Kawasha comes in majesty;Was never such a god as he.He's come from a far countryTo make our nose a chimney.Kawasha.The wine takes the contrary wayTo get into the hood;But good tobacco makes no stay,But seizeth where it should.More incense hath burned atGreat Kawasha's footThan to Silen and Bacchus both,And take in Jove to boot.Silenus.The worthies they were nine, 'tis true.And lately Arthur's knights I knew,But now are come up worthies new,The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew.Kawasha.Silenus tops[89]the barrel, butTobacco tops the brainAnd makes the vapours fine and soote,[90]That man revives again,Nothing but fumigationDoth charm away ill sprites.Kawasha and his nationFound out these holy rites.[91]
Kawasha comes in majesty;Was never such a god as he.He's come from a far countryTo make our nose a chimney.Kawasha.The wine takes the contrary wayTo get into the hood;But good tobacco makes no stay,But seizeth where it should.More incense hath burned atGreat Kawasha's footThan to Silen and Bacchus both,And take in Jove to boot.Silenus.The worthies they were nine, 'tis true.And lately Arthur's knights I knew,But now are come up worthies new,The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew.Kawasha.Silenus tops[89]the barrel, butTobacco tops the brainAnd makes the vapours fine and soote,[90]That man revives again,Nothing but fumigationDoth charm away ill sprites.Kawasha and his nationFound out these holy rites.[91]
Kawasha comes in majesty;Was never such a god as he.He's come from a far countryTo make our nose a chimney.
Kawasha.
The wine takes the contrary wayTo get into the hood;But good tobacco makes no stay,But seizeth where it should.More incense hath burned atGreat Kawasha's footThan to Silen and Bacchus both,And take in Jove to boot.
Silenus.
The worthies they were nine, 'tis true.And lately Arthur's knights I knew,But now are come up worthies new,The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew.
Kawasha.
Silenus tops[89]the barrel, butTobacco tops the brainAnd makes the vapours fine and soote,[90]That man revives again,Nothing but fumigationDoth charm away ill sprites.Kawasha and his nationFound out these holy rites.[91]
Effects of tobacco culture.
In Virginia the first settlers found the Indians cultivating tobacco in small gardens. The first Englishman to make experiments with it is said to have been John Rolfe in 1612. Under Yeardley's first administration, in 1616, the cultivation of tobacco became fairly established, and from that time forth it was a recognized staple of the colony. The effects of this were very notable. As the great purchasing power of a tobacco crop came to be generally known, the people of Virginia devoted themselves more and more to its cultivation, until nearly all other crops and most other forms of industry were neglected. Thus the type of society, as we shall hereafter see, was largely determined by the cultivation of tobacco. Moreover a clear and positive inducement was now offered for emigration such as had not existed before since the first dreams of gold and silver were dispelled. After the first disappointments it became difficult to persuade men of hard sense to go to Virginia, and we have seen what a wretched set of people were drawn together by the Company's communistic schemes. But those who came to acquire wealth by raising tobacco were of a better sort, men of business-like ideas who knew what they wanted and how to devote themselves to the task of getting it. With the establishment of tobacco culture there began a steady improvement in the characters and fortunes of the colonists, and the demand for their staple in Europe soon became so great as forever to end the possibility of perishing from want. Henceforth whatever a Virginian needed he could buy with tobacco.
The London Company's third charter, 1612.
Lotteries.
