White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (5 page)

WHITE CARGO

‘all their dripping-pans are pure gold, and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and gather ’em by the seashore!’

It was in this atmosphere that the charter authorising the two new forays to America was drawn up and two joint stock companies of

‘knights, gentlemen, merchants and other adventurers’ created for the purpose. The two principal aims were announced as ‘bringing infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility’ and

‘the mining of gold, silver and copper’. Three of the Crown’s leading councillors helped draft the document: Robert Cecil, Chief Secretary of State; Sir Edward Coke, Attorney General; and the fearsome Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham.

Cecil emerged as principal patron of the company that was allocated the southern territory, lying roughly between what is now Florida and New York. It was composed of men drawn mainly

‘from our city of London’ and inevitably became known as the London Company, and later the Virginia Company. The key post of treasurer of the company, equivalent to managing director, was taken by Sir Thomas Smythe.

Sir John Popham was the principal investor in the second company, drawn from ‘our cities of Bristol and Exeter and of our town of Plymouth’ and allocated New England. It came to be known as the Plymouth Company. Popham was a man whose character was written in his face. In one portrait, he appears a physical giant, the scarlet robes of the High Court clutched around his bulk, a heavy, ugly face glaring out, cold eyes cunning and suspicious: the face of a calculating, unstoppable bully. In his voluminous
Lives of
the Chief Justices of England
, Lord Campbell refers to the portrait and adds decorously: ‘I am afraid he would not appear to great advantage in a sketch of his moral qualities, which lest I do him an injustice I will not attempt.’4

Sir John was the man who had passed the death sentence on Sir Walter Raleigh, telling him, ‘It is best for man not to seek to climb too high, lest he fall.’ He had participated in the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots and condemned to death Guy Fawkes and hundreds more. The miracle was that he did not join them on the 36

THE JUDGE’S DREAM

gallows himself. Before he occupied one by one most of the great legal offices of state, John Popham had been a highwayman and, according to one rumour, ‘probably a garrotter’, too.

Popham was born in 1531 into an affluent Somerset family. He read law at Balliol College, Oxford, and in his twenties he was called to the Bar and respectably married. Even then, however, he was exhibiting a different side to his character. He was a heavy drinker and a gambler, and according to Lord Campbell, ‘either to supply his profligate expenditure or to show his spirit’, Popham frequently sallied forth at night from a hostel in Southwark with a band of desperate characters and, planting themselves in ambush on Shooter’s Hill, or taking other positions favourable for attack and escape, they stopped travellers and took from them not only their money but any valuable commodities they carried with them – boasting that they were always civil and generous and that to avoid serious consequences they went in such numbers as to render resistance impossible.5

Popham’s antics continued right through his twenties. Amazingly, he was never caught. In his thirties, he decided he could make as much money from the law as from highway robbery and developed an extensive practice in south-west England that brought him to the attention of the Queen. With her rare ability to pick ruthless talent that could be used one day, Elizabeth arranged a seat in Parliament for him. The former highwayman became Speaker of the House, then Attorney General and, finally, Lord Chief Justice.

‘He was a hanging judge,’ says Campbell. ‘Ordinary larcenies and, above all, in highway robbery there was little chance of acquittal.’ It was the same with those who did not fit the Protestant orthodoxies the Crown was trying to mould. Sir John pursued outspoken Puritans and Catholic priests to the scaffold. Under him, hundreds of Jesuits and suspected sympathisers were sent to Tyburn or Smithfield to be hanged, drawn and quartered, or, if a woman, perhaps to be crushed to death or strangled before being burnt at the stake.

