, as it happened, for the last time, he
sought the service of Shelburne as negotiator, and once more Shelburne,
undeterred by past experiences, undertook the difficult position. Pitt
nibbled, and for a time seemed about to bite, but in the end he drew off
unhooked; whereupon (at the beginning of September, 1763) Shelburne
immediately resigned the Board of Trade. What his real motive in taking
this step was, his own letters do not at all clearly show. Doubtless he
felt his uncordial relations with his colleagues irksome, but we can
also hardly doubt that the attraction Pitt was beginning to exercise
over him formed a material factor in his resolve. Freed from the
trammels of office, Shelburne boldly stood forward as an opponent of the
arbitrary and fatuous course which the Grenville ministry, all
subservience to the king's wishes, adopted in the miserable business of
Wilkes. Jeremy Bentham has said of Shelburne that he was the only
statesman he ever heard of who did not fear the people. Certainly,
Shelburne on this occasion showed, with an unmistakableness that simply
infuriated George III., that he did not fear the court. The king made no
secret of his displeasure. He dismissed the ex-minister even from his
post of royal _aide-de-camp_, and when he appeared at court snubbed him
pointedly by pretending not to notice his presence. Bute followed suit,
and from this time all intercourse between him and Shelburne ceased.

For upward of a year after these events Shelburne kept entirely aloof
from the world of politics, busying himself with the management of his
estates in the country, collecting a vast number of historical documents
(which are now in the British Museum), and every now and then coming up
to London to enjoy the society of the "young orators" (as Walpole calls
them) who frequented his house in Hill street, and the non-political
clubs of _litterateurs_. Benjamin Franklin was among his visitors at
this time, and the two, as Shelburne in a letter to Franklin nineteen
years afterward reminds him, "talked upon the means of promoting the
happiness of mankind."

But it was not in nature that a man of Shelburne's energetic and
practical temperament should long be content to remain in his tent when
a Grenville was afield with such (to say the least) debatable measures
as the taxation of the colonies and the Regency Bill inscribed upon his
banner. His marriage happening to occur just at the time when the famous
Stamp Act