And the ministry which succeeded it had not been a year in office before the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townsend, revived the discontents in America which Lord Rockingham had appeased.

It cannot be said, however, that the blame should all belong to him; or that the Rockingham party in the House of Commons were entirely free from a share in it.
They were--not unnaturally, perhaps--greatly irritated at the intrigue by which Lord Chatham had superseded them, and were not disinclined to throw difficulties in the way of their successors, for which the events of the next year afforded more than one opportunity.

Lord Chatham, as has been mentioned, was universally recognized as the chief of the new ministry, though he abstained from taking the usual office of First Lord of the Treasury, and contented himself with the Privy Seal; but he had constructed it of such discordant elements[43] that no influence but his own could preserve consistency in its acts or harmony among its members, as nothing but his name could give it consideration either in Parliament or in the country.

In the first months of the next year, 1767, he was attacked with an illness which for a time disabled him from attending the cabinet, being, apparently, the forerunner of that more serious malady which, before the end of the summer, compelled his long retirement from public life; and the Opposition took advantage of the state of disorganization and weakness which his illness caused among his colleagues, to defeat them on the Budget in the House of Commons, by an amendment to reduce the land-tax, which caused a deficiency in the supplies of half a million.

This deficiency it, of course, became necessary to meet by some fresh tax; and Townsend--who, though endowed with great richness of eloquence, was of an imprudent, not to say rash, temper, and was possessed of too thorough a confidence in his own ingenuity and fertility of resource ever to be inclined to take into consideration any objections to which his schemes might be liable--proposed to raise a portion of the money which was needed by taxes on glass, paper, tea, and one or two other articles, to be paid as import duties in the American Colonies.