The First Charter of Virginia
Seedbed for the Nation
by Herbert W. Titus, J.D., March 6, 2007
We gather this evening just one-half mile from historic Jamestown Island, Virginia, to celebrate the 375th anniversary year of Henricus Colledge (1619), Inc.
While it was not until July 31, 1619, that the Colledge was authorized by the Virginia General Assembly, it is most fitting to commemorate its birth on April 9, 1994. For tomorrow, April 10, is the 388th anniversary day of the First Charter authorizing the founding of the colony of Virginia.
Without the founding of the colony, there would obviously have been no college. But the connection between the two is far closer than that. Both were founded with the single purpose of winning the native peoples of Virginia to Christ.
The 1606 Charter was secured from King James I by the founders of the London and Plimouth companies “to make Habitation, Plantation, and to deduce a colony of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia, and other parts and Territories in America, either appertaining to us, or which are not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People....”
After describing a geographical area stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and on a line south to the Carolinas and north as far as Maine, the Charter turned to the founders’ purpose and the King’s acceptance of it:
We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Desires for the Furtherance of so noble a Work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government.
So the expressed purpose, and the only one written in the Charter, was to establish colonies in the new World as a Christian evangelical witness to the native peoples. And it was pursuant to that purpose that the Virginia General Assembly, in 1619, authorized the establishment of Henricus Colledge.
Two days after the Assembly acted to create the Colledge, it set forth its purpose as “laying a surer foundation of the conversion of the Indians to Christian Religion.” To that end, the Assembly required that each city, borough, and plantation “obtain unto themselves by just means a certain number of the natives’ children to be educated by them in true religion and civile course of life...”
Finally the Assembly expressed the hope that from these native children some would be “fitted [so that] from thence they may be sente to that worke of conversion” of their own people.
Less than three years after the Virginia Assembly acted, the building of the Colledge was underway on a large tract of land in the new settlement of Henrico, just up the James River from the Jamestown colony. But it was cut short, never to be completed at its original site, eventually to be devolved into the College of William and Mary in 1693.
While this effort to take the gospel to the native American people failed, and while the general effort to Christianize them also met with little success, the purpose of Virginia colony and Henricus Colledge remains as a testament that America as a nation owes her birth to the Great Commission.
The Great Commission
Just before Jesus ascended into heaven to the Father, He gave these instructions to the Church:
Go ye...and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the on, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (Matthew 18:19-20)
Popularly known as the Great Commission, this passage has inspired and motivated Christians throughout the centuries to take the gospel of Christ to all nations. Christian literature is packed with testimonies of missionaries penetrating far-off jungles, climbing high mountains, enduring hot deserts, and surviving icy terrain under great hardship and with incredible sacrifice, even of their very lives.
Not only have Christians defied the elements, but they have taken the gospel message into nations against the laws and the desires of the leaders of those nations. They have preached and taught, printed and disseminated—and even smuggled — the Word of God in violation of the rules.
By what authority have Christians done these things? Does the end justify the means? God forbid! Christ has “all power...in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18) and, therefore, the Church has authority from the King of Kings to take the message of Christ to all nations. She need obtain consent from no earthly ruler.
Paul’s missionary journeys in the Roman Empire are illustrative of this overarching authority. At no time did he or his companions seek permission from any civil ruler to take the gospel message to any area. That authority came exclusively from God through the Holy Spirit (E.g., Acts 13 and 14).
Nor were Paul and his companions deterred by charges that the gospel message violated Roman law (E.g., Acts 16:19-22), including the charge that he had violated the same law by which Christ had been charged and convicted, namely, that there was only one king, Caesar (Acts 17:7 and John 19:12, 15-16).
No wonder they were accused of turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6). The very act of taking the gospel message into a nation without permission was considered illegal, because the nations’ leaders claimed all power and authority for themselves.
But Jesus had taught the early Church well. Paul and his missionary brethren remembered to render unto Caesar only that which belonged to Caesar (Luke 20:25). And they knew that God had provided through the Holy Spirit the power to live that truth in a hostile political world (Acts 4:18-20, 23-33; 5:27-29, 40-42).
