Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-5wvtr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-24T06:35:23.889Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Renaissance Influences in English Colonization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

D.B. Quinn
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

THE New World of the sixteenth century grew directly out of the Old not merely in a physical but in an intellectual sense. The men of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who found the new lands overseas, were educated in a humanistic tradition which made the classical past, especially the Roman past, alive and relevant to them. Consequently, there is an element of continuity in the thinking about the discoveries and the problems they presented on the basis of older intellectual concepts, which continues to influence much of the thought of the sixteenth century about cosmography, natural history and about the planting of colonies in lands unknown to the ancients. It is astonishing how Ptolemy remained the standard bearer of the new discoveries: maps of the New World and other novel areas, added to his Geography for the first time in 1513, continued to proliferate in edition after edition until by the later sixteenth century the original maps and text had been so overlaid with new matter that they bore even less relationship to the original than the first issue of Gray's Anatomy has to the current edition. It was much the same with Pliny: the Natural History remained the starting point for New World and Asiatic botany and zoology throughout the sixteenth century. Oviedo in 1526 paid his respects to the master before suggesting that genuine novelties could now be added to his text: well before the end of the century Pliny too had been swamped in new material, though his text was also retained intact.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 26 , December 1976 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1976

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See especially Williamson, J. A., The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Exploration, Cambridge (1962)Google Scholar, and the not uncontroversial account inQuinn, D. B., England and the Discovery of America (London, 1974)Google Scholar.

2 Proclus, , Diadochus, , De sphaera (Vienna, 1499Google Scholar, Leipzig [1500], Vienna, 1511, London c. 1522, Paris 1534); translated into English as The description of the sphere or frame of the worlde, by Salysburye, William (London, 1550)Google Scholar.

3 More commented favourably on 21 October 1515 on Linacre's work in translating part of Aristotle's Meteorologica and a commentary on it, though neither of these works were published(Rogers, Elizabeth F., St Thomas More: Selected Letters, New Haven, 1961,pp. 52–53)Google Scholar. More made further reference to the discovery of new lands in his‘Confutacion’ (1532), in The workes (London, 1557), p. 428Google Scholar.

4 Utopia, edited by Surtz, E. L. and Hexter, J. H. (Yale edition of the Works of St Thomas More, iv, New Haven, 1965), p. 136Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 137, and see pp. 415–46.

6 New English settlements in Ireland had already been suggested about 1515, but we have no evidence that More had Ireland in mind (see State Papers, Henry VIII, ii (1834), p. 25Google Scholar; ‘to send one man oute of every paryshe of England, Cornwale, and Wales, into this lande, to inhabit’).

7 John Clement (in 1515) and Thomas Lupset (1518) were drawn to More's work on Utopia, and so involved, if only peripherally, in New World literature(Rogers, , Selected Letters, pp. 73, 110)Google Scholar.

8 Published at St Diè Lorraine, see Fischer, J. and Weiser, F. von, Die älteste Karte mit dem Namen Amerika aus dem Jahre 1507 (Innsbruck, 1903)Google Scholar.

9 A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the iiij. elementes [London, c. 1525] sig. ClvGoogle Scholar.

10 Principe, chap. 3; Discorsi, bk. i, chap. i, bk. ii, chap. 6, bk. iii, chap. 19; Istorie, bk. ii, chap, i. SeeWhitfield, J. H., ‘Machiavelli's Use of Livy’, in Livy, edited by Dorey, T. A. (London, 1971), pp. 73–96Google Scholar.

