One of the most brilliant parliamentary figures of his generation, Sandys burst suddenly and unexpectedly onto the parliamentary stage in 1604 at the relatively advanced age of 42, establishing a dominance so complete that Prestwich has dubbed him ‘the uncrowned king of the Commons in James’s reign’. This was, perhaps, an exaggeration, but even Gardiner admitted that, apart from Bacon, ‘no man enjoyed the confidence of the House more than Sir Edwin Sandys’.
I. Early Life and Career
Sandys has been described as ‘a solid and impeccable country gentleman’, but though he certainly acquired an estate in Kent, his background was such that he was hardly the epitome of a landed squire.
The publication of Hooker’s work was carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the 1593 Parliament. Sandys, who wished to participate in the parliamentary onslaught against radical Protestantism, was technically incapable of sitting in the Commons because he was prebend of Wetwang, an office bestowed upon him by his father in 1582 to provide him with an independent income.
Sandys never practised at the bar, and in May 1596 he quit his chambers. Shortly thereafter he was appointed to accompany the 2nd earl of Lincoln on a minor diplomatic mission to the Landgrave of Hesse.
While in Paris in April 1599, Sandys completed a lengthy and detailed record of his observations. Entitled A Relation of the state of Religion, it offered an overview of Christian practice in the western world, something that had never before been attempted. Indeed, Sandys’s measured approach to Catholicism became ‘the most complete and informed survey available to English readers’. Although Sandys found many features of Catholic belief distasteful, such as extreme veneration of the Virgin and the emphasis laid on ceremonies, others, like confession, Lenten observance and praying three times a day, could be ‘recommended to the imitation of all worthy Christians’. In some respects, Sandys even regarded Catholic practice as preferable. ‘I cannot but highly commend’, he wrote, that Catholics ‘spare nothing that either cost can perform in enriching, or skill in adorning, the temples of God’. He was unable to understand the Protestant ‘scant and strict rule of mere necessity’.
Sandys returned to England in 1599, where he maintained contact with Robert Cecil; indeed, he was regarded as one of Cecil’s confidants as late as May 1601.
As well as his Kent properties, Sandys also acquired the lease of a house from London’s corporation in about 1601.
II. The 1604 Session
There is no contemporary evidence that Sandys travelled to Scotland to greet James I on his accession,
One of the most striking features of the new House of Commons was that it included only two, relatively minor privy councillors - the second secretary of state Sir John Herbert and the treasurer of the Chamber, Sir John Stanhope I. Robert Cecil, who had managed the House for the queen in 1601, now sat in the Lords. Since neither Herbert nor Stanhope was particularly able, it often fell to one of the king’s leading lawyers, Francis Bacon, to speak for them. Yet while Bacon’s talents were formidable, they could not compensate for the absence of a powerful team of ministers. To bolster the Crown’s voice in the Commons, Cecil seems to have relied upon experienced Members of the House with whom he was well connected to act as his occasional spokesmen. Sir Robert Wroth I apparently performed this function during the wardship debates of 1604, and there is some evidence to suggest that Cecil’s cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, secretly acted with Cecil’s encouragement when he openly opposed making peace with Spain in May. Sandys, who perhaps had not yet abandoned all hope of achieving office at the hands of the king’s chief minister, may also have continued to see himself as a Cecil client, as will become apparent.
During the opening month of the Parliament Sandys made no recorded speeches, although a steady stream of committee nominations suggests that he was often present.
Sandys was not to be silenced so easily. After brushing aside Sir William Maurice’s suggestion on 23 Apr. that James, as the ruler of three kingdoms, was entitled to style himself emperor - he remarked that the name of king was ‘sweet’ enough, as it was one ‘which God taketh upon him[self]’
These were devastating criticisms, but Sandys had not yet finished. How, he asked, could the English Parliament, having recently acknowledged James as rightful king of England, pass another Act whose effect would be to abolish both itself and the kingdom to which James had succeeded? What, too, would become of the king’s coronation oath? While the subject could always be required to renew his oath of loyalty, the king would never retake his oath unless there were a new coronation. The dissolution of England would also undermine her foreign policy, as some of her neighbours would inevitably exploit the name change to wriggle out of their treaty obligations. Most worrying of all, perhaps, was the fate of the English Common Law. ‘The king cannot preserve the fundamental laws by uniting’, he declared, any more than a goldsmith instructed to fuse two crowns into one could do so and yet preserve the originals. Were the two kingdoms to merge, ‘we shall alter all laws, customs, privileges’. Even if the Commons passed the legislation sought by James, what guarantees were there that the Act would not be interpreted to the disadvantage of the subject, particularly as the final arbiter would be the king himself? In an ideal world, in which ‘princes had as much wisdom and goodness as God’, they would ‘need no tie’, but in practice adequate safeguards were needed.
The effect of this outstanding speech was to demolish the case for the king. The Commons was so impressed that Sandys was appointed to speak after Bacon at the forthcoming conference with the Lords.
Sandys’s opposition to the Union was undoubtedly genuine, but he may also have been receiving quiet encouragement from Robert Cecil. On 26 Apr., the day on which Sandys delivered his keynote speech, the French ambassador reported that those most opposed to the Union in the Commons were secretly receiving comfort and assistance from members of the Council.
Until this point, Sandys had almost certainly been following a policy laid down by Cecil. However, Cecil evidently had misgivings about the strategy he had been pursuing. Immediately after Sandys finished speaking on the 26th, Wroth, Cecil’s spokesman on wardship two months earlier, announced that it was ‘impossible that any good could come of this course in the matter of wardship’. Over the previous couple of days Cecil, the master of the Wards, had come under considerable pressure from the officers of his department regarding the inadequate compensation they would receive were wardship to be abolished. Cecil’s sudden change of tack meant there was now a difference between his policy and the one advocated by Sandys. Consequently, as Rabb has suggested, sometime between 11 and 26 May the plan to compound for wardship ceased to be Cecil’s and became Sandys’s instead.
Although there is circumstantial evidence to link Sandys with Cecil in 1604, it seems clear that Sandys was never merely Cecil’s creature. In one major area of debate at least, that of free trade, it soon became clear that he had his own agenda. On 24 Apr., five days after his opening attack on the Union, Sandys was appointed to a committee to consider two bills on free trade. From the outset he seems to have been regarded as its chairman, as he was its first named member. The committee took less than a month to examine witnesses, deliberate and draw up its report, which was drafted by Sandys. On 21 May Sandys presented the committee’s findings to the House in a speech described by the clerk as ‘excellently delivered’.
Free trade, wardship and the Union were the issues that most occupied Sandys in 1604, but others, chiefly relating to religion and the Church, also caught his attention. On 19 Apr. he was named to attend the joint conference with the Lords on religion. Later, on 5 May, he participated in a lengthy debate on religion, when, possibly to head off the imminent suspension of those parish clergy who were threatening to refuse to subscribe to the new Canons, he suggested a bill ‘to establish unity in a middle course, between the bishops and ministers’. On 4 June he was appointed to help consider two bills regarding pluralism. Two further nominations - one to consider a bill to prevent the import and printing of popish books (6 June) and another to ensure church attendance (27 June) - also came his way.
III. The 1605/6 Session
In August 1604, shortly after the Parliament was prorogued, Sir Henry Neville I* reported a rumour that either Sandys or Sir John Holles* would soon be offered the job of ambassador to Paris in succession to Sir Thomas Parry*. Neville, a former ambassador to France himself, thought that while Holles would probably decline such an offer, Sandys ‘I am sure, will not’.
