TY - JOUR
AU - Cogswell,, Thomas
AB - Abstract Scholars have generally assumed that the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624 initiated an extended period of benign royal neglect in which Virginia were able to develop as they wished. Yet the recent discovery of detailed minutes for a Whitehall committee makes abundantly clear that Charles I and his councilors had not forgotten about the colony -- and the wealth it might bring into the Exchequer. As this article will make clear, a remarkable projector, William Anys, prompted the royal government to establish a tight monopoly in 1626-1628 both on the colonial production of tobacco and on its retail sale within England. Mounting colonial opposition and the prospect of parliamentary criticism in 1628 eventually prompted Charles to abandon the scheme, but the prospect of a windfall profit from tobacco continued to haunt him and his ministers. A full understanding of the Anys episode in turn finally renders much more comprehensible the hitherto mysterious events in 1634-5 when Charles I again established a transatlantic tobacco monopoly and when the colonists in their rage physically ejected his governor from Virginia. Consequently, the first blow against the meddling Caroline regime arguably came, not in Edinburgh in 1637, but rather in James City in 1635. In 1640, London theatre-goers delighted in Richard Brome's comedy, The Court Beggar, and in Sir Andrew Mendicant, ‘a project beagle’ whose ‘braine is all Projects, and his soule nothing but Court-suits’. Hustling schemes from a monopoly on perrukes, guaranteed to have ‘No verminous or sluttish locks’, to a secret method of preserving cod without salt, Mendicant drove a character to exclaim, ‘Pox on projects!’ Sir Andrew eventually lost all grip on reality, appearing covered ‘all over … with draughts of Projects, Suits/Petitions, and Grants and Pattents’. His derangement allowed the playwright to pray that ‘the Projects are all/cancel’d and the Proiectors turned out o’ dores’. While Londoners delighted in the play, settlers in the tobacco colonies were not generally fond of drama, which the Bermuda assembly prohibited altogether.1 Nevertheless, in this instance the colonists might have made an exception, for one of Brome's Whitehall scam artists had recently come within an ace of altering their entire economic structure. When assessing the various threats to the early Stuart tobacco colonies, scholars have never accorded Whitehall projectors even fleeting mention in their haste to highlight the deleterious effect of a warm and often fetid climate, internal squabbles, severe economic problems, bad luck and unhappy Powhatans. Notwithstanding periodic outbreaks of optimism among settlers and investors alike on the founding of James City in 1607, the discovery of the Somer Islands [Bermuda] in 1609 and the establishment of the Virginia General Assembly in 1619, bad news long dominated reports from the colonies. A high attrition rate among the colonists quickly became the norm; in 1624, for example only 10 per cent of the 5,000 settlers who entered the colony in the preceding five years were still alive and resident there. Meanwhile, as the Virginia Company's debts steadily ballooned from £1,000 in 1612 to £9,000 in 1622, investors increasingly soured on the new settlement; by 1620, major early backers such as Sir Thomas Smythe and the earl of Warwick had begun to distance themselves from the colony, leaving others like the Goldsmith's Company to lament that its members ‘had hitherto reaped no profitt’ for an investment of £200. Equally unhappy was King Opechancanough. In 1607 he had focused his hostility on Captain John Smith whose brains he famously wanted bashed out; by 1622, years of maladroit English diplomacy and steady expansion led him to abandon such careful discrimination and to unleash his Powhatan warriors on the entire colonial population. His success can most vividly be seen in Nathaniel Butler's assessment of Virginia in 1623: ‘in steed of a Plantation, itt will shortly gett the name of a slaughter house.’ In the circumstances, it naturally followed that dissension soon overwhelmed the Virginia Company, in which divisions became so regular and deep that James I felt he had no other option except to dissolve the company in 1624 and to assume direct royal control of the colony.2 At the centre of the conflict was what Sir Edwin Sandys sarcastically called the settlers’ obsession with ‘their darling tobacco’. Notwithstanding widespread hostility to the practice of smoking, most notably from James I himself, tobacco cultivation quickly sank deep roots in the economic life of Virginia and Bermuda. By 1619, the colonists could not ignore the financial attractions of tobacco, which reportedly could bring a single farmer £200, and a planter with six servants £1,000, a year. Likewise, while some merchants sniffed at the quality of the leaf, fit in one opinion only to be shipped ‘in Turke Barbarie and other forreine parts’, others marvelled at the sheer quantity, which rapidly mounted. Consequently, notwithstanding the political uncertainties surrounding the colony, projectors began to equate the Virginia harvest, and to a lesser extent that of Bermuda, with a financial bonanza—if they could monopolise the tobacco trade. The first efforts to do so came in the late 1610s when Sir Thomas Roe and a group of London merchants began lobbying for a monopoly over tobacco imports, a request James finally granted in 1620. When protests from within the Company hamstrung the effectiveness of the contract, Lionel Cranfield, James's inventive new Chancellor of Exchequer, simply launched another tobacco contract, this time on behalf of the Virginia Company itself. Late in 1622, after extensive negotiations, the Crown and the Company concluded the arrangement. Unfortunately, it immediately became engulfed in controversy. Peace within the Company was strained with the dawning realisation that the contract awarded Sandys, the Ferrar brothers and a few protégés salaries totalling £2,500, and it became more elusive still as indignation mounted over Sandys's highhanded tactics in passing the contract, by ‘Packing of Courte by turning over shares to their friends’ and by ‘Putting things to question in undue times and manner … till 9. 10. or 11. of the Clocke at night’. Peace disappeared altogether amid protests that ‘no such Contract as this can bee made but by the Joynt Consent of all the Adventurers’. The bitter argument over grand principles left ample room for personal attacks as Lord Cavendish and the earl of Southampton discovered; when they defended the tobacco contract, the former received an ‘unreverend speech’, while the latter was denounced for thinking the other company members ‘were all as Pigmies in his sight’. In short order, the debate over control of colonial tobacco abruptly transformed the Virginia Company members into ‘Guelfs and Gebelines’ who ‘seldome meet upon the Exchaunge or in the streets but they brabble and quarrell’.3 Anxious to restore calm among the London mercantile community and overseas investors, James sprang into action, but in spite of his administrative involvement in 1623–4, a dense administrative fog about Virginia and Bermuda apparently settled over Whitehall. Admittedly, in subsequent years, the regime periodically stirred to life, issuing the odd decree before promptly settling back into its torpor. ‘Actually as a royal colony,’ Henry Ward observed, ‘Virginia faced a more relaxed supervision than when under the auspices of the company, since the crown could not devote full attention to the affairs of the colony’. It is hard to conclude otherwise after the Privy Council's 1625 declaration at Salisbury that ‘neither shall any man have power to force any contracts upon them for their Commodities, but they shall have free trade and liberty to make the best of their owne labours’. Consequently, Robert Brenner concluded that ‘after 1625, free trade became the rule in American commerce’.4 This essay does not challenge these general assumptions; without a consistent policy from Charles I, Virginia and Bermuda were allowed to develop as they would. Nevertheless, exceptions are often as important as general rules, and the largest of these in early Stuart Atlantic history concerns William Anys. Since projectors were a metropolitan phenomenon, colonial scholars have rarely mentioned him; Lewis Gray did so twice and George Beer once—in a footnote. Even contemporaries had trouble taking him seriously; the Council clerk mocked him as ‘Mr. Anus’.5 Yet someone who proposed re-structuring production and distribution of tobacco deserves very careful attention. Any remaining doubts about him vanish after considering the following exchange in 1626: when a councillor asked ‘if the Inhabitants of Virginia may neither bring hither all they plant nor send it elsewhere, what case will they be in’, Anys smoothly replied that ‘they will be by this meanes in the power of the State’.6 This grim answer persuaded Charles and his ministers to implement his project and the clerk to spell his name correctly. Scholars would do well to follow suit. The paucity of early seventeenth-century sources frustrates British historians and maddens their colonial counterparts. Although a full set of the Privy Council's decisions have survived, we know almost nothing about how the councillors arrived at these decisions; consequently, a splendid analysis of the Council's decision-making is necessarily based largely on second-hand reports. The situation is worse for early Stuart Atlantic history, because after the Virginia Company closed its books in 1624, the information about the colony plummets to a scattering of often enigmatic documents. Consequently, the chance discovery of Lawrence Whitaker's minutes of a Privy Council committee, minutes so detailed as to be nearly verbatim, represents a major development in both English and Atlantic history. The Whitaker volumes have long remained unnoticed in the University of London Library until 1990 when Gerald Aylmer produced a short note on them in which he mentioned William Anys and Virginia—once.7 Yet notwithstanding these terse references, these volumes offer a vivid portrait of early Virginia and the internal dynamics of the Caroline regime. The new material renders more comprehensible—and more chilling—the other stray references to Anys and his plan for a wholesale revision of the imperial relationship. Given the gloom that otherwise enshrouds this period of colonial history, we can only watch with fascination as Mr Anys pitched, and the councillors responded to, his bold transatlantic project. Whitehall thronged with projectors, peddling ‘plots, designs and expedients to find out money’. Among them in 1626 was William Anys, a member of both the Grocers’ Company and the Spanish Company. Early in James's reign, he had (by his account) overcome merchant opposition and earned the Exchequer over £10,000, for which he claimed a pension of £1,000; later he intervened—maladroitly—in the balance of payments dispute; and he mastered a prose style worthy of Sir Andrew Mendicant. In 1608, he bemoaned his fate to the Lord Treasurer. While other merchants, upset that he had ‘taken greate paines’ for the Crown, ‘reviell me in the exchaine’, he had ‘byne many times to have spowken to your Honor and I colde never obtaine so much favor as to be admitted’. Eager to be ‘very proffetable