The Palatine.
The lords proprietors, as tenants-in-chief of the crown, were feudal sovereigns over Carolina. They could grant estates on any terms they pleased, and subinfeudation, which had been forbidden in England since 1290, was expressly permitted here. The eldest of the proprietors was called the Palatine; he presided at their meetings, and his vote with those of three associates was reckoned a majority. As the proprietors remained in England, it was arranged that each of them should be represented in Carolina by a deputy; and the Palatine’s deputy, sometimes called Vice-Palatine, was to be governor of the colony. But any one of the proprietors coming into the colony, or the oldest of those coming, if there were more than one, was to take precedence over everybody and become at once Vice-Palatine.
Titles of nobility.
By a curious provision of the charter, the lords proprietors could grant titles of nobility, provided they were unlike those used in England. Hence the outlandish titles, such as “landgrave” and “cacique,” which occur in the Fundamental Constitutions. With the titles there was combined an artificial system of social gradations which is not worth recounting. As for the political status of the settlers, they were guaranteed in the possession of all the rights and privileges enjoyed by Englishmen in England.
The Albemarle colony.
The planting of two distinct colonies in Carolina was no part of the original scheme, but the early centres of colonization were so far apart and communication between them was so difficult that they could not well be united in a single community, although more than once there was a single governor over the whole of Carolina. Emigration from Virginia had begun as early as 1653, when Roger Greene with a hundred men made a small settlement in the Chowan precinct, on the north shore of Albemarle Sound.[257] In 1662 George Durant[258] followed, and began a settlement in the Perquimans precinct, just east of Chowan. In 1664 Governor Berkeley, of Virginia,—himself one of the eight lords proprietors,—severed this newly settled region from Virginia, and appointed William Drummond as its governor. Such were the beginnings of Albemarle, the colony which in time was to develop into North Carolina.
MAP OF NORTH CAROLINA PRECINCTS, 1663-1729
THE M.-N. CO., BUFFALO, N. Y.
The visit of New Englanders.