I

English projectors anticipated violence in New England plantations during the early 1620s, their discussions of projects suffused with allusions to external threat and their presentiments of “inveterate malice to the English” among the native peoples tending to steer settlement plans to “where the savages are less to be feared.”Footnote ³ Apprehension of violence became political reality on the northern margins of Plymouth's influence in 1625. A small barricade built on the eastern extremity of Fisherman's Field, along the southwestern sweep of Cape Ann's harbor on Massachusetts Bay, came under attack sometime in June as an English ship's crew and an unspecified number of settlers hunkered down behind a bulwark of hogsheads on the new fishing stage, armed to defend the ship's drying catch from a larger, predatory force on the mainland. The predators in this case, however, were not native peoples but fellow English subjects from the New Plymouth plantation across the bay. In a manner resembling the military operations of free states, in early June 1625, New Plymouth dispatched an armed force of twenty men under Miles Standish across Massachusetts Bay aboard the Hopewell in order to reclaim its territory and property.

In their defense of Cape Ann, the perhaps forty settlers, with a ship and crew in the service of the Dorchester Company, were undeterred from taking up arms and fortifying their position by recognition that they and these interlopers and their organization were subjects of the same sovereign. The Cape Ann incident raises questions about the extent and significance of internecine violence among English settlers and projectors during the early years of the English colonial project. Despite an awareness of such important individual episodes, the scale of what could be described as organized violence of this kind among English or British settlers before the English Civil War remains difficult to measure. In 1634, as part of a free-trade dispute over New Plymouth's commercial patent and subsequent monopoly of the fur trade on the Kennebec River, a small force under the command of John Howland, the agent in charge of New Plymouth's trading post on the Kennebec, killed John Hocking, an English merchant who had “infringe[d] their liberties” by anchoring a boat in the river “above their house” in order to “intercept the trade.”Footnote ⁴ A similar concern to secure liberties of property, in this case involving unsecured claims threatened by the prospect of annexation to Massachusetts Bay, animated the popular “combination”Footnote ⁵ in the Upper Piscataqua plantation that expelled the proprietary agent Thomas Wiggin in 1637. These annexation fears, compounded by religious anxieties and disputes that recapitulated antinomian issues, led to further violence in April 1641; factions mobilized, and the local militia commander and leader of the “combination,” John Underhill, “gathered some of the neighbors to defend himself,” marching on his rival's house alongside “one carrying a bible upon a staff for an ensign” and Hanserd Knollys, who was “armed with a pistol.” In response to this “riot,” the proprietary agent of lower Piscataqua, Francis Williams, “came up with a company of armed men and beset [Knollys's] house . . . and kept a guard on them night and day.”Footnote ⁶

This pattern of “sovereign agency” was not confined to the New England settlements.Footnote ⁷ In April 1635, settlers in Virginia and Maryland clashed in a small-scale naval skirmish on Pocomoke Sound. As early as 1632, Virginia councilors had expressed fears of the “royal and imperial power which is granted in all things of sovereignty” in Lord Baltimore's new patent, including “the power to make peace or entertain war with any at his pleasure.”Footnote ⁸ Being “so great distance” from England, the patent amounted in practical terms to “the Lord Baltimore's colony having power in themselves to manage their affairs free from all dependency on others.”Footnote ⁹ Ultimately, these anxieties came to rest on the status of Kent Island, Virginia councilor William Claiborne's lucrative station in the fur-trade network. Officers and supporters of the Maryland patent perceived the presence of this trading post within its territory, and the Virginia council's unwillingness to recognize Lord Baltimore's authority, as part of a Virginia design to make themselves “lords of all that country,” a usurpation in defiance of royal authority.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite crown letters in defense of the Maryland patent and the Virginia settlers’ prior claim to Kent Island, as well as “the duty of good subjects to obey and not to dispute their sovereign's commandment,” the confrontation escalated to organized violence on both sides.Footnote ¹¹ After a pinnace and trade goods belonging to Claiborne were seized, a force of two pinnaces under Thomas Cornwallis, one of Lord Baltimore's commissioners, attacked an armed vessel sent by Claiborne to retrieve his property. The skirmish killed one settler from Maryland and three from Virginia, including the boat's commander, Lieutenant Radcliffe Warren.Footnote ¹² The ensuing uprising in Virginia against the royal governor Sir John Harvey (recently described as the first uprising against “the obsessive administrative style” of the Personal Rule) led to Harvey's “thrusting out” of office by the Assembly and his enforced banishment to England.Footnote ¹³ The deployment of armed militia guards by the assembly in the manner of a coup d’état, the broad political franchise used in Virginia elections, and evidence of a potent Atlantic political compound of antipopery, antimonopoly, and liberty of property all suggest a comparable mobilization and organized use of controlled force, if not physical violence.Footnote ¹⁴

These instances of organized violence involved relatively small numbers of people in marginal geographic places, and even a more systematic survey seems unlikely to reveal much quantitative significance on an Atlantic scale. In 1625, the Dorchester plantation on Cape Ann housed forty to fifty settlers at mostFootnote ¹⁵ and New Plymouth only “about 180 persons, some cattle and goats.”Footnote ¹⁶ However, the qualitative and normative significance of such incidents brings them into a dialogue with several important strands of recent historical scholarship on the Stuart regime during the two decades or so before the Civil War. In each case, the language of liberties and the nature of good governance, the authority of law and security of property, and the defense of true religion fueled the use of lethal force, extending in 1641 to the establishment in Upper Piscataqua of a special tribunal on violent political crime that resembled the summary process and judgments of an English prerogative court. Indeed, the language, style, and actions of participants in these affairs more closely resemble those current during the Crisis of the Three Kingdoms than they do the patterns of public discourse and codes of civil behavior that defined the conventional social order of the Stuart kingdoms, where law courts rather than the force of arms would have settled these conflicts during the 1620s and 1630s. Using the 1625 incident at Cape Ann to explain the recourse to violence and the expectation of reciprocal violence among English settlers effectively places the experience of the civil strife of the 1640s in a larger context, both in terms of the actual power of the principles at stake to provoke organized violence between subjects of the same sovereign and in terms of public knowledge of this violent potential.

