The most common error in writing the history of the Virginia Company has been a failure to understand the fundamental character of that corporation. Whatever else may have entered into the activities of the company, it was primarily a business organization with large sums of capital invested by adventurers whose chief interest lay in the returns expected from their investment. Their motives were not entirely selfish; their desire to render a public service is unquestionable. They intended to aid England in the solution of her economic and social problems by increasing her trade, by relieving her of dependence upon other countries for necessary commodities, and by relieving her of her congested state of population. Yet even these considerations of public welfare were not wholly divorced from the idea that fulfilling its higher purposes there was to be found the best guarantee of financial reward for the company, and hence the best assurance of profit for each individual adventurer. The true motif of the company is economic, rather than political. To make the business pay was the first aim of all-as Sandys himself expressed it, ‘that whereon all men’s eyes were fixed”—and all other matters were of but secondary interest. Even the question of the colony’s government was decided largely upon the question of what form would best promote the peace and content necessary to the prosperity of the plantation.
[99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 24
Yes, I agree, but while this perspective may well arise from the final years of the Company’s “rush to judgement” as to whether it was capable of further governance of Virginia or not, it does not grasp in all its complexity that the Virginia Company was an instrument chosen by the decision-makers of the early James I to initiate, found and manage the first experimental permanent colony of England. Said and done, a good deal of my argument as to why Virginia is different from the other English colonies devolves from its being the first, a true experiment, in what we will call English colonization.
They called it more often, “plantation” development, and that concept has deeper ties to late medieval thinking and medieval institutions that our infused perspective that it was the first emergence of modern capitalistic-mercantilist colonization. As Dickins might have said “there is more of medieval than modern in the early Virginia colonial effort”. Virginia’s colonial political development is more hybrid of the two than even Massachusetts in the 1620’s was.
From the start the Company was indeed that purpose “privatized” by being placed in the hands of the Virginia Company, and privatized mean business profits, not only of its individual shareholders, but the Company as a viable corporation with capacity sufficient to its delegated mission. The Company was always from its rude beginnings in 1606 a political compromise among the many private and public elements of early Jacobean political and court life, it was indeed meant to be what today we call a true “public-private partnership”, a reality that it could never escape.
James I, whatever his intentions—and I do not think they were thought out—had to learn what a colonial public-private partnership entailed. The use of a merchant adventurer led, reform version (i.e. regulated to ensure representative open shareholder membership) joint stock corporation could not hold itself together as it learned its lessons and shifted its membership groupings over two decades—in which England went through a number of shifts that edged it ever closer to its Civil War. The reform joint stock corporation was by no means immune from these shifts and changing dynamics and thus inevitably was a poor vehicle to start a colonial experiment.
As bad as the first seven years of Virginia-Jamestown was, no matter the revamp of two additional charters, the Virginia Company by 1614-6 was pretty battered and about to get worse. The same could be said of the royal partnership which by 1615 was pretty much disillusioned with England’s dynamically changing Parliament. Personified by Edwin Sandys—and his coalition—parliament seized ahold of the Virginia Company, after a full three years of contested Company administration.
In short order the King would enter into the fray and all hell would break loose. Simply put, on top of everything else, the Virginia Company got caught in the transition from Tudor policy system to a Stuart policy system. As we shall see in later modules, Virginia couldn’t catch a break as it got caught between James I and his woe-begotten son Charles I. The “timing” of the Virginia Company and Virginia itself couldn’t have been much worse.
As I will argue from here on in, Virginia political, social and economic development was left to its own devices and the improvisation of its First Migration settlers. Early First Migration Virginia did not have to fight for its independence; it was acquired by default of its colonial sovereign unable to get its act together. With inevitable ebbs and flows, colonial Virginia never lost control of the broad contours of its own organically-derived policy system, society, and economic base.
Let the story begin.
Part I
Background to the Greate Charter: England’s First Colonial Experiment Resolves to Rectify its Mistakes and Transform Itself
Elizabethan Foreign Policy-Making Disrupted, and Stuart Foreign Policy-Making Evolves: Virginia Company Implications
By the time of James ascension to the throne (1603) foreign adventure, privateering, discovery of new lands and economic and social opportunities attracted in their own ways the various demographic and a new hierarchy became attracted, each in their own ways, to trade, commercial entrepots, and privateering which supplemented a new English merchant marine that emerged from the “outer ports (i.e. ex London which previously enjoyed a near monopoly on cloth and continental trade). Several old aristocratic families too were not only interested in foreign adventures, but very much committed to it. The eyes and pocketbooks of emerging-rising groups of merchants, added a new dimension, the Atlantic, to the traditional haunts of English foreign affairs: France, Spain and continental Europe. Even English culture was now open to foreign themes; several Shakespearian plays honed in on the topic.
Not only did new technologies and innovation make their mark of the emerging clusters of shipbuilding and maritime travel, but perhaps more importantly emotions and aspirations combined to raise the visibility of Atlantic venture. While England’s first Atlantic venture, Ireland, was a thorny and controversial multi-decade step which is more associated with the final conquest of the British Isles than Atlantic colonization, the voyages of discovery generated wonder and excitement probably not dissimilar to space travel today.
So, as one might expect, up and coming gentry, many of whom wound up as members of parliament, wanted to be involved also in colonization and trade. This rise of trade-interested gentry had already led to competition with the “outer ports”, i.e. non-London sea-borne cities such as Bristol whose fortunes were early tied to parliamentarians who protected their interests and indeed advanced them in opposition to the London clothing-textile exporters and the more adventuresome merchant adventurers who took the lead with the East India Company and our soon-to-be Virginia Company. This rivalry triggered the disruptive 1604 parliament session when a vastly contentious parliament greeted the new Scottish king, James I harshly, and even bitterly—setting him back a step or two in his honeymoon with the English.
His hope for a Scottish Union with England was rebuffed, but more salient to my topic, parliament argued vigorously for a new form of joint stock corporation to be employed in foreign commerce and trade. Shareholders in the proposed corporation were not restricted to powerful “merchant adventurers (aka Thomas Smythe’s friends) who heretofore enjoyed a quasi-monopoly over investment in, and operation of, colonial trade-purposed corporation such as Smythe’s East India corporation. The most visible oppositional parliamentary leader, on both issues, was a gentleman MP from Kent, Edwin Sandys. Sandys attacks on the new king were taken personally, and James I had little use for Sandys even before the Virginia Company was incorporated.
Virginia Company: a Victim of Tudor-Stuart Transition
While not victorious in 1604, it was clear enough that if a national “bipartisan” signature initiative in foreign affairs, commercial trade and colonization the vehicle employed would needs be “a regulated” joint stock corporation, open to all who could afford to buy shares. That is precisely what Robert Cecil proposed in 1606 and accordingly the Virginia Company of London-Bristol was fabricated and incorporated in 1606.
