Not so passive the English. The weavers mutinied against their masters, and many were killed by the guards. The Livery of London rejected Sir Henry Banks, a senior Alderman, for Lord Mayor; and Beckford and Trecothick being returned by them to the Court of Aldermen, and the former having the majority was elected a second time. He excused himself on pretence of age, which was but turned of sixty, and infirmities which he had not. He was pressed again to accept, and peremptorily refused the office; but the Sheriffs, with a train of coaches, entreating him, at the request of the Livery, not to deny himself to their wishes, he at last yielded. The Livery then inquired what answer had been returned to their petition? The Aldermen, to soften them, replied, that none had been given, but his Majesty would undoubtedly consider of the most constitutional means of redressing their grievances. They next called for Lord Holland’s letter to the Lord Mayor, who produced it; adding, that he did not know how Lord Holland, as a gentleman, could account for publishing his (the Mayor’s) letter--as if it was justifiable to tax that lord in a public manner, without process or proofs, of embezzling millions; and unjustifiable in him, in his own defence, to print the Lord Mayor’s evasion, I might almost say disavowal, of the charge! Sinking under the aspersion and loads of abuse, Lord Holland retired to France on pretence of conducting thither his wife’s sister, Lady Cecilia Lenox, who was dying, and died there, of a consumption. The City, as if he had fled from the charge, instructed their Members to endeavour a parliamentary inquiry into his conduct, and to impeach him if matter were found--but it came to nothing; and their silence cleared him.
The Marquis of Rockingham and the Cavendishes had kept aloof from the factious meetings of the rest of the Opposition, and given no countenance to the spirit of petitioning, which had now gained Hereford, Newcastle, and the counties of Gloucester and Cornwall. The Duke of Richmond, who was in France, where I was too, told me with satisfaction that his friends had resisted an example so inconsistent with the principles of liberty as appealing to the Crown against the House of Commons. Their resistance, however, was not stubborn enough to hold out against popularity, and the arts of a man who meant nothing less than to assert the constitution, and who made use of the grievance complained of to force the Crown to employ him, lucratively to himself, in every attack it meditated against the constitution. This was Alexander Wedderburne, whose name will be read with horror when this transaction is remembered, and compared with a change of conduct as sudden as the former, and as diametrically opposite to this parenthesis of affected zeal for liberty, and attended by the share he bore in lighting up a civil war, the view of which was to enslave America. Edmund Burke, too, had perhaps some influence in seducing the Whig lords into adoption of the popular measure. Not content with Lord Rockingham’s feeble politics, and hoping better from the union of the three brothers, he concerted with them the petition for Buckinghamshire; and he, Grenville, and Wedderburne drew another for Yorkshire, the ablest of all those performances; and the Marquis, the Cavendishes, and the worthy Sir George Saville, promoted that and another from Derbyshire. A patriot remonstrance composed by an Irishman born a papist, and by a Scottish creature of Lord Bute, was deservedly ridiculed.