celebrated incident in the history of Virginia. Sir Edwin was a leader
in parliament, which before the century was out would establish its
supremacy in the government of England, and the Virginia Company in
1620 had only recently established the first representative assembly in
North America. To historians who have sought the larger meaning of the
American experiment, it has often seemed that the king must have been
guided by a fear of representative government--in other words, that his
motives were largely political. No doubt, he was more easily persuaded
to enter an objection to Sandys' re-election because of Sir Edwin's
opposition to royal policies in the house of commons, but there is no
contemporary evidence to suggest that the king had even noticed the
Assembly which met at Jamestown in 1619. Moreover, that Assembly had
been authorized before Sandys' election, at a time when Sir Thomas
Smith was still in the chair, and anyone who thinks the motion had been
carried over Smith's opposition should take note that the same kind of
representative assembly was established in 1620 for Bermuda, over whose
fortunes Sir Thomas would continue to preside until 1621. Not until the
middle of the seventeenth century, at the time of Cromwell, does it
appear that anyone even suggested that the primary reason for the
king's interference was fear of a significant development in the
history of representative government.
What actually happened in 1620 would seem to be clear enough. Sir
Thomas Smith had connections that reached all the way into the king's
bedchamber, and there he effectively argued that Sandys did not know
his business. It was an argument that found not a little justification
in the fact that the company had to admit by a broadside published in
the very month of the election court that hundreds of the colonists
sent to Virginia in the preceding year had died within a short time of
their arrival there, and it may be that Sir Thomas apprehended the even
greater disasters soon to overtake the colony. A more likely
supposition, however, is that he seized upon this news from the colony
as an opportunity to vent his resentment against Sandys, a resentment
that must have become more bitter with each of Sir Edwin's promotional
releases advertising the great improvements now to be found in the
management of Virginia's affairs. The legal basis on which the king
acted was probably debatable. No doubt, he depended upon the provision
in the charter requiring that all members of the council, of which the
treasurer was the head, be sworn to the king's service. But membership
on the council was for life, and Sir Edwin had taken his oath as a
member of the council as early as 1607. Perhaps the king took advantage
of the company's regulations requiring an annual election and that the
treasurer be sworn following his election. Whether this was a new
requirement cannot be said. It can only be suggested that the king
intended to say that if Sir Edwin were re-elected he would not give him
a necessary oath of office. It may be, too, that he stood quite simply
on the prerogative of his office to insist that his subjects in
Virginia were entitled to royal protection. In any case, the
adventurers chose not to defy the king's wish.
Having protested his interference as unwarranted, the quarter court in
May 1620 adjourned without electing a treasurer. Instead, the
adventurers appointed a special committee to call on the king for the
purpose of acquainting him with the true facts regarding "the managing
of their business this last year" and to ask for a free election.
Sandys himself appealed to the royal favorite, the young Duke of
Buckingham, but with no effect on the king's decision. When the
adventurers reassembled late in June, they elected the Earl of
Southampton as treasurer. Thus, in a sense both parties to the dispute
emerged victorious. Sandys was no longer treasurer, but the adventurers
had refused to elect a merchant and Southampton would preside
thereafter in behalf of Sandys. There can be no doubt that Sandys
continued to be the leader of the company. Moreover, in 1621 he
extended his power by gaining control of the Somers Island Company
through the election of Southampton to its governorship.
A question that naturally arises is that of how, or why, Sir Edwin was
able to survive this challenge to his leadership. The news from
Virginia was by no means encouraging. Given the long record of
disappointment there, and the many men who previously had died there,
the fact that several hundred of the most recent settlers had succumbed
might have been expected to unsettle any administration. Perhaps it was
the king's interference, serving as it did to rally the adventurers in
defence of the company's liberty. Perhaps Sir Thomas was guilty of too
naked a display of his power, with the result that the lesser
adventurers, who already had been taught to view the great merchants of
the company with suspicion, rallied to the support of Sandys. Perhaps
it was because the Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas had not learned yet
the need for effective teamwork; both men disliked Sandys, but they had
their own quarrels and they would not form a real coalition against him
for another two years. All these possibilities must be given
consideration, but there would seem to be still another reason,
possibly the most important of all.
