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 appointment as 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, and the 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.