgin Mary, in which her name is shown to signify simultaneously “Army.”67 Danforth’s elegiac poem begins: MARY, the Blessed VIRGINS Name, EXALTED, Signifies: ARMY, was once the Anagram, a Poet did devise. Behold! How her Exaltedness an Army justly Boasts:

66 One poet from Massachusetts, writing on the death of John Wilson in 1667, spoke favourably of the skill of poetic anagrams as the art of making names “Unfold” and reveal truths “Out of meer Nothings.” The poem, “Some Offers to Embalm the Memory of J. Wilson” (Massachusetts, 1667), has been attributed to Benjamin Tompson but also appears as the work of Cotton Mather in Handkerchiefs from Paul, ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge, MA, 1927); see Jeffrey Walker, “Anagrams and Acrostics: Puritan Poetic Wit,” in Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, ed. Peter White (University Park, 1985), p. 255. 67 George Herbert, “Anagram on the Virgin Marie,” Works, p. 77. Mary was the daughter of Samuel Sewall, who sent to London in 1711 for two copies of Herbert’s poems: (see above, p. 154).

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Because within her HE Incamp’d, who was the LORD OF HOSTS.68

Danforth’s opening stanza weaves into its own texture almost every word, and certainly every idea, of Herbert’s two-line poem. It is noticeable that the original poet is not mentioned by name; what is beyond doubt, however, is Danforth’s indebtedness to Herbert’s wit.

VI This exploration of the links between George Herbert’s work and the religious culture of early New England would not be complete without mention of the small number of writers among the settlers who really did write like Herbert. This is the most obvious aspect of the connection between the literary cultures of the Stuart worlds on either side of the Atlantic, and has been given critical attention elsewhere.69 However, these overt links are simply what we might call the icing on the cake, since the real substance of Herbert’s role in the interconnection of these disparate lands and cultures lies in the fundamental justification of the settlers’ mission and in their use of devotional poetry by reference to his example. Herbert was seen both as a prophet and an authority on poetry in the New England context, and reference to his views and verse conferred, in turn, authority on those who cited or echoed him. One of the clearest cases of the direct influence of Herbert’s poetry on a New England devotional writer is Philip Pain’s verses on mortality, entitled Daily Meditations, published posthumously in 1668 (after the young author had drowned). The poems echo The Temple in particular detail as well as general approach; indeed, as Donald Stanford has asserted, “in both doctrine and tone” Pain is “closer to Herbert

68 Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Harrison T. Meserole (University Park, 1985), pp. 316–7. 69 See, for example, John T. Shawcross, “Some Colonial American Poetry”; David S. Shields, “Herbert and Colonial American Poetry: Then Shall Religion to America Flee,” in Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, ed. Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (New York, 1987), pp. 281–96; Robert Daly, God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978).

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than any New England poet of the seventeenth century.”70 In a manner emblematic of the relationship between Herbert’s work and its adaptation to the New England context, Pain’s framed introductory poem, “The Porch,” is recognisably in the Herbert tradition but has also taken on aspects typical of the new community, particularly the obsession with imminent death. The shape of the printed border is reminiscent of a gateway71 (as in Herbert’s “Church-porch” and Pain’s own title, “The Porch”), but the frame’s shape newly resembles a coffin and a gravestone. Thus the connection is made with the focus of Pain’s meditations (daily “Considerations of DEATH”) while the inheritance from Herbert is set firmly in early American culture.72 Within “The Porch” itself, Pain expresses the desire to overcome fear and thus to look “Death in the face, as in some pleasing book.” In addition to being a general metaphor of pleasure, this “book” could well be The Temple itself, since Herbert’s lyrics encourage the reader to face death in the firm conviction that Christ has transformed it from an “uncouth hideous thing” into something “fair and full of grace.”73 The influence of Herbert’s vision and style on the New England writers went further than their poetic writings. Jonathan Mitchel, author of the dedicatory verses to Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, was evidently well read in Herbert’s poetry, and this does not simply emerge in his use of “The Church-porch” to praise Wigglesworth’s narrative poem as a better method than sermons for conveying “Great Truths.”74 Interestingly, Mitchel seems to reverse the pattern in his 70 Donald E. Stanford, “The imagination of death in the poetry of Philip Pain, Edward Taylor, and George Herbert,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 9 (1976), pp. 53–5. 71 Pain’s poem is framed by an arched border of fleur-de-lys similar to that surrounding the last stanzas of Herbert’s “Church-porch” in mid-seventeenth century editions of The Temple (Philip Pain, Daily Meditations (1668), ed. Leon Howard (San Marino, 1936), A2r.). 72 New England communities had a very particular consciousness of mortality, expressed in artwork such as framed printed memorial notices and distinctively carved gravestones; see David E. Stannard, “Death and Dying in Puritan New England,” The American Historical Review, 78. 5 (December, 1973), pp. 1305–1330. 73 Pain, “The Porch,” Daily Meditations, A2r; Herbert, “Death,” Works, pp. 185–6. Beyond “The Porch,” the rest of Pain’s meditative poems demonstrate a profound knowledge of Herbert’s images and phrases, and a shared appreciation of the imminence of heaven (cf. the echo of Herbert’s “The Dawning” (112) in Pain’s “Meditation 26” (Daily Meditations, p. 7) or the parallels between the account of Pain’s poetry (Daily Meditations, p. 18) and ll. 35–6 of Herbert’s “The H. Communion” (George Herbert, Works, p. 53). 74 Jonathan Mitchel, in Wigglesworth, Poems, p. 299; see above, pp. 161–3.

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own writing, since he uses poetic phrases and echoes from Herbert within his sermons. In his Discourse of the Glory, for instance, he writes of heaven as a “curious piece,” where “curious” means something finely or delicately made.75 In Herbert’s lyric “Mans medley,” the human being is referred to as both flesh and soul, being made of material “whose thread is course and round” yet “trimm’d with curious lace.” The association of “curious” with the metaphysical dimension in Herbert’s poem is repeated in Mitchel’s sermon. In the same work Mitchel also describes heaven as a “Mass or Heap of Joy,” an unusual phrase which directly recalls Herbert’s summing up of the Bible as “a masse / Of strange delights.” Mitchel’s touchingly simple idea of eternity as a place where “thy Harp is ever in tune” is, in this context of accumulating echoes, almost undoubtedly influenced by Herbert’s many musical metaphors, such as his prayer to God (in “Deniall”) to “cheer and tune my heartlesse breast.”76 It is striking how late the evidence of Herbert’s influence continues to manifest itself in the work of colonial New England writers. In 1712, an elegy written by Benjamin Tompson after the death of his wife echoes the end of Herbert’s sonnet, “Redemption,” in which the questing speaker is startled to discover Christ on the cross, “Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.” Tompson’s last line consists of precisely this bold mixture of direct speech and, in the final syllable, sudden death: “ ‘My Jesus sends for me;’ Thus said, she dyed.”77 The recollection of Herbert’s poem for Good Friday, with its promise of resurrection and redemption, was perhaps a reminder to the bereaved husband that death—even in the closing moment of a poem—is never the last word. Later still, Richard Steere catches Herbert’s tones in a 1713 poem about the birth of Christ. The metaphysical mode of amazed wonder at the incarnation leads into a specific metaphor from Herbert’s “The Pulley,” on God’s gifts which “contracted into a span”:

75

Mitchel, A Discourse of the Glory to which God hath called Believers (2nd edtn., Boston, 1721), p. 127. This collection of sermons was first published in London in 1677, nine years after Mitchel’s death. 76 Mitchel, Discourses, pp. 34, 36; George Herbert, Works, pp. 131, 58 (“The H. Scriptures (I)”) and 80. 77 Benjamin Tompson, in Handkerchiefs from Paul, p. 11; George Herbert, Works, p. 40. The elegy also recalls Herbert’s poem entitled “Sighs and Grones.” Herbertian echoes in Tompson’s poems are noted by Sacvan Bercovitch, “Typology in Puritan New England,” American Quarterly 19 (summer 1967), p. 170.

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chapter five That he, whom Heav’ns Immencitie Could not contain, should crowded be, And shrink into the central point, Of the vast universe, and stint His greatness to a Place, Of but a span amidst the Aiery space.78

The most famous New England poet to follow in Herbert’s footsteps, Edward Taylor, was so late a disciple chronologically that his writing continued beyond the Stuart era. Taylor found a new kind of inspiration in Herbert’s The Temple. Whereas the first generation of Stuarts, typified by Edward Johnson in Virginia, were led into the church by reading Herbert’s poems, this late Stuart poet in New England internalised Herbert’s influence, ‘sucking in’, as it were, Herbert’s lyric tones and reproducing them with a “sweet Content.” In his own distinctive poetic manner, inspired by Herbert, Taylor offered God a newly American devotional mode—with “Waggon Loads of Love”—well into the eighteenth century.79 Echoes of Herbert in the work of New England writers such as Pain and Taylor are not isolated cases of literary discipleship but part of a larger and more complex process. In Stuart England, Herbert described his own poems as “a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul.” 80 In Stuart New England, Jonathan Mitchel wrote in remarkably similar terms that “the business of Salvation is mainly carried on in secret between God and a mans own soul,” adding that “close converse with God by Meditation & Prayer, thinking, writing, reading, examining, mourning before God” is the way to conduct that “business.”81 It was this direct “converse” with God in the New England reading and writing community that was given a personal vocabulary and form under the influence of Herbert’s The Temple.

78 Richard Steere, “Upon the Caelestial Embassy” (1713), in The Daniel Catcher, cited by Donald P. Wharton, Richard Steere: Colonial Merchant Poet (University Park, 1979), p. 50; George Herbert, Works, p. 159. 79 Taylor, Poems, pp. 8, 62. There is no need to make a case here for the influence of Herbert on Taylor’s poetic meditations. As Louis Martz has written, Taylor’s mind was “saturated with Herbert’s poetry” (in Edward Taylor, Poems, ed. Donald E. Stanford with a foreword by Louis L. Martz (New Haven, 1960), p. xiv). 80 Walton, Life, p. 74. 81 Jonathan Mitchel, “A letter written by the Author to his Friend in NewEngland,” 19 May, 1649, in Discourse, p. 283.

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VII This account of colonial New England culture has presented the devotional poet George Herbert in unfamiliar guise as the early American prophet. We have seen how The Temple was, from its very inception, linked with the New World through its popularity among leaders of the Virginia Company and in its controversial publication history; how early Americans bought, read and continued to collect copies of Herbert’s works throughout the Stuart era; how the New England settlers used his “Church Militant” to sustain the identity and purpose of their religious community; how they borrowed the didactic principle of his “Church-porch” to endorse their use of poetry for sacred subjects, and absorbed the language and moods of “The Church”—his distinctive lyric voice—into their own religious writings. It is little wonder, therefore, that Cotton Mather wrote in his diary in Massachusetts in 1713 in terms that echo those of Herbert’s earliest known poems of 1610.82 During the final years of the Stuart age, as Herbert’s work grew out of fashion in England, his influence became more discernible in New England writing. As John Dryden, for instance, in Restoration London was consigning Herbert to “Acrostick Land,”83 those very anagrams and acrostics that he was mocking were being eagerly used in New England, with Herbert’s example upholding the practice. However, this cultural timelag is only one aspect of the chronological disjunction of the transfer of devotional modes; it worked in the other direction, too. Where New England puritan sensibility led the way in using Herbert’s “Church-porch” couplet to justify expressing scriptural truths in “Meeter”—as in Jonathan Mitchel’s 1662 prefatory poem to Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom84—England’s nonconformist writers followed: as late as 1700, John Bunyan quoted the same couplet by “the Learned Herbert” to defend his own Scriptural Poems.85 These examples are a reminder that the transfer of influences within transatlantic Stuart culture was a two-way traffic of ideas. We noted that Daniel Gookin used Herbert’s “prophetic” words in New 82 83 84 85

See above, pp. 147–8. John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe (London, 1682), l. 206. Mitchel in Wigglesworth, Poems, p. 299: (see above, pp. 161–2). John Bunyan, Scriptural Poems (London, 1700), A3v.

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England in 1674, writing a work intended to be read by Charles II in London. In 1685, Archbishop John Tillotson, preaching in England, independently referred to those same words of Herbert’s “Church Militant” in an attempt to explain what had happened on the American side of the Atlantic in “this last age.”86 Herbert’s writing suddenly seems distant in this account: Tillotson notes how he remembers “a very odd passage in Mr. Herbert’s Poems,” and confesses that he is not sure whether Herbert’s account of religion passing to America was “only the prudent conjecture and foresight of a wise man” or “something more prophetical.” Tillotson does admit, however, that Herbert’s words and ideas, though “very odd,” are “not so improbable” in the light of the “vast Colonies” that have been “transplanted” across the Atlantic. Thus from the English perspective, too, early interpretations of the history of New England were coloured by Herbert’s poetic vision. Tillotson concludes that the enormous transfer of persons across the Atlantic was “as it were on purpose to prepare and make way” for the movement of religion as Herbert had predicted.87 The study of Herbert in his New England context reveals aspects of his work which tend to be forgotten by modern readers. The prophet, the utilitarian poet, the maker of anagrams—these are all present in the author of The Temple, along with the writer of lyrical poetry now valued so highly. The emergence of The Temple in early American culture acts like a prism, separating for us the strands of colour which together make up his poetic artistry. To re-read is to reprioritise, and to transfer an aspect of a culture is to transform it. Finally, the uses to which Herbert’s writings were put in the New England context have given us a sense of what the early Americans sought. Jonathan Mitchel wrote in the 1660s, It may be when you came into this Wilderness, you thought that this would be a place of your own, and that none would ever trouble themselves to come into this Corner to trouble you. But alas NewEngland is but earth and not heaven . . .88 86 Tillotson, Works, ed. Ralph Barker (London, 1712), II 623, in a sermon delivered in 1685 on “The Duty of improving the present Opportunity and Advantage of the Gospel.” 87 Ibid. Tillotson’s discussion of Herbert’s “Church Militant” was itself the subject of discussion in a sermon by the English nonconformist minister, Matthew Henry; see Henry’s Works (London, 1726), p. 571. 88 Mitchel, Discourse, p. 14.

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In that poignantly earthly context, it seems from their reactions to The Temple that early American settlers wanted an endorsement of their decision to leave “trouble” behind and seek a corner of their own in that “Wilderness.” Equally they sought in Herbert a necessary authority with whose words to defend their use of poetry for religious subjects in a Puritan community, giving them confidence to write works as varied as metrical psalms, meditational lyrics, family elegies and narrative verse. Within these poetical works, as well as in religious prose writings such as sermons and diaries, they sought a metaphoric language like that of Herbert’s lyrics in which to give personal expression to devotional uncertainties and triumphs. As Joshua Scottow wrote in 1694, the grace that powred into the Hearts and Lips of these first planters, dropt down into the pens of private Christians like sweet-smelling Myrrh.89

In this splendid evocation of the spirituality of the early settlers— the words of which, in fact, echo Herbert’s poem “Grace”90—Scottow sums up the importance of writing in Stuart New England. The “pens of private Christians” were vital tools for expressing perceptions of grace and giving shape and identity to the culture of those “first planters.” The works of George Herbert played no small part in that process.

89 90

Scottow, Narrative, p. 17. Herbert, Works, pp. 60–1, in which the refrain is “Drop from above.”

CHAPTER SIX

AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION: COTTON MATHER’S RESPONSE TO THE EUROPEAN SPINOZISTS Reiner Smolinski

When James I acceded to the throne of England in 1603, no one seriously doubted (or dared to question) the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, the divine inspiration of its prophets, their supernatural visions, dreams, and voices. When the last of the reigning Stuarts was laid to rest in 1714, the Good Book had irrevocably lost its epistemological infallibility. Textual variants, lacunae, repetitions, interpolations, and anachronisms signified to the foremost scholars of the age that textual origin and transmission was anything but certain or trustworthy, that the Bible’s verbatim inspiration and divine dictation were simply pious myth, that revelation’s exclusive object was obedience to God, not disclosure of rational knowledge about nature. The Mosaic Hexameron, once believed to be a scientifically unassailable account of what happened a mere six thousand years ago, now seemed little more than an abridged allegory adapted to the needs of an ignorant audience best managed by tales of wonder and miracles that aimed at enforcing law and order on a fractious people. If at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Moses was still held to be the author of the Pentateuch, by century’s end, the Mosaic authorship could no longer be maintained without serious qualification. The Hebrew lawgiver wrote little more than the tables of the law and ordinances, the European followers of Benedict Baruch Spinoza were wont to argue.1 The credibility of the New Testament faired hardly better. At the beginning of James I’s reign, theologians were still convinced that the Holy Spirit had dictated

1 The scribe Ezra either rewrote the lost books from memory after the Babylonian captivity (2 Esdras 14:21–22) or compiled and adapted the surviving fragments into a disordered heap of scrolls to be edited and updated by later generations of public writers.

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the books of the New Testament to the Apostles and Evangelists. By the time Queen Anne died, radical Deists claimed that the New Testament texts had been manipulated by competing sects and that the canon was the result of factional strife, which by the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) had barred from canonization more books than it actually retained.2 It is safe to say that the hermeneutical revolution in the wake of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and especially of Benedict Spinoza’s Tractatus Philosophico-Politicus (1670) demolished the Bible’s hitherto impregnable status as the Divine Oracle of God.3 Theologians on both sides of the English Channel lashed out in pious rage at this latest manifestation of atheism; yet try as they might, no individual or concerted effort could stem the subversive critique of scriptures once the followers of Hobbes and Spinoza had begun to infiltrate the marketplace of ideas.4 Terms of derision became the favorite smear 2 Among the principal seventeenth-century skeptics are the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [London, 1651], part III, chs. 33, 37); the French critic Isaac La Peyrère (Prae-Adamitae [n.p. 1655], translated as Men before Adam [London, 1656], bk. III, chs. 1–5, pp. 129–163; bk. IV, chs. 1–2, pp. 200–18); the English Quaker Samuel Fisher (The Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies [London, 1660], esp. Exercitation II, chs. 2–3, pp. 11–105); the Jewish philosopher Benedict Baruch Spinoza (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [1670], esp. chs. 1–2, 6–8); the French Oratorian Richard Simon (Histoire critique du Vieux Testament [Amsterdam, 1678], English transl. A Criticial History of the Old Testament, in Three Books [London, 1682], esp. bk. I, chs. 1–8, 16–23); the Dutch Arminian Jean LeClerc (Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande sur l’Histoire du Vieux Testament [Amsterdam, 1685], partially translated as Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures [n.p. 1690], esp. Letters 1–2, pp. 9–150), and LeClerc’s more moderate Twelve Dissertations Out of LeClerk’s [sic] Genesis [London, 1696], Dissert. 3, pp. 105–141); and the English Deist John Toland (Amyntor: Or, A Defence of Milton’s Life [London, 1699], esp. pp. 18–81). 3 Rosalie L. Colie, “Spinoza in England, 1665–1730,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963), p. 183. The relationship between Hobbes and Spinoza is examined in Edwin Curley’s “ ‘I Durst Not Write So Boldly’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ theological-political treatise,” Hobbes e Spinoza, ed. Emilia Giancotti (Naples, 1992), pp. 497–593. 4 “I know no body that has more formally assail’d the Inspiration of the Sacred Books of the New Testament,” protested the London divine Claude Groteste LaMothe (1647–1713) against the anonymous author of Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande (Amsterdam, 1685). “Spinosa led the way of the same Undertaking; but there was little heed given to that Author, because all Men knew he had no Religion. . . . But M.N. [ Jean LeClerc] has given a more subtle and more dangerous Air to Spinosa’s Notions and has digested them into a System” (The Inspiration of the New Testament Asserted and Explain’d [London, 1694], p. 10). Earlier associations between the extreme deism of Hobbes and Spinoza appear in the works of the English Deist Charles Blount (1654–93), Miracles, No Violations of the Laws of Nature (London, 1683) and The Oracles of Reason (London, 1693). The Irish clergyman William Carroll and the English cleric Dr. George Hickes invoke the specter of

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by which the orthodox clergy tried to rein in their colleagues who followed Hobbes, Spinoza, and Deism. Even the French Oratorian priest Richard Simon, best known for his classic Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), and the Dutch Arminian professor of ecclesiastical history Jean LeClerc, notorious for his assault on the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, branded each other as “Spinozists.” Through this mutual defamation, both clergymen tried to render themselves immune to the charge of heresy.5 In debating these unprecedented challenges to the authority of the Bible, physico-theologians and natural philosophers re-examined their evidence, pored over timeworn dogmas, and launched in the process the beginnings of modern biblical criticism.6 What is less understood is how the historical-contextual critique of the Bible as generated by Hobbes and Spinoza quickly caught on—even among their greatest detractors. Ironically, the seeds of Spinozism germinated especially in the theological treatises and commentaries of those who most sought to uproot them.7 In fact, many ostensible refutations did more to proliferate Spinoza’s views than to impede their spread.8

Spinozism in their vitriolic attack on their Dutch colleague Jean LeClerc, in Spinoza Reviv’d (London, 1709). 5 The mudslinging and mutual incrimination between Simon and LeClerc are examined in John. D. Woodbridge, “Richard Simon’s Reaction to Spinoza’s ‘Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,’ ” Spinoza in der Frühzeit seiner Religiösen Wirkung (Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, Bd. 12), ed. by Karlfried Gründer und Wilhelm SchmidtBiggemann (Heidelberg, 1984), pp. 201–226. 6 Though commonly thought to be a German invention of the late eighteenth century, modern biblical criticism had its cradle in Stuart Britain—long before German theologians would dominate the hermeneutical debate in the nineteenth century. 7 Charles Blount’s anonymously published Miracles, No Violations of the Laws of Nature (1683) is a case in point. The title of this tract easily catches the unsuspecting reader off guard in more ways than one: It poses as an attack against Deism by promising evidence that miracles can be reconciled with the immutable laws of nature, but supplies the reader with little more than an anthology of translated excerpts from Thomas Burnet, Hobbes, and Spinoza—without the least hint that the reader is actually perusing extracts from known heretics. See also Thomas Brown’s Miracles Work’s Above and Contrary to Nature (1683) and Matthias Earbery’s An Answer to a Book Intitled Tractatus Theologico Politicus (London, 1697), the latter, though a typical apologetic dialogue between an orthodox divine and a Spinozist, allows the latter more space to air his convictions than to the former whose answers are predictable. 8 Wiep van Bunge and Wim Klever (eds.), Disguised and Overt Spinozism Around 1700 (Leiden, 1996). Spinozism never formed a school, they argue, but “traces appear of loosely organised groups in which Spinoza’s works were studied and discussed.” Moreover, “several of the so-called ‘refutations’ of Spinozism that were

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This chapter will sketch some transatlantic connections that hitherto have escaped critical attention. Even faraway New England was not immune to Spinozist influence. Cotton Mather (1663–1728), pastor of the Second Congregational Church, in Boston, Massachusetts, Member of the Royal Society of London, and Puritan polymath had synthesized the Spinozist critique in his “Biblia Americana” manuscript long before anyone else would grapple with it in the North American colonies.9 Attention will focus on two of the central issues of the Spinozist critique: the debate about the authorship of the Pentateuch and the dispute about the divine inspiration of the scriptures. It will emerge that some of the intellectual roots of the early Enlightenment in English North America can be traced to the late seventeenth-century Puritan New Jerusalem, Boston.10

I Long before the French physician Jean Astruc surprised the Republic of Letters with his Conjectures sur les Mémoires Originaux (1753) that Genesis was compiled of two major and nine minor parallel memoirs distinguishable through their use of God’s appellation “Élohim” and “Jéhovah,” Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, LeClerc—and Cotton Mather—debated how much if any of the Pentateuch had actually been composed by Moses.11 In examining the textual evidence, they

published ‘around 1700’, were actually highly skillful efforts at propagating Spinoza’s views.” Supporters of his ideas were forced “to resort to silence, secrecy, or the use of ‘double language’” (p. viii). 9 Robert E. Brown’s Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington, 2002) has shown that Jonathan Edwards, Mather’s Puritan successor, wrestled with critical historical methods of exegesis in the middle of the eighteenth century. 10 Since American historians still tend to approach the Enlightenment in purely political terms, they almost always date the American Enlightenment from the middle of the eighteenth century and begin with Benjamin Franklin as the first representative figure. See Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); John E. Smith’s “Puritanism and Enlightenment: Edwards and Franklin,” in Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment traditions and modern religious thought, ed. by William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 195–226; and Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment 1750 –1820 (Cambridge, 1997). Even Henry Steele Commager’s more broadly conceived definition seems geared toward America’s revolutionary heroes, in The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY, 1977). 11 Jean Astruc, Conjectures sur les Memoires Originaux Dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le Livre de la Genèse (Buxelles, 1753), edited, introduced, and annotated by Pierre Gibert (Paris, 1999), esp. pp. 131–148.

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were guided by essentially the same principles of philological research that Renaissance scholars had put to good use in freeing Greek and Roman classics from layers upon layers of textual accretions, interpolations, and outright forgeries that centuries of copyists and emendators had injected into their editions.12 The scriptures had to be subjected to the same philological principles of investigation as any other book, for only then could it be liberated from the fetters of dogmatic assumptions, credulity, and tradition. As Spinoza affirmed: I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly set down.13

Doing so was no easy task. It involved evaluating the integrity of the biblical texts according to their time, place, and circumstances of composition; it entailed establishing the texts’ literary forms, didactic purposes, contradictory opinions, and intertextual citations to determine their authenticity; it required scrutinizing the texts as an organic whole, their original languages, their stylistic consistency, and anachronistic interpolations to discern if one or more authors or compilers had been at work during different time periods.14 Using these tools, these critics assembled specific evidence to substantiate that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch or, at best, authored no more than the laws, statutes, and ordinances of the Torah. Among the most conspicuous types of evidence cited by seventeenth-century commentators (and their many latter-day disciples) are anachronistic

12 See, for instance, the philological innovations of the French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), whose restored editions of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius (1577) were followed by his superb reconstruction of ancient chronology, in Opus de emendatione Temporum (1583), and of Eusebius Pamphili’s chronicle, in Thesaurus Temporum (1606). 13 The first English translation of the entire Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) appeared as A Treatise Partly Theological, And Partly Political, Containing some few Discourses, To prove the Liberty of Philosophizing (London, 1689). My citations are from Spinoza’s “The Preface,” translated by R.H.M. Elwes, of A Theological-Political Treatise (1883; New York, 1951), p. 8. 14 The most detailed description of these philological guidelines can be found in chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise, they are more or less tacitly maintained or implied in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 33 (esp. pp. 261–268); in Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament (1682), bk. I, chs. 2–4 (esp. pp. 20–22, 24–28, 29–34); and in LeClerc’s Five Letters (Letter 1, esp. pp. 15–20, 33–40 and Letter 2, pp. 57–93).

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interpolations and lacunae, narrative repetitions, and shifts in point of view. It is worth recalling the principal points of departure for Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon and LeClerc from the orthodox claim that every word of the Pentateuch and of all the scriptures were dictated to Moses and the prophets by the Holy Spirit.15 We can then determine the degree to which Cotton Mather’s exegesis was informed by this historical debate and—more significantly—how much of it he embraced and integrated in his “Biblia America.” Internal evidence suggests that many passages in the books of Moses are of a considerably later origin than the purported period in which the divine Lawgiver is to have lived. For instance, the thirdperson narrators in the Pentateuch frequently recount historical events that did not come about till long after Moses’ death. Since the narrators do not earmark them as prophetic utterances or fulfillments, some other explanation needed to be found.16 The selection of the following passages are almost always cited by those who refused to toe the dogmatic line: Gen. 12:6:

And Abram passed through the land, unto the place of Sichem, unto the plaine of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land.17 Gen. 14:14: And when Abram heard . . . and pursued them unto Dan. Gen. 36:31: And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel. Numb. 12:3: (Now the man Moses was very meeke, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.)

15 Hobbes presented his most trenchant evidence in Leviathan (ch. 33); Spinoza, in Theological-Political Treatise (chs. 8–10); Simon, in Critical History of the Old Testament (bk. I, chs. 2–5); LeClerc, in Twelve Dissertations [on Genesis] (Dissert. 3) and in Five Letters (esp. Let. 1–2). 16 Spinoza introduced this significant distinction: The writers of the Bible rarely if ever mention any secondary causes, because the religious zeal and pious habit of the ancients attributed every action, blessing, inclination, or thought as coming from God. “Hence we must not suppose that everything is prophecy or revelation which is described in scripture as told by God to anyone, but only such things as are expressly announced as prophecy or revelation, or are plainly pointed to as such by the context” (Theologico-Political Treatise, ch. 1, p. 15). 17 All biblical citations from and references to the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) are to the first edition (1611) of the Authorized Version. Though consulting several different translations of the Bible, Mather generally quoted from the KJV or furnished his own translation from one of the many Latin versions he owned.

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Numb. 21:14: Wherefore it is said in the booke of the warres of the Lord . . . Deut. 34:6: And hee buried him [Moses] in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-Peor: but no man knoweth of his Sepulchre unto this day.

Mather’s commentary on these controversial passages is highly revealing, for he wrestled with each of the underlying issues to rescue the scriptures out of the hands of their historicist detractors. The process of restoring harmony was not always easy. Over a period of thirty years, he excerpted, anthologized, and digested for his “Biblia Americana” hundreds of commentaries, reference works, theological monographs, polemical tracts, medical handbooks, geographies, and cosmographies he had inherited from his father and grandfathers, purchased from book dealers fresh upon their arrival in Boston harbor, borrowed from colleagues, or accessed at nearby Harvard across the Charles River.18 It is therefore not surprising that in such a complex undertaking Mather occasionally denied in one place what he would later affirm in another. Such happened in the case of the vexed verse in Gen. 12:6, which Mather tried to wrest out of the clutches of Hobbes, Spinoza, and their followers. When Abram sojourned through Canaan, “the Canaanite was then in the land,” according to Moses’ story of the Patriarch. Hobbes firmly dismissed the Mosaic authorship of this passage because it “must needs bee the words of one that wrote when the Canaanite was not in the land; and consequently, not of Moses, who dyed before he came into it.”19 Spinoza followed suit: “This passage must have been written after the death of Moses,

18 The following resources list the works owned by and accessible to the Mathers in the first decades of the eighteenth century. “Catalogue of Dr. Cotton Mather’s Library. Purchased by Isaiah Thomas and by him Given to the American Antiquarian Society” (AAS, Worcester, Massachusetts). As Keith Arbor and others have demonstrated in their corrigenda in manuscript (AAS), this list is far from complete. For the surviving volumes, see Julius Herbert Tuttle, “The Libraries of the Mathers,” Publications of the American Antiquarian Society 20 (1910), pp. 269–356. For a substantially complete list of works accessible to Mather at Harvard consult Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecae Collegij Harvardini Quod est Cantabrigiae in Nova Anglia (Boston, 1723) and Supplementum (Boston, 1725), both listed in Short-Title Evans [2432 and 2641]. Significantly, a multitude of books Mather excerpts in his “Biblia Americana” are not listed in any of these collections. 19 Leviathan, ch. 33, p. 262. Unless otherwise noted, all italicized passages appear in the original sources.

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when the Canaanites had been driven out.”20 “If Moses was the Authour of the Pentateuch,” Simon chimed in, “this [verse] could not be writ but after they had been driven out.”21 Richard Simon’s adversary in the Netherlands, Jean LeClerc, struck a more conciliatory tone: “Perhaps they might be added by a later hand, after the Expulsion of the Canaanites.” LeClerc would reserve his judgment: “perhaps ’tis one of those superfluous Observations which frequently occurr in the Sacred Volumes, which might have been omitted, without any Injury done to the History.”22 Mather was well familiar with the historical criticism of his European colleagues, but he also felt some of the popular prejudices against this form of exegesis: Spinosa, and after him, the Author of the Five Letters, [One for Immoralities, a Monster of Mankind,] urge, That Moses could not bee the Author of the Book of Genesis, or, as F. Simon saies, of any more than Part of it. For the Canaanite was not in the Land when it was written, The Canaanite was then in the Land ; It implying, that the Canaanite was driven out of the Land, when this Book was written.23

Hoping to find a more elegant solution than relinquishing the Mosaic authorship, Mather lit upon a work by Walter Cross, M.A., an obscure London preacher, whose The Thagmical Art: Or, The Art of Expounding Scripture By the Points (1698) offered a system of reconfiguring the Hebrew accentuation points of the Tiberian Masorites that allowed him to harmonize anachronistic verses with the time-honored authorship of the Hebrew Lawgiver. “Scepticism hath grown up in the Garden of Criticism,” Mather noted as he mulled over the exegetical dilemma of his age. But with Cross’ demonstration, the controversial passage in Gen. 12:6 might yet be rescued. It should really read,

20 Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 8, p. 122. Spinoza added an authoritative citation from Abraham Ibn Ezra’s venerable Commentary on Genesis to diminish the novelty of his own argument. 21 A Critical History of the Old Testament, bk. I, ch. 5, pp. 36–37. 22 Twelve Dissertations out of Monsieur Le Clerk’s Genesis, Dissert. 3, pp. 117–118. 23 The anonymous “Author of the Five Letters” is no other than Jean LeClerc, whose Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande (1685) was translated into English and anonymously published as Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures Translated out of French (1690). Mather’s citations are from his commentary in manuscript “Biblia Americana,” holograph MS in 6 vols. (Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston). Mather does not paginate his commentary, but generally follows the divisions of the Bible into book, chapter, and verse. The citation appears in his commentary on Gen. 10:21, pp. 243r–244v [my pagination].

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For that Canaanite was then in the Land; And that Moreh was a Man, and not a Place. The Text only saies, That Moreh, even that Canaanite, was in the Land, in the Time of Abraham, & the Owner of it; but in Jacobs Time, Sechem the Hivite possessed it.24

Designating “that Canaanite” as an individual person, rather than as an entire people, and “Moreh” and “Sechem” as names of persons, not of cities, Cross believed he had refuted the skeptics who argued for an anachronistic interpolation of this passage. Mather’s satisfaction with this idiosyncratic solution, however, seemed but short-lived. Even before he digested Cross’ Thagmical Art into a few choice pages, he acknowledged his own ignorance in this matter.25 By the second decade of the eighteenth century, the novel and seemingly subversive critiques developed by Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, and LeClerc had become, if not quite conventional, still tacitly acknowledged by all but the staunchest defenders of biblical inerrancy. However, increased acceptance of historicist scholarship and secularization do not fully account for Mather’s change of intellectual position. Certainly, his mature knowledge of philological criticism had rendered him less inclined to ascribe all manner of paradoxes to God’s impenetrable mysteries. But his appreciation for the biblical criticism of Simon and LeClerc and for what they meant by the

24

“Biblia Americana” (Gen. 10:21), pp. 241r and 244v. “Biblia Americana” (Gen. 10:21), p. 242v. Perhaps he also remembered with embarrassment his 1681 Harvard A.M. thesis “Puncta Hebraica sunt Originis Divinae,” in which the young prodigy defended the divine origin of the Masoretic vowel points (The Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708, ed. by Worthington Chauncy Ford. Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, Seventh Series, vol. VII (Boston, 1911), Part I, p. 26). In his juvenile excitement, Mather had followed Johannes Buxtorf, Jr., who defended the divine-origin thesis. The biblical scribe Ezra was inspired by the Holy Spirit, when he introduced the vowel points to render the Hebrew Scriptures intelligible to the post-exilic Jews who had forgotten the language of Moses during the Babylonian captivity. Years later, Mather admitted his youthful error: “I confess, That when I took my Degree of Master of Arts, I did publickly maintain the Antiquity & Authority of the Points, now used in our Hebrew Bible: and wholly went into the Buxtorfian Apprehensions; But I now find myself, compelled unto the Sentiments of Dr. Prideaux, upon this Controversy” (“Biblia Americana,” “Essay IV: Ezra; or, The Things done by Ezra, for the Restoring & Preserving of the SACRED SCRIPTURES,” n.p.). This confession is revealing in several ways. It shows that Mather had come a long way in embracing the historical critique of the Bible as text. Yet he did not need the approval of the Dean of Norwich, Dr. Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), to change his mind, either on the source of the Masoretic points or on the interpolations in the text. David Levin has noted that Mather changed his mind, but did not identify his sources (Cotton Mather, The Young Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer, 1663–1703 [Cambridge, 1978], p. 83). 25

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“divine inspiration” of the Bible had taken a decisive turn toward the rationalism of his contemporaneous Deist peers. Mather’s early annotations exemplify how he struggled to balance the sacrosanct status of the Bible’s textual inerrancy against the compelling evidence of invasive interpolations. Gen. 14:14 illustrates this case in point. Here, Abram is said to have pursued his brother’s captors as far as the city of “Dan,” a designation it did not acquire until centuries after Moses’ death. A later copyist, who had felt the need to update the name of the Canaanite city “Laish” ( Judg. 18:29), gave it the name “Dan” by which his contemporaries now called the former Canaanite stronghold. “By which we may gather, that the Books of Moses had here and there a Word inserted into them, after the Israelites were possessed of Canaan,” Mather willingly conceded.26 Yet the baffling anachronism in Gen. 36:31, in which Moses enumerated “the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel,” could somehow be defended as prophetic foreshadowing, Mather believed. The passage was not “too late for Moses’s Time,”—and here Mather contradicted Spinoza, Simon, and LeClerc—simply because Moses had previously recorded God’s promise to Jacob that “Kings should come out of his Loins” (Gen. 35:11).27 Furthermore, the third-person narrator’s parenthetical praise for the Hebrew Lawgiver “(Now the man Moses was very meeke, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.)” (Numb. 12:3) did also raise eyebrows among those who defended the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. For if Moses did author this panegyric, his self-praise was anything but consistent with his avowed meekness. “I know no Damage that would ensue,” Mather again conceded, “if wee should suppose the Parenthesis here, in Commendation of Moses, added by some other Prophet, in the Transcription.” But before entirely relinquishing this passage to his opponents, Mather reminded his readers that the use of a thirdperson narrator and the accompanying self-praise was a common enough rhetorical stance among ancient historians. Why not Moses?28

26 “Biblia Americana” (Gen. 12:1), p. 301r. See Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 8, p. 124; Simon, Critical History, bk. I, ch. 5, p. 37; LeClerc’s Twelve Dissertations, Dissert. 3, pp. 118–119. 27 “Biblia Americana” (Gen. 36:31), p. 420v; Spinoza, ch. 8, p. 124; Simon, bk. I, ch. 5, p. 37; LeClerc, Twelve Dissertations, Dissert. 3, pp. 122–23. 28 “Biblia Americana” (Numb. 12:3), p. 44r.

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Again we see how Mather positioned himself as a rational mediator, who seeks after truth—no matter where his quest leads him. Although he was not beyond name-calling, he did not stoop so low as to bestow anathemas on critics of the Bible for his own want of better arguments.29 One final area of contention will suffice here to gage Mather’s response to the Spinozist critique of the scriptures’ textual coherence: the problem of the lost books of the Bible. The writer of the book of Numbers cites the ancient history, “the booke of the warres of the Lord” (Numb. 21:14), which records the acts of Moses at the Red Sea and the Brooks of Arnon. The loss of this work (and many other textual problems besides) convinced Hobbes that “the five Books of Moses were written after his time, though how long after it be not so manifest.” To Spinoza, such textual lacunae and adaptations corroborated “clearer than the sun at noonday that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses.” Richard Simon followed in Spinoza’s steps and provided a whole list of ancient histories mentioned in the Bible, but now lost. They served “Public Scribes” as source material long after Moses’ death, when they composed the Pentateuch (and other books of the Old Testament), and when they revised and updated them as needed, “fitting them to their own times and design; which is usual with those who abridge the Books of others.”30 What about Cotton Mather? Again he offered several solutions. Mather speculated that “The Book of the Wars of the Lord ” might not have been lost altogether, but elements from it were incorporated into the book of Judges by inspired scribes who revised the books of the Bible long after Moses’ death. Thereby Mather finally cut through the problem and offered a version of Richard Simon’s controversial hypothesis to accommodate his own conjecture. For centuries “Publick Scribes” collected the Acts of Moses in public annals and then extracted, rewrote, updated, and refitted sections from these no-longer-extant records to create the greatest part of the Five Books of Moses—all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. “It may bee

29 Cf. “we shall have a Detestable Toland come, and make Nothing of the Great Works done by the Glorious GOD” (“Biblia Americana” [Deut. 8:15], p. 29r). 30 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 33, p. 262; Spinoza, ch. 8, pp. 124, 125; Simon, bk. I, ch. 3, p. 27; but compare LeClerc, Twelve Dissertations, Dissert. 3, pp. 112–113.

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answered,” Mather claimed, echoing Simon, “That the Pentateuch, long after the Death of Moses, underwent Interpolations from the Pens of Inspired Persons. Ezra, Revising this Book, might add this, of what was done at the Red-Sea, & at the Brooks of Arnon.”31 However, still not happy with this daring explanation, Mather consulted his trusty handbook, A Commentary upon the Historical Books of the Old Testament (1695–1700), by Dr. Simon Patrick, the celebrated Bishop of Ely. Patrick himself had paraphrased the deliberations of the Rabbis Abarbanel and Nachmanides about the problem, and, following Patrick, Mather contended that the book of The Wars of the Lord was composed “by some of the Wise Men” of the Amorites and “inserted it in their Annals.” Moses then excerpted these Amorite poems and “justifies what he writes, concerning this Conquest, out of their own Books; which he quotes, as the Apostle does one of the Greek Poets.”32 According to this explication, then, the divine Lawgiver was not beyond cribbing his material from the annals of his vanquished enemies when he composed his own history.33

II How much of the Pentateuch, then, did Moses actually write? Most of those whom orthodox theologians branded Spinozists agreed that tradition—no matter how time-honored—was insufficient proof of

31 “Biblia Americana” (Numb. 21:14), p. 76r. Richard Simon’s controversial “Public Scribes” hypothesis ostensibly intended to mitigate the radical conclusions of Hobbes and Spinoza to offer a rational explanation for the many passages that suggested an authorship of the Pentateuch much later than that of Moses. For his detailed explanation of his “Public Scribes” hypothesis, see Simon’s Critical History, bk. I, chs. 1–3, pp. 1–28. 32 “Biblia Americana” (Numb. 21:14), pp. 76r–77v. See also Simon Patrick’s Commentary, 2 vols., third edition corrected (London, 1727), vol. 1, p. 652. Nachmanides (Ramban, [1195–c. 1270]) suggests this intriguing interpretation in his Commentary on the Torah: Numbers, translated and annotated by C. Chavel (Brooklyn, NY, 1975), vol. 4, pp. 237–38. 33 Isaac La Peyrere, the controversial author of Prae-adamitae (Paris, 1655), transl. Men before Adam (London, 1656), presents a variant of this argument. He mentions several other lost books of the Bible which served later writers of the Pentateuch as source material (bk. 4, ch. 1, p. 204) and concludes that “the five first books of the Bible were not written by Moses, as is thought. Nor need any one wonder after this, when he reads many things confus’d and out of order, obscure, deficient, many things omitted and misplaced, when they shall consider with themselves that they are a heap of Copie confusedly taken” (bk. 4, ch. 1, pp. 208).

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the Mosaic authorship.34 The designation The Five Books of Moses verified his authorship as little as The Odyssey or The Aeneid vouched for Odysseus or Aeneas to be the authors of the epics whose name they bear. The titles were merely derived from the subjects of the books or from the protagonists whose actions are central to the stories. Strict rules of textual criticism suggested to Hobbes and Spinoza that Moses wrote only those portions of the Pentateuch he explicitly declared to be his. There was a vast disproportion between what he was believed to have written and what he actually did. Hobbes reduced Moses’ contribution to “the Volume of the Law, which is contained . . . in the 11 of Deuteronomie, and the following Chapters to the 27, which was commanded to be written on stones” (Deut. 31:9) and the Law of the Covenant, which Moses commanded the Levites to place inside the Ark of the Covenant (Deut. 31:26). But the Pentateuch and most of the histories, and of the prophetic books were compiled in the form we have them by the Scribe Esdras (2 Esdras 14:21–22) after the Babylonian Captivity, but before they were translated into Greek—a thousand years after Moses.35 Spinoza’s rationale was even more trenchant. Accepting no proof but that which could be clearly demonstrated, Spinoza drove his Cartesian principles to their inevitable conclusion: “We must make no assertions in such matters which we do not gather from scripture, or which do not flow as legitimate consequences from its fundamental principles.” Consequently, “we have no proof that Moses wrote any book save this of the covenant” (Deut. 1:5, 29:14; 31:9). Spinoza, too, pointed toward the fifth-century BC, Ezra as the likely candidate by whom all the historical books were written, though with far less certainty than Hobbes.36 The French Roman Catholic priest Richard Simon also took exception to the orthodox tradition that Moses wrote the entire Torah or Pentateuch. Evaluating the internal evidence on either side of the argument, Simon concluded that Moses only wrote “the Tables, the Law, the Ordinances and Commandments.” And as far as “all the

34 Spinoza deplores the credulity of his contemporaries: “. . . the light of reason is not only despised, but by many even execrated as a source of impiety, that human commentaries are accepted as divine records, and that credulity is extolled as faith” (“The Preface,” p. 8). 35 Leviathan, ch. 33, pp. 262, 265. 36 Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 8, pp. 127, 129–30; see also ch. 9.

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words of this Law” that Moses commanded them to “write upon the Stones” on the other side of the Jordan River, they were merely the twelve maledictions (Deut. 27:8, 15–26) to enforce conformity to his laws and ordinances. Though Esdras and his committee of “Publick Writers” may have collected and loosely joined the surviving scrolls, the process of revision, abridgment, and addition continued long after Esdras who was therefore “not the last composer of the sacred Scriptures.”37 Jean LeClerc proved to be much more orthodox than his peers on the problem of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Yet in his anonymous Sentimens (Five Letters), he was ruthless about invalidating “the divine inspiration” of the Holy Scriptures. LeClerc singled out Simon’s “Publick Writers” theory as his particular target. Obviously, Moses must have extracted the history of the Creation down to his own time from some ancient “Memoirs” that came down to him from his forebears, LeClerc conceded, while implicitly denying that Moses wrote his Five Books through direct inspiration.38 While the disordered state of the Pentateuch had indicated to Simon that “Publick Writers” were working independently from one another in abridging and revising the biblical manuscripts, LeClerc read the same evidence as proof of the opposite conclusion. Moses’ Pentateuch had survived in its original, unedited form as the Hebrew Lawgiver composed it during his journey of forty years through the Sinai Desert. If “Publick Writers” had extracted the Pentateuch from the annals or “memoirs” of Moses, as Richard Simon opined, they would certainly have smoothed out its rough spots and edited out the frequent repetitions and contradictions. Thus to LeClerc, Simon’s evidence just did not add up. The idiosyncrasies noted by its critics were to LeClerc the tale-telling signs not only of Moses’ authorship but also of the original annals in their unedited form. Besides, the many laws and commandments enumerated especially in the “four last Books of the Pentateuch” asserted that none but Moses was the author: for if he writ all the Laws, and the whole History of Israel, he is certainly the Author of these Books, wherein nothing else is contain’d; for who, after Moses had once written, would attempt to write and model them anew?

37 38

Simon, Critical History, bk. I, ch. 6, pp. 48, 49; ch. 8, p. 63. LeClerc, Twelve Dissertations, Dissert. 3, pp. 107–12.

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Altogether, there are only “eighteen places, which are commonly brought to prove the Pentateuch to be of a later date.” The most efficient way to resolve these difficulties is therefore to own up and to admit that either Joshua or Esdras or some later scribe might have interpolated these anachronistic verses. But since we cannot know, “we can have no surer or safer Sanctuary here, than prudently to suspend our Judgments; by which conduct, if we do not discover the Truth, yet at least it is not excluded from the Mind.”39 Cotton Mather was evidently much pleased with a balanced view such as the one offered by LeClerc, but was reluctant to praise him on other occasions. “I wish, Leclerc had never published any worse Thoughts, than those few, which I shall on this Occasion fetch from his Criticisms.” Mather revealed his ambivalence. Nevertheless, he readily espoused the arguments of Simon and LeClerc that Moses left behind only an “Abridgment of the ancient History” and “a Naked Chronology of the First Times.”40 His “Biblia Americana” then demonstrates like no other writing of Mather’s, published or unpublished, how far he had absorbed the critical debate among his European peers. He could pick and choose what seemed rational and what furthered his own goals; yet he could also rise to the challenge and denounce heterodoxy if the occasion required. A case in point is his commentary on the Chronicles (1 Chron., chap. 29), where Mather used LeClerc to rebut Simon and Simon to confute LeClerc. Mather scoffed at the views of Richard Simon and those who thought like him. As he said of one unnamed critic, “One of them has proceeded unto such a Degree of learned Nonsense, as to make the Writer thereof to be one of the little Samaritan Priests which came to teach the New Inhabitants of Palæstine, the Rites of worshipping the God of the Land, after the Ten Tribes were carried into Captivity.” Simon had sponsored this obscure thesis in his first edition of his Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (1678), but edited it out of subsequent editions. Then resorting to LeClerc’s argument, Mather played one critic against the other. But it is most certain, first, That the Mosaic Lawes were by Moses himself left behind him in Writing. [ Josh. 1.7, 8.] Now those Lawes make no little Part of the Pentateuch. Especially, the Cæremonials. It is most

39 40

LeClerc, Twleve Dissertations, Dissert. 3, pp. 112, 113, 128, 130. “Biblia Americana” (Gen. 1:31), p. 100v.

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chapter six certain also, that there are several Chapters of Prophecy in the Pentateuch, whereof Moses was the Writer. [Deut. 28. & 29, & 30. & 31.] And some of History [Exod. 17:14. with Psal. 78.5, 6, 7. And Num. 33.2.] It is likewise very certain, That these Matters were so founded in the Covenant which the Lord made with the Israelites; & with their Ancestors that the Relation thereof would be very lame, if that also were not Related. And a Good Part of the Book of Genesis must therefore then be written.

Besides, both Christ Jesus and several of his apostles specifically referred to the writings of Moses to validate the truth of Christian religion. “It is true,” Mather continued with LeClerc at his elbow, there may be certain lesser Passages, or Sentences, added in later Ages to the Pentateuch, by some Inspired Hand. The last Chapter of Deuteronomy was evidently so. But of all the Instances, which LeClerc, and other bold Criticks have collected, there will be found but Four in the whole Pentateuch, about which there is any need of acknowledging a Later Interpolation; and this too so very small, & but on such manifest Occasion, that there is no Manner of Reason from thence, to Deny, that the Books were first written by Moses, to whom our Lord Himself, & His Apostles, have ascribed them. Yea, LeClerc himself at length comes to write a Dissertation, De Scriptore Pentateuchi Mose.41

Notwithstanding the contradictory theories offered by Mather and his fellow critics, Mather’s efforts illustrate his informed response to the crisis of certitude in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Arriving at rational explanations was an ongoing process. More importantly, no reputable theologian on either side of the Atlantic could shroud himself in silence or brush aside with impunity the hermeneutical revolution that left the biblical scrolls in tatters and left the clergy as well as their parishioners in need of reassurance. However, these critical debates—though increasingly published in the vernacular—largely remained in the domain of the community of scholars. The common parishioners of the day did not need to face such issues, mainly because matters of historicist criticism were not integral to the clergy’s primary function of promoting salvation. In his final segment of the “Biblia Americana,” with the title “An Essay for a further COMMENTARY on the Sacred Scriptures,” Mather added a series of thirteen essays that may well function as a key to the historical context and physical provenance of the scrip-

41

“Biblia Americana” (1 Chron. 29:29), pp. 5r–6v.

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tures. Once more he returned to the question of the Mosaic authorship and summed up his final position. He now willingly accepted the contention that many passages in the Hebrew Bible are of considerably later origin than most of his peers were willing to admit. He agreed with Hobbes and Spinoza that Ezra was the most likely compiler and editor of the Pentateuch and much of the Hebrew Scriptures as well. He also conceded that the final chapter of Deuteronomy (34:5–12) could not have been authored by the divine Lawgiver because Moses could not communicate from beyond the grave. “The Last Chapter of Deuteronomy might be his [Ezra’s],” Mather admitted, “and so might be several other Passages, which are Plain Interpolations.” Mather further acknowledged that the reference in Gen. 12:6 (“the Canaanite was then in the land”) had to be a later insertion. Similarly, Mt. Moriah (Gen. 22:14) “was not called, The Mount of the Lord, until the Temple was built on it” nearly 900 years after Abraham’s arrival in the Promised Land. Its modern name must therefore have been a later addition. The reference to the kings of Edom long “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel” (Gen. 36:31) could not have been made by Moses either, simply because Israel did not have a king until more than 350 years after his death. In short, Mather did not brush aside such obvious textual interpolations nor did he muddle his way through by endowing them with prophetic significance to explain away these anachronisms. Instead, he allowed that the scribal prophet Ezra interpolated such passages after the return from Babylonian captivity to “render the Scriptures, as intelligible as possible unto the People” when the passage of time had made old place names, conditions, and customs incomprehensible to post-exilic Jews. Likewise, Mather argues, Ezra had to transcribe the ancient Hebrew texts “into the Chaldee Character” (Aramaic), “dropping the old Samaritan Character, wherein Moses & the Prophets had recorded the Oracles of GOD,” because the Jews returning from Babylon no longer understood the ancient script. Such drastic alterations did not disturb Mather, because God’s Word needed to be made intelligible to his people and therefore required updating.42 42 Mather, “IV. Ezra, or, The Things done by Ezra, for the Restoring & Preserving of the SACRED SCRIPTURES,” pp. 77r–78v, appended to Mather’s commentary on Revelation, at the end of “Biblia Americana.”

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Closely related to the debate about biblical authorship is the controversy about the nature and function of revelation as they are described in scripture. In an effort to break clerical power Hobbes, Spinoza, and a whole host of their disciples turned traditional hermeneutics on its head and, following on the work of Hugo Grotius, launched what is now called historical-contextual criticism of the Bible. This form of criticism explains the scripture within the historical setting and zeitgeist of the writer, keeps supernaturalism to a minimum, and focuses on man’s subjective response to natural phenomena. Problems of textual corruption and transmission aside, Thomas Hobbes unequivocally stabbed at the very heart of biblical authority by pointing at the weakest link of divine communication and its potential for human error: To say he [God] hath spoken to him [the prophet] in a Dream, is no more then to say he hath dreamt that God spake to him; which is not of force to win beleef from any man, that knows dreams are for the most part naturall, and may proceed from former thoughts; and such dreams as that, from selfe conceit, and foolish arrogance, and false opinion of mans own godliness, or other vertue, by which he thinks he hath merited the favour of extraordinary Revelation. To say that he hath seen a Vision, or heard a Voice, is to say that he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking: for in such manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering. To say he speaks by supernatural Inspiration, is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong opinion of himself, for which he can alledge no naturall and sufficient reason. So that though God Almighty can speak to a man, by Dreams, Visions, Voice, and Inspiration; yet he obliges no man to beleeve he hath done to him that pretends it; who (being a man) may erre, and (which is more) may lie.43

This rationalist approach, so disarmingly logical and yet so frighteningly subversive, clearly indicates how Hobbes reduced the means of God’s revelation to a natural function of man’s hyperactive imagination. This is not to say that Hobbes questioned outright God’s ability or will to communicate with man in dreams, visions, voices,

43

Leviathan, ch. 32, p. 257. See also ch. 2, pp. 17–18.

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or through supernatural inspiration. Rather, Hobbes emphasized the uncertainty and irrational nature of such occurrences, which, because rooted in man’s sensory experience, are problematic and therefore inadmissible proof of “absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come.”44 Consequently, faith is not grounded on fact, but hearsay; for if we take for truth the utterances of a purported prophet whose character we deem trustworthy, we merely have “an opinion of the veracity of the man,” of the honesty and piety of the speaker. But that in itself is neither empirical proof of fact, nor of the truth of the utterance, nor of its divine origin. Absolute certainty therefore remains unattainable and indelibly linked with the credibility of the prophet who is the only one who truly knows if God did speak to him.45 Hobbes did not question divine revelation as such, but distrusted man’s ability to distinguish between external impulse and wishful thinking. Hobbes’ misgivings are grounded in part in the Cartesian mechanism of corpuscular motion and the untrustworthiness of our senses. Paraphrasing René Descartes, Hobbes claims that external objects make impressions on our senses, and by pressing on the inward nerves and membranes leading to the brain and heart cause resistance, which motion we attribute to the innate qualities of external objects. These qualities, however, are nothing else but motions of matter pressing on our senses, producing counter-motions and appearing to our fancy as light, sound, odour, savour, or feeling. Moreover, since rubbing our eyes makes us imagine a light, and pressing our ears makes us fancy a din in the same manner as external objects do when they act upon our senses through unobserved motion, Hobbes found proof that the observer’s fancy forms an image of the external object, like a reflection in a mirror or an echo of a sound.46 Hobbes used the terms imagination and fancy interchangeably. They denote to him the formation of mental images of something neither perceived as real nor present to the senses. Over time, he argues, these mental images are obscured by stronger or more recent sensory impressions, by the weakness of the imagination, or by the

44

Leviathan, ch. 7, p. 47. Leviathan, ch. 7, pp. 48, 49 46 “Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused . . . by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained” (Leviathan, ch. 1, p. 14). 45

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distempers of the body, and thus fade into memory. The faculty of memory is therefore but the storehouse of our decaying sensory impressions and degenerating images that are most untrustworthy when compounded in dreams and distorted by such passions as love, hate, fear, and desire. Properly considered, dreams and visions are but “a Fiction of the Mind” and “the reverse of our waking Imaginations.”47 The subjective nature of prophetic dreams and visions and the danger of mistaking them for divine revelations are all the more apparent, because the Bible requires external means of verification such as conformity to the law of Moses as well as signs and miracles testifying to supernatural agency.48 Such empirical tests for establishing certainty, however, were not foolproof either, for the Hebrew and Christian Bibles abound with tales of false prophets performing miracles and of true prophets failing to carry out God’s mission. The case of the prophet Micaiah is particularly telling. Michaiah was the only true prophet out of 400 whom the King of Israel consulted in the war against Ramoth Gilead (1 Kings 22). Yet on returning from his mission to prophesy against Jeroboam’s altar, Micaiah fell prey to the lies of an older prophet (1 Kings 13). “If one Prophet deceive another,” chafed Hobbes, “what certainty is there of knowing the will of God, by [any] other way than that of Reason?”49 Therefore, believing that the Bible is the Word of God and knowing that it is indeed so are two entirely different issues, especially when ecclesiastical tradition puts a premium on accepting its teachings on faith.50 Caveats of this nature abound in Leviathan and had the effect of turning shaken believers into outright sceptics. Hobbes succeeded in dismantling biblical authority by subjecting it to the standard of human reason. Ironically, he also rehabilitated the Bible by making its authority dependent on the decrees of the civil ruler. If the king orders that the Bible be the Word of God, Hobbes declared, all subjects are bound to observe its strictures in accordance with the laws of the land.

