The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (3 page)

By 1660 the largely Puritan New England settlements had a population of about 30,000, many of whom were refugees who had challenged and then fled from the rigid orthodoxy of the first, coastal colonies. Theological wrangling was endemic among Puritans and it caused fragmentation as deviant preachers left communities which found their opinions intolerable. Roger Williams, a young divine who like John Milton had learned his Puritanism at Cambridge, arrived in New England in 1631. His doctrinal radicalism, which led him to deny the legal right of James I and Charles I to give away Indian lands to his fellow settlers, caused his voluntary exile in 1636. With a handful of his adherents he founded a new colony, Rhode Island, where he was later joined by other banished heretics.

Plans to rid England of another body of religious dissidents, Catholics, had been considered since the early 1570s. Excluded from Virginia, English Catholics finally gained a colony when Lord Baltimore persuaded a sympathetic Charles I to issue him a charter in 1634. The new settlement was named Maryland, in honour of Charles’s queen Henrietta Maria, and its colonists were officially cautioned to hold their masses discreetly for fear that they might antagonise their Protestant neighbours.

Catholics and Puritans were among those whom Hakluyt had characterised as ‘superfluous persons’ whose removal to overseas settlements would be for the general benefit of society. Beggars and criminals also fell into this category and, in 1615, his proposal was translated into action when a party of convicts was shipped to Virginia which was then suffering a temporary labour shortage. New classes of unwanted people emerged as the century progressed, most notably Irish rebels and prisoners-of-war taken during the civil wars of 1642–52. In 1650, Scottish captives taken at Dunbar were sold for between £15 and £20 a head as indentured labourers bound to undertake a fixed period of work on their masters’ plantations. After 1660 this convenient and profitable method of punishment became increasingly popular.

Such largely unwelcome immigrants were the exception rather than the rule in the North American colonies, at least before 1660. Nearly all who emigrated were free men and women who did so to work for a living. The companies which financed the first colonising projects wanted profits from rents and the sale of land, and therefore a greater part of their initial outlay was spent on shipping and equipping a substantial labour force whose efforts were expected to repay the investment.

But why were men and women willing to leave Britain for what was, even by the standards of the age, a hard and uncertain existence? Perhaps the strongest impulse lay in habit: there was an old and deeply rooted tradition for craftsmen, labourers and domestic servants to move around the countryside looking for employment. London enticed most. Its population swelled from 200,000 in 1600 to 350,000 in 1650, an increase entirely made up by incoming workers for this was a time when the city’s death rate exceeded the birth. It was therefore not a difficult step for, say, a Devonshire tiler accustomed to wandering from town to town for work, to accept passage from Bristol to Jamestown, Virginia. Specialist skills were keenly sought by the Virginia Company which in 1620 was advertising for ‘choice men, born and bred up to labour and industry’, especially Sussex ironworkers.

Nearly all those who went to North America went as indentured servants, legally bound to labour on the plantations, or practising their own craft for fixed periods of between four and ten years in return for wages. When their terms of service had expired they were free to enter the local labour market or return home. Between 1654 and 1660 just over 3,000 of these indentured servants were shipped from Bristol, more than half destined for the tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Former yeomen farmers and farmhands were the biggest group but there was a scattering of skilled artisans such as blacksmiths and coopers. Most came from the counties adjacent to Bristol and South Wales and were between eighteen and twenty-five.
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Such young men (and women too) were the sinews of the new colonies. All hoped to flourish in a society where the domestic obstructions to advancement did not exist. In time it was widely imagined that those with talent, application and an injection of good luck would flourish irrespective of birth or connections. At the beginning of the next century, Daniel Defoe used the fictional career of Moll Flanders to illustrate this principle. Moll, born in Newgate gaol, returns there after a sequence of picaresque adventures in which she displays resource and intelligence. Transported as a felon to Virginia she and her highwayman husband eventually overcome their backgrounds and become respected and wealthy planters.

Moll Flanders
was not pure fantasy, nor a tract by a writer who believed that a person’s place in the world should be determined by ability. In 1755 an officer serving with General Edward Braddock’s army in Virginia recalled having supper with a ‘rich planter’. His wife, he discovered, ‘had passed through the education of the college of Newgate as great numbers from thence arrive here yearly; most being cunning jades, some pick up foolish planters.’ But this man was no fool, he had married his wife for her charms and her ‘art and skill’ in managing his business.

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The pursuit of profit remained the most powerful driving force behind Britain’s bid for North American colonies. But from the start it was closely linked to a moral imperative founded upon contemporary conceptions of Divine Providence and the nature of the world and its inhabitants.

In a sermon compiled in 1609 by a clerical apologist for the Virginia Company, America was described as a land which had been ‘wrongly usurped by wild beasts and unreasonable creatures’ (i.e. native Americans, or Indians as they were then known); according to the author, God intended the land to be redeemed by English settlement. In 1625, Simon Purchas, a churchman and disciple of Hakluyt, insisted that what he called the ‘Virgin Portion’ of North America had been divinely allocated to his countrymen, ‘God in wisdom having enriched the savage countries, that those riches be attractive for Christian suitors’.