Although the Relation proved popular with a wide audience, it attracted the disapproval of the Court of High Commission, which on 3 Nov. 1605 ordered all copies to be burned. The court may have been alarmed at the book’s even-handed treatment of Catholicism, which some would later interpret, incorrectly, as evidence that Sandys leaned towards Rome. On 7 Nov. it was rumoured that Sandys himself approved of the book’s suppression, but given the recent discovery of the Gunpowder Plot he was unlikely to have said otherwise.
Sandys was evidently present when Parliament reopened on 5 Nov. 1605, as he was named to a committee.
One of the consequences of the widespread relief felt at the failure of the Gunpowder Plot was that the Commons was unusually willing to loosen its control of the purse strings. Sandys himself was prepared to vote two subsidies and four fifteenths to demonstrate the House’s ‘love, virtue [and] thankfulness’, and on 10 Feb. he dismissed any suggestion that the country was too poor to pay the amounts involved, asserting that ‘the poverty of the land [is] as much eased as may be’. However, when James demanded a larger sum he changed his tune, claiming on 8 Mar. that the recent plague outbreak had ‘wasted more’ than if there had been 100 years of continual war. He added, somewhat unconvincingly, that ‘I speak not to hinder liberality’. Six days later, in ‘a short, eloquent speech’, he moved that the money already voted should ‘go alone and not be tainted with any heavy or unpleasing gift’. If the king required a greater sum, the House should consider ‘some other projects’ instead.
Sandys’s unwillingness to vote more money may have stemmed from anger at the king’s reaction to John Hare’s bill for reforming the abuses connected with purveyance. This bill aimed, in effect, to abolish purveyance altogether, leaving the king with a bare right of pre-emption at market prices. Sandys supported both this radical measure and its author, and when on 14 Feb. Hare got into trouble with the Upper House for denouncing the abuses of purveyors with too much fervour and refusing to surrender his copy of the articles against them, Sandys rushed to his defence. On 20 Feb. he warned his colleagues that ‘Parliament is no Parliament’ if Members were not permitted to speak freely, and he suggested that the Lords should not, in future, ‘censure any without the judgment of this House’. Two days later he was appointed to a small committee to write a message defending Hare’s conduct and ask the Lords to forbear in future ‘all taxations and reprehensions in conferences’.
The debates over purveyance and taxation in 1606 clearly indicate that Sandys no longer considered himself a client of Salisbury’s. Although he seconded Salisbury’s attempt to stem the flow of volunteers that swelled the ranks of the archdukes’ armed forces, and belonged to the committee to consider the bill to permit Salisbury to enlarge his house on the Strand (5 May),
As well as introducing his own bill, Sandys was named to consider measures relating to ecclesiastical government (25 Feb. and 1 Apr.) and the restoration of deprived ministers (7 March).
Although Sandys failed to gain acceptance for his own bill, a measure to confirm the foundation and property of his old Oxford college, Corpus Christi, was enacted. There is no direct evidence that he was responsible for steering this bill through the House, but he was the first Member named to the committee on 6 Mar. after the privy councillors and he brought the measure in from committee five days later.
Another matter Sandys continued to pursue was free trade. Although there is little trace of his activity in the Commons Journal and surviving diaries, he was clearly a pivotal figure in the renewed attack on the London trading companies, and in particular the newly incorporated Spanish Company. Indeed, he was appointed to consider both the charter of the Spanish Company (5 Nov.), and the grievances associated with it (28 January). When a bill to abolish the Company received a second reading, it was referred to the committee established in November, to which Sandys belonged. Sandys undoubtedly helped get the bill onto the statute book, but all that is certain is that on 2 May he reported a conference with the Lords about the measure. As well as participating in the attack on the Spanish Company, Sandys was appointed to consider the Muscovy trade (20 Mar.) and a new free trade bill (3 April).
Although not mentioned in the parliamentary records after 17 May, when he was named to a private bill committee,
IV. The 1606/7 Session
When Parliament reassembled in November 1606 the main item on the agenda was the Union. Although James had abandoned the idea of obtaining statutory authority to use the name ‘Great Britain’, he now wanted to ensure that the Scots were legally considered full citizens of England and to abolish the hostile laws between both kingdoms. Sandys, whose devastating interventions in April 1604 had been so decisive, was at first remarkably reticent. Indeed, before the last week of February 1607 he evidently allowed Nicholas Fuller and the rest of his colleagues to do most of the running, perhaps because the main subject then under discussion was the abolition of the hostile laws, a matter better handled by the lawyer-Members. That said, on 27 Nov. he suggested that the question of the hostile laws should be thoroughly considered before any discussions were held with the Lords, and on 15 Dec. he participated in a poorly recorded debate on the same subject, when he agreed with Sir George More. He was also appointed to attend the joint conference of 25 Nov. 1606 and serve on the committee for considering matters of hostility and commerce (11 Dec. 1606) mentioned in the Instrument of the Union.
The Lords, however, sought the legal advice of the judges, who informed them that those Scots born since James’s accession - the post-nati - were natural-born subjects of both kingdoms. The Commons was appalled, and on 6 Mar. it turned itself into a grand committee to consider the matter in detail. The following day Sandys reported the committee’s deliberations. These, he stressed, remained incomplete because the questions raised were so extensive that there had not been enough time go through all of them. Nevertheless, the committee had agreed that the judicial ruling should be challenged, as it was far from clear that the judges had the authority to decide in this case. ‘Though the judges are always and in all place reverend’, observed Sandys, ‘yet are not their words so weighty when they are but assistants to the Lords in Parliament as when they sit judicially in courts of justice’ and ‘have an oath to tie them’.
These technical objections were not very persuasive, and had they been the essence of the committee’s findings the Commons’ case would have been extremely weak. Perhaps realizing this, the committee had also decided to focus upon the sort of Union desired by the king. Reporting this part of the debate, Sandys began by remarking that there were two kinds of unions. The first preserved the separate identities of both kingdoms, while the second involved a complete merger. This second type, dubbed a ‘perfect’ Union, was the one ‘which we desire’, but the main obstacle to progress was not English hostility but Scottish intransigence. For there to be a perfect Union the Scots would have to renounce their own laws and ‘be ruled by our laws’, yet they had ‘reserved in the Instrument [of the Union] all their laws’, even though ‘His Majesty desireth a perfect Union’. It was they who were trying to keep the kingdoms divided by insisting on naturalization and the right to retain their own laws. Another obstacle was Scotland’s relationship with France. The Scottish nobility was treaty-bound to aid the king of France against England, so unless the Scots were prepared to renounce their French allegiance they risked becoming traitors.
Few in the Commons really desired a ‘perfect’ Union, but it was a masterstroke to pretend that they did. The author of this new strategy was never clearly identified, but it seems likely that it was Sandys. The beauty of this approach, as one commentator has observed, is that it placed the House ‘beyond criticism’, since its Members ‘now appeared to be following the king’s real wishes’. Furthermore, Members had cleverly made it appear that the cause of any difficulty lay with the Scots rather than themselves. Indeed, they now claimed that Scottish obstructionism, coupled with the limited aims set out in the Instrument, sadly prevented the complete Union that they so fervently desired. When the earls of Salisbury and Northampton announced that afternoon at a joint conference that the Upper House desired a perfect Union, albeit ‘with restrictions’, Sandys, who had been appointed to speak for the Commons, replied that the Lower House shared this objective but was prevented by the Instrument of the Union. One week later, on 14 Mar., he bluntly told the Lords that the English Parliament was ‘tied to the imperfect Union, not by our own choice’ but by a Scottish Act of Parliament and the resolution of the commissioners of the Union, expressed in the Instrument. Salisbury was incensed, and insisted that the Instrument was entirely satisfactory and that the perfect Union, as defined by the Commons, should be left to ‘time and opportunity’. However, Sandys would not be deflected, and when the conference broke up Salisbury told the Commons’ delegation that the Lords hoped ‘that we never meet with them who are like to take a dissent for displeasure’. This remark was clearly directed at Sandys, his former client, who had earlier regretted having ‘to deliver anything displeasing to your lordships, and dissent is always displeasing’. Salisbury’s annoyance, however, contrasts with ‘the general commendation’ with which Sandys’s speech was received in the Commons.
