In 1670 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward Duke. Her father had positively forbidden the match, and when she disobeyed him cut her off without one groat. But Thomas Bacon, and after Sir Edward's death, her brother John, made ample provision for the young couple. All would have been well had not Nathaniel been tricked by two sharpers in a deal with a guileless youth named Jason, and left with a long and tedious lawsuit.
It was at this juncture that he decided to seek his fortune in Virginia. There he might hope for quick advancement, because his cousin, also named Nathaniel Bacon, had attained a position of influence, and because he was related to Lady Berkeley, wife of the governor. Upon the advice of his grandmother, Lady Brooke, he left his wife behind until he had prepared a place for her "answerable to her quality." Upon his arrival in Virginia he was welcomed by Sir William, and it was at his advice "or at least friendly approbation" that he purchased a plantation at Curles Neck, on the James, forty miles above Jamestown, and a tract of land at the site of Richmond, on what was then the frontier. "When first I designed Virginia my chiefest aims were a further inquiry into those western parts in order to which I chose to seat myself so remote," he said, "I having always been delighted in solitude."
Bacon had been in Virginia but a few months when the governor appointed him to the Council of State. This seemed a great honor indeed for a young man of twenty-eight. But Berkeley explained: "Gentlemen of your quality come very rarely into this country, and therefore when they do come are used by me with all respect." Bacon was greatly surprised. "As to anything of public employment in the country, my tender age and manner of living, not free from follies and youthful excesses, forbad me to hope or expect any such thing.... This sudden change were enough to stagger a philosopher of more settled temper than I am."
But it was not possible for the dictatorial governor and the hotheaded youth to get along together. Berkeley was accustomed to having obedience in return for favors. Bacon was not the man to knuckle under. It was prophetic of what was to follow that the first difference grew out of relations with the allied Indians. When poor immigrants took up holdings on the frontier rather than become tenants to wealthy men in the east, they encroached on the reservations of those Indian tribes which were under the protection of the government. They even laid out farms within the very limits of their villages. When the Indians, driven by hunger, killed any of their cattle or hogs, the frontiersmen "beat and abused them."