Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion

The Eschatological Origins of the English Empire

The Eschatological Origins of the English Empire Douglas Bradburn In 1612 an important front in the long struggle between Satan and the saints, in the mind of many Englishmen, was a little military camp in a country the English called Virginia.Twice a day, officers of the guard would lead the motley collection of settlers in a prayer of exhortation, begging God to help them “build up the walls of Jerusalem.” They were engaged, as Sir Thomas Dale, “high marshall” of the colony, enthusiastically acknowledged, “in Religious Warfare.”¹ They had left their homes because of God’s “motion & work in our hearts,” with the intention “principally to honor thy name, & advance the kingdom of thy son.” They implored Him to crush their enemies , open the minds of the Indians to the True Religion, end Native taunts and blasphemies, and “let wickedness, superstition, ignorance & idolatry perish at the presence of thee our God.”² Not content to merely convert or kill the Indians, the prayer called upon God to “call in the Jews together with the fullness of the gentiles” that “thy name may be glorious in all the world.” Only then would they “with all thine elect people” come to see the face of God “and be filled with the light thereof for evermore.”³ The prayer, and Dale’s vision of religious warfare, were loaded with Protestant apocalyptic rhetoric, an eschatological perspective that framed, for many Englishmen and Englishwomen, the meaning of the transformations their world was experiencing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.4 As part of their Reformation, English Protestants were encouraged to look into recent and ancient history to discover the secrets of God’s providential design, or as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs noted, of seeking out examples “from the primitive age to these latter tymes of ours” of God’s 16 / Douglas Bradburn plan for the true Church. Foxe depicted historical time as a long struggle between Christ and Antichrist, a contest for the fate of humanity in which contemporary events exhibited clear signs of a climactic fight, and in which the saints would triumph over the forces of the devil. For those who embraced such logic, England was not only the equivalent of Israel, the chosen nation, but was the natural epitome, protector, and hope of the Reformation .5 Foxe’s vision and Dale’s mission are the crucial pillars that supported, sustained, and encouraged the expansion of England’s empire. Both as a refinement of English national pride and an expectation of international Protestantism, such eschatological thinking provided the fundamental framework for the expansion of the English from the exploits of Drake in the 1580s to Oliver Cromwell’s “Western Design” in the 1650s. Historians of early English expansion and colonial America have tended to downplay the place of religious fervor in the colonization and settlement of Virginia. David Armitage, for instance, in his recent study of the ideas surrounding early English dominion overseas, emphasizes the rationalism —indeed “Oxonian Aristotelianism”—of the two great compilers and promoters of English expansion, Richard Hakluyt the younger and Samuel Purchas. He dismisses any connection to the overt piety of these apparently practical men. Andrew Fitzmaurice, for his part, attempts to fold all promotional material into a rather secular “humanist” ideology, which he argues “dominated colonizing projects.”6 For early Americanists, Virginia still exists as an easy foil for New England , useful for pedagogy and general analysis as an economic enterprise, which contrasts so nicely with the various religious designs of Massachusetts , Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island. Englishmen in Virginia are most clearly seen as adventurers: desperate, greedy, and violent , while the English in the New England colonies, although they could run into radicalism and bigotry and could kill Indians with equal ferocity , are generally seen as hardworking, pious, and well intentioned. Although numerous historians have repeatedly stressed the religious tenor of certain aspects of the Virginia story, from promotion to actual practice in the colony, there still remains a deep disjunction between Virginia’s primary status as a place striving more for profit than for God and New England ’s place in the long argument over faith and religious authority in early American society. Even those historians who catch the similarity between the militant fervor of Elizabethan England and the movements of the Puritans of the 1630s downplay the common links that necessarily extended through the Virginian project.7 The Eschatological...