Due to these charters, on July 30, 1619, the little remnant of colonists
whom disease and famine had left untouched were summoned to meet in the
church at Jamestown to form the first parliamentary assembly in America,
the first-born of the fruitful Mother of Parliaments. It was due to
Sandys not only that the first permanent English settlement in the
Western World was planted at Jamestown in 1607, but that a later group
of "adventurers"--for such they called themselves--destined to be more
famous, were driven by chance of wind and wave to land on the coast of
Massachusetts. Thus was established, not only the beginning of England's
colonial Empire--still one of the most beneficent forces in the
world--but also the principle of local self-government, which, in the
Western World, was destined to develop the American Commonwealth. The
compact, signed in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, while not in strictness
a constitution, like the Virginia Charter, was yet destined to be a
landmark of history.

Sandys suffered for his convictions, for the party of reaction convinced
King James that Virginia was a nest of sedition, and the arbitrary
ruler, in the reorganization of the London company, gave a pointed
admonition by saying: "Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin
Sandys." In 1621 he was committed to the Tower and only released after
the House of Commons had made a vigorous protest against his
incarceration. His successor as treasurer of the London company was
Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, and it is not a fanciful
conjecture to assume that, when the news of the disaster which befell
one of the fleets of the London Company on the Island of Bermuda reached
England, it inspired Shakespeare to write his incomparable sea idyl,
_The Tempest_. If so, this lovely drama was Shakespeare's unconscious
apostrophe to America, for in Ariel--seeking to be free--can be