A similar oath was required from the governor. Once a year, usually in November, the shareholders met in a general session called the General Court, to elect officers—a governor, a deputy governor, and a committee which was to transact details of business as occasion required. Each officer was required to take oath of secrecy and fidelity. This committee, it was, that appointed the captains to the vessels, the men of the crews, the local governors for the fur posts on the bay, and the chief traders, who were to go inland to barter. From all of these, oaths and bonds of fidelity were required. He, who violated his oath, was liable to forfeiture of wages and stock in the Company. In all the minute books for two-and-a-half centuries, both of the committee and the General Court which I examined, there were records of only one director dismissed for breaking his oath, and two captains discharged for illicit trade. Compared to the cut-throat methods of modern business, whose promise is not worth the breath that utters it and whose perjuries having become so common, people have ceased to blush, the old, slow-going Company has no need to be ashamed. Each officer in his own sphere was as despotic as a czar, but the despotism was founded on good will. When my Lord Preston did the Company a good turn by sending Radisson back from Paris to London, the committee of 1684 orders the warehouse keeper “_to deliver the furrier as many black beaver skins as will make my lord a fine covering for his bedd_”—not a bribe _before_ the good turn, but a token of good will _afterwards_. When Mr. Randolph of New England arrests Ben Gillam for poaching on the Company’s preserve up on Hudson Bay, the committee orders a piece of plate to the value of £10 for Mr. Randolph. When King Charles and the Duke of York interceded with France to forbid interlopers, “_two pair of beaver stockings are ordered for the King and the Duke of York_;” and the committee of April, 1684, instructs “_Sir James Hayes do attend His Royal Highness at Windsor and present him his dividend in gold in a faire embroidered purse_.” For whipping “_those vermin, those enemies of all mankind, the French_,” the Right Honorable Earl John Churchill (Marlborough) is presented with a cat-skin counterpane. The General Court and weekly committee meetings were held at the very high altars of feudalism—in the White Tower built by William the Conqueror, or at Whitehall where lived the Stuarts, or at the Jerusalem Coffee House, where scions of nobility met the money lenders and where the Company seems to have arranged advances on the subscribed stock to outfit each year’s ships. Often, the committee meetings wound up with orders for the secretary “_to bespeake a cask of canary for ye governor_,” or “_a hogshead of claret for ye captains sailing from Gravesend_,” to whom “_ye committee wished a God Speed, a good wind and a faire saile_.”