Beyond Cambridge, past and present fellows ministered to and baptised enslaved persons in North America and West Africa and defended the institution of racial chattel slavery. Thomas Thompson, formerly a fellow and the Senior Dean of Christ’s College, was one of their number, joining the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), a Church of England missionary organisation, on the recommendation of the Reverend Thomas Cartwright, a college fellow and the Archdeacon of Colchester. Thompson was first sent to Monmouth County, New Jersey, and later published a letter in 1756 and travel narrative in 1758 about his Atlantic missionary adventures. After five years in North America, Thompson next travelled to West Africa. Arriving in February 1752, he was less than enthused about his prospects for ‘saving’ souls, deriding West Africans as lazy, drunk, idolatrous, and superstitious ‘Barbarians’.¹

For almost four years, Thompson resided at Cape Coast Castle, one of around forty fortresses that lined the West African coastline. First home to the Swedish Africa Company, who traded in timber and gold, the British RAC used the Castle’s dark, cramped dungeons to imprison Africans awaiting transportation to the Americas. Whilst Thompson tried in vain to convert the locals, he became the Castle’s chaplain – recalling that the ‘Castle, which formerly had a Chaplain, being now without one, I was permitted to officiate in the Place of Chaplain. By Favour of the Governor I had a convenient Chamber allowed me, was often invited to his Table, and he was in every Respect very kind and civil to me’. Whilst civil in public, the governor, Thomas Melvil, who led the Castle after the RAC was reorganised into the African Company of Merchants, privately dismissed Thompson’s efforts to ‘convert the Negroes’ and argued that the former fellow depended on ‘the old Prophets & super-natural aid’ to save Africans from Satan.²

Melvil was correct: Thompson’s mission was unsuccessful – he brought back only three young West Africans, among them Philip Quaque, the son of a local chief and slave trader, to train as Anglicans – but he earned enduring fame (or infamy, depending on the audience) for the proslavery pamphlet he published just a year before his death. Thompson dedicated the text to William Devaynes, the five times chairman of the East India Company, a member of the African Company of Merchants, and a vocal proponent of colonisation in Sierra Leone. Understandably, Thompson was not shy about his Cambridge connections – he displayed his credentials on the frontispiece as ‘THO. THOMPSON, M. A. SOMETIME FELLOW OF C. C. C. [Christ’s College, Cambridge]’. Projecting intellectual authority, Thompson made several arguments in the piece: that African leaders did the enslaving; that enslavement was legal according to established writings of the day, including the laws of nations and war and the teachings of the Bible, and was not contrary to the laws of nature; and that the wrongs of slavery were due to individual cases of sadistic masters, rather than an indication of how enslaved people were treated throughout the British Caribbean.³

These intertwined arguments underpinned Thompson’s conclusion: that the slave trade and plantation economy rescued West Africans from the oppressions that they suffered in their homelands. Slavery, according to Thompson, halted the much greater despotisms that the local population suffered because of the practices ‘among the natives themselves’. As with plantation owners, Thompson appealed to political economy and commerce to prove the legality of “man-stealing.” To him, slaveholding arose from a ‘necessity of supplying our West India and American colonies with the fittest hands for plantation-work’ – the phrase “fittest hands” indicating that Europeans enslaved Africans for their apparent proclivity for hard labour, expertise for cultivating some crops, such as rice, and supposed resistance to tropical weather and diseases. Enslavement, to him, was a necessary evil.⁴

Abolitionists, including Granville Sharp and Anthony Benezet, challenged Thompson on his conclusions and readings of scripture. Criticising Thompson’s arguments as an effort to defend enslavement, Granville’s Sharp’s 1773 Essay on Slavery was dedicated to refuting the Christ’s man. Intending to highlight slavery’s Inconsistency with Humanity and Revealed Religion, Sharp, who had a profound influence on Cambridge antislavery activists, attacked Thompson’s claims. ‘I have not leisure to follow this author methodically’, Sharp wrote, ‘but will, nevertheless, examine his ground in a general way, to prevent any ill use that may be made of it against the important question now depending before the judges’. The court case he may have been referring to was Somerset v. Stewart (known as the “Somerset Decision”) which, at the time of writing, was still before William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield. As a committed Christian, Sharp hoped that men of the cloth, like Thompson, would display charity to the enslaved. The gospel, he declared, ‘destroys all narrow, national partiality; and makes us citizens of the world, by obliging us to profess universal benevolence…whatever “the worshipful committee of the company of merchants trading to Africa”, may think of it, or their advocate, the reverend Mr. Thompson’. Sharp appealed to Thompson’s Christian beliefs to question the Cambridge man on the veracity of his claims regarding the slave trade. As for Thompson, his residence in West Africa damaged his health, and the SPG reported that the ‘fatal Distemper there, the Flux, and other sharp Sicknesses’ had forced him to return to England. Claiming a small, yet generous, ‘Benefaction’ from Christ’s to aid him after the expense of his passage home from Africa, Thompson died in 1773.⁵

Advertising his status as a former Cambridge fellow, Thompson’s writings and reception illustrate the importance of academic status, even as the ancient universities were challenged for the inadequate educations that they sometimes provided to their young charges and prodigals. As an institution predicated, in part, on providing the British Empire with clergymen, missionary Protestantism was one of the principal avenues through which Cambridge fellows and benefactors became agents in the expanding empire, helping to reinforce slaving ideologies, and fund imperial religious organisations and educational institutions. More recently, historians, such as Travis Glasson, have highlighted the SPG’s ownership of the Codrington plantations in Barbados and proslavery efforts, and the present chapter extends these claims to the seventeenth century, with many Anglican missionaries struggling to claim ownership over the global marketplace of souls from Catholics, Baptists, and Quakers. The chapter first charts the involvement of Cambridge men in the Virginia Company and associated imperial companies in New England, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Guinea. The focus will then turn to the eighteenth century and the emergence of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which counted prominent Cambridge founders, donors, and supporters amongst its number.⁶

Cambridge men were involved in North American colonisation from its inception. St John’s College educated many of these men, and that institution’s significance to the colonisation of Virginia mirrored Emmanuel’s importance to the Puritan expedition to New England. Cambridge men took a leading role in the Company: Robert Gray, who matriculated around 1589, wrote a sermon in support of emigration as a solution to England’s problem of overpopulation; Thomas Morton, who graduated in 1586 and later became a fellow and lecturer in logic, defended the Colony’s legality; Gabriel Archer, an officer at the Colony’s first settlement in Jamestown, was at St John’s for two years; and Samuel Purchas, the ‘most vigorous and prolific promoter’ of the Company, once called Cambridge home. William Crashaw (who was a fellow from 1594) wrote much of the Company’s propaganda and his collection of 200 books, which were so substantial that their storage necessitated the construction of the Old Library at St John’s, were delivered to that institution thanks to Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton (who was also a member of the Virginia Company).⁷

Crashaw was a Company shareholder and advocated that ‘We give the Savages what they most need. 1. Civilitie for their bodies. 2. Christianitie for their soules’. The first tenet would ‘couer their bodies from the shame of the world’ and the second objective would ‘couer their soules from the wrath of God’. For Crashaw, colonisation would transform “savage” Native Americans into useful English subjects – in fact, the Company ‘will make them richer than we finde them. For he that hath 1000. acres, and being a ciuill and sociable man knowes how to use it, is richer than he that hath 20000. and being a savage, cannot plow, till, plant nor set, and so receives no more profit then what the earth of it selfe will yeelde by nature’. To that end, he proposed endowing ‘Schooles and colledges’ for the ‘Children of the He[a]then’ where they were to be educated in ‘Civilitye and Christianitie’ and the English language. For colonial promoters such as Crashaw, profit and religion were two sides of the same coin, with the struggle for Native American souls a motivating factor for colonisation.⁸

The St John’s men joined other Cambridge luminaries who sought to colonise North America. Educated at Trinity, Alexander Whitaker had a close connection to St John’s (his father, William Whitaker had been the master there from 1586 to 1595). Yet the Ferrar family were the most significant enthusiasts for the Company. Born in London, Nicholas Ferrar, the Company’s Secretary and Treasurer was one of the youngest children of his father, who was also named Nicholas. Sent away to boarding school, the younger Nicholas later entered Clare Hall as a fellow-commoner, took his BA in 1610, and was elected to a fellowship that year (and he held that fellowship for more than two decades). For the Ferrars, the Virginia Company was a family affair, and they often enjoyed the company of Sir Walter Raleigh and became associated with Sir Edwin Sandys, who later designed the headright system in Virginia, which granted land to colonists. Nicholas and his family had endless ambitions for England’s new colony. The first colonists had fallen victim to starvation, disease, and war with the local (and powerful) Powhatan, but Nicholas considered establishing iron works in the colony and his niece, Virginia, drew up plans for a silkworks. Furthermore, Ferrar planned to establish a college in Virginia for the conversion of Native Americans (as per his father’s will and legacy of £300) and he negotiated tobacco contracts with the government. Ferrar’s position as a Cambridge fellow was perhaps a significant part of his political appeal. Whitaker, in his pamphlet Good News from Virginia, ‘let all men know’ that as a ‘Scholler, a Graduate, a Preacher, well borne, and friended in England’ such fellows were not self-interested and should therefore be trusted for their opinions.⁹

