London’s Path/Approach to the Virginia Company

London’s Path to Overseas Commercial Trade, Commerce & Colonization

That assertion, that the Virginia Company (nor England) was not ready for prime time trade and colonization in 1606 constitutes a fundamental part of the first two chapters of my history and it is central to my argument that Virginia is different from other colonies in that it was the first and the most self-governed of all the original colonies. In large measure being the first was impactful not because Virginia was an experiment in colonization, but because in Virginia’s case it came so early in England’s break from the medieval world, that England itself was not sufficiently developed to launch a successful colony and manage its affairs as a colony.

Also important, is how–and why–Plymouth and London Companies became sister companies inside the conglomerate Virginia Company governed by a board of directors chosen by the crown. It was this design structure that led to a remote and inconsistent Virginia Company governance that was unable to ever establish a meaningful and marginally effective presence in Jamestown. Reacting to a series of crises and inconsistent local governance, the London and Plymouth VCs were never able to muster enough coherence to plan for or to establish their presence in Virginia. It was too late in the case of the Virginia Company and the starving times, combined with unfortunate deterioration in native relationships, reduced the colony to such a pitiful state it took a decade to recuperate and stabilize.

As is known, in mid-1610, Jamestown itself was abandoned by its residents and governor–but then the cavalry came to the rescue a few days later, forcing a return to Jamestown. In that sense at least, Jamestown too went into technical default as a colony. While Virginia survived, the Company colony faced a near decade of living on an existential edge that effectively brought to an early end its hope of founding a successful colony that lived up to anybody’s definition of success.

Elizabethan England’s Policy-Making Processes

More cautious and behind the scenes than our contemporary image of her might be, Elizabeth’s hold on the Crown required some dependence on strong brokerage support of key aristocrats that protected the interests of the Queen, often at some benefit for themselves as well. Elizabeth’s policy-making was certainly authoritarian, but it was never absolute in that she was prone to delegate among her favorites and her more powerful brokerage advisors.

Americans, I feel, tend to exaggerate the monarch’s power, but it is evident from my research that whatever transpired in the Court or London did not necessarily impact the regions evenly. Anomic violence was a factor, and Elizabeth at times, in her last years especially, deferred to pushback from parliament and seemed reluctant to invite mass reaction to her initiatives. Her involvement with the trading companies was persistent, and her aims were clear–she wanted a piece of the action. The Levant Company, the only one with consistent profits during her reign got her attention, and for a period made its operations untenable. As we shall soon see, there was also more than London as other regions of England would play a role in North America. In essence there were several “influencers” that would inform American colonization.

It was this openness of Elizabeth (and James I to some degree) to let others operate within her parameters to formulate and implement key policy areas–such as overseas trade and later colonialization. Her weakness in policy-making lie in policy implementation and in defective “feedback loop” that obscured any consistent flow of information that could lead to more effective policies and an improved process. It was toward the end of her reign that parliament, fueled by its growth in size due to population expansion and urbanization, asserted itself, particularly after 1595, concerned with the issue of monopolies and “farming”. This would set the state for a more active parliament during the Stuart succession.

[999]

Virginia’s English-Elizabethan-Stuart Inheritance

Some English historians have commented on the implied decentralization of policy-making during Elizabeth’s reign as day-to-day affairs and the implementation of central decision fell upon lower units of government and the regional nobility and aristocrats. It was during this period that the capital city, London grew and as it did power gravitated over its governance to the merchants and financiers of the realm. Allied with the Queen they would dominate London’s affairs and administration providing competent management and stability. Sir Thomas “Customer” Smythe was a third generation merchant who was an important figure in that relationship between London and the sovereign. This informal alliance broke down only in the decade previous to the civil war. In the period, local administration centered in regional centers, as did the management of England’s Anglican church conformity to its established doctrine; the result was an uneven and often regional distinctiveness in the types of English Protestantism that developed.

The central idea is England herself was in transition and transformation during this critical period of pre-colonial England. England had not yet clarified her own identity at the time she attempt to create colonies in North America. In 1600 what America might inherit from England is still in flux, and several turns of the wheel of time would be necessary to take a stab at that question. Virginia was never the primary attraction for English adventurers; if anything, England was in search of China, Japan, and the Far East; North America was in the way of getting there. When Virginia was founded the English had the no clear sense of where North America bordered, and how it was to figure in the 1600 goal of getting on the other side of the world. Nevertheless, Virginia defied the odds, survived the corporate failure, and defined a great deal of its own development. As the oldest colony–and future state–Virginia would reach far back in England’s history than the other states, with the possible exception of New England.

