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The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London. With Seven Related Documents; 1606-1621
The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London / With Seven Related Documents; 1606-1621
INTRODUCTION
Historians may trace in the Royal charters issued to the Virginia Company of London a course of empire; a Company organized for profit by the ablest businessmen of their time—merchants, manufacturers, statesmen, and artists who bound themselves together in a joint stock enterprise. The historian may also find in the three charters here published a pattern for a parliamentary system and its development into the American form of government. He might even perceive the inception of a new society.
The origin of the joint stock company was probably primitive. Its later genesis may readily be seen in the medieval guild. It became an English institution in its application by Sir Walter Raleigh to his magnificent adventures in both honest trade and romantic piracy.
The Company provided an agency for assembling adventure capital and supplying able management to enterprises of great moment. It offered an invitation to the industrious to participate in the growing wealth and expanding power of the great English middle class. It supplied an opportunity to small investors and it limited their liability. It was an adaptation by practical people to practical problems.
Subscribers, or shareholders, met in their quarterly courts to discuss the business of the Company and participate in its management. These courts were the counterpart of our present day corporate stockholders' meetings and were characterized by the same sort of discussions. King James could protest vehemently against the "democratical principles of the Company." He could see in their charters the final death warrant of feudalism. He could execute Raleigh "chiefly for giving satisfaction to the King of Spain." He could revoke the charters in 1624, but he could not stop the rising tide of representative institutions nor darken the great vision of the liberal Elizabethans. A new day had dawned.
The General Assembly which met at Jamestown in 1619 was the natural child of the Company. Some of the planters along the James River were shareholders in the Company. They had a voice in its management. In the management of the civil affairs of the Colony it was, therefore, logical that the plantations should elect their representatives to the local governing body. It was thus that the first freely elected parliament of a self-governing people in the Western World came into existence. Its principles were based on those of the corporation chartered and organized for profit by businessmen.
The three charters here published, changed successively to meet changing conditions, were the rules and the by-laws for the commercial, economic, and political development of a homogeneous, industrious English society in a land of opportunity. The principal authors and executors of the charters, Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Edwin and George Sandys, were businessmen. They were practical men. They found a practical way to assemble capital and ability, and coordinate them in constructive enterprise.
A hundred years before the great Virginia adventure, Luther, Erasmus, and Columbus rang down the curtain on the weary and confined drama of the Middle Ages. Expanding horizons challenged man's vision and intellect. Great courage made Englishmen adventurers in all things.
The charters here presented are among the world's great documents. The first which was drawn while Sir Edward Coke was Lord Chief Justice is replete with certain traditional and feudal principles, reverence for the English common law and the supreme authority of the King and his agents. The second, principally the work of the liberal Sir Edwin Sandys with the approving participation of Sir Francis Bacon, great exponent of natural law, marks a transition from government by arbitrary royal authority to the concept that government rests on the consent of the governed and on the fundamental right of man to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Students may read in this charter the first principles of the American Constitution. The third charter is an attempt to refine principles enunciated in the second in the light of experience. In addition to its political significance, the second charter proved a tremendous stimulus to the Virginia enterprise.
Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador, wrote to his King that "fourteen Counts and Barons have given 40,000 ducats, the merchants give much more and there is no poor little man or woman who is not willing to subscribe something." The landed aristocracy, gentry, merchants, and yeomen had joined in a company which they directed to provide capital and ability for a great enterprise.
The text of the three charters of the Virginia Company is taken from a contemporary copy recently discovered among the Chancery Rolls of the Public Record Office in London—contemporary enrollments "representing the official text of the charters kept in official custody," according to the Deputy Keeper, Mr. D. L. Evans. A photostatic copy of this manuscript is in possession of the Virginia State Library. Each charter was transcribed in England by Doctor Nellie J. M. Kerling for the editor's use.