From the time of the thrusting out of Sir John Harvey and his return, backed by the authority of Charles the First, there had been a war waged by proxy between king and people. The governors represented tyranny, and the Assembly opposed each encroachment. Eye to eye they stood, like wrestlers, neither side yielding a point without a struggle, yet both expressing equal loyalty and love for the King, and equal reverence for his authority. Virginia long preserved "an after-dinner allegiance" to the Crown even when she openly defied its policy. Virginians drank his Majesty's health, wiped their lips, and imprecated his Majesty's Navigation Acts. If their political creed bound them to the fiction that the King could do no wrong, they cherished no such delusion concerning his deputies. When Sir William Berkeley, as despotic at heart as his Stuart master, undertook to play the tyrant in Virginia, the country blazed out into a rebellion, which died only with the death of Nathaniel Bacon, its leader. Bacon was a rebel, but a rebel of the type of Washington and Patrick Henry--one who believed in the motto which Jefferson engraved on his seal, "Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God." What vigor and eloquence are thrown into his proclamations! They belong to the brightest pages of American literature. Read but the opening of "NATHANIEL BACON ESQ'R, HIS MANIFESTO CONCERNING THE PRESENT TROUBLES IN VIRGINIA. "If vertue be a sin, if Piety be giult, all the Principles of morality goodness and Justice be perverted, Wee must confesse That those who are now called Rebells may be in danger of those high imputations, Those loud and severall Bulls would affright Innocents and render the defence of o{r} Brethren and the enquiry into o{r} sad and heavy oppressions, Treason. But if there bee, as sure there is, a just God to appeal too, if Religion and Justice be a sanctuary here, If to plead y{e} cause of the oppressed, If sincerely to aime at his Mat{ies} Honour and the Publick good without any reservation or by Interest, If to stand in the Gap after soe much blood of o{r} dear Brethren bought and sold, If after the losse of a great part of his Ma{ties} Colony deserted and dispeopled, freely with o{r} lives and estates to indeavor to save the remaynders bee Treason, God Almighty Judge and lett guilty dye. But since wee cannot in o{r} hearts find one single spott of Rebellion or Treason or that wee have in any manner aimed at the subverting y{e} setled Government or attempting of the person of any either magistrate or private man not with standing the severall Reproaches and Threats of some who for sinister ends were disaffected to us and censured o{r} ino[cent] and honest designes, and since all people in all places where wee have yet bin can attest o{r} civill, quiet, peaseable behaviour farre different from that of Rebellion and tumultuous persons, let Trueth be bold and all the world know the real Foundations of pretended giult."