PART I CONCILIAR GOVERNMENT CONCEIVED

Main you pleas to take notice; that the beginning of this Plantation was governed by a President & Councell Aristocratycalle...This government lasted above two years:in which tyme such envie, dissentions and iarrs were daily and blasted the fruits of all men labors...Afterward a more absolute government was granted Monarchally, wherein it still contynueth.

-John Rolfe, A True Relation...of Virginia (1617)

John Rolfe came to the Jamestown settlement via Bermuda in 1610. He introduced tobacco from the West Indies to Jamestown in 1613, served as recorder of the colony from 1614 to 1619, married Pocahontas, the Indian “princess,” in 1614, went to England with his bride in 1616 and sent a description of Virginia, from which the above passage is drawn, to King James, the Earl of Dembroke, and Sir Nathaniel Rich. Contemporaries in both England and Virginia endorsed his unflattering assessment of the Virginia administration during the first three years of its history, and historians have followed it ever since.

The conciliar government of Virginia described by Rolfe was part of a dual council system devised by the Stuart court under James I to maintain direct control over Virginia and other prospective colonies in America. Its contemplation and implementation reflected the prevailing conception of colonial polities in the English mind at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its dismal failure and short life, however, signified that it was impractical to apply such a conventional arrangement of government based on Old World traditions to the colonies in the New World.

Chapter 1 Dual Council System and the Beginning of English America:Virginia, 1606-1609

No one would disagree with the judgements that the earliest years of the Virginia settlement at Jamestown were filled with chaos and despair and that the government of an equalitarian council between 1607 and 1610 was a total failure. While this negative view is well grounded in factual evidence, the constitutional origins of the council's mal-functioning have been commonly misinterpreted. More often than not, historians of colonial Virginia have tended to place the blame for the failure of the “President & Council” upon the “Virginia Company of London.” Devised and imposed by the leading merchants in a commercial corporation, Virginia's “first experiment” in government, as termed by one historian, failed because of its commercial orientation.

That the “President & Councell Aristocratycalle” government in Virginia between 1607 and 1610 was partly the product of a company creation is true. Indeed, the first permanent English settlement in America was founded under the financial sponsorship of the group of London merchants and others to whom the Crown in the royal charter of 1606 had granted the right to establish a colony in“South Virginia.” The leading members of this group were personally responsible for the misfortunes in the incipient settlement. But these arrangements should not obscure the central fact that the Virginia administration during these three years operated under direct royal control through a body of royal appointees, not all of whom had to be members of the Virginia Company. While some leaders of the London investors were personally involved with the construction of Virginia's government, they functioned as agents of the Crown rather than merely as members of the governing body of a commercial and colonizing “company.” A closer look at the institutional structure of the Virginia government in its first three years demonstrates that this peculiar government by “a President & Councell Aristocratycalle” at Jamestown, together with the similar administration provided for the Sagadahoc settlement in “North Virginia,” was, constitutionally, a royal creation and therefore in fact represented the first attempts by the Stuart monarchs in England to establish direct royal control in their New World possessions.

From the stand point of the court of King James, the administration at the Jamestown settlement, the first English settlement in America established by the settlers sent by the London group of investors, was an integral part of a system of royal control over its embryonic empire of “dependencies” in America. This administration consisted of a seven-member “Council” appointed by another“Council” composed of fourteen royal appointees residing in England. On the night of April 26, 1607, when the 104 voyagers on board of three ships entered Chesapeake Bay and went ashore they knew the names of these appointees, albeit they did not take oath of the office until seventeen days later on May 13, when the voyagers chose a peninsula, now named Jamestown Island, as their settlement. The same day the seven councilors elected Edward Maria Wingfield, one of the number as “President” of this ruling board. After three years marked by turbulence and confusion, this government by “a President & Councell Aristocratycalle” officially ended on June 10, 1610, when Lord de la Warr, the“absolute governor” commissioned by the newly incorporated Virginia Company of London under the royal charter of 1609, arrived at Jamestown and took over governing responsibility.

Exactly in the same fashion, around mid-August in 1607 another “council”took charge of a settlement at Sagadahoc estalished by 120 colonists sent by the Plymouth investors to the northern part of “Virginia.” This body elected George Popham as President. This government came to an end in early 1608 when English investors abandoned the settlement, after it had endured an “extreme unseasonable and frosty” winter with severe shortage of supplies.

Thus, the initial scheme of colonial administration for English America was composed of three “councils” at two levels. At the subordinate level there were the colonial councils for each of two settlements. Overseeing them was a superior council in England, the Council of Virginia.

This chapter is concerned with explaining the nature of this two-level council system. A consideration of this question requires an exploration of at least two related issues: first, the nature of the charter of 1606 that served as the legal foundation of this system, and, second, the structure of the councils, both in England and in America, the working relationships between them, and their respective relationship to the King's government and the organizations of merchant and gentleman investors.

The Virginia Charter of 1606 was the “constitution” of this dual council system. Before any analysis starts, however, it is necessary to emphasize the familiar but often over-looked fact that, unlike the following two charters for Virginia, issued in 1609 and 1612 respectively, the 1606 charter was granted to two groups of adventurers for the purpose of establishing two “Colonies” in “that part of America commonly called Virginia.” Usually referred by modern historians as the “First Charter of Virginia,” this document had a lengthy title, “Letters Patent to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and others, for two several Colonies and Plantations, to be made in Virginia and other parts and Territories of America.” Issued on April 10, 1606, by James I, it recognized two groups of adventurers. One included “certain Knights, gentlemen, merchants,” and other men who, with headquarters in London, planned a settlement in the southern part (precisely,between 34 and 41 degrees north latitude) of “Virginia.” The other consisted of representatives of the western boroughs of Plymouth, Bristol, and Exeter who proposed to establish a colony in the more northern part of “Virginia” (between 38 and 45 degrees north latitude).

