USA > Virginia > Old Virginia and her neighbours > Part 14
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awaited an opportunity for attacking them. How much truth there may be in this view of the case it would be hard to say; there is very little evi- dence to guide us, but we may well believe that Opekankano and his people watched with grave concern the sudden and rapid increase of the white strangers. That they were ready to seize upon an occasion for war is by no means unlikely, and the nature of the event indicates careful preparation. Early in 1622 an Indian chief whom the English called Jack of the Feather killed a white man and was killed in requital. Shortly afterward a concerted attack was made upon the colony along the entire line from Chesapeake Bay up to the Berkeley Plantation, near the site of Richmond, and 347 persons were butchered. Such a destruc- tion of nearly nine per cent. of the white population was a terrible blow, but the quickness with which the colony recovered from it shows what vigorous vitality it had been gaining under the administra- tion of Sir Edwin Sandys. So lately as 1618 such a blow would have been almost prostrating, but in 1622 the settlers turned out with grim fury and hunted the red men like wild beasts till the blood debt was repaid with compound interest, and peace was restored in the land for more than twenty years.
While these fiendish scenes were being enacted in Virginia a memorable drama was moving to- ward its final catastrophe in London. In the next chapter we shall witness the overthrow of the great Virginia Company.
CHAPTER VI.
A SEMINARY . OF SEDITION.
FEW episodes in English history are more cu- rious than the founding of Virginia. In the course of the mightiest conflict the world had Summary witnessed between the powers of des- review of the founding of Virginia.
potism and the powers of freedom, considerations chiefly strategical led England to make the ocean her battle-ground, and out of these circumstances grew the idea of establishing military posts at sundry important strategie points on the North American coast, to. aid the opera- tions of the navy. In a few far-sighted minds this idea developed into the scheme of planting one or more Protestant states, for the increase of England's commerce, the expansion of her politi- cal influence, and the maintenance of her naval ad- vantages. After royal assistance had been sought in vain and single-handed private enterprise had proved unequal to the task of founding a state, the joint-stock principle, herald of a new indus- trial era, was resorted to, and we witness the creation of two rival joint-stock companies for the purpose of undertaking such a task. Of the two colonies sent out by these companies, one 1606-1610. meets the usual fate, succumbs to famine,
and retires from the scene. The other barely
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escapes a similar fate, but is kept alive by the energy and sagacity and good fortune of one ex- traordinary man until sturdy London has invested so much of her treasure and her life-blood in it that she will not tamely look on and see it perish. Then the Lord Mayor, the wealthy merchants, the venerable craft-guilds, with many liberal knights and peers, and a few brilliant scholars and clergy- men, turn to and remodel the London Company into a truly great commercial corporation with an effective government and one of London's fore- most merchant princes at its head. As if by special intervention from heaven, the struggling colony is rescued at the very point of death, and soon takes on a new and more vigorous life.
But for such lavish outlay to continue, there must be some solid return, and soon a new and unexpected source of wealth is found.
