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 return to England in disgrace.

Despite his central role in the development of Virginia, Berkeley has been as misunderstood by historians as he was by his contemporaries, his motives and character a source of contention for three centuries.

Deeply informed and engagingly told, this biography offers the meticulous attention its remarkable subject has long deserved.