The early modern English concept of ‘native,’ derived from post-classical Latin nativus, arose in part from long standing legal perceptions surrounding a person’s status from birth, either as an individual born into bondage, servants, or one inheriting a status. In Scotland, the term dates back as early as 1381, but first appeared in English language in the fifteenth century to denote the particular status of local people as being either ‘bondmen or natifis’.[1] ‘Native’ thus not only related to local and national geography, but to the status of an individual’s parents. That status was an inheritable right. It entitled an individual, through feudal ideas of fealty and allegiance to the Crown, to certain rights and privileges that were withheld from others.[2]
In the early seventeenth century, a particularly crucial legal nuance was introduced. The 1608 legislation now known as Calvin’s Case decided that Scottish children, known as the postnati (born after the Scottish King James VI inherited the throne of England in 1603), had the legal right under English law to be considered native English subjects, whilst also clearly outlining who would be excluded from obtaining and inheriting the rights and privileges of native English subjects.[3] This ruling affirmed ideas of jus soli, based around an enduring and personal bond between subjects and the monarch, in which children of immigrants were granted, as a natural birth right, the privileges of natives through their connection to the same monarch. If a child born in Scotland after the union pledged allegiance to the Scottish Crown, then they also pledged allegiance to the English crown by proxy. The decision blurred the boundary between ‘status and place of origin’, and meant that within the British Isles, the status of ‘native’ became fully portable between England and Scotland.[4] Although Calvin’s Case settled some of the concerns around who was entitled to the status of ‘native’ in early Stuart England, a substantial group were still excluded from native rights, in particular those who were born, or whose parents were born, outside of the British Isles.
Only through naturalization or denization could an alien ‘do as the King’s native subjects do’, which included being allowed to ‘purchase, and to possess lands’ as well as ‘be capable of any office or dignity’.[5] However, foreign-born aliens, even once naturalized or made denizens, could not call themselves ‘native-born’, nor could their children. Even individuals born in England, despite inheriting the privileges from their naturalized or denizen parents, were not always considered native-born. In 1628, William Courten, the English-born son of a Dutch merchant, petitioned the Privy Council to be relieved from customs duties as an alien. In his petition, Courten drew on his reputation, wealth, and achievements, but also those of his Dutch father who had been made a ‘free denizen’ of London.[6] Courten had been born in England and therefore believed himself to be legitimately English.[7] Although successful, Courten’s petition highlights the complexities of the status of ‘native’, one that could be granted through either, both or neither inheritance or location of birth.
Despite its complexities in assigning status to particular individuals, the word ‘native’ also served to appeal to commonalities, such as a shared loyalty to the monarch and to England as a nation. In the pitch of fervour to Queen Elizabeth in the preparations leading to the Spanish Armada of 1588, subjects related the ‘defence of Queene Elizabeth’ to a love of one’s ‘native country’.[8] One poem began by contrasting Spain, ‘that forraine foe’, to ‘your sacred faith, and countries soile defend’, where all English subjects became guardians of ‘[o]ur native countrie so long kept’.[9] The appeal to Englishness was closely related to Protestantism – to the English as an ‘elect’ nation, favoured by God – but it was also an emotive one, urging English men and women to display a ‘true English hart’.[10] Executing one’s duty to the soil became a useful means for those with a tenuous legal claim to Englishness to prove possession of a true English heart. Born in London to stranger parents, the language tutor, lexicographer, translator and preeminent advocate of the Italian language, John Florio, repeatedly drew on horticultural imagery in his print Italian/English dual-language manuals to proclaim himself English. He was a gardener who, with great ‘paines’ and ‘toyles’, cultivated Italian/English hybrid trees in English soil so that the lexical fruit may intellectually and culturally nourish his fellow Englishmen.[11] Richard Collin’s prefatory verse contribution to the first of these manuals, Florio his firste fruites (1578), stresses that this laboured execution of duty is the most significant determiner of nationhood: ‘A Countrey man of ours, I warrant you, his deedes declare hym so: / True to his Prince, right gaineful to his friend, not hurtfull to his fo'.[12] Thirty-five years later, the words ‘Italus ore, Anglus pectore’ – Italian voice, English heart – were engraved below a portrait of the author on the frontispiece of Florio’s 1613 Italian/English dictionary, Queen Anna's new vvorld of words.[13] It reasserts this claim – although he proudly wears his Italian heritage, his career-long commitment to the betterment of his countrymen is what makes John – in his heart where it matters – English.
The idea of ‘native’ as ‘local’ also pertained to English understandings of other people and the places they inhabited. The mistrust of travellers becoming corrupted by their journeys in Europe and further east suggested that Englishness might be tainted by an exposure to other customs and fashions. The soldier and author Barnabe Rich warned his readers that ‘the sinnes of all those countries and of all the world besides are every day ingrossed and transported into England’, in ways that domesticated the foreign and complicated English identity.[14] By imitating the ‘ambitious’ Spanish, the ‘false’ French, the ‘deceitful’ Italian, the ‘drunken’ German, the ‘idolatrous’ Turk, and ‘superstitious’ Romans, Rich expounded, ‘[t]his propagation of sinne…[is] transported into England, [and] are now there resident and all entertained, not like strangers, but as natives that had been both borne and bred in the countrey’.[15] Rich drew on the legal language of ‘native’ and ‘stranger’ to critique the English fascination with other places, and censured the English for adopting what was ‘native’ to other parts of the world in a process of cultural naturalization.
