We can then judge the importance of a letter from Ralph Lane, the first governor of Virginia, to Richard Hakluyt, written on 3 September 1585, when he says, ‘what commodities so ever Spain, France, Italy or the East parts do yield unto us, in wines of all sorts, in oils, in flax, in resins, pitch, frankincense, currants, sugars, and suchlike, these parts do abound with the growth of them all’.
Richard Hakluyt, in his A Discourse of Western Planting, was of the opinion that Virginia could supply everything that the English would otherwise have to trade for in southern Europe, Africa and the Far East. There were also commodities to be had in North America which were far from exotic. Timber and cordage, so necessary for an English maritime nation in its building of ships from keel to masthead, were mightily expensive. Much of the timber was coming from the Baltic, but the King of Denmark was imposing swingeing taxes. How much better to establish a colony and bring it home from the new Dominions? For good measure there was always the hope that the bullion the Spanish had so easily found further south might also be mined in similar tonnage by the British to the north. Yet this remained a hope that would be a bonus. The more long-term thinkers knew that there was gold in timber.
The commercial instincts were not one-sided or one-way. The attraction was to go to the new colonies and bring back, at a big profit, goods. The entrepreneurs also judged, quite rightly, that colonists who settled these new lands would be a wonderful market for goods made in England. Ask a man to dig in Virginia and he had to have a shovel. They made shovels in Sheffield. Thus, the entrepreneurs and governing council would profit from getting imports without paying high duties from other countries and would further profit by selling more manufactured goods to the very people they had sent or encouraged to the colony. Moreover, this increased trade had to be carried so there would be a need for more ships: the shipyards would do good business and the shipowners even more.
Here then was a perfect example of the simplest economic rule of supply and demand. Even more than that, it was the establishment over a relatively short period of a new form of economics and a new economy for the British. This was British Empire plc.
Was this the beginning of the British rape of colonized lands and people? We might as well ask if the agricultural system, from its manorial and feudal beginnings, was a rape of these lands and an exploitation of the poorest people? The answer is yes, of course it was. The exploitation of black and coloured peoples is now unforgivable. So too was the medieval exploitation of the English, Scottish and Irish peasantry. The codicil is that commercial and colonial development, even in its most parochial form, was ever thus and not all the poor remained poor as a result. Perhaps this fundament of economic thinking had not sunk in when Elizabeth was on the throne, but there is no doubt that she would never have lent her seal to a voyage unless she would show a profit. Elizabeth was continuously broke. She did not need an empire to look good in her biographies. She wanted money, goods by the shipload and a system that stopped the Spanish and French getting them before she did. Elizabeth had bright men (seemingly) who would exploit this need: thus the backing for men such as Ralegh and Drake.
The one constant in the exploration of the American eastern seaboard was led by the fishermen. Here were touchable profits. No one could doubt the money to be made from fisheries. The relatively easy relationship between the English and the French continued. The French wanted to push further in to what became Canada. Trading hides and oils as well as fish was equably profitable and made a sensible economic diversion when the fish could only be taken seasonally. The French, led by Samuel de Champlain, ‘conquered’ the St Lawrence River in 1603 and established their province of Quebec in 1608. They were firmly in Canada. The English – most of the initiatives were from England at that time – and later the British concentrated their efforts further south in Virginia, despite the disaster of the first settlement. At the vanguard were the explorers. Behind them were the enormously influential figures of the merchant venturers, people like Sir Thomas Smythe.
The Smythes and their wider family had become rich through landowning and wise stewardship of their own and royal holdings. Smythe’s mother was the daughter of Sir Andrew Judd, who had been a sort of business manager for Henry VIII. The commissions and patronage were considerable. Smythe’s father was called Customer Smythe. The name ‘Customer’ came from the fact that he was the collector of Elizabeth’s customs dues and had raked in a considerable fortune as his commission.
At a time when the cloth trade was once more taking off, Thomas Smythe backed it and reaped the rewards. Instead of buying ships he saw there was far more money to be made without any risk whatsoever by victualling them. Also he was wise enough to believe that although there were short-term profits to be made from warfare, longer term investments showed a better return in peacetime. By the end of the sixteenth century, when peace was breaking out over Europe, Smythe was making even more money. Little wonder that after his experiences of quietly piling fortune upon fortune in, for example, the Levant, he became one of the original proposers for the East India Company to bring back the millions of pounds worth of cargo from the Spice Islands.
