Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century Part 1

Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century.

by George MacLaren Brydon.

INTRODUCTION

The settlement of Englishmen at Jamestown in 1607 was the outgrowth of a vision of transatlantic expansion which had been growing stronger steadily during the preceding generation. It was in the following of that vision that Queen Elizabeth granted to a group of men headed by Sir Walter Raleigh the authority to establish a colony upon the remote sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic ocean, and out of the plans of this group came the ill-fated colony which was started at Roanoke Island, in what is now the State of North Carolina, in the year 1585. This colony after a life of a few years disappeared: whether destroyed by Indian attack, or by a Spanish fleet which resented the settlement of Englishmen in a land that was claimed for Spain, or by famine or disease, no one knows to this day. The one permanent result was the giving of the name Virginia to their American land in honor of their Queen.

Following the failure of this first effort, a plan was formulated and established by charter given by King James in the year 1606. Under this charter companies were to be formed in order to found two English settlements in America; one to be a colony at some point between the 34th and 41st degrees of lat.i.tude, and the other between the 38th and 45th degrees. Both companies had the widespread interest of the English people, and both made settlements in America in the same year, 1607.

The Virginia Company established its settlement at Jamestown, from which developed the Colony, and later the Commonwealth of Virginia, as the first permanent English settlement in America. The Plymouth Company made its settlement upon the coast of what is now Maine; but this effort failed and the colonists returned home in the following year.

Permanent settlement of New England began in 1620 with the coming of the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Ma.s.sachusetts. From these two first settlements thus widely separated, but with their common ideal of English civilization and English concepts of freedom and self-government, has grown the American nation of today. This nation, while welcoming all the gifts and values which people of other nations have brought to the enrichment and broadening of our common life, is still basically an English or Anglo-Saxon nation.

Many impelling motives animated the men who organized the Virginia company and labored for the establishment of a colony in America. They wanted of course the expansion of British trade and a wider market for British manufactures; and they naturally hoped for financial profit from their investment in shares of stock in the companies. They planned, also, not merely trading posts in a foreign land as in India and elsewhere, but an extension and expansion of the empire of Great Britain.

A most important part of their plan was to make colonies the answer to a problem which was pressing for solution: the problem of what to do with the increasing overplus of population in many of the cities of England. The danger of a population too great for the land of England to support and feed was a real one. A colony to which England could send her overplus population as part of a greater England was a real solution, and a better one than would be the raising of grain and foodstuff by foreign countries to feed the hungry of Great Britain.

That men were thinking along this line appears from the action of certain large towns in paying the expense of the voyage of young people by the score or hundred to Virginia, and from the plan soon after the first settlement, whereby young women of reputable families were sent to Virginia to become wives of the colonists.

And still another motive was the religious one. The Virginia Company kept constantly in the forefront their plan to Christianize the Indians. Their plan as they began to put it into effect included the establishment of parishes and the selection of fit clergymen to go overseas; to establish a University with a college therein for Indians, and to take Indian youths into English families to fit and prepare them for their college. They secured from both King and Archbishop the authority and permission to bring the expatriated Pilgrim Fathers back under the English flag, and give them a settlement in Virginia, a plan which failed after the Pilgrims had started for their promised new home.

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

The men who came to Jamestown brought the ideals and ways of life of the mother country; its common law, the enactments of Parliament, the Church of their people; and as shown in the prayer written in England which the commanding officer of the colony was required to use daily at the setting of the watch, they hoped also that the natives of the land might be brought into the Kingdom of G.o.d. They made pet.i.tion for their own needs, but they prayed also:

And seeing, Lord, the highest end of our plantation here is to set up the standard and display the banner of Jesus Christ, even here where Satan's throne is, Lord let our labour be blessed in labouring the conversion of the heathen; and because thou usest not to work such mighty works by unholy means, Lord sanctifie our spirits and give us holy hearts that so we may be thy instruments in this most glorious work.

It is of real significance that the London Company made its first settlement a parish after the manner of the Church of England, and elected as its first rector the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, one of the most noted clergymen in England, and a man who had captured the imagination of all with his books on travel in far lands. He was expected to remain in England and represent the needs of the colonists and help, perhaps, to select clergymen to go to new parishes which would be formed as settlements developed. The religious aspect of the movement was approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he approved also the selection of the Reverend Robert Hunt who came to Jamestown as the vicar of the parish and the pastor of the colonists.

