The colonists began to betake themselves to domestic manufactures; and foreign luxuries were laid aside. In the mean while a change had taken place in the British ministry; the stamp act was reconsidered in parliament; Dr. Franklin was examined at the bar of the house of commons. Lord Camden, in the house of lords, and Mr. Pitt, in the commons, favored a repeal of the act; and, after providing for the dependence of America on Great Britain, parliament repealed the stamp act in March, 1766. On the second day of May news of the repeal reached Williamsburg by the ship Lord Baltimore, arrived in York River, from London. The joyful intelligence was celebrated at Norfolk; and at Williamsburg by a ball and illumination.
At the session of November, 1766, Mr. John Robinson, who had for many years held the offices of speaker and treasurer, being now dead, an investigation of his accounts exposed an enormous defalcation. A motion to separate the offices, brought forward by Richard Henry Lee, and supported by Mr. Henry, proved successful. Edmund Pendleton was at the head of the party that resisted it.[545:A]
Mr. Lee on this occasion pursued his course in opposition to the confederacy of the great in place, the influence of family connections, and that still more dangerous foe to public virtue, private friendship. The contest appears to have been bitter, and it engendered animosities which survived the lapse of years and the absorbing scenes of the outbreaking Revolution.
A fragment of the speech delivered by Mr. Lee on this occasion has been preserved.[545:B] After supporting his views by historical examples, he remarks: "If, then, wise and good men in all ages have deemed it for the security of liberty to divide places of power and profit; if this maxim has not been departed from without either injury or destroying freedom—as happened to Rome with her decemvirs and her dictator—why should Virginia so early quit the paths of wisdom, and seal her own ruin, as far as she can do it, by uniting in one person the only two great places in the power of her assembly to bestow?" The fragment of this speech ends just where Mr. Lee was about to combat the arguments in support of the union of the two offices. Among these arguments were, that innovation is dangerous; that the additional office of treasurer was necessary to give the speaker that pre-eminence that is befitting his station; that the parliamentary powers of the speaker give the chair no influence, as in the exercise thereof in pleasing one he may offend a dozen; that a separation of the offices might induce the government at home to take the appointment out of their hands altogether; and that the support of the dignity of the chair necessarily involved a great expense.
It could not have been difficult to refute these arguments. The combination of the offices of speaker and treasurer was itself an innovation of as recent date as 1738. The speaker of the English house of commons did not find the office of treasurer necessary to maintain his dignity. If the office of speaker of itself gave no influence, why had it been always sought for? Nor could the separation of the offices induce the home government to take the appointments from the assembly, for that separation was itself virtually a government measure. Chalmers, who was well versed in the documentary history of the colonies, says: "Too attentive to overlook the dangerous pre-eminence of Robinson, the board of trade took this opportunity to enjoin [1758] the new governor[546:A] to use every rational endeavor to procure a separation of the conjoined offices which he improperly held."[546:B] Lee, Henry, and others, who voted for the separation, were in effect carrying out the wishes of the English government. Nor does it appear probable that the government was any more favorable to the loan-office scheme than to the union of the offices of speaker and treasurer.
Upon the death of Speaker Robinson, Richard Bland was a candidate for the chair, and was in favor of a separation of the offices of speaker and treasurer. He, in the latter part of May, entertained no suspicion of any malversation in office on the part of the late treasurer, although he was aware that such suspicions prevailed much among the people. He was at this time maturing a scheme for a loan-office, or government bank, which he thought would be of signal advantage, and would in a few years enable Virginia to discharge her debts without any tax for the future. It is singular that he should have been preparing to renew a scheme so recently defeated. Whether he ever again revived it in the assembly, does not appear. Robert Carter Nicholas, at the same time a candidate for the place of treasurer, was likewise in favor of a disjunction of the two offices. To this position he and Bland were brought, as well by the inducements of personal promotion as by a regard for the public good.
Peyton Randolph was made speaker; and Mr. Nicholas, who had been already appointed in May treasurer ad interim, by Governor Fauquier, was elected to that post by the assembly.
Lewis Burwell, George Wythe, John Blair, Jr., John Randolph, and Benjamin Waller were appointed to examine the state of the treasury. The deficit of the late treasurer exceeded one hundred thousand pounds. Mr. Robinson, amiable, liberal, and wealthy, had long been at the head of the aristocracy, and exerted an extraordinary influence in political affairs. He had lent large sums of the public money to friends involved in debt, especially to members of the assembly, confiding for its replacement upon his own ample fortune, and the securities taken on the loans. Mr. Wirt says that at length, apprehensive of a discovery of the deficit, he, with his friends in the assembly, devised the scheme of the loan-office the better to conceal it. The entire amount of the defalcation was eventually recovered from the estate of Robinson, which was sold in 1770 by Edmund Pendleton and Peter Lyons, surviving administrators.[547:A] Burk attributes Robinson's death to the mortification that he suffered on account of his defalcation. Bland and Nicholas, in their letters addressed to Richard Henry Lee, allude to it in terms of exquisite delicacy.
The first of the family of Speaker Robinson of whom we have any account was John Robinson, of Cleasby, Yorkshire, England. His son John was Bishop of Bristol, and British envoy at the court of Sweden; he was also British plenipotentiary at the treaty of Utrecht, being, it is said, the last divine employed in a service of that kind. He was afterwards Bishop of London, in which office he continued until his death in 1723. Leaving no issue he devised his real estate to his nephew, Christopher Robinson, who had settled on the Rappahannock. His eldest son, John Robinson, born in 1682, was president of the council. He married Catherine, daughter of Robert Beverley, the historian. John Robinson, Jr., their eldest son, was treasurer and speaker, and is commonly known as "Speaker Robinson."[548:A] He resided at Mount Pleasant, on the Matapony, in King and Queen, the house there having been built for him, it is said, by Augustine Moore, of Chelsea, in King William, father of Lucy Moore, one of his wives. Her portrait is preserved at Chelsea; his is preserved by his descendants. His other wife was Lucy Chiswell. He lies buried in the garden at Mount Pleasant.
