Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy

Londoners and Provincial Reform in Early Modern England

J. Ward

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780312293864
• eBook ISBN: 9781137065513
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Empowered by new wealth and by their faith, early modern Londoners began to use philanthropy to assert their cultural authority in distant parts of the nation. Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy analyzes how disputes between London and provincial authorities over such benefactions demonstrated the often tense relations between center and periphery.

C H A P T E R 1

INTRODUCTION: CULTURE, FAITH, AND PHILANTHROPY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

In his will of 1614, William Jones, a successful Hamburg merchant, granted a considerable parcel of his estate to the Haberdashers’ Company of London with instructions that it establish endowments to maintain a school, an almshouse, and a preaching lectureship in his native Monmouth, a modest town 25 miles west of Gloucester. Forty years later, Henry Colbron, a prosperous London scrivener, entrusted to the London Drapers’ Company an endowment that he had created to support schools, which the company’s officers subsequently chose to locate in the parish of Kirkham, Lancashire, where Colbron had spent his childhood. The gifts of Jones and Colbron offer examples of the custom by which wealthy Londoners set aside portions of their estates for charitable purposes, a practice that, as Keith Thomas has shown, sparked commemorative activity that, in turn, encouraged further philanthropy.¹

Less customary, however, were the controversies that later swirled around the provincial benefactions of Jones and Colbron. Rather than accepting with gratitude the generosity of their native sons, local leaders in Monmouth and Kirkham came to resist what they considered to have been meddling by metropolitan interests in their local affairs, in each case pursuing litigation in the Court of Chancery during the 1670s to reduce the influence of the Londoners. These legal challenges eventually failed, but not before they revealed significant fissures in the provincial communities, divisions that were exacerbated by the ability of some to bring London-based resources to bear on long-standing local disputes. The depositions gathered during the litigation suggest that Jones and Colbron chose to entrust their benefactions to the care of London livery companies precisely because they could rely on the Londoners to promote Protestant godliness in the face of resistance from provincial elites who had remained stubbornly supportive of traditional Catholic practices.²

For this reason, the philanthropic activities of Jones and Colbron are best understood as parts of a broader contest over the institutions of cultural power in early modern England. By establishing schools, almshouses, and preaching lectureships in provincial communities, and also by leaving them in the care of London-based administrators, benefactors such as Jones and Colbron created an alternative source of cultural authority to that of the local landed elite. Londoners who held only modest rank in the traditional social hierarchy wielded their metropolitan-based wealth as a sword against the influence of the leaders in provincial, relatively Catholic, communities. As a result, they converted their commercial success into cultural power by establishing what amounted to metropolitan-based, godly missions to communities across the nation.

* * *

Contemporary observers of politics in seventeenth-century England noted that land, for centuries the foundation of economic and political power, had changed hands at a quickening pace during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This activity in the land market had telling consequences for national politics. Writing in the middle of James I’s reign, Sir Walter Raleigh put before his peers the proposition that as wealth had moved away from the aristocracy and toward the commons, so the political center of gravity in the realm would, necessarily, move in the same direction. Two generations later, after Civil War and the execution of King James’s successor had validated Raleigh’s hypothesis, James Harrington noted that societies were stratified by property ownership, and that political systems were built according to the principle of the Balance of Property, with absolute monarchy depending on royal control of land, a mixed constitution reflecting the dominance of the aristocracy, and a commonwealth resting on a broad distribution of land in society. In this way, as new money—and therefore new people—came into the land market, the social foundations of government shifted, which led inevitably to political crisis. Social historians spent much of the twentieth century testing the theories of Raleigh and Harrington. This line of research fueled the “storm over the gentry” debate about the political influence of “enterprising country gentlemen” and “agricultural capitalists,” culminating in Lawrence Stone’s famous assertion that “the real watershed between medieval and modern England” took place in the period from 1580 to 1620, a time when, among other things, the development of foreign trade could make “a London alderman the financial equal of a baron.”³

