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rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and gather ’em by the seashore!’
    It was in this atmosphere that the charter authorising the two new forays to America was drawn up and two joint stock companies of
    ‘knights, gentlemen, merchants and other adventurers’ created for the purpose. The two principal aims were announced as ‘bringing infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility’ and
    ‘the mining of gold, silver and copper’. Three of the Crown’s leading councillors helped draft the document: Robert Cecil, Chief Secretary of State; Sir Edward Coke, Attorney General; and the fearsome Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham.
    Cecil emerged as principal patron of the company that was allocated the southern territory, lying roughly between what is now Florida and New York. It was composed of men drawn mainly
    ‘from our city of London’ and inevitably became known as the London Company, and later the Virginia Company. The key post of treasurer of the company, equivalent to managing director, was taken by Sir Thomas Smythe.
    Sir John Popham was the principal investor in the second company, drawn from ‘our cities of Bristol and Exeter and of our town of Plymouth’ and allocated New England. It came to be known as the Plymouth Company. Popham was a man whose character was written in his face. In one portrait, he appears a physical giant, the scarlet robes of the High Court clutched around his bulk, a heavy, ugly face glaring out, cold eyes cunning and suspicious: the face of a calculating, unstoppable bully. In his voluminous Lives of the Chief Justices of England , Lord Campbell refers to the portrait and adds decorously: ‘I am afraid he would not appear to great advantage in a sketch of his moral qualities, which lest I do him an injustice I will not attempt.’4
    Sir John was the man who had passed the death sentence on Sir Walter Raleigh, telling him, ‘It is best for man not to seek to climb too high, lest he fall.’ He had participated in the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots and condemned to death Guy Fawkes and hundreds more. The miracle was that he did not join them on the 36
    THE JUDGE’S DREAM
    gallows himself. Before he occupied one by one most of the great legal offices of state, John Popham had been a highwayman and, according to one rumour, ‘probably a garrotter’, too.
    Popham was born in 1531 into an affluent Somerset family. He read law at Balliol College, Oxford, and in his twenties he was called to the Bar and respectably married. Even then, however, he was exhibiting a different side to his character. He was a heavy drinker and a gambler, and according to Lord Campbell, ‘either to supply his profligate expenditure or to show his spirit’, Popham frequently sallied forth at night from a hostel in Southwark with a band of desperate characters and, planting themselves in ambush on Shooter’s Hill, or taking other positions favourable for attack and escape, they stopped travellers and took from them not only their money but any valuable commodities they carried with them – boasting that they were always civil and generous and that to avoid serious consequences they went in such numbers as to render resistance impossible.5
    Popham’s antics continued right through his twenties. Amazingly, he was never caught. In his thirties, he decided he could make as much money from the law as from highway robbery and developed an extensive practice in south-west England that brought him to the attention of the Queen. With her rare ability to pick ruthless talent that could be used one day, Elizabeth arranged a seat in Parliament for him. The former highwayman became Speaker of the House, then Attorney General and, finally, Lord Chief Justice.
    ‘He was a hanging judge,’ says Campbell. ‘Ordinary larcenies and, above all, in highway robbery there was little chance of acquittal.’ It was the same with those who did not fit the Protestant orthodoxies the Crown was trying to