A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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were well represented in the rolls of colonial clergy.16 Robert Hunt (d. 1608), the first Vicar of Jamestown, had, for example, earned his. M.A. from Magdalen College. The managers of the Virginia Company screened volunteers and sent out those whose qualifications and vision for their ministry seemed the most appropriate to fill newly established parishes or vacancies created by the high mortality rate in the colony (Forty-four of the sixty-seven clergy who served before 1660 died within five years of arrival).17 Undoubtedly, however, some candidates were motivated to volunteer by personal as well as religious reasons. Robert Hunt’s marriage, for example, was an unhappy one; rumors circulated about his wife’s infidelity and his own misconduct; she did not accompany him to the colony.18
When the members of the company appointed clergy for their colonies, they were following the English custom of patronage. In England, the individual or institution that built a church building and provided the support for its clergy had the right (the advowson) to present a candidate for rector or vicar to the bishop for consent. Since the Virginia Company created parishes in each of its settlements, set aside glebe lands to provide income, and directed that glebe houses and churches be built, it also claimed the right to nominate candidates for vacant positions.
The Virginia Company’s hope of conversion of the Native American people turned out to be considerably more complicated than the English settlers anticipated. Most of the Native Americans in Virginia were part of a confederation of pre-dominantly Algonquian-speaking tribes led by Wahunsonacock (Powhatan) that may have been created as a result of a conflict with the Spanish Jesuits, missionaries who reached Virginia in about 1570. A Native American named Paquiquineo (Don Luis), who had been kidnapped by a party of Spanish explorers ten years earlier and educated in Spain and Mexico, came as an interpreter for the Jesuits. Once in Virginia, however, he abandoned the Jesuits and led an attack on the Spaniards, all but one of whom were killed. A Spanish expedition the following year collected the lone survivor and killed dozens of Native Americans in retaliation.19 It is also possible that the Native Americans knew of the failed attempt at Roanoke Island of the 1580s, which had involved multiple occasions of violence between the English and local Native Americans.20 Neither experience, if remembered, would have led the Native Americans to have positive expectations about missionary activity by the English.
It is therefore not surprising that the actual relationship between the English and the Native Americans in Virginia was an alternation between efforts to subdue one another in battle and to gain advantage over one another through treaty and trade.
Wahunsonacock (Powhatan) and his allies raided the English soon after their arrival in May 1607 and by September were engaged in a campaign of regular attacks. Lacking food and worrying about the coming winter, the dwindling company of colonists deposed their leader (Edward Maria Wingfield) and selected Captain John Smith (c. 1580–1631) in his place. Smith was able to purchase food in November from the Chickahominy, who were not part of Wahunsonacock’s federation. Wahunsonacock’s men captured Smith in December. The chief, who probably was not moved—as Smith later claimed—by the entreaties of his daughter Pocahontas (Metoaka or Matoaka, 1595?–1617), offered a treaty, which the Native Americans probably understood as a grant of food in exchange for English goods and subordination to their leader. This led to relative peace for a year.21
From 1609 to 1614, the colonists and Native Americans were back at battle again, with a new treaty ending the fighting in 1614, this one secured by the marriage of colonist John Rolfe (1585–1622) to Pocahontas (Metoaka or Matoaka ). Rolfe later explained the marriage was “for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ an unbelieving creature.”22 Clergyman Alexander Whitaker prepared Pocahontas for baptism.23 Marriage to the daughter of a chief, however, clearly had political advantages as well.24 The John Rolfe-Pocahontas (Metoaka or Matoaka) marriage was one of at least four early marriages between male English settlers and Native American women, and in each case the woman was the daughter of a Native American leader.25
Fig. 3 Pocahontas (Metoaka or Matoaka) by an unidentified engraver after Simon van de Passe.
The marriage alliance would not be permanent. After the death of Wahunsonacock (Powhatan), his successor Opechancanough attacked the colonists in 1622 (the Great Massacre) killing perhaps a quarter of the settlers and calling the sustainability of the colony into question. The colonists responded throughout the remainder of the decade with retaliatory attacks.26 The state of continued warfare was hardly ideal for evangelization.
Colonization under Charles I and duringthe Commonwealth
For so long as James I occupied the throne, the majority of English colonists came to Virginia. With his death, however, the situation began to change rapidly. The number and the religious variety of the colonies increased. The uniform religious character of the Jacobean colonies, broken only by the small and relatively late Plymouth settlement, gave way to a broad religious spectrum.
While many English Christians during Charles’s reign agreed that a Reformed insistence on justification by faith was compatible with a national church, they disagreed strongly on what a properly Reformed national church should look like. In particular, they could not agree on the externals of worship or on the role of the laity in church government.
One party in Caroline England, which the English at midcentury would called episcopal because of its support of the episcopacy, believed that the process of reform had already gone far enough.27 If anything, members of this party argued, the Church of England had already abandoned too much of the medieval tradition. The English Book of Common Prayer and such attempts at Christian education as the Homilies had corrected major theological abuses. The reforming legislation of the sixteenth century had ended the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the clergy and had given the laity a sufficient voice in church government through the Parliament. Members of a second church party, whom the English called puritans, disagreed. They hoped further to purify worship by eliminating catholic elements such as liturgical vestments, which they feared might obscure the changes that had taken place in theology. They also believed that the laity and the lower clergy needed a stronger voice in the church.
Unlike Elizabeth I and James I, who had avoided favoring any single faction within the church, Charles I sided squarely with the episcopal party. He appointed priests with episcopal party sympathies as his bishops and supported a campaign by William Laud (1573–1645), his choice for Archbishop of Canterbury, to reintroduce more Catholic ritual in England. Puritans objected, and Charles and Laud used arrest and corporal punishment to force compliance.
In 1637, Charles and Laud intensified the religious campaign in two important ways. First, Charles