On 5 April he sent Chatham a draft of the Address in which he argued for "entreating his Majesty to dismiss his Ministers, and withdraw his forces, by sea and land, from the revolted provinces...I am willing to hope that differences of opinion were more apparent than real, and arose only from want of opportunities to communicate and to explain.

"[3] Chatham replied in third person: "It is an unspeakable concern to him, to find himself under so wide a difference with the Duke of Richmond, as between the sovereignty and allegiance of America, that he despairs of bringing about successfully any honourable issue".

[4] Chatham was determined to answer Richmond's motion and so on 7 April he went to the House of Lords, swathed in flannels, supported by crutches and leaning on the arm of his 18-year-old son William Pitt the Younger.

Chatham then rose in his place: "He took one hand from his crutch and raised it, casting his eyes towards heaven...He appeared to be extremely feeble and spoke with that difficulty of utterance which is the characteristic of severe indisposition".

Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance.

Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon?

Copley positions Chatham beneath the tapestries depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada made by Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom.

Chatham's vision of the strength of the British Empire resting upon commercial expansion via the sea and his collapsing beneath the depiction of one of England's greatest naval victories are connected and symbolic.