It has become an important commonplace of historical perspectives on the early modern English state that it possessed a monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence in its territories—certainly by armed companies—and that the authority of the state, its magistrates, and its law courts increasingly informed a socially diffuse “culture of reconciliation” in the process of “policing the public peace” and maintaining social order.Footnote ¹⁷ In theory and largely in practice, only when this public order embodied by the dynastic state as a “body politic” dissolved or lost its legitimacy, as it did in 1642, could its subjects have recourse to arms and organized violence to aid in its restoration. To the extent that this view of the English state has included its Atlantic and broader global dimensions, it has recognized how the relationship between the state and its companies or projectors “created a situation in which the use of political power and armed force were intimately connected with commercial activities.”Footnote ¹⁸ This situation entailed an increased risk of conflict with rival foreign commercial entities and their state sponsors, a challenge illustrated by the relationship between the Stuart regime and the East India Company in the aftermath of the 1622 capture of Hormuz and the 1623 Amboyna “massacre.”Footnote ¹⁹ In both cases, political conflicts resulted from such unresolved issues as “whether a Company military action abroad should be considered a state military action” and the extent to which the company's royal patent licensed autonomous political and military action in the East Indies.Footnote ²⁰ However, a general recognition of the way this new corporate commercial politics could lead into complex domestic political entanglements or violent engagements with other political societies does not resolve the problem (an especially significant one for the decades before the war) of how in some political spaces it could also arm and mobilize particular groups of English subjects against others. Such conflicts summoned into existence a form of armed politics in which these groups acted like states, mirroring the dynamics of civil war on the Atlantic margins of English authority fifteen years before some of the same political issues generated civil war in England. In this way, the threats and mobilizations used to contest the Cape Ann fishing stage in 1625, as well as later incidents, disclose sovereign variants of English religious and political conflicts, amplified and empowered by their encasing in corporate political form and rendered more volatile by their geographic distance from conventional forms of English authority and order.

Some three thousand miles of ocean between England and these sites of violent conflict, along with the relative isolation of the sites in America, also raise the question of precisely how the events were communicated and understood among the settlers and settlements as well as between the settlements and the various interests and authorities in England. The register and evaluation of these events within this dynamic permit a measure of the Atlantic dimensions of what has usefully been described as an English “public sphere” taking shape in the second half of the sixteenth and first quarter of the seventeenth centuries.Footnote ²¹ This concept of a complex discursive and political space constituted by a shared language and many common terms and interests—but also riven by the numerous conflicts these generated—has considerable purchase in studies of English political culture and, more recently, in the broader political culture of the British Isles.Footnote ²² Recent studies of the East India Company have disclosed a subtle variant of this “public sphere” in response to the Amboyna episode, reflecting the careful decisions and negotiations of a corporation dependent on royal favor and primarily concerned with the opinions of a narrowly delimited political elite at court and in Parliament. As Anthony Milton has observed, “We cannot assume the existence of an organized propaganda campaign simply from . . . a collection of pamphlets” or a few letters—an evidentiary challenge compounded by the politically “problematic” and “potentially subversive” implications of “bringing matters into an unrestricted domain of public discourse.”Footnote ²³ Although the Atlantic dimensions and dynamics of British “public spheres” during the 1620s and 1630s have received less attention, the problem is prefigured in the framing of the project. If the Atlantic evidence likewise falls short of any fully articulated “public sphere,” the various reports of the marginal Atlantic violence of these decades clearly have relevance for what Laura Stewart describes as “the consolidation of London's position as the archipelago's news and information hub, drawing people from far beyond the metropolis into the European and transatlantic communication networks that flowed through it.”Footnote ²⁴

Establishing the public significance of the early English plantations poses no great challenge. After publication of Richard Hakluyt's Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America in 1582, a substantial body of published works appeared during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to promote plantations as a valuable English project.Footnote ²⁵ In this sub-discourse, the public politics primarily of chartered commercial companies or syndicates of patentees fostered an awareness of the Atlantic defined in terms of both service to the commonweal and specific opportunities for individual advancement. The “western planting in the Atlantic,” one of the figures of this discursive geography, summoned a vision of English civil society transplanted through the building of new markets for new commodities, a general expansion of trade, and increasing opportunities for productive work to relieve the underemployed multitudes in English boroughs and villages. All this worldly, mercantile effort sometimes received a new religious meaning from the related opportunity—perhaps even the divinely ordained duty—of carrying the gospel now truly scanned in Protestant England to American native peoples.Footnote ²⁶ Addressing the Virginia Company in 1609, Robert Gray conceived of the Atlantic as a means to “greater peace and prosperity” in the commonwealth, as a remedy for the “commotion and rebellion,” the “diverse kinde of wrongs” likely to result from England's “overflowing multitudes.”Footnote ²⁷ In 1623, the Council for New England discussed an initiative to distribute a letter from James I to the lord lieutenant of each English county “for the setting forth of their poorer sort of people to New England.”Footnote ²⁸ In further lamenting in 1624 “the excessive multitude of people, which . . . do swarme and superabound,” Richard Eburne addressed an appeal specifically to “the poorer and meaner sort,” setting down in a dialogue between a merchant and a farmer “particular instructions and observations touching [plantations],” for “many such as are little acquainted with them.” He included advice to buy and read some of the numerous books describing the individual English plantations and outlining the best means to take advantage of their unique opportunities.Footnote ²⁹ When the major project nominally concerned religious conversion, public discourse on planning and preparation could resemble spiritual divination. In promoting the Massachusetts Bay plantation, John White prescribed bibliomancy in 1630 as the best way to divine God's wishes and intentions concerning individual decisions to join, “as it is certain that if the [W]ord, by scanning the grounds which it proposeth, can give a Seer resolution, it must be followed.” To resolve cases of “doubtful and ambiguous” application of the text, White suggested the advice of “godly wise friends,” the close observation of the “concurrence of opportunities,” an attempt to read divine intentions in the external flow of daily events, and “frequent and earnest prayer” in order to reach “a right end and scope.”Footnote ³⁰