We have now to see how Virginia, which was fast becoming able to support itself, became also a self-governing community. The administrations of Lord Delaware, of Dale, of Yeardley, and of Argall, were all despotisms, whether mild or harsh. To trace the evolution of free government, we must take our start in the year 1612, when the London Company obtained its third charter. The immediate occasion for taking out this charter was the desire of the Company to include among its possessions the Bermuda Islands, and they were now added to Virginia. At the same time it was felt that the government of the Company needed some further emendation in order to give the members more direct and continuous control over its proceedings. It was thus provided that there should be weekly meetings, at which not less than five members of the council and fifteen of the Companymust be present. Besides this there were to be held four general courts or quarter sessions in the course of each year, for electing the treasurer and council and passing laws for the government of the colony. At these quarter sessions charges could be brought against delinquent servants of the Company, which was clothed with full judicial powers of hearing and deciding such cases and inflicting punishments. A good many subscribers had been alarmed by evil tidings from Virginia so that they would refuse or more often would simply neglect to pay in the amount of their subscriptions. To remedy these evils the Company was empowered to expel delinquent members or to bring suits in law and equity against them to recover damages or compel performance. Furthermore, it was allowed to replenish its treasury by setting up lotteries, a practice in which few people at that time saw anything objectionable. Such a lottery was held at a house in St. Paul's Churchyard, in July, 1612, of which the continuator of Stow's Chronicle tells us: "This lottery was so plainly carried and honestly performed that it gave full satisfaction to all persons. Thomas Sharplisse, a tailor of London, had the chief prize, viz., 4,000 crowns in fair plate, which was sent to his house in very stately manner. During the whole time of the drawing of this lottery, there were always present divers worshipful knights and esquires, accompanied with sundry grave discreet citizens." In September the Spanish ambassador, Zuñiga, wrote home that "there was a lottery on foot to raise 20,000 ducats [equivalent to about $40,000].In this all the livery companies adventured. The grocers ventured £62 15s., and won a silver [dish] and cover valued at £13 10s."[92]
The Company becomes an important force in politics.
Opposition to the charter: Middleton's speech.
This remodelling of the Company's charter was an event of political importance. Formerly the meetings of the Company had been few and far between, and its affairs had been practically controlled by the council, and in many cases by its chief executive officer, the treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith. Now the weekly meetings of the Company, and its courts of quarter sessions, armed with such legislative and judicial powers, put a new face upon things. It made the Company a democratic self-governing body, and when we recall the membership of the Company we can see what this meant. There were fifty-six of the craft-guilds or liveried companies of the city of London, whose lord mayor was also a prominent member, and the political spirit of London was aggressively liberal and opposed to high prerogative. There were also more than a hundred London merchants and more than two hundred persons belonging to the nobility and gentry, including some of the foremost peers and knights in the party hostile to the Stuart king's pretensions. The meetings of the Company were full of discussions which could not help taking a political turn, since some of the most burning political questions of the day—as, for example, the great dispute over monopolies and other disputes—were commercial in character. Men's eyes were soon opened to the existence of a great deliberative body outside of Parliament and expressing itself with much freedom on exciting topics. The social position and weighty character of the members drew general attention to their proceedings, especially as many of them were also members of either the House of Lords or the House of Commons. We can easily believe the statement that the discussions of the Company were followed with even deeper interest than the debates in Parliament. It took a few years for this aspect of the situation to become fully developed, but opposition to the new charter was soon manifested, even by sundry members of the Company itself. Some of them agreed with Sergeant Montague that to confer such vast and vague powers upon a mercantile corporation was unconstitutional. In a debate in Parliament in 1614 a member of the Company named Middleton attacked the charter on the ground that trade with Virginia and agriculture there needed more strict regulation than it was getting. "The shopkeepers of London," he said, "sent over all kinds of goods, for which they received tobacco instead of coin, infinitely to the prejudice of the Commonwealth. Many of the divines now smell of tobacco, and poor men spend 4d. of their day's wages at night in smoke. [He] wished that this patent may be damned, and an act of Parliament passed for the government of the colony by a company."[93]
Mr. Martin forgets himself,
and has to apologize.
