| Sir William Berkeley (1605–1677) influenced colonial
Virginia more than any other man of his era. An Oxford-educated
playwright, soldier, and diplomat, Berkeley won appointment
as governor of Virginia in 1641 after a decade in the court
of King Charles I. Between his arrival in Jamestown the following
year and his death, Berkeley became Virginia's leading politician
and planter, indelibly stamping his ambitions, accomplishments,
and, ultimately, his failures upon the colony. In a masterly
biography, Warren M. Billings offers the first full-scale treatment
of Berkeley's life, revealing the extent to which Berkeley shaped
early Virginia and linking his career to the wider context of
seventeenth-century Anglo-American history.
During Berkeley's governorship, Virginia grew from a colonial outpost to a
roughhewn imitation of its British origins—a center
of agriculture, commerce, and New World society. Berkeley's
desire to diversify the colony's economy led to increased
trade with markets in North America, the West Indies, and
Holland. His plantation, Green Spring, served as a model for
Virginia's planter aristocracy, and his creation of the General
Assembly, a bicameral representative legislature, helped establish
the origins of American political self-rule. Yet Berkeley's
increasingly questionable policies also precipitated Bacon's
Rebellion in 1676, led by his second wife's cousin. The most
serious challenge to royal authority in the colonies before
the American Revolution, it prompted tighter control of Virginia
from London and Berkeley's return to England in disgrace.
Despite his central role in the development of Virginia,
Berkeley has been as misunderstood by historians as he was
by his contemporaries, his motives and character a source
of contention for three centuries. Drawing on an unrivaled
knowledge of Berkeley's papers, many never examined before,
Billings depicts Berkeley as a self-made Virginian, a man
who sought new opportunities in America and was so swayed
by his experiences that Virginia soon gave greater definition
to his life and personality than had England. Deeply informed
and engagingly told, this biography offers the meticulous
attention its remarkable subject has long deserved.
Warren M. Billings is Distinguished Professor
of History at the University of New Orleans and the author
or editor of many books, including A Little Parliament:
The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century
and A Law unto Itself?: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal
History. He is director and editor of the Papers of Sir
William Berkeley Project, chairman of the Association for
the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities' Jamestown Rediscovery
Archaeological Project Advisory Board, and historian of the
Supreme Court of Louisiana.
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