Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (48 page)

The income generated by these various activities was used to support not only the religious houses themselves but also hospitals, charitable works, missions and colleges. The educational system in Spanish America was overwhelmingly in clerical hands. The first university in the Americas, that of Santo Domingo, was a Dominican foundation of 1538. The universities of San Marcos in Lima (1551) and of Mexico City (1553), although royal foundations, were also the outcome of initiatives by the religious orders and were intended both as bastions of orthodoxy and as training-grounds for the clergy. On the model of the university of Salamanca, however, they contained faculties of law, medicine and arts, in addition to the faculty of theology.'1' At the level of primary education, while the religious orders made an intensive effort to provide instruction for the indigenous population, and especially for the sons of the Indian nobility,"' their schools and colleges also played an important part in the education of the sons (and to some extent also the daughters) of creoles. These were supplemented by private schools, perhaps set up by unbeneficed clerics and bachelors of arts newly arrived from Spain.113

Much of the teaching probably consisted of little more than instruction in the catechism, accompanied by the rudiments of reading and writing. The educational scene in Spanish America, however, was transformed by the arrival of the Jesuits in the later sixteenth century. With indigenous education already in the hands of the mendicant orders, the Jesuits turned their attention to the cities and to the unsatisfied demand of the creoles for instruction for their children. Moving into territory that had until now belonged largely to the Dominicans, the Jesuits created a network of colleges that spanned the cities and towns of Spanish America. These colleges were designed to provide creole boys, and especially the sons of the elite, with secondary education to a high standard, but many also included provision for elementary education where existing teaching arrangements were considered inadequate. The Jesuits' domination of creole education, often from the earliest years to university level, meant that a substantial section of the elite in the Spanish viceroyalties emerged from their years of schooling solidly grounded in the forms of learning and thinking prescribed by a fixed pedagogical system, the ratio studiorum. Uniformity of method was accompanied by uniformity of content, which assimilated the humanist tradition of classical studies within an officially approved theological framework. Whatever its other merits the system was not one that provided space for dissenting opinions or for individual responses to the challenge presented by exposure to disturbing new ideas. 114

Education and the confessional enabled the secular clergy and the religious orders, assisted by the Inquisition, to keep a close watch on the movement of thought. The high premium placed on conformity in the Spain of the CounterReformation was carried over by a natural extension to its transatlantic possessions, as constituent territories of a global monarquia which saw its mission as the defence of the faith against the assaults of Protestantism, Judaism and Islam. The religious culture of the American viceroyalties therefore tended to replicate, often in extravagant form as if they were struggling to assert their own distinctive identity through the display of exemplary orthodoxy, that of the mother country to which they were intellectually, emotionally and psychologically tied. The printing press, it was true, came relatively early to Spanish America. At the request of Fray Juan de Zumarraga, Bishop of Mexico, the house of Cromberger in Seville agreed to set up a press in Mexico City in 1539, eighteen years after the con- quest.115 Lima acquired its first publishing house in 1583, and was followed by La Paz in 1610 and Puebla in 1640,116 two years after the first press in British North America was set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 117 These presses, however, were primarily devoted to the printing of religious manuals, catechisms, grammars, dictionaries and other works needed for the evangelization of the Indians, and the reading public remained overwhelmingly dependent, both for its religious and secular literature, on books imported from Spain.

The transatlantic movement of books, like that of people, was regulated in Seville with much bureaucracy and not a little inefficiency. Popular and fictional literature came under the purview of the secular authorities, which, notoriously, placed a ban in 1531 on the export of romances of chivalry to the Indies as being likely to corrupt the minds of the Indians." The inquisition, for its part, was solely concerned with the circulation of books prohibited on theological grounds. Inevitably conflicts of jurisdiction arose between the officials of the Holy Office and those of Seville's House of Trade. The frequent repetition of orders controlling and restricting the shipment of books, together with surviving inventories of the contents of private libraries in the viceroyalties themselves, make it clear that the orders were widely ignored. Even a decree of 1550 ordering that in future officials of the House of Trade should register books item by item rather than simply by bulk consignments failed to stop the contraband, and the operation continued to be undermined by laxity and fraud among the officials of the agencies involved in the inspection and registration of books for the Indies.119

By licit or illicit means, therefore, peninsular booksellers were able to supply their lucrative market in the Indies with most of the books, permitted and forbidden, which circulated covertly or openly in Spain itself. But, as in Spain, restrictions and prohibitions, combined with the dangers and difficulties of access to theologically unacceptable works, had the effect of closing off to the reading public wide areas of religious thought. Protestant writings, unless they were to be used by select individuals for the purpose of refutation, were ruled out on principle. So, too, was the Bible in the vernacular. Clerics and select laymen, however, were allowed access to the Bible in Latin, the Vulgate.120 Yet even this seems to have reached the Indies in relatively small quantities. In 1584 a Spanish bookseller, Ricardo Boyer, was in negotiation with an agent in Mexico City for the sale in the Indies of two hundred copies of the Bible with notes and commentaries by Francois Vatable, published in Salamanca that year, out of a stock of one thousand that was entirely in his hands. But the agent seems to have found the price of fourteen ducats high, and Vatable's commentary ran into serious problems with the Inquisition.121 In any event, Bibles did not figure heavily in the large amount of religious literature exported to the Indies - only three copies were included among the books registered in 1583 to 1584122 - and the mass of the laity is likely to have acquired only at second hand, through sermons and the reading of selected texts and commentaries, such biblical knowledge as it possessed.

