The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

3. The Grievances of the People

3 22 THE GRIEVANCES OF THE PEOPLE Sir William Berkeley (1602–1677) (Trustees of the Berkeley Will Trust) was governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1652 and again from 1660 until 1677. He was undoubtedly the most important white man in seventeenth-century Virginia. His administration and attempts to diversify the colonial economy shaped the evolution of Virginia during the century. His separation of the burgesses and council members into a bicameral legislature in 1643 allowed the political institutions and culture of Virginia to develop strong traditions and strong leaders that guided its history for decades. Local political institutions functioned during his second administration in a way that led to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Berkeley was not personally responsible for the conditions that led to the rebellion, but his response to it permanently damaged his reputation. The first of the warships bearing the thousand or more soldiers that King Charles II sent to Virginia to suppress Bacon’s Rebellion and the three commissioners he sent to ascertain its causes arrived at the end of January 1677—January 1676 by the old calendar. By then the rebellion had collapsed, and Nathaniel Bacon, its leader, was dead of dysentery and other loathsome afflictions. Governor Sir William Berkeley and men loyal to his administration had rounded up most of the remaining leaders, and Berkeley had tried them before courts martial and hanged them. He had put down the largest and most violent uprising of white people that took place in any of England’s North American colonies before the one that began exactly a century later. He was old, tired, angry, partially deaf, and very perplexed at how such a bloody rebellion could have broken out in the colony that he had governed with success for twenty-six of the previous thirty-four years, almost 40 percent of its entire history. Berkeley was a bitter man when he climbed aboard the flagship of the fleet to greet the commissioners and commanders of the force that arrived too late to help. He knew one of the commissioners, Francis Moryson, who had lived in Virginia in the 1640s during Berkeley’s first administration as governor. Moryson was Speaker of the House of Burgesses in 1656, compiled one of the first printed digests of the colonial laws, sat on the governor’s council early in the 1660s during Berkeley’s second administration, and was acting governor of the colony from the spring of 1661 to the autumn of 1662. By 1677, though, Moryson had been out of the colony for more than a decade and was the king’s agent and no longer the governor’s ally. The other two commissioners were strangers to Berkeley and had no personal knowledge of Virginia. Sir John Berry was a career naval officer and commander of the fleet that the king sent to Virginia, and Colonel Herbert Jeffreys was a career army officer and commander of the regiment that the king sent to Virginia. Berkeley and the commissioners got on badly from the beginning. The commissioners brought the king’s order summoning the governor back to London to report to him in person and empowering Jeffreys to supplant him as lieutenant governor. The old governor may have interpreted that as a royal rebuke or statement of no confidence. Berkeley did not leave for three months, until well after his relationship with the commissioners had deteriorated to exchanging insults, some veiled, some not. He was frustrated and angry about everything that had happened since the previous spring, and he soon grew frustrated and angry about the officious behavior of the commissioners, who 58 the grandees of government undermined his authority and issued orders as well as asked questions. Berkeley ’s deafness made his initial discussions with the commissioners difficult. They had to shout at him to be heard, and like many hearing-impaired people he probably shouted at them, too, unaware of how he sounded to them. They were yelling at each other even before they were angry with each other.1 When Berkeley met with the commissioners aboard the king’s warship on the first day of February, he read through the papers and royal instructions that they brought, and on the next day he wrote a long, detailed account of his handling of the rebellion for the information of his king and his king’s ministers .2 On the third day of the month, the...