The colonisation of Ireland inspired these educated men. Cambridge had long and enduring connections across the Irish Sea – a proving ground for the political, legal, and ethical language of English conquest. Oliver Cromwell, an alumnus of Sidney Sussex, remains infamous for his efforts to re-conquer Ireland after the successful Catholic rebellion of 1641, and his deportation of ‘tens of thousands’ of Irish prisoners as indentured servants to colonies such as Barbados and Virginia. Cromwell was not the first Cambridge connection to Ireland, however. The first Master of Gonville Hall (now Gonville and Caius College), John Colton (c. 1320–1404), left that position to become the Lord Treasurer of Ireland in 1373, earning further posts as the Lord Chancellor from 1379 to 1382 and the Bishop of Armagh in 1383. In Ireland he commissioned the Visitation of Derry, an account of a ten-day tour intended to assert the English colonists’ power over that region, and he also diligently worked to forge peace between the O’Neill clan and King Richard II. With the Irish cast as a ‘sacrilegious and ungovernable people, hostile to God and humanity’, a people who required a ‘crusade’ for the ‘wellbeing’ of Christianity – a ‘just war against those evildoers’ – more Cambridge men followed Colton in the following two centuries, including William Bedell, a pensioner at Emmanuel and later fellow in 1593, who was the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1627 to 1629 and the Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh for thirteen years, supervising the translation of the Old Testament into Gaelic. Moreover, Sir Thomas Bendish, England’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and a donor of around fifty books on subjects ranging from mathematics to anatomy to St John’s, invested £400 in the Adventurers for Irish Land, which speculated in confiscated Catholic estates and aimed to replace these inhabitants with English colonists. Francis Ash, a goldsmith, East India Company shareholder, and Governor of the Muscovy Company (which held a monopoly trading contract with Russia), also speculated £250 with the Adventurers. Ash donated forty books to the University Library and endowed ten scholarships at Emmanuel College.¹⁰

Sir Thomas Smith was a more significant connection still between Cambridge and Ireland. The second son of an Essex sheriff, Smith ascended the University ranks after took his BA degree at Queens’ around 1530. Elected a fellow of the same college, he held that prestigious position for seventeen years and, whilst navigating the academic ladder, gained a legal degree at Padua, a Regius Professorship of Civil Law in 1542, and the Vice-Chancellorship from 1543 to 1545. Following a seven-year posting as the provost of Eton College, Smith, an early Protestant, benefitted when Edward VI, the first monarch to be raised Protestant after his father Henry VIII left the Catholic Church, ascended the throne. After the young King’s untimely death, Edward Seymour, the 1st Duke of Somerset and brother to Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour, seized power – and Sir Thomas was gifted further postings as the Secretary of State and knighted for his diplomatic services. Though he lost favour following Mary’s accession, her death and Elizabeth I’s rise to power marked the beginning of another golden age in Smith’s political career.¹¹

Smith’s connection to Irish colonisation began in 1571. In the intervening thirteen-year period after Elizabeth’s accession in November 1558, Smith had entered Parliament (as the Member for Grampound in Cornwall and then Liverpool), been appointed the ambassador to France, and had established a friendship with Sir William Cecil, the Queen’s chief advisor. As a reward for his service (and in a rather brazen attempt to subvert the authority of the local O’Neill clan), Elizabeth provided Smith with 360,000 acres of East Ulster land. Smith supported Elizabeth’s unsuccessful military programme in Ireland, the “Enterprise of Ulster,” where wealthy English colonists were provided with land grants to subdue the Irish, a ‘wicked, barbarous, and uncivil people’. According to Hiram Morgan, Smith had two goals for the region: ‘the enrichment of himself and his son, and the simultaneous strengthening of England’s position in Ireland’. For Smith, patriotism served profit, and vice versa.¹²

Founding a joint-stock company to finance his endeavours, Smith launched three campaigns between 1572 and 1575 to establish his Irish estates. Hoping to recreate English society on Ireland’s shores, Smith foresaw new settlements where the Irish would live ‘in the godly awe of [the] lawes of England’. Indeed, ‘playnting’ Ireland with ‘Englyshe laws’ and religion, he argued, would reform Irish ‘barbarity’, providing in turn a significant ‘profite’ to the ‘estate of England’. Smith, a contemporary of the humanist Sir Thomas More (who authored Utopia), joked that he was establishing a ‘Eutopia’, and his understanding of colonisation was partly rooted in readings of his student Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Decades of the new worlde or west India, which justified American colonisation and bondage because it freed Indigenous peoples from their cannibalistic rulers. For agents of empire, including Smith, the objective of colonisation was to transform the social and cultural landscape of early modern Ireland – converting pagan “savages” into productive, civilised subjects – and that paternalistic attitude was evident in Virginia too.¹³

Before his involvement in Ireland, Smith contributed to a growing literature that debated and planned the development of an English empire. His De Republica Anglorum: the Manner of Gouernement of Policie of the Realme of England, was first published in 1583 but written between six to ten years before his Irish enterprises began. It justified Elizabeth’s rule at the head of a Protestant English empire. In De Republica Anglorum, Smith wrote an entire chapter on the nature of enslavement. Basing his conclusions on Roman law, he equated villeins, who were feudal tenants that offered their services in return for land, with the enslaved, or servi. The servi were those purchased with money, seized in war, or ‘left by succession, or purchased’. Servi would not form part of the commonwealth because he defined such a community as being of ‘free men collected together and united by common accord & covenauntes among themselves’ in peace and war. The enslaved would be viewed as ‘instruments’ in the same manner that a husbandmen understood his ‘plow, the cart, the horse, oxe or asse’. The Elizabethan councillor, some historians suggest, may have also been responsible for the short-lived (and, in practice, unenforceable) Vagrancy Act of 1547, which condemned destitute people unwilling to work to enslavement. Smith, however, would not live to see his magnum opus’s publication. He passed away at his Hill Hall estate in Essex on 12 August 1577, leaving his Latin and Greek manuscripts to Queens’ College.¹⁴

Cambridge’s Irish connections ensured that early Virginia Company officials had precedents to draw upon when planning American colonisation. Aside from its ideological underpinnings, University men helped to establish the institutional groundwork for slavery in the Americas. In 1615, Ferrar helped to found the Somers Island Company, which administered the colony of Bermuda for more than sixty years. African enslaved persons were brought to the island from 1616 for pearl diving and there were an increasing number of enslaved Native Americans, particularly after the Pequot War in 1636 and Metacom’s War from 1675 through to 1678. Indigenous slavery inspired much debate amongst Cambridge alumni. Emmanuel Downing, a scholar at Trinity Hall in 1602, had emigrated to Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and was elected a Deputy to the General Court of Massachusetts, a Magistrate in the Quarterly Court at Salem, and Recorder of Deeds. In the Summer of 1645, Downing advocated long before the outbreak of the conflict with Metacom that if a ‘Just warre’ began in the region it would ‘deliver them [Narragansett peoples] into our hands, wee might easily haue men woemen and Children enough to exchange for Moores, which will be more gaynefull pilladge for us than wee conceive, for I doe not see how wee can thrive until we get into a stock of slaves suffitient to doe all our buisines[.]’ According to Wendy Warren, colonisation drove enslavement (and vice versa), with 1,300 Native Americans enslaved in New England alone.¹⁵

The scale of Indigenous enslavement led the Reverend John Eliot, a Jesus alumnus, to protest this situation. In August 1675, he attacked the policy of ‘sending away such Indians’ to become ‘perpetual slaves’ in the Caribbean. The English, he continued, must convert Native Americans – not seek to ‘extirpate nations’. Warning the governor against selling Indigenous peoples, a ‘dangerous merchandise’, Elliot condemned ‘the abject condition of the enslaved Africans’ whose lives had been purchased through the sale and labour of Native enslaved people. The English were hypocritical, he protested, if they condemned the Spanish for ‘destroying men and depopulating the land’ whilst they engaged in these same atrocities. Eliot’s more diplomatic vision of Euro-Native American relations found few allies even amongst those at home who questioned the means and ends of England’s empire. Joseph Mede of Christ’s College wished the colonists ‘well as anybody’ in May 1634, but he differed ‘in the grounds they go upon’. He feared that, rather than converting ‘barbarous nations’ and the servants of Satan, ‘good [Protestant] Christians’ would become as corrupted as the Catholic servants of ‘Christ our Lord’: those ‘Mastives the Spaniards’, whom God, Mede wrote, had been sent to ‘hunt’ and ‘worry’ in a ‘hideous manner’ the Indigenous peoples of South America. Mede feared nothing less than a combined ‘Army of Gog and Magog’, with Native Americans and corrupted Europeans marching (or, more likely, sailing forth) under Lucifer’s infernal banner, from the Americas ‘against the Kingdom of Christ’.¹⁶

