The United Crowns. First American Settlers.

The Crowns of England and Scotland got united with the accession of James VI to the English throne. King James ruled in Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567, and, from the 'Union of the Crowns', in England and Ireland as James I from 24 March 1603. Scotland and England remained separate states; it was not until 1707 that the Acts of Union merged the two nations to create a new state, the Kingdom of Great Britain. James was the first English monarch of the House of Stuart, succeeding the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, who died without children.

James was a successful monarch in Scotland, but the same was not true in England. He was unable to deal with a hostile Parliament of England; the refusal on the part of the House of Commons to impose sufficiently high taxes crippled the royal finances. It was a firm belief that a King should live ‘on his own’; Parliament voted customs duties for life and didn’t expect to provide more except in emergencies. James I discovered a new source of revenue: catholics were fined for refusing to attend the services of the Established Church. Catholics, however, were not the only group of polulation alienated to James. His taste for political absolutism, his mismanagement of the kingdom's funds and his cultivation of unpopular favourites established the foundation for the English Civil War, during which James' son and successor, Charles I, was tried and executed. James embroiled himself in numerous conflicts with Parliament. Being accustomed to a timid Parliament of Scotland, he did not like working with its more aggressive English counterpart. Before his accession to the English throne, he had written The True Law of Free Monarchies, in which he argued that the divine right of kings was sanctioned by the apostolic succession, and which illustrates James' difficulty in sharing the power of his government. During James' own life, the governments of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland were relatively stable, even though Seldon and especially Pym united and disciplined opposition which Pym was to lead against King Charles I.

Along with Alfred the Great, James is considered to have been one of the most intellectual and learned individuals ever to sit on the English or Scottish thrones. Under him, much of the cultural flourishing of Elizabethan England continued; science, literature and art, contributed by individuals such as Sir Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare grew by leaps and bounds. James himself was a talented scholar.

James' chief advisor was Robert Cecil, 1st Baron Cecil of Essendon, who was created Earl of Salisbury in 1605. James was an extravagant spender; only the skill of the Earl of Salisbury could avert financial disaster. He created numerous peerage dignities to reward his courtiers. In total, sixty-two individuals were raised to the English Peerage by James, contrasted to his predecessor, Elizabeth, who had only created eight new peers during her 45-year reign.

Upon his arrival in London, James was almost immediately faced by religious conflicts in England: he was presented with a petition requesting the tolerance of Puritans. James was unwilling to agree to their demands. He did, however, agree to fulfil one request by authorizing an official translation of the Bible, which came to be known as the King James Version. It won immediate and lasting triumph, and can be considered the first English bestseller.

The Catholic part of the country, however, enjoyed neither the book nor the King. In 1605, a group of Catholic extremists led by Robert Catesby developed a plan, known as the Gunpowder Plot, to cause an explosion in the chamber of the House of Lords, where the King and members of both Houses of Parliament would be gathered for the State Opening. The conspirators sought to replace James with his daughter, Elizabeth, whom, they hoped, could be forced to convert to Catholicism. One of the conspirators, however, leaked information regarding the plot, which was consequently foiled. Terrified, James refused to leave his residence for many days. Guy Fawkes, whose responsibility had been to execute the plot, was tortured on the rack until he revealed the identities of the other conspirators, all of whom were executed or killed during capture. Fawkes is still annually burned in effigy during Guy Fawkes Night, celebrated in the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, to commemorate the failed plot. James' care not to strongly enforce anti-Catholic doctrine thereafter ensured that there were no more plots after 1605.

In the same year, Parliament voted four subsidies to the King, who still considered this to be inadequate revenue. He imposed customs duties without parliamentary consent, although no monarch had taken so bold a step since the reign of Richard II (1377-1399). The legality of such an action was challenged in 1606 by the merchant John Bates; the Court of Exchequer, however, ruled in the King's favour. The decision of the court was denounced by Parliament. Relations between James I and Parliament were also soured by the latter's refusal to pass the King's plan to allow free trade between England and Scotland.

In the last session of the first Parliament of his reign (which began in 1610), Lord Salisbury proposed the Great Contract, which would have led to the Crown giving up feudal dues in return for an annual parliamentary subsidy. The plan, however, failed because of factionalism in Parliament. Frustrated by the members of the House of Commons and by the collapse of the Great Contract, James dissolved Parliament in 1611.

