Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia

Warren M. Billings

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780807147047
• eBook ISBN: 9780807147030
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Sir William Berkeley (1605--1677) influenced colonial Virginia more than any other man of his era, diversifying Virginia's trade with international markets, serving as a model for the planter aristocracy, and helping to establish American self-rule. An Oxford-educated playwright, soldier, and diplomat, Berkeley won appointment as governor of Virginia in 1641 after a decade in the court of King Charles I. Between his arrival in Jamestown and his death, Berkeley became Virginia's leading politician and planter, indelibly stamping his ambitions, accomplishments, and, ultimately, his failures upon the colony. In this masterly biography, Warren M. Billings offers the first full-scale treatment of Berkeley's life, revealing the extent to which Berkeley shaped early Virginia and linking his career to the wider context of seventeenth-century Anglo-American history.

1
EARLY YEARS

Elizabeth Berkeley felt pangs that signaled the onset of labor. As her pains sharpened, her servant women hurriedly readied a room in her father’s house. They set out the clean bed linens, fresh clothes, and every other necessity their mistress had gathered in anticipation of what lay ahead. When the women had done all they could to make the chamber warm and snug, their mistress took to her bed. A midwife was summoned. She soothed her charge and eased her through the long hours of her travail.¹

Although delivering a child was always risky for women in the seventeenth century, Elizabeth Berkeley may have feared little beyond travail because all her previous pregnancies had ended safely. This birth would be no different. On a wintry day in early 1605, she bore a son, whom she called William, after her father, Sir William Killigrew.²

The newborn boy entered the favored world of the English gentry, blessed with sound health and hardy kindred. Elizabeth Berkeley was of a consequential lineage. Cecil blood coursed through her veins. Her mother, Margaret Saunders Killigrew, was related to the late William Cecil, first baron Burghley, lord chancellor in the reign of the Virgin Queen. Sir William Killigrew’s people were an avidly adventurous, often useful, and occasionally scandalous lot of Cornishmen whose loyalty to the Crown and connections to the Cecils profited them handsomely. Elizabeth’s father and uncles won knighthoods and seats in the House of Commons. William, John, and Henry Killigrew also held local office in Cornwall and fought against Spain. John besmirched the family escutcheon by thieving cattle, consorting with pirates, and amassing huge debts that his brothers struggled to clear. The staunchly Protestant Henry fled England during Mary Tudor’s reign and picked up the skills of diplomacy, which later led him to be one of Queen Elizabeth’s much-traveled emissaries on the Continent.³ Queen Elizabeth employed William as a groom of her privy chamber and constable of Launceton Castle. Her patronage benefited him not only in these and like offices but in lucrative grants of fees and lands as well. Sir William Killigrew also enjoyed additional preferments in the next reign, even as he continued to sit in Parliament until his death in 1622. He maintained a town house in London and a residence at the manor of Hanworth in Middlesex, and here he sometimes played host to the queen and to her successor, James I.⁴

Here, too, Elizabeth Killigrew bloomed into womanhood. Margaret and William educated their daughter in ways that prepared her to fulfill the main social expectation of highborn English maidens of the time—contracting advantageous marriages and bearing children, preferably boys. Elizabeth satisfied that purpose after she married Sir Maurice Berkeley around the year 1597 and started a household of her own.

Sir Maurice Berkeley (1579?–1617) sprouted from a Somerset sprig of the abundantly branched Berkeley family tree. The Berkeleys were an ancient tribe. Tradition held that they descended from Norse corsairs who scourged the British Isles during the Viking age. Whatever their origins, by the fourteenth century their constant loyalty to the Crown had netted them much in wealth, social stature, and political clout. The Somerset Berkeleys arose less anciently. They traced their roots in and about the town of Bruton to Maurice’s grandfather and namesake, who stood stoutly with the Tudors. Henry VIII knighted the elder Maurice and bestowed a dissolved monastery in Bruton upon him, which he refitted into his seat and called Bruton Abbey. Kin, mutual interests, and friendships soon bound Squire Berkeley and his descendants to the Pouletts, the Phelipses, the Hoptons, the Portmans, the Halswells, and numerous other magnates who governed Somerset and took turns serving in the House of Commons. Such, then, were the surroundings that shaped the grandson. As preparation for his undoubted high place in society, the younger Maurice Berkeley attended Queen’s College, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, London, as had his father, uncles, and grandsires before him. He married in his teens and entered Parliament soon thereafter, largely, it seems, through the contrivance of his father-in-law. In his mature years he earned his knighthood while soldiering with Robert Devereaux, second earl of Essex, sat as a justice of the peace for Somerset, and remained a member of the House of Commons until his death.⁵

