SOURCE: Wright, Louis B. “The Byrds' Progress from Trade to Genteel Elegance.” In The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class, pp. 312-47. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940.

[In the following excerpt, Wright presents an overview of Byrd's life, interests, attitudes, character, and writing.]

A large part of Byrd's life before his return to Virginia in 1705 had been spent abroad in varied activities that had given him a well-rounded education. Academic learning, business training, and social opportunities had all gone into the experience of the young man who was to become the most accomplished Virginian of his time. When he came back to London from Holland in 1690 and went into the counting-house of Perry & Lane, he had no intention of staying there long; after learning something of the ways of business he entered the Middle Temple, in April, 1692, and in due course was admitted to the bar.¹ On a visit home in 1696 he was elected for the first time to the House of Burgesses.

The years spent as a member of the Middle Temple were among the gayest of his life. With other young blades of his circle, he indulged in his share of gallantries and sowed the usual crop of wild oats. A hint at his rakehell days is found in one of Byrd's letters, written over forty years later, to his friend, Judge Benjamin Lynde, of Salem, Massachusetts, who had shared his adventures at the Middle Temple. “But matrimony has atoned sufficiently for such backsliding,” Byrd observes, “and now I suppose you have so little fellow feeling left for the naughty jades that you can order them a good whipping without relenting. But though I should be mistaken, I hope your conscience, with the aid of three score and ten, has gained a complete victory over your constitution, which is almost the case of, sir, your, &c.”² During young Byrd's residence at the Middle Temple, the atmosphere of Restoration gallantry had not yet been entirely dispelled by the chill wind of respectability that blew from Holland on the accession of William and Mary. The Virginian could still attend a theater only little “improved” since the heyday of the broadest Restoration comedies. Indeed, Byrd was intimately acquainted with William Wycherley, one of the boldest of the comedy writers, and quoted his plays. The great William Congreve was still at the Middle Temple when Byrd entered, as was Nicholas Rowe. Other wits of the theatrical world were also known to him,³ and he was probably more familiar with the characters in Restoration plays than with the names of some of his living neighbors in Virginia.⁴ Certainly Byrd was a constant theatergoer, and his interest in the drama persisted for the rest of his life. Many years later, while stormbound at the Randolph home at Tuckahoe, he amused the company by discussing comedies and reading aloud three acts from the second part of The Beggar's Opera, which Mrs. Randolph had in her own library.⁵

If Byrd could count among his London acquaintances a few of the rakes and scapegraces of the day, he also had for his intimates men of learning and influence. Sir Robert Southwell, distinguished diplomat and virtuoso, was his patron and adviser. Through him he met Sir William Petty and many other learned men of the time. Southwell's sponsorship resulted in Byrd's election on April 29, 1696, at the age of twenty-two, to the Royal Society⁶—a remarkable honor for a colonial youth. Membership in the Royal Society brought him into further contact with scholars, as well as with a few of the nobility who chose to patronize scientific learning. Charles Boyle, who succeeded his brother in 1703 as the fourth Earl of Orrery, was one of Byrd's lifelong friends. They were all chosen from “the best people.” Byrd maintained a correspondence with them after his return to Virginia, and, with considerable pride in his own social success, collected their portraits and hung them in his picture gallery at Westover. There, gazing on the likenesses of Sir Robert Southwell, Sir Wilfred Lawson, Sir Charles Wager, Lord Oxford, Lord Egmont, the Earl of Orrery, the Marquis of Halifax, the Duke of Argyle, Lady Elizabeth Southwell, Lady Betty Cromwell, and other fine ladies and gentlemen,⁷ the Virginian could remember the days of his social triumph in England and count himself an American counterpart of those noble persons. So much did he prize his friendship with Southwell and Boyle that years afterward the author of his lengthy epitaph thought fit to memorialize this intimacy.⁸

While he was still a very young man, Byrd began the long political career that was to make him a powerful figure in the ruling circle of Virginia. The year of his entry into the Royal Society also saw his election to the House of Burgesses. The following year, having returned to England, he represented the colony before the Board of Trade and defended Governor Andros, at the Lambeth Conference, against attacks from Commissary James Blair, who complained that the Governor was indifferent to the needs of the Anglican Establishment and the new College of William and Mary. Though Byrd's defense was no match for the Scotch logic of Blair, he gained useful experience,⁹ and in October, 1698, he received a salaried appointment as agent for Virginia. But, because he went over the head of Governor Nicholson, in 1702, to present an address to the King from the Council and Burgesses, protesting against raising troops and money to defend the frontiers of New York, the Board of Trade objected to his agency, the government rebuked the Council, and Byrd ceased his official duties in London. In 1706 he obtained the post of receiver-general for the crown in Virginia—a profitable appointment, that paid him at first a three per cent, and later a five per cent, commission on receipts. In 1708 Byrd was appointed to membership on the Council—an office of dignity that he held until his death. In the last year of his life, as senior member of the Council he became its president—an honor that would have come much earlier but for the longevity of old Commissary Blair, who, though deaf and obstinate, presided over the Council till the age of eighty-seven. Blair, who had thwarted Byrd in the defense of Andros at the Lambeth Conference, was long a stumbling block to his highest advancement in Virginia politics.

