In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the behaviours and customs of the indigenous peoples of North and South America began to appear in the commonplace books, diaries, and marginalia of statesmen in England. Those who compiled notes on Walter Ralegh's accounts of his South American voyage in 1595 did not only express an interest in English territorial expansion, but in the lives of the Taíno themselves. One anonymous transcriber included information on the Arawaks and Caribs, who ‘are wont to make war vpon all Nations, and especially w[i]th the Caniballs’, noting the indigenous practice of decorating skulls with feathers as memorials to dead rulers.Footnote 1 Between adages on civility in his commonplace book, the courtier Sir Edward Hoby copied news from the Americas, including a tract that George Popham, future leader of the short-lived Sagadahoc colony in Maine, had written promoting English affairs in South America.Footnote 2 During the brief time when Native Americans were still considered receptive to English ways of life, ‘civilizing’ indigenous peoples became one of the primary stated aims through which English colonization might be achieved, and it was important to know their ‘statutes conditions apparell and manners of food, w[hi]ch of them be men eaters…and who oure friendes or enemies [are]’.Footnote 3
Moving beyond the humanist rhetoric of savagery found in cosmographies and printed propaganda, as historians of empire have already studied, this article examines the shaping force of America on the social and political worlds of Jacobean gentlemen in London, asking how engaging with civility in the context of colonization influenced political practice at a time when members of the political elite considered the reformation of manners to be a key strategy in reinforcing hierarchical order and achieving societal control.Footnote 4 Rumours and news of ‘the wilde and sauage people themselues newly discouered’ imbued classical notions of civility with contemporary urgency, and members of the Inns, encouraged to engage creatively with current affairs and to project themselves as promoters of civil society, were enthusiastic promoters of overseas projects that proposed to subdue ‘savages’.Footnote 5 Hoby was a member of the Middle Temple, and his reports on colonization were interspersed with musings about friendship and philosophy. ‘There be fowre thinges in the world most needfull’, Hoby wrote, ‘and the same ofte most hurtfull. witt, and wordes; drinck, and Company.’Footnote 6 Commonplace books like Hoby's compiled seemingly disparate material and encouraged comparison or contrast by nature of those inclusions in one bound entity, meaning his interest in America, and his reflections on sociability, operated together to frame Hoby's way of thinking about himself in relation to the rest of the world.
While scholars have long accepted the role of the Inns of Court in educating members of the political elite, not only in the law but in the arts and graces deemed necessary for careers in service to the state, the significance and impact of colonial promotion by gentlemen in these circles has been overlooked.Footnote 7 The assumption prevails that colonization exercized little influence on English political culture prior to the more confident vision of empire apparent from the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote 8 Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have acknowledged young men as a key demographic in early migration to the Chesapeake, following the large number of labourers and political or religious refugees travelling to plantations from the 1630s and during the English wars of the 1640s, but this has placed an emphasis on the consequences, rather than the inception, of an emerging colonial culture.Footnote 9 North American plantation under James is generally projected as the dismal and fraught precedents to the godly puritan migration to New England in the 1630s, and while scholars of the ‘new’ British history have studied the interlocking histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland in relation to state formation and empire-building, the effects of intercultural contact in America on London society has hardly been considered relevant to English political history, and left out of Elizabethan and Jacobean histories more generally.Footnote 10
As a result, historians have yet to place the rise of colonization in America within their understanding of Jacobean political culture. Scholars who do approach English expansion in its earliest stages tend to focus on its intellectual origins, or on the administrative side of imperial policy. Andrew Fitzmaurice's Humanism and America demonstrated how the language of colonization espoused moral and commercial considerations that impelled humanists to pursue overseas projects, but little has been done to connect colonization to the social lives and civil ideals of metropolitan gentlemen.Footnote 11 In what ways did Native American imagery, and the adoption of social practices like tobacco smoking, actually function in political discourse and masculine sociability in Jacobean London, and to what purpose? The creation, and demise, of the Virginia Company (1606–24) aligns closely with James's English reign (1603–25), and contributed to an unprecedented escalation of interest in colonization at this time. This article explores how a demographic of young men seeking political careers engaged with America in ways that influenced their own political behaviour and civil mores, suggesting that colonization shaped domestic political culture even while it purported to transform American landscapes into English territories, and that members of the Inns played a particular role in effecting this change.