Virginia, and the Virginia Company and its two-prong attempt at overseas discovery, trade and colonization had forged no consensus defining any of these concepts. In their rudimentary state, however, these conflicting and overlapping goal-missions played a serious, if unappreciated role in the failure of the Company. The consequences and implications of that corporate failure played their role in the future economic, social and political development of the colony and later the American state of Virginia.

The Crown as did most of her aristocracy, preferred Ireland for its closeness and its ability to support plantation development–which is what the English expected out of a colony in these years., In Ireland, which was always more of a conquest than a colony-founding was a place where military, not trading skills, were most valuable and congruent with the aristocracy’s sense of honor and purpose. Elizabeth’s favorites, Essex in particular, conducted military campaigns waged on Elizabeth’s behalf, but for which they were financially responsible. Raleigh and Essex dominated her last years and they were personifications of her last years on the throne. James was also attracted to Ireland, and much less so to North America.

Virginia Company as a Joint Stock Corporation

Organization: Incapacity and Bad Design Relative to its Mission

Seldom does the more usual, and compact, Virginia history mention a second (actually first) simultaneous Virginia Company expedition that landed in Maine. It failed totally in two years. No one talks about it; history belongs to the winners-Maine lost. But here the reader should understand the Virginia Company corporate structure housed two separate and independent subsidiary companies. That meant the Company was literally headed off in two directions simultaneously. Its governance body, a large cumbersome governing council approved by, and reporting to the king, could not achieve a consistent quorum and as mentioned above had no real business and financial plan. In a practical day-to-day sense who was in charge of the Virginia Company during its first two almost three years? Even to this day that subject is barely mentioned. For all practical purpose no one was until the !609 second charter was approved by the King.
Fundamentally flawed, the Virginia Company joint stock corporation was headed for a near-certain disaster before it ever left London. This is the most important factor that will, in 1609-10 lead to Jamestown’s “starving times”. This module starts the background to understanding why that horrible event happened.

The immediate problem the Virginia Company encountered was that its “organization and organizational structure”, it was the latest version in England’s business structure: the joint stock corporation. A specialized version of that structure, the merchant trading company, had just rolled out of London’s drydock five years earlier. The East India Company was intended to lead English initiative to open up East Indies to English overseas commerce. The Virginia Company was intended to open up North America; it was designed around a politically updated version of the East India Company. The CEO of both companies was the same merchant: Sir Thomas Smythe.

Thus the “good ship Virginia Company” was the East India Company 2.0–the cutting edge version of the English great merchant trading company tasked with not only overseas commerce but a permanent settlement, a colony. The distinction between those two missions was poorly understood and that lay at the heart of the Virginia Company’s design and leadership problems–not to ignore that both were also tied to English politics that was in transition and worse, was on the threshold of “drifting into England’s great civil war (1639). Accordingly, this module will provide background to the great merchant trading companies that carried out England’s entry to overseas commerce. In England these trading companies were exclusively some form of a joint stock corporation–and the Virginia Company was the last in that line. These creatures of the sea were characteristic of that European age which we will also mention examples from several European countries.

The incapacity of the English merchant trading joint stock corporation to accomplish its missions (overseas trading factories and permanent settlement or plantation) caused no end of problems for the Virginia (and Sagadahoc Maine) colony. As I go forward into this history I hope to demonstrate to the reader why and when the merchant trading company that was the Virginia Company could not meet the demands of colonization. In the opening mainline chapter in the left column, I will make the case these companies were fatally flawed and their deficiencies were known. Complicated and lacking a widespread consensus, they continually disappointed and were consistently restructured–to little effect. The most succinct introduction to my first chapter, if not the entire book, is drawn from the English scholar, Robert Brenner:

Some of London’s greatest merchants … took charge of the original colonial ventures of the Jacobean era and in so doing, again made use of privileged companies [i.e. royal monopolies]. But the entrepreneurs behind the American colonial companies of this period achieved neither organizational stability nor financial success. By the end of the 1620’s all of the main companies had collapsed, and the great City merchants had entirely forsaken the American trades. … The fact remains that the survival of the colonial companies was. in any case, a doubtful proposition, since any attempt by the City’s company merchants to adapt traditional commercial forms [the joint stock companies] to the colonizing process faced insuperable obstacles. The Virginia Company, by far the greatest of the colonial commercial operations of the period, was initiated under relatively auspicious conditions. yet, from the start this venture had to confront fundamental problems that it could never overcome.