This brief series of examples serves to illustrate a public awareness of the Atlantic plantations during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that existed in several registers, including personal concerns and decisions as well as matters of the commonweal or public interest and policy. However, because of their often explicit interest in the promotion of specific ventures, these published accounts do not report on such incidents as the armed confrontation on Cape Ann, even when their authors possessed full knowledge of the events. The Planter's Plea (1630) by John White, a leader of the Dorchester Company, contains one of the few descriptions of the Cape Ann plantation, its settlement between 1623 and 1625, and the problems and accidents that led to its failure.Footnote ³¹ The evidence of organized violence in the Atlantic thus remained more or less confined to manuscript reports and letters, sometimes literally scribbled in the margins, as in the account of the Cape Ann incident in a letter to the Earl of Arundel from an eyewitness, David Thomson.Footnote ³² These varied writings embodied an informal, semipublic discourse of “tyranny” and “popularity,” the familiar, inversive ideological poles of political conflict during the 1620s and 1630s, belied by but seldom breaking the calm surface of promotion in public discourse.Footnote ³³ The distinctive Atlantic resonance of these terms, as well as the political motives for reticence around internecine violence, emerge clearly from the reflections of William Bradford and John Winthrop on the 1634 killing of John Hocking in Upper Piscataqua.Footnote ³⁴ Winthrop acknowledged the New Plymouth patent “with liberty of sole trade” on the Kennebec, but also the dangers of the flow of news and the political implications—“the rest of [Hocking's] men carry[ing] home the vessel and the sad tidings” and a “bark coming home [to Boston] bringing a true relation of the matter,” the killings “much condemned of all men.”Footnote ³⁵ Bradford complained that some of this news and rumor took the form of letters to the Viscount Saye and Sele and Baron Brooke, leaders of the Piscataqua syndicate that also included Sir Richard Saltonstall and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, doing “as much as they could to exasperate them in the matter, leaving out all the circumstances as if [Hocking] had been killed without any offense on his part.”Footnote ³⁶ After Saye and Brooke wrote to Thomas Dudley, governor of Massachusetts Bay, stating “that they might have sent a man-of-war to beat down the [New Plymouth] house at Kennebec for the death of Hocking,” Winthrop “feared [the incident] would give occasion to the king to send a general governor over, and besides had brought us all and the gospel under a common reproach of cutting one another's throats for beaver.”Footnote ³⁷ Both Hocking and Bradford had justified their actions as a defense of “liberties,” but the organized violence between New Plymouth and Piscataqua suggested to others the distempered license of “unrulie multitudes” led by ambition and avarice, the fruits of popularity “in the worst manner.”Footnote ³⁸ This private or semipublic discourse, articulated in the reports and letters of those in positions of authority in the plantations or their agents, had the capacity to polarize the local political environment and could, through its transatlantic networks and shared English political culture, also threaten a transformation of this environment if English authorities in London or Plymouth came to perceive its “popularity” as a threat to public order in a commonweal defined in Atlantic terms. A royal commission for “regulating plantations,” issued on 28 April 1634, around the time of the killing, empowered twelve of Charles I's councilors, including the archbishops of Canterbury and York, William Laud and Richard Neale, to, among other provisions, “make laws, constitutions, and ordinances pertaining . . . to the public state of these colonies . . . [a]nd concerning . . . how they shall bear themselves towards us and our subjects.”Footnote ³⁹ This directive spoke to the reality of Winthrop's fears, and Bradford copied it into his narrative.Footnote ⁴⁰

II

The focus of the armed confrontation at Cape Ann in 1625 was a fishing stage, one of the hundreds of vernacular wooden manufactories used to “make fish” in the early modern Atlantic commercial fishery.Footnote ⁴¹ In many areas, a familiar part of the built environment decades before the first plantations, these platforms and buildings were valuable economic assets and volatile political spaces, as well as key sites for the dissemination of news, gossip, and rumor.Footnote ⁴² Usually they were built on the shoreline by work details from the crews of ships, a group of ten to fifteen workers needing perhaps twenty days to finish their construction. They were fashioned from the nearest sources of wood, using a ship's carpentry tools and supplies. Stages—the term a shorthand for a small complex of structures involved in production—included shacks and tables “for the splitting and salting of fish,” sometimes roofed with “rindes and turfe” against the weather; “flakes” or wooden racks “whereon men dry their fish,” a process also served by “stakes fastened in the ground with rayles on them”; and a platform extending over the water, crowded with barrels or hogsheads and vats used to pack fish for shipment or to make oil.Footnote ⁴³ Fishing boats for use during the season were occasionally pulled up alongside, perhaps left behind the previous year to mark a claim to the stage. In 1623, Christopher Levett observed “convenient stage room” for as many as six ships in a harbor at the Isles of Shoals off Maine and New Hampshire but also the absence of useful timber for their construction.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Cape Ann fishing stage was probably built near the place now known as Stage Head in 1624—according to Bradford, by a combined work force of New Plymouth and Dorchester Company settlers. In addition to the usual components, it included a salt house that reportedly burned down sometime in 1625. Its industrial permanence and more substantial surrounding settlement suggest both the unusual ambition of the project—a departure from the customary seasonal uses of such buildings—and the centrality of plans for the fishery in the plantation economy of the 1620s.Footnote ⁴⁵

