Produced by Mark C. Orton, Meredith Bach, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's Note: Research done for this book indicates that its copyright was not renewed.] VIRGINIA UNDER CHARLES I AND CROMWELL, 1625-1660 By Wilcomb E. Washburn Research Associate, Institute of Early American History and Culture and Instructor in History, College of William and Mary Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation Williamsburg, Virginia 1957 COPYRIGHT(C), 1957 BY VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION CORPORATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet, Number 7 Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660 VIRGINIA ON THE EVE OF EXPANSION Woodrow Wilson named the first volume of his _History of the United States_ "The Swarming of the English." We might go further and compare the colonization and expansion in the New World to a fissioning process in which individual atoms are torn loose from a former pattern of coherence and fused into new and strange patterns. The United States, indeed, is still in the process of fusion following the earlier fission process. It has not yet reached the stability that comes to some nations in history, and which is marked by a fixed pattern of population growth, land use, day-to-day habits, and philosophic beliefs. It is, rather, a country in which every generation can look back to a strangely different era that existed before it came of age. The period 1625-1660 in Virginia history is an important one for the study of the fission-fusion process in America. During those years Virginia's population increased perhaps twenty-five or thirty fold, and the settlements spread from a thin belt along the James River to the whole of Tidewater Virginia. Human atoms were propelled outwards in every direction in an uncontrolled and only feebly directed expansion. The years 1607 to 1625 had created a base for this expansion. Those had been crucial years and difficult ones. Settlements had resembled military camps and individual colonists had been commanded like soldiers. Rigorous administration of justice, fear of the Indians, and the strict economic regulations imposed by the London Company had served to restrain the potentially expansive nature of the colonists. The year 1625 saw Virginia under a new King and under a new form of government. The charter of the London Company was made void, and the colony passed from the control of a commercial company to the direct control of King Charles I.