Outer Cities Path/Approach to the Virginia Company

Outer Cities Path/Approach to the Virginia Company

Outer Ports and London

July 28, 1629, John Winthrop and [a companion, Emmanuel Downing] were riding towards the Sempringham estate of the earl of Lincoln … traversing the East Anglican fens … a mixture of water, bog and swamp. … On this particular day as they approached the crossing of the River Ouse near Littleport … Riding along they saw locals  fishing for eels … They were talking about [a] plan [that] Dorchester’s Reverend John White had been promoting for a puritan settlement in New England. White … [a member] of the Dorchester Company of Adventurers, a West Colony effort to establish colonial fisheries. Out of the ashes of that venture had arisen the Massachusetts Bay Company, combining some of the original members with new investors from London and East Anglia. An advance party of colonists had been sent out under the leadership of John Endecott [Endicott], and had established an outpost at Naumkeag, which they renamed Salem [my home town].

Winthrop had been urged by … members of the new company to join the enterprise, and [Winthrop was] … traveling to attend a meeting of the company leadership being hosted by the earl of Lincoln. Though the earl was hosting the meeting, this enterprise was led for the most part by gentry and clergy rather than aristocrats. On the agenda was the suggestion that leaders of the company should migrate to “the new England”. … Preoccupied perhaps by their discussion, Winthrop was inattentive. His horse stumbled, slipped and fell into a bog. Winthrop found himself immersed in water up to his waist in a life-threatening accident. he struggled to right himself in the foul smelling fen waters. The footing was treacherous, and he was tangled with his horse. But as he later wrote, ‘the Lord preserved me from further danger. Blessed be his name’. Once again God had shown him special favor … What message was God sending him?

John Winthrop’s decision [to migrate to] New England had many roots … [but] if he was wavering on his journey to Sempringham being saved from danger in the fens was the sort of experience he would have seen as a signal. At last he seemed to sense what God had chosen him for. He was ready to serve. [99] Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop:  America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 147-8

During the decades after the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade and commerce commenced, seeds were planted for future change in English overseas trade and colonization. These seeds “broke ground” in their own good time, yielding a succession of colonies that would become states in the American Republic when it formed in 1789. The Virginia Company’s role in the founding of these colonies is poorly developed in American history, but its impact and leadership in founding both Virginia, the first chronologically, and a second, Massachusetts, settled intermittently over the next twenty years.

The key to filling in these gaps is to alert the reader that the Virginia Company was structured in 1605-6 to launch at least two colonies, if not more. The reason the Company was designed as it was in 1606 was England lacked a consensus on who and where the North American colony was to to be founded–and who was to manage it. The lack of consensus was due to the reality that over the previous forty years or so, both London and the Outer Ports of England had been blazing their own distinctive path that led eventually to North American colonization in 1606.

The opening story, an episode in the life of John Winthrop the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony–i.e. Massachusetts, alerts the reader that Massachusetts’ birth as a colony was a generation after Jamestown’s founding–but the Virginia Company was still involved in the Massachusetts’ founding. The incident happened in 1629, five years after the Virginia Company’s Virginia charter had been suspended, a victim of English politics and policy and a consequence of the Company’s inability to effectively govern a colony. Yet there it was still involved in founding a colony?

Massachusetts was not a creature of the London Company subsidiary of the Virginia Company as was Virginia; rather, it was a sibling of the other subsidiary company, the Plymouth Company. The Virginia Company in its 1606 design included two separate (and autonomous) subsidiary companies each supposedly government/managed by a single conglomerate board of directors. At the same time as Jamestown, the Plymouth Company made its first attempt at a colony, Sagadahoc (Maine), founded at the same time as Jamestown Virginia, however, collapsed and was abandoned two years later. The Jamestown colony, run by the London subsidiary company, fared little better than the Plymouth Company, but possessing more resources and support from the king, it was able, barely, to reassert itself through reorganization in 1609-10. The Plymouth Company, under the leadership of a different group of “investor-activist leadership”  was open to different approaches to the management of the colony, that let it reorganize, restructure, and make a second start with a much different approach than Virginia would follow.

