In 1618 the Puritan minister Lewis Hughes saw a blazing star. ‘As soone as I saw it, being then in the Sommer Islands (or The Bermudas)’, Hughes recalled, he was convinced that it was ‘a speciall signe and token that Christ will give free passage unto the preaching of the Gospel, to dispel … the errours, heresies, superstition and Idolatrie of the Church of Rome’.Footnote 1 Hughes's cosmic vision is characteristic of his prophetical narratives, which include some of the most graphic and gruesome accounts of divine judgement in the seventeenth century. Yet Hughes's prodigy also provides a point of entry into an aspect of Puritan colonisation that has largely gone unnoticed in the historiography of British settlement in the Atlantic and in narratives of the wider European Reformation. It represents a bold vision for a universal Protestant Church which would be extended to the Atlantic world. Transcending British Protestantism, this island colony closely identified with reformed traditions on the European continent.
Colonial British America has long been characterised by the model of New England Puritanism. Central to this example is flight from persecution under the Church of England's increasing measures to impose conformity during the late 1620s and '30s.Footnote 2 Having rejected the episcopal authority of the Church of England, these Puritans established new churches that were grounded on the principle of autonomous congregations. Historians have since contextualised New England religion and society in a broader Judeo-Christian and European (albeit mostly English) tradition.Footnote 3 None the less, it remains a symbol of Americanisation and the seedbed of the ‘Exceptionalism’ thesis, that America was destined to play a special and divinely appointed role. Whilst leading New England Puritan divines claimed that they belonged to a broader Reformed tradition and denied that they were the authors of innovation, there was a widespread suspicion among contemporaries that the New Englanders set themselves above the Church of England as well as the continental Reformed Churches. Self-governed and self-consciously determined to erect a ‘city upon a hill’, they admittedly set about establishing a congregational institution that pushed reformation further than their brethren in Britain and continental Europe.Footnote 4
Karen Kupperman has challenged the notion of New England as the sole Atlantic Puritan model. At the same time that Puritans migrated to New England, they embarked on another project to colonise Providence Island. Strategically located near the coast of Nicaragua, as if a gateway to the Caribbean, Providence Island promised to serve as a base to challenge the Spanish monopoly in the West Indies.Footnote 5 Here, in the ‘Caribbean cockpit’, Puritans were caught in the middle of continental European rivalry and confessional conflict. This placed the British Atlantic into the broader European context which had long been missing from earlier accounts. However, notwithstanding its ambitions to challenge the Spanish Empire, Providence Island emerged as an essentially English experiment. Its churches were predominantly understood with reference to English ecclesiology with few direct ties to reformed Protestant Churches on the continent. Despite the presence of some Presbyterians in these experiments, the inclination toward ‘independence’ of the leading ministers in both New England and Providence Island (for example Hope Sherrard) may explain why, if they appear at all in the broader surveys of ‘International Calvinism’, they are often understood (at least as far as their ecclesiology is concerned) as English anomalies, as splinters and offshoots, and detached from European reform.Footnote 6
But just how exceptional and English was Puritanism in the Atlantic? After rigorous revision, it has neither appeared to be as unique, nor as distinctively English, as historians previously maintained. J. H. Elliott's comparison of the Spanish and British Empires in the New World identified parallels between Catholic and Protestant visions for fulfilling the Great Commission.Footnote 7 This approach was further developed by Jorge Cañizares-Esquerra in his Puritan conquistadors.Footnote 8 Here Cañizares-Esquerra argued for a common religious culture among Spanish and New England settlers who engaged in a shared discourse of spiritual cultivation. They employed the same religious justification for colonisation. However, by focusing on the New England Puritan experience, Cañizares-Esquerra's study leaves room to explore alternative models further south in the island colonies. Furthermore, by drawing comparisons with European Catholic counterparts, it leaves unanswered the question of how far English settlers drew inspiration from continental Protestantism.Footnote 9 Not all scholars are convinced that such religious justifications carried weight in British colonisation. But even among those sceptical of religious motivations, European precedents are believed to have played a central role. Notwithstanding the English origins of British imperial activity,Footnote 10 David Armitage has argued for the importance of classical antiquity in inspiring British colonisation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote 11
If British colonists have been Iberianised on the one hand and classically humanised on the other, little attempt has been made systematically to explore their reception of European Protestant reform. Using the early Bermudan Church as a case study, this article explores how some British colonists identified closely with Protestants in France, the Netherlands and especially Geneva.Footnote 12 The Bermudan Church incorporated elements of reformed liturgies into its own which appeared in neither the Scottish nor the English Puritan liturgies. It enforced a strict reformation of manners on the island. It also held tenaciously to the concept of a universal ecclesiastical society, which it had inherited from European reformers. This provides an alternative ideological foundation for the establishment of British America to theories of empire and economic opportunism. It expands the boundaries of British settlement in the New World by introducing ecclesiastical ties that stretched across the North Sea, the English Channel and the Atlantic.
