The reliquary’s placement on top of Archer’s coffin, aligned with it along the east-west axis, placed the relics in close proximity to the altar above, a revealing choice in light of the historical association of altars and relics. The placement of relics in and below altars has a deep history from the origins of the cult of the saints in late antiquity. In the early Christian period, churches began to be built around or on top of the tombs of martyrs and saints; later, relics began to be “translated” from their original burial places into worship spaces. For example, Ambrose of Milan in 386 CE disinterred the corpses of two local saints from the cemetery outside the city walls and installed them below the altar of his newly constructed basilica. In doing so, Ambrose redirected the veneration of the saints’ remains from the outskirts of the cities to the altar, the focal point of liturgical space in the church, where the Eucharist was celebrated. Placing martyrs below the altar had scriptural warrant as well. Revelation 6:9 notes that upon opening the “fifth seal” John the Revelator “saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held.” Ambrose, along with African church leaders, initiated a collective move that would soon disperse martyrs and other holy people from their resting places at the edges of Roman cities to the architectural centers of Christian devotion.12 This occurred despite being, at the time, a violation of imperial Roman law.13 This precedent held tremendous sway over the centuries to come. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 prescribed that all churches have relics installed near or in the altar. Charlemagne set the requirement into law. The Council of Trent reiterated the practice in the face of the Reformation assault on the cult of the saints. Many altars were designed to bring the saints even closer to the celebration of the Eucharist—by boring holes into the altar itself where relics could be placed. There within the altar the presence of the saints, their virtus, as it was known, abutted the ritual celebration of Christ’s sacrifice, in which the real presence of Christ was realized. (It was a hard requirement to keep up, however, and in the twentieth century Roman Catholic churches were given some latitude on the requirement to have saints’ remains, in colonial Latin American churches the presence of an icon near the altar was often deemed sufficient.)14 Furthermore, there was an understanding that relics, if placed not in the altar but buried below, should align perpendicularly with the altar, even as the placement of the reliquary on the coffin, near Archer’s feet, perpendicularly aligns it with the probable placement of the altar.15 Jamestown’s altar would have been rudimentary at best, even ephemeral, so placing sacred remains in the altar would have been foolhardy. Burial was more secure.
James I’s succession from Elizabeth I seemed to predict a stable Protestant trajectory for England and its feeble but growing empire, but the situation remained contentious. This continuing turmoil and instability would impact both the visibility and location of relics in English society. The religious instability of the pre-Elizabethan era was a constant traumatic memory. English priests trained at the special English colleges on the European continent (Douai, Rheims, Rome, Valladolid, Seville) infiltrated England beginning in 1574 on a mission to turn the English soul back to Rome. Jesuits arrived in 1580. Of the 471 seminary priests who were active during the reign of Elizabeth I, almost two thirds of them were imprisoned, one hundred and sixteen were executed, seventeen died while in prison, and ninety-one were banished. Elizabeth effectively rooted out, banished, and executed many of them, in part through her successful intelligence efforts.16 Still, this influx of English priests who sought to rally sympathetic English Catholics was a reminder that the Protestant Queen had not vanquished challengers from within, even if she decisively defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 from without. The wind surely seemed to blow in a Protestant direction, but instability threatened again and again. The famous gunpowder plot of 1605, alternatively known as the “Jesuit Treason,” attempted not only to kill James I, but also to spur a country revolt in the Midlands around the claims of the Catholic Princess Elizabeth. Although those involved in the plot to destroy the King and members of both houses of Parliament in one fell fireball explosion possessed diverse motives, scholarly consensus is clear that, in the words of Mark Nicholls, “every Gunpowder plotter hankered, to some degree, after a restoration of Catholicism…”17 The instability persisted into the later part of the seventeenth century (long after Archer’s death at Jamestown), with the English Civil War, the Puritan reign of Oliver Cromwell, and the ascent of the openly Catholic James II to the throne from 1685-1688. While the infamous iconoclasm of the English reformation extended to the relics of the saints, it was not as destructive as one might think. Reformers tore down many shrines—and plundered their valuables—but parishioners often buried the remains of the saints quietly below where the shrine once stood.18 At the same time, the stripping of Catholic liturgical space had the immediate countervailing effect of massive domestication of relics in English Catholic households. English Catholics placed relics, no longer safe in shrines, monasteries, or churches, into hiding in their homes. As these Catholics kept the island’s sacred bodies in their cupboards, waiting for a future retranslation back into liturgical space, so too the reliquary sat below the altar in Jamestown, waiting for the eventuality that the English crown should swing back to Rome.19 It was not uncommon for relics, if remembered, to be exhumed or at least for the presence under the altar to become openly acknowledged. Relics placed along the axis of the altar satisfied an old requirement in a very new place, open to an unpredictable future.
