The End of the Affair
For anyone who survived the Indian attack of 22 March 1622, life in Virginia was desperately hard – homes destroyed, tobacco crops and food stores plundered, livestock killed, years of hard labour undone in a single day. Fear of the Indians prevented farmers from venturing out of their stockades to replant, and London had burdened the colony with hundreds more hungry, sick and ill-provisioned settlers and a stock of rusting, obsolete weapons and armour from the Tower of London that might nonetheless prove useful in skirmishes with the Indians.1 Ordered to abandon the straggling plantations that made them vulnerable to attack, the jittery colonists crowded into Jamestown and the few settlements considered defensible.
What happened to the survivors among the Jamestown brides reflects the fortunes of the colony as a whole. Not everyone prospered, naturally. While the months after the attack were miserable for everybody, they will have been especially hard for any maids who had failed to find a husband. Uprooted only recently from England, lacking kith, kin or natural protectors in the colony, they were ripe for exploitation by those who wielded power, elite company officials especially and those who ‘knew how to turn private distress to private profit’.2
Shockingly, nearly two years after the attack two maids were still living in the households of company officials, unmarried and apparently working as servants despite the Virginia Company’s insistence that the maids were not to be treated as such ‘save in case of extremitie’.3 According to a census compiled in mid-February 1624, London tailor’s daughter Elizabeth Starkey (only sixteen at the time of her embarkation) was living in the Jamestown household of company agent Edward Blaney, nominally in charge of collecting money for the Warwick women, while Fortune Taylor, a couple of years older, lodged with Dr John Pott.4 Both women had sailed with Blaney on the Warwick. Before she came to Virginia, Taylor had served another Virginia Company master, Gabriel Barbor of East Smithfield, one of the organizers of the now defunct lottery.
Pott and Blaney lived next door to each other in Jamestown’s New Town, which had spread eastwards from the fort towards Orchard Run, its irregularly shaped lots laid out with the help of William Claiborne, the colony’s official surveyor.5 In the mid-1620s this was the colony’s political, social and commercial heart. Almost all the property owners here were successful merchants, public officials or both. Close neighbours were Joan and William Pierce, whose Jamestown garden covered three or four acres, yielding nearly ‘an hundred bushels of excellent figges’ in a single year, where they kept tame geese, ducks and turkeys. Joan Pierce boasted to Captain John Smith that she could keep a better house in Virginia drawing on her own provisions ‘than here in London for 3[00] or 400 pounds a yeare, yet went thither with little or nothing’.6
By 1624 two unmarried ‘maids for Virginia’ (Fortune Taylor and Elizabeth Starkey) were living next door to each other on Back Street in the Jamestown households of Dr John Pott and Edward Blaney.
Both Pott and Blaney performed well in Virginia’s ‘servant sweepstakes’, one of the main pathways to wealth in the colony, since the more servants you possessed, the more tobacco you could grow.7 At the 1624 census, Blaney had eighteen people living in his household, including himself. Although he was married by then, his wife had returned to England to make a claim on her late husband’s estate8 and we can assume that the other seventeen people were servants. Only three were female: the wife of Edward Hudson, who appears near the top of his list, and two women at the bottom of the heap: Elizabeth Starkey and ‘Elinor’, who may have been one of the colony’s few Africans.9 Although the 1624 census did not identify relationships within households, it reflected their hierarchy, placing family members first and servants and Africans at the bottom.
As the colony’s physician, Dr Pott commanded three acres on the adjacent plot along Jamestown’s Back Street, which he would later extend by twelve acres.10 In 1624 he was living here with his wife Elizabeth, who had travelled out to Virginia with him in 1621; among their six servants were two women, Jane Dickenson and Fortune Taylor. At the time of the Indian attack, Jane Dickenson and her husband Ralph were living at Martin’s Hundred as indentured servants employed by Nicholas Hyde, one of the settlement’s principal investors. Both Dickensons were reported killed in the attack11 but Jane actually survived, ‘Caried away with the Cruell salvages, amongst them Enduring much misery for teen monthes’. She was later redeemed for glass beads supplied by ‘friends of the Prissoners’.12 As one of these friends, Dr Pott had insisted that she worked for him as a servant to repay a double debt: the remaining years of her slain husband’s seven-year term of indenture and her own ransom of beads.