Eliot’s entreaties, it appears, also fell on deaf ears in both New England and Virginia. More infamously, in August 1619 ‘20. and odd Negroes’ arrived at Point Comfort in Virginia. Taken from a Portuguese slaver, the São João Bautista, and transported to North America through an act of piracy, these Black indentured servants were originally transported from Luanda, the centre of Portugal’s slave trade in Angola. Six months later, the presence of thirty-two Afro-Virginians was noted in a Virginian census. John Pory, a secretary of state of the colony (and a Caius graduate), mentioned their arrival and how the ship was ‘victualled and manned… anew, and sent her with the same Commission to raunge the Indies’. He was aware of that ship’s cargo. Twenty years earlier, Pory, publishing as a scholar ‘lately of Gonevill and Caius College in Cambridge’, translated al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan’s A geographical historie of Africa. The translation elaborated on the problem of racial difference. On Blackness, he wrote that ‘Negros or blacke Moores’ are ‘thought to be descended from Ham the cursed son of Noah’. Moreover, in a subsequent passage, race was considered a ‘hereditary qualitie transfused from the parents, then the intemperature of an hot climate, though it also may be some furtherance thereunto’. Pory’s translation was such a success that it reportedly influenced the creation of William Shakespeare’s titular character in Othello.¹⁷

After 1619, the year 1622 was another significant milestone in the Company’s involvement in slavery. The newly established General Assembly in Virginia had restricted colonists from expanding their tobacco operations, but the Powhatan had other plans. On the four-year anniversary of Chief Powhatan’s death, that nation surprised the English in the Great Assault of 22 March 1622, killing at least 347 colonists, almost one-third of the colony (including the Reverend Samuel Maycock, a plantation owner and Caius alumnus). The leaders of the Company were infuriated. Although a subject of some debate, some historians argue that 1622 was a turning point in which Native American enslavement and extermination, rather than baptism, became a principal goal for the colonists there. Edward Waterhouse, the Company’s secretary, certainly argued that this massacre had relieved the English of a moral quandary: how to colonise Virginia and convert Indigenous peoples without violence. Waterhouse wrote that the English were now justified in the ‘way of conquering them is much more easy then of civilizing them by faire meanes, for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people’ – advocating that they be chased with ‘our horses, and blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to teare them, which take this naked, tanned, deformed Savages, for no other than wild beasts’. Instead of a proud ‘Nation’, Waterhouse denounced the Powhatan as ‘wilde and Savage: yet as Slaves, bordering rebels, excommunicates and outlaws’.¹⁸

Waterhouse was not alone. The mathematician Henry Briggs, a former fellow of St John’s, Cambridge, and Oxford’s Savilian Professor of Geometry, annexed a pamphlet, discussing a northwest passage to the South Seas through the ‘noble Plantation’ of Virginia and the Hudson Bay to spread religion and commerce to benefit ‘these poore ignorant Heathen people’ for the ‘publique good of all the Christian world’. (Briggs owned two shares in the Company.) Furthermore, an October 1622 letter, signed by Nicholas Ferrar, urged the Governor to execute ‘a sharp revenge upon the bloody miscreants, [by] … rooting them out for being [no] longer a people upon the face of the Earth’. The Company men were true to their word. Native American enslavement, which had begun soon after colonisation, continued until the early nineteenth century.¹⁹

Likewise, John Donne, who may have been awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity from either Cambridge or Oxford in 1615 and later the Dean of St Paul’s and chaplain to James I, helped to articulate the Company’s exclusionary labour regime. Donne had tried to become the Company’s secretary in 1609 but was appointed an honorary member of the council on 3 July 1622. He did not contribute money to the Company, which was already in great financial difficulty, yet he offered writings and sermons in service to that enterprise, some of which, as Thomas Festa makes clear, helped to establish the ‘theoretical basis for future forms of enslavement’.²⁰

Donne set out the purpose of the colonies: they were to be workhouses where vagrants, Native Americans, Black servants, and “undesirable” English subjects would be transported and worked on tobacco plantations for the benefit of Virginia’s growing white colonial elite. He wrote that the ‘Plantation’ would ‘redeeme many a wretch from the Jawes of death…. It shall sweep your streets, and wash your dores, from idle persons, and the children of idle persons, and imploy them’. Virginia would be a ‘such a Bridewell [a London prison], to force idle persons to work’. As a result of ideas such as Donne’s, the Company sent hundreds of impoverished children, ranging in age from eight to sixteen, who were forcibly transported to Virginia by the City of London from 1617 to 1622. In fashioning America’s exploitative labour system, university-educated men were amongst its intellectual vanguard.²¹

At Trinity College, the lecturer and naturalist John Ray (or Wray) advocated for the seizure of Native American property. The venue for his anti-Indigenous discourse was the morning divinity exercises delivered in the chapel, which Ray later had collated and published (with further additions and notes from respected authorities). The Trinity fellow claimed that nature and its resources were a gift from God – a gift that had to be exploited through ‘Improvement’ and ‘Industry’. The alternative to his ‘civilised’ ideal – a ‘civil and well-cultivated Region’ where naturalists ‘enrich[ed] thy Country’ through their discoveries, and English subjects leveraged the natural world for the good of ‘Trade and Merchandise’ – was a ‘barren and desolate Wilderness’. The exemplars of such a “savage” culture which he proposed to Trinity students were ancient Scythia and the ‘rude and unpolished America’ – a continent where ‘slothful and naked Indians’ lived ‘in pitiful Hutts and Cabans, made of Poles set endways’ in a manner consistent with ‘brute Beasts’. Ray’s claims mirrored Virginian colonial rhetoric, which often infantilised Native warriors as indolent “savages” who turned prime agricultural estates into wastelands.²²

The now-Faculty of History was a significant beneficiary of men such as Wray. Two prominent figures, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, and Sir Henry Spelman, an English antiquary, provided funds to support History lectureships. In 1628, the Baron Brooke, a shareholder in the Virginia Company, provided lands and £100 per annum ‘for the founding of an History Lectureship in the University of Cambridge’. Spelman, who donated funds from a Middleton rectory and manuscripts for the formation of an Anglo-Saxon lectureship, had the support of the VC, Dr John Cosins, to become the MP for the University on account of this benefaction (but only seventy votes were cast in his favour), and he ‘induced’ a friend, Sir Ralph Hare, to donate to St John’s College. Spelman was a founding member and treasurer, from 1627, of the English Guinea Company. The Guinea enterprise, whilst involved in enslavement, also had trading ambitions in ivory, gold, redwood, hides, and pepper grains in the Indian and Atlantic oceans, with voyages made from 1618 along the Gambia River. University benefactors were far more antagonistic towards Christian captivity in the Mediterranean. North African corsairs trafficked people from Italy, Portugal, Spain, England, France, and Hungary (with captives forced to labour until they were ransomed), and European states, in turn, seized Ottoman and Moroccan rowers for service on their galleys. The Craven Scholarships for two poor scholars at Cambridge (and another two at Oxford), which John Craven, 1st Baron Craven of Ryton, endowed in 1647, contained a clause assigning the residue of the fund ‘for the redemption of English Christian captives and prisoners in algiers, or in any other places under the domination of the Turk’.²³

The Atlantic trade in goods, such as tobacco, was neither a theoretical concern for the University nor merely a matter for personal consumption. By the seventeenth century, the University Court was a court of record, and the Vice-Chancellor presided over trade in the marketplace and issued licenses to taverns, vintners, and tobacco shops. In these stores, tobacco was cut into small pieces and sold by weight to eager consumers, who understood that product’s origins. Europeans celebrated how ‘The noble herb tobacco… journeys to us from afar across the seas from Mexico and Peru… it comes from wild people… [and] Makes for romping and sozzled and wild people’. John Swan, publishing as a former Trinity student, outlined the novel medicinal ‘verteus’ of tobacco from the ‘West Indies’: it eased headaches and ‘helpeth’ the pain of ‘bitings’ from ‘mad dogs’ (diseased canines were a common fear of English townsfolk). University officials, however, were worried at the traffic in a mind-altering product, especially after a Caian was caught in 1611 ‘puffing tobacco in Mr. Vice-Chancellor face when he came into the shop’, and Trinity’s Dean threatened expulsion from the fellowship for the consumption of tobacco in hall. Twelve years later, the Vice-Chancellor established rules for university members which regulated lecture attendance, dress, speech, and tobacco consumption. From 1635, at least seven Cambridge tobacconists were authorised to trade in heavily restricted amounts, but the court records are filled with cases of unlicensed retailers undermining the University-issued patents and selling to eager domestic consumers who coveted that drug as eagerly as they later did sugar, coffee, mahogany, and cotton goods.²⁴

The Virginia Company’s visions of empire, though, were a mirage. Beset with debt, dependent on lotteries to function, riddled with factionalism, and with the colony struggling to survive after the 1622 massacre, the Company was dissolved, and James I asserted royal rule over Virginia – a colonial structure that persisted in one form or another until American independence in 1776. The Somers Island Company remained a viable prospect, but investors suffered substantial losses (and they would not be the last from the era of company colonisation). Nicholas Ferrar owned £50 of stock in the Company. There were other investors who had university connections. George Montaigne, a former Queens’ fellow from 1592 to 1611 and the Bishop of Lincoln, held ten pounds and twelve shillings worth of securities. He appeared on two lists of subscribers in 1618 and again in 1620, though the exact date of his initial investment remains unknown. The year that Montaigne first appeared as a subscriber he purchased property in Cambridge to endow two scholarships at his former college. Neither Ferrar nor Montaigne lost out as much as William Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke. Herbert, who along with James I helped to found Pembroke College, Oxford, remains immortalised in statue in front of the Bodleian Library. Along with East India Company money and his involvement in the Guinea Company, the former Chancellor of Oxford held £400 in Virginia stock and served on the king’s council for the Company – a significant investment that resulted in a division of Bermuda being named in his honour. Herbert was said to have obtained a grant in Bermuda, yet his attempt at imperial riches was revoked on 6 April 1627 because of a previous claim by James Hay, 2nd Earl of Carlisle.²⁵

