George and the Strachey letter - and the Shakespeare play "The Tempest"

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George Percy and William Strachey -

is the "Strachey letter" a source for "The Tempest" by Shakespeare?

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George Percy was a friend of William Strachey.

The "Strachey letter" is of great interest to researchers.

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excerpts from The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography


George Percy's "Trewe Relacyon"
is perhaps the most important documentary source for three crucial years in the very early history of the Jamestown settlement, England's first successful and enduring colony in the New World.


Beginning in 1609, the work chronicles the deprivations and miseries that beset the colony under the brief presidency of Percy himself, and his immediate successors, concluding with Percy's arduous voyage home to England in 1612, after five and a half years in America.

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...early in 1602 he resided with Northumberland's household at Syon House, Middlesex, keeping the grooms and minor household officers company while the earl "laye at London."7


The quiet days were numbered only by his search for a cure, because current medical thinking held that those who suffered from fits might expect to prosper in warmer climates.


Accordingly, Percy embarked in August 1602 on a sea voyage to the West Indies, the earl paying for many of his "necessaries."8 Virtually nothing is known about this adventure, but he was home within the year.


Percy was still on his travels during January 1604,9 but it is clear from household accounts that he was living in London later that year.10


Early experience of an Atlantic crossing must surely help explain why this younger son of a prominent nobleman was found, four years later, among the band of settlers who established an English colony on the James River, in what is today Virginia.


There was, however, another reason. After the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605, the ninth earl of Northumberland was arrested upon suspicion of complicity in the treason.11 Circumstantial evidence told heavily against him. Following an ore tenus trial in the Star Chamber, at which he confessed various "contempts" and was sentenced to an enormous fine and imprisonment at the king's pleasure, the earl remained in the Tower of London for some fifteen years.


His downfall came as a grievous blow to the fortunes of his entire family.12 For a well-traveled younger brother, the prospect in those inauspicious days of new and distant horizons must have been welcome indeed.


Percy was almost certainly encouraged in his plans by the earl himself, who collected an impressive geographical library while in the Tower, and who displayed an abiding interest in cartography and exploration.


Certainly the support and active participation of an earl's brother, even the brother of an earl imprisoned and disgraced, would have been welcomed by the Virginia adventurers.
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As with so many well-born but landless younger sons in the early seventeenth century, George's later years are thinly documented.


Little, for example, is known of the circles in which he moved, though one or two clues hint at a small group of close, erudite friends.


Dudley Carleton told John Chamberlain in August 1607 that Percy had written from Virginia to William Warner the mathematician, a pensioner of the ninth earl: "Mr Warner hath a letter from Mr George Percie who names their towne Jamesfort, which we like best of all the rest because it comes neere to Chemesford."21


William Strachey, secretary to the Virginia colony and author of The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, seems to have been a friend in the 1610s. Dedicating this book to Northumberland, Strachey gracefully acknowledged the earl's "noble brother (from whose Commentaries and observations, I must freely confesse, I have collected these passadges and knowledges) [and who] out of his free and honorable love to me hath made me presume to offer unto your Lordship."22
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George Percy's "Trewe Relacyon": A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement


The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2005 by Mark Nicholls


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