THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.

From the busy streets of London, from the strife in Parliament and the Privy Council, we must turn once more to the American wilderness and observe what progress had been made in Virginia during the seventeen years of its government by a great joint-stock company. But for a correct appreciation of the situation we must qualify and limit this period of seventeen years. The terrible experience of the first three years left the colony at the point of death, and it was not until the administration of Sir Thomas Dale that any considerable expansion beyond Jamestown began. The progress visible in 1624 was mostly an affair of ten years' duration, dating from the abolition of communism and the beginnings of tobacco culture. By far the greater part of this progress had been achieved within the last five years, since the establishment of self-government and the greater part played by family life. In 1624 the colony of Virginia extended from the mouth of James River up nearly as far as the site of Richmond, with plantations on both banks; and it spread over the peninsula between the James and the broad stream next to the north of it, which at that time was called the Charles, but since 1642 has been known as the York River. There were also a few settlements on the Accomac peninsula east of Chesapeake Bay. It would be hard to find elsewhere upon the North American coast any region where the land is so generally and easily penetrable by streams that can be navigated. The country known as "tidewater Virginia" is a kind of sylvan Venice. Into the depths of the shaggy woodland for many miles on either side the great bay the salt tide ebbs and flows. One can go surprisingly far inland on sea-faring craft, while with a boat there are but few plantations on the old York peninsula to which one cannot approach very near. In the absence of good roads this ubiquity of navigable water was a great convenience, but doubtless the very convenience of it may have delayed the arduous work of breaking good land-routes through the wilderness, and thus have tended to maintain the partial isolation of the planters' estates, to which so many characteristic features of life in Old Virginia may be traced.

If in 1624 we had gone up stream to Werowocomoco, where Smith had broken the ice with his barge fifteen years before, we should probably have found very little of its strange barbaric life remaining. The first backward step of the Indian before the encroaching progress of Englishmen had been taken. The frontier was fast receding to the Pamunkey region along the line joining the site of West Point with that of Cold Harbor; and from that time forward a perpetually receding frontier of barbarism was to be one of the most profoundly and variously significant factors in the life of English-speaking America until the census of 1890 should announce that such a frontier could no longer be definitely located. In the last year of James I. the grim Opekankano and his warriors still held the Pamunkey River; in that neighbourhood and to the north of it one might have seen symptoms of the wild frontier life of the white hunter and trapper. Returning thence to the great bay, the plantation called Dale's Gift on the Accomac shore would have little about it that need detain us, and so sweeping across from Cape Charles to Point Comfort, we should come to Elizabeth City, named for King James's daughter Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia. The only plantation here, standing like a sentinel to guard the principal avenue into the colony, bears the name of the last treasurer of the Company, curtailed into Hampton. The next borough bears the name of Southampton's enemy, the Earl of Warwick, and opposite are the plantations on Warrasqueak Bay. Passing Jamestown, we arrive at the mouth of the Chickahominy, above which lies an extensive territory known as Charles City, with the plantations of Wyanoke and Westover, while over on the south side of the James the settlements known as Martin Brandon, Flowerdieu Hundred, and Bermuda successively come into sight and disappear. Then we sail around the City of Henricus, and passing the ruins of Falling Creek, destroyed by the Indians, we come at length to the charming place that Smith called Nonesuch. Here, a few miles below the spot where Richmond is in future to stand, we reach once more the frontier. Beyond are endless stretches of tangled and mysterious woods through which the sturdy Newport once vainly tried to find his way to some stream flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Here we may turn our prow and make our way down to Jamestown, where the House of Burgesses is in session.

