The massacre was of course a terrific catastrophe to the whole colony. Outlying settlements had to be abandoned and the colony was engaged in war with the Indians for several years. Then a second catastrophe occurred. King James became dissatisfied with the independent attitude of the London Company and personally secured its dissolution in 1624. He then took control of Virginia as a Royal Colony and he himself appointed the Governor and Council of the colony.
This ended all plans for the opening of the university. The King died in the following year and his son, King Charles I, was not interested in a university in Virginia. Nor was he or anyone else interested in sending ministers to the colonial parishes.
The London Company, with a membership including representatives of the Church and the universities, and of business interests and the higher social classes, had the confidence of the people. The King did not. He had their loyalty as their sovereign, but the spiritual and cultural welfare of a colony overseas carried little weight amid the political cross-currents and the self-seeking of a royal court.
CHAPTER TWO
The Colonists at Worship
There are several first-hand accounts of religious worship in the earliest days of the Jamestown colony. Captain John Smith wrote of the men at worship in the open air until a chapel could be erected. He describes the scene of a celebration of the Holy Communion, with the Holy Table standing under an old sail lashed from tree to tree, with a bar of wood fastened between two trees as the pulpit, and men kneeling on the ground before their first altar. Services were held daily, according to the rules of the Book of Common Prayer which they brought with them: morning prayer and evening prayer everyday, and sermons twice on Sunday and once during the week. The law of the Church required the Holy Communion to be celebrated at least three times during the year; on Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday; and unquestionably this law was observed at Jamestown. Many clergymen celebrated that sacrament oftener. There can be little doubt that the first celebration of the Holy Communion at Jamestown was on Whitsunday, May 24th (old style) 1607, although the first one of which a record remains was held on the third Sunday after Trinity, June 21. That was a special celebration, held for a two-fold purpose, one, that Mr. Hunt had been able to reconcile serious differences between certain elements among the colonists who had been in angry strife with each other, and second, because two of the ships which brought the colonists to Virginia were to set sail on the following morning upon their return trip to England.
William Strachey, writing in a report of the colony in 1610 after Lord De la Warr had arrived as the new governor presents the following picture:
In the midst of the market-place, a store-house, a "Corps-du-Garde", and a pretty chapel, all which the Lord Governour ordered to be put in good repair. The chapel was in length sixty feet, in breadth twenty-four, and the Lord Governour had repaired it with a chancel of cedar and a communion table of black walnut; all the pews and pulpit were of cedar, with fair broad windows, also of cedar, to shut and open, as the weather shall occasion. The font was hewen hollow like a canoa, and there were two bells in the steeple at the west end. The Church was so cast as to be very light within, and the Lord Governour caused it to be kept passing sweet and trimmed up with divers flowers. There was a sexton in charge of the church, and every morning at the ringing of a bell by him, about ten o'clock, each man addressed himself to prayers, and so at four of the clock before supper. There was a sermon every Thursday and two sermons every Sunday, the two preachers taking their weekly turns. Every Sunday when the Lord Governour went to church he was accompanied with all the Councillors, Captains, other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a guard of fifty halberdiers, in his Lordship's livery, fair red cloaks, on each side and behind him. The Lord Governour sat in the choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet cushion before him on which he knelt, and the Council, Captains and officers sat on each side of him, each in their place; and when the Lord Governour returned home he was waited on in the same manner to his house.
Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the first rector of the City of Henrico from its foundation in 1611 until his death by drowning in 1617, and who is still remembered as the clergyman who baptized the Indian princess Pocahontas, after her conversion to the Christian faith, described his services as follows: