# William Berkeley Royal governor of the Virginia Colony across two terms — **1641–1652** and **1660–1677** — and the antagonist of [[Bacon's Rebellion]]. Born 1605; died in London on 9 July 1677, days after the king declined to receive him because he was too ill to trouble. ## The two governorships Berkeley was named governor and captain general of Virginia in **1641** through the court circle of Charles I. That first term ended with the king's execution: when Cromwell's Commonwealth sent a fleet, Berkeley negotiated a surrender in 1652 that left Virginia's political establishment intact and let him retire to his Green Spring plantation rather than leave the colony. With the Restoration in **1660** he was reappointed by Charles II. The second term went badly — collapsing tobacco prices, heavy taxes levied largely by county elites, failed diversification schemes, and land grants on the Northern Neck that stripped the colony of revenue it had counted on. ## In the rebellion Berkeley's position in 1676 was that a general Indian war would be expensive, indiscriminate, and a breach of the **1646 treaty** with tributary nations — the Pamunkey among them — who paid annual tribute and fought alongside the English. He wanted frontier forts and patrols. Frontier settlers read that as protecting Indians at their expense. He handled [[Nathaniel Bacon]] erratically: appointed him to the Council in 1675, expelled and outlawed him in May 1676, pardoned and restored him on 6 June, reversed himself within the hour, then yielded to his demands at gunpoint on 23 June. In the most-quoted scene of the rebellion he bared his chest before the burgesses and dared Bacon's men to shoot him. He abandoned Jamestown on the evening of **18 September 1676** and watched from ships downstream as the rebels burned it the next day. ## The aftermath, and why it ended his career Berkeley's suppression of the rebellion was severe enough that the king's own commissioners turned on him. They condemned twenty-three rebels to hang, sat with him as a court — and then reported that he had tried men under wartime military justice after the fighting ended, hanged men covered by the king's pardon, and seized estates without due process. By March 1677 they had concluded that the self-styled **"Loyall Party" were the chief disturbers of the colony's peace**. Recalled to England, he sailed in the spring of 1677 intending to give Charles II his version and died before he could. ## Why he matters for the KB **He is the establishment half of the vault's oldest pattern.** The rebellion is usually read through Bacon. Berkeley is the other half: an entrenched governor whose legitimate objections — the war is expensive, the treaty binds us, the targets are our allies — were true and still could not survive a mobilized frontier constituency. The vault's recurring structure of an insurgent faction capturing a party or a government against the judgment of its incumbents has this as its earliest American instance. **The reprisal, not the revolt, ended him.** Berkeley suppressed a rebellion and lost his office over how he did it — an early and unusual case of a Crown authority being disciplined for excess rather than failure. **His successors did what Bacon wanted anyway.** Virginia's Indian policy hardened after 1677 regardless of who had won. As Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood later put it, a governor of Virginia had to steer between an Indian war and a civil war. ## See Also - [[Bacon's Rebellion]] · [[Nathaniel Bacon]] · [[Declaration of the People of Virginia]] - [[Virginia Slave Codes of 1705]] ## Sources - Encyclopedia Virginia, "Sir William Berkeley (1605–1677)" and "Bacon's Rebellion (1676–1677)" - *Encyclopædia Britannica*, "Sir William Berkeley" - Wilcomb E. Washburn, *The Governor and the Rebel* (UNC Press, 1957)