Incorporation of the Virginia Company: The Virginia Company Runs Aground on the Shoals of the Ulster “Plantation as a Colony” Paradigm

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1609 The Virginia Company Runs Aground on the Shoals of the Ulster “Plantation as a Colony” Paradigm

To set the stage, to complete the “Big Picture” we ought to look at the Plantation Strategy as it had been developed under Elizabeth, and how it evolved after the reforms of 1606-12. We will deal with how events in Northern Ireland, and Ireland in general further affected Virginia during the English Civil War in another module series to follow. At this point, then we offer a case study to allow those interested to better understand the main act of British colonization between 1610 and 1660: the colonization of Ireland. We can see how the Ulster Planation would consume British resources, attention, and priority in agenda-setting that left the Virginia Company in the shadows of British colonial policy.

To inject the Irish Ulster Plantation may seem as a rather odd intrusion to our Jamestown and Virginia story. But its inclusion here is my attempt to reverse American thought processes about early Stuart American colonization by introducing them to the unpatriotic assertion that the Virginia colonization was the intrusion into England’s top colonization agenda of 1606-08, the formulation-launch of England’s first “real” colonization initiative: Ireland.

Virginia was the “tail” and Ireland was the dog. That, I assert, is itself a major explanation of why Jamestown got off to such a bad start–and why the Virginia colonization languished in Ireland’s (and later West Indies) shadows well into the 1660’s. Thought today as the English King’s fondest overseas possession, knick-named the “Old Dominion”, the moniker was given to Virginia, not by Charles I, but by Charles II–in the 1660-after the Civil War and Cromwell’s Protectorate. It took that long for Virginia to occupy a noticeable position in Crown priorities–and even then it was not all that prominent. In many ways Virginia was always England’s forgotten and often neglected child.

I think it very important the reader have a grasp on the politics-economics of the mother country, especially in these earliest of years. The colony at this point is literally living off handouts from the plate of Merrie Olde England. It will continue to do so until it develops a modicum of self-sufficiency and functioning institutions of politics and economy. Until then such consensus as might exist, especially among elites, is drawn from religion–since no family structure will be resident in the New World for the better part of a decade at minimum.

But there is an even more compelling reason for understanding the role the Ulster Plantation plays in the role of American colonial history. Mostly, these reasons revolved around the notion that Ulster was the first venture into English colonization, and that from its events flowed the formulation of the future pillars of English colonial policy. The stuff that made Ireland important to us is less the specific initiatives but rather the “definition”, the evolving substance or content of what England did in this first bout with colonization. They will carry over and help shape anything that followed after.

It is worth note that to be appreciated one should realize that other countries in this period, France being the most salient, followed a different path. That the English chose a path that would maximize their conflict with Native American Indians, they did not appreciate because that colonization path was hacked through the wildest of Irish savages, viewed by the English as the lowest, most base, uncultured denizens of Catholicism–the true enemy of England at the time, and to make matters much worse, actively allied with their superpower enemy Spain.

On a more human note, Both James I and Charles I hated tobacco–the first issued a great counterblast against it, and the latter complained that “Virginia was built on smoke”–not a compliment. His son Charles II who assumed rule in 1661, however, was a heavy user of snuff (a tobacco product) carried over from his days in exile with the French court. Perhaps that accounts for Virginia’s rise in status. I joke of course (cough)!

The Elizabethan Irish Plantation Paradigm as Background

Depending on when you start counting, the British conquest of Ireland commenced with Henry II in 1169 and the 1070’s. Henry cut out his piece of the old sod, but the invasion really got hot under the Tudors, especially Elizabeth, and was then inherited by the Stuarts. The invasion climaxed with Cromwell in the 1650’s (not in the chronology of this module series) but it is clear we are talking about a sustained conquest/reconquest of Ireland, by England.; overall the invasion persisted for the better part of eight centuries.

The motivations behind the Irish invasion varied by period of time and the King/Queen. In this module we focus on the so-called “plantation strategy” period under Elizabeth and the Stuarts. Under the Stuarts, the Irish plantation period reform overlapped with the Virginia settlement by the Virginia Company.

In Elizabeth’s era, Ireland was perceived as a potential if not an actual threat; its natives classified as the Elizabethan equivalent of deplorables and domestic terrorists. She determined conquest of that nearby island’s collage of fiefdoms, tribal chieftains, and previously conquered territories (the English Pale), to be a primary foreign policy initiative. Her father, Henry VIII, had pronounced himself “King of Ireland”, but whatever territorial dominance England had at that point had faded significantly by the time Elizabeth decided to pick up the Crown.

She commenced an active military campaign, an activity that by its nature is very expensive—and volatile, given he ebbs and flows of battle. What is important to us is how she decided to wage that conquest, and turn it into England’s first colonization initiative. In particular, we are less concerned with its success or failure, but rather how she in effect defined what colonization should be for England. That English colonization was a consequence of Elizabeth’s scorched earth military conquest of Ireland is an assertion that carries implications.

