Henry Spelman, son of the famous antiquary. Sir Henry Spelman, was
at the Pamunkey village when Ratcliffe and his party were massacred
by The Powhatan (see above, p. 153). The young man's life was saved
by Pocahontas, and he was probably adopted. Argall found him with
Pocahontas among the Potomacs, and bought him at the cost of a small
further outlay in copper. Spelman afterward became a person of some
importance in the colony. His "Relation of Virginia," containing an
interesting account of the Ratcliffe massacre and other matters, was
first published under the learned editorship of Henry Stevens in 1872,
and has since been reprinted in Arber's invaluable edition of Smith's
_Works_, pp. ci.-cxiv.
[86] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 98.
[87] Smith's _Works_, p. 533.
[88] See Meade's _Old Churches and Families of Virginia_, ii. 79; a
most useful and delightful hook, in about a thousand pages without an
index!
[89] There is a play upon words here. The first "top" is apparently
equivalent to "drink up," as in the following: "Its no hainous offence
(beleeve me) for a young man ... to toppe of a canne roundly," _Terence
in English_, 1614. The second "top" seems equivalent to "put the
finishing touch on."--"Silenus quaffs the barrel, but Tobacco perfects
the brain."
[90] Sweet.
[91] Nichols, _Progresses of King James_, ii. 739.
[92] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 66.
[93] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 67.
[94] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 71.
[95] Brown's _Genesis_, ii. 1014.
[96] Doyle's _Virginia_, p. 157.
[97] Neill's _Virginia Company_, pp. 179, 181.
CHAPTER VI.
A SEMINARY OF SEDITION.
[Sidenote: Summary review of the founding of Virginia.]
[Sidenote: 1606-1610.]
FEW episodes in English history are more curious than the founding
of Virginia. In the course of the mightiest conflict the world had
witnessed between the powers of despotism and the powers of freedom,
considerations chiefly strategical led England to make the ocean
her battle-ground, and out of these circumstances grew the idea of
establishing military posts at sundry important strategic points on
the North American coast, to aid the operations of the navy. In a few
far-sighted minds this idea developed into the scheme of planting one
or more Protestant states, for the increase of England's commerce,
the expansion of her political influence, and the maintenance of her
naval advantages. After royal assistance had been sought in vain
and single-handed private enterprise had proved unequal to the task
of founding a state, the joint-stock principle, herald of a new
industrial era, was resorted to, and we witness the creation of two
rival joint-stock companies for the purpose of undertaking such a task.
Of the two colonies sent out by these companies, one meets the usual
fate, succumbs to famine, and retires from the scene. The other barely
escapes a similar fate, but is kept alive by the energy and sagacity
and good fortune of one extraordinary man until sturdy London has
invested so much of her treasure and her life-blood in it that she will
not tamely look on and see it perish. Then the Lord Mayor, the wealthy
merchants, the venerable craft-guilds, with many liberal knights and
peers, and a few brilliant scholars and clergymen, turn to and remodel
the London Company into a truly great commercial corporation with an
effective government and one of London's foremost merchant princes at
its head. As if by special intervention from heaven, the struggling
colony is rescued at the very point of death, and soon takes on a new
and more vigorous life.
[Sidenote: 1610-1624.]
But for such lavish outlay to continue, there must be some solid
return, and soon a new and unexpected source of wealth is found.
All this sort of work is a novel experiment, mistakes are at first
made in plenty; neither the ends to be obtained nor the methods of
obtaining them are distinctly conceived, and from the parties of brave
gentlemen in quest of El Dorado to the crowd of rogues and pickpockets
amenable only to rough martial law, the drift of events seems somewhat
indefinite and aimless. But just as the short-lived system of communism
falls to the ground, and private ownership of land and earnings is
established, the rapidly growing demand for tobacco in England makes
its cultivation an abundant and steady source of wealth, the colonists
increase in numbers and are improved in quality. Meanwhile as the
interest felt by the shareholders becomes more lively, the Company
acquires a more democratic organization. It exerts political influence,
the court party and country party contend with each other for the
control of it, and the latter wins. Hitherto the little Virginia colony
has been, like the contemporary French colony in Canada and like
all the Spanish colonies, a despotically governed community closely
dependent upon the source of authority in the mother country, and
without any true political life. But now the victorious party in the
Company gives to Virginia a free representative government, based not
upon any ideal theory of the situation, but rooted in ancient English
precedent, the result of ages of practical experience, and therefore
likely to thrive. Finally we see the British king awakening to the fact
that he has unloosed a power that threatens danger. The doctrine of the
divine right of kings--that ominous bequest from the half-orientalized
later Roman Empire to post-mediæval Europe--was dear to the heart of
James Stuart, and his aim in life was to impose it upon the English
people. His chief obstacle was the country party, which if he could not
defeat in Parliament, he might at least weaken by striking at the great
corporation that had come to be one of its strongholds. In what we may
call the embryonic development of Virginia the final incident was the
overthrow of the London Company; but we shall see that the severing of
that umbilical cord left the colony stronger and more self-reliant than
before. In the unfolding of these events there is poetic beauty and
grandeur as the purpose of Infinite Wisdom reveals itself in its cosmic
process, slowly but inexorably, hasting not but resting not, heedless
of the clashing aims and discordant cries of short-sighted mortals,
sweeping their tiny efforts into its majestic current, and making all
contribute to the fulfilment of God's will.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Hostility of Spain.]
[Sidenote: Gondomar and the Spanish match.]
From the very outset the planting of Virginia had been watched with
wrath and chagrin by the Spanish court. Within the last few years a
Virginian scholar, Alexander Brown, has collected and published a large
number of manuscript letters and other documents preserved in the
Spanish archives at Simancas, which serve to illustrate the situation
in detail. Very little of importance happened in London that the
ambassador Zuñiga did not promptly discover and straightway report in
cipher to Madrid. We can now read for the first time many memoranda of
secret sessions of Philip III. and his ministers, in which this little
Protestant colony was the theme of discussion. It was a thorn in the
flesh not easy to extract unless Spain was prepared for war with Great
Britain. At first the very weakness of the colony served to keep this
enemy's hands off; if it was on the point of dying a natural death,
as seemed likely, it was hardly worth while to repeat the horrors of
Florida. In 1612, after Sir Thomas Dale's administration had begun,
Spain again took the alarm; for the moment a war with England was
threatened, and if it had broken out Virginia would have been one of
the first points attacked. But the deaths of Lord Salisbury and of
Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1612, changed the policy of both Philip and
James. There was now some hope of detaching the latter from Protestant
alliances, and Philip's designs upon Virginia were subordinated to
the far larger purpose of winning back England herself into the
Catholic ranks. A plan was made for marrying the Infanta Maria to
Baby Charles, and with this end in view one of the ablest of Spanish
diplomats, Count Gondomar (to give him at once his best-known title),
was sent as ambassador to London. Charles was only twelve years old,
and an immediate wedding was not expected, but the match could be
kept dangling before James as a bait, and thus his movements might be
guided. Should the marriage finally be made, Gondomar believed that
Charles could be converted to his bride's faith, and then England might
be made to renew her allegiance to Rome. Gondomar was mightily mistaken
in the English people, but he was not mistaken in their king. James was
ready to swallow bait, hook, and all. Gondomar completely fascinated
him,--one might almost say, hypnotized him,--so that for the next ten
years one had but to shake that Spanish match before him and he would
follow, whatever might betide. The official policy of England was thus
often made distasteful to Englishmen, and the sentiment of loyalty to
the sovereign was impaired.
[Sidenote: Gondomar's advice to the king.]
To Gondomar the king was in the habit of confiding his grievances, and
in 1614, after his angry dissolution of Parliament, he said to him one
day: "There is one thing I have here, which your king in Spain has
not, and that is a Parliament of 500 members.... I am surprised that my
ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into
existence. I am a stranger and found it here when I arrived, so I am
obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of." Here James stopped
short and turned red in the face, at having thus carelessly admitted
his own lack of omnipotence, whereupon the wily Spaniard smiled and
reminded him that at all events it was only at his royal pleasure that
this very disagreeable assembly could be called together.[98] James
acted on this hint, and did not summon a Parliament again for seven
years. It is worth remembering in this connection that at this very
time the representatives of the people in France were dismissed and not
called together again until 1789.
[Sidenote: More advice.]
While Parliament was not sitting, the sort of discussion that James
found so hateful was kept up at the meetings of the London Company
for Virginia, which were commonly held at the princely mansion of Sir
Thomas Smith. Against this corporation Gondomar dropped his sweet
poison into the king's ear. The government of colonies, he said, is
work fit only for monarchs, and cannot safely be entrusted to a roomful
of gabbling subjects; beware of such meetings; you will find them but
"a seminary to a seditious Parliament." Before James had profited by
these warnings, however, the case of Sir Walter Raleigh came up to
absorb his attention. A rare chance--as strange and sad as anything
that the irony of human destiny can show--was offered for Spain to
wreak her malice upon Virginia in the person of the earliest and most
illustrious of its founders.
[Sidenote: Imprisonment of Raleigh.]
[Sidenote: Raleigh released and sent to Guiana.]
[Sidenote: The king's treachery.]
[Sidenote: Judicial murder of Raleigh, 1618.]
In 1603, not long after King James's arrival in England, Raleigh had
been charged with complicity in Lord Cobham's abortive conspiracy for
getting James set aside in favour of his cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart.
This charge is now proved to have been ill-founded; but James already
hated Raleigh with the measure of hatred which he dealt out to so
many of Elizabeth's favourites. After a trial in which the common-law
maxim, that innocence must be presumed until guilt is proved, was read
backward, as witches were said to read the Lord's Prayer in summoning
Old Nick, Sir Walter was found guilty of high treason and condemned
to death. The wrath of the people was such that James, who did not
yet feel his position quite secure, did not venture to carry out the
sentence. He contented himself with plundering Sir Walter's estates,
while the noble knight was kept for more than twelve years a prisoner
in the Tower, where he solaced himself with experiments in chemistry
and with writing that delightful History of the World which is one of
the glories of English prose literature. In 1616, at the intercession
of Villiers, Raleigh was set free. On his expedition to Guiana in 1595
he had discovered gold on the upper waters of the Caroni River in what
is now Venezuela. In his attempt to dispense with parliaments James
was at his wits' end for money, and he thought something might be got
by sending Raleigh back to take possession of the place. It is true
that Spain claimed that country, but so did James on the strength of
Raleigh's own discoveries, and if any complication should arise there
were ways of crawling out. Raleigh had misgivings about starting on
such an adventure without first obtaining a pardon in set form; but Sir
Francis Bacon is said to have assured him that the king, having under
the privy seal made him admiral of a fleet, with power of martial law
over sailors and officers, had substantially condoned all offences,
real or alleged. A man could not at one and the same time be under
attaint of treason and also an admiral in active service. Before
Raleigh started James made him explain the details of his scheme and
lay down his route on a chart, and he promised on the sacred word of
a king not to divulge this information to any human creature. It was
only the sacred word of a Stuart king. James may have meant to keep
it, but his evil genius was not far off. The lifelike portrait of
Count Gondomar, superbly painted by the elder Daniel Mytens, hangs in
the palace at Hampton Court, and one cannot look on it for a moment
without feeling that Mephistopheles himself must have sat for it. The
bait of the Infanta, with a dowry of 2,000,000 crowns in hard cash,
was once more thrown successfully, and James told every detail of
Raleigh's plans to the Spaniard, who sent the intelligence post-haste
to Madrid. So when the English fleet arrived at the mouths of the
Orinoco, a Spanish force awaited them and attacked their exploring
party. In the fight that ensued Raleigh's son Walter was slain; though
the English were victorious, the approaches to the gold fields were
too strongly guarded to be carried by the force at their command, and
thus the enterprise was baffled. The gold fields remained for Spain,
but with the fast increasing paralysis of Spanish energy they were
soon neglected and forgotten; their existence was denied and Raleigh's
veracity doubted, until in 1889 they were rediscovered and identified
by the Venezuelan Inspector of Mines.[99] Since the expedition was
defeated by the treachery of his own sovereign, nothing was left for
the stricken admiral but to return to England. The Spanish court
loudly clamoured for his death, on the ground that he had undertaken a
piratical excursion against a country within Spanish jurisdiction. His
wife cleverly planned an escape to France, but a Judas in the party
arrested him and he was sent to the Tower. The king promised Gondomar
that Raleigh should be publicly executed, either in London or in
Madrid; but on second thought the latter would not do. To surrender him
to Spain would be to concede Spain's claim to Guiana. Without conceding
this claim there was nothing for which to punish him. Accordingly James
in this year 1618 revived the old death sentence of 1603, and Spain
drank a deep draught of revenge when the hero of Cadiz and Fayal was
beheaded in the Palace Yard at Westminster; a scene fit to have made
Elizabeth turn in her grave in the Abbey hard by. A fouler judicial
murder never stained the annals of any country.[100]
[Sidenote: The Company's election in 1620.]
[Sidenote: The king's attempt to interfere.]
The silly king gained nothing by his vile treachery. Popular execration
in England at once set him up in a pillory from which posterity is
not likely to take him down. The Spanish council of state advised
Philip III. to send him an autograph letter of thanks,[101] but the
half-promised Infanta with her rich dowry kept receding like the grapes
from eager Tantalus. A dwindling exchequer would soon leave James
with no resource except summoning once more that odious Parliament.
Meanwhile in the London Company for Virginia there occurred that change
of political drift whereof the election of Sir Edwin Sandys over Sir
Thomas Smith, aided though it had been by a private quarrel, was one
chief symptom. That election revealed the alarming growth of hostility
in the city of London to the king's pretensions and to the court
party.[102] James had said just before the election, "Choose the Devil
if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys." From that time forth the king's
hostility to the Company scarcely needed Gondomar's skilful nursing. It
grew apace till it became aggressive, not to say belligerent. At the
election in 1620 it was the intention of the majority in the Company
to reëlect Sandys, with whose management they were more than pleased.
Nearly 500 members were present at the meeting. It was the custom for
three candidates to be named and voted for, one after another, by
ballot, and a plurality sufficed for a choice. On this occasion the
name of Sir Edwin Sandys, first of three, was about to be put to vote,
when some gentlemen of the king's household came in and interrupted the
proceedings. The king, said their spokesman, positively forbade the
election of Sir Edwin Sandys. His Majesty was unwilling to infringe
the rights of the Company, and would therefore himself propose names,
even as many as four, on which a vote might be taken. The names were
forthwith read, and turned out to be those of Sir Thomas Smith and
three of his intimate friends.
[Sidenote: Reading of the charter.]
This impudent interference was received with a silence more eloquent
than words, a profound silence that might be felt. After some minutes
came murmurs and wrathful ejaculations, among which such expressions as
"tyranny" and "invasion of chartered rights" could be plainly heard.
The motion was made that the king's messengers should leave the room
while the situation was discussed. "No," said the Earl of Southampton,
"let them stay and hear what is said." This motion prevailed. Then
Sir Lawrence Hyde moved that the charter be read, and his motion was
greeted with one of those dutiful but ominous cries so common in
that age; from all parts of the room it resounded, "The charter! the
charter!! God save the King!" The roll of parchment was brought forward
and read aloud by the secretary. "Mr. Chairman," said Hyde, "the words
of the charter are plain; the election of a treasurer is left to the
free choice of this Company. His Majesty seems to labour under some
misunderstanding, and I doubt not these gentlemen will undeceive him."
[Sidenote: Withdrawal of Sandys.]
[Sidenote: Election of Southampton.]
For a few minutes no one replied, and there was a buzz of informal
conversation about the room, some members leaving their seats to speak
with friends not sitting near them. One of our accounts says that
some of the king's emissaries stepped out and sought his presence,
and when he heard what was going on he looked a little anxious and
his stubbornness was somewhat abated; he said of course he did not
wish to restrict the Company's choice to the names he had mentioned.
Whether this concession was reported back to the meeting, we are not
informed, but probably it was. When the meeting was called to order,
Sir Robert Phillips, who was sitting near Sandys, got up and announced
that that gentleman wished to withdraw his name; he would therefore
propose that the king's messengers should nominate two persons while
the Company should nominate a third. The motion was carried, and the
Company nominated the Earl of Southampton. The balloting showed an
extremely meagre vote for the king's nominees. It was then moved and
carried that in the earl's case the ballot should be dispensed with and
the choice signified by acclamation; and then with thundering shouts
of "Southampton! Southampton," the meeting was brought to a close. The
rebuke to the king could hardly have been more pointed, and in such
a scene we recognize the prophecy of the doom to which James's wrong
policy was by and by to hasten his son.
[Sidenote: Nicholas Ferrar.]
[Sidenote: Little Gidding.]
The choice of Shakespeare's friend instead of Sandys made no difference
whatever in the policy of the Company. From that time forth its
ruling spirits were Southampton and Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar, the
deputy-treasurer. The name of this young man calls for more than a
passing mention. Better known in ecclesiastical than in political
history, he was distinguished and memorable in whatever he undertook,
and among all the thronging figures in England's past he is one of the
most sweetly and solemnly beautiful. His father, the elder Nicholas
Ferrar, who died in April, 1620, just before the election I have been
describing, was one of London's merchant princes, and it was in the
parlour of his hospitable house in St. Osyth's Lane--now known as Size
Lane, near the Poultry--that the weekly meetings of the Virginia
Council were in these latter days regularly held. In this house the
young Nicholas was born in 1593. He had spent seven years in study at
Cambridge and five years in very extensive travel upon the continent
of Europe, when at the age of twenty-seven he came to devote all his
energies for a time to the welfare of the colony of Virginia. From
early boyhood he was noticeable for taking a grave and earnest but by
no means sombre view of life, its interests and its duties. For him
frivolity had no charm, coarse pleasures were but loathsome, yet he was
neither stern nor cold. Through every fibre of his being he was the
refined and courteous gentleman, a true Sir Galahad fit to have found
the Holy Grail. His scholarship was thorough and broad. An excellent
mathematician and interested in the new dawning of physical science, he
was also well versed in the classics and in modern languages and knew
something of Oriental philology, but he was most fond of the devotional
literature of the church. His intensely religious mood was part of
the great spiritual revival of which Puritanism was the mightiest
manifestation; yet Nicholas Ferrar was no Puritan either in doctrine or
in ecclesiastical policy. In these matters his sympathies were rather
with William Laud. At the same time his career is a living refutation
of the common notion that there is a necessary connection between the
religion of Laud and the politics of Strafford, for his own political
views were as liberal as those of Hampden and Pym. Indeed Ferrar
was a rare product of the harmonious coöperation of the tendencies
represented respectively in the Renaissance and in the Reformation,
tendencies which the general want of intelligence and moral soundness
in mankind has more commonly brought into barren conflict. His ideal of
life was much like that which Milton set forth with matchless beauty
in "Il Penseroso." Its leading motive, strengthening with his years,
was the feeling of duty toward the "studious cloister's pale," and the
part of his career that is now best remembered is the founding of that
monastic home at Little Gidding, where study and charitable deeds and
prayer and praise should go on unceasing, where at whatsoever hour of
day or night the weary wayfarer through the broad fen country should
climb that hilly range in Huntingdon, he should hear the "pealing
organ blow to the full-voiced choir below," and entering should
receive spiritual comfort and strength, and go thence on his way with
heart uplifted. In that blest retreat, ever busy with good works,
lived Nicholas Ferrar after the downfall of the great London Company
until his own early death in 1637 at the age of forty-four. Of great
or brilliant deeds according to the world's usual standard this man
did none; yet the simple record of his life brings us into such an
atmosphere of holiness and love that mankind can never afford to let it
fade and die.
This Protestant saint, withal, was no vague dreamer, but showed in
action the practical sagacity that came by inheritance from London's
best stock of bold and thrifty citizens. As one of the directing minds
of a commercial corporation, he showed himself equal to every occasion
that arose. He is identified with the last days of the London Company,
and his family archives preserve the record of its downfall. It is
thence that we get the account of the election of Southampton and many
other interesting scenes and important facts that would otherwise have
passed into oblivion.
[Sidenote: Disputes in the Company.]