With the Crown deep in debt, James blatantly sold honours and titles to raise funds. In 1611, he used letters patent to invent a completely new dignity: that of Baronet, which one could become upon the payment of £ 1, 080. One could become a Baron for about £ 5, 000, a Viscount for about £ 10, 000, and an Earl for about £ 20, 000.Lord Salisbury died in 1612; Following the loss of these advisors, James began to involve himself in matters previously handled by his ministers. James' personal government was disastrous for his finances. His personal life was disastrous for the morals.

In 1614 James was introduced to George Villiers, then the son of a minor noble. James fell deeply in love with him, calling him his 'sweet child and wife' and writing to him: " I desire only to live in the world for your sake". James bestowed honour upon honour upon the young man, culminating with creating Villiers the duke of Buckingham in 1623, so making him the first commoner to be elevated to a dukedom in more than a century. This corrupt young nobleman became a close (or close) friend to Prince Charles; a friendship for which the latter was to pay dearly in later years.

From 1618 onwards, the religious conflict known as the Thirty Years' War engulfed Europe. James was forced to become involved because his daughter, Elizabeth, was married to the Protestant Frederick V, Elector Palatine, one of the war's chief participants. During the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, James' attempt to ally himself with Catholic Spain fostered much distrust.. Faced with financial difficulties due to the failure of Parliament to approve new taxes, James sought to enter into a profitable alliance with Spain by marrying his eldest surviving son, Charles, Prince of Wales, to the daughter of the King of Spain. The proposed alliance with a Roman Catholic kingdom was not well-received in Protestant England; English merchants saw a serious rival in Spain, who next to monopolized overseas trade; so this policy was rash, but luckily short-lived.

In 1623, the Duke of Buckingham and Charles, the Prince of Wales, travelled to Madrid in an attempt to secure a marriage between the latter and the Infanta. They were snubbed, however, by the Spanish courtiers, who demanded that Charles convert to Roman Catholicism. They returned to England humiliated, and called for war with Spain. The Protestants backed them and James summoned Parliament, which granted some funding for the war. Parliament was prorogued, on the understanding that it would later return to grant more funds.Parliament, however, never actually met when scheduled.

On the whole England could hardly be called successful on European political arena within the period; social conditions in the country were markedly worse: prices rose 6-fold, while wages only twofold. Arable farming developed on ‘capitalist’ lines, exploiting the ruined peasantry driven from their lands during enclosures. The New World looked a lot more promising. One of the new developments of the period was joint stock companies, or charted companies as individual financing of overseas expeditions proved to be a failure. The charted companies could fix wages and prices, without fear of competition. The first successful English settlement in North America, Jamestown was founded in 1607 in a joint-stock fashion, financed by the London Company. After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from England, the three ships, Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery with their crews of 105 men and boys, made landfall at Cape Henry on April 26, 1607. The party explored the area, named the cape, and set up a cross near the site of the current Cape Henry Memorial.

They then proceeded in their ships into the Chesapeake Bay to Hampton Roads and up the James River, where they arrived at the site of Jamestown on May 14. There they began the first permanent English settlement in what later became the United States (the colonists named the site " Jamestown", after King James; of course, there was no city there when the colonists arrived, just empty swampland).

The settlers consisted mainly of English farmers and Polish woodcutters, hired in Royal Prussia. The firstcomers were not well-equipped for the life they found in Jamestown, and many suffered from saltwater poisoning, which led to infection, fevers, and dysentery. Despite the fact that Jamestown Island is a swamp, the men of the Virginia Company chose to settle there, because they felt it was far enough inland to avoid contact and conflict with the Spanish fleet, while the river was deep enough to permit the colonists to anchor their ships, yet have an easy and quick departure if necessary. They had only been at Jamestown for less than a fortnight when they were attacked, on May 26, by Paspahegh Native Americans.

While president of the colony, Smith led a food-gathering expedition up the Chickahominy River, his men were set upon by Native Americans. When Smith was brought before Chief Powhatan (whose native name was Wahunsunacock), the chief decided to execute him, a course of action which was (as stated by Smith) stopped by the pleas of Powhatan's young daughter, Pocahontas.

After Smith was wounded in an accident, he was sent back to England, where he wrote “A True Relation about his experiences in Jamestown”, and a second book, “The Proceedings of the English Colony of Virginia”.

The winter of 1609-1610 at Jamestown became known as the " starving time" in Jamestown, in the meantime, the publication of Smith's book sparked a resurgence in interest in the colony, leading to the dispatch of additional colonists and a new governor, Lord de la Warr, in 1610. De la Warr forced the remaining 90 settlers to stay, thwarting their plans to abandon the colony. This same year, the first European doctor arrived.

