chapter 8
“Mother England” Loses Touch
A
s Queen Elizabeth had made clear to Sir Walter Ralegh, the
English bridgehead in the New World was of minor inter-
est to the English government apart from its possible use as a base for pirate
raids on the Spanish treasure fleet or Caribbean cities. The English govern-
ment was far more concerned with matters closer to England and of more
commercial value than the Chesapeake. From the time they stepped ashore,
the early colonists were cut off from Europe by months of dangerous and
unpredictable sailing over 3,000 miles of ocean. Neither their sponsors nor
their government knew much about the New World. The home govern-
ment intervened only if private sponsors failed (as they did in Virginia in
the 1620s), if the settlers and “proprietaries” were caught in an irresolvable
conflict (as they were in Maryland in the 1650s), or if their leaders and mer-
chants were transgressing imperial interests and laws (as they did in
Massachusetts in the 1660s). Looking back on this period from much later,
the great English parliamentarian Edmund Burke summed up the adminis-
trative mess that had been created by saying that the establishment of the
colonies was “never pursued upon any regular plan; but they were formed,
grew, and flourished, as accidents, the nature of climate, or the disposition
of private men happened to operate.” This was, perhaps, an exaggeration,
but the colonists certainly were unsure of their relationship to England. As
they gazed wistfully out to sea, they thought of themselves as loving daugh-
ters, but soon they suspected that their “mother” regarded them as an
“orphant Plantation.”
Just eleven years after the first colonists began to create Jamestown, the
Virginia Company of London, acting without royal sanction, decided that
126