English Inheritage Relevant to the Virginia Company
England’s Transition into the European Mercantilist Age: the Virginia Company’s Inheritance from England
This module provides background to my readers on the English experience, aspirations and capacity that contributed to the creation and subsequent operation of the Virginia Company. To most Americans this “thing” called the Virginia Company is a rather odd duck. Many come away with the notion the Company is a business company, which to a limited degree it is, but in real life it was a private public partnership with the Crown incorporated to found colonies in North America on behalf of its investors but mostly for the English crown. Whatever it was, or was supposed to be, it didn’t work out. In 1624 King James I suspended its Virginia charter, and after short interlude the Crown took charge and assumed responsibility for the management and operation of the Virginia colony. Some would argue that didn’t work out very well either–but that is another story for another time.
There are many problems with this simplified tale, but in this module I am most concerned with demonstrating to the reader the Virginia Company was the “mid wife” in the birth of England’s first North American colony. Despite its brevity administering Virginia, the Company, I suggest, played a major role in the subsequent history of Virginia, not only in the colonial period, but in its contemporary period as a state in the United States. In its seventeen year period of responsibility the Company botched the birth, and left several good and some bad after effects, by products, side effects, chain reactions, or fallouts–whatever the reader will chose as appropriate to Virginia. Implicitly, the reader can assume that I regard the colony-state’s birth as a major factor in its subsequent history, and for this reason we have to understand the Virginia Company better than we currently do.
For example, current Virginia has 95 counties (and 38 independent cities considered by the Bureau of the Census as county equivalents). Only Texas and Georgia have more. So Virginia is third; but Massachusetts–also founded by the Virginia Company–has 14, several of which are virtually non functional. Only two states have fewer (Delaware has 3, but Connecticut and Rhode Island have none, using regional councils or towns respectively). The national average for the fifty states is 62. I might add the Virginia birth was in 1607 and Massachusetts 1629. I will leave it to the reader to do the math–but their birth was a long time ago-when England was still defined as a late medieval or early modern state. As the reader will discover, I place the Virginia Company’s time period as way more medieval than early modern. That will be a major theme in this module.
Interestingly, the neighbors of Virginia and Massachusetts reflect the “mother” states approach to counties–which raise some interesting questions. Why are Virginia and Massachusetts, both founded by the Virginia Company, on opposite extremes of current county governments? This history will not ignore that question, and it will seek to address the question of “why are American states, so similar in some respects, so different in others”. Hint: one reason is that their “births” vary in time and how the “mid-wife” performed. If so, than the more medieval than modern English joint stock corporation that was the Virginia Company may have been structurally, skill set-wise. and attitudinally lacking the capacity to found and operate a colony in that time period. Virginia, a generation before Massachusetts, was managed in a different time by a reorganized and restructured Virginia Company, by the same king, James I. Is there a story to tell that Americans need to know?
This modules is focused mostly in the Elizabethan period when England first went “global” in a mission to develop commercial trade links and to address English needs in the emerging European mercantile economic and international systems. launching of English overseas and commercial trade, the foreign policy she pursued, and the dominant institutions of policy-making in use as England entered into early European mercantilist system after 1550. This is hundreds of years before England developed into the British Empire; a period when she was not a major player, and had a considerably weaker economy.
My focus centers around how the Elizabethan overseas policy-making process and the English economy interacted in this period of transition from late medieval to the very beginning of early modern that England had started developing overseas trade and commerce in the 1550’s. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign (1603), advocates sought approvals to design and incorporate what would become the Virginia Company. The Stuart king James I, in process of understanding the English policy system and finding allies to support his agenda, formally signed in 1606 a charter with the Company. In that little more than half a century, England acquired whatever skills, experience, perspectives, and practices for trade and colonization that shaped and empowered the Company. When it launched the Virginia Company, England still had not completed its exploration and discovery of North America, and had not been able to found and sustain a colony. It did, however, sign a peace treaty with Spain that ended the nearly twenty year war.
I will argue that England set out to colonize North America prematurely, and that the Virginia Company as constructed was not “ready for prime time” colonization in 1606. It would badly mismanage the birth of Virginia, leaving in its post-1624 wake a colony that was already self-governing, and pretty much developing by reacting to the events and situations its settlers encountered in the wilds of North America. The rest of this history will take Virginia into the entire Company period and the transition to royal administration under Charles I who was “drifting into the English civil war”.
[999] The drivers and initiatives of that period, immediately before the design of the Virginia Company, exerted serious impact on its formation, and offer insight into why its supposedly principal mission, permanent settlement in North America, got sidelined by an implementation process dominated by commercial trade and import into England. They offer important insight as to why the Virginia Company was NOT “ready for prime time”. Neither was England for that matter, but that is another story [See England’s Crisis of the Seventeenth Century is America’s Inability to Deal With Virginia’s First Fifty Years as a Colony].[999]
The key to my argument that England itself was not ready to launch a colony in 1606 follows from an understanding that England had JUST begun–literally–her entry into what would be the “modern” era. Many historians have called Virginia’s colonization as “an experiment”. I disagree. The Virginia Company and its trade and colony-building mission was less an experiment than a venture into the dark side of the Atlantic. Moreover, England had not meaningfully upgraded her medieval policy system to the stage that it possessed capacity and develop maritime technology sufficient to design, defend and manage a permanent settlement thousands of miles across the Atlantic. These tasks were dumped into the Company’s mission.
Also important, England’s economy had not yet reached a breakout that could support a fiscal and budgetary capacity to finance the expensive commitment, and accordingly, the mission of the Company was enlarged to include the colony’s need to export to England the critical resources needed to promote England’s domestic economic growth. The impacts that would have on the development of the colony was, for the most part, unappreciated by English decision-makers and was not included in the Company’s business plan–which was therefore not congruent with the goals and activities of the colony and the realities of the American wilderness.
Indeed, one might compare the USA’s interest and desire to create a colony on the moon or a planet. Today we can get to the moon, but do not have the capacity to found a colony there. Mankind has talked about going to the moon for centuries; just because England and others could dream about colonization in a remote wilderness three thousand miles across the Atlantic doesn’t mean they could launch a colony any more than we can today as I write. Amazingly, precious little was known about North America and its inhabitants; England’s exploration and discovery of its Atlantic coastline had just begun. For example, a task assigned to John Smith while he was in Jamestown was to sail up the North American coastline and its interior and make a map. Those who were chosen to lead the new-founded colony had no clear idea where they were going, nor what they needed to do after it set up shop there.
Topics and themes to be discussed in this module
Excepting the export of English raw cloth and wool to northern Europe, English overseas trade and import was undeveloped. English elites recognized that overseas trade and commerce was the best and most effective strategy to grow the economy and provide prosperity and innovation that would create jobs for an increasing population. To understand the dynamics of change in play, I briefly describe several English demographic and policy-relevant factors that played observable roles in the Virginia Company advocacy and design. By no means comprehensive or inclusive of the period, my presentation stresses relevant aspects of each as they affected the design, incorporation, and implementation of the Virginia Company and its charter.
It will become apparent that England had taken its first steps out of a pure medieval class society but its politics, in particular Crown and court policy-making, retained a great deal of its medieval practices. In that respect tradition medieval policy-making, values, and even aspirations were still firmly lodged in the old medieval system. This is most evident in the design of the private economic structures, in particular the English joint stock corporation. We shall trace the slow to change evolution of that structure into the great merchant trading companies that were to lead the English economy in its efforts to develop overseas trade and commerce. In a period of transition, the newly forming class configurations had not settled in, but instead were, if anything drifting apart. By the end of the period, at the time the Virginia Company was incorporated, the first real stirrings of a drift to its future civil war were felt. A transition from the Tudor to the Scottish Stuart dynasties did little, indeed made worse that drift.
Looking back four hundred years plus, contemporary readers unknowingly lose touch with background drivers of change, and the emotions and anxieties they generated. Mid sixteenth century decision-makers were still feeling the effects of a little-known enclosure movement that continued to disrupt landed aristocrat-serf manor economics and population mobility. More obvious was the memories and the still current reality of black plague pandemics. After killing about one half of England’s population, population growth by 1500 was making a comeback that accelerated effects of enclosure population mobility, and distorted and complicated England’s economic growth and general prosperity. Finally, the steroidal growth of London left the remainder of England, particularly, its non-London “outer” ports frustrated and determined to find their own niche in this period of transition. Naturally, this division impacted post-1550 adventures into global overseas commerce and colonization.
On top of this, the tendency of Tudors to use and expand England’s crown powers and scope of action heavily impacted the fiscal burden and budgetary politics of the period and generated a strong and persistent need to encourage more economic growth to keep up with population growth and aristocrat-gentry pressures on crown policy-making. The rise of the merchants combined with their narrow band of wealth accumulation, based a good deal from a one product export to northern Europe, further disrupted and fragmented crown policy-making. Few Americans, maybe some English, would realize the Virginia Company had so great an inheritance from the period immediately previous to its incorporation–and few do appreciate its future impact on the economics, society, and politics of its Virginia colony–and later Massachusetts.
While the need for more global trade and commerce was obvious by the 1550’s, the aggregated disruptions and policy fragmentation of England’s impacted her initial steps away from medieval economy and politics, leaving the overseas policy area to others, mostly private merchants and gentry who pursued overseas adventures for either the wrong reasons, medieval honor and warfare, or the pursuit of wealth by an elite few merchants who held the resources needed for the pursuit of overseas trade, commerce and colonization. Finally, as we shall
As we shall discover, England’s post 1550 growth was unbalanced and uneven. London grew into a mega city that dwarfed all other cities and regional centers. The one-export overseas trade (raw cloth and wool to northern Europe) did not take a lead in the new overseas trade expansion, but stood aside and marginalized other advocates and drivers of overseas trade growth. A clear bifurcation between London and the Outer Ports exerted considerable impact on the overseas trade strategies followed by England in this period previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company. This bifurcation had a very serious effect on the Company’s design, its implementation of its mission, and its likelihood of success.
We shall discuss each as we trace a chronological path (for the most part despite overlap and interdependency) of overseas trade through the period until the incorporation of the Virginia Company in 1605-6. Topics such as England’s one export economy; the emergence of the cloth/wool cluster; the rise of a concentrated urban underclass in London; the rise of the great trading companies, especially the first, the Company of Merchant Adventurers; emergence of the cloth/wood cluster, rise of a concentrated urban underclass; the effects of London as a mega city and its implications, rupture of the medieval class structure, population growth and urbanization. It starts with the Enclosure Movement and then the Black Plague which set the stage for the ever-popular Tudor (Elizabethan) pivot to overseas trade and commerce.
In the Beginning was the Enclosure Movement and Plague
An historical timeline of the drivers which influenced the English post 1550 pivot to broaden English global trade and commerce is essential so the reader can fit our story into a larger context. That timeline starts with the English enclosure movement. That movement, more complex and evolutionary than a simple description of its features suggest, is narrowed by my limited purpose to merely outline several of the drivers released by opening its Pandora’s box. The movement started in the 13th century, gathered momentum during the Tudor years, the late 15th century into the 16th and 17th–the last being the period on which I focus. It continued well into the 1800’s. An important caveat to our use of enclosure as less a “starting point” for England’s transition from medieval to early modern history, is that it wasn’t. What is more reasonable to say is the enclosure movement unleashed forces of change, economic, social and political drivers that would over centuries aggregate into noticeable disruption in the traditional medieval system.
Embraced initially by a few aristocrats hoping to increase their wealth and position by restricting the use of their manor’s land. Previously, the manor land had been available to serfs for common use such as firewood, grazing livestock, and hunting. With enclosure by the manor lord, these acres were demarcated by enclosing them with hedges or fence after harvest. Once enclosed the lords used the enclosed area for their sheep herding, which they their either sold or used manor serfs to make wool/cloth raw material or sale of meat.
F. J. Fisher’s succinct definition that ‘Enclosure–i.e. the suppression of common grazing rights–by agreement was a feature of the age,” but he also acknowledges the huge sweep of time enclosure persisted, adding his next sentence “But as pressure on land mounted, the question of its use became increasingly a political one.“ [99] F. J. Fisher, Tawney’s Century”, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge at the University Press, 1961), p. 5. This is because the devastating Black Plague followed in the fourteenth century. The plague radically altered the manor’s class configuration and in so doing almost revolutionized its economics.
Overtime the enclosure movement created several groupings from serfs that were dispossessed from the confiscated land: The first group, and the most fortunate, were those serfs that were able to purchase land from the lord and thus became free holders, i.e. former serfs. A second group led to artisans and trading merchants who usually moved off the manor and gravitated to larger settlements that were infused over time with increased population until they developed into an urban center. The third group, those that remained serfs, either abandoned their manor and headed for wherever they could find a living to sustain themselves and their households.
England than had three other drivers of change, urbanization, class mobility, and geographic population mobility, that arose from the enclosure movement. Each driver interacted with the others and without intention or planning, England was infused with sustained drivers of change. With increased population mobility less tied to agricultural manors new population drove a new urbanization movement that continued for five hundred years. Having said this, the Black Death hit England in June 1348, spreading to London in September, and advancing through the Isles thru 1351. This initial burst is estimated to have killed about one-third of the population. In the following decades the plague returned at intervals that persisted into the seventeenth century–for example the plague returned to London in 1603-4, immediately previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company. As one would expect the Plague disrupted England and Europe and that tested the sustainability and continuity of the medieval systems hit by it. It also wreaked havoc on families, personalities, attitudes, expectations and the mental health of all.
How hard was England hit? Not easy to estimate; England had no formal census until 1801. Testing out Google’s chat AI, it came up with the following–based on historical tax records: In 1300 the population of England was estimated between 4.5 and 5.5 million. By 1350 at the height of the first onslaught of the black plague pandemic (post 1348) it was down to an estimated 3.75 million. A killing off of approaching half the population. By 1400, the low point was about 2.1 million.
By 1500 after a century of stagnation, the population was about 2.2 million. After 1500, however, a dramatic change erupted: by 1550 the population estimated at 4 million. increased by 1600 to an estimate that ranged between 4.1 and 5 million. Other estimates place the population as high as 5.5 million by 1650. This is the period discussed in this module, and it is a half-century previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company.
The reference made often in the literature regarding the Company refers to a “surplus population” which given the huge population increase of the period reflects a larger more pressing and complicated context than is conveyed in the early Jamestown period literature. In any case. in the century and a half after 1500 more an estimate three million increase from a population base of 2.2 million by 1650. The increase is by natural reproduction. In the period when England sought to dramatically increase the scale of its overseas commerce in an effort to satisfy aggregate consumer demand, and increase discretionary income as a means to finance investment in England’s infrastructure and to provide resources to compete effectively in a rising European mercantilist age is more understandable. Also understandable is the rise of an underclass, and the incredible development of London as an exploding “mega city” that generated considered urban rivalry by England’s smaller urban areas. [999]
[999] Included in the chief reasons for the rise in population were an improvement in agricultural productivity and crop innovation (wheat, crop rotation, more use of fertilizers, warmer temperatures, fewer plague episodes, new job opportunities mainly from cloth/wool-related manufacturing and sales, greater demand for products, especially food and personal care due to increased dependent urban populations, which led to mild increases in prosperity (with inevitable ebbs and flows), and that likely engendered better nutrition, rise in birth rates and lower mortality rates. While I am reluctant to break out with “happy days are here again in merrie olde England”, it is reasonable to expect by the time of Shakespeare’s England (1564-1616), the country had recaptured much of its population base and looked for opportunities to grow economically.[999]
The expanse of time during which the enclosure played out compels an reminded that its definition and the positions taken on it vary among the time periods. In the beginning the cry of those affected negatively was “depopulation” which from their perspective it was. By the time of Henry VIII and certainly Elizabeth, however, given change that flowed from it, agricultural innovation and an increase in food and textile production provided offsetting perspectives, and instead of sheep herding, mining exploration and an extractive mineral cluster had added to its repertoire.
You Can’t Keep them Down on the Manor
As to the manor and England’s almost exclusive agricultural economic base, the effect of those changes were to remove land from use by serfs and encourage them to move on for better or worse. That resulted in a new group of free holders free holders some of which evolved into gentry on the basis of purchasing land for themselves or becoming artisans. After the black plague when local agricultural labor became expensive and the fiscal needs of the manor lords great, manor depopulation followed and incipient urbanization began.. The manor lords, despite the economic change created within their manors, still enclosed more pasture land, raising more sheep for use in wool manufacture and foodstuffs–until sheep outnumbered the English by three-to-one. This raises the question as to what is being done with all this sheep wool and raw cloth made from it?
Wool manufacture was widespread. At least twenty-five counties had flourishing wool/cloth production clusters. Scattered about England, wool and cloth manufacturers were accordingly able to easily source wool and attract workers. Those with an entrepreneurial bent were able to form companies thus jump-starting a serious industrial wool and cloth cluster. Since agricultural manor-based labor proved expensive during and after the plague more manor lords needed funds for themselves and turned to enclosure. Serfs or freemen dependent on manor land, were left with little practical alternative than to move from the manor.
Some wool was homespun and lords sold to merchants. Manor lords also sold meat to domestic merchants. Increasingly, the end products typically fell into the hands of small manufacturers who either grew their business or sold it off to larger manufacturers and domestic merchants who distributed both. In addition heavy cloth tended not be used regionally, while lighter blends were likely to be exported to Iberia and Antwerp. Accordingly, manufacturers concentrated near port cities, the most successful of which was the London metro area.
Supple concluded these exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was the chief beneficiary. … perhaps as much as 90 per cent, and certainly over 75 per cent of England’s exports were of articles made from wool. No wonder to contemporaries it appeared ‘the cloth trade is … the axis of the commonwealth, whereon all the other trades … do seem to turn and have their revolution’, or that it could be called ‘the flower of the king’s crown’ …the milk and honey of our Canaan, the Indies of England. [p.6]. To summarize this succinctly, enclosure and the black death combined to transform the rural manors into the source of products and labor force that formed into small-scale manufacturing and trading clusters that distributed the products regionally, while those wool/cloth manufacturers centered in the London area turned incrementally into an exclusive wool/cloth exporters to Antwerp and from Antwerp into northern Europe.
In so doing, the sectors blended into England’s larger guild movement by organized themselves into regional/occupational guilds. Guilds led to more cohesive and skilled regional clusters , that as the cluster matured, it tended to centralized into and around larger businesses, which tended to grow best on the peripheries of newly densely populated or urban areas–a process that inherently favored London and its suburbs, and a few regional centers, particularly those with ports whose residents demanded wool and cloth products for their use and benefit.
Naturally, the incremental increase in private land ownership meant a disruption of the medieval manor based class system, and the development of an landed (free holder) agricultural yeoman, along with increases in artisans, and merchants, also moving to more urban locations where they were more likely to prosper. Over the years many of these prospered and infused development of a gentry proto-class that, by the time of the Virginia Company participated in East India and Virginia Company affairs as investors, advocates, shipowners and sea captains, merchants and staff and leadership for the guilds that developed. Manor lords and the regional aristocracy in turn took advantage of their opportunities, some drawn into overseas adventures, others into the military, and others to the court and Crown. Also, some along with gentry were attracted to English mining, and the extraction of materials such as ores, coal and copper.
Wool/cloth manufacturing startups also led to a more mobile population who either moved from serf agriculture into cities to became a proletariat, or creating former serfs into land owning yeomen/artisans in regional economies. In short, England increased its population mobility and during these centuries a measured urbanization followed. The exception to this as we shall later describe is London. Those serfs who were unable to successfully cope with displacement were transformed into economic refugees who eventually resettled in the budding urban areas or London where the opportunities seemed apparent. From this we will hear assertions of “surplus population”, and from others, usually more followers of a radical Protestant sect, who promoted a need for “Christian charity”. Success of this first wave English underclass was very uneven, with the result that more unsuccessful piled into neighborhoods or entry level wool cloth factories as proletariat.
[999]In the later years of this transition, the Tudor’s tended toward the preservation of arable land, but its priority was low and attention to it was inconsistent, leaving its implementation to those with “a dog in the fight”. In several ways by the 1550’s enclosure had settled into a position similar to our eminent domain: messy, loud, and decided upon by local justices. [99] See also Maurice Beresford, “Habitation versus Improvement: the Debate on the Enclosure Agreement” in F. J. Fisher, Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge at the University Press, 1961).[999]
Summary: The enclosure movement in combination with the black death promoted agricultural innovation which increased foodstuffs, and woolmaking, it also fostered English urbanization and a mobile population incrementally leaving the old English serf-based manor. These movements required and generated merchants and artisans who innovated, manufactured and distributed foodstuffs, housewares, and personal needs. Artisans produced and sold specialized and more complex products and services for which skills and training were appropriate and necessary to carry on the small businesses resulted from these activities. Change also meant development of an underclass, mostly urban, based on those who could not navigate a medieval system in flux.
These “drivers” of English economic, social and political change constitute the main takeaways of the English enclosure movement’s impact on the Virginia Company. As to the direct effect of the movement on North American colonization, the reader can take note of Allan Greer’s “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America (American Historical Review, Vol. 117, No. 2, April, 2012) pp. 365-386. Whatever its good or bad consequences, the enclosure movement combined with the black plague was incredibly disruptive–and transformative. Over the several centuries it unleashed forces that undermined the traditional medieval economy and the class system on which it rested. The important take away is that England by the time of its pivot to global overseas commerce and colonization, was not a static medieval polity, society, or economy. England had already begun, if unannounced, its transition into what will be the early modern age.
the First Transition Leads into a Second: its effects on Virginia Company policy-maker
The introductory background described thus far has discussed what I call was England’s first transition that carried her away from her previous medieval system. England was “in motion”. It was not static, but nor was it in radical change. To employ a bad metaphor–a practice I love–the egg that held the medieval system had been cracked by the enclosure and the plague. Some content of the egg had been squeezed out, but by no means was the omelet (of English modernity and the formation of the British Empire) had only barely started.