By following the Virginia Company’s rise and fall, one can see why the old forms were inappropriate to this new field [permanent settlement], and discern the reasons why the great company merchants who dominated most of England’s overseas commerce were ultimately obliged to withdraw from the colonial trades. … There was, in fact, little in its formal organization to differentiate the Virginia Company from the East India Company … Nevertheless, the growth of English commerce with Virginia pre-supposed the creation of a permanent, export-producing colony. The fact that productive plantations [permanent settlements] were a prerequisite for commerce crucially distinguished the project of the Virginia Company from those of the purely trading ventures of this era, and largely accounts for its deviant line of development. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchant and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton University Press, 1993, Verso Press, 2003), pp. 92-3

Our plotline labels the distorted direction Jamestown took in 1607 maladministration caused by the institutional incapacity of the Company, along with a fundamental ignorance of what a permanent settlement required of the Company. Instead it degenerated into a gold rush to pay the Company’s bills and avoid bankruptcy. From the perspective of the Company’s governing Council, the quest for goal was absolutely necessary to pay the bills for the founding of Jamestown because having launched the ships the Company was on the threshold of financial collapse. The day those ships left England, the Company was little more than a floating bankruptcy. How did all this happen?

Firstly, my view of the design and incorporation of the Virginia Company came about from a genuine belief of many of its advocates that England was behind in the mercantile competition and that if it were to catch up England had to vastly improve upon its low level of economic development that inhibited its ability to use its economic power to serve the king’s ambitions (and lifestyle), but to defend it from foreign ambitions and perhaps most of all generate economic prosperity and create wealth to promote innovation and to resolve the tensions that resulted from England’s population movement, urbanization, and the development of an urban underclass that threatened her stability.

England’s turn to overseas trade in the mid-sixteenth century reflected England’s increasing realization it could not create sufficient economic growth to induce prosperity for its growing population, large segments of which were removed from their previous occupation as serfs on a manor. So pervasive was this disruption that England’s economy, which heretofore had a near pure agricultural economic base, increasingly developed large clusters of relocated refugees in their newly expanded capital and regional cities/towns. Unless these cities and towns raised the resources to finance these obligations, England could never compete successfully until prosperity raised the fortunes of these refugees by creating jobs and creating discretionary income not only for the refugees but profits that could be turned into investments for new exports and imports that fueled economic growth to successful raise funds needed for the kingdom’s policy, religious objectives, and political, economic and social stability. As observed by Michael J. Braddick:

The expansion of overseas trade, and the first steps toward settlement in Americas … activists played an important role in lobbying for the use of state power in new territories and new functions. In this case extension [of state power] took place as the result of the ‘variable interplay of state control and individual initiative in which great men at Court and in the councils of the realm performed an indispensable role as intermediaries’ [quoting K. R. Andrews: Trade, Plunder and Settlement, p. 15]. The trading companies chartered in the period between 1550 and 1640 represented a technique whereby national government at little cost to the exchequer, could act to promote the expansion of English commerce. [99] Michael J, Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 398-9

Without doubt that mean advocates wanted a piece of that action for themselves. But like today’s space race motivations and ambitions were multiple, and way more complex than simple greed. Today we explore planets, moons and galaxies to find exports and imports to earth that will accomplish much the same objectives–including competing in global politics to safeguard our interests, national defense, and to raise the level of prosperity for ourselves and the globe. The actors in this, personified by Musk, play the role as innovators and financiers just as the Virginia Company was supposed to be. The major difference, however, is the national commitment is to finance the projects and innovation. In the Virginia Company’s situation, it had to pay the bills. If this be progress, make the most of it?

