The civic solution to the crisis of English colonization, 1609-1625

Historical Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 25-51

  Fitzmaurice, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

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EID: 61049569825     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X98008267     Document Type: Article

References (217)

1. The author wishes to thank David Armitage, Karen Kupperman, Anthony Pagden, Quentin Skinner, and the assessors for the Historical Journal for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. The author is also indebted to the participants in 'International seminar on the history of the Atlantic world' at Harvard University, and in particular to Professor Bernard Bailyn, for their responses.
2. On the loss of the Virginia Company's two court books covering the period 28 Jan. 1606 to 28 July 1619, see S. M. Kingsbury, ed., The records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington, 1906-35), 1, pp. 25-31.
3. Alexander Brown, English politics in early Virginian history (first published 1901, reissued New York, 1968), pp. 11-13;
4. E. D. Neill, The English colonisation of America during the seventeenth century (London, 1871);
5. Charles Mills Gayley, Shakespeare and the founders of liberty in America (New York
6. Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 1, pp. 12-15;
7. Wesley F. Craven, The dissolution of the Virginia Company (Oxford, 1932), p. 24
8. 'The true motif of the Company's history is economic rather than political.' The colony, according to this account, was governed along predominantly military lines: Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 48;
9. and Herbert L. Osgood, The American colonies in the seventeenth century, 3 vols. (first published 1904, reissued New York, 1930), 1, pp. 68-71.
10. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of happiness (Chapel Hill, 1988), p. 8.
11. See also Edmund S. Morgan, American slavery American freedom (New York, 1975), pp. 44-5, 95, 118.
12. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, plunder and settlement: maritime enterprise and the genesis of the British empire (Cambridge, 1984), p. 5.
13. See, for example, Warren M. Billings, 'The transfer of English law to Virginia, 1606-1650', in K. R. Andrews, N. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, eds., The westward enterprise (Liverpool, 1978), pp. 216-18;
14. N. Canny, 'The permissive frontier: the problem of social control in English settlements in Ireland and Virginia', in ibid., p. 18;
15. David Thomas Konig, 'Colonization and the common law in Ireland and Virginia, 1569-1634', in James A. Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds., The transformation of early American history (New York, 1991), pp. 70-92.
16. Greene, Pursuits of happiness, pp. 11, 15.
17. For scepticism about the value of the Company propaganda as an historical resource, see David B. Quinn's authoritative New American world: a documentary history of North America to 1612 (5 vols., New York, 1979), v, p. 233.
18. Quinn notes that 'No examples...of the sermons preached to potential subscribers are given' in the five volumes. He justifies this omission with the observation that 'they are long-winded and in content only of intermittent interest'. Similarly, Kenneth Andrews dismisses the propaganda as' hollow rhetoric' but grudgingly concedes' Difficult though it may be now to swallow such sanctimonious bombast, we can only assume that the leading preachers of the day knew well enough how to rouse the Christian conscience and national feeling of the Jacobean public', Trade, plunder and settlement, p. 320.
19. The most notable of such accounts is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian moment (Princeton, 1975).
20. See also Blair Worden, 'English republicanism', in J. H. Burns and M. Goldie, eds., The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 443-75.
21. For an emphasis upon theories of order and unity in early Stuart political thought, see Kevin Sharpe, 'Introduction: parliamentary history from 1603-1629: in or out of perspective?', in Sharpe, ed., Faction and parliament: essays on early Stuart history (Oxford, 1978), p. 28:
22. 'The political theory of late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England was the theory of the correspondency between the ordered macrocosm and hierarchical microcosm of the state'; Conrad Russell, The causes of the English civil war (Oxford, 1990), pp. 131-60.
23. For an emphasis that 'there was a variety of political viewpoints in early Stuart England', see J. P. Sommerville, 'James I and the divine right of kings: English politics and continental theory', in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The mental world of the Jacobean court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 55-70, at p. 70;
24. Linda Levy Peck, 'Kingship, counsel and law in early Stuart Britain', in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The varieties of British political thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 80-115.
