Dynamics of the Tweens that Affected the Virginia Company: Changes in England’s Policy Making
Road Map
This module explores and discusses shareholder consensus on Company’s permanent settlement approach, and identifies reorganization initiatives to facilitate its attainment. It does so because by 1616 it is very apparent the endeavor is on the threshold of failure and shareholders are holding the past Smythe management to explain why and restore its creditability, if not honesty. The shareholder opposition is led by Sandys, although into 1619 it is not a majority of the shareholders. The audit is launched in November, 1616, but goes nowhere except to further paralyze and fragment the shareholder base.
Controversy saturates Company through 1618 but it does not stop the progress in the fabrication of a new settlement program/company reorganization as both Smythe and Sandys seem to agree on its essentials. Nevertheless, in other areas, the opposition to Smythe sharpens, and his vulnerability increases as he alienates a merchant adventurer ally (First Earl of Warwick) through his position regarding the administration and leadership of the Bermuda colony. On top of this both Smythe and Sandys share in their determination to remove Argall and send over a new governor—further alienating Warwick.
Through this discussion and controversy further problems emerge in Bermuda and Argall’s Virginia, and the latter prompt the formalization of instructions on the implementation of the new settlement strategy/company reorganization to the new governor of Virginia. Smythe and Sandys come to an agreement of both the plan and the governor. Intensive discussion explores the key goals of the new settlement approach and the reasons behind such company reorganization as seem necessary.
American historical commentators have, in my opinion, focused too heavily on Edwin Sandys, sometimes for good reasons, but all too often to create in the reader the impression the Virginia Company corporate transformation, captured and led by Sandys, was the initial notes of the song of American democracy. Awhile back in the past, historians were consciously drawing a direct line to Sandys and his Greate Charter, to the House of Burgesses, then to the Virginia leadership in the Revolution, followed by the making of the Constitution, and then holding the Office of Presidency through thirty-one of the first thirty-five years of the Republic. Without any doubt that should put Massachusetts in her proper place.
The circumstantial evidence is impressive. Virginia did exercise an crucial impact in the development of American democracy. But, to me, that requires we understand what that impact was, and how it shaped Virginia’s developmental impact on the formation of the Republic—and Virginia as a state.
Understanding the what, why and how of the Virginia Company’s singular initiative, the Greate Charter was, and how it set the stage for the political development of Virginia, how it bent Virginia’s economic and political development twig is the task at hand. For a start, the Greate Charter was not the first step to American democracy, nor was Sandys the personification of America’s first true democratic instincts. What this flux might suggest to the reader is that the Virginia Company was in large measure flummoxed by the lack of an accepted colonization paradigm, i.e. it was premature, and fatally disrupted by the interplay of competing approaches within its own shareholder base.
Shareholder Revolt Behind the 1616 Reorganization of the Virginia Company and Pivot in the Virginia Permanent Settlement Strategy Plan: the Big Picture
As discussed, the external policy environment of the Virginia Company was undergoing subtle, yet formidable, changes in its underlying political and royal court dynamics. Further English foreign commercial trade was evolving from the early Tudor years and noticeably altered in often controversial ways by its new Stuart king, James I. The world in which the Virginia Company had been founded back in 1605-7 had evolved, and the forces that played in the policy-making of English foreign policy and commercial trade affairs, colonization included, had shifted in ways that had to eventually affect the internal political composition and the structures of its policy-making within the Virginia Company, the first and very experimental attempt at North American colonization.
In particular the revamped structures of the regulated joint stock corporation, opened up its shareholder membership to include new players in trade and colonization, players that did not share in the older Tudor merchant adventurer paradigm. The regulated structure of the joint stock corporation permitted the expression of this opposition and over the next several years, the cutting edge of reorganization and strategy pivot was in the hands of the quarterly courts, i.e shareholder meetings. While merchant adventurers were numerically dominant in that shareholder base, they were not especially active and the CEO-Treasurer Thomas Smythe had pretty much been left on his own to manage company affairs and conduct the settlement of the colony.
The disaster that followed in Virginia, a disaster that in the eyes of many, persisted into 1616, made readily apparent that over the decade the company shareholder base had noticeably expanded, but hitherto had since 1612 not been especially active. Company actions in 1616, its dividend policy decision, upset that applecart and triggered the revolt. The newer shareholders would be mobilized by an activist deputy Treasurer, the parliamentary leader Edwin Sandys, and his allies, many of which were influential aristocrats who exerted a powerful impact beyond the number of their shares in the Company. For a variety of reasons, it is likely this group added new dimensions in the attack on Treasurer Smythe. Smythe’s problems intensified in 1616 when an important element of his merchant adventurer support drifted over the next two years into the opposition’s camp.
More to the point, the inability of the Company thus far to establish a sustainable Virginia colony had more than made their investors unhappy; motivated by more than simple desire for their own profit, company shareholders had signed onto the Virginia Company in their belief that colonization, a fundamental element of a viable English foreign policy upon which English commercial trade required, was increasingly vulnerable and failing, and that Virginia as the sole element in English colonization was seemingly more and more in crisis with each passing day.
That the Company was in near bankruptcy, sustained only by an unpopular lottery, prone to scandals and incompetent management of company officials and their hired contractors. The failure to pay a dividend in cash, as required, in favor of grants of land and headrights rocked the investor shareholder base. Without them, or others to take their place, the Company clearly lacked any hope of making further investments in the company, including sending more colonists over and feeding those already in Virginia.
Hence a new dimension entered into the 1616 shareholder base, a small, but again influential, group of investors decided to bypass the company and its monopoly, by taking advantage of Governor Dale’s innovative land grant distribution to company officials, and joining together in a formal joint stock company called an “association” incrementally signed contacts with the company and founded on their own dime new plantations or hundreds which were “a colony within a colony” that hugely transformed the settler dynamics after 1616. On top of this transformation was the reality these new actors planted tobacco to pay off their debt and costs, but the commencement of an economic base that was in effect a tobacco monoculture, as desirable as it was to settlers and the new investors, greatly upset the Company shareholder base.
As we enter 1616, the discovery of Bermuda and the seeming success of its initial colonization intimated Virginia was not well-managed, that conditions in Virginia were not going as well as the Smythe administration were broadcasting. Saved fiscally by a national lottery, there were scandals with the lottery’s management by the Company. Perhaps surprisingly to Americans, the only positive news coming from Virginia, the increasing export of tobacco, while popular in some quarters, were worrisome in others. Most investors believed successful colonization required more diversified export of commodities useful for England’s economic growth, and military security.
In 1616 all these matters and concerns came to a head. By the end of that year, a considerable grouping within the company’s investor community was up in arms. It was obvious the Company was sustained, and even then only barely, by proceeds from the lottery—which was not popular and vulnerable to its repudiation. The fiscal condition of the Company, expressed most soundly by its extreme debt level, left no illusions to all, including its top leaders which was fixated on the problem. The land dividend capped all other concerns detailed above. No investor expected to lose money in colonization—and from this American historians have latched onto the greedy investor as their characterization of why the colony was failing.
Perhaps surprisingly, its CEO Thomas Smythe, while highly sensitive to blame, was willing to admit things had not gone well and fundamental change was in order. He was willing to not just listen to shareholders, but to participate in an effort to provide them what they wanted. At that time, at least, he had no intention of quitting, or being ousted. Still it was clear from the beginning in 1616 that the revamp of the Virginia settlement strategy was the flip side of a coin whose other side questioned the honesty and effectiveness of the past company leadership. Thus the demand for accountability triggered a process of debate and fundamental reform that commenced in November 1616 and, for all purposes, ended in late April 1619.
That many engaged in this process suspected, if not believed, this reform and restructure was the last realistic hope of fixing the company is quite likely. There was no Plan B lurking in the background. What they came up with in the two and half years was many things: a new leadership, a reformed joint stock corporation election and management structure which amazingly extended the corporation’s management to a Virginia based shareholder body, and, most importantly, devised a redone permanent settlement business plan that applied the knowledge about colonization they had learned thus far. Americans have come to know this plan as the Greate Charter. Indeed, considerable myth has been embedded into the reform and reorganization, but at least from the English shareholder perspective it was a new stab at keeping the Virginia Company viable—and making the Virginia colony sustainable.
The reforms of 1618 to which [Sandys] contributed much, and his own election were due to the failures and disappointments experienced under the leadership of Sir Thomas Smythe. The bitter factionalism with which he [and the Company] had to contend with for [the next] five years was the product of these same earlier disappointments and of the conflicting interests of various groups of adventurers [shareholders] …. The key to the company’s history, both before and after Sandys election is to be found in the fact that the business of colonization was yet in its earliest experimental stage where many errors of judgment were inevitable and reality often proved contradictory to theory …. It should not be forgotten that [the shareholders] were truly adventurers in a new and uncharted field of commercial speculation with little in the way of previous experience to guide them. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: the Failure of a Colonial Experiment (Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 25
By May 1618, the first replacement governor [Thomas West] was on his way to Virginia armed with instructions on the what and how of the “Greate Charter”. That things didn’t work out exactly as intended then, but the Greate Charter did reach Virginia a year later and was implemented by new governor [Yeardley] empowered with instructions signed by Thomas Smythe and approved at the shareholder meetings. Then, stuff really began—but we get ahead of ourselves. More on that later.
The story of the Greate Charter is vastly more complicated in the telling, but simple in its conclusion. The Company initiative failed, the company fell into a great internal civil war, and five years later (1624) was stripped of its charter to govern Virginia. With this advanced notice, the reader might think of the following modules as the “last hurrah” of the Virginia Company. The drivers that manufactured that sad fate were the its own internal failures as development vehicle, a king (indeed two) that had no idea what a public-private colonization venture entailed, and an England heading down a path that lead to its civil war.
Perhaps fittingly, the coup de grace to the Company was applied by war with the Powhatan from which the Company, but not the colony, imploded. The Company collapsed in London, not Jamestown. The latter sentence is key to understanding the future political and economic development of Virginia.
For me the Greate Charter was a creature of the processes worked out within the Virginia Company, and how the Virginia Company, itself a creature of the early Stuart colonial and politics and its drift into the English civil war combined to fabricate a transformational corporate pivot that was intended to “save the company” and thereby preserve the first experimental North American colonial colony from what seemed in 1616 to be a near-certain fiscal collapse caused in many ways by a misconceived and badly implemented permanent settlement program.
Organization of the module is on its face, simple. Over the reform period, November 1616 to May 1619, key issues were encountered and to some degree resolved. While these issues overlapped hopelessly, and each fueled the other, we will do what we can to impart some understanding of each, how they were resolved, and do so in a more or less, mostly less, chronological order. For those who have not read the previous module, an optional recapitulation of the background dynamics is provided. The key issues are as follows:
State of company organization and internal operations at onset of the company reform period: Sir Thomas Smythe and his Management Style
Demanding Accountability of Smythe Administration to Shareholders; the Audit
Reacting to the Effects of Disputes within the Somers (Bermuda) Corporation
Impact of Deputy Governor Argall on London Company’s Reform/Reorganization
Formulation of a Realistic Permanent Settlement Business Plan: the Pivot
Instructions to the New Governor: the building blocks of the Greate Charter
What is this Virginia Assembly “thing”: Does it Bend the Virginia Political Development Twig?
Deterioration of relations among the three factions during/after November 1618
Final negotiations in 1619, Events, and “the Deal” for the Virginia/Somers Company Annual Shareholder Meetings in April and May 1619
The State of Company Organization and Internal Operations at Onset of the Company Reform Period
Into 1616 the Virginia Company, and to a large degree Somers Company shareholder, meetings were pretty well under the control of Smythe and his merchant adventurer allies. We will soon discover, however, that Smythe delegated much, literally ran it out of his home (as he did with the East India Company). He owned several homes, of course, but his Philpot home was gigantic. At one time he accommodated the French ambassador and his 120 person staff in it.
With Smythe we are dealing with a seventeenth century version of Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon or even Elon Musk. He is enormously wealthy, well-placed with the king, and CEO of the key merchant trading companies of the period. His responsibilities rendered him akin to a CEO of a huge, multi-functional conglomerate and the top dog of the cutting edge of the then modern English economic growth . Oh, did I mention he was a member of parliament [M.P.] through much of this period? He was also at one point a sheriff, not of Nottingham, but London (in 1601) and that will enter the Virginia Company picture in 1618.
Smythe at least into 1615, was involved in just about everything, and his agenda spread him across a considerable number of interests and official offices. Travel and juggling balls in the air was part of his position. By no means did he concentrate on a few assignments, but spread himself out. If he had a bureaucracy behind him, it had no special competence; his contacts, friends and relatives would be used ad hoc to carry our specific assignments. For example, he brought a relative on board to select-recruit the first settlers in the Jamestown expedition. Multi-tasking leaps out from his biography. Simply reading Alexander Brown’s biography—a very good one—takes one’s breath away, if one steps back and imagines walking in his shoes. [99] Alexander Brown, the Genesis of the United States, Vol. 2 (Forgotten Books, 2018), pp. 1012-1018
From my research I suspect he was very reactive, and focused, when problems were encountered.
He played a time-consuming role fundraising for the Company in the 1608-1610 period, and seems to have been involved in the publicity campaign previous to the 1612 charter. Without any doubt he kept the Company afloat previous to, and after, the 1609 charter. But equally with out doubt as regards to Virginia he relied upon his governor’s and on site deputy governors—Gates and Dale particularly—for day-to-day colonial administration; Thomas West handled the Pocahontas-meet and greet tobacco promotion campaign in England, and as we shall see, Bermuda was delegated to the governor, with little apparent monitoring or accountability demanded at least until Bermuda matters got out of hand. He was loyal to those whom he delegated, and that worked with Dale, but not so in Bermuda. As we shall very soon discover, he paid little attention to the company accountants and the books they kept. I seriously wonder if the Company ever had formal comprehensive financial records of its affairs.
That last item explains why we start this topic with a analysis of his management style. If the reader is to understand the period of Virginia Company corporate reform and restructure, one must develop a sense of how the Company was managed into and through 1615-16. Through the first five years he pretty much got what he wanted from shareholder meetings that were laden with his friends, relatives and fellow guild and merchant adventurers. During this period the Company was clearly and chronically in some crisis, and was flitting with bankruptcy, and efforts to keep the company afloat, literally, was not exactly a selling point for shareholders to become actively engaged in company affairs.
When in trouble, leave it to the experts, and if anyone was an expert in foreign commercial trade and finance, Smythe was the man. That changed with the 1612 Charter and the discovery of Bermuda which from its start seemed to be everything Virginia was not: a success and a colony with a future. Bermuda opportunities attracted the soon-to-be First Earl of Warwick, and a host of other wealthy, aristocratic, high-powered adventurers and courtiers who were experienced and better placed in court and society than Smythe. No doubt that required a lot more hand-holding than the Virginia Company investor core.
I would add, in my years of research on this topic, it became clear Smythe did not hail from aristocratic parentage, but rather was from an extremely wealthy and well-placed gentry commercial elite family. In court politics of the day, that mattered. aristocrats (dilettantes to their core) combined with wealthy, well-placed, successful gentry who. while useful, were also rivals to the aristocracy who were themselves in a period of uneasy transition from medieval to the then-modern. This too shall enter into the events of this module.
The English pre-class elite were themselves engaged in transition with older aristocrats giving way to rising gentry. The lower class was primarily engaged in figuring out how to cope with the enclosure disruption and many were moving to newly founded large urban areas; to the extent they could, some found jobs in the first seeds of a rising English textile industry, or sailors in a new maritime economy. Most were refugees of an disrupted English economy. And by the way, never mind, let’s not mention the religious “thing”; Church of England versus Puritans, Catholics and the like—too complicated—and those Scottish Presbyterians, what to make of them when James, the king of Scotland become king of England also—that’s a minefield for an American.
Smyth, I believe, had issues in dealing with aristocrats. Whether he was aspirational or contemptuous of highly placed aristocrats and their family goings on, I do not know. But if there were anything like an aristocratic social situation, Smythe stayed away. One final note of importance, Brown mentions in his above biography that Smythe had health issues in 1615; others state 1616; but from that point on one sees citations that Smythe was in poor health—and more to the point, there are several instances when he tries to beg off new assignments and responsibilities because of his age and health.
The reader should assume I insert this for a reason. Smythe is about sixty in 1618. He had outlived two wives (both died), and in 1618 had two teen-age sons and a daughter from a third. The theory is he also had a home life to fit into his schedule. An underline to his story may be that by 1618 life was catching up to him. Maybe I should have tossed Rupert Murdock into my list of 21st century counterparts? In any event, in 1618 his past life may have played a part in the Virginia Company’s future.
To understand, however, the role of Smythe’s management style, his delegation to others, and his over commitment to an incredible number of assignments, company CEO’s, and political commitments, all on top of his own personal involvements which were themselves substantial that had him juggling far too many balls in the air at any one time.
It should be noted the East India Company, founded and chaired by Thomas Smythe was in these years engaged in very significant initiative to approach the Grand Moghul of India with the intention of cementing not a mere trade alliance but a partnerships with his empire. That project, if any aside of Ireland, was the project of note during the early Tweens. That Virginia consumed its fair share of Smythe’s time, effort, and attention, is not to be assumed. I am uncertain the Virginia Company was “the apple in his eye”? One should read the narrative on his tombstone.
Company Organization and Decision-making
as centered in the company in London, which selected all officials, passed laws for the colony, and issued instructions controlling both the economic and political life of the colony without much distinction between that which was economic and which was political. In this work the company was relieved of any direct control by the crown, and thereby exercised practically an independent jurisdiction. It has been often overlooked that it was this whole machinery, and not any one part of it, by which the adventurers directed the economic and political affairs of the business that contemporaries referred to as the ‘government of Virginia’”. [That slim structure of decision-making rested on an internal ‘democracy’ that elected its officials on a annual basis based on ] ‘an equal franchise which paid no heed either to the sum adventured [i.e. how much the investor invested, nor the number of shares an individual held], or to the quality of the person [i.e. how and when the investor had acquired his shares, and whether or not they were actually paid for]. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company: the Failure of a Colonial Experiment, (Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 31-2
Smythe ran his Virginia Company through a joint stock governance structure that was imperfectly structured during 1605-6, ridden through as it was with Cecil-inspired national issues, rivalries and a reluctant king. Its initial royal top-heavy decision-making fell apart as soon as it was pushed off from its drydock into two badly planned colonial expeditions. After the first three years of what some call colonization, one colony had not even lasted a year, the other, Virginia was a story of the living dead. After reorganization in 1609, its shareholder democracy was faulty, ridden by a host of subsidiary corporations, and the Virginia London corporation saved in the nick of time, probably by Smythe and Sandys.
Internally defective shareholder voting was by voice, not ballot, as determined by the presiding official. Each shareholder, no matter how many shares held, got one vote. All that was needed to vote was one share. Key decisions were required to be made during one of four “quarter courts’ held each year. In between any number of weekly or monthly “courts” could be held, and committees established; quorums required only five members of the shareholder “council” elected each year, of which the Treasurer or his Deputy, along with at least fifteen shareholders were in attendance. As a policy-making corporation, the Virginia Company was a leaky ship, very far from being a coherent group of greedy shareholders, and in virtual bankruptcy since 1607. But 1609 was the first of what would be several very temporary bright spots.
After 1609 “for a few years the adventurers [shareholders] followed this new venture [the Virginia Company] with energy and enthusiasm. But as year after year brought only a few samples of the colony’s productions, and little more than disappointing reports of lack of progress, the enthusiasm of the adventurers disappeared. In the four years that followed after 1614 [the reorganization period discussed in this module] life in the company reached a low ebb, many adventurers dropped out, and attendance at courts dwindled to a very small number”. [p.33, Dissolution]. [The powerful and central Company Magazine, with its own council, in Craven’s words, became] “practically a separate company” (although it was in fact subsidiary to the shareholder council.). “the well-known Alderman Johnson, son-in-law and business associate of Thomas Smythe, was at the head of the Magazine, and he and Smythe were the chief adventurers therein” (p. 34 Dissolution])
In short, and in essence, the organizational structure of the Virginia Company had hollowed out. The few shareholders that regularly participated in their way endeavored to make order for the colony, and to such extent as possible, yield some profit from the colony. But in general their involvement in the actual operation of the colony was left to the governor or his deputy, and any adherence to a “settlement plan” was purely coincidental as reality required the colony to send exports as such exports for the only feasible source of income to pay back debts, and provide future sustenance to the inhabitants of the colony.
Again, in Craven’s words, “the colony was left largely to its own course. … The efforts of the company itself were few and feeble”. Some of its leaders were interested in other commercial enterprises of more promise and were accused perhaps with some justice of neglecting Virginia on this account. Many adventurers lost faith in the prospects of the colony, and disturbing rumors derogatory to the climate and soil of Virginia were bruited about the City [London] and country … and a state of faction and strife, not uncommon to a failing business became the prevailing order in the Virginia [shareholder] courts
Left in this fashion, with no constructive guidance from the company [in London], it is not surprising that the colony’s development followed certain lines which in the end produced as much dissatisfaction among the adventurers as did the unhappy state of affairs in the company. [p. 34 Dissolution].
Let’s conclude this inspirational description by removing at least one cause of this desperate situation in Virginia: tobacco. In 1616, Virginia only exported 2,500 pounds of the weed—and that included Bermuda as well. The next year, 18,839 pounds were sent over to England, a serious increase, but no where near the 49,518 pounds exported to England in 1618. Those last two years are the real and true beginning of Virginia’s tobacco monoculture. Change that commenced in 1616, including the first shot of the company’s civil war, its audit, did not spring from tobacco smoke that whiffed into the 1616 Pocahontas-Rolfe royal Christmas masque. What prompted that audit was something more fundamental: holding the past management to accountability for obvious failures in Virginia. There were some that believed Smythe and his ilk had to go.
[99] Statistics drawn from “Lord Sackville’s papers respecting Virginia, 1613-1631”, published in American Historical Review, XXVII (1922) cited by Craven in Dissolution, p. 39; To be sure tobacco seemingly flooded into England by 1618, and it captured the interest of new investors while it also increased frustration with an economy that could only send over that stinking weed. But the numbers were still small compared to what they would be a decade hence. As we shall argue, in that period between 1616 and 1630, there was nothing of consequence that stood in the way of tobacco, and there was no apparent workable alternative that offered a Virginian the means to survive into the next year other than tobacco export.
Demanding Accountability of Smythe Administration to Shareholders:
Sandys the Activist Shareholder:
Let us state the obvious. If there had been anyone inside the company governance structure that had been watching the Smythe administration performance since 1608, it was his Deputy Treasurer, the master parliamentarian, Edwin Sandys. It must not be forgotten, Sandys was a leading parliamentary opposition leader to the quite controversial king, and as an M.P, he had the sympathies of a smaller, but still sizeable group of parliamentary shareholders who looked to him as their only insider to the Company.
Sandys was not opposed to English colonization. He was dedicated to it. As committed to England’s colonization as any, Sandys family (brother) had been among the very first of the settlers in 1607 Jamestown, he himself a shareholder and officer since 1608 when he was finally allowed to purchase a share in the “regulated” joint stock corporation, Sandys already had a leadership commitment to English colonization previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company.
Because of his positions, Sandys no doubt enjoyed access into the goings on in the Company, but aside from the financing campaigns he did not penetrate deeply into Smythe administration decision-making—until aroused around 1616. His activism during that year had a major impact on the Company, we need to bring him deeper into our discussion.
Sandys, as far as trading companies and colonization went, was not just a leader of those in Parliament that opposed the king’s approach to foreign trade and merchant adventurer trading companies—Sandys was THE Leader. As we presented in the previous module, Sandys position on the matter at the 1614 Addled Parliament was as radical a position against monopolies as he had yet taken—and the king confined him and others to arrest when he abruptly terminated the parliament.