Perhaps the placement of the reliquary on Archer’s coffin was more personal, an attempt to join a saintly life with a singular life. This impulse has a history. Although being buried with objects was rare in seventeenth-century English mortuary practice—a simple burial shroud was the norm—many of the leaders of Jamestown were buried in their clothing with their ceremonial staffs on top of their coffins.20 Clothing, like other objects, was valuable, and rarely consigned to the grave. The Jamestown settlers, however, were far more concerned with food than clothes. Nonetheless, grave objects are unique among the other burials at Jamestown. Being buried with relics is a layered, folded practice. It joins a material body with an exceptional body. From the beginnings of the cult of the saints, elite patrons tried to join their burial with that of their heavenly patron—a martyr or saint—hoping their proximity would aid them in their aspirations for eternity. In 295 CE, for example, the wealthy gentlewoman Pompeiana obtained the corpse of the martyr Maximilianus from the magistrate in Thavaste (modern Algeria) over the claims of his kin and transported the body to her hometown of Carthage.21 There she buried the corpse at the bottom of a hill next to the body of St. Cyprian, another martyr. After concentrating these two saintly bodies, she died two weeks later and was buried next to them. The grieving father of Maximilianus was apparently overjoyed at the result. His martyred son, through the earthly patronage of a noblewoman, gained proximity to another saintly life, a heavenly patron. The interest in being buried near the saints was enduring and became a major impetus for interment within the confines of churches and near shrines. Proximity was power. People with temporal power were particularly competent in orchestrating proximity to the heavenly. Archer had temporal power; perhaps he sought the heavenly analog in death and as such wished to be buried with the reliquary.
Archer could not be buried without help and the way in which he was buried attests to the great respect with which he was regarded in Jamestown. Attacking enemies through the poor treatment of their remains was a common anti-Catholic tactic in England, but the condition of Archer’s body speaks to none of this. This raises the question as to who laid Archer into the ground. There is a long history of those who care for the dead assisting the deceased in accessing the spiritual power they sought in life, usually try to reconstruct the intentions of the deceased or, ideally, carry out their explicit wishes. Although sometimes, for superseding reasons, they act on their own, there is little evidence of rogue activity around Archer’s interment. His burial is distinguished, not hasty, nor disrespectful. The defiling of a corpse was a common punishment for unrepentant English Catholics, but there is no evidence of any such desecration. In fact, given the circumstances of “the starving times,” the burial was lavish.22 Archer was the leader of a faction within the colony and the loss of a leader in a difficult political climate is as much about honoring the dead as it is about the future. Those who buried Archer ignored their hunger pangs, built a coffin, laboriously dug the heavy cold clay from the base of the chapel, and set their leader to rest, in a coffin, with his captain’s staff and his reliquary carefully set on top. Those who buried Archer lifted up his example by lowering his body respectfully to the ground.
