Of the commissioners appointed to make inquiries in Virginia, John Harvey and John Pory arrived there early in 1624; Samuel Matthews and Abraham Percy were planters resident in the colony, and the latter a member of the House of Burgesses; John Jefferson, the other commissioner, did not come over to Virginia, nor did he take any part in the matter, being a hearty friend to the company.[172:A] Thomas Jefferson, in his memoir of himself,[172:B] says that one of his name was secretary to the Virginia Company. The Virginia planters at first looking on it as a dispute between the crown and the company, in which they were not essentially interested, paid little attention to it; but two petitions, defamatory of the colony and laudatory of Sir Thomas Smith's arbitrary rule, having come to the knowledge of the Assembly, in February, 1624, that body prepared spirited replies, and drafted a petition to the king, which, with a letter to the privy council, and other papers, were entrusted to Mr. John Pountis, a member of the council.[173:A] He died during the voyage to England. The letter addressed to the privy council prayed "that the governors may not have absolute power, that they might still retain the liberty of popular assemblies, than which nothing could more conduce to the public satisfaction and public utility." At the same time the Virginia Company, in England, presented a petition to the House of Commons against the arbitrary proceedings of the king; but although favorably received, it was withdrawn as soon as the king's disapprobation was announced.
In Virginia the commissioners refused to exhibit their commission and instructions, and the Assembly therefore refused to give them access to their records. Pory, one of the commissioners, who had formerly lost his place of secretary of the colony by betraying its secrets to the Earl of Warwick, suborned Edward Sharpless, clerk of the council, to expose to him copies of the journal of that body, and of the House of Burgesses. Sharpless being convicted of this misdemeanor was sentenced to the pillory, with the loss of his ears.[173:B] Only a part of one ear was actually cut off.
The commissioners, having failed to obtain from the Assembly a declaration of their willingness to submit to the king's purpose of revoking the charter, made a report against the company's management of the colony and the government of it, as too popular, that is, democratic, under the present charter. The king, by a proclamation issued in July, suppressed the meetings of the company, and ordered for the present a committee of the privy council, and others, to sit every Thursday, at the house of Sir Thomas Smith, in Philpot Lane, for conducting the affairs of the colony. Viscount Mandeville was at the head of this committee: Sir George Calvert, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Sir Samuel Argall, John Pory, Sir John Wolstenholme, and others, were members. At the instance of the attorney-general, to enable the company to make a defence, their books were restored and the deputy treasurer released. In Trinity term, 1624, the writ of quo warranto was tried in the Court of King's Bench, and the charter of the Virginia Company was annulled. The case was determined only upon a technicality in the pleadings.
In one of the hearings against the company, before the privy council, the Marquis of Hamilton said of the letters and instructions of the company, written by Nicholas Ferrar, Jr.: "They are papers as admirably well penned as any I ever heard." And the Earl of Pembroke remarked: "They all deserve the highest commendation: containing advices far more excellent than I could have expected to have met with in the letters of a trading company. For they abound with soundness of good matter and profitable instruction, with respect both to religion and policy; and they possess uncommon elegance of language."[174:A]
The company had been long obnoxious to the king's ill will for several reasons; it had become a nursery for rearing and training leaders of the opposition, many of its members being likewise members of parliament. It was a sort of reform club. The king, in a speech, swore that "the Virginia Company was a seminary for a seditious parliament." The company had chosen a treasurer in disregard of the king's nomination; and in electing Carew Raleigh, a member, they had made allusions to his father, Sir Walter Raleigh, which were doubtless unpalatable to the author of his judicial murder. The king was greedy of power and of money, which he wanted the sense and the virtue to make a good use of; and he hoped to find in Virginia a new field for extortion. Fortunately for the history of the colony, copies of the company's records were made by the precaution of Nicholas Ferrar: these being deposited in the hands of the Earl of Southampton, after his death, which took place in 1624, descended to his son. After his death, in 1667, they were purchased from his executors, for sixty guineas, by the first Colonel William Byrd, then in England. From these two folio volumes, in possession of Sir John Randolph, and from the records of the colony, Stith compiled much of his History of Virginia, which comes down to the year 1624.[174:B]
On the sixth day of April, 1625, died King James the First, aged fifty-nine, after a reign of twenty years. By his consort, Anne of Denmark, he had issue, Henry and Robert, who died young, Charles, his successor, and Elizabeth, who married Frederic the Fifth, elector Palatine. Charles the First succeeding to the crown and the principles of his father, took the government of Virginia into his own hands.
