USA > Virginia > Old Virginia and her neighbours > Part 15
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This Protestant saint, withal, was no vague dreamer, but showed in action the practical sa- gacity that came by inheritance from London's best stock of bold and thrifty citizens. As one of the directing minds of a commercial corporation,
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he showed himself equal to every occasion that arose. He is identified with the last days of the London Company. and his family archives pre- serve the record of its downfall. It is thenee that we get the account of the election of Southamp- ton and many other interesting scenes and im- portant facts that would otherwise have passed into oblivion.
After Southampton's election the king's hos- tility to the Company became deadly, and within that corporation itself he found allies who when once they found themselves unable to rule it were only too willing to contribute to its ruin. Sir Thomas Smith and his friends now accepted their defeat as decisive and final, and allowed them- selves to become disloyal to the Com-
Disputes in the pany. Probably they would have ex- Company. pressed it differently ; they would have said that out of regard for Virginia they felt it their duty to thwart the reckless men who had gained control of her destinies. Unfortunately for their version of the case, the friends of Sir Thomas Smith were charged with the burden of Argall's misdemeanours, and the regard which that governor had shown for Virginia was too much like the peculiar interest that a wolf feels in the sheepfold. It is not meant that the men- bers of the court party who tried to screen Argall were all unscrupulous men; such was far from being the case, but in public contests nothing is more common than to see men personally stainless blindly accept and defend the rogues of their own party. In the heat of battle the private quarrel
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between Smith and the Earl of Warwick was either made up or allowed to drop out of sight. Both worked together, and in harmony with the king, to defeat Southampton and Sandys and Ferrar. In the Company's quarter sessions the disputes rose so high that the meetings were said to be more like cockpits than courts.1 On one oceasion a duel between the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cavendish, eldest son of the first Earl of Devonshire, was narrowly prevented. As Cham- berlain, one of the court gossips of the day, writes : "Last week the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia . . . court that the lie passed and repassed, and they are [gone out ] to try their fortune, yet we do not hear they are met, so that there is hope they may re- turn safe. In the meantime their ladies forget not their old familiarity, but meet daily to lament that misfortune. The factions in [the Company] are grown so violent as Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against another; and they seldom meet upon the Exchange, or in the streets, but they brabble and quarrel." "
In 1621 the king, having arrived at the end of his purse, seized what he thought a favourable moment for summoning Parliament, but found that body more intractable than ever. The Com- mons busied themselves with attacking monopo- lies and impeaching the Lord Chancellor Bacon for taking bribes. Then they expressed unquali- fied disapproval of the Spanish match, whereupon
1 Brown's Genesis, ii. 1016.
2 Neill's Virginia Company, p. 413.
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the king told them to mind their own business
The king re- and not meddle with his. " A long and buked by angry dispute ensued, which terminated the House of
Commons. in a strong protest, in which the Com- mons declared that their privileges were not the gift of the Crown, but the natural birthright of English subjects, and that matters of public inter- est were within their province." 1 This protest so infuriated the king that he tore it into pieces. and forthwith dissolved Parliament, sending Pym, Southampton, and other leaders to prison. This was in January, 1622.
As more than a hundred members of this fro- ward Parliament were also members of the Com- pany, it is not strange that the king should have watched more eagerly than ever for a chance to attack that corporation. A favourable opportunity was soon offered him. A certain Nathaniel Butler. governor of the Bermuda Islands, was accused of
Nathaniel extorting a large sum of money from
Butler and
his pan -
some
Spaniards who had been ship-
phlet. wrecked there, and very damaging evi- dence was brought against him ; but he seems to have known how to enlist powerful friends on his side. On being summoned to England he went first to Virginia, where his services were in de- mand during the brief but bloody Indian war that followed upon the massacre of 1622. Then after arriving in England he published, in April, 1623, a savage attack upon the London Company, en- titled "The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia." Simultaneously with the publication
1 Bright, History of England, ii. 604.
11.
