The Real America in Romance, Volume 6 | Page 8

to fight like a tiger
or a ruffian. Under his glove of velvet was a hand of iron, which would
fall inexorably alike on the New England Puritans and the followers of
Bacon. With the courage of his convictions, he was ready to deal out
banishment for the dissenters; shot and the halter for rebels. He lived
on his estate of about a thousand acres at Greenspring, not far from
Jamestown. "Here he had plate, servants, carriages, seventy horses,
fifteen hundred apple trees, besides apricots, peaches, pears, quinces
and mellicottons. When, in the stormy times, the poor cavaliers flocked
to Virginia to find a place of refuge, he entertained them after a royal
fashion in this Greenspring Manor house. As to the Virginians, they
were always welcome, so that they did not belong to the independents,
haters of the church and king."
From the very first, John Stevens did not like Governor Berkeley and in
a short time learned that he was a tyrant. Berkeley issued his
proclamation against the Puritan pastors, prohibiting their teaching or
preaching publicly or privately.
John Smith Stevens participated in the Indian war in 1644, and saw
Opechancanough, at this time almost a hundred years of age, captured
and brought to Jamestown, where he requested his captors to hold open
his eyes, that he might see and upbraid Sir William Berkeley for
making a public exhibition of him. A short hour afterward the aged
chieftain was treacherously wounded by his guard.
In the year 1648, John Stevens married Dorothe Collier, the daughter of

a clergyman of the church of England. This naturally united him to the
cavalier or church party, while his mother, brother and sister were
Puritans. Sometimes John thought he had the best wife living, at others
he was almost persuaded that she was intolerable. She was a beautiful
brunette, with great dark eyes which smiled when the sky was fair, but
in which appeared the lustre of a tigress when enraged. Love in its full
strength and beauty seldom dwells in the heart of both husband and
wife through all the vicissitudes of life. It was so in John's case. When
the honeymoon waned and practical existence began, the wife became
ambitious for a more showy manner of life and more pleasures than the
husband could afford. He was prosperous; but his wife's extravagance,
in which he indulged her at first, kept him poor. Poverty became a
burden and marriage a mockery. He who had been insanely in love, and
who was unable to live out of her presence, proved an indifferent
husband before the honeymoon was over. Why? John had thought his
wife an angel, and marriage had shattered his idol. His ideal woman
had fallen so far below his expectations that disappointment drove him
to indifference. His wife thought herself his superior, and John, to her,
was more a convenience than a husband.
Gradually Dorothe grew indifferent toward her husband's mother and
young sister, who idolized him, and though they bore her no thought of
ill, she came to despise them. John's mother saw that her son's wife was
ruining him by her extravagance, yet she dared not interpose as it
would make the rupture complete. Dorothe was a haughty cavalier and
despised all Puritans and, most of all, her husband's mother; but the
cavaliers were in trouble. King Charles was tried, condemned and
beheaded in 1649, and a protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) ruled over
England a few months after the execution of the king. John Stevens'
wife gave birth to a son who was named Robert for his wife's father.
Though England was a commonwealth, Virginia remained loyal to the
wandering prince, who slept in oaks and had more adventures than any
other man of his day. Berkeley, it is said, even invited him to come and
rule over Virginia, assuring him of his support; but Parliament took
notice of the saucy colony and, in 1650, ordered a fleet to conquer it.
The fleet did not reach Jamestown until 1652, when, after a little fluster,

Sir William Berkeley retired to Greenspring, and the government was
turned over to the roundheads, who chose Richard Bennet, Esquire, to
be governor of the colony for one year. On the day of Bennet's
inauguration, John Steven's second child, a daughter, whom he named
Rebecca, was born. These two links of love made his wife more dear to
him. At times she was pleasant; but usually she studied to thwart his
will. She was humbled with the cavaliers and hated the Puritans. Ann
Linkon, an old woman given to gossiping, incurred the displeasure of
Dorothe Stevens, because she gossiped about her extravagance. She
had her arrested, condemned and ducked as we have seen. There was
no open rupture between Dorothe and her husband's relatives. She still
greeted