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Purchas, Samuellocked

(bap. 1577, d. 1626)

Purchas, Samuellocked

(bap. 1577, d. 1626)
  • David Armitage

Samuel Purchas (bap. 1577, d. 1626)

by unknown engraver, pubd 1624

© Copyright The British Museum

Purchas, Samuel (bap. 1577, d. 1626), geographical editor and compiler and Church of England clergyman, was baptized on 20 November 1577 at Thaxted, Essex, the sixth of the ten children of George Purcas (c.1549–1625), who was in the cloth trade, and his wife, Anne (c.1544–1619). He matriculated from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1594 (probably December), and graduated BA by 1597 and MA in 1600; he received a Lambeth BD on 14 March 1615 and was incorporated as an Oxford BD on 11 July 1615. He sought a bishop's licence to marry Jane Lease (bap. 1573) of Westhall, Suffolk, on 2 December 1601. They had three children: Mary (1603/4–1619); Samuel (1605/6–1658/9), author of A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (1657); and Martha.

Purchas spent his professional life in the Church of England. He was ordained deacon (1 May 1598) and then priest (25 January 1601) in Witham church, Essex. In Essex he became successively curate of Purleigh (before 23 April 1601), vicar of Eastwood (24 August 1604), and rector of Snoreham (1615); then in London he was appointed chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot in 1613 or 1614, rector of St Martin Ludgate (1614), and finally rector of All Hallows, Bread Street (22 April 1626). From 1621 to 1624 he was also a fellow of King James's College at Chelsea, the major arsenal of anti-Catholic polemic, where he composed his one published sermon, The Kings Towre (preached at Paul's Cross on 5 August 1622), and compiled much of his major work, Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrimes (1624–5).

Purchas was admitted to the Virginia Company on 22 May 1622, and attended six meetings of the company court in 1622–4 (Kingsbury, 2.20, 26, 103, 485, 498, 512, 518, 533). His first published compilation of travel literature was Purchas, his Pilgrimage (1613); he dedicated the second, expanded edition (1614) to his ecclesiastical patron Archbishop Abbot. By this time Purchas had already become acquainted with Richard Hakluyt, his great predecessor in the memorializing of English travel narratives, who lent books and some manuscripts for the second edition of the Pilgrimage. Two further editions appeared in 1617 and 1626. His only independent original works, Purchas his Pilgrim: Microcosmus, or, The Historie of Man (1619) and The Kings Towre (1623), referred to travel accounts, but were primarily works of speculative theology characteristic of the Calvinist consensus of their time. Purchas was no traveller himself: as he confessed, 'Even I, which have written so much of travellers & travells, never travelled 200. miles from Thaxted in Essex, where I was borne' (Purchas, Pilgrimes, i. i. 74).

The Pilgrimes (as it is usually known) was the culmination of almost twenty years' collecting oral and written accounts of travels in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It was based in part on Hakluyt's remaining manuscripts, which Purchas had acquired in 1620. (Their subsequent history is unknown.) The result was a four-volume folio that took more than three years to print; at the time of its publication it was the largest book ever seen through the English press. The Pilgrimes combined editing with editorializing to comprise the bulkiest anti-Catholic tract of the age and the last great English work of geographical editing for almost a century. Its four volumes traversed the world from the ancient Near East to the latest English colonies. The first volume comprised the travels of ancient kings, patriarchs, apostles, and others; comparative histories of languages, religion, church government, and ‘letters’; circumnavigations of the globe; and English voyages to Africa, Persia, India, and Asia. The second volume extended the collection of travel narratives to encompass Africa and the Near East, while the third covered China, Russia, ‘Tartary’, Iceland, Greenland, the north-west passage, and the Arctic. Purchas's coverage of European exploration and settlement in the Americas began at the end of the third volume, but made up the bulk of the fourth, which treated South and North America, and ended with English settlements in Bermuda, Virginia, New England, and Newfoundland. Purchas edited oral accounts and manuscripts (many from Hakluyt's papers), translated texts in classical and foreign languages, and reprinted previously published works. His only original contributions came in the form of various editorials scattered through the volumes on, among other things, Solomon's voyage to Ophir, Pope Alexander's bulls of donation of 1493, the 'iniquitie' of papal power, the history of Europe, and 'Virginia's Verger', an ideological justification for English settlement in Virginia in the wake of the Powhatan uprising of 1622 (Pilgrimes, 4.1809–26).

Since the nineteenth century Purchas's editorial methods have always been contrasted unfavourably with Hakluyt's, though his influence (and the European dissemination of his works) were arguably much greater. Unlike Hakluyt, Purchas attempted to construct an argument upon geographical and historical evidence that was cosmopolitan, pan-European, global, and transhistorical. The militantly theological purpose of his works may partly account for the contempt and neglect into which he largely fell in the centuries after John Locke even-handedly advised in 1703 that for 'books of travel … the collections made by our countrymen, Hakluyt and Purchas, are very good' (Locke, 353). Purchas made final alterations to his will (originally composed on 31 May 1625) on 9 September 1626. His exact death date is unknown, though it was before 29 September 1626, when the rectory of All Hallows, Bread Street, fell vacant. His burial at St Martin Ludgate was recorded on 30 September 1626, and his will was proved on 21 October 1626.

Sources

  • H. W. King, ‘Ancient wills (no. 7)’, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, 4 (1869), 164–83
  • J. L. Chester and J. Foster, eds., London marriage licences, 1521–1869 (1887)
  • S. M. Kingsbury, ed., The records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (1906–35)
  • D. Armitage, The ideological origins of the British empire (2000)
  • J. Locke, Political essays, ed. M. Goldie (1997)

Archives

  • Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, ‘Virginia's verger’, Hardwick MS 56

Likenesses

  • engraving, pubd 1624, BM [see illus.]
  • J. Benajamin, print (copy of line engraving, 1625), NPG
  • line engraving, BL; repro. in S. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas his pilgrimes, 4 vols. (1625), vol. 1
  • line engraving, NPG
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J. Venn & J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses : a biographical list of all known students, graduates, and holders of office at the University of Cambridge, from the earliest times to 1900, 2 pts in 10 vols. (1922–54); repr. in 2 vols. (1974–8)
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J. Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses : the members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886, 4 vols. (1887–8), later edn (1891); Alumni Oxonienses … 1500–1714, 4 vols. (1891–2); 8 vol. repr. (1968) and (2000)