The Transatlantic Genealogy of American Anglo-Saxonism

Michael Modarelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367585563
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429785603
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This book traces the myth of Anglo-Saxonism as it crosses from Britain to the New World as both a cultural construct and ideological nation-building tool. Through extensive investigations of both early American and English cultural attitudes toward Anglo-Saxonism and similar texts, the book advances the claim that the ways in which Anglo-Saxon authors envisioned history as unfolding becomes an important ideological model for later New World conceptions of historical and national identity. From this beginning, the book follows the influence of this adopted American Anglo-Saxonism in early American literature and the socio-cultural implications that follow upon this influence.

1 The Usable Past

Anglo-Saxonism, British Antiquities, and New World Shores

On Monday night, September 9, 1583, in a gale somewhere off the southwestern coast of Cape Breton Island, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was struggling for his life aboard the Squirrel, one of the three ships bound for the New World.¹ As the storm thrashed the Squirrel and its sister ship, the Delight, Gilbert could only watch the battering waves, praying his ship might find its way back to England, bereft of riches, and bark useless orders to seamen over the thundering storm. Not long before, Gilbert and his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh, along with Richard Hakluyt, then-famed author of Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582), and Sir George Peckham had been settled in the comforts of the mysterious Dr. John Dee’s Mortlake house discussing plans and plotting for a second voyage to the New World. Gilbert was a well-connected man in Elizabeth’s court; he had access to a huge body of correspondence and accounts of travels in the Americas, mostly accumulated by Hakluyt, and even had the support of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, for a settlement of the lands. The Queen had given Gilbert a term patent of six years in 1578. Since the first failed attempt, however, he had become financially strapped. In order to bolster finances for another passage, Gilbert had had to sell half his lands north of the fiftieth parallel, granted to him by the Queen, to the necromancer Dee. Not only was Gilbert broke, he was running out of backers and time on his patent. Luckily, the change in political atmosphere with the advent of the Throckmorton affair offered Gilbert a chance to get more deeply involved in the current political intricacies, which could help his cause.² Like Gilbert, the young Sir Philip Sidney had possessed a patent of his own, worth a considerable amount of money; however, as he was poor and vying for the hand of Sir Francis Walsingham’s daughter (who favored the match but believed Sidney’s poverty was an insurmountable obstacle), Sidney sold his rights to Peckham, who had desired a chance to explore the New World region for years. After the purchase, Peckham, in turn, offered Gilbert a way to receive funding by helping rid their country of Protestant opposition. Originated by Walsingham, the Catholic “transport” scheme would offer some 2,000,000 acres to Peckham’s Catholics, provide Gilbert with funding, help Elizabeth with the exportation of Protestant opposition, and give the Catholics a new life in the New World (Williams, 158–9). Gilbert would be the Lord Proprietor of this new colony, and he and Peckham together with one Sir Thomas Gerard would serve as well as a primitive triumvirate or council.

On that stormy September night in 1583, Gilbert was pulling out of Newfoundland, where, if we can believe the detailed narrative set forth by Richard Hakluyt the younger, he had defiantly announced claim to all territories from thence forward (meaning, of course, the New World too, once he arrived) as property of the Crown of England for purposes, he claimed, of advancing the Christian religion. Gilbert’s commission—indeed, the very reason for his voyage—was to “inhabit and possesse at his choice all remote and heathen lands not in the actuall possession of any Christian prince,” or anyone else, for that matter (Hakluyt 1600, 3:145–6).³ Believing Newfoundland to be the gateway to a utopian world, Gilbert landed there to claim it. He had earlier summoned the captains of all remaining ships, in a grand ceremonial fashion, and with great pomp and flash, granted them, their families, and their heirs possession of the very soil upon which they stood. After the lands were consecrated, Gilbert proclaimed three laws, arguably the first legal record of the British New World: (1) The Church of England had supreme religious power in this new place; (2) England, under the aegis of the Queen, possessed all land for Britain from thence forward because it had all rights; and (3) No man thenceforth could deny the first two laws, lest he suffer severe punishment. With that pomp and flair over with, Gilbert headed out to sea on that September evening to the storm-tossed, pitching ocean. He had just claimed for the British Isles under Elizabeth all territories west of Britain, all the way to Drake’s claimed San Francisco Bay area—literally, half of the world—and he believed he had secured British rights to the New World indefinitely. However, after that night, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was never seen or heard from again.

