The younger Samuel Mathews, as an adult, was known as Lt. Colonel Samuel Mathews, reflecting his standing in the local militia. In 1652, he was named to the representative House of Burgesses, which was the lower house of the legislature, on behalf of Warwick County. In 1656, he was appointed to the upper house, the Governor's Council, and later that year, became the Commonwealth Governor of Virginia, a position held until his death in January 1660. In April 1658, mainly to signal their displeasure with Oliver Cromwell, the Burgesses ceremonially dismissed him and reelected him in a single Act. Because of his loyalty, as governor, to Cromwell, he was often assumed to be a Puritan himself, although in fact he had been known as a persecutor of the Puritan sect in Virginia in the days before Cromwell. In January 1660, shortly before the English Restoration, Matthews died in office, and the Burgesses at that point simply reinstated the former Royalist Governor, William Berkeley by unanimous vote. Thus, in the view of historian Robert Beverley, Jr. writing in 1705, Virginia colony "was the last of all the King's Dominions that submitted to the Usurpation, and afterwards the first that cast it off." His brother Francis (1632-1673) outlived him. Governor Mathews married about 1655, but little information is known about his wife, other than some sources state she was of the Cole-Digges family. They had one son, John (b. 1659 - May 1, 1706) who married Elizabeth Tavernor on March 24, 1684. John also made his home at the Denbigh Plantation in Warwick County. Governor Samuel Mathews was an ancestor of Virginia's Brigadier General Thomas Mathews, who was the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates for whom Mathews County, Virginia was named when it was formed by an Act of Assembly on May 1, 1791. The site of Mathews Manor, located within the independent city of Newport News, Virginia, was the subject of an archeological study led by Colonial Williamsburg's Ivor Noel Hume in the 1960s, and was placed on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places.