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of this pamphlet the charges against its author were dropped and were nevermore heard of. Such a coincidence is extremely significant ; it was com- monly believed at the time that Butler bought the suppression of the charges by turning backbiter. His attack upon the Company is so frivolous as plainly to indicate its origin in pure malice. It is interesting as the first of the long series of books about America printed in England which have sorely irritated their American readers. Sixteen of the old Virginia settlers who were at that moment in London answered it with Some charges and answers : convincing force. Some of this Butler's accusations, with the answers of the settlers, may fitly be cited for the side-light they throw upon the state of things in Virginia, as well as upon the peculiar sinuosities of Stuart kingcraft.
"1. I found the plantations generally seated upon meer salt marishes full of infectious bogs and muddy creeks and lakes, and thereby as to malaria ; subjected to all those inconveniencies and diseases which are so commonly found in the most unsound and most unhealthy parts of England, whereof every country and climate hath some.
" Answer: We say that there is no place in- habited but is conveniently habitable. And for the first plantation, which is Kiecoutan, . . . men may enjoy their healths and live as plentifully as in any part of England, . .. yet that there are marishes in some places we acknowledge. . . . As for bogs, we know of none in all the country, and for the rest of the plantations, as Newport's News, Blunt Point, Warriscoyak, Martin's Hun-
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dred . . . and all the plantations right over against James City, and all the plantations above these (which are many) . they are [all] very
fruitful, . . . pleasant, . healthful, and high land, except James City, which yet is as high as Deptford or Ratcliffe.
"2. I found the shores and sides of those parts of the main river where our plantations are settled everywhere so shallow as no boats ean
as to wet- ting one's approach the shores, so that - besides feet ; the difficulty, danger, and spoil of goods in the landing of them - people are forced to a continual wading and wetting of themselves, and that [too] in the prime of winter, when the ships commonly arrive, and thereby get sueh violent surfeits of cold upon cold as seldom leave them until they leave [off ] to live.
" Answer : That generally for the plantations at all times from half flood to half ebb any boat that draws betwixt 3 and 4 foot water may safely come in and land their goods dry on shore without wading. And for further clearing of his false objections, the seamen . . . do at all times deliver the goods they bring to the owners dry on shore, whereby it plainly appears not any of the country people ... are by this means in danger of their lives. And at . . . many plantations below James City, and almost all above, they may at all times land dry.
"3. The new people that are yearly sent over [who] arrive here (for the most part very un- seasonably in winter) find neither guest-house. inn, nor any the like place to shroud themselves in at
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their arrival ; [and] not so much as a stroke is given toward any such charitable work ; [so that] many of [these new comers] as to dying under hedges ; by want hereof are not only seen dying under hedges and in the woods, but being dead lie some of them many days unregarded and unburied.
" Answer : The winter is the most healthful time and season for arrival of new comers. True it is that as yet there is no guest-house or place of entertainment for strangers. But we aver it was a late intent . . . to make a general gathering for the building of such a convenient house, which by this time had been in good forwardness, had it not pleased God to suffer this disaster to fall out by the Indians. But although there be no public guest-house, yet are new comers entertained and lodged and provided for by the governor in private houses. And for any dying in the fields through this defect, and lying unburied, we are altogether ignorant; yet that many [persons] die suddenly by the hand of God. we often see it . . . fall out even in this flourishing and plentiful city [of London] in the midst of our streets. As for dying under hedges, there is no hedge in all Vir- ginia.
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"5. Their houses are generally the worst that ever I saw, the meanest cottages in England being every way equal (if not superior ) with as to the houses, and their situations. the most of the best. And besides, so improvidently and scatteringly are they seated one from another as partly by their dis- tance but especially by the interposition of creeks
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and swamps . . . they offer all advantages to their savage enemies. . . .
