were destined to have no small trouble with Pierce, before they were established in their rights under the new patent granted him (in the interest of the Adventurers and themselves), by the “Council for New England.”  Master John Wincob’s early and silent withdrawal from his apparently active connection with the Pilgrim movement, and the evident cancellation of the first patent issued to him in its interest, by the (London) Virginia Company, have never been satisfactorily explained.  Wincob (or Wincop), we are told, “was a religious Gentleman, then belonging to the household of the Countess of Lincoln, who intended to go with them [the Pilgrims] but God so disposed as he never went, nor they ever made use of this Patent, which had cost them so much labor and charge.”  Wincob, it appears by the minutes of the (London) Virginia Company of Wednesday, May 26/June 5, 1619, was commended to the Company, for the patent he sought, by the fourth Earl of Lincoln, and it was doubtless through his influence that it was granted and sealed, June 9/19, 1619.  But while Wincob was a member of the household of the Dowager Countess of Lincoln, mother of the fourth Earl of Lincoln; John, the eldest son of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, had married the Earl’s daughter (sister ?), and hence Gorges stood in a much nearer relation to the Earl than did his mother’s friend and dependant (as Wincob evidently was), as well as on a much more equal social footing.  By the minutes of the (London) Virginia Company of Wednesday, February 2/ 12, 1619/20, it appears that a patent was “allowed and sealed to John Pierce and his associates, heirs and assigns,” for practically the same territory for which the patent to Wincob had been given but eight months before.  No explanation was offered, and none appears of record, but the logical conclusion is, that the first patent had been cancelled, that Master Wincob’s personal interest in the Pilgrim exodus had ceased, and that the Lincoln patronage had been withdrawn.  It is a rational conjecture that Sir Ferdinando Gorges, through the relationship he sustained to the Earl, procured the withdrawal of Wincob and his patent, knowing that the success of his (Gorges’s) plot would render the Wincob patent worthless, and that the theft of the colony, in his own interest, would be likely to breed “unpleasantness” between himself and Wincob’s sponsors and friends among the Adventurers, many of whom were friends of the Earl of Lincoln.

The Earl of Warwick, the man of highest social and political rank in the First (or London) Virginia Company, was, at about the same time, induced by Gorges to abandon his (the London) Company and unite with himself in securing from the Crown the charter of the “Council of Affairs for New England.”  The only inducements he could offer for the change must apparently have resided in the promised large results of plottings disclosed by him (Gorges), but he needed the influential and unscrupulous Earl for the promotion of his schemes,