Publishing Virginia (1608–1615): Specialization, Commissioning, Networks (2024)

Kirk Melnikoff

In 1609, two years after establishing the Jamestown colony, the Virginia Company finalized its second charter, James I signing it on 23 May.1 Though in many respects a carryover of the 1606 first charter, the patent expanded the area under the company’s jurisdiction, created a colony governor and company treasurer, and vested authority in a privately appointed council.2 It also listed over one hundred individual guildsmen by trade and close to sixty corporate subscribers. Among the thirty-two Grocers, twenty-two Clothworkers, eighteen merchants, five Ironmongers, and five Fishmongers were three Stationers: William Welby, George Swinhowe, and Edward Bishop. Listed as well was ‘the companie of stacioners’.3 Such book-trade investment in England’s first sustained colonization efforts in the Americas would prove only a small incipient part of what quickly became a strong and mutually beneficial connection between the Virginia Company and London’s Stationers—members and company alike—in the colony’s early years. The publishers involved with the financing, processing, and distribution of print material having to do with England’s colonization of Virginia played a significant role in establishing and sustaining this connection.4

Over the past four decades, attention has been increasingly paid to the English book trade agents who financed the thousands upon thousands of titles retailed across early modern England.5 Inspired by D. F. McKenzie’s sociology of the text, Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, and Peter W. M. Blayney’s essential ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, researchers have come to see publishing as essential to the transformation and expansion of knowledge and culture in England after Caxton. They have demonstrated too that each publishing operation—operating out of a printing house or a bookshop—followed its own distinctive set of practices. A desire for profit, of course, drove the vast majority of England’s early print publication projects, but it is now understood that other motives (having to do, for example, with a religious, political, or personal agenda) were often in the mix. Even more than printing, early modern publishing was a collaborative endeavour. At every stage, from acquisition to licensing to wholesaling, publishers routinely worked with other stationers as well as with patrons, associates, and family members to identify, manage, and disseminate promising titles. Moreover, the businesses that undertook much of the publishing in this period were usually cooperative enterprises, populated by husbands, wives, widows, sons, daughters, journeymen, and apprentices.

Faced with news of the Virginia colony’s impending failure in the wake of almost every early Jamestown resupply mission, book-trade publishers did much to counter mounting doubts in London by helping to reimagine the Virginia project along moral and religious lines. They also helped systematize the company’s ever-developing administrative efforts. All their businesses, at addresses that included the Fox, the Greyhound, and the Crane in St Paul’s Churchyard, were bookselling operations, and this reflected a larger shift in book financing from printers to booksellers in the second half of the sixteenth century.6 In many ways, though, the practices of these bookselling publishers—specializing in sets of related titles, taking on commissioned work, and relying upon networks of family members, company peers, and writers—were identical to those in the Stationers’ Company’s earliest days. Indeed, these would continue to define publishing in England for decades to come.

Specialization

Among those that published texts connected with Jamestown and the Virginia Company after the colony was founded in 1607 were businesses that did so as part of a larger publishing speciality. Specialization was sometimes driven by the personal penchants of bookmen and bookwomen but much more often by speculation in the face of an ever-burgeoning and -diversifying consumer society. A publisher who specialized in a distinctive species of titles put herself into a better position to capitalize on her investments. Booksellers, looking to stock their shops with her speciality, could more readily predict where it might be acquired. Authors, translators, editors, or compilers, looking for a book-trade agent to purchase and disseminate their work, could more readily identify her as a potential investor.7 And book buyers, looking to buy a particular title, could, if the publisher were a bookseller, more confidently assume that they would not be disappointed after a trip to her shop.

The demand that motivated the publishing endeavours of the Tapp bookselling business at Tower Hill was directed towards titles having to do with maritime travel and navigation. Even before being freed by the Drapers’ Company in early 1597, John Tapp had become something of an expert on the ins and outs of sea navigation.8 In the mid-1590s, his Draper master Hugh Astley had directed him to edit Richard Eden’s popular translation of Martin Cortes’s Breve compendio de la sphera y de la arte de navegar.9 In his revised Art of Navigation, Tapp corrected ‘faultes’ in Eden’s version while at the same time adding a ‘Kalendar’, a declination chart, an almanack, and an astrological table.10 He also excised prefatory material by both Cortes and Eden, replacing these with a reader’s epistle of his own addressed to ‘Seafaring men’. With this editing work, Astley may also have involved Tapp in the publication of the hydrographer Robert Norman’s The New Attractive in 1596, a troubleshooting manual on correct compass usage that concludes with rules for oceanic navigation.

