Due to these charters, on July 30, 1619, the little remnant of colonists whom disease and famine had left untouched were summoned to meet in the church at Jamestown to form the first parliamentary assembly in America, the first-born of the fruitful Mother of Parliaments. It was due to Sandys not only that the first permanent English settlement in the Western World was planted at Jamestown in 1607, but that a later group of "adventurers"--for such they called themselves--destined to be more famous, were driven by chance of wind and wave to land on the coast of Massachusetts. Thus was established, not only the beginning of England's colonial Empire--still one of the most beneficent forces in the world--but also the principle of local self-government, which, in the Western World, was destined to develop the American Commonwealth. The compact, signed in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, while not in strictness a constitution, like the Virginia Charter, was yet destined to be a landmark of history. Sandys suffered for his convictions, for the party of reaction convinced King James that Virginia was a nest of sedition, and the arbitrary ruler, in the reorganization of the London company, gave a pointed admonition by saying: "Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys." In 1621 he was committed to the Tower and only released after the House of Commons had made a vigorous protest against his incarceration. His successor as treasurer of the London company was Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, and it is not a fanciful conjecture to assume that, when the news of the disaster which befell one of the fleets of the London Company on the Island of Bermuda reached England, it inspired Shakespeare to write his incomparable sea idyl, _The Tempest_. If so, this lovely drama was Shakespeare's unconscious apostrophe to America, for in Ariel--seeking to be free--can be symbolized her awakening spirit, while Prospero, with his thaumaturgic achievements, suggests a constructive genius, which in a little more than a century has made one of the least of the nations to-day one of the greatest. Bacon, Sandys, Southampton and the Liberal leaders of the House of Commons had implanted in the ideas of the colonists the spirit of constitutionalism, which was destined to influence profoundly the whole development of the American colonies, and finally to culminate in the Constitution of the United States. The later struggle in the Long Parliament, the fall of Charles I, and more especially the deposition of James II, the accession of William of Orange, and the substitution for the Stuart claim of divine right that of the supremacy of the people in Parliament, naturally had their reaction in the Western World in intensifying the spirit of constitutionalism in the growing American Commonwealth.