Jamestown 10: The Virginia Company – King vs. Parliament

 

 

[mc4wp_form id=”123″]

Listen on: iTunes Subscribe on Android Stitcher and more

 

Another collapse …

This is it, the final (final) episode on Jamestown.  It’s here that everything comes together, and the seeds of future adventures are planted.

When the Sea Venture sank off the coast of Bermuda, the Virginia Company once again began to collapse.  The highest profile mission, the biggest failure.  The greatest hopes, the greatest disappointments.  It almost reads like a Dickens novel.

Cecil died.  Then, Prince Henry died.  In addition, the king started to compete with the company for investors when he sold royal titles.

The company used James’ financial situation to negotiate for reforms, and the right to hold a lottery, but that was delayed, and it barely helped pay the company’s debts.

Meanwhile, three factions emerged within the company, itself:

Thomas Smythe and his supporters wanted a politically neutral business.  Edwin Sandys and his supporters wanted a base for opposition to the king, and a bastion of Parliamentary control – a Commonwealth.  Finally, the Earl of Warwick and his supporters wanted a piracy base to provoke war with Spain.

The first Crown Colony

As the three sides vied for power, the king watched closely.  Edwin Sandys had been James’s most vocal Parliamentary opponent.  His political influence quickly became apparent when he took control of the colony.

It wasn’t long before the company had become a new battleground in the war between king and parliament.

By 1622, James had politically cornered Sandys, and it was at that moment that news of the Powhatan Massacre reached England.  Despite a couple PR successes, the Virginia Company collapsed.  The Earl of Warwick exacerbated the damage when he commissioned reports detailing Sandys’s failed leadership, and violence nearly erupted in the streets.

Within a month, the Virginia Company was dissolved and the colony became a crown possession.  Within a year, James died.

James’s heir, Charles I, affirmed Virginia’s right to keep its elected government, and promised never to use Virginia as a political or diplomatic bargaining chip.  Charles won the colony’s loyalty, and created the conditions that allowed the colony to flourish.

 

Transcript

Four months after the Third Supply set sail, Samuel Argall returned to London and reported that the Sea Venture hadn’t arrived in Virginia.  He hadn’t been a part of the Third Supply, he was just an independent captain, so the Company hoped the ship had just been delayed.  It didn’t look good, though, and worse, he brought back a letter from Archer discussing how horrible the situation in Jamestown was.  It was the last letter Archer would ever send to England.

A few weeks later, Francis West’s mutineers also started arriving in England, bringing reports of starvation, and a man who had eaten his dead wife.  Some of the surviving ships from the Third Supply also started to trickle in, bringing nothing but bad reports, and confirming that the Sea Venture really hadn’t shown up.  The Virginia Company’s biggest mission had turned into its biggest failure, and all of England now got to experience the kind of disappointment Virginia’s early investors had dealt with.  They started to abandon Virginia, and withdraw their money, and Virginia again was on the verge of collapse.  Lord Delaware tried to slow the panic by announcing that he personally would go to Virginia to lead it on the next voyage they could fund.  That didn’t happen for almost a year.

Two more Third Supply ships returned, one bringing the unruly youths, who the colony wasn’t healthy enough to sustain.  The other brought a furious and badly injured John Smith.  It had been a slow voyage home, and two more Third Supply ships had sunk on the way.

Confidence collapsed.  The company had been at a public visibility high, and now it had its biggest disaster.  They lost new investors and old alike.

To try to mitigate the damage, the Company plastered a broadside around London, saying the people bringing bad reports were lying to cover their own bad behavior, and that the Royal Council was preparing a mission to be led by Lord Delaware to stabilize the colony.  It also announced that the company would screen all future participants, only allowing honest, skilled workers in the most sought-after trades to go.  This was a drastic change of marketing tactics.  Definitely a desperate measure for a desperate time.