Of note, King James, likely as a precondition for his royal partnership in the colonialization effort brought in Smythe, and his merchant adventurers (and family—his Treasurer, son-in-law Alderman Johnson [99] Scott, Vol II, p. 269). The original plan for the Company was advocated and brought to London by big-name players in the court whose base of influence was the outer ports notably Bristol. It was Cecil that expanded the Company by including the London merchant adventurers. The compromise that created the “two colony” structure of the 1606 Virginia Company was negotiated by Robert Cecil, the advocate behind James I rise of king of England, and the closest equivalent to a contemporary prime minister.
The incorporation of the Virginia Company from its day of incorporation was infused with politics, including rival politics between the cities of London and Bristol. The king played a heavy hand in the first charter, creating a structure and decision-making process totally unsuitable to an enterprise three thousand miles away; in addition the king did not advance funds or make such funds available to the corporation, leaving the corporation responsible for raising its own funds. Of note it appears the initial organizational structure of the [London] half of the Virginia Company was mostly a handful of merchant adventurer and guild shareholders who were the decision-making culprits in the first year for sure, but who during 1608 accommodated outsiders and in the 1609 charter formally completed the accessibility required of a regulated joint stock corporation.
As a “regulated” joint stock corporate structure—the first of its kind—investment and ownership of the Virginia Company was open any shareholders, not only to professional merchant adventurer traders, but anyone who bought ONE share could be a shareholder. Moreover, shareholders though membership meetings and committees would participate in the company’s governance with an vote equal to any other shareholder—no matter how many shares the other shareholder owned. Voting by voice, not ballot became customary in the Virginia Company–so as long as you were at the meeting, anyone could yell yes or no–whether they owned shares at all, or had not fully paid for them.
This Virginia Company joint stock corporation had some bugs in its semi-experimental organizational structure. Obviously, I mention them because all this will play a role in the below narrative. In fact, this weakness is no small element in my assertion the Virginia Company joint stock structure, as devised in 1606, lacked the capacity to found a permanent colony three thousand miles across the Atlantic. Democracy of shareholders is a wonderful thing, but in this instance of the Virginia Company it allowed investors, and networks of investors tied to the various competing aristocratic families to battle each other in company affairs—and carry their battles into the Stuart court. As we shall see parliamentary leaders could play this game as well. The king, less than obsessed with Virginia, and the struggling Virginia Company, entered into the fray seriously in 1620.
Accordingly, I suggest, American readers interested in early Virginia colonial history, should recognize the corporate founder of Jamestown, and the administrator of the Virginia colony, was never insulated from national and institutional Stuart politics and court policy-making. It was a creature of, and a member in, England’s “big boy and girl” rivalries and conflict. The joint stock company, regulated or not, caught in the crosshairs of elite competition for royal access, was, in 1616, about to enter a struggle for its mission in Virginia, and eventually it lost it.
We are not talking about a Virginia Company that could be described as merely an aggregation of greedy (and stupid) investors. To understand Virginia political and economic development that silly definition of the early English Virginia colony’s problems, and a totally inadequate summation of why it got off to such a bad start, must be tossed away–completely. Americans have much to be proud of in Virginia’s development, but they will not understand how Virginia America developed with a grossly misshapen perspective on its First Migration and the first fifty years of its colonial development.
The Virginia Company was a Creature of Transitional Stuart Court Politics
Accordingly, as we enter into the period in which the Virginia Company was incorporated, it should be understood foreign trade and commercialization was not a policy backwater; Enthusiasm likely permeated the social-political elites more than the masses, but for the latter, economically desperate and mobile, could offer the promise of opportunity that could not be found in Ireland or England itself.
Royal courts from the time of Elizabeth and now the Scottish James I, a Privy Court bureaucracy had centralized foreign affairs and trade with the court and the king. But Parliament’s 1604 session was a rude awakening to the king that they wanted in—very, very much. For James, being new to England, the now unemployed Elizabeth court wasted little time infiltrating the formation of the Stuart court, shifted its priorities, and offered opportunities for many rising groupings to entertain the King’s—or Queen’s—ear. Their children were not immune either.
Networks formed quickly after 1603, and a couple of usurpations, the Gunpowder plot of 1605 unsettled the king, who turned to Robert Cecil to provide order to his policy-making. It was Cecil that assembled the politics surrounding the first two charters of the Virginia Company. Cecil, however, died in 1612, and after the signing of the third charter. In the vacuum his death opened up new contenders for influence jockeyed among the royal court. One of the issues that divided the court—and as we shall see the King and Queen—was James treaty with Spain, ending the multi-decade Spanish war(s).
Hugely disruptive in regards to foreign trade and colonization, the Spanish ambassador, and the desire of James to avoid entry into the Thirty Years war (which started in 1618) would leave its mark on the internal politics of the Virginia Company. While Smythe and James I were close allies, parliament on the whole was on the other side of the Spanish treaty divide. Powerful English families, often resistant to James’s Scottish imported advisors, formed informal groupings of others interested in the various elements of foreign trade and commercialization and colonization. Navigating these currents was not easy. Consider Walter Raleigh—the personification of early English colonization..
Elizabeth I had her Roanoke (1587), and its organizer, Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh a commander in the defeat of the Armada, hailed from the outer port of Bristol. A privateer he was obviously a lightning rod to the Spanish. Raleigh founded a colony (1687), the first, but it failed—or rather they lost it and couldn’t figure out where it went and what happened. Raleigh survived that debacle, but an affair-marriage with the Queen’s handmaiden proved his undoing, and while very active in the trade, expeditions expeditions of discovery, and hyping up colonization, he also became involved with the conspiracies that greeted James upon his becoming king—even with the Gunpower plot. The evidence was weak and his accusers were his enemies and rivals within the court. Convicted in a controversial trial, Raleigh was sent to the Tower condemned to death.
He was imprisioned until 1616 when pardoned by James I in 1617, Raleigh was allowed to set off on a second expedition to “find El Dorado” in Guiana (Venezuela). An incident by a subordinate, an attack on Spanish outpost in contravention of England’s treaty with the Spanish, generated a heavy-duty outrage by the Spanish ambassador that James reinstated of death penalty in 1618 and at the Tower of London Raleigh was beheaded. Colonial expeditions and foreign affairs in the mid-late teens were still high stakes, high visibility politics.