I
In 1609 the Somers-Gates expedition set out for Virginia, but famously became shipwrecked on Bermuda. A permanent British plantation was soon established on the island in 1612 as a joint stock of the Virginia Company. Fifty passengers, including the first minister on the island, George Keith, arrived on the Plough that same year.Footnote 13 This was nearly two decades before the mass Puritan exodus to New England and Providence Island, and even before the rise of congregational thought among Puritans in England. The participation of Scottish ministers in the plantation may have played a role in introducing a more reformed character into the Bermudan Church. Yet Bermuda's liturgies shared even closer ecclesiological ties with reformed Churches in continental Europe than with either the Scottish Kirk or the most earnest English advocates for Presbyterian reform in the late sixteenth century. Nor should the demographics of the island be characterised as overwhelmingly Scots. Of the 1,500 settlers who had colonised Bermuda by 1622, most were English.Footnote 14
Yet Bermuda provides a striking contrast to the New England Puritan settlement in both its economic and religious organisation. Pioneering the English cultivation of tobacco in the New World, Bermuda exported more tobacco during its early years than Virginia. Whilst tobacco dominated Bermuda's trade, the islanders limited their dependence on imports by raising livestock and poultry, and planting corn, potatoes and fruit trees.Footnote 15 In 1624 the Virginia Company was replaced by Bermuda's own joint stock company comprised of investors in the island's tobacco trade. Although governed from London by its shareholders, Bermuda was also organised locally by a governor and council. The colony was divided up into districts called ‘Tribes’ which were named after the Company's shareholders. The council's membership included overseers and ministers from each tribe along with the sheriff and secretary. The Company, based in London, monitored government and trade in the island through regular correspondence with the governor and council.Footnote 16
However, the religious policy of the plantation was left relatively ambiguous in the Company's charter, which generally required the ‘true worship of Almighty God, Christian peace and civil quietness’. Secondly it stipulated the administration of ‘the oaths of supremacy and allegiance’.Footnote 17 The Oath of Supremacy asserted the crown's authority over spirituals and affirmed King James vi and i as supreme governor of the Church of England. It had been first used by Henry viii to establish autonomy from the Church of Rome and to secure the crown's religious authority within England. The Oath of Allegiance, by contrast, was instituted as a response to the English Catholic conspiracy to blow up King James vi and i and the two English houses of parliament with gunpowder in 1605. It required an affirmation of loyalty to the crown and denial of papal powers to depose the king. At their most basic level, these oaths were measures of political loyalty when administered to religious discontents. To deny the king's supremacy, according to the governor of the island, Nathaniel Butler, was to ‘mainteyn[e] the Popes, or any other forraigne princes authoritie’.Footnote 18 Ambiguity remained over how far the administration of the oaths monitored religious nonconformity. By leaving this question unresolved, Bermuda's company charter required conformity at its bare minimum.
Bermuda's remote location also undoubtedly contributed to the freedom that the colony exercised in its ecclesiastical organisation. Thus, whilst claiming allegiance to the Royal Supremacy and the Church of England, Lewis Hughes reported in 1617 to Nathaniel Rich, an Adventurer who backed the plantation, that ‘The booke of common prayer, I use it not at all.’Footnote 19 However, to exercise such liberty in Bermuda was not altogether to renounce the English liturgy. When pressed on his nonconformity by Rich in 1618, Hughes affirmed that it was his ‘heartie praier to Almightie God that it would please his holy Majestie so to guide me with his holy spirit as in all things I may do his will’. He explained that he did not ‘refraine from using’ the Book of Common Prayer ‘in contempt of it, but because it is better for us to pray according to our necessities, rather than to tie our selves to sett praiers’.Footnote 20 Bermuda thus exercised relative autonomy from the Church of England in the first several decades of its establishment whilst expressing loyalty to it, even if almost entirely nominally.
