1643: the Virginia Policy System Stands on its Own–With a Major Assist from William Berkeley

Jon Kukla’s Order and Chaos offers a very helpful guide to key transition points in Virginia’s early history. His time line identifies the period between 1612 and 1620 as de la Warr’s military regime [with which I have a great deal of problems and have developed another in this history].and the 1620’s as a councilor-command oligarchy with which I am entirely comfortable. Considering as he does Harvey’s administration as an outlier, for me it’s a period of disruption, and a catalyst for positive political development. [999] Without a long tangent, I see the earliest period as less than a military regime (with which it did share a legal system and elite recruitment) than corporate governance which gave way 1624-1634 to an English royal/oligarchical policy system [999]

In that Kukla’s time periods overlap he constructs a simultaneous period between 1618 and 1646 during which a civilian consociational polity was created. In those years “civil offices, councilors, burgesses and commissioners of what became the counties [departing from the militia and military path] increasingly became the legal basis for the colonial elite’s domination of the economy and society”. Finally he observes that within this larger period, the years 1635 and about 1646 “the Virginians completed their transition from an imposed military regime to a enduring civilian polity” [99]  Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in pre-Restoration Virginia (American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No, 2 (April 1985) pp. 281-2

If so, then as we begin this section, we have arrived at the last years of the transition. As he fleshes out his post 1635 transition, Kukla isolates the influence and impact of former governor, then governor Francis Wyatt as the chief instigator (he gets the Deal inserted into his instructions for governor] and then once in office for his second term, both launched Virginia’s integration into its royal-oligarchical policy system and “modernized it” to respond to the increasing numbers of immigrants flowing into Virginia. I too agree it is Wyatt that we owe the completion of Virginia’s end of the English colonial hybrid policy system.

Kukla perceives transition from a “judicial” or legal perspective. My policy approach leads me into the forming–and “jelling”–of Virginia’s first truly functioning policy system. Kukla and I focus on the development and the reliance upon lower county courts as key to understanding that system. He calls attention, however, in1643, to the Assembly. 1643 is the year during which Berkeley liberated the Assembly, set it apart from the Council, and jump-started the House of Burgesses into existence–probably as much for his own purposes as political development. Freed from its fused unicameral existence, the Burgesses emerged from the yoke imposed on it by “the multi-branch” fused Assembly into an autonomous and quite distinctive legislative body almost overnight.

Berkeley’s bicameral legislature opened up Virginia policy making by separating out the key institutions of that period, the governor, council and the Burgesses into their own proto branches of government. Kukla goes on to assert it was Berkeley that manipulated these institutions into isolation and pushback to the Claiborne Clique whose business plans invited a quite robust and continental trade and finance based economy–a pushback that put that Clique in its place and elevated the mainstream planter class, by means of the Burgess, into a contender in the policy system. Said in my terminology it was Berkeley who finally committed Virginia to the tobacco monoculture and install the county-dominated Burgess as its chief defender and proponent.

As the reader will see in this section, I have some difficulties with some of Kukla’s scenario–the Claiborne Clique was already on the way out, for example, before Berkeley ever set foot in Virginia–but as i will develop in this section his scenario does sensitize us to two great themes that manifest themselves in the period previous to the Third Powhatan War (1644).

These themes are (1) the Creation of the House of Burgesses; (2) Governor Berkeley as a plantation owner, economic diversifier and promoter of Virginia’s elite plantation owner oligarchy; and Berkeley’s advocacy and pursuit of trade with Dutch ships, as the kingpin policy initiative both sustaining the planter oligarchy and Virginia’s commitment to the tobacco monoculture.

In following modules, we will see how these themes allow Virginia to endure through the last stages of the Civil War, the Republic and the Cromwell Protectorate, and finally the Restoration of 1661. An important take away is how early in Berkeley’s administration that we can see the firming up of Virginia’s newly established policy system, remarkably under the leadership of a governor who embraces it  and works to secure his position in it.

If this scenario proves to be sufficiently accurate and well-directed, it offers the last nail in the casket for the absurdity of holding the First Migration as a sort of narco state, with low class, nothing-burger thugs seeking only their own profit and power in the vacuum that was the Civil War-Restoration period. Rather it was the period in which the essentials of colonial Virginia’s institutional policy system, and its economic and oligarchical social class/society were established and made operative. Finally, while each theme will have its own section, I will mention overlaps with other themes in those sections in order to demonstrate how they interweave and overlap.

1643 Restructure of the Assembly: House of Burgesses

Restructuring the Assembly in 1643 was the most visible and dramatic of the three 1643 themes. In many ways, it was also the most important. The Burgesses completes the picture of a functioning modern policy system, a system that had emerged from the three year transition resulting from the 1639 Deal. The 1639 “deal” bore fruits early in Berkeley’s tenure and that it because Berkeley seized an opportunity which somehow, someway manifested itself in the second half of 1642. Kukla acknowledges this dramatic change that had occurred in the almost impulsive “bicameralization” of the Virginia Assembly in the previous year:

At the next meeting of the Assembly in March 1643, the elected members of the assembly organized themselves for the first time in any English colonial assembly, as a lower house meeting separately from the governor and the councilors. Within a few years, Virginia’s bicameral legislature was so well known in the colonies that it was cited as a precedent for the “politique and Civill Government” of a proposed colony in which the governor and the councilors were to constitute “the Councell of State or upper house, and “thirty Burgesses of Commons” comprise the lower house of a “parliament or Grand assembly [the province New Albion]. [99] Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia (American Historical Review, Vol 90, No. 2 (April, 1985), p. 289

Sometime in the later half of 1642 and early 1643 a comprehensive series of deals in which Berkeley appears to be the deal-maker suggest that the various pieces of the Virginia policy and politics puzzle became willing partners with Berkeley in the rather dramatic transformation of their provincial level policy system. While Berkeley plays a magnificent role in this bold initiative, I suspect this was a reform whose time had come. That Berkley I believe, ultimately transformed the Assembly to open up the Burgesses with which he could enjoy support against the Council and Kemp, should not detract from the transformative role it played in developing the overall Virginia policy system.

The initiative first became apparent in Berkeley’s initial address to the 1643 Assembly when he invited the Council of State and the House of Burgesses to sit separately in the meeting room. He was greeted with loud applause, and from that moment on he had informally restructured the previously advisory gubernatorial Royal Council-Council of State into the “upper house” of the Assembly, thereby transforming the Burgesses into the House of Burgesses. That all this fell into place rather quickly and easily is the strongest evidence that a Berkeley’s initiative was no surprise and that the various parties had already worked out what would follow.

Seemingly a spontaneous act by Berkeley, Billings observes that the rapid election of its two officers strongly suggests a set of deals had been made  previous to the session. The Clerk (John Meade) was a protégé of Kemp and no doubt Kemp was in on the decision. As to speaker, Thomas Stegge, a council member recently appointed by Berkeley, resigned from his new seat on the Council in the previous year and stood for election in the Assembly for the first time. Since Stegge was indebted to Berkeley and also a friend to Kemp he would likely be supportive of the governor during the session. Incredibly, however, at the end of the session, Stegge resigned, and was reappointed by Berkeley to the Council. 99] Warren G. Billings,  Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2004),  pp. 92-3. 

When we blow away the fog of history we can more truly understand what these events involved and what they implied.

Dividing the assembly was an elemental step in its transition from corporate appendage to representative legislature, to little Parliament. Indeed from 1643 onward as members of both houses more deliberately turned to Parliament for inspiration, and they consciously modeled their procedures on the habits of the Westminster legislature. There were immediate practical consequences as well: the new House of Burgesses needed its own chamber and officers … there was now a speaker and a clerk … Mr. Speaker was the mouth of the House, meaning that he presided over debates, made committee assignments, and represented the burgesses in discussions with the governor and the council. The clerk on the other hand did all the bill drafting, acted as reader, and managed the house calendar [99] Warren G. Billings,  Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2004),  p. 92.

A key to understanding  the complex deal(s) that underlie Berkeley’s restructure of the 1643 Virginia Assembly was answering the question of who was Thomas Stegge. Stegge is one of Brenner’s New Men, more specifically a important member of Maurice Thomason’s investment coalition. As such, Stegge was involved, probably deeply invested in the New Kent venture and the revamp of the Virginia Company charter and its deal with the New Kent Claiborne Company Magazine.

Stegge (Sr.) was primarily a ship captain/owner who commenced his Virginia trade about 1637. He plied his trade recruiting plantation owners by simply tying up to the Virginia pier and signing them up. He got to know a lot of plantation owners that way. Along the way he acquired land, on the James River especially, and brought over servants to be indentured. In this period the largest and most important of the settlements were in the Middle Peninsula, adjacent to the Fall Line falls, latter known as Williamsburg and Steeg was a key player–along with Potts and John West. There was a rather amazing “London-based New Men” land sale conducted under the nose of Harvey in 1637 in which Steeg was a participant. He was appointed to the Virginia Council as part of the “deal” Berkeley made with the Wyatt negotiations.

The other side of the story is that it was Stegge who provided the transportation that allowed Secretary Richard Kemp to escape Wyatt’s home arrest. Stegge therefore, was on both sides of the two contending factions: Claiborne and Kemp. To make matters more complicated, Stegge’s political tendencies (and those of many of his business partners), probably known at the time, favored Parliament. While Billings conjectures that overall Stegge probably “owed” Berkeley, I am more cynical and suspect that Stegge and the governor were not close or natural allies. We will return to Stegge Sr.’s role during the Civil War period, but will leave the reader with the simple observation that Stegge Sr. established the first trading post at the fall line in this period, and a generation later was  inherited by William Byrd I. Steeg was  Byrd’s maternal grandfather. In this sense he is the founder of the famous Byrd dynasty, a dynasty that endured into my life time.

Another insight to the deals was the below the surface inclusion of the Virginia Company. The Virginia Company was an essential element of the coalition that negotiated “the Deal” that brought Wyatt to Virginia as governor. It also played a major role in negotiating Wyatt’s resignation that allowed Berkeley to replaced him. It was George Sandys, after all, who negotiated Wyatt’s agreement with Berkeley. In return Berkeley named Stegge as a Council member. Thus, involving Stegge and placing him as Speaker of the first House of Burgesses, meant Berkeley had certainly come to terms with not only Stegge, but the Company and likely the Claiborne- Mathews faction as well.

Given Berkeley’s previous role as an active player in the 1642 anti-Company “Declaration” approved at the previous Assembly,  some payback like a favorable Speaker of House could overcome past bad feelings. Claiborne’s subsequent return to the Council was also part of the “package” that underlay Berkeley’s bicameral legislature initiative. Kukla implies much of this in Order and Chaos  (pp. 289ff) and Billings admits a larger deal for the bicameral legislature certainly included Mathew and Claiborne faction [Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, p.93). All had to sign off with the Kemp deal; not to ignore Menifee and leaders of the mainstream planters who had to have been onboard as well.

This is a coalition that even LBJ would have been impressed. I add that its success meant that Berkeley was a player amid all the domestic Virginia factions by the spring of 1643.

The Burgesses wasted little time in getting itself organized and ready for action. Its signature action was to review and reapprove the various laws and ordinances that had accumulated over the past two decades. Billings calls it a “through tune up” of the laws in force, with a particular eye to put order to the clutter of annual Assemblies each making its own rendition of the laws’ many sections, and incurring duplication and loopholes in the process. Making note of the changes since 1642, the legal and county legislation introduced and pursued by Wyatt in particular, it offered order and capacity to the lower levels county system making them fully-fledged partners in the Virginia policy system.

Wertenbaker alerts us to several other ordinances approved in this session that further suggest the Burgesses was not just cleaning things up in its first session. With no known prod or reason to do so, the Burgesses reiterated past legislation and reasserted that the Governor and Council had no authority to raise taxes. The (Assembly) Burgesses had stated that back in 1624 when it legislated the first taxes known to apply to Virginia. It restated it a time or two after, and now in its first session it did so yet again.

Another bill revised the tax law to “make it proportionate to ‘men’s abilities and estates’ [p.56]. This may have reference to the Panton affair, but also to punitive  abuses that occurred through the previous years. Finally, with Berkeley’s agreement, it stripped the governor of the right to conscript men for service on his estates, or on his own authority even for defense such as construction of fortifications. Conscription was never popular, and had always been avoided by residents whenever possible–even in the most desperate of times. Conscription for militia duty does not seem to have been included.

Still, the actions to the Burgesses-Assembly in this first session earn the adjectives sweeping, comprehensive, consolidation, reform, and most of all “legislative”. In its first official at bat, this legislature hit a grand slam–and it did so with the cooperation, and in several instances the instigation of its governor. Berkeley earned respect and even a measure of affection, and without doubt historians have noted that throughout his regime–until its last years at least–Berkeley was regarded as a “fair man”.

The Burgesses itself made reference to “‘the good and wholesome laws’ they had passed [and] they were especially proud of ‘the near approach we have made to the customs and laws of England in proceedings of the [county] court and trials of causes. So we hear no more of the prosecution of men on trivial charges, of the over-awing of [county] judges and of ruinous confiscations … And should one be brought before the General Court [the Council of State] to plead for life or limb, one need not submit to their decision, if unjust… for the first time, appeals were permitted to the Assembly [Burgesses]. [99] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Give Me Liberty: the Struggle for Self-Government (American Philosophical Society, 1958, pp. 55-6

The Burgesses approach to this legal review was a bit overwhelming in that its first act was to nullify all existing acts and laws, and then scouting through the wreckage, and pulling out the most use, salient, and consistent, and then it added new laws to supplement them if perceived as needed. It seems the Burgesses had its own ideas of what was to come out of this new institution. Billings makes note that Berkeley had placed himself in a favorable light with the Burgesses and the mainstream planters that comprised its electorate. It would seem that Berkeley, concerned that the fortunes and benefits accrued from his royal protector Charles was in jeopardy, replaced them with his role as a founder in the House of Burgesses.

In any event, some seventy legislative acts survived the Burgesses review and then were approved. This was a complete legislative review and it were serve as the base for the the colony’s legal system from then on. Berkeley claimed he got two acts inserted: one which in the age of a raging English religious war required conformity to Anglican canons and practices approved by the Book of Common Prayer. The second restated the council of state’s tax abatement exemptions, and Billing asserts he “augmented the courts, and advanced the division of authority between county and the provincial levels“–which we shall consider in a later module–which Billings posits invested county elites with the potential to monopolize local affairs, and added “greater latitude to the governor in determining the course of public policy [99] Sir William Berkeley, p. 94

Berkeley appears, in the vacuum of the civil war, to have initiated this restructure. If correct, one can only compliment him on his shrewd use of power and subtle appreciation of the power inherent inf political structures. Billings goes on to posit that as the founder of the House, Berkeley could hope to receive its support, or at least see him as supportive to them. We shall follow up on that shortly. As to the Council, and its still powerful Claiborne Clique (Claiborne had returned in late 1642 from England and had would have his seat restored to him on the Council. As the only true elected representative of Virginians, the House of Burgesses can be considered as Billing’s “Little Parliament”. The Council of State, on the other hand held two distinct functions: as the forum for executive branch decisions for the governor, and after 1643, the upper house of the Assembly when it convened as such.

By physically separating the two houses, and the new leadership of the House allowed the latter to check the Council and allow the governor to divide and conquer as his skills permitted. With the councillors in another location, they were no longer able to participate in House debate, or serve as its leadership, or vote. To be sure, the Council was still firmly included in executive branch decision-making and action, and still a major check on the governor, but Berkeley had recast the provincial political system to allow him wiggle room on which to maneuver.