Members of the Inns emphasized the transformative, reforming power of the law in creating civil subjects, and came to the Inns seeking political careers and the pleasures of the city. The early seventeenth century saw the growth of a London ‘season’ caused by two major factors: the development of London-based political, legal, and administrative institutions, and the city's rise in trade that made London the centre of commercialized leisure.Footnote 12 Admissions to the Inns rose steeply in this period, with sons of the gentry seeking to complete their education by experiencing London society in a way that partly served as both ‘finishing school’ and a place to establish political connections.Footnote 13 The training in law, whether or not members of the Inns were called to the bar – many were not – endowed members with the ‘smattering of the law’ that humanist statesmen like Sir Thomas Elyot had advocated since the fifteenth century for those ‘destined to become governors of the realm’.Footnote 14 As Ian Warren notes, the ‘cultural impact of this environment upon an elite previously defined largely by the provincial basis of its power and prestige’ was substantial, and manifested itself partly through changing codes of behaviour, with concepts of refinement and urbanity closely tied to the ‘civilizing’ influences of the polis, the city.Footnote 15
The Inns also provided physical spaces where gentlemen might meet to discuss colonial projects. The geographer and Anglican minister Richard Hakluyt, responsible for the massive compendia of English overseas exploits, The principal nauigations (1589; extended 1598–1600), attributed his interests in colonization to visits to his cousin's chambers at the Middle Temple. There, the lawyer showed the schoolboy a cosmography and revealed the opportunities that lay in the uncharted territories beyond England.Footnote 16 This left a deep impression on Hakluyt. His cousin's discourse, Hakluyt acknowledged, was ‘of high and rare delight to my yong nature’.Footnote 17 Hakluyt's ‘Discourse on western planting’ (1584), like other manuscript advice treatises circulated at court and amongst members of Walter Ralegh's pro-imperial and anti-Spanish circle, created ‘social blueprints’ for colonization that influenced the language and rhetoric of subsequent projects, presenting ambitious visions of English interference in America and situating its territories as contested sites in the global politics of trade and post-Reformation confessional war.Footnote 18
This article examines two aspects of Jacobean colonization at the Inns. First, it outlines the intellectual underpinnings that framed gentlemanly conceptions of savagery and civility in relation to colonization in the Atlantic, and locates gentlemanly interest in colonization at the Inns of Court. The article then turns to gentlemanly responses to colonization through appropriations of Native Americans at the Inns, specifically through tobacco smoking and the staging of two masques featuring American motifs. Political historians have acknowledged the need to integrate the social and cultural within the practice of politics: images, metaphors, and social rituals are all ‘the materials of the political theorist’, enabling scholars to ‘interrogate the changes in…discourses and concepts of early modernity’.Footnote 19 Lawyers were responsible for the two Jacobean masques featuring indigenous Americans, and these performances, like tobacco smoking, were not just manifestations of an emergent imperial-mindedness in the metropolis, but means through which gentlemen modified and adapted their own notions of civility in relation to the Atlantic, sometimes in radical ways. As Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell maintain, ‘if our subjects wrote about it, talked about it, debated it, believed it or scoffed at it, then it matters’.Footnote 20 By exploring the influence of the Atlantic on the social lives of gentlemen in the metropolis, this article maintains that gentlemen actively projected their civil state as one that might be strengthened, rather than weakened, by incorporating America into it, consciously reconciling the allure of the exotic with the language of duty and good conduct, and turning colonization into a recognizable – and, for the first time, fashionable – element of early modern political culture.
I
English attitudes towards ‘savages’ on the fringes of human government were rooted in Greco-Roman political theory, which pitted savagery against cultura, a word that denoted both the cultivation of land or industry, and the improvement of the mind and manners.Footnote 21 ‘You can see for yourselves that a happy life’, Aristotle wrote, ‘belongs more to those who have cultivated their character and minds to the uppermost’, whereas the man ‘who is unable to share in the benefits of political associations’ was a ‘savage being’.Footnote 22 Practising the law imbued students and barristers with a sense of the importance of their profession in maintaining English institutions and customs. The law was nothing, wrote the Gray's Inn lawyer Sir Henry Finch, if not the ‘Art of wel ordering a Ciuill Societie’, and gentlemen emphasized the necessity of the law in reforming and improving civil society.Footnote 23 The belief, fostered at the Inns, that the law provided the surest means of enforcing conformity and godly order was closely tied to justifications for, and methods of, subordinating other peoples on frontier territories, whether in Ireland, Wales, the Scottish Highlands, or America.Footnote 24 Unlike the British Isles, however, the English had no pre-existing claims to sovereignty in America. The arguments of colonization rested largely on natural and Roman laws about ‘civilizing’ and converting pagan peoples, and on terra nullius, the concept that ‘uninhabited’ territories could be justly conquered.Footnote 25 Before turning to how involvement in America shaped gentlemanly conceptions of civility and political duty, this section offers an overview of colonial interest at the Inns from the late sixteenth century, establishing how westward expansion and knowledge about Native American peoples imbued ideas of savagery with particular meanings.
While studies depicting the English as ‘globetrotters’ or ‘cosmopolitans’ rightfully acknowledge the breadth of intercultural exchange in an age of expansion, historiographical attention to global networks of exchange should not distract from the fact that America, and the question of governing indigenous peoples, presented a very different set of problems from relations with peoples to the east.Footnote 26 In their translation of Philip de Mornay's A woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion (1587), Philip Sidney of Gray's Inn, and Arthur Golding of the Inner Temple, wrote that ‘[o]ur poore Americans’ were ‘the sauagest people of the world’.Footnote 27 Those ‘whome wee at this day call Sauages’, especially the ‘Caribies and Cannibals’, were considered less culturally developed than the ‘Turkes, Arabians, or Persians’, who at least possessed a written culture through which to preserve their holy book.Footnote 28 The possessive ‘our’ in references to ‘savages’ reinforced the implicit view that Native American society had little of any value to offer, representing less of a political threat than an opportunity for exploitation. The religious wars ravaging the continent convinced many Protestants in England that the survival of the reformed church depended on international Protestant alliances that might combat the oppressive regime of Catholic Spain. The Spanish had already successfully conquered South America and might easily manage the same in the north.
Unlike ideas about peoples to the east, the westward enterprises were unique in that they sought to create ‘a new brittaine in another world’.Footnote 29 As Anthony Pagden notes, classical and biblical myths of the ‘savage’ were modified as a result of ‘the dual experience of administration and acculturation’ that colonization and settlement occasioned.Footnote 30 These experiences were partly forged through the Irish colonization projects of the later sixteenth century. Interest in Ireland at the Inns from the 1570s were driven largely by influential statesmen like Elizabeth's privy councillors Sir Francis Walsingham and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as well as Elizabeth's keeper of the privy seal, Thomas Smith, and William Cecil's son, Robert. Events in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) led to more stringent policies against native peoples, and influential treatises by Richard Beacon of Gray's Inn, and Sir John Davies of the Middle Temple, argued that the English colonization of Ireland had hitherto failed precisely because colonists were accepting and even imitating the morals of native peoples.Footnote 31 As attorney-general in Ireland, Davies emphasized the reforming power of the law, and the responsibility of authorities to establish English ways of life to ensure the success of colonization.
