AN VOED, COLONIAL (CAPITAL.

Henry is described as being at this time twenty-nine years of age, tall and
grim, with small, sparkling blue eyes. He wore a brown wig, unpowdered, a
peach-blossom coat, leather breeches and yarn stockings. He was an impassioned,
magnetic speaker, who seldom failed in any cause he advocated.

The Burgesses, after their dissolution, met at the Raleigh Tavern, and there
concerted many measures for the action of the colonies. Fauquier died in 1768,
and was succeeded by Norborne
Berkeley, Lord Botetourt. Al-
though so unfortunate as to make
a bad impression on his arrival,
he became in his brief administra-
tion perhaps the best beloved of
all the royal governors. He was
a true friend of Virginia; and his
graces of manner were so marked
that long afterward the young men
of his time were spoken of as edu-
cated in the school of Fauquier and Botetourt, in the manners and graces of
gentlemen. Unfortunately for the king whom he served, this finished gentle-
man and large-hearted man died in 1770, after having declared, “I will be
content to be declared infamous, if I do not, to the last hour of my life, at all
times and in all places and upon all occasions, exert every power with which I
am, or ever shall be, legally invested, in order to obtain and maintain for the
continent of America that satisfaction which I have been authorized to promise.”

Lord Botetourt’s body was interred beneath the chapel of the college of
William and Mary, and a marble statue of him stands in the college yard,
erected in 1773, by authority of the Burgesses of Virginia, as the grateful testi-
mony of the colony to his virtues, a fact which is made known to us in the
stately phrase of the inscription.

Lord Dunmore followed Lord Botetourt, and under his uncompromising rule
the irritation rapidly increased. He was continually embroiled with the Bur-
gesses; he quartered in the Palace marines from the ships of war lying off
Yorktown ; he finally carried off in the night from the octagonal powder house,
built by Governor Spotswood in 1714 and still standing, all the ammunition
stored therein. This was on the eve of the outbreak, and soon the governor
and his family were forced themselves to take refuge on the vessels, and ulti-
mately to leave the colony. But not until the city of Norfolk had been burned.
The Revolution had begun. Washington was in Massachusetts, at the head of
the northern army; but it was not until near the close of the war that Williams-
burg was to experience much of its excitement. Then Cornwallis, coming up
from the Carolinas, drew into the peninsula, and was caught in the trap at York-
town, but twelve miles from Williamsburg. Lafayette came down with his little

 

OLD DEBTORS’ PRISON AND POST-OFFICE, WILLIAMSBURG.