It is called a House of Burgesses because its members are regarded as the representatives of boroughs, and such a name sounds queer as applied to little areas of scattered farms in the forest. Still more strange is the epithet "city" for tracts of woodland several miles in extent, and containing half a dozen widely isolated plantations. The apparent absurdity is emphasized on the modern map, where such names as Charles City and James City are simply names of counties. How came such names first to be used in such senses? One's mind naturally reverts to what goes on to-day in the Far West, where geographical names, like doubtful promissory notes, must usually be taken with heavy discount for an uncertain future, where in every such appellation there lurks the hope of a boom, and any collection of three or four log-cabins, with a saw-mill and whiskey-shop, surrounded by a dozen acres of blackened tree-stumps, may forthwith appear in the Postal Guide under some such title as Chain Lightning City. In oldest Virginia we may perhaps see marks of such a spirit of buoyant confidence in such names as Charles City or the City of Henricus. No doubt Sir Thomas Dale, when he fortified the little Dutch Gap peninsula and marked out its streets, believed himself to be founding a true city with urban destinies awaiting it. This explanation, however, does not cover the whole case. Whatever the title of each individual settlement in oldest Virginia,—whether plantation, or hundred, or city,—all were alike conceived, for legal and political purposes, as equivalent to boroughs, although they were not thus designated. Now the primary meaning of the word "borough" is "fortress," and in early English usage a borough was a small and thickly peopled hundred surrounded by a durable wall. A "hundred" was a small aggregation of townships united by a common responsibility for the good behaviour of its people; it was therefore the smallest area for the administration of justice, the smallest social community which possessed a court. Ordinarily the hundred was a rural community, but that special compact and fortified form of it known as the borough retained all the legal features of the ordinary hundred; it had its own court, and was responsible for its own malefactors and vagrants. In old English boroughs the responsible men—those who owned property, and paid taxes, and chose representatives—were the burgesses. Bearing always in mind this equivalence between the borough and the hundred, we may note further that in early times the hundred was a unit for military purposes; it was about such a community as could furnish to the general levy a company of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit of representation in the ancient English shire-moot or county court. Now in oldest Virginia the colonial assembly, when instituted in 1619, the earliest legislature of civilized men in the western hemisphere, was patterned after the old English county court, and it was natural that its units should be conceived as hundreds and in some instances called so. Moreover, there are indications that at times the hundred was regarded as a military division, and also as the smallest area for the administration of justice, as in the law passed in 1624 providing that Charles City and Elizabeth City should hold monthly courts.[109] Whatever names the early settlers of Virginia gave to their settlements individually, they seem to have regarded them all in the legal light of hundreds, and as they were familiar with the practical equivalence of the borough as a unit for judicial and representative purposes, it was natural that when they came to choose a general assembly they should speak of its members as if they were representatives of boroughs. They were familiar with burgesses in England, but the designations "hundred-men" and "hundred-elders" had become obsolete.

Resuming our pilgrimage through the Virginia of 1624, we find no walls of massive masonry with frowning turrets encompassing these rudimentary boroughs, but at the most exposed points we meet with stout wooden blockhouses and here and there a row of palisades. At some places there are wharves for the convenient shipping of tobacco, but now and then, if the tide is not just right, we may be in danger of wetting our feet in going ashore, about which that ill-disposed Captain Butler has lately made so much fuss. The wooden frame houses, having been built without regard to Æsthetic effects, with beams here and there roughly hewn and boards not always smoothly planed, are not so attractive in outward appearance as they might be, but they are roomy and well-aired, and the settlers already point to them with some degree of pride as more comfortable than the houses of labouring men in England. These houses usually stand at wide intervals, and nowhere, perhaps, except at Henricus and Jamestown, would one see them clustering in a village with streets. Here and there one might come across a handsomer and more finished mansion, like an English manor house, with cabins for servants and farm buildings at some distance. Of negroes scarcely any are to be seen, only twenty-two all told, in this population of perhaps 4,000 souls. Cheap labour is supplied by white servants, bound to their masters by indentures for some such term as six or seven years; they are to some extent a shiftless and degraded set of creatures gathered from the slums and jails of English seaport towns, but many of them are of a better sort. Of red men, since the dreadful massacre of two years ago, one sees but few; they have been driven off to the frontier, the alliance cemented by the marriage of Pocahontas is at an end, and no more can white men be called Powhatans. On this point the statute book speaks in no uncertain tones: "Ffor the Indians we hould them our irrecosileable enimies," and it is thought fit that if any of them be found molesting cattle or lurking about any plantation, "then the commander shall have power by virtue of this act to rayse a sufficient partie and fall out uppon them, and persecute them as he shall finde occasion."[110]

In the plantations, thus freed from the presence of Indians, European domestic animals have become plenty. Horses, indeed, are not yet so much in demand as boats and canoes, but oxen draw the plough, the cows are milked night and morning, sheep and goats browse here and there, pigs and chickens are innumerable. Pigeons coo from the eves, and occasionally one comes upon a row of murmurous bee-hives. The broad clearings are mostly covered with the cabbage-like tobacco plant, but there are also many fields of waving wheat and barley, and many more of the tasselled Indian corn. John Smith's scheme for manufacturing glass and soap has not yet been abandoned; the few workmen from Poland, brought here by him, have remained, or else others have come in place of them, for we find the House of Burgesses passing a statute admitting them to the franchise and other privileges of English citizenship, because of their value to the commonwealth in these branches of industry. Skilled workmen of another sort have been sent over by Nicholas Ferrar from France, for since mulberries grow in Virginia it has been thought that silk-worms might be profitably raised here, but such hopes are not destined to be realized.