1610-1624. As all this sort of work is a novel experi- ment, mistakes are at first made in plenty ; neither the ends to be obtained nor the methods of obtain- ing them are distinctly conceived, and from the parties of brave gentlemen in quest of El Dorado to the crowd of rogues and pickpockets amenable only to rough martial law, the drift of events seems somewhat indefinite and aimless. But just as the short-lived system of communism falls to the ground, and private ownership of land and earnings is established, the rapidly growing de- mand for tobacco in England makes its cultiva- tion an abundant and steady source of wealth, the colonists increase in numbers and are improved in quality. Meanwhile as the interest felt by the
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shareholders becomes more lively, the Company ac- quires a more democratic organization. It exerts political influence, the court party and country party contend with each other for the control of it, and the latter wins. Hitherto the little Vir- ginia colony has been, like the contemporary French colony in Canada and like all the Span- ish colonies, a despotically governed community closely dependent upon the source of authority in the mother country, and without any true political life. But now the victorious party in the Com- pany gives to Virginia a free representative gov- ernment, based not upon any ideal theory of the situation, but rooted in ancient English precedent, the result of ages of practical experience, and therefore likely to thrive. Finally we see the British king awakening to the fact that he has unloosed a power that threatens danger. The doctrine of the divine right of kings -- that ominous bequest from the half-orientalized later Roman Empire to post-mediaval Europe - was dear to the heart of James Stuart, and his aim in life was to impose it upon the English people. His chief obstacle was the country party, which if he could not defeat in Parliament, he might at least weaken by striking at the great corporation that had come to be one of its strongholds. In what we may call the embryonic development of Virginia the final incident was the overthrow of the London Company; but we shall see that the severing of that umbilical cord left the colony stronger and more self-reliant than before. In the unfolding of these events there is poetic
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beauty and grandeur as the purpose of Infinite Wisdom reveals itself in its cosmic process, slowly but inexorably, hasting not but resting not, heed- less of the clashing aims and discordant cries of short-sighted mortals, sweeping their tiny efforts into its majestic current, and making all con- tribute to the fulfilment of God's will.
From the very outset the planting of Virginia had been watehed with wrath and chagrin by the Spanish court. Within the last few years a Vir- ginian scholar, Alexander Brown, has collected and published a large number of manuscript let- ters and other documents preserved in the Spanish archives at Simancas, which serve to illustrate the Hostility of Spain. situation in detail. Very little of impor- tance happened in London that the am- bassador Zuñiga did not promptly discover and straightway report in cipher to Madrid. We can . now read for the first time many memoranda of secret sessions of Philip III. and his ministers, in which this little Protestant colony was the theme of discussion. It was a thorn in the flesh not easy to extract unless Spain was prepared for war with Great Britain. At first the very weakness of the colony served to keep this enemy's hands off ; if it was on the point of dying a natural death, as seemed likely, it was hardly worth while to repeat the horrors of Florida. In 1612, after Sir Thomas Dale's administration had begun, Spain again took the alarm ; for the moment a war with Eng- land was threatened, and if it had broken out Virginia would have been one of the first points
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attacked. But the deaths of Lord Salisbury and of Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1612, changed the policy of both Philip and James. There was now some hope of detaching the latter from Protestant alliances, and Philip's designs upon Virginia were subordinated to the far larger purpose of winning back England herself into the Catholic ranks. A plan was made for marrying the Infanta Maria to Baby Charles, and with this end in view Gondomar and the
one of the ablest of Spanish diplomats, Spanish
Count Gondomar (to give him at once match.
his best-known title), was sent as ambassador to London. Charles was only twelve years old, and an immediate wedding was not expected, but the match could be kept dangling before James as a bait, and thus his movements might be guided. Should the marriage finally be made, Gondomar believed that Charles could be converted to his bride's faith, and then England might be made to renew her allegiance to Rome. Gondomar was mightily mistaken in the English people, but he was not mistaken in their king. James was ready to swallow bait, hook. and all. Gondomar com- pletely fascinated him, - one might almost say, hypnotized him, - so that for the next ten years one had but to shake that Spanish match before him and he would follow, whatever might betide. The official policy of England was thus often made distasteful to Englishnnen, and the senti- ment of loyalty to the sovereign was impaired.
To Gondomar the king was in the habit of con- fiding his grievances, and in 1614, after his angry dissolution of Parliament, he said to him one day :
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" There is one thing I have here, which your king in Spain has not, and that is a Parliament of 500 members. . . . I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence. I am a stranger and found it here when I arrived. so I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of." Here James stopped short and turned red in the face, at hav- ing thus carelessly admitted his own lack Gondomar's of omnipotence, whereupon the wily advice to
the king. Spaniard smiled and reminded him that at all events it was only at his royal pleasure that this very disagreeable assembly could be called together.1 James acted on this hint, and did not summon a Parliament again for seven years. It is worth remembering in this connection that at this very time the representatives of the people in France were dismissed and not called together again until 1789.
