purposes, the control of the Virginia Company over the colony. The
company lingered on as an agency chiefly through which the Sandys
faction prepared its briefs for the attention of the commissioners, or
through which orders from the commissioners might be implemented. All
of the company's records were impounded by the commission, which also
took charge of all correspondence with the colony. The records of the
company demonstrated all too clearly the bankrupt state of its
finances. The hearings before the commissioners demonstrated with equal
clarity the hopeless division of the adventurers by bitter factional
strife. Correspondence from the colony brought evidence of a desperate
situation. Even Sandys had to admit that no more than 2,500 colonists
were still alive in the colony, which was to confess an attrition,
mainly by death, of something over 40 percent of the colonists residing
in Virginia, or sent to Virginia, since he had assumed responsibility
for the management of its affairs. Actually, the situation was much
worse than these figures suggested, for a census taken in Virginia
early in 1625 showed a total population of only 1,275. In the fall of
1623 the privy council invited the company to surrender its charter on
the promise that a new one would be issued to cover all individual
rights and grants, but with a revision of the plan of government that
would place the control of the colony under the more immediate
supervision of the king. In effect, the proposal was to return to
something close to the original plan of 1606. When the adventurers, in
a court from which Sandys' enemies largely absented themselves,
rejected this proposal, the government began quo warranto proceedings
against the company in the court of Kings Bench. On May 24, 1624, that
court gave its decision for recall of the Virginia charters. And so
ended the Virginia Company.
The Bermuda Company had been dragged into the investigation chiefly
because of the close ties joining it to the older company. There was no
emergency in the colony, and its debts were not beyond the capacity of
Sir Thomas Smith and other leading adventurers to pay. As a result, the
Somers Island Company lasted on for another sixty years.
One who looks back from 1624 over the brief and frequently troubled
history of the Virginia Company may debate, as historians have often
done in the past, just what should be said by way of conclusion.
Perhaps it is this: here were men who out of their disappointment
quarreled bitterly and by their quarrels helped to destroy an agency
through which in the past they had worked together, with a remarkable
devotion to the public interest, for the achievement of great
objectives. No doubt, their greatest fault had been to set their goals
too high. Certainly, their greatest virtue was persistence in the faith
that great things could be done for England in America, a faith
destined in time to be justified by the course of history.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: For purposes of comparison, it may be noted that Spanish
tobacco was declared to have been sold for as much as 20s. a pound. The
"filthy weed" was not yet "the poor man's luxury."]