Sir Edwin Sandys was a man of remarkable gifts, and nowhere are these
gifts better demonstrated than in his ability to stimulate the highest
hopes for Virginia. Before him only Richard Hakluyt, a patriot now dead
four years, had managed better to depict the promise America held for
Englishmen. Sandys wrote no major work on the subject, and even the
company's promotional pamphlets, which he undoubtedly shaped in some
large part, lacked the fire that Hakluyt, or even Alderman Johnson,
could impart to that branch of literature. It must be said also that
Sandys added no new idea to those which for a generation past had
guided Englishmen in their American ventures. His program included not
a single objective that the Virginia Company had not theretofore tried
to realize; the chief contrast with former programs was the absence of
any emphasis on the prospect that a route to the South Seas might be
found, an objective the adventurers had dropped for all practical
purposes a good many years before Sandys became their treasurer. But
Sandys had confidence, a systematic and orderly mind, and a persuasive
way of talking in the quarter court or in conference with the
individual adventurer who contemplated some new risk of capital. As a
result, he managed to convey the impression that plans had now been so
well thought through that Hakluyt's objectives in America had at last
become attainable.
Leaving aside the search for a passage to China, which may never have
been so important to Hakluyt as it was to the people whose interest in
America he sought to enlist, Sandys undertook to carry through, all at
once, the program Hakluyt had outlined for Queen Elizabeth as early as
1584 in his famous "_Discourse on Western Planting_." It was a program
that looked to the development in America of products that would free
England of dependence upon trades with other parts of the world which
were in any way disadvantageous to England, and that would guarantee to
any Englishmen who developed such products a sure profit on their
investment. It was a program that had taken its shape first from the
prospect, in Raleigh's day, of an early war with Spain, and perhaps it
should be noted that when Sandys came to office in 1619 the Thirty
Years War had only recently had its beginning with the king's own
son-in-law a central figure. The war has gone down in our history books
as the last of the great religious wars, and many were the Englishmen
who thought that England should be, or would be soon involved.
In Virginia, Sandys promised to produce iron. It is strange that the
attempt to develop an iron industry in Virginia, on which the company
spent all told something like £5,000, should have made less impression
on modern historians than has an early and brief search for gold that
was incidental to other explorations. The iron industry in England was
suffering from the depletion of the island's wood supply, which was
still depended upon for smelting, and Virginia promised an unlimited
supply. Other industries that he hoped to develop in the colony are
suggested by a list of tradesmen the company invited to adventure to
Virginia in 1620: among them, sawyers, joiners, shipwrights,
millwrights, coopers, weavers, tanners, potters, fishermen,
fishhookmakers, netmakers, leather dressers, limeburners, and dressers
of hemp and flax. Even more important because so much depended upon
persuading the individual adventurers to invest their own money in the
development of their land, were plans for the production of sugar,
wine, indigo, silk, cotton, olive oil, rice, etc. In the development of
these products Sandys intended the public lands--those cultivated under
the direct supervision of the company and by its own tenants--to serve
more or less in the capacity of experimental farms. For their planting
he sought seeds and plants from various parts of the world. On the
college land he had some 10,000 grapevines set out, and sent for their
care foreign experts imported from the continent. To make sure that
private estates would not be devoted wholly to tobacco, as yet the
colony's only proven staple, he wrote into land patents a stipulation
that other staples would be given a trial.
To find the money for investment in the public lands was no easy task.
No common joint-stock fund could be raised in 1619, if only because the
company's plans depended chiefly upon the hope of inducing the
adventurers to invest in their own lands. It cannot be said how
successful were the renewed attempts to collect from delinquent
subscribers, but perhaps some help came from that source. Sandys
depended also, as had Smith before him, on the Virginia lottery,
perhaps more than upon any other source, for the lottery was terminated
early in 1621 by order of the privy council on grounds that included
the complaint of parliament that the lottery had become a public
nuisance. A very substantial help to Sir Edwin was the bishops' fund
for an Indian college and additional funds raised for the support of an
Indian school in the colony. The total ran to better than £2,000. It
had been decided in 1618, well before Sandys' election, that the money
from the bishops' fund would be invested in an estate to be known as
the College Land, and the precedent thus set was followed in disposing
of funds subsequently made available to the company for an Indian
school. In practical terms, these decisions meant that all mission
funds were used to send out tenants on the promise that a half-share of
the wine and other such commodities as they might produce would in time
provide a permanent endowment for the school and the college. The
decision reflects both the extraordinary poverty of the company and the
extraordinary confidence with which its leaders approached their new
ventures in Virginia.