While there were parallels between the aims of colonization in Ireland and America, English intervention in Ireland began in the twelfth century, and had crystallized assumptions that the Irish were ‘more vnciuill, more vncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish’ than anywhere else, beyond hope of being ‘civilized' without being conquered first.Footnote 32 By contrast, the polymath and protégée of Walter Ralegh's, Thomas Hariot, spent time at the short-lived Roanoke settlement in 1585 and depicted the Algonquian as gentle people, desirous for ‘friendships & loue, and…for pleasing and obeying vs’.Footnote 33 Hariot's text presented the first detailed account of Algonquians in North America, with the aim of offering the intelligence necessary to encourage gentlemen to involve themselves in overseas projects. This, Hariot emphasized, required not the blind destruction of native culture but the ability to interact with it, and so compel the Algonquians to reject their old ways of life.
While Elizabethan colonization was hampered by war with Spain, the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty of 1604 allowed the English to devote unprecedented energy to American projects. When negotiating peace with Spain, James's secretary of state, Robert Cecil, contested Spanish claims to a monopoly of the Atlantic, where the precise terms of the agreement proved vital for enabling subsequent English activity in North America and the Caribbean.Footnote 34 Whereas the Turkey Company (1581), the Levant Company (1592), and the East India Company (1600) contributed to expanding trade networks to the east in Elizabeth's reign, the Virginia Company and Plymouth Company (1606), Newfoundland Company (1610), Somers Islands/Bermuda Company (1612), and Amazon Company (1619) were Jacobean innovations that contributed to greater interests in Atlantic projects at this time. The crown's dire financial difficulties impelled James to support the plantation schemes presented to him by gentlemen and merchants. Political patronage and kingly bounty depended on the distribution of limited resources within the realm, and James welcomed ventures that promised new sources of wealth.Footnote 35
Links between the Inns of Court and westward enterprises were apparent from the beginnings of the Virginia Company in 1606. Lawyers and affiliates of the Inns, including the Middle Templar judge, John Doderidge, were heavily involved with drafting and signing the charters issued in 1606, 1609, and 1612.Footnote 36 Members who supported colonization, whether through joint-stock investment or serving on committees in parliament for the Virginia Company, included Gabriel Archer of Gray's Inn, one of the initial colonists in Jamestown who died during the Starving Time of 1609/10; Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's Inn, a devoted member of the Virginia Company; the earl of Southampton of Gray's Inn, treasurer of the Virginia Company; Francis Wyatt of Gray's Inn, royal governor of Virginia under James; Nathaniel Rich of Gray's Inn, involved in the administration of the Virginia and Bermuda Companies; George Calvert of Lincoln's Inn, who owned land in Newfoundland and secured a charter for settlement in Maryland; and William Strachey of Gray's Inn, secretary in Jamestown.Footnote 37 The Middle Temple, a particularly strong locus for colonizing projects, accommodated numerous affiliates including George Sandys, treasurer in Virginia; the Virginia councillor George Percy, younger brother to the imprisoned ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland; and the parliamentarian George Thorpe, a staunch advocate of Algonquian education. William Crashaw served as preacher to the Inner and Middle Temple from 1605, where he invested in the Virginia Company and advocated colonization from the pulpit.Footnote 38 Colonization, maintained Crashaw in 1610, ‘is not only a lawfull, but a most excellent and holie action, and, as the case now stands, so necessarie, that I hold euery man bound to assist’.Footnote 39
II
The interest in colonization during James I's reign, then, entailed the opportunity to participate in the political life of the realm while emphasizing the transformative role of Protestant civility in achieving a stable polity, which might be most effectively achieved through the establishment of governance through the law. As a result, conduct literature and political writings drew on America to promote a vision of civil masculinity that stood in opposition to savagery.Footnote 40 This section explores how gentlemen were encouraged to think about themselves in relation to contemporary events in North America, and suggests that engaging with the Algonquians in political discourse helped shape articulations of English civility as a result. James himself set a precedent when he published his Counterblaste to tobacco (1604) shortly after his ascension to the English throne. Seeking to reform the corrupting effects of tobacco evident among his wayward subjects, James argued that although smoke may seem the ‘smallest trifle’, it was tied to ‘greater matters’.Footnote 41 The ‘maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slauish Indians’ were so contrary to reason that they would render England effeminate, seduced into disobedience by a pagan plant.Footnote 42 ‘Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe?’ James asked. ‘[I]n preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes…yea why do we not denie God and adore the Deuill?’Footnote 43
Though addressed to all his subjects, James placed special concern on preventing smoking among ‘able, yong, strong, healthful men’.Footnote 44 In targeting the manners of his male subjects, lamenting the ‘publike vse of this vnciuill tricke’, James cast tobacco and the rites of sociability that surrounded smoking as a political problem.Footnote 45 ‘Is it not the greatest sinne of all’, James asked, ‘that you…who are created and ordained by God to bestowe both your persons and goods for the maintenance both of the honour and safetie of your King and Common-wealth, should disable your selues in both?’Footnote 46 The king explicitly related the fashion adopted by his subjects – especially by members of the governing elite, and perhaps most of all by ‘the partiall, couetous, and bribing Lawyers’ – to political stability, reinforcing the relationship between manners and societal order.Footnote 47 Attitudes towards America and its commodities were a pressing concern because of their dangerous influence on the civil life of political subjects.
