Invading America. David Childs
remainder of English poesy. A voyage through the poems anthologized in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse and the Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse reveals two centuries of poets obsessed with the legends of Greece and Rome and the works of Virgil, Homer and Ovid. Just one indifferent poem on the subject of the new world, Michael Drayton’s 1619 ode, ‘To the Virginian Voyage’, is thought worthy of inclusion. That is, apart from the most erotic poem in the English language, John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’, which was written in 1593 but was not published until 1633, denying a generation of young men the seductive aid of:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee!
It is doubtful if Donne would have been inspired to use his principal metaphor had not Ralegh bestowed upon the newfound land the potentially erotic name of Virginia. But that was it: English popular entertainment looked to the classics for its subject matter; the newfound lands were not considered suitable or popular material.
More surprisingly, the same indifference holds true with the plastic arts. Surprisingly, because Ralegh sent a most accomplished artist, John White, with the first Roanoke party to work with his protégé, the astronomer, anthropologist, cartographer, mathematician, linguist and polymathical genius Thomas Harriot, to record what they saw. Although much of his work may have been dumped overboard in the haste to depart with Drake’s fleet, White produced an accomplished portfolio depicting a brave new world with wonderful people in it. The works’ significance became immediately apparent to the Flemish engraver Theodore de Bry, who left England after a three-year stay in 1588 to establish a press in Frankfurt, where White’s work was copied and embellished. English artists remained wedded to the court and classical literature.
The contrast with Portugal could not be more obvious; the Portuguese national epic poem, The Lusiads, tells the story of how Portuguese mariners created a trading empire around the world. Published in 1572, it was written by Luis Vaz de Camoëns, and was based not only on the accounts of foreign ventures, but on his own service and adventures, in Ceuta, Goa and Macau. No English poet or playwright was similarly inspired by overseas adventures, nor did English bards wish to sail to new worlds. If England was to establish a commonwealth, as a small cabal of thinkers wished, then a great deal of persuasion and propaganda was going to be necessary. And it needed to start at the very top.
The lack of a presence in popular poetry and plays may imply but not confirm that colonial enterprises did not engage the public imagination. Yet it is quite possible to read a scholarly and detailed history of the Tudor and Stuart regimes, or even individual biographies of the monarchs and their leading counsellors, and not come across a reference to America. This would not be possible in works about the Spanish and Portuguese courts of the same period, for their monarchs were very much occupied with overseas enterprises.
CONVINCING THE COURT
In 1387 Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt, married João I of Portugal, and left her countrymen’s insular views behind her as she encouraged, even to her deathbed, her adopted country’s overseas expansion. Her third son, known to the world as Prince Henry the Navigator, dedicated his life to the foundation and support of a school of navigation and exploration at Sagres on the south coast. From here, the Portuguese island-hopped their way to India and, along the way, cornered the market in gold, ivory, spices and slaves. Impressed by what he had heard, Ferdinand of Aragon created at Seville in 1503 the Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade), with similar aims to Prince Henry, to support global expansion and trade. Ten years later Henry VIII of England founded Trinity House to chart and mark the mudflats and sandbanks of the Thames.
A somewhat sylvan early representation of Cupid’s Cove, more beckoning than the windswept reality of a harsh Newfoundland winter, which would have attracted few immigrants.
England did have princes who shared their distant Portuguese cousin’s global outlook but both died young. The first was Edward VI, who famously dragged himself from his final sickbed to watch Willoughby and Chancellor slip down the Thames in 1553 on their voyage to search for a northeast passage to Cathay. The second was another Henry, James I’s son and heir, the Prince of Wales who, on arrival in England at the age of nine, had been urged by Ben Jonson to, ‘Look over the strict Ocean . . . and think where, you may lead us forth’. Defying his father, Henry even visited the imprisoned Ralegh to learn from the dreamer’s own lips of the glories that awaited the bold voyager either to Virginia or Guiana. For Henry this was no passing teenage passion. In 1609 he visited the ships of the third supply as they gathered at Woolwich, and he championed the cause of the planters so strongly that the Spanish ambassador, Velasco, felt that the enterprise was surviving ‘just because the Prince of Wales lends them very warmly his support’. Henry’s enthusiasm for the Virginia venture was opposed by Sir Robert Cecil, the King’s most trusted advisor, who may have had a hand in trying to arrange a marriage with a Spanish princess for the Prince, who would thus have been forced to accept a new virgin love and abandon the old one, Virginia. In this aim both the King and the new Spanish ambassador, Zuñiga, were reported to be in concord following their friendly meetings in July 1612. Henry, however, took matters into his own hands by dying on 2 November. The impact of his death was summed up by Sir Thomas Dale, the deputy governor of Virginia, when he wrote: ‘He was the great captain of our Israel, the hope to have builded up this heavenly New Jerusalem. He interred the whole frame of this business [when he] fell into his grave.’
Apart from Edward, none of the nation’s Tudor monarchs nailed their colours firmly to the colonists’ masts. Catholic Mary would not encourage acts contrary to the wishes of her papal father and Spanish husband, while Elizabeth seemed to view such American expeditions as a way of indulging the fantasies of her favourites. This detached position changed with James who, although not wishing to be drawn into an argument with Spain, was nonetheless prepared to issue Charters to his petitioners as long as this did not involve any monetary commitment by the Crown.
This caution was in accord with the views of the Privy Council, who were often openly hostile to the proposed plans for settlement. Both Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil discouraged, and even may have tried to sabotage, settlement plans, which led to a lack of unity at the highest level, preventing the creation of a coherent and enthusiastically supported plan of occupation.
Throughout King James I’s reign no opportunity was missed to publish tracts to encourage the restless to improve their lot through emigrating to a new and bountiful world.
With no overt encouragement from the Crown, those interested in organizing overseas voyages needed to prepare well their proposition before putting it forward for a royal patent. Cabot had the least difficulty but Henry VII had far fewer problems with his European neighbours than did Henry VIII, Elizabeth or James I, who needed more persuading. An early revivalist of the western vision was Humphrey Gilbert, who, in 1576, proposed assembling a fleet in the Bermudas that would fall upon the Spanish treasure fleets and seize Cuba and Santo Domingo. Gilbert’s tracts clearly indicate that the writer had some difficulty in separating the practical from the impossible and fact from fictive hope. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Elizabeth granted him a Charter to venture westward a year after Frobisher’s expeditions had failed; perhaps she did not read Gilbert’s works. She would have found the pamphlet produced by Richard Hakluyt in 1584, Particular Discourse on the Western Planting, more digestible. In this work Hakluyt emphasized how an English colony in America would help in the struggle against Spain by providing a base from which raids could be launched on the annual Plate Fleet as well as Spanish settlements in the Indies. Once the colonists had settled peacefully and converted the natives to Christianity,