After Southampton's election the king's hostility to the Company
became deadly, and within that corporation itself he found allies
who when once they found themselves unable to rule it were only too
willing to contribute to its ruin. Sir Thomas Smith and his friends now
accepted their defeat as decisive and final, and allowed themselves
to become disloyal to the Company. Probably they would have expressed
it differently; they would have said that out of regard for Virginia
they felt it their duty to thwart the reckless men who had gained
control of her destinies. Unfortunately for their version of the
case, the friends of Sir Thomas Smith were charged with the burden of
Argall's misdemeanours, and the regard which that governor had shown
for Virginia was too much like the peculiar interest that a wolf feels
in the sheepfold. It is not meant that the members of the court party
who tried to screen Argall were all unscrupulous men; such was far from
being the case, but in public contests nothing is more common than to
see men personally stainless blindly accept and defend the rogues of
their own party. In the heat of battle the private quarrel between
Smith and the Earl of Warwick was either made up or allowed to drop out
of sight. Both worked together, and in harmony with the king, to defeat
Southampton and Sandys and Ferrar. In the Company's quarter sessions
the disputes rose so high that the meetings were said to be more like
cockpits than courts.[103] On one occasion a duel between the Earl of
Warwick and Lord Cavendish, eldest son of the first Earl of Devonshire,
was narrowly prevented. As Chamberlain, one of the court gossips of
the day, writes: "Last week the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish
fell so foul at a Virginia ... court that the lie passed and repassed,
and they are [gone out] to try their fortune, yet we do not hear they
are met, so that there is hope they may return safe. In the meantime
their ladies forget not their old familiarity, but meet daily to lament
that misfortune. The factions in [the Company] are grown so violent as
Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against another; and
they seldom meet upon the Exchange, or in the streets, but they brabble
and quarrel."[104]
[Sidenote: The king rebuked by the House of Commons.]
In 1621 the king, having arrived at the end of his purse, seized what
he thought a favourable moment for summoning Parliament, but found
that body more intractable than ever. The Commons busied themselves
with attacking monopolies and impeaching the Lord Chancellor Bacon
for taking bribes. Then they expressed unqualified disapproval of
the Spanish match, whereupon the king told them to mind their own
business and not meddle with his. "A long and angry dispute ensued,
which terminated in a strong protest, in which the Commons declared
that their privileges were not the gift of the Crown, but the natural
birthright of English subjects, and that matters of public interest
were within their province."[105] This protest so infuriated the king
that he tore it into pieces, and forthwith dissolved Parliament,
sending Pym, Southampton, and other leaders to prison. This was in
January, 1622.
[Sidenote: Nathaniel Butler and his pamphlet.]
[Sidenote: Some charges and answers:]
As more than a hundred members of this froward Parliament were also
members of the Company, it is not strange that the king should have
watched more eagerly than ever for a chance to attack that corporation.
A favourable opportunity was soon offered him. A certain Nathaniel
Butler, governor of the Bermuda Islands, was accused of extorting a
large sum of money from some Spaniards who had been shipwrecked there,
and very damaging evidence was brought against him; but he seems
to have known how to enlist powerful friends on his side. On being
summoned to England he went first to Virginia, where his services were
in demand during the brief but bloody Indian war that followed upon
the massacre of 1622. Then after arriving in England he published,
in April, 1623, a savage attack upon the London Company, entitled
"The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia." Simultaneously with
the publication of this pamphlet the charges against its author were
dropped and were nevermore heard of. Such a coincidence is extremely
significant; it was commonly believed at the time that Butler bought
the suppression of the charges by turning backbiter. His attack upon
the Company is so frivolous as plainly to indicate its origin in pure
malice. It is interesting as the first of the long series of books
about America printed in England which have sorely irritated their
American readers. Sixteen of the old Virginia settlers who were at
that moment in London answered it with convincing force. Some of this
Butler's accusations, with the answers of the settlers, may fitly
be cited for the side-light they throw upon the state of things in
Virginia, as well as upon the peculiar sinuosities of Stuart kingcraft.
[Sidenote: as to malaria;]
"1. I found the plantations generally seated upon meer salt marishes
full of infectious bogs and muddy creeks and lakes, and thereby
subjected to all those inconveniencies and diseases which are so
commonly found in the most unsound and most unhealthy parts of England,
whereof every country and climate hath some.
"_Answer_: We say that there is no place inhabited but is conveniently
habitable. And for the first plantation, which is Kiccoutan, ...
men may enjoy their healths and live as plentifully as in any part
of England, ... yet that there are marishes in some places we
acknowledge.... As for bogs, we know of none in all the country, and
for the rest of the plantations, as Newport's News, Blunt Point,
Warriscoyak, Martin's Hundred ... and all the plantations right over
against James City, and all the plantations above these (which are
many) ... they are [all] very fruitful, ... pleasant, ... healthful,
and high land, except James City, which yet is as high as Deptford or
Ratcliffe.
[Sidenote: as to wetting one's feet;]
"2. I found the shores and sides of those parts of the main river
where our plantations are settled everywhere so shallow as no boats
can approach the shores, so that--besides the difficulty, danger, and
spoil of goods in the landing of them--people are forced to a continual
wading and wetting of themselves, and that [too] in the prime of
winter, when the ships commonly arrive, and thereby get such violent
surfeits of cold upon cold as seldom leave them until they leave [off]
to live.
"_Answer_: That generally for the plantations at all times from half
flood to half ebb any boat that draws betwixt 3 and 4 foot water may
safely come in and land their goods dry on shore without wading. And
for further clearing of his false objections, the seamen ... do at all
times deliver the goods they bring to the owners dry on shore, whereby
it plainly appears not any of the country people ... are by this means
in danger of their lives. And at ... many plantations below James City,
and almost all above, they may at all times land dry.
[Sidenote: as to dying under hedges;]
"3. The new people that are yearly sent over [who] arrive here (for the
most part very unseasonably in winter) find neither guest-house, inn,
nor any the like place to shroud themselves in at their arrival; [and]
not so much as a stroke is given toward any such charitable work; [so
that] many of [these new comers] by want hereof are not only seen dying
under hedges and in the woods, but being dead lie some of them many
days unregarded and unburied.
"_Answer_: The winter is the most healthful time and season for arrival
of new comers. True it is that as yet there is no guest-house or place
of entertainment for strangers. But we aver it was a late intent ... to
make a general gathering for the building of such a convenient house,
which by this time had been in good forwardness, had it not pleased God
to suffer this disaster to fall out by the Indians. But although there
be no public guest-house, yet are new comers entertained and lodged and
provided for by the governor in private houses. And for any dying in
the fields through this defect, and lying unburied, we are altogether
ignorant; yet that many [persons] die suddenly by the hand of God, we
often see it ... fall out even in this flourishing and plentiful city
[of London] in the midst of our streets. As for dying under hedges,
there is no hedge in all Virginia.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: as to the houses, and their situations.]
"5. Their houses are generally the worst that ever I saw, the meanest
cottages in England being every way equal (if not superior) with the
most of the best. And besides, so improvidently and scatteringly
are they seated one from another as partly by their distance but
especially by the interposition of creeks and swamps ... they offer
all advantages to their savage enemies....
"_Answer_: The houses ... were ... built for use and not for ornament,
and are so far from being so mean as they are reported that throughout
[England] labouring men's houses ... are in no wise generally for
goodness to be compared unto them. And for the houses of men of better
rank and quality, they are so much better and [so] convenient that no
man of quality without blushing can make exception against them. [As]
for the creeks and swamps, every man ... that cannot go by land hath
either a boat or a canoe for the conveying and speedy passage to his
neighbour's house...."[106]
[Sidenote: Object of the charges.]
So go the charges and the answers. It is unnecessary to cite any
further. The animus of Captain Butler's pamphlet is sufficiently
apparent. He wished to make it appear that things were wretchedly
managed in Virginia, and that there was but a meagre and contemptible
result to show for all the treasure that had been spent and all the
lives that had been lost. Whatever could weaken people's faith in the
colony, check emigration, deter subscriptions, and in any way embarrass
the Company, he did not fail to bring forward. Not only were the sites
unhealthy and the houses mean, but the fortifications were neglected,
plantations were abandoned, the kine and poultry were destroyed by
Indians, the assembly enacted laws wilfully divergent from the laws of
England, and speculators kept engrossing wheat and maize and selling
them at famine prices; so said Butler, and knowing how effective a bold
sweeping lie is sure to be, in spite of prompt and abundant refutation,
he ended by declaring that not less than 10,000 persons had been sent
out to Virginia, of whom "through the aforenamed abuses and neglects"
not more than 2,000 still remained alive. Therefore, he added, unless
the dishonest practices of the Company in London and the wretched
bungling of its officials in Virginia be speedily redressed "by some
divine and supreme hand, ... instead of a Plantation it will shortly
get the name of a slaughter house, and [will] justly become both odious
to ourselves and contemptible to all the world."
[Sidenote: The assembly denies the allegations.]
All these allegations were either denied or satisfactorily explained
by the sixteen settlers then in London, and their sixteen affidavits
were duly sworn to before a notary public. Some months afterward,
Captain Butler's pamphlet was laid before the assembly of Virginia
and elaborately refuted. Nothing can be clearer than the fact that
the sympathies of the people in Virginia were entirely on the side of
the Company under its present management, and no fact could be more
honourable to the Company. From first to last the proceedings now to
be related were watched in Virginia with intense anxiety and fierce
indignation.
[Sidenote: An answer demanded of Ferrar.]
On Thursday of Holy Week, 1623, a formal complaint against the Company,
embodying such charges as those I have here recounted, was laid before
the Privy Council, and the Lord Treasurer Cranfield, better known
as Earl of Middlesex, sent notice of it to Nicholas Ferrar, with the
demand that a complete answer to every particular should be returned
by the next Monday afternoon. Ferrar protested against such unseemly
haste, but the Lord Treasurer was inexorable. Then the young man called
together as many of the Company as he could find at an hour's notice
that afternoon; they met in his mother's parlour, and he read aloud
the complaint, which took three hours. Then Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin
Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar were appointed a committee to prepare the
answer. "These three," says our chronicle, "made it midnight ere they
parted; they ate no set meals; they slept not two hours all Thursday
and Friday nights; they met to admire each other's labours on Saturday
night, and sat in judgment on the whole till five o'clock on Sunday
morning; then they divided it equally among six nimble scribes, and
went to bed themselves, as it was high time for them. The transcribers
finished by five o'clock Monday morning; the Company met at six to
review their labours, and by two in the afternoon the answer was
presented at the Council Board."[107]
[Sidenote: A cogent answer is returned.]