His leadership on the issue in the 1604 Parliament led to the creation of the so-called regulated joint stock corporation, demanding that non merchant adventurers, the gentry, be permitted to buy shares in trading companies and in so doing break the monopoly held by merchant adventurers in trading companies and in efforts to colonize. In those days his motivations were simpler: the wanted to invest and participate in these affairs, and he strongly believed colonization was not simply a vehicle for the king to provide revenues for his many expenses and a tool for the king to exercise as total a dominance over foreign affairs as possible. In Sandys’ view foreign affairs-trade-colonization was also within parliamentary discussion and action. In Sandys we see “conversations” that constituted the early drift of England that led to the civil war.
Sandys genuinely worked in the Company’s first years in ways favorable to its success, indeed survival. He had been steadfast in recruiting subscribers in the 1609-12 period, in fact while While Smythe likely used his rolodex of adventurers, guilds, and establishment commercial lenders, Sandys plied new markets attracting gentry of which a considerable number were M.P.s at the time. More interestingly, his friendship (I believe) with Southampton connected him to the Queen’s network, and enlisted an aristocratic, female, grouping, collection that had an interest in foreign affairs and colony building, that had what today we call a blood feud with Thomas Smythe, a feud that went back to the Essex Rebellion of 1601. Southampton on June 20,1620 would replace Sandys as Treasurer, and insulate him from royal interference as he (Sandys) continued his CEO status of the Company.
By 1616, with time on his hands, he and others almost certainly believed that something had to be done—and done quickly. But that meant taking on Sir Thomas Smythe and the residue of his merchant adventurer shareholders. He did so with support from the earl of Southampton, Sir John Danvers and John Ferrar who “after sundry private meetings among themselves” ‘demanded a special audit be made of the officers’ accounts”. The demand resulted in a committee entrusted with the conduct of an audit, a committee on which Sandys and Danvers were appointed along with several other shareholders. The reason for the audit as cited in “the Historye of the Bermudaes [Published by Hakluyt Society, London, 1882, p. 128] the authors of which are credited to John Smith and Nathaniel Butler.
Sir Thomas Smith [having] from yeare to yeare, for a long time [been] continued in his treasurour-shyp of the Virginian Company, it was found that many and great sommes of mony collected and brought in for the [use] and behoufe of that plantation wer so expended and lost, as a very smale growth and improvement of that colony could thereby be anyway discerned; neither (as it was sayd) could ther [ever] be gotten any perfect or iust account of these disbursements. “the Historye of the Bermudaes [Published by Hakluyt Society, London, 1882, p. 128] the authors of which are credited to John Smith and Nathaniel Butler.
According to Roper, between 1615 through 1617 especially the Queen’s Council was active and influential. “This new political atmosphere made the time propitious for revisiting Anglo-American colonization and, as they advanced [their protégé and court influencer] Villiers … Southampton and his associates turned to advancing Virginia … [where] the Southampton group remained unconvinced of the [past] administration of Sir Thomas Smythe. In November 1616, Southampton, Sandys, Danvers and others [Ferrar] demanded a review of the accounts of the Virginia Company, the leadership of which to their minds, had spent a lot of money with little to show for that expenditure [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, p. 77
Firing the First Shot of the Company’s Civil War: the Audit of 1616
Having seen the inability of the company to pay its 1616 dividends in cash, and having reverted to payment in land only if settled, the shareholder base could not escape, nor ignore, the situation, and even if not in attendance at shareholder meetings in great number, provided support to those who demanded change. [99] See Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 43. Edmund Morgan attributes this support that eventually flowed to advocates of change, Sandys being the principal activist, to “the smaller men for whom the investment probably represented a larger share of their working capital than was the case with the Smith or Warwick factions. After ten years of waiting they were dissatisfied with the management of the big men. They wanted to see some action, and the production of a disreputable weed was not what they had in mind. [99] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), p. 93.
Sandys had been around almost since its beginning, holding a responsible office in the corporation, so that one can wonder if he was aware of the method of accounting, and the output of such accounting previously. He must have been well-versed in the management style and business practices of Treasurer Smythe? Sandys reputation and character was well known to contemporaries, and I suspect in some ways he would today be described as a “whistleblower.” The call for an approval of an audit committee to examine records of the Company and Smythe was almost certainly the “turning point” in the reform of the Company, after which the internal governance of the Company underwent considerable transformation from what it had been likely months previous. To the extent that Sandys had supported the military policy system in place since 1610, it was out of simple necessity to keep order and sustainability.
As we shall see there were larger issues, indeed a different generation’s world view separated Smythe from Sandys, but sources are consistent that Smythe had a closed mind on many issues, and his administrative style labeled as autocratic, or more charitably personalistic. That he blurred his personal search for wealth with corporation purposes and decisions is indisputable—but was very characteristic of his age, and was a tendency that even Sandys shared. From these contemporary dynamics we can see a major transformation in London within the company occurred throughout 1616 and certainly 1617-18.
Contemporary notions regarding corruption and conflict of interest, however moral they may be, are out of place in this time period. Virtually all his critics stressed Smythe constantly juggled too many jobs of great responsibility [the East India Company demanded more from Smythe, and the assignments for the Crown, and his positions as a M.P., and Commissioner of the Navy]; Likely spasms of activity were interspersed with period of absence and cursory involvement. He seems never have come close to today’s image of a corporate CEO. These concerns persisted throughout the next eight years and were included in Nicholas Farrar’s “Sir Thomas Smythe’s Misgovernance of the Virginia Company published in the last days of the viable Virginia charter. From the start, the demand for an audit—and Smythe’s “accounts”—was a questioning of the Smythe administration’s record, as well as an attack on Smythe himself as CEO.
[Smythe] was rightly described as ‘primus motor’ in the Virginia Company [after 1608]. It was indeed his energy that lay behind the successive fund raising schemes, including the joint stock subscriptions at the relatively affordable L12.10 a share, and later lotteries. Subscribers were invited to pay in their shares at his house in Philpott Lane; when new settlers with key skills were sought in 1609, they were told to report to Smythe’s house, where they would be registered as adventurers. It seems to have been Smythe’s idea to sweep the streets of London clear of idle youths and ship them off to Virginia at a cost of L500.
He was closely involved in the schemes of governance reform, including the revised charter arrangement of 1609, which allowed for the nomination of [Virginia] governor in London, but reduced the power of the Privy Council over the council responsible for Virginia affairs. He was also as his critics alleged behind the new disciplinary code … which brought about conditions of near martial law in the colony. [99] “Sir Thomas Smythe, 1558-1625, lecture delivered at Skinners Hall, 26 November 2007, by Ian W. Archer, Keble College and Faculty of History, Oxford. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4a1c5a8a-78f1-4dfa-9c79-6f94a6161659; https://skincaremoz.academia.edu/IanArcher
Likely, as Archer asserts Smythe’s critics reflected “the lack of returns on their investment produced a great deal of resentment among the smaller investors, many of them gentry from provinces [that is non-London geographies] increasingly chaffed at the dominance of the London tycoons. Others felt the Company was not taking a sufficiently forward policy against Spain”. [99] “Sir Thomas Smythe, 1558-1625, lecture delivered at Skinners Hall, 26 November 2007, by Ian W. Archer, Keble College and Faculty of History, Oxford.
Sandys was not the only “outsider” to the merchant adventurers/guild company leadership at a typical shareholder meeting. In 1616 as an activist shareholder with a close group of a few powerful newcomer shareholders, with whom Sandys could share his skepticism, if not outright antagonism, toward the Smythe administration. In that year of disappointing news, a new crop of upset shareholders wandered into the shareholder “quarterly courts” in quest of answers to why so many things were going so badly wrong. At first they were among the few shareholders attended company sessions and kept involved in the Company.
To this grouping of smaller investors, one must add yet another grouping. Through the 1617-1622 period existing and new investor groups formed joint stock corporation “associations” which applied for contracts with London or Virginia officials to establish small plantations or larger hundreds. Shareholding in the Company was required. With their contracts signed, they shipped numbers of new settlers to Virginia. Craven asserts that in April 1618 about 400 settlers resided in Virginia, but in the following spring (1619) the population had increased to “around 1000”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 45. Most of the investor-association-hundreds were not merchant adventurers, but gentry shareholder associations. For this reason it may be inferred their entrance into the shareholder membership further disrupted the cohesiveness at London shareholder meetings. Thus the rise of association hundreds benefited Sandys, and not Smythe—who nevertheless did not oppose the movement and duly signed off on the contracts.
At first, these shareholder meetings at the Smythe house held more than their fair share of Smythe allies and compatriots. As a percentage of the total shareholder base, the late 1616 and early 1617 meetings were very poorly attended. But with each following shareholder meeting more would attend. Smythe retained a working majority.
The motivations behind the audit, as described by Craven in Dissolution seemed genuine, and were quite logical for 1616. I find creditable—there is no better primary research on this subject that currently exists– and it presents those who called for the audit in a “better angels” constructive light. This seems reasonable if one applies it to the shareholder opposition as an aggregate. While questioning past decision and actions, there was still genuine respect for Smythe and deference to his high standing in the court and among the foreign affairs and trade establishment. Lacking an insiders view, they looked at the audit as provided answers to the questions and concerns they held.
Sandys, on a personal level, however, held more complex feelings that reflected little attachment to merchant adventurers, or the approach the company had taken to colony-building. Smythe’s non-inclusive oligopolistic governance, and Smythe’s alliance with the king, constituted what Ferrar (and probably Sandys) would later label as a “tyranny”. Smythe’s management style, more evident to Sandys and his faction, did little to instill confidence in future Smythe-led initiatives, or effective implementation of company reform initiatives; Smythe placed more emphasis on use of the Magazine, for which Sandys had absolutely no trust.
I think it likely Sandys had other reasons for his leadership in the Company’s shareholder rebellion, including a range of items such as personal feelings, the application of his beliefs concerning trading companies, monopolies, and impositions, and no doubt grievances accumulated over the years arising from the administration of the Company, I believe the audit and the reformulation of the colonization business plan and internal company reform and reorganization that followed demonstrate the primacy, perhaps more precisely the immediacy, of his concern for the colony. Craven asserts Sandys and companions
… were representatives of that part of the [shareholders] with whom the desire to render a service was especially strong in their support of colonization. As they witnessed the sad state to which that worthy enterprise had sunk, they were not alone disturbed by considerations of personal profit and loss. There was in it something more than an ordinary business failure; there was also something akin to a betrayal of trust and a failure to measure up to the demands of a great opportunity to serve their country. Of such stuff were the men who were first aroused by the lethargy that had overtaken the company and by suspicion that its leaders had not done all they might,
They began by a demand upon the officers for an account of their stewardship, and proceeded then to plans for reform and reorganization that would enable them once again to present Virginia as an enterprise worthy of every Englishman’s support. Their intention was to solicit new capital by removing those features which discredited the company. They were especially concerned for the reputation of the business, which depended so much upon success for meeting its public ends.
I believe the best summation of Sandys’s motivations to move against Smythe and remove him from CEO arise from his letter to Buckingham sent on June 7, 1620—more than a year after the late April 1619 coup, and sent in response to his hearing the King wanted him removed as Treasurer of the Company. The letter was fascinating, but for our purposes at the moment we concentrate on his claim that he had done no wrong to Smythe save … “I have not so much have offended Sir Thomas Smith or his upholders save … that I have not yielded to the abetting or choking of those courses in managing the affairs of Virginia, with which the derogation of his Majesty’s authority, and contrary to his Majesty’s instructions (unworthily smothered [hidden?] … to the disheartening of all Adventurers [shareholders], and perpetual keeping down of the Plantation [colony] that it might not prosper; and on the other side to the enriching of themselves or some of them, by means so unlawful as the harzarding of the destruction and utter expiration of the Colony.[99] Cited in Footnote 72, pp. 143-4, Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932).
From Sandys and his coalition’s perspective, Smythe and his brand of adventurers were tied to the king’s priorities, and in payment drew their share of the colonization largesse as justified reward. The entire system offended the Sandys’ bunch. Theodore Raab complicates matters. His strongest motivation is that Sandy’s and his gentry M.P.s allies at least wanted in on the investment having been excluded from non regulated trading joint stock companies. I suspect he was correct in that this was their initial motivation to become shareholders, but years had now passed with the net result hopes and expectations had been crushed.
That position is supported by a consistent opposition to merchant adventurer “monopolies”—a condition which the Virginia Company as a regulated joint stock corporation should have had removed, but in point of fact, up to 1616 the old merchant adventurer monopoly still infested the Company’s decision-making, and its settlement goals and practices. The Magazine, which we will shortly refer, was a real sore point in that sentiment, as it was a monopoly dominated by Smythe’s right hand man, and relative, Alderman Johnson.
Craven’s take on the motivations of the audit advocates (the Sandys coalition) was that “they were representative of that part of the adventurers with whom the desire to render a public service was especially strong in their support of colonization. … they were not alone disturbed by considerations of personal profit and loss” [which does not mean they didn’t care, but they had several factors in the colonization decision-making]. “They began with a demand upon the officers [the Smythe crew] for an account of their stewardship, and proceeded then to plans for reform and reorganization that would enable them one again to present Virginia as an enterprise worthy of every Englishmen’s support”. Craven than alludes to another grouping of support, the small investors, again mostly gentry merchants/lenders-artisans-professionals who were profit-seekers but who were especially turned off by the simple consistent track record of failure, which to them suggested either incompetence or profit exploitation. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 42-3 In short, we got a severe case of shareholder rebellion.
I would not explain their “public service” obligation in those terms. To me they reflect an orientation that M.P.s had been stressing in their parliamentary debate in 1604, and again in 1614. They saw colonization and trade, which the king considered as an elements of his prerogative, a policy area within foreign policy, and one from which he could, and should, derive revenues for his expenditure priorities. This was precisely what Parliament had been fighting James about since he came in from Scotland. The Parliament saw foreign policy, colonization and trade as part of their responsibility, a responsibility intensified by the bias in James foreign policy that tilted to Catholic and Spain that sent spasms of rage into many Parliamentarians.
The Audit in Process
… an adequate explanation of previous failures in Virginia. It took time to overcome this difficulty, but a beginning was made in 1617, when adventurers [Smythe] became agitated by charges of mismanagement against the Company leadership. [On the other hand] Men who had recently regarded Virginia as worthy of scorn now found her worth quarreling about. Demands were made for a closer look at the books, and under the leadership of Sandys, whose own interest in the colony had been unflagging, an audit was undertaken.
The accounts probably needed auditing. Some of the adventurers had invested as early as 1606, others in 1609, others only in 1611, and still others for the first time in 1616. Some had paid only in part or not at all, and some claimed their shares in lieu of prizes from the lottery. Debts had accumulated and officers had frequently advanced funds from their own pockets. In a corporation whose history had been marked by such varied transactions and by so many turns of fortune, the books might well show a certain confusion [in particular in regards to who was still a fully paid shareholder entitled to vote, and the blurring of personal and corporate funds—which worked in two ways, to personal profit as well as personal infusion of funds to keep the company going]
To provide for an equitable distribution of Virginia’s land [as was in process in Bermuda] undoubtedly required that they be put straight. As the audit proceeded, however, the need for proof of Virginia’s promise apparently overcame all other considerations. Suggestions of dishonesty were added to those of carelessness. Feelings were aroused and men found it increasingly difficult to cooperate. Thus did the company enter upon a period of sharp controversy that would end in its own destruction [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 124-5
Craven concurs that it was Sandys and his Southampton group “after sundry private meetings among themselves”, that followed the disruption of the 1616 dividend being paid in land not cash. At a shareholder court session the accusers secured their appointment, and added several allies, to the committee entrusted with the audit. The committee than went to work. If one separate the company’s “formal “books” from Smythe’s privately held “accounts” one can make some observations. The books, compiled since the company formation, were not comprehensive, nor complete, complied by multiple authors, and were themselves never audited. There were also lottery records, for which audits routinely exposed issues and accusations of corruption, but they appear to have been outside the purview of the audit committee. The bottom line is the committee could develop questions and concerns—but the records were never sufficient to make an accusation, against Smythe, or for that matter anybody. Simply put in today’s language it was apparently impossible to establish an “audit trail”.
Thus the November 1616 “audit” initiative exposed and aggravated concerns regarding the previous Smythe administration. There were always questions and no answers, but from there the trail led to Smythe’s accounts—and those were not available unless the committee came to his house, and [apparently] could not remove them for analysis. What they could access, I sense, were a rudimentary record of [some] revenue numbers, and [some] expenses, but little attempt to link the revenues to expenses and no sense these were a complete and comprehensive account. It might appear Smythe’s approach to accounting was akin to a “random walk” through the Virginia Company finances. Also, I might add they never reached an agreement on access to the records, or where those records could be taken. A very elaborate secret recopying scheme was later devised-more on that later.
Even so, it was not Smythe’s style to backdown, and as the November 1616 audit, with preliminary results and rumors permeating shareholder emotion, motivated Smythe to circle his wagons and to require those who wanted to audit the books do so at his house—apparently prompting Ferrar and the Earl of Cavendish (who conducted the audit) to bring in his assistants, one of which a young Thomas Hobbes, to make copies that were fed into the Sandys, Southampton and their M.P. allies.
Differences arose in auditing the accounts, and these disputes spread into the company. The throughness with which the auditors fell to their task carried implications displeasing to Smith. He ‘believed they ment him noe good by their earnest requires for all old bookes of account’. He disliked their refusal to do the auditing at his house, which hitherto had been used as the company’s office. And most galling of all were Sandy’s repeated complaints in the courts [shareholder meetings] that the auditors were not receiving the proper cooperation from the officers, and unless they did it would be impossible ‘to attaine to any perfect account’. Smith’s reply was the fault la y in the inexperience of the auditors, and he directed his attacks at Sandys. The result of these disputes was a breach between Smith and Sandys that was never healed. Parties formed on either side, and there followed much controversy and many accusations … and around this rallying point there grew a party of opposition which looked to Sandys for leadership.[99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 43-44.
In any case, efforts to reconstruct relevant Company finances have attracted several historians (who, usually, are rather indifferent accountants) have not produced any screaming outrages. Smythe claimed Company expenses during the period in question at about L70,000, and the most serious estimation, by William Robert Scott [99] came in around L67,000. They also revealed the shareholders, by not paying their subscription bills, had themselves caused a bit less than L10,000 at one point in outstanding debt (and L16,000 by 1620)—which Smythe covered with his own personal funds. [99] William Robert Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (Vol. II) (Cambridge University Press, 1910), pp. 257-9
The real shortcoming was the Company, especially after it began its land grants after 1614, had no assets, hence no collateral in the New World. One asset and one expenditure, indentured servants, their transportation and food supplies, was more easily exploited than lent against. In this rather fluid fiscal atmosphere accusations were cheap, loud, and hard to prove or disprove. One fact was indisputable, and worked to Sandys’s benefit: the Virginia Company, had not made a profit ever, it held incredible amounts of debt, with which it had few assets for collateral, and was in perpetual day-to-day crisis to pay its bills. If Smythe hadn’t got rich, no one else had either. This is a recipe for bankruptcy, and as I have been saying for so many pages, the Company was a “going concern” from Day One in 1606.
In short there was a virtual deluge of explanations for why and how the audit was never resolved. The Company lost its charter rights to Virginia without having any final report on the audit—save one that was so contested it did not do anything more than intensify the issue. The severity of the fiscal crisis was always apparent and imminent to the extent that whatever the audit found, the fiscal crisis existed and was wreaking its havoc on future investment and day-to-day financing of the colony’s affairs and the implementation of the agreed-upon strategic plan. Enough audit details were observable even if the final figures were not determined; the company had been sloppy to negligent in its budgetary/accounting practices, but the reason for such is what likely caused the delay.
Craven again says it well” “But though the majority of the adventurers seemed to have agreed on the diagnosis and on the remedy, they were yet sharply divided on the question of placing responsibility for the company’s troubles. Some were disposed to charge all blame to the directing officers, and to demand their removal from office. The question on Smythe’s accounts, which had neither been settled nor forgotten, provided the rallying point, and from Yeardley’s departure [January 1619} plans were shaping toward the treasurer’s removal. Earlier suspicion through prolonged disputes over the auditing of the company’s books, ripened into the conviction that public funds had been converted to private use. And as Smith’s opponents looked forward to the inauguration of a program requiring heavy expenditure, they demanded of him a settlement of his accounts”.[99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Dissolution of the Company, p. 82
Shareholder meetings, therefore, in 1617 and 18 were increasingly well-attended, passionate, and mostly impacted by shareholders outside of Smythe’s merchant adventure allies. It should be remembered that in these years very disruptive shareholder meetings in the Somers Corporation ensued, followed by bitter controversy over reports regarding Argall as administration as governor of Virginia. If the meetings previous to the 1616 land dividends had been poorly attended and somewhat docile, the meetings after 1616 were full scale multi-front battles.
During 1617 the audit got virtually no where with Smythe turning over “the books”, but refusing to allow their movement from his house, which had been the company headquarters to that point. Sandys that would complain at shareholder meetings that Smythe and friends were sandbagging the audit, and that the accounts were impossible to decipher. Smythe countered the auditors were amateurs, and didn’t know what they were doing. Conversations among shareholders were never restricted to shareholder meetings and therefore rumors, arguments in the street, meetings and social occasions further divided shareholders—and the audit got nowhere.
However logical the audit, they might not have expected Smythe’s reaction to the audit, and that rapidly personalized the audit investigation and fueled Smythe’s defensiveness and his reaction to Sandys that resisted the November 1616 audit and severely impeded its application. That reaction in turn may well have intensified Sandys’s feelings about Smythe and Johnson, and during 1617 and 1618 the audit became weaponized to oust Smythe. The audit, lacking hard facts and data, raised more questions than answers, and did little to advance
Smythe on the other hand always consistently acknowledged the possibility, if not probability, that he owed funds, and was willing—and financially able—to pay them—there was never a number that the auditors were able to come up with, at least a number they could offer convincing proof of its validity. Bluntly the records, if they existed at all, were so inadequate, that no matter how and for how long auditors looked at the books (they examined them for years), no figure was presented to the shareholders for approval.
Smythe never got his number; instead numbers flew around in rumors or in private conversation that only inflamed, confused and frustrated any final resolution. Underlying this was “Sir Thomas, however, had many friends, and was a man of great influence”. He held onto many supporters within the company, and Sandys’s faction in 1619 was very much a minority. In early 1619 there were not the votes to remove him, never mind prevent his reelection in the April shareholder meeting. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Dissolution of the Company, pp. 82-3. But we shall shortly discover, other events, however, materialized previous to that meeting.
Craven concludes [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies, p. 125) the effect of the audit process (not the audit findings) was to polarize the shareholder base and to mobilize the protagonists to use and manage the shareholder democracy permitted in the regulated joint stock corporation. Craven suggests as a consequence of the audit smaller investors over the nest two years made more efforts to attend shareholder meetings in increasing numbers and, jelled into a somewhat formal opposition, led by Sandys, against the Smythe-merchant adventurer establishment.
With events seemingly deteriorating in Virginia under Argall, and the Somers Company already engaged in a power struggle for control of its governorship, more shareholders “threatened to assume control [of the company] through the direction of one of the most astute political leaders of the day”. [99] Craven, Dissolution, pp. 41-2. That as one might expect prompted resistence by Smythe and his adherents, and over the two years more personal attacks that, excepting for the negotiated new settlement strategy on which all sides recognized a need, policy-making drifted in shouting matches and paralysis amid an atmosphere of distrust and further disillusionment..
