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“Fruits of Unrulie Multitudes”: Liberty, Popularity, and Meanings of Violence in the English Atlantic, 1623–1625

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2020

Daniel C. Beaver
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Abstract

Using neglected evidence of organized, state-like, internecine violence among English settlers in New England during the 1620s and 1630s, this essay engages with recent archipelagic approaches to the early modern English public sphere and with studies of the English state and political culture in order to argue for the existence of an important, semipublic Atlantic political discourse during the decades preceding the civil wars in the British Isles. It focuses on the distinctive political dynamics of Atlantic fishing stages during the early seventeenth century and on the violent confrontation between the Dorchester and Plymouth companies in 1625 over the control of the Cape Ann stage on Massachusetts Bay. The rumors, news, and formal reports that flowed from such incidents show how diffuse English ideologies assumed the form of opposed groups, armed and mobilized in the manner of free states, and confirmed fears of such violent episodes as threats to orderly governance in a political society conceived in Atlantic imperial terms. By examining the communication of and responses to this perceived threat during the late 1620s and 1630s, the essay reveals how an Atlantic discourse of “liberty,” “orderly commonweal,” and “popularity” influenced English political culture and policy and the institutions of Atlantic governance before the English Civil War.

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Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 372 - 395
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020

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References

1 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, Autograph Letters (hereafter AL), vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 2r, Arundel Castle (hereafter AC).

2 Notestein, Wallace and Relf, Frances Helen, eds., Commons Debates for 1629 (Minneapolis, 1921)Google Scholar, 19. Sir Walter Erle figured in the events described below as governor of the Dorchester Company from 1624 to 1627 and as a defendant in the 1635 Court of Requests case against the company. See The National Archives (hereafter TNA), REQ 2/630, Court Requests (hereafter CR), Charles I, Bundle 48, Part II: Bill of Complaint (1636); TNA, REQ 2/676, CR, Charles I, Bundle 63, Part II: Second Answer (1635); Richard Cust, “Sir Walter Erle [Earle] (1586–1665),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37399.

3 Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Eliot, Samuel Morison (New York, 1952)Google Scholar, 82. These assumptions concerning violence often reflected the practical North American experience of English projectors and settlers. See Vaughan, Alden T., New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675, 3rd ed. (Norman, 1995), 82–88Google Scholar; Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000)Google Scholar, 4, 38–39, 107–8, 219–28.

4 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 263. The incident resulted in two deaths: Hocking killed Moses Talbot, a member of Howland's party, for cutting one of his anchor cables, before another member of the group shot and killed Hocking, an outcome Plymouth's governor, William Bradford, described as “one of the saddest things” of his experience. See Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 262–68.

5 Jenness, John S., Notes on the First Planting of New Hampshire and on the Piscataqua Patents (Portsmouth, 1878)Google Scholar, 45.

6 Jenness, Notes on the First Planting of New Hampshire and on the Piscataqua Patents, 45. Although without authority in Upper Piscataqua, Williams convened and presided over a court at Dover that imposed “great fines” and banishment for “riot” on Underhill and others of his company. See Winthrop, John, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Dunn, Richard S., Savage, James, and Yeandle, Laetitia (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar, 284, 348–49; Hubbard, William, A General History of New England from the Discovery to MDCLXXX, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1848), 361–63Google Scholar; Jenness, Notes on the First Planting of New Hampshire and on the Piscataqua Patents, 41–47.

7 The term sovereign agency refers to forms of practical agency enabled by the authority and technical language of royal charter or patent, office, and law. Apart from these specific technical contexts, in mundane settings, such behavior could resemble the symptoms of mental illness. As Robert Burton observed in 1621, “If an ambitious man become melancholy, he forthwith thinks he is a king, an emperor, a monarch, and walks alone.” Democritus Junior [Burton, Robert], The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 249. I return to these aspects of agency below.

8 Browne, William H., ed., Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1636–1637, vol. 3 of Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, 1885), 18–19Google Scholar.

9 Browne, Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1636–1637, 19.

10 Thomas Yong to Sir Toby Matthew, 1634, in Hall, Clayton C., ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684 (New York, 1910)Google Scholar, 57.