I’d say the comedic relief here is that because of some bizarrely inaccurate information from an Irish Sailor, this is the point at which Philip became most concerned about Virginia.  Without Cecil informing him of the colony’s every move, Philip became convinced that Virginia was thriving, that Wahunsenaca had converted to Protestantism, and been coronated, and that the English had found a bunch of secret mines, as well as being optimistic about finding a passage to the pacific, in addition to Argall’s fast Northern route across the Atlantic.  Precisely two of those things were true, and one had been ridiculous to the point of humiliation.  Meanwhile, Spain’s presence in Florida was weakening, so worried about England’s increasing power in the region, Philip sent Don Diego de Molina and Francis Lembry to take a ship to Virginia to assess the situation and see what would be needed to keep it from getting out of control.

When Delaware got to Virginia, he was able to send a promising letter back saying that they’d found the Sea Venture colonists, that most of the colony’s survivors had been brought back to good health, and that the colony was progressing nicely.  If Smythe was relieved to hear this, he was wrong, because soon Delaware returned to England, which threatened to be the beginning of another fiasco.  Worse, he’d left George Percy in charge, the man who had been president during the Starving Time, and who many in England blamed for it.

Fortunately, Smythe could assuage investors by telling them Thomas Dale had already set sail when that happened, and soon Gates also returned to Virginia with his whole family.  Then, they made Delaware account for his desertion, and published his defense.  That was a crisis averted, but the next problem was already emerging.  Virginia was starting to face competition for investors.

James had started selling aristocratic titles to raise money, which meant James and Virginia were competing for the same investors, and while the Virginia company couldn’t promise immediate wealth, an aristocratic title bought immediate political influence in the House of Lords.  This prompted multiple investors to threaten to default.  James also made Newport master of the Royal Navy, taking his attention away from Virginia.  Newport started sailing for the East India Company and died off the coast of Indonesia a few years later.

Though the selling of titles was hurting Virginia, the king’s financial problems also had an upside.  They paved the way for more political reforms.  The Company leveraged its political influence to push for a new Charter.  Sandys’s Rebel MP supporters now comprised a large portion of the company’s investors, so when he wrote the new document, it took on an even more political tone.  There would be even wider public participation, freer trade, and now, the Virginia Company would be under the control of one big assembly of all shareholders and participants, with everyone getting an equal vote regardless of share, and the king’s powers of oversight were completely eliminated.  There would also be no oath of supremacy, so anyone could become a shareholder.  Also, the Laws Martial, Divine and Moral would be introduced.

It also applied for control of Bermuda, a place which was gaining popularity after Somers’ nephew returned with tales of its beauty and fertility.  Shakespeare wrote the Tempest, and people wanted to pursue colonization.  The islands could either be an asset or a source of further competition, so they submitted a request for a new charter to include Bermuda.

In this charter, the Company also got the right to hold a public lottery, which was a huge deal, and the source of lots of parliamentary debate.  Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was one of the leaders of the opposition to Virginia’s public lottery.

If the last charter had been politically charged, this one was a downright threat to royal prerogative.  Cecil was dying, though, and too sick to stop it from passing.  One of his last actions was to organize the exchange of Molina for English prisoner John Clarke, and authorize the man making the transfer to renounce the Virginia plantation, recognizing the Spanish right to North America.  His death stopped that last part, though.

Cecil’s death did postpone the lottery, and to prevent bankruptcy in the intervening time, the company sold assets, starting with Delaware’s ship, and ending with Bermuda.  Within a few months, the Virginia Company had to deal with an even more devastating death.  In November 1612, Prince Henry suddenly died.

By the age of 17, Henry had come to be the hope of both the country and the company, England’s perfect Protestant knight.

Henry’s death left the future of the Company in danger, and with Cecil also dead it also created an influence vacuum which opened the way for faction fighting over the company’s future direction.  Henry’s guidance had been stable and rarely questioned.  Now people emerged wanting to mould and use the colony for their own purposes.  The strongest of these was a man named Robert Rich, one of the wealthiest men in England, a puritan merchant trader who had bought the title of the Earl of Warwick from James for 10,000 pounds.