Following the Virginia Company’s dissolution, Cambridge men helped to establish the laws and religious structures of power that enabled slavery to grow and persist in New England. The first shipload of eighteen enslaved Africans arrived in that “city upon a hill” in 1638, barely eighteen years after the Mayflower landed at Cape Cod. The minister John Cotton had a profound role in shaping the laws governing New England. The son of a Derby lawyer, Cotton matriculated as a lowly Trinity sizar in 1598, then moved to Emmanuel, a puritan college, to finish his BA in 1603, and MA three years later. Accepting a fellowship at Emmanuel, he studied there for five more years, earning a reputation as a scholar and local preacher. His skills were in such demand that he preached the funeral sermon for Robert Some (or Soame), the Master of Peterhouse, and he soon left Cambridge to become a vicar of St Botolph’s Church in Boston, Lincolnshire. A supporter of the French-Genevan theologian John Calvin and an even fiercer opponent of Catholicism, Cotton was forced to leave England after the accession of Charles I, who distrusted ardent Protestants. On leaving for North America, Cotton gave an impassioned address supporting colonisation, exalting the English ‘to plant a colony’ because their home was overcrowded, and he approved of those who wanted to leave for ‘merchandize and gaine-sake’ – arguing that God sanctioned the profit motive. He implored colonists to ‘Arise then, this is not your rest’. The exodus included fellow Cantabrigians such as Thomas Hooker, the former Dixie Fellow at Emmanuel, and Roger Williams, who took his degree at Pembroke, and the leading lawyer John Winthrop, whose father was an auditor at Trinity College.²⁶

Ministering in Boston, Massachusetts, until his death in December 1652, Cotton assisted in establishing a colonial charter that legalised slavery in New England. In the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, a legal code which Cotton helped to devise along with Nathaniel Ward (another Emmanuel alumnus), the text read that ‘There shall never be any body slaverie villinage or Captivitie amongst us, unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly belie themselves or are sold to us’. The document read that ‘those [persons] shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by Authoritie’. That statute was not an antislavery clause – for one, it legally established that Indigenous people captive in war could be enslaved, and that “strangers,” meaning African-descended peoples, were enslaved if obtained through exchange or purchase. King James II replaced the Body with a Provincial Charter in 1691, yet the code had legalised the Native American and African slave trades that were underway in North America. Predating the Barbados, Virginia, and Connecticut statutes on enslavement, Cotton’s Charter had helped to legalise slavery in the English Americas.²⁷

The governmental influence of Cambridge members and major benefactors was not restricted to statutes: William Sancroft, the-then Archbishop of Canterbury, designed the seal of Jamaica in 1661. Sancroft, a former Emmanuel master (1662–1665) and distinguished donor upon his death in 1692 of over 5,000 volumes to its library (which doubled in size thanks to his generosity), was well-acquainted with England’s growing Atlantic empire. The moderate royalist was friends with Tobias Rustat, who served on the court of assistants to the RAC. In fact, Sancroft, who maintained his connections to Cambridge and its constituent colleges following this departure, appears to have ‘helped to smooth the path of Rustat’s gift’ to the ancient universities: £1,000 to establish a fund for the University Library, the same amount to St John’s, Oxford, and two fee-farms to Jesus College to support scholarships for the sons of deceased clergymen. Sancroft’s seal for Jamaica had the king ‘seated on his Throne, with two Indians [Native Americans] on their knees, presenting him Fruits, and two Cherubins aloft, supporting a Canopy’. On these administrative seals, Europeans depicted the ‘barbarousness’ and submissiveness of Indigenous peoples to justify their “civilising” mission in the Americas. Underneath Charles II’s feet, the motto read: ‘How sweet the fruit the hard rind yields’. The reverse of the seal featured a shield ‘Bearing a Cross charged withe five Pines; two Indians for the Supporters, and for the Crest an Alligator’. There was a solemn prayer for a Christian empire: ‘Behold the cross hath spread its arms into another world and beareth fruit’. Delivered to Jamaica’s incoming governor Sir Charles Lyttleton, the seal’s motto was ominous in tone: ‘The Indians twain shall serve one Lord’. The depiction of Native Americans as royal vassals was, of course, at odds with the reality of well-organised Indigenous resistance to English colonialism in the Americas and the self-confident diplomatic missions that various Indigenous communities, sovereign nations, and confederacies made to the European continent.²⁸

The “puritans,” as their enemies called them, soon colonised the Bahamas. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the royalists banished Bermuda’s religious dissidents to the Bahamas, which had been claimed in 1629 but remained uncolonised. Enter John Mapletoft. At fourteen years old, Mapletoft matriculated as a Trinity College pensioner, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree around 1652, entering the fellowship in 1653, and gaining a doctorate in divinity in 1690. A friend of the philosopher John Locke, he was the Physic Professor at Gresham, and a diplomat to Denmark. It was perhaps through these political and academic connections that he became a signatory to the Articles of Association of the Company of Adventurers to the Bahama Islands in September 1672. Holding £100 in stock, an investment which Locke later took possession of, Mapletoft’s fellow subscribers claimed a thirty-one-year lease on 12,000 acres in New Providence (modern-day Nassau), with rights and royalties on resources ranging from gold to gems, ambergris to pearls, and whales to shipwrecks. At the time, the population of the Bahamas included 403 enslaved people (almost half of the total) and investors intended on founding colonies. Sir Peter Colleton, an investor, noted that ‘planting is my trade and I thinke I may without vanity say I understand it as well as most men’. Although unsuccessful (like many of these imperial schemes), the Bahamas Company was merely another imperial enterprise that Cambridge-educated religious men turned to their economic benefit.²⁹

Soon, Cambridge alumni, fellows, and lecturers became fervent evangelists to this growing empire from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans. The Church’s support for imperial activities made sense given that church men were integral figures in the British establishment. Cambridge Anglicans bolstered the monarchy, political state, and the hierarchical social order. The Church helped to forge a distinctive Protestant British national identity – a religious culture of nationalism that sought to combat the Catholic powers of France and Spain. With the twin pillars of the May 1662 Act of Uniformity in public prayers and sacrament and the Book of Common Prayer in place, the ‘Anglican establishment’ became more impregnable in the reign of Queen Anne, with Dissenters marginalised and excluded from office and from teaching or running schools (Jewish people, too, remained without equal rights). In time, the ‘Church upheld the natural hierarchy of mutual obligations which were thought to provide social cohesion, and the State protected the legal establishment as the appropriate agent of benevolence and public morality’. Due to its prestige, the clergy were increasingly drawn from gentile families; indeed, in one parish the number of elite incumbents more than doubled between 1683 and 1730, though historians have also suggested that this shift in social class perhaps had as much to do with expanding meanings of the term “gentlemen” at that time. These sons – some of them from enslaver backgrounds – took degrees at Cambridge, to the extent that at the beginning of the eighteenth century seventy-eight per cent of graduates were ordained. With their educations and backgrounds, these alumni took up fellowships and, if they had the right connections, parish positions and bishoprics. These esteemed clergymen increasingly saw the future of Protestantism abroad.³⁰

Anti-Catholicism, the perception that Catholics posed a clear and present danger to the nation’s internal and external security, provided added impetus to these missionary efforts. Catholics were demonised in this era as idolatrous, cruel, traitorous, and, importantly, ‘anti-English’ fanatics who were intent on forging a religious empire. England’s anti-Papist stance was rooted, in part, in real or imagined plots, including the unsuccessful effort to blow up the House of Lords on 5 November 1605, and the fabrications of that ‘great dunce’, Titus Oates (who attended Cambridge but did not graduate). Oates whipped the kingdom into a three-year frenzy (1678–1681) due to his false claim that the Pope’s adherents were plotting to assassinate Charles II. Spanish atrocities in the Americas also mobilised the English against Catholics. Thomas Taylor, who had been a fellow and tutor at Christ’s, preached in 1612 against the ‘Romish Wolves’: the ‘effusion of blood, which the Popish Spaniards have made among the poore Indians [Native Americans], under the pretence of converting them to the faith’. Taylor reported that Hispaniola had seen its ‘seven and twenty millions of People… destroyed’, with its Taíno indigenous inhabitants ‘throwne downe from the top of a steep mountaine 700 men together’ – atrocities that had led ‘poore men’ to ‘hang themselves with their wives and children’ and the women to ‘dash their owne childrens braines against the stones’ to avoid falling into Spanish hands. Nevertheless, England’s criticisms of the Spanish must be tempered with the realities of their empire, as white Virginian colonists waged wars against their ‘deadliest enemies’, the Native Americans, with reports that the children of one chief had been thrown ‘overboard and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water’.³¹

