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Publications: CW Journal: Past Issues: Autumn 2001
by Bruce P. Lenman
There is no doubt Sir Walter Raleigh invented the name Virginia. Raleigh,
or Ralegh, as he usually spelled his name, initiated the attempts to
establish an English colony in North America in territory that imperial
Spain regarded as part of its empire and described sweepingly as Florida.
Ralegh’s first and abortive colony in 1585 was essentially a privateer
base. His second attempt in 1587 was a serious effort to establish a
permanent settlement, though it failed. In between the attempts, Ralegh
received such marks of favor from Queen Elizabeth as knighthood and
permission to call the newly settled land Virginia in her honor, for
she never married and was “the virgin queen.” This had the
virtue of making an end of the linguistic muddle over names into which
Ralegh knew he and his colonists had fallen because of ignorance of
the local Algonquian language. The English had been using absurd terms
like Wingandacoia, whose origin was native, but whose meaning is still
obscure.
Ralegh has no role in the continuous history of the plantation that
grew to become the Old Dominion of Virginia. His colonists, including
the holding party his cousin Sir Richard Grenville left on Roanoke Island
in 1586, were all active in what is now North Carolina. He planned latterly
to move the second group of colonists to somewhere on Chesapeake Bay,
but they disappeared before it could be done. Though the later Virginia
Company of London tried to find survivors and to take advantage of their
hard-won experience, they failed, which accounts for some disastrous
decisions in the early history of colonial Virginia.
The father of Virginia was not the handsome English courtier Ralegh.
It was the man who, under heavy Spanish pressure, had Ralegh’s
head cut off in 1619-King James VI of Scotland and, from 1603, James
I of England and Ireland. He was not handsome.
Portrayed here by John de Critz or
Marcus Gheerhardt the Younger, it
appears James I inherited few
of his father Henry Stuart’s
good looks.- Colonial Williamsburg |
The son of Mary Queen of Scots and her second husband, Henry
Stuart, Lord Darnley, James had more brains than his parents put
together, but none of their startlingly good looks. Mary and Darnley
were tall, with long, elegant legs. James had short, bowed legs.
He was most comfortable on a horse. He would walk supporting himself
on the shoulders of two courtiers. His homely face often wore
an apprehensive look, and his personal manners were gross. He
could not help having a too-large tongue that made him slobber
when he ate or drank, but his personal hygiene was based on an
aversion to water that confined washing to the tips of his fingers.
Before Fidel Castro, James was a contender for the position of
longest-winded politician ever. He harangued his English Parliament
for hours. Unusually for a king, he was a voluminous writer, so
we know exactly what he felt relations between himself and his
subjects ought to be.
In a 1597 pamphlet, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies, James said the
reciprocal relationship between a rightful and righteous king and his
dutiful subjects was based on the fact that the king was “a naturall
Father to all his Liegis.” James meant this literally, as he did
when he said that “the proper office of a King towardes his subiectes
agrees with the office of the head towards the bodie.” To James,
royal authority was fatherly and a people only constituted a body politic
by virtue of submission to their ruler.
By 1603, Elizabeth, the once glamorous Gloriana, had become an unpopular
old woman with a reputation for meanness. Most Englishmen welcomed the
ascension of an open handed adult male ruler. There was a great surge
in patriarchal theories of politics, arguing that the male head of household
was the model of all righteous authority.
James was clear that after 1607 he was the father of all Virginians
and the head of the body politic they belonged to, which was England.
The word colony was not used as much as the term plantation, because
Virginia was England planted in America.
After 1603, James ruled three realms. Multiple dominions were common
in Europe. United under one monarch, the individual kingdoms kept their
identities in a sensible compromise between unity and autonomy. Their
laws and customs were the guarantors of their traditional liberties.
James most unusually wanted his ascension to the English throne to be
followed by an incorporating union between England and Scotland.
Modestly, he called on his first English Parliament in 1604 to pass
on “the blessings, which God hath in my person bestowed upon you
all,” by legislating for such a union. His believed he was the
husband of his kingdoms, inflicting on the English legislature at Westminster
embarrassingly explicit, disorganized speeches about the difficulties
of sleeping with two wives in one bed. He admitted, disarmingly, that
he seldom had time beforehand to think about the content of speeches.