47 Leviathan, ch. 1, pp. 15–17; ch. 8, p. 54; the citations appear in ch. 1, pp. 16, 17–18. 48 Deut. 13:1–5; Leviathan, ch. 36, pp. 298–302. 49 Leviathan, ch. 32, p. 257. 50 Leviathan, ch. 43, pp. 405, 406.

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Spinoza, Hobbes’ Dutch contemporary, was even more sweeping in his argument, for Spinoza did not wrest biblical authority out of the hands of the Church only to deliver it into the hands of the civil ruler. Rather, he reduced its venerable authority to a function of morality and personal choice. “What is prophecy?” Spinoza asked at the opening of his Theological-Political Tractate, and like Hobbes he immediately struck at the foundation of the Bible’s claim to authority.51 At home in classical Hebrew like few others among his contemporaries and versed in the customs and superstitions of ancient Israel, Spinoza assailed the common misconception of his time that every “yod and tittle” in the Bible had been dictated by God. The ancient writers were not endowed with “superhuman minds” because they are completely ignorant about secondary causes.52 In ascribing even the most natural phenomena to the mystery of God, they were doing no more than their pagan neighbors who were worshipping other gods. We must therefore not assume that everything in the Bible is a divine revelation merely because pious writers ignorantly refer all things to God. The hyperbolic language and tumid metaphors of the ancient prophets are indicative of their “unusually vivid imagination,” not, however, of their “unusually perfect minds.”53 Quite to the contrary, Solomon, universally regarded as the wisest of men, had no special aptitude for prophecy. In fact, the more educated a person, the less likely he is given to prophesying. “Men of great imaginative power are less fitted for abstract reasoning.” This proved the case because learned men “who excel in intellect and its use keep their imagination more restrained and controlled, holding it in subjection, so to speak, lest it should usurp the place of reason.”54 Spinoza suggested that education is actually detrimental to receiving divine revelation, for pious devotion, a hyperactive imagination, and a volatile temperament are the prophets’ chief qualifications for his office. They neither possess rare insight into natural or spiritual phenomena, nor do they become more learned by supernatural inspiration.55

51

Theological-Political Treatise, “The Preface,” p. 8. Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 1, p. 14 53 Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 2, p. 27. 54 Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 2, p. 27. 55 Nor do they ever relinquish any of their former prejudices. “We are, therefore, not at all bound to trust them in matters of intellect” and should not turn to 52

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Far from validating the prophets’ sacred office, Spinoza challenged his contemporaries’ deep hankering for prophecies and revelations. To Spinoza, supernatural revelation is the least trustworthy of all forms of human knowledge. Even the Bible demands confirmation by signs. Yet these signs and wonders were not uniformly accepted either, Spinoza pointed out, because they varied greatly and depended on the opinions and capacity of each prophet and, unlike the case of Moses, were only witnessed by a few individuals rather than by vast numbers of people. Besides, whatever the ancients could not explain, they esteemed a prodigy and a miracle, when in truth such signs were little more than natural phenomena of which the secondary causes were not easily understood.56 Even the tenor of divine revelation was subject to the prophet’s personal disposition and temperament and varied according to his mood, cultivation of mind, and background.57 We must therefore not mistake the prophet’s personal prejudices for universal truths. His own bodily humors are responsible for the tenor of his visions; his choice of metaphors and images are the result of his education, and the style of his language (rude or refined, courtly or plebeian) is the result of his upbringing rather than a matter of divine revelation. Spinoza did not neglect any opportunity to explain away the mysteries of the Bible in terms of the peculiarity of ancient Jewish customs, personal idiosyncrasies, and historical context—rational modes of explication that he incorporated in his universal rules of interpreting scripture.58 In demystifying scripture, he invested human reason with the kind of power that his contemporaries had ascribed to God alone.

them for knowledge about natural causality, because their certitude “was not mathematical, but moral” (Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 2, p. 33 and 28). 56 See Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 6, p. 84. 57 “If a prophet was cheerful, victories, peace, and events which make men glad, were revealed to him; in that he was naturally more likely to imagine such things. If, on the contrary, he was more melancholy, wars, massacres, and calamities were revealed; and so according as the prophet was merciful, gentle, quick to anger, or severe, he was more fitted for one kind of revelation than another” (TheologicalPolitical Treatise, ch. 2, p. 30). 58 See esp. Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 7, pp. 99–104.

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IV The debate about the epistemological certainty of revelation was sufficiently volatile to draw in more and more participants. In the American hemisphere, Cotton Mather adjusted to this crisis of confidence by working out the details of his response in his “Biblia Americana.” Even if he did not always acknowledge his sources, Mather extracted from friend and foe whatever seemed serviceable in defense of the Bible. He had internalized the different arguments on stylistic variations, syntactical disagreements, and diverging repetitions in parallel texts as developed by Richard Simon and Jean LeClerc. Simon believed that the disparities in the Mosaic books suggested multiple authorship, with the composition and redaction of the Pentateuch taking place over a long period of time. By contrast, LeClerc contended that stylistic disagreement or textual variants did not matter to God, but only the ideas themselves. God did not dictate to his prophets every single word, but merely inspired them with the concepts allowing each prophet or subsequent redactor to use his own words. “The Holy Spirit never tied itself up to words, as many of our Divines do now a-days,” LeClerc maintained. He only prompted the Holy Pen-men to give us the true sense of the Words that God made use of to make the Prophets understand his Will; it is only in respect to the sense, and to the things, that the Apostles assure us that they were inspired from God.59

As to matters of the style and language of the divine original, Mather had no problems accommodating the ideas of his European peers. Robert Boyle, for instance, defended the divine origin of the Bible in Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661) by lambasting incompetent and literalist translators for the texts’ uneven style and loss of poetic elegance.60 Mather, however, followed LeClerc and did not blame the translators, but quite comfortably admitted that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical writers only with His divine ideas, not with their choice of words or manner of presentation: 59

See Simon, Critical History, bk. I, ch. 5, pp. 37–45. LeClerc’s citations are from his Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration Of The Holy Scriptures Translated out of French (1690), Letter 1, p. 20. 60 The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle. In Six Volumes (London, 1772), vol. 2, pp. 258–259.

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chapter six In things which only fell under Humane Prudence, the Holy Spirit seems not immediately to have Dictated unto the Men of God; but only to have used a Directive or Conductive Power upon them; to supply them with suitable Apprehensions, & keep them in the Use of their own Rational Judgment, within the Bounds of Infallible Truth, & of Expediency for the present Occasion.61

Indeed, God allowed his prophets the “Use of their own Words, and of the Style that was most natural to them” because the Prophetic Spirit was “not Permanent or Habitual” but merely occasional as the need arose.62 To Mather, inconsistency of style, word choice, and syntax, did not signify textual corruption or editorial manipulation, but the prophet’s liberty to express supernaturally inspired doctrine in his own words. The doctrine, not the letter of the text, is vouchsafed by the Holy Spirit. In this respect, Mather is much closer to Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, and LeClerc than is commonly understood. Both Hobbes and Spinoza had argued that only those to whom God had truly spoken could know if they received a divine revelation. Everyone else could only have recourse to the Bible for evidence of their truthfulness. Mather reminded his readers that, contrary to popular opinion, a prophet is not someone whose sole function is to predict the future, but rather “One to whom God revealeth Secrects,” as Spinoza interpreted the Hebrew term Nabi.63 Prophets were principally interpreters of God’s message, teachers of holy doctrine, and scourges to those who deviated from the Mosaic Laws; yet the signs of their divine possessions were anything but flattering and earned them frequent ridicule, scorn, even persecution and death.64 The signs of their possessions are “so ridiculous, as [to] give a just Evidence, that there was a Supernatural Coercive Power of the Spirit, which forced the Prophet, against his natural Will, to submit unto them.”65

61 “An Essay, for a further Commentary, on the Sacred Scriptures,” p. 15 (“Biblia Americana” following Revelation). 62 “An Essay,” pp. 14, 15. 63 “An Essay,” p. 27. See also Mather’s commentary on 1 Chronicles, ch. 29, p. 1r. 64 “I. Vates. Or, Some Remarks upon the Spirit of Prophecy,” p. 27 (“Biblia Americana” following Revelation). See also his commentary on 1 Chronicles, ch. 29, pp. 2v–3r. 65 “Vates,” p. 28.

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The cases of Isaiah and Jeremiah are particularly notorious. Isaiah was forced to “call his Two Sons by uncouth Names; and walk Naked, without so much as a Shoe, for Three Years together” when God wanted Isaiah to demonstrate the manner in which the Egyptian captives must be enslaved.66 Isaiah’s affliction with such signs of divine favor lasted nearly forty years and earned him anything but honor among his contemporaries. The signs of Jeremiah’s divine possession were no less ludicrous, “when he hung half a dozen wooden Yokes about his Neck, & made an uneasy Complement of them unto the foreign Embassadors” in token of their impending submission.67 David’s mad dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, leaping “after the Manner of a Goat, or a Lamb”; Saul’s odd behavior “when that Spirit leaped upon him”; John’s epileptic seizures, when overcome by the Holy Spirit—all these strange manifestations indicate that when a prophet is inebriated with the Holy Spirit, his “Outward Actions . . . were sometimes indeed like those of a Madman.”68 Pretenders to divine revelation and false prophets striving after prestige and honor would not have adopted such ignominious tokens of sacred possession. “Certainly, no Deist could be impudent enough, to pretend a Priestcraft in such a Case.”69 Besides, Mosaic Law demanded that false prophets be put to death. Mather’s empirical analysis of the signs of divine possession described in the Bible demonstrates that he was fully aware of the European debate. He was prepared to examine the only evidence available—even signs of holy madness—to assert that reason alone could not account for what was happening to the prophets. Mather’s English colleague, the Latitudinarian Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, may help us appreciate how threats to the authority of prophetic inspiration elicited different responses to this epistemological dilemma. In his oft-reprinted Origines Sacrae, Or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures (1662), Stillingfleet tried to diminish the irrational qualities of divine possession by emphasizing the rational side of the prophets’ preparation for their sacred office. Prophets were

66 67 68 69

“Vates,” “Vates,” “Vates,” “Vates,”

p. p. p. p.

28; see also Mather’s commentary on 1 Chronicles, ch. 29, p. 4v. 29. 30; see also his commentary on 1 Chronicles, ch. 29, p. 4v. 29.

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no lunatics or madmen, as Hobbes and Spinoza made them out to be, but learned graduates of colleges and seminaries that existed all over the Holy Land in ancient times. The most noted Prophets to the time of David were the Presidents of these Colledges” and God ordinarily selected from these “Schools of Prophets” those “whom he did employ in the discharge of the prophetical office.70

Stillingfleet’s emphasis on the prophet’s learning and preparation betrays his fear of irrationality and madness at a time when the English elites had had their fill of mad Fifth Monarchists, social radicalism, and popular claims to inspiration. His insistence on reason and balance in the preparation and selection of the ancient prophets speaks loudly to the context of the Restoration. Cotton Mather on the other side of the Atlantic had no such problems. To him, the manifestations of the prophet’s epileptic convulsions in themselves were empirical proof that the prophet was indeed possessed by the Holy Spirit. No matter how irrational, these signs of possession indicated that Reason alone could not determine true possession or sit in judgment of divine revelation, which runs counter to all forms of empirical verification. Reason is to Judge, whether the Revelation do indeed come from GOD. But this Point being once determined by Reason, it is now humbly to sitt down, & own its Inability to go any further, or to determine upon the Matter & the Manner of Revelation.71

Obviously, there were more reliable methods of testing the certainty of prophetic revelation. And Mather, following the precedents of Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton, and others, compared prophetic utterance in biblical times with their accomplishment in the history of post-biblical times to test the accuracy of textual transmission and divine revelation.72

70 Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae, third edition (London, 1666), bk. 2, ch. 4, pp. 156, 157. Mather mentions the same argument in his commentary on 1 Chronicles, ch. 29, p. 3r. 71 Mather is here quoting from the venerable tradition of Justin Martyr (c. 114–165) (“I. Vates,” p. 21). 72 See Reiner Smolinski, Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of ‘Triparadisus’ (Athens and London, 1995), p. 13; and my essay “The Logic of Millennial Thought: Sir Isaac Newton Among His Contemporaries,” Newton and Religion, ed. by J.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (Dortrecht, 1999), pp. 259–289.

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But there was yet another way of establishing the authority of the Bible, which only required careful observation of how believers experienced God on a daily basis. “We have call’d in the Help of all Sciences, and Histories, to Illustrate the Oracles of God,” Mather concluded, admitting that the traditional tools of empirical inquiry alone could not accomplish the task: If Prudent and Pious Men, would carefully observe what they meet withal in their own Experience, and Record what they observe, to confirm the Truth of the Sacred Scriptures, we should often see them Expound what they Confirm.73

Turning to Matthew 17:27 (“Take up the Fish, that first cometh up, and when thou hast opened his Mouth, thou shalt find a Peece of Money”), Mather verified the truth of this scripture through his own experience. This I have often taken notice of, in the Providence of God towards me. A Thing of a small Value hath been handed to me, by one unexpected Method and another; Yett it hath answered a present Necessity: At the next Pinch, another Method ha’s been taken for my Supply; And in great Emergencies there hath been Suitable Provision.

God looks after those who turn to him in faith. Mather testified to his practical experience over and over again. God helps me “that I may be trained up to a Life of Faith; that I may glorify Him by Beleeving.”74 Admittedly, subjective experiences of this nature might not satisfy a Hobbes or Spinoza, yet to Mather, inwardly committed to an objective uncertainty, such experiences were of supreme value. They confirmed the supernatural inspiration of the Bible, the truth of its teachings, and the practical value of committing oneself to God, even if natural philosophy in Mather’s day began to reject phenomena that could not be verified in mathematical terms. The Promises of God “are meer Fancies, & Whimseyes, unto the foolish Unbeleever,” Mather lamented, “but the perpetual Experience of Multitudes who Beleeve them, ha’s demonstrated them to be Faithful Sayings and worthy of all Acceptation.”75

73

Mather, “An Essay, for a further Commentary,” p. 1. “An Essay,” p. 8. Mather provides dozens of similar examples from his own experience or that of his colleagues in New England and abroad. 75 “An Essay,” p. 3. 74

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By developing a conceptual framework of experiential theology (tested on a daily basis and in hundreds of occurrences), Mather could attain practical certainty even if all confidence in the Bible’s philological soundness was shaken to its core. This conceptual framework is neither certain nor uncertain; it simply expresses a way of acting and perceiving that has proven supremely valuable to those who have internalized its principles. It hardly comprised a matter of calm theoretical certainty, nor was it an issue of mere intellectual assent to authority—or something like Blaise Pascal’s wager with its rational commitment to a practice of rituals for a chance at eternal life just in case God exists and demands obeisance.76 Rather, it was a settled faith or “a sure principle of assent and assurance” that “leaves no manner of room for doubt or hesitation,” as John Locke describes the degrees of faith’s assent in matters of divine revelation.77 Mather’s practical certainty can be called “a matter of loyalty to a liberating disclosure, aimed at a great good.”78 His commitment to experiencing a hoped-for, yet invisible, reality assured him of God’s love. It quieted his heart most serenely when Mather was most resigned unto providence even contrary to the rules of common prudence. It demanded of him a readiness to surrender to God’s inscrutable will no matter what the outcome of a hoped-for event. It presupposed an emptying of Self, a disinterested benevolence akin to the stage of humiliation in the Puritan ordo salutis, trusting all along that God knew best. Mather’s practical certainty, then, was a way of life that, in spite of the iconoclastic tendencies of the age, supplanted doubt with experimental faith in the infallible promise of his God. The reign of the Stuarts witnessed the foundation of modern biblical scholarship, which began to liberate natural philosophy from theology and the individual believer from the control of the Church. However, in rising to the defense of the Holy Scriptures, physicotheologians launched new methods of philological scholarship, historical-contextual exegesis, comparative religion, and experimental

76 Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées. Transl. by Ewald Wasmuth, Über Die Religion (Berlin, 1937), Fragment 233, pp. 119–126. 77 John Locke, Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London, 1690), bk. IV, ch. 16. My citation is from Alexander Campbell Fraser’s edition, 2 vols. (New York, 1959), vol. 2, p. 383. 78 Keith Ward, Religion & Revelation (Oxford, 1994), p. 26.

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piety that contributed their share to the early Enlightenment of the late Stuart period. Cotton Mather’s unpublished “Biblia Americana” perhaps best demonstrates that Puritan New England did not lag far behind the new modes of thinking that emerged in Europe. Far from remaining unaffected by the challenges to the authority of the Bible, New England’s religious leader accommodated this intellectual revolution by synthesizing its ideas, popularizing them in his sermons, and by paving the way for the Enlightenment in America. Yet while embracing the more salutary aspects of Enlightenment thought, Mather drew sustenance from a mode of perceiving reality that by nature of its subjectivity ran counter to the quest for certainty through scientific verification. As if maintaining a double consciousness, he could comfortably employ Newtonian Science to celebrate the perfection of Nature’s Laws even as he tacitly submitted to the existence of an invisible, moral entity that accomplished its grand purpose through secondary causes.

SECTION THREE

THE DUTCH CONNECTION

CHAPTER SEVEN

IDEALISM AND POWER: THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY IN THE BRAZIL TRADE (1630–1654) Ernst Pijning

Between 1630 and 1654 the Dutch West India Company [WIC] occupied parts of the Portuguese colonies in North Eastern Brazil. With the double objectives of monopolizing the sugar trade and hitting the Iberian enemy in one of its most vulnerable places, the WIC attempted to capture both Brazil’s sugar plantations and African market places that supplied their slaves.1 In the end, the WIC’s massive investment turned into a financial and humanitarian failure. One factor in this disaster proved central: the Dutch authorities were unable to secure the allegiance of the local populations to either the company or to the Republic. In fact quite the reverse. The widely diverse inhabitants united themselves in their resistance against the company forces, and thereby ultimately created a regional identity that outlasted the Dutch occupation for many centuries. The loss of Brazil has exercised the minds of Dutch historians ever since the company forces surrendered Recife. Most have explained the company’s failure through internal factors: the lack of colonists, too few financial investments, and internal political divisions within the Republic.2 Like their Dutch colleagues, Brazilian historians have also debated the WIC’s failure to maintain its rule. In the most popular versions Brazilians portray the WIC period as being formative to the country as a whole, a proto-nationalist movement uniting the

1 The most in-depth publication about the company’s presence in West Africa see: Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650. Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen, 2000). 2 For the most recent overview see: Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800. Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario 23:2 (1999), pp. 48–51, as well as J.H. Kluiver, De Souvereine en Independente Staat Zeeland. De politiek van de provincie Zeeland inzake de vredesonderhandelingen met Spanje tijdens de tachtigjarige oorlog tegen de achtergrond van de positie van Zeeland in de Republiek (Middelburg, 1998), pp. 181–194, 233–237.

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three races (white, black, and Amerindian) in their struggle against the alien invader.3 Others such as Evaldo Cabral de Mello and José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello adopt a more positive and at the same time less anachronistic view. They have dissected the different social and economic groups of North East Brazil and their reactions towards the WIC overlordship, and concluded that “just rule” of competent administrators, such as Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, and a positive economic climate increased the local populations’ acceptance of the regime.4 However, popular support for the WIC fell away once the count had left and less competent administrators governed the colony, and also as the economic situation became less stable. British historians such as Charles Boxer and Jonathan Israel have been instrumental in placing the fall of Dutch Brazil in the context of antagonistic commercial interests within the Republic. According to Boxer, these controversies changed the fate of the West India Company’s colony in North East Brazil. He argued that Amsterdam’s position in opposition to the WIC prevented a full-blown commitment of the Netherlands government to save Dutch Brazil. In Boxer’s words: “What, then, prevented the States-General from taking drastic action against Portugal at a time when no other power in Europe could have interfered effectively? Answer: Amsterdam.”5 Given the financial power of this city, and its clout in the provincial and federal government of the Netherlands, it was to be expected that their merchants’ private interests prevailed. Jonathan Israel has perceived the fall of Dutch Brazil in the perspective of Dutch-Hispanic relations.6 The WIC gained the leverage

3 This is most plainly expressed in popular histories of the war, see for instance the children’s book: Julieta de Godoy Ladeira, Recife dos Holandeses (4th ed.; São Paulo, 1994), or the army history: Antônio de Souza jr., Do Recôncavo dos Guararapes, (2nd ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1998). 4 José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos. Influência da Ocupação Holandesa na Vida e na Cultura (São Paulo, 1947) and his Gente da Nação. Cristãos-Novos e Judeus em Pernambuco 1642–1654 (2nd ed.; Recife, 1996); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada. Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (2nd ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1998) as well as A Fronde dos Mazombos. Nobres contra Mascates, Pernambuco 1666–1715 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995. See also: Mário Neme, Fórmulas Políticas no Brasil Holandês (São Paulo, 1971). 5 Charles Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (Oxford, 1957), p. 256. 6 Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 124–125, 132–133, 167–170, 198–199, 205–206.

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to conquer Spanish and Portuguese territories after the Spanish government closed off Iberian ports to Dutch merchants. However, following the Portuguese restoration of 1640 and the Spanish-Dutch Peace of Münster in 1648, the tide turned, and Dutch merchants were more free to engage in commercial activities in those countries and their colonies. Dutch Brazil had become less important to these merchants, since they had alternative sources of sugar in the English and French Caribbean. After the rebellion of the local inhabitants, the cost of Brazil’s occupation became prohibitive, and these merchants were better off with a peace with Portugal. Israel goes so far as to argue that as early as 1646, the directors of the WIC “accepted the transformation of the Company from a trading war-machine into a non-belligerent commercial organization content to supply the colonies of other powers.” Competing interests manifested themselves in still other ways. Israel adds that the Dutch attack in southern Chile and the seizure of Curaçao overextended the republic’s forces. Brazilian defences were weakened and the colony left vulnerable as a result of this “major strategic blunder.”7 According to both Boxer and Israel, Dutch Brazil fell because of disunity among the different commercial interests in the Republic. Indeed, it was the same lack of unity that the WIC tried to overcome in Dutch Brazil itself.

I The Dutch colonizers sought to establish their regime by building a series of multi-ethnic coalitions. Moreover, they further believed from past experience that any form of Dutch colony would surely bring prosperity and thereby consolidate their rule. As Benjamin Schmidt has explained so well, the Dutch imagined that Amerindians and Dutchmen were natural allies, since both suffered under the Spanish oppression, and their mutual objective to end the tyranny united them.8 At the moment of arrival of the Dutch fleet in Pernambuco, the Dutch commander-in-chief Diederik van Waerdenburch declared this view: 7

Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, p. 170. Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. The Dutch Imaginations and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, 2001) 213: for a critical review of this book by B. van den Boogart see De Zeventiende Eeuw, 19 (2003) 2: 226–30. 8

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chapter seven From here [Pernambuco] the whole of Brazil can be subjugated and conquered at a low cost, all navigation will be completely disturbed and ruined, which is the only means to deprive our common enemy of its commerce and to reduce the inhabitants to a reciprocal confederacy and a united alliance.9

Waerdenburch’s optimistic statement illustrates the WIC’s vision of its role in the South Atlantic basin. Through massive and overwhelming Dutch sea power, the Iberian population would submit to Dutch rule. Waerdenburch felt that force would lead to economic supremacy and guide the Portuguese and native inhabitants on a true and natural path to political and economic alliance with the WIC. Profit, low costs and high returns were to be the keys to the company’s success.10 In reality, none of these optimistic anticipations were realized. Given that the company never fully obtained the support of all the Amerindians, nor most of the Portuguese inhabitants, nor, eventually, even some of its own officers, it seems remarkable that the WIC regime lasted as long as it did. In the end, the unsound economics of the sugar colony brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy, especially after the WIC was expelled from Brazil in 1654. The grand design of the WIC was to administer production centres markets in order to establish horizontal integration in the Southern transatlantic trade. Private merchants and private companies of different national origins contested this exclusion. The state company had to balance many heterogeneous private interests. For the economic power of such companies was not solely derived from commercial and military superiority, but from the trust and friendship signified by economic transactions. The WIC tried in vain to over-

9

Rodolfo Garcia ed., Documentos Holandeses vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro, w.d.), p. 30. After the era of Dutch Brazil, the WIC proceeded with policies that undercut trade in Spanish America. As Wim Klooster explains: “The economic policies [mercantilist policies by England, France and Spain] did not succeed completely. In addition to imperial trade, the colonies soon engaged in various types of extraimperial dealings which made constant inroads on the monopolies. Metropolitan merchants made lower bids for tropical crops than tax-evading foreigners. They found themselves undersold by these smugglers, or were simply ousted because of their inability to meet colonial demands” (Illicit Riches. Dutch trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden, 1998), p. 2). This was not unlike the Scottish Darien expedition, where economic fairytales and underestimations of the Spanish military power led to a quick defeat at the turn of the eighteenth century. T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2003), pp. 44–48. 10

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come its inability to establish military and economic authority by other means, such as status display, the promotion of science, religious and governmental inclusiveness. Even though the Dutch revolt was strongly ideological, individual political and economic interests of the different regions and factions remained important in the Netherlands. Thus in an atmosphere where trading with the Spanish enemy during religious wars, or as the Dutch call them, the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), was publicly condoned, monopolizing companies that limited personal or regional interests became highly contested. Grotius’ Mare Liberum argued specifically against any restrictions on commerce, and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had its opponents from the very beginning of the seventeenth century.11 Only reluctantly were Dutch merchants convinced that combining their economic strength within a single powerful trading company improved their profits, diminished their risk, and guaranteed the necessary protection of investments. The WIC had even more opponents, since Dutch trade on the Western hemisphere had already developed by 1621, and many merchants saw the company’s monopoly as an encroachment of their own established commercial connections.12 So strong was the internal Dutch opposition against any form of trade restrictions with the Portuguese inhabitants of Pernambuco that the WIC was forced to give up its trading monopoly with Dutch Brazil in 1638.13 Inspired with the ideals and zeal of the Eighty Years War, the West India Company opened an all out assault on the Iberian colonies.14 At first this Dutch Calvinistic crusade against the Spanish 11 “There is not one of you who does not openly proclaim that every man is entitled to manage and dispose of his own property; there is not one of you who does not insist that all citizens have equal and indiscriminate right to use rivers and public places; not one of you who does not defend with all his might the freedom of travel and trade.” Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas or the right which belongs to the Dutch to take part in the East Indian Trade Ralph van Deman Magoffin transl. (New York, 1972), p. 3. 12 Henk den Heijer, De Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen, 1994), pp. 25, 26 and 45. 13 Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC 4; “Stukken betreffende den vrijen handel op Brazilië,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht [KHG] 5th serie, vol. 5 (1869), pp. 191–192. “Dat alsulcx de voors. Portugesen, die inde geconquesteerden plaetsen noch overich ende gebleven waaren, bij de Comp. niet meerder en mochten worden beswaert als de te voorens beswaert waren geweeste, ende mitsdien den handel, die sij op sConincx landen hadden gedreven, ten minsten op deser sijts landen haer most sijn ende blijven gepermitteert.” 14 Engel Sluiter, “Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585–1641,” Pacific Historical Review 11:1 (1941), pp. 29–41: Pieter Emmer, “The First Global

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Catholic “infidels” proved extremely lucrative. The capture of the Spanish silver fleet at Cuba in 1628 was celebrated in song and legend. The Piet Heyn hymn, an equivalent to “Rule Britannia,” is still heard today when the Dutch national football team is winning a match, and never more so than against its former Iberian adversary.15 Dutch “sea heroes” fought the “despotic” Spaniards who tyrannized over the American populations, in just the same way as they had fought for the Netherlands against the Duke of Alva’s repression and torture. Theodor de Bry’s graphic illustrations of Bartolomé de las Casas’ Destruction of the Indies made it all too obvious for Northern Europeans that the liberators of Hispanic occupation in the Americans would be welcomed by its suffering native populations.16 Booklets such as the Mirror of Spanish Tyranny endorsed by the leadership of both the WIC and VOC made it very clear what people were fighting for: At first have the Spanish demonstrated their bloodthirsty character to the innocent Indians, who were heathens, and to whom they came in large numbers to instruct them in the true knowledge of religion, but subsequently they treated them with robbery and murders so that few footsteps of the former inhabitants can still be encountered. They dealt the same way with the Netherlands.17

Willem Usselincx (1567–1647), the spiritual founder of the WIC, also reflected the company’s belief in its moral superiority.18 Usselincx

War: The Dutch versus Iberia in Asia, Africa and the New World, 1590–1609,” Journal of Portuguese History 1 (2003) 1: 1–14. 15 Arne Zuidhoek, De West-Indische Compagnie en Piet Hein (Baarn: Uitgeverij de Prom, 1999), pp. 123–137. 16 Michael Alexander ed., Discovering the New World Based on the Works of Theodore de Bry (New York, 1974), pp. 130–145; Eddy Stols, “Convivências e conivências luso-flamengas na rota do açúcar brasileiro,” Ler Historia 32 (1997), p. 136. For a good overview of Dutch imagery of the New World see: Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas, 1600–1800. A narrative history with the catalogue of an exhibition of rare prints, maps and illustrated books from the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI, 1997). Benjamin Smidt demonstrated that the idea of Spanish tyranny predated De las Casas’ account, see his Innocence Abroad, pp. 98–99. 17 “Eerstelijck hebben de Spaenjiaerden haer bloet-dorstighen aert ghetoont aen de onnosel Indianen/die heydenen waren/to de welcke sy met groote macht ghekomen zijn om haer te onderwijsen in de ware kennisse Godes: Maer sy hebbense alsoo ghetracteert met ongehehoorde rosmenten en moordenen/dater heden nau voetstappen werden ghevonden van de voorgaende Inwoonders. Alsoo hebben sy oock ghehandelt met de Nederlanden.” Evert Kloppenburg, De Spiegel der Spaense Tyrannye Geschiet in Nederlant vol. 2 (Amsterdam, 1638), p. 1. See Smidt’s discussion of this in: Innocence Abroad, p. 189. 18 Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC, pp. 21–26.

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was a Calvinist merchant with a mission.19 Axiomatic to Usselincx was the expectation that the indigenous population would embrace WIC authority because the Spaniards had so mistreated them.20 Moreover, he further assumed that Spanish and Portuguese Creole settlers would rebel against their Iberian rulers to escape the high taxes they imposed. Finally, the colony would be a commercial success because the settlers neighbouring Iberian colonies would want to trade with the WIC settlements: many products could be provided much more cheaply by the company than products originating from Spain and Portugal. In Usselincx’s vision northern European farmer and artisan families would migrate to Brazil where they would experience more efficient and better government. He was so confident in the European settlers’ productivity that he opposed the use of enslaved Africans as the colony’s labour force on economic grounds: As a person from these lands will do the work of three blacks, who cost a lot of money; and as one gets unwilling persons, they give themselves up, or they starve themselves to death to make their masters regret, since they know of no other way to revenge their masters.21

Although Usselincx’s ideas were not completely shared by the WIC directors, his thinking did lay the foundation for the company’s rule in North East Brazil. Nevertheless, rather than creating a homogeneous society of white Protestant families that Usselincx had envisioned, the WIC chose instead to conquer the Portuguese colony in Pernambuco with a sugar economy ready to be exploited.22 Even so, the company’s policy combined conquest by force together with

19 Willem Usselincx, Vertoogh, hoe nootwendich, nut ende profijtelick het sy voor de Vereenigde Nederlanden te behouden de vryheit van te handelen op West-Indien, inden vrede metten coninck van Spaignen (1608). 20 In 1645, Usselincx strongly opposed the bad treatment of Native populations by both the WIC and VOC; Usselincx envisioned that Natives could be civilized and made productive as artisans. Catharina Ligtenberg, Willem Usselinx (Utrecht, 1914), pp. 217, 63. 21 “Een man van desen lande sal meer wercks aflegghen als dry Swerten/die groot gelt costen; ende als sy eenigen onwillige cruyghen/so vergeven sy haer selven oft sterven van honger om haer Meesters spijt te doen/want weten anders geenne middel om haer te wreken.” Usselincx, Vertoogh w.p. Usselincx was not opposed to the usage of paid African workers: Ligtenberg, Willem Usselinx, p. 63. 22 José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira. Mestre-de-Campo do Terço de Infantaria de Pernambuco (2nd ed.; Lisbon, Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2000), p. 90; Usselincx had Guyana in his mind: Ligtenberg, Willem Usselinx, p. 59.

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Usselincx’s ideal of a benevolent colony. Company policy would make it a colony founded on intra-ethnic coalitions and economic progress. It proved a policy headed for failure.

II Opposition to the company’s plan of attack came from both the Republic and the Americas. The Low Countries had long established connections with Brazil and they had invested heavily in the sugar economy.23 Those private traders, engaged in the Iberian sugar commerce, did not appreciate a renewal of the struggle against SpainPortugal in 1621 after a twelve-year truce, and increasingly challenged the idea that WIC occupation of the sugar zones would be profitable. Commercial interests were also fragmented by religious beliefs (the Arminian Remonstrants versus the Calvinist Counter-Remonstrants) as well political affiliations (stadhouder and the House of Orange versus the republican raadspensionaris). Unlike the independent merchants, the WIC attracted Orangist backing as well as significant Calvinist support from the Dutch hinterlands. The private traders were especially powerful in the cities of the northern part of Holland including Amsterdam, and they were strong enough to challenge any financial contributions by the States General and the States of Holland to the company.24 For these reasons, the WIC’s success depended on quick returns from the sugar zones at as low a cost as possible.

23 Eddy Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders of de Handelsbetrekkingen der Zuiderlijke Nederlanden met het Iberische Wereld 1598–1648 (Brussels, 1971) 1:102–106. 24 W.J. van Hoboken, “The Dutch West India Company; the Political Background of its Rise and Decline,” in: J.S. Bromley and E. Kossmann ed., Britain and the Netherlands (London, 1960), pp. 46, 54–55. The Remonstranten were the followers of the more liberal Armenius, who believed that by choosing the correct belief their followers could go to heaven. This was opposed by the more stricter Counter Remonstranten, the followers of Gomarus, who believed that God had given the people the right belief as a consequence of their predestined place in heaven. This led to the Synod of Dordrecht (1618) where the Counter Remonstranten prevailed, the subsequent out casting of the Remonstranten from the Dutch Reformed Church, and finally in 1619 the execution of Oldenbarneveldt, the speaker of the States of Holland, who supported a more open church where Remonstranten should be admitted. The stadhouder was formally the steward of the Spanish king. Once the monarchy had been abjured, he became the advisor to the Estates of the different provinces and the commander in field of the Estates General’s army. Most of the provinces elected members of the House of Orange to this position. The stadhouder

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Contrary to all expectations, the WIC did not receive much cooperation from the local inhabitants in their conquest of Brazil’s sugar areas. A brief conquest of Salvador (Bahia) in 1624 met with failure after the local Portuguese inhabitants encircled the city, and a combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet relieved the capital of Brazil a year later. In 1630 the company’s army and navy conquered coastal Pernambuco, but were unable to break the stranglehold of the Brazilian forces until two years later when the aid of native forces led by Dom Felipe Camarão finally achieved victory. The company burned Olinda, the old capital of the planter elites, the so-called Lords of the Sugar Mills, and settled in the established waterfront city of Recife. As a result, Olinda became the symbol of the struggle between the noble Luso-Brazilian landowners in exile against the heretic company of Calvinist traders.25 Only in 1635 were large parts of the countryside secured, while fighting persisted until 1641.26 During the initial armed struggle (1630–1641) both the company and the Luso-Brazilian troops had to create loyalty among their forces. Because the company was known for low wages, very few of the Republic’s inhabitants were eager to leave their relatively prosperous cities. Under these circumstances the WIC relied heavily on non-Dutch forces from all parts of Europe. These fortune seekers did not have any allegiance to the Republic, to their Dutch hometown, or even to the Calvinist religion. Instead, they came to Brazil simply to improve their own material conditions. On encountering disappointment, they were prone to change their allegiance. An incident can illustrate the precarious position of the WIC. At one point, French Catholic soldiers deserted and threatened to hand the city of Recife over to the Portuguese when an enemy fleet appeared off the coast.27 Newly arrived soldiers often soon died; and it took

was challenged by the raadspensionaris, the president of the States of Holland, the most important province. This led to several major conflicts. The first time stadhouder Johan Maurits put his opponent the raadspensionaris Johan van Oldebarneveldt to trial and the latter was executed in 1619. In 1650 stadhouder William II challenged the city of Amsterdam which he unsuccessfully tried to occupy. Shortly thereafter William died, starting the first stadhouderless period. His son, stadhouder William III later married Mary. 25 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, p. 64. 26 Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, pp. 34–35, 68–69. 27 Letter Vincent Joachim Soler to André Rivet, April 2, 1639 in: B.N. Teensma ed., Dutch-Brazil. Vincent Joachim Soler’s Seventeen Letters (Rio de Janeiro, 1999), p. 58. Changing allegiance was not uncommon for Scottish soldiers, partly for religious

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several years for settlers and soldiers alike in Pernambuco to become acclimatized. Yet, only through the retention of the veteran forces could the company maintain its position on the Brazilian coast.28 The company’s fortunes only started to change when its military was strong enough to disrupt the opposing armies and their economic resources. Although many foreign soldiers participated on the Luso-Brazilian side, they had the advantage of a home base. Mathias de Albuquerque, the leader and donatory “owner” of the captaincy, led the forces, and he was able to launch guerrilla warfare from the interior. Nevertheless, personal interest was greatly important, and Albuquerque’s warfare meant the destruction of many Luso-Brazilian soldiers’ own properties. Luso-Brazilian desertion increased once the company’s navy was able to cut off all supplies from the sea, and the WIC army took the villages with the soldiers’ families.29 The threat of native (Tapuya) assaults on their wives and children demanded a close personal protection and peace. About half of the sugar millowners left after the final defeat of the Luso-Brazilian troops in the Varzea (1635). Their main guerrilla activity comprised punitive raids to destroy sugar cane fields and sugar mills. These raids were not especially directed against the company, but rather towards Northern European settlers who bought up some of their mills. According to Usselincx’s vision, the first natural allies of a Dutch colonization project would be native peoples rather than the Portuguese inhabitants. Company explorers started to build coalitions even before the occupation of Recife. According to Johannes de Laet (1581–1649), a Dutch chronicler of the WIC’s struggles in Brazil, six Potiguaras in Paraíba volunteered to be transported to the Republic.30 These

reasons, but mostly for the circumstances of war. See for instance: Robert L. Frost, “Scottish Soldiers, Poland-Lithuania and the Thirty Years’ War,” in: Steve Murdoch ed., Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 199–211. Matthew Glozier argues that Scottish allegiance in Dutch service was quite high, reasons for this were the history of a Anglo-Scottish regiment in the Dutch army, the good and regular payment of the soldiers and the family ties between Scottish soldiers and Dutch women. “Scots in the French and Dutch Armies during the Thirty Years’ War,” in: Murdoch ed., Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War, pp. 127–137. 28 Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, pp. 68–69. 29 “Onderschepte brieven geschreven uit Brazilië naar Spanje, 1637,” KHG 5th serie, vol. 5 (1869), pp. 171, 174, 176, 184. 30 Frans L. Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998), p. 169; Johns Hemming, Red Gold. The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500 –1760 (Cambridge MA, 1978), p. 288. For the most up-to-date

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displaced Brazilian natives were instructed in the Dutch reformed faith, in order that they might serve as translators and intermediaries between the company authorities and their nation. Following the company’s successful conquest of Recife several Potiguaras also built coalitions between their nation and the “liberating” Dutch forces.31 The native populations of Brazil were one of the prime targets of the Calvinistic missionary efforts. By and large, the native populations were distinguished between the more ferocious and difficult to convert Tapuyas and the more easily persuaded Tupis.32 Ernst van den Boogaart dubbed the relationship between the company and the Tapuya as “infernal allies,” as Dutch missionaries and administrators came to see this native Brazilian population as irredeemably uncivilized.33 While happy to recruit the Tapuyas as warriors, the company was upset by their tendency to kill any Luso-Brazilian settlers that they encountered.34 For instance De Laet related such an incident in 1634 when the Tapuyas “[L]aid an ambush and rose unexpectedly knocking dead one hundred sixty persons among whom were Portuguese and Amerindians.”35 Although there were only a limited missionary efforts aimed at the Tapuyas, the company still sought to retain their alliance at all costs.36 interpretation, see the recently defended dissertation: Marcus P. Meuwese, “‘For the Peace and Well-being of the Country’: Intercultural Mediators and Dutch-Indian Relations in New Netherland and Dutch Brazil, 1600–1664” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2003): see also his “Dutch Calvinism and Native Americans. A comparative study of the motivations for Protestant Conversion among the Tupis in Northeastern Brazil (1630–1654) and the Mohawks in Central New York (1690–1710)” in J. Muldoon ed., The Spiritual Conquest of the Americas (Gainsville, FL 2004), p. 128. 31 Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, p. 169. 32 Ernst van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies. The Dutch West India Company and the Tarairiu, 1631–1654,” in: Ernst van den Boogaart et al. eds., Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. Essays on the occasion of the tercentenary of his death (The Hague, 1979), p. 521. 33 Van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies,” p. 538. 34 Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira 93; Joan Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem Marítima e Terrestre ao Brasil, Moacir N. Vasconcelos transl., José Honório Rodrigues ed., (1st ed. 1682; São Paulo, 1942) 61. The Portuguese settlers argued that the company’s army just used these troops to extort money and valuables from them. Frei Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno, e Triumfo da Liberdade (1st ed. 1648; Belo Horizonte, 1987) 1: 67. 35 Joannes de Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael van de Verrichtingen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie in Dertien Boeken S.P. L’Honoré Naber ed., (1st ed. 1644; The Hague, 1931) 1:46. “[L]eyden de Wilde in embuscade, ende onversien oprijsende, sloegen sij hondert ende tsestich man soo Portugesen als Brasilianen.” 36 For missionary efforts on the Tapuya see: Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, pp. 207–208; on freedom of religion see: Ibid., pp. 200–201.

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With the Tupis, on the other hand, missionaries had a captive audience. The Luso-Brazilian church had already brought these Brazilian natives under their administration in villages (aldeias) where they could be instructed in the Catholic faith. The task for the Calvinist predikanten (ministers) was to show that their version of Christianity was even truer, a task at which they worked quite diligently. Dutch theologians even translated a catechism into Tupi.37 The company envisioned that the conversion of the Tupi to Calvinism would create allegiance to their administration. Some Tupi warriors did indeed fight on the company’s side, but it was not clear if conversion was the reason. An extremely powerful card was the company’s early resolution to free all enslaved natives and to prohibit any future bondage of Tupis and Tapuyas.38 However, both conversion attempts and abolition had its drawbacks. The Tupi were bound to revolt when the predikanten decided to separate children from their families to educate them outside their parents’ supervision.39 Similarly, when slavery was allowed for captured natives who fought on the Luso-Brazilian side, the company lost some leverage with the Tupi.40 This was especially the case in Maranhão, where company authorities condoned enslavement of the native peoples. Consequently, the native population sided with the Luso-Brazilians in the conflict in this region, and they constituted the mainstay of the rebellious army that made the territory independent from company rule in 1643.41 The company did earn loyalty from Tupi and Tapuya peoples in some regions, and they fought on the company’s side even in far away places such as Angola. However it is doubtful whether this can simply be related to conversion to Calvinism.42 Loyalty in some cases was clearly genuine and would continue even after the company was expelled from Brazil.43 Key to this support, however, seemed to be the attitude of the company towards enslave-

37

Ibid., pp. 168–217; Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, p. 136. Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 234, 241–243. 39 Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, p. 200. 40 Ibid., pp. 173–174; Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 242–243. 41 Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, p. 248; Hemming, Red Gold, p. 293. 42 Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola 1602–1686 (London, 1952), p. 240. 43 Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, p. 213; one of the few exceptions was a rebellion in Ceará, see: Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, pp. 64–65. 38

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ment and its ability to protect the indigenous peoples from LusoBrazilian violence.44 Moreover, the company did use typical Dutch ways to gain support from the native peoples. For example, a States or a meeting among the native peoples was organized in early 1645.45 To call this meeting democratic might overstate the case, but it was the company’s attempt to represent the interests of the different native villages. The Tupi were able to bring several issues for redress to the company authorities—all of which were conceded. The very first item on the agenda was a complaint that the anti-slavery laws needed to be enforced. A more striking issue was that the demand for teachers and preachers that had been promised by the company directive in the Republic. All other agenda items had to do with elections and administration of the native villages, matters seemingly concerned with the company’s suzerainty. In practice, the native troops were essential to both the company and the Luso-Brazilian forces. Mestizo and native leaders such as Calabar and Potí were crucial to the company’s conquest of Pernambuco and the maintenance of its power. Yet Camarão’s forces were also essential to the success of the moradores’ (Luso-Brazilian settlers’) revolt in 1645. In light of this circumstance, it is hard to argue that all native peoples chose the company’s side because they were more humane. Rather, they chose the company’s side in reaction to Portuguese massacres of native populations, and changed sides when they saw that the company was no longer able to protect them.46 Sometimes religious differences influenced native loyalties. For example, Dom Felipe Camarão and his kinsmen Pieter Potí tried to persuade each other by correspondence to change sides in the conflict, arguing for the superiority of his form of Christianity.47 After the war, the Jesuit Antônio Vieira noted that Protestant “heretic” natives still survived in the back lands of the North East.48 Obviously, some native peoples saw religion as an expression of their alliance with one side or the other. 44

Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, p. 62. Pedro Souto Maior, “Uma Assembléa de Indios em Pernambuco no Anno de 1645,” Revista do Instituto Archeológico e Geográphico Pernambucano [RIAGP ] 18/79 (1910), pp. 61–77; Hemming, Red Gold, pp. 294–295. 46 Hemming, Red Gold, pp. 302–308. 47 Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, pp. 204–207. 48 Ibid., pp. 215–216. 45

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For the company it was even more important to cultivate allegiance from the Luso-Brazilian settlers.49 Usselincx had envisioned that their loyalty could be achieved through commerce, since the WIC could provide products more cheaply to the Luso-Brazilians than did Hispanic traders. Taxes on the moradores would also be lower. In Usselincx’s vision, economic prosperity would be created by means of a lively trade with the company. Further, in Usselincx’s imagined colony the WIC settlers and the moradores would live in separate communities. The latter would be naturally inclined to establish commercial relations with the former because of the economic advantage that would result. The company, in contrast, envisioned that these flourishing commercial relationships between the Portuguese settlers and the WIC colonists could be achieved through force. Through complete domination of the sugar trade, Luso-Brazilians would have no other choice than deal with the WIC, and the moradores would necessarily realize that their personal interest lay in promoting the company’s welfare. A central feature of the attempt to encourage the moradores to come over to the company’s side was the WIC policy to guarantee the Catholic inhabitants of Brazil freedom of religion and conscience. Contrary to Usselinx’s expectations, a substantial portion of the colonists were not Protestants from Northern Europe, but Sephardic Jews who had previously sought refuge in the Republic after their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula.50 The Sephardim saw a great opportunity in Brazil. They had been highly involved with the Brazil trade, and some had already established personal and commercial relationships with converso inhabitants ( Jews converted to Catholicism)

49

Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 273–274. Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, pp. 280–283, explains the difficulties of making estimations of the number of Jewish inhabitants. He argues that their numbers have been overstated, but that they were still an essential part of Recife’s economy. Gonsalves de Mello argues that 1,350 persons of Jewish descent would be larger than the Jewish population in Amsterdam. For 1649 he estimates their number at about 350 persons, but it was higher before the insurrection. Gonsalves de Mello thus has a lower estimate than Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960), p. 130. For the Jewish population of Amsterdam see: Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans. The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Portland OR, 2000), pp. 90–92. 50

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in Pernambuco.51 The key to the Sephardic success was their language skills; since many could communicate in both Portuguese and Dutch they were excellent mediators between the WIC and the moradores.52 Even though many might have preferred to become sugar millowners or merchants, many Sephardim who lived in Recife used their position to become active in finance, of which money lending and contract farming were two important specializations.53 With their religious connections and experience as long distance traders, finance became a major option for the Jews. Indeed, creditors were in a highly strategic position given the volatility of Dutch Brazil, on the one hand, and the lack of lending institutions that existed in Portuguese Brazil, on the other. Unfortunately, all sides also mistrusted the Sephardim. Johan Maurits believed that the Sephardim would switch their allegiance if the moradores promised them freedom of religion.54 The moradores for their part were fiercely hostile to open Jewish worship in Recife, and the Portuguese inhabitants blamed their Sephardic counterparts for their high debts. Due to high risk, interest rates tended to be quite substantial in Recife, and the Sephardim were singled out for charging too much. In the end, despite Maurits’ misgivings, the Sephardim proved to be the single most loyal population group to the WIC.55 The company’s mission became to “convert” and acculturate the main three groups of inhabitants—Northern European Protestants, Luso-Brazilian Catholics, and Sephardic Jews—to “Dutchness.”56 If anyone was to be successful, it had to be Dutch administrators. Many different religious denominations were tolerated in the Republic,

51

Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, pp. 21–23, 26. Gonsalves de Mello, (Gente da Nação, p. 245) shows that not all Sephardim actually spoke Dutch. 53 Ibid., p. 271. 54 Relation of Johan Carl Folner, private secretary of Johan Maurits, read to the States General on July 17, 1642, cited in: Fernando da Cruz Gouvêa, Maurício de Nassau e o Brasil Holandês. Correspondência com os Estados Gerais (Recife, 1998), p. 235. 55 Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, pp. 296–299. Especially when the insurrection plans became known to the Jewish population, they informed the council in Recife. Moreover, several Jews were immediately executed when captured by the moradores. 56 I am using the concepts elaborated by James Axtell, The Invasion Within. The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford, 1985), p. 3. “[P]erhaps most dangerous were the missionaries of all persuasions who tried to remake the natives in the image of European countrymen, inside and out, believing that adherence to the national religion would entail religious adherence to the nation.” 52

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where Sephardic Jews, Catholics, and a great many different Protestant denominations lived together in relative harmony. The predominance of the official Dutch Reformed Church in the Republic was unquestioned; likewise their normally decisive political influence. This power remained undiminished even though many Dutch soldiers and settlers were not overtly religious.57 Yet, freedom of religion had its limitations in both the Republic and Dutch Brazil. Non-Dutch Reformed inhabitants had to profess their religion without causing a “public scandal,” which meant in practice: not too openly. As Wim Klooster argued, “Tolerance was never a matter of policy, neither at home or in America. It was a result of discussions between a colony’s political and religious authorities, who were alive to the local context.”58 The ministers were not pleased by the company’s toleration of the Catholic religion, and they were likely to protest if there were any public manifestations of the enemy’s services.59 As a result, Catholic church services were encouraged to be held in private houses, and priests were viewed with suspicion as possibly inciting the LusoBrazilian population to rebellion.60 On the other hand, both priests and ministers were scandalized that Sephardic Jews were allowed to have their own synagogue in Recife.61 Partial tolerance was not enough for the Luso-Brazilian Catholics. The company had confiscated church lands and forbade priests to be appointed from Salvador (Brazil); they could only come from Europe. Local priests, the company feared, would surely stir up the moradores against them. The policy produced a shortage of priests, making it difficult for Catholics to receive the sacraments. No wonder

57 Soler wrote to Rivet about this issue on July 16, 1636: “What we have here is the scum of Holland, Zeeland etc., people who do not know what civility and honour is and, even less so, fear the Lord.” Teensma ed., Dutch-Brazil, p. 23. 58 Wim Klooster, “Other Netherlands beyond the Sea. Dutch America between Metropolitan Control and Divergence, 1600–1795,” in: Christine Daniels and Micheal V. Kennedy eds., Negotiated Empires. Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York, 2002), p. 184, Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, p. 257. So important was the religious issue that at the capitulation of the Dutch fortress in Serinhaem, the Dutch negotiated freedom of religion and freedom of trade for themselves. Nieuhoff, p. 181. 59 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, p. 284. 60 Ibid., p. 287; Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira, p. 94; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 56–58. 61 Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, p. 258.

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the Catholic faith increasingly became the tie between the different private interests of the Luso-Brazilian inhabitants inside and outside company territory. The allegiance of the Luso-Brazilian inhabitants became even more problematic after the restoration of the Portuguese king in 1640. For sixty years Spain and Portugal had been a double monarchy ruled from Spain and with a Portuguese viceroy. Even the company authorities in Recife openly celebrated the restoration of the Portuguese king John IV of Braganca. Almost immediately peace negotiations between the Republic and Portugal started, culminating in with a ten-year truce in 1641. During the negotiations the Portuguese ambassador demanded restoration of all former Portuguese colonies, but the States General refused. The company’s governor, Johan Maurits, took the opportunity to conquer the Portuguese colonies on the Angolan coast. When the captured Portuguese colonists arrived in Recife, it became obvious to the moradores that the WIC was not acting in good faith to their king. Whereas a newly resurgent national identity accentuated the differences between Portuguese and non-Portuguese inhabitants of Dutch Brazil, local allegiance remained equally important to the moradores. As Usselincx had envisioned, the Creole population viewed themselves as masters of the territory through the toil of a century of settlement and leadership as the almost noble Lords of the Sugar Mills (senhores do engenho). The acceptance of the company’s administration depended not only on military and economic issues, but also on the company’s accommodation of deeply ingrained Luso-Brazilian values. The senhores do engenho were central to the governance of Brazil and crucial to the viability of the Dutch colony. The ownership of sugar mills enhanced one’s status and formed the true backbone of the colony. As Stuart Schwartz asserts, “The title of senhor do engenho in Brazil was equivalent to a title among the Portuguese nobility because, as one observer put it, the senhor was “served, obeyed, and respected.’”62 Since sugar was the main product of Pernambuco, the company sought to run as many sugar mills as soon as possible. However after

62 Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Landed Elite,” in: Louisa S. Hoberman and Susan M. Socolow, The Countryside in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 1996), p. 116.