Warwick wasn’t interested in Virginia’s commercial prospects.  In fact, he’d only bought a single share in the company, the minimum to have an equal say in colony affairs.  He couldn’t care less what was produced there, or what kind of return people got on their investments there.  He bought a ship called the Treasurer, made Argall the captain, and made it openly available to the Virginia Company.

Warwick was a trader, and more importantly he was a leading member of the War Party, a group of nobles and senior gentry actively working to end James’ appeasement of the Spanish.  That’s a nice way of saying, a group of puritan vigilantes actively trying to provoke war with Spain.  Warwick saw an opportunity for Virginia to play exactly the role that Zuniga had feared: a base for piracy against the Spanish.

The Treasurer was the ship that would take the first Black servants to America, and Argall did help Warwick do privateering with it.  First, though, it brought Gates, Dale, Molina, Rolfe, Pocahontas and Virginia’s first tobacco back to England, which helped keep up some interest in the lotteries.  The company commissioned some cheap pictures of Pocahontas to show and sell, and sent Pocahontas and Rolfe on a tour of taverns and theaters.  This drew some controversy because some people criticized as unfit treatment for a princess.  More fitting for a princess, Pocahontas met the queen multiple times, while Rolfe wasn’t high enough ranking within England to accompany her.  Her visit ended with her attending the Royal Family’s Christmas festivities as a guest of honor.

Even with Pocahontas’s tour, the lottery barely paid the colony’s old debts, and to make matters worse, Pocahontas suddenly died.  Soon, so did the Earl of Warwick, but he was replaced by his son, who inherited his title, money and politics.

Henry and Cecil had died in 1612, and it was now 1617.  The political rift in the company had been growing for five years, but attention had been focused on the third charter, the lottery, parliamentary negotiations, Bermuda, and other things.  Three distinct factions had emerged, each with its own leader.  Thomas Smythe wanted a politically neutral business, like Smythe’s East India Company.  Edwin Sandys wanted a bastion of Parliamentary control outside of the reach of the king.  Warwick wanted a piracy base that would provoke war with Spain.

Smythe saw his influence waning, and his priority became protecting the investments of his associates.  It was for this reason that Smythe set up the magazine, the trade monopoly which gave colonists supplies in exchange for tobacco, and which led to the increase in smuggling in 1619.  Argall criticized his policy, and Smythe pointed out Argall’s own corrupt actions.  Argall had been diverting company supplies and using the colony as a base for piracy as Warwick wanted.  Still, he decided to step down.

Smythe had led the company since its inception, and was the man behind its survival in many ways, so his decision meant that the influence vacuum turned into a full-fledged power vacuum.  It was the beginning of the end for the Virginia Company.

The two main candidates to replace Smythe were Edwin Sandys and Robert Johnson.  Johnson had been Smythe’s closest ally, and planned to continue Smythe’s politically cautious style of management.  He just wanted the colony to operate well enough to return an investment.

Sandys was the leader of the Rebel MPs.  Smythe’s faction worried that Sandys would use the Virginia Company to advance his own political ambitions, possibly even turning the colony into an independent commonwealth under parliament.

Thanks in part to the Earl of Warwick’s support, Sandys won the election by a landslide, and members of his faction, including Nicholas Ferrar, won elections for essentially all the other positions in the company.  Initially, though, he kept his politics largely out of company leadership.  His first order of business was recruiting settlers.  This was the boomtown era, and colonists needed as many workers as they could get.  More workers, more money, simple as that.  He recruited undesirables to send to Virginia en masse, and encouraged the well-to-do to contribute to the cause.  The City of London even started involuntarily shipping children to Virginia, and this action was actually fairly popular.  One man called it “one of the best deeds which could be done,” because it would rid the city of them, give the company a supply of young laborers, and help them learn useful skills.  Hundreds were transported over the next five years.

Sandys also ended the monopoly of Smythe’s magazine.  The magazine was unpopular, damaging, and Sandys had taken the lead fighting against monopolies in England.  So, it wasn’t a surprising act, but Johnson interpreted the act as a provocation, and tensions between Smythe and Sandys’s factions escalated to the point of violence.

Smythe was out, and Sandys was in, but Sandys was being cautious and not behaving overly politically.  That brings us to faction number three.

Meanwhile, the new Earl of Warwick was completely out of control.  His actions weren’t measured, cautious or even focused.  He was pillaging and plundering, indiscriminately.  He’d plundered a Portuguese vessel taking slaves to Mexico, and sent the first Africans to Virginia.

At one point, he’d gotten so out of control that an East India Company vessel had been forced to intervene in his plundering activities, and impound his ship.  Warwick demanded financial compensation from Smythe, but was unsuccessful in getting it.  He was furious, and it was largely in retaliation for this confrontation that Warwick had strongly supported Smythe for treasurer, fueling his massive victory.

When Warwick saw the results of the election, his perceived political influence had made him even bolder.  Soon, he was out privateering in the Atlantic, pillaging the Spanish West Indies.

He ran a very high risk of successfully pushing England to war with Spain, and to say he was a political liability for Virginia would be a massive understatement.  If either James or the Spanish ambassador heard about Warwick’s activities, it would mean the end of the colony.  So, just a few months after accepting Warwick’s political support, Sandys reported his activities to the Privy Council, and gave them documents showing that both he and the colonists disavowed Warwick’s activities.

James already didn’t like Sandys, and his last-minute distancing of Warwick didn’t help his cause.  It really just showed that Sandys was willing to ally with people even more radical than he was to achieve his goals.  So, in the next election for treasurer, James demanded the company only select among five names, all members of Smythe’s faction.

The battle between king and parliament had spilled over to a new battlefield, and the company was facing a dilemma.  If it selected someone other than James’ choices, it would be openly disobeying the king.  If it selected a name from the list, it would effectively lose its right to free elections.  They didn’t want to back down, but they didn’t want open confrontation.  They decided to postpone a decision until the next meeting, and appointed a small group of people to negotiate with James in the meantime.  Sandys would continue in his post until they figured everything out.

In response to their pleas, James responded, “choose the devil if you will, but not Edwin Sandys.”  Sandys knew it was hopeless, and arranged for his close ally, the Earl of Southampton, to succeed him.  Southampton is a fairly interesting person.  He had been imprisoned and sentenced to death after the Essex Rebellion, but when he took the throne, James had let him go.  James was his heir’s godfather, but he had also sent Southampton to prison, briefly, following a fight with former Essex opponent Anne Grey.  He was a dedicated patron of the arts, and a tireless political agitator.

James was politically astute, though, and as much as the Virginia Company didn’t want open confrontation with James, James didn’t necessarily want Virginia to be the issue which provoked dangerous political confrontation either.  The 30 years war was brewing, and his pacifism and proposal to marry Charles to the Spanish Infanta made him more unpopular than ever.  79 members of the Virginia Company sat in Parliament, meaning about 1 in 7 MPs were in the Virginia Company.  So, at the next meeting, James allowed a free election.  Southampton was easily elected.

James had just backed down, and Sandys enjoyed extreme popularity in the Company, so this was a perfect moment for Sandys to start imposing his political beliefs on Virginia.  He started to describe the colony as a Commonwealth, which was a blatant challenge to James’ belief that it was a crown possession, beyond the scope of Parliamentary authority.  He also arranged for his close friend and in-law, Francis Wyatt, to be governor of Virginia, and started to draft the new Charter, which would solidify the colony’s political reforms.

In addition, the Virginia Company became a place from which Parliamentary opposition to James was organized and spread.  Regular meetings of 15 MPs at the Earl of Southampton’s house, led by Sandys, were at the heart of this activity.  James now called the company “a seminary for a seditious Parliament.”  James still needed money, and wanted to raise taxes, and Parliament’s opposition was more organized than ever.