There was a lot more evolving, transitioning to be done. That second transition stage for me beings with the gradual pivot of the English and its economy to overseas trade, commerce and eventual colonization. That second transition is what we now move into below. The Virginia Company was part of that second transition, but by no means the culmination to making the omelet. A third transition, the periods of the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution, lay ahead. The England of the Virginia Company was very “early on” in its process of entering into the so-called modern world. This is important to those of us interested in the interrelationship of England and American colonial history. England had a lot more inheritance to give us, but at the time of the Virginia Company and the founding of Virginia that inheritance was a long way into the future of both–a century and a half at least.
That it will further evolve into industrial-finance capitalism complete with colonies, puts on more complexity and scale, but adds moral concerns regarding public and private benefit and opens the door to negative contemporary reactions and paradigms that, on the whole, distort our understanding of decisions made in that time period. Understanding what the Virginia Company was in its day, what tasks were crucial, what pitfalls that its design attempted to avoid, what interests were being served is a prime goal of this history. I cannot burden sixteenth and seventeenth century policy-making with contemporary morals and beliefs.
Chastened by recent emotions and fears drawn from the Black Death period, Fearful that unless they took action England would be left behind in a newly emerging competitive, war-prone, colonization-based mercantilist world. But England had its own worries to contend with. Pressured by population increase and urbanization and their effects on the stability of their society and policy system, many forward-thinking English policy-makers, such as Sir Francis Bacon, and a young Thomas Hobbes would assume leadership in the early 1600’s (Bacon), or watch diligently as they began their careers in the 1620’s (Hobbes, who would become an employee of the troubled Virginia Company). But in the 1550’s and the half-century earlier, less forward-think leaders would take the lead in what I label as the period of England’s pivot into global overseas, trade, commerce, and colonization.
Profoundly tied to the past, relying much on its mentality, value system, and tried and true practices of a past England closer to the War of the Roses (or certainly Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain), than those Oliver Cromwell, or John Pym (who would figure prominently in the colonial operations of the Virginia Company) the pivot period political and administrative culture did little to sensitive the Company leadership or its settlers to what lay ahead. During the period of the overseas global pivot, liberal thinkers, like Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and the Earl of Salisbury (Cecil) were still on board supporting positions of James I, and his son, Charles I as they attempted to ride the waves of change in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
While Many American historian commentators have read into their comments on this period a as evidence of forward, if not progressive democratic propensities, the English adventurers of this period, Humphrey Gilbert for example, are seriously medieval in their approach to the New World. Better examples of the pivot period are any of the three characters that went by the name Thomas Smith (all were knighted, by the way). Even Edwin Sandys, about whom I shall make the case, were cultural residents of the late medieval than early modern.
Settler pivot era adventurers were pioneers of early English overseas adventures, to be sure, but their free spirit individualism and homestead economics were still linked to manor-like aspirations and thus were NOT equivalent to Davy Crocket, or Daniel Boone a hundred years in the future. Even Massachusetts settled a generation after Virginia’s birth, had its characters like George Downing, who matured into ” a perfidious rogue”, and civil war spymaster whose success prompted the naming of the street on which the English Prime Minister calls home. Far removed from the thought of Rousseau or Locke, or from a Parliament that had matured into a formal democratic party-oriented path to democratic-like policy-making, their policy views relevant to founding a colony followed medieval precedents and aspirations. who settled in Boston in 1632 and was one of Harvard’s first graduates. Downing moved on to capture three of the four regicides of Charles I.
In this pivot period, arguably, the most impactful event, the twenty-year war with Spain that culminated only 1604, leaving behind gross suspicions and serious internal cleavages. The bulk of the overseas pivot period transpired during the reign of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, for which Sir Walter Raleigh named the first successful and durable English colony, Virginia. Elizabeth, whatever else she was, was at her core a creature of the traditional medieval world–and that perspective and value system underlined her behind the scenes leadership during the period of the global overseas pivot.
Pragmatic, flexible, not without her convictions and strength of personality, she sustained England in its war with Spain and presided over England’s first efforts in global overseas commerce, the age of discover, and its initial colonization attempt. But without much doubt, her Court, her policy-making methods and institutions were firmly lodged in a past that belonged much more to her father, who executed her mother, than anyone else. It is at the end of this period, then, immediately after her death, that the Virginia Company would be created and incorporated. J. H. Elliott reminds us that “the English, like the Spaniards were influenced in important ways by the Spanish precedents, Yet in the same time … had their own priorities and agenda, which themselves were shaped by historical preoccupations, cumulative experience and contemporary concerns. The aspirations and activities of both the planters of Jamestown, and the conquerors of Mexico can be full appreciated within the context of national experience of conquest and settlement, which in both instances, stretched back over many centuries. For historically Castile and England were both proto-colonial powers long before they set out to colonize America. [99] J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. 16-17
I know I constantly and consciously repeat that England was transitioning into a very early European-version of our modern world. But the future English civil war makes that a very premature assertion. The Civil War-Restoration was the proper cross over point after which she started tip-toeing into modernity and empire. A great deal was broken in 1639 England, and the period after 1600 to the restoration of Charles II had to have been the nadir of English history. lar. England had just began to traipse down a path that produced a unified England, Scotland, Wales, and if you must, northern Ireland that we call Britain. That was not achieved until 1710. There mere a lot of transitioning to follow the 1600 mindset, itself would transition during the drift to civil war.
A Tudor 1600 policy system would give way to a Stuart policy system in 1603. The Virginia Company, as mentioned above, was born in 1605-6. To defend that position it is important I acquaint the reader with the larger environment that gave birth to the Virginia Company. The Company was created and tasked with a mission that reflected the times of its birth that was based upon the mindset and experience of the past fifty yeas overseas pivot period; and its early life span was safely encased in the last days of the global overseas pivot opened up by its sister ship, the East India Company. The Virginia Company was destined not to survive, as far as the colony of Virginia goes, into the period of James I’s successor, Charles I (post 1625).
Having said that, I pull the reader back and remind them of the first paragraphs, the Virginia Company was created in a period of transition. The reader ought appreciate that there were to be a series of transitions after this one before England would be knocking at modernity and empire’s door. The Virginia Company’s heritage dates back a lot further than most of us Americans realize. This is important. Fundamentally, its premature entry into colonization is why the Virginia Company failed as the midwife of Virginia’s birth. The failure of the Company to sustain its site control over the colony is why Virginia developed as she did; it explains some of her present day institutional structures–and to a degree her place in American history.
England was in process of evolving into something that was not totally medieval, but a medievalism in transition. This module’s focus topic, the pivot of England into overseas global trade and commerce is by its nature a serious break with England’s medieval system. For example, the East India Trading Company and its sister great trading company, the Virginia Company, were a cutting edge departures from a medieval economy into a global mercantilist economy–an economic system which many contemporary historians and commentators do not hold in high regard, but nevertheless was an unchangeable reality Virginia Company actors could not ignore. As it was the adaptability of its organization, the limitations of the experiences of its leadership, the lack of technology necessary to a colony three thousand miles away, and a near-complete lack of understanding of just what a colony’s permanent settlement entailed was way beyond anything England’s inheritance of that period could provide to settler-Americans.
One of the earliest twentieth century American colonial historians, and among the best, was Charles A. Andrews. Today, he is firmly lodged in American historiographic “imperial” paradigm which is about the closest an American historian can come to living in a dog house. Talk about out-of-favor, he is tagged with just about all of the baggage the word colonialism carries in today’s literature. Although it is not my purpose to wander in the weeds of the imperial paradigm, Andrew’s focus and perspective still has its merit for contemporaries. His introduction to his outstanding classic work cogently identifies the key players and the motivation of Elizabeth’s transitional pivot period.
Trade followed the flag, and the shipbuilding activities of the outports, accompanying the growing commercial connections with that of the Continent culminated in the ambitious designs of the Merchant Adventurers of London and their monopoly of the woolen export business. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: England’s Colonial and Commercial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964), p. 1
It was passing through a stage of transition, during which it was influenced less by those in official authority than by private individuals engaged in colonial and commercial enterprise, whose experience and advice … often guided the government in its effort to chart the policy of the administration. England’s commercial policy was slow in the making; it never reached the stage of exact definition … In its relation to the colonies in America, it was never an exact system, except in a few fundamental particulars. Rather it was a modus operandi for the purpose of meeting the needs of a growing and expanding state. The first settlement of America … was but the culminating phase of those great voyages of discovery which had engaged the attention of at least six of the maritime powers of northern and western Europe (p. 3) [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: England’s Colonial and Commercial Policy, Vol. 4, p. 2
While he correctly observes, this need for an English global overseas pivot was felt by her father who experienced the first impacts of Spain’s discovery and colonization of America, Andrews explains Elizabeth’s open mind to the overseas global pivot and the entry into the European mercantile world. It is not, nor ever would be, her reign’s central theme; rather she was caught in the turbulence of that entry, from her sister’s (Mary I) marriage to Phillip II of Spain, to the implications of her father’s version of the Protestant Reformation, the war with Spain that followed upon decades of European rebellion (Holland in particular), and the Pope’s Counter Reformation that supported and created the legitimacy on which Spain’s colonization of America was based. Mostly reactive, Elizabeth was not passive, and she participated gingerly and behind-the-scenes in most of the events of the pivot period.
During the Elizabethan era England, hitherto an agricultural country, emerged from the shadow of her previous isolation and inferiority, and took her stand as an equal and rival among the older Continental powers. Barred for the moment from the Portuguese route to the Indies, and from the Spanish route to the Antilles and beyond, she realized that her future upon the seas lay in entering the field of competition and contesting the claims of others… [Actions taken include for example] the powers of admirals at sea were considerably extended, and their jurisdiction placed on a definite statutory basis. Trinity House, [ a private] company of seamen authorized to look after sailors, pilots, and navigation, was incorporated in 1514 … the records of the High Court of Admiralty begin in 1524, and those of the Navy Board in 1526… During the remaining years of the century, a powerful merchant marine and efficient [but small] war fleet was brought into being. (p. 1)
I add to this transitioning, James I, a Scot king, the first Stuart king, who brought with him his own version of medieval, and the Virginia Company would be seriously affected by Stuart policy differences from the Tudor system. His world view also shaped the design and operation of the Virginia Company. In either dynasty, the Company was constructed by institutions and policy actors that are fundamentally medieval in their style of politics and economy, nevermind society. So I add to our complexity list, the Virginia Company was designed by two distinctly different royal dynasties (Tudor and Stuart).
The relevant policy-making institutions that noticeably shape the design, mission, and operation of the Virginia Company include, in no order: England’s royal sovereign, the court bureaucracies and their policy-making processes (which include patronage, farming, concessions and monopolies), a rising, but inexperienced Parliament, an evolving class structure in the midst of a Protestant Reformation, the English guild system, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, and an evolving local-regional government system that had been marginalized by a mega-city capital, London–with its own power bases that enjoyed close and fiscally useful Crown resources.
Finally, since I deal with England’s entry into this mercantile competitive economic era in the normal course of this introduction, I will only add that England was not engaged in a space race to the moon, but rather a trade and commerce race with its European competitors, a race in which England was behind, and severely disadvantaged. Colonization was a weaponized strategy that lent substance and durability to the overseas trade and commerce system important to success in that race.
Dreams of empire were articulated by many, the practicality of such a goals are easily discounted by hindsight: the Thirty Years War that began in 1618 would play a role equivalent to the future English Civil War. We can’t underestimate the then contemporary reality that there was no reasonably detailed map of the globe that existed. English discovery, still ongoing through to the mid-eighteenth century, was a time consuming and hazardous affair. By 1607 English discovery yielded little more than an outline of the coastline, and a glimpse into the native populations. In the period of this module, we are still in the Age of Discovery and in chapters to follow.
If some were dreaming of empire, just what or who that empire would consist of was not known in any serious detail. England would spend a half-century looking for a northwest passage to the Far East–a passage that did not exist. Technology and medicine sucks in this period; both play major roles in success/failure of colonization. Colonization would turn out to be a major enterprise with many consequences, but that was a story that would play out a century later, and historians of our earlier period, I believe, would do well to emphasize the tenuous beginnings it had in the sixteenth century.
the Cloth/Wool Cluster; Guilds; Company of Merchant Adventurers, one-Export Overseas Trade; Monopolies, Charters and the Joint stock corporation; and the Swamp that functioned as Elizabeth’s Policy-Making System
Corporate Culture, the Secret Sauce of the Virginia Company Inheritance to Virginia
If English medieval culture is not appreciated by Americans, also not appreciated is the corporate culture embedded into the leadership, policy-making and operations of the Virginia Company. Not only the joint stock structure of the Company proved critical to the colony, but also the values, experiences, attitudes and practices of the leadership and personnel selected to occupy the operational positions of those resident in Virginia. Whatever else they shared, their resume, for the most part, was based on their lives, skillsets, education and careers lived during the period (post-1550 to 1605).
During this period England pivoted or broke out of the trap of a one-export trade into wider global overseas commerce and the discovery of new routes and the New World itself. This resident leadership bonded or fractionalized during the dangerous and close confines of months of trans-Atlantic travel on the small ships secured by the Virginia Company. Some survived the first days, the horrific death rates, and the starving year. Others arrived and whacked their way into Virginia’s first hundreds, and established their first plantations and manors, participated in the implementation of the Great Charter, and somehow survived the Great Massacre of 1622.
They were employees, if not officials in the Virginia Company, and instead of drawing a paycheck which the always on the edge of bankruptcy Company could not afford, they took land and assembled acreage to make their homestead and achieve their aspirations. In Virginia they lived as representatives of the Company, implementing its far-away decisions in the remote North American interior. It was they who adopted tobacco, planted it, harvested it, and sent out the first annual crops for export. They used it as currency.
Dependent on the goings on in London HQ and the post 1619 corporate civil war that consumed its attention, they were to inherit the de facto leadership responsibility when the Company’s charter was suspended in 1624 at least until his successor Charles I finally got around to formalizing his royal proprietary relationship with the colony in the mid to late 1620’s. They are to me the “secret sauce” of the Virginia Company’s inheritance to the colony. That sauce was itself an acquired taste that took some getting used to, a familiarity born of persistence. I suspect the Virginia colony was in many ways an acquired taste to them; but it grew on them as its last Company governor, Francis Wyatt was to learn and appreciate. Years after his return to England, he would negotiate the “1639 deal”, with James I, along with Samuel Mathews, that formally defined the parameters of Virginia’s self-government.
The ingredients of this secret sauce were mixed with the broth of Elizabethan era politics and priorities such as a need that England grow economically so it could finance the investment needed to compete with European rivals, and was also sufficient to satisfy consumption of an explosively increasing population. They had at their disposal the technologies available in this period, and had to secure approval from a Crown and its bureaucrats, and to form some sort of consensus on the goals that would be those of the Virginia Company. They learned how to function in the shadows of the Ulster Plantation, and they quickly took advantage of the opportunity to make their own decisions when they could–and often had to because what came from London was unusable if not harmful, to their well-being as they saw it.
Veterans of a war with Spain, adherents of a Protestantism that lacked consensus, and composed of diverse groupings and classes that were learning how to operate in some sort of team. They were the ones that piece by piece shed light on the unknown globe, learned how to cope with the Atlantic, and first met the inhabitants of that the North America they would soon settle. For better or worse they were firmly lodged in England’s traditional medieval closed approach to policy-making, social status and economic wealth. Pivot period politics and policy-making was thoroughly elite politics, and medieval more than modern in social, structural-organizational, and economic relationships. After 1603 they were ruled by a new Scottish king. In very few ways did they see the world in ways similar to the 21st century resident, and they should not be judged by its standards and values. While transitioning, they were what they were.
Despite that these adventurers were themselves often cutting edge members of an English society and economy that were clearly opening up opportunity to new proto classes, and, in addition, the global overseas commerce policy initiative was a decided break from England’s medieval foreign involvement, the policy process that delivered the Virginia Company to America’s doorstep was a struggle between and among elites who sought to secure benefits from the trade by removing competition and isolating participation of others not of their ilk.
Oligarchy was their middle name, and their use of hierarchy, status and a closed policy-making corporate culture which they transported from England to America, the Company employees who settled in Virginia brought with them Virginia’s first notions of resident governance. Added to their corporate policy-making, and despite a veneer of shareholder activism, their Virginia transplanted corporate politics were more than laced with sheer opportunism and wealth accumulation–as was normal Elizabethan administration in those times; they were also dues paying proponents of England’s mercantilist initiative and they used mercantile initiative to recoup their costs and accumulate the wealth for their future. They still fully shared England’s patriotic objectives from which, of course, they could and would glean a few coins of whatsoever realm with which they traded, settled. or warred.
These are the “greedy investors” that we frequently read about in early Jamestown histories. But they were also Company employees who settled, shared housing, and the hostile environment, alongside the indentured and free holders that settled early Virginia. That “greedy investor” facile and distorting phrase, however, has stood in the way of our understanding why the first decade of Jamestown happened that way, and why many still think of first generation Virginia settlers as thugs, smokers, and slavers sitting in rocking chairs on their plantation veranda. On a given day they could be any of these, but they did have better angels, and out of the blue they could put them to work in making Virginia a successful colony.
They were entrusted with birthing, maintaining order, matching wits with their Native American neighbors, while they simultaneously pursued their own wealth objectives. How they got into positions of corporate and public power in Virginia is a question that has a long tap root that is deeply burrowed into the English politics of the Elizabethan era, and the dependence of its Crown on private corporations to carry out public-private partnership in colonization and commerce. The structure and its corporate culture were employed once again when the Company in the “16 teens” commenced its “colony within a colony” initiative to found yet new settlements in Virginia.
From them would come Abraham Piersey, John Pott, John Martin, Lord De La Warr (Thomas West) and the West brothers, Samuel Argall, Sir Thomas Gates, Captain Christopher Newport, Captain Ralph Hamor, Sir George Sandys, William Strachey (an others), but above all impactful policy-makers such as John Smith Thomas Dale, John Rolfe and his wife, Rebecca, Sir George Yeardley and his wife Temperance Flowerdew, William Claiborne, Captain Samuel Mathews and his wives Frances Greville and Sarah Hinton, and finally Sir Francis Wyatt. All were in one form or another employees of the Virginia Company, many were officers, and there are ten (lieutenant) governors of Virginia. With an exception or two most served in the early days of the colony, and nearly all carried into the 1620’s and 1630’s. Here is the secret sauce that motivated and guided the first generation leadership of Virginia.
Persistence of Feudal Practices, Behaviors and Values into the Pivot Period
In some way or other, the Virginia Company inherited elements, aspirations, and aspects of the period , blending them into a non-coherent whole, sending it out to do what they had not yet figured out or came close to understanding, Since then historians and their students have taken it and selected from it matters and observations that reflect their values, times, and aspirations–to the point that today little of the Virginia Company’s heritage seem useful or, in many cases. so unimportant they are ignored , smushed into sentences and a paragraph or two, and put to service tasks helpful to understanding a perceived future, but far less faithful to the actualities of the period itself. This history, as imperfect as it shall be, attempts to reverse that past by reconstructing a more reasonable version of the lived Virginia Company.
Accordingly, this history needs to offer a brief description of the more comprehensive post 1550 period that includes not only the transition from the feudal system, but also the resilience of that feudal policy system as it affected the North American colonial experience. The first example for this will be to assert there was quite of bit of the traditional feudal approach that still existed during the post-1550 pivot and in the first decades of the American colonial “experiment”. Conquest of non-English territories, it will be observed, is a clear and important pattern in the development of American colonization.
The formation of relatively high-powered mercantile entities was a new type of colonial experience for the English, and for most other European nations as well … Yet it is clear that during the Middle Ages less commercialized areas such as England were accustomed to practicing a very different type of territorial domination, one which reflected their own feudal form of organization. Lords or knights who subdued native populations on the Continent [in France or Holland, for instance], in the Near East, and in Ireland lived off the tributes and dues and seldom attempted to integrate the economy of the conquered land with that of the homeland for the benefit of the latter.” [99] Carole Shammas, English commercial development and American colonization, 1560-1620 in The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650, edited by K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. 152
Shammas calls to our attention that the overseas expeditions that characterized much of the English Elizabethan years did not follow the traditions that developed out of the wool and cloth one product export by the London merchant-led Company of Merchant Adventures. Not only did they not use the great merchant trading companies, they were not merchants at all. Rather, they were usually aristocratic or well-placed gentry who persuaded Elizabeth their expeditions would serve interests of English foreign policy, while simultaneously reaping rewards for her and them.
Their model of such expeditionary adventurers were little different than that employed by the earlier Spanish conquistadores as they carved out Spain’s overseas empire a few decades earlier. Shammas asserts that “by 1500 England had developed both a fairly complex mercantile community [merchants] and a moderately centralized government, [but overseas] expansion at first was more of a reaction to …[the adventurers] and Elizabethan attempts to claim New World land, like the early Spanish conquests in the America’s, continued in many ways to bear the marks of the type of domination prevalent in earlier centuries.[99] Carole Shammas, English commercial development and American colonization, 1560-1620 in The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650, edited by K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. `52
Restated more bluntly, much of the post 1550’s pivot was most accurately characterized by English overseas (Atlantic) activities that were expressions of traditional medieval warfare, the long-standing Tudor exercise of royal foreign affairs, and the medieval exercise of aristocratic values and behavior by aristocrats or gentry with aspirations. In many instances they were carried out by Elizabeth’s favorites, Dudley for example, or by others who aspired to be her favorite (Raleigh, for example), and still others, such as Gilbert and many others as seekers of adventure and fortune that were as personal as they were English patriotism. Reflecting this, Shammas further asserts that
Clearly New World colonization appealed to a very narrow segment of the Tudor population. Merchants played a limited role in these early colonization efforts, as did the country squire, the religious dissident, and the ordinary laborer. Those who became enthusiastic about claiming American territory in this period were the same men who pushed for action against the Spanish, wanted the Crown to extend protection to the Low Countries [Holland], and fought in Ireland and France, men such as Walter Ralegh, his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert [et a] … Some quickly lost interest in America and went on to further martial adventures, but others actually organized expeditions staffed by friends from court and country, relatives, servants, and seamen.