[Sidenote: Attempts to corrupt Ferrar.]
This answer was a masterpiece of cogency. It proved the baselessness of
the charges. Either they were complete falsehoods, or they related to
disasters directly connected with the Indian massacre, which was not
due to any provocation on the part of the whites, or else they showed
the effects of mismanagement in Sir Thomas Smith's time, especially
under the tyrannical administration of Argall from which the colony
had not yet fully recovered. In short, such of the charges as really
bore against the Company were successfully shown up as affecting its
old government under Smith and Warwick, and not its new government
under Sandys and Southampton. The latter was cleared of every calumny,
and its absolute integrity and vast efficiency were fully established.
Such, at least, is the decisive verdict of history, but the lords
of the Privy Council were not willing to accept such a result. It
amounted almost to an impeachment of the court party, and it made
them angry. So the Earl of Warwick succeeded in obtaining an order
that Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Rev. Nicholas Ferrar,--as
"chief actors in inditing and penning ... an impertinent declaration
containing bitter invectives and aspersions" should be confined to
their own houses until further notice.[108] The object of this was to
prevent them from conferring with each other. Further hostile inquiries
were prosecuted, and an attempt was made to detach Ferrar from his
associates. One day, as he was answering some queries before the Privy
Council, one of the lords handed him an important official letter
to the governor of Virginia. "Who draws up such papers?" asked the
lord. "The Company," replied Ferrar modestly. "No, no!" interrupted
another lord, "we know your style; these papers are all yours, and
they are masterpieces." The letter was shown to the king, who was
pleased to observe, "Verily, the young man hath much worth in him."
To detach him from the Company the king offered to make him clerk of
the Privy Council or ambassador to the court of Savoy. Both were fine
offers for a man only in his thirtieth year, but Ferrar was not to be
tempted. Then an effort was made to induce him to advise the Company to
surrender its charter, but he refused with some scorn. A great number
of the nobility and gentry, he said, besides merchants and artisans
of the city of London, relying upon the royal charter, had engaged in
a noble enterprise, one of the most honourable that England had ever
undertaken; many planters in Virginia had risked their estates and
lives in it; the Lord had prospered their endeavours, and now no danger
threatened the colony save the malice of its enemies; as for himself he
was not going to abuse his trust by deserting it.
[Sidenote: A board of commissioners.]
While these things were going on, the king appointed a board of
commissioners to investigate the affairs of Virginia, and the spirit
in which they were appointed is sufficiently revealed by the fact
that they all belonged to the disaffected faction in the Company and
held their meetings at the house of Sir Thomas Smith. One of their
number was the vindictive and unscrupulous ex-governor, Sir Samuel
Argall,--which was much like setting the wolf to investigate the
dogs. Some of these commissioners went out to Virginia and tried to
entrap the assembly into asking for a new charter. It was all in vain.
Governor, council, and House of Burgesses agreed that they were
perfectly satisfied with the present state of things and only wanted
to be let alone. Not a morsel of evidence adverse to the present
management of the Company could be obtained from any quarter. On the
contrary, the assembly sent to England an eloquent appeal, afterward
entitled "The Tragical Declaration of the Virginia Assembly," in which
the early sufferings of the colony and its recent prosperity were
passed in review; the document concluded with an expression rather
more forcible than one is accustomed to find in decorous and formal
state papers. After describing the kind of management under which
such creatures as Argall could flourish, the document goes on to say,
"Rather [than] be reduced to live under the like government, we desire
his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over with authority to hang
us."
[Sidenote: Attorney-general's opinion; a _quo warranto_ served.]
Long before this appeal reached England, the final assault upon the
Company had begun. In July, 1623, the attorney-general reported his
opinion that it was advisable for the king to take the government of
Virginia into his own hands. In October an order of the Privy Council
announced that this was to be done. The Company's charter was to be
rescinded, and its deputed powers of sovereignty were to be resumed by
the king. This meant that the king would thereafter appoint the council
for Virginia sitting in London. He would also appoint the governor of
Virginia with his colonial council. Such a transformation would leave
the joint-stock company in existence, but only as a body of traders
without ascertained rights or privileges and entirely dependent upon
royal favour. No settled policy could thereafter be pursued, and
under the circumstances the change was a deathblow to the Company.
Southampton and Ferrar refused to surrender, and referred the question
to their next quarter-sessions to be held in November. Then the king
brought suit against the Company in the court of King's Bench, and a
writ of _quo warranto_ was served.
[Sidenote: Appeal to Parliament.]
[Sidenote: The king refuses to allow the appeal.]
Then came the most interesting moment of all. The only hope of the
Company lay in an appeal to Parliament, and that last card was boldly
played. Early in 1624 the Spanish match, to secure which the miserable
king had for ten years basely truckled and licked the hand of England's
bitterest enemies, was finally broken off. War with Spain was at hand;
a new policy, of helping the German Protestants, and marrying Baby
Charles to a French princess, was to be considered; and much money was
needed. So James reluctantly issued writs for an election, and the
new Parliament, containing Sandys and Ferrar, with many other members
of the Virginia Company, met in February. In April a petition was
presented in behalf of the Virginia Company, and a committee had been
appointed to consider it, when the Speaker read a message from the
king, forbidding Parliament to meddle with the matter. He distinctly
announced the doctrine that the government of colonies was the business
of king and his Privy Council, and that Parliament had nothing to
do with it. This memorable doctrine was just that which afterwards
found favour with the American colonists for very different reasons
from those which recommended it to King James. The Americans took this
view because they were not represented in Parliament, and intended
with their colonial assemblies to hold the crown officials, the royal
governors, in check just as Parliament curbed the Crown. By the middle
of the eighteenth century this had come to be the generally accepted
American doctrine; it is interesting to see it asserted early in the
seventeenth by the Crown itself, and in the interests of absolutism.
[Sidenote: Attorney-general's argument.]
[Sidenote: The charter annulled, June 16, 1624.]
In 1624 Parliament was not in good condition for quarrelling with
the king upon too many issues at once. So it acquiesced, not without
some grumbling, in the royal prohibition, and the petition of the
Virginia Company was laid upon the table. A few weeks later the case
on the _quo warranto_ was argued before the court of King's Bench. The
attorney-general's argument against the charter was truly ingenious.
That charter allowed the Company to carry the king's subjects across
the ocean to Virginia; if such a privilege were to be exercised without
limitation, it might end in conveying all the king's subjects to
America, leaving Great Britain a howling wilderness! Such a privilege
was too great to be bestowed upon any corporate body, and therefore
the charter ought to be annulled. Such logic was irresistible, and
on the 16th of June the chief justice declared "that the Patent or
Charter of the Company of English Merchants trading to Virginia, and
pretending to exercise a power and authority over his Majesty's good
subjects there, should be thenceforth null and void." Next day Thomas
Wentworth, afterward Earl of Strafford, gave vent to his glee in a
private letter: "Methinks, I imagine the Quaternity before this have
had a meeting of comfort and consolation, stirring up each other to
bear it courageously, and Sir Edwin Sandys in the midst of them sadly
sighing forth, Oh, the burden of Virginia." By the Quaternity he meant
Southampton, Sandys, Ferrar, and Cavendish. On the 26th of June the
Privy Council ordered Nicholas Ferrar to bring all the books and papers
of the late Company and hand them over to its custody.
[Sidenote: Ferrar has the records copied.]
[Sidenote: History of a manuscript.]
Ferrar could not disobey the order, but he had made up his mind that
the records of the Company must be preserved, for its justification
in the eyes of posterity. As soon as he saw that the day of doom was
at hand he had copies made. One of Ferrar's dearest friends was the
delightful poet, George Herbert, a young man of his own age, whose
widowed mother had married Sir John Danvers, a prominent member of
the Company. They lived in a fine old house in Chelsea, that had once
been part of the home of Sir Thomas More. There Nicholas Ferrar passed
many a pleasant evening with George Herbert and his eccentric and
skeptical brother, afterward Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and if ever
their talk grew a bit too earnest and warm, we can fancy it mellowed
again as that other sweet poet, Dr. Donne, dropped in, with gentle
Izaak Walton, as used often to happen. In that house of friends, Ferrar
had a clerk locked up with the records until they were all copied,
everything relating to the administrations of Sandys and Southampton,
from the election of the former, in April, 1619, down to June 7, 1624.
The copy was then carefully compared with the original documents, and
its perfect accuracy duly attested by the Company's secretary, Edward
Collingwood. Sir John Danvers then carried the manuscript to the Earl
of Southampton, who exclaimed, as he threw his arms about his neck,
"God bless you, Danvers! I shall keep this with my title-deeds at
Tichfield; it is the evidence of my honour, and I prize it more than
the evidence of my lands." About four months afterward Southampton
died. Forty-three years afterward, in 1667, his son and successor
passed away, and then this precious manuscript was bought from the
executors by William Byrd, of Virginia, father of the famous historian
and antiquary. From the Byrd library it passed into the hands of
William Stith, president of William and Mary College, who used it in
writing his History of Virginia, published at Williamsburg in 1747,
one of the most admirable of American historical works. From Stith's
hands the manuscript passed to his kinsman, Peyton Randolph, president
of the Continental Congress, and after his death in 1775, Thomas
Jefferson bought it. In 1814 ex-president Jefferson sold his library
to the United States, and this manuscript is now in the Library of
Congress, 741 folio pages bound in two volumes. As for the original
documents, they are nowhere to be found among British records; and when
we recollect how welcome their destruction must have been to Sir Thomas
Smith, to the Earl of Warwick, and to James I., we cannot help feeling
that the chest of the Privy Council was not altogether a safe place in
which to keep them.
It is to the copy preserved through the careful forethought of Nicholas
Ferrar that we owe our knowledge of one of the most interesting
chapters in early American history. In the development of Virginia
the overthrow of the great London Company was an event of cardinal
importance. For the moment it was quite naturally bewailed in Virginia
as a direful calamity; but, as we shall presently see, it turned out to
be a blessing in disguise. Stuart despotism gained not one of its ends,
except the momentary gratification of spleen, and self-government in
Virginia, which seemed in peril, went on to take root more deeply and
strongly than before.
