With the coming of this passionate royalist came also the full and formal recognition of free government. Both James and Charles had looked sidewise at the Virginia Assembly, and merely tolerated it. Now a movement was begun to reestablish the old Loudon Company ; the Virginians protested hotly ; and Charles I., who had fled to York for refuge from his angry Parliament, wrote (July 5, 1642) to his good Virginians that they should not be alienated from his ' Immediate protection." This was flattering, but would have been unsatisfactory save for a single circumstance. The King's letter was addressed to " Our trusty and well-beloved our Governor, Council and Burgesses of the Grand Assembly of Virginia J Thus the grant of free government made to Virginia by the Company was for the first time formally recognized in an oflicial paper from the King, promising that the Company should never be restored.

Soon Berkeley gave the Puritan pastors due notice what they had to expect from him. He promptly issued his proclamation in accordance with the act of expulsion against them passed by the Assembly. Thenceforth he was regarded by them, and very justly, as their most dangerous adversary. " The hearts of the people," they said, " were much inflamed by desire after the ordinances," but the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was " a courtier and very malignant toward the way of the churches." The malignant courtier was unfortunately the executive ; and had we in those days

visited Nansemond, on lower James River, we might have witnessed a singular spectacle.

A crowd of stern-faced people are gathered in their log meeting-house around their pastors, who read to them the Governor's proclamation, that they are not permitted to " teach or preach publicly or privately," and shall "depart the colony with all convenience. So decrees the Virginia Assembly, and we may see the angry faces and hear the muttered anathemas. They must go, but there is a place of refuge, they are told by the resolute-looking man yonder, William Clayborne, the Rebel, who goes about among them. Maryland is a free country, for all its Romish abominations, if Protestant Virginia is so hostile to them. If they will come with him, he will show them where they may live in peace, — which ends unfortunately, however, in hot conflict with the Marylanders, Clayborne leading the guests against their entertainers.

And now an event took place which was to test the energy of the smiling courtier of Greenspring. The Indians had not gone yet. In spite of all, they still occupied the country along the York and Pamunkey. They had looked on at the gradual extension of the English power with the old fierce jealousy ; and now, more than twenty years after the massacre of 1622, resolved to repeat that stern protest against the extinction of their race. Their leader was the same Opechancanough, called the brother of Powhatan by some, but by others said to be a mysterious stranger from Mexico, or other remote locality. He had wrested the rule from old Opitchapan, to whom Powhatan had left his kingdom, and though nothing is heard of him in the great battle of the eight hundred bowmen with Wyat,

he was still Emperor. He was now nearly a hundred years old, and greatly emaciated. His eyes had closed from age, and he could only see when one of his people raised his eyelids. He was not able to walk, and was carried about in a litter. It is a striking picture. His old unshrinking courage still burned in the breast of the savage Emperor, and his twenty years of brooding in the York woods brought him to the resolution to make a last attack on the English.

The attack was made (April 18, 1644). Those searching for grounds to explain it have found them in the encroachments of Sir John Harvey on the Indian territories ; others said that some of the colonists told Opechancanough of the civil war in England, and that now was his time or never, to root out all the English." The latter seems absurd, whether the crime is attributed to Cavalier or Puritan, since the Indian hatchet would have spared neither. No doubt the affair was the result of blind hatred, and Opechancanoughs age warned him not to defer it. He suddenly threw himself on the settlers along the upper waters of the York and Pamunkey, and before the English could resist, about three hundred of them were killed. But that was the end of it. Either from the resolute stand made, or Opechancanough's loss of efficiency, the Indians retreated. Meantime couriers had carried the news to Berkeley, at Jamestown. He got together a body of horse, marched rapidly to the scene, and pursuing the savages into the woods, routed them everywhere, and captured Opechancanough. He was carried

in his litter to Jamestown, and Berkeley intended to send him to England as a trophy of his prowess. But this last indignity was spared the old ruler : his life suddenly ended. He was fierce and unsubdued to the last. When a crowd gathered round him, at Jamestown, to stare at him, he resented it as an affront to a man of his dignity ; and said to Berkeley, with august pride, that if it " had been his fortune to take Sir William Berkeley prisoner, he would have disdained to make a show of him." He was, soon afterwards, shot in the back, by one of his guards, to revenge some personal spite, it seems ; and of this wound he died, — an ignoble fate for the great successor of Powhatan.

Thib ended, for the time at least, the long struggle of nearly forty years, between the English and the Indians.

