So under the pretext that his wife was ill, he got permission to leave town. Then, instead of visiting Curles Neck, he headed for Henrico. Here his veterans gathered around him. When they heard that he had suffered humiliation, that he had been denied a commission, and that their grievances had not been redressed, they "set their throats in one common key of oaths and curses." We will have a commission or "pull down the town," they said. "Thus the raging torrent came down to town."[41]
Berkeley made hasty preparations to resist them. But it was too late. In Jamestown all was confusion. The cry was: "To arms! To arms! Bacon is within two miles of the town." When the Governor realized that resistance would be useless, he ordered the guns to be dismantled, and returned to the statehouse. So the motley army streamed into the village--weatherbeaten frontiersmen, demanding to be led out against the Indians; poor planters, seeking relief from heavy taxes; freedmen made desperate by hunger and nakedness. The common cry was, "No levies! No levies!"[42]
The Burgesses, hearing the hubbub, rushed to the windows of their hall on the second story of the statehouse to witness the exciting scenes below. Bacon had asked them to grant him his commission, and now he called up to them, "You Burgesses, I expect your speedy result." Whereupon his men cocked their fusils and aimed them at the windows. "For God's sake hold your hands, forbear a little and you shall have what you please," cried the Burgesses.[43]
And have it they did. It was now Berkeley's turn to be humiliated. He was forced to make Bacon General of all the forces in Virginia. When this was followed with a demand that he write the King a letter testifying to Bacon's loyalty and the legality of all he had done, he could no longer contain himself. Rushing out he threw back his coat and cried out; "Here, shoot me, fore God fair mark." Bacon replied that he would not hurt a hair of his head. And in the end he got the letter he wanted.[44]
He also got "the redress of the people's grievances," he told Berkeley he had come for. He mounted the stairs to the long room where the Burgesses sat and "pressed hard, nigh an hour's harangue," not only on preserving the colony from the Indians, but on "inspecting the revenues, the exorbitant taxes, and redressing the grievances of that deplorable country." Then, to his surprise, he learned that a series of reform laws had already been put through.