Kingsbury and the records of the Virginia Company

 Susan Myra Kingsbury and the Records of the Virginia Company of London

A century or more after Susan Myra Kingsbury completed her work on the surviving records of the Virginia Company of London up until 1625, her edition of its papers remains fundamental to modern historical research. Its four volumes are regularly cited in the most up-to-date articles and books. These were the product of her studies in archives held in the United States and in the United Kingdom, the latter of which she visited in the summer and the subsequent autumn of 1904. Her thesis was published in 1905 and the subsequent volumes of records in 1906, 1933 and 1935.

One puzzling feature of her work can, however, be found. In 1905 and again in 1906, Kingsbury maintained that she had examined 78 of the relevant papers in the Ferrar family’s archive in Magdalene College, Cambridge and 66 of the documents deposited in the Duke of Manchester’s papers in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. London. The remainder of the Ferrar papers concerned family affairs and were not reproduced.

These claims are difficult to accept. David Ransome’s more recent transcription of the papers relevant to Virginia’s early history held in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge contained 515 documents. Was the bulk of this collection withheld from her or was it too large for her to transcribe in the time she had available? Similarly, by my count, 79 of the relevant documents in the Manchester Mss were reproduced in Volume 3 and 4 of The Records of the Virginia Company of London, i.e. 13 more than she claimed were relevant, and a further 26 were not reproduced at all. In the latter case, she must have seen the report on these documents in Part 2 of the Eighth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the documents themselves in the P.R.O. Why they were omitted is an enduring puzzle.

That such gaps existed has been noted before. When Sir Nathaniel Rich’s colonial papers (which constituted the Manchester Mss) were auctioned in May, 1970, the catalogue noted a handful of omissions from Kingsbury’s works. What was also not apparent in the historiography was the existence of a small group of relevant documents amongst Sir Nathaniel Rich’s papers in what was then the Huntingdonshire Record Office.

Christopher Thompson

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