Whether well-placed or hangers-on, these gentlemen tended to frequent the court and chose military rather than administrative tasks as a means to advance themselves … as the Crown furnished neither enough opportunities nor the kind of service to satisfy the ambitions of these men, they organized private expeditions to Europe, Ireland, and America. They grasped at opportunities as they emerged and there was no real pattern in their choice of destination. Some went to Ireland before they became interested in America while others did the reverse. The object of this form of expansion was the acquisition of an area which would provide economic rewards in the form of revenues, tributes, rents and offices that could be parceled out to followers …
The most appealing territory in the New World, however, was … elaborate schemes for taking over [copying] the ready-made empires of Spain: for example Ralegh in founding Roanoke, evidently hoped to use it to attack Spanish colonies. Later in his second New World enterprise, Ralegh hoped not only to conquer Guiana, but also continue and take over the rest of Spanish South America … most of them were looking for Indian [American] cities and they usually had a particular place in mind [i.e. el Dorado, Cibola the Seven Cities of Gold] when they began to organize their empires pp. 154-5 [99] Carole Shammas, English commercial development and American colonization, 1560-1620 in The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650, edited by K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. 153
Shammas is not alone in this claim that medieval values and practices continued into the overseas pivot and colonization. They come at in by comparing it to the Spanish approach in colonization of the New World. Historians, such as J. H. Elliott, see differences between Spain and England in this period, but a major similarity was caused by their shared “national experience of conquest and settlement … which stretched back over many centuries. For historically, Castile and England were both proto-colonial powers long before they set out to colonize America“.
Medieval England pursued a policy of aggressive expansion into the non-English areas of the British Isles, warring with its Welsh, Scottish and Irish neighbors, and establishing communities of English settlers who would advance English interests and promote English values on alien Celtic soil. The English, therefore, were no strangers to colonization, combining it with attempts at conquest which brought mixed results. Failure against Scotland were balanced by eventual success in Wales which was formally incorporated in 1536 into the Crown of England…. Across the sea the English struggled over the centuries with only limited success to subjugate Gaelic Ireland, and ‘plant’ it with settlers from England …The reign of Elizabeth was to see and intensified planting of new colonies on Irish soil, and in due course a new war of conquest.” That the Irish colonization was her first overseas priority, next to the managing of Spanish relations, and that they both consumed much of her limited resources certainly affected any colonial aspirations she might have had to the New World. [99] J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 16-7
As Elliott would argue that adventurers such as Gilbert and Raleigh, having been previously deeply involved participants in Elizabeth’s Irish colonization and plantation-building, had done so not as planters but military leaders. While they made have built an estate house, they acted more consistent with “undertakers” who recruited settlers for homesteading plantations as a reward for military service. This complicated, if subtle, distinction alerts us that Irish colonization in this period demonstrated the continuity of English medieval pattern in their colonizing, rather than a settler-agricultural homesteading more consistent with the predominant American experience.
Hence, as the medieval pattern was applied to Jamestown, most blatantly in the imposition of the military colony in 1610(ish), it could be passed into the American experience as the “ancient” settlers were granted land for service in Dale’s gifts post 1612. These new free holders identified with their past indenture holders differently, or to a lesser degree, than new arrivals during the later teens. It is likely, in my opinion that this distinction also “played into” the very rapid spread of tobacco planting in the early to late teens.
England’s Post 1550 Overseas Commerce Transition’s as an Economic Development Strategy
The Tudors persistently relied on, and delegated to, the private sector to implement their policy priorities, conduct operations in various policy areas–particularly economic saturated. Mostly they did so because they didn’t have the resources or the skillsets and their policy priorities were elsewhere. They were kings and queens after all, but if one looked behind their curtain, they were also nearly broke and lacked the skillsets. Used to command, they had other things to do with their time.
This contrasts with the mental image we have of these medieval sovereigns. They did not decide everything themselves; they left it to others to simply get things done. Elizabeth liked her swashbucklers, but she never had any intention of visiting a colony, leading an overseas raid, or sailing on the high seas attacking Spanish or pirates. Having said that, Elizabeth had good sense and instincts; she could solve problems, formulate priorities, and delegate–the last being her most iffy attribute. She was consistent in understanding royal limitations, and could recognize a crisis when she saw it. England throughout her reign was trying to catch up with almost all the other European powers. She realized at its fundamental, England badly needed economic growth–and foreign trade was the best strategy to achieve it.
But as Professor B. E. Supple asserts in the early pages of his description of the post-1550 English economy was that it was dealing with change that had already disrupted the medieval economy and presented new problems to be solved. To him there were “important dislocations in England’s economic structure” citing “the importance in the manufacture of textiles at home and of woolen exports in overseas sales as a whole, and on the other, in the fact that the English economy of the time was not such as to generate the type of trade cycle so familiar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642 (Cambridge at the University Press, 1964), p. 2
Say it another way, Supple alludes to the power of different oligarchies existing in the Elizabethan policy process that froze or clogged the existing system and seriously inhibited further change in trade and commerce that was so necessary for economic growth sufficient to satisfy demand created by population growth, and break up geographic and distribution blockages that allowed such growth outside of the London “metro” area, thereby allowing more to share in the benefits accrued by such change. She acknowledged economic inequality saturated her England and as we shall see took steps to address the issue. She also tried to balance the power of London with adventurers from the Outer Ports and provinces. At times she used her Privy Council and delegated to it policy formation and oversight. She also set the tone in motivating and recruiting her policy implementers; mixing wealth accumulation with policy loyalty she used what we would call policy franchises, grants and charters, in a Elizabethan policy institution referred to as “concessionaire and monopolies.
By the early, 1500’s. these cloth/wool companies had located around England’s key port cities, most of all London whose cloth/wool cluster dominated not only the metro economic base, but extended its organizational tentacles into the country’s wool-cloth cluster as well. The cluster’s ebbs and flows injected volatility in prosperity/recession and disrupted the kingdom’s workforce that triggered relocation of the workforce not to ignore disturbing anomic riots such as “Evil May Day of1517” when thousands of City residents rose up against foreign workers and residents, pillaging their homes and hanging a number who they felt were stealing crust from their mouths and jobs from their families. Lack of a social safety net meant the unequal distribution of wealth produced horrible living conditions, horrific housing, and and desperation in the underclass.
The realization by many elites that badly distributed prosperity and an economy that could not produce sufficient number of jobs, because it rested on one industrial sector called attention to the lack of products other than cloth and wool which importation could introduce into the English economy increasingly called into question the previously dominant economic strategy of import substitution suggesting strongly it was counter productive. It was also increasingly clear the traditional English economy could not meet demands from a competitive mercantilist Europe, prone to war and colonial empires.
Innovation and entrepreneurship were suppressed and restricted to a very few elites that had successfully accessed their corporate oligarchy in guilds, which itself than seized ahold of City/town governance, and accessed national policy-making through their use of structures like the guilds, obtaining local or royal offices, acquiring concessions, and, in overseas trade, incorporating joint stock great merchant trading companies with monopolist trade charters from the Crown. The system that emerged exhibited an overpowering tendency to create a network of internal oligarchies within each corporate and public structure involved in both policy and in its implementation. Mired deep within the still traditional and aristocratic elite social structure saturated with inequality that dominated most every feature of the English Tudor policy system, England by 1550 needed and wanted to compete, produce and grow, but simply could not easily rise above its clogged policy system to achieve some sort of economic break out,.
Closed policy-elite stagnation ensued and the issue of the time was how to break into the policy process and access effectively the decision-makers that allowed for change. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the Crown was able to siphon off what it viewed as its share of the profits generated to support its priorities and lifestyle, Through its definition of partnership, its monopolistic charters regulated but also defined and legitimized the policy making and implementation of those it chose to support. Robert Ashton in some frustration is forced conceded that the process, lacking a strong Parliament in particular, “ an impecunious government can perhaps hardly be blamed if it also saw in the licensing system a means whereby it might kill the economic and fiscal birds with the same stone” [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, 1603-1643 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 18
How did all this happen? In the sections below several key background factors, dynamics and institutions that were involved in both growth, and several key institutional structures involved in the transition and change from traditional medievalism to the 1550 pivot (guilds, towns and cities, and the formation of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, and the joint stock great merchant trading companies) settled themselves into the policy process of overseas trade and commerce.
START Move below 999 elsewhere
[999] Guilds, Towns and Cities Emerge from Enclosure and Develop during the Plague–Cloth-making existed ages and eons before the enclosure movement, and it gained early access into the English guild system as it took form following the Conquest. Among the very first to achieve a guild charter, not only in London, but also in many regional centers as well, Unwin observes “… the weavers secured at an early date by the open grant of charter. Like the bakers they gained the privilege of farming their own taxes. But they secured it much earlier (before 1130) and continued to hold tit till Tudor times. The position of the weavers amongst London trades was in this respect unique, but in the 12th century there were gilds of weavers enjoying similar privileges at Lincoln, Oxford, York, Winchester, Huntington and Nottingham … [and] Winchester.
Separate Module [999] the Cloth/Wool Company of Merchant Adventurers & the One Product English Export Economy
Population Mobility, Urbanization, London as a “Mega City”, and the rival Outer Ports
Rising from its plague-created ashes, England stabilized during the fifteenth century and incrementally increased its population, but London essentially “took off”.
Unbalanced Urbanization: London as a Mega City, Marginalization of Outer Ports
London in 1500 had about 50,000 residents. (Estimates of its 1400 population, the low point in the Plague era were 40,000-50,000 down from estimated 1300 population between 80,000and 100,000). By 1550 estimates were around 80,000 to 120,000. In 1600 London reached about 200,000, it doubled to 400,000 by 1650. This is the period around which this module focuses. Population growth did not stop; in 1700 it grew to about 500,000, in 1750 reached 700,000. The 1801 census recorded over one million. Ballpark figures or not, this is a serious increase in population. This explosion was not matched–or close to match– by any other English city.
If so, the half-century previous to 1550 witness a population explosion the perhaps as much ad doubled London’s 1500 and maybe more. During the half-century (1550 and 1603), Elizabethan years, London apparently doubled again, likely more. Arguably, Paris, Europe’s largest city of the time as about 150,000 to 250,000; it is estimated to have grown to 275 to 350,000 by 1600. France was much larger than England (14 to 16 million in 1500,18 to 20 million by 1660)(England was estimated at 4 to 5 million in 1500, and 4 to 5 million in 1660). Despite Paris’s initial lead, London’s growth rate, probably tripled London’s population from 1500 to 1600. London was catching up to Paris. This incredible growth given England’s rather static growth supports our contention that England’s initial population explosion translated into a London explosion that turned it into a rapid growth mega city. It also sheds light as to the fate of England’s other urban areas (which we will discuss shortly).
Such consistent rapid growth had its fair share of negative consequences, such as London became the visible realization of England’s vastly unequal distribution of wealth. It appears that sooner or later the England’s economic refugees wound up in London creating large concentrations of poor and the underclass. That the impression the upper English elites took away was fear of their volatility, and the likely fostering of crime. From Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth and later King James I riding through their capital city could not miss the visible change in England’s social disruption of this period.
Desperate housing conditions were evident and the reality of neighboring mixed neighborhoods meant disparate living conditions were very apparent to rich and poor alike. Aside from supporting my assertion these were times of change in England, it raises the probable question English elites asked themselves as to how to deal with London’s population explosion, an explosion that would continue into the English civil war and centuries after. From our policy-making perspective this visible day-to-day witnessing of the social change explains a great deal why Crown policy elites, and parliamentarians coming to London placed economic development high on their agenda, and magnified the inequities, inefficiency, and simple corruption of the Tudor policy system.
As always, employment was the preferred solution and this meant economic development as a policy occupied a high priority–linked as it was to public safety. Overseas trade and commerce as a job generator and and the best candidate to raise the standard of living by satisfying consumer demand. Another AI question came up with four major London-based mass anomic riots: the Evil May Day of 1517 (which we will shortly mention), a series of smaller anti foreigner “they are stealing our jobs and taking bread from our mouths” riots and murders from 1560 until the Apprentice riots of the 1590’s, the 1592 Southwark riot. We could also mention the 1601 Essex coup which generated anomic London reaction. Anything that threatened job creation or the availability of jobs struck visible interest from London’s residents.
As to non-London population centers of the period, however:
Only London could be ranked with the great continental cities. Its growth had outstripped even the doubling of [England’s] population. By the beginning of the seventeenth century [1600] it contained more than a quarter of a million people, and by the end nearly a half million, most of them poor migrants who had flocked to the capital in search of work or charity. London was the center of government, overseas trade and finance, and of fashion, taste and culture. It was ruled by a merchant oligarchy whose wealth increased tremendously over the course of the century as international trade expanded ….
Other than London, however, the story was quite different. English urban demography by 1600 consisted of “About 800 small market towns of several hundred inhabitants … and in contrast to most of Western Europe, there were few large urban areas. Norwich and Bristol were the biggest provincial cities with populations around 15,000. Exeter, York, and Newcastle were important regional centers though they each had populations about 10,000 inhabitants. [England] … was predominantly rural, with as much as 85% of its people living on the lands [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-early-Stuarts-and-the-Commonwealth
In this period, B. E. Supple asserts the non-London countryside, towns and outer ports “principal economic role” lay not in manufacturing but in finishing and distributing, in marketing and arranging supplies of food and raw materials …The shortage of capital … kept standards of living at, or below, a level today associated with underdeveloped or backward economies ”’ deprived of the economics of large-scale operation”. [pp. 2-3]. Squeezed into their own countryside, capped in an economy that sustained their existence and little more, dominated by agriculture economic base and an inadequate transportation network and poorly developed logistics sector any serious advantage derived from overseas trade did not permeate into their geography and spark change.
Bristol was England’s third largest city of the period (York 2nd, Plymouth 4th)–both Bristol and Plymouth were destined to be major players in the Virginia Company drama. The huge demographic gap that opened up in England stimulated these Outer Ports to either check the rise of London, which was impossible, or find an economic development path that worked for them. Bristol’s pre-Plague population in the mid-1300’s was between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Through the sixteenth century Bristol’s population was no higher than 10,000 to 12,000, with some estimates citing 9,500. By 1700 Bristol grew to about 20,000 recapturing its previous high mark; it grew to 64,000 in 1801 and today is about one-half million. Plymouth’s population, ranging from 3500 to 5000, still large relative to other English cities, caused her to join up with Bristol in a common effort to enhance their position vis-à-vis London.
They were forced into this alliance because a good deal of London’s elite merchants were still rapped around the wool and cloth export and held strong doubt that increased overseas commerce was the best strategy to create English jobs. They, however, were often pressed by the Crown and its elites, who need funds and luxuries to make the Tudor personalistic policy system function. For example, Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell pressed merchants to pursue overseas trade opportunities, and to encourage them he reduced import duties to stimulate import of key commodities; foreign merchants set up shops in London, and over the years all this policy generated was anti-foreigner riots and little volume in trade insufficient to macro economic growth.
During Elizabeth’s years, she was open to discovery, exploration and trade ventures from both London and the Outer Ports. Indeed, the great pivot in overseas trade and commerce was made in those times.
But in that period London truly commenced a significant growth spasm that proceeded through to Elizabeth. That growth exerted immediate effect in an England just taking its first steps out of medieval life. Supple notes “the growth of London was in itself a potent factor stimulating regional specialization and hence interregional dependence … The growth of the London market exerted pressure on the resources of remote areas as well as those of home counties …. England remained nearer to the fifteenth-century mould than to the nineteenth” pp. 4-5. The chief exception to this being those areas which had generated a small but functional cloth and wool manufacturing, a manufacturing that served the region’s domestic economy and was ill-tied to export. But cloth and wool export, even if dominated by London metro, did allow another small and concentrated cluster to function (and the with the future war with Spain) grow; shipbuilding, spurring a network of assorted rope, timber, iron-mongering, tools, and sails manufacturing existed in the larger outer ports, which also provided services to fishing, defense, and a workforce (sailors) to man the ships.
Today, contemporary global economic development often contends with super-large, mega cities in the emerging world. These mega cities concentrate the poor and cannot easily rise above the never ending problems that beset them. National politics become consumed by mega city problems, as well as the mega city being a threat to national stability and prone to anomic violence. Other regions cannot grab their share of growth and opportunity easily, and they too join in pressuring national bodies for their place in the sun. It appears that fifteenth and sixteenth century England also shared that problem. While London began its takeoff, it left behind the slower regional and outer port cities. London’s left alone in its growth, created an unbalanced English economy with population movement winding up more often than not in London.
Consequences of London: the Mega City:
Mostly raw wool/cloth was exported. English finished cloth products were not exported but sold domestically. Bristol, and many other cities and regions developed their own cloth/wool production capacity, guilds, and domestic trade, but it was London entrepreneurs that early on also sent it to the continent. London companies with access to the continent expanded rapidly such that over a few decades wool and cloth exports developed into an London-based industry cluster that included factories, port. The propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, was pronounced, facilitating a Company of Adventurers-led transformation of the industry into a London-based industry nexus, ‘
Merchant adventurers’ who risked themselves and their money to find new commercial markets in Europe had emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in commercial cities across England. Exeter had one, as did Newcastle, Hull, Chester and York. Bristol’s Merchant Ventures which dated back centuries, had recently received its first charter of in corporation from King Edward VII in 1552 [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10s, and ships—and close relationships with continental merchants and agents (factors). Cloth export, primarily a one way export only concentrated in Antwerp, the primary entrance point.
Over time a European agent-factor nexus developed that allowed London and eastern-sited cloth merchants to sustain an advantage in cloth trade that other English regions could not penetrate. English cloths came to be shipped almost exclusively to Antwerp, and from there to their ultimate destinations in various parts of Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 6. That concentration of exports prompted the Company of Adventurers to locate its headquarters, offices, and even member residences in Antwerp.
…criticism of London’s position in the economy veiled an apprehension which was in the main, justified. The capital had come to condition many of the day-to-day workings of the [nation as a whole]. Quite apart from the far-flung influence of its demand for consumer goods, London as the fountain-head of privileges, the centre of government, the site of the principal law courts, the seat of the great trading companies, the crux of the land market, the main repository of trading capital, and the primary source of credit, was the inevitable controller of much economic activity in other parts of the land, and, as we shall see, the narrow bottleneck through which (to the chagrin of the provincial merchants) textiles produced in the remotest areas passed for shipment abroad [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1964) p. 4
Moreover, as Robert Ashton suggests, residence in London offered access to the network of arrangements such as farming and patents which they as members of the business elite became interlocked with the crown, its priorities, factions and bureaucracies. As such Company elites “were more intimately associated with the crown and the court. These were magnates whose economic interests while resting on a firm foundation of commodity trade, split over into the exploitation of concessions on the periphery of government finance and economic policy … Many of the patents of monopoly of this period fall into this category; so, in a sense does the expedient of customs farming. Other concessions were the product of the crown’s shortage of income which forced it back on the expedient of rewarding its servants and those whom it delighted to honor by concessions in kind rather than by payments in cash–by such devices as patents, licenses, and custom farms. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, pp. 11-12
The key to this change was by 1600 population increase had gotten to the point it exposed an unanticipated consequence: the silent creation of new election districts in the Houses of Commons and Lords, most of which were outside of London.
In Henry VIII’s first parliament [Jan, 1510] there were 37 knights who sat in 37 shires (Lords) and 223 burgesses who represented the chartered boroughs and towns of the kingdom. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign [1603] borough representation [Commons] had increased by 135 seats. The Commons was replacing the Lords in importance because the social element it represented had become economically and politically more important than the nobility. Should the crown’s leadership falter, there existed by the end of the century an organization [Commons] quite capable of seizing the political initiative … Elizabeth has sense enough to avoid a showdown with the Commons and she retreated under parliamentary attack on the issue of her prerogative rights to grant monopolies regulating and licensing the economic life of the kingdom [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-clash-with-Spain
The Economy in Transition: During this period the English economy was fragile and in transition. B. E. Supple alerts us to issues such as population concentration in London, the resulting marginalization of non-London outer port cities, and dependence on a one industry (wool) export economy. All were accurate but also interrelated. All exacted a serious effect on the pivot of post 1550’s English overseas trade Contemporary global economic development has to contend with super-large, mega cities in the emerging world; it appears that fifteenth and sixteenth century England did also.
… criticism of London’s position in the economy veiled an apprehension which was in the main, justified. The capital had come to condition many of the day-to-day workings of the [nation as a whole]. Quite apart from the far-flung influence of its demand for consumer goods, London as the fountain-head of privileges, the centre of government, the site of the principal law courts, the seat of the great trading companies, the crux of the land market, the main repository of trading capital, and the primary source of credit, was the inevitable controller of much economic activity in other parts of the land, and, as we shall see, the narrow bottleneck through which (to the chagrin of the provincial merchants) textiles produced in the remotest areas passed for shipment abroad [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1964) p. 4
Supple follows up with an assertion that London was growing far too fast and far too much as the place where business need be conducted. He lent credibility to the dilemma of the Outer Ports whose complaints “tell us much, although by no means all, concerning the economic relationships between the various local economies which comprised the England of the time” [99 , p. 4]. He also focused attention on the importance of wool as the mainstay of England’s export trade: “It is essential to go into slightly more detail concerning the manufacture of woolen textiles, for they occupied a unique position in the structure of English industry and trade [99, pp. 4-5]. That England as essentially was a one export economy (wool and cloth) had enormous repercussions not just economically, but importantly, politically prompt discussion on that topic:
B. E. Supple, a Cambridge professor of economic history, asserted London in the pivot years grew far too fast and set the standard for it being the place where business need be conducted. Sensitive to the complaints that were heard during that time from the outer ports and regional cities he lent credibility to the dilemma of the Outer Ports. Stating these complaints “tell us much, although by no means all, concerning the economic relationships between the various local economies which comprised the England of the time” [99 , p. 4]. He also focused attention on the importance of wool as the mainstay of England’s export trade: “It is essential to go into slightly more detail concerning the manufacture of woolen textiles, for they occupied a unique position in the structure of English industry and trade [99, pp. 4-5].