James decided that if the Virginia Company was going to be used in such a directly political way, he would attack it directly.  For that, he sent his secretary of state, George Calvert, a man who had been a member of the Company since 1609, and the man who would later go on to found Maryland.  In terms of political allegiances, it’s worth noting that Calvert was Wentworth’s closest and longest-term political ally, and really, one of Wentworth’s few allies because Wentworth had a reputation for toeing a moderate line based purely on legal fact, not alliances.  Calvert and especially Wentworth’s longest-term and bitterest political enemies were Warwick and John Pym.  That’s just interesting to note for future discussion.

Wentworth throughout James’ reign was a steadfast enemy of Warwick and Pym, and a close ally of George Calvert.  That’s just interesting to note for future discussion.

Calvert argued that Parliament had no jurisdiction over the colonies, which were the king’s direct possessions by right of conquest.  Sandys countered that under the royal charters, the land was held privately by the company like any other property in the kingdom, which gave Parliament jurisdiction.

Tensions were too high for comfort, and it was clear that Parliament wasn’t backing down, so Calvert announced that James would dissolve Parliament in a week unless they agreed to raise taxes.

In response to Calvert’s announcement, Sandys gave the most famous speech of his career.  He raged at the government’s failure to support the Huguenots, at the corruption of trade by monopolies, about economic stagnation, and how farmers were being driven into poverty.  A couple weeks later, Sandys was arrested on dubious charges.  His stuff was searched, and one incriminating paper the authorities found was a letter to Amsterdam Brownists trying to recruit them to go to Virginia.  The man Sandys had addressed the letter to would ultimately help organize the Mayflower expedition along with some of Sandys’s other colleagues.

Sandys’s arrest pushed tensions so dangerously high that James had to make some concessions to Parliament.  He really needed money, and a huge portion of Parliament was convinced that he had illegally arrested their political leader.  So, James released a group of prisoners, including Sandys, John Pym (who had been briefly arrested), and George Percy’s brother, the Earl of Northumberland, who had spent the last 17 years in the Tower, and whose finances were now destroyed.  It was a good way to release Sandys without raising the issue of whether he had been illegally arrested.

Releasing the prisoners marked the end of James’ attempts at open confrontation with the Virginia Company, but he wasn’t backing down, either.  He wasn’t going to accept an increasingly organized political opposition.  If the Virginia Company wouldn’t get in line, he would take it over.  This is an example of the political maneuvering that James did which Charles couldn’t, and why James kept the peace despite having more extreme ideas, while war broke out under Charles.

First, James banned the lotteries, depriving the Company of its main source of income.  He also let their charter expire, meaning that he could now collect exorbitant customs duties on anything imported from Virginia.  Then, he commissioned Fernandino Gorges to lead a revived Northern Virginia project, so that Northern Virginia would now compete with a floundering Virginia Company for investors.  In other words, Virginia now had virtually no way to raise money.

At the next meeting, James gave the Virginia Company one last chance to compromise and continue to exist as an independent entity.  He sent Calvert to ask the Virginia Company nicely, emphasizing that he didn’t want to interfere with the company’s choice, but to please consider one of five nominations for the post of treasurer.  These weren’t overtly political people, they just weren’t overt enemies.  No one connected to Smythe’s faction was on the list.  James was asking very nicely for the Company to meet him halfway, and the shareholders held a vote of thanks to James for his tone.  Then they reinstated Southampton and Ferrar, and Southampton gave a speech saying that James’ concession offered them greater hopes than ever of creating a flourishing commonwealth in Virginia.

Clearly, they weren’t interested in compromise.  James announced his offense, not only at their choice of treasurer but also the fact that they hadn’t made progress on any of the commodities that he had supported, like silk and wine.