Muddling along after its collapse, it started the Plymouth colony in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in twenty years later. This lag between Jamestown and 1629 profoundly influenced the founding of the second colony. In between, 1619-20 the Plymouth company restructured itself and developed new leadership. The Virginia Company, on the other hand had lost control over Virginia, but founded a second colony in Bermuda–which it retained until the 1660s–and still attempted to restart its Virginia charter until 1643.

The point of this is that the reader is missing a lot of the action launched by the Virginia Company if we ignore the activities of the second company. We need to be aware of both companies if we are to correctly recognize the 1606 design of the Virginia Company was faulty, and that an autonomous expedition by the second company failed for a lot of the same reasons–and both were not able to reassert their colony formation until 1620–both suffered from a lost decade.

Our interest here is to alert the reader that the Virginia Company had two subsidiary companies, one founded by London adventurers and a second, the Plymouth adventurers from England’s Outer Ports. In fact, it was the Outer Ports initiative that led the discussion that resulted in the formation-incorporation of Virginia Company–and the other subsidiary, the London Company was attached by virtue of meddling by the Queen’s broker advisory (Cecil) who wanted London’s involvement because he figured the King would support the deal. That story will be told in a future chapter.

The reality the same Company, the Virginia Company, is directly tied to both Virginia and Massachusetts founding as colonies, as well as the chronology of the chronological difference have, in my view, been push so far to the margins of American history that it is doubtful a handful of Americans appreciate the link or are aware of it. American historians have spent many a decade, and written many a book trying to explain why 1607 Jamestown failed, a exercise that seems less fruitful than simply incorporating the larger story of the Plymouth Company.

the two initial English colonies-states (Virginia and Massachusetts/New England), born of the same founder during the same time line, followed different paths from the start in 1606. Both suffered through a failed first colony settlement, both reorganized and then muddled through a decade, before reorganizing and beginning anew with new leadership and organizational design in 1619-20. To appreciate how the two companies under their own distinctive leadership followed a similar time line, but pursued a different approach to colonization, I need to alert the reader that during the period in which the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade occurred, English political and economic development opened two quite different paths or approaches to future English trade and colonization.

London would follow a trade and export model, Plymouth, once it moved past fishing, always moved toward in a permanent settlement approach.  The former was accountable and loyal to the king, his foreign policy, and his conception of the Church of England, the second more firmly lodged in the puritanism of the outer ports geographies, were supportive of founding religious-based settlements and held their own goals as to their political and economic development–and relations with the native tribes. As to why the Virginia Company was designed to create the two autonomous subsidiaries we need to understand how the paths to overseas trade and colonialization differed between the outer ports and London.

As to understand why the Plymouth Company had to include London in its initiative we had to understand how the political relationship of the outer ports contrasted with London’s. We also have to explore how and why each defined the North American initiative differently: either trade/export or permanent settlement. The starting point in these differences was the emergence and development of London as an English “mega city”, and secondly, its ability to embed the City into an alliance with the sovereign, in which London companies were able to acquire and manipulate royal monopolies in trade, export, import and impose an internal organization that fostered corporate oligarchies relatively closed to outsiders such as entrepreneurs and adventurers from the outer ports.

As to the development of the two different approaches, that resulted from experiences encountered during the post-1550 pivot to a more comprehensive, global overseas trade. That is a story that involved the great merchant trading companies that were developed and designed in that period. Outer port adventurers finding access to these companies restricted by the joint stock structure employed, took off on their own and launched their own voyages of discovery, exploration, and eventually settlement.

Outer Port’s Path Through the Overseas Pivot Period

Outer Ports (non-London) considerably smaller in population and port infrastructure also entered into cloth export but encountered heavy discrimination from the larger London cloth manufactures and Company members. With Company-created headwinds for cloth export, these Outer Ports took advantage of their western and southern locations, and developed overseas pursuits favorable to their non-continental geography. They developed their own infrastructure and their own versions of a maritime and overseas elite, infrastructure, and tradition. Hence, during the fifteenth century they oriented their overseas trade differently than the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers. For reasons including local economic development, they got caught up in England’s perpetual conquest of Ireland, and started developing Irish plantations. As the century played out they turned their attention more to discovery and exploration of new lands, privateering against the Spanish, and later colonization.