That the churches in Bermuda were organised according to the division of the islands into ‘tribes’ contributed to its Genevan character. These tribes were quickly adapted into a presbyterian model of government by ministers and overseers in each tribe. Thus, at the same time as the Bermuda Church identified with the Church of England, it closely followed the pattern of some of the Reformed Churches on the continent. This can be explained in part by the nature of the island itself, which had some of the characteristics of Geneva in its early reform both in the diversity and high influx of inhabitants and in its strategic location. When Governor Nathaniel Butler arrived in 1619 he found that the two ministers on the island agreed in their criticism of the Book of Common Prayer, but were divided over alternative liturgical forms, particularly in the administration of the Lord's supper and marriage. The Governor resolved the disagreement by introducing the presbyterian liturgy ‘used in the Ilands of Garnesey and Jarsye’.Footnote 21 Translating the liturgy out of French himself, Butler boasted about his settlement for religious uniformity in his History of the Bermudas. Not only did he introduce a liturgy that was acceptable to both ministers, but he also believed that he might avoid offending James vi and i, since it was already used in ‘his maiesties dominions, and by him tollorated’.Footnote 22 Yet Butler adds another explanation for instituting the liturgy which directly associated the Bermudan Church's practices with the reformed Churches in mainland Europe. As he put it, their liturgy would be ‘one and the very same with that of the French Protestants, those of the United Provinces, and even Geneva itself’.Footnote 23
Even before Butler's arrival, Lewis Hughes penned an alternative liturgy which he had already been using for several years. Hughes's liturgy is of interest not least because of his later attack on the Book of Common Prayer; it became a bestseller in England in 1640, and appeared in several editions under the title, Certaine grievances. Footnote 24 Hughes made strenuous efforts to print his liturgy and put it into practice in Bermuda,Footnote 25 though it never made it to print and has scarcely received any scholarly attention. A closer scrutiny of Hughes's manuscript reveals that it incorporated aspects of the Book of Common Prayer that resembled European reformed liturgies, particularly Calvin's liturgy in Strasbourg and Geneva. However, these never featured in the Scottish and English forms of prayer adapted from the English exile congregation in Geneva. Hughes's liturgy firstly departed from the Scottish Book of Common Prayer and the English Puritan Booke of the Forme of Common Prayer, by including the reading of the Ten Commandments, which reflected Calvin's emphasis on the third use of the law as a moral guide. Even the Westminster Assembly's later Directory for worship omitted the reading of the Decalogue. Yet, Calvin's Genevan Form of church prayers in 1542 incorporated the singing of the first table of the Ten Commandments, and his Strasbourg Liturgy, of 1545, completed the second table in song. The Decalogue was also recited in the Book of Common Prayer in the administration of communion.
Hughes's liturgy further departed from other Scottish and English Puritan liturgies by reading the Articles of the Christian Faith (summed up in the Apostles' Creed) and by following the sermon with prayer concluding with the Lord's Prayer. The Articles of Faith and the Lord's Prayer were included neither in the Scottish nor in the Elizabethan Puritan liturgies, though the Lord's Prayer was later adopted in the Westminster Directory. These were routine in the Book of Common Prayer and also similar to the Geneva Liturgy in which the Lord's Prayer was recited or paraphrased by the minister, and the Articles of Faith recited by communicants before the celebration of the Lord's supper.Footnote 26 However, by reciting both the Articles and the Lord's Prayer, even in the absence of communion, Hughes's liturgy appears to approach an ante-communion rite in the ordinary worship of the Bermudan Church, like the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 27 Having already incorporated the Articles, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer into the regular service, Hughes omitted the general exhortation before communion, which appeared in the Geneva, Scottish and English Puritan forms for administering the Lord's supper. Bermuda's remote location explains how Hughes's adaptations could produce a unique liturgy which incorporated elements of English liturgy, whilst also following continental European reform. It compares to the religious experience of those islands under English dominion, such as the Channel Islands, which likewise enjoyed relative freedom in religious observance.Footnote 28
Practical and pastoral reasons may also explain Hughes's liturgical additions. Bermuda's inhabitants were unlike the self-selected godly who made up the bulk of initial New England and Providence Island inhabitants. It was comprised of only a few godly clergy, a handful of elites, a small group of pious laity and increasing numbers of rag-tag inhabitants, plucked off the streets and rounded up out of Newgate and Bridewell prisons and hospitals. These inhabitants urgently needed instruction. Furthermore, there were no natives on the island, which left Hughes fully devoted to the task of teaching and catechising the ignorant:
Many poore boyes and girles, (taken vp, out of the streetes, out of Newgate and Bridewell and the Hospitals) were sent to the Sommers Ilands, where they were brought vp in ignorance like Heathen, so as, when they became men and women, and were married, and had children, they were not able to bring vp their children in the Christian Faith: therefore, to bring such to haue some care of themselues and of their children, I gaue out, that I would not baptise their children unlesse the parents were able to yield some reckoning of their Faith, or at least, rehearse the Articles without booke.Footnote 29
The Channel Islands liturgy which became the standard in Bermuda was a more simplified form, and would have allowed some room for Hughes to incorporate elements from his own liturgy. In any case, it required communicants to be catechised, and well versed in the Lord's Prayer, the Articles and the Ten Commandments. The Liturgy additionally stated that ‘they shall also abjure the Pope, the masse, and all superstition and Idolatry’.