Cambridge’s inhabitants were party to this anti-Catholic fervour after William, the Prince of Orange, landed with his Dutch forces at Torbay, Devon, on 5 November 1688. English aristocrats had invited the Protestant Prince to rule following the birth of James II’s son, James Francis Edward (which seemed to portent a new Catholic dynasty), but the town and gown population were intent on discovering potential enemies. On the night of 13 December, ten days before James abandoned the country (with James’s army abandoning him first), the Cambridge Alderman recalled that ‘2 or 300 (many scholars among them)’ were rioting under the ‘pretence to seeke for papists’ and their allies, with houses ‘ransack[ed]’ for ‘armes’. The crowd were driven into a frenzy because of reports that ‘5 or 6000 of the Irish’ had sacked nearby Bedford and ‘cutt all their throats’ and were now on route to Cambridge to perpetrate similar atrocities. In the confusion, candles were lit in solemn prayer, some fled town to ‘escape the danger’, and others took revenge on their neighbours. Fear of the ‘Irish beasts’, as one Cambridge fellow had earlier labelled Catholics across the Irish Sea, was a potent motivating force in local and national politics.³²

Aware of the Catholic threat, Cambridge men were in the vanguard of missionary Anglicanism, hoping to bring the light of Protestantism to the “pagan” world. The various companies appealed to senior scholars and doctors at the University to find ‘godly minister[s]’ with offers of money and lodging. As Captain Roger Wood, the governor of Bermuda wrote to one Cambridge graduate in the 1630s, appealing for him to come and ‘help us’: ‘It pleased God in his providence to guide your tongue unto such a strayne at Cambridge that swept you out of all your former imaginations and dreames of lyving at ease in Syon and for to make you more sensible off it the Highe Priest hath banished you forth of his jurisdiction’. For that reason, Cambridge men enthusiastically proselytised on behalf of the East India Company too. The Company, which had been first formed on 31 December 1600, soon expanded, establishing a foothold in Gujarat and its first factory in Machilipatnam in modern-day Andhra Pradesh.³³

Cambridge men arrived in the early stages of South Asian colonisation with the aim of proselytising to the local population (and forming a bridgehead against Catholic evangelism). Richard Elliott joined the Company in 1677 after a successful academic career at Eton, where he was a King’s Scholar, and at Eton’s sister institution King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow from 1669 and provided more than £1,681 for the purchase of three advowsons. Missionary enthusiasm had its limits, however. Some clergymen in the Caribbean despaired at the white colonists’ hesitancy to ‘Propagate the Gospel among either Blacks or Whites’. One writer observed in 1730 that he was acquainted with ‘near Thirty Gentlemen, Natives of the Leeward-Islands, who had their Education at Oxford, Cambridge, or Trinity-College, where of some profess the Law, and some Physick’ – but ‘none of them’ had thought to ‘study Divinity, or enter into Holy Orders, that they might supply the Churches of their Native Country’.³⁴

Financial support for the EIC and other imperial enterprises partly underpinned the collegiate religious mission. In the March 1736 will of John Craister, the Trinity fellow provided £400 of funding so that the College could purchase a ‘perpetual advowson’ (the right to recommend someone to a vacant position in the clergy), but in time, he preferred that the sum be laid out in ‘such Security’. Trinity’s Senior Bursar, the Reverend Dr John Paris (who later funded a prize for the best Latin declamation), received £550 from Craister’s executors, which he then used to purchase ‘five East India Bonds of £100 each purchased with pt. of the £550 lodged in the hands of the Coll on July 5, 1738’. From 1739 to 1742, the India stock earned more than £80 in interest.³⁵

More colleges followed suit: Magdalene helped to fund repairs to its chapel with East India money, and Jesus and Trinity Hall fellows showed a particular predilection for that investment. At Jesus, Dr Charles Proby, who had a benefaction fund in his name (part of which was invested in South Sea stock), had £400 invested. At Trinity Hall, George Oxenden’s donation of £150 was used to purchase East India bonds, which were then sold to finance another donation; the fellow Charles Pinfold (who would go on to become the Governor of Barbados), supported Dr John Chetwode’s scholarship fund with £250 in India securities; and John Andrews, whose benefaction was never received by the college due to legal problems, had £1,000 invested in the Company. Furthermore, Exton Sayer, a South Sea investor, fellow of the College from 1714 to 1724, and later a Whig Parliamentarian, helped the East India enterprise politically, leading the government in its efforts to stop an opposition attempt to end the Company’s monopoly.³⁶

Samuel Blythe’s benefaction to Clare was more significant than all these investments in shaping a college. Doncaster born and bred, Blythe (or Blyth) did not come from great wealth – he rose due to his prodigious abilities to take a BA by 1656 (matriculating as a sizar), an MA in 1659, and his DD in 1679. In between his first and third degrees, Blythe became a fellow at Clare, the Vice-Chancellor in 1684–1685, and Master from 1678 until his death on 19 April 1713. As he ascended the academic ladder, Blythe was also a deacon in Ely, the vicar of Everton in Huntingdonshire, and a rector of Newton in the Isle of Ely. Blythe provided almost the entirety of his estate, besides smaller bequests, to Clare, worth around £6,000, for the purchase of advowsons. As scholars attest, Blythe was ‘a great benefactor’, the College’s ‘principal benefactor’, and a Master whose bequest ‘guaranteed its [Clare’s] continuing success and prosperity’.³⁷

The college records reveal that Blythe used a small part of his significant wealth to fund colonial endeavours. In November 1699, he purchased £400 of East India Company stock – securities which were provided to Clare and were intended to purchase a parsonage in Duxford. The Duxford purchase did not occur until March 1869; still, the College made over £271 from the stock’s interest between 1713 and 19 April 1716. The great benefactor was no stranger to the empire in North America. In 1673, his account book made note of a ‘Henry Perrott born at Rapahanocke in Virginia’ on a 450-acre plantation, who was ‘admitted by Mr. [Charles] Alston in my absence under my [Blythe’s] care’.³⁸

Hoping to make a tidy profit, Clare sold the EIC stock in 1716. They valued the four securities at £576, yet they received a windfall of £592, which was then used to purchase Bank of England stock to support the benefaction (by 1723, the College had £3,500 laid out in that security). Blythe was deceased and therefore had no involvement in the transaction, but in October 1719 Dr Richard Laughton and William Grigg, the Master, invested £500 from the College chest in South Sea bonds. After receiving £20 in interest, the bonds were sold for £300 Bank of England stock on 4 April 1723 and the surplus given to Grigg. In effect, both these investments – the East India and South Sea money – continued, through the Bank of England purchases, to buttress Clare’s finances, cementing Blythe’s legacy as the College’s most significant and generous benefactor.³⁹

Cambridge fellows can even be found on the founding documents of successor organisations to the original East India Company. Bartholomew Wortley, a fellow and lecturer at Caius, appears to have invested at least 500 pounds in new East India Company shares in 1698 and, as a result, was named on their foundation charter. The son of a humble plumber from Fakenham, Norfolk, Wortley took his BA in 1676, MA in 1679, and held a Caius fellowship until 1706. The plumber’s son displayed such an aptitude for classical languages that he was elected to a lectureship in Hebrew from 1690 until 1696. His EIC investment would have been consistent with his religious attitudes and economic hopes for profit, given that he would have expected to receive dividends from the Company’s imperial activities that its founders assured could be ‘devise[d]’ in one’s ‘last Will and Testament’.⁴⁰

The new EIC was created, in part, in response to well-founded criticisms of the original firm: that it had monopolised trade and restricted it from “interlopers,” and that it had not endeavoured to spread Protestant Christianity abroad and limit the global spread of Catholicism. That cause was one that Wortley, given his later religious position as a parish clerk in Bratton Fleming, Devon, would have wholeheartedly supported. The enterprise’s mercantile founders planned to maintain a minister and schoolmaster in their garrisons and factories whilst providing ‘a decent place for divine service’. The founders of the new East India Company instructed missionaries ‘to learn the Portugueze and Hindoo languages, to enable them to instruct the Gentoos &c in the Christian religion[.]’ Enslavement was also mentioned in the Company charter (unsurprisingly given that the EIC had traded in Madagascan enslaved persons and had tried to establish a slave society in St Helena in the South Seas based on ‘a Barbados discipline’). The document ordered local ministers to ‘instruct the Gentoos, that shall be the Servants or Slaves of the Company, or of their Agents in the Protestant Religion’. Wortley’s interest appears to have ended with his signing of the charter, as the old and new Companies, which had no measurable competition, decided in 1708 to merge and form the “United Company of Merchants Trading to the East Indies,” more commonly known as the “Honourable East India Company.”⁴¹

