In October the Virginia Assembly met. Parliament men -- and now these were
walking with head in the air -- might regret the execution of the past
January, and yet be prepared to assert that with the fall of the kingdom
fell all powers and offices named and decreed by the hapless monarch. What
was a passionate royalist government doing in Virginia now that England was
a Commonwealth? The passionate government answered for itself in acts
passed by this Assembly. With swelling words, with a tragic accent, it
denounced the late happenings in England and all the Roundhead wickedness
that led up to them. It proclaimed loyalty to "his sacred Majesty that now
is" -- that is, to Charles Stuart, afterwards Charles the Second, then a
refugee on the Continent. Finally it enacted that any who defended the late
proceedings, or in the least affected to question "the undoubted and
inherent right of his Majesty that now is to the Collony of Virginia"
should be held guilty of high treason; and that "reporters and divulgers"
of rumors tending to change of government should be punished "even to
severity."
Berkeley's words may be detected in these acts of the Assembly. In no great
time the Cavalier Governor conferred with Colonel Henry Norwood, one of the
royalist refugees to Virginia. Norwood thereupon sailed away upon a Dutch
ship and came to Holland, where he found "his Majesty that now is." Here he
knelt, and invited that same Majesty to visit his dominion of Virginia,
and, if he liked it, there to rest, sovereign of the Virginian people.
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