Tapp would secure his first bookshop at Tower Hill around 1600, and over the next decade he worked to build a catalogue of nautical publications. These consisted of a ‘maryners book…[of] godlye prayers hymnes and songes’ (1600),11 Richard Polter’s Pathway to Perfect Sailing (1605), John Searles’s An Ephemeris for Nine Years (1609), and a new edition of his revised Art of Navigation (1609). In the months following his acquisition of his Tower Hill shop, Tapp also compiled and published The Seaman’s Calendar, a bestseller that would reach a twelfth edition in 1631. In the eleven-sheet quarto, Tapp explains that he had undertaken the project because he knew, after ‘many times [having been] conuersant with Seamen and Mariners’, that it was ‘what they (I meane the commen and plainer sort of them) chiefly desired’.12 His practical handbook contains a glossary of nautical terms, a ‘tide table’, a chart of longitudes and latitudes for different ‘places’, and a calendar akin to the one he added to the Art of Navigation.

Tapp’s early specialization in maritime manuals and familiarity with ‘Seamen and Mariners’ made his business an obvious outlet for the first account of Jamestown to be published since the colony’s founding in 1607, John Smith’s A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of that Colony. Reaching London in July 1608 with Captain Francis Nelson and the Phoenix, Smith’s manuscript appears to have been circulated among Virginia Company members before making its way in some form to City of God translator John Healey. After editing it, Healey then may have brought the text to Tower Hill. In mid-August, Tapp entered the title in the Stationers’ Register with the bookseller William Welby, and the two then brought the edited manuscript to the printer Edward Aldee.13 Moving too hastily to disseminate the title, Tapp and Welby ended up having to reissue the quarto three times before the end of the year, each time correcting a title-page misstep. The quarto was first unascribed, then ascribed to ‘Th. Watson Gent. one of the said collony’, to ‘Captaine Smith Coronell of the said collony’, and finally to ‘Captaine Smith one of the said collony’. Confessing in the title’s third reissue that he had only recently ‘learned’ of the true author, Healey explains that he had ‘happen[ed] vpon this relation by chance (as I take it, at the second or third hand)’ but ‘was induced…by diuers well wishers of the action’ (¶1r) to bring it to press. The farce-like scrambling at the Aldee printing house confirms Healey’s explanation for the text’s transmission, but the officious ending—the fourth reissue demoting Smith from ‘Coronell’ to ‘one of the said collony’—may have been the result of a Virginia Company intervention as Smith’s rise to Jamestown leadership had not been sanctioned by London’s Virginia Counsel.14

Smith’s account helped trigger what would be a volley of Virginia Company promotional literature in London’s bookstalls starting in 1609. Months before the publishing of A True Relation, Christopher Newport not only confirmed fears about a dearth of Virginia mineral riches but also squashed hopes of quickly identifying an inland water passage to China. News of the difficult conditions at Jamestown was also making its way back to London via correspondence.15 Even more worrying, a number of frustrated adventurers returned from Jamestown with Newport in the first weeks of 1609, and these men quickly began airing grievances. At a Virginia Company shareholders’ meeting around this time, it was argued that ‘some forme of writinge in way of Iustification of our plantation might be conceiued, and pass,… into many handes’ to reassure current shareholders and attract new adventurers.16 Even while fears of Spanish ‘rage’ at news of English progress in Virginia and of a pamphlet war (driven by ‘pen-adversaries’) appear to have carried the day, company reluctance to promote the Jamestown project would not last long.17 What quickly followed was a company-led sermonizing campaign that would run for almost a year, from the spring of 1609 to the winter of 1610.18 Such an operation complemented the company’s energetic fundraising efforts at the time even as it broadcasted a series of decidedly Protestant rationales for the Jamestown project. These arguments for the expansion of England as God’s chosen kingdom and for the saving of the souls of Virginia’s heathen inhabitants had up until this time been muted at best.