One year on, Pott was still refusing to release her and threatened to make her serve ‘the uttermost day, unles shee p[ro]cure him 150 li waight of Tobacco’ – the price of a woman’s freedom, it seems, as well as that of a bride. So in March 1624, while Dickenson and Taylor were both living in the Pott household, Jane submitted a ‘humble petition’ to the governor, asking to be released from her debt as she had already served Pott for ten months, which was surely too much for two pounds of beads, and her servitude in his household ‘much differeth not from her slavery with the Indians’.
Might Edward Blaney have been another friend of the prisoners? And might Fortune Taylor and Elizabeth Starkey have been taken captive at the same time as Jane Dickenson and like her been forced to redeem ransom beads with their own labour? We cannot know for certain, and their servant status can be explained in other ways. Having failed to find husbands, they may have been coerced into repaying the cost of their transportation and clothes, or they may have been working voluntarily to fund their passage home. Whatever the explanation, their desire to better themselves by marrying a Virginian planter had not borne fruit, and after 1624 both disappear from the records.
The failure of these two young women to attract the right sort of husband – one who could afford to pay for and maintain them – underlines how flawed the scheme was from the outset. As a young single man with good prospects in the colony, Edward Blaney could have taken his pick of the Jamestown brides.13 But rather than pay for a wife with hard-earned tobacco, he chose instead to marry a widow who could bring him the lands he needed to build his fortune. ‘Mr Blanie is now married in Virginia, and when he hath discharged your trust in the magazine wilbe a Planter amongst us,’ wrote George Sandys to John Ferrar in London in April 1623, calling Blaney a man ‘of a good understandinge’.14
Blaney’s wife Margaret was the widow of Captain William Powell, a resident of New Town on whose land the Blaneys were now living with their many servants. By 1625, the Blaneys’ storehouses on Jamestown Island bulged with thirty barrels of corn and two thousand dry fishes plus copious stores of oatmeal and peas, and their many cattle and wandering swine were causing friction with their neighbours.15 Most of their servants (but not Elizabeth Starkey, whereabouts unknown) had been transferred to another plantation on the lower side of the James River, which the Powells had fraudulently appropriated after the Indian attack of 1622.16 This was Powle-Brook, where Cecily Bray and Barbara Burchens had died alongside the plantation’s true owner Captain Nathaniel Powell and many others. Although not related in any way, William Powell had successfully claimed the estate through their fortuitously shared surname, and the lands passed to Edward Blaney when he married William’s widow. Nathaniel’s brother Thomas was trying to recover the estate on behalf of himself and ‘his poor brothers and sisters’17 when Edward Blaney died himself, still indebted to the investors in the Virginia Company’s general magazine, his affairs in disarray.18 No one asked for any of the tobacco Blaney may have collected for the maids who travelled by the Warwick or the Tiger, nor had he offered to reimburse the adventurers of the maids’ magazine for transporting Elizabeth Starkey to the colony.
In the matrimonial game of musical chairs played by Virginia’s wealthy elite, after Blaney’s death his widow Margaret swiftly married Captain Francis West, a younger brother of Thomas West, the third Lord Delaware, whose arrival on the James River had halted the abandonment of Jamestown after the Starving Time over the deadly winter of 1609–10. In final settlement of Edward Blaney’s debts to the general magazine dispatched by the Warwick and the Abigail, Francis West agreed – as the husband of Blaney’s widow – to pay 5,000 lbs of good tobacco in November 1626 and a further 3,000 lbs of tobacco from the following year’s crop.19 Then Margaret West died and Captain Francis West immediately married again, this time Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley, just four months after the death in Virginia of Sir George Yeardley. When Temperance died intestate, West tried but ultimately failed to divert to himself the inheritance of the Yeardley children. Marriage could bring riches to both men and women, providing you had the status, power, connections or lack of scruples to advance your cause. And providing you stayed alive.