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When it came to the rich, Sir John could be lenient if the price was right. There was no more corrupt age than the Elizabethan and the future Lord Chief Justice proved himself as buyable as any. In the 1580s, a midwife’s story horrified all who heard it. She told of being taken blindfolded in a closed coach to attend the delivery of a child in a great house, and after the birth seeing a masked man seize the newborn infant and cast it into the fire, where it perished. When the story became known, a hue and cry was raised for the perpetrator of what Lord Macaulay called this ‘horrible and mysterious crime’.6

The murderer was tracked down, only to be let off after he paid the judge in the case a truly massive bribe in the shape of his mansion, Littlecote Hall in Wiltshire. John Popham was the judge. By this and other means he became a very rich man. ‘He left behind him the greatest estate that has ever been amassed by any lawyer.’7

This intimidating man was involved in colonialism years before the Plymouth Company was created. In the 1580s, the Queen decided to stamp out rebellion for ever in Munster by confiscating the vast estates there of the Desmond family and repopulating them with English Protestants. Catholic Irish were ordered out and the land was offered at tuppence an acre to English landlords who would undertake to ‘plant’ it with tenants from England. Popham was one of many who saw himself accumulating a huge Irish estate.

He assembled more than eighty families and dispatched them to Munster. However, another English worthy was already off the mark and had tenanted the land, leaving Popham’s tenants no choice but to return home. A few decades later, a not dissimilar scheme called the headright system would be introduced in America and the wealthy would become still richer by obtaining grants of land for importing the poor to settle the New World.

The experience in Munster did not deter Popham from such schemes and his Lordship was soon propelled towards the far more ambitious project of colonising America. He was now in his late fifties, so why did the New World consume him in the last years of his life? The avarice of a rapacious old man certainly played a part, but for Popham it was also about the pursuit of a dumping ground for the criminals that even he, the draconian law officer, could never eradicate.

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As we have seen, social conditions had produced levels of crime that frightened the gentry. Now, as the century ended, a new crime wave swept over England. This was the price of peace with Spain, for, as ever, when a major war ended, newly released soldiers and mariners spread across the realm. Many of these men had been criminals beforehand and returned to their former profession. In Plymouth, London, Bristol and York, they had taken the Queen’s shilling as an alternative to the rope. In the late 1590s, when war with Spain wound down and peace negotiations began, ‘The land then swarmed with people who had been soldiers, who had never gotten (or else quite forgotten) any other vocation . . . too proud to beg, too lazy to labour. These infected the highways with their felonies.’8

In 1597, the year before the Treaty of Vervins officially ended the war, Popham had pushed through Parliament the tough new Vagrancy Act described in the previous chapter, under which persistent rogues could be banished to ‘parts beyond the seas’ at the behest of members of the Privy Council. The act was a prelude to what was to come.

Five years later, Popham drew up an Order in Council identifying those ‘parts beyond the seas’ where England’s unwanted could be dumped: ‘Newfoundland, the East and West Indies, France, Germany, Spain and the Low Countries or any of them’. As will be seen, some of these were meant in all seriousness. Virginia would soon be added to the list.

At this point, an enigmatic character entered Popham’s life. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was ‘captain and keeper’ of Plymouth Castle.

He was said to be a vain, ‘very avaricious man’ hardly any more attractive than Sir John.9 The two met in 1601 during that most tangled of Tudor dramas, the attempted coup by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Gorges was supposedly an Essex supporter. When the coup began, Essex entrusted him with guarding three members of the Queen’s council who were being held in Essex House, the Earl’s sumptuous Thameside palace. Popham was among the captives. To their surprise, Gorges turned out to be their rescuer rather than jailer and he had the party rowed upriver to Whitehall and safety. It later transpired that from the beginning Gorges had 39

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leaked details of the plot to Essex’s long-time rival Walter Raleigh, who in turn kept the Queen constantly updated. Gorges was the key witness against Essex when the former royal favourite was tried for treason, condemned and sent to the block on Tower Hill.

While his part in the plot was investigated, Gorges was imprisoned in the Tower. As that other recurrent figure in our story Sir Thomas Smythe had learned, any involvement in the Essex plot, however slight, damned you in the old Queen’s eyes. Sir Ferdinando found himself held for nine months and deprived of his military post in Devon. When James I succeeded to the throne, he was immediately reinstated and held in high favour.

