The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
was superior to their more egalitarian social systems.32 The power and right to exploit was shifting; people without birthright to status, power, or wealth, merchants and entrepreneurs, now had access to all three—and were bent on enhancing their grasp.33 Without a feudal birthright to the use of people’s labor, the rising capitalist class was increasingly dependent on hiring workers, people dispossessed, as we have seen. Those dispossessed were desperate enough to take the abysmally small wages employers offered instead of the payment they preferred, in kind or in the right to use land, or in room and board, with token money perhaps added.
The religious arguments, though often appearing intensely esoteric, actually were pragmatic justifications for particular economic and political positions; arguments about Natural Law, or about the King’s Two Bodies, had real consequences in terms of shifts in the right to exploit, to punish, to exercise force, to rule.34 They stood in for and expressed both the political and the economic malaise of the times. At the base of these arguments was the question of the source of the king’s sovereignty and thus his right to wield the power of the sword. All agreed it came ultimately from God, but did it go from God to the people (or to the aristocrats only, by bloodright) and, by their consent, to the king, or did it go to the church, and through the authority of the church to the king, or did it go directly to the king? The answer to that question had enormous implications: was the king answerable to the people? The arguments were often massively involuted—but nevertheless, they mattered. And these arguments may have led to John’s decision. He left during Cromwell’s rule, shortly after Charles I was beheaded, a time when many Royalists fled to Virginia.35 If John was one of the Royalists, he may well have been one who believed sovereignty came to the king directly from God, in opposition to the position taken by Cromwell. Practically speaking, being on the losing side, he may have been subject to persecution, maybe in real danger, maybe simply unable to continue to make a living.
The claim that the king’s sovereignty comes directly from God without the mediation of the church provided a way around the restraints on the power of the English king, restraints such as the diarchic structures that empowered the religious elites, as we saw in chapter 1, and power grabs by lesser lords and rising capitalists. Monarchy, not diarchy, became a kingly goal. And absolute monarchy was even better, in which the two roles, priest and king or council and king, are rolled into a single authority, a monarch who is head of both church and state, who both speaks for and interprets the gods, and exercises the power to carry out their wishes and to punish those who don’t comply.36 But in consolidating power this way, legitimizing spiritual authority is lost, and a king’s claim to both roles can be a pretty transparent power grab. That problem becomes particularly acute as the shift to capitalism supports the rise of a wealthy merchant class with no birthright claim to power. This merchant class exercises considerable economic power and is inclined to question the infallibility of the policies of an unrestrained monarch. As indeed they did for several centuries, with some backing the power of the church against the king, and others the power of the people against the king.
This seesawing kept England in turmoil for a few centuries, with one of its high points coming in 1534 when Henry VIII declared himself both head of state and head of church, giving him sufficient power to gain a greater monopoly on the use of force by reining in the great aristocrats’ private armies.37 A shift in address marked his heightened sovereignty: he was “Your Majesty,” no longer “Your Grace,” king by the grace of God.38 Diarchic forms remained, though with some redistribution of roles. Monasteries were confiscated and the state took over the former monastic roles of education and charity—much of the social control function was now backed directly by the state’s ability to exert force.39
HERE WE TURN AGAIN TO VIRGINIA and Radfords, with, I hope, some sense of the ideas that were swirling around in the intellectual soup of the England in which X and John Radford had lived. Those who came first to Jamestown, people like X, tended to see the king as merely God’s lieutenant, with other lesser lieutenants. With John, or at least with many of the people who fled Cromwell, came a more absolutist vision of monarchy, one to which Henry VIII had subscribed, and for which Charles I lost his head. The monarchy was restored after John left for Virginia. Charles II reigned, and despite the enhanced position of Parliament and of the King’s Council, the possibility of absolutism again arose. With this changing of the guard, there was a new flood of refugees headed for Virginia. This time they were escaping royal punishment for supporting Cromwell. Members of the rising capitalist middle class and low-level aristocrats, they had seen in Cromwell and the religious beliefs that vested sovereignty in the people the possibility of public policy that resonated with their own desire for greater power and independence. These were people like Nathaniel Bacon, who eventually became a leader of the rebellion against Governor Berkeley and his autocratic rule.
The discontent that eventually led to rebellion was simmering when Bruen may have arrived as a seven-year-old with his father in 1652. Bruen is well situated, in time and space, to pick up the story of punishing, sovereignty, and state formation, a thread that weaves its way through Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 and its aftermath. He actually first shows up in the historical records in 1680 at age thirty-five, at John Burnham’s bedside. His probable son George, apparently his only child, was born in Henrico County in 1665, when Bruen would have been twenty, and though there is no record of Bruen himself in Henrico, George spent at least some time as an adult living there with his wife, judging by the fact that his children were born there. There is no record of Bruen’s marriage. This could be just a case of missing records, of course, and many are missing in Henrico. Even so, one would still expect some mention of a wife in someone’s will or in land transactions, in which the wife had to sign away her dower rights in the land to make a sale legal. Or a record of her death, or of her remarriage after Bruen died at age forty-two. Since there was still a shortage of English women in Virginia at this time, it is improbable that if she did exist, she didn’t remarry. Most widows did, and many men managed to get land by marrying widows who inherited or held a lifetime estate from their first husbands. That Bruen may have remained unmarried, as did John’s probable cousin Roger and many other men, was not particularly unusual, given the shortage of women.40 Or perhaps there was a marriage, but the wife died in childbirth almost immediately, thereby having little time to leave traces in the historical record.
Alternatively, perhaps George’s mother was one of the many other Radfords, unrelated to John or Bruen (in which case they are not related to me). Her last name would have gone to him if George were one of the many babies described as a “bastard” because an appropriate man had not made the appropriate claim—marriage—on his mother’s body and reproductive capacity. Most frequently such children were born to indentured servants, who needed their master’s permission to marry, were sometimes abused by their masters, or sometimes simply fell in love with someone they were unable to marry.41 However, if George had an unmarried mother who was English, free or not, there would most likely have been some record. English women were brought to court and punished for bearing a child outside of marriage, or even for having a child too soon after marriage, since the child was conceived without the appropriate legal claim on the mother’s reproductive capacity.42 They were whipped or fined, depending on the woman’s “quality,” and called into church wrapped in a white sheet to beg for forgiveness and reentry into the church community. On top of that, servant women had two and a half years added to their indenture. Men were sometimes sued, sometimes forced to marry the mother. Without a marriage and therefore without support for mother or child, the child was taken to be raised by a family, often indentured or apprenticed and thus free labor, with early expenses paid by the court. Hence, the insistence on marriage—it saved the county tax money. So, either the records are missing or George’s mother wasn’t English.
Perhaps George was the result of a loving—or a forced—relationship with a Native American or African woman who was perhaps enslaved, perhaps free, perhaps herself the product of one of the early not-so-uncommon cross-race alliances. If so, Bruen must have acknowledged George as his son and given him the Radford name. If George’s mother were a member of one of the matrilineal native nations, George would also have been an acknowledged member of his mother’s matrilineage.43 There is no indication