25. Cf. J. P. Sommerville, Politics and ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London, 1986), p. 86 n. 1: 'civic humanism was buried if not dead before the English civil war'; see also pp. 57-8.
26. Patrick Collinson, 'The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69 (1987), pp. 394-424;
27. Markku Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1-6.
28. This position is adopted in particular by Peltonen and to some degree by Collinson but not, it must be stressed, exclusively. Both examine civic thought in the context of the commonwealth. See Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism, p. 54:
29. 'the occurrence of humanist and republican arguments at the margins rather than at the centre reveals something of their controversial nature'; Collinson, 'The monarchical republic of Elizabeth I', p. 397.
30. See also Worden, 'English republicanism', p. 445:
31. 'Republican ideas might be missing from the political treatises of the generations before the Civil War, but they were often explored in imaginative literature.'
32. It is tempting to argue that the Virginia Company introduced civic arguments to fill the vacuum created by the debate over whether Virginia was held by right of conquest and fell, therefore, under James's prerogative, or whether it was subject to parliament and the common law. (On this debate, see Noel Malcolm, 'Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company', Historical Journal, 24 (1981), p. 303.) As we shall see, however, the Company's pronouncements of policy respond to what is represented as a crisis in establishing a commonwealth and not to a question of authority.
33. Cf. Peter S. Onuf, 'Reflections on the founding: constitutional historiography in bicentennial perspective', William and Mary Quarterly, 46 (1989), pp. 350-1.
34. On the studia humanitatis in grammar school education, see T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's small Latine and lesse Greeke (2 vols., Urbana, 1944).
35. For the universities, see Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642 (Oxford, 1959). See also Quentin Skinner, Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 19-110.
36. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance thought and its sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York, 1979). PP. 21-32.
37. Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modem political thought (2 vols., Cambridge, 1978), 1, p. 45. While the language of citizenship may seem inappropriate to Renaissance England, Patrick Collinson observes that in early modern England 'citizens' were 'concealed within subjects'; see Patrick Collinson, De republica anglorum (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 23-4.
38. On the contrast between the aims of humanist and scholastic political philosophy, Quentin Skinner, 'Political philosophy', in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner, eds., The Cambridge history of renaissance philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), p. 413.
39. Sir William Alexander, An encouragement to colonies (London, 1624), p. 42.
40. David Beers Quinn, ed., The voyages and colonising enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (2 vols., London, 1940), 1, pp. 35-6.
41. Gilbert would beonly the first of many New World adventurers to have participated in the colonization of Ireland. It is now widely acknowledged that republican thought was used to address the problems of Ireland. I will not address here the possible links with the civic thought employed by the Virginia Company. On common involvement in the two enterprises, see Howard Mumford Jones, 'Origins of the colonial idea in England', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 85 (1942), p. 463.
42. On republicanism in the Irish context, see Peltonen, Humanism and republicanism, pp. 74-102.
43. Supporters included John Dee, Richard Hakluyt, Philip Sidney, George Gascoigne, John Florio, and Walter Ralegh.
44. On the nature and ends of deliberative rhetoric, see Aristotle, The art of rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (London, 1926), 1.3-6;
45. Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (London, 1949), 11.155-6;
46. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (London, 1942), 11.334;
47. Quintilian, Institutio oratorio, trans. H. E. Butler (4 vols., London, 1920), iii.viii.1-2;
48. Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique, ed. Thomas J. Derrick (New York, 1982), pp. 76, 89.
49. On the role of these values in Academic moral philosophy, see Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (London, 1913).
50. David Beers Quinn, England and the discovery of America, 1481-1620 (London, 1974), pp. 379-80 and 371-80;
51. Quinn, Gilbert, 1, p. 59.
52. George Peckham, A true report of the newfound landes (London, 1583), sig. B3r.
53. Ibid., sig. B3r-v.
54. E. G. R. Taylor, ed., The writings and correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts (2 vols., London, 1935), 11, P. 211.
