A SEMINARY OF SEDITION.

Few episodes in English history are more curious than the founding of Virginia. In the course of the mightiest conflict the world had witnessed between the powers of despotism 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 strategic points on the North American coast, to aid the operations 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 political influence, and the maintenance of her naval advantages. 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 industrial 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 meets the usual fate, succumbs to famine, and retires from the scene. The other barely escapes a similar fate, but is kept alive by the energy and sagacity and good fortune of one extraordinary 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 clergymen, turn to and remodel the London Company into a truly great commercial corporation with an effective government and one of London's foremost 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. All this sort of work is a novel experiment, mistakes are at first made in plenty; neither the ends to be obtained nor the methods of obtaining 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 demand for tobacco in England makes its cultivation an abundant and steady source of wealth, the colonists increase in numbers and are improved in quality. Meanwhile as the interest felt by the shareholders becomes more lively, the Company acquires 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 Virginia colony has been, like the contemporary French colony in Canada and like all the Spanish 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 Company gives to Virginia a free representative government, 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-mediÆval 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 beauty and grandeur as the purpose of Infinite Wisdom reveals itself in its cosmic process, slowly but inexorably, hasting not but resting not, heedless of the clashing aims and discordant cries of short-sighted mortals, sweeping their tiny efforts into its majestic current, and making all contribute to the fulfilment of God's will.

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From the very outset the planting of Virginia had been watched with wrath and chagrin by the Spanish court. Within the last few years a Virginian scholar, Alexander Brown, has collected and published a large number of manuscript letters and other documents preserved in the Spanish archives at Simancas, which serve to illustrate the situation in detail. Very little of importance happened in London that the ambassador 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 England was threatened, and if it had broken out Virginia would have been one of the first points 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 one of the ablest of Spanish diplomats, Count Gondomar (to give him at once 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 completely 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 Englishmen, and the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign was impaired.

To Gondomar the king was in the habit of confiding his grievances, and in 1614, after his angry dissolution of Parliament, he said to him one day: "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 having thus carelessly admitted his own lack of omnipotence, whereupon the wily 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.[98] 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 poison into the king's ear. The government of colonies, he said, is work fit only for monarchs, and cannot safely be entrusted to a roomful of gabbling subjects; beware of such meetings; you will find them but "a seminary to a seditious Parliament." Before James had profited by these warnings, however, the case of Sir Walter Raleigh came up to absorb his attention. 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 complicity 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; 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 Walter'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 History of the World which is one of the glories of English prose literature. In 1616, at the intercession 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 what is now Venezuela. In his attempt to dispense with parliaments James was at his wits' end for money, and he thought something might be got by sending Raleigh back to take possession of the place. It is true that Spain claimed that country, but so did James on the strength of Raleigh's own discoveries, and if any complication should arise there were ways of crawling out. Raleigh had misgivings about starting on such an adventure without first obtaining a pardon in set form; but Sir Francis Bacon is said to have assured him that the king, having under the privy seal made him admiral 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 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 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 command, 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.[99] Since the expedition was defeated by the treachery of his own sovereign, nothing was left for the stricken admiral 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 Raleigh should be publicly executed, either in London 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 Guiana. Without conceding this claim there was nothing for which to punish him. Accordingly James in this year 1618 revived the 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.[100]

