Sir Edwin Sandys and his attitude to the Court of King James VI and I

 The Career and Character of Sir Edwin Sandys

One of the recurrent themes in the historiography of the early colonial settlement of Virginia has been the character and career of Sir Edwin Sandys, the Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London in 1619-1620 and a major figure in its activities until its dissolution in 1624. He was viewed, for example, by Wesley Frank Craven in 1932 as “best known for his leadership of the opposition to the crown in the house of commons, which he first entered in 1586” and his opposition to King James after 1603 “won him the thorough dislike of his sovereign.” Much more recently, Sandys has been described as “a relentless critic of the king’s political agenda and leader of the opposition in the House of Commons. He was involved in all the major confrontations with James and his ministers over the next twenty years [after 1603] .... and within a few years, he emerged as one of the major spokesmen of the country’s independent gentry by championing the “ancient constitution,” and he voiced the Commons’ concerns about their privileges and the rights of the subject being undermined.” His economic and political programmes in Virginia helped to reinforce his heroic status.

The continuity between these and other accounts is surprising if only because the concept of “the opposition” to the Crown in early Stuart Parliaments disappeared from revisionist historiography in the mid-1970s. It is more surprising still because Sandys left evidence that he did not regard himself as an inveterate critic of James VI and I. In May and June, 1620 when his position as Treasurer of the Virginia Company came under threat, Sandys was perfectly prepared to seek the intervention of James’s favourite and lover, George Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham, on his own behalf. Robert Naunton informed Buckingham on 8th May, 1620 that Sandys had written “to yore Lp in reducing whom into his Maties favore and good opinion you shall do God and his Matie service and yore selfe a greate deale of honore, if I can iudge any thing aright, or have any instinct of my duetie and respect to God, his Matie, or yore Lop.” It appears that Sandys was ready to try to gain royal favour. Similarly, Sandys’ letter to Buckingham on 7th June, 1620 seeking the Marquis’s mediation in his quarrel with Sir Thomas Smith, his predecessor as Treasurer, and offering to raise “a great & speedie revenue, wthout charge to his Maties cofers, save som small matter to grace the action” has been in print since 1933. These overtures did not succeed in saving Sandys’s post but they raise questions about his attitude to the King and his Court which do not fit easily into the received opinion of his political attitudes. Furthermore, when Sandys was arrested in the summer of 1621 and his papers were examined over his activities in the House of Commons in the preceding months, his wife reportedly stated that “she wished his Matie had a key to unlock hir husbands heart, that his Matie might see, there was not any thing therein but loyaltie.” Sandys’s rapprochement with Prince Charles and Buckingham in 1624 and his role in bringing down Lord Treasurer Middlesex at their behest is much more comprehensible if he is not seen through colonial spectacles as a severe critic and opponent of King James. It was, in any case, a course of action that blasted his later reputation amongst his contemporaries.

It is no doubt uncomfortable to re-consider the received version of Virginia’s historiography and the role of Sir Edwin Sandys within it. But this antique framework was rusted beyond repair many years ago and needs a fundamental reconstruction.

Christopher Thompson

5th June, 2023