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the company’s victory, almost half of the senhores do engenho had fled and they were unwilling to return.63 Thus the WIC auctioned off those mills to anyone willing to buy.64 Luso-Brazilians bought some of the sugar mills; while retired company military officials, Northern European settlers and some Sephardic Jews bought others.65 Very quickly, however, Luso-Brazilians regained most of the sugar mills. The inexperience of the company settlers worked against them. In addition, their mills were more likely to be raided by Luso-Brazilian guerrilla forces organized by moradores who had fled company territories.66 Moreover, this “ennobled” profession was not very lucrative, and so to be a senhor do engenho was only important to those inhabitants to whom this occupation brought special personal status—the moradores in the countryside.67 Most of the company’s settlers found their professions in the urban areas, especially in Recife.68 In practice, the company became dependent on the production capacity of the vanquished people. One positive side effect was that the new owners of the sugar mills had a personal stake in allying themselves with the new regime as they would be facing challenges to their ownership should the territory be returned to Portugal. On the negative side were the harsh economic circumstances, which encouraged these new Luso-Brazilians millowners to see themselves as noble fighters against heretic Protestant and Jewish merchants and usurpers.69

IV The badly needed legitimation of the company’s status came with the arrival of the princely governor, Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-

63

Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, pp. 384–385. Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, p. 135. 65 Ibid., p. 152. 66 Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, p. 144, Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, pp. 386–387. 67 Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society. Bahia 1550–1835 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 228–229. 68 Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira, p. 114. 69 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, p. 286; New Christians and Jews were held responsible for the fall of Salvador in 1624, and collaboration with the regime in Dutch Brazil. Major inquisitorial investigations took place in 1625 after the recapture of Salvador, and later in 1646 after the start of the rebellion of the moradores in the North East. For details see: Anita Novinsky, Cristãos Novos na Bahia: a Inquisição (2nd ed.; São Paulo, 1992), pp. 122–140. 64

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Siegen (1637–1644). Apart from his title, Maurits derived most of his personal prestige from his membership in the Orange family of the stadhouders.70 In addition, Maurits also personified many of the ideals of the Republic by patronizing the arts and sciences in a way never seen in Brazil before—and which would not be repeated until the nineteenth century. Patronizing the arts and sciences was viewed as a princely affair. Maurits therefore has been credited with creating the first botanical garden, the first observatory and the first modern hospitals in the Americas.71 Whether the count actually succeeded in gaining the local inhabitants’ respect remains unclear. In the more positive Dutch version, Maurits was open to receive his Luso-Brazilian, Amerindian, Sephardic, and Northern European subjects in his palaces where they could expect a princely hospitality and a willing ear to their personal problems. Accordingly, his presence is portrayed as bringing much needed respect for the company’s regime.72 However, in the more negative Luso-Brazilian version, Maurits’ main purpose was simple self-enrichment, and he was only able to obtain respect from those local inhabitants to whom he bestowed favours.73 Eventually, complaints about the company’s administration and the need for peaceful sugar production led to a change in the governmental structure. In 1640, Maurits called together a States or meeting of the elite moradores in which he addressed their personal interests.74 He reorganized the municipal councils (câmaras) by giving

70 For references to the link of Maurits’ royal blood, prestige and decisions see: Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:88, 92–94, and 99. 71 David Freedberg, “Ciência, Comércio e Arte,” in: Paulo Herkenhoff ed., O Brasil e os Holandeses (Rio de Janeiro, 1999), pp. 192–217. 72 Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira 87. Soler wrote to Rivet “[ T ]he Portuguese may undertake some action like the one in Maranhão. [they had revolted] I dare say that were it not for the presence of His Excellency, [ Johan Maurits] they probably would already have done so.” 73 Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:195. Calado does acknowledge that Portuguese inhabitants followed Johan Maurits upon departure, but he tries to diminish this by stating that the moradores did this because they received some favors from him. According Calado the count had tears in his eyes, because he had to leave the country that washed his hands with gold. Later Calado cited a letter from João Fernandes Vieira stating that Johan Maurits took with his most officers and the best people, as they did not have anything left to plunder. With Maurits’ departure, the company was left with too few troops for its defense (Ibid., p. 232). 74 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, p. 143. As Evaldo Cabral de Mello points out quite justly, this meeting could not be called “democratic” and not formally a

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them some juridical powers based on their counterparts in the Republic. Moradores became aldermen and they had even a majority on the council of Mauritius, which replaced the Olinda council. The council’s reorganization, however, did not serve all inhabitants’ interests equally. The senhores do engenho, for instance, felt excluded from the governmental structure, and in practice judicial control remained firmly in the company’s hands.75 Aldermen were appointed rather than elected, and Maurits did not always appoint moradores who had the support of their own community. Moreover, because they did not live in the cities, the Luso-Brazilian aldermen were notoriously absent from meetings. In other cases company settlers with whom they had little connection and less leverage often judged the moradores.76 Juridical expenditure skyrocketed and the administration of the law was bedevilled by corruption and extortion.77 In fact, in the rebellion manifesto of the “war of divine liberty,” corruption and extortion would be one of the main complaints of the Luso-Brazilians.78 Corruption of the colonial administration was even acknowledged by Maurits himself. Still, it was unlikely that the WIC was more corrupt than the Portuguese administration of Brazil.79 What seems more important is that the moradores felt alienated because they could exercise little personal influence over the judicial and administrative processes. The Count understood that the moradores needed to have private access to power for them to collaborate. Some Luso-Brazilians, such as Gaspar Dias Ferreira, actively sought and found this access. Ferreira was promptly rewarded for his efforts in confiscating Benedictine, Carmelite and Franciscan sugar mills with cheap access to these former church lands.80 He also became an alderman of the newly cremeeting of the clergy, nobility and citizens, since the count selected all the participants (Um Imenso Portugal. História e Histiografia (São Paulo, 2002), p. 153). 75 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 159–160, 275. 76 Ibid., p. 138; Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:116–117. For an intriguing comparison between the company’s Municipal Councils and those of Colonial Brazil see: Neme, Fórmulas, pp. 219–233. 77 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, p. 279; Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:212–214. 78 Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:110–111; Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira, p. 92. 79 “Afscheidsrede van Johan Maurits in Brazilië,” in: Zo Wijd de Wereld Strekt. Tentoonstelling naar aanleiding van de 300e sterfdag van Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen op 20 December 1979 (The Hague, 1979), pp. 263–265; Artichofsky pointed this problem out in his memorandum dated March 31, 1637, before leaving Brazil KHG (1869) 5:5, pp. 320–321. 80 Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, pp. 388–389; Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:102–105.

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ated city of Mauritius. Indeed, Ferreira was so close to the count that he followed him to the Netherlands in 1644, where he became a Dutch citizen, only to be expelled when authorities learned that he was corresponding with the Portuguese king.81 João Fernandes Vieira, the acknowledged leader of the moradores’ revolt, also started off as a collaborator with the company’s regime.82 He was also a close advisor to the count, for which he was rewarded with major company loans and an alderman’s seat. Vieira was in a curious position: he had bought up several of the sugar mills that were abandoned by their former Luso-Brazilian owners at the time of the company’s attack. The Pernambucan historian Evaldo Cabral de Mello has pointed out that it was not in Vieira’s personal interest to rebel.83 In the case of a restoration of the Portuguese regime, he would have to face the claims of the former owners of their sugar mills. Nevertheless, as a rebel leader his position was strengthened by the support of the Portuguese authorities. Indeed, Vieira enjoyed the full support of the crown during and after the revolt, notwithstanding the claim of some moradores that he only joined the revolt for financial reasons. At the time of the rebellion, both senhores do engenho and other moradores defaulted on the interest of their heavy debt to the company and to financiers in Recife. These debts could not easily be paid back because of the devastation of war, low sugar prices, and disappointing harvests.84 The moradores made the Sephardic traders their scapegoats as they had allegedly put them into debt with their high interest rates. The Sephardim were indeed able to take advantage of their position as both Dutch and Portuguese speakers, but many were heavily in debt themselves.85 The Jewish population was not alone in lending money to the moradores, and high interest especially occurred when the moradores thought that a Spanish fleet would

81

Cabral de Mello, Um Imenso Portugal, p. 230. Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:105–108. 83 The debt amounted to ƒ4.642.196, about 2/3 of the WIC’s original subscription capital (Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada, pp. 403–404). Vieira denied this in a letter of September 11, 1646 to some merchants in Dutch Brazil, Vieira stated that it was the violence towards the land’s inhabitants that drove them to the revolt (Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, pp. 264–266). 84 Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira, pp. 97–112, 131; Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, p. 81, Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 1:1:206. 85 Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação, p. 270; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, p. 134. 82

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reconquer Recife.86 The senhores do engenho commonly were in debt throughout Portuguese America, and although this was a closely homogeneous group, they sometimes managed to solve their economic difficulties by uniting with merchant families through marriage.87 In Dutch Brazil the economic circumstances were even more difficult, and the company understood the potentially disastrous situation. The company’s governors decided to take over the Lords of the Sugar Mills’ debts, which spared many from imprisonment.88 And yet, despite this policy, the debts continued to be high and imprisonments were about to occur on a massive scale. The company itself was heavily in debt for 14 million guilders, and it had to take some strong measures.89 One was to recall the spendthrift Count, another was to reduce significantly the number of soldiers on the payroll, and a third was to collect company debts. With cash flow problems the company was unable to pay its employees on time, causing soldiers and officers to extort money and supplies from the local inhabitants.90 When it became clear that the company would not gain financially from its Brazilian colony, the WIC had to proceed to the seventeenth-century equivalent of “neoliberal” policies to improve its financial situation. Such policies destroyed any hope for reconciliation between the moradores and the company. Even Dutch officers who had made the crossover and married Luso-Brazilian women joined in the moradores’ rebellion against their former employer, as illustrated by the situation of Gaspar van der

86 Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira, p. 113; Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, p. 80. 87 Rae Jean dell Flory, “Bahian Society in the Mid-Colonial Period: the Sugar Planters, Tobacco Growers, Merchants, and Artisans of Salvador and the Reconcavo, 1680–1725,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1978), pp. 98–109. 88 Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 192–193; Nieuhof, Memorável Viagem, p. 83. 89 Johan Maurits complaints about bad provisions and pay of the company dated back from the beginning of his administration, it worsened over time. See for instance: Letter Johan Maurits to Board WIC, October 6, 1638, RIAGP (1902) 10:43–49. By 1649 company debts had increased to 36 million guilders. Den Heijer Geschiedenis van de WIC, p. 102. 90 See for instance: Letter Municipal Council Parahyba to Board of WIC, June 23, 1644 in: RIAGP 34 (December 1887) 66–69. Even in 1637 Coronel Artichofsky complained soldier’s salaries needed to be double to be a living wage (“Missive van den Kolonnel Artichofsky aan Graaf Maurtis en den Hoogen Raad in Brazilië” July 24, 1637, KHG (1869) 5th series, vol. 5, p. 229).

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Ley.91 As a retired officer in the company Gaspar van der Ley bought several sugar mills and married locally.92 Like many senhores do engenho he was heavily in debt, and by the time of the rebellion he owed the company 133,468 guilders, an amount he had to start to pay back on 1 August 1645. Five days later he switched sides. He had too much to win and too little too lose to remain on the company’s side. Van der Ley’s story was not much different from other sugar millowners. Exactly those veterans who had defeated the moradores’ armies in the 1630s turned against their own employer in 1645. Luso-Brazilian moradores were able to unite in their private interests to overthrow the company’s rule. The proclamation of “Divine Liberty” of 7 October 1645 reads much like a Declaration of Independence from the tyrannical WIC rule.93 The declaration summarizes the limitations placed on the Catholic religion, expresses anti-Jewish and anti-Protestant feelings, denounces the corruption of the company’s regime, as well as the havoc created by native troops against the moradores, the excruciating debts of the senhores do engenho, and celebrates the military successes of the revolt so far. The revolt united the interests of the senhores do engenho who sought refuge in Bahia, the debt-ridden Lords of the Sugar Mills who remained, the clergy, local inhabitants who were harassed in the insecure back lands, native peoples who remained subjugated to European settlers, and even people of African descent who gained freedom by joining the liberation forces. The moradores’ forces themselves consisted of all these population groups. João Fernandes Vieira was the leader of the senhores do engenho in Dutch Brazil, André Vidal de Negreiros led the forces of the Bahia exiles, Camarão was in charge of the Potiguar natives, and Henrique Dias was the commander of African soldiers.94 The consolidation of these individual forces created a new strong local identity. The Portuguese crown had to support the revolt secretively, for a direct war with the Netherlands might possibly have disastrous 91 Letter Ab. Tapper to Ant. van Hilten, Recife, December 11, 1645, in: KHG 5th series, vol. 5, p. 410. The two most notorious were Gaspar van der Ley and Dirk Hoogstraeten, Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 164–170; Gonsalves de Mello, João Fernandes Vieira, pp. 114–115, note 106; Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, pp. 182, 189, 191–192. 92 Francisco José Moonen, Gaspar van der Ley no Brasil (Recife, 1968), pp. 54, 60–64. 93 Calado, Valeroso Lucideno 2:85–94. 94 Nieuhoff, Memorável Viagem, p. 117.

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consequences for the vulnerable mother country: Portugal was at war with Spain, and did not have the support of France. England, Portugal’s oldest ally, was beset by civil war. It was not until 1648 that the crown openly sent a fleet to blockade Recife.95 Thus Pernambucans created a myth that the revolt was truly regional, constructing a new local identity referred to during future uprisings.96 The struggle against the “Flamengos” united these private interests, yet after the “war of divine liberty,” internal contrasts were to resurface.

V Overall the WIC project of occupying the sugar zones of the Southern Atlantic proved to be unfeasible. The local population had strong roots to the land, and the company could not supply enough inhabitants able to take over all the sugar plantations. Instead a multicultural society existed in Recife that lived off financing the Luso-Brazilian population in the countryside. The moradores continued to see themselves as the superior people (which made it all the more unacceptable to be ruled by “heretics”), for they alone were able to exercise the “noble” profession of sugar production. Johan Maurits’ reign did for a time present an alternative through the demonstration of such princely qualities as social arbitration and the promotion of science. However, in the end the sugar economy of Dutch Brazil became unprofitable, and gave the WIC too few financial means to support the upkeep of the colony by itself.97 In this situation some Dutch traders had no scruples about buying their sugar from Portuguese Brazil or São Tomé because it was cheaper.98 From that moment the WIC became dependent on subsidies from the Dutch governments, which itself was governed by too many diverse economic interests to give the full support necessary to maintain or restore the colony. The WIC was uncompromisingly embittered about the “treacherous” revolt of the moradores. In their view, the revolt was illegitimate (it happened during the truce of 1641–1651), solely based on

95 96 97 98

Cabral de Mello, Um Imenso Portugal, pp. 221–231. Cabral de Mello, A Fronde dos Mazombos. Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 279–280. Artichofsky to Maurits, July 24, 1637, KHG (1869) 5:5, p. 238.

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economic gain and fully supported by the Portuguese authorities. The company wanted no compromise at all, and all peace prospects foundered.99 Even after the Dutch had been expelled from Brazil in 1654, the WIC continued to plead for full restoration of its territories in South America. Peace agreements with the Portuguese were finally concluded in 1661 and 1669, and in them the WIC was compensated for its losses. For the remainder of the company’s existence, the WIC still needed to seek full execution of the treaties. This outcome continued to have major consequences for the relations between Brazilian merchants and the company’s officials on the Mina Coast during the following century. Whereas the Dutch colonization of Brazil has become an artefact in the historical curiosity cabinet of the Netherlands, for Brazilians the time of the Dutch still remains a live issue. As in the seventeenth century, modern interpretations are varied and are closely linked to the social position of the spectator. In carnival parades Johan Maurits is celebrated for his just rule, symbolizing the idea that, if only the Dutch had stayed, present day Brazil would be as prosperous as the Netherlands.100 Others have a different reading of the Pernambucan struggle for divine liberty. The Dutch occupation supposedly drew together the three races (African, Native, and European) against a brutal oppressor. Indeed, according to Gilberto Freyre, the famous anthropologist and creator of the myth of racial integration, the Dutch Republic was blessed by their soldiers’ intermarriage with Amerindians and Africans, and the North East region gained people with blond hair and blue eyes, and people called Wanderley (Van der Ley).101 99 Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 192–194; Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O Negócio do Brasil. Portugal, os Países Baixos e o Nordeste 1641–1669 (2nd ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1998). 100 Eddy Stols, “‘Brasil versuymd’ andersom gezien. De Brazilianen over hun Hollands verleden,” in: J. Lechner and H.Ph. Vogel eds., De Nieuwe Wereld en de Lage Landen. Onbekende aspecten van vijfhonderd jaar ontmoetingen tussen Latijns-Amerika en Nederland (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 115–116, 125–127. 101 The most famous Brazilian anthropologist/historian Gilberto Freyre expresses this best in his preface to Gonsalves de Mello’s, Tempo dos Flamengos, pp. 9–10. (. . .) “E deve haver sangue de brasileira, talvez morena e porventura brasileira, isto é, indigna, em mais de uma família hoje plàcidemente holandesa. Por outro lado, só os Wanderleys são no Brasil legião. Só êles bastam para assegurar a sobrevivência de olhos azuis e de sangue flamengo em nosso país, embora, em certos casos, já tão diluído noutros sangues que há até mulatos quase negros” (. . .). For a good discussion on Gilberto Freyre’s ideas and how they were challenged since the 1950s see: Marcos Chor Maio, “The UNESCO Project: Social Sciences and Race Studies in Brazil in the 1950s,” Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 4/5 (Spring/Fall 2000), pp. 51–63.

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Imperial historians have seen the loss of Dutch Brazil as a failure of the Dutch empire in the Atlantic. In terms of empire, the WIC lost most of its main settlements in the colony. However, the plantation economy was not lost to Dutch traders: they used the Wild Coast (Guiana) for their sugar plantations and many Dutch merchants continued to trade through colonies under English, French, Portuguese and Spanish administrations in the Caribbean and South America. The loss of Dutch Brazil inaugurated a new era of the Dutch Atlantic. Rather than actively pursuing a monopoly on the sugar trade and massive land possession, Dutch traders became increasingly involved in cross-national trade and financing. Even though historians have considered the loss of the WIC’s territories as a decline of Dutch power and prestige, Dutch merchants thought otherwise. Boxer, for instance, cites a saying about the Dutch colonial empire that “From Jacarta of yore began the victory, From the conquered Recife the defeat.”102 It is doubtful if contemporary Dutch merchants saw it the same light. Many had come to the conclusion that trade through other colonies was cheaper, more profitable and worth the additional risks. Indeed, the defeat of the WIC in Recife demonstrated that territorial occupation by chartered companies with monopolies was not in the interest of the transnational commerce of the Atlantic. Merchants in the Dutch Republic instead organized themselves in ways more appropriate for their cosmopolitan society.

102

The Dutch in Brazil, p. 245.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A NATURAL PARTNERSHIP? SCOTLAND AND ZEELAND IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Esther Mijers

The seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. Economically, culturally, religiously and politically, the country stood out in Europe. At the heart of the Dutch success was its dominance of world trade.1 To many countries it was a model of commercial and maritime success; while as many others were envious of the Dutch achievements. To Scotland, however, the Dutch were more than a purely economic sensation. They were also religious kinsmen. Several aspects of the story of Scotland and the Dutch Republic in the early modern period have received attention recently.2 However, these accounts often fail to appreciate the Dutch state for what it really was, namely “the most decentralised polity in Europe,” made up of seven united provinces.3 In both domestic and foreign affairs the different provinces very much followed their own economic and 1

J.I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989). See for instance: G.G. Simpson, Scotland and the Low Countries 1124–1994 (East Linton, 1996). More recently a number of dissertations have appeared: G. Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands (East Linton, 2004); D. Catterall, Community Without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, C. 1600–1700 (Leiden, 2002); E. Mijers, ‘Scotland And The United Provinces, c. 1680–1730’. A Study In Intellectual And Educational Relations’ (St Andrews, Unpublished Thesis, 2001). Some of the British religious connections have been explored in: K.L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism. A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), although a detailed study of the Scottish-Dutch religious connection is long overdue. Trade relations have been discussed in: T.C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union 1660–1707 (Edinburgh, 1963) and C. Wilson, The Dutch Republic and the Civilization of the Seventeenth Century World (London, 1986), Ch. 10. Two much older works exist on the Staple at Veere: J. Davidson & A. Gray, The Scottish Staple at Veere. A Study in the Economic History of Scotland (London, 1909) and M.P. Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple in The Netherlands. An Account of the Trade Relations Between Scotland and the Low Countries from 1299 till 1676, with a Calendar of Illustrative Documents (The Hague, 1910). 3 W. Speck, ‘Britain and the Dutch Republic’, in: K. Davids and J. Lucassen eds., A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 173–196, especially p. 179. 2

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political agendas. Yet too often is the Province of Holland equated with the entire Dutch Republic, without taking into account the importance of the other six provinces. In the early seventeenth century Dutch Republic, Zeeland was an economic and political force to be reckoned with, engaged in constant competition with the neighbouring province of Holland. One of Zeeland’s most natural partners was Scotland, with which it maintained particularly close relations in economic, political and religious terms. There are many reasons for studying the early seventeenth century relationship between Zeeland and Scotland. Zeeland had a long tradition of trading with Scotland and was host to the Scottish and English Staples. It also had an important stake in the growing Dutch commercial ‘empire’, involving its own sphere of influence along the so-called Wild Coast of Central America as opposed to the Holland settlements in New Netherlands. Scots appear to have been participants in these ventures. In the field of international affairs, Zeeland was especially British-oriented. Religiously, Zeeland was stricter in its Presbyterianism than Holland and had a great deal of affinity with Scotland. During the Civil War, it tolerated the use of the Staple for the transport of arms to Scotland, and in 1643 the Synod of Zeeland wrote to the Kirk to express its support for the Revolution. This religious link also translated itself into several cultural and intellectual projects, which have hitherto been neglected. The following article aims to address some of the elements of the unique relationship between Zeeland and Scotland. It will argue, firstly, that the relationship between Zeeland and Scotland included a range of commercial enterprises in addition to the Staple. These enterprises reached well beyond the North Sea and even Europe. Further, the Scottish-Zeeland relationship was far from being purely economic and involved rich political and cultural connections. Secondly, it will assess this relationship against the domestic Dutch background of economic competition between Holland and Zeeland, and place it within a larger British context.

I “[T]he seven provinces were united more in an alliance between sovereign states than in a full federal union.”4 Despite the United 4

Speck, ‘Britain and the Dutch Republic’, p. 174.

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Provinces’ descriptive name, William Speck’s apt observation is not as obvious as it ought to be. The emergence of the United Provinces as a result of a Revolt against Spanish overlordship is usually taken as an act of state formation. However, the first half of the seventeenth century was still very much a period of consolidation for the newly united provinces. Politically and economically, Holland and Zeeland quickly emerged as the dominant, but by no means the only, powers. These provinces meteoric rise to the detriment of the southern Netherlands, however, did mean a shift of the Low Countries’ point of gravity from the south to the north. The influx of Flemish refugees, including many merchants, as a result of the Revolt, provided a boost for the young Republic’s economy, and, at first especially, the Zeeland economy.5 Settling largely in the cities of Zeeland and Holland, the southerners took with them not only their wealth but also their vast international networks, including their stake in the Iberian-Atlantic system. A number of Flemish merchants also chose to settle in London thereby reinforcing the already important political and economic links with the British Isles. At least initially, Zeeland managed to capitalise on this new situation very quickly.6 Access to new trade routes opened the way for the Zeelanders to make a headstart in exploring and adventuring, including privateering, especially westwards and to the North. By the time the West India Company (WIC) was founded, in 1621, the Zeelanders had been active in the northern seas as far as Spitsbergen, on the Wild Coast (Guiana), and in the Caribbean for more than twenty years. Until the second half of the seventeenth century, Zeeland managed to keep up with its rival Holland. As a result the period was as much characterised by provincial competition as by national economic growth. Within Europe, Zeeland’s outlook was largely westwards. The three main cities of Vlissingen (Flushing), Middelburg and Veere (Campvere) each had close ties with the British Isles. Commercial relations between the Low Countries and Scotland and England had been longstanding,

5

V. Enthoven, ‘Early Dutch Expansion in the Atlantic Region, 1585–1621’, in: J. Postma & V. Enthoven eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce. Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden and Boston, 2003), pp. 17–48. 6 The economic rise of Zeeland has been described in V. Enthoven, Zeeland en de Opkomst van de Republiek. Handel en Strijd in de Scheldedelta, c. 1550–1621 (Leiden, 1996).

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dating back as far as the twelfth century.7 A series of Scottish-Dutch aristocratic matrimonial unions in the fifteenth century increased Scottish trading privileges in both the southern and northern parts of the Zeeland archipelago.8 In the sixteenth century these ties became formalised when the Scottish Staple was founded. After much moving about, it was finally established at Veere in the northern Netherlands in 1541.9 In 1582, the Company of Merchant Adventurers settled at Middelburg, effectively establishing the ‘English Staple’ there.10 Aside from these formal economic ties, there were also close political connections between Zeeland the British Isles, which had originated with the Dutch Revolt. In 1585, the city of Vlissingen had actually been handed over to the English as a garrison town in return for financial aid to the Dutch rebels.11 When James VI & I finally abandoned control over this city in 1616, it caused an exodus of English-speakers. A second, longer lasting political tie resulted from the unwritten rule that Zeeland supplied the Republic’s ambassadors to London. Although officially appointed by the States General, every ambassador ordinaris to London in the seventeenth century was born in Zeeland.12 Diplomatic traffic to and from Scotland took place via the Staple Conservator, who upheld a working relation with the Convention of Royal Burghs and the Parliament. Early seventeenth

7 L. Toorians, ‘Twelfth-century Flemish settlements in Scotland’, in: G.G. Simpson ed., Scotland and the Low Countries, pp. 1–15. For this Medieval trade see also: H.J. Smit ed., Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van den Handel met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland, I: 1150 –1485; II: 1150 –1485; I: 1485–1585; II: 1485–1585 (’s-Gravenhage, 1928; 1928; 1942; 1950). Already during the reign of David I (1124–1153), the first foreign, mainly Flemish, traders had been invited to settle in Scotland (Davidson & Gray, The Scottish Staple, p. 4). 8 Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple in The Netherlands, Ch. I. 9 At one point Veere, Middelburg and Antwerp all competed for the right to house the Staple. Davidson & Gray, Scottish Staple at Veere, p. 143. 10 They remained in Middelburg until 1621. For a contemporary account of the Merchant Adventurers at Middelburg, see: John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce wherin are Shewed the Commodies Arising by a Well Ordered and Ruled Trade, Such As That of the Societie of Merchant Adverturers is Proved to Bee, Written Principallie for the Better Information for Those Who Doubt of the Necessarienes of the Said Societie in the State of the Realm of England (Middelburg, 1601). 11 Den Briel and the fort Rammekens were also ‘given’ to Elizabeth I under the same agreement. 12 With the exception of the first one, Noel de Caron, who came from Flanders. With thanks to David Onnekink for this suggestion. O.S. Schutte ed., Repertorium der Nederlandse Vertegewoordigers, Residerende in het Buitenland, 1584–1810 (’s-Gravenhage, 1976), pp. 87–111.

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century commercial relations with the British Isles were often troubled by rivalry, mainly over fishing rights. Nevertheless, Zeeland merchants on the Wild Coast often co-operated with their British counter parts, especially in the early seventeenth century. In the realm of domestic politics, Zeeland boasted a special relationship with the House of Orange and its representative in the Zeeland States Assembly, the Marquis of Vlissingen and Veere, who also held the title of First Nobleman.13 The Zeeland States tended to be dominated therefore either by the First Nobleman or, during the so-called Stadholderless Periods (Stadhouderloze Tijdperken), by the city of Middelburg. This governing structure meant that Zeeland’s political agenda was shaped by forces different from those in Holland, where the city of Amsterdam and its mercantile interests dominated. In fact, as both the provincial organisation and the function of Stadholder dated back to well before the Revolt, each province had its own political idiosyncrasies. Zeeland’s independent stance was therefore less the exception than the rule. A direct result of the close connection with the House of Orange was the disproportionate influence of the Stadholders.14 Zeeland followed them in their increasingly orthodox Calvinism, which would be reaffirmed at the Synod of Dordt.15 The Canons of Dordt were widely accepted in Scotland, confirming the United Provinces as a natural partner and ally.

II Much has been written in recent years about the so-called North Sea Culture. This concept can be applied in some ways to the DutchScottish and more specifically the Zeeland-Scottish connection. The Dutch historian Lex Heerma van Voss has offered a thoughtful definition of what constituted this North Sea Culture. According to his formulation, Scotland’s Lowlands, the Orkneys and the Shetlands

13 G. de Bruin, Geheimhouding en Verraad. De Geheimhouding van Staatszaken ten Tijde van de Republiek (1600–1750) ( ’s-Gravenhage, 1991), p. 169. 14 It needs to be pointed out here that the provinces each appointed their own Stadholder. In reality, many chose the same one although the northern provinces, Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe, tended to choose a different one, from another branch of the House of Orange, than Holland and Zeeland. 15 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 357. Cf. A.I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, 1991), p. 27.

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would definitely constitute participants. He has identified two criteria that determined participation in this ‘system’, namely language and trade, followed by several more obvious binding factors, such as religion, the legal system and political alliances.16 When some of the different links between Zeeland and Scotland in the early seventeenth century are analysed, trade and language seem to emerge as the underlying elements. The issue of trade will be obvious. Language, on the other hand, deserves a further explanation. In the seventeenth century, Dutch was the dominant language among North European traders.17 Scots frequenting Dutch ports would have spoken it reasonably well. Furthermore, the three main towns in Zeeland were host to substantial ‘Anglophone’ communities, whose members must have been bilingual. Aside from a shared knowledge of Dutch, Scots and possibly French, Scots and Zeelanders also participated in a common culture, rooted in Presbyterianism and classical learning. The Bible, the learned preachers’ Latin and the system of Roman law, provided the Scots and Zeelanders with the tools they needed for effective religious and commercial co-operation and co-habitation. Zeeland was host to a number of ‘English’ and Scottish churches, which dated back to the sixteenth century.18 Although the Scots had the Staple church as their own official place of worship, there was a mixture of Scots and English in all congregations and they often had Scottish ministers. For example, the exiled Scottish ministers John Forbes and Robert Durie briefly preached at Middelburg and Vlissingen, when they first arrived in the Netherlands in 1608 until James VI & I raised strong objections and had them removed. The minister William Spang moved from Veere to Middelburg in 1653. The ‘English’ churches tended to lean towards Puritanism.19 They 16 L.H. van Voss, ‘Noordzeecultuur (1500–1800)’, in: L.H. van Voss & J. Roding eds., The North Sea and Culture (1500–1800) (Hilversum, 1996), pp. 25–48, p. 33. Heerma van Voss is careful to point out that the term ‘culture’ does not refer to a shared cultural framework or set of references (Kultur für sich) but rather to the cultural similarities in the North Sea region. To avoid confusion I prefer to use the more neutral word ‘system’. 17 This is confirmed by the Scottish student community. In the seventeenth century many students learned some Dutch, or could at least avail themselves of Dutch speaking countrymen, usually merchants and tutors. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century this no longer appeared to be the case. Cf. Mijers, ‘Scotland and the United Provinces’, Ch. II. 18 This paragraph is largely based on Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, Ch. VII. 19 Interestingly enough, the Printer to the State of Zeeland, Richard Schilders (1583–1634) was also the first printer of Puritan books in the province.

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were heavily influenced by William Ames, the English Professor of Theology at the University of Franeker, who was a ‘covenant enthusiast’, and Willem Teelinck, a preacher at Middelburg and the founder of the Nadere Reformatie. Teelinck had studied in Scotland at St Andrews and had spent time in Banbury in England, and introduced English pietism in the United Provinces. He worked closely alongside the ‘English’ churches. The Dutch Zeeland Churches were especially admired in Puritan eyes, the “doctrine according to godliness” being “both more Practically Preached by the Pastors, and more put in practise by the Hearers in your Churches, then hath been marked in many others.”20 Established by the Convention of Royal Burghs in 1614, the only church ‘exclusively’ Scottish in Zeeland was the Staple church. Unlike its counterpart in Rotterdam, it did not have formal ties with any classis or synod in Scotland or the United Provinces for a long time. Only in 1642 was its energetic minister William Spang, invited to the General Assembly, where the Staple church officially became a member.21 The church at Veere was careful to follow the Church of Scotland and actively recruited ministers from Scotland. Tied to the Staple, the Lords Conservator also had a distinct influence in the religious direction of the church. However, when the Royalist Sir Patrick Drummond tried to resist Presbyterianism in 1640 he was deposed by the Burghs and replaced by the Covenanter Thomas Cunningham.22 The latter had been smuggling arms to Scotland since 1639.23 The Scottish Staple played an important role in supporting the Covenanters, both through Cunningham’s arms running and William Spang’s propaganda work for the Scottish cause. The extent of the Zeeland support is illustrated by the fact that when Cunningham failed to obtain a loan on behalf of the Estates of Scotland in 1644, the wealthy merchants Adrian and Cornelis Lampsins advanced the sum “in corroboration of the joynt Publique-Faith of both Kingdomes.”24 Although the Lampsins were undoubtedly shrewd

20

Quoted in Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 362. The Scottish Church in Veere joined the Classis of Walcheren in 1669. 22 Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple, p. 174. 23 The Journal of Thomas Cunningham of Campvere 1640–1654, ed. E.J. Courthope (Edinburgh, 1928), p. ix. 24 ‘Particular specification of the armes and ammunition bought in the Netherlands upon the credit of Messrs Lampsins of Zeeland’ (Journal of Thomas Cunningham, p. 95). 21

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businessmen, their loan was surely motivated by religion. They also had a Scottish agent-cum-notary in Vlissingen, Gideon Moris, who was instrumental in their Scottish connection. In general, the Dutch Reformed Churches enthusiastically welcomed the reforms across the North Sea and actively supported their Christian brothers. Again, the Zeeland Churches went furthest in promoting religious solidarity. The provincial Synod wrote a letter to the Church of Scotland, dated 18 July 1643, which “commended the [Scots for] their new found freedom and warned them never to be seduced again by Episcopal ceremonies.”25 In 1644, the Staple church adopted the Solemn League and Covenant.26 To many Scots the Reformed churches of Zeeland were an example and an inspiration.27 The province itself was well known for its strict Calvinism, arguably derived from the sixteenth century Flemish refugees.28 A number of individual Zeeland ministers maintained close relations with their Scottish and English counterparts. It is possible to distinguish circles of like-minded Scots and Dutch ministers, although the true extent of their religious and intellectual activities and their influence still awaits research. The axis would appear to have been Willem Teelinck and Gijsbert Voetius, minister and Professor of Theology at Utrecht and champion of orthodox Dutch Calvinism.29 Other links were Anna Maria Schuurman and the preacher Jodocus van Lodensteyn. They maintained relations with Scottish Presbyterians both throughout the Netherlands and in Scotland.

25 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 385. Cf. W.C.P. Knuttel ed., Acta der Particuliere Synoden van Zuid-Holland 1621–1700, 6 vols. (’s-Gravenhage, 1908–16) II, pp. 399–402. With thanks to Allan Macinnes for pointing this out to me. Support for the developments in the British Isles was expressed throughout the Dutch churches, until the States General issued a decree in 1649 to stop the meddling of the churches in foreign political affairs. 26 S. Groenveld, “ ‘Als het huwelyck van mann ende wyff.” Puriteinse Voorstellen voor een Nederlands-Engelse unie, 1642–1652’, in E.K. Grootes & J. den Haan eds., Geschiedenis, Godsdienst en Letterkunde (Roden, 1989), pp. 147–58; A.H. Williamson, ‘Union with England Traditional, Union with England Radical: Sir James Hope and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century British State’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), pp. 303–322. The role of the Zeeland-Scottish relationship in connection with the Cromwellian proposals for Anglo-Dutch union still need to be uncovered. 27 At the same time, at his accession to the Scottish throne James VI had been enthusiastically hailed as a shining example of a Protestant Prince. His writings were translated and printed by, amongst others, Richard Schilders. 28 For example, the brothers Lampsins came from Flemish stock. 29 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 358–362.

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Among them were such figures as John Forbes, John Durie, Alexander Petrie, William Spang and Robert Baillie. These men corresponded and co-operated on matters of religious controversy, the translating and printing of pious works, the trading and smuggling of books, and, possibly also on the publication of the Blaeu Atlas of Scotland.30 The latter was a Scottish-Dutch venture for which the Amsterdam based Blaeu firm obtained and used the famous Pont maps of Scotland— researched and drawn by Timothy Pont in the late sixteenth century—for their Atlas Novus (1654). The publication history of this venture is still shrouded in mystery, but it is very likely that the Pont maps reached the Netherlands via the Staple.31 The Staple was definitely the hub for all Scottish activity in Zeeland. Aside from its economic and religious functions it also performed a legal role. It kept a close watch on Scottish mercantile interest, making sure that trade with Scotland only took place in Scottish ships. It also regulated the position of Scottish factors in relation to Dutch law, especially if they had Dutch spouses.32 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the key position of the Staple at Veere at first began to lose relevance, and then importance. As the Staple only concerned itself with the trade between the Netherlands and Scotland, it had no bearing on the emerging trade with the East and West Indies. The Staple contracts only referred to traditional staple goods: “All Sorts of Wool, Woollen and Linen Yarn, All Woollen and Linen Manufactories, Hydes and Skins of all sorts, Playding, Kerleys, Scots Cloath, Stockins, Salmond, Tallow, Oyl, All Sorts of Barrel Flesh. Pork, Butter, Leather dressed and Undressed.”33 In the sixteenth century, the Staple had also incorporated goods from other countries as well, such as wine and salt from southern Europe.34

30 For their role in the Presbyterian-Congregationalist controversies, see Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 364–368. For the illegal book trade see A.J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720. Print Commerce and Print Control in Early Modern Scotland (East Linton, 2000), Ch. 3 and Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple, pp. 155, 160–1. 31 Certainly William Spang acted as the editor for a contribution by Arthur Johnston. Many of the other contributors were ministers in Scotland and may very well have continued their Dutch contacts, possibly with the Teelinck-Voetius circle. A themed issue of the Scottish Geographical Journal, 121, 3 on the Scottish part of the Blaeu Atlas is forthcoming in September 2005. 32 Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple, pp. 170–1. 33 Zeeuwsarchief, Archief van de Stad Veere, 1215 Stukken Betreffende de Schotse Stapel, 1516–1625 (34 omslagen). 34 Cf. Macinnes, Charles I and Covenanting Movement, pp. 28–29.

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In the early seventeenth century, however, things were beginning to change. As both Zeeland and Holland entered the arena of discovery and global trade, a number of competing companies emerged, which were not overly interested in the Scottish trade.35 Moreover, Zeeland and Holland also competed with each other on the one hand, and with the British on the other. As the focus of the Dutch economy slowly began to shift further north, the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam began to grow, attracting trade and merchants from Zeeland, including Scots. The Staple seems to have been unable to adjust to these developments.36 Eventually it lost out to Rotterdam, which already held the monopoly for the lucrative Scottish coal trade.37 As a sign of the shift towards Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the English Merchant Adventurers moved to Dordt in Holland in 1655. In 1668, the Convention of Burghs entered negotiations with the same city to move the Scottish Staple, but the traditional ties with Veere proved to be too strong.38 The Convention’s unsuccessful efforts to move the Staple closer to Rotterdam can undoubtedly be seen as an attempt to capitalise on the Dutch success overseas.

III In the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands joined in the international arena of exploration and imperial trade. The boost the Zeeland economy had received with the influx of Flemish merchants also impacted on the Scottish partnership. The opening up of the IberianAtlantic system seriously expanded the United Provinces’ commercial ‘empire’, which already included the North Sea, Scandinavia and the Baltic areas, the co called moedernegotie (mother trade). For

35 They were however, keen to take on Scottish labour and to use Scotland as a stopover on their voyages to the West and North, and sometime even the East. 36 The surviving staple archives do not show any concern with the Indian trade. These only refer to legal activities of course. Zeeuwsarchief, Archief Stad Veere, XXIV, Betrekkingen inzake de Schotse Handel. 37 Catterall, Community Without Borders, pp. 25–28. 38 The Prince of Orange and the future Stadholder William III intervened at an early stage on behalf of Veere (Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple, p. 202). The Staple soon returned and remained at Veere until 1799, when the States General finally annulled the contract. I would suggest that this was a sign of the static nature of the Staple rather than of its success.

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the Scots the impact was largely indirect, although the Dutch explorer Jan Huygen van Linschoten came across Scottish merchants in the Azores in the late sixteenth century, who were active in the dye trade.39 Mostly, however, the Scots appear to have entered the Dutch Atlantic through their older contacts in the Netherlands. They were used as crew and soldiers aboard Dutch vessels and their ships were hired as ‘neutral’ means of transportation in order to avoid Spanish, and later on English, restrictions and reprisals.40 In Zeeland, early Scottish-Dutch transatlantic involvement was less one-sided than in Holland, where Scots appear to have been mainly hired help. The earliest voyages to the West were sponsored by individual merchanthouses and the so-called Voor-Compagnieën (pre-companies), which anticipated the VOC and the WIC and were later amalgamated with them.41 In their activities on the Wild Coast we can detect both informal Zeeland-British and Zeeland-Scottish co-operation. The Zeeland initiative to the west was closely tied in with the northern and eastern trades and the competition with Holland and was led by a small number of Flemish commercial magnates. One of the most important earliest financers at the outset of the seventeenth century was Balthasar de Moucheron, an enterprising merchant with interests in, among others, the African and the Venezuelan salt trades. In the late sixteenth century, he had become involved in a dispute with the Flemish-born, Amsterdam preacher and geographer Petrus Plancius regarding the possibility of an alternative route to the East Indies via the White Sea.42 Several voyages were undertaken to find this northern route, with De Moucheron backing the ‘Zeeland’ attempts. At the same time, interest in the western trade was growing. The Dutch already had been active in Brazil,

39 Itinerario Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten near Oost ofte Portugaels Indien 1579–1592, vol. II, ed. H. Kern (’s-Gravenhage, 1910), p. 184. 40 Macinnes, Charles I and Covenanting Movement, p. 29. Cf. Enthoven, ‘Early Dutch Expansion’, pp. 25–6. 41 Some of these Voor-Compagnieën were the Compagnie van Verre (Company of Far-away), the Magellanische Compagnie, the Brabantsche Compagnie etc. Most of these were concerned with the East-Indies. Pieter van Dam, Beschrijvinge van de Oost-Indische Compagnie, ed. F.W. Stapel (’s-Gravenhage, 1927), vol. I, Ch. I. Cf. S. van Brakel, De Hollandsche Handelscompagnieën der 17de Eeuw (’s-Gravenhage, 1908). 42 A van der Moer, Een Zestiende-Eeuwse Hollander in het Verre Oosten en het Hoge Noorden. Leven, Werken, Reizen en Avonturen van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611) (’s-Gravenhage, 1979), pp. 19–20.

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Venezuela and the Spanish West Indies.43 However, the Wild Coast remained unexplored. Perhaps in emulation of the English, the earliest voyages to this area left Zeeland in the mid-1590s, sponsored, again, by the companies of De Moucheron and his competitor Adriaen Hendricxz Ten Haeff, the burgomaster of Middelburg. Soon, many skippers and sailors followed and in 1598 Adriaen Cabiliau presented the report of his voyage to the Wild Coast and Trinidad to the States General.44 Cabiliau described exploring the Coast from the Amazon Delta to the Orinoco River, meeting several other Dutch ships along the way. Zeeland tradition has it that in 1598 and 1599 inhabitants of the city of Vlissingen, using Ten Haeff ’s ships, established a Volksplantinge (plantation) in the Amazon area, and built two fortresses, Fort Nassau and Fort d’Oranje.45 After their success on the Wild Coast, the Zeelanders turned again to the East Indies. In March 1598, the first Zeeland voyage left for the East Indies via the Cape, as opposed to taking the northern route. Again, De Moucheron and Ten Haeff led the way. In 1600, the two competitors merged in a new East Indian company, the Verenigde Zeeuwse Compagnie, in order to compete better with a new, Amsterdam-based company, the Eerste Verenigde Compagnie op OostIndië.46 Both remained active separately in the West Indies. Moreover, De Moucheron’s and Ten Haeff ’s were by no means the only companies whose activities spanned the globe. It is not often mentioned that, although the East Indian, the Atlantic and the northern trade systems functioned quite separately, the individuals and the compa-

43

For earlier ventures, see Enthoven, ‘Early Dutch Expansion’, pp. 24–31. ARA, SG (Loketkas VOC) 12562–3, Verclaringe van de onbekende ende onbesylde voiage van America, beginninde van de riviere Amasonis tot het eylant van de Trinidad toe, 3 February 1599. Reprinted in: J.K.J de Jonge, De Opkomst van het Nderlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I (’s-Gravenhage, 1862), pp. 153–160. 45 Zeeuwsarchief, Verzameling van Doorn van Westcapelle, nr. 41, Berigt aangaande de Colonie van Essequebo, met haare onderhoorige Rivieren, zoo ten opsigt van desselfs Bevolkinge als verderen Aanwasch, en voornamelijk, nopens het regt, ‘t geen Haar Ed: Mog: de Heeren Staten van Zeeland, op desselve privativelyk, en met seclusie van allen anderen competeert, 11 August 1750. Reprinted in: Doeke Roos, Zeeuwen en de Westindische Compagnie (1621–1674) (Hulst, 1992), Bijlage I. Enthoven doubts this claim. There was, however, certainly English activity in the area, as Cailiau’s report confirms. Vlissingen being an ‘English’ town, this may explain the claim. 46 W.S. Unger, de Oudste Reizen van de Zeeuwen naar Oost-Indië 1598–1604 (’s-Gravenhage, 1948), p. xxiv. 44

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nies involved were inextricably connected. Yet, only when seen within this larger context can the full extent of the Zeeland ‘Atlantic empire’ be understood. Another example of the widespread commercial interests of the Zeelanders comes from the Anglo-Zeeland co-operation between the Courteen family and Jan de Moor. Sir William and Peter Courteen were London-born merchants of Flemish stock, who had inherited their father’s textile business, which already traded extensively with ports in Holland and Zeeland. In his youth William had worked in Haarlem as a factor, but returned to London; Peter had settled in Zeeland.47 Under William’s leadership, the company soon expanded. In the early seventeenth century they moved into the salt trade and the whaling industry. In 1606, they joined in a company with their brother-in-law John Mounsey. Their nephew, Peter Boudaen Courteen settled in Middelburg. He became one of the founders of the Zeeland Chamber of the WIC and would succeed his uncle Peter in the family business.48 Sir William Courteen is best remembered as sponsoring the first expedition, led by John Powell, to Barbados in 1624–5 and subsequently colonising the island.49 By that time, the Courteen syndicate had already been active on the Wild Coast for over a decade, usually jointly with Jan de Moor, merchant and burgomaster of Vlissingen. Aside from the company Courteen-de Moor, as it became known, these merchants also co-operated in the Noordsche Compagnie (Northern Company), which was established in 1614 to promote whaling in the Northern Seas, in response to English competition

47

On the brothers Courteen and Jan de Moor and their activities in the West Indies, see: Enthoven, Zeeland en de Opkomst van de Republiek, pp. 262, 264. 48 He was the son of William and Peter’s sister Margaretha and her first husband the Flemish Matthias Boudaen. After his death she married the English merchant John Mounsey or Moncy. Peter the nephew only adopted the name Courteen after his uncle’s death. The Boudaens went on to become an important regent family, with close Zeeland connections well into the eighteenth century. The family relations of the Courteens are very complicated as the English and Zeeland branches are often confused. Cf. Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); R.B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery. An Economic History of the British West Indies 1623–1775 (Barbados, 1974), pp. 81–82; C.K. Kesler, ‘Tobago. Een Vergeten Nederlandsche Kolonie’, in: West Indische Gids, 10 (1929), pp. 527–534, 529, fn. 1. 49 For the most recent account of the story of William Courteen and his rival James Hay, Earl of Carlisle see: L. Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted. The English Colonization of Barbados 1627–1660 (Oxford, 2003), Ch. III. William Courteen was also financer to James VI & I and Charles I.

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in the White Sea.50 Like the VOC, which had been founded some twelve years before, the Northern Company was made up of provincial chambers. Peter Courteen and Jan de Moor were both directors of the Zeeland Chamber. From the outset there was stiff competition between Zeeland and Holland.51 In 1614 the Amsterdam Chamber of the Northern Company also founded the New Netherland Company, to aid the settling on the newly discovered Hudson River.52 This competition, however, did not constrain the Courteens who almost immediately developed trade links with North America.53 Collaboration between the Zeelanders and English-speakers dated back to the early sixteenth century.54 Victor Enthoven has identified the ‘English’ city of Vlissingen as a key factor in this. In assessing out-migration from this town, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between English, Irish and Zeeland emigrants settling on the Wild Coast. The English emigrants who departed from Flushing employed Zeeland ships, and Zeeland settlements often included many Englishspeaking settlers in their population.55 This intermingling reached a high point in 1616 when James VI & I gave up Vlissingen. Many English-speakers, including Scots and Irish, now decided to depart westwards to America. The company Courteen-de Moor organized their departure in two fleets. Michiel Geleynsse, Pieter Lodewijkse Ita and Jan Pietersz Ita commanded the first fleet that went to the Amazon, where Jan de Moor already had trade interests. The second fleet left for the Essequibo River, where the Dutch agent, Aert Adriaanszoon Groenewegen, founded a colony protected by the Fort 50

The Dutch had been active as whalers for decades, when James VI & I claimed Spitsbergen. For a contemporary response, see: H.G.A., Histoire du Pays Nomme Spitsberghe Comme il a Ésté Descouvert, sa Situation & de ses Animauls. Avec le Discours des Empeschemens que les Navires Esquippes pour la Peche des Baleines tant Basques, Hollandois, que Flamens ont Soufferts de la Part des Anglois, en l’Année Presente 1613 (Amsterdam, 1613), reprinted in: Hessel Gerritsz, Beschryvinghe van der Samoyeden Landt en Histoire du Pays Nommé Spitsberghe, ed. S.P. L’Honoré Naber (’s-Gravenhage, 1924), pp. 79–103. 51 There are numerous references to this in the Resolutions of the States General. Resolutiën der Staten Generaal [Nieuwe Reeks] (1610–1670), ed. A.Th. van Deursen et al. (’s-Gravenhage, 1971–1994). 52 George Edmundson suggests that this is what inspired the renewed interests in the Wild Coast in 1616 (G. Edmundson, ‘The Dutch in Western Guiana’, English Historical Review, XVI (1901), pp. 640–675, 664–5). 53 Enthoven, ‘Early Dutch Expansion’, p. 36. 54 Roos, Zeeuwen en de Westindische Compagnie, 8–10, W.R. Menkman, ‘Tobago. Een Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Kolonisatie in Tropisch Amerika. I’, West Indische Gids 21 (1939), pp. 218–236, pp. 224–229. 55 Enthoven, ‘Early Dutch Expansion’, p. 34.

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Kijkoveral (Look-all-over).56 Of the 130 mainly English-speaking migrants who went to the Amazon, around 70 returned to Middelburg in 1623, after the colony had to be given up due to Portuguese pressure. Groenewegen’s plantation, which had also been supported by the States of Holland, fared much better and by the early 1620s Sir William Courteen was developing extensive interests in the tobacco industry along the Essequibo. Indeed, in 1623 a contemporary Portuguese report estimated the combined weight of the annual tobacco production of the different English, Dutch and Irish settlements in the Amazon at 800,000 pounds.57 Unfortunately, evidence of Scottish involvement in the Vlissingen plantations is largely circumstantial. The substantial Scottish presence in Zeeland, including Vlissingen, strongly suggests that there must have been Scots among the English-speaking colonists.58 Scots were certainly employed in sizeable numbers by the Northern Company and the WIC. The latter also co-operated with Irish colonists, and the Dutch, unlike the English, held no obvious prejudices against either the Scots or the Irish.59 The Zeeland skipper Gelein van Stapels visited the different Dutch settlements in 1629–30. In his report he described the good relations of Dutch settlers with an Irish colony on the Taurege creek. He even had settlers from Vlissingen on board who went to join the Irish.60 Moreover, the question arises why the English-speaking colonists did not go to the English North America, since Peter Courteen had trade links Virginia.61 Lastly, Courteen-De Moor’s later ventures involved Scots based both in the Netherlands and in Scotland. 56 Groenewegen was an acquaintance of John Powell, who ‘discovered’ Barbados for William Courteen. They had both been in Spanish service. Groenewegen had also worked for De Moucheron and De Moor. 57 W. Klooster, Illicit Riches. Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden, 1991), p. 32. 58 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 200. For instance, in 1643 the Burntisland skipper Robert Angus sailed to the West Indies, leaving his wife in Vlissingen (N[ational] A[rchives of ] S[cotland], Henderson of Fordell Papers GD 172/293, Letter to Mawsie Doctour from Thomas Wright, 20 March 1643). 59 J. Lorimer, English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London, 1989), pp. 300–304. 60 M. van Wallenburg, ‘Het Reisverhaal van Gelein van Stapels: Een Zeeuwse Schipper op de Wilde Kust, 1629–1630’, in Zeeuws Tijdschrift (1995), pp. 9–14, 6–10. Gelein van Stapels’ journal deserves closer examination to see if he names any Scots among the Irish (Zeeuwsarchief, Handschriftenverzameling 182, log Gelein van Stapel, 1629–1630). 61 In 1620, an English preacher from Leiden was allegedly found prepared to

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One of these undertakings was the colonisation of Tobago, also known as Nieuw Walcheren, which was headed by Jan de Moor in 1626. Two years later the first colonists arrived from Zeeland, followed in 1632 by a larger group of 200. However, the island was also claimed by the English, the Courlanders, and later by the French as well. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Tobago saw a large number of settlements fail, including one by the ‘English’ or possibly Scottish Captain Marshall around 1640.62 The most interesting attempts came from James, Duke of Courland, who had secured the island in 1643 in lieu of arrears of a yearly pension of £400 granted by his godfather James VI & I in 1604. Although the mortgage of the island to Duke James was not formalised until 1664, the Courlanders had attempted to settle in Tobago from the early 1640s onwards.63 After a failed first attempt, they turned to the Zeelanders for help. In 1642, over 300 Zeelanders landed in Tobago, headed by the Captains Otto Keye and Cornelis Caroon or Caron, who had previously served in Brazil with the WIC. Indians soon attacked Caron’s settlement. He and the other survivors left for a Zeeland colony on the Pomeroon River.64 In 1654 a third attempt was made under the Dutch Captain Willem Mollens, whose ship carried colonists from several different nations.65 There have been suggestions that the Scots co-operated with the Courlanders in the colonisation of Tobago. Scottish connections with Courland, based on trade and on the imperial alliance between the Stuarts and the Duke of Courland,

move to New Netherland, with 400 families, in order to spread the true religion. In 1621, Hollanders established a settlement in Nova Anglia, against which the British ambassador protested to the State General. Resolutiën der Staten Generaal, IV (1619–1620), p. 377; V (1621–1622), p. 403. 62 This may have been the same Marreschal, whom the Holland merchant David Pieterz. de Vries encountered, in 1634, with 60 English, after their escape from Tortuga. David Pieterz. de Vries, Korte Verhael ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge van Verscheiden Voyagiens in de Vier Deelen des Werelts-Ronde, als Europa, Africa, Asia, ende Amerika Gedaen, ed. H.T. Colenbrander (’s-Gravenhage, 1911), p. 206. 63 H.F.M. Simpson ed., ‘Civil War Papers. Correspondence of Sir John Cochran and Others with James, Duke of Courland, 1643–1650’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, I, 15 (Edinburgh, 1893), pp. 143–212, pp. 146–147. 64 Menkman, ‘Tobago. II’, p. 308. 65 Ewald von Kloppman, ‘Abrégé de l’Histoire de Tabago’, reprinted in: J. Kleyntjens, ‘De Koerlandse Kolonisatiepogingen op Tobago’, West Indische Gids, 30 (1949), pp. 193–216.

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existed throughout the seventeenth century, but there is no firm evidence of any Scottish involvement in the settlement of Tobago until the later seventeenth century.66 A new phase in the island’s history began with the arrival on the scene of the Brothers Lampsins.67 Like the company Courteen-De Moor, the Lampsins’ firm had widespread commercial interests, throughout the East and West Indies and the Mediterranean, and they were also directors of the WIC’s Zeeland Chamber. The Lampsins had ties to the Scottish Staple and supported the Covenanting cause financially. Their Scottish notary and agent, Gideon Moris, had a stake in the Zeeland colony of St Eustatius.68 They were already patroons (undertakers) for St Maarten, and shortly of St Eustatius as well, when they turned their attention to Tobago in 1648. Four years later they began their colonisation of the island, with the intention of making Tobago an international trading depot for the entire region. Settlers came from the Pomeroon River and Brazil, including Caron and his men.69 A separate mission was undertaken to St Eustatius to entice former Tobagon colonists to return. These must have included Scots as they were certainly living on St Eustatius, and most likely on St Maarten as well, which apparently had a Scottish commander by the name of John Sympson.70 It would seem a fair assessment that there was a small but distinct Scottish involvement in the Lampsins’ planting of the Leeward Isles, in which Gideon Moris must have been instrumental. Like Tobago, most of the plantations and settlements on the Wild Coast were established independently of the WIC. When the Company was founded in 1621, it lacked the capital to take up the responsibility for the plantations that it had now assumed. Instead, it endorsed

66 Between 1643 and 1650, the Scottish diplomat Sir John Cochran (c. 1604–1657) was employed in raising money for the royal cause, especially from the Duke of Courland (Simpson, ‘Civil War’, pp. 143–212). 67 Tobago’s intriguing history continued until 1699. Cf. Van Herwaarden, Tobago, Koerland en Rotterdam, W.R. Menkman, ‘Stukken Betrekkelijk het Eiland Tabago 1664–1684–1698’, Rotterdamsch Jaarboekje (1939), pp. 80–93. 68 Roos, Zeeuwen en de Westindische Compagnie, p. 100. Their father had been an important member of the Northern Company, originally a whaling company. 69 Menkman, ‘Tobago. II’, pp. 311, 313. 70 Roos, Zeeuwen en de Westindische Compagnie, p. 104. The early eighteenth century governor of St Maarten was also Scot, John Philip, suggesting a continuous connection.

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private companies to plant settlements and large parts of the Atlantic and African trades were left to private companies. To integrate these private initiatives into the larger WIC structure, a system of franchised colonies or patroonschappen was devised. The patroon promised to attract colonists, and the WIC took care of the transportation to and from the colony.71 The first patroonschap on the Berbice River was granted to Abraham van Pere in 1627. As a result, the WIC functioned less as a monopolistic company, like the VOC, than as an agglomeration of firms. In Piet Emmer’s assessment “[I]t would be wrong to speak of the WIC as a Dutch or [. . .] as an Atlantic Company. In fact there were several companies with this same name.”72 As a result, competition between the companies and the provinces was endemic, although support and capital for the new WIC came more from Zeeland than from Holland. It also meant that it was relatively easy for foreigners, like the Scots and the English, to participate in these transatlantic ventures. The patroonschappen along the Wild Coast fell under the WIC Chamber of Zeeland, which jealously guarded the area as its own sphere of influence. One of the few Holland sponsored voyages to the Wild Coast by David Pieterz de Vries led to grave protests by Zeeland.73 As the British Isles also fell under the unofficial Zeeland remit, Scots may have been more acceptable than Hollanders. The province actively encouraged prospective settlers to migrate to the colonies through public advertisements. Although it is highly unlikely that these made it over to Scotland, the Staple at Veere and the ‘English’ city of Vlissingen were a potential source of Scottish participants. Aside from the Zeeland trading companies and the patroonschappen, the WIC also provided opportunities for the Scots. As the Company was mainly an instrument of war in the battle against Spain, a large military apparatus was needed. Scots were employed as soldiers and sailors, especially in Brazil, the WIC’s first transatlantic venture. According to Charles Boxer, “All the nations of northern

71 ‘Voorwaarden voor de bewindhebbers of participanten van de WIC die kolonisten wensen over te brengen naar de Wilde Kust of de eilanden die daar in de nabijheid liggen, 12 juli 1627’, in: Ibid., pp. 132–13. For an English translation, see: C.C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast 1580–1680 (Assen, 1971), App. III. 72 P.C. Emmer, ‘The West India company, 1621–1791: Dutch or Atlantic?’, in: L. Blussé & F. Gaastra eds., Companies and Trade (Leiden, 1981), pp. 71–95, pp. 90, 95. 73 De Vries, Korte Verhael, p. xxxii.