The gay bachelor who, in 1705, had set the hearts of Virginia maidens aflutter on his inheritance of Westover, in 1706 took a wife. She was Lucy Parke, daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke. Socially, Lucy Parke was all that could be wished, but the match was a financial disaster for her husband. When Daniel Parke was killed in the uprising at Antigua in 1710, he left his English and Virginia estates to his elder daughter Frances, wife of John Custis, and bequeathed Lucy a mere thousand pounds. Parke's debts were to be paid by selling some of the real estate. Byrd, always land-hungry, agreed with Custis, the executor, to take over the lands that would have to be sold and to assume the debts. This bargain proved a grave error, for Parke owed his London agent, Micajah Perry, more than his son-in-law realized, and there were also other debts. Byrd's efforts to meet the demands of Parke's creditors kept him pressed for ready money during most of his later life.¹⁰

Four children were born to Lucy and William Byrd, but two died in infancy. The oldest child, Evelyn, was sent to England to be educated and was regarded as one of the beauties of the day. According to a romantic tradition, the Earl of Peterborough sought her hand in marriage, but her father would not permit the match. Two recently discovered letters by Byrd, in the University of North Carolina letter book, clearly prove that another nobleman and not Peterborough was Evelyn's suitor. These letters, one written to the daughter and the other to her lover, an unidentified baronet, forbid the marriage.¹¹ Evelyn never married, and died at the age of thirty. The other surviving child, a daughter, Wilhelmina, married Thomas Chamberlayne of New Kent County. Mrs. Byrd died in London in 1716. About 1724 Byrd took as his second wife Maria Taylor, daughter of an English gentleman of Kensington. Four children were born to them. The first daughter of this match, Anne, married Charles Carter of Cleve; the next daughter, Maria, married Landon Carter of Sabine Hall; and the third daughter, Jane, married John Page of North End, Gloucester County. The fourth child was a son, named, after his father, William. He became the heir of Westover, but dissipated the property, turned Tory during the Revolution, and ended his life by his own hand in 1777.¹²

When Byrd married in 1706, he hoped to settle down at Westover to the life of a country gentleman. He was ready to forego the gaieties of London for quieter rural pleasures. But just when he had established himself comfortably as a squire on the James River, with a young family about him, he once more had to go back to England. About 1713 he came into conflict with Lieutenant-Governor Spotswood over the question of the manner of collecting quitrents, and he also led the Council in opposition to Spotswood's efforts to set up courts of oyer and terminer—a procedure designed to weaken the power of the oligarchic Council. The struggle between Spotswood and the Council was long and bitter. In 1715 Byrd went to England, partly on private business and partly to take up the cudgels against Spotswood, before the Board of Trade. Not until five years later was he able to return to his home on the James. In the meantime, Spotswood had attempted to procure his removal from the Council, but Byrd had circumvented him, and, when the planter came back in 1720, he brought a command to the various factions to make peace.¹³ To the credit of both Byrd and Spotswood, they reconciled their differences and became friends.

Byrd's leadership of the Council in the fight with the royal governor over questions of prerogative helped to increase the dignity and prestige of that governing body. As one historian has observed, “instead of throwing the Councillors, who through abilities and position were the natural leaders of the community, into an inane espousal of the rights of the crown, it developed in them a strong colony sense. They felt that they were Virginians first of all.”¹⁴ Though Byrd was strongly imbued with a love of English institutions and English manners, he did not forget that he was one of Virginia's rulers, and he exerted his best efforts to defend the colony against any encroachment from outside authority, even the authority of the King's representative.

If Byrd was looking forward to a peaceful life at Westover when he came home in 1720, he was doomed to disappointment. In the fall of that year, the Assembly passed an address to the King and again appointed Byrd colonial agent, with instructions to go back to London. There he stayed until 1726, when he returned to spend the rest of his life as the lord of Westover. The long years in England had given him further opportunities of making friends with important people, and he had become the best-known American of his time in the drawing rooms of fashionable English society. But by 1726 he was tired of London and eager to resume his residence on the James.

Byrd quickly adapted himself to the pleasant life on his estate, but one of his prominence could not avoid devoting a portion of his time to public responsibilities. He at once resumed his duties as a Councilor. When the vexed question of the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina had to be settled in 1728, he was chosen to head the Virginia Boundary Commission. His racy account of the survey, in the History of the Dividing Line, assured him a distinguished place in the history of colonial letters. Byrd acquitted himself so well in surveying the North Carolina boundary that eight years later, in 1736, he headed the commission appointed to survey the Northern Neck. These were his two most arduous labors in his later years, but, as senior member of the Council next to old Commissary Blair, he had many judicial and executive tasks to perform. Because of Blair's deafness, Byrd had to preside over the General Court. In short, he was the most distinguished and experienced of Virginia's elder statesmen.

More important than his political influence, however, was the example Byrd set as an aristocrat and fine gentleman. Having had greater opportunities than any contemporary Virginian to mingle in the beau monde and cultivate the graces of aristocracy, he thought of himself as the colonial equivalent of such noblemen as his friend the Earl of Orrery, and he sought to reproduce at Westover the kind of life he had learned to appreciate in his circle of aristocratic English friends.

About 1735 Byrd rebuilt the family mansion, erecting a handsome brick house, essentially the same as that standing today, though damage by fire and war has required reconstruction and renovation. For a model Byrd may have followed the design of Drayton Court, the Northamptonshire seat of the Earl of Peterborough,¹⁵ mistakenly believed to have been a suitor for his daughter's hand. The new manor house, with its extensive gardens and expanse of greensward sloping gently down to the river, became one of the show places of Virginia. From England the owner imported the finest Georgian furniture, a huge quantity of cut glass and silver, and everything else needed to equip his house after the latest fashion. The picture gallery, as we have already observed, contained not only family portraits but pictures of as many of Byrd's noble friends as he could procure.

