This biography of English parliamentarian, colonizer and religious thinker Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629) shows the vital role he played in the Jacobean Age's two most distinctive achievement: the early development of England's constitutional structure and the overseas expansion that began the British Empire. Sandys made his contributions, the author demnstrates, in the course on an extraordinarily diverse career. Sandys sat in the House of Commons from the 1580s to the mid-1620s, becoming its elder statesman and most influential voice on economic affairs, constitutional issues, and parliamentary procedure. He was a leader of the Virginia Company and the Bermuda Company which established and settled these two early English colonies, and was also a director of the East India Company. In an age beset by religious extremism, Sandys wrote a book on religious toleration that was widely read and discussed throughout Europe. In following Sandys' political career, the book provides a reassessment of parliamentary politics on the eve of the English Civil War. Rabb shows that Sandys helped shape gentry positions, independent of Crown or Court, on major political issues, which in turn gave the