THE ATLANTIC GATE: THE ANGLO-HUGUENOT CHANNEL COMMUNITY, 1554-1685

306 Pages·2014·1.66 MB·English

by  Phil Hnatkovich

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.
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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
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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
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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, including trade patterns and regional migration; ultimately, she
locates the origins of English global “cosmopolitanism” within experiences gained in
intra-European travel.6 The study of small-scale and regional European markets, as
Maryanne Kowaleski has observed, offers insights in early merchant capitalism
imperceptible within macroeconomic models created by Braudel and others.7

4 David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English
Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1981); David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between
England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Daniel Beaver, “Politics in the Archives: Records, Property, and Plantation Politics in Massachusetts Bay,
1642-1650,” Journal of Early American History 1, no. 1 (2011), 3-25. Elsewhere in British America see
A.G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
5 Peter A. Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4
(Oct. 2006): 725-42; Davis Eltis, “Atlantic History in Global Perspective,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999), 141-
61; Horst Piestchmann, “Introduction: Atlantic History in Global Perspective—History between European
History and Global History,” in Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System 1580-1830, ed.
Pietschmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 35-43.
6 Alison Games, “Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,”
William and Mary Quarterly 4 (Oct. 2006), 677. Also see Games, The Web of Empire: English
Cosmopolitans in an Age of Empire, 1560-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 1 passim.
7 Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-2.
3

Such sentiments are echoed in David Armitage’s speculative framework for “cis-
Atlantic” history, which consists of studies of European regions, states, or ports that focus
“not on the ocean itself but rather on the way specific regions were defined by their
relationship to that ocean.” Armitage cites precedents in historical geographer D.W.
Meinig and archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, both of who have produced studies of
unconventional European regions whose ocean-facing positions integrated them in
common political, economic, and cultural contexts. He argues that similar approaches,
particularly when applied to port cities, have the potential to destroy artificial distinctions
in subject matter – internal/external, domestic/foreign, and national/imperial – that have
persisted in transatlantic histories to the present.8
The “cis-Atlantic” concept not only promises to draw attention toward the
European origins of American development, but at the same time to reckon with the
continuing division of national histories in the early Atlantic World. This is particularly
evident in Anglophone histories, which have gravitated toward the interior development
of the British commercial empire in North America and the subsequent early national
history of the United States. In order to redress that imbalance, Eliga Gould and others
have advocated a turn toward “entangled,” or “connected” history, which would seek out
patterns of “mutual influencing” and intertwined “processes of constituting one another”

8 David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800,
ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 24-26.
Armitage juxtaposes “cis-Atlantic” history with international (“trans-“) and transnational (“Circum-“)
approaches. Along with Meinig and Cunliffe, Armitage also references David Harris Sacks’s history of
early modern Bristol – all three works focusing on regional oceanic networks in the western English
Channel. Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC – AD 1500 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001); D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on
500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986);
David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
4

in contiguous societies along the Atlantic Rim.9 This is not unlike similar transnational or
borderlands fields that have gained momentum in the last few decades.10 Transnational
studies of merchant communities are woefully underrepresented for Northern Europe
when compared with the relatively well-developed state of that field in the early modern
Mediterranean.11
Studies of European region in an Atlantic context, and particularly transnational
networks, are essential to understanding the “cultural preconditions” for early modern
maritime expansion: the processes that produced the intellectual propellants for
emigration, and the practical social skills necessary for colonial planting on a broad level.
Meinig’s formulation of regional “culture hearths” suggests how shifts in patterns of
interaction between European societies produced unique “instruments of expansion” – a
set of economic and cultural innovations that encouraged the accumulation of surplus
wealth and provided the impetus for the extension of the new system from the region of

9 Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a
Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007), 766-7, 784-5. Another influential
piece speaking to the roughly analogous concept of “connected” history is Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
“Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies
31, no. 3 (1997), 735-62.
10 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples In Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June
1999), 814-841; David J. Weber, “The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography,”
Magazine of History 14, no. 4 (2002), 259-71. The borderlands field is strongly focused on Spanish
America, but notable exceptions for French and English America include Richard White, The Middle
Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991) and Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in
Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754-1765 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
11 E.g. the still-referenced work Henri Lapeyre, Une famille de marchands, les Ruiz (Paris:
S.E.V.P.E.N., 1955) and most recently Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic
Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2012). See also the imbalance toward Southern-oriented essays in the recent volume Christopher H.
Johnson, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Francesca Trivellato, eds., Transregional and
Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond (New York: Berghahn, 2011). Exceptions for Northern
Europe include Andrew Spicer, The French-speaking Reformed Community and their Church in
Southampton, 1567-c.1620 (London: Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1997).