While Parliament was not sitting, the sort of discussion that James found so hateful was kept up at the meetings of the London Company for Virginia, which were commonly held at the princely mansion of Sir Thomas Smith. Against this corporation Gondomar dropped his sweet poi- son into the king's ear. The government of colo- nies, he said, is work fit only for monarchs, and cannot safely be entrusted to a roomful of gab- bling subjects ; beware of such meet- More advice. ings ; you will find them but "a semi- nary to a seditious Parliament." Before James had profited by these warnings, however, the case 1 Gardiner, History of England, ii. 251.
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of Sir Walter Raleigh came up to absorb. his at- tention. A rare chance - as strange and sad as anything that the irony of human destiny can show - was offered for Spain to wreak her malice upon Virginia in the person of the earliest and most illustrious of its founders.
In 1603, not long after King James's arrival in England, Raleigh had been charged with compli- city in Lord Cobham's abortive conspiracy for getting James set aside in favour of his cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart. This charge is now proved to have been ill-founded ; ment of Raleigh,
Imprison- but James already hated Raleigh with
the measure of hatred which he dealt out to so many of Elizabeth's favourites. After a trial in which the common - law maxim, that innocence must be presumed until guilt is proved, was read backward, as witches were said to read the Lord's Prayer in summoning Old Nick, Sir Walter was found guilty of high treason and condemned to death. The wrath of the people was such that James, who did not yet feel his position quite secure, did not venture to carry out the sentence. He contented himself with plundering Sir Wal- ter's estates, while the noble knight was kept for more than twelve years a prisoner in the Tower, where he solaced himself with experiments in chemistry and with writing that delightful His- tory of the World which is one of the glories of English prose literature. In 1616, at the inter- cession of Villiers, Raleigh was set free. On his expedition to Guiana in 1595 he had discovered gold on the upper waters of the Caroni River in
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what is now Venezuela. In his attempt to dis- pense with parliaments James was at his wits' end for money, and he thought something might Raleigh re- be got by sending Raleigh back to take leased and sent to Guiana. possession of the place. It is true that Spain claimed that country, but so did James on the strength of Raleigh's own discov- eries, and if any complication should arise there were ways of crawling out. Raleigh had misgiv- ings about starting on such an adventure without first obtaining a pardon in set form ; but Sir Fran- cis Bacon is said to have assured him that the king, having under the privy seal made him ad- miral of a fleet, with power of martial law over sailors and officers, had substantially condoned all offences, real or alleged. A man could not at one and the same time be under attaint of treason and also an admiral in active service. Before Raleigh started James made him explain the details of his scheme and lay down his route on a chart, and he promised on the sacred word of a king not to divulge this information to any human creature. It was only the sacred word of a Stuart king. James may have meant to keep it, but his evil genius was not far off. The lifelike portrait of Count Gondomar, superbly painted by the elder Daniel Mytens, hangs in the palace at Hampton Court, and one cannot look on it for a moment without feeling that Mephistopheles himself must have sat for it. The bait of the Infanta, with a dowry of 2,000,000 crowns in hard cash, was once more thrown successfully, and James told every detail of Raleigh's plans to the Spaniard, who
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sent the intelligence post-haste to Madrid. So when the English fleet arrived at the mouths of the Orinoco, a Spanish force awaited them and attacked their exploring party. In the The king's
treachery. fight that ensued Raleigh's son Walter
was slain ; though the English were victorious, the approaches to the gold fields were too strongly guarded to be carried by the force at their com- mand, and thus the enterprise was baffled. The gold fields remained for Spain, but with the fast increasing paralysis of Spanish energy they were soon neglected and forgotten ; their existence was denied and Raleigh's veracity doubted, until in 1889 they were rediscovered and identified by the Venezuelan Inspector of Mines.1 Since the expe- dition was defeated by the treachery of his own sovereign, nothing was left for the stricken admi- ral but to return to England. The Spanish court loudly clamoured for his death, on the ground that he had undertaken a piratical excursion against a country within Spanish jurisdiction. His wife cleverly planned an escape to France, but a Judas in the party arrested him and he was sent to the Tower. The king promised Gondomar that Ra- leigh should be publicly executed, either in Lon- don or in Madrid; but on second thought the latter would not do. To surrender him to Spain would be to concede Spain's claim to Judicial
Guiana. Without conceding this claim murder of Raleigh, 1618.
there was nothing for which to punish him.