Richard Whitbourne's report on the results of his 1615 Admiralty commission, first published in 1620, captured the gang politics and seasonal volatility of these sites, the small hubs or workshops of a highly competitive and lucrative Atlantic commercial enterprise.Footnote ⁴⁶ When “arriving first into a harbor” at the start of a new fishing season, some crews “do rippe and pull down stages . . . and other stages some men have set on fire, for that they must then spend twenty days time for preparing new stages.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Other dividends of first arrival could include theft of salt left behind the previous year—one of the crimes successfully prosecuted against the leaders of the defunct Dorchester Company in the 1635 Court of Requests case. Other competitive tactics included spoiling the vats used for oil production, tearing down flakes, stealing fishing boats or dismantling them for the lumber—indeed ripping down entire stages and taking away the “timber and rayles,” the “rindes and turfe” used to cover rooms, and the stakes and rails for drying—or simply spreading an operation to “take up more room than they need or is fitting to dry their fish” in order to exclude others.Footnote ⁴⁸ Crews were known “to set the standing woods in the country on fire” to forestall stage building, “which in little time burned many thousand acres.”Footnote ⁴⁹ When several ships did set up stages in the same harbor, these tactics shifted to the theft of oil or of bait from nets or from the fishing boats alongside ships in order to damage the next day's fishing. Occupying a shared stage, as the Dorchester Company crew on Cape Ann did in June 1625, did not head the list of abuses, but it had its place in this code of provocative gestures that governed a contested social space closer in practice to a war of interests in a competitive state of nature than to the conventions of neighborliness or the rule of law.

In the earliest report of this particular confrontation, Emmanuel Altham evoked the martial qualities of staging, perhaps reflecting his experience since 1623 as a captain in the Atlantic fishery.Footnote ⁵⁰ An investor in the Company of Adventurers behind the New Plymouth plantation, Altham had made his first voyage to New England in 1623 as captain of the Little James, a pinnace built for the plantation's fishing trade. His letter expressed the views and interests of his friends among the New Plymouth planters, reporting first how two ships, the Hopewell and a Dorchester Company ship, contracted by one Pemberton, who was also an investor in the New Plymouth Company, “both lighted upon one harbor” at Cape Ann, “where the New Plymouth colony kept a stage for their fishing.”Footnote ⁵¹ Like Bradford, Altham never referred to the Dorchester Company by name, and this description of the fishing stage as New Plymouth property reflected a view of the state of affairs on Cape Ann wherein New Plymouth possessed a secure and exclusive patent from the Council for New England for the whole territory. Known as the Sheffield Patent, named for Edmund, Baron Sheffield, the member of the Council for New England who had granted it in 1624, this indenture gave to New Plymouth “a known place there, commonly called Cape Anne,” with its bay and islands, “and free liberty to fish, fowl, hawk, and hunt, truck and trade, in the lands thereabout . . . not now being inhabited by any English.”Footnote ⁵² Of course, the last provision carried the weight of the indenture for the Dorchester Company settlers who had been established on Cape Ann since 1623 under their own patent from the council for New England.Footnote ⁵³ Disregarding the Dorchester interest, Altham related the “seizure” of the fishing stage, under Pemberton's orders, “by a wile” of the Dorchester crew, as the Hopewell proceeded to Plymouth.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a martial style evoking the volatility of stage politics, Altham described New Plymouth's swift descent on the fortified stage, now an enclosure where the Dorchester crew and settlers had barricaded themselves, “who were glad to compound, or else it had cost them the loss of their lives and ship. For the plantation sent twenty men in arms to regain it by land, and our ship [the Hopewell] lay by theirs to fight with them if any onset were given. But they, loving to sleep in a whole skin, laid down their arms and abandoned the plantation's right; otherwise it had cost them some blood, if not their lives.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Altham's account of the incident, written only days after the event, caught the tension and danger of the moment as well as the capacity of this new plantation to mobilize and project force in a manner usually reserved for free states.

If Altham's letter had contained only this dispatch from the Atlantic frontier, it would still illustrate the manuscript circulation of a perspective on English plantation politics ordinarily excluded from public discourse. However, the letter also conveyed Altham's informed opinions on how the organized violence of the stage incident reflected the factional politics of the New Plymouth Company in England. These opinions then circulated within a small Puritan network on the Essex and Hertfordshire border, focused on the Altham family seat at Mark Hall in Latton, twenty miles northeast of London, where Sir Edward resided and where Emmanuel Altham had recruited several local investors for the New Plymouth venture.Footnote ⁵⁶ Altham blamed “Pemberton and his associates” in the company for both the fight on the stage and for the “jar” within the company over its choice in 1624 of John Lyford as the plantation's minister. In the year since his arrival, Altham complained, Lyford and other “agents” of “Pemberton and his factions” had in turn “set factions” among the settlers “and do trouble this poor people . . . which I fear in time will be their overthrow.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Although Altham did not explain this religious conflict in detail, his critique reprised the “knavish” tricks of political popularity by which Pemberton and his “agents,” in pursuit of their private interests and profit, had wrecked the company in England, sown discord among the settlers of its American plantation, and wrongfully seized the plantation's property—indeed, one of its major assets. Caught between factions he characterized as “fools” and “knaves,” Altham lamented his decision to invest in the company and “much more that I persuaded you [Sir Edward] and some other friends to adventure your monies in a business so strange to us all.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Although Altham did not dwell on the religious conflict, beyond an evident sympathy for William Bradford as the capable “governor” of a disciplined settlement under duress, his network and audience in England included preaching ministers in a small but locally significant Puritan religious interest that would have appreciated the dangerous situation described in his letter.Footnote ⁵⁹ Among the godly friends whom Altham routinely named, Thomas Denne, vicar of Latton, signed a petition delivered in 1629 to William Laud, then bishop of London, by a group of beneficed Essex clergy in defense of the “conformist orthodoxy” of Thomas Hooker, a lecturer and schoolmaster in Chelmsford, who had been accused of nonconformity in an information sent to Laud by an opposing group of beneficed Essex clergy. When Hooker's “farewell sermon” evoked a desolated England, unchurched and deserted by God, “fed fat for the slaughter” and given over to “the sword,” both Denne and Altham might have been excused for understanding the desolation and violence of religious faction in Atlantic terms.Footnote ⁶⁰

