A World of Change
Who knew about Jamestown? In 1607, There was too much else going on
One of the loveliest attractions in a city with a surfeit of them, the Pont Neuf in Paris is a delicate series of stone arches that spans the Seine. Though its name means "New Bridge," it is in fact the oldest in Paris, having opened the same year that English colonists landed in Jamestown, an ocean away. Bridging, as it does, the old and the new, the Pont Neuf is an apt metaphor for 1607—a year of extraordinary transition around the world.
In Europe, political changes were underway in England and Russia—peacefully in the former, more chaotically in the latter. One major war had just ended and another was heading to a long, if temporary, lull. Science, still years before the Enlightenment, was in a state of flux, as were movements in the arts. Protestantism was breaking into multiple sects, Asia was looking to the end of the Ming Dynasty, and Japan's longlasting Tokugawa Shogunate was gaining strength. Only in the Muslim world was stability the theme: The three great Islamic states were arguably at the height of their influence and power.
It's doubtful that many residents of the world of 1607 would have taken notice that 105 English adventurers had established a settlement in Jamestown, given the myriad other events of the day. Here's what else was occupying the world, starting with the England the voyagers left behind.
Tensions. Four years before Jamestown, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the Scottish king became James I of England. Tensions between Protestant England and Roman Catholic Spain had led, in part, to what Oxford historian John Robertson calls "an opportunistic war that drained England's resources." But Hapsburg Spain—perhaps Europe's greatest power—was also feeling the strain. Still embroiled in the 80 Years' War of Dutch independence, it declared bankruptcy in 1607, while still receiving silver revenues from its colonies in the New World. Yet Catholics were not a political force in England; the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a band of Catholics sought to blow up Parliament and kill James, was considered evidence of a continuing but diminishing threat. Nevertheless, Robertson says, "Catholics were seen as a danger. ... There were fears of Catholicism being imposed by a foreign power."
The English church doled out what Howard Hotson, an expert in European intellectual history, calls a "watered-down form of Protestantism." But Elizabeth had kept the Puritans happy with her muscular foreign policy toward Spain. James faced even greater Puritan pressure for reforms. Partly in response, he authorized an English translation of the Bible, the King James Version that is still popular today. It was a significant step in allowing the literate masses to interpret the scriptures themselves, unfiltered by any church.
Growing pains were also rattling England. A doubling of the population between 1500 and 1650 put pressure on food sources and kept prices high. There were no famines, and unlike in France, no massive peasant revolts, since taxes were relatively low. Still, about 40 peasants in Northamptonshire were killed by local landowners on June 8, 1607, when several thousand gathered to protest the enclosures of common land.
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