55. Ibid., 11, p. 243.
56. See, for example, the Letters patent granted to Raleigh, in Richard Hakluyt, Principal navigations (London, 1589), pp. 725-8;
57. Thomas Harriot, A brief and true report of the newfound land of Virginia (London, 1588) sigs. A4v-Br; Arthur Barlowe, Letter to Ralegh, in Hakluyt, Principal navigations, p. 728;
58. Robert Harcourt, A relation of a voyage to Guiana (London, 1613), sig. A2V.
59. Walter Ralegh, The discoverie of the large, rich and bewtiful empyre of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado) (London, 1596), sig. q3v.
60. On Ralegh as conquistador, see also Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995), pp. 67-8.
61. Ralegh, Discoverie of Guiana, p. 10.
62. See also pp. 93-4.
63. Ibid., pp. 90-1.
64. John Brereton, A brief and true relation (London, 1602), in David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., New England voyages (London, 1983), p. 157.
65. Philip L. Barbour, The Jamestown voyages under the first charter, 1606-1609 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1969), 1, PP. 13-15.
66. Undated letter from William Brewster, in Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 107.
67. Sir Walter Cope to Lord Salisbury, 12 Aug. 1607, in Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 108.
68. See also Letters patent, 10 Apr. 1606, in which gold, silver, and copper are named as motives, in Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 24.
69. Sir Walter Cope to Lord Salisbury, 13 Aug. 1607, in Barbour Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 111.
70. Sir Thomas Smith to Lord Salisbury, 17 Aug. 1607, in Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 112.
71. Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, pp. 127 and 209.
72. George Percy, Discourse, in Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 144.
73. Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 209.
74. See Quinn, ed., New American world, v, p. 188.
75. Barbour, Jamestown voyages, 1, p. 3.
76. Quinn, ed., New American world, v, pp. 191, 205-12.
77. T. Abbay and William Symonds, eds., The proceedings of the English colonic in Virginia (Oxford, 1612), pp. 10-11.
78. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia (London, 1610), pp. 25-6.
79. See also John Rolfe, Relation of the state of Virginia, in Virginia: four personal narratives, Research Library of Colonial Americana (New York, 1972), p. 104.
80. Peckham, True report, sig. B3r.
81. On negotium and the vita activa in the civic tradition, see Skinner, Foundations of modern political thought, 1, pp. 80, 108, 217-19;
82. Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism, pp. 21-34. 63-4, 109.
83. On Crashaw's position, see Louis B. Wright, Religion and empire: the alliance between piety and commerce in English expansion, 1558-1625 (New York, 1965), p. 100.
84. William Crashaw, A sermon preached before the right honourable the Lord Lawarre (London, 1610), sig. K3V.
85. Symonds, Virginia (London, 1609), pp. 31-2.
86. Cicero, De officiis, 1.19;
87. see also 1.22 and 58.
88. Symonds, Virginia, pp. 31-2.
89. Cicero, De officiis, 1.22.
90. Robert Gray, A good speed to Virginia (London, 1609), sig. Dr. Gray probably graduated from St John's College, Cambridge: see Wright, Religion and empire, p. 92.
91. This Platonic dictum was popular in contemporary civic thought; see, for example, Henry Crosse, Vertues common-wealth: or the high-way to honour (London, 1603), sig. R.3r;
92. see also Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism, pp. 149, and 136-9.
93. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. C3r.
94. Ibid., sig. Dr-v.
95. Ibid., sig. D2r.
96. On the place of this proposition in the civic tradition, see Skinner, Foundations of modern political thought, 1, pp. 88-94.
97. On the use of this commonplace in early modern English political thought, see Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism, pp. 35-9.
98. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. D3r.