The way of life followed by Byrd—as by others of his class—was patriarchal. Surrounded by his dependents, the great planter ruled his domain like a potentate and dispensed hospitality with the generosity of a prince. But this power and this habit of hospitality implied responsibilities that prevented the lords of these baronies from sitting in idle ease. The rich planter's life in the early eighteenth century has had few better descriptions than those found in Byrd's own letters. To the Earl of Orrery, he wrote on July 5, 1726:

I have a large family of my own, and my doors are open to everybody, yet I have no bills to pay, and half a crown will rest undisturbed in my pocket for many moons together. Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flocks and my herds, my bondmen and bondwomen, and every sort of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence of everyone but Providence. However, this sort of life is without expense, yet it is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their duty, to set all the springs in motion, and to make everyone draw his equal share to carry the machine forward. But then 'tis an amusement in this silent country and a continual exercise of our patience and economy. Another thing, my lord, that recommends this country very much: we sit securely under our vines and our fig trees without any danger to our property. We have neither public robbers nor private, which your lordship will think very strange when we have often needy governors and pilfering convicts sent amongst us. … Thus, my lord, we are very happy in our Canaans, if we could but forget the onions and fleshpots of Egypt.¹⁶

Five years later Byrd wrote to John Boyle, heir of the Earl of Orrery, almost the same description, and added: “We are all of one religion and one party in politics. … The merchants of England take care that none of us grow very rich, and the felicity of the climate hinders us from being very poor. … We have no beggars but for places, which for want of favorites, court mistresses, and first ministers are never sold.”¹⁷

Though the peace and plenty on the James compensated for the gay and bustling life Byrd remembered on the Thames, he sometimes yearned for the high living he had enjoyed in England. To the end of his days he kept up a correspondence with his English friends, and through their letters to him he lived over his experiences abroad.¹⁸ To Orrery and his son he was constantly writing; with Lord Egmont he remained on terms of intimacy, praising extravagantly the portrait he had received from his lordship;¹⁹ and to Sir Robert Walpole, the great prime minister, he wrote familiarly, advising him to maintain a big navy—and also sent him a little of the herb ginseng, which Byrd believed a sovereign remedy against most of the ills of the world.²⁰ Far away in Virginia though he might be, Byrd never lapsed into a provincial; indeed, he displayed the sophisticated urbanity that he had acquired during his years in London. Writing to a certain Mrs. Taylor, widow of his second wife's brother, he playfully remarks that he is outside the latitude of news, for “'tis a mighty misfortune for an epistolizer not to live near some great city like London or Paris, where people play the fool in a wellbred way, and furnish their neighbors with discourse.”²¹ But he never lacked for sprightly comment, and even to this day his letters are a pleasure to read.

Byrd's life at Westover was by no means given over to mere material things. He never forgot that he was a member of the Royal Society, and he took care that the learned world should also remember the fact. Three years before his death he wrote to Sir Hans Sloane, the president: “I take it a little unkindly, sir, that my name is left out of the yearly list of the Royal Society, of which I have the honor to be one of its ancientest members. I suppose my long absence has made your secretaries rank me in the number of the dead, but pray let them know I am alive, and by the help of ginseng hope to survive some years longer.”²² For more than thirty years Byrd had corresponded with Sloane, one of the most distinguished of British physicians and botanists, and had supplied him with animal, vegetable, and mineral specimens from Virginia. From 1697, when he contributed his first paper to the Society—on the curious phenomenon of a negro with a dappled skin²³—until his death, Byrd kept up his scientific interests and was in frequent communication with the English virtuosi. It was fashionable in this period for gentlemen to play at being scientists, but in Byrd's case fashion was joined to a natural bent. A man whose activities were so varied could hardly be ranked among the great scientific minds, but Byrd may be regarded as one of the more serious amateurs of his day.

Throughout a long life he maintained an interest in literature. His education and associations in England had given him a wide acquaintance with many writers, both living and dead. In spite of multifarious duties and the bustle that only one who has lived on a sprawling plantation can appreciate, he managed to find time for systematic study at Westover. An insight into his scholarly interests is to be found in an intimate and personal diary, which he kept in shorthand. A part of this diary, dating from February 6, 1709, to September 29, 1712, was recently discovered in the Huntington Library; it shows that in these years he was an early riser, and, after saying his prayers, frequently read a chapter of Hebrew, a hundred or more verses from Homer, or a chapter in a Greek version of Josephus—a ritual that provided for mind and soul. Later in the day he indulged in other studies. Sometimes he notes the reading of Latin books, and he mentions time given to Italian, geometry, and law. Occasionally, he read a sermon or some other religious work. Dr. Tillotson seems to have been a favorite. All in all, he was as versatile in his learning as that later genius of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.

Byrd collected books more avidly than any Virginian before him. His library, numbering over thirty-six hundred titles,²⁴ was the largest in the colony, and was equaled in North America by only that of his New England contemporary, Cotton Mather.

