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Merchants and Bankers
From 1625-1650

Trade - an international perspective

This website, produced by Australian historian Dan Byrnes, is a no-frills, text-based website designed simply to list historical and genealogical information on many notable merchants and traders of what is termed, the Western World.

It is hoped that these webpages will be of assistance to family historians in the UK, the US and Australasia, by way of providing contexts for further research.

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Reference item: Victor von Klarwill, (Ed.), The Fugger News-Letters, Being a Selection of Unpublished Letters from the Correspondents of the House of Fugger during the Years 1568-1605. (Authorized translation by Pauline de Chary) New York/London, GP Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1925.

Reference item:

See: Chris and Carolyn Caldicott, The Spice Routes: Chronicles and Recipes from around the World. Fances Lincoln, 2001.

Reference item: Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956. (On a noted financier of the day))

1625: Charles I had risen to the throne on March 27, 1625, after the end of the reign of James 1 (1603-1625, (James VI of Scotland). James of course had hardened the penal laws against Catholics. The response was a great Catholic uprising, a plan to blow up James I and the Parliament on November 5, 1605, the plot (involving 36 barrels of gunpowder) being discovered and giving rise to the legend of Guy Fawkes. (Davies, The Early Stuarts, p. 48, p. 337).

1625: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 33, p. 48, accession of Charles I in 27 March, 1625, after end of reign of James 1. Ireland, chronology, see James 1 (1603-1625), as James VI of Scotland, finally became King of England, stiffened the penal laws against Catholics, and a response was a great Catholic uprising, a plan to blow up James I and the Parliament on 5 November, 1605. Plot discovered, hence the legend of Guy Fawkes, and 36 barrels of gunpowder discovered. Attitude of James I: James I personally loved peace, but he misunderstood the situation in Europe, he despised the Dutch because from the point of view of divine right of kings, they were "rebels".

1625: On Martin Noell:

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Martin Noell became influential in West Indies business. He was also a friend of William Courteen, the financier who had done much from 1625 to create the original establishment on Barbados. Noell appears to have been married to a Miss Thurloe as Thurloe was a brother-in-law of Noell. I assume this is the same Sir Martin Noel referred to in Pares, Merchants and Planters. Noell became a well-known financier and he acted as an agent for Shaftesbury, for Barbados. (Shaftesbury's brother George married a daughter of a London sugar baker, Mr. Oldfield - Shaftesbury remained interested in sugar and Barbados from 1646). Fraser, Cromwell, p. 534, suggests Noell was knighted by Charles II, but died bankrupt. There was a Thomas Noell, a planter of Barbados. I have assumed Thomas was a brother with the other Noell names; but this is not a known fact. There was also a John Povey, Virginia Merchant, who worked with Nehemiah Blakiston, 1699-1721 as agents; their banker was Micajah Perry. The planter name John Randolph, resident in Virginia, also arises in that context. Martin Noell, Jnr, active by 1647, is noted in Pares, Merchants and Planters. On Nehemiah Blakiston: Blakiston was a collector of customs duties on the Potomac and a leader of Charles County, Maryland. He was active by 1689. [A useful title would be Bernard C. Steiner, 'The Protestant Revolution in Maryland'. Report, American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1897, Washington, DC 1898., pp. 289ff].

Martin Noell: Sources: (Brenner, pp. 175ff.) Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 386ff, for Noel of Brook. Martin Noell and Povey are noted in Newton, Colonising Puritans. See also, K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968., p. 64; See also, Penson, Colonial Agents; Alison Olson, 'The Virginia merchants of London: a study in eighteenth century interest group politics', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, Vol. 40, July 1983., pp. 363-388., here, p. 373.

The English historian, Brenner, has only recently outlined the career of a conspicuously successful seventeenth century London merchant, an early "expansionist" of the first founding of the British Empire, Maurice Thomson. [K. G. Davies mentions Thomson only briefly in Royal African Company]. Thomson seems almost the business manager of the extraordinarily energetic Puritan noble, Robert Rich (1587-1658), the second Earl of Warwick. In fact, Warwick's business manager was his kinsman, Sir Nathaniel Rich (1585-1636), so it is possible that Thomson answered to Sir Nathaniel Rich. Whatever the organisational details, Thomson and his brothers enjoyed remarkable commercial careers that have been insufficiently acknowledged in the earlier history of English colonisation.

1625: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 337), Sir Charles Courteen noted that an English ship had touched at Barbados, found it uninhabited, and possessed it in the King's name. Courteen soon sent out ships and soon had up to 1800 people on the island, maintained by their employer. Courteen began cotton and tobacco plantations. the proprietorship of the island went into dispute, Davies does not say how or why, and slowness of Courteen's supplies threatened famine. and the island survived, and by 1640 was exporting profitably, tobacco, cotton and indigo. Thomas Warner is establishing Barbados in 1625, (see C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies. Vol. 2, The West Indies, Second Edn, Oxford. 1905, cited in Penson, Colonial Agents, p.8.

1626: In 1626, George Villiers in his essay On Plantations had vainly - and a little surprisingly - emphasised the shame of taking "scum of people" to plantations, which they "only spoiled". (Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47). It appears Charles made an arrangement with the Earl of Carlisle (family name Hay) concerning proprietorship of certain Caribbean Islands including Barbados. The reverberations were to mean many years of political conflict (as to English arrangements that is) in the Caribbean Islands.

1627: More to come

1628: England: Harvey publishes a description of the circulation of the blood.

1628: Sir Thomas Warner, coloniser of Barbados, governor of Antigua (1575-1648-1649).
Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York, Facts on File, c.1992., p. 76.; Richard B. Sheridan, `The Rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua, 1730-1775', Economic History Review, Series 2, Vol. 13, 1960-1961., pp. 342-357., here, p. 346. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 27. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 184. Davies, Royal Africa Company, index. Burke's Landed Gentry for Warner formerly of Framlingham.

1628: Sir William Courteen Senior (died 1636). He once devised a plan to settle Australia but failed to act.)
(Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York, Facts on File, c.1992., p. 68. George Mackaness, `Some Proposals for Establishing Colonies in the South Seas', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 24, Part 5, 1943., pp. 261-280 with Sir John Callender's proposal given pp. 271ff. Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously. DNB entries, various. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 125, pp. 171ff. Williamson, Caribee Islands. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984., pp. 278ff, pp. 301ff. On Courteens, see Shafaat Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century (in its Political and Economic Aspects). London, 1923. Ian B. Watson, `The Establishment of English Commerce in North-Western India in the Early Seventeenth Century', Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1976., pp. 375ff. Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff. Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, c. 1976., pp. 39ff. Also, Holden Furber, `The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, 1783-1796', ECHR, 10, (2), November 1940., pp. 138-147. Holden Furber, John Company at Work. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1948. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 183, Note 69. On Courteen's descendants, GEC, Peerage, Kent, p. 176; Hereford, p. 480; Maynard, p. 602; Valentia, p. 207.)

1628: By 1628, Barbados is already a thriving English colony, planting tobacco. In 1628 the Courteen House sent out more settlers, expanding the colony to 1600 people, "to strong for the Spaniards to challenge". Goslinga finds that the obscure history of the colonization of the Lesser Antilles is compounded by the fact that James I made his grants to rights to the Caribbean orally. Charles I later confirmed such grants with written documents, but was confused in designations to the Earl of Carlisle and the Earl of Pembroke. He writes, p. 259, "The Dutch firm of the Courteens also appears to have played a part in the general intrigue that renders inscrutable this entire episode". Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680, pp. 212ff.

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1628: Earl Warwick takes over governorship of Bermuda Co. to make it a puritan project, in 1629 many of similar view backed the Providence Island Co, to be theirs exclusively, and in 1629 the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nath Rich, Lord Saye and Sele, another puritan the Earl of Lincoln, patronized the Mass Bay Co. so these puritan ports siphoned off religious exiles. large link up, finally, of merchants and puritans, each influencing the other.
(Brenner, p. 273) Unexpectedly, Digges and Morris Abbot and his archbishop brother about the time parliament dissolved in 1629, went to the side of the crown, Abbott as Gov of EICo probably tried to help the Levant Co. top men from further radicalising, and cooled the EICo, so annoying the colonising nobles, so the opposition nobles Lord Saye, earl of Warwick and Lord Brook launched March 1629 an attack on the elite merchant leadership of the EICo, to promote their own alliances, which consisted of some of their own smaller investors. The battle went on for years.

1628: North America: On 9 March 1628 the Earl of Warwick makes a grant of land in Massachusetts to establish the New England Company (first governor is Matthew Craddock of Levant Co., and operator of Mystic River), an unincorporated predecessor of the Massachusetts Bay Co. Warwick had got the land in 1623 from the Council for New England, of which he was president in 1628, and he gave it to Dorchester Company people, and East Anglian gentlemen. (Brenner, p. 276.)

21 June, 1628: England: Digges and Rich again put forward idea for an English West India company; Rich had a bill pre-written. Part of an idea is to "breed up mariners". Similar plans in late January 1629. In August 1628 the Dutchman Piet Heyn (sic) reportedly took a Spanish treasure fleet for £1,200,000. (Brenner, p. 267).

1629: The Dutch form a West India Company. See W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti: From the earliest times to the commencement of the Twentieth Century. London, John Murray, 1915., p. 89.

1629: The English East India Company in London checks its books and is horrified to find it is more than £300,000 in the red. Clerical cost-cutting results.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1629: Colony of Massachusetts founded. In 1629, a new settlement at Salem includes six master shipbuilders.

1629: England: As early as 1629, a grant is made re the Carolinas, but no serious attempt to colonize till 1663, with eight proprietors, being Earl of Clarendon, Duke of Albemarle, Sir John Berkeley, Sir George Carteret, Earl of Craven, John Colleton, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (later Earl of Shaftesbury), and Sir William Berkeley. King only gave the Carolinas as this coalition was too strong to deny. most of these proprietors had other colonial interests, Colleton with Barbados, Sir Wm Berkeley as Gov. of Virginia, Carteret and John Berkeley involved with New Jersey. Carolina suitable for baronial estates. The Carolina system once the disgruntled Barbadians came provided a specialized plantation agriculture, promoted slave labour, reduced the flexibility of the existing local social system, articles of Carolina government drawn up by Ashley Cooper with help of John Locke, based on political ideas already outmoded in England itself. (Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 119-121.)

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1629: On 4 June, 1629 the Dutch ship Batavia goes down off the coast of Western Australia, leaving her legacy of bizarre tales of shipwreck followed by mutiny, murder, rape and retribution. (Also leaving today's Aboriginals of the area with a rare genetic anomaly originating in Holland which was being examined by scientists in 1991-1992).

1629: In 1629, Britain abandoned her pretensions on Nova Scotia, when Charles I made peace with France. (See Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660. The Oxford History of England. OUP. 1959).

1629: Nova Scotia had been given attention by Scots colonists in 1620, but in 1629, Britain has abandoned her efforts on Nova Scotia as part of Charles I' peace plan with France. (Otherwise, Englishmen regularly entertain fantasies of sending convicts to Nova Scotia until after 1788). (Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 326.)

1630 and earlier: Follows a list of earliest EICo names, to about 1630: Sir John Banks (1627-1699) (no relation to the later botanist Sir Joseph Banks), Edward Christian (see Glynn Christian, p. 23 on family of Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian, Thomas Cordell (died 1612, linked to William Garraway and William Holiday plus privateer George Clifford, Earl3 Cumberland in 1594; see Brenner, p. 18), William Methwold, mariner James Lancaster, Richard Bateman, London Lord Mayor Ralph Freeman (also Russia Co., and from 1624 he was linked to the Rich faction in control of the VA Co.), Robert Bowyer active by 1620, Thomas Mustard active by 1634, John Williams active by 1634, Capt. Weddell active by 1610, Sir Francis Cherry, Edward Sherburn a secretary to Earl of Salisbury and also to Lord Keeper Bacon, William Parker Lord Monteagle (also Va. Co.), Capt. Richard Swanley, Paul Bayning Visc1 Bayning of Sudbury.

