| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Warren M. Billings. Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia. (Southern Biography Series.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 290. $49.95.
In the last two decades, little serious scholarship has appeared on the political history of Britain's North American colonies, but that pattern may finally be changing. Francis J. Bremer's John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (2003) appeared a year before Warren M. Billings's study of Sir William Berkeley, and Walter W. Woodward's forthcoming biography of John Winthrop, Jr., will complete a formidable trinity on the public life of the seventeenth-century colonies.	1
Billings has devoted more time, care, and energy to reconstructing Berkeley's life than anyone before him. The results are impressive. Berkeley was born to a family deeply engaged in England's high politics, attended Oxford University and the Inns of Court, went on the grand tour, secured an appointment in the household of King Charles I, moved in rarified literary circles, composed a play that was reprinted at least twice, participated in the king's inglorious wars against the Scots that led to the summoning of, first, the Short Parliament and then the Long Parliament, and retained enough of the king's favor to become royal governor of Virginia in 1642. At that moment, he was the most distinguished person who had ever held the post, the only one who had often seen an English king on a daily basis.	. . .

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