Finally, if we link increase in population with urbanization, the wool trade London cluster created another dynamic: the unemployable poor, a restive urban population base when times were tough and a Dickensian like workforce in booms. That the functions of the capital, governance for example, overlapped with the restive population some form of economic development that could alleviate this was facilitated and was supported by the affluent in London. “Since cloth made up the bulk of exports, and since the industry was highly concentrated, in all cases of abrupt decline in overseas demand society was faced with the phenomenon of mass unemployment …[no one] could hope to absorb the idle labor resulting from a cessation of activity [p.6]. London and the nation’s chief decision-makers did not have to travel far to see consequences of poor economic growth.
Headquartered in London and Antwerp, the Company of Merchant Adventurers elites were in a potentially influential and strategic position from which a commanding role in England’s overseas trade and commerce. As we shall see, they chose to do so but for the most part limited their activity to protecting and enhancing their Company access to northern Europe through Antwerp and to confine themselves to cloth-wool apparel related products for export. They were not interested in imports, save to commodities use to cloth and wool industry/guilds.. Still, in that cloth and wool constituted three quarters or so of all English exports in this period, their use of London as their principal English port secured for them the status of evolving into the so-called establishment of English foreign trade. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, pp. 23-4
See K R Andrews pp 62ff-about 70
In many ways, especially social, the Company elites transformed London into a Company town, Company members and officeholders transformed their elites into an English elite quite different from the dominant landed agricultural-manor-based aristocracy; the Company was a merchant elite, an urban commercial one that concentrated in the mega city that London had become. Having said that, however, company elites often chose to involve themselves in London politics and to secure elective office, alderman, and the Lord Mayor. Their primary interest, aside from securing what benefit they could from London politics, was to access and cement an alliance with the Crown and the Sovereign. Their wealth made loans to the state possible, and their experience offered advice and middlemen for the sovereign to supplement his initiatives and priorities abroad.
As a prominent and affluent element in London’s governance of the capital city they could offer considerable resources and advantage to the cash-starved monarchy. In the Tudor period they gained access to court politics and acquired the sovereign’s favor at least to the extent the Queen saw them as a useful ally in domestic finance and foreign affairs, an ally that brought stability and critical resources. With London England’s mega city and the Crown as allies the Company’s members and core oligarchy became as close to the commercial established as England possessed at that time.
Their narrow view of such trade, however, was not encouraging or facilitative for a more expanded notion of overseas trade, and, as we shall see made London somewhat more vulnerable to political instability particularly when the cloth/wool trade was in some difficulty or in lean years when exports declined due to war or market issues. In such times when the gilds and cloth/wool companies reduced their workforce or were not hiring workers the economic refugees from the countryside looking for employment easily visible groupings of restive and sometimes volatile underclass raised anxiety of more affluent and secure Londoners, as their neighborhoods and substandard housing could not easily be ignored or bypassed.
While not reaching the point of opposition to the Company of Merchants of the establishment of this era, they saw potential in copying the Company of Merchant Adventurers methods and organizations. When an opportunity opened up in the 1550’s the more adventurous, under the leadership of John Cabot’s son, Samuel broke the ice by creating a new merchant trading company (Muscovy) around a new trading elite that sought opportunities, mostly in China and Japan, following the Portuguese and Spanish leads.
The 1550 pivot seemingly threatened to be a pivot in overseas trade away from the Company of Adventurers, but was not regarded so in that period. It was more a wave of interest in overseas trade that was perceived as an economic opportunity that should be seized. Led by a generational change in English entrepreneurs, and sons of the establishment that were willing to carpe diem. Since they did not threaten the interests of the establishment, but indeed offered them prospects that stabilized England’s tensions and offered prosperity to the rising population and growing urban centers.
As London became king of the wool export trade, it compelled England’s outer ports to devise their own path. England’s post 1550’s overseas pivot followed a bimodal development pattern: London and the Outer Ports. The rivalry and bitter competition played a notable role in England’s invasion of Ireland, and global discovery and exploration. London’s approach to overseas trade, the trading factory, and the great merchant trading companies differed radically from that used in the Outer Ports. We will discuss that in more detail below.
Equally, important, London’s organizational vehicle, the joint stock Company of Merchant Adventurers became the model, the corporate form that dominated England’s overseas trade and commerce, and colonization. In that the Tudor’s, for reasons to be soon discussed, delegated much of overseas commercial trade to private corporations the joint stock corporation’s strength, the ability to attract private investors in a manner that transcending individual companies and wealthy merchants it proved to most in that time period as the most promising corporate structure suitable to the task.
That form of business organization demonstrated an ability to achieve dominance over the domestic cloth industry. Its entry into partnership with the sovereign and the English state in its overseas export venture was made possible by a sovereign grant of monopoly to that corporation in the industry export to northern Europe. To the merchants on the inside, however, its attractiveness included a flexibility in its governance structures that centralized corporate authority into a few largest investors of the corporation–offering to them security in an investment most risky.
What made the joint stock merchant trading company seemingly effective in their view was it oligarchic and restricted membership created wealth that could be reinvested in more expeditions and trade. By the late 1500’s the joint stock corporation, not unlike a Russian doll, proved amenable to superimposing a hierarchy of internal oligarchies, that centralized its governance in a few, very few investor who were converted in to a corporate governance by family dynasties. Later on, we shall focus on this issue, but for now the change in joint stock governance over the last half century came at the increasingly noted expense of fostering jealously and frustration of those who wanted in on this opportunity.
The point of controversy was on their “monopoly” which closed their access and prevented others from participating and sharing in its wealth creation. Their perception was they lacked the political and policy making power to do so. The point of this is the dominant corporate structure of English overseas trade and commerce, had entered into the seventeenth century with what proved to be a fundamental flaw–a flaw so serious the structure would be unable to enter effectively into the new policy area du jour: colonization.
How the partnership with the state and sovereign was affected by the union of the joint stock corporation and the royal monopoly and grants or, the crown, privilege. Unable to form their own great merchant trading company, 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.
In the meantime, London merchants, including some of the cloth merchants, pressed as they were by Henry for financing, looked to expand their overseas trading monopolies to other geographies besides northern Europe, now entrapped in a series of wars and crosscutting webs of political alliances. But they too were frustrated by the stagnant power of the Company of Merchant Adventurers and its dominance of crown politics and English economic life.
Outer Ports (non-London) considerably smaller in population and port infrastructure 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. That their overseas experience also reflected a pronounced tendency to war through privateering , only drew them closer into the Spanish conquistador model. House especially calls out Raleigh, “with his wild schemes for wealth and glory through the conquest of the ‘large, rich and bewithful empire of Guiana, and it filled the heads of the gentlemen adventurers of Jamestown with dreams of gold and Indians: (p. 24)
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. 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.
As I shall argue the post-1550’s period, the reign of Elizabeth in particular, the popular sense that overseas trade, commerce, following in the path paved by the Spanish, Portuguese, and the near competitor and ally, the Dutch offered the best chance of continuing growth while protecting England from their intrusions. The need to increase overseas trade as a partial solution to restive populations and economic disruptions was considered more and more desirable, if not necessary, by the elites of the kingdom. London’s elite mentality stressed trade and commerce principally to the Far East, India and East Indies with colonization marginalized as a means by which “surplus population” can be exported, and/or the natives converted to Christianity.
While nearly all in the early decades of this period wanted trade and commerce primarily, geography and the concentration of power, wealth in London thrust the non-London and southwestern coastal ports in other directions. Reaching the Far East meant discovering a “northwest passage” thru today’s Russia or artic Canada. London’s geography pointed its advocates toward Russia or the Levant (Ottoman Empire), and that’s where they went. English western coastal ports, however, called loosely the Outer Ports, used their location to involve themselves in Ireland and northern North America, principally the Hudson Bay and Artic Canada.
Mimicking Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the southern North America, the West Indies and Caribbean, and Central America northern South America, the merchant adventurers of the southwest coastal ports headed off into areas left alone by the Londoners. The change of direction altered the business plan of the western adventurers. Privateering, raids and rival settlements were included in their plans, and with the tension and the 1585 war with Catholic Spain escalated their overseas plans to an aggressive anti-Catholic resistance. Of necessity, all of these tendencies required an aggressive and sustained period of discovery and exploration to make any of it possible and effective. So without intending consciously to do so, I have wandered into a second thread of development, likely the more most important of the two.
Accordingly we ought discuss; the effects of England’s post 1550 population increase which triggered unbalanced urbanization caused by London’s population explosion transforming it into England’s version of a sixteenth century “Mega City” which itself led to the economic and political marginalization of West County Outer Ports. That marginalization was naturally not well received and it began a rivalry with London that quickly expressed itself into counter approaches in England’s post 1550 overseas trade and commerce pivot that involved different roles and path to England’s colonization. That rivalry set in motion what turned out to be the fundamental dynamic that shaped the structure, organization, and leadership of the Virginia Company. Those competing visions went on to affect directly the commencement of England’s first colonization initiatives in 1606.
The concentrated time period, between 1500 and 1550 alerts us to likelihood considerable individual geographic and social mobility created both opportunity and anxiety, with new neighborhoods created in newly forming urban areas, entrepreneurial opportunities, and a prevalence of decent good times (not booms) interspersed with ebbs and temporary pullbacks on the poorest elements of the population. High hopes and desperation abounded. Above all, a sense that change was afoot, and fear among some that traditions would be abandoned. Such transitional periods as this fed into, and no doubt fostered religious movements of that period.
With the aristocracy itself in flux, and in search of security through change or resisting it, a rising gentry and merchant class, a new free holder yeoman asserting themselves on the manor and in agricultural areas, and the Church of England still at war with the dispossessed Catholic Church, and under pressure from a number of activist preachers, cults, and proto-sects, the parish and vestry politics and country and city governments themselves in transition, the reader should probably be willing to accept this is a period of change, not static or mired in old traditions.
During this period [of our overseas pivot] there were major internal changes within England which altered perceptions about both the New World and colonialization of settlements, and which ultimately made possible the establishment of a network of settlements in America [p.151] … What lay behind this new preoccupation with trade? … Certainly England’s growing demographic problems were creating an environment essentially favourable to some form of economic change. We know that in the sixteenth century English population accelerated its recovery from the low level at the end of the Black Death period, and probably passed the four million mark. ‘Enclosure’ and the new methods of agrarian organization made farming more efficient and market-oriented, but they also reduced the number of persons needed on the land. Unless the society could find profitable ways to utilize this superfluous manpower, per capita output would decline. Complaints about rogues and vagabonds, and the restless migration of people into and out of towns … testify to this unemployment and underemployment problem. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 167-8
Supple reports that this national economy “except for the variations in purchasing power resulting from harvest fluctuations the home market for industrial goods tended, on the whole, to be maintained at a stable and low level, and to be conditioned by regional rather than national factors. It was, therefore, frequently overseas demand which was [to be] the strategic determinant of alterations in internal [domestic] activity. As English exports largely consisted of woolen goods, and the cloth industry was the principal non-agricultural occupation, so trade inevitably came to play a dynamic role in the variations of internal prosperity“. [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642 (Cambridge at the University Press, 1964), pp. 8-9
Accordingly, the reader shall see modules filled with all sorts of grandiose merchant trading companies being incorporated after amazing ventures by their founders, a good deal of incredible exploration expeditions across the globe including Russia, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and one colonization effort (Roanoke) laced with anti-Spanish privateering, but none of these produced a volume of trade sufficient to tackle England’s economic difficulties.
Ironically, I talk of a post-1550 English pivot to global overseas trade, but the reader now is aware that while this pivot opened up the Far East, North America, the Levant, and the West Indies, but each venture consumed years for a few ships to complete their expeditions. The volume of imports were very insufficient to affect the economy; rather their value was to prove to the merchant class that overseas trade can be successful–under certain conditions like charter monopolies and restriction in the number of participating merchants.
The Elizabethans belonged to a society which was still uncertain about the role of trade in the economy. In the past few decades [she asserts] the work of economic historians has discredited the idea that the Elizabethan period was a time of great expansion in trade. Instead the English nation was essentially ‘straddling the fence’ in commercial matters throughout the Tudor period … Gentlemen on the whole did not specifically connect trade with the national or their own posterity while the Crown only became interested when trade seemed to be responsible for a gold outflow or [English] unemployment, and at such times protection of cloth manufacturing tended to have priority over protection of English traders. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization, 1560-1620′ in “the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650 edited by K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 162-4.
In the meantime, however, Elizabeth’s help seldom with financial aid, but rather the granted trade monopolies, and charters that provided her with revenues and often with favorites to help her finance her court and lifestyle and to not sell what little gold she had. She too was often inclined to support “English import substitution”, or English companies and workers producing the desired imports. This seldom mentioned London’s less than enthusiastic response to overseas trade was an important factor in explaining why England finally turned to what Charles A. Andrews describes as a colonial-commercial mercantile system in which they government-Crown was …
passing through a stage of transition, during which it was influenced less by those in official authority than by private individuals engaged in colonial and commercial enterprise, whose experience and advice … often guided the the government in its effort to chart the policy of the administration. England’s commercial policy was slow in the making, it never reached the stage of exact definition … In its relation to the colonies in America, it was never an exact system, except in a few fundamental particulars … It followed rather than directed commercial enterprise …Mercantilism, as this commercial policy came to be called, was not a theory but a condition, an expression in practical form of the experience of those concerned directly with trade and commerce. It was the inevitable accompaniment of a state of society in which foreign trade and commerce were rapidly attaining an ascendancy, and were determining the attitude of statesmen and merchant alike toward the other material interests of the nation. [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: England’s Colonial and Commercial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938), pp. 2-3
Looking at this transitional period from an English perspective, Kenneth R. Andrews sheds a more practical, if blunt, tone. Even though the export of cloth through the northwest ports of the Continent remained England’s commercial anchor throughout the period, cloth exports played a subordinate role in the new trading developments of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era … English merchants … secured control of nearly all the country’s foreign trade … The tonnage of native shipping doubled between 1570 and 1630 and provincial [i.e. outer] ports now managed a vigorous and growing share of overseas business. …The main context and content of Elizabethan-Jacobean expansion was thus commercial. Even so the difference between the eastern and western wings of [England’s] expansion movement was striking. On the one hand a colonial empire of the West was coming into being, the result of Atlantic enterprise in which the men of the west Country–gentry of the western shires as well as merchants of the western ports played a prominent part. From the first this was an aggressive drive by the armed traders bent on breaking into the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic trades, an unofficial war of trade and reprisals in the course of which emerged ambitions to colonize. …
On the other hand the Londoners who led the quest for eastern trade seem to have taken a different view of England’s oceanic role. The Muscovy Company was not interested in confronting the Iberian powers, but in finding an alternative route to the East in order to avoid conflict. Richard Staper, the leader of the Levant Company sincerely abhorred the activities of the English marauders of the Mediterranean, for they ‘invariably injured’ … the merchants interest. The aims of the East India Company were undoubtedly mercantile … it eschewed territorial acquisitions and used the substantial force of its shipping only to serve the needs of trade [99] Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 1948), pp. 8-10
From this future commerce (and empire) evolved. England, however, did not acquire such volume that overseas commerce generated profits until the days when sugar, tobacco and spices arrived in the 1620’s. The longstanding need for imports in volume is one reason why Virginia found in London a ready market for Rolfe and his wife Pocahontas. What is remarkable, however, is the development of a small group of key merchants, gentry, and aristocrats, some from London, Sir Thomas Smythe being foremost, who did support the pivot, who were involved in the incorporation of the merchant trading companies, and who maintained an interest in the West Country exploration, discovery and colonization.
That Smythe was CEO of both the East India and the Virginia Company, he also assumed top leadership positions in the other merchant trading companies of this period. Smythe had his hands in everything–and if anything that caused his corporate undoing and likely contributed to his poor health. But there is a larger point to be made: the post-pivot 1550 transition in overseas trade facilitated a macro transition in England’s economy, it did not produce immediate and impactful change in society, governance and internal politics.
Distinctions that matter in the discovery, trade and colonization of English North America
Two caveats must be kept in mind before we start. First, the assertion central to the modules concerning the English inheritance derived from the post-1550 English pivot in overseas trade and commerce is that it was early in England’s attempt to modernize its economy so it could more effectively enter and compete with the others in the developing European mercantile system. England had not yet built sufficient capacity, skillsets, experience, technology and systemic change from medievalism to plan or manage a North American successful colonization; England was not ready for prime time. Second and more fundamental, my goal is to describe things as they actually played out at the time. Chronology, not ideology or contemporary paradigms. How the adventurers saw it, not how historians commentators the events and values of the period in which they write select topics that were not primary at the time. Hence my approach to the English discovery and colonization of North America will be different than many traditional commentators..
Accordingly, the literature on the discovery and pre-colonization of the Virginia and New England colonies are the most affected. It does not reflect the distinctions and dynamics that were material in understanding the subsequent colonization attempted by the Virginia Company in 1606. Say it another way, did not draw attention to specific lessons learned during the English post-1550 pivot to overseas trade, commerce and colonization.
Understanding the transition England was making from medievalism due to changes compelled by the enclosure movement, the 13th-14th century Black Plague, and the increase and distribution of population previous to the 1550 pivot (and continued after), England developed its capital city London into a “mega city” whose growth, resources, centrality to the Crown and the English state had before 1500 created a metro whose class system was materially different from the landed aristocratic, if modernizing, landed manor economy that possessed an agricultural, rural economic base that was very much isolated from those changes that affected the urbanized London.
In that, it shall be discovered the formation of the Virginia Company, and the different approaches employed by England in its post-1550 overseas pivot exhibited diversity of approaches due in part to the delegation of its implementation to various groupings and actors we ought make a determined effort to include this diversity into our knowledge bank regarding the Company and the founding of England’s initial two colonies.
More than eighty percent of the population lived in the latter. London’s transformation into a mega city, however, no doubt exercise a considerable impact on England’s elites, while the more negative aspects of a mega city exacted effect on the isolated preponderance of the English people. A notable exception to this perspective was a few small, but growing, outer ports such as Bristol and Plymouth; these ports were able to share with London some of the benefits the latter possessed; a small shipbuilding cluster that gave rise to associated manufacturers, a specialized workforce (sailors and ship captains), and defensive spending for forts, for example.
The two outer ports, often referred to as “West Country”, developed their own response-approach to the post-1550 pivot, and that proved to be noticeably different from London’s. Without question they played an important role in the advocacy and design of the Virginia Company. The distinctions between the two geographies, their adventurers and their approach to overseas activities, have not been discussed by many, but the implications of these approaches have not always been integrated into the Jamestown, or Plymouth Company narrative. This, therefore, reduced, and somewhat misinterpreted, the role, activities, programs and contributions of the Virginia Company to its state colonial development. That a reasonable case can be made that both 1606 colonies failed, at minimum, the first decade of Jamestown resulted from the Company’s ineffective, arguably doomed, founding colony-building program.
Activities, and approach to colonization acquired from the post-1550 overseas pivot used by the Virginia Company, its corporate board, and its leadership including those resident in England and the colony itself, did not satisfactorily reflect the transition from traditional medieval perspective, or the lack of it, and in some cases have substituted topics and themes (the search for gold or conversion of the natives, two examples), nor have they describe the actions and plans of the colony’s leadership in terms appropriate to the time.
Also, English merchants like Smythe did fold into the overseas movement, but others, like Smythe’s older namesake, Thomas Smith held quite different views on overseas colonization, carried from their Irish experiences of the 1570’s to Jamestown and the native population. Key players in the voyages to Jamestown did not buy into the mentality and style of the dominant West Country adventurers. Their role in the first voyages to Jamestown was markedly less pronounced until 1608 by which time the colony had fallen into disasters and misplaced policy decisions. That the merchant approach to Jamestown colonization, an approach derived from the post-1550 pivot by London-based adventurers using great merchant companies trading with developed European and Asian countries for the purpose of commerce and trade, did not suit the initial settlement of a permanent colony in America.
The Virginia Company colonization, as was the East India commercial trade breakthrough with India, was intended to be remarkably different from most of the West Country led voyages of discovery, exploration, and initial colonization at Roanoke to North America. The latter expeditions were mostly led by “adventurers”, but not merchant adventures who used these great merchant trading companies. That both great merchant trading companies (Russia, Levant, and several others) open up these geographies to English trade–but not settlement. They negotiated with firmly established native leadership such as Ivan the Terrible, the Shah of Persia and established dynasties in India and Southeast Asia.
The lessons experiences and lessons learned by English decision-makers of the period of the fifty years of the pivot was considerable, but it is less certain how valuable, i.e. how much it was applied to those activists that actually played a role in discovery, exploration and colonization. Even if taken into account by those at the corporate HQ, it could not be assumed to travel to America without revision or nonuse by who led and were members of the settlement in Virginia. That is also likely true of those who paid the bills of these adventures–the investors and debt managers; they too would have to conceptualize the new reality, internalize it and apply it to their expectations, behaviors, and practices. In 1606 three thousand miles of ocean created an enormous opportunity for overseas autonomy.
In handing off the baton of the historical founding of these two American colonies by England, it has been possible that historians and commentators of each have consciously and unconsciously, created somewhat different narratives. That overseas trade pivot and the colonization of America were reasonably high priorities of English policy-makers of the period, one cannot assume they match the intensity of the founding by American historians and commentators; these commentators have their own perspectives, loyalties and paradigms.
Moreover, it is quite fair to assert English histories and historians include a great deal more depth and description in this period–which frankly, despite its relatively high priority, crowd out the colonial ventures of the Virginia Company. In return, American historians and commentators do not inevitably attempt to recapture the events, personalities and activities of this period and integrate them into their version of the colonial narrative. One such narrative is a comprehensive description of the post 1550’s overseas pivot that injects the diversity of this period that somewhat redefines its nature or is near-ignored; thus the matter does not become part of the explanation of why events happened in America.
Hence, one sees frequent mention that the two colonies founding in 1606 was an experiment, which in a general and superficial sense it was, is a very bad choice of words. England used the knowledge and experience it had in these colonies and the goals of colonization were derived from the needs of the English during this transition period. In fact during this period, which emphasized trade and commerce, there was no single goal, perspective, value system, or approach shared by all of the participants.
