In America, the Massachusetts Assembly sent a letter to other colony assemblies, proposing united opposition to the Townshend Acts. Hillsborough demanded that they rescind their action or dissolve. The Assembly refused, and was backed by the other colonies. In October 1768, the British sent eight ships of war to try to compel Boston to pay the import taxes. Other ships followed. By one estimate the extra military expenses that year were five thousand times the amount which the Townshend Acts produced in revenue. Franklin had judged their stupidity rightly. In the midst of the American protests against these acts, he was entertained by the Lord Chancellor Lord Bathurst and Lady Bathurst. He brought them a gift of American nuts and apples. With an irony that his lordship could not have missed, he prayed them to accept his present “as a tribute from the country, small indeed but voluntary.” The nuts and apples had come from Debby, who also sent him such American products as corn meal, buckwheat flour, cranberries and dried peaches. That year young Christian VII of Denmark visited England, and insisted that Franklin dine with him at St. James. He would not have been human had he not recalled the proverb of Solomon which his father had so frequently quoted in his childhood. Now he had not only stood before one king, Louis XV, he had sat down with a second. There would be others. The English tried for two more years to make the colonists pay duties they did not want to pay. At last, on March 5, 1770, Parliament voted unanimously to repeal all of them but the tax on tea. Franklin commented dryly that repealing only part of the duties was as bad surgery as to leave splinters in a wound “which must prevent its healing.” In Boston on that same day a squad of British soldiers fired into a crowd which had been pelting them with snowballs—killing five and wounding six. The “Boston Massacre” became a _cause célèbre_. Bloodshed had been added to the other colony grievances. The next summer Franklin visited Ireland. In Dublin, he attended two sessions of the Irish Parliament. The Speaker introduced him as “an American gentleman of distinguished character and merit,” and he was given a place of honor. He noted that the Irish Parliamentarians were more cordial than their English counterparts, but was too astute not to realize they did not really represent their own people. Ireland, like America, had suffered under British oppressive measures, but more intensely and longer. The appalling misery of the Irish people was a moral lesson to him. He foresaw that if the colonists did not continue to insist on their rights, they would suffer the same wretched fate.