White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (11 page)

In 1617, councillors from 100 parishes were called to a meeting in St Paul’s to discuss street children. There might have been a sense of urgency because the Privy Council had recently berated metropolitan officials over the ‘infinite multitude of rogues and vagrants’ at large in the Liberties. The council had warned that 77

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the King was thinking of appointing a man of his own, a provost marshal, to deal with the problem. The St Paul’s meeting agreed to assess each parish with the aim of ridding the city of as many children as possible. Eyes turned to Virginia as the solution.

Under the Poor Law, a parish could get shot of some of its poor children by forcibly apprenticing them in another parish a few miles away, though it is thought only small numbers were ever involved.

What was now proposed was very different: a mass street round-up ending on the other side of the world.

The Virginia Company appears to have been happy to cooperate.

The company wanted the children both to work in the tobacco fields and as part of a developing strategy to promote family life in the colony. Company documents show that there were plans to import hundreds of women and offer an ‘apprentice’ as a bonus to every planter who married one of them.6

Talks between the City of London Aldermen and the Virginia Company began early in 1618. Sir Thomas Smythe and Sir Edwin Sandys, the Puritan politician, represented the company. Sandys, one of the leading figures in the House of Commons, was a major investor in the Virginia Company and had involved himself in its affairs as far back as 1609. He generally played a background role but after 1615, when Sir Thomas Smythe’s health began to deteriorate, Sir Edwin became much more prominent in company affairs, deputising for Sir Thomas when the great merchant was absent.

After weeks of haggling with the Lord Mayor, agreement was reached on the street children. The city would pay the company

£5 a head to take them off its hands and ship 100 out to America as ‘apprentices’. It was agreed that all children would have to be between eight and sixteen years of age and have been born in London.

As with the decree authorising convict transportation, the arrangement was dressed up in bright humanitarian clothes. The Virginia Company was depicted as a saviour of starving children who would learn a trade in the colony, just as apprentices did in England, and one day they would be granted some land. The prolific letter writer John Chamberlain summed up the view of London’s 78

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gentry when he wrote that shipping to Virginia ‘a hundred young boys and girls that [had] been starving in the streets . . . is one of the best deeds that could be done’.7

However, it would turn out that few if any of these cockney apprentices would learn ‘the mystery’ of smithying or baking or tailoring or physicking or any of the other crafts an apprentice might learn in England. The agreement with the City gave the company carte blanche in deciding how to dispose of the children. One document stated that the children would be apprenticed ‘in such trades and professions as the . . . company shall think fit’. Another required the children merely to be ‘employed in some industrious courses’. In fact, most were destined for the tobacco plantations, where the only trade they learned was as field labourers.

In the summer of 1618, the round-ups began. The Lord Mayor ordered constables to ‘walk the streets . . . and forthwith apprehend all such vagrant children, both boys and girls, as they shall find in the streets and in the markets or wandering in the night . . . and commit them to Bridewell, there to remain until further order be given’.8

The constables appear to have gone about it surreptitiously and with good reason, for a heavy hand in London’s warren of back alleys could quickly incite a riot. Macaulay, describing the Whitefriars Liberty between St Paul’s and the river, wrote:

. . . no peace officer’s life was in safety. At the cry of ‘Rescue!’

bullies with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits and broomsticks, poured forth by hundreds; and the intruder was fortunate if he escaped back into Fleet Street, hustled, stripped, and pumped upon. Even the warrant of the Chief Justice of England could not be executed without the help of a company of musketeers.9

To avoid trouble, constables picked up children from the main thoroughfares and markets, one or two at a time. The first two, Robert King and John Bromley, were arrested by the beadle patrolling Britten Street, a road on the edge of Smithfield clogged with market stalls. The same day, a girl and boy, Jane Wenchman 79

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and Andrew Nuttinge, were picked up from Fleet Street, the most densely thronged highway in the metropolis. A single boy, Thomas Otley, was seized in Cheapside.

