LITMIR.BIZ

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needed to pay for the promised supply mission.

      The Susan Constant took two weeks to make the final leg of the journey to London. Sir Walter Cope was waiting impatiently for her, eager to get his hands on the ‘sperm’, as he called the ore sample, which he hoped would fertilize England’s new American possession.

      In a letter of 12 August, reporting the ship’s arrival to Cecil, Cope’s excitement was uncontainable: ‘If we may believe either in words or Letters, we are fallen upon a land that promises more than the Land of promise: instead of milk we find pearl, & gold instead of honey.’ He acknowledged that Cecil might treat such claims with ‘slow belief’. There was, after all, ‘but a barrel full of the earth’ to show for this first mission. But he hoped that tests to be conducted that very day would reveal ‘a kingdom full of the ore’.³

      ‘I could wish your Lordship at the trial,’ Cope continued. Cecil’s ‘word and presence may comfort the poor citizen of London’. Many had evidently refused requests to continue backing the venture, despite an attempt the previous March to enlarge the Royal Council and thereby increase the investors’ representation.⁴ In Cope’s opinion, they might be persuaded to ‘adventure much more in this most hopeful discovery’, but would need ‘a little help’ from Cecil, probably meaning further reform to the council and the company’s unusual structure. There was no shortage of money, he noted. Sir Thomas Smythe (who, Cope added in a marginal note, would benefit from ‘a word of thanks’ from Cecil ‘for his care and diligence’), had recently persuaded ‘fifty citizens’ to offer £500 apiece for a share in an East India Company expedition to the Far East.⁵

      By the following day, Cope’s mood was very different. Four trials of Newport’s soil samples, conducted in various laboratories around the city, had produced not so much as a grain of gold. ‘In the end, all turned to vapour.’ There had been suspicions the previous day that John Martin, who had tested the soil in Jamestown, had not done so properly. Now, Martin was accused of having ‘cousined’ (fooled) not only Newport, but the King, the State and his own father – the latter, Cope suggested, in a desperate attempt to persuade the mean old plutocrat to send some private supplies, ‘which otherwise he doubted never to procure’.⁶ Newport at this stage appears to have given up hope, and announced that he did not intend to return to Virginia.

      By mid-August, things were looking a little more hopeful. On 17 August, Sir Thomas Smythe, braiding every strand of influence in the hope of keeping the project together, informed Cecil that Newport was back on board. The captain now claimed he must have brought back the wrong sample. He pledged to lead the supply mission back across the Atlantic, ‘never to see your Lordship before he bring that with him which he confidently believed he had brought before’.⁷

      Others remained sceptical. A week later, the diplomat Dudley Carleton, one of Cecil’s protégés, sent his regular correspondent John Chamberlain a downbeat assessment of the settlement’s prospects. ‘They write much commendations of the air and the soil and the commodities of it, but silver and gold have they none,’ he wrote, ‘and they cannot yet be at peace with the inhabitants of the country.’

      He seemed well-informed, having somehow managed to see a copy of a letter from George Percy smuggled to his brother the Earl of Northumberland, who was still languishing in the Tower for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. ‘They have fortified themselves and built a small town which they call Jamestown,’ Carleton added, ‘and so they date their letters.’ He then proceeded to produce a series of convoluted puns ridiculing the settlers’ efforts. Never mind a supply from England, they could expect a ‘double supply’ from the Spanish – a mission sent to wipe them out. ‘The town methinks hath no graceful name,’ he mused, pointing out that it was not only dangerously close to Spanish Florida, but came ‘too near Villiaco’, meaning villainy. George Percy, he noted, called the town ‘James-fort, which we like best of all the rest, because it comes near to Chemesford’, Chelmsford, a town in Essex which one Puritan inhabitant described as a ‘dunghill of abomination’.

      Carleton then added a postscript about Captain George Weymouth. Weymouth had apparently been ‘taken’ the week before, ‘shipping himself for Spain, with intent as is thought to have betrayed his friends and showed the Spaniards a means how to defeat this Virginian attempt’.⁸

      Carleton, who was usually well informed on political matters, was obviously unaware that Weymouth had been ‘shipping himself for Spain’ on Cecil’s orders. However, he was correct in guessing that the mission somehow threatened ‘to defeat this Virginian attempt’, for as soon as Newport arrived back in England, the government made strenuous efforts to prevent Weymouth from leaving the country.⁹ For the sake of his cordial relations with Spain, Cecil had evidently been poised to abandon England’s claim to North America, and only the belated appearance of Newport’s ship had won a stay of execution.

      Don Pedro de Zuñiga, the Spanish ambassador, had remained poorly informed about the Virginia mission since the issuing of the patent. He was aware that some sort of venture was under way, but felt it was too insignificant to bother his King. News of Newport’s return seemed to reinforce his complacency. ‘They do not come too contented,’ he told the King in a monthly report, ‘for in that place there is nothing other than good wood for masts, pine-tree pitch and resin, and some earth from which they think they can extract bronze’.¹⁰

      A month later, however, Zuñiga’s tone was transformed. ‘They are mad about the location,’ he reported to the Spanish King, ‘and frightened to death that Your Majesty will throw them out.’ Preparations were in hand for a supply mission, and ‘many here and in other parts of the kingdom … are already arranging to send people there’. ‘It would be very advisable for Your Majesty to root out this noxious plant while it is so easy,’ Zuñiga concluded.

      Zuñiga had undergone such a radical change of mind since recruiting one of the members of the Royal Council for Virginia as an informer. The spy’s identity is unknown, but a candidate is Sir Herbert Crofts, who had joined the council in March 1607. Crofts, probably a kinsman of the planter Richard Crofts, is known to have become disenchanted with James’s regime, and a decade later fled to the Spanish Netherlands, where he ‘turned popish’.¹¹

      In the following month’s dispatch, Zuñiga reported that ships were ready to take a new supply to the colony, together with one hundred and twenty fresh settlers. He once again urged Philip to preempt the enterprise by launching an attack. ‘It is thoroughly evident that it is not their desire to people [the land], but rather to practise piracy, for they take no women – only men.’ He also reported that James was ‘urging the Scots to go there’.¹²

      Philip commanded Zuñiga to speak to King James about the matter, ‘expressing regret on my part, that he should permit any of his subjects to try and disturb the seas, coasts, and lands of the Indies’. Zuñiga duly asked Cecil for a royal audience, but for several months, his requests were ignored.¹³

      Then, on the night of Saturday 26 September, an invitation from the Royal Chamberlain unexpectedly arrived at the ambassador’s residence in Highgate. Having been indisposed for a week, following the death of his infant daughter Mary, His Royal Highness now felt able to grant Zuñiga an audience at 2 p.m. the following day. The venue was to be Hampton Court, the magnificent royal retreat on the bank of the Thames west of London.

      Zuñiga arrived at the palace at the appointed time, and was shown into the State Apartments, where James was waiting for him. He was welcomed ‘as usual, very courteously’. The ambassador passed on condolences

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