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Europe were well represented among the Company’s soldiery” and in 1642 Johan Maurits wrote that the majority of the men were “English, Scots or Frenchmen,” when he was ordered to discharge all those not of German, Dutch, or Scandinavian origin. At one time the garrison at Paraíba is said to have included over 150 English soldiers under the command of their countryman, Captain John Goodlad.74 It is by no means certain that this was actually the case as the Scottish Colonel James Henderson led several expeditions against the Portuguese after 1640. He had already commanded the Dutch expedition for the conquest of Angola, Benguela, and São Tomé in West Africa, when he took part in the Zeeland sponsored WIC offensive against the Portuguese rebellion in 1645–6 in Dutch Brazil.75 The surviving list of soldiers serving in Brazil with the States Army for the WIC also contains the names of hundreds of Scots.76 Scots also entered the WIC on the logistics side as the journal of the fourrier Willem Cunyngham illustrates.77 He was employed by the Chamber of Middelburg and sailed in 1625 to the “Baija de todos los Santos in Brasijlia” and along the rest of the Brazilian coast. In Plymouth, his ship was joined by several others and the fleet sailed in convoy under the command of Admiral Veron along the coast of Africa before crossing the Atlantic to Brazil. Unlike the colonists from Scotland, these men were professional soldiers, already serving in the Netherlands in the Scots Brigade or returning from the Thirty Years War. When Dutch fortunes in Brazil turned and they had to give up their settlements in 1654, the demand for these professional soldiers dried up.

74 C.R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654 (Oxford, 1957), p. 129. This is strange as Germans and especially Scandinavians were often Lutheran, whereas Scots were fellow Presbyterians. Moreover, Goodlad is an Orkney name. 75 Ibid., pp. 107, 176, 184. Cf. James Henderson’s papers regarding his service in the WIC, NAS, Henderson of Fordell Papers, GD 172/290. 76 N[ationaal] A[rchief ], 1.01.07 Staten Generaal, 12582.7, Minuten der opgemaeckte rekeningen vant staeten volck, dat voor de West-Indische Comp. in Brasilla gedient heeft, nagesien door Gillis van Schendel en Johan van der Dusse. Overgelevert April 1655. With thanks to Wim Klooster. 77 NA, 1.05.01.01 Archief van de Oude Westindische Compagnie (OWIC), 43, Rapport [. . .] vande voyagie ende rijse gedaen met het schip den Neptunus [. . .] ten dienste vande geoctrooijeerde westindische Compagnie, 1626. Cunyngham’s voyage is also described by De Laet. Joannes de Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael van de Verrichtingen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie in Derthien Boecken, ed. S.P. L’Honoré Naber, I. Boek I–III (1624–1626) (’s-Gravenhage, 1931), p. 107.

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In the early seventeenth century, Zeeland and Holland were engaged in constant competition in the White Sea, in the Americas and even in the East Indies, or at least in finding a new route there. Initially, the two provinces kept each other in check. The strength of Zeeland’s position as a maritime power was underlined by the confidence with which it had embarked on its first East Indian voyages. The Middelburg-based publisher Barend Langenes printed two Holland travel journals—one of which at the request of ‘certain merchants’— and a pocket atlas to support the expeditions.78 In the 1610s, a lull in the Zeeland economy was brought about by the Twelve Year Truce (1609–1621) and the re-opening of the River Schelde and the southern Netherlands’ trade routes. But this did not greatly affect the Western and Northern trades. By the 1620s then each province had its spheres of influence in the west—Zeeland on the Wild Coast and Holland in New Netherlands—as well as in the north and east. When the WIC was established in 1621, it was agreed that it would be managed by the Amsterdam and the Zeeland Chambers on a rotating basis, Amsterdam six years and Zeeland two.79 Yet by the early 1630s the situation had changed considerably and the WIC’s focus began to shift. Under pressure from Amsterdam, it was decided in 1633 to concentrate no longer on the Wild Coast, presumably due to the poor returns and the primitive and hostile trading environment.80 In reality, other ventures were preferred by the Amsterdam Chamber, which tried to attract settlers to its colony in the New

78 Unger, Oudste Reizen van de Zeeuwen, p. xxx. The journals were: Iournael Vande Reyse der Hollantsche Schepen Ghedaen in Oost Indien [. . .] (Middelburg, 1598) and Het Tvveede Boeck, Iournael oft Dagh-register, Iinhoudende een Warachtich Verhael [. . .] vade Reyse, Gedaen [. . .] Onder’t Beleydt vanden Admirael Iacob Cornelisz. Neck (Middelburg, 1601). The atlas was a near-contemporary competitor to Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and was one of the first pocket atlases: Caert-Thresoor, Inhoudende de Tafelen des Gantsche Werelts Landen/met Beschryvingen Verlicht/tot Lust vanden Leser/Nu Alles van Nieus met groote Costen en Arbeyt Toegereet. (Middelburg, 1598). In 1611, he also published a translation of Bartolomé De Las Casas’ Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias, dedicated to the magistrates of the city of Vlissingen in Zeeland. 79 H. den Heyer, ‘The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791’, in: Enthoven & Postma eds, Riches from Atlantic Commerce, pp. 77–112. 80 J.G. van Dillen, ‘De West-Indische Compagnie, het Calvinisme en de Politiek’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (1961), pp. 145–171.

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Netherlands.81 The Company’s main point of focus, however, was now Brazil.82 Following up the WIC’s ‘grand design’ to attack Bahia, the centre of the Portuguese administration and sugar production, in 1624, a second attack was launched in the early 1630s to conquer the sugar provinces in the north. During this time, the sugar trade was left to private companies, based in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Middelburg. When the States General reinstated the monopoly of the WIC in 1636, a disagreement broke out between the Amsterdam merchants, supported by the Brazilian sugar planters, and the WIC, in particular the Chamber of Zeeland. At issue was the Company’s monopoly, a dispute that lay at the heart of the Company’s problematic existence. The Amsterdam merchants favoured free trade and private enterprise. They had always questioned the validity of the WIC as it promoted privateering as an instrument of war. This hurt their lucrative trade with Brazil as well as the moedernegotie, as they were heavily involved in the trade between the Baltic and Portugal.83 Zeeland, on the other hand, favoured the monopoly of the WIC for several different reasons. In the first place, the Zeelanders were heavily involved in privateering. More importantly, however, Zeeland saw its economic position declining. The wine trade was moving to Rotterdam, the Scottish coal trade had done the same, and the English Merchant Adventurers had left in 1621 to go to Delft and in 1636 to Rotterdam as well. The brothers Courteen had both died by 1636, leaving the business in the hands of Peter Boudaen Courteen, one of the directors of the Zeeland Chamber. The other commercial magnates, Jan de Moor and Adrian and Cornelis Lampsins, were by now all patroons of the WIC. In other words, Zeeland had more to gain from the WIC than Holland. This also explains why Zeeland was very concerned to keep Brazil when it came under attack from the Portuguese in the 1640s. The loss of Brazil in 1654 confirmed the end of Zeeland’s strong position within the WIC. The decline of Zeeland’s economic position internationally had obvious repercussions for the ‘natural partnership’. The centre for

81

H. den Heijer, ‘The Dutch West India Company 1621–1791’, pp. 77–114, in Postma & Enthoven eds, Riches from Atlantic Commerce, p. 94. 82 See Ernst Pijning’s chapter above. 83 C. Ebert, ‘Dutch Trade with Brazil before the Dutch West India Company, 1587–1621’, in Postma & Enthoven eds, Riches from Atlantic Commerce, pp. 49–75.

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Scottish transatlantic affairs began to shift towards Rotterdam from the 1630s onwards.84 Private connections with Zeeland lasted longer, however, due to the Staple, the Calvinist connections of individuals and churches, and the mercantile and financial networks of the houses Courteen-de Moor and Lampsins, which included interests in fishing and whaling.85

V The true extent and importance of the Scottish-Zeeland connection is illustrated by the Company of Lewis, the failed attempt of Colin Mackenzie, 1st earl of Seaforth, to erect a burgh at Stornoway and set up a Dutch plantation in the Outer Hebrides in the late 1620s. This recently rediscovered Scottish initiative must be considered in the context of mercantile competition between Zeeland and Holland.86 The Earl of Seaforth was a relative newcomer to Lewis, having only recently conquered and resettled it with his own clansmen. Earlier attempts by a company of Lowland settlers, the Fife Adventurers (1598–1609), to establish a plantation had failed following native resistance.87 The Dutch were familiar with Scottish waters as a result of their fishing industries and had reached an accommodation with James VI in 1594 which accorded them access to Scottish deep-sea waters but prevented their intrusion in inshore waters reserved to

84

Catterall, Community without Borders, p. 25. There are many examples of other individuals who continued to have personal, religious and/or commercial with the Netherlands. Cf. Williamson, ‘Union with England’, p. 319. Idem, ‘Hope, Sir James, of Hopetoun, appointed Lord Hopetoun under the protectorate (1614–1661)’, DNB. 86 Loosely based on: A. MacCoinnich, ‘Native and Stranger: Lewis and the Fishing of the Isles, c. 1610–c. 1638’ (Unpublished Paper). See also: A. MacCoinnich, Tùs gu Iarlachd: Eachdraidh Clann Choinnich c. 1466–1638 (Tràchdas PhD, Oilthigh Obar Dheathain, 2005), Caib 5.41–5.48. The venture is also mentioned in: Davidson and Gray, The Scottish Staple, pp. 198–200. The author wishes to thank Aonghas MacCoinnich for generously sharing parts of his research. 87 G. Donaldson, The Scots Overseas (London, 1966), p. 29; J. Ohlmeyer, ‘Civilizinge of those rude partes’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’, in: Nicholas Canny ed., The Oxford History of Empire. Vol I. The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 124–147, p. 135. 85

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the fishing fleets from the royal burghs.88 This accommodation, however, had been stretched with the appearance of Dutch herring fleets in the Bressay Sound from 1617. The continuing importance of the waters around Orkney and especially Shetland was indicated by Blaeu in his atlas of Scotland, when he added a number of Dutch ships around the islands in a reaffirmation that the British seas were open rather than closed.89 Scottish fishermen were employed in the Dutch whaling industries around Spitsbergen and elsewhere. For the Dutch Atlantic and East Indian routes, the northern and western isles were also of strategic importance. Throughout the seventeenth century, Dutch ships often chose to take the Scottish route rather than use the Channel, especially in times of war.90 So when Seaforth approached them, the Dutch were naturally very interested in his proposals. It is not altogether clear what inspired Seaforth to turn to the Dutch. Certainly the first contact was made by the Dutch-based, Captain Mungo Hamilton, who acted as Seaforth’s agent on this occasion. It may have been George Hay, 1st earl of Kinnoull who inspired the venture. George was the cousin of James Hay, 1st earl of Carlisle, a favourite of James VI & I, who was to be granted proprietorship of the Barbados and other Leeward Islands by Charles I over William Courteen. Kinnoull had been involved with the Fife Adventurers, using his contacts at Court to establish his early business career. After this failed venture, he leased land from Seaforth in Wester Ross, in exchange for his rights to Lewis. He entered the iron and glass industries, importing English and Dutch skilled labourers. He also had an interest in whaling and obtained a nineteenyear monopoly to exploit this industry.91 Carlisle, who would certainly have come across his rival for Barbados at Court, may have introduced Kinnoull and Seaforth to William Courteen and the Zeeland branch of his business. Alternatively, Seaforth’s agent Hamilton may

88

Macinnes, Charles I and the Covenanting Movement, p. 108. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive Atlas Novus (Amsterdam, 1654), Orcadum et Shetlandiae Insularum Accuratissima Descriptio. For the trade with Shetland see: F.J. Shaw, The Northern and Western Islands of Scotland: Their Economy and Society in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 175–177. 90 Van Dam, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, pp. 673, 683, App. 2. 91 DNB. 89

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have come across the Middelburg merchants through his own contacts in the Netherlands. Either way, it is not surprising that Seaforth as a well-connected Scot approached the province of Zeeland with his venture. Seaforth’s Dutch partner was a Middelburg-based syndicate of merchants and investors with strong Atlantic connections. The leading member was certainly Jan de Moor, with or without the Courteen brothers’ financial backing. The most significant identifiable signatories on the Dutch side were in order of importance: Jan de Moor; Arend or Everard Lodenstein, burgomaster of Delft, member of the admiralty board of Zeeland and one of the chief investors in the Courteen-de Moor Vlissingen expeditions of 1616 and other voyages to the West Indies; Balthasar van de Voorde, a Brazilian settler and spokesman of the Dutch High Council of Brazil in the WIC and the States General 1645; and Jaspair or Joost van den Bogaert, another Brazilian settler in the late 1630s–early 1640s.92 In 1628 Seaforth obtained burgh rights for Stornoway and the next year his representatives entered negotiations with the Zeelanders. Unfortunately only the papers kept in Scotland survive.93 It is clear, however, that both parties meant serious business. After a number of exchanges, an agreement was reached which closely resembled the Staple Contracts, with some additional elements reminiscent of the patroons agreements.94 The Zeelanders were allowed to build a fort and were guaranteed protection from privateers and pirates. Although the Company of Lewis may have been Seaforth’s initiative, he was certainly not the sole beneficiary. The final contract was an agreement between equal partners rather than a Diktat.95 The 92 Resolutiën der Staten Generaal, IV, 1619–1620, p. 335; Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Wild Coast, p. 303, fn 67; F.C. Wieder, De Stichting van New York in Juli 1625. Reconstructies en Nieuwe Gegevens Ontleend aan de Van Rappard Documenten (’s-Gravenhage, 1925), p. 128; Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 167, 174. Aonghas MacCoinnich has identified the participants in more detail. NAS, Seaforth Muniments, GD 46/18/142, Response sur la proposition faicte par Mr. Bernard Maquigni aux participants de la Compagnie de Lewis de par Monsr. le Comte de Zeafort. a Middelbourge le 13e de Janvier 1631. Somm’y estant authorize pour procuration du dict S/M.r Comte, date le 25me de decembre 1630; GD46/20/box 5. 93 NAS, Seaforth Muniments, GD46/18/139, Memoir for Cap: Mongo Hamiltoune; GD46/18/140–143, Lewis Company Papers, GD46/20/box 5. 94 Zeeuwsarchief, Archief van de Stad Veere, 2089, Stapelcontracts, Voorwaarden voor de bewindhebbers. 95 NA, Seaforth Muniments, GD46/20/box 5, Transcription of GD46/18/140/3, Considerations and prerogatives To be contracted and aggreed uppon by [blank] As Chiefe parteners in the Society. [My italics].

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idea of an actual trading company, as opposed to a mere contract, may well have come from Jan de Moor, whose other mercantile interests were also based in different firms. The Company of Lewis certainly fitted very well into both his own activities and those of the Chamber of Zeeland, of which he was a director. As the pressure from Amsterdam on the Zeeland’s commercial activities mounted in the late 1620s, a Dutch depot on Lewis under local protection could provide the perfect antidote. Strategically well placed for the western, the northern and the eastern trade, the advantages for Zeeland over Amsterdam would be considerable. This assessment is confirmed by Sir William Alexander’s disapproving observations. Alexander, later Earl of Stirling and the coloniser of Nova Scotia, claimed that not only would the Dutch settle at Stornoway ‘with their wives and families furth of Holland’ and be placed under the king’s laws, they would also have full burghal privileges and have full power and privelige to sayle and tra[ffic] with their shippes and Barkes and to have comerce and traffique therewith within any part of Christendome in Barbara[y], Asia, Affrica, East and West Indies, and Newfoundlande, beeing his Ma[ jes]ties freinds and Confederates [. . .]96

Just how seriously the Zeelanders took this venture is shown in their concern to secure ratification from the Scottish Parliament. The last surviving document, from 1630–1, describes the Zeelander’s discontent that such approval still had not happened, despite Seaforth’s promises.97 The memory of the Dutch fishing disputes with James VI & I between 1610 and 1619 must have been still fresh in their minds, and not least the British armed intervention at the headquarters of the Northern Company’s Zeeland Chamber in Spitsbergen.98 The new settlement was too important to go the way of Spitsbergen. At the same time the merchants must also have been aware of the hostile attitude of the Scottish Convention of Royal Burghs that Sir William Alexander, as Secretary of State for Scotland at Court, had spelled out. Ironically enough, although the intervention of the protests

96

MacCoinnich, ‘Native and Stranger, p. 13. Quoted from PRO, SP 16/152 fol. 152, Clauses out of the Earle of Seaforts Patent granted by his Ma[ jes]tie under his hand . . . . . . Signed by Sir William Alexander Secretary for Scotland. 97 NA, Seaforth Muniments, GD 46/18/142. 98 Cf. W.M. Conway ed., Early Dutch and English Voyages to Spitzbergen in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1904).

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from the Convention caused the premature death to the Company of Lewis, the Scottish royal burghs were not to benefit. The burghs objected strongly to the privileged presence of foreigners. Nevertheless, Aonghas MacCoinnich has shown that, despite this opposition, four Dutch busses operated out of Stornoway by 1630. Dutch commerce only involved the fishing industry. The desired stopover between Zeeland and the Wild Coast never materialised. The royal burghs in their turn soon lost out to the Royal British Fisheries Company, licensed by Charles I in 1632, which directly sought to rival the Dutch in the inshore and deep-sea waters around the British Isles.99

VI In the early seventeenth century, Scotland and Zeeland maintained close relations. Although never defined as such by either side, they appear to have been ‘natural’ partners. Both states were made up of several islands, with a strong North Sea focus; they both had powerful, overbearing neighbours; and both formed a geographical and cultural ‘bridge’, Zeeland between the southern and the northern Netherlands, Scotland between the British Isles and Northern Europe. Most important, they shared two crucial common interests, religion and trade. The Zeelanders certainly saw the Scots as their equals. They admired their Protestantism and supported the Solemn League and Covenant wholeheartedly. To the Scots, the Dutch, and the Zeelanders in particular were the heroes of international Protestantism and the defenders of the Reformed faith. The relationship had been institutionalised early on with the Scottish Staple in Veere. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Staple became the hub for a substantial part of Scottish-Dutch religious, cultural and

99 NAS, Seaforth Muniments, GD 46/18/147, Ane discriptioune of the course that the Flemmings taks to fish in the seas belonging to his sacred Ma[ jest]ie of Great Brittane. t[ ha]t Places they fish unto. And also ane trew relatioune off the fishings and seas quilk Lyes to the West and north newer yet fished by yem. Incidentally this initiative contributed significantly to the Scottish disaffection that emerged with the Covenanting Movement. See: Macinnes, Charles I and the Covenanting Movement, pp. 108–13.

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political relations, as well as economic traffic.100 Moreover, Zeeland’s maritime rise benefited Scotland and the private firms, as well as the Zeeland branches of the large trading companies, now came to function as unofficial centres of Scottish-Dutch cooperation outside Europe. Indeed, Zeeland’s activities in Spitsbergen and along the Wild Coast early on opened up the American connection for a limited number of Scots. While Scots in Holland were part of a pool of international labourers, Scots in Zeeland had the advantage of private mercantile networks. The rise and decline of the province as a maritime player greatly affected the commercially-minded Scots in the Netherlands. Scottish geographical movements can be charted accordingly, as Rotterdam overtook Zeeland’s economic position in the second half of the seventeenth century. Economically, the history of the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century was marked not only by growth but also by competition between Zeeland and Holland. The Chambers of the WIC and the often forgotten Northern Company frequently had very different interests at heart. Despite several Zeeland voyages around 1600 to the East Indies, the Hollanders generally led the way there and in North America. The Zeelanders predominated in the West Indies, however.101 Over time specific Zeeland and Holland spheres of influence developed in what the historian Piet Emmer has referred to as the ‘Atlantic Basin’.102 Indeed, Zeeland managed to keep its ‘own’ colonies along the coast of Central America until well into the eighteenth century. It is in this context of economic competition and overseas expansion that the relationship between Zeeland and Scotland needs to be reappraised and the different layers of the ScottishZeeland ‘partnership’ are revealed. The importance of the Scottish mercantile connection for Zeeland is illustrated by the Lewis venture. To the Zeelanders, Scotland fit into both the traditional North Sea region, which for centuries had been part of the Low Countries’ trading area, as well as into the wider ‘Atlantic Basin’. A settlement on Lewis might have formed an important bridge between Zeeland and her colonies, while at the same time formalising the Scottish

100 In the course of the seventeenth century the Staple’s function became reduced to a purely economic role. 101 This is a generalisation and only refers to the discovery and opening of new routes. 102 Emmer, ‘The West India Company’, pp. 78, 95.

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role in the Zeeland colonies in ways comparable to the Staple. The Lewis Company connects the transatlantic context to the much older Scottish-Zeeland partnership. Although prompted by a Scottish-led initiative, the project would have greatly benefited both parties: Zeeland in its competition with Holland, and Scotland in its own attempts at improvement through plantation. Its failure is indicative of the changing nature of the partnership. The royal burghs resisted what was perceived to be an unwarranted attempt at economic intrusion that widened the wedge between Scottish and Dutch interests implanted by the considerable presence of the latter’s herring buses in the Orkney and Shetland isles. In this context Zeeland could only emerge as the losing partner. In the end, however, it was the decline of Zeeland’s position as a colonising power that ended the partnership. From the 1650s onwards, the United Provinces, and Zeeland in particular, lost interest in Scotland as a separate political and economic entity. The anonymous author of a pamphlet, The Interest of these United Provinces Being A Defence of the Zeelanders Choice, on the Dutch political predicament in 1673 expressed the changed attitude of the Zeelanders when he gave the following harsh assessment: That we [. . .] we may still remaine a Republick; in regard to our owne strength, and our Neighbours Intrest, Englands especially, that they had better lose Scotland or Ireland, then let the French have these Provinces.103

Jan de Moor and his fellow directors would not have approved.

103 The Interest of these United Provinces Being A Defence of the Zeelanders Choice (Middelburg, 1673).

CHAPTER NINE

ANGLO-DUTCH TRADE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: AN ATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP? Wim Klooster

Discussing the relationship between England and the United Provinces, an English observer noted around 1660: “We are rivals for the fairest mistress in all Christendom, trade.”1 Rivalry, commercial or military, has perhaps been the main filter through which historians have traditionally viewed Anglo-Dutch relations between the ascension of James I in 1603 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–90. One does not even have to subscribe to an economic explanation of the three seventeenth-century wars between the two nations to maintain that the English and Dutch were vying with one another for economic supremacy. One English author even thought that war benefited the Dutch: “Of all the world they are the people that thrive and grow rich by warre, which is the world’s ruine and their support.”2 However, despite the apparent mutual hostility, examples of peaceful and cordial relations abound, especially in the wider Atlantic world that was opening up in the seventeenth century. The present essay will show how close the relations were by focusing on transatlantic AngloDutch commercial ties.

I At the turn of the sixteenth century, trade relations between England and the rebellious Habsburg provinces across the Channel were both significant and harmonious. Perhaps as many as 10,000 Dutchmen were occasionally ashore in Yarmouth, fishermen drying their nets 1 Quoted in: Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts 1603–1660 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1959), p. 235. 2 From a pamphlet of 1664, quoted in: Ch. Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (London, 1970), p. 19.

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and merchants purchasing red herring. In addition, 360 out of 714 ships (50.4%) touching at the port of London during a nine-month period in 1601–1602 came from the Northern Netherlands.3 Likewise, Englishmen were found in large numbers in the province of Zeeland, partly as a result of the Treaty of Nonesuch of 1585. The threat of a Spanish conquest of Antwerp had led the Dutch rebels to start negotiations in that year with the English Crown in order to obtain support. The Treaty stipulated that in compensation for the English loan of money and troops, Queen Elizabeth would receive as pawns the Zeeland towns of Flushing (Vlissingen) and Brill (Den Briel), as well as the fortress of Rammekens. At these places, groups of English soldiers, each under the command of a governor, were garrisoned for the next three decades, until the Dutch finally, in 1616, had paid off their debt.4 The Treaty of Nonesuch could not prevent the fall of Antwerp. The Spanish occupation of this commercial hub had two related effects: the northward exodus of many Calvinist merchants and the gradual decline of the entrepôt on the river Scheldt. It also meant that England lost an important outlet for its main export item: semifinished cloth. The Merchant Adventurers, who moved their seat first from Antwerp to Hamburg, and by 1598 relocated their “Court” to Middelburg in Zeeland, controlled a good part of cloth exports. Realizing the importance of this move, the Dutch Estates General soon exempted the Adventurers from paying import duties on English cloth, kerseys, and bays. The establishment of the Adventurers greatly stimulated Anglo-Zeeland trade, as wool and white, unfinished cloth were increasingly carried via Middelburg to Leiden and other Holland textile towns, where it was dyed and finished.5 Flushing also assumed

3

Charles Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (’s-Gravenhage, 1957), pp. 39–40. L.R. Miller, “New evidence on the shipping and imports of London, 1601–1602.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, XLI (1927), pp. 740–760, 741. 4 Victor Enthoven, Zeeland en de opkomst van de Republiek: handel en strijd in de Scheldedelta, c. 1550–1621 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leiden, 1996), pp. 107, 293. 5 An attempt by the English government to counter Dutch control of the international cloth market was the so-called Cockayne Project, which amounted to a ban on exports of undyed cloth. The Dutch replied with a ban on dyed and finished foreign (i.e., English) cloth, which struck so hard at the English economy that the Project was discontinued: Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 118–120.

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a role in this trade, albeit an illegal one. English interlopers challenging the Adventurers’ export monopoly to northwestern Europe, bypassed Middelburg and used Flushing to send their cloth to Amsterdam.6 The Merchant Adventurers, for their part, were involved in various other activities as well, dominating early Dutch tobacco imports from Virginia and contributing to the foundation of the Dutch East India Company. The close military and commercial ties between Zeeland and England even extended to the New World. In their attempt to challenge Spain’s territorial and seaborne monopolies, both Zeelanders and Englishmen focused their activities on northeastern South America, supposedly the weak link in Spain’s colonial chain. Shippers and merchants from Zeeland controlled the greater part of the trade. Traders from Holland and England had to sail to this Dutch province to buy tobacco.7 Massive English and Dutch tobacco purchases from eastern Venezuela led Spain’s Council of the Indies in 1606 to evacuate the production sites and place a ban on tobacco production in Venezuela and the Windward Islands of the Caribbean for a period of ten years.8 On the “Wild Coast” or “Guiana,” the unsettled region between Venezuela and Brazil, the scope of Zeelandish activities was larger than anywhere else in the period of incipient Dutch expansion. As early as the mid-1590s, two trading posts were set up along the Amazon River, and in subsequent years, the Zeelanders sailed further down the river, where they witnessed Indian tobacco production. Like Englishmen, Irishmen, and Frenchmen, the Zeelanders founded small colonies for the purpose of producing tobacco themselves, but they experienced little or no success.9 6 Enthoven, Zeeland en de opkomst van de Republiek, pp. 305–309. Wilson, Profit and Power, pp. 27–28. 7 H.K. Roessingh, Inlandse tabak. Expansie en contractie van een handelsgewas in de 17e en 18e eeuw in Nederland (Gelderse Historische Reeks IX. Zutphen, 1976), pp. 188–189. Johannes Jacobus Herks, De geschiedenis van de Amersfoortse tabak (’s-Gravenhage, 1967), p. 18. 8 Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean, Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven, 1978), pp. 178–179, 225–227. Joyce Lorimer, “The English contraband tobacco trade in Trinidad and Guiana 1590–1617,” in: K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny and P.E.H. Hair, eds, The westward enterprise. English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650 (Liverpool, 1978), pp. 128, 130. E. Sluiter, “Dutch-Spanish rivalry in the Caribbean Area, 1594–1609.” Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (1948), pp. 165–196, pp. 182–183, 188, 193–194. 9 Roessingh, Inlandse tabak, pp. 45–47, 191–192. George Edmundson, “The Dutch

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Even though available records prevent us from drawing a conclusion about the extent of Anglo-Dutch overseas collaboration, it is clear that common projects were set up, starting in 1611. In that year, Zeelanders assisted in the migration of Englishmen and Irish refugees to the upper Amazon delta. Out of respect for his Spanish colleague, Philip III, the British king, James I, had strictly forbidden his subjects to move to Spain’s overseas territories. But James had overlooked the loophole of Flushing, the domicile of numerous English soldiers and merchants. Migrants from the British isles left in Zeeland ships for the Amazon, where many came to live in Zeeland colonies, which were rapidly anglicized.10 The scene of Zeeland ships carrying Englishmen across the Atlantic was repeated five years later, after the pawn towns in the Dutch province were officially abandoned. Many an Englishman refused to return to Britain, preferring settlement in the remote Amazon and Wild Coast regions.11 Zeeland’s engagement with British colonial endeavours was by no means played out, however. Another ten years later, Sir Thomas Warner was in touch with the Dutch on the Amazon before he founded the English colony on St. Christopher.12 There was yet another Atlantic connection between the two neighbours across the Channel. Both English and Dutch traders had set their hearts on what was by far the most valuable product from the New World: Mexican and Peruvian silver. The Dutch appetite for American silver was whetted during the Twelve Year Truce, which was promulgated in 1609 between the United Provinces and their Habsburg foe, Spain. The general freedom of trade, stipulated in the Truce agreement, contrasted sharply with the Spanish policy in previous years, when Dutch ships had repeatedly been put under

on the Amazon and Negro in the Seventeenth Century.” English Historical Review XVIII (1903), pp. 642–663, 644. 10 Enthoven, Zeeland en de opkomst van de Republiek, 261. Two decades later, prospective Irish-Dutch settlers still left from Flushing for the Amazon region: Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, p. 218. 11 Edmundson, “Dutch on the Amazon and Negro,” p. 647. 12 Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York, 1972), p. 63. As the superintendent of all English colonies in the Caribbean and the governor of St. Christopher and Martinique, Warner allowed ships from Holland and Zeeland in 1631 to collect salt in the English islands: Nationaal Archief (NA), The Hague, Staten-Generaal 5753.

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embargo. Several Hollanders now took up residence in Seville, where the America-bound fleets and galleons were fitted out.13 After the Truce expired, the Dutch—Zeelanders and Hollanders alike—immediately resorted to London shipping. By 1622, two-thirds of the 31 London merchants exporting textiles and other commodities to Spain, mainly for re-export to America through Seville in exchange for silver, were Dutch.14 The English connection to Spain’s American riches remained strong in the next quarter of a century, until the very end of Spanish-Dutch hostilities.15 In northern Europe, it was the other way round. Here it was the Dutch who helped out the English. As a wave of continental devaluations made English products relatively expensive after 1618, the only way for England to obtain grain and other Baltic products was through the entrepôt of Amsterdam.16

II As Ernst Pijning demonstrates below, after the ill-fated Dutch, or Anglo-Dutch, settlements on the Amazon were abandoned, Dutch colonies were founded in other parts of the Americas following the establishment of the West India Company [WIC] in 1621. But on balance, the Dutch colonization of the Americas was not very successful. On the other hand, the Dutch were unmatched as carriers and financiers. Therefore, only a relatively small share of the Atlantic trade of the United Provinces involved the shipment of goods produced in their own colonies. Most products carried back were obtained through trade with Native American or foreign European settlements. The Dutch made the most of their commercial proficiency. Their

13 Eddy Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders of de handelsbetrekkingen der Zuidelijke Nederlanden met de Iberische wereld 1598–1648 (Brussel, 1971), p. 27. 14 Harland Taylor, “Trade, Neutrality, and the ‘English Road,’ 1630–1648,” Economic History Review 25 (1972), pp. 236–260, 239. One historian estimates that the United Provinces acquired thirty percent of the precious metals remitted from America to Spain in the first half of the seventeenth century, more than remained in Spain itself: Fernando Serrano Mangas, Armadas y flotas de la plata (1620–1648) (Madrid, 1989), pp. 319, 323. 15 J.S. Kepler, “Fiscal Aspects of the English Carrying Trade during the Thirty Years’ War.” Economic History Review 25 (1972), pp. 261–283, 262. 16 Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, Nederland 1500–1815. De eerste ronde van moderne economische groei (Amsterdam: Balans, 1995), pp. 441–442.

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carrying trade proved indispensable to England and its overseas plantations during the British Civil Wars (1642–1646). In New England this trade originated with the Dutch, whose bottoms plied with cargoes of linen and pottery between New Amsterdam and Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts in a lively traffic. For all the Dutch predominance, some Englishmen were involved as well. One of the business partners on the English side, Isaac Allerton of Plymouth, fitted out ships for Dutch Curaçao and settled temporarily as a merchant in New Amsterdam.17 Dutch ships were also active in the carrying trade between Boston and the West Indies,18 and supplied Boston with African slaves in the town’s early years.19 It was the Dutch who solved the lack of currency in Boston’s trade with Native Americans by introducing wampum, strung beads made of shells. Bostonians’ trade with the Dutch grew to such a height that the use of Dutch coin was officially regulated in 1643.20 Elsewhere along North America’s eastern seaboard, the Dutch connection was vital too. For lack of English ships, it was the Dutch who came to control a good part of the early trade in Virginia tobacco. The Chesapeake was a market for a wide array of Dutch commodities, including linen, coarse cloth and brandies.21 During the Civil Wars, the Dutch formed ties with local middlemen and planters, granting them long-term credit.22 While these Dutchmen 17 Cynthia J. Van Zandt, “The Dutch Connection: Isaac Allerton and the Dynamics of English Cultural Anxiety in the Gouden Eeuw.” In: Rosemarijn Hoefte and Joke Kardux, eds. Connecting cultures: the Netherlands in five centuries of transatlantic exchange (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 51–76. Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest. Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1999), p. 284. 18 Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, p. 96. 19 On April 1, 1646, the Dutch of New Netherland sold twenty-one black slaves to Boston merchants John Richbell and John Dolling at 200 guilders each. Statement by Willem Kieft, director general of New Netherland. Fort Amsterdam, November 26, 1646. In: A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644 to 1651 (Boston: Municipial Printing Office, 1903), pp. 152–153. 20 Charlotte Wilcoxen, “Dutch Trade with New England.” De Halve Maen 60.2 (October 1987), pp. 1–5, 2–3. 21 The King to the Governor and Council of Virginia. April 22, 1637. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, pp. 250–251. Gemeentearchief Amsterdam (GAA), Notarieel Archief (NA) 1609, fols. 43–46. Act of June 29, 1639. Petition of Dutch merchants to the Estates General, ca. November 1651, in: John Romeyn Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in Holland, England and France. E.B. O’Callaghan ed. I (Albany, 1856), pp. 436–437. 22 John R. Pagan, “Dutch Maritime and Commercial Activity in Mid-SeventeenthCentury Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90 (1982), pp. 485–501, 489.

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both came from the metropolis and the colony of New Netherland, the latter predominated. Those arriving from Europe frequently engaged in circuitous voyages, leaving Amsterdam or Rotterdam for Dutch Brazil or a Caribbean port, and returning to the United Provinces via Virginia.23 The arrival of the English Merchant Adventurers in Rotterdam in 1635 had expanded the scope of the New World activities in which the port’s merchants engaged. Every year, they sent several ships to Virginia, Barbados, and St. Christopher, where provisions, clothing, fabric, ironware, sailcloth, and rope were exchanged for tobacco, cotton, sugar, indigo, and wood.24 Quite a few residents of New Netherland active in Virginia even settled in the English colony. They established themselves on the socalled Eastern Shore, an elongated peninsula off the mainland, and assumed control of local trade.25 For several decades the Dutch also furnished slaves to the Chesapeake. The twenty-odd Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619, who were long believed to have been the first blacks imported into North America,26 came off a Dutch ship. After the foundation of New Amsterdam, Chesapeake planters imported slaves mainly via Manhattan. Most slaves brought to Virginia by way of New Amsterdam were “Angolans,” i.e. they had been embarked along the coast of southwestern Africa, an area stretching from Cabinda in the north to Angola in the south. These Africans usually arrived after complicated voyages. Some found themselves on board Portuguese ships that were captured by Dutch privateers; others had first been transported to Caribbean waters. Despite New Amsterdam’s pivotal role in this early slave trade to Virginia, its merchants and officials exercised little control over shipments. They 23 In 1642, for example, the West India Company’s Chamber of the Meuse dispatched the James of 200 tons via Plymouth to Newfoundland. The ship then crossed over to Pernambuco, where it sold codfish and European merchandise, and returned to Europe over St. Kitts and Virginia. Gemeentearchief Rotterdam (GAR) Notarieel Archief (NA). Act of June 8, 1642. The Hoop Casteel van Sluys followed this route: Rotterdam-Barbados-St. Kitts-Virginia-Rotterdam, and came back with tobacco and indigo, but was seized off Ostend by pirates. GAR NA. Act of January 31, 1648. Finally, the Vergulde Engel travelled from Dutch Brazil to the West Indies and Virginia, returning with tobacco: GAA NA 1589/387–389. Act of April 29, 1650. 24 Arne van der Schoor, Stad en aanwas. Geschiedenis van Rotterdam tot 1815 (Zwolle, 1999), p. 212. 25 Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanischatlantischen Raum 1648–1713 (Köln, 1998), pp. 129, 144. 26 32 Africans were living in Virginia before the Dutch ship arrived: W. Thorndale, “The Virginia Census of 1619,” Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, 33 (1995), pp. 155–70.

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were dependent on groups of Africans arriving haphazardly. Compared to the human cargoes arriving in Brazil and the Caribbean, the numbers of Africans imported to New Amsterdam were small.27 The largest number of slaves to arrive at one time on Virginia’s Eastern Shore during the seventeenth century was a shipment of forty-one Africans in 1656. They had spent seven months in New Amsterdam after their voyage from Benin.28 The Africans’ temporary stay in the Dutch colony with its relatively benevolent racial climate, is said to have influenced Virginia slavery. In New Amsterdam, numerous slaves enjoyed a large measure of freedom, while free blacks could acquire land and other property.29 Virginia’s planters looked with favour on the maelstrom of Dutch activities. The lobby of London merchants shortly after the Civil Wars to introduce measures curtailing Dutch commerce met with protests from the Virginia Assembly and Governor William Berkeley, who maintained that the Dutch had rescued Virginia during the war. The governor and council of Barbados echoed that statement in 1651. Looking back on the early decades of English settlement on the island, they argued that all the antient inhabitants know very well, how greatly they have been obliged to those of the Low Countries for their subsistence, and how difficult it would have been . . ., without their assistance, ever to have inhabited these places, or to have brought them into order.30

Even before the outbreak of the Civil Wars, the settlers of Providence Island sold the entire crop to the Dutch in exchange for wine, despite

27 Craven, Wesley Frank. White, Red, and Black. The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971), p. 89. 28 April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004), p. 164. In 1660, Dutch traders in the English colony paid for locally grown tobacco with African slaves. Pagan, “Dutch maritime and commercial activity,” p. 497. 29 T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York and Oxford, 1980), pp. 70–2. 30 Quoted in: John C. Appleby, “English Settlement in the Lesser Antilles during War and Peace, 1603–1660” in: Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville, 1996), pp. 86–104, 96. Cf. The King to the feoffees of Jas. late Earl of Carlisle, April 1637. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, p. 251. James R. Perry, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990), pp. 148–149.

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the fact that the ship of the Company that ran the colony was waiting in the harbour. Not only was the purchase of African slaves from the Dutch permitted under certain conditions, the lack of English shipping became so acute that the officials of the Company ordered the governor and council of Providence to allow the Dutch free trade from 1639.31

III In point of fact, Dutch involvement in the commerce of Barbados and England’s other infant Caribbean settlements, and perhaps Bermuda as well,32 was even more significant than their contribution to mainland British America. In all English colonies, the large merchant fleet of the Netherlanders, their easy credit and low freight rates attracted the settlers. Dutch Caribbean transactions, according to a mid-century document, involved the sale of all sorts of European manufactures, brewed beer, linen cloth, brandies, or other distilled liquors, duffels, coarse cloth, and other articles suitable for food and raiment for the people inhabiting those places, in return for which are imported all sorts of . . . commodities, as . . . a large quantity of sugars, tobacco, indigo, ginger, cotton, and divers sorts of valuable wood.33

In some English colonies, the activities of the Dutch amounted to more than the exchange of products; they included the supply of servants, a small number of whom were from the Netherlands. Service contracts in the Amsterdam notarial archives draw attention to Dutch indentured servants being sent to work St. Christopher’s tobacco plantations, while groups of (probably orphan) boys went to Barbados

31 The Company of Providence Island to Capt. Nat. Butler, Governor. London, July 3, 1638. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, pp. 278–279. The free trade permission was granted in June of 1639: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993), p. 133. Paul E. Kopperman, “Ambivalent allies; Anglo-Dutch relations and the struggle against the Spanish empire in the Caribbean, 1621–1641” in: The Journal of Caribbean History 21.1 (1987), pp. 55–77, 62–63. 32 Cf. Minutes of Committee of the Somers Islands Company. April 29, 1652. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, p. 378. 33 Petition of certain Dutch merchants to the Estates General, ca. November 1651. In: Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History, pp. 436–437. Cf. Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados 1625–1685 (Oxford, 1926), p. 22.

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for periods of three to five years to top and tail tobacco or to pick cotton.34 The numbers of these indentured servants remained, however, very small. Except, of course, for some merchants who took up residence as factors and traders in Barbados and a handful of sugar refiners, few Dutchmen took up residence in the non-Dutch Caribbean.35 Still, the Dutch left their mark. In Jamaica and Barbados, their influence on architectural design was unmistakable, while a letter from the island’s Company instructing the governor and council that neither fort nor bay was to have Dutch names suggests the extent of the Dutch impact on Providence Island. Any Dutch names already given were to be altered.36 According to a theory that has found widespread acceptance, the Dutch economic role was not limited to the supply of necessities, slaves, and servants and the purchase of locally produced crops. Indeed, Dutch influence supposedly extended much further.37 The Dutch are the missing link, the deus ex machina, the explanation why almost overnight some infant English and French colonies in the Caribbean were able to create highly successful sugar industries. Since their conquest of Pernambuco in northern Brazil, the Dutch had come to control sugar cultivation in all its aspects, and in the middle decades of the century, they transferred their capital, expertise and technology to Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Christopher, and especially, Barbados. Not only was it supposedly a Dutchman who first introduced sugar in Barbados,38 his countrymen taught the planters how to produce sugar, loaned them capital to buy land and equipment and set up the sugar mills, supplied the slaves who worked

34

GAA, NA 490/252, Act of June 3, 1642. Pieter Jansz van der Veer and Pieter Janssen of Flushing employ Gerrit Burmeester, Pieter Graeff, Pieter Roeloffs, Torsten Sijbrantsson and Hendrick Bottelman (St. Christopher). GAA NA 1620. Act of December 12, 1645 (Barbados). 35 G. Debien, “La société coloniale aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Les engagés pour les Antilles (1634–1715).” Revue d’Histoire des Colonies XXXVIII (1951), pp. 5–279, 40, 90, 121. Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, p. 68. 36 Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, pp. 313, 372. The Company of Providence Island to the Governor and Council. London, March 29, 1637. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, p. 249. 37 Cf. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America 1607–1789. With Supplementary Bibliography (Chapel Hill and London, 1991), p. 149. Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), p. 29. 38 His name, supposedly was Piter [sic] Brouwer: George Edmundson, “The Dutch in Western Guiana.” English Historical Review XVI (1901), pp. 640–675.

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the plantations and ground the cane, and shipped the end product to Europe. A few seventeenth-century documents seem to point in the same direction, such as Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados of 1657, which reminisced about the time that the great work of Sugar-making, was but newly practised by the inhabitants there. Some of the most industrious men, having gotten Plants from Fernambock [Pernambuco], a place in Brasill, . . . made try all of them at the Barbadoes; and finding them to grow, they planted more and more, as they grew and multiplyed on the place, till they had such a considerable number, as they were worth the while to set up a very small Ingenio [sugar mill], and so make tryall what Sugar could be made upon that soyl.

Much went wrong in the initial stages and harvests were poor. “But . . . by new directions from Brazil, sometimes by strangers, and now and then by their own people . . . were content sometimes to make a voyage thither.”39 In a similar vein, French historiography credits the Dutch for having helped Guadeloupe and Martinique through the difficult early plantation years,40 and a key role has been ascribed to the activities of merchants from Middelburg and Flushing in the struggling French colony on St. Christopher. One Dutch shipmaster may even be considered responsible for the start of tobacco cultivation on the island.41 What evidence is there? It is undeniable that Dutch ships frequently called at the French and English colonies, supplying a myriad of commodities on credit. In 1655, for example, 100 Montserrat and 146 Antiguan planters were listed as debtors to the Dutch, while nine years later, 637 residents of Guadeloupe were in debt to the Dutch.42 A similar situation occurred in Martinique.43 But it is doubtful

39 Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), p. 85; see Jane Stevenson’s chapter below. 40 Clarence J. Munford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies 1625–1715 (3 vols. Lewiston, N.Y., 1991), II, p. 378. Charles Frostin, Histoire de l’autonomisme colon de la partie de St. Domingue aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles. Contribution à l’étude du sentiment américain d’indépendance (Lille, 1973), pp. 31, 62, 65. 41 Stewart L. Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy (New Haven: 1912), p. 20. 42 Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and slaves. The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), p. 122n. Gérard Lafleur, “Relations avec l’étranger des minorités religieuses aux Antilles françaises (XVII–XVIIIe s.),” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, pp. 27–44, 29. 43 Alexandre de Tracy, lieutenant-general of the French West Indies, arrived in

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whether capital goods such as sugar mills and cauldrons were supplied in great number. There is in fact hardly any proof for this hypothesis. On the contrary, analyses of Dutch trade in the Antilles in the mid-seventeenth century show that textiles and provisions predominated and that hardware formed only a negligible part of outgoing cargoes of Dutch ships.44 More broadly speaking, there is reason to question an alleged conscious attempt on the part of the Dutch to transplant the sugar plantation complex to French and English islands in the Caribbean. It is true that the Dutch cared little for the effect of their activities on the WIC’s interests in Brazil.45 Theoretically, they might have foreseen that competition from Barbados sugar in the early 1640s would cause a price reduction on the Amsterdam market, but in actual practice this matter did not exercise them, for few Dutchmen identified with the WIC. Moreover, the WIC was a mere shadow of its former self. Since 1638, its only remaining monopolies in Brazil were the slave trade, the import of war ammunition, and the export of brazilwood. The sugar business and trade in all other American crops had been opened up for all residents of the United Provinces.46 A crucial ingredient in the theory about the Dutch transfer of the sugar industry is the volume of their slave supplies. Evidence is lacking for the traditional hypothesis that the Dutch sold large numbers of Africans in the early stages of English sugar cultivation. For one thing, the supply of slave labour to Barbados was most likely a response, not a stimulus, to sugar planting. The Dutch, in other words, did not take the initiative. More importantly, the slave trade was a monopoly of the WIC, whose board did everything in its power to send bonded Africans to its prize colony in Brazil. Supplies

Martinique on June 2, 1664 which he found “chargé de dettes excessives aux Hollandais.” Frostin, Histoire de l’autonomisme colon, p. 65. 44 Ernst van den Boogaart, Pieter Emmer, Peter Klein and Kees Zandvliet, La expansión holandesa en el Atlántico (Madrid, 1992), p. 163. Willem Wubbo Klooster, “Illicit Riches. The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leiden, 1995), pp. 209–220. 45 William A. Greene, “Supply versus Demand in the Barbadian Sugar Revolution.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XVIII.3 (Winter 1988), pp. 403–418, 415. 46 Reglement byde UUest-Indische Compagnie, ter Vergaderinge vande Negentiene, met approbatie vande Ho: Mo: Heeren Staten Generael, over het openstellen vanden handel op Brazil provisioneel ghearresteert (The Hague, 1638). Cf. Wim Klooster, “Failing to Square the Circle: The West India Company’s Volte-Face in 1638–39,” De Halve Maen: Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America 73 (2000), pp. 3–9.

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to foreign colonies were rarely condoned. Admittedly, some shipments were allowed to take place from Dutch Brazil to the Lesser Antilles after a large rebellion broke out in Brazil in 1645,47 but this was by no means the beginning of a regular traffic in slaves.48 Nor were the Lesser Antilles the recipients of many smuggled Africans or slaves taken from Iberian prizes after 1645; these were almost exclusively sold to Spanish colonies.49 Furthermore, the capacity of the Dutch to supply slaves was seriously affected by the loss of Luanda, their main source of African labour, in 1648. Not until the latter days of the Dutch period in Brazil (1630–1654) are there signs of a restructuring of the slave trade that benefited the English and French colonies.50 Subsequently, shipowners routinely left the decision where to sell the slaves to their captains. In one instance, a captain was told that Barbados would be the preferred destination “[a]nd in case of not obtaining leave, then goe to Martinico, St. Christopher and Eustatias or other of the Leeward Ilands.”51 Other Dutch slave ships were directed to Buenos Aires, but this trade was short-lived. Within a decade, Curaçao emerged as the destination par excellence for Dutch slavers. The small island off Venezuela was transformed into the main centre of slave distribution for the Spanish American colonies.52

47 Likewise, Dutch smugglers occasionally arrived with slaves, such as the Tamandare, which carried 300 Africans from Angola to Barbados in 1646: Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650. Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen, 2000), pp. 259, 278. 48 Batie makes too much of the events taking place in 1645: Robert Carlyle Batie, “Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples on the English and French Antilles, 1624–1654,” in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd eds., Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader (Kingston: Ian Randle, London, 1991), pp. 37–55, 47. 49 Franz Binder, “Die zeeländische Kaperfahrt 1654–1662.” Archief uitgegeven door het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (1976), pp. 40–92, 53. 50 In 1653, the West India Company allowed private merchants to sell African slaves in the West Indies: WIC Directors to Director General Petrus Stuyvesant and Council of New Netherland. Amsterdam, July 6, 1653. In: Charles T. Gehring, Correspondence 1647–1653. New Netherland Documents Series, Volume XI (Syracuse, 2000), pp. 214–215. Incidentally, the Company had allowed residents of New Netherland the previous year to import slaves from Africa for agricultural purposes: WIC directors to the inhabitants of Manhattan. Amsterdam, April 4, 1652, in ibid., p. 160. 51 The captain in question was “Henry Cornelison” and his ship the Hare of Memblicke: Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten, pp. 187–188. 52 Binder, “Zeeländische Kaperfahrt,” pp. 54–55. Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden, 1998), Chapter 6.

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All things considered, therefore, it would seem that in the early stages of colonization, the English slave trade to Barbados must have been more significant than most historians have realized.53 Reports of the governors of Dutch Elmina imply that “the estimated yearly average of slave imports into the British Caribbean could well have been carried” by English ships only during the years 1645–1647. The Dutch also counted a total of 75 English slavers on the Gold Coast alone from 1652 through 1657.54

IV In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch were deprived of more than northern Brazil. The WIC’s other mainland colony of New Netherland met a similarly inglorious end. These territorial losses coincided with a wave of protectionist measures, both in Europe and the wider Atlantic world, which helped put an end to Dutch commercial supremacy. For a long time, the economic problems afflicting other countries in the seventeenth century hardly affected the Low Countries. Economically as much as artistically, this was the Dutch Golden Age. Commercial relations were established with a number of hitherto unexplored areas, which helped the Dutch to establish supremacy in international long-distance trade.

53 Cf. Larry Gragg, “‘To Procure Negroes’: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–60,” Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995), pp. 65–84. Van den Boogaart et al., La expansión holandesa, p. 161. For the Dutch slave trade to the French Caribbean, some implausible numbers have been thrown around. One contemporary source claimed that in Martinique, the Dutch sold as many as 12,000–13,000 Africans within one year (1664–65), Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par le François (4 vols., Paris, 1667–1671), III, pp. 201–202. Even if we would allow for an intensive trade conducted by Dutch smugglers, that figure is disproportionately high, since the average number of slaves transported to the New World in the third quarter of the seventeenth century from all parts of Africa combined was under 9,000: Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2000), p. 49. Finally, it is clear from other sources that Barbados dominated slave imports in English America in this period. In 1672, there were still no more than 2,600 slaves in all English Leeward islands combined: David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), p. 41n. 54 Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, 1596–1650,” in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn eds. The uncommon market. Essays in the economic history of the Atlantic slave trade (New York, San Francisco and London, 1979), pp. 353–375, 371–372.

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Rationalization in business operations and the use of technological innovations spread to many sectors, and the labour market expanded continuously, as the boom of trade and industry in the northern Netherlands was sustained by a continuous influx of rural residents into the towns. Amsterdam emerged as the commercial centre of Europe. Nonetheless, economic factors do not suffice to explain the remarkable Dutch mercantile success. The political unrest in many parts of Europe, characteristic of the so-called General Crisis, benefited the Dutch merchants in more than one way. The Thirty Years War not only contributed to the demise of Italian and French commercial dominance in the Mediterranean, it also prevented commercial rivals to challenge Dutch supremacy in the German markets.55 As the era of civil wars and international warfare came to an end, there was an upsurge in mercantilism. France and Sweden introduced prohibitive tariffs and other restrictive measures, including a devastating French royal ban on mercantile dealings of colonial subjects with the Dutch, initially issued under the pretext of an epidemic of plague in Amsterdam. The ban led to several revolts, both in Martinique and Saint-Domingue. The planters’ wishes were not heeded and Dutch traders beat a hasty retreat.56 The English Navigation Acts had anticipated the trend to protectionism in France and Sweden. The first Act of 1651 stipulated that foreign goods had to be transported directly from the place of origin to English settlements. It was also forbidden to transport products from Asia, Africa or America to England, Ireland, or other English possessions, except in ships owned by Englishmen or colonists. The second Act, passed in 1660, required that only English ships were to carry the imports and exports of the American colonies.57 Whether or not English merchants were its architects,58 the first Navigation Act was harmful to Dutch Atlantic trade. But initially,

55 Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 97–101. De Vries and Van der Woude, Nederland 1500–1815, p. 402. 56 Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century (Baltimore, 1950), pp. 89–90. Nellis M. Crouse, The French Struggle for the West Indies 1665–1713 (London, 1966 [1943]), pp. 4, 10–11. Paul Butel, Les Caraïbes au temps des filibustiers XVI e–XVII e siècles (Paris, 1982), pp. 81–82, 97, 102. 57 Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols., New Haven, 1938), IV, pp. 36–37, 61–62. 58 Cf.: Steven C.A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the making of English foreign policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996).

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English merchants and consumers also paid a high price. There was a sharp rise in freight rates and thus in the market prices of American plantation crops, as a result of which the large quantities of tobacco that had previously been shipped to Dutch ports remained unsold. To add insult to injury, English consumers showed little interest in the varieties that were popular in the Netherlands.59 It has been argued that the long-term effect of the Navigation Acts was to ensure that England became a fearsome rival of the Dutch in international trade. The overall consequence of foreign mercantilism was detrimental because—at least officially—the Dutch were now left with a relatively small market: the domestic Dutch one and the German hinterland.60 The enforcement of the Navigation Acts had a considerable impact on Dutch commerce on either side of the Atlantic. Most of the 300 ships seized in English waters in the 1650s for contravening the Act were Dutch, often carrying Indonesian spices. The Dutch were even more vulnerable in the Caribbean. An English naval expedition to the Lesser Antilles, launched shortly after the enactment of the first Navigation Act, captured 24 Dutch ships at Barbados worth £100,000 sterling, making it clear that London was completely uncompromising. Dutch merchants trading with Barbados pleaded in vain with the Estates General to send a fleet to capture the island.61 A few years later, in 1655–56, an English squadron surprised two-dozen Dutch merchantmen off Barbados.62 Although the Navigation Laws were followed by a reorganization of Anglo-Dutch trade, it would be simplistic to infer that there was

59 Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607–1688 (New York, 1959), pp. 116, 117. 60 De Vries and Van der Woude, Nederland 1500–1815, pp. 403, 477. 61 Appleby, “English Settlement,” p. 99. Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen, 1971), p. 330. 62 Wilson, Profit and Power, p. 87. Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten, pp. 182–184. These cases are not related to those of Dutch vessels confiscated during the first Anglo-Dutch war. English privateers seized at least eighteen Zeeland ships with a combined tonnage of circa 4,080 on their return voyage from the West Indies: NA Staten-Generaal 5765, Directors of the WIC, Chamber of Zeeland, to the Estates General. Middelburg, March 26, 1654. The West India Company chambers of Amsterdam, Zeeland, and Delft & Meuse assessed total damage at circa 700,000 guilders: NA Staten-Generaal 12576.68, Index sive Repertorium querularum et postulatorum, quae ex parte mercatorum aliorum Belgarum contra populos Reipublicae Angliae. In addition, more than a dozen storehouses owned by Dutch merchants were sequestered in St. Christopher in 1654: Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, p. 309n.