While James's tract used the threat of native ‘savagery’ to explore the ills of tobacco, other writers were influenced by Virginia itself. George Percy's ‘Trewe relacyon’, written in 1624, used his experiences in Jamestown to highlight the virtues of good conduct. Educated at Eton, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, and younger brother to Ralegh's close friend the imprisoned earl of Northumberland, Percy was one of the most aristocratic presences in early Virginia. His own love of clothing – evident in the lavish apparel and expensive fabrics he brought with him from England – prompted him to record Algonquian dress in great detail, outlining the Powhatan uses of bear claws, deerskin crowns, feathers, and beads.Footnote 48 As Mark Nicholls suggested, Percy's ‘Relacyon’ read like a letter of advice, using his experience in Virginia to impart lessons of government to the younger generation. Looking back on his time as governor of Virginia for six fraught months in 1609, when starvation led some colonists to eat their own dead, Percy's manual contained ‘more than a touch of counsel and guidance’ with an emphasis on morality and deference to authority ‘entirely appropriate to a narrative fashioned by an older generation for the instruction – and improvement – of the young’.Footnote 49 Even in the staggering adversities brought by war and factionalism, Percy wrote, ‘god showed his juste Judgem[en]t’ to those who in ‘a furious distracted moode’ blasphemed or disobeyed orders.Footnote 50 The noble death of Sir Ferdinando Weyman was ‘mutche Lamented beinge bothe an honest and valyantt gentleman’.Footnote 51 It was virtuous behaviour in face of extreme hardship, Percy, suggested, that compelled God to return the survivors to London. The experiences wrought among the uncertainty and hardships of that ‘new’ world were not insignificant, but a comprehensive part of a wider English identity and self-reflection, expected to be useful even to those who never travelled there.
The overlap between American colonization and reflections on conduct is further evidenced in reactions to the news of the Powhatan massacre of 1622, where an alliance of Algonquian warriors killed 347 colonists in Virginia, amounting to roughly a third of the English population. At the Inns, students depicted the attack as one that threatened both the colonies and their own political ideals. Simonds D'Ewes, a twenty-year-old student at the Middle Temple, recorded on 7 July 1622 that ‘[f]rom Virginia wee had exceeding badd newes for the inhumane wretches wee had given peace too thus long, conspired together’, noting that the colonists were mostly killed at Martin's Hundred, the plantation named after the lawyer Richard Martin.Footnote 52 Six weeks later, D'Ewes added that he was ‘partaker of an exact discourse of the massacre as I may learne it of our men in Virginia’.Footnote 53 Another student, William Wynn, wrote to his father on 12 July 1622: ‘In Virginia, the savages have by a wile come (as they weare wont) to traffique into our English howses, and with our owne weapons slewe 329 of our men.’Footnote 54
Scholars of early America and British imperial history tend to focus on how English subjects drew on the rhetoric of savagery to subjugate cultural others, but the aftermath of the attack revealed that Jacobean authors also adopted these tropes to condemn the behaviour of their peers. Though staggered by the extent of the damage, mourning the loss of friends like the Middle Templar George Thorpe, a significant strain of accusation from London remained directed against the colonists themselves. In the months following the event, Christopher Brooke wrote a startlingly genocidal poem advocating the eradication of native life. Brooke was heavily involved with the Virginia Company and an established lawyer at Lincoln's Inn. His urge to apply unmitigated force against the Powhatans was not just an opinion based on popular stereotypes, but informed by letters from Virginia and perhaps conversations about colonization with his friend and fellow colonial enthusiast, John Donne. The aim of Brooke's poem was not just to sensationalize the event but to locate the root of political instability. The Algonquians were ‘[s]oules drown'd in fresh and blood’ and ‘[e]rrors of Nature’, but he reserved much of the blame for the English themselves:
Guiltier than the ‘savages’, Brooke maintained, were his fellow English, those too willing to indulge in destructive behaviour themselves. Christians must perform ‘in Manners, Life, and Act’ those parts that ‘confirme you’, or watch their social order collapse, as the English in Virginia seemed to be experiencing at that moment. The damaging power of savagery on the lives of civil subjects was a persistent concern in Jacobean political discourse, and the ‘smirking wit of an all-male society’ at the Inns, though callous towards Native Americans, was just as inclined to turn its claws to attack incivility within the realm itself.Footnote 56
By James's reign, then, an investment in Atlantic colonization was already affecting the English ‘process of becoming’, and advice literature offers one means of understanding the process through which this occurred.Footnote 57 Humanism encouraged gentlemen to think politically, but also to impose constraints and judgements on the self. Noah Millstone locates conversation, reading, and travel as three modes through which subjects in early Stuart England developed a ‘politic interpretive frame’.Footnote 58 Colonization, especially after the establishment of Jamestown, and an engagement with intercultural difference through their understanding of savagery as a political evil, might be seen as a further framework through which gentlemen learned to ‘see’ and think like statesmen. Until Virginia stabilized in the 1620s, fears of the English polity being consumed by literal ‘savages’ provoked intense discussions in the metropolis over governance, both of the self and others. Only through privy council investigations and prolonged parliamentary debates, in which policy-makers amassed reports and treatises written by besieged colonists in Virginia, did it become possible to decide on the best means to ‘tie Virginia as fast to England as if it were one terra firma with itt’, at a time when ‘o[u]r Colonyes were almost made subiectes to the Sauages’.Footnote 59 As these texts indicate, the difference between ‘sauages’ and ‘subiectes’ was less a question of ethnic difference than learned behaviour. This enabled gentlemen to express, and critique, masculine behaviour in relation to the American experience.
