Odds and ends on the early history of Virginia
Richard
Pulley and Virginia
Richard Pulley’s
connection with the early colonial history of Virginia seems straightforward
enough. His testimony was cited in legal proceedings in the court of Chancery
in the Easter term of 1623 and again in a suit in the High Court of Admiralty
in 1623-1624. Both cases had arisen from Sir Samuel Argall’s period as Deputy
Governor in the colony between 1617 and the spring of 1619. Argall had become
involved in quarrels with Edward Brewster, one of his putative successor Lord
Delaware’s dependents over the disposal of the late peer’s men and property
resulting in Brewster being tried under martial law and expelled from Virginia.
These disputes re-surfaced in the Courts of the Virginia Company of London
after both men returned to England in 1619. Their allies and patrons – the 2nd
Earl of Warwick’s on Argall’s side and Sir Edwin Sandys and his supporters on
that of Brewster – became involved in the partisan struggles for control of the
company that, incidentally, produced these legal proceedings. The conclusion
has, moreover, been drawn that Pulley’s testimony was gathered from first-hand
experience and that he was personally present in Virginia in 1618 to 1619.[1]
Who was Richard Pulley
or Pully? The documents suggest that he had been born in c.1592 and educated at
Staples Inn in London, which was attached to Gray’s Inn, one of the
institutions dedicated to training English lawyers. But Pulley’s career was
built on his connection with the Rich family, Lords Rich and, from 1618, Earls
of Warwick, the owners of the largest estate in the county of Essex and
investors in both the Virginia and Bermuda Companies. The small property of
Barlands and Blakes in Prittlewell was let to Pulley in March, 1617 for 21
years at a rent of £8 10s p.a.[2] He
subsequently became the tenant of Dennis fields in 1622 and of Hadleigh Park in
1623.[3]
Shortly thereafter, he became the bailiff of three of the 2nd Earl
of Warwick’s manors in Essex. He was also Warwick’s Deputy as Vice-Admiral of
Essex[4]
and Clerk to the Justices of the Peace for the county from 1641 to 1648.[5]
His will was made on 20th January, 1649.[6]
Pulley was clearly one
of the Rich family’s officers working on the administration of their estates
and one of their more prominent servants. There is no independent evidence to
suggest that he ever travelled to Virginia. It is more likely that his legal
skills recommended him for the task of authenticating Argall’s testimony in the
proceedings the 2nd Earl of Warwick and Argall himself were pursuing
against Brewster in 1623 and 1624. Argall and Brewster had been to Virginia:
Warwick never went and it is unlikely that Pulley did so either.
Theodore Rabb on Sir Edwin Sandys’s management of the
Virginia Company 1619-1621
Theodore Rabb’s
biography of Sir Edwin Sandys first published in 1998 is the standard work on
its subject. Rabb was clear on the virtues of Sir Edwin Sandys throughout his
life as a gentleman, as a Member of the House of Commons and as the leading
figure in the affairs of the Virginia Company after 1619 until its dissolution
in 1624. In the last of these roles, Sandys had high-minded aims and hopes and
was public-spirited in contrast to his contemporary critics like Robert Rich, 2nd
Earl of Warwick. The first two years of his leadership of the Virginia Company,
i.e. 1619-1621, were relatively untroubled. Only with the onset of his wife’s
ill-health, quarrels over the importation of tobacco and the Indian massacre in
the colony in March, 1622, did Sandys’s conduct deteriorate: he then resorted
to the concealment of news, deception, and the abuse of his critics in a doomed
attempt to keep the Virginia Company alive.
There is no doubt
about Rabb’s admiration for Sandys. But is this view of the man and of his role
in the affairs of the Virginia Company sound. There is testimony in print from
Sandys himself as early as October, 1619 that the company’s courts were divided
and subject to contention. He told his Deputy as Treasurer, John Ferrar, on 4th
October to include in the record of the next (preparative) court his reply to a
motion from Sir Thomas Wolstenholme, possibly about the funding of plans to
send men and cattle in large numbers to Virginia, reserving it to the last “for
it wilbe scanned by the evill eye.” That court, moreover, should not read the
proceedings of previous courts until Sandys himself was present. The management
of the Virginia Company’s business and the reception of news had, prima facie,
to be carefully arranged.
Two weeks later, on 18th
October, Sandys wrote to John Ferrar again. He advised Ferrar to assure the
Virginia Company’s court on the following Wednesday – if it was “fit & in
tune” – that he was actively pursuing their business. Any critical motions
should be referred to the next Quarter Court. No general letters affecting the
company’s business had come to Sandys’s hands while those to the supervising
Council of Virginia had already been presented: business affecting the company
– in the letters to the Council? – would be brought to the Court in due time.
If there was trouble, Ferrar should persuade those of the Council who were not
factious to leave and depart himself rather than that the public good or
justice be adversely affected. Sandys went on to tell Ferrar that Gabriel
Barbour, the manager of the company’s lottery, had sent two letters but “keep
the contents very secret to yoreself.” Long before May, 1621, Sandys
was engaged in managing or manipulating the flow of news in the interests of
his policies.
Later comments by
Sandys support the view that he was anxious to avoid criticism in the company’s
meetings. Early in May, 1620, he wrote to John Ferrar again to describe the
work he had done in composing instructions for and letters to the colonists in
Virginia. He could not, he thought, be accused of negligence. “But would to God
there were no other cause then that. Then should I be free from as much
sorrowe, care, & feare, as I ever endured for anie one thing in my life.”
He believed he was working in a hostile environment. If Sandys was not already
conscious of the animosity of his predecessor as Treaurer of the Virginia
Company, Sir Thomas Smith, he soon became aware of it when King James informed
the company’s Quarter Court on 17th May of his wish that one of his
four mercantile nominees should be chosen as his successor: Sandys and the
company resisted. This intervention was attributed by Sandys to the “extreme hatred of me by Sr
Thomas Smith”. He pleaded in a letter on 7th June to the King’s
favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, to be allowed to serve for another year. In
the event, his appeal was unsuccessful although the Virginia Company installed
Sandys’s ally, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, as Treasurer.
Rabb’s picture of
Sandys as a high-minded, public-spirited figure in the two years after May,
1619 can, therefore, be questioned. His political skills, the arts of
subterfuge and the manipulation of news were as much in evidence then as later
as Sandys himself testified.
The
Struggle for Control of the Virginia Company in the Spring of 1619
Direct information on
the contest to control the Virginia Company and, to a lesser extent, of the
Bermuda or Somers Island Company, in the early months of 1619 is very limited.
Only one coherent account written some years later, that by Nathaniel Boteler or
Butler, survives.[7]
Butler was an ally of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, one of the
parties to the disputes in these companies, so his analysis needs to be
considered carefully along with the fragmentary evidence from contemporary
sources.
Butler traced the
origins of the quarrels in the Virginia Company plausibly enough to the poor
performance of the colony despite all the money that had been invested in it.
