All such enterprises were at once arrested.
In 1624 the long contest of the king and the court party against the Virginia Company was ended by a violent exercise of the prerogative dissolving the Company, but not until it had established free representative government in the colony.

The revocation of the charter was one of the last acts of James's ignoble reign.

In 1625 he died, and Charles I.became king.

In 1628 "the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates," William Laud, became Bishop of London, and in 1633 Archbishop of Canterbury.

But the Puritan principles of duty and liberty already planted in Virginia were not destined to be eradicated.
From the year 1619, a settlement at Nansemond, near Norfolk, had prospered, and had been in relations of trade with New England.