The year 1676 dawned upon troublous scenes in Virginia. Being a time when men were wont to see in every unusual manifestation of Nature the warning shadow cast ahead by some coming event, the colonists darkly reminded each other how the year past had been marked by three ‘Prodigies.’ The first of these was ‘a large comet every evening for a week or more, at southwest, thirty-five degrees high, streaming like a horse’s tail westwards, until it reached (almost) the horizon, and setting towards the northwest.’ The second consisted of ‘flights of pigeons, in breadth nigh a quarter of the mid-hemisphere, and of their length was no visible end, whose weight break down the limbs of large trees whereon they rested at nights, of which the fowlers shot abundance and ate ’em, ‘ and the third, of ‘swarms of flies about an inch long, and big as the top of a man’s little finger, rising out of spigot holes in the earth, which ate the new sprouted leaves from the tops of the trees, without other harm, and in a month left us.’
Looking backward from the practical point of view of our day, and beholding that memorable year under the cold light of fact, it does not seem that any evil omen should have been needed to make clear that a veritable witch’s caldron of dangers was brewing in Colonial Virginia, and that some radical change in the administration of the government alone could have prevented it from reaching boiling point.
Sir William Berkeley had served two long terms as Governor, during which his attractive personality and intellectual gifts had brought him wide popularity, and his home, ‘Green Spring, ‘ some four miles from Jamestown, had become famous for its atmosphere of refinement and good cheer, and as a resort for wandering Cavaliers. He was now—grown old in years and sadly changed in character—serving a third term; reigning, one might almost say. Stern and selfish as he had become, bending his will only to the wishes of the young wife of whom he was childishly fond and who was, by many, blamed for the change in him, he makes an unlovely, but withal a pathetic figure in the history of Virginia…
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