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 271 CHAPTER FOUR Creating Colonial Virginia Introduction Nine months before the September 1607 Flight of the Earls provided individuals like Sir Arthur Chichester, Sir John Davies, and Sir Thomas Phillips with the opportunity to compile their varying designs for the plantation of Ulster, three small ships set sail from London charged with renewing England’s claim to the New World. This colonial project was the brainchild of a group that most notably included the chronicler Richard Hakluyt, military men like Sir Thomas Gates, Edward Maria Wingfield, and Sir George Somers, and the adventurer Bartholomew Gosnold. Reflecting earlier models, their project was to be privately financed through the creation of a joint-stock company. The Virginia Company of London received its charter in April 1606, as did the Western Merchants’ Virginia Company of Plymouth, in which George Popham, nephew of the Munster Plantation designer Sir John Popham, was a leading figure. Both Virginia Companies were determined to exploit the New World’s natural resources while aiding in the containment of Spain, and both sent out settlers and supplies in 1607. Popham’s efforts to establish a colony at Sagadahoc, Maine, were shortlived , whereas the second venture just barely maintained its grasp on the New World by establishing a fortification on a small island near the Chesapeake Bay. Careful examination of colonial development in the seventeenth century reveals greater commonalities and manifold interlinkages between the establishment and development of colonial societies in Virginia and in Ireland than was the case in the sixteenth century. Yet the Virginia colony and the Ulster Plantation paralleled one another in their early years—not as successful ventures, but in the often disastrous decisions made by planters and planners and the continual failures of settlers to adhere to regulation or intention. Returning to the military model of the first Roanoke venture—an approach that contrasted with that taken by the Scottish settlers of the Ards and that intended for the Ulster Plantation—proved a costly error for the Virginia colony. By 1650, the societies that emerged from the efforts to plant 272 } CREATING COLONIAL VIRGINIA Ireland and Virginia continued to proclaim their British roots and character even as each was shaped by its interactions with the indigenous cultures. Regardless of the significant differences between the planting of colonies in Ireland and Virginia, scholars have routinely noted that numerous individuals involved in the early-seventeenth-century settlement of Virginia had also spent time in the Irish wars, as was the case with Wingfield, Gates, Thomas Dale, Lord De la Warr,Thomas West, and William Newce. Newce’s Irish experience was cited by the Virginia Company of London when they granted him the title of marshal in 1621: “And forasmuch as Captaine Newce hath given so large a testimony of his experience and skill in Marshall discipline wherein he hath bene exercised and imployed a long tyme, upon many services in Ireland . . . the Company are pleased to grant him the said place of Marshall.” Newce had fought in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War and had established himself as a planter in Munster in the early seventeenth century. In 1611, he was recorded as a captain at Kinsale with charge over fifty horsemen while Sir Thomas Phillips still commanded fifty footmen at Coleraine. Newce had also served as lieutenant to Sir Oliver Lambert and was granted a life pension of 10s. by James I in 1614.1 Like Phillips, Newce was not satisfied with merely being a military man. By 1600, he had taken on the lease for some of Walter Raleigh’s Munster lands and had begun work on Bandonbridge, a Munster Plantation town that would later be developed by the seventeenth-century planter and entrepreneur Richard Boyle. Newce subsequently established his eponymous settlement, Newcestown, in West Cork before opting for one final adventure in the Virginia Plantation. Newce and his wife, along with his brother Thomas (also a captain in Ireland) and Thomas’s wife, arrived in Virginia in 1620, where Newce, “out of a generous disposicion and desire to advance the generall Plantacon in Virginia . . . freely offered unto the Company to transport at his owne coste and charges 1000 persons into Virginia” in exchange for the title of general and a patent for lands. Described by Virginia governor Sir George Yeardley as a gentleman of “much worth and suffitienty,” Newce received the title of marshal and a patent to 1,500 acres of land, with fifty tenants, in the vicinity of present-day Newport News. Newce...

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