The company thus dissolved, had expended one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in establishing the colony, and had transported nine thousand settlers without the aid of government. The number of stockholders was about one thousand; and the annual value of exports from Virginia was, at the period of the dissolution of the charter, only twenty thousand pounds.
The company embraced much of the rank, wealth, and talents of the kingdom—near fifty noblemen, several hundred knights, and many gentlemen, merchants, and citizens. Among the leaders in its courts were Lord Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire; Sir Edwin Sandys; and Sir Edward Sackville, afterwards the celebrated Earl of Dorset; and, above all, the Earl of Southampton, the friend of Essex, and the patron of Shakespeare. Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, in 1601, was implicated with the Earl of Essex in his hair-brained and abortive conspiracy to seize the person of Queen Elizabeth. Essex lost his life. Southampton was convicted, attainted and imprisoned during the queen's life. Upon the accession of James the First he was liberated, and restored in 1603. He was afterwards made Captain of the Isle of Wight and Governor of Carisbroke Castle; and in 1618 a member of the privy council. Brave and generous, but haughty and impetuous, he was by no means adapted to the court and cabinet of James, where fawning servility and base intrigue were the ordinary stepping-stones of political advancement.
About the year 1619, the Earl of Southampton was imprisoned through the influence of Buckingham, "whom he rebuked with some passion for speaking often to the same thing in the house, and out of order." In 1620 he was chosen Treasurer, or Governor of the Virginia Company, contrary to the king's wishes; but he, nevertheless, continued in that office until the charter was dissolved, and at its meetings, and in parliament, opposed the measures of a feeble and corrupt court. He and Sir Edwin Sandys, the leaders, together with the bulk of the members of the company, shared largely in the spirit of civil and religious freedom, which was then manifesting itself so strongly in England. In the hostile course pursued against the company, the attacks were especially directed against the earl and his associates Sir Edwin Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar. These three were celebrated: Lord Southampton for wisdom, eloquence, and sweet deportment; Sir Edwin Sandys for great knowledge and integrity; and Nicholas Ferrar for wonderful abilities, unwearied diligence, and the strictest virtue.[176:A] The earl and Sir Edwin were particular objects of the king's hatred. Sir Edwin, a member of the House of Commons, was arbitrarily imprisoned in 1621, during the session of parliament; and the earl was arrested after its dissolution. Spain had, at this time, acquired the ascendancy in the English Court, and this malign influence was skilfully maintained by the intrigues of her crafty ambassador, Count Gondomar. It was believed by many that James was even willing to sacrifice the interests of the English colonies for the benefit of those of Spain. The Rev. Jonas Stockham, a minister in Virginia, in a letter dated in May, 1621, and addressed to the Council of the Virginia Company, said: "There be many Italianated and Spaniolized Englishmen envies our prosperities, and by all their ignominious scandals they can devise, seeks to dishearten what they can those that are willing to further this glorious enterprise. To such I wish, according to the decree of Darius, that whosoever is an enemy to our peace, and seeketh either by getting monipolical patents, or by forging unjust tales to hinder our welfare—that his house were pulled down, and a pair of gallows made of the wood, and he hanged on them in the place."
The Earl of Southampton was grandson of Wriothesley, the famous Chancellor of Edward the Sixth, father to the excellent and noble Treasurer Southampton, grandfather to Rachel Lady Russel. In his later years he commanded an English regiment in the Dutch service, and died in the Netherlands, 1624. Shakespeare dedicated some of his minor poems to him; the County of Southampton, in Virginia, probably also took its name from him. Captain Smith, who had been unjustly displaced by the company, approved of the dissolution of their charter. Yet, as no compensation was rendered for the enormous expenditure incurred, it can be looked upon as little better than confiscation effected by chicane and tyranny. A parliamentary committee, of which Sir Edwin Sandys was a member, in the same year, 1624, drew up articles of impeachment against Lord Treasurer Cranfield for his agency in bringing about the dissolution of the charter.[177:A] Nevertheless, the result was undoubtedly favorable to the colony, as is candidly acknowledged by that honest chronicler, Stith, although no one could be more strenuously opposed to the arbitrary means employed.