The Crisis. Группа авторов
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by your
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Majesty’s Feeder LORD NORTH, under the provident Eye of your best Subjects, Bute and Mansfield. When these Fountains of Milk and Honey, cease to flow, your Majesty’s hired Majority will grow languid and relaps into what they once were, and ever will be, mere Dissemblers of patriotic Virtue, even your Sovereign Tool of all, who now audaciously plumes himself upon their Support, will then foreswear any further Attachment to them, or you. When your chief Agents Lord Bute and Mansfield are extinct, what must become of Ways and Means, Arbitrary Taxation, and most effectual Methods for carrying these pregnant Schemes into a daring Execution, by Sword and Famine. Your Angels, Bute and Mansfield are excellent at these Devices but their fervent Zeal for your Highness’s Cause has, at last transported them beyond the Bounds of Judgment. Call these winged Hell-hounds off in Time, great Sir, if you value the preservation of your despotic Power; and as you have hitherto played the Tyrant for your Pleasure, begin now to play the Hypocrite for your Safety. Should you permit these Scotch Imps of yours to proceed farther, you will hazard all. We now feel certain Stretches of your persevering Powers, too great for human Patience, or human Nature to support long; assume, therefore, most steady Prince, in this dangerous Crisis, a Virtue, to which you are, in Truth, a Stranger. Play off, once more, an appearance of Clemency; it will be better timed now, than it ever was in the Cases of Sodomites, wanton Murderers, and military Cut-throats. Dissemble your causeless Anger, and effeminate Thirst for Blood. By this Stratagem you may, probably, make the easy, long-suffering, passive Fools, whom you wish to destroy, believe that your Majesty is really sincere, when you condescend to call them (with inward reluctance and disdain) “Your faithful and beloved People.”2 Believe me, most infernal Prince, this is the only way to compass their utter Ruin, with the least probable Security to your gracious Self, your wise Divan, your faithful Minions, your obsequious Assassins, and pensioned Parricides. By these Means, and by these alone, you may still live in prosperous, and plenteous Infamy. Thus, and thus
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only, can you hope to introduce, with Safety to yourself, that destructive plan of Tyranny, by which your beloved Bute and Mansfield, will immortalize your Reign. It must be introduced, my Prince, by gentle, slow Degrees. By your obdurate Steadiness, and precipitate Perseverance (Virtues not unworthy of a Devil) your darling Schemes may be suddenly extinguished, before you can have Time to declare again how much you are astonished at those Sufferers, who despise and detest you as much as CASCA.
To the Lords BUTE and MANSFIELD.
What Seas of Blood will Civil Discord shed?
Dire Fiend! by George’s Friends, Bute, North, and Mansfield, bred.
My LORDS,
YOUR Lordships will Pardon me, and I am sure your Brother North will readily excuse me, if I pass him by, for the Present, as a mere expletive in your execrable Triumvirate. He is, in Truth, my Lords, (and the World sees it) no more than the ostensible Leader of that fawning, false, corrupt Confederacy, who arrogantly groupe themselves under the specious Name of King’s Friends. Like designing Traytors, they, and you, my Lords, assume this Mask for the worst of Purposes; that of enriching your wretched Selves, by the Spoils of this unhappy Country; whilst your deluded, passive Sovereign, is but your stalking Horse. Poor, mean, obsequious, flexible Lord North, (like the rest of your servile Herd) is no more than the humble and callous Executioner of your infernal selfish Views, your inhuman Warrants, your destructive Bloody Policy. In a Word, my Lords, you are the Subtiles, and he is the Face.
