The Effect of the Restoration in Virginia
Berkeley stepped from the Governor's chair, retiring in wrath and
bitterness of heart to his house at Greenspring. In his place sat
Richard Bennett, one of the Commissioners. Claiborne was made
Secretary. King's men went out of office; Parliament men came in.
But there was no persecution. In the bland and wide Virginia air
minds failed to come into hard and frequent collision. For all the
ferocities of the statute books, acute suffering for difference of
opinion, whether political or religious, did not bulk large in the
life of early Virginia.
The Commissioners, after the reduction of Virginia, had a like part
to play with Maryland. At St. Mary's, as at Jamestown, they demanded
and at length received submission to the Commonwealth. There was
here the less trouble owing to Baltimore's foresight in appointing
to the office of Governor William Stone, whose opinions, political
and religious, accorded with those of revolutionary England. Yet the
Governor could not bring himself to forget his oath to Lord
Baltimore and agree to the demand of the Commissioners that he
should administer the Government in the name of "the Keepers of the
Liberties of England." After some hesitation the Commissioners
decided to respect his scruples and allow him to govern in the name
of the Lord Proprietary, as he had solemnly promised.
In Virginia and in Maryland the Commonwealth and the Lord Protector
stand where stood the Kingdom and the King. Many are far better
satisfied than they were before; and the confirmed royalist consumes
his grumbling in his own circle. The old, exhausting quarrel seems
laid to rest. But within this wider peace breaks out suddenly an
interior strife. Virginia would, if she could, have back all her old
northward territory. In 1652 Bennett's Government goes so far as to
petition Parliament to unseat the Catholic Proprietary of Maryland
and make whole again the ancient Virginia. The hand of Claiborne,
that remarkable and persistent man, may be seen in this.
In Maryland, Puritans and Independents were settled chiefly about
the rivers Severn and Patuxent and in a village called Providence,
afterwards Annapolis. These now saw their chance to throw off the
Proprietary's rule and to come directly under that of the
Commonwealth. So thinking, they put themselves into communication
with Bennett and Claiborne. In 1654 Stone charged the Commissioners
with having promoted "faction, sedition, and rebellion against the
Lord Baltimore." The charge was well founded. Claiborne and Bennett
assumed that they were yet Parliament Commissioners, empowered to
bring "all plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake to their due
obedience to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England." And they
were indeed set against the Lord Baltimore. Claiborne would head the
Puritans of Providence; and a troop should be raised in Virginia and
march northward. The Commissioners actually advanced upon St.
Mary's, and with so superior a force that Stone surrendered, and a
Puritan Government was inaugurated. A Puritan Assembly met,
debarring any Catholics. Presently it passed an act annulling the
Proprietary's Act of Toleration.
Professors of the religion of Rome should "be restrained from the
exercise thereof." The hand of the law was to fall heavily upon
"popery, prelacy, or licentiousness of opinion." Thus was
intolerance alive again in the only land where she had seemed to
die!
In England now there was hardly a Parliament, but only the Lord
Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Content with Baltimore's recognition of
the Protectorate, Cromwell was not prepared to back, in their
independent action, the Commissioners of that now dissolved
Parliament. Baltimore made sure of this, and then dispatched
messengers overseas to Stone, bidding him do all that lay in him to
retake Maryland. Stone thereupon gathered several hundred men and a
fleet of small sailing craft, with which he pushed up the bay to the
Severn. In the meantime the Puritans had not been idle, but had
themselves raised a body of men and had taken over the Golden Lyon,
an armed merchantman lying before their town. On the 24th of March,
1655, the two forces met in the Battle of the Severn. "In the name
of God, fall on!" cried the men of Providence, and "Hey for St.
Mary's!" cried the others. The battle was won by the Providence men.
They slew or wounded fifty of the St. Mary's men and desperately
wounded Stone himself and took many prisoners, ten of whom were
afterwards condemned to death and four were actually executed.
Now followed a period of up and down, the Commissioners and the
Proprietary alike appealing to the Lord Protector for some
expression of his "determinate will." Both sides received
encouragement inasmuch as he decided for neither. His own authority
being denied by neither, Cromwell may have preferred to hold these
distant factions in a canceling, neutralizing posture. But far
weightier matters, in fact, were occupying his mind. In 1657, weary
of her "very sad, distracted, and unsettled condition," Maryland
herself proceeded -- Puritan, Prelatist, and Catholic together -- to
agree henceforth to disagree. Toleration viewed in retrospect
appears dimly to have been seen for the angel that it was. Maryland
would return to the Proprietary's rule, provided there should be
complete indemnity for political offenses and a solemn promise that
the Toleration Act of 1649 should never be repealed. This without a
smile Baltimore promised. Articles were signed; a new Assembly
composed of all manner of Christians was called; and Maryland
returned for a time to her first allegiance.