Thomas ver Steeg [99] The Formative Years (Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 73. offers a salient observation on the nature of “this English inheritance of local government institutions” during this period. His point is that the inheritance is more terminology than function or effect.

America’s local government in the formative years served a purpose distinctly different from England’s. In England local government related the people directly to the central government, to the King and Parliament and thus acted as a unifying force. In the colonies local government related the people directly to the decentralized provincial governments–not to the King and Parliament. By reinforcing and strengthening the different colonial governments, local government acted as a divisive force within the [Stuart] English empire. In this distinctive role, local government in colonial America planted the seeds that were to produce a provincial American rather than a transplanted Englishman …

In effect, Berkeley set in motion the Virginia component of the London-Virginian hybrid policy system–an overlapping Parliament and Cabinet Administration in a coherent, multi-goal whole. From that point on, Virginia’s planter elites thought themselves as much the legitimate government of Virginia, as any Crown-appointed [Lieutenant] Governor. Berkeley until the mid-1670’s was able to maneuver within this version of the policy system.

Certainly, the tension between Crown, Governor, Council, the Burgess, and the growing autonomy of counties was muted, no doubt most tempered by his “long Burgesses”.. In a look forward into the future, that chronic tension between the two laid the basis for the Virginia elites fear and despising of gubernatorial authority. After 1776, Virginia’s post-Revolutionary War state constitution created one of the most weak governors in the Early Republic United States.

One might also remember our point that the Virginia policy system was one half of an English hybrid colonial system, with the other half anchored in London. Up to this time, the English half was uneven and even deferential in its application of regulation and governance over its North American colonies. It had its commissions, but negligence rather than over-regulation had been its chief fault. In 1643, however, when Virginia was taking a seeming step forward down democracy’s path, Parliament, now at war with its king, asserted authority over the “plantations” and replaced such as was exercised by the king. It created an empowered yet a new commission, the Warwick Commission;

The Warwick Commission …. was given power to call before it any inhabitants of America, or owners of land there who were within twenty miles of its meeting; to make use of all books and papers relating to the colonies; to appoint governors to the plantations [colonies]; to remove and replace existing officers; and to assign powers to secure better government in them. In fact these powers were not exercised in full, and it not exceed powers given to the 1634 commission [the Laud Commission]. Warwick was convinced in the importance of the plantations [colonies], not least the importance of the sugar and tobacco trades to providing war-time revenue. In general, however, the committee acted with restraint, seeking to cooperate with established colonial authorities. This was true even in the case of Virginia, despite Governor Berkeley’s ‘notorious royalism’ [99]  Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 411

If Billings was calling attention to his Little Parliament that emerged in 1643, we must also remember the Big Parliament brought its insurrection to the doorsteps of the assemblies of North America in the same year. Times were indeed a’changing. We will have much more to say in this regard, but will at this point content ourselves that the definition and nature of a Parliament, a legislature had entered a period of revolutionary transition. The Assembly of 1643 seemingly noticed, and it responded in a fashion that was consistent for it the entire of the twenty year period: circle its wagons by putting a lid on opposition and dissent. Partly triggered by the arrival of several Puritan “divines” from Boston the Assembly issued strictures to induce conformity of the Anglican parishes and their membership to the English Church. The Puritan ministers immediately packed their bags and headed off to Maryland:

In Virginia, the planters were well-nigh unanimous in their allegiance to the Anglican establishment of which the King by the laws of Elizabeth was the accepted head. Through ingrained habit, loyalty to all those things appropriately claiming an Englishman’s devotion was expressed in the forms of allegiance to His Majesty the King. Leadership in the colony was entrusted, just at the outbreak of war, to the young and popular Sir William Berkeley, a Royalist/ His very popularity, however, was for the moment based primarily upon the fact of his recent arrival as bearer of new assurances from the Crown [the Deal and] on the ever-recurring threat of the revival of the Virginia Company … In short, Virginians on the very eve of the war had occasion to see in the action of Parliament a challenge to the security of their most cherished rights, and to find in assurances from the King their chief guarantee (pp. 225-6)  [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp.226-230

It is ironic that both London and Virginia did so in the same year, but more narrowly we can see things would be much more complex from this point and Berkeley in particular, in a figurative sense at least, was on the same block as was his sovereign. Now he had two sovereigns, and so did the citizens and residents of Virginia. Thank god for three thousand miles of ocean, and heavy winter winds, currents and storms. But however, long it would take to reach Jamestown the nature of English inheritance was about to change radically. One wonders how these thievish, low class Virginian non- aristocratic oligarchic thugs will deal with it?

1643: Berkeley as Plantation Owner,  Chief Economic Diversifier, Advocate of Free Trade, and Promoter of Plantation Owner Oligarchy as his Bastion through the volatility of the Civil War

Saturated as this history is with “hard” economic policy-making structures, strategies, initiatives and institutional development, real-life policy-making has its softer side: personal goals, personality, social-class status, amassing political support, and in this case sowing the seeds of a future oligarchy and elite political culture. More precisely, this topic attempts to get a feel for the important role Berkeley performed in the installation or institutionalization of a political, economic and social system resting on the tobacco monoculture.

Berkeley in large measure because he “went native” as governor, and in so doing identified himself personally and politically with the mainstream planter oligarchy, which, through the seventeenth century, hardened itself into an eighteenth century way of life, that some early historians labeled “cavalier”. By extension, his period of governor permitted the development of the decentralized Virginia policy system and its domination by influences from the county level. That Berkeley facilitated this development is due to his identification and his personal ownership and development of a grand, showcase plantation that was to serve as a model of agricultural economic development experimentation that could permit the plantation to become the core unit of the monocultures political, economic and socials systems.

Berkeley Timed It Right: Breakout and Generational Cohorts–I make the argument here that Berkeley’s first administration benefited from a slow, incremental, but intensifying momentum of population and entrepreneur growth that began, ostensibly, around 1635. On top of that Virginia picked up momentum as the Civil War evolved into the Republic and Cromwell’s Protectorate. If so we are watching the early stage of the colony’s “breakout”. The configuration of the breakout matched the configuration of its economic base, if only for the reason immigration meant finding a place in the base to draw sustenance.

At this point, I will dwell on the plantation, and its role in the economic and political system that Berkeley was weaving. But I wish to remind the reader this system had its underside. Berkeley was Luke Skywalker if you were a planation owner, and Darth Vader if not. It is not difficult to understand that the origins of Virginia’s hopelessly unequal economic and social system came from several sources, including the tobacco-driven economic base, the nature, dynamics and configuration of early Stuart era emigration, and the derivatives and after effects of proprietary joint stock Virginia Company corporate governance, which in reality lingered on at minimum until 1634. But Berkeley made little or no effort to tackle that inequality–and frankly that fed into his destruction and fostered Bacon’s Rebellion thirty years or so in the future.

The limbo created in 1624 was finally terminated in 1639 with the Deal. in good measure prodded by institutional pressure generated by Virginia company-bred institutions of governance which evolved as genuine governmental bodies during that time, Virginia developed a fledgling policy-making system of some effectiveness and capacity that rendered it a participant in the evolution of its own elite from within its first generation adventurers. Wyatt and Berkeley, who immediately followed, each had their role in cementing a Virginia elite and a corresponding “mass” society-workforce.

Berkeley’s first administration through 1650 continued and built from that ongoing evolution. To foster his own interests and feather his own nest, Berkley integrated selected immigrants that came in the earliest years of the civil war into this planter oligarchy. He built, in part, his administration using these new generations to staff his offices and governmental bodies. What challenges the so-called royalist “cavalier” myth which often is attached to the Berkeley years is that the founders of several Virginia famous dynasties origins lie in the period immediately before or during the first arrival of William Berkeley in 1642.

An economic base structured and saturated with inequality necessarily thrust most immigrants, numerically, into the masses and for these souls meaningful entry and participation was delayed for around five years, and for slaves, forever, On the other hand, immigrants who came to Virginia and could acquire land , free holders, gained entry into the elite. The more energetic, the entrepreneurial risk-takers and finally those who had, or acquired, support from the established elite could build relatively large plantations surprisingly fast.

If you bought land you also could obtain headrights to import your indentured workforce. If healthy enough to survive, with the right mix or advantages, energy, and acreage-workforce an entrepreneur could enter the higher ranks of the elite structure within a handful of years. Say it another way, the elite was more permeable than imagined today, and what Berkeley enjoyed was the appearance-rise of an entrepreneurial new generation into Virginia’s s elite.

Much has been said about Virginia’s second migration as being the Berkeley generation that transformed Virginia and set the foundation for its early eighteenth century golden years. From my perspective, this second migration consisted of at least three distinct generational cohorts entry into Virginia–and arguably a fourth. What we see in Berkeley’s first administrations is the first generation that began before he even arrived. Usually, the famous family dynasties are associated with the second and third generations, but I offer the surprising challenge that the first generation (usually attributed to the First Migration) brought with it its share of the high status family dynasties–therefore playing an important role in the establishment of the social and economic system of colonial Virginia.

In a later module we shall tackle this soft policy-making with an elaboration of Berkeley’s direct role in creating a political-economic elite that infused immigrants into a second generation Virginian movement. His population-recruitment strategy, while tending to be overstated over the years, did affect the second generation migration which for our purposes began in the fifties and certainly continued to the end of Berkley’s second administration in 1677.

While Bailyn and others noticed a class-status difference from First Migration to the Second, I  sense the culprit which had enveloped the First Migration, and even large segments of the Second, was the disruption of the English class and social status that was evident in Britain during the early Stuart years. The old Elizabethan nobility never came in numbers to Virginia; many of those gentlemen of the first generation were not noble class, but amalgams of traders, military, large land owners, and daughters of each that with each generation blurred the distinctions between nobility, country, gentry and yeoman-with the overlapping commonality that given primogeniture Virginia saw the younger sons as their immigrants and entrepreneurs. Higher status mutts were what populated Virginia both in the First and Second Migration. [99] See Clifford Dowdey, the Virginia Dynasties (Little, Brown, and Company, 1969), pp. 10-13.

We shall discover that in this later period, several very important entrepreneurs, conquistadors, traders of the first generation’s 1630 and 1640’s generational cohorts, having established themselves by the fifties, will assimilate the assets and widows of the older First Migration leadership [999] It may not be surprising that Berkeley’s own widow will play such a role in the fourth generation [999] The later First Migration cohorts will be supplemented by second generation cohorts. In the turbulence of the times these generations will blur. Accordingly, the causes and impact of our “soft policy-making” themes that developed more intensely as the civil war progressed, will seem less sharp. The point we make in this section is that  the population-generational infusion that will become increasingly apparent during the twenty years of the Civil War-Restoration period began during the First Migration and continued into the Second.. Berkeley’s first administration generally benefited from them, and he should be credited with understanding how to capture these benefits, but he did not cause them..

By way of example, the proverbial dynasty–that of Robert (the King) Carter stands on the shoulders of his father, John Carver. The important takeaway is that pre-Civil War Virginia was already importing adventurers whose descendants would be members of the famous Virginia dynasties. The second migration had commenced previous to the troubled period of the English Civil War.

John Carver first arrived in Virginia in 1635 at twenty-two years of age. The son of an English winemaker and a merchant’s daughter who likely invested in the early Virginia Company. He returned the same year to put together investor support and to court his future [a landowner’s daughter] wife. On his Virginia return the next year he was captured by the Spanish in transit and didn’t make it back to London until 1638. Marrying his wife Jane Glyn he returned to Virginia in 1640, he settled in Nansemond County.

In 1642 he bought 1300 acres north of the Rappahannock (Lancaster County]  from a Puritan who was on the way home. This patent formed the core of his future home estate, Corotoman plantation. Using headright proceeds for servant importation he bought 300 acres back in Nansemond County in 1643. In essence, John Carter had established a strong presence in Virginia independent of Berkeley, with his own money and that of his investors John Carter founded his own dynasty–just in time for the sudden attack that launched the Third Powhatan War. We will pick up Carter’s tale when we discuss the aftermath.

Clifford Dowdey in his detailed book, the Virginia Dynasties, also states that other major dynasties were founded in the same period of John Carter’s: Richard Lee, Benjamin Harrison, the first Randolph, and of course, our Thomas Stegge Sr.[99] (Little Brown & Companies, 1969, p. 18. The reader might also remember our earlier brief bio of Ver Steeg. William Byrd, his grandson would inherit the trading posts and his business, built in present day Williamsburg during the period 1640’s to 1670’s. What we call the Byrd dynasty, however, can be directly traced to the early 1640’s.

An interesting dimension of that second migration was its role in “swallowing up” the assets and the family-dynasties that were trying to establish a foothold in Virginia’s social culture and society. As we shall see the second migration fused with, married into, and drew from the first generation migration to the extent that by the end of the century first generation few families remained in the Virginia elite or general population. They were as some would say “gone with the wind”. That necessarily left a vacuum into which historians have poured a first half eighteenth century golden years ‘mansion plantation’ era that tapered off into the drift to American independence and the Revolution.

William Berkeley played a larger than life role in that evolution and in the merging and fusion of the first and second migrations, and in the setting up of the plantation as the key entry point and symbol of Virginia’s policy, economic and social systems. He did so more or less intentionally and consciously. The plantation was a vital and critical personal goal, and the use he made of plantations to stoke not only new immigrants but evolve the colony’s elite into a truly Virginian elite was pretty much accomplished by the time of his ouster in the mid-1670’s.

What will become evident is that Berkeley availed himself of the services and support from these generations, and that they served as an important element of his policy-making base, as well as his chief officials and recruits to the decision-making political institutions rising out of the deal into Virginia’s formal policy system. Once again, one should note the dog that did not bark as the chief beneficiary of this Berkeley policy regime: the tobacco monoculture, which by the end of the Berkeley administration has been entrenched into Virginia’s heart, blood, and soul.

Berkeley’s First Administration Reliance on the Plantation--By end of the English civil war and the execution of Charles, about 1650, it is obvious to me that this elite-mass society-economy was presided over by proto class of plantations owners, and a political oligarchy of the large owners. While both society, elites and the masses evolved significantly after 1650, the initial argument I make is that by 1650 the political-economic and social structure of Virginia had been installed and configured sufficiently that its essentials carried over through the colonial–and even the Early Republic-periods. During Berkeley’s retirement, that oligarchy, or at least an element loyal to Cromwell, and elements much less so, governed, if that is the word until Berkeley was restored to office.

In other works, it was first migration born, bred,, and grown to adulthood that continued through the Protectorate, and were waiting when Berkeley returned. Also waiting were the The Second Migration planation owners that began in and around the 1650’s-1660′–several of whom were attracted by Berkeley himself in his people recruitment efforts. These two generations, one from each of the First and Second Migration coexisted, eventually the former giving way through age, death and even return to England during Berkeley’s second administration.

In essence the 1640’s Virginia hybrid policy system had made its way through the turbulent period and would do the same when Berkeley was fired in 1676. As we have consistently asserted, the fundamental unit of that hybrid policy system was the plantation, and that Berkeley made it through this period to 1676 can be understood in terms of his going native and becoming a plantation owner as well as a royal governor. I think that was the secret, the magic sauce, for Berkeley’s first administration’s success. Certainly, the plantation was stronger and more developed in 1676 than it was when he first came in 1642. Berkely did not challenge or seek to replace the plantation; rather he build on it and made it all the stronger and more durable.

