As soon as the king's health allowed of Parliament resuming its ordinary course of business Pitt consented to remit the Shop Tax, which had caused so much bad feeling in the city. Scarcely was this done, however, before he again gave umbrage to the citizens by a proposal to transfer the duty on tobacco from the customs to the excise. Walpole had endeavoured to carry out a similar change in 1733, but the opposition he met with was so overpowering that he was obliged to give way. Pitt was more successful. The City withstood his Bill, as it had withstood Walpole's, but in spite of all opposition Pitt's Bill passed, and all subsequent efforts to get it repealed proved futile.[547] [Sidenote: Negotiations for the removal of the Bank guard, 1788-1790.] The king's illness had interrupted negotiations that had been opened for the withdrawal of the guard of soldiers that had been accustomed ever since the Gordon riots, to pass through the city daily for the purpose of protecting the Bank of England. In 1787 a citizen had complained to the Court of Aldermen of his having been pushed off the footway by soldiers of the guard passing to the Bank on the evening of the 5th July; and the Court had thereupon instructed the lord mayor to request the secretary at war to give such directions as he might think proper that the guard might in future march in single file and not two abreast as they hitherto had done.[548] The secretary at war (Sir George Yonge) had replied that the lord mayor's suggestion would be likely to lead to great inconvenience; that he undertook to promise that the officers of the guards would for their part endeavour to conduct their detachments on the march in a quiet, decent and soldier-like manner, but that from representations that had been made to him by officers commanding the guards as to the treatment the detachments sometimes met with in their passage through the city, he felt bound to ask the lord mayor to take such steps as he might deem fit to prevent any cause of complaint arising in future on either side.[549] This letter had been referred to a committee, with instructions to report their opinion as to the best way of affording sufficient protection to the Bank and at the same time of avoiding the inconveniences complained of. The committee showed no haste in the matter, and it was not until the following May (1788) that they reported in favour of furnishing the Bank with a guard of the city's militia, in place of the detachment of foot guards. The Court of Aldermen on receiving this report wished to know what the directors of the Bank of England thought of the suggestion,[550] but all the answer they got was that if the existing mode of protecting the Bank were discontinued, the directors would not "put the city to the trouble of providing any other." The Court scarcely knew how to treat this answer. At length, after several adjournments, it resolved (21 Oct.) that