After these first abortive attempts to found English settlements under his patent, Raleigh, on the 7th March, 1589, assigned it and all his rights thereunder to a company of merchants and adventurers who were resolved to proceed with the enterprise. These assigns, after the death of Elizabeth, became the leaders in seeking from King James I "leave to deduce a colony in Virginia." That monarch, says Bancroft, "promoted the noble work by readily issuing an ample patent" and on the 10th day of April, 1606, signed and affixed his seal to the first Charter of an English colony in America under which permanent settlement was to be effected. This charter declared the boundaries of Virginia to extend from the 34th to the 45th parallels of longitude and authorized the planting of two colonies. The first of these, to be founded by the London Company, largely made up of men of that city, was designated a "First Colony" to be established in the southerly portion of England's claim; the right to establish a "Second Colony" to be planted in the north, went to the Plymouth Company, whose membership, headed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Governor of the garrison of Plymouth in Devonshire, came principally from the west of England. Under this Charter the King named the first "Council for all matters which shall happen in Virginia;" under it the London Company dispatched the expedition of three ships in command of Sir Christopher Newport and having Captain John Smith among its members; and under it and the Second Charter (of 1609) the infant colony was governed until, in the year 1624, the Charter was revoked and the Crown took over the affairs of the Colony. Until the troubled reign of the first Charles, the growth of Virginia's population had been very slow. It was not until the defeat of the Royalists in 1645 by the forces of the Parliament and the King's execution in January, 1649, that the first great increase in population occurred. In a pamphlet published in London in that latter year, by an unknown author, it is stated that her population was at that time 15,000 English and 300 negroes and these were scattered along the lower portions of the James and the York and the shores of the Chesapeake. Then the defeated Cavaliers began to arrive in such great numbers that by 1670 Sir William Berkeley estimated that 32,000 free whites, 6,000 indentured servants and 2,000 negroes were there. Many of the old population and the newer arrivals as well, were pressing northward to the land between the mouth of Rappahannock and that of the Potomac which in 1647 had been organized into a new county, under the name of Northumberland, to include all the lands lying between those latter rivers and running westerly to a still indefinite boundary. This was new territory recently, and still very sparsely, settled by the English and even as late as 1670 it was contemporaneously estimated that the Indians between the two rivers had nearly 200 warriors.