By 1630 the Spanish government agreed to market its American silver in London instead of Genoa, gold otherwise got from the Netherlands, so in all the EICo tended to be dependent on Spain as a silver supplier.
(K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600-1640. London, Frank Cass, 1965., p. 136. From about 1630 the East India Company in India was deeply reliant on Indian financiers, the shroffs, e.g., Tapi Das, just as a new joint-stock Company formed. Griffiths, Licence to Trade, p. 84; in 1631, a new joint-stock company being formed.)

1630: Indian port Surat: Famine strikes. And in other parts of India.

date?: 1630+?: (Morse, p. 228), First English ships to carry on trade with China were those of the Courteen Association, Byrnes notes that Courteen had links with Dutch VOC which have never been specified. (See Horsea Ballon Morse, 'The provision of funds for the East India Company's trade at Canton during the Eighteenth Century', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April 1922, Part 2. pp. 227ff. MF 950.05/Roy at Dixson Library, UNE.

1630: By 1630 the East India Company has 12,000 employees. (Alison Olson, Making The Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790. Harvard Univ. Press, London, Harvard. 1992., p. 17).

1631: James I had granted in 1618 a charter for a Guinea Company to Sir Robert Rich later Earl Warwick and some merchants. In 1631, the next Guinea Co. arises for England, .... . with charter from Charles I to Sir Richard Young, Sir Kenelm Digby, Nicholas Crisp and Humphrey Slaney and others.
W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti: From the earliest times to the commencement of the Twentieth Century. London, John Murray, 1915., p. 89.

1630: Some 900 Puritans under John Winthrop settle on the Boston Peninsula of New England coast, and at Charlestown, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury and Dorchester. Within a year they are trading with Virginia, later with Maryland.

1632: More to come

1633: More to come

1634: New England, America (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, begins to send masts of local timber for English navy, which does not use them till the Dutch War of 1652-1654 cuts off naval supplies carried by the Baltic trade. A mast sells for £95-115 or even up to £1600 for an extra-large one.

1635: H. B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635-1834. (Five Vols) 1926-1929. *

1636, Foundation of Harvard University in North America.

1637: June: Yorkshireman Capt. John Weddell, calls at Macao as sailing for wealthy London merchant Sir William Courteen. Courteen's organisation had earlier settled Barbados in the Caribbean. Weddell's expedition is only partially successful, carrying sugar, green ginger, cloves, gold and porcelain.

1637: June: Yorkshireman Capt. John Weddell, calls at Macao as sailing for wealthy London merchant Sir William Courteen. Courteen's organisation had earlier settled Barbados in the Caribbean. Weddell's expedition is only partially successful, carrying sugar, green ginger, cloves, gold and porcelain.

The earliest-recorded American slaving ship is Desire of Salem, which transports 17 Pequot Indians for sale in West Indies and brings home some Negro slaves.
K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988., p. 43

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1638: On Barbados by 1638 is Thomas Verney son of Sir Edmund Verney. (Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 12.)

1638: Japan: Shimabara-no ran (Riot at Shimabara) 40,000 Christians and farmers stayed in the island and fought against 100,000 of the government soldiers about 4 months. Protestants (Dutch) helped the government from the sea to seize the riot.

1638-1639: England: February: the Sheriff of Surrey receives a warrant to deliver to one William Flemmen [Fleming?] of London, Gent, some convicts for Virginia. (Wilfrid Oldham, Britain's Convicts To The Colonies. Sydney, Library of Australian History, 1990., pp. 5-6).

1639: India: English acquire Madras from a local dealer.

Late 1630s: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 335), depression in England in the late 1630s, reached a crisis when Charles I seized bullion in the tower, and though it was restored, confidence had been undermined. He also proposes to debase the coinage. A depression went on 1640-1650.

1639: Japan closes its coasts to foreigners.

1640: Founding of Montreal in Canada.

1640: English East India Co establishes Fort St George at Madras.

In 1640: Charles harms the East India Company, buying a lot of pepper, selling it at a loss and depreciating the future market; he anyway never repaid the Company. (See William Foster, 'Charles II and the East India Company', English Historical Review, xix, pp. 456-463). Other companies had similar grievances with the Crown as the depression advanced through 1640-1650.

1640: (G. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 286-287), rapid spread of the joint-stock company, as with EICo from 1600, writers begin to contrast the moneyed interest with the landed interest, no specialized bankers yet exist, spare coin is no longer stored in the Tower, but Charles I in 1640 has threatened to seize bullion there, so merchants used the strong rooms of goldsmiths for "banking".

1640: From the early 1640s, an English settlement at Bengal. From India came calico, spices, raw silk, indigo and saltpetre for gunpowder, pepper, cloves and nutmeg. English exports to India included textiles, tin, lead, and coral from the Mediterranean. It was always necessary for East India Company ships to carry bullion, as imports exceeded imports. During the 1640s, a risk arose that the EICo settlements might have to be abandoned. The Company experienced trouble with the Covenanters and the Civil Wars, and trouble also with the Courteen Association. Matters however improved during the Commonwealth, and a new arrangement was made with the Courteen association. Cromwell gave the East India Co. its first government support. A debate arose concerning joint-stock or shipowners supplying their own capital and ships. (See Davies, The Early Stuarts).

1640: English East India Co. establishes Fort St George at Madras.

1640: English occupy Hooghly, India. All English settlements and factories brought under control of Fort St. George at Madras.

1640: From about 1640, Barbados notables included Edward Cranfield and Edward Shelly, Capt. George Martin. (Penson, Colonial Agents, p. 17).

1641: Dutch capture Malacca on the Malay peninsula.

1642: ... and political repression was giving victims to the English notion of transportation. (Irish Records, Transportation, Belfast, PRO, T.429, Letter from R. West to the Deputy of the Isle of Man and court decree concerning the transportation of rebels from County Down in 1642. Copies from the Rushen Papers in the Manx Museum).

1642: English Civil War.

1642: Dutch mariner Abel Tasman discovers Van Diemen's Land - Tasmania.

1643: Re New Netherland/New York, in 1643 the New Englanders help form the New England confederation, for defense, competition with the Dutch at New Netherland, and in 1664 a new effort to subdue New Netherland, as it was encroaching on English holdings, so the king decided to grant the area to his brother James, the Duke of York, as a proprietary province. James' deputy was Richard Nicholls who sailed for New Netherland from Boston, and Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant surrendered in September 1664, colony renamed New York. New York's staple of trade was fur, part of the New York territory included what would become New Jersey, and James Duke of York here favoured his friends Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, two defenders of the Stuarts during the Puritan Cromwell period. and in 1665 they established a government for the area, but New York protested at this as it clashed with their own interests, there were Finns and Swedes then on the Delaware River, and in 1674, Lord Berkeley sold his New Jersey interests to two Quakers, John Fenwick and Edward Byllynge. And these Quakers used trustees including William Penn. (Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 115-116.)

1642-1643: (Morrell, p. 13ff), The Dutch are dominant on the Indonesian archipelago, and never really challenged Spanish claims in the Pacific. Van Diemen is an ambitious Gov.-general in the Dutch East Indies who plans a voyage for Tasman and his pilot, Major Visscher in 1642-43, the circumnavigation of New Holland, whose western and north-western coasts the Dutch East India Company's pilots had already been mapping. Tasman thought New Zealand was part of a great southern continent. (The Dutch also sent Roggeveen into the Pacific in 1721-1722, but found his work unprofitable. Morrell writes, "The disinterested curiosity of the 'age of reason' brought a new, more scientifically oriented motivation into play in regard of the Pacific."

1643: Evangelista Torricelli invents the barometer.

1644: China: The Manchu state (led by Nurhaci), captures Peking-Beijing. Later, Nurhaci's son Abahai moves from being Khan of Manchuria to Emperor of China.

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1644: Toricelli's barometer explains puzzle re pumping out mines.

1644: China: Ming Dynasty succumbs to foreign invasion, from the Manchus, descendants of the displaced Jurched. Manchus establish the Ch'ing Dynasty.

1644: The last Ming emperor of China hangs himself. His apology: "Now I meet with Heaven's punishment above, sinking ignominiously below... May the bandits dismember my corpse and slaughter my officials, but let them not despoil the Imperial tombs nor harm a single one of our people".

1644-1645: Later the New Model army was formed by Parliament, and a decisive battle at Naseby, June 14, 1645, which lost the Midlands to the Royalists. Later king surrendered to the Scots, and Oxford surrendered in June 1645. Army discontent becoming radical and etc., and looked as though a second civil war might begin. Cromwell had to suppress the Scots at Preston 17 Aug, 1648, as the Covenanters felt the Covenant had been broken. King tried for treason and Charles I beheaded on 30 Jan., 1649. Also, the Presbyterian domination was overthrown. The Queen (of Charles II) later regarded as regicides, Okey, Walton, Scroop, Norton, Pride, Whaley, Edwards, Tichbourne, Lambert and Blackwell, who now had "patriotic possession of large portions of the queen's dower":

1645: "The first identified American vessel to import slaves from Africa is Rainbow." She brings to Boston two slaves been kidnapped, not purchased. Puritans are offended and set them free, then sent them home.
See K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways.. University of South Carolina Press, 1988., p. 43.

1646: More to come

1647: More to come

1648: More to come

1649: Russia: Recent laws fully establish serfdom in Russia, by when serfdom has virtually disappeared from Western Europe.

1649: Little is known, but it is thought Thomas Crispe in 1649 was the chief factor on the Gold Coast for Rowland Wilson, Maurice Thomson, John Wood and Thomas Walter, whom he called The Guinea Company. The original site of Cape Coast Castle had been given to the English, then taken by the Swedes, then re-taken by English during Crispe's time on the coast. Crispe claimed he had obtained the original site from the local natives. (Davies, RAC, pp. 40-41).

1649: Charles I of England executed after trial. See career of Cromwell.

1649: Trial and execution of England's King Charles I.

1649: Recent laws fully establish serfdom in Russia, by when serfdom has virtually disappeared from Western Europe.

1650: Year tea is first drunk in England as imported from China.
Meantime, on piracy, see George Wycherley, Buccaneers of the Pacific: of the bold English buccaneers, pirate privateers & gentleman adventurers, who sailed in peril through the stormy straits or pierced the isthmus jungle, to vex the king of Spain in the South Seas & the Western Pacific, plundering his cities & coasts & preying on his silver fleets & his golden galleons. London, John Long, 1929.

Between 1604-1606, one of King James I's court was Sir Edward Michelbourne, one of the founders of the East India Company. However, James I also licenced one English and one Scots courtier to make their own voyages to the East, against the interests of the infant Company. Michelbourne became an interloper, as he'd fallen foul of the Company in London by not paying his dues. By 1604, Michelbourne had obtained from James a license to make an independent voyage to Asia, to China and Japan, in violation of the earlier royal charter, and he cruised as a pirate for two years; he returned to England in 1606 and shortly died. The East India Company desired but did not gain redress for the damage he'd done their reputation till 1609. (Later, Charles I when he backed Courteen's endeavours behaved much as James I had - distrustfully). (The East India Company "recalled" earlier distributing some 70,000 pounds in bribes to win a new charter, about or after 1604.)
(Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, pp. 71-79.)

In 1606, as returning interloper, Michelbourne had warned the Company that the English at Surat could expect trouble from the Portuguese (Middleton later fought the Portuguese; so did Captain Thomas Best of Company Voyage 10). With the English East India Company, 1607, Voyage 3, Captain Keeling and his second-in-command, Captain William Hawkins, had orders to open trade at Surat, or Red Sea ports, before going to the Archipelago. Hawkins here was ex the Levant Company and spoke Turkish (it is hard to align the career of this Hawkins with what we find on the other Hawkins' of Plymouth, treated earlier in these files.) James I meantime had written to the King at Surat. (There was at one time a Captain Keeling with a Lt. William Hawkins on Hector.)
(Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800.)

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Otherwise, in 1606, James I also with one charter established the London and Plymouth Companies, giving them grants extending 200 miles inland of "America". In early 1607, three ships under the command of Captain Christopher Newport (ex Mediterranean and Asia trades) carried 100 men and four boys to the Chesapeake. (Here, Sir Thomas Smith/Smythe, the leading merchant of the Virginia Company of London, was the same man also interested in the East India Company). Another Virginia Company investor was George Calvert (1578-1632), Lord Baltimore, a Catholic whose title had been granted by James I. Calvert had been the king's principal secretary of state but resigned, and he also invested in the New England Company.
(Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, pp. 21-22, pp. 42ff.)

