This
new document created a corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in
council as directors of their enterprise, were known as the Council for
New England. The president of this council was King James's unpopular
favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and its most prominent members
were the earls of Pembroke and Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and
Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Southampton. This council was empowered
to legislate for its American territory, to exercise martial law there
and expel all intruders, and to exercise a monopoly of trade within the
limits of the patent. Such extensive powers, entrusted to a company of
which Buckingham was the head, excited popular indignation, and in the
great struggle against monopolies which was then going on, the Plymouth
Company did not fail to serve as a target for attacks. It started,
however, with too little capital to enter upon schemes involving
immediate outlay, and began almost from the first to seek to increase
its income by letting or selling portions of its territory, which
extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of Quebec, thus
encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were already gaining
a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant adventurers
associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new patent in
the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers in New
England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights conveyed
to them by the Plymouth Company.
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