The myth of Gilbert would, however, live on in the Tudor New World propaganda literature, along with that of Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, a supposed Welsh royal who had, according to an originary Celtic myth that was fast growing in popularity in Elizabethan England, originally discovered America before either Vespucci or Columbus. Peckham would later author a small pamphlet, A true report of the late discoveries and possession, taken in the right of the Crown of England of the Newfound Lands: by that valiant and worthy gentleman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert knight, which he dedicated to Walsingham (as well as Frobisher and others) and published in 1583 that set out to “prove Queen Elizabeth’s lawful title to the New Worlde, based on not onlie upon Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s discoveries, but also those of Madoc” (Hakluyt 1599–1600, 8:94). Peckham’s work would serve as the first coupling of Gilbert, Madoc, and the New World and also as the source material for David Powel’s Historie of Cambria (1584) and, most famously, Richard Hakluyt’s widely-read The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), a compendium of this material that reached staggering heights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Amidst all of this, Gilbert stood at the fore of Elizabethan conquest and expansion: His declarations possessing all land for Britain from thence forward echoed across the seas. Unwittingly and seemingly overnight, he had become the fons et origo for the Tudor expansionist movement, a movement linking Gilbert to Madoc, Britain to the New World, and the mythic idea of migration to the contemporary Elizabethan day. Britain as an island had been fought over and passed through by civilizations for hundreds of years before the then-current “English” had been able to flourish: The English would look to its struggles and racial history in its development of identity in the New World British colonies. Even more, Britain would use its gossamer claims, first put forward by Gilbert, as ideological support for the cause and justification of its rights to the New World.

The Historical Vision of Anglo-Saxonism: From Gildas to Bede and Beyond

The Anglo-Saxon impulse from which early English migrants to America drew originated, of course, in the primary Saxon race. Because of its central role in migration, myth-making, and nationalism within British culture, for America, the British Isles were a powerful archetype. The idea of nation in a literate culture results, then, in part from the written records. Historians such as Gildas and Bede and, later, Geoffrey of Monmouth provide examples of what Robert Hanning calls the “historical imagination,” and what I call in this particular case “Anglo-Saxonism.” Like Anderson’s imagined community, historical imagination served as one way to further the migration myth of a people. Hanning describes it like this: “The faculty which perceives the reality of the past; the response, evoked by the record (accurate or inaccurate) of history, which identifies that record within the human condition, seen as a timeless and continuing phenomenon” (Hanning 1966, 2–3). Bede’s historical vision consisted of saints—his three “heroes” are Gregory, Germanus, and Augustine—who remain closely bound by their penchant for spreading the gospel; for Bede, the duty of the Christian hero is to fight, pray, and educate his society. Whereas Gildas equated the Britons with the new Israelites, Bede equates the Britons with the old Israelites. In a sense, then, the flux, or plasticity, of historical imagination minimizes the temporality between past and present, and highlights their proximity and continuity by creating a vision of reality, intellectual, spiritual, and sensual, which is equally relevant to both then and now. This vision varies as writing and history progress. In his creation, the historian joins knowledge and judgment to illuminate the past (or, as Hanning argues, to distort it) and thus fires the imagination of a nation.