It was claimed that no complete account of this expenditure had been or could
be obtained despite the efforts of the company’s auditors, chief amongst whom
was Sir Edwin Sandys. These auditors offended the Virginia Company’s
long-standing Treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith, by refusing to meet in his house in
Philpot Lane, London as their predecessors had done, by demanding access to and
possession of all the old books of account, and by alleging, mainly via Sir
Edwin Sandys, in the company’s courts that they were being deliberately delayed
and obstructed. Sir Thomas Smith, who was one of the leading mercantile figures
in the capital, responded, according to Butler, by pointing out the lack of
experience of the auditors in general and of Sandys in particular. These
exchanges divided the company producing hostile ad hominem motions so that,
within a short time, “all their meetings and consultations seemed rather
cockpits than courts.”[8]
The logical deduction
drawn by the auditors, if Butler was right, was to remove Smith from his post
as Treasurer. A replacement would be needed despite the fact that Smith had
powerful allies amongst his fellow merchants and, no less logically, Sandys
would be the ideal choice. Given that the Virginia Company was divided between
the supporters of Smith, of Sandys and of a third group whom Butler described
as the party of “the lords and most of the gentlemen”,[9] it
made sense for the partisans of Sandys and of the “lords” to join together to
support Sandys in a challenge for the Treasurer’s office. Butler was explicit
on the offer made to the “lords and most of the gentlemen”: in return for
supporting Sandys in the election for Treasurer of the Virginia Company, his
allies would endorse Butler himself as the new Governor of the colony in
Bermuda where the Rich family’s interests were much more significant than in
Virginia. The deal was accepted, meetings of the principal men in both groups
were arranged, and a ballot box was to be used to maximise the vote from those
reluctant to be seen voting for Smith’s rival.
This agreement
evidently worked. At the Virginia Company’s Quarter Court on 28th
April, 1619, Sir Thomas Smith stood down fearing defeat and claiming he had
other responsibilities to meet.: Sandys’s two mercantile rivals, Sir John
Wolstenholme and Alderman Robert Johnson, were defeated.[10]
Subsequently, however, Smith defeated Sandys in a contest for the post of
Governor of the Somers Island Company while Butler was overwhelmingly supported
in securing the office of Governor of the colony in Bermuda.[11]
The leadership of the two companies was severed for the first time and not
restored until 1621.
There are a number of
points to be considered about this account. The claim that Smith was charged
with responsibility for the economic failure of the colony to return dividends
to the Virginia Company’s adventurers is supported by later, although equally
partisan, testimony.[12]
If Butler was right in stating that Sandys and his fellow auditors sought to
examine all the Ttreasurer’s old books of accounts, which presumably stretched
back to 1607, then the entire financial management of the venture was being put
in question, notwithstanding earlier audits, to undermine Smith’s position.
Sandys later alleged that Smith’s accounts were inaccurate, incomplete and
wholly unsatisfactory, a judgment endorsed by W.F.Craven in 1932.[13]
Other contemporaries considered Smith’s accounts sound and, although Sandys’s
allies, the Ferrar brothers, came into possession of part, at least, of Smith’s
company archive,[14]
no specific evidence of Smith’s malfeasance or neglect was ever produced. It is
highly unlikely that a major mercantile figure like Smith could not have kept
accurate accounts or had them kept on his behalf. His wealth would be
inexplicable in such a case. It is more likely, on balance, that these
allegations were essentially ‘political’ in nature and used to persuade
disgruntled small investors to withdraw their support in the company’s courts
and to support Sandys and his allies.
Butler’s description
of the groups within the two companies is more intriguing still. It is doubtful
whether his supporters, who were essentially attached to the Rich family’s
interest in both companies and colonies, could have been accurately represented
as the “lords and most of the gentlemen”. Sandys had the backing of the 3rd
Earl of Southampton and of a significant number of gentlemen and small
investors. In any case, the reputed agreement did not cover the investigation
into the activities of Warwick’s other ally, Sir Samuel Argall, as acting
Governor in Virginia since 1617 upon which Smith and Sandys had been insistent:
Warwick had sent a ship to Virginia to remove Argall and his goods before he
could be arrested and his property seized by his successor, Sir George
Yeardley. Shortly thereafter, Sandys proved just as determined to chase Warwick
and Argall over their privateering activities as he was to pursue Smith over
his alleged accounting failures. The vendettas Sandys followed over the next
few years were already immanent in the spring of 1619. Nathaniel Butler’s Historye recounted a temporary truce in
a struggle that lasted until Sandys and his allies were finally defeated in
1624.
FP 93
This letter from “R.F.” to an
unnamed recipient in the west of England has come to have a degree of
significance in explaining the plans adopted by the Virginia Company of London
for the development of the colony from the autumn of 1618 onwards. Exactly who
“R.F.” was is not clear, although David Ransome followed by James Horn
considered that Richard Ferrar, the younger brother of John and Nicholas
Ferrar, was a possible candidate: David Ransome thought that it might have been
directed to a prospective member of the Berkeley Hundred syndicate while
another scholar believed that George Thorpe was a potential recipient. The
truth is that the authorship remains undetermined and that it is not possible
to say whether the letter was ever sent. Even so, that does not mean that more
cannot be said about it.
First of all, there is the
question of the authority and objectivity of its author. The fact that it
survives amongst the Ferrar Papers in Magdalene College, Cambridge suggests
that it was composed by a supporter of Sir Edwin Sandys, a contention that its
praise for Sandys as a law-maker also endorses. Furthermore, the document
indicates that King James himself along with members of his Privy Council and
other important officials and peers favoured the economic programme the
Virginia Company was in the process of adopting, i.e. restrictions on the
growing of tobacco, investment in other staple commodities, clearer regulation
of grants of land, conversion of the native inhabitants to Christianity, the
creation of new forms of government in the shape of a Council of State to
assist the Governor and of a General Assembly, and the adoption of English
forms of law which would prevent the use of martial law in future. The scheme
would create the colonial equivalent of Magna Carta protecting the
rights of every individual settler. Future Governors in Virginia would no
longer be able to exercise unchecked powers and adventurers might expect that
their investments would be safe. Overall, this letter was a piece of advocacy
for the programme then being adopted by the Virginia Company.
Nonetheless, there are problems
in taking this letter at face value. Take, for example, the issue of the
exercise of martial law. In one place (quoted by James Horn), the author
certainly assures his prospective correspondent that
“henceforth matters
are noe more to be carried by
haphazard in a Marshalls court, or after the uncertaine &
unlimited humour of one man but there is now a counsell of estate
erected to assiste and advise the governo[u]r in all his courses,
who in generall are in all causes both civill & criminall to
conforme themselves to our lawes & customes heere in England”.
Later in the same
letter, it is stated that, after the creation of the Council of State and the
General Assembly, they might constitute laws and ordinances to govern the
colony “allwaies reserved to the
governo[u]r a negative voice & likewise speedy Marshall law against any man
whatsoever in case of sedition mutiny or rebellion, & lastly sentence of
iudicature in all cases civill & criminall.” The two propositions were and
are contradictory. Due legal process was, in any case, not to be extended to
the acting Governor, Samuel Argall, who was to be arrested and his assets
seized upon the arrival of his successor, Sir George Yeardley.
