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The social turmoil Henry VIII (and his first two crowned children) introduced would ultimately lead England into a Civil War, but two monarchs managed to maintain stability and peace despite the opposing forces.

Elizabeth I and James I/VII not only maintained English stability and fostered some of England’s greatest cultural institutions – it was their reigns that saw colonization efforts begin.

The foundations of English America were different from those of French or Spanish America.  English colonists weren’t soldiers, and the English government didn’t really participate in the efforts.  Instead, it was individual people who looked across the ocean and saw opportunities.

People who couldn’t buy land could get land in the New World.  People who couldn’t find jobs could get jobs in the New World.  People who didn’t like the direction society was taking could build societies they approved of there, and people who felt oppressed could escape that oppression.

It was a pressure valve, giving Englishmen of all classes hope where they might not have otherwise seen it.

Transcript

England was never really a unified country.  In the year 600, it had a variety of languages, religions and inhabitant origins.  The Southeast was Germanic.  The North and West were Brittonic, Gaelic and Pictish.  The Northeast was Norse.  When the Normans invaded, England became one country, and one of the oldest nation states in the world.

600 years later, the regional divisions still existed.  In fact, maps show they still exist to this day.  The North, for example, remained loyal to the Catholics, and were ready to stubbornly – if only passively – resist Elizabeth’s changes.  They resented the new gentry, who had been enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries, which had once been the center of community life and charity, and who now threatened their way of life.

England had also developed a distinct culture from Continental Europe.  Its gentry remained attached to the countryside.  People who became wealthy moved to rural areas.  They passed their grand estates to their oldest son, so they would pass from generation to generation intact.  Younger sons worked in trades and law, and often ended up richer than the ones who inherited their wealth.  These younger sons built up their own estates, and the cycle continued.

By Elizabeth’s time, England also had the first Reformed government in Europe, and a thriving Renaissance culture.

Introduction

Elizabeth also inherited a poor, battered country, with decayed nobility, few good sailors or soldiers, a divided people, and economic problems.  England had no real allies, but it had enemies which were all-too-real.  In addition to what we’ve already discussed, Spain’s New World imports were driving inflation, and the crown’s already-limited wealth was worth less than ever.  The Irish were still hostile after Henry’s attempt to make Ireland more English, the navy he had built had decayed, and just 20 miles across the ocean Europe was becoming more and more unstable as Reformation and Counter-Reformation forces clashed.

She had a very precarious situation to navigate, and the fact that she did so successfully has made her one of the most beloved monarchs in English History.  There’s a good argument to be made that the reason Elizabeth didn’t marry anyone was because there was no peaceful way she could do so.  If she married an Englishman, it would fuel factional and sectarian fighting in her own court and country.  If she married someone from the Continent, England would be dragged into the sectarian conflict of Europe.  It could afford neither, so she took the opposite approach from her father.  Instead of trying to produce an heir, she worked to stabilize the country enough to survive without an obvious successor.

Last episode, we discussed how the various problems and divisions facing England came about.  This week, we’ll discuss how those problems were solved, and what that meant for the future of the English speaking world.

The most obvious issue was religious balance.  Elizabeth was a Protestant.  The first thing she did was repeal Mary’s Catholic legislation and declare herself supreme governor of the English Church.  A year later, she had passed the Elizabethan Settlement, which created the form of the Anglican Church.  She was the head of the Church, and it maintained a balance of Catholic traditions with a moderately Reformed doctrine.  This really kept what the average English person would have liked to see.  Predictably, she was excommunicated by the Pope, but that wasn’t really a huge deal.

What was a problem was that, while Elizabeth tried to steer the most moderate path possible, she was surrounded by mounting radicalism on both sides.  On the Protestant side, Mary’s exiles had returned from Europe, deeply Calvinist.  That meant not only opposing the power of Rome, but of any religious clergy or hierarchy, and indeed, in extreme cases, of any secular hierarchy, too.  They weren’t fully sold on the concept of the monarchy.  At their most extreme, these people wanted a theocratic democracy, where neither Elizabeth nor her Bishops had any influence on the church.  They were also very eager to give military support to the Protestants in Europe, and wanted retaliation against the Catholics for what happened during Mary’s reign.