The man just dead at Jamestown, had seen the beginning and the ending, and after him there was no one of sufficient ability to carry on an offensive war. His successor, Necotowance, styling himself ' King of the Indians," — for even the old imperial title seemed to have gone with the last Emperor, — made a treaty by which he agreed to hold his authority from the King of England, and deliver to Berkeley an annual tribute of twenty beaver skins, at the " going of the geese," which was winter. The tribes were to hold, as their hunting ground, the lands north of York River ; and no Indian was to come south of it, except as a messenger, wearing a badge of striped cloth ; if any did so, the punishment was death. It is true that for a white man to be found on Indian ground was felony ; but that was soon conveniently forgotten. The Indian power in Virginia was again broken for the time, and then all again was quiet until the Commonwealth ships came to cannonade Jamestown.

It was a prosperous and thriving society, this little colony of Virginia, as the half century was coming to an end. We have a picture of it in " A Perfect Description of Virginia" (London, 1649); a full-length portrait drawn by one who had lived in the colony.

The writer glows with enthusiasm; Virginia is the earthly Paradise. It is " full of trees," and the hum of bees ; of rare colored parraketoes, and one bird we call the mockhirdj for he will imitate all other "birds' notes ; yea, the owls and nightingales." In this happy Virginia there is " nothing wanting to produce plenty, health, and wealth." As to the bleak outside country of New England, " there is not much in that land." It is so fearful a desert, that, " except a herring he pvi into the hole you set the corn or maize in, it will not come up ! " Why do people continue to go to this frightful region, when the southern Paradise awaits them ?

In this Eden of Virginia, according to the enthusiastic writer, there were now (about 1648) fifteen thousand Englishmen, and three hundred imported African slaves ; twenty thousand head of cattle, plenty of horses and other stock ; and the inhabitants were busy with their large crops of wheat, tobacco, and Indian corn, which yielded five hundred fold." There were great hopes of making the best silk ; and mulberry trees must be planted, and a certain " George, the Armenian," was to be rewarded by the Burgesses, for instructing people in the silk manufacture. A thCMMJli iMRlftnlntn lived on

the Eastern Shore, and the bay and rivers were white with ships : at Christmas, 1 647, there were in James River, ten vessels from London, two from Bristol, twelve from Holland, and seven from New England. A regoiar trade had begun with the northern Virginians of Massachusetts Bay. The hardy Pilgrims " had come thither in 1620, and founded their polity, as they had the right to do ; what the elder Virginia of the south grumbled at was, that intruders had occupied the country south of Cape Cod, her northern boundary. The obstinate Dutchmen who had defied Argall, and remained at Albany, had come down to Manhattan Island ; and in fact all that region, extending into Connecticut, was claimed by them. At this the Virginians cry out These " Hollanders have stolen into a river called Hudson's JRiver, in the limits of Virginia ; have built forts there, called Prince Maurice and New Netherlands," and defy all comers. They trade in furs to the value of £10,000 sterling ; and ' thus are the English nosed and out-traded by the Dutch." Then a colony of Swedes had settled on the Delaware ; and Maryland, like the rest, was an invasion of Virginia right.

Thus the once great empire of Virginia was falling a prey to these strangers ; dissent on one hand and papacy on the other, were attacking the Church; and none could tell how this unhappy state of affairs would end. As late as the spring of 1660, Virginia makes her protest against this disintegration. Grovernor Stuyvesant, of " Knickerbocker " fame, writes from Fort Amsterdam, to the Governor of Virginia, proposing a friendly league, and the acknowledgment of the Dutch title by Berkeley. But that gentleman replies, in guarded phrase, with his most charming courtesy, that he shall

be " ever ready to comply with Grovemor Stuyvesant in all acts of neighborly friendship ; but truly, Sir, you desire me to do that, concerning your letter, and claims to landj in the northern part of America, which lam incapdble to doP He is " the servant of the Assembly," he says : when God shall be pleased in his mercy to dissipate the unnatural troubles in England, his Majesty will attend to matters, and decide to whom Manhattan belongs.

Virginia remains quiet and prosperous in spite of the furious conflict in England Hearts bum, no doubt, when those ships from London and Bristol bring tidings of the great wrestle between King and Parliament, which is yet doubtful. But the King's strength is plainly failing, and the Virginia royalists go about with hanging heads, sad at heart ; and the heads of the other faction who sympathize with the Parliament, begin to rise joyfully. The times are gloomy for the old Cavaliers of the King ; above all for Sir William Berkeley, who has been to England (1644) to see the King in his dark hour, and now, at his Greenspring country house, broods over the coming fate. But he does not lose heart, and is going to stand or fall for the object of his idolatry, — thet divinum. When the end comes, and the great tide of fugitive cavalierdom rolls toward Virginia, he will receive the desolate exiles with open arms and purse. His friends will be as ardent ; for ' refugees " are the representatives of a cause, and are to be welcomed. Colonel Norwood, of the King's party, flies from England (1649) and comes to the Eastern Shore ; and thenceforward makes a sort of progress through the old plantations. Stephen Charlton, of Northampton, dresses him up in a. suit of his own clothes. Captain