Shipwrecked on St Lucia in 1605, the English passengers of the Guiana-bound ship Olive Branch found themselves in open conflict with Carib-speaking peoples. Recording his experiences in an account published in London shortly after his return, the mariner John Nicholl recalled watching his shipmates die. Left ‘onely with a companie of most cruell Caniballs’, Nicholl felt he and his companions were ‘seeing as in a Glasse, the utter ruine and Butcherly murthering of our owne selves, being we made most assured accompt to drinke of the same Cuppe’.Footnote 1 What is striking in Nicholl’s account, as in most narratives by Englishmen purporting to encounter ‘cannibals’ first-hand, is the absence of any description of actual man-eating. Failing to describe rituals of consumption, Nicholl was most disturbed by the extremity of violence.
As the English began to engage with Native American groups in the Caribbean and South America, they were prone to reflecting on these experiences ‘as in a Glasse’ to examine ‘our owne selves’. To many Jacobean political thinkers, the state of nature offered the starting point for investigating the origins and functions of the civil state, including the role of the Crown and its agents in mediating conflict.Footnote 2 Cannibals were consistently depicted as the enemies of mankind, embodying extreme savagery in a way that allowed policy-makers and moralists to examine the destructive consequences of rejecting the combined authority of the Crown and the Protestant Church.Footnote 3 The English pitted cannibal violence, understood to embody raw nature in its most anarchic form, against the ideal subject to explore the nature of society, the need for charity and interpersonal amity, and the role of the monarch and the law in maintaining order.
In particular, the prominence of civility as an instrument of reform rendered cannibalism an important term for thinking about violence and the rights of bloodshed. One of Norbert Elias’ central assertions in The Civilizing Process is that subjects’ adherence to the rules of civility ‘stands in the closest relationship to the monopolization of physical force’ by the monarch.Footnote 4 The Crown’s drive to civilize its subjects, Elias argues, was an attempt to re-balance social forces within the developing state through internal pacification.Footnote 5 This did not negate the need for violence altogether, but it did affect who might legitimately carry out acts of violence, and in what contexts. Elias contends that a consequence of the move from a feudal society to a court-centred administrative regime meant that subjects from the sixteenth century now tended to commit acts of large-scale violence in crisis points like war or conquest.Footnote 6 Few historians in the twenty-first century would argue for a neat progression, but Elias’ insistence on the centrality of managing violence as a marker of civility is worth examining, particularly as Elias does not consider the drive to ‘civilize’ through colonization as informing concepts of state power.Footnote 7
The pervasiveness of the cannibal in political discourse was effective precisely because Native Americans were not a metaphor. Although English understandings of indigenous American societies were often flawed or incomplete, the acknowledgement of indigenous practices added weight and urgency to English people’s debates about their own civil society. The first part of this chapter establishes how European interactions with America in the sixteenth century revised classical associations of man-eating. The second section argues that examining ideas of cannibalism in debates over Catholic transubstantiation, self-seeking factionalism, and the breakdown of trust helps to situate late Elizabethan and Jacobean anxieties around social change within an imperial framework. The chapter closes by considering the relationship between a subject’s physical body and the body politic, where manifestations of tearing apart or breaking bodies resonated with the king’s understanding of treason and his right to shed blood for the good of the state. The presence of Native Americans in political discourse suggests that domestic articulations of civil society developed alongside, and partly as a result of, a civilizing project that could not be separated from English aspirations in the Atlantic.
English Encounters with Cannibalism
European knowledge of humans eating each other dated to antiquity. The fifth-century BC Greek writer Herodotus was an early chronicler of anthropophagy:
Beyond the desert the androphagi dwell … The [a]ndrophagi have the most savage customs of all men: they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they speak a peculiar language; and of these nations, are the only people that eat human flesh.Footnote 8
The recurrent associations between cannibalism and savagery appeared almost universally in subsequent texts. Cannibals were described as living beyond the pale of human civilization, lacking laws and systems of justice, speaking differently, and setting themselves apart by their taste for human flesh. Invoked in philosophical treatises, travel narratives, epic poetry, and political works by Aristotle, Pliny, and Juvenal, man-eating became shorthand for groups like the Scythians that existed on the margins of civil life.Footnote 9 In the hierarchy of societies, cannibals occupied the lowest rung of humanity, if indeed they were human at all.
Nonetheless, travel reports and rumours of cannibalism in Brazil and the Caribbean changed pre-existing ideas of man-eating in specific ways. Columbus’ term for Caribs provided the linguistic base from which ‘canibe’ or ‘cannibal’ likely derived.Footnote 10 English writers originally used the Greek term ‘anthropophagy’ to discuss instances of man-eating, as indicated in the humanist and statesman Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotecha Eliotae (1542).Footnote 11 In the second half of the sixteenth century, clearer distinctions between ‘anthropophagy’ and cannibalism emerged as a result of European exploration. Sebastian Münster’s popular A treatyse of the newe India, translated by Richard Eden in 1553, described man-eaters as ‘people called Anthropophagi, which are wont to eate mens fleshe’.Footnote 12 These inhabitants ‘live al naked’ and are ‘barbarous and rude’, sharing similarities with their classical forbears.Footnote 13 André Thevet’s The new found worlde, translated into English in 1568, depicted a ‘Countrey of Canibals, Anthropophages, the which regions are comprehended in America, compassed with the Ocean sea’.Footnote 14 Though Thevet felt that the word ‘anthropophagy’ was enough to indicate to readers that certain groups of Native Americans ate human flesh, his work also located the cannibals specifically within the geographic confines of the ‘new’ world.
Though some continued to use the terms interchangeably, the association between cannibals and America became widely maintained by contemporaries. Richard Eden’s translation of another cosmography, Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo, described ‘the wylde and myschevous people called Canibales, or Caribes, which were accustomed to eate mannes flesshe (and called of the olde writers Anthropophagi)’.Footnote 15 Eden’s Decades was published before Thevet’s book, and the term ‘anthropophagy’ did not disappear from print after contact with peoples in the Amazon and Caribbean, but his comment does indicate that those living in sixteenth-century England recognized a difference between the ‘olde writers’ and the recent developments that had endowed Europe with new knowledge about the world and its peoples. Cosmographies, engravings, and woodcuts depicting the ‘four parts of the world’ often personified America as a cannibal, leg in hand. Unlike stereotypes about Jews or witches eating human flesh in demonic rituals in Europe, ‘manhuntyng Canibales’ were portrayed as fierce and warlike peoples who actively preyed on surrounding groups and were described in political terms: ‘invaydynge theyr country, takynge them captive, [and] kyllyng and eatyng them’.Footnote 16
The French Protestant Jean de Léry’s account of living among the Tupinambá in Brazil, frequently cited by English writers, showed sensitivity to the lives and social practices of Tupi rituals. Yet he too saw cannibalism as indicative of bloodlust:
These barbarians, in order to incite their children to share their vengefulness, take them one at a time and rub their bodies, arms, thighs, and legs with the blood of their enemies … When the flesh of a prisoner, or of several … is thus cooked, all those who have been present to see the slaughter performed gather joyfully around the boucans, on which they gaze with a furious and covetous eye, contemplating the pieces and members of their enemies.Footnote 17
Readers of Samuel Purchas’ Purchas his pilgrimes (1625) could have read Léry’s account in English for themselves, as well as other instances of cannibalism appearing in the narratives of exploration that Richard Hakluyt and Purchas collected from travellers. There were descriptions of ‘many … killed in Chila, whom the Savages flaied and eate, hanging up their skinnes in their Temples’; the Spanish who, in 1535, escaped drowning only to be ‘eaten by the savages’; unrest in Hispaniola and Cuba when ‘the Savages did rise against’ Columbus and his crew.Footnote 18 While these accounts often recounted the experiences of the French or Spanish, the English insinuated that they had also encountered cannibal societies. In his voyage to Guiana, Walter Ralegh described ‘those Canibals of Dominica’ and Trinidad who navigated the islands through which ‘our ships passe yearly’.Footnote 19 Francis Drake’s voyage through the West Indies in 1585 included the violent death and ‘savage kind of handling [of] one of our boyes’ from whom the inhabitants had ‘taken his head and his heart, and had strangled the other bowels about the place, in a most brutish and beastly manner’.Footnote 20 Although many explorations were described in the past tense, cannibals remained living, contemporary beings in these sources, engaged with in the present tense: ‘abhominable’ men who ‘eate mans flesh’.Footnote 21 The parallel existence of those peoples made them a threatening reality.