The broader
thinking of the Virginia Company was perfectly apparent in the surviving
instructions given to Yeardley. Argall’s administration of the colony, the
contraction in the range of commodities produced and the disappearance of the
public estate were clearly condemned and were to be reversed. But it was not
clear how far Sir Edwin Sandys and his followers had control of the Virginia
Company’s business at that stage. It was one thing to condemn the resort of
suspected privateers to the colony but another for the company to instruct
Yeardley that he was not to seize the goods of Argall’s partners or to detain
Lord Rich’s vessel, the Treasurer (F.P.92). The struggles within
the company’s courts may not be well documented but there is enough surviving
material to qualify the picture of a body united in support of the new
programme.
FP 93
This letter has assumed some importance
in the recent historiography of Virginia. James Horn, for example, has used it
in his beautifully written book, 1619 Jamestown and the Forging of American
Democracy, published last year, to suggest that it provides “a unique
insight into [Sir Edwin] Sandys’s and his associates far-reaching ambitions”
for the colony in the autumn of 1618 and, perhaps, an insight into the “broader
thinking that informed the new direction [being] taken by the [Virginia]
Company.” The main purpose of the author, “R.F.”, who might possibly have been
Richard Ferrar, the younger brother of John and Nicholas Ferrar, “was to assure
the recipient, also anonymous, that martial law and the largely unrestricted
powers of the [colony’s] governor would be brought to an end and that future
investments in the colony would be safe.”[15]
These are important claims but it is not clear that they are sound ones.
It is perfectly true that the opening
paragraph of this letter refers directly to the hope expressed by its recipient
on an earlier visit to London for an indication of royal favour for the
Virginia enterprise and for the extablishment of a settled form of government
and of laws for the benefit of settlers in the colony. The bulk of R.F’s reply
is taken up with a description of Sir George Yeardley’s reception at Newmarket
on 29th November, of his discussions with King James and the
latter’s reported approval of the projects the Virginia Company had in mind for
Yeardley to accomplish, and of Yeardley’s subsequent reception by Privy
Councillors and others on his return to London. This account of royal and
conciliar favour runs from the bottom of Page 1 of this letter to the top of
Page 6. There were only two further pages. On balance, the main purpose of the
letter was to make this point clearly to its recipient in the west country.
The second major point made about this
letter and supported by a quotation from it is that it was envisaged that
martial law was to be brought to an end and that the civil and criminal laws of
England were in future to apply in the colony. Yeardley as Governor would be
assisted by a Council of State in the future while the Virginia Company had
devised suitable laws and ordinances to meet the colony’s needs. The quotation
James Horn deploys is accurate.[16] Unfortunately, he omitted
the later reference to the exercise of martial law in Virginia in the same
letter, i.e. “allwaies reserved to the governo[u]r a negative voice [in the Council of State] & likewise speedy Marshall law against any
man whatsoever in case of sedition mutiny or rebellion, & lastly sentence
of iudicature in all cases civill & criminall”. This contradiction
undermines his case.
Or take the letter’s claim that the
Virginia Company had settled a form of government for the colony. When the
Court of the Virginia Company met on 12th May, 1619, Sir Edwin
Sandys as Treasurer proposed “that there might be another Comittee [appointed]
for the constituting of Lawes and settling of a forme of Governemt
ouer all Virginia, appointing Magistrates and Officers thereunto, and
expressing their seuerall dueties: wch the Court did very well
approue of”.[17] Two weeks later, on 26th
May, an order was made for this Committee to meet on the following Friday.
R.F’s claims appear, prima facie, not to be substantiated in this respect.
For these reasons, it is doubtful whether this letter bears quite the weight of authority it has been accorded. It had clearly been composed by an admirer and supporter of Sir Edwin Sandys. Its propagandist purpose was to move its recipient and his allies to recognise that the Virginia Company’s new programme had explicit royal and conciliar support. But its claims over the abolition of martial law were contradicted by its author in that same letter and over the settlement of a form of government and laws for Virginia had eluded Sir Edwin Sandys himself.
Susan Myra Kingsbury and The Records of the
Virginia Company of London
For
more than a century, Susan Myra Kingsbury has been a major figure in the
historiography of early colonial Virginia. Her edition of The Records of the Virginia Company of London published between
1906 and 1935 offers an essential foundation for all subsequent studies of the
early years of the first permanent English settlement in North America. The
works published last year (2019) to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the
establishment of the Virginia Assembly and the almost simultaneous arrival of the
first African slaves inevitably drew on her volumes.
Susan
Kingsbury was born in San Pablo, California in 1870 and was educated in that
State before becoming a teacher at Lowell high School in San Francisco from
1892 to 1900. Subsequently, she went to Columbia University in New York to
study colonial economic history. Whilst a student there, she travelled to
England to collect documentary material for her Ph.D. thesis entitled An Introduction to the Records of the
Virginia Company of London for which she was awarded her doctorate in 1905.
Thereafter, her career took her into posts in industrial and technical
education, economics and social work. She retired as Professor of Social
Economy at Bryn Mawr College in 1936 and died at the age of 79 in November, 1949.
Unfortunately,
no copy of her thesis appears to be available on-line at present. However,
given its length at just over two hundred pages, it is likely that it was
identical to the work published by the Government Printing Office in 1905
entitled, An Introduction to Records of the Virginia Company of London with a Bibliographical List of the Extant
Documents. It was produced with a foreword by Herbert Putnam, the Librarian
of Congress, praising her work and the counsel of her adviser, Professor Herbert
L. Osgood of Columbia University. A year later, when the first two volumes of The Records of the Virginia Company of
London edited by S.M.Kingsbury
(and containing the Court Book of the company from 1619 to 1624) were
published, Herbert Putnam and Herbert L. Osgood again provided prefatory
remarks. The text of Dr Kingsbury’s introduction was identical to that of 1905
(and probably to that of her thesis as well). The extensive list of documents
she provided for the company and colony from just before 1609 also appears to
be identical to that published in Volumes 3 and 4 of The Records of the Virginia Company of London which appeared in
1933 and 1935 respectively. A handful of emendations were made to include
material from the proceedings of the Privy Council relating to Virginia and to
note that one or two documents could no longer be traced. Some material, which
had come to light since 1905-1906 and which had been published elsewhere, e.g.
in the Sackville Papers before 1623, was omitted. But, to a very large extent,
all four volumes edited by Susan Kingsbury reflected work she had done by 1905.
This
coverage of the extant archives was not, however, complete. She had reproduced
only seventy eight of the documents relating to Virginia from the Ferrar Papers
held in Magdalene College, Cambridge. As David Ransome’s more recent work has
shown, there were five hundred and fifteen such documents in that collection.
Similarly but on a much smaller scale, her assumption that the colonial papers
of the Duke of Manchester then held in the Public Record Office in Chancery
Lane, London constituted the entire archive of Sir Nathaniel Rich and the 2nd
Earl of Warwick was also mistaken. There were and are scattered pieces of
evidence related to Virginia’s colonisation still to be found elsewhere in
English archives. When Wesley Frank Craven composed his study of The Dissolution of the Virginia Company (published
in 1932), he paid a thoroughly well-deserved tribute to Susan Kingsbury’s
invaluable edition of the company’s records. He was right to do so as later
historians would wholeheartedly agree but the hunt for supplementary sources
still continues.