99. On the concern with justifying the Virginian colony in the promotional literature of this period, see Symonds, Virginia, p. 10;
100. Gray, A good speed to Virginia, sig. Br-v, B4. V, C4. V;
101. A true declaration of the estate of the colonic in Virginia (London, 1610), pp. 6-12;
102. William Strachey, The historie of travell into Virginia Britannia (1609-12), eds. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London, 1953), pp. 22-6;
103. Alexander Whitaker, Good newes from Virginia (London, 1613), p. 19.
104. See Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia (London, 1609), sig. C2r-v;
105. A true declaration of the estate of the colonic in Virginia, pp. 1-2;
106. Richard Crakanthorpe, A sermon at the inauguration of King James (London, 1609), sig. D2r-v;
107. Gray, A good speed to Virginia, sig. A3r-v.
108. On the topic of wisdom in general, see Symonds, Virginia, sig. A3r;
109. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. K3r;
110. Robert Johnson, The new life of Virginea (London, 1612), sig. A3r-v;
111. Strachey, The historie of travell into Virginia Britannia, pp. 8-9;
112. Whitaker, Good newes from Virginia, p. 10.
113. On this shift, see Charles M. Andrews. The colonial period in American history (New Haven, 1934), 1, pp. 99-100.
114. It has also been emphasized by recent commentators. See, for example, Pagden, Lords of all the world, pp. 67-8.
115. Johnson, New life of Virginea, sig. D4r-v.
116. Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans H. Caplan (London, 1954), 111.5.
117. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. F4r.
118. Gray, Good speed to Virginia, sig. B4V. For further examples of this argument, see Symonds, Virginia, pp. 13-14;
119. Johnson, New life of Virginia, sig. A3r-v;
120. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, pp. 15-16;
121. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. H4V;
122. and John Smith, The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), sig. q.
123. On the common good as the end of civic action, see Skinner, Foundations of modem political thought, 1, pp. 44-8, 175-80.
124. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. Ar-A2v.
125. Johnson, Nova Britannia, sig. A4r.
126. John Smith, A true relation (London, 1608), sig. B3V.
127. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus or Purchas his pilgrimes (London, 1625), pp. 1787-8;
128. Ralph Hamor, A true discourse of the present estate of Virginia (London, 1615), p. 24.
129. On honour and glory as the reward of civic action, see Skinner, Foundations of modern political thought, I, pp. 100-1, 178-80;
130. Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism, pp. 34-5.
131. Daniel Price, Sauls prohibition staide (London, 1609), sig. F2r.
132. Crakanthorpe, Sermon at the inauguration of King James, sig. D2r-v.
133. See also Crashaw, Sermon, sig. B3V;
134. Abbay and Symonds, eds., The proceedings of the English colonie in Virginia, p. 109.
135. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, pp. 2-3.
136. Skinner, Foundations of modem political thought, 1, pp. 99, 162-6.
137. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, pp. 10-11.
138. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. F4V.
139. John Smith, A map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), pp. 37-9.
140. On the opposition between 'dissolute liberty', or licence, and liberty enjoyed with responsibility, see Conal Condren, 'Liberty of office and its defence in seventeenth-century political argument', History of political thought, 17 (1997), p. 462.
141. Smith, Map of Virginia, pp. 37-9.
142. On the diagnosis of idleness as a problem in this period of the colony, see also Abbay and Symonds, eds., Proceedings of the English colonic in Virginia, sig. A2r;
143. and A true declaration of the estate of the colonie in Virginia, pp. 34-5:
144. 'our mutinous loiterers would not sow with providence, and therefore they reaped the fruites of too deare-bought repentance. An incredible example of their idleness, is the report of Sir Thomas Gates, who affirmeth... he hath seene some of them eat their fish raw, rather than they would go a stones cast to fetch wood and dresse it'.
145. Morgan, American slavery, American freedom, pp. 83-4;
146. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians (London, 1980), p. 17.
147. Carville V. Earle, 'Environment, disease, and mortality in early Virginia', in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the seventeenth century (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 96-125.
148. On faction and civic thought, see Skinner, Foundations of modern political thought, 1, pp. 55-64.
149. Abbay and Symonds, eds., Proceedings of the English colonic in Virginia, p. 78.
150. A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, p. 10.
151. On the theme of faction, see also Rolfe, Relation of the state of Virginia, p. 104.
152. On the civic emphasis upon the character and spirit of the citizens, see Skinner, Foundations of modern political thought, 1, pp. 44-5.
153. 'Virginia Company vs. Sir Thomas Mildmaye, James Bryarley, Mathewe De Questor, and Others. The bill of complaint, November 25, 1612', in Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, iii, pp. 34-9.
154. 'Virginia Company vs. Sir Thomas Mildmaye and Others. The Answer of Sir Thomas Mildmaye to the Bill of Complaint. December 11, 1612', in Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, iii, p. 40.
155. On wealth as the corruption of civic virtue, a theme stressed by Roman moralists such as Sallust and Juvenal, endorsed by Latini, and revived by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, see Skinner, Foundations of modern political thought, 1, pp. 42-3, 162-3.
156. On the revival of this theme in Elizabethan and Jacobean civic thought, see Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism, p. 79.
157. In this context it is striking to note that William Vaughan, a prominent player in and vigorous promoter of Jacobean colonial designs, translated Trajano Boccalini's The new-found politicke (London, 1626) which diagnosed the corruption of the Italian republics. On Vaughan, see Gillian T. Cell, ed., Newfoundland discovered (London, 1982), pp. 19-26.
158. See Quentin Skinner, 'The republican ideal of political liberty', in Gesela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and republicanism (Cambridge, 1990);
159. and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before liberalism (Cambridge, 1998).
160. Sallust, trans. J. C. Rolfe (London, 1921), xii.1, see also x-xii.
161. For the revival of this theme in early modern Britain, see Skinner, Liberty before liberalism, pp. 64-5.
162. Crashaw, Sermon, sig. G2r-v. Crashaw harps on this point: 'But if it be urged further: Why is there not then present profit, at least after so many voyages and supplies sent? In answere, that profit is not the principall end of this action' (my emphasis), sig. G3V.
163. Gray, Good speed to Virginia, sig. A3r-v.
164. In the same year Robert Johnson asks 'are we to looke for no gaine in the lieu of all our adventures', replying that there is such a hope' but looke it be not chiefe in your thoughts', Nova Britannia, sig. Cr.
165. Whitaker, Good newes from Virginia, p. 1.
166. He returns to this theme repeatedly through the tract:' you wealthy men of this world, whose bellies God hath filled with his hidden Treasure: trust not in uncertaine riches, neither cast your eyes upon them; for riches taketh her to her wings as an Eagle, and flieth into Heaven. But bee rich in good works', pp. 26-7;
167. see also p. 32.
168. Ibid., p. 32.
169. On the improvement in conditions, see Hamor, A true discourse of the present estate of Virginia, p. 16.
170. Ibid., p. 25.
171. Ibid..
172. Rolfe, Relation of the state of Virginia, p. 102.
173. Ibid., pp. 103-4.
174. On the republican sympathies of Southampton and Sandys, see S. L. Adams, 'Foreign policy and the parliaments of 1621 and 1624', in Sharpe, ed., Faction and parliament, pp. 144-5.
175. See also Malcolm, 'Hobbes, Sandys and the Virginia Company', pp. 300-1.
176. Malcolm, 'Hobbes, Sandys and the Virginia Company', pp. 300-1.
177. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 33-5.
178. Greene, Pursuits of happiness, p. 11.
179. Ibid. See also Morgan, American slavery, American freedom, pp. 117-18.
180. Smith, The general history of Virginia, p. 242.
181. For the continuing secondary position of profit in promotional arguments at this time, see also Samuel Purchas, Virginia's verger, in Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus or Purchas his pilgrimes, p. 1816.
182. See also Cicero, De oratore, 1.33;
183. Wilson, The arte of rhetorique, pp. 17-18.
184. Cf. Stephen J. Greenblatt, 'Learning to curse: aspects of linguistic colonialism in the sixteenth century', in Fredi Chiappelli, ed., First images of America (2 vols., Berkeley, 1976), 11, p. 565.
185. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11, xviii. 1-2. This view is also expressed by Cicero: De inventione, 1.6.
186. Donne, A sermon...preached to the honourable company of the Virginian plantation (London, 1622), p. 1.
187. Ibid., sig. A3r.
188. This view is expressed metaphorically by Patrick Copland whose sermon Virginia's God be thanked (London, 1622) was published by the Company six months before Donne's sermon: 'How could I, at so earnest entreatie, refuse to adventure this Mite of mine, among so many worthy adventures', sig. A3r.
