rayed its trust and
should forfeit its rights. In 1624 the charter was accordingly annulled,
and Virginia became a royal province.

Thus ended the most serious attempt of a commercial company to make
profit out of American planting. Famous and successful in the annals of
colonization, it proved a complete disaster as a financial speculation.
During the reign of Charles I, merchants were therefore but little
disposed to venture their money in enterprises of that kind. Nor was
Charles himself, who guarded the royal prerogative more jealously even
than James had done, likely to look with favor upon the creation of
corporations which would prove useless in case of failure and might
prove dangerous if they succeeded. The rough sea of politics in the time
of the second Stuart was unsuited to floating successful colonial
ventures of any kind under governmental sanction; but in so far as he
was disposed to further the development of America, it was natural
enough for Charles, who found that his usurping Parliament was backed by
the mercantile interest, to frown upon colonial corporations, and to
make use of the proprietary feudal grant as a means of rewarding the
courtiers and nobles who supported him. The very year that the New
England Council surrendered its charter, Archbishop Laud was urging the
king to recall that of Massachusetts Bay. It was a few years later that
Fernando Gorges was made Lord Proprietor of Maine; a few years earlier
that Lord Baltimore, a loyal supporter of the House of Stuart, received
a feudal grant after the manner of the Durham Palatinate of that part of
Virginia which was to be known as the Province of Maryland.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best accounts of early exploration and settlement in America are in
Channing's _History of the United States_, I, chaps. III-VII; and
Bourne's _Spain in America_, chaps, VI-IX. An admirable account of the
activities of English seamen in the sixteenth century is given by Walter
Raleigh in volume XII of his edition of Hakluyt's _Voyages_. An
interesting contemporary narrative of Drake's voyage around the world is
in Hakluyt's _Voyages_ (Raleigh ed.), XI, pp. 101-33. Hakluyt's
_Discourse on Western Plantinge_ is in the Maine Historical Society
Collections, series II, vol. II. For the rise of the chartered trading
companies, and their connection with early American colonizing
companies, see Cheyney's _Background of American History_, chaps.
VII-VIII. The best disc