Using the Munster Plantation as an example, its Gaelic-Irish chieftain was the Earl of Desmond, and he incurred the wrath of England and was hunted down and killed in 1583; the Plantation was based on his land. The area was also the scene of Spanish troop involvement, a controversial massacre upon their surrender, and a devastating scotched earth campaign that depopulated the region and left it in famine (an estimated 30,000 deaths, MacCarthy) during the earliest years of the Plantation [99] See also, R. Dunlop, the Plantation of Munster. the English Historical Review, Vol. 3, No. 10, Apr 1888), pp. 250-69. Active resistance by the Irish never really ceased, making this a truly frontier area, not unlike the North American wilderness. Whether these early plantations were an safety valve for excess displaced English and Welsh former serfs, or whether a transplanted workforce was required in this devastated area is an open, probably fruitless, conversation since one did not preclude the other.

That the Munster definition would apply to North America when the question came up a quarter-century later in the promotion of a second major Crown initiative, the Ulster Plantation and in the mentality of several who founded and invested in the Virginia Company is much less controversial. In part that sharing of colonization definition reflected a strong overlap between those who had participated in her Tudor reconquest-Munster Plantation, and who became key players in the first successful North American venture, the Virginia Channel. In this I call attention to a group of cities, guilds and merchants labeled as the “West County men”. That group included notables such as Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, John Hopkins, and Richard Grenville–all hailed from English western ports, in particular Plymouth and Exeter.

Mary and Elizabeth’s Irish colonization strategy was called simply the “Plantation”. It was not the first strategy employed by the Tudors. The first was lovingly called “martial government”, but it didn’t work, and Plantation was the second strategy nexus. It was first used by Queen Mary who during the mid 1550’s set up the Plantation of King’s County and then Plantation of Queens County. Neither came to much, but neither did they fail outright.

The strategy and purposes behind English conquest was defined by a variety of initiatives the key one being sizeable population resettlement of loyal English within the confines of the particular Plantation. Elizabeth inherited them in 1558 when she became Queen, and from the start she maintained a low-maintenance program of sporadic plantation foundlings, none of which survived much beyond their founding, so intense was Irish resistance. One such venture was led by Thomas Smith (no relation as far as I can discern to our Thomas Smythe), another by her lover the Earl of Essex, Walter Devereaux.

More to our point is the Plantation strategy was perceived at that time not as purely, or even chiefly, as resettlement defined in economic terms. Rather, it was part of a civilizing mission, in which the power of the Irish chieftains, military and feudal based, was broken, and replaced by freeholders tilling their own fields–and former sub-chieftains transformed into manor holders pursuing agricultural ambitions. This has serious overlap with American colonial homesteading and plantation establishment–putting aside the brutal conquest of these lands. One can even see some overlap with an Indian reservation. In any case, following in the civilizing mission was missionary conversion of the natives to Church of England.

Her major plantation initiative, the Munster Plantation commenced in 1583, and it became the prototype for the plantation strategy nexus. The territory assigned to the Munster Plantation had been wracked by the prolonged Desmond Rebellions, which had finally been brought to bay. The Plantation was a sort of punitive pacification effort meant to anglicize the conquered areas by installing a large mass of English-Welsh settlers–that was the key program, and its employment was both military in purpose, and a middling effort to transfer “surplus” population and set them up to farm and export products to England. About 300,000 acres were confiscated for the Plantation, but only a fraction of these actually made its way into the hands of the undertakers and English-Welch settlers.

The way this was done set the format for the resettlement programs of the future. Portions of the conquered lands were conveyed to “undertakers” (wealthy nobles or manor lords) who would identify and recruit settlers, and resettle them on plots of land in Ireland. The role/function of these overlords suggest similarities with today’s sub-contractors and even franchise ownerships. Depending on the size of the territory and number of settlers, undertakers were tasked with town or fort-building so to anchor the plantation economically and militarily. Initial plans were to import over 11,000 settlers, but there was less land available than originally contemplated, and, of all mischievous things, the deposed Irish lords sued in English court with some success and regained lost land. With limited success, then, the Munster Plantation labored on, so that by 1598, it amassed a population somewhere between four to five thousand.

Munster attracted a good deal of speculation, with a number of entrepreneurs attempting their own undertaking initiatives. Walter Raleigh established a sizeable estate, manor house included. starting up a pipe (smoking) and timber initiative in his forests; they lost money. another more successful entrepreneur, Richard Boyle did well enough so that with another Munster entrepreneur, both invested in the Virginia Company. Sir John Popham (future Speaker of Parliament, Lord Chief Justice, a future founder of the Virginia Company–ironically his seventy proposed settlers couldn’t find land and returned to England) was deeply involved with Munster as well.