Matthew Law’s bookselling business at the sign of the Fox in St Paul’s Churchyard was one of the first to capitalize on this wave of sermons prompted by the Virginia Company. Law had originally been trained as a draper, but in 1600 he, like Tapp, elected to be transferred to the Stationers’ Company.19 By the time that Tapp and Welby had acquired what would be the first printed Jamestown title in 1608, Law had oriented the bulk of his publishing endeavours around public sermons.20 Before he died in 1629, he would publish well over fifty of these, by churchmen like William Barlow, Thomas Playfere, Richard Kilby, and Samuel Smith. Marketed in part as souvenirs, Law’s sermons routinely trumpet the original time and place of their delivery in title-page blurbs. Indeed, over a dozen are advertised as being originally delivered at the Paul’s Cross pulpit in St Paul’s Churchyard, only yards away from the Fox bookshop. Along with memorability, authenticity is also emphasized by these pamphlets. According to an unidentified ‘Preachers friend’ who addresses readers in one of Law’s 1606 Barlow publications, the ‘censorious reader’ desires only unalloyed artefacts:

Law distributed his tenth sermon publication in the weeks following approval of the Virginia Company’s second charter on 23 May 1609. Chaplain to Prince Henry, Daniel Price had originally delivered what would be titled Saul’s Prohibition Stayed at Paul’s Cross on 28 May. Investigating the theological implications of Saul’s persecution of Christians before his conversion, Price’s sermon turns to Virginia in its second half, asking first for leave to refute the ‘lying speeches that haue iniuriously vilified’ the project.22 According to Price, Jamestown’s detractors are like Saul in that they are all persecutors of God. Considering then the many merits of the settlement, he promises that

Like many of these Jamestown sermons, evangelism (‘righteousnesse’, ‘conuersion of so many’) is unapologetically coupled with capitalism (‘best commodities’). Hyperbolic as it is, Price’s defence of the Virginia project only amounts to three of the printed sermon’s forty pages, and as such it reads like an afterthought. Indeed, Law advertises it on his title page in diminutive type as an appended ‘reproofe of those that traduce the honourable plantation of Virginia’.

Commissioning

Before and after the Virginia Company was granted its first charter in 1606, publishing by commission played a significant role in the ever-expanding print trade. From the first half of the sixteenth century, it was standard practice for the Crown to commission publication of official documents like statutes, ordinances, and proclamations with the King’s (or Queen’s) Printer, and it was also a common occurrence for the Privy Council to assign the publishing of State-authorized mainstays like the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer to this office.23 By the final decades of the sixteenth century, the City of London was also routinely using print to publicize its own activity, commissioning the publication of Acts of Common Council, mayoral proclamations, constables’ oaths, and the like with its official printer.24 At the same time, authors, translators, editors, or compilers—or their friends, acquaintances, and family members—would also sometimes finance print publication at their own expense.25 These agents would turn to a bookseller or printer to authorize, license, print, and, in some cases, distribute a title that they had either produced or acquired by themselves.26 In this period before authorial copyright, the right-to-copy was held by the Stationer who licensed the title, but under-the-table ownership agreements were made both before and after incorporation. Unfortunately, we know very little about the financial arrangements underpinning commissioned publishing in this period. In some cases, publishers were paid upfront for their endeavours. Once printed, copies were returned to the original investor for distribution. In other cases, publishers were reimbursed through some combination of down-payment and share of copies.27 In all likelihood, other kinds of financial arrangements between copy-text providers and publishers were negotiated as well.

The Virginia Company’s outreach efforts that commenced in 1609 enlisted the Stationers’ Company in a variety of ways. In anticipation of its second charter and in response to the setbacks in Jamestown, the company had at the beginning of the year begun an aggressive campaign to raise capital, offering for the first time individual shares to the public for £12. 10s.28 Around this time, the Virginia Company also sent a formal invitation for investment to the various London livery companies.29 In response, at the end of April, Stationers’ Company Wardens sent £125 to Sir Thomas Smith, the funds invested by close to three-dozen company members.30 At the end of 1609, the Stationers’ Company then entered into what appears to have been an arrangement with the Virginia Company having to do with the authorization of copies.31 For five years, from the end of 1609 until the autumn of 1614, eleven entries having to do with Virginia were authorized by Smith.32 During this time, the only Virginia entry not to be authorized by a Virginia Company official was for the now-lost ballad ‘The laste newes from Virginia, beinge an encouragmente to all others to followe that noble enterprise’ entered in the summer of 1611.33 Months after Smith signed off on Baron De la Warr’s Relation [to the Council of Virginia] in July 1611, the Virginia Company launched its second fundraising campaign, this time a series of lotteries between 1612 and 1621.34 In May 1612, the Stationers’ Company ventured £20 in the first of these lotteries.35 Anxious about waning interest and complaints about malfeasance in lottery administration, the Virginia Company sent letters of endorsem*nt to the livery companies from Sir Thomas Smith, the Lord Mayor, and the Privy Council for its third lottery. In response in June 1614, the Stationers’ Company ventured £45.36

