ince were committed to their care and for many
generations had successfully maintained the public interest against the
double danger of executive tyranny and popular licentiousness. It
is therefore not surprising that the many obscure freeholders, minor
planters, and lesser men who filled the House of Burgesses had followed
the able leadership of that little coterie of interrelated families
comprising the Virginia aristocracy. John Robinson, Speaker of the House
and Treasurer of the colony, of good repute still in the spring of 1765,
was doubtless the head and front of this aristocracy, the inner circle
of which would also include Peyton Randolph, then King's Attorney, and
Edmund Pendleton, well known for his cool persuasiveness in debate, the
learned constitutional lawyer, Richard Bland, the sturdy and honest but
ungraceful Robert Carter Nicholas, and George Wythe, noblest Roman of
them all, steeped in classical lore, with the thin, sharp face of
a Caesar and for virtuous integrity a very Cato. Conscious of their
English heritage, they were at once proud of their loyalty to
Britain and jealous of their well-won provincial liberties. As became
British-American freemen, they had already drawn a proper Memorial
against the Sugar Act and were now, as they leisurely gathered at
Williamsburg in the early weeks of May, 1765, unwilling to protest again
at present, for they had not as yet received any reply to their former
dignified and respectful petition.

To this assembly of the burgesses in 1765, there came from the
back-country beyond the first falls of the Virginia rivers, the frontier
of that day, many deputies who must have presented, in dress and manners
as well as in ideas, a sharp contrast to the eminent leaders of the
aristocracy. Among them was Thomas Marshall, father of a famous son, and
Patrick Henry, a young man of twenty-nine years, a heaven-born orator
and destined to be the leader and interpreter of the silent "simple
folk" of the Old Dominion. In Hanover County, in which this tribune of
the people was born and reared and which he now represented, there were,
as in all the backcountry counties, few great estates and few slaves,
no notable country-seats with pretension to architectural excellence,
no modishly dressed aristocracy with leisure for reading and the
cultivation of manners becoming a gentleman. Beyond the tide-water, men
for the most part earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, lived
the lif