Many came, "nobility, clergy and gentry, men of the first rate." A thousand are said to have arrived in the year after the King's death.
In October the Virginia Assembly met.

Parliament men--and now these were walking with head in the air--might regret the execution of the past January, and yet be prepared to assert that with the fall of the kingdom fell all powers and offices named and decreed by the hapless monarch.
What was a passionate royalist government doing in Virginia now that England was a Commonwealth?
The passionate government answered for itself in acts passed by this Assembly.

With swelling words, with a tragic accent, it denounced the late happenings in England and all the Roundhead wickedness that led up to them.

It proclaimed loyalty to "his sacred Majesty that now is"-- that is, to Charles Stuart, afterwards Charles the Second, then a refugee on the Continent.

Finally it enacted that any who defended the late proceedings, or in the least affected to question "the undoubted and inherent right of his Majesty that now is to the Collony of Virginia" should be held guilty of high treason; and that "reporters and divulgers" of rumors tending to change of government should be punished "even to severity." Berkeley's words may be detected in these acts of the Assembly.