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a direct causal connection between these phenomena in all corners of the Atlantic world. We have to take other factors into account. English wool sellers, for instance, began to by-pass the United Provinces, as Dutch production of high-grade woollens came to rely on imports from Spain and Anatolia. On the other hand, England developed into a very important outlet for Dutch linen; these exports had an annual value of two million guilders in the late seventeenth century.63 Nevertheless, the Netherlands registered an increasingly adverse trade balance with England, in part due to English re-exports of Virginia tobacco, cotton fabrics from India, and many other exotic wares.64 The Navigation Acts had further repercussions on Dutch shipping to North America, especially after the Duke of York had conquered New Netherland. Trade did not come to an immediate standstill, however. Shipments of merchandise from Amsterdam to Fort Orange, the former Dutch stronghold on the upper Hudson River, continued until the late 1680s and started to taper off only in the 1690s.65 Nor did merchants from Holland suddenly shun New York. The United Provinces were even officially permitted to dispatch an annual ship. What is more, successive New York governors looked the other way when additional Dutch ships dropped anchor. After the Dutch reconquest of New York had been reversed in 1674, Anglo-Dutch trade in New York increasingly complied with the Navigation Acts. Most ships now sailed to and from Amsterdam through the outport of Dover, where they cleared customs. They would return with goods consigned to English and Dutch merchants. New Yorkers, Dutchmen, and Englishmen joined hands as investors in these ventures.66 Dutch New Yorkers were not always on good terms with local customs collectors. Their problems came to a head in 1691, when the collectors challenged the mercantile activities of the Dutch New

63

De Vries and Van der Woude, Nederland 1500–1815, pp. 490–491. Ibid., p. 561. By the early eighteenth century, the share of Dutch merchants in the London-Amsterdam trade had shrunk to about one-eighth: Alice Clare Carter, Getting, Spending and Investing in Early Modern Times: Essays on Dutch, English and Huguenot Economic History (Assen, 1975), p. 101. 65 Jan Kupp, “Aspects of New York-Dutch Trade under the English, 1670–1674.” New York Historical Society Quarterly 58 (1974), p. 141. 66 D.J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan merchants in the seventeenth century,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1995), pp. 392–393. 64

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Yorkers. Their right to conduct trade in the city was not self-evident, so the argument ran. They should pay “strangers duties,” since they were not natives of New York, nor had they been naturalized by acts of parliament. The commissioners of the customs and the Treasury eventually decided in favour of the merchants.67 As this agreement did not cover merchants residing in the Netherlands, they needed to use all kinds of legal fiction to circumvent zealous customs officers. A popular method was to register a ship or cargo in the name of a New Yorker in order to conceal Dutch ownership.68 Legal fiction was also fairly common in the most lucrative of trades between North America and the United Provinces: tobacco. In this traffic, the initiative shifted first to settlers of the Chesapeake, then to Irishmen and Scotsmen who semi-legally shipped tobacco to Dutch ports. The Scots nominally owned the vessels used in this ScottishDutch trade, but it is unclear what role Dutchmen played. Dutch ownership and part-ownership of Scottish ships was so widespread that registering them as British in conformity with the Navigation Acts proved problematic in 1706, when the Union was discussed.69 What happened to the Caribbean connections? Although a good length of time elapsed before Dutch control of local trade weakened,70 navigation between the United Provinces and the English West Indies did decline markedly in the latter part of the century. The transatlantic link was replaced by various relations between Dutch and English colonies in the Caribbean. Breaches of the Navigation Acts abounded. Most of the tobacco crop of Montserrat and Antigua in the 1670s, for instance, was carried in Dutch vessels to St. Eustatius. On their way to Europe, Dutch ships from Statia docked at a number of English colonies and obtained large amounts of sugar.71 To the dismay of some authorities, the produce had been acquired by illicit means. In the same decade, during the English occupation of St. Eustatius and the even smaller Dutch rock island of Saba, English 67

Andrews, Colonial Period, IV, p. 73n. Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten, pp. 350–353. 69 T.C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 1660–1707 (Edinburgh and London, 1963), pp. 55–56. 70 Petition of merchants, planters, and others concerned in the good government of St. Christopher’s, to the Council of State. January 25, 1659. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers, 1574–1660, p. 473. 71 George Louis Beer, The Old Colonial System 1660–1754 (2 vols., Gloucester, MA, 1958), II, pp. 39–40, 43. Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, p. 336. 68

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officials reported that “. . . these islands of no advantage, but rather of disadvantage to his Majesty, being refuges for any who design fraud, and were better under water than above.”72 Curaçao must have come under the same category. Flying in the face of the Navigation Acts, it supplied Jamaica in the wake of the English conquest (1655) with a great variety of European goods. Whether settlers actually abided by the laws depended in part on the zeal of Jamaica’s authorities, who realized that free trade with Curaçao would solve several problems. Colonel William Beeston described Jamaica’s condition in the late seventeenth century as follows: The mean people, who are the strength, get away, as they find opportunity, to the Northern plantations, where they hope to live more quietly; and the better sort are discouraged, for, no supply of goods coming from England, all goods are excessive dear. Yet the laws are so hard on us that we must not be supplied by the Dutch our neighbours, where we could have what we wanted at easy rates. No ships come to buy or carry away our produce, yet we must not sell it to strangers nor send it anywhere but to England—thus people complain, and this makes them think themselves to be but a sort of slaves, and all that they labour and hazard for to be but precarious. Unless some speedy measures be taken, this place must come to nothing.73

While this message had an element of truth, Beeston was exaggerating. Jamaica itself would soon be an entrepôt similar to Curaçao, carrying on a daily trade with the Spanish islands and the mainland. As if by agreement, the English and the Dutch divided the Spanish territories into semi-permeable spheres of commercial influence. Trade with Venezuela became a Curaçaoan prerogative, whereas

72 Answer to inquiries sent to Colonel Stapleton, Governor of the Leeward Islands, by commands of the Lords of Trade and Plantations by Sir Robert Southwell. November 22, 1676 (Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series 1675–1676, p. 498). Such statements ignore the remarkable stance of Statia’s Dutch settlers during the siege by a Zeeland fleet of the English-occupied island in June of 1673. Not only did the Dutch make up more than half of the enemy combatants, they had taken up arms of their own volition. After the Dutch victory, the settlers paid a heavy penalty, as the fort was demolished and set on fire along with the adjacent houses and the warehouses. C. de Waard, ed. De Zeeuwsche expeditie naar de West onder Cornelis Evertsen den Jonge 1672–1674. Nieuw Nederland een jaar onder Nederlandsch bestuur (’s-Gravenhage, 1928), pp. 28, 29, 31, 116. 73 Sir William Beeston to William Blathwayt. Jamaica, March 18, 1697, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1681–1685, J.W. Fortescue ed. (London, 1898), p. 403, Doc. 824.

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New Granada fell to the merchants of Jamaica. Jamaicans and Curaçaoans did not shy away from collaboration, however. An attempt was even made to join forces in the trade to Spanish America, after a Dutchman secured a subcontract of the so-called asiento de negros, the official monopoly of slave trade to the Spanish colonies. The Dutch appointed two factors on Jamaica, where supplies were at hand and prices were said to be under those at Curaçao. Of 8213 slaves shipped to the Spanish American ports in 1683–88, over onefifth (21.8%) had been purchased in Jamaica.74 Curaçao also had close ties with the eastern seaboard of North America. There were more obstacles to trade between Dutchmen and Englishmen here than only the prevailing laws. The English conquest of New Amsterdam in 1664 obviously created new conditions. Shipments of African slaves from Curaçao came to a complete stop, but were resumed after Curaçao had been declared a free port in 1675.75 Other trade items carried to New York, as well as South Carolina,76 Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, included Venezuelan cacao (“a much-liked luxury”), Peruvian silver, as well as textiles and various other European commodities. This trade was at least as significant to Curaçao as it was to the English plantations, since North America developed into a major source of bread, flour and other provisions.77 Without a regular supply of provisions, the frequent dry spells would have reduced the island of Curaçao to famine. There is a strikingly large number of references to illegal Curaçaoan transactions in British colonial correspondence between 1696 and

74

Klooster, Illicit Riches, pp. 205–206. Ibid., p. 108. 76 In the 1710s and ’20s, ships from Holland maintained a regular trade with Dutch- and English-owned plantations in South Carolina: Cecil Headlam ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, March, 1720 to December, 1721. Preserved in the Public Record Office (London, 1933), p. 207. 77 Colonel Robert Quarry to Council of Trade and Plantations. Philadelphia, September 6, 1698. “They [the residents of Philadelphia] have so long encouraged illegal trade by exporting tobacco to Scotland and importing European goods from Curaçoa, gaining great advantage thereby, that they will not part with it.” Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Papers 27 October, 1697–31 December, 1698 (1905), p. 415. Cf. Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, February 1708–9 to March 1714–5, p. 90. NA NWIC 1149, Daily registers Curaçao, June 30, 1711–January 7, 1712. A cargo of grain sent to Curaçao during a period of scarcity led to a bread riot in Boston in 1713: M. Halsey Thomas ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729. Newly Edited from the Manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society (New York, 1973), p. 715. 75

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1702, particularly concerning trade in Philadelphia and New York.78 It is likely that these ties dated back many years, but they did not attract much attention until the late seventeenth century. In 1696 vice-admiralty courts were created in British North America, in a move to disqualify the common law courts from sitting in judgment upon the principal colonial maritime-commercial disputes. Common law courts had previously administered justice by means of jury trial, and juries tended to give offenders of the Navigation Acts the benefit of the doubt.79 Dutch Suriname was part of less illicit networks. In exchange for hardwood, sugar, and its by-products rum and molasses, New York and New England sent provisions and horses to the Dutch plantation colony.80 In addition, Suriname and Barbados were thrown together. While both produced sugar, Barbados boasted a wide variety of products, including meat, fish, vegetables, bread, and implements. In exchange, woody Suriname provided Barbados’s deforested plantations with timber and firewood.81

V In many different ways Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen on the one hand, and Hollanders and Zeelanders, on the other, collabo-

78 Edward Randolph to the Commissioners of Customs, November 10, 1696. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series 15 May, 1696–31 October, 1697, p. 213. Francis Nicholson, Governor of Maryland, to Council of Trade and Plantations, July 13, 1697. Ibid., 547. Francis Jones to William Penn. Goodman’s Fields, November 13, 1697. CSP Colonial 27 October, 1697–31 December, 1698, p. 24. Governor the Earl of Bellomont to Council of Trade and Plantations. New York, May 8, 1698. Ibid., p. 223. Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of the Treasury. New York, May 25, 1698, in Brodhead, New York Colonial Manuscripts, Volume 4, pp. 317–318. Colonel Robert Quarry to Council of Trade and Plantations. Philadelphia, September 6, 1698. Ibid., p. 415. Some years later, in 1709, a complaint was raised before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations that both Curaçao and St. Thomas were provided with rum, sugar, cotton, indigo and provisions from the Leeward Islands. Provisions were also imported from Carolina, Pennsylvania and New York. Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (14 vols., London, 1920–1938), 2, p. 90. Cf. Leonard Woods Labaree, Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors 1670–1776 (2 vols., New York and London, 1935), II, p. 728. 79 Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols., New Haven, 1938), IV, pp. 224–228. 80 Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten, pp. 294–301. 81 Ibid., pp. 222, 252–253, 262.

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rated in the Atlantic world. Not always acting in accordance with prevailing laws, their contraband trade nevertheless served ordinary people in their quest for a decent life.82 Dutch aid, commercial and otherwise, was especially important to several fledgling English colonies in North America and the Caribbean, even if the dimensions of the Dutch relief efforts have been exaggerated sometimes. The wars that pitted the neighbouring countries against each other three times between 1652 and 1674 changed the relationship between them. But while they may have left England the more powerful nation, they did not sever the strong ties that bound the two Atlantic powers.

82 However, settlers of England’s colonies did not invariably benefit from smuggling with foreign vessels, as was shown in 1693. A huge Dutch ocean-going ship, presumably in transit from Amsterdam to Curaçao and Suriname, cast anchor in New York and stayed in port for a number of months. During that period, the Dutch proceeded to sell their cargo of linen cloth in exchange for foodstuffs. Governor Fletcher connived at the sale of so many provisions that the food situation became precarious. The people “grew clamorous” and petitioned the governor to dismiss the ship. This was done accordingly. Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Treasury. New York, November 7, 1698. Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series, 27 October, 1697–31 December, 1698, ed. J.W. Fortescue (London, 1905), p. 531.

SECTION FOUR

POWER AND SETTLEMENT

CHAPTER TEN

RICHARD LIGON AND THE THEATRE OF EMPIRE Jane Stevenson

This chapter on one of the earliest English accounts of the West Indies is concerned not so much with its subject as its author. Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes has naturally been much used by Caribbean historians, who have extracted the map (the island’s first), and picked over his text for his descriptions of early sugar technology, Bridgetown, and the story of Inkle and Yarico.1 However Ligon himself is elided from these concerns, which attempt, as far as possible, to see through him, rather than through his eyes. Yet his attitude towards the English colonial enterprise has an interest of its own. Ligon’s book, which was published in 1657 and based on a sojourn in Barbados from 1647–50, begins with this substantial sentence: Having been censur’d by some (whose Judgements I cannot controll, and therefore am glad to allow) for my weakness and Indiscretion, that having never made proof of the Sea’s operation, and the several faces that watry Element puts on, and the changes and chances that happen there, from Smooth to Rough, from Rough to Raging Seas, and High going Billows, (which are killing to some Constitutions,) I should in the last Scene of my life, undertake to run so long a Risco, as from England to the Barbadoes; And truly I should without their help conclude my self guilty of that Censure, had I not the refuge of an old Proverb to fly to, which is, Need makes the old wife trot—for having lost (by a Barbarous Riot) all that I had gotten by the painful travels and cares of my youth, by which means I was stript and rifled of all I had, left destitute of a subsistence, and brought to such an Exigent, as I must famish or fly; and looking about for friends, who

1 A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (first edition, 1657, 2nd, London: Peter Parker and Thomas Guy, 1673, ed. J. Edward Hutson, Barbados, 2000), p. 78. Ligon names Yarico, whom he met. Inkle acquired his name later (1711) at the hands of Richard Steele, who fictionalised the account. See Frank Felsenstein, ed., English Trader, Indian Maid. Representing Gender, Race and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore and London, 1999).

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chapter ten are the best supporters in so staggering a condition, found none, or very few, whom griefs and had not depress’d, or worn out, Banishment absented or Death devour’d; so that in stead of these near and Native comforters, I found my self a stranger in my own Countrey, and therefore resolv’d to lay hold on the first opportunity that might convey me to any other part of the World, how far distant soever, rather than abide here.

This is like the opening of a novel—to be precise, like the opening of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Like the fictional Crusoe, Ligon locates himself socially and culturally. An elderly man (significantly higher in social rank than Crusoe), once wealthy, goes overseas, having lost all he possessed. But it is clear from the beginning that we are in the hands of a good narrator, and. as he says, a “competent Judge.” Ligon discriminates a great deal, he weighs and balances with the European élite man’s certainty that his judgments have absolute value and are based on impersonal criteria. For example, on balance, are the tropics pleasanter than the temperate zones? Let us consider the question sense by sense, he suggests, and does so; an educated man’s method of argument. On the basis of Albrecht Dürer’s canons for absolute human symmetry, are black people beautiful? Are planters good or bad? Are slaves rightfully slaves?

I Ligon’s self-representation—a man of good family, betrayed by fortune, and subsequently the hero of picaresque adventures, aligns him with the fallen princes of innumerable storytelling rencontres in romances such as Astrophil and Stella. Importantly, unlike Defoe’s hero, he is, so to say, Sir Robinson Crusoe; and the focus of his narrative is not the contrivance of a middle-class English lifestyle in the Tropics, but of an upper-class one; less on beef, beer and bread than on banqueting, music, hunting and hawking. He is therefore a witness to a phase of the English colonial enterprise in which class was still significant. Ligon did not misrepresent. His family were Worcestershire gentry, their seat being Madresfield, near Malvern.2 They had colonial 2 The first Ligon named in a pedigree given to the college of heralds in 1569 was George Ligon, flourishing in the fourteenth century, though the family is said

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connections: Richard Ligon’s oldest brother, Thomas, born 1586, went to Virginia in 1641 together with his second cousin, Sir William Berkeley, who was going out as royal governor, and another cousin, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a soldier in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, later became governor of Maine.3 Richard, probably born c. 1590, spent time at court under Charles I, and may possibly have been a page to Anne of Denmark. He names as friends and acquaintances John Coprario, ‘a rare composer of musick’, who was music-master to Charles II when he was a child, and John Tradescant the royal gardener, and he was also friendly with Brian Duppa, chaplain to the royal household and later bishop of Salisbury: letters between them, exchanged on 12 July and 5 September, 1653 are printed at the beginning of the first edition of his book, and he states that it was Duppa who encouraged him to publish his experiences. He evidently hunted with the court, since he recalls having chased the stag in Windsor Forest, presumably with the royal buckhounds. However, his own preferred recreation was the highly gentlemanly art of falconry. He was also a keenly interested amateur painter, fencer, cook, and musician, he played the theorbo and sang, and he was interested in the theory of music. Like Sir Kenelm Digby, whom he rather resembles, he was an accomplished cook, recording his way with fricassees and other meat-dishes, and also his ingenious and, he claims, successful attempts to make pastry out of cassava flour.4 It is hardly too much to say that there is the first Caribbean cookbook scattered at intervals through the True and Exact History. However, though he was of good descent and well connected, Ligon’s family home, Elston Farm on Salisbury Plain, was a modest one. Moreover, he was one of eight children, which may account

to have come over with William the Conqueror. Richard Ligon’s grandfather was William Ligon of Madresfield, who married a daughter of Lord Berkeley and died in 1567: his father Thomas was his grandfather’s third son. Richard himself was one of eight. See P.F. Campbell, Some Early Barbadian History (Barbados, 1993), pp. 128–47 (an earlier and more accessible version of his work is ‘Richard Ligon’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 37.3 (1985), pp. 215–38). Otherwise unattributed facts about Ligon are from Campbell. 3 Campbell, Early Barbadian History, p. 128. 4 It was socially permissible for an aristocrat to have a practical interest in cookery: see The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (eds) (Totnes, 1997), pp. xli–xliii.

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for the fact that none of the five boys were matriculated at Oxford or Cambridge, though his prose style suggests that he at least went to school.5 But he did not grow up with a living in prospect; he needed to support his claim to gentility in some fashion. He refers to “the painful travels and cares of his youth,” and his adult skills included surveying and engineering, conceivably acquired as part of a military education. He was employed in Barbados to design and make roads, and his book includes the first map of the island, though this is unlikely to be his own work. He also had enough arithmetic to make complex calculations and draw up a balance sheet.6 By whatever means, Ligon was evidently successful in making money. Unfortunately for him, he invested his fortune in a scheme for the drainage and reclamation of the Lindsey Levels (Lincolnshire), headed by two courtiers, Montagu Bertie, 2nd Earl of Lindsey and Sir William Killigrew. This drainage scheme was bitterly and effectively opposed by the fen-men: in a petition to the House of Lords submitted in May, 1642 from “Sir William Killigrew, Edward Heron, esq., Richard Ligon and other participants with the Earl of Lindsey,” the complainants state that they “have been by force and violence and the assembly of many hundreds of people in a mutinous and rebellious manner thrown out of their lawful possessions, their works and drains, that have cost near £60,000.”7 But by June, England was at war. The ‘undertakers’ were people closely connected with the Court, and Lincolnshire was under Parliamentarian control, so there was no possible hope of help or restitution.8 Ligon was not left resourceless at this point, but unfortunately, he seems to have bought out the interest of Sir William’s cousin, Sir

5

Westminster School, perhaps? His friend Duppa was an alumnus of Westminster, and Ligon was living in ‘London or Westminster’ in 1646 when he made his application to compound for delinquency. A poem by a distant cousin in the first edition of his True and Exact History refers to him in these terms: And (though your Judge should know the several Arts Both what the Colledge and the Court imparts . . . Evidently, he gave the impression of being an educated man. 6 Interestingly, his brother Thomas became Surveyor of Henrico County, Virginia, suggesting that he had a similar range of abilities. 7 See Clive Holmes, ‘Drainers and Fenmen: The Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century, Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 166–95. 8 Campbell, Early Barbadian History, pp. 131–2.

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Henry Killigrew in the Lindsey Levels. He made himself responsible for a debt of £1500 incurred by Sir Henry, which was set against the promise of an estate in Cornwall in which Killigrew’s other cousin, Jane Berkeley, also had some interest, revealed by the fact that Ligon agreed to pay her an annuity of £200 per annum. The Cornish end of the story is revealed in a pamphlet: Proofs that Jane Berkeley and Sir William Killigrew combined to defraud Richard Lygon of an estate left him by Henry Killigrew.9 Although Ligon subsequently willed his acquired interest in the Levels to his cousin Edward Berkeley, he was never able to secure undisputed title either to these lands in Lincolnshire or to those granted as surety in Cornwall by Sir Henry Killigrew.10 In 1647, when Ligon left England, his situation was desperate, with all that he owned tied up in unrecoverable investments.11 Ligon’s connections with the court and the Royalist cause may have led him to fight in the King’s armies, but there is no evidence for his having done so. He was in Exeter in 1646 when it finally surrendered to Parliamentary forces on 13 April, in what capacity is unknown.12 But there he met Thomas Modyford, a barrister, and son of an Exeter merchant, who had been a member of the Royalist force which occupied that city in September 1643 and had been appointed one of the royal commissioners for the administration of Devon by Charles I. In 1646, Modyford, smarting from the financial wounds inflicted by the Committee for Compounding, decided, together with his 9 The Killigrews were a large and ramifying Cornish family strongly associated with the Court through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (many of them called William or Henry). Jane Berkeley and Sir William Killigrew were both first cousins of the Sir Henry Killigrew who conveyed his estate to Ligon. 10 Ligon died at Pylle, a village north-west of Bristol, where his cousin Edward Berkeley (not a connection of Jane Berkeley) was Lord of the Manor, in 1662. 11 As the pamphlet (which Thomason dates (MS addition in BL copy) to May 18, 1653) suggests, Jane Berkeley was successful in forcing her own claim to this estate, leaving Ligon penniless. The debt which put him in the Upper Bench Prison was this debt of Sir Henry’s. His letter to Brian Duppa was written from thence on July 12, so the writing of the True History was apparently his last attempt to restore his fortunes. 12 On 11 May, 1646, Thomas Modyford came up before the Parliamentarian Committee for Compounding, and compounded for delinquency in bearing arms for the King, and in August, it fined him £35. Ligon applied to compound on 2 October, renewing the plea on 6 November 1650 after his return from Barbados, and on 4 March, 1650/1 was eventually fined £2 10s, which suggests both his impecuniosity and absence of evidence that he had fought zealously in the King’s cause.

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brother-in-law Thomas Kendall (a London merchant with overseas trading interests), that they would try their luck as planters. They suggested to Ligon that he accompany them as Modyford’s righthand man: while he had no capital to put in, he evidently had a range of relevant skills, and was highly intelligent. Modyford and Ligon embarked on the Achilles, a ship of 350 tons possibly owned by Kendall, in the Downs on 16 June 1647, and arrived in Barbados at the beginning of September.

II The success or failure of Modyford’s enterprise is not germane to this chapter, which is concerned with Ligon as a particular kind of observer, an upper class white male with court associations and genuine pretensions to culture. Stephen Greenblatt has encouraged us to see the upper class, white male perspective of early modern Europe as a highly unified one, notably in the much-cited paper, “Invisible Bullets.”13 However, the vicissitudes of seventeenth-century politics cast the luckless Ligon on the fresh green breast of the New World as an aesthete rather than any of the usual kinds of adventurer; and his perspective on his experience is surprisingly at variance from anything which might have been predicted. But Ligon’s perceptions are not only highly individual, he foregrounds his own aesthetic response, one highly nuanced by the elite entertainment of the Stuart court. Some kind of aesthetic response to the world outside Europe was not unknown in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but the tone is generally one of dry reportage. For example, Richard Eden notes that somewhere in Guinea: “their princes & noblemen use to pounce and rase their skinnes with pretie knots in divers formes, at it were branched damaske, thinking that to be a decent ornament.”14 But Eden does not give his own view of decorative scarification, though his choice of comparanda signals his awareness of a correspondence with contemporary European decorative taste. Ligon, by contrast, puts himself in the picture. 13 S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA, 1988), pp. 21–65. 14 Europeans in West Africa, 1450 –1560, Hakluyt Society 2nd ser. 87 (London, 1942). Richard Eden’s account of Windham’s voyage to Guinea (1553), II, p. 343.

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One aspect of Ligon’s reportage which is in line with common English response to the New World is a focus on parallels—unsurprising in a culture which retained the medieval sense that the natural world unfolded a series of parallels and correspondences (evidenced by designations such as sea-anemone, sea-lion, sea-cucumber and so forth), reflected in The Tempest in the concept of a ‘sea-change’, and in Ligon’s text. One of the chapters recording his experiences on the voyage out is on “hunting and hawking at sea”: to his eye, porpoises hunt in packs, like hounds, and a particular sea-bird (which from its reported behaviour is probably the small black albatross called a mollymawk) is, to him, “a kind of sea Hawk.” So too with the peoples of the New World. As Greenblatt observes, “sixteenthand seventeenth-century Englishmen characteristically describe the Indians in terms which closely replicate their own self-conception, above all in matters of status.”15 For example, Richard Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) reports that the Algonquian weroan is a “great Lord,” and speaks of “chief ladies,” “virgins of good parentage,” and so forth. Yet no such accounts represent the other world as equal; the apparently similar cultures and peoples of the New World are yet in significant ways, clearly inferior. This seems at first to be Ligon’s assumption also, when he was dining with the commander of Sao Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands (whom he refers to as the Padre), on his way to Barbados. He establishes his identity as a sophisticated London theatre-goer, amused by what passed for current in a colonial situation: Dinner being near half done . . . in comes an old fellow . . . a Lute in his hand, and play’d us for a Novelty, The Passame sares galiard; a tune in great esteem, in Harry the fourth dayes, for when Sir John Falstaff makes his Amours to Mistress Doll Tear-sheet, Sneake and his Company, the admired Fidlers of that age, playes this tune, which put a thought into my head . . . what a long Time this Tune had in sayling from England to this place.16

15

Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 27. A True and Exact History, p. 17. 2 Henry IV 2.4. 200: ‘Enter musicians’: there are two musical interludes before the end of the scene (the tunes are not named). Ligon thus in fact provides the best evidence for existence, let alone the fame, of Sneake’s band, which otherwise rests on two jokes: in Heywood, 1 The Iron Age (1612–13, printed 1632) 3. 1. 339–42: ‘Wee shall have him one of Sneakes noise’, 16

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Henry IV, pt II was performed at Whitehall in 1612/13, and possibly at court in the 1620s: it seems likely that Richard Ligon was in the audience on one or other occasion.17 He presents the Padre as a figure of fun; a fat man in a clerical gown, unable to write a Latin letter without breaking Priscian’s head three or four times, and unable even to control his horse: he arrives on the scene in a great flurry, the horse having run away with him while he let go of the reins and clutched the pommel with both hands: “in this great discomposure, he was taken off by two Negroes, and set on his own legs.” The comic perception here is itself Shakespearean; there is something of Sir Nathaniel, for instance, in Ligon’s sketch. Yet, Ligon abandons this attitude of tolerant metropolitan sophistication almost immediately, when after dinner he found himself introduced to the Padre’s mistress, the first black woman mentioned in his narrative: a Negro of the greatest beauty and majesty together; that I ever saw in one woman. Her stature large, and excellently shap’d, well favour’d, full ey’d, and admirably grac’d; she wore on her head a roll of green Taffaty, strip’d with white and Philiamort, made up in manner of a Turbant, and over that a streight vayle, which she took off at pleasure. On her body next her Linnen, a Peticoat of orange Tawny and Sky colour; not done with Strait stripes, but wav’d, and upon that a mantle of purple silk, ingrayld with straw colour. This Mantle was large, and tyed with a knot of very broad black Ribbon, with a rich Jewel on her right shoulder, which came under her left arm, and so hung loose and carelessly, almost to the ground. On her Legs, she wore buskins of wetched Silk, deck’d with Silver lace, and Fringe; lac’d with sky colour, and pink’d between those laces. In her ears, she wore large Pendants; about her neck and on her arms, fair Pearls. But her eyes were her richest Jewels, for they were the largest and most oriental I have ever seen.18

and the anonymous The Wasp, or Subjects Precedent, c. 1636–1640: ‘[you] can turne fidler too, and sneake after my noise’. Ligon’s loose ‘that age’ is therefore probably 1610–30. 17 2 Henry IV, ed. René Weis (Oxford, 1998), p. 58, and 2 Henry IV, ed. A.R. Humphries (London, 1966), p. lxxxiv. The early-seventeenth-century abridgement/combination of both Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, ‘perhaps made for Court performance’, which was further revised in the hand of Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644), ‘possibly for private theatricals’. In any case, the context for this performance was a courtly one (thanks to Carol Morley for help with London theatre history). 18 A True and Exact History, pp. 17–18.

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It is important to notice that his admiration of this woman’s beauty is not undercut in any way whatsoever. He is concerned only to establish two corroborations to her beauty, one physical, one moral. Since the strong contrast of white teeth with black skin tends to make a black person’s teeth look whiter, at least from a distance, he wanted to know if her teeth were really as beautiful as they seemed. He therefore made a diplomatic approach. I was resolved after dinner to make an Essay what a present of rich silver, silk and gold Ribbon would do to persuade her to open her lips. Partly out of a Curiosity, to see whether her teeth were exactly white, and clean, as I hop’d they were . . . but it was not the main end of my enquiry; for there was now, but one thing more, to set her off in my opinion the rarest black Swan that I had ever seen, and that was her language, and graceful delivery of that, which was to unite and confirm a perfection in all the rest. . . . Finding her but slightly attended, and considering she was but the Padre’s Mistress, & therefore the more accessible, I made my addresses to her, by my interpreter; and told her, I had some Trifles made by the people of England, which for their value were not worthy her acceptance, yet for their Novelty, they might be of some esteem such having been worn by the great Queens of Europe, and intreated her to vouchsafe to receive them. She with much gravity, and reservedness, opened the paper; but when she lookt on them, the colours pleased her so, as she put her gravity into the loveliest smile that I have ever seen. And then shew’d her rows of pearls, so clean, white, orient, and well shaped, as Neptunes Court was never pav’d with such as these; and to shew whether was white, or more Orient, those or the whites of her eyes, she turn’d them up, & gave me such a look, as was a sufficient return for a far greater present.

Silver, silk and gold ribbon amounted to a present of considerable value, suitable for a noblewoman. They are not the equivalent of glass beads: gold and silver lace cost at least two shillings a yard.19 But far more interesting is Ligon’s statement that “her language, and graceful delivery . . . was to unite and confirm a perfection in all the rest.” A chorus of contemporary writers argued that silence was the best ornament of a woman, but a few also suggested that command of apposite and graceful speech was a grace suitable to women rulers.

19 Gold and silver lace figures are extrapolated from Exchequer of Receipt Miscellanea 343 (i): in 1610, the Queen paid £1,071.5s.0d for 10,920 yards of gold and silver lace (Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: the Theatre of the Stuart Court (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), 2 vols, I, p. 192).

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Diana Primrose, for example, in 1630, wrote of eloquence as one of the late Queen Elizabeth’s chief ornaments.20 It was not a note struck in Carolean court literature; though just before the Civil Wars, Sir Balthasar Gerbier set on foot an academy of learning, in which he gave a lecture on the art of well speaking aimed at “the ladies and honourable women of this nation.”21 Ligon’s perception of the Padre’s mistress’s physical grace also places her on a royal level. I . . . awaited her coming out, which was with far greater Majesty, and gracefulness, than I have seen Queen Anne, descend from the Chair of State, to dance the Mesures with a Baron of England, at a Masque in the Banquetting house.22

Notice also the phrase “Neptunes Court was never pav’d with such as these.” The phrasing inevitably evokes “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these” (Matthew 6.29). If Solomon in all his glory is in Ligon’s mind, so too, perhaps, is the eloquent, and black, Queen of Sheba. It is not, incidentally, the case that Ligon’s cavalier gallantry extended to women in general. Immediately juxtaposed with his account of the Padre’s mistress, we find the following: some passengers of the ship . . . desired leave to go ashoar, and took divers women along with them, to wash their linen. But (it seem’d) the Portugals and Negroes too, found them handsome and fit for their turns, and were a little Rude, I cannot say Ravish’d them; for the Major part of them, being taken from Bridewel, Turnball street, and such like places of education, were better natur’d than to suffer such violence; yet complaints were made, when they came aboard, both of such abuses, and stealing their linnen.23

20

Diana Primrose, A Chaine of Pearle, Or a memoriall of the peerles Graces, and Heroick Vertues of Queene Elizabeth of Glorious Memory (London, 1630), ‘Of Science’, pp. 10–11. There is much evidence for the praise of silence (e.g. in Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino, CA, 1982), and Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998, esp. pp. 67–8). But conversely, John M. McManaman Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), p. 113, shows that eloquence was praised in Renaissance Italian noblewomen, and this view entered English discourse via translated writers such as Baldessare Castiglione. 21 Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of King Charles the First, 2 vols (London, 1833), II, p. 31. 22 A True and Exact History, p. 18. 23 A True and Exact History, p. 19.

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(White) quondam whores, future indentured servants, merit only a shrug of the shoulders for being raped by a random selection of Cape Verde manhood. The Padre’s mistress, on the other hand, is described in terms which foreground her blackness and linking it with majesty and beauty. She is the senior lady of the island, but this in itself does not entirely account for her being described in ways more associable with such women as Elizabeth of Bohemia. Ligon’s reactions can be unpicked from various different angles, starting with some other contemporary aesthetic responses to black women. The only voice which seems actually to have anticipated him is that of Anthony Gibson in 1599: In truth, it is not lawfull for any upright iudgement to perswade it selfe, that beauty hath any perticular colour, a proportion definite, or a grace imaginary, for nature . . . hath made an Ethiopian or a Moore perfectly blacke, to be as fair as the whitest in our Europe . . . this is no monstrousness, but rather an excellence of the first heate.24

Kim Hall has brought together a useful collection of poems on black women, which she considers, probably rightly, to be a set of responses to, or reworkings of, George Herbert’s Aethiopissa (first published in 1662). As she demonstrates, the Royalist poets of the Civil War period all stress difference; the black would-be lover is grotesque, portentous, negative, or reified into smoke or a shadow. Even those poems most complimentary to black beauties play explicitly with paradox and antithesis, entirely absent in Ligon’s account.25 It is also worth noting Dudley Carleton’s comments on Anne of Denmark’s performance in the Masque of Blackness, a flat denial of beauty in non-white women: instead of visards their faces and arms up to the elbows were painted black which was disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known but it became them nothing so well as their red and white, and you cannot imagine a more ugly sight than a troop of lean-cheeked Moors.26

24 Anthony Gibson, A Woman’s Woorth, defended against all the men in the world (London, 1599), p. 57r–v. This work also contains a fascinating poem in a woman’s voice, not cited by Hall, in which the (brunette) speaker imagines herself actually becoming black and argues that she would be no less attractive. 25 The negative presentation of black women in Stuart England is analysed by Kim Hall in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London), 1995, pp. 269–90. She makes no use of Ligon in this work. 26 Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark Queen of England (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 103.

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Still more to the point is Thomas Gage’s nearly contemporary account of women and their fashions in Mexico City. Although he concedes black women’s sexual appeal, admitting that “the attire” of blackamoor and mulatto girls “is so light and their carriage so enticing, that many Spaniards even of the better sort (who are too prone to venery) disdain their wives for them,”27 Gage says not a word to suggest that their beauty should be judged, as Ligon does, by absolute canons of taste. Ligon’s aesthetic response to black women, however, is not confined to the Padre’s mistress alone, but is repeated with respect to women of lesser status. Later, sitting by a well (which inevitably evokes the first appearance of Rebecca in Genesis 24), he encountered black twin sisters of about fifteen years of age who had come to fetch water. Creatures, of such shapes, as would have puzzel’d Albert Durer, the great Master of Proportion, but to have imitated; and Tition, or Andrea de Sarta, for softness of muscle, and curiosity of colouring, though with a studied diligence, and a love both to the party and the work.28

His description proceeds at some length, assuming without question that it is appropriate to assess the girls’ bodies in terms of the criteria established by leading European artists, and emphasising that they emerge from such a scrutiny as perfect creatures. He leaves the subject with an apologetic contrast between adolescent beauty, and the mature loveliness of the Padre’s mistress, followed by an apology for his account of all three women: you will think it strange, that a man of my age and gravity should have so much to do with beauty and love: But I have three arguments to protect me; the first is, I have in my younger dayes been much enclin’d unto painting, in which, art, colour, favour and shape, is exercised; and these beauties being a proper subject of all these perfections (being in themselves perfect) I could not but consider them with a studied diligence.29 27 Thomas Gage, The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies [1648], ed. A.P. Newton (Guatemala City, 1946), p. 86. 28 A True and Exact History, pp. 22–23. Note also p. 73, on black Barbadians: ‘I have been very strict, in observing the shapes of these people, and for the men, they are very well timber’d . . . and may hold good with Albert Durer’s rules, who allows twice the length of the head, to the breadth of the shoulders, and twice the length of the face, to the breadth of the hips, and according to this rule the men are shap’d. But the women not . . . for I have seen very few of them whose hips have been broader than their shoulders.’ 29 A True and Exact History, p. 25. It was possible for a gentleman to be a painter,

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III To return now to the Padre’s mistress; the principal interpretative paradigm which Ligon brings to bear on her is Queen Anne as she appeared in the Masque of Blackness. Apart from Ligon’s actual evocation of Queen Anne dancing in the Banqueting House, if we reconsider the description of the Padre’s mistress, her garments are described precisely as a masque-costume, in terms of colour, costume and cut. The use of the word ‘buskins’ for her footwear is particularly suggestive, but the mantle hung from one shoulder appears in many designs of Inigo Jones.30 She is heavily jewelled: similarly, John Pory said of the dancers in Hymenaei that “I think they hired and borrowed all the principal jewels and ropes of perle both in court or citty.”31 Apart from the cut, the fabrics are also significant. The Cape Verde lady wore taffeta, silk, silver fringe, coloured laces; her garments were a riot of colour, most of them striped; green, white and philiamort (dead-leaf brown), orange-tawny and sky, watchet (blue), purple, silver laces. Compare the description above with that of a costume for Hymenaei, as described by Jones himself. the upper part of white cloth of silver [was] wrought with Juno’s birds and fruits: a loose under garment, full gathered, of carnation striped with silver and parted with a golden zone; beneath that another flowing garment of watchet cloth of silver, laced with gold . . . their haire being carelessly . . . bound under the circle of a rare and rich Coronet, adorn’d with all variety and choise of jewels; from the top of which, flow’d a transparent veile, down to the ground; whose verse, returning up, was fastened to either side in most sprightly manner. Their shoos were azure, and gold, set with rubies and diamonds; so were all their garments; and every part abounding in ornament.32

Still more relevant is the Masque of Blackness, presented by Queen Anne on 6 January 1605, at a cost of £3000, which Ligon probably for example Ligon’s contemporary, Sir Nathaniel Bacon, ‘the most accomplished amateur painter of the century’ (Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (London, 1995), pp. 222–3). 30 It is possibly worth noting that he also attributes this fashion to the girls by the well, and that Gage states that contemporary black and mulatto ladies of fashion in Mexico City sometimes tied an outer garment across the body in this way: Gage, The English-American, p. 86. 31 Jonson X, p. 466, quoted in Dynasties, p. 190. 32 Dynasties, description p. 190, illustrated p. 191. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, p. 105.

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saw. The masquers were the Queen, the Countesses of Bedford, Derby and Suffolk, the Ladies Rich, Bevill, Howard of Effingham, Wroth, and Walsingham, Lady Elizabeth Howard, Lady Anne Herbert, and Lady Susan Herbert, representing the Daughters of Niger. An Inigo Jones drawing of the costume survives. The ladies’ exposed arms, faces, and necks were painted black, and they wore an anklelength flowing garment (striped), with over it, a knee-length striped garment in a heavier fabric. Yet a third striped fabric was used for a magnificent mantle, hung diagonally across the body, and fastened with an elaborate knot on the right shoulder. A light fabric veiled the ladies’ upper arms, and they seem to have had elaborate headdresses with a sort of central aigrette.33 On their feet they had ‘buskins all to be sett with jewells’. The resemblance between this costume and that of the layered, striped garments of the lady of Cape Verde is quite striking: the daughters of Niger were not veiled, but as Orgel and Strong note, “the billowing veil . . . the layered striped skirt’ are repeated features of early Jones/Jonson masque costumes, as is the mantle.”34 Thus, whatever the lady of Cape Verde actually looked like,35 Ligon clearly perceived her as a masque heroine. It is also important to be aware that the costume he describes, even leaving her pearls aside, would have been extremely expensive; thus she is to be understood as rich, or fabulous, or both.36 ‘Taffaty’ cost 3/- a yard in 1608, “Mingld Coulered Taffaty”—such as the lady’s striped and wavy-striped garments came in at 13/4 an ell.37 A turban might take

33 Based on the headdress of Vecellio’s ‘sponsa Thessalonica’: see Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, p. 96. They also point on that Vecellio’s ‘virgo Aethiopica’ wore a striped skirt and an overmantle knotted on the right shoulder, and another detail of the masque costume, the over-tunic cut away at knee level in front, is found in Vecellio’s ‘miles Aethiopica’. 34 Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, pp. 101, 143–49. 35 An engraving of ‘Habits des Nègres du Cap Verd’ from about a hundred years later shows the inhabitants dressed simply in a white sarong, sometimes with another piece of white cloth worn around the shoulders (l’Abbé Prevost, trs. Histoire générale des voyages, 16 vols (Paris, 1746–70, illustration 18). Ligon, however, claims that in the 1640s, many of the inhabitants wore silk. 36 James I’s silk bill with Baptist Hicks between Michaelmas 1608 and August 1609 came to £14,083. See Philippa Scott, The Book of Silk (London, 1993), pp. 203–7. 37 Taffeta figures are from Hatfield House Family Papers 22: this is what Robert Cecil was paying for stuffs used to make masque costumes. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, pp. 122–3.

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two or three yards of fabric, a flowing robe might take ten, and a mantle (of two-coloured silk) described as “large,” at least as much.38 The use of very valuable materials such as figured and striped silks was a powerful status marker in early modern England. Sumptuary laws reflect this,39 and it can be illustrated by two negative examples that are relevant in another way: occasions on which members of the English elite chose to dress up as ‘Wild Irish’. In Sir Thomas Lee’s portrait ‘as a kern’, he is semi-nude, as an Irish foot soldier would be, but the shirt which is his main garment is finest linen, embroidered all over with blackwork, to demonstrate his true status.40 The contemporary Gaelic lord, Turlough O’Neill could have maintained a whole army of kerns on what it would have cost. Similarly, a Jacobean painting probably of Jane Lambarde, dressed à l’Irlandaise, demonstrates her actual status by the quality and costliness of her mantle’s materials: it survives, and it is made of two lengths of rich crimson velvet, lined with two lengths of silk shag . . . immediately beside the shag border is a band of silver and gold bobbin lace . . . at the end of each point are bunches of four or five strings of silver and gold thread

—we are demonstrably a long way from the hairy cloak of the wandering peasant women.41 The status of ‘prince or princess in disguise’, as it were, Perdita, is signalled by the fact that these garments are exquisite parallels to Irish dress. It was sumptuous garments, more than any other single indicator, which identified an individual

38 Valerie Cumming, ‘The Trousseau of Princess Elizabeth Stuart’, in Collectanea Londiniensia: Studies . . . Presented to Ralph Merrifield, ed. Joanna Bird, Hugh Chapman and John Clark, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society Special Paper 2, (London, 1978), pp. 315–28, 325, notes that each of the princess’s dresses took 20¾ yards of the basic material. 39 Seven Parliamentary statutes and ten proclamations of the Privy Council were issued between 1463 and 1600 defining what members of each class were permitted to wear (an indication that such legislation was futile). Ronald M. Berger, The Most Necessary Luxuries: The Mercer’s Company of Coventry, 1550–1680 (University Park, PA, 1993), p. 29. 40 On the Irish shirt, see David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY, 1966), p. 91. A woodcut printed here, from John Derricke, The Image of Ireland (1581), suggests the image Lee was aiming at. 41 Lambarde was a wealthy citizeneness, daughter of Sir Thomas Lowe, Lord Mayor of London. Janet Arnold, ‘Jane Lambarde’s Mantle’, Costume 14 (1980), pp. 56–72. On the Irish mantle, or fallaing, see Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, pp. 91, 96.

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as a member of the elite.42 It is the Padre’s mistress’s princely clothes, and not merely her beauty, which enable Ligon to perceive and interpret her as a princess out of a masque. He is ‘othering’ the New World in an unusual way, seeing its inhabitants as implicitly equal/superior, because he is viewing it through the lens of courtly fiction; the encounters of romance-literature, and the moment of fusion in a court masque when the Queen and her ladies leave the stage to dance, still in their fictional personae, with the greatest men of the kingdom.

IV The implications of Ligon’s perception of the Padre’s mistress as a queen in a masque are not unimportant. Seeing the New World through the medium of the court masque is a matter of seeing it as tamed, ordered and subdued by the master-hand of the King. “The antimasque was performed by professionals, and presented a world of disorder and vice, everything that the ideal world of the second, the courtly main masque, was to overcome and supersede.”43 The masque was, so to say, the consolatory myth which court culture told itself about the nature of royal government.44 Demonstrably, the aristocratic and paternalist values enshrined in the masque are ones which Ligon took seriously. It may also be relevant, since Ligon was obviously a playgoer, to bring in the Jacobean theatre, particularly Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the play which most clearly raises the notion of government in an island community. What Ligon finds in Barbados is an island society which differs from that of a mainland colony like Virginia in a highly significant way. The Virginian settlers had to come to terms with the Algonquin; so colonialism is most often discussed in the context of the mutual impact of Europeans and indigenous peoples. But Barbados was a political tabula rasa: as in The Tempest, its Prosperos and its Calibans were all immigrants, required to come to terms with one another

42 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe states, ‘having Money in my Pocket and good Cloaths upon my Back, I would always go on board in the habit of a Gentleman’ (Crowley ed., p. 16). The word ‘habit’ here is one of complex significance. 43 Orgel, The Illusion of Power, p. 40. 44 Roy Strong, Art and Power (Ipswich, 1984), pp. 164–70.

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without the interference of any extraneous way of life. The influence of African ways on Barbados is in fact considerable, but to Ligon’s perception, the society was an entirely English one. A key question which Ligon’s approach seems to suggest is whether we are to perceive Barbados as a masque or an antimasque, a vision of the conquest of vice by virtue, or of the conquest of virtue by vice. Ligon’s view of the planters is highly complex. He is associated with the planter class, though as a poor man, not precisely of it. His friends, particularly Thomas Modyford, are planters, he expresses his admiration of their skill, their energy, their courage, and also their characters: ‘of their natures and dispositions, which I found compliable, in a high degree to all vertues, and those of the best sort of gentlemen call Excellent . . . loving, friendly and hospitable to one another’.45 Ligon fully supports and endorses the planter’s right to subdue the country, raise profits, and use the energy of slaves and servants to do so: he maintains the Aristotelian perception of class structure which gives the ruling class an absolute right to rule. However, various aspects of the planters’ collective behaviour seriously disturbed Ligon. One is their refusal of Christianity to their slaves; he instances an individual slave, Sambo, who actually asked him if he could be baptised, and also notes the appearance of a crucifix in a bisected “bonano.” This particularly exercises him since bananas, or rather plantains, were central to the Barbadian slave diet. He concludes, since those men dwelling in that place professing the names of Christians, and denying to preach to those poor ignorant harmless souls the Negroes, the doctrine of Christ Crucified, which might convert many of them to his worship, he himself has set up his own Cross, to reproach these men, who rather then they will lose the hold they have of them as slaves, will deny them the benefit and blessing of being Christians. Otherwise, why is this figure set up for these to look on, that never heard of Christ?—and God never made anything useless, or in vain.46

His perception that there is a specific divine monition warning the planters that they are acting wrongly suggests that he sees a fatal

45 True and Exact History, p. 81. There was in fact considerable tension in the colony, but Ligon chooses not to observe it (Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar (Cambridge, 2000). 46 True and Exact History, pp. 114–5.

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flaw in the small polity of Barbados, an implication which is strengthened by other observations elsewhere in his text. His assessment of the slaves themselves as a group is shifting and contradictory; at one point, he states in passing that “the most of them [Negroes] are as near beasts as may be, setting their souls aside.” This view is immediately undermined and never restated: in the same chapter, he declares that “some of these people are capable of learning Arts.” He brings as a witness to this a variety of skills which he had observed, notably slaves who had learned to fence, an art with strongly aristocratic connotations, and a man called Macow who heard him playing the theorbo and went off and made himself a xylophone which demonstrated that he had correctly understood the principle of musical intervals. His conclusion overall, which he repeats, is that “there are as honest, faithful and conscionable people amongst them, as amongst those of Europe, or any other part of the world.”47 This is very important, since it suggests that the flaw in the planters’ rule lies with the planters not the slaves; the problem is not that the Africans are born devils on whose nature nurture can never stick; quite the contrary. They are teachable, and again unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, they are chaste, which is important since unrestrained sexual appetite is a central mark of the savage in Renaissance thought.48 Ligon is emphatic on this point. ‘Chast they are as any people under the Sun . . . I never saw so much as a kiss, or embrace, or a wanton glance with their eyes between them.’49 He also goes out of his way to emphasise the astonishing, heroic willingness of the slaves to observe the social contract in which they found themselves; in 1649 when provisions were short, some of the “high spirited and turbulent” began to conspire to revolt. The plot was revealed by some slaves who remained faithful, but when the informers were awarded a day off work and double rations for three days, they refused this reward, saying they had merely done their duty; a response which Ligon notes, “might have beseem’d the best Christians, though some of them were denyed Christianity when they earnestly sought it.”50

47 48 49 50

Ibid., pp. 74, 70. 68. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1954), p. xxxix. True and Exact History, p. 68. True and Exact History, p. 76.

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Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, which Frank Kermode quotes à propos of Caliban, makes a firm distinction between men and savages: not all that beare the name of men . . . . . . Are for to be accounted men: but such as under awe Of reasons rule continually do live in vertues law.51

The evidence which Ligon puts forward defines Barbadian slaves as, by this reckoning, men, not savages. He demonstrates that they are disposed towards Christianity, which is denied them. They are capable of learning arts: he instances the eminently aristocratic and civilised arts of music and fencing. They are chaste, and they live by law. Ligon’s veering between whether the planters’ rule over their slaves is just and righteous, or as this last passage implies, unjust, is of a piece with his treatment of the island itself. It is paradisiacal, but it may be an anti-paradise. At first sight, it seemed “extreamly beautiful.” His introductory remarks focus on Barbados’s splendid trees, and are redolent of a sense of tragically wasted opportunity: These Vegetatives [Barbados’ forest cover] may teach both the sensible and reasonable creatures, what it is that makes up wealth, beauty and all harmony in that Leviathan, a well govern’d Common-wealth, where the mighty men and rulers of the earth by their prudent and careful protection, secure them from harms, whilst they retribute their pains, and faithful obedience, to serve them in all just Commands. And both these, interchangeably and mutually in love, which is the Cord that binds all in perfect Harmony. And where these are wanting, the roots dry, and leaves fall away, and a general decay and devastation ensues. Witness the woeful experience of these sad times we live in.52

It is probably relevant that Ligon fled to Barbados because he was a dispossessed and penniless Royalist, while his description of Barbados was written in 1653, under the Commonwealth. The first sight is of an island of unearthly beauty, prosperous and tamed, with sugar-cane marching up terraced slopes and 22 good ships riding at anchor in Carlisle Bay, “so quick stirring and numerous, as I have seen it below the bridge at London.” Yet this picture dissolved, leaving not a wrack behind. Within the month,

51 Arthur Golding, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, Epistle, ll. 55–62, ed. W.H.D. Rouse (London, 1961), p. 2. 52 A True and Exact History, p. 30.

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Barbados was hit by yellow fever, so badly that the living could hardly bury the dead, and the island was also threatened by famine. On the one hand, the descriptions which follow, of tropical fruit, and colossal, epicurean feasts, present a picture of a dreamlike garden world, yet on the other, the extreme precariousness of plantation life is never entirely absent. The same might be said for the governance of the planters. Is this or is it not a well-governed commonwealth? The mutual harmony of the planters is stressed, but not the harmony of the society; both slaves and indentured servants were serving unwillingly, with no sense that they were part of a commonwealth. He makes it clear that servants resisted such service to the best of their ability, and only terror, or perhaps native virtue, prevented the slaves from doing the same. Both the word “Commonwealth” and the word “Leviathan” in the passage quoted above suggest that Ligon was familiar with Thomas Hobbes’ great work, published in 1651. It may be worth pausing to include Hobbes in this narrative, since Ligon seems to present Barbados as a Hobbesian nightmare in which political society was visibly controlled only by expediency:53 Because the condition of Man . . . is a condition of Warre of everyone against everyone . . . it followeth that, in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing—even to one another’s body.54

Many commentators were revolted by the bleakness of Hobbes’ vision. Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon’s reaction to Hobbes may be a guide to Ligon’s, since like Ligon, he was a committed Royalist: he posits a voluntary limitation of power exercised by the power elite, in their own interests: where these obligation are best deserv’d, Sovraignty flourishes with the most lustre and security . . . security consists in containing themselves within their own limits, that is, kings not to affect the recovery of that exorbitant power which their Ancesters wisely parted with, as well as for their own as their people’s benefit; and subjects to rejoice in those liberties which have been granted to them.55

53 Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Soldiers, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), p. 16. 54 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London, 1651), p. 64. 55 Edward Hyde, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr Hobbes’s Book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), pp. 89–90.

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Barbados was a land of exorbitant power, and therefore, of the absence of security. The seventeenth-century saw deep-level change in social organization, notably the shift from arable subsistence to commercial pasturage in the country, the increase of wage labour, growth of urban populations, expansion of the putting-out system for textiles, growth of world trade, and institutionalisation of markets, all of which depersonalised labour relations, though custom and practice, among other things, blunted the edge of this process in the Old World. But the process was accompanied by deep, sometimes despairing, nostalgia for the old days in which the rich had perceived themselves as guardians and providers.56 Ligon’s unexamined assumptions about how the world ought to work express this nostalgia, which is why he responds as he does the Barbados rebellion of 1649,57 which he presents rather sympathetically as the result of plantocratic tyranny: “truly, I have seen such cruelty there done to Servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another.” Though there were good masters in Barbados, overall, the picture he gives is one of stark, indeed suicidal oppression, since where no bond of affection linked master and servant, the last resort of the oppressed was fire—and a cane fire could not be extinguished. For instance, Ligon testifies to Colonel James Holdip’s loss of £10,000 sterling worth of cane, and Constantine Silvester’s loss of not only his cane but his house. Ligon does not mention or suggest deliberate arson, attributing this only to “carelessness and slothfulness,” “negligence and wilfulness.” His focus is on the positive values of treating servants well rather than the negative results of treating them badly.58

56 For example, Justice Overdo in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) who would ‘give puddings to the poor . . . bread to the hungry, and custards to his children’ (this is a note particularly struck by Catholic writers, who represent themselves as standing for the ‘old ways’). Note also Richard Fanshawe, ‘AN ODE Upon occasion of His MAJESTIES Proclamation in the yeare 1630. Commanding the Gentry to reside upon their Estates in the Country’, on virtuous landlordship (Poetry and Revolution, ed. Peter Davidson (Oxford, 1998), pp. 244–8: ‘the country too ev’n chopps for raine:/you that exhale it by your power/Let the fat dropps fall downw againe/In a full showre.’ 57 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, pp. 123–26. 58 A True and Exact History, p. 64. Hobbes again here appropriate: ‘Nature hath

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The only cords which might indeed serve to bind this society in harmony are a sense of reciprocal responsibility between planters and their labour force, and/or Christianity. The planters’ short-termism puts both out of the question. Ligon’s account of Barbados is tragic, since he seems to be describing a society which, for all the genuine energy, industry and good qualities of the planters, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Ligon the courtier and Royalist, is therefore less a spokesman for the governing plantocracy than one might expect. He has a clear vision of a harmonious class structure viewed from an elite perspective, in which wise governance is rewarded by love—the central story of all Stuart masques. The last masque ever given, Salmacidia Spolia (November/December 1639) with words by William Davenant and décor by Inigo Jones, was yet another variation on Charles I’s favourite theme: it represented the furies of disorder and rebellion stilled by “the great and wise Philogenes”: the king who loved his people. But the relevance of the masque to actual politics was called into question by the king’s behaviour as well as that of the commons, as Charles could never be brought to realise: though many of his supporters were uneasily aware of it. Ligon is not alone in worrying about reciprocity. The fact that the personal rule of Charles I was to a very considerable extent responsible for England’s plunge into civil war was unsayable among Royalists, but is implied by many indirect statements of what constituted political virtue: the masquewriters, like the devisers of royal entries, were sometimes clearly concerned not to entertain the king, but to instruct him.59 Ligon sees in Barbados a microcosm in which the plantocracy has treated its commons, the indentured servants, with such cruelty as actually to drive them to revolt: he is quite clear that the provocation given to indentured servants is adequate to explain their response.60 made men so equal, in the faculties of body and mind, as that . . . the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself . . .’ (Leviathan, p. 64). 59 Peter Davidson, ‘The Entry of Mary Stewart into Edinburgh, 1581, and other ambiguities’, Renaissance Studies 9.4 (1995), pp. 416–25. 60 Many of these servants were in fact Irish: it is interesting that Ligon does not mention this, though there was considerable anxiety among the plantocracy on this score, combined with a strong effort to reduce the Irish population and replace them with more tractable English and Scots servants. See Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Documents relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932), 139–286, pp. 233–7.