FOOTNOTES:
[98] Gardiner, _History of England_, ii. 251.
[99] Stebbing's _Ralegh_, p. 121; cf. Bates, _Central and South
America_, p. 436.
[100] Some lines in sweet Saxon English, written by Raleigh on
the fly-leaf of his Bible, shortly before his death, are worth
remembering:--
"Even such is Time, that takes on trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the record of our days.
Yet from this earth, this grave, this dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust."
[101] Stebbing's _Ralegh_, p. 386.
[102] Gardiner, _History of England_, iii. 161.
[103] Brown's _Genesis_, ii. 1016.
[104] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 413.
[105] Bright, _History of England_, ii. 604.
[106] Neill's _Virginia Company_, pp. 395-401.
[107] Carter's _Ferrar_, p. 71.
[108] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 411.
CHAPTER VII.
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
[Sidenote: Retrospect.]
[Sidenote: Tidewater Virginia.]
From the busy streets of London, from the strife in Parliament and the
Privy Council, we must turn once more to the American wilderness and
observe what progress had been made in Virginia during the seventeen
years of its government by a great joint-stock company. But for a
correct appreciation of the situation we must qualify and limit this
period of seventeen years. The terrible experience of the first three
years left the colony at the point of death, and it was not until the
administration of Sir Thomas Dale that any considerable expansion
beyond Jamestown began. The progress visible in 1624 was mostly an
affair of ten years' duration, dating from the abolition of communism
and the beginnings of tobacco culture. By far the greater part of
this progress had been achieved within the last five years, since the
establishment of self-government and the greater part played by family
life. In 1624 the colony of Virginia extended from the mouth of James
River up nearly as far as the site of Richmond, with plantations on
both banks; and it spread over the peninsula between the James and the
broad stream next to the north of it, which at that time was called the
Charles, but since 1642 has been known as the York River. There were
also a few settlements on the Accomac peninsula east of Chesapeake Bay.
It would be hard to find elsewhere upon the North American coast any
region where the land is so generally and easily penetrable by streams
that can be navigated. The country known as "tidewater Virginia" is a
kind of sylvan Venice. Into the depths of the shaggy woodland for many
miles on either side the great bay the salt tide ebbs and flows. One
can go surprisingly far inland on sea-faring craft, while with a boat
there are but few plantations on the old York peninsula to which one
cannot approach very near. In the absence of good roads this ubiquity
of navigable water was a great convenience, but doubtless the very
convenience of it may have delayed the arduous work of breaking good
land-routes through the wilderness, and thus have tended to maintain
the partial isolation of the planters' estates, to which so many
characteristic features of life in Old Virginia may be traced.
[Sidenote: Receding frontier.]
[Sidenote: The plantations.]
If in 1624 we had gone up stream to Werowocomoco, where Smith had
broken the ice with his barge fifteen years before, we should probably
have found very little of its strange barbaric life remaining. The
first backward step of the Indian before the encroaching progress
of Englishmen had been taken. The frontier was fast receding to
the Pamunkey region along the line joining the site of West Point
with that of Cold Harbor; and from that time forward a perpetually
receding frontier of barbarism was to be one of the most profoundly
and variously significant factors in the life of English-speaking
America until the census of 1890 should announce that such a frontier
could no longer be definitely located. In the last year of James I.
the grim Opekankano and his warriors still held the Pamunkey River;
in that neighbourhood and to the north of it one might have seen
symptoms of the wild frontier life of the white hunter and trapper.
Returning thence to the great bay, the plantation called Dale's Gift
on the Accomac shore would have little about it that need detain us,
and so sweeping across from Cape Charles to Point Comfort, we should
come to Elizabeth City, named for King James's daughter Elizabeth,
Queen of Bohemia. The only plantation here, standing like a sentinel
to guard the principal avenue into the colony, bears the name of
the last treasurer of the Company, curtailed into Hampton. The next
borough bears the name of Southampton's enemy, the Earl of Warwick, and
opposite are the plantations on Warrasqueak Bay. Passing Jamestown,
we arrive at the mouth of the Chickahominy, above which lies an
extensive territory known as Charles City, with the plantations of
Wyanoke and Westover, while over on the south side of the James the
settlements known as Martin Brandon, Flowerdieu Hundred, and Bermuda
successively come into sight and disappear. Then we sail around the
City of Henricus, and passing the ruins of Falling Creek, destroyed by
the Indians, we come at length to the charming place that Smith called
Nonesuch. Here, a few miles below the spot where Richmond is in future
to stand, we reach once more the frontier. Beyond are endless stretches
of tangled and mysterious woods through which the sturdy Newport once
vainly tried to find his way to some stream flowing into the Pacific
Ocean. Here we may turn our prow and make our way down to Jamestown,
where the House of Burgesses is in session.
[Sidenote: Boroughs and burgesses.]
[Sidenote: Boroughs and hundreds.]
It is called a House of Burgesses because its members are regarded
as the representatives of boroughs, and such a name sounds queer as
applied to little areas of scattered farms in the forest. Still more
strange is the epithet "city" for tracts of woodland several miles
in extent, and containing half a dozen widely isolated plantations.
The apparent absurdity is emphasized on the modern map, where such
names as Charles City and James City are simply names of counties. How
came such names first to be used in such senses? One's mind naturally
reverts to what goes on to-day in the Far West, where geographical
names, like doubtful promissory notes, must usually be taken with heavy
discount for an uncertain future, where in every such appellation
there lurks the hope of a boom, and any collection of three or four
log-cabins, with a saw-mill and whiskey-shop, surrounded by a dozen
acres of blackened tree-stumps, may forthwith appear in the Postal
Guide under some such title as Chain Lightning City. In oldest Virginia
we may perhaps see marks of such a spirit of buoyant confidence in
such names as Charles City or the City of Henricus. No doubt Sir
Thomas Dale, when he fortified the little Dutch Gap peninsula and
marked out its streets, believed himself to be founding a true city
with urban destinies awaiting it. This explanation, however, does
not cover the whole case. Whatever the title of each individual
settlement in oldest Virginia,--whether plantation, or hundred, or
city,--all were alike conceived, for legal and political purposes,
as equivalent to boroughs, although they were not thus designated.
Now the primary meaning of the word "borough" is "fortress," and in
early English usage a borough was a small and thickly peopled hundred
surrounded by a durable wall. A "hundred" was a small aggregation of
townships united by a common responsibility for the good behaviour of
its people; it was therefore the smallest area for the administration
of justice, the smallest social community which possessed a court.
Ordinarily the hundred was a rural community, but that special
compact and fortified form of it known as the borough retained all
the legal features of the ordinary hundred; it had its own court,
and was responsible for its own malefactors and vagrants. In old
English boroughs the responsible men--those who owned property, and
paid taxes, and chose representatives--were the burgesses. Bearing
always in mind this equivalence between the borough and the hundred,
we may note further that in early times the hundred was a unit for
military purposes; it was about such a community as could furnish to
the general levy a company of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit
of representation in the ancient English shire-moot or county court.
Now in oldest Virginia the colonial assembly, when instituted in 1619,
the earliest legislature of civilized men in the western hemisphere,
was patterned after the old English county court, and it was natural
that its units should be conceived as hundreds and in some instances
called so. Moreover, there are indications that at times the hundred
was regarded as a military division, and also as the smallest area for
the administration of justice, as in the law passed in 1624 providing
that Charles City and Elizabeth City should hold monthly courts.[109]
Whatever names the early settlers of Virginia gave to their settlements
individually, they seem to have regarded them all in the legal light of
hundreds, and as they were familiar with the practical equivalence of
the borough as a unit for judicial and representative purposes, it was
natural that when they came to choose a general assembly they should
speak of its members as if they were representatives of boroughs.
They were familiar with burgesses in England, but the designations
"hundred-men" and "hundred-elders" had become obsolete.
[Sidenote: The houses.]
[Sidenote: Labourers.]
[Sidenote: Indians.]
Resuming our pilgrimage through the Virginia of 1624, we find no walls
of massive masonry with frowning turrets encompassing these rudimentary
boroughs, but at the most exposed points we meet with stout wooden
blockhouses and here and there a row of palisades. At some places
there are wharves for the convenient shipping of tobacco, but now and
then, if the tide is not just right, we may be in danger of wetting our
feet in going ashore, about which that ill-disposed Captain Butler has
lately made so much fuss. The wooden frame houses, having been built
without regard to æsthetic effects, with beams here and there roughly
hewn and boards not always smoothly planed, are not so attractive in
outward appearance as they might be, but they are roomy and well-aired,
and the settlers already point to them with some degree of pride as
more comfortable than the houses of labouring men in England. These
houses usually stand at wide intervals, and nowhere, perhaps, except
at Henricus and Jamestown, would one see them clustering in a village
with streets. Here and there one might come across a handsomer and
more finished mansion, like an English manor house, with cabins for
servants and farm buildings at some distance. Of negroes scarcely any
are to be seen, only twenty-two all told, in this population of perhaps
4,000 souls. Cheap labour is supplied by white servants, bound to their
masters by indentures for some such term as six or seven years; they
are to some extent a shiftless and degraded set of creatures gathered
from the slums and jails of English seaport towns, but many of them
are of a better sort. Of red men, since the dreadful massacre of two
years ago, one sees but few; they have been driven off to the frontier,
the alliance cemented by the marriage of Pocahontas is at an end, and
no more can white men be called Powhatans. On this point the statute
book speaks in no uncertain tones: "Ffor the Indians we hould them our
irrecosileable enimies," and it is thought fit that if any of them
be found molesting cattle or lurking about any plantation, "then the
commander shall have power by virtue of this act to rayse a sufficient
partie and fall out uppon them, and persecute them as he shall finde
occasion."[110]
[Sidenote: Agriculture, etc.]