The coincidence of the death of Elizabeth and the end of the war with Spain was based on sound economic sense. The influence of Essex on the Queen prohibited peace negotiations with Spain. When he was sent to Ireland in 1599, the more peacefully and legitimately trading courtiers were able to persuade the Queen that it was time to explore the possibility of peace with Spain. This was an important step in the commercial and subsequent colonial plans of the English. Certainly, people like Smythe and John Lancaster, leader of the English East India project, were keen that the talks with the Spanish, which took place that year at Boulogne, should result in a diplomatic trade in concessions and permissions. The English said, for example, that they would tell their people not to enter any Spanish or Portuguese plantation or colony but reserve the right to make their own excursions into non-plantations. Hence the insistence in Elizabethan petitions and permissions that explorers should not attempt to colonize where Christian princes already ruled.
Here was a diplomatic definition of where a country could trade and also an origin of colony. The English were saying that to have any title to distant lands then a country should have established some colonial structure. In other words we come back to the idea of creating a community in the image of the occupying power socially, constitutionally and legally. The French supported this idea. The Spaniards, who of course had most to lose, did not. This is why England remained at war with Spain until the death of Elizabeth and the translation of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England. King James’s immediate priority, even before his coronation in the summer of 1603, was to bring the wasteful war with Spain to an end. In May 1604 Spanish diplomats went to London.
The English once more demanded that they should be free to trade with the Spanish possessions in the East as well as the West Indies. The English also insisted that the Spanish recognized that the English, or anyone else for that matter, had the right to colonize any land that was not occupied by another power – never mind the local people; they did not matter. Here was an attempt to agree international law – which in those days did not much exist – with regards to imperial and colonial exploration. The English were saying that internationally the main powers, England, France, Portugal, Spain and the Dutch (often it depended on who owned the Dutch at the time), had the right to establish a colony in ‘undiscovered’ territory and that the land should have a legally recognized status. For example, an English flag planted in Virginia meant that the other exploring powers should keep their hands off and recognize that it was as much English territory as, say, Wessex or Northumberland. As a reminder that the English were very late getting into the business of colonialism on a structured scale the Spaniards argued from strength and saw absolutely no reason why they should accept these demands.
Nevertheless, this was an attempt to have peace between the English and t
he Spaniards. The English wanted to expand colonial business. The Spaniards wanted James I to call off his pirates. He had done so, but in spite of his proclamation, the Spanish galleons were still plundered. It was all very well for James to issue a proclamation, but the people it was aimed at, the privateers, were hardly likely to see it for months. Many of them would not even know that James had issued it. When his authority was enforced, this did not mean the end of piracy. James never quite approved of corsairs because it antagonized the Spanish and therefore made his country vulnerable to attack. Certainly, his successor, Charles I, had no difficulties with piracy. Robert Rich, the second Earl of Warwick (1587–1658), obtained in March 1627 a liberal privateering commission from Charles I. He had eight ships with which to attack the Spaniards. In fact, he headed for Brazil hoping to seize Spanish bullion galleons but totally missed the fleet. However, during the following two years, Rich, still under the same authority from Charles I, was successful. The prizes to be gained were often small fortunes. A privateer did not simply sail for home, share the spoils on the quarterdeck and then head ashore to the nearest inn to celebrate. The distribution was complex. The King or his agent would expect a cut and various officials would attempt to take their commission. Rich certainly found this in the 1628 and 1629 pirate expeditions. It took twelve years of legal wrangling before he finally got what he thought were his just percentages.
Although the English did not get their way with the Spanish, they got some form of treaty – the Treaty of London, 1604. It was an anodyne document but it was the beginning of the legalities of English, or by that time British, imperial history.
The sensitivities should not be underrated. It was all right for the English to sail to a port in Spain to trade. It was not necessarily all right for that same vessel to sail into a Spanish possession in the East or West Indies. Why should this have been? One answer reflected the fundamental reason for having a colony. If an English ship sailed into Lisbon or Seville it might be selling goods from England and buying something from Spain or Portugal such as wine or leather. This would be unexceptional trade. The exceptional trade would be in the colonies where, say, the Spaniards were exclusively mining silver and there was a risk that the British ship was usurping the exclusive rights of the Spaniards. Multiply that scenario across the world of possessions and the very real possibilities of making individual deals with the locals and then establishing trading companies along the coast followed by stockades, and it is little wonder that the Spaniards believed that to let an English ship into an existing colony would threaten the commercial and military authority there.
The Spanish opposition to anybody trying to trade with, for example, their American colonies was not going to be pushed aside by the English. In fact, Spain maintained this opposition until the independence of those colonies in the 1800s. Also, the Spanish Empire was by then (the early seventeenth century) established. With the exception of Brazil (mostly Portuguese), the Spanish Latin American Empire stretched from Florida to Buenos Aires. We have only to remind ourselves that apart from Brazil, Spanish remains today the familiar language from Miami to the tip of South America and through many Caribbean islands. By the London conference of 1604, the Spanish influence was everywhere except Brazil, Guiana, the Lesser Antilles and North America. In North America the Spanish controlled most of Florida up to about thirty degrees of latitude north, with the capital of that colony at St Augustine. In theory, therefore, the rest of the Americas were still to be fought over. The Dutch had a go at Brazil but were not very successful. If nothing else the Treaty of London had cleared the air so that the non-Iberian empire builders knew exactly what was up for grabs and so made preparations to grab.
