The Burgesses were indignant. In an address of historic significance they told Dinwiddie "in the strongest terms" that it was their undoubted right to enquire into the grievances of the people. To question it was to threaten the liberties of his Majesty's subjects and the constitution of the government. "The rights of the subject are so secured by law that they cannot be deprived of the least part of their property but by their own consent. Upon this excellent principle is our constitution founded, and ever since this colony has had the happiness of being under the immediate protection of the Crown the royal declarations have been: 'That no man's life, member, freehold, or goods be taken away or harmed but by established and known laws.'"[5]
Well would it have been if the King and his advisers had pondered well this declaration when it came before them, for it gave in unmistakable language the principle in defense of which the American Revolution was fought. And it would have been well for Dinwiddie had he bowed to the wishes of the Burgesses at a time when their cooperation was needed to save the British colonies from French aggression.
But in the meanwhile he had placed the matter before the Board of Trade, and the Board had asked the opinion of Attorney General Sir Dudley Ryder.[6] When Dinwiddie received word that Sir Dudley thought the assent of the Assembly unnecessary, he was resolved not to yield. The fee relates solely to the disposal of the King's lands, he told the Burgesses, which is a matter of favor from the Crown.
The Governor's plea that the fee was necessary in order to bring thousands of occupied, but unpatented acres, under the rent roll seems to have been an afterthought. "On my arrival I found in the Secretary's office a list of lands taken up near 1,000,000 acres, which, most of them, should have been patented," he wrote the Board of Trade, "which is an annual loss to the quit rents."[7] But he did not explain how the charging of a pistole fee would have been an incentive to the holders of these lands to have them patented.
The Burgesses were by this time thoroughly aroused. The Governor said it was only "some hotheaded young men" who had stirred up all the trouble, but when it was resolved that his answer was unsatisfactory, there was not one dissenting voice. The demand for the fee, they insisted, was illegal and arbitrary, contrary to the charters of the colony, to King William's express order, and tending to the subversion of laws and constitution. They were determined to place the matter before the King in a "dutiful and loyal address."[8]
At the close of the session, after the Governor's speech proroguing them, the Burgesses refused to budge from their seats until they had passed still another resolution which breathed the spirit of revolution: "That whoever shall hereafter pay a pistole as a fee to the Governor for the use of the seal to patents for land shall be deemed a betrayer of the rights and privileges of the people." This Dinwiddie thought tended to "sowing sedition and rebellion among the people."[9]
In the meanwhile, the Burgesses had drawn up the address to the King and appointed Attorney General Peyton Randolph their agent to take it to England. To defray his expenses and pay him for his services, they voted him £2,500 out of the funds in the hands of the Treasurer. When this came before the Council, they rejected it. The Treasurer then declared that he would pay the money without their consent, but he refrained when the Governor told him it would not be allowed in his accounts.
"I am sorry to find them very much in a republican way of thinking," Dinwiddie wrote to the Earl of Halifax, "and indeed they do not act in a proper constitutional way, but making encroachments on the prerogative of the Crown, which some former Governor submitted too much to them, and I fear without a very particular instruction it will be difficult to bring them in order."[10]
When Randolph asked Dinwiddie for permission to go to England, he met with a prompt refusal. "You have not acted agreeable to your duty and your office," he told him. When Randolph insisted upon going, the Governor assumed that he had vacated his office and appointed George Wythe Attorney General in his place.[11]
Soon after Randolph's arrival in England articles began to appear in the gazettes intended to arouse sentiment against the pistole fee, which Dinwiddie wrongly attributed to him. The fee was no less than a tax levied on the people without their consent, they said. Foreign Protestants and others were leaving the colony rather than pay it. To this Dinwiddie replied that any thinking man could distinguish between a fee and a tax. And he denied flatly that one person had left Virginia to avoid the pistole fee.[12] But he was sorry that the affair had made so much noise in the English coffee houses.