This association between Native American violence and the term ‘cannibal’ is reinforced by English distinctions between consuming flesh out of necessity and as an indicator of ferocity. The fear of moral and even physical disintegration into savagery became chillingly relevant after the English attempted sustained colonization first-hand. Hakluyt included an instance of Englishmen in Newfoundland eating each other out of dire hunger in 1536, and the colonist George Percy wrote a description of anthropophagy during the harrowing Starving Time in Jamestown in the winter of 1609/10. A teenage girl’s skull and leg bone, uncovered by archaeologists at Jamestown in 2012, indicates multiple, tentative incisions that substantiate Percy’s allegations.Footnote 22 Forensic investigation found that attempts were first made to open the cranium from the middle of the forehead, followed by blows to the back of the head. Further punctures and markings were made to access not just the brain but to also remove flesh and muscles from the face and leg, evident in the tibia found with the skull in a deposit of snake vertebrae, dog and horse bones, and other food remains dating from the Starving Time.Footnote 23 ‘And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face’, Percy wrote, survivors had to ‘doe those things w[hi]ch seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode w[hi]ch hathe fallen from their weake fellowes’.Footnote 24 Rumours recounted by John Smith and circulated in London in the 1610s described how a man in Jamestown had killed his pregnant wife and eaten her, offering a stinging indictment of a Protestant enterprise that gained its legitimacy through the promise of ‘civilizing’ others.Footnote 25
Although the Virginia Company challenged these allegations, no author, even Percy or Smith, referred to English colonial anthropophagy as cannibalism. This suggests that these authors considered connotations of ‘cannibal’ unsuitable for hunger cases. Writing to Dudley Carleton in 1600, the news writer John Chamberlain reported a story about an adventurer and his crew who were forced to land in Puerto Rico and faced ‘such want that they were fain to eate one another’.Footnote 26 Tales of starvation on islands or during city sieges likewise avoided the word.Footnote 27 The omission of this term in these cases implies that ‘cannibal’ was closely related to Native American anthropophagy and considered more relevant in describing situations outside of famine. Descriptions of Europeans casting lots to determine whom to eat first reinforced that acts of anthropophagy committed by those suffering from hunger were undertaken reluctantly and under immense strain.
It was the awareness of Tupi and Carib ways of life, though half understood or clouded by assumptions, that provoked Jacobean writers to draw on ideas of cannibalism in their political discourse. For this reason, the scholarly attention to human consumption in medicine or food studies is insufficient to explain anxieties about cannibalism in the early seventeenth century. It is certainly true that medicinal uses of human body parts meant that incorporation might be condoned in particular cases.Footnote 28 Pharmacopoeias suggested powdered skull as a cure for ‘falling sickness’ or fits, and some physicians considered human blood to contain curative properties.Footnote 29 Though one scholar deemed it ‘inarguable’ that ‘early modern Europeans ate each other for therapeutic purposes’, this statement is tempered by the fact that in such cases, ‘eating each other’ largely entailed making medicinal use of bodily excretions or pulverized bone, following the medical advice of the physicians Galen and Paracelsus.Footnote 30
As this chapter argues, English ideas about cannibalism often related more to violence than to flesh-eating. John Nicholl’s short account of Anglo–Carib conflict on St Lucia offers the fullest account of direct English conflict against groups considered to practise cannibalism. It is far shorter and less ethnographically rich than the accounts of Europeans in Brazil from Léry or the German Hans Staden.Footnote 31 The text is useful, however, in that it provides a Jacobean engagement with Native Americans from the Caribbean outside of Hakluyt and Purchas’ immense compendia, where Nicholl’s slim work was cheaply available to curious readers specifically drawn to news from America. Nicholl situated the English travellers on ‘an island of caniballs, or men-eaters in the West-Indyes’.Footnote 32 As in many other accounts, the initial, more peaceable exchanges with indigenous groups involved trade, gift-giving, and dining together.Footnote 33 As anxieties grew between the English, Caribs, and other European powers, Nicholl described the Caribs as ‘most strange and ugly, by reason they are all naked, with long blacke haire hanging downe their shoulders, their bodies all painted with red … which makes them looke like divels’.Footnote 34 Other Englishmen who spent more time observing customs in the Caribbean and South America noted that red body paint was not always intended to look threatening. Rather, some indigenous groups liberally applied red earth to their bodies so that ‘the Muskitas [mosquitoes] or Flies shall not offend them’, while in Algonquian colour symbolism, body paint made from the puccoon root related red to land, mountains, and masculinity, given the colour’s associations with copper and therefore virility or high status.Footnote 35
Though quick to associate Caribs with lawless aggression, Nicholl did not claim to witness acts of cannibalism himself. He associated ‘cannibals’ with anarchic violence, including the tearing and dismembering of bodies, rather than human consumption. In portraying the Caribs as ‘cruel and bloodye’ enemies who preferred to massacre the English than to provide succour to suffering human beings, Nicholls imparted to his readers an association between excessive violence and unreason.Footnote 36 This corresponded to widely current assumptions about the Caribbean, but it also exposed the crew’s vulnerability in an environment dominated by Native Americans.