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He is concerned also to work out reasons why the negroes did not revolt, obviously considering the absence of rebellion more in need of explanation than its presence. His reasons are basically that the plantocracy strictly controlled access to firearms, the slaves were deliberately terrorised, and moreover, that they had no common language, so it was thus made possible to divide and rule.61 Another reason given elsewhere in the text is the slaves’ relative indifference to the value of their own lives, which sprang from their religious beliefs: they believe a Resurrection, and that they shall go into their own Countrey again, and have their youth renewed. And lodging this opinion in their hearts, they make it an ordinary practice, on any great fright, or threatning of their Masters, to hang themselves.62

Ligon’s refusal to blame either slaves or servants for the woes of Barbados implicitly places the responsibility for absence of harmony on the leaders of society, though this criticism is highly indirect, resembling the Royalist reading of the 1640s in England as the tale of a people unnaturally and perversely destroying their own good.63 Barbados, as represented by Ligon (though not in fact), was mercifully free from faction, to the extent that planters had agreed not to discuss their political antecedents. Yet in his history, they seem determined to repeat, and even intensify the tragic errors of the previous decade. It is clear from Ligon’s account, and others, that his aristocratic ideal of monarchic government in which absolute rule is tempered by responsibility and even respect and affection was not entirely absent in Barbados.64 His friend Colonel Humphrey Walrond treated his servants well, and was rewarded by their loyalty.65 Christopher Codrington, an aristocratic Barbadian planter whose ancestor had

61

A True and Exact History, p. 72. A True and Exact History, p. 72. 63 See for example, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ‘A Description of Civil Wars’, ed. Davidson, Poetry and Revolution, pp. 449–50. 64 Though it was completely at variance with the social consensus: ‘the plantation colonies of the islands and the southern [American] mainland shared a common ethos, which was materialistic, individualistic, competitive, exploitative, and comparatively secular’. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 7. 65 A True and Exact History, p. 65. 62

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carried the royal standard at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, similarly perceived his family’s relationship with their slaves in terms of a social contract, and explained the murder of a fellow planter by his Coromantee slaves in terms of social failure—the master’s failure. He suggested that the slaves had been unwisely provoked by ‘some unusual act of Severity, or rather Some indignity’ towards them: while they had of course acted wrongly, they had not acted incomprehensibly or indeed, indefensibly.66 Speaking of Coromantees (men from the West Coast of Africa), more generally, Codrington goes so far as to declare: they are not only the best and most faithful of our slaves, but are really all born Heroes. . . . There never was a raskal or coward of that nation, intrepid to the last degree, not a man of them but will stand to be cut to pieces without a sigh or a groan, grateful and obedient to a kind master, but implacably revengeful when ill treated. My Father, who had studied the genius and temper of all kinds of Negroes 45 years with a very nice observation, would say, Noe man deserved a Corromante that would not treat him like a Friend rather than a Slave.67

V What Ligon and Codrington stand for is an anachronistic ideal of service and loyalty, an ethic which is variously witnessed in mid-century Royalist circles with an urgency that was only increased by the fact that it was ceasing to be relevant to life as it was actually lived. Their sense that it could, might, or should, apply to the West Indies is so counter to the islands’ subsequent history; the fact that this strain of political thought was ever brought there at all has barely been noticed. So is their implicit conclusion that rather than bringing order and wise governance over a people childlike, unruly or devilish, the plantocracy had exploited the well-behaved and tractable without making an appropriate return. The European civilising mis-

66

Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 37, 118–9. 67 This eloquent encomium on Coromantee heroic virtue is, interestingly, from a letter to the Council of Trade and Plantations, December 30, 1701: CSP Colonial (America and West Indies), 1701, ed. C. Headlam, (London, 1910), pp. 720–1.

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sion which Shakespeare voices in the person of Prospero is comprehensively betrayed in Ligon’s narrative, but Ligon significantly revises the version of the colonial paradigm given in The Tempest by suggesting that is not Caliban, the slave, or Stephano, the servant, who is the betrayer, but Prospero himself. It would be foolish to suggest that either Ligon or Codrington endorsed the right to rebel; but the shape of Ligon’s narrative is such that in it, rebellion, whether actual or potential, attracts a great deal of human sympathy. His aristocratic, rather than mercantilist, perspective has led him to a position which a relatively slight shift of focus would make a radical one. It is a notably more liberal position than that of the most famous alumnus of Stratford grammar, himself an investor in the Virginia Company,68 who is often perceived as the possessor of the broadest human sympathy known in ‘Stuart England’.

68 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra, pp. 14, 30. They point out that Shakespeare personally participated in enclosure (p. 18).

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BOSTON PAYS TRIBUTE: AUTONOMY AND EMPIRE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1630–1714 Mark Peterson

In the King James Version the biblical story goes like this—Jesus challenged the Pharisees’ authority over religious orthodoxy at the Temple in Jerusalem. He attempted to redefine the true subjects of the kingdom of heaven by telling the parable of the marriage of the king’s son. The king calls many, the invitation is offered to everyone, but only the chosen few—repentant believers, not Pharisees and scribes—are allowed to attend the wedding feast. Faced with this rebuke, but unwilling to lay hands on Jesus for fear of the multitude, the Pharisees tried to snare him with Caesar’s law: Tell us therefore, what thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, and went their way (Matthew 22:17–22).

In thinking about Boston’s territorial ambitions and its relationship to the imperial powers of the Atlantic community in the Stuart era, it will be necessary to dwell on the concept of “tribute”, and on the verb “to render” as the proper means by which tribute is paid. This chapter will focus on instances of the payment of tribute, and on acts of rendition in which people or things were given back to their rightful owners. Early Bostonians were so awash in Scripture, its language, metaphors, and stories, that it is helpful to have these words in mind as we approach these densely charged issues.

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Histories of modern cities are often written by way of synecdoche— they frequently depict the city as an embodiment of the larger nationstate, a part that stands for the whole. Boston is no exception to this rule. Much of its early history has been written as a narrative implicitly designed to anticipate and explain the coming of the United States.1 But Boston was the independent capital of the colony and province of Massachusetts for 160 years before the formation of the United States as a sovereign entity. During that time, the city pursued its ambitions as something like an independent city-state. Although variously subject to the governments of England and Great Britain, Boston was neither completely defined nor limited by Britain’s interests. Although Boston was certainly part of the Stuart world, its ambitions and its fate were shaped by interaction with other Atlantic empires as well—the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, as well as various Indian nations and confederacies. As one strategy for uncovering Boston’s Atlantic history, we can attend to aspects of cultural performance; that is, to the forms of behaviour and interaction that through repetition and revision became the habitual ways in which Bostonians established and sustained their identity. In this vein, the practice of paying tribute can be seen as one form of performance with political power. Tribute offers a way of understanding how the people of Boston created, adjusted, and preserved their autonomy among the various powers they encountered in settling their remote corner of the Atlantic world. In addition to the history of performance, material culture approaches also provide an important avenue for exploring these issues. The two approaches are intimately related, for we cannot understand the meaning of commodities without exploring how they are used, the social dramas in which material objects are often densely charged symbolic props. This essay aims to develop a richer sense of Boston’s relationship to the Atlantic community of the Stuart era by paying

1

For examples, see G.B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston, 1970); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America (New York, 1971); Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston, 1630–1880, 4 vols. (Boston, 1882).

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attention to commodities broadly defined, and to the way they circulate in and out of Boston, where they come from, how they get there, where they go, who uses them and how, and what they mean. In particular, the focus here will be on two distinctive commodities: money and slaves, and the particular imperial circumstances under which money and enslaved persons were rendered in tribute. Let us suppose that the early history of Boston can be considered as an experiment, an ongoing attempt to approximate the kingdom of heaven on earth, to test whether a community of the chosen few might be knit together in brotherly affection, (“soe that the riche and mighty should not eate upp the poore,” as John Winthrop, Boston’s founder, put it),2 while acting as a beacon of justice and mercy, an exemplar of civic life to the larger world. These utopian aspirations were certainly present at the town’s founding, but they did not make Boston unique. Any number of comparable English ventures in the age of the Stuarts shared similar hopes, from the Puritan grandees of Providence Island to the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania.3 What did make Boston distinctive was its degree of success in sustaining these ideals over time, and this success may have been due to the fact that Boston was more literally “utopian” than most other colonies, which is to say, it was nowhere. The Massachusetts Bay Company charter of 1629 neglected to mention any place at all as the seat of the company’s government, which allowed its founders to remove themselves from royal oversight. Massachusetts was, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, a “poor, cold, and useless place,” no place at all in an imperial sense, because it was not worth much of anything.4 Other colonies founded under the early Stuarts became strongly identified with the valuable commodities they returned. In the mind’s eye of the metropolis, Virginia was tobacco and Barbados was sugar.5 By contrast, New England’s

2 John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in The Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. to date (Boston, 1931–), 2, p. 283. 3 See Karen Kupperman, Providence Island: The Other Puritan Colony, 1630–1641 (Cambridge, 1992); also Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island to the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 45, no. 1 ( January, 1988), pp. 70–99. 4 Cromwell quoted in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), introduction. 5 The sugar islands developed a powerful lobbying interest in London, and there were ten West Indian baronetcies created in the seventeenth-century, seven from

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main contribution to the empire was what economists call ‘invisibles’. Boston’s enterprising merchants profited by moving things about from one place to another in the Atlantic, but New Englanders did not produce uniquely valuable commodities themselves.6 Boston made no distinctive additions to the material life of early modern England, and therefore, on this crude level, it was very hard for the metropolis to see what was Boston’s raison d’être. New England’s utopian impulse tends to be identified with John Winthrop’s anxious paraphrase of Matthew 5:14, “wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon vs.” But in reality, Boston’s experiment succeeded mainly because it was hidden, invisible, poor, cold, and useless, “a shelter and a hidinge place” more than a beacon for the world to admire. There was a deep tension within the city’s aspirations, a tension between the desire to have an exemplary influence throughout the rapidly expanding Atlantic world—to be a model for “succeeding plantacions,” as Winthrop phrased it—and the simultaneous fear of the propulsive forces, the quest for empire and the spread of commerce, that were bringing this new hybrid world into being.7 These forces, the competition for imperial dominion, Caesar’s power to demand tribute money, as well as the power that money itself had to transcend imperial boundaries and create networks of exchange, presented the greatest challenge to Bostonians’ aspirations. The desire for autonomous purity and brotherly interdependence would be severely tested by the incessant reach of empires and by the corrosive power of trade to measure all values in cash. But in the Atlantic world, survival required coming to terms with the forces of empire and commerce, and for that reason, Boston had to pay tribute. Paying tribute is not the same as paying taxes. To be taxed is to be counted as an individual (or corporation) in relation to the state, and thus to participate in the body politic. The word tax connotes Barbados alone; see Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 14–15. 6 For a definition of “invisibles” and a discussion of the predominance of the carrying trade in the development of New England’s economy, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985); Margaret E. Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, 1998), pp. 72–83. 7 Quotations are from Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” and John Winthrop to Margaret Winthrop, 15 May 1629, in The Winthrop Papers, 2:91, p. 295.

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a sense of burden, obligation, censure, even punishment. In its etymological origins, “tax” is essentially the same word as “task.” In earlier times, taxes were often paid in tasks, by rendering labour rather than money to one’s lord. But taxpayers often expect some kind of return on their payment in the form of protection or other services. Tribute, by contrast, more frequently involves the relationship between states or governments, and its connotations have more to do with honour and respect than with burden or censure. Tribute payment also offers greater opportunities for ceremonial relationships of subservience. Taxes can be collected in various ways, and the process was often farmed out to intermediates, so long as the king or lord got his share in the end. Tribute, by contrast, requires ceremonial contact, gestures of allegiance and obedience, for the act to have performative power. In paying tribute, a weaker state acknowledges submission to a stronger one, and expresses its respect, fear, or affection, but tribute’s connotations tend more toward exclusion than inclusion. People pay tribute in order to be left alone.8 By willingly rendering earthly things, tribute money, unto Caesar, Jesus implicitly claimed the right of his people to frame the kingdom of heaven in their own way. In order to develop and preserve the autonomy necessary to frame their godly commonwealth and to pursue their own territorial ambitions, the people of Boston similarly found it useful to exact tribute, when they could, from subordinates, and to pay tribute, when necessary, to superior powers in the Atlantic community.

II We can begin to understand this process by looking at an example of how Boston exacted tribute from others. Boston’s ability to dominate the New England region, to become a kind of city-state, was initially constrained by the severe geographical limitations in its charter. Compared, for instance, to Virginia or to New France, which

8

Indeed, performing artists will often pay “tribute” to their powerful predecessors, both to honor their influence and to allow themselves room to get out from under that influence. This discussion of the pre-modern meanings of “tax” and “tribute” is drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary On-Line, copyright Oxford University Press, 2004.

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possessed huge stretches of coastline and virtually unlimited access to the interior of North America by way of navigable river systems, the 1629 charter authorizing the Massachusetts Bay Company granted only a narrow band of land along the Atlantic coast, between the Charles and Merrimac Rivers, roughly 40 miles wide from north to south. These constricting limits meant that upon settlement, Bostonians found that they had little direct access to the lucrative fur trade, because the Charles and Merrimac could be navigated only a very short distance into the interior.9 In addition, the key to the New England fur trade was wampum, the strung beads made from whelk or clam shells that the Dutch at New Amsterdam had transformed from an item of ritual diplomacy among Indians into a monetary system throughout the region. But the molluscs needed for wampum production and the Indians with the skill to make it lived only along the coast of Long Island Sound, well beyond the reach of Massachusetts, sandwiched between the Dutch colony of New Netherlands and the English colony at Plymouth, on Massachusetts’ southern border.10 To remedy this problem, Bostonians set forth on their first attempt at hegemonic territorial expansion, a simultaneous effort to hive off a new colony in Connecticut, on Long Island Sound west of Plymouth’s patent, and to assert their dominance over the Pequot and Narragansett Indians who controlled wampum production. Intrusive colonization and blundering diplomacy quickly gave way to aggressive warfare, and by 1637, Massachusetts and its newly-formed Connecticut ally had driven out the Dutch, trumped Plymouth’s claims, destroyed the Pequots, and made tributaries of the Narragansetts, Niantics, and Mohegans. The tribute Boston received from these Indian groups came in two forms. One was wampum. Over the course of the next forty years, Boston collected thousands of pounds sterling worth of

9 On the disappointments of the early Massachusetts Bay fur trade, see Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 55–57; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), pp. 82–107. 10 Lynn Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the SeventeenthCentury World System,” in The Pequots in Southern New England, ed. Laurence M. Hauptmann and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), pp. 48–68; David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges (Amherst, Mass., 2000), pp. 116–140); Cronon, pp. 95–104. See also New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), 1:74–75.

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wampum, enough to subsidize a substantial part of the cost of New England colonization and to support the expansion of Boston’s trade deep into the region’s interior. In some years, the amounts of wampum collected as tribute were comparable to the amounts received in taxation from the citizens of Massachusetts.11 Tribute also came in human form—Massachusetts accepted tribute in persons, often children, or their cash equivalent. At the close of the war, Pequots who had tried to find shelter among neighbouring tribes were turned over by these other Indian groups to Boston as part of the tributary system. Boston merchant captains then sold the Pequot warriors into slavery in the West Indies. But Pequot women and children, less threatening than male warriors, were valued for their labour, and so the Narragansetts, Niantics, and Mohegans could bring Pequot women and children to Boston, where they would be distributed among English households. Or they could tender an annual payment in wampum if they preferred to keep the Pequot captives for themselves. In the Pequot War, Boston became a slave capturing, trading, and distributing power not unlike some of the dominant powers of Atlantic Africa, who exchanged captives taken in warfare for cowrie shell money, among other forms of payment. Just as in West Africa, some of the captives taken in war were redistributed within the continent, while others were shipped out to meet demand in the growing labour markets of the Atlantic world. The difference, of course, was that if North America had more closely resembled West Africa, the Narragansetts, not the English, might have been the conquerors and brokers, distributing captives to interior kingdoms such as the Iroquois, or selling them to offshore European merchants.12 Tributary relations continued to play an important part in Boston’s ability to establish dominion over the New England interior. But the objects and gestures of tribute payment were equally important in shaping the city’s relationship to imperial powers elsewhere in the Atlantic community. By the 1640s, Boston’s merchants were making their first concerted experiments in Atlantic commerce, testing the possibilities offered by a range of trading partners, among them the

11

Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, Mass., 1996), pp. 49–68. On cowrie shells and the distribution of African slaves, see Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1986). 12

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French colonies in Canada. At the time, two competing French colonial overlords, Charles de la Tour and Charles D’Aulnay, were engaged in a struggle for the control of Acadia, the extensive region to the north and east of Massachusetts. In June 1643, Governor Winthrop was surprised, stunned really, when La Tour sailed unimpeded into Boston harbour in a 140 ton warship bearing 140 armed soldiers. La Tour had come not to attack, but to recruit Boston’s assistance in his designs against the more powerful D’Aulnay. After much agonizing over whether it was appropriate for godly Protestants to assist papists, and after a frightening display of sabre rattling on Boston Common by La Tour’s soldiers, Winthrop decided to give La Tour the liberty to hire an additional four ships and 70 men in Boston for his impending assault on D’Aulnay.13 To Winthrop’s embarrassment, La Tour’s attack failed. In the aftermath D’Aulnay came to seek damages from Boston for its part in the affair. After intensive negotiations, D’Aulnay accepted Winthrop’s argument that La Tour had merely hired free and independent ships and men in Boston, that the colony had not officially joined La Tour’s cause and was therefore not liable. But, as Winthrop put it: . . . because we could not free Captaine Hawkins & the other voluntaryes, of what they had done, we were to sende a small present to mr Daulnye in satisfaction of that. . . . Accordingly we sent monsieur D’aulny . . . very faire new Sedan . . . sent by the Viceroy of mexico to a Ladye his sister, & taken in the west Indiyes by Capt. Cromwell, & by him given to our Governour. This the Commissioners very well accepted.14

Winthrop happened to have an elegant sedan chair (worth £40–50 sterling by his estimation) that had been dumped in his lap by Captain Cromwell, a West Indian privateer, probably as a bribe to allow the shady Cromwell to spend his booty freely in Boston. The sedan chair was useless to Winthrop, but just the right sort of tribute to appease the vice regent of New France.15 13 A first-hand account of these events is provided in The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. by Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 440–451, 464–468, 473–474, 520–524, 539–552. See also Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958); Robert E. Wall, Massachusetts Bay: The Crucial Decade, 1640–1650 (New Haven, 1972). 14 Journal of John Winthrop, pp. 642–43. 15 On privateering and piracy in early Boston, see George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmunds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630–1730 (Salem, Mass., 1923).

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As this example suggests, to tell the full story of Boston’s tributary relationships requires the exploration of a wide range of connections throughout the Atlantic world, in addition to those with Native Americans and with Britain. But even in the more familiar English imperial context, examining the practice of tribute payment can illuminate the performances through which Bostonians attempted to retain their autonomy. To do this, let us follow the lead of Jesus among the Pharisees, and take a closer look at some money.

III A piece of money, a coin, is an emblem of the intersection of the two most powerful shaping forces in the Atlantic world, empire and commerce. Stamped with Caesar’s image, a coin is an expression of imperial dominion, guaranteed to bear the value that it proclaims as far as Caesar’s writ will run and sometimes beyond, to places where the power and divinity of Caesar is recognized, if not always honoured and obeyed.16 At the same time, a coin perfectly embodies the magic of commodification—coins can make dissimilar things equal and readily interchangeable. Coins were therefore highly useful items for getting along in the Atlantic world, but in Boston, as in all the English colonies where precious metals were nowhere to be found, good coins were scarce. The initial supplies of specie brought by the waves of migrants, money raised when they liquidated their English assets, rapidly returned to England in payment for the imported goods the early plantations needed to survive. This specie of gold and silver coins was replaced initially by wampum. Wampum’s value declined through overproduction, and by the 1640s, as Bostonians began to trade in the West Indies, foreign currency

16 When Sir Francis Drake “discovered” California on his famous circumnavigation of the globe in 1577, he laid claim to the territory in the name of Queen Elizabeth by nailing a brass plate to a post, “together with her highnesse picture and armes, in a piece of sixpence currant English monie, shewing itself by a hole made of purpose through the plate.” Even after Drake and his crew sailed out to cross the Pacific, Elizabeth’s visage on the sixpence would continue to gaze out at her newfound dominion, her “Nova Albion” (The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, Being his next Voyage to that to Nombre de Dios, ed. W.S.W. Vaux (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1854), p. 132).

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began to wash up in New England, much of it clipped or counterfeit and all of it confusing in terms of value. For want of anything better, Boston’s currency consisted of this motley assortment of foreign coins, wampum, and musket balls for small change, until 1652, when Massachusetts established a mint.17 The timing of this decision hinged on dramatic developments at the opposite pole of the western hemisphere. Most of the Spanish coins that drifted into Boston were made of silver mined in Potosi, the enormous silver mountain high in the Andes, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Pieces of eight minted at Potosi were among the most common coins in early Boston, but at the end of the 1640s, word began to spread through the Atlantic of a scandal. The master of the mint at Potosi had been issuing debased coinage for over a decade, skimming the difference for his personal profit. The resulting widespread distrust in the Spanish money supply motivated Bostonians to make their own coins, while at the same time, the Spanish crown ordered the recasting of Potosi’s coinage, which likewise began in 1652.18 According to the act of the General Court that authorized the creation of the Massachusetts mint, the coins were initially supposed to be square: for forme flatt & square on the sides & Stamped on the one side with N E & on the other side with xiid. vid & iiid according to the value of each peece together with a privie marke which Shalbe appoynted every three monethes by the governor & knowne only to him & the sworne officers of the mint.19

These plain square coins, utterly without pictorial design or embellishment, nothing but the letters N E (for New England) on one side and their value as pennies in Roman numerals on the other, would contain a secret mark, a spot, blemish, or nick, changed every few months at the discretion of the governor, to assure the discerning public that the newest coins were not counterfeit.

17 On early currency in Massachusetts, see Louis Jordan, John Hull, The Mint, and the Economics of Massachusetts Coinage (Hanover, N.H., 2002); Sylvester Sage Crosby, The Early Coins of America: and the Laws Governing their Issue (Boston, 1875). 18 See Peter Bakewell, Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosi (Albuquerque, 1988); Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosi, 1545–1650 (Albuquerque, 1984). 19 Crosby, The Early Coins of America, p. 37.

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While the committee appointed to implement the legislation was just forming, however, John Hull, the newly named mintmaster, was already undermining the concept of square coins, sketching various rough designs for what were clearly circular coins in the margins of the committee’s minutes.20 Before the first coins were minted, the General Court’s orders were changed. The committee declared that “the officers for the minting of mony shall Coyne all the mony that they mints in A Round forme till the Gennerrall Courte shall otherwise declare their minds.”21 Even for Puritans given to iconoclasm, who would never think to put a graven image of God or Caesar on their coins, square pegs simply could not be made to fill the round holes that legitimate money occupied in their pockets, purses, and imaginations. So why did the General Court contemplate this quadrilateral deviation from circular custom, and why did the mint committee reject it? An answer may lie in the depths of European tradition concerning money and its representation of sovereignty and economic power. In the modern era, money has become nationalized and each nation-state is expected to have its own relatively exclusive currency.22 But in pre-modern times, indeed before the middle of the nineteenth century, the basic division of the moneys of the world lay not along national lines, but between what we might call ‘big money’ and ‘little money’. ‘Big money’ was commodity money, money in which the claims about value and quality stamped on the coin’s surface were relatively consistent with its value as a material substance, a sterling silver shilling or a gold florin. ‘Big money’ was coined by monarchs and states, traded by international traders for expensive commodities, and regulated carefully for consistency and stability. ‘Little money’, by contrast, was fiduciary money, money made of a substance (usually something inexpensive and plentiful like copper, lead, tin, or later, paper) that bore little if any relation to the value stamped on it. It came in small denominations, and was often issued

20

See facsimile in Crosby, The Early Coins of America, pp. 42–3. Ibid., p. 43. 22 The recent move toward the Euro taken by the European Union may mark a change in this generalization as we enter a “post-modern” world, but for the modern era, visitors to foreign countries have generally been required to change their money. 21

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by local authorities, corporations, or associations rather than by states or monarchs. ‘Little money’ was not well integrated with big money currencies, often fluctuating wildly in value from place to place, or else circulating across narrowly confined geographical areas. Cowrie shells performed this function in Africa, India, China and Southeast Asia, the areas linked by the Indian Ocean. Cowries were useful trade tokens over an enormous geographical area, but it was difficult to correlate their fluctuating value with that of the high-grade gold and silver coins issued by the Mughal of India.23 In Europe, plentiful cheap metals were more commonly employed for similar purposes. In early seventeenth-century London, more than 3000 different London businesses and organizations issued farthing coins of copper, tin, or lead, many of which circulated within only a few city blocks.24 Square coins have always been rare, but before the Massachusetts General Court’s brief flirtation with the idea, square coinage seems mainly to have been associated with ‘little money’.25 Prior to 1652, the economy of Massachusetts had been indeed a ‘little money’ economy. In the absence of a circulating medium, colonists turned to

23

Hogendorn and Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1986). On fiduciary and commodity money and the two-tiered monetary system, see Eric Helleiner, The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective (Ithaca, 2003), pp. 19–31; Carlo Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization in the Mediterranean World: Fifth to Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1956). On pre-modern British coins, see John Craig, The Mint: A History of the London Mint from A.D. 287 to 1948 (Cambridge, 1953). In the 1780s, London’s Royal Mint reported that 92% of the copper coins in circulation were produced by towns, by merchants, by benevolent associations, and by a bewildering array of other organizations. Only eight percent of the copper coins in circulation “resembled” those issued by the crown, which were often so poorly produced that they were easily counterfeited. 25 For instance, an early reference to square coins in European history occurs in the 1497 statute of Ferdinand and Isabella specifying the weight, quality, and design of Spanish silver reales. Later, the eight real coin, or “piece of eight,” would become famous as the Spanish “dollar” that circulated widely in early America. But this initial statute defined the real and ordered the coinage of smaller denominations, including the half, quarter, and eighth real pieces. Of these, the whole, half, and quarter coins were to be round, but the statute deliberately specified that the smallest coin to be issued, the eighth real, be square: “e que los ochavos sean quadrados” (Pragmatica of Medina del Campo, June 13, 1497, in Gabriel Calbeto de Grau, Compendio de las piezas de ocho reales, 2 vols. (San Juan: Ediciones Juan Ponce de Leon, 1970), 2: 536; reprinted in Louis Jordan, John Hull, the Mint and the Economics of Massachusetts Coinage (Hanover, N.H., 2002), 151–52). Similarly, a description of early English monetary practices in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) claims that “King Edward the first [r. 1272–1307] did first coine the penie and smallest peeces of siluer roundwise, which before were square” (See “coin, v., 1.a.” in Oxford English Dictionary On-Line, copyright Oxford University Press, 2004). 24

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substitutes like wampum and musket balls to conduct exchanges, but these forms of fiduciary money did not meet all the needs and expectations of the people of Boston, especially the experienced merchants who began to enter the Atlantic trading economy in the 1640s. The General Court’s decision in 1652 to begin coining high quality silver shillings expressed the desire among the colony’s leaders to move from a ‘little money’ to a ‘big money’ economy, and the initial call for a square coinage may reflect a latent uneasiness among Boston’s leadership about making such a bold move. Perhaps the square design was meant to disguise the fact that Boston was attempting to enter the world of big money by presenting their coins in what was traditionally a small money form. But Hull and his fellow merchants on the mint committee knew better. They were making ‘big money’, and ‘big money’ was supposed to be round.

IV Entering the world of ‘big money’ meant encountering and accepting the challenges of empire. Bostonians would inevitably face consequences in meddling with the affairs of the imperial powers competing for dominion over the Atlantic world. The Caribbean, in which Boston’s trade now centred, was still largely a Spanish lake, and Spain remained jealous of the sources of its riches. The South Atlantic, between West Africa and Brazil, had long been under Portuguese authority, but the Dutch had seized Brazil from Portugal in the 1630s and were beginning to gain control of the slave trade.26 In the 1640s, Spain and Portugal admitted for the first time that other European nations had limited rights to New World exploration and territorial possession—before then, the Iberian nations had held to the fiction, supported by the papacy, that the post-Columbus discoveries were theirs alone. Now the Netherlands and France were both mounting challenges to Spain’s hegemony in the New World. Each held North American outposts that surrounded New England and impinged on the ability of Boston’s merchants to reach inland markets and resources. The five nations of the Iroquois League were

26 Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas, 1600–1800 (Providence, R.I., 1997), pp. 25–40.

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also in a period of expansion, in an attempt to recoup the population losses inflicted upon them by disease epidemics, and they too resented any threats to their influence over the same lands and peoples, a form of influence that European colonists interpreted as “imperial.”27 And of course, the three kingless kingdoms of the British Isles, though deep in turmoil, began under Oliver Cromwell an expansive foreign policy that would end only when British rule encompassed the globe. All these competing powers challenged the autonomy to which Bostonians believed they were entitled by their founding charter, and on which their newfound livelihood depended. On one level, accepting the challenge of empire meant playing the complicated game of sustaining that autonomy in the face of external threats, by means of negotiation, alliance formation, the payment of tribute, the development of mutually beneficial trading relationships, by trickery, and if need be, by resistance, violence, and war. Yet on another level, Boston’s move to enter the world of empire grew out of the city’s own, perhaps modest, expansive impulses and designs. Many of Europe’s imperialists, not just Oliver Cromwell, thought northeastern North America was cold, poor, and useless as a place of settlement, unfit to be a domicile for civilized peoples. During the economic and political crises of the late 1630s, many New Englanders had become convinced of this as well, and either returned to England to fight for the Puritan cause or moved on to warmer and more promising colonial locations.28 But by the mid-tolate 1640s, a number of Boston’s founders and commercial leaders began to think otherwise. They were committed to gaining control over as much of the New England region as possible. To accomplish such a goal, this small, weak, and poorly resourced commonwealth had to extend its power and authority over territory beyond its borders, martial its own meagre resources to exploit the mater-

27 Richard White, The Middle Ground (Cambridge, 1991); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Long House: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992); Denys Delage, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600–1664, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver, B.C., 1993). 28 The Journal of John Winthrop for the years between 1636 and 1643 reads alternately as a lament for the loss of colonists who abandoned Massachusetts Bay, and as a litany of vengeful recriminations on those who left the Bay Colony and came to a bad end elsewhere.

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ial wealth of alien regions, and influence the political economies of other places enough to suit their own needs. Good silver coins could help Boston achieve this goal—they offered inland farmers and workers incentives to produce goods for the Atlantic markets, stabilized prices throughout the region, and provided means of payment to local merchants in exchange for overseas imports. Though coined in Boston under Massachusetts authority, the Pine Tree shillings circulated widely throughout the region, knitting the various colonial entities of the region into a single economic unit.29 For a colony to coin its own money was to usurp a privilege that monarchs jealously guarded. No other English colony was so bold. Of course, in 1652, there was no king in England, and Boston’s mintmaster, John Hull, followed the model of Cromwell’s commonwealth in casting the coinage. Like the Commonwealth shilling of 1651, the Massachusetts coins bore no human image, indeed no images at all. But these first coins were so crude and so easily clipped that they were rapidly replaced by a more elaborate design, though still without a human image. These were the so-called ‘Pine Tree Shillings’. On the reverse was the date, 1652, the value in Roman numerals, and as a superscription on the two sides of the coin, the words “Masathusets (sic) in New England.” John Hull was ordered to produce coins of the same quality alloy as English sterling, but only three-quarters the weight of their English equivalents. That is, a Massachusetts shilling was lighter and smaller than an English one, though valued at the same rate within New England. The lighter weight was to insure that Massachusetts currency would stay in Massachusetts, as foreign merchants would be less willing than local ones to accept underweight shillings.30 During the interregnum, the Massachusetts shillings went unchallenged, but after the Restoration in 1660, Charles II demanded a reckoning of the colony’s conduct. Sir Thomas Temple, who had lived and traded in Boston during the 1650s, represented the interests of Massachusetts in London. Charles II questioned Temple closely about the Massachusetts currency in 1662, claiming that it was an invasion of his royal prerogative. Temple attempted to explain that 29 See Curtis P. Nettels, The Money Supply of the American Colonies Before 1720 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1934). 30 See Louis Jordan, John Hull, pp. 46–73 for a detailed discussion of the weight and alloy quality of the Massachusetts shillings.

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the colony was ignorant of the law and had meant no harm in coining money strictly for their own use. As he explained, Temple pulled a Massachusetts coin, an ‘Oak Tree tuppence’, from his purse and presented it to the king. Charles inquired what tree that was? Sir Thomas informed him it was the royal oak; adding, that the Massachusetts people, not daring to put his majesty’s name on their coin, during the late troubles, had impressed upon it the emblem of the oak which preserved his majesty’s life. This account of the matter put the king into good humor, and disposed him to hear what Sir Thomas had to say in their favor, calling them a parcel of honest dogs.31

In this dexterous act of verbal tribute, Temple insisted that Massachusetts had usurped nothing. In its coinage the colony had been rendering unto Caesar all along, in a characteristically hidden and invisible way. The wording of the dialogue between Charles and Temple (with its echoes of Christ in the Temple) may be apocryphal, although the 1662 Massachusetts two pence piece could well have been a post-Restoration adjustment to the new imperial circumstances.32 But in either case, it was the gesture of tribute that allowed Boston to preserve its autonomy in the face of British imperial pressure. Within a few years, this pressure would be renewed when the crown established a royal commission to investigate the laws of Massachusetts. In May 1665, the commission demanded that the law establishing “a mint house, &c, be repealed, for Coyning is a Royal prerogative.”33 In response, the colony acted in a way both remarkable and, by now, typical. The General Court in Boston neither complied nor sent a representative to London to defend their case. Instead, they offered Charles more tribute: It is ordered, that ye two very large masts now on board Capt Peirce his ship . . . be presented to his majty . . . as a testimony of loyalty and affection from ye country, & that all charge thereof be paid out of the country treasury. . . .34

Meanwhile, they went right on minting their coins. 31 Crosby, The Early Coins of America, 75; on the Temple family, see Richard R. Johnson, John Nelson, Merchant Adventurer: A Life Between Empires (New York, 1991). 32 Jordan, John Hull, pp. 89–91, 298–301. 33 Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols. in 6 (Boston, 1853–54), 4:213. 34 Ibid., 4:317–18.

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A decade later, still in denial regarding the king’s intentions and facing another royal commission, Boston’s leadership decided to hedge their bets yet again and present the king with another gift.35 Pursuant to the General Court’s order, John Hull, now the colony’s treasurer as well as the mintmaster, consigned aboard his own ship The Blessing a handsome tribute consisting of 1860 codfish (about 700 of them “very large fish”) along with 10 barrels of cranberries and three barrels of samp (high-grade cornmeal mush), the total valued at £47–10/sterling, roughly the same as the sedan chair that Winthrop sent to D’Aulnay thirty years earlier.36 Whether the king received these presents as a ‘blessing’ remains unknown. The utility of the masts is obvious, especially during the second Anglo-Dutch War, but what Boston’s leadership thought Charles would want with cod, cranberries, and samp is hard to fathom unless one imagines that these humble commodities somehow represented the Massachusetts economy to the king; they were tangible symbols of what the colony’s humble coins served to circulate. Although it seems unlikely that the king accepted these gifts as adequate tribute, from Boston’s point of view, these gestures ‘worked’—John Hull continued to make and circulate ‘Pine Tree Shillings’. Only when the Massachusetts charter was vacated in 1684 did the mint stop producing coins. Even then, his majesty’s treasury seriously considered the idea of re-establishing the mint, based on arguments of economic necessity that Boston had been making for thirty years. Royal Governor, Sir Edmund Andros applied for leave to continue the practice, only to be denied in the end by the Treasury.37 The ‘Pine Tree Shilling’ was not, strictly speaking, the last New England coin of the Stuart era. In 1694, a small number of halfpennies were produced in London on behalf of the Royal Africa Company [RAC] from copper obtained in West Africa. On one side of the coin was the image of an African elephant, the symbol of the RAC, and on the other the inscription, “God Preserve New England,

35

Ibid., 5:202–03. Ibid., 5:156, 164; Crosby, The Early Coins of America, pp. 82–83; John Hull, Letterbooks, 2 mss vols., American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, typescript edition, pp. 366–367. 37 Crosby, The Early Coins of America, pp. 90–95; Jordan, pp. 41–45. 36

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1694.”38 The original purpose of this example of ‘little money’ remains obscure, but it offers a convenient way to point out the curious connection between coins and slaves. Thinking about coins, about what they are and what they do in an imperial context, turns out to be a useful way to think about the problem of slavery in the Atlantic world.

V Conceptually, slaves, like coins, were situated at the intersection of empire and commerce. As Atlantic empires evolved, the concept of empire seemed unthinkable without slavery, and the most desirable commodity was enslaved labor.39 In this context, the problem of slavery was an unavoidable aspect of Boston’s relationship with the larger Atlantic community. Whenever slavery entered prominently into public discourse in Boston, the terms of discussion were always essentially the same: do slaves belong to Caesar, or do they belong to God? Under what circumstances can dominion be extended to the absolute control of another human being? Are enslaved persons simply commodities, easily assigned a cash value, or is the human soul somehow irreducible to monetary proportions? At several moments in Boston’s early history, arguments over the ‘rendition’ of captives took center stage in the city’s public discourse about its relationship to the Atlantic world. In each case, the challenge of sorting out the meaning of “render unto Caesar” remained the same. But in each case, the configuration of Bostonians’ aspirations within the shifting forces of empire and commerce yielded different resolutions to the problem slavery posed. Let us shift, then, from a discussion of the gestures of tribute payment, to the moral dilemmas surrounding

38 Richard G. Doty, “The Carolina and New England Elephant Tokens,” in Eric P. Newman and Richard G. Doty, eds, Studies on Money in Early America (New York, 1976), pp. 91–93. 39 On the “customary association of slavery with imperial wealth and power,” see Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56 (April, 1999), p. 273. The historical literature on slavery and the emergence of Atlantic economies is enormous; for an overview, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London, 1997).

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the payment or return of the most singular of commodities, the enslaved human being. In 1644, two Boston mariners, Capt. James Smith and his first mate Thomas Keysar, sailed in the ship Rainbow on the first New England voyage bound for West Africa. There they met up with some experienced London slave traders and became accomplices in a brutal conflict. The London slavers, claiming that they had “been formerly injured by the natives,” kidnapped a number of Africans. When the victims protested, the slave traders “assaulted one of their Townes and killed many people.” After a meandering return trip, Smith and Keysar arrived in Boston, where they sold the two captives who remained in their possession, then took each other to court to sort out various commercial disputes. In October 1645, the magistrates of the Massachusetts General Court heard the case, and after deciding who owed what to whom, they took an extraordinary step. On the advice of the Boston clergy, the magistrates felt that they could do nothing to punish Smith and Keysar for “the slaughter committed” in Africa, “. . . seeing it was in another Countrye, & the Londoners pretended a just revenge.” But with respect to the African captives, “the magistrates tooke order to have those 2: sett at Libertye, & to be sente home.” The court held that the slaves’ captivity was clearly not the result of a just war (an Old Testament standard for lawful enslavement), but was rather an instance of “manstealing,” and so the slaves were rendered free and returned to their homeland.40 The context for this unusual slave rendition was an emerging argument within Boston about the colony’s proper relationship to slavery, commerce, and empire. In the mid-1640s, Boston’s anxieties over its initial forays into Atlantic commerce were exacerbated by imperial tensions, with civil wars in Britain, and the threat of war with natives and the fear of encroachment from French and Dutch competitors in New England.41 In the summer of 1645, members of

40

The Rainbow incident and its aftermath are described in The Journal of John Winthrop, pp. 602–604; The Saltonstall Papers, pp. 1607–1815, ed. Robert E. Moody, 2 vols. (Boston, 1972), 1:138–39; Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay 2:129, 136, 168, 3:46. 41 Massachusetts Bay responded to these threats by organizing the United Colonies of New England in 1643. On imperial politics and conflict in the 1640s, in addition to The Journal of John Winthrop, see Robert E. Wall, Massachusetts Bay: the Crucial Decade, 1640–1650 (New Haven, 1972).

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two leading families, the Downings and the Winthrops, exchanged correspondence about the potential for slavery as a source of commercial profits, as a labour force, and as a byproduct of imperial expansion. Emmanuel Downing and his son George, the future developer of Downing Street in London, argued that Indians captured in just wars might be exchanged for African slaves.42 John Winthrop and his son, John, the future Governor of Connecticut, were dubious about this prospect. Given the precedent set by the Pequot War, it seems remarkable that Boston did not grasp this opportunity more directly and that the Winthrops prevailed in this argument. At this moment, the magistrates’ decision to return the kidnapped slaves reflected Boston’s still tentative approach to the Atlantic world, its delicate position with respect to Parliament and the Crown, and the difficulty of arguing that a war launched against Indians for the deliberate purpose of slaving could be considered just. If we look forward a half-century, Boston’s relationship to slavery, imperial power, and Atlantic trade were going through dramatic changes by the 1690s. Although Emmanuel Downing’s proposal to exchange captured Indians for African laborers who would “do all our business” was never realized, a small trickle of enslaved Africans had arrived in Boston.43 More significantly, the city’s merchants had built Boston’s growing prosperity on their capacity to supply the West Indian sugar islands with everything they needed, including bound labour. 1697 saw the end of the RAC’s monopoly on the slave trade, though the ‘guinea’, the new coin made of African gold

42 In August, 1645, Emmanuel Downing wrote to his brother-in-law, John Winthrop, arguing for the pursuit of warfare against the Narragansetts, from which captured prisoners could be exchanged for African slaves (whom he called “Moores”), building a labor force that would replace English servants. On August 26, Downing’s son George wrote to Winthrop’s son John upon return from a visit to the West Indies. He described the islands’ wealth as a consequence of slave labor, and outlined the prospects for trade and the most desirable commodities—he even encouraged Winthrop to migrate. The younger Winthrop stayed put, and his father chose not to pursue war with the Narragansetts. See Winthrop Papers, 5:38–39, 42–45. 43 For Downing’s comment, see Winthrop Papers, 5:38. For an example of local resistance in Boston to the Atlantic slave trade, see John Saffin, John Usher, Edward Shippen, Andrew Belcher, and James Whetcombe to William Warren, June 12, 1681, and Saffin et al. to William Welstead, June 12, 1681, in The Jeffries Papers, 34 vols., MS, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, 2:149ff. In these letters, several Boston merchants instruct their agent and ship captain to avoid Boston and unload African slaves at Rhode Island or Nantasket and bring the slaves into Boston only under cover of darkness.

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stamped with the RAC’s elephant badge, remained a part of Britain’s coinage and an enduring symbol of the equivalence of money and slaves. The end of the RAC monopoly brought more opportunity for Boston merchants trading in Africa, and more slaves to Boston.44 By 1700 a new set of imperial alignments was emerging as well. For the city’s first sixty years, Bostonians had insisted that the original Massachusetts Bay charter granted the colony virtual independence from British imperial authority. Although the new charter of 1691 reduced the colony’s independence, the monarch who granted it had ostensibly a far more appealing set of imperial projects in mind than those of the Stuarts.45 Beginning under William of Orange’s leadership (and furthered by his Hanoverian successors) Britain’s Protestant alliances and aggressive policies toward France resurrected a set of utopian and millennial dreams among Bostonians, fantasies that had lain dormant so long as the Stuarts had occupied the throne.46 With a militant Protestant as its new Caesar, New Englanders now found it plausible to imagine that an expansive British empire doing battle with the forces of popery might be an aid, rather than a hindrance, in the design to build on earth a heavenly kingdom.47 It was in this context that one of Boston’s chief millennial thinkers, Samuel Sewall, a merchant, judge, and magistrate on the Massachusetts General Court, and son-in-law of John Hull, the colony’s mintmaster, addressed the problem of slavery. Sewall was prompted by the

44 On the Royal Africa Company, see Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 254–55, 266–67; Kenneth Davies, The Royal African Company (NY, 1970), pp. 129–52; on the increased slave trade and slave population in Boston, see George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (NY, 1866), pp. 48–50; Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (NY, 1968), pp. 79–95. 45 On the imperial realignment of Massachusetts under its second charter, see Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981); Philip S. Haffenden, New England in the English Nation, 1689–1713 (Oxford, 1974). 46 On William III’s shift from the foreign policy of the Stuarts, see Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 24–63, 122–47; Stewart P. Oakley, William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years War, 1689–1697 (NY, 1987). 47 For detailed discussions of Bostonians’ renewed millennial aspirations in light of imperial realignments, see Mark A. Peterson, “Boston’s ‘Dutch’ Moment: A Passage in the Shaping of Atlantic Aspiration, 1689–1733,” paper presented at “Sometimes An Art”: A Symposium in Celebration of Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University, May 13, 2000; and Peterson, “The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689–1733,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 4 (2002), pp. 1–22.

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need to render a decision in the case of an enslaved African in Boston named Adam, who demanded the freedom that his master had once promised. Legally, Judge Sewall found it impossible to follow the precedent of 1645. Legislation and customary practice of the preceding half-century had established slave-owners’ rights. Furthermore, Adam’s owner was Sewall’s fellow justice on the Massachusetts Superior Court and his chief antagonist on the question of slavery. Boston’s magistrates themselves were now split on this issue.48 Barred from granting Adam his liberty, Sewall rendered a verdict in the court of public opinion by attacking the legitimacy of the slave trade and slave holding in a Christian commonwealth. In The Selling of Joseph (1700), Sewall argued that the slave trade was legalized man-stealing. No potential good that might come of such a practice, even the conversion of stolen slaves to Christianity, could justify this evil. According to Sewall, human freedom could not be equated with money: “There is no proportion between Twenty Pieces of Silver, and LIBERTY. The Commodity it self is the Claimer.” Nor could faith be placed in imperial claims that the lawfulness of warfare produced marketable human commodities: “Every War is upon one side Unjust. An Unlawful War can’t make lawful Captives.”49 Sewall and other devout Puritans began to see the growing reach of empire as a way to ameliorate the conditions of slaves, to promote baptism and conversion, and at least in Massachusetts, to ensure the lawfulness of slaves’ marriages and prevent the worst abuses of the institution.50 If Africans, like the biblical Joseph, were going to be stolen and sold into slavery, then at least evangelical Protestants could help to ensure that the blessings of Joseph would come to them as well.51 Sewall’s pamphlets did little to stem the tide of British expan-

48

See Lawrence W. Towner, “The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 21 ( Jan., 1964), pp. 40–52. 49 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700). 50 M. Halsey Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall (NY: 1972) 1:532; Greene, 124–43; Moore, 52–58; Robert C. Twombly and Robert H. Moore, “Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967), pp. 224–42; Cotton Mather, Rules for the Society of Negroes (Boston, 1693); Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized (Boston, 1706). 51 It is important to note the extent to which Sewall and many of his fellow Puritans personalized biblical history. At the time Sewall wrote The Selling of Joseph, his own youngest son, “whom I named Joseph, in hopes of the accomplishment of the Prophecy, Ezek. 37th and such like: and not out of respect to any Relation, or other person, except the first Joseph,” was eleven years old (Sewall Diary, 1:175).

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sion in the slave trade, but they began to challenge the absolute commodification of slaves and to imagine the strength of an empire without slavery, reformed from within by the force of Christian charity.52 If The Selling of Joseph was an exceptional response to slavery in Boston at the end of the Stuart era, Sewall’s fellow Boston merchant and church member, Jonathan Belcher, offered a more typical expression. In 1708, on a return visit to the royal house of Hanover, whose head, the Princess Sophia, had been confirmed by the Anglo-Scottish Treaty of Union as the presumptive heir to the British throne, Belcher paid tribute to his future rulers with the gift of a young Indian slave, a boy taken captive in the latest Indians wars. The princess was charmed; she promised to educate her exotic new servant in European languages and to give him a Christian upbringing. Belcher felt he had done the Indian boy a favour, lifting him out of pagan depravity and giving him access to a refined Christian life, in effect, rendering him unto Caesar and unto God at the same time. In symbolic return for his tribute, Belcher received, appropriately enough, a kind of coin. The princess presented him with a commemorative medallion produced in honour of her elevation to the British succession, with her own image stamped on one side and that of Mathilda, a twelfth-century English Princess who married the Duke of Saxony, on the other; both images symbolizing the power of Anglo-Saxon unity in defiance of Catholic imperial ambitions.53

52 For examples, see Samuel Sewall to Paul Dudley, Henry Newman, Joseph Lord, and John Higginson, in Letter Book of Samuel Sewall, 2 vols., Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 6th ser., vols. 1–2 (Boston, 1886) 1:297–99, 324–26. 53 Belcher’s presentation of the Indian slave to the Princess Sophia is described in Jonathan Belcher to “Dear Brother,” Nov. 16, 1708, Belcher Miscellany, Princeton University Library. The medallion, which Belcher described as “a pretty pocket piece with her face on one side, which she desired I would accept as a mark of her respect . . .,” was a copy of the one Sophia had made for Lord Macclesfield, the English ambassador who in 1702 had arrived to present her with official news of the Act of Settlement; see Maria Kroll, Sophia, Electress of Hanover; a Personal Portrait (London, 1973), pp. 202–3, 220, which depicts a copy of the medal, facing p. 237. Mathilda (1156–1189), daughter of Henry II of England and wife of the Duke of Saxony, was a distant ancestor of Sophia’s and matriarch of the Guelph dynasty. When the Holy Roman Emperor in 1180 attempted to confiscate the Duke’s lands in Brunswick, the Duke resisted and the couple sought refuge in England. The choice of Mathilda for the commemorative medallion served as a reminder of the ancient ties between England and Germany and their mutual resistance to imperial domination. Twenty years later, Belcher’s tribute would yield more substantial rewards when Sophia’s grandson, King George II, chose Belcher to be his imperial servant as the Royal Governor of Massachusetts.

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The difference between the attitudes of Sewall and Belcher toward slavery and tribute represents a generational shift among Bostonians toward empire from the Stuart age to the Hanoverian. Samuel Sewall was John Hull’s son-in-law, and he shared Hull’s devout Puritan sympathies. Born in 1652, the year Hull began minting coins, he retained vivid childhood memories of Charles II’s restoration and his family’s flight from England in 1661, and he was educated and trained by Puritans who had fled from Charles I and William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury.54 Deeply involved though they were in the Atlantic economy and imperial affairs, the model that Hull and Sewall retained of Boston’s whereabouts in that world was still the exclusive one. Their colony was a shelter and a hiding place, where they might ward off the corrupting influences of imperial power and Atlantic commerce. The logic behind The Selling of Joseph in 1700 was the same as that of the General Court’s decision on slavery in 1645. The autonomy Boston sought was the reason that Hull and Sewall rendered worldly tribute unto Caesar but reserved godly things for God. Jonathan Belcher, born in 1682, the year John Hull ceased to mint coins, came of age under a new charter and a new king, and his father became one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants by supplying the New England armies that fought in the wars of King William against the French. For Belcher, the purpose of paying tribute was not to ward off hostile powers in the quest for autonomy; rather, it was the first step toward further inclusion in an imperial relationship, in which favours and rewards would be forthcoming from a benevolent monarch. Like Hull and Sewall before him, Belcher was a devout Protestant, a life-long member of the Boston church Hull had founded and Sewall attended, but in the post-Revolution context, Belcher could perceive little distinction between rendering unto Caesar and rendering unto God. He spent his career trying to move ever closer to the centres of imperial power—he was to become a royal governor, first of Massachusetts and then of New Jersey, and his son would stand for a seat in Parliament.55

54 Sewall’s early life is summarized in an autobiographical letter from Sewall to his son Joseph, Sewall Diary, I:1ff. 55 For an overview of Belcher’s career, see Michael C. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher, Colonial Governor (Lexington, Kentucky, 1996).

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VI Despites these shifts, the gestures of tributary relationships developed under the Stuarts became ingrained in the cultural memory and habitual practices of Boston. In the eighteenth century, the advent of royal government, the expansion of imperial warfare, the enormous growth of Atlantic commerce, the rise of an empire of goods, and the coming of transatlantic Protestant revivalism all worked to integrate Boston much more fully into the British empire than ever before. But the people of Boston nonetheless continued to think of their contribution to empire as a form of tribute, a voluntary gift to a patriot king, while Parliament saw this imperial integration as an expansion of the realm of taxation.56

56 Even as the relationship was collapsing in the 1770s under the mounting pressure over the conflict between these two conceptions, one Bostonian, an enslaved African named Phillis Wheatley, imagined that the old order could be restored through her poems, poems that were explicit tributes to the benevolent and Christian powers of the empire, including of course, to her King’s Most Excellent Majesty, George III: May George, belov’d by all the nations round, Live with heav’ns choicest constant blessings crown’d! Great God, direct, and guard him from on high And from his head let ev’ry evil fly! And may each clime with equal gladness see A monarch’s smile can set his subjects free! (The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York, 1988), 3, pp. 9–12, 17, 24, 73–75). In 1773, when two guinea golden coin was minted, Wheatley’s metaphor was literally true. The two guinea piece, perhaps the only British coin to depict a smiling monarch, could go a long way toward redeeming one of his subjects from slavery. Wheatley knew she was a very rare commodity, and in this case, the commodity herself spoke up to claim her liberty by paying tribute to Caesar.

CHAPTER TWELVE

FOREIGN PENETRATION OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE 1660–1714: SWEDEN, SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND Chris Storrs

The reign of the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II (1665–1700), has long seemed a dismal subject by contrast with those of Charles V, Philip II, and even Philip IV who—with his chief minister, the CountDuke of Olivares—nearly shipwrecked Spain and its empire in dramatic fashion in the Thirty Years War; provoking revolt in Catalonia and a successful bid for independence by Portugal. Indeed, for many historians Spain—exhausted by its efforts in the Thirty Years War, in the war against France which continued until 1659, and in the unsuccessful attempt to recover Portugal—was a power in clear and inexorable decline after 1660.1 In Europe, in 1667, Louis XIV launched his first major war, the ‘War of Devolution’. It involved an assault on the Spanish territories that encircled France, notably the Spanish Low Countries. It is difficult now to appreciate fully the impact on contemporary opinion of Louis’ initial success. ‘Europe’ was astonished at the speed and the extent of the French conquest of Flanders, or rather of the Spanish collapse.2 Louis’ success was a measure both of the improvement of the French forces, and of the decline of Spain’s Army of Flanders, which had been neglected as Spain sought victory in Portugal; contemporaries were perhaps struck by the events of 1667 far more than they were by the battle of Rocroi of 1643, which is widely regarded as the start of Spain’s military decline.3 Overseas, in 1668, Henry

1

Cf. J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London, 1961), p. 361. Major towns, including Lille, which ought to have withstood long siege, surrendered rapidly to Louis’ forces; Franche Comte fell in two weeks: J.A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV 1667–1714 (London, 1999), p. 108. 3 Cf. R.A. Stradling, Europe and the Decline of Spain (London, 1980), pp. 119, 155; J.I. Israel, ‘Olivares, the Cardinal-Infante and Spain’s strategy in the Low Countries (1635–1643): the road to Rocroi’, in R.L. Kagan and G. Parker, eds., Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 1995), p. 267ff.. 2

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Morgan, governor of the English colony of Jamaica, seized the town of Portobello on the narrow isthmus of Panama; it was one of the focal points of Spanish America, not least because it offered an easier route to the Pacific than the long and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn; Morgan only returned Portobello to the Spaniards on payment of a ransom. Nearly thirty years later, in 1697, two major Spanish cities fell to the French, in Europe, Barcelona and in the Indies, Cartagena, another key stronghold of Spanish America and not far from Darien.4 Not surprisingly, in what is often thought of as ‘The Age of the Spanish Succession’ what seemed to matter were the policies of the powers preying on a declining Spain, not those of Spain itself. However, this traditional picture is far too bleak. Spain was certainly less dominant in the late seventeenth century, and suffered some losses. Nevertheless, Carlos II was able to bequeath to his successor, Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain (1700–46) an extensive worldwide empire, one which remained a source of great wealth, prestige and power.5 When seeking to explain Spain’s achievement in preserving intact most of its vast empire, we must acknowledge the determination of the Spanish king and ruling elite to retain dominion, reputation, and resources. They were particularly concerned to hang onto the Spanish Indies, i.e. Central and South America and the Caribbean, which continued to provide some but by no means all of the financial resources which underpinned empire. This point is worth emphasising in view of the fact that some historians have suggested that the supply of silver, which had supported Spanish hegemony in the sixteenth century, had largely dried up by 1660. In part, this conclusion reflected lacunae in the official records. In recent decades, other historians, using other sources—Michel Morineau highlighting the value of gazettes and foreign consular reports6—have argued that bullion continued to reach Spain in sub4 C. Ward, Imperial Panama. Commerce and Conflict in Isthmian America 1550–1800 (Albuquerque, 1993), p. 171 ff.; J. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, 2 vols. (2nd ed., Oxford, 1981), vol. II, p. 193; and G. Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar del istmo de Panama a fines del siglo XVII y comienzos del XVIII, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, IX (1952), pp. 244–45. 5 Cf. C. Storrs, ‘The Army of Lombardy and the Resilience of Spanish Power in Italy in the Reign of Carlos II (1665–1700) Part One’, War in History, 4 (1997), p. 375 and passim. 6 Michel Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux metaix. Les retours des tresors americains d’apres les gazettes hollandaises (XVI e–XVIII e siecles) (Paris, 1983).

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stantial—perhaps even record—quantities.7 The precise figures are a matter of debate,8 but the wealth of the Indies remained an invaluable source of funds for empire which Carlos II tapped into.9 It was primarily to ensure that Spanish America continued to supply Carlos II that the system established in the sixteenth century to control trade and communications between Spain and the Indies and to exclude foreigners remained largely in place in the second half of the seventeenth century.10 This system had various features. Firstly, there were the regular fleets—the flota and the galeones—which sailed from Spain to the Caribbean with goods for sale in the colonies (which were not allowed to develop their own industries), and which returned to Spain carrying both the proceeds from the sale of these goods and the Crown’s taxes and silver. These fleets sailed less regularly in the reign of Carlos II but were supplemented by the use of independent ships sailing under licence.11 In the Indies, the trade was concentrated at a few designated points. This meant, above all, the fairs held at Portobello. Not only was Portobello a great entrepôt for Spanish America—where goods were also traded from the Spanish Philippines (and from China and Japan)—it was also the point at which the silver of Peru, having been carried up to Panama and overland across the isthmus of Panama, was embarked for Spain.12

7 There were record amounts of bullion carried on the galeones of 1691 (40,000,000 pesos) and the flota of 1697 (30,000,000 pesos). In addition, the quinquennial averages between 1671 and 1700 (40,000,000 pesos) exceeded the peak years of 1591–1600: H. Kamen, Spain in the later Seventeenth Century 1665–1700 (London, 1980), p. 134ff. 8 A. Garcia-Baquero Gonzalez, ‘Andalusia and the crisis of the Indies trade, 1610–1720’, in I.A.A. Thompson and B. Yun Casalilla, eds., The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), p. 120ff. 9 American silver underpinned the credit system which kept going Spain’s armies and fleets throughout Europe. Typically, in late 1693, Spanish policymakers saw the returning flota, and its cargo of bullion, as the means to fund an increase in Spain’s armed forces for the war against Louis XIV the following year: cf. C. Storrs, ‘Disaster at Darien (1698–1700)? The Persistence of Spanish Imperial Power on the Eve of the Demise of the Spanish Habsburgs’, European History Quarterly, 29 (1999), p. 30. 10 The best description of that system remains C.H. Haring, Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the time of the Habsburgs (London and Oxford, 1918). 11 The galeones comprised a dozen heavily armed warships, of 500–800 tons, and about 15 merchant vessels, of 400–800 tons, and called at Cartagena (Tierra Firme) and Portobello (Panama); the flota comprised 2 galleons, one escort shop and 15 armed merchant vessels, of about 500 tons each, and called at Vera Cruz (in New Spain): Kamen, Spain in the later seventeenth century, p. 132. 12 For the transport of silver from Peru via Callao, cf. H. Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire. The Making of a World Power 1492–1763 (London, 2002), p. 262.