The date of George Yeardley’s
knighthood
The importance of the measures taken by
the Virginia Company of London in the late autumn of 1618 to reform and
reinvigorate its small colony in North America has long been appreciated. The
man entrusted with executing these tasks was the newly-appointed Governor,
George Yeardley, who was knighted at Newmarket by King James VI and I just
after the company’s plans had been laid out. A description of Yeardley’s
conversations with the King at Newmarket and subsequently with a number of
Privy Councillors and others in London by “R.F.” survives amongst the Ferrar
Papers in Magdalene College, Cambridge’s library. It bears the date 5th
December, 1618 and has been used to
describe the enthusiasm expressed by the King on the preceding Sunday, i.e. on
29th November, and later by his advisers for the reform project. But
the date upon which Yeardley was knighted was not 29th November,
1618 but the Sunday before that, i.e. on 22nd November. That was the
date given by W.A.Shaw in his comprehensive list of the Knights of England
published in 1906 (Volume 2, page 170). Furthermore, the newsletter writer,
John Chamberlain, noted on 28th November that “Yardley, a meane
fellow by way of provision goes as governor [to Virginia] and to grace him the
more the King knighted him this week at Newmarket” (Letters (1939), Volume 2,
page 188). Had James been aware of Yeardley’s connection to his bête noire, Sir
Edwin Sandys, it is unlikely that he would have done so. But this mistake over
the date when Yeardley was knighted is only one of the more serious problems
that R.F.’s panegyric on the activities of Sandys and his supporters within the
Virginia Company contains.
Problems with Ferrar Papers No. 93
1. The end of martial law?
This document elaborating on
the reforms attributed to the inspiration of Sir Edwin Sandys in the autumn of
1618 has been cited in a number of places as signifying an end to the practice
of martial law in the colony. James Horn, Lauren Working and Misha Ewen have
all recently cited its contents to that effect. Their arguments rest on a
passage in the letter from “R.F.” dated on the 5th December, 1618.
That makes clear to its recipient that “to satisfie
you abowte the forme of goverm[en]t & the lawes to bee established being
the second doubt ariseth in yo[u]r thoughts, henceforth matters are noe more to be carried by haphazard in a Marshalls court,
or after the uncertaine & unlimited humour of one man but there is now
a counsell of estate erected to assiste and advise the governo[u]r in all his
courses, who in generall are in all causes both civill & criminall to conforme
themselves to our lawes & customes heere in England”. The difficulty with this claim is that,
earlier in the very same document, its author observed that there was “allwaies
reserved to the governo[u]r a negative voice [in the Council of State and the
prospective General Assembly] & likewise speedy Marshall law against any
man whatsoever in case of sedition mutiny or rebellion”. Both propositions
cannot be simultaneously true.
2. Lord Rich and
George Yeardley
“R.F.” also has an
intriguing description of the relationship between Lord Rich, as Sir Robert
Rich had become early in August, 1618 when his father had become Earl of
Warwick, a title to which he would succeed in March, 1619. It reads to the
effect that “ The noble Lo[rd] Ritch
entertained him [Yeardley}s severall tymes at his owne house, & sente him
presents, & w[hi]ch may put as much life into the action as any thing yet
mentioned, his Ma[jes]ties favo[u]r excepted, gave him his hande that before
the expiration of his goverm[en]t, his Lo[rdshi]p would p[er]sonally visit him in
Virginia.” This could be read in a very straightforward way as simply an
attempt to entertain Yeardley before his departure for Virginia and to assure
him of Lord Rich’s future intention of visiting him in the colony. However,
there is another possible interpretation, namely that Lord Rich was attempting
to suborn Yeardley in his own interests and that of Argall who was at that time
the acting Governor of the colony and against whom serious allegations had been
made by the Virginia Company. It is not clear when these contacts between Lord
Rich and Yeardley took place but Yeardley had been given very explicit
instructions about how he was expected to deal with Argall as a malefactor: it
is, therefore, tempting to suspect that these interactions took place before
Yeardley got his instructions on 18th November, 1618. A visit to
Virginia by Lord Rich was another matter: given his rank, he would effectively
been beyond the reach of Yeardley’s authority as Governor and, perhaps, a
threat to that authority as the case of Captain Henry Spelman in 1619 showed.
The Musselwhite Hypothesis
The four-hundreth anniversary
in 2019 of the first meeting of the Virginia Assembly and the almost
simultaneous arrival of African slaves in this English colony inevitably
stimulated the appearance of a number of scholarly articles and books. Some of
these were by long-established historians like James Horn and Peter Mancall
while others were by figures from the next generation like Misha Ewen,
Alexander Haskell and Lauren Working. One of the latter, Paul Musselwhite, has
argued that, barely ten years after the first English colonists arrived in
Virginia, rival visions of settlement could be detected, one focused on a
corporate system of landholding uniting the private interests of individual
adventurers and planters with the public good of the colony and a second based
on a model just established in Bermuda aimed at establishing large landed
estates with a manorial peasantry sustaining the exercise of personal
patronage. These contrasting programmes divided both the colonists in Virginia
and the adventurers in the Virginia Company of London. The ensuing conflicts
were only finally resolved after the Indian massacre of colonists in 1622 and
the dissolution of the company itself in 1624.
This is a dramatic and striking
hypothesis. It has been set out in detail beginning with the establishment by
Sir Thomas Dale, then Governor in Virginia, of Bermuda City as a corporation in
1614 embodying the first of these visions and explaining the opposition this
elicited from older planters like Samuel Argall and his ally, John Martin. Professor
Musselwhite’s account is supported by a description of the two men’s lobbying
activities in London in 1616-1617, backed, so it seems, by the Rich family, and
their successful acquisition of patents to be worked by manorial tenants on the
model introduced in Bermuda by the Somers Island Company in 1615-1616. When
Argall returned to Virginia as acting or Deputy Governor in 1617, he set about
undermining Bermuda City’s autonomy and the vision it encapsulated by
appointing a provost marshall to govern the corporation, by appropriating or
misappropriating its land and resources, and by re-locating its tenants to his
own private plantation at Argall’s town. These actions illustrated his hostile
view of the corporate frame of settlement favoured by Dale. In fact, both these
putative allies, Argall and Martin considered the careful management of their
private estates as a public service. Inevitably, Argall’s diversion of public
assets, whether cattle, labourers or land, to his own purposes, provoked
hostile criticism from some investors in England keen to secure profits. As a
direct result, in November and December, 1618, the Virginia Company guided by
Sir Edwin Sandys decided to replace Argall, to adopt Dale’s model of a
corporate community and to apply it to the other embryonic urban areas of
Virginia. These measures were intended to ensure that public lands were used to
support the corporations of Virginia rather than simply generating profits for
the company and would regulate private landownership within the context of
corporate, communal control. This attractive argument appeared with a comprehensive academic
apparatus and has passed into wider
historiographical currency.