The net quickly spread out. Children were picked up from St Sepulchre’s in the west, to Cripplegate and Bishopsgate in the east.

For most of these children, the only existing record of them is a name in the Bridewell charge book. One of the few of whom we will hear more was Elizabeth Abbott, the third girl to be arrested.

By February 1619, 140 children were in Bridewell listed as ‘held for Virginia’. No doubt they were lined up and the most robust selected by an official from the company, perhaps Sir Thomas Smythe himself. Seventy-four boys and twenty-three girls were picked out.

Three ships took them, sailing from London some time in the spring of 1619. One was called the
Duty
, another is thought to have been the
Jonathan
. On arrival in the colony, the children were sold for tobacco. Though they and other children shipped after them would ever after be known as the ‘Duty Boys’, one in four of that first consignment was a girl.

Before another batch of children could go, there was a seismic shift that appeared to change everything. Sir Thomas Smythe was forced out as treasurer of the Virginia Company and replaced by Sir Edwin Sandys, who promised a new deal to everyone, investors and settlers.

It is hard to fathom the relationship between Sir Edwin Sandys and Sir Thomas Smythe. They ended up poisonous enemies, each working for the destruction of the other. Given their characters and utterly different points of view, it is understandable that they clashed. Yet, before the crisis of 1619 they had worked together, seemingly harmoniously, for years.

Sandys, the son of an Archbishop of York, had sprung to prominence at the beginning of James I’s reign as a Parliamentarian, and a brilliant one. In a foretaste of the bitter constitutional arguments that would eventually lead to Civil War, he led the attacks on the King’s claim to divine right to rule. The monarch’s right was solely through a contract with the people, Sir Edwin asserted.

At James’s accession, Sandys had been in such royal favour that 80

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he was among the first of the new King’s subjects to be given a knighthood. But his views quickly turned the monarch into his enemy and he cemented himself into that position when he went on to organise the defeat in Parliament of James’s pet project, the union of his two realms, England and Scotland.

Sir Edwin was a populist who revelled in taking on the powerful.

He followed up his besting of the King by attacking one of the most envied and disliked groups in the land: London’s merchant fraternity. Sandys arranged for himself to be elected chairman of a House of Commons committee on monopolies and went to war against the powerful merchants. There were, he said, 5,000

to 6,000 people engaged in trade in England but because of the monopolistic dealings of the governors of the capital’s leading companies ‘the whole trade of the realm is in the hands of 200

persons at most’.10 He probably was not exaggerating. London’s take in customs dues in one year was £110,000. That was more than six times the total take of £17,000 from the rest of the country.11

No merchant was wealthier or headed more monopolies than Sir Thomas Smythe. Yet from 1609 Smythe allowed Sandys, the merchants’ enemy, into the inner councils of the Virginia Company to take a prominent role. The Virginia Company treasurer was also happy, it seems, to see the Puritan politician voted onto the governing councils of two other ventures, the Somers Islands and East India companies. Perhaps Sir Thomas was acting on the Lyndon Johnson principle of preferring your enemy inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Whatever his reasoning, after 1615, Smythe’s health deteriorated and Sandys filled in for him when he was too ill to attend to Virginia business.

In 1616, Sandys was officially appointed as Smythe’s assistant. He handled such matters as the establishment of a second lottery and the negotiations with the Pilgrim Fathers, who wanted to settle in New England.

In 1618, as the street children were being rounded up, Sandys began to move against Sir Thomas Smythe. He emerged as leader of a group of discontented small investors who wanted an audit of Virginia Company finances. Once, Smythe would easily have seen Sir Edwin off. The great merchant had always been supported not 81

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only by other leading merchants on the Virginia Company’s court of shareholders but by the aristocratic investors, who were known as the Court party. Now, though, the leader of the Court party, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, fell out with him.