As part of their fundraising and propaganda activities starting in 1609, the Virginia Company also established sustained working relationships with stationer businesses. Of these, the earliest and most significant was with the Welby bookshop.37 As we have seen, in 1609 Welby was listed with Swinhowe and Bishop as an individual subscriber in the Virginia Company’s second charter.38 Welby’s interest in the Jamestown venture was likely piqued by the Greyhound’s involvement with A True Relation the year before and solidified by his financial stake in the Virginia Company that would end up amounting to seven shares or the not insignificant sum of £87. 10s.39 It was also sustained by what would be a regular diet of Virginia Company publishing work for the coming years. Indeed, before his death in 1617 or 1618, Welby’s businesses at the Greyhound and then the Swan would become by far the most prolific publishers of Virginia titles.40 Welby’s shares may have been a partial payment for these efforts, one share per year from 1609 to 1615.41

Welby’s business appears to have begun its work for the Virginia Company by helping to usher its sermon campaign into print. In the late spring of 1609, it published A Good Speed to Virginia. In the sermon, the London rector Robert Gray presents a series of biblical precedents for England’s continued colonization of Virginia. The printed sermon bears signs of being a commissioned work, Gray dedicating the sermon to ‘Aduenturers for the plantation of Virginea’ as well as referring at its close to the ‘the godly care of the counsell and Aduenturers of Virginia’.42 Signed by Gray ‘From mine house at the Northend of Sithes lane London, April 28. Anno 1609’ (A4r) and then entered by Welby in the Stationers’ Register on 3 May,43 the sermon appears to have been intended for print publication from the start.

Around this time, the Greyhound would become involved with another Virginia sermon, this one delivered in late April by the Anglican minister William Symonds in London at Whitechapel. Co-published with Eleazar Edgar’s bookselling business at the Windmill, Virginia is advertised as ‘Published for the benefit and vse of the colony, planted, and to bee planted there, and for the aduancement of their Christian purpose’ (title page) and includes a dedicatory epistle from Symonds to the ‘Aduenturers for the Plantation of VIRGINIA’.44 In March 1610 after moving his bookshop to the Swan, Welby was back at Stationers’ Hall. This time he brought a sermon that the Anglican preacher and bibliophile William Crashaw delivered to Virginia Company officials the preceding February. Like the Gray and Symonds sermons, A Sermon Preached in London was, as it advertises on its title page, ‘published by direction’.

Virginia Company propaganda would continue to be commissioned with the Welby business over the next five years. First came Richard Rich’s News from Virginia in 1610, a short announcement in verse detailing Sir Thomas Gates’s miraculous arrival at Jamestown close to a year after wrecking the Sea Venture and being marooned in Bermuda.45 There followed six Virginia project titles: Thomas de la Warr’s The Relation of the Right Honorable the Lord De La Warre…of the Colony Planted in Virginia (‘Published by authority of the [Virginia] Counsell’ [title page], 1611); Robert Johnson’s The New Life of Virginia (‘Published by the authoritie of his Maiesties Counsell of Virginea’ [title page], 1612); Silvester Jourdain’s A Plain Description of the Bermudas Now Called Somers Islands (dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith, 1613); Alexander Whitaker’s Good News from Virginia (‘Perused and published by direction from that [Virginia] Counsell’ [title page], 1613); Ralph Hamor’s A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith, 1615); and Lewes Hughes, A Letter Sent into England from the Somers Islands (1615).46 Each of these was overseen through the printing process by Welby and wholesaled at the Swan.

