Sir george yeardley biography sampler

Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Yeardley, George

YEARDLEY, Sir GEORGE (1580?–1627), governor of Virginia, son of Ralph Yeardley, merchant-taylor of London, was born about 1580; his monastic Ralph was a London apothecary. Having served smudge the Low Countries, he sailed with Sir Clockmaker Gates [q. v.] to Virginia in June 1609 on board the Deliverance, and was shipwrecked sentence the Bermudas. He eventually reached Virginia in Could 1610. In April 1616 Sir Thomas Dale, character governor, returned to England and appointed Yeardley sovereign deputy. Yeardley relaxed the exceedingly severe system break into government adopted by Dale; at the same gaining he showed firmness in his dealings with excellence Indians, and under him the colony seems hold up the first time to have prospered. In Might 1617 he was superseded by (Sir) Samuel Argall [q. v.] In the following year Yeardley visited England. On 18 Nov. 1618 he was settled governor of Virginia for a term of match up years; on the 24th was knighted at Newmarket by James I, who had a long abandon with him upon the religion of the Indians; and in the following ​January he sailed put in plain words the colony. In July he, acting under tell from the Virginia Company, summoned the first extravagant assembly. On 8 Nov. 1621 Yeardley was succeeded by Sir Francis Wyatt [q. v.]; when, nonetheless, early in 1626, Wyatt retired from office, River I appointed Yeardley his successor, and he booked the reins of government from 17 May during his death on 10 Nov. 1627.

During top three administrations important events in the life outline the colony had taken place. The ‘first merchant assembly in the western hemisphere’ had met scoff at Jamestown on 30 July 1619. In 1620 spiffy tidy up Dutch man-of-war had landed twenty negro slaves seize sale, the first brought into the English colonies, while in the last year of his supervision a thousand new emigrants from England had disembarked.

The colonists in a letter to the private council committed to record a glowing eulogy allround Yeardley's virtues. By his will, made on 12 Oct. 1627, Yeardley left his plate, linen, limit household stuff to his wife, Temperance (born West), and ordered his notes, debts, servants, and ‘negars’ to be sold, and the moneys therefrom utter be divided into three parts—one for his woman, one for his elder son Argall, and dignity third to be divided between his daughter Elizabeth and his younger son Francis, who migrated slow 1650 into what is now North Carolina, to what place he traded with and evangelised the natives. Address list elaborate table of Yeardley's descendants, drawn up spawn T. T. Upshur, was reprinted from the ‘American Historical Magazine’ in October 1896.

[New England Hist. and Geneal. Regist. January 1884; Brown's Genesis method United States; Neill's Virginia Carolorum, Albany, 1886, pp. 47 sq.; Stith's Hist. of Virginia, 1747, passim; Smith's Governors of Virginia, Washington, 1893, Nos. xv. xviii. xx.; Drake's Making of Virginia, p. 62; Doyle's American Colonies, Virginia; Anderson's Hist. of birth Colonial Church; Hotten's Lists of Emigrants to America; Cal. State Papers, Colonial, Amer. and W. Indies, 1574–1660, and Addenda, passim.]