III
The second half of this article examines the influence of America beyond texts on the social lives of gentlemen at the Inns. The contentious but evident fashion for smoking indicates that gentlemanly attitudes towards civility and savagery were more complex than merely adhering to the rhetoric found in the moral literature or colonial propaganda they often read. This next section situates the interest in colonization within the formal socializing that burgeoned in the West End during the London ‘season’, arguing that the incorporation of tobacco into gentlemanly social rites was not unconnected to conscious attempts to advance colonization. As Phil Withington observed, sociability in the early seventeenth century did not just involve the meeting of friends, but created informal associations that fuelled social interaction and political debate.Footnote 60 The term ‘company’ suggested ‘a politics…of social participation involving inclusions, exclusions and the construction of boundaries’, and the rise of smoking at the Inns played a role in the way that civil behaviour was conceived and enacted.Footnote 61 Anna Bryson's study of changing codes of conduct in England acknowledged that ideas of civility must have been ‘elaborated partly through the discovery of the New World’, but this relationship played a larger role in the development of civility than Bryson's study allowed her to show.Footnote 62 By incorporating tobacco within metropolitan sociability, gentlemen consciously engaged with Native American cultures to articulate an imperial-minded masculinity that enabled them to celebrate and refine their own urbanity, sometimes against prevailing values advocated by authorities.
Popular print, royal proclamations, and ample archaeological evidence suggest that tobacco smoking was widely adopted in London by the early seventeenth century.Footnote 63 While physicians debated the healthful benefits of smoking, tobacco also retained strong associations with native ritual until the 1620s. Moralists frequently complained of the fumes of smoke filling taverns and private homes, lamenting that the city had become a conduit to a social practice that seemed to threaten the integrity of the realm as a whole. While large cross-sections of society smoked tobacco, nowhere did this seem more popular than among the city's gentlemen. Jacobean satire frequently noted the vain puffing – of the ego and the pipe – to which the young and moneyed seemed inclined.Footnote 64 Scholars, poets, and lawyers were those most apt to smoke, wrote Richard Brathwaite in 1617, and there was often little difference between the three.Footnote 65
Still in his teens, John Beaumont, a member of the Inner Temple, composed a mock enconium that spun an elaborate, heroic tale of ‘this precious herbe, Tabacoo’, whose heavenly properties might transform and inspire its partakers.Footnote 66 Beaumont imbued this sweet ‘Nymph’ with a history of her own, one ancient, pastoral, and divine. The Nymph was a civilizer of men: had gods and philosophers known her, the fluency of good rhetoric would have been rendered obsolete, with tobacco compelling the ‘rude vnciuill throng’ to ‘[a]n order'd Politike societie’.Footnote 67 The poem also distinguished between refined, discerning gentlemen and London gulls who imbibed inferior strains of tobacco merely for fashion's sake. In praising ‘thou great God of Indian melodie’, Beaumont invoked the heady, golden-hued plant of the exotic Americas as a fitting intoxicant for urbane gentlemen, a sentiment underscored by the ten commendatory verses written by gentlemen in Beaumont's Inns coterie.Footnote 68
Though Beaumont's poem contained a streak of youthful resistance to authoritarian control, his description of the ‘circles of a sauage round’, and of Virginian priests and ‘the valleyes of Wingandekoe…in the North part of America’, seems to reference directly the Theodore de Bry woodcuts depicting the Algonquian, which appeared in Thomas Hariot's influential and oft-cited 1590 edition of his Brief and true report. Footnote 69 This suggests that Hariot's and Ralegh's tireless efforts to advance English projects in North America – and perhaps also their famed passion for smoking – provided potent visual imagery that helped frame the way gentlemen engaged with Algonquian practices in London. To Beaumont, the glorification of an indigenous commodity nevertheless justified the subjugation of America through the control of nature, and the closing stanzas framed the commodity within an awareness of current events. Native Americans, with ‘sauage rites, and manners fear'd’, possessed a plant whose glories they did not fully comprehend, and must yield to ‘the walles of Albions cliffie towers’.Footnote 70 ‘In the farre countries, where Tabacco growes’, the Nymph's guiding hand would lead the English to assert their presence ‘ouer Virginia and the New-found-land’ and ‘[tame] the sauage nations of the West’.Footnote 71
Beaumont wrote his poem in 1602, and the following decades saw the publication of printed satires that conjured the changing modes of sociability as a result of smoking. Friends met in the streets and carried their conversations ‘vnto his Chamber…[for] the best Tobacco that he euer dranke’, incorporating the rites of smoking within the rituals of masculine conviviality.Footnote 72 Richard Brathwaite, entering Gray's Inn in 1609, made reference to these in his Solemn ioviall disputation (1617), a small octavo conducive to easy sharing and circulation. Brathwaite's volume was divided into two, with the second half devoted entirely to tobacco, giving it a prime place in articulations of social behaviour at the Inns. ‘That Light of the Law admonisheth us’, Brathwaite wrote with mock gravity, ‘that some things are to bee daily and duely learned of us’, and these included the rules around honouring friendships, drinking healths, intoxication, and seducing women.Footnote 73