The London Company made a provision that each new settlement should become a parish with its own rector. The first settlements were established by the Company itself and were called "Cities" after the ideal and pattern of Geneva. That city, the home of John Calvin and of the Calvinistic theology which so strongly influenced the Church of England in the Seventeenth Century, was a self-governing unit in the Swiss Confederation. It consisted of the city and its suburban territory and was the prototype from which the "City" or "Hundred" in Virginia and the "Township" or "town" in Ma.s.sachusetts were formed.

There were four Cities in Virginia: James City, Charles City, The City of Henrico, and Elizabeth City. They were boroughs at the time of the first meeting of the General a.s.sembly of Virginia in 1619, each one electing its own Burgesses. And as counties now, instead of cities, each one elects its own Delegates to the a.s.sembly. There were four "cities," three "hundreds," and four "plantations" represented by Burgesses in the first a.s.sembly in 1619, and each one was a separate parish. Official records have long been lost but the names are known of some six clergymen who were inc.u.mbents of parishes in Virginia between 1607 and 1619.

The London Company had a rule that every clergyman who volunteered or was invited to go to a parish in Virginia was to be investigated as to character and fitness, and each one of them was taken by a committee to a church to read the service and preach a sermon as part of the investigation.

It is not generally known, perhaps, but plans for the immediate development of the life of the colonists included the establishment of a university which would set aside one hall or college for the education of Indian youth and another for the education of sons of English families. The London Company in 1618 made a grant of ten thousand acres of land on the north side of the James River and immediately to the east of the present-day City of Richmond. That grant was to be the seat of the University and was to be developed as a group of tenant farms with the college buildings in the center. So great was the interest throughout England in the plan that the King as the temporal head of the Church presented the matter to the whole people of England. In 1617 he wrote the Archbishops of Canterbury and York:

Most Reverend Father in G.o.d: Right trustie and well beloved Counsellor, we greet you well: You have heard ere this of the attempt of divers worthy men, our subjects, to plant in Virginia, under the warrant of our letters of patent, people of this Kingdom, as well as for the enlarging of our dominions as for the propogation of the Gospel amongst infidells; wherein there is good progress made, and hope of further increase: so as the undertakers of that plantation are now in hand with the erection of some churches and schools for the education of the children of these barbarians, which cannot but be to them a very great charge, and above the expense which for the civil plantation doth come to them, in which we doubt not but that you and all others who wish well to the increase of Christian religion will be willing to give all a.s.sistance and furtherance you may, and therein to make experience of the zeal and devotion of our well minded subjects; especially those of the clergy.

Wherefore we do require you, and hereby authorize you to write your letters to the several bishops of the dioceses in your province, that they do give order to the ministers and other zealous men of their dioceses, both by their own example in contribution and by exhortation to others, to move our people within their several charges to contribute to so good a work in as liberal a manner as they may.

Under instructions from the King offerings were to be taken in every parish four times a year for two years, the money collected to be sent to the bishops and by them forwarded to the treasurer of the London Company. The treasurer reported later that more than fifteen hundred pounds sterling had been sent to him, and later he reported additional amounts. In that period three bequests aggregating more than a thousand pounds sterling were reported for the Christianizing of the Indians.

Other gifts included a "communion cup with cover and a plate of silver guilt for the bread" with communion silk and linen cloths and other ornaments, all to be placed within a church for Indians to be built under another bequest. This communion chalice and paten are owned today by one of the oldest parishes in Virginia, and are in St. John's Church, of Elizabeth City Parish, at Hampton.

On one of the ships sailing from England to the East Indies an appeal was made by the chaplain in behalf of the university in Virginia and gifts were made in such large amount that when they were sent to Virginia they sufficed for the erection of "a publique free schoole" to be connected with the university. They named it "The East India School." The General a.s.sembly, when it first met in July 1619, adopted a resolution urging English families to take promising Indian youths into their homes to teach them the fundamentals and prepare them for the opening of the college.

