The weak Henry VI. had crowned young Henry Beauchamp, Duke of Warwick, as “King of the Isle of Wight.” Politic Henry VII., for his part, saw well to restrain the power and dignity of those Island deputies, now styled Captains. In the Tudor time, three Captains came to note, Sir Richard Worsley as carrying out the reformation policy of Henry VIII., Sir Edward Horsey, as a doughty soldier of fortune, who is said to have begun his career with a plot to betray the Island to the French, but on coming into this office kept a sharp eye both on foreign enemies and on his private interests, doing a bit of piracy for his own hand, if all stories be true; then Sir George Carey, who had the anxious task of defence against the Spanish Armada. When that peril went to pieces, the Island at last began to enjoy a period of secure prosperity, testified to by the fact that most of its old houses, mansion or cottage, appear to date from Elizabeth or James. Yet so late as 1627, soon after the captaincy of Lord Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, it got a scare from a Dutch fleet, taken for Spaniards. New confusion came with the Civil War, in which the Wight people were mostly on the parliament’s side, while the leading gentry stood for the king. The best-known episode of the Island’s history is Charles I.’s imprisonment at Carisbrooke, which may be passed over here to be dealt with more fully _in loco._ The Isle of Wight might well back up the parliament; as then and till the Reform Bill it sent six members, an over-representation now reduced to one, and formerly, indeed, apt to be qualified by official interference with freedom of election. In Charles II.’s “golden age of the coward, the bigot and the slave,” the governorship of the Island was given to Lord Colepeper, who made himself obnoxious here, and got a wider field of domination in Virginia, where also he seems to have been unbeloved. His huge colonial grants passed by marriage of his daughter to Lord Fairfax, whose eldest son settled on his American property, said to extend over five million acres, giving up the English estates to his younger brother. This was clearly hint for Thackeray’s story of the Virginian Warringtons. Only the other day the heir of this family, America’s sole peer, became naturalised afresh in England, after his title had been laid up in lavender, or tobacco, for several generations. Another personage in _The Virginians_, General Webb, held the governorship of the Island for a few years. But now the Captains, or Governors as they came to be styled, had little to do which could not be done by deputy, while the post was worth holding by men of high rank, as by the Dukes of Bolton and Montague under George II., when its salary was £1500 a year.