Anthropological approaches to indigenous lifeways can bring new insights to English colonial texts. The anthropologist William Arens critically assesses purported instances of cannibalism in his influential The Man-Eating Myth (1979), arguing that most documented cases of man-eating were European misrepresentations, either accidental or intentional, of indigenous beliefs. This prompted a wave of scholarship that re-examined colonial encounters within a larger cultural and literary understanding of the early modern era and economies of power. European scholars argued that cannibalism fascinated writers and travellers because of its relevance to post-Reformation debates about incorporation, whether in terms of assimilation and submission to authority or in debates about religious rites, notably the Eucharist.Footnote 37 Arens’ research frequently appeared in post-colonial scholarship that emphasized how imperial powers used ideas about cannibalism to legitimize expansion and subsume ‘subaltern’ peoples.Footnote 38
Though Arens rightly questions European depictions of Native Americans in the context of expansion, there is some danger in dismissing the ‘cannibal’ label altogether, or in arguing that the historical reality of cannibalism is unimportant. The tendency in some areas of cultural studies to place too much emphasis on representation can be problematic. It has become commonplace to argue that English perceptions of ‘others’, however mistaken, matter as much – or even more – than reality, insofar as this can be re-constructed.Footnote 39 In the context of colonization, this risks continuing to marginalize indigenous societies by dismissing anthropological practices, inadvertently rendering them incidental to the matter at hand. One of the more positive responses to Arens’ work has been to prompt more detailed fieldwork and research by archaeologists and anthropologists. Through the examination of human body parts, skulls, burial pits, and interaction with surviving indigenous groups and their oral traditions, archaeologists have found that the taking and occasionally consuming of human body parts functioned in a range of ways, from obtaining prestige, avenging death, humiliating the enemy, legitimizing political power, transferring attributes to skilled fighters, and assisting in religious ceremonies, shedding light not just on violence but on a host of interconnected issues.Footnote 40
English writings about ‘cannibals’ must be treated with appropriate levels of scepticism, but approaching these texts with different questions can offer a starting point for thinking more carefully about English responses to the indigenous Atlantic. Beyond its associations with physical incorporation, the term ‘cannibal’ in English travel writings appears to have been intended to refer to a range of socio-cosmic beliefs and practices that were fundamental to the ideologies and identities of Tupi and Carib groups. When the Englishman Anthony Knivet spent most of the 1590s in Brazil, he wrote about the many groups he encountered, acknowledging differences between the Tupi-Guarani, Tapuia, and Carib.Footnote 41 Knivet encountered these individuals in a variety of situations, sometimes as friends or fellow captives, other times as enemies or sources of profit to be taken and traded into slavery. Knivet spent years among the Tamoio (Tupi), and it would be easy to assume his continual references to ‘the cannibals’ operated solely as a kind of debasement of Brazilian societies. Yet anthropologists have found that vengeance, with and without cannibalism, was a driving force in Tupinambá warfare in both the pre- and post-contact eras.Footnote 42 The word ‘Guarani’ derived from the word for ‘war’, and the jaguar was a vital life force, predatory but also an important agent of change and invention.Footnote 43 What Knivet and other observers seemed to be describing when they wrote of cannibals or warriors adopting the properties of jaguars was the very real place that vengeance and enmity played in the organization and social coherence of select coastal groups in Brazil.
Cannibalism and the Protestant Polity
When seeking to establish settlements along the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers, English explorers wrote about and acknowledged Tupi political hierarchies, spiritual beliefs, and the circulation of enslaved peoples among groups in Greater Amazonia.Footnote 44 Thomas Roe, before he served as an ambassador in India, first navigated the waterways of Guiana in a canoe.Footnote 45 And from this early moment of exchange, the English began to adapt this understanding of ‘cannibal’ violence to describe individuals who chose to reject the rules of society by behaving outside the bounds of Protestant orthodoxy. Although it is true that discussions of man-eating emerged from ‘charged contexts for the production of difference’, the significance of the cannibal within English discourse gained its force from the unsettling notion of similarity.Footnote 46 Accounts of English colonists eating their own countrymen were either denied or defended out of necessity, but a deep unease about the English capacity for degeneration remained. ‘Brutish Hatred’, wrote the translator and sergeant Edward Grimeston in 1621, ‘is more fitting for ravening wolves’ than men, better for ‘Canniballs and those monsters which have layd aside all humanity’ and invite ‘evill into themselves’.Footnote 47 Paralleling Catholic and cannibal behaviour provided polemicists with an extreme example of savagery, but also with a chance to expound on the demonstrable consequences of the breakdown of social order amidst the threat of aggressive Catholic expansion.
Administered at least once a year at Easter, the Lord’s Supper offered a chance for individuals to come together in reconciliation, serving an important function in community life by presenting an opportunity to heal discord in a way that was both spiritually necessary and socially affirming.Footnote 48 Protestant polemicists often accused Catholics of being cannibals who fed on the flesh of their God. Communion was only considered valid within the established Church, and it was precisely the significance of the Lord’s Supper for both Protestants and Catholics that rendered it a key point of contention. ‘The sacrament is numbred amongst the greatest benefits given to us of God in this life,’ wrote Christopher Sutton, author of a popular devotional, and there is no reason to doubt that many churchgoers found the experience poignant.Footnote 49 The Church of England accentuated the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper, meant to provoke inner reflection:
The divine wordes of blessing doe not change or annihilate the substance of the bread and wine … but it changeth them in use and in Name. For, that which was before but common bread and wine to nourish mens Bodies; is, after the blessing destinated [sic] to an holy use, for the feeding of the Soules of Christians: and where before they were called but Bread and Wine; they are now called by the name of those holy things which they signifie.Footnote 50
The usefulness of cannibal imagery lay partly in the contrast between corporality and spirituality, false imaginations and true worship. In a union ‘made by faith’, Protestants must harbour a ‘pure and exquisite faith … not by the corporall’.Footnote 51 Protestant writers depicted Catholics as choosing to enact a sensual version of the Lord’s Supper that involved drinking the blood of their Saviour. Tearing ‘the heart, wounds, bloud, yea nayles, feete, guts, yea all the parts of Christs humanitie, as though like Cannibals’, wrote Stephen Jerome in 1625, was a sort of blasphemy committed by ‘Masse Priests & Papists in a blinde devotion’.Footnote 52 ‘It should be a Christians shame’, wrote the Lincolnshire preacher Henoch Clapham in 1609, ‘to seeke union with Christ in such a Canibal manner’.Footnote 53
To Protestants, transubstantiation rendered a symbolic act into physical matter, so that Catholics became perpetrators of violence rather than reconciliation. ‘If the Canibals are to be abhorred, because they devour and eate mans flesh, their enimies whome they take in the warres’, wrote Thomas Lupton, ‘are you then much more to be detested, that are not ashamed to eate and devoure … the very bodie of Christ your great & high friend?’Footnote 54 Faithful Christians abjured violence in favour of love, wrote Thomas Sanderson in 1611, rejecting the ‘mysticall and spiritual kind of murder and mangling’ that came from ‘a corporall feeding [like] brutish Cannibals’.Footnote 55 Even Herodotus, an early cataloguer of anthropophagy, would find ‘this Theophagie … incredible’ – these ‘Theophages (that is, God eaters)’ were not like ‘the Reader, from whose eyes God of his goodnesse hath removed the veile of superstition’.Footnote 56 Sanderson’s words implied a sense of complicity against those who acted uncivilly, where membership in Christ’s covenant entailed an inclusivity that ‘savages’ could not share.
