ROYAL GOVERNMENT IN VIRGINIA

167 began the industry of logwood cutting that was to be so important later in the century. Providence was captured by the Spaniards after severe fighting in 1641, but it left memories that were recalled when Cromwell was planning his "Western Design" in 1654-5. The only permanent results of the venture lay in the relations that were opened up with the Moskito Indians on the mainland. These gave England her first direct interest in Central America, and began a connection that continued until 1850. The Providence Company was an interesting hybrid; sprung directly from the old Warwick-Smythe party in the Virginia Company it manifested Elizabethan ideas of colonisation; it was also the last of the chartered companies of the early Stuarts; infused with the Puritan theocracy of New England, it was also a forerunner of the aggressive Protestant imperialism of the Interregnum. It carries us back appropriately to the point at which we left Virginia, immediately after the revocation of the Company's charter. 1

The Privy Council was faced in 1624 with an unprecedented difficulty, that of directly governing a dependency at least two months removed from the metropolis yet accustomed for years to look for detailed instructions and support from English sources. The authorities were at first resolved to make their control as close as that over Ireland, and on 13 May 1625 Charles I proclaimed his policy "that there may be one uniform Course of Government in and through all Our whole Monarchy". It was clear that the Privy Council could not pay attention to all the details of management, and a special Commission was appointed to regulate Virginian affairs. The proclamation promised that the Crown would maintain "those public Officers and Ministers, and that Strength of Men, Munition and Fortification that shall be fit and necessary for the Defence of the Plantation". The colonists took this promise at its face value, and applied for the despatch of a royal force of trained soldiers and military engineers to assist them in a campaign against the Indian tribes, as the English army had been employed in the Irish wars. But no such help was forthcoming, for the war with Spain was just beginning, and there was not a man or a penny to spare. Within a short time the Royal Commission for Virginia ceased to function, the stream of detailed instructions dwindled, and the direction of policy in Virginia became mostly an affair for the governor and his local council with only occasional interference from England. After long delay the Crown provided £1000 a year to pay the governor's salary out of the Virginia customs, but otherwise little or no assistance was given.

In one respect the policy outlined in the proclamation of May 1625 was thenceforward generally adhered to. The government of the colonies was immediately to depend upon the Crown "and not to be.committed to any Company or Corporation, to whom it may be 1 Vide supra, p. 152. * Osgood, III, 77.

2 Rymer, Foedera, xvIII, 72–73.

proper to trust Matters of Trade and Commerce but cannot be fit or safe to communicate the ordering of State Affairs, be they of never so mean Consequence". After 1625 save in the exceptional cases of the Guiana, Massachusetts Bay and Providence Companies no further > charters to colonising corporations were issued by Charles I, but a new form was employed. Henceforward, except in New England, colonies established on a grant made to an individual lord proprietor became the general rule. This type of patent was first employed in the grant to Sir George Calvert of a part of Newfoundland, and its application to colonisation may very probably be attributed to his invention.

In a previous chapter it was stated that when Guy's Company found itself unable to exploit its lands it disposed of its rights over certain tracts to various projectors of colonising schemes.1 Among them was Sir George Calvert, who, as one of the Secretaries of State, had been concerned with colonial policy and held similar views to those of Bacon as to the strategic importance to the kingdom of establishing a colony in Newfoundland. His first practical attempt was in the plantation of confiscated Irish lands round Baltimore in Munster, and in 1621-2 he began to send out colonists at his own expense to settle the area in Newfoundland that he had purchased. In 1623 he procured from the Crown a charter granting him full proprietary rights over a region to be named the Province of Avalon with palatine jurisdiction similar to that in the Bishopric of Durham, a provision that anticipated by four years any other proprietary patent. Calvert was unable to do very much to carry out his schemes until after his resignation of the secretaryship, but in 1627 he paid a short visit to the island and in 1628 took out his wife and family with several colonists, intending to reside there permanently. Like other attempts the project was thwarted by the hostility of the fishermen and the severity of the climate, and after one season Calvert determined to abandon Newfoundland and begin again further south.

