Penguin History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan

smoking became an ever more general habit in England; 10 the market was limitless, and the producers could make vast fortunes,provided that they kept their costs down – their labour costs above all.
    The turning point came with the first of the great American uprisings, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676. As leader of the poorer planters, Nathaniel Bacon, a distant relation of the great Francis, seized control of Virginia from the royal Governor, Sir George Berkeley, on the grounds that Berkeley opposed making war on the Susquehanna Indians and seizing their lands. Bacon and his following were true revolutionaries, planning to overturn the political and social structure of the colony, abolish the poll tax, and enlist poor freemen, indentured servants and African slaves in their forces. They burned Jamestown to the ground. But Bacon died of dysentery, and Berkeley then rallied enough strength to suppress the rebellion. To prevent any recurrence of these events, royal authority was placed firmly on the side of the richer settlers; their attempts to grab all the best land in Virginia were endorsed, and Africans were rapidly excluded from the privileges of civil society (if free) or thrust down into hopeless servitude (if slaves). A new gentry emerged, which quickly enriched itself by its effective monopoly of land, labour and political power. The price would be paid, for nearly two centuries, by the slaves. It was a tragic development, but given the combination of tobacco, a hierarchical social structure both in England and her colonies, and the greed of seventeenth-century Englishmen, it was probably inevitable.

4 The Planting of New England 1604-c. 1675
    Who would true Valour see
    Let him come hither;
    One here will Constant be,
    Come Wind, come Weather.
    There’s no
Discouragement
,
    Shall make him once
Relent
,
    His first avow’d
Intent
,
    To be a Pilgrim
.
    John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim’s Progress
    Those that love their own chimney corner and dare not go far beyond their own towns’ end shall never have the honour to see the wonderful works of Almighty God.
    The Reverend Francis Higginson, 1629
    The accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558 brought with it what proved to be the decisive victory of Protestantism; but scarcely was it won when the word
Puritan
began to be heard, in allusion to a party within the national church which held that the work of reformation was not complete when the Pope had been rejected, the monasteries dissolved, the mass abolished and the Book of Common Prayer imposed.
    Inevitably the authorities saw the existence of this party as a political problem. As has been stated, 1 the Renaissance state existed to secure its subjects against civil war and invasion. The Tudor dynasty rammed home this point explicitly, endlessly. Anarchy, battle and usurpation had brought them the Crown of England; their propaganda against these evils – which found its most brilliant expression in certain plays of Shakespeare – was incessant. The Tudors also saw clearly that if subjects were left to themselvesthey would make their sovereign’s religious opinions the touchstone of their loyalty. To monarchs convinced of their right and duty to rule it was intolerable that civil peace, their reigns, perhaps even their lives, should be at the mercy of turbulent fanatics. The inference was clear. Not only must religion teach the duty of obedience to the prince and submission to the social order over which he (or she) presided. The national church must be, for safety’s sake, of royal ordering both in form and doctrines; it must be subordinate to royal purposes. To Queen Elizabeth, at least, the rightness of the arrangement was clear. She was not, she knew, a demanding sovereign: she would make no windows into men’s souls. Let her subjects swear allegiance to her as Supreme Governor of the church and all would be well. It was her duty, it was her God-given exclusive privilege, to rule the realm, to take the