here is much Impaired in his Estate by the late Rebells." In 1682 Spencer wrote to London in the wake of the events roiling Virginia. "Bacon's Rebellion," Spencer told colonial overseers in London, "had left an itching behind it". It was "plaine" that the class tensions stirred by the Rebellion had lingered, with a "mutinous mob" subsequently engaged in "wild and extravagant" rioting, going from farm to farm, tearing tobacco plants out by their roots. The Virginia government reacted harshly with militia patrols and the promise of steep fines. The "frenzy," according to Spencer, destroyed crops on over 200 plantations, and was driven by a glutted tobacco market which had depressed prices. Even the wives, Spencer wrote, took up hoes laid down by their husbands and continued to rip out the plants. Such civil disobedience, Nicholas Spencer saw, was the price paid by colonial administrators acting the foil for the empire's merchants back home. When taken with symptoms of illness, Spencer wrote to his brother in England outlining his pains, and asked him to consult an English doctor and send him the diagnosis as quickly as possible. Nor was Spencer's role as his Colepeper cousins' agent an easy job. As landlords of an almost-feudal domain eventually encompassing over five million acres (20,000 km²) in the new colony, the Colepeper Northern Neck grant, eventually passed on to their Fairfax heirs, came to be seen by some colonists as an onerous reminder of English aristocratic privilege. In Colepeper's absence, it fell to their relation Spencer to do the heavy-lifting of collecting rents and taxes on the Colepeper barony. In the meantime, Spencer married Frances, the daughter of Col. John Mottrom of Coan Hall of Northumberland County, Virginia. Mottrom was likely the first white settler of the Northern Neck in the early seventeenth century. He later served as the first Burgess for Northumberland in 1645, and presided over the county court for four years. Mottrom's daughter and her husband Nicholas Spencer named one of their sons, Mottrom, after John Mottrom. Another Spencer son, William, returned to England for schooling and remained there, serving as a Whig Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire. William Spencer, the son of the Virginia emigrant Nicholas, married Lady Catherine Wentworth, daughter of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Cleveland. (Following the early death of William, his brother Nicholas Jr. returned to England to succeed to the family estates.) Nicholas Spencer