Limerick, Cork, Tipperary and Kerry are today’s counties which were included in Munster. The whole enterprise came to a screeching halt during the Nine Years War when most Munster tenants fled their land. After that war the Plantation was reconstituted, and through 1641 enjoyed more success than it ever had previously.

By way of devil’s advocate to my assertion that the Munster Plantation was the first prototype of English colonization, I alert the rehttps://www.theirishstory.com/2011/03/28/the-munster-plantation-and-the-maccarthys-1583-1597/ader to an argument by Michael , the Munster Plantation [99] (Clarendon Press, Oxford. His argument was the population resettled into the Munster Plantation was a continuation of the more or less natural pattern of population mobility from southwestern England to Ireland, a continuation of a pattern with roots over hundreds of years. That this position is not a zero-sum counter to my assertion, i.e. both can be correct simultaneously, can be turned to support another Virginia assertion that Virginia was less a “natural” English emigration pattern than Ireland–and hence made Virginia recruitment all the harder.

Several important elements of the plantation strategy that emerged from Munster besides the foundational resettlement of English population included: (1) the creative use of the private sector as “undertakers” and entrepreneurs to set up local industry, and help found settlements or towns as economic hubs. The private sector drew upon its capital to finance the pacification of the hard-won areas, and to install either a town or agricultural economic base. From the start, Munster was, I think, rightfully a public private partnership; (2) the Crown in this initiative provided defense in the form of soldiers and garrison holders–and the royal navy secured the trade lifeline that imported and exported what was needed; (3) infused as it was by strong economic development purposes, the Plantation yielded some insights as to city-build and install an economic base in a troubled geography–indeed a disproportionate share of the settlers wound up living in urban areas, (4) the Plantation worked well enough to generate a small group of merchant adventurers, well-heeled sons of the English upper classes with both interest and some experience in pursuing future colonial ventures; and, (5) while it Plantation economy has been blamed for denuding the Irish countryside–removing what had been a forest island- to harvest timber and lumber principally used for shipbuilding–it is clear the Plantation brought some material benefit to the English economy.

Suffice it to say, these were among the darkest years of Ireland and the Irish

the Plantation Carried Forward to the Virginia Company and Ulster Plantation

The “Plantation” was Elizabeth’s marriage of public-private, political conquest-economic trade, and a solution to England’s most disruptive economic problem, the increasing irrelevance of her former serf population and their inability to uncover a role in England’s emerging pre-capitalist economy. As always, In their flexible, patriotic-religious spirit, the various merchant groupings wanted nothing to do with Elizabeth and her colonializing-plantation strategy. The Virginia Company fell victim to that plantation strategy in its venture into North America, when her successor, James, took up her mantle of Irish Plantation Conquest.

In reality, Irish plantation strategy was less a strategy to conquer Ireland than a strategy-framework to maintain England’s hold on Irish territory it “conquered”, and to integrate it into the English economy. The general idea behind the Irish plantation strategy, as least as it was seen from the Crown’s perspective, was to bring in the English merchant/investor/landlord private sector into the structure and process of England’s conquest-colonialization effort. Besides taking a financial load of the Crown, the private corporate plantation would conduct day-to-day management of the territory, implement a new upgraded agricultural and trade modernization, import reliable settlers to secure holdings, and establish small urban settlements for defense and trade.

The English Crown, i.e. the King, government or public sector, was leading the effort. Governmental bodies, usually called commissions, assumed much of the governance function, and the military, there in large numbers, the police and self-defense of acquired lands. Accordingly, one could expect some overlap with England’s turn to colonization of North America (then perceived primarily as a defense against Spanish aggression and dominance). Elizabeth, in effect, compelled the emerging English trading and investment community into financing and “governing” its acquired Irish territories. Forming joint stock companies, different groupings of English investors would incorporate a “plantation”, a colony in other words, over specified Irish areas.

Plantations as carried out by Elizabeth, partly as a means to invite-compel the English private sectors, its guilds and merchant community for example, to finance the resettlement of the seized land; the government promised to evict the Irish from these areas  as a critical prerequisite to effective economic base building ” and “segregation” as it was called constitute the core pillar of Irish plantation pacification.

The private joint stock corporation was to manage the repopulation of these areas by sub-contracting with “undertakers”, wealthy English and Scot lower nobility and gentry, who had been tasked to stock the plantation with new settlers from their estates in England/Scotland. Once in Ireland, these resettled Scots and English would be set up in farm households around villages, settlements and trading posts, useful for self-defense, trade, and self-sufficiency of the new population.

Elizabeth had authorized undertakers to be granted 3000 hectares of Irish land in return for the immigration/resettlement of 48 adult males (20 families)–here one might see the underlying skeleton of Virginia’s future headright incentive system. The plantation’s primary task was to replace the Irish Gaelic population–who would be removed from the area–with a loyal “British” population, Protestant, and English-speaking. It was labeled a civilizing strategy, as the English held the Irish in great contempt, not only for their religion, their way of life and culture.

Resettlement was only the first phase of a long-term town-building and agricultural “farming” economic base, along with (depending on the plantation) diversification into artisan ventures such as wine-making and other pre-capitalist occupations. As such the plantation was by no means simply a royal travel bureau, but an agent of economic development.

Northern Ireland was held to be an allegedly underpopulated region whose principal sector was cattle-raising. A second competing task was defense of the new communities, with fortifications, and the creation of a militia (muster) for self-defense. All this was costly and long-term, and so Elizabeth’s plantation was her form of an early public-private partnership which brought in the private sector to manage and finance not only the “settlement” of Ireland but the modernization of its underproductive economic base..

Whether or not the plantation  “pacification strategy” (that is what it would have been called in the Boer or Vietnam War) would have “worked” is a matter of debate, in large measure because the Irish natives were none too happy about it, and resistance from active rebellion, to guerilla war, to sabotage, and peaceful non-cooperation made plantation governance and economic base-building a dubious enterprise in the extreme. In any event since the 1570’s, private-public plantations litter the Irish countryside, much like roadkill litters the highway.

the Ulster Plantation Colonialization is Launched, 1606-1612

Ulster, a “territory” comprised of much of modern day Northern Ireland, became the center point of Elizabeth’s Ireland-related escapades in her last years. Ulster was regarded as the most Gaelic-resident portion of Ireland, and was until the Nine Years War (1594-1603) out of the English sphere of influence and conquest. Dominated by the O’Neil family and allied feudal lords-chieftains. England did compel in 1603 the O’Neill’s to sign a peace treaty, but on very favorable terms since the war had not gone well for either party. Alternating between a guerilla war, a Spanish-Irish medieval pitched battle, it was a brutal affair for both parties.

O’Neil’s request to Spain for a Spanish Army was granted in 1601 when the Spanish landed a strong army in Kinsale. Combining forces with the Spanish, O’Neil’s and their Irish allies offered battle against an equally strong English army. The English won, and the Spanish surrendered. The Irish hauled off and continued the war for two more years before finally agreeing to the peace in 1603.

After decades of ebb and flow, an opportunity for the resettlement of northern Ireland six “counties” seemed possible, if implemented quickly and conducted effectively. James, a Scot who despised the Irish as a people, a culture, and its religion, wanted to break the close linkage of the Irish chieftains with the Scottish highlanders (who were the Stuart’s arch enemies), with loyal Presbyterian Scot lowlanders, and with English borderlands settlers as well.

Northern Ireland was thought as the most undeveloped and underpopulated Irish region, very low levels of urbanization, and wracked by years of war and rebellion. For example, its largest city Derry, had been burned in the last series of wars, and was ruined as an economic entity. The initial intent was to displace the Irish, resettle them in other areas, and substitute the Scot and English “planters” (the word for immigrants) in more tightly packed areas which could be more easily defended from any future attack (which, BTW, was very much expected). English veterans from the Nine Years War were granted plots of land for their reward and they were intended to form a core of trained soldiers to supplement the immigrant militia.

With James I now on the throne, the peace allowed the O’Neil’s (and O’Donnell’s) to retain their titles and lands; he even issued them a pardon. But the implementation of the peace terms, allowed O’Neil’s subordinate chieftains to acquire lands he considered his own. Losing title to much of his lands, O’Neil was further embittered in 1605-6. in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, when James appointed Sir Arthur Chichester as his Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland.

James found a strong and loyal ally, in Arthur Chichester. Chichester, appointed developed a plan designed to appeal to private companies and investors. This plan, however, was unable to secure a sufficient corps of participants, and so James stepped in, jailed several foremost private leaders, fined them, and then sent a strong letter to follow letting them know they were next. He also was more open to a workable solution for the twelve major guilds and a plethora of London merchant-investor companies that had been “recruited” by Chichester and James’ coercive incentives. As designed by him, the Ulster Plantation was the first British plantation, composed of Scots and English. As this occurred a bit after the Virginia Voyage, we shall return to this topic in the next module.

James also authorized a new set of undertakers that, working with various joint stock corporations set up to settle the Ulster Plantation. The undertakers, often nobility with manors and estates, and in Scotland highland estates, would identify-recruit candidates for Scot and English planters and resettle them in Ulster. Specifically the private investors were enticed to focus their investment in a corporation seeking to develop “O’Cahan Country, a large tract of land, supposedly endowed with natural resources to mine and develop (iron ore in particular), lots of wild cattle to skin for tanneries and tallow makers as well as beef, ample rivers and streams for commercial fishing (eels and salmon), and most of all “vast forests” for precious lumber and pipe/barrel staves—a virtual trading company paradise.

