“A Part of That Commonwealth Hetherto Too Much Neglected”

Abstract

This chapter explores the creation of Virginia's General Assembly in a late Renaissance intellectual and political context in which safeguarding the colony's public took on new urgency. It attends to the ideals of the public and commonwealth that animated Virginia Company leaders like Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, and Sir Edwin Sandys and recovers the particular political crisis the colony confronted in early 1618 from two different directions. In the first place, corporate entities like the Virginia Company faced new pressures from King James I and his Treasurer Sir Lionel Cranfield, who had come to eye such public repositories as sources of wealth to which the king had a rightful claim. The greater threat, however, came from the machinations of Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick, who had similarly come to regard Virginia's public stock as fair game, though for God's purposes rather than the king's. It was immediately after Warwick launched a raid on Virginia's public stock that the Virginia Company created the General Assembly. Its purpose would be to stand sentinel against any such pillaging missions, whether by royal treasurers or Puritan pirates, in the future.