Sandys was now the darling of the Commons, but he had yet to make his finest stroke. When the Commons reassembled after Easter, he brilliantly turned the House’s strategy on its head, and in so doing delivered a knockout blow to the Union. Ever since 7 Mar. the Commons had claimed that it was prevented from proceeding with the Union by Scottish unreasonableness and the terms of the Instrument. However, on 28 Apr., in a ‘long, learned speech’, presented ‘with method and variety of argument’, Sandys urged the Commons to bring about the perfect Union that, he claimed, James had wanted ever since his accession. It was, after all, ‘more easy to be effected than the imperfect’, as there was no need to establish the status of the pre- and post-nati. All that was needed was to pass a single law, and to do this it would be necessary to establish a single legislature, for even were the Scots to adopt the English Common Law wholesale, ‘until there be one Parliament there cannot be one law’. There would also have to be only one lord chancellor and one great seal, for otherwise those charged with offences in either country would evade prosecution by simply crossing the border. Sandys’s speech so surprised his colleagues that they were temporarily stunned into silence. The next day, however, Nicholas Fuller declared it to be ‘a good plot’, since there was no point in uniting the laws of the two countries ‘if the government be not one’. On 30 Apr. Christopher Brooke ‘commended the motion of Sir Edwin Sandys’, adding that it should have been thought of sooner, while Lawrence Hyde, who had ostensibly been arguing for a perfect Union himself, claimed that the motion ‘was no digression’ and ‘ought to be followed’. The Speaker’s warning that to pursue Sandys’s suggestion ‘would cross all our former proceedings’ went unheeded.
James was furious, as he clearly understood that those who advocated the perfect Union only did so in order to sabotage the entire project. Addressing both Houses on 2 May, he warned that ‘these men that thus interpret, mark them well and you shall find that they propound and pray for that they would most shun’. While he desired ‘an absolute and full Union’, he no longer required a perfect Union, which he knew from past experience was not acceptable. James warned the Commons to ‘beware of all fanatical spirits’, and condemned ‘that speech of "love me little, love me long"’ as ‘a damned speech, for love and affection must be ardent’. Needless to say, the author of these offensive comments was none other than Sandys, who had uttered them during his debate with Salisbury on 14 March.
Far from being cowed by this reprimand, the Commons was outraged that some of their Members had been chided for expressing their opinions, and on 6 May it was resolved to ask James to permit those ‘as have been expressly blamed or taxed’ to clear themselves in his presence. The House was no less irritated that one of their number had been telling the king precisely what was said in the chamber. When Sir Robert Wingfield, a Cecil client, argued that there was nothing improper in relaying debates to the king provided it was done truthfully, Sandys retorted that ‘those things were not so spoken in the House as they were reported’ and that a true reporter related not merely the words spoken but the purpose behind them, adding ‘neither sugar nor gall’. He ended by gently chiding Wingfield for suggesting that it was James’s fault if speeches were misinterpreted.
The Union was now in tatters thanks, in no small part, to Sandys’s clear thinking, brilliant oratory and native cunning. There remained, however, the bill to abolish hostile laws, which was capable of being treated separately and which was subsequently enacted. Sandys, though, had shown little interest in this legislation before Christmas, and played only a minor role in the subsequent discussions.
Sandys was one of the few Members who remained in the House at the beginning of July, when he was appointed to consider the bill to prevent unlawful assemblies (1 July), drafted in response to the Midlands Rising. The following day he opposed continuing a Marian law on the same subject, and was rewarded with a narrow victory at the division. On the penultimate day of the session, he reported from the committee that had been set up two weeks earlier to examine the clerk’s Journal. At the same time he was instructed to examine the accounts for the Members’ collection, and to help decide how to spend the money.
V. The Sessions of 1610
During the interval between the third and fourth sessions, Sandys started to become involved in the affairs of Virginia, having been appointed to the colony’s fledgling council on 9 Mar. 1607. As well as signing letters on its behalf, he and Francis Bacon appear to have drafted together the second royal charter for the colony in May 1609.
When Parliament reassembled in February 1610, Sandys quickly re-established his dominant position in the Commons by becoming the chairman of a committee of the whole House, a body which had only recently emerged and whose rules of debate differed from those of the House. Whereas Members were normally allowed to speak only once on a single topic, the committee permitted them to speak as often as they wished, thus allowing a proper exchange of views. Sandys had realized the importance of this distinction, and in November 1606 had persuaded the House to establish a grand committee to improve preparations ahead of conferences with the Lords. In return, he had been appointed its chairman.
Despite these hiccups, Sandys had achieved an important new position as chairman of the Commons’ first standing grand committee. For the rest of the session he busily reported the proceedings of the new committee to the House.
Sandys’s committee positions reflected the esteem in which he was held in the House, but the issue which kept him to the fore throughout the fourth session was the Great Contract. On 17 Feb. he reported Salisbury’s speech of two days earlier outlining the king’s demands, and chaired the subsequent debate, conducted in grand committee. Four days later he reported from the grievances committee, describing the king’s demands as ‘high’ and suggesting that the proposed bargain should include the abolition of wardship, which Salisbury had hitherto failed to mention.
Early in May Sandys helped bring about a temporary end to the negotiations by persuading his colleagues to offer to compound for wardship separately. When Salisbury rejected this proposal Sandys, who reported the lord treasurer’s speech, advised his colleagues on 1 May to ‘bargain single’ and ‘not to mingle’.
Having helped halt the negotiations over the Great Contract, Sandys was now largely responsible for reviving them by cleverly linking the subject with the issue of impositions. The petition prepared by him on the latter was read on 23 May, and it declared that the House had no intention to reverse the judgment in Bate’s Case but merely wished to understand ‘the reasons whereupon the same was grounded’. It also stated that Members wanted to prevent the introduction of any more such duties, and if permission were granted to debate impositions they would find it easier to pass ‘cheerfully ... on to Your Majesty’s business, from which this stop hath by diversion so long withheld us’. This was a barely coded way of saying that if the king allowed the House to debate impositions, the Commons would reconsider the Contract. The House readily endorsed Sandys’s wording, and the following day it dispatched a deputation to the king at Greenwich. James was delighted with the petition, and lavishly entertained the Commons’ representatives. Sandys, however, was not a member of this deputation,
Although Sandys had helped obtain permission to discuss impositions, he took little part in the subsequent debates, which were dominated by the lawyer-Members. Nevertheless, he continued to play a pivotal role, reporting from the committee that searched the Tower for precedents (15, 19 and 22 June), summarizing a meeting of the grand committee regarding impositions (3 July), and setting down for posterity the arguments for and against impositions (10 July). He also helped prepare for a conference with the Lords, and the impositions bill was referred to him and five others for consideration (14 July).
Sandys also continued to play a leading role in the negotiations over the Contract. On 16 July he offered, on behalf of the Commons, to give the king £180,000 annually in return for the surrender of various prerogative rights, most notably wardship and purveyance. Some Members had thought this sum too little, as the king had demanded £220,000, but Sandys defended it as ‘large’ and an ‘exceeding great sum’.
Although the king and Commons had reached agreement in principle over the amount of annual financial support needed by James, little had been said about the money required to pay off his debts. Sandys favoured a small grant rather than the £600,000 demanded by Salisbury, and consequently, on 11 July he opposed adding a fifteenth to the single subsidy already agreed ‘if it were in regard of ... magnificence’.