On the Catholic side, the Jesuits had started to lead the Counter-reformation, which was gaining steam in Europe.  Jesuits wanted to stamp out Protestantism every bit as much as the Puritans wanted to expel any vestige of Catholicism from society.  There weren’t huge numbers of Jesuits in England, but there were some, they were smart, and they were dedicated.

The average Englishman just wanted to go to their own church in their own community, get baptized, learn the fundamentals of faith and morality, and live the life that the English had become accustomed to.  This went for both Anglicans and Catholics.  Elizabeth was happy to leave these people alone for the most part.  She coupled leaving people alone with her firm intention to lead the English Church to prevent England from being swallowed up by the mounting wave of Sectarian conflict.  Her keeping control of the Church was vital if England was to survive the turmoil.

The Puritans were Elizabeth’s most loyal subjects, but they were also the most dangerous, because if they got enough political power, they could pull England into Civil War.  After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, they might also pull England into war on the Continent, which England wasn’t prepared for.  They also challenged her authority, especially in Church matters, but also in secular government.  They dominated the towns of Southeastern England.  Like I said, they were democratic in theory and the way they organized themselves, but they were also intensely intolerant of anyone whose views differed from their own.  They planned to transform the Anglican Church from within, so Elizabeth had to try to keep them from organizing cells within the Anglican Church.

The Jesuits mainly came from, or at least were supported from, abroad.  Whereas the Puritans were gradually building, organizing, and spreading, the Jesuits took a more flamboyant approach, characterized by personal danger, assassination, plots and intrigue.  This was a result of necessity – Puritans had only to pull a Protestant country toward their views, whereas Jesuits if they were to succeed must change the people in charge.  Second in line for the throne was Mary Queen of Scots, who was a dedicated Catholic.  If the Jesuits could eliminate Elizabeth, a Catholic England was a definite possibility.

Speaking of Mary Queen of Scots, this is a good time to check in with England’s neighbor to the North for a couple minutes.  Scotland had been going through its own Protestant revolution.

Henry’s son Edward was supposed to marry Mary Stuart, Mary Queen of Scots, but had died too young to do so.  Mary was known for being a lively and kind person, and was well liked early in her reign.  She was, of course, a dedicated Catholic.  When Edward died, she married the king of France, and when he died of an ear infection, she married a cousin of hers and had a son named James.  Her husband killed her secretary while she watched, pregnant, and then another man killed her husband, and she then married him.

Everyone was shocked by this behavior. To make matters worse, her husband was divorced, so Catholics considered her marriage unlawful, and she was a Catholic in an increasingly Calvinist Scotland. Navigating such complex religious and legal issues may require the assistance of custody court lawyers to ensure fair outcomes for all involved parties.  Whereas England’s reformation had been calculated and political, Scotland experienced the kind of dramatic, bloody clashes that Continental Europe saw, so much so that today there’s only one remaining medieval cathedral in Scotland, and it’s riddled with bullet holes.  So, when her son was a year old, she fled Scotland and left her son to be raised by the Presbyterians there.  As a descendent of Henry VII, she was next in line for the English throne if Elizabeth died.

That made her a problem.  If Catholics could kill Elizabeth, they’d have a Catholic queen.  England was the only Reformed country in Europe at the time, so this would cripple Protestantism in general.  It wasn’t long before there was an uprising against Elizabeth, but it failed.  Elizabeth’s response actually managed to strengthen the trust between the queen and her Catholic subjects.  She put Mary in the Tower, and then there was an attempt to break her out, and while Elizabeth was reluctant to kill her cousin, by 1584, there was evidence that Mary was participating in these conspiracies.  After a formal trial, Mary was executed.

