Late Elizabethan Protestantism, Colonialism, and the Fear of the Apocalypse

Abstract

The influence of Protestant interpretations of the Bible and readings of European history on the development of English colonial thought and practice has not often received significant attention. In this essay I argue that the millennia! reading of the Apocalypse inscribed in the Geneva Bible (1560), an interpretation that appeared to receivehistorical validity after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in France (1572), had a huge impact on the writings of colonial propagandists. Writers such as M. M. S. (the translator of Bartolome de Las Casas), Richard Hakluyt, Richard Beacon, and Samuel Purchas, all argued for the importance of an English colonial presence in the Americas in terms of a struggle between the true religion of the Protestants and the false religion of the Catholic Antichrist. Beacon's Machiavellianinspired analysis of Ireland regards that country as a land torn between the two faiths and argues that lack of English vigilance could lead to violence as destructive as that unleashed on Protestants in France in the 1570s. Purchas's collection of travel writings revises Hakluyt's nationalistic focus in favour of travel as a religious allegory, thus exploding the tension between nation and faith implicit in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.