Accordingly James in this year 1618 revived the
1 Stebbing's Ralegh, p. 121; cf. Bates, Central and South America, p. 430.
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old death sentence of 1603, and Spain drank a deep draught of revenge when the hero of Cadiz and Fayal was beheaded in the Palace Yard at Westminster ; a scene fit to have made Elizabeth turn in her grave in the Abbey hard by. A fouler judicial murder never stained the annals of any country.1
The silly king gained nothing by his vile treach- ery. Popular execration in England at once set him up in a pillory from which posterity is not likely to take him down. The Spanish council of state advised Philip III. to send him an autograph letter of thanks,2 but the half-promised Infanta with her rich dowry kept receding like the grapes from eager Tantalus. A dwindling exchequer would soon leave James with no resource except summoning once more that odious Parliament. Meanwhile in the London Company for Virginia there occurred that change of political drift where- of the election of Sir Edwin Sandys over Sir Thomas Smith, aided though it had been by a pri- vate quarrel, was one chief symptom. That elec- tion revealed the alarming growth of hostility in the city of London to the king's pretensions and
1 Some lines in sweet Saxon English, written by Raleigh on the fly-leaf of his Bible, shortly before his death, are worth remen !- bering : --
" Even such is Time, that takes on trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust ; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the record of our days. Yet from this earth, this grave, this dust, The Lord shall raise me up, I trust."
2 Stebbing's Ralegh, p. 386.
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to the court party.1 James had said just before the election, "Choose the Devil if you The Com- will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys." From pany's eler- that time forth the king's hostility to tion in 1620. the Company scarcely needed Gondomar's skilful nursing. It grew apace till it became aggressive, not to say belligerent. At the election in 1620 it was the intention of the majority in the Com- pany to reelect Sandys, with whose management they were more than pleased. Nearly 500 mem- bers were present at the meeting. It was the cus- tom for three candidates to be named and voted for, one after another, by ballot, and a plurality sufficed for a choice. On this occasion the name of Sir Edwin Sandys, first of three, was about to be put to vote, when some gentlemen of the king's household came in and interrupted the proceed- ings. The king, said their spokesman, positively forbade the election of Sir Ed- The king's attempt to interfere. win Sandys. His Majesty was unwilling to infringe the rights of the Company, and would therefore himself propose names, even as many as four, on which a vote might be taken. The names were forthwith read, and turned out to be those of Sir Thomas Smith and three of his intimate friends.
This impudent interference was received with a silenee more eloquent than words, a profound silence that might be felt. After some minutes eame murmurs and wrathful ejaculations, among which such expressions as " tyranny " and " inva- sion of chartered rights " could be plainly heard.
1 Gardiner, History of England, iii. 161.
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The motion was made that the king's messengers should leave the room while the situation was dis- enssed. "No," said the Earl of Southampton, " let them stay and hear what is said." This mno- tion prevailed. Then Sir Lawrence Hyde moved Reading of that the charter be read, and his motion the charter. was greeted with one of those dutiful but ominous cries so common in that age; from all parts of the room it resounded, "The charter! the charter ! ! God save the King!" The roll of parchment was brought forward and read aloud by the secretary. "Mr. Chairman." said Hyde. "the words of the charter are plain : the election of a treasurer is left to the free choice of this Com- pany. His Majesty seems to labour under some misunderstanding, and I doubt not these gentle- men will undeceive him."