But where was the money coming from? The excursions during the past forty years including the most successful of all, the East India Company, had been largely private ventures. The Crown had no money. In fact, the monarchy was so poor that almost the only time it called Parliament together was to ask for money, usually to go to war. The monarchy did have one commodity – people. The question of how to feed and control the ambitions of the people was rarely satisfied.
The theme of redistributing some of the British population to the colonies came up time and again. Therefore, to raise the money the Privy Council approved the idea of public stock companies. The Crown would appoint commissioners and it would be their role to finance or find the finance for the expeditions of the ‘peopling and discovering of such countries as may be found most convenient for the supply of those defects which the realm of England most requireth’.33 Most certainly, the whole thing had to be done in the name of the monarch at that time, James I. With the King’s endorsement the venture was far more likely to attract public investment. Also, it was a formal warning to foreign powers that if a venture were to be attacked, especially one of its settlements, then this would be an attack on the monarch, on England, and therefore would invite official retaliation and even warfare. This was the way forward to sending people to known lands, to discover new ones, to farm and export whatever they found and, of course, to raise much needed customs dues on the produce of these colonies.
Smythe and other underwriters in the City had a forty-year tradition of making money out of explorations. These were the originators of the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company and the East Indian Company; these people saw that profits were to be made for individuals and also the practical advantages for England in finding goods and materials that were not controlled by the two Iberian states. The explorers and the Bristolian slave traders were looking for new grounds ashore while those who had backed the Newfoundland Banks’ fishermen looked for more stocks at sea. By this time Ralegh was far from being able to do anything to join in this exploration, including of Virginia. He was locked up in the Tower of London having been found guilty of treason in November 1603, condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered but sent to prison instead just moments before his execution.34 It was to Virginia that the new interest in exploration turned.
In 1606, Ralegh’s nephew, George Ralegh, and Richard Hakluyt were given the patent to start colonies in Virginia. Walter Ralegh saw this as an opportunity for freedom and asked the King to release him from prison so that he too could sail for Virginia. Queen Anne (James’s wife) was a supporter of Ralegh, but even she was unable to persuade James and his advisers to release him. By then, they would have preferred him dead. James could see nothing but trouble on any horizon upon which Ralegh stood, especially if there should be Spanish interest at hand. Although Queen Anne supported the voyages to Virginia, they were strictly commercial and therefore private ventures. However, they came under the single protection of a royal patent – the exploration was in the King’s name and thus in theory protected from the likes of Spanish disruption.
Uniquely, a Royal Council for Virginia was created. A dozen or so trustees were appointed by the King. This Council would have the power to administrate the land between thirty-four degrees and forty-five degrees north of latitude. At last Virginia was to have the formal structure which, once more we should note, reflected our definition of a colony: the Council would issue on behalf of the monarch instructions or orders.35 The first Council instructions for Virginia set out the commercial, bureaucratic and legal (including judicial) system to be imposed on the territory. Just as the colony had to reflect the mother country, so the legal distribution of land was to be as it was in England. The colonialists were not allowed to issue their own patents on who owned what land. Only the Crown could do that in England and only the Crown could do that in Virginia. It is this emphasis right the way through the history of the British Empire that shows that a colony was almost a shire county. The rules could not be bent until some self-government had been granted.
Each colony would form a council which would have the power to elect its own president and to nominate people to hold patents on the land. This council could, in just the same way as a local authority in England, create bye-laws to suit local conditions. However, it
could only do this as long as the purpose and spirit in the law in England was not usurped.
This was not control-freakery by the Crown or the Privy Council. It was simply that this new colonialism was breaking new ground. Until then, apart from the Anglo-Normans and the Channel Islands and Ireland, English settlement abroad had been nothing more than the medieval concept of occupation rather than colonialization. Winning a battle against the French and taking territory was one thing; expanding England to, say, America as an identifiable extension of the State was quite new.
Thus, with all the flexibility of commercial and economic development, the settlers remained very English even to the extent of preserving their rights as Englishmen and women (mainly men) as loyal subjects of the Crown. Indeed, they emphasized this preservation of rights as a matter of self protection. Yet legal definitions and constitutional dignity were not sufficient to make a success of opening up new territory. The success or otherwise of the colonies would depend on four conditions: the local environment being able to support settlers; the determination of the settlers; the financial support behind them; and the distance they were from Spanish and, later, French interests.
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