ould be useful in attacks upon Spanish possessions and the
trade routes which joined them to Spain. But it is evident enough that
by this time the leaders of the Virginia Company were chiefly fearful
that Spain might attack their colony before it was securely fortified,
and before it had fulfilled the promise of rewards far greater than
anything freebooting ventures could offer. As a result, Governor
Yeardley, on instruction from London, denied the courtesies of
Jamestown to the _Treasurer_ on its return in 1619, and won for Sandys
thereby the bitter resentment of the Rich family.

The king's interference in the election of 1620 has naturally become a
celebrated incident in the history of Virginia. Sir Edwin was a leader
in parliament, which before the century was out would establish its
supremacy in the government of England, and the Virginia Company in
1620 had only recently established the first representative assembly in
North America. To historians who have sought the larger meaning of the
American experiment, it has often seemed that the king must have been
guided by a fear of representative government--in other words, that his
motives were largely political. No doubt, he was more easily persuaded
to enter an objection to Sandys' re-election because of Sir Edwin's
opposition to royal policies in the house of commons, but there is no
contemporary evidence to suggest that the king had even noticed the
Assembly which met at Jamestown in 1619. Moreover, that Assembly had
been authorized before Sandys' election, at a time when Sir Thomas
Smith was still in the chair, and anyone who thinks the motion had been
carried over Smith's opposition should take note that the same kind of
representative assembly was established in 1620 for Bermuda, over whose
fortunes Sir Thomas would continue to preside until 1621. Not until the
middle of the seventeenth century, at the time of Cromwell, does it
appear that anyone even suggested that the primary reason for the
king's interference was fear of a significant development in the
history of representative government.

What actually happened in 1620 would seem to be clear enough. Sir
Thomas Smith had connections that reached all the way into the king's
bedchamber, and there he effectively argued that Sandys did not know
his business. It was an argument that found not a little justification
in the fact that the company had to admit by a broadside published in
the very month of the elec