The promotion of Lord Bottetort to the Government of Virginia had started a new difficulty. Sir Jeffery Amherst was their Governor. His eminent services and the rank of Commander-in-chief, which he had held in the American war, had placed him too high for residence in a single province. Yet the mutinous spirit of that Colony in particular required the presence of a Governor. Lord Hillsborough had hinted this necessity to Sir Jeffery, adding that if he did not choose to go thither, the King would give him a pension equal to that of Governor. Amherst had ever behaved with as much coolness and modesty as sense. His honour started at the word pension--yet not so fiercely but it was thought he would acquiesce; at least Lord Hillsborough, who had not so much delicacy, too lightly conceived the bargain struck, and too officiously to make his court, as Lord Bottetort was a favourite, named him Governor. The event was unfortunate to Amherst, whose wounded pride drew him into discovering too full a fund of vanity, self-interest, and vehement obstinacy. His first step was to resign his regiment. The next, on the Duke of Grafton’s trying to soften him, was to demand a peerage, a grant of the coal mines in America (which it was thought might produce thirty thousand pounds a-year more) and an American peerage, if any were bestowed. To the last the Duke replied at once, that the King had forbidden his naming a peerage for any man. Sir Jeffery’s intrinsic merit, the removal of him in favour of a Court tool, and his scorn of the pension, immediately presented him as a beloved victim to the Opposition. Lord Hillsborough in particular was acrimoniously pursued by the younger Burke in many publications. General Conway, a friend of Amherst, and who felt for him, undertook to reconcile the breach, and at last prevailed on him to accept as reparation a promise of the first vacant regiment, and a peerage when any peers should be made. Amherst stickled for having his brother included in the patent, but could not obtain it. At first he acquiesced and suffered Mr. Conway to acquaint the King with his acceptance of the terms; but in three days flew off again and insisted on his brother being in the patent. Conway urged that his own last words to him had been “Sir Jeffery, take notice your brother is not included in the peerage,” and showed him the impropriety of the pretension, the younger Amherst having neither services nor an estate to entitle him to such distinction. He now asked both an American and English peerage for himself and his brother, and it was not till after many conferences and fluctuations, that he at last submitted to the terms Conway had proposed.[128] Even before the affair was finally concluded, Conway himself was on the point of quitting the Court with equal disgust. The Duke of Grafton told him that it was not an absolute promise of a peerage, and that the King had only said that when any peers should