" Answer: The houses . . . were . . . built for use and not for ornament, and are so far from being so mean as they are reported that throughout [England] labouring men's houses . . . are in no wise generally for goodness to be compared unto them. And for the houses of men of better rank and quality, they are so much better and [so] con- venient that no man of quality without blushing can make exception against them. [As] for the creeks and swamps, every man . . . that cannot go by land hath either a boat or a canoe for the conveying and speedy passage to his neighbour's house. . . . " 1
So go the charges and the answers. It is un- necessary to cite any further. The animus of Captain Butler's pamphlet is sufficiently apparent. He wished to make it appear that things were wretchedly managed in Virginia, and that there was but a meagre and contemptible result to show for all the treasure that had been spent and all the lives that had been lost. Whatever could weaken people's faith in the colony, check emigra- tion, deter subscriptions, and in any way Object of the charges. embarrass the Company, he did not fail to bring forward. Not only were the sites un- healthy and the houses mean, but the fortifications were neglected, plantations were abandoned. the kine and poultry were destroyed by Indians, the assembly enacted laws wilfully divergent from the laws of England, and speculators kept engross-
1 Neill's Virginia Company, pp. 395-401.
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ing wheat and maize and selling them at famine prices ; so said Butler, and knowing how effective a bold sweeping lie is sure to be, in spite of prompt and abundant refutation, he ended by declaring that not less than 10,000 persons had been sent out to Virginia, of whom "through the afore- named abuses and neglects " not more than 2,000 still remained alive. Therefore, he added, unless the dishonest practices of the Company in London and the wretched bungling of its officials in Vir- ginia be speedily redressed " by some divine and supreme hand, . . . instead of a Plantation it will shortly get the name of a slaughter house, and [will] justly become both odious to ourselves and contemptible to all the world."
All these allegations were either denied or sat- isfactorily explained by the sixteen settlers then in London, and their sixteen affidavits The assem- bly denies the allega- tions. were duly sworn to before a notary pub- lic. Some months afterward, Captain Butler's pamphlet was laid before the assembly of Virginia and elaborately refuted. Nothing can be clearer than the fact that the sympathies of the people in Virginia were entirely on the side of the Company under its present management, and no fact could be more honourable to the Company. From first to last the proceedings now to be re- lated were watched in Virginia with intense anx- iety and fierce indignation.
On Thursday of Holy Week, 1623, a formal complaint against the Company, embodying such charges as those I have here recounted, was laid before the Privy Council, and the Lord Treasurer
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Cranfield, better known as Earl of Middlesex, sent
An answer notice of it to Nicholas Ferrar, with the
demanded of demand that a complete answer to every Ferrar. particular should be returned by the next Monday afternoon. Ferrar protested against such unseemly haste, but the Lord Treasurer was inex- orable. Then the young man called together as many of the Company as he could find at an hour's notice that afternoon; they met in his mother's parlour, and he read aloud the com- plaint, which took three hours. Then Lord Cav- endish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar were appointed a committee to prepare the answer. "These three," says our chronicle, " made it mid- night ere they parted ; they ate no set meals : they slept not two hours all Thursday and Friday nights ; they met to admire each other's labours on Saturday night, and sat in judgment on the whole till five o'clock on Sunday morning ; then they divided it equally among six nimble scribes, and went to bed themselves, as it was high time for them. The transcribers finished by five o'clock Monday morning; the Company met at six to review their labours, and by two in the afternoon the answer was presented at the Council Board." 1 This answer was a masterpiece of eogency. It proved the baselessness of the charges. Either they were complete falsehoods, or they related to disasters directly connected with the In- A cogent
answer is dian massacre, which was not due to any
returned. provocation on the part of the whites, or else they showed the effects of mismanagement in 1 Carter's Ferrar. p. 71.
