Attorney-general's argument.
The charter annulled, June 16, 1624.
In 1624 Parliament was not in good condition for quarrelling with the king upon too many issues at once. So it acquiesced, not without some grumbling, in the royal prohibition, and the petition of the Virginia Company was laid upon the table. A few weeks later the case on the quo warranto was argued before the court of King's Bench. The attorney-general's argument against the charter was truly ingenious. That charter allowed the Company to carry the king's subjects across the ocean to Virginia; if such a privilege were to be exercised without limitation, it might end in conveying all the king's subjects to America, leaving Great Britain a howling wilderness! Such a privilege was too great to be bestowed upon any corporate body, and therefore the charter ought to be annulled. Such logic was irresistible, and on the 16th of June the chief justice declared "that the Patent or Charter of the Company of English Merchants trading to Virginia, and pretending to exercise a power and authority over his Majesty's good subjects there, should be thenceforth null and void." Next day Thomas Wentworth, afterward Earl of Strafford, gave vent to his glee in a private letter: "Methinks, I imagine the Quaternity before this have had a meeting of comfort and consolation, stirring up each other to bear it courageously, and Sir Edwin Sandys in the midst of them sadly sighing forth, Oh, the burden of Virginia." By the Quaternity he meant Southampton, Sandys, Ferrar, and Cavendish. On the 26th of June the Privy Council ordered Nicholas Ferrar to bring all the books and papers of the late Company and hand them over to its custody.
Ferrar has the records copied.
History of a manuscript.
Ferrar could not disobey the order, but he had made up his mind that the records of the Company must be preserved, for its justification in the eyes of posterity. As soon as he saw that the day of doom was at hand he had copies made. One of Ferrar's dearest friends was the delightful poet, George Herbert, a young man of his own age, whose widowed mother had married Sir John Danvers, a prominent member of the Company. They lived in a fine old house in Chelsea, that had once been part of the home of Sir Thomas More. There Nicholas Ferrar passed many a pleasant evening with George Herbert and his eccentric and skeptical brother, afterward Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and if ever their talk grew a bit too earnest and warm, we can fancy it mellowed again as that other sweet poet, Dr. Donne, dropped in, with gentle Izaak Walton, as used often to happen. In that house of friends, Ferrar had a clerk locked up with the records until they were all copied, everything relating to the administrations of Sandys and Southampton, from the election of the former, in April, 1619, down to June 7, 1624. The copy was then carefully compared with the original documents, and its perfect accuracy duly attested by the Company's secretary, Edward Collingwood. Sir John Danvers then carried the manuscript to the Earl of Southampton, who exclaimed, as he threw his arms about his neck, "God bless you, Danvers! I shall keep this with my title-deeds at Tichfield; it is the evidence of my honour, and I prize it more than the evidence of my lands." About four months afterward Southampton died. Forty-three years afterward, in 1667, his son and successor passed away, and then this precious manuscript was bought from the executors by William Byrd, of Virginia, father of the famous historian and antiquary. From the Byrd library it passed into the hands of William Stith, president of William and Mary College, who used it in writing his History of Virginia, published at Williamsburg in 1747, one of the most admirable of American historical works. From Stith's hands the manuscript passed to his kinsman, Peyton Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, and after his death in 1775, Thomas Jefferson bought it. In 1814 ex-president Jefferson sold his library to the United States, and this manuscript is now in the Library of Congress, 741 folio pages bound in two volumes. As for the original documents, they are nowhere to be found among British records; and when we recollect how welcome their destruction must have been to Sir Thomas Smith, to the Earl of Warwick, and to James I., we cannot help feeling that the chest of the Privy Council was not altogether a safe place in which to keep them.
It is to the copy preserved through the careful forethought of Nicholas Ferrar that we owe our knowledge of one of the most interesting chapters in early American history. In the development of Virginia the overthrow of the great London Company was an event of cardinal importance. For the moment it was quite naturally bewailed in Virginia as a direful calamity; but, as we shall presently see, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Stuart despotism gained not one of its ends, except the momentary gratification of spleen, and self-government in Virginia, which seemed in peril, went on to take root more deeply and strongly than before.