Still, for all the advantages of pedigree and connection, Sir Maurice Berkeley did not reach the heights of his grandfather or his sons. Although he owned or leased various properties in Somerset, Gloucestershire, and London, his holdings would never be reckoned as grand. Bruton Abbey and its considerable acreage passed to him eventually, yet its profits were never wholly his to enjoy because his mother, who had a life interest in the estate, outlasted him. He turned elsewhere in search of income and bought shares in the East India Company, the Virginia Company of London, and the Irish Company. His investments mingled with those of other enterprising gentlemen to underwrite overseas commercial ventures that set the groundwork for England’s first colonial empire, but his stocks failed to bring in huge returns. At bottom great wealth never came his way for a plain reason: he took few measures to curb his extravagant appetites. And he died very much in debt.⁶

Berkeley fared little better in politics. Faithfully attentive to his magisterial duties on the Somerset bench, he nonetheless failed to distinguish himself sufficiently to attain higher judicial office. Nor did his parliamentary tenure lead to better things. Always a back bencher in the commons, Berkeley earned a reputation as a bit of a hothead, most notably during the Addled Parliament. That fame, plus his religious sensibilities, brought him close to ruination. He inclined toward those Anglicans who wanted to purge the Church of England entirely of its Romish habits and cleanse it completely of what they supposed were its ecclesiastical malpractices. Consequently, he heeded the plaints of a constituent, the Reverend Edward Peacham.

Rector of the parish of Hinton St. George in Somerset, the elderly Parson Peacham was a quarrelsome, puritanical priest continually at odds with his diocesan superiors. He went up to London in spring 1614, just before the dissolution of the Addled Parliament, and conferred with Berkeley regarding a petition against purported clerical abuses that certain Somerset freeholders had sent to the House of Commons. At about that time church authorities finally lost patience with Peacham. They hauled him before the Court of High Commission on a charge of insulting his bishop, and for that offense the court quickly deprived him of his orders before it dispatched him to cool his heels in London’s Gatehouse prison. A subsequent search of Peacham’s house turned up the draft of a sermon that attacked the church and hurled barbed words at King James I even as it seemed to counsel rebellion. The text raised such fears of conspiracies and treacheries that an alarmed Privy Council ordered Peacham to the Tower pending his further examination and likely trial as a traitor. Investigators soon learned of the conference between the priest and Berkeley. That intelligence led to an urgent summons for Berkeley and two of Peacham’s other gentry neighbors to appear before the Privy Council for questioning. Their responses evidently sufficed to ward off their being charged with Peacham, but all three remained under suspicion well after the parson’s trial and conviction for treason.⁷

Scanty detail about Maurice and Elizabeth Berkeley casts their lives as husband and wife or as father and mother in shadow, so there remains little with which to illuminate the extent of their influence on their children beyond remarking the obvious. They gave William and his siblings a cozy life and ties of kin that each might turn to some future benefit. In addition to William, they produced four sons and two daughters. Charles (1600–1665), their firstborn, was followed in turn by Henry (1601–23?), Maurice (1603–27), John (1607–78), Margaret (1611-?), and Jane (1613-?). The five boys went on to knighthoods and public careers as adults, though of them only Charles, William, and John are the ones about whom there is much to know.⁸

Sir Charles Berkeley enjoyed lifelong connections to the Stuarts. Knighted in his twenties, he inherited Bruton Abbey upon his grandmother’s death, where he later received both George Abbott, archbishop of Canterbury, and Prince Charles as houseguests. He served Charles I in various ways before he went into exile with Charles II. Steadfastness earned him a seat on the Privy Council and the place of comptroller of the royal household, before he appointed him Lord Berkeley of Rathdown and Viscount Fitzharding. John figured prominently in events leading up to the Civil War in which he played a significant role before he, too, joined the court-in-exile. Charles II subsequently turned him into the Baron Berkeley of Stratton and a privy councillor. The baron was a proprietor of Carolina and the Northern Neck of Virginia as well as lord lieutenant of Ireland, and he built a grand London town house on Berkeley Square, which sat opposite the mansion of his inveterate enemy, Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon. As for the girls, no details survive about Margaret. Jane married a wealthy widower named John Davis, and she lived long enough to be named a beneficiary in William’s will.⁹