The bottom line is the Virginia Company was never a run-of-the-mill joint stock corporation. It was a structural and political compromise by the contending forces that pervaded the 1606 charter policy-making process. It was a national endeavor, what I have described as a public-private partnership, of a new king, new to England and its policy-making processes. As we saw in the modules concerning the charter revisions between 1606 and 1612, the Virginia Company was the vehicle that the king, the merchant adventurers, and a rising parliamentary investing aspiration bought into being to start the first permanent colonies in North America, and in so doing carve out a territory that checked the colonization efforts of Spain, France, and Holland. The closest we can come to this purpose and salience is today’s space race and watchful apprehension of the moon landings, or the competition on claims for the Arctic region.
For Americans interested in these matters, I offer several suggestions to consider as you tackle the below discussion. The Virginia Company, and its New World adventure, while not front page above the fold, would have made below the fold (if there were newspapers back then). Colonization was a serious issue within foreign affairs policy agenda of the most highly-placed national, as well as London and outer ports leaders. England was a rising European power, in contest with the major powers of its day. Discovery and colonization of the New World, or East Asia for that matter, caught the attention of the king on down the political and economic hierarchy.
Therefore, wrapped within the two words “Virginia Company” was a huge mass of politics and aspirations, diverging definitions and beneficiaries, king versus parliament, and the onslaught of newly emerging proto-classes that would eventually centuries later mature and become the center core of the English colonial effort and the originator of the future British Empire. Greedy investors all these folk may well have been—but they were lots more than that. By simplifying the leadership and its shareholders as being almost exclusively obsessed with dividends and quick profits, Virginia scholarship has stripped away interest on what truly disrupted the Company, and hence shaped mightily the course of Virginia’s political, social, and economic development.
Instead, I argue that especially after the Company Charter of 1612, and the Addled Parliament of 1614, we can see the thin veneer that had heretofore insulated Smythe’s merchant adventurer dominance over the Company break apart between 1615 and 1619. Worse, the increasing bad relations with the aligned merchant adventurer sub-faction led by the First Earl of Warwick proved to be the trigger in the disruption of 1619. That quarrel would be compounded, and intensified by Smythe’s exercise of authority and decision over events in Bermuda, and then in Virginia in responses to the ascribed abuse of Argall. The control exercised by Smythe and his son-in-law-Alderman Johnson over the Magazine only added to the frustration of settlers but to investors as well. With such dominance the Smythe led merchant adventurers had no one to blame for the obvious lack of performance, and the failure to meet the requirements of a dividend in 1616 was the proverbial match in the London Virginia Company gunpowder factory.
In essence, I argue, we can trace the growing dissention within the Virginia [and Somers Island] Companies to their structure as a “regulated joint stock corporation”. The previous “unregulated” merchant adventurer joint stock corporation was structured around a shareholder board of directors restricted to those who invested in the particular expedition; the board was an fixed oligarchy of those whose unified goal was to operate the expedition to make a profit. With a unified vision the expedition was launched, operated and brought to a conclusion. Not so the regulated joint stock corporation, a creature of parliament’s anti-monopoly 1604 and 1614 parliamentary outbursts—led by none other than Edwin Sandys.
In order to secure the formation of the Virginia Company as a consensual public private national endeavor, a signature initiative of the new Stuart king, James I, the Virginia Company combined two separate initiatives into one conglomerate company with two subsidiary corporations. The subsidiary corporations were open to all who could afford the price of a share, a single share, of the subsidiary. The same was followed by the incorporation of a new sub-company, the Somers Island Company in 1615.
That membership was open created an evolving and changeable dynamic that affected its policy-making over the years. Reflecting its ever dynamic membership composition, its governance, the shape and priority of its permanent settlement mission and the distribution of internal corporate power shifted to reflect the fluid and and changing priorities of a membership with many shared goals and different visions of how they may be achieved. In some ways then this is a story of the application of early corporate democracy and shareholder activism as it affected the founding of an early American colony.
Accordingly, one can state that not only was the launch of the Virginia Company settlements in Maine and Jamestown a colonial experiment, the launch of the regulated joint stock corporation was also an exercise in experimentation. As I shall argue, the combination of permanent settlement as its mission, and the open-ended composition of the regulated joint stock corporation unfortunate. After 1615 we shall see the potential for change in its shareholder composition become reality. Charles A. Andrews put adventure, and perhaps Errol Flynn, into this dynamic by commenting that these early days of our colonial history were
marked by an outburst of romantic activity that sent hundreds of Englishmen out into the western seas in search of adventure and profit. Coincidental with the later days of these half-piratical expeditions and organized commercial enterprises migrations of those who moved by impulses that were partly religious, partly political, and partly economic sought independence of worship and permanent homes in the New World. Though differing wildly in purposes and results, these journeyings into the unknown West were often closely related in origin and were supported by groups of men, aristocrats, commoners, merchants and adventurers who were ready to promote any undertaking, whether commercial or religious that promised a profitable return … for all represented in different forms and proportions the influences at work in the motherland which were arousing in men of all classes the spirit of adventure and revolt. No single motive governed the men who voyaged overseas during this romantic period. The zeal of the Viking and the lust of the capitalist were inextricably interwoven during this romantic period. [99] Charles A Andrews, Introduction, to Charles Percival Newton, the Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans (Yale University Press, Oxford University Press, 1914), p. 1
Many factors and dynamics, not to ignore changing environments, would come into play during the Virginia Company period, but the inescapable failures prompted by the organization structures of the regulated joint stock corporation that were inappropriate to effective implementation of an English permanent settlement in Virginia left a lasting stain on the long-term heritage the Company left to Virginia history, politics, society and political and economic development.
The most basic shortcoming associated with the organizational structure was the intended opening up of its shareholders to any who could purchase a share of stock. Throughout its short history, the composition of her shareholder base and its elected leadership was led to an unstable policy making, bad decisions, and a hesitant commitment to the implementation of whatever strategic direction the company set to found a permanent settlement. The most important consequence, I suggest, was its persistent inability, particularly after 1616 to monitor and demand faithful conformity to the plans and initiatives approved by its shareholders in London. Whatever its intentions, London-based company policy traveled poorly to Virginia, and its implementation was carried out by local company officials and associates whose motivations often served their own goals and motivations suitable to the attainment of their personal wealth, status, and power over the settlers of the colony.
The focus on the Company and its organizational structure has not been sufficiently appreciated by most American historians and commentators of the colonial era. Frequently dismissed as a far away grouping of grasping profit-seeking investors, it made one bad decision after another in Virginia, our topic in this article-history. The cumulative impact of these incredibly bad decisions exacted a horrible cost in the mortality, the death rates found in Jamestown, and the inability of that initiative to achieve any serious momentum or success for over a half a century underlies much of how interested Americans see Virginia’s early colonial experience. I dispute that and will provide in detail, too much no doubt, how there is much knowledge and understanding of both the Virginia First Migration experience and the evolution of Virginia in the colonial era that needs to be told if we are to understand how Virginia evolved into a state within the present-day United States.
