CRUELTIES OF A ROYAL GOVERNOR. 321 ment. Nathaniel Bacon failed, and he is embalmed in history as a rebel. Had he succeeded, he would have been immortalized as a patriot. The vexations and fatigues which Berkeley had endured in his contest with the republicans soured his haughty temper and made him very miserable. He signalized his return to power by acts of wanton cruelty. His king had proclaimed Bacon to be a traitor, and sent an armament under Sir John Berry to assist in crushing the rebellion in Virginia. These were the first royal troops sent to America to suppress the aspirations of the people for freedom. The incident was repeated a hundred years later when Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis and Burgoyne were here, like Sir John Berry, leading British troops to suppress a more formidable and successful uprising of Americans in favor of the rights of man. Feeling strong, Berkeley, with strange stony-heartedness, pursued the accomplices of Bacon with malignant severity, until twenty-two of them were hanged. Even King Charles was disgusted with his cruelty, and said: "The old fool has taken more lives in that naked country than I have taken for the murder of my father." The first martyr was Thomas Hansford, a gallant young native of Virginia. When he was brought before Berkeley, he boldly avowed his attachment to the republican cause; and when he was sentenced to be hanged, he said: "I ask no favor but that I may be shot like a soldier and not hanged like a dog." The governor replied: "You die, not as a soldier, but as a rebel." When he came to the gallows, he said: "Take notice, I die a loyal subject and a lover of my country." When Edmund Cheesman was arraigned before the governor, and he was asked why he engaged in Bacon's wicked scheme, before he could answer, his young wife stepped forward and said: "My provocations made my husband join in the cause for which Bacon contended; but for me, he had never done what he has done. Since what is done," she said, as she fell upon her knees in an attitude of supplication, with her head bowed and covered with her hands, "was done by my means, I am most guilty; let me bear the punishment; let me be hanged, but let my husband be pardoned." The governor angrily cried out: "Away with you!" and added a brutal insinuation against her virtue. The poor young wife fainted, and her husband was led to the gallows. So fearful, at first, was the cruel old baron that some of his intended victims might escape through a verdict of acquittal by a jury that men were taken from the tribunal of a court-martial directly to the gallows without the forms of civil law. When the brave Drummond, who had been captured, was brought before him, the governor with wicked satire made a low bow and exultingly cried: "You are very welcome; I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia; you shall be hanged in half an hour." "I expect no mercy from you," Drummond replied. "I have followed the lead of my conscience, and done what I might to free my countrymen from oppression." He was condemned at one o'clock, and was hanged at four o'clock. By a decree, his brave wife Sarah was denounced as a traitor and banished, with her children, to the wilderness, there to subsist by the charity of sympathizing friends. And after these judicial murders had been publicly condemned by the king as contrary to his commands and offensive to his clemency, Berkeley continued to fine, imprison and confiscate the property of all those who, in any way, were accomplices of Bacon, until he was recalled in the spring of 1677, and went to England with the returning fleet of Sir John Berry. So glad were the colonists at the departure of the governor that they fired great guns and lighted bonfires. In England his cruelties were severely censured; and Sir William Berkeley died of grief and mortified pride before he was permitted to stand before his king. Circumstances had transformed a wise, prudent and benevolent magistrate in the days of his young manhood, into an unwise and cruel oppressor in his old age. With the troops under Sir John Berry came Colonel Jeffreys, appointed to recall Berkeley and succeed him as governor. With him were associated Sir John and Colonel Moryson as commissioners to inquire into and report the causes of "Bacon's Rebellion." They found the Virginia Assembly pretty thoroughly winnowed of its aristocratic elements, and in sympathy with the people. The Burgesses would yield nothing repugnant to liberty because of the presence of troops quartered in Virginia; and when Jeffreys and his associates demanded that all the books and journals of the Assembly should be submitted to their inspection, they hesitated. Those papers were seized; and when the Assembly demanded reparation for the insult, and Jeffreys appealed to the Great Seal of England in defence of the act, the Burgesses firmly replied to him that "such a breach of privilege could not be commanded under the Great Seal, because they could not find that any king of England had ever done so in former times." When the king was informed of this reply, with foolish arrogance worthy of his grandfather, he commanded the governor to "signify his majesty's indignation at language so seditious, and to give the leaders marks of the royal displeasure." The Burgesses were quite indifferent to the royal frowns or to the royal favors. Soon after Berkeley's departure from Virginia, the king appointed Lord Culpepper, one of his favorites to whom he had leased the province for the term of a generation, governor of the domain for life, with a salary double in amount that received by the late magistrate, because he was a peer. It now became a proprietary colony. Culpepper went there reluctantly, A PROFLIGATE GOVERNOR. 323 in 1680, with instructions to bury all animosities growing out of Bacon's "rebellion." But the profligate governor began his administration by disfranchising all of the willing followers of Bacon. He despoiled the colonists of privilege after privilege, and exercised measures which impoverished them. By a proclamation forbidding, under severest penalties, all disrespectful words concerning the governor and his administration, he closed the royal ear against all complaints of his tyranny; and having accumulated, by a system of pillage, a considerable sum of money, he returned to England to spend it in dissipation. Culpepper returned to Virginia in 1682. His profligacy and rapacity so disgusted the people and fostered discontents, that, unable to endure him longer, they broke out into insurrection. His false reports of the matter induced the king to issue an order for the hanging of several of the most influential leaders; but at length the true state of the case was laid before Charles, and he recalled the grant made to Culpepper and Arlington, and |