During her thirty-year reign, she worked with the English colony of Virginia, trying to recapture the former power of past paramount chiefs and maintain peaceful unity among the several tribes under her leadership.

So she went to the statehouse in Jamestown to answer the request, dressed in her finest state regalia: wampum, a fringed deerskin mantle, and accompanied by an interpreter and several retainers, including her son.

[5] Cockacoeske's response when told she must honor treaty obligations by supplying warriors for Berkeley, she played the consummate diplomat:[8] with grave courtlike gestures and a majestick air in her face, she walk'd up our long room to the lower end of the table, where after a few intreaties she sat down... being againe urged she after a little musing with an earnest passionate countenance as if tears were ready to gush out and a fervent sort of expression made a harangue about a quarter of an hour often, interlacing (with a high shrill voice and vehement passion) these words "Tatapatamoi Chepiack" (Tatapamoi is dead).In other words, Queen Cockacoeske successfully shamed her audience for their inattention to her own people's survival.

of this disregard she signified her resentment by a disdainfull aspect, and turning her head half aside, sate mute till that same question being press'd, a third time, she not returning her face to the board, answered with a low slighting voice in her own language "twelve, tho' she then had a hundred and fifty Indian men, in her town, and so rose up and gravely walked away, as not pleased with her treatment.Bacon's first attacks were against the Pamunkey, who fled into the Dragon Swamp.

As Cockacoeske and her people abandoned their camp, they were chased by Bacon's followers, who captured one of the Queen's attendants and tried to coerce her to bring them to the Pamunkey, but she led them astray, and they killed her.

Crown officials appointed a commission which criticized both parties for their mistreatment of the Pamunkey and other friendly Indian tribes, and stressed the importance of restoring peace to the region.

Virginia officials nonetheless expressed confidence in Cockacoeske's leadership, although they complained about Article 18 of the treaty, which had designated the colonial government the arbiters of inter-tribal grievances, when they would just as rather allow them to "weaken themselves... by their Intestine Broyls."

Cockacoeske tried to utilize colonial arbitration several times in 1678 to enforce the tribute clauses of the Treaty of 1677, but it appears that the Chicahominys and Rappahonnocks successfully rejected her claims of sovereignty over them, much as they had done to the Powhatan in the years of his chieftaincy.