The Virginia Colonists: Burgesses and Charles
The meddlesome King James, finding a majority of the London Company surely drifting toward republicanism, and disliking the freedom of debate in the General Assembly of Virginia, resolved to control the Company and the colony. "The Virginia House of Burgesses," said Gondamar, the Spanish envoy at the English court, "is but a seminary to a seditious Parliament." The king believed it; and at the election of officers for the Company in 1622, he tried to control the choice of candidates. He failed. Then he determined to deprive the Company of their charter, and, by taking control of the affairs of the corporation, regain what he had lost by granting them the liberal third charter. He sent a commission to Virginia, composed of his pliable instruments, to inquire into the affairs of the colony. They tried to coax and frighten the House of Burgesses into a relinquishment of the rights guaranteed to them by the terms of the charter. Finding these representatives of the people firm in support of their liberties, the commissioners recommended a dissolution of the charter. A pliant judiciary assisted the king in the measure, and in July, 1624, the patent was cancelled and Virginia became a royal province again. No material change was made in the domestic affairs of the colony. The monarch appointed Sir Francis Wyatt governor, with twelve councillors of state, but wisely refrained from interfering with the House of Burgesses. He boasted that he would make the colony more prosperous than ever, but he died soon afterward, and was succeeded by his son, Charles the First, on the 6th of April, 1625.
King Charles was a thorough disciple of his father in the science of what James was pleased to call kingcraft, the prime elements of which, as he exhibited it, were lying and deception. He was also as bigoted as his father in his belief in the doctrine of the divine right of kings to govern the people absolutely, and the sacredness of the royal prerogative or the enjoyment of special privileges not accorded to the people. He was only twenty-five years of age when he ascended the throne; and he was a pliant tool in the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, his father's base court favorite, who assisted in bringing to England as the queen of the young king, a Roman Catholic French princess, sister of the monarch of France. Three months after he became king, Charles received the princess at Dover and married her at Canterbury; but they did not enter London for some time because of the ravages of an epidemic there, by which over thirty-five thousand persons perished.
The queen brought with her a retinue of priests and other Roman Catholic attendants. The Protestant sentiment of a majority of the English people was alarmed. This fact, combined with the character of the king, which was uniformly marked by insincerity, deception, falsehood and treachery-the fruits of the favorite's training-made him feared, hated and despised by the honest portion of his friends, as well as his foes, and brought swift trouble upon himself and his country. There were causes which nourished opposition to monarchy, and cherished discontents. These soon led to a civil war, the beheading of the king and the abolition of monarchy in England for a season. Such was the sovereign with whom the American colonists had to deal for many years, while England was in a state of transition from absolutism or the unbridled rule of the monarch, to constitutional liberty or the enjoyment of rights guaranteed to the people by a constitution respected by the sovereign because his subjects have the power to enforce it. It was a state which Charles would not comprehend; and his stupid obstinacy plunged his country into war with itself, and also with France and Spain.
Charles did not materially change the political situation of the Virginians. His appointment of Sir George Yeardly, the magistrate who had established representative government in Virginia, was a guaranty that no such change would take place. But the king, who was selfish as well as weak, sought to enlarge his private fortune out of the profits of the industry of the Virginia planters of tobacco. He gave them the monopoly of production for the market of England, saying: "It may be well said that the plantation is built wholly on smoke which will easily turn into air, if either English tobacco be permitted to be planted or Spanish be imported." At the same time, he forbade the tobacco-growers selling their products to any persons excepting such as the king had appointed his agents. Among these agents was Sir John Harvey, who had been one of the governor's council, and who has been represented as a rapacious, unscrupulous, avaricious and cruel royalist.