Shortly, I will make the assertion that arguably the most dominant English approach to its overseas activities was feudal in character, and reflected a more militaristic and aggressive seizure of territory. England’s chief plantation-building effort during the post-1550 overseas pivot was made in Ireland, and secondarily Holland, France and Spain.
A good deal of the actors relevant to North America and the Virginia Company, had a great deal of experience in this approach. Even a superficial look at this form of English overseas activity is stunned by the realization that a great deal of English overseas territorial activities of this period meant conquest, and usually a brutally harsh treatment of the natives. Some of that is easily observed in Jamestown. One example that is so obvious, the conversion of Jamestown into a military colony, is never included into the colonization narrative. That similar activities, at the same time, were used in Ulster, Ireland plantation-building, i.e. conquest, pass unmentioned. Indeed, the English officials in charge of the Ireland plantation-building did offer advice to the Virginia Company and English royal decision-makers during the early Jamestown period.
Also, my argument that England itself was in transition at the time and that transition materially affected the founding of the initial colonies is seldom considered. That England had not yet achieved anything near a consensus on what colonization meant and what its goals were, account for a great deal of the malperformance of the Virginia Company leadership–and investors, not to ignore the Crown.
The lack of consensus on goals, definition, and appropriate strategy haunted the Virginia Company and played considerable havoc in its administration of the colonies–indeed, the internal corporate civil war it cause the Company to have its Virginia charter suspended and never reissued, though discussion and renegotiation of that matter lasted until 1643. As to issues associated with the “drift to the English civil war”, several (monopolies, role of parliament, whether foreign policy was a sovereign right of the king), they too played a seriously important role in the Virginia Company affairs.
In any event each of the several background modules will be included in our assessment of the post-1550 overseas trade, commerce and colonization pivot’s impact on the design, mission, and operation of the Virginia Company. What emerges from the several background modules is a tale of many colors, a story from which several truths can shape the observations of multi observers each positioned in different views and paradigms that have conceptualized the Virginia birth in 1606. We cannot forget that all these views were “lived” by the actors and policy-makers that dwelled within the policy-making system of that period.
The Contrast to the West Country, the non-feudal London Merchants Approach
My module offered as background for the post-1550 pivot concentrates on the London-based great merchant trading companies (their oligarchical limited membership), principally the Russia, Levant, and East India companies. While it neglects other pivot period trading companies, its Virginia Company relevance accentuates as its secondary plot emergence of the joint stock trading company as the basic foundation for its overseas expansion.. The modules outlines several strengths and weaknesses, but it stresses its limited oligarchical hierarchical membership that excluded far more than it included among contemporary English merchant adventurers. Said and done, the Virginia Company was version 2.0 of these companies, minus some of the limited membership, but still very much prone to oligarchy and benefit to its board of directors.
The London-based overseas merchant adventure trading company differs entirely with a second background module of the period focused on the voyages of discovery and exploration of North America by the “West Country’-based adventurers from the outer port of Bristol. The west country men may have held hope for finding Asia and the Far East, but it kept bumping up against North America. For the better part of thirty full years, West Country voyages mixed exploring along the coast and its waterways, with hustling natives for info, and then heading off for raids and privateering adventures to pay its bill and fill their coffers.
In a future module that describes advocacy and design of the Plymouth Company that led to fabrication by Cecil of a second London-based company that was to be the Virginia Company. In between, there is a module dealing with the Tudor-Stuart transition, a transition that had a huge effect on the top leadership of the future Virginia Company; included in that is a detail discussion and some background to the Essex Rebellion–a reaction to his fall out with Elizabeth caused by his Irish invasion. Essex’s rivalry with Walter Raleigh, and the Essex-led, Elizabeth sponsored invasion/plantation settlement of Ireland then will serve as background to an imprisioned Raleigh whose proteges and copycats will await his return to overseas action. In 1616 they got what they wished for–and it played out as Shammas described–for which Raleigh lost his head in 1618.
But Shammas offers yet another period description, which is almost never neglected by English historians because they feel it includes what is regarded as the dominant type of overseas player in the late Elizabethan overseas pivot. Read any biography of Elizabeth and there is more of adventure, favorites, overseas military invasions of anything neighboring England, most of Ireland which always was the preferred plantation to conquer, and the plantation that honed the skills and the day-to-day aspirations of its invading English “undertakers”. Had the American natives sent an observer to this, I suspect things could have developed differently in America? That will explored in this module more deeply.
As to which ONE captures not only the spirit, the history of the times, but clearly demonstrates how and why the Virginia Company was designed and incorporated is frankly anyone’s guess. Each in its manner includes part of the picture, the sum of which shaped the Virginia Company. Still, I am convinced Shammas’s missing piece ought be further discussed here so the reader can better appreciate why the Virginia Company, and England, was not ready in 1605-6 to launch its first colony in North America. It is also an excellent background for the type of English settlers that went to Virginia during its “First” migration which populated the colony until the end of the Civil War (the 1650’s). That is very important as I assert it was these folk, long despised by many American historians, that formed and provided leadership to Virginia through that period.
Each and all of these modules capture a part of the post-1550 English overseas trade, commerce and colonization pivot that in toto greatly shaped the design and incorporation of the 1605-6 Virginia Company. Each modules captures, in part, key aspects and elements of the pivot period–but not its aggregate picture. American colonial history has usually tapped into one or two of these modules.
Resilient Feudalism and its role in the Virginia Company
Shammas’s characterization of what she believes to be the key actors-personalities of Elizabethan England’s overseas affairs applies chiefly, in my belief, to the West County adventurers. These outer port post-1550 navigator motivations were less trade-focused than adventure-focused. That distinction is critical to our understanding that the post-1550 overseas pivot were by no means solidly united in the motivations, background and geographic residence. Simply put, if trade could make money the west countrymen were all for it; but, having said that their strategy and goals were more varied and flexible. Hence, we start with the distinction the core outer port adventurer-wing were quite dissimilar from the London merchant adventurers whose path involved the great joint stock trading companies and the search for access to the Far East and West Indies. The why behind this distinction, I believe lies in understanding the class composition of the adventurers, as well as their residence.
The London-based merchant adventurers were above all “merchants”, but as we shall see the outer port adventurers were a mixture of aristocrats, gentry, and even land-owning local nobility. If the London merchants at minimum had to contend with the Company of Merchant Adventurers and their cloth overseas trade and domination of London society and London’s governance. Wrapped up in the impact of London’s development as a mega city, and dominated by a economic base, a cloth and other merchant dominated society, and a city government heavily dominated by that class, the Londoners could and did access and cement their relationships with the Crown, taking advantage of her grants, monopolies, concessionaries.
Outer port adventurers, however trace their post-1550 overseas pivot initiatives, goals and strategies based on an interest in North America (not Russia, the Levant, or East India) more accessible from their western residence, but also from other sources: the exploits of John Cabot 1498 voyage, the early development of a fishing cluster in Newfoundland, the more compelling interest in defining colonization in terms of Ireland, and their interest in North America more compatible with a mixture of goals, such as an anti-Spanish-Catholic crusade that included both war and peace time privateering, and the prevalence of a disproportionate number of Anglican dissident Protestants.
The Plymouth Company was financed mainly by men from England’s west country. For half a century the inhabitants of Bristol, and the port towns of Devonshire and Dorsetshire had led England in exploring the continent discovered by John Cabot and in exploiting the rich fisheries of Newfoundland. Bitterly jealous of ‘the Engrossing and Restraint of Trade by the rich merchants of London, the westerners were a separate interest in the New World settlement, and by 1606 demanded a position at least equal to that of the Londoners in the projected settlement of ‘Virginia’. [99] Bernard Bailyn, the New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 2
Supported by the development of a shipbuilding and fishing cluster home-based in the outer ports. What Shammas alerts us too is that most of their key players were less traders than adventures and while they included local merchants in their adventures, their spirit, class composition, culture, ambitions and aspirations were more traditional medieval at this point in English history. To be sure the breakaway from the medieval system would accelerate after 1600, but they were fostered by the coming to power of the Scot Stuart dynasty and the rising activism and cohesion into sects of Anglican religious dissidents. It was these fine fellows that advocated, designed, incorporated the Plymouth Company a subsidiary of the Virginia Company. David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 482-3; See Lamon, p 14
Starting with Humphrey Gilbert (the older half-brother of Walter Raleigh) and his 1581 and 1583 voyages to North America, Gilbert, a Devon (west country) from wealthy landed gentry family, had earlier served as a page to an out-of-power Elizabeth. Educated in Eton and Oxford (where he studied navigation and military science) entered the {English] army fighting the Huguenots in France upon graduation in 1563.
Wounded, he returned to England and wrote “A Discourse in Discoverie for a new passage to Cataia” advocating a voyage of discovery to find a Northwest Passage to China “and building English trading posts along the route“, which would be staffed by populating them with surplus population (the unemployed living in poverty and convicts“. Lamont includes Gilbert’s conclusion which firmly ties the young adventurer to his asserting he was not “in fear of death” for service to his Queen and country, and that his own honour rested on his belief “that death was inevitable and fame of virtue is immortal” a knightly spirit and motivation that reminds one of Achilles. [99] Edward M. Lamont, the Forty Years that created America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 14ff. There is no mistaking Gilbert for a London cloth merchant.
Despite his friendly relations to Elizabeth she rejected the idea and instead sent him to serve her attempt to carve an English plantation out of Munster (Ireland)–in the fashion pioneered by Henry II, i.e. conquest (1567-1570). Joining in that campaign he carved out for himself his own Irish plantation using some of the most brutal and ruthless tactics employed in that conquest. The path to his headquarters was lined on both sides with severed heads of the clan chiefs he had subdued. In 1570 the Munster Irish arose in rebellion and Gilbert was key in crushing the uprising, and in so doing firmly establishing his plantation.
Elizabeth, much impressed knighted him in 1570. He represented Plymouth in Parliament beginning in 1571. In the aftermath Gilbert associated himself, as an investor in the Frobisher voyages of discovery to northern North America, voyages intent on the discovery of gold–the key to royal support and attractiveness to potential soldiers and explorers who would finance and/or join in the expeditions. Frobisher launched two voyages–each a failure that consumed much of the 1570’s decade. In 1578, Elizabeth granted to him a charter that empowered him to establish settlements in North America, on lands which had not yet been claimed by others.
Shammas asserts his inspiration was above all the discovery of a rumored great American Indian city called Norumbega. Gilbert believed there were silver mines on the river that the rumored city was located; he was granted a charter by Elizabeth for discovery of the Americas. These rather basic hopes also launched his second voyage a few years later. Gilbert was a follower of the Spanish model of colonization. Shammas claims that he along with future explorers such as Drake and Raleigh were similarly motivated by rumors of wealthy cities.
The idea was that once found the treasure of these cities “would be waiting for them to claim”, and these riches will make their discovers rich, and offer them futures such as the Spanish conquistadores enjoyed in Mexico (Cortex, 1519-21) and Peru (Pizzaro, 1532). With a small band of several hundred both conquered mighty Indian empires. This lays the foundation for the search for gold by future English explorers and settlers:
When the adventurers land in the New World they immediately began to search out Indians who could recount stories of gold and to sample rocks that showed promise of containing precious minerals. ….[but] it was not simply personal greed for gold that made them so eager to find Indians with precious metals, but also the necessity of providing an economic foundation for their [personal] domain [homestead plantation] that would attract men to follow them to America. In an age when the Crown had control over so many offices and privileges the comparable patronage that would flow from the claiming of New World territories was supremely attractive to private gentlemen. (p. 157)
What would follow from any discovery of gold was a hoped-for grant of a concession, along with such rights and privileges, including monopoly, that was to form the basis of settling a plantation in the New World. Otherwise, Gilbert saw the potential for another monopoly, over fishing rights, but his premature death in 1583, limited any substantial action on that ambition. Such concession grants, Shammas observes would confer upon the finder “extensive powers and privileges’ over land and men … usually had power power defence, government, justice, land distribution, and trade; in return the Queen required only that he reserve for the Crown one-fifth of all the precious metals found, and that he govern his settlements in general conformity with the laws of England [p. 158 ]… “Beyond the statement that there were to be ‘chiefe magistrates and lawe makers’ his plans contained no specific measures for government and the administration of justice’ [p. 159].
In Shammas’ mind, Gilbert’s ambition and goal for his settlement was that “He or his heir would be a practically autonomous lord of a vast tract of land. Having no specific plan for the development of marketable commodities and showing the proper indifference of a gentleman to the mechanics of mercantile activity, he turned over the monopoly of trade to a group of Southampton merchants [West countrymen] in exchange for a sizeable cut of the customs on goods and membership fines [conforming to the Queen’s requirements on the award of a trade monopoly] [p. 159].
Gilbert’s two voyages were not particularly successful. His first voyage simply disintegrated en route; some ships returned to England, others turned to privateering, and he turned back after some coastal exploration. After a series of financial maneuvers, he assembled a small fleet and tried again–annexing Newfoundland and asserting control over the fishing rights, before he was forced to return. Probably due to his careless sailing expertise Gilbert’s ship went down in Feb 1583 in a storm. A charismatic adventurer and soldier of fortune, whatever else he was, he was not an organizer and his overseas failures pointed out the importance of logistics and leadership as staples for such ventures. His financial deal to allow English Catholics to found a colony with lands from his charter grant (it did not come to fruition) presaged the use of the lands for future Pilgrims, Puritans, Catholic Marylanders, and Quakers. Watched in a nearby ship, his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, witnessed the ship sink.
Mercantile traders were not an apt description for west country adventurers; nor was harbingers of democracy in the making. To the extent larger ambitions entered into the discussion of the era of the overseas pivot, they originated from the Hakluyts and a few others who stressed that America “could provide a market for English goods, primarily cloth, could employ the {English] idle [or underclass], and supply England with commodities she currently had to obtain at high prices from foreigners“. [p. 160]. It appeared such thoughts appealed to those who stayed in England, rather than those who risked America.
Armed with this background information, readers could sense why future Jamestown included such a large number of gentlemen, with thoughts of gold and metals, reluctant to plant their own food and farm. It also assumes that if practiced as Gilbert intended, future Jamestown would develop into a plantation such as were being established in Ireland at that time. This is not the vision, I think, most Americans hoped for in Jamestown, but it has a decided feudal manorial cast of mind that would appear in 1620 Jamestown.
Having said this, one ought to credit Gilbert for his strong belief that America was more than a stopping point on the way to the Far East, and had considerable potential beyond use as a military port for privateering against Spain. Attracted more to northern American lands, he collided with the French in their discovery and colonization of America than the Spanish. Gilbert was awarded a charter in 1578 giving him rights to explore and colonize “heathen lands’ not yet claimed by others–an amazingly vast area that one could argue embraced North America with coastal exceptions; it is more of a testimony of the lack of knowledge of North America and that the ignorance of America in these early years was extraordinary. He was required to found a permanent settlement by the end of six years. His first voyage in 1578, except of coastline exploration was limited and ineffectual.
Citing documents uncovered by Professor D. B. Quinn, a noted American professor used in this study, Shammas reveals his plan for how his anticipated settlement would be managed. “He saw himself and his heirs ultimately ruling over an agrarian society, peopled by settlers of all sorts, from gentlemen bringing tenants with them to the poor sent over at the charge of the realm. The latter, along with volunteers who paid their own way, would become Gilbert’s tenants and receive 60 to 120 acres respectively for the term of three lives … gentlemen who became adventurers would receive 1000 acres or more of land, depending upon the number of men they brought over. [p. 158, see footnote 6 for document].
D. B Quinn summarizes Gilbert’s role and contribution to North American settlement:
The planning of English colonies in North America … really begins with Sir Humphrey Gilbert. In his abortive schemes of the years 1578to 1583, we get the first body of significant information on the difficulties of equipping and financing an overseas venture with a colonizing objective under the limiting conditions which Tudor England afforded. Gilbert was also the first Englishman seriously too dispose–if only on paper and on the basis of inadequate information–of American land to English settlers … but it was scarcely an accident that he did not succeed in establishing a colony. His resources were altogether too meager and his projects at once too grandiose to provide any real chance of success. Gilbert’s half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, had the advantage of learning a good deal from these deficiencies, and the colonizing expeditions he sponsored between 1584 and 1590 were the first serious English attempts to grapple with the realities of settlement on American shores [99] David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 282-3
Roanoke and Raleigh: a Case Study in Elizabethan Colonization
Raleigh, whose birth year is uncertain so he was 28-30 in 1582, was also Devon born. His father, Walter Raleigh, was his mother’s second husband and she his third, Gilbert was probably thirteen years older, and being raised during Mary I’s reign, resulted in Raleigh becoming vigorously anti-Catholic–which Gilbert was not. He replicated Gilbert’s early career including fighting French Huguenots at age 17, followed by education at Oxford (law), then service in Ireland (1579-83) during which time he is cited as having beheaded 600 Spanish and Italian soldiers at the siege of Smerwick.[99] David J. Wildman, the Tudor Empire (Pen and Sword History. 2023), p. 177.
He accompanied Gilbert in both of Gilbert’s voyages (1578 and 1582), Since both voyages involved privateering, he was briefly imprisioned upon his return. But that did not inhibit Elizabeth’s favor with Elizabeth when he returned and participated in Crown court. Formally appointed as as Captain of the Queen’s Guard, and was knighted by her in 1585.
Alison Weir’s, the Life of Elizabeth I, reports Raleigh’s timing of his arrival at the court was outstanding. He arrived at the court in December, 1583 after his North American and Irish venture had concluded. Elizabeth had just broken off her long-standing arranged but by this point unwanted, marriage with the French Duke of Anjou. In the emotional vacuum that ensued, Weir relates how Raleigh took Elizabeth by storm, and she likewise. “Raleigh’s rise to royal favour was spectacular, and it was not long before he was installed in Durham House on the Strand and appearing at the court in expensive, dazzling dress; a pair of his gem-encrusted shoes cost 6000 crowns alone . He made other courtiers look and feel like poor relations”.
Her description of his strengths and personality suggest a heartthrob hulk of a adventurous background. Not well received by the males at the court, Raleigh did well with the gentler sex–indeed, he would have an affair (apparently among many) with a handmaiden of the Queen, secretly marrying her, and four or five years later having a child with her which blew up his relationship with the Queen, who cast him out of the court. [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), pp. 341-4 We shall pick up on Raleigh’s career in other modules and chapters, but his 1588-90 crash at the court will provide a convenient break in his career.
[999] [999]
Allegedly tall and handsome, he did well in her court and became one of her proverbial “favorites”. She rewarded him (1585) with a large estate in Munster for his military service in Ireland; he held about 40,000 acres in Cork and Waterford. He is credited with planting potatoes in his estate-residence at Myrtle Grove. He enlisted settlers and hired Thomas Harriot to manage the land. Due to financial problems and the ongoing rebellion in Ireland, he sold the land in 1602. In 1583 the Queen granted a lease of Durham House in the Strand, London. In the same year he acquired a monopoly of wine licences, and in 1585 a concession to sell broad cloth, and 1585 warden of Cornish tin mines [99] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Raleigh-English-explorer. In his later years, he acquired still more honors and appointments. The scale of these benefits allowed him to an excellent lifestyle and a network of associates and proteges.
Perhaps, the most significant assistance the Queen rendered to Raleigh was her willingness to facilitate his inheritance of Gilbert’s rather open-ended 1578 charter. Herbert L. Osgood asserts “The royal charter which Raleigh procured, March 25, 1584, was an almost exact reproduction of that issued to Gilbert six years before. The period prescribed as that within which a colony must be established was the same and the territory over which rights of trade and government should extend was to have the same radius as that specified in Gilbert’s charter”. While Raleigh may have been able to learn from his half-brother, there is little doubt that Quinn was correct that Gilbert’s most valuable contribution to Raleigh was his charter from Elizabeth specifying his rights and privileges, but mostly for outlining the incredibly huge boundaries within which colonies could be established; indeed, those boundaries not only were inherited by Raleigh, but within the decade sold to Thomas Smythe, and a decade and a half later served as the rough boundaries specified for the Virginia Company
Accordingly, I would suggest, the speedy rate that planning for Roanoke followed upon the charter likely accelerated Raleigh’s desire to establish the colony as quick as he could–that and the reality the colony properly placed could serve in efforts to conduct the war against Spain which finally erupted in 1585 after long brewing. The war commenced with Dudley’s invasion of the Netherlands and no formal declaration of war was made. [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Forgotten Books, 1904), p. 14, p.15-
The reader ought note the crowded resumé Raleigh had in the immediate period after Gilbert’s death, but it also was affected by the War with Spain that began in 1585, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, a feat which Raleigh played a commanding role. The Roanoke colony (present-day North Carolina) which he founded was during this period also, 1585-1589. He himself did not go to Roanoke, and was forbidden to do so by the Queen. He did invest in the colony, led the planning for it, and selected the two governors (Lane and White) that supervised the colony.
Financing, which had crushed Gilbert’s voyages, taking nearly three years to resolve for his second voyage, was less a problem for Raleigh who had his own resources as bequeath to him by Elizabeth, but significant officials in her administration such as Sir Francis Walsingham, and Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral, and Grenville put up their own funds, and Thomas Cavendish either contributed a ship or took a share in a ship [99] D.B. Quinn England and the Discovery of American Colonies, p. 291. Nevertheless, it was clear to Raleigh that such investment was not sufficient for founding the colony and he retained Hakluyt who prepared “the Discourse of western planting” in 1584 which was submitted to the Queen in the hope of additional financial aid.
From this petition it seems clear that as of 1584 the intended mission for the colony and expeditions was that the colony was to “create a bulwark against the further extension of the Spanish colonial power along the Atlantic coast, and the building of a base which could be used for attacks on existing Spanish colonies and the valuable plate-fleets (treasurer ships] that sailed from them … Quinn concludes] this was “possibly the decisive factor in determining the approximate site of the first colony” [99] D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of American Colonies, p. 288.