The designated colonizing territory was extensive and by no means confined to the area subsequently covered by the Virginia colony. To the Englishmen at the dawning decade of the seventeenth century, the name “Virginia,” once proclaimed as the “Earth's only Paradise,” conveyed a capacious sense of the wild land of America as a whole. As used in the charter of 1606, “Virginia”encompassed all those parts of North America that were not occupied by rival European powers, mainly Spain, and were therefore open to the colonization by Englishmen. William Strachey, the first historian of Virginia, clearly expressed this perception:

Virginia-Britania, is a Country in America; that lyeth between the degrees of 30. and 44. of the north latitude: the Bowndes whereby, may well be thus lay'd: on the East, runneth the great-Ocean, or mayne Atlantik Sea: on the South, lyeth Florida: on the North, Nova Francia: as of the West thereof the Limits are vuknowne, only yt is supposed there may be found the Discent into the South-Sea, by the Spaniards called Mar Del Zur, so meeting on the back-side (as yt were) of vs, with that doubtful North-west passage, which leads into the East to China, Cathay, Giapan, the Moluccas, etc. now ymagyned to be discovered by our Country-man Hudson.

Perceived in this context, the “First Charter of Virginia” was a royal authorization to some of His Majesty's subjects to carry out the mission to erect outposts in an extensive area for an unfolding cross-Atlantic empire in America.

To be sure, the 1606 Virginia charter was not the first legal instrument for the purpose of discovering and colonizing America. In a legal sense, a charter is a legal document granted by the Crown to her or his subjects to confer certain rights and privileges. By 1606, charters as a form of legal instrument had a long history in Europe. The term charter (carta) originally applied to the piece of parchment upon which the instrument was written. During the later Roman Empire, it gradually came to signify the deed or instrument itself. Introduced into England through ecclesiastical agencies, a charter soon became differentiated from a deed and increasingly applied exclusively to a royal grant of land or privileges. In medieval times the state was neither elaborate nor had extensive power, and the Crown frequently employed charters to delegate many governmental powers to individuals or communities to insure the maintenance of law and order where the machinery of the central government did not effectively extend. There developed three principal types of charters in terms of privilege grantees. The earliest and most pervasive invovled grants to larger landowners. This is the charter of the palatinate fief, a feudal proprietor who held the power of government. Later on, the Crown granted a number of boroughs local control over their internal affairs. Concurrently, as a consequence of the needs of commerce and industry in the emergent cities, the Crown created another kind of jurisdiction by granting charters to groups of merchants and craftsmen.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, English merchants extended their sphere of trading overseas, and the Crown used charters to confer on them trading—and when it later became necessary—colonizing privileges in specific areas outside the realm, which was limited to England, Wales, Cornwall, and Berwick-upon-Tweed. The charter to the Muscovy (Russian) Company in 1555 was an early example of such a grant. When England began to look beyond the Old World and started to search for a northwest passage to the Orient through America, the Crown granted charters to individual explorers such as John Cabot (1496), Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1578), and Sir Walter Raleigh (1584) to discover and colonize America. Following both lines of development, the Virginia charter of 1606 was but one of these trading/colonizing grants made to a number of “adventurers” in the ongoing effort to plant English colonies in America.

But the 1606 Virginia charter contained many special features that made it unique among all these trading/colonizing instruments. First, it broke from the usual practice of bestowing overseas colonizing rights only upon individual proprietors. Up to 1606, all the colonizing charters for overseas areas had been given exclusively to such individuals as Cabot, Gilbert, and Raleigh, and had taken the form of proprietary grants. In those charters the source of all authority was the lord proprietor, who had the right to grant lands, erect local government, appoint officers, levy customs duties, and make laws. By contrast, the 1606 Virginia Charter went to a group of “adventurers.” Compared to the various rights or privileges enjoyed by proprietary landlords, it was much less generous. The grantees received neither the regal power to maintain control over government nor the right to dispose of lands within “Virginia.” In this sense, the 1606 charter represented a new type of colonizing grant that had its direct prototype in the proprietary grants of discovery and colonization of Tudor times but bestowed much abridged powers and privileges to the grantees.

In the second place, as the first grant to a collective body of adventurers in planting overseas colonies, the 1606 Virginia Charter marked the introduction of such commercial organization as the trading companies into the process of colonization. Yet, this grant was not exactly a corporation charter because it did not create a corporate body out of the adventurers of Virginia. The charter effected no legal action of incorporation, and consequently, the grantees did not have political and legal authority to maintain control over the proposed “colonies” in Virginia.

Neither a proprietary nor a corporate grant, the 1606 Virginia Charter represented an innovation in the way of cooperation between the Crown and private adventurers in overseas trading and colonizing undertakings. The nature of this new relationship was embodied in the peculiar division of financial and governmental responsibilities: on one hand, the financial management and actual business of settlement, trade, and immigration were under the charge of the adventurers, who, as members of the trading companies, assumed full responsibility for economic operation; on the other hand, political and administrative control was retained by the Crown. “It is clear from those provisions [in the charter of 1606],” observed W. R. Scott, “that there was no express intention of forming joint-stock bodies for [the] specific purpose of making settlements; indeed, it seems to have been expected that settlers, either single or in group, would arrange for their transportation; and, having obtained their respective proportions of land, would be under the government of the council for that colony, this again being controlled by the Royal Council for both colonies.”