Such was the outward aspect of things along the banks of the James River in the year when, amid general grief and forebodings, the London Company was dissolved; and such it continued to be for many a year to come, save that the cultivated area increased in extent and the settlers in number, and that in spite of divers efforts to check it, the raising of tobacco encroached more and more upon all other forms of industry, tending to crush them out of existence, while at the same time the plantations grew larger and the demand for cheap labour was vastly increased. For some time the cultivation of Indian corn assumed considerable proportions, so that not only was there enough for home consumption, but in 1634 more than ten thousand bushels were exported to Winthrop's new colony on Massachusetts Bay. Nevertheless the encroachments of tobacco went on without cessation, until the features of social life in old Virginia came to be those of a wealthy and powerful community economically based upon one single form of agricultural industry.

In the Virginia of 1624 one could not look for any highly developed forms of social recreation, or for means of education or literary attainment. Various episodes of farm work, such as the harvesting of the crops, or now and then the raising of the frame of a house or barn, seem to have been occasions for a gathering of neighbours with some sort of merrymaking, very much as in other primitive rural communities. Among the leading colonists were men of university education who brought with them literary tastes, and in their houses might have been found ponderous tomes of controversial theology, as well as those little thin quarto tracts of political discussion that nowadays often fetch such fabulous prices. Captain John Smith was spending his last years quietly in England, making maps and writing or editing books. His "General History of Virginia," published in 1624, can hardly fail to have been read with interest in the colony; and the same ship that brought it may well have brought the first folio edition of Shakespeare's complete works, which came from the press in the preceding year. Literary production of a certain sort went on in the colony. Such tracts as Ralph Hamor's "True Discourse" and Whitaker's "Good News from Virginia," though books of rare interest and value, will perhaps hardly come under the category of pure literature. But the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by George Sandys, youngest brother of Sir Edwin, has been well known and admired by scholars from that time to our own. George Sandys came to Virginia in 1621 as treasurer of the colony, fortified with some rather dull verses from the poet laureate, Michael Drayton:—

On the bank of James River the worthy George entreated the Muses with success and wrote the greater part of his poetical version, which was published at London in 1626.

But the Muses could not be enticed to stay long in Virginia without some provision for higher education there, and this was well understood by Sir Edwin Sandys and the enlightened gentlemen who supported him. In 1621 the Company resolved that funds should be appropriated "for the erecting of a public free school ... for the education of children and grounding of them in the principles of religion. Civility of life and humane learning," said the committee's report, "seemed to carry with it the greatest weight and highest consequence unto the plantations as that whereof both Church and Commonwealth take their original foundation and happy estate, this being also like[ly] to prove a work most acceptable unto the planters, through want whereof they have been hitherto constrained to their great costs to send their children from thence hither to be taught." Rev. Patrick Copeland, a missionary returning from the East Indies, raised £70 toward the endowment of this school, and was busily engaged in doing more for it. It was accordingly called the East India School, it was to be established in Charles City, and its courses of study were to be preparatory to those of a university which was to be set up in the city of Henricus. Great interest was felt in this university. Like Harvard College, founded somewhat later, it was designed not only for the education of white youths but also for civilizing and missionary work among the Indians. The Bishop of London raised by subscription £1,000 for the enterprise; one anonymous benefactor gave a silver communion service; another, who signed himself "Dust and Ashes," sent £550, and promised, after certain progress should have been made, to add £450 more; this man was afterward discovered to be a member of the Company, named Gabriel Barber. The elder Nicholas Ferrar left £300 in his will, and various contributions were added by his sons. A tract of land in Henricus was appropriated for the site of the college, and George Thorpe was sent out to be its rector, or, as we should say, its president. But Thorpe, as well as others who were interested in the enterprise, perished in the Indian massacre of 1622. It seems that Copeland was about to be sent to take his place, and the enterprise was about to be vigorously pushed on by Ferrar and his friends, when the overthrow of the Company took away all control over Virginian affairs from the people most interested in this work. So the scheme for a college remained in a state of suspended vitality for seventy years, until Dr. Blair revived it in 1692, and established it in the town of Williamsburg.