While reported as being sympathetic (this is previous to the war with Spain) she declined. Quinn believes that she was more generous in her bequeaths to Raleigh which were fungible to some degree. [p. 294]. She did grant the ship, the Tiger, to be used in the expedition. In any case, Quinn suggests that it was intended from the start to include privateering as the source of further funds. Still, Raleigh’s position as the chief representative of the Crown in the southwestern counties (the West Counties) was key to his personal ability to raise funds for the colony, particularly in the first colony.
Grenville did trade with natives on his voyages associated with Roanoke, and he took a significant prize at Havana. Thus it would appear the first colony was actually profit-making, but that followed from the privateering primarily [p. 296-7]. It was thus the financial situation for the second and third colonies that Raleigh turned to the London merchant adventurers–after having been turned down by Bristol merchants, p. 297. They had already been tapped out by other such ventures, and to the extent they did have funds to invest, the much better investment would have been privateering in the West Indies against the Spanish with whom they were then at war.
Quinn estimates the total cost of the three phases to be about 26,000 pounds, and states that “a substantial amount was recouped by privateering“; he concludes that net costs were about 12 to 15,000 pounds lost.” … The [Roanoke] colony of the years 1584-7 were planned and executed on a shoestring, and this may be seen as a major factor in their failure to endure”. he adds that the 1607 Virginia expedition may have learned this lesson and planned (and did) sail supply ships on a regular basis at a planned loss [p. 292].
Most important was his appointment of Sir Richard Grenville, his cousin and close ally, a noted military leader and hero of the war against Spain, as the commander for the 1585 expedition to found the first colony. Herbert Osgood provides an extended discussion of the conflict that developed between Lane and Grenville–making it clear that their individual role and assignments were unclear–a harbinger of the problems that accompanied the Jamestown settlement twenty years later. [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, pp. 16-18. BTW: It was Raleigh who titled the territory included in the charter as “Virginia” in name of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
Plans for the colony, made in London, involved its use a military base for privateering and war against Spain, and the location of the colony was meant to place a check on the limit of Spain’s further extension beyond Florida [99] D. B. Quinn, p. 270. Quinn also suggests it may well have played a role in Sir Francis Drake’s multi-pronged 1586 attack on Spain’s overseas empire in the Americas; Drake did visit the colony and offered serious criticism of its location and lack of a suitable harbor. [99] Quinn, pp. 270-1. “It was thus easy to associate Drake’s probable objectives with those of Raleigh and Grenville, and to conceive of the colony [Roanoke] which Grenville was believed to have planted in North America as a link in the chain of English plans for intensifying the attacks on the Spanish Indies” [99] D.B. Quinn, p. 272
All in all, while often referred to as a “permanent settlement”, Roanoke’s initial settlement was closely associated with its use as primarily military and privateering, and, in an informal role as a naval base to be used in the war with Spain. “Roanoke Island was … later to become … a base for privateering attacks on the Spanish West Indies“. But Elliott quickly adds that Raleigh, “saw its potential as a base not only for privateering but also for colonization and in the following year Roanoke was to become the setting for England’s first serious, although ultimately abortive attempt at transatlantic settlement”. [99] J.H Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale university Press, 2006), p. 7
.
Raleigh was finally able to secure confirmation of his rights to the charter in 1584, much of the coast from northern Florida north was sketchily known. [99] See D.B Quinn England and the Discovery of America, p 186, who refers to charts available to Roanoke planners as “quite inadequate … for sailors or maps for settlers. Detailed cartographical knowledge available in England about the North American coast was largely confined to the southern and eastern shores of Newfoundland, and shaded off from certainty into conjecture at the northern shore of the St. Lawrence and the southern fringe of New England“. The search for a suitable harbor for his Roanoke, colony proved to be a major problem [99] see D.B. England and the Discovery of American, p. 290ff] and a decision was made on a location that was contested by Richard Grenville. The little known reality of Roanoke was that it tried at least three sites, including the one that was lost. Using D. B. Quinn’s “bald outline” of the Roanoke settlement, one can better understand what was a three-phase colonial experience with the colony’s popular heritage based only on the last, and least understood, attempt to successfully “plant” the colony.
In 1585 Sir Richard Grenville brought out a fleet of seven vessels and between June and August explored the coastal islands and the adjoining mainland. He left behind on the island of Roanoke 108 men (the first colony) with Ralph Lane as their commander. This settlement attempted to establish itself by the construction of a fort and village, and attempts at cultivation, and by trade with the Indians but failed to remain on friendly terms with the local inhabitants … Food shortages and the nonarrival of supplies expected in April led to their deserting the colony and returning to England with Drake’s West Indies fleet in June 1586. They thus missed a relief ship sent by Raleigh which turned back when Roanoke was found deserted,
A larger supply under Grenville, consisting of three ships, arrived in July and deposited a group of fifteen me (the second colony) to act as a holding party until it should be found what had happened to the first settlers. Finally a new expedition [and a new corporation, see below) of three ships arrived … in July 1587, carrying a third colony of 117 men, women and children [the birth of Virginia Dare is know only because her grandfather, governor John White, returned to England to arrange supplies in 1587] with John White as governor [999]. They found no survivors from those left in 1586. Intending to move from [the old] Roanoke to a better site, they sent their governor home … at the end of August 1587 [to England] to hasten supplies from England. This was the last that was seen of the colony.[99] D.B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, pp. 283,285
A lack of organization bespeaks considerable planning and mission goal miscalculations between June 1585 and August 1587, an impregnable wall of war between Roanoke and England that prevented supplies or contact with Roanoke until August 1590, and a constant concern for supplies and food that bedevils all three phases. As we have detailed with our discussion of the finances for the conducting the colony founding, much effort was made but it reacted to events and was conducted in some frenzy to save the colony settlers and to secure the existence of the colony.
For example, the fate of the first colony, as reported by Shammas was substantially determined by the settler’s inability to find a feasible export, which they believed was the next-best alternative to trade with the Indians. “When the adventurers were unable to find Indian societies sufficiently developed economically to be worth conquering, they were often at a loss to know what to do instead. The reaction of Ralph Lane, captain of Raleigh’s [Roanoke] colony was probably typical. Lane had exhausted himself on searching for Indians reputed to have a special kind of copper. Finally, in disgust he abandoned the settlement [the first colony], declaring that only the discovery of precious metals or possibly a route to the East ‘can bring this [colony]in request to be inhabited by our nation. Without such benefits, those commodities that could be collected, ‘of themselves could be worth the fetching” [99] Quote taken by Shammas on p.161 English commercial development from D. B. Quinn’s Roanoke Voyages, pp. 272-3. She also asserts this issue overlapped to many other adventurer North American expeditions and notes that these attitudes were carried over to Jamestown as well. Footnote 1, p. 161. See also p. 162-3
[999] According to Osgood, Raleigh recognizing the inadequacy of previous planning for the first colony, reorganized his corporation, recruiting “nineteen London merchant adventurers who were to contribute toward the expense of the enterprise and share its profits. Prominent among these was Thomas Smith [Smythe] afterwards treasurer of the London [Virginia] company. The names of nine others appear in this connection, and among the adventurers if the Virginia colony was later founded at Jamestown. With them were also thirteen gentlemen of London who proposed to settle in the colony, and who were made governor and assistants of the city of Raleigh which it was hoped would be built and become the capital of the province.
At their head was John White, who by the charter of the corporation was made governor. All who became members of the corporation should enjoy freedom of trade with any colony Raleigh thereafter found in America, and be exempt from all rents and subsidies as well as from all duties and customs. Thus the office of general was dropped [i.e. no governor-general], the strength of the mercantile element in the undertaking was increased, and a borough government was expressly provided for the colony. Raleigh retained for himself the title of ‘chief governor of Virginia’. Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, pp. 20-1. Carole Shammas asserts that “Raleigh … contributed only a small amount … and then transferred responsibility for the settlement to London merchants who in the busy Armada period never followed through the agreement, [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization in K.R. Andrews, Canny, Hare (Editors), the Westward Enterprise, p. 161 [999]
Before moving on, what should we make out of Roanoke? First, the first colony went home to England on its own volition; the second colony probably were killed by neighboring Indians, at least that was the consensus at the time. The third colony, the one that created the multi-century mystery, we know little to nothing–there was nothing specific to be applied to this book. Initial take aways are, how small the numbers were (about 250 in total) for all three colonies combined, and how little expenditure was made in the three-stage venture (both concerns were made by D. B. Quinn) in [99] D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, p. 290
I also suggest concern for supplies, an unwillingness to cultivation combined with a preference to search for raw materials to export played a very significant role in the first colony. Shammas
The first colony had no women or families, and are therefore similar to Jamestown; they built the fort first and I suspect they were focused on wealth and privateering. They seem to have expected to trade for food with the natives? The close overlap of the third colony with future Jamestown investors, leaders and settlers is a remarkable corporate restructure as dramatic as Jamestown’s 1609 second charter; that the adventurers turned to merchants from London reflects their concern about doing a colony on the cheap. What is also remarkable is they seem NOT to have learned much–to some extent because no one told its story. Our Thomas Smythe was about 28; if nothing else it supports his departure from his father’s merchant career. The dog that didn’t bark lesson is the war with Spain isolated Roanoke so completely that colonization in the America’s was largely shut down.
White was unable to get relief sent at once, and the supply vessels prepared by Raleigh and Grenville in the spring of 1588 were detained in England by the government to help to meet the peril from the [Spanish] Armada. White contrived to ship some stores in two small vessels in April, but their crews went privateering and returned to England without having crossed the Atlantic. Not until 1590 did [White] get away from England, and then only as a passenger on a privateer. He landed on Roanoke in August and found that the colony had disappeared. He was [quickly] hustled away by the seamen before making an extended search for the settlers, and in effect the settlement was abandoned, [99] D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, pp. 283-5
A confirmation to Shammas’s observation and description of Gilbert was a brief review of Gilbert’s record in establish a successful plantation in Ireland previous to his American voyages of discovery. Her summary of Gilbert who she feels is “fairly typical of that of the adventurers generally expected to use martial rather than entrepreneurial skills to get the wealth and status they and their followers wanted … [their use of merchants and trade] ” was generally on a very superficial level … But they did not suggest any plan for engaging settlers or American Indians in large scale production of agricultural commodities for the [English] market.
[999] See also believes this belief in the mystery city of Norumbega also is inspired Bartholomew Gosnold’s 1602 voyage from Bristol (financed by the Earl of Southampton). That voyage is important for several reasons, but it certainly rekindled the interest in northern North America as a geography of interest to Bristol navigators, and it would play a role in keeping alive that area as a possible site for religious refugees. Gosnold first explored lower Maine to Cape Cod and the bays and islands adjoining it. Gosnold, who in 1607 would be an original Jamestown settler, and member of its on-site Council. He died in Jamestown in 1607, however–and that was that.
An Inheritance to Virginia from England: Lessons Not Learned
Let’s First Clear Away the Thicket–Virginia long labeled as an experiment was not an experiment. While Bacon (Roger, not Francis), who wrote several hundred years previous to this period probably came closes in medieval England to outlining the scientific method, it was Galileo who expanded it to actual application. Trouble is he was born in 1564 in Italy. His productive work started in the 1590’s and as far as I can tell the English were unaware. Francis Bacon, England’s equivalent was born in 1561; his insightful writings on colonization were during James I reign after Virginia had been founded. His insights most famous writing, On Plantations published in 1625, is most appropriately based on the lessons learned in Virginia and Ireland. In a more helpful, less cranky tone, I would suggest experiment is the wrong term as it does not aptly describe what the English were doing in setting plantations in Virginia.
They were either unaware of important risks, and disregarded and minimized risks they knew about. Plan was a four-letter word to them. The English described themselves as adventurers–and that is what they were about. They still do; Tracy Borman in her recent history of the Tudor-Stuart transition, the Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit, and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025), pp. 109-111 labels them as “adventurers” and describes Raleigh’s chief career was plundering the Spanish, in the course of which he founded Roanoke. That congruent with my history, anyway.
Books have been written discussing the Hakluyts thoughts–and they are not much more than thoughts–regarding colonization and North American colonization in particular. Historians have duly recorded the influence and the role they played in English Elizabethan policy-making. [99] see Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Englishman’s Obsession for an English America (Yale university Press, 2007); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. 6-7. Their thrust was more to advocate than a how-to manual, and almost anyone employing them concedes their serious limitations and lack of understanding of the realities of planting a permanent settlement in the wilds of Virginia in particular, and their inconsistent at best prescriptions for Native American relations.
Indeed, their clearest instructions regarding the latter included the need to obtain sustenance necessary for survival from them, trade for English necessities, and “conquer” them if required, taking such lands as needed for colonial expansion, export, and development. Sound, moral and consistent principles–Humbug! They didn’t know what they were talking about, and they never left England for the new world. They did influence the Elizabethan debate and policy-making on colonization, I concede, but that only confirms to me it is evidence of how little the other English policy-makers knew about the topic. That is a take away from this module.
the Lessons NOT Learned–What seems apparent to me is that while England as a whole entered into a good number of “adventures” overseas in the period of the overseas pivot, it remains unclear how much experience and lessons were drawn by the elites as to how to conduct and develop successful colonial enterprises. Gilbert’s endemic misadventures would alert overseas venturers what not to do, but Raleigh is a the best case for this suspicion in that he conducted England’s first overseas colonial settlement–albeit, he did so by blurring its chief mission or purpose by combining several missions (privateering, military home base, permanent settlement, and private wealth, and the expansion of the Elizabethan state).
In particular, the question of how best to finance such a settlement followed what was the traditional business plan of English overseas venture of making the single overseas expedition the basic unit of finance. Each following overseas Roanoke expedition had its own financial plan, particular investors, and method and mode of implementation. Even though it was highly likely a succession of supply expeditions would be required, there was little planning to follow up beyond the next supply expedition.
English overseas ventures developed a bias to be reactive to the previous expedition, and since the news was seldom good, finance became even more problem some. Often to put the finances together, the corporation had to restructure itself. Roanoke’s third colony for example required a major restructure, which, it turns out was never completed, plus a complete set of new investors, and the recruitment of a new batch of settlers.
All this consumed time, and that became worse when one added to it the normal travel periods that fluctuated between two or more months for each segment of a round-trip. As it turned out this schedule could, and would never be able to meet the supply obligations of a permanent settlement in North America. We will see the same issues come up with Jamestown. The same could be said for assembly of a fleet and recruitment of settlers. Given that these expeditions were usually public-Crown-private investor/adventurer affairs multiple approvals, each with their own process had to be achieved. As we saw, the impact of the Spanish War shut down not only supply but contact with the colony. The colony, lacking its own ocean-capable ships was isolated.
Roanoke it would seem suggests some important take aways should have been taken away–at least by Raleigh. As indicated earlier we will return to Raleigh in the next several chapters. he will get into trouble in the 1590’s and while he will make a comeback, the pivot period was his peak. He will engage in other overseas ventures, Guiana for example, which failed both for new reasons and older reasons that Roanoke past experience should have corrected.
In many ways, Guiana, his last major overseas venture is still very much within the Spanish conquistador feudal model. Feudal patterns were not challenged in his mind, and his prominence and popularity in some quarters in overseas ventures likely carried some weight and inspired his share of that grouping to continue in the feudal mode of conquest and the attainment of honor, personal wealth, anti-Catholicism, and English patriotism. Guiana failed in 1618–a decade after Jamestown and its starving years-still Raleigh seems to have been on automatic pilot. Hubris, the desire for wealth, and the process by which expeditions were launched were very slow to change during these times.
Let’s Next Get the Chronology Right–Trevor Burnard makes us aware that the sixteenth and seventeenth century efforts toward colonization of the Atlantic were led by England/Wales, not Britain; he further alerts us that the British Union which included Scotland started in 1707. So we really can’t call this British, an eighteenth century term, colonization. Secondly, Carla Gardner Pestana, the English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Harvard University Press, 2004) correctly asserted the key event that defined the seventeenth century English Atlantic experience was the English Civil War.
To her the breakdown in English colonial authority during the Civil War “came early in the settlement process, even before that authority had been fully established. It also gave emerging settler leaders enhanced confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs, a confidence seemingly justified by their consolidation of local power in the 1640’s and 1650’s at the expense of proprietors of the Crown”. She concludes that “the colonies were left to fend for themselves as the imperial center imploded.” [99] Trevor Burnard, “the British Atlantic” in Jack P. Greene and Philp D. Morgan (Editors), Atlantic History: a Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 116-118
Burnard places the period of our overseas pivot by England within “the first distinct period” during which “the imagining and the realizing of the late-sixteenth century colonizing process urged on the English Crown and on English merchants by propagandists such as Richard Hakluyt. That period lasted roughly from 1580 to the mid-1620’s [the Virginia Company period], covering Raleigh’s early Roanoke Island ventures, the settlement of Virginia and Bermuda in 1607 and 1609, and the start of settlement in the West Indies and New England in the 1620’s. In this early phase English colonial enterprise in America emerged from a heady combination of national ambition, Protestant mission, economic pragmatism, and thirst for individual and collective greatness that, fermenting through the late-Elizabethan period coalesced during the reign of James VI and I. Shaped by competition in Europe with Spain, a desire to counter the Catholicization of the Americas with aggressive Protestantism, and an utopian urge to end English poverty through the exploitation of Atlantic resources. English entry into the Americas was, in one sense the last act of the Renaissance. Yet it failed to realize any of its initial expectations. Up to the mid-1620’s English colonies in America were straggling, unhappy places that met none of the English objectives for Atlantic expansion. [99] Trevor Burnard, “the British Atlantic” in Jack P. Greene and Philp D. Morgan (Editors), Atlantic History: a Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 118-119
While England/Britain competed with other European mercantile powers in all periods, the first period is dominated by Spain, with their ally the Netherlands a role model of their need to catchup in technology and maritime commerce. J.H. Elliott draws special attention to Spain, and he states the two were “not two self-contained cultural worlds, but between cultural worlds that were well aware of each other’s presence”.
For a good deal of the overseas pivot they were at war, while in its beginning years, Philip of Spain was also king of England. Phillip consented to London’s formation of the Russia trading company and modified Spain’s trade policy to allow the interaction of Russia and England. In 1607, at peace, Jamestown still had to shield its location from Spain, and build forts and palisades to resist not only their neighbors, but Spain.
What is less well-known is England’s use of the conquistador model in their dealings with natives, their land, and the settlers prioritized search for gold and silver (mining) for export. On top of this the English fabricated an image of the Spanish conquest, the “Black Legend”, saturated with cruelty, obsessive cultural superiority, urban and towns-centered conquest of the interior, with the English countered with their own settlement approach which was culturally superior, more economic in nature, and focused less around conquest than land for agriculture and homestead. Markedly less urbanized and considerably more rural, English colonization was therefore more moral and humane.
The English in their mind were more ‘planters‘ than conquistadores, but as Elliott observes the Spanish conquest mode crept into even the most academic of its advocates, Richard Hakluyt. His proscriptive writing, Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise of 1585 argued that when confronted by natives with planting and homestead, ‘we may proceed with extremity conquer, fortify and plant in soils most sweet, most pleasant, most strong and most fertile and in the end bring them all in subjection and civility“. Adventurers and explorers, less focused on settlement than privateering and war against Catholics, also translated their activities into a more Spanish conquistador practice.[99] J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. xvii, quote, p. 7
Importance of the Post 1550 Pivot in English Overseas Commerce and Colonization
The relative success of that pivot encouraged England’s overseas community to press the Crown into establishing a North American permanent settlement as a first step in achieving her Far East commercial ambitions, along with defending itself against its mercantilist European competitors. After a period of weak, disruption-prone and unstable governance after the death of Henry VIII (1547), England in 1558 commenced what was its fourth successor sovereign, Elizabeth I.
As will become apparent to the reader, the period of the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade and commerce is nearly coincidental with the reign of Elizabeth I. Her ascension to the throne in 1558 followed Mary I who began in 1553 and died in 1558. Mary in her effort to restore Catholicism to England married Phillip II of Catholic Spain, and overseas empire principally fixed in Central America and the West Indies, but not without serious interest and relationships in the Far East. The union of Mary and Phillip, on the whole, was not, and is not, viewed as successful or positive in regards to English economic development in particular. When Elizabeth took the throne she described England, in her own words, as “a sad state”.
Alison Weir, a noted English historian of the Tudor period, elaborated on this sad state, and, for my purposes it does introduce the reader to an England which Americans in particular and non-English are not familiar. “Reduced to the status of a minor power on the edge of a Europe riven by religious and political strife, and a prey to the ambitions of the two major international monarchies, Spain and France. England and Spain were technically allies against France, but the reestablishment of Elizabeth of the Protestant faith in England … could not but cause dangerous discord with King Phillip who saw himself as the leader of the European Counter Reformation … France was torn by civil and religious warfare, yet the French king Henry II had not only occupied Calais [the last continental possession held by England, taken only months before the death of Mary I], but was also maintaining a threatening military presence in Scotland [in 1558 Mary “Queen of Scots” married to the future king of France]”. [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 2
While England was on the outskirts of Europe, it was small, not well populated relative to her competitors, and relatively poor with an economy unable to provide financial resources for the Crown and insufficient for her defense. “There was no money in the English treasury because much of it had gone to finance Philip of Spain’s foreign wars; its chief defences and fortresses were ruinous and had war come, it could not have defended itself“. A fiscal wreck in 1558, England “was in debt to the tune of L266,000–an enormous sum in those days“. This financial weakness explains much as to why England decentralized its governance in this period, developing local governments such a cities, towns and counties, and relied on the private sector and the landed-aristocrats to subsidize Elizabeth’s initiatives and enlarge upon the government’s power and leadership in this perilous time. Overseas trade and colonization was very much entrusted to non Crown entities. [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 2
In this regard the English economy of 1558 was not positioned to deliver growth sufficient for Elizabeth (and England’s) needs and ambitions. “On the domestic front”, Weir argues, “life was not easy. England was not a wealthy country and its people endured relatively poor living standards. The landed classes–many of them enriched by the confiscated wealth of former monasteries–were determined in the interests of profit to convert their arable land into pasture for sheep, so as to produce the wool that supported the country’s chief economic asset, the woolen cloth trade. But the enclosing of the land only added to the misery of the poor, many of whom, evicted and displaced, left their decaying villages, and gravitated to the towns where they joined the growing army of beggars and vagabonds that would become such a feature of Elizabethan life. Once the religious houses [of the Catholic Church] would have dispersed charity to the destitute, but Henry VIII had dissolved them all in the 1530’s and many former monks and ouns were now themselves beggars” [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 3
Resting upon that single pillar, the wool (and cloth) industry, sustained much of England’s domestic economy in Elizabeth’s first years. As we shall demonstrate that industry, while dependent on the production of raw wool and cloth that was exported to northern Europe, and domestic wool and cloth that was more refined and finished served the English consumer with at least one source of pride and personal consumption. “At home, as trade flourished, so industry expanded” was the consensual path to growth on the time, and the expansion of overseas trade and commerce across the globe was the strategy of English economic development. As with the wool and cloth industry its domestic sophistication rested with its import of creativity in the form of Protestant refugees from the continent who “introduced lace-making, silk weaving, engraving, needle-and thread making and other skills into England, while the woolen cloth industry continued to thrive and bring prosperity to an ever-widening area“.