The Greate Merchant Trading Companies and Pivot to Broader Overseas Commerce

Thus England as an aggregate kingdom in the period we discuss had entered into the first stages of a social-economic transformation intended to create stability and prosperity that will spur its “modernization” by Tudor policy-makers which would support its ambition to enter in, and compete, with the mercantile powers of Europe. The deal and the pivot did not work out that neatly. Over the following decades, transformation continued, and it resulted in increasingly dysfunctional politics that further unsettled its medieval order, rendering it vulnerable to popular and elite dissatisfaction that would undermine its social and class orders, but also its core institutions of governance. By the second decade of the seventeenth century England, in my words, began its “drift into civil war”. Times were a changing and the colonization of Virginia got caught up into its dynamics.

The period of the overseas pivot, excepting three years, was during the reign of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth, in my opinion, is well-known but not well understood, or appreciated, by students of Virginia political/economic/social development. Hence the need for this module. With no aspirations for a comprehensive history of the period I will cull out several themes which I believe did affect the design and hence the incorporation of the Virginia Company. The policy process that was followed for its incorporation was congruent with that of the Elizabethan process used in the previous great merchant trading incorporations, using a royal charter that granted a monopoly in return for a royal cut in the action of trading.

It was a deal each merchant grouping negotiated with her, and the interplay that followed over the trading company’s short term future was volatile and produced a mixed bag of results for all parties. The kinks of the joint stock corporation that was used as the organizational vehicle of this partnership were never resolved by 1605 mostly because they reflected the dynamics of the Elizabethan policy process and the institutions and personalities it included. A good deal of the reason for this faulty policy process was that England was in the midst of a number of major and significant economic and demographic change that introduced volatility, disruptive dynamics, and tensions among traditional medieval elites, and encourage the development of other proto classes as well. These dynamics overwhelmed the 1605-6 incorporation process and the first iteration of the Virginia Company–and the first royal charter-was a near total disaster that, in my opinion, caused the horrific start to the colony that destabilized it for decades.

In a nutshell the post 1550 created a great merchant trading joint stock corporation that persuaded Elizabeth to grant a royal charter and issue a monopoly to trade, and in the Virginia Company’s case, to found a colony. While simultaneously expanding policy-making to include a more powerful and active merchant class seeking meaningful overseas commerce, a companion gentry class (some landed, others not), and a more occupationally diverse aristocracy also wanted in. Not only different classes, but regional port cities wanted their own charter and wanted to start their own colonies. London, the great regional power wanted its own action, although it had less interest in colonization than it did in trade–with the Far East in particular. Say it another way, Mom and Dad did not agree on the gender of the child. So the governance of this colony was left for the king to nominate appoint–and that is its own story for Chapter 2.

Post 1550 Pivot to Overseas Trade Complicated by Dynamics of the One Export Economy

At this point we take a deep dive into the post 1550 English policy-making process that produced the pivot to an overseas commercial trade from which the Virginia Company resulted in 1605-6. In doing so, I might also state my objectives in this section, objectives which are in no way comprehensive or reflective of the many directions that the pivot to overseas trade could take us–such as its role the development of the British Empire or its role in the furtherance of British colonization. I am most concerned with the development of the joint stock corporation as employed by the great merchant trading companies, and the period from their inception in the 1550’s to the suspension of the Virginia Company charter in 1624-5. Accordingly, I do not address directly the more theoretical distinctions between the “state” and private sector and their relations and interrelations other than to acknowledge and employ the reality both were involved together in the making of overseas commercial policy and colonialization.

[999] I argue the capacity and its governance, the Virginia Company in particular, was not sufficient in this period to be entrusted with a permanent settlement colony, and that its deficiencies in the case of Virginia led to that colony developing its own path to American statehood which was quite distinctive in several ways from its other American colonies. In this section, I argue that on element of the Virginia Company’s incapacity was the process of policy-making in place at the time of its incorporation. In that the joint stock corporation, as detailed by Phillip Stern for example, enjoyed a much longer period of influence and development it, if nothing else matured and evolved through to the late nineteenth century. My criticisms of the Company in this very early period are therefore not necessarily reflective of this larger time period. [99] See L. H. Roper’s review of Stern’s Empire Incorporated, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61530 H-Empire H-Net Reviews, January 2025; see also Eric Mielants https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00207152241229865 International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Vol 65, Issue 1 (February, 2024) who acknowledges “that early modern as well as modern elites grafted themselves onto power structures, how money and politics become gradually more entwined in time [and] … since much of England’s mercantile elite was involved in East India Company leadership … [and] how important monopolies are to this entire process (though the extent of the author’s inspiration by Fernand Braudel are unclear) … [and] whereas in the early modern period it was blatant how overseas corporation were ‘political chameleons”, given the commercial need to obtain charters” that the very early years of the joint stock merchant trading companies were certainly susceptible to influence of the players in the policy system of that period. [999]