The conceit that the American continent was a richly endowed virgin bride awaiting a husband enjoyed considerable usage at this time. It was not just a courtier’s knack for flattery that had inspired Raleigh to name the eastern seaboard of North America ‘Virginia’ in honour of Elizabeth I. A deeper meaning was intended since Raleigh, in his plea for the occupation of Guiana, had described it as ‘a country that hath yet her Maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought, the face of earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and the salt of the soil spent by manurance’.
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In coarser vein, Captain Seagull rallied the settlers in
Eastward Ho
with the cry, ‘Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead.’ Most famously this likeness of America to an unblemished maiden is employed by John Donne (among other things a chaplain to the Virginia Company) in his ‘To his Mistris Going to Bed’, in which the seducer is both explorer and planter:

License my roaving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land …

The moral question faced by Englishmen was, by what authority could they claim the fertile, untilled lands of North America? A broad and infallible answer was provided by the prevailing view of the divine ordering of the world and man’s place in it. ‘God’, wrote John Milton in a defence of colonisation, ‘having made the world for use of men … ordained them to replenish it.’ The newly revealed American continent was favoured with abundant natural resources by a benevolent God, but it was peopled by races who had never recognised nor acted upon their good fortune. Their wilful inertia, combined with other moral shortcomings, debarred them from their inheritance which passed to more industrious outsiders. Similar arguments, with variations, would later be applied to Australasia and Africa.

One hundred years of detailed reports from European explorers had created a literature in which, almost without exception, the Amerindians were represented as a degenerate and inferior species of mankind. Sir Martin Frobisher, encountering the Inuits of Northern Canada in the 1580s, described them as ‘brute beasts’ who ‘neither use table, stool or tablecloth for cleanliness’ and lived in caves. Fifty years later a French Jesuit missionary, horrified by the cannibalism and public torture of prisoners among the Indians of the St Lawrence basin, called them ‘ferocious beasts having nothing human about them save the exterior formation of body’. The standards of Renaissance European civilisation were absolute and, judged by them, the native Americans were found wanting.

The natives of America, when first confronted with Europeans, believed they were in the presence of supernatural beings. In Mexico, the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma imagined that his people’s conqueror, Hernán Cortés, was a reincarnation of the god Quetzalcoatl. Sixty years later, in 1569, when Drake landed in California, the Miwok Indians identified him and his party as gods. Sacrifices were immediately offered and, much to their visitors’ distress, some Miwoks mutilated themselves, as they did when they fancied themselves in the presence of ghosts. Everywhere Amerindians regarded Europeans as gods whose ships were floating islands, their sails white clouds and their cannon the makers of thunder and lightning. Such naïveté was easily exploited; in 1633 a French sea captain entranced Indians by using a magnetised sword blade to pick up a knife so that, in his words, they would ‘imagine some great power in us and for that love and fear us’.

Indian customs dismayed most European observers. They appeared a race without order, that vital ingredient of what Renaissance men considered to be civilisation. They were idolators and, according to Cotton Mather, a Bostonian Puritan, were ‘Lazy Drones, and love Idleness Exceedingly’. Indolence was a form of devilment for those of his persuasion and it seemed an inevitable outcome of God’s purpose that the Indians should be dispossessed by colonists just as the Israelites had driven out the pagan Canaanites.

Nevertheless, while the Indians, like Caliban in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest,
were unfit to occupy their land, they might be put in the way of improvement. The idea of conversion and elevation was given exotic form in the masque
The Virginian Princess,
staged in 1614. The pagan Indian nobility, dressed in fanciful gold-embroidered and feathered costumes designed by Inigo Jones, were addressed in James I’s name:

Virginian Princes, ye must now renounce

Your superstitious worships of these suns …

And of your sweet devotions turn the events

To this Britain Phoebus.

In the beginning the promoters of the Virginia Company had made much of plans for the conversion and education of Indians, and during the colony’s early years relations between settlers and natives had been harmonious. But as the colony grew the settlers clamoured for fresh land which could only be gained at the Indians’ expense. War broke out in 1622 and after a massacre in which over 300 colonists were killed, a new and understandably fierce mood prevailed. ‘The way of conquering them is more easy than civilising them by fair means,’ ran a pamphlet issued by the company, ‘for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people, scattered in small communities, which are helps to Victory, but hindrances to Civility.’ In future the native Americans would be brought to heel by the destruction of their camps and crops and ‘by pursuing them with our horses, and Blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastiffs to tear them, which take these naked, tanned deformed Savages, for no other than wild beasts.’

This mandate for extermination anticipated similar calls for ruthless wars against a dehumanised enemy that would be heard from land-hungry colonists in southern Africa, New Zealand and Australia. It was also a reminder that the first colonisation of North America was contemporaneous with the far larger settlement of Ireland, mainly by Presbyterian Scottish immigrants. Between 1620 and 1642 120,000 colonists arrived to help undertake what Sir Francis Bacon revealingly called ‘the reduction to civility’ of the Gaelic-speaking, Catholic Irish. On both sides of the Atlantic the settlers faced sporadic but determined resistance and their response was the same, a resort to counter-massacre and the most extreme forms of repression. Half a century of land wars against the Indians calloused the New England settlers’ consciences. In 1703, soon after the slaughter of Pequot Indians, a soldier wrote, prompted by a clergyman, ‘Sometimes the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.’ When founded, the Massachusetts Bay Company had set on its seal a device which showed an Indian with a scroll above his head with the inscription ‘Come over and help us’.

Native Americans were not the only people who advanced territorial claims in North America. In 1494, Spain and Portugal had signed the Treaty of Tordesillas by which the New World was divided between them, and their agreement was endorsed by a Papal bull. This accord was naturally disregarded by Protestant Englishmen who undermined its legality with counter-claims based on John Cabot’s 1497 voyage. He had, at Henry VII’s bidding, crossed the Atlantic and made landfall at either Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, no one is sure which, and formally annexed the region in the King’s name. Furthermore, there was the legendary transatlantic expedition made by the twelfth-century Welsh prince, Madoc. This insubstantial tale assumed, in the hands of Elizabethan expansionists, the force of historical truth and was cited to override Spanish and Portuguese claims.