The Marquis of Rockingham and the Cavendishes had kept aloof from the factious meetings of the rest of the Opposition, and given no countenance to the spirit of petitioning, which had now gained Hereford, Newcastle, and the counties of Gloucester and Cornwall. The Duke of Richmond, who was in France, where I was too, told me with satisfaction that his friends had resisted an example so inconsistent with the principles of liberty as appealing to the Crown against the House of Commons. Their resistance, however, was not stubborn enough to hold out against popularity, and the arts of a man who meant nothing less than to assert the constitution, and who made use of the grievance complained of to force the Crown to employ him, lucratively to himself, in every attack it meditated against the constitution. This was Alexander Wedderburne, whose name will be read with horror when this transaction is remembered, and compared with a change of conduct as sudden as the former, and as diametrically opposite to this parenthesis of affected zeal for liberty, and attended by the share he bore in lighting up a civil war, the view of which was to enslave America. Edmund Burke, too, had perhaps some influence in seducing the Whig lords into adoption of the popular measure. Not content with Lord Rockingham’s feeble politics, and hoping better from the union of the three brothers, he concerted with them the petition for Buckinghamshire; and he, Grenville, and Wedderburne drew another for Yorkshire, the ablest of all those performances; and the Marquis, the Cavendishes, and the worthy Sir George Saville, promoted that and another from Derbyshire. A patriot remonstrance composed by an Irishman born a papist, and by a Scottish creature of Lord Bute, was deservedly ridiculed.