After the Indian attack of 1622 the Virginia Company limped on for another two years. The factionalism that had riven the company since Sandys assumed control erupted into open warfare, pitting former treasurer Sir Thomas Smythe and his son-in-law Alderman Robert Johnson against the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, fellow parliamentarian Sir Edward Sackville and ‘divers others of meaner qualitie’.20 Both sides hurled allegations of mismanagement and corruption at the other, and now Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, and his cousin Sir Nathaniel Rich threw themselves into the Smythe camp, incensed by the efforts of the Sandys and Southampton clique to curb their use of Virginian plantations as a base for privateering – piracy in all but name – in the Caribbean.21
The king was drawn into the controversy, impelled by his equal loathing for Sir Edwin Sandys, who had blocked his parliamentary manoeuvres at every turn, and for the ‘vile custome’ of smoking tobacco, on which Virginia depended, a habit that was, in his own words, ‘lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmeful to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse’.22 The king’s response to the ruckus was to set up a royal commission to investigate company affairs headed by Sir William Jones, justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Hearsay evidence and personal resentments were not to be aired: adventurers and colonists submitting evidence were to focus exclusively on their own private business. While neither faction had a monopoly of right, each manipulated the evidence to its own ends.
King James was not alone in condemning Virginia’s staple, tobacco: doctors linked it to coffee drinking as a cause of scurvy.
For the Smythe faction, Sir Nathaniel Rich took charge of collecting testimonies from Virginia that painted a dismal picture of life in the colony and drew attention to the Sandys administration’s reckless expenditure on ‘vast and wild projects’. Much of Rich’s evidence about conditions in Virginia was culled from letters dispatched to England from Virginia aboard the Abigail, whose outbound cargo of stinking beer was thought to have caused a plague of sickness in the colony in that first dreadful winter after the Indian attack. The letters were confiscated and sent on to the Privy Council after Rich had summarized their most damning contents.23 Among the letters was one written by Lady Wyatt, a niece of Sir Edwin Sandys, who had travelled out on the Abigail in late 1622 to join her husband the governor. Their ship was so full of infection, wrote Lady Wyatt to her ‘Sister Sandys’, ‘that after a while we saw little but throwing folkes over boord’. Much troubled, their captain had laid the blame squarely on the two Ferrar brothers, and ‘to make the people amendes dyed himselfe’. After their arrival in Virginia life hardly improved, she said, ‘for as well our people as our Cattle have dyed, that we are all undone’. She begged her mother and sisters for butter and cheese, and for malt carefully packed in very good casks, clearly intending to remedy the colony’s lack of English beer.24
Two more letters – written by Richard Frethorne, a young servant indentured to the governor of Martin’s Hundred – played directly into the hands of Warwick and the Smythe faction and may have been engineered by them.25 By March 1623, when Frethorne wrote his first letter, a ragged band of settlers had returned to Martin’s Hundred, its population of 140 reduced to ‘butt 22 lefte alive, and of all theyr houses there is butt 2 lefte and a peece of a Church’. Their leader William Harwood, who had survived the attack, said it would take £3,000 to make good the plantation.26 In a letter calculated to tug the heartstrings of any parent, Frethorne described his meagre rations to his mother and father: ‘for since I came out of the ship, I never at[e] anie thing but pease, and loblollie (that is water gruell) as for deare or venison I never saw anie since I came into this land, ther is indeed some foule, but Wee are not allowed to goe, and get yt, but must Worke hard both earelie, and late for a messe of water gruell, and a mouthfull of bread, and beife’.
