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 points attacked. 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 case of 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.