While the Muscovy Company was incorporated during Mary I’s reign (interestingly in a period after her marriage to Phillip II. I suspect that given the Company primarily was interested in trade with Russia thru Siberia as a means to access China and the larger East, the latter left it alone as little threat to his interests), it was Elizabeth I’s policy-making process that more directly affected the development of the great merchant joint stock corporation–a process that was inherited by James I, and in its essentials continued as the Virginia Company was designed and incorporated, although his priorities and the personalities involved were distinctive to his system.

That process, reflective as it was of England’s transition relied on the joint stock corporation as the Tudor default organization despite its observable deficiencies and inherent risks in large measure because the process was “closed”, and this closure permitted certain elites to assume control, or at least disproportionate dominance of corporate decision-making to the benefit of a few, and the displeasure of many- that led into its being a contentious element to the extent that it further compounded the effectiveness and capacity of the corporation. From Virginia’s perspective this contentiousness injected itself into the Company’s governance, leadership, and definition of its mission, and conflict in its founding and management of a permanent settlement

Workforce emigration and the Underclass:

the Underclass

Something had to motivate the English settler to Virginia to cross 3000 miles of cold North Atlantic storms and winds, in the middle of winter (Dec-Jan,) on ships no larger than 100 foot [(Susan B Constant), the Godspeed (68 feet), and the indominable Discovery, a 38 footer carrying 21 of the 144 settlers and crew on board the diminutive pinnacle]?

I suspect the troubled state of the English economy after 1550 played an important role in that motivation. During this period the English economy was fragile, in transition, and riddled with inflation, poverty and a Dickensian like living conditions. The noted economist, B. E. Supple, suggests that issues such as population concentration in London, the marginalization of smaller non-London outer port cities, and dependence on a one industry (wool) export economy led to an aggregate economy that could not sustain meaningful economic growth, jobs or prosperity. Each of these factors exacted a serious effect that resulted in the pivot of post 1550’s English overseas trade.

For those forced off their land, their displacement, off and on, for well over a hundred or more years meant a large grouping of England’s population were both propertyless and classless and often, jobless. Economic refugees for the most part, unskilled except in agriculture, economic refugees either became artisans/merchants, found their way into apprenticeships and guilds in more urban areas, or, if lucky found opportunities in the growing cloth/wool cluster. Of necessity these displaced groups eventually settled in cities where they remained. Unemployed unfortunates, increased during periods when the cloth industry had hard times. settling in the most desperate of occupations and housing.

Within daily sight of powerful affluent elites, also resident in London especially, these souls could not be easily ignored as they begged and did what they did to sustain themselves. In the context of this time period, the mass of classless and underclass in the growing regional centers, but mostly London no longer were congruent with tradition medieval social classes nor value system. While many were aspirational, a great number were more desperate and mired in poverty thereby putting a lid on prosperity and good times, while in bad times their desperate conditions created instability, crime and slum-like neighborhoods.

As the only sizeable job opportunity for those thrust off of, or surplus to, an agricultural manor, the workforce for the manufactured cloth was a cheap and constant factor of production. The cloth industry concentrated over time, and located closer to ports that exported their product; the workers followed them. London became the principal beneficiary of England’s population movement, and its growth dwarfed the other regional centers.

On top of this the key position enjoyed by the Company of Merchant Adventurers in growing London, was disturbed by the increasing droves of economic refugees from the countryside that were settling in England’s new urban centers. Evicted from a manor, and dispersed to seek work in concentrated urban areas, the metros of England, and London in particular were stressed. In London’s case, the major industry was cloth-making its export, but a dearth in other growing sectors meant the employment burden fell on cloth. In a boom and bust one export economy, these poor souls when negatively affected by a bust were left to the streets. and jails.

Fluctuations of cloth trade “were the principal causes of outbreaks of unemployment … Even when he was employed, the average textile worker had little enough income to buy his basic necessities, quite apart from any possibility of his saving enough to establish a buffer between slump and starvation“, and “when the looms stopped in areas where cloth manufacturing was a concentrated industry, the result might not be far from anarchy [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642: a Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 234].