His one coat was stolen off his back by a fellow servant, and he now wore only rags, possessed of nothing more than one poor suit, a pair of shoes, a pair of stockings, one cap and two cap bands. Indian attacks were continuing, wrote Frethorne, recounting the gruesome capture of Mr Pountis’s pinnace, when the Indians killed the captain, stuck his head on a pole and then rowed home.27 By February 1624 Frethorne too was probably dead.28
Even before the royal commission began gathering evidence, a privateering ally of the Earl of Warwick had come to the aid of the Smythe faction with a blistering report on conditions in the colony during its first winter following the Indian attack. On his way back to England from a controversial spell as colonial governor of Bermuda, Captain Nathaniel Butler had spent a few months at Jamestown, distilling his findings for the Privy Council in The Unmasked face of our Colony in Virginia, as it was in the Winter of the yeare 1622.
Butler portrayed a colony on the verge of collapse, its plantations seated on ‘meere Salt marishes full of infectious Boggs and muddy Creekes and Lakes’; settlements unfortified and abandoned to the Indians; just four fixed guns for the whole colony, all unserviceable; fledgling industries like the ironworks ‘utterly wasted and the men dead’. Food was so short that meal was selling at thirty shillings a bushel and Indian corn at ten to fifteen shillings a bushel, and the lack of guesthouses meant that new arrivals in winter were ‘dyinge under hedges and in the woods but being dead ly some of them for many days Unregarded and Unburied’.29
While Butler’s view of conditions in Virginia was undoubtedly partisan, the planters’ rebuttal of his accusations resorted to lame excuses, self-justifications and evasions – ‘As for dyinge under hedges there is no hedge in all Virginia.’ But no beating about the bush could mask the cardinal error of the Sandys administration in dispatching hundreds more poorly provisioned settlers to a colony already reeling from the Indian attack.30 After scrutinizing the company’s affairs through the spring and early summer of 1623, the Jones commission concluded that the colony’s state was most ‘weak and miserable’. Although exact numbers were hard to obtain, Jones calculated that the Sandys administration had sent over 4,270 settlers to join the thousand or so people living in Virginia when Smythe left office in 1619. Only a few of these remained, all living in great want.31
It took a year for legal process to shut the company down. The Privy Council set up another commission to enquire into the condition and needs of the colony, headed by Captain (later Sir) John Harvey; its members included former secretary John Pory, cape merchant Abraham Piersey and wealthy planter Samuel Matthews.32 This commission took the view that most settlers wanted to be under the immediate protection of the king, apart from a few Virginia Company employees who ‘feare by the Change of government theire losse of imployment and so desire to bee still under the Company’. Among its recommendations was the construction of a palisade fence across the York peninsula, from Martin’s Hundred on the James up to Cheskiak on the Pamunkey River, a tributary of the York, to keep the Indians out and the settlers with their livestock safe within. The government also went to law to revoke the Virginia Company’s charter, claiming that the Sandys faction had usurped authority for which it held no warrant. On 24 May 1624 the chief justice handed down his decision: Nicholas Ferrar and the other defendants had indeed failed to show sufficient proof of their privileges, which were now assumed by the king. The Virginia Company effectively went into receivership, holding its last court on 7 June 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony.
Sir Edwin Sandys survived for another five years, easing the passage through parliament of a major bill promoting free trade, for which he had been arguing for years, and assisting in the impeachment and downfall of his one-time friend Lord Cranfield, who had triggered the Virginia Company’s demise in parliament.33 He died in October 1629 and lies buried in St Augustine’s church, Northbourne, near Deal on the Kentish coast. In a free-standing memorial carved from black marble and alabaster, he and his wife lie stiffly at different levels in their four poster bed, hands clasped in prayer, overlooked by cherubs and two awkward angels added at a later date.34
After Nicholas Ferrar saved his brother John from financial ruin by buying the manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire from John’s bankrupt business partner, using money from their mother’s dower, the extended Ferrar family settled there in 1626, leading lives devoted to daily contemplation and readings of the scriptures, rigorous education and bookbinding.35 The church survives on the edge of farmland, its odour of piety reinforced by the many memorials to the Ferrars in stained glass and tablets. Outside, the plain table tombstone of Nicholas Ferrar (who died first) left space for a pavement slab for John by the west door. The American-born poet T. S. Eliot, visiting in 1936, left the rough road to the manor and, passing behind the pigsty to face the church’s dull facade and the tombstone, experienced a moment of timelessness when time past, present and future intersect. Little Gidding gave its name to the last of his Four Quartets.