Generalizations about Byrd's reading, based on the catalogue of his books, cannot be very convincing, for his library represents the accumulation of a book collector, the first of his kind in Virginia. One can assume with some degree of assurance that smaller collections, bought for their utility by persons not interested in the magnificence of their libraries, were read by their owners, but the very size of the Westover collection, and the fact that Byrd had to employ a librarian, one William Proctor, to look after it,²⁵ probably prevented intimate acquaintance with all his books. Yet it is safe to assume that the main lines of his collecting followed his personal likings and interests. Furthermore, in his time he was probably the best-read man in Virginia and his taste was more catholic than that of most of his contemporaries. If he cannot have read every book he owned, he undoubtedly was familiar with many a volume, as allusions in his letters and writings indicate, though, unlike his brother-in-book-collecting, Cotton Mather, he was no pedant and did not lard his writings with evidence of his erudition. As became a gentleman, he wore his learning with grace.

The breadth of Byrd's interest could be discerned at once by anyone who entered his library, for that estimable man, Mr. Proctor, had carefully arranged the collection by subject matter, and had numbered the cases and shelves. The sales catalogue of 1777 followed this classification, but by that time many books had been put back in the wrong places and a few works published after Byrd's death had been added. In the first four cases stood a collection of more than two hundred and fifty works of history, biography, voyages, and travels, many of them fine folios illustrated and furnished with maps. Next in order came the lawbooks, including all the most useful works, though the legal collection by no means dominated the library. Immediately after the lawbooks there was a case containing over a hundred and thirty medical works, both ancient and modern. The section classified as “Entertainment, Poetry, Translations, &c.” was one of the largest and most important. Here were to be found most of the great names in English literature, particularly recent writers, many of whom Byrd had known personally. The works of the Elizabethan and Restoration dramatists were more completely represented than in any other American library. Next to the literature of entertainment were cases containing upwards of a hundred and fifty works of divinity, about equal in number to the books of law. The religious works included many sermons and books of devotions, a little controversial material, and several Bibles, in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Dutch, and English. Of books in modern European languages, there were more than two hundred in French, “Chiefly of Entertainment,” as the classification states. In this section were novels and plays, as well as poetry and French translations of the classics.

Of Greek and Latin authors in the original languages there were nearly three hundred works, including the latest edited texts. Byrd's classical library had not only all the better-known writers of antiquity but also most of the minor authors then available. The cases of miscellaneous works contained books on almost every phase of man's life and intellectual pursuits. There were many scientific and mathematical treatises, ancient and modern; a large number of books of architecture, including the works of Vitruvius, Palladio, and more recent writers on that subject; a sizable collection of books on drawing and painting; collections of music, including examples of Italian and English operas; many books of philosophy, classical and modern—among them the works of Hobbes, Descartes, Boyle, Shaftesbury, Locke, and other relatively recent writers; twenty or more works on gardening and agriculture; an ample assortment of other utilitarian books, such as treatises on distilling, cookery, and related subjects; a scattering of textbooks on language, rhetoric, mathematics, and logic; a few books on behavior, including The Courtier's Calling and The Gentleman's Recreation—in short, almost any book that a cultivated and thoughtful aristocrat might want was available at Westover.

The Byrd library indicates no particular hobby or obsession of the collector; instead, it suggests the wide range of interest that a versatile gentleman was expected to have. As a carefully balanced collection of the best literature and learning of the day it had no equal in America. Moreover, there were few items that conceivably the owner might not have wanted to consult. The mere presence of so many good books in the house of an influential and hospitable planter undoubtedly had an effect on the cultural development of his contemporaries. What the great man of Westover did, others would try to imitate; furthermore, the books gathered there served not only the owner but also his friends and neighbors. From Byrd's time onward, libraries among the wealthy planters became more numerous and larger, and the probability is that his example encouraged others to buy books and display them in their homes.

If Byrd himself had an ambition to be a man of letters, it was the well-bred and somewhat casual ambition affected by a gentleman. He never rushed into print with anything, and, though he took care to rewrite the History of the Dividing Line with some idea of publishing it, he never finished the work to suit his taste, and the manuscript remained unprinted until 1841.²⁶ From a rough journal kept on the surveying expedition, he prepared a narrative, probably for the amusement of some of his English friends, entitled The Secret History of the Line. In this account, which was not published until Professor William K. Boyd's edition in 1929, fictitious names were given the persons mentioned, and some of the incidents, particularly the quarrels and a few cases of violence offered women by members of the surveying crew, were described with more detail than appears in the better-known version. As many a gentleman before him had done, Byrd apparently wrote an account for private circulation among his friends, and at that time was not considering publication.

The news of the narrative got around in England, and his friends urged publication. Lord Egmont, for instance, in 1736 wrote in praise of the history and another account of Byrd's travel into the border country, which the writer called A Journey to the Land of Eden. Egmont begged him to give these works to the world, but Byrd answered that “'tis a sign you never saw them that you judge so favorably”; and he added that he was too busy to prepare anything for the press, “for I am always engaged in some project for improving our infant colony.”²⁷ The projects then engaging him were schemes to found a city at the falls of the James and to settle his land on the Roanoke River with Switzers. Other friends wrote urging him to print his works, but to all of them he replied evasively that he had not yet found time to complete any literary pieces.²⁸ Nevertheless, he did revise The Secret History, substituting real names for the fictitious ones, and toning down passages that might give offense. Clearly, Byrd intended sometime to bring out the History of the Dividing Line, but he never got around to putting the finishing touches on it. In the same way he wrote out A Journey to the Land of Eden, Anno 1733 and A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732. Both of these are pleasing and entertaining accounts of trips he made to inspect his frontier properties.

