" But after so considerable an amount of mending there threatened
a standstill. What was to come next? Could men go further -- as they had gone
further in England not so many years ago? Reform had come to an apparent
impasse. While it thus hesitated, the old party gained in life.
Bacon, now petitioning for his promised commission against the Indians,
seems to have reached the conclusion that the Governor might promise but
meant not to perform, and not only so, but that in Jamestown his very life
was in danger. He had "intimation that the Governor's generosity in
pardoning him and restoring him to his place in the Council were no other
than previous wheedles to amuse him."
In Jamestown lived one whom a chronicler paints for us as "thoughtful Mr.
Lawrence." This gentleman was an Oxford scholar, noted for "wit, learning,
and sobriety . . . nicely honest, affable, and without blemish in his
conversation and dealings." Thus friends declared, though foes said of him
quite other things. At any rate, having emigrated to Virginia and married
there, he had presently acquired, because of a lawsuit over land in which
he held himself to be unjustly and shabbily treated through influences of
the Governor, an inveterate prejudice against that ruler. He calls him in
short "an old, treacherous villain." Lawrence and his wife, not being rich,
kept a tavern at Jamestown, and there Bacon lodged, probably having been
thrown with Lawrence before this. Persons are found who hold that Lawrence
was the brain, Bacon the arm, of the discontent in Virginia.
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