The French and Indian War revealed much concerning conditions in the colonies which surprised and alarmed the Ministry. They had found it impossible to get the colonies to act in unison, they had defied the King's wishes repeatedly, the Governors were kept busy explaining why they had to disregard one instruction after another, they were disgusted at the pouring out of paper money, and they must have been influenced by the warnings that the Americans were too much of a republican way of thinking. The advice to have Parliament lay a general tax on the colonies had come, not only from Dinwiddie, but from various parts of America. The determination of the Ministry to follow this advice was based ostensibly on the reasonableness of requiring the colonies to bear their share of the burden of the expense of the war. It may be argued that Virginia and some of the others, because of the disruption of trade, the very heavy taxes, the devastation on the frontiers, and their heavy losses in men, had already paid more than their share. But that there was something deeper, more vital, behind the resolve to tax than a mere matter of finance, is obvious. It was a demonstration of policy, a manifesto that Great Britain was determined to govern her colonies. When word reached America that the Ministry planned to tax the colonies by a stamp Act, there was general dismay. There were many grave faces among the Burgesses as they took their seats in November, 1764. Some of the ablest men in Virginia, among them Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, and Richard Henry Lee, drew up a protest to the King and Parliament. They begged the King to protect the people of the colony in the enjoyment of their ancient right of being governed in internal affairs by laws derived from their own consent, with the approbation of their sovereign or his substitute. This right, as men and descendants of Britons, they had possessed ever since they left the mother kingdom to extend its commerce and dominion. To the House of Lords they pointed out that, as their ancestors had brought with them to America every right and privilege they could claim in the mother kingdom, their descendants could not justly be deprived of them. It was a fundamental principle of the British Constitution, without which freedom could nowhere exist, that the people are not subject to any taxes except by their own consent or by those who were legally appointed to represent them. They reminded the Commons that this principle had been recognized ever since the founding of the colony. During the reign of Charles II, when the British Government sought a revenue to support the government of Virginia, they had tacitly admitted that Parliament had no right to levy the tax. Instead they drew up a bill in England and sent it over to be acted on by the Assembly.[38]