Upon landing at Jamestown, De la Warr listened to a sermon by the good minister, Mr. Buck. He then addressed the people, "laying some blames on them," and promising, if forced to it, to draw the sword of justice. But there seems to have been no need for this. The people, forgetting former quarrels, were united in their efforts to serve their Governor and bring a degree of prosperity to the colony. The sound of hammering and sawing was heard on all sides as little houses were built, the fort repaired, the church restored. "Every Sunday, when the Lord Governor went to church, he was accompanied by all the Councillors, Captains, and other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a band of fifty halberdiers in his Lordships livery, fair red cloaks, on each side and behind him. The Lord Governor sat in the choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet cushion before him on which he knelt."[9] But that Lord De la Warr proved to be a mild and just Governor by no means obscures the evils inherent in absolutism. A good ruler may be succeeded by a bad one. In ancient Rome the people benefited by the establishing of law and order under the great Augustus, but they suffered from the cruelty of the insane Caligula and the dissolute Nero. So it boded no good for Virginia when De la Warr fell ill. "I was welcomed by a hot and violent ague," he tells us. This was followed by an attack of dysentery. "Then the cramp assaulted my weak body with strong pains, and afterward the gout." Finally scurvy came to add to his woes, so that he "was upon the point to leave this world." In desperation he set sail for the West Indies in the hope of recovering his health.[10] A few weeks after De la Warr's departure Sir Thomas Gates assumed command of the colony. In 1614 he, in turn, was followed by Sir Thomas Dale, Dale by Captain George Yeardley, and Yeardley by Samuel Argall. When Gates was in Virginia in 1610 he had brought with him certain laws, orders, and instructions which he posted in the church at Jamestown. As the people crowded into the little building to read them they must have expressed their resentment and horror, for the laws were more suited to a penal colony than to a community of free Englishmen. In 1611 Dale brought additional laws, and the whole body was revised in England and published. Gates and Dale had both served with the English army in the Netherlands, and these laws were "chiefly extracted out of the laws for governing the army" there.