1 Sir William Berkeley is known today mainly for the event that ended his long career—Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. By that date he was seventy years old, worn down by ill health, and exhausted by long service. He punished the rebels with a savagery that shocked even the King. “That old fool,” Charles II is alleged to have said, “has killed more people in that naked country than I have done for the murder of my father.” To this day, liberal historians remember Berkeley as a failed reactionary who was an alien presence in the American past.
   A rare revisionary essay argues that Berkeley was a failed progressive whose plans for economic development met defeat. This was true of specific projects such as the silk industry, but in other ways as we shall see the southern colonies developed much as Berkeley intended—in their labor system, class structure, and many of their folkways—and progress had no place in his pantheon; cf. Joan de Lourdes Leonard, “Operation Checkmate: The Birth and Death of a Virginia Blueprint for Progress, 1660-1676,” WMQ3 24 (1967), 44-74.
   Berkeley has been the victim of three strong trends in southern historiography. The first was the work of scholars who heaped ridicule on the so-called “cavalier myth” and argued that “the most significant feature of the Chesapeake aristocracy was its middle class origin” (Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities (Baton Rouge, La., 1952), 12). A second trend appeared in the work of the “Chesapeake group” who were interested in market forces, demographic processes and models of social change which left little latitude for the agency of individuals. A third trend has been a continuing reinterpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion in ways unfavorable to Berkeley; e.g., Stephen S. Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York, 1984). There is no full-length published biography of this neglected man; but see Jane Carson, “Sir William Berkeley” (thesis, Univ. of Va., 1951), and J. R. Pagan, “Notes on Sir William Berkeley,” ms., GLOCRO.

2 H.P.R. Finberg, “Three Centuries in Family History: Berkeley of Berkeley,” Gloucester Studies (Leicester, 1957), 145-59. The Berkeleys, still securely in possession of their castle, are one of the few landed families in England who can trace their pedigree back before the Norman conquest. They claim descent from Eadnoth the Staller, a Saxon nobleman who joined William the Conqueror and was killed in 1068.

3 The founder of the Bruton Berkeleys was Sir Maurice Berkeley (ca. 1505-81), a standard bearer of Henry VIII and supporter of Thomas Cromwell. His reward was the land of Bruton Priory, together with Northwood Park near Glastonbury, and other tracts in Berkshire, Buckingham and Surrey. He was also a gentleman of the Privy Chamber before 1539, a member of Parliament for Surrey, and sheriff of Somerset in 1567. The Bruton lands descended to Sir Henry Berkeley (d. 1601) and then to Sir Maurice Berkeley (d. 1617), a member of Parliament from various West Country seats (Truro, Minehead) and father of Virginia’s future governor. See S. W. Bates-Harbin, Members of Parliament from the County of Somerset (Taunton, Eng., 1939); Visitation of Somerset (1623), s.v. “Berkeley”; for much unpublished material see ms. 20/i, 137, SOMERO.
   Little remains today of the house where Sir William Berkeley lived as a child. It stood near the ruins of the abbey, high on a hill above the stone-built medieval town. St. Mary’s Church in Bruton contains many memorials of the Berkeleys. The walls are decorated with their insignia; in the back of the church one may still find the old oil lamps which were used at midnight burials of Berkeleys in the crypt of the church. See A Walk Round St. Mary’s, Bruton (n.p., ca. 1980); D. A. McCallum, “A Demographic Study of the Parishes of Bruton and Pitcombe,” SANHSP 121 (1977), 77-87.