Viewed in the broad context of English expansion overseas, this arrangement was in effect partly new and partly old. In terms of financial sponsorship, it simply continued the practice of private undertaking which had been widely used in England in promoting overseas trade and colonization throughout the Tudor era. In the sixteenth century, lack of national support was one of the major reasons that England was left far behind Spain and Portugal in establishing colonial empires. Financially, the Tudor kings were too shorthanded to back colonial enterprises. Even the navy operated under private ownership. Consequently, almost all the expeditions dispatched from England to America in the last two decades of the sixteenth century involved the efforts of single individuals or small groups of close friends. To a large extent, the most prominent efforts to colonize America by Englishmen in these twenty years remained the undertaking of one extended family and was organized by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, his half-brother Walter Raleigh, and some other members of the family. Gilbert, in his petition to Queen Elizabeth I, expressed his willingness to make voyages “at myne owne costes & charges with the help of my friends.” However, the failures of these individual undertakers, especially Gilbert and Raleigh, convinced Englishmen that no successful colonization could be carried out by private persons. Thus, the contemporary annalist, William Camden, speaking of Gilbert's failure and death, said “it is a difficult thing to carry over Colonies into remote Countrys upon private mens['] Purses, than he and others in an erronous Credility had persuaded themselves, to their own Cost and Detriment.”

Contrived in an atmosphere in which reliance on “public” funds in colonization was assumed to be necessary, the new project to explore Virginia in the first decades of the seventeenth century was from the outset based on the assumption that it would be supported by collective funding. In this connection, the practice of the corporate companies provided a ready solution. The new Stuart king, James I, was not better off financially than his Tudor predecessors and could not invest substantially into the new Westward expedition. Under this circumstance, the 1606 Virginia Charter itself introduced no dramatic alteration in the financial aspects of the colonizing endeavor, which was still to be privately sponsored. But a far broader range of people were involved in contributing capital than in any of the previous efforts in colonizing America.

The real change, nevertheless, occurred in the political arrangement for colonization. In previous colonizing charters, an individual patentee, who, according to the feudal system, was to be the manorial lord of the land to be“planted” and held political authority. For example, by the charter of 1578 Gilbert not only had the right to dispose of land “in fee simple or other wise”but also full power to govern and punish any person residing in his territory, “as well in causes capital or criminal as civil.” The corporate companies engaged in trading activities in the Old World (mainly in the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia), also enjoyed political control, although it was far less extensive than that of the proprietary landlords in America and Ireland. The projected “colonies”in “Virginia” differed from both formulations. There, the Crown was to retain political control through the arrangement of the two-level council system. The King appointed and directed the Council of Virginia in London, which in turn appointed and directed the resident councils in the colonies.

To understand why the 1606 Virginia charter employed this system of direct royal control, one must keep in mind that, unlike any of the ensuing colonizing efforts in America, the Virginia enterprise represented to contemporary Englishmen more of a national endeavor in pursuit of national glory and power than a commercial or colonizing venture by private adventurers.

Since the Cabot voyages at the end of the fifteenth century, many eminent English figures had urged American colonization. Thus, we find one scholar saying to the council of Henry VIII in 1511 that “The Indies are discover'd, and vast treasure brought from thence every day. Let us therefore bend our endevours thitherwards; and if the Spanish and Portuguese suffer us not to joint with them, there will be yet region enough for all to enjoy.” Four decades later Richard Eden in his Decades of the New World,published in 1553,declared that it was a reproach to the English nation that they, as “the nearest people in Europe to that land,” have not attempted to christianize or occupy it, nor “to doo far owr partes as the Spaniards have doone for theyrs, and not lyke sheepe to haunte one trade, and to doo nothynge worthy [of] memorie amonge men or thankes before god.”

For all those promoters of an “Indies empire” for England, the pursuit of national glory was the foremost reason for England to participate in the colonizing movement. The two kingdoms situated in the west end of the European continent grasped the initial benefits of global navigation with the “discovering” of America. Following the voyages of Columbus in 1492 and of Vasco da Gama in 1497 Spain and Portugal established their gigantic overseas empires respectively in the West and East Indies. Thus, the desire to obtain an English empire in America meant first competing with Spain for territory. In a sense, the idea of colonizing America in England was originally a means to curb Spanish empire and to search for new trading routes to the East. “In the fifteen-seventies,” as Howard M. Jones put it, “the desire of patriotic Englishmen was not colonization but breaking down Iberian control of world trade; the thought of colonies had not arisen except in the shape of trading posts on a route to Cathay to be held by temporary residents; and the search was not for lands to be possessed but for waters by which to pierce to the Pacific.” This national zeal was fully demonstrated in three of the best known pamphlets on westward colonization published in the last decades of the sixteenth century—Christopher Carleill's Discourse(1583),Richard Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting(1584), and Sir George Peckham's True Report of the late Discoveries and possession . . . of the Newfoundlands, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Knoght(1584).The principal aim of“this enterprise”of American colonization, in the words of Hakluyt, was to “stay the Spanish Kinge from flowinge over all the face of that waste firme of America, yf we seate and plante there in time.” These writers did not neglect economic and social benefits, but they made them secondary to the all-encompassing purpose of seeking national glory. This rationale also deeply permeated into the official documents. For instance, in commenting on a proposal “of planting an English colony in the North West America,” the Privy Council stated that “it might be glorious action for our Prince and country, honorable for the general and adventurers, and in time profitable.” The national character of American colonization as perceived by Englishmen prompted them to expect and propose state involvement and control, which, as revealed by the success of Spain in America, seemed to be absolutely necessary for establishing an English empire of comparable proportions. The dominions of Spain in America had early come under the direct control of the Crown and the centralized administration of the Council of the Indies and the Casa de Contratacion in Spain and been organized into two viceroyalties with a number of subordinate governments in America. Englishmen took this organization as a convenient model for the administrative pattern of an English “West Indies.”Central to this centralized system was the involvement and direct control of the national government of the kingdom. Thus, Hakluyt proclaimed that the purpose of his Discourse of Western Planting was “to induce Her Majesty and the state to take in hand the western voyage the planting therein.”