In 1606, a few days before Christmas, sailed from London the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to begin the American colonisation.
(R. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 3.)

The third East India Company voyage was in 1607, sailing for the Red Sea. The Company's fourth voyage was commanded by Alexander Sharpie (who receives uncommon little attention from historians). In January 1608, Sir Edward Michelbourne led an independent interloping voyage and found Surat unsafe. In 1608, William Hawkins (was he of the noted Plymouth family?) went to Surat, then to Agra, the Mogul Imperial capital, for permission to open trade on the Indian sub-continent. The Portuguese were represented at the Mogul Court by Jesuits, who succeeded in having Hawkins expelled in 1611. So the English East India Company's first bid to move into India ended in failure. Another move was made by Best in 1612. Later followed Sir Thomas Roe's visit to the Moguls.

From 1607 the English East India Company ceases using its own ships and begins to charter ships.
Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 95.

Following this commercial decision, a list of notables with links to both the Virginia Company and also the East India Company would include:
Thomas Dyke (active 1617), interested in the 1612 voyage for a north-west passage, investor in the East India, Virginia and Bermuda companies;
Newton, Colonising Puritans, variously.
John Dyke, of the Rich/Earl Warwick faction controlling the Virginia Company by 1624, owner of some privateering ships used by the second Earl of Warwick, and a deputy-governor of the Providence Island Company;
Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 63.
The dissident Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629), MP, of the Rich faction of the Virginia Company as its treasurer 1619-1621, also East India Company investor;
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 70-100. Who's Who /Shakespeare, pp. 214ff.

William Paget (1572-1628/29), fifth Baron Paget;
GEC, Peerage, Paget, pp. 283ff. Burke's Extinct Baronetcies for Asshurst, p. 18; Lorimer, Amazon, p. 215, Note 3. By 1612 he had invested in the East India, Virginia and Bermuda companies. He was a member of the council of the Virginia Company, 1611-1612 and actively promoted colonisation and colonial trade.
(Privateer, Christopher Newport. An East India Company investor, he commanded the Virginia Company voyage of 1606.
K. R. Andrews, `Christopher Newport of Limehouse, Mariner', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, 11, 1954., pp. 28-41. D. B. Quinn, `Christopher Newport in 1590', North Carolina Historical Review, 29, 1952., pp. 305-316. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 36, p. 84; Rabb, Enterprise, p. 221.
(Richard Weston, first Earl Portland. (GEC, Peerage, Denbigh, p. 179; Portland, p. 583ff. Hasler, History of Parliament, Vol. 3, p. 605; Hervey, Arundel, p. 262.) a Catholic and friend of Spain, who in 1624 was a Commissioner for Virginia, a navy comptroller and a commissioner of the East India Company; Gabriel Barber of the Bermuda and Virginia companies (died 1633):
( Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 63, p. 125.)
Thomas Cordell (died 1612);
London Lord mayor Ralph Freeman.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 73-103.)

1604: 5 December: James I has permitted an expedition by Sir Edward Michelbourne to the East Indies with Tiger and Tiger's Whelp departing Isle of Wight on 5 December, 1604, and with aboard the highly-experienced John Davis, who had sailed with James Lancaster. Davis had been bad-mouthed by Lancaster to the East India Company re dealings at Achin concerning Davis' views on availability of pepper at Achin, and prices. On this voyage, Michelbourne behaved like an unprincipled pirate in regard to local and Dutch shipping. A Japanese pirate junk which had already worked the coasts of China and Cambodia, Borneo, quietened Michelbourne down - and killed John Davis. Michelborne had to shoot cannon through the interior of his own ship to get rid of the Japanese. Michelbourne got home to England in 1606.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1604+: The first French East India Company was founded in 1604 - with letters patent granted by Louis XIII, but this effort was still-born. (See Mukherjee's book here on French activity.) In 1623, Coen, "the real founder of the Dutch eastern empire", tortured and killed ten Englishmen at Amboyna, the Spice Islands, ousting the English except from Bantam at Java. This soured English-Dutch relations and also, as a shifting of focus, led England to concentrate on the Indian mainland. The English remembered the Amboyna incident bitterly for generations.
(On Coen, see Om Prakash, The Dutch Factories in India, 1617-1623: A Collection of Dutch East India Company Documents pertaining to India. New Delhi, Manoharial Publishers, 1984.)

1605: More to come

1606 Spring: Middleton arrives back to England after voyage to the East Indies/spice islands of the Moluccas, with little cargo due to the depradations of not the Dutch or Portuguese, but Englishman ("gentleman adventurer") Sir Edward Michelborne. Michelborne had earlier sweet-talked James I, who scarcely grasped the issues about trade, and the necessity for a properly-backed monopoly against the powers of the Portuguese and Dutch, into permitting a Michelbourne expedition to the East Indies with Tiger and Tiger's Whelp departing Isle of Wight on 5 December, 1604.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

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1606: Ships chartered by Elizabeth I are instructed to purchase the finest Indian opium and transport it back to England.
From website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com

1606: Sir Edward Michelbourne arrives home to England from his piratical voyages to the spice islands to retire to disgrace. Meantime the English East India Company realised that after sending three fleets to the East Indies, and about 1200 men, they had lost 800 lives, mostly by disease. The Dutch were about sending 14 fleets made of 65 ships. So the English East India Co. decided to send out a Turkish-speaking Englishman, William Hawkins to negotiate with the Moghul Emperor of India, Jehangir, from 1607.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1607: Under William Keeling, third expedition of ships of English East India Co. to spice islands, with instructions to keep ahead of the Dutch, with £17,600 of gold bullion and only £7000 worth of English-produced goods. Also sailing is David Middleton, captain of a small ship, Consent (at Table Bay by 24 July 1607), who knew Gabriel Towerson, who had been left at Bantam in the spice islands by David's brother Henry in 1604. David Middleton sailed for the Celebes Islands, where he bought cloves (and slaves) and sailed for England. Middleton spent £3000 and reaped more than £36,000.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1607: William Hawkins is sent on ship Hector by English East India Company to negotiate with Moghul Emperor of India, Jehangir for creation of an English factory on India's western coast at Surat. Hawkins had the bad luck to encounter the Indian owner of a ship that had earlier been pirated by Sir Edward Michelbourne. But Hawkins had luck in getting on well personally with Jehangir (a binge drinker and opium taker), speaking in Turkish. Hawkins became a member of the Moghul inner court, and ended up married to an Armenian woman. Hawkins finally died on his way home and his Armenian widow married East India trader Gabriel Towerson, who took her back to the East. (Towerson once kidnapped a Negro named Coree of the Table Bay area, took him back to London, to be met by Sir Thomas Smythe. Coree was cheered up by a present of some chain mail, which he often wore, then taken back to South Africa.)
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: Christmas: William Keeling's ships in the spice islands sail home for England via the Banda Islands, only to be interrupted by arriving Dutch ships. Even more Dutch ships on a seriously commercial-military mission under Peter Verhoef, with 1000 Dutch fighting men and Japanese mercenaries. Verhoef proposed to build a fort on Neira Island, to defend the Dutch from the Portuguese, which locals found outrageous. This fort was built on the foundations of an old fort abandoned by the Portuguese about 100 years earlier. A massacre followed, perhaps co-organised by Keeling. The Bandanese massacred 42 Dutchmen. Dutch command went to Simon Hoen who demanded revenges, but signed a peace treaty by 10 August 1609 which gave Neira to Dutch power. But the Dutch ended killed by the locals including dyak head-hunters), so that when David Middleton arrived, he had great complexity to deal with. Encouraged by Middleton, the islanders killed even more Dutch. In London after Middleton got home, the East India Co. directors began to look at maps and the island of Run.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1608: By 1608, reports are that Henry Hudson (an Englishman) has sailed to within ten degrees of the North Pole. He has also touched the eastern coast of Greenland. English merchants are interested, the Dutch also. Hudson arrived in Amsterdam in 1608 to meet the Dutch East India Co., to have his navigation theory questioned by Petrus Plancius. The seventeen of the Dutch East India Co. failed to accept Hudson's plan, so Hudson was approached by the French (King Henry IV) via dissident Dutchman Isaac Lemaire. The Dutch found out and recalled Hudson for an expedition for 1609.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1609: August: Crew on Henry Hudson's ship Half Moon see the shores of Chesapeake Bay. later Hudson got to Coney Island at the mouth of the Hudson River. (The Hudson River had been discovered 85 years before by Giovanni da Verrazano in the service of the French, searching for a way to the East Indies.) Hudson's findings (eg about Manhattan Island) generate different views in Holland versus England. The Dutch are not interested, the English were.
(Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Penguin Books, 1999/2000.)

1610: Samuel Eliot Morison, European Discovery of America. (Two Vols.) Boston, 1971-1974.*

1610: David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America. New York, 1974.* Also, Set Fair for Roanoke. Chapel Hill, 1984.*

Notes on merchant history of the English-speaking world since 1550:

Virginia to 1749: how it grew out of Amazon ventures:

Virginia. A word applied to tobacco. The name comes from Virgin, from the Virgin Queen, England's unmarried Queen Elizabeth. The area's name first referred to parts of North America not held by the Spanish or the French. Raleigh's piratical English colony on Roanake Island had failed, but England tried again, slightly north, with a venture sponsored by The London Company, or, the Virginia Company.
(On the merchants behind the first Virginia Company, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 98ff.)

James I in 1606 with one charter established the London and Plymouth Companies, granting them land extending 200 miles inland of the Virginian coast.
(A few days before Christmas 1606, sailed from London the ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery to begin the American colonisation; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, p. 3. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 93-94. C. M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History. Four Vols. New Haven, 1934-1936.)

In early 1607, three ships and 144 men under the command of Captain Christopher Newport, ex the Mediterranean and Asia trade, carried 100 men and four boys to the Chesapeake Bay. They entered the bay in April 1607, landing on Cape Henry. The new colony elected local councillors, selected a peninsula up the James River, and established there on 31 May, 1607, the first permanent English settlement, called Jamestown, the first of some 13 British colonies-to-be. Richmond is the capital of Virginia, today. Norfolk is the next largest city. The coastal plain or Tidewater region was flat and swampy enough to be called Dismal Swamp. It is cut by four large tidal rivers, the Potomac, the Rappahanock, The York and the James, which empty into Chesapeake Bay. By 1697 the best Tidewater lands had been taken up and some soils were found exhausted; so began the settling of the Piedmont.

At the western end the Tidewater rises and provides the Piedmont, which stretches south to the North Carolina boundary. Rising abruptly in the piedmont is the Blue Ridge, and between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian plateau further west is the Shenandoah Valley, which has provided one of the world's memorable songs inspired by great rivers, songs that are often wide and sweeping, reflective, pensive if not outrightly melancholy.

As troubles reigned in Virginia, the numbers of newcomers were cut to only 38 by the end of 1607. The Virginian colonists held out, however, and more supplies plus additional settlers arrived in January and October 1608. A new charter of May 1609 abolished the original 1606 patent and a local governor with near-dictatorial powers was appointed. A large expedition, nine ships, sailed from England in May 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates as deputy-governor.
(On the English discovery of Bermuda, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 14. As a comparative view, (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 59) in 1609 there were 176 traders active in the unregulated trade with Spain.)

Two ships were lost in the Bermudas, the others arrived in May 1610 to find the people at Jamestown had barely survived "the starving winter". More settlers arrived however.

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James I thought tobacco smoking horrible, loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to lungs, and he blasted it anonymously in a pamphlet, A Covnter [sic] Blaste to Tobacco by R.B. anno 1604.
(Richard B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry. Yale University Press, 1950., p. 116.)
Aware of lung cancer, modern medicine would agree with him. As early as 1610 the Virginia Company experienced trouble in covering the expenses of voyages, since many investors had defaulted on the second and third payment of their stocks. By 1612 it had to use lotteries to keep solvent. In 1611 Sir Thomas Dale was given authority in Virginia. In 1612 a third and final charter was given to the Virginia Company over the Bermuda Islands. This charter was more liberal in that each person transporting himself to Virginia would be granted 50 acres, and the company also set up subsidiary, private joint-stock companies to settle larger areas. And so, agriculture.