The Audit as a Wedge to open up a redefinition of the permanent settlement plan
While no more an expert on colonization than anyone else in England at the time, Sandys, never a merchant adventurer therefore less tied to their practices and expectations, had no doubt developed his own notions of a permanent settlement strategy. His close proximity to inner company workings and decision-making in the company’s first years made him a witness to its abject failures, and its then-current desperate state. whatever strategy had been intended dashed upon the rocks of fiscal instability and the threat of imminent financial collapse, and even bankruptcy.
In 1616 no less than Rolfe estimated only 351 men, women and children inhabited Virginia, and that number was “a small number to advance so greate a work” [99] John Rolfe, “Relation of the State of Virginia” (1617), published in Virginia Historial Register, I, (1848), p. 107. His promotional tour of English society spun this depressing number into a claim that opportunity for prosperous settlement still existed in Virginia at that time, and his message was closely tied to his tobacco. That only 351 settlers remained after nearly ten years of effort called attention to the high mortality rates, and reinforced the fears of many that the best the colony could produce was weak, stinky, and not very popular tobacco.
It was pretty evident to any attentive shareholder that whatever settlement policy was in effect, it was not working. It was also apparent that this failure undelay the dividend crisis of 1616. Reports from Governor Argall, combined with reports concerning Governor Argall, trickled in during 1617 and 1618 strongly raised fears matters were getting worse, and confirmed that hard times and desperate state of affairs persisted. Sandys stated the population in 1618 still hovered about four hundred [99] Sandys, Virginia Historical Record, I, p. 350. Whatever ever else the London shareholders were worried about, there was no escaping the hard reality that Smythe’s settlement plan, whatever it was, had to be reconstructed and a new one quickly put in place.
What emerged from these reports was the company’s Virginia assets (indentured servants, public or company-owned land and Magazine net assets), were virtually depleted, and that translated into next to no collateral for the heavy burden of outstanding debt issuances. There was certainly nothing that could be pledged for any future debt so very necessary to sustain those in Virginia, nevermind finance the transit of new settlers to increase the workforce so production and exports could by sufficient to retire the debt.
The company, if nothing else, was in a financial cul du sac that provided no escape path to avoid an almost imminent bankruptcy. No matter what the company audit uncovered, there was little to no hope it would resolve that crisis. As to the audit itself, Craven suggests that Sandys and others were looking less for misplaced or misspent funds than an explanation to the long string of failings and succession of crises that characterized its existence since 1607. Implicit in this was that Smythe had to go if the colony was to survive.
Having watched Smythe (and Alderman Johnson) for years, their failings, including their limited time in company affairs, the host of other obligations, and the lack of attention to detail, financial, accounting or otherwise, not to ignore their ties to James, his Privy Council, and the annoying and greedy merchant adventurers, the Smythe years were not years of unbridled success and so a review of their accounts seemed a logical start to a revamp of the company, its settlement and trade strategies, and if their suspicions were correct offer a scapegoat to be sacrificed so a new administration could take over.
The point of this being it did not take a genius to recognize the desperate situation that had befallen Virginia. Smythe himself would not deny the sorry state of affairs, and was willing to work with all to figure out what should be done. That had to mean a serious pivot, not a tweak here or there. in the economic development strategy had to be devised, and a firm company implementation of that strategy had to follow. Whatever respect shareholders had for Smythe, the master merchant adventurer, was he the man for the job?
One wonders if Smythe wondered if he wanted the responsibility to implement a radically different strategy that departed from his lifetime experience? It was already evident in this period that shareholders and new investors increasingly bypassed the company and its settlement monopoly to take advantage of its new investor association-hundreds initiative to advance their own plantation, at their own expense, enjoying as they would support, headrights for example, the company could provide. Was the Company in danger of becoming its own “fifth wheel”?
During this period, many of the more prominent shareholders were concurrently engaged in Bermuda’s settlement and turbulent politics (which will be discussed shortly), and a common denominator was how to handle land distribution to shareholders. Bermuda shareholders wanted to go their own way, as the Virginia investor-association-hundreds were doing. No longer workable in this situation, the company’s existing monopolistic business plan had to give way to a new company business plan whereby land (and the workforce to work the land) was the company’s key commodity that could be converted into fiscal resources thru sale to individual—and autonomous—ownership that would themselves produce growth through their production and developmental strategies.
This is what the company’s existing shareholders increasingly wanted. No longer expecting a simple cash dividend to reward their investment, by 1617 a small but wealthy contingent of English gentry and aristocrats were willing to go their own way and found their own plantations which while bypassing the company’s ownership, implied new coordinative responsibilities for the company to assume (for example, collective defense). Land distribution as currency for investment meant the role and position of the company had changed, and while the full impact of this shift may, or may not, have hit the investors or the company officials fully, it was very clear to both that the investment deal of 1607 was in no way similar to that being negotiated in 1617.
The new objective of shareholders meant the company had to provide governance/coordination to larger numbers of free men who were individual landowners, as well as associations of multiple wealthy investors (or in Bermuda “tribes” as they were called) who founded their own large plantation with their own indentured workforce coexisting with free men, a settlement with overtones of being both a manor and a community. Geographic dispersion meant the company had been thrust into a more complex set of responsibilities, that it had to assume burdens like regulating shires, vestries, defense, and facilitating exports and imports and their distribution through the colony. None of these were obvious, or necessary in the rather loose 1607 company plan confined to one settlement and one council.
Without any conscious design, land distribution was in effect creating a lower tier of communities that promised to tilt the company’s role in Virginia to be that of legislature than an mere shareholder council. Again, not all of this likely permeated into the mind frame of the participants at that time, but the reorganization of the company to deal with this transformation was something they had to deal with as core to making colony sustainable and productive in 1618.
Looking back from 2024 we are tempted to think in more expansive and thought through reforms, tempted to impose them on the 1618 participants, but the reality is each monthly and quarterly shareholder meetings converted their criticism of the existing situation into an individual instruction to a new governor of the colony. If there were issues to be had in the implementation, it would be up to the governor to cobble a solution and report it back to London for its reaction and insight. If it was Sandys who put pen to paper and duked it out with Smythe on each of these, I know not.
Thus it might be no surprise they did not think of the company business plan pivot as a huge planning enterprise that produced a “modern plan”, but rather a set of reform elements that were converted into governor instructions to be implemented under his authority—as transformed by new structures of company decision-making that were necessary to conduct land distribution that resulted in a lower tier of dispersed and autonomous plantations, whose integration into a coherent system befell to the governor and his newly created “provincial” structures.
In effect the shareholders in1618 London were backing into an incremental transfer from its old business monopoly to a decentralized and autonomous set of individual business ventures and individual enterprises that meant over time a new company system in the colony. Whatever was worked out in 1618 London, converted into governor instructions, was meant to be the first steps into a not very clear new company system of administration.
This is because one thing that had not changed in 1618 was the thought the company would evolve out of its responsibility for a colony; thus it was never thinking of what we would call colonial “self-governance”, but rather in line with duplicating its London organizational structure in Virginia with adjustments necessary to accommodate its geographical dispersion comprised of individual investor clusters empowered to conduct the economic and order functions of the colony.
In hindsight this seems awkward at its best, but under the pressure of both a company collapse, a fragmented shareholder base and divided leadership, and the need to quickly set in place a productive economy that could produce marketable exports, and staples that would reduce the company’s cost burdens, 1618 land distribution and company reorganization went hat-in-hand with probably little sense of where each would wind up over time. Virginia in 1618-1619 was a “colony in progress”.
Reacting to the Effects of Disputes within the Somers (Bermuda) Corporation
Somers Island Corporation— Succession Politics: Let’s Appoint a new Governor in Bermuda
Accordingly as London shareholder debate in 1617 and into 1618 forged its criticism into policy for a more effective permanent settlement in Virginia, the Magazine played an important element. London shareholders reached agreement on reform of the Magazine in its October 18th 1618 set of decisions. The Magazine’s right to trade was continued through its previously agreed term of operation, but from 1618, its profits were to capped at 25%, and the governor was to be provided with an invoice of all its sales.
While the monopoly of the Magazine, however conceptual it actually was in practice, was continued, exceptions were made for the investor-association-hundred’s production which was to be determined by the owners association itself. If they could find a better deal than the Magazine they could take it—also they handled much of their own imports. A second exemption was for items not accessible to the Magazine, buyers could make what deal they could with whomever they could. To the Magazine’s benefit, a final ruling was that otherwise a monopoly were retained by the Magazine.
The Magazine, however, had been made into a very leaky bucket indeed. The opportunity for smart Virginia shoppers to take advantage of the Magazine could not be resisted. As might be expected, the rich became richer, and the first advantage of resident company officials increased. In this way the Magazine, whatever the intentions of London investors, became part of the Virginian Company establishment. The best example of this is Cape Merchant Peirsey’s sale of his large and prosperous plantation to former governor Yeardley in 1624. With the sale went not only tobacco exports but indentured workforce.
Of little note since until 1618 or so Virginia had little to note to export, the rise of tobacco exports after that year elevated in importance a tax abatement that was included in the various King-issued charters. The first complete abatement of customs duties for the colony expired after seven years (1619) and a second abatement which applied only a 5% duty, which was a considerable benefit to Virginia exporters.
With so much dependent on tobacco in this period, we are on the threshold of rising opportunities that many many adventurers, including the king, began to take notice. For the reader’s benefit we look ahead a year or two just to set the stage for the grand arrival of king tobacco. The Company, thinking its so-called monopoly was being bypassed, contested the matter to the King and Privy Council. There followed a series of discussions, proposals, agreements, back aways from the agreements all of which (1) sharpened the attacks of the various Company factions on the others, and (2) discredited the Company in the eyes of many, including the King and Privy Council, especially as key elements of this discussion involved profiteering by the Sandys faction then in control of the Company.
With all these dynamics afoot in this very volatile period, it became more obvious the Magazine was not working well, had been captured by Virginians, no longer enjoyed anything approaching a monopoly, and in general could not get out of its own way. So Sandys in 1618 attempted to put it out of its misery. He proposed several initiatives more radical than those adopted. But here we see Smythe recognizing during early 1619 the rising power of Sandys, the ongoing escalating fight with his former ally Earl of Warwick (Rich) that his reelection in 1619 (April) was likely in jeopardy, decided not to contest the election, leaving the Treasurer position open to Sandys, but fighting hard—and largely successfully—to retain his CEO Treasurer position in the Somers Island Company, and his control over the board of directors of the Virginia Company Magazine. [999]
The Magazine had been interwoven with national politics as well as those associated with corporate succession precisely at the time when tobacco transformed into the opportunity of a decade. Perhaps, at this point, Sandys was thinking along the lines of putting the Magazine out of its misery, but as Smythe saw it, the Company Magazine, he believed could regain its former monopoly, not of the colony, but rather tobacco export-import. Smythe reorganized the Magazine to ensure in his absence as Treasurer, it would. Sandy’s efforts to recast it more radically or shut it down were frustrated by Smythe’s takeover over its board. Sandys, accordingly bypassed the Magazine and substituted his own.
So just before Smythe seemingly counted his votes and “retired” as Virginia Company Treasurer, but before he left the Virginia Company Treasurer position, Smythe created a new economic development entity to replace the existing Company trade bureau (the “magazine”) with a new one called “Adventurers of the Magazine”. Smythe’s long-time ally and deputy, Alderman Johnson was placed in charge. One can assume the motive was personal profit, and a backdoor way to continue to exert a major impact on the day to day affairs of the colony and Company. [999]
[999] The method, however, by which Virginia acquired its “monopoly” was that Spanish tobacco was not “banned”, but laden with a very high tariff. That high tariff, however, did not end English consumption of Spanish tobacco; it was of higher quality and “tasted better” than an improved post-1619 Virginian product. Many English simply paid up and smoked Spanish. The Spanish competition was compounded by an excess of Spanish product imported into England, which had the effect of reducing the price of Spanish tobacco and increasing its English sales.[999]
This meant that whatever Sandys did, there was some check to Sandys’s impact within the Virginia Company. Not congruent with Sandys approach and policy the Magazine became an early battlefield in the final throes of the Virginia Company. Predictably, Sandys never cooperated with the new entity and it fell into bankruptcy by 1621 [99] See Andrews, Vol.1, p. 127]. Sandys, however, would fall victim to his own approach to the tobacco opportunity-but that is a tale to be told later in the next module. In the meantime, for a year of so, Smythe had moved his corner office to the Bermuda Somers Company. From their competing corner offices the fight got worse each passing day. Over the next couple of years the two competed and each became the vehicle for separate visions of how tobacco could be recast into a company monopoly.
Bypassing the Magazine, I might add, counter-intuitively affected, i.e. reinforced, the spread of tobacco and strengthened the role of the plantation elite in marketing that product. Why? The inability of the Magazine to manage the tobacco export trade left the matter in the hands of the plantation owner. At the least, the export of tobacco increased owner autonomy, and transformed him into the only effective intermediary for the export of tobacco raised by renters and small homesteads in his isolated hundred. In that this dynamic was evident at the birth of the tobacco monoculture, it will not be surprising it was built into the the plantation enterprise and tobacco business model. In this respect the reader can see how these several dynamics we discuss in this section flow and interweave in ways one could not imagine.
These discussions rattled around through 1622, and deep into 1623. They are included here to alert the reader that it was these discussion that caused the final breakdown between the Company, its various factions, and the King-Privy Council. Investigations were ordered pertaining to internal records and actions of various of the Company leadership, the end result was the King order revoking the Charter of the Virginia Company and all its subsidiaries. But before we go we have one more interesting tale to tell: the 1619 Company Coup
Craven ventures a thought that after 1612 Virginia had lost its luster, and in the minds of many in London all that was required of them was to “keep the Jamestown colony alive” ( p.19) In its largest sense, the Virginia Company, in the English territorial framework, was England’s North American colonizer, and if not Virginia as primary, it could be elsewhere in North America. Massachusetts was still in the doldrums as far as the Company was concerned, but the newest colony, Somers Island, was the rising star.
Aside from a few commentators (Osgood, Scott, and Charles Andrews in particular), the Somers Island-Virginia Company shared experience is perhaps mentioned in a discussion of Virginia, but usually reduced to an insignificant commentary. Off to the margins, Bermuda’s approach to colonization has not been incorporated into the Virginia Company decision-making process as it affected Virginia. This may fit well in an “American” perspective, but in point of fact, what happened in Bermuda would prove to exert a critical and overall negative effect on the Company and its Virginia operations. For this reasons, the reader should consider the below discussion as central to Virginia, and not a tangent.
Aside from the obvious comparison between two separate colonies concurrently administrated by the Virginia Company through separate corporations, a comparison which could, and does, shed some light and enhanced understanding of each colony. That overlap will be most apparent in the next module, but in this module we can observe the rather noticeable distinction between the policy-making in the two colonies, and in Bermuda some instability and chronic change in its provincial management. The latter show allows some comment as to the capacity of the Virginia Company during this period, and it will also confirm the shared approach in settling the plantation through shareholder land grants—an approach which profound implications for the political and economic development of both colonies.
We will come to see the Bermuda Company played was probably triggered the drift toward the 1619 Virginia Company organizational coup that commenced the final disintegration of the Virginia Company and the loss of its Virginia charter. That disintegration did not affect Bermuda as the Virginia Company continued its colonial management; for Virginia, however, it was page-turning.
It is during this period that the confrontation between the East India Company, and its CEO, Thomas Smythe, and the two privateering ships owned by the Rich family occurred. With Tucker in England, the contest between the two parties, as well as the Sandys faction still engaged in the office politics associated with the audit of the Virginia Company, shifted to the two company “courts” or shareholder meetings and committees. As will be presented below, also concurrently, were discussion and negotiations regarding the pivot in the Virginia Company settlement strategy, and the role of the Smythe in its implementation. It also became apparent in the discussions and negotiations that, as Scott asserts, “Smythe had a serious illness about 1616” [99] [of an unknown nature, but its effects were cited into the 1623 period, and of constant reference in discussions attempting to resolve the audit process]. The audit, however, conflict intensified, and the Somers Island conflict expanded greatly.
The previously mentioned blurring of the Virginia Company board and the subsidiary Somers Company board now witnessed intense discussion in each, and increasing paralysis and bitterness becoming evident. By 1618, reports regarding the behavior and the administration of Governor Samuel Argall in Virginia filtered in, adding to the vex and concern of all factions. At some point in 1618, the Argall matter caused the approval of a resolution by the Virginia Company shareholder council that censured Argall “for many unjust accusations against the Magazine”. It does appear certain that the Argall matter secured a voting majority in the Virginia Company in May/June, and that a resolution censuring Argall and sending De La Warr over to Virginia in order to send Argall back to London for London’s review and decision as to his continuing as governor. It was during this short period that the instructions for the pivot in the settlement plan, had been determined and were carried over by De La Warr for their implementation.
This further activated the concerns of the Warwick faction, whose support of Argall, its protégé as governor, will be discussed in the immediate next section. In this time period, the first half of 1618, the politics in regards to Bermuda escalated considerably as Tucker’s status in office as governor, a term of which was to expire in 1619, came under shareholder council discussion. “At a court [Somers Company shareholder council meeting] in the first half of the year 1618, it had been proposed that the qualifications of a possible successor to Tucker might be discussed”. Smythe supported Tucker in the conversations that followed, and according “to the account of an adherent of Warwick, refused peremptorily ‘and with much heate and passion’ to accept this motion” [99] William Robert Scott, Vol. II, p. 267.
The matter lingered on for several months, becoming more complicated as both Warwick [Nathaniel Butler] and Sandys [his brother, George] proposed possible candidates for the office of governor. According to Scott, the discussion carried over into the Virginia Company shareholder council and in an attempt at compromise Smythe abandoned Tucker and came up with a substitute nominee, Captain Southwell. “Warwick and his supporters were opposed to the continuance of Tucker in the Somers Islands, while they advocated the cause of Argall in Virginia” [99] Scott, Vol II, p. 267] Scott picks up the discussion by adding “Tucker was supported by Smythe, and a breach thus began between Smythe and the Earl of Warwick “[99] Robert Scott, Vol. II, p. 266. Scott adds “Smythe who was in favor of the reelection of Tucker, according to the account of an adherent of Warwick, refused peremptorily ‘and with much heate and passion’ to accept this motion. After the lapse of some months, Smythe abandoned Tucker and decided to support Captain Southwell, while Warwick fixed on Nathaniel Butler [As his candidate [Sandys initially advocated his brother, George, and then was himself a candidate for Bermuda governor.
Charles M. Andrews inserts the passion that was generated by this succession fight: “As Warwick more than anyone else had been the prime mover in the Bermuda business, it is perhaps not strange that trouble should have arisen between [Smythe and Warwick]. The bone of contention was … Tucker, a protégé of Smith’s who had been commissioned governor of Bermuda in February, 1616, but who soon after gave offense to Warwick by arresting and imprisoning (with others) ‘one Mr. Riche, a kinsman of the [First] Earl of Warwick’ who in a certain quarrel had spoken arrogantly of the governor, and charged him with ‘vainglory and presumption’. This ‘usage had been taken in very ill part by their friends and families, and Warwick demanded of the Company at home that it dismiss Tucker from its employ. Smith, ‘expressing much heat and passion’ refused to do this, and the warmth thus engendered was increased when, upon Tucker’s withdrawal, Smith approved as his successor, a Captain Southwell and Warwick a Captain Butler, the latter a man ‘favoured by divers of the Lords of the Company, and in especiall long known to the Earle of Warwicke’. Sandys put forward his brother George Sandys, but later withdrew him in favor of Butler at the same time bringing pressure to bear upon Smith by raising the question of Smith’s competence as governor as treasurer [CEO]. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, the Settlement, Vol. I (Yale University Press, 1934, 1965), p. 121
By this reflection on Smith’s integrity ‘such a heart-burning and separation of affections, not to say spleen and malice) ensured their upon betwixt them, as for ever after, that to such a height of heat these distempers became inflamed within a short time that all their meetings and consultations seemed rather cockpits than courts [shareholder meetings]. These comments cited by Andrews are drawn in the last occasion from our old friend, John Smith of Pocahontas fame—a writer known for his exaggerations and one not disposed to the other Smythe. [99] John Smith, Travels and Works, II, p. 666. While adopted by Charles Andrews we can see how even contemporary observers of note were not necessarily neutral in their observations and affections, and that as more modern commentators utilize their writing it is obvious that early on the various events and drivers of dissatisfaction within the Virginia Company were compounded and collapsed upon each other.
Such is not improbable and so we too might be forgiven for doing the same; by 1618 for sure the struggles within the two companies fed off each other, to the point that resolution of one set of concerns could not be made without linkage to other. This is a hint that the “resulting deal” will in fact do so. In any case, such heated three party bruhaha will also overlap into the atmosphere that smaller, less involved, shareholders will also have to breathe and to wade their way through. That the reader can assume any form of shareholder “consensus” is questionable, and that as early as late 1618- early 1619 internal policy/decision-making has been fundamentally transformed from what it was in early 1616.
The final decision regarding the Bermuda governorship was made in May 1619 with the election of Butler as Deputy Governor, but Thomas Smythe retained his position as governor. That raises the likelihood the original deal did not hold and something happened in the interval between the two board meetings. It is worth comment that Scott’s narrative interweaves both Virginia and Bermuda matters, such as the Magazine. It is very evident to me this interchange and the exchanges made during the 1619 company discussion support my inclusion of this matter at this point. The 1619 coup that resulted in the Virginia Company, was coupled with a second action in the following Somers Company annual meeting. One can also note that on March 26, 1619 the First Earl of Warwick died, on April 29th, the Coup in the Virginia Company occurred, and on May 25, the Somers Company Annual Shareholder Court was held. Clearly we need to delve a bit deeper to find out what happened.
The Period of Company shareholder debate on the pivot of the Company and Settlement: 1617-19
Forgotten thus far in our focus on Virginia Company during the tweens, was the two pronged origin of the Virginia Company. Developed structurally as a regulated joint stock corporation compromise between two competing factions of the merchant adventurers (those from the outer ports and Londoners brought in by Robert Cecil, the “prime minister” of newly arrived James I). The two wings of the Company not only did not see eye to eye in their vision of a colony, but contrast exhibited strong anti-Church of England, anti-Spanish and a different approach to Company governance.
With a deal crafted by Cecil a partnership with James in opening up England’s North American claims to permanent settlement was made and the first charter issued in 1606. The two factions each had a subsidiary corporation and each corporation went their own way in the interval between 1606 and the date at hand in this module, 1616. [999] The distinctions and comments in the below extended footnote might help in enlarging the sensitivities to complexities that were triggered with the events in this module.
The two corporations, despite some overlap advanced different, even competing, interests, and their boards of shareholders were composed of different groupings, with vastly different prior histories. In fact, each board harbored and reflected the competition between the outer ports and the hegemonic port, London. It is worth note that each board had their own notions of permanent settlement, and that our discussion on how the London Company board evolved on this issue, was vastly different as to how the “Bristol” board conceived and executed it. and colonial definitions of two rival cities (London, with its dominant merchant adventurer traders who pioneered ventures to the continent, Russia, Levant (Mediterranean and founded the East India Company to compete with the Dutch in Asia) and Bristol, in many ways the homebase of the English North American colonial movement—and its merchant marine and privateering marine.
During the Tudor years and the war with Spain, privateering was controversial, but legitimate, and it played a serious role in the evolution of English maritime history and early colonialism. In 1617 and 1619 this privateering would enter into Virginia Company internal politics. The merchant adventurers had evolved from their early days into serious conventional traders, whose profits depended not on privateering but on stable relationships with their trading partners. Smythe and Rich, not to ignore Sandys, had very serious differences in how and why they practiced their versions of colonialism—and permanent settlement was new ground. The tentative politics of James around the period, before and during the Thirty Years War, established parameters that made privateering undesirable and James’s policy consistently discouraged it—yet as we shall see through Rich influence he would knight Argall.
