The Romance of Old New England RooftreesCrawford, Mary Caroline
History
The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees
Crawford, Mary Caroline
Historic buildings -- New England; New England -- Biography
But Berkeley was not satisfied with mere subscriptions, and remembering
what Lord Percival had said about the protection and aid of government
he interceded with George the First, and obtained royal encouragement to
hope for a grant of L20,000 to endow the Bermuda college. During the
four years that followed, he lived in London, negotiating with brokers,
and otherwise forwarding his enterprise of social idealism. With Queen
Caroline, consort of George the Second, he used to dispute two days a
week concerning his favourite plan.
At last his patience was rewarded. In September, 1728, we find him at
Greenwich, ready to sail for Rhode Island. "Tomorrow," he writes on
September 3 to Lord Percival, "we sail down the river. Mr. James and Mr.
Dalton go with me; so doth my wife, a daughter of the late Chief Justice
Forster, whom I married since I saw your lordship. I chose her for her
qualities of mind, and her unaffected inclination to books. She goes
with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer's life, and wear stuff
of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel. Her
fortune was L2,000 originally, but travelling and exchange have reduced
it to less than L1,500 English money. I have placed that, and about L600
of my own, in South Sea annuities."
Thus in the forty-fourth year of his life, in deep devotion to his
Ideal, and full of glowing visions of a Fifth Empire in the West,
Berkeley sailed for Rhode Island in a "hired ship of two hundred and
fifty tons."
The _New England Courier_ of that time gives this picture of his
disembarkation at Newport: "Yesterday there arrived here Dean Berkeley,
of Londonderry. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable,
pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great
number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant
manner."
[Illustration: WHITEHALL, NEWPORT, R. I.]
So favourably was Berkeley impressed by Newport that he wrote to Lord
Percival: "I should not demur about situating our college here." And as
it turned out, Newport was the place with which Berkeley's scheme was to
be connected in history. For it was there that he lived all three years
of his stay, hopefully awaiting from England the favourable news that
never came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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