The remarks of Hakluyt reflected a consensus among English navigators and investors that only the resources and authority of the state could accomplish the colonization of America. Elizabeth I, who ruled England from 1558 to 1603, understood this sentiment but was reluctant to assume responsibility for colonization. For one thing, the state was not wealthy enough to endure severe losses of investment. For another and more important thing, the Queen was fully aware that a state enterprise meant a head-on collision with Spain, a frontal challenge from which no retreat was possible. England was still not well prepared for this confrontation, and a failure could mean a total loss of English prestige. Nevertheless, this reluctance should not be taken as a sign that the Crown was not as anxious as anyone else to undertake colonization. Thus, she gave a generous royal grant to Sir Humphrey Gilbert and, after his tragic failure, continued to support his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh.

Moreover, at least in two aspects, the Queen took the initial steps, though cautiously, toward the direction of state control of American colonization. One was indicated by her willingness to allow Raleigh to apply her name to “unoccupied lands”—that is, in the contemporary sense, lands not under the official occupation of any European power—of North America. This was a political gesture, in the words of one historian, “a characteristically ambivalent notice to the world that she personally was involved as well as the Crown of England, her good name pledged. It was therefore an unmistakable underlining of her claim, which would not chivalrously be disregarded, a warning to others to keep off.” She took a second step in 1585 when she contributed a ship of her own, the flagship the Tiger, a well-armed ship of some 180 pounds, and 400 worth of gunpowder from the Tower, to the fleet sent by Raleigh to plant the first settlement in “Virginia.”

After the peace treaty of 1604 with Spain, James I, king of the newly-joined England and Scotland, gained a relatively free hand to realize the national dream of his Tudor predecessors to establish a British Empire in America. As the petitioners of the Virginia charter presented their request for a royal grant to colonize “Virginia” during the summer of 1605, they advocated state colonization and argued against any further attempt of colonization by proprietary undertaking. Shortly after the voyages of George Waymouth to northern “Virginia” (presently Maine) in the previous spring, Sir John Zouche, probably a Roman Catholic, reached an agreement with him. By that agreement, Waymouth was to have the title “chief commander” and to accompany Zouche on a voyage to “Virginia,”where Sir John and his followers were to found a settlement in the form of a seignory. Shortly thereafter, a tract entitled “Reasons for Raising a Fund for the support of a Colony at Virginia” appeared in London against the Zouche project on the grounds that

Private purces are cowld compfortes [to] adventurers and ever been fownde fatall to all interprices hitherto undertaken by the English by reason of details, jeloces and unwillingnes to backe that project which succeded not at the first attempt.

and that “It is honorable for a state rather to backe an exploite by a publique consent then by aprivate monopoly.”

The tract went on to expound the desirability of “public” engagement in colonizing Virginia. According to the author, going “public” meant two things. First, the necessary funds would be raised from the public—“the whole state”—instead of from a few individuals. “The manifest decaye of shipping and mariners and of manie borrowe and porte towne, and Havens cannot be releaved by private increase nor amended other wise than by a voluntary consent of manie purces of the Well-publique.” It suggested that “an Act of Parliament” authorize public funding. Secondly, the King's government should “be engaged in honor the rather to assist and protect the project.” The Crown's public commitment was necessary, it argued, because the backing of the King's government would enhance the“Reputation and opinion of the interprice” so as to induce the public to contribute money and warn off “forraigue States” from “attempt[ing] anie thing in prejudice of our Collonies.”

Although the author did not explicitly propose direct royal control over colonies, the many examples he cited of the ways other colonial powers, mainly France, Holland, and Spain, governed their colonies all emphasized the connection between government control and colonization. Pointing out that these nations were taking possession of America as “the polosy of State,” the author implied that state control was the natural mode of political management in overseas colonies.

The Spanish government never mistook the Virginia venture for anything other than a state enterprise in pursuit of national interests. The Spaniards had kept a watchful eye on the settlements of Sagadahoc and Jamestown ever since its early inception. They forged a system of espionage that penetrated even the royal council for Virginia from 1606 to 1609. The Spanish ambassador, Zuniga, kept Philip II and the Council of the Indies informed of all that was taking place in England and in the colonies. Without doubt, he recognized that the English King was ready to take full control of colony affairs. To him, the Virginia “colonies”were royal possessions, not private plantations. The keen sensitivity of a diplomat made him conclude that emphasis on individual investors in the Virginia undertaking was merely a diplomatic ploy designed to enable James I, when called upon by other governments, to shift responsibility onto private shoulders and thereby head off an international confrontation. This tactic had been used under Elizabeth I.

