But now the policy of dividing the army into isolated garrisons began to bear bitter fruit. In November, Major Robert Beverley crossed the bay with a strong force in a fleet of transports, entered the York river, and surprised the men at the site of Yorktown. Hansford was captured. A few days later Beverley returned to the York and after a brief encounter captured Major Edmund Cheeseman and Captain Thomas Wilford. Berkeley now began a series of executions marked by a brutality unsurpassed in American history. One may excuse the tortures inflicted by the Indians because they were savages. There can be no excuse for an Englishman of culture and gentle birth. Extremely avaricious, he had seen the accumulation of a lifetime taken from him; proud of his ability as a ruler, he had seen his government overthrown and had been forced to take refuge in an inaccessible corner of the colony; revering, almost idolizing, the King, he must now explain to him his failures. So his vindictiveness against the men he held responsible knew no bounds. His first victim was Hansford. When he was condemned by Berkeley's council of war, he pleaded that he might be shot like a soldier not hanged like a dog. "But you are not condemned as a soldier, but as a rebel taken in arms," he was told. As he stood on the scaffold he spoke to the crowd, protesting "that he died a loyal subject and a lover of his country." When Major Cheeseman was brought in, Berkeley sternly asked him why he had joined the rebels. But as he was about to reply his wife rushed in and told the governor that it was she who had urged him to take up arms, and pleaded that she might be hanged in his place. Though the governor knew that what she said "was near the truth," he spurned her with a vile insult. Yet he was cheated of his revenge, for Cheeseman died in prison, and so escaped the ignominy of the gallows. When Farloe was brought to trial he pointed out that he held a commission to serve under Bacon signed by Berkeley himself. But this did not save him. The court told him he had been authorized only to fight the Indians, not to take up arms against the governor. "Be silent, while sentence is pronounced on you." The executions of Hansford, Carver, Farloe, Wilford, and John Johnson, "a stirrer up of the people but no fighter," brought to an end the hangings on the Eastern Shore. Word now reached Berkeley that Major Lawrence Smith had raised the loyal standard in Gloucester, and had assembled a force so large that they could have "beaten all the rebels in the country only with their axes and hoes." In nearby Middlesex another large force was ready to cooperate with him. This seemed the opportunity to crush the rebellion. So the governor embarked 100 men on four ships and several sloops and entered the York river to close in on Ingram from the south while the others attacked from the north and east. But the plan failed miserably.