But with this piece of good nature, so characteristic of the second
Charles, there came neither to the King in person nor to England as a whole
any appreciation of the true ills behind the Virginian revolt, nor any
attempt to relieve them. Along with the King's first proclamation came
instructions for the Governor. "You shall be no more obliged to call an
Assembly once every year, but only once in two years . . . . Also
whensoever the Assembly is called fourteen days shall be the time prefixed
for their sitting and no longer." And the narrowed franchise that Bacon's
Assembly had widened is narrowed again. "You shall take care that the
members of the Assembly be elected only by freeholders, as being more
agreeable to the custom of England." Nor is the grant to Culpeper and
Arlington revoked. Nor, wider and deeper, are the Navigation Laws in any
wise bettered. No more than before, no more indeed than a century later, is
there any conception that the child exists no more for the parent than the
parent for the child.
Sir William Berkeley's loyalty had in the end overshot itself. His zeal
fatigued the King, and in 1677 he was recalled to England. As Governor of
Virginia he had been long popular at first but in his old age detested. He
had great personal courage, fidelity, and generosity for those things that
ran with the current of a deep and narrow soul. He passes from the New
World stage, a marked and tragic figure. Behind him his vengeances
displeased even loyalist Virginia, willing on the whole to let bygones be
bygones among neighbors and kindred.
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