Quiet years, on the whole, follow in Virginia under the
Commonwealth. The three Governors of this period -- Bennett, Digges,
and Mathews are all chosen by the Assembly, which, but for the
Navigation Laws, might almost forget the Home
Government. Then Oliver Cromwell dies; and, after an interval, back
to England come the Stuarts. Charles II is proclaimed King. And back
into office in Virginia is brought that staunch old monarchist, Sir
William Berkeley -- first by a royalist Assembly and presently by
commission from the new King.
- See: Navigation Acts
Then Virginia had her Long Parliament or Assembly. In 1661, in
the first gush of the Restoration, there was elected a House of
Burgesses so congenial to Berkeley's mind that he wished to see it
perpetuated. For fifteen years therefore he held it in being, with
adjournments from one year into another and with sharp refusals to
listen to any demand for new elections. Yet this demand grew, and
still the Governor shut the door in the face of the people and
looked imperiously forth from the window. His temper, always fiery,
now burned vindictive; his zeal for King and Church and the high
prerogatives of the Governor of Virginia became a consuming passion.
When Berkeley first came to Virginia, and again for a moment in the
flare of the Restoration, his popularity had been real, but for long
now it had dwindled. He belonged to an earlier time, and he held
fast to old ideas that were decaying at the heart. A bigot for the
royal power, a man of class with a contempt for the generality and
its clumsily expressed needs, he grew in narrowness as he grew in
years. Berkeley could in these later times write home, though with
some exaggeration: "I thank God there are no free schools nor
printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for
learning has brought disobedience into the world and printing has
divulged them, and libels against the best governments! God keep us
from both!" But that was the soured zealot for absolutism -- William
Berkeley the man was fond enough of books and himself had written
plays.
The spirit of the time was reactionary in Virginia as it was
reactionary in England. Harsh servant and slave laws were passed. A
prison was to be erected in each county; provision was made for
pillory and stocks and ducking stool; the Quakers were to be
proceeded against; the Baptists who refused to bring children to
baptism were to suffer.
|
Ducking Stool The ducking-stool was a strongly made wooden
armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the
culprit was seated, an iron band being placed around her so
that she should not fall out during her immersion. The
earliest record of the use of such is towards the beginning of
the 17th century, with the term being first attested in
English in 1597. It was used both in Europe and in the English
colonies of North America. See:
Curious Punishments of Bygone Days |
Then at last in 1670 came restriction of the franchise:
| Act III. ELECTION OF BURGESSES BY WHOM.
WHEREAS the usuall way of chuseing burgesses by the votes of
all persons who having served their tyme are freemen of this
country who haveing little interest in the country doe oftener
make tumults at the election to the disturbance of his
Majestie's peace, than by their discretions in their votes
provide for the conservation thereof, by makeing choyce of
persons fitly qualifyed for the discharge of soe greate a
trust, And whereas the lawes of England grant a voyce in such
election only to such as by their estates real or personall
have interest enough to tye them to the endeavour of the
publique good; IT IS HEREBY ENACTED, that none but freeholders
and housekeepers who only are answerable to the publique for
the levies shall hereafter have a voice in the election of any
burgesses in this country. Source: Hening's Statutes, vol. II, p. 280. |
Three years later another woe befell the colony. That same
Charles II -- to whom in misfortune Virginia had so adhered that for
her loyalty she had received the name of the Old Dominion -- now
granted "all that entire tract, territory, region, and dominion of
land and water commonly called Virginia, together with the territory
of Accomack," to Lord Culpeper and the Earl of Arlington. For
thirty-one years they were to hold it, paying to the King the slight
annual rent of forty shillings. They were not to disturb the
colonists in any guaranteed right of life or land or goods, but for
the rest they might farm Virginia. The country cried out in anger.
The Assembly hurried commissioners on board a ship in port and sent
them to England to besiege the ear of the King.
Distress and discontent increased, with good reason, among the mass
of the Virginians. The King in England, his councilors, and
Parliament, played an unfatherly role, while in Virginia economic
hardships pressed ever harder and the administration became more and
more oppressive. By 1676 the gunpowder of popular indignation was
laid right and left, awaiting the match.
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