Nobody really wanted his union. In Westminster the opposition
was led by a future treasurer of the Virginia Company, Sir Edwin
Sandys, who said that he thought the proposal entirely unnecessary.
By 1607, when Virginia was being born, the Jacobean Anglo-Scottish
union was in its final death-throes at Westminster, a situation
that James deemed an insult to him, and to God.
His fallback position was to encourage parallel developments
in politics and religion in the three kingdoms and the intermarriage
of their aristocracies to decrease national antagonisms. Parallel
developments included colonies.
Irish colonies were established in the huge delta of the River
Amazon. They were responsible to his Irish Privy Council, neighboring
English colonies to his English one. Famously, toward the end
of his reign in 1621, James granted vast territories in what are
now the Maritime Provinces of Canada to Sir William Alexander,
later earl of Stirling, to establish a Scottish colony, Nova Scotia.
Alexander said that in an age of New England, France, and Spain,
Scots would not support attempts to set up overseas plantations
“unless . . . they might likewise have a New Scotland.”
Virginia is named for Elizabeth I, the
Virgin Queen, the last of the Tudor
monarchs and her cousin James I’s
immediate predecessor. - Colonial Williamsburg |
James said his subjects had a right to settle in the Americas wherever
a Christian prince did not already effectively occupy, as distinct from
claim, the territory. It was an admirable position, but he did not always
stand up for it. The Irish and English Amazon colonies were destroyed
by the Portuguese, who were detested by the local tribes, and who had
never occupied the area. The only argument they would heed was an effective
counter attack, but the king of Portugal between 1580 and 1640 was the
Spanish monarch, whom James was desperate to appease. Nothing was done.
The Spaniards normally killed other Europeans they found in the Americas.
The birth of Virginia was possible because of the terms on which James
had managed to conclude the deadlocked Elizabethan war with Spain in
the Treaty of London of 1604. Because Spain needed peace more than England,
the principal Spanish negotiator, the constable of Castile, had reluctantly
to agree to drop from the treaty all mention of Spain’s exclusive
claims in the Americas. That did not mean that Spain accepted the English
colony.
Spanish reconnaissance expeditions, scouting out the land before military
action, were dispatched to the Chesapeake in 1605 and, significantly,
also in 1609. The constable hoped to see all the English colonists hanged,
but the resources of imperial Spain were strained even by the cost of
its most northerly garrison at St. Augustine. Spain’s best bet
after 1607 was to bully, wheedle, or con King James into abandoning
his Virginian “children.”
This looked possible in 1608, when his vanity and delusions about being
the great arbiter of Europe were tickled by insincere Spanish talk about
marrying his heir, Prince Henry, to a Spanish princess or infanta, and
making Henry regent of a reunited and reconciled Netherlands. The Dutch
in the northern Netherlands had long been in rebellion against their
Spanish overlords. The Spaniards, however, overplayed their hand by
abusing the crews when they captured English ships bound for Virginia.
By 1609 they had so alienated English opinion that it was clear Virginia
had become a matter of national prestige for which even England’s
near-pacifist Scots monarch would have to fight.
That diplomatic shield was vital for Virginia, especially after the
crippling Indian uprising in 1622. A critic of the Virginia Company
reported in 1623 that he had found “not the least piece of fortification”
around its principal settlement, Jamestown. The company said that there
were a few cannon and wooden palisades, but the report was probably
right in saying one small enemy warship could easily have flattened
the place.
Because he issued his two charters in 1606 and 1609 to the Virginia
Company, James I was committed to protecting the settlement. It lay
within Elizabethan grants that had reverted to the crown when Ralegh,
whom James loathed, was convicted of treason in 1603. It is fair to
ask what else James did for Virginia.
Sir Walter Ralegh-he never spelled his
surname with an “i”-took over from
his brother the patent to the Virginia
colony and dispatched the first settlers.
- Colonial Williamsburg |
He put no assets into it. He was a financial desperado, creating
massive deficits by compulsive spending and gifts to favorites
like George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. When the Virginia Company,
even after reorganization and the charter of 1609, did not make
a profit, James granted it the privilege of running a lottery.