Sir Maurice died when Will, as relatives and friends always called him, was twelve. Father bequeathed son land in Somerset and “moderate annuities to support his pretenses in the world.” The portion was about as much as a fourth son might expect, especially when it came from a much indebted estate. Will therefore rose to manhood always knowing the restraints of a pinched purse. Even so, reduced circumstances did not prevent his securing a proper education. If anything, modest means led him to excel whenever opportunities for betterment presented themselves.¹⁰

Particulars of the boy’s upbringing are scarce, though his adult papers portray him as someone of quick wits and broad learning. Will, like any other British youngster, got his first training at his mother’s knee and by observing his elders. Those lessons instilled rules that controlled relations between parent and child or servant and master, but they equally taught the mores that governed the larger world of English society and his privileged place in it. Rustic occupations were ever the way of the country gentry too, so Will absorbed the practices of the soil almost from birth. Given his father’s involvement in local and national politics, at an early age Will also came to appreciate public life, its responsibilities, and its possibilities. Similarly, he knew about faraway places such as Virginia from his parents, who had financial interests in the colony dating back to the days of its first settlers. A friend to Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Maurice also was active in the running of the Virginia Company as an ally of Sir Edwin Sandys and the Ferrar brothers, Nicholas and John, who staunchly advocated the production of exotic staples as the means of saving the struggling colony. Members of the extended Berkeley clan who tried their skill at making silk and iron there or who invested in the burgeoning Virginia trade filled Will’s head with tales of a strange new world, and their talk of ways to capitalize on the promise of Virginia was commonplace long before the lad passed into his early teens.¹¹

At about the age of six or seven Will began his first formal education at a grammar school, which was a place remarkably different from its modern American counterpart. There he learned to read and write in Latin and in English. Gaining those fundamental skills enabled him to tackle the more complex subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, plus smatterings of history and mathematics, which grounded the necessary foundations for further instruction at one of the universities. And so, just as he turned eighteen, Will followed his forebears to Queen’s College, Oxford. He and John both signed the subscription book on 14 February 1622/23, though he quickly transferred to St. Edmund Hall, while John remained enrolled at Queen’s.¹²

Institutionally affiliated with Queen’s, St. Edmund Hall was a throwback to medieval times, when such hostels were an integral part of the university scene. Their decline came slowly over the length of the sixteenth century, and their diminution marked a gradual transformation of Oxford from a university in England anchored in the authority of the Church Universal to an English university grounded in the norms of Tudor society. The changeover was far from complete when Will matriculated, but by 1623 families such as his regarded university education as essential to a son’s preparation for his rightful place in society.¹³

Contemporary records suggest something of the atmosphere and flavor of Will’s undergraduate experiences. The Reverend Doctor John Tomlinson, pro-tégé of Archbishop Richard Baxter, had served as principal of St. Edmund since 1610. His faculty consisted of nine masters and readers, including the Reverend Matthew Nicholas, who subsequently became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral Church in London. Generally, accommodations at the hall were adequate. A cook, a butler, a manciple (i.e., provisioner), and a “bible clerke,” who doubled as the porter, constituted the house staff. Students swore “to be true to our commons.” Their “allowance of bread, drinke and meate [was] reasonably provided,” by the manciple, who laid out “readie money,” and they had “alwayes single beere.” Students and faculty celebrated the daily office of morning prayer between 5 and 6 A.M. on weekdays and at 8 A.M. on Sundays and holy days. Each evening at dinner the bible clerk read a chapter from sacred Scripture, and every-one heard him “with silence.” The porter closed the gates for the night at nine o’clock, though students could go into town after hours if Dr. Tomlinson or their tutors granted them leave. “Lectures, disputations, theames, and such like” formed one of the bases of instruction. Additionally, there were “weeklie corrections” of student work, though the “bachelours and schollars [were] negligent in the speakinge of latine.” And every undergraduate had his own tutor.¹⁴

A good tutor was key to gaining well from a university education. Tutors instructed by artful example and potent precept, and, as they did, they inspired subtle, influential relationships with their pupils. Those affinities were quite difficult for someone else to apprehend fully, because tutors and students seldom wrote down their experiences of one another. Existing records do not tell who actually tutored Will. Whoever he was, he had a very profound effect upon the lad because Berkeley retained a disciplined intellect and steady appetite for knowledge all his life.

