Reviews of Books

Sir Edwin Sandys has long attracted the notice of historians of the early Stuart period, partly because of his central role in the Virginia Company during the 1610s and 1620s but mainly because of his prominence as an opposition spokesman in the English parliaments of James I. Owing to his political activities, Sandys has been blamed for the crown's dislike of the Virginia Company and especially its constituent assembly. Recently, this notion has been challenged by Richard Middleton, among others. By dwelling at length on Sandys's parliamentary career, Theodore K. Rabb's fine study allows us to revisit the question. More broadly, as the first full-scale biography of Sandys, Jacobean Gentleman sheds light on a range of important political, legal, and economic developments in England and America during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. It rescues Sir Edwin from a relatively stunted role in the historiography and establishes him as one of the most influential figures of his age.	1
As presented by Rabb, Sir Edwin Sandys deserves a prominent place in the history of the early development of England's overseas empire, certainly a much greater place than that afforded him in The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume 1: The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford and New York, 1998), where Sandys is mentioned just once in the course of nearly 500 pages. As Rabb demonstrates, Sandys was one of the most important participants in English colonial ventures in the reign of James I. Of all the gentry of England and Wales attracted by the activities of the Virginia Company, the Bermuda Company, and the East India Company, Sandys was unusual in that he became a director of all three and involved himself fully in the planning, organization, and funding of the companies' voyages. Sandys even showed interest in the short-lived Amazon Company, which hoped to colonize Guiana, but Rabb passes over this venture and concentrates mainly on Sir Edwin's involvement in the Virginia Company, about which most is known. Sandys's rivalry with Sir Thomas Smythe for leadership of the enterprise is discussed at length, and his eventual seizure of control of the Virginia Company in 1618 is presented as a manifestation of patriotic concern for the colony's welfare rather than any particular anxiety to protect his financial investments. This contention will doubtless be met with skepticism; economic self-interest is considered to have been Sandys's driving motive. But Rabb emphasizes his subject's willingness, when necessary, to sacrifice for a greater good. When Sandys instructed the Virginia colonists to grow corn as well as tobacco, he necessarily threatened the short-term profitability of the colony in order to boost the prospect of its medium-term demographic survival. In the event, his intervention was futile, and far from rescuing the company, his policies led ultimately to its dissolution.	2
Still, Sandys did whatever he could to stave off disaster. The case for his authorship of Virginia's new landholding regulations of 1618 is convincingly made; Rabb likewise suggests that he played a pivotal role in encouraging the Pilgrim fathers to set sail. A little less convincing, however, is the discussion of Sandys's reaction to the collapse of the Virginia colony and the dissolution of the company in the years 1622–1625, where Rabb is reluctant to accept that his hero behaved badly. Suffice it to say that interested readers will have to look elsewhere for details of Sandys's recourse to slander and deceit as he tried desperately to save his investments.	. . .