So much effect was produced by speeches of this sort that the council of the Company as a counterstroke presented a petition for aid, and had it defended before the House of Commons by the eminent lawyer, Richard Martin, one of the most brilliant speakers of the day. Martin gave a fine historical description of English colonizing enterprise since Raleigh's first attempts, then he dwelt upon the immediate and pressing needs of Virginia, especially the need for securing an ample reinforcement of honest workmen with their wives and children, and he urged the propriety of a liberal parliamentary grant in aid of the Company and its operations. Then at the close of an able and effective speech his eloquence carried him away, and he so far forgot himself as to remind the House that it had been but a thriftless penury which had led King Henry VII. to turn the cold shoulder upon Columbus, and to predict for them similar chagrin if they should neglect the interests of Virginia. This affair, as he truly said, was of far greater importance than many of the trifles on which the House was in the habit of wasting its time. Poor Martin should have stopped a minute sooner. His last remark was heard with indignation. One member asked if he supposed the House was a school and he the schoolmaster; another moved that he should be committed for contempt; finally it was decided that he should make a public apology. So the next day, after a mild and courteous rebuke from the Speaker, Mr. Martin apologized as follows, according to the brief memorandum entered upon the journal of the House of Commons for that day: "All men liable to err,and he particularly so, but he was not in love with error, and as willing as any man to be divorced therefrom. Admits that he digressed from the subject; that he was like a ship that cutteth the cable and putteth to sea, for he cut his memory and trusted to his invention. Was glad to be an example to others, and submitted to the censure not with a dejected countenance, for there is comfort in acknowledging an error."[94]
Factions within the Company.
Death of Lord Delaware, 1618.
While such incidents, trifling in themselves, tended to create prejudice against the Company on the part of many members of Parliament, factions were soon developed within the Company itself. There was, first, the division between the court party, or supporters of the king, and the country party, opposed to his overweening pretensions. The difference between court and country parties was analogous to the difference between Tories and Whigs that began in the reign of Charles II. A second division, crossing the first one, was that between the defenders and opponents of the monopolies. A third division grew out of a personal quarrel between the treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith, and a prominent shareholder, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick. This man's title remains to-day in the name of Warwick County near the mouth of James River. At first he and Sir Thomas Smith were on very friendly terms. Samuel Argall was closely connected by marriage with Smith's family, and it was Lord Rich and his friends who in 1617 secured Argall's appointmentas deputy-governor of Virginia. The appointment turned out to be far from creditable. Argall's rule was as stern as Dale's, but it was not public-spirited. From the upright and spotless Dale severity could be endured; with the self-seeking and unscrupulous Argall it was quite otherwise. He was so loudly accused of peculation and extortion that after one year the Company sent out Lord Delaware to take personal charge of the colony once more. That nobleman sailed in the spring of 1618, with 200 emigrants. They went by way of the Azores, and while touching at the island of St. Michael, Lord Delaware and thirty of his companions suddenly fell sick and died in such manner as to raise a strong suspicion that their Spanish hosts had poisoned them. Among the governor's private papers was one that instructed him to arrest Argall and send him to England for trial. When the ship arrived in Virginia this document fell into Argall's hands. Its first effect was to make him behave worse than ever, until renewed complaints of him reached England at the moment of a great change in the governorship of the Company.
Quarrel between Lord Rich and Sir Thomas Smith.
Election of Sir Edwin Sandys.
The chief executive officer of the Company was the treasurer. Since 1609 Sir Thomas Smith had held that office, and it had naturally enough become fashionable to charge all the ills of the colony to his mismanagement. There may have been some ground for this. Sir Thomas was a merchant of great public spirit and talent for business, but he was apt to keep too many irons in the fire, andthe East India Company, of which he was governor, absorbed his attention much more than the affairs of Virginia. The country party, led by such men as the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar, were opposed to Smith and twitted him with the misconduct of Argall. At this moment broke out the quarrel between Smith and Lord Rich. One of the merchant's sons aged only eighteen fell madly in love with the nobleman's young sister, Lady Isabella Rich, and his passion was reciprocated. There was fierce opposition to their marriage on the part of the old merchant; and this led to an elopement and a private wedding, at which the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke and the Countess of Bedford assisted.[95]These leaders of the country party thus mortally offended Sir Thomas Smith, while between him and the young lady's brother, Lord Rich, there was a furious explosion. Lord Rich, who in the midst of these scenes became Earl of Warwick, by which title posterity remembers him, was a prominent leader of the court party, but this family quarrel led him to a temporary alliance with the opposition, with the result that in the annual election for the treasurership of the Company, in April, 1619, Sir Thomas Smith was defeated, and Sir Edwin Sandys chosen in his place. This victory of the king's opponents called forth much excitement in England; for the remaining five years of its existence the Company was controlled by Sandys and his friends, and its affairs were"administered with a degree of energy, unselfishness, and statesmanlike wisdom, perhaps unparalleled in the history of corporations."[96]
Sir George Yeardley appointed governor of Virginia.