Despite the king’s attempts to appease the various religious groups who appealed to him for toleration, the Gunpowder Treason of 1605 ruptured James’ hopes of keeping his subjects’ private conscience separate from political conformity. Following the Main and Bye Plots of 1603, the Gunpowder Treason seemed to confirm what Elizabeth had often claimed, that religion was a mask under which traitors plotted malicious designs. The ‘Romish rabble’ were ‘right Canniballes, lyke to the barbarous people of [America]’ for dividing the Church and undermining civil society through violence.Footnote 57 Reformers attacked lax church attendance as representative of Catholic subversion, especially in the north, where Guy Fawkes, Thomas Percy, and other conspirators were raised. The recurring references to tearing raw flesh brought together concerns over civil disobedience and the incivility and unorthodoxy seen to pervade more rural areas of England. Protestantism, obedience to the Crown, and the reformation of manners were all interrelated aspects of the state’s civilizing project.Footnote 58
Since the Reformation gave the monarch authority over church and state, issues around the sacraments and acting out one’s faith necessarily became tied to concerns over political order. Protestants described Catholics as inviting a warlike mode of life, behaving ‘worse than the Canibals & Indies that eat their enimies’ because they sought to perpetuate discord in their communities.Footnote 59 The act of theophagy was therefore reflective of the more general violence that Protestants believed their Catholic neighbours guilty of, where the torn and broken body of Christ, ripped apart by Christians living in error, symbolized a more general willingness to commit acts of violence that threatened the stability of the state. This extremity seemed to play out most fully in the religious wars in Europe, where religious bloodshed tore apart communities and turned neighbours against each other. In the 1580s, John Foxe deemed the pope ‘a cruell Caniball’ for encouraging ‘troublesome commotions and disordered factions … wherewith the peace and concorde of Christians is so lamentably shaken and rent asunder’.Footnote 60 Forty years later, George Goodwin’s Catholic satires made the same associations. Goodwin called ‘this powder age’ the age of the Catholic ‘Flesh-feeder’, teeming with ‘Popish Caniball[s]’ intent on subverting the laws of state.Footnote 61 Acting the cannibal became a direct threat against the power of the monarch over his subjects, since these ‘bloudy butchers’ assumed ‘almost a soveraigne power and princely authority’ over their own countrymen.Footnote 62 As Arthur Marotti notes, the pope’s ‘politically intrusive … vision of international order directly conflicted with the kind of political autonomy’ that the centrally governed state sought for itself.Footnote 63
The cannibal nature of Catholic belief became incorporated into a broader mistrust of Jesuit radicalism and the question of secular authority. The climate of mistrust towards Jesuits in the 1580s and 1590s was no less prominent under James, despite his promises of toleration. Not all Catholics supported the pope’s ordinance that Elizabeth be ‘bereved or deprived of hir … kingdom, and also of all and whatever dominions’, but evidence suggests that the Crown’s attempts to locate seditions were more than mere paranoia.Footnote 64 ‘Many Jesuits come into England disguised to meet the King of Spain’s ambassador there,’ wrote John Hammond to his brother in 1604, and John Chamberlain reported in 1607 that ‘there be at least two or three hundred Jesuites priests and friers lately come over, and grow so bold that they go up and downe in some places in their habits’.Footnote 65 Catholic families sent their sons to the Jesuit colleges in France and Spain, where impressionable young members of the nobility were exposed to the rigorous Counter-Reformation influence of their Jesuit tutors.Footnote 66
Perhaps the most dangerous threat the Jesuits posed was their support of papal deposition, which maintained that subjects possessed the right to commit acts of violence against their monarchs if the pope declared them heretical.Footnote 67 William Barlow’s sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1601 forcefully condemned the teachings and writings of the English Jesuit Robert Parsons, and Jesuits more generally. ‘The law of God is straight in this case, it bridels the mouth that it speake not evill of the King, it bindes the hart not to imagine evil against him, and the civil law punisheth with death’.Footnote 68 Such intimate language between a subject’s duty to his monarch, and the role of the law in punishing disobedience, made cannibalism a potent example of the wrenching effect of factionalism in a community. The clergyman Thomas Wilson wrote in 1614 that:
Our degenerate and new Romanes take a readier way and shorter cut to quit them of their enemies … by seditions, rebellions, murthers, treasons, stabbing of Princes, blowing up of English parliament-houses, and other such monstrous unnaturall courses … How far be they from Antichrist, which delight so in the blood of Gods people, [and] in barbarous savage cruelty, such as amongst Scythians & Cannibals is not to be heard of?Footnote 69
James also used the figure of the cannibal in 1616 to combat Jesuit claims that Catholic subjects could lawfully depose their monarch.Footnote 70 ‘A most detestable sentence’, James wrote, ‘all the barbarous cruelty that ever was among the Canibals … may passe henceforth in the Christian world for pure clemencie and humanity’.Footnote 71 In his rhetorical outrage, James turned to the cannibal and other ‘infidels’ to express the illicitness of such presumptions, defending himself against those who opposed a king’s temporal authority by equating disloyal subjects to ‘savages’. James specifically framed physical violence against a monarch as both irreligious and treasonable.
References to cannibalism brought together Protestant fears of an expanding Catholic monarchy with denunciations of Spain’s imperial reach. Theodore Herring’s thunderous sermon at Blackfriars in 1625 brought these strands together:
No marvaile if they who crash their Saviour betweene their teeth, make no bones to crush their Soveraigne. No marvaile if those … GOD-eaters … prove … MAN-eaters (worse then Cannibals) STATE-devourers. What may they not doe to advance the Catholike Cause? I shall not need to aggravate their Crueltie, Treacherie, their owne Acts proclaime it to the World … New projects are daily forged on the Anvills of the Jesuites braines … so just is it … that their owne tongues and hands, should be the chiefe Heralds to blazon the barbarous and savage disposition of these Blood-suckers to the whole world.Footnote 72
Commissioned to preach on the twentieth anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason, Herring showed that memories of Catholic plots within the realm had not faded under James. He explicitly drew a connection between Catholic subversion and ‘the slaughter of the Indies’, a reference to the popular writings of the Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who featured often in anti-Spanish discourse.Footnote 73 In an inversion of the usual assumptions about cannibalism, the Spanish became more brutal than Native Americans in their wilful denial of human justice. The Spanish camp, rather than indigenous villages, took on the harrowing semblance of a butcher’s shop, where leaders kept ‘an ordinarie shambles of mans flesh’ as a terror tactic to subjugate local populations.Footnote 74 In 1626, preaching at Paul’s Cross, William Hampton overtly depicted the Spanish as a legion of cannibals: ‘Whole Armies of them living sometime like Cannibals, eating nothing but the flesh of Indians’.Footnote 75 His use of the word ‘shambles’ revealed his debt to English translations of Las Casas, but the word also evoked the illegitimacy of a Catholic regime based on unlawful uses of force.
Fears of a Spanish invasion of England appeared obsessively in English discourse into the 1620s. Hampton’s appropriation of the Spanish as cannibals, running butchers’ camps with body parts as delicacies, sought to impart the frightening possibility of Spanish rule in a domestic realm already prone to faction. ‘We have within us, many home-bred and domesticall enemies, who will betray us’, Hampton pressed; they will ‘joyne hands with this foreign foe, in working our confusion’.Footnote 76 South American children starved and killed, families dashed from mountains and forced into mines, men whipped and maimed and driven to anthropophagy, were all manifestations of the ‘dreadfull doing of these capitall enemies of mankind’ – enemies who were at that very moment warring against fellow Protestants in Europe.Footnote 77 John King, preaching at the court in 1608, reminded his audience that the bloody-mindedness of the Spanish extended from America to Christian Europe, fracturing the peace of former times. ‘Cruelty is the ensigne and badge of that church’, King announced, and ‘the diet of the Cannibals’.Footnote 78 Generations of cruelty, refined in the theatres of conquest in America, offered an urgent reminder that Catholics, as ‘degenerate’ Christians, were capable of atrocities that even unconverted souls were incapable of.
Factionalism and Revenge
The visceral language of cannibalism in debates about religion and kingly authority point to enduring Protestant anxieties after the Reformation. Protestant, particularly puritan, writers seemed to detect the vestiges of a lingering and seductive Catholicism everywhere – under floorboards where priests might hide from local authorities, in rosaries and family heirlooms privately kept to commemorate saints, or, most impenetrable of all, in the secrets and longings of the heart. The dangers of Catholicism loomed in fears of non-conformity and in the unsettled legacies of contested theological doctrines.
In condemning the wrongs that came from a disordered society, subjects engaged with ideas of cannibalism in a particular way. They held up the horrors of exocannibalism – the vengeful eating of humans outside one’s kin group – to reflect on an especially unnatural form of endocannibalism – not the internal consumption of community members out of love, as one might conceivably categorize a practice like transubstantiation, but out of cruel ill will. The ‘civil monster’ was one who ‘through disorder, and inordinate desires … become unreasonable’.Footnote 79 Succumbing to private desire at the expense of the common good showed ingratitude and excess, inducing the perpetrator to live as if he ‘devoures in some sort, them of his owne species, society, and bloud. All which the Anthropophages do not. For though they feed on their species … yet they hunt after straungers … observing still some law of society among themselves’.Footnote 80
This idea that English cannibals hatefully consumed their own kin displayed a unique adoption of an American trope, challenging assumptions that cannibals were used entirely to ‘mark the boundary between one community and its other’.Footnote 81 Cicero had described ‘fellow-citizens’ of the commonwealth as a collective body bound together by social ties, mutual obligation, and common interests. ‘[W]e are certainly forbidden by Nature’s law to wrong our neighbour’, Cicero wrote, whereby self-seeking behaviour ‘demolishes the whole structure of civil society’.Footnote 82 In the playwright Ben Jonson’s The staple of news, performed in 1625, the cook Lickfinger proposed to go to America to convert cannibals. Desiring to advance ‘the true cause’, Lickfinger acknowledged that it was ‘our Caniball-Christians’, rather than the ‘[s]avages’, who had to learn to ‘[f]orbeare the mutuall eating one another,/Which they doe [sic], more cunningly, then the wilde/Anthropophogi; that snatch onely strangers’.Footnote 83 Lickfinger’s understanding that indigenous Americans only ate ‘strangers’, a legal term denoting foreigners, stood in contrast to the broken values of citizenship evident in the incessant rivalries of the play’s money-hungry characters.
Since political authority operated through social relationships, various individuals employed notions of cannibalism to criticize neighbours and friends who acted according to their own desires.Footnote 84 Peter Lake’s study of murder pamphlets indicates that the godly often directly linked social chaos to the failure of household authority figures to promulgate deference, where individual behaviour paralleled larger political anxieties over legitimate rule and the execution of law.Footnote 85 The cannibal enters these murder pamphlets too. Upon the discovery of the murdered merchant John Sanders, his servant lamented, ‘[m]en have no mercy … they be Canniballes’.Footnote 86 The narrator of a 1616 pamphlet commented in an increasingly common trope that ‘the Caniballs that eate one another will spare the fruites of their owne babies, and Savages will doe the like’, rendering it all the more shocking that the infanticide committed by Margaret Vincent, ‘a Christian woman, Gods owne Image’, would be ‘more unnaturall then Pagan, Caniball, Savage, Beast’.Footnote 87 Another text contrasted social order against ‘the very Canibals and men-eating Tartars, people devoide of all Christianity and humanity’.Footnote 88 The accompanying woodcut displayed two men in the process of dismembering the body. One held the victim’s head in one hand while another man pulled out his entrails, drawing unsettling visual parallels between cannibalistic rituals in South America and the acts of uncivil Englishmen. The author appealed to the authority of lawmakers who, as ‘his Majesties Deputies and Viceregents’, must combat the ‘horrid and bloody’ behaviour of those who resisted the king’s ordinances.Footnote 89
The use of cannibal imagery in these sources shows the flip side of ideal harmony, not in a way that glorified the ‘festive yet forbidden pleasures of the world turned upside down’, as Lake finds in the inversions of society in murder pamphlets, but by introducing a new paradigm through which to view and uphold norms and values.Footnote 90 Unlike the devil, who lurked behind evildoers in woodcuts, enticing them to sin, the dissident who adopted ‘savage’ behaviour often became the cannibal. Those who subverted ‘his Majesties authenticall power’ were ‘blind Cannibals’ sinning ‘before God in their conscience’.Footnote 91 The English cannibal chose to act in accordance with a people who, in the world order explained by moralists, existed outside God’s covenant. Acts of oppression and disobedience showed a cruelty ‘beseeming rather the savage Cannibals, then any sound hearted Christians’, a statement reinforcing the belief that cannibals were not saved but damned.Footnote 92
The juxtaposition between virtue and cannibal malice found further relevance in criticisms of enclosure and the related pursuit of private profit. John Norden’s works on surveying were dedicated to landowning gentlemen who wanted to ‘see what he hath, where and how it lyeth, and in whose use and occupation every particular is upon the suddaine view’.Footnote 93 By 1623, Norden had surveyed 176 manors in attempts to subordinate the landscape to elite oversight. While proponents of enclosure saw the practice as a civilizing project that reformed both landscapes and those who lived on them, the clergyman Thomas Draxe attacked the system for plaguing the labouring poor.Footnote 94 ‘The Kingdome is weakened’, Draxe asserted in 1613, by ‘these cannibal enclosers … of ill-gotten goods’.Footnote 95 Though he himself enabled the process of enclosure in his role as cartographer and surveyor, Norden employed the language of cannibalism in his devotional works to denounce the same. Creditors were voracious in their demand for financial satisfaction, picking at the bones of the indebted as if ‘hee would eate his flesh like a Canniball’.Footnote 96
Images of the money-hungry citizen licking up the carnage in his wake evoked a powerful picture of betrayal, one that the merchant Gerard Malynes used in his tract on economics and foreign exchange. The uncivil monster ‘gnaweth the poore artificer to the bones, and sucketh out the bloud and marrow from him’, he wrote, ‘feeding on him most greedily’.Footnote 97 Given the emotive nature of credit relations, the breaches of trust in matters of economy were expressed through violent and vengeful behaviour.Footnote 98 No one but tyrants, preached John Scull in 1624, including ‘[c]anibals that eate one another’, would treat their neighbours in such a manner, with ‘the lesser always becomming food to the greater, and the stronger prevailing against the weaker’.Footnote 99 Scull called for forgiveness as the only way to heal faction, a virtue that seemed to be lacking in a society where no single vision of Christianity unified the realm.
There is also evidence that cannibal language pervaded everyday interactions beyond sermons and written discourse. Accused of being a Catholic and facing a deprivation of arms, the author and soldier Gervase Markham protested that ‘he was no more a papist than an atheist or cannibal’, explicitly placing the cannibal outside accepted societal values while reinforcing his own place in the commonwealth.Footnote 100 A Middlesex deposition included the colourful case of one woman who slandered another by calling her a ‘Cannibal whore’.Footnote 101 In these instances, those who transgressed social (and perhaps sexual) norms were described as voraciously self-seeking. Though this description did not, presumably, have anything to do with physical violence, it nonetheless continued cannibalism’s association with excess and vengefulness. Perhaps most intriguingly, these cases suggest that ‘cannibal’ was a familiar enough frame of reference to appear outside textual modes of discourse, referenced by men and women alike in situations of anger or stress, whether in one’s defence of Protestantism, or in slandering members of the community.
These examples present only a selection of the vast range of discourses invoking cannibalism as a symptom of changing social relations. Attention to anxieties over credit and economy help to make sense of the frequency of this metaphor at this particular time, when subjects attacked the lack of trust that caused fellow humans to betray each other. The early modern economy depended on a system of exchanges in which credit and trust were central, where Christian charity and a rejection of open self-interest characterized the ethics of local agreements and contracts.Footnote 102 During the reigns of Elizabeth and James, an unprecedented rise in litigation levels profoundly affected community relations.Footnote 103 Litigations against individuals who failed to keep their contracts or fulfil their obligations reached a peak between 1580 and 1640, contributing to a sense of fracturing and deceit as well as a significant growth of debt and downward mobility.Footnote 104 ‘The earth’, wrote Thomas Wilson, ‘woulde soone be voide for want of men, one woulde be so greedie to eate up another’.Footnote 105 This echoed the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, that ‘if yee bite and devoure one another, take heed ye be not consumed one of another’ (Galatians 5:15, KJV).
Litigations often involved attempts to protect private property. The specific presence of the term ‘cannibal’ in Jacobean critiques of consumption places this ‘emerging materialism’ and ‘souring of interpersonal relations’ in the context of expansion.Footnote 106 Blood sacrifices and heart-eating were no longer relegated to Mesoamerican societies but to fractured relationships in England, where the impact of expanding trade networks and the monopolization of commodities manifested themselves in biting accusations of a possessive ruthlessness that undermined civil bonds. At the very time when the English celebrated their civility as a means of subordinating indigenous peoples and bolstering their own refinement, rising consumption contributed to the very problems of ‘cannibal’ behaviour that the English accused each other of. As Markku Peltonen discusses in his study on duelling in England, civility operated at the confluence between merchant and courtly society, where the expression of status so essential to elite concepts of honour and authority relied on commercial development and the acquisition of goods.Footnote 107 For cannibals to only eat strangers, while the English devoured their native countrymen out of a lust for commodities and wealth, exposed the vindictiveness of the projecting culture that pitted the English against their own.
Savagery and the State
When Francis Bacon expounded on the reasons why man did not eat fellow man, his concerns lay at the intersection between bloodlust and criminality. Man shunned eating man, Bacon maintained, because humanity ‘abhorred’ it. Further, if witches were anything to go by, cannibalism induced an insatiable appetite that stirred the imagination and encouraged sin. ‘Ca[nnibals] (themselves)’, Bacon observed, ‘eat no Mans-flesh that Dye of Themselves, but of such as are Slaine’.Footnote 108 In portraying cannibals as eating only those they killed, Bacon categorized them as murderers. Cannibalism therefore entailed more than one crime against the body. This raises the final aspect of cannibalism discussed in this chapter: how the king and policy-makers in London debated the uses of violence and the legitimate instances in which violence could serve a redemptive or necessary purpose. As James told assize judges in 1616, his subjects’ vices ‘must be severely punished, for that is trew government’, a sentiment that contrasted with the anarchical quality of cannibal violence whereby subjects assumed the power to execute justice themselves.Footnote 109
James frequently expressed his belief that the monarch always acted in the interest of his subjects, his responsibility to govern granted him by God. Appearing in popular devotionals and maxims, conduct books, sermons, and court rulings, the praise of Aristotelian temperance stood in stark contrast to cannibal vengeance, which might immediately serve the individual but detracted from hierarchical authority and arbitration. In 1606, the poet and soldier Barnabe Barnes considered civility a matter of public order, attacking the enemies of the realm who ‘disturbe or diabolically roote up the publike State’ through a thirst for blood, inducing them like ‘canniballes to feed upon the flesh, and to drinke the blood of such noble persons’.Footnote 110 The impulsive behaviour that accompanied uncontrolled rage perpetuated sedition, so that he who ‘hates the light of government … eates like a cannibal’.Footnote 111 Laws were a means of regulating the passions of the body politic through reason, so that the enforcement of the law was not seen as excessively harsh but completely necessary.Footnote 112
The carefully prescribed scripts within which Native American captives participated in the narratives of their executions initially seems to resemble denouements on English scaffolds. European prisoners in Brazil, notably Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, portrayed highly ritualized cannibalistic ceremonies that involved specific dialogues between the powerful ‘jaguar’ warrior and the victim about to be subsumed. The vanquisher who administered the death blow would proclaim his intentions to kill his victim as retribution for previous deaths in war. The prisoner responded by vowing that his friends would avenge him, before ‘[t]he executioner then strikes him on the back and beats out his brains’.Footnote 113 Like Tupinambá rituals, dialogues about martyrdom or repentance adopted by those sentenced to death allowed them some agency to defend their actions, profess their loyalties, or re-enter a sacred covenant that had been broken when they transgressed.Footnote 114 However, English discourse consistently described the monarch’s exertion of physical power over individuals as fundamentally different from the seeming excess of revenge killings committed by indigenous Americans, which the English directly related to their perceived lack of civility.Footnote 115 The condemned on English scaffolds often died verbally re-affirming social and political norms, choosing to restore the relationships they broke in their acts of sin or resistance. Moreover, while the king re-instated order through bloodshed, English writings observed, Tupi warfare was intended to perpetuate further vendettas.
Michael Foucault addresses the early modern state’s publicized control over a subject’s body in his Discipline and Punish (1975), a text that has been applied to describe a Tudor ‘theatre of state’ that used violence to reinforce governing ideologies.Footnote 116 Foucault’s exploration of ‘the power exercised on the body … as a strategy’ enables historians to explore contemporary understandings of the moral and physical significance of violence, where the state’s display of bodily punishment was often intended to represent the inversion of the intended harm committed against the sovereign.Footnote 117 This supports Elias’ contention that what changed in the sixteenth century was not the ubiquity of violence, but its transference to other arenas, where subjects consented to the state’s authority to punish subjects in order to achieve higher degrees of safety or prosperity, at least in theory. Foucault’s theory has its limitations, and scholars have questioned its usefulness for the English context, where lay participation in criminal justice made the display of state power less absolutist than in France.Footnote 118 The use of ‘cannibal’ to discuss litigation and lawmaking does, however, support the findings of legal historians who detected a general willingness among subjects to denounce those who failed to live up to the standards of civility and godly behaviour that county magistrates and metropolitan lawmakers propounded.Footnote 119
The prolonged debates in Parliament over fitting punishments for state crimes indicate the didactic meanings inherent in state-endorsed bloodshed. The House of Commons remained divided over how best to punish the Inner Temple lawyer Edward Floyd in 1621, for example, for his slanders against the princess Elizabeth Stuart and her husband, Frederick of Bohemia. Members discussed varying combinations of physical pain, public humiliation, and imprisonment. What stood out was the need for a punishment that reflected Floyd’s transgression, with MPs suggesting ‘as many lashes … as [rosary] beads’, ‘as many lashes … as the Prince and Princess old’, for Floyd to swallow his rosary beads, and for his crucifixes to be pinned to his body.Footnote 120 Debates in Parliament and the Star Chamber over appropriate punishments provide the context for Thomas Egerton’s extraordinary suggestion in 1605 that the libeller and courtier Lewis Pickering be punished in the manner of ‘the Indians by drawing blood out of the tongue and ears, to be offered in sacrifice’.Footnote 121 Whether meant in earnest or offered as dry humour after intense debate, Egerton’s statement offers a rare glimpse of how indigenous customs might function in dialogue beyond written discourse. Invoked in the law chamber, the notion of sacrificial violence not only indicated Egerton’s awareness of America as a cultural referent, but also provided a means through which the habits of American peoples were adapted and engaged with, becoming part of how policy-makers conceptualized their role in prescribing order. At the same time, Egerton’s reference to ‘Indians’, rather than to ‘savages’ or ‘cannibals’, differentiated between Native American rites, however crude he believed them to be, and the extreme and anarchic practices of cannibals.
