Sir William sent a message to the Assembly directing that some mark of distinction be set upon his loyal friends of Accomac, who had twice given him shelter during the uprising. It fell to the lot of a Baconian, Col. Augustine Warner, as Speaker of the
House, to read the Governor's message, but that fiery gentleman consoled himself by adding, upon his own account, that he did not know what the "distinction" should be unless to give them "earmarks or burnt marks"—which was the common manner of branding criminals and hogs.
So many persons had been put to death by Governor Berkeley, "divers whereof were persons of honest reputations and handsome estates," and among them some of the members of the last Assembly, that the new Assembly petitioned him to spill no more blood. A member from Northumberland, Mr. William Presley by name, said that he "believed the Governor would have hanged half the country if they had let him alone."
His Majesty King Charles II is said to have declared when accounts of Berkeley's punishment of the rebels reached his ears, that the "old fool had hanged more men in that naked country than he [Charles] had done for the murder of his father."
With the completion of Sir William Berkeley's wholesale and pitiless revenge
fell the curtain upon the final act in the tragedy of Bacon's Rebellion.
As soon as the country was quiet many suits were brought by members of the Governor's party for damages to their property during the commotion. These suits serve to show how widespread throughout the colony was the uprising.
The records of Henrico County contain sundry charges of depredations committed by Bacon's soldiers, showing that the people's cause was strong in that section. Major John Lewis, of Middlesex, laid claim of damages at the hands of "one Matt Bentley," with "forty or fifty men-of-arms," in the "time of the late rebellion." Major Lewis's inventory of his losses includes "400 meals" (which he declares were eaten at his house by Bacon's men during their two days encampment on his plantation), the killing of some of his stock, and carrying off of meal "for the whole rebel army," at Major Pate's house.
The records of Westmoreland County show that the Baconians, under "General" Thomas Goodrich, had control in the Northern
Neck of Virginia as late as November, 1676. Major Isaac Allerton, of Westmoreland, brought suit for thirteen thousand pounds of tobacco for damages his estate had suffered at the hands of a rebel garrison which had seized and fortified the house of his neighbor, Colonel John Washington. The jury gave him sixty-four hundred pounds.