As is evident from the examples of Gildas and Bede, however, during these early periods, “nation” remained a slippery term; fundamentals of “nationhood” as we know it today first became evident in the fifteenth century, when the idea of nobility as a birthright was challenged, questioned, and began to be reversed (Greenfeld 1993, 47). Following the struggles of the early Britons, Celts, and Saxons, and other invaders on the land, a sense of English nation—and with it, a new ideological understanding of race, culture, politics, laws, and geographical power within that sense—began to emerge. This drive toward nationhood became increasingly more evident as ancient texts were unearthed and examined. As such,

Anglo-Saxonism [was] born in the 16th century in response to a need to demonstrate an historical continuity for the national church, and flourished in the 17th in debates over royal supremacies, finally triumphed and became the dominant myth that fired the national imagination.

(MacDougall 1982, 26)

In the 1530s, when Henry VIII used the Saxon church to justify his break with Rome, he claimed he was returning to the pure practices of the church pre-Conquest, cleansing it of Roman Catholic corruption. Thus, the religious myth of the pure Saxon church would open the doors for important political arguments later in the following centuries (Barczewski 2000, 126–8). Thus did history begin to merge with Saxon ideology.

Only by looking closely at these early nationalist movements—through the ecclesiastical and secular, the myths and histories, and the conflation of both—can the level of British, or English, influence on America’s myth of Anglo-Saxonism be properly understood. There are two reasons for this. First, much of the history of the British Isles was embroiled in conquests and migrations, continuous evolutions that led directly to the forming of a British national consciousness that would eventually disseminate in the British colonies. The model, or progeny, of this history, warts and all, was Britain’s contribution to colonial America’s nation-building. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the written histories, first in religious documents but later in all forms, the past used by the shapers of the then present time, were instrumental in the formation of what I call “American Anglo-Saxonism.” Colonial Americans looked back, as Balibar argues, to an Anglo-Saxon model for inspiration to the future. Thus, the actions of America’s now native ancestors are res gestae, the actions of America’s past. In order to flesh out America’s brand of Anglo-Saxonism in all of its scope—evident in American political, imaginative, and historical writings—we must carefully investigate the earlier English history and writers as well as later historical and antiquarian trends.

But what exactly was the “Anglo-Saxon” state? Up to the time of the Norman Conquest, there was no “England”; the country was simply a territory in South Britain, comprised of a number of competing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Brittones, or native inhabitants. The “Anglo-Saxons,” as a “race,” settled in Britain in the fifth-century and began collectively calling themselves “Englisc.” This group, composed of primarily Angles and Saxons, coalesced into a few kingdoms, and, before the seventh century was over, had accepted Christianity as their religion. Still, no formal state existed, and no Anglo-Saxon king claimed to be the supreme “King of England.” In the ninth century, a series of Viking attacks collapsed the emerging state, and Scandinavian presence resisted against these settlements. Only the English of Wessex remained. Beginning with Alfred (c. 849–99), England unified, and rulers proclaimed kingship over the entire region seeking to reconquer lands stolen by the Danes. The apex came with Athelstan (c. 894–939), grandson of Alfred and son of Edward the Elder. Crowned in 925—the first English king to have that honor—Athelstan, designated himself rex totius Britanniae (King of all the Britons), put the seal on the nation, and named the geographical region of Britain “England” in honor of the victors. A century later, William of Normandy decisively integrated the English as a nation-state (Kumar 2003, 40–3).

