the Government of the Colony of Virginia shall immediately depend upon Our Self, and not be committed to any Company or Corporation, to whom it may be proper to trust matters of Trade and Commerce, but cannot be fit or safe to communicate the ordering of State-Affairs, be they of never so mean consequence.
The age of the private Company had ended; the age of the royal colony had begun.
There are two Charters that are seldom mentioned among those that affected the development of English America. The first was the one which, on 31 December 1600, incorporated the British East India Company. Although many of the voyages that took place under its auspices ended tragically, the ships that returned safe home swamped the market with cloves, peppers, silks and saltpetre. When, in 1609, the books were closed on the combined results from this Company’s first two voyages, a profit of 95 per cent was declared. Nothing exported from Virginia could match that until tobacco became a major crop and furs a valuable catch. Certainly ship masts, staves, clapboard and sassafras could not compete. Those with money to invest – and many people, like Sir Thomas Smythe, were active in both the Virginia and the East India Companies – were far more likely to consider that, despite the shipwrecks and the seizures, trading voyages to the East Indies offered a better return on capital than did settler ships sailing to America. Nothing came of the other Charter, issued to Sir Robert Heath in 1629, but it is of note because it granted to this friend of King Charles the land lying between 31º and 36º North, the Carolinas, stretching well towards the region previously jealously and murderously protected by Spain (St Augustine was only sixty miles further south). As a statement of confidence in colonialism it would be hard to beat but, as it was never acted upon, it was never contended.
The Charters had been the unique way by which the English sovereign apportioned the new world to his or her subjects. It was a formulaic patent with little difference between that awarded to John Cabot in 1496 and that granted to Sir Robert Heath in 1629. All emphasized conquest, occupation and conversion. At the end of that long century a few square miles were occupied but not fully controlled, let alone conquered, and a few ‘barbarous men’ had been converted. The Charters presented to Cabot, Gilbert, Ralegh, Alexander, Heath and the northern Virginia Colony had come to nought; the three issued to the Virginia Company of London had proved unworkable; that for Maine, issued to Gorges and Mason, had led to a few huts being erected; Newfoundland would have struggled on without a Charter, as would have the settlement at Plymouth, while Massachusetts Bay guaranteed its success by taking the paperwork with it. Neither did the Charters of themselves address the needs of the invasion period about which its language was so up-beat. They were documents designed to ensure a quick return for the petitioners, not operational orders for invading and occupation forces. They should have been.
Map 2: The division of Virginia under the First Charter, 1606
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