The silly king gained nothing by his vile treachery. 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,[101] 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 whereof the election of Sir Edwin Sandys over Sir Thomas Smith, aided though it had been by a private quarrel, was one chief symptom. That election revealed the alarming growth of hostility in the city of London to the king's pretensions and to the court party.[102] James had said just before the election, "Choose the Devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys." From that time forth the king's hostility to 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 Company to reËlect Sandys, with whose management they were more than pleased. Nearly 500 members were present at the meeting. It was the custom 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 proceedings. The king, said their spokesman, positively forbade the election of Sir Edwin 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 silence more eloquent than words, a profound silence that might be felt. After some minutes came murmurs and wrathful ejaculations, among which such expressions as "tyranny" and "invasion of chartered rights" could be plainly heard. The motion was made that the king's messengers should leave the room while the situation was discussed. "No," said the Earl of Southampton, "let them stay and hear what is said." This motion prevailed. Then Sir Lawrence Hyde moved that the charter be read, and his motion 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 Company. His Majesty seems to labour under some misunderstanding, and I doubt not these gentlemen 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 emissaries 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 restrict the Company's choice to the names he had mentioned. Whether this concession was reported back to the meeting, we are not informed, but probably it was. When the meeting was called to order, Sir Robert Phillips, who was sitting near Sandys, got up and announced that that gentleman wished to withdraw 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 and the choice signified by acclamation; and then with thundering shouts of "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 Nicholas Ferrar, the deputy-treasurer. The name of this young man calls for more than a passing mention. Better known in ecclesiastical than 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 beautiful. 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 house in St. Osyth's Lane—now known as Size Lane, near the Poultry—that the weekly meetings 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 extensive 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 Galahad fit to have found the Holy Grail. His scholarship 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 something 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 Laud. At the same time his career is a living refutation of the common notion that there is a necessary connection between the religion of Laud and the politics 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 coÖperation of the tendencies represented respectively in the Renaissance and in the Reformation, tendencies which the general want of intelligence and moral soundness 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, strengthening 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 founding of that monastic home at Little Gidding, where study and charitable deeds 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 mankind can never afford to let it fade and die.

This Protestant saint, withal, was no vague dreamer, but showed in action the practical sagacity that came by inheritance from London's best stock of bold and thrifty citizens. As one of the directing minds of a commercial corporation, he showed himself equal to every occasion that arose. He is identified with the last days of the London Company, and his family archives preserve the record of its downfall. It is thence that we get the account of the election of Southampton and many other interesting scenes and important facts that would otherwise have passed into oblivion.

After Southampton's election the king's hostility 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 themselves to become disloyal to the Company. Probably they would have expressed 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 members 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 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.[103] On one occasion a duel between the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cavendish, eldest son of the first Earl of Devonshire, was narrowly prevented. As Chamberlain, 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 return 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."[104]

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 Commons busied themselves with attacking monopolies and impeaching the Lord Chancellor Bacon for taking bribes. Then they expressed unqualified disapproval of the Spanish match, whereupon the king told them to mind their own business and not meddle with his. "A long and angry dispute ensued, which terminated in a strong protest, in which the Commons declared that their privileges were not the gift of the Crown, but the natural birthright of English subjects, and that matters of public interest were within their province."[105] 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 froward Parliament were also members of the Company, 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 extorting a large sum of money from some Spaniards who had been shipwrecked there, and very damaging evidence 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 demand 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, entitled "The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia." Simultaneously with the publication of this pamphlet the charges against its author were dropped and were nevermore heard of. Such a coincidence is extremely significant; it was commonly 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 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 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 inhabited but is conveniently habitable. And for the first plantation, which is Kiccoutan, ... 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 Hundred ... 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 can approach the shores, so that—besides 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 such 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 unseasonably in winter) find neither guest-house, inn, nor any the like place to shroud themselves in at their arrival; [and] not so much as a stroke is given toward any such charitable work; [so that] many of [these new comers] 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 Virginia.

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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 the most of the best. And besides, so improvidently and scatteringly are they seated one from another as partly by their distance but especially by the interposition of creeks 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] convenient 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...."[106]

So go the charges and the answers. It is unnecessary 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 emigration, deter subscriptions, and in any way embarrass the Company, he did not fail to bring forward. Not only were the sites unhealthy 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 engrossing 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 aforenamed 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 Virginia 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 satisfactorily explained by the sixteen settlers then in London, and their sixteen affidavits were duly sworn to before a notary public. 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 related were watched in Virginia with intense anxiety 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 Cranfield, better known as Earl of Middlesex, sent notice of it to Nicholas Ferrar, with the demand that a complete answer to every particular should be returned by the next Monday afternoon. Ferrar protested against such unseemly haste, but the Lord Treasurer was inexorable. 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 complaint, which took three hours. Then Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar were appointed a committee to prepare the answer. "These three," says our chronicle, "made it midnight 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."[107]

