As soon as the Assembly had been dismissed Culpeper made ready to return to England, after having been in Virginia only a few weeks. Yet for his supposed services he had been receiving L2,000 a year from the revenues of the colony ever since the death of Berkeley.[57] Not content with this, he contrived to rob the English soldiers who had remained in Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion of more than L1,000. These men had received no pay for many months, and were discontented and mutinous.[58] So the Privy Council gave Culpeper money to satisfy them and the families on whom they had been quartered. On his arrival he bought up all the worn Spanish pieces of eight he could find, arbitrarily proclaimed them legal tender at six shillings, which was a shilling more than they were worth, and then paid the soldiers and landlords. But before his salary became due, he restored the ratio to five to one.[59] In 1682 news reached England of a series of tobacco-cutting riots in Virginia. The glut of tobacco in the English warehouses and its consequent low price had convinced the people that a restriction on the output was necessary. It was to be a kind of soil bank, though without the subsidy. When this failed because Maryland refused to join in, angry mobs went from plantation to plantation, cutting down the tender plants. Fearing that this might be the beginning of a new rebellion, the Privy Council ordered the reluctant Culpeper to go back at once to suppress the riots and punish the ringleaders.[60] Culpeper arrived in December, 1682. Finding that the riots were over, he contented himself with hanging two of the most notorious of the plant cutters, and then hastened back to England. By this time Charles had lost patience with him for his neglect of his government, the Attorney General was ordered to take action against him, and his commission as Governor of Virginia was declared void. In September, 1683, Lord Howard of Effingham was made Governor in his place. Effingham was well fitted to carry out the King's attack on liberty in Virginia. Deceitful, persistent, unscrupulous, he would have ridden roughshod over the people's rights had he not encountered the determined resistance of the House of Burgesses. No sooner had he arrived than the struggle began. When the Assembly met in April, 1684, he put on his peer's coronet and velvet and ermine robes, and told the Burgesses that he intended to enforce the King's order to prohibit appeals to the Assembly. This was received with dismay. They appealed to Effingham and the Council to join them in an address to the King imploring him to restore a privilege enjoyed from the earliest times. But in vain. "It is what I can in no part admit of," was Effingham's curt reply. Since this made the General Court the last court of appeals in Virginia, the structure of justice became aristocratic rather than democratic.