O’Cahan was a former ally and subordinate chieftain to O’Neil. He organized his own joint stock company and took over a vast expanse of O’Neil’s formerly titled land. That was the last straw for O’Neil, and with the O’Donnells he fled Ireland (1607) in what is known as the “Flight of the Earls”–today regarded by many as the final act that ended Gaelic and Native Irish order in Ireland.

That all this overlapped with both the incorporation of the Virginia Company, and the development of its plan for settlement-exploration was likely a factor in the rush job given to both Jamestown and Sagadahoc. The Flight of the Earls opened up Ulster to more adventurous resettlement schemes by James, and that directly intruded into Smythe’s search for investors. [99] James Stephens Curl, “the London Companies, in “War & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster” British Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/companies/lc01.shtml .

By the time the Virginia Company asked the King for revisions on the its 1606 charter, in 1609 and 1612, the debate concerning the Ulster Plantation was in full flower, and the latter increasingly permeated into the former. A central figure in this debate, was Sir Francis Bacon. Interested both politically and conceptually, Bacon advocated to the King and Privy Council a new approach to the plantation strategy. Of course this overlapped the formation of the various joint stock corporations being set up by English merchants, investors, and even municipal governments–the chief of which is the London/Virginia Companies of which we had labored on over the past modules.

The talk of the town during this period was the formation of a new, revised, and formally purposed, Ulster Plantation. The Ulster Plantation did not differ with the Munster Plantation as primarily tasked with resettling the conquered and devastated areas so recently acquired by the Flight of Earls. It was, at the request of private sector participants infused with more economic development content–involving profits of course–that were not only wanted but also more within the competence of the private sectors–rather than Crown extortion they wanted any new plantation to offer more promising opportunities to recap their investments and make genuine fortunes.

From the English  private sector’s point of view, they wanted little to nothing to do with the King’s proposal for an Ulster Plantation.  Typical was one quote from a London company: “It would be very foolish to entermeddle in this busynesse, for it will be exceading chargeable [i.e. expensive]” or as Professor James Curt observed it would be “troublesome and a bottomless pit as far as money was concerned”. [99] ahttps://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/index.shtmlmes, Stevens Curt, “London Companies” in BBC’s Wars & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/companies/lc01.shtml

So when first “asked” to join the Ulster Plantation, the English private sector resisted.  Only when A syndicate of twelve London trading companies (sub corporation of the prestigious City of London Corporation), each of which included within its organization structure one or more guilds, signed on in 1609, and were subsequently entitled as “the Honorable Irish Society”. Of note, the guilds which invested as part of the syndicate included Cloth workers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Grocers, haberdashers, Ironmongers, Merchant Tailors, Salters, Skinners, and Vintners. That story, told guild by guild, is related in Alexander Brown’s classic masterpiece, the Genesis of the United States (Alpha Editions, 2019, originally published 1890), and Thomas H. O’Brien’s “the London Livery Companies and the Virginia Company“, Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Apr, 1960), pp. 137-56

The syndicate was a who’s who of the City of London merchant investor and guild community and the initial investment which required sums to build a considerable number of public and housing structures for it purposes and the resettlement, not to mention the requirement that it must build a substantial wall, with supporting forts. The central city of this territory, Derry, was quickly renamed Londonderry (today Northern Ireland’s second largest city) and was granted a charter.

Learning from Munster, and Roanoke, it was forbidden that  undertakers and imported settlers be allowed to hire Irish as their workers or servants; instead they were required to import English or Scot indentures. They were also forbidden to sell their allotted lands to the Irish. A new economic base of homestead planters, a more diversified artisan base, and urban merchant-traders-exporters was intended to make this area prosperous. To make it more secure from Irish counter-attack the new communities were tasked with building either forts or walled palisades for self-defense. Settlers themselves were intended to constitute a local militia.

To what extent the syndicate members felt this was sufficient investment in plantation-colonialization—or a discomfort in continuing their ongoing investment in the Virginia Company in its new financing associated with its post 1609 and 1612 charter revisions—I do not know. But fifty-five of fifty-six of the London syndicate companies pulled out of the Virginia Company during these years. However, AND A VERY IMPORTANT HOWEVER, the financing of the 1606 Virginia Company did garner these groups as investors, rather small investors by my take, but investors in the original Jamestown expedition. [99] Dr. Audrey Horning, “American Connection” in “War & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster” British Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/companies/lc01.shtml

What should be obvious is that from the Virginia Company’s perspective this was an absolute disaster. There is no mention of this in Osgood or Andrews, the American classics of this period; their discussion focused only on a reality and how the Virginia Company management dealt with its consequences and aftereffects. While it will be an easily acceded to paradigm that the death and dysfunction of the Virginia Company was brought about by its financial distress, no reference is made why the Company was in such distress, other than English investors abandoned her after her first voyages.