Virginia Company publishing at the Swan during these years was not confined to sermons, pamphlets, and books. Around the time that it was first wholesaling Crashaw’s A Sermon Preached in London, the Swan began being employed to oversee the printing and dissemination of a variety of print ephemera. In recent years, job printing (the printing of short documents like receipt templates, bills, tickets, warrants, indenture forms, and taxation slips) has been recognized as an essential part of printing-house work.47 Under-recognized is the extent to which such jobs were first commissioned out to bookseller publishers and thus could constitute a significant proportion of their financing endeavours. The Welby shop’s first efforts along these lines were called upon after news first reached England in November 1609 of the Sea Venture. In early 1610, it published a broadside announcement of the shipwreck that included an extensive advertisem*nt for ‘sufficient, honest and good artificers’ (smiths, carpenters, coopers, bakers, brewers, and so on) to undertake a resupply mission to Jamestown under the leadership of Baron De la Warre.48 Along with colony announcements and advertisem*nts also came requests for administrative documents.49 After the Virginia Company’s second charter was approved, the Welby business was tasked with producing printed bills of adventure for new investors as well as a series of lottery announcements.50

Networks

Collaboration was ubiquitous in the early modern English book trade. Printers lent out type, ornaments, and woodcuts to one another and worked together on jobs; booksellers shared retail and stockroom space; and bookselling wholesalers exchanged copies to diversify their warehouses and stalls.51 The bookmen and bookwomen responsible for financing the lion’s share of the period’s print titles also routinely relied upon a network of peers to help them with investment opportunities. Within these webs of association, promising titles were identified by a trusted acquisition agent; copy was taken to a reliable trade printer; and inked quires were stored and wholesaled at a familiar warehouse operated by a known peer.52 Moreover, as we saw with Tapp and Welby’s financing of A True Relation, publication projects were commonly underwritten and managed by steadfast sets of Stationer peers. Most importantly, such partnerships allowed publishers to share financial outlay, thereby reducing individual risk.53 Book-trade publishers also regularly turned to family members and/or to circles of authors, translators, editors, and/or compilers for assistance. Connections like these could contribute to acquisition efforts, and they could exert a significant influence over the final contours of printed titles.

When Welby’s Greyhound business first stocked copies of Smith’s True Relation in 1608, it was also distributing two titles by the puritan clergyman John Downame: his Four Treatises and Lectures. According to Downame, it was pressure from Welby that helped push the two-part Lectures forward. ‘I began to resolue…not to diuulge any part’, he confesses, ‘till the whole were finished. But he who is at the charge of printing this booke, herein ouerruled me, perswading me to publish my readings vpon these Chapters first, for a taste of the rest.’54 Undeterred by his publisher’s chutzpah and haste, Downame would continue to work with Welby in the coming years, not only expanding and correcting his popular Christian Warfare for a third edition in 1612 but penning the title’s second sequel Consolations for the Afflicted (which Welby would publish in 1613) around the same time.55

At the end of 1604, Welby’s Greyhound operation began what would prove a long-term relationship with the Temple church preacher Crashaw. From Crashaw came a series of edited texts by Protestant theologian William Perkins. Such was the close relationship between the Temple divine and the Welby business at the Greyhound that in their first Perkins publication were promises of three forthcoming texts ‘found in the studie of the deceased’ and of a dozen more ‘workes, taken from his mouth, with [Crashaw’s] owne hand’.56 Crashaw, it turns out, also had had a relationship with True Relation editor Healey. In the second English edition of St Augustine’s City of God (1620), Crashaw reveals that it was because of him that Healey originally translated the text. ‘This worke of the Citie of God’, he writes, ‘was long ago translated into French. I saw not therefore any reason why it should be denied to our English people so many desiring it as did daily: Wherefore I set one about it, Who if he had time enough (for he is now with God) wanted not I am sure, neither will nor skill to doe it well.’57 The title was originally entered in the Stationers’ Register on 3 May 1608,58 months before Healey began editing Smith’s account. It is not inconceivable, in other words, that Healey, rather than first seeking out the Tapp business at Tower Hill that August, was directed by Crashaw to the Greyhound. For the next five years, Crashaw would continue to contribute regularly to the Welby business. In December 1608 he delivered an edited version of John Redman’s The Complaint of Grace, and, as we have already seen, his February 1609 Virginia sermon was published at the bookshop the following year. Crashaw also appears to have brought Whitaker’s Good News from Virginia and Jourdain’s A Plain Description of the Bermudas to Welby’s new shop at the Swan in 1612 or 1613. To each, he appended an extensive dedicatory epistle.

