The address of the Parliament and General Monk to Charles the Second, then at Breda, in Holland, was carried over by Lord Berkley, of Berkley Castle. On the eighth of May Charles was proclaimed in England king, and he returned in triumph to London on the twenty-ninth of that month, being his birth-day. The restored monarch transmitted a new commission, dated July the 31st, 1660, at Westminster, to his faithful adherent Sir William Berkley. He had remained in Virginia during the Commonwealth of England under various pretexts, and it is probable that he kept up a secret correspondence with refugee royalists, and it is said that he even invited Charles to come over to Virginia. This tradition, however, is without proof or plausibility; had the exiled Charles sought refuge in Virginia, an English frigate would have found it easy to make him a prisoner. Virginia would have presented few attractions to the royal profligate; and it could have hardly been a matter of regret to the Virginians that he never came here. Sir William Berkley's letter of acknowledgment, written in March, 1661, is extravagantly loyal. He apologizes for having accepted office from the assembly thus: "It was no more, may it please your majesty, than to leap over the fold to save your majesty's flock, when your majesty's enemies of that fold had barred up the lawful entrance into it, and enclosed the wolves of schism and rebellion, ready to devour all within it," etc. By "the wolves of schism and rebellion" he probably meant the Puritan and Republican party in Virginia, and he appears to have looked upon them as formidable enemies. Charles the Second, in the first year of his reign, that is, in the first year after the death of his father, for he was considered or imagined to have reigned all the while, had granted all the tract of land lying between the Rappahannock and the Potomac, known as the Northern Neck, to Lord Hopton, the Earl of St. Albans, Lord Culpepper, and others, to hold the same forever, paying yearly six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence to the crown. The Anglo-American colonies now established, Virginia, New England, and Maryland, contained eighty-five thousand inhabitants. The navigation act had not been recognized by Virginia as obligatory on her; had been opposed by Massachusetts as an invasion of her rights; and had been evaded by Maryland. James the First, Charles the First, and the Commonwealth, had expressly exempted the colonies from direct taxation, but the Restoration parliament extended the customs of tonnage and poundage to every part of the dominion of the crown; and the colonists did not for years resist the collection of those imposts.[248:A] FOOTNOTES: [241:A] Hening, i. 509. [241:B] Preface to T. M.'s Account of Bacon's Rebellion, in Kercheval's History of Valley of Va., 21. The clause quoted from Mr. Jefferson is omitted in the copy of the same introduction found in Force's Hist. Tracts, i. [242:A] Jefferson's Notes, 125.