Not only in rhetoric but in the actual organization the Virginia enterprise was a national endeavor. Although the English merchants, especially those of the London commercial community, were active in the Virginia venture and were mainly responsible for the successful settlement of Jamestown, the greater majority of the patentees of the charter of 1606 belonged to the English knighthood. Among the initial promoters, a group of West Countrymen played a leading role. Though they were not unmindful of commercial benefits, these gentry and noblemen were much more concerned with national glory and personal fame than the single-minded profit-hunting merchants of London. For instance, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the primary mover of the Virginia enterprise and the leading organizer of the Plymouth group, was little concerned with his “owne profit, ”saying in his Description of New England that“my ends being to make perfect the thorough discovery of the Country (wherein I waded so far with the helpe of those that joyned with me) as I spend the way for others to make their gaine, which hath been the means to encourage their followers to prosecute it to their advantage.” Among the original petitioners of the Virginia grant, the most prestigious and influential figure was Sir John Popham, lord chief justice of the King's bench. He was largely responsible for the idea of a public plantation as against a private venture, and he deserves credit for obtaining the royal consent to the Virginia grant. He was probably the major author of the 1606 Virginia charter and was therefore responsible for the design of the royal council system.

Compared with such contemporary trading organizations as the East India Company, which had a greater interest in commercial profits, a much higher proportion of investors in the Virginia stock can be classified as non-merchants. They were high-office-holders, gentry, and peers. Out of total capital of £200,000 spent from 1606 to 1624, the gentry and other non-merchant subscribers provided £94,000, or 47.2%. By contrast, out of total £2,887,000 investment in the East India Company from 1600 to 1630, the gentry and non-merchant investors were responsible for only £415,000, or 14.4%. Since its founding in 1600, the only member of the nobility in the East India Company before 1609 was the Earl of Cumberland. Only after 1609 when the company adopted a policy to grant“freedom” (membership) voluntarily to “such and so many other Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen favourous of the Company” in an effort to recruit official and noble support for the business did the non-merchant element become increasingly significant in its body of membership.

The nature of the two organizations determined this ostensible difference in membership. Merchants commonly played a far more important role in foreign trade and voyages of exploration and a comparatively lesser role, at least in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in colonial enterprises. Many gentry subscribers to the Virginia voyages, quite evidently, subscribed because of a sense of public responsibility or simply because skillfully managed propaganda persuaded them to accept participation as responsibility of their social or political position. To them, the Virginia adventure was a public undertaking. Its aim was to advance the fortune of England no less than the fortune of the adventurers themselves. This national zeal in colonizing Virginia was demonstrated by another tract,Discovering of the Bermudas, written by Silvanus Jourdan in 1609. It proclaimed that “the eyes of all Europe are looking upon our endevours to spread the Gospel among the heathen people of Virginia, to plant an English nation there, and to settle a trade in those parts, which may be peculiar to our nation, to the end we may thereby be secured from being eaten out of all profits of trade by our more industrious neighbors.”

The virtual non-availability of official records of the organizations (frequently mistakenly called the Virginia Company of London and the Plymouth Company) under which the two groups of English adventurers conducted colonizing activities in “Virginia” between 1606 and 1609 makes it difficult to describe with certainty the institutional structure of these organizations. In the case of the London group of adventurers, the Court Book between 1606 and 1615, the sole record of the organization's activities, has disappeared. The only sources of information for affairs in both England and Virginia are the narratives of the early settlers. While they are rich in observations on the environment and events in Virginia, they devote little attention to the organizational mechanism of the London adventurers. Modern historians, therefore, have to rely on the founding documents like the 1606 charter and the instructions of the King's Council and other fragmentary materials scattered in private papers to reconstruct the institutional structure of the London organization.

Most historians who have written extensively about the history of Virginia in its first three years have anachronically assumed that the formal structure of two trading and colonizing companies that existed after 1609 antedated the issue of the 1609 charter. This view has a long tradition, starting at least with such eighteenth-century provincial historians of Virginia as William Stith. In his History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia,Stith not only failed to distinguish the organizational differences of the London group before and after 1609 but also carelessly claimed that Sir Thomas Smith was “Treasurer” of “the Company” ever since 1606. Although few modern historians blindly follow Stith in claiming this leading post for Smith before 1609, their uncritical use of the names “Virginia Company of London” and “Plymouth Company” is scattered through many major works on colonial Virginia.

The only distinguished exceptions are Herbert Osgood and Susan Kingsbury. Noticing that no word for incorporation appeared in the 1606 charter, Osgood virtually ruled out the existence of the Virginia Company before 1609, even though he did not correct the anachronistic view of Stith and others. In editing the records of the Virginia Company of London, Kingsbury confirmed Osgood's analysis. However, subsequent scholars have not followed up their perceptive observation.

By reading carefully the nomenclature in the 1606 Virginia Charter, one can conclude that the two groups of “adventurers” were not incorporated into a business organization such as the East India Company. The charter of the East India Company in 1600, typical of company charters at that time, incorporated 219 persons, whose names were all listed, into “one body Corporate and politick in deed and in name” under the title of “the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies.” It empowered the company to purchase land, sue and be sued, and have a common seal. It confirmed membership to those mentioned in it, to their sons at the age of 21, and to their factors and apprentices. It entrusted management to a governor and a 24-man court of committees, all elected annually by members of the company assembled in general court.

By contrast, in the “First Charter of Virginia,” observed Osgood, “the usual words of incorporation do not appear.” What do appear, he continued, are “only the expressions‘first colony, '‘second colony, '‘adventurers, '‘associates'.” No better illustration can be provided than the following passage in the charter defining the collective body of the London adventurers:

And do therefore, for Us, our Heirs, and Successors, Grant and agree, that the said Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, Richard Hackluit, and Edward-Maria Wingfirld, Adventurers of and for our City of London, and all such others, as are, of shall be, joined unto them of that Colony, shall be called the first Colony.

According to William Blackstone, the essential “incidents of corporations”include the right of perpetual successions, of suing and being sued, of having a common seal, of dealing with lands and of making by-laws. As early as 1564, for instance, the charter of the Merchant Adventurers, “the great-grandfather,”in the words of Andrew C. McLaughlin, of all trading companies, contains those features. It declares that the charter “established one perpetual fellowship and commonalty and body Politick and Corporate,” which was to have “perpetuall succession” and “full lawful and perfect power . . . in law to sue and impleade to be sued and impleaded.”

