The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624

by Wesley Frank Craven

There can be no question, however, that the reviving interest in Virginia received an additional stimulant from the fact that the business now had a new management. At the close of 1618, and largely as the result of emigration during that year, the population of the colony stood at approximately 1,000 persons. During the year after Sandys' election, a total of 1,261 emigrants left England for Virginia, over 800 of them at the company's charge. This substantial evidence of the company's determination to assume the lead encouraged additional associations of adventurers to take up patents for their own plantations, with the result that by the summer of 1622 the council could announce that over 3,500 people had migrated to Virginia since the spring of 1619. This was a remarkable record, testifying to the very great gifts Sir Edwin possessed as a leader and the confidence men placed in his leadership.

The minutes of the company's courts have survived for the period after the election of Sandys, and so it is possible to get a clearer picture of the company's organization and procedures than can be had for any earlier date. Further help comes from the "Orders and Constitutions" drawn up after Sandys' election and published in 1620 as part of a pamphlet skilfully written to convey the impression that Virginia's affairs were then being managed much better than in the past. The company depended basically upon decisions reached in four great quarter courts, which were general assemblies of all the adventurers who wished to attend and which were scheduled for regular meeting on next to the last Wednesday of each of the quarterly terms in which the king's courts sat at Westminster. Only a quarter court could elect officers, either of the colony or of the company, enact laws and ordinances, or determine policies governing the distribution of lands in the colony and the conduct of its trade. On the Monday preceding each meeting of the quarter court, a preparatory court would settle the agenda for the following Wednesday, in order that the members might have warning of the business to be taken up at that time. Each fortnight, except in the "long vacations" between court terms, an ordinary court would meet, again on Wednesday, with a quorum that required the presence of at least five members of the council, the treasurer or his deputy, and "fifteene of the generality." The hour of meeting for all courts was 2 P.M., and at no court could a question be put after 6 P.M. A decision reached by any lesser court, including the extraordinary court that might be called in case of special emergency, could be overridden by a quarter court. This was the governing body of the company, a popular assembly in which Sir Edwin often demonstrated his special talent as a parliamentary tactician. Attendance varied according to the importance of the business at hand, but as many as 150 might attend.

The quarter court meeting in Easter term was a court of elections, where the members cast their votes for all principal officers by secret ballot. Except for members of the council, all offices of the company were held by annual election. The chief office was that of the treasurer, as the governor of the company was still officially designated. As frequently as not, in common usage he was known as the governor, but the charters had fixed the title of his office and in so doing had pointed up a primary responsibility of the office. The governor of the Virginia Company was in fact its treasurer. After 1619 no man could hold the position for longer than three years, and no man was eligible for election to it if already he was serving as the governor of another company, except that he might also serve as the governor of the Somers Island Company. The election court might vote a reward for services rendered, but the treasurer, like other principal officers, served without fixed compensation.

His chief assistant, and the second officer in rank, was the deputy. As the title suggests, he might be deputized to perform virtually any function of the governor, including that of presiding at courts in the governor's absence. But he also had important functions of his own. He is perhaps best described as the chief administrative officer of the company. He was specifically charged with superintendence over all lesser officers, and he had a primary responsibility for contracts and other business arrangements relating to the dispatch of shipping, provisions, and passengers to Virginia and to the receipt, storage, and marketing of cargoes returned from the colony. At all times, he acted, or was supposed to act, in accordance with instructions from the court, council, or treasurer, but all such instructions were necessarily general in character. Many were the opportunities to use his own judgment, or to confer a favor, as he handled business transactions involving hundreds or even thousands of pounds. For his assistance and perhaps to keep a watch on him, he had a committee of sixteen men chosen by the court under a provision requiring that a fourth of the number should be changed each year "to the end [that] many be trained up in the businesse." The committee may have been new, but the deputy's office was old. It had been occupied for many years before the spring election of 1619 by Alderman Johnson. Some of the more serious charges brought against Smith's administration related to the management of the magazine, as the stock of supplies periodically forwarded to the colony was generally described. Johnson had managed the successive magazines, each separately financed by its own joint-stock, until in 1619 he was replaced by John Ferrar.

The council, still described as His Majesty's Council for Virginia, had become a large and unwieldy body, with many of its members inactive. Its influence on the conduct of Virginia's affairs was now decidedly less important than in the earlier years. According to the Orders and Constitutions, no one "under the degree of a Lord or principall magistrate" was thereafter to be elected to the council except "such as by diligent attendance at the courts and service of Virginia for one year at least before, have approved their sufficiency and worth to the Companie." As this statement strongly suggests, a place on the council was for many members an honorary post through which one might lend the prestige of a great name to a worthy undertaking without assuming much real responsibility. Nevertheless, the legal powers of the council under the Virginia charters made its services indispensable, and made it desirable that at least a few of its members should be intimately acquainted with the business. The treasurer was supposed to consult with the council on important occasions, and especially on matters pertaining to the government of the colony. All formal instructions to officers in the colony had to be sent in the name of the council and over its seal. In any case of removal from office, in London or at Jamestown, the cause had to be considered in council before it could be taken before the adventurers. But any seven members made a quorum giving full power to actions taken in council, and the treasurer, who was always a member of the council, had the custody of its seal.