The internal Catholic threat was finished.  There were laws against Catholics, forbidding them from practicing law or medicine, and not allowing them to live in London.  There weren’t large scale executions.  It was better to be of a minority sect in England than in most European countries.  There was no chance of turning England Catholic for the forseeable future.

Externally, Elizabeth had to maintain English peace.  She didn’t have the money to fight a war, and getting involved in sectarian war would be devastating to England anyway.  Her Secretary of State was one of Mary’s exiles and wanted Elizabeth to give the Protestant cause unlimited aid.  Another of her advisors, Lord Cecil, though, wanted to pursue friendship with Spain, feeling it was a Tudor tradition and that it would inflame Puritan extremists internally.  Elizabeth agreed with the latter, and tried to build an alliance with France.

This was derailed when the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre led to the deaths of between 5 and 30,000 French protestants, or Huguenots.  Elizabeth recalled her ambassador and started to secretly fund the Huguenots.  She blockaded Scottish ports to prevent the French-Scottish alliance from re-emerging, and in the process helped solidify a Protestant Scotland at the Treaty of Leith.

She pursued similar Cold War tactics in the Netherlands.  While she sanctioned privateers to plunder Spanish vessels in an undeclared war at sea in the Caribbean, she also helped fund the Dutch protestant rebels.  She was working to weaken Spain, knowing that Spain was likely to try to invade England.

She ended up even sending an army to Holland after attack seemed imminent, and of course as tensions escalated, her navy of privateers sank the Spanish Armada.  They had smaller ships, slower ships, weaker ships, but they had one major tactical advantage – the broadside cannon.  Whereas the Spanish relied on their ability to board ships and take them in hand to hand combat, English boats could simply come up beside a ship, shoot a cannonball at it, and either cripple or sink it.  That’s exactly what they did, and after 1.5 years of anticipating the attack, the battle with the Armada was over almost as soon as it began.

It was the crowning achievement of her reign, and an event inexorably linked to the history of America.  This was the first great generation of English sailors.  They had learned seamanship running slaves on the West African coast, and as privateers – pirates – in the West Indies.  They built the navy.  Actual colonization would have to wait, though.  Privateering was the name of the game in Elizabeth’s day, and the massacre of a Huguenot settlement in Florida by the Spanish meant colonization had to be done very carefully.

By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, we see the society that would produce English colonies in the New World.  The same divisions which had emerged during Henry’s reign still existed, but they no longer threatened the existence of England.  The vast majority of English society had come to a new norm.  The Elizabethan Settlement worked for most people.  In fact, many people truly cared about the Anglican Church.  Some remained Catholic, but they had no real hope of influencing English society anymore.  Some remained Puritan, but they could slowly work for transformation of the English Church over the course of time.

England still didn’t have any steadfast allies abroad, but it also didn’t have any real enemies.  France had collapsed into internal strife and Spain had been defeated.  Scotland wouldn’t be an issue because her successor was the king of Scotland.  He would inherit both crowns.  He had been raised Calvinist, so there was no question of religious upheaval when Elizabeth died.

The peasants who had found themselves in dire poverty after the dissolution of the monasteries were still poor, but Elizabeth was trying to remedy that through her Poor Act.  Power had more comprehensively been moved from the old nobility to the new gentry, who now exerted significant influence in government, too.  In fact, while the central government was poor (Elizabeth managed to ward off a financial crisis by being extraordinarily frugal), local government was thriving.  Its wealth was increasing and a huge percent of the country started to take turns in local office.

That actually brings me to something I haven’t mentioned much, and that’s the growth of Parliament under Elizabeth.  The House of Commons had been Henry’s closest ally during the Reformation, and Elizabeth truly continued that.  By the end of her reign, they had even successfully turned against her on the issue of selling monopolies, which was one of the crown’s few revenue streams.  One of her last public appearances was in front of the Commons, where she gave a speech which has been printed in pamphlets ever since, every time the English people need a morale boost.