to his Maiesty in this his tyme of waunte’, he volunteered ‘a proiecte howe his Maiesty may have the use of 100 thousand pounds or more for two three or 4 years’ by a method ‘nott hurtfull to any subiecte’. The exact details, however, he would only deliver to Salisbury himself ‘withoute making any other acquainted there with’.8 Experienced bureaucrats therefore braced themselves on 4 August 1626 when the duke of Buckingham walked in with Anys. He ran true to form, pitching his latest project, but this time, the councillors listened. Why they did owed everything to the abortive 1626 session. Although the Parliament men effectively offered some £300,000 for Buckingham's impeachment, Charles I dissolved the session, announcing ‘gold can be bought too dear’. Unfortunately, political bravado makes disastrous financial policy. While financial officials had made deficit spending an art form, even these adepts paled at financing a full-scale war against Spain without regular parliamentary grants. Consequently, Charles appointed a Commission ‘for the lessening of his Maiesties Charge and Increase of the Revenew’ since he ‘resolveth to husband his crown after the precedent of the best and most approved kings and so to redeeme him selfe from the possibilitie of these inconveniences into which hee hath been cast’. By July, the Commission was in action, prompting the Florentine agent to observe that the king and his ministers were convinced that if ‘the Royal Revenue might be better and more profitably managed’, they would ‘become prudent managers and rich, without the necessity of having recourse to Parliament’.9 Mr Whitaker has left a detailed record. After 11 July 1626, the Commission met thirty-four times in the following three months, and the pace became frantic between 31 December and 7 January with seven meetings in eight days. The very real prospect of fiscal meltdown haunted the commissioners. Of the £540,000 the Exchequer would receive by March, all but £62,000 had already been spent, and since the Crown's annual expenses came to some £230,000, the Commissioners laboured under the sobering realisation that the government was £158,000 in the red. This figure did not cover extraordinary expenses—such as running a continental war—which ‘is not provided for’. In their desperation, nothing was off-limits, provided they had ‘an eye to his Maiesties profit’. Since the Forced Loan would cover the Crown's short-term needs, the Commissioners focused on long-term fiscal schemes, everything from household retrenchment to a tax on the title of Esquire. Meanwhile, a tidal wave of figures washed over them; falconers consumed £3,529, £3,148 more than those in Elizabeth's day; overly indulgent park keepers ‘in stead of lodges built palaces’ and the government's inability to pay out £13,000 to dismiss some troops ‘cost the King £4,000 a month’ as they languished in garrisons.10 The meetings in short represented shock therapy for profligate courtiers as well as a serious budget review. The king himself presided over four decisive meetings, and the duke of Buckingham was more zealous, attending eleven of fourteen meetings between 1 September and 7 October 1626 and twelve of eighteen from 23 November to 21 March 1627. He was, however, pressed for time, twice being out of the country for months on end. Yet he had little to fear; his protégés packed the commission. The Lord Treasurer, the earl of Marlborough, was a distinguished attorney who had recently vaulted into office—and the peerage—after his marriage to Buckingham's cousin. Both the Secretary of State, Sir John Coke, and the Attorney General, Sir Robert Heath, owed their posts to the favourite—as did Sir Richard Weston, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Finally, the earl of Dorset was an enthusiastic client, and the earl of Manchester, the Lord President of the Council, was too cautious to cause trouble. These men, however, were not marionettes, often expressing distinctly different approaches. Less reliable was the earl of Pembroke, the Lord Chamberlain, who carefully maintained his independence from the favourite. In fact he was partly responsible for the Exchequer's poverty in 1626, having quietly encouraged the parliamentary assault on Buckingham. Although the marriage of Pembroke's heir to the duke's daughter had smoothed over their differences, both men remained wary, and Pembroke doubtless enjoyed sniffing at Buckingham's household reforms, guaranteed to save £10,000 a year: ‘he remembereth that in King James his time there an undertaking to save £8000 per annum and that from that undertaking grew the great debt of £50,000.’ Hence ‘he feareth the like may be also in this’.11 For support Pembroke could only look to Sir Humphrey May, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but May, like Manchester, was unlikely to step out of line. Against that background, the commissioners thought of Virginia in less than two weeks. On 28 July 1626, they summoned Abraham Jacob and Sir Nathaniel Rich, the tobacco farmers, to explain why it ‘yeeldeth now no profit’, and in short order, Buckingham introduced William Anys to his colleagues.12 Although Anys's project figured in fewer than two dozen of the seventy meetings, Whitaker recorded so much material that this tobacco scheme is the best documented episode in Caroline Atlantic history. Consequently, notwithstanding the political uncertainties surrounding the colonies, projectors began to fantasise about a monopoly on Virginia, and to a lesser extent Bermuda, tobacco. For almost a decade, projectors had hustled schemes involving this new luxury. While parliamentary resistance grew to government intervention in the economy—indeed the 1624 session passed a statute against monopolies—canny operators argued that since tobacco was not ‘in the strictest iudgments of Parliament matters of necessitie’, no one could object if the Crown regulated ‘a forraigne Commoditie that any way either is hurtfull to the Common wealth in generall or wastfull to his Subiects in particular’. Consider the case of Sir Nathaniel Rich; although a leading Parliament man, he too pitched a tobacco scheme on the grounds that ‘this being a superfluous weede and fit to be regulated, all discreete and indifferent men wilbe so farre from excepting against as they will rather thinke it a matter of greate grace and prudence in his maiestie … to order superfluitie to so good just honorable and publique ends’. Equally tempting was the fact that tight royal control of a profitable commodity had ample continental precedents; Rich pointed out that ‘as the french kinge hathe the Gabell of salt in Fraunce and the king of Spaine the sole marchandize both of pepper and even of this Commoditie of Tobacco in Spaine’, so too James should ‘take the sole preemption of all the Tobacco in the English Plantations’. Mercantile theory strongly supported such a policy, which would necessarily break the stranglehold that a Spanish consortium headed by Ferdinando Lopez d’Acosta had on the domestic market; another projector described the eager forwardnes of theise buyers of Tobacco that upon the first noice of a parcell come beyond the Seas, and if they can not carie money, do fitt themselves English Commodities proper for Spaine and such as the Spanishe marchant Chieflie dealeth in, and then to prevent any other selleth his goods at 15 or 30 p[er] Cent losse.13 These concerns all justified royal intervention in the tobacco trade, either as a large contract or as an outright monopoly. The first to win the day in Whitehall was the consortium headed by Sir Thomas Roe and Abraham Jacob who secured a tobacco contract in 1620, and two years later, the Virginia Company under the guidance of Sir Edwin Sandys and the Ferrar brothers received a second contract. Both began confidently, and both became entangled in protests; a London grocer claimed £40. 10s. 3d. when the patentees ruined his tobacco, while no less than the mayor of Norwich found himself accused of filching some 15 pounds of contraband leaf.14 These and similar cases were just background noise to the steady drumbeat of petitions, all posing fundamental questions. ‘What satisfaction’, one asked, ‘they will give to the Virginia Planters or to our Summer Islands Tenants for this Tobacco … what order they will take to free the Adventurers of disbursements for Customes, fraight and publique Charges … what securitie they will give to performe the promisses and to give a iust accompt of the sales?’ Another begged the King to abandon this project because ‘it involves them in intricate Accompts and is like to occasion infinite suites and Contentions and will breade [sic] much Confusion’.15 Although the second tobacco contract succeeded largely in destroying the Virginia Company, Edward Ditchfield eagerly pitched a third one in 1625. Ironically, among those protesting against the tobacco contract in 1622 was William Anys.16 Nevertheless, he appreciated that the Sandys–Ferrar project would simply beget similar projects; it had to, given the scale of the potential profits. Not surprisingly, given the near inevitability of another tobacco project, Anys in 1626 decided to pitch his own. His plan was breathtaking: he would ‘make the King the sole Merchant of all Tobacco within the Kingdome’. The tobacco currently came from ‘an infinite number of tradesmen of all sorts’, who ‘doe steale in daily a greate quantitye of Spanish tobacco into the Kingdome, notwithstanding his Maiesties Proclamation to the contrary’. After a few search warrants disrupted this practice, Anys predicted that these merchants ‘will petition his Maiestie to have the sole selling of it’. By granting licences ‘to some certaine trades as Apothecaries, Droguists, Grocers and the like to sell it’, the government could sell licences, which ‘with their rents will yield the King a great yearely Revenew’ to purchase 5,000 pounds of ‘Verinus’ [Spanish] tobacco and another 25,000 pounds from Virginia and the Somer Islands. Although he would offer the planters 18d. a pound, he hoped to barter tobacco for ‘shoes, stockinge and such other commodities as are there most vendible’. Intrigued, the commissioners summoned the Customs Farmers responsible for tobacco imposts to discuss Anys's scheme and asked the Attorney General to consider ‘the legalities of … breaking open of dores, where men should refuse to have their houses searched’. The following day, Sir John Wostenholme and Mr Jacob tried to stop Anys. Embarrassed that returns on the tobacco farm had dwindled from £8,000 to £1,500, they advanced their own project to buy Virginia tobacco for 2s. a pound and sell it for 3s. In response, Anys pitched a monopoly with far-flung agents ‘in London and all other parts of the Kingdome’. ‘Droguists, Apothecaries, Grocers, Vintners or whosoever else’ could send any unsold tobacco ‘into other partes and uttered else where.’ He also volunteered ‘how the Spanish tobacco stolen into the Kingdome … may be seized, how the Virginian tobacco may be best imported’ as well as estimates of ‘the rents for these Agencies’. In addition, he recommended that Philip Burlamachi and Captain Leigh, ‘a Spanishe Marchant’, help him administer the monopoly.17 How and why Burlamachi became involved with Anys is unclear. There was, however, one certainty; compared to Wolstenholme, a leading London merchant, Anys was a small-time operator. Therefore, the addition of Burlamachi, the ubiquitous international financier, trumped Anys's rivals, for whatever the precise mercantile pecking order, Burlamachi was at the top. Indeed the government could scarcely function without him. He financed and equipped entire military expeditions down to the uniforms, he arranged prisoner exchanges and when the Exchequer needed a massive advance on the Forced Loan, he obliged. Naturally, the regime could not do enough for him, and the warrants littering the State Papers, detailing various rewards, testify that the Crown, quite literally, was in his debt. Consequently, whatever the commissioners felt about Anys, they were eager to humour Burlamachi, even if he wanted to plunge into a tobacco monopoly.18 In short, with Burlamachi beside him, Anys could easily fend off Wolstenholme and Jacob. With its new partners, Anys's project began to snowball. On the 16th he denounced tobacco smuggling, and the commission ordered the arrest of domestic tobacco planters and seized some illegal Spanish tobacco. Any profits, Anys suggested, should go ‘towards the raysing of a stocke for his Maiestie who is to be the sole Marchant of it’. They agreed, and two weeks after Anys had first proposed his plan, the government began implementing it.19 Anys reappeared on 23 August; anxious that seized tobacco might ‘be spoiled before it was sold’, he proposed establishing ‘a Magazin’ for the monopoly's tobacco. Overcome with the tobacco fever then sweeping Whitehall, Secretary Coke argued that the factors’ powers should include searching London warehouses. Furthermore, since ‘the greatest disturbance of the busyness may arise from the planters in Virginia and Bermudas who wilbe apt to clamor if their Tobacco be not taken of their hands’, the colonial producers should be told that the Crown would only buy 250,000 pounds, not their entire annual harvest of some 400,000 pounds. The commissioners agreed, ordering the inspection of all ‘sellers of Tobacco either by great retaile or by the pipe’, and authorising the searchers, who ‘often put themselves with peril of their lives’, to receive a reward of 5s. for every pound seized.20 To soothe sceptics, Anys offered to produce sympathetic planters like George Sandys, Sir Edwin's brother, and Sir Francis Wyatt, the former governor of Virginia. But on 25 August 1626 both insisted that Anys's plan ‘tended to the overthrow of that plantation’; instead if the planters had the right ‘to sell it where and as much as they would’ at 18s. a pound, the Exchequer would net some £10,000 a year. The Lord Treasurer, however, remained sceptical, proclaiming that ‘there was very litle hope of such a plantation as must be supported by no more solide a commoditie then smoke’. After all, ‘the first thing to be provided for ought to be meanes of foode for the persons that live there; and that not being provided for, it was a vaine thing to expect any happy successe of that which had no better a foundation to support it then that smokye weede’. Along with these philosophical objections, Wyatt and Sandys argued for pragmatism; ‘if they should betake themselves to the planting of any other commodities, it would require a farre longer time before it could be brought to any perfection or yield any benefite.’ Wine production ‘would be 7 yeares at the least before any benefit would arise’, while ‘the breeding of the silke-wormes’ and the development of ‘yron-workes’ would take longer still. With Virginia commodity prices at absurd levels, a cow fetching £14 and a goat £2, ‘there was nothing that could afourd [sic] it then but Tobacco’. Alternatively, without any trade restrictions, the colony ‘should hereafter be enabled to deale with better commodityes’. Their arguments brought Marlborough into Anys's corner since ‘he sawe their intention was … to draw all the benefite to themselves and bring none to his Maiestie’. In contrast, ‘if the King did undertake the plantation himselfe and employ therein such as he could nominate … he doubted not but for the charge of £5,000 a yeare for 2 yeares, his Maiestie would afterwords reape from thence £5,000 at the least, nay £10,000 per annum’. Therefore, the Commission ordered the governor to ‘call the Colonie together and to perswade them to contract with his Maiestie for the sending of no more then 250,000 li. Weight yearely into England’. In a concession to Wyatt and Sandys, the commissioners authorised the colonists to sell the surplus ‘where as they would’, but they also ordered ‘making a Magazin’ for the tobacco imports. Excited, Anys called for a stock of ‘hose, shoes and other commodityes’ to barter, vowing always ‘that the busyness might be so caryed as that all might be done with the liking and consent of the trades-men that usually sell Tobacco’ and promising even to persuade Wyatt and Sandys.21 Five days later, Anys returned: ‘divers tradesmen, grocers, Droquists and Apothecaries’, were ‘very willing to embrace his proposition’, provided ‘onely they and tradesmen of that kinde might have the selling of it within the Citye and liberties of London’. They also suggested how to limit Spanish tobacco imports to 50,000 pounds and ‘howe the planters in Virginia and the Somers Islands should goe on with their planting without restraint’. In the meantime, the Commission should order the colonists to remove from the next tobacco shipment, ‘halfe the stalkes in the butt end of the leaves’. A stroke of the pen sliced the planned shipment of 400,000 pounds to 300,000, while increasing impositions from 3d. to 8d. on Bermuda tobacco and from 3d. to 6d. on Virginian. The settlers would also learn that next spring Charles would ‘send theither a ship and a pinnace and to supply them with such commodities as they have neede of, at a cheaper rate then formerly they have had them’. Further, the outports needed to know ‘that after Michaelmas next they suffer no Tobacco to be landed there but onely in the Port of London’. The Commission readily agreed.22 By early September, Anys was in high gear, summoning Mr Sommerscales from Nottinghamshire to explain why he grew tobacco ‘contrary to the Proclamation’. After vowing reformation, Sommerscales found himself the Commission's agent to find ‘all the planters of Tobacco in the Countreyes about him’.23 On 11 September, Anys received a warrant ‘for breaking open of any doores or roomes, where any Spanish tobacco … should be concealed’. His attention, however, never wandered from Virginia where he sent Mr George, ‘a man skillfull in the making up, curing and ordering of Tobacco’, with the order that all exports ‘be so stripped as that the halfe of the stalks at the butt end of the leaves be taken out’. Furthermore, Anys persuaded the Board to dispatch two ships and a pinnace next March with ‘such commodityes as they have there neede of at a cheaper rate’. His agents would then purchase 250,000 pounds at ‘such a reasonable price as they will be answerable for unto the Councell Board’. Finally, Charles named Burlamachi ‘the Kings Factor’, responsible for importing 250,000 pounds of Virginia tobacco and 50,000 from Spain.24 Anys swept all before him—except the Attorney General. Heath had not responded to the Commission's earlier request for legal advice, busy as he was with the Forced Loan. But on 14 September 1626, a query about contraband tobacco prompted Heath to ask the Lord Chief Justice ‘whether the propositions made by William Anus of making his Maiestie sole Merchant of Tobacco and of giving power to certaine factors and Agents for the sole buying and selling of it, were not within the statute against Monopolies’. Four days later, he announced that ‘the Lord Cheife Justice was somewhat doubtfull … of having the sole selling of Spanish tobacco, whether it came not within the Statute of Monopolies’, and even more dubious was the notion that ‘it being of the plantation of the Kings Subiects, they may be restrained from buying or selling of it’. Subsequently, the Commission struggled to circumvent the 1624 statute. Sir Humphrey May wondered ‘why the King might not dispense with this Statute as well as he did with a statute that maketh it a felonye to export woolls or beeves out of Ireland’. Buckingham cited the Forced Loan and asked ‘whether his Maiestie by the advice of the Councell Board might not (non obstante the Statute) for reasons of State and for so important a benefite make himselfe sole Marchant of Tobacco’. Significantly, his colleagues were unenthusiastic: ‘these are not being held safe wayes’. Marlborough suggested a few cleverly worded proclamations to establish a monopoly, provided the proclamations contained ‘no negative clauses … to exclude others’. A majority echoed the mantra ‘no negative clauses inserted’, dispatching Heath to consult with the judges about ‘the best course so to frame a graunt … and it not come within the Statue of Monopolies’.25 These developments soon reached the merchants. On 15 September Tristam Conyam informed Nicholas Ferrar that ‘Mr Anys still perseveres in Proiect’, and he ‘is everie day at the Counsell Tabell’. Ferrar, who had been involved in Sir Edwin Sandys's ill-fated tobacco contract, was interested to learn that ‘there is great probabyllity hee will prevaile’, but ‘how longe’, Conyam added, ‘it will contynew god knows, for I think £5 for a fine will not easily be gotten out of Tobacco sellers’. Nevertheless, Anys was succeeding; for two days later, the Council issued the first warrants describing Anys and Burlamachi as ‘his Majesty's factors for tobacco’.26 As Anys and Burlamachi moved forward, they learned that strong support from Buckingham and the Lord Treasurer, which could rollover opposition from colonial interests and unimaginative lawyers, was useless against the most formidable of challenges—a takeover bid. On 10 November, Mr Warwick presented a petition from 200 retailers, who in their anxiety to exclude ‘Ale-house-keepers, Vintners and others’, would pay 20s. per annum for the right to sell tobacco, although ‘it be more, then they are able to beare’. Charles could not ‘legally forbid any of his subiects the use of a lawfull trade, yet’, Warwick argued, ‘his Maiestie may by his prerogative forbid the bringing in of any forraine commodityes into the Kindgome’. Moreover, this project ‘taketh no mans lawfull trade from him’; it ‘enableth many poore men that are Retaylers of Tobacco to live’; and it prevented ‘much abuse … by loose and licentious persons if Tobacco should be commonly sold and drunke’ in taverns. Since ‘Tobacco will ever be taken’, the Crown could expect £20,000 a year. Anys swiftly counterattacked: ‘this rent could not bring in much profite to his Maiestie.’ Against Warwick's ‘scarce 500 Retaylors’, Anys set thousands of ‘Ale-house-keepers, Vitailers, Vintners and Inne-keepers’ as well as ‘Grocers, Droguits and the like’ who would purchase his licence. The commissioners proved loyal to Anys. Afterwards, he melodramatically complained that unless the Exchequer seized some Spanish tobacco, worth roughly £900, ‘he can by no meanes avoide the importinge of Spanish tobacco by stealth’. Weston vowed to ‘move this case in the Exchequer on Monday’, while Marlborough insisted a favourable verdict was a formality since the Judges be all of opinion that in case of Importation, as in case of Coyne, the Kings Proclamation is a Law; because matters of this nature cannot stay for a Parliament; but they must be proceeded in, as the present occasions of the State shall require. Still unhappy, Anys pressed for another tobacco proclamation, and again the Lord Treasurer promised him one shortly.27 Anys had little time for celebration, for on 31 December a more potent rival than Mr Warwick emerged. After the Commissioners agreed on an imminent tobacco proclamation to ‘make his Maiestie the sole Marchant of it’, limiting imports to 250,000 pounds from Virginia and 50,000 pounds from Spain, Charles dropped a bombshell: ‘he had another proposition brought unto him concerning Tobacco’ from someone who ‘desireth not to be knowen’. After the king politely whispered the details, the Attorney General presented the plan, which the king and the commissioners examined two days later. Arguing that ‘Spanish Tobacco destroyeth the plantation of Virginia’—and cost Charles at least £16,000 a year—the rival scheme would increase Virginia tobacco imports to 300,000 pounds, all of which would be ‘his Maiesties’, and in return ‘for a great rent’, Tobacco Farmers (the most logical candidates being the current Customs Farmers) would administer the monopoly. This project also prohibited domestic tobacco production, restricted domestic sales to ‘the Kings Agents’, and established ‘Intelligencers’, lest ‘those that deale for his Maiestie will be couzened’. The Attorney General then calmly announced that this plan by his best reckoning would net £150,000 a year.28 With the new scheme came old concerns about ‘whether it was safe to graunt licenses to some to sell Tobacco and to prohibite others, in regard of the Statute against Monopolies’, an issue, Weston wearily recalled, ‘had bene allready long and often disputed at this Committee’. The king could of course appoint factors, and if the Customs Farmers’ proposal found favour, ‘it is but changing of it out of Burlamachi's hands into theirs’. Nevertheless, Weston was uncertain how the Crown could allow some, but not all, merchants to sell a product. More troubling were the plan's financial problems, for ‘he feared that the Virginia Tobacco would not yeald so high a price as 6s 8d the pound, it being formerly sold at 5s and 6s’. Marlborough concurred, noting that ‘onely the meaner sort of people did take it’. Yet although ‘Gentlemen would not but give any thing for Spanish Tobacco’, the Lord Treasurer conceded ‘the Virginia Tobacco is grownen now much better then it was at the beginning’. For him, the major problem was legal. The Commission had earlier ‘thought fitter to give the name of Agencies, then of Licenses unto such graunts’, and with such lawyerly legerdemain, the project might ‘avoide coming within the compasse of the Statute of 21 Jacob against Monopolies’. To be safe, ‘the Statute was redd, and considered of’, and the commissioners concluded that for Charles ‘to make himselfe sole Marchant of it and to sell it immediately to whom he should thinke fitt … was no way within the Statute’. Less certain was his ability to ‘graunt licenses for some to sell and to prohibite others’, but on further reflection, the ‘less considerable’ this issue appeared, ‘Tobacco not being a thing necessary but vitious’. Having sidestepped the Statute against Monopolies, the Committee became entangled in the Statute of Praemunire. The Attorney General fretted over allowing just a few merchants to have licences, wondering ‘whether this would not bring those that should countenance this within a Premunire’. After all, ‘the King cannot be within a Monopoly, though a question whether the Grandees may or no’. In the end, the members persuaded themselves that ‘there was no feare of it, being employed to a publicke use’.29 Just to be safe, they resolved to discuss the two proposals again. On 3 January, Charles again presiding, Anys denounced the ‘doubtful’ rival plan by which ‘his Maiestie will come short of the benefite thereby propounded’ in his scheme. Alternatively, he vowed to purchase a pound of tobacco with ‘commodityes which cost him only 18d’ and sell it ‘for 6s 6d the pound’ and so ‘yield to his Maiestie a revenew of £100,000 per annum’. Marlborough endorsed this as ‘the best meanes to get Tobacco from thence at a cheape rate, by sending thither such commodityes as they have neede of’. Others were less cordial. Legal doubts plagued the Attorney General: if those ‘that shall have no license shall nonethelesse sell it, how can they be hindered’, and ‘if his Maiesties Agents shall thereupon refuse to pay their rent, how can it be remedied’? Meanwhile the earl of Dorset asked how Anys would check smuggling, and his answer revealed his urban nous: first ‘suppresse the Were-house-men’ in London, all thirty-five of them, and then listen for whispers of contraband from the ‘Trades-men themselves’ who ‘all know one anothers wayes’. Heath remained unconvinced; when Anys insisted ‘ale-house-keepers and victualers must be specially be restrained from selling’, he quizzically asked ‘how that could be done?’ Secretary Coke proposed that suspects be ‘brought into the Starre-chamber’ and forced to make a choice: ‘let him either buy it of the Kings Agent or take a license of him to sell it, or not buy nor sell at all’. Perplexed, Humphrey May set the hypothetical case of three tobacco sellers in Barnet, one of whom refused to purchase a licence: ‘what do you doe to this man?’ After Weston speculated that ‘he will say he bought it of some of those that bought it of the Kings Agents’, Buckingham even became worried: ‘under color of buying 10 pounds worth of the Kings Agent’, a merchant could sell 200 pounds of contraband. Heath equally nervous about the Star Chamber where ‘proofe will not be easily found and without proofe, he conceived the Lords would not censure him’. Yet in the end, the Board agreed that with constant harassment, ‘a man that should thus sell without license, would by this meanes soone be wearied’.30 Administrative worries followed legal ones: would the monopoly ‘be better managed by Burlamachi alone … or by the farmers’? Naturally, Anys thought ‘one man might better manage a busyness of this consequence then many’, and especially since, Marlborough added, Burlamachi had ‘so much intelligence as he hath from Spaine and all forraine parts, can better tell how to bring in the commoditye of Spanish Tobacco by the crooked way then any Englishman’. Others objected that farmers ‘will be more vigilant to looke to it then any other’, given their desire ‘to see that no Custome be lost’, and Weston added that ‘men wilbe the more willing … when it shallbe put into the hands of the Kings Officers then when any one private man shall have the managing of it’. Buckingham and Coke then plumped for Anys and Burlamachi; Mr Secretary asked ‘what neede there would be of the farmers meddling with it’, and the duke ‘saw no necessitye neither, why the farmers should meddle with it’ since ‘the king would be answered his profit, and the Marchants would be well ynough looked to’. Less clear was how the Virginia planters would respond. After Anys explained that only the king could buy colonial tobacco, a startled commissioner asked ‘if the Inhabitants of Virginia may neither bring hither all they plant nor send it elsewhere, what case will they be in’, and Anys's smooth reply—‘they will be by this meanes in the power of the State’—prompted the prediction that ‘they will then be ready to say, Send shipps for us, and fetch us away’. In response, Anys maintained that ‘commodityes are there now at a very deare rate, but if they be sent at easy rates as is propounded, there will be the lesse doubt of their staying there’.31 Final questioning centred on finances. Each year, two ships and a pinnace would carry out £18,000 worth of commodities and £14,550 in specie. The trade goods would secure 250,000 pounds of Virginia tobacco, while £2,050 would purchase 70,000 pounds of Bermuda leaf and £12,500 would purchase 50,000 of the best Spanish tobacco. Transport costs of £6,000 brought the total investment to £38,550. In return, ‘at these moderate rates and proportion’—6s. 6d. for a pound of Virginian, 6s. for Bermuda and 14s. for Spanish—the annual shipment of 370,000 pounds of tobacco would earn at least £137,500. With some £50,000 in fines and £20,000 in rents, the Exchequer would net at least £150,000. Pirates and shipwrecks were not a concern since the ships ‘shallbe assured’. The toughest questioning came from Buckingham who asked once, and ‘yet againe’, where Anys would find the initial investment since contraband sales had only produced a few thousand pounds. Anys remained confident, and with such vast sums of money dangling before cash-starved bureaucrats, the ultimate outcome was never in doubt: ‘it was finally resolved by his Maiestie with the consent of the Board, that Anys should proceede in the busyness as it is by former orders settled’.32 In February 1627, Charles I issued a proclamation. In 1624 and again in 1625, his father had forbidden the importation of any tobacco except from Virginia or the Somer Islands. Yet since ‘Our Subjects can hardly be induced totally to forsake the Spanish Tobacco’, these edicts had only encouraged smuggling, while ‘many important necessities doe at this instant presse Us, and by all good meanes Wee should husband Our Revenue to the best’. Consequently, Charles permitted the annual importation of 50,000 pounds of Spanish tobacco ‘brought in by Our owne Commissioners only, and to Our owne particular use onely, and not otherwise’. All imports had to be shipped to London where ‘persons of trust and qualitie to be Our Commissioners’ would mark each shipment with one of three seals—one each for Virginia and the Somer Islands, the new West Indian colonies and Spain—and place it in a warehouse ‘under three lockes, whereof three of Our Commissioners shall keepe three Keyes’. To prevent contraband sales, the Commissioners had broad powers to search property, to command local magistrates and to reward informers who would receive all expenses, half of the fines and a further hundred crowns reward. All violators would come before the Star Chamber. With this proclamation and another in March, Anys's plan finally received royal validation.33 Implementation, however, proved awkward. On 8 March, after Anys lamented that without tighter enforcement, ‘he shall hardly … this yeare reape the intended benefits’, the commissioners hired a London warehouse with two locks, one for Anys and the other for ‘an Officer that is to be appointed’. Yet they were also becoming restive, ordering him to deal with Marlborough and Weston. A fortnight later Anys returned ‘to have the busyness so finally settled’, and again the commissioners answered his requests with growing unease, Coke objecting to a salaried treasurer and Marlborough ordering Abraham Jacob to handle imports and Burlamachi domestic retail. The conversation then turned to that year's crop. Anxious that the ‘Plantation may not be supported wholly by Tobacco but by degrees it may be brought to yield corne and other more substantiall and beneficiall commodityes’, Anys proposed bringing in only 20,000 pounds from Virginia and 5,000 from Bermuda. The councillors eventually altered the totals to 15,000 and 10,000, respectively, ordering the ‘Commissioners for Tobacco’ to grade the cargo, 2s. 6d. a pound for the best and 18d. for the rest. Furthermore, Anys also requested a declaration that Charles ‘would not by any opportunitie be diverted from that which should be determined at this Board touching Tobacco’.34 He had ample reason for anxiety, for