Berkeley, it is very clear, built on what he found in Virginia. What he left behind, hardened, and institutionalized, was a Virginia that was governed by a planter oligarchy. Unlike Harvey, Berkeley’s instincts were to work with, not upend or fight the Jamestown hybrid policy system that had evolved in Virginia since its founding. Berkeley’s genius, at least in part, was to cope with and seize the openings created by the civil war tumult, favorably contrast himself with Harvey’s controversial ad inept governance, and put into action his genuine belief a soft application of royal power was the most effective way to maintain loyalty to Charles and his own preference for diversifying Virginia’s economic base as he understood them. His motivations included a sincere and determined attempt to build and develop his personal fortune.

In Virginia this meant developing his own cash flows and building a model plantation. He never seemed to be attracted to the grandiose business plans and visions of the Claiborne clique, although he did little to challenge them–saving, of course, his belief in free trade to be discussed in the next section.

In this sense, I assert Berkeley “went native”. He was never not the royal governor, but being royal governor in the midst of a civil war in which his “boss and sovereign” had his head cut off did have its implications as we shall see. While he would maintain his loyalties according to the line of succession through 1651, Cromwell forced his retirement, and Berkeley retired to his Virginia plantation where he remained through 1660.

His return to office, weakened by his “outsider” status with Charles II, left Berkeley as much as a resident Virginia governor as a royal administrator. He had built up his local support from segments of the planter oligarchy, sustained it through his “long Burgesses” and exercised authority his own cadre of officials. After more than twenty years as a plantation owner, a model plantation at that, Berkeley could and did identify with plantation owners, and they with him–at least into Bacon’s rebellion. That he could not embrace, perhaps even understand, the evolution of the former indentured servants, nor with elements of following generational cohorts is its own story. It is clear his last days in office reveal a different royal governor than the one we discuss in this module.

Perhaps paradoxically, plantation had an “other side of the coin”: the lack of sizeable cities of economic-political meaning, a workforce lacking in independent businessmen and artisans (i..e. proto middle class), and an agricultural basic unit which did not include the individual homestead. Homesteads did not appear as such until the settlement of the Shenandoah around 1720. Tidewater and Piedmont were plantation based.

If Virginia had a port city in this period, it was James City (Jamestown) itself, and that was little more than a few piers and storage facilities. The crippling domination of export tobacco, as we shall later see, only reinforced this stunted economic development despite major efforts by London and its royal governors to alter that pattern. Berkeley too set the role model for the governor as the chief diversifier of Virginia’s economic base–and it is by no means a shock he led it from his own plantation, Green Spring.

Green Spring–How he was drawn to create Green Spring, and how he used that plantation, had its roots in Berkeley’s approach to 1642 gubernatorial governance, and it reflects his personal goals which he blurred into a political-economic development people-recruitment strategy that used plantations and Virginia’s path-breaking economic incentive, the headright, to integrate a new generation into Virginia’s governing elite–and new generations into its indentured-slave workforce. In essence, his bi-modal plantations were the instrument used to institutionalize Virginia’s inequality, and to seed its elite political culture: the Tidewater.

his 1642 actions were cautious. Settling into Wyatt’s old house in Jamestown, he signed several leases for property he administered as governor and as intended used the funds for his expenses and sustenance as governor. Rents and leases were destined to be a large part of his cash flow. In 1642 as gifts from the Assembly for several of his policies he received an orchard and two tenements which further provided him capital for his first outright purchase of a large lot to replace Wyatt’s former house and to build his own version of a Jamestown governor’s mansion-office. His ownership of land and buildings certified his voting franchise and indicated to his constituencies that his tendencies and goals were congruent with theirs.

1643 was his breakout year in demonstrating his private ambitions could be blended into his political strategies. In June he cashed in his headrights for the personal servants and associates he had brought with him to Virginia; he used them to patent, purchase, a large plot of land three miles outside Jamestown, a location sufficient to his privacy, located on a waterway useful to access Jamestown and its export facilities,  yet, well-roaded as it was,  convenient for his quick return if needed. adjustments that lot totaled about 1000 acres, with room for his personal estate and future expansion. The patent was named Green Spring  and “was the finest feather in his cap, for on it he founded the grand villa and vast working farm that turned him into Virginia’s foremost planter” [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 59. By its provision of tax funds, the legislature paid for his purchase of farmstock.

In size, scale and prestige the Green Spring villa house was a fitting display of his ambitions and as it developed over the years became among the very best, most prestigious of Virginia’s residences. It is lost today; purchased after his departure by Ludlow’s and Lees it degenerated. Its pleasure gardens were renowned, and were in high regard at the time. His pastures, gave way to cultivated fields, orchards, vineyards, and building associated with his employees/servants.

Billings outlines how Berkeley managed his workforce–and like other plantation owners blurred his workforce attraction using headrights into land sales and worker recruitment. Unlike Harvey who came as close to opposing extensive use of land patents and the issuance of headrights as he dared, Berkeley acted like the traditional Virginia plantation owner when he got into the plantation business in 1643. As far as I can determine he continued these practices throughout his life in Virginia–although his land patents/headright use records were mostly destroyed by fire. He recruited artisans for his plantations and probably paid them through wages, in-kind barter or leases, but his field workforce was overwhelmingly indentured. He did own slaves, black slaves and for some reason Turkish slaves, almost certainly some Native Americans as well [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 74.

He imported his seeds, plants, tools, and livestock for brooding from England. Planting his first groves of fruit trees, he cleared 1500 acres for future orchards in 1643 (I suspect that figure encompasses a number of years), vineyards followed. Fruits and wine-making was always regarded by Berkeley as critical elements in diversifying Virginia’s economic base. Berkeley planted tobacco, and sold his first crop to Bristol merchants; in fairness, Berkeley personally disliked tobacco, and his involvement in tobacco planting was pure economics. [p. 67]

He went to Virginia firmly committed to bettering its economy through agricultural diversity. His awareness of the literature and the debates on their merits of diversification  was as profound as that of anyone in his generation. that knowledge had been shaped in his youth and during his years as courtier. His commitment to diversification nearly meshed with certain of his instructions from Charles I … he was the first chief executive who fully grasped the possibilities, who had faith in the underlying rationale, and who remained in Virginia long enough to give diversification a chance to prove itself … Only through trial and error could Berkeley determine which products had any practicality for his personal enrichment  or application colony-wide. He turned the fields of Green Springs into a vast laboratory of agricultural experiments. His first trials centered on rice, sugar and silk. They taught him an important lesson. Although exotic commodities could be produced in Virginia, the trouble of growing some of them, such as rice and sugar, often far exceeded whatever profits they might give in return [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley , p. 68.

Indian Trading: His first economic priority was plantation agriculture, but from the start he also involved himself in trading with the Indians. Perhaps predictably he never left his plantation nor government management to traipse around the frontier. In 1643 he “secured” legislative authorization to allow “a group of friendly planters to probe “a new river or unknowne land bearing west southerly from the Appomattake river. Later he would send militia men to displace Indians around the Chowan River, and allow whites to settle in the taken land. [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley , p. 75

Billings reports that by 1649 he had developed business relations with the likes of Claiborne, Francis Yeardley, Abraham Wood, John West, Samuel Mathews, Walter Chiles and Edward Bland. Several of these fine folk evolved into close friends and were political allies as well. These were some of the key political players of the day, and Edward Bland and his family became especially close personally to Berkeley. An ofttimes politician Theoderick, a brother became a Speaker of the House, a councilor, and Edward handled the business. Walther Chiles I, smaller in scale than Bland, became friends also and from time to time served in the Burgesses [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley , p. 76,  and in 1650 buying Berkeley’s old Jamestown house, owned previously by Kemp-Wyatt.

Perhaps the most interesting of Berkeley’s trading “associates ” was Abraham Wood. A former indentured servant of Samuel Mathews, Wood at young age became a protégé of Samuel Mathews, who even more than Claiborne was one of the earliest Indian traders. The young lad took to Indian trading and became arguably Virginia’s most known, experienced and successful trader. He built Fort Henry at the Appomattox River falls, and moving into Virginia’s southwestern hinterlands. A Henrico magistrate and militia officer, he was a regular Burgesses as well as Berkeley’s closest advisor on Indian affairs. The two would form a lasting and close friendship.

Backing the activities of experienced traders enabled Berkeley to partake of a profitable traffic for the venture of a nominal contribution from his purse. They no he, purchased the trade stuff, packed merchandise into the forests; they, not he, dealt with the Indians for the deer hides and other furs that constituted the native side of the exchange; they, not he, marketed the skins through their mercantile outlets in Europe, in short, they, not him assumed all the great risks of a highly chancy business, and they paid Berkeley licensing fees in the bargain [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley. p.75

What we can see is that from his arrival Berkeley dove into the Virginia plantation system, mixed it up with the largest and his neighboring planter owners and insinuated himself into the planter community. He was one of them, and stood to profit when they were successful. No particular supporter of tobacco, he was not inclined to take the punch bowl away from the other planters. As we see above, he did the same with the Indian traders, a different grouping entirely in that they greatly overlapped the Claiborne-Mathews clique, and their trading ventures led them into similar positions regarding Maryland.

Within a half-dozen years of taking up farming in Green Spring [Berkeley] was shipping his products through an extensive alliance of English, Dutch and West Indian and New England merchants that joined his plantation to world markets …Reinventing himself into a great planter deepened Berkely’s affections for Virginia and advanced the job of turning him into a Virginian. As the change worked its way with him, he came to a clearer appreciation about how to translate his successes at Green Spring to the colony as a whole. In his mind prosperity went hand in glove with holding the settlers loyal to the Crown, but mainly free of royal direction. The autonomy would enable Virginia to mature into a deferential, closely knit community, with a diversified economy that was linked to open markets around the Atlantic rim. Such a Virginia, he thought, would benefit England, as it drew skilled immigrants to its shores and produced desirable commodities similar to those he cultivated on his plantation. Those beliefs were of a piece with his approach to the way he governed during his first ten years in office. [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley. p.77-8

Of some note, the Clique were very close to the English New Men such as Thomason was one of the chief founders of the Warwick Commission that Parliament established in 1643. Networks like these are hard to detail in 17th century Virginia, but they existed, and we have no reason to believe that Berkeley did not move in these circles in order to keep his political lines and contacts open. As I write, everyone talks about politicization of issues–and about everything in general–but in 1640’s Virginia I think it likely that something like becoming a tobacco plantation owner, especially a large plantation, conveyed much more than a commitment to tobacco export.

Developing alongside the politics and the economics was a society, a closed society open only to the largest plantation owners who enjoyed access to the institutions of governance, and the ability to gather together in common activities, be they policy-laden or social. Voyages on trips to England, lasting for six to eight weeks and sharing a common prospect of risk and adventure, no doubt established some common bonds with people of similar situation, and whose residences were not all that far from their plantations. So did intermarriage and common use of the few artisans and professionals available.

Like a country club, the  plantation oligarchy included diversified groupings of members, whose commonality was tobacco export (not golf or the 19th hole), and through “1640’s equivalent to “four-some’s”, perhaps through horseracing and betting, conducted business and political deals. It’s not impossible that dating, dances, holiday celebrations and marriages were a part of this policy-making prone activities.

While it is hard to imagine Harvey in the midst of these, one can easily assume Berkeley was included and participated when he found it useful and advantageous. Face-to-face, and verbal, in small groups, this was not at all dissimilar to English court policy-making–but not during the civil war when one suspects there were parallel affairs. On the basis of what we think we know, in Virginia the latter was less likely.

In any case, I call attention to this form of policy-making because I strongly suspect in Virginia’s shredded community such informal, personalistic and societal events and affairs played a serious role. This is where rivalries were created, as were friendships, and the diverse groups assembled in one spot to work out matters that had been formulated in the libraries, living, dining and smoke rooms of the personal estates. I suspect there was a point to the walk-through of the fields, gardens, orchards, and like today, politics, economics and ideologies of the day saturated conversation and discussion. There is no reason to believe the First Migration was devoid of these forms of “policy-making”, and that we did not have to wait until the late 1600’s, early 1700’s for such forms to enter into civilized policy-making.

Berkeley’s Dutch Trade Adventure

In 1642-4, with the arrival of a new governor, a seeming misfit for the tasks at hand, the Virginians used this new-found leeway by relying upon the capacity of its newly-installed policy system to confront the backlog of older untackled befuddlements inherited from the pre-Deal Virginia Company period. In the forties we see the Assembly in particular, persisted in applying determination and their rough character to make things work their way. “Their way” meant enhancement-increased profitability of tobacco export to the majority of the Assembly’s delegates. The alternative path as envisioned by the New Men-Claiborne Clique was out of favor in 1643, and it became clear early on did not enjoy the sympathies of the new governor. But the reader would be wise to keep these folk in the back of their minds.

Trading with the Dutch was an old favorite among the mainstream planters. More to the point they wanted to trade with whoever would give them the best price and find the hottest market. It was a simple definition of free trade, but the latter is really what they wanted; the Dutch were the best out there to fit that bill in the 1640’s. The problem they faced, however, was that their financiers, the English New Men generally, saw things differently, and during these years they were gravitating towards Puritans and Parliament in the civil war. 

the Background: the Evolution of Dutch Trade with Virginia

It is wise the reader keeps in mind that the Dutch, in their period of greatness, were closely tied geographically, culturally, religiously, and economically to England, and that the Thirty Years War, in many ways a European world war, was still in progress. My story begins in 1618 and wraps up, somewhat, in 1648. Oh yes, outside the margins of my story the reader should know Holland-Netherlands founded a colony we today call New York in 1614. That colony established a noticeable sized settlement, today’s New York City, and set up a series of settlements and plantations, complete with their planter owners patroons, along the Hudson. Henry Hudson claimed the Albany area for Holland in 1609 after that Dutch ships sailed in mid-Atlantic-Chesapeake waters.

Not to overly complicate affairs, but Holland in alliance with the big cheese of the Thirty Years War, Sweden, and they two set up a colony-like settlement in the Lower Delaware River bay (named for our de la Warr), and they would stick around until William Penn stumbled upon its remnants in the early 1680’s. That put Holland on one of the mouths of the Chesapeake’s. Not surprisingly, if the reader truly understands the New England Puritans, they were very much aware of these Dutch, and they figured prominently in the early decades of Massachusetts-New England (after the 1620’s).

The Dutch during this period were the master of the oceans and seas; their ships, their sailing, and business practices and technologies put England to shame, and that was embarrassing to England because believe it or not, Holland and England were for the most part allied, and many an Englishman fought in the Dutch wars for Dutch armies-they ranged from John Smith, to the de la Warr’s,’ to Gates and Dale, even Governor George Yeardley had served in an infantry company fighting with the Dutch, and no less than a young William Berkeley hung around some Dutch trenches and port cities along with his brother, a soldier with the Dutch military. [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century” in Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs Ed., Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, pp. 93-99; the reader is also steered to Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol, 4: England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 1938), pp. 12-21

In any case, England was just beginning its famous and proverbial English navy and merchant marine. Even in this period, English ships in North American waters were few and far between, and for a variety of reasons, were more expensive yet inferior to the Dutch ships. English ship captains, and ship owners simply were behind the times and had yet to learn the lessons Holland could teach them in ships, sea travel, and trading practices. Our reader having struggled through many a chapter and references to to James and Charles’s colonial trade policy in which tobacco monopolies were bandied about like cigarettes. is hopefully aware that no matter what was written on paper in London, the Virginians, both from necessity and desire, were using Dutch ships, although forbidden, and that, except possibly Harvey, every English governor used them–including as we shall see Berkeley. English colonial trade policy was developing in this period, as Charles Andrews suggests, but the reader ought be aware official English appetites greatly exceeded their ability to implement their proclamations–as they well knew. 

