When the Franco-American alliance was announced, North was urging the king to invite Chatham to take office and to allow him to retire, and Shelburne was sounded as to the terms on which Chatham would come in. He replied that he would insist on "an entire new cabinet". George, who had unwillingly agreed to this negotiation, was prepared to accept any men of talent with a view of strengthening the existing ministry, but not of forming another in its place, or of changing its measures. He would not commission Chatham or any opposition leader to form a new ministry: "no advantage to this country nor personal danger to himself" would, he wrote to North, induce him to do so; he would rather "lose his crown". "No consideration in life," he wrote again, "shall make me stoop to the opposition;" he would not give himself up "to bondage". His determination has been pronounced equally criminal with the acts which brought Charles I. to the scaffold.[137] According to our present ideas he should certainly have been guided by the assurance of his first minister that the government was unequal to the situation, have accepted his resignation, and allowed his new ministers to act as they thought best. These duties, however, were not, as we have seen, so clearly settled in those days. The prime minister of our time was not then fully invented, and George's plan of personal government through ministers was not yet rejected by the country. He could still rely on the support of parliament. A proposal to request the king to dismiss his ministers was defeated at that very time by 263 to 113 in the commons and by 100 to 36 in the lords. Chatham's return to office would doubtless have been hailed with satisfaction by the nation. Yet, though a change in public sentiment with regard to the American war was beginning, and was soon to spread rapidly, the king's policy was still popular with the larger part of his subjects.[138] When therefore his conduct in March, 1778, is compared with that of Charles I. it should be remembered that George had parliament and the mass of the nation at his back.