James’s efforts at ‘rooting out of all barbaritie’ in the Gaelic Highlands gave him some inkling of the problems he faced in Ireland.27 Thanks to English victory in the Nine Years War there were no internal frontiers for the crown to defend. On the other hand, of course, the war had left Ireland’s huge Catholic majority even more resentful and alienated. The solution as far as James was concerned was essentially more of the same, in particular plantations. When, in 1607, Tyrone and his supporters were either panicked into exile or fled to avoid royal punishment (there are signs they were up to their necks in treasonous intrigues with the Spanish), James authorised a massive plantation in Ulster that involved Scottish as well as English settlers. Besides allowing James to move his ‘British’ agenda forward in Ireland (if not in Britain itself), the scheme had the advantage from the crown’s perspective of driving a Protestant wedge between the Irish and Scottish Gaels, although at the cost of creating a hostile Catholic underclass in Ulster.
Appeasing the Catholics was not a priority for James’s longest-serving lord deputy of Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester (1563–1625), who seems to have suffered from the constitutional schizophrenia common to most English governors of Ireland. When Englishmen thought about their own government they tended to become misty-eyed about its antiquity and legal integrity, but when they thought about government in Ireland they were far more open to schemes for uprooting ancient customs, trampling upon civic liberties and applying extra-legal force. Chichester, one of Ireland’s ‘wasters and destroyers’, was no exception.28 He made little distinction between the native Irish – ‘beasts in the shape of men’, he called them – and the Catholic Old English, terrorising both in the name of Protestant civility.29 The Old English pleaded their loyalty to the crown, but their religion was tantamount to treason in James’s eyes, and the New English minority continued to usurp their place in public office. With the English doing little to endear themselves to the Catholic Irish it is not surprising that the established Protestant Church in Ireland proved no match for Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Seminary priests, trained mostly in the Spanish Netherlands, and Franciscan friars revitalised Catholicism in Ireland (especially in the towns) to such an extent that the Dublin administration had no choice but to turn a blind eye to the activities of a Catholic ministry, complete with bishops, operating alongside the official Protestant church establishment. Ironically, this Catholic ministry tried to imbue the native Irish with much the same notions of civility as those demanded by James and Chichester.
British colonisation of Ireland consumed cash and human resources that might otherwise have gone into planting colonies in the Americas. Perhaps as many as 100,000 people (about 30,000 Scots, the rest English or Welsh) migrated from Britain to Ireland in the early Stuart period. Yet by 1640 there were probably less than 30,000 British settlers in North America. The unspectacular pace of transatlantic expansion before 1640 was also in part a by-product of the Elizabethan privateering war. In the long term, certainly, the war helped to fashion the tools of empire – developing the skills, the ships and the investment structures needed for colonisation. But in the short term it encouraged would-be colonial adventurers such as Ralegh to go in for get-rich-quick solutions. Colonial pioneers might have to wait many years to see a return on their investment, which was not an appealing prospect to a generation of English merchants and seafarers accustomed to the quick profits to be had from privateering. Within fifty years of losing the last remnant of their medieval empire in France (Calais), the English had become global seafarers capable of rivalling the Spanish. Yet most of this expansion was commercial, not colonial, and was related to developing markets in Europe or the emerging trade routes with the Far East. It was the smaller traders and planters, men excluded from more profitable markets by the big boys in London, who dabbled in colonial ventures.
Public interest in overseas expansion was equally limited. News from the New World was avidly consumed but soon forgotten, ‘as if were nought els, but a pleasing dreame of a golden fancie’.30 Although the English no longer expected or perhaps even wanted to regain their continental empire, their sights remained firmly fixed on Europe and the unfinished business of stemming the flood-tide of Habsburg popery. Of course the main problem under the early Stuarts, as under Elizabeth, was lack of government support. The crown’s only consistent colonial policy during the early Stuart period was to avoid being seen to do anything likely to anger the Spanish or the French. James was more interested in the Ulster plantation than in the settlement established in Virginia in 1607 and named Jamestown in his honour. The kind of men who did see the advantages of a new English empire across the Atlantic were generally not welcome at the courts of James and Charles I. James had Ralegh executed in 1618 after his last voyage to the New World – to find ‘El Dorado’ on the Orinoco River – had degenerated into a raiding party against Spanish settlements.
Because early colonial enterprises were largely private undertakings they were inspired by a wide variety of motives. Militant Protestants saw the setting up of colonies as a weapon in the war against Spain, hence their focus on the Americas, the source of Spain’s great wealth. In 1630 a group of leading English Puritans formed a company to settle Providence Island, off what is now the Nicaraguan coast, as both a godly commonwealth and a privateering base against Spanish shipping. At their head stood Robert Rich, earl of Warwick (1587–1658), the son of a great Elizabethan privateer and himself the operator of England’s largest privateering fleet. At its worst, this eagerness to batten on the Spanish Indies was driven by greed ‘for golde, for prayse, for glory’.31 At its best it was inspired by the hope of ‘freeing the poor Indians from their devourers’ – meaning the Spanish – and spreading ‘the grace of Christ among those … that yet sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’.32 Another Puritan colonising project, the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in the late 1620s with the support of Warwick and his friends, had the nerve to depict on its seal a group of Indians waving a banner with the words ‘Come over and Help Us’.33
Yet, as in Ireland, the colonists’ desire to plant civility and ‘true religion’ was undermined by their lack of sympathy with the indigenous cultures. Either the ‘savages’ must submit to English civility for the good of their souls or they must submit to English muskets. In Virginia, for example, relations between the English and the equally proud and ethnocentric Powhatan Indians quickly deteriorated into mutual incomprehension and mistrust, and then into a vicious conflict over territory and resources. The colony’s first governor, Lord De La Warr, arrived at Jamestown after the terrible winter of 1609–10, or the ‘starving time’, when lack of food and a siege by the Indians had reduced the colony’s population from 600 to about 90. De La Warr was ready, if necessary, to apply the terror tactics he had learned on campaign in Ireland, where soldiers routinely killed enemy civilians. But his main job was not to fight the Indians but to lick the colonists into shape for confronting the Spanish. He was followed by another officer who had served in Ireland, the sadistic Sir Thomas Dale, and 300 heavily armoured English musketeers, veterans of the fighting in the Low Countries. Dale divided his time between disciplining the colonists, strengthening Virginia’s defences against possible Spanish attack, and killing Powhatans. By the 1620s the Virginian colonists talked openly of effecting ‘the extirpation of the Indians’.34 The coastal tribes had been dispersed or subjugated by the English in Virginia long before the end of the seventeenth century. The settlers in New England dealt similarly with the Wessagussets and Pequots – most notoriously when they surrounded and burnt a Pequot village in 1637, killing 400 or more men, women and children. It was a ‘fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same’, but the settlers consoled themselves that they were meting out divine retribution on a ‘proud and insulting people’,35 and that they had ‘sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings’.36
Virginia was joined in the early 1630s by another Chesapeake colony, Maryland, which was founded by the Catholic nobleman Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, and named in honour of Charles I’s queen, Henriette Marie (1609–69). The ‘Indian Golde’ in the Chesapeake would turn out to be tobacco – not the bitter stuff grown locally but the hybrid developed in the early 1610s by John Rolfe, the man who married the Indian princess Pocahontas and was