Nicholas Ferrar.
Little Gidding.
The choice of Shakespeare's friend instead of Sandys made no difference whatever in the policy of the Company. From that time forth its ruling spirits were Southampton and Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar, the deputy-treasurer. The name of this young man calls for more than a passing mention. Better known in ecclesiastical than in political history, he was distinguished and memorable in whatever he undertook, and among all the thronging figures in England's past he is one of the most sweetly and solemnly beautiful. His father, the elder Nicholas Ferrar, who died in April, 1620, just before the election I have been describing, was one of London's merchant princes, and it was in the parlour of his hospitable house in St. Osyth's Lane—now known as Size Lane, near the Poultry—that the weekly meetings of the Virginia Council were in these latter days regularly held. In this house the young Nicholas was born in 1593. He had spent seven years in study at Cambridge and five years in very extensive travel upon the continent of Europe, when at the age of twenty-seven he came to devote all his energies for a time to the welfare of the colony of Virginia. From early boyhood he was noticeable for taking a grave and earnest but by no means sombre view of life, its interests and its duties. For him frivolity had no charm, coarse pleasures were but loathsome, yet he was neither stern nor cold. Through every fibre of his being he was the refined and courteous gentleman, a true Sir Galahad fit to have found the Holy Grail. His scholarship was thorough and broad. An excellent mathematician and interested in the new dawning of physical science, he was also well versed in the classics and in modern languages and knew something of Oriental philology, but he was most fond of the devotional literature of the church. His intensely religious mood was part of the great spiritual revival of which Puritanism was the mightiest manifestation; yet Nicholas Ferrar was no Puritan either in doctrine or in ecclesiastical policy. In these matters his sympathies were rather with William Laud. At the same time his career is a living refutation of the common notion that there is a necessary connection between the religion of Laud and the politics of Strafford, for his own political views were as liberal as those of Hampden and Pym. Indeed Ferrar was a rare product of the harmonious coöperation of the tendencies represented respectively in the Renaissance and in the Reformation, tendencies which the general want of intelligence and moral soundness in mankind has more commonly brought into barren conflict. His ideal of life was much like that which Milton set forth with matchless beauty in "Il Penseroso." Its leading motive, strengthening with his years, was the feeling of duty toward the "studious cloister's pale," and the part of his career that is now best remembered is the founding of that monastic home at Little Gidding, where study and charitable deeds and prayer and praise should go on unceasing, where at whatsoever hour of day or night the weary wayfarer through the broad fen country should climb that hilly range in Huntingdon, he should hear the "pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below," and entering should receive spiritual comfort and strength, and go thence on his way with heart uplifted. In that blest retreat, ever busy with good works, lived Nicholas Ferrar after the downfall of the great London Company until his own early death in 1637 at the age of forty-four. Of great or brilliant deeds according to the world's usual standard this man did none; yet the simple record of his life brings us into such an atmosphere of holiness and love that mankind can never afford to let it fade and die.
This Protestant saint, withal, was no vague dreamer, but showed in action the practical sagacity that came by inheritance from London's best stock of bold and thrifty citizens. As one of the directing minds of a commercial corporation, he showed himself equal to every occasion that arose. He is identified with the last days of the London Company, and his family archives preserve the record of its downfall. It is thence that we get the account of the election of Southampton and many other interesting scenes and important facts that would otherwise have passed into oblivion.
Disputes in the Company.
After Southampton's election the king's hostility to the Company became deadly, and within that corporation itself he found allies who when once they found themselves unable to rule it were only too willing to contribute to its ruin. Sir Thomas Smith and his friends now accepted their defeat as decisive and final, and allowed themselves to become disloyal to the Company. Probably they would have expressed it differently; they would have said that out of regard for Virginia they felt it their duty to thwart the reckless men who had gained control of her destinies. Unfortunately for their version of the case, the friends of Sir Thomas Smith were charged with the burden of Argall's misdemeanours, and the regard which that governor had shown for Virginia was too much like the peculiar interest that a wolf feels in the sheepfold. It is not meant that the members of the court party who tried to screen Argall were all unscrupulous men; such was far from being the case, but in public contests nothing is more common than to see men personally stainless blindly accept and defend the rogues of their own party. In the heat of battle the private quarrel between Smith and the Earl of Warwick was either made up or allowed to drop out of sight. Both worked together, and in harmony with the king, to defeat Southampton and Sandys and Ferrar. In the Company's quarter sessions the disputes rose so high that the meetings were said to be more like cockpits than courts.[103] On one occasion a duel between the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cavendish, eldest son of the first Earl of Devonshire, was narrowly prevented. As Chamberlain, one of the court gossips of the day, writes: "Last week the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia ... court that the lie passed and repassed, and they are [gone out] to try their fortune, yet we do not hear they are met, so that there is hope they may return safe. In the meantime their ladies forget not their old familiarity, but meet daily to lament that misfortune. The factions in [the Company] are grown so violent as Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against another; and they seldom meet upon the Exchange, or in the streets, but they brabble and quarrel."[104]
The king rebuked by the House of Commons.
In 1621 the king, having arrived at the end of his purse, seized what he thought a favourable moment for summoning Parliament, but found that body more intractable than ever. The Commons busied themselves with attacking monopolies and impeaching the Lord Chancellor Bacon for taking bribes. Then they expressed unqualified disapproval of the Spanish match, whereupon the king told them to mind their own business and not meddle with his. "A long and angry dispute ensued, which terminated in a strong protest, in which the Commons declared that their privileges were not the gift of the Crown, but the natural birthright of English subjects, and that matters of public interest were within their province."[105] This protest so infuriated the king that he tore it into pieces, and forthwith dissolved Parliament, sending Pym, Southampton, and other leaders to prison. This was in January, 1622.
Nathaniel Butler and his pamphlet.
Some charges and answers: