The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660

By Misha Ewen

The Virginia Venture is an innovative exploration of how a wider public of women, children, and men across English society contributed to the foundation of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown, Virginia. Drawing on sources from dozens of archives in the United States and England, it provides a fresh perspective on how capital and labor were mobilized to help build the colony—not from the perspective of elite investors alone, but from the point of view of ordinary people across the country. Women and the laboring poor have been overlooked in these efforts: The Virginia Venture brings them center stage.

As well as exploring how society at home supported colonization, the book examines the impact that colonization had on English society, including changes in attitudes and behaviors—from the provision of poor relief to domestic tobacco cultivation. The book shows that as English society became more tightly invested in colonization in America, this sparked contestations over the prioritization of “English” and “American” interests. English social history in the seventeenth century cannot be understood without this imperial perspective.

The Virginia Venture is essential reading for scholars of English social and imperial history and early American history. It draws on the methods of transatlantic history, showing the intimate connections between England and America, but it is deeply rooted in the social history archive of England. It demonstrates how English archives can be used, to their fullest extent, to illuminate this crucial period of American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781512823004

Book preview

Cover: The Virginia Venture by Misha Ewen

THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS

Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

THE VIRGINIA VENTURE

American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660

Misha Ewen

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Hardcover ISBN 9781512822991

Ebook ISBN 9781512823004

A catalog record for this book is available from the

Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. Circulating Ideas: Print, Rumor, and Material Samples

Chapter 2. Adventuring Purses: Virginia Company Investors

Chapter 3. Creating Capital: Lotteries and Charitable Collections

Chapter 4. Mobilizing Labor and Welfare Reform

Chapter 5. Domesticating Tobacco and Moral Economy

Conclusion

Notes

Sources

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

In seventeenth-century England, news swirled about ventures across the globe. Stories of English conquest and catastrophe made their way into ports, alehouses, and parliament, and some landed in the laps of people, like Katherine Conway, in their homes. On 3 April 1626, Henry Smyth, a servant, wrote to Katherine about a thirty-year-old chambermaid that he had procured for her, who can write, and is a very good needlewoman … one of few words, and a good demeanor. The maid had twelve years’ experience serving with very curious gentlewomen, including, for some time … Mrs Tracy who went into Virginia. He wrote that Mrs. Tracy would have taken the woman with her out of the good opinion which she had of her, but it seems the maid decided to stay behind.¹ When Katherine, who was a Virginia Company investor, read Henry’s letter, it had been almost twenty years since the establishment of England’s first permanent colony in America, at Jamestown, Virginia. In that time, thousands of English women, men, and children had voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean and planted further colonies in North America and the Caribbean.

Henry’s letter conveyed how, in the intervening years, from the perspective of people at home, English overseas expansion had become commonplace, everyday even. Katherine’s first thought when she read this letter was probably that the unnamed woman had been lucky to escape the fate that befell her former employers. The maid had been employed in the Gloucestershire household of Mary Tracy and her husband William, a local gentleman and one of the founders of the Berkeley Hundred plantation in Virginia. William, Mary, and their children Thomas and Joyce sailed for the colony in September 1620. Within two years, two of family were dead. William died in April 1621 and Joyce was killed, with her new husband Nathaniel Powle, during the violence that swept through the English plantations on the morning of 22 March 1622. A third of colonists, totaling 350 individuals, including many from Berkeley Hundred, were killed by local Algonquians. Against the odds, Mary and Thomas apparently survived and were able to return to England. Despite the attempts of investors in England, the Berkeley plantation was never fully revived.²

Receiving Henry’s letter would have been a sharp reminder for Katherine of the personal and financial risks associated with overseas colonization. She was one of the first women to invest in the Virginia Company, but like the other shareholders, she never received the riches that the company promised. The mention of Mary Tracy in Henry’s letter would have struck another chord with Katherine, because Mary was the sister of Sir Edward Conway, Katherine’s husband. The families had a further kinship connection, because William Tracy’s sister Dorothy, who died in 1613, had been Edward’s first wife.³ This generation of English colonists and investors had suffered loss in more than one sense. Still, people in early modern England were not deterred, and neither was Katherine. She never voyaged to America herself, but woven throughout her life, there were similar threads that bound her, through personal attachments, to England’s burgeoning overseas empire in the Atlantic world.⁴ She was born Katherine Hueriblock to Dutch parents, Giles Hueriblock and Catharyne Hendriex, who settled in London during the reign of Edward VI, after fleeing civil and religious unrest in the Low Countries. Katherine came of age in Elizabethan London, where she witnessed an explosion in the consumption of luxury foreign goods, like silk, spices, and tobacco. This demand stimulated the expansion of English overseas trade and colonization, creating lucrative opportunities for merchant families such as her own. By the time that she died in 1639, aged seventy-four, Katherine had witnessed the development of England from a nation with little global influence, to an increasingly powerful one, with colonies in America and established trading factories in India and Indonesia. During the winter of 1627, not long after she received Henry’s letter, from her home in London she started corresponding about investment in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Ultimately, the Conways decided against the Newfoundland venture, but Edward did become a shareholder in the Guiana Company.⁵ Katherine Conway is an illustrative example, then, of how people in Elizabethan and Stuart England encountered English colonization in the Atlantic world—as a series of uncertain, fitful, even disastrous, starts, which by 1660 had culminated in an empire.