This lasted until parliamentary objections to monopolies led to
its lapse after 1621.
In 1612 one pessimist said Virginia would probably fail less
because of the Spanish ambassador’s endless ravings on the
subject to James than because of “the extreme beastly idleness
of our nation.” He said deserters from Virginia slandering
the plantation back in England hurt the Old Dominion more than
the lottery helped. The colony had nearly died out in the winter
of 1609-10. James’s ambassador in Madrid, Sir John Digby,
reported in 1612 that the Spaniards were moved to contempt by
news of the lottery, and determined somehow to destroy Virginia.
The Spanish ambassador in London in late 1612 was urging Philip
III of Spain, unrealistically, to strike before the Virginian
colony could put down roots.
By 1613, however, a spy with access to Spanish confidential sources
obtained proof that most of James’s senior counselors were in receipt
of Spanish pensions. There was a danger that Virginia might be betrayed
by the Jacobean regime.
James became so worried about the pro-Spanish influence in his Council
that he concealed from it sensitive communications from his ambassador
in Madrid. Yet as late as 1623 he was anxious for a marriage between
his heir, Prince Charles, whose elder brother Prince Henry had died
in 1612, and a Spanish infanta. Before the negotiation collapsed, Charles
and Buckingham briefly placed themselves in the power of Spain by making
a foolish and dangerous trip to Madrid.
The earl of Southampton believed the royal menagerie might help the
cause of Virginia. He reported in December 1609, “The King is eager
to have one of the Virginia Squirrels that are said to fly.” James
loved exotic animals. He failed to catch a white hind seen roaming in
the Grampian Mountains in Scotland. In 1623, however, Spain got the
king’s erratic attention by sending an elephant and camels to England.
Native Americans were exotic, though not unfamiliar. North American
Indians and Eskimos had been brought to London since the reign of Elizabeth’s
grandfather, Henry VII. In September 1603 a plague-ridden London had
seen “Virginians” demonstrate their skill in handling their
dugout canoe on the River Thames, sponsored by James’s first minister,
Lord Salisbury. They may have been Algonquians from the Chesapeake.
James was a renaissance humanist scholar, taught by the greatest Latin
poet of the day-the Scotsman George Buchanan. Basic to classical and
renaissance thought was the distinction between civilization and barbarism.
To James, who regarded most Gaelic-speakers in Scotland and Ireland
as barbarians, North American tribesmen were like barbarous Highland
clansmen.
Nevertheless, such people could have leaders whose obvious nobility
enabled James to relate to them. Thus in Scotland James wanted the MacGregors,
who had no chief to control them, “ruit oute and extirpat.”
Clan Gordon was no problem. James favored its chief, Lord Huntly, as
he did the earl of Tyrone in Ulster, despite the earl’s nine-year
war with Elizabeth. The Council of the Virginia Company in London always
insisted that there was no king in Virginia save King James, but Powhatan,
the great Tidewater Indian ruler, was often referred to as an emperor
and the normal English translation of Indian terms for chief was king.
When Christopher Newport came to Virginia with the third reinforcement
vessel of 1608 in September, he had with him a copper crown and
instructions to seek out Powhatan and crown him with it-which
he did in November-making Powhatan “King James his man.”
James assumed that a pagan ruler should submit to a Christian
one, but Powhatan was clearly to be a cooperative regional prince,
like Huntly or Tyrone.
In 1616 Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas-converted to Anglicanism
and baptized “Lady Rebecca,” because in Genesis 25:23
the Lord said of another Rebecca, “Two nations are in thy
womb”-came to London with her husband, colonist John Rolfe,
and their baby son. Received lavishly by the royal court and the
citizens of London, she “carried herself as the daughter
of a king,” and was treated with respect by James and his
nobility before her death on the eve of her return to Virginia
in early 1617.