II
Alongside religious instruction, Bermuda's mixed profile demanded rigorous discipline for civilising its inhabitants. Hughes was impressed with godly gains in the colony during the first few years of his ministry. He no doubt intended to attract more pious settlers by advertising in 1615 that ‘idle persons, and such as are giuen to filching, doe liue here in great misery: so also doe all whorish women in great disgrace, hated and loathed of all honest people’.Footnote 30 Hughes also sent optimistic reports about the prospect of establishing a godly island in his early letters to Nathaniel Rich. In 1617 he noted that ‘The people heare are very tractable.’Footnote 31 Moreover, Hughes continued, ‘I thank God we have found none obstinate, but all willing and readie to obey our Admonitions.’Footnote 32 By this time, Hughes had managed to incorporate a presbyterian model of church government, complete with four ruling elders, all of which he reported to Rich in 1617.Footnote 33
Despite the institution of this form of ecclesiastical government, Hughes lamented in 1618 that ‘the elders here are weake men’. He complained that they ‘medle with noe bodie without me, neither do I with them medle with any that are too obstinate and stout for us’.Footnote 34 By 1619 Hughes was desperate for reinforcement. He urged Nathaniel Rich, ‘for God sake do what you can to send hither godly preachers, before sinne hath got the upper hand’.Footnote 35 A hurricane which brought destruction in 1619 was a sure sign of divine judgment, not only against the colonists, but also against the Adventurers for being more concerned with their own profit than with securing more preachers for the plantation.Footnote 36
Hughes's continual resort to threats of divine judgment was not only reflective of his strong Calvinist view of providence, but also indicative of his dependence on alternative forms of censure in the relative absence of reinforcement by other elders. He employed this form of admonition even after his return to England, writing to the islanders that ‘the fearefull Iudgements and tokens of Gods wrath doe serve to admonish all, both men and women, young and old, poore and rich’.Footnote 37 Among his colourful accounts was his later narration in the mid-seventeenth century:
a women in Creed-Church Parish sleeping in Sermon-time, was wakened by one Mrs. Clark, an honest woman fearing God … she being therewith awakened, did in wrathfull manner speak, saying, You bold drunken slut, do you kick me? With many other uncivill speeches … she did curse her … and suddenly did fall down dead, and (as on that took notice of it saith) her tongue did turn black.Footnote 38
Yet Hughes was not without help in his ambitious moral reform. Furthermore, it is well known that Puritan complaint literature on its own is not always an accurate measure of moral decay. Civil officers on the island in theory supported the enforcement of ecclesiastical laws. Indeed, in its early colonial years the Bermudan Church failed to establish an ecclesiastical court and ecclesiastical misdemeanours were thus dealt with by the council, which was comprised of both civil officers and, by ordinance, all clergyman on the island. Here, in the peculiar situation in Bermuda, there was an even more extreme fusion of ecclesiastical and civil magistracy than in Geneva, akin to Zürich. When the godly new governor Nathaniel Butler arrived in 1619, ecclesiastical and civil magistrates worked in almost perfect harmony.Footnote 39 The precise form and role of these officers on the island tended to shift and it appears that Butler took some steps to grant a measure of independence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction (through the creation of a vestry), but again, the Bermuda churches tended to function as a single parish from their oversight by a single council.