English colonialism permeated many layers of domestic society, and individuals with the means to invest, like Katherine Conway, were not the only people who experienced colonization close to home. If we consider the unnamed maidservant in Henry Smyth’s letter, her story is also indicative of how individuals gained intimate experience of English colonial enterprise. She would have been resident in the Tracy household in the months, maybe years, preceding their departure for Jamestown. She would have witnessed the feverish attempts of their associates to prepare local women and men for colonization in Virginia. This meant not only ensuring that their families were provided for, but also buying the items that they would need for plantation, and providing their food and lodging in the months, weeks, and then finally in the days leading up to their departure. Fitting out the Margaret in the summer of 1619, the Berkley Hundred investors accrued expenses that included 4s. to the boatman that brought the cider, 8s. 6d. for the lodging of the servants and washing their clothes, and 15s. for lodging and diet to Eliz[abeth] Hibbert of Gatscomb.⁶ There are hundreds, if not thousands, of micro-narratives like these that suggest how, in the first half of the seventeenth century, colonial enterprise in England became ubiquitous.⁷

The Virginia Venture draws upon this web of evidence to examine how ordinary English women, men, and children encountered and engaged with colonial activity in myriad ways that contributed to the development of England’s first permanent colony in America. There was significant social depth to the domestic colonial project in the period before 1660, meaning that colonization in Virginia responded to demands from below as well as above, and galvanized support across English society. It required the cooperation and collaboration of a broad range of actors, from wealthy investors like Katherine Conway to the unnamed maid of the Tracy family. The early seventeenth century also marked a defining era of colonial development and its relationship with English society at home. By mid-century, English empire-builders had tried and tested approaches to colonization that were intimately connected to practices in the domestic sphere. Colonization weighed heavily on local concerns and national debates, and the result was that English societal issues, including charity and poor relief, customary rights and moral economy, were all inflected by expansion in America.

Decades of scholarship have presented early English attempts to establish colonies in the Atlantic world as amounting to little more than trial-and-error efforts, which received scant attention from the state or wider population until the decades following the Restoration.⁸ More recently, historians have pushed back against this analysis and demonstrated that colonization in America was an important issue of state that preoccupied Jacobean policymakers and gentlemen.⁹ Yet, the argument that the public, in its broadest sense, lacked interest in American colonization remains untested. My aim is to challenge this claim, by exploring how English citizens across the social spectrum both supported and resisted the practices associated with colonization. Writing this book required venturing much more deeply into the archive in order to reveal that across English society, whether it was through investment, charitable collections, or political debate, by writing letters, transporting vagrant children, or cultivating tobacco, women and men actively engaged with colonization in Virginia. These various encounters and experiences suggest that, contrary to the established view, there was significant social depth to English colonial enterprise as it emerged in the early seventeenth century.

The Virginia Venture provides a vantage point on how the activities of a cross section of English society made colonization in Jamestown possible and, in turn, the impact that colonization had on their lives. This includes an examination of how colonialism intertwined with the domestic sphere more broadly, determining that colonization in Virginia was intimately connected with English society through the shaping of behaviors and practices. Focusing on this significant reciprocal component of English colonialism reconfigures our understanding of the relationship between the Atlantic world and the metropole, showing that colonization in Virginia did more than occupy idle space in the English imperial imaginary. Rather, society at home was infused by the colonial project in various and contrasting ways: it crept into constitutional debates in parliament and colored everyday experiences in English towns and villages.