Without being formally incorporated, the body of Virginia adventurers had no title.It is significant to note that Gorges,in his Brief Narration,always refers to the patentees under the name of “colony” instead of “company.” In the case of trading companies, a specialist in the history of those commercial organizations has pointed out that the “corporate name, a matter of meticulous formality, is significant. By it the body of mortal members has perpetual secession, holds property, appears in Court, and (with additional help from the corporate seal)authenticates its deeds; the name is the‘knot of the combination, '‘the very being of its constitutions'.”

Thus, by no means a “body Corporate and politick” in the contemporary legal sense, the Virginia adventurers obtained no authority to grant the land in Virginia to settlers. The eighteenth and nineteenth clauses of the charter provided that the king should make such grants through letters patent under the great seal. Accordingly, no common seal was granted to the patentees of 1606. The charter was also silent about the membership of the body of adventurers and the management structure, which were, as demonstrated by the East India Company charter, absolutely necessary in incorporating a trading company at that time.

The non-corporate status of the Virginia adventurers is further indicated by the business mechanism presiding over the colonizing activities of the Virginia adventurers from 1606 to 1609. During these three years, the business of the adventurers was strictly confined to raising funds and equipping expeditions to be sent to the two “colonies” in Virginia. Although ardently advocated in the 1605 tract “Reasons for Raising a Fund,” the charter contained no clause inviting the public to purchase shares. Nor was there any provision to use joint stock to promote the colonizing enterprise, although a provision in the first instructions directing the settlers to live, work, and trade together in a common stock through a period of five years suggests the possibility of a five-year terminable stock, i.e., a fund that would be invested and reinvested through a term of five years before it was distributed together with the earnings thereon. More likely, the investors, by no means confined to the original patentees of the charter, contributed to a separate stock for each expedition. All the trading companies in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries commonly employed this method. For instance, the first voyages to the Orient under the auspices of the East India Company between 1601 and 1612 were all funded separately. To suggest that the earliest expeditions to Virginia organized by the two groups of Virginia adventurers, including mainly the three voyages under the command of Captain Newport to the Jamestown settlement financed by the London group and the voyages to the Sagadahoc settlement financed by the Bristol group, were similarly funded and that each voyage was expected to pay for itself is reasonable.

For the form of organization through which the investors functioned during this period, there is no information at all. Wesley Frank Craven suggests that there could have been three possible ways for them to function as a group. First was to follow the custom of meeting in assemblies or courts when some joint decision was needed. Second was for the adventurers sitting on the Council of Virginia to function as an executive committee for their fellow adventurers. Third, the charter of 1609 might be used as an “aftermath indicator which showed the way under which the adventurers had been organized.”

Considering the fact that the adventurers were not incorporated and the membership of the organization was not defined, it is extremely doubtful that a general meeting of the investors was either legally conceivable or practically functional. Thus, it is unreasonable to assume that the adventurers meeting regularly in assemblies or courts ever made joint decisions. This point excludes the first and third speculations proposed by Craven and leaves the second as the only possibility. However, if the King's Council had really functioned as an executive committee for the investors, it was probably more as an agency of the royal government than an instrument of the investors.

Because the 1606 charter delegated no public authority to the adventurers, the Crown named and commissioned the Council of Virginia in England, or the King's Council. As royal appointees who swore to His Majesty's service, Council members represented the Crown, instead of the adventurers, in supervising colonial affairs in America. The charter thus describes their constitutional role:

There shall be a Council, established here in England, which shall consist of thirteen Persons, to be, for the Purpose, appointed by Us, our Heirs and Successors, which shall be called our Council of Virginia; And shall, form time to time, have the superior Managing and Direction, only of and for all Matters that shall or may concern the Government, as well of the said several Colonies, as of and for any other Part or Place, within the aforesaid Precincts of four and thirty and five and forty Degrees abovementioned.

The relationship of the adventurers of the Virginia enterprise to the Council of Virginia was truly peculiar. Unlike the members of the court of committees in the East India Company who were subject to annual election by the shareholders—a typical situation in the trading companies—membership on the Council of Virginia, like that of the King's Privy Council, was for life.

The size and composition of this board experienced several changes. In the original arrangement under the 1606 charter, there were thirteen members. But James I actually appointed fourteen members in the “Instructions for the Governing of Virginia” issued on November 20, 1606. The goal of keeping an even number of representatives from each group of adventurers seems to have dictated this diviation from the charter. According to the background analysis by Alexander Brown, half of the fourteen councilors belonged to the London group and the other half to the Plymouth group. Nevertheless, this carefully created balance soon disappeared. On March 9, 1607, James I issued an “Ordinance and Constitution” to increase the membership to forty. Among the newly-added twenty-six, sixteen were from the London group and only ten from the Plymouth group. James I gave as the reason to augment the membership the necessity to maintain a constant number of people to attend business meetings in London. “Our said Council have found by experience their number being but fourteen in all and most of them dispensed by reason of their several habitations far and remote the one from the other” the document said, “that where very needful occasion requireth there cannot be any competent number of them by any means be drawne together for consultation.” The Crown added more members of the London group because the Plymouth group had been comparatively inactive in colonizing activities and the appointees from the London group lived around the capital and could gather more easily.

As for the daily working procedure of the Council of Virginia, only two things can be ascertained by the extant documents. First, the Council never designated an official chief as “President” in the colonial council in Virginia. Second, the Council set the quorum at twelve, among them six to be from each group of adventurers.