The focus on Ireland consumed a good deal of their enthusiasm for overseas involvement. At a time when London was creating regulated joint stock corporations, which we shall describe shortly,  with charter-derived monopolies over geographic areas of the globe, the Outer Ports were harnessed to the invasion of Ireland and the conquest of land they converted into an English plantation-manor. Hence, the reader might keep in mind a sort of bimodal overseas English overseas trade path and their own form of policy-making. These outer ports had grown, but not explosively. But the war with Spain and the voyages of discovery had created in many outports clusters of marine-oriented companies, ship-building complexes, and a local population of sailors, and a local aristocracy with ties to the sea and a loosely thought through strategy they could expand (like ancient Greek cities) by settling up colonies abroad.

This will become not only relevant to understanding the Virginia Company and Virginia’s colonization, but will lend considerable light to the implosion of the Virginia Company that led to its suspension of the Virginia charter.

Against this, London-based monopoly, the Outer Ports turned to privateering, the development of Irish plantations, and after the 1580’s, leadership in the discovery and navigation of North America and the West Indies. was followed by an even more intense pivot in the 1590’s and after. England’s overseas trade had evolved into a bimodal path of economic-political development. For those outer port advocates their bottom line ambition was to pursue their own economic development path not London’s. If England led by London wanted to catch up with Spain and Holland in commercial overseas trade,  the outer ports wanted to catch up with London. Colonization of North America seemed to them as one way to do it. Others wanted to establish bases from which privateering (if not anti-Catholic war) could continue to be waged in the West Indies, another group wanted to set up a base from which mass-scale fishing cluster could be developed, while still others were looking for trade routes to the Far East. Somewhere in this mélange of ambitions the role of colonization bounced around not unlike a billiard ball in a pool game.

Whatever the outer ports’ ambition to set up a permanent settlement in North America, the road to its approval ran through London: England’s sovereign, and London-based politics (Crown and Parliament). These outports seriously sought to discover and explore the North American coastline after 1580. They even founded a settlement (Raleigh’s Roanoke in 1587), and they continued their explorations despite a war with Spain and their own fascination with settling up plantations in Ireland.

Through 1604 they continued voyages to explore, discovery, and understanding natives they encountered. It didn’t help their cause that by the time the outer ports advocates presented their plan to London-based policy-makers, Elizabeth I was dead, and the Tudor-Stuart succession had placed James I on England’s throne. We will deal with the incorporation in Chapter 2, but in this module we will provide the background for Chapter I–how Londoners came to dominate the English overseas pivot as their strategy to economically develop England and themselves–and how the Outer Ports could left out and how they pursued their search for their piece of overseas trade to the exclusion of London.

 

How the Pivot to Overseas Trade was the Adopted Solution to an Economy in Transition

The exodus from the fields and pastures was the heat that kept the English economy bubbling for hundreds of years. While many engaged in agriculture were able to forge a way into a new class and some prosperity, the sheer number of those that didn’t and the inevitability that at some point they would in desperation wander into and settle in one urban center or another jus never went away–and to those who lived through it, it seemed as if it would never stop. The best solution to its disruptions and dysfunctionalities seemed job creation and the prosperity it would engender. That task fell to broadening overseas commerce and trade.

As the reader will discover below, the adoption of a broadened overseas commerce as the solution to an economy and demography in transition was as much inertia in following past activities and accomplishments and copying them into the new initiatives. Prodded by activists like Sebastian Cabot, the Hakluyts, and a series of adventurer merchants and explorers, which shall be discussed in future module-chapters, policy decision-makers, including the crown followed their own past experience with the Company of Merchant Adventurers, and the fear of missing out from a failure to effectively compete with England’s European mercantilist powers.