The issue of an heir briefly reared its ugly head when a faction of her court led by the Earl of Essex tried to use an Irish uprising to set up a way to control her successor, but for the most part it disappeared without an issue.  The Renaissance was in full swing, and England was secure in its stability, and confident in its abilities.

The subject of colonization had first emerged under Elizabeth, with people like Hawkins, Drake and Frobisher dedicated to the idea of planting new world settlements.  They saw in the New World both a chance for England to expand economically, and for its individual people to find opportunities they didn’t have in England.  With so much land being taken up by pasture, England had too many people and too little land and too few opportunities.  The needy and unemployed could go to the New World, and once they achieved financial stability, they’d be yet another market for English goods.  Colonies could be a simple way to solve the remaining practical problems faced by England.

When Elizabeth died, her successor was her cousin, James, king of Scotland.  He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and had been raised by Presbyterians since she fled Scotland when he was a year old.

Everyone had high hopes for James as a king.  First, there was a peaceful succession, which was a relief.  Second, everyone could look at James and see evidence that he might implement changes they wanted to see.  For Catholics, he was the son of Mary Queen of Scots.  They hoped he’d reduce the laws against Catholics.

Puritans saw that he was raised by strict Calvinists in Scotland, and met him on his way to London with a petition signed by a thousand Puritan ministers asking to meet with him to discuss a series of reforms to make the Church of England conform to their idea of what it should be.

And, on the whole, James was actually an extremely competent ruler.  He was shrewd, and knew when to back down in discussions with his rivals.  His reign ushered in a period of unparalleled political and social peace.  Culture flourished under James.  He continued a lot of Elizabeth’s policies, and obviously colonization finally did begin under his rule.  Some historians even argue that British values come from the Stuart era.  James quickly ended the conflict with Spain, and managed to keep the country out of the Thirty Years War which was engulfing the continent.  He wasn’t into violent religious persecution, and was much happier to simply leave his subjects alone.

He was also an ardent pacifist, having witnessed war during his youth in Scotland.  He wanted to be peacemaker of Europe, and he knew he didn’t have the money to involve England in a war, anyway.  Even when the puritan-controlled Commons wanted to go to war to defend Protestants in Bohemia, James refused because while it may have been a popular move, it wasn’t one he could win.  Parliament wouldn’t give him enough money to fight effectively, the action would empower Puritans creating internal conflict, and there was no reason to think he’d secure a military victory, anyway.  Whether or not people appreciated it at the time, his pacifism was crucial to England’s wellbeing.  The fact that he was king of both Scotland and England also removed a foothold for any Continental powers who decided to invade, and James quickly concluded hostilities and renewed diplomatic relations with Spain, ending the last remaining conflict the country faced.  He did overstep his bounds in trying to appease Spain, though, and executed Sir Walter Raleigh when Raleigh offended the Spanish.  He had already imprisoned Raleigh on the dubious charge of conspiring to depose him, and then he let him out of prison to go find the Lost City of El Dorado.  When this quest offended the Spanish governors of South America, James quickly renewed the original charge and beheaded one of England’s favorite national figures.  And, that brings us to the issues England faced with James as king.

The problem with James was that, while he didn’t make a huge number of mistakes, the mistakes he did make turned people against him personally.  So, while England did well under James, it wasn’t long before he became one of the more disliked kings in all of English history.  England never forgave him for Raleigh’s execution, and in fact his own son strongly opposed the execution.  It wasn’t the only source of discontent with his rule, though.

To begin with, his behavior was downright embarrassing.  He was not only extravagant, something which Elizabeth had intentionally avoided, he was extravagant in an embarrassing way.  He had grown up under strict Calvinist discipline, in a relatively poor Scotland, so when James got to England, he found both his financial and social constraints removed at the same time.  There were many embarrassing tales from James’ court, but nothing was more embarrassing than the fact that James surrounded himself with a number of handsome young men.

