 | CHAPTER XIX History of Virginia |  |
CHAPTER XIX
EXPULSION AND RETURN OF HARVEY
The councillors, more exasperated than ever against
Harvey, looked around for some means of striking him a fatal
blow. Captain Young, holding a commission from the King,
had been empowered to seize or build boats for the royal
service, if he should find himself unable to purchase them. He
obtained Harvey's permission to impress certain carpenters,
who were then under indenture, to construct two shallops.
The council protested, on the ground that this act was in conflict
with the provisions of an existing statute. Harvey
admitted this, but, in his own defense, pointed out the specific
terms of Captain Young's commission. The council, however,
refused to accept his explanation as fully satisfactory,—perhaps
because they were afraid that he would offer the like
clause in his own commission in justification for some similar
violation of the law. Samuel Matthews accused Harvey to his
face "of doing things calculated to raise bad blood in Virginia,"
but as Harvey was simply carrying out in this case
what he had been carrying out in the case of Calvert,—the
royal command,—the fault would seem to have been with the
King, and not with himself.
Other councillors besides Matthews were present at this
scene. "Come, gentlemen," said Harvey, "let us go to supper,
and for the night have done with this discussion," words that
would appear to indicate no very violent mood on his part.
The councillors refused to accept this conciliatory invitation,
and left his company in a huff. Not long before, Harvey, in
an undignified wrangle, had knocked out Captain Stone's
front teeth,—possibly in resentment of some remark, like
his part, as by his increasing personal unpopularity.
Another order from the Privy Council brought Harvey, as
the royal representative, in conflict with the House of Burgesses.
In 1634, the King offered to buy all the tobacco then
produced in Virginia; but that body was not willing to consent
to this arrangement; and they, therefore, addressed to the
Privy Council a letter which seems to have stated their objections
very diplomatically. Harvey, confident that this communication
would arouse resentment, and that the act of his
forwarding it would jeopardize his tenure of his office, very
reasonably suggested that the letter, in the form of a petition,
should be submitted to the colonists at large for their signatures.
In the meanwhile, he continued to hold the original
document in his possession instead of forwarding it to London.
This conduct seems to have been visited with violent
popular disapproval, and meetings were called in various
parts of the Colony to condemn it.
One of these took place at the house of Dr. Pott, who had
reason to hate the governor with bitterness. Friends of
Harvey, getting wind of this assemblage, endeavored to enter
the house to break it up, but one of the physician's servants
barred the door, and they were forced to follow what was
going on inside through the keyhole. Like people in general
who eavesdrop, they heard no kindly sentiments expressed
towards either themselves or their principal; and they quickly
reported to the governor the acrid utterances which had come
so surreptitiously to their ears. Harvey in a passion issued
a warrant for Pott's arrest and imprisonment. It seems that
an appeal to the King had, at Pott's instigation, been circulating
among the people for signatures, and he defended those
who signed it by saying while in jail that every citizen had a
right to approach the throne; and that the persons who petitioned
in this case did so because they had no confidence in
Harvey's sense of fairness.
Harvey at a session of the council demanded that Pott
declined to agree to this step. In a rage, he began walking
up and down the apartment, pouring out, as he did so, a torrent
of abusive words, whilst the silent councillors looked on scornfully
or satirically. Exhausted at last, he took his seat, and a
long silence followed, which was broken by his saying, "What
do you think that they deserve who have gone about to persuade
the people from their obedience to his Majesty's substitute?
I begin with you, Mr. Menifee." "I am but a young
lawyer," was the guarded reply, "and dare not upon the sudden
deliver my opinion." Councillor after councillor took the
cue which Menifee thus gave and politely refused to answer.
Matthews, however, with characteristic boldness, made a vigorous
protest against Pott's arrest as well as against other
acts of the governor which he considered illegal; and at this,
Harvey began to storm again, until finally the meeting
abruptly broke up.
As soon as the council reassembled, the governor at once
brought up the subject of the popular appeal to the King,
which contained some severe reflections on his public conduct.
When Menifee acknowledged that he had read this petition,
Harvey cried out, "I arrest you upon suspicion of treason to
his Majesty." "And we," exclaimed Utie and Matthews, laying
their hands on his shoulders, "arrest you for treason to
his Majesty." At a signal from Pott, forty musketeers, who
had been hidden by him from view, ran forward, with their
pieces ready to fire; but at his order, stopped at the door.
Matthews was now seeking to soothe the outraged feelings of
the unhappy governor. "No harm is intended you, Sir," he
said. "We only want to acquaint you with the grievances of
the people. Their fury is up against you,[1]
and to appease it
is beyond our power, unless you please to go to England, there
to answer their complaints." Harvey very properly refused
Majesty," he said with dignity, "and without his consent, I
will not leave my charge." But realizing his forlorn situation
at Jamestown, and apprehensive of a personal assault, which
his body-guard by itself would be unable to ward off, he, in
the end, consented to leave the Colony and return to England.