Sandys supported the bishops’ leases bill, being named to the committee on 25 Apr. and acting as a teller in its favour on 14 July. His own financial interest was involved, as he continued to be associated with the Yorkshire prebend of Wetwang, as a petition submitted to the House by Henry Thurscross, prebend of Osbaldwick, demonstrated. Thurscross wished to prosecute Sandys in connection with a lease, and asked the Commons to waive Sandys’s privilege, but the request was naturally refused.
Sandys may have missed the opening of the final session of the Parliament on 16 Oct. 1610, as there is no mention of him in the records until 8 November. However, he must have been present by 6 Nov. because on the 8th he not only sat as chairman of the grand committee but was instructed to help prepare the Commons’ answer to the king’s demand for supply as well as support, which he could not have done had he been absent earlier.
VI. The Addled Parliament
In the immediate aftermath of the Parliament James was angry with the Commons, but chronic financial problems made it difficult for him to avoid another meeting. As early as mid-October 1611 it was rumoured that a fresh Parliament would assemble in the following spring, and speculation continued into January.
Sometime over the next couple of years, and certainly by the end of 1613, Sandys entered the circle of the royal favourite, the earl of Somerset. Exactly how this happened is not clear, but the most likely route was through his friend Thomas, Lord Clinton, whose wife’s sister was married to Somerset’s father-in-law, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk. Now that Sandys was a Somerset client, an important threat to royal control of any future Parliament at last seemed to have been removed. Indeed, when Bacon tried to persuade the king in 1613 to call another meeting, he observed that ‘Sandys is fallen off’.
In previous parliaments Sandys had relied upon kinsmen to provide him with borough seats as he lacked sufficient local influence to obtain one for himself. However, by 1614 he was sufficiently confident of his local and national standing to seek election as junior knight of the shire for Kent. He was supported by his cousin, Sir Dudley Digges*, also a Kentish landowner, and Sir Robert Mansell*, treasurer of the navy and a fellow client of the earl of Somerset. An electoral alliance with Sir John Scott* of Smeeth, who agreed to stand for the senior seat, cemented his position. However, Sandys had overestimated his support in Kent, where he held no local office despite having lived there 12 years. He also suffered from being associated with neither the Cobham nor the Sidney factions, both of which had, since the 1580s, divided up the county seats between them. These groupings remained alive despite the fall from office of Henry Brooke alias Cobham†, 10th Lord Cobham, in 1603. Consequently, despite the best efforts of Digges and Mansell, Sandys failed to make headway, and quit the field four or five days before the election on 21 March. Among those he turned to for help was the former Speaker of the Commons, Sir Edward Phelips, who controlled several seats in Somerset. On 20 Mar. Phelips instructed that a seat be reserved for him at Taunton or elsewhere, ‘for he wholly dependeth on me for a place of a burgess’.
Phelips’s claim was not entirely true, as Sandys’s patron, the earl of Somerset, was also busy on Sandys’s behalf. Somerset wrote to the corporation of Rochester for a seat for Sandys, and although his letter arrived the day after the borough held its election, Rochester’s chief dignitaries offered Sandys a place on 3 Apr. after one of the elected candidates declined to serve. Sandys was at first reluctant to accept, perhaps because the practice of holding two elections on the same writ was so irregular that he feared that he might ultimately be unseated. Moreover, as his reply of 4 Apr. indicates, he had not yet given up hope of another place.
Sandys evidently missed the first few days of the session, but had taken his place by 8 Apr., when he was again named to the privileges committee. Parliament assembled amid rumours that a number of leading Members had secretly agreed to manage the Commons for the king. Sandys had earlier been vilified as an ‘undertaker’ himself after he and several other Members had privately met Salisbury in Hyde Park in July 1610, and on 12 Apr. 1614 he complained that it was unjust that several ‘of the most worthy Members of the last and this Parliament should be so unthankfully dealt with’. However, he soon suspected that the rumours were well founded, for as he observed on 14 May, a vote of subsidies was ‘too eagerly followed’ by some of his colleagues at the beginning of the session. In fact, as was soon discovered, the veteran parliamentarian Sir Henry Neville I had presented the king with a plan to manage a future House of Commons almost two years earlier. Sandys was well acquainted with Neville, and was anxious that he should not be censured before being heard. Following an investigation, it was concluded that Neville was not guilty of any impropriety. Sandys evidently shared this conclusion. Indeed, his only criticism was that Neville’s proposals, which had omitted the key question of impositions, had not been more ambitious.
Sandys was reluctant to vote subsidies at the beginning of the Parliament as the king demanded. There were few precedents for doing so, and he may also have suspected that if money was granted immediately the session would be terminated without grievances having been redressed. Instead, he advised his colleagues to postpone consideration of supply until after Easter, by which time, as Thomas Crewe argued, their constituents would have learned of the grace bills that the king was now offering and be more willing to open their purses. In the meantime, Sandys was anxious to re-establish his position as a chairman of one of the grand committees. At his suggestion, the House set up a standing committee for petitions, which performed many of the same functions that in 1610 had been discharged by the committee for grievances. Like its predecessor, this new body was chaired by Sandys, who began by laying down rules for submitting petitions of grievance, for as in 1610 he was concerned that the committee would otherwise be inundated with libels.
Not all of Sandys’s senior colleagues shared his enthusiasm for putting standing committees on a regular footing, perhaps because they were used to more flexible arrangements. When Sandys proposed fixed meeting-times for three other committees, the veteran Member Sir George More responded that it was inconvenient ‘to have such certain days and hours for committees’.
It was not only in matters of organization that Sandys led the way. On 9 Apr. he observed that county Durham was the only shire in England without representation at Westminster, a deficiency which he urged the king be asked to remedy. Not everyone approved of this suggestion. Indeed, one Member observed that the men of county Durham held it ‘a privilege not to be bound to the attendance of Parliament’. Nevertheless, the matter was brought to the attention of the committee for petitions, which Sandys himself chaired. On 14 May he reported the committee’s conclusion that despite the bishop of Durham’s opposition, a bill should be drafted and a petition sent to James. When a bill finally emerged, Sandys was named to the committee (31 May). The measure failed to progress further owing to the dissolution.
As chairman of the committee for petitions, Sandys received a written complaint against the recently instituted order of baronets. Although his brother Sir Miles had recently purchased a baronetcy, Sandys showed no partiality, for when on 23 May Sir Anthony Cope, one of the new baronets, attempted to dismiss the complaint as a libel because it was anonymous, Sandys pointed out that he had removed the name of the author himself in accordance with the orders of the House.
As a member of the Virginia Company, Sandys asked permission on 17 May for Richard Martin* to address the House on behalf of Sir Thomas Gates, a leading Company member. When Martin subsequently harangued the Commons for failing to prosecute the king’s business, Sandys was forced to claim that he was ‘distracted’ and ‘out of his element’.
Sandys played no recorded part in bringing the potentially explosive question of impositions before the Commons, although a bill was laid before the House in mid-April. On 5 May he was accused by Sir John Savile of slackness in failing to report this measure, which had been committed to the whole House on 18 April. This was not entirely fair, as on 4 May his report had been deferred for lack of time. However, Savile was not alone in thinking that Sandys was prevaricating; one of the diarists also commented that he seemed to be dragging his heels. Perhaps his patron Somerset had advised procrastination, but now that he was prompted, he delivered his report ‘excellently well’. The king’s claim to be entitled to impose, he declared, trenched upon ‘the foundation of all our interests’ and ‘maketh us bondsmen’, as it gave the subject no proprietary interest in his goods. Edward I and Edward III had levied impositions only in time of war, and the latter had asked Parliament for permission to impose. No subsequent monarch had demanded these duties until Mary Tudor, who had been wrongly ‘persuaded thereunto’ by the duke of Alba. James was being similarly deceived by some members of his Council into thinking that he was entitled to impose by right.
