Soon after the Assembly of March 1659 ended, Richard Cromwell resigned
the reins of government in England. The English nation was again plunged
into turmoil. Letters arriving in Virginia spoke of the people divided
"some for one Government some for another." The prospect of London
"burned into Ashes and the streets running with blood" was held a
likely outcome of the divisions.
In the midst of this troublous situation, Governor Mathews died. The
next Assembly met in March 1660. In a move that has astonished
historians since that time it asked Sir William Berkeley, the royal
Governor whom its former leaders had deposed, to govern Virginia again.
No royal banners were unfurled; Charles II was not proclaimed King. The
House of Burgesses, holding the supreme power in the colony, merely
offered the governorship to the man who had been universally admired for
his justice, humanity, and willingness to sacrifice his own interest to
that of the colony.
Berkeley had been unwilling to disavow his loyalty to the Crown in 1652
and he was not prepared to do so now. He replied to the Burgesses'
invitation by saying that he would not dare to offend the King by
accepting a commission to govern from any power in England opposed to
him. He urged them to choose instead a more vigorous man from amongst
their own number. But he did offer to accept the governorship directly
from the House of Burgesses if the Council would concur with the
Burgesses in offering it to him. He promised that if thereafter any
supreme power in England succeeded in re-establishing its authority in
Virginia he would immediately lay down his commission and "will live
most submissively obedient to any power God shall set over me, as the
experience of eight yeares have shewed I have done." He would not refuse
their call, he wrote, if they accepted his conditions, for "I should be
worthily thought hospitall mad, if I would not change povertie for
wealth,--contempt for honor."
The Council on March 21, 1660, unanimously concurred in the Burgesses'
choice of Berkeley as Governor, and the King's loyal servant was
thereupon installed in the office.
Some historians have seen the election of Berkeley as the signal for a
royalist purge of the Parliamentary influences that were thought to
have existed in the colony since 1652. A study of the membership of the
House of Burgesses, Council, and county courts, however, shows a
continuity of membership which extends from before the Parliamentary
seizure of the colony until after the restoration of King Charles II.
The evidence suggests that there was no violent division between
royalists and Parliamentarians in Virginia. The people were Virginians
first and royalists or Parliamentarians second. The solidarity of their
political interests was a harbinger of the American independence that
was slowly to mature in the next century.
On May 29, 1660, the birthday of Charles II, that monarch returned to
London and was restored to the throne of England. Word of the
restoration was received in Virginia in the fall, and Berkeley ordered
the sheriffs and chief officers of all counties to proclaim Charles II
King of England, and to cause all writs and warrants from that time on
to issue in His Majesty's name. The Assembly of March 1661, taking into
consideration the fact that the colony, by submitting to the "execrable
power" of the Parliamentary forces, had thereby become guilty of the
crimes of that power, enacted that January 30, the day Charles I was
beheaded, should "be annually solemnized with fasting and prayers that
our sorrowes may expiate our crime and our teares wash away our guilt."
Another act declared May 29, the day of Charles II's birth and
restoration, a holy day to be annually celebrated "in testimony of our
thankfulnesse and joy."
Thus ended the brief period in which Virginia's government was turned
upside down and permanent alteration caused in her relations with
England. Although the King once more became the symbol of the unity of
the colony and the mother country, the royal prerogative would never
again be blindly accepted by the people of either place. Larger
developments in the economic, social, and intellectual spheres were
bringing to an end the era of all-powerful Kings. Power had descended to
the lower ranks of society, and that power was beginning to be brought
into play.
This larger shift of power has been chronicled in the story of Virginia
from 1625 to 1660. It is the story of a small community of Englishmen
transplanted to American shores, living for a time subject to
traditional English restraints, then, in a period of rapid expansion,
losing their cohesiveness and their values under the impact of the
American experience and their own natures. Their political expression
soon passed from a passive to an active mode. The law became something
they made, not something someone else applied to them. Land was
similarly not something bestowed on them by generous parents, but
something one took from Nature, or Nature's surrogate, the Indian. Labor
was no longer a privilege allowed the individual by the community, but a
precious gift contributed by the individual to the community. In sum,
the ordinary people who had removed themselves to the New World soon
discovered that they were no longer humble servants of great lords, but
were themselves lords of the American earth. If they had the power why
not exercise it? The process by which the rulers of the people were
forced to become the "servants" of their "subjects" thereupon began. The
culmination of this rearrangement of the political atoms of society was
the War for Independence of 1776. Whether the swing from authority to
liberty was for good or for evil is not for the historian to say.