At the close of the session, after the Governor's speech proroguing them, the Burgesses refused to budge from their seats until they had passed still another resolution which breathed the spirit of revolution: "That whoever shall hereafter pay a pistole as a fee to the Governor for the use of the seal to patents for land shall be deemed a betrayer of the rights and privileges of the people." This Dinwiddie thought tended to "sowing sedition and rebellion among the people."[9] In the meanwhile, the Burgesses had drawn up the address to the King and appointed Attorney General Peyton Randolph their agent to take it to England. To defray his expenses and pay him for his services, they voted him L2,500 out of the funds in the hands of the Treasurer. When this came before the Council, they rejected it. The Treasurer then declared that he would pay the money without their consent, but he refrained when the Governor told him it would not be allowed in his accounts. "I am sorry to find them very much in a republican way of thinking," Dinwiddie wrote to the Earl of Halifax, "and indeed they do not act in a proper constitutional way, but making encroachments on the prerogative of the Crown, which some former Governor submitted too much to them, and I fear without a very particular instruction it will be difficult to bring them in order."[10] When Randolph asked Dinwiddie for permission to go to England, he met with a prompt refusal. "You have not acted agreeable to your duty and your office," he told him. When Randolph insisted upon going, the Governor assumed that he had vacated his office and appointed George Wythe Attorney General in his place.[11] Soon after Randolph's arrival in England articles began to appear in the gazettes intended to arouse sentiment against the pistole fee, which Dinwiddie wrongly attributed to him. The fee was no less than a tax levied on the people without their consent, they said. Foreign Protestants and others were leaving the colony rather than pay it. To this Dinwiddie replied that any thinking man could distinguish between a fee and a tax. And he denied flatly that one person had left Virginia to avoid the pistole fee.[12] But he was sorry that the affair had made so much noise in the English coffee houses. The Board of Trade considered the pistole dispute most inopportune. At a time when the French were challenging the right of Great Britain to the vast trans-Allegheny region, it was unfortunate that the Governor should have aroused the bitter resentment of the Assembly. "It is necessary that harmony and mutual confidence be established between the Governors and people in all the colonies," they wrote, "but especially in Virginia, on the frontier of which the French are carrying on their encroachments."[13]