The work of establishing the university was already proceeding; land was being cleared; farm houses were being erected; more than one hundred artisans and workmen had been sent from England and the college buildings were under construction when on Good Friday, March 22, 1621/22, the great Indian ma.s.sacre occurred. A full third of all the English people in Virginia were killed by Indians in one fatal day. The buildings at the university were burned to the ground, and every English man, woman and child in every family of the artisans and workmen was killed. The East India School was burned to the ground.

Indeed the only thing that saved the colony from utter extermination was that Chanco, an Indian who had become a Christian, had learned of the plot the night before the ma.s.sacre and warned the Englishman, Richard Pace, with whom he lived. Pace crossed the James River and warned the residents of Jamestown. So it was that Jamestown and some of the adjoining settlements were warned in time to protect themselves.

The ma.s.sacre was of course a terrific catastrophe to the whole colony.

Outlying settlements had to be abandoned and the colony was engaged in war with the Indians for several years. Then a second catastrophe occurred. King James became dissatisfied with the independent att.i.tude of the London Company and personally secured its dissolution in 1624.

He then took control of Virginia as a Royal Colony and he himself appointed the Governor and Council of the colony.

This ended all plans for the opening of the university. The King died in the following year and his son, King Charles I, was not interested in a university in Virginia. Nor was he or anyone else interested in sending ministers to the colonial parishes.

The London Company, with a membership including representatives of the Church and the universities, and of business interests and the higher social cla.s.ses, had the confidence of the people. The King did not. He had their loyalty as their sovereign, but the spiritual and cultural welfare of a colony overseas carried little weight amid the political cross-currents and the self-seeking of a royal court.

CHAPTER TWO

The Colonists at Worship

There are several first-hand accounts of religious worship in the earliest days of the Jamestown colony. Captain John Smith wrote of the men at worship in the open air until a chapel could be erected. He describes the scene of a celebration of the Holy Communion, with the Holy Table standing under an old sail lashed from tree to tree, with a bar of wood fastened between two trees as the pulpit, and men kneeling on the ground before their first altar. Services were held daily, according to the rules of the _Book of Common Prayer_ which they brought with them: morning prayer and evening prayer everyday, and sermons twice on Sunday and once during the week. The law of the Church required the Holy Communion to be celebrated at least three times during the year; on Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday; and unquestionably this law was observed at Jamestown. Many clergymen celebrated that sacrament oftener. There can be little doubt that the first celebration of the Holy Communion at Jamestown was on Whitsunday, May 24th (old style) 1607, although the first one of which a record remains was held on the third Sunday after Trinity, June 21. That was a special celebration, held for a two-fold purpose, one, that Mr. Hunt had been able to reconcile serious differences between certain elements among the colonists who had been in angry strife with each other, and second, because two of the ships which brought the colonists to Virginia were to set sail on the following morning upon their return trip to England.

William Strachey, writing in a report of the colony in 1610 after Lord De la Warr had arrived as the new governor presents the following picture:

In the midst of the market-place, a store-house, a "Corps-du-Garde", and a pretty chapel, all which the Lord Governour ordered to be put in good repair. The chapel was in length sixty feet, in breadth twenty-four, and the Lord Governour had repaired it with a chancel of cedar and a communion table of black walnut; all the pews and pulpit were of cedar, with fair broad windows, also of cedar, to shut and open, as the weather shall occasion. The font was hewen hollow like a canoa, and there were two bells in the steeple at the west end. The Church was so cast as to be very light within, and the Lord Governour caused it to be kept pa.s.sing sweet and trimmed up with divers flowers. There was a s.e.xton in charge of the church, and every morning at the ringing of a bell by him, about ten o'clock, each man addressed himself to prayers, and so at four of the clock before supper. There was a sermon every Thursday and two sermons every Sunday, the two preachers taking their weekly turns. Every Sunday when the Lord Governour went to church he was accompanied with all the Councillors, Captains, other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a guard of fifty halberdiers, in his Lordship's livery, fair red cloaks, on each side and behind him. The Lord Governour sat in the choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet cushion before him on which he knelt, and the Council, Captains and officers sat on each side of him, each in their place; and when the Lord Governour returned home he was waited on in the same manner to his house.

Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the first rector of the City of Henrico from its foundation in 1611 until his death by drowning in 1617, and who is still remembered as the clergyman who baptized the Indian princess Pocahontas, after her conversion to the Christian faith, described his services as follows:

Every Sabbath we preach in the forenoon and catechize in the afternoon. Every Sat.u.r.day at night I exercise in Sir Thomas Dale's house. Our Church affaires be consulted on by the minister and four of the most religious men. Once every month we have a communion, and once every year a solemn fast.

This method of daily and Sunday services, as the regular rule of the Church of England, was adopted in Virginia as far as colonial conditions would permit. But apart from Jamestown itself, and the schools which came into existence, there would not be many parishes in which daily services would be feasible. The people lived too far apart on their farms. They might drive or walk three or five miles to Church on Sundays, but could not give the time for that on work-days. The same objection worked against having two services on Sunday. So the custom became general of having a single service in every church and chapel every Sunday. The statement made by Rev. Alexander Whitaker, that he "catechized" every Sabbath afternoon, is ill.u.s.trative of the usual method of instructing young people of the parish in the Church Catechism as preparation for admission to the Holy Communion. Such "catechetical cla.s.ses" might be held as frequently on Sunday afternoons as the needs of the parish children, both white and Negro, might require: or perhaps sometimes, as frequently as the zeal, or lack of zeal of the inc.u.mbent minister might determine. When in 1724 the Bishop of London sent a questionary to every Anglican clergyman inc.u.mbent of a parish in America, one of the questions was, "At what times do you Catechize the Youth of your Parish?"

They have builded many pretty villages, faire houses and chapels which are growne good benefices of 120 pounds a yeare besides their own mundall [mundane] industry.

So wrote Captain John Smith a number of years after his return to England. There may have been an excess of imagination in describing new and raw settlements as "faire villages," but the salary which was to be paid to the ministers was a provable fact. t.i.thes from the culture of the land by the parishioners amounted to as much as 120, and the minister had a glebe of 100 acres from the cultivation of which his tenants and servants through "mundall industry" might greatly increase his income.

The London Company had carried to Virginia and fixed for the whole duration of the colonial period the parish system of the Church of England. Under that system each community became a parish and the people of the parish, as the land-owners of the community, supported the church and paid the salary of the minister by t.i.thes from the produce of the land. There was, however, one change from the custom in England. There the t.i.thes of a parish might produce a salary for the inc.u.mbent in any amount from ten pounds to hundreds of pounds per annum. In Virginia the amount of the salary was fixed by the General a.s.sembly as a definite quant.i.ty of tobacco. There was also a glebe farm and a residence. Those who came to Virginia brought with them their Bible and their _Book of Common Prayer_ and the Established Church of England became the Established Church of the Colony.

The all-pervading fact to be kept in mind in connection with the development of religious organization in Virginia is that the Church of England itself, during the period from 1600 to the Cromwellian era 1645-1660, was in a turmoil on account of two diverse schools of thought. One school within the Church desired to retain all the ancient forms of creed and worship from past centuries except those which had been perverted under the centuries of Roman Catholic domination. The other school within the Church desired to cast out all liturgical forms and the surplice, and also all power of the bishops. They wished to reduce worship to the forms of Calvinistic theology. There were also many who desired to make the Church broad enough to include both schools. The Calvinistic party was already forming dissenting congregations.

The Brownists, later to become the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, had already been driven out of England; and under King James, who had turned against the Calvinists to support the "high church" party, ecclesiastical courts were being formed to mete out severe punishment to leaders of dissent.

King James had declared he would "harry the dissenters" and force them to conform to the Established Church or be driven from the country.

England's answer to that threat was to establish the colonies of Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and the constantly growing power of dissent resulted in civil war, in execution of King Charles I, in the era of the Commonwealth; and in the abolition of _Prayer Book_ worship for fifteen years from every church and chapel in England.

In 1606 when the Virginia Company was organized the Calvinistic party was in power in England, and there were many Calvinists, or Puritans, as they were then called, in the universities and elsewhere. The Virginia Company itself was under the influence of Puritan leaders; so much so, indeed, that this fact was one of the reasons which impelled the King to abolish the Virginia Company. He knew the freedom of self-government which the Company had established in Virginia and he no longer trusted its loyalty to the Monarchy.