So when the time came to plant permanent settlements in America, the lure of gain had spread throughout English society, capital had been amassed, and the practice of forming corporations for profit had been well established. It was not necessary to beg a pittance from the royal treasury to launch epoch-making expeditions. The middle classes were themselves prepared to furnish both leadership and money. In the London Company, incorporated to develop Virginia, were, besides earls, bishops, knights, and gentlemen, plain commoners, merchant tailors, stationers, shoemakers, haberdashers, grocers, ironmongers, cutlers, leather sellers, saddlers, cordwainers, weavers, carpenters, representatives of all the other important trades, and two women—Katherine West and Millicent Ramsdent, a widow. The great Company that planted the first successful colony represented in fact the dominant elements in English commercial life. Its stock was advertised in the pulpit as well as in the market places and subscriptions were made in the interests of religion, patriotism, and profit.
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For the agricultural work of colonization, England had two landed classes from which capable leaders could be drawn—country gentlemen and yeomen. The first of these groups consisted of substantial landed proprietors who lived in comfortable manor houses on broad acres, served as local justices of the peace by royal appointment, sat in the House of Commons by election of their neighbors, and thus combined the management of their estates with the functions of a governing class. From this order came the Cromwells, Hampdens, and Pyms, who challenged the rule of the Stuarts and brought Charles I to the scaffold in old England; and the Winthrops, Endicotts, and Eatons, who made the beginnings of a self-governing commonwealth, Massachusetts, in New England.
In the second of these important groups, the yeomanry,