By doing its best to seal off its American possessions from heterodox opinions, the Spanish crown in alliance with the church effectively instilled into them the sense of forming part of a moral community resting on the immutable principles of divine and natural law The character and boundaries of this community were determined by the Aristotelian and neo-Thomist philosophy which was the dominant cast of thought in Counter-Reformation Spain. It was a philosophy that was deeply sceptical of innovation, and heavily reliant on a set of authoritative texts. It placed a high premium on unity and consensus - a consensus based on the precepts of natural law rather than the movements of individual conscience, and which had as its overriding aim the furtherance of the common good. It elevated order above liberty, obligations above rights, and entrusted the maintenance of justice and good government within a hierarchically structured society to a monarch in whom the people had vested their sovereignty but who remained bound in conscience to conform to the dictates of divine and human law. 123

These beliefs, and the attitudes and assumptions that sprang from them, shaped the mental universe of Spanish American society during the three centuries of colonial life. It was a universe in which a variety of opinions could be, and were, expressed - for instance on such controversial issues as the status of the Indians. But they were opinions that emerged from, and remained within, a frame of reference that had been patiently constructed by generations of theologians and moralists, and given its definitive form by the Council of Trent. The dogma, once proclaimed, was immutable, and would be sustained in Spain and its American territories by the full weight of ecclesiastical and secular authority.

The authority that was stamped across the face of Spanish America had no counterpart in the British territories to the north. The Protestant Reformation which gave them their religious colouring had begun as a movement of protest against one supreme authority, that of Rome, in the name of a higher authority, that of the Word. The outcome was a variety of creeds and confessions, which, even if seeking to impose their own authority by such devices as the creation of a new clerical elite and dependence on the coercive powers of the state, were themselves consistently open to challenge from those who found justification for their objections in their own unmediated interpretation of the Scriptures. At the same time, the newly emerging doctrinal traditions, Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican, had been forced to take into account the diversity of interpretations to which certain key passages in the Scriptures lent themselves, and in the effort to accommodate them had constructed orthodoxies rich enough to allow of a range of possibilities on such fundamental questions as grace and salvation. This offered endless scope for debate, disagreement and creative construction among ministers and laity, thus complicating still further the task of maintaining a rigid control over the movement of inquiry and belief.124

The fissiparous character of Protestantism was compounded in British America by the fissiparous character of the process of settlement and colonization. Two distinctive forms of English religion laid claim to official status in their respective territories during the first decades of settlement, Anglicanism in Virginia and Congregationalism in New England. The terms of their charter made it impossible for the Roman Catholics to do the same in Maryland, where in any event they were in too much of a minority to be able to impose their faith. This left the way open in the colony for the coexistence of several different creeds.

Although Anglicanism was to be the official faith of Virginia, the crippling weakness of the Anglican establishment during the formative years of the colony125 ruled out any possibility that the institutionalization of religion would proceed under strong clerical leadership. The late seventeenth century would see the beginnings of an Anglican renaissance in Virginia and several other colonies'126 but by that time the nature of the church-state union which governed Virginia's religious life had already been determined. It was a union in which the initiative rested with the laity in their capacity as vestrymen, and not with the parsons, who - under a system unique among the mainland colonies except for Maryland - depended for their salaries on a colony-wide church tax.127 Few in number, and coming, as the majority of them did, directly from England, they lacked the support that might have been provided by local knowledge and connections, and were not well placed to shake Virginian society out of the spiritual torpor which had settled upon it during the early stages of the colony's development. 121

Writing in 1697, James Blair, a Scot who had been appointed commissary of the Bishop of London in a bid by the Anglican church to revitalize its establishment in America, reported scathingly on the temper of life in Virginia: `For welleducated children, for an industrious and thriving people, or for an happy government in church and state, and in short for all other advantages of human improvements, it is certainly ... one of the poorest, miserablest, and worst countries in all America that is inhabited by Christians. 1129 In fact, even as he wrote, the `improvements' for which he hankered were already under way. These owed much to his own efforts, and to the support that he received from the Bishop of London. But they also reflected the desire of the emerging planter elite to establish their volatile society on firmer foundations. In 1693 the College of William and Mary was founded under royal charter, with Blair as its first president. `It was a great Satisfaction to the Archbishops and Bishops', wrote Robert Beverley in his History and Present State of Virginia a few years later, `to see such a Nursery of Religion founded in that New World; especially for that it was begun in an Episcopal Way, and carried on wholly by zealous Conformists to the Ch. of England.' 130

The Anglican church now had its own seminary in America for the training of clergy `in an Episcopal Way', potentially creating a rival establishment to New England's Harvard College, which had been producing Puritan ministers since its foundation in 1636. As with the first universities in New Spain and Peru, the religious impetus behind the foundation of the two colleges did not exclude provision for the education of the laity. The lack of towns and the dispersed nature of settlement presented particular problems for the provision of adequate schooling in Virginia. Although some parents would continue to send their sons to England to be educated, the College of William and Mary, benefiting from the transfer of Virginia's capital in 1699 from the insalubrious Jamestown to what became the handsome new capital of Williamsburg, offered a socially acceptable and less expensive answer to the educational needs of the colony's elite. The sons of the new planter class emerged from their schooling as good Anglican gentlemen whose very visible presence at Sunday morning services made it clear to clergy and congregation alike who were the masters in colonial Virginia. As a seminary, however, for the training of Anglican clergy to minister to the spiritual needs of the Chesapeake region, it failed to live up to the hopes of its founders. An anticlerical Board of Visitors entertained more secular ambitions for Virginia's only college.13'