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Sources and Interpretations
"A Potent Plantation well armed and Policeed": Huguenots, the Hartlib Circle, and British Colonization in the 1640s
Thomas Leng
| WHEN the English Parliament went to war with its king in 1642, the ramifications were felt around the globe. Already involving the two other Stuart kingdoms, Ireland and Scotland, this conflict would soon reverberate throughout England's recently established but burgeoning Atlantic empire, dividing colonies internally and straining their relationships with an equally divided metropolis, yet offering them unprecedented opportunities for self-government.1 But the canvas of England's potential Atlantic empire was still blank in many places, and England's troubles also created openings for those on both sides of the Atlantic who might want to settle these empty spaces. One such project to create a new English colony arose amid the final throes of the civil war. Approaching the soon-to-be-victorious Parliament in 1645, the projectors behind this venture hoped to capitalize on the reorientation of power within the English state by founding what would have been the nation's first parliamentary colony in the New World, created by legislation binding together subscribers in a national joint-stock company and putting the public good before private interest. The colony would be financed by an ambitious scheme of husbandry and fishing improvements, creating a settlement both productive and powerful. In its projectors' vision, the settlement would reenergize a war-torn nation and elevate it to prosperity and prowess: a fitting recompense for England's civil war sacrifices and a truly national endeavor, in stark contrast to the private charters that characterized Stuart colonization. Thanks to the new venture, Protestant England would finally have an empire able to counterbalance that of Catholic Spain. |
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The would-be colonists were not Englishmen hoping to reap rewards for service to Parliament in war. Rather, the proponents, two otherwise obscure gentlemen named Hugh L'Amy and Peter Le Pruvost, were Huguenot exiles from Richelieu's France. For them this colony would have been an international as much as a national venture, populated by Huguenots alongside Englishmen but more importantly drawing England into the confessional conflicts later known as the Thirty Years' War. Their sponsors in England belonged to the similarly international circle of German émigré Samuel Hartlib, a figure based in England since 1628 but still very much attuned to the pulse of international Protestantism, whose voluminous surviving papers supply much of the evidence for the scheme. This venture was but one of numerous projects that Hartlib tirelessly, though largely fruitlessly, sponsored in his long career as intelligencer, or intellectual communicator, ranging from educational and social reform to alchemy and agricultural improvement (he was particularly intrigued by the potential benefits of silk cultivation as a substitute for Virginia tobacco), and often undertaken by foreigners like himself. Together with his closest collaborator, the irenic and divine John Dury, Hartlib was a persistent supporter of international Protestantism in its years of crisis, precisely the cause that inspired such devotion in L'Amy and Le Pruvost.2 But the Huguenots were to find that the British people's own wars of religion were distracting them from the struggle of their Protestant brethren against the papal enemy. As a consequence their hoped-for settlement joined a host of others, stillborn, that littered this early stage of empire like shipwrecks on the Atlantic ocean floor. Despite its ultimate failure, this venture reveals interactions between the Atlantic and European dimensions of the English civil war (as well as the British aspect, since its promoters also had their eyes on Ireland and Scotland). By tracing the history of this colony that never was, we can see how Huguenots L'Amy and Le Pruvost, and those whom they encountered, understood the conflicts of the 1640s and what their consequences for England's Atlantic empire—and international destiny—might be.
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