The Company’s efforts and experiments to rectify its slowly sinking financial illiquidity, attributed by the paradigm mostly to its  errors, inefficiencies, corruption and mismanagement. These faults are all evident, and ought remain in the reader’s calculus, but by 1609-12, I argue in this module that the King cut the financial lifeline to the Company, by forcing investors to place their limited resources in sponsoring the Irish Ulster Plantation, leaving little to the Virginia Company, a company whose fortunes in its first decade produced little that would encourage willing investment. Having committed itself to paying for the colony, its building and settlement, the Company, certainly by 1612, was endeavoring to keep its head above the financial waters, as it flirted year by year with being, or not being, a “going concern”. The 1622 Second Powhattan War answered the question, as far as the Company was concerned.

The reality was two-fold. First, the Virginia Company by 1612 was at best on the margins of the London merchant investor community, and no doubt made it necessary for it to develop funding through the lottery, and secondly to allow its investors to invest in Virginia on their own, thus bypassing the Virginia Company.

In the early days, however, it wasn’t so clear that tobacco would become the salvation, and funding for both ventures [Virginia and Ulster Plantation] came from the London Companies. The Companies money was required by the King in the Ulster Plantation,[however], but at that time [before the start of the Ulster Plantation] they had already pledged money to the Virginia project. Within the first two years of the Jamestown settlement 55 out of the 56 London Companies who were involved in Ulster withdrew their funding for Jamestown, so subsequently over half the Jamestown settlers died of starvation or disease. [99] Dr. Audrey Horning, “American Connection” in “War & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster” British Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/companies/lc01.shtml

Bypassing the Company meant it lost the ability to influence, certainly control, events in Virginia, and inevitably perhaps to the development of a Virginia elite drawn from those who did influence events there: the officials, soon to be former officials, of the Virginia Company itself. Just as important the financial position of these domestic elites, as well as the drowning Virginia Company, were based almost wholly on tobacco export, and that cemented in an amazingly short period of time, a economic monoculture that was Virginia’s economic base. Poured into that economic base, was an economic-social-political institution/structure that has come to be Virginia’s chief distinction: the plantation, its manor house, and elite political culture. Sad to say, the effect this had on resident Indian tribes, and even development of equalitarian democracy was catastrophic.

If so, the permanent settlement strategy as implemented by the Virginia Company after 1612 was a derivative of the Crown’s coercive financing of the Ulster Plantation, and the response of the London investment companies to their forced participation in Ulster. As to whether I agree or not with Dr. Horning’s below observation, the logical conclusion is this disinvestment by London financial community of the Virginia Company may well have sealed its fate as early as 1610-12 (as Brenner has stated in earlier footnotes), and its effect on Virginia’s development as a colony was profoundly negative, limiting the likelihood it could sustain any effective management over the colony over a period of time or adversity.

Plantation as an Economic Development Strategy Nexus

Sir Francis Bacon–In that year, Bacon wrote a little known essay on the Irish plantation, when he was England’s deputy solicitor general (whose boss in John Popham, above). This 1609 essay, however, is NOT the more known and widely published “On Plantations” which was written in 1625 (after his experience as James’s Chancellor of England) and saliently after the 1622 Massacre by the Powhatans and the termination of the Virginia Company charter. The gap between the two, in terms of the goals intended of plantation and specifics of how to do it, are huge, and they suggest how the Virginia experience radically developed the concept as perceived by a major, and supportive colonization, settlement, and plantation supporter. The 1606 piece revealed how the Ulster Plantation could serve the more immediate interests of his new master, James I. The article was intended for the Privy Council, and the King–not for the advocates and implementers of a colony. In this article he addresses more “the why” for a colony; in the 1625, the “how” to do a colony.

Bacon’s 1609 “Certain Considerations touching the [Ulster] Plantation in Ireland: Another Britain” essay was written for the Irish Commission and had a significant influence on the development of the “Ulster Plantation”. For our purposes Bacon clearly reveals what he believed to the ultimate benefit, and hence ultimate purpose behind colonization as people movement for national defense, and for the pursuit of private prosperity that could generate the revenues necessary for that purpose. He advocated the plantation, or any plantation, was valuable that made it possible for many families to receive sustentation and fortunes, and for England to discharge from her own bounds and from Scotland so many people that were they to remain they might be the cause of future trouble.