Wortley continued to invest in colonial companies, holding £160 in South Sea trading stock. By the end of his long life, Wortley owned around £437 in South Sea shares and annuities. He loathed the Company’s ‘Villain Directors’ – an insult that suggests that Wortley had been an investor in the firm before the stock Bubble burst – and he mentioned that his original shareholding ‘was all reduced’ to £500 because it had in part been paid ‘of ye principle’ and ‘part Annihilated of the Annuities’. William Barbor, one of Wortley’s tireless executors, struggled to judge the size or significance of these securities, informing Sir Thomas Gooch that he had unfortunately found ‘as yet no Papers for ye S S Stock’. In total, Wortley’s benefaction of over £7,000 funded two fellowships, £400 towards casing the east and west sides of Gonville Court and in rebuilding the north side, five pounds spent annually on a Commemoration Feast on 23 February, and advowsons in Beachampton in Buckinghamshire, and Kirstead in Norfolk – with most of these expenses involving dividends from his original SSC investments.⁴²

In striving for religious conversion in the English colonies, Wortley had company within his college. After his schooling in Ely, Owen Stockton then proceeded to Christ’s College, but soon migrated to Caius where he was elected a junior fellow, senior fellow, Hebrew lecturer, steward, and a catechist (a teacher of Christian principles). Following his death, Stockton expressed a desire to extend those Christian principles to the North American colonies. Amongst his other bequests, which included £500 and his book collection to Caius, he promised a donation of £140 (or £20 per annum for seven years) to Harvard’s Indian College, established around the 1640s, so that Native Americans could be converted and trained to preach the gospel in their language. The clause in the will, which was never carried out (it was predicated on his daughter passing away at an early age), stipulated that if the convert ‘do so long reside in the said Colledge and at the End of every Seven Years or sooner, vacancy by Death or otherwise a new one to be chosen’. (He was not alone in his enthusiasm for Harvard’s mission: John Lightfoot, the Master of St Catharine’s, also donated his Old Testament books and ‘oriental literature’ to that college upon his death, which were later destroyed in a 1764 fire.) For the English, the Christianisation of Native Americans was seen as an effective method of transforming Indigenous peoples into loyal subjects (though the reality was that Indigenous peoples who did convert to Christianity often used their faith to build strategic alliances with the colonists on their own terms). After a protracted legal process in which the Court of Chancery vested Stockton’s £500 donation in South Sea securities, the money entered Caius’s possession. From 1727 to 1739, the College made more than £300 from annuities dividends.⁴³

None of these investments were novel: Cambridge investors in colonial companies had likeminded friends further north in Scotland. The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, which aimed to establish a commercial empire on the isthmus of Panama, depended upon significant defenders from Edinburgh University, amongst other institutions. The Company’s investors included James Gregory, the Professor of Mathematics, George Mosman, a bookseller and library donor, Thomas Young, the city magistrate and donor, Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Professor of Medicine, Archibald Pitcairn, a Professor of Medicine, Sir Archibald Stevenson, a Doctor and Professor, Sir Robert Chiesly, the Lord Provost, and Alexander Rule, Professor of Oriental Languages. Furthermore, William Scott, the Regent of Humanity (a position overseeing teaching and administration), and David Gregory, a Professor of Mathematics, published in support of Scotland’s empire, with the former organising a harangue (or lecture) in defense of colonisation, declaiming that the ‘Isthmus of Darien is ours by well-merited right’ and ‘this Colony of ours will be able to stand four-square against the unjust attacks of them [the Spanish] or of any others, for Scots today, even as of old, are as brave in defence of their gains as in the making of them’. Cambridge, then, did not hold a monopoly over the phenomenon of universities committing their ideas and purses to colonisation – Edinburgh men were similarly invested in the Atlantic imperial project.⁴⁴

When not investing in trading companies and colonial colleges, Cambridge fellows were heavily involved in missionary organisations. Founded in 1701 by the Reverend Thomas Bray, the SPG and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) had numerous adherents in Cambridge. The SPG was a plantation owner after a charitable bequest from Christopher Codrington, the former governor of the Leeward Islands, in 1710 to fund and support what became Codrington College in Barbados. On an individual basis, the list of college fellows who subscribed to the SPCK was extensive: John Mapletoft, Thomas Chapman, the Master of Magdalene, John Reepe of King’s, John Green, Master of Corpus, Stephen Whisson of Trinity, the Reverend Robert Leman of Caius, and Henry Hubbard of Emmanuel, to name just a few. Multiple colleges donated money to the SPG and SPCK – small benefactions that assisted organisations with connections to the Caribbean. The Bursar Books and Council Minutes show that Caius made three donations of five pounds, ten pounds, and fifteen pounds respectively to the SPCK in 1727 (principally so that the New Testament could be translated into Arabic) and the SPG in 1743 and 1752. Corpus Christi provided money too. In Michaelmas term 1743, the College donated ten pounds and ten shillings ‘to the Society for propagating Xtian knowledge’, and, seven years after the first recorded donation, Corpus provided the same amount for the ‘Propagation of the Gospel’. On both a personal and institutional level, Cambridge men were clearly committed to missionary enterprises.⁴⁵

The SPG owned the Codrington estate, yet the SPCK’s operations intersected, too, with imperial and plantation operations in both hemispheres of the British Empire. Henry Newman, the Society’s secretary, conversed regularly with Jamaica’s political class. In January 1723, he contacted the Governor of Port Royal, hoping that ‘you live very elegantly and get a vast deal of money, at which all your Friends here rejoice’, though he regretted the ‘Bubble’ for the ‘Mine Adventure’ in Jamaica. Supported with investments from, among others, Benjamin Hoadly, a former fellow at St Catharine’s (1697–1701) and chaplain to George I, and Henry Bland, a late King’s College fellow, the Adventurers had made abortive efforts to mine gold in the colonies. Newman’s letters to Jamaica contained news about Cambridge as well. The newspapers, he noted to Jamaica’s governor, Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland, ‘give me leave only to mention that the new Institutions of 24 Preachers of Whitehall selected by the Bp of London from both Universities, and the New Professorships erected by the king in each University for Modern History & Languages has had a wonderfull Effect on some of the Clergy to dispose them to a better temper for his Majesty’s Govermt. than they seem’d to leave when yr. Grace left the Kingdom’.⁴⁶

Aside from the new Professorship of Modern History, Cambridge-affiliated men displayed their “temper” for the king’s government through imperial enterprises in India. In 1709, the SPCK organised for a printer to travel to Tranquebar to translate the Bible into Tamil, and missionaries soon followed. The missionary expedition was funded with the assistance of Cambridge men. Two years later, the SPCK’s India accounts mention ‘Cash received of the University of Cambridge by Mr Chamberlayne’ – around £20 in total. (A donation that was supplemented with individual subscriptions, including from William Ayerst, the Canon of Canterbury and former Queens’ fellow.) South Sea investments underpinned these operations – with Elizabeth Chamberlyn’s 1724 donation to the SPCK including £300 in capital stock and £700 in annuities. The treasurers who organised these donations and the finances of the SPCK had connections to the ancient universities, too, with John Denne – the Archdeacon of Rochester and tutor and fellow of Corpus – helping to purchase £4,000 in South Sea annuities to support the missionary enterprise. Given their extensive involvement in college finances, fellows made prudent treasurers.⁴⁷

Cambridge fellows also assisted the Associates of Dr Bray, a philanthropic group established to educate enslaved African Americans. Funded with the assistance of a Dutch associate, Abel Tassin d’Alonne, a private secretary to the English monarchy, Bray and his four Associates began their work on 15 January 1724, hoping to use D’Allone’s generous £900 donation to build Black schools in the colonies. After sending twenty missionaries to America, Bray’s Associates allied with James Oglethorpe’s convict colonisation project in Georgia, supported by university luminaries such as John Helsop, a Sidney Sussex fellow and Proctor, and Edward Waring, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, who was included on a list of men making ‘Provision for Parochial Libraries, and for Instructing the Negroes in the British Plantations’.⁴⁸

Matthias Mawson, the Master of Corpus from 1724 to 1744 and the legatee of property to fund twelve scholarships at that college, assisted the Bray Associates too. On behalf of that enterprise, he distributed eighty copies of Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes to the colleges, which, though published in 1535, continued to shape the practices and role of preachers. Mawson, of course, recognised the significance of the American economy to British prosperity, preaching in 1743 of his desire to convert ‘those poor miserable People the Slaves, from whose Labours and Toil arises so great a Part of the Wealth of this Nation’. The Georgia enterprise enjoyed Corpus Christi’s generous patronage following Mawson’s Mastership. In the College accounts for Michaelmas 1751, the College provided ten shillings and six pence ‘To the Governor of Georgia’, William Stephens, who led a colony that maintained a ban on slavery until four years later, in 1755 (though the rules and regulations on the prohibition of enslavement had been lifted since 1751).⁴⁹

The stakes, to Cambridge men, were high in their American colonies. Religion was a competitive marketplace – and Anglicanism was not the only belief system available to white colonists, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans. The Governor of North Carolina, Charles Eden, desperately wrote recommending Thomas Gale of Trinity College as a missionary because ‘our Tedious Indian Warr has reduced the Country so lowe’ that without the ‘Nursing Care’ of religion the people would be ‘wholly lead away by the Quakers’. In that struggle for religious supremacy, Mawson, who had invested £250 of the college’s funds in the South Sea Company around the Bubble, and other prominent Cambridge Anglicans were eager supporters of missionary efforts.⁵⁰