They (members of the council) or any twelve of them att the least for the time being, whereof six att the least to be members of one of the Colonies, and six more att least to be members of the other Colony, shall have full power and authority.

Apparently, the charter did not establish the Council of Virginia as a committee or commission of the Privy Council. It was an agency in the Crown's government which held parallel position with the Privy Council. For this reason Hugh E. Egerton called it “a new Privy Council for Colonial Purposes.” Moreover, unlike the Privy Council which was in strict constitutional terms a purely consultative body, the Council of Virginia, besides its advisory function, had independent administrative authority. In other words, subject to the King's visitorial and superintending power, it could act without the concurrence of the King.

They shall have full power and authority, at our pleasure, in our name, and under us, our heirs and successors, to give directions to the councils of the several colonies for the government of the people to be planted in those parts and for the good ordering and disposing of all causes happening within the same.

From the stand point of the evolution of the imperial administrative system in Britain, the Council of Virginia represented, in the words of George Louis Beer, “the first administrative body created solely for the purpose of supervising colonial affairs.”The 1606 charter, therefore, by creating this imperial council, recognized the distinction between the King's functions when he was acting within the realm and his functions when he was acting for England as the head of an extended empire overseas.

The royal charter of 1606 laid down the constitutional foundations of the colonial councils in accordance with its position as a part of the imperial administrative system. The sixth clause of this document declared that

each of the said Colonies shall have a Council, which shall govern and order all Matters and Causes, which shall arise, grow, or happen, to or within the same several Colonies according to such Laws, Ordinances, and Instructions, as shall be, in that behalf, given and signed with Our Hand or Sign Mannal, and pass under the Privy Seal of our Realm of England; Each of which Council shall consist of thirteen Persons, to be ordained, made, and removed, from time to time, according as shall be directed and comprised in the same instructions.

The “Instructions for the Governing of Virginia” stipulated that the colonial councils should be appointed by the Council of Virginia:

And the same council of Virginia, or the most part of them, for the time being, shall nominate and appoint for the first several councilors of those several council, which are to be appointed for those two several colonies which are to be made plantations in Virginia and America.

The same document also further expounded the internal structure of the colonial councils:

Each of the same councils of the same several colonies shall, by the major part of them, choose one the same council, not being the minister of God's words, to be president of the same council and to continue in that office by the space of one whole year, unless he shall, in the meantime die or be removed from that office.

The colonial council, with its self-elected president, had the fullest power on colonial administration ranging from the regulation of everyday economic life to the judgement of death upon settlers. Two days before the departure of the three ships the London-based adventurers sent to “South Virginia,” the Council of Virginia in England exercised for the first time its official authority by issuing a set of “Instructions” and “Advices” to Captain Christopher Newport and the voyagers. Unlike the 1606 Charter and the “Instruction for Governing of Virginia,” they were directed to the London-based adventurers. This document consisted of two parts. Part one was a set of open “Orders,” “Advices,” or instructions, known to the voyagers on their departure for Virginia. It instructed that Captain Newport serve as commander-in-chief during the voyage “from the day of the date hereof, until such time as they shall fortune to land upon the said coast of Virginia.” Supplementing the stipulation in the “Instructions for the Government of the Colonies,” it further defined the role of president in the proposed resident council in Virginia by giving him the right to cast double votes “in all matters of controversy and question where shall fall out to be equality of voices” in the council.

The second part of the same document was composed of “several instruments close sealed with the [King's] Counsels seal” containing the names of the first Virginia resident council appointed by the King's Council. The contents of this document were to be disclosed “within four and twenty hours next after the said ship shall arrive upon the said coast of Virginia.” Such overseas trading corporations as the Muscovy and East India Companies commonly adopted this practice of sealing instructions with the intent to prevent a possible conflict of authority on the voyage between “the Officers at Sea” and “the land Officers.”No copy of these sealed “instruments” has survived, but historians have long detected its content. The expedition learned the names of seven initial councilors when the voyagers arrived in Virginia on the night of Saturday, April 26, 1607.

Thus under the direct control of the King's government, the colonial council was the creation of the King's Council and by no means was controlled by, or accountable to, the patentees of the charter. Each council had a seal, but it was the seal “of the king for his council,” not of the patentees as a corporation. Moreover, the council in the colony had power to regulate the internal affairs of the colony only in pursuance of such instructions as should be issued for it under the sign manual and privy seal of the king. The oath formulated for the president of the resident council contained a provision of fidelity not to the patentees, but to the king. Furthermore, the king himself prescribed what judicial powers the colonial council should exercise and how they should be exercised, decreed what punishments should be inflicted for more serious offenses, and authorized the president to reprieve but not to pardon, which was reserved for the king only.

In contrast to the little recorded history of the Council of Virginia in England, the administrative history under its supervision in Virginia between 1607 and 1610 is too familiar to warrant extended discussion here. From the very beginning, quarrels between its members, all designated leaders of the expedition and settlement, tarnished the Jamestown council. In fact, even before the settlers reached the shore of Virginia, friction between prospective councilors John Smith and Edward Maria Wingfield was already evident. By the time the fleet had reached its first stopover, the Canary Islands, the disagreement had reached the point at which Wingfield accused Smith of fermenting mutiny and had him arrested and confined for the duration of the voyage. When the sealed instructions were opened on April 26, and the names of seven appointed councilors disclosed, Smith was one of the appointees but was denied his post. At a meeting held on May 13, Wingfield, the only settler whose name appeared in the 1606 charter, was elected President.

