Few political clouds seemed less big with mischief than this storm, unnaturally conjured up, and little likely to last; for what principle of union could there be in common between the City of London and two or three distant counties whose apples were to be taxed? The spell, _excise_, was pronounced, but had lost its terrors. They who sounded loudest the alarm, neither were alarmed, nor expected to breathe much dread into others. But there was a frame of nerves more easily thrown into disorder; fear seized on the Favourite; he said, “We shall have thirty thousand men come down to St. James’s!” The assault that had been made on him the first day of the session had left a lasting impression; and he had showed, early in the reign, that fortitude was not a ruling ingredient in his composition. He had appointed himself a guard of bruisers the day of his attending the King into the City in 1761, when Mr. Pitt made his insolent parade thither at the same time. Now, bating the slight distemperature occasioned by the cider-tax, England seemed to be willingly, and submissively, prostrate at the Favourite’s feet. Would she have rebelled for a partial tax, after acquiescing in the peace? Fear does not calculate, but lumps apprehensions in the gross. The panic was taken, and on the 7th of April, to the surprise of mankind, it was notified that Lord Bute intended to resign the next day, and to retire for his health, not being able to go through the fatigue of business. It is true, that he had at times declared, that as soon as he had made the peace, he would quit his post; but few had heard the declaration, and fewer believed it. The Ministers knew nothing of his intention till the day before it was publicly notified; and Fox was so entirely out of the secret, that he reproached the Earl bitterly for leaving him in that ignorance and dilemma. The Favourite’s own speeches in Parliament expressing a wish of retirement had rather confirmed men in the opinion that he had no thoughts of it. No one act had had the least air of his giving up his power, nor had any measures been taken to replace him or carry on the present system; but the best comment on his behaviour at that moment was his subsequent conduct. The fondness he retained for power, his intrigues to preserve it, the confusion he helped to throw into almost every succeeding system, and his impotent and dark attempts to hang on the wheels of Government, which he only clogged, and to which he dreaded even being suspected of recommending drivers, all proved that neither virtue nor philosophy had the honour of dictating his retreat; but that fear, and fear only, was the immediate, inconsiderate, and precipitate cause of his resignation.[305]