Soon, John Martin submitted a petition to the Company for 80 square miles of land in Jamestown to become a royal forest, which Martin would manage on James’s behalf.  This land he applied for just happened to be in the exact location of Jamestown itself, meaning that the proposal would turn the colony’s core and capital into the personal property of the king.  James didn’t want this, but it put the Virginia Company in an awkward situation, of having repeatedly denied simple requests by the king.  First, they’d neglected to pursue ventures he’d invested in.  Then, they’d rejected his politically neutral treasurer candidates.  Now, they were denying him a royal forest in a land that was filled with forest.  The Company tried to minimize the damage by saying that John Martin had ruined his own land in Virginia and wasn’t fit to run a royal forest, but it didn’t look good.

Then, James’s Lord Treasurer noted that the Virginia Company could solve its financial woes by applying for a monopoly on tobacco imports.  This was, again, awkward, because Sandys had led the opposition to James’s royal monopolies, which had been pretty damaging to James.  So, Sandys had to choose between bankruptcy and hypocrisy.  And furthermore, he had to apply for that monopoly from James, whose olive branch and royal forest application he’d just rejected.

Sandys was politically cornered.  He applied for the monopoly, and prepared to enter extremely delicate political negotiations with the king whose enemy he had so actively been for 20 years.  You can imagine that the negotiations weren’t going to stay solely on the topic of Virginia’s right to export tobacco.

It didn’t seem like Sandys’s position could get any weaker, but it apparently could.  It was at this precise moment that settlers arrived from Virginia with news of a massacre that had killed a quarter of the population, and the possible collapse of the colony as the rest of the settlers were starting to starve.

So, episode before last, if you were wondering what the Virginia Company was thinking sending the kind of response it did to the colonists, now you know.  They had no money, they were politically cornered, and they were entering political negotiations with James where they faced a massive political defeat, losing not only control of the Company, but a significant amount of political control within England.

Now, they had to go out yet again and try to assure the world, and the shareholders, that Virginia wasn’t on the brink of collapse, and that their leadership hadn’t caused the current crisis.  Smythe had blamed the colonists for their woes to maintain London Company stability, and Sandys borrowed the strategy.  Then, he commissioned a book spinning the attack in a positive light, calling it a blood-letting which would ultimately make the colony stronger, trying to incentivize people to go to Virginia, hearkening to the colony’s Elizabethan roots, romance and adventure.  Most importantly, the book used the word massacre, which after the St. Bartholomew Day and Ft. Caroline massacres had acquired deeply Protestant connotations, the way Holocaust today has Jewish ones.

The tactic actually worked, and for the first time in its two decade history, Virginia was a symbol of national pride.  And between England’s recession, national and protestant pride, and involuntary recruitment, within a couple months, Sandys could boast that hundreds of people were ready to leave for Virginia along with some arms from the Tower which weren’t useful in modern combat, but which might help against the Powhatan.

It was a minor victory, but Sandys’s company was collapsing around him.  It faced financial collapse in England, Powhatan-induced collapse in Virginia, and now the shareholders had started to abandon Sandys’s leadership.  He couldn’t find a way to get through the tobacco negotiations, and those were also paralyzed.

Enter the Earl of Warwick.  Sandys’s late distancing of himself from Warwick’s reckless activities hadn’t been enough to win James as a friend, but it had been more than enough to gain Warwick as an enemy.  Warwick had been waiting for a chance to get back at Sandys, and now he had it.

While Sandys was engaged in desperate damage control, Warwick commissioned a report painting the worst picture anyone could imagine of the state of Virginia.  I mean, it actually managed to exaggerate the problems, and said that if they weren’t addressed, the colony would become known as a slaughterhouse and a source of national disgrace.  Warwick submitted that report to James.  Then, he turned around and released to the public a massive volume of meticulously gathered documents, letters and papers documenting the company’s troubles.  He’d even gotten a hold of Edwin’s brother’s private correspondence.  He laid all the blame on the Virginia Company, meaning, Sandys.

Suddenly, James decided not to go through with the tobacco negotiations after all, and instead created a royal commission, ordering the company’s directors to surrender every single document relating to the company’s activities.  All the documents relating to the Smythe era mysteriously disappeared soon after being delivered.  Then, the commission sought written testimony from anyone who had been in the colony.