A number of questions arise
about this argument. Were the members of the Rich family the sponsors of
schemes to establish private plantations with manorial peasantries in Bermuda
in 1615-1616 and in Virginia in and after 1616-1617? Were they the patrons of
Samuel Argall and John Martin when their patents were granted by the Virginia
Company of London? Were Argall and Martin allies in Virginia’s affairs? How was
the ‘growing influence’ of the ‘Earl of Warwick’ detected or detectable in 1615
or 1616 or 1617? What pro-expansion plans did the ‘Earl’ have? What were his
relations with Sir Edwin Sandys and the latter’s supporters as the Virginia
Company’s colonial venture was re-cast in the autumn of 1618 and the spring of
1619? Were there really such fundamental differences of principle over the
settlement of Virginia, a colony with only a few hundred inhabitants in
1615-1616 and barely 1,000 inhabitants by 1619? These are issues of importance
and interest and the answers to these questions may suggest conclusions rather
different from those reached by Musselwhite.
Let me begin with the Earldom
of Warwick. The last holder of this title in the Tudor period had been Ambrose
Dudley, who died in 1590: his illegitimate nephew, Robert Dudley, had tried but
failed to claim the title very early in King James VI and I’s reign. The title
was subsequently acquired by the 3rd Lord Rich, who was elevated to
the Earldom of Warwick on 6th August, 1618: his eldest son, then Sir
Robert Rich, became the titular Lord Rich on that date before succeeding his
father as the 2nd Earl of Warwick in this creation on the latter’s
death on 24th March, 1619. There was thus no ‘Earl of Warwick’ in
1616 or 1617 as Musselwhite has claimed in more than one place.
There is no contemporary
evidence either to show that Sir Robert Rich, as he then was, had any “growing
influence” in the Virginia Company in 1616 or 1617 that led to the granting of
patents to Samuel Argall and John Martin respectively in those years. The claim
that Musselwhite makes that it was with the support and encouragement of “the
pro-expansion group in the Virginia Company … led by the Earl of Warwick” that
Argall and Martin “envisioned a more hierarchical structure of landownership”
has no documentary basis at all. Not a single surviving contemporary source in
the Ferrar Papers or the Rich family’s colonial manuscripts or the exiguous
surviving pre-1619 records of the Virginia Company of London lends any support
to this claim. Exactly what Argall’s relationship, if any, to the Rich family
in 1616 and 1617 might have been is not known from the extant evidence, although
it is clear from very late in 1618 and from early 1619 onwards that he enjoyed
their protection. In John Martin’s case, there is no evidence to suggest that
he had the family’s patronage or protection before or after 1619. Nor is there
any expression by either Argall or Martin of “opposition” to Dale’s settlement
at Bermuda City or about their lobbying activities in London or on their
opinions about the merits of private plantations. In fact, it is untenable to
attribute overall colonial aims or policies or programmes regarding Virginia to
the Rich family in the years from 1615 to 1619 whatever Sir Edwin Sandys and
his allies claimed in their polemical assertions in 1623 when the struggle for
control of the Virginia Company was at its height.
Admittedly, the origins of the
scheme for large private plantations with a manorial peasantry in Virginia are
attributed by Musselwhite to a settlement allegedly imposed on Bermuda by the
Somers Island Company in 1615-1616. The prematurely ennobled 2nd
Earl of “Warwick and his allies had”, so Musselwhite claimed, “… been at the
forefront of imposing a similar structure on Virginia’s sister colony, Bermuda
(the Somers Islands).” In early 1616, that company “had refined plans for this
manorial system, resulting in a systematic survey of the islands”; the
adventurers’ tenants had been organised into groups called “families” under the
supervision of older colonists in order to reinforce patriarchal hierarchy. The
plans for Virginia shortly thereafter attributed to Argall and Martin by
Musselwhite were a natural extension of this scheme.
Two documents are cited to
underpin these contentions – the charter granted in 1615 to the Somers Island
Company and the instructions given to the newly appointed Governor, Daniel
Tucker, in February, 1616. Neither makes any reference whatsoever to the “Earl
of Warwick” (or to Sir Robert Rich) and his allies nor do they lend any credence to the claim
that he or they had played any role in devising the company’s instructions for
the surveying of Bermuda or the division of its lands amongst the adventurers.
The shares owned by Sir Robert Rich and his second cousin, Nathaniel Rich, who
was knighted in 1617, covered only a few hundred acres in Bermuda and hardly
constituted “large plantations”. (They were, in fact, much smaller than the
parks around the family’s major houses at Leez Priory and Rochford Hall in the
county of Essex.) Furthermore, no manors
were ever created in Bermuda. There were no manorial courts or court rolls, no
entry fines or heriots, no copyholders or freeholders, no manorial bailiffs or
stewards and no manorial surveys. Relations between the company’s adventurers
and the tenants and workers on the latter’s shares were regulated locally by
the bailiffs of Bermuda’s tribes and, if necessary, by the colony’s Governor
and his Council subject to the ultimate supervision of the company in England.
Argall and Martin thus had no manorial structure of the kind postulated by
Musselwhite to follow. It did not exist. In any case, the Rich family made no
assault in Bermuda on the public lands and tenants and clearly worked within
the parameters laid down in 1615-1616 as did other Somers Island Company
adventurers like Sir Edwin Sandys. Limited though the surviving sources for
Bermuda are, there is no sign that Sandys and his allies found this settlement
repugnant even after he became Treasurer of the Somers Island Company in 1621.
There was thus no Bermudan model to be
followed by Samuel Argall and John Martin.
Virginia’s boroughs before and
after 1619
New material, deeper research
and novel interpretations of the past inevitably alter the perspectives of
historians and their readers. A good example of this can be found in the work
of Paul Musselwhite on the establishment of urban corporations in the embryonic
English colony of Virginia in the early seventeenth century. He has argued in
his Ph.D. thesis, in a subsequent book deriving from that thesis and in an
essay that the reforms adopted by the Virginia Company of London in the autumn
of 1618 envisaged the extension of Sir Thomas Dale’s 1614 model corporation of
Bermuda City to the three other major settlements of Jamestown, Henrico and
Elizabeth City. The primary goal was to strengthen such corporate institutions
in order to control private landholding and trade within local public communal
bodies. This view has subsequently been reflected in the work of other
historians.
It is perfectly true that the
wording of the instructions given to the prospective Governor of the colony,
Sir George Yeardley, in that autumn appears to support this interpretation.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence which runs against this claim about the
extension of corporations to other towns or places in Virginia. In 1898,
Alexander Brown published a document issued on 28th March, 1619 by
Samuel Argall, then acting Governor of the colony, setting out the bounds and
limits of Jamestown: regrettably, Brown did not specify where he had found this
source but it did close with Argall granting permission “for the inhabitants of
James-town to plant as members of the corporation and parish of the same”
within those bounds and limits. The existence of a corporation at Jamestown is
clearly implied. Furthermore, in his report to the General Quarter Court of the
Virginia Company held on 17th November, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys as
Treasurer paid tribute to the work Dale had done in earlier years in
establishing public works in Virginia for the company’s benefit before moving
on to discuss how the instructions issued to Yeardley had provided for the
revival of the common lands of the company for the support of its officers in
Virginia, for the creation of a university there and a college for the
conversion of its indigenous inhabitants. The amount of land granted for the
first of these objectives was for “12000 Acres of Land to be the Comon Land of
the Companie; viztt three thowsand in each of the ffower old
Burroughes.” Sandys evidently believed that there had been four such bodies in
existence prior to the instructions given to Yeardley a year ago.