From 1612, John Rolfe tried tobacco planting using a Trinidad variety which found favour with the English. He married the Indian princess Pocahantos and thereby obtained some eight years of peace with the Indians of the area.
(In 1616, as a convert to Christianity, the wife of John Rolfe, and mother of a son, with several other Indians, Pocahantos sailed to London and was presented as a princess to the king and queen. She intended to return home in 1617 but took ill and died at Gravesend to be buried there. She was one of a line of indigenous people to visit England, including, from the Pacific, Tahitians and Australian Aboriginals. For example, Aboriginals Bennelong with Governor Arthur Phillip, Mydidie with Sir Joseph Banks. Like Pocahantos, several of these indigenes died in England, although Bennelong returned to Sydney. On John Smith and Pocahontas, see Ch. 4 in Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London, Methuen, 1986.)

The new governor became Thomas West, Lord De La Warre. ( Thomas West (1577-1618), Lord De La Warre.
Following sections reply heavily on Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire.)

The first Negroes arrived in Virginia in 1619 in a Dutch ship. Initially, most Negroes were indentured, not enslaved, but later, atrocious legislation by Europeans successively eroded any ideas or sentiments protecting the rights of Negroes so as to justify slavery, where human beings were owned as property. The local assembly, the House of Burgesses, became the first of its kind in the New World. By 1619 the urge on American soil for self government asserted itself very quickly, and by 1641 the colony was well established.

Regroupings in London of Virginia merchant factions:

One early Virginia Company investor was a magnate of the Levant and East India companies, Sir Thomas Smythe, whose plantation efforts were unsuccessful.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 97-98, p. 154.

Sir Thomas Smythe in 1623 became governor of the Bermuda Company, to be succeeded in that role by his son-in-law, alderman Robert Johnson.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 98; Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 70).

Regrettably, confusion still exists about the genealogy of Sir Thomas Smythe. Here, however, arises a further genealogical mystery concerning a Lord Mayor of London about 1518, Sir Thomas Mirfyn. The implications are as follows - Mirfyn's possible longer descendancy via a son Edward and a daughter Frances involves the later names Palavicino, Cromwells, Earls Fauconberg, the later Edens, the eighth Marquis Tweeddale, other Cromwellians, second Baron Ashburton (that is, Baring), and Barringtons of the Rich faction. If the same Sir Thomas Mirfyn had a daughter Joan who married Lord Mayor Andrew Judd, then Mirfyn's shorter or other descendancy would include names such as customs receiver, "Customer" Smythe (died 1591), Knightleys as republicans, Lord Mayor Rowland Hayward, Roper/Lords Teynham; and perhaps some members of the Rich faction.)

By 1616, Smythe, a London alderman, had been sometime governor of the East India, Muscovy, French and Somers Islands companies. His son-in-law was Robert Johnson, a director of the Levant and East India companies who became a governor of the Bermuda Company. Smythe became one of the leading merchants of the Virginia Company of London, but he remained interested also in the East India Company.
(The Rich family, Earls Warwick, had a large interest in Bermuda; and the second Earl of Warwick became governor of the Bermuda Company in 1628. Alison Olson, Making The Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790. London, Harvard University Press, London. 1992., p. 17.)

Sir Horatio Palavicino (1540-1600) was an Elizabethan financier from a Genoese family who died a remarkably wealthy English commoner. By 1592 he had tried to corner the world supply of pepper (does anyone ask if this had relation to reasons for the establishment of either the English or Dutch East India companies?) He had children by his wife Anne Hoftman, who as widow married the Royalist, Sir Oliver Cromwell (died 1626). Several of Cromwell's children by his first wife, Elizabeth Bromley, married Palavicino's children. Sir Horatio lived in the notable parish, St Dunstan's, Tower Ward.
Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956.)

Another of the "Virginia Magazine" was Sir John Wolstenholme, a leading London financier and a customs farmer as well as East India Company director. Other Virginia investors included William Essington, a leading Merchant Adventurer who was a son-in-law of the Merchant Adventurer, Sir Thomas Hayes, a Lord Mayor of London; William Canning, a noted Merchant Adventurer, was also deputy-governor of the Bermuda Company and several times master of the Ironmongers. (Ironmongery became important items of trade on the African slave coasts).
(Another noted Virginia Company investor was George Calvert (1578-1632), Lord Baltimore, a Catholic with a title granted by James I. Calvert had been the king's principal secretary of state but resigned; he also invested in the Virginia Company and the New England Company, and spent money on a Newfoundland colony, Avalon. Later his son Cecilius acquired land which became the colony of Maryland. Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, 1607-1763. London, Macmillan, 1965., pp. 21-23, pp. 42ff. GEC, Peerage, Baltimore, p. 393.)

With the arrival in London of James I after the death of Elizabeth I, earlier English interest in anti-Spanish privateering abated somewhat, but interest in Amazon adventures was retained, especially by the first and/or the second Earl Warwick. The descendants of Amazon adventurers gradually developed an interest in Caribbean plantations, which also allowed them to retain an anti-Spanish spirit. Meanwhile, seven or more Levant Company merchants had helped establish the East India Company in 1599-1600, and that grouping had little interest in the Caribbean, or anti-Spanish activity. But from about 1618, some figures interested in Amazon adventures firmed their interest in Virginian business.

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The "Rich faction", the second earl of Warwick's faction, remained extremely active, although the extent to which it owed its Virginian interests to its earlier Amazon interests is debatable, and has not yet been traced in detail by historians. In 1618 the second Earl of Warwick had become an original member of the Guinea Company, newly-incorporated to engage in profitable trade in Negroes.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 34-36.)

In 1618 the ship Treasurer Capt Daniel Elfrith was fitted with a Savoy Commission as a man-o-war; she carried the first shipment of Negroes ever sold in Virginia, and her arrival provided Warwick's enemies in Virginia with reasons to attack. They accused him of piracy, though Elfrith said the Negroes been obtained properly.
(Here, Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 36, notes with irony that the same man, Warwick, who introduced Negroes slaves into British America also introduced the charter of Massachusetts, later the foremost abolitionist state.)

At the time of the ship money dispute, the value of the Rich navy was so great that Warwick obtained a commission modelled on the lines of Queen Elizabeth's commission to the anti-Spanish privateer, George Clifford (1558-1605), the thirteenth Lord Clifford, and third Earl of Cumberland , who according to Newton in European Nations in the West Indies had been "more prominent than any other English nobleman as a leader of corsairs; since 1587 he had organised and fitted out at his own expense no less than eleven expeditions against Spanish commerce", with his twelfth attempt being his last.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 37ff. R. G. Marsden, `Early Prize Law', English Historical Review, April, 1910. Arthur Percival Newton, (Ed.), The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, Black, 1933., p. 115. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 70. GEC, Peerage, Cumberland, p. 568; Clifford, pp. 294ff. Some of Cumberland's commercial associates were Thomas Cordell (Mercers, and Levant Co.), William Garraway, Sir John Hart, Paul Bayning, John Watts.)

In 1619, the Earl of Warwick took a prominent part in financing Roger North's Guiana expedition, and in 1620 he was granted a seat on the council of the revived Plymouth Company for New England, and went to its meetings. As to linkages between Puritans, Warwick/Rich was a neighbour of Sir John Bourchier, whose daughter Elizabeth had recently married Oliver Cromwell. Warwick as organiser of the Guiana Company had wanted to settle there some of the separatists of Robinson's congregation at Leyden, but the dissolution of the Guiana Company meant that Company looked to North Virginia instead, hence the sailing of the Mayflower in August 1620. (The captain of the Mayflower seems to have been Capt. Peter Andrews, who engaged in Virginia and West Indies tobacco planting. Andrews was brother-in-law of the ship's owner, Samuel Vassall)
( Vassall was a Presbyterian City man and a navy commissioner who married a daughter of the London-Levant merchant, Abraham Cartwright. He was once interested with Pym in suppressing an Irish rebellion. He refused to pay ship money, was a wholesale clothier, imported eastern currants and silks, and also tobacco, flax and hemp. With Mathew Cradock he became a co-founder of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Vassall probably owned the Mayflower, taking the Puritan Fathers to America. William Vassall was a Massachusetts Bay colonist.
Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 59-60, p. 193, Note 22. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 151ff.)

(It was later, by 13 January, 1630 that Warwick obtained for the Mayflower puritans a grant of the second Plymouth patent.)

Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, was the eldest son of Robert (1559/60-1618-19), the first Earl Warwick and third Baron Rich, and great-grandson of Richard, first Baron Rich, chancellor of the Court of Augmentations to Henry VIII, founder of the family fortunes, a Puritan and a contemporary of John Preston.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, pp. 192ff. GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff; Newhaven, p. 539.)

The Rich family were anti-Spanish and therefore distasteful to James I. The second Earl of Warwick continued the earlier privateering expeditions of his forebears; in 1614 he became one of the original members of the Somers Isles Company. In 1618 he had 14 shares in the Somers Isle Company and one of the divisions of the Islands was called Warwick Tribe (sic, a peculiar appellation). In 1616 he and his father fitted out two ships with a Savoy Commission to rove in the East Indies. In fact, the second Earl of Warwick, and his commercial associates busily united the themes of anti-Spanish activity, interest in Virginia, and trade in the zones desired by the English East India Company. The anti-Spanish vehemence of Warwick's day lasted long in English cultural life, and was once expressed once Australia had been settled, by the Enderby whalers, by way of fantasies about attacking parts of the western coasts of South America. On one album of English folk songs can be found two anti-Spanish lyrics:

Take this scone to wear this horn, it was the crest when you were born,
Your father's father wore it and your father wore it too...
Hal-an-Tow, jolly rumble-o, We were up, long before the day-o.
To welcome in the summer, to welcome in the May-o.
The summer is a comin' and the winter's gone away-o.
What happened to the Spaniards, that makes a greater boast though?
Why they shall eat the feathered goose, and we shall eat the roast-o.
Hal-an-Tow. Jolly rumble-o. We were up, long before the day-o.

And again:

And now I will tell of brave Elliott, the first youth that enters the ring,
and so proudly rejoice I to tell it, ... he fought for his country and king.
When the Spaniards besieged Gibraltar t'was Elliott defended the place,
and he soon caused their plans for to alter, some died, others fell in disgrace...
(From (1) Hal-an-Tow and (2) Earsdon Sword Dance Song, sung by The Watersons, Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ceremonial Folk Songs. Topic Records, UK. 12T136.

The Earl of Warwick's Savoy commission was obtained for considerable money from Scarnafissi, the agent of Charles Emmanuel I, who was then on a money-seeking mission to England. In the East, the Rich ships took a Mogul ship worth £100,000, which was recaptured by an East India Company ship; there followed a long dispute with the Company, though while it proceeded, Rich was "constantly at the Company", borrowing stock ordnance and stores for his ships.

In 1618, Rich sent his ship Treasurer to plunder the Spanish West Indies; then he sought to use Virginia as a base for similar pirating. However, by 1620, Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629) and his circle intervened in this, and brought information to the Privy Council and the Spanish ambassador.
(Relevant here is Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, Chapter IV, The New-Merchant Leadership of the Colonial Trades.)

How far the colonising faction led by Warwick should be regarded as "aristocratic" or "commercial" remains unclear. Answering to Warwick in commercial matters from 1619, it appears, was his kinsman Sir Nathaniel Rich. (Newton regards Nathaniel Rich as the business head of the Warwick faction.) And some opponents of Sandys included an East India Company officer and alderman, Morris Abbot, a Levant Company officer Christopher Barron, and some top Merchant Adventurers including William Essington, William Palmer and Edward Palmer.
(Sir Nathaniel Rich is noted thus in Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16.)

