fifteen months of his arrival at the Hall. All undergraduates at St. Edmund Hall received a personal tutor. While the identity of Berkeley's tutor is unsure, his effect upon the boy showed through William's "disciplined intellect and steady appetite for knowledge". In 1632, he gained a place in the household of Charles I. That position gave him entré into a court literary circle known as "The Wits". Berkeley wrote several plays, one of which — The Lost Lady: A Tragy Comedy — was performed for Charles I and Henrietta Maria and was published in 1638. It is also included in the first and fourth editions of Dodsley's Old Plays, and A Description of Virginia (1663). Soldiering in the First and Second Bishops' Wars (1639–1640) gained Berkeley a knighthood. First administration as governor Berkeley replaced Sir Francis Wyatt as governor of Virginia in 1641. He was governor of the colony of Virginia from 1641–1652 and 1660–1677. Berkeley's main initiative when he first became governor was to encourage diversification of Virginia's agricultural products. He accomplished this through passing laws and by setting himself up as an example for planters. Arriving at Jamestown in 1642, Berkeley erected Green Spring House on a tract of land west of the capital, where he experimented with alternatives to tobacco. It was at Green Spring that he planted such diverse crops as corn, wheat, barley, rye, rape[seed], tobacco, oranges, lemons, grapes, sugar and silk. Berkeley devoted much of his time as a planter to experimenting with alternatives to tobacco; although he always produced the crop, he "despised" it. As a planter, with Virginia in mind, Berkeley constantly attempted to determine the best crops for the state through trial and error. Berkeley produced flax, fruits, potash, silk, and spirits which he exported through a commercial network that joined Green Spring to markets in North America, the West Indies, Great Britain, and Holland. Upon the recommendation of several of his slaves, Berkeley became a successful rice farmer. They were familiar with its cultivation from their native West Africa. He owned Boldrup Plantation. English Civil War and Commonwealth When the parliamentarians were successful, Berkeley offered an asylum in Virginia to gentlemen on the royalist side. After the king was beheaded he dispatched his secretary of state Richard Lee I to the Netherlands to secure an extension of his office from the Crown Prince. That document proved worthless because Parliament dispatched