[3] In 1760, upon entering the Army, he led a mounted light infantry regiment called the Royal Foresters under the command of John Manners, Marquess of Granby.

[4][page needed] In 1763 he travelled for a while on the Continent and in 1764 at Lausanne, Switzerland he became close friends with the writer and historian Edward Gibbon, later the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The pamphlet Observations on the Commerce of the American States (Dublin, 1783), which ran six editions, made a comparative analysis of export and import calendar between two countries.

The Observations was written in opposition to the bill introduced by William Pitt in 1783, proposing to relax the navigation laws in favour of the United States.

[10] Edward Gibbon later said that in the Observations, "[t]he Navigation act, the Palladium of Britain, was defended, and perhaps saved, by his pen; and he proves, by the weight of fact and argument, that the mother-country may survive and flourish after the loss of America".

[11] In 1790, he published Observations on the Project for Abolishing the Slave Trade, in which he took a conservative position on the debate over abolitionism, condemning the "inconsiderate and impracticable manner in which a great proportion of the community profess a disposition to relieve Negroes from slavery."

Fearful of interfering with the right of enslavers to their human "property", he claimed that "nothing is more vain and empty than the idea that the British Legislature could immediately abolish slavery", and commended what he perceived as the "disposition shewn by the West-Indian assemblies to do everything that might be suggested for the advantage of the Negroes.

He continued with Remarks on the Deficiency of the Grain; on the means of Present Relief, and of Future Plenty (London, 1800) where he expressed his displease on attacks against farmers on the suspicions that they are keeping the finest flour for themselves.

He also asserted in his pamphlet that having rich farmers is of an utmost benefit to the society because they improve agriculture and keep the stocks of grain without too much stress to the public.

At a speech delivered in the House of Commons on 30 July 1801 he criticised the large sum they paid for importation of grain from foreign countries that arose from scarcity of grain and might result to creating a "dangerous policy of feeding the people at the public expense" (The Annual Biography and Obituary, Volume 6, 1822) In 1803 he served as the President of the Board of Agriculture and, as a farmer himself, was considered as an authority in matters of land cultivation.

An example is his conservative stance on the abolition of slavery, where he commented on slave trade reformers that "not one of them had the candour to come forward and say, that those whose property was to be sacrificed in this pursuit should have any compensation whatever for their losses.