The relevance of this refresher is that the Rich faction overlapped the two corporations, and in fact the Second Earl of Warwick played an important role in its activities over his lifetime and became Lord Admiral of the Puritan-Parliamentary Navy during the Civil War, during which he served as Parliament’s “czar” of colonial trade and settlement. His father the First Earl was an active “adventurer” and while he took an interest in the Virginia Company, he became a shareholder only in 1612 spurred on by an interest in investing with the new Bermuda, Somers Island Corporation. Both father and son drifted between trade and privateering, and by default settlement. They were intensely anti-Catholic and Spanish—the former active in the long war between England and Spain. In this module section we are forced to include both father and son, because the pre-March 1619 difficulties between the First Earl laid the background for the Second Earl when he assumed the title literally a month previous to the “coup” or more precisely the ouster of CEO-Treasurer, Thomas Smythe.
An element of subtle importance is to recognize the “class” distinction between aristocrats-nobles such as the Richs, and the merchant adventurer traders, who despite their considerable wealth and impact on foreign affairs, were “gentry”. Aristocrats bore a heritage of national political involvement, both positive and negative, and their families played a huge role in historical medieval policy-making at court and in dynastic matters. In my research I did discern that Smythe felt and sometimes displayed a tension in his relationships with aristocrats, and his involvement in a famous affair during the Tudor years, left him in the Tower under arrest. Southampton was caught in a similar situation—but Southampton was an aristocrat.
What caused that glue to crack was a combination of three drivers. First the Company had been deliberately structured to allow shareholders, anyone who purchase ONE share, to speak, participate in deliberations at shareholder meetings and insist their aspirations be satisfied. Yet, simultaneous the Company was in public partnership with the king—now more challenged by parliament than ever—and a king completely unwilling to invest in his own partnership, and whose attention span on the issue was so problematical that at a key time in 1616 and 1617 allowed the Queen to support her favorite, Southampton (and his ally, Sandys) to begin the campaign to oust Smythe in 1616—the first act in the what became a corporate coup.
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
Secondly, Thomas Smythe and his merchant adventurers, however, they managed it, held sway over the affairs of the Company into 1616. The other groupings, included several powerful aristocrats, and an energetic parliamentary leader, and a privateering inclined, Anti-Spanish Earl of Warwick, alleged to have been the Bill Gates, Elon Musk like, wealthiest funder, indeed the largest funder in the newly incorporated Somers Corporation, the latest subsidiary of the Virginia Company wanted in 1616 to be inside the decision-making of the Company—and they were resisted by the heavy (and probably ill) hand of Thomas Smythe and his merrie crew of old-style merchant adventurers.
Thirdly, it was Bermuda, the disruption caused by Virginia’s Deputy Governor Argall, and the groups behind the investment of the hundreds associations that wanted Smythe and his grouping to leave these “colonies within a colony” alone. They wanted to impose their own version of a permanent settlement strategy—a strategy that could be no worse than the hap-hazard settlement strategy of the merchant adventurer factor—and on top of that wanted to remove the incompetence and blurring of private with corporate wealth within the Company that had taken over the Company practices and initiatives, i.e. Dale’s Gifts.
While the Dales’ Gift initiatives opened up Virginia and created a facilitative opportunity to those who invested in the hundreds associations, their lack of structure and accountability pitted resident company officials against the new investors, and also left undealt with provincial-wide needs for infrastructure, a diversified economic base, a more helpful policy to the Powhatans and tribes, not to mention their outright Christianization, and tossed in for good measure, a college. These investors saw their individual hundred as a unit of local government, and sought to create provincial structure to tie themselves into a coordinated and fair law-making that could grow the colony.
Reacting to the Effects of Disputes Caused by Virginia Governor Argall
Governor Dale left town in May 1616, leaving his deputy, George Yeardley, in charge until the newly appointed Governor arrived—which was a year later, May 15, 1617. Governor Samuel Argall left (fled) on April 9 1619, and his replacement, again Yeardley, arrived on April 18, 1619. April is constant likely because the London Annual Shareholder meeting (court) scheduled for April probably meant the instructions for the governor, new or not, would be developed in the period previous and sent over. Given the London shareholder restiveness, 1616 as we have seen no doubt mean discussion on who should be Dale’s replacement.
The thirty-six year old Samuel Argall seems to have won out; he was related to Smythe but did not seem the two were close, and was a long-time sea captain employed by the company and used for critical missions and assignments. His company experience specialized in fishing, Indian-matters, exploring and navigating, a Canadian and a Dutch New York assignments of some complexity elicited some bold behavior, but the most insight into who he was might be attributed to his captaincy in a 1612 Virginia mission on Robert Rich’s Treasurer, a ship to be noted for several controversial and impactful voyages.
He commanded the George in March 1617, and carried over the Rolfe’s who were returning to Virginia. Rebecca, Pocahontas died before they ever cleared England and he returned with her body; he departed in April 1617 and arrived in May—an excellent speedy trip over. Likely, he had been selected as governor by March 1617. I have previously described the outlines of Argall’s administration. Disliked by most Virginians, Argall was disruptive and bold at his worst, but as his previous record suggests he was a go-to man for the Company to tackle difficult task.
Like other company officials he blurred and blended his ambition for personal wealth into his public activities as (deputy) governor but as his supporters would argue, the place was a mess, seriously run down, and the effects of Dale’s Gift and the dispersion of settlers, plus the early hundreds-association plantation settlements, when combined with nearly non-existent provincial governmental capacity, save the harsh military law of the Virginia policy system, the resident governor had little on which to rely but a strong personality and decisive action. That he no doubt was quite aware of the London shareholder dissatisfaction, the Sandys audit, and the disruptive shareholder meetings that followed—all these had commenced previous to his departure—suggest that Argall’s blunt manner and decision, plus his self-absorbed, and arbitrary governance style was in some ways what the doctor ordered, but it was sure to stir up ill feelings.
Accordingly, previous to discussing his administration, I think it prudent to deal with the reality that by the time he was replaced, and essentially placed under arrest two years later, which explains by he escaped on Rich’s ship, and was in due course made the scapegoat for the problems of Virginia which, of course, owed their existence due to many factors not only beyond his control, but previous to his administration.
What’s more he was clearly in alliance with a major contender in London’s office politics, the Richs, and certainly out of favor with both Smythe and as we shall see, Sandys, history has been harsh with his record, despite the contradictory and conflicting few reliable records exist. That this was the period that culminated in the April 1619 Sandys coup, and the turbulent period of his first administration, Argall’s timing could not have been worse. His administration seems to have provoked in London a backlash that infused the construction of the Greate Charter instructions, and paradoxically, may have unified both Smythe and Sandys to the extent they came to mutual agreement on that important matter—the company pivot and its new business plan. [99] Scott, Vol II, p.269]. The reaction by historians has been contradictory
A … division grew out of a personal quarrel between the Treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith, and a prominent shareholder, Lord Rich, [appointed in 1618 as the First] Earl of Warwick [by the king] … At first, he and Sir Thomas Smith were on very friendly terms. Samuel Argall was closely connected by marriage with Smith’s family, and it was Lord Rich and his friends who in 1617 secured Argall’s appointment as deputy-governor of Virginia. The appointment turned out to be far from credible. Argall’s rule was as stern as Dale’s, but it was not public spirited. Dale’s severity could be endured; with the self-seeking and unscrupulous Argall it was quite the otherwise.
He was so loudly accused of peculation [by Sandys—see p. 184 Fiske, and Osgood, Vol 1., p.77] and extortion that after one year, the Company sent Lord Delaware to take personal charge of the colony once more… Among [Delaware’s] private papers was one that instructed him to arrest Argall and send him to England for trial … [Delaware died in transit]… When the ship arrived in Virginia this document fell into Argall’s hands. Its first effect was to make him behave worse than ever. … [When Yeardley arrived he was] ordered to send Argall home, but [Argall] being privately notified, it is said by the Earl of Warwick, loaded [Warwick’s] ship and sailed for England before the [new] governor arrived [99] John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, Vol. 1 (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897), pp. 182-3, 185.
Perhaps, but in most ways, Argall was a step back, as he reversed key Dale initiatives, indeed seemingly tearing the guts out of his reforms and relaxing the implementation of the harsh military code. He lined his own pockets, pursued Indian fur trade and set up fishing which diversified the Virginia colony economy (which he delegated to a former sailor in his employ, Samuel Mathews). The effort to diversify the economy, congruent with London’s wishes it would seem, also meant dealing with the issue of the huge amounts of land owned and used by the company to derive revenues from the sale of tobacco produced by indentured and former indentured servants which were assigned to that property.
Sandys, in particular, was sensitive to and planned to rely upon these public company lands in his Greate Charter reform, and he was very upset with his perception of Argall’s administration of them. The more important point, a key element in Craven’s work on the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, was that the coalition Sandys was assembling in London in opposition to Smythe had already embraced the position that since 1616 Virginia had increasingly exported nothing but tobacco, where previously it had sent over other commodities, and [that he greatly feared “the people there [in Virginia] wholly applying [themselves to tobacco] had by this misgovernment reduced themselves into an extremity of being ready to starve, unless the Magazine this last year [1618] had supplied them with Corn and Cattle from hence” [99] Craven, the Dissolution, p.40.
The statistics support his position. Only a few pounds of tobacco had been sent over in 1614, and by 1616 about 2500 pounds, but by 1617 18.839 pounds, and in 1618 about 49,518 pounds [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 39. What seems apparent to me is the initial diffusion of tobacco throughout Virginia after 1615 had created such a momentum in Virginia, for good reasons and bad, that it had generated a reaction in London by many well-placed and ambitious shareholders that they launched an opposition to the then-present company management accusing them, likely accurately, of bringing the colony to harm through their pursuit of private profit. With Argall perceived as Smythe’s appointee, his behavior in Virginia was perceived as more of the same (which it was, with the qualified exception that Argall’s pursuit of private profit diversified the economy into more desired produce), but by 1619 when it all came to a head, there was a lot of conflating going around—and Argall got caught into it. Thus at the time of the coup in 1619 Sandys bitterly complained about Argall’s administration citing the below misadministration as an example of what happened in his tenure.
As the Private Plantation [land in private ownership] began thus to increase so contrary wise the estate of the Publique … grew into utter consumption [i.e. expanded almost exclusively into tobacco production].[Citing as an example of this, Sandys called into attention one plantation, “the Company’s Garden”] which yielded L300. Fifty-four servants were employed on this land and the saltworks. Eighty-one tenants yielded a rent in corn and services which with the tribute corn of the natives amounted to L1200 English bushels per year. In addition there had been eighty kine and eighty-eight goats. But two years later “this whole state of the publique was gone and Consumed, there not being left at that time to the Company either the land aforesaid or Any Tenant, Servant, Rent or Tribute Corn, cow, or Saltwork, and but six goats only, without one penny yielded to the Company for their so great loss in way of Accompt [payment] or restitution to this very day” [99] Records, 1, pp. 350-351, cited in Craven, Dissolution, pp. 38-9
Presumably what distressed Sandys was that the company public lands had previous to Argall (1617) produced corn, engaged in saltworks, and livestock—not tobacco. By early 1619, the Garden had been stripped of workers, renters, and left with six goats—without any payment made to the company and an obvious loss to the company on what was not produced. Likely in the interim the land was distributed to private ownership, probably planted with tobacco, without any accounting to the company implying corruption.
Osgood, a friend of Sandys, and by no means supportive of Argall, asserts strongly the company’s public land was plundered by Argall:
As the protégé of Sir Robert Rich [the First Earl] … [Argall] during the two years of his administration, 1617-1619, no private grants were made [this does not include sales of land to private individuals or association-hundreds]. By this it is not meant that the company’s land was cultivated with diligence, or the commercial system utilized for the benefit of adventurers and planters. Instead, both the lands and trade of the company were recklessly exploited for the benefit of the governor and his friends. The ‘ancient colony men’ who were entitled to their freedom, and the laborers from the common garden were kept at work as the governor directed, and largely for his personal advantage. The stores of grain accumulated at Charles City, as well as the public cattle were appropriated for his use. A stock of hides belonging to the company and estimated to be worth L400 he withheld from sale and thus caused it considerable loss. At the same time he allowed ship captains and private traders to export the sassafras and tobacco produced in the colony, thus bringing the operations of the magazine almost to a standstill. The Indian trade he was also charged with appropriating to himself [99] Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, (Forgotten Books, the MacMillan Company, 1904, p. 77
Craven picks this up, with support from Warwick quote and comments the perception from London was that by late 1618-early 1619, the Virginia economic base was being diverted to tobacco, with a loss of staples production, and “they watched with alarm the growing dependence on tobacco not only because of the dangers they foresaw in an economic order resting completely on one product, but also because of the disrepute into which the whole enterprise [Virginia colonization] might fall when, instead of serving the public ends for which it had been founded, it supported only a vice which they in common with the majority of their fellow countrymen condemned”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution, p. 38-9
But of even more concern, it seems he noted was that London feared the cause was the was the pursuit of private profit, both from the settler and the Magazine and company officials using company resources for their personal gain. “When the merchant leaders [i.e. the merchant adventurer dominated company leadership] undertook no progressive program for the continued growth of the colony, and appeared to be actively interested in little more than the success of the Magazine ventures, it was easy to suspect them of having no interest but their own personal profit”. He quotes Warwick who stated that the “merchants who swayed the courts [shareholder meetings] affected nothing but their own immoderate gain, though with the poor planters extream [sic] oppression”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 41. Rich, the reader might remember was currently engaged in a battle, if not a war, with Smythe in Bermuda; each was contesting who would be appointed governor.
At this point I strongly sense that during the Argall period, events-disputes between London company management [Smythe and Johnson primarily] and economic development dynamics in Virginia were being conflated, with many shareholders believing the company was heading in the wrong direction on several levels, and that the company officials were not addressing that misdirection but were instead making money from the problem. I offer this was not far from the reality that I have been describing in this history thus far. Dale’s Gift and the payment of company officials with land to start their own personal plantations complete with transfer of indentured servants as well as Rolfe’s tobacco seeds—probably combined with the association-hundred investment and their land grants creating plantations that relied principally on tobacco, were all getting out of hand.
Argall arrived on the scene, saw all this in progress and seemingly joined in with his own private endeavors. I might also add that George Yeardley, the previous acting deputy governor, over the entire period of his service in Virginia (to his death in 1627) had the reputation, almost without challenge, of being privately motivated to the harm of the company, and vastly more involved with his private plantations with the use of company resources and programs essential elements in his pursuit of private gain. Yeardley, then in London, was in active pursuit of investors to develop hundreds-associations, and was directly associated with one group in which Smythe was deeply involved (indeed it was labeled at the time as Smythe’s Hundred).
[999] Let’s step back for an observation of serious note. What we are witnessing in the 1617-19 period is the spread of tobacco throughout Virginia, a spread endorsed and led by the top leadership in London and carried out by the upper echelons of company officials in Virginia—for their personal profit—ostensibly to provide exports sufficient the company could pay its bills and continue to sustain the colony, while avoiding its very imminent fiscal collapse. For various reasons this generated a shareholder revolt, but chief among those reasons was the belief that tobacco had already, to the detriment of the colony, taken over its economic base—and that the company had essentially lost its ability—or was unwilling–to restrain its further growth by “making a pivot” in its business plan and permanent settlement strategy.
Insert this into the contemporary assessment of how and when tobacco took over Virginia and became the dominant element in its economic base around which the principal unit of that base was the tobacco plantation and we have strong reason to believe that it was the initial diffusion of tobacco, led by resident company officials created this base intentionally, if motivated by personal profit and ambition, and that this displeased elements in the Company in London so they launched what would be a successful ouster of the previous leadership, and commenced their own pivot and launched their own economic development strategy intended to limit tobacco exclusivity and diversify the Virginia economy. [see dissolution, pp. 238-45]
We will see this all failed in 1622—and its failure would leave the economic base in the hands of those self-same company officials who would continue that diffusion of tobacco and institutionalization of tobacco as Virginia’s economic base. No London effort of significance was made in the following three decades that impeded that diffusion and institutional development—indeed in many ways, London, under royal leadership, did the opposite. Previous to 1619, then, what was to be the future economic base had indeed been put in place. [999]
If all this tobacco bruhaha were not sufficient during 1617-8 the Company was also consumed by divisive, disruptive and intensified factionalism. During this time new and even more disruptive events hit the subsidiary Somers corporation, such as Bermuda’s leadership collapse, a contested appointment of a new governor that pitted Smythe against his former ally, the son of the Earl of Warwick, along with charges of corruption of its land patent initiative, and the entrance of George Sandys, Edwin’s brother as a candidate for the Bermuda governor. If Smythe felt besieged, Sandys/Southampton, and outer ports M.P.s, felt under attack as their friend and political associate, Walter Raleigh, created an international incident in Guyana against Spain that resulted his the reinstitution of the death penalty by James. and his subsequent beheading.
Formulation of a Realistic Permanent Settlement Business Plan: the Pivot in which the Company’s Better Angels Construct a New Settlement Strategy
In the years since 1614, Virginia had drifted into a disorderly and unsettled state, in which many uncertainties of a political, economic and social character vexed the colonists’ life. Economic conditions rendered uncertain their food and any benefits they hoped to derive from their labor, the severity of martial law made insecure both their rights and property and produced a general discontent, and there was need for the settlement of some definite and permanent policy regarding tenure that would define and guarantee their rights in the land. Complaints at these conditions had engendered faction among both [London] adventurers and [Virginia] planters, and had sadly reduced the “reputation of the business” which now must be restored to enlist the support either of new capital [investor-associations] or of new colonists [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 48.
The matters raised in the above quote intensified greatly during the course of 1616. As described in the previous section, the first and most obvious changes were the Pocahontas tobacco promotional campaign that overlapped over the winter of 1617, and the November 1616 demand for and commencement of an audit of the company books and the Smythe personal accounts. The later initiative without question constituted a demand for accountability, a concern for sustainability of the company, and a visible concern with the viability of the Virginia project. The audit was central to the first two issues, but left unaddressed was the situation in Virginia.
A new effort had started in 1616 in which London investors started to bypass the Company and found their own plantations using a new Dale incentive scheme combining company headrights (land and workforce benefits in return for settlement in Virginia) and the acceptance of a new vehicle, the investor-association-hundreds initiative, a derivative of the 1613 Dale’s Gift program extended in 1616 to investors.
I think that initiative significant for motivating more London investors not only to take involvement in the Company more seriously, but to also concern themselves with the development of a better business plan and reconcile it with a rational and implementable settlement strategy. Logically, concern with the London Company’s ability to implement that strategy effectively in Virginia underlay settlement development, and as such the need for company reorganization also raised its disruptive head into company discussions. The unsettling reports about Governor Argall also prompted some discussion as to what was going on and what remedy ought be applied.
In short, the audit was not the only internal dialogue that began during 1616 among London shareholders primarily, but that dialogue overlapped and was directly related to Virginia settlers, who because of the growth in tobacco planting were increasingly, some would fear, exclusively into tobacco planting. Virginia’s economic base entered the discussion, and given the rise of autonomous investor-association-hundreds, a thought or two regarding Virginia on site governance, self-governance, also entered the conversations.
These dynamics overlapped and became conflated creating a challenge to the company’s “monopoly” over colonial development, and the autonomy of both the hundreds and individual tobacco planter from company control or even direction. That discussion also was helped along by the land distribution ongoing in Bermuda, and the seriously increasing tension between Bermuda planters and the governor. To this, of course, we can add the activism of Sandys and his factional allies, many of which were wealthy and powerful aristocrats with their own thoughts about colonial development and its larger picture. That all this was interrelated, the reader should take for granted; that all of this was contained within the periodic shareholder meetings should not be taken for granted. The weakness of the Smythe administration, and the likelihood that Smythe himself had a bout with poor health in 1616 suggest these larger dynamics were not felt only by those that thought along the Sandys perspective, but by traditional merchant adventurers and by Smythe himself.
Affairs were manifestly bad for the Virginia Company in 1616, and they got much worse through 1617. While the audit necessarily divided the company shareholders, polarized them into contending parties, discussion on a pivot in settlement policy and the necessary company reorganization to implement such a policy did not divide and polarize anywhere near as disruptively so that constructive discussion could be had—even while the audit was not doing well.
Accordingly, beginning in 1616 and continuing through 1617 into 1618, the company, its shareholders, and its leadership engaged in discussions, negotiations, and expressions of ideas and issues that no doubt had their fair share of arguments, tensions, ruffled feathers, and unilateral demands and actions that over the extended period created a measure of consensus around certain points and issues. In 1618, probably prodded by the need to bring Argall to account, this consensus became expressed in the drafting and negotiation of company instructions to a new governor, who had was to take over while Argall returned to England for some resolve as to his future. It might come as a surprise to some readers, but that consensus, expressed in gubernatorial instructions were what Virginia historians have called “the Greate Charter”.
[999] While I have expressed my own thoughts on this evolution of a major structural and development transformation, I suggest the reader also consider how well they overlap (or don’t) with that of Craven as expressed in his landmark book, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company. Somewhat hidden in pp. 38-41, we can see the main factors that he feels underlay these gubernatorial instructions.
Whether Argall should be held chiefly responsible for the conditions which prevailed during his governorship, they were nevertheless among the foremost causes of dissatisfaction which prompted ever increasing attacks upon the manner in which the business [company plan and organization] was being conducted. Especially objectionable was the decay of the public [company-owned] land. In 1619, Sandys summed up the colony’s history in the preceding years, declaring that ‘as the Private Plantation [investor-association-hundred plantation] began thus to increase so contrary wise the estate of the Publique [what I call the company monopoly] [the colony] grew into utter consumption. [p.38] … [From] this breakup of the Company plantation into individual holdings had been accompanied by another development of paramount importance in the economic life of Virginia, which became also a cause of great dissatisfaction among the adventurers. … [the rise of tobacco planting, production and export]. Thus it may be seen that this signal development in the economic life of the colony coincided with Argall’s administration and the events within the company which prepared the way for Sandys’ rise to leadership in the courts. It was in many ways a fortunate discovery for Virginia, for the continuance of supplies in after years, when the company itself was frequently unable to provide them out of its own funds, depended upon the production of some staple in the sale of which there was hope for profit.[p. 39] … But at the same time there were disadvantages … the rapid development of tobacco [meant] the governor no longer held the same control over tillage with the result that planters neglected those commodities which had not proved profitable, and the economic life of the colony became one-sided through an unwholesome dependence on one commodity … [and] neglect of food crops … and the colony became increasingly dependent upon supplies from [England]. … This development was not only opposed to the best opinion in England … [but also] prompted discontent among a group of [shareholders] forming under the leadership of Sandys [p. 40] …
They watched with alarm the growing dependence on tobacco, not only because of the dangers they foresaw … resting so completely on one product, but also because of the disrepute into which the whole enterprise might fall when instead of serving public ends for which it had been founded, it supported only a vice which … the majority of their fellow countrymen condemned … [in addition with ] no progressive program for continued growth of the colony [what I label a permanent settlement strategy] … [the company] appeared to be actively interested in little more than the success of the Magazine [p. 41] [999]
The symmetry of Craven’s 999 assessment and my own, I hope, is clear and obvious. Starting from different vantage points and pursuing different research objectives we arrive at largely the same point why 1616 fears for a sustainable colony prompted a shareholder rebellion and activism by the Sandys faction against the Smythe administration. It is also apparent we share the belief the tobacco monoculture first established itself in Virginia during these very early years—and it did so because of Virginia-laden dynamics rather than those imposed by the Virginia Company per se.
I do believe strongly that several structural deficiencies, the lack of non-commodity currency being the most devastating, and the inherent structural incapacity of the 1606 regulated joint stock Virginia Company as a vehicle for sustained permanent settlement, i.e. a lasting and functional English colony, not to mention the unwillingness of the Crown to understand and participate in a true public-private partnership was the inherent coup de grace for the Jamestown colony. All in all, many of these faults lay in the colony’s experimental nature, but that could have been overcome had not the experiment been launched on the eve of a great civil war which by its nature doomed any shared national purpose that inevitably underlaid the venture.