11 Browne, Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1636–1637, 26.

12 See also Neill, Edward D., Founders of Maryland (Albany, 1876), 51–52Google Scholar; Wertenbaker, Thomas J., Virginia under the Stuarts, rev. ed. (1914; rpr. New York, 1959), 71–72Google Scholar; Haskell, Alexander B., For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2017), 246–49Google Scholar and references.

13 Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 80; Cogswell, Thomas, “‘In the Power of the State’: Mr. Anys's Project and the Tobacco Colonies, 1626–1628,” English Historical Review 123, no. 500 (2008): 35–64Google Scholar, at 63.

14 On the narrative and political dynamics of the 1635 coup in Virginia, see Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 60–84; Andrews, Charles M., The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1934–1938)Google Scholar, vol. 2, Settlements, 287, 292; Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, 145; Brenner, Robert, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (1993; repr. New York, 2003), 140–48Google Scholar; Haskell, For God, King, and People, 258–71. On its 1620s antecedents, see Cogswell, “‘In the Power of the State,’” 62–63.

15 White, John, The Planter's Plea (London, 1630), 68–74Google Scholar.

16 Smith, John, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624)Google Scholar, in Smith, John, Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America, ed. Horn, James (New York, 2007), 199–670Google Scholar, at 667.

17 This view simply distinguishes “organized” violence by armed groups from the parental discipline of children, for example, or the informal uses of coercion among neighbors, as an effective monopoly of the early modern English state. See Muldrew, Craig, “The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 39, no. 4 (1996): 915–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braddick, Michael J., State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), 18, 180–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hindle, Steve, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England (London, 2000), 94–115Google Scholar.

18 Braddick, State Formation, 400; Mishra, Rupali, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 178–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stern, Philip J., The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See Milton, Anthony, “Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company, and the Public Sphere in Early Stuart England,” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Lake, Peter and Pincus, Steven (Manchester, 2007), 168–90Google Scholar; Mishra, Business of State, 180–90, 209–41.

20 Mishra, Business of State, 179.

21 Lake and Pincus, Politics of the Public Sphere.

22 See Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” in Lake and Pincus, Politics of the Public Sphere, 1–30; Stewart, Laura A. M., “Introduction: Publics and Participation in Early Modern Britain,” Journal of British Studies 56, no. 4 (2017): 709–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the series of essays on Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and on the interrelationships among British publics included in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies.

23 Milton, “Marketing a Massacre,” 183–84. See also Mishra, Business of State, 209–41.

24 Stewart, “Introduction,” 723.

25 Hakluyt, Richard, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, and the Ilands Adiacent unto the Same, Made First of All by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (London, 1582)Google Scholar. See Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), 149–92Google Scholar; Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 61–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Obviously, to make the case for the value of plantations in public discourse is not to argue for a coherent ideological understanding of their significance or purpose.

26 Hakluyt, Richard, Discourse of Western Planting, 1584, ed. Quinn, David B. and Quinn, Alison M. (London, 1993)Google Scholar. This promotional composite draws from a few of the many, often repetitive sources. See Gray, Robert, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609)Google Scholar; Eburne, Richard, A Plain Pathway to Plantations (London, 1624)Google Scholar; White, Planter's Plea, and numerous examples from Hakluyt's work relating to “poor people . . . utterly decayed and ruinous . . . being not set on work” and similar public motives for plantations in Hakluyt, Richard, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols. (London, 1599–1600), 3:174Google Scholar.

27 Gray, Good Speed to Virginia, sig. A3, 11.

28 Council for New England, Book of Orders, 1622–1623, 15 January, 18 February 1622/1623, 38, American Antiquarian Society Collections (hereafter AASC). This initiative lapsed because of doubts on the council about its capacity to manage the numbers of poor migrants likely to result.

29 Eburne, Plain Pathway to Plantations, 3–4.

30 White, Planter's Plea, 47–48. See also Underdown, David, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 1992), 131–38Google Scholar; Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, 1985), 45–66Google Scholar.

31 White, Planter's Plea, 69–75. See Rose-Troup, Francis, John White (New York, 1930), 57–93Google Scholar.

32 On the fluid and often highly charged relationship between public print and manuscript in political discourse and the circulation of news in early Stuart England, see Peacey, Jason, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Millstone, Noah, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2016), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 25–54.