The gentry debate emphasized the connections between the two sets of major events in early modern England—the religious reformations of the sixteenth century and the Civil Wars and revolutions of the seventeenth—but in the end it failed to produce a lasting consensus among scholars. Starting in the 1970s, political historians challenged those who emphasized the long-term social and economic roots of revolution.⁴ Such concerns did not prevent other scholars from putting forth a variety of contenders to replace the gentry as the group whose impatience with the status quo contributed to the revolutionary dynamic of the seventeenth century, such as Christopher Hill’s “industrious sort,” Robert Brenner’s “New Merchants,” and, more recently, John Adamson’s “Petitioner Earls.”⁵

Without claiming to have identified the root cause of the English Revolution, the current study focuses on the rise to sudden wealth of a small number of godly Londoners such as William Jones and Henry Colbron who had the ambition to reshape their native, provincial communities in their own images by fomenting cultural revolution, if only of a rather local sort.⁶ Their lack of standing in the national authority structure of church or state did not inhibit these newly enriched commoners from endowing institutions that undermined the entrenched influence of the Catholic elite who dominated life in many provincial communities well into the seventeenth century. In addition to wealth and a godly disposition, these benefactors also shared a confidence in both themselves and the Londoners to whom they entrusted their estates, a confidence based on their experience of the profound differences between life in the metropolis and life in their native communities.

In this way, such philanthropists sought to tie provincial communities more closely to London. Research into the metropolitan relationship with the rest of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has emphasized the movement of people, commodities, and manufactured goods through the expanding internal network of roads, rivers, and coastline. London’s influence on the provinces grew steadily during this period, partly because of the increasing centralization of state power, and partly because of metropolitan dominance of the national trade network.⁷ Each year, thousands of adolescent men and women found their way to London as apprentices and maid servants. Many of those who survived the metropolitan disease regime were able to establish a place in London’s household-based economy, but an undetermined number of others returned home having been exposed to metropolitan ideas and tastes. Those who remained in London could maintain contact with their native communities through written and face-to-face communication with kinsmen and neighbors and, as the seventeenth century progressed, traditions such as county feasts enabled immigrant Londoners to reaffirm their connections with the provinces.⁸ Historians have long recognized that thousands of Londoners with provincial roots left posthumous gifts to benefit their native communities as well as London during the late medieval and early modern periods. Collectively, these benefactions amounted to the transfer of millions of pounds of wealth from the metropolis to the provinces.⁹ Given the role that national and international trade came to play in the economy of London generally and in the creation of moveable wealth in particular, these charities were a means for resources gathered throughout the Atlantic World to be circulated through London to other parts of the realm.¹⁰

The present study seeks to increase the understanding of this process by connecting some of the more general developments related to philanthropy in early modern London to the particular concerns of individuals such as William Jones and Henry Colbron. Charities intended to benefit provincial communities but entrusted to the care of Londoners created new opportunities for ongoing, long-distance relationships between the metropolis and provincial communities, though these were relationships in which the Londoners, rather than the provincial elite, were clearly the dominant party. The focus here will be on the benefactions’ longer-term effects as much as—or perhaps even more than—on the initial benefactions themselves.¹¹ The attempt to impose a godly worldview upon provincial communities through the administration of benefactions was an aggressive expression of cultural power. Such aggression sparked resistance that was consistent with Stephen Greenblatt’s more general observation on how cultural mobility may promote “an anxious, defensive, and on occasion violent policing” of boundaries.¹² Although local leaders may have wished to shelter their communities from broader commercial, religious, and political influences, others who had roots in their communities but who became culturally mobile—such as Jones and Colbron—were encouraged by these broader influences to undermine long-standing cultural barriers between London and provincial England.