In any case, in the early years of the settlement, the ministers refrained from pronouncing the sentence of excommunication until men and women were better instructed.Footnote 40 They more frequently relied on a form of suspension from the Lord's supper, in which they declared a person infamous. Under this censure, the delinquent faced both ecclesiastical and secular punishments: he took the ‘meanest’ place in the church in addition to deprivation of any ‘office of dignity’, ‘double’ of any punishment if found violating the law, and imprisonment for six days if deviant, until found repentant.Footnote 41
Backed by the secular arm, the clergy's expectations for maintaining the moral law as set out in the Decalogue were rigidly enforced to the utmost standard. The council established that all inhabitants were required to attend service and to ‘behave themselves with all decency and reverence, under penalty’.Footnote 42 Judith Bayley, for instance, was brought before the assizes in 1616 for ‘disturb[ing] the congregation in tyme of Divine service by raylings miscallings and all other uncivill speeches in Pembroke tribe church’.Footnote 43 Infamous persons included swearers, and those who profaned the name of God.Footnote 44 The standard of Hughes's application of this mandate was shot through with Calvinistic rigour, particularly in its concern for behaviour and appropriate posture in divine service. It pertained to those that
doe abuse [the name of God], and take it in vaine, in that they doe not minde what they doe … It appeareth plainly by their sleeping, and by their whispering, and talking, and looking on this body, and on that body, when the word of God is read or preached.Footnote 45
To the sentence of infamy, he added the threat of divine judgment in graphic detail.Footnote 46
Discipline in Bermuda reflected concerns particular to the plantation. Given its fledgling state and lack of resources, authorities were quick to deal with idle persons who forsook their labour,Footnote 47 and presentations were most frequently made for petty theft and robbery. They declared:
If any man being of an idle and vaine disposition forsake his labour, or other businesse, and thereby give example to other men to doe the like: He shallbe admonished thereof by the sheriffe, or Overseer. If after admonition he persist in his idle course of life, he shall be declared infamous.Footnote 48
In this respect, Bermudan reform was perhaps closer to disciplinary cases in Amsterdam and other centres of commercial trade in its preoccupation with regulating sound business practice, for Bermudans almost wholly relied on their production of tobacco for trade.Footnote 49 Authorities were also concerned about maintaining social order, and anyone ‘of unquiet or contentious spirit’ or who was ‘a common raiser of quarrels or brabbles amongst neighbours’ was declared infamous in addition to facing other penalties under law.Footnote 50 Prevention of mutiny was attempted by promoting family values. Inhabitants were prohibited from living ‘too much scattered or single one from another’, and required to ‘draw themselves to live in a Family at the least, where it may conveniently be, so as to eate and worke together’.Footnote 51 Tenants and servants were forbidden from disrespecting or speaking ill of their masters, though they were permitted to raise complaints to the council if done in an appropriate manner.Footnote 52 Heads of families were in turn responsible for training up their children and servants ‘in the true knowledge and feare of God, in the hatred also of vice, and exercise of piety and virtue’.Footnote 53 Masters found cruel and excessive in correcting their servants were likewise presented, especially those who did ‘abuse theire wives by strikinge them, whome they should loue and cherish as theire own bodye’.Footnote 54
In contrast to other reformed communities, sexual sins do not appear to have been frequently presented.Footnote 55 Thus, Bermudan reform was unlike the Scottish Kirk in its relative absence of sexual misdemeanours.Footnote 56 Yet, on the other hand, it shared the British preoccupation with Sabbath observance and Hughes wrote extensively on the subject.Footnote 57 The Council clamped down on many of the cases that recurred in consistories across the continent, particularly in the reformation of manners.Footnote 58 Hughes reported that he was unable ‘to expresse the abhominable drunkenness, loathsome spuing swearing, swaggering and quarrelling’.Footnote 59 There was particular complaint about debauchery and authorities took the matter seriously.Footnote 60 When a man in the midst of one such drinking party suddenly died, Governor Butler ordered for him to be ‘buried in the high way, with a stake driuen through him, by them in whose company hee dranke himselfe dead, each of them hauing a paper on his backe with this superscription, These are the Companions of him, which killed himselfe with drinking’. One of the ‘most notorious … (because he was a Souldier) did ride the Cannon, shot off full charged, which did shake him terribly’.Footnote 61 Other measures were taken against ‘unlawful games as dice, cards, nine pins and such like’ with intransigent persons declared infamous.Footnote 62 In 1627 an additional act prohibited ‘the acting of any interlude or stage play of any kind whatsoeuer, on penalty of 20 lbs of tobacco’.Footnote 63