Sir Thomas Smythe led another anti-Sandys faction of merchants including Sir John Wolstenholme and Sir William Russell, both leading crown financiers, plus merchants Hugh Hamersley, alderman Robert Johnson, Nicholas Leate, Anthony Abdy, John Dyke, Humphrey Slaney, Robert Bateman, Thomas Styles, Richard Edwards (all Levant Men), William Canning and Humphrey Handford (of the French trade and an importer of European wares).
(On the rivalry between the camps of Sandys and Sir Thomas Smith, see Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16.

In 1619, Sandys supplanted Smith as treasurer of the Virginia Company. In the Sandys camp were Wriothesley, Earl Southampton, Lord Cavendish (William Cavendish (1551-1625), first Baron Cavendish, first Earl Devonshire), and John and Nicholas Ferrar. Sandys saw "direct links between power and freedom, company profits and colonial prosperity". Lord Cavendish also had one-eighth of the Bermudas. It might also be noted that Frances, sister of Lord Cavendish, married William Maynard, first Baron Maynard, son of secretary of the treasury for Lord Burghley, Sir Henry Maynard. Frances' brother Charles, an auditor of the Exchequer, married Essex Corsellis, daughter of a colleague of Maurice Thomson, Zegar Corsellis, a Dutch financier name. In later generations, Cavendish women married Charles Lord Rich and Robert Lord Rich.
(GEC, Peerage, Maynard, p. 599. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 621.)

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So, the anti-Sandys faction included Smythe and the Rich/Warwick factions. There was a tendency to first destroy the Virginia Company in order to save it, and at the time, James I's treasurer was Sir Lionel Cranfield.
(Lionel (1574-75-1645), first Earl Middlesex, was early in his career, to 1622, a merchant adventurer. Rabb, Enterprise, p. 21, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 68. GEC, Peerage, Middlesex, pp. 689ff.)

The pro-Sandys faction from 1618, the year of the "Great Charter" of the Virginia Company included William, first Baron Cavendish, and Wriothesley, Earl Southampton, plus brothers John and Nicholas Ferrar.

Squabbling over Virginia, and with company reforms of 1618, Sir Edwin Sandys' "gentry party" battled Sir Thomas Smythe's "merchant party" for the position of treasurer of the Virginia Company.
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 10-16. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 99-100.)

Sandys' gentry party from 1618 ousted the Smythe faction, but still found it hard to keep Virginia supplied financially. London merchants withdrew from Virginian adventures, till 1623 when they joined forces to regain control of tobacco handling. Just who gained that control is difficult to find, but by 1617, Virginia was shipping 50,000 pounds weight of tobacco per year, and her planters were developing a boom mentality. By 1638, Virginia exported two million pounds of tobacco.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 113.)

Dissolution of the Virginia Company:

In 1620 came the abandonment of the charter of the Amazon Company. By February 1621, Sir Nathaniel Rich had wanted to see the establishment of a West India Company.
(Sir Nathaniel Rich, (1585-1636), knighted in 1617, was the senior business manager for the second Earl of Warwick, with Maurice Thomson evidently reporting to him. Nathaniel was grandson by illegitimate descent of Richard, first Baron Rich. Nathaniel's father Richard (died 1610) had been a Virginia colonist. DNB entry for Nathaniel Rich. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 242. Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 195, Note 1.)

From 1618 erupted a squabble between the Sandys/Smythe factions for the role of treasurer of the Virginia Company.
(Here, the present writer would agree more with Brenner's analysis than with Bliss' analysis. The solution to the problem with the Virginia Company lay in finding a mode of government which fitted a plantation production system novel to the English; not, as was the Sandys plan, of finding ways to transplant English community life in a new environment. It rather seems as if Rich, the puritan Earl of Warwick realised more astutely than many others that an individualistic Puritanism that discriminated less against common folk - colonists - could solve this problem more easily).

In 1620, James I had stepped in to stop the Rich faction using Virginia and the Somers Islands (Bermuda) as bases for privateering against the Spanish in the West Indies. Later the king made the Rich faction abandon their efforts with Guiana. (Charles 1 gained the throne of England on 27 March, 1625.) In 1621 James 1 revoked the lottery funding the Virginia Company and in 1621-1622, James 1 tried unsuccessfully to back the Smythe faction in the battle for the position of treasurer of the Virginia Company. By 1623, when Sandys' faction thought they had convinced the king their views on the government of Virginia were sound, the king amazed them when in 1624 there was declared a vacancy of the Virginia Company charter, and with some involvement from Sir Nathaniel Rich, control of the company was given to Lord President Mandeville.
(Viscount Mandeville, first Earl Mandeville, sometime treasurer, Henry Montagu (1563-1642). His family turned part Whiggish; his son Edward was anti-ship money, a Cromwellian peer, although he later assisted the Restoration. GEC, Peerage, Manchester, p. 365; North, p. 657. The new governor of Virginia was Sir Francis Wyatt (a descendant of the Wyatt plotters early in the carer of Elizabeth I, who had married a niece of Sir Edwin Sandys).

Charles I when he examined the Virginia Company situation dealt with two Sandys supporters, the Earl of Dorset and William, first Baron Cavendish.
(Earl Dorset, This was Richard Sackville (1589-1624)), third earl of Dorset, an investor in the Virginia Company by 1609.
(Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 194, Note 5).

He was married to Anne Clifford, daughter of the anti-Spanish "privateer", George Clifford, third Earl Cumberland. Anne Clifford also married the anti-Spanish Philip Herbert, fourth Earl Pembroke, who was also interested in the Virginia Company, and was patron of Sir William Courteen Snr. in squabbles over the development of England's Caribbean interests. The first Earl of Dorset, sometime treasurer, Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), was of the descendants of Lord Mayor Geoffrey Boleyn.
(GEC, Peerage, Dorset, p. 422.)

Thus, the third earl of Dorset, as consulted on "colonisation" represented, as it were, two powerful families who had been affronted by Henry VIII's treatment of his wives; the Parrs and the Boleyns. )
Baron Cavendish: In 1624, (Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 113), Virginia had only 1000 colonists. On 1 March, 1624, the House of Commons' motion regarding seizure of departing East India Company ships, became part of the Smith/Smythe/Sandys squabble. Treasurer Cranfield had backed Sandys' opponents. The Commons gave some backing to Sandys and his gentry men trying to retain control of the Virginia Company. Maurice Thomson et al, were led by Smythe and backed by the Rich faction, the Earl of Warwick. At first, Charles and Cranfield had backed the merchants in their fight with Sandys; by 1624, Charles and Cranfield had destroyed Sandys tobacco monopoly, dissolved the old Virginia Company, and reconstituted it with merchants plus the Rich faction.

Behind the whole squabble seems a view taken in England, that one was either for or against the right of the individual in Virginia to own property, manage resources and make a profit in ways new to traditional English life and politics. Sandys lost the battle because his assumptions, while "democratic" enough in some ways to disaffect the king, were not well-fitted to the system of production which at the time was stimulating a boom mentality. What the king wanted finally was sufficient control over trade and profits, and so he conceded some ground on questions of colonial government, resulting in Virginia's new independent House of Assembly.)

In 1623, Buckingham and Charles had returned from their mission to Spain, determined to end the Spanish match. Their stance seemed to open ways for a rise in anti-Spanish feeling generally. Buckingham and Charles wanted to resurrect the careers of the anti-Spanish Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton...
(This was Thomas Wriothesley, (1607-1667) fourth Earl Southampton; or his father, Henry, (1573-1624), third earl, an investor in the Virginia and East India companies, also interested in finding the north-west passage. The third earl was a backer of the Sandys faction in the Sandys/Smythe squabble over the treasuryship of the Virginia Company.)

....and the Earl of Oxford, lately imprisoned by James. They welcomed William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and also the second Earl of Warwick. (Another figure to be mentioned is the great Puritan minister, John Preston, linked to Calvinist ministry, who had tutored the Earl of Warwick's son). Also with close ties of friendship to Lord Saye was the puritan Sir Richard Knightley (1593-1639).
(One of Knightley's wives was Anna Courteen, daughter of Sir William Courteen Senior. Knightley's cousin Sir Valentine Knightley was a member of the Virginia Company. Newton, Colonising Puritans, p. 69. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Knightly. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 261.)

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As Saye became an ally of Buckingham, there was also alliance with the parliamentary opposition. Buckingham even managed to recruit "the mighty earl of Pembroke", who hated Buckingham.
(Philip Herbert (1584-1649/1650), fourth Earl Pembroke, whose first wife was Susan De Vere and second, Anne Clifford. This fourth earl was given a grant of Barbados but he lost it to Earl Carlisle; by 1627-1628 he held this grant in trusteeship for Courteen Senior (as noted in DNB , entry for Courteen).

Pembroke in 1645 was Commissioner of Admiralty. In 1637 Pembroke with others was given a grant of the province of Newfoundland, which area became "a nursery of seamen". He was in the Virginia Company by 1609, East India Company by 1611, North West Passage Company by 1612 and was privateering by 1625. He and his brother were councillors for Virginia. He or his father appear to have been patrons of Courteen's early attempts to settle Barbados; whether he was double-crossed by the Earl of Carlisle remains unclear.
Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 516. Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 188. Lorimer (Ed.), Amazon, p. 291, Note 2. GEC, Peerage, Carnarvon, p. 44; Pembroke, p. 415; Oxford, p. 253; Dorset, p. 424; Clifford, p. 295. One of this earl's daughters, Mary, married Sir John Sydenham, Bart, (1642-1696) (Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, p. 516.). He was of the same family line as Elizabeth Sydenham, the second wife of privateer, Sir Francis Drake.)

A secretary of state, and a Buckingham protégé, was Sir Edward Conway, who tried to turn James to an anti-Spanish position and to recover the Palatinate. There was arising, a joint Anglo-Dutch move against Spain in the Caribbean, which may also have come to the notice of the Anglo-Dutch merchant, Sir William Courteen senior.

By 1623, writes Davies, James 1 was economically weak, with little credit given him for the good years. He restricted and disorganised trade by adding burdens, a rationalisation being that extra trade would result from peace with Spain. Earlier in James I's reign there had been new enterprises such as the East India Company and the Russia Company, and developments such as Scottish colonisation in Nova Scotia. Too little however was ever reported of Maurice Thomson till Brenner published his research.
(Here, one should also see Newton, Colonising Puritans.)

The extraordinary range of trading engaged by Maurice Thomson (agent for the second Earl of Warwick) and his associates is all the more remarkable if a brief tour is made of the fringes of English settlement and interest patterns of the decades 1600-1640, since it is helpful if the aspirations of a wide range of merchants is known as England expanded.

By Charles' proclamation of 13 May, 1625, Charles rejected Sandys' views on the government of Virginia as smacking too much of "popular government".
(Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 19-24.)

In short, from 1618, the Sandys faction's views on the management of Virginia were brought undone by bad luck, the outcomes of earlier problems, and too much leaning to popular government. (One suspects the king realised that those with the most powerful grip on rising tobacco production, and import, including the Rich faction, had the political views he could live with more comfortably!) Sandys' faction between 1618-1622 sent over 3500 colonists to Virginia, mostly young men, but their policy of diversifying the economy and discouraging tobacco planting failed.

It appears to the present writer that the level of tobacco profits from 1618, problems on the ground in Virginia, plus disputes over how to govern Virginia - popularly, or within the confines of some kind of royal charter - blasted the Sandys faction. The extent of Charles' enthusiasm for controlling the tobacco trade is not explained in Bliss's political analysis - but till April 1623, Charles had favoured his father's outlook on managing Virginia - and the views of the Sandys faction. It seems then that the Earl of Warwick with the help of Sir Nathaniel Rich and later, Maurice Thomson, created means of dominating trade to Virginia - perhaps at the cost of abandoning their anti-Spanish prejudice, and not without the aid of some Dutch capitalists.

By 1624, the Virginia Company's charter was dissolved and declared vacant, and the Crown took over the colony. Charles I had stepped in and Virginia (along with the Bermudas, (the Somers Islands) and New England, became England's first royal colony. The Sandys faction, or the "old Virginia Company" meantime, consisted of customs farmer Sir John Wolstenholme, George Sandys, Sir John Danvers, Sir Robert Killigrew, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir Robert Heath, Sir John Zouch, the Ferrar brothers John and Nicholas, Heneage Finch, Gabriel Barber and Sir Dudley Digges.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 132.)