This material suggests that,
however insubstantial and minute these boroughs might have been, they existed
before Yeardley arrived in Virginia just after Argall’s departure in April,
1619. Admittedly, apart from a few references to Bermuda City in Argall’s
surviving memoranda, it is not known how they operated but this is also true
for the period after Yeardley took up his appointment. Either way, the claim
that new boroughs were created on the model of Bermuda City’s foundation in
1614 by means of the company’s instructions in November, 1618 looks untenable.
Sir
Edwin Sandys’s status as a man in holy orders
Sir Edwin Sandys is customarily
portrayed in the historiography of early Virginia as a defender of English
liberties, as an opponent of King James VI and I in the early Stuart
Parliaments, as a defender of free trade and the architect of the “great reforms”
of 1618-1619 and, later, as the victim of the machinations of his critics
within the Virginia Company leading to its dissolution. This interpretation –
much of it derived directly from the post-April, 1619 papers of the company
itself and from the manuscripts of his allies, John and Nicholas Ferrar - can
still be found in the latest works on the colony’s history.
What is surprising about this
view is that it involves accepting Sandys’s own evaluation of his career. This
was much more complicated than historians of Virginia have realised. Take
Sandys’s experiences as a member of the House of Commons, for example. This
experience was gained illegally. In 1582, Sandys was presented to the prebend
of Wetwang in Yorkshire by his father, the Archbishop of York. He was thus in
holy orders and, by law, barred from standing for election to the House of
Commons.[i]
Nevertheless, he was elected on eight occasions for English boroughs and once
for the county of Kent between 1589 and 1626. Sandys’s ambitions for high office
under King James and his overtures to the king’s favourite, George Villiers for
his favour figure nowhere in the colony’s history. His mendacity over the
breakdown and failure of the Virginia Company and its colony and his success in
gaining the Duke of Buckingham’s patronage in the Parliament of 1624 meant that
his final years were spent in ignominy as Andrew Thrush pointed out.
Samuel Argall’s allies in the
government of Virginia 1617-1619
Few, if any, English settlers
in North America have had quite as bad a reputation as Samuel Argall, who
served as acting Governor of Virginia between 1617 and 1619. His contemporary
critics, notably Sir Edwin Sandys, John and Nicholas Ferrar and their supporters
in the Virginia Company of London viewed his administration of the colony as
arbitrary, corrupt, as dedicated to private profit at the expense of the public
good, and as a threat to the very existence of the company and colony alike.[18]
They were insistent on this verdict then and in the succeeding years as well as
proving highly influential in ensuring its repetition by later historians.[19]
Whether it was and is a sound view is another matter. In any case, the internal
politics of this small English settlement have been overlooked in favour of
studying the grand designs of Argall’s critics and enemies. It was ironically
the failure of those designs that brought the Virginia Company and its colony
to the point of collapse. As a result, Argall’s embittered critics were
themselves ousted from overseeing Virginia’s affairs.
Exactly who Argall’s allies in
the colony were in the period when he was acting Governor does not appear to
have attracted much scholarly attention. He was admittedly only in temporary charge
whilst awaiting the arrival of the 3rd Lord De La Warr as Governor
but De La Warr died during his outward voyage to Virginia in 1618. The
surviving records for the colony in this period are very sparse but two of the
peer’s brothers, Francis and Nathaniel West, were appointed by Argall to the
posts of maker of the Ordnance for life and Captain of the Lord General’s
Company respectively on 20th October, 1617.[20] After
Argall had been replaced by Sir George Yeardley as Governor, Francis West was
one of those who apparently petitioned the Council for Virginia in England for
Yeardley’s replacement by a man, perhaps a peer, of much higher social status:[21]
he was certainly prepared, according to Yeardley in January, 1620, to complain
to the Virginia Company that men had been settled on land in the colony
allocated to his deceased elder brother.[22] Francis
West looks like an ally of Argall and, perhaps, his brother Nathaniel was so
too.
The same point is probably true
for Captain Nathaniel Powell.[23]
He had been appointed Sergeant Major General by Argall on 20th
October, 1617.[24]
Powell was present when Edward Brewster was tried by Court Martial in Virginia
for trying to dispute Argall’s claim to the goods of the deceased Lord De La
Warr and sentenced to death, a sentence then commuted to banishment. He briefly
served as Virginia’s acting Governor after Argall’s departure on 9th
April, 1619 until Sir George Yeardley’s arrival ten days later.[25]
The fact that he criticised the Virginia Company’s efforts to reduce the
cultivation of tobacco in January, 1620 suggests a lack of sympathy for the
economic programme of Sandys and the Ferrars.
It is rather more difficult to
say anything definitive about William Cradock who was appointed Provost
Marshall [of the colony?] by Argall in October, 1617 and Provost Marshall of Bermuda City in February,
1618.[26]
But Argall evidently had confidence in him. And Captain Robert Smalley of
Bermuda Hundred, who made Argall the executor of his will in December, 1617,
clearly had confidence in Argall despite his widow’s later claims.[27]
In the case of Samuel Macock,
the Cambridge-educated scholar, Argall asked the Virginia Company in March,
1618 that he be consecrated so that he could act as a clergyman given the
failing eyesight of one of Virginia’s ministers.[28] Quite how
close Argall and Macock were is not entirely clear: Sir George Yeardley
considered later in 1619 that “while Capt Argall was heere he [Macock] did a
littell run with the tyme, as it was his safest Course for endeed, there was no
daring to deny what he [Argall?] would have done”.[29] Macock
may thus have been an ally for the sake of convenience.
So, there were, perhaps, half a
dozen men who might conceivably have been allies of Argall whilst he was acting
Governor. Two other men, Thomas Dowse and Samuel Mathews, who were the beneficiaries
of grants made by Argall of land subsequently claimed in March, 1620 as having
been allocated for the use of the college for educating Indian children might also fall into this category.[30]
Argall himself was clearly by the end of his time in Virginia and after his
return to England under the protection of Robert, Lord Rich, who succeeded his
father as 2nd Earl of Warwick in March, 1619. The bare outlines of
an ‘interest’ in Virginia attached to Argall and, by extension, to Warwick may
be tentatively postulated.[31]
Samuel Argall’s charges against Sir
George Yeardley 1618-1619
One of the surprising features
of the historiography covering the early
years of the English settlement in Virginia in general and of the struggle in
particular for control of both the Virginia Company and its colonial offshoot
in the second half of 1618 and early in 1619 has been the comparative neglect
of the internal politics of the settlement. The efforts by Sir Edwin Sandys and
his supporters to gain control of both the company and its colony in order to
implement what later historians have described as their ‘reform programme’ have
been comprehensively analysed at considerable length. Inevitably, the
activities of the acting Governor from 1617, Captain Samuel Argall, attracted
their attention: demands were made to call him to account and to return him to
England to answer a range of serious charges. The instructions given to his
prospective replacement, George Yeardley, for Argall’s arrest, for the seizure
of his property and for a thorough investigation of his allegedly damaging
malpractices were extremely explicit.