After all, the Lord Jesus Christ was now at the right hand of the Father and the nations were under His command as the Psalmist testified:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his anointed, saying Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision....(Psalms 2:1-4).
All the Church needed to do was act upon this promise and, by the Providence of God, the nations would be hers:
Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for they possession (Psalm 2:8).
In the first century after Christ, the Church asked and the Lord gave, for by the fourth century even the mighty Roman Empire had bowed her knee to the Lord.
Colonies for Christ
Thirteen hundred years later, the Church was on the march again, this time across the mighty Atlantic Ocean into the New World. Ready to endure hardship and to risk their lives and fortunes, Christian people settled along the coast north to Massachusetts and south to Georgia.
The 1606 Virginia Charter provided ample authority for all these various colonial enterprises, as they all were undertaken within the geographic area set forth in that document. It is instructive to not, however, that all but one of the original thirteen colonies found as its purpose the Great Commission.
On November 11, 1620, the Pilgrims penned the Mayflower Compact acknowledging that they had “undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia...”
Nine years later, the Puritans obtained permission from King Charles to found the Massachusetts Bay colony with the following statement of purpose:
[W]hereby our said People...may be soe religiously, peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderlie Conversation maie wynn and incite the Natives of Country, to the Knowledge and Obedience of the onlie true God and Sauior of Makinde, and the Christian faith, which in our Royall intencon, and the Adventurers free Profession, is the principall Ende of this Plantation
In 1632, the Lord Baltimore, a roman Catholic, obtained from King Charles a Charter for Maryland. That Charter, like the ones before it, recited that the colonial enterprise was “animated with a laudable, and pious zeal for extending the Christian Religion...in a Country hitherto uncultivated...and partly occupied by Savages, having no knowledge of the Divine Being...”
Even the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Charter of 1663, obtained by Roger Williams recited as its purpose, not just the desire for religious for himself and his fellow settlers, but “the gaining over and conversione of the poore ignorant Indian natives...to the sincere professione and obedience of the...[Christian] faith and worship...”
In the same year the Carolinas were chartered and eight years later, Pennsylvania. In both documents, the colonists recited their desire to propagate the Christian religion by their example of civil order and love of God.
These Charters accounted for seven of the original thirteen colonies. Of the remaining six, five — Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia—were carved out of territories of three of the six, Massachusetts Bay, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. Only New York, which traced its origin to the 1633 Charter of the New Netherlands, did not rest on the Great Commission, although the original charter included a paragraph urging the colonists “to find out ways and means whereby they may support a Minister...that thus the service of God and zeal for religion not grow cool...”.
So whether it was the Anglicans of Virginia, the Puritans of New England, the Catholics of Maryland, the Presbyterians of the Carolinas, the Separatist of Rhode Island or the Quakers of Pennsylvania—reliance upon Christ’s commission to the church united them all. This is, first of all, significant historically and eschatalogically, because it provides indisputable documentary evidence that the real purpose for the colonizing of America was a missionary one, to extend the Christian faith to a people that did not know God.
Undoubtedly, many who came to America were not motivated by this noble purpose. And, because of hardship and of native resistance to the gospel message, those who came with that purpose oftentimes failed to carry it out.
Notwithstanding the failures of men — and they are far too numerous to list here — God has honored the dedication of America’s early founders by sending revival to America generation after generation and by establishing her as a greatest missionary nation that the world has ever know.
But the recitation of the Great Commission is also important politically and legally, for it has provided the only foundation upon which the United States of America may claim its legitimacy as a nation.
Christian Civil Government
In contrast with the early missionary efforts of Paul and the other apostles, the missionary outreach to America through the Colonial Charters did not seek to evangelize the native peoples solely by individual conversion through the presentation of Christ as personal Savior.
Rather, the colonist sought to win the Indians to Christianity by establishing civil societies on Biblical principles, expecting that by the Providence of God through their example of a settled and quiet government, the native peoples would become convinced to live in like manner. The 1606 Virginia Charter was the first to establish this as the primary method of evangelizing the Indians. Upon landing “in the northern parts of Virginia,” the Pilgrims put that method into operation with the Mayflower Compact:
In the name of God, Amen. We...Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, do...covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid...
