Future Governors had reason to regret this change, for it added greatly to the influence of the Council, and the day was not distant when the Council was to become so powerful as to threaten to make the Governor a mere figurehead. It was the Council which was to be responsible for the dismissal of Andros and Nicholson. Governor Spotswood, in his bitter quarrels with the Councillors tried to undermine their power by striking at their judicial privileges, but he failed, and he too was forced out of office by their influence. Even more alarming to the people than the ending of appeals to the Assembly was an order from the King that certain causes arising in the courts be referred to England for decision. The Burgesses protested. Such a thing would be "grievous and ruinous," they said, and would involve delays and great expense. Moreover, they could not find that appeals to England had been allowed "from the first settling of the colony." When Effingham and the Council refused to join them, they sent their petition to the King as the protest of the Lower House alone.[61] But James II, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of Charles in February, received their appeal with contempt. In the new instructions to Effingham drawn up in October, 1685, he wrote: "Whereas ... our Committee of Trade and Plantations ... have received from some unknown persons a paper entitled An Address and Supplication of the General Assembly of Virginia to the late King ... which you have refused to recommend as being unfit ... we cannot but approve of your proceedings.... And we do further direct you to discountenance such undue practices for the future, as also the contrivers and promoters thereof."[62] At this dark hour, when American liberty hung in the balance, the Burgesses were quick to repel any attempt to tax the people without their consent. In May, 1688, they stated that they had received "many grievous complaints" that unlawful fees had "under color of his Majesty's royal authority" been unjustly imposed upon the people. They protested especially against a fee of 200 pounds of tobacco for affixing the great seal of the colony, a fee of 30 pounds of tobacco for recording surveys of land, and a fee of L5 for escheats.[63] And they were adamant in refusing repeated demands for permission for the Governor and Council by themselves to levy a tax even though a very small one. "Your Lordships will ... find their total denial that the Governor and Council should have any power to lay the least levy to ease the necessity for so frequent Assemblys," Effingham wrote the Committee of Trade and Plantations in February, 1686. "This was propounded by me to them before his Majesty's instructions came to hand ... but nothing would prevail, nor I believe will, unless his Majesty's special command therein."[64]