John Rolfe was the first man to successfully raise export tobacco in the Colony Although most people " wouldn't touch" the crop, Rolfe was able to make his fortune farming it (by 1617, the colonists exported 50, 000 pounds of tobacco to England). After Rolfe and Pocahontas lived together at his Varina Farms plantation, when they left for England in 1616, he was wealthy; and they had a son, Thomas. By the time of his death in 1622, Jamestown was thriving as a producer of tobacco, and Jamestown's population would later top 4, 000. Wheat also first grew in the colonies in Virginia, in 1618. Tobacco led to the importation of the colony's first black " indentured servants" (actually slaves) as well as women (orphans, petty criminals, prostitutes who were shipped in bunches to become wifes for the settlers) from England, in 1619. That same year, the House of Burgesses, the first legislature of elected representatives in America, met in the Jamestown Church. Their first law was to set a minimum price for the sale of tobacco. That year was also the same year that the first ironworks of the colonies were established in Virginia.

Plymouth was the second permanent English settlement in the Americas. It was founded by members of a separatist religious group, known as ‘Pilgrim Fathers’. The various members of the group had broken away from the Church of England, feeling that the Church had not completed the task begun by the Reformation. Under the guidance of the Reverends William Brewster, Richard Clifton and John Robinson, a portion of the group left their homes in and around Scrooby, England (near Boston, England, in Lincolnshire) and sailed to Amsterdam in Holland to escape what they saw as religious persecution at the hands of the religious and civil authorities of their countrymen. They left, not for religious freedom, but because there was too much freedom of religion in England and they wanted it to be more strict. These separatist " Pilgrims" settled in Leiden for 12 years, but by 1617 a poor economy, and concern about the Dutch influence upon their community convinced many of them to move on, this time to the New World. Concerned with the morals of the time in the Netherlands, and with their children being brought up in a Dutch environment, they decided to move to a place better-suited to them; and in 1620, they set sail on the ship Mayflower from Plymouth Harbour, bound for the Americas on September 6, 1620, with 102 people aboard. Their intended destination was a section of land in the area called Northern Virginia, granted by one of the Brewster family friends in the London Company. This grant would have placed them near the Hudson River.

Forced off-course by harsh North Atlantic weather, the Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod after 65 days at sea on November 11, 1620. Realizing that it would require a significant additional voyage to reach their goal, the Pilgrims chose to abandon their original plans, and to form a community where they were. Having no legal authority to colonize the area, they met to sign their own charter, known as the Mayflower Compact, in which they agreed to form a " self-governing, Christian community".

The first settlement of the colony was " New Plymouth", later Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the end of that winter, almost half of the settlers were dead (probably from starvation and disease), including their leader John Carver. Thus began one of the best-intended, historically renowned, and yet strangely ill-fated colonial ventures in America (after the Roanoke Island Settlement and Jamestown).

Many people (including school teachers) confuse Pilgrims and Puritans. Plymouth's Pilgrims wanted to separate from the Church of England. The Massachusetts Bay Colony's Puritans wanted to purify, but not separate from, the Church of England.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony (sometimes called the Massachusetts Bay Company, for the institution that founded it) was an English settlement on the east coast of North America in the 17th century, in New England, centered around the present-day cities of Salem and Boston. The area is now in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one of the 50 United States.

In 1620, the territory of defunct " Plymouth Company" was reorganized under the Plymouth Council for New England. King James I granted a charter for all the lands in America between 40В° North and 48В° N, " throughout the Maine Land from Sea to Sea." This included everything from the middle of present-day New Jersey in the south to present-day New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the north.

The writing of the Mayflower Compact and the founding of the Plymouth Colony are taught in the United States as seminal events in the history of the nation. But it was the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its successors around the Salem and Boston areas which would come to dominate the New England region in population and economic strength. And it was Massachusetts Bay that would give its name to the Province of Massachusetts when it absorbed Plymouth and other neighboring colonies in 1691-1692.

The first 400 settlers under this new charter departed in April 1629. Most, but not all of the members of the Company were Puritans, and events during the spring and summer of 1629 convinced them they could only remain non-conformists in the Church of England by getting out of England. Charles I (see the next lecture) had dissolved the parliament, and William Laud, the Bishop of London, renewed his pressure on the separatist Puritans to conform with church practices. His harassment was a direct cause of the progressively larger emigration, also called the Winthrop Fleet, over the next few years.