As mentioned above, the Anglican clergyman Symonds offered his own pulpit endorsem*nt of the Virginia project in late April 1609, a month before Price delivered the sermon that would be published as Saul’s Prohibition Stayed by Law’s bookselling business at the Fox. Delivered at Whitechapel Church in east London to an audience of Virginia Company planters and adventurers, Symonds’s sermon may very well have been the first in the Virginia Company’s 1609 sermon campaign. Symonds himself had only relocated to London from Lincolnshire a few years earlier, accepting lectureships at Christ Church (opposite St Paul’s) in 1606 and at St Saviour’s Southwark in 1607.59 At some point before addressing members of the Virginia Company, he was recruited for the Virginia Anglican ministry, this likely the result of his close connections both with Robert Bertie, Lord Willoughby (patron of John Smith), and Crashaw.60 Throughout his presentation, Symonds conjures the precedent of God’s call to Abraham in Genesis to go forth and multiply, to honour God’s creation, and to spread the good news of his works among the heathens. Symonds’s sermon is marked by its moment. Even while its biblical injunction to ‘Get thee out of thy Countrey’ was immediately delivered to what likely was a receptive Whitechapel audience, it at the same time repeatedly gestures towards a larger multitude of vocal detractors. Of these ‘cursers’ who in 1609 were aggressively questioning the legality, security, and purpose of the Virginia venture, Symonds promises that ‘it is Gods ordinance to bring a curse vpon them, and to kill them: as the children of Israel did Balam’ (G2r).

As we have seen, Symonds’s sermon quickly found its way to the print trade. In the second week of May the bookseller Edgar entered what would be printed as Virginia. A Sermon Preached at Whitechapel in the Stationers’ Register.61 Symonds’s Virginia was in fact a collaborative venture, undertaken both by Edgar’s St Paul’s churchyard business at the Windmill and Welby’s at the Greyhound.62 The printed sermon’s title page would advertise that the whole was ‘PVBLISHED FOR THE BENEFIT AND VSE OF THE COLONY, PLANTED, And to bee Planted there’, suggesting Virginia Company involvement in the text’s transmission to Edgar and Welby.63 Symonds, though, probably took the lead in this transmission, contributing a dedicatory epistle to ‘the Aduenturers for the Plantation of VIRGINIA’ (A2r) to the print quarto. It was likely Edgar who brought the title to John Windet’s Cross Keys printing house at Paul’s Wharf. Edgar had taken two titles to Windet in 1606 and in 1608, and he would bring two more titles to the printer in the later months of 1609. After Windet passed away at the end of 1610, this Cross Keys–Windmill arrangement would continue, Edgar bringing all of his copy to Windet’s apprentice and partner William Stansby who had taken over Windet’s printing operations in 1611.64

Virginia. A Sermon would prove to be the only title that Edgar would co-publish with Welby in the sixteen years that he worked in the London book trade after being freed of the Stationers’ Company in 1597.65 Even so, Edgar and Welby were part of a larger publishing network anchored by the extensive bookselling business run by Cuthbert Burby and his wife Elizabeth.66 From the year of his freedom in 1592 until his death in 1607, Cuthbert Burby was able to establish one of the more successful retail book businesses in London. Not only did he and his wife come to operate multiple shops and finance a large number of titles, but they also relied upon a network of writers like Sir John Hayward and Christopher Sutton; acquisition agents like Thomas Gosson and John Barnes; printers like Windet, Thomas Scarlet, and Adam Islip; and publishers like John Wolfe, Edmund Weaver, and William Leake to help them conduct their business.