Since, urban unemployed were more apt to be concentrated geographically Supple argues “the textile industry played an almost unique role at this time” in the English economy. Its limitations became very visible, and those with resources to form their own businesses, ranging from “gentlemen’ victims of primogeniture, to new aspirants of the gentry merchant grouping were restive as well. An unskilled poverty class haunted the new urban centers across the nation, and the economic development need was to find opportunities to satisfy their needs for housing and food, but also to calm the rising aspirations of a new population desiring their own opportunity to make a new start.

At this point I call attention to how this development in which surplus workforce emanating from the enclosure movement and economic change collected and settled disproportionately in London created a new grouping of some size and concentration that it became a factor in our overseas trade pivot. In the medieval period, at least until Henry VII broke from the Catholic Church, the poor and their care-disposition, had been left primarily to the jurisdiction of the Church. So were orphans.

Since urbanization was still in the future, this burden fell to local parishes and regional Church institutions, such as abbeys, monasteries, and parishes. Henry’s seizure of Church lands and institutional buildings and manors broke up this system. As we begin our post-1550 pivot, this breakup was only a generation in the past. But by the 1550’s the problem of the poor, unfortunate, economic refugees, in good times or but especially bad had fallen to the rising, semi-cohesive multiple protestant groupings/cults that followed in the wake of the Church of England. The Anglican Church itself, consumed as it was by Crown politics, the onset of European religious wars, and problems of defining what the Anglican Church was and what it held as its core of beliefs, did not expend much thought in regards to this horde of diverse poor that was day by day finding their way to London.

Thus non Anglican protestant groupings led by charismatic preacher activists entered into the religious debate of the era, spreading across England and Scotland, finding success in certain areas, less in others, and establishing their own “parishes”, often initially in private homes supplemented and then replaced the Catholic and bypassed the Anglican hierarchies to offer choice in faith belief systems during a time when individual choice first became practicable.

Naturally, some faith-based groups, drawing from diverse economic groupings living in the larger urban centers, but especially London, could not escape the problems of the poor, orphans, widows, disabled, and those out-of-luck members of their grouping fell into a limbo where support and charity was absent to non-existent. London, undergoing serious urbanization and population increase, was under the most strain, and its distressed population, openly visible to all, clustered in neighborhoods pocketed throughout the city, even those adjoining centers of power and finance.

Many refugees came from locations where they were serfs, i.e. the property of the lord, and now, dumped in London, they were no longer property, but having no land were not defined as free man or yeomen. Whatever name one applies to this grouping we can suggest underclass had taken shape and form. In London, the center of overseas policy-making, these new residents injected their presence into the the policy-making fabric that was the post-1550 pivot to overseas trade. In time these individuals will become candidates for emigration and colonization; they will be the recipients or victims of indenture, some who will be by hook or crook able to pay their own way overseas will become free men in the colonies, and husbands for young females. Children, those in jail especially, will find themselves on ships in large numbers to Jamestown.

For those who would make overseas policy in this period, the problem of the economic refugees and underclass could justify the an extension of overseas trade to enter into overseas colonization and permanent settlements. It certainly was picked up by the Hakluyts whom we shall introduce in later chapters It took the form of an expanded goal-function for overseas trade and commerce–a new task to create jobs or for the more cynical, they were Dicken’s “surplus population” two hundred years before his birth. For others, who would in their time, secure a charter to settle in the Virginia Company Plymouth Corporation, these poor and misfortune would be an obligation for the parish in a permanent settlement to support. Some of the religious groupings of the post 1550 pivot era would incorporate into their belief system a commitment to the poor and offer remedies congruent with their faith. The early Puritans led by John Winthrop developed in this pivot period such a commitment, made evident by Francis J. Bremer in his excellent biography [99] John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 30ff

