The poor Queen had her head turned away and bowed.
“How many?” demanded the famous rebel again.
Then she slowly turned her lovely face, and softly whispered, “Six.”
Her answer infuriated Bacon, who considered the number contemptible. “How many more?” he asked.
The Queen gave him a glance of indignant hate, and haughtily answered, “Twelve.” Then she gathered her robes about her, and majestically left the room.
Once more we see the Queen of the Pamunkeys, and now in fear and adversity. Bacon in his campaign destroyed the Pamunkey settlement—the same tribe which had so nobly assisted the English.
The poor Queen, terrified, fled far into the forest, accompanied by “onely a little Indian boy.” Her old nurse followed her, but was captured. Bacon ordered the old woman to guide him to a certain point, but she, full of revenge, led him in an opposite direction, whereupon the rebel ordered her to be knocked in the head.
The Queen wandered about almost crazy, and at last determined to return and throw herself upon Bacon’s mercy; but as she was rushing towards her desolated wigwam she came upon the body of her murdered nurse, which so affrighted her that she ran back into the wilderness, where she remained “fourteen daies without food, and would have perished but that she gnawed on the legg of a terrapin which the little Indian boy brought her.”
So only a few vivid sketches of this Queen are preserved to us in history but they have gained for her a place as a martyr. In recognition of her own and her husband’s deeds, Charles II. bestowed upon her a silver crown, with the lion of England, the lilies of France, and the harp of Ireland engraved thereon.
Savages are not averse to the baubles of civilization, and the crown which their Queen wore was a blessed treasure to her tribe for a hundred years after the Queen was dead.