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Governing the ungovernable

There’s no record of West’s term.  Harvey’s return ended in utter failure, and Wyatt (who was appointed to replace him) grew too political for the king’s comfort.

And that’s when the one and only William Berkeley arrived.  People wondered why he’d choose to waste his many talents in Virginia, but they weren’t wasted.  He may be the most important person in Virginia history.

 

Transcript

Welcome back!  Last episode, we discussed the highs and lows of Harvey’s first term as governor of Virginia, ending in his being deposed and sent back to England to account for his crimes.  This week, we’ll discuss what happened in the years between Virginia’s rebellion, and the outbreak of war in England.

Introduction

When Harvey, Francis Pott and William Harwood arrived in England, the king understood the severity of what had just happened, and immediately said Harvey must be reinstated as governor, even if only for one day, to assert the king’s authority over the office.  The governor was his representative, not an elected position.  He also reinstated Harvey’s ally, Richard Kemp, to his position of Secretary, something which also helped Lord Baltimore.

As soon as the ship carrying Harvey arrived in Plymouth, Harvey took preemptive action against Mathews and John Pott by ordering they be arrested.  A few months later, he and Harwood both presented their case to the Privy Council.  Harwood reiterated the council’s reasons for removing him, and Harvey was emphatic that he’d been in the right.  He said the council shouldn’t have power to thwart his will, because it made it impossible for him to do his job.  He reminded the king that not only had he been sent to Virginia as his representative, the king had sent him with specific instructions to correct the abuses which had existed under previous governors.  He couldn’t do that if he was overpowered by the very people he was supposed to be reigning in.  Harvey leveled his own accusations against Mathews, saying Mathews had wrongfully withheld money from other colonists, but that because he was the richest man in the colony he could successfully evade all legal attempts to resist him.  He said people like Pott and Mathews weren’t happy to give up power, or be forced to act in a fair and just manner.    The Council had fought him when he’d tried to follow the king’s instructions, and they’d been unhappy about the peace Harvey had made with the Powhatan.  He said none of the accusations against him were appropriate, and that the councilors had pushed him out of office to further their own interests at the expense of the colony.

After hearing both sides, the Privy Council sided with Harvey.  The king reinstated him as governor of Virginia, increased his power, and ordered the councilors who had deposed him to be sent to England for trial.  Harvey even got a little of his back pay.

As for Virginia, there’s virtually no surviving information about what happened there under John West’s governorship.  We don’t even know whether a General Assembly met, so we just can’t know how exactly governance changed with Mathews’s faction in charge.

There is one notable development which was occurring, though, and that had to do with Maryland’s tobacco production.  Lord Baltimore had been dedicated to the idea of an economically diverse colony, but that simply hadn’t happened.  By 1637, tobacco was Maryland’s official currency and economic foundation.  And this directly impacted Virginia, because while Virginia was strictly regulating tobacco, both in terms of quality and quantity, in order to ensure the highest price.  Maryland was tiny, new, and selling whatever tobacco it could produce.  This would decrease the value of Virginia tobacco, partially by increasing quantity, and partially by decreasing the reputed quality of Chesapeake tobacco.  Furthermore, it damaged the Virginians’ ability to negotiate with the merchants, who could now demand the rock-bottom prices for Maryland tobacco before buying anything from Virginia, itself.

A year and a half later, in January 1637, Harvey returned.  The ship the king sent him back on barely made it across the Atlantic, and Harvey lost most of his possessions over the course of the voyage.  He asked the king for reimbursement, but, surprise, he was ordered to pay out of his own pocket, and told that if the mutinous councilors were convicted in England, he could confiscate an amount equivalent to what he lost from their estates, but until then, he’d need to pay his own way.

Harvey sent Mathews, John West, Utie and William Pierce to England as prisoners, and confiscated their property pending trial, and then, he went about trying to govern the colony again.  He started work on Jamestown’s first real state house, and at the king’s orders, admitted Maryland Catholic Jerome Hawley to a seat on the council, requiring only an oath of allegiance to the king, instead of the standard oath stating the king’s supremacy.

People worked on building good-quality, permanent buildings, and by the next year, nearly every inhabitant had pigs and cattle, as well as an orchard and a garden to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs like rosemary, marjoram and thyme.  And, people were settling farther and farther inland.

Harvey allowed court cases to proceed, including those against Mathews, and when cases against Mathews were decided in favor of the plaintiffs, he gave them restitution out of Mathews’s estate.

And, in 1638, Harvey got married.  Aw, yay.  The really funny thing, though, is that his wife was the widow of council member Richard Stephens, the man whose teeth he’d knocked out.