Bremer describes Winthrop’s extended family informing us that his grandfather and father were members and employees of the Clothworkers guild. He had “taken advantage of the dissolution of the monasteries [which] led to government sale of these properties, and Adam [the grandfather of our John] took advantage of this in 1544 when he purchased the Suffolk manor of Groton which had formerly belong to the Abbey of St Edmunds at Groton. He also had no qualms about exercising the right that he acquired by this purchase to choose the new rector of Groton’s parish church, naming his step brother Roger Ponder … Adam Winthrop was a prominent Londoner by virtue of his position in the Clothworkers [guild] and was at stage in his career when he would have been on the verge of even greater responsibilities in the city. In 1548 he had been granted a coat of arms and the rank of gentleman … As leader of one the great city companies, Adam had a role to play in civic ceremonies and was looked to to provide leadership … [However, the Winthrop family had been drawn into a small protestant group that were labeled at the time as “evangelicals, and who would later be called “puritan’, faced the dilemma of risking himself and family to Mary I’s wrath in her campaign to restore Catholicism; he therefore left London [Adam] retired to his manor in Groton] While the rest of his family [including our John Winthrop’s father, also named Adam], William Winthrop [his oldest son] remained in the city to manage the family business. … [William] Winthrop was esteemed as one of the godly and soon rose to hold office in the parish of St Michael’s. In 1564 he ws chosen one of the collectors for the poor. The parish took the responsibility fot its less fortunate members seriously. After the closure of charities, the parish had converted a range of residences in the church yard, formerly used for choir members, to houses for the poor, and then, much to the annoyance of John Stowe [a critic of the puritans] ‘ had greatly blemished the church by the building of lower tenements on the north side thereof toward the high street in place of the green churchyard, ‘whereby the church is darkened and otherwise annoyed’. [p. 34] For years after becoming collector for the poor, Winthrop was elected to be one of the churchwardens, the lay governors of the parish church … William’s energetic support of religious reform detracted from his attention to his business, and he never achieved the success that his father had in the Clothworkers though he continued to trade with northern Europe and the Bay of Biscay, and was a member of the Spanish Company in 1577. … [but] he failed to hold any off [in the Clothworkers] other than steward administering some internal affairs of the company, to which he was elected by 1574 when he was forty-five years old. ..[In] later years, however, saw his fortunes collapse. He was forced to sell property … and dispatch his wife to live with her relations in Kent … William applied for assistance from the parish, and in November 1577 the churchwardens of St Michael’s voted that he should have the next house available in the churchyard [which were the housing he had constructed earlier. The following June he was assigned one of the poor houses which had so exercised John Stowe. There he live till his death in March 1582. [p.38]

Our story of the Winthrop’s offer support to several aspects of my argument. As a member and employee of the Clothworkers guild, he is wrapped up in that industry nexus; his membership in the Spanish Company, one of the many post 1550 overseas trading companies that participated in the overseas pivot. But in the particular context of my ongoing position that during the period of the pivot, the care and provision of the poor did develop among some of the protestant sects, in this case the puritans that would be emigrants in the Massachusetts venture in the late 1620’s. Interestingly, William Winthrop’s leadership in what I might call an early precursor of London urban renewal on behalf of the poor, temptingly suggests an early seed of thought in the puritan belief and value pattern. In any case, as we shall see religion did enter into the overseas pivot, and in the next chapter and others to follow we will se it played a large role in Virginia’s colonization.

the Gentry’s Problem: As for the more affluent and better off non aristocrats, Hard times for them did little to help the wealthy prosper, and disadvantaged in a primogeniture social system its “surplus” offspring lacked opportunities as well. One could also mention, the protestant faiths that were on the rise in England had members of all classes and groupings. The destruction of the Catholic monasteries and nunneries left a vacuum in a social support system that many protestant parishes and their vestries took seriously. The plight of the urban poor was for them not easily ignored, and the deficiencies of an economy dominated by a monopoly of their ilk rankled. If overseas trade was the best opportunity for wealth and job creation, then they wanted it open to themselves and jobs for the workers would follow. Not only economics but faith entered into the politics of the pivot.

But what they encountered was a London-Company of Adventurers-Royal partnership/alliance that stifled initiative and wealth generation. As described by Phillip J. Stern this clogged up policy system

Sixteenth century England … was a franchise government in which offices and positions were both public service and private property, with prerogatives and perquisites meant to offer opportunities for social and financial advancement. For someone like [England’s 1580 North American discovery leader] exploration, predation, and plantation abroad sat at the intersections of entrepreneurial enterprise and what he called “Chivalric policy and philosophie”, but what more commonly might have been known as a “project”. Like other chartered offices and enterprise’, overseas franchises could be bought, shared, sold, inherited, farmed out and financed. As they marshalled partners and investors, often including the Queen and her ministers, such projects [discovery and exploration] did not easily distinguish state [government] from individual interest, and as such were less public private partnerships than portmanteaus . Unlike their domestic brethren, however, overseas charters [the monopoly] projected their authority into places where the Crown, legally and pragmatically, had none. Territory, jurisdiction, or trading privileges abroad had to be acquired by taking it or by negotiating for it via grants, contracts, purchases and agreements with the peoples they found there. … If such models [of transaction] seemed to blur the lines between colony and commerce, finance and governance, and public office and private profit, it was because they arose from a world in which such fast boundaries had never existed in the first place. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 19.