Interestingly enough, Argall’s
response to these developments has attracted no attention at all in the
scholarly literature.[32]
Nonetheless, it is possible that he had been informed about what was happening
in England and took the opportunity to respond by making charges against
Yeardley himself. In January, 1619, Nicholas Ferrar wrote to his brother,
William, who was about to go to Virginia, to give him advice on how he should
conduct himself towards Yeardley. His letter included an account of the
problems that had arisen for Yeardley as a result of the charges that had
reached England from John Rolfe over the prospects for the colony and from
Argall against Yeardley. Whether these letters had been co-ordinated is unclear
but Nicholas Ferrar was clear about the significance of the charges against
Yeardley.
“I send you heare the letters that came from thence
& that w[hi]ch
I have writt to S[i]r George, by w[hi]ch you may gather the state
of thinges heare, w[hi]ch had beene to the destruction of S[i]r
George had not S[i]r Edwin socored him most nobly, and to give A
full clearinge to All thinges it was last day ordered in Courte,
that S[i]r Edwin should drawe a Comission to S[i]r George & the
counsell of state there for the examination of the publique
letter whereof this Inclosed is a coppy of Mr Rolfes owne hand:
w[hi]ch hath brought an Infinite scandall uppon the plantation,
soe that I suppose there will shortly bee sett forthe in print
som[m]e thinge against it; And concerninge Captayne Argolls
letter to S[i]r George there is another letter directed to the
counsell of state to examin S[i]r George uppon the particulars
w[i]th w[hi]ch hee is there charged, whoe I assure my selfe will
most nobly iustifie himselfe, and his innocency sufficiently
deffend him,”[33]
No copy of Argall’s
charges against Yeardley is currently known to survive but there is some
further information in a draft letter by Sir Edwin Sandys to the 3rd
Earl of Southampton on 29th September, 1619. His account covered the
period of time when Yeardley was knighted at New Market by King James VI and I
in November, 1619 until just after
Yeardley’s departure for Virginia in January, 1619.
S[i]r Th[omas] Smyth was highly offended w[i]th
[his deleted]
S[i]r George Yeardleys being knight[ing deleted]ed: aleging that
it beeing doon contrarie to his pleasure, yet both his [name
deleted] & the whole companies name, were used in it either
whereof [in truth] was so. Before S[i]r Georges Departure, I both
labored & effected a Reconciliation, (thinking it very unfits
that the Treasuro[u]r) of the Companie, & the Governo[u]r of the
Colonie, should be at Variance:) & [mutuall deleted] offices of
[love & kyndness did deleted] friendship passt on bothe sides.
After S[i]r George[s departure deleted] was gone, I [saw deleted]
perceived my work to be unsound, ffor upon occasion of a motion
made [openly deleted] against S[i]r G. Yeardley by a noble person
in [favo[u]r as was conceived deleted] contemplation as seemed of
Captain Argall, S[i]r Thomas taking the advantage renued his
former displeasure; not long after upbraiding in
open coort his
unduely procured Knighthood: Mr Canning also
muttering [our
deleted] matter of disgrace [by deleted] to his
wife: & this
against a man, to whom they had professed
friendship, who was
chosen by themselves, & sent by them (in great
part at his own
private charges) to so difficult a service.”[34]
The connection between Argall and “a
noble person” who favoured him was presumably a reference to Lord Rich, the
heir to the 1st Earl of Warwick and his successor in that title in
March, 1619. Sir Thomas Smith was the Treasurer of the Virginia Company until
Sir Edwin Sandys replaced him at the end of the following April. A legitimate
question arises about whether Argall’s informant in England had been Lord Rich
and whether he had solicited these counter-charges against Yeardley. Sir Thomas
Smith appears to have been anxious to exploit them if Sandys was right. Even
so, it is unlikely that Yeardley was anything other than a client of Sandys and
a man expected to deliver the condemnation of Argall’s activities that Nicholas
Ferrar expected. Nothing Argall could do or Lord Rich’s other client, John
Pory, who was travelling to Virginia as its prospective Secretary of State, was
to interfere with these aims.[35]
Migration to Virginia in 1618-1619
The instructions given by the
Virginia Company in November, 1618 to George Yeardley, its newly chosen
prospective Governor of its transatlantic colony, survive in more than one
version. The first formal set can be found in Volume 3 of the company’s records
edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury and published in 1933.[36] The
second related set of instructions for the restoration of the company’s store
of cattle and corn is located in the Ferrar Papers held in Magdalene College,
Cambridge and much more recently transcribed by David Ransome.[37]
They are not identical but they do share common characteristics.
That edited by Kingsbury begins
with the proposition that “our trust being that under the Government of you
Captain Yeardly with the advice and assistance of the said Council of State [to
be established in Virginia] such public provisions of Corn and Cattle will
again be raised as may draw on those Multitudes who in great Abundance from
diverse parts of the Realm were preparing to remove thither if by the late
decay of the said public Store their hopes had not been made frustrate and
their minds thereby clene discouraged.”[38]
This connection between the
decay of the public store blamed on the acting Governor in Virginia, Samuel
Argall, and the slackening of emigration to the colony was made even more
explicit in the document in the Ferrar Papers. Yeardley was instructed to
investigate Argall’s activities and then “for=asmuch as the publique and
notorious fame of his wasting of the wholl store of the Comon provisions of
Corn and Catle belonging to the said Colonye and Companye; and of converting
the same wholly to his private and unlawfull lucre, hath wrought here that
grievous and miserable effect, as to dishearten and keep at home many hundreds
of good people, who out of divers parts of this Realme were providing to remove
to Virg wth their wives and famelyes; whereby that Plantation was in
a prosperous coorse of growing to a very great height in strength and multitude
in a very short time, to the great honore of the Kings Matye,
and benefit of this his Realme: Whereas contrarywise by the destroying of the
said publique store (by wch the Loan of some good proportion whereof
granted in ore Coorts, the particular Plantations remooving thither
were at their first coming to have been relieved) the former feares and feares
of hunger and starving are renued and revived in the mynds and mouthes of all
men to the utter disgrace and ouerthrowe of the wholl Plantation, and of all ore
former charges, unless by very extraordinarye and dexteritye some speedy coorse
be taken for the restoring and setting up of the said publique st ore and
provisions, as farr forth as wthout breach of Justice may be
effected:”[39]
These charges against Argall
made by Sir Edwin Sandys and his supporters have figured prominently in the
historiography of Virginia from that day to the present. There is, however, no
extant evidence currently available to corroborate this indictment against
Argall over his alleged misappropriation of the public store of lands and
provisions in the colony. No further details were given or sources provided
even at the height of the struggle for control of the Virginia Company in the
period from 1622 to 1624. Some material does, however, survive regarding the
population of the colony against which the claims of Sandys and his allies on
the inhibiting effects of Argall’s actions on migration to Virginia can be
checked.
