first, Jamestown, Virginia, which had been settled in 1607). Bermuda was administered under Royal charters by the Virginia Company, and its successor, the Somers Isles Company, which appointed the colony's governors until the Crown revoked the charter and took over administration in 1684. With the transfer to the Somers Isles Company in 1615, Sir Thomas Smith remained in England as Governor and Treasurer of Bermuda, and Captain Daniel Tucker was sent to Bermuda in 1616 aboard the George, in consort with the Edwin, to succeed Moore as Deputy Governor. Twenty-four Assistants were also appointed. By the 1630s, the Somers Isles Company had ceased sending Governors to Bermuda and had begun appointing prominent Bermudians, such as William Sayle, to the position. The Crown maintained the system of government established under the company; an elected parliament (originally a single House of Assembly, which held is first session in 1620) which held its and a privy council under a governor. The Privy Council, made up of the chief justice, certain senior civil servants, and appointees, was also known as the Governor's Council and the Legislative Council (most of its responsibilities are now filled by the Cabinet and the Senate of Bermuda, with the council now only an advisory body for the governor). The last company-appointed governor was reappointed by the Crown. In 1707 the British state was created by the union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland, and Bermuda thereby became a British colony. Since the 1783 independence of Virginia, it has been Britain's oldest colony. Following US independence, Bermuda became an imperial fortress, with an important Royal Navy base and a large military garrison to guard it. As such, the policy of the government until the 1950s, when the Royal Naval Dockyard was reduced to a base (in 1951) leading to the final closure of the regular army's Bermuda Garrison in 1957, had been to appoint (often retiring) senior military (or occasionally naval) officers as Bermuda's governor and commander-in-chief. On the rare occasions when a civilian was appointed to the role, it was only as governor – with operational command of the garrison in the hands of the senior lieutenant-colonel in Bermuda, who was appointed brigadier and subordinate to a military commander elsewhere. Since the 1964, those appointed governor and commander-in-chief have tended to be prominent career-politicians at the ends of their political lives. Prior to the creation