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Finally, there were the institutions of control in Spain: the Council of the Indies in Madrid, the Casa de Contratacion in Seville, which regulated the Indies trade there, and the Consulado, the corporation of Seville merchants trading with the Indies. Until well into the seventeenth century, loading and unloading in Spain took place at Seville, on the river Guadalquivir; but Cadiz was the operational heart of the trade from 1680 following the silting up of the Guadalquivir.13 The defects of this monopoly system—which was less able, in part because of the decline of Spanish industry from c.1570, to meet the needs of the colonists in the Indies14—stimulated evasion of all sorts both in the Americas and in the peninsula, involving both Spaniards and foreigners who were otherwise excluded from the monopoly system.15 Many Spaniards were aware of the defects of this system. Some of these sought, from the 1660s, to reduce the existing system to a monopoly trading company modelled on those established by Spain’s neighbours and rivals, but without success.16 Reform was opposed by too many vested interests. These included the Crown and the Seville and Cadiz merchant communities, all of whom knew how to work the existing system to their own advantage. Spain’s imperial system therefore remained in place, underpinned by law, by force—i.e. by the various royal fleets in home, Atlantic and American waters,17 supplemented on occasion by the grant of royal patents to privateers and others and by self-interest.18

13 Kamen, Spain in the later Seventeenth Century, p. 131ff. From 1717 Cadiz was also the official seat of the Casa de Contratacion 14 A. Garcia Sanz, ‘Castile 1580–1650: economic crisis and the policy of “reform,”’ in Thompson and Yun Casalilla, Castilian Crisis, p. 13ff. 15 Cf. S.J. Stein and B.H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War. Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000), p. 67ff. 16 M. Sanchez Apellaniz, ‘El proyecto de compania de comercio en Indias aprobado por la Junta de Comercio en 1683’, Revista de Derecho Mercantil, XXXIII, 83 (1962). Spanish companies of this sort were only established after 1720 ( J.H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London, 1966), p. 288). 17 In 1670 Spain’s main Caribbean fleet, the Barlovento fleet, was re-formed and ships sent to the West Indies, but was soon largely destroyed by the buccaneers: Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, p. 193; the fleet was re-established again in 1672, following the sack of Panama. 18 In 1674 (in wartime) Carlos II allowed Spanish privateers to act against English interlopers (Haring, Trade and Navigation, pp. 256–7). Not until the second half of the eighteenth century was this system remodelled and what we might call a Spanish imperial free trade area created; only with the Napoleonic Wars and the break-up of Spain’s American empire at the start of the nineteenth century were Spain’s claims to control trade with its former colonies finally exploded (C. Noel, ‘Charles

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In the later seventeenth century, this system presented a problem for the many states which saw access to overseas colonial trade as the key to economic growth; which should, in turn, provide larger revenues and fund larger armies, navies and territorial expansion. These states had various options. They might seek legitimately, via diplomatic negotiation, privileged, direct access to the Spanish Indies in the form of a grant from the Spanish king: in the 1690s, Carlos II’s brother-in-law, the German Elector Palatine requested legal access to Darien.19 Alternatively, individual foreign merchants might purchase naturalisation (as Spaniards, or rather Castilians) and legally engage in the transatlantic trade.20 Failing this, foreigners could seek indirect access to the wealth of the Spanish Indies by using Spanish agents and front men to trade circuitously and more or less illicitly. Alternatively, non-Spaniards might settle in Spain’s colonies in breach of the law (which was ineffectively enforced) and operate from there. If all else failed, foreign states or their subjects might seek to establish their own colonies in the Indies—perhaps resorting to force— and simply trade directly with these, or use these as a base to trade more or less illicitly with the Spanish colonists. I shall deal with this large subject by looking at Sweden and Scotland, two examples of failed penetration, and at England (Great Britain after the Union of 1707), which might be thought of as an example of successful penetration. Alternative case studies are possible, most of which are already the subject of excellent studies, including the French—the leading non-Spanish mercantile community involved in the Spanish transatlantic trade21—the Flemings,22 the Genoese and the Dutch.23 Seen in this perspective, Sweden, Scotland and England can throw some further light on what made for success

III of Spain’, in H.M. Scott, ed., Enlightened Absolutism, (London, 1990), p. 139; R. Carr, Spain 1808–1975 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1982), pp. 101–02). 19 Duque de Maura, Vida y Reinado de Carlos II, ed. P. Gimferrer (Madrid, 1990), p. 563. 20 For this and what follows, cf. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, p. 183ff. 21 Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, p. 65; A. Girard, Le commerce francais a Seville et Cadix au temps des Habsbourg (Paris, 1932). 22 J. Everaert, De internationale en koloniale Handel der Vlaamse Firma’s te Cadiz 1670–1700 (Bruges, 1973). For one Flemish success story, cf. M. Bustos Rodriguez, Burguesia de negocios y capitalismo mercantil en Cadiz: los Colarte (1650–1750) (Cadiz, 1991). 23 For Dutch and Spanish relations after 1648, cf. M. Herrero Sanchez, El Acercamiento Hispano-Neerlandes (1648–1678) (Madrid, 2000), which also contains useful material on Genoa.

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and for failure in efforts to access the wealth of Imperial Spain in this period.

II By 1660 Sweden had emerged as one of the European Great Powers, having acquired both a Baltic and—following the intervention of Gustavus II Adolfus in the Thirty Years War—a north German empire.24 However, Sweden’s success owed much to the weakness of its neighbours—and its situation was in fact precarious. Sweden certainly had resources, including timber, iron and copper, all very important for the navies of Western Europe.25 Sweden was also very effective at ‘organising’ those resources.26 Nevertheless, these had been depleted by royal generosity to the nobility in recent decades and were, anyway, too limited to support its Great Power status, particularly over the long term and, above all, if Sweden found itself in a major war. A series of foreign wars between 1620 and 1660 had allowed Sweden to shift these costs onto others, levying contributions in Germany and elsewhere, and receiving subsidies from other states.27 Peace from 1660, however, forced Swedish policy makers to confront the problem of how to support Sweden’s empire on its narrow resource base.28 The solution of the Regents who governed during the minority of king Charles XI between 1660 and 1675 was again to seek foreign subsidies, in return for as limited a military commitment as possible. The Chancellor, Magnus Gabriel de la

24 D. McKay and H.M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815 (London, 1983), p. 10ff. 25 Cf. S.-E. Astrom, ‘The Swedish Economy and Sweden’s Role as a Great Power 1632–1697’, in M. Roberts, ed., Sweden’s Age of Greatness 1632–1718 (London, 1973), p. 65 ff. 26 J. Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe. Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London, 2002), p. 174 ff. 27 For B. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change. Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1994), p. 187ff., this distinctive means of funding war played a crucial role in Sweden’s success in preserving the main features of its old constitutional system. 28 This problem was made more difficult in the short term by the fact that in 1660 Charles X was succeeded by his five-year old son, Charles XI, who did not take charge until 1675; until then power lay with a Regency council (A.F. Upton, Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (Cambridge, 1998), p. 11ff.).

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Gardie, opted for a subsidy from the king of France (Sweden’s paymaster from at least 1635)29 although not all in Sweden agreed with this policy.30 In 1667, de la Gardie’s enemies forced a change in policy, following Louis XIV’s rapid conquest of the Spanish Low Countries. The other European powers were obliged to react to the Spain’s near-collapse, including England and the Dutch Republic, then fighting the so-called Second Anglo-Dutch War. These two states had everything to gain from leaving Flanders in the hands of a weak Spain, and everything to lose from Flanders passing into the hands of Louis XIV. England and the Dutch therefore made peace (the Treaty of Breda, August 1667) and in January 1668 concluded a Triple Alliance with Sweden.31 These new allies promised to aid Spain if Louis did not make peace. England and the Dutch would supply ships and the Swedes troops—troops which enjoyed a Europeanwide reputation, founded on its successes since the 1620s, as one of Europe’s best fighting forces.32 Sweden had its own concerns about French aggression on the Lower Rhine and elsewhere, or rather those who forced through this change of policy had. But equally important was the promise, backed by the English and Dutch in late April 1668, of a Spanish subsidy to Sweden totalling 480,000 crowns a year (and more in time of war) in return for Sweden’s joining the two maritime powers in guaranteeing the peace under negotiation between France and Spain.33 This proved effective: Louis XIV made peace with Spain at the start of May 1668, leaving Flanders—minus some territorial losses—in Spanish hands.34 However, much remained to be done. There were

29 G. Rystad, ‘Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie’, in M. Roberts, ed., Sweden’s Age of Greatness 1632–1718 (London, 1973), p. 213. These subsidies had ended in 1648, but were resumed between 1657 and 1666: Astrom, ‘Swedish Economy’, p. 95, lists the subsidies received from France 1632–78. 30 However, the king’s minority encouraged a struggle for power which expressed itself in disagreements over policy cf. Upton, Charles XI, pp. 14, 24. The Crown’s weakness also encouraged other groups—notably the Council of State, dominated by the aristocracy, and the Diet or Riksdag—to assert themselves. 31 K. Feiling, British Foreign Policy 1660–1672 (London, 1930), pp. 234, 256–57, 262–3. 32 Cf. A. Aberg, ‘The Swedish Army from Lutzen to Narva’, in Roberts, Sweden’s Age of Greatness, p. 265ff. 33 Upton, Charles XI, p. 14; Feiling, British Foreign Policy, p. 276. 34 McKay and Scott, Rise of the Great Powers, p. 21. It has been argued, however,

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doubts about Spain’s readiness—and ability—to pay what had been promised, necessitating renewed promises on the part of Madrid in May 1669, and again in March 1670, to pay what had been agreed in 1668;35 for its part, Madrid was anxious that the members of the Triple Alliance should fulfil their own obligations. In 1670, therefore, although there was already a Swedish minister in Madrid, the Spanish Court sent an extraordinary envoy to Stockholm. Count Hernan Nunez was to report on both the capacity and willingness of the Swedish Court to meet its responsibilities under the guarantee. He was also to press for and co-ordinate any necessary joint action.36 The count’s mission was a failure. There were various reasons for this. Hernan Nunez was a soldier, not a diplomat. In addition, he felt that Madrid needed to do much more to ‘buy’ the Swedish ministers, with pensions and so on.37 This reflected the fact that the Spanish alliance was the policy of a faction at the Swedish Court, and was not unanimously approved; de la Gardie, for one, opposed it, preferring the French alliance being urged by Louis XIV’s new ambassador to Stockholm (from 1671), Arnauld de Pomponne.38 Matters were not helped by the great distance between Stockholm and Madrid and the consequent delay in the posts and in the Spanish government’s ability to respond to developments in the Swedish capital,39 or by Spain’s inability—the consequence of its enormous financial

that Louis XIV was influenced less by fear of the Triple Alliance than by the fact that he had just agreed a secret partition of the Spanish empire with his main rival, the Austrian Habsburg, Emperor Leopold ( J. Berenger, ‘los Habsburgo y la sucesion de Espana’, in P. Fernandez Albaladejo, ed., Los Borbones. Dinastia y Memoria de Nacion en la Espana del Siglo XVIII, (Madrid, 2002), p. 55). 35 Cf. declaration by Spanish minister at The Hague, Don Esteban de Gamarra, 9 May 1669, Consolidated Treaty Series, vol. 11, pp. 123–25. 36 Consulta of Spanish Council of State, 27 Feb. and 15 March 1670, Archivo General de Simancas [henceforth AGS]/Seccion de Estado/legajo 4024. This mission is briefly surveyed in a larger context by R. Quatrefages, ‘Diplomatic relationships between Spain and Sweden XVI–XVII centuries’, in E. Martinez Ruiz and M. De Pazzis Pi Corales, eds., Spain and Sweden in the Baroque Era (1600–1660) (nd, np), p. 1005ff. 37 Consulta of Council of State, 6 Sept. 1671, on Conde de Hernan Nunez to Queen Regent, 15 July 1671; Hernan Nunez to [?], 19 Aug. 1671, Stockholm, AGS/E/4024 38 Cf. P. Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge, 1988), p. 146ff. 39 Hernan Nunez’s letter of 15 July 1670 was received in Madrid nearly six weeks later, on 28 August.

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difficulties—to fulfil its financial obligations to the Swedes.40 Just how many troops Sweden was to provide was also a moot point.41 These difficulties might, however, have been overcome if the Spaniards had been prepared to offer trade concessions to the Swedes because the latter made this a key issue in the negotiations (which resulted in a draft treaty, which was sent to Madrid).42 The Swedes wanted the commercial access and privileges in Spain already enjoyed by the Dutch (1648), English (1667) and French (1659). Above all, the Swedes—influenced perhaps by the fact that Sweden’s neighbour and great rival, Denmark, was launching its own colonial programme43—wanted access to the Spanish Indies. The Swedes clearly hoped to obtain both cash subsidies and access to Spain’s colonies in return for defending the Spanish Low Countries; they no doubt expected to secure both short-term funds and, perhaps more important, long-term opportunities for sustained economic growth which should underpin Sweden’s own empire. But the Spanish Court, which had anticipated the Swedes’ ambition when it sent Hernan Nunez to Stockholm, was clearly determined not to grant them what they sought: Swedish exports to Spain did increase between 1667 and 1674,44 but the privileged access (above all to the Indies) was not achieved. The Swedes therefore found the solution to their financial difficulties by resorting, in April 1672, to the French alliance, in return for a subsidy of 400,000 rixdollars a year;45 in this way Louis XIV bought Charles XI off as

40 For Spain’s financial difficulties, cf. Kamen, Spain in the later Seventeenth Century, p. 357ff. Spain’s envoy also suffered as a result: cf. Hernan Nunez to Queen Regent, 25 Aug. 1674, AGS/Estado/4025. 41 The Swedish government wished only to provide 12,000 men, but its minister had offered 16,000: cf. W. Westergaard, ed., The First Triple Alliance, (New Haven, 1947), p. 204. 42 Draft treaty, [sent with Conde de Hernan Nunez to [ ?], 18 May 1672 ?], AGS/Estado/4025 43 Denmark acquired the islands of St. Thomas (c. 1670), St. John (1717) and St. Croix (1733): W. Westergaard, The Danish West Indies under Company Rule, 1671–1754 (New York, 1971). 44 J.A. Sanchez Belen, ‘The Trade of Scandinavian Merchandise in the Spanish Monarchy at the end of the 17th century’, in Spain and Sweden in the Baroque Era, p. 607ff. 45 M. Roberts, Sweden as a Great Power 1611–1697 (London, 1968), pp. 174–75; Upton, Charles XI, p. 10; Rystad, ‘Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie’, p. 215; Astrom, ‘Swedish Economy’, p. 95.

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part of the diplomatic preparation for his ‘Dutch War’. Unfortunately for Sweden, this alliance resulted in a disastrous intervention in that conflict; thereafter Charles XI preferred a policy of absolutism coupled with fiscal, military and naval reconstruction at home and neutrality abroad, the latter generating a degree of economic prosperity.46 However, some Spaniards suspected that Charles XI hid sinister designs on their own empire. In the 1680s the Swedish king sought to promote a sense of Swedish national identity in his diverse territories by exploiting Sweden’s ‘Gothic’ heritage. Accordingly, he sent a member of his Court, J.G. Sparwenfeldt, to Spain in 1689–90 to gather materials from the Spanish archives on the Goths and Visigoths, who had dominated Spain between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Moorish conquest. Sparwenfeldt’s request to visit the archives was agreed by the Council of Castile in February 1690, but was regarded with suspicion by some other members of the Spanish elite. The Constable of Castille could not believe that the King of Sweden would go to the expense of sending an agent to Spain on such an innocent mission, and suspected that Sparwenfeldt was really looking for documents to justify a future claim to the Spanish Crown. The Constable was too subtle and suspicious in an age in which the Spanish Succession was of major concern in Spain and the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, even if that was not its main purpose, Charles XI’s Gothic project did suggest alternative routes to securing access to the wealth of Spanish America for Sweden and its monarch, resources which might have prevented—or at least delayed—the collapse of Sweden’s empire.47

46 Upton, Charles XI, p. 51ff. and passim. These measures helped keep the Swedish empire going for another generation, until it finally collapsed in the Great Northern War (1700–21), a conflict which decisively exposed the gap between Sweden’s resources and its military and imperial pretensions (R.M. Hatton, ‘Charles XII and the Great Northern War’, in J.S. Bromley, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 6: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia 1688–1725 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 648ff ). 47 Cf. consulta of Council of State, 14 Feb. 1690, on (a) a consulta of the Constable of Castile, 5 Feb. 1690, (b) memorial from Sparwenfeldt, and (c) letter from Charles XI, AGS/Estado/4025; and P. Hogberg, ‘Manuscrits espagnols dans les bibliotheques suedoises’, Revue Hispanique, 36 (1916), p. 377ff. For earlier, Spanish interest in exploiting the common Gothic connection (perhaps as a means of bridging the religious and military divide between Spain and Sweden in the Thirty Years War) cf. M. Morner, ‘Spain and Sweden in the 17th century: problems and achievements of a comparative approach’, in Spain and Sweden in the Baroque Era, pp. 1041–42.

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III Scotland offers an example of failure to penetrate the Spanish Indies of a different kind. Whereas the Swedes had tried to negotiate privileged access in return for services—troops for the defence of Spanish Flanders—the Scots sought to muscle their way in, while denying that this is what they were doing, in the so-called Darien venture at the end of the 1690s. This episode has been unduly neglected by European historians but—fortunately—not by Scottish ones; for many of the latter, the Scots’ failure to access the lucrative colonial trade helped pave the way for Union with England in 1707.48 It is worth emphasising that Darien was not wholly unprecedented: in the 1680s Scots Covenanters had attempted to establish a colony at Stuart’s Town in the Carolinas, a project frustrated by the Spanish garrison at San Agustin.49 Nor was the Darien venture, initially, a purely Scottish one; it had dual, English and Scottish origins. In the 1680s and 1690s Scots merchants and others were anxious to develop the Scots economy and wealth by breaking into the lucrative colonial trades. In addition, in England, the monopoly of the East India Company came under increasing attack before and after the Revolution of 1688. However, in 1693 William III confirmed the privileges of the old East India Company. The defeated opponents of the latter in London looked for an outlet for their capital in Scotland, where the Parliament passed (1693) an Act to encourage foreign trade and established ( June 1695) the ‘Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies’. But in 1695–96, the East India Company successfully mobilised the English Parliament against the new Scottish company whose English investors in the latter were in effect forced out.50

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The best accounts of the Darien venture are G.P. Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (London and New York, 1932) and F.R. Hart, The Disaster of Darien. The Story of the Scots Settlement and the Causes of its Failure 1699–1701 (London, 1930). More recent treatments include D. Armitage, ‘The Scottish vision of empire: intellectual origins of the Darien venture’, in J. Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 97–118 and D. Hidalgo, ‘To Get Rich for our Homeland: The Company of Scotland and the Colonization of the Isthmus of Darien’, Colonial Latin American Historical Review 10:3 (2001), pp. 311–50. 49 A.W. Parker, Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia (Athens, GA, and London, 1997), pp. 10–12. 50 G.P. Insh, Historian’s Odyssey. The Romance of the Quest for the Records of the Darien Company (Edinburgh and London, 1938), p. 169 ff., and p. 183ff., substantially

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The remaining capital of the ‘Company of Scotland’ was raised in Scotland, following a major marketing campaign. This was an impressive achievement, especially given the difficult conditions—including serious harvest failure—experienced by Scotland in the 1690s. In just 6 months, in the first half of 1696, £400,000 was subscribed.51 Subsequently, the Company sent agents to obtain both additional capital and ships in the German trading hub, Hamburg, and at Amsterdam in the Dutch Republic.52 It should be clear from the above that Darien—or the Isthmus of Panama, of which Darien is a part—was not the only or even the primary (or the initial) objective of the ‘Company of Scotland’ as its full name (above) reveals. On the contrary; the Darien venture, and the consequent clash with the Spaniards, was an interlude in a more fundamental and enduring concern with Africa and the East Indies which has been largely ignored by historians.53 The shift of focus in 1696 to central America was due—but only in part—to the influence of William Paterson, best known for his role in the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. For Paterson—who had in the later 1680s proposed a Darien venture to an uninterested James II— Darien offered a base for operations against Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean and south America, a warehouse and market for trade

modifies the account of the foundation of the Company of Scotland (and the role of William Paterson) in T.B. Macaulay, History of England from the accession of James II, ed. C.H. Firth, 6 vols. (London, 1913–15), vol. 6, p. 2907ff. 51 Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, p. 145; R.K. Marshall, The Days of Duchess Anne (East Linton, 2000), p. 220; Hart, Disaster of Darien, p. 36ff.; P. Dickson, Red John of the Battles. John, 2nd Duke of Argyll and 1st Duke of Greenwich 1680–1743 (London, 1973), p. 83; C.P. Finlayson, ‘Edinburgh University and the Darien Scheme’, Scottish Historical Review, 34 (1955), p. 97ff. The 1400 investors—8 of whom invested the maximum allowed (£3,000) and 640 the minimum (£100)—included the Duchess of Hamilton (who opened the subscriptions in Edinburgh), the Duke of Argyll, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun and members of Scotland’s academic and urban elite; one Dundee merchant subscribed on behalf of over 40 fellow Dundonians. 52 Cf. Sir Paul Rycaut to Lord Lexington (William III’s minister in Vienna), 20 Feb. 1696–97 (OS), Hamburg, in H. Manners Sutton, ed., The Lexington Papers, 2 vols. (London, 1851), I, pp. 248–49, for the arrival of agents of the ‘Scotch East India Company’. Rycaut successfully blocked the Company’s efforts to find investors but failed to prevent it obtaining ships (Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, pp. 130–31). For the mission to Amsterdam (and Hamburg), cf. Insh, Company of Scotland, p. 83ff. 53 Gold from an expedition to the Guinea coast was used to mint Darien ‘pistoles’, the last gold coins issued by the Scottish mint before the Union (Insh, Company of Scotland, pp. 9, 250). There were also hopes of participating in the lucrative slave trade and of trading with Russia (Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, pp. 158–60).

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in those areas, and finally—should the colonists cross the narrow isthmus of Panama—a route to the Far East and India; it might also strengthen the ties between England and Scotland.54 The success in the 1670s and 1680s, of relatively small groups of buccaneers against Spanish Central America augured well for the project. In July 1698, a small flotilla of five ships—including the Caledonia and the Saint Andrew (both built at Hamburg) and the Unicorn and the Rising Sun (the first bought in, the second built in the Dutch Republic)—left the Firth of Forth, carrying 1200 would-be colonists who were promised land.55 Some of the colonists were experienced soldiers; some had even served with the Spaniards in Flanders. In October 1698, the expedition—an attempt to colonise Crab Island in the Caribbean en route having been frustrated by the Danes56— reached the Gulf of Darien, perhaps the weakest point in Spain’s Caribbean defences given that extensive fortifications had been built elsewhere in the 1670s and 1680s.57 The Scots established the colony of Caledonia, which comprised the settlement of New Edinburgh and the fort of Saint Andrew. The names of both ships and settlement suggest that the venture was now thought of as a ‘Scottish’ project. However, the new colony was just 150 miles east of Panama and Portobello, and of the road across the isthmus to Panama along which travelled the silver of Peru destined for Spain (see above, p. 339); this was a potentially very profitable but also a very sensitive, and thus dangerous, location. The Scots did not see themselves as trying to penetrate the Spanish empire; from the start they understood—and justified their colonisation by arguing—that Darien was ‘vacant’, that the Spaniards did not occupy the territory.58 This meant that the colonists were not in breach of the treaty of 1670, whereby Charles II of Great Britain and Carlos II of Spain had recognised each other’s possessions in the West Indies, ruling out further incursions and conquests by their

54

Hart, Disaster of Darien, pp. 45–6. This account draws on Hart, Disaster at Darien, p. 54ff., and Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, p. 111ff. 56 Hart, Disaster of Darien, pp. 59–61. 57 Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar’, pp. 253–61. 58 So both the Directors of the Company of Scotland and the authorities in London were told (1697) by both William Dampier and Lionel Wafer (Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, pp. 114–16). 55

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own subjects.59 The Scots also challenged the legality of Spanish rule on the grounds that the native Indians had not accepted it.60 The Spaniards, not surprisingly, saw things differently and were understandably alarmed by the Scots colonists;61 the latter represented an enormous threat to Spain’s imperial communications, and to that supply of colonial precious metals which remained crucial to Spanish imperial finance. Spanish policy-makers could not ignore, either, the fact that their own empire had been established by the heroic achievement against established empires and against great odds by a relatively small group of men, the conquistadores. Like those early conquerors, the Scots enjoyed some support from the native, Kuna Indians, who resented the incumbent imperial power, Spain.62 The religious issue reinforced the political one: the establishment of Calvinist Scots in the Indies was both a religious and a political threat.63 Therefore the Spaniards—who had deliberately left Darien unsettled, not least to prevent yet more contraband trade64—disputed the Scots claim that the territory was ‘vacant’. According to the king of Spain, writing to his minister in London, Darien belonged to him by the titles of discovery, reduction (or conquest), and papal bulls; in addition, this dominion had been maintained by the despatch of missionaries and by the maintenance of garrisons, which occasionally punished the rebellious local Indians.65 Clearly, the Spaniards were not disposed to allow the Scots to remain at Darien, as they had been obliged to allow other interlopers to establish themselves— notably the English in Jamaica. A first Spanish attack on Caledonia in early 1699 was frustrated by the difficult terrain and poor weather, but the conditions of the

59 Cf. the instructions given the leaders of the first expedition: Insh, Company of Scotland, p. 118 and see below, p. 356. 60 Cf. comment of I. Gallup Diaz, posted on H-LATAM discussion list, 13 Jan. 1998; and the theses of William Scott, Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh University (and an investor in the Company), in Finlayson, ‘Edinburgh University’, pp. 101–02. 61 The rest of this paragraph follows Storrs, ‘Disaster at Darien’, pp. 9–10. 62 Soon after reaching Darien, the Scots concluded agreements with the Kuna, offering the latter their protection (Hart, Disaster at Darien, p. 72–3). 63 Three ministers accompanied the first expedition, and in July 1699 the General Assembly decided to send four ministers on the second, (Insh, Company of Scotland, pp. 116, 172–3). 64 Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar’, p. 253. Not all agreed with this approach. 65 Carlos II to Coloma, 23 April 1688 [1698?], AGS/E/4014.

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Scots at Darien were deteriorating. Many fell ill, or abandoned the colony and in June 1699—with the colonists reduced to just 900— the colony’s governing council, which had just learnt that the Governor of Jamaica (on instruction from London), had ordered that no aid should be given to the Scots, decided to leave Caledonia. Only one ship, the Caledonia, reached Scotland, with less than one-third of the original 1200 settlers. However, a second expedition—four ships, carrying 1300 would-be colonists66—had already, in September 1699, left the Clyde for the Caribbean, reaching Darien in November 1699. But in March 1700, the colony at Caledonia was abandoned for the second time—and for good—following an all-out attack by the Spaniards. Fewer than 300 of the 1300 colonists got back to Scotland; some of those who fell into the hands of the Spaniards were only released following representations by William III to Carlos II, after an address by the Scottish burghs and shires.67 More important, perhaps, following the second evacuation by the Scots of their colony, the Spaniards strengthened their hold on Darien. This made a third colonisation attempt there virtually impossible and none was attempted. The enthusiasm of investors across Scotland suggests great warmth there for the project. However, there were sceptics, more perhaps than we are aware of.68 Much opposition was no doubt expressed privately.69 This was partly because public criticism might be risky: on the evening of 20 June 1700, news of the success of the Darien colonists against the Spaniards, at Toubacanti, prompted celebrations in Edinburgh which degenerated into rioting during which suspected opponents of the venture were victimised.70 Inevitably, the initial success at Darien undermined the position of the critics and strengthened the case for a second expedition. However, the extent of opposition needs further investigation.71

66 This was far more than the 500 originally intended (Insh, Company of Scotland, p. 170); it may reflect either the difficult conditions in Scotland in the 1690s, or the attractions of the new colony—or both. 67 J. Prebble, The Darien Disaster (London, 1968), p. 309. 68 Prebble, Darien Disaster, p. 79, refers to the opposition of Robert Douglas 69 Cf. Hart, Disaster of Darien, pp. 47–8. 70 Insh, Company of Scotland, p. 220ff. The Scottish Privy Council deployed troops, and prohibited bonfires and other celebrations in Edinburgh and other burghs, in order to prevent a repeat of the riots. 71 Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, p. 171; cf. the comments of I. Gallup Diaz, H-LATAM, 13 Jan. 1998.

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The failure of the Darien colonisation and trade project, and the substantial loss of capital, people and ships it meant, provoked serious political difficulties for William III in Scotland in the short term, because of his obvious hostility to the project. The failure also exacerbated existing tensions between England and Scotland, because of the clear English antagonism to the Company and its project. On the one hand this antagonism made Union more difficult; on the other hand, it facilitated Union. Many Scots now recognised that Scotland could not go it alone and needed to get ‘inside’ the English trading system; for their part many in England were forced to acknowledge the threat posed by Scotland as a potential trading rival. For all these reasons, compensation of those who had invested in the company, and the winding up of the latter, became an important part of the negotiations for the Union of 1707, which put an end to the company and to distinctively Scottish efforts to penetrate the Spanish empire.72 It is worth emphasising that, unlike the Swedes, the Scots made no attempt to bargain their way into the Spanish empire. This might have been difficult anyway, since the Scots had no diplomats of their own and few bargaining chips.73 An alternative approach open to

72 Cf. C.A. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707 (East Linton, 2nd ed., 2001), pp. 48–50. It was agreed that investors and creditors should recover their investment, plus 5% a year. This was an important element of the so-called ‘Equivalent’ which to many Scots since has been part of the charge that the Union was pushed through by bribery. (A number of the politicians involved had been investors). 73 They did supply the king of Spain with troops, in the form of a Scots regiment, or tercio, in Spain’s Army of Flanders (a unit which has been completely obscured by the Scots regiments in the service of the Dutch Republic). In 1681, following Spain’s disastrous performance in the recent Dutch War, Spanish policymakers planned a major overhaul of the Army of Flanders, so as to ensure a permanent peacetime establishment of just under 30,000 men, including a regiment of 1,000 Scots (Carlos II to Alexander Farnese, 24 Jan. 1681, in J. Cuvelier and J. Lefevre, eds., Correspondance de la Cour d’Espagne sur les Affaires des Pays-Bas au XVII e siecle, vol. 5: Precis de la correspondance de Charles II (1665–1700), (Bruxelles, 1935), p. 353). However, it is by no means clear that this proposal was acted upon and the number of Scots serving in Flanders was rarely more than 1% of the total strength of the Army of Flanders in this period. In early 1673 the tercio of Scots— under its maestre de campo, Don Franscisco Schott [Scott?] totalled 203 men (Consulta of Council of State, 19 March 1673, on Conde de Monterrey to Don Diego de la Torre, 22 Feb. 1673 and relacion of troops in Army of Flanders, Feb. 1673, AGS/E/2121). In the spring of 1684, at a time when the Army of Flanders totalled 17, 431 infantry and 6, 177 cavalry, the combined total of the English, Irish, Scots and Burgundian tercios—all infantry—was just 1,501 men (Relacion of Army of

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Scots merchants interested in Spain’s Indies and other trades was to settle at Cadiz or Seville, and even to purchase naturalisation. A few Scots did take this opportunity, exploiting Philip IV’s readiness to sell the right of naturalisation in order to obtain funds for the Thirty Years War. Unfortunately for those hoping to follow this route, the king’s promiscuous exploitation of this royal prerogative was resented by the Spanish merchants who effectively forced Carlos II to close this loophole by 1690.74 Since the access and privileges enjoyed by English merchants in Spain do not seem to have been extended to Scots and since preying illegally on the trade (piracy) was too narrow and risky an option,75 it seems reasonable to conclude that the Scots had few alternatives to direct intervention.76 Perhaps inevitably, interest in Scotland has focused primarily on explaining why the Darien project failed, and on seeking scapegoats. Despite the fact that many have dismissed the entire venture as foolhardy, failure was not inevitable. It has been suggested that the location was not ideal; that the promised riches—including logwood—were not to be had at Darien;77 and that the goods carried there were inappropriate.78 Many colonists were certainly struck down by fever. However, this was as much a problem of supply as of location and climate. Indeed it has been argued that the failure of the Directors of the Company of Scotland to ensure that what meagre provision was available in hard-pressed contemporary Scotland was supplemented by supplies from neighbouring colonies in the Americas played a crucial part in undermining the health of the colonists.79

Flanders, enclosed with Grana to Carlos II, 21 March 1684, Brussels, AGS/E/3874). We do not know enough about how this force was recruited in Scotland, but it could not be the basis for the sort of deal for which the Swedes had hoped—without success—to make with a Spain which continued to rely on foreign troops. 74 A. Dominguez Ortiz, ‘La concesion de “Naturalezas para comerciar en Indias” durante el siglo XVII’, Revista de Indias, 76 (1959), pp. 227–239. 75 Cf. H. Thomas, The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (London and New York, 1997), p. 215, for the career of Thomas Browne, who was executed in 1677. 76 Scots were certainly present in some of the ‘English’ colonies in the Americas and West Indies. 77 Insh, Company of Scotland, pp. 132–3. 78 Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, pp. 230. Insh defends the Scots, arguing that the goods carried reflected the fact that they hoped to trade with the European colonists in the Caribbean, not with the Indians. 79 Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, p. 234ff.; Insh, Company of Scotland, pp. 161–63; Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher, p. 112ff.

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These problems exacerbated the tendency of the colonists to quarrel among themselves, once adversity set in; many simply gave up, joining the Kuna or the Spaniards, or leaving for the English colonies in the Caribbean and North America.80 For many, then and later, responsibility for the failure of the Darien project lies with William III. The king certainly opposed the venture, and ordered England’s colonial governors not to aid the Scots colonists. William was, to some extent, the prisoner of merchant and other interests in England and its colonies, which were anxious about the threat posed by a Scottish trading company.81 But William also had a European agenda. There are three aspects to this. Firstly, we should not forget that William had Dutch as well as English responsibilities; that he could not assume the acquiescence of the Dutch (or rather of Holland, and above all of Amsterdam) in his policies; and that the Dutch had also established a foothold in Spain’s commercial and imperial system—supplying African slaves via the island of Curaçao—one which might be threatened if the Scots project were to succeed: significantly, the Company of Scotland found it difficult to raise additional capital in Amsterdam.82 Secondly, and above all, however, William was concerned to restrain the power of Louis XIV. To do this, William must hold together the coalition which had defeated Louis in the recently concluded Nine Years War (1689–97) and which had included England (and Scotland), the Dutch Republic and Spain. William—whatever his personal views of the Spaniards—just could not risk alienating them. Thirdly, it was especially unfortunate for the Scots that their own scheme was launched just when William was trying to negotiate a diplomatic solution to the contentious issue of the Spanish Succession—i.e. the problem of who was to inherit the Spanish empire on the death of

80

Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, pp. 239–40. A successful Scots colony at Darien might have had negative consequences for Jamaica’s trade with the Spanish Caribbean. 82 Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher, p. 72; Insh, Company of Scotland, pp. 85–7. For the Dutch East India Company’s machinations against the Company of Scotland’s efforts in Amsterdam, cf. Hart, Disaster of Darien, p. 252. For Dutch participation in the supply of slaves to the Spanish colonies, cf. H. Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 212ff. For the Dutch interest in the Spanish empire, cf. Herrero Sanchez, Acercamiento, pp. 243ff; and for William’s position in the Dutch Republic, cf. S.B. Baxter, William III, (London, 1966), p. 258ff. 81

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Carlos II.83 The Spanish king and his ministers greatly resented these negotiations; their resentment was fuelled by the Darien venture, not least because they—like many Spanish (and other European) historians since—failed to distinguish sufficiently between English and Scots;84 for many Spaniards the Scots incursion at Darien was simply an expression and anticipation of English ambitions on their world empire. Notwithstanding William’s negative role, the crucial obstacle to the success of Scotland’s Darien venture was Spain. The Spaniards could not allow settlement so close to one of the nerve centres of its global empire. The Scots were helped by the fact that—initially, at least—Spain was fighting the King of Morocco in North Africa. The Spanish administrative, military and naval machine was also rather slow moving. However, unlike in the 1650s—when the English had secured Jamaica while Spain was preoccupied with a war against France—Spain was relatively free of major European commitments in 1699 following the conclusion of the Nine Years War. Spain was thus able to devote itself more effectively than it had in the case of Jamaica to ousting the interlopers, although the need to deal with the Scots delayed Spain’s response to the efforts of the French to establish themselves at Pensacola Bay.85 From this point of view, the Darien venture was just badly timed—a failure of Scottish intelligence, perhaps? But Spain’s reaction—despatching a substantial expeditionary force from Cadiz in the spring of 1700—showed that the Spaniards were better able to defend their empire than is often recognised.86 Carlos II was aided in his efforts by the Seville merchant community which recognised the threat posed by the Scots and advanced their king money—specifically to fund an expedition against the Scots. For his part, Pope Innocent XII was worried by the presence of the Protestant Scots in the Indies, allowing Carlos II to tax clerical incomes there to fund Spain’s counter-measures. Put simply, the Scots simply could not match Spain’s military and naval power, once these were effectively mobilised.

83

Baxter, William III, p. 365ff and see below, pp. 358–9. Cf. Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar’, p. 254. 85 Cf. W.E. Dunn, Spanish and French Rivalry in the Gulf Region of the United States, 1678–1762: The Beginnings of Texas and Pensacola, (Austin, 1917), p. 101. 86 This is the argument of Storrs, ‘Disaster at Darien’, on which this paragraph is based. 84

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After considering two examples of failed penetration of the Spanish empire, let us consider what, on the face of it, was a success story, that of England. In the 1650s, the Cromwellian regime had waged war against the old enemy, Catholic Spain, conquering Jamaica in 1655 and in succeeding decades the island offered an excellent opportunity for Morgan and others to prey on the remaining Spanish Caribbean colonies.87 However, the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 was followed—though not immediately—by a reorientation of English policy, in favour of Spain.88 This new direction in foreign policy, in part due to growing anxiety about the ambitions of Louis XIV brought with it trading advantages, which provided the framework for England’s commercial relations with Spain for the rest of the seventeenth century. In May 1667, shortly before Louis’ forces invaded Spanish Flanders, Carlos II—or rather the Regency led by his mother—confirmed and extended the commercial privileges granted to the English merchants in Spain by Philip IV in 1645.89 In 1670, Charles II of Great Britain having mediated the conclusion of peace between Portugal and Spain90 two years after he joined the Triple Alliance (see above, p. 343), the two countries guaranteed each other’s territories in the Caribbean, Spain acknowledging England’s possession of Jamaica.91 Interest in English penetration of ‘New Spain’, Spanish America must not be allowed to obscure the great importance to English merchants of ‘Old Spain’, i.e. Iberia, the Balearic Islands and the Canaries, and of Spanish Naples and Sicily, or the fact that Spain and Spanish Italy offered invaluable harbours for English ships trading with the Levant. England’s trade with ‘Old Spain’ was valued not least as a

87 Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar’, p. 239. One Spanish viceroy, c. 1688, suggested reconquering the island. (Ibid., pp. 239–40). 88 Philip IV had sheltered the exiled Charles II, hoping that the Restoration would mean a change in English policy; it did, but not to the extent hoped. Charles II married a Portuguese princess—Catherine of Braganza—and was an ally of Louis XIV in the first years of his reign, to Philip’s annoyance: cf. R. Stradling, ‘Spanish Conspiracy in England, 1661–63’, English Historical Review, 87 (1972), pp. 269–86. 89 S.J. Stein and B.H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, p. 66; Feiling, British Foreign Policy, pp. 232–3. The text of the treaty is in the Consolidated Treaty Series, 10, p. 63ff. 90 Feiling, British Foreign Policy, p. 263. 91 Feiling, British Foreign Policy, p. 326.

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source of the bullion needed to fund the purchase of naval stores from the Baltic and of luxury goods from the East.92 This bullion was received in payment for the English goods imported by the Spaniards, which exceeded the value of Spanish exports to England. But the English were also—indirectly—supplying Spain’s American colonies, since Spain’s industry was increasingly unable to meet the needs of the colonists. A small English merchant community at Cadiz and Seville—who had purchased naturalisation from the Spanish Crown—could legally trade in the Spanish Indies,93 but they were far fewer than the Flemings, French and Genoese who gained access to the Spanish Indies in this way. Other English merchants exported their goods to the Indies via Seville and Cadiz, using Spanish agents and front men, and also making extensive use of the local smugglers, to both load their cargoes and unload (and load into their own vessels) their silver. The treaty of 1667 greatly facilitated these operations; the export of bullion from Spain remained illegal, but the privileges granted the English merchants—including the removal of such controls as the inspection of their cargoes and books—in effect connived at their illegal export from Seville and Cadiz of Indies silver.94 However, the continued legal obstacles and practical difficulties led some English merchants to look for means to trade directly with the Spanish colonies. This was possible from Jamaica, which from 1680 was allowed to supply African slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.95 For some English merchants this offered an excellent opportunity for illicit trade with the Spanish colonies; but others looked to a future in which a much larger trade was possible.

92 This paragraph follows J. McLachlan, Trade and Peace with Old Spain 1667–1750 (Cambridge, 1940), chapter 1, passim. Cf. also G. Pagano de Divitiis, English merchants in seventeenth century Italy (Cambridge, 1997). 93 Following Morgan’s sack of Panama in 1671, the English merchants in Seville reputedly did not dare leave their houses: Feiling, British Foreign Policy, p. 326. 94 Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, p. 70. 95 Between 1698 and 1708, Jamaica imported 44,000 African slaves, far more than the island itself needed—obviously for re-export: J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (2nd ed., Stroud, 1993). Cf. also C. Nettels, ‘England and the SpanishAmerican Trade, 1680–1715’, Journal of Modern History, 3 (1931), pp. 1–32 and Thomas, Slave Trade, p. 211ff. According to Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, p. 72, England’s relatively low share of imports into Cadiz (for re-export to the Indies) c. 1685 is partly to be explained by the fact that the English were trading directly with Spain’s Caribbean colonies.

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The different interests of the various groups in England and Jamaica in fact meant a not wholly consistent policy towards Spain. On the one hand, some preferred to continue the buccaneering activity of the 1670s. On the other hand, the English government, which in 1680 concluded another treaty of mutual guarantee with Spain,96 and the merchants trading with both ‘Old Spain’ and ‘New Spain’, preferred good relations with Madrid. Not surprisingly, the English government—like so many other states which benefited from the status quo—turned against the buccaneers, and instead shored up the Spanish empire. In 1686 the English government even offered, but without success, to help Spain fight the remaining buccaneers and pirates in return for a grant of the lucrative contract to supply black African slaves to the Spanish colonists in the Caribbean, the so-called asiento de negros.97 An opportunity to secure further access to the Spanish Indies was offered by the Spanish Succession crisis, which was provoked by Carlos II’s lack of direct heirs. William III sought a Partition Treaty with Louis XIV in order to avoid recourse to war by an agreement that should satisfy the main claimants to the Spanish throne. England would be given a Spanish port or island in the Caribbean, as a guarantee of the English (and Dutch) trade there in return for English (and Dutch) consent to a partition.98 In April 1698, William III told Louis XIV’s ambassador in London that the English might be satisfied with Havana (Cuba),99 but this was too much for the French king, given the importance of Havana in Spain’s imperial system;100 Louis

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J.P. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland 1641–1702 (London, 1958), p. 46ff. Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar’, p. 243. In 1667–68, the English minister in Madrid, the earl of Sandwich, had also sought—without success—the asiento, and the legal right to trade directly with Buenos Aires (Feiling, British Foreign Policy, p. 237). 98 In 1670, Charles II had sought the entire Spanish Indies in the event of the death of Carlos II, in his secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV (Feiling, British Foreign Policy, p. 304). 99 Count Tallard to Louis XIV, 25 April 1698, London, in P. Grimblot, ed., Letters of William III ad Louis XIV and of their Ministers, 2 vols. (London, 1848), I, p. 426. Earlier William had declared his ignorance of the territories which comprised the Spanish Indies. 100 Tallard to Louis XIV, 8 May 1698, London, Letters of William III, I, p. 462. On this occasion, Tallard explained to William the economic and financial rationale behind Spain’s imperial system. On the significance of Havana and Cuba, cf. J.R. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 3ff. 97

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offered instead the Philippines and the Spanish half of the island of Santo Domingo.101 In the event, the First Partition Treaty (September 1698), promised Santo Domingo to the Dutch; the English were to have Spain’s North African outposts of Ceuta and Oran, close to the Straits of Gibraltar, in part reflecting the greater interest of English merchants in ‘Old Spain’ and the Mediterranean.102 The Second Partition Treaty (March 1700), made necessary by the death of the young prince of Bavaria (the main beneficiary of the first treaty), assigned the Indies to the Archduke Charles, son of William III’s erstwhile ally, the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I; no guarantees were assigned the English (or Dutch) in this treaty.103 These diplomatic efforts failed to prevent the outbreak in 1701–02 of the War of the Spanish Succession, in which England and its allies faced Bourbon France and Spain. Issues such as the English (and Scottish) succession were important strands in the conflict but English politicians also remained preoccupied with the issue of trade with Spain and its empire. English merchants and colonists opposed the grant by the new Spanish king, and Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V, of the asiento de negros to a French company. They were also concerned at the tightening up by the new king of Spain of the monopoly system, cracking down on illegal trade and making life difficult for the legal English trade in both ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Spain.104 English (and Dutch) war aims and strategy reflected these commercial concerns. In 1702 an English squadron tried—unsuccessfully—to prevent the arrival at Cartagena of a French squadron sent to establish there the French Guinea company, which had been

101 Tallard to Louis XIV, 22 May 1698, Letters of William III, I, pp. 505, 507; Louis XIV to Tallard, 29 May 1698, Letters of William III, II, p. 6ff.; Portland to William III, 4 June 1698, Letters of William III, II, p. 18ff. Portland rejected the offer of S. Domingo. 102 Since the 1st Partition Treaty assigned the Indies to the young prince of Bavaria, Louis claimed that the English and Dutch had no reason to fear for their trade there and could not expect ports or direct trade in the Indies; if they insisted, France must have the same (Louis XIV to Tallard, 15 July 1698, Letters of William III, II, p. 65ff.). For the offer of Santo Domingo, cf. Louis XIV to Tallard, 5 Aug. 1698, Letters of William III, II, p. 93ff; for that of Ceuta and Oran, cf. Portland to Jersey, 15 Sept. 1698, Letters of William III, II, p. 164ff. The text of the 1st Partition Treaty is in Letters of William III, II, pp. 483–95. 103 The text of the 2nd Partition Treaty is in Letters of William III, II, pp. 495–507. 104 Cf. J. Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy 1660–1793 (London, 1991), p. 142.

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granted the asiento;105 the English also launched abortive attacks on the Darien coast, perhaps influenced by what the Scots had recently attempted there.106 In 1702, too, the English and Dutch launched an abortive expedition against the heart of the Indies trade, Cadiz.107 The aftermath of this failure, the partially successful assault on the returning treasure fleet at Vigo (in north-west Spain) demonstrates the importance of the bullion of the Indies in English and Dutch thinking.108 Subsequently, the allies adopted the policy of ‘No Peace without Spain’, committing themselves to put on the throne of Spain and the Indies, in place of Philip V, the Austrian Archduke Charles. It was expected that ‘Carlos III’ would grant to English traders full legal access to Spain’s overseas empire.109 In the meantime, the war against the Bourbons continued in the Caribbean,110 English success there prevented the French company from making its slave supply monopoly effective.111 The war, however, dragged on, stimulating anti-war feeling in England; this was fanned by a belief that selfish allies were taking English subsidies in order to pursue their own aims. The Tories who won the General Election of 1710 on an anti-war platform exploited this sentiment. The new government—led by Henry St. John, Viscount

105 G.M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 1: Blenheim (London, 1930), pp. 259–61. 106 Cespedes del Castillo, ‘La Defensa militar’, p. 266. 107 It was also believed that there were large numbers of Spaniards ready to rise against Philip V in surrounding Andalusia. 108 H. Kamen, ‘The Destruction of the French Silver Fleet at Vigo in 1702’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 39, (1966), pp. 165–73. Philip V subsequently confiscated the substantial cargo of bullion being remitted to English and Dutch merchants on the silver fleet (H. Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain 1700–1715 (London, 1969), pp. 179–80). 109 In 1707 a draft agreement between Queen Anne and ‘Carlos III’, granting the asiento to the Queen’s British subjects was sent to Spain (Thomas, Slave Trade, p. 230). 110 In 1708, Admiral Wager intercepted the returning treasure fleet off Cartagena, capturing much of its cargo; Marlborough believed that this must bring peace closer, since it deprived Louis XIV and his grandson of badly needed resources (G.M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 2: Ramillies (London, 1932) pp. 405–07). In 1711 captain Littleton captured a Spanish galleon, prompting comparisons with the days of Drake (Henry St. John, viscount Bolingbroke to Drummond, 2 Aug. 1711, in G. Parke, ed., Letters and Correspondence, Public and Private, of the Right Hon. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (London, 1798), I, p. 291ff.). 111 Thomas, Slave Trade, p. 231. By 1710 the British were selling over 10,000 slaves a year, whereas the French Guinea Company sold only about 13,000 in total between 1702 and 1713.

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Bolingbroke, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford—pursued secret peace negotiations with Louis XIV and prepared to abandon both the allies and the war aim of ‘No Peace without Spain’, where Bolingbroke for one no longer believed the Allies could win the war.112 But the English ministers had not abandoned their ambitions in the Spanish Indies. St. John was determined to secure the asiento, which Harley intended should ensure the success of his newly established (September 1711) South Sea Company. In this way Harley hoped both to pay off England’s large war debt and to destroy the ‘Whig’ Bank of England.113 Bolingbroke and Oxford expected to succeed by exploiting Louis XIV’s desperate need for peace and the fact that Philip V depended greatly upon his grandfather’s financial and military support. In the late summer of 1711, it was agreed that the English should keep Gibraltar and Port Mahon (as a guarantee of their Spanish and Mediterranean trade) and that they should obtain the asiento held by the French Guinea Company. Instead of receiving Spanish territory in the West Indies as security for their Caribbean trade, the English ministers were promised the asiento for thirty years. Satisfied on these and other key issues, Queen Anne’s government urged the allies to negotiate a general peace at Utrecht.114 The progress of the negotiations at Utrecht was complicated, however. Deaths in Louis XIV’s family resurrected fears of the future union of both France and Spain under Philip V. The British government sought to enlarge the commercial and territorial concessions to be made by Louis XIV on behalf of Philip.115 The first of these issues resulted in a proposal to elevate Queen Anne’s cousin, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, to the throne of Spain and the Indies,116 and to give his Savoyard territories to Philip V, a solution rendered abortive by Philip’s decision to renounce his claim to the French crown in favour of that of Spain. In the late summer of 1712, Robert

112

Bolingbroke to Drummond, 20 and 26 Dec. 1710, and 5 Jan. 1710–11, Letters and Correspondence, I, pp. 41–62. 113 G.M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 3: The Peace and the Protestant Succession, (London, 1934), pp. 143–44; McLachlan, Trade and Peace, pp. 46–7. 114 Cf. preliminaries agreed in London by Mesnager, Bolingbroke and Dartmouth, 20 Oct. 1711, Letters and Correspondence, I, pp. 374–81; Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, 3, p. 204ff. 115 McLachlan, Trade and Peace, p. 49. 116 Cf. Bolingbroke to Torcy, 29 April 1712, Letters and Correspondence, II, p. 275ff and copy of peace plan brought to London by the French negotiator, Gaultier,

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Sutton, Lord Lexington was sent to Madrid to observe Philip’s formal renunciation in the Cortes and to conclude a trade treaty with Spain.117 But the latter was really the responsibility of Manuel Manasses Gilligan, who followed Lexington to Madrid and who had experience of asiento negotiations.118 In March 1713, the English negotiators in Madrid secured the asiento for thirty years, to supply annually 4800 African slaves to the Spanish colonists in the Indies.119 In addition to the asiento, Philip V also informally allowed the English to send, each year, one ship of 500 tons to Cartagena, Portobello and Buenos Aires. This paved the way for the conclusion of a general peace between Britain and Spain in July 1713.120 It is noteworthy—in view of the debates about the economic implications of the Union for Scotland121—that the Duke of Shrewsbury, Queen Anne’s ambassador in Paris, on seeing a copy of the recently

(Ibid., p. 286ff.). Bolingbroke’s proposal that Philip renounce what the French negotiators claimed was a ‘fundamental law‘ suggests an interesting—and largely unremarked—application on the international stage of what might be called ‘revolution principles’ (of 1688); I hope to explore this subject elsewhere. If the Duke of Savoy whose rights to the English Succession had been ignored in the Act of Settlement in 1701 had been elevated as proposed, this would not only have ensured that the Savoyard state and its subjects penetrated the hitherto largely closed Spanish overseas empire; as the protégé—or dependant—of the English government, the Duke might have been obliged to grant even greater concessions to Queen Anne’s subjects within Spain’s imperial trading system than did Philip V subsequently (see below). 117 The formal renunciation occurred on 5 November: cf. J.L. Castellano, Las Cortes de Castilla y su Diputacion (1621–1789). Entre Pactismo y Absolutismo (Madrid, 1990), p. 144. 118 Bolingbroke to Lexington, 30 Sept. 1712, Letters and Correspondence, III, pp. 109–11. Gilligan was directed from London by Arthur Moore, a director of the South Sea Company (Cf. Dictionary of National Biography, 19, pp. 184–85, ‘Robert Sutton, lord Lexington’; Bolingbroke to Lexington, 30 Sept. 1712, Letters and Correspondence, III, pp. 109–11; same to Gilligan, 25 Jan. 1713 (OS), Letters and Correspondence, III, pp. 329–30; Dictionary of National Biography, 13, pp. 787–89, ‘Arthur Moore’). 119 H.G. Pitt, ‘The Pacification of Utrecht’, in J.S. Bromley, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia 1688–1725 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 476; J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, (London, 1993), pp. 55–6. The English contractors were also permitted to establish temporary settlements on Spanish territory in the River Plate to ‘refresh’ their slaves: The asiento agreement is in Consolidated Treaty Series, vol. 27, p. 425ff. The 500 tons was doubled in 1716. 120 Pitt, ‘Pacification of Utrecht’, p. 476. The treaty is in Consolidated Treaty Series, vol. 28, p. 295ff. 121 Cf. C.A. Whatley, ‘Economic Causes and Consequences of the Union of 1707: A Survey’, Scottish Historical Review, LXVIII, (1989), p. 150ff.

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concluded asiento agreement observed that the privileges it contained were granted (only) to ‘la nation anglaise’. Shrewsbury assumed that all the Queen’s subjects were included and suggested that some more extensive term might be used. The more general trade treaty concluded at Utrecht in December 1713 after lengthy negotiations in both Madrid and London did employ different language: it referred to the subjects of Great Britain.122 Queen Anne’s ministers had, apparently, secured a great commercial prize.123 However, it soon became clear that both the asiento and the trade treaty were less advantageous than had been originally thought. Bolingbroke expected the asiento to provide a cover for a profitable illicit trade, but such a trade had been long enjoyed by the merchants of Jamaica, who resented the South Sea Company’s monopoly.124 It soon became clear, too, that in order to secure concessions in ‘New Spain’, the English negotiators had allowed the Spanish government to curtail many of the privileges, embodied in the treaty of 1667, of the English merchants trading to ‘Old Spain’.125 Bolingbroke and Gilligan especially were all tarred with the brush of corruption,126 but Philip V and his ministers had also exploited the obvious English eagerness to secure the asiento, Gibraltar and Menorca.127 Equally ominously, the more vigorous regime in Spain

122 Shrewsbury to [Bolingbroke?], 8 April 1713, Letters and Correspondence, IV, p. 23 ff. Scots participation in the South Sea Company, however, needs further study. Shrewsbury was appointed ambassador following the death in a duel of the original nomination, the Scots Duke of Hamilton. The conclusion of the general trade treaty was complicated—delayed—by various issues; apart from trade related matters, these included Gibraltar and Port Mahon, the treatment of the Catalans, that of Portugal , that of the Duke of Savoy and the desire of the Princesse des Ursins, the leading figure at the Court of Philip V, for an independent sovereignty in the former Spanish Low Countries: cf. Bolingbroke to Princesses des Ursins, 14 Jan. 1713–14, and same to Strafford, Letters and Correspondence, IV, p. 425ff, and p. 469ff. The text of the trade treaty is in Consolidated Treaty Series, vol. 28, p. 431ff. 123 Bolingbroke thought that Gilligan deserved a statue for his work on the trade treaty: Bolingbroke to Shrewsbury, 4 Feb. 1712–13, Letters and Correspondence, III, pp. 374–75. 124 Cf. McLachlan, Trade and Peace, p. 62. 125 J.R. Jones, Britain and the World (1649–1815) (Brighton, 1980), pp. 176–77; P. Langford, The Eighteenth Century 1688–1815 (London, 1976), pp. 69–70. 126 Cf. Jones, Britain and the World, p. 176 and Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the House of Lords, vol. X (New series): 1712–14 (London, 1953), pp. xxii–xxiii. 127 In early 1713, Bolingbroke believed that Gilligan should conclude a trade

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of Philip V strictly enforced the terms of the asiento, cracking down on supposed breaches and on other illicit trading. The defects of the trade agreements of 1713 helped undermine the position of the Tories in the last months of Anne’s reign,128 and—in marked contrast to Bolingbroke’s vision of closer ties between the two states in the future129—embittered Anglo-Spanish relations long after 1714.130

V Sweden, Scotland and England were not the only states hoping to penetrate Spain’s overseas empire, but their experiences suggest some broader conclusions about what made for success and failure on the part of those seeking to access the Spanish Monarchy. The Swedes were asking too much of a Spain which was always reluctant to allow foreigners into its Indies: Carlos II was never prepared to allow full, legal, direct access to Spanish America in return for outside help. As for the Scots—whose Darien venture was both more cosmopolitan than the use of the adjective Scots implies131 and also the only one of our three case studies to channel its efforts into territorial colonisation alone, they offered nothing to Madrid. But the Scots were also too small and weak to confront imperial Spain unaided by its larger, more influential and powerful southern neighbour. England was certainly more powerful state than Scotland, and perhaps even Sweden, before 1700, but its success too was limited. After

treaty even if it meant exceeding his instructions and yielding on some points (Bolingbroke to Lexington, 7 Jan. 1712–13, Letters and Correspondence, III, p. 335ff.). The British ministers had also abandoned Britain’s Catalan allies, ensuring the defeat of the latter, and their incorporation in a more ‘absolutist’ Spanish state: cf. J. Albareda, Felipe V y el triunfo del absolutismo. Cataluna en un conficto europeo (1700–1714) (Barcelona, 2002), p. 111ff.; Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, III, pp. 247–48. 128 Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, III, p. 274; McLachlan, Trade and Peace, pp. 58–9. 129 Cf. Bolingbroke to marques de Montijo, 14 July 1713, Letters and Correspondence, IV, p. 193ff. 130 One consequence was Spanish support for Jacobite projects: cf. W.K. Dickson, ed., The Jacobite Attempt of 1719 (Edinburgh, 1895). On British trade with Spanish America under the asiento after 1713, cf. J. Lynch, Bourbon Spain 1700–1808 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 149–52. The asiento was given up in 1750 (Carswell, South Sea Bubble, p. 240). 131 Deserters from Darien included Italian mercenaries (I. Gallup Diaz, post on H-LATAM, 16 Mar. 1999).

