The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
The Calvinistic controversy which broke out almost simultaneously
with that about the Sabbath and prevailed throughout the reign of
James I, added yet one more issue, by making Puritanism the party of
a stern and conservative orthodoxy, as opposed to the newer
Arminianism which spread so quickly among the High-Church clergy.
From all these fresh developments Puritanism gained in power and
compactness, if it lost something of simplicity and spirituality.
Standing for ultra-Protestantism, for good morals, for an ascetic
Sabbath, for a high dogmatic orthodoxy, Puritanism could not but win
the allegiance of the mass of the English people, and especially of
the middle class. It was this new, compact, austere, dogmatic,
self-confident Puritanism, when it had become a political as well as
a religious movement, that obliterated Laud and Charles and set up
the Commonwealth. And in studying the evolution of this later
Puritanism we have been present at the shaping of New England in Old
England.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 99.]
Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff
for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants
in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers
gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and
habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a
High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter.... He could not refuse the
civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves,
or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir
George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the
king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia,
"which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the
streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair
liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110,
Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is
sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and Vncyuile
Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving
man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the
Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are
reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The
serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his
master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to
the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any
of his master's quarrels; but his principal use was to lend dignity to
the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation
during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown
emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 100.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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