John Rolfe, for example, in his
A True Relation of the state of the colony in May, 1616 estimated that
there were 351 English people in Virginia.[40] Sir Edwin
Sandys later claimed in May, 1620 that there were about 400 colonists there in
April, 1618. More interestingly still, Sandys told the Virginia Company’s
annual Quarter Court on 17 May, 1620 that “att the cominge away of Captain
Argoll at Easter 1619 there were Persons in the Colony neere – 1000”,[41]
an estimate endorsed by his critic, Alderman Robert Johnson, early, perhaps, in
1623.[42]
Other, slightly later, estimates put the population at the time of Argall’s
departure in April, 1619 in a range between c.800 and c.1200-1300 people.[43]
It looks, prima facie, as though the number of people from England (and Wales?)
migrating to Virginia and resident there had grown significantly in the
preceding twelve months or so. This point, if sound, calls into question the
validity of the claims made in the instructions to Yeardley given in November,
1618.
Fortunately, there is a little
more information admittedly from a partisan source on the ships and people
crossing the Atlantic in this period. Argall recalled in 1623 that the
following vessels had brought to Virginia:
The Gift of God 250
The William and Thomas 150 (both in 1618)
and, in 1619, before his
departure
The George 100
Mr Lawne’s ship 100
The Sampson 50
The Edwin 30
John Pountis’s ship 50
The Diana 80
making a total of 710 migrants.[44]
Sir Edwin Sandys and John Ferrar, two of the adventurers involved in the
private plantation of Smith’s Hundred, had been planning to send 35 men there
in May, 1618 undeterred, so it appears, by the decay of the public store and
its provisions.
Given these figures, it is
difficult to accept that migration to Virginia had been inhibited for the
reasons indicated in the instructions given to Yeardley in November, 1618. If
such claims were untrue, why were they made? The most likely explanation is
that they were part of the polemical attack launched by Sandys and his
supporters on the Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, Sir Thomas Smith
and his allies then in charge of the company and wer designed to appeal to the
small investors attending the company’s Courts. These allegations also indicted
Samuel Argall, an ally of Lord Rich, as the principal malefactor in the
colony’s affairs. Attacks like these and on Smith’s accounts as Treasurer were
part of Sandys’s stock in trade inside and outside the House of Commons. In
this case, it is doubtful whether his and his allies’ claims were tenable.
[1]
Peter Wilson Coldham, English Adventurers and Emigrants, 1609-1660 (Clearfield.
Baltimore, Maryland. 2002), Pp.12-14. Martha W.McCartney, Virginia Immigrants
and Adventurers 1607-1635: a Biographical Dictionary (Genealogical Publishing
Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 2007), P.585.
[2]
Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon) dd M47B Bundle 6 unnumbered Ms and 47A
Bundle 35 (No.25).
[3]
Essex Record Office D/DS 128/37, 38, 39, 71 and T/A 708/1.
[4]
Essex Record Office T/P 83/7 Pp.581-582.
[5]
B.W.Quintrell, The Government of the County of Essex 1603-1642 (University of
London Ph.D. thesis. 1965), Pp.68-69.
[6]
TNA PROB/11/207/130.
[7]
The Historye of the Bermudaes or Summer Islands. Edited by J.H.Lefroy (London,
Hakluyt Society. 1882), Pp.120, 128-132.
[8]
Ibid., P.129.
[9]
Ibid., P.130.
[10]
Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, Volume 1, P.212.
[11]
Lefroy, ed., Historye, P.131 where Butler indicates only 3 votes out of 300
were cast against him. The meeting of the Somers Island Company followed that
of the Virginia Company, Smith’s re-election as Governor must have preceded
Butler’s election as Governor of the colony.
[12]
Kingsbury, ed., op.cit., Volume 4, p.521.
[13]
Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a
Colonial Experiment (New York. Oxford University Press,1932), Pp.106-112.
Craven’s ad verse jusdgment on Smith’s accounts, ibid., P.110, is without
evidence to substantiate the charge.
[14]
Magdalene College, Cambridge. Ferrar Papers 1596a and b; 1607; 1611, 2 and 3:
1384a.
[15]
James Horn, 1619 Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy (Basic Books.
New York, 2018), Pp.63-64. The document cited from the Ferrar Papers in
Magdalene College, Cambridge used to be FP 1518 and is now FP 93.
[16]
Ibid., p.63.
[17]
The Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury
(2 Volume. Washington, 1906), Volume I, Pp.216, 218-219.
[18] See
The Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by S.M.Kingsbury, (Washington,
U.S.A. 1906), Volume II, Pp,401-404.
[19] James
Horn, 1619. Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy (Basic Books. New
York, 2018), Pp. 55, 61, 192-193.
[20] The
Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by S.M.Kingsbury (Washington,
U.S.A. 1933), Volume III, Pp.75-76.
[21]
Ibid., Volume III, Pp.231-232. Argall also signed this document.
[22]
Ibid., Volume III, Pp.248-249.
[23] Martha
W. McCartney, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers 1607-1635. A Biographical
Dictionary (Genealogical Publishing Company. Baltimore, U.S.A. 2007), P.574.
[24]
See note 3 above.
[25] McCartney,
loc.cit.
[26] See
note 3 above and VCR, Volume III, P.91.
[27]
Lothrop Withington, Virginia Gleanings in England (Clearfield Company.
Baltimore, U.S.A. 1998), Pp.78-79.
[28] VCR,
Volume III, P.92.
[29] Ibid.,
Volume III, P.119.
[30]
Ibid., Volume III, P.264.
[31]
See VCR, Volume III, Pp.174-175 for the proceedings in the first Virginia
Assembly on 4th August, 1619 against the interpreter, Captain Henry
Spelman. He was charged with having told the Indian chieftain, Opechancanough,
that Yeardley would be replaced by a Governor of higher rank within a year. This
claim is likely to have emanated from the Rich interest in England. See Ferrar
Papers No.113 in Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
[32]
See, for example, Seymour V.Connor, Sir Samuel Argall: A Biographical Sketch,
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 59 (No.2.), April, 1951,
Pp.162-175, especially P.173. The Oxford DNB in its old and new versions does
not mention these matters.
[33]
Ferrar Papers No.100 (Magdalene College, Cambridge). I am using David Ransome’s
transcription here. The enquiry into Sir George Yeardley’s conduct, if it ever
occurred in Virginia, has left no trace in the surviving records.
[34]
Ferrar Papers No.127 (Magdalene College, Cambridge), again using David
Ransome’s transcription.
[35] As
Ferrar Papers No.100 makes clear.
[36] The
Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury.
(Washington, USA) Volume 3, Pp.98-109. The quotation can be found on P.
[37]
Ferrar Papers 91.
[38] VCR,
Volume 3, p.98.
[39]
Ferrar Papers 91 using David Ransome’s transcription.
[40]
See, for example, the copy of this tract formerly in Public Record Office
30/15/208. It was dedicated to Sir Robert Rich who became Lord Rich in August,
1618 when his father purchased the title of Earl of Warwick and 2nd
Earl of Warwick on his father’s death in March, 1619.
[41] The
Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury
(Washington, USA. 1906) Volume 1, p.350. Cf. ibid., p.309.
[42] The
Record of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury
(Washington, USA. 1936), P.4
[43] Ibid.,
Pp.130, 133, 159, 183, 215, 520.
[44]
The Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury
(Washington, USA. 1936) Volume 4, Pp.94-95.
[i]
The House of Commons 1604-1629. Edited by Andrew Thrush and John P.Ferris
(Cambridge University Press. 2010), Volume VI, page 164.
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