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Sir Thomas Smith's time, especially under the tyrannical administration of Argall from which the colony had not yet fully recovered. In short, such of the charges as really bore against the Company were successfully shown up as affecting its old government under Smith and Warwick, and not its new government under Sandys and Southampton. The latter was cleared of every calumny, and its absolute integrity and vast effi- ciency were fully established. Such, at least, is the decisive verdict of history, but the lords of the Privy Council were not willing to accept such a result. It amounted almost to an impeachment of the court party, and it made them angry. So the Earl of Warwick succeeded in obtaining an order that Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Rev. Nicholas Ferrar, - as " chief actors in inditing and penning . an impertinent declaration con-
taining bitter invectives and aspersions " should be confined to their own houses until further notice.1 The object of this was to prevent them from conferring with each other. Further hostile inquiries were prosecuted, and an attempt was made to detach Ferrar from his associates. One day, as he was answering some queries before the Privy Council, one of the lords handed him an important official letter to the governor of Vir- ginia. " Who draws up such papers ?" asked the lord. "The Company," replied Ferrar modestly. "No, no!" interrupted another lord, " we know your style; these papers are all yours, and they are masterpieces." The letter was shown to the 1 Neill's Virginia Company, p. 411.
216 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
king, who was pleased to observe, "Verily, the young man hath much worth in him." To detach him from the Company the king offered to make him elerk of the Privy Council or ambas- Attempts to corrupt Fer- sador to the court of Savoy. Both were rar.
fine offers for a man only in his thirtieth year, but Ferrar was not to be tempted. Then an effort was made to induce him to advise the Com- pany to surrender its charter, but he refused with some scorn. A great number of the nobility and gentry, he said, besides merchants and artisans of the city of London, relying upon the royal charter, had engaged in a noble enterprise, one of the most honourable that England had ever undertaken ; many planters in Virginia had risked their estates and lives in it ; the Lord had prospered their en- deavours, and now no danger threatened the col- ony save the malice of its enemies ; as for himself he was not going to abuse his trust by deserting it.
While these things were going on, the king appointed a board of commissioners to investigate the affairs of Virginia, and the spirit in which they were appointed is sufficiently revealed by the fact that they all belonged to the disaffected faction in the Company and held their meetings at the house of Sir Thomas Smith. One of their number was A board of the vindictive and unscrupulous ex-gov- commission- ernor, Sir Samuel Argall. - which was ers. much like setting the wolf to investigate
the dogs. Some of these commissioners went out to Virginia and tried to entrap the assembly into asking for a new charter. It was all in vain. Governor, council, and House of Burgesses agreed
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that they were perfectly satisfied with the present state of things and only wanted to be let alone. Not a morsel of evidence adverse to the present management of the Company could be obtained from any quarter. On the contrary, the assembly sent to England an eloquent appeal, afterward entitled " The Tragical Declaration of the Vir- ginia Assembly," in which the early sufferings of the colony and its recent prosperity were passed in review ; the document conelnded with an expres- sion rather more forcible than one is accustomed to find in decorons and formal state papers. After describing the kind of management under which such creatures as Argall could flourish, the docu- ment goes on to say, " Rather [than] be reduced to live under the like goverment, we desire his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over with authority to hang us."
Long before this appeal reached England, the final assault upon the Company had begun. In July, 1623, the attorney-general reported Attorney- general's opinion ; a gro rar- ranto served. his opinion that it was advisable for the king to take the government of Virginia into his own hands. In October an order of the Privy Council announced that this was to be done. The Company's charter was to be re- scinded, and its deputed powers of sovereignty were to be resumed by the king. This meant that the king would thereafter appoint the council for Virginia sitting in London. He would also ap- point the governor of Virginia with his colonial council. Such a transformation would leave the joint-stock company in existence, but only as a
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This memorable doctrine was just that which after- wards found favour with the American colonists for very different reasons from those which recom- mended it to King James. The Americans took this view because they were not represented in Parliament, and intended with their colonial as- semblies to hold the crown officials, the royal gov- ernors, in check just as Parliament curbed the Crown. By the middle of the eighteenth century this had come to be the generally accepted Ameri- can doctrine; it is interesting to see it asserted early in the seventeenth by the Crown itself, and in the interests of absolutism.