Across the Irish Sea, George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne in the Church of Ireland, benefitted from the largesse of Cambridge members too. In 1725 Berkeley, who remains famous for his philosophical contributions to human knowledge and vision, accelerated plans to establish a college in Bermuda that trained evangelists to Native Americans – a ‘reservoir’ of ‘learning and religion, and streaming through all parts of America… purging away the ill manners and irreligion of our Colonies, as well as the blindness and barbarity of the nations round them’. Cambridge men aided his ambitious project: Henry Finch, the Dean of York and former Christ’s fellow (who also gave £100 for redesigning the College hall’s interior), and his brother Daniel, the 2nd Earl of Nottingham, provided £300; and Dr Edward Pelling, an alumnus and former Trinity fellow, donated £100 before his death. Given that Sir Matthew Decker, the former governor of the SSC and the-then Director of the EIC, donated money, the scheme was not averse to racial chattel slavery – and Berkeley illustrated that point when he moved to Rhode Island with his wife, Anne Forster (the daughter of the Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas), and purchased “Whitehall” plantation where he enslaved between three and five Africans. Finding secure employment in North America, Berkeley had less success with his proposal for a Bermuda college – and, when Parliament’s promises of a grant proved illusory, a disenchanted and frustrated Berkeley returned to London in 1732.⁵¹

These imperial connections included more than financial muscle – Cambridge men were closely involved in organising, facilitating, and spreading the SPG’s mission. Thomas Tenison, who graduated from Corpus Christi in 1657 and was elected a fellow two years later, helped to establish the SPG as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Tenison was involved in the Codrington plantations in St John’s parish in eastern Barbados and served on its organising committee, which spent much of its time managing the estate, approving expenditures, and buying and selling enslaved people, who were later branded with the word ‘SOCIETY’ to ‘mark ye Negros’. Aside from ensuring the ‘keeping up the full number’ of the around 300 enslaved labourers on the Society’s two sugarcane plantations, the committee debated whether the ‘Plantation may be purged of such Negroes as are Burthensome to it’. The Cambridge-connected churchmen who joined Tenison on the committee at various points included Sir William Dawes, who served as chair on some occasions whilst he was the Bishop of Chester and Master of St Catherine’s College (1697-1714), Thomas Gooch, who also attended whilst he was both a fellow and then the master of Caius, John Moore, Bishop of Ely and Visitor of Trinity College, and Lionel Gatford, who funded two exhibitions at Jesus College.⁵²

As a testament to his American missionary zeal, Tenison became the Vice-Chancellor of the College of William and Mary and later bequeathed £1,000 for the American episcopacy along with books to establish a proposed college in Barbados. In his generous will, Tenison donated another £1,000 for mortgaging land to Corpus Christi College – the profits devoted to the augmentation of scholarships, and the residue to supplementing the fellows’ income. Cambridge men were inspired by Tenison to travel to the Caribbean, but with often deadly results. In December 1745, William Bryant of St John’s, Cambridge, returned ‘his hearty Thanks to the Society for choosing him their Professor in Philosophy and in Mathematicks for Codrington College’ and he hoped that the committee would hold the position until ‘the latter End of January to finish the Course of Lectures, which he is at present engaged in Reading in that university.’ The climate and the regular, rampant outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever there did not agree with his health, and Bryant died soon after his arrival.⁵³

Thomas Sherlock, the Master of St Catharine’s following Dawes’s tenure, was an adherent to the SPG and a member of the Barbados Committee, too, and like Thomas Thompson maintained that the Christian Gospel did not interfere with civil property – property being defined to include enslaved Africans. Sherlock enjoyed successive positions as the Bishop of Bangor in 1728, then of Salisbury in 1734, and then of London from 1748. The St Catherine’s man was mistrusted, however, in Hanoverian circles for his expansion of church powers – and, given his interest in appointing chaplains for the East India Company and unsuccessful proposal to provide English bishops with the power over the colonial church (ecclesiastical responsibility for the overseas church was then concentrated with the Bishop of London), these administrators had some cause for concern. Sherlock penned strong opinons on ancient and more modern forms of enslavement and shared them with readers during a rancorous pamphlet debate which escalated after Benjamin Hoadly, the-then Bishop of Bangor, questioned in March 1717 the biblical justification for church government. Writing from a High Church position a year later, Sherlock, then Master, rebutted Hoadly’s assertion that the ‘Example’ of Jesus Christ was ‘much more peculiarly fit for Slaves than to Subjects’ as the former, like their crucified Lord, were forced to suffer arbitrary authority without revenge or rancour. The Master argued, however, that slavery was not the most degraded condition one could experience. ‘It was never true in Fact’, he wrote, ‘that Slaves were in virtue of their constant Condition the lowest and most helpless sort of Mankind…in every Countrey many Subjects were in a more distressed and low Condition than the better sort of Slaves’. Furthermore, he accused his opponent of gaining ‘all his intelligence about slaves from the West Indies’ and had thereby conflated the ‘Slaves of Antiquity’ with ‘Negroes’ – indeed, Sherlock may have been somewhat anxious at the prospect that the enslaved Africans were treated as people who could, as a result of their status, particularly understand and follow Christ’s example relative to whites.⁵⁴

Cambridge-educated clergy also debated whether the Christianisation of enslaved persons made them free, as enslavement for African-descended persons was, in part, predicated on their “heathen” status. William Fleetwood, the future Bishop of Ely and King’s fellow from 1678 (and another enthusiastic South Sea investor), addressed the SPG at Mary-le-Bow in London on 16 February 1711 to reassure slaveholders that enslaved conversions did not lead to freedom. To assuage their concerns, he pleaded that there was ‘no fear of losing the Service and Profit of their Slaves, by letting them become Christians… [enslavers] are neither prohibited by the Laws of God, nor those of the Land, from keeping Christian Slaves; their Slaves are no more at Liberty after they are Baptized, than they were before’. He claimed that there were ‘People in St. Paul’s time, that imagin’d they were freed from all former Engagements by becoming Christians; but St. Paul tells them, this was not the Meaning of Christian Liberty; the Liberty wherewith Christ had made them Free, was Freedom from their Sins’. The rights of liberty, he observed, originated from being ‘English-Men’, not Christians. Finishing his sermon, he noted that ‘If therefore it be lawful in our Country, to have or keep any Slaves at all, it is equally lawful to have or keep them so, tho’ they are Christians’. Progressively, race, not religion, determined enslavement and freedom.⁵⁵

Early SPG missionaries, in time, discussed what Travis Glasson calls ‘ethnic theology’: the religious debates, which relied on Genesis, over whether Africans were natural slaves. The debate concerned the Biblical Curse of Ham, where Noah had cursed Canaan, the child of Noah’s son Ham, after Ham had seen ‘the nakedness of his father’. The passage reads: ‘Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will be his brothers’. Never mind that the curse was more of an omen, Cambridge theologians debated the meaning of this passage and how it related to Africans. To Richard Kidder, a former Emmanuel fellow and Bishop of Bath and Wells, Africans were the descendants of Ham. In his 1694 Commentary, he noted the ‘servile and base condition of Canaan’s Race. And Canaan shall be his servant’. Simon Patrick, the Dean of Peterborough and a Queens’ College fellow, similarly concluded that the ‘Four Sons of Ham and their Children, had all Africa for their Portion… and no small part of Asia which fell the share of Cush and Canaan’. More than half a century later, Thomas Newton, the Bishop of Bristol, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, chaplain to George II, and Trinity fellow, extended these arguments. Drawing upon Augustin Calamet’s Dictionary of the Holy Bible (who himself relied upon the Persian writer al-Tabarī’s Ta’rīkh), Newton argued that the ‘whole continent of Africa was peopled principally by the children of Ham’ and the sons of Ham were the ‘servant of servants’. The debate on the suitability of Africans as slaves, it must be remembered, coincided with a period when Cambridge alumni and professors, such as the Caian graduate Adam Elyott and Simon Ockley, the Adams Professor of Arabic, published captivity narratives about themselves and others. After graduating, Barbary pirates captured and sold Elyott into slavery – his escape from which he publicised in a later pamphlet. Anti-African prejudice, therefore, flourished at a time when knowledge about that continent (not to mention the realities of racial enslavement and white Christian captivity) were at their height.⁵⁶

