In England and Virginia

Born in Henrico County on March 28, 1674, Byrd was the son of William Byrd I, who had come to Virginia before 1670 at the invitation of an uncle and then inherited the uncle's estate, and Mary Horsmanden, the daughter of a royalist émigré. At the age of seven Byrd was sent to England for his education and did not return to Virginia for fifteen years. He attended the Felsted Grammar School in Essex, noted for its classical education, but instead of continuing his education there, Byrd was sent to his father's London business agents to learn the global commerce in Indian trade and tobacco. Thereafter he studied law at the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple in London and was admitted to the bar.

During his years in England (1697–1704, 1715–1720, 1721–1726), Byrd attempted to establish himself as an English gentleman, while also conducting his father's and his colony's business. Byrd came under the mentorship of Sir Robert Southwell, secretary of the state of Ireland and, briefly, president of the Royal Society, into which Byrd was inducted. On three separate occasions Byrd served long terms as Virginia's official agent in London. He frequently opposed the increasing power of royal governors, foreshadowing the conflicts that would lead to the American Revolution.

Although his social and political aspirations in England were, to some degree, dashed, Byrd was not given to sullenness, and his ultimate return to Virginia was marked by an ambitious program for advancing his family fortune as well as the prospects of the colony. When he was only twenty-two, Byrd was elected to the House of Burgesses, and in 1709 he was appointed to Virginia's Council of State, on which he remained for the rest of his life. He commanded the militias of Charles City County and Henrico County. Byrd led surveying expeditions of the boundary between Carolina and Virginia and of the Northern Neck.

Man of Letters

Byrd is best known today as a writer. Excerpts of his diaries, first published in 1941 as The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712, and the manuscript narratives of his surveying, first published in the nineteenth century, are frequently anthologized in textbooks of American literature. Like many gentlemen of his day, he viewed literary pursuits as a demonstration of wit and accomplishment rather than as a professional vocation, so few of his works were published in his own time, and those few were published under pen names.

Several anonymously or pseudonymously published works are attributed to Byrd. He probably collaborated with William Burnaby, a colleague in the Middle Temple, on a translation of Petronius's Satyricon (London, 1694). Frequenting the English spa of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, in 1719, Byrd published several poems under the name of "Mr. Burrard" in Tunbrigalia: or, Tunbridge Miscellanies (London, 1719). Byrd and other dilettante "Water Poets" (as Sir Richard Steele, 1672–1729, named them) wrote verses describing the denizens of English resorts like Tunbridge Wells, Bath, and Epsom. An early advocate of inoculation against smallpox (which had taken the life of Byrd's first wife, Lucy), Byrd anonymously published A Discourse Concerning the Plague in 1721 in London. In this work he offered an account of historical plagues in classical literature and the Bible and suggested remedies derived from medical writers whom he had read, providing a naturalist's history of epidemic disease.

Much of Byrd's writing exists only in manuscripts, which likely circulated among friends and acquaintances in a form of self-publication that would represent a gentleman's authorial career (as opposed to publishing in print for pay). These writings typically demonstrate Byrd's study of natural history and his promotion of the interests of the Virginia colony. Byrd owned extensive properties to the west of the James River and laid out the future cities of Petersburg and Richmond on its banks. His account of that territory, A Journey to the Land of Eden, was apparently intended as a promotional text in the hopes of bringing German-speaking Swiss immigrants as settlers. Traveling to Fredericksburg in 1732, he visited an old political rival, Alexander Spotswood, who had pioneered iron-mining and milling ventures. The resulting A Progress to the Mines is a more personal and mature piece, written by a man who has come to accept the limitations of his career and to terms with past animosities.

Byrd's two narrative accounts of the expedition he led to establish the boundary between Carolina and Virginia deserve to be classics in the early American literary canon, both as travel writing and as an incipient novel. In the two versions of his surveying journal, one apparently intended for print publication (The History of the Dividing Line) and the other for limited circulation among friends (The Secret History of the Dividing Line), Byrd offered a sympathetic ethnography of Virginia and Carolina Indians, a description of natural and social features from the Outer Banks westward, and a satirical view of the differences between Carolinians and Virginians. The Secret History is fashioned as a typical eighteenth-century picaresque novel in which Byrd casts himself (in the third person) as the redoubtable "Colonel Steddy."

Byrd's letters and "characters" (a popular Augustan literary prose form in which the foibles of character types or actual persons were satirized) circulated among friends, offering this small audience an unsentimental view of love, feminine beauty, and lust. His self-portrait in the character "Inamorato l'oiseaux" reveals a man who struggled with sexual passion even in childhood.

Byrd is well known as a diarist who, while not rivaling the Englishman Samuel Pepys in style or incidents (the Virginian's social circle was more provincial), nonetheless documented the routines he employed in gentlemanly self-fashioning. His coded personal diaries show a man struggling to balance his appetites and passions, particularly his unruly sexual appetites, while daily managing an extensive estate and improving his mind. In addition to writing the diaries, Byrd kept a gentleman's commonplace book, a record of his reading and conversations during eight years between his first and second marriages. His reading ranged widely, from the classics to Christian Patristic writers to treatises on medical lore and nature.

The notations in the commonplace book are derived in part from his vast library, the largest and perhaps most varied personal library in colonial America with more than three thousand volumes. It included travel writing, law, medical books, literature, art, theology, natural philosophy, and classics, which Byrd read in their original languages. After Byrd's death, the library was cataloged and much of it dispersed. Following the death of Byrd's son, William Byrd III (1728–1777), the remaining volumes were sold to pay off Byrd III's gambling debts.

Byrd twice married. His first marriage (1706–1716) to Lucy Parke, with whom he had two sons who died in infancy and two daughters, was tempestuous and ended when she died of smallpox soon after joining him in London. His second marriage, to Maria Taylor, which began in 1724 and lasted until his death, brought him three daughters and a son, all of whom survived and had children. His land holdings included estates throughout southern Virginia amounting to nearly 180,000 acres, the most famous of which was Westover Plantation, one of the James River plantations, whose classic Georgian house still stands.

Major Works

• An Essay Upon The Government of the English Plantations on the Continent of America: An Anonymous Virginian's Proposals For Liberty Under the British Crown, with Two Memoranda by William Byrd (1701)
• A Discourse Concerning the Plague (1721)
• The Westover Manuscripts: Containing the History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina; A Journey to the Land of Eden, A.D. 1733; and A Progress to the Mines; Written from 1728 to 1736, and Now First Published (1841)
• The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (1941)
• Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741, with Letters & Literary Exercises, 1696 (1942)
• The London Diary, 1717–1728 and other Writings (1958)
• The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian (1966)
• The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover (2001)