But, back in England, West, Mathews, Utie and Pierce had been agitating against Harvey.  The governor couldn’t defend himself from across the Atlantic, and Mathews’s faction had wealthy and powerful friends among England’s merchants.  They were acquitted, and the king was starting to doubt Harvey’s ability as governor.  Of course, this also meant no compensation for Harvey’s travel losses.

Harvey got orders from England to return the mutinous councilors estates, and complied immediately, except for that which he’d given to plaintiffs who had sued Mathews.  When Harvey explained the situation, the government ordered that he return all of the property immediately, but Harvey couldn’t do it.  The property was gone, and Harvey was left with accusations of having willfully misappropriated Mathews’ property and disobeyed the king’s commands.

Harvey still had his handful of supporters.  Hawley had died, but Kemp did whatever he could, as did George Donne, who was in England, and who wrote a long treatise defending Harvey’s behavior, and accusing Mathews’s faction of running the colony’s government for their personal advantage and to the disadvantage of everyone else, including the king.  But, Donne’s treatise was nearly 30 pages long and filled with obscure literary allusions, rendering it almost impossible to read, and totally ineffective in convincing anyone.

On the whole, though, Harvey was just done.  He was done with going into debt to try to help a king who wouldn’t pay him, govern a colony whose leaders showed him absolutely no respect or even basic decency, and whose populace largely disliked him for one reason or another.

One of Potts’s friends, named Anthony Panton, had gotten into a heated argument with Richard Kemp, and had called him a jackanape, who was poor, proud and totally unfit for the office of secretary, and who tied his hair with a ribbon as old as Paul’s.  Kemp was one of Harvey’s last remaining friends, and that was deeply insulting, so right or wrong, Harvey didn’t hesitate to convict Panton of mutinous, rebellious and riotous actions, confiscate his property, and banish him.  When Panton returned to England, he joined in the Mathews faction’s complaints against Harvey, and by this time, it was 1639, and the king was dealing with a rapidly intensifying political situation at home.  The old Sandys-Southampton faction was using the situation to renew their push for the restoration of the London Company’s charter, and while the king didn’t agree to this, it was the final push he needed to remove Harvey, and reinstate Wyatt as governor.  Wyatt had been aligned with their London Company faction, and shared many of their ideals, and he was a dedicated royalist, and his first term had been largely successful, so he seemed a smart choices to bridge the divides plaguing the colony.  The king also officially endorsed the constitutional legitimacy of Virginia’s political institutions, and appointed George Sandys as general agent of the colony in England.

And, the king issued a new set of instructions for the governor.  One change was that he explicitly authorized the governor to ensure ministers conformed to the Church of England.

When Wyatt returned to Virginia, he accused Harvey of abusing his power, seized his estate and prevented Harvey from returning to England until he could satisfy his creditors.  The Council actively encouraged his creditors to sue him in the Quarter Court, where the councilors were the judges.  This had the very pragmatic effect of preventing Harvey from returning to England to give his side of the story and potentially reverse the decision.  It also forced Harvey to sell all of his land and most of his personal property.  It took Harvey about a year to do this, and Kemp said that in the intervening time, anyone who had been allied with Harvey was persecuted by the now-rampant-running Mathews faction.  The king had appointed John West master general of the colony, and Wyatt seemed afraid to stand up to Claiborne.  Plus, he was on the same side as the Mathews faction on the issue of the Virginia Company, so he couldn’t afford to alienate his allies.  Harvey even wrote to England at this time, saying life in Virginia had become unbearable, and begging the Secretary of State to allow him to return to England.

And then, Wyatt essentially focused on the tobacco issue for the rest of his term.  The General Assembly passed an act saying that, because the quantity of tobacco had driven the price down, the colony would burn half of the good tobacco in addition to the bad, so that the whole quantity wouldn’t exceed 1.5 million pounds.  They also fixed the price of tobacco.

Wyatt also sent documents and petitions to England, helping George Sandys advocate for a restoration of the London Company.  In 1640, Wyatt sent these documents to Parliament, and secured the passage of a resolution authorizing the revival of the London Company.

The king wasn’t prepared to get into another fight over the Virginia Company, well over a decade after it had been dissolved, and as he was getting pulled into a fight with Parliament.  In fact, that was why he’d sent Wyatt in the first place, so if Wyatt was going to make the situation worse, he would replace Wyatt as governor.  And in his place, he commissioned the man who would become the most famous of Virginia’s early governors, William Berkeley.