Later in the debate Sandys made a further decisive intervention after the privy councillor, Sir Thomas Lake I, brought the discussion back to supply. Many Members wanted to avoid this subject until the question of impositions was settled, but Sandys, reasoning that James might then dissolve the Parliament, came up with a suggestion since described as ‘ingenious’. Seconded by Hakewill, he proposed telling James that the Commons intended to give it in ‘due time’, when unanimity had been reached. In the previous Parliament a single subsidy had been passed by a margin of only ‘one or two odd voices’, a humiliating experience for the king and one that Elizabeth had never suffered.
The eloquence of his report on impositions, the soundness of his advice in respect of a conference, and the brilliance of his proposal regarding subsidies, placed Sandys once more in the driving seat. Over the next few weeks he continued to provide leadership in the matter of impositions. On 12 May he gave a detailed report on the conference with the Lords, declaring that ‘it is impossible to believe of a king so just in his nature that he will lay his own profit in one balance and the subject’s right in another and weigh them together’. At the same time he warned that only when the issue of impositions was satisfactorily settled would it be possible to ‘proceed with more affection and plenitude of liberality’.
Up until this point Sandys had echoed the views of most of his colleagues, but on 21 May he delivered one of the most radical speeches of his parliamentary career. Discussion centered on Sir Henry Wotton’s claim that hereditary princes such as James were entitled to impose, whereas elective kings were not. Sandys denied that there was any essential difference between the powers of hereditary and elective monarchs, as hereditary princes were necessarily descended from princes who were at first elected. Consequently, all kings were bound by a contractual relationship with their subjects. In France it was true that the king not only laid an imposition on salt (the gabelle) but made the purchase of salt compulsory, but it would be dangerous to follow French practice, as it would quickly ‘bring all to a tyrannical course’, and result in ‘confusion both to prince and people’. Indeed, for a king the consequences could be disastrous, as was demonstrated by the death ‘of the last great imposing prince’ - a reference, almost certainly, to the assassination of Henri IV four years earlier. Quoting Juvenal, he added that few kings and tyrants go to their graves without violence. In England affairs were not yet as desperate as in France, but nonetheless impositions had increased so much ‘as it is come to be almost a tyrannical government’.
Sandys was not alone in foreseeing violence. Thomas Wentworth went even further, by insinuating that unless James abandoned impositions he would be murdered like Henri IV, while on 3 June John Hoskins predicted a wholesale massacre of the Scots unless they left England. The following day an angry king threatened dissolution unless the Commons voted supply immediately. Sandys, who like his colleagues refused to condemn Hoskins, described this warning as ‘a great wrong to His Majesty and the whole kingdom’. Speaking on 6 June, he argued that the Commons could not vote subsidies unless the king first laid down impositions, otherwise it ‘might imply an assent to impose in future ages’. He added that the king’s claim that the judgment in Bate’s Case (1606) entitled him to impose was unconvincing, as the judges had no authority to meddle in matters in which the ‘main liberty of the people is engaged’. Nevertheless, Sandys realized that it was essential to break the stalemate that had now been reached. He suggested that Members return a ‘dutiful answer’, which he himself offered to ‘deliver to the committee’. The king should be asked to lift the threat of an immediate dissolution, to promise to refer impositions to Parliament, ‘the ancient triers of the liberties of the kingdom’, and ‘to believe that which they shall present to him’. If James agreed, subsidies would be voted immediately. These suggestions were approved, and that afternoon the grand committee met to consider the draft text, which Sandys reported the next morning. When the wording of the message was criticized, however, Sandys impatiently replied that if anyone else noticed a fault they ‘should show how to mend it’.
Following the dissolution, Sandys was summoned before the Council to explain the meaning of his speech concerning ‘successive and elective kings’. Held in custody for a month, he was released on bond on 10 July.
VII. Sandys and the Virginia Company
In the absence of a Parliament Sandys was obliged to channel his energies into other activities. In 1615 he and the playwright Robert Tailor published a book of hymns drawn from the Psalms ‘for the use of such as delight in the exercise of music’.
Following his capture of the Virginia Company’s leadership, Sandys tried unsuccessfully to displace Smythe as governor of the Somers Island Company. Two months later, in July 1619, he perhaps also sought to oust Smythe as governor of the East India Company, of which Sandys had been a member since at least 1613. In the event, Sandys and five other shareholders had to be content with being appointed directors ‘at large’.
Although the combined forces of Smythe and Warwick were insufficient to defeat Sandys, Smythe had recently been appointed a navy commissioner and had the ear of the king. James had not forgotten the role played by Sandys in wrecking his cherished Union in 1604 and 1607, nor forgiven him for his outburst against tyrants in May 1614. Now, at last, he had been given the opportunity to exact his revenge. On 17 May 1620, the day on which the election was due to be held, he instructed the Company to restrict its choice to Sir Thomas Smythe, Sir Maurice Abbot*, Sir Thomas Roe* and Alderman Johnson. James’s intervention alarmed Sandys’s supporters, who still dominated the Company. Claiming that James had been ‘much informed’ about Sandys’s management of the Company, and anxious to defend the Company’s right to hold free elections, they resolved to postpone the vote until the next meeting. In the meantime, Sandys was prevailed upon to remain in office, and a deputation was dispatched to remonstrate with the king. At this meeting, James purportedly replied ‘in a furious passion’ that the Company could ‘choose the Devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys’, whom he considered to be ‘his greatest enemy’.
On the face of it Sandys had suffered a devastating blow. In reality, he continued to control the Company through Southampton, to whom he was distantly related and whom he may have converted from Catholicism many years earlier.
One of the earliest concerns of the Southampton/Sandys administration was the recent establishment of the New England Company. Early in November Sandys learned that this organization had been granted exclusive fishing rights off the North American coast. Virginia’s inhabitants would be thus forced to buy licences to fish in their own waters, and an additional cost would be imposed on the fishermen who sailed from England, on whose vessels colonists relied for transport. After appealing to the king, Southampton led a deputation to the Privy Council in December. According to him, the Council agreed to suspend the New England patent and upheld the Virginia Company’s right to fish.
VIII. The Parliament of 1621
When Parliament was again summoned Sandys sought election at Sandwich, the borough closest to Northbourne. This brought him into conflict with his old antagonist, Sir Thomas Smythe, who had held the seat in 1614. However, instead of campaigning for the seat in person, he remained in London, and instead dispatched his friend and ally Thomas Gookyn to muster the necessary votes. Gookyn was aided by the Brownist Thomas Brewer, with whom Sandys had recently been in contact over the possibility of settling in Virginia the English separatists living in Leiden. While Brewer enlisted the support of local puritans, whose religious opinions Sandys did not share, Gookyn promoted Sandys’s credentials as the defender of free trade against Smythe, the governor of the East India Company, an organization to which Sandys himself belonged. At a tumultuous election, held on 29 Dec. these tactics paid off, and Sandys was awarded the senior seat.
When Parliament assembled at the end of January, Sandys, who was known to be in town, was conspicuous by his absence. On 5 Feb. he was appointed to the privileges committee in anticipation of his imminent arrival, but by the next day he had still not appeared, whereupon his brother, Sir Samuel Sandys, then Member for Worcestershire, explained that he had been detained by Virginia Company business. The Commons was greatly displeased at this and consequently summoned Sandys, who appeared on 7 February. Sandys confirmed his brother’s explanation and also claimed, untruthfully, that he had been elected against his wishes. Furthermore, he condemned his election as void as he had not been sworn a freeman of the borough. The House, which had seldom heard one of its Members describe his own election as invalid, refused Sandys’s request to be spared ‘either wholly, or in part’.