Only one person’s submission survives, and that man is John Smith.  Smith had always been critical of the company, but his hostility had turned personal just a few years before, when the company had refused to compensate him for his service, or send him back to Virginia.  It was gloves off, and Smith bluntly stated all the problems with the Virginia Company.  Then, he said the thing that James was dying to hear.  The biggest problem was that the company was now owned by more than a thousand shareholders, whereas it had started with six patentees, and because each shareholder had an equal vote, there could be no decisive leadership of the Company.  The Company was too broken to fix, so James should dissolve it, fire everyone who was involved, and then send a squad of soldiers and laborers to Virginia to fix the mess.  You could pay for all of that with a two-penny poll or chimney tax.

Sandys had lost, and the damage Warwick’s actions had done to Sandys’s leadership pushed the two factions into confrontation so intense that James had to put multiple people under house arrest to prevent violence from breaking out in the streets, and this was after there were multiple vicious, public confrontations.  He couldn’t keep them under arrest long, he was just trying to take the violent edge off the conflict, but it didn’t work.  At a meeting of Bermuda investors, Warwick challenged one of Sandys’s supporters, named Cavendish, to a duel, and they were literally going to go to Holland to do it.  James had Cavendish arrested en route, and sent a royal command to Holland to get Warwick.  The violence wasn’t going away, though.

James had everything he needed to rescind the charter, and ny this point, he could also say he needed to do it to minimize bloodshed.  Sandys petitioned Parliament for help, emphasizing the higher nature of the colony, and asking that Parliament at least hear the grievances and oppressions the colony had suffered.  Three days later, James sent Parliament a very respectful, but deeply threatening letter warning them not to consider Sandys’s petition.  The days of Virginia as a bargaining chip were done.  Either they confronted James on the issue once and for all, or they backed down once and for all.  Virginia wasn’t worth the fight when there was so much else at stake.

A month later, the Virginia Company was dissolved, and James made the tobacco trade a royal monopoly.  Smythe and Johnson were appointed to help manage the colony, and James prepared to take away some of the governmental freedom that had evolved under Sandys, like the Virginia Assembly and House of Burgesses.  In a few months, James died, though, and Smythe soon followed him.  Virginia sent a delegation to negotiate the right to keep its elected government, and James’s heir, Charles, agreed.  Charles also said he wouldn’t use Virginia as a diplomatic or political bargaining chip.  The first republican government in America had been protected, Charles had won Virginia’s loyalty, and the colony could now grow.

Virginia as a royal colony was now useless to the political aspirations of Warwick’s faction, and he and his allies, including John Pym, started to look elsewhere to plant a New World colony.  They started with the Providence Island company, but soon moved onto Massachusetts Bay.

I mentioned the English Civil War, and here’s the interesting thing.  The Sandys and Warwick factions took opposing sides in the War, almost to a person, or more accurately to a family.  They were briefly united in the first three years of Charles’ reign, as Charles let Buckingham wreak havoc in England, but by the first year of the war, the factions were perfectly divided.  Smythe’s faction had always been apolitical, and they remained largely apolitical, leaning Royalist.  That was also the approach taken by the East India Company.  Calvert remained a Royalist, and after initial confrontation with Charles, his long-term ally Strafford of course did, too.

Sandys and his faction, though, gradually became some of Charles’s bigger supporters.  Edwin’s brother George Sandys became one of England’s best-known poets under Charles’s patronage, and their family eventually became very dedicated to the Royalist cause, as did Cavendish.  Southampton ended up being a military leader under Charles, dying serving him in the Low Countries.  His heir initially supported Parliament in the English Civil War, but quickly became a major Royalist leader.  The Ferrar family was one of the ones who hid Charles after the Battle of Nasby.

On the other hand, Warwick and his allies opposed Charles much more strongly than they’d ever opposed James, and Warwick was such a central figure to the Parliamentary side, that after the war ended Cromwell gave him control over English America, but, we’ll get to that.