He was treated with disrespect before his departure,—his
order to the General Assembly to dissolve, for instance, was
disregarded; and he was also refused repossession of his
formal commission and instructions, which had been taken
from him. The Councillors elected Captain Francis West in
his place; and a committee of the Assembly, having drafted a
series of resolutions in justification of Harvey's expulsion,
appointed Thomas Harwood to deliver them in person to the
Privy Council. Harwood was accompanied by Dr. Pott.
Unluckily for both, they went out to sea on the same boat as
the Governor, who, when land was made at Plymouth, persuaded
the mayor of that town to arrest the physician and to
seize the documents in Harwood's custody. The circumstances
of Harvey's removal from office came up in December,
1635, before the Privy Council. Harwood stated, in that presence,
that the governor, if he ventured to return to Virginia,
would be pistoled; but the Council, as a matter of political
expediency, decided that he must be acquitted; and acquitted
he was. They probably did not think that the charges were
very serious, as he had, in most of the actions which were
questioned, been simply obeying the royal instructions. All
his opponents in the Virginia Council were summoned to
appear in England to answer for their conduct.
The elated Harvey asked the Government for a man-of-war,
so that he could return to Jamestown in state to resume
his old duties; but was constrained to sail in a common merchantman,
after his nobler vessel had sprung a leak. Arriving
in January, 1637, he promptly dropped from the Council
every hostile member and filled the vacancies with men who
had shown friendliness to his person; but he very prudently
with the uprising against himself, except for those who had
actually ousted him from his seat. He was particularly vindictive
against Samuel Matthews, as the leader of the successful
movement to expel him. "I will not leave him a cowtail
to his name," he exclaimed; and this consummation, in
Matthews' absence on trial in England, he endeavored to bring
about through Secretary Kemp and his other partisans. These
men broke the locks of the Matthews house, tousled the papers,
and carried away the goods, cattle, and servants. Only a small
share of this property was ever recovered, although Matthews
had secured an order from the Privy Council that all was to
be returned.
Rev. Anthony Panton had, for some reason, denounced
Kemp as a "jackanapes." He was arrested at the instance of
that underling on the score of speaking disrespectfully of
Harvey and the Archbishop of Canterbury,—a somewhat
amusing, because so incongruous, a combination; was fined
five hundred pounds sterling; and compelled to confess himself
in fault from one end of the Colony to the other. He was
then banished from Virginia, with the warning that he would
have his head chopped off if he ventured to come back.
In the meanwhile, Harvey's enemies in England were
intriguing night and day to undermine him. A committee had
been appointed by the Privy Council to investigate the charges
against Matthews and his associates; and to this body every
person returning from the Colony with a grievance against
Harvey was referred by these shrewd exiles. The governor
complained that spies were employed to ferret out all the discontented
Virginians who were visiting London. But the
most influential of all his enemies were persons among the
British merchants. The English Government has always been
particularly sensitive to the wishes of its citizens in trade,
and now, as before, it turned a very attentive ear to every complaint
which these men for any reason were led to make. They
criticized especially the following measures recently passed
tobacco; the import duty of six pence on every immigrant;
and the levy of powder and shot on each ship arriving at Point
Comfort. Harvey was not the author of any of these different
laws,—he seems only to have defended their passage, which
was not at all to his discredit; but the Privy Council had grown
irritable over the complaints of every sort directed against
him, and displaced him by the appointment of Sir Francis
Wyatt.
Now began a drama of stroke and counterstroke. So soon
as the new governor reached Jamestown, Harvey was summoned
to court and compelled to disgorge a large part of his
estate as really the property of Matthews, Panton, and others;
nor would Wyatt, in his fear of what might be reported in
England, permit him to leave the Colony. In vain Harvey
declared that his physical infirmities called for the skill of
English physicians. All this time he was writing letters to
the Privy Council bemoaning the oppression under which he
groaned, the robberies of which he was the victim, and the
malevolence of which he was the target. Kemp too was
brought into court to answer for arbitrary conduct towards
Panton and other citizens of the Colony. These decisive measures
of Wyatt, by raising up a swarm of enemies, in the end
led to his own displacement. Hostile suggestions and complaints,
trickling into the ears of the King and Privy Council,
took time to do their baleful work, but ultimately they were
successful.
In 1642, Sir William Berkeley received the commission of
governor, and it was said that his nomination was the indirect
result of the poisonous intrigues that had accompanied
the endless quarrels in Virginia. Apparently, he had no direct
connection whatever with any of these controversies; and his
appointment was undoubtedly due to the sheer influence of a
brother who occupied a seat in the Privy Council, in which
body, he enjoyed all the prestige of one of the most distinguished
families in the English peerage.
| CHAPTER XIX History of Virginia | |