protests had begun. In early April, the planters considered the new plan ‘both for the quantity that they should bring into England, and also for the prize that the king will give’, which they rejected ‘with one joynt and full consent’ as ‘not to be sufficient to maintayine soe many people as were in both those plantations’. In particular, the timing was ‘signified too late’; if they had known, they could have shipped it, not to London, but to Holland and Ireland and found ‘better prizes and better markets’. In the future, unless the Crown's offer improved, they requested permission to ship it overseas.35 Opposition mounted even higher once the planters appreciated the regime's determination to implement Anys's scheme. On 17 May, Anys confronted the Virginia planters, complaining that ‘their Plantation willbe in danger to be ruined’ since he ‘will not give them as the Planters can live’ for 15,000 pounds of tobacco in London warehouses. Their Bermuda counterparts with 10,000 pounds in London insisted on 4s. a pound for the best grade and 3s. for the rest, while Anys argued that 3s. and 2s., respectively, were more than they have ever received. The earl of Dorset intervened; since they used to get only 3s. and 2s. 6d., ‘he knoweth no reason why they should not be content to sell it so to the King’. Then with news of another 100,000 pounds in transit, the commissioners ordered Anys to buy all that was then in the city for 3s. or 2s. 6d., leaving the surplus to be disposed overseas. Finally, Anys moved that since the newly instituted Tobacco Commissioners were ‘not so fitt … in regard of the particular interest divers of them have therein’, Sir Paul Pindar should join Abraham Jacob, Henry Leigh, Burlamachi and himself.36 As the deepening crisis revealed Anys's distinct limitations, Burlamachi on 28 May 1627 made a simple request: ‘that Mr Jacob and Mr. Henry Leigh might be ioyned with him as Commissioner for the busyness of Tobacco, and not Mr. Anys.’ Without further discussion, the members dumped the architect of the royal monopoly, whom Burlamachi appointed as a solicitor if he wished.37 Behind this coup were mounting personal and professional differences between the two men as the Commissioners sought the steadiest possible hand in implementing this controversial design. Hence, once Burlamachi lost faith, they were only too willing to ditch Anys. The commissioners then sought to resolve the ‘question concerning the Virginia and Bermuda Tobacco’. Marlborough advised either an additional impost on tobacco or a mass purchase by the Crown, or perhaps ‘a mixt way’ or even ‘a 4th way … mixt of 1 or 2 of these wayes’. Such creativity confused the earl of Manchester who argued for either ‘Emption or Impost’. The first tantalised Sir John Wolstenholme, for the disruption of Spanish shipments ensured that the Virginia and Bermuda harvests will be ‘better vented’. Then the commission pondered how to raise £50,000 to buy the tobacco and ‘how it will be vented’. Manchester mused ‘where to get the money to buy’ when every penny in the Exchequer went to underwrite Buckingham's latest expedition, and ‘what assurance can be given of profit to be made … so as the King may be no loser keeping the Tobacco upon his hands’. A few wealthy merchants, Wolstenholme suggested, might purchase the entire crop for the Crown at 3s. 6d. for the best grade and 2s. 6d. for the ordinary. Manchester then summoned planters’ agents to offer them 3s. and 2s. 6d., but ‘they could not take it’. As the discussion returned to impositions, they recalled Jacob's observation that 6d. in imposts together with 3d. in customs would generate £15,000. This seemed too generous to Manchester who called instead for 3d. and 9d., while Weston proposed a compromise—3d. and 9d. on domestic sales and 3d. and 3d. on exports.38 Again the agents appeared, and Manchester opened with a high bid, 6d. and 18d. for Bermuda tobacco and 4d. and 18d. for Virginian. Back came the objections: ‘they were not able to pay so great a rate’; ‘it will sinke themselves (many of them) and the Plantation’ and ‘by their Letters Patents [sic] they are covenanted with that no further taxation shallbe layd upon them but 5 in the 100.’ Sir Humphrey May pleaded that since Charles lost £50,000 a year by banning Spanish tobacco, ‘would they now give him no retribution for it?’ Lamentations only increased. Since they could not bargain with so much already in London warehouses, they ‘hope no more shallbe required of them but 6d in the pound’, their customary rate, which would net the Exchequer £30,000. The Commissioners retorted that the parley was entirely in ‘consideration of their goods being landed and in their Ware-houses’. To break the impasse, Manchester offered 12d., which ‘they likewise refused’, and in their frustration, some announced that ‘they had rather sell to the king for 3s 6d and 2s 6d’. Tempted, Weston recalled £9,000 still in Anys's fund, and his colleagues toyed with buying the crop before concluding that ‘there will be lesse danger in the imposition then in the contract’. For a last time they discussed the idea of ‘emption’ with leading merchants, and Marlborough sadly reported on 31 May that no one ‘will contract with the King to take of his hands so much Virginia and Bermuda Tobacco as his Maiestie shall buy’. Equally sombre news came from Wyatt and Sandys: while some ‘rich men in the trade’ could pay 12d. in custom and impost, ‘the Planters and those especially of the poorer sort will never be drawen to above 9d, 3d in Custom and 6d Impost’.39 Amid this chaos, all mention of tobacco and colonies ends in the Commission's notes. Once Whitaker set down his pen, Mr Anys's project plunges into the archival gloom. Nevertheless, enough remains to allow us to glimpse the magnitude of his triumph; he had sold the regime on a transatlantic monopoly, and its commitment to his idea only intensified as the war dragged on, increasing the pressure on the Exchequer. Not surprisingly, Anys's project continued without Anys—as a proclamation in August 1627 revealed. After banning domestic production and limiting Spanish importation, Charles forbade his subjects to ‘sell, utter, or offer to sell, or otherwise dispose or keepe any such Tobacco, to the intent to sell or utter the same without His Majesties speciall Commission in that behalfe’. Moreover, the colonists, who ‘neglect to applie themselves to solide Commodities fit for the establishing of Colonies’, could no longer ship tobacco to England ‘without His Maiesties especiall license’, which had to be delivered on arrival in London where a price ‘shall be reasonably agreed upon’ between ‘the Owners or Factors’ and the Tobacco Commissioners. Finally, he cautioned domestic consumers against purchasing tobacco without the appropriate royal seal. Charles, the Venetian ambassador observed, ‘chooses to be the master of all that the companies of Virginia and Bermuda are bound to bring, receiving it at a low price and selling it as other princes do salt and other regalia’. In due course, the government expected ‘this plan will be very profitable’. In the meantime, ‘the merchants of these companies complaine’.40 Residents of the Channel Islands, happily noting that the proclamation did not mention the Duchy of Normandy, duly claimed an exception. Less fortunate were those across the Atlantic. Normally, a disgruntled colonist explained, the Virginia councillors ‘made noe more accounte of the Lords Letter then if it had come from the meanest men in England’.41 But this lofty attitude ended when news of ‘the contract intended to be made with Mr. Anis’ reached James City in April 1627. Since bickering had been the bane of early Virginia, Charles I performed a miracle, uniting the fractious colony. Among planters, all too ‘apt to be cast down’ and talk ‘of nothing but of quitting the plantation’, word of the new arrangement prompted them to ‘cry out and complaine extreamely, as hating all contracts’. To Governor Yeardley, they protested they were ‘like to have bine quite undone’ by ‘avaritious and Cruell men whose exorbitant and wide Consciences proiect and digest the ruine of this Plantation’. Two years earlier, the prospect of the Ditchfield contract had traumatised the colony until the Privy Council decreed that ‘none should have power to force any Contract uppon us for our Commodities, but that wee should have free Trade and libertye to make the best of our Labours’. On that basis ‘a new life revived our dispairing minds being freed from that feare of soe greate a misery as that Contract’. Consequently, the mere rumour of another contract ‘hath soe deaded our speritts [sic] that as perplexed men, wee thinke our selves againe repossessed in these miserys out of which wee could scarce conceave our Selves delivered and freed’. The amount Charles wanted was ‘to littel for the mayntenance of the Collony’, and the insistence on removing the stalks and on rolling the tobacco represented ‘such an unaccostomed troble’ that ‘will take up the whole wynters worke’. Further, ‘there will be much cossenage and deceite in false making up theire tobacco into rowles, which being taken in leafe is allwayes to be prevented and not otherwyse’. Finally, smugglers would surely raise Spanish imports beyond 50,000 pounds a year and so ‘much debase’ Virginia leaf prices. Hence ‘all men wilbe disheartned, indevour to leave the Colonie and soe the planatation utterly overthrowne’. Yet some modifications—Yeardley suggested 300,000 pounds at 3s. a pound, plus freight charges—might pacify the colonists. An even better solution, the councillors argued, was for Charles to ‘Confirme his former Royall intentions’, nullifying ‘any Contracts … made of our goods without our consent or knowledg’.42 Private petitions seconded official ones. ‘Distressed Adventurers and Planters of Virginia’ wrote Charles, lamenting that the scheme afforded only a ‘poor returne of greate coste and sore labour’ and imposed ‘a burthen that will utterly ruin your poore subiects and by depriving them of all means cast them into the uttermost of all extremity’. Meanwhile, ‘three miserable families in Virginia’ appealed to Buckingham. Since the new monopoly would destroy ‘the whole proffit of many yeares sore labour and of infinite difficulties sustayned in the Plantation and all the meanes that they have to sustayne themselves heere’, they were ‘distressed afflicted and beyond all means pressed with the weigh of this burthen’. The duke, they begged, should remind his colleagues of ‘the reiterated promise and assurance of the honorable Board not only of all equall iustice but of noble favour and graciousness’.43 Unfortunately for the planters, their protests arrived as Buckingham straggled home from the Ile de Ré, and rather than accept failure, Charles immediately ordered another expedition to relieve La Rochelle. Frantic to raise new funds, the regime turned a deaf ear to colonial protests. In December Charles vented his frustration over ‘how little Account can bee given of any solide or substantiall Commodities which in all this tyme have been raysed there’. Notwithstanding ample investments, ‘to our dishonor and the shame [of] our people, it is and may bee truly said that this Plantation is wholly built uppon Smoake, Tobacco being the only meanes it hath produced, and that soe easie to bee turned into aire’. Therefore, he commanded the colonists to gather pitch, tar and salt; to manufacture barrels, staves