Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years (1761-63).  In 1763 Hamilton, who had found him an invaluable auxiliary, procured for him, principally with the aid of the Primate Stone, a pension of three hundred pounds a year from the Irish Treasury.  In thanking him for this service, Burke proceeded to bargain that the obligation should not bind him to give to his patron the whole of his time.  He insisted on being left with a discreet liberty to continue a little work which he had as a rent-charge upon his thoughts.  Whatever advantages he had acquired, he says, had been due to literary reputation, and he could only hope for a continuance of such advantages on condition of doing something to keep the same reputation alive.  What this literary design was, we do not know with certainty.  It is believed to have been a history of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains.  Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to Hamilton.  With an irrational stubbornness, that may well astound us when we think of the noble genius that he thus wished to confine to paltry personal duties, he persisted that Burke should bind himself to his service for life, and to the exclusion of other interests.  “To circumscribe my hopes,” cried Burke, “to give up even the possibility of liberty, to annihilate myself for ever!” He threw up the pension, which he had held for two years, and declined all further connection with Hamilton, whom he roundly described as an infamous scoundrel.  “Six of the best years of my life he took me from every pursuit of my literary reputation, or of improvement of my fortune....  In all this time you may easily conceive how much I felt at seeing myself left behind by almost all of my contemporaries.  There never was a season more favourable for any man who chose to enter into the career of public life; and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my own moral character and my industry, my friends and connections, when Mr. Hamilton first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior to those of several whose fortune is at this day upon a very different footing from mine.”

It was not long before a more important opening offered itself, which speedily brought Burke into the main stream of public life.  In the summer of 1765 a change of ministry took place.  It was the third since the king’s accession five years ago.  First, Pitt had been disgraced, and the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed.  Then Bute came into power, but Bute quailed before the storm of calumny and hate which his Scotch nationality, and the supposed source of his power over the king, had raised in every town in England.  After Lord Bute, George Grenville undertook the Government.  Before he had been many months in office, he had sown the seeds of war in the colonies, wearied Parliament, and disgusted the king.  In June 1765 Grenville was dismissed.  With profound reluctance the king had no other choice than to summon Lord Rockingham, and Lord Rockingham,