Whilst civil war and political convulsions were agitating England to the very centre of her being, peace and prosperity, security and quiet, equal laws and general contentment, were at home in Virginia. The population of the colony amounted to twenty thousand, and was still increasing; the houses were filled with children, as the ports were with ships and emigrants. At Christmas, 1648, two ships from London traded with Virginia, two from Bristol, twelve from Holland, and seven from New England.
The Virginians adhered faithfully to the royal cause, nor would they, after the execution of the monarch, recognise the Commonwealth, but still acknowledged Charles II. to be monarch, while yet a fugitive. Virginia soon became filled with cavaliers, fugitives like their sovereign. “Men of consideration among the nobility, gentry, and clergy, struck with horror and despair at the execution of the king, and desiring no reconciliation with the unrelenting rebels, made their way to the shores of the Chesapeake, where every house was for them a hostelry, and every planter a friend.” In the hospitable homes of Virginia they often met to talk over their own and their country’s sorrows, and to nourish loyalty and hope.
The Parliament, extremely displeased that this colony should thus become the asylum and nursery of monarchical principles, sent, in 1652, a naval force to reduce them to submission. Already, in 1650, foreign ships had been forbidden to trade with the contumacious colony, and in 1651 the celebrated Navigation Act was passed, which, having for its object the protection of British shipping, and the acquisition to England of the trade of the world, greatly shackled and restricted the commercial prosperity of her colonies.
In March, 1652, the republican party in the mother-country determined on obtaining the concession of obedience from Virginia. Commissioners chosen from among the planters themselves were empowered to act as pacificators with their country, the submission of which, if their efforts failed, would be enforced by the severities of war. It was the reconciliation of parent and child; the offended parent assumed an attitude of displeasure and resentment; obedient submission was that which was demanded, and which, if needful, would be enforced by violence; yet, would but the child submit, the parent would concede much; and the child, seeing the parent in earnest, yielded at once, and obtained the offered concession. No sooner, therefore, had the war-frigate of the Commonwealth anchored in the Chesapeake, than all thoughts of resistance were laid aside. The colonists, however loyal might be their inclinations, were more disposed to establish the freedom of their own institutions than to assume a hostile attitude against the mother-country, even on behalf of an exiled monarch.
There is something noble in the position which Virginia now assumed. It was not to force that she surrendered, but by “a voluntary deed and mutual compact; and in return she obtained, that her people should possess all the liberties of free-born people of England; should manage their business as formerly in their own assembly, and should have as free-trade as the people of England. No taxes nor customs were to be levied except by her own representatives, no forts erected nor garrisons maintained but by her consent.”
These conditions, so favourable to liberty, worthy to be granted by the champions of political and civil liberty in England, were a cause of great satisfaction to Virginia; and so earnest was the spirit of her submission and her desire to establish an amicable understanding with the mother-country, that Richard Bennett, one of the commissioners of the Parliament, a merchant and a Roundhead, was unanimously elected governor in the place of Sir William Berkeley.
The spirit of democratic liberty, like a strong young tree, grew with every change of season. Hitherto the governor and the council had sat in the General Assembly; the propriety of this was now questioned, and only retained by a concession which made the house of burgesses, a convention of the people, virtually possessed of supreme authority. Nor were these privileges at all interfered with by Cromwell. When Bennett two years afterwards retired from office, Edward Diggs, a steadfast Commonwealth’s man, was elected his successor, and after him the “worthy old Samuel Matthews, a planter of forty years, a most deserving republican, who kept a good house, lived bravely, and was a true lover of Virginia.” Under his governorship a single instance of the determined spirit of democracy occurred which still more strengthened and established it. The governor and his council having come to issue with the burgesses on a question of prerogative, the governor yielded, reserving a right of appeal to Cromwell. The members of the Assembly, fearing through this an infringement of their liberty, asserted their own sovereign authority, and deposed the governor and council; re-electing Matthews, however, and investing him “with all the just rights and privileges as governor and captain-general of Virginia,” and Matthews submitted, as Virginia herself had done in her quarrel with England, that by submission he might conquer. He acknowledged the right of the burgesses to depose and re-elect; took the oath; and thus was popular liberty still further strengthened in the Old Dominion—an example to all other newer states.
In March, 1660, the very time when the resignation of Richard Cromwell left England without a ruler, good old Samuel Matthews died, and Virginia was in the same predicament. But the burgesses of Virginia, unlike the people of England, stood fast by democratic principles, and, enacting that the supreme power should still reside in the General Assembly until there should arrive from England a commission, which the Assembly itself should adjudge to be lawful, proceeded to elect Sir William Berkeley as their governor; and he in his turn acknowledged the validity of this act of the Assembly by assuming office, “for I am,” said he, “but a servant of the Assembly.”
Virginia, in this case, however, it must be observed, recognised covertly another authority higher than that of her own Assembly, retaining, amid her spirit of democracy, a firm sentiment of loyalty. She hoped at this time for the restoration of the Stuarts.
Virginia was composed of separate boroughs, and the government organised on the basis of universal suffrage. Every freeman was possessed of a vote. On an attempt to limit the right of voting to householders, it was declared to be “hard and unagreeable to reason that every person shall pay equal taxes and yet have no vote in the elections.”