W.F.Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company 1932

 Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (Oxford University Press. New York, 1932)

Wesley Frank Craven was a distinguished historian in the pre- and post-Second World War periods specialising mainly in the study of the early English colonies established in the seventeenth century. He was educated at Duke University, secured a Ph.D. at Cornell University on the life of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick to 1642, and then taught at New York and Princeton Universities until his retirement. His first major book appeared in 1932 on the subject of the ‘Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a Colonial Experiment.’ As a postgraduate at the University of Oxford working several decades later on the career and interests of the 2nd Earl of Warwick, I read it with great interest and had the good fortune thanks to the late Theodore Rabb to correspond with Craven on this topic. I was and am grateful to him for his courtesy. The enduring merits of his book have ensured that it is still cited in academic historiography to this day.

This study began with a summary account of earlier works on this subject beginning in the eighteenth century with authors like Robert Beverly and William Stith before moving on to consider the publications of Alexander Brown, Edward Channing, G.L.Beer and W.R.Scott. Craven’s aim, so he made clear, was to fill in the explanatory gaps surrounding the demise of the Virginia Company of London and to correct misunderstandings, particularly those arising from a political interpretation attributing its fall to hostile royal machinations. His emphasis was, instead, to be on the venture’s economic failure after 1619, on the company’s practice of sending too many poorly supplied emigrants from England, on its inability to stimulate the production of staple commodities other than tobacco, and on the factional divisions that bedevilled the company’s courts in England by 1618-1619 and which were reanimated by the conflicting aims of Sir Edwin Sandys and his supporters on the one hand and their opponents on the other.

To his credit, Craven was well aware as W.R.Scott had been before him of the dangers of using the Court books of the Virginia Company as a source. They were recognisably partisan texts edited in the interests of Sandys and his followers. He had the inestimable advantage too of being able to use the mass of unpublished manuscript material collected by Susan Myra Kingsbury for what were then the forthcoming third and fourth volumes of her edition of the Records of the Virginia Company. The material she had amassed, especially from the Ferrar and Rich family papers, surpassed any previous research resources in quality and quantity.

Craven’s economic analysis made clear the failings of John and Nicholas Ferrar, Sir Edwin Sandys’s closest allies, in supervising the transport of food, goods, people and supplies to Virginia. Sandys expected as his correspondence made apparent that migrants sent from England would be able to support themselves relatively quickly and work to return profits to England. Unfortunately, these expectations were not met. Despite repeated advice from the colony’s officers on the best time to dispatch emigrants, despite warnings about the inadequate clothing, food and supplies sent with them, despite, indeed, protestations about the colony’s lack of proper housing, the flow of people to Virginia continued even when the company, if not its private adventurers, had become effectively bankrupt by 1621. The Indian massacre of March, 1622 and the deeply contentious negotiations over a tobacco contract with the Crown stretching into 1623 gave Sandys’s opponents their opportunity: they were able to expose the colony’s acute distress and to secure the investigations overseen the the Privy Council that led in due course to the company’s dissolution.

This analysis marked a new stage in the understanding of these events and established Craven’s reputation as a serious scholar. Nonetheless, there were and are some odd features that can be seen in retrospect about Craven’s book. Susan Myra Kingsbury had, it is now known, only transcribed seventy eight of over five hundred documents in the Ferrar family’s archive. She, like Craven, was unaware of the existence of a small group of Sir Nathaniel Rich’s papers, including his account book for 1622-1623, which had not been deposited in the Public Record Office in London. In evidential terms, the range of sources was incomplete.

Craven, moreover, subscribed to the view that Sandys and his allies, men like the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Lord Cavendish, Sir John Danvers and others could be seen as embodiments of a desire to render a public service in support of the process of colonisation. In Sir Edwin’s case, considerations of honour and public service were fused. That is to take them at their own valuation as many historians of the early history of Virginia still do. Craven gave credence too to the allegations made against Sir Thomas Smith during his period as Treasurer of the company until late in April, 1619 and indeed to the selfish, almost malign motives of the Rich family in protecting their interests in Virginia and Bermuda. In one place, Craven claimed that the Earl of Warwick and Sir Nathaniel Rich had little familiarity with the actual problems of colonisation, a claim he must have known was false from his doctoral work, and yet later argued that they were devoted to the work of colonisation. He judged that Sandys’s pursuit of Smith over his accounts was sincere just as his concern over the threat that Warwick’s privateering activities potentially posed to the safety of Virginia was. But this was a form of special pleading. The truth was that the Virginia Company offered Sandys the opportunity to exercise his oratorical skills and expertise in drafting documents that he could find nowhere else outside the House of Commons. He was not just an incompetent manager of this colonial venture but also a man who made enemies far too easily, an individual who pursued vendettas and who believed that by repeating accusations of malpractice by others over and over again, he could win arguments and secure his opponents’ defeat.

More surprisingly still, Craven gave only perfunctory attention to the evidence produced in the spring and summer months of 1623 about the sufferings of the colonists in Virginia. Quite how the Earl of Warwick and his second cousin, Sir Nathaniel Rich, acquired this damning material is an intriguing question. The distress of the colonists in this correspondence can be heard to this day. Very little, moreover, was said about the composition of the group mobilised by the Riches in opposition to the tobacco contract. There is an even more important point to be made. Craven completely overlooked the significance of Sir Nathaniel Rich’s role in the Irish Commission of 1622 and Sir Thomas Smith’s connections with the Commissioners investigating the affairs of Virginia in 1623, issues first raised in the papers I wrote and forwarded to Theodore Rabb. During the process of investigation, Sir Nathaniel Rich won the confidence of King James’s Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex, and was able to influence the official instructions sent to Virginia. There was more to the politics of the end of the Virginia Company than Craven realised even if he was mistaken in regarding Sandys and his allies as participants in ‘opposition’ to the King. Southampton and Sandys, Lord Cavendish, the Ferrar brothers and their supporters were exposed not just as incompetent managers of this colonial enterprise but also as fundamentally mendacious. Their only penalty was loss of control over the Virginia Company of London: a more serious penalty in the loss of English lives and human suffering was paid in Virginia.

What appeared in 1932 to have been a balanced, more neutral account of the decline and fall of the Virginia Company was undoubtedly a step forward from the prejudicial claims of Alexander Brown. But it was less balanced and less neutral than might have been wished. The claims of Sandys and the Ferrars still influenced Craven’s account. That is to be regretted. But this fault line still exists in more recent historiography. It is time it was removed.

21st August, 2023.