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persons with ready money at command were the merchants who, as a rule, cared little for ideas such as attracted the projectors. In the early days of Virginia and Bermuda Smythe was willing for the sake of his ideas to wait long for his profits, but he was unique both in the amplitude of his resources and the breadth of his views. The merchants at the back of the West Indian ventures were willing to continue providing capital because they could look for profits on the sale of tobacco and by supplying goods to the planters. In the same way the men who kept Virginia and Bermuda going were not those who wrangled in the courts of the companies, but those who supplied the magazines and took the planters' produce in payment. In New England and Newfoundland the interests of the merchants concerned were directed not towards colonisation, but to the fishing and fur trades to which a resident population was inimical. The great majority of the fishing merchants were determined, if they could, to carry on their business in the traditional way and to keep the shores as drying grounds during the summer season. The disputes over free fishing were fatal to the schemes of the colonisers. Merchants gave little credit to their promises of profit, and could find better use for their money elsewhere. The better class of emigrants would not readily go to places where it was notorious that they would be faced with the hostility of large numbers of unruly fishermen, and New England had therefore to await a new and more potent colonising motive than that of profit. Alexander's expeditions to Nova Scotia were regarded by France as an infringement of her right of prior occupation, and in 1624 she protested to James I against the trespass of his subjects in the peninsula.1 But the protest was disregarded, and the King tried to aid Alexander by following a precedent employed in the plantation of Ulster. To further the enterprise an order of "Knights Baronets of Nova Scotia" was founded for those who would send out settlers and pay heavy subscriptions to the funds. The outbreak of war with France set on foot other enterprises to seize the fur trade and to profit by attacking Champlain's little colony on the St Lawrence.

The story of this first English conquest of Canada will be told in a later volume, and we can here say only that on 29 August 1629 Champlain was forced to surrender the fortress of Quebec to an expedition organised by David Kirke, a privateering merchant of mixed English and French descent; a few weeks previously Scottish colonists had landed in Cape Breton Island and Alexander's men had occupied the settlement of Port Royal. The whole of the territory in French occupation in North America had therefore fallen into British hands. But meanwhile affairs at home had taken a turn that was fatal to Kirke's ambitions.

1 See Insh, G. P., Scottish Colonial Schemes, 1620-88, pp. 212-13.

2 See vol. VI.

3 See Kirke, H., The First English Conquest of Canada.

TREATY OF ST GERMAIN-EN-LAYE

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The French war had been marked by a series of disgraceful failures and Charles was utterly without means to fight further. The nation had lost interest even in the war with Spain and men's thoughts were more and more concentrated on the domestic quarrels in Church and Parliament. Richelieu, anxious to free his hands for the struggle with Spain over the Mantuan inheritance, was ready to make peace on easy terms. On 14/24 April 1629, therefore, a treaty between the two Powers was signed at Susa. Almost all debatable questions were postponed for further discussion, but it was agreed that while prizes made before the peace should be retained, those taken after an interval of two months from its conclusion should be restored.1

Richelieu was paying especial attention at this time to commercial and colonial affairs and he would not acquiesce in the retention of Canada and Acadia by Great Britain. Kirke's and Alexander's occupation had undoubtedly begun after the lapse of the period of two months' grace stipulated in the Treaty of Susa and though the words of the article ostensibly referred only to ships captured as prizes, they could also be read to include establishments on shore. The Scottish colonists in Cape Breton Island had been defeated and brought captive to France very soon after their landing, but Kirke was firmly in possession at Quebec and Sir William Alexander's Scots at Port Royal. On the other hand the French had not yet paid over the whole of the dowry of Queen Henrietta Maria, and they retained two rich English prizes which had been captured and brought to Dieppe while carrying negro slaves for Sir Nicholas Crisp from Guinea to the American plantations. The negotiations for an accommodation were long drawn out, but ultimately the French succeeded in their demands and by the Treaty of St Germain-enLaye (19/29 March 1632)2 mutual restitution was agreed upon. Quebec and Port Royal were handed over to the French commanders, and the first English occupation of Canada was at an end. Little interest was taken in the transaction by the general public, but Kirke and his associates were loud in their outcry against the injustice that they claimed had been done and before long they tried again in Newfoundland.3

In reality it would have been impossible for England to have retained the conquests without the danger of a fresh breach with France, which Charles was in no position to contemplate. An illconceived and ill-directed foreign policy had placed England in an inferior position wherever she had to face the competition of other colonising Powers. Luckily the progress of the Empire was not dependent upon governmental support; at the very moment when English prestige in Europe had sunk to its lowest point, in the field of colonisation individual enterprise became more active than ever 1 Art. 7 of Treaty of Susa: Davenport, p. 364.

a Vide infra, p. 181.

2 Davenport, pp. 319–23.

before. New motives were at work that owed little to high policy but sprang wholly from domestic conditions. They brought about the settlement of colonies of a new sort with results of profound importance for England and the world.