The proceedings following the Gunpowder Treason of 1605 illustrate the clear moral significance ascribed to kingly authority and James’ right to regulate the body politic. William Smith’s sermon to the king and court following the event described the plotters as cannibals:
These men were not content with dagger … and poison for their privie plots [but] a store-house of powder, to the which if all the fire of hell and Purgatorie could have lent & sent but one spark, we had all been consumed … praised be to the Lord, who hath not given over for a praye to the teeth of those cursed Cannibals, who seeing they cannot satiat their mawes with the blood of Christ, in their unbloody Sacrament, have sought to ingorge & imbrewe themselves with the blood of Servants.Footnote 122
The reference to cannibalism through transubstantiation allied confessional disputes with political avarice. Those who were hungry enough for ‘the blood of Christ’ would just as happily ‘ingorge & imbrewe’ themselves with the blood of kings. The physician Francis Herring drew similar themes in his poem against the plot in 1617.Footnote 123 The horror of unbridled violence, coupled with false religious justification, contaminated the Lord’s Supper by bringing vengeance to a sacred meal. The oft-published work of Samuel Garey likewise deemed the Gunpowder plotter Robert Catesby a cannibal for his actions.Footnote 124 The plotters had targeted the ‘whole body of the Parliament house (the head, hart, eyes, braines, and vitall spirits of the politicke body of the Kingdome)’ in an explosion that threatened to leave the realm headless.Footnote 125 In attempting ‘the murther of Gods Anointed King’, Catholics proved that ‘the very Cannibals are not more thirsty of bloud’ than the realm’s own dissidents.Footnote 126
The corporality of treason is evident in these texts, as in the law itself. When James became king of England, he and Parliament ratified the medieval definition of treason specified under 25 Edw. III, Stat. 5, c. 2.Footnote 127 According to this statute, a subject committed treason not against the related entities of the Crown, the commonwealth, or an abstract state, but against the person of the king.Footnote 128 James regarded his power as embedded in his personhood, where a subject must naturally defer to his liege lord, a concept that leading jurists reiterated in Calvin’s Case (1608). In deeming those who wished evil on the king ‘Romish Cannibals’, Oliver Ormerod appealed to the constraining hand of the law through a visceral mental image of the destruction awaiting those who broke the sacred bond between a monarch and his subject:
Who would ever imagine, that the sonnes of men, could be thus savage … thus I leave them, wishing that they might be drawne on hurdles from the prison to the execution, to shew how they have beene drawne by brutish affections: that their privities might be cut off, & thrown into the fire, to shewe that they were unworthie to be begotte[n], or to beget others: that their bellies might be ripped up, & there harts torne out, & throwne into the same fire as being the fountain of such an unheard treacherie; that their bodies, having harboured such wicked harts might be cut off from their heads and divided into many quartars, as they were in the bodie politique divided by treason … and that their quarters might be fixed uppon the gates of our Cities, and exposed to the eyes of men: that as their nefarious attempts were an evil example to others, so their quartered limmes might be a heedfull caveat.Footnote 129
As one Spanish Catholic onlooker observed, when the English hanged Catholics charged with treason, they ‘cut open their chest with a knife and remove their hearts and entrails, and show them to the populace claiming “Here you see the heart of traitor. Long live the King of England”’.Footnote 130 The rebellious body opened itself to brutal but calculated correction, and subjects often voiced their opinion that this letting of the ‘corrupt blood’ from the body of the state differed fundamentally from ‘cruell and bloodye Carrebyes’ in the Indies.Footnote 131 In cases of treason, writers articulated the need for law and violence to operate together. One without the other was weakness or tyranny, whereas the essence of civility lay in balance and control. Though the hanging of dead bodies in public places might appear similar to the practices of human trophy-taking among the Tupinambá, the act was one of restorative justice rather than passion. Litigation and the threat of violence were closely entwined: the law did not staunch violence altogether but decided who was entitled to execute vengeance and define justice.Footnote 132
James’ vision of civility as pacification contributed to his disapproval of feuding and duelling. Christianity, with its emphasis on self-control and forgiveness, sat at odds with personal revenge.Footnote 133 Duels, James proclaimed, were ‘dishonourable to God, disgracefull to the government, and dangerous to the p[er]sons’.Footnote 134 Since they involved a subject’s handling of violence rather than the monarch’s, feuds and duels were described in language that paralleled cannibalism. Fighting for the sake of personal honour involved a ‘bloodthirsty and revenging appetite’ that depended on one’s ‘owne vindictive and bloody humour’.Footnote 135 Duels turned ‘courage barbarous’ and duellers into ‘enemies of humane society’, meddling in ‘an imaginary Honour’ that usurped the power of the sovereign.Footnote 136 Attacking the conceits of his noblemen in 1613, James declared that ‘no quarrell of any Subjects can be lawfull, except in defence of their Prince or their Countrey, the revenging of all private wrongs onely belonging to Us’.Footnote 137 This stressed that any behaviour contrary to his wishes undermined his desire for domestic peace and expressed a clear belief in the monarch’s right to monopolize force.
This sentiment was apparent in Thomas Middleton’s The peace-maker (1618), a tract whose frontispiece bore the king’s own coat of arms. Middleton explicitly envisioned manful behaviour as rejecting physical violence.Footnote 138 The text evocatively compared duellers to the bulls and bears in Southwark, fierce in battle but destined for slaughter. ‘We stand disobedient and repugnant to our owne just punishment’, Middleton wrote, but ‘Vengeance is God’s alone; which no man ought to take in hand, but as delivered from his hand; norso [sic] to imitate his Majestie and Greatnesse, that does it not but by Authoritie’.Footnote 139 The peace-maker did not explicitly mention cannibalism, but it drew a connection between behavioural degeneration and American influences. Violence, like tobacco, enchanted young men. ‘I thinke the Vapour of the one, and the Vaine-glorie of the other, came into England much upon a voyage, and hath kept as close together’.Footnote 140
In many ways, this text complements James’ own A counterblaste to tobacco (1604), where the king attributed tobacco and the corruption of manners to the breakdown of political order, especially among young gentlemen. Moreover, the Protestant civility advocated in these texts asserted itself against Spanish imperial identities. Before the Anglo–Spanish peace, merchants ‘on either side traffiqu’t in blood, their Indian Ingotts broght [sic] home in bloud’.Footnote 141 Duelling corrupted the nobility’s honour, Middleton wrote, so that ‘Pillars at home, that were enforced to be prodigies abroad’ risked fracturing ‘our peace (in her yong plantation)’.Footnote 142 Only in becoming temperate ‘branches of the great Olive Tree’ of peace could gentlemen most display their civil qualities, much less transplant them abroad.Footnote 143
In condemning smoking and duelling, James chose to equate false notions of honour to effeminacy and savagery. Similarly, when the Welsh writer and colonial enthusiast William Vaughan urged ‘reformed Christians’ to ‘follow the traces of Gentlemen, & not like unto heathenish Canniballes, or Irish karnes’, he contrasted civil behaviour to that of Native Americans and the Gaelic Irish, those groups the English were currently attempting to colonize.Footnote 144 Dissenters ‘are more savage then the savages of America. They eate men, but they are either strangers, or their enemies: these kill themselves among themselves, kindred, neighbours, friends, conversing together … [Native Americans] doe it, not knowing the mischiefe; these doe it, knowing’.Footnote 145 Those who spurned the Christian and civic values of an ordered society fell into miserable conditions without a prince to govern them. ‘Are you of civil either nature or education?’ the civil lawyer John Hayward asked. ‘Who under the name of Civilian do open the way for all manner of deceits … ? What are you? For you shewe you selfe more prophane then Infidels; more barbarous then Caniballs’.Footnote 146