This rigid discipline was undoubtedly intended to establish a godly reputation which would in turn help to solicit a wave of respectable immigrants to Bermuda. Hughes demanded that men and women ‘haue a care to leaue their sins behinde them, and come hither as it were into a new world, to lead a new life’.Footnote 64 However, the point to underline here is that in Bermuda there was a fusion of ecclesiastical and civil authority in maintaining strict discipline and enforcing rigorous moral reform that reflected the nature of discipline of Reformed Churches across the continent. It was much closer to reformed models than to any English example. Indeed, because of the weakness of ecclesiastical censures and failure to establish a separate ecclesiastical court, reliance on the secular arm to enforce this moral reform surpassed even that of Geneva.Footnote 65
III
In addition to the mixed social profile of Bermuda, emphasis on instruction, and alliance between ecclesiastical and civil authorities in enforcing moral reform, there was also Bermuda's location. In the eyes of its chief leaders, they were placed in a strategic position that in some ways paralleled that of Geneva. Just as Geneva was located at ‘the gates’ of France, Italy and Germany, Bermuda was allegedly ideal as a launch-pad to the North American continent and to the Caribbean. Though the plantation was seemingly remote and protected by natural fortifications, Butler was ever mindful of the global context and potential threat to the plantation. He warned about ‘the rumours … of great warres in Christian-doome. If it should so fall out that any soudaine breach happen between England and Spain … ther is not any place that it will breake out vpon soner than vpon this [plantation]’.Footnote 66
Butler was not only concerned with fortifying Bermuda, but also with using the island to launch an attack. In 1624, after his term as governor, he composed a memorandum outlining his plan, which would use Bermuda as a base to overtake the Spanish West Indian Islands.Footnote 67 Although this game plan was never played out, it foreshadowed later English attempts to move into the West Indies via Providence Island in the 1630s, in which Butler himself played a leading role.Footnote 68 Although framed in anti-Catholic rhetoric as a defensive move against Spain, religious expansion and material gains also shaped Butler's aspirations. Confessional rivalry drove these ambitions as did jealousy for native converts, even if British colonists were comparatively less proactive in pursuing their conversion.Footnote 69 As Carla Gardina Pestana has recently stressed, religion played a key role in British Protestant expansion in the Atlantic by justifying conquest, undermining Catholic missions, and providing new opportunities for religious discontents in Britain.Footnote 70
Here Bermuda's history is again revealing. Whilst it was driven by anti-Catholic sentiments and confessional rivalry on the one hand, it also adapted reformed institutions to reach heathens in the New World. The Aberdeen-born clergyman Patrick Copland joined the Bermuda plantation as a minister in 1626, after spending a period of time in England and travelling to Surat as chaplain of the East India Company, even managing to tour Japan. Nicholas Canny once described this Scottish minister as ‘exceptional both in his global view and experience’.Footnote 71 Indeed, Copland was not only a seasoned traveller, but also involved in some of the earliest efforts to found the first university in North America, though alas his hopes for this institution were dashed by the Indian massacre in Virginia in 1622. Shona Vance rightly describes his pedagogical plans as an extension of Stuart colonising attempts to acculturate and instruct Scottish and Irish Gaels in the English tongue.Footnote 72
Yet confessional rivalry with Spain can also be detected in Copland's efforts to educate in the New World. Copland's famous sermon, preached before the Virginia Company, compared the riches of Virginia with those of Japan, which ‘laying under the same latitude that Virginia doth, aboundeth with all things for profit and pleasure’.Footnote 73 This was no mere matter of jealousy for trade, however. As Copland continued in his sermon, ‘when you aduance religion, you aduance together with it your owne profit’. He then proceeded to rebuke the English for their complacency, comparing them to
the double diligence of Iesuites their poisoning with … Popery many thousand soules in the East Indies and Iapan, and other the remotest parts of the world: All which might bee Motiues strong enough to stirre you up to haue a greater care of the planting of the Gospell in your Plantations.