The interrelationship between matters of conscience in religion and political discourse surfaced more clearly in Bradford's report to the Council for New England in late June 1625. As his narrative of the plantation's history also makes clear, Bradford perceived the council's selection of Lyford to settle the church in New Plymouth, the decision of the New Plymouth Company investors to shift resources to the Dorchester Company in 1625, and the seizure of the fishing stage at Cape Ann as part of a coordinated attack on the spiritual and civil liberties of the New Plymouth settlers.Footnote ⁶¹ Bradford's letter to the council focused on the plantation's liberties of property and trade, with natural law overtones, reflecting his understanding of New Plymouth as a “body politic” from its inception.Footnote ⁶² In an inventory of the dynamics of tyranny, Bradford described the settlers as “left and forsaken of our adventurers,” including mainly the company investors in London, “who will neither supply us with necessaries for our subsistence, nor suffer others that would be willing; neither can we be at liberty to deal with others, or provide for ourselves, but they keep us tied to them, and yet they will be loose from us; they have not only cast us off, but entered into particular course of trading [with the Dorchester Company, among others].”Footnote ⁶³

In pursuit of their “particular” interests and profit, Bradford maintained, this corrupt faction had not only cut off the settlers’ means of subsistence, but had also “by violence, and force, taken at their pleasure, our possession at Cape Ann.” Bradford suggested the natural liberties both of individuals and political societies to provide for their subsistence and to defend themselves and their property from the “violence and force” of a tyrant's “pleasure,” ideas embodied by his view of New Plymouth as a viable “commonwealth.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He was careful to acknowledge the authority of the council in “this place, where we inhabit under your government,” as the 1620 compact had recognized the authority of King James over the “civil body politic” formed by the compact; however, his report also articulated a deeply held belief in the contrast between political society in New Plymouth, where public business was not “done in a corner” but “done in the open view of the country before all men,” and its counterpart in London, where a duplicitous company faction had begun “traducing us with unjust, and dishonest clammours abroad, disturbing our peace at home; and some of them threatening, that if ever we grow to any good estate they will then nip us in the head.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This corrupt, vicious environment of threats and whispering campaigns, joined to the plantation like a diseased limb, naturally infected its morale and threw it into the unnatural state of “not knowing for whom we work, whether friends or enemies.”Footnote ⁶⁶

If the recovery of the New Plymouth property by the organized use of armed force against the Dorchester Company crew and settlers at Cape Ann involved a justified defense of “liberties” against an “enemy,” it remains to delineate the enemy's face more clearly. Bradford's report only hints at John Lyford's disruptive influence during the preceding year, and its significance in bringing about the confrontation with the Dorchester settlers. In his narrative, these form part of a single disturbance of the peace in the body politic during 1624 and 1625, stemming from the company's earlier decision in 1623 to admit a distinct class of settlers as “particulars,” who “did not belong to the general body” but “were to have lands assigned them and be for themselves yet . . . subject to the general government.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In a variant of the publicity narrative, Bradford described how by early 1624 some of these “particulars . . . began privately to nourish a faction” that was “privy to a strong faction . . . among the Adventurers in England,” and “by their private whispering, they drew some of the weaker sort of the company to their side and so filled them with discontent,” culminating in a formal list of religious and civil grievances presented to the company in London. In a vast transatlantic conspiracy, drawing the public interest into its dark corners, the “particulars” also assured themselves of “such friends as would carry all” in matters of supply—James Sherley, a sympathetic investor in the company, complained to Bradford of “some amongst us which undoubtedly aim more at their own private ends than the general good” in company debates—an intersection of political faction and political economy calculated to carry the petition and to subordinate the subsistence and trade of the plantation to their purposes.Footnote ⁶⁸

On his arrival aboard the Charity in 1624, John Lyford, “the preacher,” walked into the middle of this intersection. “An honest plain man, though none of the most eminent and rare,” he was part of a religious compromise negotiated by the company and by Robert Cushman and Edward Winslow, the agents for the plantation in London.Footnote ⁶⁹ During a brief rapprochement between the factions, it appeared that Lyford might receive the calling to serve as the settlement's minister and end the “sacramental drought.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Bitter controversy flared again when he refused to renounce his calling by the laity in the English church, refusing the step beyond renunciation of “antichristian” episcopacy to the denial of the Church of England as a true church.Footnote ⁷¹

By late June or July 1624, a tense atmosphere prevailed, compounded by fear and paranoia. In the course of surveillance that included searches and the seizure of letters, Bradford and his assistants discovered one of the “confederates” with a letter stating that a “Mr. Oldham and Mr. Lyford intended a reformation in church and commonwealth,” as well as a public schism in the church under Lyford's leadership. Bradford summoned a court of the whole settlement.Footnote ⁷² After examination and trial on charges of false confession, schism, corrupt administration of the sacraments by Lyford's “episcopal calling,” and other abuses of the church, both Lyford and Oldham were convicted and banished from New Plymouth.Footnote ⁷³ Antichrist, the eternal “enemy,” had been revealed in the machinations of faction and in Lyford's manifold sins, but the grand design had transatlantic geopolitical scope, and defense of the New Plymouth church did not end the threat.

In the aftermath of this “storm,” Bradford discerned “sundry sad effects,” including the effective dissolution of the New Plymouth Company, described in his narrative in terms borrowed from his report to the Council for New England following the descent on the fishing stage. In 1625, the “greatest part” of the company's investors “wholly deserted the colony in regard of any further supply or care of their subsistence. And not only so, but some of Lyford's and Oldham's friends and their adherents set out a ship on fishing on their own account, and getting the start of the ships that came to the plantation, they took away their stage and other necessary provisions that they had made for fishing at Cape Ann the year before, at their great charge, and would not restore the same, except they would fight for it.”Footnote ⁷⁴

After setting the scene more or less as Altham described it, Bradford remained silent on the decision to send the Hopewell and an armed force under Miles Standish to reclaim the stage, offering only a garbled account of his “sen[ding] some planters to help the fishermen build a new [stage], and so let[ting] them keep it.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In other words, Bradford asserted the same liberties of property in the narrative as in the report, but he omitted the mobilization in defense of them, perhaps appreciating in retrospect the invalidity or at least the weakness of the New Plymouth patent on Cape Ann, which recast his own actions and those of his soldiers as trespass and arbitrary use of force.