The SPG’s conciliatory approach to slavery was emblematic of how many Cambridge fellows tolerated and facilitated Britain’s slave empire. David Humphreys, a fellow at Trinity from 1719 and Secretary to the SPG, defined the Society’s goals in his 1728 history of the organisation. With Native Americans and West Africans having become accustomed to the English language, Humphreys believed it was a ‘great Reproach to the Christian Name, that so many Thousands of Persons should continue in the same State of Pagan Darkness, under a Christian Government, and living in Christian Families, as they lay before under, in their own Heathen Countries’. Humphreys worried, however, that the SPG may have done more harm than good. ‘Many Planters’, he complained, ‘allow them one Day in a Week [Sunday], to clear Ground and plant it, to subsist themselves and Families’. In effect, the enslavers had used rest days for Christian services to further work their exhausted labourers and force them to provide provisions for their families. Humphreys wrote that the SPG had to contend with anti-Black prejudice, with some enslavers arguing that ‘Negroes had no souls’, or ‘that they grew worse by being taught and made Christians’. Humphrey did not challenge these statements – rather, he pointed to the Christian school in New York, which ministered to the city’s population of African and Native American enslaved persons, as civilised institutions for “heathens” in the New World. To illustrate the benefits of conversion, he referred to the enslaved revolt in New York City on the night of 6 April 1712, when twenty-three Akan enslaved people set fire to an outhouse in the East Ward, with the flames providing an opportunity to ambush and kill the white colonists who had arrived to put out the conflagration. Hit-and-run tactics and efforts to weaken the enemy through sporadic, targeted fighting, rather than through more drawn-out set-piece engagements (as was common in European warfare), were a feature of some West African military cultures. Nevertheless, the revolt failed, and Humphreys was eager to inform his readers that ‘the Persons, whose Negroes were found to be the most guilty, were such as were the declared Opposers of making them Christians’. In the face of suspicion about their motives, he recognised that enslavers – the ‘Masters of Families’ – needed to be made allies if missionary efforts were to succeed.⁵⁷

Cambridge men soon argued that Christianisation would render enslaved people more docile workers for their white enslavers. As a result, Christianity became a tool for perpetuating and defending slavery. The SPG had to rebut the enslavers’ fearful claims that Christian belief resulted in enslaved rebellions, such as the September 1739 Stono Revolt in South Carolina and the New York slave conspiracy in 1741. The minister Anthony Ellys’s solution to these revolts was Christian conversion. He had entered Clare College as a pensioner in 1709, becoming a fellow in 1714 and took his doctorate in divinity at Cambridge in 1728. In a February 1759 sermon, Ellys noted the ‘advantage of making good Christians, even of the Negro-slaves, will also be very worthy of consideration’. The advantages of Christian instruction, he thought, were many: ‘For in proportion as their obstinacy, sullenness, and eagerness for revenge shall come to be abated and altered by religion, they will make better servants’. Ellys’s hopes went further still. He claimed that Black Christians would discipline and police the plantation. Black people, he wrote, ‘may become guards and defenders of their masters; and there will be no longer any such revolts and insurrections among them as have sometimes been detrimental, if not even dangerous, to several of the colonies’. Further emphasising the ties between slavery and colonisation, Ellys hoped that Black conversion would make these Americans more ‘firmly attached to our national interest’ and a firm ‘barrier’ against ‘the assaults of the heathen savages who lie farther behind them[.]’ Missionaries were thinking strategically in moulding arguments that would appeal to the enslaver class, and the notion that enslaved Black men, in particular, could act as auxiliaries and a buffer against Native American raids or African slave revolts would, he believed, convince wary colonists to aid the SPG.⁵⁸

Not all missionaries, it should be remembered, agreed on the issue of enslavement. The yearly sermons before the Georgia colony’s governing Trustees – addresses which often supported those colonists who aimed to propagate slavery there – expressed some discomfort with this important issue. George Harvest, a Magdalene fellow, agreed, of course, with the utility of the colonies, arguing that, rather than depopulate nations (as some contemporaries argued), colonists were useful auxiliaries in the service of the colony of Georgia, which, as a bulwark against the Spanish colonies in East and West Florida and French-controlled Louisiana, was ‘the Gibraltar of AMERICA’. He supported, too, the Trustees’ commercial ambitions, noting in his 1749 address that ‘the Fitness of the Land for Cultivation has been fully attested’ in such goods as silk, an ‘industrious Worm [that] lives a Lesson to the Sluggard… [by] inviting both Young and Old, Women and Children, and even the Aged Impotent, to employ their gentle Labour to improve and bring it to Perfection’. Unlike Virginia, his dreams of an empire of silk had some basis in fact – the first Seal of the Trustees featured a silkworm egg, and, at its peak, women were being paid between twenty to twenty-five pounds per annum to train their fellow colonists in the art of silk-making, with the work of 500 women being estimated to produce silk worth over £28,125. (The dream ended with the advent of enslavement and widespread rice cultivation, which had labour demands at just the time of the year when labourers were needed for silk harvesting and production.) The Magdalene man took a more sombre tone on the problem of enslavement. ‘That profane Plea against the baptizing Negroes’, he argued, ‘namely, that they are thereby released from their Slavery; I designedly pass over, as being of no possible Weight with Christians’. Furthermore, Harvest rebutted that the ‘free Constitution’ of Georgia ‘abhors Slavery’ and he was confident his audience would ‘all agree with me, that Slaves ought to be made thus free! May the Spirit of the Lord prevail among them, that they may have this blessed Liberty! May that Master, whose Service is the most perfect Freedom, make them free indeed! And, by his Grace, emancipate them from their State of Pagan Bondage, into the glorious Freedom and Liberty of the Sons of God!’ Harvest, a long-forgotten fellow, articulated his vision of a Christian path to freedom through religious conversion.⁵⁹

That possible avenue to freedom was closing in Georgia. Buoyed by the relaxation of antislavery laws, the population of white colonists there increased from 500 in 1741 to 2,381 in 1753, and the number of enslaved Africans grew exponentially from 600 in 1751 to 15,000 in 1775. Thomas Francklin, a Trinity College fellow, preached his 1750 sermon in Westminster to the Trustees as the colony was on the cusp of a such a profound shift in its social and economic makeup. He lauded the Georgia colonists because they had established the colony without ‘Force and Violence’ – ‘no Property was invaded, no Blood spilt’ – and, he maintained, there was ‘originally design’d that there should be no such Thing as Slavery in Georgia’. The colony was established on a principle of ‘general Equality’, and that was why Francklin was not concerned that the Trustees had ‘found themselves under the Necessity of introducing Negro-slaves into the Colony’. The preacher argued that enslavement in Georgia would be predicated on ‘Prudence and Humanity’, and he therefore trusted that ‘if these unhappy Beings [the enslaved] must eat the Bread of Slavery, they shall at least eat it in Peace and Quiet, that their Chains may not gall them’. The system of enslavement that Francklin envisioned in the Americas would be based on a rather perverse social contract: ‘we use their [Black] Bodies for our Support and Happiness, their Souls may be refreshed; and that for their Service here to us, we may bestow on them, by our Instructions, the glorious Opportunity of securing to themselves eternal Happiness hereafter’. The exchange of earthly labours for eternal life was, to a true Anglican believer such as Francklin, the bargain of a lifetime.⁶⁰

Missionary debates over slaveholding continued, with Cambridge men in the vanguard of these debates. East Apthorp, the son of Charles Apthorp, a Bostonian merchant and slave-trader, and Grizzel Apthorp, the daughter of a Jamaica merchant, was educated at Boston Latin School, and then completed his studies at Jesus College, winning the Chancellor’s Medal and receiving a BA in 1755, an MA in 1758, and a fellowship from 1758 to 1761. Apthorp never forgot his Cambridge roots, publishing as a ‘late Fellow of Jesus College in the University of Cambridge’, and took up residence in a New England town also bearing that name: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Returning there after his father’s death, wealthy merchants invited him to become the SPG’s minister. Refusing the £20 per annum salary, Apthorp used a significant inheritance from his father, a renowned slave-trader and catcher, to build a mansion which remains a part of Harvard University today. After travelling to old England in September 1764 in the wake of a religious controversy, Apthorp disagreed with the ameliorative stance of some British missionaries. In 1786 at Lincoln’s Inn, he declared: ‘The System of African slavery is a powerful obstacle to the humane business of conversion’. ‘A distinguished prelate [Edmund Keene, who had been the Master of Peterhouse and Bishop of Chester]’, he continued, ‘hath excited the public compassion to mitigate its horrors: but a politic and peaceful sect have set the example in their own district of abolishing it’. He approved that the missionaries had ‘freed their slaves, and allowed them wages for their labour’ – contrasting that progressive approach with Keene’s amelioration.⁶¹

For almost two centuries (and long afterwards), Cambridge clergymen and nonconformists were prominent defenders and propagators of Atlantic colonisation efforts. Supporting, whether through funds or deeds, colonial schemes ranging from the Virginia Company to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Berkeley’s aborted efforts to establish a Bermuda college, clergymen did not just benefit from colonialism and slavery – they were actively involved in directing and shaping those coercive and exploitative systems and institutions. The lives of these men illustrate the significance of university thought at a time when institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge provided an illustrious sheen to colonial endeavours. Consequently, the support of Cambridge fellows for enslavement – as illustrated in Thomas Thompson’s African Trade pamphlet – was vital to selling these operations to the English and British middling and elite classes. It would be wrong, however, to isolate this story to the upper ranks of society. If the experiences of Owen Stockton (a fourth son) and Bartholomew Wortley (the son of a plumber) are indicative, Cambridge fellows who supported these activities originated from wide-ranging backgrounds, yet, whatever their ranks, many were prominent Protestant agents of empire. As England’s Atlantic imperium took shape and form, Cambridge natural scientists and legal thinkers entered the breach, utilising their networks and ingenuity to shape and profit from empire – helping, in many cases, to define the nature of racism and Black enslavement, and ensuring that the spoils of empire and conquest returned home to Cambridge.