following year, the King, in consideration of the consent of the Company to the imposition of a higher duty, issued his proclamation forbidding its production in England, but in spite of this prohibition it continued to be cultivated privately. The Company, in order to enforce the royal proclamation, went so far as to appoint an informer, or intelligencer, as he was called, whose duty it was to prefer charges against any one who within five miles of London was discovered to be planting, and if the informer extended his observation further, he was to be specially rewarded.[1]
The agreement between the King and the Company with reference to a sole importation, excepting sixty thousand pounds of Spanish tobacco, was found to be highly injurious to the welfare of the Colony, and in twelve months it was abandoned, the King returning to his former policy of exaction, from which no relief was obtained until 1624, when the prospect of the Spanish match becoming hopeless, and the Spanish power having perceptibly waned, he assumed a more conciliatory attitude towards Virginia.
In this interval the massacre of 1622 occurred, which at first seemed destined to destroy permanently the prosperity of Virginia. So much absorbed had the planters become in the cultivation of tobacco, that they presented the Indians with their firearms and employed them in hunting as substitutes for themselves. The massacre took place in March before the planting of
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, pp. 49, 51, 52. The name of the “intelligencer” selected was Henry Mansell. See Ibid., pp. 35, 36, for very striking evidence of how little confidence the Company placed in the good faith of the contemptible monarch who then occupied the throne. The noble spirit which animated the Company itself is set forth very eloquently in the passage beginning: “Notwithstanding these apprehended disasters, etc,” p. 147.
