hemp, flax, pitch, and pot ashes. Wyatt, Harvey, and Berkeley especially, as has been seen, had striven most energetically to conform to this command, and in doing so, they were conscious that they were commending themselves to the peculiar favor of their sovereign. All conditions had now changed. When Lord Howard of Effingham was on the point of setting out to Virginia in 1685, the King was consulted as to whether the customary clause in previous instructions should not be omitted in the instructions to the new Executive, and he decided affirmatively on grounds that appear rather singular in the light of the small impression made on the minds of the colonists in the past by the effort to promote the development or cultivation of what were known as the staple commodities. The usual direction that the Governor should foster the production of these commodities was ordered by the King to be left out because the Virginians might be influenced by its insertion to neglect tobacco, advancing in justification of their action the burdensome character of the additional duty which had been recently imposed upon it.[1] If an inference could be drawn from their previous history, it was that they would continue to plant tobacco as long as it afforded them a livelihood, and even after it failed to assure them the barest subsistence. To suppose that they would abandon its culture because of a purely conventional clause in a set of official instructions was to show great ignorance of the economic conditions prevailing in the Colony.
The omission of this clause marks a distinct era in the annals of Virginia, for it signified that thereafter the English Government was satisfied to rely exclusively
- ↑ Minutes of a Committee for Trade and Plantations, British State Papers, Colonial Entry Book, No. 108, p. 179; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1685, p. 194, Va. State Library.