Two of the seven auditors now required for annual review of disbursements and receipts had to be members of the council. The auditors' office had grown out of the disputes over the accounts of Sir Thomas Smith, and in addition to the annual auditing of the treasurer's report, which had to be submitted to the Easter court, they were charged with responsibility for a close review of all earlier records of the company. The primary purpose was to establish a full and exact list of all subscriptions, with notation especially of delinquencies. Salaried officers of the company were a secretary, a bookkeeper, a husband (or as we would say, an accountant), and a bedel or messenger. The secretary served all courts held by the adventurers, the council, and the auditors, or by standing and special committees, of which last the adventurers appointed quite a number. In addition, the secretary was custodian of the company's records.

Although Sir Edwin Sandys continued to be the actual leader of the company until its dissolution in 1624, his tenure of the treasurer's office was limited to a single year. When the adventurers assembled for the annual elections in the spring of 1620, they were much disturbed to receive instruction from the king that Sir Edwin was not to be re-elected. Instead, the king suggested the choice of some merchant of means and wide experience—perhaps Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Thomas Roe, Alderman Robert Johnson, or Mr. Maurice Abbott.

Whether Sandys could have been elected in the absence of this interference by the king, which the adventurers protested as an unwarranted invasion of their liberty, is itself an interesting and debatable question. By his many criticisms of the previous conduct of the company's affairs, Sandys had won the undying enmity of Sir Thomas Smith and his important friends. More than that, he had quarreled with his ally of the preceding year, the Earl of Warwick, who had connections hardly less impressive than those enjoyed by Sir Thomas. The quarrel with Warwick was over a question of piracy, as Sir Edwin chose to regard it. One of Warwick's ships, the Treasurer, had sailed from England in April 1618 with a license to capture pirates, which was one way of getting a ship cleared from English ports for depredations against the Spaniard at a time when the king had set his face against all such activity. The Treasurer had called at Jamestown, where Governor Argall, who had rendered important services to the colony but who had special reason to understand that his position in Virginia depended upon the good will of important members of the company, helped to outfit the vessel for a raid on the West Indies. Recent studies, and especially those of David Quinn, a British scholar, argue strongly that the earlier ventures of Gilbert and Raleigh had been inspired very largely by the desire to establish some base on the North American coast that would be useful in attacks upon Spanish possessions and the trade routes which joined them to Spain. But it is evident enough that by this time the leaders of the Virginia Company were chiefly fearful that Spain might attack their colony before it was securely fortified, and before it had fulfilled the promise of rewards far greater than anything freebooting ventures could offer. As a result, Governor Yeardley, on instruction from London, denied the courtesies of Jamestown to the Treasurer on its return in 1619, and won for Sandys thereby the bitter resentment of the Rich family.

The king's interference in the election of 1620 has naturally become a celebrated incident in the history of Virginia. Sir Edwin was a leader in parliament, which before the century was out would establish its supremacy in the government of England, and the Virginia Company in 1620 had only recently established the first representative assembly in North America. To historians who have sought the larger meaning of the American experiment, it has often seemed that the king must have been guided by a fear of representative government—in other words, that his motives were largely political. No doubt, he was more easily persuaded to enter an objection to Sandys' re-election because of Sir Edwin's opposition to royal policies in the house of commons, but there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that the king had even noticed the Assembly which met at Jamestown in 1619. Moreover, that Assembly had been authorized before Sandys' election, at a time when Sir Thomas Smith was still in the chair, and anyone who thinks the motion had been carried over Smith's opposition should take note that the same kind of representative assembly was established in 1620 for Bermuda, over whose fortunes Sir Thomas would continue to preside until 1621. Not until the middle of the seventeenth century, at the time of Cromwell, does it appear that anyone even suggested that the primary reason for the king's interference was fear of a significant development in the history of representative government.

What actually happened in 1620 would seem to be clear enough. Sir Thomas Smith had connections that reached all the way into the king's bedchamber, and there he effectively argued that Sandys did not know his business. It was an argument that found not a little justification in the fact that the company had to admit by a broadside published in the very month of the election court that hundreds of the colonists sent to Virginia in the preceding year had died within a short time of their arrival there, and it may be that Sir Thomas apprehended the even greater disasters soon to overtake the colony. A more likely supposition, however, is that he seized upon this news from the colony as an opportunity to vent his resentment against Sandys, a resentment that must have become more bitter with each of Sir Edwin's promotional releases advertising the great improvements now to be found in the management of Virginia's affairs. The legal basis on which the king acted was probably debatable. No doubt, he depended upon the provision in the charter requiring that all members of the council, of which the treasurer was the head, be sworn to the king's service. But membership on the council was for life, and Sir Edwin had taken his oath as a member of the council as early as 1607. Perhaps the king took advantage of the company's regulations requiring an annual election and that the treasurer be sworn following his election. Whether this was a new requirement cannot be said. It can only be suggested that the king intended to say that if Sir Edwin were re-elected he would not give him a necessary oath of office. It may be, too, that he stood quite simply on the prerogative of his office to insist that his subjects in Virginia were entitled to royal protection. In any case, the adventurers chose not to defy the king's wish.