Indeed, remarkably, while it is likely many believe that tobacco was pursued to the degree it was because of the desire of London investors for quick profits, the opposite view in London among active shareholders wanted a diversified economy, and sustained balanced economic growth. That a prospective tobacco monoculture imperiled the ability of the company to govern and conduct affairs in Virginia by weakening its provincial government, particularly the governor, had impressed itself on Sandys, and likely many small shareholders, allegedly the most greedy for quick profits, confirms the interrelations with company organization and sound political administration.
With so many concerns and pressures manifesting themselves in this period, the character of the Company meetings changed, and increased shareholder attendance and participation in shareholder meetings was a radical departure from pre-1612 charter shareholder meetings. With the addition of well-placed and motivated activists joined the smaller shareholders so that a new cadre of “aristocratic/gentry” with strong links to court factions (like Southampton, Pembroke, Cavendish, even Warwick) diluted Smythe’s status position, exposed his dependence on the king, and most importantly made it apparent even to him that serious change was necessary. Given a large body of M.P.’s that were shareholders—with most in alliance with Sandys–their involvement in such meetings created momentum amid a cacophony of chatter that in some quarters was characterized as sedition.
That activist clamor contained anti-trading merchant adventurer monopoly overtones , and a loud, and disruptive anti-Spanish element, that seemed to be advocating something a akin to privateering in Bermuda had to disturb the previous domination of Smythe as he conducted shareholder meetings in the downstairs of his London house. As Smythe joined with his fellow shareholders in working out a plan for settlement and a company reorganization sufficient to that task, it was never lost to him that other divisions, in the Somers Company, and an autonomous resident community in Virginia were also restive, and had their own ideas on the matters. Even if it was able to work out a formal settlement plan-company reorganization, there were rough seas in store for the Company over the next years.
The Chronology in Drafting the Greate Charter
Shareholder meetings during 1617 must have been contentious (Craven calls them ‘acrimonious’ (p. 47), and because of Bermuda and Argall’s implosion they intensified in 1618. In the process of dialogue and larger attendance, which seemingly would support Sandys, may have fostered some consensus that reorganization and settlement plan was necessary to restore order in both colonies. Whatever came out of that discussion was distilled into “instructions’ for the new governors (De La Warr and Yeardley), probably by Sandys (or Ferrar) and negotiated out with Smythe and probably Johnson.
At any rate it was Smythe who issued the instructions and who signed off on them. The instructions were sent with each governor, who upon their arrival in Virginia were intended to conduct the pivot in the settlement and a company reorganization. I do not know if the instructions given to De la Warr in May were substantially the same instructions provided to Yeardley in November 18th, and carried off in January when he left London? All we can say for sure is the final instructions could not have come after November, 1618 [99] (see Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 1934), p. 181).
Logic hints De La Warr’s instructions were completed previous of his setting sail in May 1618. This implies a final major discussion in the annual committee and shareholder meetings in late March and April 1618 were salient and impactful in constructing the core of the Greate Charter. Smythe is very much still in charge, and he signed off on all of them. There is no reference by any source I have read that new discussions on the matter reopened previous to the appointment of Yeardley. De la Warr’s instructions were returned, unopened, to London on news of his death. Nearly all commentators attribute the content to Sandys, but I am inclined to see him and his allies as the advocates for a new view of settlement policy and corporate reform that somehow and to some degree achieved a relative consensus in these meetings.
Of note, I have been unable to find any reference to negative action or statement from James—other than his exasperated quote about the discussion in the shareholder meetings at times bordered on seditious—which was not made in this time period. The matter never came up in post-1623 investigations, scandals, and court-privy council decisions.
In any event De la Warr died at sea (June), probably around Nova Scotia, the cause a sickness which struck the boat’s passengers. His body was transported to Virginia—where De La Warr was buried. The ship, Neptune, had further problems with wind and storms and did not arrive in Virginia until Aug 16th 1618. At some point the Neptune returned to England, presumably with the instructions unopened; Likely this was around October, 1618. Given Argall’s personality and that he had been alerted by Warwick, Argall did become aware he was recalled to London, His ally in London, the Earl of Warwick, had time to warn him, and send over a ship for his use. Argall left Virginia seemingly under the employ of Warwick. Following this flight an extended multi-year investigation-hearing in London then followed, which, amazingly, culminated in his knighting by the King and his appointment of Admiral of a fleet to battle the Dutch.. Credit Warwick for that, I and others suspect. Argall died in that expedition.
We do not know specifically when London knew of De La Warr’s death, and when specifically it started to focus on his replacement and nominate him. Aside from his appointment by Smythe on November 16th, we know Yeardley was knighted by the King on November 24th, and officially appointed governor on November 30, 1618 by the shareholder court. We do not know whether any changes were made to De La Warr’s instructions, but given the bruhaha regarding Yeardley’s knighting [999], any major disputed change would have been made public, or expressed at some point in the four year battle that ensued. This may be an important insight on the continued validity of the instructions after De la Warr’s death reached in London; the change in governors did not seem to have resulted in any alteration of the earlier instructions issued to De la Warr.
Yeardley set sail in January 1619, and arrived in Virginia in April. Smythe was not replaced as Treasurer until April 29, 1619, and so was still in charge of the Virginia Company when Yeardley left London. The change in Company leadership was known at the first session of the Virginia Assembly in July 30, 1619. The presiding officer was a Sandy’s ally, former Speaker of Parliament John Porys who came to be known as not an admirer of Yeardley. The two had traveled together in January. Yeardley’s departure from the Smythe camp likely came while Yeardley was in Virginia. Review Craven’s Dissolution, Chap IV, p. 81 and update knighthood
As to what those instructions were, Craven, in my opinion has resolved that issue in its entirety. The content and form of the instructions are available and can be found today. Again, Craven is most specific as to the central issues discussed in 1618 in particular, and why these issues were singled out for action:
The acrimonious debates of two years had by 1618 clarified the opinion of the courts [shareholder quarterly-annual meetings] concerning remedies necessary to the reestablishment of the company fortunes. There were sharp differences of conviction as to the responsibility for previous errors, but there was little disagreement on the policies now to be followed. It was clear enough that the alarming disposition of the colonists to devote their time almost wholly to tobacco [which I inject was just in its very early production rate] must be checked, and that in its stead their efforts must be directed to the production of food and a large variety of staple commodities for which the English market was dependent upon foreign countries. … It was also expected to win for the colony a secure position in English trade, and thereby support the revenues of the company which was a matter of primary concern to the adventurers [shareholders] whether viewed from the point of their own investment or in the light of plans for the further growth of the colony [pp.47-8]
Before inaugurating, this [the new] program, however, it was necessary to reform certain conditions of life and labor in the colony. [I would suggest Craven regards these as preconditions for the successful implementation of the new business plan]. In the years since 1614 Virginia had drifted into a disorderly and unsettled state in which many uncertainties of a political, economic and social character vexed the colonists’ life…. [including] uncertain their food and any benefits they hoped to derive from their labor, the severity of martial law made insecure both their rights and property and produced a general discontent, and there was need for the settlement of some definite and permanent policy regarding tenure that would define and guarantee their rights in the land. … The courts of 1618 devoted their chief attention, therefore to certain preliminary reforms of which the settlement of land tenure, the abolition of martial law, and the establishment of the Virginia Assembly are among the most important. They had set for themselves an ambitious program, and they were engaged in nothing more than an attempt to set their house in order with the hope of providing the most favorable circumstances for the success of that program … It had been the purpose of the company, read Yeardley’s instructions ‘to lay a foundation whereon a flourishing state might in process of time by the blessing of Almighty God be raised’.[pp. 48-9; the instructions quote cited in “Instructions to Governor Yeardley, 1618”, Virginia Magazine of History II (1894), p. 154].
It is at this point when the reader ought to be informed of the dual historiographic interpretation that through the almost one hundred years since Craven’s interpretation (1932) has plagued the understanding of the instructions that became the Greate Charter. In the section below we will contrast the interpretation of the leading American scholar, Charles A. Andrews, issued in 1933 a year after Warren’s, with that of Warren.
To clarify the position taken in this history, I conclude this section with my summary of the interpretation I adopt, which largely reflects that of Warren, expressed in my wording and congruent with the conceptual design, goals and purposes of this book.
The reorganization was intended to create capacity at the provincial level, propped up the centrality of the governor, and anchored him with sound advice from a Council and elected delegates from plantations and the hundreds, all resident shareholders, who could advise and assist the implementation of the pivot, better ensuring attainment of the desired objectives. In so doing the provincial level would be able to guide, coordinate, and lead in the settlement plan pivot, while offering a meaningful partnership to the lower units of economic and political development: he hundreds.
We now call that initiative “the Greate Charter”, but offer from the start of this discussion that it never was a charter, a systematic or comprehensive integrated long-term plan, but rather the opposite, a short term plan intended to “get the ball rolling”, and most importantly to inject into the Virginia Company a coherence and capacity to manage the first experiment of English colonization so that it would become sufficiently resilient with capacity to effectively manage the company vision of future growth of the colony.
I would add that at this point in 1618 there was no thought the company would lose its charter, that the king would assume direct management of the colony, or any other transition of governance from the company was conceptualized. The goal in 1618 was to preserve viability of the company and make possible its growth under its then-present management consistent with the king’s charter.
Understanding the Making of the Greate Charter: In 1618 the Twig of
Virginia Political Development was not Bent Towards Representative Democracy:
Colonial Virginia has been a victim of its own historiography. Not without some joy, it cannot be easily summarized, but the turn of the century writings of Virginia’s early colonization, now pretty discredited injected their own bend in the twig of Virginia historiography which despite its repudiation still leaves its mark on the history of first migration Virginia, and the political and economic development encompassed by that period.
The bend in the Virginia twig of historiography centers around the 1618 Greate Charter, and in particular the implications of its creation of the initial Virginia Assembly in 1619. By distorting the meaning of that reform, and focusing the narrative on a single political structure we lose sight of the larger picture at the time, the chronology of how the colony became settled, and the reasons for, and impact of the Virginia Company on Virginia political and economic development. We lose almost completely the reasons for the dissolution of the Company—and the reason why the Crown took over its development—and proceeded to ignore it for the entire reign of Charles I.
Sadly, and I mean that sincerely, we have to pause and understand the bend in Virginia’s historiography and the distortions it brings into the narrative of colonial Virginia. The bend starts with early twentieth century historians most prominent of which are Brown, Osgood, Wertenbaker, Breen and Charles A Arthur (among others)—it is the last with whom we will dwell on as representative of approach.
(Insert: Remember Perry and Kupperman, as bookends, 1947 and 1996, with Jamestown 400th)
American historical commentators have, in my opinion, focused too heavily on Edwin Sandys, sometimes for good reasons, but all too often to create in the reader the impression the Virginia Company shareholders had accepted as one of its remedies for Virginia’s political and economic development an idea of Sandys to create a representative institution that could connect the shareholders of dispersed geographies into a institution representative of Virginia’s shareholders. An important element of this approach to the reforms and reorganizations of 1618, usually collapsed and labeled as the Greate Charter is an overstatement of the role of Sandys, and, for that matter, an overstatement of the impact of the Greate Charter itself. Indeed it is the crown jewel of the Virginia Company, and its put on a pedestal treatment is accompanied by a degradation of the role of Thomas Smythe, the merchant adventurers otherwise known as greedy shareholders, and the central role of the Virginia Company as the first experiment of English colonization.
As such Sandys was believed to be advocating something more than the annual shareholder meeting which was the body to which the Virginia Company was accountable. Shareholder democracy is what we call it today, and in the minds of many commentators, Sandys somewhere in the back of his mind wanted in Virginia a institution that was capable of being more than that. After all, that Virginia Assembly is our today’s House of Burgesses of Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or Give me Death fame. That Virginia Assembly was a seed that became “a little Parliament”, or at least a “little legislature”. In this Virginia Assembly a multitude of commentators see the initial notes of the song of American democracy.
For what little it is worth, I do not—and neither does Craven. As to why we should care— after all so, so many years in the past how could it hurt. Let’s create our democratic myth to sustain our exceptionalism and school children from centuries on will realize the essence of how America became democratic—and Virginians will believe they were the “first on the democratic” block.
The answer to this is that it does matter, if we are to understand what is actually going on in 1618. We should understand just what the Virginia Company did, or didn’t do, and understand to what extent the Virginia Company did, or did not, leave a “seed” of American democracy in its corporate heritage. It did not. It did, however, leave a private corporate structure which in the course of fifty to one hundred years evolved in a little democratic legislature—composed of delegates who represented not the Virginia people, but the Virginia planter elite. My motto is “give me better accuracy or give me oblivion”.
In the past, many historians were consciously drawing a direct line to Sandys and his Greate Charter, to the House of Burgesses, then to the Virginia leadership in the Revolution, followed by the making of the Constitution, and then holding the Office of Presidency through thirty-one of the first thirty-five years of the Republic. Without any doubt that should put Massachusetts in her proper place as secondary to Virginia in the history of America. Sorry, but Sandys is not the first to travel the path to American democracy.
But I will be happy to concede he was of primary influence in creating a body within the Virginia Company, a structure that was designed to better link the Virginia shareholders to the London shareholders so to devise a corporate structure that could participate in the overall corporate decision-making, in return for its assistance in the implementation—and conformity—to those decisions and policies. To be sure, that structure proved very helpful in very short order to shareholders and residents of Virginia in that it allowed them to make decisions on their own when left to their own devices by London. By that time the Virginia Company no longer governed Virginia—the king did, but he had other things to do with his time.
Craven’s position—The unusual attention devoted to the political side [by historians] of these reforms has somewhat beclouded the intentions of the adventurers [shareholders]. They had set for themselves an ambitious program and they were engaged in nothing more than an attempt to set their house in order with the hope of providing the most favorable circumstances for the success of that program. [Translated into governor’s instruction the optimistic hope of a better future] … Such statements when considered alone, and unrelated to the movement from which they sprang, can be given an interpretation that is especially political, to do so [however] is to lose the the full scope of what the London adventurers [shareholders] attempted in 1618. To attribute to them any idea of creating a body politic either politically or economically independent of the company and of England is to credit them with an idea that is compatible neither with contemporary theories of colonization nor with reason. [p.49]
Political reform was merely only one phase of a much broader reorganization of the company’s affairs. [i.e. they were rectifying deficiencies in the company’s shareholder decision-making and accountability of its leadership to those shareholders], and to seize upon it as the most important feature of this work [reorganization of the company] is to neglect several other aspects of more immediate significance. The reforms in Virginia were followed by a similar setting in order of affairs and the machinery of the company [in London]. The rights and duties of all offices and official bodies within the corporation were restated, and set down in a long document drawn up and ratified by the adventurers [shareholders] in quarter court. [This references to their document “Orders and Constitutions in Forces” (Tracts, Vol. III, No. 6)]. Their desire was to reduce confusion, to replace uncertainty by certainty, and to settle upon definite policies which would serve not only as the foundation of an expanding and prosperous colony, but to eliminate all possibilities for disagreement and factional strife of the type that had for some time hindered the advance of the business [the company and its objectives]. To one who thus surveys the whole field of attempted reforms in 1618, that year assumes its proper place in the history of Virginia as the period in which the company endeavored to clear the deck for action, and to prepare the way for the application of those economic policies whereupon Sandys in after years labored to build a prosperous and thriving colony.” [Underlining Mine, for emphasis]
The intended reforms in the conditions of the colony were put in effect according to several commissions, ordinances, and instructions prepared by the company and sent with Governor Yeardley to Virginia … His first immediate task was to secure sufficient food supplies for the maintenance of the colonists, and to ‘draw on’ the many people who were preparing to go to Virginia, but had been discouraged by the late decay of the public store [Magazine and the use and role of Company-owned lands]. He was especially charged to stop ‘the excessive applying of Tobacco, and the neglect to plant Corn which of all other things is most necessary for the increase of the plantation’. [These were in fact among the first statutes approved by the first session of the Virginia General Assembly [See L. G. Tyler, Narrative of Early Virginia (New York, 1907, pp. 264-5] [p. 50, Dissolution]
Of all the papers entrusted to Yeardley, however, the one designed to effect the most important of these preparatory reforms has been enshrined in history as the ‘greate Charter’—a term which was applied to it by the burgesses of the first [Virginia] assembly. Curiously enough a great deal of its historical fame has rested upon a misinterpretation of its character. Proceeding from the assumption that the chief significance in the events of 1618 was the triumph of a political liberalism, the historians of Virginia have reasoned that it [the company reform/reorganization] must have been a political character. But unable to find among the surviving records, a document which corresponded to the character thus given it, they have assumed that it was lost, or proceeding more carefully, have concluded that the term [greate Charter] referred to several different papers providing for political changes and guarantees, important parts of which no longer exist. They then allowed their imagination free play in its reconstruction and placed in our history as the very cornerstone of American liberty, a document totally without historical foundation. … The error is more interesting because the real Charter though unrecognized has not been unknown. The Library of Congress possesses a copy of it [and it later was included in a volume of the company records]. It was published in a slightly mutilated form as “Instructions to Governor Yeardley, 1618” by Virginia Magazine of History in 1894. [Craven then discussed the consideration and approval’s passed in the course of the first assembly in 1619 (see Craven’s footnote 9, p. 53, Dissolution). It is here the earlier quotation of a ‘flourishing state’ is taken] [pp. 52-3, Dissolution]
In Virginia, the creation of the General Assembly was a not too subtle message to those in Virginia, and those who might in the future settle or invest there, that the Gates-Dale military policy system (described in earlier modules), and its harsh and much despised military code and method of operation, was over.
“And there were few things of recent years that had done more to bring the business into disrepute than the repeated and loud complaints of martial law in Virginia. These complaints were a strong factor in discouraging Englishmen from giving financial support to the enterprise or from considering Virginia as a place to live. To remove this blemish on the colony’s reputation by some reform of the [corporate] government was an almost indispensable preliminary to any effort at establishing the company’s fortunes [99] p. 69, Dissolution]
The reform of the greatest immediate importance was the abolition of martial law and the substitution of the English common law. [To do so, the Company requested “the privy council [the King’s bureaucratic authority over colonial and foreign trade] to assist the company in a compilation of English laws suitable to the problems of Virginia. The [1612] Charter was especially careful to secure the equal enforcement of these laws in all parts of the colony, and to require that all laws for the government of purely local affairs within private estates [plantations and investor association-hundreds] should not run counter to English laws.[99] p. 70, Dissolution]
With the common law came also the English magistrate [i.e. in Virginia, the Governor and those entrusted by the Company to conduct the application of law in Virginia, i.e. the justices of the peace which were created by the Virginia Assembly, and so “according to Yeardley’s instructions “The government of Virginia … was to be [conducted] made by ‘Magistracy and just laws’, and the provision was made for the support of these magistrates out of the proceeds from [the company’s] public lands [99] p. 70, Dissolution]
Again, in an effort to remove the stigma of martial law, the company wanted to replicate those practices and institutions with which the settler and investor were most familiar. Accordingly names and internal procedures of the company shareholder bodies were copied from those of English governance institutions. “There was a marked similarity between the [corporate] government of the colony, and that of the company after 1619, which suggests that the latter’s organization may have been a model. The company was governed by a treasurer, council, and assembly of adventurers [shareholders]. In the public statements of the company, especially in appeals for colonists, there was much talk of Virginia’s resting on the support of two groups of adventurers [shareholders], those in London who adventured their capital, and the planters in Virginia who adventured their lives and labor, both equally contributing to and enjoying the honor of its success. The establishment of the [Virginia] assembly may have been partly due to an effort to build up the spirit of the planters by the feeling that like the adventurers [shareholders] at home, they too enjoyed a voice in [the company’s] government. [99] p. 71, Dissolution]
Of considerable note is the reforms and reorganization applied in Virginia 1618-19, were copied over to Bermuda in 1619-1620: “The Virginia Assembly predates the establishment of a similar body in Bermuda by only one year. The adventurers [shareholders] of the younger company undertook in 1619 to reform some of the conditions in Bermuda of which complaint had been made by a program not unlike that adopted by the Virginia Company in the preceding year. A significant feature of this program was the provision for a general assembly which met at its first session at the town of Saint George on August 1, 1620”, a reform and reorganization of which was not implemented by the like of Edwin Sandys (then Treasurer of the Virginia Company), but by Thomas Smythe (Treasurer of the Somers Company) [99] p. 68, Dissolution]
The dispersal of Virginia’s population from [predominately] Jamestown, first to Henrico, than in accordance with transfer of the servant workforce congruent with Dale’s Gifts (post 1613), and then the award of “colony within a colony” contracts with various investor-association-hundreds after 1616, created a new situation for the provincial equivalent level of company governance that then had to accommodate what was, in essence, a lower tier of governance, the plantation, city, or the hundred—a reality not dissimilar from the London Company recognizing that three thousand miles of water required the creation of a duplicate body of governance on the other side.
Both necessarily implied a degree of self-governance, which was inherent in governing across distance, time, and variety of local conditions. Indeed, I suspect strongly that Dale’s dispersal of population-workforce weakened his control over the colony, and set off what from London looked near chaos and inevitably to some degree required weakening of central control over workforce and public lands. Likely this exerted an impact on the character and operation of the military policy system, in effect making necessary a readjustment of not only the company monopoly, but its mode of colony management and economic growth.
That the autonomy created by the dispersion and the defacto weakening of the provincial control of the governor may have been a cause of Argall’s inability to live up to his instructions, and an irritating challenge to his personality, prompting deviations from London expectations that triggered the London development of the our “greate charter”. Headrights, of course, granted as an element of all this created an essentially private managed workforce paid for by the company—to which, as we shall see, Sandys had a fit in 1618 against Argall. In any case, by 1618 geographic dispersion of population and the resulting creation of autonomous centers of population required London to reorganize its management-governance.
Craven does not tackle this larger context, but he recognizes Virginia had become decentralized and that had weakened the governor’s ability to manage the colony—but mostly that decentralization applied to the London corporate governance which had to recognize the immutable reality of Virginia’s distance, time and local conditions and accommodate them into the company management of the colony. Thus Craven observes “Virginians lived under a dual authority, that of the company, and that of officials into whose hands was given the execution of policies determined upon by adventurers [shareholders and their officers]. Most of these [the latter, London-based] adventurers [shareholders] had never been to Virginia and had only a very superficial knowledge of conditions and problems there. As a result many policies and instructions which seemed wise in London proved to be impracticable in Jamestown. This meant friction, delay and often misunderstanding. [99] p. 73 Dissolution] In latter modules I will explore in some detail and thought the “dual authority” as applied in Virginia to the company officials “into whose heads was given the execution of policies”, i.e. resident company officials in Virginia.
As noted by Craven, the remedy to the inconsistency of decision-making caused by the “dual authority” of London and resident company officials entrusted to execute the policy in Virginia, could have been to increase the power (and autonomy) of the governor. No doubt warning bells must have gone off in London back in 1618 when this was considered; Argall reports were arriving in London, and from London’s perspective, excepting Warwick, the news was not good. In 1618 many perceived that a rogue governor was doing his thing in Virginia, and that was a prime reason they were engaged in these reforms and reorganization in the first place.
So they apparently turned to their version of a check and balance, the use of a General Assembly which included the governor, his Council, and shareholder representatives from the various geographies of the colony—the Burgesses. This in Craven’s words was “a wider distribution of authority in the colony which at the same time would not impair too greatly the necessary unity in leadership.” To clarify the parameters and process of decision-making in the colony—and company at large—“An Ordinance and Constitution for a Council and Assembly in Virginia”, the only copy of which today exists was the one sent to Yeardley in anticipation of his being replaced by a newly appointed Governor Wyatt (July 24, 1621) [99] p. 73 Dissolution].
