The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts the ATLANTIC GATE: the ANGLO-HUGUENOT CHANNEL
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE ATLANTIC GATE: THE ANGLO-HUGUENOT CHANNEL COMMUNITY, 1554-1685 A Dissertation in History by Philip J. Hnatkovich © 2014 Philip J. Hnatkovich Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2014 ii The dissertation of Philip J. Hnatkovich was reviewed and approved* by the following: Daniel C. Beaver Associate Professor of History Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee A. Gregg Roeber Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Studies Matthew Restall Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women’s Studies Deryck W. Holdsworth Professor of Geography Michael Kulikowski History Department Head Professor of History and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies * Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT This study examines a system of trade, Protestant activism, privateering, and kinship that connected port communities in the English Channel during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing on evidence from urban archives in Exeter, Plymouth, and La Rochelle, it considers the effect of Calvinist conversion, refugeeism, and the outbreak of religious warfare on port relationships in the trading region of southwest England, Normandy, and Atlantic France. This came to a peak after 1568, when a militant alignment of Huguenot and Elizabethan provincial elites oversaw a decades-long collaboration in privateering and experimental transatlantic plantation ventures. In the seventeenth century, the maritime society of the Channel region became a base for international Reformed family networks stretching to English and French North America. Altogether, the study seeks to link the social history of the Reformation with the expansion of transoceanic commercial enterprise in England and France and, in doing so, contribute to a more integrated, transnational history of the early Atlantic World. It contends that the Anglo-Huguenot Channel community produced merchant capital, maritime expertise, and formative models for northern trade and colonial settlement in a theretofore Spanish-dominated New World. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………….. v Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..vi INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 Towards a new geography of the early Atlantic World.…………………………..1 Defining region on Europe’s Atlantic façade……………………………………..8 Plan of study……………………………………………………………………..22 Chapter 1. MEN OF SALT: REGION AND ECONOMY IN THE WESTERN CHANNEL………………………………………………………………………………25 A connected history of exchange………………………………………………...27 Regional economies and culture…………………………………………………34 Chapter 2. TWO MARITIME REFORMATIONS……………………………………...77 Maritime Calvinism in the western Channel………………….………………....79 Marian refugees in coastal Normandy: the roots of alliance…………………...114 Chapter 3. THE TRADE, MILITANT: CHANNEL PRIVATEERING IN THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY………………………………………………………………143 Sixteenth-century institutions and industries of reprisal………………………..147 Anglo-Huguenot alliance at La Rochelle, 1567-9……………………………...157 The western Channel privateering system, 1569-76…………………………....180 The Anglo-Huguenot Atlantic project, 1562-1603……………………………..207 Chapter 4. ENGLISH MERCHANTS AND PROTESTANT COMMERCIAL KINSHIP AT LA ROCHELLE, 1628-61……………………………………………………….....230 English merchants at La Rochelle, seventeenth century…………………….….236 Notarial evidence and Calvinist commercial practice………………………….244 Commercial kinship and Calvinist survival at La Rochelle……………..…...…250 The geneology of an Anglo-Huguenot elite…………………………………….256 CONCLUSION. NEW WORLDS, NEW MEN……………………………………..…263 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....268 v ABBREVIATIONS ADCM Archives départementales de la Charente-Maritime (La Rochelle, France) Barbot Amos Barbot, “Histoire de La Rochelle,” Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis 14, 17, and 18 (1886, 1889-90) CSP Calendar of State Papers DRO Devon Record Office (Exeter, United Kingdom) NA National Archives (London, United Kingdom) PWDRO Plymouth and West Devon Record Office (Plymouth, United Kingdom) SP English State Papers, National Archives vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I leave graduate school indebted to many people, without whose guidance and support this study would not have come to fruition. Dr. Daniel Beaver’s knowledge, direction, and attention to detail color the pages that follow. Through our many conversations over the years, Dr. Beaver has challenged me to be a better historian; he has been a dedicated advisor, a patient teacher, and a good friend. Drs. A. Gregg Roeber, Matthew Restall, and Deryck Holdsworth have also provided invaluable criticism and advice during my time at Penn State, for which I am forever grateful. She has not survived to read this, but Dr. Beth Fitch first introduced me to English history as an undergraduate. I think of her storytelling each time I enter the classroom, even if I fall short of the lofty standards she set. My graduate colleagues Spencer Delbridge, John Hoenig, Jeff Rop, Russell Spinney, and Jason Strandquist left their mark on this project through conversations, questions, and criticism. In the process of reasearching, we come to rely on the expertise and generosity of others. The Department of History at Penn State, North American Conference on British Studies, and the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities provided essential material support towards the completion of this study. The archivists at the Devon Record Office, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, National Archives, and the Archives départementales de la Charente-Maritime demonstrated unending patience in answering many simple questions. Their knowledge of the records and manuscripts that serve as the foundation of this study is humbling. Richard and Jennifer Parker opened their home to me on a number of trips to the archives. I hope that I have the opportunity to repay their kindnesses in the future. My father may not know it, but poring through piles of his navy service books as a child fueled my curiosity in boats and sea travel. His unconditional love and support for my studies are always on my mind. I said goodbye to my mother during my first weeks of graduate study, but memories of her personal energy have been a source of encouragment each day since. Finally, this study belongs as much to my partner Melissa as to myself. When we started it there were two of us; now there are three. INTRODUCTION “We'll rant and we'll roar all on the salt sea Until we strike soundings in the channel of old England; From Ushant to Scilly is but 35 leagues.” – “Spanish Ladies,” an eighteenth-century shanty1 Towards a new geography of the early Atlantic World Historians of the English Atlantic World have reconstructed the transmission of European socio-economic and cultural systems to colonial outposts in North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their research has created a greater appreciation of the ways that knowledge – accumulated through processes of human encounter, adaptation, and innovation – acted as the arbiter of cultural transformation in the early modern Atlantic.2 Nonetheless, English adventurers did not arrive with an empty storehouse of knowledge. As Bernard Bailyn remarks in his methodological survey of Atlantic history, “the transatlantic crossings and settlements of the colonial years were but the middle links in immense chains of related displacements and adjustments” in the process of early modern European expansion.3 Literature for New England, for instance, 1 Roy Palmer, The Oxford Book of Sea Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 2 Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 59-62; David Hackett Fischer provides an ambitious overview of these processes in David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). A list of micro-historical studies would have to include Paul G. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grains (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). 3 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1986), 8. 2 has emphasized the importance of legal, social, and cultural inheritances in the early history of settlement.4 Arriving at the “first link” in the chain has proven to be difficult, and the Atlantic field still wants for a micro-historical grounding in the regional bases from which maritime knowledge and expertise emerged in Europe. Of late, the proliferation of global history has challenged Atlanticists to consider more carefully the geographic limitations of their framework, given the diffusion of early modern networks into multiple ocean spaces.5 Such histories have urged scholars to be more conscious of the contingencies that initiated the Atlantic-bounded system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Alison Games has encouraged investigations of European social exchanges that predate westward enterprises,