THE AMERICAN PLANTATIONS.

177

The plantation of Virginia and of Newfoundland was a viii.s. branch of the great contest with Spain.

1609.

England and Spain had long been rivals in plan- May 23. tation and discovery. Neither could claim for itself the wide continents of America by the happy exercise of native genius; for while a Genoese had given the south to Spain, a Venetian had conferred the north on England. Frobisher and Gilbert followed in the wake of Cabot, though working in a different spirit and to another end. Inflamed by tales of the Incas' shining palaces, Frobisher went forth in search of mines and gold; Gilbert, who revived the spirit of the Great Discoverer, sailed to the far west and gallantly gave his life, not for the rewards of wealth and fame, but solely in the hope of extending English power and of converting souls to God. When he sank in the Golden Hind he left these tasks to his young half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, who lived to be the true Founder of the United States.

Raleigh, trained to politics under the eyes of Elizabeth, saw that the battle-field of the two maritime powers lay in the waters and along the shores of the New World. Europe was peopled. But the prairie and the savannah, the forest and the lake of America were virgin fields, the homes of an expanding race, the seats of a mighty empire in the time to come. Who shall occupy this splendid scene? Shall the New World become mainly English or mainly Spanish? Shall the original type and seed of her institutions be a Free Press or a Holy Office? Such questions throbbed and thrilled in the veins of Englishmen of every rank.

Lord Bacon.

12

1609.

VIII. 9. 9. They answered with one voice. While the Queen lived and Raleigh was free to spend his genius and his May 23. fortune on the work of discovery and plantation, it never flagged. But when James came in, and, with his dread of heroism and adventure, flung the explorer of Guiana, the founder of Virginia, into the Tower, as a first step towards receiving the Spanish ambassador Velasco with proposals for a shameful peace, the old English spirit appeared to droop. Velasco for a time said little of Virginia, for the fires of the Armada and of Nieuport burned in many hearts; but Lerma, in his letters to the King, reserved an exclusive right of the Spanish crown, based on a Papal bull, to all the soil of the New World from Canada to Cape Horn. When his agents in London found their season they made this claim; when his admirals in the Gulf of Mexico felt their strength they chased the English from those seas as pirates. If the Spanish cruisers caught an English crew, they either slung them to the yard-arm or sent them prisoners to Spain.

Ruled by a corporation of adventurers, tormented by these Spanish cruisers, unprotected by the royal fleets, the settlement on the James River fell to grief. A man of genius, Captain John Smith, more than once snatched it from the jaws of death. But the planters fought among themselves, deposed Smith from power, and sent back nothing to the Company save miserable complaints and heaps of glittering dust. The colony was on the verge of failure, when a threat from Spain to descend on the Chesapeake shot new life into the

9. Smith's History, 88, 90; Nova Britannia, 1609; Jourdan's Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels, by Sir T. Gates, Sir G. Sommers, and Captain Newport, with divers others, 1610.

drooping cause. All generous spirits rushed to the de- vIII. ?. fence of Virginia. Bacon joined the Company with 1609. purse and voice. Montgomery, Pembroke, and South- May 23. ampton, the noble friends of Shakespeare, joined it. Nor was the Church less zealous. The ardent Abbott, the learned Hackluyt, lent their names. Money poured in. A fleet, commanded by Gates and Somers, sailed from the Thames, to meet on its voyage at sea those singular and poetic storms and trials which added the Bermudas to our empire and The Tempest to our lite

rature.

10. One hundred and seventy-five years after Walter Raleigh laid down his life in Palace Yard for America, his illustrious blood paid for by Gondomar in Spanish gold, the citizens of Carolina, framing for themselves a free constitution, remembered the man to whose genius they owed their existence as a state. They called the capital of their country Raleigh. The United States can also claim among their muster-roll of Founders the not less noble name of Francis Bacon. Will the day come, when, dropping such feeble names as Troy and Syracuse, the people of the Great Republic will give the august and immortal name of Bacon to one of their splendid cities?

April.

11. The session of 1610 shows Bacon in a charac- 1610. teristic scene. Bound by the traditions of his place to support the King's measures in the House of Commons, when the session opens, with a freedom which surprises the King's friends, and which Coke and Do

10. Statutes of North Carolina, e. xiv.

11. Add. MSS., 11, 695; Lords' Journals, ii. 574.

VIII. 11. deridge never dared to take, he both speaks and votes against the superior law-officers of the Crown.

1610. April.

The List of Grievances has at length been shaped into a proposition, and laid before the House. This Great Contract, as the people call it, offers to buy from the Crown, either for a fixed sum of money to be paid down or for a yearly rental, certain rights and dues inherited by the King from feudal times, which the change of manners and the refinements of society have made abominable to rich and educated men. Escutage, Knight-service, Wardship of the body, Marriage of heirs and of widows, Respite of homage, Premier seizin, every knight and squire in the land longs to suppress, as things which yield the King an uncertain income, but cover themselves with a certain shame. A group of feudal tenures which concern the dignity of the Crown, such as Serjeantry, Homage, Fealty, Wardship of land, and Livery, they propose to modify, so as to satisfy just complaints while preserving to the King all services of honour and ceremonial rite. Aids to the King they limit in amount; suits, heriots, and escheats they leave untouched; monopolies for the sale of wines, for the licensing of inns, for the importation of coal, they abrogate. In lieu of these reliefs, they offer the King one hundred thousand pounds a year.

12. At first James will not listen. The terms of such a contract touch, he says, his honour. These privileges may be of no moment to the Crown; to part with them may neither lower its dignity nor abate its pride; yet why should he be asked to part with them?

12. Add. MSS., 11, 695; Com. Jour., i. 419, 420.

DEBATE ON FEUDAL TENURES.

181

1610.

Elizabeth had them. All the Plantagenets, all the VIII. 12. Tudors, had them. Why should the first of the Stuarts strip his Crown of privileges held by his predecessors April. for five hundred years? But James is not true to his own folly. To resist a sale of the rags and dust of feudal power, if done on the ground of conscience, would to many seem respectable, to some heroic; but the offer of a hundred thousand pounds a year tempts a man dogged by duns to compromise with his sense of right. He lends his ear; he hints his willingness to treat. Will the Commons give a little more? Will they take a little less? If so, he will hear them; if not, not. Cecil asks Fleming and Coke to declare whether James can lawfully sell the burthens on tenures, yet preserve to his Crown the tenures themselves.

13. The chance of hurting Bacon, who pleads in office, as he always spoke when out of office, for the full surrender of these feudal dues, is too much for Coke. Their feud has, indeed, grown fiercer as they have grown in years, flashing out even in the courts of law. "The less you speak of your own greatness," says Bacon in open court, "the more I shall think of it, and the more, the less." As Bacon contends that a sale of the burthens on tenures is in fact a sale of the tenures, Coke answers Cecil that the King may, if it shall please him, sell the burthens, yet keep the tenures intact. James therefore sends to tell the Commons that he will sell to them for six hundred thousand pounds paid down, and a rental of two hundred thousand pounds a year, his rights of marriage, wardship, premier seizin, respite of homage and reliefs.

13. Spedding's Bacon, vii. 177; Add. MSS., 11, 695.