Now, that’s something Elizabeth had also done, but you can imagine how different it looked when instead of a virgin queen, the person flaunting a gaggle of handsome young favorites was a gruff Scotsman with a limp and no manners whatsoever.  To make matters even worse, these men often behaved extremely poorly.  One killed someone with the help of his wife, and James didn’t really punish him.  He did distance himself, though, but the man’s replacement in James’ affections was easily one of the most, and most justifiably, hated men in English history, a man named George Villiers, who James named Duke of Buckingham.

Shortly after this, James took Buckingham to Madrid to see about marrying Charles to the Spanish Infanta, and this made James a huge laughing stock among European royalty and a huge source of embarrassment at home.  Many kings throughout history have been rumored to be gay, but James fueled these rumors with vigor, and they have persisted to this day, even though many academics actually don’t believe his interest in these men was sexual.  Gay or not, a king who drooled while he ate, lectured people and took a flamboyant young man to evaluate his son’s prospective bride wasn’t exactly the look England wanted as a country.  It was even worse that he behaved this way while talking about the crown’s money issues.

The real problem, though, was that James was ignorant of and hostile to English laws and customs.  He sold noble titles to anyone who gave him 10,000 pounds, which was certainly a smart way to raise revenue for the crown, but which many found utterly disgusting.

He wasn’t totally sold on the idea of trial by jury, and in his first few weeks on the throne ordered a thief who was caught red-handed to be hanged without a trial.

And worst of all, he hated Parliament.  The new English gentry, who had over the course of Tudor reign come to control the country financially, and saw Parliament as their political voice, now faced a king who was extraordinarily hostile to Parliament – and who voiced his disapproval at every possible opportunity.

“The House of Commons is a body without a head,” he told the Spanish ambassador. “The members give their opinions in a disorderly manner.  At their meetings, nothing is heard but cries, shouts and confusion.  I’m surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence.  I am a stranger, and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.”

Like I said, he knew when to back down to prevent a big fight, but he truly, deeply disliked them, and they truly, deeply disliked him.  He tried to revert to the medieval prerogative rights of taxation and avoid having to rely on Parliament, but he couldn’t.  The only concession he got was the ability to impose customs duties.

Economically, in some ways England was thriving, with the New Gentry continuing to dramatically increase in wealth.  European inflation was hitting England hard, though, so that a lot of the poorer people found their wages only doubling while the cost of living increased sixfold.  There were people who didn’t fit in the Tudor economy, between the new industry and the old medieval guilds.  Between a hardened framework of social organization, and the aftermath of the enclosures.

He also managed to disappoint both the Catholics and the Puritans who had had so much hope when he took the throne.  James was neither a Catholic nor a Calvinist, and in fact the one English institution that he really liked was Elizabeth’s Anglican Church.  It was the least Protestant and most tolerant and diverse of all Reformed Churches, and its big tent policy was extremely pragmatic for a society that had undergone so much social turmoil connected to religion.

His upbringing had been strictly Calvinist, and he’d hated it.  He also articulated something Elizabeth had seen, which was that the Bishops of England were necessary to maintaining both political and religious stability.  At a point in history when extreme Calvinists and extreme Catholics were essentially playing a violent tug of war for every country in Europe, England’s Bishops could hold the country steady.  Church and government needed each other to maintain peace for both.  “No bishop, no king,” became his mantra.

On a less practical note, James also enjoyed the intellectual appeal of the Anglican Church.  He, himself, published numerous tracts and treatises on a variety of subjects, and as much as he enjoyed giving a good lecture, he also enjoyed having a good debate.