In this sense policy was made as much in taverns frequented by elites, as in governmental institutions. The sovereigns, supportive or not, were mostly reactive, and policy brokerage reflected much of foreign policy anxieties, a hope for personal gain, and internal crown rivalries and conflicting-friendly personalities. In the last years, Elizabeth’s favorites (Essex and Raleigh especially) played a role in Ireland and overseas affairs. A medieval martial spirit, a code of honor, and adventure permeated the process. Newton’s more rationalized approach to matters was a good seventy-five years away, as he was born in 1643; Galileo was born in 1564 and we can safely say, the rational scientific revolution awaited entry of its charismatic breakthrough personalities.

The first successful English North American colony predated most of modernity’s catalysts. One exception to that would be Thomas Hobbes who as a young man was an employee and activist in Sandy’s Virginia Company. [999] The reader is advised at this point and constantly throughout the history, that in this module she/he will encounter material discussed in previously. For the most part this is intentional as a tool to reinforce the main theses of the history and an effort to make relevancy to the contemporary more obvious. There are other reasons as well.

In this module I want to stress instances where macro behind the scenes factors intrude, in this case collide, with each other. I also want to call attention to policy-making where the background environment blur or bleed into active policy-making; the “drift of England into its civil wars” is my metaphor that macro English politics are incorporated into policy-making relevant to Virginia and the Virginia Company. Virginia histories are prone to discounting factionalization and polarization in Virginia’s early years before the main civil war.

In this period, the issue of monopolies is representative of an early issue that divided England and the Crown, and will become salient to the capacity and leadership of the Virginia Company. Edwin Sandys is a primary parliamentary opposition figure who led the parliaments’ opposition to monopolies, and who in his last years with the Virginia Company got caught up in a monopoly scandal that triggered the suspension of the Company’s Virginia charter by the king. The Company did get caught up in the monopolies issue in a very big way–and that should not be forgotten by the reader.[999]

The cloth/wool industry with its job-creating manufacturing and Holland-based export was the path pioneered by the Company of Merchant Adventurers. As problems grew more apparent to some Merchants and Merchant Adventurers it seemed logical to trade, not just in northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, but across the globe. That in a sentence was the motivation and thought behind the post-1550 Overseas Pivot. That this approach was not shared by all in the 1550’s (or ever)bespeaks the establishment approach tied to an overseas policy-making process led by those associated with the Company of Merchant Adventurers.

England had got caught up in Columbus’ post 1492 overseas venture and the earlier post 1480 voyages of discovery launched from the Outer Port of Bristol. It was those those of the 1490’s by John Cabot, who K. A. Andrews suggests, that broke the ground for England.  Cabot and his Bristol supporters were looking for new fishing grounds (Trade, Plunder and Settlement p.44-9) but instead stumbled upon what was North America–although he thought it Cathay at the time. So when he returned from his first voyage he set off on a campaign to go on his second.

“That this [adopted] Bristolian led on to the discovery of North America is attributed to John Cabot and the year 1498 … or to Bristol venturers on an earlier date. Cabot, a Venetian, probably came to Bristol in 1494 or 1495. The return of his ship the Mathew [from his first expedition] caused a stir, not only there but in London. The king immediately made an award .. and followed this up with a pension … to be paid from Bristol’s customs revenues. Cabot was feted, addressed as the admiral, and promised royal support for a grand expedition … [from which Cabot believed he had just returned] “Marco Polo’s Cathay … Cabot had been making for the East in quest of the spice trade. Henry VII intended to back him in a second venture” which departed in 1498. From that point on Bristol launched repeated expeditions to flesh out Cabot’s discovery. Two factors, however, tempered Bristol’s and Outer Port interest and/or ability to launch expeditions for overseas discovery in search of trading opportunities. The first was Henry VIII, who did encourage several expeditions during his reign, none successful, but was consumed with other priorities.

