in the House of Lords, to inquire whether he would accept the office. Southampton was little more to the royal taste. "I know the King will be angry," said he to his friends, “but, so this pious and . . . glorious work be encouraged, let the Company do with me as they think good." Then, "surceasing the ballot," the meeting elected him "with much joy and applause, by erection of hands." Sandys was chosen Deputy Treasurer and remained the real manager.

When Southampton's second term expired (1622), James again sent to the Court of Election five names. It would be pleasing to him, he said, if the Company would choose a new Treasurer from the list; but this time he carefully disclaimed any wish to infringe their "liberty of free election." The Company reëlected Southampton by 117 ballots, to a total of 20 for the King's nominees. Then they sent a committee to thank James "with great reverence" for his "gracious remembrance" and for his "regard for their liberty of election!" It is reported that the King "flung away in a furious passion." Small wonder that he listened to the sly slur of the Spanish ambassador, who called the London Company's General Court "the seminary for a seditious parliament.”

The King's courts overthrow

the London Company

in 1624

Since James could not secure control of the Company, he decided to overthrow it. A revival of the old factions within it, and the Indian massacre of 1622 in Virginia, furnished a pretext. James sent commissioners to the colony, to gather further information unfavorable to the Company's rule; but the Virginians supported the Company ardently and made petition after petition to the King in its favor. The Company made a strong defense, and the charter could be revoked only by a legal judgment. Royal interference with the courts was a new thing in England and was never to recur after Stuart times. But Sir Edward Coke, the great chief justice, had just been dismissed from office by James for refusing to consult the King's will in judicial decisions, and for a time the English courts

BECOMES A ROYAL PROVINCE, 1624

37

were basely subservient to the monarch. Accordingly, in 1624, in a flimsy case against the London Company, the King's lawyers secured judgment that the charter was void.

III. THE ASSEMBLY SAVED: 1624-1660

Virginia had become a Royal Province. To the A Royal people this meant three things.

Province

1. Land titles from the Company to settlers held good. But all the territory still owned by the Company at its fall became crown land again. Thereafter, royal governors made grants from it to settlers much as the Company had done. Virginia afterwards frequently claimed its "ancient bounds" as described in the charter of 1609. That grant, however, was made to the Company in England, and not to the colony. The King was undoubtedly within his rights when he soon gave part of the old grant to Lord Baltimore for the colony of Maryland.

2. The colony now had to support itself. In fifteen years the London Company had spent five million dollars upon it without return to the stockholders; and most Virginians believed that without such fostering the enterprise would sink. In the next four years the settlers sent four petitions to the King for aid. One of them runs, in part: "The ground work of all is that there must bee a sufficient publique stock to goe through with soe greate a worke; which we can not compute to bee lesse than £20,000 a yeare. . . . For by it must be mainetayned the Governor and his Counsell and other officers heere, the forest wonne and stocked with cattle, fortifications raysed, an army mainetayned, discoveries mayde by sea and land, and all other things requisite in soe mainefold a business." But the King was quarreling with parliament about money enough to run the government at home, and he paid no attention to such prayers. This was fortunate. The colony found that it could walk alone.

3. Political control over the colonists was now in the King's hands. And, as the colonists feared that the King would help

The danger of royal

too little, so, with more reason, they feared that he would govern too much. Even in Old England, with all its centuries of traditions for representative government, and despite dogged and heroic opposition from parliament absolutism after parliament, this new Stuart monarch seemed almost to have made into fact his new French "DivineRight" theories of kingship. How then could this little handful of Englishmen in a strange land, dependent in many ways (as they thought) on the King's favor, hope to maintain their political liberty, now that they had lost the protection of their charter! (The overthrow of the royal charters to the London Company made of no effect the Company's Charter of 1618 to the Virginians.)

representa

ment

Even so, the Virginians were determined to save their Representative Assembly. As soon as it became plain that The struggle the Company was to be overthrown, in the spring to save of 1624, a body of leading settlers sent to the King tive govern- an address in which they "humbly entreat . . that the Governors [to be appointed by the king] may not have absolute authority, . . . [and] above all . . that we may retayne the Libertie of our General Assemblie, than which nothing can more conduce to our satisfaction or the public utilitie." At the same time the Assembly itself solemnly put on record its claim to control taxation, in a memorable enactment: "That the Governor shall lay no taxes or ympositions upon the colony, its lands or goods, other way than by the authority of representa- the General Assembly, to be levied and ̧ymployed as the said Assembly shall appoynt." This was the first assertion on this continent of the ancient English principle, "No taxation without representation."

