Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia

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 James-town 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. Under Berkeley's rule, Virgina increased trade with markets in North America, the West Indies, and Holland Berkeley's plantation, Green Spring, served as a model for Virginia's planter aristocracy, and his creation of the General Assembly helped establish the origins of American political self-awareness. But his increasingly questionable policies also precipitated Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, which prompted tighter control of Virginia from London and Berkeley's r