[51] _Bath papers_ I, "The Declaration and Remonstrance of William Berkeley." [52] _Southern Literary Messenger_, Jan. 1845. [53] Charles Campbell, _History of Virginia_, 246. [54] _William and Mary Quarterly_ 1: 158. [55] _Southern Literary Messenger_, Jan. 1845. CHAPTER V A BACON! A BACON! Sir William Berkeley was one of the best Governors in the history of colonial Virginia during his first administration; during his second he was one of the worst. The man who had won the gratitude of the people by his respect for their rights, his refusal to use the courts to further his own interests, his efforts to bring prosperity, was followed by their bitter curses when he left Virginia in 1677. The courtly young gentleman who had exchanged the Court of Charles I for the forests and tobacco fields of the colony, had become the crabbed, dictatorial old man. In 1672 the Quaker preacher, William Edmundson, visited him to intercede for the Society of Friends. The next day Richard Bennett asked Edmundson whether the Governor had called him dog, rogue, etc. "No," he replied. "Then you took him in his best humor."[1] One of Sir William's worst traits, his greed, grew on him with the years. "Though ambition commonly leaves old age, covetousness does not," he wrote Lord Arlington. It may have been this which made him marry Frances Culpeper, the widow of Captain Samuel Stephens, who brought him a large estate. Though there was nothing wrong in this, it was whispered through the colony that it was the marrying of a young wife which was responsible for Berkeley's "old follyage." Frances seems to have been loyal to him amid the troubles which soon followed, even though she may have cast tender eyes on Philip Ludwell, whom she married after Sir William's death. Whatever is the explanation of the change in Berkeley's character, it obviously was the Civil War in England, the execution of Charles I, and the turmoil of the Commonwealth period which intensified his distrust of republican institutions. They had been tried and the experiment had ended in disastrous failure. True, he had been a witness of the success of self-government in Virginia, but this did not change his views. Monarchy was the form of government ordained by God. In Virginia it was he, as the King's representative, who should rule. So he was determined that there should be no more republicanism in the colony than his instructions required.