 

The evolution of English mercantilism, and its effect on the bending of Virginia twig of governance, is, in fact, what we are really discussing in the below sections. What we will discover is the English evolution of mercantilism only roughly corresponds to the contemporary sense of historic mercantilism. English (and Dutch) mercantilism, rather than being government-led, was private-led, and while private entities were nationalistic in spirit, they also sought profits–to pay back their expenses, reward their investors, and accumulate personal fortune and power.

Until recently, the dominant narrative of British Atlantic development … obscured the ad hoc cooperative reality of seventeenth and early-eighteenth century trade. Concerned principally with the task of explaining the simultaneous development of far-flung [competing-national] settlements, the imperial centers from which they emerged, and the empires they constituted, earlier [research] tended to center on bilateral connections between colony and the metropole. As scholars have shifted direction … they have discovered the extent to which culture, goods, and entrepreneurial activities flowed across imperial boundaries in a more integrated circum-Atlantic economy than previous perceived. Collectively recent work has demonstrated that the perspectives of merchants and planters operating in the seventeenth century Atlantic were framed not only by European empire building and the competition that resulted, but also by their cross-national connections to one another… settlers built trans-national communities around the Atlantic basin as a strategy for commercial success  [99] Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713 (New York University Press, 2011),  p. 3

These men were conceptualizing a new tobacco contract, and in practice it looked a lot like the Stuart king’s old one. Somehow that might seem strange to the reader, so we need to better understand how the New Men came to the same conclusion as the Stuart kings. The reason this is very important to understand is the demand for Virginian free trade in the 1640’s was the first phase in a policy-making struggle that lasted for several decades to follow. In discussing Dutch/free trade we are opening the door  that leads us into the generation long transition in London’s view of what we will later call English mercantilism. This is not to say kings and government lacked involvement in the evolution of these forms of mercantilism, but England made the decision early on to conduct foreign trade and colonialism, the raw elements of a mercantilist system, a public private partnership with the private sector.

That is why we have taken on as our first discussion of Virginia policy-making, their decision to abandon the early vestiges of a slowly developing mercantile economic-political system and in the semi-vacuum of the English civil war period conduct a valiant effort to forge their own path. If nothing else, we shall discover in this policy-making example, that evolving mercantilism was a two-way street; no matter what the official London policy may have been, there was going to be a Virginia reaction. If there was ever a prospect of a Virginian Raj, it was lost  in this period when the Virginia elite stuck to its system of governance and went toe to to with British colonial royal government.

While this was no Boston Tea Party-like affair, and there were no Sons of Liberty, in the 1640’s and 1650’s, if not the 1660’s and 1670’s, under the leadership of its arguably most effective governor, William Berkeley, Virginia royal government went “native”, and used effectively Jamestown polity structures to press its visions on London. As we shall see the realities of financing their tobacco economy meant their retention of the investment of English New Men capital  to perpetuate its plantation economy. English, i.e. London based financiers were able  roots so deep, and horrible, into Virginia that it exhibited its golden age somewhere in the first four decades of the eighteenth century, mostly at the expense of black slaves. Massachusetts, on the other hand, was able to develop its own domestic financiers and trading merchants. In short, by the Glorious Revolution these two colonies were heading down their own distinct paths into the future.

The Virginia elite fought its battle with London trade policy using its own policy-making structures, and its tobacco elites to cope with and survive the civil war, the Republic-Protectorate, and finally the restored Stuart Kings. When the Glorious Revolution kicked out the Stuarts in 1689, the Virginia policy system not only stood in place, but had developed and instilled its roots deeper into Virginia’s social and economic fabric. Those foundations made it possible for Virginia to develop a “way of life”, and a political culture to support it.

So the lessons we can learn from Berkeley and free trade are, aside from his use of the issue to muster political support, are (1) primarily economic development-related in that the issue is an excellent entry point for discussion of colonialist forms of economic development; and (2) free trade instructs us about the early development of the English so-called “mercantile” colonial economic-trade system focusing in particular on the center-periphery relationship.

Accordingly, when Dutch trade was tackled in 1643 by Berkeley and the Assembly, they took on the dysfunction and disjunction of how London perceived and conducted its version of mercantilist trade and colonialism. For those of us who thought such tensions were late to American colonial history–after the French and Indian War–our contention is that tensions between the two hybrid English colonial policy system were endemic from the beginning. Virginia’s political and economic development path would evolve on its experience with those tensions, and, as we shall see, the other colonies in existence during this period would be similarly affected by their experiences, and that is yet another reason why states are different today: the Civil War and Restoration periods left different impressions of each state’s twig.

In this module we will consider the inherited Virginia Company-English mercantile heritage to explain how Virginia’s political structures coped with the competing contenders of a London policy system in the midst of civil war. Dutch trade–free trade–was no newcomer to Virginia in 1643. It was an issue that Virginia inherited from the Virginia Company period. Pre-Deal Dutch-free trade provided Virginia sustenance that permitted the Assembly, in particular, to withstand the attacks of the two Stuart kings to enact their various version of the tobacco contract, and to stand off, defeat, the efforts of its major tobacco exporters and their New Men London financiers to create a trading and supplier monopoly out of the remnants of the Virginia Company.

With the leadership of Berkeley, Virginia’s mainstream planter-owners learned how to use the Assembly to counter the powerful Council of State and even challenge the power of the royal governor. They were able to do so because their power was rooted in their control, dominance at least, of Virginia county system of local government. With their political base firmly in place, the Burgesses elite–along with the somewhat reluctant Council of State large planters–would join with of all things, Virginia’s newly installed royal governor who allied with them against their competing London masters. These masters needed that Virginian unity that only the Assembly possessed and a sort of stalemate ensued, a stalemate that persisted into the eighteenth century.

Anglo-Dutch-Virginia Trading: Private Mercantilism at the Colony Level

The Dutch had been trading with Virginia, nosing around as Billings puts it, early into the Company period. Use of Dutch ships, illegal according to the kings tobacco contract, was a common occurrence, and almost an established tradition, which was regarded by most planters as within their rights as an Englishman, when Berkeley bought Green Springs in 1642. What we need to know, however, is less that Dutch ventured into Virginia rivers to trade, but that “trading” and colonialization were two sides of the same coin during the first fifty or so years of English-Dutch-Spanish-French and even Sweden and Portugal early mercantilist period.

While England was not a direct party to the then-raging Thirty Years War, that major European war did set off other wars–and peace–among the various European mercantilist powers in which England did become involved. These wars threw sand, and opportunity, into the operations of the various private adventurers. The instability, mostly instigated by the land conflicts among the contending kingdoms of the Thirty Years War and the associated wars that it generated again strengthened and weakened the kings and whatever capacity they possessed  to set sound consistent foreign and trade policy.

As we shall see, England had no monopoly of colonial trade in these years. Holland, the Dutch, were, if any country, the masters of the Atlantic and its trade. The Dutch and English, rivals and competitors in trading, were allies in opposing the Spanish Hapsburgs. Accordingly, trading in the first half of the seventeenth century blended privateers, colonial settlements, supplier-export trade, and increasingly once settlements were established, a cluster-agglomeration developed out of importing settlers, workforce, and surprisingly early slaves. These private mercantile actors where were the action was at least until 1650’s. When William Berkeley initiated his trade with the Dutch in 1643, he really poked the mercantile private adventurers bees nest–and opened up a can of worms (don’t you love these).

These entrepreneurial-financier-colonialists ranged the globe, from Southeast Asia, to Africa, to South America, West Indies and the Caribbean. in general. In the vacuum left by the Thomas Smythe post Tudor merchant adventures who founded the British East Indies  and Virginia Companies (among others) the mid-1620’s breakup of the Virginia Company, a new group of adventurers-financiers, our famous Brenner’s New Men jumped in and joined forced with the companies and families that had preceded them. While this was going on, the chief rival in the Atlantic and East Indies at least were the Dutch. As we shall see, however, the Dutch made inroads into the English colonies, and as we shall see the New Men-Restoration Stuarts will strike back–but the two Anglo-Dutch wars that lie in our future are outside the time periods of this module.

Perhaps evidence we can offer in this module is how the English New Men, as they replaced Virginia Company and its aristocratic merchant adventurers, came to oppose the Dutch West Indies Company, and its New York-Chesapeake settlement. The period previous to Berkeley, upsetting as it was to the English sovereign and to the Warwick New Men, did not reach such volumes as to provoke action. When that the English royal governor pioneered his Dutch trading initiative in 1643 (and which stayed in effect until he “retired” in 1651) that upset the near monopoly enjoyed by the New Men in Virginia.

As interesting, Berkeley’s initiative seemingly was counter to the traditional mercantile paradigm espoused by the English kings, English colonial trade policy, epitomized by the tobacco contract, was tossed asunder by the royalist Berkeley. Berkeley on the other hand throughout the entire period was supported, if not cheered, by the duly elected local legislature the Assembly. What should contemporaries today think is happening–first signs of American independence, populism of the mainstream planters, or something more complex?

In this early period the Dutch were ubiquitous, and their war with Spain was central to the future evolution of modern Europe, and within England anti-Catholic Spain was regarded by many key decision-makers in terms not dissimilar to how the USA, China, and Russia view each other. The scattered colonies, trading posts, and proprietary expeditions-ventures impart a fevered disorder to the Atlantic, Caribbean, West Indies, Africa, and North and South America. This disorder reinforced the need for the emergence of high-impact dynastic private adventurers-traders-financiers with logistical capacity and access to pools of investors and interested aristocratic investors who had access in the courts, trade agencies and legislatures of the period.

Coalitions and rivalries were fostered. That this became a young man’s game, with all the daring-do and wildness of youthful decision-making implied (Thomason, for example was 25 in 1630, Claiborne around 30, the second Earl of Warwick an aged 32 when he replaced his father in 1619; Charles I was 25 when he assumed the throne, William Courteen was the old man at 58 in 1630, dying in 1636) adds to the temper of early mercantile period. That the settlers of Virginia, elites or indentured, were similarly young and spirited as most gold rush, wild-west enthusiasts usually are, suggest that the reader might keep in mind that early mercantilism was not led by erudite and serious rational planners.

Colonies were founded, and some managed-to take root–but there were many failures along the way. During the pre-Restoration period the colonies that survived, Virginia in our case, experienced a very different “trading” mercantilist environment than those founded close to, and after, the late Restoration. Usually the Glorious Revolution has been regarded as the turning point of classic mercantilism to which textbooks refer. Since Virginia and Massachusetts’s in particular, were founded before the Restoration and indeed the Civil War, they encountered turbulence from a proto-economic system in the making. From this the reader can sense I assert that one can differentiate American states from the period in which they were founded and during which their early political and economic development first took root. This is not earthshaking but it is easy today to not incorporate the dynamics that could and did “bend colonial policy trees” in ways that other colonies, founded later did not experience. 

As the reader might guess, the competitive flux that saturated the early mercantile period hugely influenced politics-economics of the English colonies; that environment created a different mixture of “players” or actors in their politics, governance, and impacted their structural-institutional maturation, certainly set in place the path underlying future formation of their economic base. What this module seeks to show is those impacts and the evolution of economic bases could, did. deviate from impacts and economic bases contemplated by their supposed mercantile masters, the king and his officials.

Bottom line in this early period, the so-called masters of mercantilism often took or reacted to the actions and decisions of subordinate policy-makers. In Virginia the role and impact of private adventures-groupings becomes evident as early as 1617, and continued the disruption, i.e. impact of systemic policy, broke up the internal cohesion of the Virginia Company–forcing the King to suspend its governance temporarily over Virginia. We have discussed these folk in our earlier modules, but now we inject them into the larger “mercantilist evolution. We do so at this point because it is evident that starting with an expanded definition of the English civil war that included 1638-1641 we can see that mercantilism is entering a very important pivot point–and the colonies are going to get caught up in that transition.

This period of early mercantile development was seriously impacted by the involvement of the entrepreneurial-privateer prone adventurer families or proto-dynasties we discussed earlier. England developed several , the first Earl of Warwick while impactful was, but a shadow of his second, the Second Robert Rich Earl of Warwick. But other families such as Holland-bred Courteen’s  which formed their own trading corporations/networks; these Anglo-Dutch Courteen brothers set the tone and the geographic scope and focus of mercantilism-colonialism through the 1630’s. After the 1630’s Brenner’s New Men, Maurice Thomason being the most prominent, copied Courteen’s approach to finance and colonialize, and they would in the 1640’s exert a great deal of influence in the post 1650 evolution of English mercantilism. Virginia was more ground zero in regards to their impact than most any other colony.

the “Larger Picture” Behind the 1643 Virginian-Dutch trading imitative

Nested in that rivalry that was the 1643 Berkeley  trading initiative, England and Holland driven by the civil war permutations and the evolution of trading magnates whose impact on foreign and commercial policy had increased greatly, had shuffled the deck of cards that was mercantilist trading and foreign policy.

By 1643 Charles sort of allied with Holland against the New Men ensconced in the Parliament-controlled foreign-policy apparatus. I hesitate to suggest yet a third nested thread, the struggle between the Claiborne Clique and the royalist Catholic Maryland colony. That last thread was in process of restarting, and would pick up steam with each parliamentary victory. The reader can now see the complexity that underlie the free-trade Dutch trade initiative were are about to discuss. The Virginia Assembly would need to navigate them, and during the 1640’s their navigator was mostly William Berkeley. Still, the previous trade pattern had already set in place the traces of a new one:

tobacco provided the economic lifeline to the metropolis [London], but this frequently snarled; planters relied on imports for practically everything and the resulting debts required repaying; the shortage of regular money [coin] as well as nonagricultural economic activity [a non-diversified economic base] made the staple [tobacco] the currency of these places; and the need to pay for imports addicted the planters to the cultivation of the weed to the extent that inevitably caused its price to plunge [oversupply relative to demand] in the 1630’s. The initial success of tobacco also brought unwanted attention from the Crown which sought from 1620 to divert as much revenue from the weed as possible [pp. 33-4]

Thus, as the socioeconomic platform for the development of Anglo-America had formed. The demands of the colonizers necessitated the development of colonies that produced and consumed commodities that benefited those backers [merchant financiers]. The running of the plantation trade required agents on the ground; colonizers recruited them with offers including land and the means to transform it into an estate [headrights]. Those who accepted these … [subsidies] also provided leadership for the colony by virtue of their new economic position and their connections. Successful settlement by definition required inhabitants, and, therefore the creation of societies [permanent settlement]. Yet for those involved in the colonial trade the recruitment of labor to cultivate those staples held far more importance than the formation of American societies [and governance] in, and of themselves, did  [L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire  [p. 36]]

Berkeley’s 1643 Dutch Trade Initiative

In 1643, seemingly pretty much out of the blue, Berkeley inaugurated legislation “to throw Virginia open to the Dutch, and to extend trade contacts between Virginia and other colonies”. The legislation was whole-heartedly approved by the Assembly and the colony had incredibly tossed aside the core of Charles’s tobacco contract.  “Within a half-dozen years of taking up farming at Green Spring, [Berkeley] was shipping his products through an extensive alliance of English, Dutch, West Indian and New England merchants that joined his plantation to world markets”. [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 77. Compared to Virginia’s mainstream tobacco planters, Berkeley was late in initiating that initiative–a goodly number of mainstream Virginia planters had been developing their own trading arrangements for going on two decades.  Billings supports our belief that for his own reasons and thought, Berkeley was a free trader by nature.

As to “free trade” in Virginia, it always was shorthand for Virginia trade with the Dutch. On the surface the issue is relatively straight-forward. In March 1643 William Berkeley, far from the civil war torn courts of London and York, took it upon himself to depart from the core plank of English colonial trade policy. He submitted legislation to the Assembly (the same Assembly which restructured itself, at Berkeley’s suggestion into an upper and lower house (House of Burgesses and Council of State, a restructuring that itself required a considerable, complex and multi-faction :Deal’), and with the Assembly’s support passed legislation which ended the English monopoly over Virginia’s trade exports, and abandoned a requirement to use only English ships to export and import.

