Edward Smith, Governor in Chief of the Isle of Man, who held the government from London and spent much of it complaining about the Treasury's customs officer.

He was Governor in Chief, and he lived in London and came over only occasionally, so the resident authority was his Lieutenant-Governor's. Under the arrangement by which the two of them were appointed, one had to be on the Island, and when Smith asked Lord North for a period of absence in October 1783 North told him he must relieve Dawson first. In the same letter he asked for a chapel in Castle Rushen for the use of the troops barracked there, and for a royal portrait. He was already showing signs of the illness that brought his resignation, and the Duke of Atholl was appointed Governor in Chief on that resignation in 1793.

Charles Lutwidge was his standing grievance. Lutwidge had been put in by the Lords of the Treasury to enforce the anti-smuggling laws that came with the Revestment, and he had almost unchecked influence at the Treasury for years afterwards. Smith wrote in 1774 that he found the actions of the late Receiver General illegal and arbitrary every day. In the 1780s he was pressing that Lutwidge was dishonest and that his accounts should be audited, and in one letter he called Lutwidge's impunity a curse to the Isle of Man.

He kept the Governor's house for himself. Long afterwards the Duke of Atholl asserted that Governor Smith had always taken possession of the house on his arrival, and that Lieutenant-Governor Shaw had given it up to him in like manner.