And, in the spirit of having a good debate, James accepted the Puritan invitation for a meeting, and brought himself, his Elizabethan Bishops and some of the more moderate Puritan leadership together for a conference at Hamden Court.  Now, we’ve mentioned the Puritans quite a bit without really delving into who they were, so it’s worthwhile to do that now.  The Puritans wanted to make the Church of England Calvinist.  There were people in England who wanted to establish their own Calvinist churches, and we’ll discuss them later, but Puritans were a very specific group of people who wanted to change the Church from within.  They didn’t believe in religious hierarchy, and in many cases they didn’t believe in social hierarchy either.  They tended to be from the Southeast of England, and were overwhelmingly of the new Gentry class that had emerged after the dissolution of the Monasteries.

I won’t get into what they believed in terms of religion, exactly, but policy-wise they wanted a variety of reforms.  They wanted to recognize the Sabbath (though, this in itself meant different things to different people), improve the clergy, eliminate infant baptism, get rid of Christmas, and eliminate all tradition associated with the Catholic Church, including hymns, priest weddings, and wedding rings.  They also didn’t like the Bishops.  Like I said, they were democratic in theory and organization, and didn’t believe in the established church hierarchy.  This belief had a religious component, but it’s also something that was rooted in the class structure of the time.  The Bishops were almost all born of the nobility, that fading class of families who had controlled so much until Henry’s reign.  Puritans were the up-and-coming merchant and industrial class, the new gentry.  They were taking control of England politically, and to a large degree socially.  The Bishops were one of the few remaining places that the old nobility really exercised authority.  It’s also not a coincidence that the people who profited from the dissolution of the monasteries now decried the bishops as heretical.  It wasn’t all raw turnips and spike chairs.  It was politics.

The thing is, at this point in history, religion wasn’t all about religion.  It was intertwined in the social framework enough that political, economic and class issues frequently played out through the Church, or at least with Bible-based arguments.  There were two separate concepts which are frequently confused.  Christianity was the religion.  The term for what we now call Western Civilization was Christendom, because its two defining features were the fact that it was a group of savage peoples civilized by the Romans, and the fact that it had the Roman-introduced civilized religion – Christianity.  People could have strong, secular opinions about the way Christendom should go, things like social status, what wars to get involved in, economics, etc, without being strongly Christian in the way we think of today.  They could also be deeply religious without particularly caring about how Christendom developed.

The point is, it’s important to understand the different sects of Christianity both in their religious and doctrinal differences, and in their secular and political differences.  Don’t assume that just because someone called themselves “godly,” which was the term Puritans used for themselves, that they were really dedicated to Jesus Christ.  Don’t assume that just because someone was an Anglican, that they were apathetic about God and just took a simple middle ground.  Christianity is personal.  Christendom is civilizational.  Both used a lot of the same terminology.  The gentry were Puritan, I’m sure, in part because of genuine religious conviction, but in part because they’d like to see Christendom move in a direction that favored them.  Same for other sects.

At the conference, James did actually agree with some of the Puritans’ proposed reforms – like the improvement of the prayer book, increasing Sabbath observance, improving the clergy, and most famously, the need for a common Bible translation.  It was at this conference that the idea for the King James Bible was born, and within two years it became the most important book in English history.  It was written without theological or ecclesiastical bias, by six committees adding up to fifty scholars who had to each approve all portions of the translation.  When published, copies could be bought for five shillings, spread far and wide through the English speaking world, and eliminated the need for a new translation for almost 300 years.

On the whole, though, James was overtly hostile to the Puritans, and obviously sided with the Bishops.  He accused the Puritans of trying to impose a Scottish Presbytery, and uttered his famous phrase, “no Bishop, no king.”  He said he would push them out of England, if possible, and to that end he began to impose petty restrictions and spying to obstruct Puritan organization and worship, and this drove a group of Puritans to Leyden, at least temporarily.