His use of CEO authority, perceived as arbitrary by blocs of shareholders, had by 1615 outlived its appropriateness. From 1609 the Virginia Company shareholder membership had evolved dramatically; it continued to change in 1616 and would do so again.
we can see its opponents uniting in the belief that shareholder democracy, exercised in the Company’s meetings and committees was the proper solution. That this solution mirrored closely to the dynamics that separated Parliament from a king who asserted divine rights and assigned to himself specific policy areas (trade, foreign relations, and colonization for example) blurred the two, Company and Parliament. What we shall see emerge in and around 1616-1617 is the coming apart of that rather thin “glue” or consensus that had held the Virginia Company together to that point. The Company was well-situated and its leaders selected from the core body of national policy-making conducted by elites representative of the emerging forces that over the next three decades would converge and produce the English civil war.
This blur activated parliamentarians, led by Sandys, to view what was happening within the Company as comparable, and as reprehensible, as the divisions between king and Parliament. In this broad and crushing dynamic we can see blending of private/economic motivations and political positions.. Indeed, by 1622 and after that blurring was so complete we will be able to see a struggle between king and parliament so intense it was carried out simultaneously in both institutions, Company and Parliament—for example the king will in 1622 place parliamentary opposition leaders under house arrest, and in 1624 place Cavendish, Sandys, and Ferrar under house arrest for their defense of the Company in its final days before the Court suspended the Virginia charter.
If the movie, Perfect Storm, describes an aggregate weather front in which three hostile fronts congealed to sink the ship, we can begin to sense what the Virginia Company was going through after 1616 or so. Lost in this ever-expanding hostile storm was Virginia governance. Left to its own devices, and subject to the politics and ambitions of a shredded community, and an economic system that simultaneously created a closed elite (the tobacco monoculture), we can see emerge a Virginia-derived policy system that after the charter was suspended matured and separated itself from royal governance when it perceived such as necessary, and finally was able to “back” the king, pressed by the breakout of his civil war, into a corner where the conceded to that policy system the approval of missing institutions in his 1639 Deal.
The Addled Parliament and its Aftermath
No transition or background—how do we get to the addled and why
The cutting edge of this initiative was none other than Sandys. After a short respite in his relations with the King [very bad through 1604-13], Sandys once again assumed a leadership position against key items in the king’s presented to the 1614 Parliament which had once again been called into session in April of that year. Already upset with his experience with the Blessed Parliament (1604-10), James was again forced to turn to Parliament for subsidies and “impositions”. [99] https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/sandys-sir-edwin-1561-1629, Andrew Thrush and John P. Forais [ed], The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1604-1629
In James’s mind at least “impositions”, the imposing of subsidies, i.e. taxes or fees paid to the king by means of what we today call an executive order rather than an act of parliament, was why the parliament into session. Hugely polarizing, it led off the session’s agenda—and got the session off to a horrible start, despite the likely support of the House of Lords . Sandys who appeared to arrive late did not participate in the bitter opening of the session—and because of his close association with the Virginia Company, beneficiary of a royal imposition that allowed the company to conduct a controversial lottery, Sandys was believed to be conflicted by some of the most vehement opponents.
Nevertheless, as the debate dragged into the following months, it was Sandys who successfully advanced a compromise allowing the session to proceed. His placement on a “conference committee” with the House of Lords on the matter confirms his strong leadership position in the Addled Parliament. Advancing the institutionalization of parliament, Sandys pressed hard for the formation and holding of regular scheduled meetings of a key parliamentary committee (petition). At one point Sandys also successfully pressed for the petition of a fellow Virginia Company shareholder to speak before Parliament. The petition by Richard Martin on behalf of former Virginia Governor Thomas Gates, was not well received and was profoundly divisive in that it “harangued” Parliament for its lack of support for the king [999]. What we should make of this not in character position of Martin is not clear to me, but it suggests the Company was going on record in support of the king? https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/sandys-sir-edwin-1561-1629
[999] Sir Richard Martin (BTW there were two Richard Martins associated with the Virginia Company) was an M.P., a Recorder (chief counsel) of the City of London appointed in 1618 by the king, was longstanding member of a well-known literary group that included John Donne and Ben Jonson. A lawyer, he was Counsel (a lawyer) to the Virginia Company (and signer of the 1612 charter) around the time of his speech to Parliament. Martin, a well-known “orator” and bon vivant had been an organizer of a “welcome party” for the new king James in 1603. Active also in early Bermuda, previous to the Somers Company of which he was a founding member. In 1617 he founded the Society of Martin’s Hundred which undertook an investment and founded Martin’s Hundred in 1618 (80,000 acres seven miles below Jamestown)—after Martin’s death (smallpox or of alcoholism) earlier that year. The Martin Hundred, composed of other investors including John Wolstenholme whose name was given to the Hundred’s core settlement. At least 250 settlers were sent over. The Hundred, awarded a burgesses by the Greate Charter, was devastated and overrun during the March 22 1622 Indian Massacre. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/martin-richard-1570-1618; Lorena S. Walsh, pp. 43-4, 84-6 [999]
It was at this point, in late May that Sandys gave what the History of Parliament editors claim was the “most radical speech of his parliamentary career” in which he pointedly opposed the king’s impositions and asserted their increase had transformed England “almost into a tyrannical government”, to which he cited events which in other countries brought violence, death and insurrection to other monarchs. Other parliamentarians followed up and expanded the attack. By early June, more than frustrated, James dissolved Parliament, and placed in custody several parliamentarians, including Sandys, where they remained for a month. Named the Addled Parliament, it lasted only two months and two days, the session further embittered James, toward Parliament and Sandys personally. No Parliament entered into session until 1621.
The reader’s takeaway from Sandy’s activist role, and his obvious leadership in parliament’s resistance to the king, is Sandys was in no way a “neutral” or uncontroversial member of parliament during his tenure as Deputy Treasurer of the Company. In 1614 he continued his aggressive style in advancing Parliament in opposition to James’ divine right exercise of royal power. The reader ought correctly assume Sandys got no Christmas card from James that year. Instead he served a month in custody before he and Parliament were sent packing. It is my strong suspicion that Sandys left frustrated, and as we shall see below, he intensified his involvement in the Virginia and Somers Company, perhaps in the East India as well, and his tone and agenda regarding those companies was decidedly activist and more aggressive than previously.
Queen of the Powhatan Meets the Queen of England: Court Politics and the Virginia Company
It is a daunting task for an American to reconstruct even an abbreviated abstraction of James I’s royal court and then employ it as a conceptual fabric for the style of English policy-making during the time of the Virginia Company pivot and commencement of its civil war in late 1616. Even a fool as myself understands I have bitten off more than I can chew. Still Americans lose an important element of the what and how external political forces played into the internal policy-making of the Virginia Company, and thus, I warrant, they lose quite a bit in their understanding of what they inherited from the Virginia Company.
In the later years of Charles I reign the looming impact of the civil war is more obvious and timely. In the 1600 Tweens when the Company made its only real plan to conduct an effective permanent settlement in Virginia, the drift to the civil war was only beginning to take shape—although the parliamentary session between 1604 and 1611 certainly exposed its outlines. It is my strong belief Americans need to better feel the context of the external politics that Edwin Sandys, and Southampton and his allies brought into the Virginia Company policy-making.
They are not neutral figures in the evolving drift into the civil war. It also makes it more compelling that Americans realize the Virginia Company is not to be dismissed as a joint stock corporation run for its own purposes and profit by merchant adventurer traders. The Company was a major signature statement of England’s entry into commercial mercantilism and colonization that would in its time and place give rise to the British Empire. It was England’s first, experimental in very many ways, effort to colonize lands not adjacent to the British Isles. The Company always was a national public-private venture, and it never was apart and disassociated from its larger politics and policy-making.
Everybody had their own agenda, and patriotic aspirations as well as economic ensured the Virginia Company occupied an important position in the national and urban policy agendas. We are not talking about backwater politics. The rather disappointing progress made in Virginia was no secret, but on the other hand, the PR campaign conducted by Pocahontas and Rolfe, in tow with the top leadership of the Virginia Company was the hit of the day. The two, with their child along with Governor De la Warr and retiring lieutenant governor Dale, arrived in mid-1616 and went on tour every bit as exciting to English society as Taylor Smith’s is today. “Pocahontas and Rolfe arrived in England with their news of the promise offered by tobacco and silk cultivation along with their personification of a new peaceful phase of Indian-English relations. Rolfe’s [newly written] pamphlet, dedicated to Pembroke [999], underscored these new prospects. The couple visited Captain John Smith, now the doyen of Anglo-American settlement” [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658 (Routledge, 2016) pp. 77-8
[999] Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, a close favorite-and oft-rumored lover—of James I, a shareholder in the Virginia Company since 1612, a shareholder in the Northwest Passage corporation and the East India Company as well,, and the man whom Shakespeare himself would dedicate his “First Folio” of his collected works (1623). James favored him with a number of aristocratic titles, and by 1616, he had also acquired a reputation for some temper, and even violence. Herbert had a knock them down quarrel with the Earl of Southampton [Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton, that was broken up by the King. Wriothesley, a close ally of Sandys, was to be the CEO of the Virginia Company in 1620.
One rather important policy-maker, Queen Anne (from Denmark), the king’s wife had a genuine interest in foreign and colonial matters. L. H. Roper reports she “did not have rapid anti-Spanish beliefs, but she did have a long-standing interest in the maritime and colonial affairs of her realms, with which those of Spain would have conflicted”. Anne had formed upon her arrival as Queen of England a close network of well-connected aristocratic women, some of which were married to earls prominently linked to colonial affairs and policy-making. James, very involved in the colonial attempt regarding Ireland, Anne branched out into colonization projects of her own.
When [her] husband succeeded to the English throne, Anna registered several significant and immediate success in establishing herself as an autonomous political figure; she quickly regained control over her eldest son, Prince Henry, from her enemy, the Earl of Mar; she promptly established her own English household whose makeup did not agree with the plans of the king and his council; and she began to use that household as the nexus for political and literary patronage in England. Most significantly a group of noblewomen, led by Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and including Penelope Rich [the first wife of the First Earl Warwick, and the mother of the Second] and Mary, Countess of Pembroke—all members of the old Essex circle … It was this group who formed the core of Anna’s English network, which included their husbands, brothers, and sons, as well as the leading lights of Jacobean literature and theatre…. Not only did these women … engage in political activity of the sort customarily assigned to the ‘public’ (viz. male) sphere of early modern European societies [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658 (Routledge, 2016) pp. 77-8
Queen Anne was a close friend of Walter Raleigh, and when approached by none other than our old friend, John Smith of Pocahontas fame, who, when the king declined to see Pocahontas at court, wrote to the Queen that if she did not meet with Pocahontas, a fellow monarch, she would not only miss an opportunity to positively assist her Virginia colony, but by not seeing her would create “such scorne and furie, as to divert all this good [achieved thus far in Virginia] to the worst of evil” [99] https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/pocohontas/pocahontas_smith_letter.cfm The Queen did meet with Pocahontas “and was impressed with her grace and manners. Subsequently Pocahontas was invited to THE [mine] event of the Christmas season, the Twelfth Night Masque” with both the King and Queen in attendance”, and some assert the royal couple met with Pocahontas that night, and that Pocahontas did not recognize the king from the other guests. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Pocahontas-In-England/
L.H. Roper paints an optimistic picture of what motivated the team that Sandys brought into the leadership of the Virginia Company after 1616. His story begins at the Ben Jonson’s Twelfth Night masque that Pocahontas and spouse attended, and in the course of which met and had supper with the Queen and likely, the King. Without question at least within court circles, the tobacco trade mission also reactivated a lost enthusiasm for Virginia as the first colony. That enthusiasm may or may not have included the King but the Queen was certainly on board. She always had strong commitment to England’s colonization, and unlike her husband her colonial interests went beyond Ireland across the Atlantic. Court powers and personalities who had joined her circle of advisors and friends shared these priorities as well. As Roper reports:
The appearance of the ‘Virginia woman’ and ‘her worshipful husband’ at court signaled a new sense of purpose within the Virginia Company. With peace with the Powhatans at last achieved and prospects for the cultivation of silk and tobacco seeming bright, the time had come to reverse the negative image of Virginia in English minds (if they held any image of Virginia at all) and to encourage those minds in turn to invest persons and money in the colony…. This reinvigoration … was accompanied by the involvement with the company of a group of backers, led by Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton [Southampton], and William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke [Pembroke]. Their close associates included gentlemen such as Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir John Danvers, and the merchant John Ferrar, and Ferrar’s scholarly brother, Nicholas, and these men came to assume a controlling role in the Virginia Company between 1618 and the company’s dissolution in 1624 [99] L.H. Roper, the English Empire in America, pp. 73-4
As we have suggested around page 13 of this module, Southampton and Pembroke, along with the up and coming George Villiers, all close advisors and companions of Queen Anne, with their enthusiasm aroused by the Pocahontas tour, mobilized around the task of restoring vitality into the Virginia Company. None seemed much impressed with the record of the Company thus far, and a common reaction was to blame Smythe and his crew. This sense that the problem lay with Smythe and his merchant adventurer allies seems chronologically to have jelled shortly before or early on during the Pocahontas tour, and accordingly previous to famous Christmas masque they initiated an audit [to be described below] as to the affairs and books of the Company. With the king leaving London early in the next year for Scotland, the Queen was able behind the scenes to lend her support to their project. At the same time, those close to the Queen opened up their pocketbooks and send a goodly sum into the Company coffers.
So the Pocahontas tour was a remarkable success for the Virginia Company. It is also our start into the discussion of how and in what ways the larger English, early Stuart policy environment inserted itself into the Company’s internal decision-making. It is perhaps amazing to understand that an American Indian, the Powhatan “Queen” Rebecca, mobilized non-merchant adventurer groupings that sustained Sandys and Southampton and the others to contest in the making of policy regarding Virginia’s first permanent colonial settlement in the Americas. While we don’t want to overplay its role in the events that followed, the court and its players did exercise some impact in its beginning, and of course, was responsible for its culmination when the Company lost its right to manage the Virginia colonization effort.
Roper reports that “Southampton, Pembroke and their friends put their money where their mouths were and encouraged others to do the same; a remarkable number of Anne’s associates held remarkable prominence on the lengthy list of 1618 investors in the Virginia Company”. Listed noted aristocrats included the Earl of Bedford, Sir Maurice Berkeley (a major royalist parliamentarian), the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Oliver Cromwell [no relation to the other Oliver Cromwell, but a member of the Queen’s Council, Sir John Harrington, Viscount L’Isle, [the Earl of] Southampton], [Edwin] Sandys, and even the Earl of Suffolk a member of the noted Howard family headed by the Earl of Northampton who, Roper asserts “was a pensioner of Spain from the 1580’s (until his death in 1614) the pro-Madrid wing of James’s government”, … Pembroke himself [purchased] L400 [Virginia Company shares], the third highest subscription after Lord de la Warr and the Company of Grocers [guild] [99] [Roper, English Empire in America, p. 76, p. 78
Not to put too fine a point on this clutter of names and titles, I would observe this list is a partial compilation of the “who’s who” influentials of the English court at that time. I offer it in support of my contention the Virginia Company in this period was not on the outskirts of the Stuart Court or its politics, having as it did considerable access to the major players to the Stuart elite involved in foreign trade, politics, and colonization. It is with some irony that in the following section I will suggest the Queen’s Council, which in 1617, because of the king’s very extended stay in Scotland, played into the hands of the enemies of Thomas Smythe and his band of merchant adventurers. The trigger, or the facilitator for an increased role of those associated in the Queen’s Council, was likely the effects of the Pocahontas presentation to the Court—and the Queen—at the end of 1616-beginning of 1617. For Smythe, the timing of this could not have been worse.
To a certain extent, it also allowed the Bristol wing of the Virginia Company to mobilize its policy preferences initially to resist Smythe in Bermuda, and by the end of 1617 launch a full scape opposition against Smythe. In November 1616 six weeks previous to the Christmas play referenced above and a year before the subscriptions, however, the first direct assault against Smythe commenced by Southampton and Sandys who charged Smythe with maladministration.
Sandys Coalition: Southampton, Queen, Parliamentarians, and Future Regicides
In this module I want to give Sandys the respect he deserves, but also introduce his supporters who carried more than their fair share of the leadership and workload and the constructive role in the making of the Greate Charter by CEO Thomas Smythe. In essence, I state my position that the Greate Charter was not a Sandys soliloquy, and I further assert the Greate Charter, while it certainly introduced shareholder representation in the governance of a joint stock company, did not originate from an a very early planted seed that much later grew the “court and country” party British party system from which England’s representative democracy emerged.
Freed from parliamentary sessions, Sandys published in 1615 a book of hymns, was appointed high sheriff of Kent through 1615-1616, signed on as a founding member of the Somers Corporation in June 1615, and in 1616 was elected as Assistant Treasurer of the Virginia Company. That post appears to have been a promotion from Deputy Treasurer, a position he held since 1609. Sandys was also a member of the East Indies Company, at least since 1614, and of course had signed on as shareholder in the Virginia Company in 1608. He never went to Virginia, but it is certainly clear and evident that his interest in colonization was prominent on his agenda and is further evident by the interest of two of his brothers who emigrated to Virginia. [999]
In any event in the year following the Addled Parliament, Edwin Sandys greatly intensified his commitment to both the Virginia and Somers Company, and it is evident he brought with him friends and political allies such as the Earl of Southampton, and the Ferrar brothers, Nicholas and John, as well as Sir John Danvers, another M.P. in the Addled Parliament, who later served on the Privy Council—and still later signed the death warrant for Charles I. One of the assistants this entourage brought into Virginia Company affairs was young Thomas Hobbes, future author of the Leviathan.
The whirl of positions and the caliber and number of individuals that were associated with Sandys after 1614 in the activities of the Virginia and Somers Companies suggest to me that his policy positions articulated during the Addled Parliament may well have remained on his mind and agenda. It is also likely, as we have, and will continued to observe that he also brought with him a sincere belief that affairs in the Companies were not well managed, and that the Virginia Company in particular, was in desperate need of an significant overhaul, and settlement business plan and strategy in place thus far was a disaster. He arrived on board with his own ideas of what needed to be done. That he may have been motivated by his distaste for monopolies characteristic of the merchant adventurers is very certain.
[999] His younger brother, Thomas, had been an original 1607 “gentlemen” on the first expedition that founded Jamestown (he returned to England in 1608); Thomas’s eldest son, Robert, emigrated to Virginia and died there in 1634 https://www.badseysociety.uk/people/sandys/samuel-0; Edwin’s brother George, of course, became a Virginia Company shareholder in 1611, and a Somers Company shareholder in 1615, unsuccessfully challenging Smythe’s candidate for its governorship; he sold his shares in the Somers Company in 1619. George went to Virginia in 1621 as Company secretary and treasurer (his daughter married Virginia’s Governor Francis Wyatt), later founded a plantation, was appointed to Virginia’s Council of State, and left Virginia in 1631 after a series of arguments and inability to get along with both his neighbors and Virginia’s resident leadership) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Sandys,_George [999]
The latter often served the interests of American historians who specifically asserted the Greate Charter, advocated by Sandys if not exclusively, at least primarily, created the first true representative legislature (House of Burgesses) in America. While all concede, because they have to as the chronology is clear and certain that until 1639, and not until 1643, did the House mature sufficiently that it could be called a representative legislature.
