Assembly. To him Charles Townshend was a second and better Grenville. At the same time the relations between the East India Company and the mother-country were provisionally settled, but in a manner very different from what had been intended by Chatham, to whom "India now became a perpetual source of regrets."[1] A bill was introduced restraining the dividends, and the qualification for a Directorship was raised, but the vast territorial revenue was confirmed to the Company on condition of a payment of £400,000 per annum into the Treasury. Amongst the opponents of even these moderate proposals was Edmund Burke.[2]
Conway alone in a Cabinet held on March 13th expressed doubts of the expediency of the suspension of the legislative powers of the Assembly of New York.[3] Shelburne consented to it as part of a scheme which leaving the obnoxious Act to die a natural death, was to join firmness in the face of the opposition of a single province to conciliation towards a whole continent.[4] But finding his opinions on every other question overruled, and Chatham immediately afterwards retiring into solitude, he for some time ceased all further attendance at the meetings of his colleagues, and decided to devote himself to neutralizing the disastrous effects which could not fail to flow from their policy,[5] so far as he was able to do so in his executive capacity as Secretary of State.
The Ministers at the bidding of an imperious colleague and the King had decided on the measures just described; but they could not fail to be conscious of the precariousness of the position which they themselves occupied. Conway and Camden in their hearts were averse to the schemes of Townshend; Northington, rich if not in honours at least in emoluments, was anxious to retire; Grafton, now first minister owing to the illness of Chatham
- ↑ Chatham to Shelburne, March 6th, 1774.
- ↑ Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George III., ii. 436.
- ↑ Shelburne to Chatham, March 12th, 1767.
- ↑ See paper quoted above, p. 318, and Parliamentary History, xvi. 966.
- ↑ Shelburne to Chatham, February 3rd, 1774. During 1767 and 1768, as afterwards in 1782 and 1783, Shelburne kept a record of the Cabinet Councils he attended. See too Part. Hist. xviii. 276, 1221; Grenville Correspondence, iv. 364, 371.