Copland's approach to missions was neither wholly novel nor unique among Protestants in Europe and England. Aside from the attempted Calvinist missions in Rio de Janeiro in 1557, French Huguenots called for the evangelisation of native Americans in South Carolina and Florida during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote 74 Although there are no French editions of the account of the 1562 French expedition in South Carolina led by Jean Ribaut, two translations appeared in England. Richard Hakulyt, the great Elizabethan promoter of overseas expansion, translated the French voyages, pointing to their ambitions for ousting the Spaniards and converting native populations.Footnote 75 Others who later expressed the same concern for education and missions include Richard Baxter and, most notably, John Eliot, the ‘apostle’ to the Indians. Despite Puritan debate over whether conversion should precede civilising the Indians, ‘in practice, Massachusetts' missionaries associated the two processes’.Footnote 76 Such evangelical and civilising ambitions, not to mention material ones, were likewise wedded in Copland's determination to bring the Gospel to natives. He spoke from his ‘own experience, of the willingnesse of the Heathens in generall’ and ‘how ready they are to receiuve the Gospel’. Indeed, Copland boasted of the instruction and conversion of an Indian boy from Surat, whom he brought back to be baptised in London:
[I] taught him … but by signes … to speake, to reade and write the English tongue … both Romane and Secretary, within lesse then the space of a yeare … and within the compasse of three yeares, I taught him the grounds of Religion, and to learn most of Saint Paules Epistles by heart, and to giue a publique confession of his Faith … and since to write the Latin Epistles hereunto adioyned.Footnote 77
After the massacre in Virginia in 1622, Copland turned his attention to building an educational base in Bermuda. Although it did not have any native inhabitants of its own, Bermuda could be used to launch the campaign in the New World. Copland was no doubt influenced by a range of traditions on the continent, including the reformed academies in Herborn and Heidelberg, through his original training in Aberdeen.Footnote 78 This Bermudan institution would also perform the same function as reformed centres for higher education such as the Geneva Academy in training and dispatching ministers across the western hemisphere.Footnote 79 As Roger Wood commented in 1632, Copland ‘hath a project to erect a free school here and to train up children to be preachers to send abroad to convert the Indians’. Despite the reluctance of parents to send their children ‘amongst savages’ Copland made persistent efforts in procuring ‘1 or 2 able scholars to instruct them in philosophy, divinity and so to make them preachers’.Footnote 80 Copland was not alone. Another committed educator who penned a basic grammar textbook for use in English colonies, including Bermuda, was John Brinsley, the father of the Puritan minister of the same name, who was known in underground presbyterian circles in England and considered as a candidate to minister to the English reformed Church in Amsterdam in the 1630s.Footnote 81 Such civilising and missionising zeal did not feature generally in Puritan writing over the course of the seventeenth century. However, Bermuda provides a rich example of a Puritan colony which drew from a wider European context to bring the Gospel to the Indians. Rather than viewing these early missionary efforts in isolation, they can be seen as part of a response to the global missionary activity of the Jesuits.
What provided the ideological basis in Bermuda for extending reform to the Atlantic? Bermuda's missionising impulse was in part forged by the understanding that reformed Protestantism was universal and unlimited in its geographic scope. The concept of a universal visible Church, and by extension the concern to push reform beyond Europe and Britain, has largely been missing in accounts of Protestant settlements in the Atlantic. This is partly because the literature has been shaped either by the assumption that Protestantism inevitably led to schism or by the canard that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination was somehow incompatible with evangelisation. Accounts of early British American religion have also been largely written from a congregationalist perspective. Yet the concept of the universal Church was key to Bermuda's extension of continental evangelising zeal within European Christendom to heathens in the New World. This essay concludes by considering the concept of a universal Protestant Church and the understanding that Bermudans carried out their activity as part of that Church. This brings us to a sharp contrast between Bermuda and other Puritan experiences in the New World which has been missing from traditional accounts, and further explains Bermuda's European ties.