33 See Cust, Richard, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987), 19–22Google Scholar, 209–13, 326–29; and his series of articles on this aspect of early Stuart political culture, including Cust, Richard, “Charles I and Popularity,” in Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. Cogswell, Thomas, Cust, Richard, and Lake, Peter (Cambridge, 2002), 235–58Google Scholar; Richard Cust, “The ‘Public Man’ in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England,” in Lake and Pincus, Politics of the Public Sphere, 116–43; and Cust, Richard, “‘Patriots’ and ‘Popular’ Spirits: Narratives of Conflict in Early Stuart Politics,” in The English Revolution, c. 1590–1720, ed. Tyacke, Nicholas (Manchester, 2007), 45–66Google Scholar.

34 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 262–68; Winthrop, Journal, 114–15.

35 Winthrop, Journal, 114–15; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 263–64.

36 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 264.

37 Winthrop, Journal, 115, 131.

38 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 264. This dynamic between public print and private manuscript discourses and the circulation of news and rumor on an Atlantic scale resembles some features of the Protestant subculture described in Lake, Peter and Como, David, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of Consensus in the London (Puritan) ‘Underground,’” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 1 (2000): 34–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In August 1634, a month before Winthrop recorded the letter from the lords, at a meeting convened in Boston, he and “other of the reverend magistrates” of Massachusetts Bay, at Bradford's invitation, having “craved” their “advice and direction . . . fell into a fair debating of things,” despite the failure of Piscataqua to respond to the invitation or send a representative. “After all things had been fully opened and discussed, and the opinion of each one demanded, both magistrates and ministers . . . they could not but lay the blame and guilt on Hocking's own head . . . and thus was this matter ended, and their love and concord renewed.” See Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 267–68; Winthrop, Journal, 125.

39 Sainsbury, W. Noel, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1574–1660, (London, 1860), 177Google Scholar.

40 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 266, 422–25. On Winthrop's view of Massachusetts Bay's judicial liberty from such “laws, constitutions, and ordinances” under the provisions of its charter, see Winthrop, Journal, 240; Bilder, Mary Sarah, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 46–50Google Scholar.

41 The fishery jargon is from the 1635 Court of Requests case relating to a 1625 incident and including the only detailed list of Dorchester Company investors. See TNA, REQ 2/630, CR, Charles I, bundle 48, part 2: Bill of Complaint (1636); TNA, REQ 2/676, CR, Charles I, bundle 63, part 2: Second Answer (1635); REQ 1/35A, CR, Final Orders, Decrees 13 Charles I, Easter/Michaelmas, 453ff. The nonsequential order of the case records and their scattering through an uncatalogued Court of Requests archive has led to confusion about this important case. The original 1635 bill of complaint has not survived, nor has the first answer; the 1636 bill was revised in light of the second answer, which in turn had replaced a first, but the records all relate to a single Court of Requests case.

42 White, Planter's Plea, 70. These and the following observations are based on White's account in The Planter's Plea (69–71) of the Dorchester Company's 1623 fishing voyage, which left fourteen men from the ship's “double man” crew at Cape Ann to “build” and to “plant” in preparation for the next season, and on Richard Whitbourne's account of usual practices in the Atlantic fishery in 1615, published as Whitbourne, Richard, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland (London, 1620), 61–65Google Scholar.

43 Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, 63–64.

44 Levett, Christopher, A Voyage Into New England (London, 1624)Google Scholar, 1.

45 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 145–47. Bradford's narrative is a difficult source for the details of this episode because he never refers to the Dorchester Company, and its settlers are therefore partly buried in his “us” and “them” style of reference.

46 Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery, 63–64.

47 Whitbourne, 63–64.

48 Whitbourne, 63–64.

49 Whitbourne, 63–64.

50 The only eyewitness report of the incident is in David Thomson's July 1625 letter to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel: Thomson to Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, 2r, AC. Altham and William Bradford heard the news directly on the Hopewell's return to New Plymouth from Cape Ann. See Altham's letter to his brother, Sir Edward Altham, dated June 10, 1625 in Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, ed. Sydney V. James, Jr. (Plymouth, 1963), 53–59; and Bradford's letter to the Council for New England, June 28, 1625, in Bradford, William, Governor William Bradford's Letter Book (Boston, 1906)Google Scholar 14. Contemporaneous accounts include Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, 170–72, perhaps written during the 1630s, and Hubbard, General History of New England, 110–11, first published in 1682, the first to form part of a general historical narrative. Because Hubbard lived in Ipswich and knew several of the participants, his account has been taken for primary evidence, despite having been written some years later. See Rose-Troup, John White, 89; Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, 1:350–51. See also recent use of Hubbard's General History of New England in Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 121 and passim.