Accordingly Virginia trade could employ non-English, but realistically mostly Dutch ships, and trade wherever they went–logically for tobacco direct to Holland for processing and sale to the Continent. Say it another way, Virginia seemingly on its own volition, had initiated significant new policy initiatives with other countries and with (rival) North American colonies. What’s more its governor had pulled away from London’s slowly developing mercantilist colonial policy. The early Stuart script had never wandered in this direction and in 1643 the tail was seemingly wagging the dog. Amazingly, the Jamestown hybrid colonial policy system demonstrated a willingness to depart from the clear and consistent policy of its London “master and sovereign”. Or did it?

My reading, however, was that Berkeley’s free trade initiative was never a departure from Charles’s current program. In this period he turned his former tobacco contract inside out for very obvious reasons. Despite an undisputed autonomy Virginia as a whole did not seek to depart from its royalist convictions; it was not a parliamentary or even puritan hot bed. Without capacity to affect events both sides of the English civil war kept an eye open on colonial affairs, and a willing Berkeley picked his side in the war. If inconsistent, both warring parties saw value in their colonies, but turned to specific groupings within their membership for guidance, capacity and action. There is much more to the Dutch-free trade story than de facto civil war autonomy.

Both king and parliament required, for each of their purposes, the proceeds and customs generated by the tobacco trade; Berkeley on the surface seemingly directly challenged both. Why did Berkeley the royalist seize opening trade with the Dutch so robustly? Was that an expression of his personal commitment to free trade, and his desire to maximize Green Springs  profit and cement his influence and support of the mainstream planters and their Assembly.

What appears to have happened is the civil war, the king versus parliament, prompted parliament in October, 1642 to forbid “all trade with ‘any Port or place within any of His Majesties Dominions, being in hostility‘. With the war in flux, interpretation of these terms need be flexible, but Parliament meant to stop royalist trading with Dutch and Anglo Dutch shippers. Parliament wanted its own monopoly; it controlled the ports, at least to the extent they were controlled. Between 1643 and 1646 Parliament ships confiscated almost sixty Dutch [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century” in Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs Ed., Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, p. 100ships.

If the Parliament struck the first blow, the king quickly struck back. The king responded by “commissioning Governor William Berkeley to apprehend all ships from London [in control of by Parliament] and to seize all assets from Londoners living in the colony. Berkeley was more than willing to keep the London merchants at arms length, and to reach out to the Dutch. Berkeley found the planters who were involved in a bitter struggle with London-based merchants on his side.[99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century” in Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs Ed., Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, p. 100.

The reality was without the port of London, the tobacco trade and its byproducts would flow to Parliament. Parliament was housed there and between the merchant adventurers and the New Men its politics, more autonomous than one might have thought, was anti-royalist by that point. Charles, no doubt with a smile on his face, turned to the Dutch for help. Charles’s wife, Queen Henrietta (French-born), a daughter of Marie de Medici of the famous Italian wheeler dealers, no doubt facilitated the dramatic 180 degree shift in Stuart colonial policy. Interestingly, William Berkeley had met with her in Holland on a mission for Charles about a decade earlier. And we must not lose sight that Charles participated in England’s alliance with Hollard–although his natural tendency was to minimize antagonizing the Spanish, however much misfortune that brought him in English politics; his blend of Protestantism did not call for a radical departure of the Anglican Church from papist beliers and even practices.

In essence, the king had brokered an informal alliance with ( the Republic of) Holland against Parliament. If tobacco went to London and Bristol which were controlled by parliamentary forces Charles would lose their revenues and finance parliament’s budget. The tobacco monopoly worked against the King, and he abandoned it. He could do so by shifting trade directly to Anglo Dutch families resident in Holland instead of London. In 1643, the heritage of Anglo-Dutch shipping trading families-dynasties that emanated from the Tudor-James I years control of several Dutch cities left these traders with trading companies with residences in both countries. The shared ports, and Virginia ships that used these ports, did so under a sort of English free trade zone situation. Not surprisingly well-placed Virginia planters had already cultivated their contracts with these trading families. The bulk of English tobacco exports, still dominated by Claiborne Clique went to London anyway. In Virginia one traded with whoever would finance their investment and consumption needs.

Who among the Virginian planters employed Dutch traders? As we shall see prominent Virginian plantation owners, Francis Yeardley and his brother Argall for two (sons of former Governor Yeardley) were related by family to shipping companies in Dutch cities. We shall also see that the Yeardley’s, by 1643, had become key, if early, allies of Governor Berkeley. Thus Berkeley in turning to the Assembly had important allies on this initiative.

Billings provides this observation “Argall Yeardley also became an important ally [to Berkeley by 1643] economically as well as politically. The eldest son of a former governor-general, Yeardley eased into politics at an early age, and he entered the council [of State] in 1639, while still in his twenties. An active merchant-planter, he found much of his livelihood in commerce with the Dutch. His second wife Ann Custis [whose future descendant was Martha Washington] tightened his bonds to the Netherlands even more. She belonged to an Anglo-Dutch family from Rotterdam [and he married her in Rotterdam]. Blood ties and common business interests reinforced Yeardley’s loose alliance with like-minded merchant-planters who joined the Eastern Shore and the low James River basin to the Holland trade.[99] Enthoven and Klooster contend that Yeardley’s marriage with Custis occurred in 1649 and took place in Virginia. My research strongly suggest this is not correct; the marriage happened in 1643 and took place in the Netherlands.

Besides Yeardley trade with the Dutch” faction included Nathaniel Littleton, Thomas Willoughby, [former] Secretary [of State] Kemp [discussed in previous module and a key participant in the “1643 Deal”, and bitter opponent of the Claiborne Clique], Richard Lee [of whom we shall hear more], Edmund Scarburgh, Yeardley’s brother Francis, and Adam Thoroughgood, a Lower Norfolk County justice, whose daughter had married a Dutch trader [who had therefore established his own plantation in Virginia]. A second network connected to Amsterdam via Berkeley [himself] through Richard Glover [who] … trucked mainly around Jamestown and merchants along the York River. The Berkeley-Glover link drew into the mix councilors George Ludlow, Bridges, Freemen and Ralph Wormeley …[and] Burgesses Robert Hold and Stephen Gill, and numerous well-heeled independent merchant-planters [99]  Warren Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Louisiana State University Press,  2005), pp. 95-6

Berkeley was not, therefore, out on a limb on either side of the Atlantic. Nor was he a rogue royalist, but he certainly contested parliamentary authority and placed himself, and Virginia, firmly on the royalist side. What’s more his actions and words over the course of his long administration caused many, including me, to believe he did so in good measure because he was a free trader, and had made the leap into Virginia’s planting elite through his Green Springs plantation. At minimum in 1643 he was aspiring to be “one of them”. Conveniently the civil war provided an opportunity that could not be ignored. Kukla agrees:

Berkeley balanced the power of the Mathews-Claiborne faction not only with new House of Burgesses, but also by drawing together something like a gubernatorial faction among the elite. Outside of the James River basin, especially on the Eastern shore, and in the vicinity of modern Norfolk, trade with Dutch merchants was extensive. Prominent colonists in this area had remained individually independent of monopolists on the James River to London axis, for their interests in Dutch and non-London shipping put them at odds with the Mathews-Claiborne faction. Identification of the members of this group is necessarily fragmentary, for they lacked the well-defined goal of the James River monopolists. Berkeley’s potential allies included such independent merchant-planters as Argoll (sic) Yeardley, Edmund Scarborough, John Custis, George Ludlow,  Samuel Abbot, Ralph Wormeley, and Richard Lee. [99]  Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia (American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (April, 1985), p. 290. See also footnote 47 on that page

The initiative also revealed Berkeley acted with support from the Assembly. Moreover, Berkeley’s March 1643 trade action was not an executive order, but a submission to the (branches) of the Assembly to open trade with the Dutch. That meant approvals and discussion in both the upper and lower houses. Of particular note, within both bodies, but especially the upper house, were members of our now infamous Claiborne Clique–who very much had “a dog in this hunt”, i.e. as late as 1643 we still see the Claiborne Clique still dominant in Virginia’s tobacco export, and that it likely used English ships, and as such were supportive of the king’s previous position in English monopoly trade. That their financiers had shifted loyalties to Parliament, however, put them in a vulnerable position in royalist Virginia.

As Brenner concedes Virginia was one of several colonies (Barbados, Antigua and Bermuda) who refused to shed their royalist loyalties and by 1643 did not have to in order to use Dutch ships and financing. Rather from the beginning “the widespread willingness within the colonies should be understood less in terms of planters royalist proclivities than in terms of their commercial aspirations. The colonists real objective was to take advantage of political disarray in the home country in order to gain freedom for their trade from English domination. This set them directly against those London colonial merchants who commanded such influence within the Commonwealth, and [after 1650] Commonwealth policy toward Barbados and Virginia assumed the avowed goal of reconsolidating London merchants hegemony over colonial commerce [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 584-5; see also Enthoven and Klooster, pp. 100-101.

I interpret this to mean they opposed the near monopoly of the Claiborne Clique, and even more their ambitious business plans, continental in nature, that promised in their minds seizing the commanding heights of Virginia’s economy and economic base–and likely submerging it into an investment nexus which they and their London companions would profit. The Claiborne Clique had their hands in every pot, and they found ways to protect themselves and maintain a solid presence in Jamestown and in the counties in which they resided. The political and deal-making motif within the Council of State could be ignored only at peril.

Rebutted by the Privy Council, and Laud Commission in 1634, their dreams of contracting with the Virginia Company had been seemingly crushed. The debacle of 1642 when the Assembly and Berkeley firmly, very firmly, rejected the Company’s last attempt to secure Virginia governance, combined with the 1638 seizure of New Kent by Maryland should have been the final nail in the Virginia Company coffin. Nevertheless hope does spring eternal and the Claiborne Clique had been drawn to the Company largely by its New Men financiers who saw it as the vehicle from which its trading monopoly could be fabricated. In the mid-1640’s, however, the New Men were off to greener pastures in West Indies and South America. They already had substantial influence over Virginia tobacco export and Virginian investment and had moved on following Warwick’s example.

Thomson (and others) by this point was firmly allied with Parliament; presumably Tucker and the other Claiborne Clique, silent on the matter, were also. With or without New Kent and the Virginia Company Magazine, the Clique were still a powerhouse exporting a hugely disproportionate share of Virginia’s tobacco. They had, however, moved on to some degree and in particular were still heavily engaged in the Indian fur trade, with ambitions that embraced the whole of eastern coast, including Canada, and a commitment to supplying the needs of English colonists,

Thus the Clique still stood apart from the tobacco-obsessed typical mainstream Virginia planter, both large and small. At root their world was in trade, finance, and exporting tobacco and as the forties evolved their financier friends carried them into their parliamentary-puritan venture. Still no doubt distrusted by the mainstream Virginia planters, they were no longer able to control the Council, or the upper house, at will.

That, we might remember, set the Clique and their New Men financiers apart from Virginia’s “mainstream planters” who wanted to use inexpensive Dutch ships that would trade directly with non English ports, yielding more profits and less cost to the tobacco export. Other than that, both factions did share other common interests–one of which was land-grabbing from the Powhatan, and a through dislike of their Maryland papist inspired northern neighbors. As to Berkeley, he left them alone, consulted them and incorporated them into his grand 1643 political restructuring, and probably he still remembered the role they played in his acquiring the appointment of the governorship and Wyatt’s good faith withdrawal.

All of this suggests to me the importance less of government as a instrument of enforcing mercantile ambitions and London-relevant “center” goals that a mercantilism strongly affected by the needs and the drifts of its private business groupings. The autonomy of the civil war gave free rein to those private ambitions and in this period, the private financiers were busy little bees indeed.

For my purposes there are three stories to tell as salient to the amazing one hundred eighty degree turn in Virginian foreign trade policy: the first is a simple background to Dutch-Virginian trade previous to 1643, supplemented by what happened after the initiative was in effect; the second, is to explain why the 1643 Dutch trade initiative was NOT an assertion of Virginian autonomy but rather a flip-flop in Charles’s foreign trade policy; the third is to indulge ourselves by relating how Warwick, and the New Men accelerated their autonomy from Charles, set their own agenda, and conducted their own trade-colonization initiatives, increasingly under the mantle of puritan-anti-royalist institutions and parliament. Finally, in the [999] below, I call attention to a more theoretical debate among Anglo-American historians concerning their thoughts on the underlying transformation of English mercantilism in this period.  [99] The story from the Dutch perspective is told chiefly by Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery (New York University Press, 2011), see pp. 18-26.

[999] The significant presence, involvement, impact of these private actors has in recent years been the subject of much discussion and at its least has injected a degree of complexity into our understanding of this early mercantile period in return for a better sense of what was actually going on in regards to not only English central governance, but for us a somewhat different perspective on its impact on the colonies themselves. The theoretical literature, depending on the time period either focus on “state formation” or state-building and the progress of colonies in advancing their “liberty”– i.e. resisting the encroachments of the centralizing English state.

This focus overlaps with “modernization” which stress the two in conjunction with each other, a perspective which tends to attribute more power and capacity to our London half of the English hybrid colonial policy systems. These approaches stress that the definition of English colonial policy occurred subsequent to the Glorious Restoration–which rejected centralization pursued by the Stuarts over the colonies. This research [99] See Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester University Press, 1993) generated its own literature which stress the role of the private adventurers-financiers and the lack of capacity to impose and enforce their policy available to the Stuarts. We, of course, belong to this grouping.

Free trade, with the Dutch or otherwise, struck a nerve with the English traders, and with the Stuart kings. But there is another aspect to it that arises from how many historians have defined the emerging economic-political system that was replacing the Tudor-late medieval paradigm during the Stuart period. Mercantilism evolved through the sixteenth century, but assumed its philosophical and conceptual coherence after the Restoration and took form after the Glorious Revolution. The affairs discussed in this module, therefore, by no means should be thought of as mercantilism in full bloom. Still as many historians have demonstrated one can find much in the period that fit into this paradigm.

Yet, I caution the events and course of the civil war and the policy systems that flowed from it in the 1650’s were driven by many inspirations and motivations. In any event, while mercantilism as an economic and political paradigm included many elements and practices, the issue singled our by free trade challenged a very important tenet of the future mercantilist system: the view that trade was “zero-sum” to each country of that period. The goal was to capture trade benefits to the advantage of each country to use and protect itself from the other competing kingdoms.

In my view this zero-sum dimension in European trading patterns during the first half of the sixteenth century particularly, were not strictly zero sum. Early North American trading patterns placed the English at a disadvantage, and accordingly there was much to-and-fro among the European kingdoms–and a whole lot more among individual ship captains, financiers, and traders.

As we shall see our English New Men buy into the zero-sum, but the reality of early and mid-seventeenth century trading is that North American colonies needed to share trade, free trade if you will, in order to face the realities of three thousand miles and a hostile competing wilderness. To a degree this is the problem the Virginia Company faced, and dealt with, in shifting from a trading factory to a permanent settlement. The Dutch–and French–went light on the permanent settlement “thing” but not so the English. The realities of a permanent settlement required the fabrication of a new model of trade and finance. The New Men, taking over from the merchant adventurers, saw trade competition in a different light than those who followed the trading factory model.