Soe shall Your Majesty in this work have double commoditiye in the avoidance of people here [in England] and in the making of use of them there’. He lays stress on the fact that Ireland was a weak spot in England’s defense, and was needed for England’s safety, and that under English control, it would be sure to become a source of profit to the realm. He urges that [the Ulster Plantation] ‘undertakers be encouraged and wishes a closer correspondency between the {Ulster Plantation] Commission in Ireland and the Counsell of Plantations in England, wherein I warrant myself by the [precedent] of a like Counsell of Plantations for Virginia, an enterprise differing as much from this [of Ireland] …  [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Settlements, Vol 1 (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964), Footnote 1, p. 72

To clarify Bacon’s words a bit, I think he is arguing for an empowered joint stock corporation engaged in a public partnership with the Crown. That corporation should be delegated responsibility for the management of a colony, as a permanent settlement. He is focused on an empowered joint stock corporation, but not with the requirements and the obligations that were incumbent on the founding of a permanent settlement. In 1609 when the needs of a permanent colony in North America was being advocated, the primary need, at least in Bacon’s mind, was that the Virginia Plantation (the colony itself) were placed in the hands of the Virginia Company in partnership with England, but he did not address what the implications of that task meant for the Company. That was a subject for another day, if in fact, he gave that issue any notice at all at that time. That position, ambiguous as it was, was useful in Smythe and Sandys reconstruction of the Virginia Company charter.

Accordingly, we see the London Company in 1609 two separate joint stock corporations, the Virginia Company renegotiating its 1606 charter, and establishing a new colony in Ireland, specifically in Ireland’s Derry County. The Irish venture, located in an area we now know as Londonderry, was to be venture in a new Ulster Plantation which had just been formed to manage and repopulate a new area in northern Ireland that had just expelled the Irish leadership and was beginning its resettlement, town-building and economic development efforts.

The Ulster Plantation Settlement Strategy in its First Decade

Importing loyal, Protestant Scots and English, eviction of the Irish from specified lands, and an incentive-driven resettlement of these imported population on the lands was the centerpiece of this economic base-building and urbanization effort. The Elizabethan resettlement program, the centerpiece  strategy intended to secure site-control and stability, inject a new and loyal residency, and install a workforce with skills associated with the anticipated economic base to be created through economic development modernization, was reintroduced in James 1 Ulster Plantation project.

The incentives and rewards were adjusted to encourage involvement in the initiative. After yet another rebellion in 1608, James undertakers received a minimum of 1000 acres, up to 2000, on which they were expected to resettle twenty-four British males per 1000 acres. Those receiving the full 2000 acres were expected to build a “castle” (more a defense and secured market area), while the typical landlord had only to construct walls surrounding the settlement. This was all to be completed within three years.

But the program still was imperfectly designed; it included at least one design flaw.

The “undertakers” (we have to find another term for intermediaries) were always intended to be the single most important actor in the resettlement program. They were responsible for the recruitment and qualification of the settler (religion, English-speaking) of planter-settlers, individuals usually drawn from the estates of the undertakers. They also managed logistics to get recruits to the ships, and were an agent in the transfer of benefits into a contract of sorts with the settlers.

If the undertaker was the recipient of land in the Ulster Plantation (most intended to be so), then it was they that resettled them and found them plots of land for their new homestead—a complex and thankless task under the best of situations. It was only at the end that the undertaker got clear title for his new estate. Then he could engage in estate-building, yet another expensive and time-consumer endeavor.

One suspects that at the end of all this, if they had their throats cut by their Irish tenant, they would be candidates for the services of another kind of undertaker. The reality was many undertakers abandoned this plantation project in its early years. The other puzzling reality is at a sizeable element of the native Irish were both exasperated, isolated, and even hostile to their own  Gaelic elite that they cooperated with the English–who despite their biases did not carry out the evictions and mass resettlement of the Irish in the Ulster Plantation. That meant subsequent settlement was left to other intermediaries and the settlers themselves. Never fear, there were more settlers in hard times, settlers who came willingly in desperation—and over the future decades England and Scotland did not lack for hard times. The reader should  expect war and insurrection, independent of the Civil War, and reflective of that war were staples of the Plantation’s next several decades.

For those interested, if you were a settler in these times, you would have been better off choosing Ireland than Virginia. Virginia until at least 1625, was a death factory. Also, if things got bad, it was much easier/cheaper to cross the channels to England, than the Atlantic Ocean. The hostility of the Irish was balanced out by reciprocal hostility with Native Americans. There was something about the colonization process that got the natives riled up.

All of this meant time, supportive personnel, and above all costs. The undertaker was paid for successful resettlement of eligible refugees in the new lands—meaning the undertaker bore the expenses of this time-consuming process and was paid only at the completion of the deal—at which time he had to await for the “check in the mail for cash”. The process took years, not months, which meant the undertaker had to enjoy substantial liquidity and sufficient cash reserves at the outset of the program.