Everybody knows that the college of William and Mary is the oldest in the United States, after Harvard. It is not so generally known that the former was planned and all but established in 1622, eight years before Winthrop and his followers came to Massachusetts Bay. It is a just and wholesome pride that New England people feel in recalling the circumstances under which Harvard College was founded, in a little colony but six years of age, still struggling against the perils of the wilderness and the enmity of its sovereign. Such an event is quite properly cited in illustration of the lofty aims and intelligent foresight of the founders of Massachusetts. But it should not be forgotten that aims equally lofty and foresight equally intelligent were shown by the men who from 1619 to 1624 controlled the affairs of Virginia. One of the noblest features in the great Puritan movement was its zeal for education, elementary education for everybody and higher education for all who could avail themselves of it. It is important to remember that this zeal for education, as well as the zeal for political liberty, was not confined to the Puritans. Within the established Church of England and never feeling a desire to leave it, were eminent men who to the political principles of Pym joined a faith in education as strong as Locke's. The general temper of these men, of whom Richard Hooker was the illustrious master, was broadly tolerant. Sir Edwin Sandys was friendly to the Leyden Pilgrims, and it was under his administration that the Virginia Company granted them the patent under which they would have founded their colony on the coast of New Jersey or Delaware, had not foul weather driven the Mayflower to Cape Cod. It was Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar that were most energetic in the attempt to found a college in Virginia, and there were some curious points of resemblance between their situation in 1622 and the situation of Winthrop and his friends while they were laying the foundations of Harvard College. In 1622, while James I. was plotting the overthrow of the London Company, the horrors of Indian massacre, as sudden as lightning from a cloudless sky, fell upon the people of Virginia. In 1637 the people of Massachusetts had the Pequot war on their hands, and Charles I. was plotting the overthrow of the Company of Massachusetts Bay, against whose charter he was on the point of issuing a writ of quo warranto, when in St. Giles's church at Edinburgh one Sunday old Jenny Geddes threw her camp-stool at the bishop's head, and in the ensuing turmoil American affairs were quite forgotten.

The comparison reminds us that the Company of Massachusetts Bay knew how to profit by the fate of its great predecessor, the London Company for Virginia. In the summer of 1629, when things were looking very dark in England, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company held a meeting at Cambridge and decided to carry their company, with its charter, across the ocean to New England, where they might work out their purposes without so much danger from royal interference. This transfer of the Company to America was the most fundamental circumstance in the early history of New England. The mere physical fact of distance transformed the commercial company into a self-governing republic, which for more than fifty years managed its own affairs in almost entire independence of the British government. Difficulty of access and infrequency of communication were the safeguards of the Massachusetts Bay Company. If it had held its meetings and promulgated its measures in London, its life would not have been worth a five years purchase. It had the fate of the Virginia Company for a warning, and most adroitly did it profit by the lesson. If the Virginia Company could have been transferred bodily to America in 1620, it might perhaps have become similarly changed into a self-governing semi-independent republic; the interests of the Company would have been permanently identified with those of the colony, and the course of Virginian history might have been profoundly affected. As it was, Virginia attained through the fall of the Company to such measure of self-government as it had throughout the colonial period, a self-government much like that of Massachusetts after 1692, but far less complete than that of Massachusetts before 1684.

It was not the intention of James I. that the overthrow of the Company should contribute in any way to increase the liberties of the colony of Virginia. All colonizable territory claimed by Great Britain was, in his opinion, just so much royal domain, something which came to him by inheritance like the barony of Renfrew or the manor of Windsor; it was his to do what he liked with it, and for settlers in such territory no better law was needed than such as he could make for them himself. A shadow of doubt as to his own omniscience was never one of James's weaknesses, and no sooner had the Company's charter been annulled than he set himself to work to draw up a constitution for Virginia. It was work of a sort that he thoroughly enjoyed, but what might have come of it will never be known, for while he was busy with it there came upon him what the doctors called a tertian ague, which carried him off in March, 1625.