“Anglo-Saxon” was most likely coined by King Alfred in the ninth century to distinguish members of the Angle and Saxon tribes from other Germanic islanders in Britain. Earlier, the British Bishop Gildas’De Excidio Britanniae recounted this Anglo-Saxon invasion, which drove the Britons from their land.⁴ According to Gildas, God decreed the “Saxon” revolt in direct retribution for the sins of the Britons—thus, in its first incarnation, the term “Saxon” served as heathen foil to the inconstant Briton. The term gained religious currency in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731). Ecclesiastic in nature, Bede’s Saxons rose and fell in relation to Christianity, eventually converted by Pope Gregory the Great. Bede famously coalesced the English groups, such as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Picts, into one gens Anglorum, a literary portrait of the new Israel. By the time of Alfred, the “Anglo-Saxons” became national protagonists, battling against the Vikings, saving the homeland, and representing freedom and liberty. Alfred established culture in England. Through his laws and educational system, Alfred surpassed Bede’s gens Anglorum—he sought to create a single and entirely new gens, not a composite, called the Angelcynn. Importantly, however, “the Alfredian ‘nation’ was … defined in terms of its difference from the other (here, clearly understood to be both the Christian Welsh and, more significantly, the pagan Dane)” (Foot, 56). In the years following the Norman invasion of 1066, “Anglo-Saxon” began to represent an institution, an idea of unified national autonomy clearly separated from the “other”—the myth spoke of a regional golden-age where Anglo-Saxon England had enjoyed freedoms and liberties unknown since the unfortunate invasion. Thus, the infamous “Norman Yoke” theory emerged, claiming a mythic continuity of law from the free and democratic community that existed prior the Conquest. This is a battle the English have waged ever since.

The prehistory of the late eighteenth-century terms Teutonic, Goth, and Anglo-Saxonism emerged in England within the religious, legal, and political period of the Reformation and Revolution. Seventeenth-century Protestant dissidents recast the debate over property and rights in Anglo-Saxon roots as evidence in their debates with throne and papacy. In this revolutionary period, Anglo-Saxon texts unearthed mostly from old monasteries quickly became powerful political tools. Battling against the Stuart kings, Edward Coke and other common lawyers borrowed freely from the libraries of Sir Robert Cotton and others, often using transcriptions of ancient texts in support of the Protestant cause. William Lambarde’s Archaionomia was one such compilation. In the Archaionomia, a compendium consisting of all the Anglo-Saxon laws, Lambarde had been able to collate and finally publish this material in 1568; it was “one of the key books of the common law interpretation” (Pocock 1957, 43). Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence was another source of historical authority for dissenters. Importantly, Verstegan firmly connected Anglo-Saxons and English by recounting the Christian conversion (borrowing, as he frequently did, from Bede), where in 800 AD, King Egbert of the West Saxons decreed “Saxon” would be replaced with “English” and the land thenceforth would be called “England.” Verstegan unabashedly promotes the English as direct descendants of the Anglo-Saxons, linking the two cultures and literally fashioning an Anglo-Saxon history. To a marked extent, English antiquarians promoted the historical link to Alfred’s England, and pitted the freedom-loving democratic Saxon heritage (of Teutonic, Germanic, or Gothic descent) against the aristocratic French-Norman claims to sovereignty.

National histories are active documents. To know history is to know ourselves as humans (in whatever national setting), our history, and our possibilities; historical knowledge is simply the self-consciousness of a people who knows their own capacity for the creation of that history (Collingwood 1946, 7). For early English settlers in North America, Britain, with all of its history, written, recorded, and then retrieved by English antiquarians, provides the first and, arguably, most important key. Along with certain British, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon historical and mythical notions that figure into an Anglo-Saxon ideology, in the following pages, I will focus on the authors that I believe most influenced the rise and progression of Anglo-Saxonism: namely, Tacitus, Gildas, Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Sir Thomas Malory. As most of these authors’ works were freely available in the British colonies, almost from initial migration, the nation-building ideologies evident therein remain important for our understanding of later colonial American appropriation and perversion of the Anglo-Saxon myth for their own colonizing ends.

Importantly, the Anglo-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Critical Conceptions of Anglo-Saxonism: Nationhood, Culture, and the History of an Idea
• 1 The Usable Past: Anglo-Saxonism, British Antiquities, and New World Shores
• 2 The Emergence of “American” Anglo-Saxonism: The Curious Case of Captain John Smith and the Virginia Company of London
• 3 Christianography in New England: The Anglo-Saxonism of Bradford, Winthrop, and Mather
• 4 New Territories and Westward Movement: American Anglo-Saxonism in the Thought of Penn and Jefferson
• Epilogue: Some Versions of American Anglo-Saxonism in the Nineteenth Century
• Index