Cape Charles, which guards the northern
entrance to the Chesapeake, is named for
Charles I, son of James I, who inherited
from his father the failing Virginia
venture. - Colonial Williamsburg |
James was, on his own terms, benign and liberal. For a few desperate
years after 1611, martial law had to be imposed on the Virginia plantation
by Governor Thomas Dale to discipline the colonists for the sake of
their sheer survival. Nevertheless, the royal charters promised the
colonists the full freedoms and privileges of Englishmen, which is what
they were, and access to the common law, the guardian of those liberties.
Virginia was an Anglican church-state, with the bishop of London an
influential member of the company’s council, but King James’s
spirit was ecumenical. His devotion to peace and respect for Christians
of a different persuasion-absurdities to most contemporary kings or
popes-meant that the reunification of Christendom was his dearest, and
most impractical, wish. The Anglican establishment in Virginia in his
reign was informal, with no elaborate ritual, and was no persecutor.
James secured the forfeiture of the charter of the Virginia Company
in 1624, but only because there was no alternative. A takeover in 1618
by a group of gentry and nobles led by Sir Edwin Sandys and the earl
of Southampton failed to make the company solvent, but led to vicious
factional fighting. The Indian uprising of 1622 and subsequent war destroyed
the company’s viability. James sent the colonists obsolete armor
from the Tower of London, England’s chief ordnance store, believing
that it would not be obsolete against Powhatan’s archers.
When he personally tried to conciliate the company’s warring factions,
however, the job proved so frustrating that he rebuked Sir Edward Sackville
for impudence. James would have liked them to surrender their charter
voluntarily, and would have given them a revised one, but company holdouts
refused the deal. They tried to raise trouble in the English Parliament,
denouncing the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who was no Virginia well-wisher,
and his successors for “using their utmost efforts to destroy the
plantation.” The king said he had the matter in hand, and asked
the House of Commons not to get involved. It agreed, though suspicious
that “by such means any business might be taken out of the hands
of Parliament.”
Modern remembrances of James I: the Jamestown
Ferry slides down the James River past Jamestown
Island bound for James City County. - Dave Doody |
When the Court of King’s Bench ruled the company’s
charter forfeit for non-compliance with its terms, rumor said that
“the popular nature of the government having displeased the
king,” one hundred soldiers would be sent as a garrison. James
could not afford the soldiers, and the General Assembly set up in
Virginia in 1619 survived. Like James’s other legislatures,
it met occasionally, when needed. England was a monarchy, normally
run by its king, and Virginia, after 1624, was run by the governor
he appointed.
James was initially violently hostile to tobacco, associated with Ralegh.
The king’s authorship of the anonymous A Counterblaste to Tobacco
of 1604 was soon common knowledge. What grieved his fatherly humanist
heart was that loyal Christian subjects should, on a whim, debase themselves
by smoking like Devil- worshipping Indian barbarians. So, denouncing
its effect on the health, morals, and finances of the lieges, he compared
its “black, stinking fume” to “the horrible Stigian smoke
of the pit that is bottomlesse.” He soon realized, when Rolfe proved
tobacco was the paying cash crop in Virginia, that he could use income
from it, negotiating eventually for a third of the company’s importation
by weight. Businessmen like Sir Arthur Ingram warned the company not
to offer cash when James was too broke to make allowances if prices
collapsed.
He and the company leaders so misunderstood Virginia’s climate
they persuaded themselves tobacco cultivation was only a necessary interlude
before healthy products like silk, flax, hemp, and wine started to flow
from the Chesapeake. They never did.
Gradually James’s name and those of members of his family spread
over the map of Virginia. From 1607 there was Jamestown. A manuscript
map of 1608 showed King James his River, which by 1635 was on a printed
map as the James River. Capes Henry and Charles are named for his sons.
A map of 1651, drawn by a woman, Virginia Ferrar, showed Elizabeth City
near Point Comfort, named after James’s daughter. By 1673 a map
showed counties called Henrico and Charles City.
His great favorite Buckingham flattered the sentimental James by addressing
him as “Dad.” Virginia could have had a much worse dad than
this shambling Scots eccentric with his great strengths and preposterous
weaknesses.
Bruce Lenman, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews in Fyfe, Scotland, contributed
“Tea and Circumstance” to the spring 1996 journal.
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Historic Triangle