Now that he was forced to serve, Sandys may have expected to have been offered the chairmanship of one of the two standing grand committees. However, neither of these positions was bestowed upon him. Clearly angry, on 9 Feb. he upbraided his colleagues for referring the issue of free speech to grand committee before it had been fully debated in the House. The next day he sought to mitigate the offence of Sir John Leedes, whose failure to take the oaths he described as ‘negligence’ rather than ‘presumption’.
Sandys’s request to surrender his seat may have been connected with the renewal of the Virginia Company’s charter. As early as the summer of 1620 Sandys had been deeply involved in revising the charter, a task which had become more urgent owing to the recent dispute with Gorges over American fishing rights. Certainly the charter was at the forefront of Sandys’s mind when the Commons assembled on 30 Jan. 1621, for the very next day the Company was informed that the king was willing to allow it to proceed. Sandys contined to remain closely involved, and on 22 Feb. he reported progress on the charter in Southampton’s absence, for which the Company gave him ‘many deserved thanks for his great pains taken therein’.
By concentrating on Virginia’s affairs to the exclusion of Parliament Sandys may have committed a serious blunder, for while he was reporting to the Company the progress that had been made in renewing the charter, the Commons heard Sir William Strode object to the Proclamation preventing anyone from speaking against the lottery.
Sandys delivered his first major speech of the session on 12 Feb., when he may still have been smarting at the House’s refusal to let him surrender his seat. Many Members were then anxious that the king was seeking to curtail their right to free speech, but on 9 Feb. Sandys had warned them ‘not to charge His Majesty with breach of custom’. Though every Member was entitled to speak ‘according to his conscience, no man can have any conscience to speak against the king’.
Sandys said relatively little over the next two weeks. On 15 Feb. he opposed the granting of fifteenths because they fell hardest upon the poor but supported a proposal for two subsidies. He also suggested that subsidies should be given ‘as a present of love to the king’ rather than for the purpose of recapturing the Palatinate. This was because the sum on offer was insufficient, and if their enemies thought that the money was intended to pay for the reconquest of the Palatinate they would be emboldened rather than struck with fear.
Sandys re-emerged as a dominant figure on 26/27 Feb., with a series of speeches on the severe trade depression affecting the kingdom. In the first of these, delivered on 26 Feb., he claimed that high unemployment among the poor was attributable to a shortage of coin and the restrictions posed on free trade by grants of monopoly. The situation was so serious that ‘in one place there were 200 looms laid down, and each loom would have set on work 40 persons’. Unless a remedy was found there might be a popular uprising, as in Germany. After he finished he was urged to ‘speak his knowledge’, as he had hinted that he had more to say. Taking up this invitation, Sandys now turned his attention to the shortage of coin. Previously, he said, coin worth £100,000 had entered the kingdom annually, mostly from Spain, which had purchased English goods in specie. However, in recent years this source had dried up, because the Spanish no longer paid in specie but in tobacco, which was then sold in England. Sandys calculated England had thereby lost no less than one million pounds during James’s reign.
One commentator has argued that Sandys’s speeches of 26 Feb. set the free trade bill of 1621 in motion.
There were two immediate obstacles to banning the import of Spanish tobacco, and Sandys turned his attention to them the following day. The first was the 1604 Treaty of London, which guaranteed free trade between England and Spain. Sandys, the darling of the free trade lobby in 1604, argued that the treaty could be safely circumvented because there had been no trade in Spanish tobacco at the time it was signed. Moreover, he observed, the treaty was built on uncertain foundations, as the pope had declared that no Catholic country should trade with heretics.
Over the following month the issue of tobacco was set aside, allowing Sandys to pursue other matters. He remained vociferous in his condemnation of Mompesson, whose offences, he declared (1 Mar.), ‘hew at the roots of the kingdom’. Consequently the House chose him (6 Mar.) as the ‘fittest’ Member to advise the Lords on an appropriate punishment at a forthcoming joint conference.
The attack on Mompesson formed only one part of a wider assault by the Commons on monopolies. When a bill condemning these grants was reported on 20 Mar. it attracted criticism for seeking to deprive the king of his right to dispense with individual Acts of Parliament. Sandys replied that the intention was not to limit the king’s prerogative but to prevent its transfer to others, as ‘this regal power ought not to be put into the hands of a person that hath not a regal mind’. However, he was unable to prevent the bill from being recommitted.
As the Easter recess approached Sandys grew alarmed at the Commons’ slow progress, and on 24 Mar. he suggested that several committees should meet over the holiday.
When the Commons formally reassembled after Easter, the question of banning Spanish tobacco was debated yet again. On 18 Apr. Sir Edward Coke, who supported a ban, observed that prohibition of any commodity required legislation. Sandys readily agreed, and bolstered by those of his allies in the Virginia Company who also held Commons’ seats, he maintained that such an Act would not violate the 1604 treaty. When this assertion was contradicted by the councillors Sir Richard Weston and Sir Lionel Cranfield, several senior Members rallied to Sandys’s defence. Sir William Strode replied that the treaty was void by the recent death of Philip III, while Sir Dudley Digges thought they should press ahead regardless, for ‘no treaty can be so beneficial to us in England as £100,000 per annum’. Sandys himself was unwilling to go this far, preferring instead to argue that previous prohibitions, of pepper and whale fins, had not caused a rupture. At the end of the debate a motion to ban Spanish tobacco was carried unanimously.
While Sandys tried to obtain monopoly rights in all but name for Virginia and Somers Island, he also endeavoured to prevent the New England Company from establishing similar rights over the American fishing grounds. Despite conciliar intervention in December 1620, the Virginia Company’s dispute with Gorges had not been resolved, and on 17 Apr. 1621 a bill granting all English subjects the right to fish off the American coast was given a first reading. This measure, like the tobacco bill, was almost certainly introduced by Sandys who, on 25 Apr., successfully pressed for a second reading. During the ensuing debate he argued that the American fishing grounds, worth £100,000 p.a., were too valuable to become the exclusive preserve of one Company.
Virginia Company interests clearly informed much of Sandys’s parliamentary activity in 1621, and had the Company succeeded in obtaining a new charter Sandys would also have laid a bill before Parliament to confirm the grant.
Although Sandys did not share his colleagues’ taste for cruel punishments, he realized that they were not deliberately seeking to usurp the authority of the Upper House, which claimed the sole right to punish Floyd. Many lawyer-Members argued that they were perfectly entitled to punish Floyd, even though he was not a Member of the Commons. Sandys himself was not impervious to these arguments, for on 5 May he claimed that the House’s right to punish anyone who offended against its own Members was applicable in this case, as the king was ‘as resident with us as any Member’.
Unlike some of his more hot-headed colleagues, Sandys clearly understood that the quarrel over Floyd had the potential to create a serious rift between the two Houses. Indeed, he grew alarmed that every time the Commons tried to justify its behaviour it inflamed the situation further. As he put it, ‘question engenders question and so ends in strife’.
If Sandys was concerned at the deteriorating relationship between the Commons and the Lords, the king was also alarmed that the previously harmonious relationship he had enjoyed with the Lower House was coming to an end. When the Commons attempted to attack lord treasurer Mandeville (Sir Henry Montagu), he decided to act. On 28 May the Commons was informed that, owing to the hot weather and the fact that the parliamentary sitting had already disrupted local government and the law courts for long enough, Parliament would rise on 4 June. Like many of his colleagues, Sandys greeted this news with a mixture of despair and resignation. ‘The hope deferred’, he announced, ‘is the fainting of the heart’, but since it was the king’s wish to adjourn they should spend the remaining few days concentrating on those bills nearest completion, and decide ‘how we may quiet our country by some satisfaction that may be to His Majesty’s honour and the good of the kingdom’.