In the history of England no era is marked by the accession of Charles I. In its policy and methods, and in the political problems at issue, his reign was merely the continuation of his father's. But in the history of Virginia his accession marks an important era. For if James had lived to complete his constitution for Virginia he would in all probability have swept away the representative government introduced by Sir Edwin Sandys; but Charles allowed it to stand. As the situation was left by the death of James, so it remained without essential change until 1776. The House of Burgesses was undisturbed, but the governor and council were thenceforth appointed by the crown. The colony was thus left less independent than it would have been if the Company, with its power of electing its own executive officers, could have been transferred bodily to Virginia; but it was left more independent than it would have been if the existence of the Company had been continued in London. The change from governors appointed by the Company to governors appointed by the crown was a relaxation of the supervision which England exercised over Virginia. For the Company could devote all its attention to the affairs of the colony, but the crown could not. Especially in such reigns as those of the two Charleses, the attention of the crown was too much absorbed with affairs in Great Britain to allow it to interfere decisively with the course of events in Virginia. The colony was thus in the main thrown back upon its own resources, and such a state of things was most favourable to its wholesome development. The Company, after all, was a commercial corporation, and the main object of its existence was to earn money for its shareholders. The pursuit of that object was by no means always sure to coincide with the best interests of the colony. Moreover, although the government of the Company from 1619 to 1624 was conducted with energy and sagacity, disinterestedness, honesty, and breadth of view such as history has seldom seen rivalled, yet there was no likelihood that such would always be the case. Such a combination of men in responsible positions as Southampton and Sandys and Ferrar is too rare to be counted upon. The Company might have passed for a weary while under the control of incompetent or unscrupulous men, and to a young colony like Virginia such a contingency would have been not only disagreeable but positively dangerous. No community, indeed, can long afford to have its affairs administered by a body of men so far away as to be out of immediate touch with it. On the other hand, even if we could suppose a commercial company to go on year after year managing a colony with so much intelligence and sympathy as the London Company showed in its last days, such a situation would not be permanently wholesome for the colony. What men need is not fostering or coddling, but the chance to give free play to their individual capacities. If coddling and fostering could make a colony thrive, the French in Canada ought to have dominated North America. From all points of view, therefore, it seems to have been well for Virginia that the Company fell when it did. It established self-government there, set its machinery successfully to work, and then vanished from the scene, like the Jinni in some Oriental tale, leaving its good gift behind.

The boon of self-government was so congenial to the temper of the Virginians that they would doubtless have contrived somehow to obtain it sooner or later. Hutchinson tells us that when the second American house of representatives was instituted, namely, that of Massachusetts Bay in 1634, the people were well aware that no provision for anything of the sort had been made in of their charter, but they assumed that the right to such representation was implied by that clause of the charter which reserved to them the natural rights of Englishmen;[111] and elsewhere the same eminent historian quaintly speaks of a House of Burgesses as having broken out in Virginia in 1619, as if there were an incurable virus of liberty in the English blood, as if it were something that must come out as inevitably as original sin. But if James I. had lived longer, as I have already observed, he would undoubtedly have made an effort to repress this active spirit of liberty. The colonists, on hearing of the downfall of the Company, were in great alarm lest they should lose their House of Burgesses, and have some arbitrary governor appointed to rule over them, perhaps the hated Argall himself, whom we have seen King James selecting as one of a board of commissioners to investigate affairs in Virginia. In 1621, when for some reason or other the amiable and popular Yeardley had asked to be relieved of the duties of governor, Argall had tried to get himself appointed in his place, but the Company had chosen Sir Francis Wyatt, who held the office until 1626, while Yeardley remained in Virginia as a member of the council. In 1625, as soon as the assembly heard of King James's death, they sent Yeardley to England to pay their respects to King Charles and to assure him that the people of Virginia were thoroughly satisfied with their government and hoped that no changes would be made in it.

Now it happened that Charles had a favour to ask of the settlers in Virginia, and was in the right sort of mood for a bargain. He was no more in love than his father with the many-tongued beast called Parliament, he saw how comfortably his brother-in-law of France was getting along without such assistance, and he was determined if possible to do likewise. But to get along without parliaments a poor king must have some means of getting money. The Virginia tobacco crop was fast becoming a great source of wealth; why should not the king himself go into the tobacco trade? If all tobacco brought to England from Virginia could be consigned to him, then he could retail it to consumers at his own price and realize a gigantic profit; or, what was perhaps still better, having obtained this monopoly, he could farm it out to various agents who would be glad to pay roundly for the privilege. Now the only way in which he could treat with the people of Virginia on such matters was through the representatives of the people. Accordingly, when Governor Wyatt in 1626 had occasion to return to England, the king sent back Sir George Yeardley as royal governor, which under the circumstances was a most emphatic assurance that the wishes of the settlers should be granted. Furthermore, in a message to their representatives Charles graciously addressed them as "Our trusty and well-beloved Burgesses of the Grand Assembly of Virginia," and thus officially recognized that house as a coÖrdinate branch of the colonial government. Some arrangements made with regard to the tobacco trade were calculated to please the colonists. James I., under the influence of his mentor, Count Gondomar, had browbeaten the Company into an arrangement by which they consented to import into England not more than 60,000 or less than 40,000 pounds of tobacco yearly from the Spanish colonies. Charles I. on the other hand prohibited the importation of Spanish tobacco, so that Virginia and the Bermudas had a monopoly of the market. In spite of this friendly attitude of the king toward the colonists, he never succeeded in becoming the sole purchaser of their tobacco at a stipulated price. The assembly was ready from time to time to entertain various proposals, but it never went so far as that; and if Charles, in sanctioning this little New World parliament, counted upon getting substantial aid in ignoring his Parliament at home, he was sadly disappointed.

