Charles Yorke was sworn in, at the early age of thirty-three, as
Solicitor-General, and retained that office through the elder Pitt's
glorious administration. In 1762 he accepted from Lord Bute the
Attorney-Generalship, in which position he had to deal with the
difficult questions of constitutional law raised by the publication of
John Wilkes's _North Briton_. In November of that year, however, he
resigned office in consequence of the strong pressure put upon him by
Pitt, and took leave of the King in tears. Pitt failed in his object of
enlisting Yorke's services on behalf of Wilkes in the coming
parliamentary campaign, and the crisis ended in an estrangement between
the two, which drove Yorke into a loose alliance with the Rockingham
Whigs, a group of statesmen who were determined to free English politics
from the trammels of court influence and the baser traditions of the
party system. When, however, this party came into power in 1765, Yorke
was disappointed of the anticipated offer of the Great Seal, and only
reluctantly accepted the Attorney-Generalship. The ministry fell in the
following year, partly in consequence of Pitt's reappearance in the
House of Commons and his disastrous refusal of Rockingham's invitation
to join his Government, though they were agreed on most of the important
questions of the day, including that of American taxation and the repeal
of the Stamp Act; and Pitt, who then (August 1766) became Lord Chatham,
was commissioned to form a new government in which, to Yorke's
mortification, he offered the Lord Chancellorship to Camden. Yorke
thereupon resigned the Attorney-Generalship, and during the devious
course of the ill-starred combination under Chatham's nominal
leadership--for during the next two years Chatham was absolutely
incapacitated from all attention to business, his policy was reversed by
his colleagues, and America taxed by Charles Townshend--he maintained an
'attitude of saturnine reserve,' amusing himself with landscape
gardening at his villa at Highgate, doing its honours to Warburton,