To your Lordships, therefore, and to your Lordships only, as Principals, as the earliest and most indefatigable Deluders of weak and ductile Majesty; I now address myself, not in Terms of pleasing Flattery, but in the Rough, and odious Language of disgusting Truth. Such, my Lords, as
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the Sovereign is, the Nation has received him from your Hands. He was Born a BRITON; you, my Lords, have taught him not only to forget, but to shame his Birth. He was Born a Prince; you have levelled him with the worst, the most inhuman, and meanest of his Subjects. He became (too soon, alas!) a KING; you, my Lords, have debased him to a Tyrant. His Mind, though enlightened by no auspicious ray from Heaven, was yet capable of receiving some moderate degrees of Culture; it was, in its infant State, open at least to the impressions of HUMANITY; you, my Lords, in that early period, gave it a most unnatural, and unhappy Bent; you moulded, you contracted, you steeled it for your own wicked Purposes. To say the best of it, it remains, after all your painful Lectures, either totally unprincipled, or most atrociously perverted. Hence, my Patriotic Lords, have flowed (and still flow) all the Grievances of the present inglorious, ignoble, and inhuman Reign. Let me ring them in your Ears, my Lords:—Court—and Ministerial Assassinations, of which Martyn, Dun, and Talbot, can remind you, in Wilkes’s Case. In the same Case, in Bingley’s, and some others, Royal Persecutions, Star-Chamber Inquisition, erasing Records, inveigling, byassing, misleading, deceiving, over-bearing, and even packing Juries, by Lord Mansfield.3 Daring Corruptions and Perversions of Justice, by the same Hand, in the last Resort (the once righteous House of Lords) in the late Case of Thickness and Leigh, under the infamous, illegal, and unprecedented Conduct of Lord Apsley, Lord Mansfield, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. The unjust Proceedings in this Case will (to your immortal Infamy, Lord Mansfield) be handed down to the latest Posterity—even a Jeffereys would have blushed at them. As for your Shadow, Apsley; your dependant Scots, Cathcart and
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Galloway,4 and your Bully Denbigh, they are but Tools in your Lordship’s Craft, they live by the Breath of your Lordship’s Nostrils, and are too inconsiderable to be named either by Historian or Reporter; but Lord Mansfield’s Name and Doctrines will be faithfully recorded.—Now, my Lords, I returns to Grievances, the Offspring of your Scotch Politics. Among others, you may recollect the Violation of the Freedom of Election, and the Lives you have to answer for at the Middlesex Election, in Support of your Court-Tool, Sir William Beauchamp Procter.5 Your Lordships, and your royal Pupil, countenanced a still greater Violation of the Rights of Election, which was most impudently and perfidiously avowed, and sanctified by a corrupt House of Commons, in the Case of that insignificant Time-server, Colonel Lutterell, the King’s Brother in Law.6 Let me now remind your Lordships (for you are too callous to be shocked with the Sound) of Murders (repeated, wanton Murders) at the Brentford Election, and in St. George’s Fields, even of Women and
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Children. The barbarous Carnage of young Allen (naked and unarmed) must be attoned for.—By whose Advise, and with whose Privity, my Lords, did your Pupil return public Thanks for this Slaughter of his Subjects; who in the one Case were but curious Gazers, and in the other, were discharging their Duties as honest, independant Electors, above ministerial Bribery and Corruption? Let me ask you, my Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England (whose Duty it was to bring these ministerial Cut-throats to condign Punishment) why were these guilty Miscreants screened, protected, pardoned, pensioned? Why, and by whose Orders (unless yours, my Lord) was so much affected Tenderness, Management, brow-beating of the Prosecutor’s Council and Witnesses, such nice Caution in summing up the Evidence, such Menaces against those who should dare to print these public Trials, but particularly that of young Allen? Why did your Lordship’s upright, holy, and favourite Judge, Smythe,7 so signalize himself, and labour with such uncommon Partiality? Why were the known Laws of England, dispensed with in the Case of the military Scotch Ruffians, who spilled the innocent Blood of Allen in St. Georges’s Fields? Who suggested the happy Thought of dissolving the last Parliament on a sudden, and of smuggling and packing (by means of private Intimations to the Court-Members) a corrupt Majority in the present House of Commons in support of the ruinous and despotic Plan laid by your Lordships, and carried on by your obsequious Instrument Lord North, and his pensionary Subalterns in both Houses of Parliament? How, and by whom, are the Seats of Justice to be filled for
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the future, my Lords, and for what Purposes? I will not ask, what knowledge of the Laws, but what Interest, what private Reasons, made such a Man as Hotham, a Baron of the Exchequer?8—This is a new Grievance