However, other records shed additional light on the decision and its meaning. According to Thomas Morton, following his banishment, Lyford had moved only a few miles north of New Plymouth to the “Wessaguscus shore” and “stayed at Massachusetts,” where he “freely executed his office”—meaning that he administered the sacraments to the scattering of settlers there, including “particulars” who had followed him from New Plymouth, “and preached every lord's day . . . with the blessing of god . . . in an honest and laudable manner.”Footnote ⁷⁶ William Hubbard elaborated how Roger Conant, one of the “particulars” who had “lately removed out of New Plymouth out of dislike for their principles of rigid separation,” took over in 1625 “the managing and government of all [Dorchester Company] affairs at Cape Anne” through the offices of John White and Conant's brother John, an investor in the company. The two men “likewise invited Mr. Lyford, lately dismissed from Plymouth, to be the minister of the place.” Lyford “accepted and came along with Mr. [Roger] Conant” from Nantasket, later Hull, where Morton's account had left Lyford.Footnote ⁷⁷ These later accounts suggest that in 1625 the Dorchester Company established a “church and commonwealth” at Cape Ann directly opposed to the fundamental principles of the “body politic” at New Plymouth, recruiting its ecclesiastical and civil officers from the latter's disgruntled exiles. As threats to religious liberties and to civil liberties of property formed two sides of conventional Puritan notions of despotism,Footnote ⁷⁸ both the impulse and the logic of Bradford's decision to use armed force become clearer, helping to explain both how the seizure of the fishing stage by New Plymouth's religious enemies led to the mobilization of Standish's expedition and also why the appearance of the soldiers prompted the reciprocal force of the barricade on the stage. When threatened by “tyrants” or by “traitors and rebels,” the English religious principles established during the 1620s as Atlantic “body politics” responded and mobilized in the manner of free states.Footnote ⁷⁹

The only eyewitness account of the confrontation was that set down in a letter from David Thomson to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, an influential force on the Council for New England. Thomson's account was part of a general report on the state of affairs in New England, concluding with a prescription for governance that anticipated the 1634 commission for plantations.Footnote ⁸⁰ A trusted servant in council business, Thomson had become a patentee in 1622, licensed to transport settlers to New England, and he spent much of the next six years using an extensive transatlantic network to build up and secure his interest there; Morton described him as “a Scottish gentleman” of “good judgement,” a scholar and traveler “diligent in taking notice,” knowledgeable and “conversant with the natives of New England.”Footnote ⁸¹ In terms of Thomson's understanding of the nature and scope of the “public” served by his report, he approved Morton's conclusion “that the original of [these natives] may be well conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium,” suggesting a broad and inclusive vision of Atlantic political society.Footnote ⁸² Unlike most of the current English public discourse on ethnicity, which tended to follow Mosaic history in its ethnic theology, this account made use of a common English “racial myth” to join the English and native American peoples as descendants of a single Trojan race, at least implying the existence of a common public interest in the governance of New England.Footnote ⁸³ Although much of Thomson's property lay on the Piscataqua River, his patent also included the island in Boston Harbor that bears his name; his presence at Cape Ann in early June 1625 may be explained by news of ships there, mundane conduits of a transatlantic correspondence.Footnote ⁸⁴

Thomson wrote his report “to ansere yore honore's expectacon and performe my dutifull promise,” and his survey included an “ex[h]i[bitio]n of graye marbel I found in this countrie near to Naemkeek [Salem] . . . between Cape Anne and the Messachusets” as tangible evidence of New England's noble promise.Footnote ⁸⁵ He inserted his account of the violence at Cape Ann as evidence to support a systemic analysis of the dysfunction in the Atlantic political economy. “Undiscreet and unskillfull gouveernores” and “promiscuous trading, as well unfree as free” led the “infinit abuses and vile enormities” that had caused Massachusetts to “cast forth two plantacons” since Thomson's arrival in New England in 1622, “the [third] upon yielding his last breath, the fourth [at Cape Ann] hopeful.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Using the terms “unfree” and “free,” Thomson described a total system of trade, including the “unfree” practices of unlicensed traders as well as the “free” traffic of those licensed to trade by the Council of New England, and its “promiscuous” trends, which had led to a sixfold inflation in the native market for the goods of licensed traders, a related decline in Atlantic projects and voyages because of diminished profits, and an increasingly desperate condition among settlers deprived of supply both in “necessities” and “more people” to build their plantations. In this way, disorderly trade led to more disorderly trade, as both settlers and interlopers began to sell “peeces, pistols, swords, powder, and shott” to the natives, notwithstanding the 1622 royal proclamation against this practice.Footnote ⁸⁷ Indeed, the natives had “growen so expert” in the use of these firearms “that they exceed[ed] most of the English.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Thomson identified this impact of “disorderly” trade on the population of settlers as a fundamental problem, asking Arundel to solicit Charles I's “pleasure of the continuance of us here [in New England], which is impossible without more people, [f]or the salvages increasses daylie, [while] we diminish rather then otherwayes.”Footnote ⁸⁹