and clapboard and to produce potash, iron and wine when they were not mining. Tobacco itself should be ‘well ordered and the quantity moderated’ because ‘our desire is to take [it] within our owne hands as our owne Marchandise’. He would pay 3s. a pound for tobacco delivered in London, a shilling on arrival, the last two within ten months. Heath provided additional details, announcing the arrival of an expert, William Capp, lecturing the planters on the correct method for raising tobacco—four feet apart with no more than six leaves on each plant—and ordering corvees of 100 settlers periodically sent ‘to the topp of the Mountains’ in pursuit of promising rocks. Tobacco had a place in this homily on economic diversification, albeit a modest one. In addition to shipping only ‘good and Marchantable’ leaf, Virginians had to ‘take care that the stalkes of the tobacco bee taken out, [that] the king may have ware and not stalkes for his mony’. Finally, each captain had to post bond that they would unload only in London with a certificate from the Virginia Council detailing the cargo. ‘Bee assured of this’, Heath warned, ‘that whosoever comes without such Certificate from you shall answer for it at their Coming home’.44 These directives found disarray at James City where the councillors had elected Francis West to replace the deceased Governor Yeardley. Their good humour was scarcely improved on learning that Heath had ordered Yeardley not to discuss the new scheme, or indeed any ‘matters of Government’, with his Council. Having politely tried to remind Whitehall of the Salisbury decree on free trade, they now adopted another tack, readily recognisable to any local elite struggling with awkward royal orders—they highlighted complications while stalling for time. Much of that year's crop had already left for London, the new governor explained, and for the remainder, they could not ‘try the goodnes of the same or to contracte for it on his Maiesties behalfe, the greatest parte belonging to Marchants and Adventurers in England, whose factors residing here have noe such power given them’. Willingly they offered to work with the new government expert—once they found him, ‘being absent … on what pretences wee know not’. Even after Capp's return from French leave, they could not alone alter the colony's economic structure, for ‘we want the meanes and not the will to raise those staple Commodities’. As for tobacco, they bristled at any disparaging remarks since the current crop ‘shall farr exceede the tobaccoe which hath formerly gone from hence and equall any that shall come from other partes’. The monopoly itself, they predicted, would function well enough—with a dramatic increase in the size of the annual shipment. Ample time remained to ponder such changes, for implementation would be slow, since colonists were soe deepely ingaged and indebted to the Marchants that wee must eyther stopp upp the Current and course of Iustice or soe farr as may be Convenvent suffer the Planter this yeare by his labor to paie his debtes and performe those Contracts which are already made.45 Nothing, in short, could possibly happen before 1629 at the earliest. The General Assembly was even less hopeful. The production of pitch and tar was theoretically possible but economically pointless, ‘being a Commodity of soe small a value’. Likewise with pipestaves, barrels and clapboard, ‘the freight of soe meane a Commoditie will bee too deare to incourage any man to goe in hand with it’. The profits of mining were more substantial, as were the costs of guarding the operation from ‘our Enemies the Indians’. Wine production did tempt them, all the more reason to regret that ‘wee are none of us skillful therein’. Potash was a complete mystery, and the mention of an iron industry led to lamentations over their furnace, which was ‘at the Massacre throwen into the River by the Indians’. Above all else, the burgesses scoffed at the Attorney General's agricultural ideas. Cutting off the stalks would encourage ‘wett and mould’ and hinder ‘our other workes of Consequence’ like ‘Cleering of new grounds, planting of gardens and orchards, the erecting of Commodious buildings, the extirpation of the Indians and the raysing of all staple Commodities’. The order that the proper tobacco plant sport only six leaves dumbfounded the burgesses: ‘wee wonder why any such thing should be inioyned unto us.’ The only suggestion they embraced concerned sea salt, which they would produce as Mr Capp directed—once they found him. The impracticality of diversification only highlighted the tobacco monopoly's importance. Formally the burgesses applauded Charles's decision ‘to take the affayres of this plantation into his more neere regard and Princely care’—provided they dictated the terms. While the Assembly feared even modest Spanish imports which would leave ‘the markett glutted, to our damage and hinderance’, it welcomed Charles's interest in improving their product, most of which they confessed was ‘of noe good Condition’; what could be expected when they had to exchange it for commodities, invariably ‘rotten and unusefull, and allwaies sould at most excessive rates’? Hence, with a regular royal contract ‘our tobacco shall bee very good and Marchantable much exceeding the tobacco which hath formerly gon from hence’. The terms themselves were more problematic; against Charles's proposal of 3s. a pound delivered in London, the colonists offered 3s. 6d. a pound delivered in Virginia, London delivery raising the price to 4s. Either way, these imports had to be duty free. Equally unsettling was the prospect of waiting for payment out of the Exchequer; instead the Virginians insisted on bills of exchange ‘from men of unquestionable sufficiency’ and on shortening the time of payment—half within ten days of delivery and half after three months. Their most extravagant demand was that Charles purchase the entire crop; 500 of the 3,000 colonists alone produced over 400,000 pounds, and the others drove the total higher still. Alternatively, they proposed a seven-year contract for 500,000 pounds with the right to export the surplus overseas. While conceding the necessity of reducing the harvest's size, they resisted immediate change; since ‘wee being now in greate sommes indebted to the Marchant’, a dramatic reduction could require Charles to ‘shutt up our Courtes and deny Iustice to those that shall require it’. In short, the colonists would welcome a contract if Charles effectively doubled the annual amount, increased the cash value by 33%, reduced the payment cycle by 66%, cut the Exchequer out of the scheme and waited several years before implementing it. Behind the facade of compliance lay the colonists’ devotion to the 1625 Salisbury decree enshrining free trade. They begged Charles to listen to them, not to those who neyther informed by Experience uppon the place (the most infallible guide) nor led by good iudgment at soe grewate a distance doe intend their private endes more then the honor and profitt of the king or the welfare of this Colony. Mournfully they continued: ‘the making of any Contracte uppon our Tobacco hath bin hitherto a thing soe much feared and the very name of it rather a terror and discouragement to the whole Colony, then any way by us wished or assented unto.’ Indeed ‘the bare rumour whereof hath wrought soe evill an effecte as generally to disharten all men’, making merchants ‘doubtful of adventuring hither’ and planters ‘fearefull to settle their abode here or raise any workes of better Consequence’. They could do no less in a place ‘wherein there could bee noe certainty or stability of their affaires but continually subiect to ruine’. Looming over this was the colonists’ bete noire—the projector. More than hostile tribes, they feared ‘the sinister informations of pryvate men in England and their proiects there tending solely to their owne pryvate Commoditie and gaine’, men who peddle schemes ‘without our Consents and uppon such unreasonable termes and Conditions as have directly tended to the immediate distraction and misery’ of the colonists. Happily they recalled how the councillors had listened to their earlier protests, while bemoaning that ‘wee have Continually beene insnared in these toyles and for these six yeares have perpetually laboured in the confused pathes of these labyrinthes’, constructed ‘in the very imagination of Unconscionable and uniust men’ without ‘any respecte the advancement of the Colony’.46 Private entreaties seconded these formal protests. Governor West asked his brother, Lord Delaware, to continue their father's care for the colony in ‘these Stormes which since [his day] have well nigh overwhelmed us’, the worst of which were ‘these pernitious contracts which soe often for these six yeares have been continually intended and made on our Tobacco without our knowledge or privity’. Therefore, he begged his brother that ‘none may contract on our goods without our consents’. While Delaware was effectively invisible at Court, the earl of Dorset was not, and this protégé of the duke received a similar appeal. After recalling Dorset's help in blocking earlier contracts, West reported that the colony was ‘againe insnared in the same toyles and likely to suffer extreame preiudice by new contracts which wee feare are proiected by these men whose ends are theire private gaines and lucre’. With the earl's help, the king would ‘put an end to these long troubles whereby our affayres have ben exceedingly perplexed’.47 As the governor wrote these letters, a more sympathetic body gathered in Westminster. After their actions in 1621 and 1624, the Parliament men were unlikely either to endorse the new monopoly or to forget about the colonies. Close personal and economic ties bound many members to Virginia and the Somer Islands, one of whom—John Delbridge of Barnstaple—had fallen afoul of the new tobacco regulations. He had already protested against this policy, which violated ‘my right herin, which belongeth unto me as his Maiesties subiect’, and in earlier sessions, he had not been shy about voicing criticism. To be sure, the regime's eagerness to gain the colonists’ cooperation doubtless reflected the Attorney General's legal anxieties about Anys's project. Nevertheless, a restrictive tobacco arrangement, whatever its precise terms, could easily fall within the definition of monopoly, and no lawyerly language could possibly cover Charles's establishment of a domestic monopoly over all retail sales. The Crown for its part knew full well its looming bankruptcy and its need for parliamentary support. Therefore, before the session opened, it released the jailed opponents of the Forced Loan in hopes of reaching a modus vivendi with the Parliament men. It is almost certain that either immediately before or shortly after the session opened, the regime dropped the tobacco scheme. After early 1628, all reference to it, and all protests, ceased. In early June, for instance, the Bermuda planters formally protested to the Commons about the state of the tobacco trade, never mentioning a word about Mr Anys's scheme.48 Mr Delbridge moreover sat quietly through these debates. In these circumstances, nothing appears left of Anys's project. It took awhile for the news to reach Virginia, but once it did, the Council there found it impossible to convey ‘the generall ioy of the whole Colony’ which ‘produced such deep effects in our minds as wholy to calme