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impatient with any adviser who dared to contradict him. Soon after Grenville’s appointment, the king was complaining, “When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me foran hour more.” At the end of each interview, the king spurred Grenville on his way, “It is late. Good morrow,Mr. Greenville. Good morrow, Mr. Greenville.” It was George’s small revenge never to call his prime minister by his right name.
    Grenville was dull but also dogged. The war had left England with a deep debt, and he was determined to reduce it. He began to entertain new ideas for raising revenue.

Patrick Henry opposing the Parsons’ Cause in Hanover Court House
    VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Henry
1763–64
    W HILE George Grenville was struggling with England’s debt in the autumn of 1763, the Reverend James Maury of Fredericksville, Virginia, was worrying over his family’s budget. Bostonians might have found Maury’s preoccupation with money unbecoming in a minister, but Virginians had a less exalted opinion of their clergy. The Church of England had been the established religion from the time the colony was first settled, and the law requiredVirginians to take communion twice a year in an Anglican church, although their attendance was rarely enforced. Ministers of other denominations who went to the capital at Williamsburg for a dispensation would be licensed to preach, and the Presbyterians accepted that restriction. Baptists, Methodists and Quakers refused on principle and could expect to be jailed or fined. Sometimes they had theirmeetings broken up by the sheriff or by aChurch of England clergyman leading a band of hostile neighbors.
    With the Anglican Church enjoying that monopoly, many of its parsons took their positions as sinecures and turned to worldly pleasure. They could be seen at horseraces and cock fights—not always sober—or playing backgammon, billiards and cards. They also went dancing. As one visitor put it, Virginians would dance or die. The current fancy was the jig, which had reached plantation ballrooms by way of the slave quarters.
    The Reverend Maury neither gambled nor danced. He eked out a living for his wife and his eleven children by teaching school. In daily life, he also made use of his classical education in naming his slaves—Clio, Cato, Ajax and Cicero. One of his brightest pupils, Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle County, had joined Maury’s classes in 1758, at the age of fifteen. Thomas’ father had died the previous year and left the boy a comfortable estate, but Thomas noticed that Pastor Maury was hard pressed. He seemed harassed by a lack of money and that he often complained about a recent law called the Two Penny Act.
    The act’s very name reminded Virginia’s clergymen that they were paid servants of the state. Throughout the colony, each town’s officials—or vestrymen—hired a minister and set his salary. Since the vestry were usually large plantation owners, they paid in tobacco. In 1748, the Virginia House of Burgesses had fixed a parson’s salary at sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco a year, and vestrymen who did not provide that amount could be sued for damages. After the king ratified the legislation, it had become a royal law that only the king himself could undo.
    But with the next bad crop, the legislators regretted their generosity. In 1755, and again three years later, they meddled with the quota. Instead of granting a parson the full sixteen thousand pounds—worth about four hundred pounds sterling in 1758—the Burgesses compelled him to accept Virginia’s depreciated paper money at the rate of twopence for every pound of tobacco. As a result, a clergyman was collecting only about one third of what the law had guaranteed him.
    Virginia’s parsons were not men to take consolation in the beatitudes; they sued. After one court awarded a parson double his regular pay in damages, the Reverend Maury filed a similar suit in the