An inseparable cause of the dysfunction, which Thomson used the violence at Cape Ann to illustrate, involved a failure of political leadership in the plantations, the “undiscreet and unskillfull gouveernores” being “lyke amongst us to undoe all.” Thomson drew on the conventional metaphor of “body politics,” a common trope in the discourse of publicity and popularity, to describe the New England settlements as a political monstrosity, “lyke a bodie without a head, none to rule us, none to minister justice, infinit greevances amongst us, none to redresse, especiallie amongst the Brownists of Newplymouth.”Footnote ⁹⁰ His reference to New Plymouth settlers as “Brownists” or seditious sectarians, who were particularly egregious in their disorderly politics, echoed John Oldham's 1624 verbal attack on Lyford's enemies as “traitors and rebels.”Footnote ⁹¹ It also reprised a late Tudor and early Stuart trope of Protestant religious nonconformity as a form of popular “sedition,” the “multitude” unleashed to pull down the church.Footnote ⁹² Under the circumstances, Thomson “often called to mynd the speeches used in yore Honor's chamber, speaking of the South Colonie [Virginia], a swoord put in a madmans hand, a chylds hand, or a foolles hand is dangerous. What can be expected, that a rude, ignorant mechanicke can doe with a sharpe swoord of justice. The complaints amongst them are soe many that to particularise would be tedious to your Honor.”

However, Thomson could not forebear mentioning “how that this yeere there hardlie escaped great murder and bloodshed at Cape Anne for Stage Roome,” for “these are the fruits of unrulie multitudes,” with both parties to the dispute incapable of governing themselves and therefore unqualified to govern others: “16 or 17 muskatars came from Newplymouth. Both parties seemed not only resolute but desperat. By good fortune, I was there accidently and used many arguments on both sydes to dissuade such ungodlie, violent, and unansoreable proceedings. The day and tyme, yea place appointed to fight on shoare. Barricades and bulwerkes made. Shippes readie not to faylle to play their parts.”Footnote ⁹³

The range of meanings attributed to this organized violence in the three accounts of Bradford, Altham, and Thomson indicates the complex Atlantic entanglements that formed a common public of English kingdom and plantations during the 1620s. At the same time, the circulation in manuscript of news and perspectives that seldom broke the surface in print also helps to delineate the circles and networks that were informed about a capacity for violent, ideologically charged conflict in English political culture belied by its relative absence in England, where the Stuart dynastic state maintained its effective monopoly of the organized use of force. The accounts suggest a broad spectrum of meanings associated with such violence in the Atlantic. Emmanuel Altham more than the others parsed the news as yet more evidence of the volatility and disorder of Atlantic fishing stages, a major obstacle to the successful building up of the commercial fishery in the plantations and a justification for the actions of New Plymouth in defense of both its property and the public interest.Footnote ⁹⁴ On the stage itself, Bradford, for New Plymouth, and the Dorchester Company settlers, only known from his report and other indirect sources, experienced the fight as part of an ideological war between Puritans and separatists—against violent “traitors and rebels” whose disloyalty to church and king annulled any claim to the property in dispute; against servants of the tyrannical “episcopal enemy,” whose assault on property merely echoed a more dangerous attack on liberties of conscience. In literally stepping between these armed camps, Thomson lamented the inevitably violent consequences of this governance by “unrulie multitudes.” To address the dysfunction and restore order, he proposed that “all the land plantacons in the countrie should be forced to drawe together to live in the Messachusets . . . [b]ut those Brownists of New Plymouth to continue where they are, for as they desyre the societie of none but such as are of their own profession, so I am assured none regards them or their fellowship.”Footnote ⁹⁵ By appointment of the crown, this consolidated plantation would have one “g[e]n[er]all gouvernore,” in temperament “discreete,” and “experienced” in plantation government, “a fitt instrument” to rule such of “the carelessest people of all the rest” as “fishermen,” who were “aptest to quarrell with the salvages and to steale . . . from them.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Royal authority and a monarchic power of command would bring order to the “unrulie” and inspire a true fear of divine wrath in the “Brownists” banished in their turn from the remodeled plantation, like “traitors and rebels” unfit for inclusion in a commonwealth.

III

In shifting from these local attempts to make sense of the fight for the Cape Ann stage to questions of the issue's broader significance, it has already become evident that the writers of the letters and reports addressed themselves to an Atlantic audience of considerable authority, power, and influence, including officers of the royal council and the Council for New England as well as Church of England ministers and local gentry. Although Emmanuel Altham's letters to his brother Sir Edward in the early 1620s easily disappear in “the transatlantic flow of information” across the seventeenth century, they also included what amounted to an investment report intended for the several neighbors Altham had induced to take part in the Atlantic project. They thereby joined a semipublic manuscript discourse on its health that included news of the violence at Cape Ann and New Plymouth company factions.Footnote ⁹⁷ More obviously, the reports of William Bradford and David Thomson, encompassing the Privy Council and the Council for New England, not only situated themselves within a political discourse that defined the morality of public acts in ideological terms but also did this in a way calculated to mobilize support for specific positions regarding English policy in the plantations. This evidence of Atlantic engagement in the English public politics of the 1620s has value in itself while raising questions about the impact of this involvement during the late 1620s and 1630s. If crown officers in England had received credible reports of organized violence in the plantations arising from the discursive forces of “tyranny,” “liberty,” “faction,” and “unrulie multitudes,” in what ways did their subsequent statements, decisions, and actions suggest that these reports had registered?

Before turning to the problem of English imperial practices during the decade or so before the Civil War, it remains to consider the significance of this evidence and its informal Atlantic political discourse for English popular politics during the 1620s. A current historical narrative of English popular politics, defined in insular rather than Atlantic terms, relates an episodic “politicization” of conflict—or the translation of local grievances into ideological terms—during the later 1620s and 1630s, rapidly escalating after 1640 into the “mobilization of an armed citizenry” in 1642 based largely on the Protestation.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet the beginnings of this narrative remain less clear than that of the popular political capacity for organized violence during the 1640s. In this context, the indication that evidence of this capacity from the Atlantic plantations circulated in manuscript as early as 1625 acquires greater meaning, especially when considered relative to the dynamics of London's Protestant political culture.