and silence those distempered motions which by the complaintes and petitions appeared to have made soe greate a rupture in our Publique Peace’.49 The regime's climb-down can be easily explained. The project, while financially tempting, proved administratively awkward; some Commissioners even questioned the entire scheme, as did everyone associated with tobacco, either in London or overseas. To be sure, the burgesses were willing to accept a contract, but since their terms grossly exceeded what Whitehall had in mind, a successful negotiation was unlikely. Meanwhile, Parliament would certainly rank a tobacco monopoly as a major grievance. Anxious to pick its battles, the Council in 1628 did not welcome the grief inherent in such an unprecedented, difficult and, as yet, unproductive scheme. Thus a project, begun two years earlier under Mr Whitaker's careful eye, abruptly vanished. The Anys affair calls into question several common assumptions about both English and colonial history. From June 1626 to March 1628, Buckingham and his creatures experimented with ‘new counsels’, chief among them the Forced Loan. In addition, as we have seen, the Commission launched several revenue enhancement schemes, one of which was a transatlantic tobacco monopoly, all to make Charles I, as Salvetti noted, ‘rich, without the necessity of having recourse to Parliament’. Nevertheless, the Crown's role in Anys's scheme remains surprising. First and foremost, such an extended glimpse into the internal dynamics of the duke's inner circle is inherently enlightening, but the initial amazement of watching the king and the favourite operating in a Council subcommittee quickly gives way to surprise. Charles presided over several pivotal meetings, but he did not dominate them. Indeed on 31 December, although plainly eager to jettison Anys, he deferred to the majority. Buckingham could play a more decisive role, witness him ushering in Anys on 4 August and pressing on 31 January ‘yet againe’ about the scheme. Nevertheless, he too generally assumed a low profile, allowing his fellow commissioners to overrule him. They did so, for instance, when he proposed using reason of state to justify the monopoly, far from a trifling matter since Anys proposed permanently augmenting the state's ordinary income by at least 50 per cent. Whitaker's notes therefore contained a thoroughly salutary cautionary tale about casually assuming Charles and Buckingham were autocrats. After James I's death, Buckingham's rivals accused him—with considerable reason—of systematically subverting the autonomy of the Privy Council, packing it with his creatures while excluding more independent councillors, and since the traditional frank exchange of views was purportedly impossible in the Privy Council, Villiers style, the duke's critics bitterly quipped the king's council rode on one horse. Whitaker's labours, however, force us to separate popular perception from political reality. The most influential, and surprising, councillor was the earl of Marlborough, whom scholars have dismissed as a sycophant too old to serve as Lord Treasurer; the existing evidence famously led Conrad Russell to conclude that by 1626, ‘the feebleness of Marlborough's signature indicates his readiness for retirement’.50 Yet the colonists would have rejoiced if Marlborough had in fact been decrepit. Here it is worth recalling that most of the administrative information for this period comes from the chance survival of the Conway and Coke manuscripts. The Anys project therefore makes clear that our understanding of the late 1620s would be dramatically different if Marlborough's archive, and that of Weston, had survived. Yet of them all, the most eye-opening figure on the Commission was surely Sir Robert Heath. Charles's Attorney General has long been a shadowy figure, the ever-present legal officer with a broad remit, whom the surviving evidence suggests to have been ‘not the sort of counsellor to offer original advice on matters of high policy’. Yet Whitaker's notes reveal the presence of an unexpectedly rigid backbone in Heath, and by constantly posing serious legal objections, his scepticism helps account for the Crown's attempt to negotiate rather than to impose a tobacco contract. Here it is worth pausing over an Attorney General, who amid his heavy duties in the Forced Loan project and the Five Knights Case, repeatedly observed that Anys's project sat awkwardly alongside parliamentary statute. On mature reflection, his stance is not so unexpected. Richard Cust has identified Lord Keeper Coventry as a moderate over the Forced Loan, someone who stressed the legal problems in order to advance a ‘softly-softly’ approach in which ‘anything which raised the issue of the loan's ultimate legality was better avoided’. Scattered evidence made it harder to fix Heath's position, but Mr Whitaker allows us to align Heath with Coventry. Nor was Heath the only moderate on the Commission; after all, a majority once blocked Buckingham's use of reason of state with the observation that ‘these are not being held safe wayes’. As Cust has shown, while some within the duke's entourage backed ‘new counsels’, others struggled to avoid ‘awkward and divisive constitutional issues’.51 Heath certainly had every reason to do so, for he would have to conduct the Crown's legal defence. It speaks volumes about the uneasiness of the Attorney General over the winter of 1627–8 that he was so eager to avoid another delicate case like that of the Five Knights, from which he was then attempting to extricate Charles.52 This is not to deny that Charles and Buckingham advanced policies obnoxious to most Parliament men; it simply is to stress again, pace Cust, that some of the duke's clients were profoundly uncomfortable with these schemes. Put another way, it is more than a little surprising to appreciate that sharp policy exchanges among independent speakers, so characteristic of the ‘traditional’ Privy Council, flourished in Buckingham's heyday rather ironically among the allegedly docile ‘yes men’ on the Revenue Commission. Since we know so much less about Caroline Virginia, the importance of this cache of new material is exponentially greater. Edmund Morgan argued that the colony boomed during the 1620s, but we must carefully define the boom. Admittedly, the population expanded, the output of tobacco soared and many settlers became prosperous.53 But this occurred amid profound political and economic uncertainty verging at times on mass hysteria. Surviving evidence has never afforded a clear view of Virginia after 1624, much less of the Anys project; indeed the evidence about the colony after 1624 is so scattered as to be oracular at times. But Whitaker's detailed notes allow us to set these stray letters in context, and the new picture of Virginia makes plain the magnitude of the administrative bullet that the colony dodged. To be sure, Whitehall never pursued a consistent policy after the Virginia Company's dissolution. But it certainly attempted to impose new, and ever more extreme, regulations with unsettling regularity. The pattern of initiatives, while apparently random enough, became quite sinister on the other side of the Atlantic. The tobacco contract that Roe and Jacob exercised in 1620–1 gave way to that of Sandys and the Ferrar brothers, which fatally convulsed the Virginia Company. Then in 1625–6 Edward Ditchfield pitched another contract, which generated serious interest in Whitehall and equally serious consternation in James City. With the Company went a government based, as Charles I complained, on ‘the greater number of Votes and Voyces’, and in its place came confusion over the precise form of government as well as landholding. The uncertainty was scarcely relieved when Charles I within weeks of his accession announced his intention to take ‘such a right course, as might best agree with that forme which was held in the rest of his Royall Monarchy’. Initially the ‘right course’ appeared to be Ditchfield's monopoly, but any celebrations over this project's collapse quickly led to renewed anxiety as William Anys spent 1626–7 spinning out new ways to aggravate the colonists. So seduced was Whitehall with his logic that it actually began implementing the design. Further, as Governor West and his colleagues discovered, Anys's plans also brought forth a royal order downgrading the council; no wonder West and the councillors fervently prayed that there be ‘an end to these long troubles whereby our affayres have ben exceedingly perplexed’. They were, if anything, understating the situation when they observed that ‘we have Continually beene insnared in these toyles and for these six yeares have perpetually laboured in the confused pathes of these labyrinthes’. A fuller appreciation of the Crown's intermittent efforts at remodelling the colony casts in much sharper relief Virginia's celebrated mutiny in 1635. Granted, Governor Harvey was maladroit, and the colonists were apprehensive about the Catholic menace from Maryland and their property rights. But this string of royal interventions, proposed as well as fully implemented, starkly emphasises the immediate reason for the governor's ‘thrusting out’. In the aftermath of the Anys episode, the Virginia Council begged their counterparts in Whitehall to reiterate the 1625 Salisbury decree, ensuring that ‘wee may have all free trade to those parts and marketts where such Commodities as we by our Industrye shall rayse will be best vented’. Charles declined to do so. Instead in 1634, he re-established the domestic aspect of Mr Anys's project, a retail monopoly on tobacco sales, and early in 1635 he decided to implement the rest of it and to control Virginia production. Consequently, Harvey's violent expulsion, far from being a random occurrence, can best be seen as the logical escalation of colonial frustration with a decade of royal projects.54 From this perspective, Virginia, not Scotland, first rebelled against a heavy-handed Caroline regime; after all, the obsessive administrative style that others denounced in the 1630s as the ‘policy of thorough’ was something that had vexed Virginians since 1625 as Charles pursued ‘a right course, as might best agree with that forme which was held in the rest of his Royall Monarchy’. The prolonged struggle against these projects also cast a political shadow that stretched well beyond 1635, for it also allowed Virginians to develop a distinctive political vocabulary. Early in 1621, news of Sir Thomas Roe's contract prompted widespread lamentation along the James where ‘wee are plunged in so great extremities that now remayneth neither helpe nor hope’, ensnared as they were in ‘the sinister practize’ of projectors ‘who pretending your Majesties profitt, but intending their owne more, have gone about to blowe us up at once’. Yet by 1623, the Virginians had learned to intertwine legal with emotional arguments in their protest against ‘divers contracts made wholy without our consents or pryvity, and sett on fote by avaritious and unconscionable men [i.e. Sandys the Ferrars] intendinge theire own private lucre and gaine’. Rather than ‘be made slaves to those men, from whose exorbitant and wide consciences wee expect no mercye’, the colonists stood on principle: ‘wee are to governe our affaires to the lawes of England that doe not allowe the good subiect to bee dispossessed of his goodes without his consent’. Again in 1625, an opponent of the Ditchfield project argued that ‘the Virginia Company being now discharged, it hath been fit the Colony had been consulted about it, and not to dispose of other mens states and goods, without their consent and knowledge’. The same rhetoric returned with Virginia's protests against Anys's project. In 1627, the councillors in James City begged their counterparts in Whitehall to ensure that ‘no Contract or Monpoly may be graunted uppon our Tobaccoes without our consents’. A year later, they explained to Lord Delaware that the colony simply wanted to establish a basic principle—‘none may contract on our goods without our consents’. The prevalence of such rhetoric is not to deny the later importance of Locke, eighteenth-century ‘commonwealthmen’ and the philosophes. Rather it simply reminds us that such were the tensions of a distant colony fending off uncongenial projects that the Virginia settlers found it all too easy to cast their struggle against Mr Anys, as Governor Yeardley did in 1627, as one for ‘free trade and Libertye’.55 Put another way, the royal Court and the celebrated metropolitan theatres were thousands of miles from the straggling settlements along the James. Yet no matter how isolated, the inhabitants there knew all too well projectors such as Sir Andrew Mendicant, and to Virginians, the rarified language of rights and liberty came all too naturally, repeatedly entangled as they were in what Mr Anys rather cheerfully described as ‘the power of the state’. 