Even if not by formal institutional association, Bermudans conceived of themselves as in league and federation with continental Churches: Nathaniel Butler associated the Bermudan Church with reformed Churches in the Netherlands, France and in Geneva. Patrick Copland wrote in 1622 of the ‘league of friendship’ that should be honoured with the Dutch overseas, despite commercial rivalry.Footnote 82 Such federation of course extended beyond fraternal association. It directly followed from the view that they belonged to a universal ecclesiastical society which had been a working assumption in the thought of the magisterial Protestant reformers. After their break with the Church of Rome, the Reformers tended to stress catholicity through doctrinal continuity over institutional unity. However, they none the less affirmed that there remained a single true Church which was unlimited in its geographic scope. They ‘uniformly affirmed that the visible church is itself catholic and ecumenical. Spread abroad throughout the earth, it professes a common faith and cherishes a common fellowship’.Footnote 83 The concept of a universal visible Church was also the working definition of the Church assumed by English Presbyterians in the late sixteenth century. It was stressed even more vigorously by Presbyterians in England, the Netherlands and in New England in the first half of the seventeenth century in response to the rise of independent congregationalist thought.Footnote 84
By the mid-seventeenth century the idea of a universal reformed Church was challenged in Bermuda by a movement for independency. The two leading independent ministers to emerge in Bermuda were William Goulding, who emigrated as preacher to the Warwick tribe in 1638, and Nathaniel White, who arrived the following year to minister to the Southampton and Sandys churches. By 1643 White and Goulding had established a congregational church in Bermuda. From its first emergence, independent thought was predicated on the idea that a universal visible Church did not appear in the New Testament. Its earliest exponent, Henry Jacob, argued that ‘under the Gospell Christ never instituted, nor had any one Universall visible church … which ordinarily was to exercise spirituall outward government, over all persons through the world professing Christianity’.Footnote 85 For Jacob, ‘only a Particular ordinary constant Congregation of Christians in Christes Testament is appointed and reckoned to be a visible Church’.Footnote 86 If the visible Church was a particular congregation, no formal jurisdiction could be exercised between or beyond that body. Nathaniel White, defending independency in Bermuda, likewise questioned ‘is there any so much as the least rumour of a Nationall Church in the new Testament, as there is in the old?’Footnote 87 White's definition of the visible Church as a particular congregation held the same implications for congregational ecclesiastical independence: ‘here is the great, and main difference (if I mistake not between the Classicall dependents, and the Congregationall Independents) the one holds dependencie upon men, upon Churches, in regard of Church government or power, the other holds none’.Footnote 88
The movement for independency in Bermuda during the 1640s was ultimately outmanoeuvred and its leaders embarked on a new settlement in the Bahamas.Footnote 89 Yet the emergence of independency reveals the assumptions underlying the Bermuda Church. Critics of Independents in Britain were horrified by the establishment of the congregational church in Bermuda. For Richard Baxter, the rise of independency in Bermuda ‘would make the Christian heart to bleed’.Footnote 90 The broader breach of independency, according to Robert Baillie, was not simply the division of the Church in a particular plantation. Nor was it necessarily limited to the ‘Churches of a whole nation’. It would threaten to destroy the Churches ‘of the whole world’.Footnote 91 For the first several decades of its settlement the concept of a universal Church had been the foundational definition of the Church in Bermuda. Even by the mid-seventeenth century this idea continued to predominate on the plantation.
Despite its remote location and relative isolation, Calvinism in Bermuda was, at least in the eyes of contemporaries, part of a globalised godly reformed world. This understanding dovetailed with a vision for extending the reformed Church further west and expanding its boundaries through civilising and missionary activity. Godly government and talk of native converts alone are not necessarily indications of a pan-Euro-British-Atlantic world as opposed to a strictly Anglo-American alliance. Neither were these characteristics of ‘Calvinism’ per se. A link between these traditions, however, appears in the organisation and nature of religious life on the plantation.
Bermuda's adoption of government by elders, construction of liturgical order, mechanisms for social control in alliance with civil magistrates and calculated evangelical designs through the establishment of an academy all reflect a distinctively Calvinist ecclesiology, which varied across the continent, yet none the less stretched back almost a century to early Genevan reform.
The concept of a universal Church, which acted as a catalyst for colonising fervour in Bermuda, also adds an important dimension to the motivations behind British expansion in the earliest years of its settlement in the New World. For at least the first several decades of its colonisation, Bermuda managed to achieve a unity in British religion that was unprecedented. That unity was in part fostered by the broader continental models which it incorporated. It also developed as a result of its relative distance from Scottish and English traditions. Given that distance, it is an irony that Bermuda's early Church embodied the very vision of a united reformed British Church that the likes of Andrew Melville, John Knox, Christopher Goodman and other Elizabethan Presbyterians had endeavoured to realise in the sixteenth century.
This is not to minimise the importance of British theories of empire or economic opportunism. Nor is it to compete with explanations for the spread of Calvinism in the sixteenth century including flight from persecution and intellectual exchange through cosmopolitan culture. Instead, it reveals a powerful centrifugal force within the reformed tradition which could contribute to territorial expansion given the right moment and strategic location. Whilst this overlapped with the general language of spiritual cultivation which appeared in Iberian counterparts, it also developed out of a close affiliation with reformed precedents in Europe.