The development of guilds in this time also created a supplemental-alternative path to individual prosperity through skills training. “The Statute of Apprentices of 1563, by making long indentures mandatory, helped to bring stability to industry and farming. Yet commercial success had its debit side. The pursuit of wealth and the frantic race to acquire land and power meant that most people cared only for their own interests, and not for the public good, or the needs of those weaker than themselves. It was a greedy and avaricious age, corrupt in many ways … The rich lived well [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 9
By that time it was fairly evident England was off to a late start in the mercantilist age, and its economy was not sufficiently productive to provide her with sufficient investment capital and sustainable economic prosperity to overcome the multiple gaps between her and her other competitors. Enhanced overseas trade and commerce was the key to resolving both and over the next fifty or so years, most of which under Elizabeth England developed the confidence, skills and capacity that she perceived herself ready to take the next step, permanent overseas trading posts and colonies as the prelude to a hoped for empire.
From my perspective at least, that last step was premature: England was not yet ready of prime time. Most importantly, as early as the first decade of the seventeenth century, during the transition from the Tudor to the Stuart dynasty that a fragmentism in its political, religious, social and economic fundamentals fabric was deepening, and that a “drift to a potential civil war” overlay its efforts to catch up and create an economy capable to resolving its liquidity and resource inadequacies. While there was a consensus on these as goals, there was much less agreement on who would benefit, and the process by which it would be implemented.
If one has to start somewhere to retell the transformational start to serious English overseas trade, it begins with the Company of Merchant Adventurers. The Company was certainly the platform from which serious overseas trade commenced in the 1550’s. It also dominated policy-making relevant to such trade, and its success was a model for those who wanted to head off in new directions—after all a good many of the new adventurers were members of the Company, and did not surrender their membership after the commenced their new trading companies.
Certainly, the power of the Company in regards to impact on the governance of London, and its relationship with the sovereign persisted into the early Stuart years and affected the period during which the Virginia Company managed Virginia helps us understand that Virginia was not the cutting edge of English colonial and commercial trading in the Stuart years. That was Virginia’s fate: it was not foremost in the minds of English policy-makers, but neither was it out of the ball park. Support, perhaps enthusiasm is a better word for North American settlement during the pre-civil war years ebbed and flowed. During these years the Company of Merchant Adventurers occupied front page headlines and more parliamentary interest as the Cockayne Affair did between 1614 and 1624
In Henry VIII’s first parliament [Jan, 1510] there were 37 knights who sat is 37 shires (Lords) and 223 burgesses who represented the chartered boroughs and towns of the kingdom. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign [1603] borough representation [Commons] had increased by 135 seats. The Commons was replacing the Lords in importance because the social element it represented had become economically and politically more important than the nobility. Should the crown’s leadership falter, there existed by the end of the century an organization quite capable of seizing the political initiative … Elizabeth has sense enough to avoid a showdown with the Commons and she retreated under parliamentary attack on the issue of her prerogative rights to grant monopolies regulating and licensing the economic life of the kingdom [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-clash-with-Spain
As time moved on an increasingly more powerful Parliament. facilitated a power shift towards parliament during the transition from Tudor to Stuart that followed from Elizabeth’s 1603 death. During the last decades of her reign, during the war with Spain, the size, internal composition, and configuration of evolved dramatically. By the last decade of her reign, Elizabeth encountered the restyled Parliament’s first serious efforts to shape policy—a pushback from royal dominance that initially centered in large measure on her use of monopolies, their effects on the economy, and the increasingly observable corruption and abuse exercise of her authority that often resulted. She retreated from this opposition by pledging less use of them. Her soon to follow death, however, meant It would be the Scot James I that would have to deal with the new Parliament, which he did in 1604 to his considerable surprise from which he never seems to have reconciled himself. That inability to work with Parliament didn’t work out well for him. While there were several “third rails” of policy in the Stuart years that poked parliament and royal conflict (the half-sleeping bear of policy-making, religion was certainly one) but the one most salient to our topic was “monopolies”. [999]
There are multiple ways and reasons that explain why countries and kingdoms developed on some scale overseas trade. England’s took a path that resulted in its distinctive incremental evolution of a more comprehensive overseas trade: one factor was enclosure wool/cloth exceeded local needs and its manufacturers took advantage of Low Countries and export to them. To facilitate export, the early Company of Adventurers took form.
England in the 1550’s was facing a crisis, which in hindsight was its ability to rise to challenges of making it through the first phase of modernity. English historians recognize this; permit me to cite one of its noted historians of that period, Lawrence Stone, who provide us with an introductory, well-articulated assessment of what the post 1550 crisis entailed:” … whatever the strength of the pressures for change … a situation … which faced [England’s] aristocracy at this period … may reasonably be described as a crisis. … It is nevertheless between 1560 and 1640 that the real watershed between medieval and modern England must be placed. [99] Lawrence Stone, the Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1158-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 12
After outline a succession of internal changes that occurred in this period, Stone finishes up by asserting that “foreign trade developed sufficiently to begin to preoccupy the minds of statesmen, and to make a London alderman the financial equal of a baron; then that usury was first opening legislated for, that interest rates fell to modern levels, that the joint stock company began to flourish, that colonies of Englishmen were established across the seas, that England abandoned its territorial ambitions in Europe and dimly recognized its future as a naval power; then that capitalist ethics, population growth, and that monetary inflation undermined old landlord -tenant relationships…. It was to this changing, challenging world that the peers had to adapt themselves between the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the outbreak of civil war. Their failure helped to open up the way to the political upheavals of the seventeenth century …
it offers a new explanation of the central event of modern English history–the breakdown of monarchical and aristocratic government in 1640 [the onset of the English civil war], and its reestablishment in 1660 (Restoration), and 1688 [the Glorious Revolution] [99] Lawrence Stone, the Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1158-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 13
While the Merchant Adventurers trade was thus an increasingly unitary one [cloth export to northern Europe], and separated from the others [expanded goods and import into new markets] the southern and eastern trades [the latter] experienced an increasingly intertwined growth, motivated by the same interlocking group of merchants with common commercial goals” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 15-17. In essence a new group of trading merchants had spun off from the Merchant Adventurers [the Muscovy or Russia Company], and the latter pushed into trading with the Spanish, Portugal, Italy, and Turkey–forming the Levant Company in 1592. Our soon to be friend, Sir Thomas Smythe was a major leader in the latter set of trading companies.
“That foreign trade [be] developed sufficiently”
Stone makes clear England at the time it decided to expand foreign trade (1550’s) was confronting a near existential crisis of modernity and entering a period of fundamental and disruptive change which was “the central event in modern English history”. My first chapter details the benchmark great merchant adventurer trading companies that preceded the Virginia Company in a period of transition from medieval to modern England. This background chapter culls out key drivers and factors that are important to understanding how and why England developed these trading companies and in so doing makes the case that England’s macro politics and demographic ought be factored in to explain why England was not ready for prime time colonization in 1606.
There are at least two questions that follow from this statement. First, it is hard to believe that England is only entering into serious global trade as late as 1550. For me that is understandable in that an appreciation of European history after the fall of Rome, a thousand years past, reveals that European breakout relative to global competitors is only occurring in the late 15th century; Spain, Portugal, and Holland (within the Hapsburg Empire) seized the early momentum. They could, and did, seize upon discovery and exploration and gained first advantage in capturing foreign trade or resources exportation (gold and slave trade). What might not be appreciated is these countries seized their avdantage because of the favorability of their geographic position after the fall of the Byzantine Empire with the taking of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. George Louis Beer sets up their situation:
The expansion of England in the seventeenth century was not the result of isolated or fortuitous circumstances, but like all great historical developments it was intimately connected with the main currents of the world’s political evolution. … From time immemorial up to the discovery of America, the most important of commerce brought to Europe the spices, silks, ivory and precious stones of the East. During the middle ages, access to the East could be attained virtually only from the Mediterranean, and as a consequence the Italian cities were able to control the commerce. From Italy the Eastern produces were sent to the German Hanseatic cities … This condition lasted until the rise of the Ottoman power in the fifteenth century, when the Turks not only captured Constantinople, but also developed a formidable navy and made themselves masters of the Mediterranean. As a consequence Europe was to a great extent cut off from trade with the East. The dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and the imperative demand for a renewal of regular commercial intercourse with he Orient led to that period of intense scientific and exploring activity which culminated in the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama … a new highway to the Indies was revealed … The future belonged not to the Mediterranean countries, but to those on or near the Atlantic seaboard. [99] George Louis Baer, the Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908, 2024), p. 1-2,
The rest of Europe was placed in catch-up mode. England. As I will shortly argue, England, relatively quickly, began breaking from its medieval systems after Columbus and the cessation of the War of the Roses which itself culminated with Henry VII (1485) ascended to the Throne. Devastated by that extended (thirty years) semi-civil war, England found it necessary to seek out forms of economic growth–which motivated his issuance of charters and monopolies to gilds, individuals, and the Company of Merchant Adventurers to speed economic development and to counter the accumulated effects from the enclosure movement.
The lure of gold that Spain extracted from South and Central America increased the pace of Spanish commerce and colonization. Spain was fortunate in that gold export was in “high demand” as the currency reserve, but also a source of funds to pay for the costs of early modernization–including the facilitation of capital investment for trade and commerce. While Americans have long cited the attraction of gold in the quest that underlie the Jamestown settlement in particular, gold as the driver for North American settlement has been exaggerated and misunderstood. To the extent there was “an American dream” that motived Europe, gold did play a part. Gold paid for Spain’s initial colonization and certainly motivated the conquistadores and the wish England could discover the same elevated the desire to uncover the mysteries of North America.
If England was behind-the-ball in 1550, much of the blame lay in its lack of material resources, and the fact it was poor relative to its gold/spice-financed competition. On top of that, the English state after Henry VIII through Elizabeth was more concerned with religious change and the social and cultural divisions it unleashed. Henry VIII’s breakup of the Catholic Church facilitated creation of a new generation of aristocrats, and the rise of the gentry both of which disrupted the old manor based agricultural system. The breakup from the Catholic Church resulted in land redistribution resulting from royal confiscation of monasteries and nunneries, and that invariably creates political instability, and economic change. That disruption pushed discovery and exploration off the top rungs of English priorities.
Also as Beer notes, before the break with Rome and the Catholic Church, the “papal bull (executive order by the Pope) debarred Catholic England from access to the most attractive parts of America. Thus for nearly two generations [discovery] was intermitted; and was then resumed [after the break] in the exploring, commercial, and colonial activity of the Elizabethan age. .. There is a close connection between the varied activities of the Elizabethan seamen and the future colonial movement. With the object of establishing direct commercial relations [bypassing the Spanish] with the Far East, many devoted their attention to finding a northern route. [99] George Louis Baer, the Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908, 2024), p.
The cloth and wool industry grew and matured during the fifteenth century. With the assistance of the Crown that produce became England’s first major export. That the cloth/wool manufacturers along with the rise of English merchants captured London’s City Corporation and formed an alliance with the crown not only cleared the way for its export, but also set off a mal-distributed population and economic growth. That in turn led to a insufficient increase of wealth, and its retention by the cloth merchant oligarchy that had developed. Neither of these factors aided a more vibrant and sufficient general prosperity that would have increased the demand for English new products and services–and the entrepreneurship that would lead to more exports.
This period which started around 1500 is one that needs deeper explanation–and that deals with the question: how and why did Elizabeth’s policy-making process detract from the pace of England’s modernization and economic growth? Given Elizabeth’s path was pretty much adopted by the incoming Stuart dynasty, a case can be made that not only did her policy-making processes feed into an English civil war, but its use by the Stuarts intensified political-religious conflict that increased the pace into that civil war. It is necessary that AI can demonstrate how that policy-making system impeded and distorted England’s drive to overseas trade and commerce, as well as its colonization–and made in the interim near impossible any serious colonial permanent settlement adventures.
The irony I see happened was that England never disengaged from its drive to increase trade through colonial exports when it set up its first colonies. They did not realize that the two were seriously different goal-initiatives. In particular, the fiscal and financial viability of the corporation that developed and managed the colony depended on exports from the colony as the chief, if not only, mode that could finance the hugely expensive, time-consuming permanent settlement colony. That was the situation the Virginia Company–and Sagadahoc–found themselves thrust into. My sense is this was at some level recognized by early Company decision-makers, but what they missed was two fold: one, that a colony’s exports had to be developed–a reality that made the trade factory model inappropriate from the get go. In the trading factor natives were a partner and the traders concentrated on trade not resources development or in-country logistics. The second issue the reality of developing an export base for different clusters that had potential to be export seems not to have been seriously considered during the Smythe period, and Sandys, who obviously had a better feel on this question, failed to realize the time factor–a prerequisite that meant he had better find some way to live with Smythe and his allies. Ending the corporate civil was was his only option in that regard.
Whether the funds came from private, public, or both, it was absolutely a requisite that discretionary wealth and governmental and trade capacity be developed to the extent it could pay for permanent settlement. England needed colonial exports to finance its modernization and capacity-building, but how could one expect such from brand new colonies in a wilderness at war with its native population. The blowback from this miscalculation ruined the Virginia Company–and the pay go system of financing colonial development. Both topics will be discussed in future chapters.
Instead of wealth, prosperity and capacity, England’s policy-making processes created oligarchies, clogged and corrupt policy, and a disjointed, inefficient and only marginally productive overseas trade and governance. Oligarchies and a small number of dynastic-like families formed around monopolies, farming and concessions; these inhibited faster sustainable and more balanced economic growth. That is what the post 1550 pivot to broad economic trade and commerce hoped in part to correct. The problem for me, however, was the next logical step, colonization and empire, required more wealth and. most importantly, enhanced economic capacity and reasonable political stability capable of founding and sustaining a very expensive and time-consuming drive to set up permanent settlements thousands of miles across the stormy seas.
As Stone points out, the benefits of the economic capacity and political stability were not in place until after the 1689 Glorious Revolution. That was the period during which England was able to found most American colonies. Simply put, in 1606-7 England was not ready for prime time colonization. Accordingly, its first efforts of colonization yielded in Virginia’s case a colony that was unable to attain any serious economic or population breakout until the 1640’s at best–and actually later than that. Virginia had a solid nearly seventy-five years in which some level of self-government resulted in its own distinctive political culture and economic base, not to ignore noticeable effects on the development of its political structures and institutions.
In essence, although England in the Elizabethan-Stuart period was still encrusted with profound medievalist institutions, beliefs and practices,
As early as the Elizabethan period, England grappled with its need to accommodate these changes with increases in wealth, disposable income, and commercial growth that would be created through global commerce and trade. The success of English global commerce would mean increased wealth, and from that vibrant investment and increased resources available to meet crown and state demands would hopefully result. Whether or not the actors of this period had any consensus on this is doubtful, but hindsight allows us to recognize the England’s drive to trade, commerce, and colonial settlements was related to its transition into modernity.
That mission is one of the very first steps England took as it started to enter into what will become its modern age. That colonization came so early into England’s drive to modernization, however, suggests to me strong evidence England, nevermind the Virginia Company, was not ready for prime time settlement of colonies.
Why had England Not Developed Sufficient Capacity? Its Political/Policy Processes Were Stuck in Medievalism
The enclosure movement incrementally altered the English manor-centered medieval agricultural base, it also facilitated the formation of multiple groupings into proto-classes that either owned their own land, settled in small and regional centers, or fled to London in their search for prosperity, employment, and a homestead. Over the years that followed it sustained gradual urbanization, but it also formed an industry manufacturing cluster, cloth/wool, in the enclosures.
The combination of these drivers helped to form a political “tendency” that was not simply instrumental in the transition to early modernity described above, but a sort of default strategy adopted by a critical mass of political actors, chief of which, of course, was Elizabeth. Today one might refer to it as a “script” but whatever it was called, as we will assert shortly, by the first decade of the sixteenth century guilds and trading companies embraced the royal charter and the accompanying privileges and monopoly. Michael J. Braddick calls attention to this tendency when he picks up the 1550 pivot to broaden English overseas trade and commerce. He identifies the chief actors and a particular reason why the “tendency” made sense to them:
The expansion of overseas trade, and the first steps towards settlement in the Americas, proceeded in ways that were, in some sense analogous to the means by which the practical authority of the Tudor and Stuart state was intensified in its core areas. In particular activists played an important role in lobbying for the use of state power in new territories and new functions. In this case the extension took place as a 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’. 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. 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 company.
Companies overcame a number of problems associated with new trades. In many cases the commercial risks were high–the markets for English goods, and the English market for expected imports equally uncertain. To these commercial risks were added other, real and imagined. For example, political relations between the governments of the two areas might be poorly established, and merchants unsure that their property and persons were secure. Similarly in many trades English merchants were entering into more or less direct competition with traders from other European countries and that posed a threat to commercial interests. As a result merchants entering these new and uncertain trades developed particular techniques of organization. Merchants banded together into guild-style organizations in order to negotiate with foreign governments …Associated with such functions might be controls over price and quality… With or without a monopoly the power of such regulated companies was much enhanced by a charter … In response to this difficulty a characteristic form of funding developed which spread the risk–the joint stock. [99] Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England: 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 398-9
Monopoly and Internal Oligarchies
During the sixteenth century that followed after its incorporation, Company of Merchant Adventurers took steps to limit access of “mere merchants” into its membership, casting out retailers, wholesalers, finance and other merchant groups. Keeping these elements from being able to export, at least easily, profitably and at a scale, the were able with their geographic and industry monopolies marginalized other rivals, frustrated opportunities not to their benefit, while further accumulating the wealth derived from export of England’s sole export industry–thus limited export only to cloth/wool/textiles. Simultaneously, the Company of Merchant Adventurers turned their own corporate leadership into small, narrow near-perpetual oligarchy that founded member family dynasties that effectively closed the door for the rising gentry class that could not achieve membership in the Company.
With the royal charter they secured a royal grant of monopoly to a specified geography (Antwerp) that limited competition, reduced risk, and provided legitimacy to the traders in their relationships abroad. Being the first of guilds-exporters, the pattern was set for all that followed. The all-important take away was that a guild monopoly over a trade was then infused with a second monopoly to trade that product in a defined geography. This model became preconditions for future overseas trading ventures. Thus these devolved from the Company of Merchant Adventurers before the sixteenth century.
Cloth industry became more concentrated as it matured, raising the cost of entry so over a few generations only a few merchant owners dominated overseas wool export and the Company of Merchant Associates-Adventurers that held the royal monopoly itself developed into an oligopoly of its own. The propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, was pronounced, and it facilitated a Company of Adventurers transformation in a London-based industry nexus, ‘Merchant adventurers’ who risked themselves and their money to find new commercial markets in Europe had emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in commercial cities across England. Exeter had one, as did Newcastle, Hull, Chester and York. Bristol’s Merchant Ventures which dated back centuries, had recently received its first charter of in corporation from King Edward VII in 1552 [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10
Overseas merchants, among others, routinely organized themselves into guilds and companies to maintain and control access to the special techniques and knowledge, or ‘mysteries’ of their trades. Many only later sought out royal grants to allow them further immunities of self-government, relief from certain taxes, and most importantly, unimpeded rights to travel from and reside beyond the realm … [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10.
At the point when growth in the cloth trade stagnated during the decade of the 1550’s the impulse of those desiring to trade in untouched markets directly affected the course of overseas trade and foreign commerce. New Adventurers were drawn to action. While not abandoning their memberships or relations with the powerful Merchant Adventurers, they modified her structure and incorporated the first of the major “regulated” joint stock trading companies that would be formed during this the second half of the sixteenth century.
While the Company of Merchant Adventurers, which still included by far the greatest number of the City’s wealthiest merchants provided relatively little investment support “to the network of new, growing and dynamic overseas trading companies, “becoming even more obsessively focused on their short-route cloth trade with northern Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 21-3.
While the Merchant Adventurers trade was thus an increasingly unitary one [cloth export to northern Europe], and separated from the others [expanded goods and import into new markets] the southern and eastern trades [the latter] experienced an increasingly intertwined growth, motivated by the same interlocking group of merchants with common commercial goals” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 15-17. In essence a new group of trading merchants had spun off from the Merchant Adventurers [the Muscovy or Russia Company], and the latter pushed into trading with the Spanish, Portugal, Italy, and Turkey–forming the Levant Company in 1592. Our soon to be friend, Sir Thomas Smythe was a major leader in the latter set of trading companies.
But more to the point, the enthusiasm and experience of the London merchant community to overseas trade, and colonization was limited to a few, of its membership. Even if high-placed such as Thomas Smythe, that leadership consumed itself trying to sail very leaky boats, i.e. the joint stock corporations they managed required heavy baggage relationships with the larger community, and much time would be spent patching up majorities, bailing out of problems caused by a chronic under investment, and failure to fulfill their membership and stock subscription commitments.
