To his Tyrannic Majesty—the DEVIL.

DO not affect the utmost astonishment at this address; it comes not in the tremendous form of a Petition; of these your sulky Majesty shall have no more during the short time you can hope to tyrannize over us in a regal shape. What I humbly offer now, concerns, not your infested and afflicted kingdoms, so nearly as your dear self and favourites. Your Majesty's best beloved spirits, Bute and Mansfield, the whole astonished world consider as the blackest imps in all your train; and yourself, as their humble execu­tioner. They advise, and you most condescendingly administer, Destruction. Their ascendancy and your humility, their patriotism and your discernment, their wisdom and your humanity, are subjects of universal admiration. But of all your most diabolical virtues, satanic Sir, the most conspicuous is Hypo­crisy. The blaze of it, upon one occasion, in par­ticular, the death of Lord Chancellor Yorke, (as Milton says) "far round illumin'd hell." As you can practice it so successively for the desolation, let me intreat you, gloomy Sir, to assume it now (by way of frolic only) for the preservation of mankind; but, above all, for your own precious interest, much [Page 190]dearer to you than the salvation of an inferior uni­verse. Your Majesty has disported yourself amidst the dangerous indulgencies of three most unprincely passions; pride, anger, and revenge, for fourteen years past; ever since the demise of our good King, George the second; in whose reign your most hy­pocritical highness was advised to wear the mask of decency and circumspection. You then cast a fa­vourable glance only at corruption; but you have since spurned the reign of policy, and broke out into such uncommon tyrannies, such bloody inhumani­ties, unprovoked, that your despotic Highness must now either desist, or expect to be deserted and de­posed. My great tenderness for two of your High­nesses dearest friends, the Scotch Lords, Bute and Mansfield, obliges me to give you this timely notice Should you still continue, dread Sir, to "have en­tire confidence in the wisdom of your Divan," should you still, "Steadily pursue those measures which they have recommended"—your reign can be but short; your animating supporters Bute, and Mansfield, must surely fail. When these hellish in­stigators of your pride are gone, your unhappy reign must end, when those arch fiends of corrup­tion and iniquity, are no more; your wise Divan, will fall off from you like water, they will neither support your wanton slaughter in America, nor your pious designs upon Great Britain, your faithful pen­sioners will faint for want of those heartening sup­plies, with which they are now daily refreshed in plenteous streams, by your 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 [Page 191]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 nature, or human patience 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 case 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." Believe me, most infernal Prince, this is the only way to compass their utter ruin, with the [Page 192]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 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

To the Lords BUTE and MANSFIELD.

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 [Page 193]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 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 enligtened 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 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 attrociously 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 inquisitions, erasing records, inveigling, byassing, misleading, deceiving, over-bearing, and [Page 194]even packing juries, by Lord Mansfield. 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, Carthcart and Galloway, 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 return 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 Proctor. 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, Col. Luttrel, the King's brother in law. 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 Chil­ren. The barbarous carnage of young Allen (naked and unarmed) must be attoned for. By whose ad­vise, and with whose privity, my Lords, did your [Page 195]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, independent 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 councils and witnesses, such nice caution in summing up the evi­dence, such menaces against those who dare to print these public trials, but particularly that of young Allen? why did your Lordship's upright, holy, and favourite judge, Smythe, so signalize himself, and la­bour with such uncommon partiality? why were the laws of England, dispenced with in the case of the military Scotch ruffians, who spilled the innocent blood of Allen in St. George's Fields? who suggested the happy thought of dissolving the last Parliament on a sudden, and of smuggling and packing (by means of private in [...]ions 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 the future, my Lords, and for what purposes? I will not ask, what knowledge of the laws, but what interest, what reasons, made such a man as Hotham, a Baron of the exchequer? This is a new grievance and a real one.

Perrot sells out, Hotham buys in, and his seat in parlia­ment [Page 196]is thus purchased, and filled up by your Lordships. I must interrogate your Lordships still further. Of all your other wicked counsels, what impolitic, diabolical spirit, could instigate you to advise your pupil ever to consent to, much more to persevere, in the inhuman massacre of Ame­rica? Why were the petitions of the city of London, an­swered in your reign, my Lords, with sneers, insults, abuse, menaces, indignant frowns, and even with accusations of high treason? I refer your Lordships to your last Bas [...]aw-like answer to the city petition, where you will find, to the general astonishment, that you have almost impeached a part of his Majesty's faithful and beloved people, of high treason, for only making a constitutional supplication to the throne for humbly remonstrating against the pernicious influence of corruption and your lordships, and for expressing natural and just feelings for their fellow subjects, doomed by your lord­ships to destruction in America.

These my Lords, are some of the most palpable wounds which your Lordships have, by hirelings and dupes, already given, there are others in Embryo, which you are about to give to the British constitution. For these iniquities, when your measure is full, my Lords, you must assuredly account at last, unless, like true cowards, you fly from pub­lic justice, or disappoint the meritorious executioner, by the timely application of your own guilty hands, to the rottennest and most detested hearts that ever beat. If murdering innocence and virtue, in the subject, and ex­tinguishing their influence in the sovereign, is tyranny and treason, and rank cowardice, I am no false accuser of your Lordships. The instances I have already given are such as would blacken the reigns of a Nero, or Domi­tian, but they are such my Lords as sprung naturally from those internal institutes which your Lordships have incessantly penned and preached, for the Edification of a British King; of a King; who neither does, nor possibly can, hold the crown of England upon such principles as your Lordships have laboured to instill, these labours, my Lords, are crying sins against the liberties, and Majesty of the nation, and the wages of these sins is death.