Assembly have written me a letter, which I enclose to your Lordship. The governor writes short, but inveighing in general terms against the people.
A petition is at the same time come from New York, signed by two hundred and forty persons, to the House of Commons, and sent to the Board of Trade to present;[1] who have transmitted it to me, to know the King's pleasure upon it. I likewise find that when the last ships came away the Assembly had my letter under consideration; which your Lordship may remember was written after a Council, upon Sir Henry Moore's and General Gage's accounts of the difficulty made by the Assembly to provide the troops with vinegar and other articles, which Sir Jeffery Amherst's letters assure him they will not comply with, lest they should admit what might hereafter be deemed a precedent for a Tax Act.
I have only told the merchants in general that it was well known some of those who opposed the Stamp Act opposed it upon very extensive principles with regard to American trade, upon a supposition that the advantages of it must finally centre with the mother-country; that these objects could never be considered separate: to consider them together required not only great judgment and great power, but temper too; leaving it to them to judge how very imprudently the present moment was chosen, when on the one hand they saw how far the prejudices, about the Stamp Act still prevailed, and on the other an assembly imprudent enough to hesitate about obeying an Act of Parliament in its full extent, after the tenderness which had been shown America; not to mention their manner of sending it over. The merchants and the Americans here seem sensible of its being the height of imprudence, and are sorry; but your Lordship may easily conceive it has occasioned a number of reports, and is likely, in the talk of the town, to undergo the imputation of rebellion, and will probably be mentioned as such by Mr. Grenville in the House of Commons without seeing it.[2]Chatham replied by expressing a hope for better news, but the next mails from America confirmed the accounts of the resistance to the Mutiny Act at New York, of Massachusetts having joined a general indemnity for the rioters to the indemnification of the sufferers, and of the general distrust spread by the Declaratory Act, which made the Colonists, as Shelburne told Chatham in in-
