The Virginia Colonists: Harvey and Puritans

These arrangements did not disturb the Virginians, and the colony prospered until Harvey was made governor in 1629, two years after the death of Yeardly. In 1628, not less than a thousand English people emigrated to Virginia. But the advent of Harvey in 1630 was the beginning of confusion. He was represented by his political foes as an enemy of the people, and he made himself unpopular because he advocated and promoted a system of land grants which would tend to place the soil of the province into the possession of a few landed aristocracy-and so be injurious to the prosperity of the colony. In various ways he offended the Republicans. Violent disputes arose, and after a war of words for several years, the House of Burgesses deposed Harvey and sent commissioners to England with an impeachment. The governor went with the commissioners. The king refused to hear any complaints against his agent, and sent him back clothed with power to rule the state independently of the people.

Harvey was succeeded in 1639 by Sir Francis Wyatt, whose administration was an uneventful one. It ended in February, 1642, when Sir William Berkeley, brother of Lord Berkeley (one of the earliest English proprietors of New Jersey), arrived at Jamestown with the commission of chief magistrate of Virginia. He was a fine specimen of a young English courtier, only thirty-two years of age. Handsome in person, educated at Oxford, polished by extensive travel on the continent and possessing exquisite taste in dress, he was one of the most elegant of the cavaliers of his time. Some salutary measures which he adopted at the beginning of his administration for the benefit of the people made him popular in Virginia; and his natural suavity of manners, and the generous hospitality dispensed at his mansion at Green Spring, not far from Jamestown, sustained that popularity for many years. He was a staunch loyalist, but not a bigoted one; and so prudent was the method of his adhesion to the cause of the king during the civil war from 1641 to 1649, that a greater part of the Virginians were in sympathy with him. There was a party for the Parliament, in Virginia, but it was not sufficiently strong to show any serious opposition to royal rule. The colonists were warmly attached to the Church of England, yet there were many Puritans there, for toleration had been the rule-Puritans had even been invited to come, with their ministers, when the peculiar character of the revolution, then going on in England, brought religious sects into political prominence. The Puritans in England were identified with the Republicans in their struggle with royalty. Governor Berkeley was of the cavalier class, and despised the non-conformists. He perceived that a great majority of the inhabitants of Virginia were warmly attached to the Church of England, and he conceived that to tolerate Puritanism in Virginia was to nurture a Republican party there. So he decreed that no Puritan minister should preach or teach publicly, except in accordance with the constitution of the Church of England. This was soon followed by the banishment of nonconformists from the colony. It was a calamity; but a heavier one soon fell upon the Virginians.

Ever since the massacre by the Indians in 1622, there had remained a deadly hostility between the two races. In 1643, the Virginia Assembly decreed that no terms of peace should be entertained with the Indians. Opechancanough was yet living and past ninety years of age. He had been on the Pamunkey, nursing his wrath for twenty years. Prudence only had restrained his nature, and now he was too old and feeble to make war, on his feet. But his malice was as keen and his will as strong as they had ever been in the days of his prime.