The gut of this matter simply came down to Stuart-New Men trade policy was in their minds zero-sum. From their perspective, their profits–and their need for capital resources to pay back their investments–were essential to their rise and standing in London, and from the colonies perspective were key to their receipt of capital investment by London.

This zero-sum dilemma is not an easy problem to solve, and its appearance, even before mercantilism assumed preeminence, suggests to me the problem results as much from the need to finance colonial development conducted by London’s private sector (or royal-government taxes-fees) as the simple desire for profits, excessive or otherwise. Someone had to pay for capital investment in colonial development, and there was serious risk associated with that investment, plus it was not timely. Thus the future incorporation of this zero sum-protectionist trade policy as a cornerstone of future English mercantilist trade policy should retain its dual motivations, and understand that there would have been little distinction between merchants and future capitalists or the the government (royal, parliamentary or democratic) tasked with the development of permanent settlements in the New World.

England-Britain during this decade slowly heading toward articulating its first major policy statement regarding colonial trade and relationships (mercantilism as we used to call it). The authors of that articular are principally the English “New Men”. They are the ones to watch in the forties. The inside story is that many of our infamous New Men tended toward Puritanism, and from that they associated themselves with Parliament, leaving their past support for the king behind. Their newfound friends and allies found a spot for them on the Privy Council. That would seemingly auger well for the Claiborne Clique.

In essence in this period trading was part of a multi-goal mercantilist system, conducted by aristocratic-merchant groupings who went wherever opportunity and charter beckoned. As much a navy for their kings as traders, they raided ports and traded ports as the impulse and the profit motivated them. Today we think of mercantilism as a settled system directed by its sovereigns ( early Stuarts) and imposed on its colonies; in this period, that perception is a serious mistake.

We argue that using Virginian-Dutch trade as an example, demonstrates how complex, and often more subtle, was the relationship between centralizing English authorities and their supposedly dependent colonies. We discuss the roles of private corporations, merchant-financier-ship owning-leasing families, ship masters, and even immigrants, indentured servants, and slaves. As to pre-1650 Virginia-Dutch trading, the noise was from London, but the action was in the colony–and for the most part, that action does not instill any overwhelming sense of dependence on London. That rivalry will consume a great deal of the pen and ink over the next several module series. Perhaps the most useful summary of these volumes is offered by L. H. Roper

To comprehend the English imperial enterprise properly, then we must assess its achievements and failures within the context of seventeenth century England’s political culture, where the interests of the state required at the least, the cooperation of local leaders [the other American side of the two hybrid policy systems’.

In the case of empire, ‘success’ even after the Restoration arose from the activities of ‘private’ individuals–such as Martin Noell, Thomas Povey, and Maurice Thompson–in conjunction with the metropolitan associations they formed. These men–whose perspectives and interest transcended ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ ‘merchant’ or ‘planter’ and ranged from the East Indies to West Africa to the West Indies to Hudson’s Bay–supported, even provided the impetus for, the state’s greater role in imperial affairs that was palpable after 1649 [the death of Charles and rise of Parliament-Cromwell]. There is evidence to suggest, for example, that they had a hand in establishing a council of foreign plantations, which protected and advanced their interests L. H. Roper, “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century, Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654-1676 in New England Quarterly, Vol. LXXXVII, no. 4 (December 2014), pp. 668-9 [999]

the Background

As to the Dutch entry into Virginian trade in this period, that story is also complicated. Enthoven and Klooster call attention to the reality that English ships could not match the needs of the colonists for supplies without the involvement of Dutch ships to supplement the few available English ships–England after all was early in process of developing its own shipbuilding cluster. Further, d the unwillingness or inability of English shipbuilders to copy Dutch innovations translated into English ships, shipbuilders and marine personnel were markedly less competitive and therefore provided to Virginians inferior logistics, greater risks and costs, and a forced trade in English ports in conformity to the tobacco contract (or actual smuggling and bypassing of the contract in the smaller English ports).

Enthoven and Klooster further argue that once in London, the Virginian tobacco was then resold, one way or another, to Dutch merchants in Middelburg and Zeeland (later Amsterdam) where Chesapeake tobacco was cut and mixed with Dutch-grown varieties which enjoyed more demand on the continent. They observe as late as 1700 the Dutch still imported and consumed one third of Maryland and Virginia tobacco. In short, the Dutch were always the unspoken third leg on the English tobacco trade. There is little doubt this was not lost to the Virginian tobacco exporter.

What was at stake in 1643 was that the tobacco contract which ordered Virginia and Maryland to ship on English ships to London, where it was bought by English factors and reshipped, most likely to Holland was in jeopardy. In terms of English politics, the merchant trade community in London, traditionally a major factor in London politics and governance–and by the way the location of the Houses of Parliament–were the ones threatened–if, of course, the King was somehow able to protect his customs duties, custom-farming, and taxes. More on that below.

Dutch maritime and commercial connections had been vital for the survival of the fledgling colony. The Dutch had ‘relieved’ the Virginians in two ways. First they supplied the planters and colonists with all kinds of necessities in order to survive in the New World. Archeological evidence substantiates the impact of Dutch commercial links on the material culture of the early Chesapeake. Second, they had shipped the fruits of Virginia–tobacco, corn and meat–to the Old World and had marketed these products [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century, in Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (Eds) (University of Virginia Press, 2011),  pp. 90-1

Underlying future Dutch trade with the Americas was an agreement made by Elizabeth back in the days of her war against Spain and the threat of the Armada. The Hapsburgs seized Antwerp i 1585, threatening British trade with the continent and providing a harbor for its fleet. To counter this, Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonsuch in which the English pledged their support of the Dutch resistance and war effort with troops and money. In compensation, the States General granted several cities, the so-called cautionary towns in Zeeland (Flushing and Brill) to England and placed them under her governance. “For the next three decades, a substantial English community lived in Flushing, where an English civil administration and a sizeable garrison had been installed”. [99] Enthoven and Klooster, p. 92

The treaty expired in 1616, but by that time not a few English-Dutch families had become merchants and traders. These merchant families did provide some immigrant support to Virginia, but more importantly the more successful, the Courteens for example, became powerhouses in the English overseas private trading-colonization community. Having access both to Dutch Zeeland, a center of English-European trade, and residence in London, one can see how they brokered a good deal of trading and export. Say it more precisely, when trade with Virginia was possible these families could own or procure ships for trade, and sent their second sons and indentured artisans to Virginia for opportunity. Probably the most known Dutch-English settler was Edward Bennett, whose plantation was among the largest–and which was badly damaged in the March 1622 Indian attack. There were others as well that established plantations in Virginia.

The Virginia Company was supportive of this and utilized the services of these families and the trading resources. Far from zero-sum, the first two decades of the Virginia’s colony mercantile trade embraced Dutch resources. That began to change in 1621 when James introduced his first “tobacco contract” which restricted trade to English ships and ports. In return James created a tobacco monopoly for the London Company and its subsidiary companies. A “deal” emerged from this regulation in which Bermuda (the Somers Company) satisfied the quota set by James for import to England, thereby leaving the London Company (i.e. Virginia) free to trade directly with the Dutch former cautionary towns. Dutch shippers returned the favor and from that point on intermittent trade with Virginia commenced–and continued into the forties.

With this introduction we can remind the reader that the earliest troubled days of Jamestown relationships with the Dutch were fairly good. Between 1609 and 1621 there was a truce in the Dutch war with the Hapsburgs. When war recommenced in 1621, the Dutch West indies Company was founded, and that was when the rivalry between England and Holland took on a new dimension; Holland was now a trade competitor.

Two observations of this early period. First, “Early [Jamestown colony] had close contacts with the Netherlands. Several of its early leaders [including four governors/lieutenant governors (Thomas de la Warre (Thomas West), John Smith, Gates, Dale) ‘were excellent old soldiers” who had served with distinction in the Low Countries, that “university of warre”. The second observation was that after 1611, Rolfe and his tobacco project planted the first exported tobacco which were taken to England on board ship with Dale, with whom he was close friends (he named his son after him). Dale, of course, granted his plantation to Rolfe, and married him to Pocahontas. One suspects that tobacco was not unknown to the Dutch early on.

Dale, the last governor (1616), actually was paid by the States General for his service as governor of Virginia–both Gates and Dale were on temporary duty from the Dutch army. Gates had returned to report to the States General in 2010, and then returned to Virginia until 1614. Dale, interestingly, married the daughter of the lieutenant governor of Flushing (Netherlands, see above). Enthoven and Klooster supplement this with more evidence that Gates and Dale in particular were at least sympathetic to the Dutch in regards to general relations and trade, and during their period several episodes suggest they served two masters” at Jamestown.  [99] Enthoven and Klooster, pp. 93-5 For example, Dutch artisans were sent to Jamestown in 1608 to work as glassblowers in Jamestown. Enthoven and Klooster also cite several ships that traded with Virginia previous to 1621 (p. 95). They also assert that:

as late as 1627, the province of Zeeland still dominated the tobacco trade, importing 29,199 pounds of Virginia leaf from London (or 78 percent of a total of 37,384 pounds received in the Dutch Republic, easily eclipsing Amsterdam (6,390 pounds) and Rotterdam (1,795 pounds) [99] Enthoven and Klooster, pp. 95

Lacking local factors who could organize Virginia plantations, the Dutch had to cruise the rivers, and operate out of the mouths of the major rivers. Their advantages were the better quality and cheaper necessities and luxuries, and the higher price they could pay for tobacco. In 1621, Dutch investors created the West Indies Company for trade in the Atlantic. It would, of course, found the New York colony. At its first meeting in November 1623, the West Indies Company dispatched a ship to Virginia, and forbade other private ships from that trade. The effect of both James’s tobacco contract and the West Indies ban drove those Dutch traders willing to take the risk “underground” or upriver if you prefer.

The cargoes of the ships venturing from the Dutch ports to the New World included a wide array of merchandise, from liquor to cheese, pitch, barbers’ chests. These shipments were high-risk undertakings because in most cases, because of a lack of contacts and the absence of a network, no prearranged deals were made about the purchase of tobacco. Ships sailed to the New World on ‘adventure’ [i.e. speculation]. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Middelburg [heart of the English-Dutch trade], an entrepreneur–referred to as ‘the husband’–would take the initiative for such a venture to the other side of the ocean. First he would purchase a cargo, and then hire a ship from a ship-owning company. In many cases his cargo was not sufficient to fill the whole ship, so he tried to interest his business friends in sending goods to the New World as well..

Dutch merchants, masters and supercargoes, did not yet possess a well-developed local network of agents and factors who could assemble cargoes and transact business on their behalf. Hence, only by spending inordinate amounts of time plying Virginia’s vast system of waterways, sometimes going from plantation to plantation, were they able to sell their wares, collect their debts, and fill their ship’s holds with hogsheads of tobacco [99] Enthoven and Klooster, p. 97

I suspect what we are seeing is the power of the Claiborne Clique which into the 1630’s held sway over two-thirds or more of Virginia’s annual tobacco export. Tied to their New Men, London (or Bristol) based trade financiers-merchants, they increasingly gravitated to using “an annual convey” which would assemble and leave from the James’s mouth in the Chesapeake Bay. The various inspection checks which were used after the late 1620’s also reinforced the shipment of tobacco through this annual fleet. Still, although few records exist, irregular trading did occur both from the Hudson River New York and direct from the Netherlands.

That trade was sufficient to motivate the West Indies Company to loosen its ban on Virginia trade, allowing smaller ships to trade and such trade aggregated at New York colony for shipment direct to Holland. Dutch trade was also nettlesome to James who in 1627 issued more detailed trade regulation that required all ships leaving Virginia to ship to London. Enforcement, as always was problematic. The response was for those still interested in trade with Virginia was to establish a “circuit” of stops along and among the Atlantic colonies creating the potential to trade without having to return to the home port with “enumerated goods” such as tobacco.

So ‘Anglo-Dutch’ investors such as the Courteen brothers had early on in the Virginia Company experience, in the midst of the Dutch Revolt, embraced Virginia and its tobacco when it became available, and using their approach to trade Virginians had been incorporated into a multi-colony Atlantic trade. London-based and other merchants mastered the early colonial period by mixing cargos, locations, and needs, thereby facilitating the evolution of the financial trade cluster that would be available to provide the capital and expertise necessary for Virginian economic development. Merchant trades, whatever their persuasion, learned early in the game that Atlantic commerce was their best path to commercial development and profits. [99] See L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017.

The result of all this pen, ink and bluster was a dramatic expansion of Dutch trade with Virginia after 1643. Dutch shipmaster De Vries reported in 1643 that he counted thirty-six vessels in the Chesapeake–only four of which were Dutch. That was an increase from his last count in 1637 when ALL thirty-six were English. “At Christmas 1648, De Vries observed that out of thirty-one ships in the colony, twelve were English, twelve were Dutch, and seven came from New England. That same year twenty-five Dutch ships left Holland for Virginia“. [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century, in Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs (Eds) Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, p. 99

The English civil war had a profound effect on Virginia-Dutch commercial relations, both in the short and long run, and both in scope and character. During the war navigation between the mother country and the colony was severely hampered. While Parliament got the upper hand in England, Virginia remained firmly royalist, at least until 1652 [when Berkeley went into retirement]. Dutch merchants … dominated tobacco exportation during the war years. In the long run, many different commercial ties were established between the Dutch Republic and Virginia. They involved elite Virginians, London merchants, English and Dutch merchants operating from Amsterdam and Rotterdam and Dutchmen settling in Virginia

During the 1640’s Virginia planters and Republican Dutch entrepreneurs worked closely together. These contacts were so well developed by 1652 that in spite of the Commonwealth’s assumption of control over the colony, the removal of Dutch ally Governor William Berkeley from office, and the onset of the First Anglo-Dutch War [1652], Dutch ships still sailed to Virginia. Some of these vessels were seized as prizes [by the Commonwealth]. [99] Enthoven and Klooster, pp. 105-6

Also, as Enthoven and Klooster observe the “character” of the Dutch-Virginian trade during the forties led to the installation of a trade infrastructure in Virginia. By 1652 the Dutch were able to to put in place practices  such as bills of exchange to settle trade and to pay debts [bills of exchange could be collected by a third party who might enjoy power of attorney for the counter party in Holland]. This financial innovation tied those Virginia planters who used it to Dutch traders. Anglo-Dutch traders based in England and Holland stood to benefit the most. In any events, Dutch factors constructed warehouses in Virginia and were able to store tobacco-goods in anticipation of a future ship–allowing deals to be made previous to ship arrival. Of note, Maryland tobacco exporters also participated in this Dutch trade as well.

We will pick up this topic again, yea says the reader, when we reach the 1650’s and Berkeley’s retirement and Cromwell’s arrival. But here it is wise to mention a “hidden in plain sight” critical shift: that Charles had abandoned his tobacco contract and had instead come to an “informal” alliance with the Dutch Republic in regards to Virginia trade. A Virginian could be a royalist supporter and trade with the Dutch, while on the other hand, one could be a New Man-Claiborne Clique and require that all Virginian trade, import and export, be shipped on English ships to English ports–and, of course, be a “Roundhead” Puritan loyal to Parliament. Charles’s shift official in 1642-3, began, in 1639 when Charles ended his pro-Spain foreign policy [i.e. anti Dutch], by allowing the Dutch to use English ports to battle the Spanish fleets and their attacks of the Netherlands. When Charles lost effective control of English ports, he lost what was his prime interest in the tobacco contract: control of tobacco fees, custom farming and taxes.

Bills of exchange, the development of trade “factors”, and the construction of a physical infrastructure (warehouses and piers] were major advances in Virginian economic development. Their existence and use predated the practices of English traders, the New Men for example, and their effectiveness in promoting stable and more profitable trade no doubt provided motivation and inspiration for their extension to English trade.