This faction had little interest in the Caribbean, which was also part of their undoing, since their commercial enemies were linking business between West Indian islands and Virginia. On 15 July, 1624 a new commission was issued by James I to "the merchant party" and also to members of the Rich faction. If there had been linkages between the Rich/Warwick faction, and Sandys' gentry/merchants faction, they were probably cast more in terms of Puritan affiliation, where religious viewpoint helped shape views on the government of colonies, than in terms of more traditional or gentry politics.
(Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 30ff.)

From 1623-1628 the affairs of the Somers Island Co. been going from bad to worse. The Governor. in 1622 was John Bernard, sent out to inspect Capt. Butler's proceedings, but Bernard died, and his successor was John Harrison, a nominee of the Sandys faction, who only held office in 1623. He was succeeded by Capt. Henry Woodhouse (1623-1626); Woodhouse was succeeded by Capt. Philip Bell qv, one of the Warwick/Rich faction. The company's agents were accused in England of monopolistic practices, as they sold dear to planters for necessities and bought cheap. There was conflict with a Barnstaple merchant, John Delbridge, who wanted a right to trade to the islands without paying high license duties required.)

What hampers many historians' treatments of the era is failure to recognise the role of Puritan nobles in what is termed, the anti-Sandys merchant faction.
(The Virginia Company was dissolved by the Crown, and in 15 July 1624 a new commission issued by James I to the merchant party and Rich faction, 41 members including Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir James Cambell and Sir Ralph Freeman, and, plus ten commissioners who were leading officers in the government of James I. But with the death of James I, this new commission was abrogated and Charles I never re-established it. So many of the City's merchants withdrew from trade with Virginia, except for some remaining, including Samuel Vassall and Matthew Craddock, plus Humphrey Slaney who traded with his son-in-law William Cloberry. Some others remaining were Edward Bennett (Levant), Nathan Wright (Levant), Benjamin Whetcomb (sic) (Levant), Anthony Pennyston (Levant), Richard Chambers (Levant), and Wm. Tristram (Merchant Adventurer).
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 103, p. 216.

These were some of the merchants involved by the time William Claiborne in Virginia was promoting the Kent Island project. And so, a newer generation of Levant Company men, different to those first involved with the creation of the East India Company, were becoming interested in North American trade.)

Meanwhile, Warwick's chief business manager, Sir Nathaniel Rich, was understudied by a man who seems more like a merchant banker than a merchant with a great many associates, Maurice Thomson.

( Scattered material on Maurice Thomson surfaces in various books, but he has never been treated comprehensively.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 120ff.

When the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624, William Tucker and Maurice Thomson were partners and brothers-in-law, and were leading Virginia development. Another brother-in-law of Tucker was William Felgate. By 1626, Maurice Thomson had returned to London to organise trade for Virginia, which suggests he had earlier lived in Virginia. Given his timing, one suspects that Thomson had astutely gauged the extent to which Puritan ideology would continue to remain an ally of the production system developing in Virginia.)

It is still not entirely clear that either Sir Nathaniel Rich or the powerful and puritan second earl of Warwick were fully involved in all the schemes in which Maurice Thomson became involved, yet, the schemes had a seamlessness of interest and push about them which suggests a continued high-level and successful inspiration, presumably from Warwick.

Following the settling of the Smythe-Sandys squabbling, a group newly-emerging in Virginian affairs had 41 or more members, including Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir James Cambell (Lord Mayor of London in 1629 and no relation to any Campbells of the extended Campbell family discussed here, who started on Jamaica in 1700). And Sir Ralph Freeman.
(Sir James Cambell; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies, pp. 98ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 89-90.)

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There were also ten commissioners who were leading officers in the government of James I, but with the death of James I, this new commission was abrogated, and Charles I never re-established it.

London merchants by the mid-1620s found that Charles (son of James I) and Buckingham were willing to confront London's Merchant Adventurers in order to try to find new sources of merchant or financial support. The Earl of Carlisle was a dependent of Buckingham, and as proprietor of the Caribbean, Carlisle became an unexpected winner in colonisation stakes, since neither he nor his kin had ever had any interest in maritime activity. (In early 1624, Buckingham did not scruple to stop an outgoing East India Company ship and get from the Company some £10,000 for himself and an extra £10,000 for the king.)
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 216.

On 1 March, 1624 came a House of Commons' motion regarding the seizure of departing East India Company ships, and such matters became part of the squabble between the Smythe and Sandys factions. When the Commons backed Sandys and his gentry men as they tried to retain control of the Virginia Company, this meant that they moved against Maurice Thomson's interests, which meant they moved against the interests of Robert Rich the second Earl of Warwick, and/or those of Sir Thomas Smythe. The treasurer, Cranfield, had backed Sandys' opponents. The king and Cranfield had backed the Sandys party of merchants, but by 1624, Sandys' tobacco monopoly was destroyed, the "old" Virginia Company was dissolved, and it was reconstituted with merchants including associates of the Rich faction.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 252.)

London's America merchants in the City became disconcerted by the stance adopted by the Commons, as they could not deal with America on a monopoly basis, as free trade was to become the rule. Brenner feels it would have been worse for Virginia if the monopoly style of trade had been continued to there, as it would have bled the colonists dry. Sir Francis Bacon suggested that noblemen and gentlemen would be more useful for the Virginia trade as they'd be more inclined to bear a loss than merchants who wanted quick gains. But the nobles were "not interested"; they invested on average a mere £35 each at one time in Virginia. Some gentry did back the "hundreds", or plantation deals, including Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Sir Richard Berkeley, but these were short-term operations. Finally it was seen that new Virginia capital came not from gentry or the greater merchants, so American trade was infiltrated by merchants from lesser backgrounds, including "mere mariners".
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 79, pp. 104-108, pp. 114ff, pp. 116-118.)

So, many of the City's earlier-involved merchants withdrew from Virginia/America trade. Some men remaining in American trade in the 1620s included Samuel Vassall (a name to be known also on Jamaica) and Matthew Craddock, plus Humphrey Slaney, who traded with his son-in-law William Cloberry. Some other investors remaining were Edward Bennett (Levant Company), Nathan Wright (Levant Company), Benjamin Whetcomb (sic) (Levant Company), Anthony Pennyston (Levant), Richard Chambers (Levant), and William Tristram (Merchant Adventurer).
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 92, p. 103, p. 136.

In 1630 Samuel Vassall failed to settle South Carolina, helping Huguenots, in territory granted to Sir Robert Heath. Emigrants for there were mistakenly landed in Virginia. Vassall often worked with Richard Bateson and Edward Wood, who were Maurice Thomson's privateering partners. Also linked was Richard Cranely, a Levant man, an American sea captain who worked Virginia and the West Indies with one Mr. Thomson (possibly the "founder" of Nevis, Edward Thomson); plus Nathan Wright, a Levant Company man trading with New England and an interloper in both the Greenland and Newfoundland trades, before he began with America in the late 1630s.)

Between 1600 and 1630 then, it appears that the following happened: by about 1624, the Warwick circle, and some privateers, entered conflict with Sir Thomas Smythe and City magnates, who led the Virginia Company and East India Company, plus other operations. This conflict encouraged the lesser Sandys faction. Rich's circle otherwise sent out two vessels to the Red Sea with a privateering commission from the Duke of Savoy, and attempted to plunder a great ship belonging to the queen mother of the Great Mogul.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 100.)

The East India Company had just secured trade privileges from the Moguls and were worried. Several Company ships interrupted Rich's vessel and so bad feeling developed between Rich and the East India Company. Then Smythe and his friends frustrated Warwick's attempts to have his protégé, Nathaniel Butler, appointed governor of Bermuda. Smythe's son married Warwick's sister, Isabella.
(Isabella Rich; GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff, Newhaven, p. 539.) ... of which Smythe Senior disapproved.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 216. Isabella Rich; GEC, Peerage, Holland, pp. 538ff, Newhaven, p. 539.)

By the 1630s, a new group or generation of Levant traders, whether or not they remained interested in the East India Company, were also becoming interested in Virginia/American trade, though not necessarily in Caribbean or West Indian trade. This disposition in trading groups would probably have remained, had not Thomas Warner discovered Barbados, the matter which prompted Sir William Courteen Senior to invest in settling Barbados.
On Caribbean dealings between Warner and Maurice Thomson, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 127.

1620: Puritans, the Mayflower and other matters:

The Puritans' Mayflower had sailed in September 1620, landing at Plymouth, an area later annexed to Massachusetts, in 1691, after failing to find Virginia. The Scottish colonisation of Nova Scotia about the same time gave some stimulus to English trade (as we shall see, via Maurice Thomson's interests), but Britain in 1629 abandoned her efforts on Nova Scotia, when Charles I made peace with France. Meanwhile, in 1620 occurred the first known exploration of the African interior, up the Gambia River. A factory was established at the river mouth and later a fort was acquired at James Island. The English probably also visited Sierra Leone and Sherbro River.

An Englishman on one such expedition is said to have been offered slaves, but he magnanimously declined to deal in human beings. Unfortunately, things changed, although it should be emphasised, when chattel slavery began to be used on Barbados, the institution was initially unfamiliar to the English there. On Barbados, a "code" had to be drawn up, in which situation of course, the Negro had no voice, such was the voice of what would become Imperialism! This became the Barbados slave code, later exported to Jamaica, then to Virginia.
(K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company. London, Longmans, 1960., p. 9, p. 15, p. 42. I have leaned heavily here on the use of Davies' lists of investors in the slave trade, as given in his index, in order to link names with other information on men involved in the English slave trades from the 1640s.)

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Also as part of developing trends, in 1620 the City of London sent "a swarm of 100 children" to Virginia; street children.
(F. L. W. Wood, `Jeremy Bentham versus New South Wales', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. XIX, Part 6, 1933.. pp. 329-351; here, p. 330. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, p. 24, pp. 35-37. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 273.)

In this, London's aldermen got their way without protest. The tradition was arising, of people being "disappeared", especially from Middlesex. So, in the American colonies, by 1619, after the struggle between the Smythe/Sandys factions for control of the Jamestown settlement at Virginia, instructions were received for the formation of a local government, the House of Burgesses, which became more democratic in ideas than anything in England or Europe (as Ver Steeg notes). But the need for labour led a demand for slave, convict and indentured labour that would also mean that over time, that any nascent sense of "democracy" was to be corrupted by equations of rights to citizenship with rights arising from property ownership; meaning that citizenship would be offered to fewer European individuals, and denied to those of other races.
(This theme is traced with some feeling in James Michener's novel, Chesapeake, although Michener there makes little mention of transported convicts. Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 32-33.)

How colonisation provoked the transportation of offenders:

In 1620, Sir Thomas Smith (Smythe?) had been allowed to ship 20 people to the Somers Islands (Bermuda). (Within a few decades, the term "being Babadosed" came to mean being kidnapped to work on Barbados. Long later, the term was "Shanghaied"). By the 1640s, many younger people on Barbados had arrived after being kidnapped. Later, other new inhabitants included London thieves and whores, Scottish and Irish soldiers captured in Cromwell's campaigns. Cromwell did much to encourage the transportation of people deemed undesirable, but not before certain trends had earlier been set by the second Earl of Warwick, his associates, and those who answered to them. Between 1623-1624 the newly-organised Dorchester Company was granted permission by the Council of New England to fish and trade. By 1626 the company - with some members prominent Puritans - had established a settlement at Salem, promoting the idea of a Bible Commonwealth.
( By 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company was formed with a charter from the Crown. Some Levant Company men investing in Massachusetts Bay Colony included Francis Flyer, Matthew Craddock, Samuel Vassall, Nathan Wright, men already active in America trade. It is difficult not to see them co-operating with "the Rich faction". The Massachusetts Bay Company members were merchants, some fishing men of the Dorchester Company, some London merchants and some Puritan gentry. (In 1630, some seventeen English ships sailed for Massachusetts, with 1000 persons plus provisions and animal stock).)