It is now time for us to attend a session of this House of Burgesses, to make a report of its work, and to mention some of the vicissitudes which it encountered in the course of the reign of Charles I. The place of meeting was the wooden church at Jamestown, 50 feet in length by 20 in width, built in 1619, for Lord Delaware's church had become dilapidated; a solid brick church, 56 feet by 28, was built there in 1639. From the different plantations and hundreds the burgesses came mostly in their barges or sloops to Jamestown. In 1634 the colony was organized into counties and parishes, and the burgesses thenceforth represented counties, but they always kept their old title. At first the governor, council, and burgesses met together in a single assembly, just as in Massachusetts until 1644, just as in England the Lords and Commons usually sat together before 1339.[112] A member of this Virginia parliament must take his breakfast of bacon and hoe-cake betimes, for the meeting was called together at the third beat of the drum, one hour after sunrise. The sessions were always opened with prayers, and every absence from this service was punished with a fine of one shilling. The fine for absence during the whole day was half a crown. In the choir of the church sat the governor and council, their coats trimmed with gold lace. By the statute of 1621, passed in this very church, no one was allowed to wear gold lace except these high officials and the commanders of hundreds, a class of dignitaries who in 1634 were succeeded by the county lieutenants. In the body of the church, facing the choir, sat the burgesses in their best attire, with starched ruffs, and coats of silk or velvet in bright colours. All sat with their hats on, in imitation of the time-honoured custom of the House of Commons, an early illustration of the democratic doctrine, "I am as good as you." These burgesses had their speaker, as well as their clerk and sergeant-at-arms. Such was the first American legislature, and two of its acts in the year 1624 were especially memorable. One was the declaration, passed without any dissenting voice, "that the governor shall not lay any taxes or impositions upon the colony, their lands or commodities, otherway than by the authority of the general assembly, to be levied and employed as the said assembly shall appoint." The other was the punishment of Edward Sharpless, clerk of the house. When the king's commissioners to inquire into the affairs of Virginia asked for the public records of the colony the assembly refused to show them, albeit they were ready to answer questions propounded in a becoming temper. But the commissioners practised upon Sharpless and induced him to furnish them with a copy of the records, whereupon the assembly condemned the said Sharpless to stand in the pillory and have half of one ear cut off.

This general assembly was both a legislative and a judicial body. It enacted laws and prescribed the penalties for breaking them, it tried before a jury persons accused of crime and saw that due punishment was inflicted upon those who were adjudged guilty, it determined civil causes, assessed the amount of damages, and saw that they were collected. From sweeping principles of constitutional law down to the pettiest sumptuary edicts, there was nothing which this little parliament did not superintend and direct. On one occasion, "the delegates from Captain John Martin's plantation were excepted to because of a peculiar clause in his patent releasing him from obeying any order of the colony except in times of war." A few days afterward the said Captain Martin appeared at the bar of the house, and the speaker asking whether he would relinquish the particular clause exempting him from colonial authority, replied that he would not yield any part of his patent. The assembly then resolved that the burgesses of his plantation were not entitled to seats.[113] Such exemptions of individual planters by especial license from the home government, although rare, were of course anomalies not to be commended; in some cases they proved to be nuisances, and in course of time all were got rid of. From this constitutional question the assembly turned to the conversion of the red men, and enacted that each borough or hundred should obtain from the Indians by just and fair means a certain number of Indian children to be educated "in true religion and a civil course of life; of which children the most towardly boys in wit and graces of nature [are] to be brought up by them in the first elements of literature, so as to be fitted for the college intended for them, that from thence they may be sent to that work of conversion." Few enactments of any legislature have ever been better intended or less fruitful than this.

It was moreover enacted that any person found drunk was for the first offence to be privately reproved by the minister; the second time this reproof was to be publicly administered; the third time the offender must be put in irons for twelve hours and pay a fine; for any subsequent offences he must be severely punished at the discretion of the governor and council.

To guard the community against excessive vanity in dress, it was enacted that for all public contributions every unmarried man must be assessed in church "according to his own apparel;" and every married man must be assessed "according to his own and his wife's apparel."

