nt. The
intent was good, the timing was wrong. Pitt, for reasons still somewhat
obscure, accepted a peerage and became Lord Chatham and opened the door
to cries of corruption and sell-out by the "Great Commoner." More
significantly, Chatham was trying to lead a ministry from the House of
Lords. He could not bring it off and sank deeper into that melancholia
which left him mentally incapacitated during much of his ministry's
short life.

[25] J. Steven Watson, THE REIGN OF GEORGE III (Oxford, 1960), 4.

American affairs fell into the hands of the brilliant, egotistical,
unstable, and ambitious Charles Townshend, whom Pitt called in as his
chancellor of the exchequer. Townshend was one of those junior
government officials who, during the French and Indian War, had
discovered the economic richness and maturity of the colonies and their
constitutional rebelliousness. He had opposed repeal and represented
the gradual infiltration of ministry positions by men who believe the
colonists should pay for their government in a manner which
forthrightly established parliamentary supremacy. In the 1750's he had
developed a plan to bring the colonies into check. Once given the
opportunity by Chatham, he seized it with enthusiasm. That opportunity
came with the huge deficit in American defense costs for 1766 and New
York's intransigent defiance of the Mutiny Act of 1765 (the Quartering
Act.)

The Revenue Act of 1767 (the Townshend Act) was a direct challenge to
colonial self-government and a true measure of the chancellor's
insensitivity and folly. Citing the supposed distinction between
"internal" and "external" taxes, a distinction which he, himself, did
not believe existed, Townshend proposed import duties on glass, paints,
lead, paper, and tea, of which only tea was a potential producer of any
real revenue. The funds from these import duties were assigned to pay
the salaries of colonial governors and other royal officials and were
not for defense expenditures. Had Townshend calculated a means for
arousing the ire of the colonists, he could not have chosen a better
device. It was an injustice that Townshend died suddenly before he had
to wrestle with the consequence of his actions.

By 1769 Chatham finally realized he could not longer govern and
resigned the government to his hero-worshipping follower, the Duke of
Grafton, ostensibly over the decision of Chatham's own ministers to
dismiss General Jeffrey Amherst as titula