Settled Place, Contested Past: Reconciling George Percy’s “A Trewe Relacyon” with John Smith’s Generall Historie

Abstract

Settled Place, Contested Past:Reconciling George Percy's "A Trewe Relacyon" with John Smith's Generall Historie Forrest K. Lehman (bio) John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) purports to be a comprehensive record of the early history of the Jamestown colony, but Philip Barbour describes the Generall Historie as "John Smith's Memoirs, his Apologia, and his Defense, rounded out with information from others bearing on what he considered his colonies" (Barbour, Three Worlds, 368). David Read concurs, describing it as "a profoundly unsettled work" and characterizing colonial literature as a generally unsettled genre: "The knowledge of the colonial world that Smith presents to us in his text," Read tells us, "is shot through with radical uncertainties" (430). One man who wrote in hopes of destabilizing Smith's Generall Historie is George Percy (1580–1632), the eighth son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland and the highest-ranking gentleman at Jamestown during his stay.1 Percy's "A Trewe Relacyon" (1625), one of two extant records of his Jamestown experiences,2 challenges the authority of Smith's Generall Historie: both texts directly witness events at Jamestown between August and October of 1609, when Sir Thomas Gates's failure to arrive with the new charter sparked a succession crisis. Percy's narrative of this politically charged period, however, often differs from Smith's. Percy's continuing account of events following Smith's departure in October until his own departure in April 1612, meanwhile, would seem to undermine the corresponding sections of the Generall Historie, which chronicle events Smith did not personally witness. I contend, however, that Percy's "Trewe Relacyon" fails to live up to its author's aspirations. Percy declares his intention to challenge Smith's narrative at the beginning of the "Trewe Relacyon," but he later finds himself corroborating Smith's version of events in order to excuse his own failings during his tenure as the colony's president. In the end, Percy, [End Page 235] anxious to undermine Smith's historical authority but also desperate to salvage his reputation, accomplishes neither goal. And while Mark Nicholls has recently argued that Percy developed his indisputable animus toward John Smith retrospectively rather than during his time at Jamestown, it seems to me that his opposition to Smith while at Jamestown was neither as cautious nor as ambiguous as Nicholls suggests.3 The apparent cautiousness and ambiguity attending Percy's criticisms in his "Trewe Relacyon" stem not from any mixed feelings toward John Smith on Percy's part while at Jamestown, but rather from Percy's rhetorical confusion as he abandons his attacks on Smith and instead begins to offer excuses for his failures while at Jamestown. In a prefatory note to his brother Henry, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, George Percy clearly posits his "Trewe Relacyon" manuscript as a response to Smith's critical account of the colony in his self-promoting Generall Historie of the previous year:4 many untrewthes concerneinge Theis p[ro]ceedeinges have bene formerly published, wherein The author hathe nott Spared to apropriate many desertts to him selfe w[hi]ch he never p[er]formed and stuffed his Relacyons w[i]th so many falseties and malicyous detractyons nott onely of this p[ar]t and Tyme w[hi]ch I have selected to Treate of, Butt of former ocurrentts also: so thatt I coulde nott contein my selfe butt expresse the Trewthe unto your Lordshipp concerninge Theis affayers. (242) Although Percy's note never mentions Smith by name, the account he describes could only be Smith's. Besides the ego that Smith and Percy's unnamed "author" appear to share, Percy likely employs the words "p[ro]ceedeinges" and "Relacyons" to reference Smith's Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia (1612) and A True Relation (1608), respectively. Percy probably felt compelled to respond to Smith's slights because he, like Jamestown's other gentleman colonists, would have recognized himself as a target of Smith's anti-aristocratic ire. Smith believed, as J. A. Leo Lemay has so aptly observed, "that America provided the opportunity for an individual's standing in society to be determined...