Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/75

Solicitor-Generalship, when King James was proposing the Protestant plantation of Ulster, Bacon wrote his first article on colonization, Discourse of the Plantation in Ireland, about January, 1608-1609. His point of view was essentially that put forth in Certain Articles or Considerations touching the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland (1604). The Solicitor-General believed in the aggrandizement of the United Kingdom, peaceably by preference, but by force if necessary. At the very time that Bacon was engaged in writing this paper on the Irish plantation, a fresh attempt to colonize Virginia was maturing at Court, for on May 23, 1609, "The Treasurer of the Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia" was chartered by King James, primarily to go to the relief of Captain John Smith. Among the six hundred and fifty-nine "adventurers" were Sir Francis Bacon, his cousin, Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, Shakspere's friend, the Earl of Southampton, and Sir Oliver Cromwell, uncle to the Protector. The essay Of Plantations, first published in the third edition of the Essays (1625), was written from a personal knowledge of the London or South Virginia Company. Bacon mentions the over-cultivation of the new plant, tobacco, in Virginia, "to the untimely prejudice of the main business." The very streets of Jamestown were planted with tobacco by the first settlers, who then secured for themselves from King James a monopoly of the home market for their commodity, in spite of the royal objection to