Hayward’s beliefs, supported by James, who granted him a knighthood in 1619, advocated a civil and religious realm where honour was defined not by personal prowess but by submitting to the will and authority of the king. Research on litigations in the Star Chamber and in country courts provide plenty of evidence that the Crown’s insistence on overseeing arbitration was gradually becoming effective.Footnote 147 Appeals to the king and to local authorities in cases of duels and slander suggest a growing belief in the function of the law. Gentlemen could, and did, appeal to justices of the peace to settle matters of personal honour.Footnote 148 Richard Cust’s case studies on gentry litigation find that early Stuart gentlemen increasingly subscribed to ideas of honour that celebrated Protestant activism through public service.Footnote 149 The value that many subjects placed on the law provided a contrast to the cultures of vengeance seen among the Tupi, but also in Catholic countries like France, where duels and religious persecution evaded the execution of state justice. The elite became active participants ‘in the rhetoric that made law a central part’ in changing concepts of civility and refinement, one that subscribed to arbitration and mediation as a means of tempering the behaviour – and the influence – of the ‘overmighty’.Footnote 150
Comments on the extremity of cannibal violence in discourse underline the complexities of the Protestant vision of expansion and the civilizing project. On one level, the use of violent language in political discourse might suggest that subjects supplanted the physicality of violence by channelling conflict through rhetoric and slander instead. The gentry’s willingness, in many cases, to defer to the law and higher authority signified that humanist morality could effectively shape gentlemanly conduct, and shaming invectives against extreme violence may have served to underscore and codify these ideas.Footnote 151 On the other hand, as this chapter has demonstrated, real colonial experiences underpinned the salience of cannibalism as a metaphor. Many of James’ subjects resisted his vision of a masculinity that pacified violence altogether. Satirists and puritan MPs often attributed court corruption to an effeminizing luxury that prioritized peace at the expense of military might.Footnote 152 Escalating tensions over James’ policies in the 1620s led courtiers and MPs to express violence as integral to retaining and expanding their imperial polity. Pro-imperial gentlemen therefore promoted colonization in the Atlantic in ways that both aligned with and at times contradicted the king’s own notion of a civil polity and how it would be achieved.
Although subjects attacked certain policies of James’, notions of uncontrolled violence ultimately confirmed the necessity of kingly prerogative. None of James’ subjects ever referred to the English state itself as cannibalistic. Whereas Protestant writers consistently depicted Spain’s monarchy as ravenous and insatiably destructive, they portrayed their state in opposition to the chaotic violence of illegitimate bloodshed, an idea that subjects appeared to have accepted and subscribed to on the whole.Footnote 153 The 1613 translation of Montaigne’s essays came closest to attacking state measures, but such views do not seem to have been replicated or vocalized by the majority. Montaigne believed that ‘the Canibales and savage people’ who consumed dead bodies were less savage than those who inflicted torture – ‘even in matters of justice, whatsoever is beyond a simple death, I deeme it to be meere crueltie’.Footnote 154 Yet English writers never denied the state its right to practise violence through the execution of the law, for the ‘mortall plague of Rebellion … is a sicknesse not to bee cured but by letting blood’.Footnote 155 Those who wilfully acted in stubborn error, whether Native American or natural subject, subverted the king’s power, becoming ‘blind Cannibals in before God [and] their conscience’.Footnote 156
*
Under James, cannibalism – not a staid repetition of an ancient idea, but a response to encounters with Native Americans, and distinct from hunger anthropophagy – began to take a varied role in the expression of civility and governance in England. The influx of thinking politically about cannibalism was a response to a particular historical moment, informed by English experiences in the Atlantic and by changes within the realm itself. The frequent invocation of Carib and Tupi violence in political discourse placed the religious and political uncertainties of post-Reformation England within an emerging imperial polity, one dominated by hopes that America ‘may be possessed, planted, and annexed to his Crowne’.Footnote 157 This suggests that what contemporaries deemed ‘this powder age’, the years when the Gunpowder conspiracy lingered powerfully in popular memory, existed within a global vision of authority, partly expressed through a Protestant imperial impulse that held up the horrors of savagery for political ends while de-legitimizing Catholicism.
The physicality of cannibalism lent itself to discussions of the body politic at a time when treason and state violence were closely connected to the physical person of the monarch. Yet ideas around cannibalism were also symptomatic of the troubling effects of the English civilizing project on Atlantic spaces and at home. What often lay behind accounts of cannibal violence was colonial violence more broadly: a series of shifting alliances and conflicts between the English and Native Americans that profoundly altered patterns of mobility, settlement, and the organization of communities. Beyond English descriptions of ‘cannibals’ lay a rich, uncertain realm of relations that exposed the English to South American and Caribbean mythologies and rituals, and to their material cultures. Objects fuelled the desire for colonial interference and possession, from macaw feather ornaments and iridescent beetles’ wings to animal skins and gemstone jewellery (Figure 4). Caribs ‘would provide all kinds of delicious fruits’, sugar, ‘[p]arrats, and any thing that they thought we delighted in’, Nicholl reported.Footnote 158 In applying ideas of cannibalism to the domestic polity to condemn self-serving profiteering, English writers implicitly conveyed that the pursuit of land and global goods had, in effect, generated cannibals rather than destroyed them. Courtiers and merchant projectors, some of those most determined to expand their estates and attain luxury commodities through colonization and trade, were those now devouring the traditional bonds that held the commonwealth together.
Figure 4 Blue and red macaw feather headdress from Guiana with small green feathers and hexagonal plaiting at the base. Though the fragility of featherwork makes early modern examples difficult to preserve, this object and its techniques of production illustrate the long-standing importance of feathers in status display and knowledge transmission in Greater Amazonia.
From increased enclosure to the rise of litigation, socio-economic changes in the realm impacted individuals on a deeply personal level. This helps to explain why the cannibal metaphor entered discourses about friendship and betrayal. The popular Pythagorean aphorism ‘eat not thy heart’ was an appeal to kindness, to a civil society based on community and fellowship. Those who lacked friends with whom to share secrets or unburden themselves were ‘devourers of their owne hearts’, wrote Ambrose Purchas. ‘So great an Enemy to man is this his secret hatred, or aversation [sic] to societie, that it causeth him to degenerate … to become a Caniball’.Footnote 159 When Edward Grimeston evoked cannibals as exemplars of hatred and the breakdown of social order, he discussed love as a solution – not marital love, but the bonds of masculine friendship, for ‘to banish Love from a civill life, and the conversation of men [fills] the whole world with horror and confusion’.Footnote 160 In these ways, writers on both sides of the Atlantic advocated a trust-based civil society as an antidote to both actual and metaphorical cannibalism. Those ‘[h]eathens … who very bruitishly and cruelly doe dayly eate and consume one another’, wrote Robert Cushman from New England, would find reconciliation by the ‘peaceable examples’ of the English, encouraging ‘many of your Christian friendes in your native Countrey, to come to you, when they heare of your peace, love, and kindness’.Footnote 161 To Cushman, the solution to cannibalism was a transatlantic society founded on order and harmony, one that negated the uses of violence altogether.
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