The American Colonies and the British Empire, 1607-1783, Part I Vol 1

Steven Sarson, Jack P Greene, Steven Sarson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138757677
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000161885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This first part of an eight-volume reset edition, traces the evolution of imperial and colonial ideologies during the British colonization of America. It covers the period from the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1607 to 1764.

BENSON, A SERMON PREACHED AT PAULES CROSSE

George Benson, A Sermon Preached at Paules Cross the Seaventh of May, M. DC. IX. (London: Richard Moore, 1609).

Neither religion in general nor Protestant Christianity in particular was a primary imperative behind early English imperialism. Yet religion was inseparable from all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas and actions, and clergymen, including Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, were among England’s earliest imperialists. Virginia was notoriously the least Godly and most worldly of early English colonizing ventures, but even the Virginia Company turned to clerics in times of trouble.¹

The original charter and ‘Instructions for government’ of 1606 said little about establishing a church in Virginia or about Christianizing Native Americans, and there was only one clergyman, Robert Hunt, among the first colonists who founded Jamestown in 1607. When the first resupply ship arrived in January 1608, all but 38 had succumbed to disease, malnutrition and maladministration, and when news of this catastrophe reached England, the Virginia Council used religion to rejuvenate Jamestown’s purpose and image. A new charter of 23 May 1609, which privatized the Company, necessitating new investment, contained greater emphasis on religious matters than did the first charter, as did the Company’s instructions to new governor Thomas Gates. Furthermore, George Abbott, Bishop of London and a Virginia grantee, was to be overseer of the Church in Virginia. To raise subscriptions, the Council took pains to employ priestly propaganda.

In late 1608 and early 1609, eight eminent churchmen spoke for the Virginia mission. Robert Johnson, chaplain to the Bishop of Lincoln and son-in-law to Virginia Company treasurer Sir Thomas Smith, based his Nova Britannia on conversations, but the other seven speeches were sermons. Richard Crakanthorpe, chaplain to the Bishop of London, delivered A Sermon Solemnizing of the Happie Inauguration of our most Gracious and Religious Soveraigne King James on 24 March 1609. Robert Tynley, Archbishop of Ely, published Two Learned Sermons in 1609, the latter of which, at St Mary’s Spittle on 17 April 1609, briefly addressed Virginia. William Symonds of St Saviour’s, Southwark (Virginia, a Sermon Preached at White-Chappel, in the Presence of many, Honourable and Worshipfull, the Adventurers and Planters for Virginia. 25 April. 1609) and Robert Gray, rector of St Bennet Sherehog in Cheapward, (A Good Speed to Virginia) did so more lengthily. George Benson preached his sermon, printed here, on 7 May 1609. Daniel Price, chaplain to Prince Charles, spoke of Saul’s Prohibition Staide … with a Reproofe of those that Traduce the Honourable Plantation of Virginia on 25 May. Price refers to another pro-Virginia sermon by Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester and future Bishop of York, though no text survives.

Crakanthorpe, Benson and Price delivered their sermons at Paul’s Cross. Weekly sermons there were major public events attended by audiences up to 6,000 strong and including the Lord Mayor, aldermen and Bishop of London.² These sermons argued for the superiority of English over Spanish and Amerindian land claims, and for the Christian conversion of pagan natives, yet claims that they represented a ‘great crusade’ and called for a ‘medieval pilgrimage’ are probably overstated. Indeed, David Beers Quinn declined to publish the sermons in his five-volume collection of documents on America to 1612, calling them ‘long-winded and in content only of intermittent interest’. Other historians have been equally dismissive. Yet Andrew Fitzmaurice makes a powerful case that the sermons reflected the Virginia founders’ broader humanistic, commonwealth ideology. George Benson’s sermon certainly seems best understood that way.³

Benson (c. 1570–1647) was a 1589 graduate and later Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, and University Proctor from 1601. From 1604 he was vicar of Landridge, and from 1607 of Rock, Worcestershire. He became a Doctor of Divinity the same year, while also Canon Residentiary at Hereford Cathedral.⁴ His 1609 Paul’s Cross sermon only mentions Virginia once, noting that it was ‘most pregnant’ for the spreading of the Gospel (below, p. 70). Elsewhere, though, there are numerous biblical and historical references to the territorial rights of the Godly over previous heretic and pagan occupants. Given his habitually allegorical style, it seems likely, for example, that he was referring to English imperialism when he wrote of the ‘great difference betwixt a carnal man, and those that desire (through Iesus Christ) to be more then Conquerours’ (below, p. 52). Moreover, the repeated theme of reclaiming civil and political life from every kind of heresy and sin in preparation for the imminent second coming of Christ (which he calculated would occur ‘betweene the yeares 1688, and 1700’, below, p. 48) places colonization in the context of a broader millennial cosmology as well as humanist ideology.

