He then turned his attention towards the wide field of colonial enterprise which presented itself in New England. From the autumn of 1620 until the summer of 1635 he, from time to time, actively supported the endeavours of the ‘Council for the Planting of New England.’ [Sidenote: _Proclamation Book_, May 15, 1620. (R. H.)] The Minute in which that Council summed up the causes which induced it, at the date last-named, to resign its charter is an instructive one. [Sidenote: SURRENDER OF THE NEW ENGLAND CHARTER.] It expresses, in few words, the views of Lord ARUNDEL and of his ablest fellows at the board:—‘We have found,’ say the Councillors, in their final Minute, ‘that our endeavours to advance the plantation of New England have been attended with frequent troubles and great disappointments. We have been deprived of near friends and faithful servants employed in that work. We have been assaulted with sharp litigious questions before the Privy Council by the Virginia Company, who had complained to Parliament that our Plantation was a grievance.’ They proceed to say that a promising settlement which had been established, under the governorship of Captain GORGES in Massachusetts Bay, had been violently broken up by a body of speculative intruders who, without the knowledge of the Council of New England, had found means to obtain a royal ‘grant of some three thousand miles of the sea-coast.’ Finding it by far too great a task, for their means, to restore what had thus been brought to ruin, ARUNDEL, and his fellow-councillors were constrained to resign their charter. [Sidenote: _Colonial Papers_, vol. viii, § 58. (R. H.)] Four years later the Earl formed an elaborate plan for the colonization of Madagascar. But the events of 1639–40 soon made its effectual prosecution hopeless.