Brathwaite framed the metropolitan gentleman as one who was informed by the world of expansion and discovery beyond him. Decades before the arrival of the first coffeehouses in England, he conjured the microcosm of the tobacco shop as a political space, where men could meet to smoke, speak to travellers, and discuss state affairs. Ours, wrote Brathwaite, was the ‘Smoaking Age’, and much of the humour of his discourse on sociability relied on probing the tensions between the pleasures of smoking and the duties of state, between expected conduct and long-standing concerns over the perils of degeneration through the exposure of ‘savage’ influences. The author's invented acquaintance, the ‘Bermudan’ Boraccio Fumiganto, discussed his resolve to govern and ‘worke wonders among the wilde Irish’ by reducing ‘all those bogs and marishes [sic] to plots of Tobacco’, a ludicrous project that jabbed at the Jacobean enthusiasm for schemes that purported to benefit both state and private purse.Footnote 74 Brathwaite included a lengthy complaint by Father Time that neatly echoed anti-tobacco polemic, where the elderly figure lamented the mores of the younger generation and their penchant for ‘an herbes vapour’ over ‘their countries renowne[,] Commonweales success; or publike managements of state’.Footnote 75
Beyond the comic effect achieved by mimicking the dominant rhetoric against smoking, the exaggerated power of tobacco in undermining civil society also allowed Brathwaite to bring his readers into a state of complicity. The pleasures of smoking would not corrupt cities or deprave youth, the text implied, because its readers – students of the law, gentlemen who sought court preferments and seats in parliament – were, through their own virtuosity, reconciling pleasure with virtue, and transforming tobacco into an acceptable component of civil society. Putting a ‘Blackamoore’ who fished for pearls ‘or a Virginia-man…upon the Frontespice of thy doore’ would seduce students easily; but so would ‘pure eloquence’ and ‘absolutenesse of method’.Footnote 76 Brathwaite's frontispiece depicted gentlemen sitting around a tavern table, their pipes serving as conduits to poetic inspiration and civil discourse, while merrymakers of humbler status performed jigs in an alehouse to the sound of bagpipes. This juxtaposition indicated tobacco's role in fostering the intellectual lives of London wits, and highlighted the gentlemanly ability to assimilate America without losing their own cultivated civility.
Though exoticism seemed to indulge, rather than reject, what authorities perceived to be uncivil behaviour, smoking therefore became part of a complex interplay between metropolitan sociability and political action. Men who scribbled odes to tobacco at tavern dinners were also faced with the task of finding the best policies to benefit the realm without letting the Virginia Company flounder. ‘Tobacco, which albeit some dislike…will bring as great a benefit and profit to the vndertakers’, recognized the parliamentarian and Virginia Company councillor Edwin Sandys.Footnote 77 Where James had stated, in 1604, that ‘idle delights’ were ‘the first seedes of the subuersion of all great Monarchies’, policy-makers now purposely framed tobacco as a marketable commodity to be brought under strict state regulation.Footnote 78 While a substantial number of those sitting in the House of Commons advocated banishing tobacco altogether because of ‘the spoiling of the subjects Manners by it’, John Ferrar reminded the House that ‘4,000 English [in Virginia]…have no Means, as yet, to live’ without it.Footnote 79 Though he ‘loveth Tobacco as ill as any’, proclaimed Thomas Jermyn, it was ‘fit to be given [to] Virginia’.Footnote 80 The king granted the Virginia Company a monopoly on all tobacco in 1624, an act that allowed him simultaneously to increase his revenues, show support for planters, and deprive the Spanish of a significant source of income by sourcing the commodity directly from English colonies. The lengthy debates in parliament over tobacco in 1621 and 1624 reveal how deeply imbedded with colonial support the issue of tobacco had become. This process of monopolizing tobacco should not be disconnected from the gentlemen who strolled through London with their pipes, praising the conquest of America and the feats of fellow Inns members like George Sandys and Francis Wyatt, in combating the ‘savages’ of Jamestown.
IV
Students of the law were encouraged to enact political ideals in other forms, and this final section explores the significance of the two court masques featuring American motifs in how gentlemen articulated their own civil ideals. As an institutional and collective statement of support for English imperialism, masques provide a very different, but complementary, approach to the promulgation of expansion exhibited in the social rites of smoking.
George Chapman's The memorable masque (1613), and The maske of flowers (1614), of unknown authorship but commissioned at great personal expense by the solicitor-general and member of the Virginia council, Francis Bacon, were both performed by Inns gentlemen. Scholars have recognized that Chapman's masque, performed for the marriage of James's daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, was strongly associated with Prince Henry's pro-imperial court.Footnote 81 The masque involved dozens of ‘Virginians’ – elaborately apparelled students of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn – parading on horseback through London to Whitehall.Footnote 82 Their skin stained brown and feathers entwined in their hair, the gentlemen spilled into James's tiltyard and then Banqueting House, where they performed for ‘the King, Bride [Elizabeth Stuart], and Bridegroom [Frederick V], with all the Lords of the most honord priuy Councell, and our chiefe Nobility’, presenting lavish visions of triumphant civility while bringing imperial agendas to the heart of the Jacobean court.Footnote 83
The king commended Sir Edward Phelips and Richard Martin – both shareholders of the Virginia Company – for their role in organizing the spectacle. What the masque also demonstrates is how gentlemen engaged with ideas from America to articulate their own status, advancing a graceful masculinity that defined itself partly against the savagery it purported to subdue. As with tobacco-smoking, gentlemen exploited indigenous customs to heighten themselves as civil and politically aware. Paul Raffield described masques and revels at the Inns of Court as enactments of ‘a traditional code of manners or honour as the basis of ideal governance’, concerned primarily over questions of kingly authority and its tensions with the law and its constitution.Footnote 84 The memorable masque, and The maske of flowers, however, might be seen less as exhibiting a ‘traditional code of manners’, than a willingness on the part of gentlemen to use imperial imagery to advance a vision of governance that did not eschew, but subordinated, the exoticism of America to English political life.