In the plantations, thus freed from the presence of Indians, European
domestic animals have become plenty. Horses, indeed, are not yet so
much in demand as boats and canoes, but oxen draw the plough, the cows
are milked night and morning, sheep and goats browse here and there,
pigs and chickens are innumerable. Pigeons coo from the eves, and
occasionally one comes upon a row of murmurous bee-hives. The broad
clearings are mostly covered with the cabbage-like tobacco plant, but
there are also many fields of waving wheat and barley, and many more
of the tasselled Indian corn. John Smith's scheme for manufacturing
glass and soap has not yet been abandoned; the few workmen from Poland,
brought here by him, have remained, or else others have come in place
of them, for we find the House of Burgesses passing a statute admitting
them to the franchise and other privileges of English citizenship,
because of their value to the commonwealth in these branches of
industry. Skilled workmen of another sort have been sent over by
Nicholas Ferrar from France, for since mulberries grow in Virginia it
has been thought that silk-worms might be profitably raised here, but
such hopes are not destined to be realized.
[Sidenote: Tobacco.]
Such was the outward aspect of things along the banks of the James
River in the year when, amid general grief and forebodings, the London
Company was dissolved; and such it continued to be for many a year
to come, save that the cultivated area increased in extent and the
settlers in number, and that in spite of divers efforts to check it,
the raising of tobacco encroached more and more upon all other forms
of industry, tending to crush them out of existence, while at the
same time the plantations grew larger and the demand for cheap labour
was vastly increased. For some time the cultivation of Indian corn
assumed considerable proportions, so that not only was there enough
for home consumption, but in 1634 more than ten thousand bushels were
exported to Winthrop's new colony on Massachusetts Bay. Nevertheless
the encroachments of tobacco went on without cessation, until the
features of social life in old Virginia came to be those of a wealthy
and powerful community economically based upon one single form of
agricultural industry.
[Sidenote: Literature.]
In the Virginia of 1624 one could not look for any highly developed
forms of social recreation, or for means of education or literary
attainment. Various episodes of farm work, such as the harvesting
of the crops, or now and then the raising of the frame of a house
or barn, seem to have been occasions for a gathering of neighbours
with some sort of merrymaking, very much as in other primitive rural
communities. Among the leading colonists were men of university
education who brought with them literary tastes, and in their houses
might have been found ponderous tomes of controversial theology, as
well as those little thin quarto tracts of political discussion that
nowadays often fetch such fabulous prices. Captain John Smith was
spending his last years quietly in England, making maps and writing or
editing books. His "General History of Virginia," published in 1624,
can hardly fail to have been read with interest in the colony; and the
same ship that brought it may well have brought the first folio edition
of Shakespeare's complete works, which came from the press in the
preceding year. Literary production of a certain sort went on in the
colony. Such tracts as Ralph Hamor's "True Discourse" and Whitaker's
"Good News from Virginia," though books of rare interest and value,
will perhaps hardly come under the category of pure literature. But the
translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by George Sandys, youngest brother
of Sir Edwin, has been well known and admired by scholars from that
time to our own. George Sandys came to Virginia in 1621 as treasurer
of the colony, fortified with some rather dull verses from the poet
laureate, Michael Drayton:--
"And worthy George, by industry and use
Let's see what lines Virginia will produce;
Entice the Muses thither to repair,
Entreat them gently, train them to that air;
For they from hence may thither hap to fly."
On the bank of James River the worthy George entreated the Muses with
success and wrote the greater part of his poetical version, which was
published at London in 1626.
[Sidenote: Education.]
[Sidenote: Project for a university.]
But the Muses could not be enticed to stay long in Virginia without
some provision for higher education there, and this was well understood
by Sir Edwin Sandys and the enlightened gentlemen who supported him. In
1621 the Company resolved that funds should be appropriated "for the
erecting of a public free school ... for the education of children and
grounding of them in the principles of religion. Civility of life and
humane learning," said the committee's report, "seemed to carry with
it the greatest weight and highest consequence unto the plantations
as that whereof both Church and Commonwealth take their original
foundation and happy estate, this being also like[ly] to prove a work
most acceptable unto the planters, through want whereof they have
been hitherto constrained to their great costs to send their children
from thence hither to be taught." Rev. Patrick Copeland, a missionary
returning from the East Indies, raised £70 toward the endowment of
this school, and was busily engaged in doing more for it. It was
accordingly called the East India School, it was to be established in
Charles City, and its courses of study were to be preparatory to those
of a university which was to be set up in the city of Henricus. Great
interest was felt in this university. Like Harvard College, founded
somewhat later, it was designed not only for the education of white
youths but also for civilizing and missionary work among the Indians.
The Bishop of London raised by subscription £1,000 for the enterprise;
one anonymous benefactor gave a silver communion service; another,
who signed himself "Dust and Ashes," sent £550, and promised, after
certain progress should have been made, to add £450 more; this man
was afterward discovered to be a member of the Company, named Gabriel
Barber. The elder Nicholas Ferrar left £300 in his will, and various
contributions were added by his sons. A tract of land in Henricus was
appropriated for the site of the college, and George Thorpe was sent
out to be its rector, or, as we should say, its president. But Thorpe,
as well as others who were interested in the enterprise, perished in
the Indian massacre of 1622. It seems that Copeland was about to be
sent to take his place, and the enterprise was about to be vigorously
pushed on by Ferrar and his friends, when the overthrow of the Company
took away all control over Virginian affairs from the people most
interested in this work. So the scheme for a college remained in a
state of suspended vitality for seventy years, until Dr. Blair revived
it in 1692, and established it in the town of Williamsburg.
[Sidenote: Puritans and Liberal Churchmen.]
Everybody knows that the college of William and Mary is the oldest in
the United States, after Harvard. It is not so generally known that
the former was planned and all but established in 1622, eight years
before Winthrop and his followers came to Massachusetts Bay. It is a
just and wholesome pride that New England people feel in recalling the
circumstances under which Harvard College was founded, in a little
colony but six years of age, still struggling against the perils of
the wilderness and the enmity of its sovereign. Such an event is quite
properly cited in illustration of the lofty aims and intelligent
foresight of the founders of Massachusetts. But it should not be
forgotten that aims equally lofty and foresight equally intelligent
were shown by the men who from 1619 to 1624 controlled the affairs of
Virginia. One of the noblest features in the great Puritan movement
was its zeal for education, elementary education for everybody and
higher education for all who could avail themselves of it. It is
important to remember that this zeal for education, as well as the zeal
for political liberty, was not confined to the Puritans. Within the
established Church of England and never feeling a desire to leave it,
were eminent men who to the political principles of Pym joined a faith
in education as strong as Locke's. The general temper of these men, of
whom Richard Hooker was the illustrious master, was broadly tolerant.
Sir Edwin Sandys was friendly to the Leyden Pilgrims, and it was under
his administration that the Virginia Company granted them the patent
under which they would have founded their colony on the coast of New
Jersey or Delaware, had not foul weather driven the Mayflower to Cape
Cod. It was Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar that were most energetic in the
attempt to found a college in Virginia, and there were some curious
points of resemblance between their situation in 1622 and the situation
of Winthrop and his friends while they were laying the foundations of
Harvard College. In 1622, while James I. was plotting the overthrow
of the London Company, the horrors of Indian massacre, as sudden as
lightning from a cloudless sky, fell upon the people of Virginia. In
1637 the people of Massachusetts had the Pequot war on their hands, and
Charles I. was plotting the overthrow of the Company of Massachusetts
Bay, against whose charter he was on the point of issuing a writ of
_quo warranto_, when in St. Giles's church at Edinburgh one Sunday old
Jenny Geddes threw her camp-stool at the bishop's head, and in the
ensuing turmoil American affairs were quite forgotten.
[Sidenote: Massachusetts and Virginia.]
The comparison reminds us that the Company of Massachusetts Bay knew
how to profit by the fate of its great predecessor, the London Company
for Virginia. In the summer of 1629, when things were looking very dark
in England, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company held a meeting
at Cambridge and decided to carry their company, with its charter,
across the ocean to New England, where they might work out their
purposes without so much danger from royal interference. This transfer
of the Company to America was the most fundamental circumstance in
the early history of New England. The mere physical fact of distance
transformed the commercial company into a self-governing republic,
which for more than fifty years managed its own affairs in almost
entire independence of the British government. Difficulty of access and
infrequency of communication were the safeguards of the Massachusetts
Bay Company. If it had held its meetings and promulgated its measures
in London, its life would not have been worth a five years purchase. It
had the fate of the Virginia Company for a warning, and most adroitly
did it profit by the lesson. If the Virginia Company could have been
transferred bodily to America in 1620, it might perhaps have become
similarly changed into a self-governing semi-independent republic; the
interests of the Company would have been permanently identified with
those of the colony, and the course of Virginian history might have
been profoundly affected. As it was, Virginia attained through the fall
of the Company to such measure of self-government as it had throughout
the colonial period, a self-government much like that of Massachusetts
after 1692, but far less complete than that of Massachusetts before
1684.
[Sidenote: Death of James I.]
It was not the intention of James I. that the overthrow of the Company
should contribute in any way to increase the liberties of the colony
of Virginia. All colonizable territory claimed by Great Britain was,
in his opinion, just so much royal domain, something which came to him
by inheritance like the barony of Renfrew or the manor of Windsor; it
was his to do what he liked with it, and for settlers in such territory
no better law was needed than such as he could make for them himself.
A shadow of doubt as to his own omniscience was never one of James's
weaknesses, and no sooner had the Company's charter been annulled than
he set himself to work to draw up a constitution for Virginia. It was
work of a sort that he thoroughly enjoyed, but what might have come of
it will never be known, for while he was busy with it there came upon
him what the doctors called a tertian ague, which carried him off in
March, 1625.
[Sidenote: Effect of the downfall of the Company.]
In the history of England no era is marked by the accession of Charles
I. In its policy and methods, and in the political problems at issue,
his reign was merely the continuation of his father's. But in the
history of Virginia his accession marks an important era. For if James
had lived to complete his constitution for Virginia he would in all
probability have swept away the representative government introduced
by Sir Edwin Sandys; but Charles allowed it to stand. As the situation
was left by the death of James, so it remained without essential change
until 1776. The House of Burgesses was undisturbed, but the governor
and council were thenceforth appointed by the crown. The colony was
thus left less independent than it would have been if the Company,
with its power of electing its own executive officers, could have been
transferred bodily to Virginia; but it was left more independent than
it would have been if the existence of the Company had been continued
in London. The change from governors appointed by the Company to
governors appointed by the crown was a relaxation of the supervision
which England exercised over Virginia. For the Company could devote all
its attention to the affairs of the colony, but the crown could not.