Meanwhile the system of proprietary grants was being employed to provide for the government of the new English colonies in the West Indies whose genesis we considered earlier.2 The 1623 patent for the Province of Avalon apparently provided the model for the various patents issued in 1627 to the Earl of Carlisle as Lord Proprietor of the Caribbee Islands and to the Earl of Montgomery for his Provincia Montgomeria. When Virginia became a royal province in 1624, the unoccupied lands within the original grant legally passed back into the hands of the Crown and were available to be granted afresh. But the colonists contested this view, and maintained that the corporate right to the whole area stretching 200 miles north and south of Point Comfort and an indefinite distance inland was vested in the resident community in Virginia and not in the dispossessed London Company. In their contention unsettled 1 Vide supra, p. 90. 2 Vide supra, pp. 143-5.

PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT IN MARYLAND 169

lands throughout the whole area could be granted only through the colonial government and the province which later became known as the "Old Dominion" was one and indivisible. But these claims were disregarded, and in October 1629 the Crown acceded to a petition from Sir Robert Heath, the Attorney-General, for the grant of rights. to establish colonies at his own expense in portions of the lands originally assigned under the Virginia charter of 1609. The area granted to Heath lay to the south of the settlements along the James River, and he projected a colony there to be called "Carolana", but nothing was done to carry his project into effect, and ultimately he disposed of his rights to certain London merchants. It was not until after the Restoration that any effective settlement took place in the region and then it was under fresh proprietary grants.

Calvert, who was created Lord Baltimore in 1625, had petitioned for a grant of unoccupied lands in Virginia while he was still in Newfoundland and visited James Town about the time when Heath received his patent. He was naturally regarded with hostility by the Virginians, and they got rid of him by tendering the oath of supremacy which as a recent convert to Roman Catholicism he refused to take. For three years they succeeded in preventing any grant to him and meanwhile the governor and council furthered the settlement of William Claiborne, one of their number, in the region for which Baltimore had applied. It was not until after his death in April 1632 that his suit was successful and a patent was issued to his son Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, for the colonisation of Maryland including the lands on the north of the Virginia settlements up to the 40th parallel, the southern boundary of the territory granted to the Council of New England. The claims of Virginia were formally rejected in 1633, but a long contest began between Claiborne and Baltimore's colonists that embittered the relations of Virginia and Maryland for many years.

The proprietary patents that began with Calvert's Avalon grant in 1623 and continued down to 1629, when the province of Maine was granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, were generally similar in their provisions, and they may be most appropriately studied in Baltimore's Maryland patent of 1632 since that alone remained in effect until the eighteenth century.1 The colonies established by chartered companies were in a sense proprietary, but they derived from the precedents of trading corporations and the relations between the grantees and their colonists were only industrial and political. The essential features of the true proprietary colonies were on the other hand feudal. The rights of the grantees were expressly stated in the patents to be modelled on those of the Bishops of Durham in their county palatine. All land was to be held directly or indirectly of the lord proprietor as the feudal superior and he was endowed with full seignorial rights.

1 See Osgood, vol. III, chaps. i-iv.

1

!

