Bacon then stepped forward and handed in his written submission. The Governor resumed:
"God forgive you! I forgive you!"
"And all that were with him?" asked one of the Councillors.
"Yea, and all that were with him. Mr. Bacon, if you will live civilly but till next quarter court I will promise to restore you again to your place there," resumed the Governor, pointing to Bacon's vacant seat.[38] In fact it was the very next day that he reappointed him to the Council.
Philip Ludwell explained this great leniency by pointing out that there were hundreds of armed men within a day's march of Jamestown ready to revenge any harm done to their leader. But Berkeley had an additional motive. Bacon in the Council was far less dangerous than Bacon in the House of Burgesses. In the Council he would be under his watchful eye; in the House he would put himself at the head of the majority in pushing through reform measures.
So Bacon had to sit as a helpless and dissatisfied spectator, as Berkeley once more dominated the Assembly. Thomas Mathew, who was present, tells us that "some gentlemen took this opportunity to endeavor the redressing several grievances the country then labored under," when they were interrupted by pressing messages from the Governor to meddle with nothing until the Indian business was dispatched.
With the matter of reform sidetracked, there followed a debate as to whether two Councillors should be asked to sit on the committee on Indian affairs. "The great sway that those of the Council bear over the rest of the Assembly in matters of laws and also in orders upon appeals, being commonly appointed chairman in all committees,"[39] had been a long-standing grievance. So now one member rose and pointed out that if they had bad customs they had come together to correct them. In the end the matter "was huddled off without coming to a vote, and so the committee must submit to be overawed, and have every carped at expression carried straight to the Governor."[40]
Bacon grew more and more restive as he saw the way things were going. The Assembly did not prove "answerable to our expectation," for which they should be censured, he said later. When a motion was presented to request Berkeley not to resign, he must have looked on with disgust as enough pro-Bacon men assented for it to pass.
So under the pretext that his wife was ill, he got permission to leave town. Then, instead of visiting Curles Neck, he headed for Henrico. Here his veterans gathered around him. When they heard that he had suffered humiliation, that he had been denied a commission, and that their grievances had not been redressed, they "set their throats in one common key of oaths and curses." We will have a commission or "pull down the town," they said. "Thus the raging torrent came down to town."[41]
Berkeley made hasty preparations to resist them. But it was too late. In Jamestown all was confusion. The cry was: "To arms! To arms! Bacon is within two miles of the town." When the Governor realized that resistance would be useless, he ordered the guns to be dismantled, and returned to the statehouse. So the motley army streamed into the village—weatherbeaten frontiersmen, demanding to be led out against the Indians; poor planters, seeking relief from heavy taxes; freedmen made desperate by hunger and nakedness. The common cry was, "No levies! No levies!"[42]