On the formation of a government by the Duke of Devonshire in 1756, Charles Yorke was sworn in, at the early age of thirty-three, as Solicitor-General, and retained that office through the elder Pitt's glorious administration. In 1762 he accepted from Lord Bute the Attorney-Generalship, in which position he had to deal with the difficult questions of constitutional law raised by the publication of John Wilkes's _North Briton_. In November of that year, however, he resigned office in consequence of the strong pressure put upon him by Pitt, and took leave of the King in tears. Pitt failed in his object of enlisting Yorke's services on behalf of Wilkes in the coming parliamentary campaign, and the crisis ended in an estrangement between the two, which drove Yorke into a loose alliance with the Rockingham Whigs, a group of statesmen who were determined to free English politics from the trammels of court influence and the baser traditions of the party system. When, however, this party came into power in 1765, Yorke was disappointed of the anticipated offer of the Great Seal, and only reluctantly accepted the Attorney-Generalship. The ministry fell in the following year, partly in consequence of Pitt's reappearance in the House of Commons and his disastrous refusal of Rockingham's invitation to join his Government, though they were agreed on most of the important questions of the day, including that of American taxation and the repeal of the Stamp Act; and Pitt, who then (August 1766) became Lord Chatham, was commissioned to form a new government in which, to Yorke's mortification, he offered the Lord Chancellorship to Camden. Yorke thereupon resigned the Attorney-Generalship, and during the devious course of the ill-starred combination under Chatham's nominal leadership--for during the next two years Chatham was absolutely incapacitated from all attention to business, his policy was reversed by his colleagues, and America taxed by Charles Townshend--he maintained an 'attitude of saturnine reserve,' amusing himself with landscape gardening at his villa at Highgate, doing its honours to Warburton, Hurd, Garrick and other friends, and corresponding among others with Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, to whom he had been introduced by his brother Sir Joseph. Gradually, however, Chatham made a recovery from the mental disease under which he had been labouring, and in January 1770 he returned to the political arena with two vigorous speeches in the House of Lords. His first speech spread consternation among the members of the Government and the King's party, led by the Duke of Grafton, who had assumed the duties of Prime Minister; and one of the first effects of his intervention was the resignation of Lord Camden, who had adhered to Chatham, and openly denounced the Duke of Grafton's arbitrary measures. This event placed the Court party in the utmost difficulty, and no lawyer of sufficient eminence was available for the post but Charles Yorke, who thus