Modest means combined with quick intelligence to motivate Will, who received his bachelorship within fifteen months of his arrival at St. Edmund Hall. Attaining a B.A. did not necessarily signify that one had completed his degree. Usually, the distinction meant only that an undergraduate had qualified for higher studies that would lead him to a master’s diploma in time. Evidently, however, Berkeley’s mother and brother Charles bore something else in mind because Will was admitted to the Middle Temple two months before St. Edmund awarded his bachelorship. The plan, it seems, was to equip Will as a barrister or a local magistrate.¹⁵

He spent two years at the Middle Temple. Like the other inns of court, the Middle Temple existed to ground young men of whatever station in the practice of English common law. Its structure and method of instruction differed not all that much from St. Edmund Hall. Members and students lived, dined, worshiped, and studied together within the walled precincts of the temple. Curricula offerings tended toward the haphazard, and it could take up to seven years to prepare for entry to the bar, though students often had little inclination to pursue a career in the field of law. Instead, the highborn ones regarded whatever time they invested in legal study as an impressive way of rounding off a gentleman’s schooling. The temple also afforded an arena for witty students to try their hands at crafting epigrams, poetry, verses, plays, and masques, for there were numerous festal occasions that demanded entertainment or bon mots. Will reveled in the opportunity to hone his gift for words, which contributed later to his reputation for clever conversation and repartee. Outside the temple walls lay the city of London and manifold opportunities for sampling high culture and low life. In these circumstances Will learned law as he forged friendships and experiences that stood him well for the remainder of his life. Not least of these bonds was one he fashioned with his fellow student, Edward Hyde, the future earl of Clarendon, who would figure prominently in his later career. For all of that he balked at satisfying his mother’s expectations of him. He never answered a call to the bar, nor did he pursue county office. Instead, he returned to Oxford, entered Merton College, renewed his studies, and in 1629 earned his master of arts degree. The latter accomplishment led to his election as a college fellow, one of Merton’s senior resident scholars.¹⁶

Now that Master Berkeley was appropriately prepared, he appeared willing to settle into the contemplative life of an academic, but after a little while that profession failed to sate inner yearnings that tugged at him. He petitioned the warden and fellows in February 1630 for an extended leave of absence, which his colleagues promptly granted. Some months later, armed with a passport from the Privy Council, he and two companions set out “to travill into the partes beyond the Seas for the space of three yeares next insuing, with a promise not to goe to Rome.”¹⁷

Thomas Coryat (1577?–1617), who toured Europe early in the seventeenth century, popularized the idea that foreign excursions had a wholesome effect upon Stuart gentlemen such as Will Berkeley. To Coryat’s way of thinking, purposeful travel in strange places widened the outlook as it increased awareness of a greater world that lay beyond the British Isles. He gave voice to his views in Coryat’s Crudities, hastily gobled up in five moneths travells in France Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called the Grisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany and the Netherlands; newly digested in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
• 1. EARLY YEARS
• 2. AT THE KING’S COURT
• 3. A TIME TO LEAVE, A TIME TO BEGIN ANEW
• 4. SETTLING DOWN
• 5. THE HOUSE AT GREEN SPRING
• 6. BARGAINS WITH GREAT MEN
• 7. AN ENFORCED RETIREMENT
• 8. RETURN TO POWER
• 9. MISSION TO LONDON
• 10. CAROLINA
• 11. VIRGINIA’S CURE
• 12. AGE AND MISFORTUNE HAVE WITHERED MY DESIRES
• 13. A BACON! A BACON! A BACON!
• 14. DISGRACE
• 15. THAT HIS DAYS SHOULD BE ACCOMPLISHED
• ESSAY ON SOURCES
• INDEX
• FOOTNOTES