Especially in such reigns as those of the two Charleses, the attention
of the crown was too much absorbed with affairs in Great Britain to
allow it to interfere decisively with the course of events in Virginia.
The colony was thus in the main thrown back upon its own resources,
and such a state of things was most favourable to its wholesome
development. The Company, after all, was a commercial corporation,
and the main object of its existence was to earn money for its
shareholders. The pursuit of that object was by no means always sure to
coincide with the best interests of the colony. Moreover, although the
government of the Company from 1619 to 1624 was conducted with energy
and sagacity, disinterestedness, honesty, and breadth of view such as
history has seldom seen rivalled, yet there was no likelihood that such
would always be the case. Such a combination of men in responsible
positions as Southampton and Sandys and Ferrar is too rare to be
counted upon. The Company might have passed for a weary while under
the control of incompetent or unscrupulous men, and to a young colony
like Virginia such a contingency would have been not only disagreeable
but positively dangerous. No community, indeed, can long afford to
have its affairs administered by a body of men so far away as to be
out of immediate touch with it. On the other hand, even if we could
suppose a commercial company to go on year after year managing a colony
with so much intelligence and sympathy as the London Company showed
in its last days, such a situation would not be permanently wholesome
for the colony. What men need is not fostering or coddling, but the
chance to give free play to their individual capacities. If coddling
and fostering could make a colony thrive, the French in Canada ought to
have dominated North America. From all points of view, therefore, it
seems to have been well for Virginia that the Company fell when it did.
It established self-government there, set its machinery successfully to
work, and then vanished from the scene, like the Jinni in some Oriental
tale, leaving its good gift behind.
[Sidenote: The virus of liberty.]
The boon of self-government was so congenial to the temper of the
Virginians that they would doubtless have contrived somehow to obtain
it sooner or later. Hutchinson tells us that when the second American
house of representatives was instituted, namely, that of Massachusetts
Bay in 1634, the people were well aware that no provision for anything
of the sort had been made in of their charter, but they assumed that
the right to such representation was implied by that clause of the
charter which reserved to them the natural rights of Englishmen;[111]
and elsewhere the same eminent historian quaintly speaks of a House
of Burgesses as having _broken out_ in Virginia in 1619, as if there
were an incurable virus of liberty in the English blood, as if it
were something that must come out as inevitably as original sin. But
if James I. had lived longer, as I have already observed, he would
undoubtedly have made an effort to repress this active spirit of
liberty. The colonists, on hearing of the downfall of the Company, were
in great alarm lest they should lose their House of Burgesses, and
have some arbitrary governor appointed to rule over them, perhaps the
hated Argall himself, whom we have seen King James selecting as one of
a board of commissioners to investigate affairs in Virginia. In 1621,
when for some reason or other the amiable and popular Yeardley had
asked to be relieved of the duties of governor, Argall had tried to get
himself appointed in his place, but the Company had chosen Sir Francis
Wyatt, who held the office until 1626, while Yeardley remained in
Virginia as a member of the council. In 1625, as soon as the assembly
heard of King James's death, they sent Yeardley to England to pay their
respects to King Charles and to assure him that the people of Virginia
were thoroughly satisfied with their government and hoped that no
changes would be made in it.
[Sidenote: Charles I. and the tobacco trade.]
Now it happened that Charles had a favour to ask of the settlers in
Virginia, and was in the right sort of mood for a bargain. He was
no more in love than his father with the many-tongued beast called
Parliament, he saw how comfortably his brother-in-law of France was
getting along without such assistance, and he was determined if
possible to do likewise. But to get along without parliaments a poor
king must have some means of getting money. The Virginia tobacco crop
was fast becoming a great source of wealth; why should not the king
himself go into the tobacco trade? If all tobacco brought to England
from Virginia could be consigned to him, then he could retail it to
consumers at his own price and realize a gigantic profit; or, what was
perhaps still better, having obtained this monopoly, he could farm
it out to various agents who would be glad to pay roundly for the
privilege. Now the only way in which he could treat with the people
of Virginia on such matters was through the representatives of the
people. Accordingly, when Governor Wyatt in 1626 had occasion to return
to England, the king sent back Sir George Yeardley as royal governor,
which under the circumstances was a most emphatic assurance that the
wishes of the settlers should be granted. Furthermore, in a message to
their representatives Charles graciously addressed them as "Our trusty
and well-beloved Burgesses of the Grand Assembly of Virginia," and
thus officially recognized that house as a coördinate branch of the
colonial government. Some arrangements made with regard to the tobacco
trade were calculated to please the colonists. James I., under the
influence of his mentor, Count Gondomar, had browbeaten the Company
into an arrangement by which they consented to import into England not
more than 60,000 or less than 40,000 pounds of tobacco yearly from
the Spanish colonies. Charles I. on the other hand prohibited the
importation of Spanish tobacco, so that Virginia and the Bermudas had
a monopoly of the market. In spite of this friendly attitude of the
king toward the colonists, he never succeeded in becoming the sole
purchaser of their tobacco at a stipulated price. The assembly was
ready from time to time to entertain various proposals, but it never
went so far as that; and if Charles, in sanctioning this little New
World parliament, counted upon getting substantial aid in ignoring his
Parliament at home, he was sadly disappointed.
[Sidenote: The first American legislature.]
It is now time for us to attend a session of this House of Burgesses,
to make a report of its work, and to mention some of the vicissitudes
which it encountered in the course of the reign of Charles I. The
place of meeting was the wooden church at Jamestown, 50 feet in length
by 20 in width, built in 1619, for Lord Delaware's church had become
dilapidated; a solid brick church, 56 feet by 28, was built there in
1639. From the different plantations and hundreds the burgesses came
mostly in their barges or sloops to Jamestown. In 1634 the colony was
organized into counties and parishes, and the burgesses thenceforth
represented counties, but they always kept their old title. At first
the governor, council, and burgesses met together in a single assembly,
just as in Massachusetts until 1644, just as in England the Lords
and Commons usually sat together before 1339.[112] A member of this
Virginia parliament must take his breakfast of bacon and hoe-cake
betimes, for the meeting was called together at the third beat of the
drum, one hour after sunrise. The sessions were always opened with
prayers, and every absence from this service was punished with a fine
of one shilling. The fine for absence during the whole day was half a
crown. In the choir of the church sat the governor and council, their
coats trimmed with gold lace. By the statute of 1621, passed in this
very church, no one was allowed to wear gold lace except these high
officials and the commanders of hundreds, a class of dignitaries who
in 1634 were succeeded by the county lieutenants. In the body of the
church, facing the choir, sat the burgesses in their best attire, with
starched ruffs, and coats of silk or velvet in bright colours. All sat
with their hats on, in imitation of the time-honoured custom of the
House of Commons, an early illustration of the democratic doctrine, "I
am as good as you." These burgesses had their speaker, as well as their
clerk and sergeant-at-arms. Such was the first American legislature,
and two of its acts in the year 1624 were especially memorable. One
was the declaration, passed without any dissenting voice, "that the
governor shall not lay any taxes or impositions upon the colony,
their lands or commodities, otherway than by the authority of the
general assembly, to be levied and employed as the said assembly shall
appoint." The other was the punishment of Edward Sharpless, clerk of
the house. When the king's commissioners to inquire into the affairs
of Virginia asked for the public records of the colony the assembly
refused to show them, albeit they were ready to answer questions
propounded in a becoming temper. But the commissioners practised upon
Sharpless and induced him to furnish them with a copy of the records,
whereupon the assembly condemned the said Sharpless to stand in the
pillory and have half of one ear cut off.
[Sidenote: Martin's case.]
[Sidenote: Education of Indians.]
This general assembly was both a legislative and a judicial body. It
enacted laws and prescribed the penalties for breaking them, it tried
before a jury persons accused of crime and saw that due punishment
was inflicted upon those who were adjudged guilty, it determined
civil causes, assessed the amount of damages, and saw that they were
collected. From sweeping principles of constitutional law down to
the pettiest sumptuary edicts, there was nothing which this little
parliament did not superintend and direct. On one occasion, "the
delegates from Captain John Martin's plantation were excepted to
because of a peculiar clause in his patent releasing him from obeying
any order of the colony except in times of war." A few days afterward
the said Captain Martin appeared at the bar of the house, and the
speaker asking whether he would relinquish the particular clause
exempting him from colonial authority, replied that he would not yield
any part of his patent. The assembly then resolved that the burgesses
of his plantation were not entitled to seats.[113] Such exemptions of
individual planters by especial license from the home government,
although rare, were of course anomalies not to be commended; in some
cases they proved to be nuisances, and in course of time all were got
rid of. From this constitutional question the assembly turned to the
conversion of the red men, and enacted that each borough or hundred
should obtain from the Indians by just and fair means a certain number
of Indian children to be educated "in true religion and a civil course
of life; of which children the most towardly boys in wit and graces
of nature [are] to be brought up by them in the first elements of
literature, so as to be fitted for the college intended for them,
that from thence they may be sent to that work of conversion." Few
enactments of any legislature have ever been better intended or less
fruitful than this.
[Sidenote: Drunkards.]
It was moreover enacted that any person found drunk was for the first
offence to be privately reproved by the minister; the second time
this reproof was to be publicly administered; the third time the
offender must be put in irons for twelve hours and pay a fine; for any
subsequent offences he must be severely punished at the discretion of
the governor and council.
[Sidenote: Dress.]
To guard the community against excessive vanity in dress, it was
enacted that for all public contributions every unmarried man must be
assessed in church "according to his own apparel;" and every married
man must be assessed "according to his own and his wife's apparel."
[Sidenote: Flirting.]
Not merely extravagance in dress, but such social misdemeanours as
flirting received due legislative condemnation. Pretty maids were known
to encourage hopes in more than one suitor, and gay deceivers of the
sterner sex would sometimes seek to win the affections of two or more
women at the same time. Wherefore it was enacted that "every minister
should give notice in his church that what man or woman soever should
use any word or speech tending to a contract of marriage to two several
persons at one time ... as might entangle or breed scruples in their
consciences, should for such their offense, either undergo corporal
correction [by whipping] or be punished by fine or otherwise, according
to the quality of the person so offending."[114]
[Sidenote: Scandal.]
[Sidenote: Clergymen.]
