Early in 1765 the Stamp Act was introduced, and passed the House of Commons with but forty dissentients. The debate, Burke says, was extremely languid. Pitt, suffering from gout, was unable to be present, but Conway[6] and Beckford protested against the measure, and Barré[7], more far-seeing than most, denounced it in a startling speech, in which he referred to the colonists as "sons of liberty." "Children planted by your care!" he exclaimed. "No! your oppressions planted them in America; they fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country! They nourished by your indulgence! They grew by your neglect of them! They protected by your arms! They have nobly taken up arms in your defence." The Bill, which was to come into operation on November 1, passed the House of Lords without a division, and the Royal Assent was given on March 22. [6] Henry Seymour Conway (1721-1795), lieutenant-general 1759, general 1772, field-marshal 1793. [7] Colonel Isaac Barré (1726-1802). The question, however, was in England "little understood and less attended to";[8] and contemporary memoirs may be ransacked in vain for any reference thereto. Even Walpole, whose letters form so detailed a chronicle of events, dismissed it cavalierly. "There has been nothing of note in Parliament," he wrote to Lord Hertford on February 12, 1765, "but one slight day on the American taxes, which Charles Townshend supporting, received a pretty heavy thump from Barré, who is the present Pitt and the dread of all vociferous Norths and Rigbys, on whose lungs depended so much of Mr. Grenville's power." The fact of the matter was that England had not realized the importance of colonies, and practically nothing was known in the motherland of her possession. "I suppose you are violent for your American friends," Lady Sarah Bunbury, so late as July 6, 1775, wrote to Lady Susan O'Brien. "I hope they are good sort of people, but I don't love Presbyterians and I love the English soldiers, so that I at present have a horror of those who use them ill beyond the laws of war, which _scalping_ certainly is, and I don't believe a word of the soldiers doing more than they ought; you know one is always unreasonable when one's prejudiced."[9] [8] Horace Walpole: _Memoirs of George III_. [9] _Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox._