The foundation of New England was delayed awhile, her Pilgrims yet in England, though meditating that first remove to Holland, her Mayflower only a ship of London port, staunch, but with no fame above another.
The London Company, soon to become the Virginia Company, therefore engages our attention.

The charter recites that Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, Knights, Richard Hakluyt, clerk, Prebendary of Westminster, Edward-Maria Wingfield, and other knights, gentlemen, merchants, and adventurers, wish "to make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia." It covenants with them and gives them for a heritage all America between the thirty-fourth and the forty-first parallels of latitude.
The thirty-fourth parallel passes through the middle of what is now South Carolina; the forty-first grazes New York, crosses the northern tip of New Jersey, divides Pennsylvania, and so westward across to that Pacific or South Sea that the age thought so near to the Atlantic.

All England might have been placed many times over in what was given to those knights, gentlemen, merchants, and others.
The King's charter created a great Council of Virginia, sitting in London, governing from overhead.

In the new land itself there should exist a second and lesser council.

The two councils had authority within the range of Virginian matters, but the Crown retained the power of veto.