Further evidences of Byrd's literary efforts are to be found in two unpublished notebooks in the University of North Carolina library. These notebooks, containing journal entries for the years 1739-41, are also filled with odds and ends of literary exercises: letters addressed to various persons under classical names, “characters” drawn in the manner of the seventeenth-century character writers, scraps of poetry, a version of the classical story of the Matron of Ephesus, and a series of love letters to one Mrs. Smith, designated as Sabina. The letters to Sabina are a part of a genuine, and unfortunate, courtship,²⁹ but many of the other letters suggest that Byrd was writing for the sake of the composition.

Byrd wrote in the sophisticated and urbane manner of the Londoners of his day. The man who had known Wycherley, Congreve, Swift, Pope, and many another well-known author was not likely to lapse into provincial solecisms. Moreover, his style has a gaiety and sprightliness that no other American of his generation attained. Had he been less involved in “projects” and more intent upon a literary reputation, he might have become an author of note, who could have influenced others to regard their pens as a way to the attainment of honor. But, as already noted, Byrd's works were not published until long after his death and, except upon the few who may have read the manuscripts, they exerted no appreciable contemporary influence. Like other great planters, he was too busy with the innumerable duties and obligations of his class to follow the craft of letters.³⁰

Byrd's social attitudes constantly appear in his correspondence and his writings. Though he was by nature a kindly and gracious man, there was never the least taint of democratic equalitarianism in his thinking. He was conscious of his own superiority—so conscious, in fact, that he rarely saw any need of asserting it. The lordly disdain that he felt toward tradesmen who imitated the dress and manners of their betters is illustrated in a letter to an unnamed London agent, dated June 27, 1729:

You will herewith receive the invoice for my family, and beg you will please to employ your interest with the tradesmen not to send all the refuse of their shops to Virginia. Desire them to keep them for the customers that never pay them. 'Tis hard we must take all the worst of their people and the worst of their goods too. But now shopkeepers have left off their bands, and their frugality, and their spouses must be maintained in splendor, 'tis very fit the sweat of our brows should help to support them in it. Luxury is bad enough amongst people of quality, but when it gets among that order of men that stand behind counters, they must turn cheats and pickpockets to get it, and then the Lord have mercy on those who are obliged to trust to their honesty.³¹

When roughing it in the wilderness with his party of surveyors Byrd maintained an instinctive reserve that set him apart from common men. For example, there were familiarities which he did not permit himself, even in the freedom from social restraints experienced by campers on the borders of the Dismal Swamp. When some of the party made a harmless but coarse jest at the prudery of the chaplain, Byrd preserved a dignified and serious mien. “I left the company in good time,” he says in The Secret History, “taking as little pleasure in their low wit as in their low liquor, which was rum punch.”³² Although he knew how to keep his distance—a sort of spiritual aloofness—from the rest of his party, he readily shared their hardships. “For want of our tent,” he remarks of one incident on the survey, “we were obliged to shelter ourselves in this wretched hovel, where we were almost devoured by vermin of various kinds. However, we were above complaining, being all philosophers enough to improve such slender distresses into mirth and good humor.”³³ Throughout his life Byrd held to a strict belief in the superiority of his class. When, in A Progress to the Mines, he reports the unfortunate marriage of a planter's daughter to her uncle's overseer, he takes occasion to observe: “Had she run away with a gentleman or a pretty fellow, there might have been some excuse for her, though he were of inferior fortune; but to stoop to a dirty plebeian, without any kind of merit, is the lowest prostitution.”³⁴

Byrd's sense of superiority and his adherence to a code of gentlemanly behavior had in them nothing of priggishness. Combined with his belief in the value of social distinctions was a healthy lustiness and a fund of common sense. Furthermore, he had too much of kindly toleration, as well as too much of calm assurance of his own position, to become a snob.

In his ethical views, Byrd represented the better type of gentleman of his time. Consciously or unconsciously he exemplified a dictum laid down in many a courtesy book—the command to heed Aristotle's doctrine of the golden mean. In his letters and other writings there is evidence of his consistent belief in the principle of temperance and moderation in all things; in his private life he exemplified that belief. The unpleasant prohibitions of Puritanism and the violent excesses of license were equally distasteful. But as “a man of sense,” as a thoroughgoing rationalist of the day, he had a broad tolerance for the shortcomings of his fellows. No missionary zeal could burn in his soul, and he could report with a sense of amusement the moral lapses of members of his surveying party when they encountered freehearted country wenches or tempting Indian squaws. As the leader, Byrd himself held aloof from these temptations, yet without any attitude of being “holier than thou.” Indeed, he was not altogether a Galahad, as his shorthand diary reveals.³⁵ But before his men Byrd could not afford to show a weakness for women. There were some things a gentleman kept decently hidden from public notice. Even his sins must be committed in accordance with convention.