Thus the company shifted to a body more thoroughly acquainted with the conditions in the colony the enactment of a large number of measure [jurisdiction over] dealing with local problems, which taken singly do not appear of great importance, but in sum total comprise one of the most important functions in government … many irritations were avoided by placing the enactment of laws governing the colonists’ daily life in the hands of their own representatives. But at the same time it did not diminish the authority of higher officials [in London]. [To secure London’s place in the corporate hierarchy] “the assembly was definitely limited by important restrictions” [including] “follow the laws, customs and government of England” … the governor held at all times the right of veto over any measure of the the assembly, and none of its laws [the Virginia Assembly] laws were to have any force unless ratified by a quarter court [of London shareholders].
[Indeed] At its work the assembly is shown again as a sort of greater council. It was much more than a legislative assembly [bold mine]. Questions of policy were considered, not only in the ratification of instructions from the company, but by petitions suggesting the initiation of new policies or changes in those already decided upon in London, and important judicial functions were to be performed. [As such these other non legislative functions constituted] … a more equitable administration of the new code of laws, and a security against any highhanded course by the governor such as some had felt to be one of their most legitimate grievances of Argall. It was one of the most valued privileges given the planter by the new government, and enabled the company to advertise in England that the ‘Governor is so restrained to a Counseil joyned with him, that he can doe wrong to no man, who may not have speedy remedy’. …
In short ‘the government of Virginia’ still centered in the London] company, and its [the London company] hand was only strengthened by better understanding, a better spirit, and stronger cooperation by the colonists’. [99] pp. 73-4, pp. 77-8 Dissolution].
Craven’s conclusion: There is nothing surprising nor especially radical about the the establishment of the Virginia Assembly. Its functions were of much the same general character as those of the older council [Council of State]. The instructions and laws of the company were given greater force through their reenactment by representative colonists.[A list of additional benefits is then provided, p. 77] … Nor did it interfere with the company’s right to full control over the life and development of the colony. Important questions of policy were still decided upon at London, and detailed instructions [to the governor] continued to issue forth from the London council…. All important officials for Virginia were selected by the [London] shareholders. In short, the ‘government of Virginia’ still centered in the company, and its hand was only strengthened
At this point it is useful to leap ahead by a year to understand how London—Sandys—would view the implementation of the instructions, and use them to support his vision and purposes. At that time he did not promote some grandiose future, nor a radical approach to Virginia governance, but one that was congruent with the continuation of the Company administration but which argued that under Company administration opportunities for growth and immigration to the colony were the result. In 1620 the Company published a “blog” pamphlet that announced to the public, as well as its political elite, that reform had occurred and was successful in removing past fears and rumors, and had restructured for growth. It was a 1620 version of “Virginia is for Lovers”.
The proper understanding of these changes in government can be had only by a better understanding, a better spirit, and stronger cooperation among the colonists[pp.77-8]. The proper understanding of these changes in government can be had only by their study in connection with the much broader program of reform and reorganization of which they were a natural and integral part. A perspective, more suitable than that ordinarily used in examining this part of Virginia’s history may be had by a glance at the use to which the adventurers [shareholders] put these reforms in their appeals for popular support. On July 1, 1620, the company published “A Declaration of the State of the colony and Affairs in Virginia” [declaring] ‘that the colony beginneth now to have the face and fashion of an orderly State, and as “such is likely to grow and prosper’ [and then goes on to elaborate on the themes listed above][99, p.78. Dissolution]]
… The position of the Virginia Assembly in the history of the company should be the same as that given it by its founders, as merely one of the very improvements made in the colony’s life. When studied in connection with other reforms of 1618, it is unnecessary to read back into history ideas and conceptions belonging only to more recent times. And while recognizing the great importance of the assembly’s later history, the accurate historian must seek the explanation of its origin in contemporary conditions rather than in more recent developments [underline mine] [99] p. 79, Dissolution]
Sandys (and Smythe’s) Settlement Business Plan: the Plans of Mice and Men …
The below are description of the instructions given to De La Warr—and later to Yeardley [99] See for First Division “London Company Instructions to George Yeardley, 18 November 1618” in Frank E. Grizzard Jr., and Boyd D. Smith, Jamestown Colony. 2007, p. 335-342; See for Second Division, Warren M. Billings, the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1975, “Beginning of Representative Government: the London Company Creates a General Assembly, pp. 37-8 —.
The First Division of Instructions
So in 1618 the two drafted (Sandys primarily) a new economic development strategy and incorporated within it a new land use and people-recruitment policy (the Greate Charter) that promised a realistic effort to break the permanent settlement logjam [99] See Osgood, Vol 1, p. 83. Craven opens up the subject of the content of the discussions by asserting the “acrimonious debates of the two years had by 1618 clarified the opinion of the courts [shareholder meetings] concerning the remedies necessary to the reestablishment of the company’s fortunes. There were sharp differences of conviction as to the responsibility for the previous errors, but there was little disagreement on the policies now to be followed” [in the gubernatorial instructions, and presumably agreement on the selection of Yeardley] [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, p. 47.
There were two divisions or parts in the instructions, which the second being more “political instructions” outlining corporate provincial institutions to be created to allow resident Virginia shareholders access to participating in Virginia Company policy-making, and the first a variety of topics ranging from corporate housekeeping, pulling back from the previous military policy system with concern for civil rights and secure land tenure for eligible settlers, integration of investor-hundreds-association plantations and settlements, setting up a more defined system of “local”, i.e. non provincial entities, requirements, and relationships, and setting parameters for Virginia’s economic base.
By dictum included in the Greate Charter instructions tobacco planting should be regulated and “efforts must be directed to the production of food and a large variety of staple commodities [produced and exported] for which the English market was dependent on foreign countries”. Virginia’s self-sufficiency was linked to English mercantile needs, both of which produced revenues necessary for sustaining and growing the colony. Yeardley was expressly ordered to stop “the excessive applying of Tobacco, and the neglect to plant Corn which of all other things is most necessary for the increase of that plantation [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, p. 50. This order was extended to the association-hundreds which were tasked with planting of many staples, orchards and livestock importation.
Craven calls attention that London had little taste for Virginia tobacco as its prime justification and benefit derived for and from Virginia and its colonial footprint had to be known as more than a mere “cloud of smoke”. If Americans have any thought that London or even the Company wanted tobacco above all else, and that blame for the monoculture rests upon them, the record is pretty clear—they didn’t. The problem was, as we assert as central to my thesis in this history, England did not have sufficient control over the day-to-day in Virginia that they were able to alter in any significant way what the Virginia’s did during this period of time. The Virginians continued to plant tobacco, and extend the plantation system into the hinterland still further.
So long as the colony for all practical purposes was concentrated in Jamestown, the body seemed as a “local council”, but Dale’s dispersion of the settler population required the council be updated to reflect that fact. Accordingly, to integrate these four new entities (Jamestown, Henrico, Charles City, and Kecoughtan (later Elizabeth City) into the emerging corporate provincial policy system, and offering a potential orderly administration that could be developed these Dale-created jurisdictions, formerly called hundreds, were instead called boroughs and congruent with the role of boroughs in England were intended to enjoy special status as a level of corporate governance, and was provided 3,000 acres for its use to pay its costs. In addition, acreage was set aside to pay for costs associated with the parish and its vestry. These were the initial company-related “Dale’s Gift” hundreds for the most part, or were defense and trade sites that had been used after 1606. All situated along the James River and/or Chesapeake Bay, they proved to be the economic and settlement core of the First Generation settlement—at least through the 1620’s.
The practices relied on by Dale to pay for the salaries and costs of resident company officials, including and especially the governor or his lieutenant, were reconfirmed in the Greate Charter instructions, as was the practice of augmenting these lands granted with company indentured servants, who were defined as “tenant by halves” with the governor receiving one half their produce or labor. Workforce access was the critical ingredient in the growth of a plantation and its access to capital and export markets. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, p. 55.
I have already commented these practices impacted the political and economic development of the future colony greatly, and were important to our explanation as to why Virginia evolved differently than other colonies. Most important was that these practices consciously blurred public and private responsibility of its Virginia officials and governance, provided them “first advantage” in the setting up of their own plantations, and provided them a workforce which was of immense value in a Virginia characterized by a continuous shortage of labor. That indenture magnified this first advantage dynamic.
One other, in my opinion likely consequence, given the relatively small number of individuals involved, and the very large number of settlers excluded for one reason or another, the first advantage nexus created an informal “small club” atmosphere, not unlike the proverbial J. R. Ewing (Dallas TV Show) “cattlemen’s club” (with Rolfe’s tobacco as a substitute and a shared bonding) where rivals came together to the benefit of all and formed a powerful protective forum that was both a sanctuary, a place to make deals and seize opportunities, and to express status. Admittance to this forum was aspirational to ambitious outsiders and therefore served as a model and created a deference to those in the club. What would a historian call these club members? An elite. This was a kernel of a once and future elite that will guide and shape the behavior and proclivities of the First Migration movers and shakers, adding to the Virginia Company a little-noticed, but critical aspect of its heritage to Virginia.
We will also understand how an unequal workforce and society was semi-consciously established by the Virginia Company—and how many observers, including Craven, thought the plantations they established were akin to a “manor”. While many commentators have credited other factors as responsible for these developments, I do not believe the Virginia Company’s role, which is fundamental to this question, can be ignored. The Greate Charter confirmed existing practice and legitimized the practices so they, by default, became incorporated not only in individual expectations, but as traditions of office and service in local and provincial government.
Because Argall had interfered with Dale’s dispersion and his settlement of indentured and former indentured settlers, Jamestown would for two years be sent new settlers to enable it to set up its corporate plantation. One might observe that a known deficiency regarding colonial Virginia was its lack of urban settlements, including a capital and port city, but it cannot be said that was a deliberate or conscious policy of the Virginia Company. To the contrary the Virginia Company desired to found larger urban-like settlements, and for that matter, so did the royal government after it took over in 1624.
The instructions also were intended to repair Argall’s damage done to Dale’s Virginia plantation settlement dispersal, the implementation of indentured servant land grants, the use and specifics of headrights. Clarifications were inserted into particular hundred’s contracts and an implicit approval for further hundred-association plantation investment underlie the instructions. A stress on increasing the size of the workforce was also stated, and the Company committed itself to send over workforce and to work with individual hundred-association investors to do so also.
Craven further states the Company committed itself to work with the associations and with the resident shareholders to work with them to resolve their concerns and criticisms. “Complaints at these conditions had engendered faction among both adventurers and planters, and had sadly reduced the reputation of the business [the Virginia Company] which must now be restored to enlist the support either of new capital or of new colonists” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, p. 48. If shareholders as individuals and groups were to settle in Virginia on their own dime then the Company had to make land and opportunity secure and accessible if these investors were to take the risk and to create an atmosphere where potential English settlers and other investors could be recruited.
Virginia’s reputation in 1618 worked against this and concrete pivot from the military policy system and a flexibility to each investor association to set up and grow its own plantation-hundred had to be offered. Incentives had to sweeten the deal, as well as a policy structure in Virginia that was capable of dealing with Virginia concerns close at hand, not in London. In short a capital attraction and economic development plan had to be created and implemented in short order. Necessarily, since these plans required policy and economic structures to be established in Virginia.
I would also add, the Company had accepted the donations from the Episcopal Church, made after the death of Pocahontas, mentioned above, to commence an Native American conversion program, which was included in the instructions to start at a location near Henrico. A “reservation” of 10,000 acres for the endowment of a college in which Native American children might be trained in religion [i.e. converted] and European values and occupations [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, p. 55.
It is with these concerns, a concerted movement away from Argall’s military style command and gubernatorial predominance of Virginia’s governance, the confirmation and support of private land titles, grants and their ability to manage their individual plantations and investment, and the setting in place of the company’s role in the growth of the economy and the management of the corporation’s affairs in Virginia which stood at the core of the second section of the instructions sent to the governors.
?? ll were important as the Company in these instructions intended to fashion an integrated and somewhat comprehensive revamp of its administrative practices and structures and provide the parameters of their authority necessary for integration, coordination and regulation. In that providing comfort and security to both future individual settlers and older ancient settlers, as well as to the new kid on the block, the private investor settlers with their plantations and hundreds-association contracts [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, p. 57.
The Second Division of Instructions
Because there is some dispute, and several meanings, intentions and purposes attached to the institutions created in the second divisions, I thought it best to provide the reader with the exact (somewhat) of the relevant instruction, as cited in Billings. The second division opens up by stating it was sent from
the Treasuror (sic), Council [shareholder quarterly meeting held on November 28,1616)] and Company of Adventurerers and planters of the Citty of London [the formal name of the Virginia Company]. … Knowe yee That wee the said Treasuror, Council and Company takeing into our Careful Consideration the present state of the said Colony in Virginia: and intending by the divine assistance of settle such a forme of government ther as may bee to the greatest benefit and comfort of the people, and whereby all Injustice, greviance and oppression may bee prevented and kept of as much as is possible from the said Colony have thought fitt to make our Entrance by ordayning and establishing such supreame Counsells as may not only bee assisting to the Governor for the time being in the administration of Justice, and executing of other duties to his office belonging, but also by their vigilent Care and prudence may provide as well as for remedy of all inconvenyencies groweing from tyme to tyme, As also for the advancing of Encrease strength, satabillitie and prosperytie of said colony [.]
Wee therefore the said Treasuror Counsell and Company, by authoritie directed to us by his Majestie under his greate seale upon mature deliberation doe hereby order and declare, That from hence forward ther bee towe [two] Supreame Councells in Virginia for the better government of said Colony as aforesaid. The one of which Counsells to be called the Counsell of State and whose office shall Cheiflie bee assisting with ther Care advise and circomspection to said Governor shall be Chosen, nominated and displaced from tyme to tyme by us the Treasuror Counsell and Company … [names followed setting in place the new Council of State] …
The other Counsell more generall to be called by the Governor and yeerly of Course, and no oftener but for very extreordynarie and Important occasions shall consist for the present of the said Counsell of State and Tow [two] Burgesses out of every towne hunder [hundred] and other particuler plantation to bee respetially [i.e. especially] Chosen by the inhabitants. Which Counsell shall be called the generall Assemblie, wherein as also in the said Counsell of State all matters shall be decyded determined and ordered by the greater part of the voyces [voices] then present, Reserving alwaies to the Governor a negative voice [veto]. And this generall Assembly shall have free power to treat Consul and conclude as well as all emergant occasions concerning the publique [public] weale of said Colony and the good government thereof
In another statement the London Company stipulates that it may issue no order to the new General Assembly which is binding to it, unless it is ratified by the Virginia General Assembly—and vice versa. The London Company further orders such actions and decision of the Virginia General Assembly must conform to English law, and administrative and legal custom. There is, of course, no reference to any sovereignty other than the King, to which both London and Virginia are subject. For the record, that also does not include orders of Parliament—which in several decades will be very important.
As to whether or not this is a “little Parliament” in the making, or a representative democracy with an electoral franchise of its citizens who elect the Burgesses there is no mention or suggestion. Others such as Charles Andrews and Herbert Osgood imply and flirt with the notion this was an “democratic experiment ([99] p. 182 Andrews, Vol. 1)—before finally conclude that “the drafting of the charter of grants and liberties [the instructions] was the company’s reply to the complaints that had been accumulating of Argall’s way of managing affairs in Virginia. In essence he summarizes the intent as:
It was a long document, a veritable code of privileges, orders and laws, that dealt with the affairs of the colony … and was designed to bind the members of the colony and their heirs forever. It put an end and introduced a system of POPULAR [?] [mine] control that was undoubtedly copied from the practice of the company itself in its quarterly gatherings of the generality to the rule of Gates and Dale [our military policy system] [i.e. Company] [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 1, p. 182
To the extent that the Company’s right and power as an regulated English joint stock corporation to set for itself its own approved measures of decision-making in open shareholder meetings during which eligible shareholders can exercise voice vote, and to which the Company extended that right to shareholders in Virginia unable to participate in London meetings to have their own such body is nothing more than a form of corporate ‘shareholder democracy’. I fully agree with Craven’s assertion that the Virginia Company “attempted in 1618 … to attribute to [the instructions] any idea of creating a body politic either politically or economically independent of the company and of England is to credit [the Company] with an idea that is compatible neither with contemporary theories of colonization nor with reason. … To one who thus surveys the whole field of attempted reforms in 1618, that year assumes its proper place in the history of Virginia as the period in which the company endeavored to clear the deck for action and to prepare the way for the application of those economic policies whereon Sandys in after years labored to build a prosperous and thriving colony [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 49-50.
In this spirit just as the company had altered the first policy system in Virginia to create a second, the military policy system, it was in 1618 creating yet a third policy system that more precisely reflected its own corporate policy system extended to colonists-shareholder in Virginia. The reforms in Virginia were followed by a similar setting in order of the affairs and machinery of the company [as existed in England, and were lacking in Virginia]. The rights and duties of all officers and official bodies within the corporation were restated and set down in a long document drawn up and ratified by the [London] adventurers in quarter [shareholder] court [99] Orders and Constitutions, in Force, Tracts, III, No. 6; and “Instructions to Governor Yeardley, 1618, Virginia Magazine of History, II (1894), p. 154; See pp. 53-4, footnote 9]. Their desire was to reduce confusion to order, to replace uncertainty to certainty, and to settle upon definite policies which would serve not only as the foundations of an expanding and prosperous colony, but to eliminate all possible opportunities for disagreement and factional strife that had for some time hindered the advance of the business [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 1932, pp. 48-49.
The unusual attention devoted to the political side of these reforms [Virginia Assembly, including the House of Burgesses and Council of State in particular] has somewhat beclouded the real intentions of the adventurers [Smythe and Sandys and the London shareholders]. Arguably, the best support Craven provides that these instructions were agreed to by both Sandys and Smythe is an undisputed fact: only one year later (1619), Bermuda (Somers Island Company), under Sir Thomas Smythe its Treasurer and CEO, created its own General Assembly, replicating much of the earlier Virginia reform structure. The relevant background feature was its accommodation to previous land distribution actions to private shareholder investor groupings {aka tribes as they were called in Bermuda, and corporation-association-hundreds in Virginia] and logically movement from monopoly company ownership of the land to contract-driven private ownership of the Company’s land and the coexistence of retained public-Company-land as well.
One can hint the Company had stumbled upon land redistribution in both colonies and by 1618 it was evident a need had been created a need for correcting errors in contracts, confirming individual rights as well as obligations, filling in the gaps, clarifying ambiguities, and setting in place relationships between the Virginia Company/Somers Company provincial level authority, and the private actions and requirements of a colony within a colony. Both reforms clearly retained final authority for the corporate body in London. One final point after a year in operation the Bermuda General Assembly, having passed thirty-two approved actions, sent them to London corporate body for their final ratification. The Treasurer and CEO in that year, 1620, was Edwin Sandys.
They had set for themselves an ambitious program and they were engaged in nothing more than an attempt to set their house [i.e. the resident Virginia Company] in order with the hope of providing the most favorable circumstances for the success of that program. There was much talk of making Virginia into a regular and well-ordered state. It had been the purpose of the company, read Yeardley’s instructions, ‘to lay a foundation whereon a flourishing state might in process of time by the blessing of Almighty God be raised”. While such statements, when considered alone and unrelated to the movement from which they sprang, can be given an interpretation that is especial political, to do so is to lose the full scope of what the London adventurers attempted in 1618. To attribute to them any idea of creating a body politic either politically or economically independent of the Company and of England is to credit them with an idea that is compatible neither with contemporaries theories of colonization nor with reason. ..
Yeardley, as Governor, (and Porys, the Speaker) was instructed to establish and call into session two new and potentially powerful institutions: a House of Burgesses, and an Assembly. These of course were added to the existing governance institutions, the governor/lieutenant governor and his Council of State [the latter body enjoyed multiple names and for clarity I refer to it as the Council of State). Members of the council were appointed by London through action of its executives and the shareholder quarterly meeting (court). Appointment was for life, subject to several serious situations.
The council of state was the council set in place in the original 1606 instructions and which was formed in the first days of Jamestown as the governor’s council. Up to 1618 its function was certainly advisory, but in practice actively engaged in policy-making, and in the absence of the governor would assume authority, even to the point of electing a replacement governor who would conduct affairs until ratified or replaced by the London authorities. The council carried over to the military policy system and in that period performed civil duties as well as manage units of the military. governor from 1606 onward had appointed a “council” which served as his advisors, and in the interim between the governor’s absence serve and or elect his successor subject to London ratification. The Greate Charter extended this body and specified its role and scope of authority to some degree.
The real troublemaker is the creation of the Assembly, in particular the House of Burgesses, and the inclusion of the Council and the Governor in one grand body that meets at least, and preferably no more, than one meeting a year. I and certainly Craven, argue that it is a replication of the Company’s own shareholder annual meeting that engaged its individual shareholders in an annual election of its leadership and a consummate decision-making body for major decisions and courses of action.
As such it is a corporate decision-making body, but certainly its application to a far-away colony without an active government system in place as there was in England invites what ought to be thought of is decisions that overlap into governmental function. Usually, the word used in this is “self-government”—and to the extent that the colony is directly under the authority of a royal governor that would be more appropriate. In Virginia’s instance under the Company, the better term would, I suggest, be “self-administration”.
The distinction may be semantic, but it does have the virtue of tempering ones aspirations. It taps into injecting a geographic decentralization in the Company’s organizational structure rather than creating a seed of the central decision-maker in a far away geographic location. The first instance of English colonization in North America it may be, but that venture was entrusted to a public-private partnership in the form of a privately-controlled and managed joint stock corporation that through increased “regulation” was itself governed and managed by its own shareholders. In 1618 it is hard to think anyone, especially James I thought otherwise (although Edwin Sandys is another matter to be sure).
Entrusted by its charter, that corporation had the right to exercise limited governmental powers, but was never contemplated to be a government itself. That possibility was probably contemplated in 1630 Massachusetts, with its charter safely stowed away in Massachusetts. But if Thomas Smythe, still very much in charge of the Company, had thoughts similar to Winthrop is very hard to believe.
It was his signature on the instructions to the governor. And whatever his English governmental dreams might have been, Sandys likely did not intend his corporate reforms to be hardened into self-government for the colony, at least in 1618, when he was not yet in position to control the Company, nevermind the English government; it is at least premature, and likely a bridge too far in governance in this period. That events over the next decades could make such thoughts possible, even if unlikely, is another matter. For this module, at least, we live in 1618 to the extent possible.
The Virginia Assembly in 1618, and after during the Company hegemony, was a Virginia joint stock corporate body in a mutual agreement entrusted with administering it oversight and conveying its input into the London corporate headquarters. On this basis the investors and settlers could feel comfortable in their rights and in a policy-making process to which their interests and ideas could be considered and dealt with. This conforms to the goals in evidence during the 1628 discussion in London, and to the agreement no doubt negotiated between Smythe and Sandys.
I also have to confront the reality that the instructions in that they are based upon a geographical representation at the annual meeting are not a mirror image of the London policy corporate system might need some explanation. We forget the London Company was only one of two sub-companies in the Virginia Company. The Company founded in 1606 was structured around a geographical basis, one company established to represent the interests of Bristol and the outer ports, and the other, London.
In 1618 the other sub-company was off in the northern wildernesses of New England primarily, and outside of our purview in this module. But geography played a role in the larger Virginia Company structure and policy-making, and the injection of geography in the instructions regarding the House is an acknowledgement that the geography of Virginia’s settlement pattern and the different actors (association-hundreds) associated with that settlement pattern were all effectively shareholders and had to be included in its Virginia corporate policy-making structure.