51 James, Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, 54. In 1625, the Pemberton interest in the Company of Adventurers for New Plymouth included Paul Pemberton, a London haberdasher who had invested £20, and John Pemberton, a minister perceived by Bradford as an enemy of the plantation's plans for church settlement. TNA: Prob 11, Will Registers (1624–1643), piece 146: Clarke, quire nos. 64–102, Paul Pemberton (1625); Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 150. See also Frances Rose-Troup, The Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors (New York, 1930), 151, which mistakenly places the confrontation at Cape Ann in 1624.

52 Peabody Essex Museum, Phillips Library: 974.42 C10; Thornton, John W., The Landing at Cape Anne (Boston, 1854)Google Scholar includes a facsimile of the manuscript.

53 Council for New England, Book of Orders, 1622–1623, AASC, 18 February, 20 February, 1622/1623, 39, 42, record the council's approval of a license to “Richard Bushrode of Dorchester and Associates,” proposing “to settle a plantation in New England,” to send “a ship for discovery and other employments in New England” in 1623, and also its drawing up of a “sealed covenant” for the £110 patent.

54 James, Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, 54.

55 James, 54.

56 Altham's letters consistently seek to communicate with this broader network and to manage the flow of news from the plantations through Sir Edward and James Sherley, treasurer of the New Plymouth Company. See James, Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, 34, 38, 40, 51, 56, 58.

57 James, 53–54, 56.

58 Altham criticized both factions for admitting too many investors to the company at the expense of its capital: the “fools” in a conscientious pursuit of their religious vision for the settlement and the “knaves” only to overthrow Bradford and his allies in London and New Plymouth. See James, Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, 54.

59 Peter Lake and David Como argue persuasively that during the 1620s, “the mechanisms of control and consensus,” including a range of informal meetings and semipublic ritual performances, whereby important religious disputes had been contained and kept more or less private among puritan clerics and laity, “began to break down, and this seedy underbelly was exposed to more public view, with . . . unsettling results.” News from the plantations of armed mobilizations in defense of positions taken in these disputes became orders of magnitude more unsettling. See Lake and Como, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents,” 34–35, 41, 47–48, and 40n13 for a gesture toward the Atlantic dimensions of a “godly public sphere.”

60 Hooker, Thomas, The Danger of Desertion (London: G. M. for George Edwards, 1641)Google Scholar, 9, 14–15; Davids, T. W., Annals of Evangelical Nonconformity in the County of Essex (London, 1863), 149–153Google Scholar, 157. Altham's network also included the Blands: Esdras Bland, vicar of Latton (1580–1593) and of Hunsden, Hertfordshire (1586–1592), and his son Esdras (probably the Bland of Altham's letters), vicar of Buckland, Hertfordshire, until his death in 1667 and signatory of a 1646 petition from Hertfordshire ministers to the House of Lords for “establishing government” according to the Solemn League and Covenant. In his 1663 will, Esdras the younger left his copy of Andrew Willet's virulently anti-popish Synopsis Papismi (London, 1592) “to be fixed” by the churchwardens in Buckland parish church. See Urwick, William, Nonconformity in Hertfordshire (London, 1884)Google Scholar, 124, 679, 741; TNA, Prob 11, Will Registers (1660–1673), piece 324: Carr, quire nos. 59–116, Esdras Bland (1667); James, Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, 34, 40, 56. Altham had invested some of the younger Bland's money in the company and worried about that investment in 1625.

61 See Winship, Godly Republicanism, 120–33, for the controversy surrounding John Lyford in 1624 and 1625 as America's “first clash between puritans and separatists.”

62 John Robinson, minister of the Leiden church, used the term in his 1620 letter, publicly read to the migrants for their consent during the Atlantic voyage. See Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 51, 350.

