On entering Bruton church, the eye is first attracted on the right of the chancel to the novel sight of the governor's seat, high canopied and richly upholstered in crimson and gilt. The high-backed chair is railed off from the "common folk," and the name Alexander Spotswood in gold lettering runs around the top of the canopy. At once you realize that this was indeed the court church of the vice-regal court at Williamsburg, and that you are in old Colonial Virginia. The lines "He rode with Spotswood and Spotswood men," the knights of the "Golden Horse Shoe," run through the brain, and the knightly figure of Raleigh, the chivalric founder of the colony, and brave John Smith and a score of others, heroes of that elder day, come from out the shadowy past, and hover about one. You look at the quaint old pulpit, on the left of the church, with its high-sounding board, and then glance down at the pew on your right, which bears the name of George Washington, and opposite the plate on the pew reads Thomas Jefferson, and next are James Madison and the seven signers of the Declaration of Independance, and Peyton Randolph and Patrick Henry and the doughty members of the house of burgesses who worshiped here, and whose liberty-loving spirits fired the world with their brave protests against tyranny. When you read these names, suddenly the church seems full of the men who bore them, and you are surrounded by that goodly company of heroes who made Virginia and America, the cradle of liberty. The magic spell is upon you. You turn cold and burning hot with high enthusiasm and the glory of the vision. You are roused from your trance by the pleasant voice of the young minister, Mr. John Wing, who is saying: "Now we will go down into the crypt."
There are treasures in the crypt indeed. We follow in a dazed fashion, and are shown the Jamestown communion service; the communion silver bearing the coat-of-arms of King George III; the ancient communion silver of the College of William and Mary; the Colonial prayer book, with the prayer for the president pasted over the prayer for King George III; a parish register of 1662, the pre-Revolutionary Bible; coins found while excavating in the church, and brass head-tack letters and figures by which some of the graves in the aisles and chancel were identified. We are told that the date of parish was 1632, first brick church, 1674-83; present church 1710-15. Precious and deeply interesting, but I imagined that I could hear the tread of that "knightly company" upstairs, who let neither silver nor gold nor the glitter of the vice-regal court at Williamsburg seduce them from their love of liberty, nor dull their hatred of tyranny in its slightest exercise. Ah! there were giants in those days among those Virginia pioneers, in whose veins ran the hot blood of the cavalier, who loved truth and hated a lie, who loved life and despised danger, and feared not death nor "king nor kaiser," descendants of the valiant Jamestown colonists to whom Nathaniel Bacon cried one hundred years before: "Come on, my hearts of gold!"