In 1626, when Katherine Conway received Henry Smyth’s letter, many of the defining moments of early English attempts at colonization in the Atlantic world had already passed. The failed Roanoke venture was fading from memory and there was little hope of finding any of the surviving colonists left behind in 1587, who it was supposed had found refuge with local Carolina Algonquians.¹⁰ In 1604, King James signed the Treaty of London, which brought to an end two decades of conflict with Spain and unencumbered raids on Spanish ships. James’s reign marked a new phase of plantation and exploration in Ireland and the Americas, in places that were, importantly, not already claimed by other European empires.¹¹ There was no clean break with Elizabethan ventures, however, and many of the individuals who had promoted colonization in Virginia during Elizabeth’s reign, including Sir Walter Ralegh and the polymath Richard Hakluyt, supported renewed efforts to colonize in the Jacobean era.¹² The Virginia Company received its charter from the king in 1606 and initially consisted of a council of elite merchants and nobles. While the London company directed colonization in the south of Virginia, the Plymouth company, founded by West Country interests, in Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth, sent its colonists to the north in Sagadahoc, Maine. But the men and boys who set sail for Sagadahoc in 1606 hardly survived their first winter. The colonists succumbed to faction and failed to establish friendly trading relations with the local Indigenous population and were forced to abandon their project after little over a year.¹³

The Jamestown colonists hardly fared better. In the first few years, colonists suffered the impact of disease, starvation, and war with the Powhatans. John Rolfe’s successful experiments with tobacco cultivation and his marriage to Pocahontas in 1614, ending the First Powhatan War, signaled a new phase of peace and prosperity. Between 1619 and 1622 alone, a further 3,570 colonists arrived in Virginia, including greater numbers of women. These advances bolstered the colonial economy and population, and they coincided with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in English North America, at Point Comfort, Virginia, in August 1619. Only one month earlier, the Virginia Assembly, which gave property-owning male colonists a hand in governing themselves, met for the first time.¹⁴ But this hard-won progress—as the Virginia Company and colonists saw it—was almost wiped out by the violence of 1622 and the Second Powhatan War that followed.¹⁵ The English seized upon the attack as a massacre, using it to justify an even more violent policy against the Algonquian people.¹⁶ This event, alongside faction within the company, and the accusation that colonists had built an economy completely dependent upon tobacco, contributed to the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624. Charles I subsequently brought the colony under Crown authority in 1625. For Katherine Conway, and other company shareholders who were observing events from England, it was a disappointing outcome. But the colony was not, in all eyes, a failed experiment. Instead, in Jamestown the English had realized their ambition of permanent colonization in America, and the colony would influence the progression of English colonialism elsewhere, not least by establishing a commitment to plantation slavery.¹⁷ As Katherine Conway reminds us, Virginia was never the only potential option for colonization in the Atlantic world: Ireland, Guiana, and Newfoundland were also within the orbit of her family. But Virginia is a distinct example of how English domestic colonial enterprise developed in this period. The Virginia Company stirred new interest in American colonization, galvanized an unprecedented amount of wider public support, and uniquely influenced and responded to issues in the domestic sphere. Virginia determined the shape of colonial enterprise elsewhere in the Atlantic world, and it is an example for which the surviving archival material is also incredibly rich.

Ensuring the permanence of the colony depended upon the Virginia Company’s success at rallying local support across England. Weaving together these imperial stories reveals a rich tapestry of efforts that stretched across the whole of English society. This is not to deny that there was also resistance to the Virginia Company’s efforts. In 1619, when a woman named Ruthe Pittman, from Wells, Somerset, appeared before the Justices of the Peace, she reported how she had been violently robbed of 6s. won playing at the Virginia Company’s lottery.¹⁸ It was stories such as these that helped to bring about the early termination of the lotteries, which had done so much to bolster the company’s coffers. Johanna Howell, who was a persistent offender, succeeded in avoiding criminal transportation to Virginia when she pleaded the belly in court and was found to be pregnant.¹⁹ Even when facing powerful colonial pressures, then, women could reassert their agency. Local people, in orchards and gardens in southwest England, cultivated crops of American tobacco from seeds their friends had sent home—tobacco that made its way into smokers’ pipes in London. In 1658, thirty-six Commonwealth officers traveled to Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, on horseback to stamp out domestic tobacco growing. The Virginia Company, and later merchants trading to Virginia too, continuously petitioned the government to see it eradicated in favor of colonial produce. Nonetheless, the officers reported their surprise at being met by a street full of protesting men and women, English tobacco growers.²⁰ These vignettes demonstrate just how local the colonial project could be. But they do more than reveal the ways in which ordinary folk, in their local settings, became entangled with the colonial enterprise far overseas: drawing out these stories emphasizes how the domestic priorities and actions of a diverse range of women and men actively shaped colonization.