Renewed anti-Spanish feeling after the Sandys/Smythe squabble:

Puritanism remained a strong theme in politics. In 1628-1629 were parliamentary confrontations with the crown over unparliamentary taxation, forced loans, arbitrary imprisonment, and Arminianism and persecution of Puritans. A political opposition grouped around the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and Sir Nathaniel Rich and their colonizing ventures.
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 148ff.

It would appear that Brenner is the first historian to strongly link the second Earl of Warwick with the formerly unreported extent of the trading engaged by Maurice Thomson and Thomson's associates. To date, it seems arguable that the significance of the Earl of Warwick's commercial efforts have been understated. On Warwick and some of his aristocratic-investor connections.
See also, Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, pp. 194ff. It is given in Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, A&C Black, 1933., pp. 172ff, that Warwick's efforts should be associated with English efforts seen in the Virginia Company, North's unsuccessful settlement of the Amazons, and the settlement of the American New England - as well as with the anti-Spanish Providence Island Company. Warwick was greatly responsible for the promotion of the English use of chattel slavery - and this is said far too seldom by historians.)

Warwick was probably encouraged by conflict with Spain, as it is almost as though having won his part of the Sandys/Smythe squabble, the Earl of Warwick wished to renew his anti-Spanish fervour, fully aware that English commercial shipping would now sweep wider from Africa, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Virginia, and north on the Canadian coasts.

From 1625, England was to be at war with Spain, then with France. One of England's responses was to promote privateering again, in a context where proposals for the establishment of an English West India Company as well as for improvements to the navy were common. "A group of MPs associated with the second Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich", became vocal. Warwick was a "privateering magnate" and "was to lead the Providence Company in a private war with Spain".
(Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 36-37. [Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 39] has Winthrop at Massachusetts believing by 1640 that the Providence Island Company had lost £120,000. Bliss writes, by the early 1640s, "Meanwhile, parliamentary leaders like the Earl of Warwick were as aware as anyone of the potential for sugar to fuel the sinews of war.")

Andrews in Ships, Money and Politics writes, Warwick was "the only great shipowning aristocrat of his time, patron and chief entrepreneur of westward colonization, especially in the West Indies and the Somers Islands"... Is this remark significant? "The only other peer with a considerable interest in shipping [was] the Earl of Carlisle..." However, it remains difficult to find ship men or traders associating with Carlisle. As he worked to "plant" the Caribees, Carlisle relied even more than Warwick did, on merchant backing. Carlisle's clique of merchants being led by Marmaduke Roydon.
Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, p. 156, p. 183. There is little information however on Roydon's family history or career, and his associates seem surprisingly few.

Later regarding Barbados, the associates of the Earl of Carlisle (family name Hay) were such as Peter Hay, James Holdip. Carlisle's backers included Marmaduke Roydon, William Perkins, Alexander Bannister. The Barbados experience acclimatised English people to managing chattel slavery.
Bliss, Revolution and Empire, p. 33.

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These men Hay had kinsmen, Sir James Hay and Sir Archibald Hay who helped shore up the influence of the Earl of Carlisle, re rent collections. The new governor, Henry Huncks, threatened Peter Hay with physical violence. But the Hays did however understand colonial reluctance to undertake trade regulation if there was a share in colonial government a la issues later rising with the outbreak of the American Revolution].)

There seems however to be little evidence that Carlisle was interested in maritime activity before he developed ambitions to dominate the English efforts in the Caribbean. In fact, little is found in books on the merchants Carlisle used, and his commercial activities, as distinct from his political influences, remain rather blank to the historian. And further, Carlisle's interests cannot be properly understood without reference to Courteen's investments on Barbados - and much else. Perhaps, Carlisle was constrained to use shipping deployed by merchants whose greater loyalty was to the Earl of Warwick?

In 1628 the second Earl of Warwick took over the governership of the Bermuda Company to make it a Puritan project. By 21 June, 1628, Digges and Rich had again put forward a plan for a West Indies company; Rich had a bill pre-written. An associated idea was to "breed up mariners". Similar plans were expressed in late January 1629. (In August 1628 the Dutchman Piet Heyn (sic) reportedly took a Spanish treasure fleet for £1,200,000.)
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 267-268.)

In 1629, many Englishmen with vehement Puritan views backed the Providence Island Company, to be theirs exclusively, and in 1629 the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nathaniel Rich, Lord Saye and Sele, and another puritan, the third Earl of Lincoln (Thomas Clinton, 1571-1619), patronized the Massachusetts Bay Company.
(Third Earl Lincoln: Who's Who /Shakespeare, p. 152. GEC, Peerage, Lincoln, p. 695, Clinton, p. 318.)

So, American puritan ports siphoned off religious exiles (and later, undesirables). There emerged a large network, finally, of merchants, puritans and nobles, each influencing the other, and most of them influencing trade.
(Titles consulted for this section include: Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550-1646. London, The Hakluyt Society, 1989. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530-1630. London, Yale University Press, 1978. See Chapter on Hawkins and the slave trade, Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, Manchester University Press. 1990. Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. With some information on William Courteen, see R. H. Major, FSA, Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of that Vast Island, from the beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the time of Captain Cook. London, For the Hakluyt Society, No. 25. M.DCC.LIX. First published in 1859. J. A. Doyle, The English in America: The Puritan Colonies. Part 1. New York, Ames Press, 1969. (Orig. published in 1887). Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies.)

(In the late 1620s and early 1630s, a few Levant-East India Company men also dominated the Russia Trade, being Hamersley, Job Harby, William Bladwell and Henry Garway.)
(W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-stock Companies to 1720. Three Vols. Cambridge, 1910-1912.)

Once again with the plan for a West Indies Company, the idea was to keep fifty ships stationed, and fifty as back-up. The Venetian ambassador thought any such plan would only keep the Dutch and English at each others' throats. Soon, by 1630, the Bermuda Company would be joined by John Pym, Rudyerd, Lord Saye, Lord Brook (either Fulke Greville or Robert Greville; Fulke the first Baron Brooke, Robert his cousin, second Baron Brooke), and Sir Richard Knightley - all of whom began to deal with Maurice Thomson and Thomson's many associates.

By 1634 there were 175 men trading with Virginia; by 1640 there were 330.
Here, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, Chapter IV, The New-Merchant Class Leadership of the Colonial Trades, is particularly interesting. On debts, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 129.

(And planter debts were to become a matter for comment.) By 1640, America trade was in great contrast to the East India Company's style of operation. In Virginia, a distinction between merchant and planter became blurred as planters dealt in trade, also as merchant-councilors appeared. A large name in the American trade continued - Maurice Thomson. Thomson was born around 1600, the eldest of five sons of a Hertfordshire family, father Robert.
On Thomson, see Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 6, pp. 57ff, p. 91, p. 183, pp. 195ff.

By 1623, Maurice had been in Virginia for six years. He had settled there in 1617, then became master of a 320 ton ship in which he took passengers and provisions for the Virginia Company and the Virginia colonists. He obtained a Virginia estate of 150 acres, and in 1623 his three brothers, George, William and Paul joined him in Virginia, with their brother-in-law, William Tucker, who covered costs. (Tucker had married a Thomson sister.) And in view of the many kinds of trade engaged by Thomson's associates, it may be more appropriate to view Thomson as something other than a merchant. He was more a prototype for a merchant banker with a determination to promote colonisation. He helped expand various forms of commerce - many of them later dependent on slavery.
Perhaps the fullest account of the mutuality of the interests of the Earl of Warwick and Maurice Thomson is given in Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I. Sydney, Cambridge University Press, 1991., p. 6, p. 13, pp. 36-37, pp. 146ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 1255ff treats Maurice Thomson's earlier career.

Sir William Courteen and the struggle for control of Barbados: the Earl of Carlisle and proprietary rights to the Caribbean:

NB: To the end of this chapter is a chronologised listing of the merchant associates of Maurice Thomson, the "merchant banker" who worked consistently for decades to promote the colonising interests of the second Earl of Warwick.

At this point in the narrative must be entered information on two more careers not fully detailed in history books - those of Hay, first Earl of Carlisle, and Sir William Courteen Senior. The Carlisle genealogy is short. Sir James Hay of Kingask, wife unknown, had a son, James Hay (1580-1636), first Earl of Carlisle, who married first Honora Denny (died 1614) who had a fortune; and secondly Lucy Percy (1599-1660) the daughter of the anti-Spanish Henry Percy, third Earl Northumberland.
(Henry Percy, third Earl Northumberland (1564-1632); GEC, Peerage, Halifax, p. 243; Northumberland, p. 734 and Note H; Romney, p. 83; Percy, p . 465.)

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Honora Denny had a son, James (1605-1660), second Earl of Carlisle who married Margaret Russell (died 1676). The second earl's title became extinct.
(GEC, Peerage, Carlisle, p. 32; Denny, p. 187; Norwich, pp. 768-769; Manchester, p. 371. On Lucy Percy" Strickland, Lives of the Queens Of England, Vol. 5, p. 284. Lucy's sister Dorothy (died 1659) married the second Earl of Leicester, Robert Sydney (1595-1677). Robert's father was a member of the Virginia Company, the East India Company and the North West Passage Company. ) Who's Who of /Shakespeare, p. 39. Margaret Russell was daughter of Francis Russell (1593-1641), fourth Earl of Bedford, and Catherine Brydges (died 1656).)

James, first Earl Carlisle, became a favourite of Buckingham. It has been said that the Rich family (Earls Warwick) and the Hay/Carlisle family had bad blood due to a feud between members in Paris in 1624, and long squabbles over proprietary rights in the Caribbean do seem to bear out the existence of such enmity.

Sir William Courteen Senior (1572-1636) was the son of an émigré tailor, William, who had married Margaret Casiere. William's sister was Margaret, who married John, first Earl of Bridgwater. Another of Margaret Casiere's sons was Sir Charles Courteen. Sir William, a financier, married firstly a Dutchwoman with a fortune, named Cromling; and secondly, Hester Tryon. Tryon's son Sir Peter, Baronet (active 1623) married Jane Stanhope (died 1683) the daughter of Sir John Stanhope
(Jane Stanhope married as second wife to Francis Annesley, first Viscount Valentia. GEC, Peerage, Valentia, p. 207.)

Sir Peter's brother was the financier Sir William II Courteen, (died 1666), who married Catherine Egerton, daughter of John Egerton (1646-1701 and a First Lord of Trade, 1695-1699) the third Earl of Bridgewater.
(The third earl married as second wife, Jane Paulet, daughter of Charles Paulet, sixth Marquis Winchester. GEC, Peerage, Egerton of Tatton, p. 16 and note A; Bridgwater, p. 313.)

As noted in an earlier chapter, a daughter Anna of Hester Tryon married Sir Richard Knightley; and another daughter Mary (died 1643) married the MP, Henry Grey, Earl of Kent.
(GEC, Peerage, Kent, p. 176.)

The Courteen genealogy is imperfect. At Cologne was an unmarried Peter Courteen, merchant (1581-1631), but it is uncertain where to place him in the family.

The career of merchant Sir William Courteen Senior:

The capitalist settler of Barbados, Sir William Courteen Senior, was "an Anglo-Dutch financier finally bankrupted by his involvements with the Dutch East India Company".
(Titles generally useful for the preparation of this file included: Griffiths, A Licence to Trade; Furber, Rival; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution; , Ian B. Watson, Foundation. W. K. Hinton, `The Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun', Economic History Review, Second Series, VII, 1955., pp. 277. D. C. Coleman, `Naval Dockyards under the Later Stuarts', Economic History Review, Second Series, VI, 1953-1954., p. 134. S. A. Khan, The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century. London, 1923. P. J. Thomas, Mercantilism and the East India Trade. London, 1926. W. H. Moreland, From Akbar to Aurangzeb. London, 1923.)

Furber writes, Courteen had married a wealthy Dutch woman, Cromling (presumably a widow of a man well-connected with the Dutch East India Company?).
(Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, p. 157. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 43, 51, pp. 200-201.)
(Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff.)

Sir John Coke, as it happened in April 1625, set out a program for privately financed (£361,200) anti-Spanish piracy in the West Indies. Coke's plan seemed to be a project backed by the Earl of Warwick. Secretary Heath had a similar idea for attacking the West Indies by April 1625. Courteen was probably aware of such stirrings. It was at about this point that Warner "discovered" Barbados. But firstly...
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 257.)

