A delegation of four ministers called on Governor Dinwiddie to urge him to veto the bill. But Dinwiddie, who was begging for funds and troops, had no stomach for a conflict with the Assembly over this affair. "What can I do?" he told them. "If I refuse to approve the act, I shall have the people on my back." So he signed the bill.
Unwilling to let the matter rest here, ten of the ministers, among them the Reverend Patrick Henry, uncle of the statesman, appealed to the Bishop of London. The unjust Two-penny Act would lower them in the eyes of the people, it would discourage them in the discharge of their duty. And, to clinch their argument, they pointed out that their cause was also the cause of the King. "Our salaries have had the royal assent and cannot be taken from us or diminished in any respect by any law made here without trampling upon the royal prerogative."[7]
Three years later, when again there was a "prodigious dimunition" in the tobacco crop, the Assembly acted to give relief to debtors and taxpayers by again making obligations payable in money at tuppence a pound. This time the clergy made no appeal to the Burgesses, but Commissary Dawson, John Camm, and Thomas Robinson went to the Palace to urge Fauquier to veto the bill. Note that it has no suspending clause, they said. Note that it alters a bill to which the King gave his assent. If you let it pass, will you not be ignoring your instructions?[8]
But Fauquier was as much in need of funds as Dinwiddie had been. He answered that that was not the point to be considered. What was important was what would please the people. So he gave the act his approval. "The bill was a temporary law to ease the people from a burden which the country thought too great for them to bear," he wrote the Lords of Trade. "A suspending clause would have been to all intents and purposes the same as rejecting it.... The country were intent upon it ... and I conceived it would be a very strong step for me to take ... to set my face against the whole colony.... I am persuaded that if I had refused it, I must have despaired of our gaining any influence either in the Council or the House of Burgesses."[9]
But the clergy were determined to bring the matter to an issue. Commissary Dawson advised caution, but pressure from other ministers forced him to call a convention. When they met they not only vented their indignation in many denunciations of the Two-penny Act, but drew up an address to the King entitled "The Representation of the Clergy." In it they hammered on the point that their cause was his cause. The act was as injurious to the royal prerogative as to the rights of the Church. "It gives us great concern that an ancient, standing law of this dominion, confirmed by the sanction of the royal assent, is no security to our livings."[10]