Edgar and Welby’s mutual connection to the Burbys may account for their collaboration on Symonds’s sermon. Edgar probably first encountered the Burbys while working as an apprentice and then as a journeyman bookseller for Raphe Jackson at the Swan bookshop. When the Burbys acquired the Swan after Jackson’s death in 1601, Edgar may have continued working as a journeyman there. Before Cuthbert Burby’s death in 1607, Edgar co-published an extensive treatise on preaching by William Perkins with the Burbys,67 wholesaled three titles at the Swan warehouse, and co-published titles with two of the Burbys’s former apprentices, first with Robert Jackson in the later months of 160768 and then with Ambrose Garbrand in 1610 and 1611. An August memorandum to Cuthbert Burby’s will names Edgar as a witness, and the December 1607 inventory of the Burby estate lists a debt of £5 owed by Cuthbert Burby to Edgar. Welby’s association with the Burby business did not formally begin until 16 October 1609 when he was granted the Burbys’ rights (full and partial) to over three-dozen copies.69 By the early months of 1610, Welby had also moved his bookselling business to the Swan. Negotiations for both of these arrangements with Elizabeth Burby may have begun earlier in the year, around the time that Welby and Edgar pursued their only collaborative project.70

Around the time of Welby’s Burby acquisition in October, news had reached London that Jamestown’s new Governor Sir Thomas Gates was feared dead in a wreck of the flagship Sea Venture. Along with this report, Captain Samuel Argall brought word of difficult conditions at Jamestown, famine and dissension severely undermining colony morale. It was at this point that the Virginia Company had become even more aggressive in controlling information about Virginia, negotiating an arrangement with the Stationers’ Company to authorize all Virginia titles and regularizing its connection with publishers like Welby and Kingston. Sometime before 14 December, Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Waller Coxe gave John Stepneth authorization to publish A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia.71 Endorsed by and likely composed at the direction of the Virginia Company, A True and Sincere Declaration opens with a candid explanation of its intent, which is

In its following pages, the pamphlet addresses the rumours set off by Argall’s return while at the same time attempting to set the record straight about the colony’s past, present, and future. According to Symonds, these were times strictly dedicated to God, country, and profit, in that order.

A True and Sincere Declaration was the first title that Stepneth would enter in the Stationers’ Register since he was freed by the Stationers’ Company in 1602.73 Like Edgar, Stepneth had not immediately opened his own bookshop; instead had most likely been labouring as a journeyman bookseller. In 1609, he may have been working for Walter and Margaret Burre as A True and Sincere Declaration’s imprint lists their bookshop at the Crane in St Paul’s Churchyard as its wholesale location. Stepneth would work again with the Burres on Jonson’s Alchemist, wholesaling copies from his new shop at the opposite west end of St Paul’s Churchyard in 1612.

Stepneth’s dealings with the Crane bookselling business involved him in a publishing network that not only had links to the trade printer George Eld and to the playwright Ben Jonson74 but also boasted strong ties to the Chester Middletons, a family heavily invested in the maritime ventures of the East India Company. Margaret Burre was the sister of ship captains Sir Henry Middleton, David Middleton, and John Middleton, and she received substantial legacies from each in their wills.75 On two occasions before 1610, the Burre business published accounts that it likely acquired through the Middleton captains. In 1600, it published a short report and a ballad recounting a naval battle between English merchants and the Spanish navy in the Strait of Gibraltar.76 Six years later in 1606, it published two separate accounts of the East India Company’s expedition to establish a trading post at Bantam from 1601 to 1605: The Last East-Indian Voyage and merchant Edmund Scott’s An Exact Discourse of the Subtleties, Fashions, Policies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians.77 All three Middleton brothers helped lead this expedition, and The Last East-Indian Voyage may have been completed by Henry Middleton shortly after he and David Middleton made their way back from Bantam in 1606. In a short prefatory epistle, Burre assures his readers that the ‘beginner of this relation following, would no doubt if he had liued haue himselfe set it out to thy good liking: but this I assure thee, that both his & this continuation of it is set forth with as much faithfulnes as could be gathered out of the best obseruations of them that are come home’.78 Burre also advertises An Exact Discourse in this epistle, telling his readers to ‘looke shortly for an exact and large discourse written by Maister Scot chiefe factor at Bantam, euer since the first voyage’. Scott returned with the Middletons in 1606, and it stands to reason that it was through their efforts that his account ended up at the Crane at the same time as The Last East-Indian Voyage.79

