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Illustrated Episode · Volume I, chapter 8 · 28 April 1635

And we you, for treason

In a timber-beamed room, two men in dark doublets grip the arms of a red-faced, shouting man with a raised fist, while another man stands in a sunlit doorway with his hand up and armed men run toward the house behind him.
Jamestown, April 1635. Governor Harvey has just struck a councillor and cried that he arrests him for treason, and now Councillors Utie and Mathews have him by the arms: and we you, they answer. Outside, forty musketeers run for the house. Rothbard calls it the first open rebellion under royal rule, against a governor who taxed exports and sided with a feudal proprietor. Chapter 8 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

By 1635 Virginia's royal governor, Sir John Harvey, had taxed tobacco exports, charged fees on immigrants, jailed his critics and taken Lord Baltimore's side against Virginia's own William Claiborne. The planters had had enough. On 28 April, at a Council sitting in his own house at Jamestown, Harvey rose from his chair, struck Councillor Menefie on the shoulder and cried, "I arrest you upon suspicion of treason." John Utie and Samuel Mathews rushed up and seized him: "And we you upon suspicion of treason to his Majestie." At the door Dr. John Pott raised his hand, and about forty musketeers who had been hidden nearby came running with their guns presented. Harvey refused to go at first, but within days, under the Council's guard, he agreed to take the first ship to England, and Captain John West was put in his place. The king sent him back in 1637, then removed him for good in 1639. Rothbard calls this "the first open rebellion while Virginia was under royal rule" (CiL, p. 71). He puts several hundred armed men behind Mathews; the record at the house counts forty. Either way, Virginians had thrown a royal governor out by force, forty-one years before Bacon and 141 before 1776.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. I, ch. 8, pp. 71-76. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 1607-1688 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914), ch. III, 'The Expulsion of Sir John Harvey', quoting the depositions in the Public Record Office, CO 1/8. Secondary source
  3. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, vol. I (Richmond, 1809), colonial note on Harvey: 'thrust out of his government', 28 April 1635; as quoted in Encyclopedia Virginia and VirginiaPlaces.org. Primary source
  4. 'Sir John Harvey (ca. 1581 or 1582-by 1650)', Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities), accessed 2026-09-29. Secondary source
  5. Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, Historic Jamestowne, 'An Upper-Class Neighborhood 1630s-1699' (marker text) and Structure 112, probable site of Sir John Harvey's house (accessed 2026-09-29). Secondary source
  6. John L. Cotter and J. Paul Hudson, New Discoveries at Jamestown (Washington: National Park Service, 1957), section 'Muskets'. Secondary source
  7. Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, 'Historical Clothing' (accessed 2026-09-29): doublets, breeches, falling bands, linen cuffs. Secondary source
  8. Annie Lash Jester, Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet 17, 1957), pp. 9-10. Secondary source