trade and commerce. In making these
reports Archbishop Laud acted as president of the Council, president
of the Commission for Foreign Plantations, president of the committee
for Foreign Affairs, High Commission Court, etc.]

[Footnote 32: The term "subcommittee" is used by petitioners as late
as August, 1640 (Cal. Col., 1574-1660, p. 314), but no references and
reports of so late a date are to be found in the Calendar or the
Register.]

[Footnote 33: This is, of course, the well-known Williams patent of
1644. Rhode Island, Colonial Records, I, pp. 143-146.]

[Footnote 34: Osgood, The Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, III,
pp. 110-112.]

CHAPTER II.

Control of Trade and Plantations During the Interregnum.

The earliest separate council to be established during the period from
1650 to 1660 was that appointed by act of Parliament, August, 1650,
known as the Commission or Council of Trade, of which Sir Harry Vane
was president and Benjamin Worsley, a London merchant and "doctor of
physic," already becoming known as an expert on plantation affairs,
was secretary. This body was specially instructed by Parliament to
consider, not only domestic and foreign trade, the trading companies,
manufactures, free ports, customs, excise, statistics, coinage and
exchange, and fisheries, but also the plantations and the best means
of promoting their welfare and rendering them useful to England.
"They are to take into their consideration," so runs article 12 of the
instructions, "the English plantations in America or elsewhere, and
to advise how these plantations may best be managed and made most
useful for the Commonwealth, and how the commodities thereof may be so
multiplied and improved as (if it be possible) those plantations alone
may supply the Commonwealth of England with whatsoever it necessarily
wants." These statesmanlike and comprehensive instructions are notable
in the history of the development of England's commercial and colonial
program. Free from the limitations which characterize the instructions
given to the earlier commissions, they stand with the Parliamentary
ordinance of October, 1650, and the Navigation Act of 1651, as forming
the first definite expression of England's commercial policy. Inadequate
though the immediate results were to be, we cannot call that policy
"drifting" which could shape with so much intelligence the functions
of a board of trade and plantations. There is no trace here of the