While it is conceivable that Stepneth published A True and Sincere Declaration entirely on his own, the Burre business’s familial connection to the Middleton captains suggests that it likely played some role in the pamphlet’s acquisition. When Stepneth entered the title in the Stationers’ Register in December 1609, Sir Henry Middleton was in London, awaiting a commission from the East India Company that would come in the early months of 1610.80 Though neither Sir Henry nor David Middleton were Virginia Company investors, both had significant personal connections to the company. The two brothers were closely acquainted with East India Company Governor and Virginia Company Treasurer Sir Thomas Smith, so much so that each left Smith a £5 legacy to buy a mourning ring to wear as a remembrance token.81 They also shared an intimate connection with the prominent Virginia Company investor Robert Middleton, describing him in their wills as a ‘Cozen’ as well as a ‘good friend’ and making him an overseer.82 Along with singling him out as an overseer, Sir Henry also left a £20 legacy and a mourning ring to his ‘good friend’ Sir Thomas Middleton. Like Robert Middleton, Sir Thomas invested more than £30 in the Virginia Company and was listed as an adventurer in its second charter.

Against all odds, Sir Thomas Gates and the crew of the ill-fated Sea Venture would eventually make it to Jamestown in May 1610 after wintering in Bermuda.83 What Gates found at his arrival was a colony in a state of disorder, anxiety, and famine (in the midst of ‘the starving time’, as it is now commonly called). In response, an elaborate system of martial law was implemented. Gates would return to England towards the end of the year, leaving Jamestown in the hands of his recently dispatched replacement, Thomas West, Baron de La Warr. Back in England, Gates was able to convince company officials, against a burgeoning movement to abandon the enterprise, to invest more men and money in Virginia. Two supply missions would be sent in the first six months of 1611, the second with Gates who was again making the transatlantic voyage as Jamestown’s next Governor.

It was at the end of this year that the Virginia Company would again sponsor a publication project, this time a collection of its colony’s newly minted laws along with sets of instructions for company officials, from the Governor to the common soldier. The volume was compiled by William Strachey, a survivor of the Sea Venture misfortune who had been named Secretary to the Jamestown Colony during his time in Bermuda.84 For the Colony in Virginia Brittania: Laws Divine, Moral and Martial was entered for publication in mid-December 161185 and published by the Burres at the Crane the following year. Stepneth, at this point, had secured his own bookshop at the west end of St Paul’s and would not again be linked to a Virginia Company title. Like many of Welby’s publications after 1609, For the Colony in Virginia was a commissioned publication intended primarily for the use of the Virginia Company. As Strachey acknowledges in his dedicatory epistle to the friends and assistants of the Virginia Council, it was ‘to be deliuered in particular to officers and priuate Souldiers for their better instruction’.86 The pamphlet was also sold at the Crane and other bookshops as propaganda, intended to ‘chicke, [those] who malitiously and desperately heretoforè haue censured of [the Virginia project], and by examining of which they may be right sorie so to haue defaulked from vs as if we liued there lawlesse, without obedience to our Countrey, or obseruancie of Religion to God’ (A2v). When Walter Burre entered For the Colony in Virginia for publication, his brother-in-law Sir Henry Middleton was still away leading an East India Company expedition. His brother-in-law David Middleton, however, had been in London since the summer after returning from Bantam with a significant cargo of nutmeg and mace.87 Once again, it may have been through the intervention of family members that a title had been taken to the Crane.

Like other important episodes in early modern England’s history, the colonization of Virginia was energized, enabled by the book trade. Distributed across the country by booksellers of all sorts, first-hand accounts piqued interest, pamphlet edicts flouted apprehensions, and printed sermons recast the endeavour along religious and nationalist lines. At the same time, printed ephemera such as bills of adventure, lottery receipts, and position advertisem*nts streamlined the Virginia Company’s administrative work and fundraising efforts. As this chapter has demonstrated, the process by which this material was acquired, printed, and disseminated was in almost every case collaborative, and it was prompted as much by writers, compilers, and translators as by book-trade publishers. In some cases, the publishing penchants of a bookseller directly led to a Virginia title being brought to press. In others, established familial, intellectual, and/or professional networks had much to do with its publication. In still others, financial investment in the Virginia Company was the essential motivating factor. However they came to be published, collusion between the Virginia Company and the Stationers’ Company ensured that these early broadsides, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos all championed what would be England’s first sustained annexation of the Americas.

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