Epilogue

The epilogue glances forward to the imperial crisis of the 1760s when colonial politicians like the Virginian burgess Richard Bland sought to reconstruct the circumstances by which the Renaissance empire gave rise to colonies like Virginia that took for granted their substantive civil integrity in relation to the state. Bland was sufficiently a product of the Enlightenment era and its own embrace of the Hobbesian theory of state sovereignty that he struggled to understand fully how such colonial commonwealths came into being. Yet, he grasped much about the Christian humanist logic on which Virginians had defined their polity, and he had no doubt that the British American empire's current constitutional arrangements were incomprehensible except in relation to English colonization's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century beginnings.

Providence, the Renaissance Atlantic, and Law

This chapter introduces the late Renaissance preoccupation with the interplay between God's will and earthly power by focusing on three issues. Envisioning the law as pathways of rightful conduct where Providence and human initiative intersected, colonizers viewed Christopher Columbus's discovery as as a divine sign that Christians were free to cross the ocean. Because distinguishing lawful pathways from erroneous ones was a matter of conscience, the literature that emerged to justify the Virginia venture took the familiar form of casuistry. Centered on the callings or divinely appointed offices by which humans contribute to bringing about the eschatological promise of the world's redemption, casuistry underlay, for instance, the magus and humanist John Dee's claim, in 1577, that Elizabeth I had a duty as a grace-filled empress to issue her first letters patent authorizing Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colonizing voyages. And colonization was inevitably defined as a project in forging commonwealths that brought everyone to his or her duties, for only in such a morally complete polity would Virginia satisfy God and contribute to coaxing sinners away from the primitive individualism left by the Fall.

Introduction

Sir Walter Ralegh published his monumental History of the World in 1614, two years after the untimely death of the young Prince Henry, heir apparent to James I, and seven years after the successful establishment of a Virginia colony at Jamestown, a fort situated along a grand river given the same sovereign-evoking name, the James. The three events were undoubtedly intertwined for Ralegh. Prince Henry was the darling of the Virginia colonizers. Embraced for his firm Protestant faith but also more broadly idealized as heaven-sent, Henry was eagerly courted by the adventurers, who wanted him to serve as the “...

Sir William Berkeley, the Hobbists, and the End of Renaissance-Era Colonization

This chapter traces the end of Renaissance-era colonization in the tensions between Thomas Hobbes's new theory of state sovereignty and the more-traditional Christian humanism of Sir William Berkeley. As Virginia’s governor for more than a quarter century, Berkeley applied an establishmentarian approach to governance that he had first developed, in the 1630s, in the theological-philosophical coterie known as the Great Tew circle. Adopting a Pyrrhonian skeptical view of God's truths as accessible only in the mundane civil achievements of humans, Great Tew members like Berkeley's friend Edward Hyde, later first earl of Clarendon, exalted established laws and institutions as the only true guide to following God's will. Eschewing both the godly assurance of the Puritans and the extreme skepticism of Hobbes, Berkeley sought to steer Virginia through an era marked by the English Civil War, the Restoration of monarchy under Charles II, and new Hobbesian initiatives to realize a unitary state that centered on England and whose colonies were meant to be provinces rather than commonwealths. When, in 1676–1677, Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., launched his own Presbyterian Hobbist challenge to Berkeley's authority in Bacon's Rebellion, planters themselves ultimately rejected Hobbism in favor of the colony's familiar commonwealth bonds to king and God.

Framing a New Public

This chapter relates the politics of commonwealth formation in Virginia as James's reign came to an end and his successor, Charles I, made clear that he, too, preferred for Virginia to function as a commercial outpost and generator of royal revenues rather than an integral kingdom. Against the backdrop of the political tensions and religious divisions of the Thirty Years War, the colony's supporters in both England and Virginia adopted a new justificatory approach that centered on the providential importance of the planter. Defining Virginia as a polity that rested on the reciprocal bond between king and planters, writers like Captain John Smith, Samuel Purchas, and Captain John Bargrave treated the mutual obligations of planters and king as forming a public, or shared body of resources and institutions, that should be seen as sacred and inviolable. When, in 1635, Charles and his treasurers' persistent efforts to impose a tobacco contract on the colony reached a crisis point, local politicians like the councillor Samuel Mathews led an uprising against Governor Sir John Harvey that symbolized the idea of Virginia as a commonwealth that sat rightly under God only insofar as the wills of king and planters were conjoined.

The Providential State and the Legitimizing Fellowship of “Company”

This chapter explores a new strategy for defending the Virginia project that emerged in the early seventeenth century as a male king, James I, ascended the English throne and as England's powerful secretary of state Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, sought to overcome the dishonor attached to Elizabethan sovereign engagements overseas through a robust vision of state-led colonization. Eager to usher in an era of vigorous English sovereignty under a fit male ruler but discouraged by James's uneasiness in challenging Spanish title across the Atlantic, Salisbury became the energetic prime mover behind the Virginia Company. Intended to embody the English body politic and thereby endow the colonizing venture with a legitimacy derived more from the public than the king, the company was from the outset a controversial entity that leaned on a rich literature of the providential state to argue for Virginia's commonwealth status. After Salisbury's death, the company would become vulnerable to the machinations of James's new treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex, who would seek to reinvent the Virginia Company as a mere trading company whose function was less to found a viable American kingdom than to ensure a steady flow of revenue to royal coffers.

Conquerors, Governors, and Chroniclers

This chapter examines the efforts by Elizabethan colonizers like Sir Walter Ralegh to define their persona as captain as entailing a calling of considerable providential significance. Drawing on the Renaissance ideal of imperium as the strength needed to pin down the world's sinful inconstancy, sixteenth-century English proponents of colonization argued that captains possessed the manly fortitude and prophetical insight needed to carry out God's will in conquering areas where Elizabeth's sovereignty was sound but not yet realized. An anxiety that underlay the attempts by writers like Richard Hakluyt the clergyman to defend Elizabethan conquest in America was the simmering worry, especially pronounced in an age of religious division and Spanish-Habsburg dominance, that God did not grant sovereignty to female rulers. Thus, her captains took on an especially precarious role in embodying England's imperial crown overseas, and failed colonies like Roanoke would eventually come to epitomize the Elizabethan captains' ignobility for their ineffectuality as conquerors.