The shouting and firing of guns in celebration of the accession of William and Mary had hardly ended when the Virginians turned their thoughts to the long desired new charter. The Bill of Rights gave them as well as Englishmen residing in England guarantees of liberty, but they had distinctive interests which they thought ought to be protected. Appointing Jeffrey Jeffreys to manage the affair, the Council and Burgesses sent him L200 for expenses and suggested that he call to his support any Virginians who chanced to be in London. That the art of lobbying was as well understood in the seventeenth century as it is today is shown by their instruction "to procure the assistance ... of the nobility and such as have offices at Whitehall and other men of note ... to be mediators with their Majesties."[3] The proposed charter was to confirm the authority of the Assembly. At first sight this would seem to be unnecessary since the Assembly had been in existence since 1619, and had been recognized by James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II. But the attempts to undermine its authority during the Second Stuart Despotism had convinced the people that its very existence might be threatened by some future King. They asked, also, that in the charter it be promised "that no tax be made upon this country but by the consent of the Assembly." The people had been deeply disappointed that a like promise had been left out of the charter of 1676. They took for granted that Parliament would not violate their rights as Englishmen by taxing them, but it would have comforted them to have it down in black and white. How necessary such a guarantee was became apparent eighty-five years later with the passage of the Stamp Act. The charter was to promise, also, that the King and Queen would continue to the Virginians and their descendants their rights as natural born subjects of England, and that as "near as may be" they should be governed after the same method as Englishmen, and "have the full benefit of the Great Charter and all other laws and statutes indulging the liberty of the subjects." Jeffreys was to ask that "the ancient method" of making appeals from the General Court to the Assembly be restored, since appeals to the Privy Council were in most cases impractical because of the expense involved and the difficulty of bringing "evidences, papers, and other records" to England.[4] We do not know why the application for the charter was dropped. It may have been because Jeffreys found that it would not meet with success, or the Assembly may have been persuaded that a charter was unnecessary under the liberal administration of the new monarchs.