Consider also Elizabeth Waters, who acted as the executrix of her husband John Waters, a biscuit maker. In 1623, she petitioned the Virginia Company for £13 10s., money it owed to her husband for ship biscuit he had supplied to the company. Although it was not explicitly recorded, it is likely that she worked alongside her husband in this trade and knew the business well. However, the company refused to reimburse her, unless she could provide a witness to the transaction. This led to her appearing in the Court of Chancery to compel Nicholas Dorling to confirm the truth of her claim.²¹ This crumb of evidence speaks to the ways in which women were enmeshed in the domestic economies that supported empire-building, the pressure they put on trading companies, and how their work and agency is regularly concealed in archival records. It is only due to the company’s reticence that Elizabeth’s endeavors came to light. Including metropolitan women like Elizabeth in this book, in multiple and varied roles, forces us to recalibrate what constituted early modern empire-building and who was involved in it. The Virginia Venture illuminates what a broader public of empire-makers looked like, and how their everyday activity—the small tasks they performed—shaped the colonial project.²² Individuals and events that might have been considered peripheral, parochial, or unimportant by previous generations of scholars actually reveal the extent to which everyday life in England strengthened the ties between colonization in America and society at home.

Of course, it is important to recognize that there was a spectrum of participation in domestic colonial enterprise, from what could be considered more passive or fleeting, to active, deeper, engagement. Often, this also means that the archival footprint is heavier for individuals who were more tightly involved with the colonial project, making it difficult to determine the exact motivations of those who contributed at the periphery: parishioners who donated money, or players at the company lotteries, for instance. Their imprint on the archive is lighter, as their interaction with the colonial project was short-lived. We cannot be certain that they understood the handing over of their wages as an act that would facilitate overseas expansion, by outfitting ships, clothing indentured servants, or fortifying Jamestown. But it would also be naive to assume that people made no plausible connection, when sermons in church and a ballad written for the lotteries explicitly promoted those associations. Equally, just because ordinary English women and men donated money in church, this does not mean that they were wholehearted supporters of colonization. From the very beginning, colonization had its detractors.

Still, whether they fully supported it or not, individuals’ decision-making made colonization possible. The Virginia Venture explores this complex spectrum of engagement with English colonial enterprise, focusing on how broad swathes of English citizens experienced and contributed to colonization. In their roles as investors, donors, and migrants, or in positions of authority, like churchwardens, Justices of the Peace, and governors of houses of correction, women and men smoothed the way for practices in England that enabled overseas colonization to advance. It makes sense to examine this much more expansive experience of colonization, as most ordinary people in England would have encountered it and understood its implications. This means writing about individuals and events even when the evidence is more limited, instead working to stretch archival fragments in the words of scholar Marisa Fuentes.²³

The following chapters explore key aspects of colonial enterprise as it emerged in English society. While each chapter focuses on a different theme, this varied approach is, nonetheless, purposeful. It allows us to get at the more discreet, and harder-to-reach, corners of English society in this period, towards an understanding of how ordinary citizens as well as the Crown and company responded to colonization. The chapters also follow an important stage of the early colonial project, from generating interest and raising investment, to mobilizing a labor force and producing commodities—in this case, tobacco. Chapter 1 is a study of how information about English colonization in America circulated through various forms, from print and manuscript, to material samples and eyewitness testimony, raising awareness as well as shattering expectations. Focusing on Virginia Company investors, Chapter 2 elucidates the ways that elite women and men were drawn into investing, through the persuasion of friends and familial networks, and the kinds of economic and social behaviors that company investment prompted. Chapter 3 further nuances our understanding of how capital investment in colonial enterprise was mobilized, examining the Virginia Company lotteries and church and charitable collections. Especially for those that could not afford shares in the company, investing in this way was accessible and proved to be widespread, ensuring that ordinary women and men were also implicated in the financing of empire. Chapter 4 explores how debates on poverty and paternalism intersected, and were associated, with criminal transportation, efforts to persuade poor families to migrate, and the indenture of poor children. This chapter shows that the practices associated with colonial transportation also forced new debates on domestic welfare reform. Finally, the development of the tobacco industry in England is the focus of Chapter 5. Tobacco was crucial for the economic sustainability of the Virginia Company and colony, yet the domestication of tobacco reveals how the entanglement of domestic and colonial interests sparked contestations over customary rights and political and moral economy throughout the seventeenth century.