Perhaps the most salient critique of this position, by Noel Malcolm [99] Aspects of Hobbes (Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 56-8 who in making his critique also elaborates upon who was associated with Sandys in his Virginia Company administration—and who alerts us to what happened to them in the course of the drift into the English civil war. Finally, he also points out what, in 1616, at least was the primary motivation behind their first shot against Smythe in November 1616-the audit of the Company in an almost desperate effort to reform and reorient the Company to ensure viability of the colony.
… in his criticism of Smythe’s management of the Company’s finances, by a group which included his brother [not George or Thomas, but yet another] Sir Samuel Sandys [99] https://www.badseysociety.uk/people/sandys/samuel-0 {it was his daughter that married Governor Francis Wyatt} , John and Nicholas Ferrar, the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edward Sackville, Sir John Danvers, Sir Dudley Digges and [the First Earl of Devonshire William] Cavendish … It is clear that Warwick [Smythe’s ofttimes ally] and Smythe had more influence at the King’s court than did Sir Edwin Sandys [during the Company civil war]; but it would be wrong to attribute to the sinister intriguing of ‘a court party’ what was in fact the genuine concern no doubt felt by James and his council, and by Sandys’ opponents that the affairs of the Company should be taken in hand to save the colony from ruin. Nevertheless, even when one has removed all the accretions of American patriotic historiography—when one has ceased to suppose tht the dissolution of the Company was masterminded by Gondomar [the Spanish ambassador], or to regard James I as a proto George III, and when one has attempted to reduce everything to conflicts of interest or to differing views on the economics of colonization— the fact remains that Sir Edwin Sandys was regarded with suspicion by the King and his council, and the Company under his [Sandys] direction was tarred with the brush of his own record and opposition in Parliament. Three of Sandys’s sons were later to become colonels in the parliamentary army [Sandys died in 1629], one of those close associates in the Company, Sir John Danvers, was actually to become a regicide
Malcolm then proceeds to in elaborate detail how Sandys in the course of his career, speeches and writings, deviated significantly from the core roots/values/philosophic principles of future parliamentary and Puritanism [and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan]. He concluded that “The Virginia Company was, after all, a practical affair. Theoretical claims were aired, but only in the service of practical business … if we are interested in the intentions of the men who circulated them, we must also look at the administrative policies which these men pursued. [However] Almost without exception, historians have declared that the policies of the Sandys-Southampton administration were dominated by the twin concerns of Puritanism and the promotion of democratic principles … [But] This line of interpretation does not stand up well to examination. The evidence of ‘democratizing’ tendencies consists mainly in the ending of martial law in the colony and the setting up of the House of Burgesses, which sat for the first time under Sandy’s treasurership. But it is clear from the records that the plans for both of these measures were drawn up under the administration of Sir Thomas Smythe. Furthermore they were simple and essentially non-political motives at work in these decisions: martial law had been a disincentive to new settlers, and the Assembly was practically expedient as a court for local settlement of disputes and hearings of petitions [99] Aspects of Hobbes (Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 63-4; I would add the role of the House of Burgesses, in my argument, is more robust, and it is for me the application of the shareholder representation in the Virginia Company “regulated” joint stock structure operating at the time in London, to Virginia and specifically to shareholders founding colonies within a colony in Virginia.
Malcolm bases his assertion on evidence presented, and the argument made, by Wesley Frank Craven in his Dissolution of the Virginia Company—which Malcolm observes is “the best accounting in the final years” of the Virginia Company [99] Footnote 16, p. 56. Accordingly, it is best we provide Craven’s position on this matter, for which, the most succinct version is included in his Dissolution of the LONDON COMPANY (American Historical Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Oct, 1931)). The article presents a central theme of his then-forthcoming book, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company (1932). Craven’s argument asserts that the cause of the Company’s 1624 Dissolution by the King was not politically based, and was not by any reasonable means an early example of the court versus country early seed of English and American representative democracy. He concludes:
There can be no doubt that above all else the opposing factions [in the Company civil war] were fighting over the economic policies of the Sandys regime and their effect on the colony. It is true their arguments were colored by hatred acquired in disputes only indirectly connected with the company’s policies, but these did not alter the central theme of their contentions.
It would perhaps be a mistake to disregard altogether the possible effect of Sandys’s disfavor because of his leadership in the Commons. The government [Crown] may have been more critical of his administration, more willing to find fault, and James may have found some pleasure in uncovering the failure of his political foe. There can be no doubt that Smith [SMYTHE} and his associates had the royal ear, and survey of the relations between the company and the privy council during the tobacco negotiations [circa 1623] and the subsequent investigation of the company’s affairs leaves and impression of fairness and lack of prejudice. And those who attach chief significance in the five years of Sandys leadership to a political controversy not only advance an interpretation depending largely on suppositions for which there is little warrant, but ignore the fact that in the economic condition of both company and the company there was ample justification for the procedure of the government from the inception of 1623 to the dissolution of the company in 1623.
The story is one of commercial disappointment … it should not be regarded as arising from the victory of ‘a court party’ over a ‘popular party’ within the company. [99] pp.23-4
Shift in Company Shareholder Composition and Motivations, 1616
The first after effect of the Pocahontas-Rolfe “smoke Virginia tobacco” tour probably was a reaction to it by the bishops of the Church of England. Craven posits that Pocahontas and “her entourage of maiden consorts” stayed for many months on tour in England before leaving in 1617 for Bermuda and Virginia. Immediately, upon leaving in mid-March, however, Pocahontas took sick and died while still on the river in sight of England. Buried in England, the shock of her death mobilized the bishops “to sponsor a collection of funds for an Indian mission in Virginia”.
Approximately L1,500 was raised and turned over to the Company to sponsor an Indian “missionary’ initiative in Virginia. It was these funds that motivated, probably Sandys, to include an instruction to new Governor Yeardley list of instructions, a list that in aggregate he titled “the Greate Charter”. Yeardley was instructed in 1618, therefore, to “set aside 10,000 acres at Henrico for support of an Indian college”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Virginia Company of London, 1606-1624 (Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957, 1959, 1964), p.26.
While the Pocahontas-Rolfe tour brought good news for the Virginia Company, but these funds arrived too late to do him much service. Beginning 1613 through 1616 the Company had survived, fiscally and otherwise, on the adventures and fortunes of a controversial lottery. The terrible reputation Virginia had previous acquired in its first half-decade persisted, and crushed the purchase and value of its subscription shares by depressing its sale price to the extent the Company could never hope to finance its way through sale of its stock.
