upon installed in the office.

Some historians have seen the election of Berkeley as the signal for a
royalist purge of the Parliamentary influences that were thought to
have existed in the colony since 1652. A study of the membership of the
House of Burgesses, Council, and county courts, however, shows a
continuity of membership which extends from before the Parliamentary
seizure of the colony until after the restoration of King Charles II.
The evidence suggests that there was no violent division between
royalists and Parliamentarians in Virginia. The people were Virginians
first and royalists or Parliamentarians second. The solidarity of their
political interests was a harbinger of the American independence that
was slowly to mature in the next century.

On May 29, 1660, the birthday of Charles II, that monarch returned to
London and was restored to the throne of England. Word of the
restoration was received in Virginia in the fall, and Berkeley ordered
the sheriffs and chief officers of all counties to proclaim Charles II
King of England, and to cause all writs and warrants from that time on
to issue in His Majesty's name. The Assembly of March 1661, taking into
consideration the fact that the colony, by submitting to the "execrable
power" of the Parliamentary forces, had thereby become guilty of the
crimes of that power, enacted that January 30, the day Charles I was
beheaded, should "be annually solemnized with fasting and prayers that
our sorrowes may expiate our crime and our teares wash away our guilt."
Another act declared May 29, the day of Charles II's birth and
restoration, a holy day to be annually celebrated "in testimony of our
thankfulnesse and joy."

Thus ended the brief period in which Virginia's government was turned
upside down and permanent alteration caused in her relations with
England. Although the King once more became the symbol of the unity of
the colony and the mother country, the royal prerogative would never
again be blindly accepted by the people of either place. Larger
developments in the economic, social, and intellectual spheres were
bringing to an end the era of all-powerful Kings. Power had descended to
the lower ranks of society, and that power was beginning to be brought
into play.

This larger shift of power has been chronicled in the story of Virginia
from 1625 to 1660. It is the story of a small community of Englishmen
transplanted to American shores, living for a time subjec