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1700 England (Britain from 1707) played a key—indeed the crucial—role in the War of the Spanish Succession. Louis XIV and his grandson, Philip V, could not end that struggle until Britain, the arbiter of the peacemaking in 1712–13, had been bought off, above all with the asiento, Gibraltar and Menorca.132 For her part, however, Queen Anne had been obliged to acknowledge Philip’s possession of both Spain and its Indies.133 The asiento was acquired at the price of abandoning more ambitious commercial and territorial demands in the Spanish Americas, while the Anglo-Spanish trade treaty of 1713 was by no means a net gain for an English merchant community composed of diverging, and sometimes opposed interests. What is most striking, perhaps, is the Spanish empire’s ability to resist encroachment to 1714. Thereafter Spain’s overseas empire remained the largest of all the European states, one jealously preserved for exploitation by Spaniards and the Spanish crown, while the grant of privileged access to Spain’s imperial trading system remained an invaluable bargaining chip to a monarch intent on restoring Spain’s dominion, power and prestige.134

132 These gains sought not only to ensure English/British penetration of the (Spanish) Americas but also to prevent that of a rival, France; Queen Anne’s ministers insisted that Portugal—another protege of Queen Anne in the peacemaking— abandon its desired barrier against Bourbon Spain in the Iberian peninsula in return for protection of its position in the Amazon basin against inroads from French Guiana: cf. Shrewsbury to Bolingbroke, 8 March 1713, Letters and Correspondence, III, p. 406ff. 133 Philip had lost Spanish Flanders and Italy, but some historians believe that these were a liability, such that Spain was, paradoxically, stronger after 1713 (cf. Kamen, War of Succession, pp. 391–92). 134 Cf. McKay and Scott, Rise of the Great Powers, p. 101ff.

EPILOGUE

BECOMING ATLANTIC Peter C. Mancall In 1604, James I printed his first pamphlet since becoming king of England. Entitled A Counterblaste to Tobacco, he hoped that the brief tract would prevent the English from becoming more interested in a plant that many Europeans had already tried and many believed was a panacea. James wrote the tract because he believed that “it is the Kings part (as the proper Physician of his Politicke-body) to purge” the nation of disease.1 James excoriated existing and widely publicized claims that tobacco possessed astonishing therapeutic value. These claims had reached their apogee in the work of a physician in Seville named Nicholas Monardes, whose work on the subject became the most widely cited in Europe. Translated into English and printed in London in 1577 with the alluring title Joyfull Newes out of the Newfound World, the book included a long chapter on the benefits of tobacco.2 James opposed the plant precisely because it was not indigenous to England. It had its origins among the “barbarous Indians” who relied on it to cure them of “the Pockes, a filthy disease” they were susceptible to because of the weakness of their bodies and the unhealthy heat of their climate.3 But its appeal in England sprang from a base human desire: envy. Tobacco was popular “because it is come to be the fashion,” he argued. For such is the force of that naturall Self-love in every one of us, and such is the corruption of envie bred in the brest of every one, as we

1

[ James VI & I], A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London, 1604), sig. A3v. For a discussion of the effect of Monardes’s work see D. Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica” in L. Schiebinger & C. Swan, eds, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 83–99; and P.C. Mancall, “Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe” Environmental History 9 (2004), pp. 648–78. 3 Counterblaste to Tobacco, sig. Bv. 2

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cannot be content unlesse we imitate every thing that our fellowes doe, and so proove our selves capable of every thing whereof they are capable, like Apes, counterfeiting the maners of others, to our owne destruction.4

His concerns were not those of modern-day opponents of tobacco, who rely on contemporary science to argue that the plant causes cancer. Instead, his criticism took aim at the claims of tobacco as a panacea and the fact that the plant’s novelty promoted it: “And therefore the generall good liking and imbracing of this foolish custome, doeth but onely procede from that affectation of noveltie, and popular errour.”5 James’s assault on what would soon become one of the most profitable exports of the English North American mainland colonies was symptomatic of a longstanding reluctance on the part of the English to embrace the potential gains to be had from establishing settlements across the ocean. Yet despite the ferocity of its attack, the Counterblaste did not signal a future in which the English eschewed colonial adventures. Instead, it can now be read as one of the last testimonies of its kind. Along with the deep anti-colonial hostility to be found in a few other cultural products of the first decade of the seventeenth century, the pamphlet soon became a relic of an earlier mentalité, an entire set of presumptions about the proper ordering of a society that made sense when the Tudors ruled but became increasingly anachronistic under the Stuarts.

I James was not alone in his opinions during those early years of Stuart rule. Others too expressed scepticism bordering on derision for any schemes that suggested great benefits to be had from expanding overseas activities. Though the English had already mounted several serious efforts to expand their horizons westward—primarily the Sir Martin Frobisher voyages of the mid-1570s, the disaster-ridden exploration of Newfoundland under Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, and the eventual loss of the Roanoke settlers in the late 1580s—

4 5

Counterblaste to Tobacco, sig. Cr. Counterblaste to Tobacco, sig. Cr.

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their failure was followed by inaction or small-scale ventures (such as Bartholomew Gosnold’s voyage to New England in 1602). Those earlier setbacks had apparently sent a message: long-distance journeys could be dangerous or even fatal (even for leaders such as Gilbert) and promises of abundant wealth or prestige needed to be rebuffed. The Counterblaste was but one expression of this antipathy towards long-distance enterprise. In 1605 English audiences could attend performances of the multi-authored play Eastward Hoe or read a recently printed book called Mundus Alter et Idem, probably written by Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich. These cultural spectacles attacked the idea that overseas activities were necessarily a good proposition for the English. Instead of taking seriously the potential benefits to be had from sustained engagement in long-distance travel, trade, and settlement, the play and the pamphlet ridiculed the idea that such ventures could ever make sense. “I tell thee, Golde is more plentifull [in Virginia] than copper is with us,” one character declares in the satiric play, and for as much redde Copper as I can bring, Ile have thrice the waight in Golde. Why man all their dripping Pans, and their Chamber pottes are pure Gold; and all the Chaines, with which they chaine up their streetes, are massie Golde; all the Prisoners they take, are fetterd in Gold: and for Rubies and Diamonds, they goe forth on holydayes and gather ’hem by the Sea-shore, to hang on their childrens Coates, and sticke in their Capps, as commonly as our children weare Saffron guilt Brooches, and groates with hoales in ’hem.

In this world of temperate climate and ample food, the English “shall live freely there, without Sargeants, or Couriers, or Lawyers, or Intelligencers.” In this new world, “You may be an Alderman there, and never be Scavinger; you may be any other officer, and never be a Slave.”6 Hall’s work was more nakedly hostile, moving from the biting satire of his Mundus alter et Idem of 1605 (published in English in 1609) to the strident polemic against travel in his Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell, published in 1617.7

6 George Chapman, Ben Johnson, and John Marston, Eastward Hoe as it was playd in the Black-friers by The Children of her Majesties Revels (London, 1605), sig E3v–[E4r]. 7 [ Joseph Hall], Mundus alter et idem sive Terra Australis (Frankfurt, 1607); [ Joseph Hall], Discovery of a New World or a Description of the South Indies (London, 1613 or

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Yet neither the play’s satire nor the ferocity of Hall’s attack carried the day. At virtually the same time that Hall was shifting from a satirist to a scold, the idea of long-distance activity was taking hold as never before among the English. The shift itself was not surprising but the rapidity with which it took place and its effect upon the intellectual and cultural climate were astonishing. Despite voices crying out for the retention of insularity, the dominant trend of policy and people alike under the Stuarts aimed at expansion of the realm. The planting of Jamestown in 1607 did not on its own mark the change, especially given the fact that extraordinary mortality among the colonists continued to undermine the outpost’s chances for success.8 What signaled the shift was the fact that the Virginia Company managed to keep the nascent colony supplied, an effort supported by a gradual but perceptible change in public opinion (at least as it can be inferred through the migration of thousands of individuals). Further, the Virginia Company received direct financial support from individuals who were accustomed to patronizing the literary efforts of individuals such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and John Donne.9 But real change accelerated under the Stuarts. Seventeenth-century emigrants from England had multiple possible destinations by the third and fourth decades of the century, and for the first time in their history those who decided to leave home for foreign shores constituted a significant proportion of the English population. By the century’s end 180,000 English migrants had gone to Ireland, in addition to the 190,000 who migrated to the West Indies, 116,000 to the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, 21,000 to New England and a post-1660 movement of 23,500 to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.10 Those migrants altered local economies. They created sugar plantations in the West Indies. They encouraged American hunters to

1614); Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell as it is commonly undertaken by the gentlemen of our nation (London, 1617); A. Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonization, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 79–80. 8 C.V. Earle, “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Jamestown” in T. Tate & D. Ammerman, eds, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 96–125 9 Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, p. 62. 10 N. Canny, “English Migration into and across the Atlantic during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” in N. Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), p. 64.

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harvest the once-abundant fur supplies of the interior and exhausted soils on tobacco farms. The shifts can be seen in Newfoundland. In the late sixteenth century the Europeans there comprised a migratory workforce in the cod fishery. By the 1640s, a more permanent population had become rooted there. What happened in Newfoundland was typical of the British Atlantic experience: from a period of experimentation in the sixteenth century to an era of economic modernization and sustained investment (in human and economic terms) under the Stuarts.11 Of course, not every scheme worked; in 1622 James encouraged the breeding of silkworms and the construction of silkworks to take advantage of the mulberry trees in Virginia, an industry he found preferable to the “many disorders and inconveniences” he associated with tobacco.12 That scheme failed, but the colony survived. The waves of humanity moving westward signaled a decisive shift in English politics and culture. The English East India Company, established at the endpoint of Elizabeth’s long reign, began operations in the Spice Islands in the first decade of the new century. When ships returned, news of their actions spread not only by word of mouth, as tales about sea voyages had always circulated, but in printed books, a practice that had begun at the end of the 1590s.13 English publishers also found an expanding market for books that

11 See the superb description of this transformation of the early fishery in P.E. Pope, Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 2004), especially pp. 11–44. To understand the nature of the overseas migration from Britain and how population movements shaped the heterogeneous societies of the realm’s distant colonies see Alison Games’s brilliant Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). As Games points out, “[t]hese migrations through the Atlantic and Caribbean made it impossible for any part of the colonial world to evolve in isolation” (p. 191). 12 His Majesties Gracious Letter to the Earle of South-Hampton, Treasurer, and to the Councell and Company of Virginia here: commanding the present setting up of silke works, and planting of Vines in Virginia (London, 1622), sig A3r–v. 13 Cf., The description of a voyage made by certaine ships of Holland into the East Indies. With their aduentures and successe: together with a description of the countries, townes, and inhabitants of the same, trans. W.P. (London, 1598); Cornelis Gerritszoon, An addition to the sea journal of nauigation of the Hollanders unto Iaua, containing the appearances, shewes, or resemblances of the Cape of Bona Speranza . . . (London, 1598); A true report of the gainefull, prosperous and speedy voiage to Iaua in the East Indies, performed by a fleete of eight ships of Amsterdam (London, 1599?); Jacob Cornelissoon van Neck’s The Journall, or Dayly Register, Contayning a true manifestation, and Historicall declaration of the voyage, accomplished by eight Shippes of Amsterdam, under the command of Iacob Corneliszen Neck Admirall (London, 1601).

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focused on travel. The younger Richard Hakluyt’s monumental Principall Navigations of 1589 had appeared in a three-volume edition from 1598 to 1600, but it is difficult to know how many could have seen this work. Yet when Samuel Purchas—who had acquired many of Hakluyt’s unpublished manuscripts when he died—published his first collection of travel accounts, Purchas his Pilgrimage in 1613, the book proved so popular that he felt compelled to publish a new edition in 1614, another new edition in 1617, and a greatly expanded work in 1625 (Hakluytus Posthumous). Other travel accounts also appeared, such as the remarkable text by Fynes Morison demonstrating both the travails of such a long adventure and the possibility of surviving it.14 These accounts did not necessarily describe foreign places in positive terms. Even a promotional pamphlet from the struggling Virginia Company in 1611 acknowledged that one settler was so desperate that he killed his wife, hid her body, and “fed daily upon her.” But despite such occasional cannibalism, the Company recognized the great potential that existed in the new settlement.15 The rapid expansion in the publication of travel narratives paralleled the expansion of actual overseas efforts, from the growing business of the East India Company in the Spice Islands to the founding of the New England colonies and the greater stabilization of the settlements in the West Indies and alongside Chesapeake Bay. Travel abroad continued to be dangerous and colonial mortality high. Many wealthy West Indian planters, along with the African slaves they worked so hard, could not avoid a quick death in the tropics.16 But under the Stuarts, the risks now seemed worth taking, at least judging by the number of individuals who chose to look beyond England for their opportunities.

14 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary . . . Containing His ten Years Travell Through The Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1617). 15 “A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie of Virginia” in P.C. Mancall, ed., Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580–1640 (Boston, 1995), pp. 128–32, quotation at 128. 16 R.S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), pp. 300–34.

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II As the essays in this volume demonstrate, there was no single reason that these developments occurred. Inspiration came from an elite embrace of educational opportunities, evident in the idealistic vision of David Hume and Patrick Copland. When Copland became the tutor of the boy baptized as Peter Pope, with the idea that Peter would return with the East India Company to his home imbued with the benefits of Protestant religion and the ability to read and write, he was putting into practice the crucial idea that non-British men and women could be brought into the cultural universe of the realm. That same idea motivated him to open a school in Bermuda. Similar motives inspired Stuart plans to undermine indigenous American cultures, best evident in the efforts to establish Henrico College in Virginia and the marginally more successful efforts of Harvard’s Indian College.17 English cultural obsessions moved abroad with colonists. The serious-minded Puritans who made it across the ocean were engaged in long, often abstruse academic debates about precise theological matters, such as the meaning of the Book of Revelation. Yet their often excruciating parsing of texts was not only a product of the American experience but instead part of a larger transatlantic dialogue that stretched from Scotland and England to Massachusetts Bay. A successful journey across the ocean often took five to eight weeks, but that delay was not always evident in the rapid-fire discourse relating to religious issues. The rise of the printing press and the desire of clerics to publish sermons and textual analyses created a virtually unified public discourse on matters of Protestant doctrine in the Anglophone world. Seen from an Atlantic perspective, Increase and Cotton Mather become less a New England ministerial dynasty consumed with John Winthrop’s vision of creating a city on a hill than men engaged in ongoing debates that stretched thousands of miles. The daily lives of New England colonists might have differed substantially from the mundane practices of Britons who never made such a journey. But their intellectual exchanges suggest how deeply intertwined their cultures remained. 17 For a thorough description of such ventures in the Anglo-American settlements in the seventeenth century see M.C. Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Albuquerque, 1988), pp. 46–128.

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When they managed to shed their blinders and recognize the potential to be had in their ever-expanding world, the British had to adjust their goals to take account of others. As every long-distance traveler knew, ships and crews came to the Americas from many parts of Europe. The Elizabethans had defined their actions in North America in direct response to the French and Spanish. Under the Stuarts, relations with the Dutch became more central. The change was anticipated by growing presence in England of Dutch vessels in the early seventeenth century. As Wim Klooster notes here, relations between the two continued, with the Dutch performing valuable services for the nascent English tobacco trade. Remarkably, these links survived the three Anglo-Dutch wars. The resilience of such ties testifies not only to English recognition of the limits of the realm but also the fact that the Dutch proved to be such enterprising commercial artists wherever they went. During the seventeenth century, as they gathered their riches, the Dutch set standards for exploitation and profit from their colonies.18 Even their failures to create the Brazilian society they dreamed about did not tarnish the power of their vision for other Europeans—notably the British. When the Stuarts’ subjects went out into this seascape of possibility, they did more than participate in trade for new goods (such as tobacco) or expand opportunities for other already known commodities (such as sugar). They also reshaped the landscape wherever they went. The transformation, evident from the wide banks of rivers flowing into the Chesapeake to the forests of New England, was most visible in the West Indies. Barbados, the so-called jewel of the British crown, became a sugar plantation, its marvelous natural abundance obliterated by commercial forces. Through the eyes and person of Richard Ligon parts of that transformation can be observed almost first-hand. Yet as Jane Stevenson points out, Ligon wanted to transform the English landscape too, notably by investing in an expensive drainage scheme to reclaim the Lindsey Levels of Lincolnshire. In this sense Ligon represents the forces changing the Atlantic basin in the seventeenth century, a symbol of European desires to modify local environments for economic ends. 18 On Dutch commercial success and the material culture it spawned see especially S. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987).

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One way to make sense of the varied changes that took place over the course of the seventeenth century would be to adopt the perspective of a macroeconomist. Such historical analysis tends to reduce human agency to virtual insignificance, turning men and women into cogs in what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the “modern world-system.” But the essays in this volume show the fundamental weakness of such an approach. Each pivots on the actions of individuals and contingent moments. Although macroeconomic analysis might explain the growth of the tobacco trade, it can provide no explanation for the transatlantic appeal of George Herbert, or the educational endurance of Patrick Copland, or the Mathers’ engagement with leading British and continental theologians. Under the historian’s microscope, reliable verities such as perpetual tension between the Protestant British and continental Catholics collapse, as Steven Pincus has revealed in his astonishing close reading of littleused manuscript evidence. Historians of the seventeenth century who have not examined the divisions among European Catholics have missed the religious complications of the end of the Stuart era. An Atlantic approach that situates Britain as a series of islands surrounded by the ocean and its constituent parts—including the North Sea and the English Channel—explains events in ways that insular approaches cannot.

III A collection of discrete essays cannot provide a thorough explanation for any era, especially one that brought fundamental transformations in one of the best documented societies of modern history. The source material for seventeenth-century Britain is absurdly abundant. But examined closely by a variety of scholars, the sources suggest a series of specific changes, many of them unexpected and intelligible only in a local context. Even under a highly focused lens, some of these events still baffle. How can any of us four centuries later understand the 1605 “Masque of Blackness” in which Queen Anne and the ladies of her court appeared in blackface? The essays here cannot wrestle with all of the complexities of the era. Most pay little attention to the staggering demographic crisis that the European invasion of the Americas produced, a long-term

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population collapse well documented elsewhere.19 Only Mark Peterson’s essay makes the issue of slavery a major thematic concern, and none of the authors here examine why New England colonists sought to enslave Americans even though there was no obvious economic need for their labour.20 The rising numbers of bound African labourers in Stuart colonies receives little sustained notice, despite the fact that it is impossible to understand the development of the British Atlantic world without it. What made the seventeenth-century Atlantic experience so remarkable was the meeting of so many disparate peoples, some free and many not.21 It would be easy to dismiss Dutch aspirations to transform Tupinambas and Sephardim into Dutch Protestants in Brazil as a colonialist fantasy. But such fabulous hopes were hardly novel in this era of long-distance migration, exploding commercial opportunities, and extravagant European cultural schemes. Near the beginning of the Stuart era, the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius published a book entitled Mare Liberum. In this tract he made an argument for Dutch access to the Spice Islands. In the process, he undermined Portuguese monopolist arguments (based on the papal Treaty of the Donation of 1494) and noted that any Europeans could trade in the East if the islanders allowed their presence. In other words, he recognized that grand claims of exclusive possession had no legal substance. A year or so later, the younger Hakluyt translated Grotius’s book into English though he never pub-

19 See R. Thornton, American Indian holocaust and survival: A population history since 1492 (Norman, 1987), pp. 42–90. It could be argued that the demographic catastrophe intensified for Americans in the seventeenth century, at least judging from the number of smallpox epidemics. Smallpox, the deadliest Old World disease released into the Western Hemisphere, struck twice in the sixteenth century—though the first epidemic (from 1520 to 1524) was in all likelihood the worst—and returned for twelve more epidemics in the seventeenth century; see H.F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, 1983), p. 15. 20 The extent of Native slavery increased after King Philip’s or Metacom’s War of the mid-1670s, with devastating consequences; see M.E. Newell, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670–1720” and R.W. Herndon & E.W. Secatau, “Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Servitude in Early Rhode Island,” both in C.G. Calloway & N. Salisbury, eds, Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston, 2003), pp. 106–173. 21 Alison Games has called attention to the enormous numerical disparity between free and bound migrants in the early modern era in “Introduction, Definitions, and Historiography: What is Atlantic History?” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 18 (2004), pp. 5–6.

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lished it.22 He did so because he valued the argument for an economic system in which the English would have as much access to distant products as any other European nation. He also, perhaps inadvertently, recognized something that the essayists here also emphasize: the importance of local decisions made in diverse places far from Britain. This idea comes through most clearly in Mark Peterson’s insightful analysis of big money and little money—the coin of the realm on the one hand and the currency of localities on the other. Neither currency dominated all monetary exchanges; wampum remained more important than coins among certain Americans. The fact of its survival tells much about the Atlantic basin as it evolved in the age of the Stuarts. The British became more expert players than they had been before 1600. Offshore colonial populations grew and the range of goods available at home increased substantially. Nonetheless, the British had become one more Atlantic people, not the masters of the basin that they later wanted to be.

22 Richard Hakluyt’s translation has recently appeared in print for the first time in its entirety: Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, D. Armitage ed., (Indianapolis, 2004).

INDEX

Aberdeen 4, 27, 55, 58, 60–61, 73–74, 77 Grammar School 58, 73 Town Council 58–59, 61, 72, 75 universities 4, 56–60, 72–78 absolutism 80–81, 93–98, 107–08 Acadia 318 Africa/Africans 8–9, 22, 231, 275, 322, 327, 376 slavery 213, 267, 302, 317, 323, 329, 331, 372 Alexander VIII, Pope 5 Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling 127, 257 Algonquin/Algonquian 291, 300 Amazon 244, 246–47, 263–65 Amboyna 9 America/American 8, 14, 55, 57, 62–63, 74, 246–07, 252, 259, 368 colonies/plantations 7, 9–10, 12, 20–21, 26, 130 promised land 130, 139 religious experience 150–52 slaves 266–69, 272–73, 280 Amerindians 208–10, 217, 225, 231 Amsterdam 208, 214, 237, 242–44, 246, 252–53, 257, 267, 269, 272, 277 commercial centre of Europe 27, 262, 265, 275 religious centre 119 publishing 129, 241 Anatolia 277 Anglican establishment 5, 121 Anglo-Dutch relations 261–82 settlements 265 trade 261–62, 264, 276–77 Wars 6, 327, 343, 374 Angola 218, 223, 251, 267 Anne of Denmark 39–40, 287 courtly entertainment 294–95, 297 Anne, Queen of Great Britain 176, 363–65, 375 Antichrist 41, 125–26, 128–29, 133–35, 141, 144 Antigua 271, 278 Antilles 272–73, 276

Apocalypse/apocalypticism 14, 39, 121, 123–40, 142, 145, 331 Arianism 144 Armageddon 120, 134, 137 Armenians 21 Asia 50, 275, 322 Asiento de negros 280, 358–65 Atlantic 1, 3, 15, 27 Basin 210, 259, 377 republican tradition 33 trade 19, 28–29 Authority 117–28 Bible 118, 123 civil 145 royal 123, 126, 128 texts 117–18 Azores 243 Babylon 120–21, 124–25, 133, 136, 144 Bahamas 4, 76, 77 Bahia see Salvador Baillie, Robert 134–35 Baltic 3, 27–28, 242, 253, 265 Bank of England 348, 361 Barbados 7–8, 245, 285, 288, 290–91, commerce 267–74, 281, 313, 374 propietorship 255, 276 revolt 302, 306–07 Richard Ligon’s description 300–307 Belcher, Jonathan 333–334 Bellenden, John 39, 47, 53 Benin 268 Berbic River 250 Berkeley, Sir William 268, 287 Bermuda 4, 75–77, 269, 373 Bertie, Montagu, 2nd Earl of Lindsey 288 Bible 13–14, 118, 120–21, 138, 152, 155, 157, 166, 169, 197 authority 118, 123, 175–77, 194–97, 201–03 authorship 179–91 criticism 6, 14, 192 Geneva 121–22, 125, 127 geography of reading 118–21

380

index

James VI & I, authorised version 121, 127 Pentateuch 175, 178–80, 182, 184–91, 197 Revelation 198–99 Blaeu Atlas 241, 255 Boece, Hector 39, 42, 46–47, 53 Book of Revelation 5, 14, 43, 119–121, 126, 138, 144–45, 373 English interpretation 125–129 New England interpretation 130–143 Rome as Antichrist 119, 122, 128 Scottish interpretation 121–25 Bossuet of Meaux, Jacques-Benigne 84, 89–90, 93, 98–99, 101, 113 Boston 27, 132, 136, 156, 158, 178, 311–35 commercial activities 7, 9, 266 preaching 132, 136, 158 tributes 314–18, 326–27, 333–335 Brazil 26, 231, 248–51, 253, 256, 268, 271, 323, 374, 376 Dutch settlement 6, 10, 207–232, 243, 263, 267, 270, 272–74 Jews 220–22, 224, 227 Luso-Brazilian 215–30 native population 210, 212, 215–19, 229 slave trade 268, 323 sugar economy 207, 209–10, 213–16, 220–21, 223–30, 232 Brightman, Thomas 129, 133–34, 137, 140–41 Bristol 27–29 Britain/British 4, 12, 15–16, 19, 264, 312, 319, 329, 331, 373–77 America 269, 274, 281 Atlantic World 12, 371, 376 Civil Wars 149, 234, 266, 268, 275, 294–95, 306 churchmen 129, 375 enterprises 3, 20 Isles 1–2, 5, 15, 18 political life 11–12, 21, 26–27 political writing 39, 41–42, 44–48, 50–52 Bruce, Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury 88, 103–04 Buchanan, George 33–39, 42, 47, 50–51 Buenos Aires 273, 362 Burnet, Gilbert 83, 96

Burnet, Thomas 143, 200 Butler, Sir Nicholas 97–98, 100 Cadiz 28, 340, 353, 357, 360 Calvert, George Lord Baltimore 106 Calvin, John 100, 102 Calvinism 36, 44, 53 counter-remonstrants 214 Dutch 211, 213–15, 217–18, 237, 240, 254, 262 Scottish 69 Camarão, Felipe 215, 219, 229 Cambridge University 50, 147–148, 150, 156, 166 Campvere see Veere Cape of Good Hope 64, 67–68, 70, 244 Cape Verde Islands 291, 295, 297–298 capitalism 2, 8, 13, 19, 26, 28–29 Caribbean see West Indies Carlos II, King of Spain 337–39, 341, 349, 351, 353, 355–56, 358, 364 Carlos III, King of Spain 360 Caron, Cornelis 248–49 Cartagena 338, 359, 362 Cartwright, Thomas 133, 135 Catalonia 337 Catholicism/Catholics 4, 23, 79–114, 118–19, 122, 127, 135, 149, 162, 212, 218, 220–23 country 80, 92, 114 court 8, 95, 98, 102, 104 divisions within English and Scottish communities 81–82, 105–108, 111, 114 political complexity 12, 375 Chamberlaine, David 72–73 Charles, Archduke of Austria 359–60 Charles I, King of Great Britain 19, 149, 255, 258, 287, 306, 334 opposition 5, 14, 289 Charles II, King of Great Britain 86, 157–58, 172, 287, 334, 349 colonial coinage 325–26 restoration of 29, 334, 356 Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor 337 Charles XI, King of Sweden 342, 345–46 Charles River 181, 316 chastity 302–303

index Chauncey, Charles 154–55 Chesapeake 29, 266–67, 278, 370, 372, 374 Chile 209 China 28, 322 Christianity 306 slavery 301–303 Church of England 76, 119, 126, 131, 135, 144, 148, 151 Church of Scotland 239–240 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 43 Civil society 11–12, 16–18 Cleveland, John 23–24 cloth 262–63, 266–67, 269 Codrington, Christopher 307–309 colonisation 13, 18–21, 131 Columbus, Christopher 130 commentators 9–10, 18–19 commercial networks 3, 6–7, 25–28 Commonwealth 303–04 Boston 324 British 45, 149 Cromwell’s 325 godly 55–57, 59, 68, 70, 78, 315, 332 Scottish 39, 47 Company of Merchant Adventurers 236, 242, 253, 262–63, 267 Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies 347–48, 353–54 Congregationalists 76–77 Connecticut 266, 316, 330 Constantine 124, 126, 129 Copland, Patrick 4, 9–10, 21, 55–78, 373, 375 Cotton, John 6, 131–40 Counter-Reformation 4, 15, 18, 22, 47–48, 53, 80, 109, 111 Courteen brothers 245–46, 253, 256 Peter Boudaen 245, 253 Peter, 245–47, 253 Sir William 245, 247, 253, 255 Courteen-de Moor ventures 245–47, 249, 254, 256 courtly entertainment 290, 292, 294, 300 Creoles 213, 223 Cromwell, Oliver 25, 149, 313, 324–25 Cross, Walter 182–83 Cuba 212 Curaçao 209, 266, 273, 279–80

381

Danforth, John 139, 166–67 Darien 8, 11, 24, 27, 338, 341 Caledonia 349–51 Scottish venture 347–55, 360, 364 D’Adda Ferdinando 103–04 D’Aulnay, Charles 318, 327 de Barillon, Paul 86–88, 91–92, 97, 100–01, 103–05 de Bonrepaus, Usson 88, 90 de la Gardie, Magnus Gabriel 343–344 de Laet, Johannes 216–217 de las Casas, Bartolomé 212 de Montaigne, Michel 47–48 de Moor, Jan 245–49, 253, 256–57, 260 de Moucheron, Balthasar 243–44 de Seignelay, Marquis 89–90 Defoe, Daniel 106, 286 Deism/deists 143–44, 176–77, 184, 199 Delaware 20, 26–27 Delft 253, 256 Denmark/Danes 25–26, 345, 349 Descartes, René 193 Dominions 7, 21–22, 26 British 4, 11, 19, 26 Donaldson, Walter 60–61 Dordt 237, 242 Dragonnades 84–85, 99, 114 Drummond, James, Earl of Perth 89–90, 97 Drummond, John, Earl of Melfort 89–90, 97 Dryden, John 95, 99, 171 Dürer, Albrecht 286, 296 Durie, Robert 238, 241 Dutch 6, 25–26, 374, 376 colonies 10, 22, 247, 265, 268, 281 commercial networks 3, 6 East India Company (VOC) 25, 211–12, 243, 246, 250, 263 Hispanic relations 208, 264–65 Patroon 249–50, 253, 256 Republic 207–09, 214–16, 219–23, 225–26, 231–34, 259, 343, 348, 354 Revolt 235–37 Scottish connections 233–260 Scottish Covenanters 239–240, 249, 258 slave trade 272–74

382

index

sugar business 270–72 trade 242–43, 253, 261–282 West Indies Company (WIC) 25, 107–32, 235, 243, 245, 247–53, 256, 259, 265, 272, 274 East Indies 4, 241, 243–44, 252, 259 Edict of Nantes 93 revocation of 5, 101 Edinburgh 27, 52, 60–61, 105 education 34–38, 55–78 Edward I, King of England 46 Edward VI, King of England 125 Egypt 40 Eighty Years War (1568–1648) 211 Eleuthera 76–77 Elizabeth, Queen of England 5, 125–27, 137, 262, 287, 294, 371 eloquence 293–94 England/English 37, 54, 170–72, 230, 235, 239, 314, 334, 341, 343, 354, 367–374 Carribean 209, 269, 278, 232 church and churchmen 5, 14, 19, 23, 96 colonies 4, 8–10, 17–21, 27, 246–47, 280, 319, 325, 365, 370 commercial networks 6, 27, 281–82 diplomats 27 Dutch connections 6, 261–282, 374 East India Company 9, 25, 30, 58, 62, 67, 71, 75, 77–78, 347, 371–73 Elect nation 129, 133–34, 137, 140–41 imperial power 5, 26–27, 312, 324 Navigation Acts 27, 29, 275–79, 280 politics 24–25, 88, 106, 360, 371 religion 14, 150–51, 160 Spanish relations 15, 354, 356–64 trade 261–282 union with Scotland 2, 44–45, 347, 349, 352 writers and commentators 18, 106, 171, 369, 372 Enlightenment 2–3, 51, 53, 203 Episcopal government 14, 61–62 Essequibo River 246–247 Europe/European 1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 21–22, 26, 29

Ferrar-family 152–53 Nicholas 68, 75, 149–51 John 152 Ferreira, Gaspar Dias 226–27 Fife Adventurers 254–255 Fitzjames, James Duke of Berwick 90 Flanders 337, 343, 349 Fleming, Placidus 92, 108 Flemish merchants 235, 242 Flushing see Vlissingen Forbes, John 238, 241 Fort d’Oranje (Fort Orange) 244, 277 Fort Nassau 244 Fort Saint Andrew 349 Foxe, John 125, 129 France/French 4, 7, 15, 26, 34, 46–48, 50, 54, 61–62, 215, 230, 275, 323, 331, 337, 343, 355, 359, 361, 374 Carribean 209, 232, 270 colonies 263, 271–73, 318 Guinea Company 359, 361 Reformed Church 60, 129

fencing 287, 302–303 fen drainage 21, 288

Habsburg 261

Gage, Thomas 7, 296 Gallicanism 5, 81, 90, 93–98, 102–04, 106–07, 110–11, 113–14 Gathelus 40–42, 44, 54 Germany/German 129, 275–76 Gibraltar 361, 363, 365 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 368–69 Gilligan, Manual Manasses 362–63 Glasgow 27–29, 57, 61 “Glorious Revolution” (1688–91) 12, 29–30, 80–81, 105, 107, 109–11, 261 Gold Coast 274 Gookin, Daniel 156–58 Gordon, George, Duke of Gordon 107 Gray, Gilbert 56, 59 Groenewegen, Aert Adriaanszoon 246–247 Grotius, Hugo 192, 211, 376 Guadelope 270–71 Guiana see Wild Coast Guinea 290 Guise, House of 38 Gunpowder Plot 147 Gustavus II Adolfus, King of Sweden 120, 133, 342 18, 22, 48, 107, 122, 125,

index Empire 39–41 Spain 8, 18, 264 Hakluyt, Richard 372, 376 Hall, Joseph 369–70 Hamburg 27, 262 Hanoverian Succession 2, 25 Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford 361 Harriot, Richard 291 Harvard College 76, 140, 142, 154–55, 181, 373 hawking 286, 291 Hay, George, 1st Earl of Kinnoull 255 Hay, James, 1st Earl of Carlisle 255 Hemecus, leader of the Hibernian Gaels 41–42 Henri IV, King of France 53 Henrico 64, 71, 373 Henry IV, King of England 291–292 Henry, Prince of Wales 40, 124, 127 Herbert, George 6, 147–73, 375 American connections 149–152 inspirator in New England 159–170 popularity in England 148–49 popularity in New England 152–159 heretics 215, 219, 224, 230 Hiber, leader of the Iberian Gaels 41 Hills, Henry 90, 94, 99 historic myth 11, 40–41 Hobbes, Thomas 6, 178–81, 191, 200–01 criticism 183, 185, 187, 192–95, 198 Leviathan 176–77, 303–304 Holland 237, 245–47, 257, 262–63, 265, 277, 281 Scots in 243, 259 Zeeland, competing with 234–35, 242–43, 246, 250, 252–54, 259–60 Howie, Robert 56–57 Hudson River 246 Huguenots 5, 60, 98–99, 119, 121 conversion of 84–85, 101, 108 Hull, John 321, 323, 325, 327, 331, 334 Hume of Godscroft, David 4, 19, 33, 41, 44–54, 211, 373 De unione insulae Britannicae 45–47 hunting 286–287, 291 Hyde, Edward, 1st Earl of Clarendon 304

383

Iberia/Iberian 207, 209–14, 220, 273 indentured servants 270, 295, 304, 306 Independency/Independents 24, 75–76, 135 Congregational system and discipline 134–35, 141 India 22, 62–63, 67, 277, 322 Indian Ocean 28 Indians 9, 135, 140–42, 312, 316–17, 319, 330, 333, 367 conversion of 156–58 Lost tribes of Israel 133 Indonesia 9, 58, 276 infidels 64–65, 70, 212 Innocent XI, Pope 5, 79–114 Louis XIV, tensions with 81–85 “protestant pope” 83 interlopers 28, 263 Ireland/ Irish 3, 4, 22–24, 26, 30, 66, 275, 278, 281 British dominon 19–21 Catholic commentators 19 colonies 246–47, 263 Gaelic 17–18, 63 New Historicism 17 plantations 23, 27, 370 victimhood 17–18 “Wild Irish” 299 Iroquois 317, 323 Isabella, Queen of Spain 130 Isle of Man 29 Italy/Italian 50, 275 Jacobean theatre 300 Jacobites 30, 110–11 Jamaica 77, 338, 351, 357–58, 363 Dutch influence 270, 279–80 English acquisition 8, 350, 355–56 James, Duke of Courland 248 James II, King of Great Britain 4, 79–114, 348 absolutism 81, 93–98 Cabinet Council 86, 100 Catholic opposition 102–109 Duke of York 105, 277 French Catholicism 85–93 Louis XIV 81 religious toleration 81, 98–102 Roman Catholic 4, 79–82 James V, King of Scotland 39 James VI, King of Scotland & I, King of Great Britain 19, 38–39, 43, 73, 238, 248, 371

384

index

A Counterblaste to Tobacco 367–68 apocalypticism 122, 127 Dutch relations 236, 246, 255, 257, 264 English throne, accession to 5, 58, 147, 175, 261 legislator 46–47 poet 53–54 reunified Christendom 127–29 Works 126 Jansenism 5, 119 Japan 64 Jermyn, Henry, Lord Dover 86 Jerusalem 120, 130–31, 133–34 New 129–30, 135, 137 Jesuits 83, 85–88, 91, 108 English catholics, aversion from 105, 108 papal antipathy 83–85, 87, 104, 111–112 Jews 8, 24, 26, 40 anti-semitism 25 Brazil, in 220–22, 224, 227 conversion of 129, 133–34, 143, 220 Sephardic 220–22, 224–25, 227, 376 John IV, King of Portugal 223 Johnson, Edward 152–53, 165, 170 Jones, Inigo 297–298, 306 Jonson, Ben 370 Junius, Franciscus 121 Keating, Geoffrey 19 Keith, George, 5th Earl Marischal 56–57 Killigrew, Sir William 288–289 King Arthur 43 Knox, John 36, 121–23 Kuna Indians 350, 354 La Chaise, pere 86–87, 90, 113 Lampsins, Adrian and Cornelis 239, 249, 253–54 Lapps 18 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 151, 334 LeClerc, Jean 177–78, 180, 182–84, 188–90, 197 Leeward Islands 27, 249, 255, 273 Leiden 60, 72, 262 Leopold, Holy Roman Emperor 110 Leslie, William 79, 83, 87, 112 Lewis 254–57, 259, 316 Company of 254, 257–58, 260

Ligon, Richard 7–9, 285–309, 374 life in England until 1647 286–290 observer 290–296 slaves and planters, view on 300– 308 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes 271, 285 Lindsay, Sir David 36, 43 Lindsey Levels, Lincolnshire 288–289, 374 Lipsius, Justus 47 literary criticism 5, 12, 117–18 Lithgow, William 22–23 Liverpool 27, 29 Livonians 18 Livy 37, 39 Locke, John 12, 117, 202 London 23, 58, 69, 72–73, 75–76, 236, 245, 276, 325–27, 329–30, 367 commercial centre 27, 327 Dutch in 235, 262 merchants 265, 268 metropolis 27, 322 slavery 329–30 Louis XIV, King of France 4, 79, 337, 356, 361, 365 James II, relations with 81, 85–98 Pope, tensions with 81–85, 100–102 Sweden, relations with 343–45 William of Orange, opposition of 111, 354, 358–59 Low Countries 214, 235, 259 Luanda 273 Luther, Martin 102, 121 Lytcott, John 79, 83, 112 Machiavelli, Niccolò 39, 45 Mackenzie, Colin, 1st Earl of Seaforth, 254–257 Madrid 340, 344–45, 358, 362–64 Magna Carta 217 Maimbourg, Louis 93–94, 98, 113 Maine 287 Manhattan 267 Maritimes 10 Martinique 270–71, 273, 275 Mary, Queen of Scots 33, 37–38 Maryland 29, 370 masque 294, 298, 300–01, 306 costume 297 Masque of Blackness 295, 297, 375 Salmacidia Spolia 306 writer 306

index Massachusetts 4, 148,158, 161, 171, 312, 318, 331–32, 334 Bay Company 313, 317, 331 General Assembly 139 General Court 320–21, 322–23, 326–27, 329, 331, 334 Indians 156, 316–17 mint 319–328 trade 266, 280 Mather, Cotton 6, 140–43, 146, 148, 155, 158, 159, 163, 171, 373, 375 apocalyptic mission 142–45 “Biblia America” 178, 180–81, 189–90, 197, 103 theologian 178, 180–86, 189–91, 197–203 Mather, Increase 142–43, 146, 154–55, 163, 373, 375 Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, Count Johan 208, 221, 223–26, 228, 230–31, 251 Mede, Joseph 130, 143 Mediterranean 15, 275 Melville, Andrew 39–47, 50, 54, 57, 125–27 Menorca 363, 365 mercantilism 275–76 Merrimac River 316 Mexico 264, 296 Micmac Indians 10 Middelburg 235–39, 244–45, 247, 251–53, 256, 262–62, 271 Middleton, Charles, Earl of Middleton 107 military-fiscal state 25, 30 Millenium 34, 137–38, 144, 331 Mitchel, Jonathan 154, 161–65, 168–72 modernity 2–3, 29 Modyford, Thomas 289–90, 301 Mohegan Indians 316–17 Montserrat 271, 278 Morgan, Henry 338, 356 Moris, Gideon 240, 249 Morrice, Roger 86–89, 105 music 286–87, 302, 303 Napier of Merchiston, John 43, 124–25 Narragansett Indians 316–17 Natives, 376 Americans 7–9, 11, 17–18, 157, 265–66 Brazilians 210, 212, 215–19, 229

385

conversion of 156–58, 217–18 naturalisation, purchase of 341, 353, 357 Negroes/Blacks 292, 294, 301–02, 307–08 women 292, 295–296 Netherlands 262, 269, 275–78, 323 New Albion 20 New Amsterdam 26, 266–68, 280, 316 New Britain 20 New Edinburgh 349 New England 5, 14, 135 158, 314–317, 320, 323–25, 327, 331, 334, 369–70, 374 apocalypse reading of 131–45 culture 155, 161, 171 Herbert’s impact 153, 155, 157, 161, 164, 166, 172 libraries 154–55 New Israel 5, 6 New Jerusalem 130, 135, 137 poetry 15, 162, 163–70 Puritanism 6, 9, 137–38 171, 203, 324 religion 144, 159, 167, 373 settlers 171, 372–73, 376 Spinozist influence 178 trade 266, 281, 314, 316, 319 writers 159, 162–70 New France 315, 318 New Granada 280 New Historicism 3, 15–17, 25, 290–291 New Jersey 334, 370 New Netherland Company 246 New Netherlands 234, 252, 267, 274, 277, 316 New York 27, 277–78, 280–81, 370 Newfoundland 368, 371 Newton, Sir Isac 143, 200, 203 Niantic Indians 316–17 Nine Years War (1689–97) 354–55 Niuw Walcheren see Tobago Noordsche Compagnie (Northern Company) 245–47, 257, 259 Nostalgia 305 Nova Britannia 20 Nova Scotia 10, 21, 257 Nunez, Hernan, Count 344–345 O’Flaherty, Roderic 19 Olinda 215, 226 Orange, House of 237

386

index

Orinoco River 244 Orkney Isles 237, 255, 260 Ottoman Empire 8, 127 Ovid, Naso 43, 303 Pain, Philip 167–68, 170 painting 296, 299 Palmer, Roger, Earl of Castlemaine 91, 100, 103 Panama 8, 11, 338–39, 348–49 Paterson, Wiliam 348 Penn, William 98, 100 Pennsylvania 280, 313, 370 Pequot Indians 316–17, 330 Perkins, William 126–127, 133–34 Pernambuco 6, 209–11, 213, 215–16, 219, 221, 223, 270–71 Persia 22 Peru 264, 280, 320 Petre, Father Edward 88–89, 103, 106, 108 Petty, William 4 Philadelphia 27, 281 Philip II, King of Spain 337 Philip III, King of Spain 53, 264 Philip IV, King of Spain 337, 353, 356 Philip V, King of Spain 338, 359–65 Piet Heyn hymn 212 plantation/planters 14, 18, 21–22, 27, 286, 290 colonialism 3, 20–22 Dutch 6, 22, 244, 247, 249, 253–54, 260 English 18–20, 29, 64–65, 70, 75, 249 Ireland 4, 20–21, 23 Scotland 4, 22, 245, 260 plantocracy 305–308 pluralism 2, 13 political economy 2–3, 6, 29 Pomeroon River 248–49 Pope, Peter 63, 67 pornography 9 Portobello 338–39, 349, 362 Portugal/Portuguese 209, 227, 230, 253, 267, 323, 356, 376 colonies in Brazil 207–11, 213, 217, 219–21, 223–24, 226–32 rebellion 1645–46 251 restoration 209, 213 Potiguaras Indians 216–17, 229 Potomac River 27 Powis, William, Marquis of Powis 107

Presbyterianism/Presbyterians 59, 127, 240 Dutch 234, 238 English 99, 135, 142, 153 French 99 Scottish 39, 42, 44, 125, 129, 133–36, 239–40 prophecy 5, 11, 14, 19, 125, 143 Protestantism/Protestants 12, 23, 118, 160, 258, 375 Arminian Remonstrants 214 Brazil, in 215, 219–22, 224, 229, 376 education 56, 63, 65–66, 78 Revelation, reading of 119, 122–23, 145, 373 universal monarchy, aversion to 18–19 providence 11, 13, 19, 142 Providence Island 268–70, 313 Puritanism/Puritans 76, 119, 151, 173, 178, 238, 321, 332, 334 apocalyptic literature 120, 126–27, 129–32 Charles I, opposition to 5, 14, 324 New England 5–6, 9, 137–39, 153, 171, 178, 200–03, 313 prophecy 125–26 Quakers

149, 313

race relations 9, 11, 208, 231 Radicals 119–20 rebellion 305–07, 309 Recife 207, 215–17, 221–24, 227–28, 230, 232 Reformations/Reformers 4, 13, 15, 18–19, 66, 99, 102, 111, 114, 130, 133, 141–42 English 121, 125 Revolution (1888–91) and the 111 Scottish 49, 57, 124 regal union (1603) 2, 4–5, 15, 45, 123, 125, 127 Reid, Thomas 73–74 Renaissance 4, 30, 37, 53, 179 Restoration (1660) 18–19, 24, 29, 171, 200, 325–26, 334 Rhode Island 266 Richelieu, Armand-Jean, Cardinal 93 romance 286, 300 Rotterdam 27, 239, 242, 253–54, 259, 267

index Royal Africa Company (RAC) 327, 330–31 Royal British Fisheries Company 258 Royal James 68, 73 Royal Society of London 119, 123, 143, 178 Royalists 149, 151, 239, 288, 295, 303–04, 306–08 Rutherford, Samuel 135 Ruthven, William 1st Earl of Gowrie 53 Saba 278 Saint Domingue 275 salt trade 243, 245 Salvador 215, 222, 253 Santo Domingo 359 São Tomé 230, 251 savages 302–03 Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax 106 Scandinavia 27, 242, 251 Schelde River 252 Scota 40, 42 Scotland/Scottish 2–4, 14, 18–19, 24, 26–27, 29, 92, 96, 278, 281, 341, 362, 364, 372 civic tradition 4, 15, 46 colonists 10, 27 commercial networks 3, 6, 25, 27–28 Convention of Royal Burghs 236, 239, 242, 257–58 Covenanters 14, 134, 239–40, 249, 258 Dutch connections 233–260, 278 Highlands and Isles 34, 50–51, 63 Lowlands 51, 238 origin myth 40–41 Parliament 236, 257 plantations 8, 11, 21–22, 27 political writing 38–54 Protestant reformers 19, 350, 355 reformation and apocalypse 121–25 Spanish relations 347–355 Zeeland relations with 233–41, 247, 250–51, 255–60 scotophobia 24 Scots Brigade 251 Scottow, Joshua 158, 173 Scripture 118, 120–21, 138, 146 authority 123 interpretation 118, 120, 138, 143 Senhores do engenho (Lords of the Sugar Mills) 215, 223–24, 227–29

387

settlement/settlers 5, 20–21 colonialism 20 Creole 213, 223 Dutch 6, 10, 234, 246–49, 251, 253, 256–57, 259 English 9, 21, 156, 247, 316, 324, 300 Irish 247 Scottish 10, 254, 257, 259, 347–55 Seven Anglican Bishops, prosecution of 97, 108 Seville 265, 340, 353, 355, 357, 367 Sewall, Samuel 154–55, 331–334 Shakespeare, William 291–92, 300, 302, 309, 370 Shetland Isles 237, 255, 260 Sidney, Philip 40, 44–45 Simon, Richard 177–78, 180, 182–89, 197–98 Skelton, Bevil 82, 91–92 slaves/slavery 7–9, 21, 218, 279, 308 Africa 7, 207, 213, 268–69, 372, 376 anti-slavery 219 attitude towards 301–04, 307–08 Boston 266, 313, 317, 328–334 Brazil 207 trade 266–70, 272–74, 280, 313, 329–30, 332–33, 358–65 Solemn League and Covenant 24, 135, 240, 258 Somers Islands (Bermuda) 75–76, 78 Company 76, 78 Sophia, Princess of Hannover 333 South Carolina 280 South Sea Company 361, 363 Spain/Spanish 4, 8, 23, 26, 41, 50, 227, 277, 374 America 280, 338–39, 346, 349, 356–57, 364–65 Armada 122, 124–25 colonies 273, 264, 279–80 Dutch relations 209, 211–12, 215, 250, 262–65 Flanders 347, 356 imperial monarchy 8, 15, 20 Indies 232, 260, 338, 340–41, 345, 347, 357–58, 361 Low Countries 337, 343, 345 New 356, 358–59, 363 Old 356, 358–59, 363 Philippines 339, 359 Portuguese relations 213–14, 223, 230, 356

388

index

shipping 339 Succession 338, 346, 354, 358–59, 365 Spang, William 238–39, 241 Spenser, Edmund 18–19, 45, 54 Spice Islands 371–72, 376 Spinoza, Benedict Baruch 6, 175–203 Spitsbergen 235, 255, 257, 259 St. Christopher 264, 267, 269–71, 273 St. Eustatius 249 St. John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke 360–61, 363–64 St. Maarten 249 St. Thomas 26 Staple, 241 church 238–40 Conservator 236 Scottish 234, 236, 241–42, 249–50, 254, 256, 258, 260 States General 208, 214, 223, 236, 244, 253, 256, 262, 276 Steere, Richard 165–66, 169 Steuart, Esmé, Seigneur d’Aubigné 53 Steuart, James, Earl of Moray 37–38 Stillingfleet, Edward 199–200 Stornoway 254, 256–58 Stuart, James Francis Edward, Prince of Wales 90 Stuarts 19, 21, 147, 248, 356 sugar trade and industry 29, 270–72, 281 Brazil 207, 209–10, 213–16, 220–21, 223–30, 232, 253 Surinam 26, 281 Sussex 21, 27 Sutton, Robert, Lord Lexington 362 Sweden 8, 18, 26, 275, 341, 364 Gothic heritage 346 Spanish relations 342–346 Switzerland 113 Synod of Dordt 237 Synod of Zeeland 234, 240 Talbot, Richard, Earl of Tyrconnel 86, 105, 107 Tapuya 216–18 Teelinck, Willem 239, 240 Temple, Sir Thomas 325–326 Test Acts 107 Thirty Years War (1618–48) 18, 128, 251, 275, 337, 342, 353

tobacco 367–68, 371 trade 29, 64, 263, 266–67, 269–71, 276–78, 374–75 Tobago 26, 248–49 Tories 5 Treaties 262, 349, 376 Anglo-Dutch 343, 357, 363 Partition 358–59 of Union 25, 28–29, 333, 341, 352, 362 of Utrecht 8, 361, 363 tribute 7, 314–315 Trinidad 244 Triple Alliance (1668) 343–44, 356 Tudors 18, 63, 66, 145 Tupis 217–19 Turks 8, 112, 121, 127 Twelve Year Truce (1609–21) 252, 264–65 Ulster 20–22 United Provinces 6, 7, 234–35, 237, 239, 242, 260–61, 267, 277–78 Atlantic trade 265, 272, 277–78 Catholic antipathy 91–92 Usselincx, Willem 212–14, 216, 220, 223 utopian dreams 313–14, 331 universal monarchy 4, 15, 18 van Citters, Dutch ambassador 87, 89, 105 van der Ley, Gaspar 229, 231 van Waerdenburch, Diederik 209–10 Veere 235–39, 241–42, 250, 258 Venezuela 243–44, 263, 273, 279–80 Verenigde Zeeuwse Compagnie 244 victimhood, 3, 17–19, 22 Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy 361 Vieira, João Fernandes 227, 229 Virginia 130, 287, 291, 300, 313, 315, 369–71 Eastern Shore 267–68 education 4, 64–65, 67–68, 71–72, 74, 78, 373 reading Herbert 152–55 settlement 9, 20, 29 trade 9, 247, 263, 266–68, 277 Virginia Company 63–72, 74–75, 78, 149, 152, 171, 309, 370, 372 Vlissingen 235–38, 240, 244–45, 247, 250, 256, 262–64, 271

index Wallace, William 43–44 Walsingham, Francis 44–45 Walton, Izaak 149, 151 wampum 266, 316–17, 319–20, 323, 377 War of Devolution (1667) 337 Wellwood, James 106, 111 Wentworth, Thomas, Lord Deputy of Ireland 20 West Indies 3, 7–9, 249, 259, 285, 308, 317–19, 323, 330, 351, 360–61, 370, 374 English colonies 209, 232, 274, 278, 354, 372 French colonies 209, 232 shipping 256–57, 266 Spanish colonies 232, 244, 338–39, 348–49, 356–58 trade 9, 28–29 Westminster Assembly of Divines 130 whaling 245, 254–55 Whigs 5, 12, 29 Whiston, William 143, 200 White Sea 243, 246, 252 White, Ignasius Marquis d’Albeville 91

389

White, Nathaniel 75–76 Whitehaven 27, 29 Wigglesworth, Michael 159, 161, 163–64, 168, 171 Wild Coast (Guiana) 232, 234–35, 237, 243–46, 249–50, 252, 258–59, 263–64 William of Orange, Dutch Stadholder and King of Great Britain 80–81, 105, 141, 331, British Catholics 82, 109–11, 114 Darien 347–355 Windward Islands 263 Winthrop, John 131–32, 138, 313–14, 318, 327, 330, 373 Zeeland/Zeelanders 6, 237, 262–65, 281 colonies 246–51 Holland, competing with 234–35, 242, 246, 250, 252, 254 Lewis venture 254–258 Scottish connections 234–60 Synod 234, 240 trade 243–46

THE ATLANTIC WORLD ISSN 1570–0542

1. Postma, J. & V. Enthoven (eds.). Riches from Atlantic Commerce. Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12562 0 2. Curto, J.C. Enslaving Spirits. The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1550-1830. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13175 2 3. Jacobs, J. New Netherland. A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America. 2004. ISBN 90 04 12906 5 4. Goodfriend, J.D. (ed.). Revisiting New Netherland. Perspectives on Early Dutch America. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14507 9 5. Macinnes, A.I. & A.H. Williamson (eds.). Shaping the Stuart World, 16031714. The Atlantic Connection. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14711 X