Compounding that limitation was that many shareholders limited their risk by paying their stock on an installment plan, the failure to pay second and final installments was commonplace. By the time the Church of England sent over its philanthropic largess to the Company, the Company’s fiscal burden was huge, and its annual budgets, lacking any sales of Virginia exports, limited to the lottery revenues. A one-time endowment such as the Indian mission revenue had to wait until the Company could revamp and reform its business plan so it could develop the administrative capacity to implement the Indian conversion mission within a larger plan for economic development colonial growth. That plan, as we shall see, was devised during 1618, and implementation in Virginia began in 1619-22. The shift in the Company’s business plan and permanent settlement strategy, a shift which by 1615 was evident to all, was also not to the taste of many of its investors.
So fundamental were the requirements imposed on the company to finance a long-term permanent settlement, whose offsetting revenues and profits lay years into the future, that it really required not only a deferral of profits, but adjusting the entire approach to trade and investment of the merchant adventurer shareholders—the majority of the Company’s earliest investors—and holders of much of her outstanding debt. These folk were Smythe’s core constituency. This pessimism seems to have affected Smythe’s merchant adventurers allies, and the guilds were hard-pressed by the king to invest in his Irish colonial effort, leaving little if anything to Virginia.
William Robert Scott reports that “for the years from 1613 to 1616, the most part of the adventurers abandoned the enterprise [the Virginia Company], leaving it to a small remnant of ‘undaunted spirits” to support it. These under the leadership of Smythe continued to hold meetings every week and to send such supplies as they could obtain to the plantation. This withdrawal of the adventurers meant that the undertaking could not be financed by any considerable further issue of shares.[99] Robert Wilson Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720, Vol. II (Alpha Editions, 2019, Cambridge University Press, 1910, p. 254.
Edmund Morgan surmised that these merchant adventurers who remained and stayed involved in the Company as “big merchants, for whom Virginia was only one of many ongoing enterprises”. These were the type of investor, Morgan believes were more prone to look at Virginia as a long-term investment “in which one need not look for immediate success. They were disappointed with the results thus far achieved and with the settlers new addiction to tobacco, but they were willing to wait for Smith, who had been highly successful in other ventures to bring this one to fruition” [99] Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 92
It is my contention, asserted without secondary support, that the precipitating motivation behind this exodus was a variety of factors including competition from Ireland, the failure of James in the 1614 parliamentary session, the increasing popularity of investing in the Somers Corporation, but also the 1616 financial restructure of the Company’s business plan that was forced upon her by the Company’s inability to play for its required dividend with cash, substituting land grants and headrights instead. Traditional merchant adventures wanted cash from dividends, not land, whose title still seemed a bit fragile, and required investing AND SETTLING in a hundred-plantation. 1616 really marked the year that London opened up Dale’s Gift to the Company’ shareholders.
Promoting investment not through individual stock shares, but by aggregating shareholders into forming a type of joint stock company, an association, groups of shareholders could enter into contract with the Company to start their own plantation nexus, manage it themselves, and, of course, limit their risk of long-term expenditures through action on their own board of directors, thereby bypassing the Virginia Company. Marketing investment by association, a “company within a company” joint stock association—which, not a factor before 1616, gathered a degree of momentum in the following years to 1622. If one wanted to play along with the Virginia Company as it pivoted to a real permanent settlement, the latter option was the way to go. But simply put, for most merchant adventurers there were easier ways to make a “trading dime” than going to live in Virginia.
Here was the pivot in the Company’s business plan and the radical adjustment of its permanent settlement strategy. I might toss into this pivot, the attractiveness of annual tobacco export as the cash export crop that new investors could count on to raise revenues to offset their expenses and hopeully over a period of time lead to some profit. Inadvertently, then, the spread of tobacco, the propensity to evolve tobacco into a monoculture, was a significant factor in the Company’s 1616 pivot. Considering this we can see how the Rolfe-Pocahontas trade mission played into this rather significant shift in the Virginia Company.
It is also worth mention that rival merchant adventurers, especially Sir William Courteen, created an alternative with which merchant adventurers could invest in the Atlantic and East Indies employing hybrid trade factory finance and trading practices. Courteen, who traded out of the Dutch cities located in the “English free trading zone” established under treaty with Holland, offered more lucrative opportunities, albeit with their risks, whose time lines at least were more predictable than the Virginia Company—and whose reputation was less soiled. Courteen in the years after 1616 established trade along “the wild coasts of Guiana” which in these subsequent years produced great volumes of tobacco, and the securing of a patent (from our friend Pembroke) to trade in Barbados as well.
All of his was inspiration to the wilder elements of the Virginia Company shareholder base that found the Somers Island more attractive than Virginia—not especially to grow tobacco but as trading port and military base for adventures in West Indies, South America and Caribbean. [99] See L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 29 All of this complicated the preferred merchant adventurer East India trade model which rested primarily of our trading factory business plan that rested on individual trading voyages and cooperation with the native elites to use “trading hubs” for goods for the “return trip”.
While Smythe’s constituency in Company shareholders was losing its thrust, the Pocahontas-Rolfe tour played very nicely into the plans and “policy positions” of another grouping: aristocrats attracted to the Queen’s inner circle whose wives were members of the Queen’s Council. Having introduced the Queen briefly and described her and the Council’s role in the Pocahontas-Rolfe tour and subsequent share subscription during 1617-18, we now more to broader pastures: the inclinations of a powerful and focused court grouping that took advantage of the king’s extended sojourn to Scotland (it consumed a great part of 1617) and, interested in colonial and settlement matters, not to ignore a proclivity to anti-Spanish actions and trade competition,
The death of Northampton [leader of the pro-Spanish wing of James I court], the increasing age of the Howard Earls of Suffolk and Nottingham (the English family arguably most supportive and facilitated the ascension of James I to the English throne, and who enjoyed considerable influence and access to the king—and his Scottish allies in London—for which he polarized in opposition many other English aristocratic families), and the collapse of Somerset [a lover of James who also enjoyed considerable favor with the king], made Anna’s group pre-eminent between 1615-1617; in addition to the continuing rise of [George] Villiers [Anna’s protégé tasked with gaining access into the king’s close advisors of the moment whose first office was Chamberlain of the Bedchamber to Earl of Buckingham—which interestingly he was appointed at the Christmas Masque attended by Pocahontas], [our friend] Pembroke became Lord Chamberlain, while Anna took effective charge of English government for much of 1617 … presiding over a Council which included Prince Charles [Charles I, seventeen years of age] as well as her allies [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, p. 76-7
Ron W. Coan 