Even those colonizing efforts undertaken outside the auspices of the 1606 Virginia Charter, adopted the method of the Jamestown settlers. The Puritans of Massachusetts spelled out in detail the form of civil government, including the selection of officers and the oaths of office, and the authority of that government to enact and enforce the rules of civil conduct—all for the dual purpose of establishing peace and order amongst themselves and of winning the native peoples to the Christian faith.
The Puritans knew, as did their fellow Christians in Virginia before them, that God had established nations, as Paul had put it in his sermon in Athens, so “that they should seek the Lord” (Acts 17:26-27). Moreover, every Charter acknowledged that the King ho gave permission to establish a colony ruled “by the grace of God,” for as Paul also stated in his letter to the church at Rome: “[T]here is no power, but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1).
If the purpose of a nation was to encourage its people to seek the Lord, and if a nation’s ruler was raised up by God, then it followed that that ruler was really God’s servant. And as God’s servant, he was to rule for good, including the good of the church, and not for evil (Romans 13:4).
By establishing godly civil government, the American colonists would not only accomplish these goals for themselves, but, by doing so they would evangelize the American natives who, as the 1606 Charter put it, were not ruled by any “Christian prince.”
The Virginia Charter referred to such absence for good reason. Under international law, no nationo could intrude upon the territory of another nation, except as justified by the laws of war. And no Christian nation could claim the right to intrude within the territorial boundaries of another Christian nation to establish a witness for Christ.
Where there was no Christian king, it was well established under the law of discovery that a Christian king could establish colonies of settlers who, in turn, would obtain land through purchase, or through adverse possession in those nation where the native peoples were not exercising dominion.
The colonists in North America chose both means. Men like Roger Williams contended, however, that the land could only be rightfully acquired by “purchase and consent” of the native peoples. It was also Williams’ claim that, without such consent, efforts to win the Indians to Christ were doomed.
From the beginning, relations between the colonists and the native peoples ranged from friendly to hostile. In retrospect, one would have to conclude that the optimism expressed in the Charters that the native peoples would be won to Christ by example was misplaced. But it would be a mistake to conclude that the sole reason for this was the failure of the American colonists to be true to their expressed evangelical zeal.
Covenant Self-Government
That zeal may have been lost in the colonists’ relation with the native peoples, but not in relation with the Mother country. Whatever might have been the Christian witness of godly self-government vis-a-vis the Indians, that witness would soon undo any imperial ambitions of the English monarchy to keep the American colonies for the glory of England.
The 1606 Virginia Charter provided for local government by appointees of the King. But it guaranteed to the colonists “all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities...to all Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born, within this our Realm of England....”
One of the rights of an Englishman, at least of one who owned property, was that of representation in the English Parliament. Geography, alone, made it impossible for Parliament to represent the American colonist. The Atlantic Ocean was not, however, the major obstacle to Parliamentary authority over the colonies.
Under the English form of government, the king, not the Parliament, had authority over foreign affairs. The Charters, therefore, had been issued by the King, not by the Parliament, and the King was not about to extend parliamentary powers over the colonies.
By making provision for local rule through a Royal Council, it was not long afterwards that the Virginia colonists were agitating for a council composed of their own representatives. By 1618, under the leadership of Sir Edwin Sandys, the Virginia colonists established the first representative assembly in the New World. Sandys, a leader of the Reformation Anglicans in the House of Commons, championed representative government and recruited the Pilgrims to leave Holland and to come to America to colonize northern Virginia.
The Pilgrims added to the political claim for representative self-government, the theological basis for it. As the Scriptures affirmed the right of believers to associate and covenant to form a church, so the people have a right to associate and covenant to form a civil government. They put that theology into practice with the Mayflower Compact, forming a local self-governing colony before disembarking from the Mayflower.