Upon the details of the founding of New England it is not necessary to dwell at length. For our purpose it is of more importance to emphasise certain aspects of it that were of lasting consequence. Though the great majority of Englishmen conformed to the settlement of the Church as established by the Act of Uniformity, there were small groups scattered here and there who desired to go much further in the direction of reform and would not acquiesce in even the mildest episcopal control. We showed earlier how such a group of Brownists proposed to sail to America with Captain Charles Leigh in 1596 and how the design ended in failure. Many other little parties of separatists left England under Elizabeth and James I to escape the reach of authority, and they mostly fled to the Netherlands. In 1607 such an independent congregation from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, without licence from the authorities,1 were led oversea by their pastor, the Rev. John Robinson, and William Brewster. They established themselves first in Amsterdam and later in Leyden, and there for ten years they strove to keep themselves apart, much as they had done in England. But they found the conditions round them irksome, their religious feelings were troubled by their neighbours, they had a hard struggle to make a living, and feared that their children were forgetting that they were English. In 1617 the leaders determined to carry their congregation to a fresh home in the New World far from corrupting influences. But they were without sufficient means to provide for transportation and to stock a colony. They first contemplated a settlement in Guiana where they might live by planting, but this plan was soon abandoned, and they approached the Virginia Company for a licence to settle within the limits of its grant but far removed from the colony round James Town. An invitation from the Dutch to settle in their newly projected colony at the mouth of the Hudson River was rejected as inconsistent with their desire to remain English, and through Sir Edwin Sandys they obtained the Virginia licence they desired. Application was made to the Crown for governmental sanction of their project, and this was granted without trouble, but they failed to obtain the patent they sought to protect their separatist form of Church organisation. No Government in that age could be expected to establish such a precedent of religious toleration, but the petitioners were informally promised that they would not be interfered with so long as they bore themselves peaceably. So far from persecuting them, the authorities

1 For impartial surveys of the story see Adams, J. T., Founding of New England, pp. 90103; Channing, E., Hist. of U.S. 1, 293-315.

2 Bradford, W., Hist. of Plymouth Plantation, pp. 22-4.

THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS

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regarded their plans benevolently, but it was difficult to obtain financial help to carry them into effect. As was shown earlier, so much money had been lost in colonial schemes that financiers generally declined to help them. Luckily for the pilgrims, some of the London fishing merchants were beginning to be interested in the New England fur trade and fisheries and saw opportunities of profit in the establishment of a permanent base there. A terminable joint stock was formed to which the merchants subscribed money or stores and the emigrants their labour, and it was agreed that after seven years the accumulated property of the venture should be distributed pro rata among the shareholders.

Incessant difficulties arose to delay the enterprise, and it was not until 6 September 1620 that the first of the emigrants managed to get away from the port of Plymouth in the Mayflower. Their pastor Robinson was unable to go with them and John Carver was elected governor, being succeeded on his death a few months later by William Bradford, the historian of the colony. After a voyage of two months and a half they came at length to the sandy shores behind Cape Cod and landed there in the middle of November. The region clearly lay beyond the limits of the Virginia Company whose licence they held, but they decided to remain, and after some weeks' search they settled on a site for the colony which they called Plymouth. There building began on 21 December 1620. As already mentioned, a grant of land for the settlement was obtained by John Pierce from the Council of New England in whose jurisdiction it lay, but this was rather for the security of the merchants who had financed the voyage than for the benefit of the colonists, and ultimately they had to buy Pierce out. The foundation of the Plymouth colony attracted little notice in England, and almost the only public reference to it was in the debate in the House of Commons on free fishing when the issue of a patent to the settlers by the Council for New England was quoted as one of the grievances of the fishermen.1

For ten years until the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629 Plymouth with its two or three hundred settlers was by far the largest centre of population in New England, but there were many other attempts along the coast from Maine southwards. None of them succeeded in establishing organised or self-supporting communities because profits were lacking. In the plantation colonies where profitable investment was possible, the planters became to a considerable extent merely cultivators for English absentee owners, but in Plymouth the London merchant-venturers had sold out to the settlers and cut their losses by 1627, and from that time onward the colony was economically self-contained. The settlers could live their own lives, and all their efforts contributed to their own benefit. A great sickness had recently killed off almost the entire aboriginal population 1 Vide supra, p. 148.

about Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, so that the little settlement was fortunately able to survive its early years without Indian attack. Constitutionally the colony was in an entirely anomalous position, for it could never procure a grant from the Crown giving rights of jurisdiction. The Company derived directly from the earlier trading enterprises with a terminable joint stock. When such attempts had been made with the shiftless or broken men who were the usual emigrants of the time, they had resulted in failure, but the infusion of the religious motive provided a nucleus of settlers of determination and self-control who could carry the colony over its initial difficulties, and this was the new and vital factor in the experiment. The men of strong religious conviction were, it is true, but a nucleus; among the original 102 passengers in the Mayflower only thirty-five had belonged to the Leyden congregation and the remainder were a very mixed company from London who gave signs of indiscipline from the start. But the leaders found means to control their followers even before they landed in America, and thenceforward they never lost command. The first permanent colony in New England owed almost everything to a narrow group of men who could work together as a team. To quote the words of one of them: "In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and murmurings arise amongst some, and mutinous speeches and carriage in others; but they were soon quelled and overcome by the wisdom, patience and just and equal carriage of things by the governor and better part which clave faithfully together in the main."1

The steps they took were of constitutional significance, for they gave a radically democratic basis to the colony from the start. Some of the rougher emigrants from the London slums, sent out by the merchants as indentured servants, knew that they were no longer under authority when it was decided to settle beyond the boundaries of the Virginia Company's grant, and boasted that they did not intend to be ruled by anyone, but would use their own liberty. To cope with this menace the leading colonists assembled together on 11 November 1620 and drew up a short written instrument modelled on the form of a separatist Church covenant. By this "Mayflower Compact", as it has been called, they agreed to combine themselves into a civil body politic for their own preservation and to assume such power under the King as was necessary for the framing of just laws and equal ordinances and the appointment of competent officers. Fortyone men signed the document and thus established a basis for the legal authority of their government in the absence of an express commission from the King. The signatories became in fact the first freemen of a new political community, preserving their allegiance to the English Crown and laws unimpaired, but compelled by reason of

1 Bradford, pp. 192, 3.

Facsimile from Bradford's History in Adams, J. T., op. cit. p. 93.

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