The spirit of democratic liberty, like a strong young tree, grew with every change of season. Hitherto the governor and the council had sat in the General Assembly; the propriety of this was now questioned, and only retained by a concession which made the house of burgesses, a convention of the people, virtually possessed of supreme authority. Nor were these privileges at all interfered with by Cromwell. When Bennett two years afterwards retired from office, Edward Diggs, a steadfast Commonwealth’s man, was elected his successor, and after him the “worthy old Samuel Matthews, a planter of forty years, a most deserving republican, who kept a good house, lived bravely, and was a true lover of Virginia.” Under his governorship a single instance of the determined spirit of democracy occurred which still more strengthened and established it. The governor and his council having come to issue with the burgesses on a question of prerogative, the governor yielded, reserving a right of appeal to Cromwell. The members of the Assembly, fearing through this an infringement of their liberty, asserted their own sovereign authority, and deposed the governor and council; re-electing Matthews, however, and investing him “with all the just rights and privileges as governor and captain-general of Virginia,” and Matthews submitted, as Virginia herself had done in her quarrel with England, that by submission he might conquer. He acknowledged the right of the burgesses to depose and re-elect; took the oath; and thus was popular liberty still further strengthened in the Old Dominion—an example to all other newer states. In March, 1660, the very time when the resignation of Richard Cromwell left England without a ruler, good old Samuel Matthews died, and Virginia was in the same predicament. But the burgesses of Virginia, unlike the people of England, stood fast by democratic principles, and, enacting that the supreme power should still reside in the General Assembly until there should arrive from England a commission, which the Assembly itself should adjudge to be lawful, proceeded to elect Sir William Berkeley as their governor; and he in his turn acknowledged the validity of this act of the Assembly by assuming office, “for I am,” said he, “but a servant of the Assembly.” Virginia, in this case, however, it must be observed, recognised covertly another authority higher than that of her own Assembly, retaining, amid her spirit of democracy, a firm sentiment of loyalty. She hoped at this time for the restoration of the Stuarts. Virginia was composed of separate boroughs, and the government organised on the basis of universal suffrage. Every freeman was possessed of a vote. On an attempt to limit the right of voting to householders, it was declared to be “hard and unagreeable to reason that every person shall pay equal taxes and yet have no vote in the elections.”