est commendation: containing advices far more
excellent than I could have expected to have met with in the letters of
a trading company. For they abound with soundness of good matter and
profitable instruction, with respect both to religion and policy; and
they possess uncommon elegance of language."[174:A]

The company had been long obnoxious to the king's ill will for several
reasons; it had become a nursery for rearing and training leaders of the
opposition, many of its members being likewise members of parliament. It
was a sort of reform club. The king, in a speech, swore that "the
Virginia Company was a seminary for a seditious parliament." The company
had chosen a treasurer in disregard of the king's nomination; and in
electing Carew Raleigh, a member, they had made allusions to his father,
Sir Walter Raleigh, which were doubtless unpalatable to the author of
his judicial murder. The king was greedy of power and of money, which he
wanted the sense and the virtue to make a good use of; and he hoped to
find in Virginia a new field for extortion. Fortunately for the history
of the colony, copies of the company's records were made by the
precaution of Nicholas Ferrar: these being deposited in the hands of the
Earl of Southampton, after his death, which took place in 1624,
descended to his son. After his death, in 1667, they were purchased from
his executors, for sixty guineas, by the first Colonel William Byrd,
then in England. From these two folio volumes, in possession of Sir John
Randolph, and from the records of the colony, Stith compiled much of his
History of Virginia, which comes down to the year 1624.[174:B]

On the sixth day of April, 1625, died King James the First, aged
fifty-nine, after a reign of twenty years. By his consort, Anne of
Denmark, he had issue, Henry and Robert, who died young, Charles, his
successor, and Elizabeth, who married Frederic the Fifth, elector
Palatine. Charles the First succeeding to the crown and the principles
of his father, took the government of Virginia into his own hands.

The company thus dissolved, had expended one hundred and fifty thousand
pounds in establishing the colony, and had transported nine thousand
settlers without the aid of government. The number of stockholders was
about one thousand; and the annual value of exports from Virginia was,
at the period of the dissolution of the charter, only twenty thousand
pounds.

The company embraced much of the rank, wealt