But with this piece of good nature, so characteristic of the second Charles, there came neither to the King in person not to England as a whole any appreciation of the true ills behind the Virginian revolt, nor any attempt to relieve them. Along with the King's first proclamation came instructions for the Governor. "You shall be no more obliged to call an Assembly once every year, but only once in two years . . . . Also whensoever the Assembly is called fourteen days shall be the time prefixed for their sitting and no longer." And the narrowed franchise that Bacon's Assembly had widened is narrowed again. "You shall take care that the members of the Assembly be elected only by freeholders, as being more agreeable to the custom of England." Nor is the grant to Culpeper and Arlington revoked. Nor, wider and deeper, are the Navigation Laws in any wise bettered. No more than before, no more indeed than a century later, is there any conception that the child exists no more for the parent than the parent for the child.
Sir William Berkeley's loyalty had in the end overshot itself. His zeal fatigued the King, and in 1677 he was recalled to England. As Governor of Virginia he had been long popular at first but in his old age detested. He had great personal courage, fidelity, and generosity for those things that ran with the current of a deep and narrow soul. He passes from the New World stage, a marked and tragic figure. Behind him his vengeances displeased even loyalist Virginia, willing on the whole to let bygones be bygones among neighbors and kindred. It is said that; when his ship went down the river, bonfires were lighted and cannon and muskets fired for joy.
And so beyond the eastward horizon fades the old reactionary.
Herbert Jeffreys and then Sir Henry Chicheley follow Berkeley as Governors of Virginia; they are succeeded by Lord Culpeper and he by Lord Howard of Effingham. King Charles dies and James the Second rules in England.
Culpeper and Effingham play the Governor merely for what they can get for themselves out of Virginia.* The price of tobacco goes down, down, The crops are too large; the old poor remedies of letting much acreage go unplanted, or destroying and burning where the measure of production is exceeded, and of petitions to the King, are all resorted to, but they procure little relief. Virginia cannot be called prosperous. England hears that the people are still disaffected and unquiet and England stolidly wonders why.
* In 1684 the Crown purchased from Culpeper all his rights except in the Northern Neck.
During the reign of the second Charles, Maryland had suffered from political unrest somewhat less than Virginia. The autocracy of Maryland was more benevolent and more temperate than that of her southern neighbor. The name of Calvert is a better symbol of wisdom than the name of Berkeley.
Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, dying in 1675, has a fair niche in the temple of human enlightenment. His son Charles succeeded, third Lord Baltimore and Lord Proprietary of Maryland. Well-intentioned, this Calvert lacked something of the ability of either his father or his grandfather.
Though he lived in Maryland while his father had lived in England, his government was not as wise as his father's had been.
But in Maryland, even before the death of Cecil Calvert, inherent evils were beginning to form of themselves a visible body. In Maryland, as in Virginia, there set in after the Restoration a period of reaction, of callous rule in the interests of an oligarchy. In 1669 a "packed" Council and an "aristocratic" Assembly procured a restriction of the franchise similar to that introduced into Virginia. As in Virginia, an Assembly deemed of the right political hue was kept in being by the device of adjournment from year to year. In Maryland, as in Virginia, public officials were guilty of corruption and graft. In 1676 there seems to have lacked for revolt, in Maryland, only the immediate provocative of acute Indian troubles and such leaders as Bacon, Lawrence, and Drummond. The new Lord Baltimore being for the time in England, his deputy writes him that never were any "more replete with malignancy and frenzy than our people were about August last, and they wanted but a monstrous head to their onstrous body." Two leaders indeed appeared, Davis and Pate by name, but having neither the standing nor the strength of the Virginia rebels, they were finally taken and hanged. What supporters they had dispersed, and the specter of armed insurrection passed away.
The third Lord Baltimore, like his father, found difficulty in preserving the integrity of his domain. His father had been involved in a long wrangle over the alleged invasion of Maryland by the Dutch. Since then, New Netherland had passed into English hands. Now there occurred another encroachment on the territory of Maryland. This time the invader was an Englishman named William Penn. Just as the idea of a New World freedom for Catholics had appealed to the first Lord Baltimore, so now to William Penn, the Quaker, came the thought of freedom there for the Society of Friends.