Men were held to more strict accountability for the spoken or written
word than in these shameless modern days. One of the most prominent
settlers we find presenting a petition to the assembly to grant him
due satisfaction against a neighbour who has addressed to him a letter
"wherein he taxeth him both unseemly and amiss of certain things
wherein he was never faulty." Speaking against the governor or any
member of the council was liable to be punished with the pillory. It
was also imprudent to speak too freely about clergymen, who were held
in great reverence. No planter could dispose of so much as a pound
of tobacco until he had laid aside a certain specified quantity as
his assessment toward the minister's salary, which was thus assured
even in the worst times, so far as legislation could go. It was
enacted that "noe man shall disparage a mynister whereby the myndes
of his parishoners may be alienated from him and his mynistrie prove
less effectuall, upon payne of severe censure of the governor and
councell."[115] At the same time clergymen were warned against unseemly
practices in terms so concrete as to raise a suspicion that such
warning may have been needed. "Mynisters shall not give themselves to
excesse in drinking or ryott, spending their tyme idelie by day or
by night playing at dice, cards, or any other unlawfull game, but at
all tymes convenient they shall heare or reade somewhat of the holy
scriptures, or shall occupie themselves with some other honest studies
or exercise, alwayes doinge the things which shall apperteyne to
honestie and endeavour to profitt the church of God, having alwayes in
mind that they ought to excell all others in puritie of life, should be
examples to the people, to live well and christianlie."[116]
[Sidenote: Sabbath-breaking.]
The well-being of Virginia society was further protected by sundry
statutes such as the one which punished profane swearing by a fine
of one shilling per oath. "For the better observation of the Saboth"
it was enacted that no person "shall take a voyage vppon the same,
except it be to church or for other causes of extreme necessitie,"
under penalty of forfeiting twenty pounds of tobacco for each offence.
A similar fine was imposed for firing a gun upon Sunday, unless it
might be for defence against the Indians. Selling arms or ammunition
to Indians was punished by imprisonment for life, with confiscation
of goods. Every master of a family was required, under penalty of
ten pounds of tobacco, to bring with him to church every Sunday a
serviceable gun with plenty of powder and shot.
[Sidenote: Strong drink.]
Stringent legislation protected the rights of thirsty persons. "Whereas
there hath been great abuse by the vnreasonable rates enacted by
ordinary keepers, and retaylers of wine and strong waters," maximum
prices were established as follows: for Spanish wines 30 lbs. of
tobacco per gallon, for Madeira 20 lbs., for French wines 15 lbs.,
for brandy 40 lbs., for "the best sorte of all English strong waters"
80 lbs.; and any vender charging above these rates was to be fined at
double the rate. For corrupting or "sophisticating" good liquor by
fraudulent admixtures, a fine was imposed at the discretion of the
commissioners of the county courts. The inn-keeper who sold wines and
spirits to his guests did so at his own risk, for such debts were not
recoverable at law.[117]
[Sidenote: Forestallers.]
The ancient prejudice against forestalling survives in the following
statute, which would make havoc of the business of some modern brokers:
"Whatsoever person or persons shall buy or cause to be bought any
marchandize, victualls, or any other thinge, comminge by land or
water to the markett to be sold, or make any bargaine, contract or
promise for the haveinge or buyinge of the same ... before the said
marchandize, victualls, or other thinge shall bee at the markett
readie to be sold; or make any motion by word, letter or message or
otherwise to any person or persons for the enhaunsing of the price,
or dearer sellinge of any thinge or thinges above mentioned, or else
disswade, move, or stirr any person or persons cominge to the marquett,
to abstaine or forbeare to bringe or conveye any of the things above
rehearsed to any markett as aforesayd, shall be deemed and adjudged a
forestaller. And yf any person or persons shall offend in the things
before recited and beinge thereof dulie convicted or attaynted shall
for his or theire first offence suffer imprisonment by the space of
two mounthes without baile or maine-prize, and shall also loose and
forfeite the value of the goods soe by him or them bought or had as
aforesayd; and for a second offence ... shall suffer imprisonment by
the space of one halfe yeare ... and shall loose the double value
of all the goods ... soe bought ... and for the third offence ...
shall be sett on the pillorie ... and loose and forfeit all the
goods and chattels that he or they then have to theire owne use, and
also be committed to prison, there to remayne duringe the Governor's
pleasure."[118]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The kingdom of Virginia.]
Edmund Spenser, in his dedication of the "Faëry Queene," in 1590, calls
Elizabeth the queen of England, France, and Ireland, and of Virginia,
thus characterizing as a kingdom the vast and vague domain in the
New World which she was appropriating. Soon after the downfall of the
Virginia Company, the document containing Charles I.'s appointment of
William Claiborne as secretary of state in the colony mentioned it as
"our kingdom of Virginia;" and the phrase occurs in other writings of
the time. It is a phrase that seems especially appropriate for the
colony after it had come to be a royal province, directly dependent
upon the king for its administration. During the reign of Charles I.
the relations of the kingdom of Virginia to the mother country were
marked by few memorable incidents. In this respect the contrast with
the preceding reign is quite striking. One must read the story in the
original state papers, correspondence, and pamphlets of the time, in
order to realize to what an extent the colony was cut loose by the
overthrow of the Company. The most interesting and important questions
that came up were connected with the settlement of Maryland, but before
we enter upon that subject, a few words are needed on the succession of
royal governors in Virginia.
[Sidenote: A convivial governor.]
The commission of Yeardley in 1626 named Sir John Harvey as his
successor. When Yeardley died in 1627, Harvey had not arrived upon the
scene, and needed to be notified. In such cases it was the business
of the council to appoint a governor _ad interim_, and the council
appointed one of the oldest and most honoured settlers, Francis West,
brother of the late Lord Delaware. After one year of service business
called West to England, and his place was taken by Dr. John Pott, who
held the government until Sir John Harvey's arrival in March, 1630.
This Dr. Pott is described as "a Master of Arts, ... well practised
in chirurgery and physic, and expert also in distilling of waters,
[besides] many other ingenious devices."[119] It seems that he was
likewise very fond of tasting distilled waters, and at times was more
of a boon companion than quite comported with his dignity, especially
after he had come to be governor. A letter of George Sandys to a friend
in London says of Dr. Pott, "at first he kept company too much with
his inferiors, who hung upon him while his good liquor lasted. After,
he consorted with Captain Whitacres, a man of no good example, with
whom he has gone to Kecoughtan."[120] What was done by the twain at
Kecoughtan is not matter of record, but we are left with a suggestion
of the darkest possibilities of a carouse.
After Harvey's arrival ex-Governor Pott was arrested, and held to
answer two charges: one was for having abused the powers entrusted to
him by pardoning a culprit who had been convicted of wilful murder; the
other was for stealing cattle. The first charge was a matter of common
notoriety; on the second Dr. Pott was tried by a jury and found guilty.
The ex-governor was not only a pardoner of felony, but a felon himself.
The affair reads like a scene in comic opera. Some reluctance was felt
about inflicting vulgar punishment upon an educated man of good social
position; so he was not sent to jail but confined in his own house,
while Sir John Harvey wrote to the king for instructions in the matter.
He informed the king that Dr. Pott was by far the best physician in
the colony, and indeed the only one "skilled in epidemicals," and
recommended that he should be pardoned. Accordingly the doctor was set
free and forthwith resumed his practice.
[Sidenote: Growth of Virginia.]
[Sidenote: Other colonies.]
Soon it was Governor Harvey's turn to get into difficulties. How he was
"thrust out" from his government in 1635 and restored to it by Charles
I. in 1637 will best be told in a future chapter in connection with
the affairs of Maryland. After Harvey's final departure in 1639, Sir
Francis Wyatt was once more governor for three years, and then came the
famous Sir William Berkeley, who remained for five-and-thirty years the
most conspicuous figure in Virginia. When Berkeley arrived upon the
scene, in 1642, on the eve of the great Civil War, he received from
Wyatt the government of a much greater Virginia than that over which
Wyatt was ruling in 1624. Those eighteen years of self-government had
been years of remarkable prosperity and progress. Instead of 4,000
English and 22 negroes, the population now numbered 15,000 English and
300 negroes. Moreover, Virginia was no longer the only English colony.
In 1624 there were no others, except the little band of about 200
Pilgrims at Plymouth. In 1642 the population of New England numbered
26,000, distributed among half-a-dozen self-governing colonies. There
was also a community of Dutchmen laying claim to the whole region
between the Mohawk valley and Delaware Bay, with a flourishing town
on Manhattan Island in the finest commercial situation on the whole
Atlantic coast. The Virginians did not relish the presence of these
Dutchmen, for they too laid claim to that noble tract of country. The
people of Virginia had made the first self-supporting colony and felt
that they had established a claim upon the middle zone. The very name
Virginia had not yet ceased to cling to it. In books of that time one
may read of the town of New Amsterdam upon the island of Manhattan in
Virginia. In 1635 a party of Virginians went up to the Delaware River
and took possession of an old blockhouse there, called Fort Nassau,
which the Dutch had abandoned; but a force from New Amsterdam speedily
took them prisoners and sent them back to Virginia,[121] with a polite
warning not to do so any more. They did not.
Still nearer at hand, by the waters of the Potomac and Susquehanna,
other rivals and competitors, even more unwelcome to the Virginians,
had lately come upon the scene. The circumstances of the founding
of Maryland, with its effects upon the kingdom of Virginia, will be
recounted in the two following chapters.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Ingle, "Local Institutions of Virginia," _J. H. U. Studies_,
iii. 148.
[110] Hening's _Statutes at Large_, i. 176, 193.
[111] Hutchinson, _Hist. Mass. Bay_, i. 37.
[112] Skottowe, _Short History of Parliament_, p. 19; Taswell-Langmead,
_English Constitutional History_, p. 262.
[113] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 140.
[114] Cooke's _Virginia_, p. 149.
[115] Hening's _Statutes at Large_, i. 156.
[116] Hening, i. 158, 183.
[117] Hening, i. 194, 219, 261, 263, 300, 319, 350.
[118] Hening, i 194.
[119] Neill's _Virginia Company_, p. 221.
[120] Neill's _Virginia Carolorum_, p. 79.
[121] Brodhead's _History of New York_, i. 254.