Appearances are not what they seem in 1643 

On its face Berkeley’s 1643 “free trade” contradicted the infamous royal “tobacco contract” on which past modules have obsessed. What’s more, Berkeley followed up by formalizing trade and colony relations with the Dutch in New York and allowed Virginia exports to directly ship to Holland. His actions opened Virginia up to whomever was willing and able to trade with her. New England and West Indies ships afterwards anchored in Virginia’s bays and rivers. By a stroke of a pen Berkeley launched his own version of the proverbial thousand ships unleashed by the kidnapping of Helen of Troy.

What prompted this rather sudden repudiation of the past forty years of Stuart policy.? Was Berkeley really going native? Or rogue? Was he simply looking to make a profit? Was he pressured into doing it, arguing his own principles or allying with the dominant groupings in Virginia? In this module I will answer in the affirmative for all. The conventional explanation for Berkley’s rather abrupt and path-breaking Dutch/free trade policy initiative is some variation of Edmund S. Morgan’s perspective:

During the Civil Wars, king and Parliament were so occupied with one another in England that neither gave much attention to what was happening in the New World. All talk of tobacco contract was forgotten now, and the Virginians elevated England’s salutary neglect into a matter of principle by asserting their right to a free trade, and by affirming it as ‘ the libertye of the Colony and a right of deare esteeme to free borne persons … that noe law should be established within the kingdome of England concerning us without the consent of a grand Assembly here. [Morgan adds] … Throughout the fight between royal and Parliamentary forces Berkeley remained a staunch partisan of the king, but he was an equally staunch partisan of Virginia, and an enthusiastic supporter of the colony’s development of Dutch trade. [99] Edmund S. Morgan,  American Slavery, American Freedom (W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), pp. 146-7

From this I glean an overemphasis on the position of mainstream planters, an ignoring of the Claiborne Clique and the New Men, and a free trade rational congruent with Virginians yearnings for liberty, personal freedom, individualism and all things future American. While the cat’s away, the mice will surely play–and London colonial authority-enforcement capacity was certainly at its lowest ever. But I would also suggest no sooner was the free trade initiative announced than a year later the Third Powhatan War began and lasted into 1646. That no doubt caught some Virginian attention, as did the ebb and flow of the civil-religious war. While on one level I can, and do, agree with Morgan, autonomy played a role. However, I cannot agree the Atlantic colonies “escaped” the attention of those in England during this period and I question the extent to which the episode is an example of American predisposition to “liberty”, as asserted by many who joined with Berkeley by asserting their right to get the best possible terms for their business transactions.

Evolution of English private trading dynasties to 1643

During the period immediately previous to 1643, and over time to Cromwell rise to power in 1651, undercover behind Virginia’s foreign trade policy initiative, we see transition among private trade-colonialization business groupings . This private transition proved critical to Virginia and its political-economic development during the 1650’s. What should be understood is that during the post-1643 forties, Virginia was on the margins of private merchant factions and dynasties, not because Virginia was engaged in much trade with the Dutch, but because the English private merchant traders had their own agendas–which they conducted more or less uninhibited by Charles and the royalists. Succinctly, these colonizers focused on West Indies, Asia and northern South America–and the African slave trade.

L. H. Roper traces the emergence and involvement of these private traders in Virginia’s colonization starting around the the time Argall became governor in Virginia (1671). We might remember our biographies of the plantation conquistadors suggest Samuel Mathews owed his start in Virginia to Argall, who was affiliated with the first Earl of Warwick. The Earl of Warwick [the second earl who came to earldom in 1619] ” may have been the most prominent proponent of expanding English overseas interests [I except the Virginia and East India Companies] in the period through the late 1650’s. While Warwick did not control the various mechanizations of the several traders, who operated on their own ambitions and their fluid and flexible investors and partners, young men as they were, drew inspiration and a measure of protection by their association with Warwick and his more powerful entourage.

… he [Warwick] certainly was one of the leading politicians the period prior to the breakdown of the government in 1642. This aristocrat had his fingers in all the proverbial overseas pies; he was a leading member of the first English company, chartered in 1618 to trade with Africa … an early supporter of attacks on Spanish shipping … and he was a patron of colonialization ventures from the Caribbean to New England. … Warwick assembled an extensive web of mercantile, clerical, and political clients that he used in conjunction with like-minded aristocrats … to promote his fiercely anti-Spanish views [99] L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 26-7

It was Warwick who took on the leading grandfather of the merchant adventurer faction, Thomas Smythe in the Virginia Company after taking over from his father in 1619.. The disputes between the two were Warwick’s propensity toward privateering against the Spanish, and his piracy in the East Indies (where Smythe was governor of the East India Company). His support of Argall in Virginia, and his assistance in his escape from Smythe’s–de la Warre’s effort to displace him (plus the marriage of his son to Smythe’s daughter) made the affair bitter and very personal.

In the Atlantic Warwick contested Smythe’s control over Bermuda–which was ideal to use for Spanish privateering (or piracy (when England was at peace with Spain). Victorious, ousting Smythe from governorship in 1619, he ran afoul with Sandys-Southampton-Ferrars, again because of his piracy and joined with Smythe to oust Sandys–which, when combined with the devastation and virtual collapse of the colony during the Second Powhatan brought an effective end to the effective governance of the Virginia Company over Virginia and led to the king’s [intended temporary pending restructuring] suspension of the Virginia portion of the 1609 and 1612 charters.

This narrative is congruent with the one I constructed in our Jamestown module series. My Jamestown saga, for my own reasons, was based more from the king’s view of colonialization, sensitive to court politics and royal ambitions, and the dilemma presented by the transition from the trading factor model of the East Indies Company to an unknown and poorly understood permanent settlement strategy (and its politics), embraced a more traditional view of English mercantilism. Centered about the dynamics, within and among the Virginia Company joint stock shareholders, I pinpointed the effects of private investors on the behavior and actions of the Company, and suggested how, inadvertently and largely unplanned, they planted the thin sapling that was to be the Virginia governance twig. By the 1640’s, however, and with Berkeley in tow, we are ready to flesh out that picture.

L. H. Roper’s research supplements that conventional definition of mercantilism, by adding to it the involvement of private interests, within and mostly without, the Virginia Company. From this private-centric approach we can see the Company finally succumbed to the pressure generated by these private adventurers, and freed largely of its constraints, fabricated their own opportunistic agendas and ambitions, owned and/or leased ships and headed off toward their particular colonial paradise.

The king kept a wary eye of these, likely knowing full well when they ran into trouble they would be infiltrating his court and its backrooms for some form of assistance. The reader ought take note that in this approach the king is reactive for the most part, especially if we limit his concerns to taxes and revenues derived from the colonial enterprise that he needed to pay his bills and conduct his agendas–which surprisingly are ignored, bypassed, or adopted if advantageous by the private groupings. For those inclined to rational endeavors and a history in which greedy and powerful actors imposed their will on weak and dependent populations, our version here is more like colonialization was conducted by Keystone Cops of the late medieval-early modern period.

More charitably, the politics and policy-making of the pre-Restoration colonial period, drifted toward civil-religious war, assisted by polarization of English-British religion/politics plus inept handling of Charles, were increasingly driven-led by the activities and agendas of different, autonomous, if not competing, private groupings of private adventurers.

During the civil war and until Cromwell asserted himself after 1651, English colonial mercantilism was less a governmental enterprise, and more a private-profit-seeking (with nationalistic, puritan-leaning, anti-Catholic tones). If accurate, we have a blip or disruptive period in the evolution of a more established and defined English mercantilism. Such blips can bend our North American colonial twigs so we need to explore them and see if they did. At minimum, we should expect differentiated responses from the various colonies, Massachusetts for example, that help shape their distinctive economic and political development paths.

What we see in Virginia is the differentiation within the planter class–the oligarchy that literally controlled Virginian policy-making. In that the tobacco exporting colossus, Claiborne Clique, had visions of a monopolistic diversified Virginia economic base, the more numerous and widespread mainstream planters resisted as best they could to their tender mercies, and many, bold planters broke the royal tobacco contract and traded with the Dutch.

They did so in the years immediately preceding Berkeley, and with Berkeley deciding to go native and establish his own profitable plantation, he followed his instincts and joined up with them. We might realize that Berkely is following former Governor Harvey’s footsteps, but we also notice Berkeley more charming and open approach, plus the opportunistic abandonment of the tobacco contract by his monarch left an opening that shuffled the politics within the planter class. In that the outcome of the civil war was in the mid forties at least not clear, likely no one felt comfortable in taking sides, except Berkeley, who stayed loyal to Charles, the Clique in particular did not break with Berkeley, choosing instead to be patient and concentrate on their own Virginian business plans and keep their head down. Time, after all would wound all heels.

The Dutch come into English-Virginian colonialization through a different path, and different private groupings–outside the Warwick nexus. Anglo-Dutch groupings certainly sprung from Zeeland’s autonomy from the Dutch United Provinces and an earlier period of alliance with England. For England’s support of the Dutch struggle against Spain, the former were granted governance and economic rights until 1616, during which English merchant families took up residence and intermingled with Dutch trading families. The most aggressive of these resident overseas merchant financiers were the Courteen family, whose  family residence was Zeeland’s port of Vlissingen.

Sir William and his brother, Peter inherited a successful merchant business, piggy-backed it with Dutch interests into a whaling and and salt trading conglomerate which drew them into the Atlantic, and eventually to the coast of Guiana. William, in London, oversaw English merchants who were drawn into their circle, and Peter in residence in Zeeland, the Dutch. William supported and lent considerable sums to James I, and according thus entered into the West Indies tobacco trade, and “pioneered” the transport of English, Irish and Dutch settlers and workers to the various colonies. Becoming aware of the Virginia Company’s involvement in tobacco, he secured a patent from the Virginia Company, and colonized Barbados, attempted to plant tobacco. The fragmented and convoluted merchant politics of Barbados, fueled by competing patents issued by Charles, forever disrupted his endeavors on that island.  Up to this point he was not a player in Virginia, but he will become a major player in adventurer-driven mercantilism. We will return to Courteen later.

Most impressive, and directly relevant to Virginia, is the rise of Maurice Thomason (aka Thompson), a Virginian settler who survived the Indian Massacre of 1622, and departed Virginia the same year, at the age of seventeen. He returned to England, apparently financed by his new brother-in-law, William Tucker, a powerful Virginian plantation conquistador, he became a ship captain who either wandered into, or was recruited by the Earl of Warwick. His involvement in the early Claiborne venture of 1629-32 (New Kent) has been noted. He was in his mid-twenties at that point. Roper notes the connection between the Earl (Robert Rich Jr.) and Thomason was likely infused with an anti-Spain/Catholic and Puritan-leaning religious bent. (Roper, Advancing Empires, p. 32).

That Thomason was familiar with plantations, tobacco, and Indians and that made him an expert and go-to in the English world of colonization, particularly in the export, fur trade and supplier opportunities. He took whatever opportunities he stumbled on–one of them was slave trading; Roper asserts Thomason “shipped about sixty slaves” to St. Christopher’s in 1626-“the first recorded English slaving voyage ever made to an English settlement” (p. 33). He would have been about 21.

In any event, as a member in good standing of the Warwick trading network, Thomason had a rolodex full of financiers, colonizers, adventurers, and even aristocrats. “The collective goal for the Warwick network–in addition to profit–seems to have been to carry the fight against the Catholic fore via privateering and colonization, which would also increase English territorial claims and the flow of revenue to both the Crown’s coffers and the estates of the colonizers. Thus Warwick and his associates, often styled as Puritans, proposed the creation of an English West India Company, following the example of the Dutch West Indian Company that had been founded in 1621” [99] Roper, Advancing Empires, p. 35.

 

Virginia became a sideshow in the Providence Company’s more masculine-Puritan approach to colonization. I note the similarities minus the Puritanism, to the Claiborne New Kent business plan that was in formation at the same time, and which came to England in 1629 searching for financing. Thomason took off on his own ventures during the 1630’s, and upon the conquest of New Kent by Maryland in 1638, convinced Claiborne himself to join in his Caribbean and West Indies ventures.

The West India Company idea, however, ran afoul of the restart of the Thirty Years War after a temporary peace. Mismanagement of several expeditions launched by members of the network  sparked a reaction by parliament to their conduct and the backlash fell on Charles as Warwick was a player in his court politics, formerly allied with the kingpin of the 1620’s, Buckingham. Charles in part because of these colonial misadventures, suspended Parliament in 1632–an action that would haunt him through 1640. Over the next few years, Charles took off in a new direction, these were the Laud Commission years, and Warwick would up breaking with Charles, and engaging in his own plans and ambitions, which Warwick and the Puritans though pro-Catholic, if not pro-Spain/France. As Charles grew weaker and more consumed with other matters, colonial policy fell into the hands of the private adventurers, whose aggregate actions constituted the essence of English colonization and mercantilism at least until the mid to late 1640’s.

The “West India Company” became lost in these political fights. Its spirit lived on in the form of the Providence Island Company”, first established in 1630 (an island about 120 miles from Nicaragua) . It was intended by its Board to be a model of a Puritan community (a la Winthrop’s City on a Hill), it was more a privateer home base for raids on Spanish shipping and ports.

The Providence colony was founded by a corporation led by key members of the Warwick family and network–and its style of governance contrasted sharply with that of Massachusetts which it can be compared. The Corporation was very much in command, as opposed to Massachusetts’s self government led by Winthrop. Providence Island was constantly raided by the Spanish-Portuguese, destroyed in 1635, and finally conquered by them in 1641.

Providence Island was pure “Warwick” mercantilism, but as far as Virginia was concerned its role was to place Virginia in the shadows of English private mercantile agendas. Berkeley, then, was the prime beneficiary. It was during this period Berkeley would firmly establish himself as governor. Have no fear for Warwick, however, he will shortly become the chief admiral of the Parliamentarian fleet. We have not heard the last of him. But by the early 1640’s the Providence Corporation membership turned against Charles for his failures in not launching war against Spain and support the Providence Company. This membership became a nucleus of a 1640 ‘opposition faction’ to Charles, and a bastion of the parliamentary faction.

The take away for me is, to strain a metaphor, Warwick and his associates carried out many “venture” expeditions-colonies-foundlings during the 1630’s. These were activities that did not usually draw the support of Charles, and thus Warwick et al, because of their religious loyalties gravitated to parliament, away from Charles. Parliament, however, previously skeptical, excepting its dominance over the Sandys-Ferrar Virginia Company, if not oppositional to colonizing merchant adventurer corporations, itself drifted closer to support of colonization conducted by Puritan-led corporations. We shall pick up that topic in short order.

the  Third Powhatan War: Surprise Attack

Berkeley inherited an impossible relationship with the Powhatan. Since the Second Powhatan War the various local tribes regrouped, and the settlers kept on coming, seizing more land each year and intruding ever deeper on the cherished home grounds of the Powhatan. Billings reports  the Powhatans “clung to as much of their traditional territory as they could without provoking the colonists unduly. At the same time the Indians eagerly sought trade goods from the English. The conundrum was how to take the best the aliens had to offer, keep the strangers at a distance, and retain cultural identity. This was not an easy riddle to crack, given the rapidity with which Virginia expanded after 1632. [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 49

From the Virginians perspective, the tie in with the expansion of the tobacco monoculture was fundamental to their personal business plan and to their desire to express their individualist drives by establishing a homestead-plantation which was compelling. Indians were simply steam-rolled, and any earlier Virginia Company-royal hopes of coexistence and missionary conversion died during the Second War. In Richter’s view “In Virginia the emphasis on individual mastery of labor [obtained through a headright from a land patent] inspired a particularly frantic sort of land grabbling. Whoever first ‘took up’ a plot of choice riverfront ground with an abandoned Powhatan village and cornfields, hired a surveyor to mark its bounds and paid the appropriate registration fees … for the headrights won the prize”.

