But Mr. Bancroft seems to think that Virginia could not have failed to be weaned from her attachment to the king, and won over to Cromwell and his parliament, by the magnanimity and justice of their proceedings. He adverts to the article in the treaty of surrender, by which Virginia had stipulated for a trade as free as that of England, and assures us that "its terms _were faithfully observed till the restoration_." (p. 241.) He adds at p. 246, that "the navigation act of Cromwell was not designed for the oppression of Virginia, and _was not enforced within her borders_." Hence he says (p. 241) that the pictures drawn by Beverley, Chalmers, Robertson, Marshall, and Holmes, of the discontent produced by commercial oppression, are all "pure fiction."
Now what says the reader to the following extract from a memorial on behalf of the trade of Virginia, laid before Cromwell in 1656?
"What encouragement the poor planter has had to sweeten his labor, since the Dutch were excluded trade, appears by the _general complaint_ of them all, that they are the merchant's slaves, who will allow them scarce a half-penny a pound for their tobacco. Beside that, since the Dutch trade was prohibited, till this year there has been a great deal of their tobacco left behind for want of fraught, and spoiled, to the almost undoing of divers of them." ... "This is an inconveniency which has attended _that act for navigation_," "but unless it be _a little_ dispensed withal, it will undoubtedly ruin part of the trade it was intended to advance. 'Tis true the people of themselves, some of them at least, have this year endeavored their own relief by _secret trade with the Dutch_," &c. &c.
Is not this decisive? If it does not prove the fact, it at least proves the complaint. Mr. Bancroft denies both. Perhaps this paper is a forgery. Perhaps Mr. Bancroft never saw it. YES HE DID. It is the same paper to which he refers at p. 247, note 2, in the very paragraph in which he says that Cromwell's navigation act was not designed for, nor enforced in Virginia. Mr. B. indeed says "the war between England and Holland necessarily interrupted the intercourse of the Dutch with the English colonies." But this memorial is of the year 1656, and peace had been concluded April 15, 1654.