University of Virginia Library

PRIVY COUNCIL REGISTER

Since the Privy Council took no direct part in the affairs of the company
between 1617 and the summer of 1622, its orders related to those regulations which
would enable the acts of the company to advance the interests of the kingdom, leaving
absolute power to the company as the proprietor. Thus fully one-half of its thirty
measures during those five years were reprieves of prisoners, with the warrants nec-
essary to send them to Virginia or orders enabling children to be transferred from
the cities of the kingdom to the colony. During this period the Crown commenced
its attempts to secure a revenue from the tobacco trade, and a series of orders finally
resulted in the approval of the contract with the company in February of 1622/3.
In its foreign and external relations the company was of course subject to the action
of the Privy Council, and hence the orders in council concerned the contest with
Spain over the attack of the Treasurer. Furthermore, the disagreement with the
northern colony concerning fishing privileges had to be adjusted by the council and
resulted in the renewal of the patent to the northern colony and in regulations as
to rights of fishing. It was in the summer of 1622 that the first movement was
made which brought the difficulties between the factions into the open board.
The petition of John Bargrave against Sir Thomas Smythe, Alderman Johnson,
and others, in which they were accused of mismanagement, resulted in the defeat of
Bargrave six months later, as was to have been expected from the hostility of the
Crown to the party in Parliament led by Sir Edwin Sandys, of which Bargrave
was evidently a member at that time. But the storm broke in the following April,
when the commission was appointed to inquire into the true state of the Virginia
and Somers Islands companies. From that date until the dissolution of the com-
pany in the summer of 1624 the council busied itself with the affairs of the company.
No less than 31 orders are recorded which create commissions and empower them
to investigate both the colony and the company and in the end to assume the
functions of government in the name of the Crown, while seven of these documents
pass directly between the council and the colony, and no other measures were con-
sidered except those which enabled the Warwick faction to tear down the work of
the adventurers and to take into its own hands the control of the entire business.
These forms of government, planned by the Crown and the commissions here
recorded, by which the authority was vested in the commissioners and later in a
committee of the Privy Council, stand for the beginning of royal control. Here-

tofore, with a few exceptions, these orders have been known only through the
calendar of state papers, and even then not more than one-half have been included.

The Privy Council Office and its records are located in the treasury building,
Whitehall, London; the registers of the council orders are kept in the clerk's office
but all of the early registers are properly about to be transferred to the Public
Record Office. These registers contain the orders of the council, and, after
Charles I, also the petitions received and the letters issued by the council. In
the earlier reigns such documents were not recorded; whether they were even
preserved as public documents is not certain, although, as stated above, many of
them have found their way to the Record Office and are there calendared among
the colonial, domestic, or foreign papers. There is a collection of such original
material, dating from the close of the seventeenth century, in the treasury building.[149]