Not merely extravagance in dress, but such social misdemeanours as flirting received due legislative condemnation. Pretty maids were known to encourage hopes in more than one suitor, and gay deceivers of the sterner sex would sometimes seek to win the affections of two or more women at the same time. Wherefore it was enacted that "every minister should give notice in his church that what man or woman soever should use any word or speech tending to a contract of marriage to two several persons at one time ... as might entangle or breed scruples in their consciences, should for such their offense, either undergo corporal correction [by whipping] or be punished by fine or otherwise, according to the quality of the person so offending."[114]

Men were held to more strict accountability for the spoken or written word than in these shameless modern days. One of the most prominent settlers we find presenting a petition to the assembly to grant him due satisfaction against a neighbour who has addressed to him a letter "wherein he taxeth him both unseemly and amiss of certain things wherein he was never faulty." Speaking against the governor or any member of the council was liable to be punished with the pillory. It was also imprudent to speak too freely about clergymen, who were held in great reverence. No planter could dispose of so much as a pound of tobacco until he had laid aside a certain specified quantity as his assessment toward the minister's salary, which was thus assured even in the worst times, so far as legislation could go. It was enacted that "noe man shall disparage a mynister whereby the myndes of his parishoners may be alienated from him and his mynistrie prove less effectuall, upon payne of severe censure of the governor and councell."[115] At the same time clergymen were warned against unseemly practices in terms so concrete as to raise a suspicion that such warning may have been needed. "Mynisters shall not give themselves to excesse in drinking or ryott, spending their tyme idelie by day or by night playing at dice, cards, or any other unlawfull game, but at all tymes convenient they shall heare or reade somewhat of the holy scriptures, or shall occupie themselves with some other honest studies or exercise, alwayes doinge the things which shall apperteyne to honestie and endeavour to profitt the church of God, having alwayes in mind that they ought to excell all others in puritie of life, should be examples to the people, to live well and christianlie."[116]

The well-being of Virginia society was further protected by sundry statutes such as the one which punished profane swearing by a fine of one shilling per oath. "For the better observation of the Saboth" it was enacted that no person "shall take a voyage vppon the same, except it be to church or for other causes of extreme necessitie," under penalty of forfeiting twenty pounds of tobacco for each offence. A similar fine was imposed for firing a gun upon Sunday, unless it might be for defence against the Indians. Selling arms or ammunition to Indians was punished by imprisonment for life, with confiscation of goods. Every master of a family was required, under penalty of ten pounds of tobacco, to bring with him to church every Sunday a serviceable gun with plenty of powder and shot.

Stringent legislation protected the rights of thirsty persons. "Whereas there hath been great abuse by the vnreasonable rates enacted by ordinary keepers, and retaylers of wine and strong waters," maximum prices were established as follows: for Spanish wines 30 lbs. of tobacco per gallon, for Madeira 20 lbs., for French wines 15 lbs., for brandy 40 lbs., for "the best sorte of all English strong waters" 80 lbs.; and any vender charging above these rates was to be fined at double the rate. For corrupting or "sophisticating" good liquor by fraudulent admixtures, a fine was imposed at the discretion of the commissioners of the county courts. The inn-keeper who sold wines and spirits to his guests did so at his own risk, for such debts were not recoverable at law.[117]

The ancient prejudice against forestalling survives in the following statute, which would make havoc of the business of some modern brokers: "Whatsoever person or persons shall buy or cause to be bought any marchandize, victualls, or any other thinge, comminge by land or water to the markett to be sold, or make any bargaine, contract or promise for the haveinge or buyinge of the same ... before the said marchandize, victualls, or other thinge shall bee at the markett readie to be sold; or make any motion by word, letter or message or otherwise to any person or persons for the enhaunsing of the price, or dearer sellinge of any thinge or thinges above mentioned, or else disswade, move, or stirr any person or persons cominge to the marquett, to abstaine or forbeare to bringe or conveye any of the things above rehearsed to any markett as aforesayd, shall be deemed and adjudged a forestaller. And yf any person or persons shall offend in the things before recited and beinge thereof dulie convicted or attaynted shall for his or theire first offence suffer imprisonment by the space of two mounthes without baile or maine-prize, and shall also loose and forfeite the value of the goods soe by him or them bought or had as aforesayd; and for a second offence ... shall suffer imprisonment by the space of one halfe yeare ... and shall loose the double value of all the goods ... soe bought ... and for the third offence ... shall be sett on the pillorie ... and loose and forfeit all the goods and chattels that he or they then have to theire owne use, and also be committed to prison, there to remayne duringe the Governor's pleasure."[118]

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Edmund Spenser, in his dedication of the "FaËry Queene," in 1590, calls Elizabeth the queen of England, France, and Ireland, and of Virginia, thus characterizing as a kingdom the vast and vague domain in the New World which she was appropriating. Soon after the downfall of the Virginia Company, the document containing Charles I.'s appointment of William Claiborne as secretary of state in the colony mentioned it as "our kingdom of Virginia;" and the phrase occurs in other writings of the time. It is a phrase that seems especially appropriate for the colony after it had come to be a royal province, directly dependent upon the king for its administration. During the reign of Charles I. the relations of the kingdom of Virginia to the mother country were marked by few memorable incidents. In this respect the contrast with the preceding reign is quite striking. One must read the story in the original state papers, correspondence, and pamphlets of the time, in order to realize to what an extent the colony was cut loose by the overthrow of the Company. The most interesting and important questions that came up were connected with the settlement of Maryland, but before we enter upon that subject, a few words are needed on the succession of royal governors in Virginia.