Notes

1. D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 64; L. B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558–1625 (New York: Octagon Books, 1965, pp. 85–104; J. Parker, ‘Religion and the Virginia Colony, 1609–1610’, in K. R. Andrews, N.P. canny and P. E. H. Hair The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 245–70; A. Fitzmaurice, ‘“Every Man, that Prints, Adventures”: The Rhetoric of the Virginia Company Sermons’s in L.A. Ferrell and P. E. McCullough The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 24–42.

2. M. Maclure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958).

3. P. Miller, ‘The Religious Impulse in the Founding of Virginia: Religion and Society in the Early Literature’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 5 (1948), pp. 492–522; Parker, ‘Religion and the Virginia Colony’, p. 270; Quinn (ed.), New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols (London: Macmillan, 1979), vol. 5, 233; K.R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire,1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 320; N. Canny, ‘England’s New World and the Old, 1480s–1630s’ in N. Canny (ed.), The Origins of Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire, 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 148–69, on 164.

4. A. Wood, in P. Bliss (ed.), Athenae Oxonienses … to which are added the Fasti, 4 vols (Oxford: J. Parker, 1813–20), vol. 1, pp. 248, 290, 322; A. G. Matthews (ed.), Walker Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 383.

A

SERMON

PREACHED AT

PAVLES CROSSE THE SEAVENTH OF MAY,

M. DC. IX.

By GEORGE BENSON,

Doctor of Diuninitie, sometimes fellowe of
Queenes Colledge in OXFORD.

Imprinted at London by H. L. for Richard Moore, and are to be
sold at his shop in S. Dunstans Church-yard. 1609. /

TO THE CHRISTIAN READER.

Good Reader, though we live in an age which is more mercilesse to inke and paper, then the ages of our forefathers have bin; and therefore it might seem a a foolish pitty in me to spare that which will be spent: yet have I ever dedicated my poore labours to the care only, that therby (if God would) they might bee convaied to the heart: not vnto the eye with a desire to have them exposed to the censure of the world. Notwithstanding mine own private iudgement & resolution, mistake me not, I can very well digest the publishing of other mens labours. b For as Simonides seeing a man silent at a feast, sayd vnto him; If thou beest a wise man, then art a foole for concealing thy wisdome: if a foole, then thou art wise for not reuealing thy folly: So, I hold it wisdom in them which are enriched with extraordinary gifts, to impart their graces vnto the world: But as for those to whom knowledge hath either not dawned, or not so plentifully shined as upon their fellows, I aduise them as c Vlyssles did Andromache (when her son Astyanax was in danger of the enemy)³ Lateat, hæcvna falus! let them silence their labours, if they would not be traduced, and censured by those that love them not, I justly ranke my selfe amongst the later sort, and would have followed the counsell that i give to others, but that I am weyed against my owne mind by such reasons as I hope wil passe for weighty in the iudgements of others as wel as of my selfe. When by the commandement of the right reverend Father in God, the Lord Bishop of London (by whom I was and ever will gladly be commanded) I was called vnto this service and deliuered this sermon in that honourable presence where it was bestowed, I found that it was swoln farre too bigge for the time allotted to that exercises which might by me have been more fitly proportioned to the time, if I had endeuoured (as heretofore I have done)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Introduction
• Chronology
• Introduction, 1607–1763
• References and Further Reading
• George Benson, A Sermon Preached at Paules Cross (1609)
• A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia (1610)
• [John White], The Planters Plea. Or The Grounds of Plantations Examined, and usuall Objections Answered (1630)
• Sir Philip Meadows, ‘Observations concerning the Dominion and Soveraignty of the Seas’ (1673)
• William Petty, ‘Trade: Dominion of the Seas’ (c. 1674)
• John Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce, their Original and Progress (1674)
• Editorial Notes