This answer was a masterpiece of cogency. It proved the baselessness of the charges. Either they were complete falsehoods, or they related to disasters directly connected with the Indian massacre, which was not due to any provocation on the part of the whites, or else they showed the effects of mismanagement in 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 efficiency 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 containing bitter invectives and aspersions" should be confined to their own houses until further notice.[108] 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 Virginia. "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 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 clerk of the Privy Council or ambassador to the court of Savoy. Both were 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 Company 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 endeavours, and now no danger threatened the colony 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 the vindictive and unscrupulous ex-governor, Sir Samuel Argall,—which was 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 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 Virginia Assembly," in which the early sufferings of the colony and its recent prosperity were passed in review; the document concluded with an expression rather more forcible than one is accustomed to find in decorous and formal state papers. After describing the kind of management under which such creatures as Argall could flourish, the document goes on to say, "Rather [than] be reduced to live under the like government, 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 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 rescinded, 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 appoint the governor of Virginia with his colonial council. Such a transformation would leave the joint-stock company in existence, but only as a body of traders without ascertained rights or privileges and entirely dependent upon royal favour. No settled policy could thereafter be pursued, and under the circumstances the change was a deathblow to the Company. Southampton and Ferrar refused to surrender, and referred the question to their next quarter-sessions to be held in November. Then the king brought suit against the Company in the court of King's Bench, and a writ of quo warranto was served.

Then came the most interesting moment of all. The only hope of the Company lay in an appeal to Parliament, and that last card was boldly played. Early in 1624 the Spanish match, to secure which the miserable king had for ten years basely truckled and licked the hand of England's bitterest enemies, was finally broken off. War with Spain was at hand; a new policy, of helping the German Protestants, and marrying Baby Charles to a French princess, was to be considered; and much money was needed. So James reluctantly issued writs for an election, and the new Parliament, containing Sandys and Ferrar, with many other members of the Virginia Company, met in February. In April a petition was presented in behalf of the Virginia Company, and a committee had been appointed to consider it, when the Speaker read a message from the king, forbidding Parliament to meddle with the matter. He distinctly announced the doctrine that the government of colonies was the business of king and his Privy Council, and that Parliament had nothing to do with it. This memorable doctrine was just that which afterwards found favour with the American colonists for very different reasons from those which recommended it to King James. The Americans took this view because they were not represented in Parliament, and intended with their colonial assemblies to hold the crown officials, the royal governors, in check just as Parliament curbed the Crown. By the middle of the eighteenth century this had come to be the generally accepted American 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, and the petition of the Virginia Company 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 limitation, 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 annulled. Such logic was irresistible, and on the 16th of June the chief justice declared "that the Patent or Charter of the Company of English Merchants trading to Virginia, and pretending to exercise a power and authority 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 Cavendish. 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 Company must be preserved, for its justification in the eyes of posterity. As soon as he saw that the day of doom was at hand he had copies made. One of Ferrar's dearest friends was the delightful poet, George Herbert, a young man of his own age, whose widowed mother had married Sir John Danvers, a prominent 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 Nicholas 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 fancy it mellowed again as that 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 Sandys 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 Collingwood. Sir John Danvers then carried the manuscript to the Earl of Southampton, who exclaimed, 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 afterward, in 1667, his son and successor 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 History of Virginia, published at Williamsburg in 1747, one of the most admirable of American historical works. From Stith's hands the manuscript 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 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 recollect how welcome their destruction must have been to Sir Thomas Smith, to the Earl of Warwick, and to James I., we cannot help feeling that the chest of the Privy Council 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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