The commission of Yeardley in 1626 named Sir John Harvey as his successor. When Yeardley died in 1627, Harvey had not arrived upon the scene, and needed to be notified. In such cases it was the business of the council to appoint a governor ad interim, and the council appointed one of the oldest and most honoured settlers, Francis West, brother of the late Lord Delaware. After one year of service business called West to England, and his place was taken by Dr. John Pott, who held the government until Sir John Harvey's arrival in March, 1630. This Dr. Pott is described as "a Master of Arts, ... well practised in chirurgery and physic, and expert also in distilling of waters, [besides] many other ingenious devices."[119] It seems that he was likewise very fond of tasting distilled waters, and at times was more of a boon companion than quite comported with his dignity, especially after he had come to be governor. A letter of George Sandys to a friend in London says of Dr. Pott, "at first he kept company too much with his inferiors, who hung upon him while his good liquor lasted. After, he consorted with Captain Whitacres, a man of no good example, with whom he has gone to Kecoughtan."[120] What was done by the twain at Kecoughtan is not matter of record, but we are left with a suggestion of the darkest possibilities of a carouse.

After Harvey's arrival ex-Governor Pott was arrested, and held to answer two charges: one was for having abused the powers entrusted to him by pardoning a culprit who had been convicted of wilful murder; the other was for stealing cattle. The first charge was a matter of common notoriety; on the second Dr. Pott was tried by a jury and found guilty. The ex-governor was not only a pardoner of felony, but a felon himself. The affair reads like a scene in comic opera. Some reluctance was felt about inflicting vulgar punishment upon an educated man of good social position; so he was not sent to jail but confined in his own house, while Sir John Harvey wrote to the king for instructions in the matter. He informed the king that Dr. Pott was by far the best physician in the colony, and indeed the only one "skilled in epidemicals," and recommended that he should be pardoned. Accordingly the doctor was set free and forthwith resumed his practice.

Soon it was Governor Harvey's turn to get into difficulties. How he was "thrust out" from his government in 1635 and restored to it by Charles I. in 1637 will best be told in a future chapter in connection with the affairs of Maryland. After Harvey's final departure in 1639, Sir Francis Wyatt was once more governor for three years, and then came the famous Sir William Berkeley, who remained for five-and-thirty years the most conspicuous figure in Virginia. When Berkeley arrived upon the scene, in 1642, on the eve of the great Civil War, he received from Wyatt the government of a much greater Virginia than that over which Wyatt was ruling in 1624. Those eighteen years of self-government had been years of remarkable prosperity and progress. Instead of 4,000 English and 22 negroes, the population now numbered 15,000 English and 300 negroes. Moreover, Virginia was no longer the only English colony. In 1624 there were no others, except the little band of about 200 Pilgrims at Plymouth. In 1642 the population of New England numbered 26,000, distributed among half-a-dozen self-governing colonies. There was also a community of Dutchmen laying claim to the whole region between the Mohawk valley and Delaware Bay, with a flourishing town on Manhattan Island in the finest commercial situation on the whole Atlantic coast. The Virginians did not relish the presence of these Dutchmen, for they too laid claim to that noble tract of country. The people of Virginia had made the first self-supporting colony and felt that they had established a claim upon the middle zone. The very name Virginia had not yet ceased to cling to it. In books of that time one may read of the town of New Amsterdam upon the island of Manhattan in Virginia. In 1635 a party of Virginians went up to the Delaware River and took possession of an old blockhouse there, called Fort Nassau, which the Dutch had abandoned; but a force from New Amsterdam speedily took them prisoners and sent them back to Virginia,[121] with a polite warning not to do so any more. They did not.

Still nearer at hand, by the waters of the Potomac and Susquehanna, other rivals and competitors, even more unwelcome to the Virginians, had lately come upon the scene. The circumstances of the founding of Maryland, with its effects upon the kingdom of Virginia, will be recounted in the two following chapters.

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