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It is possible that Courteens in the City of London had perhaps been given some expansionist inspiration after 1615-1617, since about 1617, the king allowed "the Cockayne project", promoted by George Cockayne, a plan which was protested in parliament as a pocket-liner. The project collapsed.
(Cokayne's project is noted in an earlier file.)

One source says the crown extracted £20,000 per year for granting a charter for the Merchant Adventurers, but treasurer Cranfield instead accepted a lump sum of £80,000 plus bribes and gifts to courtiers. By 1620, trade was in doldrums and calls for free trade (as from Sir Edwin Sandys) were growing. There were strong attacks on merchant privileges. Parliament in 1621 blasted all merchant companies. The issue, of course, was the promotion of royal monopolies and their restricting affect on traders with less respectable backing; monopoly versus free trade.
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 211.)

Early on, the Courteens traded to Portugal; and with Spain in the salt trade. Courteens were creditors of the English king, and they also had many connections with illicit trade of the time.
(Peter (died 1631) the brother of Sir William Courteen Senior is named in Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean, pp. 233-244ff. Peter at Cologne apparently co-managed the European departments of Courteens as Anglo-Dutch merchants.)

Their training was in contemporary commerce, possibly in the cloth trade, in Haarlem. In time, Courteen's body of "adventurers" included influential personalities at the English court. These "influentials" tend never to be named, but it appears that through them, Courteen developed an association with the king.

By 1621, the East India Company was again criticized for exporting bullion. On 3 May, 1621 James I forbade the various company charters from being examined by parliament. A trade crisis peaked in 1622. Parliament did not dent the merchant companies till 1624, especially not the Merchant Adventurers. Some free-trade leaders were Sir Edward Sandys, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Dudley Digges and Sir Robert Phelips (sic), who also opposed the crown on issues of foreign policy and free speech. They entered into alliance with the Duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles (that is, the later Charles II), and they wanted a new (anti) Spanish foreign policy. Buckingham helped turn the tide. The Merchant Adventurers was opened up to new, fee-paying wholesalers. It seems unlikely such men would have ventured an anti-Spanish policy unless such a prejudice had not been heightened by the "Rich faction".

Some Merchant Adventurers of the old school were Sir John Savile, plus Sir Humphrey May, steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, Sir Francis Nethersole, diplomat to Germany, Sir Heneage Finch the recorder of London and a royal appointee, Sir Henry Mildmay the master of the Jewel House. The general hope rose of freeing up the Guinea and Muscovy companies, plus the Eastland Company with its monopoly on importing naval stores. (In time, American traders would become interested in naval stores.)
(Robert G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problems of the Royal Navy, 1652-1862. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1926. Incidentally, the sign used in North American colonies to designate timber set aside for British naval purposes in the eighteenth century was a broad arrow, meaning, naval property. This is the genesis of the "broad arrow" seen on the clothes of convicts around Sydney after 1788.)

There were to consider, the New England Company's newly-granted monopoly of fishing offshore England, and free fishing on the North American coast. The Commons upheld Sir Edwin Sandys, and Sandys' gentry party conducted its bitter fight with some of the City's great merchant leaders in the East India and Virginia companies. Sandys quarrelled with the Virginia trader Sir Thomas Smythe from 1618.

Oddly enough, by 1626, relatively early in colonisation business, George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, in his essay On Plantations vainly emphasised the shame of taking "scum of people" to plantations, which they only spoiled.
(Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 340.)

It was an interesting remark, an objection to what became an English tradition lasting centuries, using colonies as genealogical sumps. Davies records, about 60,000 people left England, one third for New England, and between 1630 and 1643, nearly 200 ships carried 20,000 men women and children at an estimated cost of £200,000 - many emigrants being unwilling to submit to a "hateful government".
(Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, pp. 45-47. On the "pouring" of lower-class Englishmen onto Caribbean Islands by the Earl of Carlisle, see A. P. Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, pp. 156-157. Davies, Early Stuarts, p. 340. Villiers (1592-1628, assassinated), Lord High Admiral, anti-Spanish, first honorary governor of the Guiana Company, married Katherine Manners, daughter of the sixth earl of Rutland. Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628. London, Longmans, 1981. Joyce Lorimer, (Ed.), Amazon, p. 85. GEC, Peerage, Chichester, p. 194; Denbigh, p. 178; Grandison, p. 76; Ros, p. 111; Buckingham, pp. 392ff. The sixth Earl of Rutland, Admiralty Lord Francis Manners (died 1632) was an investor in the East India Company and also took part in the 1620 Amazon adventure. GEC, Peerage, Rutland, pp. 261ff; Lennox, p. 610; Antrim, p. 175; Suffolk, p. 465.)

Buckingham and Charles wanted to resurrect the careers of the anti-Spanish Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Oxford, lately imprisoned by James.
(Thomas Wriothesley, fourth Earl Southampton (1607-1667) had three wives. He helped promote the Courteen plan to settle Mauritius. GEC, Peerage, Bedford, p. 81; Carbery, p. 8; Chichester, p. 194; Devonshire, p. 344; Digby, p. 354; Gainsborough, p. 599; Somerset, p. 78; Northumberland, p. 739; Molyneux, pp. 44ff; Holderness, p. 536; Southampton, p. 131.)

They welcomed William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele (probably first Viscount Say and Sele), and also the Earl of Warwick.
(William Fiennes (1582-1662) first Viscount Saye and Sele is "semi-forgotten": His own DNB entry. GEC, Peerage, Saye and Sele, pp. 486ff; Wimbledon, p. 743, Hibbert, Cavaliers and Roundheads, pp. 300-310, lists. John Kenyon, The Civil Wars in England. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988., p. 261. Newton, Colonising Puritans, pp. 36ff, pp. 65ff. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 261ff. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 12.)

Republican-minded and anti-Spanish, Fiennes was eager for the settlement of Providence Island. He was a Presbyterian enemy of James I and Charles I, and interested in colonisation from about 1629. He led the Oxfordshire resistance to ship money, and once obtained land on the Connecticut River from the second Earl of Warwick; John Winthrop later helped govern that area.)

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Also part of a newly growing network was the great Puritan minister, John Preston, linked to Calvinist ministry, who had tutored the Earl of Warwick's son, and who also had ties to Lord Saye, and the puritan Richard Knightley. Buckingham even managed to recruit the "mighty earl of Pembroke", who had hated Buckingham. A secretary of state and a Buckingham protégé was Sir Edward Conway, who attempted to turn James to an anti-Spanish position and to recover the Palatinate. A joint Anglo-Dutch move against Spain in the Caribbean was also mooted, although it is uncertain if Courteen was part of this. Certainly, the second Earl of Warwick was in an anti-Spanish mood.

Merchants and terra australis incognita:

Attention however now needs to be diverted further to a little known twist in the story of English interest in terra australis incognita, which might have been settled by "the Courteen Association" headed by Sir William Courteen Senior. What is extraordinary is that Courteen (or he and his association) had sufficient capital after they met Thomas Warner, the "discoverer" of Barbados, to sink £10,000 into the island from 1625, and to also manage shipping to the East in a way that remained a thorn in the side of the East India Company - prior to the spectacular Courteen bankruptcy.

Here, Brenner is helpful:
(Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 176.)

"The program of trade and colonization launched by the new merchants' East Indian interloping association found its origin in Sir William Courteen's interloping and colonial projects of the 1630s, as well as those of Arundel, Rupert and Southampton." They wanted to pursue Courteen's plans for the Far East, and also settle areas off Eastern Africa, or, Madagascar. So, in 1645, they sent Capt. John Smart to Madagascar. Some of these projecters were Maurice Thomson and his relatives, plus some of Courteen Senior's associates. And so an argument presents itself, that English interest shown in terra australis from 1625 was part of a grand commercial vision perceived by Sir William Courteen, or, the inheritors of his visions. These inheritors tended to be East India "interlopers". If memory of this persisted in London's commercial circles, it helps explain why the East India Company of 1786 was so negative to ideas of colonizing eastern Australia!

The English find Barbados:

In contrast with Virginia, Barbados in the West Indies, 166 square miles in size, had a "soft" founding, or origin, partly as it was originally uninhabited. Barbados' settlement is oddly similar to the founding of Britain's convict colony in Australia in 1788, respecting the number of people involved at least. Some 1420-1530 people were initially part of the First Fleet complement to Australia.
(Figures vary. See Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet. Sydney, Library of Australian History, 1989. Furber, Rival, pp. 69ff. A London researcher, Gillian Hughes, has advised me thus: Calendar of State XC9452, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I. 1625-1626, State Paper Dept., PRO, Edited by John Bruce, London, 1858., p. 206.)

Courteens involved a similar number of people in developing Barbados as were sent to New South Wales on the First Fleet.

In London, Courteen, Anglo-Dutch financier, was informed that an English ship had touched at Barbados, which was found to be uninhabited, and so had been claimed in the king's name. It is not yet clear when or why Courteen Senior first began to seem influential in London. Furber provides this... Sir William Courteen Senior was the son of an emigre Protestant clothier, and brother of an even lesser-known Sir Charles Courteen. There were two men named William Courteen, father and son, and it is not impossible that some historians have confused the biography of one with the other. William Senior died in 1636; Sir William Courteen the younger died in 1666.

By the mid-1620s, Courteen had many interests in Amsterdam and "along the wild coast of South America". Between 1610-1620, the Courteens of Middleburg used Trinidad for "illicit trade" in tobacco and were attempting to build a network of trade routes to the interior of South America. In 1619 Courteen Senior was involved in proceedings in the Star Chamber, accused of transporting "secretly seven millions of gold" from England. He was discharged about July 1620 with a fine of 20,000 l. for the "unlawful transporting of coin", with a general pardon of past offences.
(Letter from Gillian Hughes, 27 September, 1993, after she had searched information from 1619 to 1636 for the present writer.)

By 1625, "Sir Wm. freely lends his money for supply of the King's instant occasions, and that without interest of the old debt". Courteen's terra australis aspirations may not have been unrelated to the money Courteen had loaned to Charles I in 1625?. (While Courteen's links, if any, to the Dutch East India Company are never mentioned).

In 1625? We find, Item 33: Petition of Sir Wm. Courteen to the King:

"the lands in the South part of the world called Terra Australis Incognita, are not yet traded to by the King's subjects. The petitioner desires to discover the same and plant colonies therein. He prays therefore for a grant of all such lands with power to discover the same and erect colonies."

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On the same original page as this is also mention of a case of concern over enriching the Kingdom, increasing shipping and employing the idle... (Employing the idle was to be a long-standing English pre-occupation, but it should be noted, "idle" came to mean not slothful, but insubordinate). Courteen had first wanted to settle "Australia", but could not, so he settled Barbados. We also find he invested in the Dutch East India Company, which "finally sent him bankrupt".
(Griffiths, A Licence to Trade, pp. 82ff. Furber, Rival, variously.)

We find, Courteen had been intriguing against the English East India Company since the late 1620s. It is generally unheard in Australia that Courteen wanted to settle terra australis incognita. Where this is mentioned, the information is hedged about with various other controversies about the discovery of Australia.
(Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 250 Years before Capt. Cook. Revised. Sydney, Pan, 1977. For a modern view here on the origin of the "Papal Line", Oskar H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake. Vol. 1 of The Pacific Since Magellan. Canberra, Australian National University Press. 1979-1988. [Vol. 2, Monopolists and Freebooters; Vol. 3.)

Various stories are told about Barbados and Warner. In one story, in 1622, Warner became interested in establishing a West Indies colony. He found capital from London merchant, Ralph Merrifield, and became interested in "undercover" West Indian trade. Warner got to St. Kitts by 1624.
(Arthur Percival Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688. London, A&C Black, 1933., p. 143 on Warner and Courteen, p. 155.)

Another story has it that Capt. John Powell, sailing for Courteens, chanced on Barbados, uninhabited, and found that the island was rich in dye woods (known as logwood) used in the English textile trades. Powell claimed Barbados for James I and England, and then called at St Christopher (a haven for fr