In 1627, the contentious issues of what constituted a true church, and whether or not the Church of England met the qualifications, helped to define the complex spectrum of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” in the diffuse subculture of the Puritan “underground” in London, whose conferences and conventicles form a key site for historians of politicization, including the process of radicalization, during the decades before the Civil War.Footnote ⁹⁹ On the Atlantic margins of English political society, however, as early as 1624, opinions on this subject had escaped the confines of ephemeral ecclesiological debates and assumed political form, and in 1625 demonstrated a capacity for organized violence usually reserved to free states. As reports of this capacity and its underlying political dynamics circulated during the later 1620s, an awareness of the resulting political monstrosity, this “bodie without a head,” conjured the unnatural excesses of popular mobilization in 1642 and, in its confrontation of Puritans and separatists, offered a preview of the “almost inexplicable horrors” of armed Anabaptism in 1646.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

When construed in terms of this semipublic Atlantic political discourse, the evidence of organized violence in English plantations during the 1620s and 1630s tends to confirm the existence of a principled popular politics, a moral calculus of public virtue common to ordinary social actors, incorporating key principles concerning the security of property, religious liberties, and the king's law—as well as an awareness of this politics and its capacity for armed violence among many crown officers in England—at least fifteen years before the political crisis of the early 1640s, a date often taken as their first major public demonstration. This perspective offers new angles on at least three Atlantic projects of the late 1620s and 1630s. The shift from plantation by patent under the Council for New England to planation by royal charter in 1629, as part of the Massachusetts Bay Company project, addressed known problems of Atlantic “disorder” by using such familiar charter devices as designated offices and officers to remove the “sharpe swoord of justice” from the hand of the “rude, ignorant mechanicke” and to establish the governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England as “one body corporate and politique” under the crown, empowered under its seal to administer justice and possess property as “any other corporation or body politique of this our realme of England may lawfully doe.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In other words, the devolved sovereignty conveyed by royal charter bound the new plantation to the crown, as it did the scores of English boroughs and other corporate bodies essential to the “good government” of the kingdom. David Thomson complained to Arundel that English settlers had “scoft” at Robert Gorges, “the gouvernore and his authoritie” in 1624, “because he wanted power.”Footnote ¹⁰² In 1629, Charles I and his councilors attempted to bring the devolved sovereign power of English corporations to bear on this problem of “unrulie multitudes.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Although in its local execution the Massachusetts Bay project shifted in radical Protestant and republican directions during the 1630s, its establishment in 1629 endeavored to address the problems of Atlantic “popularity,” “disorder,” and violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

This crown and conciliar interest in putting a head on the body politic did not confine its attentions to the instruments of plantation. During the late 1620s and 1630s, lines of authority from the prerogative and equity courts at Whitehall—especially from the Courts of Admiralty and Requests—began to constrain the “promiscuous trading, as well unfree as free” that Thomson had lamented in 1625. Under the active direction of Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester, formerly lord president of the Privy Council and Charles I's lord privy seal from 1628, the Court of Requests acquired “such repute” that its volume of business rivaled that of Chancery, including Atlantic cases that reflected Manchester's experience as a commercial investor and as president of the Virginia Commission in 1624.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Manchester presided over the final settlement of the Dorchester Company's financial troubles between 1635 and 1637, when the Court of Requests ruled in favor of Henry Beale and Peter Lennarts, London merchants and owners of the Zouch Phoenix, a ship licensed for the fishing trade in 1624 and 1625, in a complaint demanding compensation for interference in lawful trade and theft of property by Dorchester Company agents at Cape Ann. The case reprised the dysfunction referred to in Altham's letter as well as Thomson's report, revealing the casual lawlessness of the fishing stage in the case documents’ accounts of stolen shallops and purloined salt, supplies the Zouch Phoenix crew had installed on an island in Cape Ann's harbor ahead of the 1625 fishing season. Although the Dorchester Company had dissolved by 1627, the court imposed a fine for the thefts of £191 on John White and his surviving partners, a clear statement of the crown's equity jurisdiction in the regulation of trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Viewed beside the Atlantic transformations that resulted from the Civil War and Revolution, the evidence of this public response to the “unrulie multitudes” of the 1620s is understated, but it suffices to indicate that English political society had an Atlantic life during the 1620s and 1630s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ If its dynamics often lay submerged in this subtle interplay of “publicity” and “popularity” in manuscript reports and letters, they did not conceal a dangerous volatility and capacity for civil violence. In light of this evidence, the establishment in 1634 of the royal commission for “regulating plantations,” including the earls of Manchester and Arundel as well as other privy councilors, takes on greater significance as the culminating project in a broader campaign to enlist “sound discretions” and “provident circumspection” for the service of “faith and justice” in the Atlantic body politic, effectively establishing a prerogative court for the plantations. The commission spoke directly to the concerns of the 1620s in its emphasis on adjudicating “how [the settlers and their leaders] shall bear themselves towards us and our subjects” . . . “by unjust possession or usurpation or one against another making grievance or in rebellion against us,” and the initiative even included the appointment in 1635 of David Thomson's model of a governor general, John Mason, as vice admiral of New England.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Although this crown and conciliar project to fully embody an Atlantic political society lost momentum amid the multilateral demands on the regime during the late 1630s and 1640s, to separate the campaign against “unrulie multitudes” from the general crisis would overlook their fundamental continuities. As the evidence of organized violence has suggested, English political society in the Atlantic during the 1620s and 1630s articulated precisely, and sometimes more acutely, many of the same ideological, discursive, and factional conflicts that largely caused and certainly fueled the civil wars in the British Isles. To encounter the violence of these divisions in manuscript reports as early as 1625 is to see early Stuart political society as a transatlantic phenomenon, to place its later crisis in a longer temporal frame, and to understand the motives and decisions of its people as more informed than is conventionally recognized by an awareness of the destructive and fatal consequences of the conflict.Footnote ¹⁰⁹