The crucial issue between them was piracy. Warwick was an enthusiastic dabbler in privateering and was manoeuvring to use Virginia as a base from which to attack the Spanish. In 1617, a new Governor, Sam Argall, was appointed. He was in league with Warwick and allowed privateers into the Chesapeake. Company chiefs in London were told that, with Argall’s connivance, Warwick’s ship the
Treasurer
, ‘manned with the ablest men in the colony was set out on roving in the Spanish dominions’.12

Complaints against Argall mounted. Smythe had instructed him to rule with a lighter hand but London was deluged with complaints about his tyranny. On one occasion he had sentenced a planter to death for attempting to free a group of time-served workers the Governor was refusing to liberate. Smythe ordered Argall home. The recall of his protégé and a row over another of his piratical ventures prompted Warwick to split from Sir Thomas Smythe. In 1619, he forged an alliance with Sir Edwin Sandys and Smythe was forced out.

Smythe attempted to save face by resigning before being pushed.

He announced that the King had just appointed him Commissioner for the Navy and this would leave him no time for the Virginia Company. He died six years later, reportedly of the plague.

Sir Edwin Sandys’s triumph enabled him to control the company, and thus the colony, for four momentous years and win plaudits from historians. He was, says the
Columbia Encyclopaedia
,

‘responsible for many of the progressive features that characterized the last years of the company’s control over Virginia’. Prime among these was the introduction of a representative assembly, the House of Burgesses. This was ‘the beginning of freedom,’ according to one modern historian.13

Freedom for some was not freedom for others. In November 1619, three months after the burgesses held their first meeting, Sir Edwin took the first step to resume the shipment of street children.

In November 1619, he informed the Lord Mayor of London that 82

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the first 100 had arrived safely ‘save such as died on the way’ and the company wanted more. ‘We pray your Lordship . . . in pursuit of your former so pious actions to renew your like favours and furnish us again with one hundred more for the next spring.’14

The Common Council of London, which Sandys expected to pay once again for these deportations, was a little more demanding this time. It required a written assurance that the apprenticeships were genuine and a commitment that eventually, in adulthood, the apprentices would be offered a plot of land each. Years later, some of those few apprentices who survived long enough to qualify for a plot found that the land apportioned to them was deep in Algonquin territory.

Round-ups of children resumed the following month. On Christmas Eve 1619, ten boys were brought into Bridewell. A week later, on New Year’s Eve, a further thirty-four were delivered from the City and twenty-five from different parts of Middlesex.

Others followed in dribs and drabs. Bridewell records tell us little about each child beyond a name and the destination – ‘kept for Virginia’. Ages are not given but the odd comment in the charge book, such as Willie Laratt is ‘a little boy who says his mother dwells in the country at Westminster’, suggest that some were very young indeed.

The arrests of the children the previous year had not resulted in any problems. There were no recorded protests and the children appear to have gone quietly. No doubt they assumed they would spend a few months in a Bridewell prison workshop and then be released.

Not this time. The grapevine of the streets knew what was afoot and the children did not come meekly. In late January, constables brought in more than fifty boys, half of them in a single day. Serious disturbances broke out, leading to a ‘revolt’ inside Bridewell.15

Then someone – perhaps a parent or a pamphleteer – raised the question: by what right was this being done? It emerged that no law permitted children to be forcibly transported. The 100 girls and boys who had been shipped to Virginia the previous year had been sent illegally. Edwin Sandys was forced to admit that the City lacked the authority to deliver, and the company to transport, the children against their will.

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It did not matter: the 100 who had gone were history. Sandys moved rapidly to ensure that there would be no legal doubts about the next 100. On 28 January 1620, he wrote to the King’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Naunton, repeating the claim that child transportation was a great humanitarian exercise and asking for powers to deal with a hard core of the worst children who were refusing to go. He described them as those of ‘whom the City is especially desirous to be disburdened’ and asserted that ‘under severe masters in Virginia they may be brought to good’.16