The second, again by K. A, Andrews who summed it up by observing, that “At bottom the weakness of English oceanic enterprise [in this period] … lay in London. We have noticed throughout the pioneering role of Bristol men, Plymouth men , Southampton men, but London initiative and support were for the most part conspicuous by their absence. The crown, the court, the government lent a helping hand often, and sometimes gave a lead, but the City [of London] held back. At this time the community of London merchants was richer and more powerful than ever before, and its wealth and power were fast increasing, yet the range of London overseas trade contracted during the reigns of the two Henries. For the basis of the nation’s commerce was the production of woollen cloth for export, but although these exports doubled during [this] period, they flowed increasingly into a single narrow channel: through London to Antwerp … depriving the English outports of much of their business and making Antwerp the one great source for imports from far and wide [because] … the great company of London cloth exporters [Company of Merchant Adventurers] had privileges there which multiplied the profitability of their privileges in England. Their interest lie in exploiting these advantages, not in looking for alternatives“. [p. 63]

The importance of overseas trade as the breakout initiative in creating jobs, prosperity, individual wealth, and more competitive relations with other kingdoms was obvious, and lent support to the Crown’s willingness to work with the successful merchants to trade across the globe—and by the seventeenth century an excellent strategy, colonization, by which it could put to good use its “surplus population”. It all came together, almost naturally without thought, theory, or planning, from overseas trade came colonization.

Overseas trade also seemed an excellent policy to fill the king’s coffers to satisfy her/his many expenses, including the Court and favorites, and the costs of and often corrupt and personalistic government bureaucracy. The Crown bureaucracies also looking out their windows saw opportunities as well, as did parliament’s M.P.s, and the rising gentry class. There was a lot going on in England during this period around 1600, driven by many important issues and policy areas. But overseas trade as economic development, what we call it today, was never far from the minds of those who were looking for ways to create wealth and achieve visions. 

The Bristol-based voyages provided a dynamic breakout policy opportunity that carried into and underlay the political and economic transition from Tudor to Stuart in foreign affairs. It must be stressed that the consensus at this time was significantly more pronounced in trade/commerce that colonization or permanent settlement. London merchants dominated trade policy areas, and, little appreciated today, the vehicle they used for overseas trade ( joint stock corporation) evolved into England’s behemoth merchant trading companies, almost by default in the period after 1550.

Despite the multipolicy of other forms of business organization that traded overseas (family and partnerships, for example) the great trading merchant joint stock corporations dwarfed all the others in distance of market, size of cargos and trade, ability to develop the foreign market, and reduce costs. They became the superstars of this pivot overseas. They were all led and founded by London merchantmen.

The poor fit between merchant trading companies, adapting their trading factory motif (to be explained later), and applying it to found a permanent settlement, however, was not seen or well-notice. With no real experience in founding a successful permanent settlement, English policy-makers chose to overlook the mission in favor of garnishing profits from trade and commerce using ports in developed populated countries. The important distinction, however, was that profit was not pocketed, but sent to the sovereign to pay crown expenses, and to an oligarchy that accumulated wealth and started other monopolies. Because of a royal monopoly they lacked scalable competition. “The trading companies chartered in the period between 1550 and 1640 represented a technique whereby national government, at little cost to the exchequer [the English treasury department] could act to promote the expansion of English commerce. In fact, so successful was the strategy that by the 1580’s it was only trade with France, Scotland and Ireland that was not in the hands of a [joint stock company]company. [99] Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England: 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 398-9.

As we shall see in Chapter 1 they were unable to learn from their mistakes, and instead doctored unsuccessfully with the design of the Company of Merchant Adventurers’ joint stock corporation and monopoly for over fifty years. By the time of the Virginia Company 1605-6 design and incorporation, England’s overseas efforts were, charitably, “still in process” awaiting some sort of consensus that came, in the Virginia Company’s case, only in 1609 (somewhat) and in 1612. By then it would prove too late, and the joint stock corporation was repudiated by the King as the vehicle for England’s North American overseas colonization in 1624. Here the reader sees the background for my “Not Ready for Prime Time” metaphor.