The detailed arrangements that were developed in each proprietorship naturally varied according to circumstances, and in no instance were they an exact reproduction of their English original. Their type was fundamentally the same, but each province, owing to diverse social and political forces, filled in the outline in its own way, and the development of government in the Caribbee Islands produced a result differing at least as widely from Maryland as that colony differed from its neighbour, Virginia. The lord proprietor was a tenant-inchief and held his province of the King like a private feudal estate. It was subject to the King's sovereign control and all the inhabitants owed allegiance to him, but titles to land were derived, not from the Crown as elsewhere, but from the proprietor. He was empowered to establish courts and appoint all officers necessary for the execution of the laws, and was authorised to legislate for the province through an assembly of freemen, to issue ordinances of government under his seal, to execute justice and to grant pardon. In fact in almost every respect the lord proprietor was a petty sovereign within his province which was imperium in imperio; his estate was heritable like any other fief, and since his powers were derived, not from the province or its inhabitants but from the overlord, it was theoretically impossible for him to be called to account by the settlers within his domain. This system was infinitely removed from the democracy of the New England commonwealths, but in practice its institutions rapidly developed in a democratic direction. The pioneer conditions of the New World were unfavourable to the exercise of aristocratic or autocratic power, and the lords proprietors both in Maryland and the Caribbees were more anxious to develop the material prosperity of their colonies and to attract settlers than to insist on legal forms. Thus from the first, as elsewhere in the outer Empire, the power of the elected Assemblies increased while that of the proprietor diminished. But while the rule of a chartered company could be terminated by a single act, the rights of a proprietor could not be extinguished without expropriation or revolution.

In one respect Maryland was unique among the colonies, for it was the only region in the Empire governed by a Roman Catholic proprietor and in which Roman Catholics were in the full exercise of political power. Toleration in Rhode Island had come as a matter of principle from the theological teaching of Roger Williams, but in Maryland it was adopted by Cecilius Calvert for practical convenience to assist the material progress of his colony by including any suitable emigrant whatever his religious beliefs. In the early years there was a Roman Catholic majority in the Assembly, but gradually the Protestants came to preponderate without any alteration of religious policy. At one time certain Jesuit zealots attempted to press restrictive measures upon the proprietor, but he refused pointblank to allow religious aims to interfere in civil affairs, and it was

STRUGGLES FOR BARBADOS

171

not until the Interregnum that invading Puritan zealots from New England were able to destroy the practice of toleration for a time and to exclude all Catholics and Anglicans from political power. With the Restoration the Independent bigots were expelled and the colony regained its original comprehensiveness.

We now return to Barbados and the Leeward Islands to consider the steps taken to establish the proprietary governments under the Earl of Carlisle's patent of 7 April 1628 procured in the circumstances mentioned earlier.1 The new grant largely increased the lord proprietor's opportunities of personal profit both at the expense of his rival Sir William Courteen and of the planters. His purpose of excluding other competitors achieved, he took no further active part but at once handed over to his merchant associates complete authority to manage the business, of which they availed themselves to the full. Captain Charles Wolverston, who had been one of the early planters in the Bermudas, was commissioned as Governor of Barbados and sent out with some eighty colonists. Since he professed entirely friendly intentions, Courteen's settlers made no objection to his landing, but when a couple of months later he had established himself securely, he suddenly produced his commission as governor for the Earl of Carlisle, nominated a council and demanded submission to his authority. After some show of force the original settlers surrendered,2 and trusting in the promise of the Carlisle party that they "should continue in their former freedom without being a colony", they agreed to pay the heavy dues upon their produce that were assigned to the lord proprietor under his new patent. As soon as the news of these proceedings reached England, Montgomery and Courteen resolved to despatch a new force to protect their rights. The command was entrusted to Henry Powell, the brother of the first commander in Barbados, and at the end of February 1629 he landed there, seized Wolverston and some of his officers and re-established his nephew, John Powell the younger, as governor. He confiscated the tobacco and stores of Carlisle's colonists and sailed back to England, taking with him Wolverston and others as prisoners in irons.

While this was happening in the colony, the rival claimants in England carried their dispute to the King. Since it was concerned with the interpretation of conflicting grants issued under the great seal, it ought properly to have been tried in the courts of law, but Charles arbitrarily exerted his authority in the interest of his favourite, and merely referred the matter for an informal hearing before the Lord Keeper Coventry. His reports pronounced generally in favour of Carlisle's claims, but it bore indications that the decision was given under pressure and against the Lord Keeper's better judgment. Royal orders were at once despatched to Carlisle's representatives in Barbados to secure obedience, and the managers of the syndicate * 28 April 1629.

1 Vide supra, p. 145.

2 September 1628.