TOBACCO

 The importance of the negotiations between the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex, and the Virginia and Bermuda companies from the summer of 1622 over a contract to import tobacco into England has been analysed in works by historians from the time of W.R.Scott and Wesley Frank Craven in the last century to the present day. Although agreement was reached, the unfavourable nature of the terms and the salaries to be paid to the dominant party in the two companies led by Sir Edwin Sandys, the Ferrar brothers and their supporters produced a reaction so hostile that the contract had to be abandoned. Once news of the Indian massacre of English settlers in Virginia in March, 1622 reached England, the fate of the Virginia Company of London hung in the balance. Eventually, Sandys’s enemies led by the 2nd Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas Smith, the former Treasurer of the company and a major mercantile figure, secured the dissolution of the Virginia Company and the ejection of Sandys and his followers from the management of the Bermuda Company as well.

What has never been clear is why the struggle over the tobacco contract mattered to Warwick and his second cousin, Sir Nathaniel Rich. But some indirect light may be thrown on their concerns from Sir Nathaniel Rich’s account book for 1623 and 1624. This indicates that, in December, 1624, Sir Nathaniel Rich received c.£600 for his half share of the tobacco sold on his and the Earl’s behalf for 1623 and 1624. Together, they must have been paid £1,200 for this tobacco. Now, exactly what either man’s landed income in the mid-1620s is not known. But, in the 2nd Earl of Warwick’s case, his landed income in the county of Essex alone in 1622 and 1628 was c.£6,500: this figure derives from his rentals in those years and excludes entry fines for new leases and wood sales as well as income from his Northamptonshire and Norfolk estates. Tobacco sales of c.£600 per annum would have been just under ten per cent of his net landed income from Essex alone: the overall percentage for his total net income would have been smaller.

This was a sum, nonetheless, that was worth defending, especially given the economic incompetence of Sir Edwin Sandys and his allies since April, 1619.

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