For a few minutes no one replied, and there was a buzz of informal conversation about the room, some members leaving their seats to speak with friends not sitting near them. One of our accounts says that some of the king's emis- saries stepped out and sought his presence, and when he heard what was going on he looked a little anxious and his stubbornness was somewhat abated ; he said of course he did not wish to re- strict the Company's choice to the names he had mentioned. Whether this concession was reported back to the meeting, we are not in- Withdrawal of Sandys. formed. but probably it was. When the meeting was called to order, Sir Robert Phillips, who was sitting near Sandys, got up and an- nounced that that gentleman wished to withdraw
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his name; he would therefore propose that the king's messengers should nominate two persons while the Company should nominate a third. The motion was carried, and the Company nominated the Earl of Southampton. The balloting showed an extremely meagre vote for the king's nominees. It was then moved and carried that in the earl's case the ballot should be dispensed with Election of
and the choice signified by acclamation ; Southamp- and then with thundering shouts of ton.
"Southampton ! Southampton," the meeting was brought to a close. The rebuke to the king could hardly have been more pointed, and in such a scene we recognize the prophecy of the doom to which James's wrong policy was by and by to hasten his son.
'The choice of Shakespeare's friend instead of Sandys made no difference whatever in the policy of the Company. From that time forth its ruling spirits were Southampton and Sandys and Nich- olas Ferrar, the deputy-treasurer. The name of this young man calls for more than a passing men- tion. Better known in ecclesiastical than Nicholas Ferrar.
in political history, he was distinguished
and memorable in whatever he undertook, and among all the thronging figures in England's past he is one of the most sweetly and solemnly beanti- ful. His father, the elder Nicholas Ferrar, who died in April, 1620, just before the election I have been describing, was one of London's merchant princes, and it was in the parlour of his hospitable hou: e in St. Osyth's Lane -- now known as Size Lane, near the Poultry -- that the weekly meetings
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of the Virginia Council were in these latter days regularly held. In this house the young Nicholas was born in 1593. He had spent seven years in study at Cambridge and five years in very exten- sive travel upon the continent of Europe, when at the age of twenty-seven he came to devote all his energies for a time to the welfare of the colony of Virginia. From early boyhood he was noticeable for taking a grave and earnest but by no means sombre view of life, its interests and its duties. For him frivolity had no charm, coarse pleasures were but loathsome, yet he was neither stern nor cold. Through every fibre of his being he was the refined and courteous gentleman, a true Sir Gala- had fit to have found the Holy Grail. His scholar- ship was thorough and broad. An excellent mathematician and interested in the new dawning of physical science, he was also well versed in the classics and in modern languages and knew some- thing of Oriental philology, but he was most fond of the devotional literature of the church. His intensely religious mood was part of the great spiritual revival of which Puritanism was the mightiest manifestation ; yet Nicholas Ferrar was no Puritan either in doctrine or in ecclesiastical policy. In these matters his sympathies were rather with William Land. At the same time his career is a living refutation of the common notion that there is a necessary connection between the religion of Land and the polities of Strafford, for his own political views were as liberal as those of Hampden and Pym. Indeed Ferrar was a rare product of the harmonious cooperation of the ten-
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dencies represented respectively in the Renais- sance and in the Reformation, tendencies which the general want of intelligence and moral sound- ness in mankind has more commonly brought into barren conflict. His ideal of life was much like that which Milton set forth with matchless beauty in " Il Penseroso." Its leading motive, strengthen- ing with his years, was the feeling of duty toward the "studious cloister's pale." and the part of his career that is now best remembered is the found- ing of that monastic home at Little Gid- Little
ding, where study and charitable deeds Gid ling.
and prayer and praise should go on unceasing, where at whatsoever hour of day or night the weary wayfarer through the broad fen country should climb that hilly range in Huntingdon, he should hear the " pealing organ blow to the full- voiced choir below," and entering should receive spiritual comfort and strength, and go thence on his way with heart uplifted. In that blest retreat, ever busy with good works, lived Nicholas Ferrar after the downfall of the great London Company until his own early death in 1637 at the age of forty-four. Of great or brilliant deeds according to the world's usual standard this man did none ; yet the simple record of his life brings us into such an atmosphere of holiness and love that man- kind ean never afford to let it fade and die.
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