So did the individual shareholders who subscribed to the maids’ magazine ever receive the rich rewards they were expecting? The likely answer is no, or not much. Timing did not favour any of the magazines. When the Warwick arrived at Jamestown in December 1621 most of the tobacco crop had already been carried away by other ships, so potential husbands for the brides had little to spare.36 Certainly the promised Maydes Towne never materialized, and the two men responsible for collecting tobacco from prospective husbands both failed to meet their obligations.
Three months after the maids left England, the company wrote a gently nagging letter to the governor and council in Virginia, reminding them that the adventurers were seeking a good return for their investment and enclosing copies of the company’s earlier letters ‘to revive thinges in yor memorie’.37 When that elicited no response, the company wrote again, in June 1622 (a month before London caught wind of the Indian attack), urging the Virginian authorities to give their ‘best favor and assistance’ to the four magazines – the glassworks, the fur trade, the maids and the shipment of general supplies. While the adventurers had not yet received the returns they were expecting, the company hoped that ‘the good proceed of theire Adventures’ might enable such ventures to continue’.38 The company had heard privately that Pountis wanted to return to England but earnestly entreated him to stay, ‘both in regard of his skill and office’.
Six months on, Virginia’s governor had more pressing matters on his hands than securing payment from recalcitrant husbands, but Sir Francis Wyatt nonetheless tried to reassure the adventurers in London that Virginia’s treasurer, Sir Edwin’s brother George Sandys, would let them know what was being done about returning profits from the glassworks, and Mr Pountis would do the same for the maids.39
By August 1623, some two years after the dispatch of the maids, the Virginia Company was losing patience. For the magazine of general supplies sent by the Warwick and valued at nearly £2,000, Edward Blaney had returned less than 2,000 lbs of tobacco, a fraction of its value.40 Although the investment had been made by private men, the consequence of non-payment was ‘of publique good, or evill, to the Colony’, warned the company, suggesting that while the adventurers were not doubting the ‘integritie of mr Blany’, they were nonetheless ‘offended’ that he had not even bothered to submit accounts.41 Likewise the adventurers who had invested in the maids wanted to hear from Mr Pountis, ‘from whom they hope the full return this yeare, wch we earnestly desire, that it may in the same, or some other profitable maner be readventured’. At no point did the company ask whether any of the maids it sent over had died in the attack, nor did it address the issue of payment for brides who had been slaughtered or who remained unmarried.
His health clearly suffering, Pountis could take the strain no longer. Having had his request to return to England rejected, he left the colony abruptly without settling his account for the brides. Virginia’s governor and council could only express themselves ‘such strangers’ to his proceedings that they could give the Virginia Company no account thereof, although before Pountis went abroad they had reminded him about his duties and shown him the company’s letters, ‘therfore he cannot be unmindfull to give you Satisfactione’.42
Pountis died before he could give any satisfaction to the Virginia Company or to the adventurers in the maids’ magazine,43 and then the company died too, leaving Virginia’s governor and council to sort out the mess as best they could. In mid-June 1625 they wrote to the Commissioners for the Affairs of Virginia, declaring that ‘mr Blany never medled with the disposinge of the maides’, thereby absolving him of any part in their finances, despite the Virginia Company’s clear instruction that he should collect tobacco for the Warwick women, and keep a ‘pticular accompt’.44 Pountis’s death had inevitably left his accounts ‘much intangled & perplexed’, said the council. Many of the husbands had made payments, ‘and most of ye rest pretend the like’, but the council had not yet had time to examine their proofs.45 Treasurer George Sandys was able to send accounts for the shipwright business, and for the glassworks, which made sorry reading: ‘the death of one of ye princypall woorkmen, an other beinge subject to the falinnge sicknes, and many defects wch render the woorke unservable’. The council had therefore conceded to the glass workers’ request to return to England, having achieved precisely nothing.