In addition to his inability to steer the government, Wingfield showed no respectable statesmanship in insisting on not admitting Smith into the council. His animus towards his personal foe divided a council already riven by disagreements over the colony's future. The other councilors suspected him of withholding supplies, and in less than six months after his installation that suspicion finally led to his replacement as president by John Ratcliffe. The new president upon his inauguration appeared to be less prejudicial than his predecessor in admitting Smith into the council in the summer of 1607, but he could not erase the discord among the councilors. The bickering and talk of conspiracies continued. One such rumor even led to George Kendall's expulsion from the council and his execution as a Spanish spy. In addition, slow death by disease and starvation magnified the leaders' division. Some new members joined the council in January 1608 when Captain Newport arrived with the “first supply,” but as unseasoned colonists they played a relatively passive role. The situation of chaos in leadership remained all through Ratcliffe's term as president. In September 1608 his one-year term expired, and Captain John Smith was elected as the third president of the council in Virginia.

Smith was a practical man. He was among the first colony leaders to realize the impracticality of the London adventurers' “desire for present profit.” He seldom refrained from holding his tongue in criticizing the policies of the colony's London superiors, which, embodied in a series of instructions of the Council of Virginia brought by Captain Newport and others, set the priorities of acquiring precious metals, seeking the “North-west Passage” to the East, and locating the survivors of the Roanoke expedition. Of course, the colony achieved none of these goals. The only outcomes of pursuing them were to enhance the frictions within the colonial council and to widen the breach between the Council of Virginia and the subordinate council in the colony. However, the ensuing problems also helped to reveal the central weakness of this governing system, and to induce changes on both sides of the Atlantic.

The initial change was purely a product of the English settlers' experience at Jamestown. Under Smith's presidency, the government by council in Virginia had, under special circumstances, gradually been transformed into a kind of one-man rule. After his restoration to the Council in the summer of 1607, Ratcliffe named Smith supply master in September. In that capacity Smith traded with the Indians for food and soon became the most experienced negotiator with the natives. His ability to deal with the Indians won him the respect of his fellow settlers, and he was elected president of the Council in September 1608. When Captain Newport sailed back to England after dropping the “second supply”in December, he (himself a councilor) brought with him another councilor, the former president Ratcliffe, now a personal foe of Smith. Two more councilors, Matthew Scrivner and Richard Waldo, lost their lives in an accident of drowning shortly thereafter. That left Captain Peter Winne as the sole councilor other than the president, but Winne also died, probably of disease, in early 1609. From then until the following September Smith ruled the settlement singlehandedly. He was now judge, jury, and—if he chose to be—executioner. In his efforts to maintain strict order, he once told the settlers that “There are now no Counsellors to protect you, nor curbe my endevors, therefore he that offendeth, let him assuredly expect his due punishment.” Thus, the so-called government “by a President & Counsell Aristocratycalle” became in every respect except in name a government by a sole executive.

For the designers of the dual council system, the original intention of setting up a government by council was to avoid one-man's rule in the colony. The“Instructions for Governing of Virginia” stipulated the principle of majority rule for the expressly proclaimed purpose of not allowing anyone in the Council—including the president, of course—to “be above thirteen of either of the said councilors.” But unfortunately the wisdom of the classic teaching that rule by a few was apt to result in division came to reality as factions plagued the colony. The disputes among Smith, Wingfield and Ratcliffe were merely the most flagrant examples. Conflict was so pervasive that Smith, once in his letter to the Council of Virginia at home, warned that “If he (Ratcliffe) and Arthur (another councillor) returne againe, they are sufficient to keepe us always in factions.”

Paradoxically, exactly what the Council of Virginia had endeavored to avoid in the colony's constitution—the dominance of government by one man—quickly developed as the result of the failure in the government by council. By the spring of 1609 it was evident that the government “by a President & Counsell Aristocratycall” had failed to sustain the English outpost at Jamestown. Only by the resolute rule of one man were the colonists kept alive. An alteration in the form of government became absolutely necessary if the London adventurers were not to see their Jamestown settlement, like that at Sagadahoc, abandoned.

The abortive implementation of the dual council system in general and the government “by a President & Counsell Aristocratycall” in particular during the first three years of English colonization in America does not demonstrate, as historians usually contend, the impracticality of “the first experiment” in governing colonies by a commercial/colonizing company. Instead, it represents the failure of the initial attempt on the part of the Crown to establish a system of royal control for the overseas “plantations.” Sir Francis Bacon recommended the same scheme in his Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland presented to James I on New Year's day of 1609. He proposed the establishment of two councils for the Irish plantation, one to sit in London, the other in Ireland.

The lessons rendered by the experience at Jamestown and Sagadahoc, however, did not compel the King and his ministers to abandon this scheme of colonial administration, including the two-level council system for imperial control and a conciliar government in each colony. Even after the Crown's government was forced to relinquish the actual control of colonial affairs to the newly-incorporated Virginia Company of London in 1609, such a scheme was the only imaginable formulation of imperial/colonial administration. As soon as the Crown reestablished direct control over Virginia, Crown officials again implemented this scheme in May 1625. After the dissolution of the Virginia Company of London, Charles I proclaimed the restoration of the royal provincial system for Virginia and announced that control over its affairs would be intrusted to a council of his own appointment in England, and to another subordinate council resident in Virginia.

Nevertheless, on all the other occasions of government-making for the American colonies during the period from 1609 to 1640, the Crown's government was unable to act as the primary designer. Either a commercial/colonizing company or an individual proprietor assumed responsibility for devising a practical form of government for the colony under its or his authority. As a result, the actual patterns of colonial administrations emerging in those privately-founded colonies deviated from the original royal designed form of conciliar government.