Burying Archer with the reliquary could have been intended to simply mark him as a Catholic, making visible his religious identity. Indeed, Archer’s political alliances followed rough Catholic lines; during Archer’s lifetime Jamestown’s colonists brought up two Catholics for charges of espionage. These men were Archer allies, but extant sources offer no signs of true Catholic sympathy on Archer’s part. Perhaps the placement of the reliquary on his coffin honored his Catholic upbringing, or maybe it was intended to remove an assemblage of troublesome sacred objects from circulation. Here Archer’s family history is germane. Archer was raised in a family of “recusants,” Catholic faithful who refused to attend services at the local English parish church. His parents had paid fines for their absence, were known to authorities in Essex, and even had other recusants living under their roof.23 Around the time of Archer’s birth, Essex had a small recusant population clustered around the home of the wealthy Catherine Audley, but the group faced intense pressure from local authorities loyal to Queen Elizabeth, in large part due to their proximity to the ports. Local recusants could host Catholic priests, nuns, and students traveling back and forth from the Continent. There is evidence that the concern on the part of local authorities was warranted, for many priests and nuns were caught in Essex in the homes or inns of local Catholics.24 Nonetheless an ostensibly Catholic upbringing did not entail a lack of loyalty to the Crown. Gabriel Archer was a bombastic presence in early Jamestown, especially in his opposition to Captain John Smith, but he wasn’t outspoken in terms of religion. In fact, Archer was one of the most energetic promoters of the Virginia Company from the start; there are no signs of equivocation in his commitment to English advance in North America, nor to the reign of James I. At the end of his “Brief Description of the People,” one of the most elegant narratives of the Jamestown settlement, Archer gives a view into the practices of the local Indians, ending his narrative thus:
To conclude, they are a very witty [cunning] and ingenious people, apt both to understand and speak our language, so that I hope in God, as He hath miraculously preserved us hither from all dangers, both of sea and land and fury, so He will make us authors of His holy will in converting them to our true Christian faith by His own inspiring grace and knowledge of his deity.25
Here Archer gives a broad Christian gloss to the hopes of converting the local Indians; he encapsulates the religiosity of the English in a capacious phrasing that suggests unity and belies the presence of religious tensions: “our true Christian faith.”26 At least for his readers in England, Archer narrated commonality in religious mission, not difference. His readers would have interpreted this characterization not as a progressive ecumenical gesture, expressing the equivalency of a wide range of Christian traditions, but rather as a commonality centered on the professed Protestantism of the Church of England. Archer, like all colonists to Virginia, swore (it seems in good faith) allegiance to the King, including a denial of Papal authority. Openly Catholic settlers were not required to make the same oath.
Religion emerges in passing here and there in the three extant Archer narratives, almost always in a political context or in relation to the Indian population. One narrative, attributed to Archer by scholars, relates an intriguing political moment during an expedition up the Powhatan River, now called the James River, where the English settlers met with “Great King Powhata,” the ruler of the Powhatan federation of Indians west of Jamestown. “King” Powhatan was in as much need of allies as the besieged English, thus he sought to extend his political power among the region’s various Indian groups. The English settlers’ venture up the river was a mixture of diplomatic mission, ethnographic exploration, and territorial scouting. Archer related the story of Captain Christopher Newport’s arrival near the “mouth of the falls” of the river, by modern Richmond, where the group erected “a cross with this inscription: ‘Jacobus Rex.1607’” in the nearby presence of a small group of Powhatan’s followers.27 Archer noted that upon the “erecting thereof we prayed for our king and the prosperous success in this his action, and proclaimed him king with a loud shout.”28 Captain Newport interpreted the cross to the Indian observers in a different way. He told them, in a moment of disingenuous translation, that the “two arms of the cross signified King Powatah and himself, the fastening of it in the midset was their united league, and the shout the reverence he did to Powtah, which cheered [the Indians].”29 Archer related the prayers, cross, and shouts for James I, including his own, in a positive light, and took note with some distaste of Newport’s dishonest translation of the object and the meaning of their activity. In sum, Archer appears in full support of his king’s claims on the New World in association with the religious object, just as he was in support of the spread of Christian religion among the Amerindian population.
