thou wilt]. The "monks" were said by some to have performed obscene parodies of Christian rites, as well as orgies of drunkenness and debauchery in which Dashwood was said to have used a communion cup to pour out libations to heathen deities. These details, possibly embellished, were described in a contemporary novel by the Anglo-Irish satirist Charles Johnstone. Dashwood was approaching fifty, and thus ten years older than Thomas Potter whom Almon describes as the worst of the set and the corrupter of Wilkes; he was nearly twenty years older than Wilkes, and two years older than "the aged Paul" (Whitehead), who acted as secretary and steward of the order, and was branded by the satirist Charles Churchill as "a disgrace to manhood". As a contrast to Medmenham Abbey, Dashwood erected a church on a neighbouring hill, which, as Churchill put it in "The Ghost", might "serve for show, if not for prayer", and Wilkes was equally caustic in his references to Dashwood's church "built on the top of a hill for the convenience and devotion of the town at the bottom of it". Later political career On 15 April 1754 Dashwood was re-elected to parliament for New Romney, and when the Buckinghamshire militia was raised on the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1757, Dashwood became its first colonel with Wilkes as his lieutenant colonel. In the same year, he made a praiseworthy effort to save the life of Admiral John Byng. On 28 March 1761, he found a new seat in Parliament for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis (UK Parliament constituency); he was re-elected on 9 June 1762 on his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer, which he owed to his dependence upon Bute. "Of financial knowledge he did not possess the rudiments, and his ignorance was all the more conspicuous from the great financial ability of his predecessor Legge. His budget speech was so confused and incapable that it was received with shouts of laughter. An excise of four shillings in the hogshead, to be paid by the grower, which he imposed on cider and perry, raised a resistance through the cider counties hardly less furious than that which had been directed against the excise scheme of Walpole". Dashwood accordingly retired with Bute from the ministry on 8 April 1763, receiving the sinecure Keepership of the Wardrobe. On 19 April he was summoned to Parliament as 11th