James Sherley’s career is indeed the central one among the London merchant supporters of the colony at Plymouth. In December 1624, when he was thought to be fatally ill, his generosity was called “the only glue of the company.” Without his “unfeigned love” for the Pilgrims, his patience and willingness to disregard the harsh judgments of the dissatisfied adventurers, it was said that the project would have failed.
Sherley was apprenticed to his father, Robert Sherley, as a goldsmith in 1604, and became a full member of the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1612. Like several other members of his family he remained in close association with the Company throughout his life, although it is clear that he did not follow the craft of making plate or objects of gold and silver. Instead, he was in trade. Yet he was first active in Company business through his collection of Company rents, and he was chosen to take part in the ceremonial occasions of the Goldsmiths. On Lord Mayor’s Day, 1633, attired in a rich livery gown “furred with Foynes,” Sherley appeared at dinner at the Guildhall to “welcome the Lords Ladies & other guests.” On another occasion, before dining with members of a neighboring company, he joined them in a special service at St. Mary Woolnoth’s. Beginning with the office of assistant, and refusing the third wardenship in 1639, he had risen to the Company’s highest office, that of prime warden, by 1644. In this capacity he attended frequent wardens’ and court meetings and presided over a complex amount of Company business involving leases, loans, relations to the Mint, and other matters. Goldsmiths’ Hall, in Foster Lane, was a busy center for financial transactions.
Sherley’s own London address is something of a puzzle. Letters were directed to him in 1623 both as “dwelling on London bridge at the Golden hoospyte,” and to Crooked Lane. His brother John had a shop on London Bridge; perhaps in early years they shared a dwelling among the fine merchants’ houses erected there. Crooked Lane was a winding artery in Candlewick Ward, the site of a noted Dutch tavern; this may have been where James Sherley maintained his business address. Like many others who had left the stench, noise, and possible plague of London, he later had a home in Clapham, Surrey, then a rural environment. He wrote Bradford of carrying his records there in 1636 when the plague was raging in London.
It was from Clapham that Sherley was chosen to serve in the public capacities then filled by men of substance. He was a member of the Surrey committee for levying assessments for the militia. In confirmation of the strong religious tendency evident in his correspondence with Bradford, he was an elder in the Croydon Classis in Surrey, formed during a reorganization of the English Church along Presbyterian lines. The New England Company, erected to spread the Gospel to the Indians, included him among its members. Parliament made him one of a Surrey group appointed in 1652 to deal with the problem of supplying proper ministers and schoolmasters in the churches of his county. His son was granted the right to administer his will in Clapham in 1657.[33]
Early in his business career Sherley very likely was connected with the Netherlands trade, for he was sufficiently friendly with Edward Pickering, Weston’s agent, who died in 1623, to be one of the executors of his will; in 1630 he wrote that he had spent nearly three months in Holland. In underwriting the Plymouth “Undertakers,” he perhaps was committed financially as deeply as he could afford, for he did not join the Massachusetts Bay Company. He did own ships in the New England trade, however, one of which was hired by Isaac Allerton. He had a share in the Ashley scheme in Maine and in voyages to Massachusetts Bay. The latter colony owed him money in 1648.[34]
Nothing has been discovered about the remaining adventurers to alter the character of the group as described above; they were chiefly Puritan merchants, possessed of substantial means but not great wealth. It is true that Robert Alden, a prosperous salter, at the opening of the Civil Wars adhered to the Royalist minority of London citizens. William Greene, described as “one of the most religious of the adventurers,” was among those whose opposition to sending out any more emigrants from Leyden, made him withdraw his support. Another, Thomas Brewer, lumped together and imprisoned by the royal authorities with Brownists, by 1640 had become Anabaptist, a sect not tolerated by the Pilgrims.[35] For the most part, however, a consistency of business, religious, and political purposes seems to have prevailed among those who closed out the Company of Adventurers to New Plymouth.
PART II
Plymouth Reorganizes Financially
The colony looks to the fur trade to pay its debts
The method devised for repaying what was a stiff debt for the young colony, as one writer puts it, “shows considerable business ingenuity.” With ownership transferred from London to Plymouth, the plantation became a virtual corporation in fact. Two important matters still had to be decided. Should all the settlers share in the disposition of the corporate lands and assets and in the obligation of repayment to the adventurers? How would they be able to guarantee satisfaction of the London men? It was wisely decided to include as holders of shares, or “purchasers,” all men, whatever their former status, who were either heads of families or single and not indentured servants. At the 1627 division of assets in the form of land and cattle, every such person received twenty acres of tillable land to add to the one-acre portion allotted him when the plantation had ended the “common course.” The livestock was parceled out for a time among twelve groups, a total of 156 individuals, with every six persons receiving one cow and two goats. These “purchasers,” of whom in 1640 fifty-three were listed as living in Plymouth and five in England, were to benefit from subsequent divisions of land as the colony opened up.
The immediate task of paying the Londoners fell upon a group of eight leaders, including William Bradford, Miles Standish, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, John Howland, John Alden, and Thomas Prence, known as the “Undertakers.” These men founded a partnership to manage the fur trade of the colony for six years, the time during which the returns from the Pilgrims’ most profitable business enterprise were to be devoted to paying the debt and importing essential English goods. This became the business of the eight who took possession at once of the company boats and “the whole stock of furs, fells, beads, corn, wampampeak, hatchets, knives, &c.”