The diversion of the tobacco of the Colony to Holland was, in spite of the determined opposition of the royal authority, considered at the time to be entirely consonant with the immemorial privileges of men of English heritage. Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the firmest and most sagacious members of the Company, practically denied that the King had any authority whatever to assume control over the action of the individual planters, or the private associations in disposing of their annual crop, although he admitted that the right of the sovereign to order that all of the commodities in possession of the Company, whether produced on the Company’s lands or purchased by it from the planters, should be brought to England, and there be made subject to existing customs, was founded upon a basis that might be considered tenable.[1] Even this, however, was held to be unconstitutional by many, on the ground that although the Company owed its existence to the royal charter, yet there were certain prerogatives which the corporation possessed, as a body of free-born Englishmen, which not even the King could suspend, curtail, or destroy, either permanently or for a time. The planters and the societies were entirely disconnected from the Company, and held their estates under the same general laws governing the tenures of the landowners in England. The greatest part of the tobacco produced in Virginia at this time belonged to them, the larger quantity of which they sold to the owners of ships not sailing directly to England. They claimed as inherent the right to dispose of their commodities to the highest bidder; and to interfere with this right, common to Englishmen everywhere, would be a mere exercise of arbitrary power.
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 143; vol. II, pp. 124, 128, 130.