Material symbols are culturally and politically flexible. In the early settlement, the acute concern, in terms of religion, was geopolitical, both in reference to distant Europe and to more immediate relationships with the local Indian population. James I had recently brokered a tenuous peace with Spain’s Phillip (Filipe) I. In the Virginia interior, Newport sought to reassure Powhatan of English support for his rule through a makeshift cross, devoted originally not to their relationship, but to the English king. The Virginia Company endeavored simultaneously to make money, to spread the Christian message, and to establish a foothold in a New World dominated by the Spanish.30 The issue of Catholic and Protestant contention came up in the colony only when it was a question of espionage. In 1608, the colony brought the two Catholic settlers previously mentioned up for charges of conspiracy. The first was Captain George Kendall, who was first imprisoned, then convicted of being a spy for the Spanish and shot to death for mutiny.31 The other was Edward Maria Wingfield, then president of the governing council, whose political rivals suspected him of conspiracy for his open Catholicism. He was ultimately acquitted and sent back to England. In fact, Wingfield’s initial dismissal from the governing council stemmed not from his Catholicism, but from complaints that he had been tight-fisted with food supplies and, moreover, that he was not religious enough. Wingfield reported in his defense that he had been accused of atheism since he “carried not a Bible.”32 The material culture of religion, or in Wingfield’s case, the lack thereof, mattered in the public space of the colony. The colonial leaders sought to inculcate piety—compelling everyone to attend church services—but also religious harmony in hopes of scaring off sedition. John Smith, for example, believed that this was a strength of the Ottoman empire, being united “generally of one religion,” while “the Christians in so many divisions and opinions…are among themselves worse enemies than the turks.”33 “Therefore,” Smith argued, “I doubt not but you will seeke [sic] to the prime authority of the Church of England.”34 In 1619, about ten years after Archer’s death, John Pory, a secretary to the Governor of the colony, visited Jamestown. In a letter to the treasurer of the Virginia Company, Pory criticized the conduct of “Mr. Chanterton,” whom he stated, “smells too much of Rome.”35 The evident cause of the so-called smell for Pory was Chanterton’s attempts to “worke myracles wth his Crucyfixe,” an index for Pory of Chanterton’s stubbornness in “mayntaining his sensles religion.”36 Pory’s suspicion that Chanterton had come “hither as a spy,” was reinforced by Chanterton telling Pory that he had been in “Rome in Octobr Last.”37 For Pory, this was a conspicuous religiosity that did not inculcate harmony. In the end, however, the local administration ruled that they would “take no notice.”38 Early leaders surely found the Catholicism of these men suspicious, but not necessarily damning; the trials and accusations to which they subjected potential Catholics turned on their loyalty to the colony and Crown, not whether they owned crucifixes or relics, or sought the intercession of the saints. This was consonant with James I’s policy regarding religion; he was willing to allow some religious toleration insofar as he could expect political loyalty.
It is important here to disaggregate the geopolitical issues between Catholic and Protestant powers from those of religious practice. The Church of England was preeminently Protestant in its rejection of the authority of the Pope and embrace of vernacular English in both worship and the Bible. In terms of religious practice, however, the Church of England was far more of a hybrid, never engaging in the comprehensive reforms of worship, theology, or church space that the more radical Protestant sects achieved on the Continent. Even the 1549 Book of Common Prayer retained Latin titles to help jog the memory of those immersed in the rituals of the pre-Reformation church. The Protestant Queen herself, Elizabeth I, maintained a crucifix above her private altar. Reform waxed and waned, reversed and advanced, but was never complete. So if the Church of England represented a hybridized Protestantism, the archaeological evidence reveals that early English settlers of Virginia likewise embraced a hybrid faith. Archer could profess loyalty to his Protestant king, while also remaining committed to the practices of an older order. He was not alone. Archaeologists working at Jamestown have found a wide range of religious artifacts at the site, including ecumenical book clasps, presumably to hold together unwieldy Bibles or other devotional books—but also more explicitly Catholic jet crucifixes, rosary beads, silver and copper medallions, and other devotional objects such as cross coin necklaces (Fig. 6).39 The material composition of these objects, much like that of the reliquary, indicates a Continental provenance, which aligns with the production of devotional objects in the period, especially from Spain where silver was abundant from its colonial mines (especially Potosí in modern Bolivia), and the workshops of the Catholic Low Countries. Acquiring such objects would not have been hard. As historian Karen Kupperman has demonstrated, many of the early settlers of Virginia—especially its leaders—lived remarkably transnational lives, spanning the Protestant, Catholic, and Ottoman worlds. Captain John Smith, for example, bumbled through France, was thrown overboard in the Mediterranean for being a “Hugonoit” by a “rabble of [Catholic] Pilgrimes…going to Rome,” fought a Venetian ship between Egypt and Italy, helped end the siege of an Ottoman city in Hungary, decapitated three Ottoman officers in one-on-one combat in Romania, was enslaved in a territory near the Black Sea, escaped, traveled to Germany, France, and Spain, and then to northern Africa again.40 After returning to England, to cap it all off, he signed up to go to Virginia.