Perhaps by oversight, the company's charter made no mention of the location of its headquarters. On August 29, the shareholders who wished to move to America reached an agreement (The Cambridge Agreement) and bought out those who wished to remain in England. So when John Winthrop set out with the next wave of 700 settlers in March of 1630 (The Winthrop Fleet of 1630), they carried their Charter with them When they reached their destination, the leadership and headquarters of the Colony and the Company were united in America. Charlestown was the first capital of Massachusetts Bay, but the water there was inadequate, so it was moved across the Charles River to Boston.

The idea that this colony was a community with a special covenant with God was laid out in Winthrop's sermon, " A City upon a Hill." The idea that theirs was a holy community shaped life in the colony enormously, making it imperative that colonists legislate morality, enforcing marriage, church attendance, and education in the Word of God as well as relentlessly seeking out and punishing sin and sinners.

Massachusetts Bay continued its rapid growth, in spite of serious difficulties. During the first winter (1630-1631), over 200 died. When the next ships came, more chose to return to England. This was, in fact, the only tragic winter faced by the young colony. Since the pressures on the Puritan non-conformists at home continued, so did increasing and rapid immigration, and by the end of 1631 the colony numbered over 2, 000. Over the next several years, as Archbishop Laud continued to add rigor to the Church hierarchy, the growth continued.

The colony's charter granted, to the Massachusetts General Court, the authority to elect officers and to make laws for the colony. Its first meeting in America was held October of 1630, but was attended by only eight freemen. They voted to grant all legislative, executive, and judicial power to a " Council" of the Governor's assistants (those same eight men). They then set up town boundaries, created taxes, and elected officers. The first revolution was complete: a trading company had become a representative democracy. By 1641, the colony had added its first code of laws, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, written by Nathaniel Ward, that specified required behavior and punishments

The Province of New Hampshire was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1641 to 1679, and again from 1688 to 1691. In 1643, Massachusetts Bay joined Plymouth Colony, Connecticut Colony, and New Haven Colony in the Confederation of New England, which fell apart in the 1650s. From 1686, Massachusetts Bay was administratively unified by the English king with the other New England colonies in the Dominion of New England. In 1688, the Province of New York, East Jersey, and West Jersey were added.

Roger Williams, after falling apart with ‘the goodly’ Puritans of America, founded a town of Providence (now Rhode Island). He was first to put to practice the complete separation of Church from lay government. The colony was sustained by the distilling and sale of spirits. By 1640’s Barbados, St.Christopher and Antigua were also in English hands.

All in all, in these first decades of the great emigration over 80.000 English-speaking people crossed the Atlantic. England wanted to curb the growing independence of colonies, but they were left for themselves for over 25 years due to the Civil war in the mother country (see the next lecture). After that, it was already too late.

The United Crowns, the first American settlers feedback tasks. Note: the questions are meant to provide kind of a rough plan for your examination answer; you are welcome to rearrange them in a more suitable way.

1. In which way are ‘the United Crowns’ different from the Kingdom of Great Britain?

2. James I was: a) Tudor; b) Stuart; c) Plantagenet. Which is correct?

3. What is ‘the King James version’? Why was it so popular?

4. Dwell in details on the relations of King James I and the Parliament; what caused increasing conflict?

5. What was the main interest of joint stock companies: a) arable farming; b) ironwork; c) overseas ventures.

6. Comment upon reasons for Gunpowder Plot; Why do you think Guy Fawkes’ Day is still celebrated?

7. Enter the grid on the first American colonies:

8. In which way are names of Pym, George Villers, Earl of Salisbury, John Rolfe important for the period?

9. Translate into English: ввязаться (впутаться) в…, обратить в веру, сжечь изображение, фракционность парламента, звание (титул), торговые монополии, плодотворный.

The United Crowns, the first American settlers feedback tasks. Note: the questions are meant to provide kind of a rough plan for your examination answer; you are welcome to rearrange them in a more suitable way.

10. In which way are ‘the United Crowns’ different from the Kingdom of Great Britain?

11. James I was: a) Tudor; b) Stuart; c) Plantagenet. Which is correct?

12. What is ‘the King James version’? Why was it so popular?

13. Dwell in details on the relations of King James I and the Parliament; what caused increasing conflict?

14. What was the main interest of joint stock companies: a) arable farming; b) ironwork; c) overseas ventures.

15. Comment upon reasons for Gunpowder Plot; Why do you think Guy Fawkes’ Day is still celebrated?

16. Enter the grid on the first American colonies:

17. In which way are names of Pym, George Villers, Earl of Salisbury, John Rolfe important for the period?

Translate into English: ввязаться (впутаться) в…, обратить в веру, сжечь изображение, фракционность парламента, звание (титул), торговые монополии, плодотворный