trusted advisor, who may have had a hand in trying to arrange a marriage with a Spanish princess for the Prince, who would thus have been forced to accept a new virgin love and abandon the old one, Virginia. In this aim both the King and the new Spanish ambassador, Zuñiga, were reported to be in concord following their friendly meetings in July 1612. Henry, however, took matters into his own hands by dying on 2 November. The impact of his death was summed up by Sir Thomas Dale, the deputy governor of Virginia, when he wrote: ‘He was the great captain of our Israel, the hope to have builded up this heavenly New Jerusalem. He interred the whole frame of this business [when he] fell into his grave.’
Apart from Edward, none of the nation’s Tudor monarchs nailed their colours firmly to the colonists’ masts. Catholic Mary would not encourage acts contrary to the wishes of her papal father and Spanish husband, while Elizabeth seemed to view such American expeditions as a way of indulging the fantasies of her favourites. This detached position changed with James who, although not wishing to be drawn into an argument with Spain, was nonetheless prepared to issue Charters to his petitioners as long as this did not involve any monetary commitment by the Crown.
This caution was in accord with the views of the Privy Council, who were often openly hostile to the proposed plans for settlement. Both Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil discouraged, and even may have tried to sabotage, settlement plans, which led to a lack of unity at the highest level, preventing the creation of a coherent and enthusiastically supported plan of occupation.
Throughout King James I’s reign no opportunity was missed to publish tracts to encourage the restless to improve their lot through emigrating to a new and bountiful world.
With no overt encouragement from the Crown, those interested in organizing overseas voyages needed to prepare well their proposition before putting it forward for a royal patent. Cabot had the least difficulty but Henry VII had far fewer problems with his European neighbours than did Henry VIII, Elizabeth or James I, who needed more persuading. An early revivalist of the western vision was Humphrey Gilbert, who, in 1576, proposed assembling a fleet in the Bermudas that would fall upon the Spanish treasure fleets and seize Cuba and Santo Domingo. Gilbert’s tracts clearly indicate that the writer had some difficulty in separating the practical from the impossible and fact from fictive hope. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Elizabeth granted him a Charter to venture westward a year after Frobisher’s expeditions had failed; perhaps she did not read Gilbert’s works. She would have found the pamphlet produced by Richard Hakluyt in 1584, Particular Discourse on the Western Planting, more digestible. In this work Hakluyt emphasized how an English colony in America would help in the struggle against Spain by providing a base from which raids could be launched on the annual Plate Fleet as well as Spanish settlements in the Indies. Once the colonists had settled peacefully and converted the natives to Christianity, boundless trading opportunities would arise that would, Hakluyt suggested, make England self-sufficient in essential commodities such as furs and timber. In other words, Hakluyt laid out the very arguments for colonization that would appeal to a hard-up and threatened monarchy.
The Crown and Council, however, needed not only to be convinced that the ideas of settlement were sound but also that they would be recognized internationally as legitimate when held up against the powerful papal authority of the Treaty of Tordesillas. The campaign to convince the sceptics was waged with flattery and the force of law.
The flattery was applied by Richard Hakluyt the younger (to distinguish him from his older cousin, also Richard, who enthused and inspired him), who in 1582 published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, following this up in 1589 with the book that would make him famous, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. The second, much larger edition, published in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, included the additional significant word, Traffiques, in the title after Voyages, for Hakluyt had appreciated that trade was going to be the mainsail that would power discovery forward, as without the hope of gain there would be no viable voyages. The first edition of this work was dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham, ‘Principal Secretary to Her Majesty, and one of Her Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council’. The second volume of the second edition, published in 1599, was dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, ‘Principal Secretary to Her Majesty’. The dates of publication are important. Ralegh’s Virginia adventure had ended ignominiously, giving the Queen’s advisors ample opportunity to deflect her from supporting further such ventures. Hakluyt counterblasted this potential threat by stating, ‘There is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia; the inland whereof is found of late to be so sweet and wholesome a climate, so rich and abundant in silver mines, so apt and capable of all commodities . . . [and] acknowledged inland to be a better and richer country than Mexico.’ With such an enthusiastic description of Virginia, Hakluyt’s nose stretched, Pinocchio-like, across the Atlantic. When the later editions of his book were being printed, England was at war with Spain, so Hakluyt, in addition to emphasizing the desire to establish a woollen trade with Cathay, made it very clear that he had included within the volumes detailed descriptions of every Spanish port in the West Indies to ease the task of would-be raiders. However, to encourage the peacemakers as well as the warmongers at Court, Hakluyt wrote:
If upon a good and godly peace obtained, it shall please the almighty to stir up Her Majesty’s heart to continue with transporting one or two thousand of her people, and such others as upon mine own knowledge will most willingly at their own charges become adventurers in good numbers with their bodies and goods; she shall by God’s assistance, in short space, work many great and unlooked for effects, increase her dominions, enrich her coffers, and reduce many pagans to the faith of Christ.
LEGITIMIZING CONQUEST
The legal issues were handled by the polymath John Dee, who set out to challenge the belief that the unknown world had been divided up between Spain and Portugal, using a mixture of historical myth, geographic guesswork and incisive, incontestable, well-reasoned legalistic opinion.
To provide the proof to support the historical right of England to the lands between Florida and the Arctic, Dee turned to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had woven into his History of the Kings of Britain, finished in 1136, sufficient myth to demonstrate the pre-existence of a sizeable British Empire which, through King Arthur’s conquests, included Ireland and the island chain that stretched to the Americas via the Shetlands, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador, establishing a prior claim that was reinforced by the Welshman Madoc in 1170 as far south as Florida. This ancient right of ownership over these lands was later strengthened, so Dee suggested, by the voyages of the Cabots and Frobisher, which were made while most of North America was still terra incognita to the Spanish.
Dee based his argument for the legitimacy of English settlement in America on Roman law, which proclaimed that rights of sovereignty over any land depended on both a demonstrable historical intent to occupy and a corporate presence being established in the territory. In other words, a ruler, or their representative, needed to be present both in body and in soul, which the Spanish evidently, were not. Furthermore, the Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century AD, had stated that, ‘what presently belongs to no one becomes by natural reason the property of the first taker’. Dee expanded on this decree by demonstrating that it was insufficient to claim ownership merely by discovery; that legal title to territory depended on taking physical possession as well as putting the land to productive use. Cleverly, by the use of legal and scriptural argument drawn from irrefutable sources acceptable to both Catholic and Protestant alike, Dee ensured that his rationale could not be dismissed as heretical. Even more cannily, Dee used the same argument to support the Spanish colonization of the lands to the south of Virginia, including Florida, despite his suggestion of a prior English interest in this region.
John
