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The first of the warships bearing the thousand or more soldiers that King Charles II sent to Virginia to suppress Bacon's Rebellion and the three commissioners he sent to ascertain its causes arrived at the end of January 1677 - January 1676 by the old calendar. By then the rebellion had collapsed, and Nathaniel Bacon, its namesake leader, was dead of dysentery and other loathsome afflictions. Governor Sir William Berkeley and men loyal to his administration had rounded up most of the remaining leaders, and Berkeley had tried them before courts martial and hanged them. He had put down the largest and most violent uprising of white people that took place in any of England's North American colonies before the one that began exactly a century later. He was old, tired, angry, partially deaf, and very perplexed at how such a bloody rebellion could have broken out in the colony that he had governed with success for twenty-six of the previous thirty-four years - almost 40 percent of its entire history. Berkeley was a bitter man when he climbed aboard the flagship of the fleet to greet the commissioners and the commanders of the force that arrived too late to help.
He knew one of the commissioners: Francis Moryson had lived in Virginia in the 1640s during Berkeley's first administtation as governor, was speaker of the House of Burgesses in 1656, compiled one of the first printed digests of the colonial laws, sat on the governor's Council early in the 1660s during Berkeley's second administration, and was acting governor of the colony from the spring of 1661 to the autumn of 1662. In 1677, though, Moryson was the king's agent and no longer the governor's ally. The other two commissioners had no personal knowledge of Virginia and were strangers to Berkeley. Sir John Berry was a career naval officer and commander of the fleet that the king sent to Virginia, and Col. Herbert Jeffreys was a career army officer and the commander of the regiment that the king also sent.1
Berkeley got on poorly with them. The commissioners brought the king's order summoning the governor back to London to report to him in person and empowering Jeffreys to supplant Berkeley as lieutenant governor. The old...