The council in Virginia had already started to investigate who owed what for the maids, ordering that those indebted to the maids’ magazine should pay the tobacco they owed or appear at Jamestown before the governor and council to explain themselves.46 Just one man came forward in response, William Moch (or Mutch) of James City, who testified on behalf of another planter called William Cobb who had married one of the maids: nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Dag from the mariners’ district of Limehouse on the Thames. Before setting off on a trading voyage, Cobb had made a will and asked Moch to convey it to John Pountis together with three bills of money owed to him, offering them in ‘Satisfactione for the Passage of the said Elizabeth Dagg’. Another witness swore that Moch had delivered the papers as requested into the hands of Pountis, where they presumably disappeared into his tangled accounts.47 William Cobb was clearly dead by this time, or he would have appeared in court himself, and no one enquired after the fate of his wife, the former Elizabeth Dag. No evidence survives to prove whether any of the other planters ever paid for their wives either.
After the Virginia Company’s demise and the financial collapse of the maids’ magazine, no more official bridal shipments came to Virginia, although individual women continued to travel out in hope. A deed from the Isle of Wight is said to record that on 1 October 1624 John Kent of Newport, innkeeper, had responded to the ‘earnest request’ of his widowed sister-in-law to ship her daughter to Newportes News in Virginia by the Ann, ‘uppon his owne adventure and charge’. Both mother and daughter were called Elizabeth Baker, and the younger woman was travelling to Virginia with her mother’s consent. Apparently named in the deed were two gentlemen from Newportes News, William Blackwell and Thomas Cheeseman, who were to look after the girl in Virginia and pay to John Kent ‘six score pound wayte of good marchauntable Virginia Tobacho’ on her marriage. My search at the Isle of Wight Records Office failed to produce the original deed, but I was able to confirm that John Kent’s wife Mary and the widowed Elizabeth Baker were sisters, as claimed.48
More generally, the idea prevailed that Virginia could provide good husbands for women without dowries. In his practical guide to making a fortune in Virginia, published in 1649, Englishman William Bullock advised male servants to buy a heifer in their first year and to begin trading with England. Bullock calculated that after four years they will have accumulated at least sixty pounds and a stock of cattle, sufficient ‘to wooe a good mans Daughter’.49 He would like to advise maidservants too, he said, but ‘they are impatient and will not take advice but from a Husband, for if they come of an honest stock and have good repute, they may pick and chuse their Husbands out of the better sort of people’. Never having travelled to Virginia himself, Bullock told his readers that all the women servants he sent out to his Virginian plantation were married within three months of their arrival, aside from one ‘poore silly Wench’, and even she found a suitor who was willing to work for a full twelve months to reimburse Bullock for clothing and transporting her. ‘To conclude this, whereas in England many Daughters makes the Fathers purse leane, the Sonnes here make the leane purses, wherefore to avoid this danger, I shall advise that man that’s full of Children to keepe his Sonnes in England, and send his Daughters to Virginia, by which meanes he shall not give but receive portions for all his Children.’
The maids whose married lives I trace in the next three chapters bear out Bullock’s optimism. Two of these women, Catherine Finch and Audry Hoare, settled upriver from Jamestown, at Jordan’s Journey and Neck of Land Charles City, while Bridgett Crofte went with her husband to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Given the difficulties of finding a husband in England, in London especially, their varied fortunes supply ample proof that with luck and good health women of spirit could prosper on North American soil, providing they learned to adapt to the much rawer circumstances of a new world in the making.