189. In the style of Crashaw, Copland's sermon is also devoted to arguing that there is a duty to adventure to Virginia. The implications of Donne's argument are fully explored in Andrew Fitzmaurice, 'Every man, that prints, adventures: the rhetoric of the Virginia Company sermons', in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, eds., The English sermon revised (Manchester, forthcoming).
190. On Scottish plans, see Alexander, An encouragement to colonies; John Mason, A brief discourse of the Newfoundland (Edinburgh, 1620) in Cell, ed., Newfoundland discovered, pp. 85-99;
191. Robert Gordon, Encouragements (Edinburgh, 1625). On Welsh plans, see William Vaughan, The golden fleece (London, 1626), and Cell, ed., Newfoundland discovered, pp. 13, 15-26.
192. On Irish plans designed primarily by Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, and George Clavert, Lord Baltimore, for the resettlement of the Catholic 'Old English', see T. C., A short discourse of the Newfoundland (Dublin, 1623), in Cell, ed., Newfoundland discovered, pp. 227-36;
193. see also pp. 17, 207-49.
194. Bradford and Winslow, A relation of Plymouth, sig. B3V (see also pp. 2-3).
195. Robert Cushman, A sermon preached at Plimmath (London, 1622), pp. 1, 2, and 13. The western branch of the original Virginia council which became the New England council under the leadership of Sir Ferdinando Gorges was at the time threatening 'to give the law along those coasts', see A brief relation of the discovery and plantation of New England (London, 1622), in Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his province of Maine, ed. J. P. Baxter (New York, 1967), p. 225.
196. On the concern with liberty in Massachusetts Bay, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 'Definitions of liberty on the eve of civil war: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies', Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 17-33.
197. On the comparison between the Massachusetts Bay and Providence Island colonies, see Kupperman, 'Definitions of liberty on the eve of civil war'.
198. Cell, ed., Newfoundland discovered, pp. 26 and 32. The council included George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, and Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, both with vested interests in Newfoundland.
199. Alexander, Encouragement to colonies, p. 42.
200. On the author's obscurity and possible motivations, see Richard Eburne, A plaine pathway to plantations, ed. Louis B. Wright (Ithaca, 1962), pp. xxvi-xxviiii.
201. Ibid., pp. 58-9. 'What high and worthy enterprise', he argues, 'is there that ever hath without some difficulty been achieved', p. 75.
202. For this commonplace of courage, see also Robert Hayman, Quodlibets, lately come over from new Britanniola, old Newfoundland (London, 1628), Bk 2, p. 34;
203. and Gordon, Encouragements, sig. E3r, 'Doe wee dreame of difficulties? Then know; that it is out of the greatest difficulties, that spring the greatest honours.'
204. Eburne, A plaine pathway to planatations, p. 120.
205. For example, Gordon's lengthy passage justifying colonization (Encouragements, sig. B4r) is taken, verbatim, from A true declaration of the estate of the colonie in Virginia, p. 12;
206. his argument that 'no other moderate or mixt course' (Encouragements, sig. B3v) of colonization can be followed also repeats A true declaration, p. 10;
207. his division of the ends of adventurers according to position (Encouragements, sig. C2r) reprints a passage from Smith, General historic of Virginia, p. 221.
208. Gordon, Encouragements, sig. B2v.
209. Ibid..
210. Ibid., sig. Ev.
211. Greene, Pursuits of happiness, p. 23.
212. Stephen Forster, Their solitary way: the puritan social ethic in the first century of settlement in New England (New Haven, 1971);
213. Allen Cardin, 'The communal ideal in puritan New England, 1630-1700', Fides el historia, 17 (1984), pp. 25-38.
214. Pagden, Lords of all the world, ch. 3.
215. Cf. Onuf, 'Reflections on the founding', pp. 351-3;
216. Richard Vetterli and Gary Bryner, In search of the Republic: public virtue and the roots of American government (Totowa, 1987);
217. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, commerce, and history (Cambridge, 1985), p. 272.