Samuel Argall and the Rich Family

 SAMUEL ARGALL AND THE RICH FAMILY

Few, if any, figures in the early history of English colonization in Virginia

have experienced quite such criticism, sometimes quite such a degree of

vilification, as Samuel Argall and his patron and protector, Robert Rich,

who was the 2 nd Earl of Warwick from March, 1619. Argall’s period as

Deputy and then acting Governor in the colony from 1617 to 1619

attracted the hostility of the Virginia Company of London under the

leadership of Sir Thomas Smith as its Treasurer at first and then of his

successor, Sir Edwin Sandys and his allies including John and Nicholas

Ferrar. Their allegations about Argall’s apparent expropriation of

company property, his irregular granting of local patents, and willingness

to assist in provisioning privateering ventures formed the basis for his

pursuit by the Virginia Company after his return to England. They still

crop up regularly in more recent historiography even though the

surviving evidence is fragmentary and some of it uncorroborated.

Unanswered questions remain about these polemical narratives.

The purpose of this note is not to tackle these larger issues but to make

a cautious and tentative suggestion, not a definitive assertion, about

how Samuel Argall’s relationship with the Rich family began. The Argall

family is usually described as having its origins in Kent where his parents

had their main estate. Samuel Argall’s elder brother, Sir Reginald, did,

however, hold property at Higham Hill at Walthamstow, which was then

in Essex, following his marriage to the widow of the London Alderman,

William Rowe. Samuel Argall was one of the beneficiaries of Sir

Reginald’s will as was another brother, John Argall. The latter is of more

interest. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, he, too held

land in Essex at Colchester and Great Baddow. He was Captain of the

Lexden Hundred company of foot soldiers from 1613 to 1620 and a

Justice of the Peace in Essex from 1608 to 1642. John Argall was one of

Samuel’s fellow adventurers in a patent granted by the Virginia

Company in 1615 and, later, a member of the Council for New England in

which the 2 nd Earl of Warwick was a prominent member. Later still, in

the late-1620s, John Argall and the Earl of Warwick were engaged on the

same side in litigation in records now preserved in the U.K.’s National

Archives. The two men clearly knew another by then.

What may have been significant in this relationship was the location of

John Argall’s estate at Great Baddow, It was just to the south of the county town of Chelmsford in Essex. Not far away to the north of

Chelmsford was the heart of the Rich family’s estate in northern central

Essex stretching from Broomfield to Braintree and Felsted and

westwards to Fyfield and High Ongar. It is possible, but not certain, that

this was where John and Samuel Argall first met the future 2 nd Earl of

Warwick. Samuel Argall seems to have enjoyed the Rich family’s

confidence and the protection that frustrated the efforts of Sir Edwin

Sandys and his allies to punish him for his activites in Virginia. The last

major event in his life was his participation in the English naval

expedition against Cadiz in 1625: Sir Samuel Argall commanded the

vessel in which Warwick’s cousin, the 3 rd Earl of Essex, sailed. Whenever

and however Samuel Argall’s relationship with the Rich family was

formed, it endured to his end.

Copyright: Christopher Thompson 

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