By the spring of 1621, when the bulk of the college funds had been
expended and the lottery was terminated, Sir Edwin's financial
resources had become even more skimpy and uncertain. Some projects,
such as that for the settlement of Italian glass-workers who were to
manufacture pottery and beads for use in the Indian trade, could be
financed by subscriptions to a special joint-stock, but this device
offered no help in meeting general expenses. As a result, Sandys
continued to take certain shortcuts, or perhaps the blame should rest
rather on Deputy John Ferrar. In any case, the colonists complained
that shipping came out so overloaded with passengers as to invite the
epidemic disease with which they usually suffered on landing, and which
made of newcomers a useless burden on the colony for some time after
their arrival. The deathrate among the colonists continued to be high.
The time and energy required to house them, or to feed them,
unavoidably forced delay with projects on which Sandys had pinned his
chief hopes. He was especially disappointed over the slow progress of
agricultural experimentation. Accordingly, when Yeardley's three year
term was ended in 1621 and Sir Francis Wyatt was sent as his
replacement, Sir Edwin also sent his brother, George Sandys, as
appointee to a new office of treasurer. He was given special charge of
all projects looking to the development of new staple commodities and
was intrusted with the collection of rents, of which the company
claimed £1,000 were presently due. These rents, which were to be
collected largely from half-share tenants who had migrated within the
preceding three years, undoubtedly now constituted the company's main
hope for an immediate revenue. Except in a very few instances, no
quitrents would be payable until 1625, and so general had been the
disappointment experienced so far with special projects that further
time would have to be allowed before any return from them could be
expected. In short, the company had exhausted its very limited
resources in getting Wyatt and George Sandys out to Virginia, and had
nothing left but hopes for the future and the anticipation of a small
immediate revenue from the rents of its own tenants, most of which had
already been assigned to such special charges as the support of public
officers in the colony. In London, virtually the only asset left to the
company was the will and determination of Sir Edwin Sandys.
In these circumstances, Sandys necessarily devoted his main energies
after 1621 to the problem of tobacco, the only marketable staple the
colony had as yet produced. It was an old problem, but one now filled
with new difficulties. In earlier days, when it had been hoped that
tobacco might be one of a variety of staples produced in the colony,
the Virginia Company, like the Bermuda Company, had lent encouragement
to efforts looking to its production. But hardly had early experiments
proved successful before the adventurers faced the risk that tobacco
would take over the colony entirely. There is nothing surprising in
this development, for a tobacco plant, unlike a grapevine or an olive
tree, matures within a few months of its planting, and the tobacco
habit at this time was a thing of comparably rapid growth in many parts
of the world. To settlers who had been staked by adventurers ever
insistent upon a prompt return of their capital, or who wondered how
best to procure the means to make payment for the supplies brought in
the next magazine ship, the obvious answer was to plant the land to
tobacco. After doing this, if time and energy remained, they might try
some of Sir Edwin Sandys' ideas--maybe set out a few grapevines or
mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason
for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that
tobacco might put a blight on all other projects.
More than that, the increasing shipments of tobacco, especially in view
of the still relatively poor quality of the Virginia leaf, gave the
colony a bad name just when its good name was so important to the
promotional efforts of the company. The tobacco habit did not yet have
the respectable associations it would later acquire in the eighteenth
century. Instead, it was associated with tippling or bawdy houses,
where in truth a pipe was most easily had by the contemporary resident
of London. Moral considerations were reinforced by an additional
concern for the public interest. So much of the weed consumed came from
Spain that thoughtful men were inclined to consider how much England
paid out, to the profit of the Spaniard, for a commodity which added
nothing to the well being of the country. Had it not been for the
influence of Virginia and Bermuda adventurers in the House of Commons,
Parliament in 1621 might well have prohibited all importation of
tobacco into England. And in all England there was no more vigorous
opponent of tobacco than the king himself. Indeed, the king had even
written a book on the subject.