Finally, Craven offers several relevant observations that complete our discussion of the nature of the Assembly as conceived in the instructions of 1618:
Martial law [especially considering the recent actions by Argall] had become the most objectionable feature of the old government, and there is good reason for the statement that the introduction to the common law was considered the most valuable part of the political changes provided in 1618. … In papers submitted by the colonists [in the 1623 London trials-investigations of the Company] their chief complaint of the old regime was the harsh and cruel law under which they had been forced to live, and their main argument in behalf of the new [Greate Charter policy system] was the justness and mildness of its government. [Craven then inserts the emphasis on the application of justice through mobile circuit and then fixed jurisdiction judicial bodies was further evidence of the importance of the creating a common law infrastructure in Virginia—a important priority and achievement of the Greate Charter period]
[ ME: In this manner we can see the “inheritage” of English common law in early Virginia was not by osmosis or by memory, but by semi-conscious institutionalization by the parent body through allowance-establishment of self-administration]
[Accordingly,]There was a marked similarity between the government of the colony, and that of the Company after 1619, which suggests that the latter’s organization may have been a model. The Company was governed by a treasurer, council, and assembly of adventurers. In the public statements of the company, especially in appeals for colonists, there was much talk of Virginia’s resting upon the support of two groups of adventurers, those in London who adventured their capital, and the planters in Virginia who adventured their lives and labor, both equally contributing to, and enjoying the honor of its success. The establishment of the [Virginia] assembly may have been partly due to an effort to build up the spirit of the planters by the feeling that like the adventurers at home they too enjoyed a voice in the government. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 70-1.
Tobacco and the Magazine in the Greate Charter Instructions
Interestingly, instructions also specified actions regarding the controversial Magazine. P.50-1 link up with Magazine section below!!!
The rapid rise of tobacco and its export after 1616, and the amazing demand it found in England, placed the company “Magazine”, and its chief official, the Cape-Merchant, in the proverbial sweet spot. In theory—but from practice, the Magazine had a near-monopoly over the colony’s exports and import, it was Virginia’s only department store—with its Amazon like access to the settler household-housing-tools supplies/goods needs. The Magazine, a bastion it seems of the Smythe group, took an early lead in pressing for the export of the processed product, and its sale in England.
Its central position over the Virginia domestic economy could have been the chief counter for the spread of the tobacco monoculture–except for three “buts”:
- profits from its sale was about the only source of real income for the Company and its investors other than the lottery, but its exclusive planting incurred dangerous and unstable conditions caused by the confiscation of Indian lands-field, and reliance on Indians for its exchange of food stuffs and
- the dispersed nature of the tobacco diffusion into the Tidewater meant considerable autonomy for tobacco growers to cut their own deal with purchasers. With the increasing prominence of autonomous investor association-owned hundreds plantation-settlements, the Cape Merchant and the Magazine was increasingly seen as an intrusive and exploitive body, tainted by ineptitude and corruption in Virginia as well as England;
- With the entry of the Sandys alliance and a larger non-merchant adventurer shareholder base many shareholders, still interested in profits of course, wanted a more stable economic base than one based on tobacco. Staples-livestock-orchard production and local manufacturing and artisan entrepreneurship, not to mention mining and resources export from Indian trading all were potential opportunities for a truly robust permanent colony that could attract on its merits a more diversified settler population. Further, this line of thinking was often shared by those who held some contempt to the weed, and were reluctant to think that Virginia’s road to tobacco led to a colonization that produced little more than a “cloud of smoke” that promised on unstable pricing and as well as a “stink” upon the company’s reputation.
In short, if Virginia’s short term use of tobacco seemed ordained for the moment in London, there was little taste for its dominance over the Virginia economic base over the long term. Thus in 1618 the need and desire for a much more diversified economic base ingrained itself into the mainstream London investor. The discussion of permanent settlement matters in 1618 revolved around its sincere commitment to stress non tobacco priorities to develop and foster. As we saw in the first division of the instructions the solutions were in making land more accessible to landowners whose title was secure and predictable. The second priority was to diversify the planting and production of staples and to venture into non agricultural, certainly basic material extraction, and alongside improved relations with the Powhatan developing more trade, fur trading in particular with them.
The Reform of the Magazine—The final nail I want to pound in my answer to support my argument that the negative heritage of the Virginia Company profoundly bent the Virginia political and economic development twig while for better or worse laid the foundation from which Virginia evolved during the colonial period is the failure of the Virginia Company Magazine. The Magazine was the Virginia Company’s primary EDO (economic development organization); it should be the entity entrusted with the pivot being made in the economic development strategy in London during the discussion period—and to a degree it was.
In the currency discussion we saw how it was given the responsibility to turn tobacco into a currency for investors and for Virginia consumers—not to mention the revenue for its Virginia Company operations in Virginia. But now we move onto its core role in the management of both exports and imports. A creation of the Company’s merchant adventurer period, its structure and function rested on the flawed initial approach which insisted the Company enjoyed a monopoly over Virginia resources and production, and was responsible as the provider of residential consumption and tools-staples required for development and population sufficiency. The monopoly created a semi-socialist cooperative in Virginia that was carried over into the second military policy system.
After 1616, tobacco export on the horizon, and with the rise of independent investor-hundred plantations, the Magazine risked becoming a sort of fifth wheel. With the privatization of land ownership, the development of plantations outside the company jurisdiction, and the spread of private plantations along the James and Chesapeake coastline and river banks, the last bastion of the Magazine was resident Company officials’ Dale’s Gift plantations. While tasked with its success, the Magazine could not compel these officials to follow its lead, and as the Magazine leadership owned their own plantations, their willingness to dedicate the time and commitment to the Magazine instead of their own plantations increasingly became an issue in this period.
Always dogged by serious complaints on its mixture and availability of critical goods imported and prices for which it sold these goods, plus allegations of corruption in its decisions, and the natural push back from its being the only “game” in town, the Magazine did not enjoy any support from those that relied upon. Still the London shareholders had little else to rely upon in its pivot into a new permanent settlement strategy. Smythe started it off with some reforms and a new young Cape Merchant, Peirsey in 1616 [999], but his approach played off of the old approach, and tobacco became its victim, with tobacco purchase price in Virginia set artificially low, while sales in England went for higher prices after it was sold to custom farmers that were investors in the Company, and its top leaders (Smythe and Alderman Johnson) were beneficiaries. It was for Smythe, as we observed earlier, a way for him to recapture his investment in the Company, if not to make a profit as well—he was a trader by occupation after all.
[999] Peirsey, sent over in 1616 as Cape Merchant to oversee the Magazine reforms of that year, was thus made into the powerhouse broker in the colony. It is no accident that by 1624 he is cited as being the second wealthiest man in Virginia, second only to George Yeardley, at that time the former governor. https://www.jamestowne.org/blog/abraham-peirsey-burgess-from-peirseys-hundred-prince-george-county. Peirsey controlled the Magazine, Yeardley had to sign off on all land grants and headrights, Rolfe, the colony’s Secretary, was a major source of tobacco seeds, and the Company surveyor, after 1621 was William Claiborne. One can see how a company official had the inside track into the tobacco monoculture, and how the so-called “first advantage” that led to their dominance of the evolving Virginia elite materialized. With Virginian company leadership so profoundly tied to tobacco, and with so little oversight from London, the reader can see how a shift from tobacco had a hard time gaining traction.
Previously before this instruction, the colony under the first two policy systems had little practical need for the colony since they were employed by the company which possessed a monopoly of coin, credit and product produced—and by the fact that indentured servants were treated as “property” that enjoyed English civil liberties, a curious contradiction. Trade, with the Powhatan employed “copper”, sea shells made into jewelry, as well as corn. The Company Magazine had exclusive rights for trade and finance and with the introduction of tobacco products that product dominated trade with England. When London made tobacco an exchange medium, a commodity currency, it did so at the request of Virginia company officials who argued there was not coin nor metal avail in Virginia at the time. [99] Daniel Goldberg, Money, Credit and Banking in Virginia, 1585-1645 , Yale Department of Economics, 2015 [999]
The Magazine was a compromise creature of the merchant adventurer’s approach to Hakluyt’s approach to colonization, or permanent settlement. It sought stable and speedy profit from what was a long term venture that in the 1606 beginning was an aggregate of multiple individual expeditions, each expected to pay their own way and whatever dividends were incurred from the debt issued. It depended on the exceedingly rapid discovery of exports that could be profitably sold in England that would pay off that debt. It relied, more than it realized, on trade with the native tribes, and it confined itself more with the economics than with the politics and community entailed in a permanent settlement.
The Magazine was the internal instrument of the company that conveyed its monopoly over Virginia’s resources and the production and profits there were realized from it. By 1616 none of this was intact, and while not everybody knew what had to be done, everybody knew something had to be done. The shareholder conflict and debate of 1617-18 fashioned, forged and compromised the “quo vadis” of a future Virginia Company permanent settlement—and the Magazine did not fare well
Smythe Declines to Run for CEO in 1619
There was nothing permanent in whatever truce may have existed between the rival factions during the reorganization of 1618. Hardly had the leading questions before the company had been settled [in the instructions to the governor] than once more various disputes gave evidence of internal strife among the adventurers. [To begin with] Yeardley had been the choice of Smith, but bitter feeling arose between the two shortly after the governor’s commission was issued because of a knighthood conferred upon him contrary to Smith’s wishes [99] Wesley Frank Smith, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 81
In the course of these 1618 discussions on the settlement policy, an interesting and crucial conflict between Smythe and Sandys erupted over the knighthood of Yeardley by the King. Given the influence and closeness of Smythe to the king, mutual allies in the affairs of the Virginia Company and larger foreign policy matters, one would suspect it would have been Smythe who secured the king’s knighthood. Craven, supported by several primary records, asserts the opposite; Smythe opposed the knighthood and a bitter dispute opened up previous to Yeardley’s departure to Virginia. Craven asserts that Yeardley had been Smythe’s candidate for governor—a position later confirmed by Sandys himself. Yet when the request for Yeardley’s knighthood, which was a customary honor and confirmation of status associated with the office– were presented to the king, Smythe’s allies within the court opposed the action and “his opponents in the courts [i.e the Sandys faction] quickly rallied to the governor’s support” [to be knighted]. [99] Wesley Frank Smith, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 81
The result as reported by Craven was that Sandys “thinking it would be unfit that the Treasurer of the Company and the Governor of the Colony should be at Variance” somehow arrived at a “apparent reconciliation” previous to Yeardley’s departure in January, 1619. He also comments that shortly after Yeardley’s departure Smythe “renewed his displeasure at the governor’s ‘unduly procured knighthood’, while another member muttered [it was] a matter of disgrace to his wife”. One could assume the reference is to Yeardley’s new bride, or off the wall, a disgrace to Smythe’s wife, which I can see only if this matter had been conflated with the concurrent marriage of the Smythe’s son (see below). [99] Wesley Frank Smith, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 81
I suspect the culprit is Southampton (and the nexus linked to the Queen’s Council) who somehow inserted himself to the king. When informed later in the late spring (June), Yeardley took offense, and as Governor he thereafter identified with the Sandys faction (it was not by any means certain that Sandys, however, considered him a true ally, but more an ally of convenience). Yeardley then apparently offered his resignation, but Sandys’ April 1619 election convinced him to stay. Sandys in a letter to Southampton blamed the affair on Smythe, implying Yeardley had been agreed to as governor by both men, and had in effect been betrayed by Smythe.
The affair, and its timing, is both awkward and embarrassing to the Company, and suggestive that Yeardley was more than reconciled to his new Treasurer, Sandys. While his instructions, as I indicated previously, were “bipartisan”, reflecting the consensus of the shareholder councils, the interpretation of said instructions left considerable latitude and with Sandys’ election as Treasurer, one would expect that gubernatorial latitude would reflect the Sandys perspective. In any event, this eruption between Smythe and an unknown somebody, was stage-managed by the likes of Sandys as an intermediate, only confirms Craven’s above introductory statement, that there was much afoot in November, 1618, and that matters after that point continued to deteriorate.
The 1618 through 1620 period is one in which historians know much, but understand poorly. The 1619 Sandys coup over the Virginia Company was only one event out of many, and it suggests, strongly, to me this was a turbulent period indeed, for those participating in English colonization, Atlantic trade, and Spanish privateering. Smythe came out of this period rather hammered, and the dominant merchant adventurer by 1622 or so was not he, but the Second Earl of Warwick, who succeeded his father in mid-1619. By 1623, the last days of the Virginia Company in Virginia, Smythe had been clearly reduced as a secondary leader of the Virginia Company merchant adventurers, replaced by the Second Earl of Warwick. I suspect the macro political environment shifted a great deal in this period, unsettling both the policy environment of colonization and trade, internal goings on in court alliances, and more uncertainty in royal relations with Parliament. With so much turbulence surrounding the Virginia Company in these years, I feel it warranted to ask the reader to be sensitive that the Virginia Company, while occupying a central point in English colonization, was by not means the prime center of anything in England.
Consider for instance, that Sandys, in July 1618, months after the coup ran against Smythe as Treasurer of the East India Company—until the king ordered he be removed from the election (he was) on account of his lack of negotiating experience with the Dutch. The question might be asked as to which Company either had more commitment. Sandys had been on its governing council since 1614. Smythe in turn, after 1619, was appointed to several critical offices and positions, besides his Commissioner of the Navy position; if he was overworked and beleaguered before 1619, little changed after. Smythe was definitely in ill health in late 1624 and had retired to his Kent estate. He died in 1625. His role in the last days of the Virginia Company are problematical.
The reader is urged to read their biographies in the History of Parliament in order to discern a more accurate picture of their comprehensive political involvements. National political leaders have national agendas and interests. For example, both were members of Parliament and Parliament was in session off and on during 1621. Sandys involvement in that session was simply put huge—and his various positions and participation in its key matters, so time-consuming and central to the session’s agenda that its failure so infuriated the King that in May, 1621 Southampton and Sandys confined under the tender mercies of the Sheriff of London. They were not released until July. Sandys was placed in house arrest for periods of 1622, and again in 1623. Virginia was not central to his confinement. If one is looking for support for the proposition the Virginia Company in these years was consumed by its internal politics and fiscal affairs, one should also look to the place the Company held in the commitments of its top leadership relative to all other activities in which they were involved.
The reader might temper the American fascination with the Virginia Company as the primary focus of its leadership, but that would be simply wrong. Focused they were, but no where near primary, never mind exclusive. I would add to this mix, that Southampton, the post-1620-23 Treasurer, was also noted for his long absences, during which Sandys, in his role as auditor would step in—plus in at least one instance the two were cellmates—at a time when the second phase of the Greate Charter economic development plan was formulated and initially executed.
We should respect that the largest war of the late medieval-early modern period, the Thirty Years War, formally commenced in 1618. That England did not engage in battle, should not suggest she was unaffected by its events and dynamics. To the contrary. English-Spanish relations in particular were foremost in England’s foreign, court, and domestic politics during these years. Compounded by anti-Catholic emotions, and the rise of puritan dissent against the Church of England’s seeming Catholic leanings, the Atlantic colonization project was riven with factions saturated with larger emotions, beliefs, and policy differences. Remarkably, Sandys’ father was closely associated with Catholic tendencies as Archbishop of York, reflected also in his son’s anti-Calvinist writings.
Raleigh’s execution by James for piracy (against Spain) on October 29th 1618 seems to have been followed by a good deal of flux and I suspect transition. Raleigh was a dominating figure in the world of English adventurers, and a stubborn anti-Spanish privateer tossed in for good measure. He was the last of the Tudor figures; the death of the First Earl of Warwick in March 1619 suggests to me that we have begun a change in generational leadership. Within a decade, Sandys was to die (1629), only a four years after Smythe (1625), and Southampton was dead by 1624.
For that matter James I died in early 1625 after a period of sickness that extended into and through the last days of the Virginia Company charter. In 1619 we are on the eve of a generational transition in English Atlantic colonization and trade. I would also insert these are the very earliest years of Brenner’s new rising merchant class. I wouldn’t carry this too far, but the reader should be sensitive “the times are a’ changing’.
As I cull out the Virginia Company for singular treatment, I want the reader to be sensitive to its environment in the greater Atlantic community of trade, colonization and privateering. It is little wonder that Kenneth R. Andrews, a foremost British scholar of this period, titles his most popular work “Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime enterprise and the genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630”. This is the Atlantic environment in which the Virginia Company walks on its path to its dissolution in Virginia.
Inside the Virginia Company, much is in flux as the shareholder rebellion, and the politics of the audit, are still very much in play. Moreover, what there was of Virginia immigration was shifting from Company supply fleets full of indentured servants, and a hap-hazard collection of free men to a small but impactful group of private association-hundred investors. Putting their own money into settlement projects, they wanted answers to questions that gave them sufficient security. In that atmosphere, the question of authority, its competence proven by its past record of performance, was always in their minds.
The audit was certainly intended to deal with past blames, but through the “drafting” of the governor’s Greate Charter instructions, the audit had yet to be resolved: Some were disposed to charge all blame to the directing officers, and to demand their removal from office. The question of Smith’s accounts which had neither been settled nor forgotten, provided the rallying point, and from Yeardley’s departure plans were shaping towards the treasurer’s removal. Earlier suspicion had, through prolonged disputes over the auditing of the company’s books ripened into the conviction that public funds had been converted to private use. [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 82
In short resolution of the company audit lay in the minds of many shareholders. Smythe, despite his offer to pay for any misspending, had not cooperated with Sandys, nor the audit committee for two full years. Whatever the audit, if resolved would say, was by December 1618 less impactful than the sense that Smythe had to go, and new leadership was necessary if the instructions were to achieve their full potential.
The treasurer’s refusal to lend hearty cooperation in [the audit] to substantiate the charges against him convinced his accusers that there was no hope for a satisfactory auditing of the books so long as he remained at the head of the company. They decided, therefore, to attempt the election of Sandys. Their decision, as explained by them in 1625, arose from the ‘apparent misprosperinge” of the Plantation, and the fowlnes of Accounts here” [quote from “the Discourse of the Old Company” in Narratives of Early Virginia, pp. 445-6, and the context cited from Craven, Dissolution, p. 82
Craven asserts that a job search for a “disinterested” candidate to replace Smythe was in place behind the scenes, but it also appears that many shareholders were not willing to send Smythe off in bad style. He was too respected, too powerful, too wealthy, and connected to the King to send off in indignity. At this juncture around November, 1618 a signal was sent into the social circles of England’s foreign policy-making networks that some inside the court’s most closed nooks were willing to send him packing. That signal played out starting in November into at least February of 1619, and lingering on into its summer. For us, 21st century readers, we are about to see how the court politics was conducted and how it entered into Virginia Company matters.
Marriage of John Smythe and Isabella Rich: court politics and the removal of Thomas Smyth from the Treasurer of the Virginia Company
It was at this time (late 1618) that Smythe’s eighteen year old, rather entitled and adventurous son fell in love with a daughter of Warwick’s first wife (maybe); they eloped and got married. With this unimpressive, almost comical interlude, most American historians have contented themselves with a brief insertion into their narrative on the ongoing troubles between Smythe and the First Earl during 1618 (and 1619). Bemused as I was myself, further research reveals this was a much more significant event than a family disturbance. Its inclusion into Virginia Company discussion made necessary because it was in fact a serious episode in the ouster of Thomas Smythe.
Briefly put, whatever the impact the marriage-elopement had between the two families—and that is not at all clear—the formal marriage was arranged and conducted by individuals associated with the Queen’s faction, which neither the Rich nor Smythe family attended. Its cause, not especially clear either, amazingly harkened back to the aftermath of the Essex rebellion of 1601. That rebellion led to the imprisonment in the Tower of London of both Southampton and Smythe. Although both were released, due to the intercession of about-to-be-crowned James I, the revolt left a chasm between the two, probably due to the uncertain role Smythe played in the revolt.
The staged marriage of the two lovers was, I contend, a deliberate effort to embarrass Smythe and his family, and likely designed to carry overtones that would support the ouster of Smythe from the Virginia Company. If so we have an intrusion of court-related politics into the internal dynamics of the Company at a very critical and timely period of its history. My suspicion is the Queen was not directly involved, but members of her Council and court officials (the Lord Chamberlain), were mobilized by Southampton who seems to have managed the event along with the Countess of Bedford (Queens Bedchamber)—with the event being leaked by another to the larger social network.
The event was followed up over a period of several months, into 1619, not only embarrassing Smythe’s family, but attacking Rich’s daughter as well. A nasty initiative by any definition, it cut in several ways, in that the Essex Rebellion also brought in the Rich family, and returned them to a very sad and difficult period. It also likely affected the Second Earl, who upon the death of his father a few months later in March 1619, became himself the Earl of Warwick shortly after. The young bride was either his sister or “half” sister, depending upon her parentage. The two, whatever their parentage, had been raised in the Rich family.
As I suggested in the section above, Southampton to me appears as the instigator of the marriage and of the knighthood of Yeardley. To me he seems the one with both motive and access to the King and the Queen. While Sandys did enjoy access to the Queen’s Council, it is next to impossible to believe the king would accessible to him. In any event, despite the complexity of the motive, it is necessary to provide the necessary context to readers who might be interested.
[999]
It appears a formal marriage was arranged by Southampton, and Lady Bedford or Lucy Russell, the Countess of Bedford, both long-standing members of the Queen’s Council. The aforementioned Lord Chamberlain [of the Royal Household] who presided was at the time the third Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert (a smoker who did so to calm his migraines. He was an active in the colonization movement). His brother [99]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herbert,_3rd_Earl_of_Pembroke
That the youngest, then twenty-three, of these contested offspring, Isabelle, would elope with the eighteen year-old son of Sir Thomas Smythe in 1618 adds yet more to the story. To shame Sir Thomas Smythe who opposed the marriage and certainly the elopement, the marriage ceremony was managed by the Queen’s council members which was managed by the Earl of Southampton, who would succeed Sandys as CEO of the Virginia Company in 1620 through to its dissolution in 1624. Letters by John Chamberlain confirm the official marriage, and several events that followed over the next several months. They confirm the turmoil and social shame that likely accompanied the marriage and suggest the Smythe family was noticeably disrupted during late 1618 and early 1619.