So the claim of royal prerogative in colonial America was checkmated. Local legislative assemblies with power to govern became commonplace throughout the English colonies. The 1618 Ordinances for Virginia led the way, establishing two councils. One of the councils was to be composed of men appointed by the King, with executive and judicial power. But legislative power was conferred on the General Assembly, composed of the first council and “two Burgesses out of every Town, Hundred, or other particular Plantation, to be respectfully chosen by the Inhabitants...”
Future Charters would include provision for at least one branch of the local legislative assembly to be elected from the governed, although local self-government did not come without a struggle.
By the mid-seventeenth century, however, covenant self-government began to predominate in Virginia and in New England, as best evidenced by the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639, heralded by modern students of American history as “the oldest truly political Constitution in America.”
The Preamble to that document provides irrefutable evidence of the Biblical origin of covenant self-government in America:
For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God by the wise disposition of his divine providence so to order and dispose of things that we...are now...dwelling...upon the River of Connectecotte...and well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God...do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one Public State...to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus...
So the right self-government by consent of the governed became established in America through the local legislative bodies under each of the colonial charters. Those bodies, in turn, were commissioned by the people to govern in accordance with the laws of God, as they were enforceable in the civil order.
William Penn developed this point in his 1682 Frame of Government of Pennsylvania. Quoting from 1 Timothy 1:8-9 and Romans 13:, the Preface to that document affirmed the duty of the civil magistrate to rule according to law was “a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end.”
As for the end of civil government, Penn claimed that whatever the form of government — monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy — good government existed “where the laws rule, and its people are a party to those laws.” If the rule of law did not prevail, then there would be “tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.”
Lesser Civil Magistrates
This Biblical understanding of the purpose of government reinforced the 1606 Virginia Charter commitment to the preservation of the rights of Englishmen. With that commitment firmly established in the Charters, and with local representative assemblies firmly in place, the stage was set for the momentous encounters between the American colonist and the English Parliament which would lead eventually to the independence of the United States of America.
If there was a battle cry of the American Revolution, it was “no taxation without representation.” From 1765, when the Stamp Act Congress called for the repeal of certain taxes imposed by Parliament on the colonies, to 1776, when the Congress declared America’s independence, America’s leaders claimed that, as Englishmen, they could be taxed only by their local representative in assemblies.
John Adams and others traced this right first to the Magna Carta, the thirteenth century charter that had become the fountainhead of the rights of Englishmen. Later, when Adams and his fellow patriots claimed that the right of the people to be taxed by their representatives was not only one of the rights of an Englishman, but a right of the people in all free governments.
It was one thing to claim the right, it was quite another to act upon that claim. Without question, the American colonists could have refused to pay any tax levied upon them by the English Parliament. In refusing to pay such a tax, they would have made the same appeal as had the early Church in Acts 5:29: “We ought to obey God and not men.”
But disobedience was not the same as armed resistance. To take up arms against a civil ruler was not covered by the example of the Church chronicled in the Book of Acts.
Adams sought support elsewhere and found it in a sixteenth century political tract, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, written by a French Huguenot. Drawing on John Calvin’s exegesis of Romans 13 where Calvin denied to the individual the right to resist an ungodly ruler, but granted such right to a “lesser magistrate,” the Vindiciae was utilized in America to support the proposition that the colonial assemblies, as lesser magistrates, had the right to call people to armed resistance to English tyranny.
Had the colonist not formed these local assemblies as their preferred means for carrying out the Great Commission, this claim would not have been possible. The Declaration of Independence could not have been written, for it was inscribed by men who acted on behalf of the people as their representatives. And without a claim of right to take up arms to resist George III and the English Parliament, the people would not have rallied to the revolutionary cause.
Conclusion
When the founders of Virginia wrote the 1606 Charter, they could not have known the events that would unfold in the next 170 years. By the Providence of God they acted in such a way as to lay the seedbed for American independence and liberty. If that independence and liberty is to be preserved, we must return to the godly principles of the Great Commission lest God withdraw His grace and mercy from us.
Article originally published in The Forecast, Vol. 1, No. 14, April 15, 1994. Reprinted with permission.