The gallantry that Byrd had learned as a young man in London never left him, and his attitude remained that of the cavalier quickly attracted by the smoldering eye of a charming woman. Many of his letters portray him as the passionate and romantic lover. One group, smacking of the artificiality of French romance, were signed “Veramour” and addressed to “Facetia”; they recount his passion for an unknown young woman in the summer and fall of 1703, three years before his first marriage. Another group, addressed to “Charmante,” describe an equally passionate attachment for an unidentified enchantress, in 1722, two years before his second marriage, when Byrd was fast approaching his forty-ninth year.³⁶ Some of the letters to Charmante have all the artificial pastoralism of a painting by Boucher.³⁷ Gallantry, tinged with some of the hard brutality of the Restoration, is evident in a third group of love letters—the series addressed to Sabina, in the University of North Carolina notebooks. All of these letters show studied care in their composition. Byrd knew how to convey his passion in the approved literary manner of the day. He also kept up a correspondence with Mrs. Taylor. His letters to her suggest a particular pleasure in her friendship, and occasionally they show a hearty delight in a good story and a bit of scandal not altogether edifying.³⁸ But there is no suggestion that the relations between Byrd and Mrs. Taylor were ever anything but proper.

If anyone had seriously suggested to Byrd that drinking of alcoholic liquors should be prohibited among gentlemen, he would have regarded such a proposal as barbarous and uncivilized. But, in an age when drunkenness did not place a man beyond the pale, he himself stood for moderation in this, as in other things. On the rare occasions when he was intemperate he notes the fact in his diary; for example, on September 12, 1709—the day that he was sworn a member of the Council—he notes: “we went to the President's where I drank too much French wine and played at cards and I lost 20 shillings. I went home about 12 o'clock at night. I neglected to say my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thanks be to God Almighty.” After a somewhat lavish entertainment, tendered by a “plain man worth £20,000,” near Norfolk, during the survey of the boundary line, Byrd observes that “the parson and I returned to our quarters in good time and good order, but my man Tom broke the rules of hospitality by getting extremely drunk in a civil house.”³⁹ The intemperate servingman, we may be sure, received an appropriate reprimand from his master. When preparing for the survey, the Virginia commissioners took care to have ample quantities of strong drink, and informed their North Carolina colleagues that “we shall be provided with much wine and rum as just [to] enable us and our men to drink every night to the success of the following day; and, because we understand there are many Gentiles on your frontier who never had an opportunity of being baptized, we shall have a chaplain with us to make them Christians.”⁴⁰ Thus everything was to be performed fittingly, with good cheer and clear consciences.

Byrd was ahead of most of his contemporaries in his attitude toward negro slavery and the rum traffic. Though he owned his full share of negroes, and occasionally even followed in his father's footsteps as an importer of African slaves, he realized that slavery was an evil and dangerous institution. His sense of decency was also outraged by the sanctimonious piety of the New England traders who brought in enough of both rum and slaves to be the ruin of the country. When Oglethorpe prohibited rum and slavery in Georgia, Byrd expressed his approval. Writing to his friend Lord Egmont, one of Oglethorpe's partners, Byrd observes that Georgia will have much ado to keep out negroes and rum, for “the saints of New England, I fear, will find out some trick to evade your act of Parliament.”⁴¹ These “foul traders,” Byrd continues, “import so many negroes hither that I fear this colony will sometime or other be confounded by the name of New Guinea.” A further remark about the influence of negro slaves upon the planters shows Byrd's realistic perception of a subtle danger. “I am sensible of many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us,” he comments to Egmont. “They blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our white people, who seeing a rank of poor creatures below them, detest work for fear it should make them look like slaves. … Another unhappy effect of many negroes is the necessity of being severe. Numbers make them insolent, and then foul means must do what fair will not.” The debasing effect of slavery upon the owners, as well as the positive danger from their increasing numbers, was seen as clearly by this slaveholder as by any latter-day social historian. Rum, a commodity that the elder William Byrd had imported in huge quantities, received the peculiar condemnation of his son. “I entirely agree with your lordship in the detestation you seem to feel for that diabolical liquor rum, which does more mischief to people's industry and morals than anything except gin and the Pope,” he assures Egmont. “Thrice happy Georgia if it be in the power of any law to keep out so great an enemy to health, industry, and virtue. The new settlers there had much better plant vineyards like Noah, and get drunk with their own wine.” There is scarcely need to point out, however, that his objection to rum was not based on puritanical considerations, but upon the abuse of rum drinking by the poorer elements in the population—a factor that has induced hard-drinking Southern aristocrats in later times to vote for prohibition. Byrd, of course, was no prohibitionist. His complaint was against the social disintegration that had come to the mass of the population through the importation of cheap rum.

Swearing was scarcely a vice in Byrd's opinion, though he would have depended upon a gentleman's taste as to the time and place for oaths. He himself had the good sense to know how to make effective use of a few resounding oaths properly delivered. When provoked because of some disobedience and rascality among his men, he swore at them so furiously on one occasion that, “by the good grace of my oaths, I might have passed for an officer in his Majesty's Guards.”⁴² If swearing was scarcely a sin at all, lying, on the other hand, was an offense as heinous as thievery. A gentleman's word was literally his bond, but Byrd was wise enough to know that gentlemen did not always live up to their professions. Hence, when one of his fellow commissioners insisted that “a gentleman should be believed on his bare word without evidence and a poor man condemned without trial,” he commented that this procedure “agreed not at all with my notions of justice.”⁴³ Justice was the greatest of the obligations of a true gentleman to both his equals and his inferiors.