63 Bradford, William Bradford's Letter Book, 14.

64 See Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 121, for New Plymouth as a “commonwealth.”

65 Bradford, William Bradford's Letter Book, 14; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 75–76, 161. See also Cust, “The ‘Public Man’ in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England,” 132, for these tropes in political discourse, referring to Job Throckmorton's declaration against public business “huddled up in a corner” and a civic preference for “all in public” during the 1586 Warwick election contest.

66 Bradford, William Bradford's Letter Book, 14.

67 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 127–28, 140–41, 142–44. The account that follows focuses on Bradford's perception of Atlantic political dynamics and its interrelationship with religious beliefs and practices in New Plymouth, as this had a decisive impact on the decision to use armed force in 1625.

68 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 140–41, 142–44, including 372–73, James Sherley to William Bradford, 25 January 1624. Among other grievances, the “particulars” complained of “diversity about religion” and “want of both the sacraments,” as neither baptism nor communion was administered in New Plymouth before Lyford's arrival.

69 Robert Cushman to William Bradford, 24 January 1624, in Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 373–74. This compromise patently forestalled the transportation of John Robinson and others of the Leiden church to the plantation.

70 Winship, Godly Republicanism, 121.

71 See Winship, 120–33, for a detailed account of the politics of this ecclesiological dispute from June to December 1624 between the Puritan Lyford, supported by John Oldham and other “particulars,” and Bradford and the separatists. Among other transatlantic connections, Lyford wrote complaining to “John Pemberton, a minister and great opposite of [the separatists]” in a letter intercepted by Bradford. See also Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 150, 147–75.

72 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 150–51.

73 Bradford, 157.

74 Bradford, 170.

75 Bradford, 170.

76 Morton, Thomas, New English Canaan (London, 1637)Google Scholar, 120.

77 Hubbard, General History of New England, 106–7, 110–11. Hubbard may have known and talked to Roger Conant, whom he described as “a religious, sober, and prudent gentleman, yet surviving about Salem until the year 1680 . . . having a great hand in all those . . . transactions about Cape Anne.” Hubbard, General History of New England, 106.

78 See Tyacke, Nicholas, “The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558–1642,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (September 2010): 527–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 151.

80 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, 2r, AC. Arundel served on the Privy Council, and the report thus addressed the highest officers in the Stuart regime.

81 Council for New England, Book of Orders, 1622–1623, 16 November, 3 December 1622, 19, 25, AASC. Thomson was the son of Scots parents who served in the London household of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. After his marriage, Thomson lived with his family in Plymouth, where he set up as an apothecary, but his Atlantic projects occupied him from 1622 until his death ca. 1628. See Anderson, Robert Charles, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, 3 vols. (Boston, 1995), 3:1807–1809Google Scholar.

82 Morton, New English Canaan, 22, presenting a significant, more inclusive variation on the familiar theme of native Americans as analogous to ancient Britons. See Fitzmaurice, Andrew, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation (Cambridge, 2003), 157–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 See Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2004), 14–15Google Scholar, 59; MacDougall, Hugh A., Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal, 1982), 7–27Google Scholar. See also Cohen, Matt, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, 2010), 21–91Google Scholar, for a persuasive analysis of the native American discursive impact on English publications about New England.

84 Levett, A Voyage Into New England, 1–2; Edward Winslow, Good News from New England (London, 1624), 50. Thomson said only that he “was there accidentally, by good fortune.” David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 2r, AC.

85 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 1r, AC. See Howarth, David, Lord Arundel and His Circle (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar, 116, 170–71, on Arundel's passion for building in marble and his promotion in 1633 of a project to quarry Irish marble at Drean in Donegal.

86 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fols. 1r–v, 2r, AC.

87 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 1v, AC; “A Proclamation Prohibiting Interloping and Disorderly Trading to New England in America [6 November, 1622],” in Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2 vols., ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford, 1973, 1983), 1:555–57.

88 Thomson's view reflects Michael Adas's recent observation that in “this spatial and psychological zone, where neither side had yet gained dominance over the other, a rough but uneven balance was maintained in military, economic, and cultural exchanges,” in this context favoring native American groups. See Adas, Michael, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 62.

89 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 1v, AC.