In 1619 when the First Earl’s son, also a Company shareholder, and half-sister of the bride, became the Second Earl of Warwick in 1619 upon the death of his father in that year. Smythe in early 1619 entered into a very public disagreement with the Second Earl, leading to the latter to enter into a [temporary] alliance with Sandys creating the opportunity and the votes to oust Smythe as Treasurer. Either deciding that enough was enough or realizing after counting the likely votes against him, Smythe declined to run for Virginia Company Treasurer in 1619 thereby opening the way for Sandys to become Treasurer [CEO] in April 1619 [99] See Fiske, p. 184
[21 November, 1618] Sir Thomas Smythe’s son come lately from travel, a proper young gentlemen some nineteen years old, and the only child he hath, is so inveigled and cunningly caught in affection with the Lady Isabella Rich (five or six years older than himself) that I hear he hath married her two days earlier since without his father’s privity, and contrary to his express command … and the affront is more being done in such good company as the Countess of Bedford with divers other ladies and persons of account, whereof the Lord Chamberlain gave the bride, but not one of his friends or kindred present or made acquainted with. [30 January 1619] Our new bridegroom, Sir John Smythe is arrested by the smallpox, and his Lady Isabella forgetting her late promise of better or worse in sickness and in health is fled to save her fair skin. [31 July 1619] Young John Smythe that married Lady Isabella Rich is stepped aside and gone over secretly into France which breeds many surmises, but himself has written to his father, that the clamour of creditors, the high state of expense he had fallen into, the unequal division of his maintenance, the avoiding of some company unfit for him, and the enabling himself to live more providently hereafter, had caused him to absent himself. [99] Correspondence of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester in Brennan M.G. Kinnamon NJ and Hanny, M. P. (Eds), Contemporary Editions, 2010, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Smythe-512
A larger context to the marriage and the personal disruption encountered by the Smythe family is offered by Ian W. Archer [99], Sir Thomas Smythe (a Lecture delivered at Skinners Hall, London, 26 November, 2007 (Dr. Archer, Keble College and Faculty of History at Oxford):
His only surviving son proved a disappointment. In 1618 he went off on a newly fashionable European tour with his cousin, Thomas Smythe, heir to Sir John, and a tutor or pedagogue, one Captain Brett, who seems to have been a corrupting, rather than improving influence. The cousin was not a good influence either, according to the gossip mongers, a ‘more debauched youth every way I have not known for the time. Soon after he returned from his travels, and apparently contaminated by these companions, the nineteen year old John eloped with Lady Isabella Rich, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, with whom the boy’s father was in dispute over the Rich’s family privateering operations. Warwick’s son had plundered an enormously wealthy ship, belonging to the Mogul’s emperor’s mother, endangering the trade concessions the East India Company under Smythe’s leadership, had just secured. There was a reconciliation between father and son and Sir Thomas agreed to take the new couple in, promising 500p if they lived with him and anther 300p if they lived elsewhere. But the marriage was tense. Forgetting her late promise of for better or worse or sickness or health, she abandoned her husband when he caught smallpox. John recovered, but promptly decided on the advice of Brett to flee the country …. Isabella now joined forces with her father-in-law [Sir Thomas Smythe] (himself in ‘great spleen’) to have Brett clapped into prison
As the reader might suspect, the timing couldn’t have been worse for Thomas Smythe, and it, we suggest, greatly affected his ability to manage his position on the Virginia Company. The obvious thought was the elopement and contrived marriage ceremony compounded his relationship with the Warwick’s, father and son—and it did. What is less evident was the marriage ceremony was not a Warwick enterprise but an intrusion of court politics designed to exact revenge on Thomas Smythe for a past episode in his life, and in so doing aid in putting pressure on him to leave the Virginia Company. The author of his intrusion was, I believe, Southampton, as he is the only individual in a position to have carried it out.
That is recognized by several historians who also saw through his action. Craven, for example, repeats the assertion by Brown (in his Genesis of the United States, Vol. II, p. 980) that “on the marriage with Smith’s son, in which Southampton had been instrumental” [99] Craven, Dissolution, Footnote 5, p. 84.
That intrusion allows us the opportunity to see in action how court politics of the Jacobean period could enter into colonial policy-making; it is my contention that Southampton using his access to the Queens’ Council members engineer an event of high visibility to expose Smythe to ridicule and loss of important standing, while simultaneous driving deeper a wedge between the Warwick’s and Smythe to further the policy agenda of the Sandys nexus to eject Smythe from his control and dominance over the Virginia Company.
Returning to Company Politics Previous to Coup
The intensity of internal conflict within the Company was at fever pitch in January 1619. Readers should note three insights into this conflict. First, the distinction between the Somers and Virginia active Company shareholders is minimal, and the two shareholder meetings often met on the same day, the conclusion of one meeting meant only a change in the presiding officers. Hence, the politics relevant to each subsidiary corporation bleed into the other. Attendance could drop off as the afternoon went on. Craven (Dissolution, p. 85) claims “From the beginning of Sandys’ regime to its end, the differences among the Virginia [shareholders] were only one part of a larger fight extending to both companies. The motives of the two factions could be better understood if the records of the Bermuda Company were more completely preserved”.
From this rather blurred separation of companies, it is easier for the parties and factions to “make a deal” involving trades off between the two companies. In fact this is what happened sometime in early 1619:
Sandys saw an opportunity of turning [his] situation to his advantage in the Virginia Company. His supporters accordingly proposed to Warwick’s group that if they would assist in the election of Sandys as head of the Virginia adventurers, ‘a point (as they sayd) of maine necessitye for the welfare and stabilitie of that plantation,’ they [Sandys] would support Butler [Warwick’s candidate for Bermuda governor] …. After ‘some fewe meetings of the prime men on both sides’ such an agreement was reached. [99] cite drawn from Historye of the Bermudaes, p. 130 and used by Craven, Dissolution, pp. 85-6]
Second, governance of each colony was fraught with shareholder opposition. But if the Somers colony politics, involving gubernatorial succession pitted Rich against Smythe, politics in Virginia engaged a larger London audience as it questioned the activity and alleged abuses of Argall, who was closely allied with Rich, and more sympathy with Smythe and Sandys who were outraged at Argall. The chronology of events suggest to me that the Bermuda succession politics picked up steam in this period, and may have reached a crescendo around the time of the April Virginia Company and May Somers Company elections.
The Bermuda conflict picked up considerable steam in the last half of 1618. Smythe, at first backed Tucker for governor; Tucker, of course, was engaged with a full-fledged fight with Rich agents-relatives in Bermuda, and the First Earl was seriously concerned Tucker was screwing him in the ongoing land distribution. In the succession controversy Rich wanted his own candidate to protect his interests. Smythe eventually backed away from Tucker but shifted support to another candidate. The politics carried over to London as Tucker returned to London (left Bermuda in Jan, 1619, Brown, Genesis, Vol2,) to fight his battle effectively—though it did him little good in the end.
In private negotiations, one suspects, several “deals” were made among the participants, but not all were lived up to. It is also possible that backlash from “the atmosphere” created by Southampton’s Smythe marriage affair could have tempered ill feelings from the Second Earl of Warwick and Smythe, the latter receiving benefit in the Somers Company election. Both were discovering they both shared common enemies in Southampton, Cavendish, and Sandys. As we shall shortly see, whatever his concern was with Smythe—and vice versa—the two worked to mutual benefit in the selection of a new governor (Butler) and the administration of the Somers Company through 1621. We will attempt to tie lose ends together in our discussion after the coup.
The second observation is a “below the fold” reality that a second struggle was underway for control of each company’s Magazine. While at one level the internal struggle involved the top leadership of both colonies, a perhaps equally intense struggle involved who would control—and receive the benefits of—the Magazine of each company. Each Magazine had a separate sub-organization, membership and board of directions. Smythe had a much heavier interest and support in the Magazine boards than he seemingly enjoyed in the Virginia Company shareholder meeting. It is likely his personal benefit, and that of his supporters and allies, was received disproportionately from these Magazines.
In danger of losing his CEO position in each company, Smythe could have resolved to save what he could from control of the Magazines. It also seems this battle heavily involved Smythe’s deputy, Alderman Johnson, who would enter the fray for the Virginia Company CEO position after Smythe withdrew. Johnson was the principal participant in the Magazine fight; he had always been deeply involved in its administration. At this critical time, one suspects the Magazine was the “soft underbelly”, the more seemly side of the Company’s colonization effort.
While some readers may be feeling we are getting “too deep into the weeds”, the intensity of the struggle in, and through 1619, over the Magazine strongly supports the notion that the Magazine was where “one followed the money”. Sandys would, as we shall see, enter the picture by proposing his own Magazine once he secured power of the Virginia Company, and the struggle for the control of the Magazine would persist longer than the period now under discussion.
We shall return to this topic, but readers should note the Magazine may have impacted Smythe’s April Virginia Company CEO decision not to run as its CEO. It also may have played a role in his ability to retain the CEO of the Somers Corporation in the May, 1619 election. BTW, it is not evident that the Warwick’s were involved in this struggle; Sandys was, however, deeply and likely emotionally involved, as this tapped into his belief that trading companies like the Virginia Company profited unduly the merchant adventurers that ran them. The third observation is the internal struggle ran afoul of the voting procedures employed at shareholder meetings.
The third observation concerns the shareholder voting process engaged in by both companies. It was by hand held up. Said in another way, the vote was not secret. It is alleged by Scott, and implied by Craven, that the show of hands was used by Smythe to maintain his dominance over the shareholder elections. Scott more precisely asserts “Voting was by show of hands amongst those entitled to be present at the meeting, all of whom might not be shareholders, since a member of the [shareholder] council could continue to hold office though he had never subscribe [paid] for a stock. … Of a total membership of close on 1,000, probably more than three-quarters had long considered the scheme [the company] to be impracticable [a lost cause], and many of these had not paid up full amounts due on their shares. In the House of Commons alone there were 49 members who had abandoned their shares. It was among this class [of unpaid shareholders] that under the existing conditions of voting Sandys found the basis of his following. [99] Numbers drawn from Brown, Genesis, “the Manchester Papers’, pp. 802-5] … It will be seen then that the strength of Sandys in the coming struggle was potential [he had to mobilize these uninvolved shareholders and require their attendance] rather than actual. That of Smythe and Warwick was apparent [they paid and attended meetings]” [99] William Robert Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge University Press, 1910), p. 268
Craven asserts that Sandys, ever on the alert, was able to mobilize his following, and “stack” a shareholder meeting in which he expected an important vote. This practice also extended to committee meetings in which “shareholders” whether or not on the committee, could vote. In any event, Smythe or anyone else could easily determine the vote by observing who was, or was not, at the shareholder meeting. [Craven, Dissolution, p. 86]. The reader may keep this in mind as she/he goes further in this section.
[999] As expanded upon by Scott, p. 268, [Warwick] was the largest shareholder in the Somers Island [Company] and he had many friends in both companies. Smythe had the support of James I, and of the leading merchants. Not only was he [Smythe] in close touch with many of the important shareholders, but he was considerably interested in the Magazines of both companies, while he may be taken to have represented the great holdings of the livery companies [there were about 111 livery companies in London at the time and they were deeply involved in the governance of the city of London. Today we would call them “guilds”.] Thus from several points of view his [Smythe’s] influence was great, even when voting individually, not in proportion to the shares held, and when there was no provision for proxies]
The Coup
The “known” drama of the annual Virginia Company shareholder meeting, scheduled for April 28th, 1619 began at a committee meeting of the “orders and regulations of the company’ met on the day before, April 27th. That committee had been formed the previous day, April 26th, with Sandys, Nathaniel Rich [Warwick’s relative and agent], Alderman Johnson [Smythe, Deputy, son-in-law and agent), Sir John Wolstenholme (likely Smythe ally), and Sir Edward Harwood a Puritan military background (perhaps, Warwick or Southampton). At the meeting, Sandys claimed that “several adventurers [shareholders] could not vote according to their real opinions on show of hands owing ‘to their dependences’ upon Smythe, therefore it was resolved that the coming election should be by ballot. [99] Scott, Constitution, Vol. II, pp. 268-9].
It is at this point that the “deal” earlier arrived at by Sandys and [the Second] Earl of Warwick came into play. Sandys would withdraw his candidate for governor of the Somers Island company, while Warwick would support Sandys in the Virginia Company vote the next day. [99] Scott, Constitution, Vol. II, pp. 269].
What happened that night or the next morning I, or anybody alive knows not. We do know that at the April 28th shareholder meeting, Smythe pleading there was much too much on his plate, i.e. “many other pressing duties [and asked] to be relieved of the cares of office, declined to stand for reelection” [99] Craven, Dissolution, p. 87]. Scott describes the scene as “Smythe, either from a desire to resign the cares of office, or knowing the extent of the opposition declined to seek reelection. Besides Sandys, two of Smythe’s supporters were nominated, Alderman Johnson and Sir John Wolstanholme. The ballot resulted in 59 votes for Sandys, as against 41 divided between the other [two] candidates. John Ferrar [Sandys’ closest ally] secured a slightly larger majority for the post of deputy treasurer … [Ferrar had not either paid up … or [purchased] shares [in the company] [99] Scott, Constitution, pp. 269].
Segueway if one will to the next month’s meeting of the Somers Island Company annual shareholder meeting [Quarter Court] Warwick “secured the election of Butler as the local governor … [then] Sandys was defeated in his candidature” for CEO-Treasurer of the Somers Company and Smythe was elected, as was Alderman Johnson as his Deputy. Thus, in Scott’s words, “Sandys and his supporters had failed to obtain a complete victory over Smythe, since the latter remained in control of the Somers Islands Company … as well as the Magazine of the Virginia Company. … The adventurers [shareholders] of the Magazine elected their director and committees, while most, if not all of this body were adherents of Smythe”. [99] Scott, Constitution, pp. 269-70.
Virginia Company Immediate Aftermath of the Coup: Post April 1619 in London
From Hindsight What Do We Know ? – Smythe and Johnson ran the Somers Island Company and Magazine until 1621, when they were ousted from those positions. They lost the 1621 vote narrowly, and the 1622 election by one, with Warwick partially abstaining [99] Scott, Constitution, p. 278. ‘It was two years before Sandys gained control over the Bermuda Company, and even then he experienced much difficulty by virtue of the fact that his enemies remained stronger in the younger company than in the older” [99] Craven, Dissolution, , p. 88.
Sandys was ousted from the Virginia Company in favor of his ally Southampton the next year (1620). – to be discussed later. The Magazine of the Virginia Company became a battleground—to be discussed shortly.
Sandys took over the Virginia Company and commenced implementation of the Greate Charter instructions. So did the Somers Company under Smythe beginning in 1619-20 [99] For detail regarding the Bermuda Company instructions to its new Smith and Warwick supported governor, see Charles A. Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 1, pp. 221-25, Smythe supported Warwick’s candidate Butler that May, 1619, and during his two year stint as Treasurer conducted his administration of the Somers Islands with the support of Warwick. Smythe and Warwick became steadfast allies against Sandys through 1624. Smythe died in 1625 (probably). Scott suggests that Smythe sold some of his stock in the Virginia Company and in the Smith’s Hundred association joint stock corporation. He did not, however, sell any of his stock in the Virginia Company Magazine. [99] Scott, Constitution, p. 269
Not well appreciated was the Edwin Sandys having toppled Smythe in the 1619 Virginia Company, then the 1621 Somers Company, went on to challenge Smythe’s Treasurer-CEO position over the East India Company. He also ran against Smythe for a Kent parliamentary seating—and won. To which the king responded by finding another seat for Smythe. While Sandys did oust Smythe et al from the Company’s officers, he was still subject to a majority of the Quarterly Court, the annual shareholder council. That council, fragmented as it was (Smythe still was a voting member), required constant attention after April, 1619. Thus it is reasonable to alert the reader the Virginia Company shareholder council, at this point at least, was not Sandys tool.
One must also recognize the partial victory secured by Sandy’s election-coup, was far from complete as the Somers Company closeness to the Virginia Company was always a wedge from which Sandys had to cope and that his command over the Virginia Company shareholder councils and committees was far from absolute. The issue of how Sandys was to manage the London shareholder councils and committees in the future proved to be an important and serious matter. These issues will be detailed in the following modules. Suffice it to say, Sandys’ alliance with Warwick was always meant to be a temporary accommodation, and no surprise we will discuss that shortly.
Impact With James I–One should suspect that after May 1619 the king was no longer “in command” of the Virginia Company, and the next five years reflects, in part, his effort to regain accountability of what was a public private partnership with him. That Smythe retained the support of James throughout this and into the future, the reader must recognize as a reality. Scott summarizes the reality that followed the “coup”:
Owing to his political views [Sandys] was out of favor with James I, and in alienating Smythe [Sandys] had closed many of the sources from which the company had been hitherto financed. During the first year after the change of treasurers, the general stock was increased [i.e. revenues of the company] by L9830 pounds, L7000 pounds of which was derived from the profit of the lottery and the remainder from various sources most of which were unlikely to recur. The [company] expenditure had been L10431 pounds [expenditures exceeded revenues]. [99] Scott, Constitution, p. 271
Orders and Constitutions— The very committee that had approved the use of the ballot in the April Virginia Company election of officers. The Orders, Offices, and Laws of the Company Committee, had been tasked to prepare a comprehensive management audit of the company’s internal structures and existing procedures and orders in view of the pivot and the new permanent settlement strategy. After the election, it went to work and delivered a report to the Quarterly Court of June 9th, 1619, and said report was approved.
A formal publication of the report was published in June, 1620; cleverly entitled Orders and Constitutions, Partly collected out of his Maiesties Letters, Patents, and partly ordained upon mature deliberation by the Treasurer, [Council], and Companie of Virginia, for the better of governing of the Actions and affaires of said Companie here in England residing, report was transformed into the Company’s constitution, as it formalized the structures and relationships of entities within the company. Audits and audits were required and formalized, and the audit committee was tasked with making sense of the older finances of the company.
Thus the ongoing audit of Smythe and accounts of his administration were continued, with an intention to bring them to some conclusion with a report. Hindsight requires that I alert the reader that the audit will continue for several years, and Sandys insistence on the audit proved to be, if nothing else, fuel that intensified the polarization of factions, and as such directly led to the Company’s charter dissolution in 1624. Sadly we have not heard the last from this topic.
One regulation imposed on the officers was the Treasurer could no longer be head of another trading company, excepting the office of Treasurer of the Bermuda Company. This restriction provides solid support for a shareholder consensus that its previous Treasurer had been unable to juggle his many offices and responsibilities. Also three year terms were placed on the offices of Treasurer and his deputy, and that these offices would be elected by the ballot—although other company offices were still by show of hands.
The exception to this, however, were company offices which comprised the resident governance of Virginia (Governor, Deputy Governor, admiral, marshal, chief justice and treasurer which would also be elected by secret ballot, but whose offices must be confirmed by action of a Quarterly Court IN LONDON (mine), A term of three years for such offices was set, and the term could be extended. Except for the governor, no individual should serve for more than six years.
I suggest the reader should take from this a reasonable consensus of the Virginia Company shareholders, irrespective of the factions, did exist for sound organizational structure, which set up a copy of itself in Virginia for the administration and implementation of company programs, procedures, and initiatives. That it was envisioned Virginia-based company officers, and for that matter private shareholders, were in varying degrees beyond the direct and timely authority of London shareholder councils, colony viability and growth required a supplementary company organization be set up.
That this copycat organizational structure possessed an inevitable autonomy, it was to be held responsible for its structures and official actions. Subject to the “Orders and Constitutions”, its actions and enactments were also limited as they approved by the London-based Quarterly Court. With the exception of the Virginia Assembly, the company officers had to be approved by that Quarterly Court as well. as made necessary by the realities of Virginia, it was also very evident that the London shareholders, first among equal of all the company shareholders, had to approve of such actions and behavior. [99] See, Craven, Dissolution, pp. 90-2 for the detail and context.
The Virginia Company Magazine–No consensus, however, regarding the Virginia Company Magazine existed. With the reader keeping in mind that the Magazine was its own joint stock corporation, with its own elected officers and its own shareholders owning stock in its activities, the Virginia Company Magazine (and the Somers as well) was in effect “a company within a company”. Whatever the reader might think of the organization logic of such, the reality was Sandys was not in charge of the Virginia Company Magazine, Smythe was.
Two months after assuming office Sandys demanded an accounting of its finances and affairs, with little reaction. Sandys then on July 7th, 1619 threatened to submit a request for compliance from the king’s Privy Council. Alderman Johnson, after an extremely heated session at the Company shareholder meeting, was censured by the council. Still, Sandys was not able to exert influence over the Magazine. The contest dragged on into 1620, when a Virginia Company shareholder council passed an action that “declared the company’s trade in Virginia to be open”, thereby ending any monopoly of trade that the Magazine enjoyed. As reported by Scott, however, Sandys did not intend or want to end the Magazine:
The minutes of the meeting are so carefully worded that they convey the impression that a part of the policy of the new administration was the abolition of the restrictions on commerce with the colony [i.e. the monopoly of trade], which had been framed in the interests of the merchants who had formerly been in control [i.e. Smythe, Johnson and their contractors]. A careful scrutiny of the available information shows that the real object was not to abolish magazines financed by subsidiary joint stock [corporations], but to manage that the direction of this enterprise should be in the hands of supporters of the party that was now dominant [i.e. whoever was dominant and enjoyed the majority of Virginia Company shareholders at that time]. It is true that minutes are silent as to the formation of a new Magazine, but it was not long before incidental references began to appear which show a new one had been constituted [99] Scott, Constitution, p. 270
Now this very definitely is “in the weeds”, but the matter is fundamental to the successful operation of the Virginia colony, and it had serious effect on the lives and trade of the Virginia colonists. Essentially, Sandys was not able to exercise control over export and import in Virginia, and that lack of control persisted—as we shall see into 1621. Thus Sandys in 1620 formally ended the authority over such export-import by the Magazine, and apparently, possibly by executive order, set up his own Magazine. Yeardley was caught in the middle of this, and Scott goes on to reference his difficulties in reconciling trade into 1621 [99] Scott, Constitution, p. 270.
For those fumbling about in this distressful jungle of organizational weeds, the hugely important take away is that Sandys did not have control over what was planted, grown, exported and sold from, and imported into Virginia. HERE ONE CAN SEE A MASSIVE REASON WHY THE VIRGINIA TOBACCO MONOCULTURE WAS BEYOND SANDYS CONTROL DURING THE PERIOD IN WHICH HE WAS IMPLEMENTING THE GREATE CHARTER. That this monoculture persisted during the period of the Greate Charter, and in fact, grew, can be almost completely explained by Sandys’s inability to manage and control the activities of his “own” company Magazine. We shall follow up on this assertion-observation in this and following modules
The story behind the continuation of the tobacco monoculture, however, will, during 1619 and 1620, become vastly more complicated—requiring a separate section detailing the manifestation of what will be labeled “the tobacco contract”. That tobacco contract would exert considerable impact on both company’s Magazines, and would accordingly sharpen the internal disputes between both companies, and affect them internally as well. That is yet another alert to the reader that rough times are going to follow very shortly and will come to a head in the next election. [See Scott p. 271ff to p. 78. Suffice it to say at this point there will be many authors in the writing of the Virginia tobacco monoculture.
Wrap Up and Segueway
If this assessment is substantially accurate, this core conflict between Treasurer, his Deputy, and a privateering shareholder faction may have sealed the lid on the Virginia Company fiscal coffin. The struggle was over the purpose of the Virginia Company, the restatement of its permanent settlement strategy and the necessity of company organizational restructure, exposed the fragility of the Company as a vehicle of English permanent colonization.
Its organizational shareholder fragmentation in the face of its fiscal crisis, revealed a chasm that existed between the royal public partnership with the Company, the Parliament, and the Private Sector. Whatever logic Sandys, his faction, and the shareholders who supported him, had in their press to oust its Treasurer, the ensuring disruption it generated was more than that fragile structure could handle. If the Virginia Company could be compared to a ship, I suggest that by the summer of 1619, it was threatened with capsizing.
I do not believe I exaggerate. From this point on the Company—despite its subsequent launch of the Greate Charter—had lost a great deal of what little coherence it had. The coup, and that is how man saw it, ruptured what good feelings the King had about the Virginia venture, or at least its potential success under the auspices of the joint stock Virginia Company. Sandys would indeed oust Smythe from the Treasurer position–and had seized dominance in Virginia colony’s policy direction–but his hold on that was fragile. And we have yet to deal on the coherence and suitability of that plan and whether it had reasonable prospects for success. In its wake the Virginia Company holding company as an somewhat unified aggregate had been broken into rival feudal subsidiaries, regulated poorly by unstable shareholder majorities in its internal structures, the annual and quarterly meetings, and committees.
One, indeed a dominant, theme of this book is the Virginia Company was not likely from its conception, incorporation and its first settlement at Jamestown to successfully launch England’s first North American colony. My purpose throughout the book is, has been, and will continue to be the presentation of support that justifies that position. I am not finished with that task and will return to it in the module after the next.
I now must move on, to tackle the implementation of the Greate Charter in Virginia. Following that I will discuss the wreck of the Virginia Company in London from 1619 to 1624. With that accomplished I will be able to attend to my second dominant theme, the survival of the Virginia colony through the resilience of its First Migration. Like Rome, nurtured by wolves in the wilderness, Virginia will need to raise itself, using what it had at hand.
Ron W. Coan 