The Arlington-Culpeper grant, 1673.
Another cause of trouble was the king’s recklessness in rewarding public services or gratifying favourites by extensive grants of wild land in America. It was an easy way to pay debts, for it cost the king nothing, and all the labour and expense of making the grant valuable fell upon the grantee. To many of these grants there could, of course, be no objection. Those that founded the Carolinas and Pennsylvania and the Hudson Bay Company were all proper enough. The trouble began when territory already granted and occupied by Englishmen was given away again. There were some complicated and obscure instances of this in New England, but a flagrant and exasperating case occurred in Virginia in 1673, when Charles made a grant of the whole country to the Earl of Arlington and Lord Culpeper, to hold for thirty-one years at a yearly rent of 40 shillings to be paid at Michaelmas.
Some of its effects.
The practical effect of this grant was to convert Virginia into something like a proprietary government, with Arlington and Culpeper for proprietors. It was, of course, not the intention to disturb individuals in the possession of lands already acquired by a valid title; but escheated lands were to go to these proprietors instead of the crown, and there was an opportunity for grievous injustice, for many escheated lands were occupied by persons who had purchased them in good faith. The lord proprietors were to receive the revenues of the colony, to appoint all public officers, and to present pastors for installation. In short, the entire control of the internal administration of the colony was to be placed in their hands, and against such favourites of the king an appeal at any time was likely to be of little avail. It is needless to add that the grant was made without consulting the Virginians. For people who had lavished so much loyalty upon a worthless sovereign, this was a scurvy requital. To find its match for ingratitude one must go to the story of Inkle and Yarico. No sooner did the House of Burgesses hear of it than they sent commissioners to England to make an energetic protest. They found the king rather surprised to hear that the Virginians cared anything about such a trifle; he promised to satisfy everybody, and that naturally took some time, so that the matter was still under discussion when things came to a blaze in Virginia.
Character of Sir William Berkeley.
The unprincipled government of Charles II. in England was matched in some respects by the oppressive administration of Sir William Berkeley in Virginia. We have already met this gentleman on several occasions; it is now time to notice him more particularly. He was son of Sir Maurice Berkeley, who was one of the members of the London Company when it was first organized in 1606. Several members of the family were interested in American affairs. Sir William’s elder brother, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, was a favourite of Charles II., and one of the group of proprietors to whom that king granted Carolina in 1663. Sir William was an aristocrat to the ends of his fingers, a man of velvet and gold lace, a brave soldier, a devoted husband, a chivalrous friend, and withal as narrow and bigoted and stubborn a creature as one could find anywhere. He had no sympathy with common people, nor any very clear sense of duty toward them. When he first arrived in Virginia in 1642, at the age of thirty-four, he was considered very gracious and affable in manners, and during the ten years of his first governorship he seems to have been generally popular. From 1652 to 1660 he lived in retirement on his rural estate of Greenspring near Jamestown, where he had an orchard of more than 2,000 fruit trees—apples, pears, quinces, peaches, and apricots—and a stable of seventy fine horses. There he entertained Cavalier guests and drank healths to King Charles until he was once more called to Jamestown to be governor. In 1661 he went to London and stayed for a year, and it was afterwards thought that his visit with his froward and hot-tempered brother[35] worked a change in him for the worse. Berkeley’s errand in London was to oppose an attempt which the old London Company was making to have its charter restored; the people of Virginia had long ago passed the stage at which they regretted the overthrow of the Company. During his stay in London, Berkeley saw one of his own plays performed at the theatre, for this courtier and Cavalier dabbled in literature. Of this tragi-comedy, “The Lost Lady,” Pepys tells us in his Diary that at first he did not care much for it, but liked it better the next time he saw it.[36]
Corruption and extortion.
The Long Assembly, 1661-1676.
Berkeley’s violent temper.
After Berkeley’s return to Virginia the evils of Charles’s misgovernment soon began to show themselves. A swarm of place-hunters beset the king, who carelessly gave them appointments in Virginia, or recommended them to Berkeley for places. Judges and sheriffs, revenue collectors and parsons, were thus appointed without reference to fitness, with the natural results; the law was ill-administered, the public money embezzled, and the church scandalized. The custom-house charges on exported tobacco afforded chances for extortion and blackmailing, of which abundant advantage was taken, and Berkeley was not the sort of man who was quick to punish the rogues of his own party. Enemies accused him of profiting by the maladministration of his officials, and he himself confessed in a rather cynical letter to Lord Arlington that, while advancing years had taken away his ambition, they had left him covetous. A little group of wealthy planters, friends of Berkeley, obtained places on the council, and contrived to have everything their own way for several years. With their aid the governor tried to do away with the popular election of representatives. Amid the blaze of royalist exultation over the restoration of monarchy, the House of Burgesses elected in 1661 contained a large majority of members who believed in high prerogative and divine right; and Berkeley, having thus secured a legislature that was quite to his mind, kept it alive for fifteen years, until 1676, simply by the ingenious expedient of adjourning it from year to year, and refusing to issue writs for a new election. The effect of such things was to carry more than one staunch Cavalier over into what was by no means a Puritan but none the less a strong opposition party. As this opposition could not find adequate voice in the legislature, it became ready for an explosion. As Berkeley’s old popularity ebbed away he grew arrogant and cross, and now and then some instance of mean vindictiveness swelled the rising tide of hatred against him. He became subject to fits of violent passion. The famous Quaker preacher, William Edmundson, who visited Virginia in 1672, called on the governor and sought to intercede with him for the Society of Friends, the members of which were shamefully treated in that colony. “He was very peevish and brittle,” says Edmundson, “and I could fasten nothing on him, with all the soft arguments I could use.... The next day was the men’s meeting at William Wright’s house [where I met] Major-General Bennett.... He asked me ‘How I was treated by the governor?’ I told him ‘he was brittle and peevish.’... He asked me ‘if the governor called me dog, rogue, etc.’ I said ‘No.’ ‘Then,’ said he, ‘you took him in his best humour, those being his usual terms when he is angry, for he is an enemy to every appearance of good.’”[37]