Sandys threw himself into his work with great ardor, and scarcely a month passed that a ship did not leave England loaded with emigrants and cattle for Virginia. At the end of the year the company would have elected him again but for the interference of King James, who regarded him as the head of the party in Parliament opposed to his prerogative. He sent word to "choose the devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys." Thereupon Sandys stepped aside and the earl of Southampton, who agreed with him in all his views, was appointed and kept in office till the company's dissolution; and for much of this time Nicholas Ferrar, brother of John, acted as deputy to the earl.[12] The king, however, was no better satisfied, and Count Gondomar, the Spanish minister, took advantage of the state of things to tell James that he had "better look to the Virginia courts which were kept at Ferrar's house, where too many of his nobility and gentry resorted to accompany the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous Sandys. He would find in the end these meetings would prove a _seminary for a seditious parliament_."[13] These words, it is said, made a deep impression upon the king, always jealous for his prerogatives. For two years, however, the crown stayed its hand and the affairs of Virginia greatly improved. Swarms of emigrants went out and many new plantations sprang up in the Accomack Peninsula and on both sides of the James. The most striking feature of these settlements was the steady growth of the tobacco trade. In 1619 twenty thousand pounds were exported, and in 1622 sixty thousand pounds. This increasing importation excited the covetousness of the king, as well as the jealousy of the Spanish government, whose West India tobacco had hitherto monopolized the London market. Directly contrary to the provision of the charter which exempted tobacco from any duty except five per cent., the king in 1619 levied an exaction of one shilling a pound, equal to twenty per cent. The London Company submitted on condition that the raising of tobacco in England should be prohibited, which was granted. In 1620 a royal proclamation limited the importation of tobacco from Virginia and the Bermuda Islands to fifty-five thousand pounds, whereupon the whole of the Virginia crop for that year was transported to Flushing and sold in Holland. As this deprived the king of his revenue, the Privy Council issued an order in 1621 compelling the company to bring all their tobacco into England.[14]