I began my serious historical research many years ago by investigating the involvement of the Rich family, i.e. of the 2nd Earl of Warwick and his second cousin, Sir Nathaniel Rich, in the affairs of the Virginia Company of London. This entailed detailed work on the Records of the Virginia Company edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury between 1906 and the mid-1930s and contact with the studies of Wesley Frank Craven and that of Theodore Rabb which was then in progress on the career of Sir Edwin Sandys. I have maintained a watching brief on more recent historiography and have written quite a few small-scale pieces over the years on the subject. One of the features of earlier and later historiography on the subject which was and still is a surprise to me is the credence given to the claims of Sir Edwin Sandys and the two Ferrar brothers, John and Nicholas, about the struggle for control of the Virginia Company and over its eventual dissolution. Sandys and his allies usually appear as admirable figures brought down by the Indian massacre of the English colonists and by the machinations of their opponents in the Virginia and Bermuda companies.
This view, which still features in very recent works, is, I
am afraid, profoundly mistaken. Sandys was a grossly incompetent manager of the
companies' affairs as Rabb and, more recently, Michael Jarvis recognised. The
records, moreover, on which this erroneous assessment rests are highly
selective and inadequately edited. It is a grave mistake to take the opinions of
Sandys, the Ferrars and their allies about their own virtues and their critics'
malevolence at face value. The problem for Sandys and their supporters in the
final analysis was that their correspondence with the colonists in Virginia
fell into their opponents' hands and revealed the desperate state of the colony
and their mendacity. The history of Virginia requires a wholly new approach,
one free from the misconceptions that still dog its representation.