The following afternoon (29 May), however, the Commons learned that James was immoveable. Amid scenes of despair, a distraught Sandys declared that while ‘passions are ill counsellors’ he would ‘rather speak now than betray my country with silence’. He announced that he had never been more afraid than now, as ‘all things in the country are out of frame’; poverty was widespread, and what trade existed was in the hands of a few corrupt monopolists. Meanwhile, true religion was rooted out abroad while nothing was done to strengthen the country’s defences. He suggested that the House should rise and not answer to the Lords concerning the remaining business to be handled until the following morning. Despite the pleas of the councillors present, who wanted an answer sent immediately, the Commons accordingly ‘rose in a great passion and confusion’.
Few Members had hitherto worked harder to preserve harmony between the king and both Houses than Sandys, but events on the afternoon of 29 May fuelled the suspicion in Whitehall that he was attempting to wreck the Parliament. The main exponent of this view was the king’s chief minister in the Commons, the master of the Wards, Sir Lionel Cranfield, who had clashed with Sandys as early as 8 May. Cranfield had complained that he had been accused of asserting that the Commons was not a court of record, whereupon Sandys identified himself as the culprit, and defended himself by saying that ‘I spake as an honest man’.
Cranfield’s suspicions were increased on 31 May, when the House debated whether to complete any of its legislative business ahead of the adjournment. Sandys, who had previously wanted to finish some bills, now argued that to do so would bring dishonour upon the king, as it would breed a rumour that James had forbidden more to pass. Furthermore, he claimed that the House would lose face if, having sat so long, it completed only a handful of measures. Besides, where was the point in passing bills on minor matters when the most pressing questions - the chronic shortage of coin and the safety of the kingdom - remained to be addressed? Unless the bills regarding arms, recusants and monopolies were passed, it would be better to leave all outstanding legislation to the next sitting, always assuming that Parliament did reassemble, as this ‘may be the last time of asking’. Instead, the Commons should direct its energies into framing a Remonstrance demonstrating to James the parlous state of his kingdom. Cranfield was not surprisingly incensed at this volte face, and retorted that the king ‘can apprehend quickly when he is abused’. Sandys was ‘mistaken, for it cannot be (as he saieth) for the honour of the king that we shall refuse to pass any bills, whenas His Majesty, at our request, hath yielded to pass bills’. Nor could it be good for the House’s reputation to change its mind after it had sought permission to pass some bills.
During the course of these furious exchanges Sandys revealed that Cranfield had taken offence at his speech of 29 May and accused him of slandering the Privy Council. He therefore asked ‘that he might not be questioned after the Parliament, as his brother was threatened to be’.
Sandys may have hoped that this marked the end of his quarrel with Cranfield, particularly as the Commons adjourned on an unexpectedly happy note. Certainly he now turned his attention to preparations for the next sitting. On 13 June he was ordered to help draft a bill after he reported to the Virginia Company the enthusiasm which greeted his suggestion six weeks earlier in the Commons that the kingdom’s poor be sent to Virginia.
During his confinement Sandys’s London house was searched. A letter between him and the Brownist Thomas Brewer was discovered, as was a half-finished treatise by him on the power of God containing references to the rights and powers of earthly rulers. How Sandys explained away this now vanished treatise is unknown, but the letter probably related to his negotiations with the English separatists at Leiden over their planned resettlement in Virginia.
When the Commons reassembled on 20 Nov. many of its Members, unaware that Sandys was no longer confined, were determined to discover the cause of his imprisonment. The following day the Speaker, Sir Thomas Richardson, produced a letter from Sandys explaining that his absence was due to illness. In the short term this quieted the unrest in the Commons, but on 23 Nov. the issue of Sandys’s earlier imprisonment was raised, whereupon Secretary Calvert assured the House that Sir Edwin had not been committed for anything said or done in Parliament. This was patently untrue, and on 1 Dec. the House resolved to dispatch two of its Members, Sir Peter Heyman and William Mallory, to learn from Sandys the cause of his earlier imprisonment. Mallory subsequently interviewed Sandys ‘by the fireside at ten of clock at night’, and had him set down the reasons for his arrest, but although he brought this paper back to the Commons the House ordered that it be burned (19 December). Sandys evidently travelled to London sometime after 3 Dec., when he wrote that he would soon let his friends know in person that his absence ‘hath been just and necessary’.
IX. Alliance with Buckingham and the Collapse of the Virginia Company
Following the end of the Parliament, Sandys resumed his duties in the Virginia Company, which remained under the nominal control of Southampton, who had been re-elected as treasurer in May 1621. However, the continuing animosity of the king resurfaced at the Company’s leadership election on 22 May 1622, when James again tried to prevent either Southampton or Sandys from being chosen. Despite his intervention Southampton was elected for a third term.
Cranfield’s offer marked the beginning of a thaw in the relations between Sandys and the Jacobean regime that continued into the summer. In mid-July Sandys entered Buckingham’s circle after his wife’s nephew, Richard Bulkeley*, married Buckingham’s cousin, Dorothy Hill. How far Sandys himself paved the way for this alliance is unknown, but in April 1622 he was in contact with Buckingham’s client, Sir Robert Killigrew*.
By the time the commission became active, Sandys was once again mired in difficulties. In November 1622 the Virginia Company had finally agreed to undertake the tobacco contract, which specified that administration of the monopoly be vested in the hands of officers selected by the shareholders. Sandys was appointed director, while his close ally, John Ferrar, was named as treasurer. Salaries for the officers amounting to £2,500 were also ratified. However, these financial arrangements provoked uproar among the Warwick and Smythe factions, who thought that Sandys and his acolytes were trying to reap all the benefits of the contract themselves. In February 1623 they appealed to the king, who ordered that the contract be suspended, and at the end of March it was abandoned. Sandys and his followers had been dealt an enormous blow, but worse was to follow: in April the king was persuaded to investigate the Company’s affairs after Nathaniel Boteler, an ally of Warwick’s, described from his own recent observations the parlous condition of the Virginia colony. Although the Company’s officers prepared a detailed rebuttal of Boteler’s charges, a commission of inquiry, packed with the allies of Smythe and Warwick, was formally established on 9 May.
Sandys’s long battle to manage the Virginia Company successfully was now finally lost, and by the end of the year it looked as though his parliamentary career, too, was on the verge of ruin. The king resolved to summon a new Parliament, but only on condition that Sandys and Sir Edward Coke* were first packed off to Ireland.
X. The Parliament of 1624
Shortly after the Parliament opened, Sandys was appointed chairman of the committee for trade.
The main focus of the Parliament, however, was the continuing marriage negotiations with Spain. One of the principal obstacles to breaking off these negotiations was the opposition of lord treasurer Middlesex. As recently as June 1623 Sandys had regarded Middlesex as an ally. However, he had since learned that Middlesex, perhaps the main cause of his imprisonment in the summer of 1621, had sent him away in May 1623 to make it easier for the commission appointed to inquire into the state of Virginia to find against him and his fellow Company officers. Sandys was naturally incensed, and on 26 Apr. 1624 he and his followers in the embattled Company petitioned the Commons, accusing Middlesex of having abused his authority by siding with the Warwick and Smythe factions.
The Virginia Company’s grievance was, in itself, unlikely to bring down Middlesex, and therefore Sandys must have been delighted that his patron, Buckingham, also wished to destroy the lord treasurer. However, when on 5 Apr. Middlesex was charged with corruption Sandys tried to appear even-handed, reminding the House that it was an ancient rule that a man was innocent until proven guilty.
