The great, crowded
meetings of the Company Sessions rang with their divisions upon policies
small and large. Words and phrases, comprehensive, sonorous, heavy with the
future, rose and rolled beneath the roof of their great hall. There were
heard amid warm discussion: Kingdom and
Colony -- Spain -- Netherlands -- France -- Church and State -- Papists and
Schismatics -- Duties, Tithes, Excise Petitions of
Grievances -- Representation -- Right of Assembly. Several years earlier the
King had cried, "Choose the Devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" Now he
declared the Company "just a seminary to a seditious parliament!" All
London resounded with the clash of parties and opinions.* "Last week the
Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia . . .
court that the lie passed and repassed . . . . The factions . . . are grown
so violent that Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against
another!"
* In his work on "Joint-stock Companion", vol.II, pp. 266 ff., W.
R. Scott traces the history of these acute dissensions in the
Virginia Company and draws conclusions distinctly unfavorable to
the management of Sandys and his party.--Editor.
Believing that the Company's sessions foreshadowed a "seditious
parliament," James Stuart set himself with obstinacy and some cunning to
the Company's undoing. The court party gave the King aid, and circumstances
favored the attempt. Captain Nathaniel Butler, who had once been Governor
of the Somers Islands and had now returned to England by way of Virginia,
published in London "The Unmasked Face of Our Colony in Virginia",
containing a savage attack upon every item of Virginian administration.
Pages:
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96