* * *

The interaction of business, faith, and politics in early modern England has long attracted the attention of scholars interested in the advent of modern capitalism, a process that gained momentum in seventeenth-century England, although it certainly had global causes and consequences as well. In particular, the theories of Max Weber suggested that Calvinism, especially as it came to be practiced in the Anglocentric world, fostered the accumulation of capital by encouraging the diligent pursuit of labor in one’s calling, a restrained style of life, and anxiety about the eternal fate of the soul, with the hope being that economic success might offer some assurance of divine favor.¹³ In Weber’s view, Calvinists tended to make money and not to spend it, and so they built up savings that could find their way into early modern capitalist enterprise. The Weber thesis, though a classic of modern social thought, has been challenged in a variety of ways. Most notably in the context of early modern London, Paul Seaver has shown how Nehemiah Wallington, a godly member of the London Turner’s Company in the first half of the seventeenth century, was a highly ineffectual businessman in large part because his Calvinist spiritual exercises often took him away from his workshop in quest of another sermon.¹⁴

The current study will offer a further critique of Weber’s thesis by suggesting that faith itself may have motivated individuals such as William Jones and Henry Colbron to pursue wealth because they desired to deploy their newly gained resources in ways that advanced the cause of national reform. Those who believed that God had placed them on the path to wealth may have developed a sense of empowerment that took on a spiritual quality. Having seen their own lives transformed through what they considered divine favor, they then accepted the responsibility to transform the lives of others.

Such responsibility had important political consequences. The approach taken here to the interplay of culture, faith, and philanthropy among early modern Londoners will focus on both the local and national contexts. While benefactors such as Jones and Colbron may have assumed positions of self-appointed responsibility for significant aspects of cultural life in individual provincial communities, London’s leading livery companies, collectively, found themselves serving as trustees for dozens of charities scattered across the realm.¹⁵ As we shall see, such metropolitan-centered charities sometimes provoked hostile reactions from the traditional elite in the affected localities, who viewed Londoners with mistrust for interfering in the affairs of their community, all the more so because this meddling was occurring in an era that saw the state increasingly undermine divisions between metropolitan and local societies.¹⁶ In these ways, the intended recipients of a Londoner’s beneficence may have considered it an aggressive display of personal will instead of a welcomed, paternalistic intervention.¹⁷ Such hard feelings disappointed, but they certainly would not have shocked, Londoners who shared the contemporary understanding that it was an act of kindness to chastise one’s neighbor for falling away from the path of righteousness.¹⁸

The central purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding of cultural relations between the metropolis and the provinces through a close analysis of the efforts of William Jones and Henry Colbron to reform their native communities. It will pursue that purpose through the detailed reconstruction of the cultural values and social relationships that informed the philanthropic work of Jones, Colbron, and their trustees. The first three chapters will explore aspects of London’s popular culture that encouraged individuals to seek wealth, but to do so while aligning their personal ambition with the broader needs of society. The cultural forms involved in this process—ranging from sermons and didactic pamphlets to plays and broadside ballads—drew upon the varying impulses of the Renaissance and the Reformation to promote a metropolitan moral economy in which the successful would be directed toward charity and away from greed. Philanthropists could be inspired by their quest for personal honor and lasting fame, but they might also be motivated by a sense of religious duty, a feeling that their wealth was not only a sign of divine favor but also a test of their faith.

The development of this point will involve the interpretation of the evolving, literary legends surrounding the medieval lords mayor Simon Eyre and Richard Whittington. The fantastic tales of Eyre and Whittington that circulated in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emphasized the incredible opportunities for wealth creation that were available in London, but the realization of such opportunities required a combination of keen ambition and a sense of divine favor that could destabilize society if it were not harnessed into socially productive projects such as charitable benefaction. Here, and throughout this study, early modern works of imaginative literature will be read alongside archival sources in an effort to reconstruct the anxieties and debates surrounding the interconnections of culture, faith, and philanthropy. In this way, literary works will not be treated as mere reflections of a reality that is easily recoverable by modern scholars. Instead, they will be considered prompts for reflection and experimentation—important contributions to the contemporary pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions
• 1   Introduction: Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy in Early Modern England
• Part I Faith, Philanthropy, and London’s Moral Economy
• Part II Faith, Philanthropy, and Provincial Reform
• Notes
• Selected Works Cited
• Index