90 All quotations from David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fols. 1v, 2r, AC. See Christopher Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster,” in Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1974), 181–204; Cust, “Charles I and Popularity,” 243.

91 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 151.

92 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 151. See also Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 403–31Google Scholar; Lake, Peter, The Boxmaker's Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy,” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001), 183–84Google Scholar; Hill, “Many-Headed Monster,” 191; Cust, “Charles I and Popularity,” 237.

93 See also Hubbard's account of the incident in his General History of New England, 110–11, which closely follows the one in Thomson's letter, substituting “the prudence and moderation” of Roger Conant, from whom Hubbard may have had his account, for Thomson's intervention. Thomson appears more likely as the neutral arbitrator to persuade the parties to stand down, “the ship's crew, by advice, promising to help [New Plymouth settlers] to build another [stage], the difference [being] thereby ended.” Altham's later account may have overstated the number of firearms among the company.

94 In addition to Altham's letters, see Cressy, David, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar, 9, 38, for Altham's interest in the fishery.

95 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 2r, AC.

96 Thomson's governor general would allow “dispersed” settlement only to “companies” of forty, fifty, or sixty people, especially among fishermen. As a model governor, Thomson recommended John Mason, a soldier and navy captain, royal governor of the English plantation at Newfoundland from 1615 to 1621, and joint proprietor with Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the Maine patent granted by the Council for New England in 1622. See David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 2r, AC; Sainsbury, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1:32.

97 See Cressy, Coming Over, 213–34, for the scale of transatlantic correspondence during the seventeenth century.

98 Walter, John, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2017), 1–6Google Scholar, 244–61. See bibliographic references in Wood, Andy, Riot, Rebellion, and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), 112–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 208–15; Walter, John, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), 71–114Google Scholar; Beaver, Daniel C., Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the Civil War (Cambridge, 2008), 55–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braddick, Michael J., God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 113–55Google Scholar, 182–238.

99 See Lake, Boxmaker's Revenge, 92, 94–95, 265–68; Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 See Hughes, Ann, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 103, 55–129; Braddick, God's Fury, 439–64.

101 David Thomson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 1v, AC.

102 David Thompson to Earl of Arundel, 1 July 1625, AL, vol. 3, no. 275, fol. 2r, AC; Charter of Massachusetts Bay in Francis N. Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, 7 vols. (Washington, 1909), 3:1852.

103 The terms “devolved sovereignty” and “sovereign agency” express both the legal principle of sovereignty under the Crown and the practical experience of lordship and agency that charters conveyed to their recipients. See Daniel C. Beaver, “Sovereignty by the Book: English Corporations, Atlantic Plantations, and Literate Order,” in Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in England, 1550–1750, ed. Jason Peacey and Christopher Kyle (Manchester, forthcoming 2020).

104 See Hall, David D., A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York, 2011), 3–52Google Scholar; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 183–232, for radical republican aspects of church settlement and political society in Massachusetts Bay during the 1630s and 1640s.

105 See Brian Quintrell, “Henry Montagu (c. 1564–1642), First Earl of Manchester,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19020; Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), 289. The scale and scope of the role played by the Court of Requests and other prerogative courts in this Atlantic political society form the subject of Benjamin Herman's Pennsylvania State University doctoral dissertation, currently in progress.

106 See White, Planter's Plea, 69–74; TNA, REQ 2/630, CR, Charles I, bundle 48, part 2: Bill of Complaint (1636); TNA, REQ 2/676, CR, Charles I, bundle 63, part 2: Second Answer (1635); TNA, REQ 1/35A, CR, Final Orders, Decrees 13 Charles I, Easter/Michaelmas, 453 fols. White and his codefendants did not deny the complaint's main claims, answering weakly that they had not authorized the thefts and that, in any case, the salt had decayed over time and spoiled the fish when their agent used it. Rose-Troup, John White, 102–3, vastly underestimates the court's fine, misreading pounds for shillings in the manuscript.

107 Pestana, Carla Gardina, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar, 3, 14–24.

108 Sainsbury, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1:177, 210, 214. See R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987), 104, for the association of Arundel in particular with qualities later codified in royalist explications of noble virtue.

109 See Tyacke, “The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558–1642,” 527–50.