Things didn’t go too much better with the Catholics.  Like the Puritans, Catholics had hoped that James would be sympathetic to their cause.  Like the Puritans, they were associated with a specific class, though instead of the new gentry, they were overwhelmingly members of the old nobility.  James’ mother was their greatest hope in the last generation, so when James came to the throne, they did two things.  The first was that a few prominent Catholics asked James for assurance that he would roll back the laws persecuting Catholics.  He said he would.  The second was that they petitioned the Pope to allow them to give their secular allegiance to the king.  James had never been excommunicated, and he had said he’d allow them to practice Catholicism.  If the Pope would just allow them to do this, they hoped they’d be able to live and worship peacefully.  Unfortunately, the Pope was a member of the Jesuit counter-reformation, intent on stamping out and opposing Protestantism wherever he could.  He refused to allow them to give secular allegiance to a heretical sovereign, and furthermore began to publish volumes attacking James’ right to the throne.  This forced James to act, and Catholics again found themselves fined for refusing to attend Anglican services, watching their priests be banished, and watching their rights be taken away.  Hope turned to despair, and a small group of Catholics hatched a plot to collapse the current government, and establish a Catholic regime with Spanish help.  They would blow up the increasingly Puritan Parliament along with the king, and start fresh.  This was, of course, the Gunpowder Plot, and it, of course, failed.  James didn’t use the plot as an excuse to institute general violence against Catholics, though.  He didn’t want to spill blood, and tried to differentiate between simple Catholics who felt a natural duty to their sovereign, and ones who wanted to topple the government.  So, the Catholics accepted their legal restrictions, took the oath of allegiance, participated in James’ required celebration at the failure of the plot, went back into the quiet hiding like they’d done during Elizabeth’s reign, and began to tacitly accept the government.

So, the last episode discussed how English society fractured in the first place.  This episode has explored the implications of those fractures under the two monarchs who held together that fragmented society.  These same fractures ultimately led to the English Civil War under James’ son, Charles, and they also characterized American colonization, which was first explored under Elizabeth and James.

James’ peace with Spain allowed English attention to venture abroad again.  The Elizabethan texts advocating colonization were revived, and a second wave of explorers arose.  People left England for many reasons, which follow from what we’ve just discussed.  England was unique among European powers in that it saw Colonies as a good way to alleviate problems at home, not simply as a government venture to increase the crown’s wealth.  People stifled by the new English economy could find economic opportunity abroad.  Younger sons who couldn’t find land to build up their estates, could find land.  James saw an opportunity for trade with lively colonies to increase customs revenue which would help fund the crown.  Merchants and gentry saw opportunity for investment and trade when there weren’t many such opportunities in Europe.  The Nobility saw a place where it could set up societies the way English society had been when they were in charge.  Religious minorities saw places where they could either escape persecution, or establish their own religious order.

Next episode, we’ll take a quick look at what happened at Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke colony.  After that, we’ll get into the real details of early American history by discussing the first permanent colony at Jamestown.

Learn more:

My favorite books on this topic are:

The English and their History by Robert Tombs

A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill

First hand documents and articles I mentioned during the show:

Elizabeth I’s Golden Speech – The Virgin Queen’s last speech before Parliament.

We know how to prize, but Loyalty, Love, and Thanks, I account them invaluable: and though God hath raised Me high, yet this I account the glory of my Crown, that I have Reigned with your Loves. This makes that I do not so much Rejoyce, that God hath made Me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so Thankful a People.

Gunpowder – BBC

By the way, you know we covered the Gunpowder Plot in this episode, and if you’ve listened to future episodes, you know it comes up quite a lot in the Jamestown Series, too.  If you like historical dramas, Gunpowder is a great one, depicting the plot, as well as the politics of the time (including problems faced by Catholics in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras).  Minor things were changed for the sake of translating the story to screen, but it’s remarkably accurate.

The major complaint people have about it is how brutal it is, but honestly it wasn’t excessive.  I was dreading the brutality, expecting some Game of Thrones-like stylized violence, but it wasn’t there.  It was appropriate to the story, no more or less than required.  Plus, no sex scenes or profanity.  Gunpowder was just a very accurate dramatization of a truly fascinating story, as well as characters (like James and Cecil) who appear in our own story time and time again.