AN OLD COLONIAL GAPITAL.

ticed at the bar of its little court room. Near by is the Palace Green, at the
northern end of which is the site of the palace of the royal governors, of which
enough is known to make it safe to say that it was one of the most magnificent
houses of the colonial period, probably excelling the manor house of the Patroon
Van Rensselaer at Albany. Brilliant pictures come down to us of fétes in the
palace in the days before the Revolution, and at no time did the governors
maintain grander state than when the weapons were being forged to strike down
the royal power in America.

Society was indeed brilliant in Williamsburg in the days of its glory. Besides
the fétes at the palace, there were grand assemblies in the Apollo Room of the
Raleigh Tavern, now, alas! only a memory; a theater, at which Shakspere’s
plays were first produced in America, ministered to the pleasure of a pleasure-
loving people, while there was a round of gayeties at all the great houses of the
gentry. Many of the planters of the country had winter residences in the bril-
liant little city.

Recalling all these memories, it requires little effort of the imagination, as
one stands in the streets of Williamsburg to-day, to people them with the bril-
liant life of old, the stately ladies, the glittering cavaliers, the galloping steeds,
the ponderous coaches, the silks and laces and velvets; all the gayety and light-
ness of a life that yet had a very serious undercurrent, as coming events were
to show. We can see Lord
Botetourt, courtly and ele-
gant, who temporarily “ gave
offense” to these gay but
democratic Virginians “ by
the gaudy parade and pomp-
ous pageant exhibited,” for
he went to open the assembly
“drawn by eight milk-white
horses, in a state coach pre-
sented him for that purpose
by the king, and the same
formalities were observed as
when the British sovereign goes in state to open Parliament.” Williamsburg
was indeed a “ vice-regal capital.”

But the old capital has stronger claims upon interest than its picturesque
association with the social froth of the colonial court. “Bacon the rebel,” first
of American revolutionists, had made Middle Plantation his headquarters; and
partly because the obstinate rebel had left little of Jamestown, partly because
the site of the latter place was exceedingly unhealthy, but most because Middle
Plantation had been made the seat of William and Mary College in 1694, it
became the capital, under Governor Francis Nicholson, in 1705, and was then

 

THE COURT HOUSE, WILLIAMSBURG,
(Designed by Sir Christopher Wren.)