The moral character of the colonisation of Virginia has presented a vexed question since the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). For Alexander Haskell, the ideal of “commonwealth”—“a constellation of rightly turned wills and lawfully performed offices” following a divine plan (37-38)—underpinned the promotion of English interests in North America. A “fraught mixture of impulses”, which reflected “a fragile combination of self-righteousness and moral and legal ambiguity at the heart of Tudor and early Stuart colonization in America”, this sensibility created “a taut and mercurial atmosphere in which worldly and godly tendencies competed in complicated, rarely fully resolved struggles for primacy”. It also “proved fertile ground for the volatile, and ultimately combustive, blend of providentialism and skepticism that sundered civil bonds during the English Civil War [sic], and that plunged Virginia into its civil cataclysm in the conflict known as Bacon's Rebellion” (21). This potent mixture also generated “a dramatically secularized view of state sovereignty articulated most influentially” by the one-time Virginia Company member, Thomas Hobbes (22).
Ideas—or, rather, ideals—matter most here since “the particular ways the colonizing project was defended and framed were instrumental in giving Virginia's polity its original integrity and shape” and since its proponents drew upon “the powerful persuasive as well as constitutive force” of rhetoric (23). Haskell thus focuses on the virtues of colonisation pronounced by the familiar cheerleaders against, on the one hand, the scorn of playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, and other sceptics, and the grasping of “statists”, such as James I's Lord Treasurer Lionel Cranfield (191-194), who sought to divert colonial revenues for Crown purposes. Slavery, indentured servitude, and tobacco receive remarkably scant attention here.
The concept of “commonwealth” connected the social and religious ideals from which the colonisation of the place arose to the characterisation of that society employed by Virginia's rebels when they constituted their new government after George III's August 1775 proclamation of rebellion placed them in a Hobbesian state of nature (Haskell colony-centred analysis ignores this point, 353-368). For Haskell, Virginians and their ideological midwives entertained no questions about the virtues that their endeavours furthered. Although their efforts to perpetuate this ideal fell victim to the “rise of Hobbism” (288)—views of a centralising empire that held increasing sway after 1650—the collapse of the imperial regime enabled it to rise phoenix-like a little over a century later.
For God, King, and People provides a reminder of the happy results that promoters proclaimed would come from Anglo-American colonisation if only Crown and public provided more support for the pursuit of their providential vision. Unfortunately, the privileging of ideals means we receive little sense of the sort of “commonwealth bonds” that developed in Virginia.
In the first place, we should recall that the proponents and defenders of colonisation resorted to the printing press to assure an often-indifferent public (and Crown) of the divine favour purportedly bestowed upon Virginia. More importantly, the history here was not a history of ideas, at least not humanist ones. While the reflections upon the purported virtues of the colony offered by the likes of John Donne, Captain John Smith, and Samuel Purchas might draw upon the literature of statecraft, casuistry, Platonism, and providentialism, in reality, the Virginia Company pursued this initiative for “private” reasons—that is a return on investment—at least as much as for “public” ones. Furthermore, the Virginia venture was riddled from its genesis by the sort of factional backbiting that undermined commonwealths everywhere.
The “thrusting out” of Governor Sir John Harvey in the mid-1630s by a party of planters led by Samuel Mathews and William Claiborne provides an excellent illustration of the blinkered view provided by examining seventeenth-century Virginia through an intellectual lens. According to Haskell, Virginia's “first major political test” arose “from a brief renewal of optimism about the colony's prospects” apparently due to the accession of Charles I “as it was natural for [Virginia's supporters] to see Charles as the Virginian emperor they had so long anticipated” (158). These hopes, however, fell due to the metropolitan furore over the king's religious policy and misuse of funds, which Haskell elects to characterise as a debate over “Charles's unrestrained will” (162). This fracas purportedly spilled over to Virginia where the colony's councillors rejected Harvey's high-handed attempts to compel them to obedience “as part of the broader politics concerned with Charles's worrying prioritization of his conscience over the upright activities of his subjects”: the commonwealth ideal had taken root across the Atlantic (163).
Perhaps; but this episode reflects the character of seventeenth-century Anglo-American society and politics: colonial political cultures that replicated their metropolitan model replete with factions, the cultivation of patronage, and the pursuit of status and wealth that entailed the prodding of a vacillating and impoverished English State to intervene in disputes. Here, the Claiborne-Mathews group used their metropolitan connections to shunt Harvey to the sidelines as a by-product of their fight against the Maryland patent held by the Calvert family.
The dispatching by the new English Republic of Sir George Ayscue's fleet to subjugate Virginia in 1652 at the behest of a network headed by the merchant (and erstwhile Virginian) Maurice Thompson constitutes yet another manifestation of how this culture worked. Thompson, whose command of the colony's overseas trade from the 1630s through the 1650s provoked continuing demands from the likes of Sir William Berkeley for free trade, receives no mention here. Predictably, Thompson's associates, Claiborne and Richard Bennett, served as the commissioners that accompanied Ayscue and Bennett replaced Berkeley as governor; he was not “appointed” by the imperial thinker Benjamin Worsley. The players in this imperial game might cloak their pursuits in the language of commonwealth, liberty, providence, and virtue, but can we take their claims to be advancing the public weal at face value?