11 See Quinn, D. B., ‘Edward Walshe's “Conjectures” Concerning the State of Ireland [1552] ‘, Irish Historical Studies, v ( 1947 ), pp. 302–22Google Scholar. Walshe (who saw service at Boulogne in 1544) showed in his pamphlet, The office and duety in fightyng for our countrey (London, 1545 ), dedicated to Sir Anthony Saintleger, that he was well acquainted with Livy and other classical histories. (I am indebted to Dr Dean White for suggesting that this pamphlet would be worth examination.)Google Scholar

12 ‘Then they chewse out of euery citie certeyn cytezins and buylde vp a towne vnder their own lawes in the next land.…’ A fruteful and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weak and of the newe yle called Vtopia (London, 1551 ), fo 15v., and in 2nd edn (London, 1556), fo 15vGoogle Scholar.

13 In The First Three English Books on America, ed. Arber, E. (Birmingham, 1885) pp. 49–60, 285–8Google Scholar.

14 Ribault, Jean, The whole and true discouerye of Terra Florida (London, 1563)Google Scholar, sig. *2V.

15 See Quinn, D. B., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert 2 vols., (London, 1940), I, 9–12, II, 490–97Google Scholar.

16 Smith to Cecil, 6 June and 7 November 1565, P.R.O., State Papers, Foreign SP 70/78, 1007 and 1302; Smith to Sidney, May 1565, State Papers, Ireland, SP63/13, 51, seeDewar, Mary, Sir Thomas Smith (London, 1964), pp. 156 –57Google Scholar.

17 Strype, John, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1820), pp. 276–77.Google ScholarSee Morris, Christopher, ‘Machiavelli's Reputation in Tudor England‘ ii Pensiero Politico, II (1969), no. 3, p. 90Google Scholar. (I am indebted for this reference to Dr Cecil Clough.)

18 Canny, Nicholas, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland. A Pattern Established 1565–1576 (Hassocks, 1976)Google Scholar.

19 Sidney to the Queen, 12 November 1568. P.R.O. State Papers Ireland, SP63/26, 18.

20 Queen to Sidney, 6 June 1569. OLaidhin, T., Sidney Papers, 1565–70 (Dublin, 1962), p. 108Google Scholar.

21 See Quinn, D. B., ‘Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, lxxxix (1945), 343–60Google Scholar; Dewar, , Sir Thomas Smith, pp. 156–70Google Scholar; Canny, N. ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: Ireland to America ‘, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. xxx (1973), 575–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Smith to Sir William Fitzwilliam, 17 July 1572. Bodleian Library, Carte MS 57, fo 38.

23 Smith to Fitzwilliam, 31 July 1574, Carte MS 56, fo 218. In the same letter he designated de facto leaders of the colony ‘Colonel, and coloniae doctor and agrorum divisor.’

24 Mr Barry Langston.

25 Smith to his son Thomas, , 05 1572, Calendar of Slate Papers, Foreign 1583, and Addenda, pp. 491, and see 467–68, 492Google Scholar. Hale, John R., ‘To Fortify or not to Fortify’, Essays in Honor of John Humphreys Whitfield, ed. Davis, H. C., Rees, D. G., Hartwell, J. M. and Slowey, G. W. (London, 1975), p. 110Google Scholar, shows that Machiavelli stressed both the importance of fortifying conquered territories and of colonizing them, but he did not put the two themes together. Smith, , rather than Justus Lipsius, Politicorum Librisex (1589)Google Scholar, inOmnia opera, iv, (Wesel, 1675), 73–74Google Scholar, who is cited by Hale, appears to be the earliest, or at least one of the earliest, to do so.

26 See Dewar, , Sir Thomas Smith, pp. 164–68Google Scholarand review byQuinn, D. B.Irish Historical Studies, viv (1964–1965), 285–87Google Scholar. The emphasis is again on the city: ‘The chief strength to fortify a colony is to have a city or town of strength well walled and defended.’

27 Listed, in Appendix, pp. 92–93Google Scholarbelow.

28 See Stefansson, V., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 2 vols. (London 1938)Google Scholar.

29 See Quinn, , Gilbert. 2 vols. (London, 1940)Google Scholar, and England and the Discovery of America (London, 1974)Google Scholar.

