Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia by Warren M. Billings

Author:Warren M. Billings [Billings, Warren M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), General, Biography & Autobiography, State & Local
ISBN: 9780807147030
Google: KiBfDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2010-03-01T00:33:14+00:00

12

AGE AND MISFORTUNE HAVE WITHERED MY DESIRES

Burden of years and weight of office lay heavily on Berkeley. He sought to lighten his load when he asked permission to retire in 1667. “What I shall say my Lord,” he wrote to the earl of Arlington that spring, “age and misfortune has withered my desires as wel as hopes and the truth is I cannot in this time of my very old age so wish my selfe happy but that I possibly repent of my desires to be so, the way I proposed when the time was that I could have taken any gust in the favour of princes I wanted the help of a frendly Angel to put me into the Poole when the waters were made seasonable for hopes and powerful to treate dispayre.” Arlington, reacting to the exigencies of the Dutch war and the pleas of Secretary Ludwell, ignored the request. Berkeley persisted to no avail, and in a while his “dispayre” became melancholic acceptance.1

Thus, it was a languid Berkeley who marked his sixty-fifth birthday in 1670. Weariness dulled his mental acuity. Poor health altered his personality. Death deprived him of dependable patrons and dear friends. But he soldiered on.

Observers first noticed a change in Berkeley during the mid-1660s, but, except for deafness, none of them ever specified the exact nature of what they saw. Ludwell, who worked with the governor almost daily, called attention to an impairment when he remarked to the earl of Clarendon and Baron Berkeley that his friend was in the “saddest condition he ever saw.” The ailment, whatever it was, worsened by 1674 to the point that even Berkeley seemed to fear his end might be close. That February he designated Sir Henry Chicheley his successor in the event that he became incapacitated. The appointment was uncharacteristic because for three decades Berkeley had always managed without a deputy, save for his two absences in London. Moreover, he took steps to put his real estate holdings in order. Among others he had the Council of State renew his rights to Green Spring, plus a large tract in New Kent County in April 1674. Four months later he got the General Assembly to confirm his freehold of Green Spring by statute and to codify his recent sale of Bolthorpe plantation to William Cole.2

Deafness was the clearest extant indicator of a pronounced personality transformation that overcame Berkeley in the 1670s. Whoever greeted him—friend, casual visitor, suitor, antagonist—had to shout at him just to be understood, if at all. Engaging Berkeley in such a manner heightened his natural tendency to irascibility, and the need of loud talking made him seem in a perpetual state of irritability. The Quaker evangelist William Edmundson captured a telling insight into the impact of the hearing loss on Berkeley’s temperament. While on a visit to Virginia, Edmundson called at Green Spring House. He found his host “very peevish and brittle” and not in the least inclined to his vaunted hospitality. Afterward Edmundson spoke of his encounter with Councillor Richard Bennett, who had known Berkeley for thirty years.

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