The attitude of King James had a most important bearing on another
angle of the problem. Under its charter, the company had been allowed a
seven year exemption from import duties on cargoes brought from
Virginia. When this exemption expired in 1619, the government
immediately imposed a duty that was fixed early in 1620 at 1s. per
pound of tobacco. Though this was only half the duty paid by Spanish
tobacco, it was nonetheless a heavy burden to be imposed upon leaf that
was declared never to have sold at more than 5s. a pound and that
brought an average of only 2s. for the better grade in 1620.[A] The
adventurers' attempted escape by shipping their tobacco to Holland won
them a sharp reprimand from the privy council, and an order to bring
all of Virginia's tobacco to England for payment of his majesty's
customs. As negotiations with the king's ministers for some relief
continued, it was proposed in 1622 that the Virginia and Bermuda
adventurers might take over the tobacco monopoly, which was a grant of
the sole right to import tobacco of any sort into the kingdom in return
for a fixed contribution to the royal revenues. The holder of such a
monopoly--a very common device at the time--was entitled to collect the
customs and to hope that what he collected, plus the advantage of a
monopolistic control of the market, might enable him to clear a profit
on the transaction. Here, in other words, was a proposal that might
provide the needed relief, even some income for the company's hard
pressed treasury. The Virginia Company by 1622 was in no position to
ignore such an opportunity and fortunately, the Sandys faction was now
in control of the Somers Island Company. A joint committee of the two
companies, headed by Sir Edwin himself, entered into negotiations for
what was known as the tobacco contract.
The bitterest factional strife in the history of the London adventurers
soon followed. It is a complicated story, too complicated and too long
to be told fully here. Briefly, both the terms agreed upon by Sandys
and his proposals for the management of the contract, proposals which
left Sandys and his cohorts in full control, touched too closely the
vital interests of some of his bitterest enemies. In Bermuda, as in
Virginia, the hope of an early profit from the production of sugar,
silk, wine, indigo, and other such commodities had proved vain, and
like Virginia, Bermuda lived by the tobacco it grew. The Earl of
Warwick and members of his family had made especially heavy investments
in their Bermuda properties, and Sir Nathaniel Rich became the floor
leader, as it were, of an attempt to defeat the contract. Sir Thomas
Smith and his friends joined in the effort. Especially objectionable in
the view of the opposition were plans for placing the management of the
contract in the hands of salaried officials, with Sir Edwin as director
at a salary of £500. At one Virginia court, meeting early in December,
the debate got so out of hand that it required several additional
sessions to straighten out the minutes in order that appropriate
penalties might be imposed upon Mr. Samuel Wrote, a member of the
Virginia council whose unrestrained charges of graft violated the
company's rules and offended the court's sense of its own dignity. In
the end the opposition elected to make the final test in a Bermuda
court, whose consent was necessary to close the contract and where
Sandys' opponents included the more substantial investors in that
colony. The test came in February 1623, and Sandys won. But it could be
demonstrated that had the vote been by share rather than by head, as
was the rule in both companies, he would have been defeated. Sandys'
opponents in the Bermuda Company all along had complained of a plan to
distribute the charges of the contract equally between the two
companies, arguing that the Virginia tobacco had a greater value and
should therefore carry a proportionately larger charge. And now they
were in a position to argue that the Virginia Company, in whose courts
for some time they had steadfastly refused even to vote on the salary
question, sought to exploit the younger plantation, as was evidenced by
the opposition of the adventurers to whom Bermuda's tobacco chiefly
belonged. With this argument, Sandys' opponents promptly carried the
whole question before the privy council.
This was in the spring of 1623. During the course of the preceding
debate, news had come of an Indian massacre in Virginia that had cost
the lives of over 350 colonists. The faction-ridden and bankrupt
company had stirred itself to send such aid as it could, but now came
the word that this had not been enough. By the testimony of Sandys' own
brother, though this testimony may not have been immediately available
to his enemies, another 500 colonists had died before the year was out
as a result of the dislocations occasioned by the massacre, and as a
result of the failure of the company to send enough aid. The tobacco
contract dropped into a position of secondary importance as Sandys'
opponents, with Alderman Johnson taking the lead, petitioned the king
for a full investigation of the situation in Virginia and of the recent
conduct of its affairs.
Whatever one may think of Sir Edwin Sandys, or of the motives which
inspired his opponents, there can be no question as to the correctness
of the action taken by the government. The leaders of the two factions
were called before the privy council on April 17, where they displayed
so "much heat and bitterness" toward one another as to make it
difficult to get on with the business. In the end, the council won
agreement that a special commission should be established for an
investigation of the state of the colony's affairs, the agreement
coming finally when the council conceded the demand of Sandys'
supporters that the investigation should begin with the administration
of Sir Thomas Smith. Accordingly, on May 9, a commission was issued to
Sir William Jones, justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and six other
gentlemen "to examine the carriage of the whole business." Meantime, a
letter had been prepared by the privy council to acquaint the colonists
with the fact that their affairs had been taken into "His Majesty's
pious and princely care" and to encourage them "to go on cheerfully in
the work they have in hand." The central issues all pertained to
Virginia, but in the circumstances there was no choice but to include
both companies in the province of the Jones commission.