The term ‘native’ is further complicated by the fact that it cannot be disentangled from colonialism. While ‘native’ peoples in colonial contexts continued to refer to local inhabitants, English assumptions about the inferiority of those indigenous societies they sought to ‘civilize’ rooted ‘native’ with issues of subjugation and unequal balances of power. Early arguments in favour of colonization in Virginia, for example, established that ‘[o]ur enemies must bee eyther the Natives, or Strangers [Spanish]; Against the first the war would be as easie as the argument’.[16] Pro-imperial tracts repeatedly associated ‘native’, in an American context, with ‘savage’: in seeking to establish ‘the West Empire’, the English commonly iterated that ‘[t]he Savages’ were ‘the natives of the countrie’.[17] In the case of Ireland, too, the lawyer and colonist John Davies argued in 1612 that the realm had not yet been ‘subdued and reduced to Obedience to the Crowne of England’ because the English had not maintained a sustained military effort to support their civilizing initiatives.[18] Those ‘as are descended of our English race, would bee found more in number, then the ancient Natives’, Davies insisted, but to truly secure the region, ‘the Husbandman must first breake the Land, before it bee made capeable of good seede...So a barbarous Country must be first broken by a warre’.[19] Since colonization required the English to establish a permanent presence in Ireland and America through plantation, they often used the language of husbandry and cultivation of the soil to argue for regeneration. This would replace the ‘ancient [n]atives’ with ‘our English race’, relating plantation to acts of reform and supplanting. While ‘native’ potentially tied inhabitants to the soil, the English promoted a western empire by explicitly de-legitimizing Gaelic and Native American ties to their lands, articulating that these territories had been left to degenerate into wilderness.
The English use of the term ‘native’ has some connections to some similar terms applied in the Iberian colonial world, such as nativo (the Portuguese and Spanish equivalent for native) or its more recurrent synonymous ‘natural’ (Por. natural, naturais; Spa. natural, naturales). The Spanish and Portuguese classified ‘savage’, ‘barbarous’, ‘heathen’ or ‘infidel’ communities that lived outside the colonial apparatus according to the willingness of these groups to vow allegiance to Iberian monarchs and the Catholic Church. The often ambiguous positions and hybrid identities of these local populations, not to mention the myriad of juridical solutions developed to suit the specificities of different territories, granted native populations a rather liminal socio-political status that could lead to further exploitation, even when they conformed to the Iberian colonial and religious order.[20] In colonial Peru, the Jesuit Ludovico López wrote to Father Francisco Borgia on 29 December 1569, that the Spanish settlers and the colonial officials were ‘very cruel to the natives [naturales], treating them not as human beings, but as beasts [bestias], because this is the way they use them to get their goal which is silver’.[21] A 1611 memorandum on the Portuguese occupation of Ceylon exposed the fragile status of the Singhalese naturaes (‘natives’ or ‘naturals’), noting the ‘little rewards we give to the natives who serve us in the war, being them Singhalese captains and soldiers, and they only have a handful of land, and many of them, to speak honestly, live in destitution after doing to His Majesty many services with great loyalty’.[22]
Some naturais da terra (‘naturals of the land’) in Brazil, Angola, or India, however, due to their utility to the colonial apparatus, were eagerly co-opted by the Portuguese Crown. In 1644, João IV ennobled the Potiguara chief Poti, baptised António Filipe Camarão, as a recognition for his key role in the successful campaigns against the Dutch in Pernambuco.[23] Besides being granted the title of Dom (‘lord’), António Filipe Camarão received other markers of aristocratic status such as a coat of arms and the habit of the Order of Christ.[24] The concession of these privileges to Dom António’s heirs contributed to the formation of an aristocratic and military lineage of Potiguara noblemen in Pernambuco. The Iberian context highlights crossovers, but also differences, between English and Portuguese or Spanish attitudes towards the ‘native’ in the context of empire. While indigenous groups in Iberian colonial empires were confined to marginal status, viewed as conquered peoples of various and inferior ethnic origins, those who converted, collaborated, and whose services were useful to the colonial apparatus could be integrated in Iberian monarchies in ways the English rarely attempted with Native Americans in North America.
The concept of ‘native’ further developed as English people migrated in larger numbers to America in the 1630s and 1640s. In the Atlantic world, English women and men operated within a complex legal arrangement that saw them as natives of both the colonies and England. In 1648, the House of Lords introduced a bill ‘for making the Planters that are born in New England free denizens of England’.[25] This act did not pass, since many believed it unnecessary: the rights of English settlers were covered in many colonial charters that stipulated that settlers and their children would ‘have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subjects within any of the Domynions of Us’.[26] Although the 1648 act failed, the status of English settlers was gradually established through other means. The Navigation Acts from 1651 stipulated that ships in the colonies were considered the ships of ‘native’ subjects. As the legal historian Clive Parry suggested, ‘between England and the plantations or colonies there seems to have been no distinction of nationality in general’.[27] However, settlers in the colonies were granted substantial levels of autonomy to naturalize and endenize individuals. The particular migration patterns to different colonies created substantial regional diversity in how English subjects identified with their rights and privileges in England.[28]
As these questions over subjecthood were debated in multiple places, ‘native’ as a descriptor for indigenous peoples remained largely pejorative, depicting part-victimized, part-idolatrous beings in conflict with conquistadors, or exoticized on London stages by those who endorsed empire. In the poet and playwright William Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), the ‘chief Priest of Peru enters with...a Garment of Feathers longer then any of those that are worne by other Natives’. [29] The rights of settlers invoking their ‘native country’ and the ‘natives’ encountered through conquest and colonization could thus exist alongside each other with no seeming discrepancy, even as the former hinged on the dispossession of the latter. Meanwhile, colonial communities combined longstanding legal ideas with the experience of their new societies and environments to develop their own perceptions of what categorized a ‘native’. The language of loyalty to one’s ‘native’ country, from sixteenth-century feudal bonds of allegiance to fervent calls to escape the yoke of tyranny during the American Revolution, carried emotive resonances to those who lived in England and its colonies, but its true meaning was difficult to pin down.