One would hardly pick William Byrd as a man of religion, for he seems the very essence of worldly rationalism. But, for all that, he still believed that decency and order in society demanded adherence to the Anglican Establishment. Religion, no doubt, was scarcely a mystical experience for him, but it was nevertheless an essential part of the society to which he belonged. That he insisted upon a chaplain—his friend the Reverend Peter Fontaine—accompanying the party that surveyed the boundary is in itself worthy of remark. Though at times in The Secret History he makes a joke at the expense of the parson, he never speaks lightly of religion. Even in the wilderness, when Sunday came Byrd put on clean clothes and attended divine service.⁴⁴ In the daily entries of his earlier diary he is careful to note the routine of his private devotions, morning and evening, though now and then he confesses to forgetting to say his prayers. On the first leaf of the little notebook containing the shorthand entries of the diary,⁴⁵ there is a religious creed in Byrd's handwriting. Most of the statements of belief are orthodox and conventional, such as any good Anglican would have made, but a few imply a leaning toward the rationalism that characterized eighteenth-century intellectuals. “I believe that God made man … [and] insp[ire]d him with a reasonable soul to distinguish betwe[en] good and evil,” the credo reads; “that the law of nature taught him to [follow] the good and avoid the evil because the good tends manifestly to his happiness and preservation, but the evil to his [misery] and destruction.” Finally, after expressing an orthodox belief in Christ and the Resurrection, the assertion of faith concludes without mentioning the conventional heaven or hell; instead, it affirms “that those who have led good and holy lives here will be rewarded with unspeakable happiness hereafter. But those who have obstinately and impenitently rebelled against God and their own consciences shall go into a state of sorrow and misery.” Surely this was a faith that a cultivated and rational gentleman during the Century of Enlightenment could well have accepted.

William Byrd II, who died in 1744 and was buried in the garden he loved at Westover, was the herald of the eighteenth-century order of Virginia gentlemen—gentlemen in the grand manner, who made the Virginia aristocracy famous throughout the land. Though at times the pressure of “the usurers” of London—his creditors—sometimes embarrassed the great planter and kept his purse light, he accumulated a princely domain. At his death he held title to 179,000 acres of the best land in the colony.⁴⁶ Only two years before his end he patented 105,000 acres in the rich valley of the Dan River stretching to the North Carolina line. Like the nobles of England whom he knew, admired, and perhaps envied, he sought to enhance his greatness by the acquisition of land. He, of course, was not the only rich landed aristocrat of the first part of the century, for there were others even wealthier, but he was the most cultivated of them all, and he lived in greater elegance and with more fitting grace than any of his contemporaries. A generation later there would be many like him, but Byrd was the forerunner of a type. In the second William Byrd, the aristocracy that had been slowly evolving during the seventeenth century attained a brilliant exemplification, and, though Virginia gentlemen before him had exhibited aristocratic qualities like his, the best attributes of his class shone in him with peculiar radiance. The way of life marked out by the lord of Westover was the pattern followed by other gentlemen of Virginia in succeeding generations.

Notes

1. John Spencer Bassett The Writings of Colonel William Byrd (New York, 1901), p. xliv.

2. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, IX (1901-2), 244.

3. See Richmond Croom Beatty, William Byrd of Westover (Boston and New York, 1932), p. 44.

4. Among the manuscripts in the Brock Collection in the Huntington Library are nine volumes of transcripts of Byrd papers, for the most part copies of the letters of William Byrd II. Vol. 9 of this collection (BR 188) is a transcript of a literary piece called “The Female Creed,” a prose travesty in the Restoration spirit, probably written by Byrd. In it are numerous literary allusions which suggest that the writer had been reading Restoration plays.

5. The passage describing this incident is found in A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732 (in Writings, ed. Bassett, pp. 341-42). Byrd described the popularity of The Beggar's Opera, “which had diverted the town for 40 nights successively, and gained four thousand pounds to the author,” and then related several gossipy bits of information concerning the play. “After having acquainted my company with the history of the play, I read three acts of it, and left Mrs. Fleming and Mr. Randolph to finish it, who read as well as most actors do at a rehearsal. Thus we killed the time and triumphed over the bad weather.”

6. Maude H. Woodfin, “William Byrd and the Royal Society,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XL (1932), 23-34, 111-23.

7. Bassett, p. lxxxi.

8. Ibid., p. xli; and Beatty, op. cit., pp. 210-11, where the epitaph is reproduced.

9. Bassett, p. xlv.

10. See ibid., pp. l-li, for details of the deal.

11. In the University of North Carolina letter book, Byrd disguised most of the names. He addresses his daughter as “Amasia,” and the baronet as “Erranti.” The letter to his daughter is dated July 20, 1723. In it Byrd reminds Evelyn of her promise by word of mouth and by letter to have no further “converse of correspondence with the baronet.” He rebukes her for seeing him in the country and orders her not “to meet, speak, or write to that gentleman,” or to give him an opportunity “to see, speak, or write to you.” After forbidding her “to enter into any promise or engagement with him of marriage or inclination,” he solemnly vows to cut her off without “one brass farthing” if she disobeys. The letter ends on a pleading note, with Byrd begging his daughter not to wreck her happiness by an unfortunate match. This letter was followed by one to “Erranti” under the same date. He informs the baronet that he has learned of his following his daughter into the country, “with a pompous equipage.” Byrd warns him that in a new will, made since the baronet's attentions to his daughter became known, he has bequeathed her “a splendid shilling if she marries any man that tempts her to disobedience.” Sarcastically, Byrd remarks: “I fear your circumstances are not flourishing enough to maintain a wife in much splendor that has nothing, and just such a fortune as that my daughter will prove if she ventures to marry without my consent.”