Gorges backed George Waymouth’s 1605 expedition to the North Atlantic coast. Upon his return, Waymouth presented him with five members of the Wabanaki and Pemaquid tribes he had captured. The idea was to exhibit them around England to drum up interest in the colonial enterprise. The captives demonstrated their skill in handling a dugout canoe on the River Thames, and, according to the Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro de Zuniga, they were quickly taught English so they could ‘say how good that country [America] is for people to go there and inhabit it’.10

Gorges wanted Popham’s help in his American ventures and presented the Lord Chief Justice with two of his Native Americans.

The two men were soon partners and they aimed to bring together burghers from London and Plymouth, and members of the gentry who had previously invested in expeditions. Top of the list would have been great merchants like Smythe and aristocrats like Henry Wriothesley, the brilliant Earl of Southampton who was William Shakespeare’s patron. Most of the lobbying appears to have taken place in the vast new banqueting hall of the Middle Temple, under the coats of arms of Tudor knights that still hang there today over the heads of other ambitious lawyers.

In the winter of 1605–06, Popham approached the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke. He laid the emphasis not on the riches to be had in America but on England’s desperate need for a dumping ground for criminals. Coke reported their conversation: 40

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My Lord Chief Justice, foreseeing in the experience of his place the infinite number of cashiered captains and soldiers, of poor artisans that would and cannot work, and of idle vagrants that may and will not work, whose increase threatens the state, is affectionately bent to the plantation of Virginia.11

He explained that the judge wanted the go-ahead ‘to call the undertakers, gentlemen, merchants etc unto him and by their advices set down the best manner of project, which being agreed upon shall be speedily returned to your lordships because the best season for the journey approaches’.

More talks followed, with a great deal of haggling over who was to be in control. Eventually the Virginia Company was chartered with two divisions: a London Company and a Plymouth Company.

The charter helped to give birth to a myth. Ostensibly, it was a remarkable document from a King who espoused the divine right to rule and conceded no powers without a struggle. In a section on how the colonies were to be governed, James stated: I do . . . declare and order that my loving subjects in America shall forever . . . enjoy the right to make all needful laws for their own government provided only that they be consonant with the laws of England.

Two hundred and sixty years later, when the American Civil War

– the war to end slavery – had been won by the northern states, the New England historian John A. Poor traced the region’s belief in human rights back to James’s charter: ‘This charter of liberties was never revoked,’ he crowed.

It was a decree of universal emancipation and every man of any colour from any clime was by this Act of King James redeemed, regenerated, disenthralled the moment he landed on the soil of America between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees . . . 150 years before the decree of Lord 41

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Mansfield [threw] off the chains and fetters of Africans in England.12

It was bunkum. There would be forms of both white and black slavery even in New England throughout the colonial period.

Once the charter was issued for his Plymouth Company, Popham wasted no time. ‘His position as Chief Justice gave him a controlling influence in all the jails and penitentiaries in the realm.’13 Although there is no chapter and verse on his use of convicts, snippets of information from contemporaries leave little doubt that Popham exploited his power. ‘He stocked Virginia out of all the gaols of England,’ reported John Aubrey, the seventeenth century’s master of the biographical sketch.14 Popham sent out men who were

‘pressed to that enterprise endangered by the law’, wrote the Earl of Stirling, a confidant of Gorges and later a colonist himself.15

The image lingers in the mind’s eye of the hatchet-faced Popham handing down rough justice, offering convicts facing execution the option that would become commonplace in later decades – slave for years in exile in America, possibly to die there, or go to the gallows.

This choice had the happy effect not only of saving lives but of aiding Sir John’s financial endeavours. Likely-looking specimens for transportation – the young and strong – would no doubt have been paraded before Sir John for inspection. It is difficult to imagine the Lord Chief Justice of England vetting each felon and vagabond in the notorious foulness of Jacobean gaols.