In this situation, other merchant adventurers, either members in the Company, or those drawn to other occupations and products saw increased trade as the solution to their problems and hopes. In the last half of the sixteenth century the Company because of its restricted membership and the impact of primogeniture no longer offered an avenue for future English merchant adventurers as it had previously. England needed economic growth to allow for adjusting to the changes it was undergoing; overseas trade was easily one of the opportunities to allow for such growth. It was time to move on, the cloth-based Company of Adventurers were not, and so other merchant organizations did.

Cloth Export and the Origins of English Overseas Trade: Company of Merchant Adventures

Company of Merchant Adventurers Set the Path for London-based Overseas Merchants

How did the London London merchants gain a head start in overseas trading? The answer lies in the formation of England’s first major joint stock corporation by London-based cloth merchants: Company of Merchant Adventurers. Blending a guild-like cloth industry membership with a royal monopoly to a structure with exclusive export across the English Channel to the continent, the new corporation was, almost by definition, the first English proto-type joint stock corporation relevant to English overseas trade. The Company received its first charter in 1407; obtained its breakthrough charter Henry VII in 1496 and 1505, and Elizabeth’s 1564 charter transformed Company’s membership in the corporation into a patrimony of families that created a lock on the Company’s “board of directors” and committee leadership.

With restricted membership allowed to the Company by Elizabeth, the Company’s governance, now self-perpetuating, meant the leadership held control over the non Board Company shareholders. The upper levels of the Corporation held virtually a monopoly not just in continental wool export, but also the Company itself. Inheritance of this membership became the entry for future leaders, and rendered the Company structure a closed oligarchy dedicated to continental trade of English cloth. From that point on the London-based leadership of the Corporation incrementally placed restriction on cloth merchant in the outer ports and cities, as well as factors in he continental ports of trade which effectively shut them out of .the cloth overseas trade. While Elizabeth moderated this in the course of her reign, it did not alter a core resistance of the Company governance to entry by non-London merchants.

In alliance with the Crown in policies concerning commercial trade, and aligned with English Crown vs. Parliamentary politics, the Merchant Adventurers proceeded to dominate the political governance institutions of the City of London, placing the latter within the King’s orbit, by securing the election of its members to important positions of power during much of the pre-English Civil War period. That meant the great power and influence of London merchant adventurers associated with the corporation amassed great influence over the governance of the City of London, and the investment and finance activities of the capital city of England during the century in alliance with Elizabeth.

The net effect, intended or not, small powerful oligarchy of London merchant adventurer families for all practical purposes marginalized overseas trade by other merchant adventurers. The exclusive focus on the Company on wool export and the Continent meant it constrained access of other to London’s wealth and investment, as well as access to the Court. The simple story is London was where the action was—but England’s general population, about four million in 1600, were in the countryside. Excluded, marginalized entrepreneurs and aspiring gentry from areas other than London had to deal with London’s size and concentration of power and institutions, but unwilling to abandon their place of origin they pursued their adventures from their homelands and dealt with London’s power as their needs required. This, of course, intensified their frustration.

Overseas trade become one of the Tudor monopolies, and a very important one at that. The heavy weight of the cloth merchants and the Company of Adventurers, however, shook the vigor out of the the overseas manufacturing, finance, trade and investment communities of England. “the comparatively primitive structure of England’s overseas trading system hindered the development of her extra-European enterprise. In the sixteenth century English merchants conducted simple bilateral trade with the Baltic and Mediterranean and Levant trades … Such a structure, which was associated with a heavy reliance upon cloth exports, gave little scope either for acquiring the specie needed for [Asia] trade or for marketing [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, p. 361

London’s Path to Overseas Commercial Trade, Commerce & Colonization

Elizabethan England’s Policy-Making Processes

Virginia Company as a Joint Stock Corporation

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