Romney on 5 May. In Parliament he followed Samuel Sandys, 1st Baron Sandys and vehemently attacked Sir Robert Walpole, declaring that abroad he was looked upon with contempt. Walpole's fall made no difference to Dashwood's position, and as a courtier of Frederick Lewis he was in chronic opposition to all of George II's governments. In 1747 he introduced a poor-relief bill that recommended commissioning public works, such as the Hellfire Caves he later had excavated at West Wycombe Park, to combat unemployment, but it failed to pass. Dashwood was re-elected for New Romney on 26 June 1747, and in January 1751 made a rather ostentatious disavowal of Jacobitism, of which Andrew Stone and others of George, Prince of Wales household were suspected. At Leicester House Dashwood abetted the influence of George Bubb Dodington (Lord Melcombe), and opposed the Regency Bill of 15 May 1751. On 13 April 1749 he was created D.C.L. of Oxford University, and on 19 June 1746 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society The Hellfire Club Dashwood was too young to have been a member of the very first Hellfire Club founded by Philip, Duke of Wharton in 1719 and disbanded in 1721, but he and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich are alleged to have been members of a Hellfire Club that met at the George and Vulture Inn throughout the 1730s. It was again at the George and Vulture that in 1746 Dashwood founded the precursor of his own Hellfire Club, a group called the "Knights of St. Francis". This was a parody of a religious order, based on a pun upon his own Christian name and that of the medieval Italian saint. Apparently it was when he returned from one of his Grand Tours, around 1731, that Dashwood first had the idea of founding a parody of the Franciscan order. He had visited various monastic communities in Europe, "founded, as it were, in direct contradiction to Nature and Reason", and he thought that by founding "a burlesque Institution in the name of St Francis", he could prove the absurdity of such unnatural communities, by substituting "convivial gaiety, unrestrained hilarity, and social felicity [...] in lieu of the austerities and abstemiousness there practised." In 1752 he moved the group's headquarters to his family home in West Wycombe, holding the first meeting on Walpurgis Night (April 30). The group was now known as