As it turns out, most Scot and English estate landowners did not possess sufficient wealth, income or liquidity to flood the program at its start with loads of settlers. James had his ambitions (a three year process), and he wanted a sizeable number of settlers early on to pacify the lands as soon as possible. They did not come in his expected numbers. They also had to compete with the Virginia Company, and since they had the better—and geographically closer—deal, the Virginia Company resorted to its own devices for its people recruitment: jails, children/teen agers, generally around the London metro area. By the end of three years’ time, many of the intermediary-undertakers were compelled to sell their acquired estates, wholly or plot by plot, cheaply, to pay their bills. The Elizabethan program depended on continuity of the undertakers in their governance of the new colony, and this was weakened in the Ulster Plantation.

In the fluidity of these times, settlers were able, by hook or crook, to float away from their given plot of land, to more attractive sites—usually around Derry which concentrated most of the English and Scot settlers—leaving the more remote areas largely or marginally resettled. Urbanization, another centerpiece of the resettlement strategy suffered also, and even in the more attractive locations like Derry, sizeable towns-cities were slow in coming (late 1630’s-early 40’s). In fairness, however, urbanization was a success—over a hundred towns were developed—by the end of the seventeenth century.

In these early years of the Plantation, the Scots overwhelmed the English planter. Poverty-stricken, they were economic refugees. The English on the other hand were borderland residents also, who possessed artisan-like skills that were used in the huge building construction program in process during these years. Many had not made a final commitment to reside in Ireland, and not infrequently as the landlord undertaker came under fiscal pressures, the turned to these folk to be his tenancies under attractive terms.

The arrival of a large number of planter-settlers injected a measure of stability and a workforce into these areas, on which economic modernization could be more effectively implement, and would presumably yield greater profits. The requirement of the London syndicate to construct serious infrastructure in the first three years, and the commitment to support the equipment and substance needs of its imported settlers launched an early flurry of activity in the first years. While I cannot determine population levels with any degree of certainty, it was estimated that by 1640, a minimum of 40,000 Scots and English had repopulated this territory. It seems that about 6,000 Irish were displaced outright, but that too is likely to be considerably higher.

What broke down almost immediately was the King’s inability or unwillingness to live up to his promises with the syndicate. The most important problem was the failure to export the native Irish from the region as was promised; this is obviously an action which I, an Irish descendant of the O’Brien’s, find some considerable sympathy, but from the Londonderry Honorable Irish Society’s perspective was a betrayal as serious as to what they did to the Virginia Company.

To this I would add, the plight of those Irish who were not physically displaced, who remained on some of the lands, was horrendous. The only amelioration was contrary to the expected timetable of immigration, the Scots and English “undertakers” were not able to send over the number of planters they had committed to. Nevertheless …The native Irish in Ulster bitterly resented their treatment …  [causing] Lord Deputy Chichester … to remark that the native inhabitants would ‘endeavor at one time or other to find an opportunity to cut their landlords throats’” [99] ””Reaction of the Natives” in “War & Conflict: the Plantation of Ulster” British Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/companies/lc01.shtml

They were pushed into the most unproductive sections of their land, while the Scots planters took over, tenuously, the more desirable portion. As immediate neighbors, never were there bad feelings and daily incidents that as years went by drove the Irish into yet another rebellion (1641)—a rebellion in which they were remarkably, if temporarily, successful. To make matters worse for the Catholic Irish, their priests were displaced and the Catholics were unable to practice their religion. Piled on top of this was James’s negotiations with the defeated Irish chieftains who had fled the nation—negotiations which threatened to return them back to their lands (ultimately failing due to the death of the principal Irish leader, the Earl of Tyrone).

As more and more Scots and English arrived in Ulster, their ability to find good lands, and securely invest in those lands with their labor and sweat equity—with a lack of a legal title that followed, they could not even hand it over to the descendants. The reader might anticipate that a hundred years in the future, many of their descendants would travel to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, or remain in Pennsylvania their original port of embarkation. In this Ulster Plantation imported planters we are to see the fathers and mothers of future American Scots-Irish.

The London Companies on the other hand, having to constructive a large volume of expensive infrastructure, took immediate advantage of the natural resources, urban-based trading, to develop an extensive export trade in key commodities. Lumber (for staves) was the most important, but fishing

Segue Way into the Module Series

When Virginia and Ireland reached a fork in the road around 1609-1612, a short, but bold attempt was made by the private sector to update and upgrade the notion of plantation away from macro colony-building toward profit-making economic development for its investors and for the Throne as well. The “rubber had hit the road”, exposing the ill-defined and conflicting goals of the parties involved. It raised the question as to whether the joint stock corporation, as previously defined and practiced, could be successful in macro colony building. That the government under Elizabeth had exerted considerable pressure requiring private participation in the plantation-colonialization-conquest approach, it was hoped the onset of a new King, James might be more open and less coercive. Click here and delve into the 1609 – 1612 charter reform and experiment that Smythe, and later Sandys, devised to somehow empower the financially devastated Virginia Company to survive.