This victory in the spring election consummated the ascendency of Sandys and his party, but that ascendency had been already shown in the appointment of George Yeardley to succeed Lord Delaware as governor of Virginia. The king can hardly have relished this appointment, but as Yeardley was of rather humble birth, being the son of a poor merchant tailor, he gave him a certain sanction by making him a knight. High official position seemed in those days more than now to need some such social decoration. Yeardley was ordered to send Argall home; but that independent personage being privately notified, it is said by the Earl of Warwick, loaded his ship and sailed for England before the governor's arrival. He was evidently a man who could carry things with a bold face. His defence of himself satisfied the court party but not the country party; the evidence against him seems to have reached the point of moral conviction, but not of legal certainty; he was put in command of a warship for the Mediterranean service, and presently the king, perhaps to relieve his own qualms for knighting Yeardley, slapped him on the back and made him Sir Samuel Argall.
The first American legislature, 1619.
On many occasions the development of popular liberty in England has gone hand in hand with its development in America. The growingstrength of the popular antagonism to Stuart methods of government was first conspicuously marked by the ascendency of Sir Edwin Sandys and his party in Parliament and in the management of affairs in Virginia. Its first fruit was the introduction of parliamentary institutions into America. Despotic government in Virginia had been thoroughly discredited by the conduct of Argall. More than 1,000 persons were now living in the colony, and the year 1619 saw the number doubled.[97]The people called for self-government, and Sandys believed that only through self-government could a colony really prosper. Governor Yeardley was accordingly instructed to issue writs for the election of a General Assembly in Virginia, and on the 30th of July, 1619, the first legislative body of Englishmen in America was called together in the wooden church at Jamestown. Eleven local constituencies were represented under the various designations ofcity,plantation, andhundred; and each constituency sent two representatives, calledburgesses, so that the assembly was called from 1619 until 1776 the House of Burgesses. The eleven boroughs were James City, Charles City, the City of Henricus, Martin Brandon, Martin's Hundred, Lawne's Plantation, Ward's Plantation, Argall's Gift, Flowerdieu Hundred, Smith's Hundred, and Kecoughtan. The last two names were soon changed. Smith's Hundred, at first named after the treasurer, took for its sponsor one of the opposite party and became Southampton Hundred. The name of this friend of Shakespeare, somewhat curtailed, was also given to Kecoughtan, which became Hampton, and so remains to this day. These eleven names indicate the extent of the colony up the James River about to seventy miles from its mouth as the crow flies, and laterally five or six miles inland from either bank, with a population rather less sparse than that of Idaho at the present day. Such was the first American self-governing state at its beginning,—a small beginning, but what a change from the summer day that witnessed Lord Delaware's arrival nine years before!
Nature of the General Assembly.
Concerning this House of Burgesses I shall have something to say hereafter. Let it suffice for the present to observe that along with the governor and deputy-governor there was an appointed upper house called the council; and that the governor, with the assistant council, and the House of Burgesses, altogether constituted a General Assembly essentially similar to the General Court of Massachusetts, to their common prototype, the old English county court, and to their numerous posterity, the bicameral legislatures of nearly all the world in modern times. The functions of this General Assembly were both legislative and to some extent judicial. It was endowed with full powers of legislation for the colony. Its acts did not acquire validity until approved by the General Court of the London Company, but on the other hand no enactment which the Company might make for the colony was to be valid until approved by its General Assembly. These provisions were confirmed by a charter issued in 1621.
The first negro slaves, 1619.