The expansion into the Middle Peninsular during Harvey’s administration, the construction of the Palisade Wall on the [Williamsburg] fall line, and the simultaneous settlement by such as Potts, West and others established yet another frontier. Settlement on the Eastern Shore, as reported earlier led to yet more land seizures as did the settlers-plantation owners drift to the Carolina borders. While the Second War seemingly ended sometime in the mid-thirties, the tension between Powhatan and English always had the potential to start another.

 For Richter the “root of the [Third Powhatan War] was the relentless colonial pressure on Native land holdings from Virginia planters and the roaming herds of semi-domesticated animals, that by trampling the remaining Indian cornfields had become as much a part of the English juggernaut as tobacco. [99] Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (the Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011, pp. 208-9 Piled onto this expansion of Europeans into the Tidelands and northern/southern coastal tidewater land was the influx of more and more settlers after 1635. In 1625, the Virginia census recorded about 750 settlers to about 7600 in the early 1640’s [99]   L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire, p. 50.  Part of that exodus was the drift toward civil war, and religious-economic tensions that grew during this period.

What really changed after 1622 Second Powhatan War was the mentality of the English. Up to that time, the Virginia Company, certainly its leadership in England, reflected in the hopes of its sovereign James (and later Charles as well) was a sort of missionary and beneficial trading relationship between English and England that would allow for not simple survival but prosperity and the diversification of the economic base. The First Powhatan ended any hopes of that and in return left in the minds of the surviving and incoming English a set of behavior and attitudinal patterns that translated into that “Indians should be avoided as much as possible, used when necessary, and exterminated when they got in the way. Natives were just one more obstacle to English possession of Virginia, and many a colonist looked to that hoped-for-day when the barbarians, like weeds of a field, might be cut down forever. Inspired thus, settlers remained wary, arrogant, and general hostile to anything Indian [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 50

An interesting sidelight to this narrative is the development of an alternate set of relationships in the Potomac and Maryland tidewater regions. Instead of tobacco, fur and European goods/metals were traded between non Powhatan tribes that settled near-by and English-Virginian traders. The natural enemies of these tribes were the Powhatan, and in their mind the English traders were allies in that struggle. The reader will rightly suspect that I have snuck in the Claiborne Clique, Claiborne and Mathews in particular. “After the founding of Maryland in 1634, Virginians competed with their colonial rivals to the north for control of the Indian trade, and some of the first men [Europeans] to settle along the Northern Neck of Virginia, did so in order to trade with the Susquehannock [99] Colin G. Calloway, the Indian World of George Washington (Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 24

During this period of expansion a significant turn was toward settlement in these areas, small-scale to be sure, but in alignment with a trading focus, settlements were as much trading posts as they were permanent cities. That this trade would in a few decades open up Maryland to a port city, Baltimore, suggests an alternate development to the monoculture was not an impossibly. It also lends a bit of credence that Indian-settler relationships did not have to be the zero-sum relationship such as found in the European Virginia tidewater heartland.

Still, in my view, there was no mistaking the Third Powhattan War was near to inevitable—and had been for at least two decades. The Powhatan traditional home, the Tidelands of Virginia, and what will be North Carolina, was at stake. Sources allege the timing for the attack was some combination of the Powhatan perception of the English civil war and its effects on the colony, and the arrival to the new governor who was in their eyes a newcomer and vulnerable.

Opechancanough had learned of the civil war wracking England and determined that’ now was his time or never, to roote out all the English: For those that they could not surprise and kill under the feigned masque of Friendship and feasting, and the rest would be by wants; and having no supplyes from their own Countrey which could not helpe them, be Suddenly Consumed and famished’ [99] A Perfect Description of Virginia (London, 1649), p. 12;    [99] Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, p. 209

Amazing as it was, the leader of the third war was Opechancanough, the leader of the second, and a major leader, capturer of John Smith in the first. Estimated to be around 100 years of age, his describers acknowledge he was immobile without the assistance of others, and his eyelids were so weak he required others to hold them up so he could see. Yet, as Wertenbaker states, his mind was clear and his memory of his near-victory in the first year of the Second Powhatan War served as his battle plan for the third. Like in March 1622 he set the say for the first surprise attack on an English holiday (Holy Thursday, 18 April 1644). Hitting with the same surprise and ferocity the result mirrored the first day of 1622, “the Massacre”:

The slaughter was even greater than in 1622, and no less than 500 Christians are said to have been destroyed. But this calamity fell almost entirely upon the frontier counties at the heads of the great rivers, and upon the plantations on the south side of the James. The [Powhatan] could not penetrate to the older and more populous counties of the lower peninsula. For this reason, the disaster, horrible as it was, did not overwhelm the entire colony and threaten its destruction as had the massacre of 1622″  [99] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607-1688,  p. 73

Wertenbaker outlines Berkeley’s response, crediting him with driving the Indians back. Unfortunately, he did not mention that by June of 1644, Berkeley was heading back to England, where he would remain into June of 1645. Richter is more helpful. Admitting that “documentation on the Powhatan campaign against the Virginians is sparse”, but he some commentators report the Indians continued to “alarm” the settlers “day and night”, killing their cattle and corn fields at night [p. 209]. This corresponds to Opechancanough’s game plan in which after the surprise attack he would continue a sustained attack against the Virginians, avoiding a pitched battle, and hitting their food and livestock.

Berkeley had ordered that vulnerable areas be abandoned and the local population sent to protected forts and settlements. The militia were organized at the Palisade, and eighty militia were sent to its relief. Throughout Virginia the militia were woken from their long sleep and formed into an organized force at the county and settlement level [99] William L. Shea, Virginia at War: 1644-46 (Military Affairs, Vol 41, No. 3 (1977), p. 142. Wertenbaker refers also to “Palizaded houses”, that converted a homestead into a mall fort for several families (this was used a hundred-thirty years later in the New York Mohawk River area during the Revolutionary War). He also confirmed that when the English sent retaliatory expeditions the Indians were no where to be found, retreating into the woods.

This meant, of course, the English were able to return the favor and burn Indian crops, livestock and settlements. By June 1644, it was probably clear to Berkeley that a fast quelling of the insurrection was unlikely and that Virginia needed help from England to continue a sustained resistance. As a sidenote, that sustenance was rendered extraordinarily difficult as in 1642, Charles lost control of the English Navy after having been placed under the command of the Earl of Warwick by Parliament. Aware of this development or not, Berkeley called into session on June 1, the Assembly “to map out a battle plan”. A consensus quickly took shape and the Assembly approved a resolution setting the new Indian relations policy for the colony:

wee will forever abandon all formes of peace and familiarity with the whole Nation, and will do the utmost of our power to pursue and roote out those which have anyway had their hands in the shedding of our blood and Massacring of our people”. [They further stated] the tactics that had proved effective in the [Second Powhatan War]  … the systematic destruction of the fleet-footed Indians, vulnerable corn crop–were to be followed as farre as our abilities and Ammunition shall enable us [99] William L. Shea, Virginia at War: 1644-46 (Military Affairs, Vol 41, No. 3 (1977), p. 142. Shea suggests that much of this quote came from Berkeley himself.

Berkeley was then authorized to return to England “and implore his Majesty’s gracious assistance for our Releife”. Empowered with letters of credit (to help pay for supplies) and to pay Berkeley’s transit, Berkeley left on 22 June.

At this point, a pause to consider Berkeley’s mission to England. Scattered commends and suggestive wording by several historians suggest they shared my initial reaction to this action. For all sorts of reasons this trip seems counter-intuitive. The political risks of leaving Virginia to the other groups outside his faction, the perils of the trip itself, and the ebb and flow of the king’s fortunes in the civil war, plus the landing of his ship in London, controlled by Parliament, on what was a very fragile mission suggest Berkeley was taking on quite a risky affair. That he took a year to get back, and, at one point, joined on the field of action the Crown’s resistance to Parliament, is in no way contemplated as part of his Virginia mission, can leave one to wonder what Berkeley had in his mind.

Smartly, Berkeley had split his Virginia powers between his lieutenant governor, Richard Kemp, and, the Captain General in charge of militia and the military campaign to, OMG, William Claiborne. This was wise in a political sense; Kemp and Claiborne were bitter enemies, rivals, and not likely to join forces against him. Likely Berkeley felt he enjoyed the Assembly’s support, and to the extent it mattered general support in the settler population. But the risk he assumed that in the military campaign was incalculable. What saved him in the end when he did return to Virginia, was that Claiborne was at best ineffectual and has stood accused of using the militia to further his own anti-Maryland ambitions than fighting the Powhatan.

Why was Claiborne Ineffectual in fighting the Powhatan? Inserting the Invasion of Maryland by London New Men and Virginian Associates.

Why was Claiborne ineffectual in waging the Third Powhatan becomes apparent when we see what he was up to during Berkeley’s absence. Berkeley left for England in June 1644, and in the early autumn Claiborne, incredibly invaded Kent Island and repossessed old haunts, New Kent, which for the past six years or so was considered as part of Maryland colony. He was no doubt making a determination as to whether he could breathe life into his old business plan. In the autumn of 1644, Claiborne launched this attack on New Kent with a force of Virginia militia, diverted from the Pamunkey (Indian) campaign. Claiborne reconquered his old trading base and settlement–holding it under his control into 1645. [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, pp. 79-80. In the midst of the Third Powhatan, Claiborne was repossessing New Kent with borrowed Virginia militia.

Fausz, almost commonsensically, sees Calvert saw an opportunity “to link his personal goals in Chesapeake affairs to the larger Anglo-American struggle over political and religious ideology. Exploiting an expanded circle of interethnic allies and associates, Claiborne became the friend of every Maryland enemy making their cause, his cause, and their triumphs, his triumphs. Although Claiborne did not coordinate every move of a united conspiracy, he was linked with, and benefited from all the crises that befell the Calverts between 1642 and 1658.[99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, pp. 76. 

This focus, determination, obsession on Maryland had a certain appeal to most Virginians, who as Harvey had discovered, were robustly opposed to having a “papist” colony carved out of their loins’. It is not at all likely this firm commitment against Maryland as a colony carried top priority when the Third Powhatan War commenced. That was their top priority, but it proved of little concern to Claiborne who continued in his policy obsession. Working with Thomson, Ingle, Bennet and Stone he was a glue that kept this disparate coalition together as the coup evolved into 1648 agreement with Calvert. Handed a Protestant coup over the royalist Calvert, Warwick was not unhappy, and when Cromwell arrived in the 1651 colonial scene, neither was he.

From 1642 on Maryland was vulnerable. Lord Calvert was resident in England/Ireland, and his brother was governor. Maryland and Calvert were, as all colonies were, considerably disrupted by the start of a civil war, and to make matters worse his colony was financially hard-pressed, near bankrupt, deeply enmeshed in the Irish-civil war campaigns, and Maryland itself was engaged in its own war with resident tribes who were enemies of the Powhatan–and allies of the Claiborne Clique. To further add to Calvert’s woes, Maryland was populated by only a handful of setters. By 1646 the “beleaguered Maryland colony contained fewer English residents than it had at its founding a dozen years before. Lord Calvert’s Maryland was about to enter its “Valley Forge” period of state history.

Simultaneously, in autumn 1644, a certain Captain Richard Ingle “invaded Maryland with armed adventurers from Virginia and letters of marque from Parliament seeking to destroy the Calvert’s’ alleged ‘tyrannical power against the Protestants”. [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, p. 78; See also Brenner, p. 167;  Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 233-4. Not surprisingly Ingle rapidly overran what opposition he encountered, and seized Maryland’s capital. Maryland’s governor, the brother of Lord Calvert, i.e. Governor Calvert, fled to, of all places, Jamestown–where else could he go?

Who was this Richard Ingle? On its face Ingle was the captain of a ship named “Reformation” (a neutral name no doubt). Hailing from Kent, England Ingle was a Chesapeake trade factor in the employ of a certain Maurice Thomson. Fausz asserts Ingle’s real mission was a “plundering time” that Thomason-Ingle exacted from Maryland residents for his personal revenge and mistreatment by Calvert’s council of state, and a larger aspiration of “London Puritan merchants to ruin the Stuart-tainted Lord Baltimore“[99] See Fausz, p.79, footnote 44 for a detailed, more than you ever want know, explanation of Thomason’s anger. Brenner casts a larger shadow on the Maryland invasion. He acknowledges that “sections of the colonial merchant leadership almost certainly had known beforehand of these attacks on Maryland”

Brenner further adds that “Sections of the Virginian merchant-planter-councilor leadership [our Claiborne Clique] quickly saw an opportunity [at the departure of Berkeley and the chaos opened up by the civil war] to regain control. Richard Ingle, a merchant and sea captain who had been trading with Maryland in partnership with the London colonial merchants Thomas Allen and Anthony Pennyston seized St Mary’s in 1644. Almost simultaneously, William Claiborne captured Kent Island. Both men claimed to represent Parliament against the royalist and papist proprietary government, and Calvert’s patent was immediately brought into question before the Earl of Warwick’s parliamentary commission on plantations.[99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 167-8

This Maryland adventure-“invasion” in 1644-5 was more a private affair than a parliamentary one, but private elements of the Center and the Periphery had joined hands  with Warwick sitting “innocently” in London, to overthrow the legitimate chartered government of the Maryland colony. In advance of any official authority from Parliament or the Commission of Foreign Plantations, nor with any authority from the Virginian government (the Virginia governor was in England taking the field to fight in the King’s cause). While Virginia’s royal government under Kemp was holding steady in Jamestown, the colony’s foreign policy, under the command of its Commander of the Militia, launched an attack on Maryland, presumably to protect Virginia from the Powhatan, who of course, were nowhere to be found in Maryland.

Berkeley’s Trip to England: June 1644-June 1645

So let’s discuss Berkeley. Why did he take a year to come back to Virginia–no doubt aware at some point about the Maryland invasion? What did his experience in England do to affect his policy and politics when he returned to Virginia?

As Billing’s recounts upon his return Berkeley found his allies tossed all over the place, and his favorite home, the court, in a mobile exile. Colonial policy was never the king’s highest priority, and in the context of the civil war the extent it came into play was on its impact on matters made important by the civil war. The best opportunities lie in the several “fields” or geographic areas in which campaigns and battles were waging. Berkeley’s past experience in that situation was not likely to lead him to drop his governorship and pursue the former. More than anything perhaps was a likely realization that he was left to his own resources, if he was to return to Virginia.

Billings in his Virginia biography acknowledges that the governor “memories aside, something else surely tugged at him: the realization that having … [such a military] command would mean abandoning the colony for a long while and maybe for good”. He concludes, however, “that was not a prospect he relished because of his deepening attachments for Virginia. And so he took his leave of the king, bought what arms he could, and went home as quickly as he could find a westbound vessel [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 98

Well, OK. I have nothing better to offer. His subsequent behavior and actions speak louder than my misgivings. The Queen with whom he was reasonably close was in refuge in France, his supporters, proteges and family were either dead, scattered to the four winds, or in the field or the inner councils of Charles. Things were not going well for Charles, and it was certainly evident the king could not send any last-minute cavalry–or ammunition and supplies–to Virginia. His was a lost cause. Lacking any documentation, I conclude, as Billings, that as soon as Berkeley’s questions were answered, Berkeley took the next available ship to Virginia, and after a year interlude he was back on the scene.