Albion's Seed, Part II: The Cavaliers 1642-1675

Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia

-- by Sara

Introduction
Part I

The wave of Puritan migration from England to America slowed dramatically after 1641. Through the English Civil War and Cromwell's Protectorate, the Puritans found themselves politically and economically ascendant in England -- which greatly diminished their interest in leaving it. But the Puritan victory came at the expense of another English subculture, whose flight from Cromwell propelled the second wave of English migration to America.

These were the Cavaliers -- loyal Royalists, many of them nobles and courtiers, who sought refuge from the chaos in Virginia. David Hackett Fischer notes that Southern historians have long debated the actual extent and effects of the Cavaliers' influence on the region's culture; but 210 pages of Albion's Seed are given over to studying their specific folkways and cultural values as they existed on the estates of southern England, and as they later expressed themselves in the Chesapeake region. The detailed analysis is convincing: like the Puritans, the Cavaliers brought the culture they knew, and transplanted it firmly and deeply in the soil of tidewater Virginia. In the process, they added a second enduring English voice to America's conversation about rights, freedom, and power.