in America. It did not take hold, but from its failing sprang up a greater evil – slavery. At the time of the 1609 Charter, however, the secret orders guaranteed war where peace was the most important policy.
Outside the excavated remains of Jamestown the modern visitor can see a line of low-lying grassy banks which mark the houses and workshops of the artisans who were brought to Virginia to establish the settlement’s export industry. A short distance away down an old track is the remains of the glass works. A large mulberry tree also hints at early hopes of a silk-weaving industry: the fact that it was the wrong sort of mulberry for silk worms is an arboreal indication of the lack of planning that went into meeting Gates’s fourth target, which Smith also condemned by pointing out that the Baltic lands were far better able to export that which the investors demanded. Thus each instruction carried with it the seeds of failure and it was not until the settlers themselves decided to grow tobacco, or in the case of New England export furs, that commercial success ensued.
When the initial enthusiasm for shares diminished in the light of no quick return the Virginia Company hit upon another wheeze, which the King backed by the issue of the third Charter of Virginia in March 1611. This authorized a lottery to be held. With a first prize of £1,000, it proved to be an instant success and once more the coffers of the Company, but not the pockets of the investors, were filled.
The continuing failure of Virginia to deliver a sizeable and reliable return rekindled interest in the northern plantation, now renamed New England. Although this had been abandoned in 1608, interest in the area had remained because of both the great catches of fish netted from the waters off Maine and the proselytizing work of John Smith, who had published his work A Description of New England to encourage re-colonization, a venture in which he wished to play a key role. In March 1619 the King was presented with a somewhat grovelling and self-justifying, but short, petition for a new Charter of New England. By 3 November of that year the lengthy, fairly indigestible, Charter had been written and promulgated. Its main point was that it remained a West Country initiative, uncoupled from the arrangement with its London twin.
Those who still viewed the expanding world as one in which privateering had a part to play could also see value in retaining a settlement in Newfoundland, especially if the Government were charged ‘to maintain a couple of good ships and two pinnaces in warlike manner upon the coast’, for the sites selected lay not too far off the route home from the West Indies and were also a convenient halfway port of call for vessels bound for Virginia. St John’s had, of course, been claimed for the Crown by Humphrey Gilbert, but the Charter of 1610, which awarded the whole island to the London and Bristol Company, did not mention this fact. Instead it attempted to link London capital with Bristol experience to create a going concern based on managing the fisheries and, that inevitable chimera, mining for gold and other precious metals. However, the company had learned from the obvious errors committed by its Virginia forerunner. In particular the first settlers sent out to Newfoundland were mainly labourers, fishermen and people with practical skills who were instructed to settle away from swampy ground, to keep busy and to establish good relations with the few native people that they encountered in this land ‘so desolate of inhabitance’. The governor selected was also not an untested ‘gentleman’ but an experienced merchant who knew this new world well enough. The flaw in the Newfoundland Charter was the belief held by both propagandists and investors that settlement could create added value to the already efficient offshore fishing industry. It could not, nor could a land where survival alone was challenging enough provide a return to shareholders. Gradually, the latter, along with the gentlemen adventurers, moved away, but the labourers stayed. They needed no Charter to continue to eke out a living for they had sufficient land that they could call their own to support a family in freedom. Harsh as it undoubtedly was, many of them had more to lose by leaving than they would gain by remaining. More limpet than tree root, they clung on and survived.
The Charter for Nova Scotia, issued in September 1621, granted almost sovereign powers to Sir William Alexander over a tract of land stretching between Newfoundland and Maine which had previously been known by the French name of Acadia. In a supplementary document the King gave his reasons for making the grant as:
Having ever been ready to embrace any good occasion whereby the honour or profit of our Kingdom may be advanced, and considering that no kind of conquest can be more easy and innocent than that which proceeds from plantations specially in a country commodious for men to live in, yet remaining altogether desert or at least only inhabited by infidels the conversion of whom to the Christian faith (intended by this means) might tend much to the glory of God considering how populous our Kingdom (Scotland) is at this present and the necessity that idle people should be employed, preventing worse courses there are many that might be spared, of minds as resolute and of bodies as able to overcome the difficulties that such adventures must at first encounter the enterprise doth crave the transportation of nothing but only men, women, cattle, and victuals, and not of money, and may give a good return of a new trade at this time when traffic is so much decayed. Therefore we have the more willingly hearkened to Sir William Alexander who has made choice of lands lying between New England and Newfoundland, both the Governors whereof have encouraged him thereunto . . .
It is a succinct summary of all the reasons for plantation that had appeared in earlier Charters.
When, as had happened in earlier Charters, Alexander found that he could not persuade sufficient ‘idle people’ to head out to the commodious lands, and, finding that the enterprise was in need of money, he hit upon the ingenious idea of offering land for honours, centuries before Lloyd George, and later politicians, saw that titles were saleable assets. He persuaded the King to create a new order of twenty-two barons, each of whom would hold titles in Nova Scotia. The estates that accompanied the titles covered up to 12,000 acres each and were available for the down payment of 1,000 marks and the dispatch of six settlers.
But sextets wishing to sail for what was in reality a scheme to restore Sir William’s fortunes were not readily available and, apart from a military expedition to hold the land against prior French claims, little was achieved between the issue of the Charter and 1631 when, by treaty, the land was returned to France.
Ironically the Christian religion, or the zealously guarded Anglican version of it, delayed the departure of many who might have been expected to apply the high-minded desire of spreading the gospel which had been expressed in the Charters. Stuart England had a growing number of minority creeds, ranging from the sizeable old Catholic families to the newer Puritans and other dissenters. Many of these welcomed the opportunity to emigrate to the new world, where they were quite prepared to work as communities to establish viable settlements, provided that they were guaranteed freedom to worship. This King James was not prepared to allow, being influenced most understandably by the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Both the 1609 and 1620 Charters included a paragraph that stated:
because the principal effect which we can desire or expect from this action, is the conversion and reduction of the people in those parts, to the true worship of God and the Christian religion, we should be loath that any person should be permitted to take passage that we suspect to affect the superstitions of the Church of Rome, we therefore declare that it is our will and pleasure that none be permitted to pass in any voyage which from time to time be made to that Country, but such as have taken the Oath of Supremacy . . .
The paragraph went on to state that the Company and appointed officials could demand of any settler that they swear the oath of allegiance and acknowledge the Act of Supremacy. Not even the most illustrious could ignore this ruling.
In 1629, Sir George Calvert, Baron Baltimore and an out-of-the-closet Catholic, cruising the American coast with his wife and family in search of a site for a settlement more in keeping with his requirements than he had discovered Newfoundland to be, put in to Jamestown. Here he was asked to take the oath, in accordance with the Charter, but refused to do so, after which he departed in haste for England, leaving his family behind. Once back at Court he did what the Virginians suspected that he would do, and persuaded
