When word of this outrage reached Governor Berkeley he was furious. "If they had killed my grandfather and my grandmother, my father and mother and all my friends, yet if they had come to treat of peace, they ought to have gone in peace," he blurted out. Major Trueman was impeached in Maryland, fined and sentenced to imprisonment, but this did not undo the wrong or prevent the terrible consequences.
The Indians in the fort put up a desperate resistance. Weeks passed, and they still held out. To every suggestion of parley they asked: "Where are our great men?" At last, when "brought to great distress" through hunger, they broke through the encircling English with their wives and children, and vanished into the forest. Making their way up the Maryland side of the river, they crossed over to Virginia, and began a series of raids upon the frontier plantations on the upper Rappahannock and Mattapony rivers.
Within a few days they had killed sixty persons. The fortunate ones were those who fell at the first volley, for the miserable captives were subjected to tortures that would have baffled the imagination of a Dante. "Some they roast alive, offering their flesh to such English prisoners as they keep languishing by a lingering death, pulling their nails off, making holes and sticking feathers in their flesh. Some they rip open and make run their guts round trees."
For the moment the old spirit which had made him so ardent a fighter in the English Civil War and in the battles against Opechancanough flared anew in Governor Berkeley. Calling together a force of horse and foot, he placed them under the command of Sir Henry Chicheley with orders to pursue the murderers. But when all was ready and Chicheley was expecting the order to march Berkeley changed his mind, withdrew his commission and disbanded his forces.
This sudden change has long puzzled historians. Berkeley himself had taken the lead in carrying the war to the enemy following the massacre of 1644; why did he hang back now? It may have been the offer of peace from the new chief of the Susquehannocks, which Sir William was willing to accept but which the Indians themselves ignored. It may have been the fear that Chicheley's men might not discriminate between friend and foe and by attacking some of the allied Indians involve them in the war. He stated later that he would have preserved those Indians so that they could be his "spies and intelligence to find out the more bloody enemies." Certainly in this he was foreshadowing the policy followed by his successors for more than a century. But it did not justify leaving the frontier open to attack, while the murders and torturing continued.