Government may see that His Majesty as well as the Company have done their utmost endeavours to seize the said pirates and to make restitution to the persons injured so far as it is in their power.” In taking this course the Company must have realized that it would be very distasteful to the King and his four great ministers, who were proposing themselves to appropriate the bulk of the spoil. But they also knew that these great men had placed themselves hopelessly in the wrong; and that there were plenty of their enemies in the House of Commons who would be only too eager to expose the scandal, when the time came for them to do so. This consideration seems to have had some weight with the Lords Justices, and prevented them from shelving this petition as unceremoniously as the Admiralty had done the former one. Anxious to appease the Company, and at the same time to safeguard the rights of the adventurers, they decided at a meeting at which the Duke of Shrewsbury, one of the adventurers, was present, to send a peremptory but guarded dispatch to the governors of all the American plantations, requiring them “to take all possible care, and use all due means for the seizing and apprehending all such pirates and sea robbers and such as may be reasonably suspected for the same, either by reason of the great quantities of gold and silver of foreign coins they usually have with them, or by other probable circumstances; and to cause them to be straightly imprisoned, and their ships, goods, and plunder to be kept in safe custody; until upon returning to us a full account of the said persons, ships, goods and plunder, with the evidence relating to them, His Majesty’s pleasure shall be known and signified concerning them.” Amongst the signatories to this despatch the name of the Earl of Romney, another of the adventurers, appears.