Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/333

 January he sailed to the colony. In July he, acting under instructions from the Virginia Company, summoned the first colonial assembly. On 8 Nov. 1621 Yeardley was succeeded by Sir Francis Wyatt [q. v.]; when, however, early in 1626, Wyatt retired from office, Charles I appointed Yeardley his successor, and he held the reins of government from 17 May until his death on 10 Nov. 1627.

During his three administrations important events in the life of the colony had taken place. The ‘first representative assembly in the western hemisphere’ had met at Jamestown on 30 July 1619. In 1620 a Dutch man-of-war had landed twenty negro slaves for sale, the first brought into the English colonies, while in the last year of his governorship a thousand new emigrants from England had arrived.

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

[New England Hist. and Geneal. Regist. January 1884; Brown's Genesis of 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 the Colonial Church; Hotten's Lists of Emigrants to America; Cal. State Papers, Colonial, Amer. and W. Indies, 1574–1660, and Addenda, passim.]  YEARDLEY, JOHN (1786–1858), quaker missionary, son of Joel and Frances Yeardley, small dairy farmers at Orgreave, near Rotherham, Yorkshire, was born there on 3 Jan. 1786. John was admitted a member of the society in his twentieth year, entered a manufactory in Barnsley, and married, in 1809, Elizabeth Dunn, a convinced Friend much his senior. He commenced preaching in 1815, moving from place to place in the northern counties.

In 1821 Yeardley's wife died, and, led by a persistent ‘call,’ he decided to settle at Pyrmont in Germany, where a small body of Friends existed. For his subsistence he arranged to represent some merchants who imported linen yarn, and later on he commenced bleaching on his own account. His philanthropic labours included the establishing of schools and meetings for the young, and many notable persons, including the prince and princess of Prussia, came to hear him preach. In 1824 he accompanied Martha Savory, an English quakeress, on a gospel journey up the Rhine from Elberfeld to Würtemberg, Tübingen, and other German towns, through Switzerland to Congeniès in Central France, where some Friends were and still are settled. They visited Pastor Fliedner at Kaiserswerth, and all the principal religious and philanthropic institutions on their route.

Upon reaching England they were married at Gracechurch Street meeting on 13 Dec. 1826, resuming soon after their missionary labours in Pyrmont, Friesland, and Switzerland, and visiting asylums, reformatories, and Moravian schools.

During a short time spent in England both Yeardley and his wife applied themselves to the study of modern Greek in preparation for a visit to the isles, for which they started on 21 June 1833. They were warmly received by de Pressensé in Paris, and by Professors Ehrmann and Cuvier, the naturalist, at Strasburg. In Corfu they established a girls' school, also a model farm, obtaining from the authorities there a grant of land upon which prisoners were permitted to supply the labour.

After eight years at home, spent in studying languages, the Yeardleys in 1842 returned for the fourth time to France and Germany. In 1850, during a stay in Berlin, they became acquainted with Neander the historian. Mrs. Yeardley died on 8 May 1851, but her husband continued his travels to Norway in 1852, and to South Russia and Constantinople in 1853.

In his seventy-second year he commenced to study Turkish, and started for the East on 15 June 1858. After some work in Constantinople, and while waiting for his equipments and tents to proceed to the interior of Asia Minor, Yeardley was smitten with paralysis at Isnik, and was compelled to return to England, where he died on 11 Aug. 1858. He was buried at Stoke Newington on the 18th.

As a preacher Yeardley's racy humour, with occasional lapses into his broad native Barnsley dialect, added to his 