On February 10, 1775, Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer Frederick North “moved for leave” in Parliament to introduce “a Bill for putting the trade of America with England, Ireland, and the West Indies under temporary restrictions, and for restraining the refractory provinces from fishing on the banks of Newfoundland.” Dissenting heads of the British state who were among the first to read copies of the bill were very concerned. In the House of Commons, Sir John Griffin “after expressing his sincere wishes to see a happy conclusion put to the American disputes without bloodshed, declared, that upon reading the Bill, he felt himself alarmed, and was jealous that, if the greatest caution and delicacy was not to be used in perfecting the Bill, it would rather provoke than effect any good purpose.” When the bill made it to the House of Lords, peers such as Charles Prat, Earl of Camden, a Whig and the judge who acquitted John Wilkes, compared the Bill to other Parliamentary legislation aimed at America. Lord Camden found that other laws were “by no means so violent in their operations as this.” He believed that the bill “was at once declaring war [against the colonies], and beginning hostilities in Great Britain [i.e. the British Empire].”