As Brenner observes those previous initiatives involved creating a great merchant trading company empowered with specially designed royal monopoly intended to facilitate trading success, they without much thought or perhaps even awareness, created yet another, the Virginia Company to pursue a colonization venture. The idea that these two missions differed radically, if nothing else than time and finance, never seems to have entered their marble heads. “The growth of English [overseas] commerce with Virginia pre-supposed the creation of a permanent, export-producing colony. The fact that productive plantations 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 [i.e. its failure]. [99]  For Americans, don’t try to figure out where rational scientific policy-making enters the picture; court policy-making was anything but. 

The core argument I make in Chapter 1 is English overseas policy-makers, permitted by the Crown and led by London-based  merchant adventurers prodded the throne for additional great merchant trading companies in an effort to pivot English trade and commerce into commercial opportunities in new areas of overseas trade. To do so they had to advance the design of the joint stock corporation, and learn from the problems they encountered with each version of the joint stock corporation and royal monopoly. 

[999] For those who want to see how this fits into my macro argument the Virginia Company failed in its colonization, and therefore left the colony largely self-governed. I offer more of the argument. The reaction of the Company when the colonies initially began to fail was reactive and increasingly desperate until the Company went through the first of its structural reorganizations in 1609. In the meantime, one colony failed entirely (Sagadahoc), and Virginia held on while the Company responded with half way and desperate initiatives, crippled by serious time lags in getting across the Atlantic, that inhibited productive and/or timely communication, to the extent that in 1608 London had little hope to get on top of the situation. From this the starving times would follow. That in a nutshell is how the London policy process sent out expeditions also not ready for prime time. We shall in the mainline Chapter 2 detail this in more precise description.

Having said this, a few caveats. First, I am not saying Virginia’s colony was medieval simply because it was devised and implemented by a policy system that was clearly medieval English Crown dominated. Rather, I observe that while its roots and leadership were clearly tied to a medieval policy system, Virginia’s subsequent periods were seriously affected by the drift to the English civil war and the Tudor-Stuart transition.

The Virginia Company would have a hard time navigating through this, and in 1624 her charter to manage the Virginia colony was temporarily revoked by James I. The principal reason for the last action was the incompetence and incapacity of the Company to manage the affairs of the colony, so that by 1624 the colony was yet again on the edge of complete failure. In short, having a disastrous start the Virginia Company was never able to clearly establish sufficient site control, mostly because of the failure of its leaderships and its structural incapacity that included too much debt and no revenues.

That story occupies a considerable portion of our mainline narrative. But here, I call attention to an implication that will characterize Virginia from other English colonies that followed her founding: No other colony went through this period, not even her sister colony Massachusetts (whose founding was a precious decade and half after Jamestown, and whose political development followed its own path with leadership drawn from anti-royalist puritans whose governance was theocratic and oligarchical. Massachusetts was founded after the Virginia Company second subsidiary was reorganized in the early 1620’s. That too will be discussed later.

Enjoying its own autonomy derived from its own separate subsidiary, New England was outside the jurisdiction of the London Virginia Company subsidiary. It was able to develop along its own path while able to observe the goings on in Virginia. Looking ahead to Philadelphia-Pennsylvania’s founding in 1681-3, and New York’s colonial period begun by the Dutch two years after Jamestown, and conquered by the English in 1664, we can easily see that the major English colonies started in the seventeenth century had noticeably different time lines and different political-economic-social dynamics that the Virginia Company colony of Virginia.

Using a metaphor, each colony’s early childhood was very different from the other. We have discovered, inadvertently a major reason, not the only reason by far, but a major reason why each colony  was in its way different, and those differences became embedded into its future statehood. Finally, keeping in mind a slew of American colonies were founded in the 1700’s when England had evolved into Britain, and the Parliament had asserted its position against the monarchy that its politics, if nothing else, no longer resembled anything Virginia had encountered.

Accordingly, we can appreciate that timing of the colony’s founding does matter. Penn’s Philadelphia was seventy-five years distant from Jamestown, decades after the Restoration, for example. What Virginia will experience as we go forward is distinctive to Virginia–and that is what we hope to capture in our mainline narrative.[999]

1.