    Sir Charles Mordaunt, Peterborough's grandson and successor, has been suggested as Evelyn's suitor. This seems hardly possible, for on Dec. 1, 1720, Mordaunt married a daughter of Sir John Conyers. She lived until Mar., 1726.

12. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXII (1924), 37.

13. Bassett, pp. lv-lxxv, gives a detailed account of the controversies.

14. Ibid., p. liii.

15. Edith Tunis Sale, Manors of Virginia in Colonial Times (Philadelphia, 1909), p. 137.

16. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXII, 27.

17. Ibid., p. 35; letter dated June, 1731.

18. Ibid., XXXVI (1928), 216.

19. Ibid., p. 219.

20. Ibid., pp. 356-58.

21. Ibid., IX, 229.

22. “Letters of William Byrd II and Sir Hans Sloane Relative to Plants and Minerals in Virginia,” William and Mary College Quarterly, 2d Ser., I (1921), 186-200.

23. Woodfin, op. cit., pp. 28-29.

24. A catalogue of the library was made in 1777 by J. Stretch, just before the library was sold. Bassett, pp. 413-43, reprints this catalogue.

25. See a humorous letter from Byrd to his librarian, in Bassett, pp. 399-400.

26. For a history of the manuscript and the printing of Byrd's work, see William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd. (Raleigh: The North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929), p. xvi.

27. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXVI, 217.

28. See Bassett, p. lxxix. In a letter to Peter Collison, July 18, 1736 (The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXVI, 355), Byrd comments:

    But now I come to the most difficult part of your letter to answer, that I mean wherein you desire a sight of my History of the Line. I own it goes against me to deny you such a trifle, but I have one infirmity, never to venture anything unfinished out of my hands. The bashful bears hide their cubs till they have licked them into shape, nor am I too proud to follow the example of those modest animals.

    He offers to send him his rough journal, but adds:

    This is only the skeleton and ground work of what I intend, which may sometime or other come to be filled up with vessels and flesh, and have a decent skin drawn over all, to keep things tight in their places and prevent their looking frightful. … I must only desire you not to suffer this journal to go out of your hands nor a copy of it unless Sir Charles Wager should have a fancy to see it.

29. One letter, addressed to the father of Mrs. Smith, under the name of “Vigilante,” is of particular interest because Byrd evaluates his Virginia possessions in pounds sterling. At that time, 1717, he lists 43,000 acres of land and 220 slaves. He points out that the yield from his plantations varies according to the price of tobacco, but he shows that his annual income is satisfactory: “In the year 1715 they produced clear of all charge £1716:5. In the year 1716 they cleared no more than £1535:14:11. But this year they will yield more than £1800.”

    In a letter that follows, addressed to “Lord Tipparari,” he estimates the value of his Virginia property at £33,000.

30. “The Female Creed,” perhaps written by Byrd, suggests that the writer was consciously trying to imitate the manner and style of certain frivolous writings of the day. There are other evidences of Byrd's literary efforts. He had known John Oldmixon, author of The British Empire in America (1708), when he was at Middle Temple, and had written out for him a brief history of Virginia, which that author utilized in his own account of the colony. (See The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXV, 374-75.)

31. Huntington Library manuscripts, Brock Collection (BR 188, Vol. V, n.p.).

32. Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line, ed. Boyd, pp. 111, 113.

33. Ibid., p. 40.

34. Bassett, p. 338.

35. Since the discovery of the portions of Byrd's intimate journals in the Huntington Library and at the University of North Carolina, a third part, also in shorthand, has turned up in the Virginia Historical Society. This covers the period from Dec. 13, 1717, to May 12, 1721, when Byrd was in England. At the time, he was a widower, and was paying court to various ladies, including the Mrs. Smith mentioned in the University of North Carolina letter book. He also kept a mistress, and notes, after a visit on Dec. 14, 1717, the payment of a fee of two guineas. The Virginia Historical Society has permitted me to have a photostat of this part of the diary, for purposes of study only. I do not have permission to quote verbatim from the document.

36. For accounts of these two affairs, see Beatty, pp. 34 ff., 104 ff.

37. See, e.g., letters in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXV, 383 ff., especially p. 385.

38. See letter to Mrs. Taylor, dated Oct. 10, 1735, in Bassett, pp. 394-96.

39. Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line, ed. Boyd, p. 39; from The Secret History.

40. Ibid., p. 21.

41. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXXVI, 220-21; letter dated July 12, 1736. All the quotations cited here are from this letter. Byrd felt bitter about the traffic of New England ship captains who invaded the Virginia rivers. In a letter, dated Feb. 20, 1736, to his friend, Judge Benjamin Lynde, of Salem, he comments: “Some of these banditti anchor near my estate, for the advantage of traffiquing with my slaves, from whom they are sure to have good pennyworths. I am now prosecuting one of them, whose name is Grant, for this crime, and have evidence sufficient to convict him. I wish you would be so kind as to hang up all your felons at home, and not send them abroad to discredit their country in this manner.” (The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, IX, 243-44.)

42. Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line, ed. Boyd, p. 59.

43. Ibid., p. 89.

44. Ibid., p. 71; see also pp. 174, 287.

45. Huntington Library manuscripts, Brock Collection (BR 61). Miss Norma Cuthbert, of the Department of Manuscripts of the Huntington Library, was the first to observe that this creed was in Byrd's handwriting. I am indebted to her for calling it to my attention.

46. Bassett, p. lxxxiii.