Sir William Berkeley

Sir William Berkeley, Virginia's longest-serving governor, was the King's representative in the colony from 1642-52 and again from 1660-1677. Significant achievements of his first term include the creation of a bicameral legislature and the striking of an informal agreement between warring political factions that allowed the colony to settle into a sense of regularity and economic progress. An advocate of free trade and agricultural diversification, he protested the Navigation Acts from their first passage in 1651. Troubles during his second term, however, have historically overshadowed his earlier, more skillful political management. In 1676, in response to high taxation rates, economic hardship, and violence on the frontier, his distant relative Nathaniel Bacon galvanized a rebellion to unseat the governor. Berkeley managed to regain control after seven months of civil war, but he never, within his lifetime, regained his good name, dying in the summer of 1677.

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