Occurring in two expansionary bursts, between the 1480’s and 1510, and the 1530’s to 1550 cloth export by the first decade of the seventeenth century (1600-1610) were three quarters of England’s total exports, of which three quarters went to Germany and the Low Countries. Brenner estimates the guild-like Company of Merchant Adventurers controlled one half of London’s total export trade, and asserted that the Company of Merchant Adventurers “constituted England’s outstanding commercial group by any test of wealth or power, and that its leading members enjoyed a disproportionate share of London’s highest political positions” [99] Brenner, p. 3.
By the 1550’s, actually earlier, the Company essentially ran the one-horse export economy that England enjoyed. As such it developed into a bastion of wealth for its members, this wealth was put to use in a number of investments and opportunities. Some merchants, however decided that opportunity lie in expanding overseas trade to the four corners of the globe, particularly the Far East and the East Indies. And so in the middle 1550’s England started its oversea commercial trade pivot. With the power emanating from their privileged monopolies London-based cloth merchants pleaded their case to the central royal government in residence at London.
Cloth export, primarily a one way export only concentrated in ports such as Antwerp, the primary entrance point, and over time a European agent-factor nexus developed that allowed London and eastern-sited cloth merchants to develop and sustain an advantage in cloth trade that other English regions could not penetrate. English cloths came to be shipped almost exclusively to Antwerp, and from there to their ultimate destinations in various parts of Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 6. During the fifteenth century, the focus of the Company of Adventurers was abroad; that’s where its offices were and the continent and its ups and downs, conflicts and opportunities, captured the interest of these merchant adventurers.
Like other chartered offices and enterprises [of this period] overseas franchises could be bought, shared, sold, inherited, farmed out [think of farming as a royal franchise over a government product, service or function] and financed. As they marshalled partners and investors, often including the ... [crown and ministers] such projects did not easily distinguish state from individual interest [i.e. public from private interests] and as such were less public private partnerships than portmanteaus [mutual personal largesse] … Overseas charters projected [the Company’s] 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 or agreements with the peoples and polities they found there. … If such ... [practices and structures] seemed to blur the lines between colony and commerce, finance and governance, they arose from a world in which such …boundaries had never existed in the first place. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that built British Colonialism (the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), pp. 18-19)
[999] Like Professor Stern, I encounter in this historical tale a difficulty translating it into terms and expressions comprehensible to a contemporary reader. But such terms are hard to find as their meaning and application and use five hundred years in the past does not conform easily to contemporary understanding and modern realities. In this period of time of this history, a corporation was an institutional term for an entity to perform certain broad but specified functions and purposes, and provided sufficient autonomy to conduct a “business” or a set of transactions for what was construed as a government function–such as export trade. In 1500-1600, the King/Queen owned/ruled the country/kingdom; the state is personal to him/her. The sovereign’s dilemma is that he/she cannot do everything at the same time and the “corporation” was a vehicle by which the sovereign could delegate and/or decentralize sovereign powers. This is not a classic definition of today’s Wal-Mart, or GE, but sometimes one wonders about corporations such as Microsoft and Alphabet.
In this history, a corporation such as the joint stock merchant trading company Company of Merchant Adventurers is granted by the crown and endowed with rights, privilege’s and responsibilities salient to its mission. This royal treatment is commonplace in this era and dates back quite a few years into the 12th century. This “corporation” is also similar to the municipality, such as London (entrusted with task, functions and a mission to govern a municipality), which is “governed” in the Tudor period by the City of London Corporation, headed by a Lord Mayor, and a Common Council whose alderman were elected from wards. This form of government evolved from the 1141 royal charter that granted its local authority and autonomy, and the rights and privileges to the corporation salient to its governance of London as defined at that time, and adjusted as it expanded.
The use of a “corporation” structure in medieval England by the time of the Tudors, very evident during the Elizabethan period, was widespread for missions of some importance, complexity and scale, and for which they should be considered “traditional” in the English context. Today, of course, “corporation” is private and not governmental, and usually considered as “business”, but through this period of English history that is not accurate. That distinction truly became more solid hundreds of years in the future. During English history the “corporation” was a flexible structure, a hybrid in each distinctive period that delegated royal powers to a private, i.e. non royal entity, and enjoyed through its royal charter delegated powers and autonomy relevant to their implementation.
While they were not a public-private partnership in today’s spirit of the term, they were such in the spirit of the time when kings and queens ruled a kingdom given to them by God (or something close to it). Thus when we refer to the Virginia Company in this history, it should be thought of as a 1605-6 great merchant trading company structured as a joint stock corporation, empowered by royal charter to perform specified tasks with parameters and responsibilities that limited and defined the permissible actions and responsibilities. Americans ought to regard the Company, not as a contemporary business company with greedy investors, but as a royally empowered entity delegated formerly royal powers and resources entrusted with functions and mission to which it is accountable to the Crown and its sovereign. It does not fit our contemporary definitions very well, so our Company of the early seventeenth century should not wear clothes that generate reactions more typical of the modern age. [999]
Stern proposes this period to be an age of “corporate colonial capitalism”. He is expressing what is almost obvious when one delves deeply into colonialism of this era is that in many ways it is foreign affairs subcontracted with a corporation that enjoys a relatively distinctive relationship with the crown and is subject to direct sovereign accountability. Stern’s creative description of that age does properly focus on the organizational structure which he, as I, believe is central to understanding its behavior and actions. It allows us to include in the corporate decision-making the necessity of its accountability to the English sovereign.
It also makes obvious that these corporations are far from pure profit-making entities, and their investors have multiple motivations, that while including profit, are also tempered by fealty, patriotism, and the kingdom’s ability to function amid mercantile competition. Religion too will also infuse the behavior of these entities. Finally, their decision-making is very much linked to macro politics of the kingdom, and the priorities of the sovereign. Ironically, and correctly, Stern also observes how all this can lead over time, distance, and personality to an insulated corporation aloof from its home base nation.
In the Virginia Company, the problem, I stress is the “drift into civil war” that created such tensions between the king and parliament and their supporters, and between classes and religions. In the beginning of this period, the City of London for instance, is tied closely to the Crown; by the time of the English Civil war, less than forty years in the future, London is a creature of Parliament. The Company–and the Virginia colony–will be greatly affected by such drifts. As such one might construe as part of England’s inheritance to Virginia, is her turbulence as it affected colonization.
Usually much stress is made by American historians of positive inheritances such as English common law, and its fledgling “drift” to democracy. True enough, but each has their limits regarding England’s initial half-century or so early North American colonization. While there were limits to excesses provided by English common and contract law of that period; instead one could include the definition of individual honor, as medieval a value characteristic of that age, could check individual misbehavior, and affect positive motivation as well. Still more than anything, the medieval “art of the deal” in which we can label policy-making, was more personalistic than legalistic, reflecting social and hierarchical institutional realities (although the jurist Coke played a role in the design of the Virginia Company while serving as a Cecil protégé). As one must navigate this drift to civil war, anyone who has his office in, or adjacent to, the Tower or London, seldom forgets who signs her paycheck.
But the businesses and business practices we value today had yet to be developed; the institutions of business were rudimentary, and among them the joint stock corporation was respected, and consciously employed in the more substantial, complicated, and risky business enterprises such as overseas trade. Business practices, the audit/bookkeeping for example existed, but do not compare to modern practices, and were casual in their use and not without biases in their application.
The use of farming, grants and patents, were used often of necessity due to the chronic lack of discretionary income by the Crown and its bureaucracies. Crown fiscal affairs is arcane and medieval as one might expect, but fiscal liquidity in an age of land being the primary asset of choice, leaves little room for cash lying around; when there are few, if any, institutions such as banks, if one needed cash an exchange of it for a “deal” such as corporate colonialism constantly required made, the art of the deal quite different than one normally experiences or expects today–but even this is questioned by Stern:
The story of how the joint stock corporation came to shape British colonialism from its sixteenth century origins through the era of decolonization may on first glance seemed ripped from today’s headlines, as billionaires race to colonize Mars, and global technology companies have grown to the point that they look, as Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook or META founder and owner] ‘more like a government’. In a world where an oil conglomerate might run what has been aptly described as a ‘private empire’, and even insiders [today] come to think of the British Crown as “the Firm”, understanding the thin line between private and public governance has a deep and complex past has never been more consequential … that if the joint stock corporation was well-suited to [ late medieval] empire, it was not because it was some inexorable juggernaut. Rather, like empire itself, it was–as it remains–a powerful paradox: person and group; public and private; commercial and political; mercantilist and capitalist; sycophantic and rebellious; regional and global; immortal and fragile; smugly patriotic and belligerently cosmopolitan; and the cornerstone of a British Empire never fully owned or operated by Britain as such’. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 2
Naturally, the Company’s royal overseas “monopoly” generated considerable compliant, opposition and resentment from disenfranchised merchants and gentry, but the great merchant trading companies, placed well in court politics, protected by court bureaucracies, and with resources to mobilize the overseas farmers and Elizabethan monopolies/franchises that saturated the imports from overseas markets.
One final term pertinent to this art of a Tudor deal, is “the royal charter”. The charter is somewhat similar in spirit and function to an American executive order; in particular it is personal to the sovereign and is intended to be flexible with its ultimate meaning at any point being defined, not simply by law or contract, but by the continued support of and by the king. Over this period, the issue of royal charter was being challenged by a rising and not especially happy House of Commons (lower chamber of Parliament). Stern comments that such charters could become “unseated through never fully supplanted by Parliamentary legislation, but [each] ,,, shared the basic assumption that corporations, in the words of the seventeenth century jurist Edward Coke, ‘[rest] only in intendment [intentions] and consideration of the law“–i.e. limitations cited above that a charter was both a political as well as legal transaction.
“Conceiving of corporations as “concessions” of the State [as we do in argue in this section], made for another formidable irony. Stern reminds us that over time and place that “affording corporations an outside power that states [home government] could not always control and that frequently could be employed to control states“, I will propose Coan’s corollary that such powers could be exercised by colonies in the name of the corporation to reflect their own needs and requirements. This corresponds to my larger insertion that weakness of the Virginia Company translated into self-government by Virginians during the extended Company period. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 6
From the 1550’s to 1605 England engaged in a series of overseas initiatives that prepared the way for the 1606 Virginia Company’s launch of colonies in English North America. The lessons and experience gleaned from these initiatives constituted the great bulk of the knowledge and skillset which the elites that launched and sailed on the took with them over the Atlantic. I argue, probably far too repetitively, that they needed more;
England was still not prepared to start colonies across the Atlantic. Ireland was one thing, at least it was close, its past and inhabitants were known, its value to England appreciated. Virginia and New England were unknown except for coastal explorations. The hubris that infused these English elites, infested is a better word, was a characteristic of that age and elites that participated in colonizing during that period used it as a filter to remove caution and inject a can-do ambition that exceeded the technology of the period and the depreciated reality they would encounter in the North American wildernesses.
A large part of the hubris was tied to the relative success in overseas commerce that England enjoyed during the post 1550 years, and the lack of thought and planning that they put into colonization, thinking instead their commerce experience would carry over to colony-making. Religious fundamentalism, so prevalent in these years, did not help either, as it motivated many to throw themselves into missionary work among the Natives they found. The Hakluyts, today a foundational source for what the English thought about Virginia colonization, represent this tradition, and their naivete, combined with inexperience and hubris of the post-1550 England thrust English adventurer elites into the activism that fabricated the Virginia Company.
The above section title includes the next layer of factors that drove the design and implementation of the Virginia Company and its mission. These factor-drivers are so interwoven they defy description, and cannot be easily pulled apart for discussion. The wool/cloth cluster and the one-export economy will be discussed first because they infused the decision-making of much of England’s overseas-relevant elite that had immediate access to the Crown and its policy system.
What the reader should look for in the below narrative is that despite its command over society, Crown support, the overall English economy and society, its policy making systems were seriously flawed; able to adopt policy choices but unable and largely unwilling to implement these choices without deferring to a series of overlapping bureaucracies, the development of a medieval city-town-county system of local governments to which much jurisdiction over policy was given to make and implement, powerful near autonomous dynastic families, an emerging group of twelve guilds that dominated the viable English workforce, and an ascendant, first advantage modern sector, the wool/cloth industry whose leadership was quick to develop its own overlapping hierarchies and interweave them throughout London institutions, and then to construct and mobile England’s first great merchant trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers. That Company constructed and then “sat on” a one-export, virtually no import overseas commerce, and then “sat on it” even thought that overseas economy did little for England, but on the other hand generated considerable personal wealth and status for them.
What we describe is a aristocrat-merchant-gentry configured Crown and City of London policy system that made and implemented kingdom-relevant decision-making, pushing other regions and urban centers off to the margins. You may be amazed to learn the discovery of America fell mostly to the latter while the London elites headed to the Far East (China, Japan) or the East Indies (India, Southeast Asia). England from the start of its pivot to global overseas commerce, exploration and colonization had not developed a consistent unified approach–and would not until after the English Civil War.
1550 the decade the Pivot Begins
It also seemed an excellent policy to fill up the king’s coffers, that could satisfy his many expenses, including the Court and his favorites, and the costs of government. 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, many important issues and policy areas, but overseas trade, economic development is what we call it today, was never far from the minds of those who were looking for ways to create wealth and achieve visions.
This dynamic process underlay the political and economic transition from Tudor to Stuart in foreign affairs, but was more pronounced in trade and somewhat less so in permanent settlement. London merchants dominated the trade, and little appreciated today, the vehicle they used for overseas trade (the joint stock corporation) evolved into England’s behemoth merchant trading companies, and almost by default. The poor fit between merchant trading companies, adapting their trading factory motif, and applying it to found a permanent settlement was arguably destined not to go well—and that constitutes much of this chapter.
The vehicle of choice came in two basic versions: the joint stock corporation and the “regulated trading company” or regulated joint stock corporation. The distinction mattered much in those days, and has been featured prominently in the historical literature of the time, but both versions. served the same core purposes: “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. In fact, despite the multiplicity of other forms of business organizations that traded overseas (family, 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.
Colonization is not Trade and Commerce
At this point we need to take a deep dive into the overseas commercial trade and colonization policy-making system that produced relevant decisions, initiatives–and implemented them. To do this it is necessary to introduce to the reader, the oligarchy-monopoly of the great merchant joint stock corporation that dominated that system: the Company of Adventurers. They enjoyed a monopoly of trade in cloth and wool—and hence controlled a great deal of everything that was exported from England. In the sixteenth century the Company of Adventurers essentially ran the one-horse economy that England enjoyed. As such it was the bastion of wealth and the centerpiece of whatever was English entrepreneurism. It dominated London, and as we shall see its politics and city leadership.
London was a Company town, with a pronounced position in the one exception to an elite dominated by a landed agricultural-manor-based aristocracy, the City merchants and their wool export trade. The 1550 pivot I have referenced thus far is a pivot in overseas trade away from the Company of Adventurers—led by a generational change in English entrepreneurs, and England’s need to provide an alternative to the up and down economy generated by the wool trade, and an alternative to the fear that trade had matured to the point that it could grow no more.
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.
The poor souls affected 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 business, 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. 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 enterprises, 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.
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
[999] That distinction, to form a permanent settlement—what today we call a colony–lie at the center of the Virginia Company venture. As we shall discover being England’s first permanent settlement the distinction was new ground to the English, and for most of those involved with the design of the initial Company. The change of mission it appears was a distinction that may not have mattered greatly in their calculations. Professor L. H. Roper explains this assertion by his own that “English people [in this period] interested in overseas ventures always regarded Asia as the ‘brass ring’”/ Asian commodities, particularly pepper, was a lucrative trade that not only satisfied English demand, but was a key re-export as well. The real problem that confronted its designers, the most “intractable, was the distance involved by any route chosen. [999]
Nevertheless these overseas adventurers set sail and began fifty years of exploration, trade overtures, expeditions, and formal ventures led by the great trading merchant adventurer companies. With little to no experience at first the “adventured on” and garnered what they could from their quest to reach and trade with the Far East. In time, the notion of colonization took shape.
What the new emphasis on markets [trade/commerce] did for American colonization was to restore its plausibility and underline its desirability. Jacobean organizers of projects [would tell] prospective participants [settlers] that men would be planted [settled] and the gospel spread in the New World by way of ‘merchandizing and trade”, rather than by conquest, and denied that there was any similarity in ‘ends’ or ‘managing of means’ between their ventures and those of the Elizabethans. After ‘some planting and husbandry’ the Americas could supply not only England’s needs but those of other nations as well.
[999] That distinction, to form a permanent settlement—what today we call a colony–lie at the center of the Virginia Company venture. As we shall discover being England’s first permanent settlement the distinction was new ground to the English, and for most of those involved with the design of the initial Company. The change of mission it appears was a distinction that may not have mattered greatly in their calculations. Professor L. H. Roper explains this assertion by his own that “English people [in this period] interested in overseas ventures always regarded Asia as the ‘brass ring’”/ Asian commodities, particularly pepper, was a lucrative trade that not only satisfied English demand, but was a key re-export as well. The real problem that confronted its designers, the most “intractable, was the distance involved by any route chosen. [999]
Nevertheless these overseas adventurers set sail and began fifty years of exploration, trade overtures, expeditions, and formal ventures led by the great trading merchant adventurer companies. With little to no experience at first the “adventured on” and garnered what they could from their quest to reach and trade with the Far East. In time, the notion of colonization took shape.
What the new emphasis on markets [trade/commerce] did for American colonization was to restore its plausibility and underline its desirability. Jacobean organizers of projects [would tell] prospective participants [settlers] that men would be planted [settled] and the gospel spread in the New World by way of ‘merchandizing and trade”, rather than by conquest, and denied that there was any similarity in ‘ends’ or ‘managing of means’ between their ventures and those of the Elizabethans. After ‘some planting and husbandry’ the Americas could supply not only England’s needs but those of other nations as well.
Advocates of colonization, however, ‘had little idea what the successful commodity or commodities might be–wine, sugar, naval stores received the most mention–they could draw attention to current trade developments which supported their argument“. When this statement was made, it was two years before Rolfe reached Virginia and settler-investor recruitment after the 1607-9 setbacks collapsed was in its prime. That prompted in 1608-9 significant reforms and reorganization of the Virginia Company, infused by new leadership; the spokesperson was part of it. The Company restructure resulted in the issuance of a second charter and a somewhat redefined relationship with the Crown. The spokesman for the newly restructured Virginia Company intention was to remind prospective new settlers/investors of how much experience had been accumulated over those last half-decade and that they would be part of a future success.
“What a novice our nation was [at that time] with these [sixty] yeeres, in case of forrane trade, not knowing whence too fetch, nor which way to transport, but only to some mart or staple towne within two days sailing and that was counted so great a matter then, that therefore they were called ‘Marchant adventurers’ … [then it was only] “the great hulkes of Italie’ and the ships of other nations which brought in the rich goods and fed us …”. But as he pointed out things had changed In 1609 England had control of its own merchandising, but “much remained to be done ‘before this little Northerne corner of the world [England] could be ‘the richest Store house and Staple for merchandizing all Europe’. The overseas settlements were portrayed as being a crucial part of the general effort that was already clearly under way to expand English commerce [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 170-1
Those words, written in a 1609 Virginia Company pamphlet, by spokesman, Robert, later to be referred to as ‘Alderman’, Johnson, son-in-law and second-in-command to the new Virginia Company Treasurer & CEO, Sir Thomas Smythe. Johnson played a major role in the Virginia Company through its charter suspension in 1624 and the death of Smythe in 1625.
What can be suggested is at late as 1609 the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade experience instilled confidence of future settlers and investors that the task was noble, legitimate, to some degree regarded as a success; by 1609 England’s confidence resulting from that series of initiatives and ventures had brought England a long way from its almost comical start a half century earlier. “Johnson could see the turning point as occurring in the Elizabethan period”. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 167. If so, the post-1550 pivot was viewed as not only critical to England’s success in the seventeenth century, but the foundation on which future success could be achieved.
Advocates of colonization, however, ‘had little idea what the successful commodity or commodities might be–wine, sugar, naval stores received the most mention–they could draw attention to current trade developments which supported their argument“. When this statement was made, it was two years before Rolfe reached Virginia and settler-investor recruitment after the 1607-9 setbacks collapsed was in its prime. That prompted in 1608-9 significant reforms and reorganization of the Virginia Company, infused by new leadership; the spokesperson was part of it. The Company restructure resulted in the issuance of a second charter and a somewhat redefined relationship with the Crown. The spokesman for the newly restructured Virginia Company intention was to remind prospective new settlers/investors of how much experience had been accumulated over those last half-decade and that they would be part of a future success.
“What a novice our nation was [at that time] with these [sixty] yeeres, in case of forrane trade, not knowing whence too fetch, nor which way to transport, but only to some mart or staple towne within two days sailing and that was counted so great a matter then, that therefore they were called ‘Marchant adventurers’ … [then it was only] “the great hulkes of Italie’ and the ships of other nations which brought in the rich goods and fed us …”. But as he pointed out things had changed In 1609 England had control of its own merchandising, but “much remained to be done ‘before this little Northerne corner of the world [England] could be ‘the richest Store house and Staple for merchandizing all Europe’. The overseas settlements were portrayed as being a crucial part of the general effort that was already clearly under way to expand English commerce [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 170-1
Those words, written in a 1609 Virginia Company pamphlet, by spokesman, Robert, later to be referred to as ‘Alderman’, Johnson, son-in-law and second-in-command to the new Virginia Company Treasurer & CEO, Sir Thomas Smythe. Johnson played a major role in the Virginia Company through its charter suspension in 1624 and the death of Smythe in 1625.
What can be suggested is at late as 1609 the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade experience instilled confidence of future settlers and investors that the task was noble, legitimate, to some degree regarded as a success; by 1609 England’s confidence resulting from that series of initiatives and ventures had brought England a long way from its almost comical start a half century earlier. “Johnson could see the turning point as occurring in the Elizabethan period”. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 167. If so, the post-1550 pivot was viewed as not only critical to England’s success in the seventeenth century, but the foundation on which future success could be achieved.
Ron W. Coan 