had Samuel Mace seek to make contact with the lost colonists but also wrote a note to Sir Robert Cecil, demanding that the cargo of sassafras landed from the returning Concord, following the voyage to North Virginia by Bartholomew Gilbert and Bartholomew Gosnold that same year, be impounded as infringing his monopoly. Then, realizing that he might be on shaky ground, he used his justly famous silver-tongued flattery to persuade John Brereton, who wrote the account of the Gosnold voyage, to dedicate his book to him and to include a note which stated, erroneously, that the voyage had been made ‘by the permission of the honourable knight, Sir Walter Ralegh’ – a tacit reminder of Ralegh’s suzerainty.
This was Ralegh’s last effort to retain his Charter rights. In March 1603 his Queen was dead. In July he was placed in the Tower to answer charges of treason. In November he was tried and sentenced to death. Only King James’s cunning clemency granted him a stay of execution long enough to have him embroiled in a voyage to Guiana in 1617, the failure of which would finally lead him to the block. Among those who passed judgment at his first trial were Sir Robert Cecil, Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice, and Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General. A cynic might see some link in the fact that it is their names which are associated with the drafting of the first Charter for Virginia in April 1606, at a time when Ralegh had been in the Tower long enough to be either no longer a disruptive force or a man with any public following. Nevertheless, his shadow fell on the deliberations, for, among the eight suitors to be named in the Charter were Raleigh Gilbert and William Parker, respectively a relative and a servant of Sir Walter, who it can be presumed were included to avoid any outbreak of unpleasantness.
The continuing issue of Charters so early in James’s reign is a cause for some surprise since the King’s major foreign policy was to secure peace with Spain and not to go to war again. Yet he was content not only to sign a potentially contentious document but also to remain resolute in the face of Spanish objections. One reason for his support of this new venture was that, in the years since Ralegh’s failure at Roanoke, many English merchants and speculators had learned more about the potential opportunities that America might offer. In the north, fishing, furs and forestry seemed available for exploitation, while in the south the climate could encourage the planting of crops traditionally imported from the Mediterranean, as well as offering a chance to increase the acreage the nation had devoted to industrial crops such as flax and hemp and silk, a special favourite of the King. Thus began a fault line between an extractive north and an agricultural south, which would be emphasized in the Charter of 1606 and finally shear into the earthquake of 1861. Back in 1606, however, what investors hoped to find within this landscape was mineral wealth and a navigable route to ‘nearby’ Cathay.
In England, the north–south divide of Virginia was reflected in an east–west divide of investors in the first Charter for Virginia, with West Country merchants of Bristol, Plymouth and Exeter being granted the right to settle and exploit the land lying between 38º and 45º North, that is from Chesapeake Bay to present-day Bangor, Maine, while London businessmen were offered the bloc between 34º and 41º North, from Cape Fear to Manhattan Island. The obvious overlap seems to have been inserted to encourage competition and expansion, but even within their exclusive boundaries the two companies established to manage the colonies were only given control of a square of territory stretching fifty miles either side of any settlement and a hundred miles inland, as well as the adjoining seas out to the same distance.
The two colonies thus created were to be organized by two separate companies that would be overseen by a royal council of thirteen members appointed by the King and named the Council for Virginia, which would include four representatives of both sub-groups.
The Charter named eight individual suitors; four West Countrymen for the northern plantation and four Londoners for the southern one. Their names and backgrounds are indicative of the purpose and development of the nascent colonies. The link with the jailed Ralegh remains even here, and there can be little doubt that the noxious Wade was present to act as a spy on the ‘shepherd of the sea’ now locked up ashore.
Suitors for Licence to Establish a Colony in Virginia, 1606
Excluded by name are the ‘divers others of our loving subjects’, which probably encompassed Sir Robert Cecil, by now Lord Salisbury.
Members of the Council for Virginia
Unlike Ralegh before them, many of these investors did risk their own lives to gain their reward. Of the eight grantees named in the 1606 Charter of Virginia, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and Edward-Maria Wingfield sailed to Jamestown, while Raleigh Gilbert and George Popham established the short-lived northern colony. Later, in 1628, George Calvert tried to settle in Newfoundland, where he had been granted extensive charter lands. Thus there was an attempt to lead by example and endure with equanimity the hardships that those they had almost conned into taking passage had to face with uncertain support from their backers. Their misfortune was that they were, for the most part, not able to command that which they had created.
The Jacobean Charters continued the tradition of awarding a generous grant of resources, which, of course, were not the king’s to give, allowing the settlers to ‘have all the lands, woods, soil, grounds, havens, ports, rivers, mines, minerals, woods, waters, marshes, fishings, commodities, and hereditaments, whatsoever, from the said place of their first plantation . . .’
Among the minerals expressly mentioned, copper, after it was reported as being much used by the native Amerindians, joined gold and silver as being one of the minerals for whose extraction the Crown required a percentage payment. The overwhelming desire for gold was nowhere more evident than in the change of plan for Frobisher’s northern voyages, for no sooner had he returned from his first expedition in 1576 with a lump of black rock, than the search for a route to Cathay was abandoned in favour of gathering vast quantities of this worthless stone. The resulting attempt to establish a settlement near Baffin Island in 1578 might have been doomed, but the 100 people who were selected to form this early English colony in the new world were wisely chosen as far as their trade was concerned. They included forty seamen, thirty miners and thirty soldiers, all under the command of Edward Fenton. Luckily circumstances enabled them to avoid trying to endure the unendurable – an Arctic winter – but the mix of skills is hard to fault. This was not so in Virginia.
The 1606 first Charter for Virginia had within its framework the seeds for success, which were encouragingly watered by the issue, the following November, of Instructions for Government, which were enforced in December by Orders for the Council for Virginia, which assigned ships and their captains, to whom were issued sealed orders. However, at the same time, the London Council for Virginia issued Instructions Given by way of Advice . . . for the Intended Voyage to Virginia to Be Observed by those Captains and Company which Are Sent at This Present to Plant. This proved to be the inhibitor for the southern group, for it moved away from the simple aim of establishing a successful colony that would export what it was able to glean, to one which was to have, amongst several aims, the requirement for further exploration, specifically to find a way to the ‘Other Sea’, the Pacific Ocean, and to search for gold. It was in choosing to follow rivers that might lead to this mythical route that the colonists lost their way. The error they imported is obvious from the text which, assuming they numbered 120 and not the 104 that disembarked, required forty of them to build the fort and protect the settlement, thirty to clear and plant, ten to man a watchtower at the river entrance and forty to spend two months in exploring the route to the Pacific. In commanding this division the Council failed to appreciate several things: the challenges that the settlers would meet; the priorities that would be imposed by their circumstance; the nature and size of the terrain on which they would disembark and, probably most significant of all, the composition of the force that they would require to secure their beachhead.
