nd favours, and leaves us, and his own
province withering and decaying in distress and poverty.... This
unreasonable and unfortunate prohibition ... hath not only increased the
discontent of many of the inhabitants of his province, but hath raised
the grief and anger of allmost all your ... subjects of this colony to
such a height as required great care to prevent those disturbances which
were like to arise from their eluded hopes and vain expences."[404]

Can there be any doubt that the Navigation Acts and the futility of all
attempts to escape their baleful effects, were largely instrumental in
bringing on Bacon's Rebellion? As prosperity and contentment are the
greatest safeguards of the public peace, so poverty, nakedness and
distress are breeders of sedition. Philip Ludwell spoke of Bacon's army
as "a Rabble of the basest sort of People; whose Condicion was such as
by a chaunge could not admitt of worse".[405] Had England been less
selfish in her treatment of Virginia, there would not have been so many
indigent men in the colony eager to join in this wild uprising against
the government. Berkeley himself admitted, in 1673, that at least one
third of the freemen had been rendered so desperate by poverty and debt
that in times of foreign war their loyalty to England could not be
relied upon.[406]

But Charles II was indifferent to the welfare of these distant subjects
and blind to their growing dissatisfaction. Just when the situation was
most critical, he aroused their anger and grief to the highest pitch, by
making a gift of the entire colony to Lord Culpeper and the Earl of
Arlington. Previously he had granted that portion of Virginia which
lies between the Potomac and the Rappahannock rivers, known as the
Northern Neck, to Lord Hopton and several other noblemen. These
patentees were to receive fees, remainders, reversions and escheats, and
were given power to grant patents for all land that had not been taken
up. This had caused the people of Virginia, and especially those
residing in the Northern Neck, great uneasiness, and had proved a
serious hindrance to the settling of that region. The Assembly, dreading
the clash of jurisdiction which this grant made almost inevitable, had
sent agents to England to persuade the King to annul the patent, or
permit the purchase of the tract by the colony. While they were working
to this end, there came the unexpected news that Arlington and Culpeper
had received a grant of t