The law of 1624" No taxation

without

tion

That same summer, however, King James began his control by reappointing the old governor and Council in Virginia and giving them full authority to rule the colony. The instructions to these officers made no mention of an Assembly. Indeed James planned a permanently despotic government; but he died in a few months before he had completed his draft of a "new constitution" for Virginia.

THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE ASSEMBLY

39

The next year the new king, Charles I, appointed a new governor in Virginia with instructions like those used the year before by his father, and still with no reference to an Assembly; and no Assembly met for five years (1624–1628). Still the colonists kept asking for one; and in 1625 they sent Yeardley to England to present their desires. Yeardley told the royal council that only the grant of an Assembly could allay the universal distrust in Virginia, where "the people,... justly fearing to fall into former miseries, resolve rather to seek the farthest parts of the World."

Neither this threat nor other petitions met with any direct answer. In 1628 Charles did order the governor to call an Assembly, though only because he hoped, vainly, to persuade it to grant him a monopoly of the profitable tobacco trade. Then Charles appointed Sir John Harvey governor. Harvey belonged to the court faction in England; but he had been one of the royal commissioners to Virginia in 1623, and apparently he had learned there that it would not be wise to try to rule the colony without an Assembly. His commission from Charles made no mention of one; but, in 1629, before leaving England, he drew up for the King's consideration a list of seven "Propositions touching Virginia," and one of these asked for a represent- The Virative Assembly as part of the government. The King ginians win seems to have been influenced by this request from the courtier-governor more than by the petitions of the colony. He was just entering upon his eleven-year period of “No Parliament" in England, but, in his answer to Harvey, he approved an Assembly for Virginia.

With this sanction, the Assembly continued regularly; and formal directions to call Assemblies became a part of each future governor's instructions. The change from a proprietary colony to a royal colony, then, did not make political liberty less. The Stuart kings were so involved in quarrels at home that they had little time to give to a distant colony; and Virginia was left to develop with less interference than it would have had from the most liberal proprietary company. The London Company had planted constitutional

liberty in America; the settlers clung to it devotedly; and the careless royal government found it easier to use the institution than to uproot it.

Sir John

tiny of 1633"

The Virginians had dreaded Harvey's coming. Despite his "proposition" for an Assembly, he was known as a supporter of arbitrary rule. And so, soon after Harvey and his arrival, the Assembly of 1632 reënacted, word "the mu- for word, the great law of 1624 regarding representation and taxation. Harvey clashed continually with the settlers, and complained bitterly to the authorities in England about the "selfwilled government" in Virginia. Finally, he tried to arrest some of his Council for "treason." Instead, the Council and Assembly "thrust him out of his government," sent him prisoner to England, and chose a new governor in his place. This was the mutiny of 1635. Two years later, the King restored Harvey for a time; but replaced him, in 1639, by the liberal Wyatt. Then, in 1641, Sir William Berkeley was sent over as governor. He had been an ardent royalist in England; so his first Assembly enacted verbatim, for the third time, the law of 1624 regarding taxation. Berkeley ruled, however, with much moderation, keeping in touch with the Assembly and showing no promise of the tyranny which was to mark his second governorship, after the Restoration.

Sir William Berkeley's first

governorship, 16411649

under the Commonwealth,

1649-1660

In 1649, after the English Civil War, the home country for a time became a republican "Commonwealth." ParliaVirginia ment sent Commissioners to America to secure the obedience of the colonies. Berkeley wished to resist these officers, but the Assembly quietly set him aside and made terms. With the approval of the Commissioners, the government was reorganized so as to put more power into the hands of the Burgesses, because parliament could trust them better than it could the more aristocratic elements. Each year a House of Burgesses was to be chosen as formerly, but this body was now to elect the governor and Council.