In 1624 Parliament was not in good condition for quarrelling with the king upon too many issues at once. So it acquiesced, not without some grumbling, in the royal prohibition, Attorney- general's argument. and the petition of the Virginia Com- pany was laid upon the table. A few weeks later the case on the quo warranto was argued before the court of King's Bench. The attorney-general's argument against the charter was truly ingenious. That charter allowed the Company to carry the king's subjects across the ocean to Virginia; if such a privilege were to be exercised without limi- tation, it might end in conveying all the king's subjects to America, leaving Great Britain a howling wilderness ! Such a privilege was too great to be bestowed upon any corporate body, and therefore the charter ought to be The charter annulled, June 16, 1024. annulled. Such logic was irresistible, and on the 16th of June the chief justice declared " that the Patent or Charter of the Com-
220 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
pany of English Merchants trading to Virginia, and pretending to exercise a power and author- ity over his Majesty's good subjects there, should be thenceforth null and void." Next day Thomas Wentworth, afterward Earl of Strafford, gave vent to his glee in a private letter: "Methinks. I imagine the Quaternity before this have had a meeting of comfort and consolation, stirring up each other to bear it courageously, and Sir Edwin Sandys in the midst of them sadly sighing forth, Oh, the burden of Virginia." By the Quaternity he meant Southampton. Sandys, Ferrar, and Cav- endish. On the 26th of June the Privy Council ordered Nicholas Ferrar to bring all the books and papers of the late Company and hand them over to its custody.
Ferrar could not disobey the order, but he had made up his mind that the records of the Com- pany must be preserved, for its justifica-
Ferrar has
the records tion in the eyes of posterity. As soon copied.
as he saw that the day of doom was at hand he had copies made. One of Ferrar's dear- est friends was the delightful poet, George Her- bert, a young man of his own age, whose widowed mother had married Sir John Danvers, a promi- nent member of the Company. They lived in a fine old house in Chelsea. that had once been part of the home of Sir Thomas More. There Nicho- las Ferrar passed many a pleasant evening with George Herbert and his eccentric and skeptical brother, afterward Lord Herbert of Cherbury : and if ever their talk grew a bit too earnest and warm, we can faney it mellowed again as that
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other sweet poet, Dr. Donne, dropped in, with gentle Izaak Walton, as used often to, happen. In that house of friends. Ferrar had a clerk locked up with the records until they were all copied, everything relating to the administrations of San- dys and Southampton, from the election of the former, in April, 1619, down to June 7, 1624. The copy was then carefully compared with the original documents, and its perfect accuracy duly attested by the Company's secretary, Edward Col- lingwood. Sir John Danvers then carried the manuscript to the Earl of Southampton, who ex- claimed, as he threw his arms about his neck, " God bless you, Danvers! I shall keep this with my title-deeds at Tichfield; it is the evidence of my honour, and I prize it more than the evidence of my lands." About four months afterward Southampton died.
Forty-three years History of a afterward, in 1667, his son and successor manuscript.
passed away, and then this precious manuscript was bought from the executors by William Byrd, of Virginia, father of the famous historian and antiquary. From the Byrd library it passed into the hands of William Stith, president of William and Mary College, who used it in writing his His- tory of Virginia, published at Williamsburg in 1747, one of the most admirable of American his- torieal works. From Stith's hands the mann- script passed to his kinsman, Peyton Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, and after his death in 1775, Thomas Jefferson bought it. In 1814 ex-president Jefferson sold his library to the United States, and this manuscript is now
222 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
in the Library of Congress, 741 folio pages bound in two volumes. As for the original documents, they are nowhere to be found among British records ; and when we recolleet how welcome their destruction must have been to Sir Thomas Smith, to the Earl of Warwick, and to James I., we can- not help feeling that the chest of the Privy Coun- cil was not altogether a safe place in which to keep them.
It is to the copy preserved through the careful forethought of Nicholas Ferrar that we owe our knowledge of one of the most interesting chapters in early American history. In the development of Virginia the overthrow of the great London Company was an event of cardinal importance. For the moment it was quite naturally bewailed in Virginia as a direful calamity ; but, as we shall presently see, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Stuart despotism gained not one of its ends, except the momentary gratification of spleen, and self-government in Virginia, which seemed in peril, went on to take root more deeply and strongly than before.
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