Sandys felt no qualms about advising the king to break off the Spanish marriage negotiations, an objective also pursued by his patron, Buckingham, and from the outset he played a major part in the debates. On 1 Mar. he declared that treaties were ‘the Spaniards’ own game, at which we have played too long’, that they should ‘thank God’ for having raised up Prince Charles and Buckingham ‘to such a great light’, and also list their reasons for breaking off the negotiations.
Sandys was now riding high, but he was brought down to earth the next day when he reported the meeting with the Lords. At this conference his ally Southampton had pointed out that the king would almost certainly demand to know what assistance the Commons would provide in the event of war with Spain. Southampton and Pembroke had therefore penned a note, which Sandys now brandished, stating that the Commons would be ready to give both their lives and fortunes. Sandys evidently expected his colleagues to be pleased, especially as the note echoed the wording of the Commons’ own Protestation of June 1621, but Alford, aghast that the Lords had employed Sandys as their messenger, reminded the House that supply was the exclusive preserve of the Commons. He also criticized Sandys for presenting the note without the House’s permission. Mallory was no less appalled, and ‘would have any man that shall at a committee exceed his commission put out of the House’. Not everyone thought that Sandys had acted improperly, however, and eventually it was agreed to drop the subject and return the note.
Sandys had clearly suffered a humiliating reverse and his reputation was now tarnished. Like Sir Robert Phelips and Sir Dudley Digges, two other senior Members who had reached an accommodation with Buckingham, he was widely thought to be an ‘undertaker’.
One consequence of the parliamentary desire for war with Spain was to focus the Commons’ attention on the loyalty of English Catholics. In 1621 Sandys had expressed concern at their growing number, particularly among the gentry, and had recommended that the sons of Catholic gentlemen should be prevented from travelling abroad lest they enter one of the seven foreign seminaries ‘wherein the papists breed up the youth of this kingdom’. He had also advised imposing financial penalties on those who contributed to the maintenance of Catholics studying abroad.
Though he remained one of the most dominant figures in the Commons, Sandys, like Phelips, proved remarkably reluctant to discuss the king’s right to levy impositions.
Sandys naturally took an interest in the charges against Dr. Anyan, president of his old Oxford college, Corpus Christi, whom he described as ‘a notorious and incorrigible offender’ (20 May).
In the dying days of the session the Virginia Company was effectively dissolved,
XI. The Parliament of 1625 and 1626
Following the death of James I, Sandys was summoned to London. Although now in his mid-sixties, there were rumours that he would soon be made secretary of state.
When a fresh Parliament was summoned at the beginning of April 1625, Sandys sought re-election as knight of the shire for Kent. He immediately forged an electoral alliance with Edward Scott of Smeeth, the son of the man whom he had partnered in the 1614 Kent election. However, it is unclear whether he was fully supported by his patron, Buckingham, for although the duke wrote for a seat at Sandwich for Sandys’s eldest son, Henry*, Buckingham was obliged to support secretary of state Sir Albertus Morton* for one of the county seats, and may not have wished to oppose Lord Burghersh (Mildmay Fane*), eldest son of the earl of Westmorland (Sir Francis Fane*), for the other. Despite Buckingham’s ambivalence, Sandys clearly expected to win, and was incensed when, on the day of the election (2 May), the sheriff abandoned the poll and declared Morton and Burghersh elected. As his harangues were ignored, Sandys had himself sworn a freeman of nearby Maidstone the next day in the hope of being returned there instead. It is not certain that he stood at the borough election on 7 May, however, as on 4 May Buckingham’s client, Sir Robert Killigrew, returned him for the Cornish town of Penryn, which he had never even visited.
Although Parliament opened on 18 June, Sandys was not mentioned in its records until 23 June, perhaps indicating that he delayed his arrival for fear of the plague, which was then rife. As the Commons did not appoint any standing grand committees in 1625, Sandys was unable to assume his customary role as a permanent chairman, though he seems to have chaired ad hoc grand committees, whose deliberations he reported to the House. In early July, for instance, he relayed the proceedings of the grand committee regarding the Council of War and the treasurers for the 1624 subsidies.
It has been suggested that Sandys was abnormally quiet during the 1625 Parliament,
Sandys supported the decision to vote two subsidies, but regarded the amount as inadequate, ‘considering how much we owe His Majesty’. However, since he anticipated that there would be another session soon, he thought that two subsidies would suffice ‘for the time’ (30 June).
Sandys remained at Westminster until at least 9 July, when he supported moves to draft a bill permitting the removal of London’s prisoners from the capital to avoid the plague.
Sandys did not take his seat in the new assembly for almost three weeks after it opened. Ill health certainly dogged him over the coming months, and twice during the Parliament, in early April and mid-May, he was noted as being absent due to sickness.
Sandys never openly aligned himself with Buckingham’s defenders, and there were times when he almost seemed critical of the duke. On 27 Feb., while discussing recent military failures and the supposed misspending of war funds, he allegedly declared that ‘there is a supreme hand which has cost all’, although he also noted that they should ‘not run into the remedy at first without knowing the diseases and causes’.
When, on 12 June, the House considered its declaration blaming Buckingham for all the hindrances they had endured since the Oxford sitting, Sandys proposed a further clause stating that Members were confident that there would be reform of that ‘great grievance’.
Although Sandys failed to defend Buckingham, he repeatedly tried to persuade the House of the king’s good intentions. When the Commons resolved to draw up a Protestation following the arrests of Eliot and Digges, Sandys advised his colleagues to seek to satisfy Charles, who had ‘proceeded with us sweetly this Parliament’. He reminded them that the king had previously referred to their judgment the cases of Clement Coke and Dr. Samuel Turner, and they should therefore ask Charles to refer the matter to both Houses, ‘before whom the words were spoken’. However, he was ignored, and despite his subsequent absence due to sickness he was ordered to sign the Protestation.
The king’s pressing financial needs clearly concerned Sandys. On 20 Apr. he declared that the three subsidies and three fifteenths already voted in principle were ‘as much as nothing’ given the scale of the war in Germany, although he conceded it would be difficult to find the additional funds from ‘this small and not very rich island’. Six days later he urged the House to vote a more generous grant, though he admitted that the country was not as wealthy as it had been under Elizabeth owing to the continuing burden of impositions. At the same time it should address the problem posed by the decline in the value of the subsidy, as ‘the more we double the number of subsidies, the more the weight of them is diminished’. Some had suggested increasing the rate per pound each subsidyman was required to pay, but his own solution was to set minimum levels of payment for titled men. Thus a knight, baronet or peer of Ireland should pay a minimum of £20, while an English viscount would pay not less than £50. Those who purchased titles could afford to pay higher taxes.
Although Sandys desired a more generous vote of supply, his comments on 20 and 26 Apr. indicate that he had not forgotten the grievances of the country, particularly impositions. Moreover, on 7 June he criticized the Council of War for its failure to pay coat and conduct money out of the 1624 subsidies as required by statute. ‘Where is now the Act or the credit of the Parliament-men’, he declared, ‘if this be not looked to?’
XII. Ignominious Final Years
Sandys remained a Buckingham client, despite his failure to defend the duke and a rumour that he had been discarded. In September 1626 he was appointed a commissioner for martial law in Kent, and in November he was named one of the county’s commissioners for the Forced Loan. Unlike many of his former Commons’ colleagues, he paid his contribution to the Loan without objection.
Sandys was ill by 9 July 1629 and drew up his will on 25 August. By the second half of September he was bedridden. On 16 Oct. his wife reported from Northbourne that he had begun to recover,