The chapters move forward chronologically, and the analytical focus of the chapters also shifts. Whereas the first chapters explore the perspective of elite women and men who engaged with colonization, as promoters and financial investors, later chapters examine how actors from across the social spectrum responded to colonization, through donating money and playing at lotteries, as well as through voluntary and forced migration, trade, and consumption. The final two chapters, for example, focus on how the laboring poor, vagrants, and pauper children reacted to the practices of, and debates on, transatlantic migration and trade. This approach illustrates how engagement with colonial enterprise cut across layers of society in England, mobilizing a much broader social base of participants who underpinned the first permanent English colony in America.

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In 1631, Katherine Conway was widowed, and seems to have lived out the rest of her life in Acton, Middlesex, where she was buried in 1639. Shortly after her husband’s demise, she bought new items for her home, furnishing it with Turkey work chairs, and, for herself, new clothes including a camlet gown, velvet cloak, and beaver hat, made with fur from America. She had in her employ a maid named Mary, who could have been the woman recommended by Henry Smyth five years before.²⁴ In these final years, she lived comfortably, helped in no small part by an annuity of £200 from plantations in Ireland she inherited from her husband.²⁵ Her wealth and the very fabric of her surroundings, from the clothing she wore to the chairs she sat on, were directly derived from England’s overseas colonial and commercial ventures. And she was, herself, directly involved in driving trade and colonization, in Virginia and elsewhere. This book explores how individuals in England, like Katherine, Elizabeth Waters, and the tobacco planters who rioted in Cheltenham, were made actors in seventeenth-century empire-building and how they responded to the significant changes it wrought upon the fabric of English society itself.

CHAPTER 1

Circulating Ideas

Print, Rumor, and Material Samples

In March 1582, Thomas Aldworth, the mayor of Bristol, and the city’s leading merchants gathered together to discuss the possibilities of colonization in Virginia. In 1578 Elizabeth I granted Sir Humphrey Gilbert letters patent to establish a colony in North America, but now he needed the practical support and investment of the country’s nobility and merchants. The geographer Richard Hakluyt published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America in 1582, a practical and comprehensive guide to colonization in North America, to further Gilbert’s project. From the Bristol mayor himself and also Sir George Peckham, a Catholic gentleman, word of Divers Voyages reached Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s principal secretary. Walsingham described in a letter to Hakluyt how he had heard that he had endeavoured, or given much lights for the discovery of the western parts yet unknown. Walsingham, together with Aldworth, then drew up a plan for Hakluyt to use his printed publication to persuade the city of Bristol to invest.¹ So it was that an assembly of the merchants … gathered, probably in the city’s common hall, on 27 March 1582. Letters privately sent by Walsingham to Aldworth were read in public, but additionally, some good light [was] given by Mr Hakluyt unto them that were ignorant of this country and enterprise. Hakluyt’s speech and Walsingham’s letters were so persuasive that the motion grew generally so well liked that there was … set down by men’s own hands … the sum of 2000 marks or upwards.² According to Peter Mancall, Hakluyt offered a new kind of expertise: the knowledge of someone who knew the original manuscripts, had pored over the various editions of travel accounts, and whose own authority manifested itself in print. While Hakluyt’s expertise was demonstrated by his mastery of manuscript sources, he also relied upon the tales of travelers. An early biographer noted that he kept "constant intelligence with the most noted Seamen at Wapping near London."³ Hakluyt’s successful endeavors in 1582 meant that Gilbert had sufficient investment to set sail for America in 1583, but he died at sea on his return from Newfoundland, never having achieved his purpose of planting a colony. Under the aegis of his half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh, the venture continued, and in 1584 the first English colonists arrived at Roanoke, present-day North Carolina, marking a decisive shift in English colonial engagement with America.

During the first years of English colonization in the Atlantic world, when ships anchored home after returning from America, they spilled forth news and goods that were highly valued by observers in England. The episode in the Bristol common hall relays one of the ways that ideas about America were conveyed to audiences and how they were subsequently persuaded to invest in colonization. It is through such glimpses and fragmentary reporting that we can glean how a broader public interpreted the news, images, and ideas that came out of America. Previously, scholars including Catherine Armstrong have argued that a paucity of evidence means it is difficult to know how people responded to news from America.⁴ But through a close reading of letters, manuscript, and print sources it is possible to challenge this perception. Instead, a picture builds of how ordinary citizens as well as elites