The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624

by Wesley Frank Craven

The bitterest factional strife in the history of the London adventurers soon followed. It is a complicated story, too complicated and too long to be told fully here. Briefly, both the terms agreed upon by Sandys and his proposals for the management of the contract, proposals which left Sandys and his cohorts in full control, touched too closely the vital interests of some of his bitterest enemies. In Bermuda, as in Virginia, the hope of an early profit from the production of sugar, silk, wine, indigo, and other such commodities had proved vain, and like Virginia, Bermuda lived by the tobacco it grew. The Earl of Warwick and members of his family had made especially heavy investments in their Bermuda properties, and Sir Nathaniel Rich became the floor leader, as it were, of an attempt to defeat the contract. Sir Thomas Smith and his friends joined in the effort. Especially objectionable in the view of the opposition were plans for placing the management of the contract in the hands of salaried officials, with Sir Edwin as director at a salary of £500. At one Virginia court, meeting early in December, the debate got so out of hand that it required several additional sessions to straighten out the minutes in order that appropriate penalties might be imposed upon Mr. Samuel Wrote, a member of the Virginia council whose unrestrained charges of graft violated the company's rules and offended the court's sense of its own dignity. In the end the opposition elected to make the final test in a Bermuda court, whose consent was necessary to close the contract and where Sandys' opponents included the more substantial investors in that colony. The test came in February 1623, and Sandys won. But it could be demonstrated that had the vote been by share rather than by head, as was the rule in both companies, he would have been defeated. Sandys' opponents in the Bermuda Company all along had complained of a plan to distribute the charges of the contract equally between the two companies, arguing that the Virginia tobacco had a greater value and should therefore carry a proportionately larger charge. And now they were in a position to argue that the Virginia Company, in whose courts for some time they had steadfastly refused even to vote on the salary question, sought to exploit the younger plantation, as was evidenced by the opposition of the adventurers to whom Bermuda's tobacco chiefly belonged. With this argument, Sandys' opponents promptly carried the whole question before the privy council.

This was in the spring of 1623. During the course of the preceding debate, news had come of an Indian massacre in Virginia that had cost the lives of over 350 colonists. The faction-ridden and bankrupt company had stirred itself to send such aid as it could, but now came the word that this had not been enough. By the testimony of Sandys' own brother, though this testimony may not have been immediately available to his enemies, another 500 colonists had died before the year was out as a result of the dislocations occasioned by the massacre, and as a result of the failure of the company to send enough aid. The tobacco contract dropped into a position of secondary importance as Sandys' opponents, with Alderman Johnson taking the lead, petitioned the king for a full investigation of the situation in Virginia and of the recent conduct of its affairs.

Whatever one may think of Sir Edwin Sandys, or of the motives which inspired his opponents, there can be no question as to the correctness of the action taken by the government. The leaders of the two factions were called before the privy council on April 17, where they displayed so "much heat and bitterness" toward one another as to make it difficult to get on with the business. In the end, the council won agreement that a special commission should be established for an investigation of the state of the colony's affairs, the agreement coming finally when the council conceded the demand of Sandys' supporters that the investigation should begin with the administration of Sir Thomas Smith. Accordingly, on May 9, a commission was issued to Sir William Jones, justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and six other gentlemen "to examine the carriage of the whole business." Meantime, a letter had been prepared by the privy council to acquaint the colonists with the fact that their affairs had been taken into "His Majesty's pious and princely care" and to encourage them "to go on cheerfully in the work they have in hand." The central issues all pertained to Virginia, but in the circumstances there was no choice but to include both companies in the province of the Jones commission.

The appointment of the Jones commission ended, for all practical purposes, the control of the Virginia Company over the colony. The company lingered on as an agency chiefly through which the Sandys faction prepared its briefs for the attention of the commissioners, or through which orders from the commissioners might be implemented. All of the company's records were impounded by the commission, which also took charge of all correspondence with the colony. The records of the company demonstrated all too clearly the bankrupt state of its finances. The hearings before the commissioners demonstrated with equal clarity the hopeless division of the adventurers by bitter factional strife. Correspondence from the colony brought evidence of a desperate situation. Even Sandys had to admit that no more than 2,500 colonists were still alive in the colony, which was to confess an attrition, mainly by death, of something over 40 percent of the colonists residing in Virginia, or sent to Virginia, since he had assumed responsibility for the management of its affairs. Actually, the situation was much worse than these figures suggested, for a census taken in Virginia early in 1625 showed a total population of only 1,275. In the fall of 1623 the privy council invited the company to surrender its charter on the promise that a new one would be issued to cover all individual rights and grants, but with a revision of the plan of government that would place the control of the colony under the more immediate supervision of the king. In effect, the proposal was to return to something close to the original plan of 1606. When the adventurers, in a court from which Sandys' enemies largely absented themselves, rejected this proposal, the government began quo warranto proceedings against the company in the court of Kings Bench. On May 24, 1624, that court gave its decision for recall of the Virginia charters. And so ended the Virginia Company.

The Bermuda Company had been dragged into the investigation chiefly because of the close ties joining it to the older company. There was no emergency in the colony, and its debts were not beyond the capacity of Sir Thomas Smith and other leading adventurers to pay. As a result, the Somers Island Company lasted on for another sixty years.

One who looks back from 1624 over the brief and frequently troubled history of the Virginia Company may debate, as historians have often done in the past, just what should be said by way of conclusion. Perhaps it is this: here were men who out of their disappointment quarreled bitterly and by their quarrels helped to destroy an agency through which in the past they had worked together, with a remarkable devotion to the public interest, for the achievement of great objectives. No doubt, their greatest fault had been to set their goals too high. Certainly, their greatest virtue was persistence in the faith that great things could be done for England in America, a faith destined in time to be justified by the course of history.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] For purposes of comparison, it may be noted that Spanish tobacco was declared to have been sold for as much as 20s. a pound. The "filthy weed" was not yet "the poor man's luxury."