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The Virginia planters lived by land, and they had a very genuine grievance in being taxed by London on their land and on the crops that they shipped abroad. Now, as everybody knows who's ever quarreled with a business partner or started a divorce action, one real grievance sprouts a host of others and soon they were blaming London for their cost of living. Now, the Virginians lived high, no question, not perhaps as high as the Governor, he set the style, but increasingly they complained that they were in hock to London for their carriages, their wines, their furniture, and such beautiful baubles as you see here, candelabra from London, hand-made clock from Glasgow. Now we've all seen a sloped-front desk, but that bureau with the beautiful side pulls is not a desk, it's an organ, London 1760. This rare harpsichord, made of walnut, as light as honey, London 1762.

And in this room, a glass chandelier from London. You see how splendidly they picked up the Chinese fashion. This wallpaper came from Canton. It first had to be shipped to London, and then, after a middleman's cut, sent on to Virginia.

One way and another, the planters were in debt to London for two million pounds, which was 20 times the amount of money in circulation in Virginia at that time.

But for other reasons, for more idealistic reasons anyway, this town was a hotbed of resistance. And it's not surprising that in the more clubbable, the less theological south, the cradle of sedition should have been not a church, but a tavern named after Sir Walter Raleigh.

You could call this the Old South Meeting House of the Old South, the life of most pubs guarantees a certain number of fires along the way and this was no exception. The original Raleigh Tavern was burnt down. But it has been faithfully restored, and it was in this room that the Virginians formed their Committee of Correspondence. More than that, it was here that they created the radical network of committees throughout the colonies, and it was here that two men, more than any others, pushed the Virginians towards an open break with Britain.

One was Thomas Jefferson, a young country squire living off the 1900 acres his father had left him, a lawyer who distrusted lawyers and abandoned what he called a talkative and dubious trade, a godly man who yet said "beware of the clergy in politics". He went into politics when the troubles were breaking out all over as a member of the Virginia parliament, the House of Burgesses. When the Governor dissolved it as an insubordinate body, he and 88 others came along this street to this tavern, and they signed a pact not to import any slaves, any wines, any British manufactures.

The last straw must have been the day that riders came clattering in, having done the whole 550 miles from Boston with the news that the British, the House of Commons had closed the port of Boston. Now imagine the port of London closed by order of United States Congress, Massachusetts naturally retaliated by suspending all trade with Britain. That was enough to bring all the Virginia revels here and proclaim themselves the first Provincial Convention, which amounted to being the very first revolutionary legislature. All they needed now was a first-class breast-beater to goad the other colonies to do the same.