This gift of free government to England's first colony was the work of the London Company—or, as it was now in London much more often called, the Virginia Company—under the noble management of Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends. That great corporation was soon to perish, but its boon to Virginia and to American liberty was to be abiding. The story of the Company's downfall, in its broad outlines, can be briefly told, but first I may mention a few incidents that occurred before the crisis. One was the first introduction of negro slaves into Virginia, which, by a rather curious freak of dates, came in 1619, just after the sitting of the first free legislature, and thus furnished posterity with a theme for moralizing. "About the last of August," says Secretary Rolfe, "[there] came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars." A census taken five years later, however, shows only twenty-two negroes in the colony. The increase in their numbers was for some time very slow, and the establishment of slave labour will best be treated in a future chapter.
A cargo of maidens, 1619.
The same year, 1619, which witnessed the introduction of slaves and a House of Burgesses, saw also the arrival of a shipload of young women—spinsters carefully selected and matronized—sent out by the Company in quest of husbands. In Virginia, as in most new colonies, women were greatly in the minority, and the wise Sir Edwin Sandys understood thatwithout homes and family ties a civilized community must quickly retrograde into barbarism. On arriving in Virginia these girls found plenty of suitors and were entirely free to exercise their own choice. No accepted suitor, however, could claim his bride until he should pay the Company 120 pounds of tobacco to defray the expense of her voyage. This practice of sending wives continued for some time, and as homes with pleasant society grew up in Virginia, life began to be made attractive there and the immigration rapidly increased. By 1622 the population of Virginia was at least 4,000, the tobacco fields were flourishing and lucrative, durable houses had been built and made comfortable with furniture brought from England, and the old squalor was everywhere giving way to thrift. The area of colonization was pushed up the James River as far as the site of Richmond.
The great Indian massacre, 1622.
This long narrow colony was dangerously exposed to attack from the Indian tribes along the York and Pamunkey rivers and their confederates to the west and north. But an Indian attack was something that people had ceased to expect. For eight years the Indians had been to all appearance friendly, and it was not uncommon to see them moving freely about the villages and plantations. There had been a change of leadership among them. Wahunsunakok, the old Powhatan whom Smith called "Father," was dead; his brother Opekankano was now The Powhatan. It is a traditional belief that Opekankano had always favoured hostile measures toward the white men, and that for some years heawaited an opportunity for attacking them. How much truth there may be in this view of the case it would be hard to say; there is very little evidence to guide us, but we may well believe that Opekankano and his people watched with grave concern the sudden and rapid increase of the white strangers. That they were ready to seize upon an occasion for war is by no means unlikely, and the nature of the event indicates careful preparation. Early in 1622 an Indian chief whom the English called Jack of the Feather killed a white man and was killed in requital. Shortly afterward a concerted attack was made upon the colony along the entire line from Chesapeake Bay up to the Berkeley Plantation, near the site of Richmond, and 347 persons were butchered. Such a destruction of nearly nine per cent. of the white population was a terrible blow, but the quickness with which the colony recovered from it shows what vigorous vitality it had been gaining under the administration of Sir Edwin Sandys. So lately as 1618 such a blow would have been almost prostrating, but in 1622 the settlers turned out with grim fury and hunted the red men like wild beasts till the blood debt was repaid with compound interest, and peace was restored in the land for more than twenty years.
While these fiendish scenes were being enacted in Virginia a memorable drama was moving toward its final catastrophe in London. In the next chapter we shall witness the overthrow of the great Virginia Company.
A SEMINARY OF SEDITION.
Summary review of the founding of Virginia.
1606-1610.
Fewepisodes 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 barelyescapes 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.
1610-1624.
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 theshareholders 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 poeticbeauty 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.
Hostility of Spain.
Gondomar and the Spanish match.
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 pointsattacked. 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.
Gondomar's advice to the king.
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.
More advice.
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 caseof 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.
Imprisonment of Raleigh.
Raleigh released and sent to Guiana.
The king's treachery.
Judicial murder of Raleigh, 1618.
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 inwhat 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, whosent 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 theold 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 Company's election in 1620.
The king's attempt to interfere.
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 andto 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.
Reading of the charter.
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."
Withdrawal of Sandys.
Election of Southampton.
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 withdrawhis 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.