30 See Quinn, D. B., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–90, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1955)Google Scholar.

31 ‘A particuler discourse’, the so-called ‘Discourse of Western Planting‘, inTaylor, E. G. R., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols. (London, 1935), ii, 211–326Google Scholar.

32 Laudonniere, R., A notable historie containing foure voyages made by certayne French captaynes unto Florida (London, 1587)Google Scholar, sig. AI–AIB.

33 Beer, G. L., The Origins of the English Colonial System, 1578–1660 (New York, 1908)Google Scholar, is still the fullest account, though his interpretations have been modified and developed in books such asDavis, Ralph, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London, 1973)Google Scholarand Davies, K. G., The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis, 1974)Google Scholar.

34 Dunlop, R., ‘The Plantation of Munster ‘, E.H.R., iii (1888), 250–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quinn, D. B., ‘The Munster Plantation: Problems and Opportunities ‘, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, lxxxi (1966), 19–40Google Scholar.

35 Lefranc, P., Sir Walter Ralegh hrivain (Paris, 1968), pp. 237–40, 633–35Google Scholar.

36 Edited by W. E. Buckley (Roxburghe Club, 1887). For Sir William Herbert of St Julians, Monmouthshire, see biography byDodd, A. H. in Dictionary of Welsh Biography (London 1959), p. 355Google Scholar, and Herbert Correspondence, edited by Smith, W. J. (Cardiff and Dublin, 1963), pp. 4, 8, 61–64Google Scholar.

37 Pp. 35,4I

38 P. 54, see also pp. 26, 35–8. I am indebted to Dr Cecil Clough for translations.

39 For Richard Beacon, fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, Queen's Attorney in Munster, 1586–91, grantee of 6,000 acres in Munster, 1591, seeFoster, Joseph, Alumni Oxonienses, i (London, 1891), 94Google Scholar, and, for the grant of 1591,Calendar of Patent and Close Rolls of Ireland, 18–45 Elizabeth, edited by Morrin, James (Dublin, 1862), p. 266Google Scholar.

40 Pp. 81, 108, 114. I am indebted for information on Solon to Dr Sydney Anglo who is making a study of the text.

41 A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Renwick, W. L. (Oxford, 1970), pp. 98–100, 125, 169Google Scholar; Prose Works (Variorum Spenser, ix), edited by Gottfried, R. (Baltimore, 1949). PP. 229, 279, 286, 304, 397, 429Google Scholar.

41a Sig. B4r., pp. 205–06.

42 Dedication to A direction for the plantation in Ulster (London, 1610)Google Scholar.

43 A discouerie of the true causes why Ireland was neuer entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the crowne of England, untill the beginning of his maiesties happpie reigne (London, 1612), pp. 77, 124–25, 156, 164Google Scholar.

44 Sig. B 4.

45 Nova Britannia (London, 1609), sig. C2, E2V., and The new life of Virginia (London, 1612), sig. Fi, G4.Google Scholar

46 In Force, Peter, Tracts… Relating Principally to the Origin… of The Colonies in North America, III (Gloucester, Mass. 1963), no. 1, pp. 4, 15Google Scholar.

47 Sig. A2V.

48 The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania {1612), ed. Wright, L. B. and Freund, V. (London, 1953), p. 24Google Scholar.

49 Sig. G4.

50 A plaine path-way to plantations (London, 1624), p. 17Google Scholar, and A Plain Pathway to Plantations, ed. Wright, Louis B. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), p. 41Google Scholar.

51 P. 11, other references to Roman colonies are on pp. 37, 43–44.

52 General guides to the early development of colonies in North America arePomfret, J. E., and Shumway, F. M., Founding the American Colonies (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, Craven, W. F., The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1949)Google Scholar; Andrews, G. M., The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, 1934), iGoogle Scholar, and D. B. Quinn, ‘North America from First Discovery to Early Settlements’ (forthcoming).