The printed account of the masque included a lengthy description of the gentlemen's appearance. The chief masquers wore apparel embroidered with suns, covered in gold, pearls, and feather ruffs, and ‘[o]n their heads high sprig'd feathers…like the Virginian Princes they presented’.Footnote 85 These gentlemen were differentiated within their own ranks from the torch bearers, who bore a ‘humble variety’ of the costumes in order to show ‘the more amplie, the Maskers high beauties, and reflected in their kinde, a new and delightfully-varied radiance on their beholders’.Footnote 86 Through the masque, students of the Inns demonstrated their ability to transform the perceived savagery of the Indies through the superior artifice of culture. This ‘art’, visible in the costumes themselves as in the behaviour of the wearers, was not incidental, but presented a symbiotic relationship between appearance and cultivation, between the deportment of the individual subject and the expansionist agendas of the political elite. The ‘Body expresseth the secret fantasies of the minde’, Brathwaite wrote in his conduct manual of 1630.Footnote 87
Chapman's careful attention to the masquers's physical appearance suggests that gentlemen at the Inns fashioned themselves both in relation to aristocratic courtliness and against the presumed brutishness of unrestrained nature. Arriving on an island ‘in command of the Virginia continent’, the performance featured Capriccio, a self-styled man of wit who embodied the archetypal foolish Jacobean gallant. Not unlike Beaumont's differentiation between gulls and the urbane masculinity of gentlemen who tastefully flirted with licence but remained committed to moral uprightness, members poked fun at the stereotypes of their own wit culture while ultimately disassociating themselves from those who sought riches without honour. Capriccio and his band of foolhardy global travellers, dressed as ruff-clad baboons, had crudely ‘cut out the skirts of the whole world’ in search of riches, yet were overshadowed by the grace of Eunomia, embodying ‘the sacred power of Lawe’.Footnote 88 The costumes, together with the American motifs, separated the principal masquers from the uncivil gentlemen in the anti-masque who proved themselves ill-suited to bear the responsibilities of colonization.
The masque of flowers, performed at Whitehall on 6 January 1614, featured Kawasha, the ‘chiefe’ god recounted by contemporary histories of Virginia.Footnote 89 Here, too, the masque enabled gentlemen to stage the allure of America to express their own civility. Presented by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn during the Twelfth Night celebrations of 1613–14, the performance celebrated the wedding of the king's favourite, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, to Lady Francis Howard. Francis Bacon, a member of Gray's Inn, commissioned the masque, filling the hall with flowers that metamorphosed into ‘beautiful youths’ with the onset of spring.Footnote 90 On either side of the Banqueting House stood the temples of Silenus (Wine), and Kawasha (Tobacco), where the two contended for superiority in the anti-masque. Kawasha appeared ‘borne vpon two Indians shoulders’, ‘his body and legges of Oliue-colour stuffe, made close like the skinne, bases of Tobacco-colour stuffe cut like Tobacco leaues’ and holding a pipe the ludicrous size of a harquebus.Footnote 91 The masque contained an elaborate garden setting featuring a globe, where cultivation and industry were celebrated in both a colonial and domestic context, and where the transformation of wild nature represented an essential component of English civility. Through the flower-boys, nature was literally transformed into the human – ‘your verdure to fresh bloud’ – and the restoration celebrated in terms of James's civilizing power.Footnote 92 Britain, once ‘rude & waste’, became ‘fit to be,/A seate for a fitt Monarchie.’Footnote 93 The masque, therefore, did more than to highlight the ‘nationalist prejudices of the legal profession…[against] indigenous Americans in particular’.Footnote 94 The performance also enabled gentlemen to propound a complex vision of civility that praised both the cultivation of artifice over the ‘savagery’ of raw nature, and a refinement found on the other side of colonization. The good-humoured battle for sovereignty between Silenus and Kawasha, ultimately, was hardly a battle at all. The two figures operated on the same stage, inviting less a polarity than a reconciliation: a vision of a world in which the ‘old’ successfully incorporated and accommodated the ‘new’.
V
By James's death in 1625, Jamestown – now eighteen years old – was coming of age. Nearly two decades of intermittent famine, disease, Anglo-Algonquian war, and internal political disputes contributed to James's decision, in 1624, to dissolve the Virginia Company and bring the colony under royal control, rendering Atlantic colonization a nascent but familiar part of English political culture. Younger sons and members of the lesser gentry, struggling to find employment in England, articulated colonization as a means of acting upon the humanist ideal of service to the state. ‘What else shall become of Gentlemens younger sons?’, Edwin Sandys asked the House of Commons in 1604, ‘who cannot live by Arms, when there is no wars, and Learning preferments are common to all, and mean? Nothing remains fit for them, save only Merchandize.’Footnote 95 Sandys appointed his own younger brother, George, Virginia Company treasurer in 1621.