1 Richard Brome, The Court Beggar, in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome (London, 1873), 188, 192, 194, 197, 213 and 267; and Acts of the Assembly, Mar. 1627, printed in J.H. Lefroy, Memorials of … the Bermudas (Hamilton, 1932), I, 418. See also M. Butler, Theatre and Crisis (Cambridge, 1984), 220–9. 2 20 Nov. 1611, Goldsmith's Hall, Court Minutes, P1, fo. 37; and Nathaniel Butler, ‘The Unmasked Face of Virginia, 1623’, in S. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company (Washington, 1906), II, 376. See also K. Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 3 ‘Sundry Reasons,’ 1623, Centre for Kentish Studies, U269/1, OV 45; ‘Complaints’ [1623]; and 29 Jan. 1623, Court Book, The Records, IV 54 and 181, and II, 188 and 191; and The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), II, 509. See also W.F. Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932); and T.K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman (Princeton, 1998), 353–97. 4 H. Ward, Colonial America (New York, 1991), 28; 24 Oct. 1625, Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, I, 93; and R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Princeton, 1993), 105. See also W.F. Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1949), 153. 5 G.L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660 (New York, 1922), 147, n. 2; and L.C. Gray, The History of Agriculture in the Southern United States (Washington, 1933), 237 and 240. Although his name was variously spelled Anes, Anees and Anus, the most common spelling was Anys. 6 ‘A Journall Booke of the Proceedings of His Maiesties Commissioners for the Lessening of His Maiesties Charge and Increase of the Revenew’, University of London Library, MS 195 [henceforth ‘A Journall Booke’], II, fo. 42. 7 R. Cust, ‘Charles I, the Privy Council and the Forced Loan’, Journal of British Studies, xxiv (1985), 208–35; and G.E. Aylmer, ‘Buckingham as an Administrative Reformer?’, ante, cx (1990), 355–62. 8 Samuel Butler, ‘A Projector’, in Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1891), 350; and Anys to Salisbury, 28 Nov. 1608 and [1608–9], Salisbury MSS, Hatfield House 126/73 and 195/65. See also B.E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642 (Cambridge, 1959), 186–8 and 268; J. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford, 1978); and P. Croft, The Spanish Company (London, 1973), 29 and 54. 9 Coke to Brooke [Aug. 1626], BL Add. MS 64,889, fo. 37; and 14 July 1626, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Skrine, 80. For an early warrant, see the answer to the petition of Robert Tipper and John Gason, 26 July 1626, BL Add. MS 64,889, fo. 83v–4. 10 ‘A Journall Booke’, I, fos. 17v and 19; and II, fo. 44v; and ‘The Accompt of Our Proceedings’ [late Aug. to early Sept. 1626], BL Add. MS 64,890, fo. 69. At the back of the second volume of MS 195 is the note ‘Mr. Whitakers booke theise’. See also R. Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987). 11 ‘A Journall Booke’, II, fo. 36. For the various councillors, see R. Lockyer, Buckingham (London, 1981); M. Young, Servility and Service (London, 1986); P. Kopperman, Sir Robert Heath, 1574–1649 (London, 1989); M. Alexander, Charles I's Lord Treasurer (London, 1975); and D. Smith, ‘The 4th Earl of Dorset and the Politics of the Sixteen-Twenties’, Historical Research, lxv (1992), 37–53. On the dynamics of the council, see Cust, ‘Charles I, the Privy Council’, and his ‘Charles I and a Draft Declaration for the 1628 Parliament’, Historical Research, lxiii (1990), 143–61. 12 ‘A Journall Booke’, I, fo. 9. 13 ‘Reasons to Induce His Matie to Assume … the Sole Importation of Tobacco’; and Sir Nathaniel Rich, ‘A Proposition for Advancement of His Maiesties Profit’, [early 1620s], Centre for Kentish Studies, Cranfield MSS [henceforth CKS], U269/1/Ov 59 and 17. See also Craven, Virginia Company; and Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman, 353–85. 14 ‘The Losses of Richard Younge’ [1621]; and Hall to Middlesex, 16 Apr. 1622, CKS, U269/1/Ov 14 and 31. 15 ‘Proposition Considerable for the Equall Managinge of the Contract’; and ‘Sundry Reasons Against the Contract [1622–4], CKS, U269/1/Ov 1 and 45. 16 [Petition], 28 May 1622, CKS, U269/1/Ov 48. 17 ‘A Journall Booke’, I, fos. 10v–11, 12 and 13v. 18 Ibid., I, fo. 13v. On Burlamachi's central role, see APC 1627, 73, 155, 164, 208–9, 210, 224, 225 and 353. See also Robert Ashton, ‘Disbursing Official Under the Early Stuart’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxx (1957), 162–74; and A.V. Judges, ‘Philip Burlamachi: A Financier of the Thirty Years’ War’, Economica, vi (1926), 285–300. 19 Ibid., I, fos. 15v and 19; and 15 Aug. 1626, APC, 1626, 193–4. 20 Ibid., I, fos. 20 and 20–20v. 21 Ibid., I, fos. 21v–22v. 22 Ibid., I, fos. 23v–24. 23 Ibid., I, fo. 26v; and APC, 1626–27, 230, 246 and 247. 24 Ibid., I, fo. 30v. 25 Ibid., I, fos. 36–37. 26 Conyam to Ferrar, 15 Sept. 1626, Ferrar Papers [Microfilm], Magdalene College Cambridge; and 19 Sept. 1626, APC 1626, 274. It is devoutly to be wished that scholars are, if only occasionally, permitted to consult the original documents of the Ferrar MSS and not simply the microfilms. 27 ‘A Journall Booke’, II, fos. 5v–6v. 28 Ibid., II, fos. 32v and 37–7v. 29 Ibid., II, fos. 37–7v. 30 Ibid., II, fos. 39v–40v. 31 Ibid., II, fos. 41–42. 32 Ibid., II, fos. 39v, 41 and 42v. 33 17 Feb. and 30 Mar. 1627, Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford, 1983), II, 131–6 and 140–1. 34 ‘A Journall Booke’, II, fos. 51v and 52v–53v; and 10 July 1627, APC, 1627, 409. 35 ‘The Planters of Virginia and the Sommer Islands Touching Tobacco’, 7 Apr. 1627, T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice], C[olonial] O[ffice], IV/20, quoted in Lefroy, Memorials of … the Bermudas, I, 441–2. 36 ‘A Journall Booke’, II, fo. 56–7. 37 Ibid., II, fo. 57. 38 Ibid., II. fos. 57–57v. 39 Ibid., II, fos. 57–58 and 59. 40 18 Aug. 1627, Stuart Royal Proclamations, II, 162–5; and Contarini to the Doge and Senate, 3 Sept. 1627, Calendar of State Papers Venetian, xx, 350. 41 Osborne to Coke, 22 Aug. 1627, BL Add. MS 64,892, fo. 103; and Martin to Caesar, 8 Mar. 1627, BL Add. MS 12,496, fo. 462. 42 Yeardley to Privy Council; and Yeardley et al. to same, Apr. 1627, TNA, PRO, CO 1/4/53 and 55–55v. 43 ‘To the Kings Most Excellent Maiesty’ [late 1627 to early 1628]; and ‘To the High and Mighty Prince [Buckingham]’ [late 1627–8], Ferrar MSS, Magdalene College Cambridge. 44 Charles I to governor and Council; and Heath to same [Dec. 1627], TNA, PRO, CO 1/4/84–84v and 86–86v. 45 West et al. to Heath, 27 Feb. 1627, TNA, PRO, CO 1/4/109–9v. 46 ‘The Humble Answer of the Governor and Counsell Together With the Burgesses … Assembled in Virginia’, 26 Mar. 1628, TNA, PRO, CO 1/4/118–121v; and 27 Feb. 1628, Minutes of the Council of the General Court of Colonial Virginia, ed. by H.R. McIlwaine (Richmond, 1979), 168. 47 West et al. to Delaware; and same to Dorset, 30 Mar. 1628, TNA, PRO, CO 1/4/124 and 126. 48 [Delbridge's remonstrance], 12 June 1627, quoted in Lefroy, Memorials of the … Bermudas, I, 443–7; and Proceedings in Parliament 1628 (New Haven, 1991), IV, 100–1 and 383–4. See also Cust, Forced Loan, 72–90. 49 Harvey et al. to Privy Council, 22 Dec. 1631, CKS, U269/1/Ov 20. 50 C. Russell, Parliaments and English Parliaments, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), 296, n. 1. See also K. Sharpe, ‘Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England’, ante, ci (1986), 321–50. 51 Cust, Forced Loan, 60 and 147. See also T. Barnes, ‘Cropping the Heath: The Fall of a Chief Justice, 1634’, Historical Research, lxiv (1994), 331–43. 52 R. Cust, ‘Charles I and a Draft Proclamation for the 1628 Parliament’, Historical Research, lxiii (1990), 143–61. See also J. Guy, ‘The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered’, Journal of British Studies, xv (1982), 289–312; and M. Kishlansky, ‘Tyranny Denied: Charles I, Attorney Heath and the Five Knights’ Case’, Historical Journal, xlii (1999), 53–83. 53 E. Morgan, ‘The First American Boom: Virginia 1616 to 1630’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, xxviii (1971), 169–98; and R.R. Menard, ‘The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617–1730’, Research in Economic History, v (1980), 157. 54 Hervey et al. to Virginia Commissioners, 6 Mar. 1632, CKS, U269/1/Ov 21; ‘A Proclamation for … Virginia’, Stuart Royal Proclamations, II, 27; and J. Mills Thornton, ‘The Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vxxvi (1962), 11–26. I plan to develop this argument at greater length in ‘Free Trade and Liberty’. 55 Yeardley et al. to Virginia Company, 21 Jan. 1621, and Virginia Council to Mandeville, 30 Mar. 1623, The Records, III, 425, and IV, 69; ‘Sundry Reasons Against the Contract’ [1621], CKS, U269/1/Ov 45; Considerations Touching the New Contract for Tobacco (London, 1625 ESTC S105056), 10; and Yeardley et al. to Privy Council, Apr. 1627, TNA, PRO, CO 1/4/55. Author notes * I am much obliged to the Special Collections staff for their assistance and patience in the University of London Library; to Alastair Bellany, Jack Greene, Mark Kishlansky, Karen Kupperman, Peter Lake, Mark Summers, Christopher Thompson and Michael Winship for reading drafts; to Corbett Capps for long discussion about tobacco cultivation and to Ron Hoffman for reminding me about the importance of politesse in the republic of letters. I am grateful to Robert Sackville-West for permission to consult the Virginia documents in the Cranfield MSS. © The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
TI - ‘In the Power of the State’: Mr Anys's Project and the Tobacco Colonies, 1626–1628
JO - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/cen002
DA - 2008-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/in-the-power-of-the-state-mr-anys-s-project-and-the-tobacco-colonies-ltXIYqo4Da
SP - 35
VL - CXXIII
IS - 500
DP - DeepDyve
ER -