Profitable settlements: the earl of Warwick and toleration in the English Atlantic, 1643–8

Abstract

This article examines the tolerationist policies of Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick, in response to religious disputes among English settlers in Bermuda and Rhode Island in the 1640s. It shows how Warwick’s newly established Committee for Foreign Plantations extended toleration to those godly Protestant settlers who were deemed useful to the militant confessional program of English colonization that Warwick and his allies had pursued for decades prior to the civil war. The territorial and evangelical expansion of Reformed Protestantism, in his view, depended upon the toleration of godly settlers, the enslavement of African-descended labourers and the subjection of Indigenous American nations to English sovereignty.