As this article has suggested, however, colonial promoters advocated colonization for reasons beyond employment. Gentlemen framed their political and even moral responsibilities in relation to participating in Atlantic projects. Senior members like Francis Bacon or the third earl of Southampton were ‘ever approving…of the Virginian Plantation’, investing hundreds of pounds in Virginia voyages and patronizing explorers and colonists.Footnote 96 In Virginia, a desperate George Sandys urged his friends in London to ‘aduenture not to [sic] much in ioynt stockes, nor in those projectes w[hi]ch ever fayle’.Footnote 97 Yet many of the initial failures in Virginia – so often used by historians as evidence of lacklustre colonial involvement in Jacobean England – were not the cause of too little interest, but too much. The irony, as Sandys recognized, was that many of the hardships besetting Virginia were a direct result of the vogue for colonization currently underway in London. London councillors were sending too many migrants, when colonists could scarcely feed, much less clothe, themselves. Elsewhere, Sandys complained that the sins of colonists were matched by ‘too much vaine glorie and presumption at home’.Footnote 98 This ‘vaine glorie’ was a characteristic critique of gentlemen at the Inns, who explicitly framed themselves as urbane upholders of civil society, and who played a significant role in advancing colonization at a time when English projects in North America might otherwise have failed. These men were the recipients of a university education that had first begun to incorporate cosmography and geography within its core curricula in the second half of the sixteenth century, in humanist programmes that encouraged them to ‘envisage a world in which England was both morally and actually superior and where other parts of the globe were inferior and available to be controlled’.Footnote 99
Locating colonization at the Inns of Court invites a reconsideration of Jacobean masculine political culture. Performances brought Atlantic peoples out of cosmographies and into material forms, enacted by those well-situated to advance their interests at Whitehall and parliament. Lawyers and aspiring statesmen drew on concepts of savagery, informed by America, in their intimate understandings of their own orthodoxy and political responsibilities. Edward Hoby's commonplace book, or the Virginian masque, suggest that colonization inspired inward-looking contemplation as much as it encouraged a celebration of wild abandon. The inherent difficulties between promoting expansion and overcoming savagery emerged from travel narratives themselves: ‘The Tobacco of this place is good: but the Indians…[are] Canibals.’Footnote 100
At the same time, gentlemen showed themselves willing to probe and question the codes of behaviour subscribed them in moral literature. An investigation of gentlemanly civility in relation to the Atlantic complicates the dichotomous picture of a sober-minded ‘moral puritanism’ set against contemporary perceptions of a corrupt or extravagant court at Whitehall.Footnote 101 Rather, it suggests that individual subjects and their understanding of the physical as well as the political body – their gestures, what they wore, what they imbibed – involved using their social worlds to position themselves in the commonwealth in ways that could be both conservative and subversive, passionate and at times contradictory. By praising the transformative potential of exoticism on their own civil articulations, gentlemen incorporated colonization as a regular feature in their codes of manners and political discourse. Dressing up like Native Americans might reinforce English religious and political conformity, but it also contributed to notions of what civility and urbanity were, and offered alternate means through which they might be expressed, in politics as in gesture and style. Pamphlets and sermons of the Jacobean era lamented the decline of martial ability and godly discipline, juxtaposing it against the ‘effeminacy’ of a vice-ridden metropolis. The frontispiece to Samuel Ward's published sermon, Woe to drunkards (1622), condemned the gentlemanly penchant for the trappings of metropolitan, courtly life – tobacco, cards, dice, lace – by contrasting them to the military and scholarly endeavours of earlier times. Yet London gentlemen frequently presented their urbanity as a marker of an active, imperial-minded Protestantism. They enacted empire in often sensual and lavish terms, not in opposition to duty but as an extension of it.
In doing so, pro-imperial gentlemen at the Inns pandered to James's vision of a sovereign ‘Britain’ while also modifying it. A passage from Brathwaite's ‘Smoaking Age’ suggests that gentlemen were aware of their role in influencing policy, even when it contradicted the king's own desires. Ostensibly referring to former emperors, but plainly depicting James's kingship, Brathwaite noted that although the ‘princely…censure’ of tobacco had ‘seemed to men of your profession a little bitter, their pipes were battered, their Tobacco scattered, and this late introduced relique of Gentilie cashered’, supplies from America had infiltrated London chambers so that ‘both Court and Citie have no lesse steemed with your fume…than the Academie’.Footnote 102 Though steeped in the vaulting rhetoric of wit humour, Brathwaite's text appeared shorty after Pocahontas's husband, the planter John Rolfe, first began successfully exporting large crops of Virginian tobacco to England, and events in parliament in the following decade did successfully integrate a native intoxicant within a vision of Protestant industry by granting the Virginia and Bermuda Companies a monopoly on the trade.
Young men at the Inns were learning to ‘see like statesmen’, and they were confident enough in their own civil mores to promote a vision of an English polity that looked beyond the boundaries of the realm. These gentlemen played a role in securing a future for Virginia, especially in the second half of James's reign, after both James's principle secretary, Robert Cecil, and the king's own son, Henry, died in 1612. Cecil and Henry had encouraged state expansion into the Atlantic, and the tireless devotion to the Virginia Company shown by lawyers including Christopher Brooke and Richard Martin were doubtlessly crucial to Commons acknowledging, in 1614, that the affairs ‘of the Plantation [are] well accepted, and looked upon with the Eyes of our Love’.Footnote 103 This occurred the same week during which ‘Dicke [Richard] Martin came to the parlement house…to plead for some course to be held for the vpholding of Virginia’, and Martin remained passionately involved with the Virginia Company and the Middle Temple throughout his career.Footnote 104 When, in 1614, Sir Roger Owen asked Brooke to leave the chamber while Commons deliberated Virginian affairs, Brooke refused. He would not, Brooke reasoned, be asked to leave if the House set about discussing York, which he also represented, and so he would not withdraw here: ‘for that [Virginia] concerneth the Commonwealth’.Footnote 105 As with other members of the Inns, Brooke no longer considered it possible – nor was he willing – to exclude America from the political realm.
