new doctrine, dangerous to the royal authority and conducive to future breach 
o£ instructions. 503 
Fearful of the pitfalls of the law and unwilling to hazard all upon the outcome 
of Camm's cause, other suits had been instituted by the clergy in the 
inferior courts of the colony. The conduct of these suits was apparently handicapped 
by the reluctance of able counsel to plead the clerical cause and by the 
prejudicial conduct of Fauquier, as in White's suit, when providing copies of 
the disallowance at the various trials. 504 Cleric Thomas Warrington brought 
suit in the Elizabeth City County Court, but upon a special verdict the court 
as a matter of law adjudged the 1758 act valid. 505 Plaintiff appealed to the 
General Court with some hopes of success, but the appellate court refused to 
hear any further causes until Camm's appeal was determined. 508 The most 
publicized cause was that commenced by James Maury, preceptor of Thomas 
Jefferson and rector of Fredericksville parish, in the Hanover County Court in 
1763. In this cause the court adjudged the 1758 act to be "no law," sustaining 
a demurrer that the act, not having received the royal assent, did not have the 
force of law and that it had been declared null and void by the King in 
Council. But a jury summoned on a writ of inquiry to settle the damages 
brought in only one penny for the plaintiff. Although the evidence was uncontradicted 
that the tobacco commuted at £-/i6/S per hundred pounds had 
a market value of 50 shillings per hundred, the jury was swayed to this determination 
by the irrelevant rhetoric of young Patrick Henry. 507 This budding 
demagogue sought to show that the act of 1758 had every characteristic 
of a good law, that it was a law of general utility, and that it could not, consistently 
with an alleged original compact between the King and the people, 
be annulled by the King. 508 From this it was inferred that the King, by disallowing 
acts of a salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated 
into a tyrant and forfeited all rights to the obedience of his subjects 
609 Further strictures followed upon the unbecoming conduct of the 
503 p err y j o p. cit., 496. 
so* Ibid., 496. 
505 20 William and Mary College Quarterly, 
172-73. The versions of the trial given in 
Perry, op. cit., 496-97; Fulham Palace MSS, 
Va., Box 2, #132; Camm, A Review of the 
Rector Detected, 23-24, obscure the use of a 
special verdict. Fear of offending their superiors 
was stated to be the reason for this judicial 
ruling (Perry, op. cit., 513). Scott (The Constitutional 
Aspects of the "Parson's Cause," 
31 Pol. Sci. Quart. 566) places the trial in the 
York County Court. 
506 Perry, op. cit., 514. 
507 Ibid., 497; Memoirs of a Huguenot Family 
(ed. by A. Maury, 1853), 420; Wirt, Sketches 
of the Life and Character of Patrick. Henry, 
22. Cf. the accounts of the trial in I Henry, 
Patrick. Henry, Life, Corres. and Speeches, 
37-43; Camm, A Review of the Rector Detected, 
23. Reliance must be placed upon 
unofficial sources as the Hanover County Court 
records of this period have been destroyed. 
508 Maury, ed., Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, 
421. 
509 Ibid., 421; Perry, ed., Hist. Coll. Rel. Amer. 
Col. Church, Virginia, 497, 514; Fulham 
Palace MSS, Va., Box 2, #132.