Harvey returned to England around the time Berkeley was named governor, and when he arrived, he found people like Anthony Panton continuing to criticize his term, using this to try to discredit the king’s commission of Berkeley as governor.  This agitation led to a year-long delay in Berkeley’s departure, during which Richard Kemp and Christopher Wormeley, another of Harvey’s allies, were also detained in England.  Berkeley, Kemp and Wormeley all submitted counterpetitions to the House of Lords, asserting that there was no basis to Panton’s accusations, and that even if the stories about Harvey were true, they wouldn’t make it necessary to delay their return to Virginia, and the Lords agreed.

Berkeley arrived in Jamestown in March 1642.  He was from a distinguished family, a graduate of Oxford who nonetheless had a decent agricultural background.  He was a playwright and courtier who was so admired that people wondered why he’d choose to waste his talents in Virginia.  In hindsight, those talents weren’t wasted at all.  Berkeley had Harvey’s values and Harvey’s priorities, but with the refinement, political acumen and people skills Harvey lacked.

Before presiding over his first General Assembly session, Berkeley encouraged the body to split into a bicameral legislature, with the Burgesses in one house, and the Council in the other.  This enabled the Burgesses to act as a counterweight to Mathews and his council faction, and allowed Berkeley to forge a direct alliance with the Burgesses.  This circumvented the need to work directly with the Council, and it allowed him to take the position of being the people’s ally.  So, suddenly the political dynamic changed.  Whereas Harvey would go “You can’t do that!” and the council would say “oh yes we can, you can’t undermine democratic institutions like that,” and turn to the Burgesses and say “right?”  Berkeley could convince the Burgesses of his position, and then turn to Mathews’ faction and go “and, of course you agree, right?”

Of course, the Mathews faction couldn’t disagree, because disagreeing with the colony’s legislature would destroy their credibility, so their power was instantly deflated.  And Berkeley had done what no one else could.  The Mathews faction was still there, but Berkeley neither fought them like Harvey had, nor submitted to them like Wyatt.  He just put them in a weaker position, and made it impossible for them to strongly oppose him.

That allowed him to do things like confirm the colonists’ right to trade with the Dutch.

And, Berkeley led the Burgesses and Council in a harsh denunciation of the attempt to reconstitute the Virginia Company.  They drafted a document saying the return of company rule would destroy all the democratic rights allowed by the King’s instructions, such as legal trial by jury, and the right to petition and yearly Assemblies, and that it would impeach the freedom of trade which was the blood and life of the commonwealth.

This was another example of Berkeley’s political skill.  Because first, the Mathews faction wouldn’t have done that voluntarily, so it shows how instantly Berkeley exerted his influence.  More importantly, the document was simultaneously a statement against the company, and for the king, and it was a demonstration of Berkeley’s allegiance to the colony’s interests.  It both showed the king that Berkeley was in charge and that Virginia would work for his interests, and showed the colony that Berkeley, as the king’s representative, was the best safeguard to the colony’s interests.  It stated the colony’s support of self-government, and its firm aversion to rebellion against the king.  All of Virginia’s ideals, listed in one document, led by Berkeley.  And if colonists didn’t follow the carrot of an idealistic vision, there was a stick to bring them into line.  Any colonist who promoted the idea of the re-creation of the Virginia Company would be tried, and if found guilty, considered an enemy of the colony and have his entire estate confiscated.

And finally, Berkeley recommended the Assembly repeal various legislation which paid even a small amount of money to the person in the position of governor.  Whether or not Harvey had done anything financially untoward, this immediately made Berkeley popular.  The Assembly immediately declared that the new governor preferred the public freedom to his particular profit.

So, Berkeley’s governorship started at a tenuous time, but he was a force to be reckoned with.

As for Harvey, he never got his money.  He fought for the king during the English Civil War, but in 1645, his wife died, and the king lost, so Harvey wrote a will detailing what money he was owed, well over 7,000 pounds in total, and how that money should be divided among his children, as well as bequeathing 400 pounds to the poor of his London parish.  After writing the will, he departed for some unknown destination, and that’s the last record of his existence.  It’s quite possible he never returned to England.  His will was dealt with in a way usually reserved for people who died at sea, so it seems, that with his wife dead and the war lost, the old captain decided to sail off into the sunset, never to be heard from again.

And on that note, we’ve taken Virginia to the point we’ve taken New England and Maryland, through the tumultuous years which predated the bloodiest war in English history.  And, you can see the wide range of stances the colonists will take during the war.  But before we get into how the English Civil War shaped America, I want to flip the tables a bit and look at how American colonization encouraged the outbreak of war.  And at that story involves the story of Providence Island, England’s second most important failed colony.